Water: The Revolutionary Element of Reflection and Likeness

Abstract

For the book envisaged as Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus, Benjamin also planned a methodological introduction. Like the book itself it was never finished, but there are two short manuscript drafts from which an introduction has been reconstructed posthumously.¹ Apart from these two drafts there is a third note which has not merited the same attention.² This fragment, quoted in the epigraph above, is the only place where Benjamin extensively, if somewhat ambiguously, unfolds the relationship between historical materialism and photography (See appendix for a full translation).

(1) An image of Baudelaire is hereby laid forth. It is to be compared to an image in a camera. The (a) tradition (b) social tradition is this camera. It belongs to the instruments of critical theory and is among them indispensable. The dialectical materialist works with it. That is, with it he can try out a (a) closer or f (b) larger or smaller framing, (a) su (b) choose a more glaringly political, or a softer/dimmer historical exposure — but he will always depend on this instrument. On the other hand, he alone can use it. He does not lose himself like the bourgeois theoretician before the delicately tinted little inverted images that replace each other in the viewfinder [Sucher]. His task [Sache] is to determine [festzustellen].

Benjamin, Untitled fragment, in GS I:3, 1164.