The View From the Train Read Online Free
Author: Patrick Keiller
remarkably prosaic photographs.
The eroticism portrayed is as much that of their relationship with their surroundings as with each other. Georges Bataille writes: ‘Erotic activity, by dissolving the separate beings that participate in it, reveals their fundamental continuity, like the waves of a stormy sea.’ 10
Love is the conquest of the discontinuity between individuals: hence the erotic dimension to ‘losing oneself in the crowd’, or indeed losing oneself in the city, habitually so alienating, reconstituted instead as a dream. It is in such an appropriation, such a repossession of townscape – or landscape – that the possibility of an erotic relationship between people and public space is to be found. 11
There are other Surrealist townscape texts: Robert Desnos’s
La Liberté ou l’Amour!
(1927) and those of Walter Benjamin, notably
Marseilles
(1928), in which he converts the then new cathedral into a railway station, and
Hashish in Marseilles
(1928), which enjoys the transformations enabled by the drug. 12
Benjamin recounts the remark made of Eugène Atget that he photographed the deserted Paris streets ‘like scenes of crime’: ‘The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance.’ 13
Bernard Tschumi has written that, for Georges Bataille, ‘architecture covers the scene of the crime with monuments’ 14 (this is perfectly true – just think of Trafalgar Square). Atget’s depictions of public places in and around Paris captured, in themost modest way (this is surely his strength), the sense that ‘anything could happen’ that the Surrealists were later to write about, as well as being evidence of all the terrible things that already had happened. They reveal an ambiguity, a potential for transformations both subjective and actual, in ordinary locations. The crime that Bataille and Benjamin allude to is an ambiguous affair, but its major resonance is that of the rarity, in everyday experience and in actuality, of such transformations. They come about only, if ever, in reveries, revolutions, or the more poignant moments of war.
Atget’s photographs were of the streets; Surrealist photographers went to more exotic locations. Eli Lotar’s photographs of the abattoirs at La Villette illustrate Bataille’s entry ‘abattoir’ in the section ‘Chronique: Dictionnaire’ in
Documents
. 15 Bataille concerns himself with outlining the significance of abattoirs, that they are the modern counterpart of sacrificial temples in which animals were killed for both religious and alimentary purposes, the cursed status of abattoirs in modern times resulting from the denial of their religious function. Lotar’s photographs demonstrate this world within the one we think we know, as they demonstrate the camera’s ability to unmask it. It is almost as if the machine was built for this purpose, as we now know only too well, for indiscriminate transformations of the ordinary into the miraculous now form one of the mainstays of advertising.
Anguish
At the same time, the discovery of the ability to perceive the marvellous leads to the discovery that things have a habit of not staying that way:
Although I can always see how beautiful anything could be if only I could change it, in practically every case there is nothing I can really do. Everything is changed into something else in my imagination, then the dead weight of things changes it back into what it wasin the first place. A bridge between imagination and reality must be built. 16
In Poe’s writing, taken as a whole, two things seem to stand out as most remarkable: his descriptions of extraordinary states of consciousness, and of rooms, buildings and landscapes. Many of his works consist of little else: ‘The Philosophy of Furniture’, a treatise on decor; ‘The Domain of Arnheim’ and
The eroticism portrayed is as much that of their relationship with their surroundings as with each other. Georges Bataille writes: ‘Erotic activity, by dissolving the separate beings that participate in it, reveals their fundamental continuity, like the waves of a stormy sea.’ 10
Love is the conquest of the discontinuity between individuals: hence the erotic dimension to ‘losing oneself in the crowd’, or indeed losing oneself in the city, habitually so alienating, reconstituted instead as a dream. It is in such an appropriation, such a repossession of townscape – or landscape – that the possibility of an erotic relationship between people and public space is to be found. 11
There are other Surrealist townscape texts: Robert Desnos’s
La Liberté ou l’Amour!
(1927) and those of Walter Benjamin, notably
Marseilles
(1928), in which he converts the then new cathedral into a railway station, and
Hashish in Marseilles
(1928), which enjoys the transformations enabled by the drug. 12
Benjamin recounts the remark made of Eugène Atget that he photographed the deserted Paris streets ‘like scenes of crime’: ‘The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance.’ 13
Bernard Tschumi has written that, for Georges Bataille, ‘architecture covers the scene of the crime with monuments’ 14 (this is perfectly true – just think of Trafalgar Square). Atget’s depictions of public places in and around Paris captured, in themost modest way (this is surely his strength), the sense that ‘anything could happen’ that the Surrealists were later to write about, as well as being evidence of all the terrible things that already had happened. They reveal an ambiguity, a potential for transformations both subjective and actual, in ordinary locations. The crime that Bataille and Benjamin allude to is an ambiguous affair, but its major resonance is that of the rarity, in everyday experience and in actuality, of such transformations. They come about only, if ever, in reveries, revolutions, or the more poignant moments of war.
Atget’s photographs were of the streets; Surrealist photographers went to more exotic locations. Eli Lotar’s photographs of the abattoirs at La Villette illustrate Bataille’s entry ‘abattoir’ in the section ‘Chronique: Dictionnaire’ in
Documents
. 15 Bataille concerns himself with outlining the significance of abattoirs, that they are the modern counterpart of sacrificial temples in which animals were killed for both religious and alimentary purposes, the cursed status of abattoirs in modern times resulting from the denial of their religious function. Lotar’s photographs demonstrate this world within the one we think we know, as they demonstrate the camera’s ability to unmask it. It is almost as if the machine was built for this purpose, as we now know only too well, for indiscriminate transformations of the ordinary into the miraculous now form one of the mainstays of advertising.
Anguish
At the same time, the discovery of the ability to perceive the marvellous leads to the discovery that things have a habit of not staying that way:
Although I can always see how beautiful anything could be if only I could change it, in practically every case there is nothing I can really do. Everything is changed into something else in my imagination, then the dead weight of things changes it back into what it wasin the first place. A bridge between imagination and reality must be built. 16
In Poe’s writing, taken as a whole, two things seem to stand out as most remarkable: his descriptions of extraordinary states of consciousness, and of rooms, buildings and landscapes. Many of his works consist of little else: ‘The Philosophy of Furniture’, a treatise on decor; ‘The Domain of Arnheim’ and
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