Posted on November 29th, 2008 in musings and tagged architecture, art, memory, walter benjamin
I recently discovered a remarkable (to me, anyway) connection between my past and the past of Walter Benjamin — or rather, my past as reconstructed in images drawn out of memory and Benjamin’s as recounted in a memoir (of images) of his childhood in Berlin. What we share is a vivid, vital, shadowy architectural space, one which looms somewhat significantly in my intellectual and creative evolution as it seems to anchor both a sense of loss and an aboriginal permanence in the early life of Benjamin the expatriate. Thinking back to his youth in the city of his birth, he writes in “Berlin Childhood around 1900″ (excerpt available) of the loggia, that classically modeled transitional space wavering in between interior and exterior depending upon the relative push and pull of light and dark, warmth and coolness. Here, he remarks on the loggia as memory space:
In the years since I was a child, the loggias have changed less than other places. This is not the only reason they stay with me. It is much more on account of the solace that lies in their uninhabitability for one who himself no longer has a proper abode. They mark the outer limit of the Berliner’s lodging. Berlin — the city god itself — begins in them. The god remains such a presence there that nothing transitory can hold its ground beside him. In his safekeeping, space and time come into their own and find each other. Both of them lie at his feet here. The child who was once their confederate, however, dwells in his loggia, encompassed by this group, as in a mausoleum long intended just for him.
My explicit engagement with architecture and memory began with the above image of a loggia, sketched shortly after returning from a year abroad in Rome as an undergraduate. The loggia held a similar fascination for me as a very particular container of memory, a representation capable of describing the relationship between memory and architecture. (Albeit often suffused with nostalgia and romanticism; it became my task later to problematize such notions and investigate the politics of memory, both personal and collective.) This image led to the construction of other images of architecture — half-remembered, half-invented, part literary, part autobiographical, part who-knows-what — and then provoked me to enter grad school to actually study architecture and understand the role of memory in the practice and theory of architecture. In the preface to my master’s thesis — ostensibly about 20th century Italian architect Aldo Rossi — I recalled this potent remembered architectural image in order to begin an exploration of how we make meaning in the buildings and spaces we inhabit:
Later, there was a time when architecture happened to me and I became conscious of its happening. I remember it. I remembered it. Meaning, I first became conscious of architecture happening to me as it happened to me in my memory. Meaning, the architecture was just an image, but an image of such profound significance that it single-handedly provoked me to embark on what can only be called my “life’s work” — meaning architecture. Meaning meaning. Meaning building. Meaning building. Building meaning. Making meaning out of the memory of architecture.
Curiously, I first noticed architecture as it appeared to me in an image, as a brief flash in my memory. I was a painter; I quickly drew it on paper. Where did it come from? It was familiar yet vague; it was the place I had never been but revisited everyday for the past year. Some ancient loggia in Italy — in Cinque Terre, by the sea? or in Rome, on the bank of the Tiber? (The previous year, I had lived in Rome and studied art and art history.) I became obsessed with the image. I made paintings about it, returning to it, exploring it (at this time I was working in a dingy studio in the midst of a very cold and gray Philadelphia winter).
It’s satisfying to me to unexpectedly share the loggia with Benjamin in this way. Like most young art students, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” was one of my earliest introductions to art theory in general and critical theory in particular (I serve it up to my undergraduate students as well). I’ve found solace and inspiration in the richness of his multivalent reveries; I’ve wandered the streets of Berlin with his words and ideas supporting my own thoughts; I’ve imagined the stalls of Les Halles while thumbing the pages of his Arcades Project; I’ve wrestled with his political philosophy. This latest reengagement with Benjamin is borne of a current video project dealing with the structure of memory and a summer spent in Berlin and small recorded fragments of everyday life, and I find that his words say more effectively the things that I am thinking:
Language shows clearly that memory in not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. [...] (from “A Berlin Chronicle”)
Posted on November 9th, 2008 in musings and
Since last Tuesday night I have been trying to steal a few moments to ruminate on the election of Barack Obama as the next president of the United States. Of course, the post-election commentary is voluminous, insightful, nuanced, maybe ignominious, even hateful, and apparently emitting from a range of perspectives that spans the globe. What could one add to this sea of voices? In doing so, I merely document the event with a few brief impressions and as likely many questions. I am provoked by other missives from out there in the digital ether (actually, a couple of Chicagoans: Dan Wang and Heath Schultz, and some chatter on Nettime) whose thoughtfulness and perspectives are appreciated and helpful.
The image of Obama on that stage in Grant Park before tens of thousands, standing before them as the first black man to be elected president, was powerful (and hyper-constructed, as his political representation has so skillfully been). Even more touching was the moment when his family joined him and darted about with warm smiles and vigorous embraces — how wonderful, how momentous to see all of those black faces on that stage in commemoration of his victory! His oratory was characteristically intelligent, adept, and affecting, full of rhetorical flourishes and a vernacular cadence that channeled the great black orators of those generations that struggled before to prepare his way. Yet, his words and demeanor were also somber (as many have already pointed out) and nuanced as he sought to prepare us for the truly daunting challenges this country faces. Absorbing that media event, I felt genuinely moved by the result of this election, momentarily drunk on the optimistic rhetoric (and images) of “hope” and “change” and reveling in its historic grandiosity.
Apparently, I sober up pretty quick, because, while Obama’s achievement is impressive, it must be understood within the context of a demonstrably corrupt and increasingly militarized and corporatized neoliberal political system. Yes, Obama won — and I may take pleasure at that because I support the winning side this time — but he won in no small part because of his superior gamesmanship, by playing the game better than his opponents. The rules of this political and electoral game have absolutely not changed. A more productive “hope” we might have now is that under this new leadership there might arise the possibility to change the nature of the American political system. Will Obama work to change the rules of the game now that he has been elected? Will the Clintonites with whom he is apparently surrounding himself change the rules? Will they change the rules (as Bush did) to consolidate and secure power, or to distribute power? Emerging from the hazy warmth of the election, I ask: With this incredibly significant democratic event, how do we leverage this slight shift towards the Center-Left to do the work that needs to be done in order to (re)build a civil society where economic and social justice extend to all of our fellow citizens? How can we work to open up authentic spaces for participation, discourse, and difference?
For example: I was interested to hear Glenn Loury speaking with Bill Moyers on his Journal program last week about all of the issues that have not been thoughtfully discussed during the course of the campaign. Loury says: “We draw lines and boundaries about what is legitimate and illegitimate to be said. And then we conduct our political conversations mindful of those boundaries. And often times profoundly important, substantive matters get left by the wayside.” He then offers as an example of an often ignored issue the epidemic of incarceration in the US and how a disproportionate percentage of those in prison are black men and other minorities. Underlying the monolithic vagaries of “the economy” and “energy innovation” and “health care,” there are the complexities of such issues like incarceration which demand sustained and systemic attention in order to change deep structural inequities in our society. Thinking back over the last two years (gasp!) of this campaign, I find it difficult to identify anything resembling substantive discourse that occurred within the narrow confines of the campaign scripts.
While reading among the pages of Group Material’s Democracy project, I came across a reprinted Letter to the Editor written 20 years ago in the New York Times by Mark P. Petracca (an Asst. Professor of Politics and Soceity at UC-Irvine at the time). He responds to an article which apparently lambastes the American electorate for its huge failure to vote in recent elections. He writes:
Electoral politics is the politics of inclusion; elections incorporate and co-opt the citizenry in a stable and nondisruptive form of political participation. Definitions of democracy and good governance that focus on electoral participation are a potent instrument for social control. Elections offer the illusion of participation in exchange for political quiesence. In sum, they limit and constrain our interactions with our government — substituting subordination for the promised liberation of participatory democracy. Electoral involvement does not necessarily empower its participants; rather it tends to create power over them.
Millions of citizens donated small amounts of money and greater amounts of volunteer time toward Obama’s campaign and his ultimate victory. (I am not included among them.) While I am inclined to agree with Petracca’s assessment of electoral politics, there does seem to be an amazing amount of potential energy located within the masses of Obama volunteers (some veteran activists, some political newbies), and this energy may be productively applied towards true grass-roots social and political change. Whether or not President Obama aggressively pursues a more open, democratic, and just society (through both policy and tone), we must pursue it. We, as an engaged citizenry, must hold his administration accountable and apply the necessary critical perspective. We must participate locally (and globally), not only for the narrow goals of getting our guy elected but more importantly for the building of a just society and a progressive democracy.
Postscript: I must finally recommend Rebecca Solnit’s reaction to the election as well (which I’ve just read after writing most of the above). Her thoughts are pragmatic and measured, and for me present circumspect call to action that lands somewhere between the ecstasy of the current Obamamania and the cantankerousness of some of the radical Left’s extreme skepticism.
Posted on September 20th, 2008 in musings and
Today is Friday, September 19, 2008. The miscellaneous preoccupies my mind. An onslaught of fragments, non-discursive missives from the ether, synapses popping like fireworks after our team wins the series. Thinking in terms of Twitter and status updates, most of which are never committed to the Archive at all, yet linger in the halls like boys late locked out of homeroom. Simply, I am mixed. Not mixed up — mixed. It is the drawer in the corner cabinet in the back room into which we throw…
“(a) belonging to the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.”
Borges, how wonderful it is to make a list! For what, for why? The most basic of organizational structures. A student reminded me today that even the analog reduces to the digital at a certain microscopic scale. Or was it vice versa? My brain feels digital, appears a thing separate, a digitized, pixelated representation of a thing we thought so smooth, of such fine resolution. A thing that should not be a thing at all, not something separate, not something to behold, to regard from a distance. Cleaved from consciousness by the Enlightenment and doomed forever to walk anti-animistically from point to point to point to point to point in Descartes’ denuded grid space. Then the gray beard emerges from the forest of Brookland — and why would I think of him now, after so long? — and his voice is familiar. We used to nod to each other on the ferry. It’s nostalgia doubled-down, I know. The swollen afternoons in a languid institutional classroom, a coolness on the faux wood laminate, the boisterous barks of an impassioned educator who gives you the bird, you bitch, cuz you just wouldn’t drive on through!
“The past and present wilt – I have fill’d them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.
Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute
longer.)
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
Personally, I would have ended with an exclamation point, but my sense of timing is really so bad. A list is digital; it contains discrete elements. Patterns emerge. Provisional patterns. Patent, or tacit. I’ve looked for patterns, for meaning. The miscellaneous is lazy. The miscellaneous is a myth. One cannot escape the luxuriousness of the semantic web. With points for correct punctuation.
(What is — what has been — the voice here until this point?)
Whitman was an American poet, maybe the first. Melville was an American novelist. Near perfect contemporaries, they understood space. “I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy” wrote Charles Olson in Call Me Ishmael. The story of the white devil VS. the demon savior Ahab is the story of America. America the abyss. When he spiked the gold doubloon on the mast, our fate was set, our free will annihilated — we would all go down in the sinking ship. All except one: the one who lives to tell the tale. Ishmael. “God listens” — what perfect literary symmetry.
So, who you gonna vote for? Everything I’ve ever read I regurgitate and spew forth. A chewed cud of vile taste, formless and without color. I can imagine the fluid scrape of the pen on bleached and blue-ruled notebook paper, an endless itinerary of ascents and descents, loops and crosses, but all I hear is the dull and plastic tick tack of branded backlit QWERTY keys. Could someone possibly have made this for me? An exercise: let’s make a list of everybody in this place. Tens of millions of people — people beloved, genuinely beloved, by Whitman — millions of ideas and loves and hates and all the rest. Now let’s organize our list according to two categories so that we can really understand these folks. Strawberry cola drinkers or blueberry cola drinkers but we all like cola of course. I know you, you drink blueberry cola. But in that other place they only have blackberry cola to drink and only drink it in small draughts in between shifts working at the branded backlit QWERTY keyboard factory. Honestly, I don’t drink cola much these days…
Patterns of coercion. Square pegs in round holes. A worldview we did not choose infected us and made us trust it implicitly as the natural order of things. (We fancied ourselves so sophisticated, so savvy, so cynical as to be unmoved but the paradigm was fused with our very fiber.) The great tumultuous accumulation of everyone who ever said “No!” beckons us to break those patterns, to suggest provisional patterns, other ontologies. Chop down the main-mast, shred the sails, melt down the gold… embrace the waves, the thrill of being tossed to and fro. Seasick at first, but finding sea legs soon enough. Again, the poet sings:
Here are our thoughts, voyagers’ thoughts,
Here not the land, firm land, alone appears, may then by them be
said,
The sky o’erarches here, we feel the undulating deck beneath our
feet,
We feel the long pulsation, ebb and flow of endless motion,
The tones of unseen mystery, the vague and vast suggestions of the
briny world, the liquid-flowing syllables,
The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the melancholy
rhythm,
The boundless vista and the horizon far and dim are all here,
And this is ocean’s poem.
Nothing is arbitrary. Nothing remains miscellaneous.
