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 station, 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 Benjamins 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 Schweppenhuser, 7 vols. in 15 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 197289), or the Gesammelte Briefe (Collected Letters), ed. Christoph Gdde and Henri Lonitz, 6 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 19952000) (hereafter cited as GS and GB, respectively), 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, 19962003), and The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 19101940, 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.

165

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 dwellerin this case the train travelermust forge his or her way through it as if in the primeval forest. A train journey is a succession of mythic trials 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 rst: The anesthesia of a fear through another one is his [the travelers] 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 ctitious excitement (GS, 4.1:38283).2 Benjamins 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 travelers anxieties are probably Benjamins 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 con icts are in the ofng (Walter Benjamins Passages, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995], 5859). 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 Maurice [sic] A. K. Green, Emile Gaboriau (Monsieur Lecoq), andwhen he was in MunichMaurice Leblancs stories about Arsne 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 (18841934) and his character Asbjrn Krag; the Swede Frank Heller (a.k.a. Martin Gunnar Serner, 18861947); the Briton Wilkie Collins (182489); the Czech-Austrian Leo Perutz (18821957); the Frenchman Gaston Leroux (18681927), specically Le fantme de lopra and Le parfum de la dame en noir; Arthur Conan Doyles (18591930) Sherlock Holmes; and the American Anna Katherine Green (18461935), specifically Behind Closed Doors and The Affair Next Door (GS, 4.1:38182). As early as 1920 Benjamin gives a list of guten Kriminalromanen in a letter to Scholem: Greens Affair Next Door, Behind Closed Doors, and Filigree Ball; Elvestads Der Mann der die Stadt plnderte and Die zwei und die Dame; Gaboriaus (183273) Monsieur Lecoq; Lerouxs

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 experimental 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 gure 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 Philosophischer Traktat; in France Rgis Messac published a thick book on the inuence of scientic progress on detective ction, Le detective novel et linuence de la pense scientique in 1929, from which Benjamin himself transcribed many quotations.5 In Benjamins corpus, references to the gure of the detective are multiple but usually go no farther than a hint or suggestion. Apart from Kriminalromane, auf Reisen, no other piece of writing is dedicated exclusively to the
Le fantme de lopra and Le mystre de la chamber jaune; Lawrence L. Lynchs Schlingen und Netze; August Gottlieb Meiners (17531807) Platanenallee No. 14; E. Balmer and W. M. Harys Feine Fden; Arnold Bennetts (18671931) Grand Babylon Hotel; and Alfred Kubins (18771959) Die andere Seite (GB, 2:1045). From a couple of letters to Kracauer of 1926 and 1928, we know that he read G. K. Chestertons (18741936) 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 (190389), an author of worthy detective novels (GB, 4:2089), is the main reference in the correspondence, where Benjamin mentions the novels Les suicids (GB, 4:539, 4:541, 5:28), Le locataire (GB, 5:28, 271, 276), Les Pitard (GB, 5:231, 271, 276), Lvad (GB, 5:271, 276), and La Marie du Port (GB, 6:329); but Agatha Christies (18901976) Mystery of the Blue Train and the French mystery author Pierre Vry (19001960) 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 Kriminalroman, in GS, 7.2:84651. In Brechts Nachla, the notes for Kriminalromanen go under the title of Tatsachenreihe, of which one episode follows a schema in Benjamins Materialen (Werke, vol. 17 [Berlin: Aufbau; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989], 44355). 5. Whereas Messacs book is a constant reference in The Arcades Project, there is no trace of Kracauers 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], 103204). In a letter to Kracauer of March 1924 (thus before the completion of the work), Benjamin writes that he is curious (gespannt) about Kracauers 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 inuence of Kracauer on Benjamins Theorie des Kriminalromans is rather unlikely. On the other hand, Kracauers study is a phenomenological analysis of the metamorphoses of the ratio, the systematic scientic-industrial thought, with the dissolution of piety in bourgeois society and the relationship between kitsch and will of power, and thus diverges from Benjamins interest in the genre.

168

Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective

gure 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 neur, the bourgeois interior, and the trace. If these few inferences cannot be considered either whimsical or supercial, they are nonetheless marginal and dispersed and therefore do not add up to a Theorie des Kriminalromans. Indeed, critical attention to this gure in Benjamin rarely goes farther than a nod to its existence, so that, to date, only a few articlelength studies focus on it specically. Nevertheless, the detective can be analyzed as a coherent and consistent gure in Benjamins work, even though its ctitious 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 Benjamins theoretical project. I rst analyze Benjamins quasi-sociological account of the birth and development of the detective story in the nineteenth century as another phantasmagoric description of the city. I then connect this description to the phenomenon of the city crowd and the anxieties and fears it provokes. After comparing the detective and the neur, I relate the gure of the detective to Benjamins theory of the trace, thus stressing the political importance of the detective pursuit. I conclude by giving an account of the historian as detective 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 innity 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 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 intrieur for the 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 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, Benjamin observes that it is no accident that [Eugne] Atgets photographs have

Carlo Salzani

169

been likened to those of a crime scene. But isnt every square inch of our cities a crime scene? Every passer-by a culprit? Isnt it the task of the photographer descendant of the augurs and haruspicesto reveal guilt and to point out the guilty in his pictures? (GS, 2.1:385; SW, 2:527). The sacred ground of nerie (M2a,1), the place the 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 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 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 description. Unlike the physiologies, the detective story plays with this sense of unfamiliarity, incomprehensibility, and anxiety and so exacerbates fear of the urban environment. As a genre it was more successful: it satised 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 forcesfrom ghetto uprising to the more diffuse spread of a counterculture with its rejection of normative models of social behaviourthat 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 imaginary of this class: a fear of crime.6 This fear derives from the bourgeois obsession with law and order, ideological security, and political immobility.7 Benjamin 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, 1.2:54243; SW, 4:21). The description is politically charged: bourgeois society always feels under attack; political crisis, social crisis, ideological terror are its permanent state of existence; therefore we always play detectiveand read detective ction. 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 Flneur, October, no. 102 (2002): 116. 7. Ernest Mandel, A Marxist Interpretation of the Crime Story, in Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Robin W. Winks (Woodstock, VT: Countryman, 1988), 210.

170

Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective

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 neur is transformed from a philosophical stroller into a werewolf, a hunter, a savage, and the experience of the metropolis is depicted as adventure. Many of Benjamins 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 inuence 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 (M11a,6). A quotation from Baudelaires Fuses, 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 conicts 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 phantasmagoric 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 ctitious escape route: Poe, Alexandre Dumas, and Eugne 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 individual, 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 articiality hold sway over this strangely vivid world. Nothing happens here that is not long premeditated; 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 of Fantmas (G15,5).

Carlo Salzani

171

sense of the self. Here, intrepid gures perform heroic deeds, either of sublime courage or of magnicent 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 civilization was strictly for harmless consumption. There is no social critique, no sociological analysis of crime or poverty, no political concern for the revolutionary potentiality of the mass: the villains, the criminals are always aristocratic and often gentlemen, who seek, according to Gilloch, the challenge and excitement of crime for its own sake, not merely for pecuniary benet.10 The detective novel is thus, for Benjamin, part of the phantasmagoria of modern life: if the traces the 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 Benjamin, 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 persecutors. Of all the menacing aspects of the masses, this one became apparent rst. 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 criminal 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 encountering a bloodthirsty villain in the street. The neur, who in the physiologies disinterestedly enjoyed the colorful life of the swarming boulevard, is phantasmagorically 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 proscript (M16,3). In a letter to Max Horkheimer on April 16, 1938: The crowd . . . is the outcasts latest place of asylum (GB, 6:6566; C, 557).

172

Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective

masses for a trace of the criminal. The phantasmagoria of the detective story lies in the assumption of the detectives ability to follow the criminals traces in the crowdashiding place: the 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 Benjamins 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 heritage, of external culture, and of technique of life.13 The detectives 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 detectives 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 individuals traces in the big-city crowd (GS, 1.2:546; SW, 4:23). The bourgeois fear of anonymity is balanced by the necessity of the criminalbut also of the poor, the bohemian, those living at the fringe of society and legalityof 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 nds profound, acute, and contradictory formulation in Baudelaire, whose neur embraces the crowd in a kind of erotic encounter with the other. But Benjamins 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 rst observed it. For Poe, it has some12. McDonough, Crimes of the Flneur, 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, 18801932 (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 appearance of the London crowd as Poe describes it is as gloomy and tful as the light of the gas lamps overhead (GS, 1.2:629, 625; SW, 4:327, 325). One of Poes stories provides Benjamin with the perfect example of the collapse of the neur into the crowd: The case in which the neur completely distances himself from the type of the philosophical promenader, and takes on the features of the werewolf restlessly roaming a social wilderness, was xed for the rst time and forever afterward by Poe in his story The Man of the Crowd (M1,6). McDonough argues that the neur-detective collapses into the man of the crowd, who is dragged toward the other by a pathological, and therefore criminal, passion. The neur-as-criminologist, as instance of panoptical observation, thus becomes indistinguishable from the badaud, lhomme de foules, the asocial: pursuer and pursued lose their polarities, and the desire for the other becomes criminal. For Benjamin, then,
Poes 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 neur. . . . To Poe the 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 asocial person and the neur. The harder a man is to nd, the more suspicious he becomes. (GS, 1.2:550; SW, 4:27)

Poes description of the crowd and the street summarizes the fundamental motifs of modernity, but his narration surpasses Baudelaires erotic fusion with the crowd. At the beginning of The Man of the Crowd the narrator behaves like the neur-physiognomist, reading on the faces of the passersby the history of long years.16 But when he spots the old man, he encounters an absolute 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 lesenit 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.

174

Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective

read. Jonathan Elmer makes the same point: The tale narrates the collapse of these two poles, for it is the narrators 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 flneur into the detective entails the social legitimation of nerie. Benjamin writes that if the 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 ight; 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 justication of the labor time of journalists and writers of feuilletons, who, like the neur, put their observations . . . for sale on the market.20 Ill at ease with the idleness of the neur, capitalist society triumphs over his formal resistance by imposing a productive label on the activity of observation. In utilitarian society, the neurs power of observation is put to use and becomes the productive work of the detective, thereby receiving social approval. The common trait of neur and detective is thus their power of observation. Following Benjamin, many have drawn the parallel: James V. Werner, for example, highlights the resemblances between the neur and Poes 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 produc18. 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 gure of the neur is that of the detective. The 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 Benjamins Notes on Flnerie, in The Flneur, 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 detective purposeful, but both need to be simultaneously wide-ranging and deeply penetrating. Both neur and detective derive a subtle pleasure from detecting the truth of the street, and both demonstrate a thorough pedestrian connoisseurship. 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 condence 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 altogether. (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 unnishable collection of things worth knowing, whose utility depends on chance, has its prototype in study. (m2,1)

Through its connection with observation, the detective story is related to the optical devices of modernity, especially photography and lm. A Little History of Photography relates the development of the camera to that of a new, scientic mode of observation: it brings things closer for inspection, discovers unknown images, reveals the secrets of realityin 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 eeting and secret images whose shock effect paralyzes the associative 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 Flneur, 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 Baudelairethat is, of the man committed to his workhas been omitted from this portrayal: his absentmindedness.In the neur, the joy of watching prevails over all. It can concentrate on observation; the result is the amateur detective. Or it can stagnate in the rubbernecker; then the 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).

176

Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective

problematize the relation between inner and outer, on which bourgeois society is based. This is the argument of Tom Gunnings study of Benjamins optical detective. Drawing a parallel between Poes Dupin and Benjamins detective, Gunning argues that the detective method inverts and complicates the relationships between hidden and uncovered, deep and supercial, visible and invisible, simple and complex, inner and outer, so that the boundaries between these apparently opposed categories become uid under the detectives gaze. Therefore, he concludes, the detective story activates the complex dialectical optics of modernity, an optics based not only on the visual mastery of surveillance but also on the uncanny experience of transformed 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 detection is similar to that of the neur: through nerie and observation the detective constructs, as Shields argues, a social physiognomy of the street.25 Flnerie, writes Benjamin, gives the individual the best prospects for playing the detective (GS, 1.2:543; SW, 4:21). Nevertheless, the physiognomies of the rst 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 neurs method with the physiognomic 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 considered an evolution of the physiognomies, able to account for the anxieties of the city. As Benjamin notes, the insufciency of nerie led to an eventual collapsing of the neur into the badaud. The distance the neur-as-physiognomist claims to maintain from the crowd, and from others, disappears in the Second Empire as the neur collapses into the criminal and every distinction between pursuer and pursued is annulled. This is why Poes Man of the Crowd is an X-ray or, better, a model for the detective story.26 The detectives observation is thus an evolution and an improvement upon that of the neur-physiognomist.
23. Tom Gunning, The Exterior as Intrieur: Benjamins Optical Detective, boundary 2 30, no. 1 (2003): 127. Werners argument is very similar (cf. Detective Gaze, 1319). 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 solipsistic unity (Gumshoe Gothics: Poes the Man of the Crowd and His Followers, in Detecting 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 detectives method supersedes the neurs method, being both more adequate to the new experience 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 hasnt signed anything, who left no picture, Who was not there, who said nothing: How can they catch him? Erase the traces. Bertolt Brecht, Lesebuch fr Stdtebewohner (Reader for City Dwellers)

Benjamins theory of the detective comprises the dialectic between, on the one hand, the analysis of the detective story as another phantasmagoric representation of the city and, on the other, the work of the detectives method as a sign of modernity and a progressive political tool. I pursue this second path a little farther, connecting the gure of the detective to Benjamins 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 Projectmainly, but not only, in convolute I, The Interior, the Traceand a few other pieces of writing. It is related to the theory of the intrieur, to the analysis of the panoptical state, and, nally, to the revolutionary potentiality 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 neur-as-physiognomist and the detective: One can speak, in certain respects, of a contribution made by the physiologies to detective ction. 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 (d14a,4).

178

Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective

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 surrounded 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 Poes 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 ction, shows himself to be the rst physiognomist of the domestic interior. The criminals in early detective novels are neither gentlemen 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 Manorially 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 eeing victim. . . . The bourgeois interior of the 1860s to the 1890s . . . ttingly houses only the

28. In To Live without Leaving Traces (GS, 4.1:427; SW, 2:7012), 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, Youve 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 markthe ornaments on the mantelpiece, the antimacassars on the armchairs, the transparencies in the windows, the screen in front of the re. A neat phrase by Brecht helps us out here: Erase the traces! is the refrain in the rst poem of his Lesebuch fr Stdtebewohner. Here in the bourgeois room, the opposite behaviour became the norm. And conversely, the intrieur forces the inhabitant to adopt the greatest possible number of habitshabits 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 something broke. Even their way of showing their annoyanceand this affect, which is gradually starting to die out, was one that they could produce with great virtuositywas 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).

Carlo Salzani
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, 4.1:8889; SW, 1:44647)

179

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, annihilated, 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 conceals from the others. The cult of the trace is also simultaneous to the disappearing of the trace. The bourgeois, like the asocial, erases the trace because in modernity an increasingly strict and rm net of control has been spread over private life. Examples include the ofcial numbering of houses or the use of photography as a police identication procedure. As Weidmann writes, A new way of preserving the traces immediately regains control of the disappearing of traces.31 Benjamin himself observed that since the French Revolution 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 bourgeois 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, 8182). 30. An entry in The Arcades Project refers to this intoxication as satanic, connecting the intoxication of interior with modernity as the time of hell (S1,5): Nineteenth-century domestic interior. The space disguises itselfputs 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 cozinessa mood that in hashish intoxication concentrates 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 interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spiders 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. 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,

180

Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective

the invention of photography was a turning point in the history of this process. It was no less signicant for criminology than the invention of the printing press was for literature. Photography made it possible for the rst 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 persons 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 architecture 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 protect the inner space, and the functionality of modern lines declares war on the nineteenth-century plush. As Weidmann notes, The private sphere, the proprietors 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 surveya giants 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 bohme 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: Its 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 Benjamin 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 glassmilieu 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, 2:7012).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, articulated, 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. Benjamin, 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 appearance 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, cancellation, or rewriting, and our relation with it. The argument can be introduced through the commodity. The commodity 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 neur or
34. Weidmann, Flanerie, Sammlung, Spiel, 1056. 35. Almost the same words are repeated in Experience and Poverty (GS, 2.1:21718; SW, 2:734).

182

Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective

the baroque emblem, the commodity is a decontextualized fragment, polyvalent and empty. Its signicance lies in the social relations of production, but it obliterates the traces of this production and oats, like the baroque allegory, in a polyvalence of meanings. The commodity receives and displays the traces only of other commodities, in a vicious circularity Eagleton 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 innitely metonymic: each commodity is dened 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. Benjamins detective 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 afterlives the truth content of production.37 The reference to the gure 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 criminal, and it tries to erase the traces of its crime in the commodity. A progressive detective ction could be used to show this, and this is the aim, writes Benjamin, of Brechts Threepenny Novel:
Brecht is concerned with politics; he makes visible the element of crime hidden in every business enterprise. Bourgeois legality and crimethese are, by the rules of the crime novel, opposites. Brechts procedure consists in retaining the highly developed technique of the crime novel but neutralizing its rules. This crime novel depicts the actual relation between bourgeois legality and crime. The latter is shown to be a special case of exploitation sanctioned by the former. (GS, 3:44748; SW, 3:89)

The auratic object, writes Eagleton, continually rewrites its own history to expel the traces of its ruptured, heterogeneous past (WB, 33). Like the commodity, 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 ctitious tradition (a path of traces) that is the victors tradition. This is the aura the bourgeois proprietor attempts to impose on the commodied intrieur of plush: the trace is reinscribed, modied, falsied. The trace, then, argues Eagleton, belongs in one sense with the aura, either as its petried 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 mechanical reproduction lie in its expunging such Ersatz aura in a cheerful act of revolutionary violence, which, according to Eagleton, will blast out of history the apocalyptic empty space within which the new may germinate (WB, 31). The personication of this purifying violence is the destructive character. 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 phantasmagoria of the bourgeois interior and of the bourgeois obsession for leaving traces of proprietorship: The destructive character is the enemy of the tuiman. The tui-man looks for comfort, and the case [Gehuse] is its quintessence. 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 rubblenot for the sake of the rubble, but for that of the way leading through it (GS, 4.1:39798; SW, 2:54142). The shattering of tradition, the liquidation of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage (GS, 7.1:35354; SW, 3:104), must ensure the rediscovery of the tracesthose erased and obliterated by the victors traditionof 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 objects historicity, the elements of the production process that, in still clinging to the object, help defetishize it. The traces inscribed on

184

Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective

an objects 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 different history, of the tradition of the oppressed, we gain possession of the thing (M16a,4). The gure 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 second half of the nineteenth century as a part of the phantasmagoria of modernity. 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 rescuedalbeit only ctionallythe sense of individuality and singularity that modernity has lost in the labyrinth of the crowd. Benjamin, interested in the detectives peculiar gifts for observation, explicitly relates the gure 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. Gunnings and Werners studies pursue this argument no farther than the detectives optical dimension. I have been arguing that the gure of the detective in Benjamin acquires a fuller meaning if related to the theory of the trace. Pursuing 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; nally, losing these traces in a twentieth century marked by glass-and-steel architecture and serialized reproduction of art and commodities, the detective reveals the revolutionary possibilities that must be looked for in the avant-garde. The revolutionary action of mechanical reproduction and of the destructive 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 annihilateto return to dust soon dispersed by the winds of historybut rather to unsettle, to break into pieces.38 Amid these broken pieces, these shattered ruins of the ofcial history, the materialist detective, like the hunter or the archaeologist, tries to follow the trail [Spur] of the past (H1a,1). Detection is the method of the neur, the ragpicker, the archaeologist, and the historian, who search for clues among dead data. Readingor rather reconstructingthe traces of a shattered tradition, the tradition of the oppressed, is the redemptive activity of this alternative gure of detective, who, in David Frisbys words, seeks to bring insignicant details and seemingly fortuitous events into a meaningful constellation.39 For Benjamin, the citys surface is double layered: in the asphalt over which the neur passes, his steps awaken an echo (GS, 4.1:238; SW, 3:354), the echo of the past. The space winks at the neur (M1a,3): along his route the palimpsest of the street becomes alive, and images from the past throw the neur-as-detective into a state of anamnestic intoxication (M1,5). The specter of the past haunts the present, the ghosts of the past await resuscitation; the neur-as-detective, following the traces of forgotten histories, discovering what is hidden in the city, awakens the dead. The historians work is similar to that of the detective because these traces are hidden and obscure, incomprehensible like hieroglyphs.40 Under the detectives acute observation, the traces reveal the past in a ash 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 possibility 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 Flneur in Social Theory, in Tester, Flneur, 99. 40. Angelika Rauch, Cultures 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.

186

Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective

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 oursin 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 ction.43 In this sense, Benjamin himself has been often related to the gure 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 Bibliothque 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 historian 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 Benjamins intent when he asks: But isnt every square inch of our cities a crime scene? Every passer-by a culprit? Isnt the task of the photographerdescendant of the augurs and haruspicesto 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 Atgets disturbing photographs: Photographic records begin to be evidence in the historical trial [Prozess]. This constitutes their hidden political signicance (GS, 7.1:361; SW, 3:108). For Benjamin, history is a catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage (GS, 1.2:697; SW, 4:392), a never-ending series of crimes, injustice, murders. 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-as42. See, e.g., Michael J. Arrato Gavrish, The Historian as Detective: An Introduction to Historical Methodology, Social Education 59, no. 3 (1995): 15153; Cushing Strout, The Historian and the Detective, Partisan Review 61 (1994): 66674; 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 Detective, in Winks, Detective Fiction, 24250. 43. Winks, Historian as Detective, 242. 44. Mike Featherstone, The Flneur, 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 diligent search and acute intuition, but also the gloomy expectation of discovering a corpse, the sense of danger and precariousness of being in the dark, the awareness of ghting powerful and merciless enemies, and the iron determinacy of discovering the murderer.46

46. The evolution of detective ction took, though, a different direction: parallel and opposed to Dupins model (from Conan Doyle, Dorothy Sayers, and Christie to the hardboiled gures 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 detection, 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 rened 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 specically 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 disappears 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 phantasmagoricthat is, ahistorical and self-indulgentromanticization of the self. For introductory 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 Fiction in the USA (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996).