Secretions

DNA profiling, in which individual being is identified by its cellular structures, was first developed by the geneticist Alec Jeffreys in the 1980s. That this source of identity also forms the instructions through which living organisms are generated has complicated profiling’s place in the cultural imaginary of the late twentieth century. So, while profiling actually deals only in non-coding regions of the genome—matter often referred to as ‘junk DNA’—the significance of DNA as a substance of forensic analysis, in the late twentieth century imaginary, is its resonance as the apparent blueprint of existence. The notable features that this blurring of concepts brings about include a conceptualization of identity as a mass of information; notions to do with codes and coding; the presence of the body in the fluids which spill beyond its bounds; and a sense of the body as an archive of heredity and primitivism. In writing specifically about genetic research, Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1991) serves a dual function in this chapter, as both an explicatory document and thematic example. But the more substantive analysis is reserved for the work of J. G. Ballard which, from its science fiction origins in novels such as The Drowned World (1962), through the controversial era of Crash (1973), to its trilogy of autobiographical texts (Empire of the Sun (1984), The Kindness of Women (1991), and Miracles of Life (2008)) articulates a form of identity that has close, though often oblique, affinities with all the most prominent features of DNA profiling.

Conclusion

Patricia Highsmith’s anti-hero Tom Ripley, who first appears in her 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley, is made the focal point of this concluding chapter. Among Ripley’s more obvious talents is his ability to impersonate others, this being pursued to an extreme degree as he murders, and then takes on the identity of, his friend Dickie Greenleaf. Analysing Ripley’s imposture of Dickie through the lens of performativity theory (Austin and Derrida), this chapter demonstrates why this is an apt way of reflecting upon the previous chapters of the book for three reasons. Firstly, rather than focusing solely upon identifications as constative utterances which verify a pre-existing identity, this book has interpreted them as modes which perform identities in specific ways. Secondly, these performances are deeply connected to the precise form of an identification technique but are also determined by the contexts in which techniques arise and individual identifications take place. Thirdly, the book concludes by emphasising how it is the performativity of narrative prose which is at the heart of the connections traced in the preceding pages. Literature performs identities that reflect but also project and imagine what identity is and could be: subjectivity is not represented in literature, it is constituted by its forms. In this sense, the importance of literature to this project is the fact that it is only in its realm that the truly performative nature of identificatory methods can be seen.

Impressions

In 1901, fingerprinting was first implemented by Scotland Yard for the purposes of criminal identification, usurping Alphonse Bertillon’s anthropometric system of body measurements in the process. Recording identity in the imprint left by a body’s digits allowed for the identification of individuals on a mass scale, ‘fixing’ their identity with apparently incontrovertible certainty. But in this chapter it will be argued that the fingerprint also served as an example of a much more enigmatic and ‘impressionistic’ identity. Gathering together the most noticeable and telling features of how fingerprints were first thought of as a means of identification, lines of comparison are then drawn with two other discourses which have a similarly impressionistic basis: firstly the early writing of Sigmund Freud and, secondly, the Literary Impressionism of Joseph Conrad. Focusing especially closely on Conrad’s Lord Jim (1900) the chapter argues that while the eponymous ‘Jim’ remains obscure even by the novel’s conclusion, the identity of the narrator, Marlow, is made apparent throughout the narration: Marlow essentially smears his prints all over the text. In lifting prints, analysing traces, and reading impressions fingerprinting, psychoanalysis and Literary Impressionism read identity in the signs made during its contact with the external world—signs which had to subsequently be enhanced, analysed and represented by authoritative experts who could make such identity visible.

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.

Introduction

During the long second part of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1978), entitled ‘Pseudoreality Prevails’, Ulrich, the novel’s protagonist, intervenes when he witnesses the police’s manhandling of a drunken stranger. Promptly arrested and taken to the nearest police station, Ulrich’s subjection to naked state power is felt not simply in terms of his physical coercion but also in the more subtle forms of a reduced agency rendered by the architecture and atmosphere of his location. He finds the station reminiscent of an ‘army barracks’, for example, and recognizes the ‘heavy intimation that here one was expected to wait, without asking questions’....

Registrations

From the beginning of the Second World War until 1952, the UK maintained a National Register and issued all citizens with identity cards (one of only two times in which this has occurred—the other being during the First World War). The National Registration Identity Card was an intrinsic part of the logic of classification which guided life on the home front and organized individuals into categories of usefulness, vulnerability, and risk. Mirroring the simplistic basis of these categories, the National Registration Identity Card was notable for the paucity of information it contained. Rather than working as an authentic token which served to validate identity in itself, when it came to security, the card only really worked when read alongside the more richly detailed register to which it referred. Cross-checking between card and register and, more importantly, opening conversations which rested upon the potential for cross-checking, thus animated attempts to identity individuals in wartime Britain. In retreating from the radical subjectivity of modernist prose, writers of the period, such as Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen, produced characterizations that were as similarly shorn of depth as the categories that the home front pushed individuals into and the cards that identified them. In playing upon the genre of the espionage thriller, The Ministry of Fear (1943) and The Heat of the Day (1948) thus narrate identities that are defined by social position and by plots which confirm individuals as often precisely what they initially appear to be.