(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

PARIS ON THE AMAZON?
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After a synthetic review of the relations between the metropolis and its
periphery it will be interesting to analyze a few fragments in detail, in order to
get a more concrete vision of some social and cultural problems that already
existed in the “capital of the nineteenth century” and that reappear in our days
in the megacities of the Third World, cities that can be understood as gigantic
and monstrous reproductions of the model of the “civilized European
metropolis.” From the perspective of an intercultural dialogue, I propose to
investigate Benjamin’s concepts of “madness” (section III) and “hell” (section
IV), confronting them with the vision of Latin-American authors. Our
postcolonial interrogations on Benjamin’s European Modernism will then be
completed by posing a final question, “Paris on the Amazon?” (section V),
which deals with the problem of cultural identity.
Before starting our analysis, just one more observation. Among Benjamin’s
works we will focus on the Passagen-Werk, with its three phases:
the first sketch with 405 fragments; the Big Archive, as I propose to call
the 36 convolutes containing 4,234 fragments of “Aufzeichnungen und
Materialien”; and the unfinished model-book, the “Baudelaire,” for which
Benjamin used 1,745 of these fragments.
For our kind of investigation it has been more instructive to work with
the Passagen-Werk as a big archive rather than as a book. The thousands of
materials assembled by Benjamin make it a research device that is not finished
and complete but constitutes an open repertoire, always in movement,
expressing and stimulating the spirit of experimentation and invention. Let
us remember that Benjamin, in his early work Einbahnstraße (One-Way
Street, 1923/28), argued in favor of direct communication between the
“Zettelkasten” (card box) of the researcher who organized it (in this case,
himself) and the researcher who studies in it (GS IV.1:103; SW 1:456). Let
us also remember another passage, which has received little attention from
critics, where Benjamin compares “de[n] Menschen” (“the human being”)
to a “Schaltbrett, an dem tausende von Birnen sind; bald erlöschen die
einen, bald wieder [die] andern, [und] entzünden sich neu” (“an instrument
panel on which are thousands of electric bulbs. Some of them go
out at one moment, some at another, [and] come back on again,” M,12).
This comparison contains an exact description of the Passagen-Werk. It is
a hypertext with thousands of fragments. 14 If we organize a selection of
those fragments into constellations and combine these constellations with
an attempt to reveal a “noch-nicht-bewußtes Wissen” (“not-yet-conscious
knowledge,” K1,2) of concrete “Ausdruck[sformen] der Wirtschaft in ihrer
Kultur” (“[forms of] expression of the economy in its culture,” N1a6), then
we will obtain — in the sense of Benjamin’s dialectical historiography — an
ideal device for the study of the phenomenon of the modern metropolis
and its relations with peripheral countries, in literary texts as well as under
the open sky of history.