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

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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 booksto 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

New German Critique 100 Vol 34 No 1 Winter 2007

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 Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols. in 15 (Frankfurt am Main:

Suhrkamp, 1972–89), or the Gesammelte Briefe (Collected Letters), ed. Christoph Gödde 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.


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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 getover 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

Lessknown 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 of fing” (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 Arsène 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 Asbjörn 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 fantôme de l’opéra 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-

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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 Régis Messac published a thick book on the influ-

ence of scientific progress on detective fiction, Le “detective novel” et l’in fl u-

ence de la pensée scienti fique in 1929, from which Benjamin himself transcribedmany 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 fantôme de l’opéra and Le mystère de la chamber jaune; Lawrence L. Lynch’s Schlingen und

Netze; August Gottlieb Meißner’s (1753–1807) Platanenallee No. 14; E. Balmer and W. M. Hary’s

Feine Fäden; 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 suicidés (GB,

4:539, 4:541, 5:28), Le locataire (GB, 5:28, 271, 276), Les Pitard (GB, 5:231, 271, 276), L’évadé (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 Véry (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 Nachlaß, 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

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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 flâneur, 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 broadenits 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 flâneur, I relate the figure of the detective to

Ben jamin’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 LifeThen 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 flâneur may follow, every one of them will lead him to a

crime” (GS , 1.2:543; SW , 4:22). The city, initially a delightful intérieur for the

flâneur, 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 flâneur, 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



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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 flânerie”

(M2a,1), the place the flâneur 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

flâneur-as-journalist described urban types, giving a sense of intelligibility

and familiarity to the urban environment, which Benjamin judged highly

phantasmagoric. “The phantasmagoria of theflâneur,” he writes in The Arcades

Project , is the pretension “to read from faces the profession, the ancestry, thecharacter” (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 bourgeoisimaginary 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 Flâneur,” October, no. 102 (2002): 116.

7 E M d l “A M i I i f h C i S ” i D i Fi i A C l

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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 flâneur 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 becomespossible 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” (M11a,6). A

quotation from Baudelaire’s Fusées, 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 Eugène 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



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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 flâneur 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 thepossibility 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).11

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 flâneur, 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 inBaudelaire . . . they efface all traces of the individual: they are the newest asylum for the reprobate

and the proscript” (M16 3) In a letter to Max Horkheimer on April 16 1938: “The crowd is the

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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 flâneur-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 individualityof 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 theindividual’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 flâneur

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 Flâneur,” 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 J h C Th I ll l d h M P id d P j di h Li



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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 flâneur into the crowd: “The case in which the flâneur 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’” (M1,6). McDonough argues that the flâneur-detective collapses into

the man of the crowd, who is dragged toward the other by a pathological, and

therefore criminal, passion. The flâneur-as-criminologist, as instance of pan-

optical observation, thus becomes indistinguishable from the badaud , l’hommede 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 flâneur. . . . To Poe the

flâneur 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 flâneur. 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 flâneur-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 certainGerman book that ‘er lasst sich nicht lesen’—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

Carlo Salzani 173


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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 flâneur into the detective entails the social legitimation of

flânerie. Benjamin writes that “if the flâneur is thus turned into an unwillingdetective, 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 flâneur, “put their observations . . . ‘for sale’ on themarket.”20 Ill at ease with the idleness of the flâneur, capitalist society triumphs

over his formal resistance by imposing a “productive” label on the activity of

observation. In utilitarian society, the flâneur’s power of observation is “put

to use” and becomes the productive work of the detective, thereby receiving

social approval.

The common trait of flâneur 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 flâneur 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

flâneur is that of the detective. The flâneur 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 Flânerie ” in The Flâneur ed



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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 flâneur 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. (m2,1)

Through its connection with observation, the detective story is related to theoptical 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, thedetective 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 Flâneur, 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 flâneur, 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 flâneur 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

h h ” (GS 1 2 572 SW 4 41)

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problematize the relation between “inner” and “outer,” on which bourgeois

society is based. This is the argument of Tom Gunning’s study of Ben jamin’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 becomefluid

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 flâneur: through flânerie and observation the detec-

tive constructs, as Shields argues, “a social physiognomy of the street.”25

“Flânerie,” 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 thecrowd and its dark shades. If we identify the flâneur’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 insuf ficiency of flânerie led to an eventual collaps-

ing of the flâneur into the badaud . The distance the flâneur-as-physiognomist

claims to maintain from the crowd, and from others, disappears in the Second

Empire as the flâneur 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 flâneur-physiognomist.

23. Tom Gunning, “The Exterior as Intérieur: 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,1).

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

li i ti it ” (“G h G thi P ’ ‘th M f th C d’ d Hi F ll ” i D t t



13/24

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 flâneur’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 TraceThe 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 für Städtebewohner

( 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 patha 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 intérieur,” 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 exposé “Paris, the

Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” he wrote that “the interior is not just the

universe but also the étui 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

flâneur-as-physiognomist and the detective: “One can speak, in certain respects, of a contributionmade by the physiologies to detective fiction. Only, it must be borne in mind that the combinative

d f th d t ti t d d h t i i l h th t i d ll d th

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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” (I5,2). 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 samewords, 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 für

Städtebewohner. Here in the bourgeois room, the opposite behaviour became the norm. And con-

versely, the intérieur 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;



15/24

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. HeinerWeidmann 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 of ficial 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 inter ior 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” (S1,5): “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” (I2,6).31. Heiner Weidmann, Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel: Die Erinnerung des 19. Jahrhunderts bei

Walter Benjamin (Munich: Fink, 1992), 108.

Carlo Salzani 179


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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. Thedetective 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 bohème 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).



17/24

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. ‘It 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 wishedthat 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 flâneur or

34. Weidmann, Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel, 105–6.

35. Almost the same words are repeated in “Experience and Poverty” (GS , 2.1:217–18; SW ,

2:734).

Carlo Salzani 181


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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 metonymic: 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 possibleinstance 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

5



19/24

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 intérieur 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). Thedestructive 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 étui-

man. The étui-man looks for comfort, and the case [Gehäuse] 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

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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 DetectiveBenjamin 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 relatesthe 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



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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 of ficial history, the mate-

rialist detective, like the hunter or the archaeologist, tries to “follow the

trail [Spur] of the past” (H1a,1). Detection is the method of the flâneur, 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 flâneur passes, “his steps awaken an echo” (GS , 4.1:238; SW , 3:354),

the echo of the past. “The space winks at the flâneur” (M1a,3): along his route

the palimpsest of the street becomes alive, and images from the past throw the

flâneur-as-detective into a state of “anamnestic intoxication” (M1,5). The spec-

ter of the past haunts the present, the ghosts of the past await resuscitation;

the flâneur-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.

Carlo Salzani 185

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 Flâneur in Social Theory,” in Tester, Flâneur, 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:

P i t U i it P 1997) 11


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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 researchesin the archives and in the labyrinth of the Bibliothèque 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 Flâneur, the City, and Virtual Public Life,” Urban Studies 35

(1998): 909


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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

Carlo Salzani 187

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, Italo 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


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Documents

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