Traces of Poe in the Arcade

There is a literature of 'the trace' beginning with Benjamin (WB) who finds its origins in Poe's Man of the Crowd where all the drapery of the crime vanishes and leaves only a set of traces; thus 'the trace' appears at the time of Second Empire in France. Thereafter, WB notes, traces turn into government's 'multifarious web of registrations' as endlessly discussed by Foucault, Donzelot and Castel. It is a modest step from the man in the crowd to our world of risk management where the individual disappears and is replaced by Castel's ' calculus of probabilities or factors and statistical correlations of heterogeneous elements likely to produce risk (usually a file). Another strand in the history of the trace is the collapsing of heterogeneous laboratory elements (experimental rats) into tractable and portable traces (Latour).