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IDENTIFYING TRACES:
TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FORENSIC NARRATIVE

By

Joy Elizabeth Palmer

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2005

ABSTRACT
IDENTIFYING TRACES: TECHNOLOGIES OF THE FORENSIC NARRATIVE
By

Joy Elizabeth Palmer

This project takes as its starting point the contemporary cultural fascination with
the “forensic” and asserts that since the discovery and later acceptance of DNA
identiﬁcation techniques in the early nineties, the forensic mode of narrative has fast
become one of the most dominant truth-telling paradigms of our time. By positing that
the tracing of empirical evidence can always lead to whole truth, forensic narratives
control historical account by ﬁxing the truth of events and identity. Indeed, if the central
problematic of the forensic narrative is the problem of identity, then that narrative is
necessarily bound up in the history of identiﬁcation devices such as photography,
ﬁngerprinting and DNA proﬁling. This history is chronicled by the texts under
examination in this dissertation. Each of the forms of identiﬁcation discussed in this
project--from the mug-shot to the DNA proﬁle--is surrounded by popular discourses that
illustrate the fascinating ways in which the forensic narrative takes shape within the
cultural imaginary. These discourses also reveal the instabilities that inhere within that
narrative. Identifying Traces tracks this fascinating interplay between the concepts of
identiﬁcation and elusive individuality, and also demonstrates the intrinsically multi-

discursive construction of the forensic paradigms of narrative and identiﬁcation.

DEDICATIONS

To Jack, my lovely laughing boy, for always making all this academic stuff seem to
matter just a bit less.
To Mum, Dad, and Jonathan for never questioning that I’d get here one day, and for
always being so bloody proud!
And to my husband Frank, most of all. For being with me on this long and winding road,
and for always assuring me that my dissertation wouldn’t suck.

I love you.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation is the direct product of the collective of people who have guided
and supported me. Ellen Pollak has supported me through the long haul, not only
through coursework and exams, but also as I have navigated through grad-life,
pregnancy, parenting, and the long hard labor of this dissertation. Thanks, Ellen, for
always pushing me to be better, and for always knowing I could get here. Judith Roof
came into this project as I was further down the road. Thanks so much, Judith, for
instilling in me a new sense of vigor in this pursuit, and for pushing me in new and
challenging directions in these last few years. It’s been fun! A massive vote of thanks to
Steve Rachman and Scott Juengel, you have both been such generous and engaged
readers. Thanks for cheering me through the ﬁnish line.

In additional need of acknowledgement are the many people who make up the
fabric of my “other” professional life. If I had not had the full encouragement and
support of my Matrix directors (and protectors) Dean Rehberger and Mark Kombluh,
there is no way I would have reached this goal. Dean, you will never know how much
your mentorship and ability to make me see the ridiculous side of all this has helped me
to plug on. Mark, thanks for your unending generosity and fatherly concern, it has been
always abundantly clear that you actually cared.

Of course, I need to acknowledge those who have slogged through graduate
school along with me, and been there through all the soul-searching and “is this all worth

it?” Without their support and empathy this would have been a long and isolated journey.

iv

Most of all Jill Anderson, who’s been right there with me since that bloody class in Old
English.

Finally, Frank, thanks for reading my drafts and watching C.S.I. ad nauseum, for
your insights and gentle humor, and for not berating me too much for sloppy use of

hyphens and Latinate phrases.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1
THE C.S.I. EFFECT: TECHNOLOGIES OF CONTEMPORARY NARRATIVES ...... 1

CHAPTER 2
IMAGE CAPTURE: PHOTOGRAPHY, FINGERPRINTING
AND FORENSIC IDENTIFICATION ........................................................... 38

CHAPTER 3

TRACING “THE SMALLEST POINTS OF IDENTITY”: NARRATIVE AND
SCIENTIFIC DETECTION ....................................................................... 76

CHAPTER 4
EMPIRICAL/UNCANNY: TRACE PARADOXES IN CONTEMPORARY FORENSIC
NARRATIVES ..................................................................................... 1 1 1

BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................. 146

vi

Chapter One

“The C.S.I. Effect”: Technologies of Contemporary Forensic Narratives

[W]e examined the rungs of every chair in the hotel, and, indeed the jointings of
every description of furniture, by the aid of a most powerful microscope. Had
there been any traces of recent disturbance we should not have failed to detect it
instantly. A single grain of gimlet—dust, for example, would have been as obvious

as an apple. (Edgar Allan Poe, “The Purloined Letter” 1844)1

To ﬁx the human personality, to give to each human being an identity, and
individuality that can be depended upon with certainty, lasting, unchangeable,
always recognisable, and easily adduced, this appears to be in the largest sense the

aim of the new method. (Sir Francis Galton, Finger Prints, 1892)2

It’s the small things that will break a case. Post the OJ. trial this is the kind of
thing people love. Deﬁnitiveness. You spray, there’s blood, there’s guilt, and I
think that’s one of the things people love, because you don’t get deﬁnitive

answers anywhere else. (Ann Donahue, C. S]. DVD commentary, 2004)3

“Who Are You? I Really Wanna Know!” The opening sequences of Crime Scene
Investigators (C. S. I. ) television’s “most watched drama” is a frenetic montage set against
The Who ’s 705 rock anthem. The “who” in question here is the unknown subject, or
“unsub,” that has committed a crime, but unwittingly left behind traces of his or her
identity. The opening montage of highly abstract, high-tech images, intercut with shots
of agents peering into microscopes and scrutinizing computer-generated images, conveys
the stylized spectacle of forensic science representation. Each episode of C. SI, and its
numerous imitators, depicts a stunning array of forensic devices at work--ALS lights
make trace evidence burst into the ﬁeld of vision, comparative microscopes match hair
follicles, lasers criss-cross a room in a reconstruction of gun-ﬁre. These contemporary
“scientiﬁc detectives” replace Sherlock Holmes’s humble magnifying glass with
sophisticated new imaging technologies. In the forensics laboratory, investigators’ faces
illumine as they peer into light boxes or scrutinize victims’ bodies with ﬁber optic
devices. Under these specialized forms of light and imaging the most mundane of trace
evidence—hair follicles, carpet ﬁbers—become startling images, digitally enhanced to
increase both their visibility and their aesthetic appeal. As the crime scene investigators
gaze upon these physical traces of crime and identity, they literally “piece together” an
entire account of crime and culprit, creating a forensic narrative that ﬁts minute elements
of evidence into a cohesive chain of causal links.

This project takes as its starting point the contemporary cultural fascination with
the “forensic.” Images from forensic science regularly illustrate popular magazines like
Scientiﬁc American, Time, and Newsweek where hypermediated “traces” of evidence

generated from an array of newly enhanced imaging technologies—scanning electron

microscopes, ﬁber optic light sources, mass spectrometers—appear colorized and
sharpened in order to enhance their visual pull. In the last decade, televised narratives
depicting forensic science have also exploded on the popular scene, each conveying an
apparently radical and revolutionary form of detection that appears infallible in its
scientiﬁc exactitude. While in the late 703, Quincy became the ﬁrst television show to
highlight the use of forensic pathology in solving crime, over a decade later the
depictions of methods of forensic detection have moved the form away from the intuitive
detective-work of the crusading and somewhat idiosyncratic Quincy. C. 5.1., leading in
the primetime drama ratings for the last three years, has spurned a number of spin-offs—
C. S]. Miami, C.S.I. New York. Meanwhile other networks compete with dramas such as
Crossing Jordan, Without a Trace, Navy C.I.S., Cold Case and Medical Investigation.
With the success of forensic detective ﬁction and shows such as Autopsy, cable producers
have vastly exploited the entertainment value of forensic science over the last decade,
with forensic shows becoming the mainstay of “educational” and “investigative”
channels, CourtTV, Discovery, and TLC, and reaching its pinnacle with the recent glut in
primetime network programming.4 Forensic detective ﬁction continuously occupies the
bestseller lists, most notably Patricia Comwell, whose Kay Scarpetta series, depicting a
forensic pathologist-cum-detective, has become the archetypal formula for the multitude
of imitators that have followed.5

Since the discovery and later acceptance of DNA identiﬁcation techniques in the
early nineties, and especially the trial of OJ. Simpson that would bring such technologies
to the forefront of public debate, the forensic mode of narrative has fast become one of

the most dominant truth-telling paradigms of our time. By asserting that the tracing of

empirical evidence can always lead to whole truth, these forensic narratives control
historical account by ﬁxing the truth of events and identities. In popular rhetoric, forensic
science cannot only ﬂawlessly resolve the question of “whodunit?” by simply
interpreting the material evidence, but even more miraculously it can reach across time,
rewriting histories and identities, revealing to us the “real” identity of Jack the Ripper,‘S
the sexual relations of Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemmings,7 the genetic core of
Beethoven’s “genius,”8 or the “real” face of Jesus Christ.9

Formally a term used to refer to argumentation within a legal context, “forensics”
has now become a cultural shorthand that denotes an entire set of scientiﬁc procedures
and practices conducted in the name of the law.lo “Forensics” suggests not simply the
scientist as witness making an argument within a court of law, but teams of forensic
investigators and their methods, from ﬁeld work such as evidence collection, to high-tech
chemical processing and imaging and the autopsying of dead bodies. This co-opting of
forensics away from the law is thematized in the majority of the ﬁctionalized
representations of forensics; here courts of law are largely absent from the plot, and
lawyers are only represented to depict the inherent and subjective corruption of a legal
system gone awry.ll “Forensics” is now a term far removed from connotations of
argumentation and debate; while truth might be negotiable in the criminal justice system,
these plots assert, the deﬁnitiveness of the scientiﬁc method is far more absolute and
trustworthy than any evidentiary truth derived in a court of law.

The current intrigue with forensic science can be tied directly to advances in
forensic identiﬁcation that have apparently “revolutionized” our ability to identify

individuals, speciﬁcally DNA typing, and also to the dramatic advancement in visual

imaging made possible with the advent of digitally enhanced technologies. From its
inception, the rhetoric surrounding DNA typing has been hyperbolic in tenor,
emphasizing how crime has met its ultimate foil as we stand at the “dawn of a new age.”
Such renderings are characterized by the assumption that changes in technology will
precipitate changes in society, in the ways in which we understand crime and even in
identity itself. Progressivist accounts of the history of forensics thus begin with the
invention of photography and the crude mugshot, and end with a discovery that brings the
forensic drive to know to its logical culmination, the discovery of DNA “ﬁngerprinting”
in 1984 and the ability to “identify” an individual at the very level of the gene.” A
Question of Evidence: The Casebook of Great Forensic Controversies, from Napoleon to
0.1., for instance, charts the progress of forensics by examining ﬁfteen controversial case
studies. Author Colin Evans writes of this advancement:
The evolution of forensic science has been a long, complex, and
fascinating journey. For the most part it is a story of triumph, a succession
of victories--some large, others barely noticeable--in a never ending battle
to close the loopholes through which criminals slip. This progress has
been exponential. Although the ﬁrst tenuous steps in scientiﬁc crime-
solving came as early as the eighteenth century, the giant strides didn’t
really happen until after World War H. With crime levels soaring through
the roof, it became blindingly obvious that the old standbys of crime
detection--shoe leather, informants, and methodical elimination (though
these still form the bedrock of any investigation)--were not enough to stem

the onslaught. New weapons were needed.

Enter the crime lab. Suddenly the electron microscope, the
spectrograph, gas chromatography, DNA typing, and a hundred and one
other sub-branches of the forensic detection tree became indispensable
allies of the investigating ofﬁcer. (Evans 1-2)

Newspaper and feature articles from the late eighties and early nineties that detail the new
technologies similarly exploited a sense of change, where “traditional” detection,
embodied (somewhat erroneously) by Sherlock Holmes must move aside for pure
science. As such, crime is now, more than ever, a question for empirical scientists and
geneticists: “A late twentieth-century Holmes would be glad of his Watson,” a 1989
article in The Economist declared, for as “a modern medical man, Dr. Watson would be
well versed in genetics. He would know how a drop of blood or semen or a hair follicle
could—at least in theory—prove that a certain person had been at the scene of a crime.”
Detective work had been removed from the streets and placed in its “proper” home, the
laboratory (Begley 81).

Contemporary representations and discourses surrounding forensics, and
speciﬁcally DNA, hyperbolically assert that we are at the “dawn” of a new age. Forensic
science is unsurpassable, the rhetoric asserts, and such revolutions in technology will no
doubt precipitate changes in society and in the ways in which we understand crime and
even identity itself. As a culture we have become preoccupied with the rapid advances
made in all technologies that intervene in the production of identity and the very notion
of what it means to be human: computer science, genetic-engineering, organ

l3

transplantation, cosmetic surgery, In Vitro fertilization. Mid-to-late nineties rhetoric

surrounding the advent of the internet and communications technologies, for instance,

both reveled in and despaired over the loosening of identity from body—digital space
enabled the realization of a Cartesian paradigm where pure mind (or self) could interact
in a space completely free of the body.14 While the hyped tenor of this rhetoric has now
abated somewhat as the intemet moves into the mainstream of everyday life and
interaction, a new discourse emerges in which identities are “networked” or “distributed”
in new spaces of interaction and cognition. Banks now tap into (and create) anxiety over
identity-theft; recent commercials by Citibank playfully dramatize how a nefarious
intemet hacker (oddly, of doubtful intellect) can appropriate the identity/body of an
unsuspecting credit card holder.

Theoretical discourses have described the condition of postmodernity as a period
of profound epistemological and ontological change that is triggered by the rapid
acceleration of such technological advances in communication and representation.
Donna Haraway’s description of postrnodemity as a “translation of the world into a
problem of coding” celebrates our “cyborg ontologies” and the decentering of the
modernist subject (164). Frederic J ameson’s distinctly more pessimistic version of the
postmodern as “hyperreal” adopts the concept of “hyperspace” a term that refers to a
profoundly alienating dislocation between the subject and the material world, and the loss
of the integrated subject of modernity (10-1 1). Baudrillard’s assessment of the
postmodern as a “simulacrum” signals a loss of the bounded body as grounds for
subjective experience: the individual can “no longer produce the limits of his own being”;
he is “now only pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of inﬂuence”
(“Ecstacy” 132-133). In light of the hyperbolic rhetoric concerning the breakneck speed

at which technologies are accelerating, the theories of both Baudrillard and Jameson take

on a deeply prophetic tenor as the human subject is “reduced” to code, digitized and
decentered as point elements across a global, asynchronous and non-linear network.

But the view of technology as the locus for epistemological change and the
“instruments” or neutral tools that trigger cultural change require careful scrutiny. Judy
Wajcman reminds us that “technology is more than a set of physical objects or artifacts.
It also fundamentally embodies a culture or a set of social relations made up of certain
sorts of knowledge, beliefs, desires, and practices” (149). According to this Foucauldian
usage of the term, technology here is understood as organized systems or “apparatus” that
produce a range of representations and effects at the very level of the body and subjective
experience. '5 “Technologies” are thus the processes of interaction between institutional,
discursive, and material effects that interdependently produce meanings or “truth effects”
at the level of the human subject. Moreover, in this production of knowledge,
technologies articulate power relations that, in turn, become part of an apparatus of
control. “Discipline,” for example, “may be identiﬁed neither with an institution nor with
an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising of a whole set
of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or
an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology” (Foucault, Discipline 215). In Discipline and
Punish, for instance, Foucault describes how Bentham’s panopticon was a form of
disciplinary surveillance that induced “in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent
visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” and so “represented the
abstract formula of a very real technology, that of individuals” (201, 224). The
Foucauldian concept of technologies therefore becomes useful as a framework for

investigating how taken for granted “truths” are culturally constructed.

To interrogate the discourses surrounding forensic science and its instrumental
technologies, then, is also to interrogate the fundamental modes of representation, the
discursive technologies that have mediated and produced speciﬁc concepts of identity or
identiﬁcation. The “facts” of forensic science are produced by more than the
instrumental technologies of forensic science. As Ann Balsamo has argued, the meaning
of such new instrumental technologies is produced by “a complex arrangement or
articulation of texts, narratives, institutional structures, economic forces, bodily practices,
and other material effects.” This arrangement, in turn, establishes “a set of possibilities
for the further development and deployment of new technologies” (10).

This project considers a range of material and discursive technologies that
produce the compelling truths of forensic science, and looks speciﬁcally at how the
“minute” elements at the center of the forensic narrative--the “traces” of crime and
identity--are transformed into such “deﬁnitive” facts about history and identity. What are
the technologies that produce such truth-effects? Clearly, the most explicit technology or
“anatomy of power” that informs these truths is that surrounding positivist science. The
central truth-effect of the forensic narrative is that truth itself is always knowable and
identity always traceable through the scientiﬁc discovery and interpretation of empirical
facts. In its invocation of science and its privileging of positivist logic in determining
questions of truth and identity, the forensic narrative always posits truth as objectively
veriﬁable, ﬁrst via the analysis of the trace elements at hand, and then by the subsequent
organizing of these elemental “facts” into a larger factual and deﬁnitive account of past
events.

The introduction to Crime Investigation, one of the ﬁrst US. textbooks devoted to

the subject of forensics, dramatizes this central tenet of the science:
Wherever he steps, whatever he touches, whatever he leaves, even his
ﬁngerprints or his footprints, but his hair, the ﬁbers from his clothes, the
glass he breaks, the tool marks he leaves, the paint he scratches, the blood
or semen he deposits or collects—all these and more bear mute witness
against him. This is evidence that does not forget. It is not confused by
the excitement of the moment. It is not absent because human witnesses
are. It is factual evidence. Physical evidence cannot be wrong; it cannot
perjure itself; it cannot be wholly absent. . . . The laboratory must be
devoted to this study and understanding if the all-important traces which
can speak so eloquently of guilt or innocence are to be heard. To this
study must be brought-all the resources of science and human
understanding if the message is to be clear, complete, and unequivocal.
(Kirk 4-5)
Strikingly, the technical processes of mediation, and the narrative processes of rendering
empirical facts into probative evidence (or mute witnesses) are completely elided in this
rendition. Instead the passage dramatically highlights the totalizing power of science;
physical evidence is asserted as utterly neutral, a pure and objective form of evidence that
transparently and without apparent mediation conveys a truth that is “clear, complete, and
unequivocal.” Indeed, science and reason appear to have found their zenith in this
forensic domination of nature, truth, and identity; participating in the broader

epistemological drive to know that deﬁnes enlightened modernity, the instrumental

10

technologies of forensic science are conveyed merely as the impartial tools that reveal
these a priori truths.

Such characterizations veil the fundamentally ideological operations of science,
which claims sole authority to represent the objective world of nature. Trace “speaks” a
truth because it is an object of nature, a material fact that cannot but tell the truth. But
scientiﬁc facts—the immutable aspects of the natural world—are in fact fabricated in
particular sites through rhetorical devices. Paradoxically, though fabricated, “they are
simultaneously certiﬁed as not fabricated, and therein lies the key to their ideological
power” (Brodwin 3). Indeed, another arresting aspect of Kirk’s rendering is the
fundamentally panoptic forms of surveillance that it connotes. The individual, as an
unknowing subject of a disembodied, techno-scientiﬁc gaze, cannot but help betray
himself. Nowhere to hide, the individual--just by existing in the world-~is always visible,
traceable, and uniquely identiﬁable. It is through such optics of seeing, Foucault writes,
that modern society exercises its controlling systems of power and knowledge. As a
disciplinary technology, forensic science is an instrument of “permanent, exhaustive,
omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible” even while its own ideological
operations remain invisible (197). Thus, even though contemporary representations of
forensic science create stunning visual spectacles of its images and devices, such
emphases effectively obscure the discursive and ideological technologies that invest
forensics with such power.

This dissertation traces the discursive technologies that inform this positivist
paradigm of truth-telling, and takes as its theoretical premise that the self-evident truths

of forensic science are actually culturally produced, institutionalized, and negotiated.

ll

Through a series of critical examinations that address signiﬁcant moments in the history
of forensic methods of identiﬁcation, I investigate the narrative processes whereby “trace
elements” become truth-effects that supply “whole” truths about crime and identity. In
doing so, I also identify some of the central contradictions, anxieties, and instabilities that
have inhered in the forensic method and its attendant narratives since its inception.

More concerned with modes of telling than with its conclusions, the forensic paradigm is
less troubled with arrival at truth than in privileging its own method, a method that is
always an end to itself. In turn, I am less concerned with the scientiﬁc credibility of the
“truths” arrived at by forensic narratives (though oftentimes these truths are highly
suspect) than with how forensics operates narratively as truth-telling paradigm. I do not
provide a comprehensive history of forensic science or its popular representations, but
rather investigate how forensic technologies of identiﬁcation and their products--
photographs, ﬁngerprints, DNA proﬁles--“identify” individuals, and thus themselves
operate as discursive technologies that produce disciplinary truth-effects at the level of
the individual.

In Discipline, Foucault describes how the development of such institutions as the
bureaucratic criminal archive and the disciplines of the social and hard sciences
represented a new aspect of disciplining the body that underpins the epistemological
transformation of the human subject as the object of enlightened thought. For Foucault,
the project of enlightenment is deﬁned in its drive to know through the scientiﬁc
domination of nature, particularly the “nature” of human identity. Inextricably linked to
this drive, is the way in which in the nineteenth century dispersed processes of power

coincided with these new modes of knowledge that are predicated on rational and

12

positivist modes of truth-telling. The instrumental technologies of forensic science of
contemporary forensics are thus discursively entrenched in the disciplinary, discursive
technologies described by Foucault.

Richard Thomas’s Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science articulates
the relation of the literary forensic narrative to the transformation of the subject described
by Foucault:

The nineteenth century succeeded in creating this elaborate social
machinery to examine, classify, and analyze every conceivable variety of
bodily activity and anatomical aberration. It also invented this resilient
and popular literary genre so centrally concerned with the act of
investigating bodies, exposing and submitting for scrutiny the most carnal
of secrets, and offering as evidence brutal facts about the body in order to
control its functioning—either by explanation or conﬁnement. (17-18)
Within these earlier forensic narratives, Thomas argues, the body is made to unwittingly
speak for itself through the “jagged lines of the heart recorded by the lie detector, the
lineaments of the face imprinted on a mugshot, and the swirling patterns of the skin
inscribed in the ﬁngerprint” which “all render the body as a kind of automatic writing
machine.” The contemporaneous genesis of the detective narrative, which represented
the forensic technologies deployed in the project of tracing identity, “helped to make
nineteenth-century persons legible for a modern technological culture” (Thomas 17).

Thomas builds upon the work of Foucault in this interdisciplinary study, the ﬁrst

and only book-length work to build upon such criticism in order to critically examine the

relationship between the development of forensic science in the nineteenth century and

13

the invention of the new literary genre of detective ﬁction in Britain and America.“

Examining the criminal body as a site of interpretation and enforcement in a wide range
of ﬁctional examples-~from Poe, Dickens and Hawthorne through Twain and Conan
Doyle to Hammett, Chandler and Christie--throughout this literary study, Thomas
interweaves analysis of the rhetoric surrounding forensic science and its technological
advances--from the lie detector to ﬁngerprint classiﬁcation--and illuminates how such
advances were accommodated and negotiated within literary ﬁction.17

This project intersects with and extends Thomas’s interdisciplinary work by
examining further the intersections of popular culture and technological advances in
forensics, and by connecting the contemporary concept of “the trace” to a larger
discursive and intrinsically narrative tradition that reaches back to at least the middle of
the nineteenth century. The cultural and technological history of forensic science
repeatedly overlaps with popular representations of that science. Since the nineteenth
century, forensic science has furnished the raw materials and imaging technologies that
can be deployed in the narrative spectacle of popular forensic narratives. At the same
time, since the inception of institutionalized forensic science in Europe and the United
States, popular generic narratives of detection have played a central and inﬂuential role in
reﬁning of the forensic method itself. Exploring the symbiosis between the rareﬁed
domain of forensic science and popular narrative, this project shows how the narrative
technologies of the forensic are intrinsically interdiscursive and that-~despite hyperbolic
assertions of technological and epistemological revolution--we understand our
“identifying traces” through paradigms of truth-telling that are part of this broader

historical trajectory.

14

In the contemporary milieu, forensics-based reality crime shows have captivated
audiences and drawn accolades ﬁ'om programming executives. Forensics clearly sells.
Executive vice president of the Discovery Channel pinpoints the fascination of the
forensic narrative for both its revolutionary potential and its scientiﬁc veracity: "All the
science and technology that goes into these shows--much of which was considered
science ﬁction 20 years ago--is now science fact and part of crime-based programming"
(Umstead, “Under the Microscope” 17). Contemporary plots like those of C. SJ.
consistently tap into this appeal to the authority of science, especially the ability of new
technologies to image in stunning detail what was not previously available to the eye.
Such representations transform the most mundane of routines into visual spectacles, the
unglamorous ﬁgure of lab technician into sexy protagonist who wields the ultimate
weapons for “making the dead speak.” Such hype not only glamorizes but, at times,
even fabricates devices for the procedures of forensic science. Tests of DNA, which
would ordinarily take weeks or even months to process, are performed on-the-spot in the
laboratory; agents on C. SJ are now equipped with completely ﬁctionalized “DNA
readers” akin to pregnancy tests: “a red line means you’re a match; no line means you’re
not.”18

Despite the dramatic license taken with the timing and forensic possibilities of
certain devices, it is clear that the appeal of forensic narratives like C. S]. stems not from
the pleasures of science ﬁction, but rather from a sense that such procedures reflect
“science fact.” Indeed, in courtrooms, lawyers and judges are noting what is coined as

the “C. 5.1. Effect” where jurors, newly educated in the procedures of forensics, are

insisting on more empirical evidence during trial.19 In the 2003 trial of millionaire

15

Robert Hurst, who was accused of murdering and dismembering a neighbor, defense
attorneys hired jury consultant Robert Hirschhom who explicitly targeted jury members
“familiar with shows such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation to spot the importance in
such a gap of evidence.” Surveying 500 people in the jury pool, “the defense found that
about 70% were viewers of CBS' CS] or similar shows such as Court TV's Forensic Files
or NBC's Law & Order.” Hirschhom, quoted in USA Today, noted that talking about
science in the courtroom used to be “a real jury turnoff.” But now that “there is this
almost obsession with the (TV) shows, you can talk to jurors about (scientiﬁc evidence)
and just see from the looks on their faces that they ﬁnd it fascinating” (Willing 1A).

The inﬂuence of popularized or generic forensic narratives is wide-ranging,
extending far beyond television or literature’s representation of “real life” techniques.
Forensic science may supply the science and technological apparatus for narratives and
spectacles in popular culture, but at the same time, forensic science regularly employs the
representational conventions of generic narrative. Indeed, forensic science itself has
beneﬁted immensely from this public intrigue. The National Science Foundation has
recently developed curricula units on forensic science for the teaching of middle and high
school science so that students can learn the “dry facts” of chemical compositions and
physics equations within the exciting context of crime detection (Applebome l). The
National Science Teacher’s Association, for instance,

[c]apitalizing on the groundswell of interest in forensic science television
shows such as CSI and Forensic Files . . . has teamed with Court TV to
develop exciting new curriculum units on forensic science for middle and

high school students. The units help students solve intriguing mysteries

16

using real science, including biology, chemistry, and physics. (“Forensics
in the Classroom”)

Recent studies have also revealed that enrollment in forensics program within colleges
and universities have grown exponentially since the OJ. Simpson trial, which, as I
discuss below, brought DNA typing ﬁrmly into the popular lexicon. This upsurge has
spiked over the last three years, a phenomenon administrators directly attribute to the
extreme popularity of C. S]. with their applicants.20

In turn, creators of ﬁctional forensic narratives become elevated to the status of
experts-in-the-ﬁeld or forensic experts lend their hand to the creation of ﬁction.
Remarkably, Patricia Comwell, though not a certiﬁed forensic scientist, currently serves
as Chair of Board of Directors of Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine,
where she lectures and works in training. The institute’s tirneline of milestones in
forensic history asserts: “Much credit should go to Comwell for launching Forensic
Science and Medicine into the public consciousness. The Scarpetta novels are, altogether,
nothing less than the evolving history of Forensic Science and Medicine, wrapped in
compelling, meticulously researched narratives” (“VIFSM Milestones”). The publication
of Postmortem features in this chronology as a milestone that ranks on a par with the
discovery of the double helix, suggesting that her contribution to the ﬁeld is akin to that
of Watson and Crickes’. Joining the ranks of Comwell are writers like Kathy Reichs, a
fully credited and renowned forensics expert who rivals Comwell with her new detective
series starring Tempe Brennan, a crime-ﬁghting forensic anthropologist. Such overblown
appeal to the scientiﬁc expertise of literary authors or the belabored emphasis on the use

of technical consultants for shows like C. S. 1. works to reify the scientiﬁc credibility of

17

forensic narratives, an appeal to a certain scientiﬁc realism that is central to their
inﬂuence.

The case of 0.]. Simpson, especially, raised public awareness of forensic science
through DNA evidence. The trial also triggered debate over the authoritative appeal
offered by such hard “facts.” Ann Donahue’s statement (one of the opening quotes to
this chapter) suggests that while ﬁctional forensic narratives provide a satisfying
“deﬁnitiveness” in its airtight reconstructions of causal relations, the Simpson trial
seemed to offer anything but resolution. The circus-like atmosphere of the trial in 1995
highlighted, rather, the inherent failure of the legal system. Highly perforrnative and
malleable, justice could be “bought” with the purchase of a “dream-team” who could
expose the corruption of forensic science in the hands of a deeply ﬂawed legal system,
even while it upheld the authority of forensic science in theory. Despite a battery of
other forms of evidence, the fact that the prosecution possessed “conclusive” DNA
evidence swiftly became a central focus in the trial and its surrounding commentary.21
Among Simpson’s defense attorneys were Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld, cofounders
of the Innocence Project, an organization devoted to appealing convictions based on
“junk science” with the aid of post-conviction DNA testing. Scheck and Neufeld
launched an attack in which the validity of forensic DNA evidence was accepted in
principle, but undermined in fact through criticism of the sloppy (and perhaps ﬁ'audulent)
tactics of Cellmark22 and the L.A.P.D., whose forensic technicians, Dennis F ung and
Andrea Mazzola, had committed numerous procedural errors in recovering, storing, and

transporting the evidence to the LAPD crime laboratory. This evidence, along with the

18

taint of institutional racism supplied by Furhman, who would brag about fabricating
evidence, led to an acquittal of Simpson.

Despite the defense’s successful attempt in the Simpson case to undermine the
scientiﬁc credibility of DNA evidence in the minds of the jury, popular media
commentators could not understand how the jury could ignore the “overwhelming” DNA
evidence in the case. The blood on the infamous black leather glove was proven
“untraceable,” but within the mainstream media and (largely white) popular opinion “the
glove ﬁt” and bore the traces of Simpson and his victims.23 Remarkably, in a case where
forensic science appeared to be far from infallible in its potential, DNA proﬁling came of
age as a widely accepted and incontrovertible form of forensic identiﬁcation. Not only
did the trial appear to trigger widespread acceptance of the technique within the scientiﬁc
community, it brought the science of DNA testing into the broader cultural discourse.
Within the scientiﬁc community, just two months before the trial began, Eric Lander,
pioneer researcher in DNA typing, published an article in Nature stating that any disputes
conceming DNA identiﬁcation are now laid to rest. In the article Lander notes that the
general public’s understanding of the science has been enhanced by the ad hoc lessons of
popular press:

The US public, usually indifferent to matters scientiﬁc, has suddenly
become obsessed with DNA. Nightly newscasts routinely refer to the
polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and even tabloids offer commentary on

restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RF LPs) (202).

19

The apparent shift from “indifference” to “obsession” noted by a somewhat bemused
Lander fuelled not only the tone of the trial coverage within the mass media, but also a
pronounced upsurge in the visibility of forensic science in general.24

If the Simpson trial exposed trial law’s spectacle as an endless parade of
litigation, point of view, and verbal account, the forensic detective narratives that
emerged almost directly in its aftermath appeared to counter with a higher form of
justice—that of pure science. The invocation of science displaces trial-procedure within
a positivist and univocal account of the “facts” in an airtight and scientiﬁcally veriﬁable
version of the truth. Within these “scientiﬁc” narratives, the relation of law to science is
far more harmonious than in reality, the answers provided far more deﬁnitive. Indeed, in
direct response to this appeal, Court TV, once the cable bedrock of such televised trials
shifted its programming focus signiﬁcantly—away from trial coverage, and toward the
representation of forensic science. The channel’s salvation since 2003, when ratings
dropped exponentially, came with its new investigative show Trace Evidence: The Case
Files of Dr. Henry Lee, which explicitly focuses on how Lee interprets trace evidence to
pursue truth in cases that have left others perplexed and confused. Tapping into
“audience's fascination with forensics and mystery,” producers responded with a formula
that was devoted to making forensic science “accessible, understandable and riveting”
(Umstead, “CourtTV Emphasizes Investigation” 9).

Shows such as Trace Evidence and its ﬁctionalized counterparts hinge upon a
central narrative principle: to chain these traces—a partial print, a skin cell, or blood
spot—into a gapless exposition of cause and effect, and so expose the largest and most

“unsolvable” of crimes. The ability of new technologies to render visible minute

20

elements, and to chain such elements into a narrative of guilt, is central to this translation
of forensics into something “understandable and riveting.” Forensics visual culture is
saturated with hypermediated images of trace evidence. HBO was one of the ﬁrst
networks to feature forensics as part of a show that focuses on real-life crimes. The
channel’s annual program Autopsy, part of its America Undercover documentary
franchise, debuted in 1994, and in the following years rapidly escalated in the ratings.”
Autopsy producers, while they originally balked at the notion of “revealing” the secrets of
forensics in such exact technological and too-morbid detail, had no idea that it would
have such popular appeal; it soon became clear that the viewing public was “taken by
how the examination of such minute elements as ﬁngerprints, saliva cultures, hair
follicles and stomach contents in a forensics laboratory could unearth evidence that could
solve a seemingly unsolvable crime” (Umstead, “Under the Microscope 1).

Ann Donohue encapsulates the narrative pleasure offered by the typical C. 5.1. plot
with her succinct statement, “you spray, there’s blood, there’s guilt,” and directly
correlates this satisfaction with how “it’s the smallest things” that will break a case. Such
ﬁxation on the empirical and self-evident “facts” of a crime, however, belies the complex
level of mediation required to make this move ﬁ'om blood to guilt. As in Kirk’s textbook
description of the processes of forensics, Donahue’s lock-step characterization conveys
forensic detection as linear and seamless, trace evidence simply as transparent images of
guilt. In shows like C. SI. for instance, pivotal plot points occur within the laboratory, as
investigators analyze trace evidence to a soundtrack of thumping techno music.

Dialogue suspended, such scenes allow viewers to participate in the pleasure of looking

and discovery, the most commonplace of evidence—a ﬂeck of nail polish, a tire mark-—

21

provides startling revelation. Stylistically, such scenes are lit so that protagonists “blend”
with the machine, bathed in the green light of the computer screen, or phosphorescing
like the ALS light source. In other scenes, directors use dramatic camera angles and
zooms that have become the show’s trademark—these techniques represent how the
penetrative eye of the investigator can literally “see” inside the microscopic recesses of a
victim’s body, or instantly magnify a stray fragment of evidence that lingers at a scene.
In these new incarnations of police procedurals or “cop shows,” looking through a
microscope literally replaces the hot pursuit chase sequence, inﬁnitely more fascinating
and exciting as vision appears unmediated, even while the technologies of that mediation
are all around.25

Indeed, the repeated integration of montage editing within television dramas like
C. S]. underlines the distinctly positivist logic of the trace narrative, where the truth of
crime and criminal are arrived at within purely material terms. But despite this
hyperbolic assertion that only science can reveal truth and identity, C.S.I., in fact, relies
upon much more familiar conventions and plot devices to supply the revelation of
identity—the very “old standbys of crime detection” that were apparently cast to one side
in the face of new methods. “Traces” may speak, but not loudly enough. As such, C. S].
agents take on responsibilities that far exceed the typical terrain of their real-life
counterparts—not only analyzing physical evidence, but questioning witnesses. The
revelation of truth and identity within these plots relies heavily upon televisual
conventions that require interpretation of suspects’ facial expressions as they undergo
interrogation.26 The refrain of “Who Are You?” in the opening credits of the show, then,

while directly referring to the processes of forensic identiﬁcation, more obliquely refers

22

to the revelation of individual character: that identity or “Human Nature” that forensics,
and the positivist logic of the trace narrative, cannot account for.

While forensic truth inheres in the empirical facts, the quantiﬁable and
recognizable, that truth is consistently--if not overtly--found lacking. As agents move
smoothly among the crime scene and lab and the interrogation cell, between two
fundamentally different modes of discovering truth, the concept of identity as a
nominalist and purely material effect of identiﬁcation consistently slips away from the
material into a more metaphorical concept of essential individuality. The positivist bent
of the forensic narrative, which locates truth in only that which is materially veriﬁable,
would appear to make the genre fundamentally hostile to these metaphorical
understandings of identity, of “Human Nature.” But as I explore further in Chapter Four,
this slippage typiﬁes contemporary popular forensic narratives, where plot conventions
consistently resort to distinctly non-forensic and metaphorical modes of truth-seeking.

Nonetheless, what unites these narratives is the sense in which the authority of
science is always recuperated and maintained; moments of revelation always return us
ﬁrmly back to the crime lab. Adorno and Horkheimer note that in “the anticipatory
identiﬁcation of the wholly conceived and mathematized world with truth, enlightenment
intends to secure itself against the return of the mythic” (49). If the tendency towards the
metaphysical to explain characters or events reveals instability within enlightened
epistemology, in turn, the forensic paradigm overly compensates with a spectacle of
images as facts that assure that it is science that will always triumph, ﬁlling in any gaps

and glossing inconsistencies.

23

This tendency of forensic narratives to revert to alternative, metaphorical modes
of truth-telling has characterized the form from its inception. As a profoundly positivist
paradigm for discovering truth, the forensic narrative participates in the larger project of
enlightened modernity and also inherits its attendant anxieties. Indeed, it is precisely this
problem of reconciling the metaphorical with empirical knowledge that is ambivalently
thematized in Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin series. Benjamin referred to Poe as “the ﬁrst to
attempt the scientiﬁc story, a modern cosmogony, the description of pathological
phenomena. These genres he regarded as exact products of a method for which he
claimed universal validity” (43). The key procedure of the forensic detective story,
where an aspect or fragment substitutes for an absent whole, is ﬁrst dramatized within the
well-known scene in “The Murders at the Rue Morgue.” Here Dupin deftly reads the
physical traces of the violent murders—the massive handprint that left “dark bruises and
deep indentations of ﬁnger-nails” on the daughter’s neck, and the scrap of non-human
hair—to reveal that the crimes must have been committed by a “large fulvous Ourang-
Outang of the East Indian Islands” (304-5).

This forensic approach within the narrative procedure of the ‘tale of ratiocination’
appears on one level to radically disavow the need for any symbolic explanation of its
action and any further “resolution” of its traces than that offered by the synecdochical
logic of reading the orangutan in the ﬁnger smudges, the sailor from the greasy ribbon.
In “Rue Morgue,” the various clues acquire their meanings through being
recontextualized rather than through what Dupin calls their “ﬁnite truths” (Priestrnan 54).
Here we are “being taught to feel for a different order of meaning, where ‘direct’ access

to metaphorical depth is replaced by our willing acceptance of the horizontal, metonymic

24

surface of the narrative” (49). Nonetheless, this approach to truth-telling is at the same
time undercut by a markedly contradictory attitude towards these empiricist principles of
detection. Poe’s profoundly ambivalent attitude toward the genre he invented has been
noted by many critics.27 In one letter about his detective ﬁction Poe was to ask:
[W]here is the ingenuity of unraveling a web which you yourself have
woven for the express purposes of unraveling? These tales of ratiocination
owe most of their popularity to being some thing in a new key. I do not
mean that they are not ingenious—but people think they are more
ingenious than they are—on account of method and air of method. (Poe,
Letters 38)

This resistance is echoed through Poe’s protagonist, who in “Rue Morgue”
denigrates Paris’s “greatest” detective, Vidocq, as a man who “erred continually by the
very real intensity of his investigations.” Vidocq, Dupin pronounces, was a man who
“impaired his vision by holding the object too close. He might see, perhaps, one or two
points with unusual clearness, but in doing so he, necessarily, lost sight of the matter as a
whole. There is such a thing as being too profound, Dupin argues: “Truth is not always
in a well” (290). Similarly, the Prefect in “The Purloined Letter,” errs by looking too
“deeply” at minute surface details. “[B]y the aid of a powerful microscope,” he has had
his men “scrutinize each individual inch through the premises.” “Had there been any
traces of recent disturbance we should not have failed to detect it instantly. A single
grain of gimlet-dust, for example, would have been as obvious as an apple. . . ” (436,
437). Despite the application of powerful imaging tools, the truth of crime cannot be

discovered through such rigorous attention to the physical traces of a crime. Dupin

25

critiques their strictly methodical approach, where the privileging of a speciﬁc method
forecloses the ability to see truths via different means, a failure that stems from its
inability to broaden its sense of human ingenuity:
What, for example, in this case of D__, has been done to vary the
principle of action? What is all this boring, and probing, and sounding,
and scrutinizing with the microscope, and dividing the surface of the
building into registered square inches—what is it all but an exaggeration
of the application of the one principle or set of principles of search, which
are based upon the one set of notions regarding human ingenuity, to which
the Prefect, in the long routine of his duty, has been accustomed?” (442-3)
These declarations might also be viewed as a critique of the very genre Poe
perfected; the qualities Dupin denigrates in Vidocq and the Prefect--attention to detail,
intensity of investigation, and the ability to see the relevance of minute details-~would
seem to be the prerequisite skills of any detective. Yet within the tale, this purely
forensic approach to the question of identity resolutely fails, for the inspector fails to
stand back from the method itself, and consider the question of the character of the
criminal—who is already known to them. The prefect lacks the imaginative skill to
consider the interior motives and character of the criminal who is intellectually and
imaginatively superior to the police: “when the cunning of the individual felon is diverse
in character from their own, the felon foils them of course.” Poe succeeds, for he is can
identify with the D__, who symbolically functions as his double. The Dupin tales
thus operate on two levels: the ﬁrst is symbolic, where there is a metaphorical parallel

between the detective and the criminal, which converts the story into “a richly

26

metaphorical psychodrama.” But on the second level, this narrative principle is
prohibited:
Instead we pursue the solution by reference to numerous disparate
fragments broken off, as it were, from a number of different contexts but
all lying on, rather than under, the surface of the tale. The new genre, then,
radically replaces one kind of formal unity with another. The synchronic
uncovering of a uniﬁed meaning operating throughout the text becomes a
diachronic juxtaposition of fragments whose originating contexts have no
satisfying or ‘deep’ meaning in themselves, but only as they provide
stepping stones to the next fragment and context. (Priestrnan 50-51)
Priestrnan’s reading of Poe here identiﬁes a central contradictory tension within detective
ﬁction that privileges empirical, materialist modes of truth-ﬁnding that characterize
forensic narratives. The “richly metaphorical psychodrama” found in Poe, ﬁnds its
contemporary mutation in detective ﬁction and true crime narratives that feature
detectives who practice psychological proﬁling.28 While commonly referred to as
“forensic” proﬁling, the ﬁctional practices of this form of “identiﬁcation”—which
require protagonists to intuit and “get into the minds” of their adversaries to achieve a
sense of close emotional association--are distinctly less “scientiﬁc” or methodical than
the strictly forensic sense of identiﬁcation--which is a system, as I discuss in the next
chapter, largely based on taxonomic principles of description, that correlates
identiﬁcation with the act of identifying physical evidences of identity.
John Douglas, the behavioral proﬁler based at the FBI and the inspiration of plots

like Silence of the Lambs, refers to his afﬁnity to Dupin in the opening chapter of his

27

biography, Mindhunter. Dupin, Douglas states, “may have been history’s ﬁrst behavioral
proﬁler” and “The Murder at Rue Morgue” the ﬁrst “to represent the ﬁrst use of a
proactive technique by the proﬁler to ﬂush out an unknown subject and vindicate an
innocent man imprisoned for the killings” (32). Behavioral proﬁling, predicated on
psychoanalytic principles and indebted to the empirical techniques of crime scene
analysis, nonetheless ﬁgures in popular ﬁction on a more transcendental level. Douglas
notes that such skills require “a lot more than simply inputting data and crunching it
through.” To be a good proﬁler, “you have to be able to evaluate a wide range of
evidence and data. But you also have to be able to walk in the shoes of both the oﬂ'ender
and the victim” (31). This duality and especially the tendency to slip between two modes
of identiﬁcation--forensic and intuitive--typify contemporary forensic detective ﬁction by
authors such as Comwell, Reichs, and Deaver. Like their televised counterparts, these
narratives overtly insist upon the primacy of empirical methods of truth-seeking, while at
the same time slipping into alternative modes of seeking the truth about “identity.”

While on one level this contradictory trait might be viewed as a means to add
“drama” to an otherwise dry set of evidence, the forensic narrative’s reliance on such
devices also points to an inherent failure within that mode of truth-telling, and also to
deeper and longstanding cultural anxieties provoked by the scientiﬁc leveling of both
identity and truth to the always material, measurable and ﬁxable. In contemporary
forensic narratives, trace evidence often signiﬁes more than material “things”; it is
transformed into something spectral, an uncanny sign that is evocative of that which is
absent—the whole person. On one level, such ﬁgurings allow “trace” to signify

something much more than “material” truths, and extend trace’s effect—my discussion in

28

the ﬁnal chapter of Comwell’s real life foray into crime detection looks speciﬁcally at
this tendency. But this propensity for contemporary authors to slip into “proﬁling”
mode, or to foreground trace’s “uncanny" quality, I argue, are also examples of this
slippage and symptomatic of this epistemological anxiety.

As a totalizing process where method is always decided from the start, the central
premise of the forensic narrative is that crime is always solvable, and the criminal subject
always locatable, through the application of positivist logic (which privileges empirical
knowledge). Participating in the larger project and the epistemological transformations
of enlightened modernity, where the scientiﬁc domination of nature, including human
identity, is perceived as the means to secure whole truth, forensic accounts of criminal
events and identities are monolithic, with the veneer of scientiﬁc objectivity and
deﬁnitiveness consistently asserted.29 The forensic method is thus self-enclosed,
foregoing other modes of interpreting truth, positing that truth can only be found within
the conﬁnes of its own method.30 An enlightened approach to knowledge, the forensic
method only recognizes “what can be apprehended in unity,” the structure of which “has
always been the same. . . . The multiplicity of forms is reduced to position and
arrangement, history to fact, things to matter” (Adorno and Horkheimer, 28).

If the central problematic of the forensic narrative is the problem of identity, then
it is necessarily bound up in the history of identiﬁcation devices such as photography,
ﬁngerprinting and DNA proﬁling. This history is chronicled by the texts under
examination in this dissertation. Each of the forms of identiﬁcation discussed in this
proj ect--from the mug-shot to the DNA proﬁle--is surrounded by popular discourses that

illustrate the fascinating ways in which the forensic narrative takes shape within the

29

cultural imaginary. These discourses also reveal the instabilities that inhere within that
narrative. Through this project, I trace this fascinating interplay between the concepts of
identiﬁcation and elusive individuality, and also demonstrate the intrinsically multi-
discursive construction of the forensic paradigms of narrative and identiﬁcation.

Chapter Two explores how images became truth-effects or “identifying traces”
within early discourses surrounding photography and criminality. The evidentiary status
of the photographic image drew from its ontological status as a literal trace of the real.
But, as I discuss, the conversion of that image into an identifying trace required continual
negotiation across a diverse range of contexts. These discursive contexts informed the
kind of “truths” these images appeared to transparently reﬂect. As an object of science,
the photographic image was transformed within these contexts as a means to claim sole
authority in representing the objective world of nature. In rendering this knowledge more
visible, photography’s potential lay in its ability to “revea ” the hidden truths about
human identity, and speciﬁcally that of “The Criminal.” Photographic images within
these varying contexts became “facts”——the immutable and measurable truths of human
identity. As positivist approaches attempted to rationalize means of knowing the human
subject, that subject was transformed into an object of technical intervention, 3 natural
thing-in-itself.

The contexts under examination in this chapter—the early iterations of the
“criminal portrait” within criminal archive and the rogue’s gallery; the development of
“pictorial statistics” within the biological deterrninist approaches of criminal
anthropology; the reﬁnement of the bureaucratic criminal archive and its “verbal

portraiture”; and the advent of ﬁngerprinting which could literally link individuals to

30

crime scenes—reveal a the belabored processes at work in translating the signs of the
photographic image and later the ﬁngerprint into identifying traces. This chapter charts
the connection between the transformation of the visual culture of identiﬁcation—the
shift ﬁ'om photography to ﬁngerprinting--to the broader epistemological transformation
of “identity” into a nominal effect of identiﬁcation.

A striking feature of the early discourses surrounding forensic science--whether in
legal journals, the scientiﬁc press, or literary ﬁction--is its heavily intertextual and
interdiscursive aspect. Chapter Three interrogates ﬁrrther the interchange between
cultural narratives such as detective ﬁction and the real practices of forensic science in
the early twentieth century—~—an interchange that was transatlantic as well as
interdisciplinary. In an Anglo-American legal context where physical evidence became
the most logically probative of “real” evidence, minute traces of evidence became
increasingly probative within criminal trials. Minute traces became forms of the “perfect
clue” woven into full narratives as proofs of events and identity. In light of science’s
increasing ability to particularize--to “throw light into the world of the invisible” and to
identify criminals by “sound registers, by ﬁngerprints, by blood analysis” within these
discourses, identity becomes a truth derived from the literal matter of the body (Bayle
119). But the truth of both events and identity, it seemed, was discernible only through
enhanced imaging technologies and the application of the forensic method to interpreting
those traces.

This narrative working of trace into identity, performed by the lawyer or expert in
the courtroom, was perfected by the reﬁned genre of detective ﬁction. In the late

nineteenth-century the archetype of this “scientiﬁc” detective was embodied by Sherlock

31

Holmes. In the United States, “Craig Kennedy, Scientiﬁc Detective,” was coined as the
“American Sherlock Holmes.” Despite the huge popularity of this series, Craig Kennedy
has all but faded from cultural memory. Certainly, despite the comparison to Holmes, the
Kennedy series is deﬁned less by the ratiocinative prowess of its protagonist than by its
extravagant representation of forensic devices and techniques. The Kennedy tales are
revealing, however, not only in their overblown depictions of the contraptions and
methods of forensic science, but also for how author, Arthur Reeve, must compensate for
a narrative based solely on the principle that the application of the scientiﬁc method will
always root out crime. Within the tales, the empirical traces of identity are always
translated into abstract data, equivalent to, and of no more metaphysical signiﬁcance than
the whorls and loops of a ﬁngerprint, or the “automatic recor ” produced by a machine
that reads the pulsations of the heart. This tendency, and failure, contrasts with the
compensatory (and symptomatic) conventions for representing “identifying traces” that
dominate contemporary literary detective ﬁction.

Chapter Four revisits the contemporary fascination with scientiﬁc detection, now
“forensics,” and also some of the central paradoxes concerning the trace. Craig Kennedy
and the real-life scientiﬁc detectives of the early twentieth century wielded miraculous
devices of ﬁngerprinting and lie-detection, but contemporary forensic scientists and
crime scene investigators appear to wield even more revolutionary tools for discovering
the truth of events and identity. This contemporary re-emergence of forensic science, and
its attendant narratives, coincides almost precisely with the advent of the most miraculous
form of identiﬁcation, DNA evidence. If the discovery of DNA’s double helix as the

“Code of Life” appears as the logical culmination of enlightenment positivism, early

32

rhetoric surrounding DNA “ﬁngerprinting” would bring such knowledge to the identity
of the criminal with devastating accuracy. But as a sign DNA triggers profound cultural
anxiety over the loss of the individual, an anxiety that manifests itself across various
narratives and discourses by a general reassertion of the individual or self, and
speciﬁcally in the conﬂation of individuality with identiﬁcation. In some registers, for
instance, the legal debate surrounding DNA evidence, this reduction of identity to code
incites anxieties over how such technologies, by exploiting the gene, violate rights to
privacy and self-ownership.

Within the highly popular generic narratives of forensic detection, this conﬂation
is evidenced by the consistent manner in which the trace paradigm for knowing identity is
seamlessly exchanged for an epistemological paradigm that centers on motive and the
interiority and character of the suspect. Within these plots trace evidence, and not simply
DNA, is interpreted not only to identify an “unsu ” (Unknown Subject) but is also
transformed into an uncanny sign. As an uncanny sign, trace is precisely what is not
identity, but that which is left behind. At the same time, trace connotes presence through
contact.

In ﬁctional forensic narratives, trace evidence often signiﬁes more than material
“things,” but something spectral, an uncanny sign that is evocative of that which is
absent—the whole person. Such ﬁgurings allow “trace” to signify much more than
“material” truth and extends its effect. My discussion of Cornwell’s real life foray into
crime detection looks speciﬁcally at this tendency. The propensity for contemporary
authors to slip into “proﬁling” mode, or to foreground trace’s “uncanny” quality, I argue,

are examples of this slippage and symptomatic of this epistemological anxiety.

33

Furthermore, this slippage, I conclude, suggests a heightened need for narrative to
compensate for positivism’s assault on “the individual.” The advent of new technologies
of forensic science and identiﬁcation, and the glut of popular representations of those
technologies, highlights not only culture’s faith in and fascination with scientiﬁc modes
of truth-telling. The forensic narrative’s reliance on non-forensic devices also points to
an inherent failure or instability within that mode of truth-telling, and to deeper and
longstanding cultural anxieties provoked by the scientiﬁc leveling of both identity and

truth to the always material, measurable and ﬁxable.

 

' Page 436.

2 Page 169

3 This commentary accompanies the season two episode of Crime Scene Investigation (C.S.I.) “Alter
Boys.”

4 For discussion of marketing trends of forensics programming on cable television, see T. Thomas
Umstead’s “Under the microscope: viewers examine cable's forensics programming (forensic medicine
continues to thrive as a topic for cable television programming)”

5 Other highly successful American authors who have series featuring forensic scientists as detectives
include Kathy Reichs and Jeffrey Deaver.

6 As discussed further in chapter four, Patricia Comwell’s ﬁrst true crime book, Portrait of a Killer: Jack
the Ripper, Case Closed, proclaims to have discovered the real identity of the Ripper through the use of
forensic science, and speciﬁcally DNA testing.

7 The much-publicized application of DNA testing to the question of the Thomas Jefferson and Sally
Hemmings connection produced a spate of articles in popular magazines about the science, and speciﬁcally
its ability to rewrite history.

8 See Russell Martin’s 2001 publication, Beethoven 's Hair: an Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and
Scientiﬁc Mystery Solved.

9 Thanks to advances in forensic science, the “Real Face of Jesus Christ” graced the cover of Popular
Mechanics, December 17, 2002.

.'°The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology notes the term as “[p]ertaining to or connected with courts
of law. Thus forensic medicine is medicine in its relation to law. In the Essay, Bk. II. 27, Locke describes
‘person’ as a forensic terrrr, meaning that the point of describing something as a person, or ﬁnding that the
same person was present on two different occasions, is essentially the attribution of responsibility. Thus if
an octogenarian is found to be the same person as the twenty-year-old prison guard of sixty years ago, then
he can be held responsible for the crimes of the latter; otherwise not.” The Oxford English Dictionary notes
the modern sense of the term, as an adjective “forensic” is “relating to or denoting the application of
scientiﬁc methods and techniques to the investigation of crime” as well as “relating to courts of law.” As a
noun, “forensics” refers to “scientiﬁc tests or techniques used in connection with the detection of crime.

” In season three of C.S.I., episode, “What You See is What You See,” centered on the institution of a
DNA dragnet within a High School. The lawyer for the school featured as antagonist in his invocation of
civil liberty concerns with the incident.

‘2 The numerous book-lengtlr works chronicling the history of criminalistics and forensic science include
Colin and Damon Wilson’s Written in Blood: A History of Forensic Detection (2003); Colin Evan’s The

34

 

Casebook of Forensic Detection: How Science Solved 100 of the World '3 Most Baﬂling Crimes (1998) and
A Question of Evidence: The Casebook of Great Forensic Controversies, from Napoleon O.J. (2002)
'3 For critical discussions surrounding biotechnologies and their attendant cultural anxieties see
Biotechnology and Culture: Bodies, Anxieties, Ethics (2000) edited by Paul E. Brodwin; The Visible
Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, Science (1998) edited by Paula Triechler, Constance Penley, and
Lisa Cartwright; Body Bazaar: The Market for Human Tissues in the Biotechnology Age (2001) by Lori
Andrews and Dorothy Nelkin.
" Classic examples from early critical and epochal discussions of digital media include Howard
Rheingold’s Virtual Reality (1991) Rosanne Allucquere Stone’s “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?”
(1991) and Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (1995).
‘5 Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979) and The History of Sexuality, Volume I:
An Introduction (1978) laid the theoretical groundwork for such critical approaches. Critical works that
interrogate contemporary discourses surrounding technology and science from this Foucauldian standpoint
include Judy Wacjman’s Feminism Confronts Technology (1991) Sarah Kember’s “Medicine’s New
Vision?” (1995) Ann Balsamo’s Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women ( 1996)
Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and
Informatics (1999)
‘6 Work that speciﬁcally examines the intersections the use of technological apparatus to trace and classify
the criminal body in the mid-to-late nineteenth-century, include Alan Sekula’s “The Body and the Archive
(1986); John Tagg’s The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies (1988); Jonathan Crary’s
Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1992); Thomas Gunning
“Tracing the Individual Body: Photography, Detectives, Early Cinema and the Body of Modernity” (1995)
n The academic study of detective ﬁction, especially, has waned over the last decade; the books that have
appeared have been aimed more at a general readership than towards to an academic, specialist audience.
Thomas notes that previously contemporary literary scholars of detective ﬁction have repeatedly returned
to the genre to “illustrate new waves of critical methodology”: For instance, Jacque Lacan’s allegoric
reading of “The Purloined Letter” as a signiﬁer that reveals the paradoxical logic of the text of the
unconscious, or Holquist’s “Whoth and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in post war
Fiction” which sees detective ﬁction as “the preeminent literary model for postrnodernism’s exposure of
the subterfuge of order and the fundamental truth of chaos” (7).

Thomas is less interested in examining “detective ﬁction” as special category of literature, but in
“how the classiﬁcation and marginalization of popular forms like the detective story may be read as an
effect of the culture of knowledge and power that produced them” (8). Such an approach is directly
connected to how English studies itself is transforming under the impact of cultural studies, feminism, and
postcolonial theory, a transformation that has produced critics such as Klein, Munt, and Walton and Jones,
who provide sophisticated feminist and/or cultural analyses of contemporary detective ﬁction, and adopt a
more intertextual critical methodology,

Watson and J ones’s Detective Agency, for instance, argues for an approach to the genre that does
not invoke such a static conception of the form and its passive consumer. Genre, they argue, “serves as a
relational, conventional, and contradictory location that tends to complicate in practice any simple either/or
categorization.” Key to this approach is the assumption that genre ﬁction requires critical attention by
virtue of its supposed transparency and conformist nature, for these are the texts that do the rigorous
cultural work of ordering and compensating for the vexed contradictions surrounding cultural notions of
gender and social identity. As Walton and Jones argue, while genre ﬁction works to reinscribe and
perpetuate the social role of many of the readers the form simultaneously works to “ease transition into a
social situation and to confront the problems resulting from transformation” (88-89) These popular and
reassuring narratives become safe spaces where cultural anxieties may be confronted, negotiated and
ultimately resolved.
'8 Numerous news programs have investigated the “science” of televised forensics and how it stands up to
real life practices. For instance NPR’s “Dose of Reality: ‘CSI’ vs. True Las Vegas Crime Lab (All Things
Considered, May 24th, 2004) and CNN Intemational’s feature “Innovative Techniques in Forensic Science:
cs1 on the TV and in Real Life” (House Call with Dr Sanjay Gupta May 14‘“, 2005).
'9 Over the last year news organizations have extensively reported on the so-called “C.S.I Effect”
phenomenon. For example: “The Jury’s Out: How 12 Reasonable People Got Hung up on Reasonable

35

 

Doubt” The Washington Post, June 26'“, 2005; “Defense Prosecution Play to New “CSI’ Savvy: Juries
Expecting TV-Style Forensics” The Washington Post, May 22"“, 2005.

2° See Peter Applebome’s “With Sexier T.V. Image, Forensic Science Reaps the Reward in Popularity.”
The New York Times. (October 6‘”, 2004) and “Forays into Forensics: When it Comes to Enthusiasm for
Science, High schools and Colleges ﬁnd Crime Does Pay” in Newsday (December 14'”, 2004).

2' Coverage during the period preceding the trial also addressed the legal wrangling surrounding the tests
“The Code: DNA and OJ. Simpson: Testing Science and Justice” The New York Times, June 26’”, 1994;
“Simpson Team Rejects Plan on DNA Exam: Judge Insists Both Sides do Tests at Maryland Lab.” The
Washington Post, July 28‘”, 1994.

22 A privately run DNA laboratory, Cellrnark had several years before been placed under scrutiny for the
mishandling of evidence due to an inadvertent mix-up of samples. See Thompson and Fords’ “DNA
Typing: Acceptance and Weight of the New Genetic Identiﬁcation Tests,” Virginia Law Review 75 (1989)
126.

23 For further examination of the racial polarity surrounding the trial and its forensic evidence “If the Genes
Fit, How Do You Acquit?” by Andrew Ross in Birth of a Nation 'hood: Gaze, Script and Spectacle in the
OJ. Simpson Case (1997). Susan Bordo’s discussion of the case (“P.C., OJ. and Truth) argues “the
defense constructed the ﬁctional but compelling coherency—the plot to frame O.J.—to make “sense” of the
clutter, providing jurors with a narrative “logic” to replace the laborious sitting and weighing of evidence
that they were either unable, unwilling, or too exhausted to perform” (93).

2’ Lander and Budowle’s 1994 “DNA Fingerprinting Dispute Laid to Rest” appeared in Nature on the eve
of the trial. The article recounted various criticisms of DNA evidence that had been raised over the years—
including some by Lander himself—and concluded that these problems had now been addressed appeared.
The timing of this publication in light of the trial was not lost on stauncher critics of DNA evidence, with a
letter to this effect by Richard Lewontin and Daniel Hartl appearing in the next issue of Nature.

25 In Screening the Body, Lisa Cartwright notes that the “microscopic gaze” has “tidily excised the matter
of its own role as an instrument of institutional surveillance and power. Microscopy closes one eye to its
object, offering up a modernist text that is stripped of historical as much as spatial depth” (83).

26 For discussion of the conventions of televised law see “Law in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in
Judith Roof’s Reproductions of Reproduction (1999). Roof states: “[t]he spectacle of collecting evidence is
like watching someone put together a puzzle; it make viewers collaborators in law’s constant fact-based
legitimation by inveigling their participation in the gradual solution of crimes. Law shows speciﬁcally
invite (and even require) viewer interpretation of facial expressions, analysis of testimony, and knowledge
of human nature through the spectacle of faces offered for examination. . . . Thus, by strategically imaging
faces that signify answers, Perry Mason seduces viewers into a cooperation with the metaphorical
trajectory of Law’s truth in its spectacular narrative guise” (125).

27 While crime and early forms of detective ﬁction appeared prior to Poe’s publication of the Dupin tales,
Poe’s innovative development of the detective-protagonist who combines the “aura of genius combined
with the actuality of simple explanation.” He referred to his stories as ‘tales of ratiocination,’ stressing the
intellectual process he added to the aura of Gothic mystery, creating the mix central to the Dupin stories
and so much later crime ﬁction. These tales, Stephen Knight writes, play upon “the balance between an
investigated enigma and the highly imaginative methodology that Dupin claims to operate.” While Dupin
insists “he has the power of the poet to see solutions as a whole” he also offers “detailed and empirical
explanations for his insights” (26). For further examination of the origins and “pre-history” of detective
ﬁction see The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin Priestrnan (2003); Crime
Fiction 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity by Steve Knight (2004);

28 Works from this sub-genre were highly popular in the early-to-mid nineties, a success that can be
attributed to the wild success of the ﬁlm version of Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs (1991).
Television programs depicting proﬁlers during this period included N.B.C.’s Proﬁler series in the United
States, and Cracker in Britain.

29 Lyotard writes of Enlightenment: “With modern science, two new features appear in the problematic of
legitimation. To begin with, it leaves behind the metaphysical search for a ﬁrst proof of transcendental
authority as a response to the question ‘How do you prove proof?’ or, more generally, ‘Who decides the
conditions of truth?’ It is recognized that the conditions of truth, in other words, the rules of the game of
science, are irrrmanent in that game, that they can only be established within the bonds of debate that is

36

 

already scientiﬁc in nature, and that there is no other proof that the rules are good than the consensus
extended to them by the experts (29).
3° One direction this research project could have taken was to integrate discussion of the impact of
psychoanalysis on notions of truth-ﬁnding and identity. Thomas notes that Freud was a famous reader of
detective ﬁction, and that he likened the role of the analyst to that of the detective. “Just as the detective
cannot expect a clear path to explaining the mystery, the analyst cannot expect a clear path to disentangling
the patient’s acts of deception. Both require the skills of the trained expert to interpret the distorted traces
of the past left behind in the present and enable a more truthful reconstruction of the past from them” (33).
In this project, I am interested in narratives that overtly privilege empirical science and physical
evidence as a means to arrive at truth. One direction this research could take, of course is how crime scene
traces are read to reveal the behavior and psyche of the criminal, and indeed this is a predominant theme in
contemporary forensic narratives. My discussion of Comwell touches on how empirical means slip into
other means, and how proﬁling and psychological aspects of her works lend a more gothic function to the
texts, extending the effect of physical evidence. I see this as a symptom of the forensic narrative’s inherent
reductionism, and its inadequacy, to account for larger, more metaphysical pursuits of identity and truth.

37

Chapter Two

Image Capture: Photography, Fingerprinting and Forensic Identiﬁcation

We know that the photograph is not the work, in any respect affecting its
truthfulness, of a human brain, but of natural forces, which, experience teaches,
generally speak the truth without ﬂattery or detraction. If I am correct in this, a
photograph, proved to be that of a person absent is that person himself, precisely
as he exists in the article of vision—is, therefore, direct and original evidence of
the kind of man he was. So, of the photographic likeness of any natural object or
place. When shown to be the photograph of the place or object, it is original—that
is, legally speaking, the best—evidence of its features and relations; as much so as
the testimony of a witness speaking from memory of the same features and

relations. (J .A.J ., “The Legal Relations of Photographs,” 1876)1

[T]he signaletic notice accompanies every reception and every delivery of a
human individuality; it is the muster-roll which preserves the evidence of the real
and effective presence of the person . . . (Bertillon, Signaletic Instructions,

1896).2
The photograph as such and the object itself share a common being, after the

fashion of a ﬁngerprint. (Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,”

1967)’

38

André Bazin’s oft-cited comparison of the photographic image to the ﬁngerprint
underscores his indexical concept of photographic ontology—the photographic image,
like a ﬁngerprint, represents an intimate relation of contact between sign and thing. This
characterization also highlights the forensic intertwining of these two indexical signs,
which both ﬁgure as identifying traces within the modern context of identiﬁcation. This
chapter considers the historical contexts of science and criminal justice in which the
technologies of photography and ﬁngerprinting could produce the signs of identity. The
invention of photography, notes Benjamin in Charles Baudelaire, “is no less signiﬁcant
for criminology than the printing press is for literature. Photography made it possible for
the ﬁrst time to preserve permanent and unmistakable traces of a human being” (48). As
a trace of identity, the photographic image can literally “arrest” its referent, even while
the “individual’s traces” are obliterated “in the big-city crowd” (43). Identifying
photography’s disciplinary potential in a context of increasing urban mobility and
modernization, Benjamin highlights the ability of the image to capture the literal “traces”
of the individual, and at the same time preserve them for use within disciplinary contexts.
Moreover, these unmistakable traces are rendered newly visible by photography, “which
can bring out those aspects of the original that are unattainable to the naked eye yet
accessible to the lense.” Not only then could the camera provide new means to render the
traces of identity visible, it could “put the copy of the original into situations that would
be out of reach for the original itself” (Benjamin,” The Work of Art” 220).

The paradoxical status of the image as both indexical reference and severed sign
is central to understanding how in the nineteenth century photographic images, and later

ﬁngerprints, became “identifying traces” within the overlapping contexts of forensic

39

identiﬁcation and criminal anthropology. While the “natural” and evidentiary status of
the photographic image drew from its seemingly ontological status as a literal trace of the
real, the translation of the photographic image into an identifying trace--a transparent and
“perfect representation of human identity’ ’--required continual negotiations within these
contexts. Images that spoke of certain truths about identity--“identifying traces”--were
produced not by the “power of the camera” but “the power of the apparatuses of the local
state to deploy it and guarantee the authority of the images it constructs to stand as
evidence or register a truth.” The photographic image in and of itself did not have
intrinsic identity. Its status as a referent, and photography’s status as a technology, varied
with the power relations which invested in it, and legible only within these particular
currencies (Tagg 63). For example, within the burgeoning science of criminal
anthropology, photography was viewed as an empirical means to verify scientiﬁcally
theories of biological determinism; photographic images of phrenological characteristics,
“atavistic” or evolutionary regressive markers, and even manipulated composites of
“types” were all presented as scientiﬁc objects, transparent facts that provided proofs
concerning the criminal type. Within these “scientiﬁc” contexts social constructions of
identity were transformed into evolutionary inevitabilities.

This chapter examines how photography and later ﬁngerprinting were recuperated
within these contexts as a both scientiﬁc apparatus and disciplinary mechanism of
forensic identiﬁcation in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. As an object of science, the
photographic image became a means to claim sole authority in representing the objective
world of nature. In rendering this knowledge more visible, photography’s potential lay in

its ability to “reveal” the hidden truths about human identity, and speciﬁcally that of “the

40

criminal.” The photographic image within these contexts became “fact”—the immutable
and measurable truth of human identity. I chart the connection between the
transformation of the visual culture of identiﬁcation, from photography to ﬁngerprinting,
to broader epistemological transformation of “identity” into material facts
measurable/rendered legible only by science, and also examine how images of criminals
functioned as “scientiﬁc facts” or “proofs” across a divergent range of sites, and how,
paradoxically, these “fabricated” facts, which were simultaneously certiﬁed as not
fabricated, presented particular but divergent and contradictory epistemological “truths”
about human identity.

Confronted with a new form of technology that paradoxically promised direct
access to the natural but also threatened notions of the original with its inﬁnite
reproducibility, discourses surrounding science and law tamed the image by over-
determining its claims to truth. This taming of images and later ﬁngerprints into the facts
of criminal identiﬁcation required an increasingly negotiated context of “scientizing” the
image.4 The early images of criminals within crude archives and rogue’s galleries, for
instance, are notable for their stylistic similarity to bourgeois portraiture; in addition these
massive and unruly archives of criminal individuals, though providing sensationalist
entertainment, were largely ineffective in the context of law enforcement. In order that
the image be both useful in the context of law enforcement and stand in for empirical
results within the observational sciences of criminology, images of criminals—whether
individual criminals, or “the criminal” of criminology—were integrated into broad

statistical and taxonomic systems.

41

Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is central in understanding the institutional
mechanisms that both “modernized” the subject, and transformed the subject into an
object of scientiﬁc knowledge and disciplinary control. It was within this context that
bureaucracies emerged whose mission it was to know, index, and record individuals
within institutions like prisons, schools and the military, and within the newly constituted
human sciences. This epistemological shift from sovereign to disciplinary power is part
of a process of modernization that consists in the production of controllable subjects
through “a certain policy of the body” that renders the subject “docile and useful.” “This
policy required the involvement of deﬁnite relations of power; it called for a technique of
overlapping subjection and objectiﬁcation; it brought new procedures of
individualization” (305).

As technological advances of modemization transformed the economic
landscapes of Europe and triggered mass urbanization of culture in the early to mid
nineteenth century agencies responded with widespread bureaucratic action, including
early development of passports and in Paris, speciﬁcally, a criminal archive.5 In America
during this period, an ever-growing and mobile immigrant population and a context of
decentralized power created unique challenges. Alexis De Tocqueville’s 1833 report to
France on the American penal justice system articulates the emerging challenge of
identiﬁcation:

Where passports do not exist, nothing is easier than to change one’s name.
Nothing is easier than passing from one state to another, the ties
between the various states being strictly political, there is no central power

to which the police ofﬁcers might refer to obtain information respecting

42

the previous life of an indicted person: so that courts condemn, almost

always, without knowing the true name of the criminal and still less his

previous life. (55)
Such conditions meant that criminal individuals could easily pass from state-to-state,
simply assuming new identities in order to evade the law. As identities became more
mutable, boundaries of class and race could break down: “In modern, anonymous,
anomic society, one cannot rely on appearance, on social markers, on accent, on
anything, to tell good from evil, human from subhuman, saint from murderer” (Friedman
203).

The cultural shifts effected by technological and commercial modernization
within the nineteenth century can be characterized by a marked anxiety about mobility
and identity-transgression. Within an emergent bourgeois and transaction-based culture,
appearance might be the only determinant in establishing a relationship of trust upon
which to base business. Bureaucratic government institutions evolved not only to
accommodate modern society, but to respond to this pervasive cultural anxiety: “For the
ﬁrst time, governments considered it their business to collect and store information about
ordinary people. Bureaucracies arose whose mission it was brewing individual citizens.
For the ﬁrst time, governments thought it important that some people, notably criminals,
have an identity that existed outside the physical body” (Cole 10).

Concomitant with the bureaucratic drive to index identities was the integral
development of the social sciences, which sought to address the social factors of
criminality. Within this emerging discipline, the question of the human subject was

approached from a positivist perspective—the truth of the human, as an object of nature

43

and thing-in-itself, was conceived a priori as always measurable, provable. In processes
of technological modernization, and the larger project of modernity, then, the human
subject becomes the object of rationalized knowledge. As Foucault argues, the evolution
of bureaucratic record-keeping institutions, which worked to “ﬁx” these unruly identities,
into effective disciplinary regimes for regulating (and constituting) the individual was

predicated on the rationalist drive “to know.”6

The concept of “the criminal” became a
central focus of this rationalization within the rareﬁed approaches of science, where
experts focused attention, not on individual criminals, but on the “criminal type.” In the
nrid-nineteenth century the concept of the “repeat offender,” or recidivist, emerged as a
new generation of reformers began to question the strictures of classical jurisprudence.
This new concept of approaching crime or “criminality,” an early form of “proﬁling”
criminal behavior, was notably articulated in the 1840S by the Belgian statistician and
social scientist Adolphe Quetelet, whose “social physics” treated crime, like other social
phenomena such as birth, death, and suicide, as determined by statistical laws. “Criminal
statistics,” Quetelet asserted, “becomes as positive as the other observational sciences . . .
We are forced to recognize that the facts of the moral order are subject, like those of the
physical order, to invariable laws” (qtd. in Hacking 73).

These statistical models for understanding crime highlighted a sense of
criminality as less a series of isolated acts of individual will than an organized social
phenomenon that, subject “to invariable laws,” was both observable and measurable. The
object under observation within this context was the criminal subject. The recidivist

became visible as an object of scientiﬁc knowledge; the disciplines of craniology and

phrenology, which held that inner character could be read via the visible surfaces and

44

contours of the body, particularly the head, would integrate both statistical and taxonomic

”7 As early as the

models of analysis for representing the identity of the criminal “type.
1840s, sub-disciplines such as craniology, phrenology, and physiognomy, sought to
understand the innate qualities of social types by reading the outer signs of the body, and
presenting these ﬁndings through a series of graphical, hand-drawn illustrations.8 These
early and pre-Darwinian disciplines were comparative and taxonomic, seeking to cover
the complete range of human diversity, with “zones of genius, virtue, and strength . . .
charted only in relation to zones of idiocy, vice, and weakness” (Sekula 348).

Knowledge of the criminal subject in these contexts, then, was predicated on a
priori assumptions conceming the biologically determined nature of degeneracy, and also
the assumption that such traits might be rendered visible with the application of correct
methods of analysis and the aid of increasingly reﬁned imaging technologies and
methods of visual representation. These technologies, in turn, would provide the
empirical facts to support these theories. Photography was swiftly recuperated as a means
to ﬁx identity within early versions of the criminal archive, and techniques for taking
down hand-drawn portraits for the criminal records that populated the vast underground
archive of the Paris Sﬁrete, for instance, were immediately supplanted by the use of
photographs in the 1840s.9 However, photography’s mergence into a scientiﬁc apparatus
would be less instantaneous, occurring nearly two decades after its integration into the
unruly criminal archive.

Early treatises on the photographic image as a purer form of representative truth
addressed the form’s capacity to “capture” nature more effectively than art. “[T]he

closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing” Edgar Allan Poe would famously assert,

45

“discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing
represented. The variations of shade, and the gradations of both linear and aerial
perspective are those of truth itself in the supremeness of its perfection (Poe 1840). A
product of exposure to a preexisting entity, the image directly bears the imprint of the
entity and so provides evidence of its identity. While aesthetic renderings and linguistic
descriptions could only approximate realism, the indexical aspect of the photograph as
“object of nature,” as opposed to representation, seemed to spring from its intimate
relation with the thing represented. This distinctive truth-value of the photographic
image, which provided record-keeping accuracy, was only reiﬁed by this fundamental
concept of the apparatus itself as an objective mechanical means to render an image with
a seeming minimum of human intervention.

Henry Fox Talbot, a few years after Poe’s declaration, would describe the
photographic apparatus as “the pencil of nature,” a nomenclature that alluded to
photography’s double status as both art and scientiﬁc object. While his treatise was
largely concerned with defending the artistic merit of the form, he devoted some space to
the manner in which the photographic image might function in legal contexts.
Speciﬁcally, such an image might be regarded as a new form of documentation within
bourgeois culture, an indexical inventory of goods for instance; photographs could be
taken of possessions as a proof of ownership. In this context, the image is cast as a form
of “mute testimony” that would “take down” facts in univocal transcription (3). Talbot
was thus among the ﬁrst to lay claim to a new kind of “legalistic truth, the truth of the
indexical rather than textual inventory” (Sekula 345). Talbot does not invoke the role of

photographer or law enforcer in his rendering; instead the apparatus itself is sufﬁcient to

46

perform the task of representing an objective and unmediated truth, analogous to the
expert who might “take down” the facts that might be used in evidence, but far superior
in its lack of subjectivity.

Within the context of criminal justice, treatises on the legal use of photographs as
evidence do not begin to appear until several decades after the invention of the
daguerreotype in 1839, though these too were initially characterized by credence in the
photographic apparatus’s ability to capture images objectively and without human
intervention, and also by a belief that the image itself represented a form of “direct”
evidence that differed from witness testimony. Within the US. and Europe, photographic
images would circulate within juridical and law enforcement settings as the perfect form
of evidence, a superior form of text and testimony. An 1869 legal treatise on “The Legal
Relations of Photographs” argues that as a form of evidence, the photographic image
“differs from hearsay” in one “essential particular”:

it is wholly free from the inﬁrmity which causes the rejection of hearsay
evidence, namely, the uncertainty whether or not it is an exact repetition of
what was said by him whose testimony is repeated by the witness. In the
picture, we have before us, at the trial, precisely what the apparatus did
say. Its language is repeated to us, syllable for syllable. (J .A.J . 6)
Here it is the apparatus that “speaks” in the place of the witness, repeating or transcribing
in a language that corresponds “syllable for syllable” to the thing-in-itself. Both sign and
signiﬁed, the photograph of an individual, the author asserts, “is that person himself,
precisely as he exists in the article of vision” and therefore, it is not only image, but

“direct and original evidence of the kind of man he was” (5).

47

This na‘r‘ve gesture towards photography as unmediated access to the real,
however, negates what critics and historians have identiﬁed as a highly vexed and
debated role of photography in both legal and scientiﬁc settings. On one level, the image
was recuperated into the juridico-legal context as an indexical record, divorced from
subjective manipulation, adapted easily into a legal system, which, in turn, was shifting
away from focus on testimony and confession to rhetorical argumentation, “forensical
debate,” made by presentation of objective “proofs.” 10 On another level, the laudatory
rhetoric concerning the photographic apparatus veils a distinct co-existing crisis of faith
in an optical empiricism that divorced form from content.

Such treatises on the legal use of photography can thus be viewed as an instance
of criminal justice’s overdetermined and compensatory translation of the image into
objective and direct evidence, and indeed, this early testimony to photography’s legal
potential is situated within a growing debate over the role of photography, and,
speciﬁcally, its status as an objective means of representation. John Tagg describes how
this coupling of evidence, speciﬁcally the evidence of and for identity, photography
became intimately related to the emergent practices of record—keeping and observation,
which constituted the core of the developing network of disciplinary institutions in the
nineteenth century (5). Here, the evidentiary function of the photographic apparatus, and
speciﬁcally its status as a forensic technology for identiﬁcation, was framed
predominantly in terms of its a priori status.

However, this overdetermined status of the image as an object of nature results
less from its indexicality than ﬁom its inherently more radical aspect—the ability to

represent an original object outside of time and place in multiplicity. Within these

48

settings, both photography’s power and threat stems from its detachable nature. Images
can circulate like currency and acquire meanings completely independent of their
referents. This latter understanding is notoriously characterized by Oliver Wendell
Holmes’s deliberately ironic statement that images were “universal currency of these
bank-notes, or promises to pay in solid substance, which the sun has engraved for the
great Bank of Nature.”
F arm is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact, matter as a visible
object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is
shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from
different points of view, and that is all we want of it. . . . There is only one
Colosseum or Pantheon; but how many millions of potential negatives
have they shed—representatives of billions of pictures—since they were
erected. Matter in large masses must always be ﬁxed and dear; form is
cheap and transportable. (80-81)

The photographic apparatus thus represented not only a new mode of
technological representation, but “the reshaping of an entire territory on which signs and
images, each effectively severed from a referent, circulate and proliferate” (Crary 13). In
this regard, the detachable and circulatory aspect of the image undermined traditional
ideologies concerning the material basis of identity, and from this perspective,
photography in the nineteenth century can be understood as not simply the latest stage in
realistic representation but a part of “a new system of exchange which could radically
tl’ansform traditional beliefs about solidity and unique identity” (Gunning 18). The actual

use of photographs, then, correlated less with the image’s status as natural phenomenon

49

than with its ability to gain a mobility its referent never possessed; its “natural” and “self
evident” meaning was renegotiated across differing and often paradigrnatically opposed
contexts. In this sense, “[p]hotography and money become homologous forms of social
power in the nineteenth century” each “magical forms that establish a new set of abstract
relations between individuals and things and impose those relations as real” (emphasis
added, 13).

Photographic portraiture, for instance, managed to regulate social disorder even as
it endorsed emerging elites. Such images operated “honoriﬁcally,” and these conventions
were “able to proliferate downward,” representing the petit-bourgeois subject within a
newly emerging context of possessive individualism in a cultural context where the legal
basis for the self lay in a model of property rights (Sekula 346). Here, the image was
recuperated as a form of honoriﬁc representation, a symbol of wealth and status among
the privileged classes that was a much more affordable symbol of middle-class
ascendancy. As photographic portrait studios cropped up all over America and England,
photography temporarily undermined or degraded a traditional form of representation,
painted portraiture, only to accelerate and popularize “the ceremonial presentation of the
bourgeois self.” While any one of these new moneyed classes might boast a gallery of
family portraits, “that honoriﬁc practice found its negative image in the coerced mug shot
of the criminal forcibly taken and publicly displayed in the local police precinct to serve
as a record of deviance and a mark of shame” (Thomas 114).

Strikingly, while these honoriﬁc and repressive forms of representing identity are
deﬁned within diametrically opposed contexts, when viewed outside of these contexts—

the parlor vs. the early mug shot—the stylistic differences between these sets is much less

50

distinct. The characteristics of the mug shot, with the subject shown in front and side
proﬁle, holding a board with name and identifying number, was not reﬁned until the
18808, when Bertillon invented his anthropometric system of identiﬁcation. In the
18503, pioneering American daguerrotypist Matthew Brady, famed for his taking of
photographic portraits of “illustrious” Americans, was also employing his art to the
assemblage of a “Rogues’ Gallery” to alert the public to the identity of known criminals
in their midst. Both forms of portraiture deployed similar conventions in terms of optical
distance and positioning, and none of the familiar conventions of the mug-shot, where
criminals are photographed in frontal and proﬁle shots, inform the typography of the
image.11

This slippage in visual iconography, a slippage that points to photography’s
ability “to impose relations as real” as far from stable, is especially pronounced in
Thomas Bymes’s Professional Criminals of America (1886), which ostensibly presents a
gallery of coerced shots of criminals exposed to the public. One of the most well-known
images from the Bymes tome is that of the criminal being photographed—as he struggles
in the chair, he is held down by four detectives; Bymes stands back, gazing at the
criminal and standing in for the camera eye. This obviously staged “performance” of
“image capture” works to visually illustrate Bymes’s characterization of the role of
photography in capturing, and more to the point, exposing the identities of those whose
appearances would deceive in other contexts, and who would attempt to defy the camera
by screwing up their faces. Even in these cases, the most cunning of dissemblers could

not evade the arrest of the camera, Brynes attests:

51

The very cleverest of hands at preparing a false physiognomy for the
camera have made their grimaces in vain. The sun has been too quick for
them, and has imprisoned the lines of the proﬁle and the features and
caught the expression before it could be disguised. There is not a portrait
here but has some marked characteristic by which you can identify the
man who sat for it. (53)
Just as the image in “The Legal Relations of Photographs” is a form of natural and
umnediated representation, here the traces of identity are captured as a result of the sun,
which “irnprisons” and literally arrests identity. On one level, then, the image of the man
coerced by detectives into being photographed metaphorically represents both the
struggle between the criminal and the disciplinary gaze of the detective/camera.
However, the composition—placed directly adjacent to the passage quoted above-
-informs readers on how to interpret the multitude of criminal portraits populating the
remaining pages of the book, and thus compensated for how many of those images more
stylistically resemble parlor portraits of the bourgeois than any conveyance of struggle
and capture. Byrnes’s own portrait, which appears in the opening preface of the book,
while larger than those others who inhabit its pages, could easily ﬁnd place within the
galleries of rogues that follow. Bymes meditations on these criminals tap into cultural
anxieties over how such individuals are visually indistinguishable ﬁ'om law-abiding,
upper-class citizens. For Bymes, the “Professional Criminals” were the forgers and
conﬁdence artists who could exploit social mobility and cross over boundaries of class
and even race in an ever-expanding American urban landscape. These are “men of

education, possessed of plenty of assurance”; criminals who operate by being “very

52

careful in their appearance” endeavoring to “attain an easy respectability in effect”:
“Professional conﬁdence men have more than once declared that a tinge of gray in their
side whiskers would be a great disadvantage to them, and a bald head a fortune (40). The
pages of Professional Criminals are ﬁlled with such accounts of crimes of identity and
authenticity, where the abuse or swapping of identity itself constituted the crime. These
were very much crimes of mobility, depending on “anonymity, ambiguity of identity, and
the ﬂuidity of lines that separated strata and classes in the population” (Friedman 135).

Within the Bymesian rogues’ gallery, the camera as a forensic technology of
identiﬁcation attempts to render these slippery identities stable, with the processes of
capturing and ﬁxing identity effectively encapsulated by the metaphor of the freeze-
frame. The photographs in the rogues’ gallery thus focus on the face, the “tool of the
trade of the conﬁdence game” (Cole 22). Many of the “professionals” represented are
white men who could betray conﬁdences by acting as respectable bankers and men of
principle and wealth. Women also joined the ranks of the gallery, those who could
dissemble in the guise of the devoted wife and mother in order to con the gullible into
handing over money in sympathy. Bymes, concerned with showing how “respectability”
could be performed by adopting a certain appearance and demeanor, shows how cultural
assrunptions regarding gender, ethnicity, conduct, and attire can allow these individuals
to “pass” as others.

In his chapter “Why Thieves are Photographed” Bymes initially links this societal
naivety with a certain “miseducation” provided by sensationalist literature; it is here that
“the public err” for “[t]heir idea of burglars and all have been gathered from books, and

they look for Bill Sykeses and Flash Tobby Cracketts, whereas the most modest and most

53

gentlemanly people they meet might be the representatives of their very characters” (53).
Physiognomy, “the popular idea of criminal’s appearance,” he asserts as a poor guide to
determining character in most cases: “There is ‘Wess.’ Allan. The scar on his cheek and
the missing eye would mark him anywhere, but he manages to be so sober in his dress
that no one notices him” (54). The “true” inner nature of the criminal, a “ﬂash of malice”
that comes “into the sharp eyes,” Bymes insists, is hidden below this artiﬁcial
appearance, a truth that can be seized upon by the cunning detective, and captured by the
camera eye (52).
A central contradiction within Professional Criminals is Bymes’s assertion that
physiognomy (sister science to the determinist schools craniology and phrenology) could
not be relied upon as a sufﬁcient method for recognizing criminals. But at the same time,
more telling is the absence of those faces he has not chosen to depict among the
“professionals.” Criminals from the degenerate underclass Bymes asserts, do “wear”
their true natures in their faces and appearances, and as such have no need to be included
in his book:
River thieves and low burglars are as hard-looking brutes as can be found.
. . . There are numbers of conﬁdence men, too, who in spite of their
gentlemanly dress and conversational powers, look the very incarnation of
sharpers. In fact, it is a bad thing to judge by appearances, and it is not
always safe to judge against them. Experience of men is always needed to
place them right. (55)

Bymes is less interested in depicting those who would automatically garner suspicion due

to class, race, and demeanor. These “types”--non-Caucasian immigrants and former

54

slaves--did not require exposure and arrest by the camera eye, for their appearance
already “gave them away” as “natural” miscreants. Social suspicion is sufﬁcient to take
care of recognizing and stigrnatizing these individuals, it seems. Bymes concedes to the
determinist tenets of physiognomy, but simply does not need to represent these types who
“look like” who they really are.

Within such versions of the police-implemented rogues’ gallery, an
unsophisticated precursor to the more complex criminal archive, the criminal is cast as
exceptional, even a genius, slipping into the crowd and indistinguishable from the
bourgeois. The public display of portraits of professional criminals who sought
anonymity and concealment became one of the most popular forms of photographic
galleries, in many cases a popular tourist attraction, even displayed in Bamum’s museum.
By the 1880s, the rogues’ gallery became a feature of each major town in the United
States, a sideshow curiosity that entertained more than it effected law and order.

The disciplinary and identiﬁcatory force of the gallery then lay not so much in
any real practical method of combating repeat offenders, but in its spectacular
representation of that “shadow archive,” the necessary other of bourgeois portraiture.
These images are placed alongside triumphant stories of pursuit and detection, with the
photographic apparatus itself foregrounded as the ultimate detective; false identities
exposed for true ones. The central principle of the Gallery was the notion that both
members of the public and detectives would memorize the faces of known criminals and
recognize them on the street. “That is what has to be studied in the Rogues’ Gallery”
Bymes would assert, “detail.” The “skilled detective knows all this and looks for

distinguishing marks peculiar to his subject (53). A more informal and sensationalist

55

version of the criminal archive, the rogues’ gallery shared the same fundamental ﬂaws as
early pre-Bertillonian archival systems—ﬁles were ordered and retrieved by name, and
the system hinged upon the skills in recognition and memorization of the detective. In
addition, the system was contingent on the individual criminal not changing his or her
identity to avoid detection. While physical features or ineradicable marks might be
taken down in record, there was at this time no way for a prison clerk or police clerk to
use a physical feature to look up a prisoner’s name.

The photographic apparatus’ tendency to capture contingencies presented a
fundamental problem for law enforcers; by writhing, blinking, or grimacing while being
photographed, the criminal could successfully evade the gaze of the photographic
apparatus (despite Byrne’s claim they could not). The photographic image was thus
“simultaneously too poor and too rich a form of evidence to supply the easy means of
identity a modern police department required” (Phéline translated by Gunning 29). The
“scientizing” of the image, which was occurring contemporaneously in different
disciplinary and national contexts, thus responded not only to the need to secure the
image as an empirical “fact” but also to the need to raise the practical efﬁcacy of the
criminal archive. In Britain and Europe, it was the likes of “recognizable” criminals
preoccupied the more rareﬁed and scientiﬁcally accepted studies of biological
determinism. These schools, interested in pursuing the question of how to recognize
innate criminality, shared the premise that the surface of the body, and especially the face
and head, bore the outward signs of inner character” (Sekula 347). Systems of taxonomic
categorization, central to the ﬁeld of criminal anthropology, fundamentally underpinned

the securing of photography as a practical forensic device.

56

Cesare Lombroso’s Criminal Man (1876) would form the guiding theory behind
the concept of criminality as both innate and typical, and held that outer appearance
directly correlated within this inner truth. Founder of the Italian School of criminology,
which came to train policemen in anthropological and practical principles of criminology
for law enforcement purposes, Lombroso was a physiognomist who adapted Darwinian
theory to argue for the existence of an “atavistic” criminal bio-type, a genetic throwback
distinguishable from “normal” individuals due to recognizable physical characteristics.
This paradigm for recognizing the regressed identities of criminal types became widely
inﬂuential within the newly emerging and rareﬁed ﬁeld of criminal anthropology. The
criminal type became the object of scientiﬁc knowledge, and the preoccupation of the
emerging discipline of criminology.

As a biologically determined category of meaning, criminal identity was deemed
innate and, more importantly, visually recognizable. Lombroso proceeded from the
principle that “there is an intimate co-relation between bodily and mental conditions and
processes”:

As a result of this examination he ﬁnds that the criminal population as a
whole, but the habitual criminal in particular, is to be distinguished from
the average member of the community by a much higher percentage of
physical anomalies” (Lombroso and Ferrero, viii-xx).
Here appeared to be a method that responded to cultural needs and anxieties regarding
societal order and criminality, providing a truth about the speciﬁc criminal that was
unavailable even to himself. Lombroso, and the host of biological positivists that would

follow him, developed a single semiotic principle: “the body carried inscribed upon it

57

signs that betrayed its essential criminal character” (Thomas 23). This was a method that
promised that the character of strangers could be quickly assessed “in the dangerous and
congested spaces of the nineteenth-century. Here was the gauge of the intentions and
capabilities of the other” (Sekula 348).

Sir Francis Galton was a Victorian “gentleman dilettante” whose research
spanned from eugenics and anthropometry to the “invention” of ﬁngerprinting, and
Havelock Ellis, whose work The Criminal appeared in 1890, wrote the ﬁrst English study
to systematically present an anthropological theory of criminality. Both men created
elaborate methods for identifying the biological determinants behind social, racial, and
criminal classes, with the photographic apparatus as a centerpiece, particularly for
Galton. By exposing the physiognomic characteristics of the criminal, the photographic
image appeared to render visible the very face of criminality. The “truths” of identity
thus became transparent and recognizable.

Nephew to Charles Darwin, Galton was speciﬁcally interested in the application
of these theories to read the signs of “hereditary genius.” In his charting of the genius,
who “naturally” occupied the ranks of the aristocratic elite within the Western world,
Galton was, of course, at great pains to illustrate other inherited traits, including
imbecility, idiocy, and degenerate criminality. While detenninist theorists were swift to
adopt the photographic apparatus to illustrate their points about the shapes of the skull
and head in relation to internal character, it was through Galton that this enterprise would
ﬁnd its most curious, and illuminating, exposition. Galton’s composite photographs are
now regarded as an amusing curiosity in the otherwise illustrious career of a man who is

more widely acknowledged in the annals of criminal history as the inventor of

58

frngerprinting. The portraits were made by combining those of many different persons
into a single resultant ﬁgure” (Nature 97). To generate these eerie portraits, Galton
would consecutively cast faint images of several photographic portraits onto a single
sensitized photographic plate (97). Increasingly gathering prominence as a leading ﬁgure
in the emerging discipline of criminology, Galton found both audience and sanction for
this radical method of “revealing” types-speciﬁcally according to “pedigree” or
“degeneracf’nwithin a range of journals, including Nature, The Journal of the
Anthropological Institute, The Scientific American, The Photographic Journal and
Photographic Weekly.

These composites, or, as he also termed them, “generic portraits,” were developed
to render a visual proof of all typical criminal traits. The relevance of this discovery for
criminology was central to Galton’s expositions, because the technique could be used to
aid in the recognition and approbation of the criminal class that haunted society.
Signiﬁcantly, Galton would deploy the same type of principle he had “frequently
employed with maps and meteorological traces” (98). The body was thus transformed
into a topographical landscape, like colonial territory, charted and mapped into legible
and controllable zones. In his Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, Galton
asserts that the composite simply “brought into evidence” the facts of innate
identiﬁcatory types, which “naturally” fell along fault-lines of race and class. Within
these groups and subgroups, criminals are broken down by specialties, and “swarthy”
Europeans broken down into categories of Jews, Gypsies, and Eastern Europeans:

the photographic process enables us to obtain with mechanical

precision a generalised picture; one that represents no man in particular,

59

but portrays an imaginary ﬁgure, possessing the average features of any
given group of men. These ideal faces have a surprising air of reality.
Nobody who glanced at one of them for the ﬁrst time, would doubt its
being the likeness of a living person. Yes, as I have said, it is not such
thing; it is the portrait of a type, and not of an individual. (97)

Galton’s a priori assumptions concerning generic human identity, along with his
credence that photography was the empirical means to garner the proofs of that identity,
resulted in a curious merging of photography and statistics within the composite portrait.
The description of the process and its results by Galton here suggest that the types
rendered by these images are both representations and realities, both artiﬁce and truth.
The images resemble a real person but are “no such thing,” yet they possess a “surprising
air of reality.” A higher form of representative and essential truth, the composites convey
a truth about identity that is invisible to the lay eye. Here “[a]ll that is common remains,
and all that is individual tends to disappear” (97). Temporally removed from context,
only to reveal something more profound within a renewed context, the composite image
brings what is invisible but “true” to the forefront, allowing the authorities to “see” the
criminal type, while blurring out the “unimportant details” of individual traits. The
generic type is thus both an abstract and the authentic human norm; individuals are
reduced to ghostly traces, existing literally as mere shadows of the more substantial type.

For Galton, these images do not achieve “perfect identity” with their referent in
the indexical or nominal sense, but instead achieve a superior level of representative
truth. The photographic apparatus, harnessed to produce what Galton terms “pictorial

statistics,” reveals to the specialist what the untrained eye could not see. Composite

6O

pictures are thus much more than averages, Galton asserts, rather they are the visual
equivalent of “those large statistical tables whose totals, divided by the number of cases
and entered in the bottom line, are the averages.” These were the “real generalizations,”
where the “blur of their outlines, which is never great in truly generic composites, except
in unimportant details, measures the tendency of individuals to deviate from central type”
(“Generic Images” 233). Some forty years after Quetelet had introduced the abstract
graphic of the Gaussian bell curve to visually convey “social physics,” Galton presented a
new scientiﬁc image, a translation of the abstract via the miracle of photography; “the
symmetrical bell curve now wore a human face” (Sekula 369). In Galton’s hands, the
camera is deployed to illustrate a particular paradigm for understanding both the speciﬁc
criminal type and of the human subject in general. Subjectivity is understood only
comparatively, via an elaborate taxonomy of physiognomic characteristics. Individuality,
deﬁned by non-conforrning characteristics—the blur at the edge of the portrait, is
eradicated, reduced to “unimportant detail.” In this sense, individuality as such has no
meaning, for the individual—a criminal, a Jew, a gypsy—only exists by virtue of being
identified within this comparative paradigm—the criminal, the Jew, the gypsy.

The composite image thus stood for both empirical and statistical data. For
Galton, reﬁnement of his techniques would lie in the technical reﬁnement and
modiﬁcation of the optical apparatus and its ability to render visible more image-facts
that “proved” physiological characteristics correlated with social identity. Nonetheless,
his procedure, along with many of the other anthropological studies he undertook, was
based on a fundamentally archival principle of classiﬁcation, which required a massive

taxonomic ordering of images of the human subject. In his attempt to image “The

61

Criminal” or other categories of individuals, and to condense what he viewed as the a
priori and measurable “statistical norms” of identity, Galton “sought to embed the
archive in the photograph” (Sekula 373). Individuality, reduced to a blur at the edges of
the portrait, and bourgeois notions of “the individual” as essentially unique, were thus
radically undermined by a system that posited identity as purely relative, and its truth
purely a matter or thing for science.

Alphonse Bertillon’s relatively simple and practical system of measuring,
photographing, and categorizing the surfaces of the criminal body also drew directly from
the principles that underpinned Galton’s work. By introducing the application of more
rigorous taxonomic principles of archival cataloguing to the unruly but practically-
intended criminal archive, Bertillon’s system represented the culmination of both the
statistical approach to identiﬁcation articulated by Quetelet and the bureaucratic approach
to documenting criminal identities. Like Galton’s application of composite photography
to the question of identity, Bertillon’s method was heavily indebted to the taxonomic and
archival approach developed by these “statisticians” of society.

Running counter to Galton’s paradigm for “biologizing” the individual into types,
here the criminal body expressed nothing of an innate “type.” Nothing could be
“revealed” about the inner character of the man via the classiﬁcatory measurements the
criminal was subjected to; instead, “the surface and the skeleton were indices of a strictly
material sort. The anthropological signalrnent was the register of the morphological
constancy of the adult skeleton, the key to biographical identity. Likewise, scars and
other deformations of the ﬂesh were clues, not to any innate propensity for crime, but to

the body’s physical history; its trades occupations, calamities” (Sekula 362).

62

The Bertillon system secured the distinctly forensic form of identification in
which the revelation of identity is purely practical, the “uniqueness” of identity a matter
of pure data, existing only for purposes of reference. It thus shifted forensic paradigms of
identity into a sophisticated system where the securing of identity is attained via the
reﬁnement of ever-more precise indices of both identity and difference. As such, “he
sought to embed the photographic image in the archive” (3 73). In order to compensate
for these failures in both descriptive practice and vision, and to overcome the camera’s
tendency to capture contingencies, Bertillon proposed a “method of elimination
analogous to that employed in the sciences of botany and zoology” that take as their basis
“the characteristic elements of individuality, and not the name” (Bertillon 13). In order to
capture these “characteristic elements of individuality” the photographic apparatus was
rigidly controlled and standardized. The individual was placed in a rigid and stationary
chair which held the head in place, with the front and proﬁle views of an individual
subject were shot by specially calibrated camera. The camera’s lenses and focal length
were standardized in order to ensure that the face, and its speciﬁc traits, could be properly
gauged against classiﬁcatory diagrams. The individual would then be subjected to eleven
different anthropometric measurements taken with special calipers.

The product of this process would be a single card, the signaletic notice of an
individual, a “speaking portrait” that was comprised of both image and text. Bertillon
asserted that the “voice” of the image would preserve the “evidence of the real,”
suggesting that while the system compensated for photography’s fallibility, it was still
predicated on a sense of faithfulness in optical empiricism: “[T]he signaletic notice

accompanies every reception and every delivery of a human individuality; it is the

63

muster-roll which preserves the evidence of the real and effective presence of the person
had in view by the administrative or judicial act” (11). The indexical veracity of the
image, however, could only be “preserved” or guaranteed by the accompaniment of
classiﬁcatory data, which would “guard the trace” of the real person and make the image
usable within the context of the criminal archive. Uniqueness or “individuality” in this
context is deﬁned by the assumption that each person can be reduced to an image that is
delineated into a set of physiological signs. Mastery over the criminal body therefore
required a massive campaign of inscription, a “transformation of the body’s signs into a
text that pared verbal down to denotative shorthand, which was then linked to a
numerical series” (Sekula 376).

F undarnentally nominalist, this system, like that of Galton, ran counter to a
metaphysical doctrine of self, eroding the notion of “uniqueness” in any essentialist
sense. Individuality as such had no meaning. Instead, paradoxically, uniqueness of a
single person relied on a certain standardization of the appearance of the photograph in
order that the individual be made more easily identiﬁable, resulting in images which take
on generic similarity. Viewed “objectively,” the individual thus occupied a position that
is wholly relative. If the “individual existed as an individual only by being identiﬁed,”
then the “truth-effect” of identity and the ability of the image to secure that truth, were
produced only through systems of identiﬁcation which reduced identity to the literal
matter of the body. The “numerical form of expression” far exceeded that of language

“on account of the delicacy and seriation of its degrees” (Bertillon 34).

64

From Identiﬁring Images to Identifying Traces: Fingerprinting and the Transformation of
the Visual culture of Identiﬁcation

In an 1890 letter to Nature, British scientist Henry Faulds would suggest a form
of identiﬁcation that dispensed With the need for extensive metadata attached to a
photographic image. The ﬁngerprint, he wrote, was an identifying mark that “needs no
other index than its own essential structure ” with patterns that could be translated into a
“syllabic index” (22; emphasis added). Though the history surrounding the “invention”
of ﬁngerprinting classiﬁcation is fraught with debate, less contestable is how the system
of ﬁngerprint identiﬁcation swiftly became devastating in its efﬁciency.12 Francis Galton
formalized the system of classiﬁcation suggested by Faulds in his 1892 publication of
Finger Prints. Here, Galton outlines how the ﬁngerprint could be abstracted into a form
of language—a syntactical sign or pattern that “may be expressed by numerals with
sufﬁcient precision to sort it under the right heading.” The complex and labor intensive
processes of photographing and indexing the criminal body in Bertillonage was replaced,
or rather rrricroscoped into a system where just one minute detail—the whorl or loop in a
single digit’s print, could authenticate and stand in for identity, and secure the
individual’s place within an archive of criminal bodies. In this regard, ﬁngerprinting was
immediately heralded as a method of identiﬁcation that would succeed where other
methods--photography and anthropometry--had failed. Not only did the print offer a
pared down syntax for effective recording and indexing of the body, it was a surer form
of identiﬁcation, for even the “natives” who “all look alike” can be distinguished from
one another within such a system. While the photographic image had represented the

body in terms of a recognizable image that corresponded to its subject, revealing identity

65

as something to be seen, and only supplemented by the numeric data of the signaletic
notice, with the ﬁngerprint, identity itself was represented and “ﬁxed” by an abstract
image. As a form of classiﬁcatory identiﬁcation, ﬁngerprint classiﬁcation swiftly
replaced Bertillonage, which was dependent upon the repeated measurement of an
individual’s body.

The advent of ﬁngerprinting thus signaled a ﬁmdamental shift, not only in the
visual culture of forensic science, but also in the larger epistemological transformation of
identity into an object of scientiﬁc knowledge, a matter of empirical facts, always
observable and measurable. Galton articulated the heady, positivist promise of
ﬁngerprinting in its potential to “ﬁx the human personality, to give to each human being
an identity, and individuality that can be depended upon with certainty, lasting,
unchangeable, always recognisable, and easily adduced, this appear to be in the largest
sense the aim of the new method” (169). In Finger Prints, Galton outlined how the
ﬁngerprint could be abstracted into a form of language—a syntactical sign or pattern that
“may be expressed by numerals with sufﬁcient precision to sort it under the right
heading.”

Ironically, though Galton devoted his career to categorizing social groups of
individuals according to biological type, his system for ﬁngerprint identiﬁcation was
entirely at odds with his determinist approach. Indeed, initially, Galton was “less
interested in the function of ﬁngerprint patterns than in how those patterns might be
exploited: both to identify individuals and to provide a physical marker of heredity,
ethnicity, and race” (Cole 75). The eugenicist was convinced that somewhere in this

hieroglyphic lay some sort of typical pattern that was in line with his theories of heredity

66

and biological determinism, and this essentialist tendency haunts his works on the
subject. Nonetheless, the ﬁngerprint system of identiﬁcation was far more akin to the
nominalist principles of Bertillonage than biological determinism, and Galton swiftly
changed tack within his publications on the ﬁngerprint, emphasizing how this “token of
identity,” would be invaluable to criminal investigation and social control. Here the
“existence of such a method would settle questions of personation, of mistaken identity
and of previous conviction.” A “valuable adjunct to a severe passport system” in Europe,
most notably, the system, already long-implemented in colonial Bengal, would be “of
continual good service in our tropical settlements, where the individual members of the
swarms of dark and yellow-skinned races are mostly unable to sign their names and are
otherwise hardly distinguishable by Europeans, and, whether they can write or not, are
grossly addicted to personation” (303). In this regard, ﬁngerprinting was immediately
heralded as a method of identiﬁcation that would succeed where other methods--
photography and anthropometry--had failed. From its inception, the application of
ﬁngerprinting to the recording of individuals operated within a profoundly disciplinary
system of surveillance and bureaucratic record-keeping.

While the credibility and evidentiary status of the photographic image drew from
its seemingly ontological status as a literal trace of the real, the ﬁngerprint offered
something more indexical than the image. Not only did the print link a body to a
record—the inked mark imprinted in identiﬁcation records buried in archives—more
tantalizingly, the ﬁngerprint could also link ﬁnger impressions left at crime scenes to
those same records. Through the interpretation of latent prints, and other physical

evidence, detectives could work backwards to recreate the circumstances of a particular

67

crime, and the identity of the perpetrators. Like the photographic image, it was the direct
result of literal, physical contact with the thing itself, a material sign of identity. As
Micheal Taussig notes, the grooves and ridges of the ﬁngerprint correspond “point for
mimeticizing point” with the contact ridges of a unique touch, tangible evidence of a
tactile and accountable presence. Such traces are thus replete with the “magic of both
copy and contact” (223).

This quality of the ﬁngerprint informed the distinctly more metaphysical
renderings of ﬁngerprints that characterized some of the earlier discourses surrounding
the system, and would also underpin the symbolization of trace into an “uncanny” sign
within popular narratives. Such ﬁgurings emphasize the inherently paradoxical status of
the print and other forms of trace evidence as a mode of “self writing” that could not be
read by the self. Such signs assured that minute physical markers could disclose the
unauthentic and ﬁx “true” identity. Twain’s Pudd ’nhead Wilson (1894) dramatizes--and
problematizes--this escalating credence in new technologies of detection in its oft-cited
court scene. David Wilson announces to an enthralled courtroom that:

Every human-being carries with him from his cradle to his grave certain
physical marks which do not change their character and by which he can
always be identiﬁed—and that without a shadow of doubt or question.”
These marks are his signature, his physiological autograph, so to speak;
and this autograph cannot be counterfeited, nor can he disguise it or hide it
in any way, nor can it become illegible by the wear of the mutations of
time. This signature is each man’s own—there is no duplicate of it among

the swarming millions of the globe. Upon the bait of this dagger stands

68

the assassin’s natal autograph, written in the blood of that helpless and
unoffending old man who loved you and whom you all loved. There is
but one man in the whole earth whose had can duplicate that crimson sign.
216)
While Torn Driscoll’s “true” identity is, of course, a legal ﬁction, it is a ﬁction that took
on the aura of scientiﬁc credibility within the discourses surrounding ﬁngerprinting.
Indeed, the irony implicit in Pudd ’nhead Wilson was completely lost in various legal
recuperations of the scene, where Driscoll’s declarations are quoted in order to support
the veracity of this form of identiﬁcation, for instance, in a 1919 edition of the California
Law Review, on a treatise promoting “The Right to Take Fingerprints, Measurements and
Footprints” (28).
It would not be until 1910, some thirty years after the publication of Galton’s
Finger Prints that a case would be tried in the United States where ﬁngerprint evidence
would play a central role and raise signiﬁcant, albeit short-lived, questions about the
relation of ﬁngerprints to individuality and identity. As one legal journal reported the
case:
A negro murderer has recently been convicted in a northern State upon the
evidence of his ﬁngerprints; the bloody marks of which near the crime
scene, compared with imprints made at the trial, showed an exact
similarity. Two questions were raised in the trial—one as to the
sufﬁciency of the evidence; the other upon the fact that the criminal was
compelled to imprint his ﬁngers upon paper properly prepared to take the

marks. (People v, Jennings)

69

In a case that anticipates of some of the early legal debates surrounding the role of DNA
evidence, lawyers representing the defense suggested that the print was a form of “self
incriminatory” testimony--a compelled confession that violated Fourth Amendment
rights-~was quickly discarded by the court. The trial established the admissibility of
ﬁngerprint evidence, and asserted that the ﬁngerprint was not a form of “writing” by the
individual; rather it was a sign of identiﬁcation interpreted by a scientiﬁc expert. This
landmark case established precedent for those that followed and demonstrated that as an
indexical sign, the ﬁngerprint was not transparent; it required ﬁltering through a forensic
expert (Cole 180).

It is with ﬁngerprinting, then, that the trace paradigm for identiﬁcation—where
an individual is traced from a minute piece of material evidence—comes to its full
realization. Trace was not an indexical representation of the individual but a material
sign of identity, in some cases literal remnants of identity. In 1923, John Henry Wigrnore
illustrated the ﬁmdamental manner in which the body could be converted to material fact,
direct evidence, when he famously asserted that a person’s ﬁngerprint “is not testimony
about his body, but his body itself” (874). As ﬁngerprinting, and other more
“miraculous” devices of forensic science took hold in the American context, the concept
that criminals were leaving “bits” of self at scenes of crime, and betraying themselves as
surely as if they had remained at the scene, becomes a dominant trope in the popular
imaginary—where trace is transformed from a literal sign to something more
metaphorical, an “uncanny sign” that connotes the absent body of the criminal.

In New York, the Times would devote columns to this new science, featuring

articles where the new technique was aiding police in miraculous ways. In one robbery,

70

for instance, “[t]he detectives knew who cracked that safe as surely as if they had been
hidden in the same room when the work was done. It was only a question of ﬁnding the
men, and last evening detectives went out to get the thieves" (“Identiﬁcation Bureau
Aided by Finger-Print Clue” 20). As a repressive form of representation, the print is
rendered legible, not by the bearer or “utterer” of this sign of the self, but an expert
trained in translating this syntax; here the “writing” of the print is quickly translated into
an always already sign of guilt: “Now, when a murderer leaves his bloody tracery on a
wall, his hands red with the gore of his victim, it would be curious to study the
peculiarities of the horrible imprint he may have left, and how the minute whirls or loops
might identify him” (”The Finger Print: How Human Ingenuity is Taxed to Discover the
Clues to Mysterious Crimes” 10). In addition, however, the “horrible imprint” here
suggests something not just uncanny but gruesome, trace as more than just the indexical
record of an individual, but symbolic of an individual so monstrous that he can deems to
“write” of his crimes in the bloody tracery of the print. Like Bymes’s description of the
rogues in his gallery, whose “real” nature is masked but sometimes visible in a ﬂashing
look of malice, here the print, “horrible” and even gothic, might reveal something of that
hidden nature. This double aspect of trace and the epistemological instabilities it
suggests are explored further in Chapter Four.

As the efﬁcacy of the photographic apparatus for criminal identiﬁcation came into
question at the turn of the century, and Bertillon’s anthropometric system pushed aside
for the far more absolute and more efﬁcient system of ﬁngerprinting, the role of the
forensic scientist, chemical expert, or the later coined term “scientiﬁc detective,” who

possessed the authority and expertise to read such abstract, minute, and non-iconic signs,

71

was simultaneously elevated. Concurrently, the drive within juridical contexts to a
radical reordering of the hierarchical principles of juridical proof meant that subjective
and “tainted” witness testimony and confession were increasingly displaced in terms of
probative weight by the scientiﬁc proofs of evidence—trials based on such evidence
became a “hunt for clues.” This new form of evidence altered the narrative logic of signs
of guilt, a move that Foucault typiﬁes as the cultural transition from the “exposition of
the facts to the slow process of discovery; from the execution to the investigation; from
the physical confrontation to the intellectual struggle between criminal and investigator”
(Foucault 181). Systems of identiﬁcation, and as I shall discuss in the next chapter, the
surfacing discipline of forensic science or scientiﬁc detection, form the perfect
illustration of this transition. Instead of reading conventional signs imprinted on the
criminal body with the force of sovereign power, the reading of identity, especially the
detection of identity, was approached as a science that employed careful measurement,
techniques of observation, and the gauging of statistics (Gunning 22).
In 1891, Galton wrote a shorter article for Nature, “Identiﬁcation by Finger-Tips,”
introducing the main principles to be outlined in his book-length publication. The closing
passage of the article reveals Galton’s more romantic conjectures over the possibilities
for the ﬁngerprint as a sign of identity: 3

I look forward to a time when every convict shall have prints taken of his

ﬁngers by the prison photographer . . . when the index-number of the

hands shall usually be inserted in advertisements for persons who are lost

or who cannot be identiﬁed, and when every youth who is about to leave

his home for a long residence abroad, shall obtain prints of his ﬁngers at

72

the same time that the portrait is photographed, for his ﬁiends to retain as
a memento. (311)

These conj ectures--that prints might also circulate within the public domain as
readable advertisements for missing persons, or as a form of personal memento, a
tangible reminder of one who is absent, akin to a photographic portrait or a lock of hair--
illuminate complex issues concerning exactly who is authorized to both “write” or “read”
a ﬁngerprint. In the late nineteenth century, when individual photographic portraiture
had become the ubiquitous means of representing the bourgeois self, Galton envisions
precisely the same type of role for the ﬁngerprint. He saw the most “natural” candidate
for the role of print taker as the photographer as:

a class of men who are naturally gifted with dexterity of ﬁngers,
mechanical aptitudes, versatility, and some artistic taste. So far as they are
engaged in portraiture, they already occupy themselves in supplying ones
means of identiﬁcation; therefore the pursuit of another means of
identiﬁcation would in some sense lie within their present province. (311)

As ﬁngerprinting swiftly displaced the arduous system of Bertillonage in Europe
and later the US, the securing of ﬁngerprinting, and speciﬁcally its presentation as
evidence within a court of law, required a new form of expert to explain it. While
Galton’s choice of photographer might well be analogous the role of the police clerk who
takes and records prints of suspect criminals, the fact that partial and latent ﬁngerprints
could be left at a crime scene introduced a more complicated factor to the role of prints as
both evidence and literal traces of identity. While the photographic image could perform

dual functions as both a form of honoriﬁc and repressive representation, a metonymic and

73

metaphorical signiﬁer, despite Galton’s musings, the ﬁngerprint would never signify in
the same manner. Underpinning Galton’s vision for the bourgeois recuperation of the
print is a ﬁrndamental misj udgrnent and contradiction over whom and by what means
such traces could come to have meaning within speciﬁc cultural settings. Galton
envisioned a day when the language of prints would be a common syntax of everyday
life, much as the photographic image was and remains today, but the ﬁngerprinting
system signaled a fundamental shift in the visual paradigms of identiﬁcation, a shift that

required the training and development of a cadre of professional “scientiﬁc” detectives.

 

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2 Page 11

3 Page 15

’ In The Birth of the Clinic Foucault describes how the Enlightenment especially gloriﬁed the clinical gaze
and convinced itself of its penetrating ability. In the “scientizing” of photographic imaging, the
characteristics of the medical gaze described by Foucault as purely objective--reﬁ‘aining from intervention-
- “silent and gestureless”--appeared to ﬁnd its mechanical alternative in the camera. With the nineteenth
century invention of the clinical gaze “What was fundamentally invisible is suddenly offered to the
brightness of the gaze, in a movement of appearance so sirrrple, so immediate that it seems to be the natural
consequence of a more highly developed experience. It is as if for the ﬁrst time for thousands of years,
doctors, free at last of theories and chimeras, agreed to approach the object of their experience with the
purity of an unprejudiced gaze” (195). This investment in the power of the scientiﬁc gaze and its
“prosthetic” imaging technologies to expose hidden truths is the primary premise underpinning the
interconnected ﬁelds of observational sciences.

5 Passports were introduced in post-revolutionary France as early as 1792, and other European countries
followed suit, requiring such documentation of all subjects passing across national boundaries. These early
systerrrs for regulating crime, dissent, and mobility were poorly effected, with blank identity documents
frequently stolen and appropriated by criminals. In addition, the methods for describing or representing the
subject within these documents were so vague as to be useless. Features would be noted as “normal” or
“healthy,” and, as Simon Cole notes, outside of France, rrriddle and upper class people were not described
at all “since the better sots of people found abhorrent the idea of subjecting their physical person to the
descriptive gaze of some petty bureaucrat” (10). Other early systems of identiﬁcation, and speciﬁcally the
criminal archive, were similarly ineffective in achieving the aims of knowing and ﬁxing identity. Simon
Cole notes that the criminal register for New York’s Newgate Prison provides a particularly revealing look
at how such systems functioned at the turn of the century. Each record denotes name, place of origin, date
of birth, and complexion, and in a special column, distinctive “mar ” for each individual are listed.
Descriptions of such marks were oddly diverse—common characteristics such as blue eyes or baldness
rrright be taken down for one individual, while others are much more subjective or indistinct: “bad nose,”
“large head,” “very gross habit,” or “tender eyed” (l 1). See also Caplan and Torpey, Documenting
Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World, and speciﬁcally Andreas
Freeman’s essay within that volume, “Governments and Forgers: Passports in Nineteenth Century Europe.”
6 In Birth of the Clinic, Foucault describes how Enlightenment presented the practical krrowledges of
medicine and positivist science “as the restitution of an eternal truth in a continuous historical development

74

 

in which events alone have been of a negative order: oblivion, illusion, concealment. In fact, this way of
rewriting history itself evaded a much truer but much more complex history. It masked that other history by
assirnilating to clinical method all the study of cases, in the old sense of the word; and, therefore, it
authorized all subsequent simpliﬁcations whereby clinical medicine became simply the examination of the
individual (57).

7 For critical histories of the concept of recidivism, see Rennie’s The Search for Criminal Man: A
Conceptual History of the Dangerous Oﬂendor and Rafter’s Creating Born Criminals.

a For instance, Charles Caldwell’s Elements of Phrenology. Leading theorists of phrenology included
Franz Joseph Gall (of Switzerland) who is considered the “founder” of phrenological theory, and George
Combe (of Britain) who was the leading phrenologist in Britain in the early nineteenth century.

Simon Cole and Jurgen Thorwald (Century of the Detective) both describe how, in Paris, the newly
formed Sﬁrete, headed by former criminal and convict, Eugene Vidocq, was amassing an archive of
criminal records. Fuelled by the unending stream of information acquired by the men he planted in prison
and on the streets, these archives contained drawings of known criminals and descriptions of their
appearance and methods of work. This archive would form the basis of the Sﬁrete’s system of detection,
which attempted to create an intimate knowledge of the criminal underworld, constructing a sense of how
the criminal society operated, and at the same time frxating on the control of individual criminals.
Circulating within this underworld, detectives were expected to irrrprint the faces of criminal on their
memories, in order that they could identify them at a later time. Their recollections would be recorded and
indexed in this early form of the criminal archive. These ﬁles amassed at a remarkable rate, and were
ordered by name, and/or chronologically—thus the efﬁcacy of the retrieval system for these records was
contingent on the ability of the detective to memorize both faces, names, or the time and location of
speciﬁc crimes. By 1857, the ﬁles had amassed into an enormous archive of over ﬁve million records
maintained by an army of clerks. A ﬁle existed for each known criminal, detailing names, aliases, crimes
and sentences, and appearance. In the 18405, the hand-drawn image was replaced by daguerrotypes, and by
1879, eighty thousand photographs had been accumulated. In America, the criminal archive found its
counterpart in the development of the Rogue’s Gallery, and by the 18705, most major cities and towns in
the United States could boast its own photographic collection of incorrigible rogues and imposters.

'0 This shift is described in more detail in the following chapter.

” Thomas notes that in the same year as Matthew Brady’s Illustrious Americans was published, he was
commissioned to provide photographs of criminals for Marmaduke Sampson’s Rationale of Crime and its
Azppropriate T reatrnent (1846)

l The question of who “discovered” frngerprinting as a system for classifying identity and tracing crime
was—and remains--a matter of some debate. This history, and also the extent to which the efﬁcacy of
ﬁngerprinting was over-deterrrrined within early cases that used the technique, is described in Cole’s
Suspect Identities. See also Colin Beavan’s slightly less academic take on the matter in Fingerprints.

75

Chapter Three

Tracing “the smallest points of identity’ ’1: Narrative and Scientiﬁc Detection

The microsc0pe which reveals the smallest points of identity, if once fully
used, might often establish connections of which ignorant rufﬁans would
never dream—the very mud on a man’s boots being enough to identify the
connection of person and place, when examined by an experienced

microscopist. (“The Scientiﬁc Detection of Crime ” 1876)2

The detective story, we are reminded in London’s Nature, is written
backwards. The author has carefully laid out his clues all along the track
of crime. It is thus an easy matter for the detective, who is in the secret, to
pick them up as he goes along. Yet it is not impossible . . . that the same
faculty which enables one to devize ingenious detective stories would help
in the actual detection of crime. (“Why The Great Scientist Will

Supersede the Great Detective” 1911)3

There is no human act that does not leave its record. There is no crime
that cannot be traced to its perpetrator, in the light of modern science. We
daily identify criminals by the air they breathed at the scene of their crime,
by sound registers, by ﬁngerprints, by blood analysis. We throw light into
the world of the invisible, and bring light ﬁom a world to which our eyes

have been blinded. (Edmond Bayle “The Crime Doctor” 1924)4

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On May 19th, 1911, New Yorker Charles Crispi (a.k.a Caesar Cella) became the
ﬁrst person in the United States to be identiﬁed and convicted of a crime through the use
of latent ﬁngerprint evidence. Crispi's case began February 23, 1911, with the burglary of
a safe in a garment manufacturer's loft. With no eyewitnesses to the crime, New York
police were left only with ﬁnger impressions that were found at the scene. At trial Crispi
pled not guilty, but later confessed to the burglary after testimony by ﬁngerprint expert
Captain Joseph Faurot. In light of this “assistance” in the science of ﬁngerprints, Crispi
was given the minimum sentence of six months in prison. "I at ﬁrst had little faith in this
expert evidence," Rosalsky said at Crispi's sentencing hearing, "but after the experiment
conducted by Lieutenant Faurot in the courtroom, in the presence of the Court and
jury. . .when he was able to designate the person who made the imprint on the glass, I
became satisﬁed that there is something to this science.” Lt. Faurot, “of the Bertillon
bureau at Police Headquarters,” had learned the method some ﬁve years earlier when the
NYDP Commissioner sent him to London’s Scotland Yard to study the new technique of
ﬁngerprinting (People vs. Crispi). By 1911, Faurot was adept enough at the method to
perform a demonstration of this process of identiﬁcation in a spectacle that, as Simon
Cole points out, strongly resembled the infamous courtroom scene of Twain’s
Pudd’nhead Wilson (183).

During the ﬁrst three decades of the twentieth century, in the United States
particularly, representation of the techniques of “scientiﬁc detection” dominated over
multiple discourses. From legal journals and the academic presses, to the popular

scientiﬁc press and vastly consumed literary serial ﬁction, the tools and techniques of this

77

new type of expert, the scientiﬁc detective, were described in miraculous and awe-
inspiring detail. Edmond Bayle, French detective and student of Bertillon, would declare
in America’s McClure ’s:
There is no human act that does not leave its record. There is no crime
that cannot be traced to its perpetrator, in the light of modern science. We
daily identify criminals by the air they breathed at the scene of their crime,
by sound registers, by ﬁngerprints, by blood analysis. (119)
While photography could provide a means to represent the surfaces and contours of the
body and so secure certain truths about identity, it seemed that more powerful
technologies such as microscopy, ﬁngerprint analysis, or blood-typing could literally
“throw light into the world of the invisible, and bring light ﬁom a world to which our
eyes have been blinded” (119). Certainly, in an Anglo-American legal context that
increasingly privileged the probative value of empirical evidence over witness testimony,
the instrumental technologies of forensic science accrued powerful status as truth-telling
apparatus.5 In the United States and Europe, the scientiﬁc detective thus emerged as a
crucial cultural ﬁgure, becoming a symbol for the devastating efﬁciency and truth-telling
power of science.

The narrative of the trace, I argue, emerges during this period as an
interdiscursively produced epistemological paradigm for knowing identity, where
narrative ﬁction borrows from science and science borrows from the conventions of
narrative ﬁction. In the courtroom, this narrative rendering of facts into proofs of events
and identity was performed by the lawyer or expert. But it was with the new literary form

of detective ﬁction that the narrative paradigm of forensics was perfected. Indeed, early

78

informational articles 6n the techniques of scientiﬁc detection would refer to literary
detectives such as Dupin or Holmes as worthy of emulation, a reference that highlights
not only the intertextual production of the discursive technologies of forensic science but
also the narrative underpinnings of the forensic paradigm itself. The ordering principle of
the detective narrative merged disparate fragments of empirical evidence into testimonial
evidence, and thus provided heterogeneous account with a certain cohesiveness and
plenitude. The truth-effect of trace as an a priori empirical fact, then, was actually the
production of the discursive technologies of the forensic narrative. In turn, in light of this
increasing ability of science to particularize, identity itself was transformed into a truth
derived from the literal matter of the body, and speciﬁcally its most particular and minute
elements. But this reduction of truth and identity to empirical facts, as I discuss in my
concluding analysis of Arthur Reeve’s Craig Kennedy, Scientific Detective series, also
created unique challenges for the detective narrative.

In 1911, the elicited confession and subsequent conviction of Crispi in the trial
described above exempliﬁes the fundamental shift occurring within both legal and law
enforcement settings: in trial law, the privileging of physical evidence and forensic
testimony, and concurrently the emergence of the “scientiﬁc detective,” who contrasted
signiﬁcantly with the Bymesian beat-cop.6 In the Crispi case, the court, previously
cynical about new-fangled “expert” testimony, was transformed into a setting where the
newfound ﬁgure of the “scientiﬁc detective,” embodied by European-educated Faurot,
could perform his feats, and so transform American evidentiary rules to admit a form of

evidence that uniquely identiﬁed the criminal.

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“Fingerprints, enlarged, occupied the jury in general sessions yesterday” reported
The New York Sun, in an article that detailed the performance of Faurot during the Crispi
hearings. To provide the most convincing case for ﬁngerprinting, Faurot performed a
series of somewhat theatrical feats. He asked twelve jury members to provide, in his
absence, a set of prints, and for one of those prints to be duplicated on a pane of glass.
When F aurot returned, Judge Rosalsky, a self-proclaimed cynic about the science, came
down from the bench to watch the process, which was described by the news article in
the following terms:
Lieut. Faurot dusted some white powder with a camel’s hair brush over
the ﬁnger-marks on the glass. He put a bit of black paper under the glass
and the marks became distinct. The he shufﬂed through the pack of slips
in his hand. The ﬁrst seven were quickly discarded after a quick glance.
The ﬁve next went more slowly. Finally he had three in his hand. Two of
these took only a moment’s examination. With his magnifying glass he
went over to the last slip and over the powder marks on the glass. “The
man whose slip is ‘I,”’ he said, “is the man who made those ﬁngerprints
on the glass. (“Jury Study Finger Prints” 39)
After just four minutes, the paper reports, F aurot reached his conclusion and identiﬁed
the correct individual. Following this act, Faurot went on to present another striking
image: enlarged photographs of the ﬁngerprint evidence. Using these images he
indicated to the jury how he performed his “trick” which was based on an exact and
methodical science. And thus, some twenty years after the publication of Galton’s

Finger Prints, ﬁngerprint evidence ﬁnally made its way into the legal precedent. While

80

Galton had predicted a time when all would be versed in this “syntax,” Judge Rosalsky’s
decision not only heralded the admissibility of latent print-evidence as sufﬁcient for
indictment, but also clariﬁed that such evidence required expert mediation. Judge
Rosalsky, recognizing the import of the case, urged Crispi to revert from his plea of “not
guilty”:
I want you to make a full confession. I can assure you that no indictment
will be found against you, or any witnesses who testiﬁed in your behalf in
the course of the trial, for perjury, but it is more for the interest of justice
and science that you tell the truth. It is invaluable for us to know whether
or not the expert testimony given during your trial was correct or
otherwise. The ﬁngerprint experts are of the opinion that the science of
identiﬁcation, by means of ﬁngerprints, is more exact than the Bertillon
system and photography. Did you remove the pane of glass, in evidence
here, from the door of the loft of HM. Bernstein & Brothers? (40).

The image of F aurot “shufﬂing” through the slips and making a pronouncement to
an awed jury, though perhaps sensationalized by the New York Sun reporter, nonetheless
illustrates the emerging cultural visibility of the “scientiﬁc detective” and the spectacle of
science. This detective’s ability, through applied science, to read identity in the most
abstract traces of evidence swiftly raises him to the status of modern hero. Within a
cultural context that increasingly privileged the ﬁgure of the “expert,” the Showmanship
of Faurot, who performed the feat of detection in an ad hoc laboratory contrasts
signiﬁcantly to that of folk-hero Bymes, a corrupt but effective “father” of the modern

police force who protected society via brutish and coercive means, circulating on the

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streets among the criminal classes. Epitomizing what was becoming termed in the
popular and even academic presses as the “detective of the future,” F aurot was a
“scientiﬁc detective,” for whom “[p]olice routine work, the walking of the beats, the
direction of trafﬁc, the quelling of strike riots” were things of the past (“Why the Great
Scientist Will Supersede the Great Detective” 279). An equal match for the specter of the
“scientiﬁc criminal,” a mastermind who equally occupied the pages of the popular
scientiﬁc press and serial ﬁction, this type of expert “must now enter the detective service
by another door—that of applied science”:
In every department of crime nowadays science seems to have lent a hand
to make easy the work of the criminal. This circumstance greatly
discourages the layman who does not realize that were the detective also
an applied scientist, the forger, the thief and the murderer would be
quickly apprehended. The criminal’s own ﬁnger prints, as everyone
knows, are an infallible means of identiﬁcation; but the retort and the
microscope of the analyst are equally fatal to the adepts in the higher and
more scientiﬁc departments of crime. (279)
Interestingly, the article cited above appeared in the same year as the Crispi trial, and
refers to the now common acceptance of ﬁngerprinting as a means of forensic
identiﬁcation, and indeed, the scientiﬁc detective as having many more tricks up the
proverbial sleeve. While the “man in the street” might not recognize the potential of
novel inventions, the scientiﬁc detective is swift to harness the power of the microscope,
ﬁngerprint identiﬁcation, sound registers, pulsation-monitors, and chemical analyses, all

of which could render a full account of the events of a crime, identifying a speciﬁc

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individual by means of “scarcely discernible” of evidence. As the Crispi case
demonstrates, this tracing of identity elicits a form of unwilled testimony, a self-betrayal
so forceful that it frequently triggers a spoken confession on the part of the suspect.

In the mid-to-late nineteenth century, discussion of the role of science in crime
within legal journals and the popular scientiﬁc press demonstrated great anticipation over
advancements in the ﬁeld. These pre-Hohnesian accounts of scientiﬁc detection are
characterized by the tendency to assign agency to the apparatus itself, which is cast as the
unerring detective of crime. The gaze is deﬁned as a technological mode of looking, with
the subjective role of the microscopist or chemists completely obviated. Unmediated and
conclusive, imaging alone reveals “damning proofs” of criminal identity as both narrative
and process are telescoped into the single act of revelation, enacted by the apparatus. The
ﬁne-tuning of devices such as the microscope, spectroscope, and X-ray, meant that
evidence previously invisible to the naked eye could be rendered visible, and even the
“smallest points of identity” discoverable. In 1858, The Scientiﬁc American would--in a
passage connoting Poe’s description of the Prefect’s application of “powerful
microscopes” in the case of the purloined letter--would prophesy how the “time may not
be as yet, but it will be when science will be the strongest arm of the detective”:

The microscope which reveals the smallest points of identity, if once fully
used, might often establish connections of which ignorant rufﬁans would
never dream—the very mud on a man’s boots being enough to identify the
connection of person and place, when examined by an experienced

microscopist. (“Science and Justice” 283)

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Twenty years later, in 1876, the journal celebrated the extent to which science had aided
in the detection of crime that the escape of a criminal was “much less an easy matter than
half a century ago.” The “unerring detectives” responsible for this revolution, the article
asserts are “[c]hemistry, the microscope and spectroscope” that “supply the authorities in
a wonderful way, with damning proofs for conviction.” So accurately do they “perform”
their work, the article reports, that the “merest traces of the organic ﬂuids are discovered;
and the spectroscope, if supplied even with an almost inappreciable amount of poison or
blood, will ﬁrmish sufﬁcient evidence to hang a guilty man” (284).

The enthusiastic reception of advances in forensic science is echoed, in part, by
legal journals of the period, which similarly predict the revolution science might effect in
criminal law. For example, during the 1870s and 808 a question that continually vexed
the practitioners of medical jurisprudence concerned the ability to distinguish human
blood ﬁ'om that of other species. The spectroscope, as “that most valuable of all
instruments,” appeared to offer an “infallible test” for ascertaining that distinction, for
“[i]t is competent to detect the smallest trace of blood, even after clothing has been
washed.” The spectroscope “revealed” blood type by visually striking means, “[o]ne-
half of the spectrum, ﬁom the violet end, is entirely absorbed, and dark bands appear in
the red and green rays.” In light of such stunning visual accuracy, the article maintains,
surely, “with such an instrument as this at our disposal, the chances for the suspected
person are very small” (“The Scientiﬁc Detection of Crime” 823). The actual application
of the spectroscope to distinguishing blood types among species would be one among
many failed approaches and supplanted two decades later by the precipitin test.

Nonetheless, attention to visual spectacle within this article appears to conﬁrm a certain

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optical truth, a truth only reiﬁed by its dramatic effect within a darkened and hushed
courtroom, where visible traces of identity would appear to be true--refracted and
illurrrined by rays of violet, red, and green.

In a passage that highlights this hyperbolic spectacularization of science and its
devices, and the profound emphasis on vision and image as evidentiary proof, an 1896
article ﬁom The Central Law Review illustrates not only the devastating efﬁcacy of
science in the service of the law, but the ﬁguring of material elements—that “little spot”
of evidence—into a cohesive narrative of detection and apprehension:

As expert agencies in leading to the detection of a crime and in aiding the
courts in meting out justice to offenders against the majesty of the law
none are more important than chemistry; largely because of its scientiﬁc
exactness. And this certainty of analysis aided by the power of the
microscope, and the wonderful reproductive force of photography
combined, have marked the destruction of many poor guilty wretches. . .
The darkened court room; the awed force of the blow to the guilty man
when he ﬁrst beholds the evidence of his crime illumined by the light of
scientiﬁc test. . . The murderer, intent on his effort to avoid suspicion, or
to throw off the scent of pursuit already hot on his tracks, yet forgets the
little spot, almost inﬁnitesimal, caught somewhere on his clothing in the
deadly struggle with his victim. He is in the meshes of the law at last. . . .
Beginning with the slight, but terrible indication of guilt, step by step the

awful revelation follows, and the guilty one is brought at last through the

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employment of scientiﬁc agencies, to the bar of justice. (Edwards 365-6;

emphasis added)
Evoking the dramatic setting of the criminal trial, where the narrative revelation of “self”
betrayal wrought by the hands of science takes place, here the darkened courtroom
becomes a place of awe-inspiring performance, as the chemical expert literally illumines
guilt with his devices and reveals the traces of the victim left upon the body of the
accused. Chemistry aided by the “certainty of analysis” of the microscope, combined
with the “reproductive force of photography” can bring that forceful blow to the guilty
man whose literal traces, rendered visible in glowing, microscopic detail, provide a
testimony that conveys the ultimate act of self betrayal. While the images here are
conveyed as transparent in their rendering of identity and guilt, the passage also
demonstrates how the reading of traces is predicated on a narrative (and positivist)
principle that assembles “things” into causal links. This trace narrative extends into the
past, relating cause to effect with objective veracity, then propels forward to the moment
of revelation--the identiﬁcation of a perpetrator.

As evidence law was transformed into a “science,” the lawyer’s role gradually
changed from being the master of legal tradition and precedent to acting as rhetorical
specialist skillfully managing information. “Blending the testimony of witnesses with
corroborating material evidence into the ‘strong representation’ of a narrative” the
lawyer’s role was to create an “argument that turns even false testimony into account”
(Thomas 35). One of the most inﬂuential juridical theorists in the Anglo-American
context, American legal theorist John Henry Wigmore, would raise the value of material

or physical evidence (both circumstantial forms) over that of the direct evidence of

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witness testimony. In 1898, Wigrnore espoused the guiding principles for this “science
of proof,” and argued that the scope and function of the law of evidence could be reduced
to two basic principles: “(1) that nothing is to be received which is not logically probative
of some matter requiring to be proved; and (2) that everything which is thus probative
should come in, unless a clear ground of policy law excludes it” (530).7

In this context, circumstantial evidence, especially physical evidence, became the
most logically probative of “real” evidence, “things” converted into “facts” converted
into “proofs.” Wigrnore, in each new edition of the Principles, attempted to synthesize
and to take stock of the whole ﬁeld of forensic science as it bore relation to judicial proof.
One main difference between the third and earlier editions, for instance, is the amount of
space devoted to such topics as ballistics, ﬁngerprinting, blood grouping, spectroscopy
and advances in telecommunications (Twining 140-1). Scientiﬁc facts, within

9’ 6‘

Wigrnore’s theories, thus function as “factum probans or material evidencing the
proposition” (181). In 1924, Wigrnore produced a second edition of his treatise on
evidence: A Treatise on the Anglo-American System of Evidence in Trials at Common
Law. New topics on this treatise included “Fingerprints and Foot Marks” and “Moving
Picture Photographs as Evidence,” subjects received with much critical acclaim by the
legal press.8 Indeed, Wigrnore dedicated the ﬁrst and subsequent editions of the
Principles to Dr. Hans Gross, “who did more than any other man in modern times to
encourage the application of science to judicial proof.” Gerrnan-bom Gross was the ﬁrst
major expert-writer on the use of forensic science for solving crime: “The progress of

criminology” he argued, “means less trust in witnesses and more in real proofs” (9). He

coined the term “criminalistics,” a term that contrasted with that of “criminology” which

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implied a reliance on the “softer” social sciences, and published Criminal Investigation,
the ﬁrst comprehensive description of uses of physical evidence and the application of
the scientiﬁc method in solving crime and identifying criminals.

The translation of the identity into an effect of identiﬁcation—traced from the
empirical facts of material evidence-~emerges as this new discipline of forensic science
held increasing sway in legal contexts where witness testimony was approached with
growing cynicism and scrutiny, and physical evidence became increasingly probative
within criminal trials. Minute traces of the body became new forms of the “perfect clue”
woven into full narratives as proofs of events and identity. Consistently emphasized
throughout these narratives is the manner in which the apparatus can render visible even
the minutest traces of identiﬁcatory evidence. In the nineteenth century, this crafting was
accomplished by the lawyer, but in popular ﬁction it was the task of the detective to
render this “strong representation” of narrative truth from the facts or clues he
encountered in the drive to identify an unknown criminal.

This narrative working of trace into truth and identity, performed by the lawyer or
expert in the courtroom, was perfected in the emerging genre of detective ﬁction
(Thomas 35). In the late nineteenth century the archetype of this “scientiﬁc” detective
was embodied by Sherlock Holmes, who became the model not only for the myriad of
ﬁctional imitators who followed him, but for practitioners of crime detection and forensic
science itself. In these mysteries, forensic scientists not only found a role model in the
acetic Holmes, but more speciﬁcally a paradigm for crafting the trace narrative. This
literature, in part, gave rise to the discipline of forensic science, and within the popular

imaginary, assured a harmonious relation between science and trial procedure (Thomas

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43). Indeed, our ﬁrst introduction to Holmes in “A Study in Scarlet” (1892) ﬁnds him in
his laboratory exalting over his newest discovery, a chemical means to distinguish blood
stains from other stains, in a test that uncannily foreshadows the actual invention of the
blood precipitin test that would occur ﬁve years later in 1897. “Why, man, it is the most
practical medico-legal discovery for years. Don’t you see that it gives us an infallible test
for blood stains?” (7). Holmes, like both the lawyer, who can craft an account of crime
and guilt from physical evidence, and the scientist, who proves a theory based on
observable and empirical facts, can identify a man by reading the previously invisible or
unnoticed proofs:
By a man’s ﬁngernails, by his coat-sleeve, by his boot, by his trouser-
knees, by the callosities of his foreﬁnger and thumb, by his expression, but
his shirt-cuffs—by each of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed.
That all united should fail to enlighten the competent inquirer in any case
is almost inconceivable. (16)

Holmes as “scientiﬁc detective” does not equip himself with devices and
techniques for analyzing clues. Rather, as Thomas notes, the detective embodies the
device with a gaze akin to that of a microscope or camera, capturing and rendering visible
the hidden truths in the minutest or obscure of details. Marks, footprints, dust traces, and
physical marks are all interpreted as truths that “plainly” and visibly reveal the facts of
past events and identity. Such traces in the Holmes narratives are magniﬁed under the
protagonist’s gaze, assisted only rarely by a simple magnifying glass.

A precursor for the scientiﬁc detective, a master reader of the trace, Holmes

elucidates how any sign, no matter how inﬁnitesimal, could be read to determine identity

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and restore order. Holmes’s inﬂuence upon contemporary forensic science and scientists
proved ubiquitous, as he was frequently referred to as the ideal model for any detective
by real practitioners in the ﬁeld. Hans Gross, for instance, was commonly termed as the
“living” Holmes, with the inﬂuential Criminal Investigation appearing some four years
after “Study in Scarlet” was published for the ﬁrst time in 1887. Described by the popular
press as a renaissance man, as “a trained criminal lawyer, an expert chemist, a scholar
with erudition so vast that it embraces nearly every ﬁeld of human knowledge,” Gross is
credited with having “invented the most infallible system known for tracking down
criminals.” The subject of numerous American newspaper and magazine articles
featuring the radical new sciences of detection, Gross developed a system of “detective
science” that apparently made “American police methods seem medieval in their crudity”
(Kaempffert 99). A 1914 McClure’s article decries the brutish tactics of the American
police force, consistently conveys methods of scientiﬁc detection commonplace in more
“advanced” European nations. Here the “simple” application of the scientiﬁc method to
crime and the question of identity produces a Hohnesian detective, who embodies the
forensic device and who merely “sniffs an envelope and promptly says that the murder
was committed by a blond-haired, blue-eyed man with a scar on his left cheek” (99).

Like Holmes, such detectives recognized science, like narrative, is “but an
organization of facts.” As such, crime and the question of criminal identity can be
approached scientiﬁcally, with the facts of crime--speciﬁcally material evidence--
systematized to create a “real science of crime detection” (101). The narrative procedure
of scientiﬁc detection both informed and was reﬂected in the narrative processes of

generic detective ﬁction. The propensity for real-life scientiﬁc detectives to cite the

90

procedures of their literary counterparts, especially Dupin and Holmes, pinpoints not only
the interdiscursive production of understandings of forensic science and trace evidence,
but also the narrative underpinnings of the trace paradigm of identiﬁcation. British
expert, Charles Ainsworth Mitchell, author of the highly inﬂuential Science and the
Criminal (1914) would impress upon his students and followers the need to adapt a
mindset like that of “the detective story writer”, and the need to develop the ability to
render a full account from the most “inconsequential triﬂes of evidence,” by
reconstructing the crime as story in reverse. Though the contrived detective story is
“written backwards,” a work of ﬁction where the “author has carefully laid all his clues
along the track of the crime,” nonetheless, “it is not impossible . . . that some faculty
which enables one to devize ingenious detective stories would help in the actual detection
of crime.” Indeed, Mitchell goes on, “storytellers can succeed in unraveling the mystery
where detectives have failed,” and as such, “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might make a
distinguished associate for any scientiﬁc detective technic” (279).

By 1930, Edmond Locard a leading ﬁgure in the history of criminalistics, and
“inventor” of the “exchange principle,” would introduce an otherwise dry exposition on
the role of dust in crime scene analysis with a few words about the study of
criminalistics, which for Locard should also include the works of Conan Doyle. Through
Holmes, the detective in training learns how to “diagnose” traces, and chain together
evidence into a fulsome account of events leading to a crime:

I hold that a police expert, or an examining magistrate, would not ﬁnd it a
waste of time to read Doyle’s novels. For, in the adventures of Sherlock

Holmes, the detective is repeatedly asked to diagnose the origin of a speck

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of mud, which is nothing but moist dust. The presence of a spot on a shoe
or pair of trousers immediately made know to Holmes the particular
quarter of London from which is visitor had come, or the road he had
traveled in the suburbs. A spot of clay and chalk originated in Horsham; a
peculiar reddish it of mud could be found nowhere but at the entrance to
the post ofﬁce in Wigmore Street. . . . [e]ven such an inspection may
develop something signiﬁcant and one might proﬁtably re-read from this
point of view the stories entitled: A Study in Scarlet, The Five Orange
Pips, and The Sign of the Four. Elsewhere Holmes insists upon the
interest and fascination to be found in collecting tobacco ashes, on which
he says he has “written a little monograph concerning one hundred and
forty varieties.” (The Boscombe Valley Mystery.) On the latter point one
should read again The Sign of the Four, and also The Resident Patient.

(277)

Such emphases on the ability of the literary detective to read crime from material

evidence impress upon the scientiﬁc detective that evidence, especially minute evidence,

is meaningless without the ability to create a framing narrative which renders a chain of

causes from such trace-effects. The mechanisms of the detective narrative, with its

closed structure and positivist bent, could provide account with a certain cohesiveness

and plenitude, merging disparate fragments of evidence into the rational and seamless

logic of detection. In this sense, “traces” become “facts”—fabricated by narrative, while

paradoxically posited as not fabricated. The truth-effect of “the identifying trace” as a

priori is actually produced by this narrative where fragments of evidence are read by the

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detective to create an account of crime and identity. The trace narrative is an
interdiscursively produced epistemological paradigm for knowing identity, where
narrative ﬁction borrows from science and science borrows from the conventions of
narrative ﬁction.

Critics have largely recognized Conan Doyle as the inventor of the modern
detective archetype, and the popularity of the Holmes narratives produced a spate of
imitations on both sides of the Atlantic.9 In 1910, a new detective appeared on the
American scene—Craig Kennedy, Scientiﬁc Detective—who was widely advertised in
the American and British popular press as the “American Sherlock Hohnes.” 10 Like
Conan Doyle, author Arthur Reeves was something of an expert-in-the-ﬁeld of scientiﬁc
detection, if to dramatically lesser extent.11 Explicitly and unabashedly, the Kennedy
series mimics the Hohnes narratives in terms of convention and plot. Kennedy and his
sidekick Walter Jameson are obvious imitations of Holmes and his Watson; Jameson, a
yellow-page journalist narrates each tale of the miracles in detection performed by his
roommate, Dr. Kennedy, a professor of chemistry at the University of Chicago. In
literary serial ﬁction, the Kennedy escapades generated enthusiastic reader response in
the United States and were also the ﬁrst mysteries by an American author to gain a wide
readership in Great Britain. Kennedy swiftly became one of the most popular detectives
for several years, appearing not only within serial ﬁction but numerous silent ﬁlms, also
written by Reeve, where the central heroine would be rescued from death at the last
moment by the white-coated Kennedy.12

While Holmes might “embody” the devices of forensic detection, however, the

Kennedy plots contrast in the consistent and spectacular representation of the methods of

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forensic science. Kennedy maintains that the “[t]he methods employed in the detection of
crime are, or rather should be, like the methods employed in the process of discovering
scientiﬁc truth”; in turn, each Kennedy plot insists upon the uncomplicated scientiﬁc or
technical resolution of all mysteries. Situated within an American context of
modernization where “the social distribution of knowledge begins a major shift” and a
transference (as far as technology and technique are concerned) from bottom to top,”
Craig Kennedy thus epitomizes a new distinctly American cultural hero described by
cultural theorists such as Trachtenburg and Tichi (Trachtenburg 163). He is a highly
trained expert who can shift aside the traditional and “brutish” tactics of law enforcement
for the specialized and arcane knowledge of science, and so advance and even “save”
society from its own evils.l3 For instance, the short story “Helen Bond,” later published
as “The Scientiﬁc Cracksman,” appeared in the pages of Cosmopolitan in 1910 just six
months before the historical Crispi case, where F aurot would demonstrate in dazzling
display of ﬁngerprinting analysis for the jury. The large proportion of Kennedy’s
adventures connotes Faurot’s performance of science. While F aurot created an ad hoc
laboratory within the courtroom, the narrative conclusion of each Kennedy tale takes
place similarly—within Kennedy’s own laboratory, or within one he has swiftly put
together at the site of the crime. Each demonstration is witnessed by the necessary cadre
of potential suspects and witnesses. A detective or two will also be present, and ready to
arrest the perpetrator who “confesses” his or her guilt via the evidence Kennedy brings
forth. In the process, old forms of criminal justice are displaced for the higher form of

truth, Science.

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In an interchange occurring in the opening paragraphs of this ﬁrst Kennedy tale,
Jameson, like a naive Watson in The Study in Scarlet, acts as the perfect narrative foil for
the scientist, denouncing that such skills could be learned, but that the good detective is
“born and bred to it.” While college professors might be equipped to study the sociology
of crime, he asserts, “for the detection of it, give me a Bymes” (1). Jameson thus
articulates, if brieﬂy, an ambivalent regard for the application of science to areas
traditionally taken care of by law men typiﬁed by Bymes—men who were not afraid to
get their hands dirty, ruling and controlling the masses with an innate sense of the
criminal underworld and its morés. Kennedy counters:

Colleges have gone a long way from the old ideal of pure culture. They
have got down to solving the hard facts of life—pretty nearly all, except
one. They still treat crime in the old way, study its statistics and pore over
its causes and the theories of how it can be prevented. But as for running
the criminal himself down, scientiﬁcally, relentlessly—bah! We haven’t
made an inch of progress since the hammer and tongs method of your
Bymes. (2)

As writers for McClure 's and The Scientiﬁc American decried the “medieval”
tactics of American policing, Kennedy makes the very same case. He dismisses”
American methods of law enforcement as retrograde and un-evolved, he explains, “[W]e
are mere children beside a dozen crime-specialists in Paris, whom I could name” (1 -2).
The case concerns the tracking down of an unknown individual who mysteriously
cracked into a safe but apparently took nothing from its contents. This “scientiﬁc

cracksman,” Kennedy notes with admiration, has managed to avoid leaving prints

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through an ingenious method, though he “didn’t know criminals in America knew that
stunt” though “up-to-date criminals in Europe” apparently quickly learned to wear gloves
to hide their prints. This case, Kennedy sees, signals the ﬁrst wave of crime by
“scientiﬁc criminals,” who, “schooled” in Europe would require a worthy foil, similarly
schooled in European methods of detection, similarly erudite and far-advanced over the
primitive individuals of American police force.

The pursuit of scientiﬁc detection, then, posits that positive knowledge of the
criminal must approach it as natural phenomena, with its properties or “identities”
veriﬁed by the empirical sciences. The scientiﬁc approach to detection, Kennedy insists,
need pay no regard to social factors. Instead, this worldview classiﬁes “the criminal
himself” as an object of technical intervention and scientiﬁc knowledge. As with
Bertillon’s nominalist system of identiﬁcation, such knowledge reveals nothing about the
innate or typical character of the criminal, but locates truth in the literal, empirical facts
of the material. Compared to the tracing of germs, identity is reduced to nothing more
signiﬁcant than a cluster of bacterium, which can be located and seen in the microscopic
depths of the body. The “forcing of man’s secrets is like the forcing of nature’s secrets,”
Kennedy explains, with the only difference in the laboratory being the subject matter.
“Both are pieces of detective wor ” (4)

The central narrative premise of the Kennedy series is that thanks to advances in
science, the identity a speciﬁc individual is always discoverable. “The Case of Helen
Bond,” is thus described as the “ﬁrst of a series of unusual detective stories in which the
professor of criminal science adopts the new method of making the criminal discover

himself, and throughout his adventures Kennedy managed to elicit this metaphorical form

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of criminal “self betrayal” via his ability to read identity into material evidence (2).
Whereas Holmes reads identity into the invisible or “unnoticed” marks upon the criminal
body and its traces, Kennedy’s technologically assisted gaze extends further into the very
cellular makeup of material identity, as applies “science to the detection of crime” by
“the same sort of methods by which you trace out the presence of a chemical, or run an
unknown germ to earth” (“Silent Bullet” 3).

Kennedy astounds Jameson (and the reader) with the astonishing amount of
information about identity that he can garner from even the tiniest trace of evidence.
In The Silent Bullet the detective, echoing Holmes in The Study in Scarlet, speaks
excitedly of a dramatic new “discovery” and test for typing blood, one that will surely
revolutionize the identiﬁcation of criminals. By the time the Kennedy series was ﬁrst
published, the precipitin test for distinguishing animal from human blood had been
perfected, although the procedure involved nothing more than using enzymes as reagents
to separate blood into categories of species. Kennedy’s rendition of the “discovery”
suggests rather more, however, as he explains how the Carnegie Institute’s minute study
of blood has in fact helped to reclassify the entire animal kingdom, adding some
“surprising additions to our knowledge of evolution.” Not only has this test “revealed”
distinct differences between blood of various species, Kennedy explains, they also
revealed that “the blood of a certain group of the human race gives a reaction much like
the blood of a certain group of monkeys, the chimpanzees, while the blood of another
branch gives a reaction like that of a gorilla.” Kennedy recounts this discovery so he can
explain its signiﬁcance to a case he just recently solved, concerning the mystery of a

wealthy man, found murdered on the side of the road. Thanks to this technique, Kennedy

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could determine that the bloodstain found on a handkerchief next to the victim was that
of the “negro waiter,” who, prior to the test, had produced a water-tight alibi.

Kennedy’s reading of the blood spot “proves” that in the biological features of
the racially-typed blood, the “natural” signs of degeneracy and criminal behavior can be
detected. Evocative of a savage criminal body, the negro waiter, is connected to a
description of the typical “negro” blood type, and the text of the blood sample is
exchanged for that of social Darwinism and eugenics. In this instance, the blood sample
(like the ﬁngerprint for Galton) is deciphered as a coded text, and in it Kennedy “reads”
the identity of the culprit and evidence of an evolutionary hierarchy that conﬁrms the
biological supremacy of whites. Kennedy notes that even before starting his tests he had
known the waiter did it, demonstrating that the test merely reveals a known truth about
the “innate” identity of this type.

Kennedy’s account here, however, functions merely as a side-note within the tale
of another mystery, where the perpetrator is far less “obvious” and typical than his black
counter-part. In the case of the “negro waiter” Kennedy was not required to visit the
scene of the crime to establish any motive or account of the events that occurred. He
“knew” it was the waiter all along, and the blood test merely conﬁrms what “naturally”
had to occur. Kennedy thus clinches the case, and elicits a confession all from the
conﬁnes of his laboratory. Kennedy’s involvement in other “high class” cases, of course,
requires much more direct involvement and social delicacy on the part of the scientist.

The process of making the criminal “discover himself” in these tales is therefore
much more complex than the simple matter of classifying blood to read racial and/or

criminal identity. For the most part, Kennedy does not concern himself with the criminal

98

classes; instead he focuses his skills on locating criminals who pass unnoticed for what
they are in the circles of high society and blood tests to determine the race and
evolutionary rank are never required. Kennedy instead unlocks the identities of his
criminals--rogue lawyers, corrupt businessmen, vanquished socialites--with more
sophisticated devices: handwriting analysis and lie-detectors, for instance. Nonetheless,
as in the case of “the negro waiter” within each tale the resolution of the mystery is
achieved in much the same manner. Kennedy analyzes the material evidence of crime,
and by conducting a series of tests, normally in the presence of all involved, points the
ﬁnger to the perpetrator who promptly confesses guilt.

It is this biologically superior class of criminal that preoccupies the vast amount
of the Kennedy cases, for it is these “undetected” criminals that require more subtle and
absolute methods of detection. A gentleman detective and scientist, Kennedy is never
required to sully his hands by dealing with the criminal under classes. The incident of the
bloodstain is discussed in the opening pages of an altogether different type of mystery,
where the identity of the person who murdered a wealthy broker with a silent bullet is
much more clever and mysterious, and clearly the work of a “superior” form of criminal
mind. While the murder Kennedy recounts in the early passages is an act of violence and
aggression, with the victim lying robbed and bludgeoned to death on the side of a road,
Kennedy mysteries largely deal with the pursuit of criminals who ﬁnd more subtle and
“civilized” means to manipulate, extort, and murder.

Despite the thrill of the invocation of “the scientiﬁc criminal,” however,
Kennedy’s criminals are entirely devoid of character, completely ﬂat and appearing only

as vehicles through which Kennedy can perform his feats of identiﬁcation. “The

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unlocking of man’s secrets” in this sense requires the reduction of what is hidden to
nothing of any more metaphysical signiﬁcance than a printout from a lie-detector, the
classiﬁcation of a ﬁngerprint, or the analysis of a blood sample. Similarly, the
signiﬁcance of the physical evidence that is brought forth in each case is inﬂated to such
a degree that Reeves has to compensate by somewhat chaotically interjecting rapid
accounts of events not provided by science even while Kennedy, mysteriously, can assert
that the evidence already led him to such conclusions.

The case of “The Silent Bullet,” for instance, centers on the murder of a banker
who publicly fell dead from a bullet wound. Mysteriously, according to witnesses, “no
shot was ﬁred, no smoke was seen, no noise was heard, nor was any weapon foun ” and
yet the coroner recovers a “thirty-two-calibre bullet” from the victim’s neck. After
scrutinizing the bullet for a few moments, “with his inevitable magnifying glass,”
Kennedy pronounces, remarkably, that based on this evidence alone “we shall be able to
put our hands on the murderer—I think we can get a conviction, sir, on the evidence that
I shall get on the bullet in my laboratory.” His assertion works to support his central
theoretical principle—that the empirical facts of a crime will lead to the identity of the
criminal. This is a principle consistently maintained, if not demonstrated, throughout the
Kennedy tales.

While the interpretation of the ballistic evidence immediately illuminates
something to Kennedy, its relevancy in the case of Parker is withheld until the concluding
pages of the tale, where it is translated along with an array of other evidence gathered in
the pursuit. Instead, the narrative is propelled forth, not by the reading of evidence, but

by the recounting of events by trustworthy witnesses and even details of damning

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hearsay-evidence supplied by newspaper men, who are acquaintances of Jameson. In
terms of plot development, the reading of empirical evidence is clearly not sufﬁcient in
propelling the narrative. The events of the murder, for instance, are not clear from
interpretation of the crime scene itself and are recounted by a loyal and conﬁdential clerk
to the broker. Until the scientiﬁc revelations that conclude and resolve the tale, Kennedy
pursues the decidedly subjective back-story to Parker’s demise—the origin of the letter,
and the motive of any potential murder. Jameson’s role as journalist and connection to
the managing editor on the Star also proves pivotal in the discovery of what led up to the
event of death.

Reeves, through Kennedy, takes some pains to foreground that such non-forensic
plot devices merely substantiate what is already “known” vis-a-vis science: “In a crime of
this sort, two kinds of evidence need to be secured. Circumstantial evidence must ﬁrst be
marshaled, and then a motive must be found. I have been gathering facts. But to omit
facts and rest contented with mere facts would be inconclusive.” Thus, when Jameson
recounts what he has learned, “Kennedy raised his eyebrows only a fraction of an inch.

“1 had guessed something of the sort,” he said merely. “I’m glad to ﬁnd it conﬁrmed even
by hearsay evidence”” (25). While Kennedy asserts that “one shouldn’t let any
preconceived hypothesis stand between him and the truth” and that he is willing to “make
a new guess” should his theory based on empirical facts be proven wrong, he is, of
course, rarely pushed into such complications. His reading of circumstantial (in this
context, material) evidence always brings the truth, even if in terms of the overarching
narrative plot relies on questions of motive. Kennedy as “scientiﬁc detective”

consistently restates his scientiﬁc principles that circumstantial evidence is primary--he

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already had secured the knowledge of what Jameson had discovered through laborious
account, although how we do not learn.

In order to demonstrate this centrality of the material evidence in creating a full
account of events and the criminal perpetrator, Kennedy performs a series of forensic
tests in the presence of the suspects of the case. In light of these performances—a
ballistic test and ﬁber analysis, Kennedy states: “I think it is almost unnecessary to add
that in the present case we know precisely who——-,” but does not need to complete his
sentence as one suspect “Miss La Neige” succumbs and confesses to her part in the
crime. Before she can continue, and ﬁll in the details of the rest of crime and her
accomplice, Kennedy swiftly silences her, stating that the “truth must come out,” but
through scientiﬁc means.

Kennedy so returns to the ballistic evidence, where he produces more condemning
evidence over the silencer device. Within the room “to all outward appearances not a
heart beat was quickened. Someone in that room had an amazing store of self-
possession.” Kennedy, still withholding the information of the killer, completes his
performance with a more stunning demonstration, and promptly informs the group that
each suspect has, in fact, been undergoing a psychological test during the entire
proceeding:

Each of your chairs is wired under the arm in such a way as to betray on
an appropriate indicator in the next room every sudden and undue
emotion. Though it may be concealed from the eye, even of one like me
who stands facing you, such emotion nevertheless is expressed by physical

pressure on the arms of the chair. (32)

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The murderer is revealed as Mr. Bruce, a character who does not speak a single
line throughout the tale, has until the climactic scene been able to “conceal from the eye”
his true guilt and identity. Even under the conditions of the laboratory, he maintains that
“amazing store of self-possession.” However, with the “pulsation device” Kennedy has
assembled in his laboratory, Bruce is forced to speak another form of testimony, which he
provides via the strip of quantitative data that is “merely noted” by a student concealed in
another room. Bruce thus supplies a permanent, written record of otherwise undetectable
information about the hidden condition of his guilt, which is rendered equivalent to the
“curves drawn by the self-recording pens on regular ruled paper.” The student has thus
“merely noted what took place in the lecture-room as corresponding to these curves” (32-
33).

Kennedy refers to the readings as Bruce’s “automatic record,” emphasizing how
the human body, machine-like, might involuntarily produce such a text in the hands of
science and the psychological device. Indeed, the Kennedy plots suspects and witnesses
rarely speak directly; they function merely as vehicles for demonstrating the devastating
impact of science on crime or on discenring guilt. It is these criminal bodies that instead
provide testimony by leaving traces of their past behind in the present, distorted and all-
but indecipherable traces that can be interpreted only by the trained expert, who reads the
trace to enable a truthful and gapless reconstruction of the past. Here, the psychological
apparatus, whether a lie-detector or a simple word-association test, is conveyed as
equivalent to the application of the hard sciences to questions of crime, and indeed
becomes the detective’s instrument of choice in eliciting the ﬁnal testimony of guilt.

Moving swiftly from a demonstration of ﬁngerprinting to psychological tests, these plots

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make no distinction between the veracity and probative weight of the “evidence”
produced by either process. Both are conveyed as forms of unwilled testimony, self-
betrayal on the part of a criminal who has been able to conceal true identity.

Certainly, Kennedy’s propensity to produce a lie detector at the denouement of
each of his cases dates the ﬁction signiﬁcantly and is perhaps one of the central reasons
for its demise in the 19208 when the scientiﬁc credibility of the apparatus was
fundamentally challenged by the 1923 case of Frye v. the United States. As an author,
Reeve’s aim to demonstrate the role of scientiﬁc detection and circumstantial evidence
means that plot and even logic are sacriﬁced to the spectacle of forensic detection (Miss
La Neige’s and Bruce’s guilt could have easily been ascertained with some simple
questioning based on the evidence, for example). This characteristic of the scientiﬁc
detective plot, and the overdetermined role of forensic technologies in questions of
identity, was quickly lampooned by satirical presses such as Puck magazine, whose
Sprague Hennerby would much rather deploy bizarre devices such as “Thorwaldsen’s
lately invented facio-tictacometer to determine identity than simply ask the name of an
individual, or to deploy a modicum of ‘common sense’ in considering why a certain
crime might have been committed (6).

This lean towards literal metonymy, where an individual’s identity is reduced to
nothing more than the metaphysical equivalent of a trace of evidence such as a ﬁngerprint
or blood test is arguably what informs the ultimate failure of the Kennedy narratives. On
one level, the Craig Kennedy Series’ fall from grace might well be due to how swiftly the
“new” technologies depicted in the adventure became outmoded and even ridiculous.”

Indeed, the later stories in the series certainly embarked more into the terrain of science

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ﬁction fantasy, a genre that was beginning to grip the popular imaginary.15 However, the
failure of Kennedy’s tales also stems from the over-privileged role of scientiﬁc apparatus
and positivist logic within the tales, a tendency that reveals how the most “scientiﬁc” of
narratives depends on other modes of truth-telling in order (paradoxically) to be
satisfying forensic narratives. In line with theories of “scientiﬁc detection” abounding at
the time, Kennedy asserts that all that is needed to reach truth is knowledge of material
truths, the empirical facts. But to form a narrative of guilt such knowledge is not enough
at all. Where in the Holmes narratives we rely on the narration of Watson to draw
character, the Kennedy series completely sacriﬁces character to the lavish display of
forensics; and thus the purely scientiﬁc, nominalist reading of trace makes for a very ﬂat
and one-dimensional narrative. The success of the forensic narrative, as I discuss in the
next chapter, relies on the transformation of trace into a symbolic and uncanny signiﬁer,
where the skill of the detective is not simply the mastery of the scientiﬁc method, but the
imaginative ability to access the profundity of human nature.

Signiﬁcantly, the ﬁnal of the Kennedy series, Atavar, was published in 1924, just
one year after the Frye hearings would transform the evidentiary role of lie-detector
results and the status of science itself within the courtroom. In the 1923 decision of Frye
v. United States, a District of Columbia circuit court ruled against the admissibility of lie
detector evidence in a murder case because the technology had not been accepted in the
relevant scientiﬁc community. This general standard has been followed by most state
courts when the question arises as to whether novel scientiﬁc evidence should be

allowed. By this standard, prosecution and defense are granted the opportunity to attack

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adverse scientiﬁc evidence, and the role of science, and the scientiﬁc expert becomes far
less secure and authoritative within the court of law:
Just when a scientiﬁc principle or discovery crosses the line between the
experimental and demonstrable is difﬁcult to deﬁne. Somewhere in this
twilight zone the evidential force of the principle must be recognized, and
while courts will go a long way in admitting expert testimony deduced
from a well-organized scientiﬁc principle or discovery, the thing ﬁ'om
which the deduction is made must be sufﬁciently established to have
gained general acceptance in the particular ﬁeld in which it belongs. (293)
As Thomas has argued, in the decades preceding the hearings, the scientiﬁc detective
story “explores that medico-legal twilight zone and tells the story of that competition by
presenting the literary detective a8 a ‘thinking machine’ or rational superhero who is able
to detect the truth that conventional representatives of the law cannot” (3 3). Nonetheless,
the legal rejection of the lie-detector during this period suggests a broader cultural
disillusionment with devices that can purportedly “unlock” the secrets of the individual,
and reduce those secrets to nothing more than an analog printout or the results of a lab
test and are thus fool-able.

This disillusionment is dramatically articulated within the form of detective
ﬁction that would supplant the forensic in the United States. Thomas notes that the
invention of the hard-boiled tradition of detective ﬁction in the early twentieth century
might be read as a critique of the assumptions underpinning the forensic narrative,
speciﬁcally the scientiﬁc ideal of objective truth, and its propensity to equate the

resolution of crime with the question of identity. Dashiell Harnmett’s Red Harvest, ﬁrst

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published in 1929, features a detective who “is not required to solve a mystery that took
place in the past, but to survive in a continuously escalating environment of violence in
the present.” Hammett’s Continental Operative, like the long line of hard-boiled
detectives who would follow him, is not ordered to “identify or bring to justice a single
culprit but to investigate a proliferating state of corruption that can at best be destabilized,
not corrected” (91). The ratiocinative detective certainly did not disappear in the
following decades, and the hard-boiled detective’s European counterparts, Christie’s
Poirot and Sayer’s Lord Peter Wimsey, can be deﬁned by their ability to apply
methodical and deductive reasoning to the question of crime. Nonetheless, these ﬁctions
can also be deﬁned by their speciﬁc attention to the interior motive of the criminal mind,
the intriguing “why” as opposed to the dry facts of “what.”

The genre of scientiﬁc detective ﬁction also mutated into the emergent sub-genre
of the police procedural, which highlighted the speciﬁc techniques and processes used by
law enforcers, and the primacy of hard evidence or “just the facts” in investigating
crimes. Emerging in the 19408 and 508 the procedural form, typiﬁed by radio programs
and television shows such as Dragnet, sought to present to the reader a realistic portrayal
of police methods by providing extensive details of police routine and investigation
techniques in the solving of the crime.16 Indeed, frequently within this subgenre, crime
itself is depicted as secondary to the speciﬁc details of a crime and the techniques
employed by the police to solve it; thus larger questions of justice, human psychology,
and social order are relegated to second place in relation to the details of daily life in a

police station or to the scientiﬁc and/or police techniques employed in solving the crime.

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Nonetheless, the traits that deﬁne the tales of scientiﬁc detection at the turn of the
nineteenth-century, speciﬁcally the privileging of traces of physical evidence over
questions of motive and character, resurge in the contemporary versions of the “scientiﬁc
detective” narrative we see in the televised plots of C. SJ. and within the pages of Patricia
Cornwell and Jeffrey Deaver. While procedurals are normally presented from the point
of view of a police detective, more recently such detectives are not necessarily police
ofﬁcers but expert ﬁgures such as medical examiners or crime scene technicians, where
the procedures of forensic science take--at least superﬁcially--precedence over other
forms of detection. C.S.I. for instance, attempts to suppress the attention paid to the
personal character of the detective(s) or suspects in order to focus on the science of
forensics itself.l7 Driven by plots saturated with forensic detail, contemporary narratives
of forensic detection return to the fantasy where scientiﬁc obj ectivism can dislocate all
alternative forms of historical account and even replace law itself. The “twilight zone”
addressed in the Frye hearings reappears with force in the context of legal negotiation
over the most revolutionary and “novel” of scientiﬁc techniques—DNA proﬁling. Like
photography and ﬁngerprinting, the inception of DNA proﬁling raises but also heightens
anxieties and questions over the relation of such knowledge, not only to criminal trials,
but to fundamental and metaphysical questions over the relation of identiﬁcation to
identity, individuality, and self. Contemporary forensic narratives mediate between the
statuses of trace a8 a mere literal fragment and as an uncanny and even transcendental

form of signiﬁcation.

 

' Quoted from page 283 of “Science and Justice” in Scientiﬁc American (1858).
2

Page 825
3 Page 278

108

 

‘ Page 119

5 Welsh writes: “Trials were changing from a scene dominated by witnesses to one dominated by lawyers. .
. and from the cautious admission of anything other than direct testimony to the professional management
of a mixture of evidence” (35). Theories and procedural guidelines for this new “science of proof” were
comprehensively formulated ﬁrst in A Treatise of Judicial E vidence (1825) by England’s Jeremy Bentham,
and at the turn of the century by American John Wigmore with the publication of the vastly inﬂuential The
Principles of Judicial Proof( 1913).

6 Cole notes that ﬁngerprint identiﬁcation and the role of such evidentiary proofs became routine during
this period not only because the technology was reﬁned, but also because of the emerging professionalism
of police: “The police were increasingly perceived like impartial scientists and less like political thugs in
the employ of party machines. The “scientiﬁc policing movement, led by Berkeley Chief August Vollrner
and his “college cops,’ enhanced the credibility of the kind of police science of which ﬁngerprinting was a
prime example” (200). See also Walker’s A Critical History of Police Reform: The Emergence of
Professionalism and Police in Urban America, I 860-1920.

7 Twining notes that “Few works in the history of Anglo-American legal scholarship have been so highly
praised or have dominated a ﬁeld so thoroughly or for so long” (111).

Twining also notes that Wigmore was perhaps insufﬁciently critical of the claims of scientiﬁc crime
detection: “Wignrore did not theorize much about his conception of science. From what he says in the
Principles about psychology, forensic science and the science of proof itself, one may reasonably infer that
he held a simple view of science as representing a steady pushing forward of the frontiers of knowledge
through the accumulation of more and better data and generalizations tested by research” (141).

9 The most immediate irrrpact of Holmes, Stephen Wright writes, was found in short stories depicting
“scientiﬁc detectives.” “One approach was to take him seriously as a rational supemran and to generate
even more intensiﬁed versions of his skills in intensely scientiﬁc detectives. . . . ” (68). Jacque Futrelle’s
The Thinking Machine, which featured Professor S.F.X. Van Dusen as a human “thinking machine” is the
most extreme example. (See also Kayman’s “The Short Story from Poe to Chesteron” for further discussion
of Futrelle). Other scientiﬁc detectives from this period include Balmer and Machbargs’ Luther Trant (in
America) and R. Austin Freeman’s Dr Thomdyke (in Britain). Knight says speciﬁcally of Thomdyke: “A
scientist and lawyer who practices in London’s legal district of the Inner tenrple, Thomdyke brings genuine
if sometimes over-detailed authority to scientiﬁc detection. Doyle had just guessed you could separate
tobacco ashes on sight or tell which way bicycle tracks were going (wrongly, as critics have showed);
Freeman gives the speciﬁcs” (69).

10 Advertisements for the books typically cited “Craig Kennedy, The American Sherlock Holmes. Arthur
B. Reeve, The American Conan Doyle” and especially highlighted how these works were advancements on
the Holmesian formula: “He has taken science—science that stands for this age—and allied it to the
mystery and romance of detective ﬁction. Even to the smallest detail, every bit of the plot is worked out
scientiﬁcally”

" Very little published research is available on Reeves and his Kennedy series, but Steinbrunner and
Penzler state that Reeve studied, but never practiced law—becoming a journalist instead. Reeve apparently
also wrote a series of articles on the subject of scientiﬁc detection, and during World War I he was asked to
help establish a spy and crime detection laboratory in Washington, DC. (340).

'2 Kennedy made his ﬁrst ﬁlm appearance in The Exploits of Elaine (1915). The two sequels featuring
Kennedy were The New Exploits of Elaine (191 5) and The Romance of Elaine ( 1916). In a ﬁfteen-chapter
ﬁlm serial of 1919, The Carter Case: The Craig Kennedy Serial the detective “uses the wireless and x-rays
and is shot with phosgene bullets and trapped in a vacuum room” (Steinbrunner and Penzler, 232).

'3 Tichi’s Shifting Gears and Trachtenburg’s The Incorporation of A merica both describe how new form of
“professional” hero emerged during this period of cultural transformation. Trachtenburg states that
“[a]long with the “quest for greater productivity” which enlarged the role of the accounting ofﬁce in
decisions relevant to materials and labor, transportation, advertising, and sales” another kind of abstract
calculation appeared in an “enlarged and more systematic role for science, for basic research as well as
applied science and engineering. Professional, white collar personnel expanded the size and inﬂuence of
office and laboratory, both increasingly distant from the shop ﬂoor but increasingly pertinent to the daily
arrangements and pace of factory life. Calculations of economy and of science developed in to professional

109

 

processes with their own skill and rules, but in the end their effects were felt in the changing relations
between human labor and machines, in the steady encroachment of mechanization on the forms of work, of
everyday life, and social transactions throughout America” (63).

I’ In 1946, Howard Haycraft described the lack of longevity offered by the Kennedy Series in these

terms: ’[H]e is, in fact, a pseudo scientist, utilizing all manner of strange divining machines and speculative
systems, and employing the latest “discoveries” in the realm of fantastic and theoretical physical research.
He is not unlike a composite of all the inventors and ballyhoo doctors of science who regularly supply
sensational research copy for the Sunday Supplemental magazines” (49).

'5 For example 1935’s Enter Craig Kennedy, which was published with a surrealist dust wrapper depicting
a robot-machine.

"5 The most prominent early American practitioner of this kind of ﬁction was Ed McBain whose 87th
Precinct novels focused on life in a big city police force. In Britain, John Creasy created the character of
Inspector Roger West of Scotland Yard who appeared in 40 novels beginning with Inspector West at Home
(1944). Early televised law and order show also followed this formula, most notably Dragnet (1951-1959).
Roof notes, “Dragnet organized and consolidated televisions somewhat disparate images of law
enforcement, private detectives, and law into the single, businesslike, straight-arrow ethical ﬁgure of police
Sergeant Joe Friday. . . . The show rrrirrricked documentary realism (“The story you are about to see is true.
Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent”) ﬁlming scenes on location and narrating an
overly detailed attention to exact time, police language, a seeming restriction to “just the facts,” and the
court’s disposition of the offenders” (124). Contemporary law and order shows such as N YPD Blue,
Homicide and Law and Order also utilize these conventions, though, as Roof argues, with differing
ideological effect.

'7 Though, as I note in the opening chapter, C.S.I. relies far less on “science” to propel its narrative than its
surrounding hype would suggest.

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Chapter Four

Empirical/Uncanny: Trace Paradoxes in Contemporary Forensic Narratives

The long arm of DNA investigation reached into history to implicate Thomas
Jefferson in an extramarital affair with a slave, helped identify the remains of the
last Russian Tsar and his family and sealed the case that President Clinton was the
source of the world’s most famous dress stain. (Jeffrey Kluger, “DNA Detectives”

1999)‘

For more than a hundred years the murders have remained among the world’s
greatest unsolved crimes, and a wealth of theories have been posited which have
pointed the ﬁnger at royalty, a barber, a doctor, a woman, and an artist. Using her
formidable range of forensic and technical skills, bestselling author Patricia
Comwell has applied the rigorous discipline of twenty-ﬁrst-century police
investigation to the extant material, and here presents the hard evidence that the
perpetrator was . . . (“Frontispiece,” Portrait of Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case

Closed 2002 )2

111

In November 2002, following the release of her ﬁrst work of nonﬁction, Portrait
of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed, Patricia Comwell gave a lecture at the
University of Tennessee at Knoxville. The cost for attending the sold-out lecture was
ﬁfty dollars, with proceeds going to the University’s Forensic School. Press coverage of
the event noted the discernible presence of heavily-armed security; Comwell’s lecture
was certainly a celebrity occasion, and she did not fail to deliver. According to coverage,
Comwell walked onto stage to rapturous applause, wearing a blue Windbreaker with the
word FORENSICS emblazoned on the back--a gift from the School. As the applause
died down, she opened the lecture by saying “The reason we were able to catch this son
of a bitch is one word...” and with that, she stepped out from behind the podium, turning
around and throwing her arms into the air, and then pumping her arms and ﬁsts
downward, pointing to the yellow FORENSICS on her back. The crowd once again
“erupted into a riotous standing ovation” (Medine 23). With the publication of Portrait of
a Killer Comwell appears to have brought forensic science to its pinnacle, using it to
“solve” what has become the one of the most notorious and debated hunts for criminal
identity of all time. Finally, it seems, the real Jack the Ripper is “revealed” to us as none
other than Walter Sickert, post-Impressionist painter.

Portrait of a Killer details how forensic science has apparently solved one of
history’s most famously debated mysteries. Though not a certiﬁed forensic scientist,
Comwell’s widespread inﬂuence in the ﬁeld of forensic science, along with the
tremendous wealth accumulated from her sales, has allowed her to pursue the ultimate
“unsub”--or unknown subj ect-~of all time. One hundred years of investigation and

hundreds of publications could not satisfactorily resolve the identity of the Ripper, but

112

Comwell, after just eighteen months of investigation (she claims that before this time she
had never even heard of the killings) and millions of dollars of her own money, has
apparently produced the “hard evidence,” those scientiﬁc facts that reveal Sickert as the
“evil sonofabitch” who committed the crimes.3 Comwell’s dubiously argued and
somewhat histrionic book may simply be dismissed as a work of no relevance to
contemporary matters concerning criminal justice and the role of forensic science in
contemporary society. Ripperologists” might balk, as might Walter Sickert devotees, but
in the end Comwell’s hobby-horse is precisely that—a marketing device to boost sales of
her ﬁction and her proﬁle as the real-deal. Indeed, despite the assertion that the identity
of the Ripper is revealed through the hard facts of physical evidence, the book is far less
an exposition of the forensic method than an account of Comwell’s obsession with an
artist whose paintings she found offensive. Portrait of a Killer is indeed just that--a
highly impressionistic account of Comwell’s interpretation of the so-called “facts.” In
the previous chapter I illustrated how the discursive technologies of the scientiﬁc
detective borrowed heavily from the narrative conventions of detective ﬁction. Here the
premiere author of forensic detective ﬁction herself turns forensic specialist.

Comwell’s foray into “real-life” forensics, after more than a decade of penning
her ﬁctional forensic detective series demonstrates a particular hubris that actually
characterizes a great deal of the contemporary “real” or “genuine” forensic narratives that
dominate the mass media. Within these accounts forensics can literally reach back into
time to “reveal” the deﬁnitive truth of events through identity, and control messy and
multitudinous accounts into the seamless logic of detection. A8 I shall discuss ﬁrrther

along in this chapter, Comwell’s overdetermined attempts to resolve the identity of the

113

Sickert she locates within personal memoirs, photographs, and his art with the “physical
evidence” she purports to have traced, highlights how the truth-telling effect of
“scientiﬁc” empirical evidence is extended when “traces” are transformed from literal
facts to symbolic, even uncanny, signs; moreover, such gestures illustrate how the truth-
effect of Comwell’s distinctly subjective and slanted research into the life of Sickert is
extended when placed in close proximity to empirical “evidence.” In cases such as
Portrait of a Killer, along with the myriad of other “History’s Mysteries” solved via
forensics that dominate primetime, these forensic narratives attempt to control tightly
historical accounts through the monolithic revelations.

While the words and action of historical ﬁgures are documented and archived, the
narratives of DNA detection suggest their genetic proﬁles might better reveal them to us.
DNA becomes, in effect, a sound bite, “a quick and supposedly deﬁnitive source of
historical information, less dusty and less confusing than the archive” (Andrews 179-
180). A8 I have discussed throughout this project, popular narratives of forensic
detection--and many of the other forms of discourse surrounding forensic science--
hyperbolically assert “science” as a higher form of justice, a purer form of the law,
distanced from the messy subjectivity and endless litigation hearings that pollute the
criminal justice system. If the vast potential of DNA and forensic science lay in its
ability to provide more hard “facts,” better the forensic and empirical paradigm of truth-
telling produces a whole narrative that ﬁlls in the gaps of knowledge, controlling and
rewriting historical accounts by ﬁxing the truth of identity.

In the ﬁrst chapter of this project I argued that though the central premise of

contemporary forensic narratives is that empirical “evidence never lies,” when it comes

114

to providing satisfying accounts of criminal acts and their perpetrators, that truth is found
lacking. The compensatory narrative gestures of televised forensics shows and detective
ﬁction, which typically resort to non-forensic means of truth-discovery, ﬁnd their
rudimentary form in early twentieth-century ﬁctions such as the Craig Kennedy series.
These stories provide an illuminating glimpse into the instabilities of a prototypical
formula that is reinvigorated with full force in contemporary forensic narratives. In the
contemporary versions of scientiﬁc detection, the truth conveyed by empirical science is
privileged as absolute and certain, and, like the Kennedy adventures, center on the
spectacle of science itself. But such truth and such spectacle cannot adequately carry the
weight of plot or character development.

Contemporary forensic narratives consistently resort to distinctly non-forensic and
metaphorical modes of truth-seeking in its dispensing of “empirical” truths. Explicitly,
these narratives privilege the spectacle of forensic detection, and attention to the observed
“hard” facts, with protagonists frequently posturing over the irrelevancy of witness
testimony in light of such knowledge. However, these narratives also work to reconcile
the operations of positivism--which asserts the truth of identity to the literal matter of its
traces--by consistently exchanging the forensic mode of interpretation for a mode that is
concerned with character and metaphysical interiority. Identifying traces, for example,
are transformed from literal things into “essences” of identity, or uncanny signs that
connote presence and absence, the depth and profundity of that monstrous identity. This
contradictory and ambivalent characterization of identifying traces, and the

interconnected slippage between forensic modes of identiﬁcation and the pursuit of the

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“individual” in bourgeois sense, is more pronounced in contemporary discourses
surrounding the science.

DNA as the ultimate signiﬁer for identity, the “Code of Life,” brings the problem
of identity and essence explicitly to the forefront.4 Where, in the late nineteenth century,
ﬁngerprinting signaled the shift to a profoundly metonymic form of identiﬁcation, a sign
that signiﬁed uniqueness of identity by referring only to its own structure, DNA
“ﬁngerprinting” applies the same principles to the very structure of an individual’s genes.
Developed in 1984, DNA ﬁngerprints are analog representations of the loci where the
genetic code continually repeats or “stutters” a sequence of DNA base pairs (the pairs of
proteins that comprise the double helix strands of DNA).5 These Short Tandem Repeats--
or STRs--refer to the number of times an individual’s genome might repeat the pattern, a
repetition that varies sufﬁciently to determine the statistical probability of a match
between two samples. The potency of this technology stemmed ﬁom its ability to render
match probabilities of striking scale; at present if a match sample from the suspect is
available, and the evidentiary sample is free ﬁom contamination, probability matches can
be as high as one in several billion, which equates to a “statistical uniqueness.” Matches
are achieved, not by the establishment of the uniqueness of an individual’s entire genetic
sequence or “code,” as is commonly misconceived, but by the relative length of STR
patterning in comparison with another. DNA “prints” ignore the DNA in genes in favor
of the “junk DNA” in between, and in this, the process fundamentally contrasts with the
process of DNA sequencing which works to sequence genetic instructions for humans or

other species.

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Despite the fact that DNA ﬁngerprinting works only with “junk” DNA, from its
inception, the cultural concept of the DNA print has been popularly confused with the so-
called “genetic blueprint” for an individual. For instance, in 1988, The American Bar
Association pronounced that “[t]he test. . . . unlocks the secrets within DNA, or
deoxyribonucleic acid, which carries the genetic information that determines individual
characteristics such as eye color and body size” (66). In this context, though mere
“junk,” the DNA ﬁngerprint culturally connotes--erroneously--its more powerﬁrl genetic
counterpart, which culturally suggests “an enumerable series of chained signiﬁers that
accounts for every fact, aspect, chemical operation, and anatomical morsel of human
existence” (Roof 172)6. Current methods of DNA typing do not look at the entire DNA
sequence, but visualize only a few loci, a minute fraction of all the information available
on the entire human gene sequence, a numeric series represented by the analog image of
the STR “bar code.” Despite the fact the DNA reveals nothing more than an identifying
pattern, connoting nothing more than its own unique structure as an identifying trace
within popular discourses surrounding forensics, in varying ways DNA signiﬁes whole
identity, and its evidentiary value has been overblown.

Forensic methods have been brought into the realm of historical “mysteries”; a
spate of feature articles in the late nineties concerning “DNA Detectives” not only
outlined the processes of the new form of forensic identiﬁcation, but foregrounded the
potential of “the long arm of DNA investigation” to reach back and solve mysteries from
the past.7 The integration of forensics into historical method supplies deﬁnitive “facts” to
questions that had previously been of historical conjecture; a new breed of “history

detectives” brought “high tech” forensic methods to the seeking of historical Truth.

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Popular coverage of forensics especially dwell on the fact that DNA proﬁling as an
investigative technique was recently brought to bear upon the identity of one of the
Founding Fathers. While the sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his
slave, Sally Hemmings had been long asserted by Aﬁican-American historians, “[m]ost
scholars of the history of slavery had virtually ignored the circumstantial evidence so
obvious to Aﬁican-Americans, and they also dismissed the information that appeared in
slave memoirs” (Andrews 142). When DNA tests proved a genetic link between
Thomas Jefferson and the youngest son of Sally Hemmings, the results cast the
conclusive truth of the matter and brought the issue to the foreﬁ'ont of public attention.8
The timing of the discovery in 1999 at the same moment as Clinton’s DNA was
under scrutiny was not lost on the political press and popular media. Newsweek
described the discovery of the J efferson-Hemmings link and its connection to Clinton in
the following terms:
The long arm of DNA investigation reached into history to implicate
Thomas Jefferson in an extramarital affair with a slave, helped identify the
remains of the last Russian tsar and his family and sealed the case that
President Clinton was the source of the world’s most famous dress stain.
(66)
The articles surrounding “DNA detectives” during this period explicitly focused on
demystifying the technology of DNA typing, with most of its visual property given over
to graphical explanations of the complex process. Newsweek 's article features a montage
of images featuring Lewinsky’s infamous dress from the Starr report, Jefferson’s

presidential portrait, and a photograph of Sam Shepard, the ﬁrst man to be posthumously

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exonerated by DNA evidence. The images are bound together, marked off by a boundary
icon, the now ubiquitous strip of yellow crime scene tape that reads “Crime Scene: Do
not Cross.” This visual annotation imposes a playful commentary upon the piece, as the
DNA detectives make their “arrests.”

Nonetheless, this trio of images, juxtaposed against the blown- up images of STR
sequences and double helixes that dominate the feature, highlights the metonymic logic at
work within these narratives. The body of Clinton is not represented; instead, the
presidential body is displaced by a far more potent and readily available stand-in, the
stain of so-called “presidential semen” on that dress. The stain, which cannot of course
even be seen, can remain unseen, for not only is it indelible in the mind of the popular
imagination DNA detection assures that this microscopic sign of identity can be seen.
The synecdoche for the presidential body was no longer the White House, it seemed, but
a stain that bears the much more literal code of the President’s body.

The placement of the standard visual topography of forensic science--ﬁngerprints,
STR patterns, double helixes--alongside images of archival documents and photography
argues that one form of truth-telling has been deﬁnitively supplanted by another. More
radically, it demonstrates that such seeming deﬁnitiveness comes at the sacriﬁce of a
more mythic rendering of truth and identity; even the most venerable and symbolic of
identitie8--a Founding Father, a President--can be reduced to a question of empirical
facts. Conceived as the most deﬁnitive total signiﬁer for identity, DNA identiﬁcation
appears to bring the epistemological project of Enlightened knowledge to its culmination,
a project that overtly disavows the “mythic” to explain events and characters. But if this

leaning towards the metaphorical reveals instability within enlightened epistemology, in

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turn, as such articles show, the forensic paradigm rebuts or compensates with a spectacle
of images as facts that assure that science will always triumph, ﬁlling in any gaps and
glossing over inconsistencies in knowledge.

The intrinsically positivist bent of forensics--where the truths of past events and
identity are reduced to knowledge derived from empirical facts--radically undermines
essentialist concepts of identity and self. One example of the cultural fallout ﬁom “life”
reduced to empirical facts, is the concept of the " genetic self," the idea that essential
selﬂrood lies within the genetic sequence, and identifying traces more than literal facts,
but transcendental sigrriﬁers, a “sign of the self” that is predicted on a bourgeois ethos of
essential and unique individuality. In the early legal history of DNA in the United States,
this perception, along with the misconception of the DNA proﬁle as equivalent to the
harvesting of genetic sequences of speciﬁc individuals, triggered a debate over the
constitutionality of DNA proﬁling for the purposes of forensic identiﬁcation. In one
case, naval ofﬁcer Donald P. Power reﬁrsed to give a DNA specimen to the military on
the basis that it violated his religious principles as a Native American. He explained,
“[m]y body was a sacred recipe to me, and I didn’t think I should share it. . . They were
not holding a part of me on a shelf. . . You ﬁnd personal power in knowing who you are”
(Andrews 114). These declarations of rights, based on a speciﬁc view of DNA as
something more profound than an abstract code, typiﬁed the early legal struggles over
DNA proﬁling. Indeed, during the late eighties and early nineties, legal articles and notes
address their concerns over whether requirements to supply a sample could be deemed as
unreasonable search and seizure and so constitute a violation of both the Fourth and Fifth

Amendments. Debate centered upon the level of violation that required a DNA sample

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involved--for instance, whether such typing was simply another form of “nonviolative”
ﬁngerprinting, performed prior to any proof of reasonable cause, or whether DNA testing
of suspects and criminals constituted an unreasonable violation of the body, where one’s
privacy was dismissed as one’s very “lifecode” was harvested for means beyond the
individual’s control.9

This invocation of this bourgeois ethos of the self, encompassed by “the very
biological substance of people’s individuality,” triggered anxieties over the violating of
civil liberties and a concern that such technologies could erode The Bill of Rights
(Benavid 1). Of central concern in these discourses was the rapid development of
statewide and national identiﬁcation databases that would compile individual DNA
patterns for ready retrieval by investigators; such a DNA print bank would give
“unprecedented access to any information that could be determined from an individual’s
genetic code” (Pearsall 679). In a 1991 casein Virginia, six inmates from a correctional
facility challenged the state’s mandatory testing program as unconstitutional. While the
inmates conceded that prisoners do relinquish certain rights when they are incarcerated--
guards may enter their cells and search their property without ﬁrst obtaining a warrant or
pemrission--the taking of their body ﬂuids violated their right to bodily integrity, a right
they deﬁned as a distinctive category. The tissues of their body, their “genetic blueprint”
they maintained, should not be violated even in the context of the prison system. The
court disagreed, but one judge was troubled by the decision, conceding that although a
prison cell is not private, that “does not mean that body cells are not private” (105). As

one lawyer explained, such an exploration “makes many jurists and scientists nervous,

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raising such specters as invasion of privacy, a hunt for a ‘crime gene,’ lab mistakes that
falsely convicts someone, and racially prejudiced genetic tests” (Benavid 1).

In popular culture, ﬁctional negotiations of the meaning of DNA have been
relegated largely to the realm of science ﬁction and fantasy, where dystopic portrayals of
a world gone awry with cloning, genetic engineering, and scientiﬁc hubris demonstrated
a profound anxiety over the threat such technologies pose to a bourgeois ethos of self.lo
With the re-emerging forensic detective genre, the representation of DNA proﬁling and
forensic science is markedly less fraught in its imaginings. The invention of DNA
proﬁling and reﬁnement of forensic imaging with digitization techniques has triggered a
re-explosion in the popularity of this form of the scientiﬁc detective genre. Here,
forensic devices of detection are represented in far more spectacular and even reverential
tones--the scientiﬁc detective has returned, and so too have the devices that promise that
identity can be traced via physical evidence alone. Within these plots, issues of motive,
means, and opportunity are all subordinated to the question of what the evidence can tell
us.

Patricia Comwell’s 1990 work, Postmortem, widely acknowledged as the ﬁrst
detective novel to speciﬁcally dramatize contemporary advances in forensic science,
features Kay Scarpetta, forensic pathologist and Chief Medical Examiner of Virginia.
Contemporaneous with the early legal history of DNA evidence, Comwell’s novel
dramatizes how the new technology of DNA ﬁngerprinting can be used to track down a
killer. Pressured as a single female, but never as a scientist, critics have noted that
Scarpetta occupies an uneasy position as a “feminist detective” by virtue of this alliance

l

to science, and its cold rational empiricism.1 Certainly, Comwell’s work can be

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characterized by its deeply ambivalent treatment of gender and society. Sexual predators,
often “queered” criminals, are a threat precisely because of their ability to manipulate
their traces, even their ﬁngerprints and DNA traces, and thus evade the scientiﬁc gaze.
The popular appeal of the series appears to stem from the author’s expertise in
relating how the techniques of forensic science and narrative assurance that these
individuals can always be traced from the empirical facts of a crime. But in her
melodramatic pitting of the deeply rational and “civilized” scientist against the “hideous
irrationality” of the criminal, Comwell’s works can be characterized by a frenetic
straining for effect that actually counters the clinical aspects of the novels and transforms
“traces” from literal facts into deeply symbolic, gothic symbols:
It’s not like I’m fabricating spooks and phantoms. I mean, this is a reality:
that people are raped and shot and mugged and murdered and generally
there’s not necessarily an esoteric motivation behind it. And I like the
sort of fearful symmetry of having very civilized and human people who
are warring against this. (143)
Postmortem centers upon a serial rapist and murderer, “Mr Nobody,” who is literally
preying upon the women of Richmond. Early in the narrative, it is established that the
criminal in question is a “non-secreter,” a term referring to the fact that although the
killer leaves large amounts of semen at the scene, it is not possible to determine a blood-
type, and thus the evidence actually carries no identiﬁcatory or probative signiﬁcance.
Unnamed and untraceable, Mr Nobody is a monstrous and ghostly presence, and indeed,
in the opening passages of the book, the protagonist wakes from a dream where she has

been haunted by “a face, forrnless and inhuman” (17). Within a few pages, Scarpetta

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examines the body of Mr. Nobody’s victim in the pathology suite. As she casts a
phosphorescent wand over the body of the victim, she sees “[t]iny ﬁbers lit up like hot
wires”:
What we saw didn’t register at ﬁrst. The wand was probing several inches
of Lori Peterson’s right shoulder when directly over her right clavicle
three irregular smudges suddenly leapt out as they were painted with
phosphorous. We both stood still and stared. Then he whistled through
his teeth as a faint chill ran up my spine. . . The monster had signed his
work again. (22-23)
These thrilling traces of the killer are transformed from empirical evidence of identity
into uncanny signs, a “signature” that connotes the monstrous identity of the unsub we
cannot yet identify. As Scarpetta returns to her nightmares, the monster signiﬁed by the
trace haunts her dreams—where she can now “almost see” the face of the killer, though it
still “had no features” (34).

In a pivotal scene towards the conclusion, Scarpetta receives the DNA ﬁngerprint
evidence from the private lab. This is a pattern that resembles a “bar code,” Scarpetta
notes, to which Wesley responds dryly, “[t]oo bad we can’t run it over a scanner and
come up with his name.” While this is intended as a wry joke, Scarpetta suggests that
although “this doesn’t give us his identity” only a statistical match, nonetheless
“[e]verything about him is there.” Hidden within X-Ray image of vertical bands of
varying shades is “the microcosm of the total person, his life code.” The problem is
merely that “the technology isn’t sophisticated enough yet to read the speciﬁcs, such as

genetic defects, eye and hair color, that sort of thing. There are so many bands present

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covering so many points to the person’s genetic makeup, it’s simply too complex to
deﬁnitively make anything more out of it than a match or nonmatch” (271).

Here, in one of the earliest ﬁctional representations of DNA evidence, DNA
becomes a sign that can not only empirically identify the suspect, like a ﬁngerprint, but
connotes the killer in much more devastating and totalizing ways. Signifying an entire
individual, and standing in for unique individuality itself, the image is more than a
pattern; it is a code that could be decoded (just not yet) to reveal the entire individual.
Both Marino and Wesley’s presences in this scene are signiﬁcant, as two approaches to
identity—one based on forensic identiﬁcation, and the other based on questions of motive
and interiority—appear to merge seamlessly as both forensic scientist and proﬁler
examine the evidence together. In a narrative move that typiﬁes Comwell’s ﬁction,
Scarpetta moves from the processes of identifying the killer via the reading of physical
evidence, to that of reading the “clues” the killer has left on the victim’s body to “get
into” his mind. The application of forensics and the narrative logic of identiﬁcation--
where “identity” is a matter of chaining minute material evidence into a ﬁll] account of
guilt and identity--performs as an overlay that lends credence and scientiﬁc viability to
the distinctly non-forensic mode of “touching evil,” which is based on the ability to see
into the depths of human nature, and not on the processes of forensic identiﬁcation.

This paradoxical, compensatory gesture recurs throughout much if the serialized
forensic detective ﬁction that currently dominates the market. Ostensibly, novels like
Jeffrey Deaver’s The Bone Collector (1997) frmction as textbooks for understanding the
science of identiﬁcation complete with a glossary of forensic terms to educate the reader

on the methodologies and techniques used within the plot. Like Comwell, reviewers

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have consistently lauded Deaver for presenting “genuine forensic knowledge” to his
readers. The protagonist of the novel is Lincoln Rhyme, a former criminalist, injured on
the job four years before and rendered paraplegic. Languishing suicidal in his Manhattan
apartment, Rhyme is called upon to bring his expertise to a serial murder case that is
confounding the NYPD. As a master reader of the trace, a rationalist super-man, who is
almost literally the Cartesian “pure mind” in the literal machine, Rhyme consistently
asserts the primacy of physical evidence in conveying the truth. Resisting intuitive
questions of “why,” he states “[m]otive doesn’t interest me,” be consistently asserts
“[e]vidence interests me” (210). Indeed, literally anchored to his bed, it appears that
Rhyme can only read crime and criminal identity via the traces of evidence investigators
bring to his room, and this novel focuses explicitly on the investigation of trace evidence.
Explicitly, Collector is a narrative exposition of Locard’s Exchange Principle, the central
tenet of modern criminalistics, presenting a plot predicated on the principle that: “there is
always an exchange of physical evidence between the perpetrator and the crime scene or
victim, however minute or difﬁcult to detect that evidence might be” (426).

Though the protagonist explicitly defers questions of interiority and motive,
Collector nonetheless applies a series of plot devices to render the character of the
illusive “Unsub 823” who has perpetrated a rash of gruesome murders across New York
City. The most obvious of these devices is the use of a parallel ﬁrst-person narrative told
ﬁom the perspective of the killer, who in his own mind “lives” within an imagined
nineteenth-century New York. Similarly, Rhyme’s sidekick, the beautiful rookie cop,
Amelia Sachs, is constantly at odds with Rhyme over his inability to be “human” or to

see anything of any importance beyond the physical evidence. Rhyme relies on Sachs

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not only to be his “legs” but to emotionally identify with both victims and killer as she
reconstructs crimes scenes. As she works crime scenes, she locates physical evidence
that has clearly been planted which requires the investigators to interpret the evidence as
a clue to the personality, the essential character, and not simply the nominal identity of
the killer.

This conﬂation of identiﬁcation--the practical process of ascribing a classiﬁcatory
identity to an unsub--with revelation of the essential individuality of the criminal
highlights once more the central characteristic and paradox of the forensic narrative--the
impetus to ﬁx not only identity but essential individuality. While in forensic terms,
identiﬁcation, or the ascribing of identities, is a purely classiﬁcatory system of ordering
subjects—“typing” or evidence into categories of meaning, a name, a blood type, a
ﬁngerprint, an address, for instance—Sachs performs an alternative form of
identiﬁcation. Rhyme requires her to identify with the killer in order to read the unique
personality of Unsub 823, again not merely his name and address, but his “hopes and
aspirations” as well. Not only identity but individual interiority becomes recognizable
and chartable.

The narrative of Collector quite literally charts this sequential tracing of the killer,
with a representation of the whiteboard grid that breaks down information according to
“Appearance, Residence, Vehicle, and Other.” As more trace evidence and other clues
are brought to Rhyme—multiple dust samples, the “monstrous print” of a leather glove,
images of shoe-prints—the chart, which is intte ected throughout the book, becomes
gradually complete with factual detail. Unsub 823 is systematically transformed into an

identity (Appearance, Residence, Vehicle) and an individual (Other). It is not only

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discovered that he is a Caucasian male with slight build, but also that he may have dual
personalities and a keen sense of history. As Rhyme meditates at a moment when it
looks like the case was to be taken over by the FBI, they were “getting a feel for him,
starting to learn the unsub’s language, starting to see him” (208). As the chart ﬁlls with
information, a formerly cynical Sachs hones her craft and learns to look as Rhyme does.
Thus, as the novel progresses and Rhyme pursues Unsub 823, Amelia Sachs must
sift through the “burdensome weight of evidence,” and distinguish trace from other false
trails, for the central problem of the criminalist is “not that there’s too little evidence, but
that there’s too much” (136). When Sachs encounters her ﬁrst crime scene, an
underground boiler room, where the scorched remains of Unsub 823’s second victim lay
chained to a steam pipe, she collects evidence intentionally planted by the criminal.
Rhyme reassures her that even though this criminal is clearly versed in forensics,
apparently clearing the scene of any traces of evidence, Locard’s principle assures
otherwise. Sachs simply needs to learn to “see” the way Rhyme does. In exasperation
she claims “[b]ut there’s nothing here.” He counters: “Oh, yes there is, Amelia. There’s
his address and his phone number and his description and his hopes and aspirations.
They’re all around you” (104).
Searching her third crime scene, Sachs lifts up a small brown leaf that has been

touched by 823:

He’s touched it. Him. The man who’d killed T.J. Colfax . . . She thought

of Locard’s Exchange Principle. People coming into contact, each

transferring something to the other. Something big. Something small.

Most likely they didn’t even know what. Had something of 823 come off

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on this leaf? A cell of skin? A dot of sweat? It was a stunning thought.

She felt a trill of excitement, of fear, as if the killer were right here in this

tiny airless room with her.” (235)
Sachs’s meditation effectively telescopes the entire trace paradigm, as she immediately
connects traces that she cannot even yet see with the individual, “Him.” The microscopic
becomes macroscopic, literally and ﬁguratively standing in for the identity and distinct
essence of 823. The microscopic “sense” of trace here (and Sachs can only “sense” this
trace without the sophisticated technology located in Rhyme’s ad hoc lab) is almost
sublime, evoking a deep thrill in Sachs. As an uncanny sign, trace is precisely what is not
identity, but that which is left behind—it represents the absence of that identity. At the
same time, it denotes that identity in a “stunning” synecdoche that brings that person
right into the “tiny airless room with her.”

The scientiﬁc, positivist bent of the forensic narrative is swiftly restored however,
as these traces are reigned in as physical clues, empirical facts that aid in the seamless
logic of detection, signs that connote nothing beyond their own literal status. Even a
criminal as versed in forensic procedure as Unsub 823 cannot evade the investigative
gaze that will transform skin cells, chemical elements, shoe-prints, ﬁngerprints, and hair
ﬁbers into a full account of guilt. Indeed, Rhyme ruminates over Unsub 823: “[T]he
question’s not how clever you are but how clever you think you are. How conﬁdent were
you that we’d never ﬁnd those miniscule bits of yourself that M. Locard assures us you’d
leave behind?” (361).

As Collector reaches its conclusion, and Unsub 823 revealed as a medical doctor

with a grudge against Rhyme himself, Rhyme shares a tender moment with Sachs,

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conﬁding his desire to solve the most deeply rooted mysteries in cultural history. All he
needs is physical evidence, proofs, and the most complex and debated accounts of
humankind can be adequately accounted for, even the cruciﬁxion:
Calvary. Two thousand years ago. Now there ’s a crime scene I’d like
to’ve worked. I know what you’re going to say: But we know the perps.
Well, do we? All we really know is what the witnesses tell us. Remember
what I say—never trust a wit. Maybe those Bible accounts aren’t what
happened at all. Where’s the proof? The PB. The nails, blood, sweat, the
spear, the cross, the vinegar. Sandal prints and friction ridges. (329)
Rhyme’s statement here, though stated with ironic humor, highlights the central principle
of the forensic narrative, which ﬁrnctions as a paradigm for not only tracing and ﬁxing
identity, but also for creating full and objective version of historical events—all that is
needed are the empirical proofs or facts of the events--the “nails, blood, sweat, the spear,
the cross, the vinegar--and forensic scientists can “deﬁnitively” supply the truth about the
most fundamental of ordering mythos of contemporary culture.

The drive to “solve” “History’s Mysteries” and to forensically account for events
in the past informs a great deal of the popular discourse surrounding the science. Patricia
Comwell’s venture into real life detection in Portrait of a Killer is similarly predicated on
the Locardian principle—the assurance that somewhere, somehow, there must be traces
of the real Jack the Ripper that are simply waiting to be discovered. The immense
popularity of Comwell’s Scarpetta series immediately guaranteed Portrait of a Killer a
bestseller status. But immediate upon its publication, the book garnered overt attacks

over the author’s histrionic obsession with the case, and speciﬁcally her suspect use of

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forensic science.12 Certainly, in comparison to the Scarpetta plots, Portrait of a Killer is
decidedly less well-constructed, its use of physical evidence ﬂawed as Comwell’s quest
to forensically trace the real Jack the Ripper becomes a psychodrarna concerning her
personal vendetta with the man she claims was the killer. Recall that Comwell
dramatically asserted that ‘Vve were able to catch this son of a bitch” with one word,
“F ORENSICS” but within the book Comwell consistently shifts from a narrative based
on the reading of trace evidence to one based on motive. She cannot resist proﬁling the
“evil” mind of the killer, probing into his personality by psychoanalyzing his paintings,
letters, and even photographs and an early ﬁlm depicting Sickert himself; she looks to the
face to ﬁnd the character, or monster, that she cannot locate in the trace evidence.
Nonetheless, the central dramatic revelation of the book is asserted as Comwell’s
apparent success in matching the DNA of Walter Sickert to a “sample” from the Ripper.
In the opening chapter of Portrait of a Killer, Comwell lines up a battery of evidence
against Sickert with the relentless skill of a prosecuting lawyer; the book comprises a
prosecution of the artist, with Comwell problematically serving as detective and scientist,
prosecutor and jury. The author was ﬁrst intrigued by the case, she writes, when she
visited Scotland Yard and perused some of the evidence surrounding the case. On
hearing that Sickert was among the numerous suspects for the crimes, she looked further-
-not at the scant physical evidence--but to Sickert’s paintings. This prompted a “gut
feeling” that he was, indeed, Jack the Ripper: “I am sure there are artistic explanations for
all of Sickert’s works. But what I see when I look at them is morbidity, violence, and a
hatred of women . . . I saw a diabolically creative mind, and I saw evil.” As a result,

Comwell “began to add layer after layer of circumstantial evidence to the physical

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evidence discovered by modern forensic science and expert minds” and created the case
apparently “closed” by this publication (11).

Throughout the text, this conjecture over the inner workings of a killer are
interrupted with Comwell’s abrupt return to the empirical evidence supplied by modern
forensic science, and speciﬁcally the DNA “signature match” found by comparing the
DNA excavated from stamps from a “Ripper letter” (one sent to a Dr. Openshaw) to
DNA tenuously attributed to Sickert. Careﬁrl to acknowledge that she cannot certainly
attribute these samples to either the criminal or Sickert, nevertheless, in the same breath
she goes on to describe in evocative detail how these sequences came from “them,”
Sickert and Ripper, “from the cells inside their mouths that sloughed off into their saliva
and were sealed in adhesive.” These “little bits of identity” would lie dormant until a
century later, when DNA scientists would recover these genetic markers “with tweezers,
sterile water, and cotton swabs” (11).

If this fragile, tenuously attributed, DNA proﬁle is not perhaps as conclusive as
Comwell would like, the metaphorical transformation of the evidence into “bits of
identity” and ﬁnally into Sickert himself described as a “twister tearing through a lab”
provides for Comwell precisely the powerful synecdoche she needs to make her case.
This fragile DNA print literally and symbolically stands in for Sickert, who, in turn,
stands in for the Ripper; the truth of identity collapsed into a sub-molecular particle
transformed into a massive force of destruction. Indeed, for the remainder of the book,
Comwell does not distinguish between Sickert and the Ripper; “they” become “him.”
The traces of DNA evidence gathered from these sources and the “match” garnered by

her team of forensic scientists, stand in for Sickert, who is (she is 100% sure) the real

132

Jack the Ripper. Any ambiguity is rhetorically undercut by the image of Sickert/Ripper’s
trace, that uncanny “piece of him” that has remained dormant for well over a Century,
only to be resurrected within the laboratory. The fact there is no proof that the sample
came from Sickert is framed as an ultimate act of evasion: The “ever-elusive Walter
Sickert has yet to offer us his DNA proﬁle” and is “a forensic scientist’s worst adversary”
(167).

While Comwell consistently asserts that she is applying radical new forensic
technologies as a means to prove her case, fragile evidence is woven in a plot that is
driven by the need to reveal the “true character” of the Ripper. In addition to the DNA
proﬁle, Comwell presents a battery of other forensic evidence. For instance, that letters
penned by Sickert in personal correspondence and as the Ripper bore the same
watermark. She also employs handwriting analysts to forensically connect the hand of
Sickert to that of the Openshaw letter, dismissing the fact that other examiners have
stated that no one person could have written all the Ripper letters; Comwell argues that
most of them came from the man, for she has “no doubt that Sickert had an amazing
ability to write in many different hands” (178). Sickert was a “compulsive writer who
enjoyed persuading, manipulating, and impressing people with his words . . . It would
have been in character for him to have written a startling number of the Ripper letters,
including some of those mailed from all over the map” (157).

Controlling historical account through orrrission, Comwell’s invocation of
forensics allows her to approach the mystery of the Ripper as a “scientist” and to ignore
any historical research that might counter her claims. The forensic evidence proves her

claims, and her “proﬁling” of Sickert merely backs up this knowledge. She argues that

133

one of Sickert’s paintings bears and uncanny resemblance to the crime scene photos of
one of the Ripper’s victims, although there was no possible way for him to have seen this
image. She also uncovers evidence that Sickert’s relationship with his father was strained
and remote; he bore an unhealthy connection to his mother, which led to his estrangement
from his siblings and rendered him always the outsider, and that as a young child Sickert
underwent horriﬁcally painful surgery for a ﬁstula (which Comwell posits as penile)
which could have left him impotent. “If’ that ﬁstula was penile, she asserts (and she
presents no evidence to substantiate this claim) then the three surgeries he endured, “if”
they were failures (again, no evidence) have led to genital deformity and impotency, and
so a psychopathic monster was made. She connects these “facts” with the fact that the
Ripper’s victims where mutilated and brutalized with a knife, but were not penetrated
vaginally. Additionally, despite her “reading” of Sickert’s literal castration, she ignores
evidence that he did father at least one illegitimate child.

While Portrait of a Killer is a narrative driven by questions of motive--both
Comwell’s and Sickert’s--a pursuit of the “character” and not merely the identity of the
killer, Comwell and her publicists consistently assert otherwise. The fundamental
marketing tactic underpinning sales of the work is that this is The Real-Life Scarpetta. It
is with the DNA evidence that Comwell appears to make her strongest case for pinning
down that identity--as a sign for identity, the DNA proﬁle is deemed the most certain and
absolute forms of identiﬁcation. The unrelenting saturation of the work with trademark
references to scientiﬁc devices and processes, consistently reiﬁes this assertion:

The extracts of all ﬁfty-ﬁve DNA samples were sent to the Bode

Technology group, an internationally respected private DNA laboratory,

134

best known for assisting the Armed forces Institute of Pathology (AF IP) in
using mitochondrial DNA to determine the identity of America’s Vietnam
War Unknown Soldier. More recently, Bode has been using
mitochondrial DNA to identify victims of the 9/11 terrorist attack on the
World Trade Center. (161)
The identity of the Ripper has been “proven” not just by Comwell, this passage suggests,
but with the assistance of those conducting forensic exams for the government itself. Yet,
it is in this context that Comwell’s grossest inaccuracies are laid out. In terms of the
DNA sample collected from a “Ripper letter,” Cornwell neglects to mention that scholars
have found the most or nearly all the letters coming from “the Ripper” were hoaxes, and
that writing them had become somewhat of a sick public pastime. She also neglects to
mention that the Openshaw Letter, upon which she pinpoints her DNA hopes, has never
been considered a genuine Ripper letter by any of the serious scholars or researchers of
the case. Even if assuming that this letter came from the Ripper himself, and that the
sample “offered” by Sickert (and again, both these samples were highly contaminated
with other DNA and highly degraded) was from him, all that this match could faithfully
attest to is that he could not be ruled out. While 99% might seem a convincing statistic
for this match, this means that hundreds of thousands of people could not be ruled out
either. Central to this problem is the fact that it was mitochondrial and not nuclear
DNA13 that was used for the testing, and this form of DNA, which is found outside the
nucleus of the cell, is not unique and not much better than blood-typing in its ability to

narrow down identity.

135

Nonetheless, the proximity of forensic identiﬁcation techniques to the question
concerning the “character” or individuality of the killer effects a deliberate confusion
between identity, as revealed by identiﬁcation, and individuality. The “identity” of
Sickert/Ripper as the numeric series or “bar code” analog represented by DNA slides
easily into a synecdoche for that “evil sonofabich.” Comwell’s foray into actual
detection results in an account where empirical facts of a crime are laboriously
overworked and manipulated into a narrative of guilt; the so-called “hard facts” offered
by real life do not seamlessly ﬁt into any such a narrative. The overt contradictions and
inconsistencies in this book, however, reveal broader latent instabilities within the
forensic mode of truth-telling itself, and speciﬁcally the insufﬁciency of trace evidence in
accounting for truth and identity. Such instabilities trigger a reassertion of the essential
identity forensics cannot account for. The use of the trope of the uncanny, particularly,
allows Comwell to exaggerate the truth-value of trace, invoking deeply symbolic and
mythic renderings of identifying traces, even while it overtly afﬁrms its own status as a

positivist paradigm.

Conclusions

The popular fascination with the techniques of forensic science centers
speciﬁcally on how such “minute” elements as a hair follicle or a sample of DNA
rendered from a trace of saliva can become “traces” of identity and ways to re-read the
past. In its privileging of positivist logic in determining questions of truth and identity,
the forensic narrative always posits that truth as objectively veriﬁable, ﬁrst via the

analysis of the trace elements at hand and then by the subsequent organizing of these

136

elemental “facts” into the larger factual and deﬁnitive account of what occurred. At the
opening of this dissertation, I asked “what are the technologies that produce such truth-
effects?” Despite its overt privileging of positivist logic and empiricism in determining
questions of truth and identity, contemporary forensic narratives rely on distinctly non-
forensic mode of truth-telling in order that our identifying traces convey signify
something much more than literal and material truths. Within the highly popular generic
narratives of forensic detection in contemporary culture, the conﬂation of identity as an
effect of identiﬁcation with the symbolic concept of essential individuality is evidenced
by the consistent manner in which the forensic paradigm for knowing identity is
consistently and seamlessly exchanged for an a metaphorical mode of truth—telling. Here
forensic scientists identify “with” a killer or traces become uncanny, even unruly symbols
for an identity that cannot be accounted for by forensics.

In these narratives, trace evidence as a nominal sign not only is interpreted to
identify an “unsub” but is transformed into an uncarmy sign connoting the depth of
identity. This translation of trace into a metaphor—a monstrous “signature” or a “twister
tearing through a la ”—directly informs the rhetoric surrounding forensic science and
greatly impacts its cultural weight. Evidence “talks” to investigators, victims “speak”
from the grave, and criminals unwittingly provide testimony by leaving their traces to
betray them. The consistent presence of forensic science at epochal events such as 9/11
and the Vietnam War," demonstrate the remarkable and disturbing extent to which this
narrative conﬁdence in the forensic will reach, as chemists become “sorcerers”

practitioners of “Black Magic.”

137

The recent case of Joyce Gilchrist, an Oklahoman police chemist, who earned

,3 6‘

herself the name “Black Magic, a forensics wizard who dispatched people to prison
with devastating, jury-swaying testimony” illustrates in disturbing terms how this
particular credence in the power of forensic science holds sway in both the legal setting
and the cultural imaginary. More speciﬁcally, the case highlights the signiﬁcantly over-
inﬂated role of the forensic expert within that imaginary, where the expert functions as a
protagonist whose scientiﬁc mastery over nature is a form of alchemy that creates logic
out of chaos. In 2001, Gilchrist rather publicly fell ﬁ'om grace when she was accused of
providing misleading and false testimony in numerous cases where she has appeared as
the pivotal expert witness for the prosecution. Over the span of her career, Gilchrist
worked over 3,000 cases; her testimony has put at least 23 men on death row, with 11
executed so far. It appeared that there was nothing that this “sorceress” could not do with
a fragment of human evidence, and in an interview with Sixty Minutes 11; Gilchrist herself
admitted to Dan Rather, “I seemed to be able to do things with evidence that nobody else
could do” (“Under the Microscope”). For a case in 1985, for instance, Gilchrist
performed a microscopic hair analysis that appeared to match suspect, Jeffrey Pierce, to
the rape and murder of a young woman. Despite witness testimony to the contrary,
Gilchrist’s presentation of the scientiﬁc evidence carried far more weight with the jury, as
she explained how a minute fragment of hair found upon the victim could belong to no
one other than Pierce. This testimony proved powerful evidence indeed, and it was on
this basis of these “facts” that Pierce was convicted for 27 years.

In light of the allegations that Gilchrist had in fact misrepresented the facts, or

even fabricated evidence in much of her testimony, the media covering the case were

138

quick to pick up on the nickname “Black Magic” bestowed on the chemist by prosecutors
and the law enforcement establishment. Her status as some kind of miracle worker
obscured what was a particularly mundane and unglamorous career as a police chemist.
Unlike the highly popularized versions of forensics experts on primetime, Gilchrist’s job
did not require her to work alongside police as a crime scene investigator, nor to perform
autopsies. As a chemist her work would be laborious, repetitive, and largely divorced
from any sense of the context in which the sample evidence she tested had been
collected; yet, Gilchrist garnered a reputation as something much more than a lab
technician, a notoriety she appeared to cultivate and embrace.15 This rise in status from
chemist to sorceress and alchemist seriously highlights the weight given to trace evidence
in a criminal investigation, and the attendance and overblown authority automatically
bestowed on those who interpret it. It appears that Gilchrist herself was more than
beguiled by this version of her self, and took her role as ad hoc cop-in-labcoat very
seriously. When prosecutors were in need of certain evidence to “ﬁt” a predetermined
pattern of guilt, Gilchrist, it is alleged, happily delivered. Her, now-termed, “junk
science”--a term referring to the “science” practiced by corrupt and non-obj ective
individuals who take the witness stand as “experts--was easily and without resistance was
accepted as fact for over 15 years.16

The case of Jeffrey Pierce precipitated a thoroughgoing examination of Gilchrist’s
work by the FBI and brought the case to public attention. In 2001, lawyers for Pierce
succeeded in using a new state law that allowed the physical evidence in a case to be
reexamined for DNA evidence. The test results proved that, in fact, the hair from the

crime scene did not match Pierce, and he was subsequently released and pronounced

139

innocent. Gilchrist has yet to stand trial for any crime, and a trial seems unlikely, not
least, it appears, because any such investigation would lead directly to those police and
prosecutors that Gilchrist helped. However, the case appeared to draw attention, if
momentarily, to the fact the evocation of forensic science within a courtroom too easily
inﬂuenced juries and the general public into accepting such evidence as authoritative, a
priori, and that portioning forensic testing to laboratories that are afﬁliated (both
ofﬁcially and unofﬁcially) with police departments and prosecutor’s ofﬁces presents a
serious ethical problem. Similarly, the case raised awareness once more about the
exculpatory potential of post-trail DNA testing in the US. criminal justice system. Here,
the “facts” of identity disclosed by the chemist as incontrovertible truth were summarily
and powerfully displaced by the more incontrovertible and truer facts of DNA evidence,
which represents the identity of the original culprit with far more certainty.
Momentarily, it seems, DNA testing would appear to radically destabilize the
criminal justice system—exculpating rather than accusing an individual. Yet even within
its use for the laudable Innocence Project, which works to counter the corruption of the
criminal justice system by conducting exculpatory DNA tests for men on death row who
are appealing their convictions, the approach to forensic science and its techniques of
identiﬁcation is still revered as absolute, a panacea for social injustice. DNA remains a
master trope, and criminality and identity are still reduced to the results of a laboratory
test that will ﬁx the identity of who did (or did not) perform a crime. DNA typing
becomes the miraculous means to undo wrongs, and rewrite verdicts and the historical
version of “what really happened.” “Junk” science is thus brought down by the purer and

higher principled form of science. Despite cases like the Gilchrist controversy, the

140

Innocence Project participates in the narrative of science as a pure solution for all
questions of social justice, even while it dismantles one part of that narrative—that in
which the tainted and human “scientist” is beyond reproach.

On one level the project of Enlightenment modernity ﬁnds its zenith in forensic
science’s ability to dominate over nature, truth, and individuals. However, as this project
has explored, the truth-claims of forensic science are produced by more than its
instrumental technologies of forensic science. The meaning of the instrumental
technologies of forensic science and the truths they claim are produced through a variety
of mechanisms, ideological, institutional, and cultural. The institutional reﬁnement of
the bureaucratic criminal archive and the concurrent development of forensic science, for
example, signaled a profound shift in the epistemologies of individual identiﬁcation. In
light of science’s increasing ability to particularize, identity thus becomes a truth derived
from the literal “facts” of the body, speciﬁcally its most particular and “smallest points of
identity,” which are discernible only to experts, the scientiﬁc detectives who render such
truths culturally legible. Such knowledge underscores the intrinsically disciplinary
power of forensic science as a discursive technology that produces truth-effects at the
level of the human subject.

The genre of detective ﬁction--and speciﬁcally its sub-genre of “scientiﬁc” or
later “forensic” detection--has played an integral and inﬂuential role in the institutional
development of forensic science and its popular resonance. Such narratives mediate the
cultural meaning of the instrumental technologies of detection and identiﬁcation that
“reveal” our identifying traces. The notion of the trace that is predicated on Locard’s

Exchange Principle, as I have discussed, is hinged upon a distinctly narrative principle,

141

where trace evidence is chained into a full and cohesive causal account. Early twentieth
century tales of “scientiﬁc detectives” such as the Craig Kennedy series explicitly
spectacularize the devices and techniques of this method, often to the detriment of plot
and character. But these tales are the cultural forbearers to the intensely spectacular
forensic narratives that dominate primetime and the bestseller lists today. Shows such as
C. SJ. and its numerous offspring take the spectacle offered by forensic science to new
heights and deliver a version of forensics that appears radical, new, and cutting edge and
absolute in its ability to know and to control.

As I have shown with the works of Comwell and Deaver, and the case
surrounding Gilchrist, such ﬁgurings allow “trace” to signify something much more than
“material” truths and work to extend trace’s effect. But this compensatory gesture also
suggests something more profound about the instabilities and insufﬁciencies of the
forensic paradigm. This contradictory and ambivalent characterization of identifying
traces, and the interconnected slippage between forensic modes of identiﬁcation and the
pursuit of the “individual,” is more pronounced in contemporary forensic narratives. And
such heightened tendency is perhaps symptomatic of the anxieties triggered by the
epistemological transformation of identity into an effect of forensic identiﬁcation. The
problematic posed by Poe in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”--the reconciliation of the
forensic with the imaginative, and speciﬁcally the role of these functions in perceiving
the “truth” of the individual--is only heightened today in a contemporary context where
radical new technologies of identiﬁcation, speciﬁcally DNA proﬁling, appear to have
brought the positivist promise of “identifying” the human to its culmination. Currently

DNA typing stands, hyperbolically, as the culmination of forensic identiﬁcation, the last

142

word in the disciplinary translation of individuals into identities. As an identifying trace
DNA appears to ﬁx identity, even standing in for our uniqueness as individuals.
However, underpinning much of this rhetoric is the sense that as science approaches the
fullness of knowledge with the very secrets of the body’s microscopic inner-mechanisms
“revealed,” the more our identifying traces are transformed into empirical and measurable
facts. While the positivist drive to know profoundly disavows any metaphysical searches
for truth, the reduction of the truth of “the human” to the literal matter of the body
triggers anxieties over the “loss” of essential individuality, and a reassertion of an
individuality that such knowledge cannot account for.

The contemporary forensic narrative functions as a familiar ordering principle or
metanarrative that helps us culturally to make sense of these disparate fragments of
identity. But such narratives also compensate for their own excesses by exchanging
positivist, literalist modes of truth-seeking for distinctly metaphorical ones. Interestingly,
the latest addition to the programming lineup for Court TV is not another forensics show,
but Psychic Detectives, where police track cases with the assistance of a consulting
psychic medium. The primetime counterpart to this show is NBC’s Medium, a drama
that centers on the same principle. While police procedurals and forensics-based
programming show no sign of abating in terms of exposure and popularity, perhaps the
emergent genres of detection that center on the occult might also signal a sense of
saturation with the empirical science of forensics, and a turn to profoundly symbolic,
even gothic, explorations of the “truth.” Certainly, the wild popularity of Dan Brown’s
The Da Vinci Code would also suggest a cultural yearning for a return to a mythic form

of truth-telling that the forensic paradigm suppresses. The Da Vinci Code is a detective

143

narrative that hinges upon the ability of Robert Langdon, a Harvard symbologist, to read
the deeply allegorical and encrypted signs of a profound but concealed historical truth.
But even while the plot centers on the deciphering of symbols and the quest for the Holy
Grail, the Grail itself translates into the physical body of Mary Magdalene, a body that
literally bears much more powerﬁrl secrets. According to the history unearthed by
Langdon, Magdalene, bearing Jesus’ child, ﬂed to France immediately after the
cruciﬁxion, thus taking with her the sacred bloodline that would be carried through the
French royal family. Hence the discovery of Magdalene’s tomb could provide the
empirical evidence required to prove such a lineage, supplying a new, literal truth that

would overturn greatest Western mythos of all time.

 

‘ Page 66
2 This passage appears in the publisher’s frontispiece to Case Closed.
3 Comwell’s exploits were featured in a 2002 BBC documentary, In Search of the Ripper.

4 In The DNA Mystique, Nelkin and Lindee argue that the 19908 saw a resurgence of popular genetic
determinism, the idea that genes are all-powerful ‘master-molccules’ directing development and behaviour.
Child care rrranuals switched from advising how to maximize your baby’s potential to learning to live with
the traits it was born with. This, they argue, obscures other causes of personal and social problems, and
diverts attention from other kinds of solutions.
5 In a recent interview with National Public Radio (“Pioneering DNA Forensics”) Jeffries recounted how,
while researching the heredity value of the human genome he stumbled upon an aspect of DNA that he
immediately knew would be of value in the context of forensic identiﬁcation.
6 In this passage, Roof also argues that such totality of knowledge suggested by DNA inherently threatens
how the Name-of-the-Father metaphorically stood for lineage. “DNA, it seems, provides the literal end to
the problem of a symbolic crisis. The Name is replaced by the comprehensive code; the nothing secured by
rhe name’s metaphor is supplanted by the too-much something of an overextensive set of sigrriﬁers that
replace metaphor with fact and Law with a code whose strategically aligned elements simplify into grains
of molecular sense.
7 For instance, Jeffrey Kluger’s “The DNA Detectives” in Time and Gujan Sinha’s “DNA Detectives in
Popular Science both published in 1999.
8 Articles on the “discovery” appeared in multiple settings: Don Terry’s “DNA Results Conﬁrm Old News
About Jefferson, Blacks Say,” in The New York Times, 1998; Eric Lander and Joseph Ellis’s “Founding
Father,” in Nature.
9 For extended discussion of this legal history, see Andrews and Nelkin’s Body Bazaar (1999)
loDystopic renderings include: Twins (1988); Judge Dredd (I 995); Alien Resurrection (I 997); Gattaca
{1997); Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002).

' Critical discussions of Comwell have largely centered on her credentials as a “feminist” writer of
detective ﬁction, and Scarpetta as a feminist detective.

144

 

'2 See “Neither History nor Science” by Terry Melton in The Scientist (2003) and Miles Kingston’s “Case
Closed, Ms. Comwell: Jack the Ripper Killed Diana” the London Guardian (2003).

'3 Mitochondrial DNA is passed via the mother and remains identical; thus maternally related family
members are identical in this context.

" For coverage of DNA testing on the remains of the Unknown Soldier, see Rowan Scarborough, “Vietnam
War Remains identiﬁed by DNA test” (1998) and Ralph Watterhahn “Missing in Action” (1998). Coverage
of the use of DNA testing to identify victims of the World Trade Center attack was wide-ranging, and
occupied both the popular and scientiﬁc presses. For instance, Hubbard’s “The Unknowns” in The New
Yorker (2001) and Randerson’s “Search Goes on for World Trade Center’s Missing” in New Scientist
(2003).

'5 On CBS ’8 60 Minutes II, Gilchrist explained to Dan Rather how she got her reputation and her nickname:
“It was in reference to a homicide case where the defense attorney referred to me in his closing statements
as a sorcerer - someone who conducted black magic, and stated that I seemed to be able to do things with
evidence that nobody was else able to do.”

16 For more on “Junk Science” see Jim Dwyer, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufelds’ Actual Innocence (2001).

145

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