Profaning Fascism's Analogs: Petzold's Transit , NSK's and Dread Scott's Passports, and Technologies of Escape and Control

This essay analyzes three cultural artifacts that take up the passport as a pervertible form of biopolitical identification: the 2018 German film Transit ; the "passports" issued by the Slovenian art collective NSK; and Dread Scott's All African People's Consulate (2024). In Transit , the film's jarring anachronism introduces the opportunity to think through different logics of control, analyzing them through the rhetorical figure paralepsis. Likewise, the NSK passports attempt to subvert the current power of nation-states. The groups behind the project claim that "the NSK State rejects the categories of (defined) territory and the principle of national borders and advocates the law of transnationality." But it has partially backfired as an art project, with many people mistaking the ambiguous project as an authentic EU passport. Finally, the passports issued at Scott's consulate, promising a future citizenship, further subvert the passport's self-evident authenticity and ability to identify. If the kind of identification technologies dominant in the twentieth century were fundamentally "paper knowledge," in Lisa Gitelman's terms, those that have emerged in the present century are different, even as that difference is uneasily anchored in the analog logics of twentieth-century control.