to recognize. They make up a specific body of texts, or, to be more precise, a class of papers. Their quality and the very paper on which they were printed was so significant that documents frequently came to be referred to as ‘papers’. And it was this paper quality which led to them being described both respectfully and in a pejorative fashion.12 Just as in the post-Soviet period we could immediately recognize advertising fliers that were pushed through our letter boxes, the document has long been instantly recognizable. It always has a certain look to it. Special forms and templates were devised for documents. (In Soviet times we knew them by their number: Form Number 1 was the main one, which a citizen would fill out in order to obtain a passport. This contained far more details about the person than the passport itself. Form Number 9 was needed to apply to register in a particular city, and so on.) This speaks about the limits of their contents, and about the fact that, by their very nature, documents were designed to be used in a narrow set of circumstances. They were instantly recognizable. It was not by chance that the templates for documents were the first texts to be laid out in printed form.13
According to the Russian linguist, Sergei Gindin, there are two types of coherence in a text. One is internal or intrinsic, not requiring anything extratextual, while the other type of coherence depends on the relation to an external matrix or template and cannot be understood without relation to that.14 Like many other documents, the passport falls into the second category; but its layout has become so much a part of the consciousness of ‘the passport person’ that the basic details can be easily understood without referring to the template itself. Texts such as autobiographies written in the Soviet period bear witness to this: they give the sort of personal details found in passports, but with no reference to the actual passports themselves.
We are interested here in written texts. There is a different relationship to the written text than there is to the oral text. Until comparatively recently, the written document was regarded as an object which was endowed with magical powers.15 All the details of the document speak about its authority: the size and quality of the paper on which it is printed; the way in which it is protected; its properties; and so on. This all goes to create a particular aura for the document, which leaves one in no doubt that herein lies special, protected, information. Later on, when documents began to be printed, they were marked out by an indispensable group of handwritten details, such as a specific date, the person’s name, their own signature, and so forth. This combination of the printed and the handwritten can be seen as immediately demonstrating the formal nature of the document as well as the importance of the information contained therein. The printed part gives the standard information, which any similar document would have, while the handwritten entries are there to ensure its uniqueness. This dual nature determines the different attitudes to the printed and the handwritten parts of the document. In particular, when it is checked, special attention is paid to the handwritten entries, which are the ones where forgeries most often occur.
As mentioned above, a document may be regarded as a vehicle for templates, examples or certain standards, and this stereotypical function is so strong that it is reflected in the language of the document, which is typical for its formal nature, both in its address and in its contents. ‘This document is intended to bring to your attention …’; ‘This is hereby to certify that Mr S.V. Ivanov …’. As is well known, red tape is marked out by a high level of conventionality; one often finds that the initial variants of contemporary forms can be found in bureaucratic writing of the nineteenth century or even earlier.
Typically, the drawing up of documents involves both their form and their contents. Perhaps this is true above all for documents relating to identity. We find here a somewhat paradoxical situation: a document which is designed to highlight and emphasize the individual’s characteristics is made up of a conventional collection of evidence, deliberately designed to standardize everything. We shall be discussing in detail the way in which the person’s details are stamped onto this.
Unlike other texts, the document always has certain properties that immediately identify it as such. These include the date, the stamp, the signature, the series, the number, the particular quality of the paper to protect against fraud and so on. Besides, the modern document (in contrast to documents from long ago) always has a reference number which indicates where it is filed in a particular database, so that it can be easily located. This means that the origin of the information contained in the document can be established and verified. In reality, though, it is possible to check and confirm only the source of the evidence (that is, the body which checked the evidence) but not the actual evidence itself. For example, can one prove that Mr X was born on 5 May 1922 if the actual record of his birth has not survived? Or that Ms X is Russian if previously no record was kept of nationality? As Galina Orlova wrote in her paper, ‘Inventing the document: the paper trail of the Russian Office’, ‘Geared as it is to the priority of the written word, the document does not so much confirm the existence of the person it describes as provide a sufficient and definite confirmation of the documentary record.’16 In other words, the document does not definitively demonstrate some kind of correspondence with a previously established fact. Its ‘strength’ lies elsewhere: the fact that it comes from an authoritative source. The true value of the document is indeed magical, rather than an established and verified fact. In this sense we can say that the document is an object enclosed within itself; or, in other words, a self-referencing item.17
3.
It is worth examining in more detail the level of trustworthiness attested to by a document, given that its fundamental purpose is to reflect or confirm certain details as ‘true’. Our everyday impression of the world is based on the supposition (and logic) of truth, sufficiency and identity, given that the truth and the lie are always interdependent. It is natural to want to clarify the dividing line between the two, thus making the world a more orderly place. The authorities are forever conducting various projects aimed at bringing about greater order. They do this with an inexhaustible enthusiasm. For them, the creation of a document is not merely symbolic but a genuine attempt to establish such a dividing line. Within this logic, what is ‘true’ is defined by documents. So the truth is not necessarily ‘the correct order of things’ per se, but something which is artificially created, above all with the help of documents. As a result, the document becomes the embodiment of trustworthiness. In its own way it is a conclusive act. There is no need to check the information contained in the document (for the checking of the documents themselves, see chapter 7). A particular ‘truth’ is created with the help of these documents, suitable for one situation or another.
From this it should be clear that such documents work only when there exist institutions which take upon themselves, if not the place of Almighty God, then at least the position of the ‘bearers of the truth’, since they give themselves the right to define the truth. The history of documents – from the edicts of princes to the certificates of the housing commission – illustrates that first and foremost it is the authorities that take this role upon themselves. Documents always reflect the authorities’ power in any culture (hence the formality and official nature of documents).18
A document, then, is the transfer of some kind of relationship (or of a person’s details, as in the case of a passport) into a different, documented reality. The document acts as a replacement for a particular object: ‘“Here’s my house”, he said, waving a sheaf of papers’. It is significant that when it comes to documents used for identification, they have become metaphors for the person’s surrogate; they are, as David Levy calls them in Scrolling Forward …, ‘talking things’.19
These ideas, which have been added to the document, are borne out in social interaction. A document becomes an actual document only when it is used for its primary purpose: when it certifies, affirms or proves something. Outside these situations, it is, in essence, a worthless piece of paper.20 Its link with what is thought to be ‘trusted’ makes the document a natural target for falsification (the reverse
