1Documentality

The issue of social legibility brings us to the theory of documentality. I use the term here to designate the very effort to leave, secure, and follow traces as an epistemic practice of establishing reference. According to the philosopher Maurizio Ferraris, one of the few thinkers to attempt a systematic philosophy of the document, the documental function is a fundamental condition of social reality. On the one hand, the registration of traces allows us to give permanence to thoughts and memories which are otherwise ephemeral, unpredictable, and unreliable. On the other hand, inscriptions also enable us to endow those traces with social significance. The legibility of the trace is what makes individual thoughts and actions accessible to other persons and opens up the potential for them to enter a public domain. Traces understood as inscriptions, in this sense, supply the material conditions for creating social objects – and hence documents – since they are “open to access by more than one person” and can be “codified in objects that are essentially designed to be exhibited” (Ferraris 2013, 178).

Because such inscriptions enable us to fix performatives, they also supply the basis for building social institutions and conferring institutional value upon certain acts and objects.

The fact of being written, and hence shared or shareable allows the registration to fix values, to integrate different values in a single system, to mobilize resources, to put people into relations with each other, to protect transactions as well as to certify identity, and to confer or safeguard determinate statuses. (Ferraris 2013, 236)

Ferraris’s theory helps us to think the transitions from mental and material traces, via inscriptions and registrations, to social objects, documents, and institutions. Documentality is his term for the social activity of record-keeping as it emerges from inscriptions. Within this framework, documents themselves are inscriptions endowed with an institutional value and hence the trace of social act. A social collectivity, a physical medium, and usually an idiom, such as a signature – defined by Ferraris as an “iterable singularity” (Ferraris 2013, 254) – are necessary for traces to transform into documents. Once these conditions are met, a document, derived from the Latin docēre, meaning to teach or show, is a material object that has been processed and framed as a piece of evidence with the epistemic function of enabling us to know something by showing us something (Gitelman 2014, 1–3).

Yet the problem with Ferraris’s account, as I see it, is that it does not account for the validity or the authority of the documents upon which our institutions are built. His effort to unseat the metaphysical commitment to a fiction of collective intentionality by emphasizing the material conditions of social interaction is certainly laudable. But by privileging the materiality of the trace, the argument too readily sidesteps the question of the source of authority that endows certain inscriptions with a documental status not granted to others. The argument is in fact circular. Ferraris wants to position the exchange of documents as the enabling condition of a collective. Yet the existence of such a social collectivity is one of the necessary conditions for traces understood as inscriptions to be granted the status of documents in the first place. The validity of not only what is written in a document but even of the document’s legibility as a document in contrast to various inscriptions of whatever kind depends on a system of practices embedded in an institutional framework with the authority to make certain inscriptions normative. In what follows, I will examine how identity documents exemplify this fundamentally instable slippage between the indexicality and validity of the trace within documentality.

Identity documents provide knowledge in the form of a written record about a person’s date and place of birth, parentage, citizenship, and so on, that can be shared with others, and they confer, in a performative sense, such social markers on persons by being produced as written records by state authorities in the first place. The existence of official documents, such as a birth certificate, is coeval with the establishment of a person’s social and political status (for instance, being born as a citizen of a certain nation). Conversely, in the absence of official documentation, the validity of a person’s claims about their social status, even that person’s credibility, can be cast into doubt by others. Since social identities understood in this way both generate and require a paper trail, we cannot, in the social realm, maintain a distinction between being born and being made, for either documents or persons.

Let us return briefly to Ferraris in order to tease out some sociopolitical implications of his account of documentality as they apply to the identity document. Ferraris wants to provide an account of the social that replaces the notion of collective intention with a materialist account of the trace. In Ferraris’s Baltheory, writing and record-keeping are more fundamental features of social institutions than communication. Registrations are a condition of possibility for communication, but they are not reducible to it. According to him, restaurant receipts and train tickets, to cite some of his examples, involve leaving traces in the form of written records rather than acts of communication. They represent instances of documenting a transaction or storing information to later be transmitted. Such operations are as crucial to society today as ever before. This seems uncontroversial. However, to raise the stakes, I want to take a closer look at one of Ferraris’s passing remarks in this discussion of the primacy of registration over communication. Ferraris refers to having little money and “the social exclusion of clandestine immigrants” as “lacks and difficulties [that] derive from a defect in registration and not in communication” (Ferraris 2013, 186–187). Social inclusion, Ferraris suggests, depends on the efficacy of our documental practices. Accordingly, we seem to require a more comprehensive system of registering identities for our institutions to be able to embrace all persons within their fold. But to what extent can we attribute the exclusion of undocumented persons from participation in the social world to a ‘defect in registration’? Wherein lies the defect? Is the point that once documented on paper, everyone has the ability to participate in social activities; or is it rather that everyone’s activities – especially in their interactions with one another – leave myriad traces that require a more accurate or all-encompassing system of documental registration that can account for the varieties of social activity? To even begin to tackle this conundrum, which in my view Ferraris does not resolve, we need to take a closer look at the points where practices of registration break down and certain traces withhold their documentality.

One place to start is with the passport, perhaps the most significant identity document in the modern age of migration. The passport encapsulates in object-form the creation and organization of a system of reference which modern institutions rely upon in order to establish and vouch for the identities of persons. Though the passport as we know it today has a long history filled with various precursors, with the emergence of modern citizenship as a result of the French Revolution it gained in institutional importance as a tool for implementing uniform regulations on movement and for distinguishing between foreigners and nationals. The passport subsequently transformed into the unique document of an international regime with standardized formats and rules in the aftermath of the First World War. As an assemblage of a picture, stamps, watermarks, seals, and a signature, the passport combines iconic, indexical, and symbolic signifiers in one portable documental object. The efficacy of this collage of signifiers depends, of course, upon the existence of state-sponsored bureaucratic apparatuses and established procedures for guaranteeing the passport’s authority and authenticity. Further presupposed by this regime of signification are a standardized orthography and the creation of legal criteria for proper names (Caplan 2001, 54–55). States harnessed these signifying practices for the administration of resources human, natural, and monetary along national lines. The distinguishability of individual persons therefore went along with the biopolitical desire to implement a distinction between foreigners and nationals. Documents enabled governments to create knowledge about the identity of persons and, in the condensed form of the passport, made this knowledge portable and showable in the hands of its citizens as they moved within territories and crossed national borders (Torpey 2003, 83). Whether in its early forms of paper knowledge or in its increasingly prevalent mediations as digital data, exemplified today by the EU’s fingerprint database Eurodac,35 the legibility of distinct bodies of persons and citizens has been a function of documentality.

2Displaced Persons

For many displaced persons, there is no legible paper trail documenting their identities and movements.36 The existence of refugees, for instance, reveals the cracks in the system of documentality; they embody moments in which social relations and institutions break down, identities can no longer be certified, and legal statuses are no longer safeguarded or become indeterminate. This is why the invention of the modern passport system coincided with its breakdown. The passport system aims not only to identify and manage persons on the move but also to identify the specific nation-state ultimately responsible for persons defined as citizens. Shortly after its inception, however, the limitations of the passport system were exposed when individuals and populations appeared who were without a verifiable nationality or citizenship, were on the move without a nation-state that was willing to claim responsibility for them, or were unwilling or unable to return to the country of their former citizenship due to fear of persecution. The massive refugee crisis of the 1920s and 1930s brought to the forefront the paradoxes of the passport system at the same time that it contributed to its standardization and internationalization. Nation-states still struggle to administer and manage such persons on the move. Their authorized agencies seek to establish, track, and document the identities of displaced persons for purposes of travel, immigration, asylum, or humanitarian aid. Yet at the same time, it is this very effort to classify persons according to categories of ethnicity, nationality, marital status, and age that can be used to discriminate against them, drive them out, or threaten their lives in the first place.

3Displaced Papers

The refugee, displaced or stateless person embodies, as it were, a reminder of the gaps within the documental regimes of nation-states. For one, they remind us that personal identity only tenuously rests upon a presumed identity between nativity and nationality; in other words, they challenge one of the referential bedrocks of modern politics, namely, that a human being is born as a citizen of rights into a nation-state. For Giorgio Agamben, they therefore expose the biopolitical fiction underpinning the logic of sovereignty at the same time that they point to how the human being can only exist as an exception within a political order divided up among sovereign nation-states (Agamben 2000, 20–21). It is not my aim here to re-launch a complex discussion of the place of human rights within the discourse of law and sovereignty. Rather, I wish to highlight the precarious documentality of persons revealed by the phenomenon of displacement. I want to emphasize the constitutive role of documental practice within the administrations of nation-states, in the hope that by calling attention to the heterogeneity of officially ratified signifiers of identity and the traces of persons on the move, we can get a better glimpse of both the shortcomings and political stakes of our techniques for establishing reference. In short, I propose that we regard the trace as a highly politicized phenomenon at the intersection of migration and modern bureaucracy.

The desire to create paper trails vouching for the identities of persons and to make them evident and portable in passports has generated a parallel set of phenomena which challenge and potentially undermine the sources of referential authority within documentality. Identity documents only wield signifying authority if a regime of bureaucratic reference is already in place. This presupposes an established state with considerable resources and an administrative apparatus vested with the authority to wield state power. Yet there is more to the story. The rise of a documental regime making officially authorized identities legible has been accompanied by a history of counterfeiting, forgery, and impersonation, not to mention exclusion, exploitation, and illegibility. The various efforts to establish the likeness of a person and to classify sameness, as the historian Valentin Groebner argues, reveals the “history of identification as fiction, deception, pretense and ambivalence” (Groebner 2001, 27). The documental regime not only enables nation-states to keep records about citizens and track the movements of migrants both ‘regular’ and ‘irregular,’ but it also generates clandestine persons and uncanny double identities. In addition to recording, transmitting, and tracking the traces of persons on the move, the documental regime inadvertently bears traces, as it were, of its own instability.

4Bureaucracy, Credibility, and Compliance: Kurt Tucholsky’s Critique

The traces of that uncertainty and instability – manifest in instances of deception and ambivalence – derive from the fact that signifiers of identity are themselves conventional and hence rely upon leaps of faith. Their credibility as evidence of personal identity rests upon our general acceptance of their signifying efficacy. Indeed, it is because nationality is an ascribed status that cannot be determined on the basis of appearance and language alone that state administrations have developed systems of documentation to supply evidence of national identity (Torpey 2001, 269). Citizenship and nationality are social conventions whose signifiers are accordingly unmotivated. This is why they have to be coupled with those signifiers of personal identity regarded as motivated – pictures, signatures, fingerprints – in order to index a person with an ascribed nationality. Proper names exemplify the intersection of these semiotic registers: are we attached to our names or are they attached to us? We also know that appearances change, pictures can deceive, and signatures can be forged. The interplay of motivated and unmotivated signifiers can therefore both bolster belief in the evidentiary quality of identity documents and foster disbelief in their authenticity. The efficacy of identity documents thus hinges to a great extent upon our acceptance of their ability to show us knowledge about persons.37

In this regard, the signifying power of identity documents is not only a function of a documentality that supplies the medial conditions of our social institutions, but also of what the anthropologist David Graeber calls the “total bureaucratization” of social life. Traces are not merely recorded on various surfaces or registered on papers recognized as documents without a framework that confers institutional significance upon them. We also have to be willing to accept their inscriptions as valid. According to Graeber, bureaucratic systems “always create a culture of complicity,” in which we act as if we believe in their abstractions (Graeber 2015, 26–27). Our personal investment in identity documents, our acceptance of their ideological and semiotic presuppositions, is yet another example of how the logic of bureaucracy infiltrates our lives.

Graeber is not the first to call attention to this ‘as-if’ structure of belief within bureaucracy. We find it articulated in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, when the period of xenophobic border controls and mass displacement gave rise to the standardized international passport system and modern refugee regime, leading writers to reflect intensely on the facets and implications of the new prevalence of identity documents. For example, the German writer Kurt Tucholsky (1890–1935), one of the leading critical journalists of the Weimar Republic, penned a satirical piece on the identity document for the left-liberal daily Berliner Volkszeitung in June of 1920. His short piece, laconically titled “Identification” (“Der Ausweis”), describes the humiliating and, as it were, grotesque quality of the attempt to acquire an identity document – “sometimes called a passport or a registration card or an entry card or personal documents” – at any of the bureaus issuing such papers (Tucholsky 2017a, 1). In Tucholsky’s account, the unwitting traveller, seeking for instance to drive to Upper Silesia with an aunt, can expect to encounter an indifferent man-child at the office as well as a miserable back and forth of paperwork before being able to obtain the necessary identity document.

But in addition to remarking on its ubiquity, Tucholsky diagnoses the causes of this “identification epidemic” which had broken out in Germany around the time of the First World War. He attributes this social malady to a widespread bureaucratic mindset perpetuated by structures of complicity and enforced by the militarization of society. Writing at a time when these administrative measures had only recently been adopted as a feature of civilian life in Germany, Tucholsky characterizes this bureaucratic mentality in terms that have long since become familiar to many of us well beyond the confines of the stereotypical Prussian discipline he invokes: “the Prussian mind is so construed that it simply cannot proceed without lists, registry apparatuses, and – identification” (Tucholsky 2017a, 2). What Tucholsky imputed to a peculiarity of the Prussian administrative culture of Germany at the time, applies to a pervasive bureaucratic mentality upon which the documental system of governance rests in general. The same can be said for the ways in which the administrative apparatus of identity maintains its existence by establishing “its own immoderate importance” (Tucholsky 2017a, 2). Again, Tucholsky’s remarks about police registration in the crisis-ridden Weimar Republic ring just as true today for the activities of such agencies elsewhere:

We recognize identification in a thousand different forms. In the hundred unnecessary registration and deregistration certificates, in that restlessly absurd police registration system which only blooms in this blessed country (and which inhibits not a single criminal, yet burdens thousands of respectable citizens) – we find it in the senseless communications and reports which no one reads and which only become important when they go unfinished – we find it in the lists and minutes which everyone finds necessary to complete – in the ragged forms and permission slips which must be produced, filled out, signed, stamped, and submitted. And meanwhile the country drowns in disarray. (Tucholsky 2017a, 3)

However, it is Tucholsky’s emphasis on the twin structures of complicity and militarization that resonate with Graeber’s more recent analysis of the total bureaucratization of society. Having served in WWI, Tucholsky was well aware of the passport’s function as a military regulation. However, what was introduced for a society at war, in which neither soldiers nor civilians could move freely without first applying for and receiving the official paperwork, had after the war become the standard model of civilian life:

This identification affair is part of the wartime and controlled market system, and the funniest (and saddest) aspect of this is that ‘bureaus’ know precisely that they will always lose their paper war against life, the practical challenges of the day will not be just, and that in the end all these racketeers will slip right through the cracks. (Tucholsky 2017a, 2)

Tucholsky’s reference to the military context of these regulations underscores how the registering and policing of identities is rooted in the monopolization of violence by the state. Justified in the name of securing the nation’s borders in order to protect the nation from foreign enemies, this bureaucratic practice rests on the threat of violence against anyone who does not comply with its rules. At the same time, his example of racketeers slipping through the cracks acknowledges that bureaucracy’s standards do not apply equally to everyone. More by virtue of than despite its inefficiency, then, the administration of identity documents is another instance of “the link between coercion and absurdity” upon which bureaucracy feeds (Graeber 2015, 66). In Graeber’s view, bureaucracy requires onerous expenditures of interpretive labor on the part of those trying to navigate bureaucracy’s absurdities and thereby taxes their creative imagination. Coupled with the threat of meaningless police violence impervious to any alternative arguments or perspectives, bureaucracies “are ways of organizing stupidity – of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence” (Graeber 2015, 81).

Tucholsky, as these passages show, anticipates Graeber’s analysis of bureaucratic compliance. Toward the end of his piece on the identity document, Tucholsky even alludes to how the, as I call it, ‘as-if’ structure of belief in documental identification encourages otherwise intelligent people to conform to its rules and, as a result, the perpetuation of the bureaucratic administration of identity documents: “All who read this will quite possibly nod their heads, smile, and say ‘Yes: He’s right!’ But does this rid us of even one single identification? Everyone considers all these identifications unnecessary – every identification but one’s own” (Tucholsky 2017a, 3). Tucholsky challenges his readers to examine their own complicity with the structural inequalities (and violence) instituted and perpetuated by the administration of identity documents. In another short satire published with the title “The Border” (“Die Grenze”) in the same newspaper only a few days after “Identification,” Tucholsky caricatures the xenophobia entailed in the arbitrary drawing and policing of borders by nations and empires, where hospitality and neighborliness have been replaced by violent division and discrimination.

Bah, foreigner! You are the most miserable being under the European sun. Foreigner –! The ancient Greeks called foreigners “barbarians” – yet treated them hospitably nonetheless. You, however, are hunted from place to place, you – foreigner of our time – you will receive no right of entry here, there no residency permit; you are forbidden to eat bacon in one place, nor may you bring it with you on your way from one spot to the next – foreigner! (2017b, 1)

Here Tucholsky connects the deadening militarist administration of identification documents he described in the first piece to the logic of border control with its jingoistic divisions of persons into residents and foreigners. Furthermore, he links the xenophobic magnification of conflict to the massive displacements and regnant tribalism unleashed by the First World War:

After this war, after such displacements – compared to which the tiny day trips of the Great Migrations were naught but child’s play – after the bloody marches of peoples across half of Europe, the small disputes around the church steeples of every parish have attained hellish significance. Lineage more ancient than the Greiz-Schleiz-Reuss and the People’s State of Bavaria and an autonomous Upper Silesia and France and Congress Poland – it’s always the same. (2017b, 2)

But in both pieces he also exhorts his readers not to blindly accept these bureaucratic fictions just because it is convenient for those of us who hold an identity document to do so. For the extent to which the absurd administration of identification could translate into the sociopolitical exclusion of persons was already apparent in Tucholsky’s time and it continues to haunt political life to this day.

5Repetitions and Disappearances of the Person: Joseph Roth’s Critique

Contemporaries of Tucholsky, as well as many writers since, have explored the asymmetrical relationships, subaltern identities, and uncanny doublings brought about by the reliance on identity documents to govern the registration and movement of persons. I want to now consider how an unfinished novel by one of Tucholsky’s contemporaries, the Austrian-Galician writer Joseph Roth, represents these uncontrollable byproducts of identity documentation. Roth is one among a number of other authors writing in the 1920s–1940s who take up both the dehumanizing absurdities and the potential for forged identities produced by documental identification. These themes come to light in the fictional stories about stateless protagonists from this period by such authors as B. Traven, Erich Maria Remarque, and Anna Seghers (see, respectively, Gulddal 2013; Payne 2013; Hofmann 2017). Written between 1927 and 1929, Roth’s abandoned novel The Silent Prophet (Der stumme Prophet) was rediscovered and pieced together in the archive and published in 1966. At first glance, it gives a strange and morose account of a revolutionary modeled on Trotsky, presumably informed by Roth’s observations as a reporter travelling through the Soviet Union in 1926. For the issues I am raising here, however, the novel is important for the ways in which it links the protagonist’s motivation, disillusionment, and banishment to the phenomena of statelessness, displacement, and marginalization. Moreover, Roth’s novel sets this tale of a revolutionary outlaw among the movements of displaced and clandestine persons as well as profiteering smugglers and forgers, as these figures travel across the borders of the collapsing Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires.

As much more than a loosely biographical examination of a revolutionary whose ideals were betrayed by party functionaries, then, The Silent Prophet explores what types of traces persons might leave behind in a society obsessed with administering identity. The novel directs the reader’s imagination towards the marginalized and excluded persons inhabiting the European landscape in the time around WWI and the Russian Revolution. The protagonist, Friedrich Kargan, was born in Odessa as the illegitimate son of an Austrian piano teacher and the daughter of a wealthy Russian tea merchant. Rejecting the piano teacher as an unsuitable husband for his daughter, the tea merchant sends her and the child to live with her wealthy businessman uncle in Trieste. After Friedrich’s mother dies at an early age, he moves into the servants’ quarters at the uncle’s house and spends his childhood separated from the rest of the family. Denied the opportunity to study at university, Friedrich enters instead the world of bureaucracy as an apprentice in a shipping bureau. He then transfers, in 1908, to a border affiliate of the shipping agency, where he comes into contact with migrants and smugglers of varying shades. After finding a way to study in Vienna, he meets his love interest and joins the revolutionary cohort. We follow him as he travels around clandestinely on behalf of the revolution, is disappointed by the woman he loves, and is arrested and banished to Siberia, first by imperial authorities and later by his former revolutionary party after they have taken over the government.

Through the narration of Friedrich’s biography, Roth’s novel provides scenarios in which the bureaucratic administration of identity documents produces a doubling of identities. Examples of such ambivalent identities in the novel include displaced and migrant persons either without a recorded identity or seeking a new one, the creation of fraudulent identities, and the bifurcation of an individual identity into official and unofficial, public and private, selves. Dissimulation is represented as a lucrative business and a defining feature of Friedrich’s character made possible by documentality. Without any familial or national affiliations to tie him down, Friedrich decides to transfer to the company’s shipping office on the eastern border of the Austrian monarchy as a chance to alter the course of his life. In this unnamed border town he meets the Parthagener family who runs the affiliate of the shipping agency as well as an inn called “The Ball and Chain” (“Zur Kugel am Bein”). Here he comes into contact with “deserters, emigrants and refugees from the pogroms” making their way across the Austrian border from the Russian empire (Roth 1979, 13). Within this constellation, he becomes acquainted with the lucrative trade of human trafficking in an era of mass migration. This form of entrepreneurship operates not only at the borders of nation-states but also at the crossroads of legality and illegality. Such border agencies, the narrator matter-of-factly informs us, “enjoyed the goodwill of the authorities”:

It was the government’s unconcealed desire to remove these poor, unemployed and not altogether innocuous refugees from Austria as quickly as possible; but also to convey the impression that Russian deserters would be supplied with sailing tickets and recommendations to countries overseas – to such an extent that the desire to quit the army should affect an increasing number of Russian malcontents. The authorities were probably tipped off not to keep too close an eye on the shipping agents. (Roth 1979, 14)

In this account, it was the unofficial job of the shipping agencies to intercept these migrants and redirect them to North and South America (Roth 1979, 14). Since European nation-states had already begun to control the flow of Eastern European migrants across their borders in the decades leading up to the First World War, these migrants, refugees, and fugitives required the necessary papers to travel (Gerhard 2006, 21–22). However, because of their dubious status vis-à-vis state authorities, many lacked such official documentation. Therefore, “for those who could pay, papers were manufactured at the frontier” (Roth 1979, 16). A subterranean economy of false documents was born.

By naming the inn owned by the Parthageners “The Ball and Chain,” Roth aligns this scene of border-crossings and forged documents with his critique of the modern identity document as a stultifying practice of identification. On 28 September 1919, Roth published an article with the title “The Ball and Chain” (“Die Kugel am Bein”) in a short-lived daily newspaper in Vienna called Der Neue Tag. In this article, in which he formulates perhaps his most explicit critique of the dehumanizing effects of the new passport requirements, the ball and chain serves as a metaphor for the passport. Through its use of classifications to pattern fixed knowledge about a person’s origin and physiognomy, the passport territorializes individuals and renders bundles of physiological data into representations of abstract citizens, Staatsbürger, subtracted of the dynamism proper to a biography and hindered in their ability to move through physical space (Roth 1989a; Gerhard 1998, 210–211; Rahn 2008, 116–122).

In light of Roth’s deployment of the ball and chain metaphor to describe the (re-)territorializing functions of the passport, the inn takes on antithetical connotations, which I would argue reflect the ambivalences within documentality. That the inn is named for the ball and chain fastened to a prisoner’s leg stands in stark contrast to its function as a non-place of transience and the transnational movement of goods and persons in The Silent Prophet. For Friedrich the antithetical inn is both a crossroads and a site of personal repetitions and returns: it is where he “learned how to lie, to forge papers, to exploit the impotence, the stupidity, and even sometimes the brutality of the officials” (Roth 1979, 23); where he first meets Savelli (the revolutionary modeled on Stalin); where he acquires false identity papers that allow him to go study in Vienna; where he is arrested by border police who send him to Siberia; and where he would return time and again during his clandestine travels. There is even something uncanny about these repetitions and returns. Because his “birth had not been registered anywhere,” he has the local forger give him the surname and nationality of his Austrian father, Zimmer, with which he travels to Vienna and studies at the university (26). In this way, he illegally assumes the name and nationality that would have been his birthright. Through this iterative repetition with a difference, he joins the ranks of all the other assumed and doubled identities that have emerged from “The Ball and Chain.” In light of Roth’s critique of state-administered identity papers, we can read the inn’s name as suggesting however that even the adoption of false personas is nonetheless a form of subjugation to the dictates of documental identity. The narrator echoes Roth’s critique when, after the outbreak of the First World War and the introduction of passport requirements in the novel, he remarks: “People – as one knows – had all become the shadows of their documents” (Roth 1979, 100). Here, the image of the person as a shadow is a metaphor for the reversal of indexicality under conditions of documentality. The document does not consist of assembled traces of a person, it is not the representation of a person, but rather the person, as a shadow, has his or herself become a trace of the document.

We can thus read The Silent Prophet as exploring the ambivalent kinds of traces left behind by persons in a society in which efforts by state bureaucracies to keep records of their citizenry and to police national borders give rise to displaced persons, false papers, and doubled identities – in short, shadow existences. At the same time, the novel is concerned with the threat of certain persons disappearing from the record altogether. It thus also presents alternative techniques for preserving and transmitting the traces of displaced persons in opposition to those dictated by state bureaucracies. Given that signifiers of identity only function within an institutional framework that endows them with their signifying power, it is not surprising that Roth’s novel, like many other tales of displaced persons, is structured by a frame narrative.38

At the outset of the frame narrative, the first-person narrator explains how the embedded narrative reconstruction of Friedrich Kargan’s story came about. The framework in question is provided by the official Soviet political apparatus: a regime consisting of party functionaries, secret police, and their numerous reports. The once revolutionary movement has become a modern state bureaucracy. On New Year’s Eve of 1926–1927, the narrator tells us, some friends and acquaintances have retreated from this official Soviet world to celebrate privately in a hotel in Moscow. When Friedrich Kargan’s name comes up in conversation, the narrator comes to his defense against the charges of anarchism and intellectual individualism uttered by others in the room. The narrator then undertakes, with the help of a secret service agent whose business was to know details about Kargan, what he calls “an attempt at a biography” (Roth 1979, 8). The ensuing narration took three nights, he tells us, and by the end the audience had dwindled to only two listeners. Apparently concerned that Friedrich Kargan’s story might not be heard by a wider audience, the narrator decided to transcribe his account. Yet he puts an ironic twist on the familiar convention of the framework narrative to insist on both the fictional status of this biography and a greater truth about the fate of individuals in society:

Omitted […], even deliberately suppressed, are certain indications that might lead to Kargan’s identification and might further the reader’s natural impulse to recognize in the individual portrayed a definite, historically existing personality. Kargan’s life story is as little related to actual events as any other. It is not intended to exemplify a political point of view – at most, it demonstrates the old and eternal truth that the individual is always defeated in the end. (Roth 1979, 9)

Roth’s narrator self-consciously marks the embedded narrative as fiction. The truth it claims to present us with is a matter of significance rather than reference. Its significance consists, to a large extent, in resisting society’s obsession with identification. When the narrator asks, “Is Friedrich Kargan destined finally to sink into oblivion?” he really is pondering whether society can accommodate individuals without a citizenship status, or whether persons who are not defined by a nationality, like the stateless Friedrich, “will be engulfed in empty solitude, unnoticed and without a trace, like a falling star in a silent obscure night” (Roth 1979, 9).

By transcribing his biography of Friedrich, however, the narrator does not merely add more paper to what Roth described in another article from October 1919, bluntly titled “Paper,” as a “vicious circle” in which persons have been rendered “a scrap of paper, no longer flesh and blood but a legitimation, a passport, a registration form.”39 The narrator does not wish to salvage the traces of Friedrich’s origins and movements from oblivion by documenting them on paper as if he were attesting to an unofficial record of this private history to counteract Friedrich’s absence from the public record. Rather, by bracketing the question of reference in this ironic framing of the trace, the novel presents us not with traces understood as indices of a really existing person but only with mere traces. These fictional traces mark, if anything, an absence. What emerges out of this constellation is an insistence on the ways in which a trace marks just as much the disappearance of an origin as it does the possibility of repetitions that can give rise to both records and forgeries. It is in this sense, “namely, that there is no presence without trace and no trace without a possible disappearance of the origin of the said trace, thus no trace without a death” (Derrida 2005, 158), that we should interpret the narrator’s statement about the demise of the individual. The individual in Roth’s sense is only present as a trace – has disappeared in a world populated by identities recorded on paper and the displaced persons to which that documental regime gives rise. This ironic framing of the trace as fiction is then mirrored by the novel’s anti-fictional devices: it reproduces letters by Friedrich as evidence about his person. The novel deploys an ironic discourse of the trace in order to critique the state’s bureaucratized documentation of traces for the purpose of identification.40 In Roth’s critique, forgery’s doublings and the disappearance of individuals are the front and back sides of the same government document.

6Conclusion

In a world that defines persons as national citizens, displaced persons bring to light myriad ways for conceptualizing the traces of persons. The dynamics of the trace sketched above with the help of Tucholsky and Roth have concrete political implications for the theory of documentality upon which state practices of record-keeping are based. They show us that documental reference seeks to suppress but cannot keep up with the heterogeneous traces of persons and unpredictable iterations of signifiers of identity. My discussion of the texts by Tucholsky and Roth sought to situate Ferraris’s theory of documentality within historical practices of state bureaucracy and border control. These two authors belong to a transnational cohort of writers who have responded critically to the reductive version of making identity legible that proceeds, as patterned by the passport, from a set of ascribed origins and “marks out the path taken by the individual up to the moment of inspection” with reference to visa stamps and categories of identity such as marriage, occupation, and kinship (Chalk 2014, 28). They expose the ways in which these procedures generate signifying gaps and onerous absurdities as well as political discrimination and social exclusion.

These criticisms still hold today. Similar logics inform the newly developing technologies and purposes of identification. One of the passport system’s jobs is to manage mobility across borders, to identify who is within but also to keep unwanted persons from entering a national territory. The distinction between citizens and aliens, foreigners and nationals, has been primary to the self-definition of the modern nation-state and the policing of its borders. But it has become even more vehement with the heightened securitization of the nation-state in the effort to combat terrorism and the desire to curtail mass migration from the global South to the North. Modern migration technologies are now used for ‘profiling’ persons on the move in accordance with three broad categories: privileged (trusted) travellers, the unwanted, and those who are suspect and hence requiring further scrutiny. The construction of such profiles increasingly relies on biometric signifiers of personal identity and digital storage and communication technologies to assist in the processing of this information as knowledge about persons. One result is a new permutation of the splitting and doubling of identities already criticized by Roth: by transforming bodies into information that can be stored and circulated in order to regulate people’s access to territories, these technologies create “data doubles” of persons on the move (Dijstelbloem and Broeders 2015, 28). Such scrutiny of travellers and migrants overlaps with tighter restrictions on the ability of displaced persons to move and find asylum. The technology might be changing, but government bureaucracies and their police forces are still in pursuit of the elusive dream of a seamless paper trail.

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