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.

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."

The Folk Festivals of Capitalism

After the department stores, the most immediate successor to the Paris arcades were the world exhibitions. The first world exhibition took place in London in 1851. The centerpiece of the fair was the Crystal Palace, designed by the Duke of Devonshire's gardener, Joseph Paxton. The Crystal Palace was basically a giant greenhouse constructed in the same manner as the Paris arcades.  When the public learned that the massive scale of the structure would require the destruction of a row of ancient elm trees in Hyde Park, Paxton simply threw the iron and glass structure over the elm trees. Horace Walpole described the Hyde Park elms in the Crystal Palace as "looking almost like the lions of the forest caught in a net of glass." Others described the Crystal Palace as "incomparably fairylike."

Skeptics charged that such a huge edifice couldn't be constructed out of iron and glass, so the Crystal Palace represented a triumph over the engineering limits of the time. The Crystal Palace also proved that metal and glass were proper building materials for public buildings. Like the Paris arcades before it, the Crystal Palace was a world in miniature, encompassing both nature and culture, the finest in manufactured goods and their raw materials, all under the same roof. On a much larger scale than the intimate arcades, the London world exhibition was a plausible vision of a world remade by humans and their industrial might.  On a concrete, massive scale, the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition represented the forthcoming universe of plenty.

The 1851 exhibition was so successful that the French had to stage one as soon as they could gather enough iron and glass.  "Europe is off to view the merchandise," the French philosopher Ernest Renan sighed at the opening of the Exposition Universelle des produits de l'Agriculture, de l'Industrie et des Beaux-Arts de Paris 1855. Paris also hosted world exhibitions in 1867, 1889, and 1990. Most of the structures were temporary, including a massive exhibition hall for the 1867 that one witness described as looking “as if there were before you a monument built on another planet, Jupiter or Saturn.” A few structures are still standing, including, most famously, the Eiffel Tower, built for the 1889 world exhibition. The architectural historian Sigfried Giedion described the world expositions as Gesamtkunstwerke, or total works of art, because of their phantasmagoric blends of technology and art, military displays and fashion shows, business and pleasure.

Walter Benjamin described the world exhibitions as the “folk festivals” of capitalism. They were the origins of the entertainment industry in that, for the first time, mass spectacles became big business. Each exhibition was grander and more spectacular than the previous one. While the original 1851 exhibition was a purely commercial affair, subsequent exhibitions were more explicitly about national progress. By the 1900 Paris exposition the line between commercial success and national glory was completely blurred. National pavilions became commonplace, a tradition carried on to this day with the “International Participants' Pavilions" for the 2010 Shanghai Expo. Once again, displays of national progress are mixed with industrial might in China’s most affluent city.

Contemporary world exhibitions, like their nineteenth-century precursors, are nationalist displays that don't really address individual fantasies. They parade goods before mass audiences with a passive, look-but-don't-touch ethos. The exhibitions were designed to overwhelm the individual, to place him or her in a new world space in which a single city (London, Paris, Shanghai) absorbs all other nations, including its own. The exhibitions are the height of nationalism even as they drain all essences from culturally-specific lived experiences.

The Eternal Return of the Arcades

As I mentioned yesterday, the Paris arcades had a relatively brief heyday, perhaps thirty or forty years. As shopping venues, they were replaced by the large department stores. The arcades' architectural forms were expanded by the world's fairs and the great urban railroad stations. Their visual experiences replaced by the cinema. Their means of engagement with the urban crowds taken up by literature.

Ordinarily we would consider these developments to be consistent with normal history. Progress means that inventions are improved upon. Structures get bigger, more comfortable, more convenient. Consumer goods continually improve over time. Stories get more realistic. Spectacles become more immersive.

But what if we looked at progress in these realms in a different way--not as progress, as moving forward, but as repetition. What if each new iteration of something--the arcades to the department stores to the shopping malls, for instance--represented not an improvement, but another attempt to address the same needs, the same social demands. Each new development, from this perspective, would look like a return to the past. There would be an implicit sense of failure accompanying every new development.

To get a better sense of what I'm getting at here, consider the way we think about fashion. We're often deeply ambivalent about it. Fashion is new and exciting, a chance to shed old styles and old identities. It's also hemlines up, hemlines down, then back up again. Padded shoulders are here one year, gone the next, then back again ten years later.

As Roland Barthes pointed out in The Fashion System, fashion doesn’t just dictate a given set of details as fashionable; it also consigns other qualities as unfashionable, as banished (temporarily) or forbidden (more or less permanently, like the slit sleeves of medieval France). Yet when unfashionable details return to fashion, become visible again, we experience their return as novelty rather than recurrence. As Walter Benjamin remarked, “Fashions are the medicament that is to compensate for the fateful effects of forgetting on a collective scale.” The pattern of continual forgetting and constant novelty provide the illusion that the world is changing. In fact, fashion the human capacity for change is deflected into the object world. Meanwhile, fashionable people dress for eternal youth. Fashion arrests biological and social change, while introducing constant change in consumer choices. Nature is dead; only the thing world lives.

According to Benjamin, this is how we experience progress: repetition and forgetting on the subjective side, constant novelty and increased monumentality on the objective side. Progress, Benjamin declared, was an ideology, “the chief narcotic of the nineteenth century.” His own aim in researching the Paris arcades was to “drive out any trace of ‘development’ from the image of history.” Thus, the dwelling places of the masses—from the great department stores to the world exhibitions to railway stations to airports and sports stadiums—are really just the eternal return of the Paris arcades.

The Primordial Landscape of Consumption

The Paris arcades were the first international style of modern architecture, hence part of the lived experience of a worldly, metropolitan generation. By the end of the nineteenth century, arcades had become the hallmark of a modern metropolis. Glass-enclosed, sunlit bazaars appeared in Moscow, Cleveland, Istanbul, Glasgow, Berlin, Johannesburg, Naples. Buenos Aires and Melbourne.

But the heyday of the Paris arcades was brief. They peaked during the 1830s and 40s, and by 1900 the original arcades appeared to be dead malls. Their small specialty shops couldn’t complete with huge new department stores—another Parisian invention—that sold mass-produced goods at a pace rapid enough to compensate for their falling profit margins.

By the time Walter Benjamin wandered into them in 1924, the dilapidated arcades were like an archeological site. To him the small shops were a "primordial landscape of consumption," their nineteenth-century customers “the last dinosaurs of Europe,” rendered extinct by the same historical forces the middle classes had themselves set into motion. Benjamin

would later track the rise and fall of the mode of consumption initiated by the arcades, a mode formerly reserved for the aristocracy. The “dreaming collective,” Benjamin discovered, confused the decline of a certain mode of shopping for the decline of the world itself.

The Paris arcades are still open for business. In recent decades Paris has made an effort to commemorate their cultural importance (most have historical markers at their entrances) and to restore them as chic shopping destinations. There’s even one shop--Stern, a stationery store—left over from the original arcades, operating in the same location since 1834.

If the Paris arcades are now museums rather than archeological sites, quaint reminders of old Paris, their forms live on in every suburban galleria where you amble among a warren of upscale stores protected from the elements. The arcades’ iron and glass construction and window-shopping experience also appear in the world expositions and railway stations of the nineteenth century. Iron construction was never used for private homes, only for the homes of the restless urban masses.

In a way, then, the arcades weren’t superseded by larger and more efficient means of selling merchandise. They have reappeared in slightly altered form throughout Western consumer culture. In other words, the arcades are like fashion: recycled forms appearing as the new.

Stay tuned for more posts on fashion, the world expositions, and railway stations.

The Dreaming Collective

“Fashion, like architecture,” Walter Benjamin once wrote, “stands in the darkness of the lived moment.” Fashion and architecture express the unconscious of the present, offering a glimpse into a better time in the future. According to Benjamin, the utopia to come is expressed not in the new but rather in the archaic. During the 2009 London Fashion Week, which one observer described as having “the sexual charge and fashion energy that has characterized the city since the days of ‘Swinging London’ in the 1960s,” young British fashion designer Graeme Black presented “an Indian fantasy collection” (at left), complete with models in jodhpurs against a backdrop of Indian temples and jungle sounds. At a moment when unemployment in Britain is at a 14-year high, and likely to remain high for the foreseeable future, Black’s post-colonial imagery recalls a time when economic opportunity came with a sense of adventurousness, when individual and national purpose coincided.

Black’s jodhpurs shouldn’t, and didn’t, raise any eyebrows in London or in the US. After all, nearly every American shopping mall includes a store called the Banana Republic. That colonial imagery still circulates in Anglo-American culture suggests there’s a kind of collective desire at work. Benjamin called expressions of collective desire “wish images” produced by a “dreaming collective.” Wish images appears when new buildings, fashions, and technologies retain older forms, when "the new is permeated with the old." In the wish image

the collective seeks both to overcome and to transfigure the immaturity of the social product and the inadequacies of the social organization of production.  At the same time, what emerges in these wish images is the resolute effort to distance oneself from all that is antiquated--which includes, however, the recent past.  These tendencies deflect the imagination (which is given impetus by the new) back upon the primal past.  In the dream in which each epic entertains images of its successor, the latter appears wedded to elements of primal history [Urgeschichte]--that is, to elements of the classless society.  And the experiences of such a society--as stored in the unconscious of the collective--engender, through interpenetration with what is new, the utopia that has left its traces in a thousand configurations of life, from entering edifices to passing fashions.

A prime example of a wish image is the Paris arcades. When Benjamin happened upon them in the 1920s, the arcades were derelict and neglected. Consumers had moved on, but they had left behind traces of their hopes and dreams. For Benjamin the dilapidated arcades were a material repository of the dreaming collective. I’ve already talked about how the arcades were an early image of a perfect public space in which people could feel as comfortable in the streets as they could at home. An 1852 travel guide to Paris called the arcades “a world in miniature.” The utopian philosopher Charles Fourier regarded the arcades as the physical form of the phalanstery.

During the nineteenth century the arcades “radiated through the Paris of the Empire like fairy grottoes,” Benjamin wrote. The arcades were not just simply a collection of shops; they were a landscape of dreams. Exotic goods were shipped in from around the world and displayed with the care paid to religious icons. For the first time the sheer display value of commercial goods was as important as their use. The arcades were the center of what Balzac called Paris' “great poem of display” which “chants its stanzas of color from the Church of the Madeleine to the Porte Saint-Denis.”

But by the 1920s the Paris arcades were on the verge of being dead malls. Next up: what happened to the arcades.

On Ugliness

Over at the Reading Experience Daniel Green considers Roger Scruton's recent essay, "Beauty and Desecration" in which the philosopher urges us to "rescue art from the modern intoxication with ugliness." In brief, Scruton's argument is that the fundamental role of art is to "magnify life as it is and to reveal its beauty," but modern art and popular culture have instilled the "habit of desecration," which leads to moral chaos. Once landscape painters like Poussin and Turner portrayed the "joy that lies incipient in decay and to the eternal implied in the transient." Now we have an adaptation of Mozart’s opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail set in a Berlin brothel. But as Green points out, when Scruton demands that art return to its pre-modernist role of reconciling us to the order inherent in nature, he forgets "the world at times betrays an order that isn't necessarily beneficent." Beauty may be truth, but it is a partial truth.

Green is right to charge Scruton with confusing moral and aesthetic crimes. I would add that Scruton underestimates the value of ugliness, which, like beauty itself, has a history. Very early art was full of ugly images in order to enforce taboos by scaring people. As human subjectivity became stronger and the old primitive fears subsided, the ugly became a taboo itself, in this case against crude forms and dissonance. But when the promised freedom of the subject never quite developed fully, the old taboos returned so that the subject could both submit to old fears and rebel against them.

Scruton is correct in pointing out that the ugly took a qualitatively different form in Modernism, although I disagree with the lesson he draws. For traditional aesthetics, the ugly disrupts the harmony and unity of form; consequently, the ugly may appear, but it has to be subsumed under an overall form to reaffirm the mastery of the artist over his or her material. In Modernism, by contrast, the ugly is no longer something that can be recuperated into formal unity. In the Modernism of Rimbaud, Gottfried Benn, and Beckett the ugly becomes a dynamic principle in place of beauty. The ugly incorporates beauty in the same form-giving processes.

Arguably, there's nothing that is intrinsically ugly, that something appears to be ugly only through reference, directly or indirectly, to art. Without the ugly, a couple of things happen to beauty: one, purified of the ugly, beauty becomes kitsch, and two, without the ugly beauty has nothing to counterbalance the spurious spiritualization of beauty. Beauty thus becomes little more than "a spell on a spell," as Adorno put it.

Art, as Nietzsche said, is cruel. It changes materials and imposes form on them. Telling an artist that he or she should produce art without any traces of cruelty or ugliness is really just a demand to conform to the tastes of an audience. Ugliness in modern art is an expression of the cruelty of art, of our own botched relationship to nature under globalized capitalism, and of the mythic forces still lurking beneath the surface of modern society, just as the ugly was an expression of the threat of the malevolent divine in early Greek art.

What Does It Mean to Be a Revolutionary Today?

The topic of revolution has suddenly become relevant again, primarily because of three recent developments: the worldwide economic crisis, the election of Barack Obama, and the uprising in Iran. Eric Alterman compares our current predicament to the one faced by Franklin Roosevelt and finds Obama insufficiently bold compared to FDR, perhaps, Alterman suggests, because FDR didn't have to contend with an army of lobbyists working on the inside against him and constant braying from right-wing demagogues working on the outside. Alterman says bolder action to combat the current economic crisis is hampered by "a political discourse that ranges 'from the moderate left to the far right' with no room for the kind of bold 'persistent experimentation' needed to rescue America from the catastrophes it faces after eight years of incompetence, extremism and corruption enabled by a proudly clueless but uneducable punditocracy."

Putting aside the issue of exploiting an economic crisis to push through a radical agenda, which the left has long accused the right of doing, the question is this: Is communicative rationality enough to solve our collective problems?

Arguably, communicative rationality is the source of Obama's revolutionary potential. Has Obama failed to take sufficiently bold action because he could only come up with $800 billion to rescue the economy, or because he hasn't led a purge of all conservatives from government and the public sphere?

Last Monday Slavoj Žižek gave a speech in which he dismisses liberal faith the incremental change brought about by communicative rationality. (Watch the speech on YouTube.) In "What Does It Mean to Be a Revolutionary Today?" Žižek calls for radical action against what he sees as the totality of the capitalist system. Ever the Lacanian, Žižek regards capitalism as a sort of obsessive neurotic giant desperately clinging to its problems--everything from ecological disaster to Islamic fundamentalism--just to reassure itself that nothing will change. He cites Walter Benjamin's dictum that every fascism is an index of a failed revolution to make the claim that right-wing demagoguery in the US and Islamic fundamentalism are both symptoms of a deeper problem within global capitalism. Žižek would argue, for instance, that Brad Pitt's Make It Right Foundation, which enlists starchitects to rescue the poor of New Orleans, is insufficiently bold because does nothing to address the underlying cause of substandard housing. Although Žižek doesn't explicitly make this claim, he suggests the Iranians are rebelling against their cultural and political mandarins so that we don't have to rebel against ours.

As usual, Žižek veers between the sublime and the ridiculous in his talk. After telling a vulgar joke he abruptly calls for more modernity, more rationality, not less. To take Benjamin's remark about fascism one step further, we should look for the moment of truth buried within the shouting from the "proudly clueless but uneducable punditocracy." Sure Rush Limbaugh is a blight on the republic, but in his backhanded way he recognizes there's a madness in the system that's experience at an individual level as alienation from modernity itself.

It would be gratifying if the president could smite Limbaugh and his fellow bloviators like Obama crushed that fly in the MSNBC studio, but simply dismissing them from the national dialogue would be irrational. It would be the difference between boldness for boldness's sake, and genuinely thoughtful action.

Foucault in Iran

With no abatement in the anti-government fury now gripping Iran, it’s worth recalling Michel Foucault’s remarks on the 1978-79 Iranian revolution, which toppled the Shah. In a career full of provocative statements, Foucault’s most notorious stance was his enthusiastic endorsement what he called the “rapture” (ivresse) of the rebellion that killed thousands of Iranian civilians and left the country in the grip of a repressive theocratic order.

I haven’t heard anyone describe the current uprising as rapturous, but there’s certainly been some degree of romanticization of the role of the Internet in fomenting rebellion in the IRI. It’s easy to imagine that the thunderous voice of Iranian rebellion is a Tweet, but that’s mostly because Twitter is virtually the only source of news from the streets of Tehran.  Iranians themselves are much more likely to communicate through cellphone text messages.

In his infamous Le Monde column from May of 1979, Foucault was actually discussing two Iranian revolutions, not one. "Does the horror of the second condemn the rapture of the first?" he asked. The first revolution resembled the one we’re seeing now, except much more brutal and violent. Foucault had been sent to Iran by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera shortly after the “Black Friday” massacre of 4,000 people on September 8, 1978.  Foucault functioned as a journalist interviewing representatives from the Shah’s army, important figures in the opposition, and even American government officials in Tehran. He witnessed the street demonstrations, which were rapidly growing in size and intensity at that time. He reported on the strains of anti-Semiticism and xenophobia emerging in the protests. He claimed that the street protesters were fighting not only the Shah, but also “global hegemony,” the array of external influences and strictures governing daily life for Iranians.

If the Twitter dispatches from the IRI indicate anything, it’s that the current protests aren’t xenophobic. No one seems concerned with global hegemony at the moment. Like the 1978 protesters, today’s Iranian rebels simply want their daily lives to change. So far, however, the government has not cracked down with the severity of the Shah’s forces. It was the trauma of 4,000 dead in one day that sparked the religious—and rapturous—element to the battle against the Shah. Religious fervor propelled the opposition past their fear of death.  For Foucault, the heady early days of the Iranian revolution proved that there was no limit to the desire for human freedom.

The first stage of the Iranian revolution was the political limit-experience Foucault had been searching for his entire career. Alas, it was the last one. By the time Foucault wrote his Le Monde article, the ayatollahs were firmly in charge and beginning their own violent repression. The late 1970s were a depressing time for oppositional politics. On the day Foucault’s article appeared the front page of Le Monde carried the headline, Is It Useless to Revolt? Liberal French intellectuals had gone from embracing a principled Marxist opposition to finding common cause with absurd Moaist ultra-leftists after May 1968, before finally giving tepid support to the naked stupidities of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Brigades. For a brief time during the fall of 1978 the Iranian uprising seemed like an oppositional politics one could believe in. People were risking their lives just so they could live according to their own beliefs.

Daily life was the primary political battleground for Foucault, and it was here that the 1979 Iranian revolution failed, as he recognized. In this sense the stakes are the same today. In the US we have some valid interests in seeing political change in Iran. After all, Iran is a state spinning its way to a nuclear bomb. But there’s also a sense of American triumphalism in the commentary here: Iranians chose the ayatollahs while we chose the Internet, and now we’re winning. It’s worth keeping in mind what Foucault would say is really at stake in Tehran right now: not the freedom to use Twitter, but the very possibility of risking everything to become more of what one is.

Hermiticism and Engagement in Peter Zumthor

The selection of Peter Zumthor as the winner of this year’s Pritzker Prize continues to create controversy. A number of critics have denounced the “Swiss hermit” for his isolation from the pressing political issues architects currently face. Zumthor’s monkish existence troubled me as well, but, to be fair, we probably wouldn’t be so concerned about Zumthor’s isolation if the building boom were still on.

At Archidose John Hill defends Zumthor against charges of being apolitical. Hill argues that architects are always already political in that they have to contend with government agencies, developers, and landowners in every project. “Architectural projects in democratic societies can be seen as the utmost expression of politics, in that the conflicting interrelationships are played out in space, with the help of money, power and (free) speech,” he writes. Zumthor is political because “he is closer to being an activist than an ignoramus, because he is very selective of the projects he takes, he works on projects for an amount of time much longer than most architects, and he creates buildings at odds with most developer-driven architectural production today.”

Indeed, in Zumthor’s book Thinking Architecture, the architect presents himself as a Proustian sensualist, recalling his childhood memories of opening the gate to his aunt’s garden. “That door handle still seems to me like a special sign of entry into a world of different moods and smells.” He then goes on to cite Joseph Bueys and the Arte Povera group as major influences for “the precise and sensuous way they use materials.”

This would seem to be an odd takeaway from artists known first and foremost for their political artworks. But in The Politics of Aesthetics Jacques Rancière defines the aesthetic as the political rearrangement of the possibilities of experience. The aesthetic

is a delimitation of spaces and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.

Zumthor’s artisanal approach to building re-acquaints public architecture with sensual memories, what Zumthor calls “architectural atmospheres and images.” This is, I think, a legitimate political stance, especially because it offers an alternative to the highly visual quality of most high-end architecture today. Frank Gehry is a wonderful designer, but compared to Zumthor, his buildings are remote; they’re not to be touched. The way Zumthor thinks about architecture couldn’t be more different than Gehry. The Swiss architect recalls the doors in his aunt’s house, the way that they “closed in such different ways, one replete and dignified, another with a thin, cheap clatter, others hard, implacable, and intimidating . . .” (ellipses in original). How different from the stories of Daniel Libeskind agonizing for weeks over the choice of a door handle. Zumthor wants to bring the experiences of things not designed into the most refined designs imaginable.

The only question I would have about Zumthor’s political architecture is this: By introducing the complexity of individual sensual experience into public architecture, is Zumthor opening up the possibility of a shared experience—we’re now free to invoke the feel of humble, commonplace things around the house while we’re in public space—or are his buildings mainly objects for individual contemplation cut off from any kind of present day social experience?