Walter Benjamin & Naples
There
are 3 entries
here; - 1. Is Naples Still
porous (below) 2. The Human
Side of Porosity 3.
Countless
Theaters
1. Is Naples Still
“Porous” ?
It can't be a coincidence that the other day I came
across a copy of Walter Benjamin's essay on Naples (Neapel,
written with Asja Lacis in 1925) and that the very next
day (yesterday) was Pasquetta, the Monday after Easter, when all
Neapolitans move out into the streets for their yearly
lemming-like march to nowhere (the cliffs are on strike). From
my entry on Pasquetta:
...Pasquetta the most hectic, bustling day of the year in Naples. Last–minute Christmas shopping, Mardi Gras celebrations, New Year's Eve, rowdy bands of football hooligans — all of that is nothing compared to the Monday after Easter. Every single teenager who is upright and breathing puts on a knapsack packed with food and sets out to go somewhere — anywhere. But not alone. They travel in packs, herds, swarms, or whatever the appropriate collective noun is for a carefree mob out for a picnic in celebration of a religious event they no longer remember anything about....
The
image (right) is “porous”. That road is where the seabed used to be;
then it was a street, then it was a pedestrian walkway.
Today I'm not sure what it is. Cafes have encroached on
the space in some places to the middle of road. The term
“porosity” or “porousness” has come into the English
vocabulary of architecture and urban planning from the
German (Porosität) of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940)
the German essayist, philosopher, and social critic.
His essay on Naples is one of his lesser known works.
He was obviously fascinated by the nature of
cities...what is a city?...what does its architecture
mean? (“In Naples the architecture
is as porous as the rock.”) ...how is it
possible to find beauty in something that is ugly? How
does urban living increase our sense of isolation?
Roughly, “porous” means that the structures we build resist
well-defined function; you can build a square or a
park, but people use it for anything they want, and
once it falls to pieces, as it will, the city will
flow back through
and around it. Most would agree that at least in
Naples, you feel less isolated because of this “porosity”.
Benjamin wrote about other cities as well, such as
Marseilles—another port city, like Naples—and one that
has undergone attempts to “clean it up," as has Naples.
I
have been caught out a few times in the Pasquetta parade
and hated every second of it, yet I think this is what a
lot of non-porous
northern visitors find attractive about
Naples. Benjamin's porosity
is the quality that makes the city either more
livable or less livable. No one seems to know. Visitors
like to come and gush about Naples and its...
... passion for improvisation, which requires that space and opportunity be preserved at any price. Buildings are used as a popular stage. They are all divided into countless theaters with different plays all running at the same time. Balconies, courtyards, windows, entrance ways, staircases, roofs all become stages and box seats...the living room shifts out to the street, with chairs, hearth, and altar...and the street moves into the living room...each private attitude or act is permeated by streams of communal life.
[trans. note: besides Porosität, Benjamin is fond of the German verb durchdringen - or some derivative
thereof - to describe Naples. It is normally
translated as "permeate", as it is in the
above passage. It is
better than mixture, because
it indicates
active movement.
If you take the German verb apart, it
means "press through". In
Naples everything
is "permeated"
(pressed
through) with
everything
else:
- Unwiderstehlich
durchdringt
der Festtag
einen jeden
Werktag./
Holidays
irresistibly
permeate each
workday.
- Auch hier Durchdringung von Tag und Nacht./ Here, too, the permeation [that's awful!] of day and night.
- ...und so durchdringen sich Familien in Verhältnissen./ ...thus families permeate in relationships. [equally awful!]
- Wahre Laboratorien dieses großen Durchdringungsprozesses sind die Cafes./Coffee bars are true laboratories for this grand process of permeation.]
Visitors like to
come to a place (at least for a while) where “nothing
is definitive..." where no one ever says “this
is the way it is and nothing else...” (Compare
that to a sign I saw once on a patch of grass in a park
in Berlin that said: Liegewiese, meaning “you
may lie on this grass.”) They have come to the right
place in Naples. There is something “oceanic” about
merging into the flow you see in the image, above. You
can get mugged, too. But while that is happening, please
think about the durchdringung “...of day and night,
noise and peace, outer light and inner darkness,
street and home … [and how] Poverty has
brought about a stretching of frontiers that reflects
the most radiant freedom of thought.” My frontiers
feel stretched just thinking about it. Or at least
permeated.
Benjamin's essay is from
roughly the same era as this letter/essay
by Jean-Paul Satre about Naples. Sartre took
another tack and just pointed out that the new streets
covered up what was essentially still wrong with the
city. He was not taken with the pores of the city or
with the soul of the city wafting like some
indeterminate quantum fog through and in and out of all
the nooks and crevices. Benjamin on the other hand found
that that was precisely what was right
with the city.
So
are we still porous? (The image on the left certainly
is. That was a nice outdoor park with bleachers where
students and office workers could sit and have lunch.)
There are certainly parts of Naples that look as they
did centuries ago. Not decades. Centuries. But there have been various attempts
at urban renewal. Some call it "cleaning up." The most famous one
was from 1885-1915. It was called the risanamento
(lit.=making healthy again!) A success? Possibly, yes.
Except to those who called it the "gutting" or
"disembowelment" of the city. (See this
link.) Some might just say "sanitize"—make people think you are putting a new
face on the city (forgetting to mention that you are
ripping the guts and soul out of it). Maybe it's a
tough call since I harbor no nostalgia for quaint
whores and hoodlums down by the ports in some cities.)
The Fascist
rebuilding of the 1930s? (image, left.)
Well, there is nothing “porous” about mastodontic marble
facades. They definitely do not "resist
well-defined function. They are a well-defined
fusion of form and function. Big and intimidating. Of
the more recent attempts at urban renewal in Naples,
three stand out:
the housing projects at Scampia (image, right)
the Centro Direzionale
(Civic Center, image below, left), and the new
subway system. The first is an urban blight and has
already been partially torn down. (Of course, maybe that
was part of the pore people's plan; it was meant to
pre-eventually fall to pieces and be reabsorbed back
into the urban fabric and thus doth the beautiful cycle
begin anew (like an old Disney nature film about the
eternal rebirth of spring!).
The Civic Center (left)
was a highly touted architectural wonder, but it is all
high 
rises
and no one ventures out at night. The spaces (pores)
between the high-rises were meant to generate a sort of
Oriental bazaar mentality where people would naturally
gravitate out into the flow of humanity. (Like a kraal,
a South African tribal community, another metaphor that
Benjamin used to describe Naples.) That has not
happened. The entire compound has increased the
isolation of the residents and it's a forbidding area to walk through at
night. The third item, the subway system, makes it
easier to get around, so that might decrease isolation.
Benjamin wrote that...
The nature of the architecture, its porosity, evolves from this need of the Neapolitans to improvise, but improvisation, itself, depends on the porosity of the architecture. Consequently, the architecture is porous, allowing new constellations to emerge...
That
was written 90 years ago, but none of the major
projects in recent years show signs that they are
“allowing new
constellations to emerge.” Maybe that's what people
really want. There is a constant barrage of
articles in architecture magazines about how Benjamin's
idea of “porosity” is what many cities need in order to
rid them of an increasing sense of isolation, to restore
their sense of humanity, to get people moving in and out
and through their
cities. Yet when all the tourists who come to
Naples to enjoy the “porosity”—when
those people go home to wherever they come from, it
might be that they feel safer in their gated
communities! Indeed, they are safer! Even in porous
Naples I live in a such a place. Got the gate out in
front. Got the Beware of Dog sign (although the dog died two
years ago). Got the
watchman at the gate. All that. And mine is a
typical street, at least in this part of town and many others. Many
Neapolitans live
in gated communities (up and down the beautiful Posillipo
coast you can't get onto any of the lovely gated
properties from
the land or
sea without
calling in a drone strike). But the
residents are content to let everything
else fall to hell on the outside. In Myth
and Metropolis: Walter
Benjamin and the City by
Graeme Gilloch, the author says,
top photo (right) of the mob along the seafront is by Selene Salve. Unless otherwise indicated, all passages set off in quotes "like this" or set off in separate indented paragraph citation format are from Neapel by Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis (1925).Benjamin aims to reveal the process of construction as the production of instant ruins. Naples is the perpetual ruin, the home of nothing new. In the ruin, the cultural merges into the natural landscape, becoming indistinguishable from it. The production of instant ruins!
That's what I didn't realize when I wrote an entry called Upkeep and Maintenance, to describe the photo above of the park fallen into ruin. You can read that if you want, but don't let it bother you too much because that photo is already way out-of-date. It is now something else —a roadway, I think. You see, they put in the park and then decided to build a station for the new metro line right there, so...well, it looks ok now, whatever it is in this particular brief iteration. So the answer to the question is yes, we are still porous. Makes my skin crawl, too, believe me.
added May 17, 2016
2. The
Human Side
of "Porosity"
Benjamin
remarked that the architecture in Naples is as “porous
as the rock”—first one function, then another and another. The
functions of places shift and are overtaken; they change
like an endless string of theater sets flipping from one
to the next as the season progresses ("season" being
life, itself, and
“progress” maybe
a poor choice of words), maybe a comedy, then a musical,
then an Ibsen or Pirandello or whatever. Walter
Benjamin's native language and culture were German. His
language has a proverb that says Ordnung muss sein—”There
must be order”. It permeates German culture and, as well, is a
cliché to describe German culture and poke fun at the
people. Indeed, the orderly Germans! Everyone
makes fun of them. (Lenin once quipped that the first
thing a German revolutionary does when he gets orders to
occupy the train station is to buy a platform ticket!) To such
a person, then, the kaleidescope of Naples —the
impermanence, the coming apart at the seaminess— was the
charm of the city. They come from a land of rigorous
order to a land of
instability and they wallow in it. It's all so quaint.
There
is, however, a human side to this quaintness. In one
day!—just last
week—I found a few examples (and I know many more). A
gentleman whom our family has known for decades and
specializes in carpentry and woodworking came by to
adjust a door panel and a wooden shutter or two. He
is, I suppose, a professional handyman, and there's
nothing he can't fix. In the course of the few hours
he was in our home, I asked him about his workshop. I
remembered it as right down the street; it used to be
you could take stuff over there—a busted chair, things
like that—and he'd work on it and bring it back to
your home. Now he comes and gets it and takes it away
and brings it back or tries to mend it in your home.
He told me that he had given up the workshop, an
establishment that he and his brother had opened and
run successfully for decades. Why? Couldn't afford the
rent, taxes, electric bills, or the “squeeze” from the
mob, and he
couldn't even afford to pay the city the yearly fee
for sometimes picking up the trash on the street. All
that and more. So he became a traveling handyman. Call
his cell-phone and he'll gear up and come over,
toolbox and all. It was more like one of those
old-time professions that you
see described here: offer a service, but keep
moving, keep wafting through the pores of the city.
His life had become impermanent, perhaps quaint to northern
philosophers. His life had become as “porous as the
rock” that so fascinated Benjamin.
So
it is with a young woman who used to work in a beauty
parlor down the street where my wife went to get her
hair done. Same story. They closed for all those same
reasons, so the woman is now an ambulatory
hair-dresser with a cell-phone. There are local fruit
vendors working out of the back of illegally parked
vans, and there are fine electricians who used to have
a legitimate shop but now wander from place to place
putting up their advertising flyers and waiting for
the cell-phone to ring. I know a seamstress who worked
in one of a chain of shops
that had the additional expense of paying the staff a
minimum hourly wage plus year-end bonuses, so they
just closed that location and the women who worked
there now walk the streets with their needles, thread,
cell-phones and hastily printed calling cards that
they hand out along the way. Then there's the mechanic
and the man who tried to open a small restaurant...
etc. etc.
It
may be that Benjamin's romanticized view of the
virtues of chaos and impermanence—that is:
"... buildings are used as a popular
stage. They are all divided into countless
theaters with different plays all running at the
same time. Balconies, courtyards, windows,
entrance ways, staircases, roofs all become stages
and box seats..."
...was
influenced by the fact that he saw Naples in the
1920s. There was not yet any real motorized traffic to
speak of and, importantly, it was before the age of
the disastrous overbuilding of the city in the wake of
WWII, a period when formerly green, even bucolic,
spaces in the Vomero, Posillipo and Fuorigrotta
sections of town were layered with shoddily
constructed buildings and laced with miles of
underground water and sewage lines almost guaranteed
to leak and siphon away the soil, caving in random
streets and homes (pictured above). Porous?
Very. Quaint? Not so much.
3. More on "...countless theaters with different plays all running at the same time." added June 16, 2016
Here is another example of the quaintness of chaos in Naples. The building
on the left is now known as the Villa Maria. It was
built as the Hotel Eden, one of the most delightful and
photogenic examples of Art Nouveau
architecture in Italy (known as "Liberty" style in Italian). It was built in 1899-1901 and was
the design of Angelo Trevisan (1849-1929).
In the original and recently restored configuration it was
more or less as you see it on
the left:
broad,
high facade with a lush garden in
front. The garden has
become increasingly important
since the premises border on a
congested square (Piazza Amedeo,
in the Chiaia
section of Naples).
Aesthetically, the garden provides
spaciousness and simply breathes green out onto a
square that needs it. On the right is a
photo from the other day.The space is cluttered with lawn
furniture where a shop has moved its stock out
into the garden. Hundreds
of items on display and for sale. Hurry, hurry,
hurry. Consolation? It won't last long. Summer is about to
start.
It will end. The rains will come, and an
umbrella shop can open up Entry #3 also
appears in the
Naples Miscellany pages here.]
© 2002 - 2023