City as Crime Scene

The City as Crime Scene: Walter Benjamin and the Traces of the DetectiveAuthor(s): Carlo SalzaniSource: New German Critique, No. 100, Arendt, Adorno, New York, and Los Angeles (Winter,2007), pp. 165-187Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27669191 .Accessed: 18/11/2014 13:17

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The City as Crime Scene: Walter Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective

Carlo Salzani

Theorie des Kriminalromans In 1930 Benjamin published in the Literaturblatt der Frankfurter Zeitung a short piece titled "Kriminalromane, auf Reisen" ("Crime Novels, on Travel"). Starting with the observation that people do not usually bring their own books to read in trains but buy new ones in the stations, Benjamin wonders why crime novels are particularly suitable for this kind of journey. Entering a railroad sta tion, writes Benjamin, is like entering the middle of a gigantomachy between the gods of the railroads and those of the station, so the modern traveler must

pay his or her offertory to the divinities of modernity, "in a dark feeling of

making something which will please the gods of the railway" (GS, 4.1:381).1

1. All references to Benjamin's works are made parenthetically in the text. All references to The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), are to the convolute number. For the other works, references are provided both to the German text of the Gesammelte Schriften {Collected Writings), ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenh?user, 7 vols, in 15 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972-89), or the Gesammelte Briefe {Collected Letters), ed. Christoph G?dde and Henri Lonitz, 6 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995-2000) (hereafter cited as GS and GB, respec tively), and to the English translation of the Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996-2003), and The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) (hereafter cited as SW and C, respectively). Where no English translation is available, as for "Kriminalromane, auf Reisen" or part of the correspondence, I use my own.

New German Critique 100, Vol. 34, No. 1, Winter 2007 DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2006-022 ? 2007 by New German Critique, Inc.

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166 Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective

These divinities are the god of the steam, the naiads of the smoke, and the demons of the stucco; a railroad station, a cathedral of modernity (GS, 4.1:381), is populated, Benjamin had learned from the surrealists, by myth; and the city dweller?in this case the train traveler?must forge his or her way through it as if in the primeval forest. A train journey is a "succession of mythic tri als and dangers," from the anxiety of being "too late" to "the solitude of the

compartment," from "the fear of missing a connection" to "the horror of the unknown lobby" (GS, 4.1:381). The easiest way to free the mind from this series of fears, writes Benjamin, is to provoke another fear, which will anesthetize the first: "The anesthesia of a fear through another one is his [the traveler's] salvation. Between the fresh cut pages of the crime novel he looks for the

idle, as it were, virginal apprehensions [Angst], which could help him to get over the archaic fear of the journey" (GS, 4.1:381). The Kriminalroman thus constitutes a momentary escape from the anxieties of modern life. In the station-as-cathedral of modernity, "we want to thank," concludes Benjamin, "the mobile and gaudily colored altars," and "the minister of the new, of the absence of spirit and of the sensational," which allow us, for a couple of hours, to envelop ourselves in the protective scarf of fictitious excitement (GS, 4.1:382-83).2

Benjamin's taste for crime and detective novels is well known.3 Less known is perhaps the fact that he courted the idea of writing a crime novel:

2. Pierre Missac argues that the traveler's anxieties are probably Benjamin's own anxieties for the deteriorating political and social situation of Weimar Germany: "Just as he needed to escape from his anxiety, counterpart to fascination, about the train journey ... so the detective novel is in some sense an antidote to obsession with the increasing dangers now that Hitler has arrived on the scene and new conflicts are in the offing" {Walter Benjamin's Passages, trans. Shierry Weber

Nicholsen [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995], 58-59). 3. From a few sources we can get an idea of what Benjamin read and admired: Scholem writes

that "Benjamin was very fond of reading mystery novels, particularly the German translations

brought out by a Stuttgart publisher, of American and French detective classics like those of Mau rice [sic] A. K. Green, Emile Gaboriau {Monsieur Lecoq), and?when he was in Munich?Maurice

Leblanc's stories about Ars?ne Lupin, the gentleman burglar. Later he read a great deal by the Swedish author Frank Heller, and in the thirties he added the books of Georges Simenon" {Walter Benjamin: The History of a Friendship [London: Faber and Faber, 1982], 32). In "Kriminalromane, auf Reisen," Benjamin gives a list of authors, characters, and works: the Dane Sven Elvestad (1884-1934) and his character Asbj?rn Krag; the Swede Frank Heller (a.k.a. Martin Gunnar Serner, 1886-1947); the Briton Wilkie Collins (1824-89); the Czech-Austrian Leo Perutz (1882-1957); the

Frenchman Gaston Leroux (1868-1927), specifically Le fant?me de l'op?ra and Le parfum de la dame en noir; Arthur Conan Doyle's (1859-1930) Sherlock Holmes; and the American Anna Kath erine Green (1846-1935), specifically Behind Closed Doors and The Affair Next Door {GS, 4.1:381-82). As early as 1920 Benjamin gives a list of guten Kriminalromanen in a letter to Scho lem: Green's Affair Next Door, Behind Closed Doors, and Filigree Ball; Elvestad's Der Mann der

die Stadt pl?nderte and Die zwei und die Dame; Gaboriau's (1832-73) Monsieur Lecoq; Leroux's


Carlo Salzani 167

in a 1933 letter from Ibiza to Gretel Karplus he mentioned a "project" of a Kriminalroman, of which he was sketching "scenes, motifs and tricks" for future consideration (GB, 4:207); in the same year, he wrote again to Karplus from Paris about his discussions with Bertolt Brecht on the Theorie des

Kriminalromans, which "perhaps will be followed one day by an experimen tal undertaking" (GB, 4:310).4 In this particular area, he was at one with his time, for such an interest in detective stories and the figure of the detective

was arguably part of the Zeitgeist of the 1920s: Siegfried Kracauer wrote a

book-length study of the detective novel, Der Detektiv-Roman: Ein Philoso

phischer Traktat, in France R?gis Messac published a thick book on the influ ence of scientific progress on detective fiction, Ee "detective novel" et l'influ ence de la pens?e scientifique in 1929, from which Benjamin himself transcribed

many quotations.5 In Benjamin's corpus, references to the figure of the detective are multi

ple but usually go no farther than a hint or suggestion. Apart from "Kriminal romane, auf Reisen," no other piece of writing is dedicated exclusively to the

Le fant?me de l'op?ra and Le myst?re de la chamber jaune; Lawrence L. Lynch's Schlingen und Netze; August Gottlieb Mei?ner's (1753-1807) Platanenallee No. 14; E. Balmer and W. M. Hary's Feine F?den; Arnold Bennett's (1867-1931) Grand Babylon Hotel; and Alfred Kubin's (1877-1959) Die andere Seite {GB, 2:104-5). From a couple of letters to Kracauer of 1926 and 1928, we know that he read G. K. Chesterton's (1874-1936) Man Who Knew Too Much and Club of Queer Trades (which Kracauer reviewed for the Literaturblatt der Frankfurter Zeitung [GB, 3:147, 342]). In the 1930s Georges Simenon (1903-89), an "author of worthy detective novels" {GB, 4:208-9), is the

main reference in the correspondence, where Benjamin mentions the novels Les suicid?s {GB, 4:539,4:541, 5:28), Le locataire {GB, 5:28, 271, 276), Les Pitard {GB, 5:231, 271, 276), L'?vad? {GB, 5:271, 276), and La Marie du Port {GB, 6:329); but Agatha Christie's (1890-1976) Mystery of the Blue Train and the French mystery author Pierre Very (1900-1960) are also mentioned {GB, 5:28, 37). In a 1937 letter to Willi Bredel, Benjamin includes a study on Simenon in a proposal for a series of "Pariser Briefe," which were in fact never written {GB, 5:516).

4. For the planned detective novel (or series of novels), see Materialen zu einem Kriminal roman, in GS, 7.2:846-51. In Brecht's Nachla?, the notes for Kriminalromanen go under the title of

"Tatsachenreihe," of which one episode follows a schema in Benjamin's Materialen {Werke, vol. 17 [Berlin: Aufbau; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989], 443-55).

5. Whereas Messac's book is a constant reference in The Arcades Project, there is no trace of Kracauer's study. In fact, Kracauer wrote Der Detektiv-Roman between 1922 and 1925 but never

published it; only the chapter "Hotelhalle" was later included in Das Ornament der Masse (1963). The full study was published only posthumously {Schriften, ed. Karsten Witte, vol. 1 [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971], 103-204). In a letter to Kracauer of March 1924 (thus before the completion of the work), Benjamin writes that he is "curious" {gespannt) about Kracauer's "Detective Analysis" {GB, 2:430); he was thus acquainted with at least a part of it, and the two possibly discussed it. But no other reference to this work appears in the correspondence between the two, and therefore an influ ence of Kracauer on Benjamin's Theorie des Kriminalromans is rather unlikely. On the other hand,

Kracauer's study is a phenomenological analysis of the metamorphoses of the ratio, the systematic scientific-industrial thought, with the dissolution of piety in bourgeois society and the relationship between kitsch and will of power, and thus diverges from Benjamin's interest in the genre.



figure of the detective or the detective novel. Other references can be found scattered throughout his work, from One-Way Street to the late notes of The

Arcades Project, basically in relation to Poe and Baudelaire, but also to the motifs of the fl?neur, the bourgeois interior, and the trace. If these few infer ences cannot be considered either whimsical or superficial, they are nonethe less marginal and dispersed and therefore do not add up to a Theorie des

Kriminalromans. Indeed, critical attention to this figure in Benjamin rarely goes farther than a nod to its existence, so that, to date, only a few article

length studies focus on it specifically. Nevertheless, the detective can be ana

lyzed as a coherent and consistent figure in Benjamin's work, even though its fictitious cohesiveness and unity result from the work a posteriori of the commentator. I propose to connect it with the motif of the trace, to broaden its range and give it fuller meaning within Benjamin's theoretical project.

I first analyze Benjamin's quasi-sociological account of the birth and development of the detective story in the nineteenth century as another phan tasmagoric description of the city. I then connect this description to the phe nomenon of the city crowd and the anxieties and fears it provokes. After

comparing the detective and the fl?neur, I relate the figure of the detective to

Benjamin's "theory of the trace," thus stressing the political importance of the detective pursuit. I conclude by giving an account of the historian as detec tive and of the city as crime scene.

The Phantasmagoria of Parisian Life Then we sallied forth into the streets, arm in arm,

continuing the topics of the day, or roaming far

and wide until a late hour, seeking, amid the wild

lights and shadows of the populous city, that infinity of

mental excitement which quiet observation can afford.

?Edgar Allan Poe, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue"

In "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire" Benjamin writes: "No matter what trace the fl?neur may follow, every one of them will lead him to a crime" (GS, 1.2:543; SW, 4:22). The city, initially a delightful int?rieur for the fl?neur, a spectacle of excitement and intoxication, is depicted here as crime scene. Benjamin argues that the literary genre of the detective story snoops into the "dark side" of the metropolis, transforming it into a place of danger, fear, and angst. Even to the fl?neur, the "urban native," supposedly perfectly at ease in the metropolitan environment, "the city has become strange" "and

every bed 'hazardous'" (J72,3). In his "Little History of Photography," Benja min observes that "it is no accident that [Eug?ne] Atget's photographs have


Carlo Salzani 169

been likened to those of a crime scene. But isn't every square inch of our cities a crime scene? Every passer-by a culprit? Isn't it the task of the photographer descendant of the augurs and haruspices?to reveal guilt and to point out the

guilty in his pictures?" (GS, 2.1:385; SW, 2:527). The "sacred ground of fl?nerie" (M2a,l), the place the fl?neur considered his house, the street, is portrayed in this new account as inhospitable, fearsome, dangerous.

The detective story developed in France in the mid-nineteenth century as a substitute for an earlier "urban" literature, the physiologies. In these, the

fl?neur-as-journalist described urban types, giving a sense of intelligibility and familiarity to the urban environment, which Benjamin judged highly phantasmagoric. "The phantasmagoria of the fl?neur," he writes in The Arcades

Project, is the pretension "to read from faces the profession, the ancestry, the character" (M6,6). The goal of the physiologies had been to alleviate the panic caused by the overwhelming new reality of the city, and in this they ultimately failed because the urban environment always resists interpretation and descrip tion. Unlike the physiologies, the detective story plays with this sense of unfa

miliarity, incomprehensibility, and anxiety and so exacerbates fear of the urban environment. As a genre it was more successful: it satisfied the bourgeois obsession with the threat to order and propriety in a time of political and social turmoil. As Tom McDonough writes, "Threat haunted the bourgeois imaginary as a concatenation of all those forces?from ghetto uprising to the

more diffuse spread of a counterculture with its rejection of normative mod els of social behaviour?that threatened the middle-class hold over the city.

Yet even greater than these political fears, and to a considerable extent acting as a mask for them, was the social anxiety that dominated the urban imagi nary of this class: a fear of crime."6 This fear derives from the bourgeois obses sion with law and order, ideological security, and political immobility.7 Benja

min writes that "in times of terror, when everyone is something of a conspirator, everybody will be in the position of having to play detective" (GS, 1.2:542-43; SW, 4:21). The description is politically charged: bourgeois society always feels under attack; political crisis, social crisis, ideological terror are its per

manent state of existence; therefore we always play detective?and read detec tive fiction.

The literary-ideological trope for the city thus becomes the jungle, for, like the jungle, the primeval forest, and the wilderness, the modern city is a site of danger and adventures, its citizen either hunter or victim. In the bourgeois

6. Tom McDonough, "The Crimes of the Fl?neur," October, no. 102 (2002): 116. 7. Ernest Mandel, "A Marxist Interpretation of the Crime Story," in Detective Fiction: A Col

lection of Critical Essays, ed. Robin W. Winks (Woodstock, VT: Countryman, 1988), 210.



imagination the city is turned into a landscape, which threat, danger, and vice transform into a hunting ground. As Benjamin notes in "A Berlin Chronicle," "Only those for whom poverty or vice turns the city into a landscape in which

they stray from dark till sunrise know it in a way denied to me" (GS, 6:488; SW, 2:612). Confronted with this social reality, the fl?neur is transformed from a

"philosophical stroller" into a werewolf, a hunter, a savage, and the experi ence of the metropolis is depicted as "adventure." Many of Benjamin's entries in The Arcades Project refer to the novels of James Fenimore Cooper, which portray the North American savage roaming and hunting in the wilderness. These images of the forest and the savage are transposed to the urban setting and contribute to the experience of the city as "adventure" and the subsequent creation of the detective story: "Owing to the influence of Cooper, it becomes

possible for the novelist in an urban setting to give scope to the experiences of a hunter. This has a bearing on the rise of the detective story" (Mlla,6). A quotation from Baudelaire's Fus?es, annotated by Benjamin in The Arcades Project, summarizes this description of the city: "Man ... is always ... in a state of savagery. What are the perils of jungle and prairie compared to the daily shocks and conflicts of civilization? Whether a man embraces his dupe on the boulevard, or spears his prey in unknown forests, is he not.. . the most

highly perfected beast of prey?" (M14,3). This "romanticization" of the city is, for Benjamin, no less phantasma

goric than the operation of "domestication" attempted by the physiologies. Picturing the city as wilderness is a way to escape the fundamental boredom and repetitiveness of capitalist modernity, to evade the claustrophobic limits of a highly regulated society.8 Crime-as-adventure thus provides a fictitious

escape route: Poe, Alexandre Dumas, and Eug?ne Sue transform the city into a place of unnameable dangers, menacing shadows, and evil lurking in every door, that is, an exciting place. This escape is merely imaginary, generated by, and in turn producing, a self-deception, a childish intoxication that hides the social, political, and economic reality of capitalist modernity.9 The indi

vidual, annulled in the crowd and living a life of repetition, boredom, and

spleen, recovers in the detective story what Graeme Gilloch calls "a heroic

8. Gavin Lambert, "The Dangerous Edge," in Winks, Detective Fiction, 49. 9. Benjamin quotes from Roger Caillois in The Arcades Project: "Elements of intoxication at

work in the detective novel. . . . The characters of the childish imagination and a prevailing artifi

ciality hold sway over this strangely vivid world. Nothing happens here that is not long premedi tated; nothing corresponds to appearances. Rather, each thing has been prepared for use at the right

moment by the omnipotent hero who wields power over it. We recognize in all this the Paris of the serial instalments o?Fant?mas" (G15,5).


Carlo Salzani 171

sense of the self." Here, intrepid figures perform heroic deeds, either of sub lime courage or of magnificent infamy, in tales that exalt everyday life as a heroic struggle for survival. Baudelaire would call it "the heroism of modern life." Gilloch acutely notes, however, that "the precarious character of civili zation was strictly for harmless consumption." There is no social critique, no

sociological analysis of crime or poverty, no political concern for the revolu

tionary potentiality of the mass: the villains, the criminals are always aristo cratic and often gentlemen, who seek, according to Gilloch, "the challenge and excitement of crime for its own sake, not merely for pecuniary benefit."10 The detective novel is thus, for Benjamin, part of the phantasmagoria of mod ern life: if the traces the fl?neur follows inevitably lead to a crime, then "this is an indication of how the detective story, regardless of its sober calculations, also participates in the phantasmagoria of Parisian life. It does not yet glorify the criminal, though it does glorify his adversaries and, above all, the hunting grounds where they pursue him" (GS, 1.2:543; SW, 4:22).

The Hiding Place of Modernity An essential element in the development of the detective story, writes Ben

jamin, is the quintessentially modern phenomenon of the crowd. In various passages and notes he argues that at the origin of the detective story lies the

possibility for the criminal to hide amid the population of the big city. In "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire," for example, he writes: "Here the masses appear as the asylum that shields an asocial person from his per secutors. Of all the menacing aspects of the masses, this one became appar ent first. It lies at the origin of the detective story" (GS, 1.2:542; SW, 4:21).n The crowd is a threatening phenomenon because the asocial and the crimi nal may hide in the urban multitude. Unlike the physiologies, in which the crowd was depicted as a harmless and amusing spectacle, the detective story describes it as the

"asylum for the reprobate and the proscript" (M16,3), in which the criminal vanishes and at any moment one is in danger of encoun

tering a bloodthirsty villain in the street. The fl?neur, who in the physiologies disinterestedly enjoyed the colorful life of the swarming boulevard, is phan tasmagorically turned into the detective, who searches the menacing urban

10. Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), 141.

11. This observation is repeated in several passages. In The Arcades Project: "The masses in Baudelaire . . . they efface all traces of the individual: they are the newest asylum for the reprobate and the prescript" (M16,3). In a letter to Max Horkheimer on April 16, 1938: "The crowd ... is the outcast's latest place of asylum" (GB, 6:65-66; C, 557).



masses for a trace of the criminal. The phantasmagoria of the detective story lies in the assumption of the detective's ability to follow the criminal's traces in the crowd-as-hiding place: the fl?neur-as-detective, McDonough notes,

becomes an instance of social control that can alleviate the bourgeois fear of the crowd.12

Nevertheless, the crowd obliterates the traces not only of the criminal but of the individual in general. "The masses," writes Benjamin, "efface all traces of the individual" (M16,3). It is therefore a hiding place because in it all traces are lost, a fact that is a double source of anxiety and alienation.

Georg Simmel, whose analysis of metropolitan modernity was seminal for Ben

jamin's generation, wrote that "the deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heri

tage, of external culture, and of technique of life."13 The detective's work can therefore also be read as a reassuring rescue of individual traces from the

anonymity of the masses. John Carey, for example, argues that the detective's function is "to disperse the fears of overwhelming anonymity that the urban

mass brought."14 Both readings, of the detective-as-rescuer of the individual and as an instance of social control, are based on the same premise, that "the

original social content of the detective story focused on the obliteration of the individual's traces in the big-city crowd" (GS, 1.2:546; SW, 4:23). The bour geois fear of anonymity is balanced by the necessity of the criminal?but also of the poor, the bohemian, those living at the fringe of society and legality?of hiding from the panoptical power of the state apparatus. The crowd, argues Gilloch, "becomes the hiding place of modernity, the haunt of the bohemian and the fugitive."15

The dialectic between the desire to escape the anonymity of the crowd and the necessity to hide within it corresponds to the dialectic of anxiety and desire the crowd inspires. For Benjamin, the description of the crowd finds profound, acute, and contradictory formulation in Baudelaire, whose fl?neur embraces the crowd in a kind of erotic encounter with the other. But Benja

min's primary reference for the description of the horror and excitement of the crowd is Poe: "Fear, revulsion, and horror were the emotions which the

big-city crowd aroused in those who first observed it. For Poe, it has some

12. McDonough, "Crimes of the Fl?neur," 105. 13. Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed.

and trans. Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950), 409. 14. John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary

Intelligentsia, 1880-1932 (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 8. 15. Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, 142.


Carlo Salzani 173

thing barbaric about it; discipline barely manages to tame it"; "the appear ance of the London crowd as Poe describes it is as gloomy and fitful as the

light of the gas lamps overhead" (GS, 1.2:629, 625; SW, 4:327, 325). One of Poe's stories provides Benjamin with the perfect example of the collapse of the fl?neur into the crowd: "The case in which the fl?neur completely dis tances himself from the type of the philosophical promenader, and takes on the features of the werewolf restlessly roaming a social wilderness, was fixed for the first time and forever afterward by Poe in his story 'The Man of the Crowd'" (Ml,6). McDonough argues that the flaneur-detective collapses into the man of the crowd, who is dragged toward the other by a pathological, and therefore criminal, passion. The fl?neur-as-criminologist, as instance of pan optical observation, thus becomes indistinguishable from the badaud, Vhomme

d?foules, the asocial: pursuer and pursued lose their polarities, and the desire for the other becomes criminal. For Benjamin, then,

Poe's famous tale "The Man of the Crowd" is something like an X-ray of a

detective story. It does away with all the drapery that a crime represents.

Only the armature remains: the pursuer, the crowd, and an unknown man

who manages to walk through London in such a way that he always remains

in the middle of the crowd. This unknown man is the fl?neur.... To Poe the

fl?neur was, above all, someone who does not feel comfortable in his own

company. This is why he seeks out the crowd; the reason he hides in it is

probably close at hand. Poe purposely blurs the difference between the aso

cial person and the fl?neur. The harder a man is to find, the more suspicious he becomes. (GS, 1.2:550; SW, 4:27)

Poe's description of the crowd and the street summarizes the fundamental motifs of modernity, but his narration surpasses Baudelaire's erotic fusion with the crowd. At the beginning of "The Man of the Crowd" the narrator behaves like the flaneur-physiognomist, reading on the faces of the passersby "the his

tory of long years."16 But when he spots the old man, he encounters an "abso lute idiosyncrasy," a face that cannot be read, which explains the incipit of the tale: "There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told."17

The old man represents the reality of the crowd, which can never be truly

16. Edgar Allan Poe, "The Man of the Crowd," in The Complete Tales and Poems (London: Penguin, 1982), 478.

17. Poe, "Man of the Crowd," 478, 475. The whole passage reads: "It was well said of a certain German book that 'er lasst sich nicht lesen1?it does not permit itself to be read. There are some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told. . . . Now and then, alas, the conscience of man takes up a burden so heavy in horror that it can be thrown down only into the grave. And thus the essence of all crime is undivulged."



read. Jonathan Elmer makes the same point: "The tale narrates the collapse of these two poles, for it is the narrator's inability to withstand trying to read the (man of the) crowd that causes him to plunge into its very circulation. He cannot read the crowd and he cannot stop trying to do so; he cannot be alone and he cannot cease from being so."18 The impossibility of communion with the crowd, and of escaping the crowd, makes up the drama of modernity. The result is that the man of the crowd, in his unreadability, becomes suspicious: everyone is a criminal in the crowd.

The Uses of Observation

Turning the fl?neur into the detective entails the social legitimation of fl?nerie. Benjamin writes that "if the fl?neur is thus turned into an unwilling detective, it does him a lot of good socially, for it legitimates his idleness. His indolence is only apparent, for behind this indolence there is the watchfulness of an observer who does not take his eyes off a miscreant. Thus, the detective sees rather wide areas opening up to his self-esteem.

... He catches things in flight; this enables him to dream that he is like an artist" (GS, 1.2:543;

SW, 4:22).19 Rob Shields argues that the emergence of the detective novel is tied to the social justification of the labor time of journalists and writers of feuilletons, who, like the fl?neur, "put their observations . . . 'for sale' on the

market."20 Ill at ease with the idleness of the fl?neur, capitalist society triumphs over his formal resistance by imposing a "productive" label on the activity of observation. In utilitarian society, the flaneur's power of observation is "put to use" and becomes the productive work of the detective, thereby receiving social approval.

The common trait of fl?neur and detective is thus their power of obser vation. Following Benjamin, many have drawn the parallel: James V. Wer ner, for example, highlights the resemblances between the fl?neur and Poe's

Dupin, pointing out how both pay "minute attention to details regarding facial

features, expressions, and body language"; how both present a connection with some form of wealth and aristocracy and a snobbish rejection of "produc

18. Jonathan Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 172.

19. The same formulation is repeated in The Arcades Project: "Preformed in the figure of the fl?neur is that of the detective. The fl?neur required a social legitimation of his habitus. It suited him very well to see his indolence presented as a plausible front, behind which, in reality, hides the riveted attention of an observer who will not let the unsuspecting malefactor out of his sight" (M13a,2).

20. Rob Shields, "Fancy Footwork: Walter Benjamin's Notes on Fl?nerie" in The Fl?neur, ed. Keith Tester (London: Routledge, 1994), 63.


Carlo Salzani 175

tive" and "socially valuable" labor; how both exhibit "isolation and detachment

from society."21 The eye of the stroller may be casual, and that of the detec tive purposeful, but both need to be simultaneously wide-ranging and deeply penetrating. Both fl?neur and detective derive a subtle pleasure from detecting the truth of the street, and both demonstrate a thorough pedestrian connois

seurship. The method of both is the acute attention to whatever occurs in the street and incessant obsession with images and the pursuit of traces in the city crowd; both wish to uncover the mysteries of the city. Moreover, both are able to conjugate attentiveness to detail, a certain absentmindedness and distance from the outer world, and the confidence of the idler in the power of chance.22

An entry to The Arcades Project reads:

The experiences [Erfahrungen] of one who attends to a trace result only very remotely from any work activity, or are cut off from such a procedure alto

gether. (Not for nothing do we speak of "fortune hunting.") They have no

sequence and no system. They are a product of chance, and have about them

the essential interminability that distinguishes the preferred obligations of

the idler. The fundamentally unfinishable collection of things worth know

ing, whose utility depends on chance, has its prototype in study. (m2,l)

Through its connection with observation, the detective story is related to the

optical devices of modernity, especially photography and film. "A Little His

tory of Photography" relates the development of the camera to that of a new, "scientific" mode of observation: it brings things closer for inspection, dis covers unknown images, reveals the secrets of reality?in a word, it discloses the optical unconscious of which Benjamin speaks in the "Work of Art" essay. "The camera is getting smaller and smaller," writes Benjamin, "ever readier to capture fleeting and secret images whose shock effect paralyzes the asso ciative mechanisms in the beholder" (GS, 2.1:385; SW, 2:527). Similarly, the detective follows traces, and the detective story, with its attention to details,

brings to light what was hidden. Both camera and detective story thereby

21. James V. Werner, "The Detective Gaze: Edgar A. Poe, the Fl?neur, and the Physiognomy of Crime," American Transcendental Quarterly 15 (2001): 10.

22. In "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire" Benjamin writes: "An important trait of the real-life Baudelaire?that is, of the man committed to his work?has been omitted from this

portrayal: his absentmindedness.?In the fl?neur, the joy of watching prevails over all. It can con centrate on observation; the result is the amateur detective. Or it can stagnate in the rubbernecker; then the fl?neur has turned into a badaud. The revealing representations of the big city have come from neither. They are the work of those who have traversed the city absently, as it were, lost in

thought or worry" (GS, 1.2:572; SW, 4:41).



problematize the relation between "inner" and "outer," on which bourgeois society is based. This is the argument of Tom Gunning's study of Benjamin's "optical" detective. Drawing a parallel between Poe's Dupin and Benjamin's detective, Gunning argues that the detective method inverts and complicates the relationships between "hidden" and "uncovered," "deep" and "superficial," "visible" and "invisible," "simple" and "complex," "inner" and "outer," so

that the boundaries between these apparently opposed categories become fluid under the detective's gaze. Therefore, he concludes, "the detective story acti vates the complex dialectical optics of modernity, an optics based not only on the visual mastery of surveillance but also on the uncanny experience of trans formed vision, glimpsing a presence where it is not, a space where it does not

belong, and triggering a frisson of possible recognition."23 Observation, detection, chance: all add up to the question of "method,"

which for Benjamin is the core of the detective story.24 The method of detec tion is similar to that of the fl?neur: through fl?nerie and observation the detec tive constructs, as Shields argues, "a social physiognomy of the street."25

"Fl?nerie," writes Benjamin, "gives the individual the best prospects" for play ing the detective (GS, 1.2:543; SW, 4:21). Nevertheless, the physiognomies of the first half of the nineteenth century failed in describing the modern city, because they were unable to grasp the complexity of the phenomenon of the crowd and its dark shades. If we identify the flaneur's method with the physi ognomic method, then the detective can also be seen as an opposition to, or, better, an evolution from, this method. And the detective story can be consid ered an evolution of the physiognomies, able to account for the anxieties of the

city. As Benjamin notes, the insufficiency of fl?nerie led to an eventual collaps ing of the fl?neur into the badaud. The distance the fl?neur-as-physiognomist claims to maintain from the crowd, and from others, disappears in the Second

Empire as the fl?neur collapses into the criminal and every distinction between

pursuer and pursued is annulled. This is why Poe's "Man of the Crowd" is an

X-ray or, better, a model for the detective story.26 The detective's observation is thus an evolution and an improvement upon that of the flaneur-physiognomist.

23. Tom Gunning, "The Exterior as Int?rieur. Benjamin's Optical Detective," boundary 2 30, no. 1 (2003): 127. Werner's argument is very similar (cf. "Detective Gaze," 13-19).

24. Cf., e.g., "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire" {GS, 1.2:546; SW, 4:23) and The Arcades Project (M12a,l).

25. Shields, "Fancy Footwork," 63. 26. Or, even better, as Patricia Merivale argues, for what has been called the "metaphysical"

detective story, "in which the triadic multiplicity of detective, criminal, and victim is reduced to a

solipsistic unity" ("Gumshoe Gothics: Poe's 'the Man of the Crowd' and His Followers," in Detect ing Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism, ed. Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999], 107).


Carlo Salzani 177

Dana Brand points out that "The Man of the Crowd" was written before the

Dupin stories and argues therefore that it is not an X-ray but an "embryo" of the detective story. In the representation of the city, the detective's method

supersedes the flaneur's method, being both more adequate to the new expe rience of the crowd and more complex and detailed than the physiognomies. Poe, with his descriptions of crime, incommunicability, anxiety, violence, and

solitude, invented a new genre and new models for reading and consuming the modern city.27

Theory of the Trace The man who hasn't signed anything, who left no picture,

Who was not there, who said nothing: How can they catch him?

Erase the traces.

?Bertolt Brecht, Lesebuch f?r St?dtebewohner

(Reader for City Dwellers)

Benjamin's "theory of the detective" comprises the dialectic between, on the one hand, the analysis of the detective story as another phantasmagoric rep resentation of the city and, on the other, the work of the detective's method as a sign of modernity and a progressive political tool. I pursue this second path a little farther, connecting the figure of the detective to Benjamin's "theory of the trace" (Theorie der Spur). The connection is explicit in his notes, even though it seems marginal and has therefore not been investigated. The theory of the trace remains at the state of intuition, scattered in notes to The Arcades

Project?mainly, but not only, in convolute I, "The Interior, the Trace"?and a few other pieces of writing. It is related to the "theory of the int?rieur" to the analysis of the panoptical state, and, finally, to the revolutionary potenti ality of modern architecture.

"To dwell means to leave traces," writes Benjamin, and the preferred site of these leavings is the bourgeois interior. In the 1935 expos? "Paris, the

Capital of the Nineteenth Century," he wrote that "the interior is not just the universe but also the ?tui of the private individual. To dwell means to leave traces. In the interior, these are accentuated. Coverlets and antimacassars,

27. Cf. Dana Brand, The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 79. Benjamin himself distinguishes between the fl?neur-as-physiognomist and the detective: "One can speak, in certain respects, of a contribution

made by the physiologies to detective fiction. Only, it must be borne in mind that the combinative

procedure of the detective stands opposed here to an empirical approach that is modelled on the methods of Vidocq, and that betrays its relation to the physiologies precisely through the Jackal in Les Mohicans de Paris" (dl4a,4).



cases and containers are devised in abundance; in these . . . the traces of the inhabitant are imprinted in the interior" (GS, 5.1:53; SW, 3:39).28 In stamping his or her mark inside the bourgeois apartment, the owner transforms it into a museum for posterity; the bourgeois individual is "at home" only when sur rounded by his or her own traces. In fact, Benjamin notes, the privilege to leave traces is almost a bourgeois monopoly; plush is "the material in which traces are left especially easily" (15,2). Benjamin refers to Poe's "Philosophy of Furniture" as a seminal account of this phenomenon: "Enter the detective

story, which pursues these traces. Poe, in his 'Philosophy of Furniture' as well as in his detective fiction, shows himself to be the first physiognomist of the domestic interior. The criminals in early detective novels are neither gentle

men nor apaches [sic], but private citizens of the middle class" (GS, 5.1:53; SW, 3:39). The reference to Poe is not fortuitous: the detective story remains the only adequate description of the bourgeois interior and its horror. The traces the bourgeois leaves there are the traces of a crime, the apartment as

claustrophobic and horrifying as a crime scene, the interior itself a "dead"

space. Benjamin makes the connection between bourgeois interior and the detective story explicit as early as the piece in One- Way Street called "Mano

rially Furnished Ten-Room Apartment":

The furniture style of the second half of the nineteenth century has received

its only adequate description, and analysis, in a certain type of detective

novel at the dynamic centre of which stands the horror of apartments. The

arrangement of the furniture is at the same time the site plan of deadly traps, and the suite of rooms prescribes the path of the fleeing victim. . . . The

bourgeois interior of the 1860s to the 1890s . . . fittingly houses only the

28. In "To Live without Leaving Traces" (GS, 4.1:427; SW, 2:701-2), and, with almost the same words, in "Experience and Poverty," Benjamin reiterates this concept: "If you enter a bourgeois room of the 1880s, for all the coziness it radiates, the strongest impression you receive may well

be, 'You've no business here.' And in fact you have no business in that room, for there is no spot on which the owner has not left his mark?the ornaments on the mantelpiece, the antimacassars on the armchairs, the transparencies in the windows, the screen in front of the fire. A neat phrase by Brecht helps us out here: 'Erase the traces!' is the refrain in the first poem of his Lesebuch f?r St?dtebewohner. Here in the bourgeois room, the opposite behaviour became the norm. And con

versely, the int?rieur forces the inhabitant to adopt the greatest possible number of habits?habits that do more justice to the interior he is living in than to himself. This is understood by everyone

who is familiar with the absurd attitude of the inhabitants of such plush apartments when some

thing broke. Even their way of showing their annoyance?and this affect, which is gradually start

ing to die out, was one that they could produce with great virtuosity?was above all the reaction of a person who felt that someone had obliterated 'the traces of his days on earth'

"

(GS, 2.1:217; SW, 2:734).


Ca rio Sa Iza ni 179

corpse. "On this sofa the aunt cannot but be murdered." The soulless luxury of the furnishings becomes true comfort only in the presence of a dead

body. (GS, 4.1:88-89; SW, 1:446-47)

The bourgeois apartment is thus a dead space, soulless and lifeless, built as a

trap and inhabited by corpses, from which any living thing is expelled, anni

hilated, or murdered by the cult of lifeless and ageless commodities.29 The dream of permanence in commodity culture perpetuates the phantasmagoria of modernity and, as such, is as intoxicating as hashish.30

Though the bourgeois proprietor stamps every object with his or her mark, he or she conceals these traces from others. The bourgeois private sphere is therefore a fortress against the interference of public life. Heiner

Weidmann notes that "the keeping of the trace is at the same time also its

covering. The bourgeois, like the asocial, erases the traces, even as he or she

preserves them; what the owner rescues for him- or herself, he or she con ceals from the others. The cult of the trace is also simultaneous to the disap pearing of the trace." The bourgeois, like the asocial, erases the trace because in modernity an increasingly strict and firm net of control has been spread over private life. Examples include the official numbering of houses or the use of photography as a police identification procedure. As Weidmann writes, "A new way of preserving the traces immediately regains control of the dis

appearing of traces."31 Benjamin himself observed that since the French Revo lution the administrative apparatus has strived to multiply the traces of the individual in an instance of panoptical control.32 He writes that

29. Gilloch argues that the bourgeois interior is the space of dying, but without the body, it is not so much a space of death as a "dead space": "The interior becomes 'ageless,' the sense of 'bour

geois security that emanated' from the middle-class home stemming from 'timelessness,' from the denial of transience. The space of death, the murder, simultaneously becomes that of immortality, of permanence" (Myth and Metropolis, 81-82).

30. An entry in The Arcades Project refers to this intoxication as "satanic," connecting the intox ication of interior with modernity as "the time of hell" (SI,5): "Nineteenth-century domestic interior.

The space disguises itself?puts on, like an alluring creature, the costumes of moods. ... In the end,

things are merely mannequins, and even the great moments of world history are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances of complicity with nothingness, with the petty and the banal. Such nihilism is the innermost core of bourgeois coziness?a mood that in hashish intoxication con centrates to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm, indicating precisely to what extent the nineteenth-century interior is itself a stimulus to intoxication and dream.... To live in these inte riors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider's web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry" (12,6).

31. Heiner Weidmann, Fl?nerie, Sammlung, Spiel: Die Erinnerung des 19. Jahrhunderts bei Walter Benjamin (Munich: Fink, 1992), 108.

32. An entry of The Arcades Project reads: "Multiplication of traces through the modern administrative apparatus. Balzac draws attention to this: 'Do your utmost, hapless Frenchwomen,



the invention of photography was a turning point in the history of this pro cess. It was no less significant for criminology than the invention of the

printing press was for literature. Photography made it possible for the first

time to preserve permanent and unmistakable traces of a human being. The

detective story came into being when this most decisive of all conquests of

a person's incognito had been accomplished. Since that time, there has

been no end to the efforts to capture [dingfest machen] a man in his speech and actions. (GS, 1.2:550; SW, 4:27)

Personal traces thus become incriminating clues, dangerous evidence in the hands of the detective-as-spy. To erase the traces, as Brecht writes, becomes a

necessity not only for those who are illegal but for everyone, since everyone is a sort of criminal.33

Modern architecture further complicates the theory of the trace. If to live means to leave traces, as Benjamin writes, then modern architecture seems to connote a paradox: it uses as construction materials glass and steel, on

which it is impossible to leave traces. Its motto is thus "to live without leaving traces." The idea of transparency seems dominant in the modernist architec ture of Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, and the Bauhaus, which projected and built constructions whose materials and lines declared war on everything the

nineteenth-century bourgeois interior had stood for: secrecy, possession, accumulation, collection. In "Experience and Poverty" Benjamin writes that "objects made of glass have no 'aura.' Glass is, in general, the enemy of secrets. It is also the enemy of possession" (GS, 2.1:217; SW, 2:734). Transparency annuls the opposition between interior and exterior, walls of glass do not pro tect the inner space, and the functionality of modern lines declares war on the

nineteenth-century plush. As Weidmann notes, "The private sphere, the pro prietor's biotope, appears now destroyed in the new houses, which exhibit the

to remain unknown, to weave the very least little romance in the midst of a civilization which takes

note, on public squares, of the hour when every hackney cab comes and goes; which counts every letter and stamps them twice, at the exact time they are posted and at the time they are delivered;

which numbers the houses ... ; which ere long will have every acre of land, down to the smallest

holdings . . . , laid down on the broad sheets of a survey?a giant's task, by command of a giant.' Balzac, Modeste Mignon' (I6a,4).

33. In "Commentary on Poems by Brecht," Benjamin notes:

"

'Erase the traces': A rule for those who are illegal" (GS, 2.2:556; SW, 4:233). On the one hand, the poor and the boh?me are not allowed to leave traces; on the other, though, they are pursued by a panoptical state that, at the same

time, tries to control them and obliterate their existence. Therefore "the rule in the First Poem, 'Erase the traces!' can be completed by the reader of the Ninth: 'It's better than having them erased

for you'" (GS, 2.2:560; SW, 4:327).


Carlo Salzani 181

inmates as in a theatre and prevent the collection and the accumulation of

objects."34 The antibourgeois potentialities of avant-garde architecture are embraced as revolutionary by Benjamin, at least in this piece of writing: a new

"poverty" is necessary to disrupt the bourgeois world and its obsession with traces, marks, and possession; a new poverty is the tool to "erase the traces" of the capitalist-consumerist modes of production-accumulation and to redesign new ways of living. In "To Live without Leaving Traces" Benja

min writes: "This is what has now been achieved by the new architects, with their glass and steel: they have created rooms in which it is hard to leave traces. Tt follows from the foregoing,' Scheerbart declared a good twenty years ago, 'that we can surely talk about a "culture of glass." The new glass

milieu will transform humanity utterly. And now it remains only to be wished that the new glass-culture will not encounter too many enemies'

"

(GS, 4.1:428; SW, 2:701-2).35

Trace and Aura

"Objects made of glass have no 'aura'" (GS, 2.1:217; SW, 2:734). Is this because no trace can be left on them? How, then, are trace and aura related? From the above quotation, it might be inferred that where no trace can be left, no aura can be found. But the relation between trace and aura is more complex, artic

ulated, and, at times, apparently contradictory. They are bound together, since aura comes from the unique existence of an object "that bears the mark of the history to which the work has been subject" (GS, 7.1:352; SW, 3:103); aura is thus the result of the transmission of traces as an instance of tradition. Ben

jamin, however, explicitly counterposes the two. In an entry to The Arcades Project he writes: "Trace and aura. The trace is appearance of a nearness, however far removed the thing that left it behind may be. The aura is appear ance of a distance, however close the thing that calls it forth. In the trace, we

gain possession of the thing; in the aura, it takes possession of us" (M16a,4). The problem revolves around the concept of tradition, its conservation, can

cellation, or rewriting, and our relation with it. The argument can be introduced through the commodity. The com

modity is "auratic" insofar as it bears no traces of its production. In this case, aura and traces are opposed. Terry Eagleton argues that, like the fl?neur or

34. Weidmann, Fl?nerie, Sammlung, Spiel, 105-6. 35. Almost the same words are repeated in "Experience and Poverty" (GS, 2.1:217-18; SW,

2:734).



the baroque emblem, the commodity is a decontextualized fragment, poly valent and empty. Its significance lies in the social relations of production, but it obliterates the traces of this production and floats, like the baroque allegory, in a polyvalence of meanings. The commodity receives and dis

plays the traces only of other commodities, in a vicious circularity Eagle ton calls

"ambiguity": "Hollowed to the empty receptacle of traces of other

traces, without a particle of autonomous matter in its economic make-up, the commodity is an orphaned nonentity with nothing to call its own. . . . The

process of commodity exchange is infinitely m?tonymie: each commodity is defined only by its displacement of another, constituted only by the endless circulation of the 'trace' that is the mechanism of its movement."36 The

detective, whose job it is to follow traces, becomes in this context a possible instance for reconstructing the condition of production from the collection of evidence or traces of social relations in commodities. Benjamin's detec tive becomes thus an archaeologist, and the traces he follows are the fossils of industrial glaciation: these fossilized traces can be read on the surfaces of

surviving objects, the fossils of the ur-commodity revealing in their after lives the truth content of production.37 The reference to the figure of the detective is important, because obliterating the traces of the social relations of production is a crime. The capitalist mode of production as a whole is crim

inal, and it tries to erase the traces of its crime in the commodity. A "pro gressive" detective fiction could be used to show this, and this is the aim, writes Benjamin, of Brecht's Threepenny Novel:

Brecht is concerned with politics; he makes visible the element of crime

hidden in every business enterprise. Bourgeois legality and crime?these

are, by the rules of the crime novel, opposites. Brecht's procedure consists

in retaining the highly developed technique of the crime novel but neutral

izing its rules. This crime novel depicts the actual relation between bour

geois legality and crime. The latter is shown to be a special case of exploi tation sanctioned by the former. (GS, 3:447-48; SW, 3:8-9)

The auratic object, writes Eagleton, "continually rewrites its own history to expel the traces of its ruptured, heterogeneous past" (WB, 33). Like the com

modity, which expels the traces of the social relations of production, the

36. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin; or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: Verso, 1981), 29. Hereafter cited as WB.

37. Cf. Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 56, 211.


Carlo Salzani 183

auratic object constructs the authority of an origin by erasing, expelling, and rewriting its traces. Aura as "authenticity" and "authority" imposes a ficti tious tradition (a path of traces) that is the victors' tradition. This is the aura the bourgeois proprietor attempts to impose on the commodified int?rieur of

plush: the trace is reinscribed, modified, falsified. "The trace, then," argues Eagleton, "belongs in one sense with the aura, either as its petrified physical residue or . . . the unconscious track" (WB, 32). The "authenticity" and "authority" of a thing are the essence not only of what is transmitted but also of the modes of its transmission. The revolutionary potentialities of mechan ical reproduction lie in its expunging such "Ersatz aura" in a cheerful act of

revolutionary violence, which, according to Eagleton, "will blast out of his

tory the apocalyptic empty space within which the new may germinate" (WB, 31).

The personification of this purifying violence is the "destructive char acter." In "The Destructive Character," published in 1931 in the Frankfurter

Zeitung, Benjamin sketches a sort of personal parallel of the revolutionary work of mechanical reproduction: as "the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition" (GS, 7.1:353; SW, 3:104), so the destructive character, destroying, "rejuvenates, because it clears away the traces of our own age" (GS, 4.1:397; SW, 2:541; emphasis added). The destructive character is the revolutionary force that clears away the phantas

magoria of the bourgeois interior and of the bourgeois obsession for leaving traces of proprietorship: "The destructive character is the enemy of the ?tui

man. The ?tui-man looks for comfort, and the case [Geh?use] is its quintes sence. The inside of the case is the velvet-lined trace that he has imprinted on the world. The destructive character obliterates even the traces of destruction."

The destructive character gets rid of "auratic" tradition, of those traces the

bourgeois can only leave in plush; "what exists he reduces to rubble?not for the sake of the rubble, but for that of the way leading through it" (GS, 4.1:397-98; SW, 2:541-42). The "shattering of tradition," the "liquidation of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage" (GS, 7.1:353-54; SW, 3:104), must ensure the rediscovery of the traces?those erased and obliterated by the vic tors' tradition?of a different history.

Therefore the erasure, preservation, or revival of traces is, as Eagleton insists, a fundamental political practice. The object is but a palimpsest, on

which every generation leaves a new set of scars and traces, which are thus what marks the object's historicity, the elements of the production process that, in still clinging to the object, help defetishize it. "The traces inscribed on



an object's body," writes Eagleton, "are the web that undoes its self-identity, the mesh of consumptional modes in which it has been variously caught" (WB, 31). The decision to erase or preserve the trace depends on the nature of the trace itself: the "auratic" trace "takes possession of us," whereas if we clear superstructural tradition out of the way and rescue the traces of a dif ferent history, of the tradition of the oppressed, "we gain possession of the

thing" (M16a,4). The figure of the detective thus becomes complementary to the destructive character: in rescuing and redeeming the traces of a shattered

past and a lost tradition, the detective becomes a metaphor for the materialist historian.

The Historian as Detective

Benjamin convincingly argues that the detective story developed in the sec ond half of the nineteenth century as a part of the phantasmagoria of moder

nity. Depicting the city as a place of danger and adventure, it played with the fears and anxieties of bourgeois society, which likes to indulge in the feeling of an ideological terror. Yet it also romanticized the dull existence of the city dweller and rescued?albeit only fictionally?the sense of individuality and

singularity that modernity has lost in the labyrinth of the crowd. Benjamin, interested in the detective's peculiar gifts for observation, explicitly relates the figure to the new optical technologies of modernity. That the detective

story developed in a certain way is thus related to a Zeitgeist involved in an

optical revolution, with a peculiar interest in vision and visibility. Gunning's and Werner's studies pursue this argument no farther than the detective's

"optical" dimension. I have been arguing that the figure of the detective in

Benjamin acquires a fuller meaning if related to the theory of the trace. Pur suing the traces the bourgeois proprietor imprints in his or her objects as a

mark of ownership, the detective unveils the crime and death residing at the center of the bourgeois interior; snooping after the traces the panoptical state tries to multiply to control private life, the detective becomes a spy in the

capitalist complot; finally, losing these traces in a twentieth century marked

by glass-and-steel architecture and serialized reproduction of art and com

modities, the detective reveals the revolutionary possibilities that must be looked for in the avant-garde.

The revolutionary action of mechanical reproduction and of the destruc tive character has to be counterbalanced and completed by the activity of research and preservation of the materialist historian-as-detective, whose task is not to "erase the traces" (the destructive character has done this for


Carlo Salzani 185

him or her) but to recover and reconstitute them. As Pierre Missac points out, "to destroy or to shatter is not to annihilate?to return to dust soon dispersed by the 'winds of history'?but rather to unsettle, 'to break into pieces.'

"38 Amid these broken pieces, these shattered ruins of the official history, the mate rialist detective, like the hunter or the archaeologist, tries to "follow the trail [Spur] of the past" (Hla,l). Detection is the method of the fl?neur, the ragpicker, the archaeologist, and the historian, who search for clues among dead data. Reading?or rather reconstructing?the traces of a shattered

tradition, the tradition of the oppressed, is the redemptive activity of this alternative figure of detective, who, in David Frisby's words, seeks to bring "insignificant details and seemingly fortuitous events into a meaningful constellation."39

For Benjamin, the city's surface is double layered: in the asphalt over which the fl?neur passes, "his steps awaken an echo" (GS, 4.1:238; SW, 3:354), the echo of the past. "The space winks at the fl?neur" (Mla,3): along his route the palimpsest of the street becomes alive, and images from the past throw the fl?neur-as-detective into a state of "anamnestic intoxication" (Ml,5). The spec ter of the past haunts the present, the ghosts of the past await resuscitation; the fl?neur-as-detective, following the traces of forgotten histories, discover

ing what is hidden in the city, awakens the dead. The historian's work is simi lar to that of the detective because these traces are hidden and obscure, incom

prehensible like hieroglyphs.40 Under the detective's acute observation, the traces reveal the past in a flash of light, which illuminates what was in the dark, but risks disappearing if we do not recognize it. As Benjamin writes in "On the Concept of History," history withdraws, and the image of the past always "threatens to disappear in any present that does not recognize itself as intended in that image" (GS, 1.2:695; SW, 4:391). History, as Eduardo Cadava points out, "is always on the verge of disappearing, without disappearing."41 The pos sibility of history is bound to the survival of its traces and to our ability to read

them, and the task of the historian-as-detective is thus to bring these traces to

legibility in the time of danger.

38. Pierre Missac, "Walter Benjamin: From Rupture to Shipwreck," trans. Victoria Bridges et al., in On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press, 1988), 214. 39. David Frisby, "The Flaneur in Social Theory," in Tester, Fl?neur, 99. 40. Angelika Rauch, "Culture's Hieroglyph in Benjamin and Novalis: A Matter of Feeling,"

Germanic Review 71, no. 4 (1996): 254. 41. Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 1997), 11.



The metaphor that connects the historian with the detective is well worn by now: the methods and tools are similar, and Benjamin is not alone? either in his time or in ours?in his taste for detective novels, as a growing literature suggests.42 Robin W. Winks, as one example among many, writes that "the historian must collect, interpret, and then explain his evidence by

methods which are not greatly different from those techniques employed by the detective, or at least by the detective of fiction."43 In this sense, Benjamin himself has been often related to the figure of the detective. He was a great collector of traces, as Mike Featherstone points out: he collected "the scraps of urban life such as handbills, tickets, photographs, advertisements, diaries, newspaper cuttings. He followed the principle of citation in which the mute bits and pieces of urban life were asked to speak for themselves."44 His researches in the archives and in the labyrinth of the Biblioth?que Nationale emblematize the

"dangerous" and obscure pursuit of the explorer of texts and the adventurer of libraries.

What this literature fails to emphasize, though, is the fact that the his torian has to work as a detective because what he or she has to uncover in the

past is a series of crimes. This is surely Benjamin's intent when he asks: "But isn't every square inch of our cities a crime scene? Every passer-by a culprit? Isn't the task of the photographer?descendant of the augurs and harus

pices?to reveal guilt and to point out the guilty in his pictures?" (GS, 2.1:385; SW, 2:527). This passage is echoed and completed in the "Work of Art" essay, when Benjamin again refers to Atget's disturbing photographs: "Pho tographic records begin to be evidence in the historical trial [Prozess]. This constitutes their hidden political significance" (GS, 7.1:361; SW, 3:108). For Benjamin, history is a "catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreck age" (GS, 1.2:697; SW, 4:392), a never-ending series of crimes, injustice, mur ders. And, as in a detective novel, the traces, as Ernest Mandel writes, "have to be discovered because tracks have been covered."45 These traces are the "evidence in the historical trial," and therefore the work of the historian-as

42. See, e.g., Michael J. Arrato Gavrish, "The Historian as Detective: An Introduction to His torical Methodology," Social Education 59, no. 3 (1995): 151-53; Cushing Strout, "The Historian and the Detective," Partisan Review 61 (1994): 666-74; Robin W. Winks, ed., The Historian as

Detective: Essays on Evidence (New York: Harper and Row, 1968); Winks, Modus Operandi: An Excursion into Detective Fiction (Boston: Godine, 1982); and Winks, "The Historian as Detec tive," in Winks, Detective Fiction, 242-50.

43. Winks, "Historian as Detective," 242. 44. Mike Featherstone, "The Fl?neur, the City, and Virtual Public Life," Urban Studies 35

(1998): 909. 45. Mandel, "Marxist Interpretation," 211.


Carlo Salzani 187

detective is eminently political. The historian thus shares with the detective not only method and technique, the sharp eye and deductive power, the dili

gent search and acute intuition, but also the gloomy expectation of discover

ing a corpse, the sense of danger and precariousness of being in the dark, the awareness of fighting powerful and merciless enemies, and the iron determi

nacy of discovering the murderer.46

46. The evolution of detective fiction took, though, a different direction: parallel and opposed to Dupin's model (from Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, and Christie to the "hardboiled" figures of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler), a different model evolved on the blueprint of "The

Man of the Crowd," the metaphysical or antidetective story (Jorge Luis Borges, Vladimir Nabokov, Alain Robbe-Grillet, ?talo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Paul Auster). In this different account of detec tion, victim, pursuer, and pursued are the same person, and detection results in a quest for identity.

This second model became predominant in the development of the genre and transformed it from a

popular lowbrow consumer good into a highly intellectualized and refined postmodern allegory. In this model all the traces lead inward, in a quest for identity that is always open-ended or failed and that has been related specifically to the crisis of the modern order. This project of detection does away with crime, truth, justice, right, or wrong and thus also with any reference to history and politics: the space of the city implodes and is reduced to a play of mirrors in which the other disap pears and the protagonist (or the author) contemplates his or her own image; the crimes of history (and history as such) fall into oblivion; the detective works no longer as an allegory of the historian.

From a Benjaminian point of view, what remains when the historical-political component recedes is a phantasmagoric?that is, ahistorical and self-indulgent?romanticization of the self. For intro

ductory readings see Merivale and Sweeney, Detecting Texts; Stefano Tani, The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984); and Ralph Willett, The Naked City: Urban Crime Fic tion in the USA (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).


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Issue Table of ContentsNew German Critique, No. 100, Arendt, Adorno, New York, and Los Angeles (Winter, 2007), pp. 1-207Front MatterGenealogies of Total Domination: Arendt, Adorno, and Auschwitz [pp. 1-45]The "Eclipse of Reason" and the End of the Frankfurt School in America [pp. 47-76]"Eichmann in Jerusalem", Arendt in Frankfurt: The Eichmann Trial, the Auschwitz Trial, and the Banality of Justice [pp. 77-109]Der Fall Faustus: Continuity and Displacement in Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno and Thomas Mann's Californian Exile [pp. 111-139]Funnier than Unhappiness: Adorno and the Art of Laughter [pp. 141-163]The City as Crime Scene: Walter Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective [pp. 165-187]Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World [pp. 189-207]Back Matter

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City as Crime Scene