Berry and DeCock, Computational Porosity

David M. Berry, and Christian DeCock (2026) “Computational Porosity: Benjamin, Lācis and Algorithmic Life.” Controversies of AI Society. https://doi.org/10.54337/aau.add.scai-11425

This interesting conference paper which will hopefully be further developed. The authors start off with a sophisticated discussion of Benjamin and Lacis’s concept of porosity, noting it as a product of the encounter between Naples and an exoticizing European gaze which then uses the concept to problematize the assumed arrangement of space in the North and elsewhere. Drawing on Jameson and Adorno, they also note the role the concept played in the development of Benjamin’s thought, particularly his concept of denkbild or “figure of thought.” B and DeC also point out the temporal, not just spatial, interpenetration of porosity. They tie the concept further to the Brechtian concepts (which Benjamin was influenced by) of estrangement (Verfremdung) and refunctioning (Unfunktionierung). [These specific aspects of Benjamin’s thought on porosity are not specifically returned to in the later discussion of computational porosity.]

"We argue that Benjamin and Lācis’s concept of porosity can be used to help understand how computational architectures structure contemporary social relations." (32)

The crucial difference is that computational porosity operates not through stone and concrete but through the material substrate of processors, networks and algorithms that increasingly mediate social existence. This includes the proliferation of enterprise software, algorithmic management systems, and platform-mediated labour that restructure how work is coordinated, controlled, and experienced in organisations.

They deploy the concept of computational porosity two ways:

1. “as a descriptive concept which helps understand how discretisation as a practice within computation is giving way to diffusion techniques”

2. “as a critical concept in the sense given by Benjamin and Lācis who saw it as an alternative to bourgeois ways of organising the lifeworld.”

Just as Naples resisted the rationalised planning of modern cities, computational porosity challenges organizational boundaries and hierarchies. In platform organizations, the distinction between employee and contractor, workplace and home, working time and leisure time becomes increasingly porous. Uber drivers, for instance, exist in a deliberately porous space where they are neither fully independent nor fully employed, where the car becomes simultaneously private property and workplace, where algorithms interpenetrate with human decision-making about when and where to work. (33)

The office diffuses into domestic home spaces and synchronous and asynchronous communication blur together making corporate surveillance and individual autonomy clash through activity monitoring software and flexible scheduling.

... computational systems create fluid boundaries between local and cloud processing, between human and machine cognition, and between private data and public circulation. The physical permeability [Benjamin and Lacis] identified in Naples’ buildings finds its contemporary parallel in the technical permeability of computational systems that allow data and processing to flow across previously distinct spheres and across planetary networks.

When we issue a voice command to ChatGPT or another LLM, the computation flows seamlessly between device, data centre and cloud, creating what appears as a unified interaction but which actually traverses across multiple computational domains. This technical arrangement mirrors the interpenetration of spaces that Benjamin and Lācis observed in Naples, though now operating through digital rather than architectural forms. Similarly, the diffusion processes that many AI systems now implement, make all cultural works diffuse and hybrid within the latent spaces of their neural networks, a process Berry (2025) calls diffusionisation. (33-4)

In a footnote:

The idea that porosity is now also an instrumental process, actuated through computational techniques for the diffusionisation of the lifeworld, raises interesting questions about how a practice of resistance can be integrated into the system. However, we want to suggest that porosity, as Benjamin and Lācis deploy it, points to the excess that cannot be captured fully, even when turned into a computational function. Thereby, computational porosity creates unforeseen lines of flight and potentials for resistance in social and political practice.

While computational porosity describes the broader phenomenon of interpenetrating boundaries between human and machine agencies, diffusionisation represents a specific technical manifestation of this porosity within AI systems. Through diffusion models, cultural artefacts are not simply stored or processed but become porous themselves as their features, styles, and meanings blur and intermingle within the latent spaces of neural networks. This technical process of diffusionisation thus intensifies the porosity Benjamin and Lācis observed in Naples’ architecture, as it operates not just on the level of infrastructure but on the very substance of cultural production itself. (34)

They describe using Google's “Smart Compose:”

As we compose, our thought processes become intertwined with algorithmic suggestions in ways that go beyond simple automation. The system learns from aggregate patterns of communication across millions of users, creating a kind of collective linguistic porosity where individual expression becomes mediated through statistically derived patterns.

This example thus layers all, or at least many of, the kinds of porosity they talk about (spatial, boundary-blurring, temporal, social, "diffusionist"). They also discuss agential porosity, “where human and machine decision-making become so entangled that attributing responsibility becomes difficult” (35). Through computational porosity, agency is distributed through [the assemblage] of human and non-human, with no clear [figure] in which it can be located. “This computational porosity obscures accountability whilst intensifying control and will create a number of difficulties unless reflexively understood.” They further discuss variations such as playful coding, and “workaround cultures” in which workers try to game the algorithms they are being controlled by.

Just as Neapolitans used architectural porosity to evade official functions and create alternative uses, workers develop tactics to game algorithmic management systems, exploit platform vulnerabilities, or repurpose enterprise software for unintended purposes. For example, call centre workers might share strategies for maximising metrics whilst minimising actual work, Deliveroo riders might use geographic quirks in the algorithm to secure better-paying orders, and remote workers might use mouse or keyboard automation to simulate work activity to evade surveillance software. These practices reveal the porous character of seemingly rigid computational management systems.

However, “The same flexibility that enables worker resistance also enables platforms to externalise costs, avoid employment obligations, and intensify exploitation through the blurring of work and non-work time” (35-6).

However, computational porosity is not merely analogous to architectural porosity. Rather, it represents an intensification and acceleration of the interpenetration of spaces and practices that Benjamin and Lācis observed. Contemporary computational systems do not simply enable movement between defined spheres but actively blur the boundaries between them. When we interact with AI systems or social media platforms, increasingly human and algorithmic agencies are diffused in complex ways. The “theatrical” dimension they identified in Naples’ architecture becomes literalised in computational systems that transform every interaction into a performance that can be captured. (36)

The concept of “explainability,” which Berry advocates in other writings, would create “epistemic porosity, where technical knowledge and democratic oversight must somehow coexist and interpenetrate” [it would be interesting to explore the connections between this concept and "legibility" per Enfield, et al.] Algorithmic management is another example of “temporal porosity” between past hiring decisions (e.g. encoded in training data), present applications, and future workforce composition.” There does not appear to be a set number of ways in which they want to discuss kinds of “porosity,” as they keep adding more, then circling back and revisiting ones discussed previously [perhaps one could argue there is a “porosity” to this mode of discussion.] It would be nice to have a set, clear list or overview paragraph of the forms or relations which computational porosity takes [not, of course, that Benjamin and Lacis bothered with anything of the sort], and how these tie back to their initial discussion of B&L’s porosity.

 [Whereas in my 2019 article I had looked at porosity primarily in terms of the relative openness or closedness of different spaces to interaction with each other, B&DeC seem more interested in how it creates mingled productions, blurred categories, “dissolved boundaries,” and recondite traces of (unevenly) distributed/delegated agency; this concern is likely linked to the project of “explainability” (which they do state in their conclusion); they are more interested in the politics of discursive articulation than in the politics of spatial articulation].

There are also possibilities for resistance: “For example, in adversarial machine learning, researchers and activists can deliberately exploit the porous boundaries of AI systems to reveal their limitations and biases. This recalls Benjamin’s (1930) attention to how Naples’ street urchins used the city’s new underground to subvert the purpose of this technology with playful chaos” (37). Apps like Signal “create deliberate impermeability within otherwise porous systems;” they give other examples workers’ collectives, unions, using apps.

“The European Union’s AI Act and similar regulatory frameworks create new porous spaces between technical systems and collective governance, opening possibilities for workers to contest how algorithms organise their labour” (38). The authors find parallels between use of silicon computing, and the tuff stone of Naples.

Whilst computational systems create new forms of algorithmic governmentality and platform capitalism, their porous character potentially generates possibilities for alternative social arrangements; a “chance to correct the incapacity of peoples to order their relationships to one another in accord with the relationship they possess to nature through their technology” (39, quoting Benjamin)

The key question then becomes how to mobilise computational porosity towards democratic ends. Just as Naples’ citizens used the city’s porous spaces to create autonomous zones and informal economies, we might identify how computational porosity enables new forms of collective organisation and resistance. For instance, the porous boundaries between local and cloud computing could support decentralised infrastructure projects that prioritise community control over corporate profit. The diffusional character of contemporary AI systems might be redirected towards collective knowledge production rather than data extractivism.

The conclusion turns more specifically to the subject of AI:

we can see generative AI’s outputs as a form of involuntary surrealism as they often contain unexpected juxtapositions, distortions, and a Verfremdung-­effect that can either enlighten or mislead, depending on context. Just as the Surrealists collaged disparate elements to jolt consciousness, AI often unwittingly collages fact and fiction.

Large language models, trawling through billions of data points and recombining them, might surface hidden cultural obsessions or biases in strange new forms. Indeed, image generators trained on internet data often produce biased or stereotyped images, spuriously classifying people by race, gender, sexuality, and personality .... When these biases appear blatantly in AI outputs, they can become an estranging mirror held up to society’s prejudices. It makes visible what is often obscured in polished human-made media, the deep-set biases in our collective imaginary. Thus, AI’s remix aesthetic can become a tool for critique, a way to see the “dream wishes” of society laid out unsparingly, much as Benjamin read the arcades of Paris as the dream wishes of the 19th century. (40)

Benjamin had seen that contemporary media and technology could be used for both fascism and freedom. B&DeC note that much current discourse on AI focuses on fears related to “boundary violations” between the human and the simulated. Such anxieties over borders have long been weaponized by fascism, and a better ground for progressive politics is needed. 

The question becomes not just how to maintain boundaries, but how to cultivate forms of porosity that enable flourishing rather than domination. Indeed, porosity functions dialectically in workplace struggles as it simultaneously enables new forms of worker coordination and new modes of managerial control. Workers will need to increasingly engage in collective reverse-engineering of opaque systems, sharing knowledge about how algorithms calculate work, predict demand, or evaluate performance. A critical concept of porosity must therefore resist managerial appropriation by foregrounding questions of power, exploitation, and resistance.

They turn to the question of “explainable forms of life” in the algorithmic age as a political, not just technical, issue. "This requires new institutional arrangements and technical practices that enable collective deliberation about how computational systems shape social life" (41).

Profane Illumination, Chapter 4

Summary of Chapter 4: The Ghosts of Paris

In this long chapter, Cohen works to distance Breton’s writing in Nadja from several other representational modes. First off is the monumental history critiqued by Nietzsche:

Breton's Nadja offers no such monumental vision of Parisian histor­ical grandeur. Rather than encompassing the city in a panoramic glance, Breton wanders in among its streets, catching enigmatic glimpses of scenes from daily life or dwelling on places singularly tangential to the great structures of collective memory. (79)

She takes as an example the Vendôme column; when Breton visits this location in Nadja, he is immediately reminded of how it had been torn down during the Paris Commune. In terms of monumental history, the restoration of the column means that the revolutionary moment has been erased and the column now appears as “one more image of the bourgeois state’s eternal reign” (79). For this reason, the non-monumental historiographic project “cannot rely on realist methods of representation” (80) (since these would show the literal, physical presence of the column, and not be able to show its former non-presence). [Though it seems to me this is not wholly true. Breton mentions the former overthrow of the column by Courbet and the communards; the memory of this event is still part of the column, so even as it stands it also lies in ruin, inevitably, to any observer who knows the history. THOUGH C is arguing not about the column as an object having various “real” or “unreal” qualities, etc., but about ways of seeing the column; realism privileges the visual, and it is thus according to realism that the column has only the present, visual meaning, not the past, haunting meaning.] [It’s a bit ironic for Courbet to be used in an argument against realism.]

“In Nadja Breton explores the pos­sibility of writing surrealist historiography by applying a Freudian paradigm of memory to collective events.” [She is making the move I inferred above, though does the connection to Freudianism lessen the ambiguity and productive ambivalence? of the column being both standing and fallen.] She quotes Benjamin’s description, from his Surrealism essay in Reflections, of Breton’s method in Nadja (though he says it is more of a “trick” than a “method” of substituting “a political for a historical view of the past” [by “historical view” is presumably meant something along the lines of monumental history.]

Cohen then explores Parisian panoramic literature of the 1920s, and of some earlier decades, to reconstruct the discourse and [structure of feeling] of the era in which Breton was writing, in order to get a better sense of how a reader of his time would have recognized the various “ghosts” haunting the Paris through which Nadja and Andre travel. She started off doing an exhaustive survey of panoramic literature on Paris from the 20s, but realized this was not necessary as it was all very redundant:

Repeatedly, the same historical associations were identified with Breton's charged Parisian sites, confirming the hypothesis that there did indeed exist a contemporary res­ervoir of Parisian phantoms that Breton could invoke.

The uncanny effects of Parisian places, Breton suggests, derive from ef­faced historical memories that continue to cluster around the place of their occurrence in invisible but perceptible form. (83)

Comparing Breton’s text with that of the panoramic literature on the various sites he mentions, C finds that Breton consistently pursues the connections between Parisian bohemia and the history of insurrection at any particular locations; this is “a crucial component to Nadja's attack on orthodox Marxist notions of praxis” (94). Nadja is continuously associated with the side of the revolution that lost out, from the royalists to the Girondins (and Lepeletier, more of a radical, but an early martyr). Acc C, Breton is outlining an opposition to violent revolution, through contrasts or whatever with all these ghosts of failed past revolutions. Reference is made to the Sacco-Vanzetti riots on 1927, which were also failures, because the French Communist party hoped they would spark a more general revolutionary movement.

For in these experiences Breton finds confirmation for a haunting notion of subjectivity which calls into question the possibility of establishing an enlightened and conscious subject outside of ideology in several ways. Posing the problem of whether there exists a self-present subject at all, Breton also suggests the conscious subject as the locus where the reigning ideology reproduces itself. Ghosts endowed with powers of resistance only surge up in moments when the subject's conscious experience is disrupted by forces coming from a mysterious unconscious realm. In addition, the collective uncanny suggests that history is composed of temporal strata layered as in the situations of individual psychic repression at issue in psycho­analysis. (106)

In contrast to mainstream Marxism, Breton focuses on Bohemians and lumpen as the revolutionary class; “ragpicker as revolutionary” (106ff). Cohen recounts Breton’s annoyance at the shiny happy people on the sidewalk shaking hands, etc. which I had found so amusing; C, in contrast, appears to read this as Breton’s distrust of the working class as having revolutionary potential.

Rather, against the Marxist interest in mobilizing the proletariat, Breton stresses the need for individual, tactical disruptions of reigning social orders in what he calls “unchaining.” In doing so Breton disqualifies the class from which orthodox Marxism expects revolution, for he suggests as precondition to praxis the subject’s being freed from the material conditions of industrial production. Socially transformative activity becomes instead the province of subjects who no longer define themselves according to their work: (107)

The key concept Cohen pulls out of Breton’s book is désenchaînement, “perpetual unchaining.” The need for this is his response to Nadja’s insistence that the working class are “good people;” he takes this to mean martyrs for the cause (for work, for the nation in wars, for the CP in revolutionary struggles). It involves an openness to “the marvelous,” “an interest that surrealism itself took over from the Gothic tradition” (107).

Chaîne also means assembly line:

Enchainement is a word resonating not only on the material level but also on the conceptual level, as the enchainement of ideas; the disruption of dominant conceptual structures is an oft-stated goal of surrealist revolution. (108)

If Breton appropriates the Marxist liberatory language of “unchaining,” then, it is to displace Marxism's vision of the working class rising up and casting off its chains.

The inclusion of various lumpen/bohemian characters in the novel is contrasted with Marx’s distrust of this class.

But precisely its marginal relation to capitalist processes of production endears bohemia to Breton. In its Lumpen constitution and practices, bohemia embodies the unchaining of social hierarchies that surrealism seeks. (109)

She discusses Breton’s [détournement] of the word “perverse” into something positive (from Latin pervertere, to overturn, C notes]. This “more closely approaches his flea-market vision of social change than does the word revolution” (110). Breton is also interested in bohemia’s links to the libidinal unchaining of the erotic, which is also traditionally distrusted by mainstream marxism:

In Breton's subsequent theoretical writings he will try to reconcile Marxism with his interest in unchaining libidinal forces, speculating that the seemingly differentiated fields of libidinal and economic production may in fact turn out to be one. (110n58)

C turns to criticisms that mainstream surrealism accorded women a secondary status, stating that there are two ways to put surrealism’s treatment of women in perspective; first, by looking back, Cohen notes that the subordination of women in surrealism, even as they were made into “emblems of its power” goes back to the Jacobin revolutionary tradition (110-1). Second, looking forward, she finds that surrealism had some positive influence on feminist theory, through the concept of “subversion.” C provides some interesting comments on the status of “subversion” for “politicized postmodernism” at the time of her writing in the early 1990s:

After over a decade, subversion is losing its prestige; touting it as a political practice all too often seems like prescribing snakeoil for gaping social wounds. The pressing critical questions, we have started to feel, are elsewhere (nothing is so profoundly anti-erotic as the recently out­moded, Benjamin remarks), for example in exploring the complex relation of the aesthetic to other forms of social production rather than in denying its specificity or simplistically exalting its effect. I suspect moreover that the death-knell of subversion has, at least for the moment, been sounded with the fracturing of the Reagan-Bush right. Alleviating in some measure the academic left’s sense of social and political marginalization, this fracturing removes a key factor in the appeal of subversion to the politically engaged wing of American critical postmodernism throughout the 1980s. (111)

In a discussion of de Certeau’s influences, the distinction between Bataille and Breton is neatly summarized:

But in the case of tactics de Certeau’s view more resembles Bretonian unchaining than the equivalent therapeutic unleashing of the forces of the unconscious onto existing social order prescribed by Bataille. (111)

Bataille celebrates absolute negation and general collapse through expenditure; Breton and de Certeau are more interested in “small-scale moments of intervention” (e.g., de Certeau’s interest in “tactics”). The trouvaille, or lucky find, is dear to both surrealism and de Certeau. She also finds a link to D&G:

I think, for example, of Deleuze and Guattari’s “molecular multiplicities of desiring-production,” which owe much to Nadja’s haunting subjectivity; the trajectory here runs from unchaining to deterritorialization. (112)

Though she notes that “High surrealism is cer­tainly a conspicuous absence in Anti-Oedipus” which prominently cites the Beats and the renegade surrealists of Bataille’s faction.

She raises the issue of aestheticization, or the rendering of workers, bohemians, etc. into aesthetic tools via representation, in a way degrading them and stealing their agency: Breton is opposing aestheticization by traditional Marxism, but he himself risks doing it himself, and navigating this takes up most of the rest of Cohen’s discussion.

Discussing the degraded life of the urban proletariat, Breton points out that to make the worker into an agent of social change is to aestheticize the social realities of the worker’s life. One can certainly argue, however, that Breton’s interest in bohemian practices lends glamour to the dirty business of sifting through society’s trash. … It could equally be objected that Breton glamorizes prostitution and madness. (113)

However, according to C, Breton does not in fact aestheticize these positions because “Breton simultaneously narrates his encounters with Nadja in a fashion undoing the bohemian suggestions for revolutionary practice that he proposes” (114).

[Fanny Beznos, a character from the book who plays a key in this part of Cohen’s discussion, and who Breton recounts seeing at a flea market selling books, later died in Auschwitz].

Cohen’s summary of the plot; Nadja is a stock character from 19^th century social novels, the newcomer woman to the city who falls into prostitution:

In this desperate state, she meets a bored, young, married aesthete. Fascinated by her fragile mental health, the aesthete seduces her, driving her to madness; repelled by the sordid details of her life, he eventually abandons her. Later learning that, utterly destitute and alone, she has been institutionalized, he does nothing to help her but only abstractly bemoans her fate. (114)

This somewhat callous ending has disappointed many critics and indeed, readers in general (Breton comes across as so bourgeois in the end); Cohen, however, sees it as part of what makes Breton’s novel actually revolutionary; he is contrasted in particular to the writers of social novels, such as Eugene Sue, and Zola, and she describes how each would have written the story differently, to elicit particular feelings, so as to prompt readers to support social reforms. Breton denies us these nice cathartic feelings, and further complicates his books relation to the social novel by also bringing in elements of the post-Romantic prose poem a la Nerval or Rimbaud, precursors to surrealism.

In valorizing the prostitute, for example, Baudelaire’s prose poem redeems as aesthetically fertile her availability to chance and to the unknown as well as her refusal to engage in the forms of behavior which bourgeois morality defines as work.

Unlike Sue or Zola, Breton’s account of Nadja does not place the reality of prostitution, insanity, etc., under the obligation of communicating “a certain ideological necessity” linked to bourgeois moralizing, like that which Marx criticized in Sue (116). Instead of “replacing the social Nadja with the aestheticized Nadja” Breton problematizes all this with his constant questioning as to “who is the real Nadja?” This also does not romanticize bohemian unchaining, because it can lead to madness, etc. Instead, Breton’s setting up the possibility of unchaining, then showing also its pitfalls, creates for the reader an aporia or aporias, (in the Derridean sense of the word):

Breton’s generic disruption does not offer transcendence or liberation but rather throws the reader into impasse, aporia, and specifically the aporia of oppressive material conditions which destroy the efforts at ideological unchaining necessary to change them.

Nadja’s fate raises the possibility that surrealist désenchaînement may not only fail to undermine the superior force of the ruling order; it may exist only as an effect of the order it thinks to challenge. (117)

[The above implication that romantic désenchaînement might be part of the [spectacle] is not pursued any further in this chapter].

She notes criticisms that B’s attitude toward the insane prisoners of the asylum is patronizing and condescending, tinged with bourgeois moralism.

Many readers have expressed disappointment that Breton does not present his and Nadja’s adventures as heady and intoxicating transcendence. Condemning Breton for his final betrayal of Nadja, they link it to his betrayal of the marvelous series of steps the text sets out to take. It seems to me, however, that such betrayal does not mark the failure of the text’s disruptive power but instead its accomplishment. The disruptive force of the betrayal can indeed best be gauged by readers’ persistently negative reactions to it, which bear witness to their own unexamined needs for texts presenting optimistic schemas of social change. (118)

Interestingly, Cohen’s defense of Breton here could be said to be similar to his approach in the book: she defends him but also allows cracks and doubts in the edifice, so that Breton can be seen as both brilliant revolutionary and failed, un-self-critical bourgeois consumer of the spectacle, at the same time.

Profane Illumination, Chapter 2

 

Summary of Chapter 2: Benjamin’s Marxisms

This chapter takes on the question of the relationship between material relationships of production, and “remoter realms of the superstructure, including art” in Marxism, and how this was a central question for Benjamin; he saw the relationship as “a series of mediations, as it were transmissions” between base and superstructure (17). B opposed vulgar Marxism, which sees the base as simplistically determining, but what actual alternative he put forward has been debated; C notes his response is “maverick,” “Gothic Marxism” that attempts “to fuse Marxism with all manner of non-Marxist discourses” (18).

Benjamin turns to psychoanalytic vocabulary to conceptualize a revi­sion of base-superstructure relations which he both grounds in Marxist theory but finds Marxism unable to describe because of its own immer­sion in Enlightenment concepts of representation and causality. (18-9)

She focuses on the incompleteness of the Arcades Project, and Adorno's criticisms of B. Adorno’s criticisms will be addressed in relation to the concept of wish-image, from the second Paris Capital essay. The term “wish image” refers to “products of the superstructure from the inception of industrial production,” which “came into contact with deep-seated collective desires” (e.g., for a classless society), and which thus “could be put to socially transformative ends” (21). B considers these collective wish-images to be hidden in something like the unconscious, and his view of the cultural critic is based on the Freudian psychoanalyst, though working at a cultural rather than an individual level. He bases his wish-image concept in part on the Freudian theory of dreams. Adorno was skeptical of this. B also described wish-images in terms of phantasmagoria, a term taken from Marx’s discussion of commodity fetishism; A has no quarrel with this.

From the expose’s unconceptualized use of phantasmagoria it seems that Benjamin applies this term to those products of the superstructure where negative ideological mystification prevails. (23)

However, B does not specifically articulate the relationship between “these two forms of manifestation taken by the superstructure” (dream versus phantasmagoria). This is related to another “slippage” in B: “When discussing ideology, the Passagen-Werk often col­lapses the question of how ideology mystifies material relations into the question of how the superstructure transforms the base.” B is uncertain whether the superstructure can be experienced outside of ideological distortion.

B is interested in the subjectivity of the dialectical image; A wants to purify it of subjectivity, as an insight into or reflection of “objective conditions.” A’s Hornburg Letter has framed much subsequent discussion of B, with arguments coming down either on his side or on A’s. C discusses a quote from Konvolut K “that has become a locus classicus in Benjaminian interpretation” (28), in which he suggests that the superstructure cannot be a reflection of the base, since it involves ideological expression; instead, the superstructure must be an expression of the base:

The economic conditions of a society's existence come to expression in the superstructure, just as the over­ filled stomach of someone who is sleeping, although it may causally deter­mine the dream content, finds there not its reflection but its expression. (B, quoted in C, 28)

She gives a reading by Habermas as one end of the debate: H seems to largely agree with Adorno’s criticism. Buck-Morss, in contrast, defends B against A’s charges using the same passage. She argues that B is in fact very materialist and ties the collective dream to the class interests of the bourgeoisie. Cohen, however, wants to outline B’s position, not as a reaction to the dialectics of the Frankfurt School (and A), but to those of surrealist Marxism.

But Benjamin’s divergence from Frankfurt School Marxism must be read as his orientation toward another recognizable Marxist position rather than as his turn away from Marxist thought. (30)

She traces this influence of surrealist Marxism through Althusser, first; quoting from Reading Capital on the problem of defining/describing the “structural causality” (or “metonymic causality”) of base/superstructure-ideology relations; acc Althusser, this needs to be done in a more complex and adequate way than Marx had been able to, given the terminology etc of his time. Althusser thus incorporates Saussure, also drawing on Lacan and Freud; psychoanalysis is used to characterize base/superstructure relations, such that the economic appears “disfigured” in a superstructure which has its own material reality (32).

That Benjamin simultaneously insists on dream determination as adequate to his displacement of a vulgar Marxist base-superstructure model indicates that "expression" is a misleading phrase for the com­plexity of the concept toward which he strives. (34)

Benjamin describes the literary superstructure here as the sublimation of the contents of collective consciousness, which he qualifies not as libidinal impulses but rather as economic activity. While this repressed economic content could, as Buck-Morss suggests, be read as a class’s repressed wishes that focus on economic matters, it could also be read as the realm of economic production itself.

C shows links in the ways Althusser and B both argue for a psychoanalytically informed way of explaining base-superstructure relation. B cites Marx’s concept of “uneven development;” Althusser uses this as well in developing his own concept of overdetermination.

Althusser and Benjamin have different ways of situating/interrogating Marxism in its 19^th century origins. For A, this is about rescuing Marxism as a science from these ideologically limiting origins; B’s aim is “more ambiguous,” but involves also seeing Marxism “not as a science but as an important nineteenth-century form of expression” to be investigated in relation to other such forms of expression (37). B is also interested in the therapeutic potential of psychoanalysis, “how the psychoanalytic recasting of the base­-superstructure problematic may not only diagnose the complexity of current social relations but also provide models for socially transformative activity.” B is also, obviously, more eclectic; B furthermore has a very different (theologically influenced) linguistic theory than A.

C invokes Benjamin’s “spleen and ideal” as contrasts, spleen somehow illuminates the absent ideal? Much like the fallen word (which must signify to have meaning) somehow echoes the self-sufficient prelapsarian, unified word [BwO?] In 1933, in “On the Mimetic Faculty”, B develops the concept of “nonsensuous similarity”, “concerned with the traces left by divine language in the postlapsarian world” (39). According to graphology, handwriting conceals/contains unconscious images, and B hypothesizes this might have been significant at the origins of writing: “Script has thus become, like language, an archive of nonsensuous similarities, of nonsensuous correspondences.” (B, quoted on p 39). B thus complicates his earlier linguistic theory (regarding how words from different languages have some “nonsensuous similarity” to their shared referent, and to each other (?), bringing in the concept of repression, the relationship is now seen as overdetermined.

B sometimes says “nonsensuous similarity” and sometimes “nonsensuous correspondence;” C explores this. Examples of “profane illumination” (flashes of clarity?) in B are discussed; the notion of the collective dream or “wish image” is traced through the various drafts of the Paris essay.

If the products of the superstructure take the dis­torted form of dreams, Benjamin suggests, it is because they are doubly determined, not only by material forces but also by a nonmaterial col­lective agency that Benjamin names the collective unconscious. Benjamin ties the collective unconscious to some form of buried libidinal experience when he relates it to classless society from prehistory (Urgeschichte). (42)

The collective has a “need to give the new imagistic form.” How the distant/mythic past appears in images of the new (as contrast to recent past):

In addition, these wish images manifest an emphatic striving for dissociation with the outmoded – which means, however, with the most recent past. These tendencies direct the imagistic imagination, which has been activated by the new, back to the primeval past. (B quoted on page 43)

A footnote on the influence of the surrealist Mabille gives some perspective on how B is trying to distance himself from Jung’s timeless use of archaic images as “archetypes,” which he sees as reactionary.

Social products are incomplete (they can’t deliver what they promise), and the social order of production is unjust, limiting, and exploitative: “Responding to the insufficiencies of material conditions, the collective unconscious produces images where unsatisfactory material conditions are set to right” (44). Thus the distortion of the base by the superstructure is a result of overdetermination: the superstructure is not just determined by the base, but also “by multiple nonmaterial imperatives that he characterizes in libidinal, symbolic, and ideological terms.” This in turn complicates the simple base-superstructure relation/distinction [because aspects of the superstructure are being seen as productive]

Why these determining noneconomic forces are subject to collective repression is, however, a question that Benjamin does not address. (45)

The difference of Cohen’s position from Adorno’s:

Benjamin does not employ “the notion of collective consciousness . . . to divert attention from true objectivity and its correlate, alien­ated subjectivity” ... Rather, he devises it to propose a link between base and superstructure going beyond either linear or dialectical causality as well as to differentiate the appearance of the superstructure from its material workings. Benjamin seeks to use this notion to explain how the forces of the superstructure can have an obscured effect beyond the phenomenal forms in which they appear. In addition, he opens up the possibility for therapeutic formulations of social intervention. (46)

She discusses the concept of “construction” in Freud, whether analyst reconstructs from the pieces of the past, or constructs anew, is left ambiguous.

The gauge of the accuracy of the new construction is not only its faithfulness to what has been forgotten but also its therapeutic effectiveness in the present; Freud simultaneously stresses that this gauge is far from confirming that the construction ever existed as such. (47)

B in turn distinguishes “critical construction” from “reconstruction” and from historical processes/dialectics; the wish image or utopia is in a non-place. Adorno seeks to remove/dissolve ambiguity, to uncover objective processes; B seeks to use it. C however thinks “ambiguity” is a weak term and a “strategic error” on B’s part, preferring Althusser’s “overdetermination,” which she seems to argue is the concept that B is grasping for. (Which A further is distinguishing from Hegelian dialectics, something B does not do?)

B’s method and use of psychoanalysis, though, is meant to allow for “graphicness” (Anschaulichkeit) which is lacking in regular Marxist method; he will bring in montage to achieve this. B’s model is incomplete; the question of the relation between collective and individual consciousness remains, as well as relationship between phantasmagoria and base.

She turns to Benjamin’s use of the metaphor of “awakening:”

I want here to ask only one last question: How does our awakening from the world of our parents relate to our own implication in a collective dream? More specifically, given Benjamin's libidinal notion of critique, why does he describe the critical moment with a vocabulary of awakening at all? (52)

This seems problematic because the language of “awakening” sounds more like Adorno’s Enlightenment approach, re “awakening” from the illusion of superstructure to objective awareness. Surely B does not mean this? C argues that B uses the term “awakening” for two reasons: 1) due to the influence of surrealism, which will be explored in future chapters; 2) simply because “awakening” is the natural discursive opposite of “dream,” which B has already committed to. Nevertheless he does mean it as the simple opposite of dreaming or sleep.

Benjamin focuses specifically on the language of dream in this endeavor in part because it seems to provide an elegant pivot from materialism to psychoanalysis. This language, central to psychoanalysis, is also one that Marx employs from time to time. (53)

[Unfortunately Cohen’s book is just too early to have been able to engage with Derrida’s Specters of Marx.]

The Freudian account of dream, which B is drawing on, is more complex than the Enlightenment account, and “loaded with affect and ... the ambivalence of desire and fear” (53). For B, “awakening is not waking but rather a moment that, in its access to repressed processes, must be conceived of as close to the form of experience that reigns in the world of dream” (54) B “deconstructs” the relationship between sleep and waking, seeing rather “an infinite variety of concrete states of consciousness, that are conditioned by all conceivable gradations of awakened-hood in all possible centers (B, quoted on p 54).

B abandons dream terminology in the 1939 exposé, instead using the concepts of phantasmagoria and shock, “the moment making the overdetermination regulating social processes accessible to the individual subject.”

Can it be that awakening is the synthesis whose thesis is dream consciousness and whose antithesis is waking consciousness? Then the moment of awakening would be identical with the ‘Now of recognizability’ in which things put on their true-surrealist-face (B, quoted on p. 55)

To summarize: Benjamin breaks with established Marxist views of his time by complicating the base-superstructure relationship in a way that Adorno misconstrues as idealist; B is, however, actually pursing this relation in a way informed by psychoanalysis, similar to what Althusser later does as well. (Which is why Cohen argues we can use concepts from Althusser to elucidate Benjamin). The concept of “awakening,” is not a simple opposite of dreaming, a waking-into-the-real-world a la the simplistic Enlightenment opposition as used by Adorno; it is rather a dialectic, moving from the “waking” world of the establishment, through the dream world of wishes for a revolutionary future as imaged through the past, to a new “awakening” which is similar to Freud’s “construction,” which is not necessarily a reconstruction of the actual past but more importantly, has therapeutic power in the present.

Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic

John Ruskin (image from Wikimedia Commons)

John Ruskin (1900). The Nature of Gothic: A Chapter from the Stones of Venice. George Allen, London.

Summary:

Seeing as Cohen did not provide any definition of “Gothic,” in her discussion of Gothic Marxism, beyond a general suggestion of the noir, I thought I would turn to its most famous commentator, the fascinating and deeply problematic John Ruskin (Cohen does not cite Ruskin, and most likely did not have him in mind). It is of course somewhat anachronistic to try and modernize the political alignments of a person from another era, but Ruskin’s thoughts on the value of independence in labor can be read alongside, and contrasted to, such later arguments as the anarchist “abolition of work” argued for by Bob Black and others. Ruskin certainly had an influence on the anarchist and socialist tradition, as witnessed by the introduction to this volume, by William Morris; nevertheless he himself was, at least in this text, firmly conservative in the old sense of the term, pining for an idealized feudal order in which there is mutual respect up and down the rungs of a naturalized class hierarchy. Parts of his argument can also be read, somewhat against the grain though not completely, as an argument for a DIY punk aesthetic, along the lines of my (ahem) old band Yellow #5's aptly named 1987 debut album, Everybody Doing Their Own Shit At The Same Fucking Time.

Part of Ruskin’s charm, and his ability to write so many very long, multi-volumed books, is apparently his ability to go off on long tangents that would make Edward Gibbon envious. This chapter, from volume II of Ruskin’s three-volume survey of the architecture of Venice, starts off addressing the question of the form Gothic architecture took in Venice, leading to the question of how to define and evaluate Gothic in general; this leads on into discussions of the qualities of good art and architecture in general, on how and why architecture reflects the social order which produced it, and thus on the form of the ideal social order. That last topic is the one which has made this “chapter” (of 150 pages in the original text) so famous, and I read a version published as a separate book (though it was unfortunately lacking the plates, so I had to find and refer to a full copy of the Stones of Venice, anyway).

So: the question of Gothic architecture in Venice, leads to the question of how to define the Gothic in general; this is not just a question of various “Gothic” elements which may or may not be present, but of a unity they form; we all already have some idea of what we understand by “Gothic.” His plan is “tracing out this grey, shadowy, many-pinnacled image of the Gothic spirit within us” (3). If the reader has a different idea than Ruskin, “I do not ask him to accept, but only to examine and understand, my interpretation.”

Ruskin takes an approach akin in some ways to the “principles and elements” in discussing art: he focuses first on internal aspects (“certain mental tendencies of the builders”), before moving on the the mere external forms (arches, etc.)

Thus, the mental characteristics of Gothic, in order of importance: 

1. Savageness

2. Changefulness

3. Naturalism.

4. Grotesqueness.

5. Rigidity.

6. Redundance. (4)

Those are characters of the buildings themselves; to them correspond the following characters of the builders:

1. Savageness or Rudeness

2. Love of Change

3. Love of Nature

4. Disturbed Imagination

5. Obstinacy

6. Generosity

 In any given building, a few of these can be missing, but take away too many, it ceases to be “Gothic.”

I. Savageness

The name “Gothic” originated as a reproach for buildings with “a degree of sternness and rudeness” looked down on by commentators in the south (5). Should the name be replaced with something more fitting and respectable? No need, says R.

It is true, greatly and deeply true, that the architecture of the North is rude and wild but it is not true, that, for this reason, we are to condemn it, or despise. Far otherwise: I believe it is in this very character that it deserves our profoundest reverence.

He gives a highly poetical climate-based argument for cultural and artistic differences between northern and southern Europe; there is a “look of mountain brotherhood between the cathedral and the Alp” (8). But savegeness is even better if it reflects religion, not just climate – this is part of his deeply Christian analysis: what is key to the Gothic is that it reflects the Christian belief in the sanctity and equality of every soul.

This leads him into his most interesting argument. He distinguishes between servile, constitutional, and revolutionary traditions of architectural ornament. Servile ornament characterizes the schools of ancient Greece, Nineveh, and Egypt, who subordinated enslaved workmen to rigid rules, and confined creativity and artistry to the overseers [shades of Braverman]. Revolutionary or Renaissance ornament involves some kind of overskilling – every worker is equally schooled and skilled, but the result is that “his own original power is overwhelmed, and the whole building becomes a wearisome exhibition of well-educated imbecility” (9).

Constitutional ornament is the Gothic one, and it reflects a double aspect of Christian thought: first, that every soul is equally of value and not to be subordinated; second, that imperfection is inevitable. “That admission of lost power and fallen nature, which the Greek or Ninevite felt to be intensely painful, and, as far as might be, altogether refused, the Christian makes daily and hourly, contemplating the fact of it without fear, as tending, in the end, to God’s greater glory.” The Christian exhortation is thus, “Do what you can, and confess frankly what you are unable to do; neither let your effort be shortened for fear of failure, not your confession silenced for fear of shame.” Gothic schools of architecture thus “receive the results of the labour of inferior minds; and out of fragments full of imperfection, and betraying that imperfection in every touch, indulgently raise up a stately and unaccusable whole” (10). [It is not clear to me whether Ruskin would have been aware of the corollary concept of wabi-sabi in Japanese art.]

A desire for perfection should not lead us to “prefer the perfectness of the lower nature to the imperfection of the higher;” we are “not to set the meaner thing, in its narrow accomplishment, above the nobler thing, in its mighty progress; not to esteem smooth minuteness above shattered majesty; not to prefer mean victory to honourable defeat; not to lower the level of our aim, what we may more surely enjoy the complacency of success.”

In every manual laborer there are “some powers for better things,” some level of higher thought, which is not allowed to develop under the current system, in which they are made to act like machines.

Understand this clearly: You can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to cut one; to strike a curved line, and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool. (11)

[There is a lot to unpack in that; the assumption the worker is somehow asleep like an automaton, that has to awake into manhood [definitely this is more about “manhood” than “humanity?”] “You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.” [Granted this is in the language of one upper-class person talking to another about the plebs below, but it still beats Taylorism.]

Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them.

“On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool.” Once he starts to imagine on his own, he loses his precision and becomes unreliable; “but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon him.” [So what exactly is this “majesty?” For Ruskin it seems to be the sovereignty of the free, Protestant, [male] individual.]

Ruskin argues that factory work is even more degrading and dehumanizing than slavery or feudal serfdom, on the familiar existentialist argument that even in slavery you can remain “in one sense, and the best sense, free” (12). His argument seems to be that even manual labor, done by hand, requires some intelligence, and thus allows the worker to develop their own intelligence, and thus be “free” in their minds, despite being enslaved. Factory work, in contrast, will “smother their souls with them,” and make their skin “into leathern thongs to yoke machinery with.” By being tied to, and thus dependent on, machinery, workers lose even their intelligence; the perfection of modern English products is a measure of this enslavement. In contrast, the imperfections of old Gothic architecture are “signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her children.” (13)

[It seems R feels that subordination to machinery is more degrading than social subordination, even in such a condition as slavery. This can clearly be contrasted with Marx’s position in the Grundrisse; Marx agrees that automatic machinery reduces workers to “conscious linkages;” nevertheless what is most important is not the worker’s relation to technology, but the class relation that organizes production. R’s position in this light seems to be more in the line of “compassionate conservatism.”]

Ruskin is not against hierarchy, and feels that to “obey another man, to labour for him, yield reverence to him or to his place, is not slavery. It is often the best kind of liberty – liberty from care.” (13) The man who has to oversee others is the one with more “care” and worry. The current struggles of the 19th Century seem, to R, to be misdirected when they are simply against the wealthy upper class – instead of being against the division of labor per se, we should seek a more just division of labor, in which there is no such degrading labor as exists in factories. Back in feudal times, “the separation between the noble and the poor was merely a wall built by law; now it is a veritable difference in level of standing, a precipice between upper and lower grounds in the field of humanity...”

He goes through a sort of master-and-servant dialectic, which ends somewhat differently than Hegel’s, on the relation between the worker who “reverences” his master, and the master who shoulders all the burden of responsibility:

Which had, in reality, most of the serf nature in him – the Irish peasant who was lying in wait yesterday for his landlord, with his musket muzzle thrust through the ragged hedge; or that old mountain servant, who 200 years ago, at Inverkeithing, gave up his own life and the lives of his seven sons for his chief? – as each fell, calling forth his brother to the death, “Another for Hector!” (14) 

[The reference is to the history of Clan Maclean of Scotland. Perhaps it is not specifically English, but the nature of imperialism, to romanticize the peoples whom you have already colonized and beaten down, more than the ones who are still putting up resistance? The correct answer is that no, the Irish rebel has broken with any “serf mentality” the moment he took up his rifle, and is continuing the same battle against Cromwell, and all he stands for, that the seven Maclean brothers gave their lives in, back in 1651.]

So anyway, Ruskin feels that the current working class feels unthanked, their sacrifice in the factory is not honored like the reverent sacrifices of the past generations on battlefields, etc. In turn, the upper class folks who want to help should not teach or preach (presumably the standard attempts of the time; and still common today), since these are basically insulting the intelligence of workers; instead what is needed is a “right understanding, on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labor are good for men, raising them, and making them happy” (15), and centering the economy on this, giving up the forms of beauty, convenience, etc., which can only be gained by squeezing the life and soul out of workers. R suggests three “broad and simple rules:”

1. Never encourage the manufacture of any article not absolutely necessary, in the production of which Invention has no share.

2. Never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some practical or noble end.

3. Never encourage imitation or copying of any kind, except for the sake of preserving records of great works. (15)

1. By “invention” he more specifically means inventiveness or creativity, on the part of the worker creating the product. His examples is the manufacture of glass beads, which are “utterly unnecessary” (16), and which involve mindless, repetitive labor. “And every young lady, therefore, who buys glass beads, is engaged in the slave-trade, and in a much more cruel one than that which we have so long been endeavoring to put down.” [the last bit there seems an unnecessary exaggeration. IIRC someone has made an argument somewhere that this frequent assertion in the 19^th century that factory labor is “worse than slavery” ultimately justified or normalized the existing slavery system.] However, glass cups or vessels can be “the subjects of exquisite invention,” and when we  buy and appreciate these, “we are doing good to humanity.” Similarly, wearing cut jewels merely for the sake of their value is wrong, but wearing fine gold jewelry which has been crafted by a skilled artisan is good.

[Ruskin can interestingly be linked to the current arguments for degrowth, on the shared point that we could do away with the production of a lot of useless and wasteful things (though his example is glass beads, not SUVs, etc.). This is also related to a problem with his argument for a return to an artisanal economy, namely that the exquisite glassware, etc. which we can keep can only be afforded by the wealthy, while the cheaper, “useless” decoration he wants us to give up, is that which the working class can afford.]

2. Ruskin is not against elegance and finish per se, just against it being prioritized over the freedom and thought of the creator. “If you are to have the thought of a rough and untaught man, you must have it ina  rough and untaught way .... Only get the thought and do not silence the peasant because he cannot speak good grammar, or until you have taught him his grammar.” (17) “So the rule is simple: always look for invention first, and after that, for such execution as will help the invention, and as the inventor is capable of without painful effort, and no more.”

He discusses the difference between English and old Venetian glass: the former is always precise, the latter cruder but also more inventive at its best: “Choose whether you will pay for the lovely form or the perfect finish, and choose at the same moment whether you will make the worker a man or a grindstone” (18).

He imagines an objection, that the talented craftsman should be promoted to overseer or designer, and have less talented workers under him, and so we can get “both design and finish.” R replies:

All ideas of this kind are founded upon two mistaken suppositions: the first, that one man’s thoughts can be, or ought to be, executed by another man’s hands; the second, that manual labor is a degradation, when it is governed by intellect. 

He defines large-scale architecture on this model as “the expression of the mind of manhood by the hands of childhood” [very much the Kantian “What is Enlightenment” here]. Starting to sound a bit more radical, he argues that the societal distinction between the gentleman thinker, and the working “operative” is a problem:

We are always in these days endeavoring to separate the two [thinking and working]; we want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. (19)

Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.

No master [or boss?] should be too proud to do the meanest or hardest work in their profession. So anyway, the rudeness indicated by the term “Gothic” should be seen as a good quality, not a reproachful one: “no architecture can be truly noble which is not imperfect” (20). [R’s theory of work and art are very appropriate to his own writing, because there is some beauty, depth, and insight there, that shines through a lot of crudeness and error.]

Ruskin now admits that his use of the terms “perfect” and “imperfect” so far has been inaccurate to his ends:

But, accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a misunderstanding of the ends of art.

This is for two reasons:

1) “...no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure;” that is, the truly great artist is always pushing beyond what they can currently do, experimenting instead of staying inside what they can comfortably do, which itself would lead to relative mediocrity. If they strain to actually achieve perfection, they end like Leonardo, spending ten years on a painting, then leaving it unfinished to go on to new projects which will end the same way. The results will necessarily be beautiful but imperfect.

2) Imperfection is in fact essential to life, and is a sign of progress and change in all nature. He provides examples from the natural world: “to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality” (21).

II. Changefulness

From Savageness, he turns to the second quality of the Gothic, Changefulness, or Variety. This is a natural benefit of allowing  workers more freedom over their own work. He contrasts the regularity of a properly built neo-classical home, using the correct styles for Greek columns, etc, with buildings that can be read like poetry, because in addition to regularity, they have something else, variety.

The idea of reading a building as we would read Milton or Dante, and getting the same kind of delight out of the stones as out of the stanzas, never enters our mind for a moment” (23).  Architecture and every other art should say new things, not just repeat itself. 

Nothing is a great work of art, for the production of which either rules or models can be given. Exactly so far as architecture works on known rules, and from given models, it is not an art, but a manufacture... (24)

He turns to the superiority of a pointed over a round arch, as the former has infinite variability; ditto for grouped shafts and tracing in windows. There are, nevertheless, both healthy and “diseased” loves of change. He makes his appeal to nature (and music) for the distinction:  monotony and change are best experienced in alternation. The “diseased” love of change is when there is too much change, so it has become monotonous, and we seek “extreme and fantastic degrees of it” (27). Healthy love of change, acc R, led to the rise of Gothic, and diseased love of change led to its fall.

Monotony unbroken, like darkness, is painful (and even at its best it serves as a painful preparation or something for the relief of change): “...an architecture which is altogether monotonous is a dark or dead architecture; and of those who love it, it may be truly said, ‘they love darkness rather than light.’” Yet “transparent monotony” is a good use of monotony; “endurance” of monotony/darkness is a good quality of mind.

R starts off a great discussion of the superiority of the Gothic by observing that it is “not only the best, but the only rational architecture, as being that which can fit itself most easily to all services, vulgar or noble” (28). Because it is not dominated by a rigorous symmetry like Romanesque, etc., it can grow or shrink in width or breadth or function. Gothic builders never let ideas of “outside symmetries and consistencies to interfere with the real use and value of what they did.” [in contrast, the miserably boring uniform façades of many European squares comes to mind, particularly those celebrated by A.E.J. Morris.]

If they wanted a window, they opened one; a room, they added one; a buttress, they built one; utterly regardless of any established conventionalities of external appearance, knowing (as indeed it always happened) that such daring interruptions of the formal plan would rather give additional interest to symmetry than injure it. So that, in the best times of Gothic, a useless window would rather have been opened in an unexpected place for the sake of the surprise, than a useful one forbidden for the sake of symmetry. Every successive architect, employed upon a great work, built the pieces he added in his own way, utterly regardless of the style adopted by his predecessors; and if two towers were raised in nominal correspondence at the sides of a cathedral front, one was nearly sure to be different from the other, and in each the style at the top to be different from the style at the bottom. (28-9)

He gives religious import to the “confession of Imperfection” and the “confession of Desire of Change:” “If we pretend to have reached either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded ourselves and our work.” [i.e., it would be hubris]

It is that strange disquietude of the Gothic spirit that is its greatness; that restlessness of the dreaming mind, that wanders hither and thither among the niches, and flickers feverishly around the pinnacles, and frets and fades in labyrinthine knots and shadows along wall and roof, and yet is not satisfied, nor shall be satisfied. (30)

III. Naturalism

He defines naturalism as “the love of natural objects for their own sake, and the effort to represent them frankly, unconstrained by artistical laws” (31) [this seems a problematic formulation]. “Naturalism” was sometimes used as a reproach in his day [in contrast to “Purism”], and he explains why, by distinguishing between composition (of colors, lines, etc.) and representation per se. “Now the noblest art is an exact unison of the abstract value, with the imitative power, of forms and colours. ... But the human mind cannot in general unite the two perfections; it either pursues the fact to the neglect of the composition, or pursues the composition to the neglect of the fact.” (32) Nevertheless, both of these serve their purposes, for communication, and for decoration. 

R says men are artistically divided into three “classes:” men of design, men of facts, and men of both. Each class has both healthy and unhealthy functions. The unhealthy forms are caused by despite or envy; errors on the side of design only cause inferior art, while errors on the side of facts produce idealogues who ruin everything.

Three more classes: good and evil are mixed in everything, yet one class seeks the good, one the evil, and the third perceives both. He calls these purists, sensualists, and naturalists, respectively.

He excoriates the sensualists at length, but more interesting is his criticism of the purists: “... this vulgar Purism, which rejects truth, not because it is vicious, but because it is humble, and consists not in choosing what is good, but in disguising what is rough, extends itself into every species of art. ... There is nothing, I believe, so vulgar, so hopeless, so indicative of an irretrievably base mind, as this species of Purism.” (44)

... the very becoming a Purist is commonly indicative of some slight degree of weakness, readiness to be offended, or narrowness of understanding of the ends of things: the greatest men being, in all times of art, Naturalists, without any exception... (45)

He recognizes in passing the ranty and digressive character of this 100+ page “chapter:”

the reader may already be somewhat wearied with a statement which has led us apparently so far from our immediate subject... (45) 

So anyway, the Gothic workman confesses his own imperfection (rudeness) and that of his subject (naturalism). On page 48, R comes out strongly against historicism in a footnote: “All good art representing past events, is therefore full of the most frank anachronism, and always ought to be. No painter has any business to be an antiquarian. We do not want his impressions or suppositions respecting things that are past. We want his clear assertions respecting things present.” (48)

[Well, Benjamin would have a response, that we can have both, that the image from the past can resonate with the present.]

He discusses Gothic vegetation, and how it is far more interested in the actual forms of real vegetation, than many older sculptural styles, which were content with very stylized vegetation as ornament. R links this to the rebirth of scientific inquiry at the close of the Middle Ages. He notes a theory that the Gothic developed out of imitation of nature; he points out this is historically inaccurate, the Gothic only developed to be closer to nature in its most mature form, but this itself reveals how central naturalism is to the “temper” of Gothic builders:

It was no chance suggestion of the form of an arch from the bending of a bough, but a gradual and continual discovery of beauty in natural forms which could be more and more perfectly transferred into those of stone, that influenced at once the heart of the people, and the form of the edifice. (50-1)

IV: The Grotesque.

R unfortunately declines to discuss this until the third volume, other than describing it as “the tendency to delight in fantastic and ludicrous, as well as in sublime, images.” (52).

V. Rigidity.

He immediately admits that the word “rigidity” is not really sufficient; “active rigidity” might be closer: “the peculiar energy which gives tension to movement, and stiffness to resistance.” [“Energetic” would perhaps be the best term]; he refers to the quality of Gothic architecture that uses tension to achieve lightness, instead of having stones just sitting on each other like southern architecture; and also how Gothic ornamentation does not simply sit on the walls but leaps forth, independently. R ties this to the need for people in northern climates to find joy in the cold season, as much as in the warm.

[This is of course belied by Moorish architecture, indeed, it has been argued, more recently, that Islamic and specifically Moorish architecture influenced Gothic.]

He emphasizes the importance of moderation: “The best Gothic building is not that which is most Gothic...” (55).

VI. Redundance

Last and least, Redundance, “the uncalculating bestowal of the wealth of its labour” (56). Instead of relying on elegance or economy, “a certain portion of their effect depends upon accumulation of ornament.”

For the very first requirement of Gothic architecture being, as we saw above, that  it shall both admit the aid, and appeal to the admiration, of the rudest as well as the most refined minds, the richness of the work is, paradoxical as the statement may appear, a part of its humility. No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple; which refuses to address the eye, except in a few clear and forceful lines; which implies, in offering so little to our regards, that all it has offered is perfect; and disdains, either by the complexity or the attractiveness of its features, to embarrass our investigation, or betray us into delight.

[Obviously, he would have some harsh words for modernist architecture.]

The inferior rank of the workman is often shown as much in the richness, as the roughness, of his work; and if the co-operation of every hand, and the sympathy of every heart, are to be received, we must be content to allow the redundance which disguises the failure of the feeble, and wins the regard of the inattentive.

[There is something in here, despite the classism carried over, regarding the way art could look in an anarchist society based on universal cooperation and sympathy; “failure” in the above just means not meeting certain elite standards or aesthetic expectations. What R is describing is how a more democratic, egalitarian work-process, reflecting a society of the same values, creates art with more “redundance,” or better put, variety of aesthetic judgments and innovations. This stands as a plausible response to Le Guin’s characterization of the anarchist society in The Dispossessed as being drab and uninterested in, or suspicious of, adornment; more likely, there would be greater diversity and “redundance” of artistic style, because there would no longer be any hierarchy of taste.] R then lists several interests in the Gothic “heart” which are quite relevant to this: “a magnificent enthusiasm, which feels as if it never could do enough to reach the fulness of its ideal; an unselfishness of sacrifice, which would rather cast fruitless labour before the altar than stand idle in the market; and finally, a profound sympathy with the fulness and wealth of the material universe...” (56-7). He goes on about the influence of nature on Gothic artists, that being influenced by nature they necessarily had no fear or revulsion of complexity or richness.

Having covered the six aspects of the inner spirit of Gothic, he turns to outward form. He reiterates that we can’t say that a building is or isn’t Gothic, only that it is more Gothic or less Gothic, depending on the extent to which it possesses those six aspects of inner spirit, and the elements of outward form which he will now enumerate.

He starts, naturally, with pointed arches, then turns to roof construction. Gabled roofs are even more important than pointed arches, being linked to the northern climate, and forming the basis of turret and spire, etc.

“It is not the compelled, but the willful transgression of law which corrupts the character. Sin is not in the act, but in the choice.” (59) This is his way of introducing the point that architects can stray from the rules of Gothic by necessity (shortage of room, etc.) and still be Gothic, it is when they do it willfully that they “sin.”

All of Gothic is developed from the relationship between the pointed arch for the bearing line below, and the gable for the protecting line above (62); he gives an illustration of this shape, basically the star trek insignia, but not off-center.

There are three ways of bridging space, with straight lintel, round arch, and angled gable; the Gothic “pointed arch” is properly speaking a rounded gable. All architectures of the world can be grouped by which means they use to bridge space. Examples: Greek, Romanesque, Gothic.

Per my above comment about Islamic architecture, R does mention a style he calls “Arabian Gothic” (as opposed to “pure Gothic”), of which he states that it “is called Gothic, only because it has many Gothic forms, pointed arches, vaults, etc., but its spirit remains Byzantine, more especially in the form of the roof-mask” (65) (i.e., with domes instead of gables).

Foliation is the inspiration for the trefoil arch, and for tracery: Gothic artists don’t necessarily try to imitate plants per se, but to reproduce their structural or geometrical beauty and the pleasure received from perceiving them.

He provides a final definition of Gothic based on physical characteristics: “Foliated architecture, which uses the pointed arch for the roof proper, and the gable for the roof-mask” (72).

There is now only one point more which he wishes to make, regarding foliation and sculpture, and the highest or purest form of Gothic, versus its final degraded forms. Early Gothic was “noble, inventive, and progressive,” whereas late Gothic was “ignoble, uninventive, and declining” (73) due to how they use foliation and figure sculpture.

He distinguishes between two styles he calls linear and surface Gothic; R gives two examples, one a gable from Abbeville, France, illustrating linear gothic; and the other from Verona, Italy, illustrating surface Gothic. R notes that the Italian example he has provided appears to have been executed less skillfully or expertly, yet this is not important: “The Veronese Gothic is strong in its masonry, simple in its masses, but perpetual in its variety. The late French Gothic is weak in masonry, broken in mass, and repeats the same idea continually. It is very beautiful, but the Italian Gothic is the nobler style” (76). 

Ruskin states a principle of economy in art: “a composition from which anything can be removed without doing mischief, is always so far forth inferior.” [Is it churlish to point out that “so far forth” could be removed from that definition, without any undue mischief?]

He provides some rules for recognizing “whether a given building be good Gothic or not, and, if not Gothic, whether its architecture is of a kind which will probably reward the pains of careful examination” (78): 

1. steep gable, high above the walls

2. windows and doors with pointed arches and gables over them.

3. presence of foliation

4. the arches in general "are carried on true shafts with bases and capitals." Exceptions noted for non-religious use.

Those identify Gothic; but is it good architecture? Some more rules of thumb:

1. “See if it looks as if it had been built by strong men,” if it has roughness, “nonchalance” mixed with gentleness, as “of men who can see past the work they are doing, and betray here and there something like disdain for it” (79). Mere precision is less likely to clearly indicate that it is of the “noblest” schools.

2. Irregularity, with “different parts fitting themselves to different purposes, no one caring what becomes of them, so that they do their work. If one part always answers accurately to another part, it is sure to be a bad building...”

3. It has “perpetually varied design” in ornamentation. (180)

4. “Read the sculpture.” The sculpture on a building should be legible from a distance. “Thenceforward the criticism of the building is to be conducted precisely on the same principles as that of a book” in terms of the knowledge and feeling communicated.

Ruskin would no doubt be depressed and disappointed upon trying to “read” the architecture of today with its almost total lack of sculpture or artisanal ornamentation whatsoever. More importantly, he would note that its ugliness, its drabness and arrogance, directly reflect the dissociation of designers from builders: the problem with modern architecture is that it reflects the hierarchical, exploitative relations through which it was built, and of the deeply unequal society which built it.

 

 

 

 

 

Profane Illumination, Chapter 1

Margaret Cohen, (1993) Profane illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of surrealist revolution. University of California Press, Berkeley.

Summary of Chapter 1: Gothic Marxism

Cohen introduces the concept of Gothic Marxism, by which she refers to “a Marxist genealogy fascinated with the irrational aspects of social pro­cesses, a genealogy that both investigates how the irrational pervades existing society and dreams of using it to effect social change” (1-2). Her two primary interlocutors for the study will be Walter Benjamin and Andre Breton, both of whom struggled with the economic determinism of the “vulgar Marxism” of their day; Breton developed a “modern materialism” which, Cohen argues, influenced Benjamin in his great unfinished Arcades Project, and in his work of bringing Freud into a Marxist vision.

Cohen appears fond of long numbered lists, for instance she summarizes Breton’s influence on Benjamin thus:

We will see Benjamin particularly provoked by (1) the modern materialist appeal to the fissured subject of psychoanalysis to modify the conscious and rational subject dear to practical Marxism; (2) its application of psychoanalytic notions of history to collective history in order to displace a linear or mechani­cally causal vision of historical process and to break down the base­ superstructure distinction with appeal to libidinal forces permeating both; (3) its use of psychoanalytic formulations of determination and representation to complicate a reflective model for the relation between superstructure and base; (4) its psychoanalytically informed interest in the everyday, which it uses to revise orthodox Marxist notions of the stuff of history as well as to open possible reservoirs for recuperative experience in damaged life; and (5) its application of psychoanalytic notions of therapy to an Enlightenment view of critique, notably as this application pertains to the dialectical image (p. 6).

She notes past scholarship on the connections between Benjamin’s Arcades Project and surrealism; this has normally been interpreted as Benjamin importing surrealist influence into Marxist analysis:

In the standard Marxist readings of this relation, informed by the Marxism either of the Frankfurt School or of Brecht, Benjamin's use of psychoanalytic language, notably dream language, has been considered the place where he substitutes the smoke and mir­rors of writerly technique for critical analysis. (8)

Breton, in turn, has been dismissed by mainstream Marxists as "lacking in seriousness.” C situates this in relation to the contest between “high surrealism” (Breton) and “renegade surrealists” (Bataille), with the latter being the ones favored by later theorists. She discusses the relation with, and the debt owed to, the surrealists such as Breton, by the later “theoretical avant-garde” of Lacan, et al., who dismissed Breton and the high surrealists. A lot of the rejection by the subsequent generation can be seen as a reaction to the dominance of surrealism for a time: “With the aging of the generation tyrannized by high surrealism, official recognition of the movement is returning” (12n33).  

She situates her project as a form of what Benjamin called “rescuing critique,” that is, a critique that rescues elements of the past through an understanding of their resonance with the presence, but which, by remaining “critique,” does not devolve into nostalgia. She gives another list of the rescued material with which a Gothic Marxism will be interested:

The most suggestive material rescued here includes: (1) the valorization of the realm of a culture’s ghosts and phantasms as a significant and rich field of social production rather than a mirage to be dispelled; (2) the valorization of a culture’s detritus and trivia as well as its strange and marginal practices; (3) a notion of critique moving beyond logical argument and the binary opposition to a phantasmagorical staging more closely resembling psychoanalytic therapy, privileging nonrational forms of “working through” and regulated by overdetermination rather than dialectics; (4) a dehierarchization of the epistemological privilege accorded the visual in the direction of that integration of the senses dreamed of by Marx in The 1844 Manuscripts: “. . . the complete emancipation of all human senses and qualities . . . The senses have therefore become directly in their practice theo­reticians” ; accompanying this dehierarchization, a practice of criticism cutting across traditionally separated media and genres as well as critical attention to how and why these separations came to be; and (5) a concomitant valorization of the sensuousness of the visual: the realm of visual experience is opened to other possibilities than the accomplishment and/or figuration of rational demonstration. (11-12)

To summarize the above:

1) a culture’s “ghosts and phantasms” are not just a mirage, but a “field of social production;”

2) ditto for a culture’s “detritus and trivia,” likewise not to be consigned to the dustbin;

3) moving beyond critique as a form of argument and opposition to something more like                            psychoanalytical therapy [this feels very 90s];

4) replacing the privilege of the visual with an integration of all the senses; and

5) at the same time, valorizing the “sensuousness of the visual” as more than just a stand-in for “rational     demonstration.”

She notes that she will be linking up to the Gothic Marxism of later French avant-garde thinkers, including Deleuze and Guattari, Michel de Certeau, and particularly Louis Althusser, and concludes with a note on Benjamin’s concept of “fascination” (15), which seems related to the Aristotelian concept of wonder; she quotes Ackbar Abbas, stating that Benjamin “sees in fascination not a will-less affect, not the response of last resort, but a willingness to be drawn to phenomena that attract our attention yet do not submit entirely to our understanding.” This sounds very much like the sensibility of the "modern hero" in Benjamin's Baudelaire book.