the materialist historian; rather, it is recognized and re-membered as it flashes up,

blasting open the continuum of history.

 Since Benjamin advocates a historiography that is substantially different from

traditional history, the experiences of marginal nineteenth-century figures serve better for

composing such a history than those of the traditional historian. Connected as they are to

that century's minor preoccupations, these figures have the capacity to capture and

develop images that flash up from the continuum of history. In this project, I draw on

three such figures of historical materialism: the ragpicker, the flaneur, and the detective,

who appear over and over in the Arcades Project and other writings. While chapters 2, 3,

and 4 will theorize those roles more fully, at this point let me sketch their figures and

point out some overlaps. The ragpicker is a relatively minor figure in the Arcades

Project. He is the historian most interested in the refuse of the past. He collects rags, but

he is not a connoisseur; instead, he uses these discarded rags to piece together a history

that depends on chance. Like the ragpicker, the flaneur also navigates the nineteenth-

century city. But he is distracted not by rags but by objects appearing in the arcades. First

identified by Charles Baudelaire, the flaneur is a detached pedestrian, who follows a

whimsical trail rather than the rules of traffic. FlInerie becomes a capricious method of

traversing the city, pausing wherever an ordinary object catches his eye, in order to

discover an entire history out of a single detail. The detective is a successor of the

flaneur. He appears after the flaneur's tactics are deemed inadequate for navigating the

increasingly illegible nineteenth-century city. The detective confounds the traditional

distinctions between interiority and exteriority in his investigations. While these

characters perform different functions, they all serve the task of writing an alternative