Applications

Chapter Four asks what happens when the physical markers of identity are rendered in the language of digital code. In the contemporary moment, fingerprints and DNA profiles are stored and matched through networked databases rather than paper records, while iris scans and facial recognition technology have produced radically new modes of reading identity in the body. This digitization of identification is accentuated still further when the more mundane means of identifying oneself in the contemporary period (through the use of credit cards or in ‘checking in’ to a workplace) are considered. Taking place within an essentially surveillant contemporary culture, these validations of identity create a retrievable record of one’s movements and activities and place the citizen’s body in the ‘non-place’ of networked databases in which a direct checking of what Haggerty and Ericson describe as ‘data doubles’ takes place. As with Chapter Three, much of the significance that is attached to this development in recent identificatory practice will be developed via Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations. This explication will cede into a more thorough analysis of Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1984) and Cosmopolis (2003) and Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me (2001). While DeLillo’s earlier text represents some of the archetypal modes of contemporary surveillance, both Cosmopolis and Look at Me depict a complete internalization of its logic. Thus, just as DeLillo and Egan’s central characters voluntarily place themselves under surveillant monitoring, so too their representation as, in effect, data doubles requires a decidedly anti-realist form of narration.