Image and Crisis in One-Way Street: A View into Walter Benjamin's “Kaiserpanorama”

Abstract

In One-Way Street Benjamin explores unconventional and vanguard forms of representation; in this sense the book is a unique artistic application of his theoretic efforts. While this expands the means of expression, the book is otherwise concerned with phenomena of crises, with ways in which Bewegungsmöglichkeit, the possibility of movement, is constricted in the contemporary world. Toward this constricting aspect of the crisis Benjamin gestures with the title of his book. A reading of the text Kaiserpanorama demonstrates how in One-Way Street the sphere of images trespasses into text and how on this account Benjamin confronts and dismantles a thinking that is caught within crisis. This raises the fraught question of the visual dimension of the text; in Benjamin the textual transformation of the image retains its spatial dimensionality. In One-Way Street space is a compositional principle on various different levels, from the arrangement of the texts to their specific shapes themselves. Again, Kaiserpanorama illustrates the way that Benjamin deflects Redewendungen, turns of phrase, against themselves in order to debunk their phantasmagoric effects that restrict the potential of critical thought. In visual terms this means language manifests an image space, within which perspectives can change. Changing perspectives in the image space reveals itself to be Benjamin's strategy for Kaiserpanorama and overall for the book project. One-Way Street calls for a new attention toward the visual within the medium of text.

Keywords:

• crisis
• image
• Imperial Panorama
• Kaiserpanorama
• space

Notes

Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1983), 166. Arendt noticed early on in her controversial 1968 essay on Benjamin his particular use of metaphors. “Provided that ‘metaphor’ is understood in its original, nonallegorical sense of metapherein (to transfer),” she writes, Benjamin aimed to give them back their “sensual substructure” (165, 166). Instead of taking a metaphor as a figurative expression that refers to something other than what it actually says, Benjamin took it precisely the other way around.

Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 1, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003), 444. Selected Writings hereafter cited as SW with volume and page number.

Such a tactile representation of thought is also evident in Benjamin's 1929 essay on Surrealism, where he begins: “Intellectual currents can generate a sufficient head of water for the critic to install his power station on them” (SW 2: 207). This is also an example of Benjamin's use of metaphors: He is taking the German Strömung, which—metaphorically—refers to literary schools or movements, by its technical or material meaning as current, flow, but he leaves it in its former context.

Alexander Honold, Der Leser Walter Benjamin. Bruchstücke einer deutschen Literaturgeschichte (Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk 8, 2000), 347ff. Honold relates the ambiguous terms of “Haltung” and “Fluss” within a combined close reading of Benjamin, Brecht, and Kafka. “,Haltung‘ ist ein dem, Fluß der Dinge‘ gegenläufiger Begriff. Heraklits Naturprinzip, demzufolge, alles fließt‘, setzt Brecht die gesellschaftliche Gestaltung und Modellierung dieses Fließens entgegen, dem Strom der Zeit dessen (zumindest zeitweilige) Stillstellung. […] Der Sache nach gleichberechtigt, sind Haltung und Fluß in Benjamins glücklicher Formulierung von der, Dialektik im Stillstand‘ (II/2, 530)…” (352).

Benjamin discusses this Umfunktionierung, or transformation, in an intended talk on The Author as Producer (1934), and links it also to a recasting of literary forms.

Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 4, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Hermann Schweppenhäuser, et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972–1989), 90. Gesammelte Schriften is hereafter cited as GS with volume and page number.

Benjamin, discussing the just-completed One-Way Street in a letter to Gershom Scholem: “—das Wort nicht metaphorisch zu verstehen!—” Walter Benjamin, Werke und Nachlaß: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, vol. 8, Einbahnstraße, ed. Detlev Schöttker (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2009), 261.

“Imperial Panorama” in the Selected Writings edition. Throughout this essay I prefer the German title, since this is the name of the original device as well.

Michael Jennings, “Trugbild der Stabilität. Weimarer Politik und Montage-Theorie in Benjamins ‘Einbahnstraße” in Global Benjamin: Internationaler Walter-Benjamin-Kongress 1992, ed. Klaus Garber and Ludger Rehm (München: W. Fink, 1999), 518.

 August Fuhrmann. Taken from Michael Bienert, Erhard Senf: Berlin wird Metropole. Fotografien aus dem Kaiser-Panorama (be.bra Verlag, 2000), bookcover. Likely: August Fuhrmann, Goldenes Buch der Zentrale für Kaiser-Panoramen (Berlin-Brandenburg: Eigenverlag, 1909).

 For details on the mechanism see Erhard Senf, “Das Fuhrmann'sche Kaiser-Panorama,” in Michael Bienert, Erhard Senf: Berlin wird Metropole, 10. August Fuhrmann was not the inventor of stereoscopic images, but from him originates the particular device and name “Kaiser-Panorama” (12). Susan Buck-Morss compares the experience of the virtual journey the Kaiserpanorama provided to the image space of One-Way Street: “The experience corresponded to that of moving along a street of commodity display windows.” In Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing. Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 82.

 On the history of the various types of panoramas since 1792 from an international perspective, its role as a forerunner of cinema, and here especially on the “issue of illusionism and the blurring of the line between art and reality,” see Angela Miller, “The Panorama, the Cinema, and the Emergence of the Spectacular,” in Wide Angle 18, no. 2 (1996): 41.

 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with a Hammer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 20.

 Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, 527; GS 5: 655.

 Erhard Senf, “Das Fuhrmann'sche Kaiser-Panorama,” in Michael Bienert, Erhard Senf: Berlin wird Metropole, esp. 13–15.

 For details, see Erhard Senf, “Das Fuhrmann'sche Kaiser-Panorama,” in Michael Bienert, Erhard Senf: Berlin wird Metropole, 9.

 Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, 6.

 For example, in Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner Reproduzierbarkeit: “This [the increase in technological means] is found in war, and the destruction caused by war furnishes proof that society was not mature enough to make technology its organ, that technology was not sufficiently developed to master the elemental forces of society” (SW 4: 270; GS 1: 507).

 Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, 871.

 In the English translation: “History merges into the setting.” Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1985), 92.

 “Trostlose Distanz” (GS 4: 97).

 “im Sittlichen” (GS 4: 96).

 This “illusionistic representation” can be observed already in the earliest panoramas, gigantic 360-degree images into which the spectator literally had to climb: “The design of early circular panoramas was calculated to conceal this process of production; all reference to a space beyond or outside of the ocular arena of the panoramic vista was masked off through curtains that blocked out natural light as well as the frame of the building itself. Spectators wound their way up a dimly lit staircase before emerging onto the viewing platform, where the scene appeared with the revelatory force of the real.” In Angela Miller, “The Panorama, the Cinema, and the Emergence of the Spectacular,” 43.

 Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, 11; GS 5: 55. Also One-Way Street: “Just as all things, in an irreversible process of mingling and contamination, are losing their intrinsic character while ambiguity displaces authenticity, so is the city” (SW 1: 454).

 See Werke und Nachlaß, 8: 270–76. Also Michael Jennings, “Trugbild der Stabilität,” 518.

 The notes to the essay show that Benjamin took this phrase from Pierre Naville: “La révolution et les intellectuels” (SW 2: 218).

 Interestingly, Carl Schmitt, to whose theoretic work Benjamin was drawn to, characterizes in his Political Theology a “decision” as a “miracle” in the political sphere establishing sovereign authority. See Kam Shapiro, “Politics Is a Mushroom. Worldly Sources of Rule and Exception in Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin,” in diacritics 37, no. 2–3 (Summer–Fall 2007), 123. For Benjamin, as we see here, the “wonder” is rather a change of collective apperception in regard to socio-political conditions.

 See also Kam Shapiro, “Politics Is a Mushroom.” When comparing Carl Schmitt to Walter Benjamin, Shapiro comes to similar conclusions. Rather than confirming a central sovereign (e.g., the Catholic Church, an individual ruler, or a party) to have power over the state of emergency, Benjamin sought to locate this power in the (oppressed) collective majorities. His later concept of the “schwache messianische Kraft” (GS 1: 694) is an example. Shapiro writes: “In Benjamin, I find an account of nonauthoritarian, critical, and collective pneumatics, a kind of “democratic virtuosity” (130). What he calls “democratic virtuosity” outlines various possibilities, where in the sphere of human behavior points of origins of such a power may be found. Shapiro examines Benjamin's notion of “politeness” closer. The concept of “Aufmerksamkeit” as presented here seems to fit into his category as well.

 For example, “Fascism attempts to organize the the newly proletarianized masses while leaving intact the property relations which they strive to abolish” (SW 4: 269; GS 1: 506).