Space as Storyteller: Spatial Jumps in Architecture, Critical Theory, and Literature
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Space as Storyteller: Spatial Jumps in Architecture, Critical Theory, and Literature
264Paperback(Reprint)
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810133457 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/15/2016 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 264 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
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Space as Storyteller
Spatial Jumps in Architecture, Critical Theory, and Literature
By Laura Chiesa
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2016 Northwestern University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3346-4
CHAPTER 1
In the Primeval Fields of Modernity
Introduction
In an essay on Walter Benjamin's Parisian passages and Siegfried Kracauer's hotel lobby, Anthony Vidler emphasized the way emblematic architectural spaces haunt these texts. Vidler points to the artifice implied in these writings: "In a real sense these are purely textual spaces, designed, so to speak, by their authors; they possess an architectonic of their own, all the more special for its ambiguous status between textual and social domains; they are, so to speak, buildings that themselves serve as analytical instruments." Vidler underlines the spatial and constructive side of Benjamin's writing and the spatialization implied in his practice of inscribing motion and temporality within the arguments themselves.
In the Arcades Project, the spatiotemporal open framework of Paris in the nineteenth century allows Benjamin to work within the complex relationship between past and future, at the moment that initiates the provisional relationship that appears at the encounter between the "what has been" and the "now." This relation is configured in a dialectical image that emerges when the "what has been" and the "now" crystallize into a constellation ("Paris") of a certain period ("the nineteenth century"). Benjamin writes: "It's not that what is past cast its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation" (N2a,3). Benjamin's method of interpretation is guided by the moment of twilight of the relationship between past and future: it is a moment and a space-time from which can emerge the new and the unexpected as well as the ruinous aspect of what was new, the "has been." Indeed, Benjamin discerns a specific relationship, or directionality, between the present and the past:
We can speak of two directions in this work: one which goes from the past into the present and shows the arcades, and all the rest, as precursors, and one which goes from the present into the past so as to have the revolutionary potential of these "precursors" explode in the present. And this direction comprehends as well the spellbound elegiac consideration of the recent past, in the form of its revolutionary explosion. (Oº,56)
In this chapter I approach a number of passages from Benjamin's Arcades Project that are related to what he defines, if disruptively, as a "method." Benjamin conveys his method through figural language and images that, while communicating with each other, are self-enclosed in a monadic style. These images require a continuous suspension and interruption of straightforward logic.
Through fleeting images characterized by a sense of transience and interruption, Benjamin defies language so that his writing loses any self-evidence. He suspends the conciliatory mode of understanding that allows the direct association of a description with an image. Thus my reading focuses on the singular way in which language inhabits images but always exceeds and overflows the confines of a single image or concept. I am particularly interested in the logic of a method composed of diffracted perspectives. Benjamin's use of nonlinear, dialectical figures allows for multiple configurations of perspective. Benjamin proceeds not by providing a method that may then be applied but by elaborating a manifold study of a specific epoch, in which each point of view relates to another and at the same time differentiates itself from another. The Arcades Project, because of its in-progress format, can be accessed by selecting from among Benjamin's numerous perspectives. The ones I have selected show how Benjamin captures the emergence of two terms that are in tension: construction and space. "Construction" (and scaffolding) will give us access to the way Benjamin envisions the "origin" of a new way of understanding and experiencing architecture and the cityscape. "Space" results, not as a simple extrasubjective extension but instead as a site of experiment that requires the reader and the inhabitant to participate. I will show how Benjamin situates his writing within these perspectives, how he brings the reader into this perspectival method, and how his figural language disseminates images that appear and disappear in a space and time suspended between writing and materiality. This chapter, traversing the Arcades Project and a few other related texts of Benjamin's, will show how architecture, rather than constituting a self-contained object, emerges instead primarily for its potential, for its "architecturability," as a medium and in relation to other media, where repetition and the unexpected converge in unprecedented ways; it will show too that space, as inscribed in the intriguing term "colportage phenomenon," is not a static entity but instead a storyteller in the moving cityscape.
Part 1. Legibility: A Methodology of Composition
Setting the Sails — Experience, Sea Voyages, and a Method of Drafting
December 30, 1929. No sooner do you arrive in the city than you feel rewarded. The resolve not to write about it is futile. You reconstruct the preceding day just like children who reconstruct [aufbauen] the table full of presents on Christmas Day. This, too, is a way of expressing your gratitude. Still, I'm holding to my plan [Veranstaltungen] that someday soon I will do more than just this. For the moment, at least, the plan prevents me — as does the space for reflection that I need in order to work — from abandoning my willpower and surrendering myself to the city.
This quote is from the beginning of a piece, Paris Diary (1930), in which Benjamin reports on his meetings with various Parisian intellectuals during his stay in Paris (between December 1929 and February 1930). Stepping into the city demands that he write about it in a way that is like reconstructing the day just passed; Benjamin writes that he does not have time or, better, does not have "the space of reflection" for his plan to write on the city. The end of the piece concludes with a moving cityscape in which Benjamin walks:
Spring has come with the cold, and when you come striding down the Champs-Elysées as if down a snowy mountain slope, with racing pulse and flushed cheeks, you suddenly call a halt in front of a small lawn behind the Théâtre Marigny — a lawn in which spring is in the air. Behind the Théâtre Marigny, an impressive building is in the process of construction; a tall green fence surrounds the site, and behind it the scaffolding [Gerüste] rises. ... And as I walked along, my thoughts became all jumbled up as a kaleidoscope — a new constellation at every step [Und wie ich im Gehen meine Gedanken so kaleidoskopisch durcheinanderfallen fühlte — mit jedem Schritt eine neue Konstellation]. Old elements disappeared, and unknown ones came stumbling up — figures of all shapes and sizes. If one remained, it was called a "sentence." And among thousands of possible ones, I found this one, for which I had been waiting for many years — the sentence that wholly defined the miracle that the Madeleine — not the Proustian madeleine, but the real one — had been from the first moment I saw it: in winter the Madeleine is a great furnace that warms the rue Royale with its shadow.
The end of this piece draws the attention toward an actual theater, the Théâtre Marigny, but behind it appears a building in the process of construction and a scaffolding being erected. New constellations spring from each step as he walks among those constructed spaces. Benjamin's remark that "old elements disappeared, and unknown ones came stumbling up — figures of all shapes and sizes" seems to point toward images, yet what remain are not images, figures, shapes, but instead a "sentence" from among "thousands of possible" sentences. The sentence refers to a monument and its relation with the atmosphere of the cityscape, which could be defined as the "aura" of a specific place in the cityscape. At the end of the piece, just before giving us the "sentence," the text, like a photograph or a film, superimposes two different kinds of locations, a theater and a building in the process of being constructed, blurring theatrical and architectural spaces in a way that, I will show, occurs in many passages of the Arcades Project.
While this text shows Benjamin's endless stylistic power to translate or convey images through sentences, it does not embrace the avant-gardist tone that he works out in the citational style of the Arcades Project or in the style of One-Way Street. Michael Jennings argues that One-Way Street marks the attempt to establish, not simply a new avant-gardist form, "a new, montaged, and non-narrative form," but a form that in turn "places unusual demands on the reader." For Jennings, such a text is Benjamin's attempt to achieve a fusion of many avant-garde expressions (Dada, Constructivism, and Surrealism), as part of a collective venture of the G-Gruppe, the Berlin-based artists' collective Benjamin associated with in the 1920s. Compared with One-Way Street, Paris Diary's style tends toward an auratic rather than avant-garde experience of the cityscape: the vision of the city and the walking are embedded in a specific locality, while in One-Way Street places lose their sense of unique locality. Whereas in Paris Diary the spatial dimension is embedded in ordinary (even if enchanted) walking, in One-Way Street, as Jennings has noticed, space resides in disorientation; according to Jennings, "the most brilliant evocation of this form of spatial displacement occurs toward the end of the volume, in 'Stand-Up Beer Hall.'" Jennings writes, "The bourgeoisie experience the disorienting power of commodities in a mediated manner ... For the sailor, however, whose work 'in the rump of the ship maintains contact with the commodity,' the world actually travelled and lived in ceases to have any local character" (27).
Certainly the numerous notes and citations constellated in the Arcades Project bring the disorientation of One-Way Street to the cityscape of nineteenth-century Paris, whose assemblage Benjamin invites the reader to navigate. The passages of the Arcades Project move the reader between orientation and disorientation, and while insisting on a specific time and a specific place, their interrelationships destabilize any simple totality and produce a flash-like multitude of perspectives on an epoch. There are some passages that pose the "I" of the writer, who, while proceeding in his writing, gives moving images in which he indeed seems to move and transport the reader. I have selected some of them in order to show how the tension between space (never a simple extension) and architecture (never an isolated object) is embedded in Arcades Project. Oddly enough, one of the first passages from Konvolut N introduces not a cityscape but instead a sea voyage (Schifffahrt), which alludes to Benjamin's own way of proceeding: "Comparison of other people's attempts to the undertaking of a sea voyage in which the ships are drawn off course by the magnetic north pole. Discover this North Pole. What for others are deviations [Abweichungen] are, for me, the data which determine my course. — On the differentials of time (which, for others, disturb the main lines of the inquiry), I base my reckoning" (N1,2).
A sea voyage implies a relation to space and to experience that inflects the way of proceeding and draws it off course (abgelenkt); movement can no longer be completely calculated. Whatever calculations figure in the sea voyage must also cope with the magnetic field, which actively inflects the normal course of the vessel. The spatial deviation of the trajectory and the "differentials of time" are crucial to Benjamin's thought. In the comparison with navigation, the writer is a sailor, and the "differentials of time" are decisive in Benjamin's method.
The passage cited above is a "script-image" (Schriftbild), which Samuel Weber defines as both "an image that calls for reading" and "a scenario": this script-image exhibits a way of proceeding that is not simply in motion but also diachronic, deviating, and destabilized in its direction. If Benjamin compares his way of thinking with navigation, this implies that there is an experientially crucial aspect, connected also with time and movement, in his way of proceeding. Here as in the rest of this Konvolut, Benjamin's notion of experience involves disorientation and danger. The differentials of time are indispensable to the method Benjamin adopts in composing the Arcades Project; in the image of the sea voyage, his method (a quasi-calculated navigation) is thus never completely totalized into a single perspective. While this quote introduces the experience, if not the feeling, of navigating, the comparison with navigation returns in other passages of Konvolut N in a strange metonymy. Indeed, the way of proceeding by navigating and sailing corresponds to the method of a dialectician who, Benjamin writes, has the "wind of world history" in his sails (concepts). During the navigation, phenomena are rescued. "The rescue that is carried out ... can operate solely for the sake of what in the next moment is already irretrievably lost" (N9,7). The metaphors of the "rescue" and of navigating are conjoined in a group of passages from Konvolut N to comprise a metaphor for Benjamin's way of proceeding. Phenomena are rescued from the "wind of the absolute": "They are saved through the exhibition of the fissure within them" (Sie werden durch die Aufweisung des Sprungs in ihnen gerettet) (N9,4). "Thinking means ... setting the sails" (N9,6). The emphasis is on knowing "how sails are set"; otherwise there would be no movement (no history) and only concepts. Why? Because sails are words, and "the way they are set makes them into concepts" (N9,6), just as having sails is different from sailing and knowing how to set the sails. Benjamin claims that it is necessary to articulate words and concepts in a differential mode and "to dissipate [zerstreuen] the semblance of eternal sameness, and even of repetition, in history" (N9,5). It is not enough, emphasizes Benjamin, to have the sails; "what is decisive is knowing the art of setting them" (N9,8).
Knowing how to set the sails is thus the dynamic basis for Benjamin's method: it is a dialectical method that situates the historian in the epoch "he himself must live in" (N9a,8), while the past is the prehistory of his own epoch. Such a method is "distinguished by the fact that, in leading to new objects, it develops new methods, just as form in art is distinguished by the fact that it develops new forms in delineating new contents" (N10,1). In the same way as there is a tension between words and concepts, between having the sails and knowing how to set them, for Benjamin it is also important to explain the determinant intensity of the method of composition (Abfassung), drafting, writing, or reporting. Benjamin articulates or, better yet, disarticulates the very idea of method, situating the inquiry between intensive and extensive dimensions. Everything that one is thinking should be "incorporated into the project" (N1,3); this is what gives intensity to the method of composition. A telos is required, such that everything converges virtually at a specific moment, but paradoxically this can be attained only when "the intervals of reflections" (N1,3) are preserved and the distance between the parts (Teilen) of the work is maintained. On the one hand, because of the intensity, everything is virtually present from the start in the project; on the other hand, as Benjamin writes, this method of composition "aims to characterize and to preserve the intervals of reflection, the distances lying between the most essential parts of this work, which are turned most intensively to the outside" (N1,3). In the split of knowledge described in this passage, an epoch in history becomes a set of fields through a movement that Benjamin describes as a paradox of civilization and madness: "cultivated fields [Gebieten] where, until now, only madness has reigned" (N1,4). There is a moment in which these fields, which Benjamin calls a "primeval forest" but also employs as the materials of the method, "must have been cleared of the undergrowth of delusion and myth" (N1,4). And Benjamin's aim is that this "be accomplished here for the terrain of the nineteenth century" (N1,4). Benjamin's method of composition maintains intervals that are cuts or breaks, in which the figural dimension of the method should persist. Benjamin wants to avoid establishing oppositions, as is clear in another passage:
It is very easy to establish oppositions, according to determinate points of view, within the various "fields" [Gebieten] of any epoch, such that on one side lies the "productive," "forward-looking," "lively," "positive" part of an epoch, and on the other side the abortive, retrograde, obsolescent. (N1a,3)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Space as Storyteller by Laura Chiesa. Copyright © 2016 Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
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