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its core aims at holding on to each moment, not to make it memorable, but primarily to make it capable of being experienced in the first place as a momentary event.

Snapshot

In his novel Abfall für alle (Trash for everyone), [19] Rainald Goetz writes: «The snapshot. A kind of Polaroid of one’s mental state, at the moment. Of course it is also about what is on the photograph. But it is just as much about the KIND of image production, the production process, the method, i.e., something very formal. Not to recall something from the past, but something from NOW.» Before it appeared in book form, Abfall für alle was an Internet project in which every day over the course of an entire year (1998), the author noted bits and pieces of his life and published them online: thoughts, encounters, conversations, telephone conversations, shopping lists, etc. In this sense trash should not be taken literally, but as that which is left over at the end of a day’s work. In the process, neither interpretations nor justifications are attached to the snapshots—as records of material

 

momentarily available or found—rather they are sampled and mass-produced in order to cross out any similarity with inwardness.

From a sociological standpoint, taking snapshots is a redundant activity whose sole function is ritual and which generates wholly stereotypical images; from a conventionally aesthetic standpoint, which lays down the template of the never explained and inexplicable category of the ‹good picture,› taking snapshots is absolutely deficient, results from a non-formation, and can also only produce ‹non-formations.› Following the writer Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, what Goetz suggests is something else: The snapshot stands for a process of developing writing and that to be written out of everyday occurrences, and a radical reference to the present. The issue is the performativity of writing itself, which here is crystallized in the metaphor of the snapshot, in an act «that in the varying repetition of introduced patterns and forms first produces that about which it appears to be speaking.» [20] If we transfer this to the specific practice of taking snapshots, a perspective opens up beyond the aesthetic or sociological (dis)qualification of the

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