ABSTRACT
The Modernist project did not need to resort to an ‘anaestheticizing tactic’ to avert the ‘shock of modern experience.’ It rather absorbed it. In this chapter we argue that Modern Architecture in the 1930s was able to ward off the lure of phantasmagoria. Modern Architecture, in this sense, was an ‘architecture without phantasmagoria’ that ‘owned up’ to what Benjamin called the ‘poverty of experience.’ This is not to deny that in the Weimar period, across a broad ideological spectrum, the dominant tendency on the left to regard technology as an opening for a Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) also displayed a certain naive fascination with the machine and with rationalization, which as John McCole in his Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition notes, unwittingly ended up espousing – via Taylorism and Fordism – the changing demands of the capitalist economy. 1 At times, this resulted in a cult of rationalization that projected into the future an optimistic hope in progress – as seen in the many ‘manifestoes,’ from Gropius to Le Corbusier and Mies Van Rohe, among many others, issued during these years. 2
As Howard Caygill notes in his perceptive reading of the third version of Benjamin’s Artwork essay (section XV, dated 1939), it was during these years that architecture emerged as a ‘main site for interaction of technology and the human, a negotiation conducted in terms of touch and use. It is both a condition and an object of experience, the speculative site for the emergence of the “technological physis .” ’ 3 Indeed, as Benjamin argued, architecture was the ‘concrete a priori’ and the ‘canonical art form’ for the new kinds of ‘distracted perception’ in which the masses absorb the work of art ‘into themselves’ in contrast with the mode of ‘concentration’ in which a person is absorbed by the work. As Benjamin put it famously: ‘Architecture has always offered the prototype of an artwork that is received in a state of distraction and through the collective. The laws of architecture’s reception are highly instructive.’ 4 Other forms of arts come and go like epic and tragedy, for example, but architecture persists. It is a distinct form of art apart from all other forms because it is received in a ‘twofold manner,’ Benjamin says: ‘by use and by perception. Or, better: tactily and optically.’ 5 This reception can be understood only as distraction: ‘Tactile reception comes
about not so much by way of attention as by way of habit. The latter largely determines even the optical reception of architecture, which spontaneously takes the form of casual noticing, rather than attentive observation.’ 6 As he put it in a most succinct and categorical formulation: ‘Under certain circumstances, this form of reception shaped by architecture acquires canonical value. For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at historical turning points cannot be performed solely by optical means – that is, by way of contemplation. They are mastered gradually-taking their cue from tactile reception-through habit. ’ 7
As Caygill notes, for Benjamin, art in the age of technical reproducibility reconfigures itself according to new technological conditions. The model for this is the art of architecture: ‘the art which responds most readily to changes in the structure of experience.’ 8 If film in the age of technological reproducibility is the medium that in essence brings about the mode of distracted reception, it does so against the background of architecture’s always already having been such a medium . Actually, as Caygill notes, Benjamin goes further: ‘film merely “corresponds to profound changes in the apperceptive apparatus” which are structured by the architecture of the city, or “changes that are experienced on an individual scale by a person in the street in big city traffic, and on a historical scale by every present-day citizen.” ’ 9
It is in this sense that we argue that in modernist architecture of the 1930s the observer absorbs the building rather than being absorbed by it, insofar as use, for the first time, becomes not only dominant but largely replaces contemplation, as Benjamin would say, and in this way, albeit precariously, keeps phantasmagoria, for a short time, at bay. Of course, in a society in which the commodity mode of production prevails, phantasmagoria is always in waiting. Moreover, in a city that we have already defined as ‘structured like a phantasmagoria,’ an ‘architecture without phantasmagoria’ can only have subsisted precariously as an isolated occurrence. In any case, what is certain is that the architecture of the 1930s destroyed the hallmark of the Second Empire phantasmagoria of the ‘ intérieur ,’ replete with its layers of traces and signs of habitation, replacing it with a new ‘transparency,’ which, although not without its own utopian naïveté, was a new beginning.
