voorthuis.html

Back to the Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate Homepage

Walter Benjamin,Ambling Through

the City of a Mind[1]

by Jacob Voorthuis

[Head of the humanities department at the Caribbean School of Architecture in Kingston, Jamaica between 1994 and 1999, architectural theorist Jacob Voorthuis is currently preparing a book in the Netherlands on the experience of Caribbean architecture and urbanism. The following essay grew from a course he developed called "Philosophies in Architecture."]

Introduction

A rectangle, a finite and universal receptacle for the fragments of the universe in portrait format. [2]A portrait of a city: an image, imagined. The rectangle is divided into three horizontal sections. The top section is demarcated by two thick, horizontal lines, which sandwich a black circle. Below are various bands of busy lines, roughly divided into two large sections by a broad band of lines resembling the stretcher bond pattern of a brick wall. What happens in these two separated sections is difficult to describe. Hieroglyphs, all of them resembling the primordial house, assemble along unbroken horizontal lines. Some of these hieroglyphs look like cuneiform writing, others resemble large apartment blocks with infinite subdivisions, others again look like the beginnings of a complex organogram of some mute Kafkaesque institution. Others look like honeycombs, or look as if they represent the logo of some business. There is more text, more significant tissue here, but this will have to do. We are told it is "A Leaf from the Book of Cities." In the first instance this title reminds me of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. And indeed the texture of the lines is as complex as all the layers of the city of Venice superimposed upon one sheet of paper. But on second thoughts, Klee's picture has a more prophetic resonance; it interferes with the future of cities.

The two thick lines might be Heaven and Earth, the horizon and the sky. The black circle (I am looking at a black and white reproduction) might be the sun. But instead of shunning our gaze because of its brightness, this sun draws our eyes into the infinity that is blackness. The thin horizontal lines could represent streets and the stretcher bond lines a city dividing and replicating itself by a wall. The lines which look like houses and institutions, might at the same time also represent the way that these institutions are settled and organised: the image of the city as an organogram or as a rich history. The hieroglyphs constitute an image of how both language and buildings reside in places and can thus help to enhance the division of society according to class. There again the lines may also represent a map of some intensely personal journey, some of the houses almost look like notes upon a scale, and what is a scale if it is not to distinguish and render clear the rhythm of stratification. No meaning is mutually exclusive in this painting. That is a definition of wealth. Looking at the drawing again, are the two outermost bands of the city form not walls, or bastions, to keep people in and out? Are the lines that connect the houses, paths? Are the curious domes crowned with their crosses and housing tree-like objects institutions, preserved like cheese under a glass bell?

Benjamin's thinking: good cheese under a glass bell

The objective of this essay is to explore a few themes in the thinking of Walter Benjamin. Many of these themes can be read into Klee's painting and I want to focus especially on that aspect of Benjamin's thinking that might help us in the understanding of the city. With the ability to describe what we experience, we may arrive at the possibility of analysis. And with analysis comes the power to transform our attitude to design.

First of all I want to introduce Walter Benjamin through some of his thoughts and insights; then I shall try to find a way to interpret his writings and embroider on some of his insights with reference to architecture. The leading principle in this search is the idea of description as a normative agent, that description is a way of recreating the object we see, in our vision of its potential. Then I would like to look at Benjamin's treatment of cities and stop to look at a number of ideas in some depth. The essay ends simply with an invitation to read some of Benjamin's descriptions.

Born in Berlin in 1892, Benjamin was a tragic figure: a Jew in an increasingly anti-Semitic Germany. As the son of a prosperous art-dealer he was not prepared for the confusing days ahead. He had wanted to spend a quiet life buried in a university. The German government, however, refused to pay Jewish lecturers. He would have had to become a private lecturer, funded by his family. That would have presented no problem under normal circumstances but his father had lost much of his business during the years of hyperinflation that set in after the First World War. Benjamin had to support himself. To do this he was ill equipped. Legend has it that he was extraordinarily clumsy, a problem that had irritated his mother beyond endurance during his youth and which seemed to predestine him for a career in thought and contemplation. When the Nazis came to power in Germany, Benjamin fled to Paris where he continued to write reviews and articles. When the Germans entered France in 1940, he wanted to escape to Spain. On the French-Spanish Border the Spanish authorities informed him that he and the others in his group would have to be handed over to the Gestapo. He committed suicide that night. It was 1940. Hearing of his suicide, the Spanish authorities felt guilty, relented and let the others across the border. His suicide, a lonely act of despair, had heroic consequences.

Who was Walter Benjamin? And more to the point, what is he to us? Primarily he was someone who was able to look. He could 'see' with great resolution. His thought is poetically provoking, by which I mean that his interpretation of the everyday changes the goal-posts of our expectations. His writing forces you to look at problems and events in a different light, from a different angle, at a different scale. His analysis of what he looks at is rich as well as incisive, but his writing does not obey the strictures of scholarly persuasion and rigid taxonomy. He is a poet in prose. He undermines the landscape we think we are so familiar with by substituting new landmarks for old. In this way Benjamin forces us to acknowledge features which, veiled by the ordinary, needed to be made visible. And when we begin to see what we think he is showing us, he tells us that it is precisely the veil of the everyday that is so full and rich in possibilities. He removes the distortions we have grown accustomed to and substitutes these for new distortions. That allows you, for good or bad, to develop fresh strategies to approach your own problems and your own interpretation of events.

( Photo of Benjamin taken by the Spanish Authorities before his death )

What does a work of architecture say?

Above all, what is special about Benjamin is his ability to relate the objects, forms and events surrounding us, to our spiritual life. In his essay on The task of a translator he reveals something of his attitude to artifacts and their relationship to our spiritual life. He opens the essay with the following words:

In the appreciation of a work of art or an art form, consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful.... Art posits man's physical and spiritual existence, but in none of its works is it concerned with his response. No poem is intended for the reader, no symphony for the listener...What does a work 'say' ? What does it communicate? It tells very little to those who understand it. Its essential quality is not statement or the imparting of information. [3]

So what is art about then? And if a literary work does not state or impart information, then what is a translator to do? How can a translator do more than simply translate the information given in one language into another? What is the essential quality of a work of art? And what about architecture, which likes to think of itself as a useful thing; are we to simply dismiss the people we build for, our clients? Well before we get all upset, let's approach this thing with a bit of system. Let's see how far his proposition gets us. "In the appreciation of a work of art ... consideration of the receiver never proves fruitful." To understand this proposition we must take a detour and get rid of some of our dearly held assumptions that would otherwise get in the way. For example, it might be useful within the present context to analyze the self in relation to the other. It might also prove useful to look at the idea of art in relation to its famous rival science. This 'pair' of oppositions would appear to play an important role in the quotation just given.

Let's start with the division between science and art. Both art and science have the same project, which is to penetrate the universe with understanding. That is not a controversial statement. Science tries to isolate and define simple elements with which it then tries to reconstruct the complex structure of reality; its truths, wonderful and great as they are, are never more than fragments of the whole. Art approaches reality the other way around. Art represents the unfathomable by reflection; its truths are never more than incomplete approximations. Reflection approaches the object by comparison, conjunction, disjunction and metaphor. In this sense the relationship between art and science is not one of diametrical opposition. They are complementary, they form a pair. Science could not exist without art, without the thing that art does, which is to hypothesize freely and creatively about reality. Science needs that creative principle. Similarly art disintegrates without the paradigm, conditions and methods provided by science. Architecture is irrevocably lost without either.

Architecture is the art of building well. It is not half art or half science; its symmetry makes up a whole and not just a sum of two halves. With that I mean that it is the tension between the two approaches that furnishes us with right ingredient for a creative approach to real problems. In focusing on that tension architecture has recourse to the full range of possibilities at its disposal. To ignore them is to impoverish the process and the product.

But how does the designer gain access to this full range of possibilities? And how does he or she select what is right and appropriate to the task in hand? Naturally, in order to fulfill oneself it is imperative to learn from the full scope of possibilities offered by the world, from science and art. The good designer studies a particular problem in detail. Picture him hunched over his book or drawing, imagine the tunneled concentration that connects his eyes to the screen of the computer. Then, suddenly, he sits back, expands, stretches and allows this detailed study, these microscopic observations and various fragments to connect to a full and generous view of the world. [4]

It is at this point that the relationship between your self and society at large becomes interesting. Paradoxically, when you keep on learning actively, you yourself are the fullest representative of the other. The fullest that is accessible to you at any rate. By fulfilling the self in the most generous way possible, by learning and listening with an open and generous mind, your self begins to work for humanity at large. It is in your interest to be good at what you want to do, but it is also, and for the same reason, in the interest of society that you are good at what you do, whatever that may be. If being a good architect is your purpose, then good architecture is what you want to make. This requires a different agenda to becoming a rich architect or becoming a social success. It is that simple. The architect, to be a good architect, does what an architect does, well. Now that is a circular argument. Or is it? Well it may be, but it is not strange that it should be circular. It is circular only in the sense that you state from the start what you want the end result to be. The circularity consists in the fact that you want your hopes and your achievements to meet at the end of your life.

Even so, what does good mean here? Can we define this doing well in such a way that we do not merely say something circular and do more than say: 'well' here is an example of good architecture. Circular arguments do not get us any further, they simply turn around in circles, and examples of specific instances of good architecture are too sensitive to context to allow simple transplantation. Examples need to be given their proper context to be useful. So instead we want to pin down the kind of things a good architect does and thinks about in order to make good architecture. So, what is great architecture? Great architecture is architecture that is called great. Again it is that simple, and absurd. But not quite as absurd as all that. Marcel Duchamp had convincingly argued that he had the right to call anything he liked 'art' and so he put a urinal on a pedestal, signed it, and called it art.

Try and contradict him. You cannot, at least not without mistaking a simple definition for a value judgement. The point is that greatness as a value judgement reaches a crescendo in only one way, by being pointed out and argued convincingly. There are no short cuts. But we might get a little further than this by returning to the idea that the architect is part of the world he inhabits; that the self, without merging into indistinctiveness, is not necessarily a contradiction to the society it belongs to. The architect can use the self as a representative for the other as a vehicle for the great. Great architecture takes the needs, desires and the potential of the user, client and passer-by as the leading principles of its creativity. They are primal instruments in the design process. The best architecture marries the full purpose of the architect to the full purpose of the client, the user, the city-dweller and society at large. That requires imagination, empathy and learning. If the architect sees his client or the public as his enemy, then that is what they become. An enemy is an intellectual construct. Then the process of design becomes at best one of reconciliation. A work should not narrow itself and bow down to your imagined reader, client or user. You should work on a more generous conception and work to make your argument convincing. Your design should be based on the assumption that the reader, client, user, passer-by is capable of expanding into your work, to achieve fullness within it. It requires the architect to use limitations to his purpose rather than see them as obstacles. Limitations are what the architect should love most. When you design a museum you design something for memories to come to light. A good museum is a museum that does what it does, well. And if it does it well, you as architect have been fulfilled. Therefore, your greatest purpose is to fulfill the purpose of the museum. You study light, you study display, you study conservation, you study the context in which the object will appear, you study the function of a museum in society and you study your own relation to all these things. The best example of the way this process works is the game of brainstorming, brainstorming has only one rule: never reject just someone else's contribution to the brainstorming session, rather: try to find how it fits in to the picture.

Therefore, when Benjamin says that the poem is not for the reader, he means that it is for that which lies in between the writer and the reader, the thing that pulls and pushes between the reader and the writer: the poem. The great poet is the writer of great poetry. Great poetry inhabits that space where relationships, communication and growth become possible, moral growth, aesthetic growth, and metaphysical growth. This is a functionalism in a full sense: the architect uses the needs, desires and potential of the user, the client and the passer-by as the creative principle in his own fulfillment as a good architect. Therefore the architect should learn to make architecture, great architecture.

Can we get anywhere nearer to translating this ethical or attitudinal concept of the good architect to something more specific? Can we point at something and say 'that is good?' And can we then use that as a model? Yes, but with the understanding that great architecture is exceedingly sensitive to context. Greatness is conceptually very close to disaster. But we must also be wary of examples and precedents. We do not want to reinvent the wheel, we must use it and perfect it. There is so much scope for brilliant architecture, it transcends any narrow criterion. A great work of art, Benjamin argues elsewhere, has an aura. [5] The closer we come to defining what good art is, what that aura consists of, the further that element of greatness appears to recede into the skin of the object admired. What actually happens is that merely another veil is lifted off to present us with the next, and so on, ad infinitum.

If we are still happy to be guided by the concept of beauty as being that to which we aspire, then we can visit Benjamin again. Beauty, Benjamin defines as that which remains true to its essential nature only when veiled. What does that mean? Is Benjamin saying that life is like an onion, an infinite layering of veils? I think so, each veil achieves a certain autonomy as a version of reality, which comes into being at a particular scale. We can get close to beauty if we try to get close to life. But this has its dangers. Getting close to life reveals the next scale of observation, reveals a new reality, in the distance. That is progress. A helpless and mysteriously unhelpful progress which does not take us further unless we stand open to its message, which, paradoxically is not much different to the messages of wisdom from sources as old as Buddha, Confucius, Solomon and Socrates. But then, we do not ask to perform life, we are thrown into life. In the same way we are thrown into art.

The concept of life is given its due only if everything that has a history of its own, and is not merely the setting for history, is credited with life. (..) The philosopher's task consists in comprehending all of natural life through the more encompassing life of history. And indeed is not the continued life of works of art far easier to recognize than the continual life of animal species? The history of the great works of art tells us about their antecedents, their realisation in the age of the artist, their potentially eternal afterlife in the succeeding generations. Where this last manifests itself it is called fame.

A translation then, is a form of sustenance, an active furtherance of life, an aspect of fame. Here we get a clue to the purpose of the work of art and perhaps that of the architect. It is not for the receiver, even if the work of art is received by him. If a work of art suits the receiver he will drink of it voluntarily. If it is good art, he will want to be immersed in the work, he will make it his own by expanding his ability to conceptualize his condition and fit the work. He will give it life, by using it as a reference point in his own life, thereby owning it and wandering or wondering at its depth. In his enjoyment he will want to remember. In this sense a worthy fame is no empty foolishness, it is the sign of fulfillment.

All purposeful manifestations of life, including their very purposiveness, in the final analysis have their end not in life, but in the expression of its nature, in the representation of its significance.

The end of life is to express its nature, to represent its significance. That is not a revelation of God's hidden purpose; Benjamin does not know God's hidden purpose. It is simply the conclusion of his looking around. Great buildings when read well, express the full nature of life. That is the basis upon which they can be enjoyed. Great buildings simply express that nature in a great way. They allow us to get closer to the next scale of observation at which a new veil expresses a larger conception. The nature of life is complex and paradoxical. It opens the possibilities of an ugly building being great, simply because it expresses the nature of ugliness, and ugliness is an aspect of life. Maybe if we try to fathom the purpose of ugliness, that ugliness will fade away by becoming appropriate. If we analyze the ugliness maybe we will see beauties.

Good architecture is conceptually large and generous and can take many forms. Good architecture grows from the warp and woof of a strong leading vision tying together a thorough awareness of the many issues and intricate mechanisms at work in the self, society and the environment. It meets these challenges creatively and critically and expands society within a clear and generous vision. It plays. This conceptual largesse and this playing, will, in turn, give society the room and the desire to fill the building out in its attempt to rise to the widened purpose it offers, which, surely, is to give everyone a place.

Barbarous civilization

Art expresses life in creations in an attempt to comprehend it fully and science expresses life in formulas, which it has found by looking at life closely. The task of the philosopher, Benjamin wrote, is to comprehend all of natural life through the more encompassing life of history. Anyone who looks at history - which is the history of science and art- is performing an act of philosophy. In his beautiful set of aphorisms on history Benjamin wrote three things which are prerequisite to any understanding of his philosophy. On top of that they reveal his critical admiration for Marx and its curious connection to his ineffable Jewish melancholy.

A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grow skyward. This storm is what we call progress. ["On the Concept of History ," IX (a.k.a. "Theses on the Philosophy of History")]

What an image! The storm blowing from paradise might well be progress, it might well be God's wrath for having eaten that infernal apple, and maybe the two are the same, who knows? I do not want to narrow this image with explanation. It needs to sink in, to be made your own. Instead I shall give you another quotation:

"There is no document of civilization which is not also a document of barbarism."

What exactly does that mean? Is this statement redemptive? Does it mean something along the lines that good aspects of European civilization would not have been possible without its plundering the resources of the world? Does it excuse such behaviour? Maybe. Or is the statement far harsher, more matter of fact, less excusing? Is it that every document necessarily has two sides? That it is two-faced? Where a document reveals civilization it merely veils barbarism and where it reveals barbarism it hides civilization? In other words when Europeans went into Africa and laughed at her savagery, is it that they were merely blind to the peculiar qualities of African civilization and blind to their own savagery? I rather think that that is what he meant. That is food for thought, it encourages a fatalism and prepares one for the idea that the good and the bad have an obscenely intimate relationship. It prepares you for the possibility that judgement reflects the judge and not the judged. It also allows us to preserve lovingly that which is most barbaric. For we know it to have two faces. Like Auschwitz, or the remaining plantation houses, which resonate, plucking the tense connection between the truly savage and the falsely civilized. It also prepares us for the third and last bombshell, which is:

"The class struggle is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist."

What does this mean? Does the 'which' refer to 'the struggle' or 'the crude and material things'. Does it simply mean that we have to earn enough money before we can start enjoying its fruits? Probably. But I do think there is more. I have always misread this quotation, half-deliberately. Imagine the 'which' to refer to 'the crude and material things'. In that case the sentence tells us that the most beautiful expressions of our nature are those which derive spiritual nourishment from the questioning, analysing, looking at and thinking poetically about the daily reality of our lives. It gives us the possibility that it is precisely our relationship to things, even to crude material things that give us the possibility of refinement. Is it not our attitude to things, which characterize our belonging? Is this not also what Heidegger wanted to get across? Does not our belonging or not-belonging express the desperate flight of our spirit? Is not the hermit who renounces all material goods in life particularly concerned about his relationship to things? Is any state of mind not an expression of your relation to things, either to deny or to affirm things? In other words we are all collectors of things. It is what we collect which makes us different: What we collect gives us the feeling that we give that object a life. To a true collector, Benjamin writes in his lovely lecture called "Unpacking my Library", the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth. That is true but not just true for the books collected. It is true for the collector: the renewed life for the book is our life renewed. Curiously enough, this aspect of giving life through one's relation to things is what Benjamin calls the childlike element in collecting:

... children can accomplish the renewal of existence in a hundred unfailing ways. Among children, collecting is only one process of renewal; other processes are the paining of objects, the cutting out of figures- the whole range of childlike modes of acquisition, from touching things to giving them names.

If that is childlike then beware of putting away childish things, some of them remain useful: To renew the old world - that is the collector's deepest desire.

Again we have to generalize this quotation. We are all collectors of some sort of another. The acquisition, appropriation and absorption into ourselves of the objects of our passion, renew our experience of the world. A new pair of shoes gave Mrs. Marcos a new life. Benjamin collected books, quotations and observations. He gave them a new life in his particular way of looking at them. With these instruments of observation and revision we have finally arrived at the possibility of examining Benjamin at work in describing the city.

Walking your life in a city

"I will go lose myself, and wander up and down to view the city."---Antipholus of Syracuse in Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors.

Benjamin loved to play the part of the flaneur, the aimless wanderer who loses himself in the city, stands back from the crowd and whose urgent and single-minded purpose is to have no urgency, lose his way and observe. It is difficult. The pace at which one goes is all-important as it determines the scale of one's observation and thereby what becomes visible. Speed abbreviates. Benjamin writes somewhere about some fellow, I forget his name, who wanted to take a tortoise out for a walk, as it would force him to keep to the right pace.

From this activity as flaneur, he arrived at the conclusion that the streets of Paris are like the walls of a living room. That comparison becomes normative to the city planner and the architect: who would not like to live in a street, which is like a living room? In fact it legitimizes the habit of Jamaican living, where the best house is but a treasure box used for self-proclamation and the storage of earthly possessions. Life itself takes place outside, in the streets where the disk jockey and his wall of speakers transform the street into something that is pre-eminently alive.

If architecture spills out into the street, we might legitimately ask the question where architecture begins and ends. In a discussion about the writings of Kafka, Benjamin argues that Kafka could have defined organization as destiny. That is an intriguing statement for us: 'organization is destiny'. Organization implies a purpose; a purpose implies a direction and its fulfillment a movement. Movement reaches towards a destination. Therefore, 'organization is destiny'. Benjamin illustrates the idea with reference to Kafka's story called "The Great Wall of China." In this story social organization and the act of building converge, as they so often do. The one cannot exist without the other. A building of this size could not be realized without a finely tuned society with a common sense of purpose. And such a wall would not be necessary if it did not have something fine to protect. If that is so and if architecture is the physical product of organization, in terms of the channels and obstacles it creates, then maybe we can begin to understand Benjamin's particular sensitivity to the city in relation to the behaviour of people in groups as organised politically and socially. The city is the physical evidence of our destiny. It represents the remains or product of our struggle; it is the wreckage, which piles itself up at the feet of our Angelus Novus. And being confining and containing, architecture begins to work our destiny. The city is the two-faced document of our civilization and of our barbarism, and the city is the object of our struggle for the crude and material things without which no fine and spiritual things could exist.

The crossing between the crudely material and the spiritual, the representation of organization as destiny is the map. Think, for example of the idea of turning your life into a map, to represent your life as a city. This idea became his autobiographical sketch entitled A Berlin Chronicle. The way he does it is peculiarly his, of course, but think instead of how you would do something like that. Think of how the buildings looked and appeared to work when you were a child. Try to think of the city you grew up in without that extra sensitivity to buildings that you have developed since becoming a student in architecture. Think of the map you would draw of your city and what the effective cause of the shape of that map would be: the contingencies of where your parents lived, the demands of your background, your socio-economic position, your parents' concerns, your own bravery to venture out. Think of what size you would give each event in your life, each place. What objects play an important part in that map? How would the events and their places arrange themselves in relation to each other? Would you stay true to the map of your childhood or would you create a new place called 'My life as I wished it had been?' Project your own memories onto a city map and see what happens. Try it.

With the spectacular growth of the city and the invention of the concept of the metropolis and later the megalopolis, new space and time defying inventions began to be introduced, which interfere with our geometrical conception of the world. Euclid's planar geometry is no longer enough even for everyday life: the telephone, the radio, the camera, the movie, the television, the computer, the Internet are devices that transport you into other spaces and other times without moving. Things become near while remaining far away. They again alter the axioms of our existence. They are virtually accessible, which has proved to be accessible enough. People are happy to discard the full experience of the slow walk, and are prepared to abbreviate distance in favor of speed. In fact they create a new kind of map, a map where space is conceptualized and which until then had only been accessible to the sailor. In his One-Way Street Benjamin writes in a short piece called "Stand Up Beer Hall"

Sailors seldom come ashore; service on the high seas is a holiday by comparison with the labour in harbors, where loading and unloading must often be done day and night. When a gang is then given a few hours shore leave it is already dark. At best the cathedral looms like a dark promontory on the way to the tavern. The alehouse is the key to every town; to know where German beer can be drunk is geography and ethnology enough. The German seaman's bar unrolls the nocturnal plan of the city: to find the way from there to the brothel, to the other bars is not difficult. Their names have criss-crossed the mealtime conversations for days. For when a harbor has been left behind, one sailor hoists like little pennants the nicknames of bar and dance halls, beautiful women and national dishes from the next. But who knows whether he will go ashore next time? For this reason, no sooner is the ship declared and moored than tradesmen come aboard with souvenirs: chains and picture-postcards, oil paintings, knives and little marble figures. The city sites are not seen but bought. In the sailor's chests the leather belt from Hong Kong is juxtaposed to a panorama of Palermo and a girl's photo from Stettin. And their real habitat is exactly the same. They know nothing of the hazy distances in which for the bourgeois, foreign lands are enshrouded. What asserts itself in every city is, first, service on board, and then German beer, English shaving soap and Dutch tobacco. Imbued to the marrow with the international norm of industry, they are not the dupes of palms and icebergs. The seaman is sated with close-ups, and only the most exact nuance speak to him. He can distinguish countries better by the preparation of their fish than by the building-styles or landscapes. He is so much at home in detail that the ocean routes where he cuts close to other ships become noisy thoroughfares where you have to give way to traffic. He lives on the open sea in a city where, on the Marseilles Cannebière, a Port Said bar stands diagonally opposite a Hamburg brothel, and the Neapolitan Castel dell'Ovo is to be found on Barcelona's Plaza Cataluña. For officers their native town still holds pride of place. But for the ordinary sailor, or the stoker, the people whose transported labour-power maintains contact with the commodities in the hull of the ship, the interlaced harbors are no longer even a homeland, but a cradle. And listening to them one realizes what mendacity resides in voyaging.

I love that passage; it proves that space might be quantifiable in scientific terms, but in order for such a science to help us in the analysis of our experience of it we need science to be fuller. The point is that telephones, faxes, computers, which abbreviate experience in order to increase the distance that experience is able to cover, are confronting us with the problem that sailors have known for years. Our conception of geometry is definitely non-Euclidean; triangles are triangles only in a heavily conceptualized and abstracted sense. Points connect through the geometry of consciousness and memory. With these machines there is a gain. But what is gained in one way is lost in another. The net-product is mysterious. The wonderful travel across empty oceans dissolves in the mundane pleasures the sailors crave. No longer the dupes of palm trees their loneliness patches together the familiar corners of exotic cities into one transcendent and mundane metropolis of bodily pleasure. The same argument may hold in the new space of the world, after all, it is sex, which at the moment sustains the economy of the Internet. Machines like the computer are a supplement to experience and memory; they allow us to make life fuller under the same conditions that life was made fuller before and then only if we are intimately familiar with the topography of the distortions they impose. Otherwise they merely extend our appetite for more, quicker. That is a gain of sorts. These machines make large cities possible as good places. But beware the sophistication of logistic, social, cultural, commercial and political systems that make large cities possible, become embroiled in our need to express our nature and to forgive a desire for life.

Prost! Proust!

Living together is difficult, and, as Michel Foucault has justly argued, discourse seems to be mostly about the exercise of power over others. Listen to Benjamin's characterization of Marcel Proust's novel La récherche du temps perdu, which is translated into English as: The Remembrance of Things Past but which could be more literally translated as "The search for lost times." The point about the title is that it is a search for something that is lost. Because of the loss, something curious happens in the attempt to remember. Here is Benjamin on Proust:

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

Why use an architectural metaphor here? Picture a honeycomb, then picture a house. What is the essential difference between them? The spaces of a honeycomb do not obey an explicit hierarchy. The spaces of a house do. The honeycomb is a uniform hexagonal grid. Each vessel is exactly the same size. From it emerges an undifferentiated 'swarm of thought'. The volumes of a house obey a hierarchy: a hierarchy of size and arrangement related to purpose and significance. That hierarchy is defined by a complex brief of demands made on the house. The house is the vessel of our substance, that which we own and become. It is our place. The house is of our substance in the same way that seven thousand sheep were Job's substance. In such a house the thoughts can be modulated, expanded, stored, flushed away. The re-ordering the honeycomb of memory is essentially an architectural task. Proust becomes not just the archaeologist of his memory but also its architect. He reconstructs and even constructs his memories and gives them form as an architect gives form to people's daily lives. The result is 'a life'. Life is being subject to a hierarchy.

There is another point to make. Proust's life happened in the city of Paris and among its buildings. Although their presence is not emphatic in the novel, they are rather low profile in fact; the buildings and streets nevertheless serve as the web or framework of his life. Paris too, is Proust's substance, without it, Proust would not have been Proust. Benjamin makes the point that the word Textum, from which we get the word text as well as the word textile, in fact means web or woven fabric in the original Latin from which it came. The city is a web, a piece of woven fabric: a text. And the text of our lives is in turn inscribed on the city and on the house, on the spaces we inhabit. To search for those inscriptions we draw a map, of the city as it exists in tension with our lives. But these inscriptions are overlaid with later changes, partially obscured and altered. We constantly make tiny changes to the city, to our houses, everyday. Those tiny changes accumulate in something called age. Age is the accumulation of tiny changes. Our memory ages and so does the city. In our search for our lives we constantly renew our city and our memory of it. We are the architects of our lives.

There is a homeless and confused man in Liguanea, Kingston. Actually I haven't seen him for some time now, but I used to watch him closely. He was relatively young and wore the things that people passing through his territory discarded: plastic bags, old shoes, orange juice boxes around his arm, shaving foam in his hair, even a large pink ribbon around his private parts once, trophies of change and consumption. He had become obsessed with change. He would spend his days carefully readjusting the stones that had come to be misplaced during the course of the day by the countless feet and tires that would pass through his territory and displace things aimlessly. All this involved making small adjustments, turning a stone there, moving one here. He worked to undo the aging process that was naturally at work in his neighbourhood, through the tiny displacements of everyday movement and exchange. Age is a metaphysical concept, the product of exchange and displacement, the manifestation of the depth and complexity that arises from movement and exchange through the contingencies of proximity obeying the laws of mechanics. It is the process by which cities grow and transform themselves. The confused man in Liguanea was trying to hold the clock. A one-man time machine facing the universe. His madness consists not in the folly of the idea; that requires a poetic imagination. His madness consists in the folly of seriously entertaining its possibility and trying it. That is what genius and madness have in common.

The three elements discussed so far, the personal map, the architecture of memory and the mechanics of age suggest that although the shortest distance between to points might be a straight line in theoretical terms, in creative terms, such theory is a distant and childish memory. The geometry of the city is never Euclidean. It does not obey the laws of the plane and the circle, it's topography is multidimensional and its axioms wild and awesome. The line is chaotic and the relationships it represents are not easily summarized in the sum of the angles. It is the detour, the complications of error and misunderstanding, the contingency of proximity and the dictates of myth that create routes and models which more closely resemble the reality and wealth of the everyday. Benjamin discusses Proust's perverse predilection for deliberate complications. They become quickly emblematic for much modern architecture, which is willfully and deliberately complex: it delights in the complicated, like Proust. Proust too was somebody who delighted in making things difficult. This is a quotation from Benjamin's "The Image of Proust":

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

Functionality cannot be narrowed to the immediate objective; function must negotiate the wild landscape of man's personal myths and beliefs about his place. It is paradoxical that prejudice is the most immovable obstacle to change, and yet it is invisible and weightless. Proust refused to bypass the ceremonial of social/intellectual exclusion in his description, thereby bringing the nature of explanation into focus. Explanation, literally, involves coming out of the plane: ex- planation, it is the transcendence of the plane. Proust's explanation does just that. Instead of making things clear and obstacle free his explanation sets up new boundaries, makes laws of belonging and so shows that the topography of the city is shaped by social institutions, which alter the nature of its geometry, which demand a new set of axioms. I would suggest that much self-conscious 'Architecture' of recent years does just that. It is metaphysics in glass and steel: a dance celebrating intellectual incest.

For those 'in the know' few words are needed to convey difficult concepts. They can be abbreviated. Anyone in the know about the way an address works does not need lengthy descriptions. Anyone who knows the city needs few words and not just any words but colloquially codified abbreviations at that. It is ironic that such a familiarity, such a merging of the object and the viewing subject in fact becomes itself a separation, excluding those who are unfamiliar. This sets up the possibility of a social difference, a possibility that under the provisions of a qualification of Murphy's law will lead to that social difference. But when the movement through a city touches on the deepest universal themes and mysteries, such as lust, desire, love, the pursuit of wealth and status, the giving of directions involves a liturgy. In this way language, accent, idiom and syntax describe a demarcation line between us and them. It is our accent, our idioms, our use of slang which place us with regard to our relative position in society and thereby our position in the city.

The experience of a city is divided along caste and class in the same way that language is. And each class, whatever the criterion along which it divides looks at the other to help define itself. But class is always experienced individually. In Kingston the division between Uptown and Downtown, the concept of area stigma, are two well known phenomena, which illustrate my point. These divisions have become physical in so far as they are manifest. And they are made manifest through the language of architecture, through the language with which people talk and move through the city and through the geographic aspirations people foster, to live there rather than there.

Many architects have made it their special project to question such divisions architecturally, and that is a useful exercise. For example there are now architects in Jamaica who purposefully exploit colour, while the division between uptown and downtown has in the past been enforced by a preference for white and subdued colours versus bright and garish colours. What this will do eventually to the social connotations of colour is not clear as yet. To speculate that the use of colour in buildings will cease to be a point of social division is, I think, naive. And yet the change in perception, whereby people are less certain as to what colour they want their house to be, might involve more than a simple inversion. The geometry of social aspiration seems to spiral. The lowly look up and the uppity, with their confidence, look down again to appropriate for themselves the 'picturesque charm' and philosophical comfort of a poverty they imagine to consist of a blissful simplicity. But nobody ever comes full circle. Small tiny changes will have been made to the techniques of applying the colour, the choice of colours and the value these colours are supposed to represent.

Language and city confront each other more directly in the habits of naming places. James Robertson in his reconstruction of the early years of Spanishtown after the English had taken the city in 1655, noticed strange patterns and habits in the naming of places. The streets were often not given names! On the sketches accompanying the grant of title, surveyors would merely write A Street rather than naming that street. Or they would write to Miss Anne Taylor's or to Colonel whatshisname's. In taking over an existing city none of the traditions of naming obtained. None of the habits of re naming streets after Kings and Queens and landowners had become essential to the appropriation of Spanishtown and the assimilation of it to English expectations. The names that are there now are of a later date. In this way Spanishtown is very different to the original grid of Kingston. The very name of the city Spanish Town expresses not just the alien character of its grid and the longevity of its original Spanish houses. (There were still Spanish structures to be seen some 100 years after the Spanish had moved out) but even the curious lack of conquering zeal. White Church Street was the English name to denote the position of the original Spanish church. The fact that women's names appeared so often on the surveyor's reports was probably due to the habit of plantation owner's coming into the city to do their business and staying with a lady who ran a boarding house or inn and leaving thereafter. Spanishtown was not a residential city and was therefore never properly appropriated. It was an administrative centre. It remained the capital for so long because of inertia and the political tussle between the plantocracy and the merchants, not because it was so conveniently situated. This is reflected in the forms and the present level of neglect as well as the names used within the city.

It is this connection between people's doing and people's dwelling that makes Benjamin such fascinating reading for architects. He will observe a city and discuss the tortuous relationship between the history of form and the history of habits and how these organically linked movements constantly shape each other. In the essay entitled "Some Motifs in Baudelaire" Benjamin analyses the crowd. He does this on a very curious authority. He has noticed that in the poetry of Baudelaire, a poet of the city of Paris, there are no descriptions of the crowd or the city that the crowd inhabits. And yet, both the city and the crowd are always present in his poetry: the crowd usually as something that was there a moment ago, or something that is inscribed in the feeling of a place, but is not actually there at that moment: the deserted street is Benjamin's example. Being deserted lifts the city street out of ordinary experience. Being used or even crowded is the norm. By describing it as deserted, the street becomes the vessel of a memory of something that has been there, and will be there again, but is not there at that moment of experiencing. It is that which gives the street a peculiar quality of loneliness, of aloneness, perhaps of agoraphobia, or whatever.

Baudelaire had become part of the crowd, and no longer saw it as something special. He was a Parisian. But in fact the crowd, if not invented during the nineteenth century, certainly became commonplace during that time. This is the time when cities grew at an extraordinary rate. The crowd emerged as a standard inescapable feature of city life. The first experience of the crowd for those who weren't used to such concentrations of people was rather disconcerting. At length Benjamin quotes Engels from his book The Condition of the Working Class in England:

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

The virtue of 'minding your own business' here becomes the tool of 'a cruel indifference.' Communism was obviously perfected in the provincial mind of a country bumpkin who was unfamiliar with the language of the city, where people mind their own business and make that aspect of their lives visible. When Engels talks of human nature, he does not see that, in fact it is human nature, which created the city animal. What he means when he uses the phrase human nature has nothing to do with Marx's definition of human nature. It is really just a veiled reference to what he (Engels himself and those who think like him) likes and dislikes with reference to what he is used to.

Anonymity, all exclusive purposefulness, doing business and being in a rush constitutes the language of the city dweller. His gestures and method of carrying himself in a city speaks that language of anonymity, of haste, of purpose. He feels at home in it. He likes it. In fact that anonymity is the generous compensation for the loss of the personal space he had to sacrifice in his move from the village to the city. Anonymity is the conceptualization of personal space and such a successful conceptualization that he might with reason dismiss the quiet pace and generous space of the village. As Baudelaire puts it in "Les Foules" ("Crowds") in Petit Poemes en Prose (le spleen de paris): "Qui ne sait pas peupler sa solitude, ne sait pas non plus être seul dans une foule affairée." ("A man who cannot people his solitude is no less incapable of being alone in a crowd.") On the other hand, the person new to city life often feels acutely alienated by it. Engels merely decided to judge what he could not understand. But he struck a chord. There were many that did not and do not understand the city. The city was such a new phenomenon. But during the twenties there were many who, within the guise of progress and modernism, started admiring the energy of cities, loved the virtual space of anonymity. Filmmakers and artists, writers and architects, financiers and economists started simply 'liking the city'. This kind of feeling culminated in 1978 with the publication of Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York, which is a manifesto for hyperdensity and the wonderful world of artifice it requires and creates. The city, if we apply Marx's dictum, is man doing what he does naturally, creating an artificial environment. New York is the epitome of this artificial environment, and it has revealed itself to be immensely creative. Artifice is man's nature.

But, as Benjamin rightly observes, the most common feelings the city inspired were horror, revulsion and fear. It was barbaric, wild: a concrete jungle. He quotes the French author Paul Valéry: "The inhabitant of the great urban centers reverts to a state of savagery - that is - of isolation." The theme was taken rather literally in the film Themrock, which tells the story of a man fired from his job in a paint factory, who rebels against society. He does this by knocking the façade out of his flat in the middle of Paris and beginning a new life as a cave man. It is a deed so provocative, so dangerous to society that the civilized elements are prepared to undertake barbarous acts of violence to prevent him living there like a caveman and they send a whole army to stop this breach of civilization. Rather timely as it turned out because many of his neighbors began to be rather attracted by the idea of living like cavemen. The city is the great jungle.

Benjamin, the ultimate observer, loved to get lost in that jungle. In that getting lost he discovered the nature of life expressing itself in the signs of life: built form, street dress, crowd behaviour, brazen advertising, and so forth. The city is a receptacle of enormous creative potential. I cannot come to any conclusion. This essay was never about conclusions; it was about an opening up. Therefore the conclusion to this essay is in the form of urgent advice. Read Benjamin's descriptions of Paris, Moscow, Naples and Berlin. For in Benjamin's writings the accepted axioms of our experience are constantly undermined by a more sophisticated understanding of the landscape we walk. I think that Paul Klee's "Leaf from the book of cities" illustrates rather well the possibilities of this way of looking .

Sources & Notes:

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

[1] This essay represents an elaboration of a lecture introducing the thought of Walter Benjamin to the M.A. students of the Caribbean School of Architecture, who have taught me more than I would care to admit in public. I would very much like to thank my mentor Dr. Thomas A.P. van Leeuwen for having introduced me to Benjamin and Professor Ivor Smith for making me think differently about design.

[2] In set theory in mathematics the rectangular set represents the universal set which contains all elements that are being considered in any discussion, c.f. M.F. Triola, Mathematics and the Modern World, Menlo Park, Calif., 2nd ed. 1978, p. 27.

[3] This attitude actually has an illustrious past. Montaigne in his preface to the Essays makes a similar claim.

[4] This image comes from George Eliot's description of Dr. Lydgate in her novel Middlemarch (1871-1872).

[5] "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction," 1936.

Return to Index

Back to the Walter Benjamin Research Syndicate Homepage