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.