| Summary/Abstract |
India’s programme for biometric registration, Aadhaar, is organised through engineering concept work that depends upon three distinctive claims for the ‘social’ as human condition: (1) the social as ‘socialism’, the failed premise of Nehruvian decolonisation understood to have placed the poor into a condition of bare life; (2) the social-yet-to-come as the effect of a proper distribution of the good termed ‘service’, to bring the poor into a self-ameliorating form of life; and (3) the social as the affective entanglements that family, caste and religious ties of biography demand, ties that divert service from proper distribution. Within the concept-world of Aadhaar, such entanglements prevent the social-yet-to-come, demanding a form of government that can produce a political subject outside of biography, which for the engineers is achieved by conceiving of India as a database, an archive prone to the duplication of its elements, and thus governing India as one would govern a database: by continually ‘de-duplicating’ it.
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