Architecture, Philosophy, and the Pedagogy of Cinema

From Benjamin to Badiou

Nadir Lahiji

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000392104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Critique de l'architecture

Philosophers on the art of cinema mainly remain silent about architecture. Discussing cinema as 'mass art', they tend to forget that architecture, before cinema, was the only existing 'mass art'. In this work author Nadir Lahiji proposes that the philosophical understanding of the collective human sensorium in the apparatus of perception must once again find its true training ground in architecture.

Building art puts the collective mass in the position of an 'expert critic' who identifies themselves with the technical apparatus of architecture. Only then can architecture regain its status as 'mass art' and, as the book contends, only then can it resume its function as the only 'artform' that is designed for the political pedagogy of masses, which originally belonged to it in the period of modernity before the invention of cinema.

Chapter 1

Returning to the philosophy of masses

Benjamin and Badiou

The increasing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two sides of the same process.

—Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’¹

‘Mass’ is a political category, or more precisely a category of activist democracy, of communism.

—Alain Badiou, Cinema²

Mass reproduction is especially favored by the reproduction of the masses.

—Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’³

There has never been a philosophical theory of masses in the theory and critique of architecture. The current categories and concepts, institutional practice and pedagogy, not only leave architecture exposed to the exploitation of ruling technological-industrial capitalism, but worse, make it useful for it. Against this state, I first invoke Walter Benjamin’s methodological introduction to his Artwork essay. Benjamin begins the introduction by invoking Marx’s ‘Preface’ to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and ends by stating that he will offer concepts that are ‘completely useless for the purpose of fascism’. It goes as follows:

When Marx undertook this analysis of the capitalist mode of production, this mode was in its infancy. Marx adopted an approach which gave his investigation prognostic value. Going back to the basic conditions of capitalist production, he presented them in a way which showed what could be expected of capitalism in the future. What could be expected, it emerged, was not only an increasingly harsh exploitation of the proletariat but, ultimately, the creation of conditions which would make it possible for capitalism to abolish itself.

Since the transformation of the superstructure proceeds far more slowly than that of the base, it has taken more than half of a century for the change in the conditions of production to be manifested in all areas of culture. How this process has affected culture can only now be assessed, and these assessments must meet certain prognostic requirements. They do not, however, call for theses on the art of the proletariat after the seizure of power, and still less for any on the art of classless society. They call for theses defining the tendencies of the development of art under the present conditions of production. The dialectic of these conditions of production is evident in the superstructure, no less than in the economy. Theses defining the developmental tendencies of art can therefore contribute to the political struggle in ways that it would be a mistake to underestimate. They neutralize a number of traditional concepts—such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery—which, used in an uncontrolled way (and controlling them is difficult today), allow factual material to be manipulated in the interests of fascism. In what follows, the concepts which are introduced into the theory of art differ from those now current in that they are completely useless for the purpose of fascism. On the other hand, they are useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art [Kunstpolitik].⁴

More than 80 years later, Benjamin’s ‘prognostic requirements’, made in the specific context of the 1930s, not only remain valid for our time but also acquire urgency. Transposing his diagnostic thesis to our present condition, where he says ‘art’, I add ‘architecture’; and where he says ‘fascism’, I qualify it by employing the term ‘democratic fascism’—a term I borrow from Alain Badiou—as the defining hegemonic political force in our time. In his analysis of the art of cinema, Benjamin situates film in the intersection of three trajectories: the ideology of art and aesthetics under industrial capitalism, the impact of technology on the perceptual apparatus of the human sensorium, and the political formation of masses. These are formative elements constitutive of the political crisis of modernity.⁵

The last 125 years—from the invention of film by the Lumière brothers in 1895 to our present time—can be conceived as a historical block forming a unity that I characterize as: ‘Building in the Age of Cinema’. This unity comes under the jurisdiction of an altered perceptual apparatus brought about by the invention of cinema. Benjamin named it as distraction [Zerstreuung], a phenomenon arising fundamentally from an experience of what he called the ‘big-city’. Put under this jurisdiction, it is the non-art of the ‘art’ of architecture that must be thought as the point of departure for theory and critique of architecture, and that I advance in analogical comparison to the ‘non-art of the art’ of cinema in Badiou’s presentation. We will come to this in a later chapter.

Benjamin wrote: ‘Film corresponds to profound changes in the apparatus of apperception—changes that are experienced on the scale of private existence by each passerby in big-city traffic, and on a historical scale by every present-day citizen’.⁶ In this work I contend that the theory, critique, and analysis of architecture must be restructured and rethought under the category of apperception, a term used by Benjamin and one he may have adopted from Kant’s critical philosophy—the origin of which goes back to Leibniz—of whom he was an avid reader. I suggest that architecture as a technological apparatus (dispositif ) must be studied with a view to a ‘new task of apperception’ for the individual, as Benjamin would say, affecting the human sensorium. In the center of this resides the ‘theory of experience’. This theory is to be traced back to Kant’s first Critique, the Critique of Pure Reason, and its transition to Hegel who called his ‘Phenomenology’ the Science of Experience.⁷ On the basis of this philosophical theory of experience, I attempt to develop the thesis that there cannot be any thought of an architecture if it is not grounded in the philosophical theory of masses which, by logical inference, is political in nature. My aim is to accomplish a critique of the notion of ‘semblance’ in architecture in order to separate it from the optical delusion that permeates it today. The latter is an illusion produced solely by the senses. In Kantian terms, I make a distinction between illusion and Schein, the necessity or inevitability of the ‘transcendental illusion’, understood within the triadic structure of phenomenon, thing-in-itself, and Schein.⁸

Significantly, the invention of cinema coincided with two other notable events. It was in 1895 that Freud and Joseph Breuer published Studies on Hysteria with their epochal invention of psychoanalysis and the discovery of the unconscious, the same year that, as Todd McGowan instructively reminds us, Louis and Auguste Lumière screened their first film in the Grand Café in Paris. The coincidence of the discovery of psychoanalysis and the invention of cinema is not accidental. As McGowan notes: ‘psychoanalysis makes its most important discoveries through the analysis of dreams, and to this day, the cinema remains a dream factory, a form of public dreaming’.⁹ Now, the invention of these two was also simultaneous with the rise of the metropolis, which might better be termed the cinemetropolis. The big-city, as Benjamin called it, is a cinematic city or it is not at all. As Anton Kaes points out, cinema and metropolis ‘are equally products of late capitalism and the technical-industrial revolution’.¹⁰ Significantly, ‘insofar as cinema is a part of metropolitan mass culture, the critique of cinema adopts some elements of the critique of the big city’.¹¹ In early cinema, ‘the lightning-fast and disconnected physical movement characteristic of early silent film seemed to offer just what the big city dweller wanted to see’, and, therefore, it was in the year 1910 that it was said:

The psychology of the cinematographic triumph is metropolitan psychology. Not only because the big city constitutes the natural focal point for all manifestations of social life, but especially because the metropolitan soul, that ever-harried soul, curious and unanchored, tumbling from feeling impression to fleeting impression, is quite rightly the cinematographic soul.¹²

This confirms Georg Simmel’s commentary in his famous 1913 essay, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, where he wrote that the ‘swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli’ in the metropolis, bring about ‘the intensification of emotional life’, and further, ‘The rapid telescoping of changing images, pronounced differences within what is grasped at a single glance, and the unexpectedness of violent stimuli’.¹³ As Kaes notes, according to Simmel, these are ‘constitutive conditions of perception in the big city and analogous to the perception of the rapid and jolting succession of cinematic images’.¹⁴

Together these three—the invention of cinema, the discovery of the unconscious, and the rise of the metropolis—are simultaneous with the rise of the mass-mediated society, later to be turned into a full-fledged consumer society by the early decades of the twentieth century, under the ideological hegemony of technological-industrial-liberal capitalism. In its center resides the phenomenon and reality of ‘masses’. Fascism later came to usurp and manipulate this category through an effective manipulation of the same technological media. Politically speaking, every failure of liberal industrial capitalism—and it has not ceased to fail again and again—as we learned from Benjamin, paves the way for fascism. The term ‘masses’ itself has to be submitted to political, philosophical, and analytical scrutiny. In the age of cinema, there is a dialectical relation, as Benjamin put it, between technological ‘mass reproduction’ and ‘reproduction of mass’. Fascism exploited it fully then, and ‘democratic fascism’ utilizes it now.

Now consider the following questions: In what terms should the relation of architecture to the ‘masses’ be defined? Is architecture a ‘mass art’? What defines the paradoxical term ‘mass art’? Is there an architecture that is not conditioned by the mass-mediated soc...