(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

THE PASSAGEN-WERK REVISITED
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of the phantasmagorical, the question as to what influences modern urban
subjects comes into focus, especially when so much emphasis is placed upon
the epistemological and cultural meaning invested in the commodities on
hand. After all, these too can only acquiesce to the readings that their contemporary
iterations provoke. Hence modernity materializes as a distorted
mirror comprising dialectical images that continuously surge back and forth
between object and subject or vice versa without specifying where the true
origins of the relationship might lie.
In the long run, a random collection of objects or, for that matter,
a mixture of textual fragments, is a playing field for the dialectics of
modern cultural aesthetics. Left adrift within the semiotics of the social
order, individuals are expected to mold the memory texture in which to
embed their particular “wish images.” No longer tempered by norms
and traditions, amorphous zones of communicative, social, und cultural
memory are generated, which also give rise to the abstract signatures
of modernity. Capitalizing on Benjamin’s iconic and material dialectics,
the Passagen-Werk succeeds in demonstrating how text and image
relinquish their medial boundaries and coalesce in liminal spaces or spatiotemporal
“force fields.” When text and image enter into an optical
synthesis and thus stimulate the most elusive forms of edification, then
the boundaries between individual, collective, and cultural remembrance
defer identity, making modernity a game of deception; “jeder dialektisch
dargestellte historische Sachverhalt polarisiert sich und wird zu einem
Kraftfeld, in dem die Auseinandersetzung zwischen Vorgeschichte und
Nachgeschichte sich abspielt” (“every dialectically presented historical
circumstance polarizes itself and becomes a force field in which the
confrontation between its fore-history and after-history is played out,”
N7a,1). At this juncture the relationship between the signifier and the
signified becomes intimidating, ghostly, even terrifying. “Entscheidend
ist weiterhin,” Benjamin observes, “daß der Dialektiker die Geschichte
nicht anders denn als seine Gefahrenkonstellation betrachten kann, die
er, denkend ihrer Entwicklung folgend, abzuwenden jederzeit auf dem
Sprung ist” (“What is even more decisive is that the dialectician cannot
look on history as anything other than a constellation of dangers which
he is always, as he follows its development in his thought, on the point
of averting,” N7,2) This “‘constellation of dangers” is Benjamin’s lasting
contribution to a dialectical method of reconfiguring and recoding
urban life, in which emblematic, semiotic, and imagistic components are
telescoped down to the surface of the written word.
III
In the context of Benjamin’s theory of historical materialism, commodities
form the substance of collective dreams. The fantasies in which