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Walter Benjamin cm: Walter Benjamin, Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes—today I’m particularly interested in the engagement with Barthes, and I’m curious: has he influenced your thinking? And if so how? mf: Not as much as Walter Benjamin. The reason I didn’t mention Benjamin when I said the piece [The History of Photography in Sound] was dealing with references to Barthes and Sontag is that Benjamin is so much more than a philosopher of photography. Benjamin’s project, and the whole way that he looks at the world, is fundamental to the way I think about producing stuff. cm: Can you tell me more about that? mf: Not in any detail I can’t really, but I read an awful lot of Walter Benjamin’s writing (certainly not all of it but a great deal of it). The interface between reality and meditation, between recollecting and tranquility (as Coleridge and company in the nineteenth century put it), and what it is that the artwork actually is, when you’ve made it. It’s all there in Benjamin. If I could quote reams I could, but I won’t; I’ll just say go away and read it because it’s essential. And it’s the modern world—it’s like reading Wittgenstein. It’s not the nineteenth century any more. In a funny kind of way I think Barthes is more nineteenth-century. It’s very nostalgic, it’s very much about memory—which is an important facet of what I do too, how we remember stuff and so on. But the narratives that hang off memory are different for Barthes than they would be for me. I’m not investing that kind of sentimental attitude. And not in a bad way, but it uses sentiment as the key element. I don’t want to do it because that doesn’t bring in as much technique, and I’m interested in the technique too. I’m interested in what my pen can do, what my eye can do, what my ear can do, what I can hear, what I can analyse. None of that has anything to do with sentiment. That’s all very objective. (Or at least it seems so to me.) So it’s interesting—I haven’t [previously] declared much interest in Benjamin because it’s almost too important. [. . .]