founding story of modern fingerprinting, famously recorded in Charles Edward Chapel’s 1941 forensic guide Fingerprinting: A Manual of Identification and told in dramatic detail in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 1991 official pamphlet, Fingerprint Identification, is indeed a dramatic example of the power of modern identification (Fig. I.1).5 As the FBI pamphlet declares, “It would be hard to conceive a more nearly perfect case for refuting the claims of rival systems of identification” (7). For many years visitors to FBI headquarters could even view a wall-sized version of the story, which is retold in many histories and forensic textbooks.6
Figure I.1. The story of Will West, as told in Fingerprinting Identification (1991). (Federal Bureau of Investigation, U.S. Department of Justice)
There is just one problem with the story of Will West: It isn’t true. Kansas fingerprint examiner and historian Robert D. Olsen has conclusively demonstrated that, while the two Wests did exist, the scene described above simply did not take place. The Wests were never incarcerated at the same time and place, and there is no record of their fingerprints being taken and compared. In fact Leavenworth did not even begin recording prisoners’ fingerprints until 1904. Olsen concludes that it “makes a nice case to tell over port and cigars, but there is evidence it never happened” (3). Yet “over the years, popular true crime authors and professional scholars alike have repeated the Will West story as if it really happened” (S. Cole 146). The FBI pamphlet was published in 1991, four years after Olsen publicly appealed to forensic professionals to abandon the West story, declaring that “it is not necessary to use a fable to illustrate the value of the fingerprint system” (3). A decade later one could still find intellectually rigorous scholars citing the official version of the Will West incident (Joseph 170; Rowe 163). And still a decade after that, at the time of this writing, a simple Internet search yields numerous sites by popular and professional devotees of fingerprinting, including law enforcement officials and forensic science instructors, which repeat the legend as fact.7
This adherence to the Will West story in defiance of historical contradiction establishes it as not simply myth or fable but fantasy: a thing we not only imagine but desire to be true. The fantasy of the two Will Wests is also an inextricably racialized fantasy; it is no coincidence that the two Wests were African American.8 Nineteenth-century interest in fingerprinting was originally driven by colonialist imperatives and figured as a means to distinguish between racially homogeneous “others”—in the British context, Indian natives, and in the United States, Chinese immigrants.9 Sir Francis Galton, the figure most notably associated with introducing fingerprinting to a wide audience, was also the acknowledged “father” of modern eugenics and was deeply invested in his ultimately unrealized goal of using fingerprints in the service of racialist science.10
In the West story, and in many other examples discussed in this book, the fantasy of identification merges notions of individual and group identity: West is at once himself, a criminal, and a black man, and the supposed power of fingerprinting is to fix and merge these identities into a single knowable subject. Indeed the remarkable success of fingerprinting over the past century stems from its real and imagined ability to encompass and link different realms of identity. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno observe, the paradoxical individuality of modern culture is represented by “fingerprints on identity cards which are otherwise exactly the same, and into which the lives and faces of every single person are transformed by the power of the generality” (154). The power of fingerprints to stabilize personal identity is accomplished only through the existence of a state apparatus to organize and frame that identity, and, as historian Simon Cole convincingly argues, the primary challenge for nineteenth-century fingerprinting researchers was to develop a working system for the organization and retrieval of fingerprint data, “a link between an individual body and a paper record held by the state” (4). The centrality of this link between body, text, and state underscores the crucial difference of modern identificatory practice, what Foucault describes as “cellular power,” in which individuality is legible only in relation to a homogeneous, regularized grouping (Discipline and Punish 149). The fantasy of identification, then, is always far less concerned with individual identity than with placing that individual within a legible group.
Among the “elementary signs of modern identity . . . the name, the portrait, and the fingerprint,” only fingerprints provide a sign of identity rooted firmly in the physical body (Caplan 52).11 While portraits (and photographs) provide a textually mimetic reflection of personal identity, and names formalize identity into language, for many years only fingerprints—what Mark Twain famously called our “natal autographs”—combined the textual, linguistic, and physical into a master signifier, “a kind of serial number written on the body” (L. Davis, Enforcing Normalcy 32). While Simon Cole claims that “fingerprinting . . . embedded firmly within our culture the notion that personhood is biological” (5), I suggest the reverse is true, that prior notions of biological personhood influenced the selection of fingerprinting as the preferred means of identification in the modern era (since the existence of fingerprints was known cross-culturally for many centuries before its modern European and American implementation in the late 1800s). Lennard J. Davis connects this development to the emergence of normative bodily models, as “the notion of fingerprinting pushes forward the idea that the human body is standardized” (Enforcing Normalcy 32). The normalizing power of the fingerprint provides an apparent resolution to the dilemma of identification outlined at the start of this introduction—the paradox of reconciling unique individuality with democratic social equality—as every individual’s fingerprints are “qualitatively unique, yet capable of being enrolled in a numerical series for the purposes of classification, retrieval, and communication” (Caplan 53). To this extent, fingerprints function as a perfectly Foucauldian mechanism that disciplines individuals into objects of state control while maintaining the illusion of individual autonomy.
However, the fissures in this totalizing view of fingerprints provide glimpses of the ambiguity, tension, and subversion that lurk within. In nineteenth-century America, with its intense “desire for coherent and legible identities” (Chinn 47), the discovery of the fingerprint signified less an advance in material technology than the power of a fantasy of identification to produce and naturalize its own systematic realization. This dynamic becomes dramatically clear when we discover that fingerprinting was deployed fictionally before it was ever used in legal or forensic settings; in fact this fantastical power of fiction may even have enabled the eventual implementation of this form of identification. Twain’s 1898 novella, Pudd’nhead Wilson, discussed at length in chapter 5, famously introduced fingerprinting to the wider cultural discourse, touting its unparalleled ability not only to distinguish between unique individuals but also to delineate the different identities of racially ambiguous subjects. This solution to the crisis of identification so deeply satisfied the nation’s fantastic desires that, startlingly, Twain’s fictional statements on the accuracy of fingerprints were repeatedly cited in actual criminal trials of the early twentieth century to produce convictions—both literally and in the sense of a powerful state of belief. Indeed Twain’s protagonist’s famous speech on the power of this “physiological autograph” is still cited and repeated in forensic textbooks, granting the power of the expert to a character who exists as pure invention.12 Thus we see that the blurring of truth, imagination, and desire in the West story is not an aberration in the story of modern identification but rather its defining feature.
Time Travels: Staging, Penetrance, Institutionalization
In Raymond Williams’s description of dominant and residual cultures, the residual comprises those “experiences, meanings and values, which cannot be verified or cannot be expressed in terms of the dominant culture, [but] are nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of the residue—cultural as well as social—of some previous social formation” (159). In the case of fantasies of identification, representation is both residual and prescient, both preceding and emerging from social formations. The narrated fingerprinting of the
