Walter Benjamin: ambling through the city of a mind Part 3

By Jacob Voorthuis

prost! proust!

Living together is difficult, and, as Michel Foucault has justly argued, discourse seems to be mostly about the exercise of power over others.

Listen to Benjamin’s characterisation of Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu, which is translated into English as: The Remembrance of Things Past but which could be more literally translated as The search for lost times.

The point about the title of the book is that it is a search for something that is lost.

Because of the loss, something curious happens in the attempt to remember. Here is Benjamin about Proust:

…from the honeycombs of his memory he built a house for the swarm of his thoughts.

Why use an architectural metaphor there? Picture a honeycomb, then picture a house. What is the essential difference between them? The spaces of a honeycomb do not obey a differentiated hierarchy.

The spaces of a house do.

The honeycomb is a uniform hexagonal grid. Each vessel is exactly the same size. From it emerges an undifferentiated “swarm of thought”.

The volumes of a house obey a hierarchy: a hierarchy of size and arrangement related to purpose and significance. That hierarchy is defined by a complex brief of demands made on the house.

The house is the vessel of our substance, that which we own and become. It is our place. The house is of our substance in the same way that seven thousand sheep were Job’s substance. In such a house the thoughts can be modulated, expanded, stored, flushed away.

The re-ordering the honeycomb of memory is essentially an architectural task.

Proust becomes not just the archaeologist of his memory but also its architect. He reconstructs and even constructs his memories and gives them form as an architect gives form to people’s daily lives. The result is “a life”. Life subjected to an arrangement of spaces, of nodes.

There is another point to make. Proust’s life happened in the city of Paris and among its buildings. Although their presence is not emphatic in the novel, they are rather low profile in fact; the buildings and streets nevertheless serve as the web or framework of his life.

Paris too, is Proust’s substance, without it, Proust would not have been Proust.

Benjamin makes the point that the word Textum, from which we get the word text as well as the word textile, in fact means web or woven fabric in the original Latin from which it came.

The city is a web, a piece of woven fabric: a text. And the text of our lives is in turn inscribed on the city and on the house, on the spaces we inhabit.

To search for those inscriptions we draw a map, of the city as it exists in tension with our lives. But these inscriptions are overlaid with later changes, partially obscured and altered. We constantly make tiny changes to the city, to our houses, everyday. Those tiny changes accumulate in something called age.

Age is the accumulation of tiny changes. Our memory ages and so does the city. In our search for our lives we constantly renew our city and our memory of it. We are the architects of our lives.

There is a homeless and confused man in Liguanea, Kingston. Actually I haven’t seen him for some time now, but I used to watch him closely. He was relatively young and wore the things that people passing through his territory discarded: plastic bags, old shoes, orange juice boxes around his arm, shaving foam in his hair, even a large pink ribbon around his private parts once, trophies of change and consumption.

He had become obsessed with change. He would spend his days carefully readjusting the stones that had come to be misplaced during the course of the day by the countless feet and tyres that would pass through his territory and displace things aimlessly. All this involved making small adjustments, turning a stone there, moving one here.

He worked to undo the ageing process that was naturally at work in his neighbourhood, through the tiny displacements of everyday movement and exchange.

Age is a metaphysical concept, the product of exchange and displacement, the manifestation of the depth and complexity that arises from movement and exchange through the contingencies of proximity obeying the laws of mechanics.

It is the process by which cities grow and transform themselves. The confused man in Liguanea was trying to hold the clock. A one-man time machine facing the universe. His madness consists not in the folly of the idea; that requires a poetic imagination. His madness consists in the folly of seriously entertaining its possibility and trying it. That is what genius and madness have in common.

The three elements discussed so far, the personal map, the architecture of memory and the mechanics of age suggest that although the shortest distance between to points might be a straight line in theoretical terms, in creative terms, such theory is a distant and childish memory.

The geometry of the city is never Euclidean. It does not obey the laws of the plane and the circle, it’s topography is multidimensional and its axioms wild. The line is chaotic and the relationships it represents are not easily summarised in the sum of the angles.

It is the detour, the complications of error and misunderstanding, the contingency of proximity and the dictates of myth that create routes and models which more closely resemble the reality and wealth of the everyday.

Benjamin discusses Proust’s perverse predilection for deliberate complications. They become quickly emblematic for much modern architecture, which is wilfully and deliberately complex, perhaps in part due to a desire as expressed by architects like Aldo van Eyck and Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction. Modern architecture delights in the complicated, the obtuse, like Proust. Proust was somebody who delighted in making things difficult. This is a quotation from Benjamin’s The Image of Proust

Proust was most resourceful in creating complications. Once, late at night, he dropped in on Princess Clermont-Tonnère and made his staying dependent on someone bringing him his medicine from his house. He sent a valet for it, giving him a lengthy description of the neighbourhood and of the house. Finally he said: “You cannot miss it. It is the only window on the Boulevard Haussmann in which there is still a light burning.” Everything but the house number! Anyone who has tried to get the address of a brothel in a strange city and has received the most long-winded directions, everything but the name of the street and the house number, will understand what is meant here and what the connection is with Proust’s love of ceremony. (...) Is it not the quintessence of experience to find out how very difficult it is to learn many things, which apparently could be told in a very few words? It is simply that such words are part of a language established along lines of caste and class and unintelligible to outsiders. Walter Benjamin, The Image of Proust, from Illuminations, Fontana Press, 1992 (1973) p. 197-210

Functionality cannot be narrowed to the immediate objective; function must negotiate the wild landscape of man’s personal myths and beliefs about his place.

If it does not, such a functionalism kills the very purpose it is meant to serve. It cannot be right to merely house the millions, the need a place to be at home.

It is paradoxical that prejudice is the most immovable obstacle to change, and yet it is invisible and weightless.

Nevertheless, if we want to change our environment it is precisely that invisible and weightless thing we need to tackle.

Proust refused to bypass the ceremonial of social/intellectual exclusion in his description, thereby bringing the nature of explanation into focus.

Explanation, literally, involves coming out of the plane: ex-planation, it is the transcendence of the plane.

Proust’s explanation does just that. Instead of making things clear and obstacle-free, his explanation sets up new boundaries, makes laws of belonging and so shows that the topography of the city is shaped by social institutions, which alter the nature of its geometry, which demand a new set of axioms.

The grain of the city usually describes the social layering and arrangement of its population. To make that point clear, look at the difference in grain in this city which illustrates how a palace settles into the surrounding fabric

I would suggest that much self-conscious “Architecture” of recent years also does just that. It is metaphysics in glass and steel: a dance celebrating the fun of thinking.

For those “in the know” few words are needed to convey difficult concepts. They can be abbreviated. Anyone in the know about the way an address works does not need lengthy descriptions. For those who are not in the know, the city presents a chaos which has still to be made into an order

Anyone who knows the city needs few words and not just any words but colloquially codified abbreviations at that.

It is ironic that such a familiarity, such a merging of the object and the viewing subject in fact becomes itself a separation, excluding those who are unfamiliar.

This sets up the possibility of a social difference, a possibility that under the provisions of a qualification of Murphy’s law:

familiarity will lead to social difference.

But when the movement through a city touches on the deepest universal themes and mysteries, such as lust, desire, love, the pursuit of wealth and status, the giving of directions involves a liturgy. In this way language, accent, idiom and syntax describe a demarcation line between us and them.

It is our accent, our idioms, our use of slang which place us with regard to our relative position in society and thereby our position in the city.

The experience of a city is divided along caste and class in the same way that language is. And each class, whatever the criterion along which it divides looks at the other to help define itself.

But class is always experienced individually. In Kingston the division between Uptown and Downtown, the concept of area stigma, are two well known phenomena, which illustrate my point.

These divisions have become physical in so far as they are manifest. And they are made manifest through the language of architecture, through the language with which people talk and move through the city and through the geographic aspirations people foster, to live there rather than there.

Many architects have made it their special project to question such divisions architecturally, and that is a useful exercise.

For example there are now architects in Jamaica who purposefully exploit colour, while the division between uptown and downtown has in the past been enforced by a preference for white and subdued colours versus bright and garish colours.

What this will do eventually to the social connotations of colour is not clear as yet. To speculate that the use of colour in buildings will cease to be a point of social division is, I think, naïve.

And yet the change in perception, whereby people become less certain as to what colour they want their house to be, might involve more than a simple inversion.

The geometry of social aspiration seems to spiral.

The lowly look up and the uppity, with their confidence, look down again to appropriate for themselves the “picturesque charm” and philosophical comfort of a poverty they imagine to consist of a blissful simplicity.

But nobody ever comes full circle. Small tiny changes will have been made to the techniques of applying the colour, the choice of colours and the value these colours are supposed to represent. The colours and forms of uptown will always be carefully differentiated from the bright and raw use of colour Downtown Kingston for example.

Language and city confront each other more directly in the habits of naming places.

James Robertson in his reconstruction of the early years of Spanishtown after the English had taken the city in 1655, noticed strange patterns and habits in the naming of places.

The streets were often not given names! On the sketches accompanying the grant of title, surveyors would merely write A Street rather than naming that street. Or they would write to Miss Anne Taylor’s or to Colonel whatshisname’s.

In taking over an existing city none of the traditions of naming obtained. None of the habits of re naming streets after Kings and Queens and landowners had become essential to the appropriation of Spanishtown and the assimilation of it to English expectations. The names that are there now are of a later date. In this way Spanishtown is very different to the original grid of Kingston.

The very name of the city Spanish Town expresses not just the alien character of its grid and the longevity of its original Spanish houses. (There were still Spanish structures to be seen some 100 years after the Spanish had moved out) but even the curious lack of conquering zeal.

White Church Street was the English name to denote the position of the original Spanish church.

The fact that women’s names appeared so often on the surveyor’s reports was probably due to the habit of plantation owner’s coming into the city to do their business and staying with a lady who ran a boarding house or inn and leaving thereafter.

Spanishtown was not a residential city and was therefore never properly appropriated. It was an administrative centre that lost its raison d’être, when the capital moved from Spanish town to Kingston.

It remained the capital for so long because of inertia and the political tussle between the plantocracy and the merchants, not because it was so conveniently situated. This is reflected in the forms and the present level of neglect as well as the names used within the city.

It is this connection between people’s doing and people’s dwelling that makes Benjamin such fascinating reading for architects.

He will observe a city and discuss the tortuous relationship between the history of form and the history of habits and how these organically linked movements constantly shape each other.

In the essay entitled “Some Motifs in Baudelaire” Benjamin analyses the crowd. He does this on a very curious authority. He has noticed that in the poetry of Baudelaire, a poet of the city of Paris, there are no descriptions of the crowd or the city that the crowd inhabits.

And yet, both the city and the crowd are always present in his poetry: the crowd usually as something that was there a moment ago, or something that is inscribed in the feeling of a place, but is not actually there at that moment: The deserted street is Benjamin’s example.

Being deserted lifts the city street out of ordinary experience. Being used or even crowded is the norm. By describing it as deserted, the street becomes the vessel of a memory of something that has been there, and will be there again, but is not there at that moment of experiencing. It is that which gives the street a peculiar quality of loneliness, of aloneness, perhaps of agoraphobia, or whatever.

Baudelaire had become part of the crowd, and no longer saw it as something special. He was a Parisian. But in fact the crowd, if not invented during the nineteenth century, certainly became commonplace during that time. Before that time there were simply not enough people to create real crowds.

This is the time when cities grew at an extraordinary rate. The crowd emerged as a standard inescapable feature of city life. The first experience of the crowd for those who weren’t used to such concentrations of people was rather disconcerting. Benjamin quotes Engels (Karl Marx’s colleague) from his book The Condition of the Working Class in England:

Excerpt from: The Condition of the Working Class in England:

A City like London, where one can roam around for hours without reaching the beginning of an end, without seeing the slightest indication that open country is nearby, is really something very special. This colossal centralisation, this agglomeration of three and a half million people on a single spot has multiplied the strength of these three and a half million inhabitants a hundredfold...But the price that has been paid is not discovered until later. Only when one has tramped the pavements of the main streets for a few days does one notice that these Londoners have had to sacrifice what is best in human nature in order to create all the wonders of civilisation with which their city teems, that a hundred creative faculties that lay dormant in them remained inactive and were suppressed....There is something very distasteful about the very bustle of the streets, something that is abhorrent to human nature itself. Hundreds of thousands of people of all classes and ranks of society jostle past one another; are they not all human beings with the same characteristics and potentialities, equally interested in the pursuit of happiness?...And yet they rush past one another a if they had nothing in common or were in no way associated with one another. Their only agreement is a tacit one: that everyone should keep to the right of the pavement, so as not to impede the stream of people moving in the opposite direction. No one even spares a glance for the others. The greater the number of people that are packed into a tiny space, the more repulsive and offensive becomes the brutal indifference, the unfeeling concentration of each person on his private affairs.

The virtue of “minding your own business” here becomes the tool of “a cruel indifference.”

Communism was obviously perfected in the provincial mind of a country bumpkin who was unfamiliar with the language of the city, where people mind their own business and make that aspect of their lives visible.

When Engels talks of human nature, he does not see that, in fact it is human nature, which created the city animal. What he means when he uses the phrase human nature has nothing to do with Marx’s definition of human nature. It is really just a veiled reference to what he (Engels himself and those who think like him) likes and dislikes with reference to what he is used to.

Anonymity, all exclusive purposefulness, doing business and being in a rush constitutes the language of the city dweller.

The gestures and method of carrying oneself in a city speaks the language of anonymity, of haste, of purpose. City dwellers feel at home in it. They like it. In fact that anonymity is the generous compensation for the loss of the personal space people had to sacrifice in their move from the village to the city.

Anonymity is the conceptualisation of personal space and such a successful conceptualisation that he might with reason dismiss the quiet pace and generous space of the village.

As Baudelaire puts it: Qui ne sait pas peupler sa solitude, ne sait pas non plus être seul dans une foule affairée. (A man who cannot people his solitude is no less incapable of being alone in a crowd.

From: “Les Foules” (Crowds) in Little prose poems.

On the other hand the person new to city life, often feels acutely alienated by it. Engels merely decided to judge what he could not understand. But he struck a chord..

There were many that did not and do not understand the city. The city was such a new phenomenon during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

But during the twenties there were many who, within the guise of progress and modernism started admiring the energy of cities, loved the virtual space of anonymity.

Filmmakers and artists, writers and architects, financiers and economists started simply “liking the city”. This kind of feeling culminated in 1978 with the publication of Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York, which is a manifesto for hyperdensity and the wonderful world of artifice it requires and creates.

The city, if we apply Marx’s dictum, is man doing what he does naturally, create an artificial environment. New York is the epitome of this artificial environment and has revealed itself immensely creative. Artifice is man’s nature…

But, as Benjamin rightly observes, the most common feelings the city inspired were Horror, revulsion and fear. It was barbaric, wild: a concrete jungle. He quotes the French author Paul Valéry The inhabitant of the great urban centres reverts to a state of savagery - that is - of isolation.

The theme was taken rather literally in the film Themrock, which tells the story of a man fired from his job in a paint factory, who rebels against society. He does this by knocking the façade out of his flat in the middle of Paris and beginning a new life as a cave man.

It is a deed so provocative, so dangerous to society that the civilised elements are prepared to undertake barbarous acts of violence to prevent him living there like a caveman and they send a whole army to stop this breach of civilisation. Rather timely as it turned out because many of his neighbours began to be rather attracted by the idea of living like a caveman. The city is the great jungle.

Benjamin, the ultimate observer, loved to get lost in that jungle. In that getting lost he discovered the nature of life expressing itself in the signs of life: built form, street dress, crowd behaviour, brazen advertising, and so forth.

The city is a receptacle of enormous creative potential. I cannot come to any conclusion. This essay was never about conclusions; it was about an opening up. Therefore the conclusion to this essay is in the form of an urgent advice.

Read Benjamin’s descriptions of Paris, Moscow, Naples and Berlin. For in Benjamin’s writings the accepted axioms of our experience are constantly undermined by a more sophisticated understanding of the landscape we walk.

I think that Paul Klee’s Leaf from the book of cities illustrates the possibilities of this way of looking rather well.

Sources: Illuminations, with and introduction by Hannah Arendt, Fontana Press, 1992 (1973); One Way Street, and Other Writings, with an introduction by Susan Sontag, Verso Classics, 1997 (1979)