(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

THE PASSAGEN-WERK REVISITED
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here: the idea that historical data and time are condensed and reclaimed
in the object; the idea that modern history is imagistic and not epic; the
idea that monads signify modern allegories for dialectical processes; the
idea that historical materialism precludes the notion of linear progress;
and finally the idea that historical materialism is structured logically and
within easy reach of language, the most precise and supple instrument
for cultural analysis. Placing objects in the vortex of cultural design and
dialectics may not have been entirely new, since dialectical materialism
is fundamental to the economic theories advocated in Friedrich Engel’s
and Karl Marx’s philosophy of social progress. Nevertheless, Benjamin’s
emphasis on “reading” the object as a medium of transformation exploits
commodity fetishism, which he did not locate in the articles of production,
as Marx did, but in the items for consumption, such as those on display
in the arcades or in bourgeois living rooms. When we hone in on the
imprint that commodities make on the collective psyche, it becomes evident
that they are meaningful as dialectical images or symbols of cultural
equivalence, especially when they form the basic components for semiotic
codes. They hark back to a “paradisiacal pre-history,” even while heralding
“utopian expectations” of a liberated society. 6 Phantasmagorical in
nature, objects interrupt the continuum of time to suggest images in the
collective consciousness in which the old and the new interpenetrate. In
fact, the discerning eye identifies material objects, ciphers, and even events
as clusters of closely related elements. That is also why the dialectics of
time and place allude to palimpsests, in which the literal and figurative
essence of commodities embraces several layers of historical experience.
Linked to the reciprocity of time and place, these phantasmagorias are
indexed with regard to the “presence of the now.” Compressed into the
passage work of cultural imagery at the point of their concurrence, they
come to a momentary standstill, and it is here that they are decipherable
for the fraction of an instant.
Nicht so ist es, daß das Vergangene sein Licht auf das Gegenwärtige
oder das Gegenwärtige sein Licht auf das Vergangene wirft, sondern
Bild ist dasjenige, worin das Gewesene mit dem Jetzt blitzhaft zu
einer Konstellation zusammentritt. Mit anderen Worten: Bild ist die
Dialektik im Stillstand.
[It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what
is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what
has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.
In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. (N3,1)]
The fissure dividing the temporal modes impacts the meanings derived
from “reading” the entities embedded in each constellation. The past
surfaces as discrete or shattered flashes of wakefulness no longer bound