my blue is your blue?

maybe the grey cloud

Gni in

Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs

Guy Debord

on the Divan

Fear

stating the obvious

theory

by neglect

a syllable nearer silence

Absence of Depth

walls

Then to the left he turned. Leaving the walls, 

he headed toward the center by a path 

that strikes into a vale, whose stench arose, 

disgusting us as high up as we were. 

Dante- Canto X The Inferno

dance

but if a living dance upon dead minds

why,it is love;but at the earliest spear

of sun perfectly should disappear

moon's utmost magic,or stones speak or one

name control more incredible splendor than

our merely universe, love's also there:

and being here imprisoned,tortured here

love everywhere exploding maims and blinds

(but surely does not forget,perish, sleep

cannot be photographed,measured;disdains

the trivial labelling of punctual brains...

-Who wields a poem huger than the grave?

from only Whom shall time no refuge keep

though all the weird worlds must be opened? 

ee cummings 

sacred box

• Dimitris Pikionis Marika Kotopouli Summer Theatre, Heyden Street, Photograph, view of stage 1933 ΑΝΑ_67_15_18
• Neohellenic Architecture Archives

in the train

http://www.the-temenos.org/tt_album2.html

filled with animals

                                                                                                                                                                     Margarita Bofiliou, "Mixed Technique"

"The man of the future will be filled with animals"

 Rimbaud

ce cours de sable qui glisse

4th wall

How are we to inhabit 

This space from which the fourth wall is invariably missing, 

As in a stage-set or dollhouse, except by staying as we are, 

In lost profile, facing the stars, with dozens of as yet 

Unrealized projects, and a strict sense 

Of time running out, of evening presenting 

The tactfully folded-over bill? 

 

-John Ashbery, (1977) 

covered with snow

In A Desert In A Large Bunker Covered With Snow

- Liam Gillick -

Gabriel Tarde suffered from intermittent periods of semi-blindness, an extreme form of myopia that may have severely affected his academic legacy yet may well have led to the most potent theme of a neglected yet important work. This nineteenth-century French sociologist, who worked on the notions of the inventive in relation to the imitative, immediately preceded Henri Bergson as the head of modern philosophy at the Collège de France. Tarde wrote one piece of published fiction. The original French version, Fragment d’histoire future, was written in 1896, eight years before his death, at which point the much more celebrated and referenced Bergson took over his chair. That same year, Fragment d’histoire futurewas translated into English by Cloudsley Brereton, an inspector of schools who also contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and translated Bergson’s essay “Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic,” among many other texts, essays and books.

As was the Anglophone habit at the time, hardly modified by the Hollywood practices of the present, it was deemed necessary to transform Tarde’s original title into something a little more exciting. So Fragment d’histoire future was published as Underground Man in English in 1905, with an introduction by H. G. Wells as both a tribute to a fellow science-fictionist and a selling point for the English version. At the time, Wells had already published his most famous books: The Time Machine(1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and The War of the Worlds (1898), among others. His introduction to Underground Man marvels at the light-footed hubris of an academic entering the world of science fiction with a text that both enlightens us about a potential future and plays complex games with the place of the sociologist within intellectual culture. Wells accompanies this with a degree of patronizing respect for a notion of a complex culture that can multiply and erase itself simultaneously in terms of signifiers, potentials and narrative:

He [Tarde] rejects the proposition that ‘society consists in an exchange of services’ with the confidence of a man who has thought it finely out. He gives out clearly what so many of us are beginning dimly perhaps to apprehend, that ‘society consists in the exchange of reflections.’ 1

Underground Man takes catastrophic climate change as its starting point. The sun is dying although we are never told why—it just is—and the resulting drop in temperature drives everyone from European cities towards the Sahara and Middle East. (America is rarely referred to, but we can assume that the entire population of that continent is wiped out.) The timing of the disaster is unfortunate as it is explained that society has reached a certain heightened level, and a particular understanding between people has developed leading to a neo-Hellenic culture of sophistication and seriousness. This development is partly explained through a brief digression on the complexities of war in the future where only the weakest and most stupid people are sent to fight as the government relies primarily on technology, hence saving the “best” people to contribute to society’s progression.

These technological wars result in the unification of the planet under a neo-Hellenic system of both language and philosophy, yet there is an implication that a loss of intuitive people has resulted in an indulgent and self-referential political system. In the years leading up to the climatic disaster, society has gone through a number of dynamic changes in governmental technique. A wonderful new city in Iraq had been built where primacy is rotated between various models of government—from technocratic through bureaucratic to charismatic—including varied experiments in valuing the most creative people over the most practical, and accepting and rejecting a number of relativistic systems in quick succession.

It is at this notional peak of imploded yet heavily tested political democracy, expressed through the occupation of Iraq, that the sun starts to falter. The capital city is gradually abandoned. A wonderful metropolis built of marble on the ruins of Babylon hosts the last days of sophisticated modern political hubris in a complex and self-regarding way. While some doubt the rapidity of the sun’s demise and insist that it is merely waning, before long the rump of humanity is reduced to living in a large concrete bunker surrounded by enormous furnaces in order to stay alive. Food is scarce. While the bunker contains the elegant and educated remnants of society, the group grows weak and loses the will to continue.

It is at this point that the last people on earth are joined by a single individual—a man who has somehow defied the extremes of the surface climate up to this point. He is a throwback: a man who fought wars and punched people in moments of fury. He even carries a scar on his cheek—a mark of past values long denied and covered up by the civilized world. The complexities and contradictions of the culture immediately preceding life in the bunker tended to suppress and critique such behavior and appearance as antisocial while continuing a brutal path in a more “efficient” and veiled way. But these very traits have apparently led to the survival of this single character, despite all the trials and tribulations he—and everyone else—has had to face. His arrival provokes some degree of unease among the survivors, for he has a plan. Standing, he makes a speech—an appeal against looking up and onwards, instead proposing to move down, underground, into a world of half-light and interiors. While he suggests that the present generation will perish without pleasure, their work will provide the basis for a new society.

The bulk of the book from this point on outlines the process of creating an architecture with no exterior: a sequence of tunnels, grottos and caves where the remnants of sophisticated society can build a life based on ideas, aesthetics and thought. Nature will be better preserved through representation alone than anything on the now frozen and petrified surface of the earth. While every spring there are rumblings of dissent that lead some to venture and perish on the frozen surface of the earth in search of direct engagement with “nature,” in general people are persuaded that a life below is preferable to all civilizations that came before them.

Since trees, animals, plants and insects no longer interpose themselves between people, and vulgar desires no longer hinder progress, everyone seems to be born well bred. Everyone is born a sculptor, a musician, a philosopher or a poet and speaks well with the purest accent. Balance is maintained by indescribable politeness, courtesy and charm that is never false and is aimed to please without being obsequious or fawning. It has nothing to do with social hierarchy but social harmony. It has nothing to do with the degenerate air of government or royalty but is connected to a real reflection of feelings. Its refinement is to such an extent that the people who used to live on the surface of the earth cannot even imagine it. It permeates the machinery of our complicated and delicate existence like a fragrant oil. Anti-social behavior and misanthropy cannot resist it. The charm is too profound. 2

At one point in the text, they come across an old stash of video and audio recordings. By this point, the subterranean society is extremely developed, and their art and the architecture of interior spaces has provided them with a heightened, post-simulation of the living planet. When they view the video recordings, their depression spreads as they realize that their visions have superseded and transcended the reality of life on earth:

Luckily an intellectual, looking through a forgotten corner of the archives, found an old collection of recordings and films, which had been put together by an ancient collector. Using tape players and video systems we have been able to hear all the former sounds of nature accompanied by images. Thunder, wind, mountain torrents, the murmurs that accompany dawn, the monotonous cry of the osprey and the long drawn out lament of the nightingale during the multiple whisperings of the night. The resuscitation of another age created immense astonishment, but then disillusion arose among the most passionate advocates of a return to the surface. The earth was nothing like they had believed it to be, despite the work of the most realist artists and writers. It was something infinitely less ravishing and less worthy of regret. The song of the nightingale really caused an unpleasant surprise. We were all angry because it turned out to be so inferior to its reputation. You can be sure that the worst of our concerts is more musical than this so-called symphony of nature.3

Social sciences have the upper hand in the world below. Philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists work on their theories alongside the now diminished status of theoretical physicists, chemists and biologists, who no longer proceed with practical experiments but instead speculate and elucidate theories based on masses of data that were accumulated before the global catastrophe. No longer held back by the pressure to “observe,” the subterranean scientists make a number of key breakthroughs, working theoretically rather than in an applied way:

Recently one of them has discovered a new way of steering airplanes, which is quite ironic under the circumstances. These discoveries are useless yet they are always beautiful and generate new ideas, which although superfluous, remain elegant. They are welcomed by people in an enthusiastic way. And for the inventors they offer something more than glory, which is happiness.4

This loss of political will, combined with a hubristic rush to occupy Iraq, is inextricably linked within the narrative to a reverse acknowledgement of the importance of aesthetic work that is only forced home in the face of global catastrophe. While Tarde cannot be accused of consistent or elegant prose to match the subtlety of some of his sociological observations, his prescience, based on an ironically myopic lucidity, neatly conflates things into a troubling record of a future present that is parallel to our own.

1. H. G. Wells, Introduction to Underground Man by Gabriel Tarde (1904); translated by Cloudsley Brereton (1905).
2. Gabriel Tarde, Underground Man (1904); translated by Cloudsley Brereton (1905).
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.

http://www.artlies.org/index.php?issue=60&s=0

Instant light

                                            Tarkovsky pollaroids

plus le jour ni l'heure

sous aucun pretexte

envelopments

We are discovering new ways of folding, akin to new envelopments 

Gilles D.

absorption

End of the Day

existencias

The body cannot survive without organs and cells, 

but the latter two groups can survive without body. 

 

Roger Morton 

wrath

                                                                          Margarita Bofiliou

The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction . . . William Blake

itinerant practice

The Hotel

Sophie Calle: Suite Vénitienne

 (1980-96):

For months I followed strangers on the street. For the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested me. I photographed them without their knowledge, took note of their movements, then finally lost sight of them and forgot them.

At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in a crowd. That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice.

dans la décrépitude

Vous n' êtes que le premier dans la décrépitude de votre art

Beaudelaire to Manet

1865

stranger

                                                             

                                     A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the  meaning of words, but their tasks. 

 

                                                                                                                                           Georges Bataille,  A Critical Dictionary 

craving

The Craving for simplicity.

People would like to say: " What really matters is only the colors." You say this mostly because you wish it to be the case. If your explanation is complicated, it is disagreeable, especially if you don't have strong feelings about the thing itself.

-Ludwig Wittgenstein

?

suture

                                                           „Images are not created to express imaginary unity, but difference. 

             The ontological difference between image, object and subject becomes the point of departure, the suture.“

                                                                                            valie export

aux plages de reverie

                                                   http://www.floatermagazine.com/issue01/Micro-organisations/

pensees

He lives on the other side of the water.

Pascal

a hell of a tester

i was the third brother of five,
Doing whatever I had to do to survive.
I'm not saying what I did was alright,
Trying to break out of the ghetto was a day to day fight.

Been down so long, getting up didn't cross my mind,
I knew there was a better way of life that I was just trying to find.
You don't know what you'll do until you're put under pressure,
Across 110th Street is a hell of a tester.

Across 110th Street,
Pimps trying to catch a woman that's weak
Across 110th Street,
Pushers won't let the junkie go free.
Across 110th Street,
Woman trying to catch a trick on the street.
Across 110th Street,
You can find it all in the street.

I got one more thing I'd like to y'all about right now.
Hey brother, there's a better way out.
Snorting that coke, shooting that dope man you're copping out.
Take my advice, it's either live or die.
You've got to be strong, if you want to survive.

The family on the other side of town,
Would catch hell without a ghetto around.
In every city you find the same thing going down,
Harlem is the capital of every ghetto town.

Across 110th Street,
Pimps trying to catch a woman that's weak
Across 110th Street,
Pushers won't let the junkie go free.
Across 110th Street,
A woman trying to catch a trick on the street, ouh baby
Across 110th Street,
You can find it all in the street.
Yes he can, oh

Look around you, just look around you,
Look around you, look around you, uh yeah.

another day

temenos

‘The cinema, too, has to be destroyed.’ (Guy Debord)

well, no one told me about her

Well, no one told me about her
The way she lied
Well, no one told me about her
How many people cried

But it's too late to say you're sorry
How would I know, why should I care?
Please don't bother trying to find her
She's not there

Well, let me tell you 'bout the way she looked
The way she acts and the color of her hair
Her voice was soft and cool, her eyes were clear and bright
But she's not there

Well, no one told me about her
What could I do?
Well, no one told me about her
Though they all knew

But it's too late to say you're sorry
How would I know, why should I care?
Please don't bother trying to find her
She's not there

Well, let me tell you about the way she looked
The way she acts and the color of her hair
Her voice was soft and cool, her eyes were clear and bright
But she's not there

SOLO

But it's too late to say you're sorry
How would I know, why should I care?
Please don't bother trying to find her
She's not there

Well, let me tell you about the way she looked
The way she acts and the color of her hair
Her voice was soft and cool, her eyes were clear and bright
But she's not there 

As far as Chō-fū-Sa

The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter

by Ezra Pound

After Li Po

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead

I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.

You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,

You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.   

And we went on living in the village of Chōkan:

Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.   

At fourteen I married My Lord you.

I never laughed, being bashful.

Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.

Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,

I desired my dust to be mingled with yours

Forever and forever, and forever.

Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed

You went into far Ku-tō-en, by the river of swirling eddies,

And you have been gone five months.

The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.

By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,

Too deep to clear them away!

The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.

The paired butterflies are already yellow with August

Over the grass in the West garden;

They hurt me.

I grow older.

If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,

Please let me know beforehand,

And I will come out to meet you

                        As far as Chō-fū-Sa.

                                                         Soliloquy Series (Water over Head) 
                                  1999/2000, Photo, 51 x 61 cm, Courtesy of the artist

bridge

“Isn’t that like a bridge, of which only the beginning and the end exists, and which one nonetheless so confidently walks over as though all of it were there?”

Robert Musil

Joseph Kosuth

Alain Leroy

The sensitivity was in my heart, not my hands.

Don Fabrizio

We were the Leopards, the Lions,

 those who'll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; 

and the whole lot of us, Leopards, jackals, and sheep, 

we'll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.

                                                                                                                                               Don Fabrizio

on the way

a harbour teeming

Your hair holds a whole dream of masts and sails; it holds seas whose monsoons waft me toward lovely chimes where space is bluer and more profound, where fruits and leaves and human skin perfume the air.

In the ocean of your hair I see a harbour teeming with melancholic songs, with lusty men of every nation, and ships of every shape, whose elegant and intricate structures stand out against the enormous sky, home of eternal heat. 

On the burning hearth of your hair I breathe in the fragrance of tobacco tinged with opium and sugar; in the night of your hair I see the sheen of the tropic's blue infinity; on the shores of your hair I get drunk with the smell of musk and tar and the oil of coconuts.

baudelaire 

Phaedo

The Death of Socrates, from Plato's Phaedo

Then he turned to us, and added with a smile: "I cannot make Crito believe that I am the same Socrates who has been talking and conducting the argument; he fancies that I am the other Socrates whom he will soon see, a dead body--and he asks, How shall he bury me? And though I have spoken many words in the endeavor to show that when I have drunk the poison I shall leave you and go to the joys of the blessed--these words of mine, with which I was comforting you and myself, have had, as I perceive, no effect upon Crito. And therefore I want you to be surety for me to him how, as at the trial he was surety to the judges for me: but let the promise be of another sort; for he was surety for me to the judges that I would remain, and you must be my surety to him that I shall not remain, but go away and depart; and then he will suffer less at my death, and not be grieved when he sees my body being burned or buried. I would not have him sorrow at my hard lot, or say at the burial, Thus we lay out Socrates, or Thus we follow him to the grave or bury him; for false words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. Be of good cheer then, my dear Crito, and say that you are burying my body only, and do with that whatever is usual, and what you think best."

When he had spoken these words, he arose and went into a chamber to bathe; Crito followed him and told us to wait. So we remained behind, talking and thinking of the subject of discourse, and also of the greatness of our sorrow; he was like a father of whom we were being bereaved, and we were about to pass the rest of our lives as orphans. When he had taken the bath his children were brought to him (he had two young sons and an elder one); and the women of his family also came, and he talked to them and gave them a few directions in the presence of Crito; then he dismissed them and returned to us.

Now the hour of sunset was near, for a good deal of time had passed while he was within. When he came out, he sat down with us again after his bath, but not much was said. Soon the jailer, who was the servant of the eleven, entered and stood by him, saying: "To you, Socrates, whom I know to be the noblest and gentlest and best of all who ever came to this place, I will not impute the angry feelings of other men, who rage and swear at me, when, in obedience to the authorities, I bid them drink the poison--indeed, I am sure that you will not be angry with me; for others, as you are aware, and not I, are to blame. And so fare you well, and try to bear lightly what must needs be--you know my errand." Then bursting into tears he turned away and went out.

Socrates looked at him and said: "I return your good wishes, and will do as you bid." Then turning to us, he said, "How charming the man is: since I have been in prison he has always been coming to see me, and at times he would talk to me, and was as good to me as could be, and now see how generously he sorrows on my account. We must do as he says, Crito; and therefore let the cup be brought, if the poison is prepared; if not, let the attendant prepare some."

"Yet," said Crito, "the sun is still upon the hilltops, and I know that many a one has taken the draught late, and after the announcement has been made to him, he has eaten and drunk, and enjoyed the society of his beloved; do not hurry--there is time enough."

Socrates said: "Yes, Crito, and they of whom you speak are right in so acting, for they think that they will be gainers by the delay; But I am right in not following their example, for I do not think that I should gain anything by drinking the poison a little later; I should only be ridiculous in my own eyes for sparing and saving a life which is already forfeit. Please then to do as I say, and not to refuse me."

Crito made a sign to the servant, who was standing by; and he went out, and having been absent for some time, returned with the jailer carrying the cup of poison. Socrates said: "You, my good friend, who are experienced in these matters, shall give me directions how I am to proceed."

The man answered: "you have only to walk about until your legs are heavy, and then to lie down, and the poison will act."

At the same time he handed the cup to Socrates, who in the easiest and gentlest manner, without the least fear or change of color or feature, looking at the man with all his eyes, . . . as his manner was, took the cup and said: "What do you say about making a libation out of this cup to any god? May I, or not?"

The man answered: "We only prepare, Socrates, just so much as we deem enough."

"I understand," he said; "but I may and must ask the gods to prosper my journey from this to the other world--even so--and so be it according to my prayer.

Then raising the cup to his lips, quite readily and cheerfully he drank off the poison. And hitherto most of us had been able to control our sorrow; but now when we saw him drinking, and saw too that he had finished the draught, we could not longer forbear, and in spite of myself my own tears were flowing fast; so that I covered my face and wept, not for him, but at the thought of my own calamity in having to part from such a friend. Nor was I the first; for Crito, when he found himself unable to restrain his tears, had got up, and I followed; and at that moment, Apollodorus, who had been weeping all the time, broke out in a loud and passionate cry which made cowards of us all.

Socrates alone retained his calmness: "What is this strange outcry?" he said. "I sent away the women mainly in order that they might not misbehave in this way, for I have been told that a man should die in peace. Be quiet then, and have patience."

When we heard his words we were ashamed, and refrained our tears; and he walked about until, as he said, his legs began to fail, and then he lay on his back, according to the directions, and the man who gave him the poison now and then looked at his feet and legs; and after a while he pressed his foot hard, and asked him if he could feel; and he said, "No;" and then his leg, and so upwards and upwards, and showed us that he was cold and stiff. And he felt them himself, and said: "When the poison reaches the heart, that will be the end."

He was beginning to grow cold about the groin, when he uncovered his face, for he had covered himself up, and said--they were his last words--he said: "Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; (1) will you remember to pay the debt?

"The debt shall be paid," said Crito; "is there anything else?"

There was no answer to this question; but in a minute or two a movement was heard, and the attendants uncovered him; his eyes were set, and Crito closed his eyes and mouth.

Such was the end . . . of our friend; concerning whom I may truly say, that of all the men of his time whom I have known, he was the wisest and justest and best.

Translated by Banjamin Jowett (1892)

---

(1) The god of health and medicine.

from the window

All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog.
—Franz Kafka

Outside of a dog, a man's best friend is a book. Inside of a dog, it's Too dark To read.
—Groucho Marx

"Dogs don't make mistakes."
-Sherlock Holmes

My mother groan'd! my father wept. 
Into the dangerous world I leapt; 
Helpless, naked, piping loud, 
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.

—William Blake, "Infant Sorrow"

oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,
or with his nails he 'll dig it up again!
You! hypocrite lecteur! mon semblable,- mon frere!

-T.S Eliot

By the dog!

-Socrates

I wanna be your dog.
—The Stooges

cyclop

Cyclops: Ram, get a clean one
(ODYSSEUS searches on his knees for the skewer, hiding it.)
Odysseus:No, no, no, it's all right,really. I'll pick it up.
Cyclops: Ram, a clean skewer!
Odtsseus: (From under the table): No, really.
Cyclops:LEAVE IT ALONE!
(RAM exits. ODYSSEUS, on his knees looking, gets near the door.)
Odysseus: That;s the way I am, sorry.I hate losing things.
Cyclops: My men, my money. My way home.
CYclops: Your life next.
Odysseus:That I don't mind.Just hate losing things.

chasms of blue

at the enormous distance above my 

subterranean living room the houses take root,

the mists assemble. The mud is read or black.

Monstrous city, endless night!

lower down are the drains.On either side, nothing but the thickness

of the globe. Perhaps chasms of blue sky, wells of fire.

A Rimbaud 

time lapse

francys alys

where are you Hanna?

Syntagma, Athens,1984

                                         valie export

Come on is such a joy

Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey

Writer, lead vocal: John Lennon

 

Come on come on come on come on 
Come on is such a joy Come on is such a joy 
Come on take it easy 
Come on take it easy Take it easy take it easy 
Everybody's got something to hide except for me and my monkey.

The deeper you go the higher you fly The higher you fly the deeper you go 
So come on come on 
Come on is such a joy Come on is such a joy 
Come on make it easy 
Come on make it easy.

Take it easy take it easy 
Everybody's got something to hide except for me and my monkey.

Your inside is out and your outside is in 
Your outside is in and your inside is out 
So come on come on 
Come on is such a joy Come on is such a joy 
Come on make it easy 
Come on make it easy Make it easy make it easy 
Everybody's got something to hide except for me and my monkey.

down to the present

“The forming of the five senses is a labor of humanized nature.

The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.”

Marx’s Economic and Philosophic manuscripts of 1844.

Carlotta

the lie of the land

my companion for these walks was thoroughly familiar
with the lie of the land, and knew the best time to take in
each rustic scene, and the places best viewed in the
morning hours, which were most charming and
interesting at sunrise and which at sunset, as well as
the coolest, shadiest areas in which to seek refuge from the
burning midday sun.

Diderot on Art, The Salon of 1767

portmanteau and what she found there

JABBERWOCKY

Lewis Carroll

(from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand:
Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought

And as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! and through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And has thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

don't look back now

perfect mute

PERFECT MUTE FOREVER
Rosalind Nashashibi
By Will Bradley

Rosalind Nashashibi's Bachelor Machines Part I centers on the unspectacular activities of the Italian crew of the cargo ship Gran Bretagna as it travels from Italy to the Baltic Sea. Over the course of thirty minutes, the men go about their business--attending to ship activities, eating, smoking and playing cards, dancing (furtively) in the dining room. But this is not the stuff of "reality television"--the onboard community of men is not subjected to the sort of documentary-making that seeks to expose its subjects' private lives to an audience hoping for a prurient glimpse of a world they'll never know. Nor is life aboard ship aestheticized. There is a sense of respectful distance, a refusal of intimacy that belies the filmmaker's intimate access--a refusal underlined by the dialogue being in Italian, none of it subtitled and none of it important, really; or rather, not to the point.
Instead, Nashashibi's cinematically literate shot-making animates the ship and the literal machinery of global commerce--dockyard cranes, shipping containers--in a way that evokes both Dziga Vertov's constructivist celebration of the machine age and Jean-Luc Godard's dystopian reprocessing of Vertov in 1970s films such as British Sounds. One scene, in which two seamen repeatedly open and close an uncooperative door on deck, verges on silent comedy. In another, the setting sun heaves brilliantly into view through an open hatch, creating a textbook vision of the cinematic sublime--a vision so entirely part and parcel of the everyday experience of the crew that it passes entirely without acknowledgement.
The artist's use of 16-mm film (as opposed to more readily manipulated digital technologies) and the interpolation of herself and her camera as an acknowledged but silent character situate her as an unreliable eyewitness, neither orchestrating events nor erasing her own presence. She keeps her head to the ground. Her method suggests an unspoken collaboration with the people she represents; the work neither depersonalizes nor universalizes its subjects, and there is no sense of performance for the camera or of an attempt to produce some emblematic moment that can sum up the complexities of individual lives.
Her earlier Hreash House (2004) centers on the gathering of an extended family in an apartment block in Nazareth. It also avoids the conventions both of televisual storytelling and of the handheld, uncut art video, assembling a simple narrative whose interest is generated in the cinematic details, the particular gestures of the participants and the close-up shots of textiles and interiors, as much as by its overall arc. There is hardly a story, just an ordinary middleclass family going about the preparation and aftermath of a fast-breaking meal during Ramadan. Also presented without subtitles, the film subtly communicates a sense of social convention that is at once spontaneous and scripted. Once again Nashashibi finds herself in a context that is not her own, allowing us to occupy her subjectivity without feeling guilty or manipulated.
This balance of poetic subjectivity and documentary restraint can be traced back to the films of the French ethnographer Jean Rouch, which had an outsize influence on European filmmakers in the 1960s. But Nashashibi works in light of the very public deconstruction of the techniques she has adopted, and she employs her verite; approach to build a deliberate fiction, secure in the knowledge that no one will mistake her work for an attempt to portray the inaccessible truth of the situations she is filming. There is a latent politics at work in Nashashibi's practice, though she avoids addressing the direct political questions that might attend, for example, the working-class identity of the sailors in Bachelor Machines Part I or the Palestinian identity of the family depicted in Hreash House. Rather, she manages to explore a wider representation of the relationships between behavior and belief, control and convention. Her film of students in the Glasgow University Library, for example, simply titled University Library (2003), is a compressed typology of behaviors, presented via shots and setups that also foreground the modernist architecture of the university building. The contrast between the evident intention of the architecture and institution (highly controlled and directed toward an idealized model of learning) and the actual activities of the students (caught between the dictates of the institution and personal or social imperatives) makes for a gentle and subtle investigation of the ways that power operates, and the ways it fails. Appropriately, Nashashibi captures the students distractedly tapping their pencils, staring into the ether, listening to music on their headphones.
Nashashibi's background as an Irish-Palestinian artist educated in England and Scotland (she graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in 2000) is often invoked as an explanation for her interest in the workings of particular subcultures and communities. But her interest, at least in ethnographic terms, can be seen more easily as having something in common with structuralist anthro-pology. Her film Eyeballing (2005), for example, is a playful series of static shots of objects and landscapes, some close-up, some in wide angle, in which it's almost impossible not to see the apparition of faces. Plainly, for evolutionary reasons, the human brain is hard-wired to recognize the combination of two dots or circles with a line beneath them as a face. These images are intercut with footage of New York City police--men and women--shot as they enter and exit what looks like a side door to one of Manhattan's many police stations. The juxtaposition between the deeply structural recognition of the faces and the deeply cultural, costumed roles played by the cops emphasizes the place of representation and ritual in the world around us. The faces emerge from the city and are both its inhabitants and its totems--or, in the artist's words, its "gods or monsters."
Recently Nashashibi translated her investigations into book form. Mute: On Sound is an essay composed mostly of found photographs and archival images, from reproductions of premodern art and documentation of ritual behaviors and local traditions to modernist architecture and performance. An acknowledgment of the influence of Pier Paolo Pasolini's films on Nashashibi's work, it uses his unorthodox reading of Freud and the assertion of the stubborn presence of ancient mythology in contemporary culture as a framework within which to draw together the artist's particular personal inspirations. Symbolism and ritual are presented as ways not of binding us to the past but of creatively resisting or transcending the conditions of the present.
Carl Jung once said that mythologizing "gives existence a glamour we wouldn't want to be without." Nashashibi seems to agree-- she borrows from the quote for the title of her most recent set of photographic works, a triptych of found images representing dancers in the Malawian village of Gumbi, a scene from Pasolini's Oedipus Rex, and a portrait of La Cicciolina. But the ideas of myth and glamour she is interested in are not those produced by the contemporary star-obsessed mass media, but rather, the glamour of everyday life, the myths made by rituals that arise from direct, sometimes banal, social interactions.
Still, one of the characteristics of the documentary mode in which Nashashibi works is that it seems to offer the possibility of truth, and so some kind of truth is always attempting to return beyond the index of the image, all the reality that can't be caught on film: the world outside the frame, the time before and after, all of the invisible conditions that surround the production of a particular image. It is a paradox of this kind of myth-making, this kind of ritual or glamour, that, while the documentary image can never embody the relationships of meaning that give it its power, it nonetheless exists as the social production of imagery, of symbols and their meanings.
In the end, it is as if Nashashibi is telling us that we are condemned to act out the rituals of a script we have only inherited--whether as model-airplane enthusiasts in Omaha, Nebraska (Midwest: Field, 2002), as young men playing football in an East Jerusalem town (Dahiet Al Bareed, 2002), or as members of a crew on a cargo ship making its way across the sea. After all, this is a world and a series of myths that are not of our making but that, in occasionally subtle and often unsubtle manner, make us.

Bidoun Magazine and Bidoun.com Copyright 2007

mercury

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see, I swallow immediately.
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike
I am not cruel, only truthful—

Plath's Mirror

nostalgia for ruins

Nostalgia for Ruins 

ANDREAS HUYSSEN 

The dictionary defines nostalgia as “homesickness” or a “longing for something far away or long ago.”1The word is made up of the Greek nostos= home and algos= pain. Nostalgia’s primary meaning has to do with the irreversibility of time: something in the past is no longer accessible. Since the European seventeenth century, with the emergence of a new sense of temporality increasingly characterized by the radical asymmetries of past, present, and future, nostalgia as a longing for a lost past has developed into the modern disease per se.2This predominantly negative coding of nostalgia within modernity is easily explained: nostalgia counteracts, even undermines linear notions of progress, whether they are framed dialectically as philosophy of history or sociologically and economically as modernization. But nostalgic longing for a past is always also a longing for another place. Nostalgia can be a utopia in reverse. Temporality and spatiality are necessarily linked in nostalgic desire. The architectural ruin is an example of the indissoluble combination of spatial and temporal desires that trigger nostalgia. In the body of the ruin the past is both present in its residues and yet no longer accessible, making the ruin an especially powerful trigger for nostalgia. The cult of ruins has accompanied Western modernity in waves since the eighteenth century. But over the past decade and a half, a strange obsession with ruins has developed in the countries of the northern transatlantic as part of a much broader discourse about memory and trauma, genocide and war. This contemporary obsession with ruins hides a nostalgia for an earlier age that had not yet lost its power to imagine other futures. At stake is a nostalgia for modernity that dare not speak its name after acknowledging the catastrophes of the twentieth century and the lingering injuries of inner and outer colonization. Yet this nostalgia persists, straining for something lost with the ending of an earlier form of modernity. The cipher for this nostalgia is the ruin. 

The Ruin Craze 

At a time when the promises of the modern age lie shattered like so many ruins, when we speak with increasing frequency both literally and metaphorically of the ruins of modernity, a key question arises for cultural history: What shapes our imaginary of ruins in the early twenty-first century, and how has it developed historically? How canwe speak of a nostalgia for ruins as we remember the bombed out cities of World War II (Rotterdam and Coventry, Hamburg and Dresden, Warsaw, Stalingrad, and Leningrad). Bombings, after all, are not about producing ruins. They produce rubble. But then the market has recently been saturated with stunning picture books and films (documentary and fictional; e.g., The Downfall, 2004) of the ruins of World War II. In them, rubble is indeed transformed, even aestheticized, into ruin. Nostalgia is at stake in the northern transatlantic when one looks at the decaying residues of the industrial age and its shrinking cities in the industrial heartlands in Europe, the former Soviet Union, the United States, and elsewhere: abandoned auto factories in Detroit; the monstrous blast furnaces of former steelworks in the Ruhr, now incorporated into public parks; the gigantic coal-steel conglomerates in Eastern Europe surrounded by ghost towns, ciphers of the end of socialism; and so on. Such ruins and their representation in picture books, films, and exhibits are a sign of the nostalgia for the monuments of an industrial architecture of a past age that was tied to a public culture of industrial labor and its political organization. We are nostalgic for the ruins of modernity because they still seem to hold a promise that has vanished from our own age: the promise of an alternative future. Such nostalgia for the ruins of the modern can be called reflective in Svetlana Boym’s sense and refutes historian Charles Maier’s pithy pronouncement that nostalgia is to memory like kitsch is to art.3“Reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalizes space. . . . [It] reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment or critical reflection.”4 The present fascination with industrial ruins raises other questions. To what extent is the contemporary love affair with ruins in the countries of the northern transatlantic still energized by an earlier imagination that had fastened on to the ruins of classical antiquity? And what is the relation of this imaginary of ruins to the obsession with urban preservation, remakes, and retrofashions, all of which seem to express a fear or denial of the ruination by time? Our imaginary of ruins can 

be read as a palimpsest of multiple historical events and representations, and the intense concern with ruins is a subset of the current privileging of memory and trauma both inside and outside the academy. Given this overdetermination in the way we imagine and conceptualize ruins, can something like an “authentic” ruin of modernity be the subject of reflective nostalgia? An answer can be found in the imaginary of ruins that developed in the eighteenth century’s querelle des anciens et des modernesand was carried forth in romanticism and privileged in the nineteenth-century search for national origins, only to end up in the ruin tourism of the present. The work of Giovanni Battista Piranesi stands as one of the most radical articulations of the ruin problematic within modernity rather than afterit. My interest in Piranesi and his ruins may well be itself nostalgic—nostalgic, that is, for a secular modernity that had a deep understanding of the ravages of time and the potential of the future, the destructiveness of domination and the tragic shortcomings of the present; an understanding of modernity that—from Piranesi and the romantics to Baudelaire, the historical avant-garde, and beyond—resulted in emphatic forms of critique, commitment, and compelling artistic expression. Here, as in any form of nostalgia, it is difficult to walk the line between sentimental lament over a loss and the critical reclaiming of a past for the purposes of constructing alternative futures. But Piranesi may have lessons for us as we reflect upon the loss of an earlier modernity and its visions of alternative futures. My interest in coupling the abstract concept of authenticity with the concreteness of ruins and their imaginary is based on the idea that both the ruin in its emphatic sense and the notion of the authentic are central topoi of modernity itself rather than simply concerns of the late twentieth century. Modernity asruin was atopos well before the twentieth century and most certainly before postmodernism. The authentic ruin is not to be understood as some ontological essence of ruins but as a significant conceptual and architectural constellation that points to moments of decay, falling apart, and ruination already present in the beginnings of modernity in the eighteenth century. Just as the imaginary of ruins was created in early modernity rather than being modernity’s end product, the notion of authenticity is a thoroughly historical concept produced, like nostalgia itself, by modernity 

rather than referring to an atemporal transcendent essence or to some premodern state of grace. Tied in literature and art to eighteenth-century notions of author- ship, genius, originality, selfhood, uniqueness, and subjectivity, the idea of authenticity accumulated desires and intensities the more it was threatened by alienation, 

inauthenticity, and reproducibility during the course of modernization. As a term in that broader semantic field, authenticityhad its heyday in the second half of the 

twentieth century together with the boom in nostalgias of all kinds, and it has its currency today in retro-authenticity, authentic remakes, and the Web’s “authenticity consulting,” all phenomena which implicitly deny what they claim to be. At the same time, authenticity has fallen on hard times in intellectual discourse. From Adorno to Derrida authenticity has been disparaged as ideology or metaphysics, tied to a jargon of Eigentlichkeit,pseudo-individualization, and delusions of self-presence. Nevertheless, I am not ready to abandon the concept altogether, and I take comfort in the fact that even Adorno, one of the most radical critics of a specific post-1945 form of Eigentlichkeit,still spoke of the authenticity of modernist art as radical negation. His is a notion of the authentic aware of its own historicity. Similarly, I will locate the “authentic ruin” of modernity in the eighteenth century, and I will suggest that this earlier imaginary of ruins still haunts our discourse about the ruins of modernity in general. At the same time, I acknowledge that the twentieth century has produced a very different imaginary of ruins that has made that earlier authentic ruin obsolete. Even genuine (“echt” rather than authentic) ruins have metamorphosed. The element of decay, erosion, and a return to nature so central to eighteenth- century ruins and their nostalgic lure is eliminated when Roman ruins are sanitized and used as mise en scène for open-air opera performances (Terme di Caracalla in Rome); when medieval castle ruins or dilapidated estates from later centuries are restored to yield conference sites, hotels, or vacation rentals (the Paradores of Spain, the Landmark Trust in the United Kingdom); when industrial ruins are made over into cultural centers; or when a museum like the Tate Modern installs itself in a decommissioned power plant on the south bank of the Thames. Authenticity seems to have become part of museal preservation and restoration, a fact that can only increase nostalgia. “Authentic ruins,” as they still existed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, seem no longer to have a place in late capitalism’s commodity and memory culture. As commodities, things in general don’t age well. They become obsolete, are thrown out or recycled. Buildings are torn down or restored. The chance for things to age and to become ruin has diminished in the age of turbo capitalism, ironically in step with the continuing rise in the average age of the populace. The ruin of the twenty-first century is either detritus or restored age. In the latter case, real age has been eliminated by a reverse face-lifting. The new is made to look old 

rather than the old made to look young. Repro- and retrofashions make it increasingly hard to recognize that which is genuinely old in this culture of preservation 

and restoration. The German writer and filmmaker Alexander Kluge once spoke tellingly of “the attack of the present on the rest of time.”5 

Authenticity and Nostalgia 

If in the late twentieth century, as Lyotard has claimed, architecture and philosophy lay in ruins, leaving us with only the option of a “writing of the ruins” as a kind of micrology, then the question arises whether the whole tradition of modernist thought all the way into postmodernism isn’t overshadowed by a catastrophic imagination and an imaginary of ruins that has accompanied the trajectory of modernity since the eighteenth century.6Architecture in decay or a state of destruction seems to be an indispensable topos for this tradition. Real ruins of different kinds function as projective screens for modernity’s articulation of asynchronous temporalities and for its fear of and obsession with the passing of time.7If, as Benjamin said, allegory in the realm of thought corresponds to the ruin in the realm of things, then this implies a production principle of modern art, literature, and architecture that is a priori directed toward the ruinous.8For Adorno, in analogous fashion, the most authentic works of modernity are those that are objectively and formally determined by the ruinous state of the present. The architectural ruin seems to hover in the background of an aesthetic imagination that privileges fragment and aphorism, collage and montage, freedom from ornament and reduction of the material. Perhaps this is the secret classicism of modernism that, however different from eighteenth- century classicism in its coding of temporality and space, is still predicated on an imaginary of ruins. Classicism in Winckelmann and Goethe’s times constituted itself through the ruins of antiquity, but it aimed at the totality of style rather than privileging montage, dispersion, and fragmentariness as modernism would later do. One doesn’t have to accept a metaphysics of history in order to see the field of classical modernism as a fascinating and oscillating landscape of ruins left from a failed attempt to create an alternative kind of totality that in architecture went under the name of the International Style. As a product of modernity rather than a phenomenon from a deep premodern past, authenticity is analogous to Benjamin’s aura. Originality and uniqueness, which characterize the auratic work of art in Benjamin, were made into privileged categories in the romantic age that was already flooded by reproductions, translations, and copies of all kinds. Analogously, the ideological value of authenticity rose in proportion to print culture’s inherent tendency to reproduction and repetition. Even in the transition from a Fordist to a post-Fordist mode of production, we can detect the attempt to return the semblance of authenticity and uniqueness to commodities by way of customization. Aura and authenticity are analogous to each other. Both have to be framed historically rather than ontologically. Modernist decisionism declared both of them dead and gone, but both have proven to be quite resistant to all manner of ideology critique. The desire for the auratic and the authentic has always reflected the fear of inauthenticity, the lack of existential meaning, and the absence of individual originality. The more we learn to understand all images, words, and sounds as always already mediated, the more, it seems, we desire the authentic and the immediate. The mode of that desire is nostalgia. A gap opens up between intellectual insight into the obsolescence of the concept and the lifeworld’s desire for the authentic. The longing for authenticity is the media and commodity culture’s romantic longing for its other. Reality TV is its pathetic expression. Authentic cuisine, authentic clothing, authentic identities of any and all kinds follow suit. The positing of stable origins and of a historical telos is never far when the authenticity tune is being played. The same is true for the discourse of ruins that has played such a central role in legitimizing the claims to power by modern nation states. Indeed, romantic ruins guaranteed origins and promised authenticity, immediacy, and authority. However, there is a paradox. In the case of ruins that which is allegedly present and transparent whenever authenticity is claimed is present only as an absence; it is the imagined present of a past that can now only be grasped in its decay. This makes the ruin subject to nostalgia. Even if the modern ruin is not exhausted by the semantics of pastness, its temporality, which points to past glory and greatness, is different from the claims to plenitude and presentness invariably at stake in the discourse of authenticity. Authenticity claims, however, are often 

contaminated by doubts that then have to be compensated by further mythmaking. Thus some would claim that authentic authenticity was possible only in past ages when the world was allegedly still more transparent and not under the shadow of mass-media representation and distortion. We know what kind of ideological phantasms such projections of authenticity have caused in anthropology and other cultural sciences—the authenticity of the archaic and primitive, the privileging of authentic community, the anomie and artificiality of modern societies. Especially in the post-Enlightenment invention of origins and national identities, the present of modernity appeared (more often than not) as a ruin of authenticity and of a better and simpler past. Against this idea of a deep authenticity embodied in the ruins of a glorified past, I posit the idea of the authentic ruin as product of modernity itself rather than as royal road toward some uncontaminated origin. Nostalgia is never far when we talk about authenticity or about romantic ruins. The political critique of the nostalgia for ruins simply as regression corresponds to the philosophical critique of authenticity as a phantasm grounding stable identities. But such a critique misses the fundamental ambiguity of the ruin, of nostalgia, and of the authentic. However justified it may be to criticize the nostalgia markets and their ideological instrumentalization of authenticity claims, it will not do to simply identify the desire for authenticity with nostalgia and to dismiss it as a cultural disease, as Susan Stewart argues in her book On Longing.9Neither will it do to understand the modern imagination of ruins and its link with the sublime as 

expressing nothing but fantasies of power and domination, though that is indeed the case for Albert Speer’s theory of ruin value. The dimension present in any imaginary of ruins but missed by such reductive critiques is the hardly nostalgic consciousness of the transitoriness of all greatness and power, the warning of imperial hubris, and the remembrance of nature in all culture. At stake with the “authentic ruin of modernity” is not simply the genuineness (Echtheit) of specific ruins; nor is it some suprahistorical memento mori. Genuine- 

ness as naturalness in opposition to artificiality and the fake—a topos central to eighteenth-century aesthetics and middle class culture—is an empirically verifiable criterion of the ruin, and the memento mori dimension is not limited to modernity. We can speak of the modern authenticity of ruins only if we look at the ruin aesthetically and politically as an architectonic chiffrefor the temporal and spatial doubts that modernity has always harbored about itself. In the ruin, history appears spatialized and built space temporalized. An imaginary of ruins is central for any theory of modernity that wants to be more than the triumphalism of progress and democratization or longing for a past power of greatness. As against the optimism of Enlightenment thought, the modern imaginary of ruins remains conscious of the dark side of modernity, that which Diderot described as the inevitable “devastations of time” visible in ruins. It articulates the nightmare of the Enlightenment that all history might ultimately be overwhelmed by nature, a fear succinctly represented in Goya’s famous etching El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. 

The ambiguity of Goya’s title is well-known. “El sueño de la razón” means both the dream and the sleep of reason, thus pointing to what later came to be known as the dialectic of the Enlightenment. A third reading is possible, however. Imagine that the figure, dreaming or having fallen asleep at his table upon which we see the utensils of his writing, is the artist imagining the other of reason, imagining that which will become the etching—its swarm of owl-like, nefarious monsters crowding his imagination. Assume Goya’s figure is Piranesi at the moment of dreaming the shape of ruins as they will come alive in his etchings. Putting the emphasis on sueñoas fantasy and representation rather than simply sleep or utopian anticipation permits a reading of Piranesi as the creator of an authentic imaginary of ruins that reveals something central to modernity and its representations. Piranesi’s etchings from the middle of the age of Enlightenment point toward a critical and alternative understanding of modernity that always stood against the naive belief in progress and the moral improvement of mankind. Although Piranesi’s nightmarish image world had a strong influence on romantic literature, romantic images of ruins in the nineteenth century mostly tended toward domesticating and beautifying ruins by way of the picturesque. It is no coincidence that Piranesi’s work was emphatically rediscovered in the twentieth century, often in the context of reductively realistic claims that his Carcerianticipated the univers concentrationnaireof fascism or Communism’s gulag or that his etchings articulated the existential exposure and cast-out state of the modern individual in the face of overwhelming systems as described in Kafka’s novels. Ignored by such readings was the inner connection between Piranesi’s fantasies of incarceration and the major part of his work: his archival documentation of the architectural ruins of the Roman Empire. Art historians tended to read the Carcerias the bizarre work of the artist as a young man, while focusing on Piranesi’s role in the eighteenth-century quarrel over whether the architecture of Athens or that of Rome should have pride of place. This question was surely central to Piranesi’s archival work in and around Rome, but exclusive focus on this debate does not pay tribute to the fact that the various reworkings of the Carcerispanned most of Piranesi’s working life. It also fails to make much of the fact that the later versions of the Carceriare visually close to the etchings of Roman ruins. With the help of an alternative body of Piranesi scholarship, especially the work of Ulya Vogt-Göknil, Piranesi’s imaginary of ruins can be adequately understood only if his archive-driven etchings of Roman ruins are read together with the fantasy-driven spaces of his architecture of incarceration. Only then can one speak of an authentic imaginary of ruins in a precise historical sense. Piranesi’s ruins and his jails are artifice through and through. That is what constitutes their authenticity within his rather dark vision of a modernity still much in the shadows of a glorious Roman past. It is an authenticity that is captured by Adorno: “The proof of the tour de force, the realization of the unrealizable, could 

be adduced from the most authentic works.”10 What else are the Carceri if not unrealizable as architecture and tour de force as drawing? For Piranesi and for Adorno, who never wrote about this Italian artist, the refusal of wholeness and classical closure is the sign of authenticity. Authentic ruins in Piranesi and authentic artworks in Adorno point to an absence, the utopia that cannot be named in Adorno, the nightmarish dystopia that is inscribed into the utopia of neoclassicism in Piranesi. The tour de force in Piranesi’s craft points to that moment of coercion and violence implicit in all authenticity as carrier of authority. Authentic works for Adorno are fragmentary works whose achievement must be located in their lack of completion and whose “failure [is] the measure of their success,” 11works such as those by Lenz, Hölderlin, Kleist, or Büchner “that succumbed to the terror of idealism’s scorn.”12 At first popular in France and England, Piranesi’s etchings, both of the Carceri and of the antique ruins, eventually suffered a similar fate and fell into oblivion only to be rediscovered after World War II. For the nineteenth-century ideologues of the classical tradition they were not reconcilable with a post-Winkelmannian idea 

of classicism, and they didn’t allow for Matthew Arnold’s vision of antiquity as sweetness and light. The height of authentic architecture for Piranesi was the monumental Roman temples, palaces, triumphal archs, and tombs of the Via Appia. In his many volumes of etchings, from the Prima Parte di Architetture, e Prospettive(1743) and the Varie Vedute di Roma(1743) to the four volumes of Le Antichità Romane(1756) and Della Magnificenza ed Architettura 

de’ Romani (1761), he captured their overgrown residues with archival precision and in a decidedly unique style. Even in decay, the monumentality and sublimity of these ruins of the past were more impressive than the miserable present that denied the trained architect Piranesi any real possibility to build in grand style. Piranesi mobilized all available visual tricks to achieve the monumental mise en scène of those ruins. In the dedication to Prima Parte di 

Architettureof 1743 he writes, “Io vi diró solamente, che di tali immagini mi hanno riempiuto lo spirito queste parlanti ruine, che di simili non arrivai a potermene mai formare soprai disegni, benchè accuratissimi, che di queste stesse ha fatto l’immortale Palladio, e che io pur sempre mi teneva innanzi agli occhi.” [I would only say that these speaking ruins have filled my spirit with images of a kind which even precise drawings such as those by the immortal Palladio, which I always kept before my eyes, can never conjure up.]13 

At stake here is the subjective effect achieved by the representation, the production of phantasms that the ruins bring to life. Speaking ruins flood the senses with architectonic images that include not only the views of antique Rome but also the Carceri.Especially in their second, significantly darker version, the Carceri show close affinities with the etchings of antique ruins. In their spatial configuration, the Carceribelong with Piranesi’s imagined antiquity rather than with the concentration camps of the twentieth century or the panoptic jails of modern industrial societies. Roman architectural elements such as arcades of columns, broad flights of stairs, large portrait busts, tomb sculptures, and Latin inscriptions fill Piranesi’s vast jails down to their distant corners. In their style of representation, however, the Carcerias well as the overgrown ruins of Rome itself belong with a present-day modernity, and not just that of the eighteenth century. Despite all affinities, Piranesi’s views of Roman ruins are ultimately distinguished from the prison etchings and stand in productive tension with them. The ruins are located in an outside, in the urban landscape of Rome and its environs, the Campagna. Their erosion and natural decay point to that central aspect of the imaginary of ruins that Georg Simmel has emphasized best: the return of architecture to nature. What appears all too romantically as a reconciliation of spirit and nature in Simmel, however, assumes features of the uncanny in Piranesi. Masonry and soil are organically coupled and made to look as if the ruins have grown out of the innards of the earth. In their erosion, some of the buildings appear like sublimely 

threatening and inhospitable rock formations. Mysteriously and uncannily these eroding and decaying monuments and remnants of gigantic buildings tower over a dwarflike present. The voices of the dead appear to speak through Piranesi’s ruin images. Instead of nature morte,Piranesi created an architettura morta,which not only reminds the present of its own transitoriness but seems to include a warning about a culturally destructive forgetting of the past. While his etchings of antique remnants focus on the intertwining of nature and architecture in decay, the Carceri present, as it were, pure architectural spaces far from all nature, complex interior halls that seem to be partly ruins, partly unfinished buildings. This impression is exacerbated by the fact that spatial constriction typical of any prison is not constituted by the absence of space but paradoxically by an opening up of space toward infinity.14Passages, staircases, and halls seem to disperse in all directions and lack spatial closure. The possibility of an outside (even when not represented) is therefore not in principle excluded. Certainly, the natural light stream- inginto the prisons points indirectly to some outside space. The Carceri are so fascinating because both their temporality and their spatiality remain so indefinable. Just as the opposition of proximity and distance seems abolished in their confusing spatial arrangements, the borders between past, present, and future no longer seem to obtain. Even though Piranesi was influenced by baroque theater decorations for prison dramas, his mise-en-scène of the prisons has to be read primarily as a formal architectonic proposition rather than as a simple message about the 

condition humaine. Bruno Reudenbach put it well when he wrote, “We see illogical spatial structures not because the goal is to represent prisons. On the contrary, building on an already developed iconography of prisons, the Carceri represent experimental space.”15Piranesi was interested in prisons as a model for a vast interior space whose representation allows the artist’s architectonic fantasy to take off independent of any realistic limitations.As he had done in some of the architectonic fantasies of the Prima Parte,Piranesi canceled the laws of Euclidean space. Units of built space are connected atectonically and illogically. Any single etching requires several distinct perspectives so that the gaze of the spectator never comes to rest. The closer the spectator looks, the more his or her gaze is disturbed. In a detailed analysis of the architectural structure of the Carceri,Ulya Vogt-Göknil has shown how three-dimensional spaces evolve into two-dimensional planes, how depth dimensions are being pulled apart and breadth dimensions are being shrunk.16Especially uncanny is the relationship between space and a kind of light that seems to produce darkness. Rays of light leave their natural trajectory. They bend and curve around things, sliding from one object to another, occasionally jumping over interstitial spaces. In all these instances, the walls seem to be sucking up the light instead of reflecting it. The rules of tectonics and central perspective are canceled. Horace Walpole noted of Piranesi: “He has imagined scenes that would startle geometry.”17 And Goethe in his Italienische Reiseemphasized the difference between his perception of real ruins and Piranesi’s attempt to create effects through fabulation.18 Contrary to certain claims, such observations must not be attributed to some 

inability or to simple playfulness on Piranesi’s part. Piranesi refused to represent homogeneous enlightened space in which above and below, inside and outside could be clearly distinguished. Instead he privileged arches and bridges, ladders and staircases, anterooms and passageways. While massive and static in their encasings, the prisons do suggest motion and transition, a back and forth, up and down that disturbs and unmoors the gaze of the spectator. Instead of viewing limited spaces from a fixed-observer perspective and from a safe distance, the spectator is drawn into a proliferating labyrinth of staircases, bridges, and passageways that seem to lead into infinite depths left, right, and center. It is as if the spectator’s gaze is imprisoned by the represented space, lured in and captured because no firm point of view can be had as the eye wanders around in this labyrinth. Contrary to what Alexander Kupfer claims, this does not suggest that space and time lose all meaning.19The lack of central perspective and a firm point of view, the proliferation of perspectives and unfolding of spaces must be read differently: Piranesi followed to their logical conclusion the spatialization of history and the temporalization of space that already characterized his etchings of antiquities. In his Carceri d’invenzione—the modifying noun is significant—times and spaces are shoved into each other, telescoped and superimposed as if in a palimpsest whereby this complex temporally fraying imagination of space becomes itself a prison of invention. Tour de force, as Adorno says of what are to him the most authentic works of art. Manfredo Tafuri has argued that by breaking with the temporal and spatial perspectivalism of the Renaissance, the Carcerid’invenzionealready point toward basic principles of construction as developed much later by the cubists, constructivists, and surrealists.20Equally important, however, is a fundamental difference between Piranesi and the historical avant-garde. Piranesi’s imagination is not energized by some constructive utopian ideal of multiperspectivalism and spatial flu- idity (Eisenstein); nor does he privilege montage or the fragment in the same way. He rather remains haunted by the threatening aura of ruins, by their oppressive interlocking of past and present, nature and culture, death and life. The work undermines any enlightened and secure standpoint in the course of time and in the location in space, and it is quite distant from the avant-garde’s ethos of alternative futures. Ultimately, Piranesi’s prisons are also ruins,more authentic even than the Roman ruins of the Vedute di Roma.The irritating and threatening simultaneity of times and spaces, of condensed and displaced perspectives, which is exacerbated in the second version of the prison etchings by the increased presence of torture instruments, pushes the impression of uncanny space to an extreme only in the Carceri. 

Conclusion 

In their reciprocal tension and their obsessive intermingling of times and spaces, Piranesi’s prisons and ruins can be read as allegories of a modernity whose utopia of freedom and progress, linear time and geometric space they not only question but cancel out. A past embodied in ruined and memory-laden architecture seems to tower over the present of the age of Enlightenment. Piranesi’s imaginary of ruins is thus the product of an age that only slowly freed itself from the overwhelming ideal of classical antiquity. In its decay, antique architecture articulates that dialectical constellation of nature and history that posits the changeability and contingency of both nature and history instead of opposing blind mythological nature to history as enlightened ontological agency. Piranesi’s work thus belongs with a self-critical consciousness that has accompanied enlightened modernity from its beginning. The authenticity of Piranesi’s imaginary of ruins lies in this critical aesthetic consciousness and its articulation in terrifyingly beautiful etchings. If the etchings of decaying classical architecture point to a natural history of destruction in a Sebaldian mode, then the Carcerisuggest a cultural history of incarceration in an infinite inner space that no longer has any outside—a critique of Romanticism avant la lettre. Reading Piranesi through Adorno and through Benjamin’s concept of natural history, which is grounded in a philosophy of history, will also reveal the historical limits of this authentic imaginary of ruins. As a form of secularized theology with its rises and falls, declines and redemptions of cultures, the philosophy of history produced by the Enlightenment stands itself like a ruin in our twenty-first-century present. Analogously, Piranesi’s imaginary of ruins has itself become a ruin. Modernist architecture points to another historical boundary of an imaginary of ruins à la Piranesi. Concrete, steel, and glass building materials aren’t subject to erosion and decay the way stone is. Modernist architecture refuses the return of culture to nature. Furthermore, the real catastrophes of the twentieth century have mainly left rubble rather than ruins in Piranesi’s sense, even if some of that rubble has lent itself quite well to beautifying representations. The age of the “authentic ruin,” at any rate, is over; its genealogy can be written, but it cannot be resurrected. The present is an age of preservation, restoration, and authentic remakes, all of which cancel out the idea of the authentic ruin that has itself become historical. But Piranesi’s ruins are accessible to reflective nostalgia. They embody a dialectic of modernity that should be remembered as we try to imagine a future beyond the false promises of corporate neoliberalism and the globalized shopping mall. The future, not just of nostalgia, is at stake. 

20 Grey Room 23

Notes 

1. Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary, 2nd ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 1223. 

2. Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia(New York: Basic Books, 2001). 

3. Boym, xiv. 

4. Boym, 49–50. 

5. See Alexander Kluge’s film entitled Der Angriff der Gegenwart auf die übrige Zeit(1985). English 

title The Blind Director. 

6. Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and the Jews, trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts 

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 43. 

7. For a thorough discussion of asynchronous and asymmetric temporalities see Reinhart Koselleck, 

Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time(New York, Columbia University Press, 2004); and 

Reinhart Koselleck, Zeitschichten: Studien zur Historik(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000). 

8. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama(London: New Left Books, 1977), 178. 

9. Susan Stewart, On Longing(Durham: Duke University Press, 1993). 

10. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory,ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: 

University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 106. 

11. Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 

1998), 220. 

12. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory,63. 

13. G.B. Piranesi Catalogue,(New York: Smith College Museum of Art, 1971), 115. 

14. See Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from