Life of Lemons
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  However, by the 1930s the need to use such forms had rapidly become more pervasive, and first times were increasingly a thing of the past.Thus the disappearance of the anxiety over the demand for documents appears to possibly be a consequence of the fact people had quickly become accustomed to the documentation of individual identity and the general paperization of everyday life.While tracing the passport nuisance in the 1920s and 1930s is a useful way to understand the extension of practices of documentary identification, it is difficult to read this development as a failed opportunity for the power of a centralized and intrusive state to have been seriously challenged.Rather, the passport nuisance, as an almost exclusively 1920s phenomenon, provides a moment from which to try and understand the somewhat rapid acceptance of an enveloping bureaucratic state.However, a passport also carried with it the recognition that the state could depersonalize that relationship as it reduced citizenship to an administrative fact that could only be verified through documents.That the passport was contested through the 1920s illustrates some people did not accept its representation of themselves and the state.The complicated specifics of the acceptance of the official documentation of identity, and the emergence of official identification in general, is evident in a comparison with the failed campaign for universal fingerprinting that occurred contemporaneously with the demise of the passport nuisance.These differences ultimately demarcated the passport as an identification technology with purposes and functions distinct from that of fingerprinting, and hence suggest reasons for its acceptance.The kidnapped child had long been one of the key figures in the argument for universal fingerprinting.The figures of the kidnapped child, the unidentified dead body, and the amnesiac were invoked to play on the fear of being a stranger that proponents argued the preemptive act of fingerprinting would prevent.114 In this argument, the possibility of becoming a stranger had been increased through the enhanced mobility of modern life, which purportedly took individuals away from small communities and into large cities where people could easily be strangers even in their everyday life.Within the new modern form of anonymous community epitomized by the large city the state needed to have the right and the ability to know its population in order to provide the comfort of familiarity in a developing mass culture.The association between criminals and fingerprints was even stronger than that between criminals and identification documents.While in other contexts passport fraud remained an ongoing concern for the State Department, in the correspondence over fingerprinting, officials downplayed the threat of fraud to national security.In comparison fingerprinting remained an irregular occurrence and an exceptional practice.As the documentary verification of identity became a pervasive practice, and therefore, paradoxically, it was seen less in terms of surveillance.When average Americans encountered initial piecemeal forms of state observation such as passport requirements in the early decades of the twentieth century, these were novel and alien.Secondly, with this as the dominant understanding of the function and role of surveillance, demands for documents in their lives seemed to cause the better classes to assume that surveillance had become pervasive through society.The previous absence of state inquisitions in their lives in the United States led many citizens to understand the need for passports as evidence of a new form of continuous surveillance orchestrated by a pervasive bureaucratic state.This fueled some of the anxiety over the passport.It would very quickly become more consistent over the following decades, such that by the end of the 1930s, the need to prove individual identity to a variety of officials and institutions had become a common occurrence.121 However, by that time knowledge and the skills of how to negotiate modernity in the form of the documentary mediation of people and the world had been acquired, and the giving of information previously considered personal to official strangers had lost much of its annoyingness.Thus the use of documents to mediate interactions with the state and other institutions provoked a decreasing amount of frustration and lessened its association with surveillance.In contrast, fingerprinting remained an occasional and visceral act popularly perceived as surveillance.Based on its history in the United States, immigration officials had come to accept a passport as evidence of identity.Members of the public had seemingly come to tolerate both the general demand for identification, and the passport in particular, as a representation of their identity.The passport arrived at this paradigmatic moment only after negotiation over its status as proof of identity, and, of the identity the state had come to deem necessary.The arrival of the passport in its modern form critically involved the acceptance of the larger assumption that identity could be documented.However, in questioning this inevitability, the preceding history of the passport is premised on a rejection of the collapsing of identity and identification.To separate identity and identification is to see how the documentation of individual identity depended on a rethinking of identity as the object of identification, and a general acceptance of this new way of thinking about identity.Aspects of the passport nuisance and its scattered forerunners in the nineteenth century indicate a struggle to fully grasp this new relationship between identity and identification.The passport has a history as an identification document precisely because of this struggle to comprehend and accept that identity could be documented.The necessity for travelers to carry a passport made some individuals aware that not only did the government know who they were, but also made them conscious of the techniques through which they were known.Bertillonage, which emerged from an increasingly bureaucratized and professional French police force in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, embodied the archival elements that would gradually define accurate practices of identification through techniques of cataloguing and retrieval.As in our current moment, national security concerns brought attention to identification practices.State officials became interested only in those aspects of personal identity that were useful to them.Modern practices of identification such as the passport and fingerprints were useful precisely because they simplified identity to only that information necessary for the state, and thus it was thought that accurate identification would be easier to achieve.In this understanding, identity had become something that could be duplicated and filed, and, therefore, potentially more rigorously verified.As this history has shown, these technologies produced a new identity, something made all too explicit to those citizens who felt as if they had become dehumanized objects of inquiry for their government.The perception by individuals that they were objects of inquiry acknowledges a disconnect between their sense of self and their official recognition, and, therefore, is a recognition of identification as the production of a new identity.
 
 
 

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