Chapter 3
Porosity at the edge

Working through Walter Benjamin’s ‘Naples’

Andrew Benjamin

What is that identifies a city? Where is the feeling or sense of that identity located? Could that sense of identity – no matter how it was discovered – be generalized? The encounter with a city endures within attempts to articulate that experience within writing. Equally, an encounter with a specific city – once it admits the possibility of generalization – may become productive within design. Walter Benjamin continued to work through the city.¹ The modern and the urban coincide. And, yet, that coincidence brings with it more than a simple equivalence. Cities have a past. The modern contains vestiges. The question of the city – if only as a beginning – concerns that complex presence. In a text that demands consideration not just because of its content, but equally due to its actual design – Einbahnstraße – the presence of the affective city, the city as the place of experience endures.² A brief entry under the heading ‘Freiburg Minster’ opens a possible interplay between the particular and the related move to a form of generality. Or if not the movement itself, what is at work within this brief note is the provision of two of the categories within which movement within the city can be thought. (In the end, it will be movement that constitutes the urban and thus defines the city.)

Freiburg Minster. – The special sense of a town ( dem eigensten Heimatgefühl einer Stadt ) is formed in part for its inhabitants – and perhaps even in the memory of a traveller who has stayed there – by the tone and intervals with which its tower clock begins to chime. (IV.1. 124/1. 213)

Accounting for the ‘Heimatgefühl’ of a town can be located in the way the relationship between material presence and time is worked out. Here material presence is the clock tower itself – standing as a point of orientation. Time is inscribed, in this context, within the intervals marking the striking of the bells. Orientation in relation to distance is always intermingled with a temporal dimension. Both combine in the ‘feeling’ – ‘gefühl ’ – that a town engenders. What this means is that spatiality is not the central element in any account of what can be described as the affect of urbanism. Spatiality is always measured. The nature of its measure, however, involves time. The time in question is not the universalizing time that is arbitrarily though exactly enacted – an exactitude with its own exigency – either by the clock or by chronology. If there is another conception of time then it arises from the operative quality of the city itself. It will not be time as a series of single moments; those heard on each occasion the bell is struck. Rather, it will involve the complex temporality suggested by the interplay of differing temporal systems articulated within different forms of spatial presence. The relationship between space and time – thought as a relation of inherently complex sites – both opens a way towards Benjamin’s discussion of Naples, while at the same time signalling the extent to which it may become possible to generalize that account.

Writing of the café in Naples Benjamin states, ‘A prolonged stay is barely possible’ (‘Längerer Aufenthalt ist kaum möglich ’) (420/316). However, what is it that is not possible, or only ‘barely’? What type of stay – perhaps even what form of lodging – is precluded? While these questions refer to time they are equally concerned with issues of spatiality. What is in play is the nature of the place in which one stays, or in which this form of staying takes place. Stay here is measured by time. The Neapolitan café is not a place for an Aufenthaltzeit. Measuring place by time – thereby allowing time a form of complexity – reconfigures place by allowing it to take on a position in which there is the interplay of times. Prior to taking up the consequences of this move from a singular conception of time to a plural one, it is essential to stay with the café and the positioning of what is, or is not, or only ‘barely’ possible within it.

The contrast Benjamin provides is with the Viennese coffee house. The latter is marked by a sense of the ‘confined’ (‘beschränkte’). While the term is deployed specifically to describe the literary world of Vienna, it is a world that has an architectural correlate. Noting this distinction, however, is not enough. The contrast is not between the contained and the open, as though the only possible response to a form of restriction or containment would be the elimination of all borders and thus the creation of the purely open. (It may be that such an aspiration is no more that a gestural reiteration in another guise of a conception of place as a terra nullus.) Movement through space is always temporal. It takes place through time. Presented in this way movement comes to define the way in which space is both contrasted and then worked within. Of the Neapolitan café it should be recalled that Benjamin wrote, ‘A prolonged stay is barely possible’ (316/420). What delimits the length of stay has to do with the way coffee is drunk. Coffee is ordered by gestures. Naples is characterized by the ‘language of gestures’ (‘Die Gebärdensprache’) (316/421).³ The ordering of the drink, its consumption and the passage out from the café, all need to be understood within the rhythm of the gesture. Space is positioned – and therefore created – by one particular rhythm rather than another. What occurs within the café is the interarticulation of spatial positioning and the rhythm of the body. The argument as to why it is ‘barely possible’ to stay within the café for a sustained period of time has to do therefore with the way the space of the café is constructed. It is not a given domain that is simply occupied in a range of different ways. The café becomes a site whose presence is created. Time, space and the rhythms of the body work together. If there is a way into the general sense in which porosity figures within Benjamin’s writings on Naples, then it resides in its effects. Effects are productive. Porosity, if only as a beginning, provides a way of making space and time work together to define both the urban condition and the body’s place within it. Time is integral to an understating of urban affect.

Naples, once named, means that avoiding the hold of the idiosyncratic will depend upon allowing the name Naples to name both the city itself and, in the process, to name and as significantly to produce an abstraction that has an inherently generative dimension. While Benjamin writes about Naples there is an additional question – a question driven not just by the imperative of design but also by the possible construction of a site in which those imperatives may come to take on a political texture. The question’s force resides in the power of abstraction. (Abstraction not as an act of withdrawal but as the relocation of effect. Abstraction is that which allows for potentiality precisely because the original is no longer held by interplay of representation as the locus of meaning and representation as defining either the image or the description.) The question is the following: Is it possible to reconfigure that writing – Benjamin’s ‘Naples’ – diagrammatically? In other words, can the text be read as occasioning design? Designing arises neither from the application of an analysis nor from the simple identification of the text’s concerns. Rather, the potentiality for abstraction – the diagram – opens up design as a practice. As a result, design would be a practice rather than the enactment of a predetermined task. If only to indicate how such a possibility would be realized part of the answer will involve reconfiguring the urban – and here Naples names the urban – in terms of time and movement. Time and movement should not be understood as simple generalities. They are given a specific configuration within ‘Naples’. If there is a way through Naples it has to do with the use of porosity as a temporal concept rather than a purely spatial one. This is a position that can only emerge from working through ‘Naples’.

The text’s opening words carry the quality of story telling. The text begins with the evocation of an event whose completion marks the point of entry into the text. Completion is both the enclosure into the narrative at the same time as its creation. Completion and threshold conjoin at the text’s beginning. At work here, and this is just the beginning, is a doubled entry. Benjamin writes, ‘Some years ago a priest was drawn through the streets of Naples for indecent offences’ (307/414). (It needs to be noted that ‘indecency’ (‘unsittlicher’) should not be understood in terms of a realm of private or personal morality. ‘Indecency’ already brings into consideration the realm of tradition and custom, i.e. die Sitte.) ‘Naples’ will continue to rework the private, depriving it of its privative quality. The actual terminology, one that refuses to position the private and the public as a productive opposition, does not ignore the private realm. On the contrary it brings both the public and the private into play but freed from their ready insertion into a simplifying opposition. (As will be noted it is an opposition undone by the work of porosity.) And, yet, within the terms of the text’s narrative what is recounted is an event. And as an event it is over. Moreover, it is an event whose impersonal quality is carried by its passive construction (wurde … gefahren). What has been identified therefore in this opening – in its impersonal pastness – is as much an opening towards the present as it is to different possibilities of involvement. Both of these openings – holding the actuality of the present and its inherent complexity in play – indicate not just ways of avoiding the complete identification of the text with Naples but allowing that possibility to be already contained in the text itself. The opening of ‘Naples’, understood as a threshold, is already doubled. Complexity pertains ab initio.

The value of such an approach to this text is that it allows for the possibility that the complex density of the urban endures as a recurrent thought within writing.⁴ The question of density, however, needs to be set in relation to an understanding of place as that which is already contested. The real significance of the term ‘porosity’, and this is the term used by Benjamin to analyze the city of Naples, is that it does not refuse the distinction between, for example, ‘the sitting room’ ( die Stube) and ‘the street’ (der Strasse ), or between ‘day’ (Tag) and ‘night’ (Nacht). What it does, however, and this is part of the strength of Benjamin’s approach, is begin to define their relation in terms of an already present sense of ‘interpenetration’ (Durchdringung). The question that arises here concerns to what this term – ‘interpenetration’ – pertains. Porosity, if it were thought to do no more than mark mere process, would involve nothing other than a form of seepage, as though edges could be permeated, entered but no more than that. What occurs with the evocation of the porous brings additional elements into play.

The term first occurs in the following context. Benjamin has been describing a series of rooms within the city, its buildings and finally within the cliff faces. Overall the city is ‘craggy’ (‘felsenhaft’) (309/416). This would, however, be no more than a spatial description, as though all that is involved is a series of interlinked chambers and rooms; as if ‘porosity’ were no more than courtyards that led to arcades or vestibules which in turn lead to ante-chambers and finally to inner rooms themselves. If there were a way of describing the temporality and thus the form of movement that such a conception of porosity engenders – a conception in which its force would be stilled and thus its productive possibilities contained – then it would be in terms of a sequence and thus as a linear narrative through the city. In relation to sequence – a relation that resists simple linearity – Benjamin introduces a terminology that will structure the effective, hence productive, presence of porosity. Describing the base of the cliffs, the point at which the city touches the sea, a point of encounter, a place of touch that could have been an actual border – there are, Benjamin notes, doors and caves. They are neither separate nor merely connected. In relation to them he writes:

If it is open one can see into large cellars, which are at the same time (zugleich) sleeping places and storehouses. Farther on, steps lead down to the sea, to fishermen’s taverns installed in natural grottoes. Dim light and thin music come from them in the evening. (309/416)

Central to the orientation of this passage – indeed central to the sense of place at work within it – is that complexity depends upon the overdetermined moment. The present as a site of original complexity is noted by the use of the term ‘ zugleich’ (‘at the same time’ – recalling therefore the doubling that marks the point of entry into the text). In other words, what undoes the linear is the complexity of the moment. Allowing for this complexity is already to have demanded a different sense of mapping than one that would have been driven by linear sequence and singular moments.⁵

The contrast needs to be made more emphatic. The linear, itself becoming moments within a sequence, would define passage through the urban, a passage in which these singular moments gave rise as much to their continuance as to their cessation. One place would lead to another. One singular place would open onto another. Within such a conception of movement how is the border to be understood? Whether it be a border that is no more than the entrance to a building, or more dramatically the entrance to another country, the singular – and hence linear, a structure that must generate and contain its own narrative of the city – demands that it be retained. The singular as door or entrance – equally the singular as the spatial condition existing after the entrance – must stage and constrain both movement and the quality of the spatial conditions. Inside must be radically distinct from outside. What this involves is a conception of movement that has to resist the threshold as a condition and maintain the entrance as either open or shut. The border as the singular brings another exigency into consideration: its being policed. The border, precisely because of its projected singularity and the related demand that it be policed, opens up the possibility of its being traversed. That would be the response – the singular response – to the presence of the border understood as a single line. There is, however, another response, one that while opening up the singular does in a way that causes the positing of singularity to become problematic. Two strategies emerge. The first is the border’s refusal; traversal as refusal. The second is what can be described as the border’s undoing.

In regard to the former – traversal – borders can always be traversed. However, such crossings are incursions and consequently would then be defined as illegal. If there is a way of approaching the border that refuses the terms in which the border is traditionally given – terms that are under the dictate of control, a dictate that is inscribed within statutes for control (legal provisions no matter how arbitrarily created) – then it has to be linked to the undoing of the border.⁶ Undoing is not destruction. Moreover, it is in terms of undoing that Benjamin’s work – a work in which Naples has already come to name a more generalized urban condition – is central. Porosity as a temporal concept – temporal with its own spatial determinations – emerges as a form of undoing. In Benjamin’s text what has been identified here as ‘undoing’ is linked to the movement of interpenetration. Prior to pursuing the passages in the text in which what is addressed are the temporalizing movements that reconfigure spatial locations, it is important to stay with this ‘undoing’. The term – ‘undoing’ – makes demands. In part, it enacts the work of porosity. The work in question begins with the interruption of the opposition between the singular and the closed on the one hand and the completely open on the other. However, there is more at work than just a specific strategy for reading. Part of the argument will be that through ‘undoing’ it becomes possible to reconfigure urban conditions. Porosity as an ‘undoing’ will lead to a differing conception of the urban and thus of an urbanism than one directed by the interplay of the temporal singularity of simple lines. (Equally, this difference will itself be registered in the representational means used to create these differing possibilities.)⁷

In general terms, lines of demarcation – simple lines – are held in place. Neither natural nor arbitrary, they are placed and held there. In its most benign form this will concern lines drawn on a map that indicate the presence of streets, or specific urban locations. This type of map is used to define zones that in turn will have an effect as much on building regulations as they will on the creation of infrastructure. While lines and maps of this nature allow for contestation – the argument, for example, to have a certain area rezoned – whatever sense of contestation there is, it will have been delimited by the sense of lines, time and spatial relations that engender it. What is at work here is a defined sense of enclosure. Part of the definition comes from privileging not just spatial relations, but also a definition of spatial relations and the lines used to create them in terms of a founding simplicity. Despite these simplifying moves, such a conception of the line once it becomes the border brings an exacting reality into play. One response to the actuality of such a demanding presence is destruction. However, the process of destruction does not just move in one direction. The creation of the arbitrary border constructed as a single line can also be understood as a form of destruction. In the latter case what is destroyed is the originally complex or plural sense of place. Destruction in such a context is the refusal of the border in the name of the open, as though the border’s destruction will allow for a sense of the common defined as the open. It is in relation to both of these senses of destruction that the process of ‘undoing’ can have its most exacting effect. Undoing becomes a productive activity.

Porosity, as the term moves through and organizes Benjamin’s text, ‘Naples’, is bound up with the provisional. And, yet, the usual temporality of the provisional, a temporality and conception of action defined by a move to completion, a move which is itself explicable in terms of linearity, is precisely the conception of the provisional which is undone by porosity. Moreover, porosity comes to be inscribed within and as part of a dynamic process. Movement and mobility characterize porosity. It is not just that ‘everything joyful (Lustige) is mobile ( fahrbar )’ (311/417); there is a more profound sense of the dynamic. After arguing that there is founding interpenetration of ‘feast days’ and ‘work days’, an interpenetration that is not simply occasional, rather it is ‘irresistible’ such that the kernel of one exists irrevocably and irrecoverably in the other, allowing each the possibility for a reconfiguration, a repositioning, perhaps the adoption of a different colour or another form, that could occur, perchance unforeseen, at any moment, Benjamin configures porosity as the ‘law of life’ (Gesetz dieses Leben) (311/417). However, this is not just any law. Benjamin described it as ‘inexhaustible’ (unerschöpflich) (311/417). In other words, it is not a conception of law that defines both obedience and obligation, and which because of its externality yields subjects and in the end will define subjectivity as subject to it. Action is neither regulated nor defined by following this law. The ‘inexhaustible law’ is the actative itself. While the term ‘inexhaustible’ (unerschöpflich) recurs within the text, what is central is the way in which an active dimension comes to define what is usually taken either as static or as complete. (An ontology defined by movement begins to supplant one positioned by stasis.)

‘Building’ (Bau) and ‘action’ (Aktion) work together (309/416). They go in and through each other. This could, however, be no more than a simple, and in the end simplifying if not reductive, evocation of process. While the opposition of the static and the dynamic is opened once ‘building’ and ‘action’ are defined in terms of their interpenetration (rather than their so-called essential qualities), the undoing of that opposition, however, is dependent upon allowing the interpenetration – and therefore porosity – a productive dimension.⁸ For Benjamin their interpenetration is positioned within the framework of a productive sense of the provisional. Only by allowing for this original sense of connection can there then be the actuality of interruption and thus the occasion of what Benjamin describes as ‘new and unforeseen constellations’ (309/416). The condition for the emergence of the ‘new’, and it should be noted that the ‘new’, while ‘unforeseen’, in the precise meaning that it does not have an image, is that which occasions by a counter movement a productive cessation that can be neither restricted nor constrained by predication. The ‘new’, in the precise way the term is used in this instance, for Benjamin neither corresponds nor mimes. It is nonetheless a ‘constellation’.⁹ Rather than an already given image of the future that finds expression, the new is an interruption. After all, how could that which is unforeseen occur other than as an interruption? Moreover, the emergence of the ‘new’ resists finality. (Hence the recourse to a language of inexhaustibility.) That resistance is as much ground in the temporality of inexhaustibility as it is in the interconnection of the inexhaustible and the incomplete. While Benjamin is offering a literal description of buildings in Naples – a description that holds to the interplay of dilapidation and construction – the formulation opens up beyond the literal. He writes of these buildings that they ‘are not finished or self-contained’ (fertiggemacht und abgeschlossen wird nichts) (310/416).

Caution is necessary here for this is a real sense in which a designation of this type needs to be moved from positing a direct equivalence of the provisional nature of forms of completion and the self-contained with a description of Naples. It must be more. The designation needs to be a generalized description of the urban condition itself. (Naples/‘Naples’ adopting the status of a diagram.) A redescription in which the setting is changed. A situation in which there will be lines of division – lines that will still demarcate areas – even the culmination of lines in borders. However, to the extent that the provisional is taken as identifying this position, and moreover if the provisional is understood as bound up with the process of undoing, it is possible to maintain edges and forms of separation and yet rather than defining them in terms of the presence of single lines that need to be policed, they will emerge as porous sites. Edges and borders are held in place by movement through them. Movement, that instead of taking linearity as its model, will need to be rethought in terms of the presence of a divergent set of attractors creating eddies allowing for forms of occupation that will draw their force and have a pulse (though, in the end, it will be pulses) derived from a divergent set of sources. All of these elements – the materiality of the occupation, the immateriality of forces – cohere in a continually provisional configuration. Containing yet not self-contained and therefore openings not defined by (or as) the purely open but by an ‘inexhaustible’ potentiality. And yet from one position – and correctly – this would still be the same place and what occurs does so at the ‘same time’. Retaining a sense of the ‘same’ is the precondition by which destruction is avoided even though place and time are reconfigured. At work is undoing as porosity and porosity as undoing.

Porosity is also linked to personal life. However, the moment that the private realm is rethought in terms of porosity it comes to be articulated within the movement of undoing and the provisional. Private life is equally porous. Accepting the interplay of ‘building’ and ‘action’ as the point of departure means that to exist in Naples, for Benjamin, and it should be noted that it is literally ‘to exist’ (Existeieren) (314/417) has a different orientation. The thinking being within the urban condition necessitates the recognition that the predicament of modern existence is a ‘matter of collectivity’ (Kollektivsache) (314/417). Therefore architecture – taken as including the weave of urbanism and individual design projects – meets the political in at least two senses. The first involves the question of how this ‘matter’ (‘sache’) is given architectural expression. Of course, architecture is from the start an expression of political concerns even when this is not recognized. However, once human existence – urban being – is positioned beyond either a unifying generality, or the individual as an apparently undetermined consuming unit, then what emerges is an affirmative conception of place and thus an architecture that is no longer defined by that opposition. Second, architecture encounters the political when what type of collectivity is envisaged can itself be raised as a question that gives rise to an architectural resolution. As such, giving centrality to collectivity and thus to the movement through spaces means for Benjamin opening up the private.

Public lines are drawn through the private. Moreover, what are taken to be merely private concerns are drawn through the public. Their opposition is thus undone and the terms are radically transfigured. The house does not vanish as a place – undoing is not destruction – rather it is repositioned. (Perhaps what emerges is an ‘unforeseen constellation’ (309/416).) Rather than allow the house and thus the private to be equated with the domestic – such that house and domus are one and the same – an equation in which the house would be no more than a ‘refuge’ (‘Asyl’) (314/419), Benjamin repositions it.¹⁰ A move enacted by the particularity of the space having been given by, and through, the continuity of movement – movement as constitutive of space – the house becoming thereby an ‘inexhaustible reservoir (unerschöpfliche Reservoir ) (315/420). Thus for one living in Naples – occupying therefore a generalized urban condition – solitude takes on a different condition. ‘Private existence (Privatexistenz) is the baroque opening of a heightened public sphere (gesteigerter Öffentlichkeit)’ (310/416).

Another instance of the way the undoing of the opposition between the private works to redefine space – and it will need to be remembered that the extent to which this undoing and redefinition is allowed an abstract quality, the quality of a diagram, is the extent to which it can be taken as generative – can be located in Benjamin’s description of the effect of population size on the structure of the family. If the family increases too quickly or there is the loss of a parent then, as Benjamin writes:

A neighbour takes a child to her table for a shorter or longer period, and thus families interpenetrate (durchdringen) in relationships that can resemble adoption. (315/421)

Of the many aspects of this passage that warrant consideration two are uppermost. The first is the role of time and the second is the interconnection of time to the way in which the family is no loner identified as a discreet unit but as part of a self-organizing system. Now, while what Benjamin is describing concerns the result of a specific set of social relations there is another dimension. In the same way as the house cannot be directly opposed to the public – and accepting the obvious reciprocity concerning the public – positions are defined in terms of the interplay of movement and occupation on the one hand and space and the rhythms of the body on the other.

The movement of family members from one ‘table’ to another is not defined by a sense of permanence. Change is for either a short or longer period. Time is not defined by civil law but by the ‘law of life’. The constellation that delimits the family is potentially continually shifting. The provisional and porous nature of architecture – understood now as the interpenetration of ‘building’ and ‘action’ – is reiterated in the description of the ‘interpenetration’ of families. Architectural relations and social relations begin to have a similar diagram. Again, it has to be noted that this is not the construction of an open field. Divisions – from the door to the border – endure. The difference, and here the difference is paramount, is that divisions and relations are not characterized by the enforcing oppositions that usually define the urban. Rather the complex work of undoing and porosity – two terms that work together and which are themselves productively interpenetrated – announce, though also demand, the urban’s reconceptualization.

Porosity continues to be at work. There is a further register, one that moves between sight and taste, hence between eye and tongue. As a prelude, however, porosity is connected to one of the most demanding terms in Benjamin’s work, namely ‘grey’.¹¹ After all in relation just to Naples, Benjamin writes ‘in reality it is grey’ ( In Wirklichkeit ist sie grau) (309/415). Porosity works together with grey. Grey as a colour, as a layering, perhaps even as a surface is the sheen of potentiality. Grey is pure gossamer. (Perhaps, though, this is to speculate, if beauty is refused the structure of surface and depth, if Beauty, the Platonic and Neo-Platonic remnant is allowed to be just that, i.e. a remnant, and thus can no longer work to guarantee the beautiful, if therefore, as the correlate, this Beauty is no longer longed for, a longing whose most determined form is there in the stern gaze of Melancholia, then the site of beauty – beauty as immediate potentiality – is grey. Perhaps, to speculate further, it is the grey.)¹²

Given grey, what, therefore, is there to be seen? What is to see grey? The speculative question does, of course need to be asked – what is it to see the grey? As a beginning it is to see all colours in grey. Grey is always the range of colours. Benjamin concedes that this predominating grey may have detracting effect. He continues, that ‘anyone who does not see (nicht auffaßt) form sees little here (hier wenig zu sehen)’ (309/416). A lack of concern with form, perhaps the reluctance to see grey as form(ing) amounts, not to a failure to see – there is no suggestion of blindness – but to seeing ‘little’ (wenig). What is there, there to see in the grey? Seeing into the grey – rather than merely to see grey – is to allow for sight to acquire its own type of porosity. Again, what is at work here is the movement of interpenetration. What can be described as a seeing-into occurring at the same time as a coming-out-from. The latter is the continuity of that which is finding form. The former – seeing-into – is allowing for this continuity’s registration. Seeing grey dissolves surfaces – or rather dissolves surfaces as given in opposition to depth. ‘Brightly dressed boys fish in deep-blue streams and look up at rouged church steeples’ (311 /418). Flatness founders, the stream is ‘deep blue’ ( tiefblauen), the steeples wearing make-up ( geschminkten ) thereby allowing surfaces, apparent planes, to have been captured – perhaps momentarily held then released, dispersed – by the continuity of coming-out-from. They start to appear, to shine, capturing light, displacing its effect, caught, among other things, as a moment within refraction. Becoming, reappearing no longer as one but as the continual play of light, colour and in the end texture. Though this is no mere end. All of which is there in the grey. There, that is, in grey as inexhaustible potentiality. The ‘faint’ (311/418) sun shines. Refracted through ‘glass vats of iced drink’ (311/418). Light through liquid comes out as colouring, bathing thus creating surfaces. Benjamin writes:

day and night the pavilions glow (strahlen) with the pale aromatic juices that teach even the tongue what porosity can be. (311/418)

‘Faint’ sun in a city, which can itself ‘fade’ (welken) (311/417). However, as it fades, the faint is no longer a dissembling, what would have been a literal feint in which what is would have done no more than vanish. Indeed, the contrary is the case. Fading and the sun’s faint presence form part of the continuity of coming-out-from. Form continues. The ‘pavilions’ are bathed. As the tongue tastes, what is tasted colours walls. Light slips through liquid to solid and taste from tongue to sight. Interpenetration, though not as an amalgam, rather as the continually enacted set of complex relations, reworks the differences between time and space. (A reworking and not a vanishing, hence spaces become timed as time acquires spatiality.) What continues to be presented is form; a presentation – another coming-out-from – that is ground in movement.

The diagram of Naples, ‘Naples’ as a diagram, emerges not from questioning the literal accuracy of Benjamin’s description of Naples but from within its formulations. Terminology and modes of thought grip the text. Their release, perhaps a hand’s unfolding, carries the mark of an original setting that is coming apart. Not, however, under the sway of destruction – destruction is undone by working through as an undoing – but because that setting is envisaged as porous. And, yet, porosity, porosity within ‘Naples’, is not an addition ornamenting the text. Porosity is not an option. It organizes Naples (text and place, melding for a moment) working as its law. Moreover, the text both announces porosity as a topic – figuring therefore within it as part of its content – and, at the same time, porosity figures as integral to the text’s operative quality. Porosity has an effective presence. As a beginning, the text’s doubled entry stages its porous nature. Once ‘Naples’, instead of being about porosity, can be seen to be porous, the text as place will admit the original complexity that the place Naples – an urban condition – necessarily contains. A complexity, which, in both instances, is bound up with time. The city will have been defined by its porous edges. Edges proliferate. They have an ‘inexhaustible’ potential.

Acknowledgment

This essay was first given as a lecture in the Institut for Künst und Architektur at the Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna on 20 May 2005. I want to thank Eyal Weizman for inviting me, and the audience for their generous response.

References

1 All references to Benjamin’s works are to the Gesammelte Schriften and the Selected Writings. Gesammelte Schriften (1980–91) edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. In regard to the English, reference for the most part will be made to the Selected Writings (1996–2003) edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, Harvard University Press. The pagination and volume are given in the text. The German precedes the English. At times translations have been slightly modified. In regards to the city, it should be noted that while Benjamin’s writings on Paris have attracted the most attention, he continued to write short texts on a range of cities. Moreover, as the reference to Einbahnstraße makes clear, the urban works as a continual figure throughout his writings. As such, it is never just the city, nor moreover could it ever be just ‘Paris’ or ‘Berlin’ etc. Inevitably, something else is at work. The project here is to begin to identify one possibility for that additional element.

2 Einbahnstraße (One Way Street ) continues to be cited as though the text were only ever part of a larger work and not a discreet work on its own. This means that for the most part this occurs while neglecting the text’s particularity. Its construction – indeed the appearance of the original edition – warrants consideration not just in relation to content but also as a part of the contents itself.

3 While not referred to by Benjamin, it would have been surprising had he not been familiar with the writings of Andrea de Jorio. His celebrated work of 1832, La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestia nepoletato, set out to describe not just the centrality of gesture to Neapolitan social life but sought to indicate a possible confluence between the use of gesture in the Roman world with its then current practice in Naples.

4 In 1925 Bloch wrote a text on Naples. Not only is it a clear engagement with Benjamin, it is also an attempt to reposition the concept of porosity. For Bloch porosity is more closely defined – and thus limited – by its link to the Baroque. See (1985) ‘Italien uni die Porosität’, Literarische Aufsätze. Werkausgabe Band 9, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, pp. 508–15.

5 The general question of mapping and its reconsideration in light of a philosophical thinking linked to the dynamic has been undertaken by Teresa Stoppani (2004) in ‘MAPPING: The Locus of the Project’, Angelaki, 9(2).

6 The term has a clear affinity with the conception of ‘désuvrement’ introduced by Bataille in his treatment of poetry and form creation. I have discussed Bataille’s approach to form and its link to this term in (2001) Architectural Philosophy, London: Continuum. See in particular Chapter 1. In this instance, as has been indicated, ‘undoing’ needs to be interpreted as a term that refuses the opposition between modes of fixity (e.g. the border) and its complete destruction.

7 The important point here is that as conceptions of the architectural begin to change what occurs is a move in the nature of the representations – and by ‘nature’ what is meant is their status – and the tools by which they are created. The single line demands the pencil or its equivalent in the realm of the digital. There would be the possibility of continual oscillation between the two. Once movement is taken as central and the lines involved have to capture a dynamic process then what emerges is the need for a representational device adequate to such an undertaking. In regards to the latter what this opens up is not only the move to forms of animation software but also the necessity to use such a form of software if the urban is defined in terms of movement.

8 Without signalling it directly, once Benjamin links ‘building’ and ‘action’ this move overcomes any attempt to reconfigure the architectural in terms of the attempt to recover that which is essential to either ‘building’ or ‘dwelling’. The obvious implication of this particular orientation is that what is distanced is Heidegger’s approach to these questions. In Heidegger’s most important text on this question – ‘Bauen Wohnen Denken’ (in Vorträge und Aufsätze, Tubingen: Neske, pp. 139–57) – the defining element is always couched in the language of essentialism. The term predominating the philosophical task as understood by Heidegger is the recovering of the ‘Wesen’ (Essence). That recovery will always efface the hold of what Benjamin calls the ‘law of life’; i.e. ‘porosity’.

9 Moreover, it is only in terms of a constellation that it becomes possible to allow for modernity – modernity understood as a founding interruption. This reference to the ‘constellation’ needs to be understood as structurally similar to Benjamin’s formulation of ‘dialectics at a standstill’. I have discussed this formulation in terms of temporal montage. The value of such a definition is that it overcomes the possibility of defining the singular moment in terms of pure singularity. What is affirmed, on the contrary, is the original complexity of the singular. See in this regard the discussion of Walter Benjamin throughout my (1997) Present Hope: architecture, Judaism, philosophy, London: Routledge; and (2005) Style and Time: essays on the politics of appearance, Chicago: North Western University Press.

10 For an important discussion of the domus see Jean-François Lyotard (1988), ‘Domus et la mégapole’, Po&sie, 44: 93–102.

11 While it is pursued in a different direction, any discussion of colour in Benjamin’s work is indebted to Howard Caygill’s exceptional engagement with Benjamin. See his (2003) Walter Benjamin and the Colour of Experience, London: Routledge.

12 The reference here is of course to Dürer’s engraving Melancholia (1514). The problem of overcoming the structure of beauty cannot be taken up here. It should be suffice to note that the structure of beauty concerns as much the guarantee of its presence – a position allowed for by Plato and which finds its reiteration within both the history of art and philosophy – as it does the longing for its presence. A longing that remains unfulfilled. In this regard see Erwin Panofsky (1971), The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, Princeton: Princeton University Press, p. 170.