(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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KARL IVAN SOLIBAKKE
objects assume an essential role give rise to the psycho-sociological
magma out of which secular utopias ultimately materialize. At first subliminal,
these illusions mirror the objectives of a bourgeois class bent on
transforming daydreams and reveries into the tangibles of urban sophistication.
On one level Benjamin exposes the blind folly of the bourgeoisie
by mounting “die Traumstadt Paris als ein Gebilde aus all den
Plänen von Bauten oder Entwürfen von Straßenzügen, den Anlageprojekten,
den Systemen von Straßennamen, die nie durchgedrungen sind,
in die wirkliche Stadt Paris” (“within the actual city of Paris, Paris the
dream city — as an aggregate of all the building plans, street layouts,
park projects, and the street-name systems that were never developed,”
L2a,6). Resembling the caricaturist Grandville’s Les ponts des planètes
(The Bridges of the Planets), a futuristic vision of the cosmos that could
easily have come from a Jules Verne novel, the city dissociates itself here
from its geographical reality as a discrete distribution of space. Linear
space is transformed into network design, in which the focal points
and peripheral zones are reduced to nothing more than aphorisms,
paragraphs, and convolutes, symbolizing Benjamin’s “Traumhäuser
des Kollektivs: Passagen, Wintergärten, Panoramen, Fabriken, Wachsfigurenkabinette,
Kasinos, Bahnhöfe” (“dream houses of the collective:
arcades, winter gardens, panoramas, factories, wax museums, casinos,
railroad systems,” L1,3). Like Grandville’s futuristic formations, grammar
and syntax develop into the micrological labyrinth for dream cities
that amalgamates the empirical with the ideal and transforms physical
sensations into virtual imagery. Semiotic networks engulf the physical
features of the metropolis, revealing it to the mind’s eye as surreal, fragmented,
and intangible. Beatrice Hanssen has shown how intimately the
abstract process of contextualizing the city can be linked to the trauma
of surrealistic visions, which enable “the release of a flood of images,
rushing across the threshold between sleep and awakening” and trigger
“a new synaesthetic experience in which sound and image merged.” 4
More decisive than the upsurge of heterogeneity in urban aestheticism,
surrealism intrudes on the politics of topographical and corporeal space,
redefining the relationship of subjects to their environment and transfiguring
spatial representations of the human body.
On another level, Benjamin’s bourgeois utopias — made all the
more tangible by the dream-like arcades and passages imitating bourgeois
interiors — are but one example of the intricate role that dreams
play in Benjamin’s cultural commentary. They also stand at the crossroads
of his interest in Marxist theories of fetishism and the subconscious
desires enmeshed in the commodities of production, his incisive
examination of Proust’s mémoire involontaire in the Baudelaire book, his
appropriation of Sigmund Freud’s concepts of the individual and collective
unconscious, and the allusions to Nietzsche’s “Eternal Return” that