A DOCUMENTARY REGIME OF VERIFICATION

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.