(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

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KARL IVAN SOLIBAKKE
commodities were designated for international markets, and national
economies endorsed colonial expansion. Exposure to cultural discrepancies
on the one hand and mass communication media on the other made
both of them sensitive to a rapidly changing fascination for secular beliefs,
unfettered by classical, ideological, or religious traditions. After the bourgeoisie
came to power in 1830, the semiotic codes espousing modern cultural
design were no longer anchored to homogeneous ideologies, given
that mnemonic repositories and cultural symbols were among the first
to be decoupled from religious dogma or philosophical convictions. Yet
Heine and Benjamin, both of whom were well acquainted with Marx’s
philosophy of economic progress, but who had chosen to adopt different
positions, do provide convincing evidence that economic beliefs, the cult
of capitalism, replaced the theological and metaphysical principles once
forming the framework of sociocultural remembrance. 9 During the reign
of Louis Philippe urban experience succumbed to the exigencies of rampant
commodification, implying that the tokens feeding the circulation of
secular symbols were indicative of the material objectives championed by
bourgeois cultural memory.
Nestled in a web of icons and images, the constituents of urban society
had to be unearthed level by level and scrutinized using new methods
of observation and imaginative epistemologies of memory. In keeping
with this archaeological or stratified disposition, urbanity succumbs to
cybernetics, the idea that perpetual movement — bustling traffic, masses
of pedestrians, rapidly fluctuating visual sensations, and the incessant
flow of goods — is vital to the dynamics of the temporal and counters
the intransigence of the spatial. What is more significant is that Heine’s
reconfiguration of the conventions governing time and space anticipates
the proliferation of data in today’s telematic and telecommunications network,
in which “near” and “far” have been almost completely decoupled
from the spatial impact they once had. Long before Benjamin’s notion of
profane illumination, the jarringly uncanny imagery posed by surrealistic
approaches to spatial representation, recast collective memory to match
the politics of “image-space and body-space,” Heine raised the specter
of the death of material space within the epistemological strongholds of
modern cityscapes. In response to economic expansion between 1830 and
1840, the railway network radiating out from the French capital revolutionized
demographic mobility and accelerated industrial growth. Hence
the flow of time superseded the durability of space as the primary factor
in urban experience, heralding the historical index Benjamin integrates
into his dialectical images. He refers to the close analogies between the
Passagen-Werk and the Trauerspiel book in a letter to Adorno in May of
1935, asserting that his insights had undergone a pattern of resolution
during which these ideas, though originally derived from metaphysical
sources, had achieved a cumulative stage in which the dialectical image