#39

Excerpts from Walter Benjamin, "The Life of Students," written 1914-15:

The innocently hypocritical reservations people have about science include the expectation that academic study must lead to a profession for all and sundry. Yet scholarship, far from leading inexorably to a profession, may in fact preclude it. For it does not permit you to abandon it; in a way, it places the student under an obligation to become a teacher, but never to embrace the official professions of doctor, lawyer, or university professor.

The uncritical and spineless acquiescence in this situation is an essential feature of student life. It is true that the so-called independent-student organizations [Freie Studentenschaft], as well as others with one social tendency or another, have attempted to resolve this problem. Ultimately however, their answer lies in the complete assimilation of academic institutions into bourgeois conditions, and nothing has shown more clearly that the students of today as a community are incapable of even formulating the issue of the role of learning, or grasping its indissoluble protest against the vocational demands of the age. It is necessary to criticize the independent student organizations and the ideas of those close to them because it will throw light on their chaotic conception of academic life.

The symptomatic importance of these attempts on the part of the independent students, including Christian-Socialists and many others, is that in their desire to demonstrate their utility in the state and in life, they re-enact in the microcosm of the university that same conflict that we have noted in the relationship of the university to the state. They have conquered a sanctuary in the university for egoisms and altruisms of almost every kind, for every self-evident mode of being in the real world. Only radical doubt, fundamental critique, and the most important thing of all – the life that would be willing to dedicate itself to reconstruction – are excluded.

By directing students toward the professions, it must necessarily fail to understand direct creativity as a form of communal activity. In reality, the uncomprehending hostility of the academy toward the life that art requires can be interpreted as a rejection of every form of direct creativity that is unconnected with bureaucratic office.

The organization of the university has ceased to be grounded in the productivity of its students, as its founders had envisaged. They thought of students as teachers and learners at the same time; as teachers, because productivity implies complete autonomy, with their minds fixed on science instead of on their instructor's personality. But where office and profession are the ideas that govern student life, there can be no true learning. There can no longer be any question of a devotion to a form of knowledge that, it is feared, might lead them astray from the path of bourgeois security.

The community of creative human beings elevates every field of study to the universal through the form of philosophy. Such universality is not achieved by confronting lawyers with literary questions, or doctors with legal ones (as various student groups have attempted). It can be brought about only if the community ensures that specialized studies (which cannot exist without a profession in mind) and all the activities of the special disciplines are firmly subordinated to the community of the university as such, since it alone is the creator and guardian of philosophy as a form of community. This philosophy, in turn, should concern itself not with limited technical philosophical matters but with the great metaphysical questions of Plato and Spinoza, the Romantics, and Nietzsche. This, rather than conducted tours through welfare institutions, is what would create the closest links between life and the professions, albeit a life more deeply conceived. This is what would prevent the degeneration of study into the heaping up of information.

A deeper problem arises from the unconscious distortion of student life by the dominant erotic conventions. Just as the vocational ideology of the professions has become the accepted truth and has fully monopolized the intellectual conscience, so, too, does the concept of marriage, the idea of the family, weigh upon the notion of eros. The erotic seems to have vanished from a space that extends, empty and undefined, between childhood and founding a family of one's own. Whether unity might exist between creating and procreating, and whether this unity is to be found in the family – these questions could not be posed, so long as the tacit expectation of marriage went unquestioned, since this implied an illegitimate interlude in which the most that one could do was to erect barriers to temptation. The eros of creativity – if any group were in a position to understand it and strive to achieve it, it would have to be the student body. But even when external bourgeois conditions were absent and no prospect of founding a family existed; even where, as in many European cities, a hydra-headed mass of women based their entire economic existence on students (through prostitution) – even in such places students failed to ask questions about the eros appropriate to themselves.

That expansive friendship between creative minds, with its sense of infinity and its concern for humanity as a whole even when those minds are alone together or when they experience yearning in solitude, has no place in the lives of university students. In its place, there is only that fraternizing which is both unbridled and personally limited. It remains the same whether they are drinking in a bar or founding societies in cafés. All these institutions are nothing but a marketplace for the preliminary and provisional, like the bustling activity in lecture halls and cafés; they are simply there to fill the empty waiting time, diversions from the voice that summons them to build their lives with a unified spirit of creative action, eros, and youth. There is a chaste and abstemious form of youth that reveres those who are to succeed it, and that is echoed in Stefan George's lines:
Inventors of rolling verse and sparkling dialogues
by quick-witted orators: time and distance
allow me to engrave on my memory my former foe. Do likewise!
For on the scale of ecstasy and passion we are both in decline;
Nevermore will the praise and rejoicing of youth flatter me;
Never again will verses thunder thus in your ear.
Faintheartedness has alienated the lives of students from insights like this. But every way of life, with its own specific rhythm, follows from the commandments that determine the lives of the creative. So long as they shy away from these, their existence will punish them with ugliness, and hopeless despair will strike the hearts of even the dullest. At present it is this highly endangered necessity that is still the issue; it requires strict control. Everyone will discover his own imperatives, the commandments that will make the supreme demands on his life. Through understanding, everyone will succeed in liberating the future from its deformed existence in the womb of the present.

#38

Le Corbusier's Modernity: Problems and Contradictions

[Hegel - Marx - Heidegger]

PLASTICITY
Iron and glass after the fin de siecle
Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich --> Benjamin, Arcades Project
Corb's early critics/supporters

ENERGY
Corb at Behrens' studio --> electricity in the 20s villas
Leger and the "mechanical object"
Technical objects in the Salons and Expos

CIRCULATION
Development of the "Promenade architecturale"
Drawings of ville contemporaine, of interiors
The automobile in photographs
Matisse and the Villa at Garches

GLOBALIZATION
The global building: Villa Savoye to Pavilion Suisse
Corb's drawings -- "second-order nature"

#37

Notes on Brancusi



















Let's see if I can't get at the crux of Brancusi's work. What is distinctive about his practice? Here is a list of motifs, most of which I've culled from Anna Chave's book: Brancusi's aversion to "beefsteak," his term for the cadaverousness of the male body when re-presented sculpturally (rather than presenced in and as sculpted matter); his mania for photography; his orbs and phalluses, and the extremes to which he took Rodin's mantra that "a monument should be able to roll down a mountain and still remain intact, an organic block"; his obsessive working-over of the studio, hiding his phonograph speakers in stone casings, hiding his power tools, touring guests from room to room in accordance with a self-mythologizing script; his use of interchangeable bases, which (according to Chave) simultaneously debase and re-base the sculptural object (in the same way the automobile debases and re-bases the pedestrian subject); his monumental Birds and Cocks, which he hoped would "fill the vault of the sky" and "pervade the whole universe"; his interchangeable, de-gendered lovers (The Kiss), modern day sorb-apple creatures (Plato's Symposium by way of Freud's Civilization and its Discontents); his Endless Column, which he referred to as "time's reverse pendulum," and which could be installed (anti-monumentally) indoors or outdoors.

commodity-object --> commodity-image

Baudrillard in Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign: "What fascinates us is always that which radically excludes us in the name of its internal logic and perfection. ... a mathematical formula ... a useless object, or, again, a smooth body, without orifices, doubled and redoubled by a mirror, devoted to perverse autosatisfaction."

If Cubism is one response to the photographic penetration of "room-space," Brancusi's sculpture is another. His objects give the camera something a surface that is -- simultaneously and absolutely -- a body, and an architecture that is also sculpture. But only, or primarily, according to the eye of the camera, from which the actual matter of the sculpture shrinks, becoming a sort of black hole, or a cloaking device -- one whose atmospheric shimmer intimates something of the shape of the body beneath, though nothing of its identity or purpose.

Return to primordial space/objectivity -- but by way of the latest involution in the development of the commodity, which now splits itself between its invisible, absolute interiority and the photographic image of its surface, an absolute exteriority. Of course, this is the contradiction that Brancusi's art attempts to sustain, even to exaccerbate. The studio tour and the public monument are both weak points in Brancusi's oeuvre; they are his attempt at a resolution of his work's antinomies -- resolution in the form of praxis, in other words. With the Endless Column and the Tirgu Jiu project thought together with the studio tour and the quotations from Milarepa, we see what the terms of dialectical reconciliation must necessarily be for Brancusi: instead of the fetishism of the commodity, its worship -- the commodity as annihilating Absolute.

#36

Notes on Cubism and Léger



















To begin with Cubism: If the paradox -- the contradiction -- of Picasso and Braque's attempts at landscape painting 1909 was that the space functioned increasingly as still-life, and that although purportedly set outside, the outdoors as they conceive it is closed-off and increasingly surface-level. These Cubist landscapes demonstrate, pace Worringer, a "fear of space" -- fear of far distances, of atmosphere and regression towards the horizon -- accompanied by a will not to abstraction (nor to "empathy") but to something closer to what Riegl calls "tactile" or "haptic" values. Cubism wants to bring things close-up and near-to-hand, not in the sense Benjamin gives to the eradication of distance, but as a reassertion of the auratic presence of things. It wants to test the limits of aura, too, both in pictures (the minimum of distance as an effect of the near abandonment of the figure, of thingness, of coherent shape) and in life (the maximum of bohemian proximity to the objects of the Cubist nature-morte). For "aura," read tangibility, also self-possession. Objects are auratic in Picasso's world insofar as they make manifest their innerness as a site of tactile interest. One makes one's way through a Cubist painting in the manner of a rock-climber, by securing a foothold, a handhold, a hole for a finger or two. Totally unlike Matisse's paintings, which eradicate all footholds and handholds (his phobia of holes), opting instead to control the route of the viewer's optical freefall.

What is paradoxical, or contradictory, about early Cubist "landscapes" is, in other words, the "insideness" of the outside. Even in 1909, Cubism is gravitating quickly towards its true topos, the studio-apartment. In Léger's Cubism, developed around 1908-9, following Braque's summer at L'Estaque, Cubism's originary contradiction is elevated into the working principle of a career; Léger gives it the name "contrastes des formes," but the contrast is really between the verticality of the Cubist ground -- Cézanne's kitchen table tipped up flush with the canvas surface, and broken up, dematerializing into a field of facets and planes -- and what Léger called the "subject," i.e. the human figure or arrangement of objects positioned at the center of the picture. Léger's paintings show us what was dangerous about the Cubist world as it had emerged in Braque and Picasso's early canvases: Cubism's resources and procedures tended to obfuscate the distinction between earth and sky, between rock and house, between figure and ground (remember that Braque's canvases of 1908 did not include human figures). My sense of things is that Léger saw and understood that the human figure would not be compatible with the world of Cubist landscape; rather than retreat to the still-life, however, he decided to remain in an ambiguous inside-outside space, and to derive the maximum of energy, or "contrast," from this incompatibility.

When Cubism does go indoors, then, it is not only to reaffirm its allegiance to the still life and the portrait; it is also to clarify its architectural and phenomenal conditions, and to ensconse itself in a world and a space (the bohemian apartment) capable of accomodating Cubism's radical formal dis-integration of the ground plane without jettisoning the figure and the object in the process. If Picasso's paintings done at Cadaques in 1910 veer again towards the landscape format, his canvases of the following year augment the no-man's land of the faceted, fractured ground with, on the one hand, more surface-level scumbling and passage-esque pseudo-divisionism ("genre Signac"), and on the other, more tokens and signs of the tactile: eyes, moustaches, curtain ties, guitar strings, etc. The point is to insist on the irrelevance of architecture for Cubism: it should not need to evoke space directly (indeed, its resources are incapable of this), it can rather count on the unquestioned givenness of its milieu. In my view, Cubism's confidence in the givenness of its architectural surround -- its version of "room space" -- depended on the hermeticism of Picasso and Braque's practice in the "heroic years" of Cubist experimentation. The paintings were meant to be seen in and as a part of their milieu; they argue for the durability of Parisian bohemianism and fail or succeed depending on the viewer's ability to imagine this world in its material reality. Cubism proclaims that the one thing, the painting, can’t do without the other, the space in which it is painted, and out of which it occasionally emerged. It insists upon the real durability of the bohemian studio-apartment so as to annihilate it, or dematerialize it, pictorially. Cubism was a matter of demonstrating potlatch-style that it was capable of destroying what it possessed (not in reality, of course, but in -- and as -- the imagined space of the picture) -- that it was its own master.

The turn away from Cubism should thus be considered in terms of a loss of faith in the durability and self-enclosure of the bohemian world. The problem is stated well enough in a photograph taken in Picasso's studio in 1913: it shows a Cubist sketch hung from the wall (or perhaps from the ceiling), to which Picasso -- or someone else -- has affixed a pair of arms made of newspaper and a paper guitar. The mixed-media guitarist stands before a real cafe table, upon which sit archetypal Cubist objects: a bottle of wine and a briar-pipe. The message is, I would argue, that Cubism is in danger of becoming a caricature of itself, and of its bohemian stock of subjects and objects. Collage and papier collé are attempts at incorporating within the scene of the studio still life both the degradation of the bohemian world and the encroachment of the world outside; key tropes of this are the newspaper, strips of wallpaper, and the tabletop.