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22 DOWNING
A bit later in the same Convolut, Benjamin does provide a quote, this
time directly from Balzac’s own Cousin Pons (1848), a work written at
the very Grenze of the nineteenth century mentioned above:
If anyone had come and told Napoleon that a man or a building is inces-
santly, and at all hours, represented by an image in the atmosphere, that all
existing objects have there a kind of specter which can be captured and
perceived, he would have consigned him to Charenton as a lunatic . . . Yet
that is what Daguerre’s discovery proved. [. . . And] just as physical objects
in fact project themselves onto the atmosphere, so that it retains the specter
which the daguerreotype can fix and capture, in the same way ideas . . .
imprint themselves in what we must call the atmosphere of the spiritual
world . . . and live on in it spectrally. (Y8a,1; emphasis in original)
the eye perceives, or the memory records, is itself not other than the
original physical object or the emanated image: it is that image, that
shed object, transported through the “atmosphere”—not a represen-
tation in any traditional sense (or in any Platonic sense of remove),
but only in the sense in which the object itself is a representation, ex-
isting only insofar as it continuously represents itself in the form of
continuously projected images.
Although in the passage quoted (from Cousin Pons), the “atmos-
phere” is presented as a space, a topos, it is clear that Balzac, and
Benjamin also, even primarily, conceives of it as a temporal space. It
is essentially spatial insofar as images are felt to depend on a partic-
ular object, and so only to haunt the realm from which they objectively
emanate. But it is temporal insofar as the atmosphere traversed, by
the image, between the emanating object and the perceiving camera
(or subject: der Aufnehmende) introduces a temporal disconnect or
difference. To help picture this, we might take up Long and Sedley’s
suggestion and consider our modern experience of looking at stars, or
rather starlight: What we are seeing are light particles emanating from
the material star, but the star itself is billions of years older than the
original light at the moment we perceive it; indeed, the star might not
even still be there at the moment we see its light, but rather already
long gone (78).5 On a greatly foreshortened scale, this is also what
Balzac imagines to occur in the case of everyday photography and
perception—and, I would say, what Benjamin imagines in the case of
memory: The image recorded, for all its exact correspondence, even
identity, with its original object, is temporally distinct; the object per-
ceived, the image perceived, only comes to us through time. (As we
will see, this is how Lucretius explains ghosts, where the images, like
all images, survive their bodies.)6 This is the concrete basis for
Balzac’s apparently fanciful conceit connecting photography and div-
ination in the more extended context of the Cousin Pons passage, a
connection very like Benjamin’s own of past memory and future
prophecy: Even as new telescopes allow us to look back in time to see
the universe at a stage where the present is still a future, so, Balzac
speculates, specially equipped individuals should be able to look back
into the approaching images of the recent past and see the “traces,”
the “germs” of the future present.
Balzac offers the bare rudiments of an atomist or eidolic theory of
images. As Benjamin’s comment on Nadar underscores, a fuller ver-
sion is to be found in the classical world, not only in the work of Epi-
LUCRETIUS AT THE CAMERA 25
ages; the empty space between the images is precisely what is not
perceived, so that the flow appears continuous, “temporal” in the
Bergsonian sense of durable.13 But as Lucretius explains about how
we imagine we see “images rhythmically going forward and moving
their supple limbs” (bk. 4, line 768f),
The images seem to do this [. . .] because when the first image perishes
and a second arises in a different stance it looks as if the first had
changed its pose. You can take it that this happens fast, so great is the
speed and availability of things. And so great is the availability of parti-
cles within a single period of time detectable by the senses that it is ca-
pable of keeping up the supply. (4.770–76; cf. 4.798ff)
Even as motion is nothing but different images and the speed of their
individual appearances, so is time (or “tempora multa, quae tempore
in uno, cum sentimus, latent” [4.794f]) nothing but these particular
and separate fleeting Bilder.
Lucretius describes a special case that further illuminates the gen-
eral schema, in ways that have special relevance to Benjamin (indeed,
to post-Nietzschean culture in general). He asks, if all images in fact
derive from material objects—if all images are themselves material
objects—how do we come to imagine or picture things that don’t exist,
such as “Centaurs, the bodily forms of Scyllas, the dog-faces of Cer-
berus” (and, he adds, “the likenesses of those who have met their
death and whose bones are in the ground” [4.732–34])? The answer,
it seems, is this: in our imagination, one sequence-stream of images
is intersected and interrupted by another—say, the image of a man by
the image of a horse—and a new sequence of images arises; in our
desire “to see the sequel to each thing” (4.806), we combine the dis-
crete and different images into one and the same thing—a centaur.14
Something similar occurs in dreams when “an image of the same kind
is not supplied, but what was previously a woman seems to have
turned into a man in our arms, or one face or age [aetas] is followed
by another” (4.818–21): the fact that this does not surprise us, says
Lucretius, that we allow for the changing nature of the image, is “the
doing of sleep and oblivion” (4.822), that is, the relaxation of our de-
sire for coherence and our need for, literally, re-membering. What we
experience in dreams, however (and in the case of centaurs and the
like), is in important ways more revealing of actuality than what we
perceive in so-called waking life. The images emanating out in their
rapid sequence are all different, each one its own unique thing or mo-
ment; the object itself is a compacted composite of multiple layers of
LUCRETIUS AT THE CAMERA 27
And the same holds true for film. In film, quotes Benjamin, “a move-
ment decomposed, and presented in a rhythm of ten images or more
per second, is perceived by the eye as a perfectly continuous move-
ment” (Y7a,1).19 But insofar as film presents its image as “un mouve-
ment parfaitement,” it does not present the Epicurean reality, but only
its illusion: the reality resides only in the movement décomposé, in the
isolated, detached frame (and the indispensable interval, or void, before
and behind it).20 That is, only as a series of discrete snapshots, not as
“cinema,” does film have truth value for Benjamin: hence the privileg-
ing of the relatively old-fashioned Momentaufnahme over film in Berlin-
er Chronik (or of film only insofar as it presents Momentaufnahmen).
Again, this is the case not only because of Benjamin’s understanding of
the technology of the photographic medium, but also because of his un-
derstanding of the real material world—which is to say, the historical
world—and the historical subject. The former is attested to in Ben-
jamin’s well-known formulations in the “Theses on History,” in his ve-
hement opposition to “empty homogenous time” and the continuum of
history, and in his insistence on time and history as structured instead
by the presence of the instant (Jetztzeit), the flash-image brought to a
standstill and “blasted” out of the additive, homogenous course of his-
tory.21 The latter can be glimpsed in Benjamin’s continued fascination
with the optical device of the Phenakistoscope, and particularly with
Baudelaire’s application of this device to a description of the modern
subject in “Morale du joujou,” where the subject, say, a dancer or jug-
gler, is “divided up and decomposed” into a certain number of discrete
images and arranged around the edge of a circular piece of cardboard
that, when twirled and viewed through a mirror, creates the illusion of a
unified and continuous person—but only and always as an illusion, a
recognizable trick.22
The realization of this “Epicurean” theory of photography and histo-
ry in Berliner Chronik—which, as Linda Haverty-Rugg puts it, creates
the photo effect that Benjamin’s essays explain (133)—is perhaps best
seen in one of its longest sections, the description of Berlin’s cafés, an
example particularly well suited to illustrate the geschichtet nature of
everything geschichtlich (GS 6: 480–84; Writings 2: 606–09). Ben-
jamin describes the Bilder of three cafés in detail; the Viktoria Café, the
old West End Café, and the Princess Café, and that of another, the Ro-
manische Café, more incidentally. But in every case, Benjamin de-
scribes the café not only as a place—a Lokale that is also always a
Stelle—but also as a place whose identity (or Bild) is always changing,
30 DOWNING
logical endpoint of Berliner Chronik: the moment just before the out-
break of World War I and the almost immediately following suicides of
Benjamin’s best friend, Fritz Heinle, and Heinle’s girlfriend, Rika Selig-
son, on 8 August 1914, which closed this period of Benjamin’s life and
for a long time caused the city and Benjamin’s concern for German so-
ciety to “sink out of sight.” But that moment before, when some hope
of redemption, of effective action and active meaning, still seemed
possible: that is the moment Benjamin is seeking to isolate, to separate
from the events that followed it and robbed it of its hope, its futurity.
Socially, the sought-for Bild is concentrated around the figures of Ben-
jamin and Heinle: but to recognize what was so special about it, this
Bild needs to be separated from the various “streams” to which it might
seem to belong. First, and most pressing, “our narrower world,” “the
world of our ‘movement,’” “our self-contained group” needs to be dis-
tinguished from that of “the emancipated,” “the sated, self-assured bo-
hemians around us”: for although Heinle was a poet, and Benjamin a
writer composing in jazz clubs, they were not part of the disengaged
aesthetic movement of Expressionism that, we are told, eventually lost
the threatening nimbus of its revolutionary designs. Nor were they fully
part of the bourgeois strata that preceded and followed the aesthetes,
whose denizens were just slumming in a different, more exotic world; a
bourgeois class whose own afterlife, after the war, for all its Ren-
ovierung, also lost its progressive force. Nor were they simply part of
the so-called Youth Movement that put all its hopes in straightforward
“actions” and “speeches,” a movement that also eventually faltered.
Their Bild, which is to say their stratum, moment, or movement—their
Vorstellung, as Samuel Weber puts it24—was all these things, caught up
in all these other streams. But it was also none of them, and in its iso-
lation, it retained a truth, a reality, different from each and all. Benjamin
writes, “We had no intention of making connections in this café. On the
contrary—what attracted us here was being enclosed in an environ-
ment that isolated us.” It is an isolated, discrete world that Benjamin
renders archaeological by calling it a “subterranean stratum” of the
Youth Movement, and photographic by evoking as its tutelary spirit the
specter of Simon Guttman, the founder of the Deutsche Photodienst; by
referring to their meeting place with the self-styled phrase die
Anatomie, Benjamin links both his archaeological and his photo refer-
ences with the process of cutting up wholes into discrete parts. And,
strangely enough, after his atomistic anatomy, what Benjamin is left
with as irreducibly singular about his and Heinle’s Bild at that isolated
32 DOWNING
NOTES
1. In the larger project, I consider how the introduction of photography fun-
damentally altered the genre of the Bildungsroman, including the character-
istic engagement of Bilder in its program, such as we find, for example, in the
painting of the sickly prince in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister or in the many paint-
ings of Keller’s Der Grüne Heinrich, all of which play crucial roles in the given
protagonist’s Bildung. For archaeology, I am concerned to show how, just as
photography radically refigured the field of the Bildungsroman, archaeology
refigured the field of classical studies, which since its inception by Humboldt
at the beginning of the nineteenth century had served as the institutional foun-
dation for the official program of Bildung in German lands. Archaeology oc-
casioned as great a reconception of visual culture (and Bilder) in the nine-
teenth century as did photography, in part together with photography;
together, they challenged not only the traditional model of high culture, or Bil-
dungskultur, but also the model of the properly cultured, or gebildet, subject.
One key symptom of this is how, during this period, both photography and ar-
chaeology became introjected as privileged tropes for memory and, as part of
this, for subject identity and development; this had major repercussions for
the project of that subject’s Bildung. See my After Images: Photography, Ar-
chaeology, and Psychoanalysis and the Tradition of Bildung.
2. Translations taken from The Arcades Project. Parenthetical references in
the text will refer to Benjamin’s own reference system, which is common to
both the German and English editions.
3. Translation by Heather Klomhaus-Hrács.
4. Balzac’s use of the term “spectre” for the Epicurean eidôlon has some
classical precedent: Cicero notes that the Roman Epicurean Catius translated
eidôla as “spectra” in 45 BCE: this is the only attested use of “spectra” in Latin
prior to the seventeenth century (Fam. xv 16.1, 19.1). Lucretius preferred the
terms “simulacrum” and “imago,” and occasionally “effigies” and “figura.”
See David Sedley’s 1998 book, Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek
Wisdom. Although not specifically indicated, Balzac seems the likely source
for Roland Barthes’s use of “spectre” and atomist vocabulary as well.
LUCRETIUS AT THE CAMERA 33
13. It is worth noting that Henri Bergson was himself a Lucretian scholar, and
in 1884 published an edition of De Rerum Natura under the title Extraits de Lu-
crèce, with a commentary, notes, and essays on the text, poetry, physics, and
philosophy of Lucretius. As is well known, Bergson had a major influence on
Benjamin’s thinking (“Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire” [GS 1: 605–53; Writ-
ings 4: 313–43]), including his ideas about both memory and images, or
Bilder. To calibrate some of the differences between their respective receptions
of Lucretian thought, we might juxtapose two axioms from Bergson’s essays:
the claim, “Everything turns to dust,” with which Benjamin would be very
much in sympathy; and “Nothing changes, everything remains the same,”
which adumbrates the Bergsonian doctrine of durée, which Benjamin consis-
tently attacked. We can assume they would have had different responses to
the question posed, but not answered, at the end of the passage quoted above
from Nadar. See Bergson.
14. Benjamin had a special fascination with centaurs: see his letter to Ernst
Schoen, 30 July 1917 (Correspondence 52); see, too, Hamacher 165.
15. For Nietzsche, see, for example, Genealogy of Morals, second essay, sec.
13. For Nietzsche and Democritus, see Porter, “Nietzsche’s Atoms” and Niet-
zsche and the Philology of the Future. Karl Marx was also, of course, greatly in-
terested in Democritus, and used him as the basis for his dissertation.
16. In her 1984 work, Elizabeth Asmis adds the important caveat that
“this much-cited comparison is appropriate so long as we do not take it to
mean that individual traits lose their individual distinctiveness as they
merge into a single general presentation [that is, into the ‘composite pho-
tograph’]” (65).
17. I should emphasize that whereas Bailey and Sedley are both applying
the technology of photography to account for Epicurean thought, Benjamin
seems to be doing the reverse, applying Epicurean thought to account for
photography. Together, they suggest something of the reciprocal interaction
that Stefan Andriopoulos brilliantly delineates for television technology and
occultism at about this same time, an interaction that, he says, approaches
the “circular causality” of complex feedback mechanisms. The same model
seems equally relevant to the example of photography and ancient atomism.
See Andriopoulos.
18. We might also note the often unspoken objection to snapshot photogra-
phy mentioned by Benjamin, that it is impossible for the human countenance
to be captured by such a machine (Y4a,4). But this is because the counte-
nance is a lie.
19. Benjamin is quoting Roland Villiers.
20. For Benjamin on the indispensability of the interval, see, for example,
“The Metaphysics of Youth” (Writings 1: 12); “What is Epic Theater? (II)”
(Writings 4: 306).
21. For more on the political ramifications of photographic technology, con-
sider the following statement from the Passagenwerk: “The entrance of the
temporal factor into the panoramas is brought about through the succession
of times of day (with well-known lighting tricks). In this way, the panorama
transcends painting and anticipates photography. Owing to its technological
LUCRETIUS AT THE CAMERA 35
formation, the photograph, in contrast to the painting, can and must be cor-
related with a well-defined and continuous segment of time (exposure time).
In this chronological specifiability, the political significance of the photograph
is already contained in nuce” (Y10,2).
22. Cf. Passagenwerk Y9a,1; Y7a,1.
23. For “beer restaurant,” the German has Bierrestauration, which involves
an irreproducible wordplay on the notion of Restauration.
24. Weber explains in Mass Mediauras that every Bild is a place, or Stelle,
and every such place is in constant motion, to and fro; hence, every Bild is a
Vorstellung, a wordplay impossible to reproduce in English, but most
provocative for its resonances with atomist doctrines.
WORKS CITED