TY - JOUR
AU - Smith, Douglas
AB - Abstract Since its foregrounding in Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis’s essay on Naples in 1925, the concept of porosity has become a topos in discussions of that city, of Italy and of urban planning in general, to the point of receiving criticism in some quarters for its imprecision and over-use. The aim of this article is to explore the background to the term and its possible relevance to more recent transnational models of culture. This involves tracing the emergence of porosity in the work of Germanophone intellectuals travelling in Italy in the 1920s and its relation to the paradigm of travelling theory developed by Edward Said, itself one of the precursors of current models of transnationalism. Ultimately, the history of porosity reveals weaknesses and strengths that anticipate some of the problems and opportunities encountered by present attempts to understand cultural identity and interaction in transnational terms. Introduction Porosity is sometimes criticized as an over-used and imprecise notion, particularly in writing about Naples, but also more generally in the theory and practice of urbanism.1 Since Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis first used the term in the mid-1920s to encapsulate what they saw as the defining feature of Neapolitan life, many other writers, philosophers and sociologists have taken it up in texts devoted to the same southern Italian city, or to Italian culture as a whole, or to the analysis of cities in general.2 This is particularly the case since the 1990s and the advent of models of ‘liquid modernity’ to account for the impact of what has been perceived as a more intensive phase of economic globalization.3 In certain respects, porosity is of course the necessary counterpart of liquidity, since it is only by virtue of the permeability of the frontiers between nation-states that the flows of people, goods and capital assumed by globalization are possible, flows that in turn necessitate the more fluid subjectivity said to characterize globalized societies. More recent research on the transnational dimension of cultural identity equally assumes the permeability of cultures and traditions to one another. According to Seyla Benhabib, for example, ‘the boundaries of cultures are fluid, porous and contested’.4 This suggests that if porosity is indeed a problematic notion, then its exploration might have significant implications for transnational approaches in the humanities. Transnational research is often driven by both intellectual conviction and political commitment.5 The intellectual conviction holds that many cultural and historical phenomena are regional or global in scope and can only be adequately understood within a comparative framework.6 The transnational approach is further motivated by a political commitment to two related forms of critique: the first directed against narrow conceptions of the nation-state – understood as a closed entity that seeks to consolidate itself by aligning as closely as possible a defined territory with a fixed population sharing a single language and a homogeneous culture – and the second against a wider world order dominated by a small number of nation-states that seek to use their economic and military superiority to subordinate and exploit entire regions.7 The genealogy of many current transnational approaches to cultural analysis can be traced back, in part at least, to the models of ‘traveling theory’ and ‘traveling cultures’ elaborated by Edward Said and James Clifford respectively in the 1980s and 1990s.8 According to these ‘travelling’ models, both cultures and the theoretical models developed to understand them consist of interactive and mobile processes rather than isolated and static entities. One of the main concerns of travelling theory was to contest the idea of culture as ‘dwelling’, defined by its attachment to a single place, a model of identity closely associated with the territorial claims of the nation-state. Clifford famously characterized this shift from dwelling to travelling via the homophonic transformation of ‘roots’ into ‘routes’.9 The aim of this article is to revisit the notion of porosity through the history of its emergence and its relation to Said’s model of ‘traveling theory’. Porosity was first elaborated as a critical concept in the travel writing and cultural criticism produced by various Germanophone writers associated with what later came to be known as the Frankfurt School during their stay in and around Naples in the mid- to late 1920s.10 Introduced by Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis, the notion was quickly taken up and extended by Ernst Bloch.11 In a broad sense, porosity is an example of travelling theory in so far as it emerges from the experience of another culture through travel. For Edward Said, however, the term had a stricter sense: travelling theories are intellectual models that migrate from one culture and language to another, changing their political valency as they move across borders.12 In this restricted sense, it is arguable whether the porosity of the 1920s fully qualifies as travelling theory, since, for all its currency among German émigrés, the idea did not really enter Italian theoretical reflection until much later.13 However, porosity does represent a reworking of German ideas in a new context, even if this falls short of appropriation by another culture. More significantly perhaps, the notion of porosity articulates one of the underlying assumptions of travelling theory in the Saidian sense. For the very notion of a travelling theory presupposes a reciprocal permeability between migrant ideas and their host cultures. As Said has stated, ‘the history of all cultures is the history of cultural borrowings. Cultures are not impermeable.’14 This means that porosity is not just another example of theory on the move, but more fundamentally an enabling condition of that mobility in the first place. As such, the way in which the notion of porosity is developed in the mid-1920s remains relevant to more recent developments involving travelling, and by extension transnational, models of theory and culture. For Benjamin and Lacis, porosity seems a notion invented more or less on the spot to account for a variety of different phenomena encountered in the streets of Naples; it does not aspire to the status of an authoritative concept, but at the same time it cannot completely evade the possibility of abstraction into a kind of metalanguage for interpreting the city. For Bloch, in contrast, porosity is the result of processes of hybridization that problematize the smooth surfaces of the neo-classical vision of Italian culture. In order to illustrate how a ‘national’ culture is the product of multiple influences, Bloch deploys a rhetoric of proliferation, and in the process runs the risks of both denying the specificity of Italian culture and producing a different stereotype of chaotic multiplicity. From this perspective, the story of the Italian journey undertaken by porosity starts to look like a salutary tale, demonstrating some of the pitfalls that await theory as it travels, and so effectively reveals some of the difficulties of thinking transnationally. The porosity of Naples: Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis In 1924, Walter Benjamin spent six months on the island of Capri in the Bay of Naples.15 Throughout the 1920s, Naples and the surrounding area hosted a floating population of German thinkers; during his time on Capri, Benjamin met Ernst Bloch and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, while Siegfried Kracauer and Theodor Adorno were to make the same trip the year after Benjamin. In fact, many of the figures associated with the Frankfurt School of Western Marxism spent time in and around Naples in the course of the decade, leading Martin Mittelmeier to suggest that under different circumstances, and in spite of nationality and language, the group might well have been called the Neapolitan School.16 The German presence had a specific socio-economic context. In the mid-1920s, Weimar intellectuals whose private incomes had been drastically reduced by postwar hyperinflation were drawn to the Bay of Naples not just by its climate or cultural riches, but also by the prospect of living much more cheaply than at home. Thus, Benjamin would in retrospect refer to his compatriots on Capri as an ‘intellektuelles Wanderproletariat’.17 Regardless of straitened circumstances, the voyages to Italy undertaken by German intellectuals at this time often represented transformative experiences giving rise to significant work. Benjamin’s stay on Capri was in part conceived as a writing retreat devoted to the completion of his habilitation thesis Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, and on a superficial level it is hard not to associate that book’s treatment of allegorical emblems such as the death’s head with the catacombs and religious iconography of Naples.18 More fundamentally, Susan Buck-Morss has suggested that Benjamin’s time in Italy was crucial for the development of much of his later writing, including his last unfinished project on the Paris arcades.19 Italy brought changes in style and substance to Benjamin’s work. According to Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, the Naples essay represents the invention of the Denkbild, the innovative form of fragmentary writing that would become Benjamin’s signature style.20 In Momme Brodersen’s view, Benjamin’s time in Italy resulted in nothing less than a new model of philosophical reflection premised on the openness of porosity.21 The stay on Capri undoubtedly marked a critical turning point in Benjamin’s life and work. In intellectual terms, his work was about to become much more explicitly political. In terms of his personal life, he began an affair with the Latvian actress and stage director Asja Lacis. The two turning points are of course related, since it seems to have been Lacis’s Marxist convictions that influenced Benjamin’s political development. In the dedication that opens Einbahnstraße (1928), Benjamin famously characterized Lacis’s impact on his life in the following terms: ‘Diese Straße heißt | Asja-Lacis-Straße | nach der die sie | als Ingenieur | im Autor durchgebrochen hat’.22 Lacis has been a contested figure in Benjamin studies, as Heinrich Kaulen has demonstrated.23 Regarded by some such as Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno as a pernicious influence, Lacis was effectively edited out of certain accounts of Benjamin’s life, for a combination of personal, religious and political reasons. The adulterous relationship was a cause of embarrassment to colleagues of Benjamin who also considered themselves family friends. Moreover, Lacis’s militant agitprop Marxism did not sit well with either the Judaic-Messianic interpretation of Benjamin’s work favoured by Scholem or the formalist orientation of Adorno’s Marxist aesthetics towards art that carried the negative imprint of its socio-economic context rather than an explicit political content. In the case of Theodor Adorno’s 1955 two-volume edition of Benjamin’s selected works – a publication that marked an important stage in the postwar communication of the author’s work to a wider audience – the editing-out was drastically literal: the co-authored essay on Naples appeared under Benjamin’s name alone, while the dedication text from Einbahnstraße was omitted altogether.24 In the late 1960s, however, Lacis was rediscovered by a younger generation of intellectuals and reinstated at Benjamin’s side as an equal member of a theoretical ‘power couple’ whose relationship embodied the joint project of political and sexual revolution.25 This was probably to overstate the stability of their relationship, which was complicated and intermittent and never really formed the basis of a sustained common endeavour. Hence recent research on Lacis and Benjamin has sought to do justice to Lacis’s own work and to secure due recognition for the impact of her ideas on Benjamin’s development.26 It was during their stay on Capri that Benjamin and Lacis completed their only piece of collaborative work: an essay on Naples that appeared under a shared byline the following year in the Frankfurter Zeitung of 19 August 1925. The essay consists of a series of variations on the concept of porosity, the absence of fixed boundaries that for its authors characterized both the physical fabric and the social organization of the city: ‘Porosität ist das unerschöpflich neu zu entdeckende Gesetz dieses Lebens’ (NE, 311). According to Benjamin and Lacis, the oppositions and hierarchies that conventionally structure urban life break down in Naples; it is a place where supposedly antithetical principles and practices communicate and transform themselves into their opposites in disconcerting ways. Perhaps the two most striking are the religious opposition between the sacred and the profane, and the social opposition between the private and the public. The essay opens with an anecdote about a priest who, having been found guilty of sexual indecency, is mocked by a crowd. However, when a wedding procession passes and the priest blesses the newly married couple, his persecutors suddenly fall to their knees. A situation that is associated not just with the profane but with acts of profanation and the language of profanity transforms itself suddenly into an acknowledgement of the sacred and an expression of renewed reverence for previously scorned religious authority (NE, 307). According to Benjamin and Lacis, this interpenetration of the sacred and the profane also permeates the organization of time in the city: there is little distinction between feast days and working days, between Sundays and weekdays, as each is characterized by the same mixture of indolence and activity (NE, 311). In such a context, material success becomes a matter of providence rather than endeavour, and business is assimilated to a lottery (NE, 312–13). Beyond the sphere of religion, the main social distinction undone by Neapolitan life is that between public and private: people live their lives on the street, and the street regularly impinges on their living space (NE, 314). This affects both the kind of life lived and its physical setting. Life in Naples is theatrical, as if acted out on stage for all to see (NE, 310). Neapolitan architecture opens out its interiors to the street, as its stairways twist inside and out, allowing its landings to operate as theatre sets (NE, 310). The provisional impression of the stage set is enhanced by the unfinished appearance of much of the city’s built fabric, as if suspended uncertainly between construction and dilapidation (NE, 310). Furthermore, the porous quality of the architecture is visible even in the texture of the tufa stone used for its construction (NE, 309). Overall, the pervasive porosity of the city results in an avoidance of the definitive and a style of life grounded in improvisation (NE, 310). Ultimately, the porosity of Naples contradicts the values of a rationalized secular modernity, with its compartmentalized activities and regulated spaces assigned to religion, commerce and domesticity. Hence the challenge posed by the city to the categorical rigour of a post-Enlightenment philosophy based on the drawing of distinctions: Benjamin and Lacis gleefully describe how an international conference of philosophers organized to celebrate the 700th anniversary of the founding of the University of Naples quickly descends into chaos, dissolving into the swirl of a competing street festival (NE, 307–08). This challenge to conventional philosophy may help to explain Benjamin and Lacis’s decision to explore porosity not only as a concept but also as a stylistic principle. As many commentators have observed, the essay enacts the phenomenon of porosity as much as it describes it.27 The overall organization of the text is not linear and cumulative but associative and dispersed; as Klaus Garber points out, its original version consisted of five sections without paragraph breaks.28 This structure allowed the text to flow across the conceptual boundaries associated with the conventional paragraph defined by its topic sentence and conceptual coherence. Consequently, as Dietrich Erben notes, the three main levels of porosity identified by the essay (in terms of building material, architecture and social organization) are not clearly distinguished but deliberately interleaved.29 The placing of what might stand as the essay’s overall thesis typifies its organization. The words ‘Man meidet das Definitive, das Geprägte’ figure neither in the introduction nor in the conclusion, but are embedded deep in the second section (paragraph eight) (NE, 309). Even this key idea is expressed in a series of variations that effectively enact the provisional and improvisational quality of Neapolitan life through repeated reformulation: ‘Man meidet das Definitive, das Geprägte. Keine Situation erscheint so, wie sie ist, für immer gedacht, keine Gestalt behauptet ihr “so und nicht anders”’ (NE, 309). At other points within the essay, individual sentences exploit effects of chiasmus and inversion to stress the interpenetration and reversibility of opposed elements: ‘Ein Gran von Sonntag ist in jedem Wochentag versteckt und wieviel Wochentag in diesem Sonntag’ (NE, 311). Overall, the organization and syntax of the essay are as porous as its portrait of the city. Notwithstanding the attempts of Scholem and Adorno to eliminate Lacis from the history of the Naples essay, she herself maintained that the idea of porosity originated with a casual remark made to Benjamin while walking in the city: ‘Einmal sagte ich, daß die Häuser porös aussehen.’30 Some commentators have accordingly suggested that the concept belongs more to her than to Benjamin.31 It might be argued, however, that the very idea of porosity resists exclusive attribution. This is not to confiscate once again Lacis’s work to the advantage of a single male author, but rather to suggest how her participation in a joint project might contribute to the dissolution of an individualistic and patriarchal notion of single authorship. After all, according to Benjamin’s dedication to Einbahnstraße, the encounter with Lacis cut a street right through him or, in other words, made him porous or permeable to the ideas in circulation around him. There is in fact a sense in which the idea of porosity was circulating implicitly in the avant-garde circles to which Lacis belonged in the mid-1920s. According to Lacis, the spectacle of the porous city offered inspiration for her stage designs, but it is possible that at least some of the inspiration flowed in the opposite direction and that her view of the city emerged in part from ongoing aesthetic debates in which her designs participated.32 As Momme Brodersen has pointed out, the Naples essay mobilizes the idea of interpenetration (Durchdringung) as a complement to porosity,33 and ‘spatial interpenetration’ (Raumdurchdringung) was in the process of becoming a central element of the discourse on modern architecture and design in the mid-1920s.34 If the origin of porosity is unclear in absolute terms, attributable to both or perhaps neither of its co-authors, the notion has also had a paradoxical posterity. In his two further solo-authored pieces of writing on Naples (a book review from 1928 and a radio broadcast from 1931), Benjamin describes similar phenomena to those noted in the essay co-written with Lacis, but there is no mention of ‘Porosität’.35 Nor does the term appear in his subsequent writings on other cities, apart from a single reference in the Passagen-Werk.36 Nevertheless, the first Naples essay of 1925 is widely considered a classic text on the city it takes as its subject, and the motif of porosity has frequently been taken up by subsequent travel writing and cultural criticism.37 Moreover, in more general terms, the essay has been consecrated as a model for both the theory and the practice of urban planning and architectural design.38 Its vision of city life offers a congenial alternative to the modernist orthodoxy of functional zoning; instead of insisting on the rigorous separation of distinct spaces devoted to working, dwelling, shopping and so forth, porosity encourages permeable boundaries and the mixed use of shared space. As a result, according to Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, porosity has become one of the key metaphors of contemporary urbanism.39 If porosity represents a dead end in Benjamin’s own writing, it has travelled much further in the work of others, as a means of understanding Naples, Italy, and even urban development in general. The porosity of Italy: Ernst Bloch Benjamin and Lacis’s text had a near-immediate echo in the work of a fellow visitor to Capri, the philosopher Ernst Bloch, who arrived on the island in September 1924 and whom Benjamin saw frequently during the final weeks of his stay. A few months after the appearance of the article by Benjamin and Lacis, Bloch published an essay entitled ‘Italien und die Porosität’ in Die Weltbühne on 29 June 1926. Bloch’s essay partly acknowledges the source of the image of porosity by attributing it to Benjamin (IP, 508) but fails to mention Lacis as co-author or the fact that many of the examples he cites in his own essay are in fact borrowed from the earlier text.40 If many of the examples are familiar, Bloch’s approach to the topic is quite different. By identifying porosity in his title, Bloch effectively transforms the elusive porosity of Benjamin and Lacis into a master concept, a move reinforced by the way in which the title applies the notion much more widely to the whole of Italian culture rather than to the life of an individual city. Such an expansive development of an initial premise could be said to be characteristic of Bloch’s intellectual method in general, but in this instance his expansive approach to the application of concepts also reveals how porosity is open to being hypostasized into a full-scale theoretical model. In certain respects, Bloch’s expositional style is more conventional than that adopted by Benjamin and Lacis. His essay has a clear thesis, enunciated in its title and opening paragraph: namely, that the conventional German perspective on Italian culture is blind to one of its key characteristics, the instability of contour called porosity. This thesis is articulated in cultural-historical terms, with an allusion to Winckelmann and direct references to Goethe and the Baroque in the first paragraph alone (IP, 508). The general line of argument also owes a great deal implicitly to the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin and his distinction between Classical and Baroque art, defined in terms of linear (linear) and painterly (malerisch) qualities respectively: while Classical art defines itself by its clear lines, Baroque culture is marked rather by its preference for a broken (porous) contour.41 Essentially, as Arturo Larcati points out, Bloch’s essay presents a critique of the German Hellenist or neo-classical view of Italian culture that identified its essence in clarity and integrity of form, embodying the Winckelmannian values of ‘edle Einfalt und stille Größe’ (IP, 508).42 According to Bloch, this neo-classical image blocks from view the actual porosity of Italian culture, which is characterized by the broken contours and interleaved planes of a wide range of Mediterranean influences including Islamic, Byzantine and Spanish Baroque elements (IP, 512–13). Bloch agrees with Goethe’s celebrated remark that Sicily is the key to understanding Italy, but for diametrically opposed reasons; where for Goethe Sicily embodies the classicism of Magna Graecia, Bloch sees in the island the revelation of a later Mediterranean diversity. As a result, he outdoes Goethe by suggesting that the ideal way to understand Italy is to begin one’s journey even further south than Sicily, ideally in North Africa (IP, 512). As his essay progresses, Bloch mobilizes another term alongside porosity in order to help convey the heterogeneity of Italian culture. Appropriately, the word itself has a broken contour, in terms of its spelling in translation. In both the original German publication and Bloch’s collected works, the term appears as tuttilità, with an initial ‘t’, which is also how it is spelt in the Italian translation of Bloch’s essay.43 In the English translation, however, the word appears as duttilità, with an initial ‘d’. The reason behind ‘correcting’ the spelling seems fairly clear: duttilità is a term that exists in modern Italian, meaning ‘ductility’ or ‘malleability’, and plausibly captures the sinuous contours of Baroque art, as well as the capacity for change in a hybridizing culture. Tuttilità, on the other hand, as Enrico Donaggio indicates, appears to be a neologism coined by Bloch.44 Bloch’s lexical invention plays on the meanings of utilità (utility) and totalità (totality) in relation to duttilità. Broadly speaking, tuttilità appears to designate a cultural whole (totalità) whose all-encompassing nature (tutti) is tautologically stressed, and whose utility (utilità) lies in its ductility or malleability (duttilità). The neologism suggests a certain linguistic exuberance or excess, a refusal to respect the bounds of existing terminology and a willingness to hybridize multiple elements. Bloch’s style thereby echoes his argument, but in a very different way from that evident in the writing of Benjamin and Lacis. As Martin Mittelmeier has observed, the central paradox of Bloch’s demonstration of the cultural porosity of Italy, with its insistence on openness to other cultures, is that his chosen manner of exposition is, in terms of its overall structure, quite closed.45 Whereas Benjamin and Lacis begin in medias res and retain a tight focus on the details of Neapolitan city life without ever really generating an overview, Bloch foregrounds his central idea from the outset and then proceeds to demonstrate it in a strikingly expansive way, orchestrating a wide range of cultural allusions and references, basing his generalizations on a proliferation of examples drawn from across Italy as a whole. His second paragraph alone ranges from Palermo to Venice, via Naples, Capri and Amalfi, referring along the way to the theatre of Pirandello, the opera of Verdi and the painting of de Chirico (IP, 508–12). The paragraph works by accumulation, leading to a kind of crescendo. This expansiveness may not create the same close-up impression of porosity as the approach adopted by Benjamin and Lacis but, as Christina Ujma has noted, it does lend Bloch’s essay a capacious carnivalesque quality that complements his vision of Italian culture, turning upside-down the neo-classical stereotypes of noble simplicity and quiet grandeur.46 Porosity and petrifaction: Lukács in Italy In what sense, then, might the model of porosity as developed by Benjamin, Lacis and Bloch be considered a form of travelling theory? As we have seen, Edward Said developed the notion to describe how the political implications of theoretical models change as they move from one geographical and cultural context to another. At different points in his career, Said gave two diametrically opposed accounts of the effects of such a movement of ideas. In ‘Traveling Theory’, he argued that ideas often lose their political force as they migrate; once divorced from their original context, their ‘insurrectionary’ qualities are ‘domesticated’.47 James Clifford criticized this account of travelling theory as a more or less traditional one-way narrative of acculturation, and as such symptomatic of a kind of unacknowledged nostalgia for dwelling rather than travelling, expressed in the way that the original meaning of ideas was privileged over their subsequent attrition and appropriation.48 Some years later, however, in ‘Traveling Theory Revisited’, Said would reverse his prior judgement, recognizing how a change of context can in fact reinvigorate the critical dimension of ideas that have been absorbed or recuperated at home.49 In both essays, Said’s main example was the work of the Hungarian Marxist critic and theorist Georg Lukács. According to the earlier of the two essays, in travelling to France, Britain and then the United States, Lukács’s work had been adopted by a largely apolitical literary-critical establishment. In the process, it had lost its radical potential as an instrument of social change. In ‘Traveling Theory Revisited’, however, Said acknowledged that in 1950s France Lukács’s work inspired not only a political reading of culture, as in the work of Lucien Goldmann, but also a more direct engagement with contemporary politics in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Frantz Fanon. Porosity might be deemed travelling theory on two main grounds. First, as mentioned before, it is, in a very broad sense, a notion that arises directly out of the travel of its authors and is then elaborated in the mode of travel writing: it is the product of a contrastive experience of another culture, the work of travelling theorists. Second, and here is where we rejoin Said, it is a notion that was developed in the aftermath of the publication of Lukács’s Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein and so represents an implicit engagement with his ideas, transposed into another context. For Lukács, the fundamental fact of life in advanced capitalist society is reification: the reduction of the human condition to a thing-like state within a rigorously organized system of production. The intellectual result is a culture reduced to what he called ‘versteinerte Tatsächlichkeit’ (‘petrified factuality’).50 Published in 1923, Lukács’s work was a frequent talking point among the members of the German intellectual community on Capri the following summer. Bloch had reviewed Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein in Der neue Merkur in March 1924, and Benjamin discussed both book and review in his correspondence.51 Lukács’s critique of capitalist society inevitably coloured the way Benjamin, Lacis and Bloch perceived their less developed surroundings. To their northern European eyes, Neapolitan – or, more broadly, Italian – life represented the antithesis of the reified character of modern capitalist society. Bloch makes this explicit when he argues that the true opposition in his essay is not between porosity and the impermeability of classical form, but that between porosity and the compartmentalization created by the division of labour of advanced capitalism (IP, 513–14). For Benjamin, Lacis and Bloch, porosity offers an attractive contrast to the petrifaction of contemporary northern industrial Europe; life in Naples and Italy embodies an idealized alternative to advanced capitalism as depicted by Lukács. There are at least two ironies to this idealization of the porosity of Neapolitan and Italian life. The first is that the petrifaction associated with northern European capitalism by the German visitors of the 1920s is also an alternative trope for life around the Bay of Naples. Petrifaction is often closely identified with the fate of Pompeii and Herculaneum upon the eruption of Vesuvius in 59 CE. If the actual disaster had not itself petrified the remains of its victims, the plaster-cast moulding technique developed by the nineteenth-century archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli effectively converted them into statues.52 This moulding technique has often determined the subsequent perception of their fate: most of the victims of the volcanic eruption were actually incinerated by a pyroclastic wave or suffocated by falling ash, but popular imagination tends to envisage them as turned to stone. Petrified humans and (in reverse) reanimated statues or casts populate many accounts of the Bay of Naples from Gautier’s fiction through Freud’s psychoanalysis to Rossellini’s cinema and beyond.53 More recently, the idea of Naples as a politically paralysed city trapped in ‘un tempo petrificato’ has figured in the work of the writer Ermanno Rea.54 In some quarters, then, the imagery of petrifaction is as appropriate to the Bay of Naples as it is to northern Europe, albeit for different reasons. The second irony of this representation of southern Europe as a freer alternative to the advanced capitalist north is that it is itself in many respects a form of reification, a petrified simplification. Arjun Appadurai has argued that in its approach to other cultures Western anthropology has tended to engage in ‘metonymic freezing’, producing a reductive version of the culture under study by privileging a single striking feature at the expense of a more complex whole.55 In many ways, the isolation of porosity as the distinctive trait of the city of Naples (Benjamin and Lacis) and then of Italy in its entirety (Bloch) is a clear example of such a procedure, a focus on a single point that blurs the bigger picture. In Bloch’s case, the fact that his essay sets out to correct an entrenched cultural stereotype (the German neo-classical version of Italy) does not necessarily compensate for the substitution of an alternative stereotype; one frozen metonym (the strong contours of the classical statue) is replaced by another (the porous boundaries of Baroque art). Moreover, with respect to Benjamin and Lacis as well as Bloch, the association of Naples with porosity is not only an idealizing stereotype but also a potentially derogatory one, echoing the longstanding reputation of the city as a place of incoherence and inconsistency. The risk that porosity might inadvertently rejoin the stereotypes it seeks to avoid arises in part through the way in which it is contextualized by Benjamin, Lacis and Bloch. Graeme Gilloch has noted how the Benjamin and Lacis text on Naples omits any real socio-economic background for the diverse urban phenomena it describes.56 This is consistent with the essay’s overall withholding of context and its concentration on detail at the expense of overview. Bloch’s essay admittedly provides much more background, but does so almost entirely in terms of cultural history; the only element of socio-economic analysis is reserved for the northern European bourgeois ideology that produces the neo-classical illusion of wholeness by way of compensation for its own alienated fragmentation (IP, 513–14). In sum, for all its permeability, porosity might be viewed not as the opposite of petrifaction, but as a form of reification in its own right, a single inert concept superimposed on the cultural diversity of a living city and nation. In that guise, it functions as an illustration of travelling theory in its negative mode, that is, a way of thinking that loses its critical incisiveness as it moves. Porosity and the Southern Question: Croce and Gramsci The possible decontextualizing effects of an emphasis on porosity become clearer when some consideration is given to philosophical-theoretical and political developments in mid-1920s Italy. In particular, Benjamin, Lacis and Bloch seem largely unaware of the work of their contemporaries Benedetto Croce and Antonio Gramsci and their respective engagements with the ‘Southern Question’, the vexed relations between the advanced industrial north of Italy and the ‘underdeveloped’ agrarian south.57 Benjamin mentions Croce in passing in his correspondence, with reference to the latter’s very discreet presence at the World Conference of Philosophy held in Naples in May 1924 to coincide with the 700th anniversary of the foundation of the city’s university (the same event mentioned in the Naples article co-authored with Lacis).58 On that occasion, Benjamin caught a brief glimpse of the celebrated philosopher, but the Naples article bears no trace of Croce’s work, and particularly not the essays that would be republished in book form as Storia del regno di Napoli in 1925.59 To some extent, this is surprising, given that a discussion of Croce’s aesthetics figures prominently in the preface to the habilitation thesis that Benjamin completed while on Capri.60 But the omission might be explained in part by the fact that Croce’s account of the history of southern Italy is underpinned by a model of historical development that is very different from the Marxist one developed by Lukács and whose implications Benjamin and Bloch were still absorbing during their time in Italy. As followers of Hegel, both Croce and Lukács ascribe a key role to human consciousness in the making of history, but they construe this consciousness in very different ways in relation to social class. For Lukács, in the early twentieth century, the developing class consciousness of the proletariat is in the process of becoming the motor of history, promising to overcome the alienation of capitalism (as implied in his title Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein). According to Croce’s idealist Hegelianism, however, history is made, rather, by a disinterested intellectual minority (composed necessarily of educated members of the bourgeoisie and enlightened aristocracy) whose progressive values gradually shape the future, in spite of the obstacles posed by the opposition or indifference of a majority unable to rise above material interests (SRN, 196–97). Thus for Croce the history of southern Italy is not one of chronic underdevelopment determined by climate, race and resistance to change (as influential essentialist interpretations of the Southern Question insisted), but rather a fitful narrative of incremental improvement propelled by progressive initiatives that make a crucial contribution to social change even when partially frustrated. Within this history, the short-lived Parthenopean Republic of 1799 represented a utopian moment, a failed attempt to introduce constitutional democracy that nonetheless contributed to progress in the long term (SRN, 201–04). As this suggests, Croce’s philosophy of history is voluntaristic and reformist, and implicitly encourages southern intellectuals to defend liberal-progressive ideas against the prevailing Fascist ideology of the early 1920s (SRN, 253–55). Many of the issues discussed in Croce’s book figure also in the work of the leading Marxist politician and intellectual Antonio Gramsci. In May 1924 (shortly after Benjamin’s arrival in Capri and the World Conference of Philosophy in Naples where he caught a glimpse of Croce), Gramsci returned to Italy to take up a seat in the National Assembly after two years in Moscow and Vienna as the Italian Communist Party delegate to the Comintern. The political context was extremely tense as Mussolini’s Fascist party moved to consolidate its hold on power. In June 1924 (while Benjamin was staying on Capri), the Socialist opposition deputy Giacomo Matteotti, an outspoken critic of the regime, was kidnapped and murdered by Fascists. The King, Vittorio Emanuele III, refused to dissolve parliament in spite of the withdrawal of opposition deputies from the Chamber and Communist calls for a general strike, so allowing the Fascist government to remain in power. In January 1925 (six months before the appearance of the Naples essay by Benjamin and Lacis), Mussolini’s government introduced ‘exceptional laws’ to circumvent constitutional restraints on executive power. In November 1926 (five months after the publication of Ernst Bloch’s article), all the Italian Communist Party deputies including Gramsci were arrested and imprisoned, in contravention of their parliamentary immunity. At the time of his arrest in 1926, Gramsci was working on an ambitious essay on the ‘Southern Question’.61 For Gramsci, the stereotypical image of a backward southern Italy parasitic upon the developed north was simple propaganda; it was in fact the north that was exploiting the south as a kind of colony, a source of agricultural produce and cheap migrant labour (AT, 116–17). As a whole, Italy was dominated by the alliance between a northern industrial bourgeoisie and a southern agrarian bloc of landowners (AT, 153). The landowners’ control over the poor peasants who were their labourers and tenants was assured in part by the mediation of southern intellectuals, who tended to identify culturally with the northern bourgeoisie while mitigating the insurrectionary potential of the peasantry by exerting some reformist influence on the exploitative behaviour of their landlords. Gramsci’s political strategy was to work towards an alternative configuration in which an alliance between the northern proletariat and the southern peasantry would challenge that between the northern bourgeoisie and the southern landowners. A key step necessary to achieving this was the transformation of the ideological function of the southern intellectual, involving a realignment with the interests of the peasantry rather than those of the landowners (AT, 141–42). According to Gramsci, one of the main obstacles to this strategy was Benedetto Croce himself. As a leading southern philosopher with national status, Croce’s idealist view of the leadership role of the educated classes helped to defuse the potential radicalism of southern intellectuals by absorbing them into a national cultural milieu that effectively aligned them with the interests of the northern bourgeoisie (and then by extension with their allies the southern landowners) (AT, 137–38). For all its apparent liberalism, the main effect of Croce’s work was, in Gramsci’s view, profoundly reactionary. Notwithstanding Gramsci’s withering critique of Croce’s social and ideological function, their respective analyses of the Southern Question share two key features. First, both insist that the south is an integral part of the modern Italian state and has played a significant part in its foundation and development. Second, both are severely critical of fatalistic or deterministic visions of history and emphasize instead the role of human will in historical change, even if this is understood in very different ways (in the idealist terms of intellectual leadership for Croce, and in the materialist terms of class consciousness and collective political endeavour for Gramsci). The mid-1920s work of Croce and Gramsci participates in an intense ideological struggle over the meaning of the region in which the intellectuals associated with the Frankfurt School spent their summers. In particular, for all their differences, both insist on how the south and north of Italy are not separate entities but intertwined elements of a single nation and economy. This pinpoints two weaknesses in the German Marxist perspective on southern Italy: first, 1920s Italian society and culture are not homogeneous but divided and conflictual; second, neither Naples nor Italy is the ‘Other’ of northern European capitalism; they are in fact part of the same system. Italy is a complex and diverse entity, and this heterogeneity is partly the result of the symbiotic relationship between advanced northern industrial areas and an ‘underdeveloped’ agrarian south. This symbiosis implies, of course, that the frontiers between northern and southern regions are porous rather than impermeable, and this leads in turn to the conclusion that a meaningful dialogue between German and Italian intellectuals in the 1920s might not only have deepened the visitors’ awareness of the wider context for their travelling observations, but also have enriched the local analysis of the Southern Question by adding a resonant conceptual category to the debate. In a sense, the Neapolitan phase of the intellectuals associated with the Frankfurt School represents a missed opportunity, a non-encounter between two regions of what came to be known as Western Marxism, the term coined by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the mid-1950s to designate the various non-Soviet forms of Marxism elaborated in Western Europe since the 1917 Russian Revolution.62 Following Merleau-Ponty, Western Marxism has often been conceived as a geographical entity, and accounts of the movement have been dominated by models of mapping and topography.63 As pointed out by figures as different as Franco Moretti and J. G. Merquior, some of the implications of this geographical modelling have proven misleading while others have remained unexplored.64 One negative consequence of the geographical model is a tendency to emphasize separation and distance rather than relation, particularly when dealing with different national inflections of Marxism. Conversely, the interest of the presence in the Bay of Naples of figures associated with the nascent Frankfurt School lies precisely in its potential to bring together aspects of Western Marxism often construed as distinct and unrelated, even if the tantalizing possibility of a meaningful dialogue between figures such as Benjamin and Gramsci was not realized at the time. In fact, the German travellers of the 1920s kept largely to themselves, and their attempts to interact with Italian intellectuals seemed to fail or fall short. This missed encounter is epitomized by Benjamin’s experience of the World Conference of Philosophy in Naples, from which he gained nothing more than a glimpse of Croce from afar, together with a dismayed sense of the ‘subaltern’ status (Subalternität) of the modern intellectual (a lexical choice that itself inadvertently echoes one of the key terms of Gramsci’s work).65 Whatever awareness Benjamin, Lacis and Bloch may have had of the critical state of Italian politics in the mid-1920s seems to have been largely overshadowed by their own preoccupations. In his correspondence, Benjamin mentions a visit by Mussolini to Capri in September 1924 but not the earlier murder of Matteotti and its political consequences.66 In this context, ironically, the elaboration of the notion of porosity could be said to occur in a kind of sealed space, impermeable to the immediate events surrounding it. Conclusion: travelling theory, the transnational and porosity The emergence of the notion of porosity in the mid-1920s poses three main problems that resonate beyond its immediate context to include later attempts to think through the relations between ideas and place in terms of travelling theory and the transnational. First, in many ways porosity operates as an intellectual model that moves around more or less indifferently without effective local contextualization. In the short term, Benjamin, Lacis and Bloch were deprived of Italian interlocutors, and their ideas simply returned to Germany for publication without any impact on debates in Italy. In these terms, their time in Capri is perhaps more an example of travelling theorists than travelling theory in Said’s sense. Indeed, Said’s work might itself be seen as an attempt to restage this failed encounter between the Lukácsian tradition (reflected in part through the work of Benjamin, Lacis and Bloch) and Gramscian ideas. Said explicitly positioned his own work as a critique of what he perceived as the potentially deterministic or fatalistic model of historical development promoted by Lukács, stressing instead the importance of geography and the human agency involved in the ongoing struggle for ideological and territorial advantage that Gramsci chose to foreground.67 If Said’s first ‘Traveling Theory’ essay corresponds to this critique of the Lukácsian tradition by suggesting how easily domesticated it becomes in a new context, the second essay ‘Traveling Theory Revisited’ presents a more ‘Gramscian’ Lukács, whose work is reinvigorated by a new geopolitical setting. Said’s reparative move is, of course, only possible because of the initial failure of porosity (understood as a reaction to Lukács) to translate immediately into an Italian context in the 1920s, but it does indicate how the promise of that missed encounter might remain available for retrieval at a later opportunity. The second problem with porosity is its vulnerability to recuperation as a key term within a master discourse on the city or nation. The notion of porosity as deployed by Benjamin and Lacis functions as a kind of non-concept, operating as closely as possible to the empirical details of city description (thus the idea of porosity is implicit in the very tufa of which the city of Naples is built). In a sense, it seems designed to resist its elevation into an analytic category, yet this is the fate that befalls it, especially once it is appropriated by Ernst Bloch as a means of describing Italian culture as a whole. In spite of itself, porosity becomes a kind of master category mobilized to account for a vast range of different phenomena. Similar risks attend attempts to develop travelling and transnational models of culture that seek to avoid centre–periphery hierarchies by emphasizing horizontal relations between the phenomena they seek to capture. Once posited, a key concept tends to become an organizational centre and risks reinstating the hierarchy it set out to challenge. The third problem with porosity is the possibility that it may compromise its analytic value by over-extending itself. Bloch’s deployment of the concept of porosity in conjunction with his model of the interpenetration of different cultures emphasizes the diversity and profusion that results from permeable boundaries. This has the advantage of challenging narrow or monolithic definitions of cultural identity, an aim shared by travelling and transnational models of culture, but Bloch’s reliance on a rhetoric of proliferation means that porosity runs the risk of losing analytic purchase on the specificity it seeks to define. If everything is hybrid, then the supposedly particular components of diversity quickly relinquish their distinctiveness, leading potentially to a loss of a meaningful sense of cultural difference. In a sense, the second and third problems are variations on the difficulty of trying to escape the restrictions of a metalanguage or a master-discourse designed to offer analytic control of a given field of study. If the aim is to reconfigure a field along non-hierarchical lines (as transnational analysis seeks to do with respect to relations between nation-states and national cultures), then the development of a metalanguage is something to be resisted. One possible way out is to implode the metalanguage, to choose deliberately a ‘weak’ concept that undermines itself and cannot serve effectively as a robust analytic category; another way out is to explode the metalanguage, multiplying heterogeneous examples until the idea of a master analysis collapses through excess. As we have seen, porosity operates at both ends of the spectrum (implosion in the hands of Benjamin and Lacis; explosion in the hands of Bloch); it is able to challenge even its own claims to metalinguistic status in the modes of impoverishment and excess. In that sense, in etymological terms, the porous is aporetic, its passage (póros, in Greek) is impassable (áporos, in Greek). This gives it considerable tactical value in the ongoing challenge to the centralized and sedentary models of power and culture that travelling and transnational theory seek to mount. As a travelling theory, then, and as a precursor of the transnational, porosity operates in an ambiguous way. On the one hand, it runs the risk of establishing itself as a master-concept and so redrawing certain boundaries and reinforcing certain stereotypes (along the lines of characterizing Naples, southern Italy or even the country as a whole as lacking coherence). On the other hand, porosity also resists elevation to a metalanguage, and so represents an opportunity to move beyond frontiers and stereotypes in so far as it rejects the idea of containment and closure. In its paradoxical relation to fixed conceptual frameworks, porosity has the frustrating potential to be elusive in detail and excessive in range. No wonder that the term has been condemned as imprecise and over-used. As Ernst Bloch conceded already in the mid-1920s, porosity is a problem (IP, 515); it lacks consistency and integrity. But it is precisely this problematic character that allows the notion of porosity to problematize in turn apparently stable cultural models that in contrast take themselves too much for granted. In these terms, porosity offers itself as a particularly useful tool for the critique of the narrowly conceived nation-state, albeit one that needs to be handled with care. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This work was supported by the Humanities Institute, University College Dublin, under the auspices of the ‘Modern Architecture and Culture at Mid-Century’ research project. Endnotes 1 See, for example, Dietrich Erben, ‘Porous: Notes on the Architectural History of the Term’, in Porous City: From Metaphor to Urban Agenda, ed. by Sophie Wolfrum (Basel: Birkhauser, 2018), pp. 26–31 (p. 29). 2 For the founding text, see Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis, ‘Neapel’ (1925), in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Herman Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), IV.1, pp. 307–16, hereafter NE in the text. For an overview of porosity as a topos of writing about Naples, see Salvatore Pisani, ‘Neapel-Topoi’, in Neapel: Sechs Jahrhunderte Kulturgeschichte, ed. by Salvatore Pisani and Katharina Siebenmorgen (Berlin: Reimer, 2009), pp. 28–37. For an overview of the use of porosity in urbanism, see the contributions in Porous City, ed. by Sophie Wolfrum. 3 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). 4 Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), p. 184. 5 On transnationalism in general, see Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism (London: Routledge, 2009). 6 See for example Tyler Stovall, Transnational France: The Modern History of a Universal Nation (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2015). 7 See for example Minor Transnationalisms, ed. by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 8 See Edward W. Said, ‘Traveling Theory’ (1982), in The World, The Text and the Critic (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), pp. 226–47 (first published in Raritan, 1.3 (1982), 41–67), and ‘Traveling Theory Reconsidered’ (1994), in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), pp. 173–86 (first published in Critical Reconstructions: The Relationship of Fiction and Life, ed. by Robert M. Polhemus and Roger B. Henkle (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 251–65) (subsequent references are to the book republications); and James Clifford, ‘Traveling Cultures’, in Cultural Studies, ed. by Lawrence Greenberg, Cary Nelson and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 96–116, and Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). On travelling theory, see Charles Forsdick, ‘Travelling Concepts: Postcolonial Approaches to Exoticism’, Paragraph, 24.3 (2008), 12–29. 9 Clifford, ‘Traveling Cultures’, p. 108. 10 The term ‘Frankfurt School’ is used here in a broad sense, referring to the constellation of German Marxist thinkers loosely gathered around Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and the Institut für Sozialforschung, originally based in Frankfurt am Main, and not in the narrow sense of the formally affiliated members of the latter. The texts concerned will be cited in the original as they are discussed, but the main articles are usefully anthologized in Italian translation in Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Siegfried Kracauer, Karl Löwith and Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Napoli, ed. by Enrico Donaggio, trans. by Tristana Dini, Enrico Donaggio, Claudio Groff and Francesca Tondi (Naples: L’Ancora, 2000). For extended discussions of these texts, with a focus on Adorno but considerable attention to other figures, see Martin Mittelmeier, Adorno in Neapel: wie sich eine Sehnsuchtslandschaft in Philosophie verwandelt (2013; Munich: btb, 2015). 11 Ernst Bloch, ‘Italien und die Porösität’ (1926), in Ernst Bloch, Gesamtausgabe, ed. by Burghart Schmidt, 16 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1968–78), IX, pp. 508–15, hereafter IP in the text. 12 Said, ‘Traveling Theory’, pp. 226–27. 13 The Benjamin and Lacis essay on Naples was not published in Italian translation until 1979. See Benjamin auf Italienisch: Aspekte einer Rezeption, ed. by Momme Brodersen (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Neue Kritik, 1982), p. 148, and Adorno et al., Napoli, p. 109. 14 Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 261. 15 Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014), pp. 200–16. Arriving on the 9 or 10 April, Benjamin would leave on 10 October. See also Momme Brodersen, ‘Von Berlin nach Capri: Walter Benjamin in Italien’, in Benjamin auf Italienisch, pp. 120–42. 16 Mittelmeier, Adorno in Neapel, p. 247. 17 Walter Benjamin, ‘Jakob Job, Neapel’ (1928), in Gesammelte Schriften, III, pp. 132–35 (p. 133). 18 Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann (1928; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), p. 145. 19 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 8, 26–27. 20 Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, p. 211. 21 Brodersen, ‘Von Berlin nach Capri’, p. 141. 22 Walter Benjamin, Einbahnstraße/Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2011), p. 7. 23 On the relationship between Benjamin and Lacis and its handling in the reception of Benjamin’s work, see Heinrich Kaulen, ‘Walter Benjamin und Asja Lacis. Eine biographische Konstellation und ihre Folgen’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 69 (1995), 92–122, and Martin Mittlemeier, ‘Asja Lacis in Neapel: Wie das Konzept der Porosität den Stil der Texte Walter Benjamins und Theodor W. Adornos beeinflußt’, Kulturas Krustpunkti, 8 (2015), 79–85. 24 Hildegard Brenner, ‘Nachwort’, in Asja Lacis, Revolutionär im Beruf: Berichte über proletarisches Theater, über Meyerhold, Brecht, Benjamin und Piscator (Munich: Rogner & Bernard, 1971), pp. 131–36 (p. 133); Kaulen, ‘Walter Benjamin und Asja Lacis’, p. 94; and Mittelmeier, Adorno in Neapel, pp. 44, 258. 25 Kaulen, ‘Walter Benjamin und Asja Lacis’, pp. 95–96. 26 See, for example, Susan Ingram, ‘The Writing of Asja Lacis’, New German Critique, 86 (2002), 159–77, and Justine McGill, ‘The Porous Coupling of Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis’, Angelaki, 13.2 (2008), 59–72. 27 Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), p. 36; Andrew Benjamin, ‘Porosity at the Edge: Working through Walter Benjamin’s “Naples”’, in Walter Benjamin and Architecture, ed. by Gevork Hartoonian (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 39–50 (p. 49); Mittelmeier, Adorno in Neapel, p. 49; and Erben, ‘Porous’, p. 26. 28 Klaus Garber, Zum Bilde Walter Benjamins: Studien, Porträts, Kritiken (Munich: Fink, 1992), p. 175. 29 Erben, ‘Porous’, p. 26. 30 Lacis, Revolutionär im Beruf, p. 50. 31 Erben, ‘Porous’, p. 26. 32 Lacis, Revolutionär im Beruf, p. 50. 33 Momme Brodersen, Walter Benjamin: A Biography, trans. by Malcolm R. Green and Ingrida Ligers, ed. by Martina Dervis (London: Verso, 1997), p. 143. 34 See, for instance, Sigfried Giedion, Bauen im Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton (1928; Berlin: Mann Verlag, 2000), a book that would later figure as an important source in Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk. On Benjamin and Giedion, see Heinz Brüggemann, ‘Walter Benjamin und Sigfried Giedion oder die Wege der Modernität’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift dür Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, 70.3 (1996), 443–74. 35 See Benjamin, ‘Jakob Job, Neapel’ and ‘Neapel’ (1931), in Gesammelte Schriften, VII.1, pp. 206–14. 36 Walter Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, 2 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), I, p. 292. 37 See, for example, La città porosa: conversazioni su Napoli, ed. by Claudio Velardi (Naples: Cronopio, 1992); Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (New York: Verso, 2002), p. 373; Iain Chambers, Culture After Humanism: History, Culture, Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 129–33 and ‘Naples: A Porous Modernity’, in Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of Interrupted Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 71–129. 38 See, for example, Benjamin, ‘Porosity at the Edge’, and Porous City, ed. by Sophie Wolfrum. 39 Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), p. 5. 40 On the considerable overlap between the Benjamin and Lacis essay and Bloch’s text, see Stefan Bub, ‘Porosität und Gassengeschlinge: Siegfried Kracauers und Walter Benjamins mediterrane Städtebilder’, KulturPoetik, 10.1 (2010), 48–61 (p. 50). 41 Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst, 2nd edn (1915; Munich: Hugo Bruckmann Verlag, 1917), pp. 20–79. 42 Arturo Larcati, ‘Neapel, die poröse Stadt: Anmerkungen zu Benjamin, Bloch, Henze’, Literatur und Kritik, 359–60 (2001), 68–74 (pp. 69–70). 43 For the first German publication, see Ernst Bloch, ‘Italien une die Porosität’, Die Weltbühne, 22.26 (1926), 995–99. For the English translation, see ‘Italy and Porosity’, in Ernst Bloch, Literary Essays, trans. by Andrew Joron (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 450–57. For the Italian translation, see Ernst Bloch, ‘L’Italia e la porosità’, in Adorno et al., Napoli, pp. 19–28. 44 Enrico Donaggio, ‘Introduzione’, in Adorno et al., Napoli, p. 15. 45 Mittlemeier, Adorno in Neapel, p. 50. 46 Christina Ujma, ‘Zweierlei Porosität: Walter Benjamin und Ernst Bloch beschreiben italienische Städte’, Links 2007: Rivista di letteratura e cultura tedesca / Zeitschrift für deutsche Literatur und Kulturwissenschaft, 7 (2007), 57–64 (p. 60). 47 Said, ‘Traveling Theory’, p. 236. 48 James Clifford, ‘Notes on Travel and Theory’, Inscriptions, 5 (1989), 177–88. 49 Said, ‘Traveling Theory Revisited’, p. 439. 50 Georg Lukács, Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein: Studien über marxistische Dialektik (1923; Munich: Luchterhand, 1970), p. 173. The formulation echoes Marx’s reference to ‘versteinerte Verhältnisse’ in Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosphie: Einleitung, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, 44 vols (Berlin: Dietz, 1970–), I, p. 380. 51 Ernst Bloch, ‘Aktualität und Utopie: zu Lukács’ Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein’, in Gesamtausgabe, X, pp. 598–621, and Walter Benjamin, letter to Gerhard [Gershom] Scholem, 13 June 1924, in Briefe, ed. by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, 2 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966), I, pp. 346–50 (p. 350). 52 On Fiorelli’s technique, see Eugene Dwyer, ‘Science or Morbid Curiosity? The Casts of Giuseppe Fiorelli and the Last Days of Romantic Pompeii’, in Antiquity Recovered: The Legacy of Pompeii and Herculaneum, ed. by Victoria C. Gardner Coates and Jon L. Seydl (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007), pp. 171–88. 53 See Théophile Gautier, Arria Marcella, souvenir de Pompéi (1852; Paris: Livre de poche, 1999); Sigmund Freud, ‘Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens “Gradiva”’, in Gesammelte Werke, ed. by Anna Freud, 18 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999), VII, pp. 30–125; and Viaggio in Italia , dir. by Roberto Rossellini (Italia Film, 1954). 54 Ermanno Rea, Mistero napoletano (Turin: Einaudi, 1995), p. 3. 55 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Putting Hierarchy in its Place’, Cultural Anthropology, 3.1 (1988), 36–49 (p. 36). 56 Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis, p. 35. Gilloch concedes that Benjamin’s later urban writings integrate more historical and socio-economic context, as may be seen even in his two later pieces on Naples. 57 The literature on the Southern Question is of course considerable. For an historical survey of the formulation of the problem and a range of ‘solutions’, see Italy’s ‘Southern Question’: Orientalism in One Country, ed. by Jane Schneider (Oxford: Berg, 1998). For a succinct summary of the cultural stereotypes involved, see Gabriella Gribaudi, ‘Images of the South: The Mezzogiorno as seen by Insiders and Outsiders’, in The New History of the Italian South, ed. by Robert Lumley and Jonathan Morris (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), pp. 83–113. 58 Walter Benjamin, letter to Gerhard [Gershom] Scholem, 10 May 1924, in Briefe, I, p. 344. 59 Benedetto Croce, Storia del regno di Napoli (1925; Bari: Laterza, 1967), hereafter SRN in the text. On the pre-publication of the book’s essays in Croce’s journal La critica, see SRN, p. ix. 60 Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, pp. 25–28, and Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, p. 214. On the relations between Benjamin’s and Croce’s conceptions of history, see Axel Körner, ‘The Experience of Time in Crisis: On Croce’s and Benjamin’s Concept of History’, Intellectual History Review, 21.2 (2011), 151–69. 61 Antonio Gramsci, ‘Alcuni temi della questione meridionale’, in Nel mondo grande e terribile: antologia degli scritti 1914–1935, ed. by Giuseppe Vacca (Turin: Einaudi, 2008), pp. 115–42, hereafter AT in the text. 62 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Les Aventures de la dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), pp. 43–80. 63 See, for example, Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (1976; London: Verso, 1979), and Martin Jay, ‘The Topography of Western Marxism’, in Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 1–20. 64 Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998), p. 9, and J. G. Merquior, Western Marxism (London: Paladin, 1986), p. 1. 65 Benjamin, letter to Gerhard [Gerhsom] Scholem, 10 May 1924, in Briefe, I, p. 344. 66 Benjamin, letter to Gerhard [Gershom] Scholem, 16 September 1924, in Briefe, I, p. 353. 67 Edward W. Said, ‘History, Literature and Geography’ (1995), in Reflections on Exile, pp. 453–73. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews. The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland: No. SC013532. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews. The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland: No. SC013532.
TI - Porosity and the Transnational: Travelling Theory between Naples and Frankfurt (Walter Benjamin, Asja Lacis and Ernst Bloch)
JO - Forum for Modern Language Studies
DO - 10.1093/fmls/cqab001
DA - 2021-07-15
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/porosity-and-the-transnational-travelling-theory-between-naples-and-lluWdA08DX
SP - 240
EP - 259
VL - 57
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -