The Brooklyn Rail

One day in 1924, a German man in his early thirties steps into a European street. Businesses, shops, signs, public announcements: in the two years that it takes him to reach the end of the street, he notes everything that catches his eye, until the outlines of a city come into view.

Filling Station
Breakfast Room
Number 113
For Men
Standard Clock
Come Back! All Is Forgiven!
Manorially Furnished Ten-Room Apartment
Chinese Curios
Gloves
Mexican Embassy
To the Public: Please Protect and Preserve These New Plantings
Construction Site
Ministry of the Interior
Flag …
… at Half-Mast
Imperial Panorama
Underground Works
Coiffeur for Easily Embarrassed Ladies
Caution: Steps
Attested Auditor of Books
Teaching Aid
Germans, Drink German Beer!
Post No Bills
Number 13
Ordnance
First Aid
Interior Decoration
Stationers
Fancy Goods
Enlargements
Antiques
Watchmaker and Jeweller
Arc Lamp
Loggia
Lost-and-Found Office
Stand for Not More than Three Cabs
Monument to a Warrior
Fire Alarm
Travel Souvenirs
Optician
Toys
Polyclinic
These Spaces for Rent
Office Equipment
Mixed Cargo: Shipping and Packing …

At the same time, in Paris, a man in his mid-twenties enters the Passage de l’Opéra, and, as if sighting the first man’s itinerary from across their borders in advance, subsumes his long list down to essentials—“For Men,” “Coiffeur for Easily Embarrassed Ladies,” and “Stamp Shop”—and catches them all, catches all of life, in a single glimpse.

Two hairdressers follow the stamp dealer in single file, the first a ladies’ hairdresser, the second a Salon for Gentlemen. The specializations involved in your functions as hairdressers to the two sexes are by no means lacking in pungency. The laws of the world are inscribed in the letters across your shop fronts.¹

Again in Paris twenty-nine years later, a twenty year-old, a believer in something he and his fellows call “psychogeography,” looks at the city as if to leap off of the infinity marked by the first man’s last sighting and the prolegomenon to all future cataloging of commercial establishments in the second man’s last sentence, listing the most suggestive street names the city has given up.

Bains-Douches des Patriarches
Machines à trancher les viandes
Zoo Notre-Dame
Pharmacie des Sports
Alimentation des Martyrs
Béton translucide
Scierie Main-d’or
Centre de recuperation fonctionnelle
Ambulance Saint-Anne
Cinquième ave nue café
Rue des Volontaires Prolongée
Pension de famille dans le Jardin
Hôtel des Etrangers
Rue Sauvage…

Like others before them and after, Walter Benjamin, with One-Way Street, written between 1924 and 1926 and published in 1928; Louis Aragon, with “The Passage de l’Opéra,” written in 1924 and published as the first chapter of his Paysan de Paris in 1926; and Ivan Chtcheglov, under the name Gilles Ivain, with “Formulary for a New Urbanism,” written in 1953 and published in the first number of the journal Internationale situationniste in 1958—were attempting to define the peculiar nature of the modern in their century, to capture what was singular about what they would have seen as their shared place and time.

The modern was not necessarily the new: all were aware of what Benjamin called, in his 1929 essay “Surrealism,” “the revolutionary energies that appear in the ‘outmoded.’”² Those energies (in “the first iron constructions, the first factory buildings, the earliest photos … the dresses of five years ago, fashion able restaurants when the vogue has begun to ebb from them”) were in the great promises—social, political, philosophical, technological, sensual—made by the past that the future, now one’s own present, had not kept: the energies of one’s sense of the betrayal of the past by the future and of the promises that remained to be kept.

If the technics of this antimodern were unlimited in their capacity for oppression, brutality, and evil, for erasing the very understanding of the modern of what it meant to be human, one thing that linked Benjamin, Aragon, and Chtchelgov was the philosophical conviction, or instinct, that the totality had to be resisted, even chipped away, even defeated, by the fragment: the street, the sign, the name, the face, the aphorism, the evanescent, the ephemeral, the worthless, the unimportant, the meaningless. “What form do you suppose a life would take that was determined at a decisive moment precisely by the street song last on every one’s lips?”

That sentence, from Benjamin’s 1929 essay “Surrealism,” is the image, the dramatic moment, that he is searching for all through One-Way Street. A walk down the street is also a quest: a quest to find, as Edmund Wilson wrote in 1922 in Paris, sharing time and space with the rest, “for what drama our setting is the setting.”

In Benjamin’s One-Way Street, the mind is constantly at play, thinking, dreaming, thinking about dreaming, free-associating, not distinguishing between the trivial and the world- historical, the modern mind trying to walk and psychoanalyze itself and the world at the same time. No wonder the book has so many traveling companions: Benjamin is tapping into an essential modernist impulse, to remake the world out of attractive, invaluable fragments—bits of what Aragon called “the cult of the ephemeral”—those things that to nonmodernists appear to be merely part of the unassailable whole.