A Documentary Regime of Verification

The emergence of the US passport and the archival problematization of identity

Bibliographic Data

ID7428289
AuthorsCraig Robertson (0000-0001-9461-8132)
Year2008
Volume23
Issue3
Pages329-354
Publication date2008-06-21
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0950-2386 • E-ISSN: 1466-4348
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/09502380802016253
OpenAlexW1542100493
LanguageEN
Citations received26
References cited38

This essay is concerned with a critical but under theorized practice of modern society – official identification. It makes two arguments about modern identification technologies: they develop within an archival problematization of identity, and secondly, they should be critically analyzed as practices of verification. Although the essay is historical in focus these two arguments are intended as an intervention in debates about contemporary practices of identification and surveillance. The essay examines the emergence of the passport in the US from the 1850s to the 1930s. The contested development of the conviction that the identity in a passport is in 'fact' someone's identity is the subject of this history of the passport. The passport is used to argue that official identification, as a modern problem was rethought as the collection, classification and circulation of information through new bureaucratic logics of objectivity. The subsequent assemblage of modern identification practices formed what is best understood as a documentary regime of verification that produced identity as a stable object critical to the governing practices of the modern state. The passport as a technology of verification foregrounds that the modern production of this 'official identity' through documents is collapsed into a truth claim, which presents that identity as self-evident. Keywords: passportidentificationverificationbureaucracyarchivesurveillance Notes 1. McKenzie to Department of State, 18 July 1897, RG 59 MLR 509, Box 99, National Archives, Washington, DC (NARA). 2. I would arguea contemporary articulation of the archival problematization of identity is the object of Oscar Gandy's (1993 Gandy, O. 1993. The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information, Boulder, CO: Westview. [Google Scholar]) ground-breaking work. 3. Bruce Curtis (1998 Curtis, B. 1998. 'Administrative infrastructure and social enquiry: Finding the facts about agriculture in Quebec, 1853–4'. Journal of Social History, 32(2): 309–327. [Google Scholar], p. 312), writing about the Canadian provinces of the nineteenth centuries argues that 'kinship, neighborliness, mutual economic dependence, community school and community church, parish institutions and exchange networks' formed the social relations that underwrote the knowledge and identity that I am labeling 'local'. 4. Michael Power (1999 Power, M. 1999. The Audit Society: Rituals of Verification, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], p. 80) makes a similar argument in his critique of auditing. He argues, through 'social consensus' audits construct the context in which auditing occurs. For Power, 'audibility is not a function of things themselves (of an absolute property of the transactions themselves) but of agreements within a specialist community which learns to observe and verify in a certain way'. He does not specifically define audit because he argues it is a practice that is constantly negotiated. 5. Thanks to Lacey Torge and Vivek Kanwar for helping me begin to think about the passport as a technology of verification. 6. My interest in the passport is as an example of identification practices not identity. In that sense the essay does not engage with the substantial body of work on representation and identity which is associated with 'cultural studies.' It is instead interested in the 'technical' practices through which identity is made practical and usable. I do not seek to compare the 'truth' of the passport as a representation of identity, rather I am interested in how an identification document like the passport was granted the status of truth. 7. While there were specific instances in the nineteenth century when passports were required, they were generally optional documents. This is particularly the case with the US passport and the presentation of passports at the US border. 8. Well into the second half of the nineteenth century at polling booths members of the community verified the right to vote. When a voter was challenged, in the absence of documents, age, residence, gender, ethnicity and race were determined through the collective memory of the community, and when that failed it was read off the body of the voter using agreed upon community norms (Bensel 2004 Bensel, R. 2004. The American Ballot Box in Mid-Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]). 9. Another useful formulation of this development is Bernard Cohn's (1996 Cohn, B. 1996. Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar]) argument about 'investigative modalities' in the governing of colonial India. 10. Although scientific objectivity and bureaucratic objectivity developed in different contexts, I argue Lorraine Daston's (2001 Daston, L. 2001. "'Scientific objectivity with and without words'". In Little Tools of Knowledge: Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Practices, Edited by: Becker, P. and Clark, W. 259–284. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. [Google Scholar]) work on scientific objectivity makes explicit the epistemological groundings of the practices that came to constitute bureaucratic claims to objectivity. Others would beg to differ. Becker and Clark (2001 Becker, P. and Clark, W. 2001. "'Introduction'". In Little Tools of Knowledge: Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Practices, Edited by: Becker, P. and Clark, W. 2–34. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. [Google Scholar], p. 27) note the disembodied authority of scientific objectivity does not completely map onto bureaucracy based as it is on the bureaucratic persona. However, as I shortly argue the authority of the bureaucrat is dependent on an impersonal logic of location that in the specific case of official identification is in fact disembodied, relative to the pre-existing local practices. 11. The introduction of vertical filing in the State Department is typical of the ad hoc manner in which the federal government adopted bureaucratic practice. In 1906 after the then Secretary of State received several cumbersome and poorly indexed bound volumes in answer to a request for specific documents, he demanded the introduction of a vertical filing system in which documents would be stored according to a decimal system based on subject (Gustafson 1970 Gustafson, M. 1970. 'State Department records in the national archives: A profile'. Prologue, 2(3): 175–184. [Google Scholar], p. 179). 12. The development of federally issued legal tender is another example of the cultivation of a trust in documents. See Henkin (1998 Henkin, D. 1998. City Reading: Written Word and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York, New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar]) and Lauer (forthcoming) Lauer , J. (forthcoming) 'Money as mass communication: US paper currency and the iconography of nationalism' , The Communication Review . [Google Scholar]. 13. The previous two sentences are adapted from Michael Buckland's (1997 Buckland, M. 1997. 'What is a document?'. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 48(9): 804–809. [Google Scholar]) summary of Suzanne Briet's definition of a document. Briet was a mid-twentieth century French documentalist. The documentalist's developed 'documentation' as a set of techniques to manage the explosion of information from the late nineteenth century. This is a further example of the broader context of the developing information management practices which enabled modern identification documents to function as a technology within the archival problematization of identity. Also see Ronald Day (2001 Day, R. 2001. The Modern Invention of Information: Discourse, History and Power, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. [Google Scholar]). 14. The State Department issued almost 500,000 passports in the nineteenth century, more than 200,000 of them in the last quarter of the century (US Passport Office 1976 US Passport Office 1976 The United States Passport: Past, Present, Future , Government Printing Office , Washington, DC . [Google Scholar], p.220). 15. Zimmerman to Benedict [Passport Clerk], 23 September 1885, RG 59 Entry 509, Box 80, NARA. 16. Other reasons for misspelling a personal name include: a clerical error at the time of naturalization, the subsequent formal or informal changing of a name, sloppiness on the part of the notary or attorney overseeing the application, or limited literacy. See examples in RG 59, Entry 509 Box 79, NARA. 17. Here I am invoking the significant body of historical work on whiteness. For example, in his insightful history of post-bellum whiteness Matthew Frye Jacobson (1998 Jacobson, M. 1998. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Google Scholar], p. 75) argues that as immigration increased in the middle of the nineteenth century the Anglo-Saxon racial credentials that underwrote citizenship and naturalization law became increasingly problematic. He argues that 'in this period of volatile racial meanings, people such as Celts, Italians, Hebrews and Slavs were becoming less white in debates over who should be allowed to disembark on American shores and yet were becoming whiter and whiter in debates over who should be granted the full rights of citizenship'. 18. This somewhat strategic use of documents, as a documentary regime coalesced, is also an example of a broader argument critical to this essay – the historically contingent relationship between evidence, facts and the production of truth inherent to any verification practices. 19. While this example is also about the form of identification, it is also about different modes of identity. This controversy centered on a legal identity (nationality) while Brown utilized identification practices more akin to verifying personal identity. 20. The limited reach continued to manifest itself as illiteracy in documentation skills. For example a series of the retrospective birth certificates issued by the New York State Department of Health revealed that standard office practice had different officials signing the certificates in the name of the designated official thus limiting the usefulness of the signature as a sign of authority. The certificates also all had the same date from 1912 because staff had not been able to change the date stamp for a dozen years (Consul, Prague to Secretary of State, March 26, 1924 RG 59 138.81/95, Report, May 1, 1924, RG 59 138.81/75, NARA). 21. Shortly after the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914, the US government introduced passport and visa requirements for citizens and aliens as they both entered and left the US. Although these requirements only became law in 1917, they had been indirectly (and technically illegally) enforced in conjunction with changes in the policies of steamship companies, and presidential proclamations that 'encouraged' citizens to carry passports when they traveled. 22. Flournoy to Secretary of State, October 12, 1917, RG 59 811.111/927, NARA. 23. White (2nd Assistant to Secretary of Labor) to Secretary of State, August 25, 1924, RG 59 811.111/4322, NARA. 24. For long-term residents it often proved impossible to locate records of entry from the pre-war period. In these situations an alien resident had to locate two witnesses who could swear to their long-term residence, and then pay $20 to get a certificate of arrival (New York Times, 30 May 1932, p. 27). 25. Day to Comm.-General of Immigration, March 15, 1930, RG 85 55630/4A, NARA. 26. Clearing-houses were also critical for the professionalization of social work through case files (Tice 1998 Tice, K. 1998. Tales of Wayward Girls and Immoral Women: Case Records and the Professionalization of Social Work, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. [Google Scholar], pp. 31–33). 27. Hull to Watts, September 27, 1934, RG 59 138/3333, NARA

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