(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

270
DIANNE CHISHOLM
liberals? What remains of the gay sexual revolution and of the great gay
migration to the big city? Or, how can lesbian culture come into existence
and sustain itself without doing the work of making lesbianism
marketably sexy, and, how, if it is successful, does it not sell itself out to
the sexual status quo and abolish its heroic resistance to the reproduction
of market values? Alternatively, how might the nineteenth-century
utopian dream of engendering a women’s culture be reconsidered in
light of recent historical findings that it was cruising lesbian prostitutes
and their consorts and clients who were the first sexually mobile, streetwalking
women to occupy city space for women? 25
Eco-Technological Eros
Benjamin’s thought-image “Zum Planetarium” (GS IV.1:146–48; “To the
Planetarium,” SW 1:486–87) from Einbahnstraße augurs a coming age of
technology that replaces the “Naturbeherrschung” (“mastery of nature”) of
imperialist technology with a “Berherrschung vom Verhältnis von Natur und
Menschheit” (“mastery of the relation between nature and man.”). Imperialist
technology achieves its climax in the orgy of destruction of the First World
War, whereas the coming technology revels in the prospect of creating a new
relation to nature in communion with the cosmos: “Ihr [mankind] organisiert
in der Technik sich eine Physis, in welcher ihr Kontakt mit dem Kosmos
sich neu und anders bildet als in Völkern und Familien” (“In technology, a
physis is being organized through which mankind’s contact with the cosmos
takes a new and different form from that which it had in nations and families”).
The war that shattered the “Gliederbau der Menschheit” (“frame of
mankind”) also revealed the real power of technology to affect the world on
a cosmic scale beyond the scope of nature’s utility. Does Benjamin allude here
to state and Oedipal structures that were so highly naturalized in European
modernity? In any case, in the wake of global destruction came the bliss of a
mind-blowing perception, namely that “der Schauer echter kosmischer Erfahrung
ist nicht an jenes winzige Naturfragment gebunden, das wir ‘Natur’ zu
nennen gewohnt sind” (“the paroxysm of genuine cosmic experience is not
tied to that tiny fragment of nature that we are accustomed to call Nature”).
Recruited by the betraying ruling class to man the war machine, the proletariat
was the body that felt this “paroxysm” most, and that most resisted the
pacification of peace time. To Benjamin, the revolts that followed the First
World War signal an attempt by the members of the proletariat “den neuen
Leib in ihre Gewalt zu bringen” (“to bring the new body under its control”).
The planetarium figures as a stage of technological revolution, where the
war’s proletarian survivors set their sights on a new form of planetary society.
Unlike Foucault’s panopticon, Benjamin’s planetarium looks outward to a
planet no longer oppressed by a master anthropology and open to Man’s selfovercoming.
The planetarium’s astronomers, besides being proletarian