Synopses & Reviews
This book is about seeing how a small rectangle of plastic can say something about the central problems of identity in our age.
A classic teenage fetish object, the driver's license has long symbolized freedom and mobility. It is youth's pass to regulated vice—cigarettes, bars, tattoo parlors, casinos, strip joints, music venues, guns. Over the past decade, however, the license has become increasingly associated with freedom's flipside: screening. The airport's heightened security checkpoint. Controversial ID voting laws. Federally mandated, anti-terrorist driver's license re-designs. An icon, then, of two almost contradictory values—"liberty" and "security"—the license speaks to who we've been as a culture, and who we might become.
Rife with anecdote, Driver's License explores not only cultural identity, but also personal identity. What's the relation between singularity (person) and standardization (ID)? How long, if ever, is our photo "current" and "me"? How much can we extrapolate from a stranger's license? (Spoiler: a lot.)
Each of the short chapters examines an aspect of the driver's license and connects it to the book's two overarching concerns—one, (individual) liberty versus (collective) security and, two, personal identity as an intimate philosophical concern.
Synopsis
Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.
A classic teenage fetish object, the American driver's license has long symbolized freedom and mobility in a nation whose design assumes car travel and whose vastness rivals continents. It is youth's pass to regulated vice-cigarettes, bars, tattoo parlors, casinos, strip joints, music venues, guns. In its more recent history, the license has become increasingly associated with freedom's flipside: screening. The airport's heightened security checkpoint. Controversial ID voting laws. Federally mandated, anti-terrorist driver's license re-designs. The driver's license encapsulates the contradictory values and practices of contemporary American culture-freedom and security, mobility and checkpoints, self-definition and standardization, democracy and exclusion, superficiality and intimacy, the stable self and the self in flux.
Object Lesson is published in partnership with an essay series in the The Atlantic.
About the Author
Meredith Castile is a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University, USA, and is an ongoing contributor of articles and book reviews for The Vienna Review.
Table of Contents
1. Design
2. Teen
3. Fake
4. Intimacy
5. Standardized
6. Security
Index