MEDIUM | MEDIALITY in Walter Benjamin — Workshop Programm

Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal

Congrès de l'Association d'art des universités du Canada (AAUC) | Conference of the Universities Art Association of Canada (UAAC), 2021

L’objectif du Réseau Art et Architecture du 19e siècle (www.raa19.com) consiste à promouvoir le renouveau des recherches globales et interdisciplinaires sur le 19e siècle en histoire de l’art et de l’architecture. Cette session ouverte invite des propositions théoriques ou des études de cas qui couvrent des corpus issus du long dix-neuvième siècle, de 1789 à 1914. Une attention particulière sera donnée aux propositions qui font ressortir de nouvelles problématiques ou des méthodologies novatrices. Séance G.4. RAA19 Séance ouverte (Réseau art et architecture du 19e siècle). Présidence : P. Davis et M.-L. Poirier. Elham Etemadi (Hunan Normal University), «Imagining Character Transformation: The Case of Shahrzad in Thousand and One Nights». Larissa Vilhena (Trinity College Dublin, The University of Dublin), «A New Methodology to Study the Illustration-Poetry Relationship in the "Moxon Tennyson" (1857)». Anne-Philippe Beaulieu (UdeM), «La tradition inventée au secours de la mémoire collective. Le cas du Canada français au tournant du XXe siècle». Stephanie Weber (Concordia University), «An Elusive Allusivity: Paradox in the Representation of Plate Glass in Canada, 1851-1900». Séance H.4. RAA19 Séance ouverte (Réseau art et architecture du 19e siècle). Présidence : P. Davis et M.-L. Poirier. Andréanne Parent (UdeM), «Fanny Robert, la première femme artiste sourde de Paris». Béatrice Denis (UdeM), «Louis-François Lejeune et l'auto-représentation hitorique». Tim Chandler (Concordia University), «Modern Lives: Failure, Biography, and the Avant-Garde in 19th-Century Paris». David Misteli (Eikones - Center for the Theory and History of the Image, University of Basel), «Painting as Terrain Vague: Van Gogh and the Salon des Indépendants of 1888».

2019

The relations between literature and architecture are so complex that, from an epistemological and methodological perspective, a great variety of approaches can be adopted in order to study them. And, actually, the rather chaotic bibliography that already exists on the mapping of those relations is a reflection of this complexity, crystallized variously within the fields of architectural theory, urban theory, semiotics, and literary theory. Firstly, sometimes authors from the discipline of architectural theory use expressions such as "architecture as a language", or "architecture as a (literary) text" or "the city as text", to create a kind of loose "analogy" between the two disciplinary fields. On the other hand, from the viewpoint of textual poetics or narratology, we can find similar, vague metaphors such as "narrative as a space", "narrative spaces", "the space of language", the "architecture of the text", or even "textual space". There seems to be another, second, family of approaches, that tends to establish a parallelism or a quasi-structural correspondence between space and narrativity, architecture and narrative, or building and narrativity, that goes beyond mere metaphors. The cases of Philippe Hamon's studies on the French realist novel or of Paul Ricoeur's famous article on "architecture and narrativity" immediately come to mind. In this paper I will argue that there is another, third, epistemological possibility of relating literature and architecture that is deeper, more significant, and may prove rather fruitful if we would wish to extract design or creative principles from such a comparative procedure. I would like to call such an approach a functionalstructural correlation that focuses on the roles and the conceptual content of the elements used to construct the above relation. The aim of the paper is to outline this possibility by organizing and typifying the bibliographical field under three distinct epistemological models usually at work when investigating the relation between literature and architecture, or between narrativity and space. Those models are conceived of as ideal types, in Max Weber's sense. In the exposition, I will specifically analyse the spatial literary theories of Gérard Genette, Elrud Ibsch, Genealogy and Prehistory of the Relations between Space and Narrative/ Language Postmodern theory played a major role in revisiting the problem of the relation between architecture and language, long after the early discussions and musings about the "architecture parlante" of the 18th century. Charles Jencks, George Baird, and Geoffrey Broadbent were some of the protagonists of those debates during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This era was exactly the heyday of semiology or semiotics. What Jencks and others tried to do is simply copy and transfer some models from linguistic and semiotic theory into architectural discourse. Jencks's argument in favour of a triple articulation (form-function-technic) of architecture, in direct relation to the famous semiological triangle developed by Ogden and Richards, is such an attempt (Jencks and Baird, 1969: pp. 13-17). And despite Gillo Dorfles's hesitation on the epistemological validity of such transfers, due to the complexity and "stereognostic" texture of architectural codes and their irreducibility to those of common spoken languages, people like Broadbent and even Christian Norberg-Schulz went on. They wanted to investigate how meaning was created by architecture, how signifiers were related to signifieds, how material buildings created "symbol-milieus" (according to Norberg-Schulz's catchy phrase) (Jencks and Baird, 1969, pp. 40-48, 51-56, 223-226), and they wanted to know whether architecture is a language or speech, following Saussure's famous dualism (Terzoglou 2018, pp. 121-123). The quest for meaningful form was a kind of heroic dimension of postmodernism, despite the fact that the protagonists themselves were supposed to nurture suspicion towards "grand narratives". This fervour attracted the attention of famous semioticians such as Umberto Eco, who started addressing the specific problems of a semiotics of architecture. Eco significantly added a flavour of scientificity to the whole debate. In his article on the architectural column, he claimed architecture's double function, the signified one being types of possible functions, but, most importantly, introduced the problem of the specificity of architecture as a discipline. The fact that when addressing spatial contexts we have a mixture of synchronic and diachronic "languages", an array of hybrid morphological and historical features that persist in time, makes the semiotic analysis of architecture not an easy task (Eco 1972, pp. 98, 113-115). My point of view, developed in a recent article, is that facing architecture, if we aspire to adequately analyse it from a semiotic perspective, we have to adopt an interdisciplinary methodological stance, merging literary theory, modal narratology, architectural theory, urban theory, and semiology, at the least (Terzoglou 2018: pp. 123-124). Juri Lotman's idea of a "semiotic continuum" could be useful for such an endeavour. Moreover, Lotman introduces the concept of "the space of the semiosphere" (2005, pp. 206-208), which is diachronic, related to cultural memory, and therefore more relevant to architecture, which addresses, basically, social values, cultural hierarchies, existential distinctions, and collective memory, through the articulation of space within a temporal continuum or framework. Note Ideal Type Two: Critical Epistemological Models There seems to be a different family of approaches, a second ideal type that articulates the relation between space and narrativity, architecture and narrativity, or building and language. This second type tends to establish a parallelism beyond mere, vague metaphors: a kind of quasi-structural correspondence between the two disciplines, architecture and linguistics, or architectural theory and literary theory. I claim that this second type of relations is based on an external comparison between two fields of inquiry, based, however, on abstract concepts. This comparison is no longer a collation but a sort of abstract but strict analogy or correspondence, making use of expressions based on "like", "such. .. as", or "between" to institute a parallelism or homology among distinct disciplinary frameworks. I would like to call such approaches, from an epistemological perspective, critical or representational conceptualisms. "Critical" because they transcend mere empiricist epistemologies using only vague metaphors, "representational" because they tend to assume a kind of one-to-one correspondence between the elements comprising each discipline, and, "conceptualism" in order to account for the fact that this family of models actually makes use of concepts in the articulation of the comparison between the disciplinary matrices at hand. Therefore, if I could compare the second ideal type with the first, the differences are striking, but, however, there is one, common element in both of them: the relation between the two parts of the comparison, architecture and language, or space and narrativity, is always assumed to be external. That is, it is presupposed that those disciplines are already readymade entities, so to speak, and then they come into contact or dialogue. To give some examples of this second ideal type, I will briefly analyse the major works and articles by Gérard Genette, Philippe Hamon, and Paul Ricoeur. Genette, in his 1966 article on the relation between space and language, already notes that "il y a toujours de l'espace dans le langage.. .. Tout notre langage est tissé d'espace " (Genette 1966, p. 107) [there is always space within language.. .. All our language's tissue is spatial]. Since language spatializes itself (1966, p. 108), we would expect why poets such as Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Proust, Claudel, and Char are obviously fascinated by place and space, claims Genette (1969: p. 44). Therefore, in his other seminal text from Figures II, on "Literature and Space", published in 1969, Genette tries to unravel the complex relation between the two concepts. The interesting feature of this article is that it somehow avoids the pitfalls of the general and vague metaphors pervading the 1966 article, inaugurating a methodology resembling ideal type two. Genette asks the crucial question of whether "space" is only one "subject" of literature among others, therefore just an object of representation for the temporal mode of existence of literary narrative (Genette 1969: pp. 43-44). If that were the case, then space would be something passive and external, and literature would only speak about space, in a kind of empiricist

Leonardo, 1999

in t er médi a li t és • n o 6 au t o m n e 2 0 0 5

The clarity and transparency of Roussel's works, exclude the existence of other worlds behind things and yet we discover that we can't get out of this world. Everything is at a standstill, everything is always happening all over again. In 1914, Raymond Roussel (1877-1933, one of the ancestors of experimental writing and forerunners of avant-garde art practices, commissioned Pierre Frondaie a popular pulp fiction writer, to turn his novel Locus Solus ('Solitary or Unique Place') into a play. The production, however, was a complete failure. Roussel and his strangely titled work became the butt of jokes overnight, and everyone waited with impatient malice for the next play. The paper examines the three modular stages (and spaces/stageslocations/loci) of a three year project based on Roussel's Locus Solus so as to discuss a wide range of possibilities of re-visioning and re-making the context in which Locus Solus was framed, misread, misunderstood and misfitted during the epoch it was written.

2008

Conference, 2023

Introduced in 1902 in response to a polemical article by Strzygowski, the category of haptic formulated by the Viennese theorist Alois Riegl enjoyed a remarkable critical fortune, exquisitely interdisciplinary, throughout the 20th century and beyond. A critical fortune that, not infrequently, has taken the form of a complex and radical reinterpretation of the "optical device”, postulated by Riegl, reflecting on the construction of space in Egyptian bas-relief. Since the 1990s significant new interpretations have been made in Film Studies field by authors such as Antonia Lant, Noël Burch and, in a more openly subversive, transcultural and gender-based key, by scholars such as Laura U. Marks, Jennifer M. Barker and Giuliana Bruno. Although the research that has converged in the Film Studies field still needs systematic recognition, this branch of studies is partially known. Otherwise, the adoptions and interpolations this notion has received in contemporary art criticism and historiography still constitute a widely unexplored field. Given this scenario, this contribution aims at tracing how the notion of haptic has entered the lexicon of contemporary theory and criticism through the modernist period. It will try to record affinities, interpolations and reinterpretations of the Rieglian model to stress the theoretical malleability and vitality of this category. Through the rediscovery of some forgotten sources, such as Louis Danz's prodromic study on Picasso Guernica (1937) published in 1941, this study aims at analyzing critically how this notion has been experienced by authors such as Herbert Read, Clement Greenberg, Lucy Lippard and Jole De Sanna. Tracing essays and theories is intended to show how this category has become an eccentric critical tool to disorientate and dismantle the Modernist epistemic framework.

A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned.

Modern Criticism, 2002

This article analyses 'The Arcades Project' by Walter Benjamin and views its structure as anticipating the Internet. The text that we have, although written in the first half of the twentieth century, has, paradoxically, to be seen as a recently released cultural phenomenon that still needs to be absorbed by historians, literary critics, art critics, philosophers and sociologists: if the German edition did not appear till well into the twentieth century's second half, the book burst on the English-speaking world only as the century was in its death-throes. In the brief time of its existence so far, the English version, published by Harvard University Press, has been received with near-universal enthusiasm and admiration by readers and critics. What is an arcade? In its classic sense, the term denotes a pedestrian passage or gallery, open at both ends and roofed in glass and iron, typically linking two parallel streets and consisting of two facing rows of shops and other commercial establishments - restaurants, cafés, hairdressers, etc. "Arcade" is the English name: in French the arcades are known as "passages", and in German as "Passagen". The modern arcade was invented in Paris, and the Parisian arcades remain the type of the phenomenon. Benjamin quotes a passage from the Illustrated Guide to Paris, a German publication of 1852, which sums up the arcades' essence: "These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-panelled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of the corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need".