Walter Benjamin: ambling through the city of a mind, Part 2

By Jacob Voorthuis

Part 2

Barbarous civilisation

The task of the philosopher, Benjamin wrote, is to comprehend all of natural life through the more encompassing life of history.

Anyone who looks at history - which is the history of science and art- is performing an act of philosophy.

In his aphorisms on history Benjamin wrote three things which are prerequisite to any understanding of his philosophy.

On top of that they reveal his critical admiration for Marx and a curious connection to his ineffable Jewish melancholy.

‘A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet….’

‘The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grow skyward. This storm is what we call progress.’

What an image! The storm blowing from paradise might well be progress, it might well be God’s wrath for having eaten that infernal apple, and maybe the two are the same, who knows?

I do not want to narrow this image with explanation. It needs to sink in, to be made your own.

Instead I shall give you another quotation:

There is no document of civilisation which is not also a document of barbarism

What exactly does that mean?

Is this statement redemptive? Does it mean something along the lines that good aspects of European civilisation would not have been possible without its plundering the resources of the world?

Yes

Does it excuse such behaviour? I don’t think so, he merely sees it as inevitable….

Or is the statement far harsher, more matter of fact, less excusing?

Is it that every document necessarily has two sides? That it is two-faced?

Where a document reveals civilisation it merely veils barbarism and where it reveals barbarism it hides civilisation. Whatever it choses to hide, that hidden aspect is still very much present….

In other words when Europeans went into Africa and laughed at her supposed savagery, is it that those Europeans were merely blind to the peculiar qualities of African civilisation and blind to their own savagery?

I rather think that that is what he meant.

That is food for thought, it encourages a fatalism and prepares one for the idea that the good and the bad have an obscenely intimate relationship.

It prepares you for the possibility that judgment reflects the judge and not the thing judged.

In architectural terms this statement has a wide significance. It means that it is possible to take something for granted that is often so hotly debated. It essentially means that every form, style, means of construction, has a valuable place in our world and cannot be dismissed as inherently wrong. A style may be inappropriate for a particular setting, for a particular purpose, but that only means that you have to find the meaning and function of the style and suit it to its purpose, or vice versa.

In other words the debate about style, and other political positions which still dominates architectural discourse is a sidetrack.

What we should be doing is determining the essence of “good” architecture in terms where style, method of construction, etc become subject to careful judgment of the overall program of the architect. They are matters of careful choice.

One only reveals one’s shortsightedness when one dismisses an architect simply because of the clothes he puts on.

Ask him instead why he is wearing those clothes. He might not know himself and so you might have started him on a quest…

Let’s change the discourse of architecture to look, not at whether a modernist has a right to be modern or a classicist has a right to be a classicist, but at what the duties of a modernist are and what the duties of a classicist are.

Admit that your likes and dislikes are valued personal documents of your own inadequacy… milepoles in your own journey through taste

The statement by Benjamin also allows us to preserve lovingly that which is most barbaric. For we know it to have two faces. And memory serves as a warning.

Like Auschwitz, or the remaining plantation houses, which resonate, plucking the tense connection between the truly savage and the falsely civilised.

The entrance to Auschwitz Birkenau extermination camp. The idea of this harmless looking building was to create a screen to hide the extraordinary industrial killing that went on inside the camp.

Rose Hall, St James. This house contains a similar paradox. It is a house, rather pleasant in its proportions and spectacular in its setting but commemorates a weird and heinous history.

The statement also prepares us for the third and last bombshell, which is:

The class struggle is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist.

There is a grammatical ambiguity in the translation of this sentence, which I am not sure exists in the German original, but which suits my purposes very well…

What does this mean? Does the “which” refer to “the struggle” or “the crude and material things”?

Does it simply mean that we have to earn enough money before we can start enjoying the fruits of life? No, I don’t think so.

I have, I suspect, always misread this quotation, half-deliberately.

Imagine the “which” to refer to “the crude and material things”.

In that case the sentence tells us that the most beautiful expressions of our nature are those which derive spiritual nourishment from the questioning, analysing, looking at and thinking poetically about the daily reality of our lives.

This is a photograph I took of an interior of a tiny house in Havana, Cuba. The occupants are extremely poor. The things that hang on the wall have little so-called “refinement” and yet the wall tells an extraordinary story to those happy to listen for a while.

Such a statement gives us the possibility that it is precisely our relationship to things, even to crude material things that give us the possibility of refinement.

Is it not our attitude to things, which characterise our belonging?

Is this not also what Heidegger wanted to get across? Does not our belonging or not-belonging express the desperate flight of our spirit?

Is not the hermit who renounces all material goods in life particularly concerned about his relationship to things?

In fact, is not the hermit the prototype of the minimalist?

This House by the architect Alberto Baeza is such a minimalist house, in which the relationship to the ordinary things of the everyday is heightened by their absence.

Is any state of mind not an expression of your relation to things, either to deny or to affirm things? In other words we are all collectors of things.

It is what we collect which makes us different: What we collect gives us the feeling that we give that object a life.

To a true collector, Benjamin writes in his lovely lecture called “Unpacking my Library,” the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth.

That is true but not just true for the books collected. It is true for the collector: the renewed life for the book is our life renewed.

Curiously enough, this aspect of giving life through one’s relation to things is what Benjamin calls the childlike element in collecting:

... children can accomplish the renewal of existence in a hundred unfailing ways. Among children, collecting is only one process of renewal; other processes are the painting of objects, the cutting out of figures- the whole range of childlike modes of acquisition, from touching things to giving them names.

If that is childlike then beware of putting away childish things, some of them remain useful, Here is Benjamin again:

To renew the old world - that is the collector’s deepest desire.

Again we have to generalise this quotation. We are all collectors of some sort of another.

The acquisition, appropriation and absorption into ourselves of the objects of our passion, renew our experience of the world.

In that way, the old world, a personal analogous old world comes into existence.

This quotation addresses our attitude to all sorts of things but especially our attitude to issues such as restoration, preservation and the attempt to invoke the old world in ways that are commonly derided.

One example is Disney World in Florida: a fake old world. Or simply a fantasy. What is actually wrong with fantasy?

A new pair of shoes gave Mrs. Marcos a new life.

Benjamin collected books, quotations and observations. He gave them a new life in his particular way of looking at them. With these instruments of observation and revision we have finally arrived at the possibility of examining Benjamin at work in describing the city.

Walking your life in a city

I will go lose myself, and wander up and down to view the city. Antipholus of Syracuse in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors.

Benjamin loved to play the part of the flâneur, the aimless wanderer who loses himself in the city, stands back from the crowd and whose urgent and single-minded purpose is to have no urgency, lose his way and observe.

It is difficult. The pace at which one goes is all-important as it determines the scale of one’s observation and thereby what becomes visible. Speed abbreviates.

Benjamin writes somewhere about some fellow, I forget his name, who wanted to take a tortoise out for a walk, as it would force him to keep to the right pace.

From this activity as flâneur, he arrived at the conclusion that the streets of Paris are like the walls of a living room.

That is in fact a conclusion that Louis Kahn arrived at too….

Streets are like living rooms. How do w ensure that quality of the street. What rules, regulations, design decisions to we need to implement/take

The comparison between the street and the living room becomes normative to the city planner and the architect: who would not like to live in a street, which is like a living room?

In fact it legitimises the habit of Caribbean living, where the best house is but a treasure box used for self-proclamation and the storage of earthly possessions, but real life….

Real life takes place outside, in the streets and open spaces where photographers set up shop, where the disk jockey and his wall of speakers transform the street into something that is pre-eminently alive.

The same can be said for Aldo van Eyck’s important comparison between the city and the house: The city is a house and the house is a city…

If architecture spills out into the street, we might legitimately ask the question where architecture begins and ends. What is architectural and what is not in some measure architectural?

In a discussion about the writings of Kafka, Benjamin argues that Kafka could have defined organisation as destiny.

That is an intriguing statement for us: “organisation is destiny”.

Organisation implies a purpose; a purpose implies a direction and its fulfilment a movement. Movement reaches towards a destination. Therefore, “organisation is destiny”.

Benjamin illustrates the idea with reference to Kafka’s story called The Great Wall of China.

In this story social organisation and the act of building converge, as they so often do.

The one cannot exist without the other.

A building of any size could not be realised without a finely tuned society with a common sense of purpose.

Take the Grand Mosque at Djenne, Mali. Mud architecture, far from being primitive is a great social instrument, as the maintenance of the building becomes part of the collective responsibility of a people

And the wall of China would not be necessary if it did not have something fine to protect.

If that is so and if architecture is the physical product of organisation, in terms of the channels and obstacles it creates, then maybe we can begin to understand Benjamin’s particular sensitivity to the city in relation to the behaviour of people in groups as organised politically and socially.

The city is the physical evidence of our destiny.

It represents the remains or product of our struggle; it is the wreckage, which piles itself up at the feet of our Angelus Novus.

And being confining and containing, architecture begins to work our destiny. The city is the two-faced document of our civilisation and of our barbarism, and the city is the object of our struggle for the crude and material things without which no fine and spiritual things could exist.

Therefore: the city becomes what we are, and the city is what we were….

The crossing between the crudely material and the spiritual, the representation of organisation as destiny is the map.


Think, for example of the idea of turning your life into a map, to represent your life as a city.

This idea became Benjamin’s autobiographical sketch entitled A Berlin Chronicle.

The way he does it is peculiarly his, of course, but think instead of how you would do something like that. Think of how the buildings looked and appeared to work when you were a child.

Try to think of the city you grew up in without that extra sensitivity to buildings that you have developed since becoming a student in architecture.

Think of the map you would draw of your city and what the effective cause of the shape of that map would be: the contingencies of where your parents lived, the demands of your background, your socio-economic position, your parents’ concerns, your own bravery to venture out.

Think of what size you would give each event in your life, each place. What objects play an important part in that map?

How would the events and their places arrange themselves in relation to each other? Would you stay true to the map of your childhood or would you create a new place called My life as I wished it had been? Project your own memories onto a city map and see what happens. Try it.

With the spectacular growth of the city and the invention of the concept of the metropolis and later the megalopolis, new space and time defying inventions began to be introduced, which interfere with our geometrical conception of the world.

Euclid’s planar geometry is no longer enough even for everyday life: the telephone, the radio, the camera, the movie, the television, the computer, the Internet are devices that transport you into other spaces and other times without moving.

Things become near while remaining far away. They again alter the axioms of our existence. They are virtually accessible, which has proved to be accessible enough. People are happy to discard the full experience of the slow walk, and are prepared to abbreviate distance in favour of speed.

In fact they create a new kind of map, a map where space is conceptualised and which until then had only been accessible to the sailor. In his One way street Benjamin writes in a short piece called “Stand Up Beer Hall”

I love that passage; it proves that space might be quantifiable in scientific terms, but in order for such a science to help us in the analysis of our experience of it we need science to be fuller.

The point is that telephones, faxes, computers, which abbreviate experience in order to increase the distance that experience is able to cover, are confronting us with the problem that sailors have known for years. Our conception of geometry is definitely non-Euclidean; triangles are triangles only in a heavily conceptualised and abstracted sense.

Points connect through the geometry of consciousness and memory.

With these time abbreviating machines there is a gain. But what is gained in one way is lost in another. The net-product is mysterious.

The wonderful travel across empty oceans dissolves in the mundane pleasures the sailors crave. No longer the dupes of palm trees their loneliness patches together the familiar corners of exotic cities into one transcendent and mundane metropolis of bodily pleasure.

The same argument may hold in the new space of the world, after all, it is sex, which at the moment sustains the economy of the Internet.

Machines like the computer are a supplement to experience and memory; they allow us to make life fuller under the same conditions that life was made fuller before and then only if we are intimately familiar with the topography of the distortions they impose.

Otherwise they merely extend our appetite for more, quicker. That is a gain of sorts. These machines make large cities possible as good places.

But beware of the sophistication of logistic, social, cultural, commercial and political systems that make large cities possible.

Eventually they become embroiled in our need to express our nature and to forgive a desire for life.

What that means?

work it out for yourself!