(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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KARL IVAN SOLIBAKKE
art forms — that their progress and their success are proportionate to the
transparency of their social content,” N4,6). The arcades, glass-covered
shopping and bourgeois recreation areas, became testimonies for a discernible
moment in the continuum of European cultural history. Their
decline or disappearance at the time that Benjamin began to chronicle
their significance not only points to a historical index but also heralds the
passing of nineteenth-century collective memory as the twentieth century
began to encroach on the cityscape.
From his vantage point in the 1920s and 1930s Benjamin struck a
pose as disquieting as that of his renowned angel of history in “Über
den Begriff der Geschichte” (“On the Concept of History”), peering out
over the ruins of the nineteenth century as Fascism in Western Europe
and Stalinism in the East were jeopardizing the future of European intellectual
ideas, and artistic movements such as aestheticism, surrealism,
and decadence were subject to spurious assessments of their degeneracy.
Resembling the debris left behind by natural or man-made catastrophes,
Benjamin’s textual fragments aspire to catalog the emblems and signs of
an era condemned to extinction. With regard to this historical objective,
his dialectical method blends the imagistic and the textual into the presence
of the now. For in resuscitating both the topographical and topological
traces embedded in cultural artifacts Benjamin exposes his present
to rigorous scrutiny. Above all, he envisions a gap in time that superimposes
past and present upon one another. The historical layers within
that interstice mirror the vulnerability of metropolitan experience, pitting
ephemeral revelations against linear notions of collective advancement.
Turning his back on the notion of optimism in nineteenth-century history,
Benjamin’s historiography is transitory, even impulsive in character
and resists any alliance with the grand narratives that commemorate
social progress. Cultural practices are parsed down to their barest semiotic
constituents and can be read as part of the “book of nature”; “so
soll es hier mit der Wirklichkeit des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts gehalten
werden,” Benjamin asserts. “Wir schlagen das Buch des Geschehenen
auf” (“that is how the reality of the nineteenth century will be treated.
We open the book of what happened,” N4,2). When navigating the
scores of pages in the Arcades the reader retraces Benjamin’s footsteps,
perusing the city with the eye of the flâneur, and only in hindsight does
much of the semiotic data take on relevance. That is why coming to
terms with the fragment requires a synchronic and diachronic methodology,
in which the empirical and ideal facets of individual cultural factors
merge with the chronological and phenomenological insights provided
by historical materialism.
Confronted with Benjamin’s textual montages, the reader is also
obliged to sort through the debris that once made the arcades models
of bourgeois cultural recollection and reconstruct the semiotic web that