Mysteries and Conspiracies E-Book

Luc Boltanski

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 782

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

The detective story, focused on inquiries, and in its wake the spy novel, built around conspiracies, developed as genres in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the same period, psychiatry was inventing paranoia, sociology was devising new forms of causality to explain the social lives of individuals and groups and political science was shifting the problematics of paranoia from the psychic to the social realm and seeking to explain historical events in terms of conspiracy theories. In each instance, social reality was cast into doubt. We owe the project of organizing and unifying this reality for a particular population and territory to the nation-state as it took shape at the end of the nineteenth century.

Thus the figure of conspiracy became the focal point for suspicions concerning the exercise of power. Where does power really lie, and who actually holds it? The national authorities that are presumed to be responsible for it, or other agencies acting in the shadows - bankers, anarchists, secret societies, the ruling class? Questions of this kind provided the scaffolding for political ontologies that banked on a doubly distributed reality: an official but superficial reality and its opposite, a deeper, hidden, threatening reality that was unofficial but much more real. Crime fiction and spy fiction, paranoia and sociology - more or less concomitant inventions - had in common a new way of problematizing reality and of working through the contradictions inherit in it.

The adventures of the conflict between these two realities - superficial versus real - provide the framework for this highly original book. Through an exploration of the work of the great masters of detective stories and spy novels - G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Le Carré and Graham Greene among others - Boltanski shows that these works of fiction and imagination tell us something fundamental about the nature of modern societies and the modern state.

Leseprobe

MYSTERIES AND CONSPIRACIES

For Christophe Boltanski

MYSTERIES AND CONSPIRACIES

DETECTIVE STORIES, SPY NOVELS AND THE MAKING OF MODERN SOCIETIES

LUC BOLTANSKI

Translated by Catherine Porter

polity

First published in French as Énigmes et complots © Éditions GALLIMARD, Paris, 2012

This work, published as part of a program providing publication assistance, received financial support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).

This English edition © Polity Press, 2014

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8344-7

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Polity would like to thank Penguin Group (UK), in addition to the following entities for permission to use the extract on page vi:

“The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero”, from COLLECTED FICTIONS by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Andrew Hurley, copyright © 1998 by Maria Kodama; translation copyright © 1998 by Penguin Putnam Inc. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.

From Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges. Copyright © Maria Kodama, 1998. Translation and notes copyright © Penguin Putnam Inc., 1998. Reprinted by permission of Penguin Canada Books Inc.

Extract from ‘Theme of the Traitor and Hero’ from COLLECTED FICTIONS by Jorge Luis Borges. Copyright © 1995, Maria Kodama, used by permission of The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Preface

1  REALITY versus Reality

2  The Inquiries of a London Detective

3  The Inquiries of a Paris Policeman

4  Identifying Secret Agents

5  The Endless Inquiries of ‘Paranoids’

6  Regulating Sociological Inquiry

Epilogue: And History Copied Literature

Notes

References

Index

The idea that history might have copied history is mind-boggling enough; that history should copy literature is inconceivable.

Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Theme of the Traitor and Hero’

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Written between 2008 and 2011, Mysteries and Conspiracies benefited from discussions with many colleagues – so many that I shall not attempt to list them all here – about the themes I had set forth in On Critique. But the current book is above all the fruit of friendly and even familial exchanges. Friends better informed than I about the sociological questions raised by literature, journalism, law, films and television generously offered skills that I lacked, and I hope they will not feel betrayed by my admittedly often awkward attempts to put what I learned from them into practice. Gabriel Bergounioux, Sabine Chavon-Dermersay, Philippe Roussin, Arnaud Esquerre and Marcela Iacub were of special help during the preparation of this book, and they offered well-informed and perspicacious readings of a preliminary version.

I also took excessive advantage of the little ‘think tank’ that I am lucky enough to have at hand almost without leaving home. My brother Jean-Élie Boltanski, a linguist and specialist in British literature, transmitted his passion for Anglo-Saxon detective stories and spy novels, as well as for the films they inspired. My daughter Ariane, a historian who specializes in sixteenth-century France and Italy, taught me a great deal about the origins of the problematics of conspiracy. My son Christophe, a war correspondent for a major news magazine, helped me understand the similarities and differences between sociological and journalistic writing. I exchanged ideas daily with my wife Élisabeth Claverie, whose current research focuses on the anthropology of genocide and the establishment of international tribunals designed to judge suspected participants; her work bears especially on questions about the meaning of ‘organized crime’ or ‘common criminal enterprise’, questions that directly concern problematic relations between individual and collective entities, and thus the problematics of conspiracies. I express my deepest gratitude to these family members here.

The text also owes a great deal to the attentive rereadings undertaken by Mauro Basaure, Emmanuel Didier, Damien de Blic, Corentin Durand, Jeanne Lazarus, and, more generally, to the highly stimulating intellectual atmosphere in the laboratory – the Groupe de sociologie politique et morale of the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) – in which I have been working for more than twenty years. Éric Vigne, without whom this text would never have achieved the status of a book, was also, as always, an attentive and vigilant reader. He has earned my warmest thanks for the stubborn determination with which he persists in defending the social sciences against all odds. Finally, I thank the Gallimard copy editors who put their precious knowledge of spelling, syntax and typography at the service of the text and helped turn the typescript into a book.

In addition, I would like to thank the organizers and participants in the seminars in which I presented my work; their questions and critiques were very useful. Several occasions stand out: the October 2010 conference organized by Élie Kongs on new directions in critique; the joint EHESS-Université Paris-VIII seminar on processes of attribution that I gave in 2010–11, with Damien de Blic, maître de conferences at Paris-VIII, and Cyril Lemieux, director of studies at EHESS; the EHESS seminar organized by Marcela Iacub on the relation between law and literature, where my work was presented in January 2011; the seminar organized in April 2011 by Mauro Basaure in the context of the Instituto de Humanidades at Diego Portales University (Santiago, Chile), which gave me the opportunity to discuss the ideas developed in this work with Chilean colleagues from several disciplines (literature, philosophy, sociology) over three especially intense hours; the lecture I gave in June 2011 at Humboldt University in Berlin, at the initiative of Professors Jean Greisch and Rolf Schieder. Intermediate versions of chapter 2 appeared in the collective work Sozialphilosophie und Kritik published by Rainer Forst, Martin Hartmann, Rahel Jaeggi and Martin Saar in honour of Professor Axel Honneth (Suhrkamp 2010), and in the journal Tracés, published by the École normale supérieure lettres et sciences humaines in Lyon, under the direction of Arnaud Fossier, Éric Monnet and Lucie Tanguy (spring 2011). Many thanks, too, to Professor David Stark, who invited me to spend some time at Columbia University in April 2010, enabling me to complete the documentation for this book.

In conclusion, I have to say that my decision to embark on this project was spurred to a large extent by the so-called Tarnac affair, in which Julien Coupat, a militant French leftist whom I had known when he was enrolled as an EHESS student in my seminar and who later became a friend, was one of the principal individuals unjustly accused of having tried to cut the power supply to a train; he was arrested, charged under anti-terrorism laws, and imprisoned for six months. I began writing a month or so after the beginning of this affair in November 2008, and the process of constructing the book helped me manage my emotions and my indignation by shifting them onto a zone of reflection. I very much hope that the court’s rulings, which have not yet been issued as I write, will exonerate the ‘Tarnac Nine’, although this will obviously not eliminate the prejudice produced by the relentless police efforts directed at Julien Coupat and his companions.

FOREWORD

With this volume, Polity completes its admirable task of making the principal works of the sociologist Luc Boltanski available in English. This makes accessible to British and American readers one of the major bodies of post-Bourdieusian European social theory. Undertaken in France between the 1980s and the present, oriented to solving problems left by the previous generation of theorists associated with post-structuralism and pensée ’68 – that age of ‘heroic’ theory, from an apparently revolutionary opening within the frozen post-war consensus – Boltanski’s project transpired amidst a historical chastening of hopes for élite theoretical understanding and radical political transformation. Yet Boltanski did not make the turn to liberal (or neo-liberal), anti-totalitarian (or deradicalized), or banal Americanizing themes, as did those of his countrymen who created that self-abnegating pensée anti-68 which has made fin-de-siècle French thought often look so barren when viewed from abroad.

In many ways, Boltanski has been a man out of place. Despite individual books, translated earlier, which have had enormous impact in particular sub-fields of Anglo-American scholarship (specifically Distant Suffering [1993], essential to theorists of humanitarianism, and The New Spirit of Capitalism [1999, written with Eve Chiapello], a fundamental analysis of the postmodern workplace), the coherence of his project had not been visible in anglophone countries until now. His reception abroad was blocked, on one side, by hostility to his early-career separation from Pierre Bourdieu, making him seem more alien than necessary to the ‘reflexive sociology’ so ardently received in the English-speaking countries. On the other, it suffered from too much of a sensation of familiarity, as Boltanski’s commitments showed close affinities with Anglo-American intentions to rediscover the agency, resistance, and vernacular self-understanding of ordinary social actors.

Boltanski commenced his career as a student, assistant, and close associate of Bourdieu. He collaborated on the founding of Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales with ‘the boss’ (as Boltanski calls him in a recent memoir and reflection, Rendre la Réalité Inacceptable [Rendering Reality Unacceptable]) and co-wrote notable work on the ‘production of the dominant ideology’ in French media and society. As Boltanski formed his own distinct research programme in the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, he drew up strong objections to the god’s-eye view that belonged to the sociologist in his mentor’s system. Their difference, and ultimate theoretical competition, is remembered as acrimonious up to the time of Bourdieu’s death in 2002.

In more recent summaries of his sociological life’s work including On Critique (2009), Boltanski has stressed that his research into the pragmatics of moral contestation and everyday critique ‘was fashioned both in opposition to [Bourdieu’s critical sociology] and with a view to pursuing its basic intention’ (x). Bourdieusian critical sociology had tried to fuse the quest for emancipation in Marx with the value-neutrality of Weber. It would unmask ideology and domination – the ways that privileged groups get to say what reality is like – but remain scientific, committing itself to no concrete interest or normative particularity. It might inspire readers to indignation, but always remained coy about its personal involvements. And the scientist would stand in for the revolutionary, but stood apart from political constituencies, somberly alone in knowing how things ‘really are’. So Boltanski’s moral and political sociology tried to plunge back into the perspectives of narrow interests and communities of limited view – but seeing multiple sides and approaches at once. He produces a ‘sociology of critique’, anatomizing the philosophical bases and rationales for different actors’ multifarious challenges to institutions. Instead of the super-sophistication of the god’s-eye observer, he traces the dynamics of unsophisticated ‘affairs’ and scandals (like the Dreyfus Affair) for practical social change. In place of the unconsciously incorporated dispositions of habitus, he explores the ‘unofficial’ ratiocination and unacknowledged moral philosophy that goes on where official discourse prefers to close its eyes (as in his ethnography of French women’s experience of legal abortion, The Foetal Condition [2004]). During Bourdieu’s lifetime, this tack could seem hostile to the predecessor’s sociological edifice. From the standpoint of today, Boltanski’s moral-philosophical and actor-centered perspective has come to seem the earlier system’s vital complement and completion.

Mysteries and Conspiracies is not a departure for Boltanski, though the transposition to literary accounts of social order may seem unexpected. The underlying architectonics of how ‘reality’ is constituted, challenged, and stabilized through social forms belongs to On Critique. The last chapter in this book (‘Regulating Sociological Inquiry’) openly continues the meditations of that earlier apologia. The discovery of profound sociological significance in fictional media, too, goes back to some of Boltanski’s earliest research on comic strips and is perhaps not altogether methodologically unlike his later uses of the literature of management theory. It also alludes silently to Boltanski’s other life as a poet, librettist, and occasional writer on art. The incredible pleasure and good humor of Boltanski’s unfolding of the detective novel and the spy novel, genres wholly familiar to us revealed in entirely unfamiliar ways, is as much a wonder of artistic and readerly ingenuity, however, as it is a surprisingly convincing scientific strategy to capture a difficult social reality.

This book turns to popular fictions as a new means of cracking open the State and the law. This maneuver is not new. Literary scholars will certainly make it. But because Boltanski is a sociologist first, the outcome is uniquely felicitous. He knows what to look for – where the bodies may be buried, so to speak. State and law are simultaneously social fact and fantasy: anxiety-producing impositions of iron upon our soft reality, and highly personalized, fleshly protagonists of reassuring stories. Thus where literary scholars often seem undeservedly surprised and impressed at distilling any social order from fiction, Boltanski uses novels to attack very particular problems in our theorization of the place of ‘the official’ in the daily, unofficial experience of instituted power. He explores ‘social causality’. He pries open such topics as the intimacy between police and social science; the idea of ‘inquiry’ as such and its delineation of the formations it looks into; the concealment of one order of reality and causation by another. (Hence his neutral interest in disreputable ‘conspiracy theories’, and the basis of distinctions between social causation we – the ‘educated’ – ratify, and those which we disdain.)

One will not find here the discussions of language and form that define literary criticism; the quarry is altogether different. Through detectives and secret agents, Boltanski discovers shoring-up processes, in social fantasy, of forms of order necessary to the state which the state may not, juridically, contain (like the moral law, the agreements of gentlemen, the ethos of a civil service – or the ‘deep state’ and global-financial-racial conspiracy). In Mysteries and Conspiracies, Boltanski thus confirms his admission to the fraternity of great literary sociologists and sociologists of literature – whether we speak of the distinct orientations of a Raymond Williams, Lucien Goldmann, Franco Moretti, or Pierre Bourdieu. Through this most recent of Boltanski’s books, originally published in French in 2012, the English-language audience has the opportunity to have ‘caught up’ on his work at last, in two senses. We can await the new books to come.

Mark Greif

Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at The New School, New York, and a founding editor of n+1.

PREFACE

This book takes as its subject the thematics of mystery, conspiracy, and inquiry. It seeks to understand the prominent place these thematics have occupied in the representation of reality since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It focuses, first, on works belonging to two literary genres intended for a broad public in which these thematics have been featured: crime novels and spy novels, grasped in the forms they took from their beginnings in the late nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century (chapters 2, 3, and 4). Then, by developing the thematics of inquiry (which is at the heart of crime fiction) and the thematics of conspiracy (the main subject of espionage fiction), the work veers towards questions that concern not only the representation of reality in popular literature but also the new ways of problematizing reality that have accompanied the development of the human sciences. These sciences have made inquiry their principal instrument. But they have also sought to establish a procedural framework allowing them to distinguish inquiries that can claim ‘scientific’ validity from the many forms of inquiry that have developed in the societies they study. These forms include police investigations and/or their fictional stagings, and even inquiries undertaken occasionally by social actors in order to unveil the causes, which they deem real but hidden, of the ills that affect them.

For this project devoted to the human and social sciences, I have drawn essential material from three fields in particular. First, psychiatry: at the dawn of the twentieth century, psychiatry invented a new nosological entity, paranoia, one of whose chief symptoms is the tendency to undertake interminable inquiries and prolong them to the point of delirium. Second, political science: this discipline has taken up the problematics of paranoia and displaced it from the psychic to the social level, looking on the one hand at conspiracies and on the other at the tendency to explain historical events in terms of ‘conspiracy theories’ (chapter 5). Third, sociology: this discipline pays special attention to the problems it encounters when it seeks to equip itself with specific forms of ‘social’ causality and to identify the individual or collective entities to which it can attribute the events that punctuate the lives of persons and groups or even the course of history.

The articulation among these seemingly disparate objects is established by positing the analytic framework presented in chapter 1, which serves as a general introduction. This framework seeks to pin down the social and political conjuncture in which, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the thematics of mystery and conspiracy became tropes destined to play a prominent role both in fiction and in the interpretation of historical events and the workings of society. The thesis proposed here links questions about the representation of reality with changes that affected the way reality itself was instituted during the period in question. The relation between reality and the state is at the heart of the analysis. Mysteries can be constituted as specific objects only by being detached from the background of a stabilized and predictable reality whose fragility is revealed by crimes. Now, it is to the nation-state as it developed in the late nineteenth century that we owe the project of organizing and unifying reality, or, as sociology puts it today, of constructing reality, for a given population on a given territory. But this demiurgic project had to face a number of obstacles, most critically the development of capitalism, which ignored national borders.

As for the thematics of conspiracy, it is the focal point for suspicions about the exercise of power. Where does power really lie, and who really holds it? State authorities, who are supposed to take charge of it, or other agencies, acting in the shadows: bankers, anarchists, secret societies, the ruling class … ? Here is the scaffolding for political ontologies that count on a distributed reality. A surface reality, apparent but probably illusory even though it has an official status, is countered by a deep, hidden, threatening reality, which is unofficial but much more real. The contingencies of the conflict between these two realities – REALITY vs. reality – constitute the guiding thread of this book. We shall follow the conflict, as it unfolds, from several different angles. For the appearance and very rapid development of crime novels and then spy novels, the identification of paranoia by psychiatry and the development of the social sciences, sociology in particular, were more or less simultaneous processes that also coincided with a new way of problematizing reality and of working through the contradictions that inhabit it.

Rather than offer an impossible conclusion to a history that is presumably far from over, the book’s epilogue returns to the terrain of literature by looking at Franz Kafka’s The Trial. That text concentrates – with an intensity whose brilliance has been endlessly praised by the novel’s many commentators – the principal threads that I am seeking to disentangle at least to a limited extent here. The Trial takes up the thematics of mystery, conspiracy and inquiry that are at the heart of crime novels and spy stories. But by inverting their orientation and perverting their mechanisms, Kafka’s text discloses the disturbing reality that these apparently anodyne and diverting narratives conceal.

It is certainly possible to challenge an approach that consists in grasping the question of reality by relying at the outset on a documentary corpus made up of works intentionally presented as fictions. All the more so since, in the narratives at issue, it is conventional to leave a maximum of free play to the imagination for the explicit purpose of entertaining the reader – that is, precisely in order to remove the reader from the pressures and constraints of daily life and thus of reality. Nevertheless, crime novels and spy stories have arguably been the chief means for exposing to a broad public certain concerns that, precisely because they go to the heart of political arrangements and call into question the very contours of modernity, could not easily have been approached head on, outside of limited circles. According to this logic, it is precisely because uncertainties about what may be called the reality of reality are so crucial that they find themselves deflected towards the realm of the imaginary.

It is generally acknowledged today that crime novels and spy novels count among the principal innovations of the twentieth century in the domain of fiction. These genres made a sudden appearance in English and French literature at the end of the nineteenth century and in the first half of the twentieth, and they spread very broadly with remarkable speed. Initially associated with so-called popular literature, these narrative forms, organized around the thematics of mystery, conspiracy and inquiry, were rapidly extended to more ambitious literature, which took over their predominant themes. But the appearance and very rapid development of these genres are more than interesting phenomena within the history of western literature. Detective stories and tales of espionage, which have been proliferating continually since the early twentieth century, first in written form1 and then through films and television, are the most widespread narrative forms today on a planetary scale. Thus they play an unprecedented role in the representation of reality that is offered henceforth to all human beings, even illiterates, provided that they have access to modern media. In a sense, these narratives constitute objects of predilection for a sociological approach that is turning away from a strictly documentary function and seeking new ways to grasp certain symbolic forms, especially political thematics, that have developed during the twentieth century,2 somewhat the way history and philosophy have been able to make use of the Homeric poems to analyse the symbolic structures of ancient Greece, or the way classical tragedy used those same texts to explore representations of power in seventeenth-century France.

On the conceptual level, this project has given me an opportunity to deal with questions that I had carefully avoided earlier, questions that I not only was unable to answer but that I did not even know how to formulate. The first of these is the question of the state, which is probably the hardest for sociology to address, precisely owing to the foundational ties that link the apparatus of state power with this apparatus of knowledge. I should also mention the question of social causality, one that has been largely abandoned by contemporary sociology; the question of which entities are pertinent for sociological analysis; the question of relations of scale (micro- and macrosociology); and the question, finally, of the place that should be attributed to events in the descriptions proposed by our discipline. Let me reassure the reader: none of these major issues will find a satisfactory solution here. But it has nevertheless been a relief to me to dare to look at them straight on.

This book also gave me an opportunity to use concepts that were better broken in because I had worked with them in earlier studies, for example the concepts of uncertainty, trial, affair, critique and especially reality, constructed reality understood as a network of causalities based on pre-established formats that make action predictable. In On Critique (2011 [2009]), I sought to show that the idea of the ‘construction of reality’, which belongs today to the organum of normal sociology, is meaningful only provided that one analyses the way reality comes to attach itself to the surface of what I call, in that same work, the world (a distinction that is taken up again with more precision in the first chapter of the current book). Everything that happens emanates from the world, but in a sporadic and onto-logically uncontrollable fashion, while reality, which is based on a selection and an organization of certain possibilities offered by the world at a given moment in time, can constitute an arrangement apt to be grasped synthetically by sociologists, historians and also local actors. One goal of my present endeavour is thus also, in a way, to flesh out the conceptual system proposed in On Critique.

I must add, nevertheless, that in writing this book I have hoped that readers who are not sociologists but practitioners of other disciplines (or even of no discipline at all) could read the text with interest. I have undertaken this project with a concern for grasping symbolic forms that, situated as they are on the borderline between social and political reality in its most tangible aspects and in particularly fantastical fictional representations, are not easily grasped either by using the methods of classic sociology or by resorting to the means available to literary studies. This approach implied taking as given the links that have always brought sociology into proximity with the vast realm of the ‘humanities’. In this way I have hoped to contribute to the analysis of the political metaphysics that, without necessarily being inscribed in the canonical forms of political philosophy, have nevertheless marked the previous century and that to all appearances still haunt the century that is now our own.

— 1 —

REALITY VERSUS REALITY

The London meanderings of Aristide Valentin

‘The Blue Cross’ is the first story in The Innocence of Father Brown, which is in turn the first of five collections of detective stories published by G. K. Chesterton between 1911 and 1935 (Chesterton 1994). Father Brown, the detective hero of these tales, is a Catholic priest, small in stature and quite ordinary in appearance. He faces a superb criminal: Flambeau. French by birth but worldwide in scope, a brilliant artist of crime, Flambeau is wanted by the police in at least three major European countries. At least, this is the case in the early stories; later, Father Brown manages to ‘turn’ Flambeau and make him an invaluable collaborator. Together they solve mysteries that arise like shooting stars from the ether in the earth’s atmosphere, repeatedly penetrate our world and disrupt its seemingly stable and orderly arrangement of reality.

When ‘The Blue Cross’ begins, a French detective, Aristide Valentin, has gone to England to track down Flambeau, about whom he knows nothing except that he too has crossed the Channel. Valentin is French to the core, thus devoted to reason. But as he has a good understanding of how reason works, he is not unaware of its limits, and he knows that there are circumstances when reason requires us to pay the closest attention precisely to what seems to elude it. On this occasion, Valentin has no trail to follow. All possible paths of investigation are open to him; he has no reason to prefer one to another. Not only does Valentin not know where Flambeau is, he does not even know what has drawn his quarry to London: a criminal enterprise, inevitably, one for which Flambeau has devised a plan, but there is no reason to suppose that the deed has already been done. Valentin thus opts for an approach that consists in paying attention to minuscule events that seem senseless and thereby take on the character of mysteries.

In the opening sequence of ‘The Blue Cross’, Valentin meanders about the streets of London, not seeking clues (as Sherlock Holmes does), since he does not even know the nature of the criminal deeds towards which certain particular arrangements might point; if he knew, he could establish a referential relation between these arrangements and the deeds themselves. He simply pays close attention to every event that has the character of a mystery, in the sense I have just given this term. A first mystery: he goes into a restaurant for breakfast – it is a tranquil, simple place with old-fashioned charm – and orders coffee and a poached egg. As he is about to put sugar in his coffee, he is astonished to find that the sugar bowl does not contain granulated sugar, as he expected, but salt. When he proceeds to examine the salt shaker, he observes that it is full of sugar. He summons the waiter, who acknowledges the oddity and attributes it to two priests, one tall and one short, both calm and respectable, who had had soup at that very table a short time before. Why this attribution? Because, the waiter explains, while one of the two priests behaved normally (he paid the bill and left), the other lingered a moment and (second mystery) grabbed his cup of soup and tossed its contents against the wall.

Valentin, continuing his random pursuit, comes across a display of fruit in a grocery-shop window: oranges and nuts. Now (third mystery), on the pile of nuts there is a sign indicating ‘premium tangerines, twopence’, and on the pile of oranges, ‘top selection of Brazil nuts’. Under questioning, the enraged merchant answers that two priests had come by and that one of them had (fourth mystery) deliberately overturned the basket of oranges. Valentin then speaks to a policeman standing across the street and asks him if by any chance he has come across two priests. The policeman answers that they had climbed aboard a yellow bus and that one of them appeared drunk (which constitutes a fifth mystery, priests not being the sort of individuals one generally expects to see strolling inebriated about the streets in the morning). Valentin in turn takes a yellow bus and sits on the top deck. After a while, the bus passes a pub with a broken front window, looking as if it had been deliberately smashed (sixth mystery). The owner, when questioned, tells him that this misdeed was committed by two men in black. When it was time to pay the bill, one of the two had given him a sum three times higher than the price of the meals consumed. ‘It’s for what I’m about to break’, the man said, whereupon he used his umbrella to break the glass. Finally (seventh and last mystery), a woman encountered in a charming sweetshop tells Valentin about a package that a priest gave her, asking her to send it to a certain address. By tracking this package, Valentin puts himself on the trail of the still unknown criminal and crime that justify his own presence in London.

How to understand ‘mysteries’

Aristide Valentin’s ramblings through the streets of London, where he lets himself be guided by a series of mysteries, give us a first indication of how this term is to be understood. A mystery arises from an event, however unimportant it may seem, that stands out in some way against a background – to borrow terms from the psychology of form – or against the traces of a past event, not witnessed by the narrator, that remain perceptible later on. This background is thus constituted by ordinary understandings as we know them through the intermediary of authorities (educational in particular) and/or through experience; the latter gives actions a relatively predictable character, especially by associating them with habits. A mystery is thus a singularity (since every event is a singularity) but one whose character can be called abnormal, one that breaks with the way things present themselves under conditions that we take to be normal, so that our minds do not manage to fit the uncanny event into ordinary reality. The mystery thus leaves a kind of scratch on the seamless fabric of reality. In this sense – to return to concepts introduced in On Critique – a mystery can be said to be the result of an irruption of the world in the heart of reality (Boltanski 2011 [2009]: 57–9).1

By the world, I mean ‘everything that happens’ – to borrow Wittgenstein’s formulation – and even everything that might possibly happen – an ‘everything’ that cannot be fully known and mastered. Conversely, reality is stabilized by pre-established formats that are sustained by institutions, formats that often have a legal or paralegal character, at least in western societies. These formats constitute a semantics that expresses the whatness of what is; they establish qualifications, define entities and trials (in the sense in which the term ‘trial’ is used in On Justification [Boltanski and Thévenot 2006 (1991)]), and determine the relations that must be maintained between entities and trials or tests if these are to have an acceptable character. In this way, reality is presented as a network of causal relations that holds together the events with which experience is confronted. Reference to these relations makes it possible to give meaning to the events that are produced by identifying the entities to which these events must be attributed.2

These causal relations are thus tacitly recognized in general as unproblematic, so that it does not seem necessary to verify them, to establish proofs for them – or at least it does not seem necessary to push the investigation beyond the boundaries that have been set up by habit and also by the trust placed in the validity of the established formats. Especially when the causality in question has a social dimension, this trust is based on agencies that guarantee the regular attribution of events to pre-defined entities – among which, in the modern era, legal and governmental agencies play a preponderant role. We shall see later on that law can be considered as one of the principal social arrangements used to establish and maintain these attributions.

Unlike events that can be qualified as ordinary, an event possesses an enigmatic or mysterious character when it escapes the normal attributions of a specific entity (there is no valid reason for a waiter to put sugar in a salt shaker) or when the nature of the entity to which it can be attributed is unknown. Thus a mysterious event may well have an immediate signification (a certain building has collapsed), in the sense that the change of state affecting the situation in which it intervenes can be described in a way that relies on generally accepted physical data (if the building had risen into the sky, it would have been called a ‘miracle’). But one can say that the event does not have a meaning as long as it has not been possible to attribute it to a given entity or, when that entity is already known, to determine that entity’s intentions. The event, as a singularity, thus takes on full meaning only by being related to an entity credited with an identity, a certain stability across time, and an intentionality – whether this latter is manifested, or not, by way of a conscious act.3 A given building has collapsed. This is a ‘fact’. But to give the event a meaning, we have to be in a position to identify the entity to which it can be attributed as well as the reasons behind it. Must the cause of the collapse be imputed to an earthquake? A design flaw? A construction defect on the part of the builder (who used inferior materials to save money, for example)? To an illegal manoeuvre on the part of the owner so he could get the insurance money? To a criminal who sought to cover up the murder he had just committed? To a bomb set off by a terrorist (and, in that case, what were his real intentions, and is it truly appropriate to call him a terrorist)? We shall come back to these notions in more detail later on.

Detective stories vs. fantastic tales and picaresque novels

Detective stories, as a genre, set forth mysteries and their solutions. Stories of this form begin with an event and work back towards its causes.4 The formation of this literary genre thus entails a certain number of presuppositions about reality. Indeed, it has been observed that an enigma can only stand out against the background of a stabilized reality. Detective stories are based, more precisely, on two presuppositions that distinguish this genre from its predecessors: tales, especially fantastic tales, on the one hand, and, on the other, novels that can be called ‘picaresque’, in a succinct designation of a narrative orientation that originated in Spain and developed in quite diverse forms in French and English literature.5

Detective stories are distinct from tales, whether miraculous or fantastic, to the extent that they bank on the existence of a reality known as ‘natural’, that is, on the type of causal linkages that the ‘natural’ sciences establish. The association between the narrative logic of detective stories and scientific logic was central to the earliest analyses of this genre (Messac 1975 [1929]). Detective stories could not exist without a clearly established dividing line between natural reality and the world known as supernatural. If gods or spirits can modify reality according to their whims, and if we cannot know their intentions, then reality does not possess the necessary stability for mysteries to stand out in a salient way against the background formed by the normal course of events. In detective stories and also, of course, in spy stories, there are no references to supernatural beings, such as ghosts, and this absence marks the difference between the two literary genres we are considering, on the one hand, and so-called fantastic tales, on the other. To be sure, in the literature of the second half of the nineteenth century there are many narratives associated with the fantastic genre that do not refer directly to the intervention of supernatural beings, or to anything magical, but that seek to arouse anxiety and unease in the reader by depicting ordinary situations in terms apt to bring out their strangeness (Todorov 1973). But this device, particularly evident in Guy de Maupassant’s fantastic realism, aims to look on all reality as tinged with an anxiety-producing uncanniness, often by presenting it as it might appear to a subject afflicted with mental illness. Now, this literary approach, too, excludes the possibility of establishing a detective-story intrigue. For if reality as a whole takes on an enigmatic form and is tilted towards the impossible and the incomprehensible, then the singularities on which mystery-based novels rely (singularities that the investigator’s job is to explain) are swallowed up in a framework that no longer allows the ordinary to be distinguished from the extraordinary, the interpretable from the inconceivable.

The work of Edgar Allen Poe, who was both a master of the fantastic genre and the inventor of the detective story,6 allows us to distinguish clearly between these two genres. Paranormal phenomena are not excluded from Poe’s fantastic tales. But such phenomena never come into play in those that prefigure the detective story. Similarly, while Arthur Conan Doyle was a devoted practitioner of spiritiualism in his private life and even wrote a history of the practice (Doyle 1926),7 he excluded supernatural and paranormal elements from the detective stories featuring Sherlock Holmes. These narratives do not incorporate any events apt to transgress the causal modalities that we customarily ascribe, in western societies, to ‘natural laws’. And while certain characters may initially evoke such phenomena – ghostly appearances, doors that open or close without human or mechanical intervention, and so on – the inquiry always ends up giving them a natural explanation, or attributing them to manoeuvres designed to deceive the story’s protagonists (and by the same token its readers).

This restriction clearly does not apply to Doyle’s many fantastic tales. Let us compare, for example, two stories that both include the mysterious appearance of a monster. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, a detective story, readers are first allowed to believe that the huge beast terrifying the villagers is of paranormal origin. But this irrational belief is disproved by Sherlock Holmes’s investigation. The irrational has a rational outcome. In ‘The Terror of Blue John Gap’, a fantastic tale, rational arguments are invoked at the beginning of the story, but they are belied by subsequent events. The inhabitants of a remote mountain village in England also believe in the existence of a terrifying monster. The narrator, ‘a man of a sober and scientific turn of mind, absolutely devoid of imagination’, is scornful at first of these ‘old wives’ tales’ and tries to find a rational explanation for the strange phenomena reported by the locals (the inexplicable disappearance of sheep on moonless nights), before finding himself in the presence of a monster from the bowels of the earth whose victim he becomes in turn (Doyle 1977: 69).

A second presupposition concerns the social world. If the mysteries on which detective stories hinge are to stand out sharply against the background of reality, reality has to be consistent not only with natural ‘laws’ but also with social regularities. This is what distinguishes detective stories from picaresque narratives. Both genres belong to the vast domain of adventure stories. A detective story includes characters who have ‘adventures’; it strings together incidents, reversals, dramatic turns of events, and so on. But, unlike picaresque tales, detective stories bank on a reality whose lineaments and linkages offer a basis for predictable anticipations, and the enigma stands out against the background of this stabilized social reality.

In a picaresque novel, ‘adventures are juxtaposed without benefit of causal relations’, in ‘a world that has nothing to offer but chance,’ and where ‘fragmentation and contingency’ rule (Pavel 2003: 101, 106). Let us take, for example (to remain within the confines of French literature), Alain René Lesage’s Gil Blas de Santillane (1886 [1715–1735]), inspired by early seventeenth-century Spanish literature, or Voltaire’s Candide (2005 [1759]), which can be seen as a late, parodic expression of picaresque narrative. In these texts, as in the classic works of the genre, stress is placed on the more or less chaotic nature of the various milieus in which the characters and, with them, all human beings are immersed, no matter when or where they live out their earthly lives. According to the conceptions presented in such works, human beings are above all playthings of circumstances, welcome or unwelcome. These circumstances are always local, in terms of space and time. Each moment in every place is thus characterized by a certain combination of circumstances on which the protagonist’s situation depends in the ‘here and now’. But once a given situation is resolved, especially an unwelcome situation from which the character seeks to escape, he or she is thrust into another situation, equally singular (and often no more welcome). Life’s unfolding is thus comparable to a series of ‘throws’ – as in throws of dice – that is not governed by any principle of general causality but depends rather on whim or chance (the latter term is used here in its trivial sense to designate absolute unpredictability, and not in the probabilist sense it has been given by mathematicians after Pascal). The picaresque novel not only sets aside the picture of an ordered reality, it even excludes any reference to a hidden principle of order – whether this might involve divine providence, historical determination, or objective laws governing society – that would make it possible to give meaning to events that no individual person has planned or even desired. A rational construction of moral life, like the one Adam Smith, inspired by Newton, developed in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (2002 [1759]), is at the opposite extreme from the picaresque novel, in which it is impossible to distinguish the ‘good guys’ from the ‘bad guys’ (and it was precisely to mock efforts to establish a simultaneously providential and rational moral order that Voltaire wrote Candide). The picaresque tale, starting with the novella first published anonymously in Burgos that came to be regarded as the prototype of the genre (Life of Lazarillo de Tormes 2000 [1554]), makes malice, lies and trickery the very principles of human behaviour and the driving forces behind stories that proceed in erratic ways. But this sort of dark realism excludes the possibility of a stabilized reality, since the motives for action are entirely unpredictable. What is more, the representation of reality is laid out on a single plane, the one that links the fleeting intrigues fomented by trickery; this structure not only excludes the reference to parallel levels of reality that is needed to set up a detective story, it also rules out any staging of the ambivalence – inasmuch as ambivalence is distinguished, precisely, from lies – that will constitute one of the major themes of the modern novel.

The stories that Robert Louis Stevenson collected in New Arabian Nights (1882) and in a sequel, More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter (1885), constitute an even more telling example for our purposes, in that they are contemporaneous with the invention of the detective story. They include most of the ingredients that will be found in the narratives marking the birth of the detective genre, and later the first spy stories, even though Stevenson’s tales can be clearly distinguished from the latter. In Stevenson’s short stories, mysteries arise one after another, but they dissolve in chaos, paradox or comedy. As the collection titles show, the author’s intention was to renew the genre of the Arabian tale, transposing it to contemporary London, which had been treated since the mid-nineteenth century as a city full of mystery.8 In these narratives we find the kinds of threatening situations (booby traps, duels, and the like), entities (clandestine clubs with perverse aims, such as the Suicide Club and secret societies), and characters (criminals, swindlers, bomb-throwing anarchists) that will become familiar in detective fiction, and even more so in spy fiction. But, in keeping with the logic of tales, in Stevenson’s stories anything at all can happen, and the hero’s adventures are completely unpredictable. Prince Florimel, Sovereign of Bohemia, wanders in various disguises through the London underworld accompanied by his faithful sidekick Colonel Geraldien. He meets madmen, desperadoes, male and female adventurers, virtuous damsels in distress,9 fanatics and wise men; relying only on his courage and his sense of honour, he serves as the instrument of an immanent justice that is beholden neither to the police nor to the legal system. There are indeed mysteries, but their outcome is always paradoxical. Thus, for example, in ‘The Dynamiter’ the chief anarchist, Zero, never manages to set off a single bomb; he is the very embodiment of impotence. Although all the ingredients are borrowed from contemporary reality, nothing ties together the various situations that arise one after another in these more or less bizarre stories whose implausibility is presumably designed at least in part to bring out the contingent nature of the existing social order. A nonchalant dandy himself, Stevenson was a critical observer of the society of his day.10

Neither the fantastic tale nor the picaresque tale is well suited for the construction of mysteries. The fantastic tale presents the world in its strangeness; the picaresque presents the world in its incoherence. The staging of both states of affairs, strangeness and incoherence, relies on ontological presuppositions that exclude any departure from the worlds thus put in place. An enigma exists as such only through reference to the possibility of a solution, that is, of its negation as an enigma. It is presented as an anomaly: as something that intervenes to disrupt a coherent set of predictable expectations. However, this disruption is not only temporary but, in a certain sense, illusory. Once the solution has been found, everything falls back into place.

The constitution of reality: the real vs. reality

Having taken on the task of specifying the conditions for the emergence of the detective story, I shall posit a first hypothesis. The appearance of this novelistic genre has as a condition of possibility the establishment of something that can be presented as reality.

To clarify what I mean by this term, I shall introduce a distinction between two ways of naming the context of action: on the one hand, the real, on the other, reality. The characters that navigate within a fantastic tale are certainly in contact with real entities and states of affairs. If a given fantasmatic apparition were not real, the story would lose all interest (hence the reader’s disappointment when the narrator sees fit to give, in conclusion, a ‘rational’ interpretation of the strange events recounted during the narrative). Similarly, the hero of a picaresque novel grapples with entirely real circumstances (otherwise he would run no risk and the narrative would hold no interest). But the real entities and states of affairs with which the action has to reckon have a circumstantial and singular character. They remain, as it were, attached to the particular events through which they manifest themselves and to the situations that these events bring about. There are thus as many real things as there are events, and the series of situations gives rise to a series of different, and often incompatible or contradictory, real things.

To refer to something as reality presupposes, conversely, that one can count on a set of regularities that are maintained no matter what situation is envisaged and that frame each event, however singular it may be. These regularities make it possible to trace the boundary between the possible and the impossible, and they offer a general framework for action that allows for a certain predictability or, as it were, a certain order. In picaresque or fantastic narratives there are isolated zones of order, to be sure; these are generally attributed to the political will of the powerful, or to more or less well-marked trajectories and points of encounter (today, we would speak of networks). But they are always fragile, and they rarely stand up against the combination of circumstances that shatters them. Conversely, detective stories count on reality in itself, that is, on something apt to serve as a substratum for the various situations confronted by the action, independent of the ‘subjective’ interpretations developed by the actors. The elements that constitute this reality have an all-encompassing character (even if the extension and limits of the reality in question can be problematic). These elements are presumed to exist in a stable relation with one another and to constitute a relatively coherent whole that makes a descriptive overview possible (even if it is understood that such a picture, always incomplete, may be subject to modification and even transformation). It is only against this background of reality, taken for granted, that a mystery can stand out, shine and attract attention.

Depending on the historical context and on what we now call society, reality thus defined can be grounded in very diverse forms that are linked, for example, to religion, kinship or law. In the original detective story, this background of reality rests on two clearly separated although interacting orders whose constitution as such is relatively recent. It is first and foremost a matter of physical reality, and the first analyses to which this genre gave rise, those of Régis Messac (1975 [1929]) and Siegfried Kracauer (1981 [1922–5]),11 quite appropriately stressed the relation between the appearance of detective stories and the development of science and technology. But it is also, and one might even say especially, a matter of social reality.

By this term, I refer to a project of describing the human environment as an organized whole, possessing a specific logic and obeying laws that are peculiar to it, independently of the motives and wills of each individual taken singly. This whole is composed simultaneously of individuals and of very diverse entities. Certain entities are defined by law (for example, members of the bar), while others are not (for example, social classes). These entities may be locally rooted (for example, the inhabitants of a particular small town) or they may be dispersed in space (for example, the nobility). Finally, the entities are generally endowed with properties, with a type of intentionality and a way of being or a specific character that are reflected, by and large, in the way of being and the character of individual persons in so far as the latter can, through certain of their properties, be associated with these entities. Thus there is a way of being characteristic of the bourgeoisie, and someone who has prior knowledge of this way of being will anticipate certain behaviours upon coming into proximity with a member of that class.

Other older, more widely attested ways of constructing reality, in particular by relying on law and on kinship, are not abandoned with the development of these new forms. But the combination of the properties that derive from specifications of the legal order – which can be called statutory or official – and the properties that are identified when one takes into account non-legal, unofficial and properly social entities, as it were, is problematic, a source of uncertainty. Thus certain individuals may ‘in fact’ have a way of being that does not fit with their official identity and that is discovered – often with astonishment – before it becomes clear that their bizarre nature has to do with bonds that attach them to specific entities that are not legally defined (it is not known at first, for example, that a given physician is Jewish, or of lower-class origin, but once this information is available, everything becomes clear …).

The idea that such an ‘objective’ description, capable of shifting from physical reality towards social reality (and also, as Lorraine Daston has shown [1992], from social reality, governed by laws established by legislators, towards physical reality, which is also presumed to obey ‘laws’), is not only possible but necessary to the harmonious workings of political entities began to emerge, as we know, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It accompanied the development of statistics, political economics, and then – shortly before the appearance of the detective story – sociology. It was also in this intellectual context, and by relying on these new ways of envisaging the human environment, that the social novel took shape, a genre that flourished to an extraordinary degree in the nineteenth century and of which the detective story is, in part, a belated transformation.

Social novels, detective novels, spy novels

From the outset, detective novels and spy novels have been presented as sociological genres, like the broader genre of which they are offshoots, the social novel. It is hard to see how these two sub-genres could have come into existence before the establishment of a category that became ‘self-evident’ in a commonsensical way only in the mid-nineteenth century: namely, society.12 Thus it can be said that the genre of exotic or historical detective stories, very widespread today, is anatopical and anachronistic, in the sense that it projects into non-western spaces or remote historical periods a way of envisaging the human environment that is historically and geographically situated. In the case of detective fiction, as with the social novel more generally, the characters featured in a narrative, necessarily limited in number, are depicted in terms of groups – age, sex, nationality, and so on – and especially of social classes, whose groupings and relationships make up society as a whole. Each character is thus treated both as a singular individual – with his or her unique personality, psychology, past, destiny, and so forth – and as a typical representative of a larger whole, a grouping with more or less defined contours that figures in society and constitutes one of its components. The reading contract is based on the hypothesis that all readers will be capable of shifting back and forth between the characters presented in the narrative with their own biographical particularities and the social types of which these characters are exemplars (tokens), and even that readers will be able to relate characters to real persons whom they could well have met in the course of daily life and whom they could have identified by operating similar back-and-forth movements between the real person, the character in the novel and the social type.

The type of determinism that subtends social novels makes room, as sociology does, for transgression and crime; these too can be explained by taking the social properties of the characters into account. Relying on statistics, sociology showed in the nineteenth century that transgressions and crimes themselves obeyed regular social patterns which made them as predictable as ordinary behaviours, if not more so13; indeed, this was one of the major accomplishments that allowed sociology to show its mettle. Moreover, the convergence between the social novel and sociology was such that it would not be absurd to suppose that the public success of certain sociological works during the second half of the twentieth century (Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction in particular [1984 (1979)]) derived from a transfer of the reading contract from the social novel to works that appeared at first glance to be intended for specialists in the social sciences. As in the case of the social novel, these texts aroused the interest of readers who recognized themselves and others in the pictures they were offered, where they saw something like small-scale or stripped-down models of the society in which they themselves were immersed.

In social novels, a crime, as an event, is an attribute of the criminal who is its cause. Event and cause are inseparable. The question raised by the crime and the criminal is then essentially a moral question: if we know the social conditions that turned a man into a criminal, do we have the right to hold him morally responsible for his crime, or must we attribute a portion of the responsibility to the entity called society? Now, the innovation introduced by the crime novel in relation to the social novel concerns precisely the relation between the crime and the criminal. An event occurs. It is a crime. But we do not know to whom to attribute it. Any of the characters represented, including the narrator (as in Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), might be its author; the detective is the sole exception.14

Detective fiction and spy fiction deploy characters that are even more stereotyped and establish an even more ordinary reality than social fiction does. But this banalization of reality serves as a support structure for the crisis, which takes a criminal event whose attribution is problematic and reveals the uncertain and fragile character of that event. Spy fiction goes a step further, since beneath every character, no matter how ordinary, another person may be concealed, one who has totally different properties, inclinations and intentions, and whose social appearance is all the more stereotypical in that it is only a disguise intended to deceive both the other characters and the reader. By the same token, not only the real identities but also the real relationships that the actors maintain become uncertain and problematic, since surface relations of a certain type in fact dissimulate bonds, intentions and plans that are kept secret.

Reality in crisis: the conspiracy and mystery forms

This deliberate, functional layering of identities characterizes the structure of what we may call the conspiracy form. A conspiracy is an object that is only perceived as such – as distinguished from ordinary human relations – from the outside. It is distinguished from ordinary relations only by the operation of unveiling that sets an apparent but fictitious reality and a hidden but real reality side by side, on the same level. This is why the moment when the conspiracy is unmasked has the properties of a coup de théâtre, a dramatic turn of events.

Thus reality, social reality as initially perceived by a naive observer (and reader), with its order, its hierarchies and its principles of