(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

10
ROLF J. GOEBEL
[Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything.
Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious
formulations. But the rags, the refuse — these I will not inventory
but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making
use of them. (N1a,8)]
The topographic montage of Paris is principally constructed through
the viewpoint of the flâneur. Deriving from the nineteenth-century dandy
and aesthete leisurely strolling through the city, Benjamin’s flâneur is less
a historical figure or individual subject than a perspectival medium, reading
the collective memory of his city from the silent surfaces of churches,
thresholds, and paving stones: “Beim Nahen seiner Tritte ist der Ort schon
rege geworden, sprachlos, geistlos gibt seine bloße innige Nähe ihm Winke
und Weisungen” (“At the approach of his footsteps, the place has roused;
speechlessly, mindlessly, its mere intimate nearness gives him hints and
instructions,” M1,1). Thus the flâneur functions as the translator of the
silent language of topographic sites into the conceptual language of the
modern urbanite. In this sense he relates to Benjamin’s magic philosophy
of language, which proposes, in “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die
Sprache des Menschen” (“On Language as Such and on the Language
of Man,” 1916), that there is no event or thing in animate or inanimate
nature that does not participate in language in order to communicate its
mental content (GS II.1:140–41; SW 1:62). The classical flâneur’s movements
still negotiate the physical confines of real urban topographies and
the visible traces of their local histories. By contrast, the stationary Internet
surfer of today’s digital communication age is sucked into an ever expanding
virtual reality that represents the opening of geopolitical boundaries,
the flow of transnational capital, and the seemingly universal dissemination
of data typical of the age of globalization, but seems to subvert the authentic
experience of material reality and its spatial depth of field. 17
This virtualization of topographic space today harks back to Benjamin’s
theory of the loss of “aura” in the age of technological media. 18
By reproducing unique and faraway things, photography and film bring
them closer to any audience, no matter where and when, thus satisfying
modern desires of mass consumption and entertainment distraction.
Like textual translation, these media are less bound to the authority of
an original than to the function of transmittance and change itself. In
fact, by reproducing the original for new audiences, photography and film
destroy the aura of the original, its mysterious authenticity and uniqueness,
which seems to remove the object perceptively even when it is physically
close. As Benjamin notes in “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie”
(“Little History of Photography,” 1931): “Was ist eigentlich Aura? Ein
sonderbares Gespinst von Raum und Zeit: einmalige Erscheinung einer
Ferne, so nah sie sein mag” (GS II.1:378; “What is aura, actually? A