THE GERMANIC REVIEW

Copyright © 2006 Heldref Publications

Lucretius at the Camera: Ancient

Atomism and Early Photographic
Theory in Walter Benjamin’s
Berliner Chronik
ERIC DOWNING

W hat follows is part of a larger project that explores the intersec-

tions of photography, archaeology, and Bildung in the literature
of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Germany.1 What I pre-
sent here is a part of that project that concentrates on the role of both
photography and archaeology in the work of Walter Benjamin, and par-
ticularly on their role in his autobiographical Bildungsgeschichte,
Berliner Chronik. Throughout his work, Benjamin is interested in pho-
tography and archaeology as cultural practices in their own right, and
he explores them in both their collusions with and resistance to the
bourgeois program of Bildung, which he imagines to have promulgat-
ed a model of culture and history that was more than incidentally re-
sponsible for the rise of fascism in the 1930s. And like many of his con-
temporaries, Benjamin was also interested in photography and
archaeology as metaphors for the processes of memory, in its systems
of both storage and retrieval; each of these fields occasioned major
reconceptions of the nature and function of Gedächtnisbilder, or mem-
ory-images, and of the role of such Bilder in the formation or Bildung
of the individual subject in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies. In any case, a reading of Benjamin’s work offers several occa-
sions to consider the intersections of photography and archaeology
therein. Examples include his discussion of Atget’s photography, which
practices a kind of modern, urban archaeology that Benjamin tries to
emulate in the “photographic” writing of his own text; or, in Berliner
Chronik, the famous examples of his postcard of the Halle Gate and his
ring with the Medusa’s head, both of which offer images that are de-
picted as at once layered and Lichtbilder; or his equally famous med-
itations on memory qua photography, with its “deeper” and “deepest”
selves, and on memory qua archaeology, where his archaeological
quarry is, as he says, always Bilder. Sometimes these intersections ap-
pear incidental or even accidental, and sometimes not even as inter-

21
22 DOWNING

sections at all, but merely parallels, the engagement of two separate

discursive systems that the modernist era, for largely unrelated rea-
sons, appropriated and applied to matters of memory, psychology, and
Bildung. There is, however, one crucial passage in Berliner Chronik in
which the link between photography and archaeology becomes firmly
forged, and it has important ramifications for the work as a whole, in-
deed, for Benjamin’s work as a whole.
Significantly, it is a passage that focuses on a classical text; equally
significant, it focuses on die Lehre des Epikur, a tradition largely ne-
glected by German classicism, surviving mostly in fragments and by
and large cast aside (as so much debris) in the construction process of
a coherent and monumental classical world or worldview, one that could
shape an equally coherent and monumental German present. The pas-
sage comes at the midpoint of the text, at a point where Benjamin is
rededicating his project, first with an epigraph and then with the follow-
ing claim. He is defining the limits (die Grenze) of his formative child-
hood memories, and explaining how these memories extend well be-
yond his own past, into the past where his family and public history first
intersect, a past that for this very reason includes the “realm of the dead,
where it juts into the living”: its ghosts, or rather, those places and set-
tings still filled with such ghosts. The precise limit set on the child’s
memory is unclear, but it more or less corresponds with the moment of
emergence of photography, archaeology, and bourgeois Bildungskultur
in the middle of the previous century:
Wherever this boundary may have been drawn, however, the second half
of the nineteenth century certainly lies within it, and to it belong the fol-
lowing images, not in the manner of general representations, but of im-
ages that, according to the teachings of Epicurus, constantly detach
themselves from things and determine our perception of them. (Ben-
jamin, Gesammelte Schriften [GS] 6: 489; Writings 2: 613)

As I hope to show, following through on this directive on how the

text’s images or Bilder are to be read will lead us to recognize some
of the most essential correspondences between photography and ar-
chaeology in Benjamin’s understanding of memory and Bildungs-
geschichte: it will lead us to contemplate not only their nebulous realm
of death and ghosts, but also their more concrete realm of politics and
history—and Bildung.
What is die Lehre des Epikur regarding images? And what is the con-
nection with photography? Both questions are perhaps best answered
by turning first, as Benjamin himself does in the Passagenwerk, to the
LUCRETIUS AT THE CAMERA 23

Lehre of Honoré de Balzac.2 In Convolut Y, Benjamin notes that that icon

of nineteenth-century photography, Nadar, “reproduces the Balzacian
theory of the daguerreotype, which in turn derives from the Democritean
theory of the eidôla” (Y2a,1). Benjamin doesn’t cite his source, but he
seems to refer to the following statement from “Balzac et le daguerréo-
type,” recorded in Nadar’s Quand j’étais photographe (1899)3:
According to Balzac, each body in nature is composed of a series of spec-
tres, in infinitely superimposed strata, foliated in infinitesimal films, ex-
tending in every direction that the optic [l’optique] perceives the body [. . .]
Thus each Daguerrian procedure only intercepted, detached and reat-
tached in an applying onto itself [en se l’appliquant] one of the layers of
the body in question. It follows that, for that body and with every repeat-
ed procedure, there was an evident loss of one of its spectres, which is to
say of a portion of its constituent essence. Was there an absolute and de-
finitive loss, or would this partial deterioration repeatedly repair itself in
the mystery of a more or less instantaneous renewal of the spectral mat-
ter? [. . .] This second detail was never broached between us. (6)4

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)

As Balzac describes the photographic process, photographic images

are in fact based on projected images that emanate from physical ob-
jects themselves; that traverse (or simply inhabit) the empty space or
atmosphere that intervenes between (or, rather, encompasses both)
the object and the camera; and that are then captured by the perceiv-
ing recording apparatus. It is a model in which material objects them-
selves are constituted of spectral images, and in which these spectral
images are themselves material objects; hence the easy, logical tran-
sition in the second passage from the physical to the spiritual or
ideational world, insofar as not only is the physical conceived as being
imag-inarily constituted, but “ideas” are also accepted as material in
their own right. In any case, the image that the camera captures, or
24 DOWNING

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

curus himself—for example, his “Letter to Herodotus”—but also in that

of his predecessors and followers: Democritus, whom Benjamin ex-
plicitly mentions (and implicitly conflates with Epicurus); more ob-
scurely, Diogenes of Oenoanda; and more famously, Lucretius.7 Book
4 of Lucretius’s De rerum natura offers the fullest and—for Benjamin’s
time, certainly—most accessible and influential account of die Lehre
des Epikur regarding images, objects, and memory, and it fore-
grounds an aspect of the topic just hinted at by Balzac but central to
Benjamin.8 According to Lucretius (and Epicurus says much the same
thing [Letter 46 A1–5]),9 it is not just that objects are incessantly, at
all hours, represented by an image in the atmosphere, that all existing
objects have there a kind of specter. Rather, objects are represented
by a continuous stream of images, or rather an almost inconceivably
rapid sequence of discrete filmic images emanating from the object
and impinging themselves on the viewer.10 Three points follow from
this. First (and as intimated in the Nadar passage), objects themselves
are imagined to be constituted by an almost inconceivable number of
layers of such atom-films, which they are constantly both throwing off
and replenishing from within: the object is nothing except the cumu-
lative effect of the multiple layers—which is to say that every object is
composed of accumulated strata (is strata), and is essentially tempo-
rally composed, constituted by the ongoing flow of images cast off
and renewed.11 It is just this concept of the image as a temporal strat-
ification, or stratified temporality, that makes it seem “archaeologi-
cal,” as it were: an archaeology of images or, alternatively, a histori-
cal materialism. Second, when the observer perceives the object,
what he is actually perceiving is not so much an image (a spectral
image) of the object as this incredibly rapid sequence of discrete
filmic images rushing out from the object. The sense of the object’s
solidity and continuity, even of the singleness and seamlessness, the
coherence and unity of the image, is in many ways a false one—an in-
ability to match the speed of the individual fleeting image, a forgetting
of the void in between, an imaginative tendency to compose an en-
during whole out of passing, discrete Bilder—which is to say percep-
tion, too, is stratified, temporal, but it forgets this, or better: it does not
perceive it. Third, and most difficult to formulate: time is not (or not
so much) the continuous flow of images, and still less the empty
space or void through which it passes. Rather, time is the speeding
image itself.12 The continuous flow is an optical illusion, an almost un-
avoidable mistaken impression of the rapid sequence of separate im-
26 DOWNING

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

different Bilder, made homogeneous only by the “trickery of decep-

tion” of our perceiving desire: the “one face or age followed by anoth-
er” in a dream is but an exaggeration, an illustration of what is always
the case anyway. In the language of Nietzsche, another student of
Democritus, we could say every object is historical, genealogical (or
in the language of Foucault, a student of Nietzsche’s: archaeological):
a compact of different historical identities, layered one on the other,
with no meaning or “identity” to the whole, but only to the isolated
moment.15
What, then, beyond the Balzac, is the relevance of this Lehre des
Epikur to photography? To Benjamin’s thought in general, and to
Berliner Chronik in particular? As early as 1928, the eminent Lu-
cretian scholar Cyril Bailey suggested a parallel between the Epi-
curean model of perception and the process of composite photogra-
phy, wherein a series of similar images would be “as it were, heaped
one upon another in the mind” (245), resulting in a rather Gal-
tonesque effect, with the dissimilarities of the individual images re-
ceding and what was common to all coming to the fore in the final
impression.16 More recently, David Sedley has noted the obvious ap-
plicability of the Epicurean model to an understanding of cine-
matography, where the initial strangeness of a “rapid sequence of
discrete filmic images,” and so forth, seems to all but disappear
(Long and Sedley 77).17 Benjamin engages and extends both these
parallels and adds another: he applies the Lehre des Epikur to the
case of early daguerreotypes taken with a long exposure time (clear-
ly a variant of Bailey’s composite photography) and to film, and also
to his understanding of the function—both aesthetic and political—of
more modern snapshot photographs, known as Momentaufnahmen.
Indeed, the Epicurean model brings into sharp focus the functional
and theoretical position, for Benjamin, of snapshot photography over
and against both the earlier, temporally extended daguerreotypes
and the “fluid existence” (fließende Dasein) of the more recent medi-
um of film (GS 6: 470; Writings 2: 599). In both instances, that func-
tion is determined by Benjamin’s application of the Epicurean model
not only to the perceptual apparatus of the aesthetic media (early
photography, snapshot photography, cinematography) but also to
the real, material world of the perceived objects themselves. Indeed,
it is just this coordination, this identity that makes the model Epi-
curean, and makes Benjamin’s theories of photography at the same
time a theory of “life” (which for Benjamin is to say “history”).
28 DOWNING

When Benjamin wishes to explain the difference between early pho-

tography and its present form in the Passagenwerk, he quotes Brecht,
who claims that the portraits, the Bildnisse of human faces by con-
temporary photographic devices, are much poorer than those of “the
old boxes” with which daguerreotypes were produced. “With the older,
less light sensitive apparatus, multiple expressions would appear on
the plate, which was exposed for rather long periods of time,” yielding
a “livelier and more universal expression.” By comparison, “the newer
devices no longer compose the faces—but must faces be composed
[zusammengefaßt]? Perhaps for these new devices there is a photo-
graphic method which would decompose faces [die Gesichter zerlegt]?”
(Bertold Brecht, qtd. in Benjamin, Arcades Y8,1). According to the
teaching of Epicurus, the seemingly superior quality of the earlier im-
ages of faces is a result of the accumulation of multiple layers of more
or less instant images: these photos are a temporal stratification of sep-
arate images, and their composition is an illusory forgetting of this—
even as the object itself, the subject’s face, is itself a temporal stratifi-
cation of separate faces (or ages), whose solidity and endurance are
also a product of the trickery of perception.18 And it is worth pointing
out that, as Benjamin notes in “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie,”
the face in almost all these early photographs is that of the newly ar-
rived bourgeois subject (GS 2: 376f; Writings 2: 517): the sense of
“long time” required by the early photographic medium that imposed
itself onto the subject photographed was matched by the “air of per-
manence” inspired by the hegemonic class ideals that this same sub-
ject brought with him into the studio—an effect, part medial and part
ideological, more or less defined by its illusory exemption from time.
One had to wait until the end of the century, when photography lost its
need for long exposures and developed the Momentaufnahme, before
this illusion could be shattered—in the photography of someone like
Eugène Atget, who could deploy the speed or Flüchtigkeit of the new
photographic devices to capture, render, and expose the precisely
equivalent momentariness of modern subjects and the culture that pro-
duced them and to rob both of their illusory durée. For Benjamin as for
Lucretius, the truth of the recorded image, even as of its material sub-
ject, lies only in its most fleeting, momentary, almost instantaneous
unit: the truth cannot be conveyed in the composition, but only in the
décomposé of the subject—in the isolation of a single stratum, a single
instant, a single Bild separated from the sequence, or rather from the
sequence insofar as its Zusammenfassung poses itself as the real.
LUCRETIUS AT THE CAMERA 29

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

whose existence can only be understood as an accretion of changing,

momentary identities: from the opening account of the Viktoria Café
that, we are told, “no longer exists” and whose place “has been taken
by one of the noisiest luxury cafés in New Berlin” to the closing image
of the Princess Café, which one day “a new ‘renovation’” transformed
into Café Stenwyk, and which “has now sunk to the level of a beer
restaurant.”23 Whether the direction is imagined as forward or back-
ward, up or down, in each case the “locale” is presented as a histori-
cally layered one, something like Lucretius’s centaur, and even more
like an (almost instant) archaeological site of successive, stratified
units. Everything, from the interior decoration—for example, the “pri-
vate boxes” of the Princess Café that stood “historically [geschichtlich]
midway between the chambres séparées and the coffee parlors”—to
the customers, is defined in such geschichtet/geschichtlich terms. Re-
garding the latter, Benjamin writes, “The history [die Geschichte] of the
Berlin coffeehouses is in good part that of the different strata of the
public [die Publikumsschichten], those who first conquered the floor
being obliged to make way for others gradually pressing forward, and
thus to ascend the stage.” This last example, in which Benjamin com-
bines or collapses the historical stratification of Berlin qua place with
the class stratification of Berlin qua society, reveals what is probably
most at issue here in this section, indeed here in the work: the history
of the bourgeois class, simultaneously rising (“one of the luxury cafés
of New Berlin”) and falling (“a beer restaurant”), retreating and recon-
quering, but in no way a solid, enduring, continuously same whole
thing, whether conceived socially or temporally.
Benjamin is not only at pains to depict the cafés and their society as
geschichtet and geschichtlich, as layered and cumulative; he is also
dedicated to isolating one specific stratum, identity, or moment to sep-
arate its image from the accumulated layers of earlier and later images,
as a means of countering the continuum (and so, too, of encountering
a truth). This is true of memory: Benjamin speaks of the accumulated
layers of later images, the “films” under which the Bild of the earlier
café-life lies obscured, much as, when remembering what his first
books meant to him, he has first to forget all his later knowledge of
them. But it is also true of Bildung: Benjamin is trying to isolate one
moment of his Bildung from its overall course, one isolated Bild that of-
fers a truth lost in the subsequent layers—and that involves isolating it
both temporally and socially. Temporally, the sought-for Bild is from
the moment before the two major catastrophes marking the chrono-
LUCRETIUS AT THE CAMERA 31

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

moment in time is not only their unique combination of literature and

social concern, but also their commitment to “help for comrades in
need, care for those imperiled by entanglements either of friendship or
of love,” and their interest, equal to that in literature, politics, and
friendship, in cocottes. Strangely but significantly, this isolated unit
sought by Benjamin—this Bild, this Schicht—once released from its
competing streams, reveals itself as what it truly is: a precious unit of
well-nigh Goethean Bildung, an Epicurean Bild that, dug up and
loosed from its associations, holds out, perhaps, a truth that has not yet
arrived in the present, however long gone its original world.

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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

5. Susan Sontag draws the same analogy for photography, as does

Barthes (80f).
6. Cf. Lucretius bk. 4.733. Translations with occasional emendations will
be based on Rouse, Lucretius: De Rerum Natura. As Sedley notes (148–50),
the proem to book 4, which outlines the Epicurean theory of images, an-
nounces that the book will concentrate on explaining ghosts (4: 30–40): the
affinity between Epicurean images and specters assumed by Balzac seems
suggested in Lucretius as well.
7. John Peradotto has suggested the “Letter to Herodotus” as the specific
text for Benjamin’s reference to die Lehre des Epikur in Berliner Chronik: see
Jacobs 117, note 18. But as the reference to Democritus in the Passagenwerk
seems to secure, Benjamin is not making informed distinctions between the
various atomists and their teachings; he is referencing the tradition of ancient
atomism as a whole, most popularly transmitted to his generation by Lu-
cretius’s great poem.
8. The accessibility and influence of Lucretius’s work in Benjamin’s time
are not as self-evident as we might imagine. Lucretius’s text all but disap-
peared after the age of Augustus: by the eighth century, only one extant man-
uscript seems to have survived. With the exception of Lambin’s of 1564,
which greatly influenced Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), there were few edi-
tions worth noting before Lachmann’s in 1840, Bernays’s in 1852, and
Munro’s in 1864. Which is to say that Lucretius’s major impact came in the
nineteenth century, at roughly the same time as the historical emergence of
photography. For a more detailed account of Lucretius’s reemergence in
Western thought, see Johnson, which does not, however, recognize his im-
portance for early photographic theory, and Turner.
9. The Epicurus is translated in Long and Sedley 72.
10. But in diminished form, cf. the line, oft quoted by Benjamin, “Ah que le
monde est grand à la clarté des lampes! / Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde
est petit!” (Charles Baudelaire, Le Voyage): cf. Benjamin, “Zum Bilde Prousts”
(GS 2: 320; Writings 2: 244); “Die grosse Kunst, auf der Erde es enger wer-
den zu lassen” (GS 6: 203; Writings 2: 248).
11. This representation of Epicurian theory is, stricto sensu, not incon-
testable: it follows Balzac’s and Nadar’s reading, their conflation of the “spec-
tres” and “essence constitutive” of a given body, the notion of “la matière
spectrale.” The ancient atomists themselves seem to have made a stricter di-
vision between the unchanging essence of an object and the stream of images
it projected, the former retaining more the quality of durée emphasized by
Bergson (see below): I present the Balzacian take because of its more imme-
diate relevance to Benjamin’s reception.
12. Cf. Lucretius 1.459ff: “Time also exists not of itself, but from things
themselves is derived the sense of what has been done in the past, then what
thing is present with us, further what is to follow after. Nor may we admit that
anyone has a sense of time by itself separated from the movement of things”
(“tempus item per se non est, sed rebus ab ipsis / consequitur sensus, trans-
actum quid sit aevo, / tum quae res instet, quid porro deinde sequatur; / nec
per se quemquem tempus sentire fatendumst / semotum ab rerum motu”).
34 DOWNING

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.

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