Enigmas of Identity

Peter Brooks

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781400839698
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From eminent critic Peter Brooks, an exploration of the modern preoccupation with identity "We know that it matters crucially to be able to say who we are, why we are here, and where we are going, " Peter Brooks writes in Enigmas of Identity. Many of us are also uncomfortably aware that we cannot provide a convincing account of our identity to others or even ourselves. Despite or because of that failure, we keep searching for identity, making it up, trying to authenticate it, and inventing excuses for our unpersuasive stories about it. This wide-ranging book draws on literature, law, and psychoanalysis to examine important aspects of the emergence of identity as a peculiarly modern preoccupation.In particular, the book addresses the social, legal, and personal anxieties provoked by the rise of individualism and selfhood in modern culture. Paying special attention to Rousseau, Freud, and Proust, Brooks also looks at the intersection of individual life stories with the law, and considers the creation of an introspective project that culminates in psychoanalysis.Elegant and provocative, Enigmas of Identity offers new insights into the questions and clues about who we think we are.

1 | Marks of Identity

I would guess that we share an obsessive interest in identity, however defined. It’s in any case my belief that such an interest is nearly definitional of modern human beings and the societies in which they live. While the notion of identity is not new—especially as a philosophical topic—a widespread concern with one’s personal identity, and its relations to “the others” among whom one lives, seems to have emerged with greater intensity with the Enlightenment, and to gain force throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and into our own time. To the extent that a characteristic of modernity is a new valuation of the individual, the obsession with identity follows almost inevitably. Modernity, confessional discourse, the novel itself as genre, identity as an enigma and an object of quest and questioning: these are all related phenomena, and the coming of psychoanalysis at the dawn of the twentieth century merely confirms a process begun by such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. And it seems to be the case that the individual search to know the self is matched by society’s concern to know, to classify, and to order the range of selves that are out there.

My own interest in this topic came into focus a few years ago from an article in the New York Times concerning fingerprinting and its status as evidence in the law. A decision from the Federal District Court for Eastern Pennsylvania made the extraordinary claim that fingerprint identification did not meet the standard of scientific evidence set by the Supreme Court decision in Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals in 1993, and therefore could not be used to “prove” the identity of a suspect at trial.¹ It came from Judge Louis Pollak (former Dean of the Yale and University of Pennsylvania law schools), in a case called United States v. Llera-Plaza. Pollak noted that other recent federal cases described fingerprint identification as “the very archetype of reliable expert testimony” and “scientific knowledge,” but that it failed on the grounds of testability and especially falsifiability. “Scientific methodology today is based on generating hypotheses and testing them to see if they can be falsified,” wrote Justice Harry Blackmun in Daubert (quoted in Llera-Plaza). It is the test of falsifiability that allows one to know not only that a proposition is true a good deal of the time but that it is universally true. Fingerprint identification, while mustering a considerable body of expertise, does not in the final analysis meet this test. It is indeed the final step in fingerprint identification—the determination of a match between two sets of fingerprints—that involves a subjective judgment rather than a scientific procedure. Pollak cites forensic scientist Dr. David Stoney: “The determination that a fingerprint examiner makes . . . when comparing a latent fingerprint with a known fingerprint, specifically the determination that there is sufficient basis for an absolute identification is not a scientific determination. It is a subjective determination standard. It is a subjective determination without objective standards to it” (37–38). Therefore Pollak rules that experts may present analysis of fingerprints, and point out observed similarities between prints, but “will not be permitted to present testimony expressing an opinion of an expert witness that a particular latent print matches, or does not match, the rolled print of a particular person and hence is, or is not, the fingerprint of that person” (69).

Yet if you go to look for Pollak’s opinion in Llera-Plaza, you won’t find it; it has now been “unpublished.” Faced with the outcry from prosecutors and police across the land and judicial skepticism in a number of other jurisdictions, in response to the government’s motion for reconsideration Pollak took the unusual step of reversing himself two months after the original decision, and, by way of a new evidentiary hearing, readmitting fingerprints as within the realm of technical expertise—comparable to the testimony of an expert on metal fatigue or tire failure, for instance. Our criminal justice system, and our culture at large, are not ready yet to do without fingerprints.

The case of Brandon Mayfield—arrested in 2004 as one of the Madrid train bombers (though he was in Oregon at the time of this act of terror) on the basis of a fingerprint match the FBI called “100% positive” and then later released with apologies and a $2 million damage award when the Spanish police (who had never accepted the FBI “match”) found the fingerprints to be those of a much more likely suspect—again shed doubt on a technique whose claim to scientific status is more a matter of cultural myth than tested fact. On the basis of the Mayfield mistake, Judge Susan Souder of Baltimore County, Maryland, recently threw out fingerprint evidence in a capital case on the grounds that it was not certain enough to justify putting the defendant to death. In her memorandum opinion, she summarized succinctly the kind of doubts earlier expressed by Pollak concerning the “analysis, comparison, evaluation, and verification” methodology touted by forensic experts, noting, “Defendant contends that ACE-V is not a methodology which has been subjected to scientific testing. As a result, the error rate in latent print identifications is unknown. Absent an error rate, reliability of the methodology is unproven. A fundamental problem, according to Defendant, is that the subjective comparisons in ACE-V involve psychological phenomena known as ‘confirmation bias.’ Further, Defendant argues that the ‘standards’ for latent fingerprint identification are inadequate.”² The “verification” stage in fact involves another fingerprint technician, trained in the same way as the person who pronounced the “match,” confirming the work of someone who is usually his colleague. But Judge Souder’s caution is not standard operating procedure for courts. Although the reliability of fingerprint evidence has yet to be given a thorough, probative test (efforts to do so are finally under way) both professional techne and the popular imagination clearly believe that fingerprints are revelatory of identity. Recently, for instance, fingerprint expertise was pitted against art historical savoir faire in the contest over the authenticity of a Jackson Pollock—or not—painting that seems to have a fingerprint on its reverse.³

I was struck by Judge Pollak’s critique of fingerprint identification because, like most Americans, I grew up believing in its infallibility—though I admit to having always had sneaking suspicions about the claim that every set of fingerprints is absolutely unique to the individual, and unalterable over time. It seemed to me comparable to the proposition that no two snowflakes ever are duplicates. It is, at least, counterintuitive. And as I thought about Pollak’s critique, it dawned on me that our belief in fingerprints may most of all represent a will to believe that our very identities are carried in our digital imprints—as an infallible signature of who we are. The unique and invariant fingerprint would correspond to a cultural belief unfolded since the Enlightenment and Romanticism that each of us is unique, irreplaceable, never seen before and never to be seen again.

The initiatory statement of the belief no doubt comes from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the first page of his Confessions, where he claims that nature “broke the mould in which she cast me.”⁴ Rousseau here invites comparison to Michel de Montaigne’s famous statement, “Each man bears the entire form of the human condition” (Chaque homme porte la forme entière de l’humaine condition); every individual bears the stamp or impress of the common lot, like coins struck from the same die.⁵ Rousseau rejects that sense of a common identity, insisting on the uniqueness of his own. The markers of his identity—like that of the unique and invariable fingerprint—belong to him exclusively. The mold used to shape him is broken once Rousseau has been cast in it. Further, it is part of Rousseau’s contention that this uniquely characterized individual is essentially invariable over time, despite aging and loss and sorrow and even the attempts of his enemies to present the world with a “disfigured portrait,” a lying version of Jean-Jacques. This fear of a false, disfigured identity presented to the world—and especially to posterity—anguished Rousseau during his paranoid later years. The very last page he wrote—the opening to the unfinished Tenth of The Reveries of a Solitary Walker (Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire)—insists upon his sameness despite difference. Rousseau begins by noting it is Palm Sunday and exactly fifty years from the day he first met Madame de Warens, a meeting that, he claims, “decided what I was to be for the whole of my life, and produced by an inevitable linkage the destiny of the rest of my days” (décida de moi pour toute ma vie, et produisit par un enchaînement inévitable le destin du reste de mes jours; 1:1098). Madame de Warens fixed, stabilized his mobile adolescent character; without his years with her he might never have known who he really was. It is a moving text in that Rousseau near his end asserts through this anniversary his essential sameness, the “linkage” of his self at age sixty-six to the identity established at age sixteen. Despite the disfigured external portrait, he claims an unaltered identity.

Yet to make that claim, Rousseau demonstrates, requires engaging in an ever-renewed autobiographical project. The self knows itself, as John Locke contends, through its capacity to “repeat the idea of any past action with the same consciousness it had of it at first, and with the same consciousness it has of any present action; so far it is the same personal self.”⁶ Rousseau foregrounds Locke’s point that the concept of the self depends on memory, that faculty that assures us that we are the same person as before. And he makes clear that this self is narrative; it must be retrieved from the past, the lines of continuity leading from past to present traced and retraced. Identity—and I think here again Rousseau ushers in our modernity—is a project, an undertaking that requires one to ask in what ways one is the same, and different, and no doubt in most cases to hold on to a sense of one’s uniqueness and invariance despite the tolls taken by life. We know that we are not quite “the same persons” we once were. We hope that somehow everything that we vaguely classify as “experience” has made us wiser, perhaps in some sense better. At the same time, we know—through memory, largely—that we are identifiably, to the state and to ourselves, the same as we were. Most of us do not want to think of ourselves as impostors—though imposters are certainly useful in thinking about our common sense of identity.

I shall in chapter 3 evoke a modern impostor’s lesson. But think for a moment about a premodern example of imposture, or identity theft. Natalie Davis, in The Return of Martin Guerre, shows us that the problem of authenticating, or exposing, the claim to be Martin Guerre by the man who was really (apparently, probably) Arnaud du Tilh is made almost impossible by the lack of socially and legally validated marks and tokens of identity. We are in a time before identity cards, before photographs and fingerprints and—when the persons in question are peasants—portraits and signatures and even mirrors. At the trial of the apparent impostor, only the cobbler—who maintained an “archive” of lasts for making shoes—offers anything that approaches scientific evidence: the pseudo-Martin’s feet appear to be smaller than the Martin last on file. The rest of the evidence relies on memory of what Martin looked like many years before, how he spoke, and how adeptly the pseudo-Martin can simulate recall of persons and relations. The evidence of Bertrande, wife of Martin who accepted the pseudo-Martin as authentic, has particular importance because it is judged that she can discern the touch and the intimate bodily details of the man who has arrived in the village of Artigat claiming to be her husband.⁷

If the pseudo-Martin is on the whole easily accepted and assimilated in Artigat it is no doubt because, as Davis argues, he is wanted there: his absence has created a gap, a problem in domestic, kinship, and social structure. And the legal system is on the verge of ratifying the pseudo-Martin’s identity precisely because he fills this gap, gives the Guerre household the heir, landowner, husband, son-in-law, and father that it has been lacking. The only thing that keeps the Parlement de Toulouse from ruling favorably on his claim to be Martin Guerre is the sensational last-minute appearance of the “true” Martin, hobbling in on his wooden leg.

It is striking, post-Rousseau and post-Freud, that no one at the trial of Martin Guerre talks about his childhood—so much a part of our modern sense of selfhood and identity. (Think of the “replicants” of Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, who appear human but have no childhood memories—unless “implanted.”⁸) The testing of who Martin Guerre is doesn’t seem to involve memories of childhood at all. It has more to do with social and kinship structure than individual psychology. The continuity of selfhood, of an ego present to itself, does not seem to be at issue: the problem is not posed in terms of our claims to our own past. Identity in Rousseau, in contrast, lies in a claim of an inner core of selfhood to self-recognition over time, to the assertion of sameness in apparent difference and temporal change. Like his disciple Freud, Rousseau sees in the recall of infantile affect a determinative sign of the continuity of his being and his knowledge of it. Identity depends on a psychobiography in narrative form. No doubt this continues to be true for our contemporary sense of who we are.

In the nineteenth century—following Rousseau, and in so many ways the first “modern” century—the problem of defining, knowing, and testing identity became more acute and anxious. It activated various pseudoscientific technologies for knowing who people are (as we say). Physiognomy and phrenology—techniques for reading identity from face and skull—gave way to “Bertillonage,” the system of cranial and bodily measurements perfected by Alphonse Bertillon that was supposed to identify the criminal recidivist. Photography from the moment of its invention in 1839 was put to use for the police mug shot. This was a time of vast social dislocation, and especially of urban growth. Population density, especially in London and Paris, gave the impression of an innumerable new proletarian population—comprising mostly immigrants from the provinces. As Louis Chevalier pointed out in his classic study, the working classes came to appear, in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, the dangerous classes.⁹ Part of the official bourgeois response was to control through classification, to establish new markers of identity.¹⁰ Workers and ex-convicts, for instance, were required to carry passports to move within France. Prostitutes were required to carry a card if streetwalkers, to be assigned a number if in a brothel. Once registered in the police files they could be erased and rehabilitated only with the greatest of difficulty: the whole point, as historian Alain Corbin has shown, was to prevent any confusion between the deviant “marked” woman and the respectable bourgeoise.¹¹ The fear was that a deviant element might show up under the guise of the respectable. What if the mayor of your town turns out to be a former convict—as in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables? Hence a society officially committed to its Inspector Javerts, charged with ferreting out the criminal in disguise.

As the novelist who remains the best guide to this period for France, Honoré de Balzac, repeatedly tells us, in the “stupid” nineteenth century people increasingly look alike. All the men dress in bourgeois black: you can’t tell the social status and the identity of someone from his costume alone. There is a generalized semiotic crisis, which means that you need to pay attention to small, apparently insignificant signs: how someone ties a cravat, or how fresh his gloves are, or his gait as he walks in the anonymous urban crowd. Balzac worked intermittently throughout his career on a never-finished “Pathology of Social Life,” which is all about the new semiotics of modern urban existence.

Balzac (like Dickens and Wilkie Collins in England) was fascinated, even obsessed, by the problem of criminal identity. There are whole novels that turn on false appearance and mistaken identity. There are secret societies, such as Les Treize (The Thirteen), whose occult action on the world is suspected but never directly seen. His novels are mostly set in the 1820s, though largely written after 1832, the date when the legislature, on humanitarian grounds, abolished the practice of branding convicts on the shoulder. This abolition of la marque, as it was known, became to Balzac (as to other writers) a symbolic moment in the semiotic crisis. His representation of the crisis pervades his work, nowhere more than in that shadowy key figure of the Comédie humaine, Jacques Collin, alias Vautrin, alias the Reverend Father Carlos Herrera, aka Trompe-la-Mort (Cheat-Death) who is always in disguise, very often hidden from view in an attic from which he pulls the strings of the action on the ground floor, who can speak in many languages including one invented by himself and his criminal associates—an absolutely protean figure who will end by passing from the ranks of crime to those of the police. A key moment of Old Goriot (Le Père Goriot) involves drugging Vautrin so that he ca...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• To Begin
• 1 Marks of Identity
• 2 Egotisms
• 3 The “Outcast of the Universe”?
• 4 Discovering the Self in Self-Pleasuring
• 5 “Inevitable Discovery”: Searches, Narrative, Identity
• 6 The Derealization of Self
• 7 The Madness of Art
• Epilogue: The Identity Paradigm
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index