Peter Sloterdijk reaches a similar conclusion concerning the imagination and conception of inside spheres in a late modern context. In ‘societies conditioned in an individualist manner’ (2009: 432), inside spaces rarely take the form of the globes described above. Instead, they are increasingly conceived as ‘multitudes of loosely connected environment cells, in which each separate cell, by virtue of its own volume, has the weight of a uni- verse’ (2009: 432). As such, the universalist, all-resolving globe – ‘the epic of the divine sphere’, as Sloterdijk calls it elsewhere (2007: 490) – makes way for a metaphorical ‘foam’ of situational ‘bubbles’: an ‘accumulation of egocentric, excentered points each with their environments’ (2007: 491). Once the collective project of a socio-historical development for the better is abandoned, spatial organisation increasingly comes to serve a less political project: that of retreating from socio-historical reality altogether and meet- ing one’s individual needs as best one can. This is why late modern man takes great pains over designing maximally enjoyable bubbles: ‘Significantly, our embedment thinking has suddenly depoliticized after 1945, and withdrawn from the lofty collectivist spheres.’ (2009: 371) Likewise, abandoning his political ‘Don Quixote battles’, Duteurtre’s protag- onist decides to ‘accept the world as it is, and try to get to know (him)self instead (…) Is that not a more concrete and inspiring program around which, one day, the human species in its entirety could be mobilized?’ (18-19). He eventually finds himself all too happy to withdraw into the safe enclave of Town Park where he can keep to himself and carelessly enjoy what he likes most in life:
In the end, I never feel so equilibrated as when I keep to myself. I work in a cer- tain security in my residence … I can revisit the jewels of the past in peace and quiet: download Stravinsky’s integral work …, reread Balzac …, watch all the masterpieces and rubbish in film… All of that almost without getting up from my couch. These frequentations give me a permanent happiness… (40-41)
In his description of ‘foam city’ (2009: 422-470), Sloterdijk indicates that our contempo- rary cities are increasingly equipped for such withdrawal into bubbles, a conviction that
he shares with Lieven De Cauter, who gave a more detailed outline of this urban trend in The Capsular Civilization (2004). De Cauter speaks of ‘the rise of a heterotopian form of urban planning’ (63). He is convinced that ‘the heterotopia has become the norm in a cap- sular society’ (68) and considers the Disneyfication of the public domain, the ‘theme park city’, as a symptomatic case in point (58, 70). According to Sloterdijk, contemporary urbanism and architecture increasingly develop entire ‘experiential environments’ (2009: 468), which we could call ‘aesthetic’ in the etymological sense of the word (the Greek aisthetikos, meaning ‘sensitive’ or perceptive’, derived from aisthanesthai, ‘to perceive’ by the senses or by the mind, ‘to feel’).13 Rather than as a political experiment, contem-
porary urban space is more often set up for full-fledged, direct experiences these days: individual enjoyments shielded from all too complex outside conditions. Architectures offering self-contained experiential environments have already by far ‘outgrown the tra- ditional forms of the city park or the greenhouse’, according to Sloterdijk: ‘The motif of encapsulation has become so powerful that it integrates ever vaster, previously external landscapes and urban complexes’ (2009: 468) in the way that Town Park absorbs entire city districts.14
The late modern crumbling of political optimism has evidently been described by many others before Sloterdijk, not in the least by Jean-François Lyotard, who put forward that postmodern epistemology is primarily characterised by the collapse of so-called ‘grand narratives’ (1979). Our protagonist, too, has taken note of this development over the years,15 which ultimately brings him to give up on the ‘reforms through which (he)
intended to save the world’ and that he, much like Arnold and Julia, used to defend ‘with the self-assurance, the logic, and the anger of the defenders of the truth’ (Duteurtre 17). Instead, he decides in favour of the ‘acceptance of the data of (his) era’ (44). No longer seeking to ‘build history against the tide’, he renounces the ‘detrimental tendency that sought to make politics the centre of (his) existence’ (18).
It would be wrong, however, to push the analysis only so far and prematurely conclude that late modern man is an utterly disillusioned and demythologised realist. True, idealist political narratives of the kind encountered in Heym’s novel are probably the most salient and visible mythical remnants, since they translate into wholly worked-out conceptual constructions and discourses. But space can be the object of a much more subtle mythical enchantment, one that functions on the less tangible, pre-reflexive level of direct, affective experience. As mentioned above, this is the most elementary form of mythical enchant- ment in Cassirer’s view, which thus has an all the more direct impact on the way we daily experience the world. With his concept of the ‘phantasmagorical’ or ‘auratic’ experience, Walter Benjamin was perhaps the most convincing theorist of such instantaneous re- enchantments of the pre-conscious kind. Underlining, like Cassirer, the physiognomic reading of objects and landscapes it entails, Benjamin writes in Ueber einige Motive bei Baudelaire that ‘(t)o perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return’ (‘Die Aura einer Erscheinung erfahren, heißt, sie mit dem Vermögen belehnen, den Blick aufzuschlagen’; 1974: 646-647), as if it were animated and had a soul of its own. Such phantasmagorical effects are particularly triggered in con- sumer society. Consumer goods and leisure spaces indeed capitalise on pre-conscious
desires, needs and fears (see also Featherstone 1991). Sloterdijk, too, emphasises that the abundant production of affectively pleasing bubble spaces is primarily a matter of affluent societies and their consumer lures (2009: 547-596).
The protagonist of The Happy City is indeed not only disillusioned with grand political narratives, but he also relocates his strivings in the aesthetic domain (in the etymological sense described above). Because of his resolution to ‘stop thinking for humanity’ and instead ‘savour every moment and content (himself) with simple pleasures’ (23-24), the protagonist decides to stay in Town Park, a readily ‘dreamifiable’ place apt for phantas- magorical enchantment. The cathedral of Historic City, for instance, triggers such a phan- tasmagorical effect:
I love this narrow quarter where one only has to look up to see the medieval clock tower raised in the sky, with its crown of frivolous turrets. These vertig- inous niches evoke a fairytale castle (…) This is probably why tourists from around the world seem enchanted: not to discover the real Middle Ages, but something that reminds them of Walt Disney. They look at the old stones as an imitation of children’s books (…) (93)
Marvelling at such fairytale effects, families in Town Park find themselves ‘happy to relax, determined to enjoy the week-end to the fullest, in this renovated, lustrous, golden décor that still maintains the magic of the real’ (95). Like Benjamin’s flâneur, our prota- gonist also increasingly manages to ‘find (…) a form of poetry in the whole tourist bazaar’ (96). Again, a lively, poetic glow seems to emanate from the material reality of the Park, as was the case at World Peace Road. But a shift of emphasis has occurred. Whereas both spaces are coloured by affective as well as conceptual associations, World Peace Road was overdetermined by more abstract conceptual meanings because of the political and socio-historical concerns connected with it. In Town Park, on the other hand, the more individualist and aesthetic matter of on-the-spot enjoyable experiences occupies centre stage: it mainly runs on the directly affective involvement of its visitors, and conceptual associations are secondary.
Conclusion
If the collapse of grand narratives initially seemed to relegate inquiry into the mythical aspects of space to redundancy or insignificance, nothing appears to be further from the truth. Rather than a triumph of pure rationalism and pragmatism, the end of grand narra- tives may well have marked a return to more elementary layers of mythical experience, in which space is directly perceived in the light of a magical glow. Narrative fiction being a privileged medium for rendering the myriad associations that colour spaces, it proves a rewarding object of study for grasping spatial experience in all of its facets. This experi- ence itself, moreover, is highly symptomatic for the more irrational and enchanting fea- tures of our times, which can be addressed as mythical remnants. By exposing the myth- ical colours of concrete spaces, we can procure insight into specific fears and desires that mark a certain era. This aspect constitutes a necessary complement to more traditional
literary-sociological approaches, which tend to overemphasise explicit ideological state- ments.
This may be of particular importance in an era in which many of the political problems manifest themselves in an unspoken, irrational manner (for instance, the aforementioned fear of ‘stalked streets’, supplemented with the desire for predictable and manageable public spaces). Cassirer had observed this tendency as early as the 1940s. In The Myth of the State, one of his final works in which he analyses the rise of fascism, he shows to what extent our analysis of the political situation is infused with affective imagination. Ben- jamin proves to share this view when he calls capitalism a ‘natural phenomenon’ that reac- tivates mythical forces that we believe belong to primitive cultures: ‘Capitalism was a nat- ural phenomenon, which engulfed Europe in a new dream sleep, and, in this, a reactivation of the mythical forces’ (‘Der Kapitalismus war eine Naturerscheinung, mit der ein neuer Traumschlaf über Europa kam und in ihm eine Reaktivierung der mythischen Kräfte’; Benjamin 1982: 494). Benjamin and Cassirer were right to be concerned about the irra- tional tendencies of our secularised, objectified, and rationalised world. In such a culture, the flip side of the coin automatically gains equal importance. According to Benjamin, humanity ‘will remain under the power of mythical fear as long as phantasmagoria has a place in that fear’ (Benjamin 1999: 939). That which fascinates in a mythical construction of knowledge equally possesses an element of terror. Uncovering affective fears and dreams in spaces may teach us more about the present condition than any explicit criti- cism of ideology could.
Bibliography
Augé, M. (1997) L’impossible voyage. Le tourisme et ses images, Paris
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981) “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: notes toward a histor- ical poetics”, in: Holquist, M., Emerson, C. (eds.) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, Austin, 84-258
Bartetzky, A., Schalenberg, M. (2009) “Shapes of Happiness: Planning Concepts and their Mani- festations in Urban Form”, in: Bartetzky, A., Schalenberg, M. (eds.) Urban Planning and the Pursuit of Happiness, Berlin, 7-17
Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity, Cambridge Benjamin, W. (1974) Gesammelte Schriften I.2, Frankfurt
---- (1982) Gesammelte Schriften V, Frankfurt
---- (1999) The Arcades Project,Cambridge (Mass.)
---- (2002) Selected WritingsIII: 1935-1938, Cambridge (Mass.) de Botton, A. (2006) The Architecture of Happiness, London
Cassirer, E. (1955) The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume 2: Mythical Thought, New Haven ---- (1965) The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume 3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge, New
Haven
---- (2007) The Myth of the State, Hamburg
Debord, G. (2002) Society of the Spectacle, Canberra
Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. (1980) Capitalisme et Schizophrénie. Tome 2: Mille Plateaux, Paris Deleuze, G. (1983) Cinéma 1: L’image-mouvement, Paris
Duteurtre, B. (2007) La cité heureuse, Paris
Featherstone, M. (1991) Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, London Foucault, M. (1986) “Of Other Spaces”, Diacritics 16.1, 22-27
Hardt, M., Weeks, K. (2000) “Introduction”, in: Hardt, M., Weeks, K. (eds.) The Jameson Reader, Oxford, 1-29
Heym, S. (2006) The Architects, Evanston
Jameson, F. (1983) “Postmodernism and Consumer Society”, in: Foster, H. (ed.) The Anti-Aesthetic, Port Townsend, 111-125
Keunen, B. (2006) “Fredric Jameson”, in: De Geest, D., Masschelein, A. (eds.) Engelse literatuur- kritiek na 1945, Leuven, 219-237
---- (2011) Time and Imagination: Chronotopes in Western Narrative Culture,Evanston Lévi-Strauss, C. (1955) Tristes tropiques, Paris
Lotman, Y. (1979) “The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology”, Poetics Today 1.1/2, 161-184 Lyotard, J.-F. (1979) La condition postmoderne. Rapport sur le savoir, Paris
Orth, E.W. (1995) “Geschichte und Literatur als Orientierungsdimensionen im Philosophie Ernst Cassirers”, in: Enno, R., Küppers, B.-O (eds.) Kulturkritik nach Ernst Cassirer, Hamburg, 105-128
O’Toole, R. (1996) “Salvation, Redemption and Community: Reflections on the Aesthetic Cos- mos”, Sociology of Religion 57.2, 127-148
Poole, B. (1998) “Bakhtin and Cassirer: The Philosophical Origins of Bakhtin’s Carnival Messian- ism”, in: Hitchcock, P. (ed.) Bakhtin/’Bakhtin’: Studies in the Archive and Beyond. Special Edition of theSouth Atlantic Quarterly 97, 537-578
Sloterdijk, P. (2007) Sferen. Band 1: Bellen-Globes, Amsterdam
---- (2009) Sferen. Band 2: Schuim, Amsterdam
Notes
1. An overview of these three knowledge functions is found in the final volume of the trilogy,
The Phenomenology of Knowledge (1965).
2. ‘The farther back we trace perception, the greater becomes the preeminence of the “thou” form over the “it” form, and the more plainly the purely expressive character takes prece- dence over the matter- or thing-character.’ (1965: 63)
3. Walter Benjamin hints at the same phenomenon with his notion of the ‘auratic’ experience of landscape in ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ (‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’; 2002: 104-105), and so does Gilles Deleuze with his concept of the ‘visagéité’ (‘faciality’) of architecture in Mille Plateaux
(1980: 211-212) and the description of the ‘visagéification’ (‘face-ification’) that the ‘image-affection’ operates in Cinéma 1 (1983: 125). In a somewhat simplified version, the phenomenon reappears in Alain de Botton’s treatment of ‘Talking Buildings’ in The Archi- tecture of Happiness (2006: 77-103).
4. Unless mentioned otherwise, all English translations from Dutch, German and French texts in this article are our own.
5. Bauman gives a few examples of this ‘exile or annihilation of the others’: ‘The extreme var- iants (…) are now, as always, incarceration, deportation and murder. The upgraded, “refined” (modernised) forms (…) are spatial separation, urban ghettos, selectiveaccess to spaces and selective barring from using them.’ (2000: 101; original emphasis)
6. At the end of the novel, the elements seeping in from the outside are indeed those strangers of the so-called ‘stalked streets’ that provoke fear: the management hires low-salary immi- grants who speak no foreign languages as animators, and more and more vagrants wander around the Park.
7. Examples of such ‘suspension or annihilation of their otherness’ run ‘from cannibalism to enforced assimilation – cultural crusades, wars of attrition declared on local customs, calen- dars, cults, dialects and other “prejudices” and “superstitions”‘ (101; original emphasis). 8. Cassirer also describes it as ‘the presupposition that the Logos itself descended into the sen-
suous world and there was incarnated in temporal uniqueness’ (1955: 257).
9. See also Bakhtin (1982: 148) and Lotman (1979) on eschatological narratives. For a com- mentary on both, see Keunen (2011: 54 and 83-84).
10. Sloterdijk establishes the link with such teleological, utopian narratives when he claims that the actualisation of the globe would mark the end of ‘the confusing human history’, and the beginning of ‘the post-historical … the condition in which space has absorbed time’, the ‘simultaneous world’ of ‘relaxation in the apocalypse of space’ (2007: 427).
11. Julia’s quest constitutes the main driving force of The Architects because it is a near text- book example of a Bildungsroman. She progressively is disillusioned about the righteous- ness of the communist party and her husband’s implications in it, and, with every disap- pointment, grows into a new way of life. This gradual ideological shift from an authoritarian to a more humanist line of socialism eventually dictates changes in both her personal life (she leaves her patronising husband Arnold, for Wollin, with whom she is an equal) and her architectural career (she discards socialist-realist architecture in favour of functionalism). Throughout the novel, the key moments propelling this progressive transition are epitomised by her ever-changing perceptions and conceptions of World Peace Road, which signal her subsequent fears, hopes and dreams.
12. In the novel, the so-called ‘intellectual tournaments’ (Duteurtre 2007: 90) in the Park clearly mark the depoliticisation that follows such a collapse of the historical dimension. These tournaments are organised every Wednesday afternoon for the entertainment of the Park’s tourists. In them, the protagonist says, we ‘force ourselves to recreate the rebellious spirit of the years of resistance by debating the most topical matters in a total freedom of speech’ (2007: 91). The descriptions of these tournaments (2007: 90-91) would provide Zygmunt Bauman with an excellent illustration for his thesis of the public domain being reduced to mere spectacle in late modernity, while abandoning its political role of translating individual concerns into public ones. In Bauman’s view, the result is an era that combines absolute freedom of expression (or de iure autonomy) with a real deficit of truly emancipatory dis- course (de facto autonomy) (2000: 16-52).
14. Sloterdijk emphasizes that such experiential ‘containers’ should not be mistaken for mere curiosities, but, instead, testify to a fundamental tendency in affluent societies (468). 15. ‘Perhaps society knew its own childhood when it envisaged the future as a horizon full of
promises, a hope for discoveries, justice and prosperity pushing its limits ever further. Today, our world, having grown up, starts to discern the horizon of its own death – with its … hopeless conveniences (…) (W)e continue a blind march, but the great dreams of history have collapsed.’ (Duteurtre 2007: 183-184) In these circumstances, the protagonist is con- vinced, we merely foster the ‘illusion of a political life, at a time when we have lost all con- trol over the course of events’ because ‘(t)he new world is regulated by the laws of enter- prise’ (2007: 186).