Fantasies of Identification. Ellen Samuels
establishes it as not simply myth or fable but fantasy: a thing we not only imagine but desire to be true. The fantasy of the two Will Wests is also an inextricably racialized fantasy; it is no coincidence that the two Wests were African American.8 Nineteenth-century interest in fingerprinting was originally driven by colonialist imperatives and figured as a means to distinguish between racially homogeneous “others”—in the British context, Indian natives, and in the United States, Chinese immigrants.9 Sir Francis Galton, the figure most notably associated with introducing fingerprinting to a wide audience, was also the acknowledged “father” of modern eugenics and was deeply invested in his ultimately unrealized goal of using fingerprints in the service of racialist science.10
In the West story, and in many other examples discussed in this book, the fantasy of identification merges notions of individual and group identity: West is at once himself, a criminal, and a black man, and the supposed power of fingerprinting is to fix and merge these identities into a single knowable subject. Indeed the remarkable success of fingerprinting over the past century stems from its real and imagined ability to encompass and link different realms of identity. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno observe, the paradoxical individuality of modern culture is represented by “fingerprints on identity cards which are otherwise exactly the same, and into which the lives and faces of every single person are transformed by the power of the generality” (154). The power of fingerprints to stabilize personal identity is accomplished only through the existence of a state apparatus to organize and frame that identity, and, as historian Simon Cole convincingly argues, the primary challenge for nineteenth-century fingerprinting researchers was to develop a working system for the organization and retrieval of fingerprint data, “a link between an individual body and a paper record held by the state” (4). The centrality of this link between body, text, and state underscores the crucial difference of modern identificatory practice, what Foucault describes as “cellular power,” in which individuality is legible only in relation to a homogeneous, regularized grouping (Discipline and Punish 149). The fantasy of identification, then, is always far less concerned with individual identity than with placing that individual within a legible group.
Among the “elementary signs of modern identity . . . the name, the portrait, and the fingerprint,” only fingerprints provide a sign of identity rooted firmly in the physical body (Caplan 52).11 While portraits (and photographs) provide a textually mimetic reflection of personal identity, and names formalize identity into language, for many years only fingerprints—what Mark Twain famously called our “natal autographs”—combined the textual, linguistic, and physical into a master signifier, “a kind of serial number written on the body” (L. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy 32). While Simon Cole claims that “fingerprinting . . . embedded firmly within our culture the notion that personhood is biological” (5), I suggest the reverse is true, that prior notions of biological personhood influenced the selection of fingerprinting as the preferred means of identification in the modern era (since the existence of fingerprints was known cross-culturally for many centuries before its modern European and American implementation in the late 1800s). Lennard J. Davis connects this development to the emergence of normative bodily models, as “the notion of fingerprinting pushes forward the idea that the human body is standardized” (Enforcing Normalcy 32). The normalizing power of the fingerprint provides an apparent resolution to the dilemma of identification outlined at the start of this introduction—the paradox of reconciling unique individuality with democratic social equality—as every individual’s fingerprints are “qualitatively unique, yet capable of being enrolled in a numerical series for the purposes of classification, retrieval, and communication” (Caplan 53). To this extent, fingerprints function as a perfectly Foucauldian mechanism that disciplines individuals into objects of state control while maintaining the illusion of individual autonomy.
However, the fissures in this totalizing view of fingerprints provide glimpses of the ambiguity, tension, and subversion that lurk within. In nineteenth-century America, with its intense “desire for coherent and legible identities” (Chinn 47), the discovery of the fingerprint signified less an advance in material technology than the power of a fantasy of identification to produce and naturalize its own systematic realization. This dynamic becomes dramatically clear when we discover that fingerprinting was deployed fictionally before it was ever used in legal or forensic settings; in fact this fantastical power of fiction may even have enabled the eventual implementation of this form of identification. Twain’s 1898 novella, Pudd’nhead Wilson, discussed at length in chapter 5, famously introduced fingerprinting to the wider cultural discourse, touting its unparalleled ability not only to distinguish between unique individuals but also to delineate the different identities of racially ambiguous subjects. This solution to the crisis of identification so deeply satisfied the nation’s fantastic desires that, startlingly, Twain’s fictional statements on the accuracy of fingerprints were repeatedly cited in actual criminal trials of the early twentieth century to produce convictions—both literally and in the sense of a powerful state of belief. Indeed Twain’s protagonist’s famous speech on the power of this “physiological autograph” is still cited and repeated in forensic textbooks, granting the power of the expert to a character who exists as pure invention.12 Thus we see that the blurring of truth, imagination, and desire in the West story is not an aberration in the story of modern identification but rather its defining feature.
Time Travels: Staging, Penetrance, Institutionalization
In Raymond Williams’s description of dominant and residual cultures, the residual comprises those “experiences, meanings and values, which cannot be verified or cannot be expressed in terms of the dominant culture, [but] are nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of the residue—cultural as well as social—of some previous social formation” (159). In the case of fantasies of identification, representation is both residual and prescient, both preceding and emerging from social formations. The narrated fingerprinting of the two Will Wests takes place a full year before fingerprinting technology is introduced at Leavenworth. Twain employs fingerprinting in a fictional trial, and only decades later is it used in actual courtrooms. This paradoxical dynamic becomes even more complicated when we move to the current day, as modern science is increasingly evoked to support fantastic claims of identification, most notably in the area of DNA testing. As I demonstrate in chapter 9, both representations and implementations of genetic forms of identification tend to precede—and yet also skip past—the necessary scientific knowledge regarding the meaning and reliability of these identifications, and the material effects of this process are considerable.
For this reason I argue that to fully understand the persistence of fantasies of identification it is necessary always to consider not only their visible material effects but also their circulation within multiple cultural spheres. In this book the literary, filmic, and artistic texts I discuss reveal a much more complex, ambivalent, and subversive view of identification than do the corresponding legal, historical, and medical documents against which they are read.13 The tensions revealed by these texts are crucial because of the deeply imbricated and mutually entangled relation of this literature to the material reality represented by the legal, medical, and historical texts, demonstrating “a powerful and effective oscillation between the establishment of distinct discursive domains and the collapse of those domains into one another,” one element of which is the attempt to isolate “fantasies in a private, apolitical realm” (Greenblatt 7–8).14 I foreground the public nature of fantasy in shaping racial, gendered, and dis/abled identification, as fantasy functions both to forecast and to reinforce the supposedly concrete and fixed matter of identification that takes place daily in courtrooms, medical offices, border checkpoints, and countless other realms of the “real.”
In the nearly two centuries covered in this study, we will see how the fantasy evolves from its nineteenth-century incarnation as an imagined or staged relation conveyed most tellingly in the representative sphere to its current, twenty-first-century realization as a highly institutionalized regulatory structure most visible in the workings of state bureaucracy and the law. The argument and structure of this book follow this development. In the first part I examine how versions of the fantasy emerged in literature and film in relation to social anxieties about bodily identification, with these representational fantasies often exceeding or even compensating for their relatively