"‘The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious.’"
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chronicling a labyrinth of architectural + personal contemplation based in atlanta
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"To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives"
— Walter Benjamin, c. 1940
"Fiat ars, pereat mundus,” [“Let art be created, let the world perish”] says Fascism, and as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of ‘l’art pour l’art.’ Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing art."
— Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1936
"A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past-which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments. Each moment it has lived becomes a citation a l’ordre du jour — and that day is Judgment Day."
— Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (III), 1940
Charles Fourier, Phalanstère, c. 1820
“A phalanstère was a type of building designed for an utopian community and developed in the early 19th century by Charles Fourier. Based on the idea of a phalanx, this self-contained community ideally consisted of 1500-1600 people working together for mutual benefit. Though Fourier published several journals in Paris, among them La Phalanstère, he created no phalanstères in Europe due to a lack of financial support. Several so-called colonies were founded in the United States of America by Albert Brisbane and Horace Greeley. Fourier believed that the traditional house was a place of exile and oppression of women. He believed gender roles could progress by shaping them within community, more than by pursuits of sexual freedom or other Simonian concepts.”
Walter Benjamin, Passagenwerk / Arcades Project, 1927-40
“The Passagenwerk or Arcades Project was an unfinished lifelong project of philosopher Walter Benjamin, an enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, especially concerned with the iron-and-glass covered “arcades” (Passages couverts de Paris). Benjamin’s Project, which many scholars believe might have become one of the great texts of 20th-century cultural criticism, was never completed due to his death under uncertain circumstances on the French-Spanish border in 1940. Written between 1927 and 1940, the Arcades Project has been posthumously edited and published in many languages as a collection of unfinished reflections. These arcades began to be constructed around the beginning of the nineteenth century and were sometimes destroyed as a result of Baron Haussmann’s renovation of Paris during the Second French Empire. Benjamin linked them to the city’s distinctive street life and saw them as providing one of the habitats of the Flâneur (i.e., strolling in a locale to experience it).”
"The city is the realisation of that ancient dream of humanity, the labyrinth. It is this reality to which the flâneur, without knowing it, devotes himself. Without knowing it; yet nothing is more foolish than the conventional thesis which rationalises his behaviour, and which forms the uncontested basis of that voluminous literature that traces the figure and demeanour of the flâneur the thesis, namely, that the flâneur has made a study of the physiognomic appearance of people in order to discover their nationality and social station, character and destiny, from a perusal of their gait, build and play of features. The interest in concealing the true motives of the flâneur must have been pressing indeed to have occasioned such a shabby thesis."
"The messianic world is the world of complete and integral actuality. Only in the messianic realm does a universal history exist. Not as written history, but as festively enacted history. This festival is purified of all celebration. There are no festive songs. Its language is liberated prose - prose which has burst the fetters of script and is understood by all people (as the language of birds is understood by those born on Sundays)."
— Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena on the Concept of History,” 1938-40
Paul Klee, Die Zwitscher-Maschine (Twittering Machine), 1922 (via beetleinabox)
“Like other artworks by Klee, it blends biology and machinery, depicting a loosely sketched group of birds on a wire or branch connected to a hand-crank. Interpretations of the work vary widely: it has been perceived as a nightmarish lure for the viewer or a depiction of the helplessness of the artist, but also as a triumph of nature over mechanical pursuits. It has been seen as a visual representation of the mechanics of sound.”
"In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it."
— Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (VI), 1940
