An Explanation of Method and the Relation of Property to Materialism - Friedrich Georg Jünger

The purpose of this presentation is to open the reader's eyes to new kinds of connections and to give him an understanding that no longer depends on the blind method used by economists and social theorists, biologists, sociologists and psychologists working with "materials". We are not engaged in specialised science here. And all the equipment and organisation concerns us only in relation to the individual, to the image of the human being on whose deformation we are working hard. Each example given here is at the same time a model for a new understanding, a new approach to the things and events that surround us. The most important are those that are part of everyday life and that we find everywhere because they surround us and accompany us. We are not trying to collect rare events, because that would be mere curiosity. We seek the merit of this presentation in that it forces the reader to experience familiar surroundings in a new way.

Why, asks the naive mind, can't I own a camera like other things? What can be argued against this? After all, I completely and exclusively own this camera and the pictures I take with it. But the question is wrongly posed and the answer is wrong, because that relationship is no longer important. The question is rather, does this device belong to the property or the technical community? And the answer to this question has been obtained since the photographic process became a mechanical reproduction process, because in this way it became a process of the technical community. Why are mechanical processes of reproduction and ownership incompatible? Because the process contradicts the concept of ownership in a way that could not have been foreseen from the beginning, that was not understood, but which is becoming evident. The individual apparatus, which is still private property, which is still perceived as a concrete thing, is not the main thing; what matters is the mechanical process and its organising principle. In a world that has become entirely photographic, it is difficult to think about ownership. This may be obvious to anyone who notices a man with a camera swooping like a fly over a property and its owner. To detach the photograph from the subject is to detach the property from the owner, and this is characteristic of mechanical reproduction in general. Photography is not a visual enrichment, as many believe, but a process that improves all vision, which trains the eye in the mechanical relationship of time and space. Those who take photographs always and everywhere see only the details that can be photographed. The photographic process is an exploitative process, because all mechanical reproduction processes exploit what is already there by separating and mechanically repeating it. In a light show, based on the same process of mechanical reproduction, this process becomes even clearer. I may still own a film machine, but that says nothing about the process. The same applies to radio. The fact that the whole world is amused by what these processes make presentable says nothing about these processes. What is important, however, is that we are aware of how these processes are changing the world.