Table Of ContentA book series about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
Series Editors:
Ian Bogost and Christopher Schaberg
Advisory Board:
Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, Johanna Drucker, Raiford Guins,
Graham Harman, renée hoogland, Pam Houston, Eileen
Joy, Douglas Kahn, Daniel Miller, Esther Milne, Timothy
Morton, Nigel Thrift, Kathleen Stewart, Rob Walker,
Michele White.
In association with
BOOKS IN THE SERIES
Drone by Adam Rothstein
Remote Control by Caetlin Benson-Allott
Golf Ball by Harry Brown
Hotel by Joanna Walsh (forthcoming)
Refrigerator by Jonathan Rees (forthcoming)
Shipping Container by Craig Martin (forthcoming)
Silence by John Biguenet (forthcoming)
Phone Booth by Ariana Kelly (forthcoming)
Glass by John Garrison (forthcoming)
Waste by Brian Thill (forthcoming)
Tree by Matthew Battles (forthcoming)
Hair by Scott Lowe (forthcoming)
Dust by Michael Marder (forthcoming)
Doorknob by Thomas Mical (forthcoming)
Blanket by Kara Thompson (forthcoming)
driver’s license
Meredith Castile
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
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BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks
of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published 2015
© Meredith Castile, 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval
system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting
on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication
can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Castile, Meredith.
Driver’s license/Meredith Castile.
pages cm. – (Object lessons)
Includes index.
Summary: “A lively exploration of how the driver’s license encapsulates the
contradictory values of contemporary culture and identity, and especially
freedom and security, mobility and restriction”– Provided by publisher.
ISBN 978-1-62892-913-3 (paperback) – ISBN 978-1-62892-978-2
(ePub) – ISBN 978-1-62892-564-7 (ePDF) 1. Drivers’ licenses–United States.
2. Identification cards–United States. 3. Liberty–United States.
4. National security–United States. I. Title.
HE5623.C333 2015
929.9–dc23
2014029807
ISBN: PB: 978-1-6289-2913-3
ePDF: 978-1-6289-2564-7
ePub: 978-1-6289-2978-2
Series: Object Lessons
Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
CONTENTS
1 America 1
2 Fake 7
3 Design 41
4 Teen 67
5 Identity 83
6 Civics 113
Notes 133
Acknowledgments 141
Index 143
vi
1 AMERICA
Do we contradict ourselves?/Very well, then we
contradict ourselves.
In the America of the ubiquitous road less traveled, the paved
paradise where the bearded Bard sings the hymn of the open
road and life is a restless punching through the radio and
also a highway and we’re going to ride it west against the
night and off into the sunset, in this mythic America, we fly
along in the fast lane, placing bets against flashing lights in
the rearview mirror, against the dreaded sidle into the gravel
and the voice at the window demanding our license. This
enforcer of safe limits, the license! But also—the license,
talismanic pass to life: we may flash it to fly, skydive, gamble,
tattoo ourselves, pierce ourselves, marry each other, register
an assault weapon, drink, smoke, chew, dance, see a striptease,
see jazz in the clubs where it belongs, rent a car, travel on
Amtrak, buy dildos, swords, firecrackers, spray paint …,
donate blood, file government forms with new employers,
receive unemployment, be issued a birth certificate for our
own newborn, adopt dogs from shelters, surrender dogs to
shelters, attend sex conventions, open bank accounts, charge
major purchases, vote, get senior discounts, register as a visitor
at a hospital’s front desk, and so on, and so on, and so on. The
license is our pass, our validation, our bureaucratic identity.
Presenting it is the handshake of officialdom: This is who I
am, the official me. But it can also be a motion of intimacy:
I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. This photo is the
worst photo ever taken of me—it doesn’t even look like me.
Will you still sleep with me now that you’ve seen it?
Few other objects are so pervasive, part of so many different
registers of American life, as the driver’s license. Embedded
in our procedures and processes, open to contradictory
meanings and uses, the license reveals America, the insatiable
nation, wanting it all. State authority and personal expression.
Freedom and security. Miles of unbroken road, unbeatable
TSA checkpoints. Self-regulation, social legislation. Drunken
excess, Puritan prudence. Rooting for outlaws, guarding the
rule of law. Sweet sixteen, pay your own way. Government
safeguards, bureaucratic fraud. City, suburb. Image, authen-
ticity. Inclusivity, borders. National standardization, state
prerogatives. The franchise as a right, the franchise as
conditional. Privacy, centralized information. And more. A
map, the great ideological fault lines of America, emerges as
I follow the license on its course across the rugged, stubborn,
oversized land that calls itself united.
A note on terms: during a long childhood of wide-flung
travel, when I wasn’t being coached to say I was from Canada
2 DRIVER’S LICENSE
(I’m not), my parents emphasized the fact that we were from
the United States, not America. “Bolivians and Mexicans and
Canadians are just as ‘American’ as we,” my father instructed.
Now, in my adopted home of Vienna, my nationality is
satisfyingly specific and inoffensive—US-Amerikanerin. Yet
for this book I choose to speak mostly of America, because
the symbolic life of a driver’s license lives in a web of values
and ideologies not coterminous with the concrete nation-
state the United States. But, of course, the fantasy Americas
fold over into the real one. Imagination and interpretation
shape lived political realities. So alongside the laws, facts
and figures of the United States, “America” figures in this
book as mythos, a symbolic territory, a construction. The sea-
to-sea vastness of the nation, a vastness webbed by interstates
totaling triple our planet’s circumference, facilitates such
mythologizing. Andy Warhol explains:
Everybody has their own America, and then they have
pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but
they can’t see. … [Y]ou live in your dream America that
you’ve custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions
just as much as you live in your real one.1
The wider the vision, the more intimately it reflects back on
the seer. So too with this book. My exploration into a nation’s
relation to identity, transit, and personal freedom—by virtue
of its breadth—cannot not be projective and personal. So be it.
My analysis spins along grooves of an American-made mind,
AMERICA 3
