Benjamin was influenced by surrealism. It became his "attempt to capture the portrait of history in the most insignificant representations of reality, its scraps, as it were" (Briefe II, 793). "Paying attention to the correlations, correspondences between a street scene, a speculation on the stock exchange, a poem a thought, which with the hidden line which holds them together... placed in the same period, clarifying and illuminating one another, so that finally they would no longer require interpretative or explanatory commentary" (Illuminations, 11).
This reading of history against the grain, by means of diverging from official historical texts, (and the victors who have written history), and informing oneself rather from the often discarded and overlooked remnants. Gathering evidence of particular phenomena - drawing inspiration from Goethe, on matters of significance and appearance, or more particularly when they coincide. Has this come to be known as materialist history?
A book made entirely of quotations. The violence of decontextualization, ripping the tradition, extracting the pearl. In place of the dialectic, Benjamin engaged dialogism, where various voices are present in the text. Dialect tends to make a synthesis.
Memory and Promise
Benjamin has been regarded as melancholic in regards to visualizing the future (promise) although very attentive to memory, the past and what has come before.
Derrida, proposes that it is memory that is the ultimate victim, as we can never return to it, rather everytime we revisit a memory we change it - it has changed.
How is this a parallel to Foucault's method of geneology - not searching for an essence, an origin, but a recognition that all is fragmented and constantly shifting (Nietzsche).
Benjamin, Photography and the mimetic faculty
Originating with the ancient Greeks, mimesis is classically defined as the visual or literary representation of nature. The word mimetic is often used in this way to describe photographic images. Our engagement with photography, however, should also be considered in relation to what Walter Benjamin calls the mimetic faculty: the capacity to yield to our surroundings, to perceive and produce similarities, and to become Other. This faculty unsettles our everyday interactions with the lives of photographs, from the latent image to the print and beyond.
