ileanaa's blog

After their 1924 summer in the Bay of Naples (Capri), Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis wrote the essay "Neapel", which appeared in Frankfurter Zeitung in 1926. It is Benjamin's first recording of his reflections on the modern city experience.

The ruins of Pompeii and Naples stimulated them to distinguish within the process of decay categories such as spatial porosity (suggested by Lacis) and temporal transition. In terms of architecture, "one can scarcely discern where building is still in progress and where dilapidation has already set in" (1924:417 in Howard Caygill 1998). Porosity appears as the central image of the everyday life experience that 'captures the fact that the structuring boundaries of modern capitalism - between public and private, labor and leisure, personal and communal - have not yet been established: "Just as the living room reappears on the street [...] so the street migrates into the living room"; "For the sleeping and eating there is no prescribed hour, sometimes no place" (p.314)' (in Susan Buck-Morss 1989:26).

According to Buck-Morss this essay is the methodological beginning of Benjamin's Passagen-Werk experiment, by using street images to interpret the city. 'The images are not subjective impressions, but objective expressions. The phenomena - buildings, human gestures, spatial arrangements - are "read" as a language in which a historically transient truth (and the truth of historical transiency) is expressed concretely, and the city's social formation becomes legible within perceived experience' (p.27).

Benjamin illustrates through an anecdote that 'in the south of Italy, on the hollow and crumbling shell of the precapitalist order, modern social relations have been shakily, unevenly erected' (Buck-Morss, p.26):

"In a bustling piazza a fat lady drops her fan. She looks about helplessly, too unshapely to pick it up herself. A cavalier appears and is prepared to perform this service for fifty lire. They negotiate and the lady receives her fan for ten" (p.313).

May 23 (1923)*

My dear Emilian,

As I expect you have already guessed, every ship is going to depart without me, because I am not going to leave this country again. When I went away from you I thought it would be my last absence, as I promised to return, and believed I would be capable to do it. Please imagine that it happened to die during our prolonged separation. And actually that is what happens to me with regard to you.

Every death is involuntary, even the self-provoked death.

I am thinking of those lines of Alfred de Vigny over which we have had reflected together: “You cannot love an absent being. What does the one whom you love mean for you? A daily letter, a more or less cold advice. You don’t love an advice, you love a human being; and if that absent being stopped living, she wouldn’t become more absent than before and you’d stop crying for her…” I was away, now I am not at all. Don’t cry for me. The earth incorporated me, as it had to happen one day. I tried to be myself; I became one with the other things, I melted with nature.

In complete solitude I came to this deserted shore to examine my consciousness, in the rhythmic uproar of a sea without ebb and without flow, which always hits the same coasts.

I asked myself if my heart could submit to the rhythm of this incredibly beautiful sea, which never rises and never lowers its level. And right here, I found out that my perseverance had quitted me, and together with my perseverance quitted as well my force to concentrate on a sole human being that incomprehensible infinite love, that divine impetus that takes me away from you.

My conversion became reality; the transformation that occurred in me is a transformation of being, it is what revelation means for mystics. And I don’t know exactly how this happened to me… through the slow action of the climate, through the unanimous forces that surround me.

It is like I took the veil, after I verified the strength and counted the ties created between things and me, between beings and me …

In your last letter you drew my attention to the disappointment that the love for a people would bring me, as sort of a sentimental generalization that brought only hopelessness and aversion to those who lived it. Do not worry! If I love the people of Izvor and those who are alike, it is because I consider them creatures gifted with the quality of being loved, as I love the tree bearing fruit on the side of the road; it is not mine, yet I wish it would bloom.

As for you, my dear Emilian, I know that you’ll stay loyal to the other love of yours, which is the main principle of your being.

I do abdicate in favor of your new love, as an unwilling usurer, as every loved woman is a double usurer: first, prevailing over the woman who was before her, and then over the woman who would come after her and who is made inpatient by the state of waiting.

Soon you will see the rays of the past and the rays of the future combining, crossing, and raveling me out - like a meaningless ghost! As long as you would like to believe it though, remember that I love you and… it will be true.

*Letter included in the ethnography of the Izvor village in the Carpathian Mountains, Romania - Bibescu, Martha. 2000. Izvor, tara salciilor. Anca-Maria Christodorescu (Romanian transl.) Isvor, le pays des saules [Paris 1923]. Bucuresti: Compania. pp.334-335

Shunryu Suzuky 1970:

... everything comes out of emptiness. when we reach this understanding we find the true meaning of our life. when we reach this understanding we can see the beauty of human life ...

Zelda Fitzgerald 1929-30: every place has its hours:

there is Rome in the glassy sun of a winter noon and Paris under the blue gauze of spring twilight, and there's the red sun flowing through the chasms of a New York dawn.

Li Po 李白 (~750): the world around us:

Dread Lord, do not wave your scepter: it is bejeweled.

Dear Dancer, do not whirl your scarves: they are orchid-flowered.

Pale Poet, do not flaunt your heart: it is radiant with love.

Our world cares only for unenchanted things.

Fr Maximos 1997: By charity I don't mean only to offer alms to the poor and to donate money to various worthy causes. All these are external manifestations of charity. The charitable propensity, as the movement that characterizes God, is none other than absolute and unconditional Love. ... When we learn to generate only good logismoi and develop right judgment and clear vision, ... then we will realize that whatever comes our way is, in the final analysis, a blessing.

www.youtube.com/watch

arlington west

The Unseen Power

We are the flute, our music is all Thine;


We are the mountains echoing only Thee;


Pieces of chess Thou marshallest in line

And movest to defeat or victory;


Lions emblazoned high on flags unfurled -


Thy wind invisible sweeps us through the world.

Only Breath

Not Christian or Jew or Muslim, not Hindu

Buddhist, sufi, or zen. Not any religion

or cultural system. I am not from the East

or the West, not out of the ocean or up

from the ground, not natural or ethereal, not

composed of elements at all. I do not exist,

am not an entity in this world or the next,

did not descend from Adam and Eve or any

origin story. My place is placeless, a trace

of the traceless. Neither body or soul.

I belong to the beloved, have seen the two

worlds as one and that one call to and know,

first, last, outer, inner, only that

breath breathing human being.

There is a way between voice and presence

where information flows.

In disciplined silence it opens.

With wandering talk it closes.

Who Says Words With My Mouth?

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.

Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?

I have no idea.

My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,

and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern.

When I get back around to that place,

I’ll be completely sober. Meanwhile,

I’m like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.

The day is coming when I fly off,

but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?

Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?

I cannot stop asking.

If I could taste one sip of an answer,

I could break out of this prison for drunks.

I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way.

Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.

I don’t plan it.

When I’m outside the saying of it,

I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

Trans. Coleman Barks

... Richard Sennett wrote an article on the foreigner that starts from Simmel's understanding of the stranger's role to expose "the sheer arbitrariness of society's script, which insiders follow thinking lines have been written by Right, Reason, or God" (2002) and goes on with the foreigner's knowledge about living a displaced life... To understand the meaning of these roles, Sennett reminds us of Sophocles' Oedipus: "The two wounds on Oedipus's body are thus a scar of origins that cannot be concealed [his ankles bear a scar that marks his origins] and the wanderer's self-inflicted scars that do not seem to heal" (192). The two scars represent the conflict between the truth claims of belonging and the truth discovered by wandering. And to come to present times, Sennett places this ancient conflict at the origin of the modern tendency to change societal arrangements at will, and to treat community, identity and roots as "borders to be sealed rather than boundaries to be crossed" (194).

Wandering around with a camera, we/our cameras play the foreigner's role... similar to the (outside) participant observer in field research in anthropology. In the city the story is a bit more complicated, as politics (life in the polis) manifest in speech and action (at least according to Aristotle). At present there is one talk on multiculturalism and more actions towards isolation and exclusion. But hopefully flânerie might help to bridge that gap...

On the condition of being a stranger, I draw here on Georg Simmel's description of the stranger as a social type (1908). In order to determine typologies he focuses on forms of social interaction and contextualizes sets of observations within systems of meanings. If one considers opposed categories as constitutive of the social order, Simmel's central analytical interest is oriented toward sociological dualism in terms of conflicts and contrasts between the opposed categories. Levine explains in the introduction to Simmel's sociology (1971), "The conflict between established forms and vital needs produces a perpetual tension, a tension which is nevertheless the source of the dialectical development or replacement of social structures and cultural forms throughout history." Thus Simmel understanding of individuality in a dialectical manner applies also to the stranger, as a dynamic process directed toward the accomplishment of an ideal. This ideal is endogenously determined by the capabilities manifested in each individual existence.

Based on Simmel's theory of forms as synthesis of opposites, the stranger is at the same time in a state of detachment and attachment to a place. The sociological form of the stranger is similar to the position of the outside observer of places. The outside observer is detached from, but interested in the object of study, s/he is part of the present spatial experience, but is involved in the long-term life of the place only through recollection.

"The stranger will thus not be considered here in the usual sense of the term, as the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as the man who comes today and stays tomorrow – the potential wanderer, so to speak, who, although he has gone no further, has not quite got over the freedom of coming and going. He is fixed within a certain spatial circle – or within a group whose boundaries are analogous to spatial boundaries – but his position within it is fundamentally affected by the fact that he does not belong in it initially and that he brings qualities into it that are not, and cannot be, indigenous to it. … The state of being a stranger … is a specific form of interaction. … The stranger is an element of the group itself … whose membership within the group involves both being outside it and confronting it” (Simmel 1971, pp.143-144).

In context, the stranger embodies the foreigner (Sennett 2002), the outside observer (in anthropological field research), and the other... and this blog will continue on the similarities and differences of these social roles :o)

arcades

Etymologically the word flânerie comes from the French verb flâner that means to stroll, to take a walk. The origins of the verb are dialectal. In the seventeenth century the verb ‘flanner’ was used in Normandy to mean ‘to waste time’ (CNRTL). The verb flâner [to stroll], and the nouns flâneur [stroller] and flânerie [the act of strolling] became part of the French language in the nineteenth century, in writings of Balzac (1837) for instance, to describe someone who likes to do nothing. 

French nineteenth-century poet Charles Baudelaire, who experienced and also theorized flânerie, coined the concept of the flâneur. Initially the term flâneur referred to the reflective stroller in the streets of Paris. The flexibility of flânerie became a pleasure for anyone who could be a detached pedestrian observer of the modern metropolis. After the second half of the century though, flânerie in the capitalist city became mostly the pleasure of those who had the capacity to consume. The flâneur is the initial form of the modern intellectual whose interest was to explore modernity itself. 

arcades

 

In Los Angeles, we could do windshield flânerie (from our cars), which is closer to the online flânerie through the computer screen (window). At ipernity we experiment with off-line and on-line flânerie and please join the group and contribute, as I would like to do too :o) 

In the essay "Seen from the Window" included in the collection Rhythmanalysis, Lefebvre presents an intermediate position of the rhythmanalyst that is placed in between the nineteenth century flâneur and the contemporary e-flâneur. Protected from the tumult of street life, the rhythmanalyst analyses the rhythms of the public space from the window of his private space. 

 

 

"From the window opening onto rue R. facing the famous P. Centre, there is no need to lean much to see into the distance. To the right, the palace-centre P., the Forum, up as far as the (central) Bank of France. To the left up as far as the Archives. Perpendicular to this direction, the Hôtel de Ville and, on the other side, the Arts et Métiers. The whole of Paris, ancient and modern, traditional and creative, active and lazy.

He who walks down the street, over there, is immersed in the multiplicity of noises, murmurs, rhythms (including those of the body, but does he pay attention, except at the moment of crossing the street, when he has to calculate roughly the number of his steps?). By contrast, from the window, the noises distinguish themselves, the flows separate out, the rhythms respond to one another. Towards the right, below, a traffic light. On red, cars at a standstill, the pedestrians cross, feeble murmurings, footsteps, confused voices. One does not chatter while crossing a dangerous junction under the threat of wild cats and elephants ready to charge forward, taxis, buses, lorries, various cars. Hence the relative silence in this crowd. A kind of soft murmuring, sometimes a cry, a call. 

…. The harmony between what one sees and what one hears (from the window) is remarkable. Strict concordance.

…. The noise grows, grows in intensity and strength, at its peak becomes unbearable, though quite well borne by the stench of fumes. Then stop. Let’s do it again, with more pedestrians. Two-minute intervals. Amidst the fury of the cars, the pedestrians cluster together, a clot here, a clump over there; grey dominates, with multicoloured flecks, and these heaps break apart for the race ahead.

…. The noise that pierces the ear comes not from passers-by, but from engines pushed to the limit when starting up. No ear, no piece of apparatus could grasp this whole, this flux of metallic and carnal bodies. In order to grasp the rhythms, a bit of time, a sort of meditation on time, the city, people, is required.

Other, less lively, slower rhythms superimpose themselves on the inexorable rhythm, which hardly dies down at night: children leaving from school, some very noisy, even piercing screams of morning recognition. Then towards half past nine is the arrival of the shoppers, followed shortly by the tourists, in accordance, with exceptions (storms or advertising promotions), with a timetable that is almost always the same; the flows and conglomerations succeed one another: they get fatter or thinner but always agglomerate at the corners in order subsequently to clear a path, tangle and disentangle themselves amongst cars" (Lefebvre 2004, pp.28-30).

 

Rhythmanalysis is the study of rhythms :o) Gaston Bachelard borrowed the term from the Portuguese writer Lucio Alberto Pinheiro dos Santos in The Psychoanalysis of Fire and in The Poetics of Space as “rhythmo-analysis”, and developed a chapter on “Rhythmanalysis” in Dialectic of Duration. Toward the end of his life Henri Lefebvre made an attempt to develop a theory of rhythms, in order to build an understanding of “the concrete modalities of social time” (Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, 2004 [1992]). Social time manifests as rhythms that pertain to either natural time (cosmic rhythms) or to linear time (historic rhythms) like in modern everyday life, which is modeled on the time of watches and clocks. Lefebvre argues for the regeneration of present social life by means of incorporating the natural rhythms into the modern consciousness.  

“Without claiming to change life, but by fully reinstating the sensible in consciousness and in thought, [the rhythmanalyst] would accomplish a tiny part of the revolutionary transformation of this world and this society in decline. Without any declared political position” (Lefebvre 2004, p.26).

On sound (silence, music and laughter) John Cage

"[The rhythmanalyst] will listen to the world, and above all to what are disdainfully called noises, which are said without meaning, and to murmurs [rumeurs], full of meaning – and finally he will listen to silences.” …  “The sensible? It is neither the apparent, nor the phenomenal, but the present. The rhythmanalyst calls on all his senses. … without privileging any one of these sensations … he does not neglect smell, scents, the impressions that are strong in the child and other living beings, which society atrophies, neutralizes in order to arrive at the colourless, the odourless and the insensible. … The rhythmanalyst will not be obliged to jump from the inside to the outside of observed bodies; he should come to listen to them as a whole and unify them by taking his own rhythms as a reference: by integrating the outside with the inside and vice versa" (Lefebvre 2004, pp.19-21). 

On love and time www.ipernity.com/blog/ileanaa/73599