One-Way Street

The World Is a Shop of Images and Signs

In my last post I touched upon the historical decline in experience, a major concern of Walter Benjamin. His concept of experience is very complex, but basically Benjamin argues that in modern times we've lost the ability to experience ordinary life as meaningful, as an activity connected to tradition. Instead, modern life has become just one thing after another. Modern life is boring and repetitive and empty. It's as if we're all on the assembly line.

However, Benjamin said that certain modes of experience retain their depth and meaning. Storytelling is one example. Another is allegory.

For Benjamin, allegory is a form of experience. In fact, experience and allegory have a common origin in German Romanticism. The Romantics devised the concept of experience to describe their notions of empiricism, as concrete and specific, while, at the same time, they regarded allegory as a means of finding moral certainty in art. Consequently, experience generated its own ideal forms out of itself, mediated by the beautiful forms of art.

Benjamin and Baudelaire were both children of Romanticism. However, neither one of them fully subscribed to Romanticism's idealization of art. For Benjamin and Baudelaire, art is first and foremost a commodity, and the poet produced goods for the marketplace. “Baudelaire knew how things stood for the literary man,” Benjamin writes. “As flâneur, he goes to the marketplace, supposedly to take a look at it, but in reality to find a buyer.”

Baudelaire turned his own experience as a flâneur into a commodity. As a post-Romantic, his primary means of accomplishing this was allegory in an updated form. Instead of seeing moral perfection in art, Baudelaire saw eternal transience in high capitalist culture. Paris in the Second Empire was dazzling, but it could become as useless and unwanted as an old commodity. In other words, it was suffered the same fate as the Paris arcades.

The "entire world is a shop of images and signs," Baudelaire declared. For the Baudelairan allegorist, reality is encoded to its very core; every thing in the world is a symbol of some deeper meaning. And yet, like the commodity, which links the lofty with the commonplace, symbols in Baudelaire's poetry often combine the sacred with the profane.

Her polished eyes are made of charming jewels
And in her strange, symbolic nature where
Inviolate angel mingles with ancient sphinx,

Where all is gold, steel, light, and diamonds
There shines forever, like a useless star,
The cold majesty of the sterile woman.

Notice how the form of Baudelaire's poetry is conventional. His innovation--and claim to Modernism--lies in his tropes as they express his allegorical gaze. Unlike, say, Walt Whitman, Baudelaire's flâneurie is not a relationship with presence. Baudelaire's poetry is "archi-ecriture," Jacques Derrida's term for a form of experience that regards the world as a text. Baudelaire's poetry isn't new by virtue of its radical form; it's new because the world in which he was immerse was entirely new, and already perishing.

Baudelaire and the Decline of Experience

The second foundational figure of literary Modernism, along with Flaubert, was Charles Baudelaire. Both French writers were fascinated by urban experience. Flaubert incorporated it into his narrative form, while Baudelaire made urban experience the subject of his poetic practice. Baudelaire was a practicing flâneur. For long stretches he didn’t own a writing table. He made aimless wandering through Paris a method of productive labor. Although he was immersed in the street life of the city, Benjamin noticed that the city rarely figured directly in his poem. Rather, the city was “the scene of their action,” the setting for imagistic renderings of encounters Baudelaire “suffered” through.

Baudelaire asked, “What are the dangers of the forest and prairies next to the daily shocks and conflicts of civilization?” He fought off the jolts of street life like a fencer (“I walk alone, practicing my fantastic fencing/Sniffing at every risk-filled corner for a rhyme”). Baudelaire so keenly registered the shocks experience of daily life that experience, the accumulations shaping memory and wisdom, becomes “withered” instead, Benjamin claimed. For Benjamin Baudelaire was among the first writers to articulate the decline of meaningful experience in modern life, its graduate decline into an empty repetition of the same.

The excitement of urban life is generally held to be simulative, if stressful. In “The Metropolis and Mental Life” George Simmel had claimed that because of the encounter with so much stimuli, urban life is more sophisticated. The urbanite forms barriers against stimuli, "reacts with his head rather than his heart."  The urbanite has to become more intelligent than his more laid-back country cousin in order to protect himself, yet at the same time his intellect expands to accommodate diversity of urban life.

Simmel’s view of urban life remains part of the myth of urbanism. All those galleries and coffee houses make for more evolved people. However,in Baudelaire's poems, the first truly great urban poetry, the peregrinations of the flâneur turn into a kind of work. There is no rest for the Baudelairan flâneur. His double vision enables him to see the degradation of labor into endlessly repeated empty moments even as he knows the city offers up glimpses of a world we pretend doesn’t exist. Baudelaire's poetry is full of fleeting glimpses into the grotesque and the immeasurably ancient lurking in the center of Paris, the most modern city of the nineteenth century. Benjamin describes Baudelaire’s poem “Seven Old Men” as an “anxiety-filled phantasmagoria” based upon a chance encounter with an old man in the streets of Paris.

He was not bent, but broken, and his spine
Formed such a sharp right angle with his leg
That his walking stick, perfecting his demeanor
Gave him the contour and the clumsy gait
Of some lame animal . . .

His likeness followed: heard, eye, back, cane, tatters,
Spawned from the same Hell; no trait distinguished
His centenarian twin, and both these baroque spectors
Marched with the same tread toward an unknown goal.

To what infamous plot was I exposed,
Or what evil luck humiliated me thus?
For seven times, as I counted minute to minute
This sinister old fellow multiplied!

The speaker of “Seven Old Men” is no dandy taking in the sights. The flâneur recognizes a uniquely repulsive old man, only to suddenly find him everywhere in the industrialized city. Baudelaire has no recourse to the compensatory transformations of narrative, like Flaubert. Baudelaire’s images are searing, but they go nowhere. If experience is to mean anything, it must take the form of something alienating and strange. In other words, it must take the form of a commodity.

More on that in my next post.

Flaubert: In the World, Out of Time

Sorry about the infrequent postings lately. I've started a new job this week and things have been pretty hectic.

The last time we talked we were discussing the flâneur as a literary figure. The flâneur embodies a mobile point of view. He is the opposite of the distracted viewer. His devotion to seeing is so complete that he has, in effect, a kind of double vision. He is an investigator, but he knows that he cannot fully plumb the depths of mysteries. He is a connoisseur of fine things, yet he also knows their essential emptiness, because he is empty too. The flâneur can empathize equally well with people and objects. He is the perfect novelist.

In many ways the modernist novel begins with this scene from Flaubert's A Sentimental Education. 

There was firing from every window overlooking the square; bullets whistled through the air; the fountain had been pierced, and the water, mingling with blood, spread in puddles on the ground. People slipped in the mud on clothes, shakos, and weapons; Frederic felt something soft under his foot; it was the hand of a sergeant in a grey overcoat who was lying face down in the gutter. Fresh groups of workers kept coming up, driving the fighters toward the guard-house. The firing became more rapid. The wine-merchants' shops were open, and every now and then somebody would go in to smoke a pipe or drink a glass of beer, before returning to the fight. A stray dog started howling. This raised a laugh.

The novel's hero Frederic is on his way to meet his mistress for their first assignation. All his romantic yearnings have culminated in this day. Unfortunately for Frederic, he scheduled his tryst on the day the July Revolution broke out, and he's extremely irritated that the mayhem is preventing him from reaching his mistress.

The telling detail here is the lifeless hand upon which Frederic steps. This detail ruptures the procession of details both innocuous and telling. The dead sergeant's hand is one of those small details that carries the full force of the real. Frederic may be a dreamy fool, but there's really a war going on.

Flaubert was the first novelist who allowed his characters to walk around simply observing things. The early chapters in A Sentimental Education contain several observational sketches as Frederic walks around Paris.

Besides the primacy of vision in his fiction, what makes Flaubert so modern is his way of handling details. On a per page basis Balzac probably stuffed more observed details into his novels than Flaubert. However, Balzac was content merely to accumulate details. His novels are great department stores, poems of display. His characters are fish swimming in an early capitalist sea, propelled forward by pure, insatiable desire.

Flaubert's novels are chapter after chapter of little boutiques. His details aren't simply seen; they are processed by a mind attracted, but not irresistibly so, by the thinginess of the world. The minds of Flaubert's characters feel older than the worlds they inhabit. Like the flâneur, the last incarnation of the 18th-century dandy, his characters' attitudes are out of date. Frederic, for instance, seems out of place in the country, where nothing ever changes, and the city, where everything seems to have changed all at once.

Frederic, the old flâneur, outlives his ideals, yet doesn't live quite long enough for his irony to coalesce into a way of being. He's too late for Romanticism, too early for Modernism. 

The Flâneur in Bleak House

Walter Benjamin constructed the figure of the flâneur from the writings of his friend Franz Hessel, as well as Baudelaire, Poe, Balzac, Dickens and Marx in his writings on commodity fetishism. The flâneur is a historical type, as we saw in my previous post, but he is also a mode of experience, a literary motif, and a means to see into commodity culture.

Benjamin started his elaboration of the flâneur from George Simmel’s observation that "interpersonal relationships in big cities are distinguished by a marked preponderance of the activity of the eye over the activity of the ear." For the flâneur, Benjamin writes, “the joy of watching is triumphant.”  Mostly what the flâneur watched was the city itself. Flâneurie arose at the same time as the early novels of metropolitan life produced by restless, expansive urbanites like Balzac and Dickens. In their novels the city is a landscape, alternately familiar and alienating, comforting and dangerous.

Dickens used to roam around London at night, not an entirely safe activity, and the labyrinthine mysteriousness of the city appears most directly in Bleak House. The novel’s narrator as a flâneur whose freely ranging yet penetrating gaze permits us to see what the naïve eye Esther Summerson cannot. For a moment in the remarkable chapter 48 the flâneur assumes the guise of the moon as it gazes down upon the city and illuminates the shocking murder of Tulkinghorn.

Dickens showed the late Romantic strain of the flâneur, at once fastidious and macabre. Balzac, on the other hand, revealed the flâneur’s sociological bent. Dickens dramatizes the act of looking at the city; Balzac philosophizes it.  Take, for instance, the opening lines of Balzac’s Facino Cane:

I walked the streets to observe the manners and ways of the faubourg, to study its inhabitants and learn their characters. Ill-dresses as the workmen themselves, and quite as indifferent to the proprieties, there was nothing about me to put them on their guard. I mingled in their groups, watched their bargains, heard their disputes, at the hour when their day’s work ended. The facility of observation had become intuitive with me; I could enter the souls of others, while still conscious of their bodies,--or rather, I grasped external details so thoroughly that my mind instantly passed beyond them; I possessed, in short, the faculty of living the life of the individual on whom I exercised my observation, and of substituting myself for him, like the dervish in the Arabian Nights who assumed the body and soul of those over whom he pronounced certain words.

Here is the flâneur as undercover cop. He not only passes unnoticed, he can revels in his powers of empathy. He is the perfect guide to the still new phenomenon of the large industrial city. Under his guidance we see the city as one half novel of manners, one half vast criminal conspiracy.

In Balzac and Dickens the flâneur’s powers of exacting observation and empathy remain firmly in the service of a story. Everything they observe fits into a larger whole. The figure of the flâneur assumes a more self-conscious and modernist form in Flaubert and Baudelaire. In these two writers flâneurie becomes not just simply a way of seeing, but also a way of writing.

More on Flaubert and Baudelaire and the figure of the flâneur in my next posts.

A Turtle on a Leash

If “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is the best known by-product of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, the best known figure to emerge from his study of nineteenth-century Paris was the flâneur. The term is now used to describe someone adrift in the city, a detached observers strolling through the streets at a leisurely pace. According to a Wikipedia entry, the flâneur is a term used in architecture and city planning to describe “those who are indirectly and unintentionally affected by a particular design they experience only in passing.” In other words, people who take in their environments in a distracted manner.

This description couldn’t be further from the flâneur either as an historical figure or as a literary motif. The historical figure of the flâneur was the result of two developments in urbanism. One was the growth of the urban crowd. As early as 1798 the Parisian police fretted about the increased density of people on the streets.  A police agent reported in October of that year, “It is almost impossible to summon and maintain good moral character in a thickly massed population where each individual, unbeknownst to all the others, hides in the crowd, so to speak, and blushes before the eyes of no one.” This was the period in which the city’s traditional sins—licentiousness, deviousness, ruthless self-interest, foul odors—assume a mass and anonymous form. For the first time, the sheer size of the city was a threat to the individual. At the same time, however, the urban masses provided camouflage for the flâneur. The anonymity of the masses freed him to move about without anyone paying any undue attention to him.

The second development in urbanism leading to the rise of flâneurie was the construction of the Paris arcades in the early nineteenth century. The arcades offered a respite from the bustling crowd outside. Dandies began to frequent the fashionable arcades, taking in the sights and offering themselves up as spectacles in their own right. Around 1839, Benjamin reports, it was fashionable to walk through the arcades with a turtle on a leash in order to enforce the slow pace really determined looking required.

The flâneur walked a fine line between the teaming masses of the great industrial city and the bourgeoisie protected by its private interests. The flâneur's ambiguous social position gave him a kind of dual vision.  For him the city is "now landscape, now room," as Benjamin puts it, adding, “The street becomes a dwelling place for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the facades of the houses as a citizen within his four walls." The flâneur had a keen eye for the phantasmagoria of public space, where all distinctive characteristics, all traces of unique personality, have seeped out of the individual and into the commodity. If the flâneurs were useless and nonproductive, that was because the luxury goods for sale in the Paris arcades had no use value. The flâneurs were the first to express the notion that a complete lack of utilitarian value could be a social statement. In other words, the flâneur was the first sign of the slow death of the commodity's use value.

The Arcades Project was originally conceived as an exercise in flâneurie. In 1927 Benjamin published a review of Franz Hessel’s memoir Spazieren in Berlin entitled “The Return of the Flâneur.” Benjamin and Hessel briefly planned to collaborate on an essay about flâneurie, a dead form by that time. Flâneurie, like the Paris arcades themselves, flourished only for a brief period. The wide boulevards created by Haussmann starting in the 1870s destroyed the narrow streets that were the natural habitat of the flâneur. By then the city crowds had grown too big, urban phenomenon too overwhelming. The flâneurs lost another home when the arcades fell out of fashion. Flâneurie isn’t possible in a department store. The flâneur as an historical figure ended ignobly. According to Benjamin, “the last stand of the flâneur” was the decrepit figure wearing sandwich board advertisements.

However, as a literary motif, flâneurie had a longer and more robust existence. More on that in my next post.

Fun Friday

At the end of every week my family has "Fun Friday," an evening of pizza, popcorn, and movies. My kids are age two and five, so the movies are invariably animated and the pizza cheese only. (I make a pizza with grownup toppings for my wife and me.) In the spirit of Fun Friday, here are some tasty items for your own Fun Friday.

Michael Hulse, who translated Herta Müller into English, says the 2009 Nobel Prize winner may be obscure, but not to everyone everywhere. Only four or five of her novels have been translated into English, yet all of them have been translated into Polish, for instance. Shamefully few novels are translated into English, Hulse says, and the ones left behind are usually dismissed as too difficult or too culturally specific. He also argues that since English is the most international of languages, it should disseminate works from less widely-spoken languages (Swedish, Estonian, etc) through translation.

Peter Pennoyer and Anne Walker's biography of the Gilded Age architect Grosvenor Atterbury has just appeared. (Buy here, read about here.) Atterbury apprenticed at McKim, Mead & White, where he learned how to design houses as a long series of rolling bays sheltered by a deep shingled roof, a prototype of the McMansion style. He was also the architect for Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, developed as part of the Garden City movement: curving streets, green parks, compact lots, mixed housing types.

Alain de Botton has a weakness for tough-minded philosophers. He introduces La Rochefoucauld's Maxims, the 17th-century book that gave the French their taste for philosophical reflection. La Rochefoucauld's brand of bracing skepticism is laid out in forceful, sometimes sardonic aphorisms. He was equally unsentimental about helping others ("We all have strength enough to bear the misfortunes of others") and falling in love ("There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they had never heard that there was such a thing").  

After abandoning the cinema for years, Peter Greenaway is back with J'Accuse, a Dan Brown-style examination of Rembrandt's Nightwatch. (A still from the film is at top.) Greenaway argues that a murder has been committed before our eyes in the painting, and all 34 characters in the painting are suspects. If J'Accuse isn't playing at a theater near you and you've never seen a Greenaway film, for your own Fun Friday watch Drowning by Numbers (1988) and/or The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) for a good introduction to his work. But send the kids to bed first.

Announcements:

Half Gallery in New York City will hold an opening reception for its Ry Fyan show on Monday, October 26. Details here. (At left: Fyan's The Reasons I Can't..., [2009])

Guernica magazine, a terrific art and politics journal, will host a Guernica at 5! benefit on Wednesday, October 28 in Brooklyn. Among those making an appearance are Jonathan Ames, the creator of HBO's Bored to Death, and the 3-piece band Brazilian Girls (only one woman, and no one is Brazilian, in case you were wondering). Details here.

The Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, CO will hold a Portraits Exhibition starting November 6 and ending on the 28th. The exhibit is juried by Mary Ellen Mark. Among the 2,500 images from seven different countries on display is a portrait by Whitney Yeager, a talented photographer who also happens to be my sister-in-law. Her contribution is at left.

Metropolis magazine has issued a call for entries for its 2010 Next Generation Design Competition. The theme is One Design Fix for the Future. Come up with one design for an object that will have a positive positive impact in the future and you could win $10,000.

Speaking of competitions, the Office of Metropolitan Architecture won the competition to design Rotterdam’s Stadskantoor, a multi-use municipal building in OMA's home town. Reinier de Graaf and Rem Koolhaas designed the proposal. De Graaf says, "Rather than posing as the city's next superlative, the design for the Stadskantoor is partly a building, partly an urban condition – a skyline in its own right."

Terminal 5 Vision

The Guardian's Robert McCrum says books may be changing, but the writing life hasn't. He provides two examples of the writer as diversified enterprise in the nineteenth-century style: Margaret Atwood's book tour, during which she's signing books by remote control pen, and Jeanette Winterson, who will write fiction in any form available to her. Neither Atwood nor Winterson are Alexandre Dumas-style "factories of literature," but the variety of their endeavors recall Dickens and Twain, two writers who knew how to turn a buck (or a quid).

However, McCrum's third example, Alain de Botton, strikes me as something new, although not radically new. "Writers have always needed enlightened patrons," McCrum writes. "In some ways the recession, which has downsized or slashed so many publishers' advances, and brought the marketplace back to some semblance of reality, has been a good thing." De Botton has been criticized for accepting an assignment from BAA, the company that owns Heathrow, to write a short book about Heathrow's Terminal Five. De Botton has gamely tried to connect the project to his familiar themes of Proust and happiness, linking, for example, to a book on Proust and air travel on his Twitter account. But the BAA-de Botton relationship is more than a traditional literary patron-writer relationship. De Botton is writing what amounts to an extended commercial for BAA and its new terminal. The airline is running a campaign to make people forget Terminal Five is an airline terminal. "The £4.3 billion building is so light, modern and spacious that it’s hard to believe it’s an airport terminal at all," gushes the site copy.  Yes, de Botton's book represents a clear-eyed view of the realities of the literary marketplace, but if de Botton's new book begins, "If Proust were alive today, surely he would book a flight that lands in Terminal Five," then put the book down.

Walking on the Moon

Ted Gioia argues that sci-fi reached its high-water mark during the 1969 Apollo 11 mission to the moon, when the predictions of "the ABCs of sci-fi (Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke)" came true. However, when NASA never got around to taking the next step, a mission to Mars, all of the glamour drained away from the American space program and science fiction alike. "How could these same writers adapt to a world where rockets and astronauts had lost their luster?" Gioia asks. "The authors, for the most part, stuck to their favorite plots of space exploration, but the stories rarely had the same pizzazz as before."

I wouldn't venture to guess about the current state of sci-fi as a popular culture genre, as opposed to just a literary one. One moment when everything crystallized will always seem more vital and meaningful than the dispersed practices of the current time. Gioia refers only to literary sci-fi and its powers of prognostication. Much of the genre's claim to literariness rested in its ability to be six or seven steps ahead of history.

If sci-fi writers failed to predict that space travel would be turned over to bureaucrats, sci-fi writers also failed to predict that their own genre would be turned over to giant entertainment conglomerates. Amazing Stories had a peak circulation of 50,000 in the mid-1960s, but that's small change compared to contemporary Hollywood space epics. The latest installment of the Star Trek series grossed nearly $378 million worldwide. As a popular culture genre, sci-fi is a big business, but few would claim that Star Trek or Star Wars can tell us anything about how we will live in the future. Sci-fi has gotten out of the prognostication business.

When Neil Armstrong walked on the moon on July 21, 1969, science fiction went legitimate, at least for a moment. To my mind, however, that event spelled the beginning of the end of literary sci-fi, not the disappointed expectations that followed. Part of the genre's appeal, it seems to me, is its vaguely louche, outsider quality. Every sci-fi novel says to its reader, "You and I know things could be better, but everyone else is too stupid to realize it." Meanwhile, after 1969 the rest of us said to the sci-fi crowd, "So we walked on the moon, but nothing really changed back on earth. What else do you have for us?"

We're still waiting.

Vertiginous Heights and Flesheating Bloodthirsty Bunnies

Here's a follow up on some topics I've already considered in this space, and where I'll be looking next.

The Royal Society of British Architects reports that a fifth of all architects are unemployed, about another fifth are underemployed, but when they find work, UK architects can expect a 7% salary increase.

The Twitter Revolution may be here after all: Yesterday's protests were organized almost entirely online and succeeded in rattling the authorities, despite government attempts to restrict Internet access--and a sandstorm. 

Colm Tóibín hates writing. You know what? It shows.

I don't think this is a comprehensive list--there are no East Asian cities--but here are the ten oldest continually-inhabited cities in the world. Oldest city? Damascus.

The presentations from last month's 17th annual Congress for the New Urbanism aren't online yet, but there's a feature on an urban infill project in Denver's old Stapleton airport.

Tonight's viewing in Chicago: "flesheating bloodthirsty bunnies" in Andrea Eve and Mark Gavin's Vamphoppers, which will make its world premiere tonight at the Portage Theater as part of the Bang-a-Thon festival. Stick around for the Q&A session with the film's directors and a Britney Spears Toxic Karaoke competition. 

On Monday I will be downtown to take a look at Ben van Berkel's pavilion for the Burnham Plan centennial. Alas, Zaha Hadid's pavilion, also located in Millennium Park, won't be completed until August 1. And, if I have enough time, I'll stand on the Sears Tower ledge and look 1,353 feet straight down.

Little Dorrit on a Little Screen

Ann Kirschner conducts an interesting experiment that I would be interested in conducting myself. She compared the experience of reading Little Dorrit on four platforms: paperback, audiobook, Kindle, and the iPhone. At stake is more than a consumer choice. She asks herself, "Do I love books or do I love reading" In other words, how important are books as culturally significant objects. Are they simply the only possible medium for a rich narrative form, or a symbol in a cultural system that distinguishes between low (TV, movies, rock music) and high (books, films)?

Kirschner's trial has a surprising conclusion: the iPod is hands down the best reading experience--better than her grad school Penguin edition, and better than the Kindle, which "does almost nothing that an iPhone can't do better — and most important, the iPhone is always with me." Besides, Kindles are for oldsters. She says most Kindle readers she knows are above 50 years old, suggesting that the Kindle won't have a long product life. 

From what I've seen--mostly on the CTA--Kindle readers are usually twentysomethings, and E Ink technologies are still relatively new, but Kirschner has a point: it's all about device convergence, and all about the story.