Coding face, enumerating race from Francis Galton's numeralised portraits to biometric facial recognition technology in the twenty-first century

Anchored in an analysis of Francis Galton&s;s 1910 article, “Numeralised Profiles for Classification and Recognition” – a text proposing a proto-facial recognition system based on the numerical coding of unique “cardinal points” of the facial profile – this chapter excavates the face as a visual and statistical object of racialising practices of identification. Reading Galton&s;s “Numeralised Profiles” within a genealogy of biometric facial identification regimes, the chapter theorises biometric facial recognition as a conditioning form of mask-making deeply entangled with the socio-material construction of race and the face itself. Moving beyond the heuristic of “bias” commonly invoked to critique the operation of racialism within contemporary algorithmic systems, it interrogates the deeper historical continuities and ruptures through which biometric technologies extend and reconfigure racial power through the enmeshed logics of classification and individuation. Taking the recent deployment of biometric facial recognition and fingerprinting technologies by the Home Office in the United Kingdom as a case example, the chapter explores how biometric identification systems continue to have racialising effects that simultaneously deviate from Galton&s;s biopositivist paradigm. In doing so, this work highlights the enduring socio-material role of the face in encoding and enumerating human difference in updated technical formats.