Architecture as a Cult

Nikos Salingaros: Architecture as a Cult

"2. Defining a cult.

A system may be identified as a dangerous cult if it has the following characteristics, combining aims with techniques:

1. It aims to destroy
2. It isolates its members from the world
3. It claims special knowledge and morality
4. It demands strict obedience
5. It applies brainwashing
6. It replaces one's world view
7. It has an auto-referential philosophy
8. It creates its own language, incomprehensible to outsiders

I will show here that contemporary architecture satisfies these criteria.

3. Architecture and cults.

Few people today connect architecture with religion. And yet, up until about the last two centuries, architecture could not be distinguished from religion. Today, architecture has broken away from religion in forming its own cult. Architecture competes with religion because it promises transcendent pursuits to its practitioners. It offers mystical enchantment, with insights left to be discovered purely by the power of creativity, and thus an opportunity for any initiate. The architect sees a chance for transcendental expression beyond the utilitarian uses of a building.

From this, it is not surprising that architecture misused the workings of religion to further itself.

The Bauhaus and Taliesin -- two "compounds" upon which contemporary architectural education is based -- followed a cult structure.
It is irrelevant whether the spiritual groups mentioned above represented beneficial, benign, or harmful cults. Cult methods were applied to make architecture into a new cult, and an extremely dangerous one because of its virulence and destructive aims. A key aspect of modernism was an absolute belief in the necessity of eliminating all pre-modernist architecture.

The point where architecture turned into a cult can be identified with the abandonment of traditional building culture. Like science, architecture has a vast store of practical knowledge and technical skills that one needs to master before making original contributions. By throwing all of that away, the modernists could offer instant gratification to those who joined the cult. They attracted followers using the myth of the creative genius. Instead of learning and absorbing a core body of knowledge, they trained for allegiance to the architectural cult.

4. Brainwashing.

Cult indoctrination begins by tearing down a person's confidence and self-esteem; i.e., one's emotional equilibrium as established via the childhood development of one's intuition and senses. Tactics for achieving this include mental and physical humiliation to discredit what are already automatic and natural responses. After one's major point of internal stability and referential attachment to a world view is effaced, that candidate is open to any kind of indoctrination.

For several decades, architectural novices have been conditioned by the message that sensual gratification from ornament and architectural forms, surfaces, and colors is a criminal act. It is asserted that such sources of pleasure are fit only for primitive peoples and social degenerates. Indeed, a cultivated non-response to sensually emotive architectural elements is supposed to characterize the intellectually advanced individual. As a psychological and physiological reaction to those forbidden elements is normal, however, this message induces feelings of guilt and worthlessness, as required to break down a student's spirit. Self-esteem is then rebuilt using the modernist repertoire of alien, hostile forms and surfaces -- and, from then on, only the cult's reality is considered valid.

One of the slogans of the Bauhaus was "starting from zero". Its aim was a radical restructuring of human consciousness. Every incoming student was subjected to intense psychological conditioning designed to cleanse every preconception regarding architecture, so as to re-wire the student's neuronal circuits.

The studio method of architectural training lends itself perfectly as a technique for cult indoctrination. A student's project is judged -- without having a basis of proven logical criteria -- as to how far it resembles currently fashionable buildings. The student's grade is entirely up to the whim of the teacher. It is no wonder then that, despite the widely-pronounced aims of limitless creativity, all students' projects tend to look the same and to conform to stylistic dogma. Students who don't adopt the cult's beliefs are eliminated before they can get their degrees, so they never join the architectural profession.

5. The cult of Deconstructivism.

In a devastating hoax, the two physicists Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont have exposed some of the most prominent French deconstructivist philosophers as charlatans.

Charlatans are not protected in the scientific world. The society of their peers would expel them from positions where they could continue to do harm. Science needs to protect its foundation more than its individual members, something that will not occur in a power-driven discipline that lacks a scientific basis. In the architectural arena, deconstructivists are unassailable because the discipline is based largely on cult beliefs. Those who use deconstructivist philosophy to justify their bizarre constructions are now at the top of their profession.

There is something dangerously wrong with a society that ignores the exposure of intellectual impostors. If part of a system is pathological, this puts the entire system at risk. Systemic connections will eventually infect the rest of the system (in this case, society as a whole), and thus destroy it. Our civilization appears to be so complacent with its recent technological progress that it does not recognize threats to its very existence. We are distracted by technological toys and are not applying our scientific knowledge to keep our society in healthy working order. More traditional cultures are aware that something is dreadfully wrong, but they don't know how to react in a constructive manner.

Architecture schools are training graduates who are indoctrinated into deconstructivist philosophy, yet are unable to design a simple building fit for human sensibilities. Deconstructivist buildings, moreover, have been shown to remove life from the environment. Life here is defined in mathematical terms as a measurable degree of organized complexity that is characteristic of biological forms. None of this is even remotely perceived by either practicing architects, or students who would become architects, because the discipline has become entirely self-referential. There is no contact with outside reality, which is arrogantly stated to be the deconstructivist's principal aim.

The deconstructivist agenda is to destroy the logical foundations of knowledge and reasoning, in a way that would make it impossible to reconstruct it afterwards. For deconstructivist architects, there is no more utopia, only nihilism.

6. Architectural cult symbols.

As psychological conditioning is used to reformat the minds of architecture students with an "approved" set of images, this indoctrination develops negative associations for "disapproved" images of traditional buildings. A remarkably effective propaganda campaign has successfully linked traditional architecture with all the ills of history. To many, a Classical building now stands for something evil, and a building in local vernacular style as a serious impediment to progress. Just as experimental animals and human prisoners-of-war are conditioned to react automatically to a particular stimulus, architects have been conditioned to feel a physical revulsion for new buildings in traditional styles. They have been brainwashed by the cult to identify the cult's "enemy" without reflection.

Modernism's cult symbol is an empty rectangle, with the concept of emptiness expressed by its interior being just as important as the sharp rectangular edges. Since modernist dogma strictly forbids ornament on the human range of scales 1cm - 2m, there exist no true modernist symbols on those scales to which human beings can connect. The imposition of modernism's alien aesthetic is achieved by creating a void. Its symbol is precisely the absence of symbols. The mental image of "pure" form erases living structure from our world.

Theo van Doesburg (of De Stijl and the Bauhaus) is credited with saying that: "The square is to us as the cross was to the early Christians". Here we encounter a philosophical shift of levels, from visual symbols to an abstract ideal. The modernists worshipped the unattainable abstraction of geometrical purity, and this displaced all visual and architectural symbols of the past. This indicates the transference of values from traditional symbols and rules (which could express religion) to an abstract ideal (which therefore competes with religion).

Deconstructivism is an offspring of modernism that retained many of its parent's cult symbols; for example their sharp edges and high-tech surfaces. Seeking novelty from within a severely limiting style, deconstructivist architects abandoned early modernism's horizontally-aligned rectangular geometry to create broken straight lines, diagonals, and curves. Modernism's ideological aim of eliminating the copying of historical forms and symbols was achieved via severe geometrical abstraction. The only possible direction to move from empty abstraction -- without returning to the ordered complexity of traditional architecture -- is to destroy forms altogether. Because modernism as a thought system denies organized complexity, it could only evolve into disorganized complexity.

Architectural cult symbols act like viruses to infect the built environment. They have even parasitized established religions, with the consequence that postwar religious buildings are spreading the cult's ideology rather than their clients' spiritual values."
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Robert Adam: Hidden Modernism in the World of Audit

"Welcome to the World of Audit. In this world, every judgement that affects anyone - and what judgements don't - must be backed up with expert advice: the audit. This is a world where fairness, equality and discrimination are defined by experts, sometimes singly but more usually - for greater safety - in groups. Nothing is sacred. Quality, beauty and excellence must be pinned down with measurement and survey. In the World of Audit, no one dare make a judgement based on taste, preference or ideology.

Or do they?

The World of Audit has taken over our industry. It has, for example, led to the creation and proliferation of safety engineers. Life is intrinsically dangerous and there is no end to how it can be made safer. So building inspectors, health and safety inspectors, highway engineers and others have an unlimited future in ever finer reductions of risk. Once an audit says that something might be safer, there is no escape. No one dare overrule such a statement, however puerile, lest the one case in five million happens in this building, on that site or on this road. To the safety engineer, enormous odds do not mean that something is very unlikely to happen but that it will happen - albeit not very frequently.

The idea that the judgements of audit are not based on opinion and ideology is ridiculous. Levels of acceptable risk are an ideology. Every safety audit is only an opinion on the assessment of risk (more or less based on evidence). Claims of objectivity in audit are a smoke screen to avoid criticism, the lawyer at the enquiry or, worst of all, the judge in court.
So what hope have we for aesthetic judgement in the World of Audit?"

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Nice...the Architecture as a Cult one especially.

The second one echoes N.'s attitude [JW, 1] that Pain and 'evil' contribute/can contribute as much to the preservation of the species and this is not something to be avoided. Its the pain-bringers who have preserved and elevated mankind. The Audit mentality only works and does things from the p.o.v. of preservation of the species by over-insisting on its "safety". That kind of thinking weakens our capacity to face and want pain.

Lyssa wrote:

The second one echoes N.'s attitude [JW, 1] that Pain and 'evil' contribute/can contribute as much to the preservation of the species and this is not something to be avoided. Its the pain-bringers who have preserved and elevated mankind. The Audit mentality only works and does things from the p.o.v. of preservation of the species by over-insisting on its "safety". That kind of thinking weakens our capacity to face and want pain.

Yes, one comment: not everything is Nietzsche.
People knew about these things before this man published them and made them marketable to generations of youngsters disillusioned with their civilization.

Satyr wrote:

Yes, one comment: not everything is Nietzsche.
People knew about these things before this man published them and made them marketable to generations of youngsters disillusioned with their civilization.

N. recovered what many people had already said and knew before him and for that, I will recover N. wherever and anywhere I can. The discipline of Reciprocity is part of my individuality.
Secondly N. was/is one of the best cultural physicians, and when I study or analyze culture, here in the area of archt., I see no irrelevance in taking his name. There is nothing wrong in using the best devoted to the study of decadent symptoms. I am studying a disease, and I will always have a doctor on call.

For you and anyone else who may find the quoting of N. intolerable, I can also analyze Adam's point from a Vedic perspective; the Bhagavad Gita for example states freed from the delusion of opposites of pain and pleasure, is the one who,
"with equal calm
Taking what may befall, by grief unmoved,
Unmoved by joy, unenvyingly; the same
In good and evil fortunes.." [4]

Present day archt. practice as shown by this audit mode clearly still is overruled by a pleasure/pain principle, it fears pain and uncertainty, constituting yet another field of modern decadence and sickliness.

I don't find quoting "intolerable" but an easy out.
If used effectively and in conjunction with personal insights it is useful.

As I said Nietzsche is for most a conduit, a nexus, a reference point which, like a magnifying lens, brings into focus something at a distance.
His greatest contribution was,a s you say, a physician of modernity.

Ok.

Lyssa wrote:

Robert Adam: Hidden Modernism in the World of Audit
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Accounting and the Making of Homo Liberalis
Caroline Lambert, Eric Pezet

Abstract

"This paper investigates the practices whereby the subject, in an organisational context, carries out systematic practices of self-discipline and becomes a calculative self. In particular, we explore the techniques of conduct developed by management accountants in a French carmaker, which adheres to a neoliberal environment. We show how these management accountants become calculative selves by building the very measurement of their own performance. The organisation thereby emerges as the cauldron in which a Homo liberalis is forged. Homo liberalis is the individual capable of constructing for him/her the political self-discipline establishing his/her relationship with the social world on the basis of measurable performance. The management accountants studied in this article prefigure the Homo liberalis in the self-discipline they develop to act in compliance with the organisation’s goals."

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Quote :

"Among the symbols for the social failures of the twentieth century, the apartment-box is as appropriate as any. It captures the essence of atheistic socialism in a way that no monument of some cement man with bulging biceps and carrying a submachine gun can. It is a monument to man as a packageable commodity. It was the one thing that the Communist East and the consumerist West had in common. Both civilizations wanted to put people in boxes. The New Man was to work in a glass box during the day and then, in the evening, go home and live in a cement box at night." [E. Michael Jones, Living Machines: Bauhaus Architecture as Sexual Ideology]

The anxiety created by the Warped shapes and buildings of modern architecture:

Quote :

"Legrand’s synthetic description of the disease was as dramatic as it was unambiguous in characterizing its setting:

"The fear of spaces, ordinarily compatible with the most robust health, is frequently produced at the very moment when the neurotic leaves a street and arrives at a square, and it is marked by a sudden anxiety, an instantaneous beating of the heart. The patient, then prey to an indefinable emotion, finds himself isolated from the entire world at the sight of the void that is presented to him and frightens him immeasurably . . . he feels as if he is destroyed, does not dare to descend from the sidewalk to the roadway, makes no step either forward or backward, neither advances nor retreats, trembles in all his limbs, grows pale, shivers, blushes, is covered with sweat, grows more and more alarmed, can hardly stand up on his tottering legs, and remains unhappily convinced that he could never face this void, this deserted place, or cross the space that is before him. If one’s gaze were suddenly to be plunged into a deep gulf, if one were to imagine being suspended above a fiery crater, to be crossing the Niagara on a rigid cord or feel that one was rolling into a precipice, the resulting impression could be no more painful, more terrifying, than that provoked by the fear of spaces."

He concluded: “no fear without the void, no calm without the appearance of a semblance of protection.”

Worringer identified agoraphobia as the underlying cause of the ceaseless drive of art toward abstraction: “The urge to abstraction is the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of the outside world. . . . We might describe this state as an immense spiritual dread of space.”

In the aftermath of what Worringer termed the “great shifting of emphasis in investigation from the objects of perception to perception itself ”— the Kantian revolution—it had become clear to psychologists, aestheticians, and art historians that the conditions of perception were far from fixed and arrayed in a priori categories but rather subject to infinite variability. The “dogma of the variability of the psychical categories,” in Worringer’s phrase, following the psychological theories of Fechner, Volkelt, and Lipps, immediately placed perception in a field conditioned by “the checkered, fateful adjustment of man to the outer world,” a field that was “ceaselessly shifting in man’s relation to the impressions crowding in upon him.”

Abstraction, for Worringer, far from being a new and modern form, was in fact the most ancient, born precisely out of anxiety and founded on no less than a primitive fear of nature and a concomitant desire “to divest the things of the external world of their caprice and obscurity,” to endow them with a regularity represented in geometric abstraction. Worringer cites “the fear of space [Raumsheu] which is clearly manifested in Egyptian architecture,” and compares what seems to him to be a generalized geistiger Raumscheu, or “spiritual dread of space,” to the modern malady of agoraphobia, or what he terms Platzangst.

In the same way as “this physical dread of open places may be explained as a residue from a normal phase of man’s development, at which he was not yet able to trust entirely to visual impression as a means of becoming familiar with a space extended before him, but was still dependent upon the asurances of his sense of touch,” so the spiritual dread of open space was a throwback to a moment of “instinctive fear conditioned by man’s feeling of being lost in the universe.” He characterizes this feeling as “a kind of spiritual agoraphobia in the face of the motley disorder and caprice of the phenomenal world.”

The “sensation of fear [Angst],” Worringer concludes, was “the root of artistic creation.”

In the later Form in Gothic, Worringer repeated the thesis of “primitive fear” and elaborated it with respect to modern fantasies of a Rousseauesque “golden age.” “Man has conceived the history of his development as a slow pro- cess of estrangement between himself and the outer world, as a process of estrangement during which the original sense of unity and confidence gradually disappears”; the reverse, he argued, was in fact true. Rather than the “poetical conception” of primitive man, the historian should reconstruct the “true primeval” man by the elimination of sentiment, leaving a “monster” in the place of “the man of paradise.” This monster, helpless, incoherent, a mere “dumbfounded animal,” receives unreliable perceptual images of the world that are only gradually remodeled into conceptual images. The real development, then, was not from wholeness to estrangement, but rather from the feel- ing of strangeness to familiarity. The original “gloomy spirit of fear,” based on instinct, survives in the “deepest and most anguished insight.”

It is such fear, finally, that drives the search for absolutes, the rigid line, and abstraction. The capturing of shifting images on a plane surface frees objects “from their disquieting environment, from their forlorn condition in space”; such a surface resisted depth, the third dimension, which once more tended to plunge objects into the “boundless relativity” of space, and provided a security against the infinite. Whenever abstraction reemerges in art, it will be, Worringer held, a symptom of individual subjugation to “the crowd”: “crowd sensibility and abstract sensibility are . . . two words for the same thing.” Impersonal, the “expression of the undifferentiated crowd,” abstraction still marks the presence of agoraphobia and a relationship of fear to the outer world.

Now while Worringer’s observations were made, as Dora Vallier has recently pointed out, in strict isolation from cubist or expressionist experiments in abstract art, and while they seem, as Worringer himself claimed, to have been advanced without detailed knowledge of Georg Simmel’s own investigations into the “mental life” of modernity, his juxtaposition of agoraphobia and abstraction was nevertheless a calculated reversal of the turn-of-the-century wisdom that saw the spaces created by modern abstract geometry as a direct cause of agoraphobia, if not of the entire psychopathology of modern urban space.

Ernst Gombrich has transcribed some of the notes and drafts for this lecture, in which Warburg used, so to speak, his own mental illness to develop theories of ostensibly “primitive” but evidently autobiographical mental states:

"Primitive man is like a child in the dark. He is surrounded by a menac- ing chaos which constantly endangers his survival. The original state, therefore, is one of fear, of those “phobic reflexes” to which Tito Vignoli . . . attached such crucial importance for the genesis of myth and ultimately of science. Our mind is in a constant state of readiness to take up a defensive position against the real or imagined causes of the threat- ening impressions which assail us."

The phobic reflex which substitutes a known image, however men- acing, for the dread of the unknown cause has an important biological function: even the most fearful imaginary cause is less fearful than the dreadful unknown. . . . In this respect the phobic reaction prepares the ground for the mastery of the world through the act of naming and thence to the dominance of logical thought." [Vidler, Warped Space]

Quote :

"The pathological symptom of Berührungsangst, the fear of getting into too close a contact with objects, is spread endemically in a mild degree nowadays. It grows out of a kind of hyperaesthetics, for which every live and immediate contact produces pain.

In the face of the crowded disorder of the modern metropolis, argued Simmel, the “sensitive and nervous modern person” required a degree of spatial isolation as a kind of prophylactic against psychological intrusion. If such a personal boundary were to be transgressed, a “pathological deformation” might be observed in the individual, who would present all the symptoms of what Simmel called “fear of touching,” or Berührungsangst. This fear of coming into too close a contact with objects was, he argued, “a consequence of hyperaesthesia, for which every direct and energetic contact causes pain.”

Simmel’s diagnosis was at once spatial and mental: the real cause of the neurosis was not, as West- phal and Sitte had implied, solely spatial. Rather, he argued, it was a product of the rapid oscillation between two characteristic moods of urban life: the overclose identification with things and too great distance from them. In both cases, as with the symptoms of agoraphobia, the question was spatial at root, the result of the open spaces of the city, those very large expanses in which the crowds of metropolis found their “impulsiveness and enthusiasm.”

This distance was necessarily reinforced by the very character of daily life itself. In The Philosophy of Money, Simmel wrote,

"For the jostling crowdedness and the motley disorder of metropolitan communication would simply be unbearable without such psychological distance. Since contemporary urban culture, with its commercial, professional and social intercourse, forces us to be physically close to an enormous number of people, sensitive and nervous modern people would sink completely into despair if the objectification of social relationships did not bring with it an inner boundary and reserve. The peculiar character of relationships, either openly or concealed in a thousand forms, places an invisible functional distance between people that is an interior protection and neutralization against the overcrowded proximity and friction of our cultural life."" [Vidler, Warped Space]

This was an interesting observation - the modern hotel as an inverse-extension of the Church:

Quote :

[size=12]"Of these, the hotel lobby (Hotelhalle), seen by Kracauer as the paradigmatic space of the modern detective novel, and thus as epitomizing the conditions of modern life in their anonymity and fragmentation, was perhaps the most Simmelian in its formulation. Kracauer compared the modern hotel lobby to the traditional church; the one a shelter for the transient and disconnected, the other for the community of the faithful. Using Simmel’s categories of spatial description, Kracauer elaborated the distinction between what he termed erfüllter Raum, or the “inhabited space” of Verknüpfung, or “communion,” and the void or empty space of physics and the abstract sciences—what he characterized as the ratio of modern life. Shut out of the religiously bonded community, the modern urban dweller could rely only on spaces, like that of the hotel lobby, “that bear witness to his nonexistence.” Detached from everyday life, individual atoms with no connection save their absolute anonymity, the hotel guests were scattered like atoms in a void, confronted with “nothing” (vis-à-vis de rien); stranded in their armchairs, the guests could do little more than find a “disinterested pleasure in contemplating the world.”

In this way, “the civilization that tends toward rationalization loses itself in the elegant club chair,” in the ultimate space of indifference. Even the conventional silence of the setting parodied that of the church. Kracauer quoted Thomas Mann in Death in Venice: “In this room there reigned a religious silence which is one of the distinctive marks of grand hotels. The waiters serve with muffled steps. One hardly hears the noise of a cup or tea-pot, or a whispered word.” In Kracauer’s vision of spatial alienation,

"Rudiments of individuals slide in the nirvana of relaxation, faces are lost behind the newspaper, and the uninterrupted artificial light illumines only manikins. It is a coming and going of unknowns who are changed into empty forms by forgetting their passwords, and who parade, imperceptible, like Chinese shadows. If they had an interiority, it would have no windows."

Kracauer cited the detective novel by Sven Elvestad, Death Enters the Hotel: “One sees thus once again that a grand hotel is a world apart, and this world resembles the rest of the big world. The clients wander here in their light and carefree summer life, without suspecting what strange mysteries evolve among them.” Here, the “pseudo-individuals,” or guests, spread themselves like molecules in “a spatial desert without limits,” never destined to come together, even when compressed within the Grossstadt.
Their only link, Kracauer concluded, was indifferent enough: what he called, suggestively, the strategic grand routes of convention." [Vidler, Warped Space]

Vagabondage, Amnesia, Modern Cities.

Quote :

"Would it be the case that vagabondage leads to hysterical neurasthenia, or rather the reverse, that neurasthenia leads to vagabondage?" [Jean-Martin Charcot, Leçons du mardi]


"...the dandified figure of the stroller was complemented in Benjamin by another, more subversive image: that of the vagabond who alone, criminal and exiled, possessed the marginal vision that transgressed boundaries and turned them into thresholds, a way of looking that engendered what Benjamin called the “peddling [colportage] of space."

Referring to the many cases of “ambulatory automatism” examined by Charcot and his followers, Benjamin compared this perception to that of the vagabond amnesiac: “It is not the association of images that is here decisive, but their interpenetration. This fact should also be remembered in order to understand certain pathological phe- nomena: the sick man who wanders the city during the hours of night and for- gets the way back has perhaps felt the ascendency of this power.”

Only a dreamlike state of sus- pension might enable the wanderer to cross between physical surroundings and their mental contents.

Viewed through these lenses, the urban street regained something of the original terror of the nomadic route. Where, Benjamin noted, the original track or road had always carried with it associations of the “terrors of wandering,” embedded in the mythical consciousness of the tribes, the street engendered a new form of terror, that of the boredom inspired by its “monotonous ribbon of asphalt.” Drawing these two terrors together, and still to be found buried in the subterranean ways of the modern city, was the figure of the labyrinth, site of endless wandering—the Métro.

This underground, which was for Benjamin in some way an equivalent to the unconscious of the city, was to be explored with all the techniques of the geographer.

Implicitly, through the accumulated citations of the Passagen-Werk, Benjamin traces a history of modern vision in which the rise of deeper and more public perspectives in the public realm was accomplished at the expense of individual interiority.

The ideology of transparency, the battle cry of modernism, was, as Benjamin recognized, the agent of a spatial dissolution to which only the flâneur was privy: “the sensation of the entirely new, of the absolutely modern, is a form of becoming as oneiric as the eternal return itself. The perception of space that corresponds to this conception of time is the transparency of the world of the flâneur.” [Vidler, Warped Space]

Quote :

"Benjamin’s remark about distraction, usually joined to a discussion of his concept of the “loss of aura,” is generally understood to refer to the distracted state of mind of the urban dweller, jaded, bored, or swamped by the flood of visual and social stimuli of the modern city, along the lines of Georg Simmel’s reworking of nineteenth-century neurasthenic pathology applied to metropolis. Benjamin himself employs the concept more precisely, however, linking it to the opposition he is drawing between a traditional spectator of a work of art in a state of concentration, and a mass audience lacking concentration and thus “absorbing” the work of art. In the case of buildings, only a tourist will evince that “attentive concentration” characteristic of the art lover.

In this Benjamin would seem to be echoing his friend Siegfried Kracauer, whose influential essay of 1926 on Berlin’s “picture palaces” was titled “Cult of Distraction.”

The German Zerstreuung might mean, at one and the same time, distraction, diversion, amusement, diffusion, preoccupation, absentmindedness, scattering, dispersion, and so on. To take just one example of such differentiation: Kracauer clearly uses the word to delineate the “need for entertainment,” the “addiction to distraction” of the Berlin masses, seeking relief from the conditions of their workday lives; he is concerned to describe the movie houses of Berlin as palaces of distraction, optical fairylands, “shrines to the cultivation of pleasure.”

“As regards architecture, habit determines to a large extent even optical reception.” Through habit and use, the rapt attention of an individual observer of a work of art is dispersed, so to speak, in the custom of “noticing the object in an incidental [beiläufig, casual] fashion.” Distraction here, rather than an active search for over-the-top pleasures, represents an absentmindedness common to a subject in a state of habitual activity: in front of the film, even, “the public is an examiner but an absent-minded one [ein zerstreuter].” [Vidler, Warped Space]

Quote :

"The momentary impact of baroque is powerful, but soon leaves us with a certain sense of desolation. It does not convey a state of present happiness, but a feeling of anticipation, of something yet to come, of dissatisfaction and restlessness rather than fulfillment. We have no sense of release, but rather of having been drawn into the tension of an emotional condition." [Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock, 1888]


For Wölfflin, student of the “psychology of architecture,” this was a pathological condition, reflected in the mental state of its artists: “all the most prominent baroque artists suffered from headaches,” he noted, citing Milizia on Bernini and Borromini, and “there were also cases of melancholia.”

Thus, for Wölfflin, the baroque (which he dated from the Council of Trent) pushed the limits of (classical, Renaissance) architecture to their po- tential destruction. An architecture of depth and obscurity had, in his view, replaced an architecture of surface and clarity. The baroque, according to Wölfflin, introduced “an entirely new feeling of space, tending toward infinity.” “Space,” he wrote, “which in the Renaissance was regularly lit and which can be represented only as tectonically closed, here [in the baroque] seems to be lost in the unlimited and undefined.” No longer faced with a clear, external form, “the gaze is led toward infinity.”

Such a dissolution of space into incommensura- bility was explained from a psychological point of view that understood every object to be judged according to its relation to the body. Wölfflin had already es- poused such a view in his thesis, Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architectur, two years before. Noting that “a historical psychology—or rather, a psychological history of art—should be able to measure with great accuracy the acceleration of linear movement,” Wölfflin spoke of what he called “the breathless haste of Arab decorative lines” and compared different arch styles to the impressions they give of slow or quick breathing. In the margins of his personal copy of the Psychologie, he wrote: “Baroque: irregular breathing.”

In the baroque, that is, the capacity of the human body to empathize with the building was stretched to deformity. Such a psychological interpretation was to influence that of Jacques Lacan, whose summation of the “baroque”—“the regulation of the soul by the scopic regulation of the body”—seems to extend Wölfflin’s critique.

If the baroque represented a breakdown of form, it was easy to associate its characteristics with the new nervous illnesses; the baroque in architecture and painting was after all filled with rifts, breaks, and openings representing the relations between the material and metaphysical worlds." [Vidler, Warped Space]

Quote :

"The essential thing that will be said here is that the release of aesthetic emotion is a special function of space.

ACTION OF THE WORK on its surroundings: vibrations, cries or shouts (such as the Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens), arrows darting away like rays, as if springing from an explosion; the near or dis- tant site is shaken by them, touched, wounded dominated or caressed.

REACTION OF THE SETTING: the walls of the room, its dimensions, the public square . . . , the expanses or the slopes of the landscape even to the bare horizons of the plain or the sharp outlines of the moun- tains—the whole environment brings its weight to bear on the place where there is a work of art. . . . Then a boundless depth opens up, effaces the walls, drives away contingent presences, accomplishes the miracle of ineffable space.

In this sense, ineffable space was, for Le Corbusier, transcendent space. Its qualities were those of container and contained; he compared it to a sounding board, resonating and reverberating with the “plastic acoustics” set up by the natural and man-made objects that inhabited it. Objects, if possible freestanding, generated force fields, took possession of space, orchestrated it and made it sing or cry out with harmony or pain. Such space, Le Corbusier claimed in 1946, was a discovery of modernity—“the fourth dimension” that a number of artists had used to “magnify space” around 1910.

“The fourth dimension is the moment of limitless escape evoked by exceptionally just consonance of the plastic means employed.” And when correctly employed, this space had a strangely powerful effect on the very buildings that defined it and set it in motion: “In a complete and successful work there are hidden masses of implica- tions, a veritable world which reveals itself to those it may concern,” wrote Le Corbusier, adding, with a contempt worthy of Roark, “which means: to those who deserve it.” This feeling—like that described a few years earlier by Freud, who in a letter to Romain Rolland called it “oceanic”—was virtually religious in nature: “I am not conscious of the miracle of faith, but I often live that of ineffable space, the consummation of plastic emotions.”

In a virtual replay of the explosion that demolished the Parthenon, ineffable space dissolves walls and opens the inside to the outside, an outside now simply framed in order to testify to its visual existence, but open more or less panoramically around the entire building. Ineffable space would then be that dreamt and idealized, worked and realized experience that matched the heights of Periclean Greece.

This developed theory of space, articulated in the presence of the Acropolis in 1933, was sensed and intuited on his first visit to it in 1911. His travel journal of that early journey also evoked a certain fear, an awe, sometimes a confessed terror in his appreciation of spatial experience. Thus, beyond the appreciation of the Parthenon as a type form, a “product of selection” to be compared to the modern automobile, uneasy words surround his attempt to understand it and its site, words like “violence,” “terror,” “sacrifice.” The Parthenon is a “terrible machine,” it holds something “du brutal” “de l’intense.” In traditional aesthetic terms, that is, Le Corbusier is removing the object from the category of the beautiful and reestablishing it, along Nietzschaean lines, in its proper order of the terrifying sublime." [ib.]

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"Most of old Athens has already fallen victim to a post-war building boom that replaced the old courtyard houses with ugly five-storey apartment blocks. It would be hard today to find in Athens even a single example of the courtyard house, whose typology goes back to ancient Greece (and was transmitted via Rome to the Islamic world and Spain, then to the New World, and to California of the 1920s). A few neoclassical buildings remain, built in the period between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the Second World War, but not many (Salingaros, 2005).

Like so many other countries around the world, Greece is facing architectural cannibalism driven by the onslaught of a new worldview. This worldview is intolerant, substituting and replacing a nation's tradition, culture, and even its religion. But it is not imposed by an invasion of a foreign military force (unless you identify globalization and the international media, as many do, as insidious forces of occupation); architectural cannibalism is a civil war. A few Greeks have been brainwashed to destroy their own heritage. They desperately wish to conform to the cult of contemporariness.

Fanaticized ideologues whose minds are infected with alien images and anti-humanist principles are desecrating the city of Athens and its history. Willing, eager collaborators have betrayed their heritage and embraced the fashionable cult of architectural nihilism imported from Europe and the US. Even as the rest of the world begins to reject that nightmarish period of inhuman architecture and urbanism (Salingaros & Masden, 2007), some individuals within Greece are proud to promote it. Always a little behind the times, this group nevertheless makes up for its lag by showing a proper fanaticism in its willingness to pay homage to the cult."

Come on, it's not THAT bad. There's beauty in those rat-traps.
Why is everyone complaining?
They've got indoor plumbing, don't they?

You are only bitter because you don't own an apartment.

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Lyssa wrote:

Vagabondage, Amnesia, Modern Cities.

Quote :

"Would it be the case that vagabondage leads to hysterical neurasthenia, or rather the reverse, that neurasthenia leads to vagabondage?" [Jean-Martin Charcot, Leçons du mardi]


"...the dandified figure of the stroller was complemented in Benjamin by another, more subversive image: that of the vagabond who alone, criminal and exiled, possessed the marginal vision that transgressed boundaries and turned them into thresholds, a way of looking that engendered what Benjamin called the “peddling [colportage] of space."

Referring to the many cases of “ambulatory automatism” examined by Charcot and his followers, Benjamin compared this perception to that of the vagabond amnesiac: “It is not the association of images that is here decisive, but their interpenetration. This fact should also be remembered in order to understand certain pathological phe- nomena: the sick man who wanders the city during the hours of night and for- gets the way back has perhaps felt the ascendency of this power.”

Only a dreamlike state of sus- pension might enable the wanderer to cross between physical surroundings and their mental contents.

Viewed through these lenses, the urban street regained something of the original terror of the nomadic route. Where, Benjamin noted, the original track or road had always carried with it associations of the “terrors of wandering,” embedded in the mythical consciousness of the tribes, the street engendered a new form of terror, that of the boredom inspired by its “monotonous ribbon of asphalt.” Drawing these two terrors together, and still to be found buried in the subterranean ways of the modern city, was the figure of the labyrinth, site of endless wandering—the Métro.

This underground, which was for Benjamin in some way an equivalent to the unconscious of the city, was to be explored with all the techniques of the geographer.

Implicitly, through the accumulated citations of the Passagen-Werk, Benjamin traces a history of modern vision in which the rise of deeper and more public perspectives in the public realm was accomplished at the expense of individual interiority.

The ideology of transparency, the battle cry of modernism, was, as Benjamin recognized, the agent of a spatial dissolution to which only the flâneur was privy: “the sensation of the entirely new, of the absolutely modern, is a form of becoming as oneiric as the eternal return itself. The perception of space that corresponds to this conception of time is the transparency of the world of the flâneur.” [Vidler, Warped Space]

The neurotic and the psychotic are the dregs of modern melancholia.
The Neurotic annihilates time, the Psychotic annihilates space...

Quote :

"The tradition of Enlightenment has been finally and completely abandoned. For the eighteenth century, to be mad was to be under the sway of illusion; now it is just in the conviction of a certain kind of conventional illusion that we can claim to be sane. We cannot defend this sanity by a sincere appeal to ‘reason’; it has deserted to the other side. In constituting itself as a system of signs ‘detached’ from the impurities of immediate experience, reason discovers in itself an analogy to the ‘primary process’. Reason, that is to say, as pure ‘mediation’, enjoys the unlimited freedom of transformation among arbitrary signifiers. Being wholly abstract, reason accepts no practical limit upon the range of its internal self-reference. And, as pure ‘relation’, it avoids the compromises and contradictions of empirical reality. Sanity exists, however, in tolerating the contradictions, inconsistencies, and incompleteness which has been expunged from the life of reason. Our ‘signatures’ are composed from just such impoverished and imperfect materials. Insanity, therefore, is as much a temptation to reason as a resurgence of the primary process. Both tendencies are visible in the abundance of modern psychopathology. In using their inner freedom, perversely, to refuse the consolation of ‘signatures’, the insane become transparent to us. Defenceless before the world, they act as passive recording devices of all its most fundamental processes. There is an appalling directness in the gesture of the insane. It is the truthfulness of their symptoms which frightens us, their helplessness as signifiers.

The neurotic, burdened with partially discarded wishes, is too honest to accept the cunning of conscious memory and too demanding to be satisfied with the intermittent pleasure of spontaneous recollection. The assumption of continuity, implicit in the operation of conscious memory, is too great a leap of faith for the neurotic.55 The neurotic tries to live without the illusions of time. Experience is decomposed into discrete moments accidentally occurring as a linear series. Each moment might be the last. None carries the promise of a successor which, should it materialize, might do so in some unimaginable way. Equally, however, as their lives are only ‘gestures’ to the truth, the neurotic tries to coexist with a conventional world in which he cannot believe. There is no escape to the playfulness of the instant The work of inhibition proves irreversible. Instead, therefore, of a release into the atemporal paradise of fun (the primary process), the neurotic suffers the torment of anxiety, which is simply a fear of time. Anxiety manifests itself in the ‘freezing’ of movement. It is an inability to act. Each moment, heavy with doubt and possibility, threatens both to appear or not to appear. The neurotic’s defensive gestures, the ritualization of behaviour, symptomatic obsessive acts, endless preparations for actions which never take place, prolong the present beyond its ‘normal’ duration. Anxiety, like play, is open before the world of infinite possibilities. But whereas in play each momentary metamorphosis is without consequence, in anxiety each instant becomes an absolutely decisive choice. Reason is helpless; only the biographical fiction of an extended ‘self, projected into the future by a reflex of the will, can guide the subject through such fearful discontinuities.

‘Hovering above existence’, the neurotic in a sense retains an ideal humanity. Refusing to become one person rather than another, he contains, crammed into the anxiety of each timeless moment, the unalienated essence of endless possible identities. The neurotic, to put it crudely, cannot make up his mind; or, more accurately, tries too hard to make up his mind. In attempting to ‘think ahead’, the neurotic suffers from a surfeit of reason as well as an excess of sensuousness. He cannot ‘realize’ himself in spontaneous action because his ‘self exists as a kind of volatilized essence desperately leafing through a catalogue of its own future. In seeking to be led by reason, the neurotic comes to a standstill, unable to decide upon the correct path.

The neurotic cannot rid himself of childhood. Endless metamorphoses, interiorized and made anxious, circulate within him. Attempts to ‘solve’ the problem (avoidance rituals, obsession, hysterical symptoms), rather than crystallizing from the flux of subjectivity a fixed personal identity simply make him more ‘nervous’. It is tempting to interpret these signs as an appeal to be ‘looked after’. But there is no hypocrisy here. Neurotic helplessness is more a measure of seriousness than irresponsibility.

The neurotic is all terrified openness, unable to pick his way through the overwhelming complexity of the object world. For the psychotic the moment of choice lies irretrievably in the past. Everything is settled and complete. He must set about conforming the object world to his decision. He has traversed the entire length of the road upon which the neurotic cannot set out. He has become the unique individual which is said to be the goal of rational self-development. He has an absolutely clear and determined identity which ‘reality’ must vindicate. The psychotic withdrawal from the world is a logical transformation of the neurotic’s anxious sign-system.

The psychotic ‘illness’ is primarily a disease of space. The literature reveals a truly formidable variety of examples.62 The object world is dissolved into a plastic medium from which can be created, effortlessly, an entire cosmos to confirm and threaten the psychotic’s chosen identity. Not simply unique among other unique beings, the psychotic leads a solitary existence. He is the only individual, the sole survivor of a cosmic catastrophe. Empirical reality is a deceptive appearance populated by the ‘fleetingly improvised’ creatures ‘miracled’ up by his enemy. He is con tinually threatened by the world he creates, which appears to him as the macabre invention of a demiurge. Spatial relations are arbitrarily transformed. He finds himself stretched across vast reaches of space. Distant stars are felt as the pores of his own skin. But he might just as easily shrink to nothing. The interior of his body becomes a laboratory of hideous experimentation. It is metamorphosed into a series of mechanized contraptions. Schreber’s description of ‘miracles’ perpetrated on his body is the most ample of modern pornographies. All those distinctions normal to the developed ego, self/other, inside/ outside, body/world, melt away. If he is wholly ‘objectified’ and fixed, then all else must be ‘subjective’, malleable, and transitory. The world is dangerous because it is never still; each contact with it threatens the frozen personality of the psychotic. Space itself is dangerous and must be contained. Where the neurotic seeks safety in the abolition of time, the psychotic, fearful of everything other and therefore beyond himself, annihilates extension. He takes the cosmos into himself and attempts physically to master it. Nothing should be ‘left over’, no place remain uncolonized by the psychotic’s expanding soul. But realizing that he cannot succeed, he fears that the cosmos will master him, that he will be ‘absorbed’ by it, that already every other human being has been sucked into some hideous machine of destruction.

The fear of time and the fear of space constitute the fundamental axes of psychopathology, the signs of insanity.69 In this respect confirming the judgement of the Enlightenment, the unreasonableness of the insane is manifest in disturbed consumption. The neurotic is too anxious to consume. He cannot bear the doubt of selection. He wants everything and has nothing. The psychotic, having already swallowed the cosmos, can find nothing else to consume and becomes a voracious anorexic.

Gabel ingeniously argues that these opposing tendencies can be readily conceived as respectively an underestimation, and an overestimation of the level of alienation characteristic of ‘normal’ social relations.70 We cannot tolerate the truth of capitalism. We resist, psychologically, the fact of our alienation into ‘objective’ relations and live instead under the illusion of personality.

The neurotic goes too far in this refusal. He insists upon the real individual humanity of everyone he sees. He cannot act in a partial or fragmented fashion. He cannot accept the facility of stereo types. His is a disease of sensitivity. Burdened with the duty of authenticity in a wholly unalienated world, he is overwhelmed by its plenitude. The psychotic, on the contrary, does not resist enough. In accepting the present reality of alienation, he refuses to accept the comfort of an imagined past His life is absorbed into the general process of production. As the last human survivor, he realizes his predicament when it is already too late, and shrinks from a world whose touch would transform him into a lifeless commodity. Neither can tolerate the superficial inconsistencies of sanity.

Our normal personality is ‘opaque’. It reaches towards the ‘primary process’, retracing its own path of ‘development’ by an indirect route. It exists in the small delusions of a personal ‘signature’. By comparison, the ‘gestures’ of the insane are ‘transparent’. Insanity, then, like childhood, comes to enjoy a privileged status, not as some exotic deviation, but as an exemplary instance of the life of reason.

Signatures are ‘rational’ illusions, gestures ‘rational’ disillusions.

The neurotic is, literally, excessively excitable. He does not consume because every potential ‘object-choice’ has aged before it can be possessed. The ‘cathexis’ has become so superbly mobile that it keeps too far ahead of the ego and is distributed too ‘thinly’ over the object world, which consequently takes on a uniformly drab and uninspiring appearance. The psychotic, conversely, is not excitable enough. The ‘cathexis’ never leaves the ‘muffled interior’, and he remains indifferent to any possibility. The psychotic consumes himself; the neurotic lacks the self with which he might consume the world. As types, they serve to define a model of regulated insatiability; the ideal modern consumer or, better, the ideal consumer of modernity. In their open acceptance of the ephemeral and insubstantial, they celebrate the ‘arbitrary, fleeting and transitory’ as the accidental relationship of selfhood." [Harvie Ferguson, The Science of Pleasure]

Mobile Homelands a.k.a. as Ships...

Sloterdijk wrote:

"The reaching out into the planetary white could never have become the ‘success story’ for Europeans and their descendants that it was, in all its outgrowths, in geopolitical and technological terms, if the departing risk-takers had not managed to preserve or regenerate minimal endospheric conditions on the way and at the other shores. Thus the true history of terrestrial globalization should first of all be told as a history of shells brought along, and as a crossing of enclosing husks, visible and invisible ones alike.

One can say with good reason that it was the specific European art to export canopies – portable symbolizations of the sky that could also be appropriated outside by the travellers as a ‘sky for us’. It was not so much their fatal exterminism that made Europeans leaders in the conquest of the outside for centuries as their ability to preserve a minimal native space in the most remote locations. Islanders imported to Europe usually lost their coordinates fairly soon, whereas Europeans took themselves everywhere by drawing strengths from their ships, their missions and their egotechnics.

One could say that the European settlers were the inventors of worldwide camping. Wherever they appeared, they usually proved the better observers: an observer is someone who perceives the other through a window of theory while themselves eluding counter-observation. As they had portable mental windows at their disposal, the managing Europeans were usually ahead of the discovered others by an entire dimension of descriptive, analytical and acting capacity.

The psychodynamic aspects of the ship's-hold experience are most accessible to presentday people, as they have points of reference from dealing with caravan interiors and car cabins. The availability of such ‘traffic’ means would not have become an indispensable, and usually enjoyable, method of movement for the considerable majority of modern individuals if the interior forms of the vehicles themselves did not adapt elementary structures of sphere formation on a small scale. The ship, like – more moderately proportioned – the car and the caravan, is the mobilized nest or the absolute house.

From an existential perspective, the task is a mobilization of the interior – which amounts to squaring the circle of life. Because the ship simultaneously embodies the realization of the longing for being-with-oneself and evasion, it is (especially in its early modern, seaworthy form) the archetype of the resolved contradiction. It balances out the diametrically opposing strivings towards habitation and adventure. It makes symbiotic relationships possible – and yet it can be experienced like a projectile striking the unheard-of. The vehicle is experienced as a belly that holds a litter of newcomers; they will go ashore where they can, and do as they please in front of their context-free front door.

At the same time, the ship is a magical-technospheric self-expansion of the crews – like all modern container-vehicles, it is a homeostatic dream machine that can be steered through the outer element like a manipulable Great Mother. (A psychohistorically convincing history of vehicle superstition has yet to be written.) Thus ships can become mobile homelands for their crews. In recognizing ships as extensions of the country under whose flag they sail, maritime law follows an original spherological intuition: being-on-land here changes in spatio-logical and international law terms into being-onboard; central aspects of the earth's nomos, the ‘peace’ of the native space, are transferred to the floating endosphere.

The decisive function of the ship's hull, admittedly, is to push back, both in physical and in symbolic terms: because it moves through the damp element, whose displaceability aids the fulfilment of the ship's spatial demands, the floating body wins out over the resistance of its carrier. At the social level, this corresponds to the rule that human ensembles which throw themselves outwards only remain coherent if they succeed in stopping their leaks and asserting the precedence of the interior amid the unliveable element. Just as church naves once transferred this act of displacement to the mainland in order to be vehicles for Christian souls on the earthly sea of life, expedition ships in the outer space will have to rely all the more on their displacement space as the spatially selfdisposing shelter form they have brought with them. (The correspondence is even clearer in the German, as the word for ‘nave’ is Kirchenschiff, literally ‘church ship’.)

The totalizing quality of such gatherings is therefore expressed less through those present than through the universalist symbolism of the assembly's architectural container – the typical superlatives of macrospherically committed architecture: the Catholic cathedral and the secular sports arena. In the cathedral, the nave and the dome indicate the assembling power of the Roman Catholic creed, while in the stadium, the neo-fatalistic arena motif exhibits itself as a symbol of the closed world sphere.


Whoever inhabits does not behave towards their dwelling, their environment or their social world as a cartographer or land surveyor. A geometrician who comes home stops measuring and reducing; they project themselves into the habitual at a scale of one to one. Indwelling is passive commitment to one's own situation, a suffering and coproducing of its vague and unmistakable extension; it is partisanship and a sense of selfinclusion in a regional pleroma. This can neither be reduced true to scale nor expanded beyond a certain degree.

One sees immediately that the extendedness of embedding situations is the natural accomplice of the lasting. It is the origin of cultivations that cannot be achieved without repetition and persisting with a single matter. One can, of course, move house and settle anew, one can divorce and remarry, one can emigrate and be naturalized somewhere else – as we know, the moderns do all this more often and more aggressively than the ancients. Even in new situations, however, the basic situation returns; one establishes oneself in a particular place and extends oneself by means of local resonances. Hölderlin's intuition probably articulated the in situ principle most clearly: ‘Full of merit, but poetically, man dwells on this earth.’ The phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty interprets the rooting of being in its own worldly voluminosity with the statement that ‘our body is not primarily in space: it is of it’, and Heidegger offered the most general formulation possible in his analytics of being-in-the-world: ‘In Dasein there lies an essential tendency towards closeness.’ These claims converge in a space-theoretical perspective: they state that existence, as the positing of a symbolic and physical volume, means residing in the uncompressible. One could even say that existence and self-extension converge.

Dwelling implies the principle of ‘occasional sealing’, which means that even those who change their residence frequently cannot avoid developing a habitus of dwelling on their way. Psychologists have observed that people who travel a great deal show behavioural patterns which they interpret as a mobile cocooning; the models for this are the aforementioned nomads, for they, quaintly put, are at home on their travels, or, less quaintly put, they use deterritorialization itself to reterritorialize themselves. This is a different way of pointing out that nomadic cultures, for all the flexibility one attributes to them, constitute the most conservative, ‘domestic’, closed systems that have appeared in the spectrum of social evolutions." [In the World Interior of Capital]

Quote :

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The ancient Athenian historian Thucydides made a prediction in his History of the Pelopponnesian War that has come true with a vengeance.  He wrote that “…[if] Sparta were to become deserted and only the temples and foundations of buildings remained, I think that future generations would, as time passed, find it very difficult to believe that the place had really been as powerful as it was represented to be. Yet the Spartans occupy two-fifths of the Peloponnese and stand at the head not only of the whole Peloponnese itself but also of numerous allies beyond its frontiers. Since, however, the city is not regularly planned and contains no temples or monuments of great magnificence, but is simply a collection of villages, in the ancient Hellenic way, its appearance would not come up to expectation. If, on the other hand, the same thing were to happen to Athens, one would conjecture from what met the eye that the city had been twice as powerful as in fact it is.” (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book I, 10, 2.)

This statement was as much a criticism of Athens’ building program under Pericles (that had diverted contributions from the Delian League, intended for defense measures against the Persians, to building extravagant temples in Athens) as a critique of Sparta.  Yet it has misled modern scholars and novelists to portray Sparta as if it were a primitive village of dirt and mud.

For example, in his best-selling novel Gates of Fire, Stephen Pressfield calls Sparta “a village” adding: “The whole stinking place would fit, with room to spare, within His Majesty’s [Xerxes of Persia’s] strolling garden at Persepolis. It is … a pile of stones. It contains no temples or treasures of note, no gold; it is a barnyard of leeks and onions, with soil so thin a man may kick through it with one strike of the foot.” (p.188). Nicolas Nicastro is only willing to concede the dominant superpower of Greece was “an agglomeration of sleepy villages.”

All these modern writers are guilty of both a too hasty reading of Thucydides, and a failure to consider other evidence.  Thucydides complains that Sparta “is not regularly planned” – but then nor is London. And he says it is “simply a collection of villages, in the ancient Hellenic way.”  This is not the same thing as saying Sparta was not a cosmopolitan city, it only means that Sparta had no plan and no walls and hence grew haphazardly -- as all major European cities did after their confining medieval walls were torn down. No one today would call Paris, Berlin or Rome “a collection of villages” simply because they are in fact many villages which have grown into a single metropolis after the need for fortifications disappeared and economic growth fueled urbanization. Why should we assume that just because Sparta was made up of five distinct villages in pre-Archaic times that it was not – in its years of glory – a cohesive, dynamic city?  

Likewise, when Thucydides writes Sparta “contains no temples or monuments of great magnificence” he is not denying the existence of temples and monuments, only ones “of great magnificence” – such as Pericles built with stolen funds from Athens satellite states without their consent. In short, Thucydides never claimed that Sparta was not a major, metropolitan city, nor did he deny it had notable monuments, he was only making the astute statement that, judged by its buildings alone, future generations would over-estimate the power of Athens and under-estimate that of Sparta.

The assessment of Sparta's architecture has been aggravated for modern observers by the fact that today we cannot see what Thucydides did. Sparta was destroyed by earthquakes many times over the centuries. It was flooded by the Eurotas. It was abandoned. Nothing destroys architectural monuments so completely as abandonment.  Nor should it be forgotten that Sparta has not been systematically subjected to archeological excavation in almost a century.

Nevertheless, what has come to light demonstrates definitively that far from being a place full of primitive, mud structures, Spartan architecture was substantial, monumental (not the same as “magnificent”!), and very, very typical of Doric architecture throughout the ancient world. Sparta was, in fact, the ultimate Doric power. It did attained it greatest artistic flourishing in the 6th rather than the 5th century BC, and consequently its greatest monuments were archaic not classical or Hellenistic. But they existed! We can still see some of the foundations and remnants to this day. Sparta was not just a heap of peasant hits, as Pressfield and Nicastro would like us to believe.

For anyone whose imagination is too weak to mentally reconstruct a great city from the remnants left in Sparta today, we have the meticulous record of an ancient travel guide. Pausanias traveled to Greece in the 2nd Century AD, long after Sparta’s decline from prominence and more than half a century after its “golden era” in the 6th Century BC.  Yet he needs 26 sections and more than 60 pages to describe the city! And that, although he claims he has not described everything but rather has selected and discussed only “the really memorable things.” (Pausanias, III.10. p. 37)

Finally, I would like to point out that no Spartan has left a written description of his/her city that has survived to our time. Would a Spartan have found the Acropolis in Athens “magnificent” or simply “distant, intellectual and arrogant”? Would a Spartan necessarily have admired the altar at Pergamom?  Or found it “gaudy” and “busy”-- as many people see rococo architecture today?  Sparta was different from other cities of its age, particularly Athens. Does that necessarily mean it was less attractive?

Let me be heretical. We know that in ancient Greece most statues and temples were painted vivid colors and the statues of the gods were dressed in robes, ivory, gold and jewels. What if Spartan austerity indeed extended to temples, statues and monuments and these were adorned only with natural beauty – i.e. naked stone and marble sculptures set amidst flowering trees and running water? Isn’t that what we find strikingly beautiful in Greek architecture and sculpture today? The perfection of proportion, symmetry and form in beautiful natural settings? Isn’t it the lifelike poses, gestures and expressions that appeal to us? Would we rather see Venus de Milo painted in flesh tones with red lips and blond hair? Would we admire the Parthenon in Athens as much if it was dressed in bright paint?


What if Spartan homes were indeed devoid of elaborate interior paintings because, unlike their Athenian counterparts, they were not crammed into an over-crowded city and surrounded by high-walls that blocked out almost all daylight? Spartan houses could be built on a generous plan because the city had no plan. They could incorporate interior courtyards planted with fruit trees and herbs, they could surround themselves with gardens and orchards, they could sparkle not with gold and silver but the glinting of sunlight on water in internal fountains. Spartan homes could have windows that let in the light and they might have decorated their homes, as they did themselves, with things of nature: cut flowers, bowls of fruits, running water. Such things are transient; they rarely leave an archeological record.

Sparta, far from being a “stinking village” full of pigsties and mud-huts as modern novelists portray it, was a city – as Pausanias describes -- full of marble monuments, pure Doric temples, sun-soaked theatres and imposing stoas. It was a city with large villas set in blooming gardens. And it was a city where the barracks and civic buildings were interspersed between sunny open spaces set aside for running, ball-games and horse-racing. It was a city decorated with fountains and flowering trees. In short, it was a city much as we would plan one today.

Lyssa wrote:

The neurotic and the psychotic are the dregs of modern melancholia.
The Neurotic annihilates time, the Psychotic annihilates space...

Quote :

"The tradition of Enlightenment has been finally and completely abandoned. For the eighteenth century, to be mad was to be under the sway of illusion; now it is just in the conviction of a certain kind of conventional illusion that we can claim to be sane. We cannot defend this sanity by a sincere appeal to ‘reason’; it has deserted to the other side. In constituting itself as a system of signs ‘detached’ from the impurities of immediate experience, reason discovers in itself an analogy to the ‘primary process’. Reason, that is to say, as pure ‘mediation’, enjoys the unlimited freedom of transformation among arbitrary signifiers. Being wholly abstract, reason accepts no practical limit upon the range of its internal self-reference.  And, as pure ‘relation’, it avoids the compromises and contradictions of empirical reality. Sanity exists, however, in tolerating the contradictions, inconsistencies, and incompleteness which has been expunged from the life of reason. Our ‘signatures’ are composed from just such impoverished and imperfect materials. Insanity, therefore, is as much a temptation to reason as a resurgence of the primary process. Both tendencies are visible in the abundance of modern psychopathology. In using their inner freedom, perversely, to refuse the consolation of ‘signatures’, the insane become transparent to us.  Defenceless before the world, they act as passive recording devices of all its most fundamental processes. There is an appalling directness in the gesture of the insane. It is the truthfulness of their symptoms which frightens us, their helplessness as signifiers.

The neurotic, burdened with partially discarded wishes, is too honest to accept the cunning of conscious memory and too demanding to be satisfied with the intermittent pleasure of spontaneous recollection. The assumption of continuity, implicit in the operation of conscious  memory, is too great a leap of faith for the neurotic.55  The neurotic tries to live without the illusions of time. Experience is decomposed into discrete moments accidentally occurring as a linear series. Each moment might be the last. None carries the promise of a successor which, should it materialize, might do so in some unimaginable way. Equally, however, as their lives are only ‘gestures’ to the truth, the neurotic tries to coexist with a conventional world in which he cannot believe. There is no escape to the playfulness of the instant The work of inhibition proves irreversible. Instead, therefore, of a release into the atemporal paradise of fun (the primary process), the neurotic suffers the torment of anxiety, which is simply a fear of time. Anxiety manifests itself in the ‘freezing’ of movement. It is an inability to act. Each moment, heavy with doubt and possibility, threatens both to appear or not to appear. The neurotic’s defensive gestures, the ritualization of behaviour, symptomatic obsessive acts, endless preparations for actions which never take place, prolong the present beyond its ‘normal’ duration.  Anxiety, like play, is open before the world of infinite possibilities. But whereas in play each momentary metamorphosis is without consequence, in anxiety each instant becomes an absolutely decisive choice. Reason is helpless; only the biographical fiction of an extended ‘self, projected into the future by a reflex of the will, can guide the subject through such fearful discontinuities.

‘Hovering above existence’, the neurotic in a sense retains an ideal humanity. Refusing to become one person rather than another, he contains, crammed into the anxiety of each timeless moment, the unalienated essence of endless possible identities.  The neurotic, to put it crudely, cannot make up his mind; or, more accurately, tries too hard to make up his mind. In attempting to ‘think ahead’, the neurotic suffers from a surfeit of reason as well as an excess of sensuousness.  He cannot ‘realize’ himself in spontaneous action because his ‘self exists as a kind of volatilized essence desperately leafing through a catalogue of its own future. In seeking to be led by reason, the neurotic comes to a standstill, unable to decide upon the correct path.

The neurotic cannot rid himself of childhood. Endless metamorphoses, interiorized and made anxious, circulate within him. Attempts to ‘solve’ the problem (avoidance rituals, obsession, hysterical symptoms), rather than crystallizing from the flux of subjectivity a fixed personal identity simply make him more ‘nervous’. It is tempting to interpret these signs as an appeal to be ‘looked after’. But there is no hypocrisy here. Neurotic helplessness is more a measure of seriousness than irresponsibility.

The neurotic is all terrified openness, unable to pick his way through the overwhelming complexity of the object world. For the psychotic the moment of choice lies irretrievably in the past. Everything is settled and complete. He must set about conforming the object world to his decision. He has traversed the entire length of the road upon which the neurotic cannot set out. He has become the unique individual which is said to be the goal of rational self-development. He has an absolutely clear and determined identity which ‘reality’ must vindicate. The psychotic withdrawal from the world is a logical transformation of the neurotic’s anxious sign-system.

The psychotic ‘illness’ is primarily a disease of space. The literature reveals a truly formidable variety of examples.62  The object world is dissolved into a plastic medium from which can be created, effortlessly, an entire cosmos to confirm and threaten the psychotic’s chosen identity.  Not simply unique among other unique beings, the psychotic leads a solitary existence. He is the only  individual, the sole survivor of a cosmic catastrophe. Empirical reality is a deceptive appearance populated by the ‘fleetingly improvised’ creatures ‘miracled’ up by his enemy.  He is con tinually threatened by the world he creates, which appears to him as the macabre invention of a demiurge. Spatial relations are arbitrarily transformed. He finds himself stretched across vast reaches of space. Distant stars are felt as the pores of his own skin.  But he might just as easily shrink to nothing. The interior of his body becomes a laboratory of hideous experimentation. It is metamorphosed into a series of mechanized contraptions. Schreber’s description of ‘miracles’ perpetrated on his body is the most ample of modern pornographies. All those distinctions normal to the developed ego, self/other, inside/ outside, body/world, melt away.  If he  is wholly ‘objectified’ and fixed, then all else must be ‘subjective’, malleable, and transitory. The world is dangerous because it is never still; each contact with it threatens the frozen personality of the psychotic. Space itself is dangerous and must be contained. Where the neurotic seeks safety in the abolition of time, the psychotic, fearful of everything other and therefore beyond himself, annihilates extension. He takes the cosmos into himself and attempts physically to master it.  Nothing should be ‘left over’, no place remain uncolonized by the psychotic’s expanding soul. But realizing that he cannot succeed, he fears that the cosmos will master him, that he will be ‘absorbed’ by it, that already every other human being has been sucked into some hideous machine of destruction.

The fear of time and the fear of space constitute the fundamental axes of psychopathology, the signs of insanity.69  In this respect confirming the judgement of the Enlightenment, the unreasonableness of the insane is manifest in disturbed consumption. The neurotic is too anxious to consume. He cannot bear the doubt of selection. He wants everything and has nothing. The psychotic, having already swallowed the cosmos, can find nothing else to consume and becomes a voracious anorexic.

Gabel ingeniously argues that these opposing tendencies can be readily conceived as respectively an underestimation, and an overestimation of the level of alienation characteristic of ‘normal’ social relations.70  We cannot tolerate the truth of capitalism. We resist, psychologically, the fact of our alienation into ‘objective’ relations and live instead under the illusion of personality.

The neurotic goes too far in this refusal. He insists upon the real individual humanity of everyone he sees. He cannot act in a partial or fragmented fashion. He cannot accept the facility of stereo types. His is a disease of sensitivity. Burdened with the duty of authenticity in a wholly unalienated world, he is overwhelmed by its plenitude. The psychotic, on the contrary, does not resist enough. In accepting the present reality of alienation, he refuses to accept the comfort of an imagined past His life is absorbed into the general process of production. As the last human survivor, he realizes his predicament when it is already too late, and shrinks from a world whose touch would transform him into a lifeless commodity. Neither can tolerate the superficial inconsistencies of sanity.

Our normal personality is ‘opaque’. It reaches towards the ‘primary process’, retracing its own path of ‘development’ by an indirect route. It exists in the small delusions of a personal ‘signature’. By comparison, the ‘gestures’ of the insane are ‘transparent’. Insanity, then, like childhood, comes to enjoy a privileged status, not as some exotic deviation, but as an exemplary instance of the life of reason.

Signatures are ‘rational’ illusions, gestures ‘rational’ disillusions.

The neurotic is, literally, excessively excitable. He does not consume because every potential ‘object-choice’ has aged before it can be possessed. The ‘cathexis’ has become so superbly mobile that it keeps too far ahead of the ego and is distributed too ‘thinly’ over the object world, which consequently takes on a uniformly drab and uninspiring appearance. The psychotic, conversely, is not excitable enough. The ‘cathexis’ never leaves the ‘muffled interior’, and he remains indifferent to any possibility. The psychotic consumes himself; the neurotic lacks the self with which he might consume the world. As types, they serve to define a model of regulated insatiability; the ideal modern consumer or, better, the ideal consumer of modernity. In their open acceptance of the ephemeral and insubstantial, they celebrate the ‘arbitrary, fleeting and transitory’ as the accidental relationship of selfhood." [Harvie Ferguson, The Science of Pleasure]

The Neurotic is witty. The psychotic hysteric is an amnesiac.

Menninghaus wrote:

"Hysteria is the consequence of a presexual sexual shock. Obsessional neurosis is the consequence of a presexual sexual pleasure, which is later transformed into [self-]reproach.” Presexual here means “actually before puberty, before the release of sexual substances; the relevant events become effective only as memories.” The concept of an originally deferred or belated effect is integral to Freud’s proud announcement in the letter of November 14, 1897:

"A release of sexuality . . . comes about, then, not only (1) through a peripheral stimulus upon the sexual organs, or (2) through the internal excitations arising from those organs, but also (3) from ideas—that is, from memory traces—and therefore by the path of deferred action. (You are already familiar with this line of thought. If a child’s genitals have been irritated by someone, years afterward the memory of this will produce by means of deferred action a release of sexuality far stronger than at the time [of the traumatizing occur- rence], because the decisive apparatus and the quota of secretion have meanwhile increased.) . . . Deferred action of this kind occurs also in connection with a memory of excitations of abandoned sexual zones. The outcome, however, is not a release of libido but of an unpleasure, an internal sensation analogous to disgust in the case of an object. To put it crudely, the memory stinks in the present, just as in the present the object stinks; and just as we turn away our sense organ (the head and nose) in disgust, the preconscious and the sense of consciousness turn away from the memory. This is repression."

With regard to this year-long delay in the emergence of disgust as a neurotic symptom, Freud’s theory of disgust diverges from widely-held anthropological assumptions at two key points. For eighteenth-century anthropology, as for Aurel Kolnai’s phenomenology of disgust, obtrusive physical presence or prox- imity—and hence a particularly striking case of “object” experience—was the indicator of an excitation of the prototypical senses of disgust, smell, and taste. With Freud, on the other hand, disgust originates in a virtual space, as a memory-bridge between two data which, in themselves, each lack what is disgusting. The traumatic event, the presexual sexual shock is not experienced as dis- gusting at the time of its occurrence, despite its having the character of an assault, because the physical (and moral) “apparatus” necessary for the experience of sexual disgust is not yet developed. And the later, factical trigger of “disgust,” in its presence to the senses, can lack every ostensible mark of the disgusting.

It is the short-circuiting of the two experiences in the memory that first engenders, in the mode of deferral, the feeling of disgust in regard to some nondisgusting later experience, while at the same time, obliquely and belatedly, rejecting the earlier experience. To be a “defensive symptom” has a radical consequence for disgust: it means that disgust “can arise only from memories,” that only in memory can it “stink in the present.” “Real” experiences, on the other hand, have no such effect: “None of the later scenes, in which the symptoms arise, are the effective ones; and the experiences which are effective have at first no result.” The affect of disgust thus arises as a deferred “effect” in a virtual space between two noneffects. It attains its present actuality as a stink-reaction only after years of deferral through a “false” object: in this respect also, Freud’s theory of sexual “hell” is a “theory of internal stinking.”" [Disgust]

Menninghaus wrote:

"In hysteria it is the memories; in obsessional neurosis, the perverse impulses . . . which penetrate into normal life amid distortions due to compromise.” According to Freud, those who develop into obsessional neurotics were introduced into a presexual sexuality, with “perverse” aims and practices, either through a perverted seducer or through oedipal-incestuous fantasies.

Their efforts to repeat a pleasure experienced in the past, to be sure, subse- quently run into the cultural barriers of disgust, but they do not therefore slacken. This obstinate fixation implies that “the genital organization (of the phallic phase), in whole or in part, is thrown back to the earlier sadistic-anal level.” A “libidinal regression” of this type goes together with the develop- ment of an excessively strong super-ego, which is then responsible for the symptoms of compulsive cleanliness, exaggerated conscientiousness, and “ceremoniousness” in certain routine functions:

"The overstrict super-ego insists all the more strongly on the suppression of sexuality, since this has assumed such repellent forms. Thus, in obsessional neurosis, the conflict is aggravated in two directions: the defensive forces become more intolerant and the forces that are to be fended off become more intolerable."

While the super-ego—grown harsh, tormenting and, in the wake of libidinal regression, “sadistic” as well—attempts to transform, along with the perverse impulses, almost all libidinal impulses “into [self-]reproach,” the warded-off impulses seek channels for substitute satisfaction. Although they are “opposed to one another,” the two symptom-generating tendencies often meet: “symptom-formation scores a triumph if it succeeds in combining the prohibition with the satisfaction.”

Such symptoms then oscillate in undecidable “ambivalence” between (sadistic-anal) fantasies of punishment and (perverse) fantasies of satisfaction. The obsessive neurotic becomes “quite conscious” of his “unpleasant obsessive ideas,” whereas in the case of hysteria—where the process of repression is comparatively more successful—things are otherwise. Freud indeed adds the restriction that “usually only a distorted substitute” penetrates into consciousness, and that, in most cases, “the actual wording of the aggressive instinctual impulse is altogether unknown to the ego.” But whereas the hysteric has no suspicion that her cough conceals a fantasy of oral intercourse with her father, the obsessional neurotic attains to a recognition of the psycho-pathological character of his symptom-formation—although only at the cost of even aggravating an already torturously obsessional conscientiousness.

Even the undistorted (not negated) and hence “authentic re-establishment of the repressed idea”—the emergence of perverse impulses from the depths—does not undo the work of repression but rather remains, thanks to other “special techniques,” integrated into its dynamic economy. The operation of wit and—as will soon become clear—the particular achievements of art constitute models of such manifest (obsessive-neurotic) engagement with repressed impulses, forms of open engagement which simultaneously suspend any release of unpleasure for the ego, or indeed simultaneous transform their potential unpleasure into an “incentive bonus” of a peculiar sort:

"Special techniques have been evolved, with the purpose of bringing about such changes in the play of mental forces that what would otherwise give rise to unpleasure may on this occasion result in pleasure; and, whenever a technical device of this sort comes into operation, the repression of an instinctual representative which would otherwise be repudiated is removed. These techniques have till now only been studied in any detail in jokes. . . . We may suppose that the repressed exercises a continuous pressure in the direction of the conscious, so that this pressure must be balanced by an unceasing counter-pressure. Thus the maintenance of a repression involves an uninterrupted expenditure of force, while its removal results in a savings from an economic point of view."

It follows that the obsessional neurotic behaves in a “witty” and economic way when he occasionally calls on certain “techniques” to make conscious (in an almost undistorted form) the “intolerable forces that are to be fended off.” This implies that the “triumph” of obsessional-neurotic symptom formation can include explicit reflection on the “perverse” overcoming of barriers of dis- gust without in any way weakening the obsessional idea. In particular, Freud has observed two “symptom-forming activities of the ego” which, as “surrogates of repression,” serve to neutralize the process of making the obsessional idea conscious: “undoing what has been done and isolating."
The techniques of undoing, understood as a “negative magic,” operate through motoric symbolism designed deliberately to “blow away” events that have occurred.

By contrast, the techniques of isolation sever the event from its affect and, by suppressing all associations appertaining to it, make it fall into an “amnesia” of its own. Such “magical acts of isolation . . . [obey] one of the oldest and most fundamental commands of obsessional neurosis, the taboo on touching.”  Where the traumatizing experience is “not forgotten,” it can be given in “undistorted” form to consciousness in isolating representation, at the same time that it is actively withdrawn from consciousness:

“The effect of this isolation is the same as the effect of repression with amnesia.” Hysteria does not need such witty and paradoxical techniques of non-repression as a continuation of repression. Without the help of the analyst, the hysteric’s fantasies—whose “content . . . corresponds completely to the situations in which satisfaction is consciously obtained by perverts”—remain as a rule wholly “unconscious.”

In spite of all these distinctions, both forms of neurotic behavior are ways of processing “repudiated repression.”
They both share the same point of departure and its subsequently refused “perverse” implications for choice of object and for sexual practices: “Obsessional neurosis originates . . . in the same situation as hysteria, namely, the necessity of fending off the libidinal demands of the Oedipus complex.”

And they both develop their symptoms as a “negative of perversions,” as deferred effects of the barriers of disgust instituted by culture and education in the face of “prehistoric” libidinal impulses. Perverted father, perverted maidservant or prostitute, desexualized mother, hysterical daughter, and obsessive-neurotic son—this, in Freud’s view, is the “noxious” constellation that determines almost unavoidably the fate of sexuality ever since our “primitive” and “truly ineradicable,” “animal impulses”—free of disgust and “perversion” as they originally are—entered into the field of upright posture and its “fateful” achievements (organic repression, foundation of the family, cultural repression). The “extinction of the human race” in the wake of systematic conversion of pleasure into disgust is evidently preventable (if at all), not through further progress of civilization but only through its deliberate withdrawal in favor of those forces which, in the form of “perversions” and “the negative of perversions,” have tenaciously out- lived the institution of disgust and shame." [Disgust]