Introduction (Table of Contents)
Sources
Reyner Banham Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Pelican: NY, 1971 (1976), 256 pp., See Text
Amit Chaudhuri In the Waiting-Room of History a review of Dipesh Chakrabarty Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, London Review of Books 24 June 2004, p. 3, 2004b, See Text
Lorraine Daston Are you having fun today? Robert Merton and Elinor Barber The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A study in sociological semantics and the sociology of science Princeton: NJ, 2004, London Review of Books, 23 September 2004, p. 29 and 31. See Text
David Gebhard and Robert Winter A Guide to Architecture in Los Angeles & Southern California, Peregrine Smith: Santa Barbara, 1977, 728pp. See Text
Laurence Goldstein, The American poet at the movies: a critical history, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1994, 272 pp., Introduction, 1922, 1915 See Text
Jim Heimann Sins of the City: The Real Los Angeles Noir, Chronicle Books: San Francisco, CA, 1999, 159pp., Introduction See Text
Richard Howard Los Angeles Times Book Review, 28 March 2004, Rachel Cohen's A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Artists and Writers, 1854-1967, Random House: NY, 2004, 366 pp., 2004. See Text
Ingersoll's Century History Santa Monica Bay Cities (Being Book Number Two of Ingersoll's Century Series of California Local History Annals), 1908, 1908a, Preface, See Text
J.B. Jackson The Timing of Towns, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 4 See Text
Mark E. Kann Middle Class Radicalism in Santa Monica, Temple University Press: Philadelphia, 1986. 322 pp., See Text
Paul J. Karlstrom and Susan Ehrlich Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists 1920-1956, Barry M. Heisler Introduction Santa Barbara Museum of Art 1990, Introduction See Text
Jed Perl The Urban Mirror: Robert Alter Imagined Cities: Urban Experiences and the Language of the Novel, Yale University Press, 2005?, The New York Times Book Review, 19 June 2005, p. 9 See Text
Kelyn Roberts Comment on Diebenkorn Criticism, Ocean Park Anthology, 2004, 1980s, 1970, 1960s See Text
Lionel Rolfe Literary L.A., Chronicle Books: San Francisco, 1981. 102 pp., Intro See Text
James L. Rolleston The Politics of Quotation: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, PMLA, 104, 1, January, 1989, pp. 13-25 See Text
Andrea Schulte-Peevers and David Peevers Los Angeles, Lonely Planet: Oakland, 2nd ed., 1996 (1999), 351pp., See Text
Comments
"In his California Synchromies, Macdonald-Wright brings his early discoveries to a state of perfection. Now, as before, color determines structure and obliges other elements to submit to its control. Operating as a spatial force, it grants forms plasticity. As the artist observed: "Form to me is color . . . I conceive space itself as of a plastic significance that I express in color. Form not being simply the mass of each object seen separately, I organize my canvas as a solid block as much in depth as laterally.
"Clearly, color and form in these Synchromies function synergistically to yield an interwoven field in the mode of the late Cezanne. Luminous hues, harmonically grouped, give the impression of tiny, bright rainbows adrift in a moist atmosphere . . .
". . . [These paintings] sustain a light, impalpable air. Blithely, they accurately capture a sense of place-of gullies and bluffs sheathed in soft haze, of villas stacked on palisades overlooking cool bays. Gauzy white patches powder the fields to evoke Santa Monica's ambient fog. The manner in which they blanket the forms recalls the Oriental landscape painting which the artist admired. The gaps that they create on the surface thus might be read, not as negative voids, but as resonant regions of light in accord with their Eastern models." -Karlstrom and Ehrlich, 1990
Anybody who was nearly everybody . . . Probably because they were easily connected and because no one stayed around so that coming and going was bound to result in one or two misses and that with a litttle digging . . . K. Roberts
Documents
Reyner Banham Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Pelican: NY, 1971 (1976), 256 pp.
[The author] aimed . . . to present the architecture . . . within the topographical and historical context of the total artifact that constitutes Greater Los Angeles, because it is this double context that binds the polymorphous . . .
" . . . One can . . . begin by learning the local language; and the language . . . in Los Angeles is the language of movement. Mobility outweighs monumentality . . . and the city will never be understood by those who cannot move fluently through its diffuse urban texture . . . p. 23
" . . . no city has ever been produced by such an extraordinary mixture of geography, climate, economics, demography, mechanics and culture . . . p. 24
" . . . because the Southern Californians came . . . overland to Los Angeles . .
" . . . this giant city, which has grown almost simultaneously all over, is that all its parts are equal and equally accessible from all other parts at once. Everyday commuting tends less and less to move by the classic systole and diastole in and out of downtown, more and more to move by an almost random . . . motion over the whole area. " p. 36
2. Ecology I: Surfurbia
"The Beaches are what other metropolises should envy in Los Angeles, more than any other aspect of the city. From Malibu to Balboa almost continuous white sand beach runs for seventy-odd miles, nearly all of it open to public access, much less of it encroached upon by industry {although} . . . the sea is too handy a dumping ground for cost-cutting industries and public 'services.' . . . Los Angeles is the greatest City-on-the-Shore in the world; its only notable rival . . . is Rio de Janeiro . . .
"In the long view of geological time, Los Angeles has only recently emerged from the ocean; most of what is now the Greater Los Angeles basin was below sea-level in Jurassic times, and has been hoisted into the sunshine by a prolonged geological lifting process . . . p.37
"But Los Angeles . . . was an inland foundation that suddenly began to leap-frog to the sea in the railway age, establishing on the shoreline sub-cities that initiated its peculiar pattern of many-centered growth. Angelenos (and others) hurried down to the beaches for health and recreation, then decided to stay when they discovered the railways had made it possible to commute . . .
"Both Hollywood's marketable commercial fantasies, and those private ones . . . have left their marks on the Angel City, but Hollywood brought something that all other fantasists needed-technical skill and resources in converting fantastic ideas into physical realities . . . much of Shangri-la had to be built in three dimensions, the spiral ramps of the production numbers of Busby Berkeley musical spectaculars had to support the weight of a hundred girls in silver top hats . . . pp. 124 and 125
"This business of showing the plant to visitors as a tourist attraction has spread beyond the movie industry . . . p. 127
". . . All the skill, cunning, salesmanship, and technical proficiency are there.
". . . this undistinguished townscape and its underlying flat topography were quite essential in producing the distinctively Angeleno ecologies that surround it on every side. In a sense it is a great service area feeding and supplying the foothills and beaches-across its flatness of instant track-laying ballast, the first five arms of the railroad system were spread with as little difficulty as toy trains on the living room carpet, and later the Pacific Electric inter-urban lines, and later still the freeways. The very first railroad of all in the area, the Wilmington line, ran down across the plains to the harbour, but it was the Long Beach line of the Pacific Electric with its spurs to Redondo and San Pedro and its entanglements with the Los Angeles Pacific (which it bought out in 1906) which really began the great internal network that used the plains to link downtown, the foothills, and the beaches into a single comprehensible whole.
"Watts was the very centre of all this action, a key junction and interchange between the long distance trunk routes, the inter-urbans and the street railways. . . . " p. 173
(Back to Sources)
Amit Chaudhuri In the Waiting-Room of History a review of Dipesh Chakrabarty Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, London Review of Books 24 June 2004, p.3
" . . .
". . . Walter Benjamin thought photographs changed our perception of human movement:
"Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no idea at all what happens during the fraction of a second when a person actually takes a step. Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious; just as we discover the instinctual subconscious through psychoanalysis." [The last analogy seems tacked on to me, and of little use. KR]
". . . Benjamin goes on to say in a late essay Theses on the Philosophy of History, "The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time."
" . . . he [suggested] an alternative version of modernity and space in his description of the flâneur, the Parisian arcades and 19th-century street life. . . . The flâneur, indeed, retards and parodies the idea of 'progress'. But [the flâneur] did not prevail; Taylor, who popularised the watchword "Down with dawdling", carried the day. Theflâneur views history subversively; he-and it is usually he-deliberately relocates its meanings, its hierarchies. As far back as 1929, Benjamin had explained why the flâneurhad to be situated in Paris:
"The flâneur is the creation of Paris. The wonder is that it was not Rome. But perhaps in Rome even dreaming is forced to move along streets that are too well-paved. and isn't the city too full of temples, enclosed squares and national shrines to be able to enter undivided into the dreams of the passer-by, along with every shop sign, every flight of steps and every gateway? The great reminiscences, the historical frissons-these are all so much junk to the flâneur, who is happy to leave them to the tourist. And he would be happy to trade all his knowledge of artist' quarters, birthplaces and princely palaces for the scent of a single weathered threshold or the touch of a single tile-that which any old dog carries away."
" . . . Benjamin doesn't romanticise the primitive . . . instead, he comes up with a particularly modern form of aleatoriness and decay in the 'weathered threshold' of a Parisian street.
"Of course, the flâneur was not to be found in Paris alone. There was much wayward loitering in at least two colonial cities, Dublin and Calcutta. . . . Calcutta would have probably been difficult for Benjamin to imagine. Benjamin's figure for the flâneur was Baudelaire, and for Baudelaire-and, by extension, for the flâneur-the East was, as it was for Henri Rousseau, part dreamscape, part botanical garden, part menagerie, part paradise. Could the flâneur exist in that dreamscape? Dipesh Chakrabarty, the author of Provincialising Europe, [writes] an elegy for, and a subtle critique of, his own intellectual formation and inheritance as a Bengali. The kind of Bengali who was synonymous with modernity and who believed that modernity might be a universal condition-irrespective of whether you're English, Indian, Arab or African-has now passed into extinction. Chakrabarty's book is in part a discreet inquiry into why that potent Bengali dream didn't quite work-why 'modernity' remains so resolutely European.
" . . .
" . . . Europe is at once a means of intellectual dominance, an obfuscatory trope and a constituent of self-knowledge, in different ways for different people and histories.
"Said's great study [Orientalism] takes its cue from the many-sided and endlessly absorbing Foucault, in its inexhaustible conviction and its curiosity about how a body of knowledge . . . can involve the exercise of power. [This approach seems somewhat used up. Chakrabarty seems post-structuralist and Derridean, and it rehearses a key moment in Derrida: the idea that it is necessary to dismantle or take on the language of 'Western metaphysics, . . . but there is no alternative language available with which to dismantle it-so that the language must be turned on itself.
" . . .
" . . . Historicism-and even the modern, European idea of history-one might say, came to non-European peoples in the 19th c. as somebody's way of saying 'not yet' to somebody else.' . . . John Stuart Mill . . . proclaimed self-rule as the highest form of government and yet argued against giviing Indian or Africans self-rule since they were not yet civilized enough to rule themselves. . . thus consigning [them] and other rude nations to the waiting room of history."
" . . . Gandhi . . .when asked what he thought of Western Civilization thought it would be a good idea. . . . Tharoor writes, "India is not an underdeveloped country. It is a highly developed country in an advanced state of decay" . . .
". . .
[The literature of colonialism, J.S, Mill, Naipaul, Conrad, Forster is about 'waiting,' 'not now,' 'not yet,' 'an echo,' 'not real.']
" . . .
" . . . The translator and scholar William Jones called Kalidasa, the greatest Indian poet and dramatist of antiquity, the "Shakespeare of the East." To do this, Jones had to reverse history -Kalidasa preceded Shakespeare by more than a thousand years. Jones is not so much making a useful (a supremely approbatory) comparison as telling us inadvertently that it's impossible to escape 'homogeneous, empty time:' that as far as Kalidasa is concerned Shakespeare has already happened . . .
"The 'first in English, then elsewhere' paradigm . . made the processs of modernisation seem . . like mimicry. "We pretend to be real, to be learning, to be preparing ourselves for life, we mimic men of the New World," Naipaul [writes]. . . . the exuberantly impenetrable Homi Bhabha in Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse . . . tries to rescue the idea of mimicry to make it subversive: mimicry undermines the colonisers' gaze by presenting him with a distorted reflection . . .
" . . . to provincialise Europe is not to vanquish or conquer it . . . but a means of locating and subjecting to interrogation some of the fundamental notions by which we define ourselves.
" . . . [the narrator of The Mimic Men]. . . writing something like his memoirs, is . . . haunted, even entrapped by the language called 'Europe.' It's not a life story he wishes to compose. My first instinct was towards the writing of history . . . I have read that it was a saying of an ancient Greek that the first requisite for happiness was to be born in a famous city. . . . Even memory, the site of renewal for the Romantics and Modernists, is deceptive. . . . memory is 'discursively constituted,' and has its own truth. . . .
" . . .
" . . . in the chapter Adda: A History of Sociality . . . (pronounced 'uddah') is translated as "a place for careless talk for boon companions" or "the chats of intimate friends."
""By many standards of judgment in modernity, adda is a flawed social practice: it is predominately male in its modern form in public life; it is oblivious of the materiality of labour in capitalism; and midde-class addas are usually forgetful of the working classes. Some Bengalis even see it as as practice that promotes sheer laziness . . .
" . . . Both adda and flânerie are activities whose worth is ambivalent in a capitalist society: they rupture the 'march of progress.' Flânerie is 'dawdling', and adda a waste of time . . . Neither flânerie nor adda is a purely physical or mental activity; both are reconfigurings of urban space. The flâneur . . . walked about the Parisian arcades of the 19th c. . . . as if they were extensions of his living room: he blurred the line dividing inside from outside. . . adda took place in drawing rooms, in such a way as to disrupt domesticity and turn the interior into a sort of public space; or on the rawak or porches of houses in cramped lanes . . .
"Benjamin's relationship to the flâneur and his subterranean affirmation of daydreaming in his meditations on flânerie lend his work an odd poignancy and ambivalence; given that Benjamin was a Marxist, the flâneur could never be wholly legitimate either outside or inside his work . . . Chakrabarty's concerns . . . modernity, adda, and the shadow of Benjamin's flâneur . . . occupy a similarly ambivalent position in relationship to his provenance . . . It is the ambiguity of Chakrabarty's own position as both a critic and archivist of modernity that give his study its poetic undertow and its intelligent irresponsibility."
(Back to Sources)
Lorraine Daston Are you having fun today? Robert Merton and Elinor Barber The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A study in sociological semantics and the sociology of science Princeton: NJ, 2004, London Review of Books, 23 September 2004, p. 29 and 31.
" . . . For many centuries, curiosity was a forbidden pleasure (recall Eve and Pandora), but a pleasure nonetheless. It was precisely its aimless yet addictive quality that rendered curiositas suspect among medieval and Renaissance theologians; when Thomas Aquinas wrote of the scholarly virtues, he preferred sedentary studiositas, with its diligent Sitzfleisch associations, to roaming curiositas. Even after curiosity was redeemed as an intellectual virtue in the 17th and 18th centuries, its most enthusiastic proponents admitted that it was voracious; Hobbes callled it 'a Lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continuall and indefatigable generation of Knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnall Pleasure.' Like avarice, curiosity is dangerously insatiable; like lust, it is capricious and changable in its objects. Like the scientific research it propels-and like fashion-it is hungry for novelties. Serendipity of Walpole's sort is nourished by cavalier curiosity, and its distinctive pleasures, like those of curiosity, are those of the perpetual hunt. . . . the masters of serendipty are, like the princes of Serendip, on the move, if only from one book to another."
" . . .
"Walpole believed serendipity to be a peculiar talent of his. He was so lacking in drive that Victorian readers of his correspondence thought him frivolous and lazy. Hazlitt pronounced Walpole's heart and mind as cluttered with curios as his house at Strawberry Hill; Macaulay was exasperated by his sloth and snobbery: 'Serious business was a trifle to him, and trifles were his serious business.' 'Serious upon trifles' is a reproach that has been hurled at naturalists and antiquarians fascinated by empirical minutiae since at least the 17th century. Leisured, rambling curiosity, indulged over decades, turned serendipity into a habit for Walpole. Despite Merton's hopes, . . . there is hardly an extant institution of higher learning that would tolerate research as a life-long random walk . . . The language of serendiptiy stresses instantaneity, the moment of revelation. Yet 'moment' may be the wrong unit of time to capture the pace and workings of serendipity. There is no straight line to serendipity, only a slow, erratic amble." p. 31
{Consider the flaneur . . . }
(Back to Sources)
Jim Heimann Sins of the City: The Real Los Angeles Noir, Chronicle Books: San Francisco, CA, 1999, 159 pp. Introduction
Noir Writers
" . . . Few of the writers were natives. Authors such as Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West, John Fante, Evelyn Waugh, and Aldous Huxley drew inspiration from local news accounts. The tales were there for the asking. The local rags and newpapers published the city's dirtiest laundry. . . . early writers of the noir culled these stories, adding the chaos and cynicism of the corrupt city, . . .
"Later, a new crop of writers such as John Gregory Dunne, Walter Mosley, and James Ellroy . . . From the dreams and nightmares of the real city they crafted fact into fiction, and the photographs substantiated their writings." p. 156
The Photographers:
"Early in the twentieth century, the city was filled with daily tabloids: the Los Angeles Times, the Daily News, the Mirror, the Examiner, the Herald, the Hollywood Citizen. Photographers such as Delmar Watson represented the typical news photographer. George Watson, Delmar's uncle, worked initially for the Times later becoming manager of Pacific and Atlantic Photos, a forerunner of United Press International Wire Photos. One of the town's most aggressive news photographers, George Watson shot the region's most acclaimed personalities, events, disasters, and crimes. Delmar Watson described the Los Angeles shooting scene as one that was free form and filled with spontaneous decision making. Bruce Henstell* in his book Sunshine and Wealth quotes Daily News editor Matt Weinstock describing his newspaper's staff of ten photographers as uncontrollable: they "could terrorize everyone with flash powder which after the explosion filled the vicinity with throat-searing smoke."
"After the war and into the fifties, stringers for East Coast scandal sheets such as Confidential shot viciously unflattering celeb shots, or anything else that looked like a story. Forerunners of today's paparazzi they were an unorganized group who were an unwelcome intrusion around town.
"A few commercial photographers, in the course of their assignments, caught another side of the Southland: the posed and precise Los Angeles. The Mott, Dick Whitington, Merge, and other studios produced some of the most enduring images of L.A. A studied treatment was given to tourist attractions, architecture, movie premieres, grocery store openings, flossed-up streets, and hand shaking politicians. Together with the freewheeling newspaper photographers, they captured the genuine Los Angeles noir." p.158
(Back to Sources)
Ingersoll's Century History Santa Monica Bay Cities (Being Book Number Two of Ingersoll's Century Series of California Local History Annals), 1908, 1908a, Preface
The writing of history is not the thought or work of a day, but rather the diligent pursuance of a fixed and determined purpose. The writer of fiction may work from an inspiration based upon a fertile imagination; the newspaper writer is the chronicler of current events; the descriptive writer of travel pictures that which he then and there observes; but the historian makes a truthful record of the past, stating only that which has actually transpired. He indulges in no ideals, must be keen in discrimination, never self-opinionated or self-assertive, must be untiring in research, a faithful, patient, plodding gleaner of facts and an inherent lover of the truth. Lacking these virtues he is without his calling.
(Back to Sources)
J.B. Jackson The Timing of Towns, Architecture California, 14. no. 2, November 1992, p. 4
"Most foreign visitors to the United States eventually come to like us. It is our landscape that bewilders them and that they find hard to understand. They are repelled by its monotony, by the long, straight roads and highways, the immense, rectangular fields, and the lonely white farmhouses, all very much alike. They remind us that in Europe, every city has its own individuality, whereas in this country, it is often hard to distinguish one city from another. With the possible exceptions of Boston, New Orleans, and San Francisco, cities not only lack architectural variety, but they are also lacking in landmarks and in neighborhoods of unique character. We are often asked, how we who live in the midst of such urban monotony can have any sense of place whatsoever.
[p. 8] . . . Let me quote from Paul Tillich:
"The power of space is great, and it is always active for creation and destruction. It is the basis of the desire of any group of human beings to have a place of their own, a place which gives them a reality, presence, power of living, which feeds them, body and soul. This is the reason for the adoration of earth and soil, not of soil generally but of this special soil, and not of earth generally bu of the divine powers connectedc with this special section of earth . . . But every space is limited, and so the conflict arises between the limited space of any human group, even of mankind itself, and the unlimited claim which follows from the definition of this space . . . Tragedy and injustice belong to the gods of space, historical fulfillment and justice belong to the God who acts in time and through time, uniting the separated spaces of his universe in love."
(Back to Sources)
Mark E. Kann Middle Class Radicalism in Santa Monica, Temple University Press: Philadelphia, 1986. 322pp.,
" . . . One can bicycle down to old Main Street and be transported back to the 1890s by its wooded storefronts and stained glass windows, Victorian restorations, period restaurants, and sidewalk vendors. . . . The more contemporary consumer can choose between Santa Monica Place, a new indoor center featuring major chain outlets, chic boutiques and gallleries, an lots of roofed-in greenery designed by a famous local architect . . .
"One item regularly produced and consumed in Santa Monica is culture. Simply living in Santa Monica is a form of cultural enrichment. One's neighbors are likely to be interesting if not important people in the world of ideas and the arts. The city houses an incredible concentration of scientists, professors, journalists and writers, architects, designers, doctors, and lawyers as well as producers and directors, actors, dancers, sculptors, painters, and artisans. These "captains of culture" for the Southern California region and beyond form a critical mass of support for public and commercial performances. Many of them contribute time, talents, and money to city cultural affairs, and many patronize the experimental theaters that germinate there. Furthermore, their avocational interests compose the demand that attracts an abundant supply of private schools and lessons that cater to middle class hobbyists.
"The source for Santa Monica's middle class affluence, consumption, and culture is marketable intellectual skills. . . ." pp. 6, 7
"Southern California was founded on corporate promotion schemes that converted the climate into a marketable commodity and made rapid expansion the main business of the region. Santa Monica was also produced by corporate entrepreneurs who sought to control the city's future in order to reap monopolistic profits. But their bid failed, and early Santa Monica history is marked by a small town autonomy and a small business dominance that stood in sharp contrast to nearby burgeoning Los Angeles. Not until the post-World War II period was Santa Monica caught up in the maelstrom of regional growth. Local autonomy was eroded as the regional marketplace overspilled local boundaries; small business dominance was undermined by an influx of middle class professionals and managers, themselves escaping an unhappy existence in the metropolis. The result, by the 1970s, was a fragmented social structure and a political vacuum that created new opportunities for radicals who could appeal to middle class discontents." p. 29
(Back to Sources)
David Gebhard and Robert Winter A Guide to Architecture in Los Angeles & Southern California, Peregrine Smith: Santa Barbara, 1977, 728pp,
"The war years also set the stage for an increased dispersal of population. In 1941 the Los Angeles Regional Planning Commission drew up the basic guidelines for development in the next quarter century. Los Angeles was not supposed to be a classical city, with one or two centers but a complex entity with a variety of commercial and industrial centers. The region was to continue to stress the single-family house. To realize this scheme, the private automobile was to be cultivated as the major means of transportation. All this meant a complete devotion to freeways. . . . By the seventies when the building tapered off due to the economy and a growing skepticism, almost everyone in Los Angeles was less than four miles from a freeway, the goal of the transportation experts." p. 27
(Back to Sources)
Laurence Goldstein, The American poet at the movies: a critical history, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1994, 272 pp., 1922, 1915
"Where [Walt] Whitman called the United States the greatest poem, offering himself as equal to the task of apprehending and articulating its structure, [Vachel] Lindsay states as "my general proposition that the United States is a great movie . . . All American history past, present and to come, is a gigantic movie with a Pilgrim's Progressor hurdle race plot". This significance of such statements can hardly be overestimated. If history is imagined as a purely visual structure [an Egyptian hieroglyph], then the bardic ambition of Whitman and Lindsay must yield to the "fine director's hand" capable of rendering that history in its appropriate form."
"The Whitmanian dream of American literature is that space might replace time, that the linkages between place and place-railroads, canals, telegraph lines, bridges-might usurp the time cycles of events as principal facts of everyday consciousness."
". . . On his last unsuccessful reading tours on the East Coast [Vachel Lindsay] went to the movies compulsively, in every town and village, rejoicing in the thought that somewhere in the West a new imagination of history was being created. . . . "
(Return To Sources)
Richard Howard Los Angeles Times Book Review, 28 March 2004, Rachel Cohen's A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Artists and Writers, 1854-1967, Random House: NY, 2004, 366 pp., 2004,
"It is a truth insufficiently acknowledged that a phenomenon of culture, particularly a book, to be properly enjoyed, is best and properly known for what it is (and not for what it is not).
" . . . is a series of linked explorations of intimacy and amity (including certain failures of intimacy, certain violations of amity) among American writers and artists. . . . something of a new genre . . . a Divination by Affective Nearness . . . And what is being divined is nothing less than . . . the nature of modern literary and artistic tangency in the United States.
" . . . has been mistaken for literary criticism, which it is not, although . . .
""Gertrude Stein explained that she had noticed that every American starts over on the project of writing American history or the American novel. She did that. And, at the same time, she had also noticed that each American chooses a tradition, collects, in some sense, his or her own sensibility, and she did that, too.""
" . . . has also been mistaken for a biographer, which she is not, although . . .
"It is easy as well to mistake the tone . . . for gossip, which it is not, although . . .
""John Cage was worried about Marcel Duchamp. By chance, they had been at the same parties four nights in a row, and he had looked and looked at Duchamp and realized that Duchamp was old. He wanted to be with him; he wondered why he hadn't made an effort to be with him all the time.""
"And easier still, . . . may be mistaken for literary history, which it is not, although . . .
"I grant there is a good deal of . . . imbrication between gossip and biography and criticism and history on the one hand and on the other the work she has actually written, but that is merely a consequence of its genre-indeed such confusions are in the nature of this genre she has recovered, if not invented.
" . . .
" . . . she has afforded a vision of lives of the makers that proposes, as she rolls out the links of the chain, a sort of fraternal structure in which her consciousness-and as a result, ours as well-can dwell, as if it were the most natural, the most logical thing in the world these days to regard literature and art and music as affording the soul a lodging, indeed a palace of pleasure.
"For that is the secret sense of the braid of lives she has recounted so affectionately, and why I have insisted on the peculiarity of genre . . . The peculiarity that so often asserts "it would be nice to think that they walked down the street together," or "perhaps he waited for her downstairs," or "it must have been the case that she laughed at his joke.""
" . . .
"We are not accustomed nowadays to regard such an array of contacts among the makers, especially American makers, as comfortable, as consoling, even as euphoric. . . . She has had a vision of what Shaw used to call the sanity of art, and what in reading her I would describe as the felicity of engaging in the intimacy of cultural production, something very rare in our moment of subversion and repudiation, when so many notions of the pleasures of the arts, and of art-making, as a primary spiritual resource have been contested.
"It is an indication of the insecurity and the fragility of such pleasure these days that Cohen chooses the term "chance meeting," . . . to identify her governing structure; . . . a visionary author would have call such contacts Fate and revelled in the transcendence of the accidental. It is an evidence of our incomparable modernity that we find it appropriate to attribute the felicities of friendship, and the failures too, to Fortune and no longer to Fate.
"But even under the sign of accident, Rachel Cohen's vision of the life of art in her chosen century . . . is one of an astonishing gladness. Not that she scants misunderstanding or misery, or even the makings of tragedy. But such makings are the kind that compelled Yeats, in his furious old age, to invoke the gaiety of Hamlet and Lear."
(Back to Sources)
Paul J. Karlstrom and Susan Ehrlich Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists 1920-1956, Barry M. Heisler Introduction Santa Barbara Museum of Art 1990, Introduction
Paul J. Karlstrom Modernism in Southern California, 1920-1956, Reflections on the Art and the Times
"The look, form, and character of Los Angeles and environs can be explained only in part by geography and climate, the natural features to which artists ordinarily respond and which contributes to a "sense of place." Perhaps more relevant was the mass influx of humanity that overwhelmed the existing community, still little more than a very large village. In the view of historian Carey McWilliams and other astute observers, the formation of urban Los Angeles is the direct consequence of hetergeneous transplanted populations attempting to recreate the familiar on an accommodatingly neutral and expansive landscape. . . . In the words of Willard Huntington Wright*, "Culture in Los Angeles is not indigenous . . ."
" . . . Carey McWilliams, "Lacking deeply rooted social traditions, Los Angeles quickly adopted the motion picture elite as its arbiters of taste and style . . . Los Angeles imitated Hollywood."
" . . .
"Far more than an indigenous aesthetic tradition (which, to the extent it existed at all, was a fairly conservative reflection of developments elsewhere) the psychology of the area provided the sense of place to which artists eventually responded in quite unfamiliar ways. More than anything else, including the famous California light and expansive horizontal landscape, it seems to be the psychology of change, incongruity, and impermanence that underlies what is most original in Los Angeles art of the period. These dual qualities, evidence of ideas and forms drawn from elsewhere and their free combination expressive of a distinctiive aesthetic and social point of view, distinguish Southern California's most interesting art . . . none of the [local] well-known artists developed in a creative vacuum . . .
"The cultural situation in Southern California made of Los Angeles-almost from the beginning-a post-modernist, rather than a modernist city . . . I would call attention to the eclectism, fantasy, sense of humor, colorism, and random "grazing" among historical styles . . . The l.A. "fantasy" style, highly imaginative and symbolic, is epitomized in the notorious commercial establishments fabricated in the shape of hotdogs and hats, giant doughnuts and pumpkins . . . Fantasy and the picturesque are essential parts of Hollywood film, popular culture, and the Los Angeles [ambivalent] ambience. Revivalism, playfulness, incongruity, illusion, impermanence, eccentricity, and color are basic qualities . . . pp. 22, 23
" . . . In . . . Sunshine Muse, Peter Plagens* states that "pre-war Southern California produced little important art, and the main gain was the hard-won beginning of modern art's cultural acceptance."
"Presumably, the same would be said of the 1940s and early 1950s, which is generally viewed as a conservative period with the figurative expressionism of Rico Lebrun at one extreme and the reactionary Society of Western Artists at the other. . . . p. 23
" . . . in comparison to developments in Northern California, art activity in Los Angeles seemed to be fragmented, conservative, and devoid of ideological underpinnings and stylistic direction. . . . Los Angeles seemed to enjoy a great deal of artistic activity, but no art-historical personality emerged from this pluralism. Furthermore, no individual or movement seemed dominant enough to impose a single personality, despite the presence of prominent artists such as Stanton Macdonald-Wright*, Man Ray, Lorser Feitelson and Rico Lebrun. A number of explanations for the situation are possible, from the area's lack of a strong visual arts tradition and supporting institutions, to its urban sprawl and the absence of a true bohemian center in which ideas are generated and exchanged. But of these explanations, the most fruitful for the purpose of this discussion have to do with the positive aspects of the very factors that would seem to inhibit the emergence and growth of traditional forms of "high-art' culture: community indifference, rootlessness, flexible standards, and indistinct boundaries.
" . . . in a least two ways the situation in Los Angeles may well have been unique. First, there existed a young society that put an unprecedented premium on entertainment and recreation as a way of life. Second, as the paradigm of the modern city, Los Angeles by this time had come to embody, both physically and psychologically, change, freedom, and mobility -the very ingredients essential to modernist sensibility and the rise of an art based upon popular culture. A value system developed, contributing to and fed by "the industry" built on illusion, artifice, and the interchangeability of levels of experience. Inevitably, along with a clearly associated life-style it informed the attitudes and work of a generation of local artists . . ."
"What the younger generation of California artists . . . came to admire [those] who worked by choice in semi-isolation on the coast south of Los Angeles, were his extraordinary independence and total commitment to an art developed on its own terms. Like David Hockney, Richard Diebenkorn*, and a score of others who chose to work in California in part because they would be left alone. . . .
" . . . as Susan Larsen points out, McLaughlin's painting is "profoundly anti-classical. He creates disequilibrium and virtually subliminal visual and psychological motion out of stasis and symmetry." In this respect McLaughlin appears to move closer to a general Southern California aesthetic that acknowledges change and impermanence as conditions of existence." p. 34
" . . .
"The history of graphic ideas] isn't chronological in the sense that one idea leads to another in the way it does in fields of technology, in which one thing makes another obsolete. You get a faster fighter plane, and you don't continue to make the old ones. But T.S. Eliot doesn't obviate John Donne because he's more modern, any more than Picasso makes El Greco obsolete. Quite the contrary. He confirms El Greco's presence by finding him germinal, alive again in his own work. so this history is, as I say, not chronological: it's a set of graphic ideas that can constantly be interchanged, moved in their relative positions. It's a lacework, a network." -Howard Warshaw
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Charles Merewether (Ed.) The Archive, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2006, 208 pp.
In the modern era, the archive-official or personal-has become the most significant means by which historical knowledge and memory are collected, stored and recovered. The archive has thus emerged as a key site of inquiry in such fields as anthropology, critical theory, history, and especially, recent art. Traces and testimonies of such events as World War II and ensuing conflicts, the emergence of the postcolonial era, and the fall of communism have each provoked a reconsideration of the authority given the archive-no longer viewed as a neurtral, transparent site of record but as a contested subject and medium in itself.
This volume surveys the full diversity of our transformed theoretical and critical notions of the archive-as idea and as physical presence-from Freud's "mystic writing pad" to Derrida's "archive fever;" from Christian Boltanski's first autobiographical explorations fo archival material in the 1960s to the practice of artists as various as Susan Hiller, Ilya Kabakov, Thomas Hirshhorn, Renée Green, and The Atlas Group in the Present.
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Sven Spieker The Big Archive: Art From Bureaucracy, MIT Press, 2008, 228 pp.
The typewriter, the card index, and the filing cabinet: these are technologies and modalities of the archive. To the bureaucrat, archives contain little more than garbage, paperwork no longer needed; to the historian, on the other hand, the archive's content stantds as a quasi-objective correlative of the "living" past. Twentieth-century art made use of the archive in a variety of ways-from what Spieker calls Marcel Duchamp's "anemic archive" of readymades and El Liissitzky's Demonstration Room to the compilations of photographs made by such postwar artists as Susan Hiller and Gerhard Richter. In The Big Archive, Sven Spieker investigates the archive-as both bureaucratic institution and index of evolving attitudes toward contingent time in science and art-and finds it to be a crucible of twentieth-century modernism.
Dadaists, constructivists, and Surrealists favored discontinuous, nonlinear archives that reisisted hermeneutic reading and ordered presentation. Spieker argues that the use of archives by such contemporary artists as Hiller, Richter, Hans-Peter Feldman, Walid Raad, and Boris Mikhailov responds to and continues this attack on the nineteenth-century archive and its objectification of the historical process.
Spieker considers archivally driven art in relation to changing media technologies-the typewriter, the telephone, the telegraph, film. And he connects the archive to a particularly modern visuality, showing that the avant-garde used the archive as something of a laboratory for experimental inquiries into the nature of vision and its relation to time. The Big Archive offers the first critical monograph on an overarching motif in twentieth-century art.
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Jed Perl The Urban Mirror: Robert Alter Imagined Cities: Urban Experiences and the Language of the Novel, Yale University Press, 2005?, The New York Times Book Review, 19 June 2005, p. 9
" . . .
" . . . And if the city gave birth to the panoramic novel, the effort by novelists to catch shifts in consciousness, . . . led other writers away from the novel entirely, toward the poem as an epic collage, which in Eliot's Wasteland and Crane's Bridge becomes a formalist's astonishing rubbish heap, designed to hold the fascinating fragments and shards gathered by the walker in the city. One can even argue that if it were not for the city, artists would never have discovered the country, for landscape is a type of painting that was first imagined in cities, and the pastoral is surely one of the most insistently urban of all literary modes.
" . . .
" . . . if the creation of a city is in some sense an act of the collective imagination, [it will always challenge the artist] . . . how to re-present the city's style and atmosphere and meanings and metaphors. . . . The cities of art and literature are cities twice imagined, for the communal creation must be recreated through the singular imagination."
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Kelyn Roberts Comment on Diebenkorn Criticism, Ocean Park Anthology, 2004,
The paintings, prints and drawings of Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park Series are representations of Ocean Park itself; they are all the more recognizable either as landscape, seascape, or their fusion. While much of the critical discussion of Diebenkorn's work link him to art historical communiities of thought, their language also serves as a metaphor for the actual description of wave and fog, of horn, helicopter and crashing surf, of traffic wedged onto shifting and shifted edge, and architecture: warehouses, factories, apartments, studios, houses and homes which assert verticality across the sweep of ocean, beach, strand and dune, like the bay itself strata of time, saturation and a saving emptiness. The paintings and descriptions of the landscape and the paintings offer their own idealized versions of Ocean Park.
The closest place to see his work that I know of is the orthopedic offices on the ninth floor of the west medical tower at Santa Monica Boulevard and Twentieth Street where a Frank Stella three dimensional print, a beaten metal assemblage and a Diebenkorn print function as windows by self-multiplication in mirrors.
"Other imaginings include Ocean Park, The Animated Feature Film which includes "the sophisticated super-hero Abbot Kinney, perhaps choosing an opera cape, setting fires by flicking one of his specially prepared Turkish cigarettes, into the dreams of his corrupt rivals."
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Lionel Rolfe Literary L.A., Chronicle Books: San Francisco, 1981. 102pp., Intro
Preface:
"No one has yet precisely pinpointed the literary tradition of Los Angeles; but then, L.A. itself is a hard place to pinpoint. Perhaps this is because L.A. became a major city of the world without having had a history that went back for centuries. . . . The transitory aspects of the contemporary human condition have been institutionalized in Los Angeles . . .
" . . . the modern condition is rootlessness. . . . Even without Hollywood, L.A. might have fostered a literature of the brief encounter, the momentary assignation that sometimes ends up in seduction . . . Los Angeles has turned that [rootlessness] into a kind of powerful adaptive mechanism. Ebb and flow, a non-homogeneous collection of human types piled decades high upon the magnificient California landscape had to produce something distinctive . . ." p. ix
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James L. Rolleston The Politics of Quotation: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, PMLA, 104, 1, January, 1989, pp. 13-25
"Walter Benjamin was not the first to view the Paris arcades as emblematic of the way capitalism and technology transform not just the appearance of cities but the imaginative lives of their inhabitants. Alert Parisians and foreign visitors in the 1830s and 1840s noted, often with suddenly vivid speculative insights, the rhythmic changes in urban living wrought by these strange zones consecrated to commerce and technology, these glass-and-metal structures infiltrating and enveloping the old houses. (1) But between 1927 and 1940, Benjamin indefatigably collected materials relating to the arcades, and to the Paris of the nineteenth century generally, for a project of the first magnitude: to write the prehistory of the world crisis of the 1930s in such a way that its posthistory, the language of an awakening from the nightmare culmination of commodity capitalism, would become a reality. One's instinctive shock at the seeming lack of proportion and continuity in such a vision (what do the commercial innovations of the 1830s have to do with the totalitarian ideologies of the 1930s?) is the shock Benjamin intended to provoke. For, while operating within the central Marxist categories of history, materialism, and dialectics, Benjamin sought to liberate those categories from their manifest complicity with determinism, tyranny, and political impotence.
"The established formula of dialectical materialism no longer seeemed to protect left thinking from its intellectual enemies, essentially unchanged since the nineteenth century. Vulgar materialism, the belief in open-ended "progress" had been renewed by twentieth-century technology; and dialectical method, the structuring of history as the conflict of totalized, socially coherent periods, had been co-opted by vast pseudoscientific schemes like Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West. Its critical function debilitated, dialectic was deployed as a self-confirming mode of encyclopedic historical description. Clearly, the concept of history itself was at risk. Continuities of class, cultural meaning, political interest-key components of any social analysis-all seemed invalidated by the crises of the 1930s. At the same time there was an unavoidable sense of being in the catastrophic late phase of some undecipherable, not yet intelligible continuum. The loss of historical understanding released no one from the actuality of historical processes. And the words available to confront that actuality remained those of dialectical materialism, now inseparable from its failures as well as its successes.
"Walter Benjamin resolutely laid claim to this vocabulary, calling himself, for example, a "historical materialist" and a "materialist dialectician." While he would not use the master words of the tradition whimsically or inconsistently, he would define them operationally, by new models of historical narrative that he needed to generate, test, and consolidate in a single textualizing process. Dialectical in the fullest sense, this move was latent in Benjamin's thinking long before the terminology of Marxism became important to him. A juxtaposition of two excerpts written twenty-four years apart can begin to suggest the ambition and consistency of his project (2). The first, from his 1916 essay on language, opposes any suggestion that words and meaning, signifier and signified, are distinct. The very notion of meaning is linguistic, and all phenomena are engaged in a ceaseless process of self-expression, in both verbal and nonverbal "languages":
""The full importance (of the concept of translation) is achieved in the insight that every higher language (with the exception of God's Word) can be understood as a translation of all others. Given the relation between languages as that of media of differing density, the translatability of languages into one another becomes evident. Translation is the transference from one language to another through a continuum of transformations. Translation works through a continua of transformations, not through abstract realms of equivalence and similarity. The translation of the language of things into that of human beings is a translation not only from silence to sound but from namelessness to naming.""
The second passage, his fourteenth thesis on the philosophy of history, comes from his last work (1940):
""History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now that he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thicket of long ago; it is a tiger's leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution.""
"In the course of my essay I hope gradually to decode this extremely compressed language. For now I want to suggest how the concepts of the essay on language are both at work in and illuminated by the very late text. The uncompromising fullness of language proclaimed by the young Benjamin-its universal operation, its inclusion of all substance within itself-is the essential premise of the older Benjamin's analogy between fashion and revolution. While certainly a "higher" language, revolution needs the language incessantly produced as fashion in order to become itself a language at all. And the mildly paradoxical phrase "continua of transformations" becomes a much sharper paradox in the 1940 text. The "tiger's leap." the radical rupture of continuity, is at the same time an acknowledgement that the continuum of history exists. The relations among the continuum of jostling materials, the productive moments that define it, and the vantage point of any given present moment-these disputed relations are central to Benjamin's entire project. But such linkages cannot be conceptualized without a double premise of ontological difference: temporal difference or rupture (the need to explode the illusions of continuity in which all present moments are embedded) and linguistic difference (the distinct yet interlocking languages spoken by the past, by the layout of cities as well as documents, by the oppressed, who are often barely audible, as well as by rulers.) It is precisely those who would homogenize history, prescribing a neutral continuum of events in covert affirmation of the writer's own moment, who produce lifeless illusion, a version of the past that is empty because it merely echoes the unacknowledged forces controlling the historian's own time." p. 15
"Above all, it is the simultaneous functioning of dissonant language systems that provides the model for Benjamin's reimagining of history. The ceaseles process of language production that he posits in 1916 remains his focal point in 1940. The republican language of ancient Rome continued to be spoken through the world after Rome's demise, in law, art, philosophy, personal feeling; worm out and "forgotten" by the eighteenth century, it became usable in 1789 as a newly potent "remembered" language of revolution. And the same observation applies to the afterlife, to the forgettings and rebirths of the French revolutionary language itself. But Benjamin never assigns priority to the language we call political. For him, everything speaks: buildings, administrative organizations, utopian fantasies, advertisements, social chatter. The speaking is not equal in volume or presence; indeed, it may be precisely the wearing out, the lifelessness, of a given language that can tell us most about the processes of social change. For these processes are the substance, the signified, which is utterly inseparable from the signifier of the languages that embody them. We cannot describe these processes; we can only listen to them, making legitimate use of our temporal vantage point-namely, bringing to full verbal life, within the vocabulary of the past, motives and tensions now illuminated by our own social relations. Our present moment is itself wholly within this linguistic arena; we are, in our turn, being "produced" in ways we cannot perceive. but the synchronic structure implicit in the very concept of language enables Benjamin to resist an image of history as shapeless flux. The present moment (which a priori cannot understand itself) relates to the entirety of the past (which has never ceased speaking) through mutual translation. The reader of history's linguistic material makes the connection, among all the superficially disparate "paroles" of an age, that makes it possible to construe and speak a new and higher language, the language that blends later perspectives into the earlier texture. and by a dialectic essential to Benjamin's argument, the reproduction of past languages simultaneously speaks of the present with new clarity. For the language of the nineteenth century is that of the twentieth century. Its seemingly worn-out forms make "tiger leaps" into the future inhabited by the translator, the parnter in conversation, the dialectician turned toward the past.
"To link Benjamin's earliest and latest writing in this way is not to deny his intellectual development: the texture of the two passages is prima facie wholly different, and a study, like Richard Wolin's, of the shifting emphases and allegiances in Benjamin's life and work is obviously a legitimate enterprise. My purpose, rather, is to suggest how Benjamin could oppose most contemporary usages of the words history, materialism, and dialectic yet formulate an ongoing intellectual project to which these terms are fundamental. The key assumptions of this linguistic-political project can now be summarized. Benjamin's understanding of history remains close to the Romantics', particularly to Novalis's and Friedrich Schlegel's: history is a self-conscious crystallization of three separate moments: the moment of the writer, the moment in which the writer is focusing, and the entirety of the tradition in which the writer is embedded, a tradition that necessarily includes the outwardly static realms of nature and religion. Historical narrative is possible, but only as a heuristic device: as soon as continuities are proclaimed that repress the dynamics of the crystallized moment, historical truth is lost. The mateial of history is language, the multiple interlocking languages of the past that has never ceased speaking and that fundamentally condition the historian's own language. Benjamin's expansive understanding of the concept of language ensures that this kind of materialism is not at all reductive: the physical world is as ideologically marked as ideas are technologically conditioned, in a constantly shifting force field of apparently normative languages. There would, however, seem to be a danger of cirucularity: how can the historian claim acccess to truth, even provisional truth? Do not the ceaseless production and proliferation of linguistic, hence irresistible, meanings simply submerge all possibility of a stabilized perspective?
"The answer, crucial to Benjamin's understanding of dialectic, lies in the concept of quotation. As his essay on language already implies, past languages produce an immense variety of texts: the silent texts of building and urban planning, the minimal verbal formalizations of public regulations, and the slightly more elaborate descriptive style of documents and reports, with their implicit value judgements. From the historian's perspective, all these languages, though distinct from one another, are clearly interwoven. Benjamin simple takes the further step of aligning such texts with those produced at a higher level of self-awareness: daily and occasional journalism, escapist or satirical poetry, projections of the future, based on the present (science fiction). diaries, and novels that seem to articulate the "truth" of an entire society (Balzac, Dickens). The social process as a whole speaks through these langauages as a whole, but how is that whole to be identified? Nothing could be more misleading, in Benjamin's view, than a documentary style, a seemingly objective narrative ("social history") underpinned by a subjectively conditioned selection from disparate texts. Rather, Benjamin approaches the problem through the ontology of a text itself: a text compresses the fluidity of the spoken language into the ordered space of written (or, for nonverbal languages, constructed) syntax. It ruptures the continuum of the world; it quotes reality. So the historian's isolation of sentences or paragraphs from a text is already an intensified form of citation, a quoting to the second power. If the process is pursued further, acts of rupture multiply; passages from different kinds of text speak on a new level when juxtaposed, texts from distant years actualize a radical change or, even more interesting, an absence of change. At perhaps the highest level yet imaginable, a fusion of past texts activates the "language" of the historian's own epoch. For without such mediation the multiple languages at work in any given present cannot be comprehended; they are ceaselessly subjected to the censuring, masking processes of social and economic power.
"Through quotation, Benjamin's conception of dialectic can be defined: disrupting both the closure toward which any text aspires and the synchronic and diachronic continuities to which even revolutionary texts are instantly assigned by dominant languages, the historian momentarily fuses two or more isolated passages, thus producing the "dialectical image" (Benjamin's phrase). This dialectical image always involves, whether tacitly or explicitly, through added commentary, the historian's own perspective; the language it would bring into being, in its moment of illumination, is precisely, not the language of contemplation (conventional history from a detached perspective), but the language of action, politics. This perhaps surprising outcome is implicit in the very syntax of language as Benjamin understands it; a text certainly describes the world, but always with a purpose, a dimension of longing, a contrasting of what is with what might be. To quote from a text is not to neutralize that longing, which the speaker may or may not intend, but to heighten it dialectically, to draw the sedimented dreams and ideals out of an individual word or image through the magnetizing power of its secret allies in other texts, Benjamin summarizes his method, insisting dialectiacally (and in practice not quite accurately) on his own absence qua individual speaker from the potent new language of quotation:
""The method of this work is literary montage. I have nothing to say. Only to show. I will steal nothing valuable and appropriate no brilliant formulations. But the rags, the refuse: my intention is not to make an inventory of these things but to allow them, in the only possible way, to fulfill their existence-by making use of them.""
"The work to which Benjamin is referring her is his arcades project, the study of Paris in the nineteenth century that Benjamin collected materials for from 1927 until 1940 and intended to write using the methodology of quotation. The book was never written, although essays and prospectuses emerged from efforts, and his studies on Baudelaire assembled posthumously, became an extraordinary book (Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Age of High Capitalism.) One cannot say that these prelimaries give any idea of what the final work might have looked like, since they are far from reflecting the methodological rigor Benjamin intended to impose on himself:
""I have nothing to say."" p. 16
"The 1982 publication of the entire collection of materials, however, suggests much about Benjamin's understanding of history, modernity, and dialectical method and about the specific ways in which he sought to make the languages of nineteenth-century Paris resound anew. Above all, the learned debate surrounding his "These on the Philosophy of History"-does theology or Marxism have the upper hand?-looks very different in the light of these materials(4); with their many repetitions, their quick, informal annotations, these notes exemplify both the limitless ambition and the strict self-discipline of Benjamin's theoretical project. His remarkable melding of perspectives-the philosophical, the literary, the sociological, the linguistic, the political, the theological-is what enables him to will his own withdrawal from the scene as an individual. His individuality is wholly expressed in his vivid, excited yet skeptical responses to the texts of the past. And readers who find certain key terms in the published essayss vital but somehow elusive can see these words here in action, informal and probing, imposing specific connotations while remaining still open, unfinished." p. 17
"One such word is aura. In the major essays, The Storyteller and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, aura can appear to be a long-range diachronic concept of a fairly traditional, Schillerian kind. Surrounding the revered objects of older societies based on ritual, aura implies both directness and distance, a human sensorium attuned to manual crafts as well as to the organic round of the seasons; in short, it involves a structure of instinctual responses no longer available to industrialized humanity. These essays, however are neither melancholy nor dispassionate; they communicate great urgency, as if all the values associated with aura were somehow recoverable. But the deterministic premises exclude this possibiltiy; industrialization is obviously irreversible. Something seems to be missing, namely, Benjamin's understanding of history as linguistically organized, a notion that pervades his essays without being spelled out. Paul Fry has astutely remarked that aura seems to be "inseparable from the moment of distraction in which it is reproduced." Benjamin has produced the concept of aura dialectically, from a perspective in which only its absence can be known. He is doing for preindustrialized society as a whole what the Renaissance and neoclassicism did for ancient Greece, with the difference that he is fully aware of creating a necessary dream, a projected antithesis to the as yet undecodeed language of an urbanized, "distracted," nonauratic world. This linguistic perspective enables him to set aura in a series of binary relations with terms that do evoke specifically urban experiential structures. . . . "Trace and aura. The trace is the appearance of proximity, however remote the object that left it behind. Aura is the appearance of distance, however close the object that evokes it. In the trace we take possession of the object; in aura it takes possession of us." Although Benjamin uses this definition of aura, without its antipode, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, the context generates an unnecessary ambivalence; the experience of aura is contrasted, in a neutral tone, with . . . "the desire of contemporary masses to bring things 'closer' spatially and humanly'". A reader unaccustomed to this shorthand will tend to assign positive, nostalgic value to aura. But the fuller context of the quotation from Das Passagenwerk shows that Benjamin means almost the opposite. In the age of fascism and advanced communications, aura is the illusion of distance produced by trivial dictators who have learned how to "take possession of" the masses. Not that Benjamin wants aura to be confined negatively either; the goal of producing a language of modernity is to enable us actually to describe our own experience. And withot the binary tension with what that experience is not, such description is impossible.
"That fascism takes possession of the masses' utopian longings does not mean that those longingss are to be condemned. Benjamin seeks precisely to articulate a syntax that would liberate longing from its imprisonment within the language of commodities. But such a syntax absolutely requires dialectical thinking, a rigorous exploration of why modernity, in its bourgeois format, necessarily excludes, marginalizes, and depoliticizes the utopian.
""The lines in [Goethe's] Blissful Longing- "no distance weighs you down, you fly hither, bewitched"-describe the experience of aura. The distance that, in the loved one's eyes, draws the lover toward it, is the dream of a better nature.The decline of aura and the shriveling of the fantasy image of a better nature (conditioned by a defensive posture in the class struggle) are one and the same. Thus the decline of aura and the decline of potency are ultimately one and the same.""
Since we live within this double decline, we have no direct access to its meaning. Judgements about it constitute the small change, the clichés of everyday language; they are in no way outside that language. Only through the dialectic of quotation, the activation of the past, does meaning become conceivable.
"The material of the arcades project is collected thematically, with groups of texts ranging from the hugely long section entitled, Baudelaire to a brief one on the stock exchange, economic history. One of these sections concerns "impotence": in the new language Benjamin is seeking to forge, the therapeutic phenomenon of impotence, widely analyzed in the nineteenth century, will speak without categorical mediation both to the growing fascination with "art for art's sake," aestheticized sterility, and to the draining away of political potency that is structured into the institutions of bourgeois democracy While neither aura nor political potency is available to the citizen of late capitalist societies, the capitalist ruling establishment is centrally concerned with producing an illusion of their availabiltiy strong enough to assuage the longing for them and to dislocate immediate perceptions. Hence, if alternatives are even to be conceived, it is essential to generate a language in which decline of aura and decline of potency are lived, comprehended as actualities, not as mere intuitions of absence.
"Another juxtaposition of sentences evokes both Benjamin's seemingly instinctive use of dialectiical thought structures and the problematic role of aura in an industrialized world:
""Waiting is in a sense the well-nourished interior of boredom . . . Blanqui's theory [of recurrence] as a repetition of myth-a fundamental example of the primal history of the nineteenth century . . . Eternal recurrence is the originary form of primal, mythic consciousness . . . Life, in the hypnotized circle of eternal recurrence, supplies an existence that never emerges from the auratic.""
Dialectical thinking is indispensable for formulating the historical premises of lives structured by capitalism, which are inescapably specialized, isolated, prefabricated. Aura must be experienceced as a negative because it is constantly being reproduced as an illusory positive, an indulgence of the longing for coherence.
"Equally hard to perceive-embedded as we are in the language of historical cause and effect, trends, roots, and progress-is that the key truth of the "age of history" is the impossibility of history, the perpetual replaying of the same scenario of power, exploitation, and the illusion of change. This truth is expressed in the myth of eternal recurrence, formulated by the famous revolutionary Auguste Blanqui in his last book written in prison, L'éternité par les astres: Hypothese astronomique (1872). Blanqui's work anticipates Nietzsche, and Benjamin's excitement at this discovery is palpable. That a revolutionary should, without diminution of intellectual energy, produce a wholly disillusioned version of the realm of political action is for Benjamin a key example of "primal history," that radical rupture of surface phenomena which enables the dialectician to penetrate to the "origin." Origins, in Benjamin's language, may be produced at any moment; they are not to be confused with the illusory "sources' of linear histories. An origin is both synchronic and diachronic, a moment, (a year, a decade) when a self-consistent cultural language comes into being, a discourse that generates both its own myths (e.g. history) and the refutation of those myths-here the theorization of (capitalist) recurrence." p. 18
"The surface mood coresponding to the myth of recurrence is boredom, a common complaint in the nineteenth century (Benjamin notes, without comment, Lamartine's 1839 remark that "La France s'ennuie"). Benjamin equates boredom with waiting; to wait without expectation of change is ultimately the same as refusing the idea of change, and this refusal means, through a dialectical shift in the experience of time, an opening toward a change beyond all prediction. Nietzsche makes this move in theorizing recurrence, and Benjamin's purpose is not to explain or even to contextualize Nietzsche but to annotate and juxtapose the many textual signs of the crisis that becomes explicit in Nietzche's thought. Theis effort certainly involves empathy with the nineteenth century, but not the historicist's empathy of self-denial and false neutrality; for Benjamin the partially mystified languages of the two centuries meet in the act of quotation, to be intensified through "translation" into a repoliticized syntax and vocabulary that can only be produced in this way:
""Boredom is always the outward sign of unconscious happening . . .One must not waste time but must load time into oneself. To waste time (to propel time out from oneself): the gambler. Time is spurting out of his every pore. To load up time, as one charges a battery: the flaneur. Finally the third type: he loads up time and reproduces it in changed form, the form of expectation-the one who waits.""
Boredom and waiting are figures of resistance to the empty recurrence of history. The auratic life implies the failure to resist: the events of daily life take possession of the individual who assents to them. And such assent was (and is ) extraordinarily easy. The entire apparatus of modern technology, under bourgeois control, is dedicated to making the passages of daily time painless, enjoyable, and full of novelty. It is virtually impossible to describe this process, since it has no outside; it remains culturally universal. One option is to celebrate the situation ironically, to disrupt temporal uniformity through acceleration: Baudelaire makes this move in praising "le nouveau," the other side of his desolate spleen and boredom. Baudelaire is the key figure through whom Benjamin gains access to the primal history conjoining the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and it is another theme of Baudelaire's that provides the core impulse for Benjamin's archaeology-his declared hostility to nature and his production of openly invented and exotic landscapes. In this respect, too, Baudelaire is rupturing, through ironic exaggeration, the illusory continuities in which he is embedded. Technology's shattering of preindustrial society is encoded in the refusal of industrial society to acknowledge any change: instead of political innovation, what is offered and reoffered as the new is an infinite series of simulacra of preindustrial society. Where nature was, there is now the reproduction of nature. Stated abstractly, this insight is hardly new: Heine, Marx, and Nietzsche, as well as Baudelaire, saw the paradox clearly. But Benjamin's temporal perspective drives him toward a new response, one that is not ethical or metaphysical but linguistic. Marx's revolutionary consciousness, Baudelaire's ironic intensity, Nietzsche's ethical transformation-all have proved powerless in the face of the normalcy of bourgeois recurrence.
"The third of the three master concepts, mateialism, becomes indispensable at this point. Benjamin's project is materialistic in the sense that he locates the origin of modernity-the birth of the newly systemic language of commodities-in a material object, the Paris arcades, the glassed-in passages of shops that began to be installed between the old houses in the early 1800s. Why the arcades? These structures provide, for Benjamin, an almost complete symbolic text for the commercial production of daily life s it was undertaken (and elaborately masked) throughout the urban world of the century. There is first the virtuosic and manipulative deployment of the new technologies of glass and steel. The contours of the existing relations between buildings are not destroyed but blurred. In one sense, it becomes unclear where the outside ends and the inside begins. Whether one calls this process the privatization of the public realm or the surrender of private to public, these material objects can be read as easily as Balzac's novels in their rearticulation of human experience in the industrial age. In another sense, however, the the inside of the arcades clearly prevails over the outside: Benjamin has collected many citations devoted to the "interiorization" of city life, from the recurrent fantasies of a future Paris completely glassed over to the "domestication" of the streets, with people feeling free to move furniture from overcrowded apartments onto the street outside.
"Within the arcades themselves the production of nature proceeded apace, the glass roof sealing in rather than opening up. Benjamin notes the immediate interest in the exotic: the first theme arcade seems to have been devoted to Egypt, drawing on the collective memory of the Napoleonic campaign. History and geography are anthologized in the little shops, that is, deracinated and derealized; the shops provide the spectator and consumer with a seemingly inexhaustible urban "nature," protected from death and decay by the new rhythms of commerce. And, early on, as the structures began to "blossom" in sinuous decorative patterns, Benjamin links the seeming intimacy of the arcades to the seeming grandiloquence of the Crystal Palace and the trade fairs of the second part of the century. The project of enclosure and "naturalization" is open-ended, since every kind of restlessness must be assuaged.
"The more politics is repressed in the new urban landscape, the more it becomes legible in the margins of the text:
""The masklike play of styles that pervades the nineteenth century results because power relations are becoming invisible. The bourgeois power holders often no longer have power in the places were they live (as pensioners) and no longer in direct, unmediated forms. The style of their apartments becomes the false expression of their power.""
The ambivalence of power relations defines the arcades also. The freedom to stroll and wander, beloved of the new archetypal observer, Baudelaire's flaneur, is acted out within the symbolic control of the enclosure. Benjamin finds the earliest reference to a flaneur in a 1798 police report complaining of the difficulty of identifying people in crowds. Commerce needs crowds, and the arcades generate them. Yet these crowds may produce intensified isolation rather than politics, not only because of the richly documented administrative measures for the control of crowds but also because of an unstable dialectic at the heart of the flaneur's consciousness, one that folds the observer back into the commercial continuity:
""Dialectics of flânerie: on the one hand, the man who feels looked at by everyone and everything, the epitome of the suspicious person; on the other hand, the person who is completely untraceable, protected. Presumabley it is just this dialectic that [Poe's] "Man of the Crowd" develops.""
"The concept of quotation rearticulates the relations between the three master concepts-dialectic, materialism, and history: (1) the language that will bring the nineteenth century to consciousness in a twentieth century as yet helplessly immersed in its unrecognized past-this language is to be produced dialectically, through a technique of rupture and montage that refuses the (commercially)prefabricated continuities of history; (2) the language will be structured by quotations in which the unguarded documentary sentence speaks directly to the irony of Baudelaire, dispensing with the traditional hierarchies of intellect and sensibility, which in a world ruled by commodities have become mere masking devices; (3) the historical truth that needs to be documented is the myth of eternal repetition of the same, a myth created, not on Zarathustra's mountaintop, but by the limitless ambition of capitalism to structure a "normal" everyday life devoid of politics-a structuring conditioned by, and in turn conditioning, the need to reproduce nature, to reinvent a preindustrial world where mass politics have no place. Benjamin stresses the delight of the materialist in the eloquence of nineteenth-century produced objects, especially the most ephemeral and useless: in them the text of reproduced nature and repressed politics becomes ever more legible, the more the quoted objects are juxtaposed.
"If the arcades project were describable exclusively through the schema just outlined, Benjamin could justifiably be charged with offering mere antihistory. Instead of presenting events as moving steadily forward at the whim of politicians, so the argument might go, he shows us events moving in meaningless circles at the whim of technological innovation. But for Benjamin technology is far from being the base for superstructural phenomena. Rather, it is an important element in the open-ended "text" of the nineteenth century; and his quest is for the syntactical rules governing that text. To a reader like Benjamin, such rules are peculiarly legible at points of apparent marginality, in utilitarian technologies or in subjective emptiness. Nothing could be more energetic and speculative than his addenda to the quotations on boredom and impotence. What fascinates him about the eternal recurrence of modernity is that it comprise two antithetical moments, fabulous inventivenss and the sudden evaporation of meaning, involving a diachrony: the industrial landscape has to be invented before the signs of decay can be discerned. But, as Benjamin's texts reveal, there is nothing gradual about either the invention or the decay: the full range of industrial fantasies and controls is on the scene by 1830; they are noted by contemporaries, and pronoucements about decay follow almost immediately. (5)" p. 21
"This cycle, of course, is built into the structure of fashion, which is central to the capitalist project. But Benjamin, like Baudelaire, refuses to take such phenomena lightly. For the rhythm of obsolescence controlling fashion has produced a trap into which most historians have fallen: the discerning of a "rise and fall" of this or that political-cultural phenomenon-in other words, an extrapolation from the style of the new, recurrent history patterns to a postulation of substance. In making this move, historians imagine for themselves some kind of external position, presumably superior to the deluded processes they are describing. But they are the deluded ones; thy have simply succumbed to the capitalist machine's constant production of its ultimate exquisite seduction: decay. "There are no periods of decay," insists Benjamin. Moreover, we live within the system as it works to manufacture the illusions of growth and decay; there is no intellecutally neutral place to stand outside it. The pseudodramas of modern recurrence are continually being produced for our stimulation and tranquilization, and our only recourse, the task Benjamin set himself, is to force into consciousness, through the electricity generated by quotation, the language of the phenomena in which we are embedded. Only with a precise descriptive language will genuine politics be possible. For the utopian impulse of revolution has been fully programmed into the nonpolitics of recurrence.
"To evoke the colossal inventiveness of early modernity, the birth moment of the arcades, Benjamin frequently quotes Balzac. Because the commercial machine aims at generating "natural" images, fantastic and documentary modes are intertwined in literary texts from the outset, and Balzac, as his contemporaries often noted, seems to have invented the actual human beings of the Second Empire. But, in seeking the syntax of the modern, Benjamin is interested less in Balzac's psychological or "prophetic" powers and more in his extraordinary openness to the profusion and jumble of the new cultural anthologizing and to the genuine abyss between modern and premodern experience. Benjamin cites a passage from Le cousin Pons:
""To believe that events prior to a man's life . . . can be immediately represented by cards that he shuffles, that he cuts, and that the teller of horoscopes divides into packets according to mysterious laws-that is absurdity; but it is absurdity that condemned steam power, that still condemns aerial navigation, that condemned the invention of gunpowder and printing, those of eyeglasses, engraving, and the most recent great discovery, the daguerrotype. If someone had come to tell Napoleon that a building and a man are ceaselessly and at any time represented by an image in the atmosphere, that all existent objects have such a tangible, perceptible spectral image, he would have consigned that person to Charenton. . . . And yet that's what Daguerre has proved by his discovery.""
Photography was born into a context of competing modes of phantasmagoric production, such as panoramas. Its potential for precision was always already shaped by the commercial need to produce images of power and escape. Objectivity is to subjectivity as decadence is to the "blooming" of commodities; all values are inscribed in a grid of illusory opposites, applauded or condemned according to the needs of the productive cycle.
" For Benjamin, the arcades themselves, for all their evident functionality, were inseparable from their image-making capacity:
""As long as gas and oil lamps burned in them, [the arcades] were fairy palaces. But when we want to think of them at the height of their magic, we imagine the arcade of the panorama around 1870 when on the one side hung the gaslight, on the other the oil lamps still flickered. The decline begins with electric lighting. But it was not fundamentally a decline, but more precisely a reversal. As mutineers, after conspiring for days, seize a fortified position, so the commodity, at one stroke, seized power over the arcades. Only now came the epoch of numbers and large firms. The inner glow of the arcades was extinguished with the blaze of electric lights and stole away into their names. But now the name became like a filter, which only released the most secret, bitterest essence of what had been.""
It is important to grasp the strategy Benjamin used in this passage, which is in every sense dialectical. Superficially he is attributing the decline of the arcades to technological change, but the intimate link between the visibility of technology and the invisibility of the ruling class is a premise of this descriptive style. Moreover, the decline was so sudden that it was not really a decline at all but a dialectical shift, a transformation of object into readable text. "Naming" is a central theme of Benjamin's early essay on language; as the arcades "became" their names, their syntax becomes verbal. And political activity is present here too. The date 1870, the time of the Commune, cannot be accidental. Since the book remained unwritten, we cannot know how Benjamin would have integrated his thematic texts on the Commune with his analyses of technological change. But the quotations concerning the Commune tell of the extreme self-consciousness with which the uprising was based on existing revolutionary texts-and of the way in which its failure was itself instantly textualized, as the myth of recurrence rose to the surface of consciousness. Clearly 1870 is the moment, the rift through which the text of the industrial landscape suddenly becomes legible, to contemporaries as well as to later observers. The image-making productivity of early modernity, the play of styles and moods that culminates in Baudelaire's time, the Second Empire, can suddenly be seen for what it is." p. 22
"Such moments owe their lasting power of illumination, Benjamin tells us, to their containing within themselves both their prehistory and their posthistory . . . The posthistory of 1870 has been the persisting indecipherability of what was briefly legible to the few (Blanqui, Nietzsche) as the text of recurrence. Between 1870 and Benjamin's time the numberless programs for radical change were without exception absorbed into the recurrence they sought to transcend. In his own attempt at decoding the text, Benjamin deployed the imagery of dream and awakening ;
""The Copernican shift in historical perspective is this: the fixed point used to be "the past," and the present endeavored, gropingly, to align its understanding with this given entity. Now this relation is to be inverted, and the past is to receive its dialecttical definition from the synthesis that the act of awakening achieves through the structuring of antithetical dream images. Politics attains primacy over history. That means that historical "facts" become something that has just happened to us: to grasp hold of them is the task of memory. And awakening is the model act of remembering, that act in which we succeed in remembering the things that are closest, most intimate, in remembering the self.""
One section of the arcades project is devoted to Jugendstil because Jugendstil constitutes, in Benjamin's view, a false awakening from the dream, an intensification of modernity toward paradox rather than clarity. Jugendstil artists understand very well the dynamics of recurrence; but instead of translating its symptoms, such as impotence and boredom, into political understanding, they transfigure, fetishize these very symptoms. In particular these artists make the move most distrusted by Benjamin, the undialectical restoration of aura through new stagings of ritual and illusory distance:
""Jugendstil forces the auratic. The sun had never felt better than in their wreaths woven from its rays . . . Maeterlinck develops the auratic to the point of monstrosity. The silence of dramatic characters is one of its forms . . . A basic motif of Jugendstil is the transfiguration of infertility. The body is preferably drawn in those forms that precede sexual maturity.""
"For all its sophistication, Jugendstil acts out once again the prescribed sequences of consumer captialism: anthologizing the exotic, reproducing technology as if such tools were natural phenomena, idealizing a humaness severed from all social functioning, claiming to purify and transform social relations through the intimate refinements of aesthetic ritual (6). Benjamin is thus able to link Jugendstil to its apparent opposite, futurism, that explicit glorification of recurrence and technology which opens directly onto the debased auratic ritual of fascism:
""The reactionary attempt to uncouple technically defined forms from their functional context and to turn them into natural constants, that is, to stylize them, emerges, as in Jugendstil, in futurism somewhat later.""
"Benjamin's ideal for the arcades project is, as we saw earlier, a montage of quotation devoid of commentary:
""I have nothing to say.""
The realization of such an ideal, however, would require the reader to deploy a politically activated language. The implicit circularity is that of language as such: within the reader's mind the completed citational structure would crystallize the syntax indispensable for decoding the text. The nineteenth century would be both fully internalized and transcended by a political consciousness. Thus Benjamin's failure to complete the work appears, once one's sadnss at his individual fate is absorbed, appropriate to his refusal of all premature languages. On the one hand, the quotations as juxtaposed continue to suggest evem more provocative juxtapositions. And, on the other hand, Benjamin's comments and independent speculations permit certain keywords to acquire a new identity. These words would have to belong to an "awakened" vocabulary. Though included in the dictionary, they urgently need the politicized connotations without which the industrial age cannot be brought to full consciousness (7).
"To conclude, I will briefly explore a crucial exemplar, the word pair Erfahrung and Erlebnis, which have become familiar through Benjamin's published essay On Some Motifs in Baudelaire. Since the dictionary defines both terms as "experience," the translator, Harry Zohn, assigns that meaning only to Erfahrung, while varying the renderings of Erlebnis according to context (Illuminations) The simplest definition is "moment that has been lived," or "lived moment," which catches the actural German etymology. In the Baudelaire essay Benjamin develops the distinction in relation to definitions of memory. In the arcades project the range is broader:
""Experience is the harvest from work, the lived moment is the phantasmagoria of the idler.""
Since this remark is made in the thematic context of idling, the reader is alerted to its dialectical intention. Benjamin elaborates, in another comment:
""What distinguishes experience from the lived moment is that it is inseparable from the idea of a continuity, a sequence.""
Since the whole thrust of the project is to clarify the discontinuities of an urban existence, it becomes clear that experience, the deriving of wisdom from work and lived continuity, is precisely what modernity renders unavailable; Benjamin argues this point in The Storyteller. To articulate a modern syntax, then, he must explore what the lived moment involves, since it defines the mode of experience actually available to us.
"By dialectical necessity, the exploration is negative in tone. Produced by the consumption cycles of capitalism, lived moments are ecstasies of artifice that the system has aimed at gradually domesticating, so that there has ceased to be a counterdefinintion of experience with which to contrast them. In the nineteenth century the "need for sensation" intensified, and services sprang up to satisfy the need. Among the new professionals was the gossip journalist who . . .
""alienates the city from th city dweller. He is thus one of the first technicians called into being by the heightened need for lived moments.""
The emphasis on the lived moment seems to imply that the material continuities of work and community have been culturally devalued; whatever the relational context of one's existence, one learns to discount it, aspiring instead to a ceaseless supply of lived moment produced by the ever-expanding network of urban stimuli. As a dialectician, Benjamin presses this bleak reality to its consummation in the antiexperience of the First World War:
""The intentional correlative of the lived moment has not remained the same. In the nineteenth century it was "the adventure." In our day it appears as "fate." In fate is contained the concept of the "total lived moment," which is by definition deadly. The war prefigures this perfectly. ("That I was born German, for that I am dying"-the trauma of birth already contains the shock that is deadly. This coincidence defines "fate.")""
"In this somewhat elusive comment we feel Benjamin's intensely linguistic consciousness at work. Can the oxymoron "total lived moment" be made to yield a dialectical turn? Once the seemingly negative concept of the lived movment is forced into juxtaposition with the equally unpromising "fate," the two words begin to seem jointly moveable onto a new linguistic plane. Benjamin explored one set of possibilities in his Baudelaire essay: through the notion of "involuntary memory," derived from Proust and Freud, a structure of genuine experience becomes imaginable, a mutual illumination of an accidental lived moment and the entirety of an individual life reanimated as fate. Here I would point to another linguistic connection, the association of the word fate with a familiar Benjamin figure, the collector:
""Let us remember how significant for a collector is not only his object but also its entire past, that which belongs to its creation and authenticity as well as the details from its apparently external history: previous owners, purchase price, value, etc. All this, the "factual" dates as much as the others, coalesces for the true collector, with every one of his possessions, into a whole magical encyclopedia, into a world order whose outline is the fate of his object. Here, in this narrow domain, can be understood how the great physiognomists (and collectors are physiognomists of the world of things) become interpreters of fate.""
The simulataneous detachment and involvement of the collector suggest a key to the dialectical recovery of lived moments. Like the collector, the ordinary individual in the urban machine severs (involuntarily, to be sure) moments of experience from one another and from their functional context in the work world or in any collective enterprise. But the model of the collector suggests tht it is possible to reconstitute thes moments as an acknowledged fate, a collection of events that can be read as the text of a single story, the epoch as a (repressed) political object. And the consciousness that undertakes such reading can only be political (8).
"Aware of the elitist element in the collector image, Benjamin develops the lived moment as a potential locus of resistance in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. The urban masses cannot be released from the incessant production of lived moments, but their discontinuous subjectivity can perhaps be valorized through another term Benjamin seeks to install in the new political language, distraction. In their very distraction the masses may resist the more blatent artifices of fascist ritual, may even appropriate the new technologies to achieve a genuine analysis of the urban landscape. To be sure, Benjamin is advocating this dialectical move, not describing it. And Richard Wolin reproaches him for excessive optimism, for falling into the technologism against which he himself so often warned. But Paul Fry observes that Benjamin's exploration of the term distraction is in harmony with an ancient tradition, one that has been marginalized by the new, obsessive rituals of aura:
"The oldest notions of distraction are in fact associated with preternatural wisdom, even with holiness."
"Ultimately the lived moment gains its potency from its constitutive role in Benjamin's own enterprise. Benjamin is fully aware that his life is made of discontinuous moments, that "experience" is not to be had. And so he discovers, in the urban landscape of the nineteenth century, all his partial selves-the flaneur, the collector, the critic-who have constructed life models out of this initial debasement of human temporality. These models are individualist modes of resistance, conditioned by self-irony and self-enclosure. For Benjamin, the crisis has deepened in every sense in the twentieth century, not because of the disastrous political events, but precisely because of our utter inability, as isolated and fated individuals, to read the language of these events, to speak politically. Benjamin's dream of a montage of quotations, from which his own voice might ultimately be absent, does not express a renunciation of the individual for the collective; rather, it represents a heightened version of what the individual might be. We are still dreaming the dreams of the last century and are inexorably obeying its command of novelty, whenever we think seemingly novel thoughts. Fantasies of exploration, of discovery, of escape perpetuate themselves through new versions of subjectivity and technology, in a symbiosis that is open or masked according to the imperatives of the consumer moment. To awaken from the dream, we must learn to read it as a text; but to become such readers, we must distill from it a language that is outside it as well as inside. Only through a language born in the deprivatized zone of quotationn, a political language finally adequate to the mystifications of capitalism, can we acknowledge and confront the alarming identity between the text of the nineteenth century and that of the twentieth." p. 25
"(1) Already in 1822 Fourier, in his Théorie de l'unité universelle, locates the "rue-galerie" within his urban utopia as . . . "the principal rooom in the palace of harmony, of which one can have no idea in civilization." . . . there was a hiatus in the building of the arcades betweenn 1800 (the date of the "passage des Panoramas" and 1822, and most of them were contructed between 1822 and 1834. . . . Benjamin evokes their "physiognomy" by citing a sentence from Baudelaire: . . . "It seemed strange to me that I could have so often walked past this prestigious establishment without guessing its point of entry."
"(2) . . .
"(3) The theory of redemption sketched here is best understoood in linguistic terms. A language omits nothing. Yet it is not an inventory, not a list of substansives, but a syntax, a systematizing instrument with dialogue and change inherent in its ontology: "The historian's task, as Benjamin conceives it, is as necessary and impossible as that of the translator. It is that task . . . Even though our 'messianic power is 'weak', 'nothing,' according to the Theses, 'is to be given up as lost for history.' The Passagenwerkwas destined to draw the consequences from that extravagant posulate-and to do so, in consequence, at every level. Perhaps, then, it was destined to remain unfinished." Irving Wohlfarth, Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonier, New German Critique, 39(1986), pp. 142-68.
"(4) . . . Benjamin has no "alternative" language . . . The words he uses are necessarily provisional, written inside the "dream" of technological capitalism. If we accept this metaphor, for the modern experience, we must . . . acknowledge that we have not yet awakened from the dream. Indeed the pace of required innovation and obsolescence, inaugurated at the time of the arcades, is obviously accelerating. All our isms speak this language. There is (as yet) no outside, no hors-text."
"(5) In a striking confirmation of Benjamin's reading and dating of the syntax of modernity, Michael Foucault stresses that the recurrent "failure" of prisons (like the "decay" of bourgeois institutions in general) is built in to the intial conceptualizations of reform through detention: "For the prison, in its reality and visible effects, was denounced at once as a great failure of penal justice. In a very strange way, the history of imprisonment does not obey a chronology in which one sees, in orderly succession the establishment of a penality of detention, then the recognition of failure, then the slow rise of projects of reform, seeming to culminate in the more or less coherent definition of penitentiary technique; then the implementation of this project; lastly, the recognition of its successes or its failure. There was in fact a telescoping or in any case a different distribution of these elements. And, just as the project of corrective technique accompanied the principle of punitive detention, the critique of the prison and its methods appeared very early on, in those same years 1820-45; indeed, it was embodied in a number of formulations which-figures apart-are today repeated almost unchanged." Michel Foucault Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1977.
"(6) Jugendstil's refusal of dialectical opposition, of course, makes these artists peculiarly accessible to Benjamin's dialectical reading of them, much as advertising images open a political perspective onto today's society: . . . "No historical phenomenon is comprehensible solely in terms of the category of escape; the flight is always stamped by the reality of what is being fled." In this section, Benjamin names-besides Maeterlinck-Wilde, Beardsley, the young Rilke, Stefan George, and Odilon Redon; he also sees the sterile perfection of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler as an anticipatory critique of Jugendstil."
"(7) The translation of social text into operational language reinforces Susan Buck-Morss's response to Benjamin's political challenge; in her view, his notations were never intended to document "all" issues of modernity. Benjamin had not, or could not have, understood certain structures of oppression that feminist readings of the Western past have since yielded. It is up to us, not to 'complete' Benjamin's panoramic work, but to keep it open and active: "On their own, the historical facts in the the Passagen-Werkare flat, situated, as Adorno complained, 'on the crossroads of magic and positivism.' It is because they are, and were meant to be, only half the text. The reader of Benjamin's generation was to provide the other half from the fleeting images that appeared, isolated from history, in his or her lived experience. The spatial, surface montage of present perception which makes all of us flaneurs can be transformed from illusion to knowledge once the 'principle of montage' is turned into history . . . . " Susan Buck-Morss The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering, New German Critque, 29 (1986); 99-141.
"(8) . . . '[Fuch's] thought is to give back to the work of art its existence in society, from which it had been so radically dislocated that the place where he found it was the art market, a place in which, equally remoted from its makers and from those who could understand it, it persisted, shrunken into a commodity.'"
Works:
Walter Benjamin Gesammelte Schriften, (Ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser), 6 vols., Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972-85. [Trans. and published by Harvard U. Press]
Walter Benjamin Illuminations (Trans. Harry Zohn) New York: Shocken, 1969.
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Andrea Schulte-Peevers and David Peevers Los Angeles, Lonely Planet: Oakland, 2nd ed., 1996 (1999), 351pp.
"Generations of people around the world have grown up thinking Santa Monica is California. . . . " p. 180
"Kinney (d. 1920) may have been a little kooky, but he unwittingly set the trend for the Venice of the future. Throughout the 20th century, the communtiy attracted whatever was the counterculture of its decade, be it Lawrence Lipton and Stuart Perkoff of the '50s Beat generation, the hippies of the '60s (Jim Morrison and the Doors were among those who lived here), the New Agers of the '70s and '80s, or the Rollerblading, image-obsessed babes and dudes of the '90s. In many ways, much more than Berverly Hills and certainly more than Hollywood, Venice generates the image of the free-wheeling, laid back, slightly crazed but creative and cutting-edge city that many people expect LA to be."
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