Architectures of Transversality

Paul Klee, Louis Kahn and the Persian Imagination

Shima Mohajeri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351759748
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Architettura generale

Architectures of Transversality investigates the relationship between modernity, space, power, and culture in Iran. Focusing on Paul Klee's Persian-inspired miniature series and Louis Kahn's unbuilt blueprint for a democratic public space in Tehran, it traces the architectonics of the present as a way of moving beyond universalist and nationalist accounts of modernism. Transversality is a form of spatial production and practice that addresses the three important questions of the self, objects, and power. Using Deleuzian and Heideggerian theory, the book introduces the practices of Klee and Kahn as transversal spatial responses to the dialectical tension between existential and political territories and, in doing so, situates the history of the silent, unrepresented and the unbuilt – constructed from the works of Klee and Kahn – as a possible solution to the crisis of modernity and identity-based politics in Iran.

1 Transversal space of modernity

Only a living culture, at once faithful to its origins and ready for creativity on the levels of art, literature, philosophy and spirituality, is capable of sustaining the encounter of other cultures—not merely capable of sustaining but also of giving meaning to that encounter. When the meeting is a confrontation of creative impulses, then it is itself creative.

Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth

Iranian encounters with modernity as a divided experience between progressive (unhistorical) and regressive (historical) attitudes is, in fact, indicative of an inherent polarity in the nature of modernity itself. As in almost all definitions of modernity, this opposition rests on the element of “time” that poses a challenge to radical modernization practices. History, its cultural pasts, and traditional ways of life are what adamantly resist and destruct modern hopes, and therefore modernism sees its temporal other as a limit and a concrete barrier that must be broken down. Yet modernity in its genuine form is born again and again in the present out of this unceasing challenge and through a renewed critique of the past. This dynamic, almost chaotic image of time that is immanent in the structure of modernity is nevertheless abstracted into a linear break between past/present and old/new, and thereby disrupts the unity of modernity itself.

In what follows, I wish to return to major classic articulations of modernity – in the works of Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Benjamin – as a mode of temporality that never fully breaks with the past.¹ However, by focusing on the dimension of time, I hope to show that even the classic definitions of modernity involve a “spatial” context and social milieu through which modernity comes to life and begins to flourish. This spatial character of modernity that acts as a communicative force between differ ent fractured milieus is what I may call “transversal.” As I will argue, the transversal condition of modernity not only inspires and carries the dynamic tension and the unsettled temporal struggle between past and present, but also allows modernity to seek its full development when traversing new places, contexts, and relations.

It is along the axis of time that the concept of modernity was first examined by philosophers and poets, each offering a distinguished image of this complex phenomenon. The nineteenth century modern poet and art critic, Charles Baudelaire, gives the following definition: “By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.”² In fact, Baudelaire’s concept of modernity appeared during his critique of Constantin Guys’s works, the artist and subject of Baudelaire’s famous essay The Painter of Modern Life (1863). Guys is the “observer of life” and “the man of the world,” according to Baudelaire.³ His rapid sketches of the living present are dressed up in the spontaneity of visual and spatial language, while recording the “fashion” of everyday life. Yet Baudelaire’s man of the world “makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever element it may contain of poetry within history, to distil the eternal from the transitory.”⁴ For Baudelaire, modernité is thus characterized by the sketchiness of the present moment being temporary and unfinished enough to capture lasting and permanent qualities.

Still, Baudelaire’s aesthetic modernity is achieved through the crowd, in its global sense, as “an immense reservoir of electrical energy.”⁵ The modern man of the world, in Baudelairean poetic description, is thus multiplied among the metropolitan crowd while observing the kaleido scopic beauty of life in its unsteady and repetitive motion. Baudelaire warns us against any overindulgence in “abstract” and “indeterminate”⁶ ethos, away from the realities of contemporary life. Thus, modernity becomes the mercurial, though concrete and real, limit of the present in order to continually transgress and violate the territory of abstract and indefinite meanings trapped in history, and thus always still enlivens them. As Foucault recognizes in his article, “What is Enlightenment?” Baudelaire’s modernity brings eternal and abstract values “within” the vicinity of the contemporary life-world, and well under its permanent scrutiny.⁷ Therefore, Baudelaire’s approach to modernity, as a temporal problem, brings history into a mutual relationship with the living present, even though the two continually negate one another. However, this temporal characterization of modernity is indivisible from spatial practices and social engagements in the midst of the cosmopolitan crowd.

Baudelaire’s account of modernity in its rapport with life and history exhibits parallels to Nietzsche’s conceptions of modernity in his second Untimely Meditation, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life (1874). Nietzsche’s passage offers a simultaneous reading of history and life, despite his harsh criticism of the “excess of history”⁸ in the present. Nietzsche opts for an “unmodern” approach to modernity that, unlike some of his contemporaries, assimilates the rigidity of the modern knowledge to the body of life⁹ to the point where modernity transforms the life of a people and a culture. Nietzsche’s exchange of modernity for life promises a novelty and vitality that is grounded on the condition of “forgetfulness” and a break with the memory of the past. Yet, as Nietzsche suggests, this open, unknown region of action and creation, animated through the art of forgetting, is incomplete without a simultaneous break and bridge to historical and cultural life. In a sense, the insatiable desire for eradicating the historical for the sake of a progressive modernity in any given culture is traversed by the regressive indulgence of past forms and values to maintain historical continuity. Thus, it is only in the mutual encounter between history and modernity, “historical and unhistorical,” and in the midst of temporal discontinuities that the new returns.

Although modernity is chained up to history in Nietzsche’s analysis, an invisible boundary runs through each singular territory, thus guaranteeing their liveliness. Without such a boundary, modernity and history begin to overwhelm life. Yet this is not a straight line that separates darkness from light, the historical from the modern; it is the experience of a limit as a “plastic power”¹⁰ that sees no inside or outside, but rather provokes indefinite configurations. Nietzsche writes:

To determine this degree, and therewith the boundary at which the past has to be forgotten if it is not to become the gravedigger of the present, one would have to know exactly how great the plastic power of a man, a people, a culture is: I mean by plastic power the capacity to develop out of oneself in one’s own way, to transform and incorporate into oneself what is past and foreign, to heal wounds, to replace what has been lost, to recreate broken moulds.¹¹

From this standpoint, modernity lives on by means of remaining within the confinement of this uncanny ensemble that in its chainlike structure would promise a living and generative culture. One can argue that modernity would devour historical and traditional forms only if a serpent could swallow its own tail.

The temporal critique of modernity in Nietzsche’s metaphor of the chain that emphasizes the intertwining space of the past and the living present turns into a more dynamic and free-floating image of the “constellation” in Walter Benjamin’s analysis. The constellation, according to Benjamin, is the composition of “nows,” each carrying historical significances for the present that are brought together in the same spatial milieu. Benjamin writes in The Arcades Project, “in order for a part of the past to be touched by the present instant [Aktualität], there must be no continuity between them.”¹² The idea of the constellation defies the concept of history as progressive, linear, and a “causal nexus” of events, and instead re-situates history among a discontinuous multiplicity of nows that can revolutionize and illuminate the present.¹³ While Nietzsche’s “critical” view of history, in its dialectical relation with modernity, celebrates the living present as the moment of forgetting, Benjamin’s “constructive” view of history develops a critique toward modernity and the present time. Benjamin’s spatial metaphor of constellation brings history as an object within the present, in the “here-and-now” [Jetztzeit].¹⁴ This revolutionary and constructive stance toward modernity that incorporates history as its material resource in fragmented pieces,¹⁵ Benjamin believes, would make a new present.

All three accounts of modernity, presented by Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Benjamin, identify the internal tension and fracture of modernity caused by its temporal counterpoint: history. Each offers a spatial diagnosis that would promise the production of the new by postponing the temporal disjunction between modernity and history. Certainly, each figure maintains a different critical relation to tradition and history, but all agree that bringing modernity to life as the engine for social and cultural practices requires hardship, revolutionary thought, and the plastic power of a people. In the words of Jürgen Habermas, “a differentiated reconnection of modern culture with an everyday sphere of praxis that is dependent on a living heritage” closely tied to a renewed “process of social modernization” would only complete the project of modernity.¹⁶ It is perhaps the lack of such dialectical interplay between modernization practices and the cultural and intellectual attitudes and responses that the Iranian promise of modernity remains unfulfilled. This is not to say that the Iranian people have not yet experienced social change in the form of revolution and in the name of modernity and life, or that their modernization projects were far too advanced for a stagnate culture. Rather, it suggests that Iranian revolutions were not radical breaks with past traditions, but at best revolts against a symbolic and undeveloped modernity which simply prepared a blank slate for a returning history and tradition in an outdated and authoritarian form. In light of this, the revolutionary spirit did not serve to heal the rift between the historical and the modern, but rather provoked a much deeper tension between the two.

Heidegger's Iranian children

Modernity was perceived among Iranian cultural critics of the 1960s along the axis of time. By leaving behind historically and socially grounded criticisms, a group of Iranian intellectuals established a sense of temporality beyond time and space to impose on their reconstructed image of modernity. This suspension of historical time situated the discourse of Iranian modernism at the edge of time in order to transcend the Western modernity while mobilizing and transporting the Iranian people toward a new beginning.¹⁷ This group, while accepting the inevitable shift to modernity, argued that a whole new process of modernization must be invented that summoned the ahistorical, timeless ethos of the Iranian-Islamic tradition. This early postcolonial condition in Iran sought its legitimacy outside of the Iranian cultural and aesthetic landscape, in the counter-modernity dis courses of Bergson and Heidegger. This new theoretical construct fashioned by Iranian intellectuals was originally a mode of resistance against the hegemonic power of the West and its alienating force, without any direct critique of local power. However, the Iranian anti-modernist mode of thought became a popular voice to serve the revolutionary movements against the power of the state.

This mythical regeneration of modernity was anchored to the principle of negation: “where the West ends, we begin.”¹⁸ This statement by the Iranian thinker, Ahmad Fardid (1909–1994),¹⁹ epitomizes the dichotomies of East and West, tradition and modernity, self and other, and craft and machine, thus highlighting the unbridgeable gulf between them. The chief ramifications of the Fardidian critique of Westernization (hence his well-known theory of “Westoxification”) among a group of Iranian intellectuals²⁰ brought a spirit of resistance toward Western philosophy and all of its manifestations, such as democracy, rationality, and developmental history. Beginning in the 1930s, among Iranian modernists there was an interest in the relevance of Bergson’s thoughts on intuition and the spiritual approach to life. Fardid, among other Iranian intellectuals, wrote two introductory articles on Bergson.²¹ He allied himself with the French philosopher to rescue modernism from its rationalist an...