Illegibility: Reading and Insecurity in History, Law and Government

‘I know that what I write to you is worth reading; but my words, and yours! There are all of yours standing like soldiers on exercise in fine uniforms, and mine like a rabble of rebels with truncheons.’

Rahel Varnhagen to Friedrich Fouqué, 1811¹

This essay derives from research on the documentation of individual identity in modern Europe, which began as a more or less straightforward project to look into the history of identity documents of different kinds. I soon became more interested in exploring how the protocols of individual identity – for example, the personal name, the distinguishing mark – have been conceived and stabilized in specific historical circumstances, in such a way that they can be transferred to the ‘papers’ that have codified identification in the modern world in a range of different contexts or for different purposes.² The source of this essay is another technology of identification, namely handwriting and signatures. There are obvious ways in which handwriting belongs in the general field of identity: the signature is the oldest biometric, and the authentication of handwriting and the detection of forgery are longstanding aspects of civil and police routines. As I worked on this, however, a related but less noticed issue began to force itself to the surface: the question of illegibility. Once this entered the field of visibility, it became hard to ignore it.

I begin by introducing literal illegibility in the form in which it may be most familiar to historians, as an unwanted property of the historical archive; and then go on to consider how the metaphor of legibility and illegibility has made its way into the historiography of the information state in recent years. The rest of the essay discusses three specific instances of illegibility in government and the law, and concludes by suggesting what we might learn from conceptualizing and historicizing illegibility in this way.

Literal and Metaphorical Illegibility

Historians have surely all had the unnerving experience of working in an archive and coming across a handwritten document which looks important but which we simply cannot read. There are of course technical or historically specific hands that paleography can train us to read, but there are also cases where an individual style of handwriting is enormously difficult to decipher, by virtue of the writer’s idiosyncratic writing technique, or the

Fig. 1.

Copying exercise, from William Stewart Thomson, Copying Manuscript Exercises, for Civil Service Examinations, Aberdeen, 1892.

fact that he or she just has very bad handwriting. In theory we wrestle with the page until we have deciphered it. But we have to admit that success is not always achieved. Some writing is simply unreadable, and probably in practice even the most meticulous of historians has had to give up the struggle at some point, however important the context, and hope for the best. (Fig. 2)³

So far so bad, but let us now consider the case that illegibility can be seen not just as an alarming property of the archives, but as a subject that deserves some attention in its own right. In its broadest implications, illegibility represents an unacknowledged underside or shadow to the official writing practices that produce legibility in both a concrete and a metaphorical sense. On the grand scale, the relationship between the history of writing and the history of the modern European bureaucratic state is self-evident,⁴ and one can lay down a handful of markers here. Early surviving written records, such as the Ugarit tablets classified by Jack Goody, show just how close is the association between writing and the state, if we understand the early state’s records as primarily systems of book-keeping.⁵ What Anthony Giddens has called the ‘administrative power’ of the state may not be exclusively tethered to writing (and nor, of course, is writing exclusively tethered to the state); but until recently written means of communication and information storage – the means by which Giddens’s administrative power is generated – have been dependent on written records. For the history of how writing moved...