Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe Keith Breckenridge (bio) Who Are You? Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe. By Valentin Groebner, trans. Mark Kyburz and John Peck. New York: Zone Books, 2007. Pp. 349. $30. Monitored and harassed at every turn by digital cameras, biometric documents, and invasive, dull-witted databases, it is easy to believe that the systems of surveillance that afflict us today are intrinsically new. Indeed, at times—perhaps especially in airport queues—it seems that the experience of ubiquitous surveillance is the defining feature of this new century. Valentin Groebner's study of the history of identification practices in medieval and early modern Europe provides a startling corrective to this idea. Even more powerfully than Eddy Higgs's history of the emergence of the modern information state in England, Groebner's research into the high-medieval roots of the politics of identity demonstrates that the struggle over identification has a deep and powerful history in Europe, dating back almost to the beginning of the second millennium. He shows that our current struggles with the faulty technologies of identification, registration, and classification all have their origins in the High Middle Ages. Much more than other studies of states' ways of seeing, this book shows the enormous cultural and administrative significance of the medieval church and the European municipalities in the organization of coercive identification systems, hundreds of years before the rise of the modern nation-state. Not all of this history is a study of the origins of the present. Some of the themes of identification that Groebner explores in the medieval period certainly have no modern descendent (at least not for the moment). The stress in the Middle Ages on the moral and status-indicating qualities of apparel has no immediate purchase in a world where clothing is almost everywhere systematically commodified and ephemeral. So too, the medieval concern with the diagnostics of skin color, not simply as markers of personal identity but of a wider set of moral and political characteristics determined [End Page 490] by "astrology, the doctrine of bodily fluid, and cosmology," has no obvious contemporary equivalent. The pre-modern, Mediterranean disdain for the evil climate of northern Europe, and the debilitating psychological and moral effects suggested by pale skin, changed dramatically after the fifteenth century. Groebner shows that a new diagnostics of complexion began to emerge in earnest as slavery and the idea of "race" provided grounds for a reordered hierarchy of skin color. But, especially from the middle point in the book, Groebner lays out the foundations of the contemporary state by tracing the medieval etymology of the keywords of contemporary surveillance systems; he suggests (sometimes tendentiously) that the origins and usage of the current terms for identity, information, registration, race, bureaucracy, and identity papers all lie in the pre-modern era. Groebner shows that written identity registration was a key weapon of the strong against the weak as early as the thirteenth century. Whether it was the high-medieval church building a list of the names of the damned, as the "dark counterpart of God's book of life," or sixteenth-century municipalities inventing the concept of the identity paper as a tool for policing beggars, he demonstrates the startling cultural significance of the power of writing in European history. Some of the claims here—Groebner's observation, for example, that Frederick II's decision in 1231 to produce his chancellery's register on the new paper marked "nothing less than the beginning of the history of bureaucracy in Europe"—are left more at the level of provocative claims than demonstrated theses, but the overall significance of a deep history of written surveillance is incontrovertible. Groebner shows that the rise of literary government from the eleventh to the sixteenth century produced the key characteristics of our modern surveillance politics—an ever-increasing obligation to register identities through writing coinciding with a widespread imperative to deceive by means of the same technology. These practices of identification and registration were used by the military, by Philip II's imperial government, and by municipalities throughout central Europe, but the heart of this study, before...