One-Way Street

Unforgiving Years

For a brief period in the 1920s, Soviet culture was among the most dynamic and creative in all Europe. During a visit to Moscow in 1927, Walter Benjamin remarked on the "improvisatory" nature of post-revolutionary Russia. But even during Benjamin's visit the lights were starting to dim. By the time Stalin consolidated power in the early 1930s, Soviet culture was well into its extended Socialist Realist phase, with its beaming factory workers, overflowing wheat harvests, and tractors that look like they're about to burst into song.

But what if Soviet culture had retained its creativity throughout the 1930s? Victor Serge (real name: Victor Lvovich Kibalchich) certainly would have been one of its literary stars, and he would have been much better known today.

That we have any Serge novels, let alone the seven he managed to publish, is something of a miracle. He lived a tough life. Born to penniless anti-czarists in Brussels, Belgium, Serge watched his younger brother starve to death. His first career choice was being an anarchist. That career ended with a four-year term in a French prison. His second career as a Soviet agent based in Berlin concluded with an ill-considered decision to join the Trotskyites' battle against Stalin. In 1928 he fled the USSR for Paris, where he began his third career, as a writer.

Serge's tense years in Paris dodging Stalin's murderous agents formed the bases became the basis for Unforgiving Years, his last novel, written in 1947 and first published in France in 1971. The novel, like all his novels, was written in French, and it's available for the first time in English in a translation by Richard Greeman. The action opens in the weirdly calm days before the outbreak of World War II, when Parisians were preoccupied with lurid crimes and adulterous affairs. Serge's hero is known by various names, but the narrator calls him D. We meet him immediately after he has decided to quit the Soviet secret service because he's lost faith in the communist revolution. Unfortunately for D, it was no easier to quit Soviet intelligence than it was to quit the Mafia. He knows he's doomed, but he sticks around for a few days trying to persuade two women, Nadine and Daria, to escape the French capital with him.  Nadine reluctantly agrees to leave with him, but Daria flatly refuses, partly because D is prone to anguished and confused ruminations on his own principles--not a good quality when the history's bloodiest conflict is starting to ignite. Serge depicts D's thought process with a prose style that combines the energy and conviction of agitprop with the refined inventiveness of high modernism. The default viewpoint is third person, but the point of view can switch at any time, such as when D asks himself,

What is "conscience"? A residue of beliefs inculcated in us from the time of primitive taboos until today's mass press? Psychologists have come up with an appropriate term for these imprints deep within us: the superego, they say. I have nothing left to invoke but conscience, and I don't even know what it is […] I'm behaving almost like a believer. I cannot do otherwise: Luther's words. Except that the German visionary who flung his inkwell at the devil went on to add, "God help me!" What will come to help me?

The big newspapers don't have a conscience (he had bribed them often enough, through savvy intermediaries, to know that) and the little ones don't count. The big writers wouldn't believe me.

Here both idea and self are disintegrating. The abrupt conceptual shifts (from Freud to Martin Luther to newspapers) mirror the pronoun shifts (us, I, he, me). The idea of a conscience has suddenly ceased to have any substance, and yet D clings to it like a lifeline. Years of covert identities have dissolved D's  present self, a process that mirrors his own statelessness and the coming historical catastrophe.

After the first section, the narrative itself fragments into pieces. The second section follows Daria's journey from an isolated Kazakh village to the siege of Leningrad. The third section strikes even further afield, covering the final battle for Berlin. This section is the most unexpected and perhaps explains why Serge had such trouble finding publishers and readers during his lifetime: Serge, a dedicated Bolshevik, sympathizes with ordinary Germans to a degree that can get mawkish at times. Serge rewrites the Nazi period in Germany as a class struggle: ordinary Germans suffered greatly, while wealthy Germans survived the war with their properties and their political connections intact.

The final section sorts out the final fates of the main characters, whose storylines sometimes get lost in the historical shuffle. Despite their ontologically reduced states, D, Nadine and Daria embody the idea of humanism, which endures, but just barely. Serge died in Mexico shortly after completing the novel, physically and emotionally exhausted. Yet, he seemed made for strife. He was like a raw nerve experiencing some of the darkest episodes in modern history like a raw nerve. It's as if he couldn't live in peacetime. Unforgiving Years is Serge's most personal novel in the sense that it's about a mind under the stress of war, looking for core beliefs while facing the existential void.

One Last Genius

The biographies of philosophers rarely make engrossing reading.  The life of the mind may be rich in ideas but poor in narrative action. One of the more dramatic moments of a philosopher's life tends to be   his first appointment to a university teaching appointment. Here the life of Theodor Adorno fits the mold: his Habilitationsschrift, in which he tried to make Kierkegaard sit down with Marx, was rejected by the faculty of the University of Frankfurt, now known as the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität. (Walter Benjamin's Habilitationsschrift was rejected by the same faculty a few years later. He eventually published it as The Origin of German Tragic Drama.) But Adorno's formidable networking skills served him well, and he eventually landed a job at Frankfurt. 

Although Adorno's comfortable world soon collapsed around him, he did enjoy a collegial lifestyle pretty much no matter where he lived. His friendships were the central dramas of his life. They contrasted with his writings--magisterial, uncompromising, rigorous, and lugubrious in the extreme. This is why Detlev Claussen focused more on the former than the latter in his Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius. Claussen treats biographical chronology like Adorno treated tonality: rejecting it as a false totality, a residue from an earlier, more violent time. Instead, Claussen tracks Adorno's life through his friendships. Adorno was precocious and self-confident in everything he did, including forming friendships. An early tutor was Siegfried Kracauer. Soon after reading Ernst Bloch, then one of the German-speaking world's best-known thinkers, Adorno tracked him down and introduced himself. He did the same for Alban Berg and, even more aggressively, for Arnold Schoenberg.

Adorno's most famous friendship was with Walter Benjamin; the friendship was also representative of what it was like to be Adorno's friend. Eleven years Benjamin's junior, Adorno swooned over Benjamin when they met in 1923. By the 1930s, when Benjamin was struggling to make something out of the Arcades Project under the pressure of isolation, poverty, and impending war, Adorno was safely ensconced in New York after lingering in Nazi Germany for an unseemly length of time.  Adorno arranged for what little financial support Benjamin had, but he also caustically rejected Benjamin's early drafts of his Baudelaire essays and his ruminations on the philosophy of history. Adorno had few encouraging words to say about Benjamin's most enduring work, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."  Benjamin sunk into despair with each letter from New York bearing Adorno's unforgiving and absolute judgment. Adorno's early admiration for Benjamin's paralogical thought gave way to a ruthless self-certainty.   The wife of Max Horkheimer, Adorno's most consistent friend, once declared, "Teddie is the most monstrous narcissist to be found in either the Old World or the New."

Everyone disappointed Adorno--Kafka, Proust, Schoenberg, the Western world.  His epochal gloom can reach almost comical depths, such as when he was moved to write, "even the blossoming tree lies the moment its bloom is seen without the shadow of terror." For all the scrupulous subtlety of his thought, he could be crudely fixated on an idea, such as his animus against identity. In Negative Dialectics he defined ideology as "the hunger of the lion for the antelope." Then he leaves it pretty much at that.

However, one can't read Adorno without soaking up at least some of his more powerful ideas. If you can get past the nagging feeling that he wouldn't approve of you, either, you can learn a lot. One of my guiding principals about modern art and architecture comes straight out of Adorno: one can't build a building or paint a painting as if the twentieth century never happened. One of his most potent ideas is that aesthetic form is itself political. One doesn't have to side with the workers to produce valid art. For Adorno, the freedom of the artwork mocks the unfreedom of life in a bureaucratized society. One of his ideas still has widespread currency: his concept of the culture industry. Adorno was the first to point out that leisure was really just the flip side of work, and that even the most homespun cultural objects were saturated with mass market ideas.

We now roll our eyes at Adorno's fussy absolutism. It's possible, we've learned, to watch America's Funniest Home Videos without paving the way for fascism. But when you feel a pang of conscience while watching the audience howl as some hapless performer gets booted off the stage on American Idol, Adorno says from the grave, "Now you know what I was talking about."

The Snapshot in the Age of Digital Reproduction

The Globe and Mail's Kate Taylor visits Contact, the largest photography exhibit in the world, now taking place at Toronto's Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. Taylor says that this year's show, entitled Between Memory and History: From the Epic to the Everyday raises the question, "where exactly photography is leading us, cellphones and Coolpix in hand."

First of all, digital photography is leading to the wrecking ball for old film stock factories. Prominently displayed at the exhibit is a photograph taken by Robert Burley (above) of the destruction of buildings 65 and 69 at Kodak Park in Rochester, NY. The irony is double: the photograph includes former workers in the factories recording the event using their digital cameras, and Burley is himself mourning the death of film stock technology with a digital image.

But beyond the death of amateur film photography (the Polaroid Corporation recently announced it will quit the instant-film business next year), not a whole lot seems to be happening in photography, at least as the genre is assessed in Contact. If there's a broad trend, it's that digital technologies have allowed photography to assume the monumentality of painting. For instance, the Dutch photographer Bert Teunissen has a series of portraits blown up to the scale of an Ingres or David canvas. Marx once observed that new technologies initially take the form of the technology they replaced, but in Contact digital photography seems content to re-enact analogue photography's fascination with painting.

The Contact exhibit still stages photographs as singular objects for sustained contemplation. It seems to me that if digital technology has changed photography, it has opened a whole new realm of visual experience to photography. Cheap digital images are both permanent and disposable. Whereas we once had to factor in cost before we decided to record something with a snapshot, now we'll take pictures of pretty much anything and treat it like we were documenting the Spanish Civil War. My three-year-old son has his own digital camera, and he has already formed his own distinct style and subject matter. One series he recently completed, The Kitchen Floor, had a sequel, The Kitchen Wall. Another series, Little Sister Making a Mess of Her Lunch, was shot in one January afternoon. The Kitchen Floor sessions produced a single shot--his masterpiece, I think--of his foot. All these photos (well, most of them) are on currently exhibit on our iMac.

I'm not quite as prolific as my son, but digital photography has also changed the way I view the documentary qualities of photography, if not its expressive properties. A few weekends ago I was replacing our bathroom vanity when I ran into a particularly knotty plumbing problem. Instead of describing the problem to the hardware store salesman, I simply took a photograph of it on my BlackBerry and showed it to him. He understood right away and suggested a solution, which worked. Globally there must be several terabytes of storage devoted to shots just like this one, which I call IMG00038--quotidian photographs that either have one meaning, or none at all.

Taylor considers three photographs by the German artist Thomas Ruff as an exploration of "the false relationship that the ubiquitous image can create between the viewer and actual experience." This is hardly new ground, even for old film-based photography. It's based on a relationship of photographer to viewer that digital photography has broken down. Photography is now much more embedded in our own experience and the ways we record it and make sense of it. Photos of kids' parties and weekends in Telluride are now routinely circulated via email and photo sharing sites, a kind of exchangeable experience that Walter Benjamin never could have imagined, nor, evidently, any art photographs working today.

Talking about the Disasters to Come

This has been a strange week in my small world. It started with a cougar roaming around near my CTA stop and ended with an earthquake. In between was a series of computer code crashes and server failures and all-night conference calls and impatient managers to placate the next day. This week hasn't been anomalous. Since last August my family and I have experienced the worst thunderstorm in at least half a century, the worst winter in 20 years, the worst real estate market collapse in living memory, the highest gas prices in history, and potentially the worst recession in 15 years--or worse, an actual depression. Lakes big (Michigan) and small (our own Birch Lake in Wisconsin) are at historically low levels. Twenty-four Chicago schoolchildren have been killed so far this year.  Throw in the collapse of the Cubs, the White Sox the Bears, the Bulls and, quite possibly, Barack Obama's chances at the presidency (thanks a lot, Hillary! May you get 3 AM calls every night for the rest of your life) and one starts to think that we're in the midst of some slow-motion, multi-faceted disaster. As a friend said to me last night, "This whole area is on suicide watch."

If it's hard to find solutions to many of these problems (one problem has already been solved: the cougar was shot later that day by Chicago police), it helps to make grim remarks about them. In The Writing of the Disaster Maurice Blanchot points out that the French word for disaster, désastre, literally means "from the stars." Because disaster is something that is thrown down, like dice, from indifferent gods, it's neither a catastrophe nor a tragedy. Blanchot says disaster "dismisses all ideas of failure and success." It "impoverishes all experience, withdraws from experience all authenticity." If Walter Benjamin is right, impoverished experience (Erlebnis) can't be effectively narrated and made meaningful in a larger sense. Impoverished experience is one damn thing after another. Confronted with startlingly high prices at the gas pumps or a cougar stalking the streets, people complain or trade fact and speculation, but no coherent narratives emerge, at least none that can be told by ordinary people have to live through these experiences. Disasters big and small don't conform to our normal means of constructing cause and effect. They're outrages, pure and simple; they're monstrous provocations.

"This whole area is on suicide watch"--what a telling remark. It's a point at the beginning, or the end, or a story. It's also a bit of black humor, an ironic twist on a cliché doubly ironic in the context of a notorious suicide of a local resident. In its multiple meanings, the remark is a literary meme. Blanchot would call the remark "skeptical gaiety." He cites Levanas's assertion "Language is itself already skepticism" to make the claim that to write about a disaster is to practice a happy skepticism, to set in play the As If in the face of the menace of disaster. If we can't tell stories to console ourselves, we can play with language, spinning out pregnant metaphors, implying stories that won't ever be told. This play is a way to avoid just throwing up our hands and accepting fate, for there is no refuge in fatality. That would assume we're the intended victims of disaster. "The disaster is not our affair and has no regard for us; it is heedlessness unlimited," Blanchot writes.

Indulging in black humor may seem like a futile or inappropriate gesture, but Blanchot would see it as countering dreadful ambiguity with a playful, even hopeful ambiguity. Read enough news stories on the web and in print about a failing economy and a deteriorating environment and after a while you don't know what to think or how to feel. Figurative language, the kind largely banished from journalistic writing, interjects the possibility of feeling differently about how badly things are going. It opens up the possibility that no matter what happens, we will learn from the experience.

Archive Fever

Every year brings another pile of books on Walter Benjamin. As one might imagine, these volumes are of uneven quality and usefulness, but one new book stands out from the crowd. Walter Benjamin's Archive, a companion book to a 2006 exhibit in Berlin, presents samples from the vast number of notebooks, photographs, collectables, postcards, and manuscripts Benjamin left behind when he died in 1940.

Each chapter of Archive focuses on a different aspect of the archive. The most interesting chapter examines his notebooks, including his date book pictured above. Notebooks are now more of a metaphor than an everyday working tool--the MacBook Air is essentially a $3,000 Moleskine--and cheap digital storage allows us to see writing as almost infinitely extensible. It's surprising, and a little touching, to see Benjamin writing in his tiny, precise script over every square centimeter on every scrap of paper he could lay his hands on. He owned some Moleskine-like leather-bound notebooks, but sometimes he resorted to writing on both sides of a doctor's prescription pad.

The longest chapter in the book focuses on Benjamin's notes on his son's language acquisition. Benjamin's interest in children (another chapter is devoted to his collection of Russian toys) is one of the most incongruous aspects of his character. It's hard to imagine Hegel following his children around, recording their every utterance, as Benjamin did with his son. This section isn't especially interesting, except for the glimpses it offers into Benjamin's chaotic and troubled home life. Benjamin records, without a hint of self-consciousness, his son Stefan imitating his father by stomping around their Berlin apartment, yelling at everyone to be quiet because Daddy is trying to work.

The children's language chapter, as well as some of the brief and somewhat haphazardly assembled last chapters, expose the limits of the book's origins as an accompaniment to a museum exhibit. The edition's four editors were clearly primarily interested in rummaging through Benjamin's published work to find rubrics through which they could display the material in the archive. The book doesn't follow the familiar outlines of Benjamin's themes. The Trauerspiel book, for instance, is barely mentioned, and neglected altogether is Benjamin's early involvement with youth movements, which may explain his later interest in children. Still, Benjamin himself would have appreciated a representation of his career as a collection of things.

There's at least one unexpected gem in the book: a page from Benjamin's notes for the original essay on the Paris Arcades. (Disclosure: I did my dissertation on the Arcades Project, so I'm interested in everything to do with it.) Michael Schwarz explains Benjamin's working methods for the Arcades Project, which eventually grew to include 10,000 notes, most of them quotations from obscure nineteenth-century sources. A few pages of notes are reproduced, and another chapter contains Germaine Krull's evocative photographs of the Arcades, but otherwise the sampling from Benjamin's largest project--and his most intense exploration of the idea of the archive--is disappointingly slim.

But Walter Benjamin's Archive succeeds in conveying Benjamin's life-long interest in allowing things to speak for themselves. The Surrealists and the Baroque allegorists taught Benjamin to search for the buried life of culture, to pay attention to all those things we once thought were essential but later forgot about. By showing us two poles of Benjamin's life--the stable organization of the collection on the one hand, and the spontaneous, constantly evolving text of the notebook on the other--the book illustrates the drama of the life of the mind lived during a time of madness.   

The Task of the Storyteller

Last Friday I was rereading Walter Benjamin's essay "The Task of the Storyteller" when a  highly successful advertising executive from my home town threw himself from a hotel window and plunged to his death. In the week that followed I heard or read several stories surrounding this unfortunate man's death, but no coherent picture of the man emerged. He was a beloved family man, a widely-admired executive with several high-profile advertising campaigns to his credit. He was an alcoholic bully despised by his underlings for his abusive management style.  He left behind a wife and two young daughters. He left behind a mistress. The stress of heading up the creative department of a major advertising agency killed him. Getting thrown out of his house killed him. Bloggers killed him.

One version of the story can be found here. Note the widow's terse and enigmatic comment.

A couple of nights ago my wife received a call from a friend of hers whose husband is also the head of the creative department of a major advertising agency and lives in a North Shore suburb very near where the dead man lived. The woman's husband was shaken up, as were a lot of people in the Chicago advertising community.  It was from this woman that I heard the first confirmation that all was not well with the suicide victim's life. Listening to her, I thought, any number of people had motive to kill him. From her we learned, for instance, that he threw himself from the Fairmont Hotel because he was living there after being thrown out by his wife when she discovered his affair with another advertising executive. In this version, his death was a kind of retribution for being a thoughtless, arrogant jerk. Advertising didn't kill him. Living amongst high-strung, fiercely competitive haute bourgeoisie didn't kill him. He lived recklessly. He was a drunk. In this version of the story his case was isolated--nothing to do with anyone else or the industry in which he worked.

Immediately after she hung up my wife and I Googled the man and found a maelstrom of recriminations and expressions of grief. An uncle of the dead man claimed attacks from bloggers drove his nephew to kill himself. In this version, the advertising executive was a blameless victim of a pack of hyenas bent on his destruction. The uncle made this claim in a blog.

In "Task of the Storyteller" Benjamin considers the state of storytelling in his time, a condition he links to the state of experience. Before the advent of the novel and the mass media, when stories were primarily passed on by word of mouth, the storyteller related "experience from afar" that nevertheless was instantly comprehensible to his or her audience because they had a common base of experience. The novel, according to Benjamin, doesn't have this shared sense of experience; a novel is a wholly self-contained world the reader must enter as an outside observer. The ability to exchange experiences is further degraded in newspapers, which convey information without wisdom, "the epic side of truth." We get news from all over the world as it happens, but our historical knowledge is paltry because none of this news is memorable. It's too far outside our experience, which has become so routinized that we'd rather forget what happens to us than explore it in depth.

What's interesting about the stories I heard about the advertising executive's suicide was that instead of trying to enter it, to appeal to a shared experience, people were trying to extricate themselves from it. The man's death was a chockerlebnis, a shock experience, for many people. In his later writings Benjamin placed shock experience at the center of Baudelaire's poetic practice and, by extension, at the center of modern literature and modern life. Every person effected by the suicide last Friday is busy trying to construct a narrative that places someone else besides themselves in that hotel room. As a shock experience, however, the narrative processing will never end because the experience itself is traumatic. Therefore, it can never enter language directly. It can only be approached again and again from different directions, but never cracked open. Each person tells their own story, but they can't get anyone else to believe it because we've lost our ability to share experiences and incorporate them into our memories.  "Only by virtue of a comprehensive memory," Benjamin writes, "can epic writing absorb the course of events on the one hand and, with the passing of these, make its peace with the power of death on the other."

Oligarchitecture

As a follow-up to my earlier post on socially-conscious architectural practices, here's a look at what's happening on the upper end of the architectural stratum. Last week in Dublin Daniel Libeskind went all "Spielberg," as Times' Tom Dyckhoff puts it, and declared "I won't work for totalitarian regimes. Architects should take a more ethical stance."

"That would be a first," Dyckhoff acidly comments. "Before Libeskind came along with his pinko views, Western architects had been making a perfectly decent killing building monuments for regimes that you definitely wouldn't want to bring home to meet the folks." Dyckhoff goes on to list some projects in which high-profile architects are working with some shady characters. Dyckhoff picks on Norman Foster in particular for his affinity with Russian oligarchs. He mentions Foster's Crystal Island project in Moscow, pictured above. Foster is also working on another project in Moscow. It's more modest than Crystal Island--merely redecorating Red Square--but it also evinces a totalitarian flair with its Haussmannization of the historic center of the Russian capital.

Dyckhoff goes on to skewer Rem Koolhaas's CCTV Headquarters in Beijing, ("just how many other one-party command economies have been magicked into multi-party democracies by one building?") and Zaha Hadid, the darling of London, for designing a monument to Heydar Aliyev, the brutal former strongman of Azerbaijan who learned his trade from the Soviets ("Maybe she misheard. It was KGB, Zaha, not D&G."). Dyckhoff doesn't mention Dubai, but one could shake one's head at the sight of A-list architects like Hadid, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel and Tadao Ando lining up to work for petrodollars.

Architects are generally on the side of power. But aren't we all?  My paycheck has some petrodollars in it somewhere. Most of us make comfortable livings for undemocratic, profit-driven enterprises. Furthermore, the entire tourist trade in Europe would dwindle to nothing without the continent's monuments to naked power. Walk through the Piazza Venezia in Rome and you'll see the balcony from which Mussolini did his chest thumping. Turn around and you'll see the huge and vulgar monument to Vittorio Emanuele II, built by Il Duce himself.

Or take a stroll down the elegant boulevards of Paris, built by Baron Haussmann in the 1850s and 1860s. To construct the boulevards Haussmann tore up the old medieval heart of Paris, tossed the working classes to the city's fringes, and installed the bourgeoisie in its place--all at a handsome profit to himself and his cronies. As Walter Benjamin noted, the Parisian boulevards extended the phantasmagoric effect of commodities on display from the Paris Arcades and the world exhibitions to the streets of the city as a whole, further mystifying class relations in the city. The boulevards opened up the city to monumental vistas and facilitated the movement of security forces throughout the city. The boulevards were also designed to ensure the unruly masses couldn't throw up barricades during their periodic uprisings.

Castles? Monuments to feudal repression. Skyscrapers? Phallic assertions of trans-national corporate power. I could go on and on. Yes, it would be nice if architects would listen to their consciences more often, but I don't know who has the energy to clear every business transaction with Amnesty International. Is designing a media headquarters for the Chinese morally better or worse than buying a Thomas the Tank engine toy from the Chinese?  Who decides these types of questions? Until those questions are sorted out, rest easy: the starchitect-designed authoritarian monuments will some day make excellent Flickr slideshows.

You Look Fabulous

The Getty Museum has acquired 252 photographs by Irving Penn. The photographs, condescendingly called "The Small Trades," represent a departure in content, if not form, for the fashion photographer. The photographs feature workers posed in Penn's trademark blank stage, in full body length, with the subject gazing serenely back at the camera. The Getty acquired the "Small Trade" photographs because they round out the career of an important American photographer. Virginia Heckert, an associate photography curator at the Getty, is "very excited" about the acquisition, which doesn't mean anyone else has to be.

The problem isn't fashion photography, per se. Fashion photography is unique because it finds an eternal value, beauty, in the transitory, fashion. The glimpse of something enduring within the fleeting formed the basis of Baudelaire's definition of modernism. Later, Walter Benjamin picked up this view for his own understanding of modernism and its relation to the culture at large.

But "The Small Trades" are not fashion photographs. They are portraiture of an elaborately staged, and class-conscious, kind. Why Penn should turn his attention to the lumpenproletariat isn't clear, but, now that they're in the Getty Museum, for us the question is, what do Penn's photographs tell us about the history of photography?

One explanation is offered by Heckert, who says Penn's photographs are "really about the subject presenting himself in a more intimate setting to his photographer. It's a more psychological relationship between the artist and the subject." Maybe Penn got tired of looking at vacuous models and wanted someone more interesting looking back at him. What's clear is that Penn wasn't interested in changing the nature of his medium's relation to its audience. These are photographs for the same cultivated middle classes that were consumers of his fashion photography.

In his writings on the history of photography, Walter Benjamin distinguished between those photographers who mystified the process of creativity, and those who opened up it. (He made the same distinction, by the way, amongst architects and filmmakers.) Penn may have placed the working classes at the center of his photography, but he doesn't allow his subjects to appropriate (Benjamin used the word "absorb") his mode of seeing.

Take a look at Penn's photograph of a waiter, "Garcon de Cafe -- Raoul," shot in Paris in 1950. Raoul is a vivid individual--no anonymous, plasticized model here. But there's nothing particularly illuminating here for another waiter. The subject has been completely decontextualized, utterly shut off from lived experience. Furthermore, you can practically see the process of commodification gathering around him. He is the model of the "Parisian waiter" at the exact time when the French tourism and leisure industries were assuming their present form to accommodate the masses of American tourists flocking to Europe after World War II.

Whether he's photographing a fashion model or a charwoman, Penn reduces his subject to a drama staged for the benefit of a controlling male gaze. It elicits the clichéd response, "You look fabulous," which is at once complementary and dismissive. Of course, one could argue that that's pretty much the essence of fashion, but at the same time, fashion is supposed to be something one inhabits. It allows one to control, to a certain extent, what semiotic messages one wants to send. Penn's crucial innovation, arguably, isn't the famous gray background, but the full body shot. The subject of the photograph is a whole thing with no outside--no inside, either. Nothing individual sticks out. Even Raoul's jaunty tray is off balance, a mere prop that doesn't express anything individual. In Penn's photographs, there is no place to hide, and no place to inhabit, either.

Air Guitar

On Christmas Day I had the chance to play Guitar Hero on a Wii system. It was a Christmas gift to my nephew or my brother-in-law, it's not really clear which.  On one level, the game makes perfect sense. But on another, there's something unsettling about it as well. Interpreting the experience of performing in a rock band for a video game seems completely natural. The audience demographic for video games and guitarist music is pretty much the same, and sooner or later someone was going to fuse the narcissistic fantasies of rock stardom and video games.

And yet Guitar Hero is yet another example of a collective experience rendered virtual. To put it in Benjaminian terms, the game turns erfahrung into erlebnis; it turns a contingent and transmissible experience into a repetitive and closed-ended one. A crucial part of being a guitar hero is creating music, not just aping other musicians, and the experience of being a rock star is exactly what's being conveyed in a rock song. In other words, the subtext of every rock song is rock stardom itself. Even the game's performance scenario isn't all it appears to be. You must satisfy the demands of an inscrutable other--a crowd of dancing zombies--and play a repertoire that has more to do with corporate license agreements than drugs, sex and rock and roll. On stage with your anonymous band mates, you are alone within a group. In this sense Guitar Hero is a lot like work.

Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot, the hosts of Sound Opinions, recently denounced the game, asserting that parents would be better off giving their children real guitars. Kot and De DeRogatis have a point: by the time one masters all levels of the game one could be a serviceable rhythm guitarist in a respectable garage band. In fact, I've avoided game counsels partly because the skills they cultivate seem like a developmental dead end. It's possible, though, that Guitar Hero may be an exception. Others, like Slate contributor Joel Johnson,  have countered that Guitar Hero opens the door for a revival of amateur musicianship, which, in turn, will make better music fans and, eventually, higher quality music for all. This claim isn't as absurd or exaggerated as it may first appear. Guitar Hero doesn't teach notation or time schemes, but the basic concepts are present.

Playing Guitar Hero isn't without its frustrations, but it does force one to listen to music like a musician. The level one songs--the only ones the game let us play--are guitarist anthems of surprising complexity. Even a primitive thumper like Fog Hat's "Slow Ride" has tricky passages. Heart's gimmicky "Barracuda" has those churning power cords, of course, but also some off-tempo runs in the bridges. Most intriguing are the practice screens in which each song is broken down into its component parts, revealing much more intricate structures than the verse/chorus alternation that's usually sufficient to guide a listening experience of a rock song. If the mysteries of "Slow Ride" can be uncovered by a video game, then maybe there's hope for guitarist music after all.

The Classicists Strike Back

The Chicago Tribune's Blair Kamin reports on an obscure battle in the endless war between the traditionalists and the modernists. Last year the U.S. General Services  Administration chose Thomas Gordon Smith, once the dean of the Notre Dame  School of Architecture, as its chief architect. Smith was a neo-classicist determined to put a stop to the rampant modernism infecting public buildings--the Thom Mayne Syndrome, if you will. Smith wanted government buildings to return to the classical style of the early Republic--forgetting not only twentieth-century modernism, but also nineteenth-century Beaux Arts style. However, the modernists won this particular skirmish, forcing the GSA to relegate Smith to an advisory role.

Then Carol Ross Barney (I seem to recall that she was the first woman to head up an architecture firm in Chicago, but I could be wrong about that) was chosen to design a federal building and courthouse in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Republican Senator Richard Shelby objected to Barney's abstract take on classicism. Perhaps he found it too feminine. The job went to another Chicago architect, Thomas Beeby, whose Harold Washington Library Center is so aggressively classicist it's actually kind of lurid.

I don't know what Senator Shelby and the GSA had in mind for Tuscaloosa, but I would imagine they would be happy with an architectural version of the Roman legion classicism of Jean-Jacques David's Oath of the Horatii. There's nothing inherently wrong with classicism. As Richard Meier and Mies van der Rohe have both demonstrated, classicism and modernism aren't irreconcilable. But in the current context of our now tattered imperial ambitions and widespread cultural reaction, the GSA's turn toward the classical recalls an early flash point in the battle against the modern, Weimar Germany. Walter Benjamin dismissed Weimar neo-classicism as a "symptom of reaction," a revolt against modernity led by conservative elites. Benjamin regarded post-Renaissance classicism as inherently deceptive, flattering power with false totalities. Baroque allegory was one of several movements that tried to cut through its specious harmonies. Baudelairan proto-modernism was another.  Benjamin was heavily influenced by early modernism and the baroque as he refined his critical practice in the 1920's. Benjamin used a baroque eye to recognize how conservatives were using classicism to show "the compatibility of Weimar and Sedan," of  traditional German culture and militarism--years before Hitler made the combination the house style of the Reich.

The Weimar Republic existed in times even more politically charged than our own, and most likely the GSA classicists simply want people to trudge up marble steps before they do government business. But it's important to note that for all the objections voiced against modernism (ugliness, obscurity, reckless indifference to popular tastes and the messiness of history), classicism has its own baggage. It's not just a bunch of stately columns.

Delirious Chicago

Rem Koolhaas's Delirious New York is a book specifically about New York City, but I think it goes a long way in explaining the architecture of irrational exuberance now infecting Chicago.  A depressed real estate market and an overburdened infrastructure haven't put a damper on some of the more delirious projects either active or proposed in the city, including the new Trump Tower, the Waterview Tower, the whirligig building, and most remarkably, the Chicago Spire.

Contrary to the popular belief that it takes a giant ego to build a skyscraper in New York, Koolhaas suggests it takes a bit of craziness. Koolhaas traces the origins of modern Manhattan to early twentieth-century Coney Island, which was inspired by "hopelessly obstinate desire to record and preserve a mirage." Luna Park, for instance, is the first city of towers.  The amusement park's towers, built in 1903, are pure illusion with no function other than to "overstimulate the imagination and keep any recognizable earthly realities at a distance." 

When towers finally migrate to Manhattan, they are, in a sense, functional illusions.  Their developers justify the giant buildings by claiming that businesses need them.  In this view tall buildings are inevitable, as if they were a plant native to Manhattan Island.  However, these giant climate-controlled machines for producing paperwork only appear to be rational.  Not only do skyscrapers exceed the human proportions of the Renaissance city, they also exceed the control of architects, who can no longer impose their individual wills on them.   Koolhaas sees the skyscraper as "the instrument of a new form of unknowable urbanism.  In spite of its physical solidity, the Skyscraper is the great metropolitan destabilizer: it promises perpetual programmatic instability."  The Empire State Building, for instance, has no real reason for being, and its hyper-efficient construction processes assumed a life of their own. The building is thoughtless.  "Pure product of process," Koolhaas writes, "Empire State can have no content.  The building is sheer envelope."

If the Empire State building is a kind of empty rationalism, an ego with neither an unconsciousness nor a  superego, the Rockefeller Center is an irrational fantasy realized in small, rational steps. Combining a concentrated urbanism and an artificial nature, Rockefeller Center is a collection of towers incorporating pre-modernist layers.  The towers rise from "the fabricated meadows of the new Babylon, the pink flamingos of the Japanese Garden and imported ruins donated by Mussolini." They are perfect Benjaminian objects--the sedimented, mythic past at the core of the modern.

Rockefeller Center, the "Garden City aloft," is the epitome of what Koolhaas regards as the fundamental principle of New York City: Manhattanism.  Koolhaas points out that New York architects and city planners have never really been serious about reducing congestion.  In fact, "the real enterprise of Manhattan's architects" is a "culture of congestion," which is the final expression of the inner logic of Manhattan's grid, laid out in 1807.  The traffic-clogged streets become Venetian canals, while buildings are cities within cities, islands in a modernized Venice.  New York City, like Nietzsche's Venice, is a collection of solitudes.

Manhattanism is congestion for congestion's sake, along with a pragmatism so obsessive that it becomes a kind of poetry. Manhattanism explains why Le Corbusier, the great rationalist architect of modernism, failed to realize if any of his grand schemes in New York.  Corbusier's Radiant City, which Koolhaas describes as "a majestic flow of humanist non sequiturs," is a proposal to erase all the great, crazy ideas upon which Manhattan was built and replace them with a uniform set of towers evenly planted in green spaces. He wanted to purify the city, and give its residents light and air. But he failed to comprehend New Yorkers' neurotic attraction to traffic and pollution, offering only the efficiency of banality in exchange.

Koolhaas sees architecture as an essentially otherworldly profession.  Architects are always designing for the great flood that will sweep away all of the historical clutter of cities. This may explain why Santiago Calatrava was inspired to design a 2,000-foot-tall sliver of ice in Chicago just as the Great Lakes are receding because of global warming. His invocation of snail shells in the building's design resembles the petrified remains of prehistorical global disasters.  Possibly the building's tepid and incredulous reception so far is because there's something apocalyptic about it.  Furthermore, I'm not sure that Chicagoans are ready to admit that the pragmatism of "the city that works" has reached the excessive, crazy, and poetic dimensions of Manhattan.

The Googlization of Public Space

Today Google Maps adds Chicago to its "Street View" function, so that urbanites' activities in all their banality are memorialized until the next image refresh. No one cares that their phone may be tapped, but they get incensed if someone tries to photograph them unloading groceries.

The Street View is neither a panoptic intrusion into our private lives nor Walter Benjamin's utopian concept of a public space in which people feel as comfortable and as empowered as they do in private space. Rather, the Street View is a symptom of a reality deficit, in which everything is so indexed and classified that there's nothing left to discover. It's an anti-dérive.

The 3 Penny, Plus Shipping and Handling, Opera

Dave Kehr takes a look at the Criterion Collection's re-release of G. W. Pabst's 1931 film adaptation of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's The 3 Penny Opera. As Kehr notes, Pabst was a logical choice for the adaptation--he was trained in the theater--but Brechtian experimental theater was evidently not to his tastes. Pabst let some songs go only as long as he could stand them, while others he couldn't bring himself to film at all. Although the original 1928 play was a popular success, Pabst's film version wasn't.

Pabst is invariably classified as a realist, and Brecht is often classified as one as well, albeit with less certainty. Pabst and Brecht each represented very different examples of what happens when realism is imbued with an explicit or implicit political purpose. Pabst was the most prominent film director of the neue Sachlichkeit ("the new objectivity") which entered German society and art during the 1920's. Reacting to the overwhelming phenomenon of defeat and economic collapse after World War I, Germans were determined to see things objectively, but in a way they never had before: infected by cynicism, disillusionment, and an almost masochistic sense of resignation to things are they are. In his best-known film, The Joyless Street (1925), Pabst's static, unblinking camera eye watches as two young women, one of them played by Greta Garbo in her German film debut (by the way, if you want to know why people made such a fuss over her, watch the scene in which she first appears), sell themselves into prostitution to save their financially ruined families. With no sentimentality or symbolism whatsoever, Pabst follows the women as they amuse wealthy clients at opulent blackmarket nightclubs while the women's families scramble for food. 

Brecht's 3 Penny Opera might seem farcical and frivolous by comparison, but Brecht's play represents a very different approach to the same social problem. Instead of Pabst's shrugging depiction of exploitation, Brecht wanted to use the theater to involve his working class audiences in a broad political and philosophical vision of the material struggles that divided society. He set out to restore realistic art the principles of play, artistic experimentation, and genuine aesthetic gratification that the neue Sachlichkeit mopes had replaced with the downcast reflection of the world. Brecht overcame the age-old dilemmas of a didactic theory of art (to teach or to please?) in a vision that was scientific in the best sense: imbued with curiosity along with a willingness to experiment and to fail, popularly and aesthetically. Brecht was proud of the popular success of The 3 Penny Opera with the same working classes Pabst sequestered in the dreary back streets of Vienna, and for a brief time he and Walter Benjamin thought they'd found the recipe for a genuinely Marxist aesthetic practice. Alas, Brecht's plays were met with indifference when performed for workers in an actual Marxist state (East Germany), and his exuberant estrangement effects fell out of favor with post-war Western intellectuals under the spell of Samuel Beckett.

Pabst's 3 Penny Opera, restored from the original camera negative in 2005, recalls a time when depressed Germans were looking for a way out of their miseries, and Brecht offered a vision of a very different future than the one that eventually unfolded.

Traces of the True

Yesterday I introduced Jacques Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics. I'd like to take a closer look at his remarks about modernism, which, in all their ambivalence, bear a striking resemblance to Walter Benjamin's sometimes contradictory writings on modernism.

The full force of Rancière's claim that the political and the aesthetic are intricately related becomes clear when he takes up the issue of technology and the aesthetic. "The aesthetic regime of the arts," he writes, "is the true name for what is designated by the incoherent label 'modernity.'" Under the aesthetic regime the arts freed themselves from all the old rules, but, at the same time, neglected mimesis, the salient quality of the previous regime, the poetic. The loss of mimesis meant art cut itself off from the "spheres of collective experience." This appeal to the experiential nature of art and modernity is familiar from Benjamin, as well as Oakeshott and the British Marxists of the 1960's, when Rancière was an Althusserian. The Marxist tradition, in its Western European manifestation, mourned the general decline of experience in modernity, when cultural and economic forms had less and less to do with how people actually lived. Worse, the abstraction of economic relations--and modern art--drained ordinary experience of all substance and precluded most forms of collective political action.

And yet, virtually all of Rancière's examples of the aesthetic intervening in the political occur under the aesthetic regime of the arts, when art had supposedly retreated from collective experience into contemplation of its own perfect forms. In his discussion of Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" Rancière expresses some reservations about Benjamin's essay, as everyone does, then goes on to acknowledge how much he's learned from it--again, as everyone does. Rancière makes the startling claim that literature and painting were, in effect, the true leading edge of modernity. Following Benjamin, Rancière points out that literature discovered the subject matter of photography before photographers did. In fact, the great Realists Balzac, Hugo and Flaubert broke down the opposition between high and low culture long before reproductive technologies did. Rancière concludes,

On the one hand, the technological revolution comes after the aesthetic revolution. On the other hand, however, the aesthetic revolution is first of all the honour acquired by the commonplace, which is pictorial and literary before being photographic or cinematic.

This is where Rancière is far more interesting than his complaints about modernism. He says that literature conducted a symptomatic investigation of history long before historians or scientists did. By extension (Rancière himself doesn't make these claims), the economic theory of Adam Smith isn't possible without the rise of the pastoral tradition in English poetry during the eighteenth century, nor psychology possible without the Romantic poets. Freud himself once admitted that everything he discovered about the human psyche was already known to the Romantics. Stephen Greenblatt shows us in his study of Columbus's diaries in "Marvelous Possessions" that the entire conquest of the New World was made possible by writing.

Rancière concludes his remarks about technology's role in modernity with a Benjaminian flourish. As Benjamin knew, we can no longer see ordinary life directly because we no longer trust mimesis. Instead, as Rancière puts it, "the ordinary becomes beautiful as a trace of the true. And the ordinary becomes a trace of the true if it is torn from its obviousness in order to become a hieroglyph, a mythological or phantasmagoric figure." First of all, this is a pretty succinct description of Benjamin's critical practice. Second, the social sciences, with their dry empiricism and disdain for the figurative, were in fact founded upon the phantasmagoric nature of the true, only they've forgotten this origin. Rancière accuses modern art of just this type of forgetting, only to explain how we can't see ordinary life, the fertile ground of the political, unless we see it aesthetically.

Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics

We've been taught that Richard III is a political play, but what about A Midsummer's Night Dream? Picasso's Guernica is obviously political, but can we say the same thing about Malevich's Black Square? If we were inclined to talk about Black Square as a political work, how would we do that?

Jacques Rancière's The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible gives us a way to talk about the political meaning of art that's both powerful and limited. He makes historical comparisons easy, but his theory of art and the political doesn't offer a means to read a work closely for its political implications, although he doesn't preclude such a reading. He also regards modernism as something of a historical dead end, a view I don't share. Rancière's theory of art and politics is worth considering, at the very least, because it's elegant and simple. According to Rancière, art is one means by which a culture determines what is perceived and what enters language, as well as who gets to do the perceiving and writing or painting. In short, art represents a distribution of the sensible. He says that art

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.

Art has its own way of doing and perceiving, and changes in aesthetics cause epochal changes in ways people perceive and reflect upon the world around them.

In this short book Rancière provides few examples that exemplify this or that distribution of the sensible, but two examples stand out, each marking an important change in Western culture.

The first involves the arrival of Renaissance quattrocento painting, which introduced three-dimensional space in order to capture the immediacy of live speech and action. Giotto and those who followed him eschewed not only the iconic work of the Middle Ages, but also Plato's separation of art and living. The return of two-dimensional pictoral space in Modernism, Rancière claims, reflects a technology-saturated world of pages, screens, and interfaces between different media, including different artistic genres. Malevich's Black Square, for example, depicts the interface between typography and painting, a prevalent theme in a lot of explicitly political art in High Modernism. That this interface now strikes us as commonplace doesn't vitiate its initial impact or the political gesture of pointing to emergent forms of life.

Modernism not only broke down the neo-classical separation of the arts from each other, it also incorporated new subject matter into high art. The plein air painters of the mid-nineteenth century were one strain of the massive re-distribution of the sensible during the 1800's. Another was literary Realism, which emerged around the same time. Rancière discusses the proto-modernist Flaubert, who refused to give any particular emphasis to anything that found its way into his fiction. When Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education first appeared, they were hailed as democratic, even revolutionary works, "despite Flaubert's aristocratic situation and political conformism," Rancière dryly adds. For Rancière, Flaubert's indifference to the bourgeois material of his fiction

is the result of a poetic bias: the equality of all subject matter is the negation of any relationship of necessity between a determined form and a determined content. Yet what is this indifference after all if not the very quality of everything that comes to pass on a written page, available to everyone's eyes? This equality destroys all of the hierarchies of representation and also establishes a community of readers as a community without legitimacy, a community formed only by the random circulation of the written word.

This last remark, with which I disagree, points to an affinity Rancière has with Walter Benjamin, whom I also disagree with about the possibility of the novel as the basis for community, or less abstractly, of exchangeable experience. In my next post I'll talk more about Rancière's debt to Walter Benjamin.

Same Barnes, Different Place

Yesterday the Barnes Foundation announced, with a characteristic sense of shadowy intrigue, their new downtown Philadelphia museum will be designed by the New York architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. (More here and here.) People have been bickering about what to do with the Barnes collection since, it seems, Gauguin shipped out for the South Seas. Albert Barnes created the foundation through the well-meaning but unworkable terms of his will. His priceless collection of nineteenth-century art was bestowed to the trustees of Lincoln University, an historically black university outside Philadelphia. The trustees were to ensure that the collection was reserved for the edification of students who ordinarily wouldn't have access to fine artworks. A commendable idea, but the collection was stranded in Merion, a wealthy suburb far away from anyone who could be called disadvantaged. Even seasoned field trippers rarely ventured to Merion to visit Barnes' small and staid museum. Attempts to update the collection were fruitless; Barnes dictated that the paintings should never be moved from the walls. Eventually the museum came to attract more probate attorneys than art lovers.

Now Barnes' imaginary South of France will be located on Philadelphia's imaginary Champs-Élysées. The Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the location of the new museum, was created in an inept exercise in Haussmannization. Instead of a grand promenade, Benjamin Franklin Parkway is a favorite location for local drivers to menace tourists scurrying across its wide crosswalks. During the ten years I lived in Philly the Parkway averaged one dead bicyclist a year, including several children. Plopped awkwardly between Logan Square and the Art Museum, the Parkway has never felt very organic to the city, so city planners might as well fill up the space with buildings. All things considered, Williams and Tsein are sensible choices to design the new museum, but the foundation didn't see fit to invite a local architect to submit a design.  Philadelphia is a lovely but underachieving city that could be a lot better. New York and, to a lesser extent, Washington and Boston suck up all of the energy on the east coast, so it's sad to see Philadelphia subscribing to the same dynamic.

If Paris was once the capital of the nineteenth century, as Walter Benjamin once proclaimed, then Philadelphia remains a provincial city of the nineteenth century, Flaubert's Rouen with cheese steaks. With its odd exhibition spaces and fusty collection reproduced in a MoMA-style building, the new downtown Barnes is emblematic of the city as a whole: clinging to the harsh quirks from its past while looking elsewhere to update itself for the new millennium.

Unpacking My Library

"I am unpacking my library. Yes, I am," Walter Benjamin declares at the opening of his essay, "Unpacking My Library." He's standing among the packing crates that have held his books for two years. A failed marriage, the inability to land an academic position, the uncertain life as a freelance writer, and political instability meant Benjamin led a peripatetic life, so reacquainting himself with his books must have been an immense relief and a great pleasure. The order in chaos quality of the collection, the way fate and the passions play themselves out in the private library, had special meaning for Benjamin. He even points out that people have gone crazy, or were reduced to a life of crime, when deprived of their books.

We moved into our new house three weeks ago, but it was only yesterday that I finally unearthed my copy of Illuminations, in which "Unpacking My Library" appears. I'd been looking for it since we arrived. With a new house comes a new arrangement for books. Once the last box has been unloaded from the truck, finding a place for my books is the first decision I have to make in every domicile I've ever moved into. This weekend I set up a triple front of bookcases in the living room (another triple set will go in the finished basement). For the first time in years I've felt settled enough to arrange them in order: literature chronologically from the top, the Greeks to late modernism, followed by literary criticism, film studies, and a row of philosophy ending in a special section on Walter Benjamin. The bottom shelves house contemporary novels in hard cover, primarily to stabilize the bookcases. The historical sweep of my collection, I can now see, is like a sine wave, with certain periods well represented, and others still to be retrieved by the act of purchasing books. "To renew the old word--that is the collector's deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things," Benjamin writes. He tells the story of the lengths he went to so he could procure an 1810 edition of the memoir of a physicist told in the form of an obituary of a supposedly deceased friend. The strange book is "the most important sample of personal prose of German Romanticism," according to Benjamin. An entire epoch of intellectual history dwells in the autobiography of an obscure German scientist. In a sense book collecting is a way of writing one's own obituary in the form of an collection of dead authors--but it's an obituary that fends off death, rather than hastening it. 

Benjamin lingers over the act of unpacking his library. At the conclusion of his essay he's working past midnight going through the crates. Each book reminds him of the place in which he bought it. The entire geography of his life is laid out before him, from his childhood in Berlin to Paris, where he made his final home. Tyler Cowen claims that we buy books in order to enhance our sense of self, but reading Benjamin on collecting we realize only dilettantes buy books to shore up their egos.  For Benjamin the serious book collector lives the "disreputable" but glorious life behind "the mask of Spitzweg's 'Bookworm,''' because the inside the bookworm

there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for the collector . . . ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as is only fitting.

Intimacy in Global Space

Nicolai Ouroussoff pays a visit to the Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza, who won the Pritzker Prize in 1992. Although Siza has never attracted the international attention that flashier architects like Frank Gehry have enjoyed, Ouroussoff declares that Siza "has steadily assembled a body of work that ranks him among the greatest architects of his generation, and his creative voice has never seemed more relevant than now."

Why is this architect who has hardly built anything outside the Portuguese-speaking world so relevant? To begin with, Siza's buildings are "mesmerizing," an adjective Ouroussoff uses twice to describe Siza's work. In contrast to, say, Santiago Calatrava, who is known for his giant ice sculpture buildings, or Hemut Jahn's techno minimalism, Siza's modernism is warm and sensual. He's a sort of Alvar Aalto of the sub-tropics. However, the key to Siza's work is not just his use of materials, but the way he arranges space.

Ouroussoff tours three Siza buildings, including the architect's latest project, the Iberê Camargo Foundation in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Ouroussoff locates the essence of Siza's work in the experience of walking through his buildings, in the way materials and spaces unfold as one walks, slowly, through each room. The progressions of spaces within the Iberê Camargo museum, for instance, "forge a closely calibrated architectural narrative, regulating your pace through the site." The museum features galleries around a central atrium. Connecting the galleries are long, dark passageways with small windows affording glimpses of the cityscape (image above, swiped from the New York Times article). Ouroussoff remarks, "the passageways are . . . a way of drawing out the time spent in thought, allowing us to absorb more fully what we have just experienced. In a way they are Mr. Siza's rejoinder to the ruthless pace of global consumerism."

This is an architecture of phenomenology rather than symbolism. The unfolding of gallery and passageway, interior space and framed cityscape, enacts Bachelard's dialectic of division, of inside and outside, yes and no, which Bachelard warns, can come to "govern all thoughts of positive and negative." Siza may offer contemplative spaces, but that doesn't mean his spaces aren't as controlling as any other modernist architectural form.

Ouroussoff writes that Siza's spaces are a rejoinder to global capitalism and "the bold and delirious forms churned out by celebrated architects today [that] mirror social upheavals," while serving "to camouflage the damage." The reverie of a maternal, womblike, space that's both sheltering and remote is a symptomatic response to the experience of an unheimlich modernity. On this level Ouroussoff's view of Siza is nostalgic. Siza's work is elegant, and the appeal of a warm modernism is enduring, but one should be aware of what Siza excludes. Two more expansive models for a Latin American modernism are the more permeable spaces of Enríque Norten and the more socially-conscious buildings of Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha.

Siza's work encapsulates modernism's still unresolved dilemma between embracing technology as the essence of modernity and revealing technology's bad side. His work may be nostalgic, but then again so is all modernism at this point. Besides, as Walter Benjamin has taught us, nostalgia can also point to unresolved social conflicts. Siza's buildings address a social need for intimate public space in which we can contemplate artworks--or other people. What's remarkable, even revolutionary, about Siza's public buildings is that they offer a hierarchy of intimacy that we've largely lost even within our own homes, dispersed, as they are for Americans, in the horizonless suburbs or stacked indifferently in the city, with every space wired to every other one.

The Re-Distribution of the Sensible

As I've mentioned before, last weekend we moved from relatively urbanized Oak Park to Wilmette, which is definitely suburban. On one level, the environmental differences are definite but not overly striking: more trees, far fewer pedestrians, bigger lawns. Last Saturday morning we walked to a Corner  Bakery for breakfast, eating outside. It was nice to get a refill without elbowing out someone trying to get the last drips from the decaf pot. I was used to much fiercer competition for coffee. We strolled back at a noticeably slower pace than we used to in Oak Park, which has some of that amphetamines-in-the-air feel of Chicago and, especially, New York City. In Wilmette the whole experience of going out to breakfast was weirdly relaxed.

That night a full moon shone directly into my daughter's bedroom, just as the sun did in the morning. The roar of cicadas at night is deafening; my son has already perfected his imitation of it. (Walter Benjamin proposed that children imitating nature was the foundation of our mimetic facility.) The vast parking lots heat up quickly in the morning, but the shady residential streets are much more comfortable. We're close enough to Lake Michigan to feel the cooling effects of the lake.

Moving to Wilmette has been a startlingly new sensory experience. There's a completely different set of sights, sounds, impressions, and language practices. Middle school kids take Latin classes. Things that were once far away--open spaces, the mailman, the expressway, the moon--are now closer. This re-distribution of the sensible recalls Jacques Rancière's aesthetic theory.  In The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible he talks about how societies are divided into discrete groups, with modern art traversing these divisions and creating new possibilities for perception--as well as excluding other possibilities. Art re-scrambles the established divisions between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, the sayable and the unsayable. By re-distributing the sensible art becomes political because the political, for Rancière, also intervenes in the stable order of perceptions and language practices, which Rancière refers to, unsatisfactorily, as the police order.

In light of Rancière's theory of aesthetics and politics, it's interesting to note that the North Shore suburbs get progressively more conservative as one moves northward up the lake shore, away from the city. One could attribute the political differences to income levels, but surely there's something in the environment of the leafy North Shore that determines how people relate to the body politic. And the distribution doesn't fall neatly into the polarities of liberal/conservative, Democratic/Republican. Urbanized Oak Park was not only a generally liberal place, but it was also intensely political. I'll bet few municipalities, even liberal ones, had anti-war protestors in their Fourth of July parade, as Oak Park did earlier this month. "Broad lawns and narrow minds," was how Hemingway described his home town. Now that the lawns are much narrower in Oak Park, the minds have become more inclusive in certain ways, although they're still narrow in other ways, including architecturally. It will be interesting to see how more architecturally liberal, moon-bathed Wilmette formulates the political.

The Body Politic

Ready to be irritated by anything their new conservative president does, the French Left is up in arms over Nicolas Sarkozy's jogging--in an NYPD tee shirt, no less. Libération wondered aloud, “Is jogging right wing?” Commentators on the Left have declared not only is jogging right wing, it's also un-French and, therefore, pro-American. François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, Charles de Gaulle, Marshall Pétain--all non-joggers. According to this view, jogging is about bodily control, a fascistic celebration of the body beautiful and the triumph of the will. Media coverage of Sarkozy's workouts are hypnotizing the French public. Walking is a more dignified and properly French activity. Walking is ruminative. Never mind that the young Jean-Paul Sartre worked out while studying Heidegger; Frenchmen should never break a sweat, soccer players excepted.

The French Left should be careful: Fretting over the king's body is a leftover from monarchist times. The current fuss over President Sarkozy's jogging says more about the impoverishment of left-wing political discourse than it does about the politics of running. The American Right was in a similar position when Bill Clinton went jogging early in his administration. Right-wingers were transfixed by Clinton's chunky thighs chugging around Washington. Eventually, the Right moved on to a fascination with other presidential body parts. 

The question of which is more liberal, walking or jogging, is a false choice. It is perfectly possible to jog in the morning and take a ruminative walk in the afternoon. I do it all the time. Is jogging while listening to the Clash and Rage Against the Machine still right wing?

The real question is the role of the body in politics. Historically, this has been an extremely tangled issue. Walter Benjamin's flâneur, a nineteenth-century dandy who walked the streets of Paris at a leisurely pace, cut through the hectic urban masses, resisting getting incorporated into some alien identity. In this sense, flâneurie is inherently political, but in his foppishness (flâneurs were known to lead turtles on leashes) and his resistance to the collective, his politics were ambiguous. Benjamin's thoughts on the body in politics don't end with the flâneur. In his writings on surrealism Benjamin declared, "The collective is a body, too." The collective body is constructed out of images, which are, in Benjamin's formulation, material things. Actual bodies are things to be organized into higher social forms. Mikhail Bakhtin, by contrast, based a leftist politics on a body in all its gross particularly. The drinking, farting body in the carnival (and the sweating jogger gasping for air?) undermined the polarities of authority.

Whether running or walking the body is a slippery thing, politically. All I know is that I'm going to get a Libération tee shirt so I can go jogging in it.

Notes on Anselm Kiefer at the Grand Palais

Anselm Kiefer is probably the most Benjaminian of contemporary artists, so it's fitting that he would have an exhibit at the Grand Palais in Paris. The Grand Palais was built for the 1900 Universal Exhibition, the third in a series of world's fairs in Paris. (The second one, in 1889, left the Eiffel Tower behind.) The nineteenth-century world exhibitions are important subjects in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, his unfinished study of the Paris arcades as the origin of capitalist culture. The world exhibitions were Gesamtkunstwerke, total works of art, phantasmagoric admixtures of technology and art, armaments and  fashions, business and pleasure. According to Benjamin, the world exhibitions were the origins of the pleasure industry. The fantastic