滑小姬 发表于 2020-8-5 01:48
《Nostalgia for Ruins》(废墟的乡愁)
The dictionary defines nostalgia as “homesickness” or a “lo ...
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.6 Architecture 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. If, 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. For 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.9 Neither 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. Genuineness 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 chiffre for 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.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi
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 owllike, 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 sueño as 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 Carceri anticipated the univers concentrationnaire of 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 Carceri as 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 Carceri spanned most of Piranesi’s working life. It also fails to make much of the fact that the later versions of the Carceri are 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,” works such as those by Lenz, Hölderlin, Kleist, or Büchner “that succumbed to the terror of idealism’s scorn.” 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 Architetture of 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 sopra i 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.]
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 Carceri belong 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 Carceri as well as the overgrown ruins of Rome itself belong with a present-day modernity, and not just that of the eighteenth century. |