(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

THE PASSAGEN-WERK REVISITED
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seated perceptions about movement and location. He writes: “Constructed
space is more than simply the concrete and material substance
of constructed structures, the permanence of elements and the architectonics
of urbanistic details. It also exists as the sudden proliferation and
the incessant multiplication of special effects which, along with the consciousness
of time and of distances, affect the perception of the environment”
(94). On a material level, the architectonic surfaces of the city, the
constituents of geodesic representation, and the continuum of time and
space have become increasingly indiscernible. Uniformity has made the
world’s metropolises from Paris to Mexico City and Berlin to Shanghai
starkly homogeneous. Distinctive signatures the cities once boasted can
now be accessed as “special effects” on the Internet, where, depending
upon the sophistication of the technology, larger-than-life apertures can
be engineered for the viewer. According to Virilio spatial construction
is now cinematographically contrived, and the desire to construct virtual
worlds finds confirmation within the framework of postmodern urbanistic
interfacing. Interfacing, in turn, necessitates a never-ending series of fissured
images resembling the discrete fragments of film scenes. This only
serves to corroborate Heine’s and Benjamin’s assumptions about dialectical
methods for gathering, storing, and retrieving cultural memory.
In our telematic age objects and events no longer fluctuate as they once
did; rather, “without necessarily leaving, everything arrives” (88) That is
essential for the “the rites of passage of a technical culture” (87), one premised,
as Benjamin might have argued, on its own technological reproducibility.
Digital cameras, cellular phones, and miniature video players
have superseded discursive forms of cultural observation, reconfiguring
the frontiers of visions and dreams in global textures. 12 Consistent with
Benjamin’s approach to the optical unconscious, Virilio’s assessment of
constructed space revolves around the notion that technological imagery
governs contemporary peripheral environments. This omnipresence
of imagery bears close resemblance to Benjamin’s speculations about the
dominance of the optical in modern cities and also ties into the idea of
the optical unconscious within the substratum of the collective psyche.
Initiated, as has been shown, by the triumphant rise of the photographic
medium in the third decade of the nineteenth century, the optical unconscious
evokes new “Bildwelten, welche im Kleinsten wohnen, deutbar und
verborgen genug, um in Wachträumen Unterschlupf gefunden zu haben,
nun aber, groß und formulierbar wie sie geworden sind, die Differenz von
Technik und Magie als durch und durch historische Variable ersichtlich
zu machen” (GS II.1:371; “image worlds, which dwell in the smallest
things — meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking
dreams, but which, enlarged and capable of formulation, make the difference
between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical
variable,” SW 2:512). In a nutshell, the optical unconscious distinguishes