Rella, F.- Eros and Polemos, The Poetics of the Labyrinth (Article-1987)

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Eros and Polemos: The Poetics of the Labyrinth Author(s): Franco Rella Source: Assemblage, No. 3 (Jul., 1987), pp. 30-37 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171063 Accessed: 28/01/2015 20:35

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Translated from the Italian by Ellen R. Shapiro.

Franco Rella teaches literature at the Universitario di Venezia and architectural history and theory at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura in Venice. His most recent books are La battaglia della verita and Attraverso l'ombra.

1 (frontispiece). Chartres Cathedral, labyrinth, circa 1200. Originally, a brass plaque depicting the Minotaur, Ariadne, and Theseus occupied the center of the labyrinth.

Franco Rella Eros and Polemos: The Poetics of the Labyrinth

I . In the Phaedrus, the only Platonic work in which philosophy is not practiced inside the city, but outside, on the banks of the Ilyssus amidst an overwhelming "natural" presence, it is stated that the city is the place where knowledge is exercised, or better, the elected place of the establishment of the episteme.

Why should the city, where difference and disagreement dominate, be the site of the origin of a knowledge that places itself beyond disagreement? Of a knowledge legitimated precisely by the overcoming of disagreement?

Here, in the Platonic text, a therapeutic dimension of philosophy is insinuated, which reaches back to Pythagoras, and which was singled out by Nietzsche. Philosophy has its origin in the "malaise of the real, " that is, in the paralyzing perception of the ineluctable plurality, the stir, the seething that, as Schelling would later say, leads reason to be reduced to silence. Philosophy is born to "heal" ,this malaise, to give order to this plurality: to reduce the "immense sea of dissimilarities" to the identity of the true thing.

The Republic is an attempt to go beyond the sublimation of differences and to transform the city itself into a place of order, hierarchies, and identity, cutting off through a sacrificial act not only the differences but also the discourse structured from them: the tragic discourse expressed through great poetry and great art.

The Phaedrus, written after the Republic, takes place, as we said, outside the city. But this suspension of the usual

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context of philosophy is also the suspension of its usual time and space . It is the definition of a "neutral" place that ideally anticipates the Platonic theorization of the choros in Timaeus. Just as the demiurge fills this space with forms that constitute the visible reality of the world, so the discourse of the philosopher fills the space of the Phaedrus first with illusory forms - those of logographers and poets - and then with the forms of true discourse, and thus transforms this other space into an ideal city: into the place of paideia and psychagogy; in short, into the place of the education of the anima .

2. The city is therefore site of perdition and salvation, disorder and order: it is earthly and celestial city, coacervation and temple, in an alternation that passes through all of Western culture.

The opposition proposed by Le Goff between the medieval city and its "outside" - the desert, the ocean, the forest -is never precise. To be sure, and here Dante comes to mind, there exists the closed city protected by its walls, but this is the ideal city of the past. In it today disorder, wealth, commerce, and exchange reign, and they have insinuated disorder, transforming the city into the kingdom of Sardanapalus. Already in Boccaccio we have a reversal: the plague rages in the city, while grace, lightheartedness, and discourse have a place outside the city. This ambivalence seems to constitute the way man has looked at and lived the urban experience.

3. But if this duplicity - the city of Dis and the celestial city - remains in balance in the Middle Ages and long afterward, and if "peace" reigns more inside the city than outside it, with the modern we have a radical reversal. The city reaches such a differential density that it can only be designated a labyrinth.

For Baudelaire, to walk in the city is to walk in a forest full of dangers and wild beasts; for Stimer and Dostoevsky, it is to descend into a horrid subsoil; for Flaubert, it is to be immersed in the wave of the immense new that spills over from all around; for Zola, it is to confront the unfigurable; for Musil, it is to perceive untrasversable densities and abysmal voids.

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Why has the metaphor of the city taken on this meaning? Why has the forest of likenesses and differences, which in the past seemed able to be ordered in categories, if not in ideas, nearly been reduced to an absolute and terrible identity? Heaps of goods, of soulless, formless things without color or warmth seem to surround man, confining him in an uncrossable desert where it is impossible to find any reference points. Valery states that this horrid indifference is present even in museums, in the temples of culture and memory, where, as in the "magnificent museum of the streets," the perversion of every spatial and temporal relationship has been insinuated, so that things, in their whirling movement, become indistinguishable, like the incandescent materials inside an oven .

4. This tragic perception of metropolitan impossibility is the other side of a powerful attempt to describe in a universe of sense this plurality founded on the pervasive force of a metaphor derived from the machine. It is the beginning of functionalism.

Even this description, however, is not without residue. This is exemplified by one of the greatest descriptions of the metropolis in machine terms, that of Zola, who - for example, in Le ventre de Paris - expresses, above all, a nostalgia for the lost body. Another instance is the maniacal rage against "ornament," the "more" with respect to function that can survive only in the stylizations of the Jugendstil, or in those interiors described by Benjamin that resemble exotic panoramas, that express the dream of a place elsewhere that leads to a kind of stupefaction, coming to life perhaps for the emergence of a petit fail-divers, crime, which occupies the nascent industry of detective literature.

This fusion of machine and nostalgia finds dazzling expression in a very recent novel by Ernst Ji.inger, The Illusions of Aladdin, in which he proposes the great utopia of death's evasion of the laws of the rapid consumption of the machine: a great necropolis, escaping from the rhythms that cyclically overturn cemeteries, where the "old" dead must make room for the "new" dead. But the great necropolis itself becomes a machine. The attempt at salvation is transformed into a giant illusion that hurls the new Aladdin into madness and dissociation.

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The city is thus rendered illegible outside its functioning. Memory has no rapport with the present, since it is no longer divination, is no longer thought opening the road to what is to come. Memory becomes monument, which only seemingly is set against the constructions without memory disseminated around us. In reality it is an accomplice: in fact, it reproduces the same absence of real value, proposing itself as a museum piece encapsulated in the aura of the aesthetic .

5. And yet the city, experienced as a place of loss, of the crumbling of experience - a place of irredeemable "lost time," from Proust to Blade Runner - is the place where images survive that seem able to resist the usury of things and concepts: images that conceal themselves, transform themselves, but that in this transformation also find new life.

But this is not the problem I wish to discuss . I would like to venture a definition, or better, a working hypothesis that must be verified by future research: The city is the place where, precisely through the disagreement characterizing it, a special, specific relationship with truth is possible. It is the place of an apate, of a kosmos apatelos that grants to mortals, as Parmenides said, 1 a road to true being. This access road opens therefore within the modern city, in the very heart of metropolitan culture.

6. Aragon had only intuited it: with the swarm of the gods of the new urban mythology who speak and make visible the contradictions that an abstract metaphysic cannot grasp. Echoing Vico, Aragon, in a metropolitan context, in fact proposes a "metaphysic of the concrete," that is, not a "reasoned and abstract metaphysic," but one "felt and imagined," which functions like a "history," like that movement which leads us to the borders of the visible, up to the perception of the beyond.

Thus Leopardi, who had stated that modern cities are ugly because they all have "more or less the same form," writes in an annotation to the Zibaldone that "the light itself seen in cities is very pleasing and sentimental, where it is cut through by shadows, where darkness contrasts with light, where the light diminishes little by little, as on rooftops, where some secret places obscure the view of the luminous

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star. Variety, uncertainty contribute to this pleasure, not seeing everything, and thus being able to roam freely with one's imagination regarding what one does not see."

It should be remembered that Leopardi is one of the great representatives of the Neoplatonic tradition, or rather of the Neoplatonic gnosis. This "roaming freely with one's imagination" does not therefore mean opening up to the fantastic, but knowing through the image what is blocked to the "rational" gaze, to pure reason, which, without contamination, Leopardi says, is the source of inevitable madness - just as, however, to reason with the most exquisite exactness about what is merely visible "is a continual source of errors."

Variety, uncertainty, not seeing everything thus become the possibility of approaching what is not visible. And all knowing, as Novalis said (one of the authors who signalled the great Stimmungen of the modern), lies entirely in this relationship between the visible and the invisible: in this ability to reach the invisible by means of the visible.

"For the above-mentioned reasons," Leopardi continues, "the sight of an uncountable multitude is still most pleasing, like stars, or people, ... in a multiple movement, uncertain, confused, irregular, disordered, a vague undulation ... like that of a crowd."

Michel Tournier says that a writer is often a prophet. Schlegel said that to think is to divine: to state first what is possible, what will happen, and what has not yet happened. Leopardi, in the heart of the Italian provinces, speaks about what becomes the perception of the changing crowds - of the masses we find in Zola, in Canetti , in the great contemporary cinema.

7. Zola, in L'oeuvre, without even realizing it, manages to demolish his own theoretical presuppositions (those of painting en plein air) to configure a visibility of the metropolitan reality in the obscure depth of the symbol. In The Castle, our century's greatest novel about the city, Kafka draws out a road to truth that passes through shadow and thus through a displacement of the theophany of light that in our culture has determined the entire metaphoric relative to truth.

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Truth through shadow. The manifestation of the real through light has not always been univocal (even if dominant). There also exists the theophany of darkness and night (from Juan de la Cruz to Georges Bataille). But here we are not talking about the opposite of light, nor about darkness and night; we are talking about shadow, and hence about a mixture of light and darkness. A great metaphor thus reaches its transformation.

8. What does the metamorphosis of a metaphor mean? According to Blumenberg, some metaphors exist that refer to nothing more than the original question about the meaning of the world and about man's relationship to the world that originated the metaphor itself, from which there developed a metaphoric and conceptual chain, as well as a series of systems of thought. Thus only great transformations lead to a change in the meaning of a fundamental metaphor, to its inversion. This is not simply, as Plato said in the Phaedo and the Phaedrus, a case of overcoming an obstacle, which reason cannot overcome, through an image that serves as a bridge to span a gap whose borders are defined and established by reason itself. It is a question of a change in reason .

We see, in relation to the city, the metaphor that has reached its turning point. What figure contains the fragmentary images we have seen flash by little by little: the inextricable forest, the undulating and unstoppable motion, the indescribable arabesque of existential trajectories, and the shadow that directs these same images toward another sign, that of a new insight?

Let us hazard a hypothesis. The figure that contains these multiple images is that of the labyrinth.

Within the entrance to Chartres Cathedral lies a design of a labyrinth. Only by passing through the labyrinth of the world can one reach the temple, the cut-out space in which, according to the Heideggerian etymon, there reigns another temple, another temporality. The labyrinth is the place of loss, and only beyond it can one find salvation.

But is it possible to leave the labyrinth? Or is the destiny reserved for this inevitable trip that of being torn to pieces by the Minotaur, or that of maddening, of grasping onto corroded, viscid walls that crumble under the pressure of

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the fingers, without opening into a passage that leads beyond them?

Dante got out of the labyrinth and could "see the stars once again." Is this reemergence possible for metropolitan man? Does a space exist that is not a metropolis, or that is not irremediably inscribed in it?

In "A Berlin Chronicle" Benjamin speaks of a confrontation with the city that becomes a decisive battle for one's own memory, with individual time and collective time. And it is this confrontation that leads him, in A Berlin Childhood Around 1900, to the conviction of a science of the labyrinth, of a knowledge with its origin in the labyrinth itself.

"Not to find one's way in a city means little. But to lose oneself in a city, as one loses oneself in a forest, is something to learn." Even in Kafka's Castle an analogous Verirren (losing oneself) is discussed that leads inevitably to an lrrsinn, to that senseless state that is the deprivation of the sense of power of the Castle. Because of this, when K. becomes lost in Frieda's body, as in a foreign land where not even the air has the familiar characteristics of the air we usually breathe, and in which one can only advance, he feels no sentiment of horror, but rather "the consoling sensation of a possible emergence from the shadows," of a possible Aufdiimmern.

Eros is the force that guides K. in his first Verirren. It is an erotic sensation that accompanies the first sensation of becoming lost, when, "let happen what will happen," the young Benjamin abandons himself to the labyrinth of streets and their seduction: to the love of the things that live inside the labyrinth.

When Benjamin attempts a theoretical definition of this art or science of the labyrinth in The Arcades Project, he offers an image, the image of awakening that opens Proust's Remembrance of Things Past: the constellation in which oneiric images and conceptual power join forces to redeem things, sinking into the time of loss to free them in a new landscape in which they can return to us the warmth of the love we have been able to invest in them.

From the amorphous array of objects, from the heap of inert things that delineate the sinuous crossing of the laby-

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2. Massimo Scolari, II ponte de/la donna onesta (The bridge of the honest woman), 1979.



rinth, "things" emerge, and with them, as Rilke said, "the figure that saves."

9. From the manner of seeing by means of images that constitutes the Leopardian invisible, through Benjamin, Kafka, Proust, and Rilke we arrive at the transformation (or transfiguration) of the metaphor of the labyrinth into a landscape. We perhaps have in a text by Diirrenmatt the "declaration" of the change that has occurred. 2 If the Minotaur never left the labyrinth, in all probability the young people \Yho entered had but a small chance of meeting up with it, and even less chance of being killed by it. In the great gardens, which certainly constituted the labyrinthine space, the Minotaur wandered about happy, a vegetarian, protected, with his double nature, until the advent of Theseus, until the meeting with the destructive violence outside.

The discourse of Diirrenmatt is clearly paradoxical. It is the symptom of a changed cognitive and spiritual attitude with regard to the metaphor of the labyrinth. If we pass through this paradox and go back to the mental acts, to the works and experiences that this paradox tries to explain, we find ourselves before the greatest Stimmung of the Friihromantik, one that has marked all the modem, and one that we can fully grasp only in the crisis of the mechanistic model of our late modernity (or postmodernity).

Aeschylus had said that Zeus destined mortals to the condition that to know is to have passions, to have experience. Plato had fought this affirmation, transmitting however to Neoplatonics the heredity of a knowledge that is episteme tas erotikas: an erotic knowledge (or an erotic of knowledge). The Friihromantik affirms that we know a thing when we love it and are loved by it - that is, when we have a complete experience of it that passes through reason and feeling. This experience is possible only if we do not reduce the complexity in the cognitive act, if, as Schlegel says, we do not silence the stirring and humming of the gods. And if, as Schelling says, reason becomes silent before this swarming, we must find some figures that will contain it, beyond its usual codes, without suffocating it.

How does one keep together the arbitrariness of life and the scientific spirit, art and the philosophy of nature, the

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conditioned and the unconditioned, the impossibility and the necessity of a perfect communication?

These absolute antitheses, which thought must come to terms with in order to produce knowledge, are not confusion, but, as Schlegel said, that chaos from which a new world can be born: the chaos of forms, of their affinity and diversity, of their capacity for metamorphosis that can be gained from the double force of irony within the complex figure of the arabesque.

'The supreme beauty" (which in another fragment Schlegel identifies with the "thing in itself"), "or rather the supreme order, is that of chaos and precisely a chaos only awaiting contact with love to spread out into a harmonious world," in which it is possible to contemplate the thing "in a sensitive and spiritual manner." Because of this it is still necessary, Schlegel writes, "to annul the course and the laws of reason" and to move into the experience of another thought. Schelling and Leopardi have given valuable indications of the shape of this thought. As Schelling says, at issue is not weak thought, but a strong philosophy "able to measure itself against life, and, far from feeling impotent in the face of life and its prodigious reality, and occupying itself only with sad things and simple negations and destructions, it instead takes its force from reality itself, and therefore also, once again, produces something operative and consistent." With Schelling's text we have returned to the production of the new: in a certain sense, to a strong philosophy of the project.

10. Valery, lamenting the end of architecture, in fact laments the end of this project: that is, of the capacity to conceive [progettare] a place where diversity and plurality can find a horizon of sense.

If the city has generated the idea of the labyrinth and also its transformation from a place of loss to a place of knowledge, if thought - even if in areas that until recently were marginal - has succeeded in thinking the possibility of this different experience of the city, what can be in this context the action and activity of the architect? To gather together whatever has a time that can be defined as historic in a sort of huge and monstrous museum, and disperse a\\ the rest into the indifference of the parts of a machine? Or

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is it not a matter of proposing a "history," a great fiction that, as Eisenman says, dismisses the classical fictions and deconstructs its metaphysical and naturalistic foundation, and opens up to the memory of what was and to the expectation of what will be?

This "history" possesses not only a deconstructive value (it is the limit of the American theorization closest to Derrida) and not only a temporal value. This grand fiction, this fabula, in fact, like Schlegel's arabesque, must be able to iterate forms, to reveal through repetition, refuse, and deviations a reality that has always been hidden.

Functionalist logic with its values is put into check by this process. It loves repetition, but not cyclical repetition: the coming and going of forms, the sinking and reemergence of sense.

Even this checkmating of functionalist logic through the labyrinthine figure of cyclical repetition finds a correspondence in a precise romantic Stimmung. It is Novalis who states that there exists a pleasure of producing, and that because of this - for the erotic pleasure connected with it - "every production is a polemical work": it is, then, polemos, conflict. And if, as Novalis says, "philosophy is indeed nostalgia, the wish to feel at home everywhere," we know that this house is the place of eras and polemos, it is the city, a place that, to paraphrase Novalis, is in the focal center of our time.

Thinking and designing [pensare e progettare] are precisely this heading for the focal center of our time, toward the rhythm and pulsation of things that trace out the borders of our actual experience and make new experiences possible.

This journey is an adventure that outlines one of the manifold roads that man travels. In it we see the formation of the strange figures that the blinding light of metaphysics prohibited us from seeing: the figures of shadow; the figures of the labyrinth, given a new beauty, that only through our words and our signs can manifest themselves, propose themselves as the very goal of our journey, of a cognitive adventure.

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Notes This text reproduces, with slight variations and corrections, a lecture given at the conference "The City: Form and Meaning" that took place in Trent at the Museo Provinciale, Palazzo delle Albere, 16-17 December 1985, and published in Italian in Casabel/a 524 (1986). It is dedicated to Gabriella Belli.

I. Franco Rella, La battaglia della verita (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1986).

2. Friedrich Diirrenmatt, "Dramaturgie des Labyrinths, " in Der Winterkrieg in Tibet, book I of Stoffe IIII (Zurich: Diogenes Verlag, 1981), pp. 77-94.

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Figure Credits I. John James, The Masons Who Built a Legend (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982), p. 86.

2. Massimo Scolari: Architecture Between Memory and Hope (New York: IAUS, 1980), p. 107



Article Contentsp. 31p. [30]p. 32p. 33p. 34p. 35p. 36p. 37

Issue Table of ContentsAssemblage, No. 3 (Jul., 1987), pp. 1-146Front Matter [pp. 1-3]Editorial [p. 5]The Architecture of the Uncanny: The Unhomely Houses of the Romantic Sublime [pp. 6-29]Eros and Polemos: The Poetics of the Labyrinth [pp. 30-37]The American City: Ideal and Mythic Aspects of a Reinvented Urbanism [pp. 38-59]Urban Americana: A Commentary on the Work of Gandelsonas [pp. 60-62]The Order of the American City: Analytic Drawings of Boston [pp. 63-71]Modernism of a Most Intelligent Kind: A Commentary on the Work of Diener & Diener [pp. 72-75]The Tradition of the Modern in the Present: Four Projects Composed from Fragments [pp. 76-107]Betondorp: Amsterdam's Concrete Garden Suburb [pp. 108-143]Back Matter [pp. 144-146]

Rella, F.- Eros and Polemos, The Poetics of the Labyrinth (Article-1987)

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