Trace

Definition

The trace, in Derrida's lexicon, is the non-present remainder that constitutes meaning. Because every signifier refers not to a self-present signified but to other signifiers in an endless chain, meaning is never fully present; it is the "trace" — the mark left by the chain of differences — that constitutes what we take as meaning. In architecture, the trace undermines the idea that a building's meaning originates in its author's intention or is fully contained in its form. A building always carries traces of other buildings (precedents, types, styles), traces of the conditions of its production, and traces of the uses that have inhabited it. The trace connects Derrida's thinking to the Benjaminian dialectical image and to forensic or indexical approaches to architecture.

A second, domestic register comes via Elizabeth Grosz (through Georgina Downey's house-museum reading): the trace as corporeal remainder — the signature that "cannot authenticate, it cannot prove, it cannot make present the personage of the author; but it is a remnant, a remainder of and a testimony to both a living past and a set of irreducible and ineliminable corporeal traces" (Grosz, p. 22) — always "a kind of infusion or double bind, between the interior and exterior of the text." Downey applies this to the musealized home, where the trace is "small signs of dwelling" — "traces, objects, features, and small signs of dwelling that provide a tenuous journey of memory and interpretation": the prayer books, the narrow single bed, the prie dieu in Gaudí's bedroom; Yvonne's pillow twelve inches from the toilet. Here the trace is the house museum's exhibit-principle, Benjamin's dictum "to dwell means to leave traces" (The Arcades Project, p. 9) as its curatorial warrant — and its destabilizer, since the corporeal trace "shock[s], overturn[s], or subvert[s] the main discourse being presented."

A third, documentary register comes via Marian Macken's spatial-document reading: the trace promoted from residue to document — the entire room as trace. "With the understanding that events and experiences leave residual traces as proof of their occurrence, the studio-museum retains and preserves former artistic events: it becomes a spatial document, or spatial archive, that serves as evidence of a course of events. In this way, the room is a trace left by the past." Where Derrida's trace conditions meaning and Grosz's traces testimony, Macken's trace is spatialized at room scale: the preserved interior "occupies the same site and structure as the original and is imprinted with traces of its own original space, but it is no longer the original" — the trace that you can walk into. And the register carries the trace's temporal depth: as traces, spatial documents become "'intratemporal, that which is "within-time'"'" — with "temporal simultaneity" in the archive, "the future has a presence within the archive." See spatial-document.

A fourth, erasure register appears via Rachel Carley's reading of Life A User's Manual: the trace as what a system plans to abolish — and cannot. Bartlebooth's fifty-year project ends with each reassembled jigsaw "dip[ped] in a detergent solution until nothing else is left but blank paper. No trace would remain of an endeavor that took fifty years to complete." Bellos's gloss names the plan's fatal flaw: it "must fail because it ignores death, or rather seeks to treat death only as an event that follows the completion of life, rather than as the radical imperfection that is in life and constitutes moral existence." Where the Derridean trace conditions meaning, the Benjaminian trace records dwelling, and Macken's trace documents events, the Bartlebooth trace is the negative case: the tracelessness a designed system can pursue but never achieve — the error, the thwarting, the "radical imperfection" (the clinamen) guaranteeing that traces survive every system of erasure. See voluntary-constraints.

A fifth, marker register appears via J Macgregor Wise's essay — the trace promoted to a theory of the lived marker, with Illich's formula joining Benjamin's. "In and of themselves markers are traces of movement that has passed. 'To live means to leave traces,' as Benjamin once wrote" (p. 392): the home's objects are traces before they are anything else, and their double life is the concept's richest formulation — static as mark ("static, dull, and cold"), radiating when lived ("when lived (encountered, manipulated, touched, voiced, glanced at, practised) it radiates a milieu, a field of force, a shape of space," p. 392). Wise adds Illich's universal corollary: "all living is dwelling, the shape of a dwelling. To dwell means to live the traces that past living has left. The traces of dwellings survive, as do the bones of people" (quoted p. 392) — the trace not only deposited but inhabited: dwelling as living the traces. Where Downey's trace is the house museum's exhibit-principle and Taylor's the uncurated imprint, Wise's marker-trace is the everyday's own boundary-drawing apparatus — the trace that spaces a room into a home. See milieu, home, dwelling.

Key Thinkers

• Jacques Derrida — the trace as the condition of possibility for meaning that is never present in itself.
• Richard Coyne — "signifiers appear to be referring constantly to other signifiers"; meaning is the trace-effect of these chains.
• Georgina Downey — the domestic-museal application: habitation's "small signs" as the house museum's evidence; the trace "signed as authentic or not" as the pivot of interpretation (2018, via Grosz).
• Marian Macken — the documentary application: the room itself as trace — "the room is a trace left by the past"; the spatial document as trace made walkable, "intratemporal" within the archive's simultaneity (2018).
• Walter Benjamin — the dwelling-trace dictum: "to dwell means to leave traces" (The Arcades Project, p. 9) — the trace as dwelling's residue rather than language's condition (via Downey).
• J Macgregor Wise — the marker register: "markers are traces of movement that has passed" (p. 392); the trace's double life (static mark vs radiating milieu when lived); Illich's "To dwell means to live the traces that past living has left" as the trace-inhabiting corollary (2000/2006). See milieu, home.

Related Concepts

• Deconstruction — the practice of reading that follows the play of traces.
• Différance — the process of differing/deferring that produces traces.
• Arche-Writing — the proto-writing that leaves traces prior to the speech/writing distinction.
• Presence — the metaphysical illusion that the trace exposes and destabilizes.
• Dwelling — the trace's dwelling register: "to dwell means to leave traces" — inhabitation as trace-production.
• House Museum — the institution built to exhibit the trace: the museal interior curated around "traces of habitation."
• Interior as Biography — the trace's evidentiary yield: the involuntary biography the signs of dwelling write.
• Material Memory — the trace's materialist sibling: the interior's materials as carriers of a work's memory (Marinic).
• Spatial Document — the trace's room-scale form (Macken): the preserved interior as trace-document, walkable, "intratemporal."

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Rethinking Histories of the Interior (Rice 2004/2006) — the trace as the bourgeois interior's historical mode: "The bourgeois domestic interior emerges historically in the nineteenth century through an accumulation of traces, and in relation to occluded meanings" (pp. 286–287); Benjamin's collector supplying the trace's practice — possession by divesting things "of their character as commodities," the things becoming "the traces of inhabitation" (p. 285); and Praz as the trace-historian's misuse: he "collects traces of the inhabitant through their visibility in the interior. Yet he generalises this bourgeois condition as one obtaining across all history" (p. 288) — the trace collected without its historical specificity. See bourgeois-interior, the-collector.

• Derrida for Architects — the trace and the endless chain of signifiers.

• To dwell means to leave traces (Downey 2018) — the domestic register: Grosz's Derridean trace quoted ("a remnant, a remainder of and a testimony to both a living past and a set of irreducible and ineliminable corporeal traces," p. 22) and applied to conserved interiors — "they contain traces, objects, features, and small signs of dwelling that provide a tenuous journey of memory and interpretation"; the trace's subversive yield (the Matamala wall text as a trace that "would constitute a radical new reading of Gaudi's life"); Benjamin's "to dwell means to leave traces" as the chapter's title and closing warrant (n. 17, p. 9); and the interpretive crux: the "trace that is signed as authentic or not," which "when allowed to work in conjunction with" Keeble's and Aynsley's optics "can permit the interiorities of the spaces to reflect attitudes, values, and ideologies of the present."

• Documenting interiority/inhabiting duration (Macken 2018) — the documentary register: "With the understanding that events and experiences leave residual traces as proof of their occurrence, the studio-museum retains and preserves former artistic events: it becomes a spatial document, or spatial archive, that serves as evidence of a course of events. In this way, the room is a trace left by the past"; Demand's photographs "not evidence or proof, but… traces of a process"; and the trace's temporal depth — documents "as traces, become 'intratemporal, that which is "within-time'"'; the future has a presence within the archive."

• Puzzle (Carley 2018) — the erasure register: the blank-paper terminus — "No trace would remain of an endeavor that took fifty years to complete"; Bellos via Carley: the plan "must fail because it ignores death… rather [than treating death] as the radical imperfection that is in life" — the trace's negative limit case, guaranteed by the system's own clinamen. See voluntary-constraints, clinamen.

• Architecture and Interior: A Roam of One's Own (Taylor 2001/2006) — the trace's everyday register, distinguished from the collection: "Are these really 'collections' or the emphasised traces that Benjamin asserts we leave behind in the interior along with everyday imprints on loose covers and protectors?" (p. 341). The room's furnishings "self-gathered and inherited, both consciously and unconsciously" are claimed for the trace, not the collection — the trace as what a life deposits without intending, "everyday imprints on loose covers and protectors" as its humblest form. The register splits the wiki's Benjamin inheritance in two: the collector's curated trace (Rice) against the inhabitant's uncurated imprint (Taylor) — both from Benjamin, but the second needing no connoisseur's value, only a room of one's own and time. See the-collector, becoming-interior, bourgeois-interior.

• Home: Territory and Identity (Wise 2000/2006) — the marker register: "In and of themselves markers are traces of movement that has passed. 'To live means to leave traces,' as Benjamin once wrote" (p. 392); Illich's universal formula joining Benjamin's on the page — "all living is dwelling, the shape of a dwelling. To dwell means to live the traces that past living has left. The traces of dwellings survive, as do the bones of people" (quoted p. 392); and the marker's double life — "static, dull, and cold" as mark, "when lived… it radiates a milieu, a field of force, a shape of space" (p. 392). The trace as the everyday's boundary-drawing apparatus: the trace deposited by living and inhabited by living ("To dwell means to live the traces that past living has left"). Where Downey's trace is museal and Taylor's uncurated, Wise's is the home's own — the trace that spaces a room into a home. See milieu, home, dwelling.

• Boredom and Bedroom (Teyssot 1996/2006) — the trace's temporal-fabric register: the interior's surfaces as time's deposit — "Perhaps it is possible to turn inside-out this lining of time, which is not only the arabesque of the box, but also the design of the carpet, of the wall, and of the reflection between the mirrors and the windows" (p. 346). Here the trace is not an imprint left on surfaces but the surface as time's lining: the carpet's pattern, the wall's design, the mirror-play read as the padded fabric in which the everyday's repetitions are stored ("Boredom is a warm gray cloth that is padded on its inside with the most glowing, colorful silk lining," p. 346). Where Taylor's trace is the uncurated imprint and Macken's the walkable document, Teyssot's is the interior's fabric-body of time — turned inside out only by an act (the essay's programme) that would expose what the habitual has been storing. See bourgeois-interior, aesthetic-boredom, temporality.

• source-notes/berger-2018-death-of-the-architect

• source-notes/dubbeldam-2006-thing-shapes

Open Questions

• Can the registers be unified? Derrida's trace is a structural condition of signification; Benjamin's is the empirical residue of habitation; Grosz's is the corporeal remainder that no signature can make present; Macken's is the room promoted to trace-document. Does the museal trace (Downey) need all four — and does "the trace that is signed as authentic or not" collapse the structural into the curatorial?
• Rice's primary text adds the trace's historiographic limit: Praz "collects traces of the inhabitant through their visibility in the interior" — but visibility (the interior view, the photograph) is only one trace-register, and its collection "generalises this bourgeois condition." Is the wiki's trace-evidence (preserved rooms, photographs, documents) therefore always the visible subset of inhabitation's traces — and what does a history of the invisible traces (the "occluded meanings" Rice pairs with accumulation) require?
• If traces "shock, overturn, or subvert the main discourse being presented" (Downey), is the trace inherently counter-authorial — the more a text/house asserts a persona, the more its traces testify to what the persona excluded? Cf. self-fashioning.
• Macken's register makes the trace walkable and durational ("intratemporal"): does a trace that occupies "the same site and structure as the original" cease to be a trace (a remainder) and become a replica — or is Macken's "no longer the original" exactly the remainder-condition the trace requires?