The Writing is on the Wall

My hand – is a fool’s hand: woe to all tables and walls and whatever has room left for fool’s scribbling, fool’s doodling!

– Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

 
After the reunification of Germany in 1990, the project to renovate the Berlin Reichstag was awarded to the British architect Norman Foster, who described his plan for the structure as “a quest for transparency and lightness as well as democracy,” adding that his design was guided by the conviction that a “parliament should be open, accessible, and inviting to the society that it serves” (“Preface” 12-13).¹ Foster’s most striking additions to the historic edifice were a large glass cupola on the roof of the building and a new legislative chamber dominated by glass walls and connected to the rooftop dome by a conic tunnel; during daylight hours, a set of mirrors reflects natural light into the assembly hall, while at night, the artificial lighting from inside is cast upward, illuminating the cupola.²
 

 

 

Click for larger view

Fig. 1.

Reichstag at Night

© Nigel Young/Foster + Partners.

 

 
Commencing just after the wrapping of the Reichstag by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Foster’s reconstruction of the building appears to cement its status as a modernist icon reborn as a postmodern one. At the same time, his ideology of transparency recalls nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates about the transformative, even utopian power of glass and steel architecture and their implications for the reshaping of a public sphere more accustomed to the concealing power of stone. Just as many modernist thinkers challenged the notion that transparency was an intrinsically democratizing concept, contemporary critics question whether it is helpful for understanding individual or social agency.³ From this perspective, Foster’s commitment to openness may be an effort to cloak political tensions masquerading as an invitation to free debate, his experiment in sensationalist spectacle offering a vision of a polity grounded in identity and homogeneity, without any place for heterogeneity or difference.
 
The limitations of this architecture of exposure become even more evident if we turn from the showy glass additions to the Reichstag and focus on the original stone. As Foster’s crews stripped away the plasterboard and asbestos lining the interior walls since earlier renovations in the 1960s, they discovered approximately two hundred surviving examples of the Russian graffiti that had covered almost every inch of the building’s vertical surfaces in May 1945 as the victorious soldiers of the Red Army scrawled everything from signatures to vulgar taunts to brief travelogues (e.g., “Moscow-Smolensk-Berlin”).⁴
 

 

 

Click for larger view

Fig. 2.

© ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York

 

 
Foster was determined to preserve these wall writings: “the Reichstag’s fabric bears the imprint of time and events more powerfully than any exhibition could convey. I remain convinced that the graffiti should not be erased” (“Living Museum” 11). On his view, the return of the repressed that emerged as the layers of earlier additions were peeled away provides an authentic record of the past. It is a “natural” exhibit of history, a “living museum,” as Foster describes it, which surpasses any “artificial” exhibit a museum curator might organize. Not wiping the walls clean becomes a means for the newly unified German nation to demonstrate that it can face the past honestly and constructively. “Our approach,” writes Foster, “was radical, based in the view that the history of the building should not be sanitized. And the fact that Germany accepted this approach shows to me what an extraordinarily open and progressive society it has become” (qtd. in Cohen).
 
While Germany did accept Foster’s position, it was not without compromise, for critiques of the preservation effort emerged from across the political spectrum. One common objection was that the Red Army’s decoration of the Reichstag walls was offensive and might poison German-Russian relations. The Russian ambassador himself protested that “Death to the Germans” was not an appropriate slogan for the hallway of a parliamentary building, although he also released a contradictory statement claiming that “attempts to wipe away [the graffiti] would be very harmful to the reconciliation and trust between our two peoples, particularly against the background of the sixtieth anniversary of Nazi Germany’s attack on our country” (qtd. in Baker 36; see also Bornhöft 46). Another objection was that preserving the graffiti was tantamount to turning the Reichstag into a museum of Cyrillic characters and that there would not be enough remaining space on the walls for German art; this protest was complemented by the suggestion that the Russian writing should be replaced with “German symbols” (Bornhöft 46-47; Homola). In the opposite vein, the conservative politician Wolfgang Zeitelmann condemned the Russian graffiti for its failure to rise to the level of an aesthetic object, comparing it to dirt or pollution—a denigration that radicalized the widely-held view that Foster’s plan to leave the walls undisturbed exaggerated the significance of what were ultimately trivial markings, of no more interest than what one would find on the walls of a public restroom in any Russian-speaking city (Baker 35).
 
Roger Cohen, the Berlin correspondent for The New York Times, offered a darker interpretation of Foster’s agenda: “Certainly there is something ‘open,’ if not plain masochistic, about obliging Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, whose father died in 1944 on his way back from the Russian front, to pass Russian obscenities to reach his blue-doored parliamentary office.” In these terms, walking down the graffiti-marked halls of the revamped building constitutes a repetition of the death march of one’s forefathers, and the threat of such an experience is perceived to be so acute that it warrants bleaching the past from the walls, as if such an emendation of one of the most historically significant structures in Berlin over the last century could, much less should, cleanse it of its multiple layers of symbolic significance. In the end, Foster yielded to this host of contradictory attacks, but only to a degree—the explicitly lewd and aggressive statements were expunged, and the majority of what remains on the walls today are simply soldiers’ signatures.
 

 

 

Click for larger view

Fig. 3.

© goerner-foto.de

 

 
Whether it has been deemed a transparent portal to the past or an obfuscation of it, hopelessly out of place or in exactly the right spot, a record of the monumental defeat of fascism or a confirmation of the banality of incidental scribbling, the Russian graffiti on the Berlin Reichstag has prompted a host of contradictory judgments that say as much about the uncertain relationship between buildings and writing as they do about European history or the health of democracy in contemporary Germany. We are accustomed to treating graffiti as a provocation. Lying on top of and yet outside of formally or legally delineated surfaces—the sides of homes and businesses, billboards, or official monuments—graffiti can be seen as a challenge to property rights. Mocking the authority of official signs and community announcements, it competes with the corporate advertising that saturates urban space. As a transgression in and of the rules that govern the public and private spheres, it is out in the open for all to see, but it frequently complicates its own exhibitionist tendencies by remaining cryptic or illegible to anyone not privy to the nuances of its scripts and iconographies. Bold, colorful, and enticing, graffiti is equally vexing and impenetrable, a tension between display and inscrutability that is crystallized in the graffiti artist’s tag or “anonymous signature,” the distinctive mark, reproduced over and over again that reveals a given instance of wall writing to be part of a specific—nameless, faceless—individual’s oeuvre, an oeuvre that may consist of nothing more than such tags, spread across the buildings of a metropolitan area or throughout multiple cities.
 
At the same time, the simple equation of graffiti with vandalism is of relatively recent vintage, and its prominence today can obscure some of the other complexities that have surrounded wall writing since ancient times, in particular its challenges to our ideas about the personal or impersonal nature of the written word, its relationship to its addressees, and above all, its significance for the structures on which it appears. If graffiti is often seen to be powerful because it is transgressive, its intricate scripts all the more striking in that they are not supposed to be where they are, graffiti also reveals that the demand to be written on is essential to architecture. The Reichstag will never constitute the “natural” historical phenomenon that Foster envisions because buildings are always potential sites of—if not provocations to—scratchings and scribblings. There is no wall until the writing is on the wall. Conversely, graffiti—putatively writing that is somehow out of place—proves to be the paradigmatic case that shows all writing to be in the wrong place, forever corrupting the propriety of the sites it inhabits. One consequence is that graffiti is fundamentally unreliable as an historical artifact: undeniably a product of its context—local, singular, and contingent—it is nonetheless out of step with any context that claims it as its own. While Foster’s renovation of the Reichstag aimed to preserve the writing on the wall while transforming other features of the building, he failed to see that any instance of graffiti is a display of the capacities, and limits, of writing. This auto-exhibitive trait is crucial for understanding graffiti’s aesthetic and political powers, and dangers.
 
If Foster’s taste for transparency recalls modernist debates about glass architecture, his use of graffiti alludes to an important strand of modernist photography, an obsession with taking pictures of words that stretches from Eugène Atget’s photos of inscriptions on trees to the placards, billboards, and other signs that populate the city scenes of Walker Evans and Aaron Siskind. A key contribution to this project was the oeuvre of the Hungarian photographer Gyula Halász (1899-1984), known more popularly by his pseudonym Brassaï. Half a century before the historic renovation of the Reichstag, Brassaï explored the relationship between language and architecture on the walls of Paris. Many of the scenes he recorded were palimpsest-like combinations of words and images comprised of chalk markings and carvings in stone. In his own accounts of his photographic practice, Brassaï insists that walls are not simply barriers or supports for structures in which people live, work, or shop, but provocations: “A high wall throws down a challenge. Protecting property, defending order, it is a target for protest and insult, as well as for demands of every sexual, political, or social persuasion” (Graffiti 19). For Brassaï, a wall is a field of cultural forces—mores, standards, and injunctions—and the graffiti artist is uniquely positioned to intervene in the expressive dynamics of the social order and transform daily life. In a 1933 essay in the Surrealist journal Minotaure, Brassaï declares that the “bastard art of the streets of ill repute that does not even arouse our curiosity, so ephemeral that it is easily obliterated by bad weather or a coat of paint, nevertheless offers a criterion of worth. Its authority is absolute, overturning all the laboriously established canons of aesthetics” (qtd. in Lewisohn 29). Such claims may seem overblown. It is a rare artistic medium that overturns “all the laboriously established canons of aesthetics,” and urban graffiti, ubiquitous in classical and medieval cities, was anything but a newcomer to the European scene. One might infer that what Brassaï is really celebrating is not the power of graffiti, but the revolutionary power of photography itself, as the newer art form. The problem with such a conclusion is that it would appear to be tantamount to proposing that Brassaï’s photos of Parisian walls negate the transience and fragility that for him define graffiti, fixing for posterity something that he maintains is not fixed at all. However, Brassaï does not actually conceive of photography in terms of its power to preserve the past by presenting it to a viewer in the form of an image that can be identified as a straightforward record of prior experience. In his book Proust in the Power of Photography, he argues that involuntary memory and latent image “are phenomena closely linked in [Proust’s] mind: when he is struck by a sound or a taste which has the mysterious virtue of reviving a sensation or an emotion, he is irresistibly led to relate this phenomenon to the apparition of the latent image under the effect of a revealing agent” (xi). Like his contemporary Walter Benjamin, also a devotee of Proust, Brassaï characterizes the encounter with a photograph not in terms of a viewer’s conscious reaction to what is manifestly presented, but as a process in which he or she unintentionally confronts something that is intimately his or her own yet remains irreducibly foreign; one re-experiences something that has never before been experienced and that gains its psychic significance from the fact that access to it is organized by unconscious impulses.⁵ For Brassaï, a photograph is a representation of the collapse of representation. Rather than reproducing what might otherwise be forgotten, the image captured by the camera confirms that what it allows us to engage with becomes meaningful only as something invisible or missing.
 
Juxtaposing Brassaï’s analyses of photography, graffiti, and Proust, it becomes difficult to distinguish between his accounts of these three different media. Considering the best-known Parisian graffiti artist of the 1930s, Restif de la Bretonne (a.k.a. “The Scribbler”), Brassaï observes that an encounter with one of his creations will prompt involuntary memories: “As he dotted graffiti about the Île Saint-Louis, Restif was preparing and, as it were, inciting reminiscences akin to Proust’s experiences with ‘madeleines,’ ‘uneven paving-stones,’ and ‘starched towels'” (Graffiti 19). For Brassaï, a profound engagement with a cathedral or monument is not a matter of gazing up at it, overwhelmed by its sublime grandiosity or entranced by the interplay of intricate forms. A building is far more imposing when it is confronted as a site of inscriptions—not inscriptions that are read and deciphered, but inscriptions that encipher one’s relationship to one’s own experiences. Treating graffiti as something essential to vertical surfaces rather than as a violation of them, Brassaï proposes that a wall does not truly become a wall until we have glimpsed at least a portent of the writing that will mark it. There is no wall until the writing is on the wall that there will be writing on the wall.
 
The affinity between photography and graffiti lies not in their common capacity to exhibit, but in the way they both illustrate the ruin of any simple connection between an artwork’s manifestation—as a word, an image, or a building—and its status as a representation of something, be it a figure or an idea, that existed prior to its creation. In Brassaï’s photographs, this ruin of representation first and foremost means the ruin of writing. A number of his photographs show walls on which various rogue markings have been sloppily painted over by municipal workers. Half-obliterated, he argues, “each letter is converted into another from some imaginary alphabet, and a curious writing system is born—hermetic, enigmatic, of strange beauty” (Graffiti 20). The conversion of the alphabet in its effacement at the hands of the city employee is powerful because it recalls the original conversion that takes place every time a graffiti artist goes to work. The distinctive way in which a graffito places letters or symbols on display inexorably transforms them. On the one hand, the scriptural excesses of wall writing tend toward the baroque, threatening to produce characters so ornate as to be indecipherable. On the other hand, the words on the wall begin to lose their status as words. In this vein, the author and filmmaker Frederick Baker observes that much of the confusion about the Russian graffiti on the Reichstag stemmed from the fact that it was composed in the Cyrillic alphabet and therefore gave non-Russian speakers the “visual impression of an abstract painting, which to some turns the graffiti into art” (36). Brassaï’s photos of obliterated sentences hint that all graffiti is distinguished by the way in which it turns letters, words, and sentences into non-verbal images or even abstract shapes.⁶ Far from simply constituting an example of writing in the wrong place, graffiti outs writing as something more or less than writing, revealing it to be constantly on the verge of collapsing into either meaningless cipher or unadulterated ornamentation. Prior to any personal or political sentiment it may express, a graffito is an instance of language that provokes language; the primary object of its scorn is not any particular property owner or authority figure, but the belief that wall writing can be written off as more out of place—and hence less serious than, or even somehow fundamentally different from—than any other verbal discourse.
 
If graffiti is writing that is under attack by writing, it does not necessarily constitute an aesthetic spectacle that dominates the wall on which it is exhibited. Brassaï maintains that it is in the nature of a wall to compete with whatever one puts on it, suggesting that the real seduction of graffiti may have to do with the way in which it reveals that a wall is more beautiful than anything a wall writer can do to or on it, even if the wall is the provocation that spurs the artist to action. In these terms, graffiti is of interest precisely because its audiences do not become embroiled in unpacking its symbolic or semiotic nuances and instead see through it to appreciate the elegance and power of the buildings that host it. Brassaï’s photos of painted-over graffiti would thus be parodies of the essential status of wall writing as see-through, sardonic demonstrations that no matter how obscure or imposing a graffito is, it is not what an onlooker processes when he or she confronts it. Ultimately, Brassaï seems unsure about whether it is the writing or the walls that are the real subject matter of his photographs, indicating not that graffiti is an art form so dependent on its material medium as to be indistinguishable from it, but rather that it no longer makes sense to differentiate between the exhibitionary powers of words and buildings.
 
By contrast, Brassaï is unequivocal when it comes to detailing the specificity of the act of graffiti writing, which for him distinguishes its effects from those of other verbal media: “Neither newspapers, nor posters have supplanted ‘the writing on the wall.’ A word inscribed by hand in huge letters has an impact that no poster can possibly have. Imbued with the emotion and anger of the gesture that made it, it holds forth, barring the way forward” (Graffiti 20). According to Brassaï, a work of graffiti should be understood as an event rather than as a static object. The power, not to mention the precariousness, of such a conception of the artwork is explored by Theodor W. Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory, where he avers that “artworks have the immanent character of being an act, even if they are carved in stone” (105). For Adorno the “phenomenon of fireworks is prototypical for artworks” in general, because fireworks “appear empirically yet are liberated from the burden of the empirical, which is the obligation of duration; they are a sign from heaven yet artifactual, an ominous warning, a script that flashes up, vanishes, and indeed cannot be read for its meaning” (107). Adorno’s word for “ominous warning,” Menetekel, invokes a story in the Book of Daniel in which the Babylonian King Belshazzar and his court are shocked to see a human hand appear out of nowhere and write Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin on the wall. Neither the King nor his wise men are able to understand the message, but on the queen’s advice, they invite the dream interpreter Daniel to examine the mysterious scrawl, and he explains that the words, units of measure and currency, indicate that the monarch’s reign is “measured.” If the analysis was simple, it also proved to be deadly accurate. The sovereign was slain that night, his line ended, and his kingdom was divided between the Medes and the Persians.
 
Biblical scholars have interrogated every detail of this tale, starting with the question of why the King and his court could not make out what was written on the wall given that the message was apparently composed in Aramaic, their language. If this is a story about the relationship between political and hermeneutic authority, it is notable that the modern idioms that reference it all but elide the centrality the Hebrew Bible accords to the interpretive prowess of Daniel. The English expression the writing is on the wall implies that knowledge of impending danger is garnered the moment you recognize that script has appeared; there is no need for the assistance of a skilled exegete to grasp that a threat is at hand. The German expression das Menetekel an der Wand, “the omen on the wall,” goes one step further and factors out the written quality of the portent entirely such that the warning appears as a self-evident threat, with no specification as to whether its mode of transmission is graphematic or pictographic. Indeed, in German the wall itself starts to fade away, for if the word Menetekel unambiguously invokes the story from Daniel, ein Menetekel can, as in Adorno’s text, refer to an ominous sign encountered somewhere other than on a wall, suggesting that the force of its threat is independent of the facts surrounding its emergence.
 
The different elements of the Book of Daniel that survive in these contemporary expressions indicate that where the relationship to an uncertain future is concerned—when the writing genuinely is “on the wall”—there is a temptation to forget about the writing, the wall, and the hand, as the mysterious fingers that marked the Babylonian King’s chamber are in effect replaced by Menetekel, a ghostly conjunction of two Aramaic words that point back to the bizarre circumstances surrounding their original production, if only fleetingly. It is as if the spirit hand, the phantom scribe of the original story, has become a second-order ghost, leaving its famous act of “wall writing” to remind us that the origins and intentions of all writing are shrouded in spectral mists and that every effort to understand even the most directed slogan solely in terms of the context in which it appears is doomed to failure. The lesson of Daniel’s hermeneutic prowess is that the space in which an instance of writing appears never completely circumscribes the script, delimits it, or controls its referential or signifying pretensions.
 
The question is whether every time one picks up a can of spray paint or a piece of chalk and starts writing on a wall, one is participating in the same godly or ghostly production logic that left the Babylonian King and his court in confusion as it literally spelled out their doom. Is part of what makes graffiti powerful that it reveals the act of writing itself to be a mystery, an anxiety-inducing, if not lethal, operation? In Adorno and Brassaï, the arresting experience of graffiti is paradigmatic for art as such. The flash whereby the script and the building are momentarily manifest as spectacle warns that the violence that allows media such as writing and architecture to come into their own through their mutual interpenetration also guarantees their essential transience. At its most imposing, if not traumatic, an encounter with a sentence or a building is distinguished by a gesture that foretells the doom of the words or the structure in question.
 
Brassaï’s interest in approaching the relationship between language and architecture through the problem of gesture is shared by his contemporary Bertolt Brecht, for whom wall writing represents a confounding intersection of the material and the immaterial. In a series of poems written in the late 1930s, Brecht casts his net more widely than Brassaï does in considering the entire range of scripts on buildings, from official placards to the scrawls of political dissidents fleeing the police. Some of his observations are practical, e.g., he argues that low-paid construction workers would be empowered if they were permitted to sign their creations, an idea he sought to put into practice decades later when he composed epigrams to laborers for display on East German public buildings. Brecht’s lyrics also make a more abstract call for a merger of poetry and architecture, as if the very distinction between the two art forms were a relic of bourgeois thinking. In a short text called “The Undefeatable Inscription,” Brecht describes an imprisoned socialist dissident who engraves the words “Long Live Lenin!” on his cell wall. Despite the guards’ best efforts to paint over the offending remark, the words continue to shine forth, and even after a stonemason has chiseled away at the phrase for hours, “Long live Lenin!” remains clearly legible. Having failed to eradicate the offending graffito, the head guard becomes frantic, and the poem concludes with his desperate injunction: “Remove the wall!” (39-40).⁷ The irony is not simply that even this final gesture may fail to erase the message. The walls have become dispensable to the prison, toppled, in effect, by the words. The prisoner’s writing is so out of place that the walls have lost their pride of place; their importance as a containment field is undermined by the way in which they serve as a site for a scriptural display.
 
In an essay on Brecht’s poetry, Walter Benjamin dwells on a short collection of texts called “German War Primer.”⁸ Benjamin proposes that these poems that repeatedly discuss wall writing are themselves written in a “lapidary” style, stressing that the word “lapidary” (in German, lapidar) is derived from the Latin lapis (“stone”) and refers to the ancient lettering that was developed for monumental inscriptions. The most important characteristic of this style, Benjamin argues, is its brevity, which he in part attributes to the difficulty of chiseling words into stone, but also to the fact that there was an awareness that “in speaking to subsequent generations it was proper to be brief” (Selected 4 240). The exact parameters of this propriety remain vague, if not counterintuitive, since a review of the surviving objects of antiquity reveals that not every classical author epitomizes the concision Benjamin prescribes, and producing a longer text does not necessarily prove fatal for the reception of one’s work over the millennia.⁹
 
Acknowledging that his friend Brecht did not carve his lyrics into stone with a chisel, Benjamin asks what will remain if we strip away the “natural, material conditions of the lapidary style in these poems” and confront their “inscription style” as such (Selected 4 240). To this end, he cites one of the short pieces in the collection, which he deems to be not simply lapidary, but a text about lapidary writing:
 

On the wall was written in chalk:

Auf der Mauer stand mit Kreide:

They want war.

Sie wollen den Krieg.

The man who wrote it

Der es geschrieben hat

Has already fallen.

Ist schon gefallen.

(240)

Benjamin suggests that the first line of this poem could be the opening line of any of the poems in “German War Primer.” As “inscriptions,” he proposes, these texts should be compared not to the writings on Roman monuments that remain legible millennia later, but to the graffiti that are scratched on makeshift palisades by rebels with hardly a second to spare, writing that is almost immediately lost to posterity. In appropriating an anonymous scrawl that may not survive the next rain storm or police patrol, Brecht’s poem paradoxically ensures that the sentence “They want war” will endure the coming Armageddon, preserving “the gesture of a message [Aufschrift]” made in passing by a rebel fleeing his enemies (240). For Benjamin no less than for Brassaï, the gesture outlives the writer, the material medium of his or her writing, and even the world in which it was penned. “The extraordinary artistic achievement of these sentences composed of primitive words,” writes Benjamin, “resides in this contradiction. A proletarian at the mercy of the rain and Gestapo agents scribbles some words on a wall with chalk, and the poet invests them with Horace’s aere perennius” (240).

 
Brecht’s poem does not preserve this instance of wall writing simply by virtue of recording the words, as a news report would document a politician’s pronouncements. Lapidary writing makes the original gesture quotable by revealing it to be less a force of inscription, Inschrift, than a sort of over-writing or superscription, Auf-schrift; it is the gesture of a “messaging” or “labeling.” Despite its etymology, the lapidary style is not distinguished by a writing in (Inskribieren, Eingravieren, or Einschreiben), but by a “taking down,” “setting down,” or “marking out” (Auf-schreiben). This writing gains its power not from the depths of its marks or the physical solidity of its traces, but from its ability to put language on display (Aufschreiben as Ausstellung).
 
Brecht’s text is lapidary because it reproduces the gesture of verbal exhibition that distinguished the original manifestation of “They want war.” At the same time, his poem cites the words it designates as a quotation by taking them out of their context; it gives them form, it frames them, by interrupting them, tearing them from their original “wall” and putting them up on countless others.¹⁰ This is the “gesture of the inscription” that makes these poems “wall poems,” a combination of contingency and connection produced by the fact that no inscription is ever in the wall and hence truly of it. Instead, writing remains on or by the wall, as much inessential as essential to it, as much a flaw or blemish as the wall’s fulfillment. The lapidary style is forceful because it fails to pierce the surface. One can always pick up a pen, a piece of chalk, or a can of spray paint and slap something down, but Brecht’s verses suggest that such writing never stays down. An over- or superscript as much as an in-script, the letters on the wall become a demonstration of writing, flaunting its powers as much as they attempt to impart any particular message. Graffiti is arresting because prior to the manifestation of any given set of words or meanings, what “flashes up [and] vanishes” is a glimpse of writing as a force beholden to no particular constative or performative agenda.
 
If Brecht’s poem preserves a gesture such that it may survive even the end of the world, his text’s lapidary style is not an affirmation of the immortality of the graffiti artist or of the permanence of his or her product or message. On the contrary, this lapidary quatrain about the lapidary gains its historical force from the fact that what its gesture sets on display is finitude. In the first instance, the poem describes the demise of the composer of the line “They want war” rather than the death of “they” who want it, although there is more than a hint that the warmongers’ days may also be numbered. The full significance of the writer’s fall, in particular the veiled threat that it may include our own demise insofar as we are hailed by his verses, is expressed in the contrast between the open-ended modal verb “want” and the irony it acquires when it is prefaced and followed by simple—Benjamin calls them “primitive”—past-tense constructions: “was written in chalk,” “has already fallen.” When the poem turns back on the line it quotes, it elevates its own lapidary style to new heights, as the “it” of “The man who wrote it” reduces the previous line to a single two-letter word: It is on the wall—need we say more? To the extent that the poem does say “more,” it states the obvious in explaining that the writer of the words on the wall is now gone. Since any grapheme emerges as a sign only by exhibiting its independence from its composer, the closing section of the text merely spells out what has to be the case: “The man who wrote it / Has already fallen,” a judgment that reflexively extends to include the poet presently writing about the wall poet, and the wall itself. Brecht’s poem reveals not just that any sentence can be infinitely cited and re-cited across countless contexts, but that each time this happens, a sentence puts its new “wall”—whether it is made of paper, brick, or digital bits of information—on display, and thereby puts the wall in jeopardy, like the prison walls that were enlisted to celebrate Lenin. In this respect, Brecht’s quatrain is no less in flight from the rain or the Gestapo than the anonymous graffiti artist it eulogizes. Since his poem’s power stems from its ability to reproduce the violent gesture whereby both wall and writing make a vivid but transitory appearance, it is fated to reveal itself to be its own epitaph. From this perspective, all graffiti becomes a play on the expression of doom inherent in the idiom the writing is on the wall, as if “on the wall” can never literally be “on the wall” enough.
 
Benjamin’s analysis of Brecht’s lapidary style is part of a larger study of the relationship between language and architecture that accords particular significance to the shopping passages of nineteenth-century Paris. This Arcades Project, as it is now known, consumed Benjamin for the latter part of his life and has become the centerpiece of his legacy, dominating discussions of his influence on aesthetic and cultural theory. In the host of essays and fragmentary texts he produced in the 1930s, Benjamin moves easily between comments about the artistic and political implications of new building materials and forms of construction and reflections on the concept of experience that emerges in nineteenth-century lyric poetry, especially in the work of Charles Baudelaire. What has not been recognized is that Benjamin’s research of this period was punctuated by a series of challenges to the traditional notion of a wall. In the essay “The Task of the Translator,” first published in 1923, four years before he started his study of Paris, Benjamin offers an intriguing illustration of his now well-known claim that a real translation is transparent and allows the pure language to shine upon the original:
 

This [real translation] may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than sentences to be the primary element of the translator. For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade.
 

(Selected 1 260)

Although it appears as the Latinate Arkade rather than the German Passagen that will become common in Benjamin’s texts after 1927 and more directly translates the French passages, this is the first reference in his oeuvre to the arcades. What is unclear is whether the opposition between walls and arcades constitutes a claim about the articulation of space by language or about the organization of the verbal order by space. Commenting on this passage, Jacques Derrida emphasizes its optical motif: “Whereas the wall braces while concealing (it is in front of the original), the arcade supports while letting light pass through and giving one to see the original (we are not far from the Paris arcades)” (210). These remarks echo Brassaï, for whom a given graffito proves its power through its paradoxically untransparent transparency that allows the viewer to see the wall that otherwise was fated to remain hidden in plain view, prompting the passerby to begin to read the wall rather than simply to look at it.

 
In a fragment from The Arcades Project, Benjamin stresses that “in the arcades it is not a matter of illuminating the interior space, as in other forms of iron construction, but of damping the exterior space” (539). In other words, we should not imagine that the glass roofs over these shopping areas turn the interior space into a display in its own right, as if the showcases of the individual stores were being mirrored on a larger scale. The arcade alters the relationship between inside and outside such that the one is no longer separated from the other by a barrier of any sort, be it stone or glass. To characterize the disorientation that plagues efforts to navigate such a system, Benjamin repeatedly invokes dream states. In a formulation that appears more than once in the Passagenwerk, he writes, “Arcades are houses or passages having no outside—like the dream” (406; see also 839). This absence of an outside is equally the absence of an inside. Benjamin sees nineteenth-century Paris as a radicalization of the bourgeois architecture of ostentatious prosperity such that “the domestic interior moves outside,” and any given slice of a building presents itself as a façade, as if people lived in structures of pure frontage (406).¹¹ In these terms, the arcades are passageways between impossible spaces, and Benjamin says that the route one travels “between” them is similar to the path that a ghost follows through walls as it traverses the inside and outside of buildings with equal ease.¹² In the German Passagen, we have to hear not only the French noun passage and the verb passer, but also the adverbial en passant. In the arcades, one is never doing more than passing through, passing by, or moving along “in passing.” In this space of non-spaces, everything happens en passant, by the by, as if the architecture had become phantasmagoric. Going from (non-)place to (non-)place, one is always underway, but there are no longer clear axes with which to plot precise distinctions between “here” and “there.”
 
In this network of pseudo-vectors, it is difficult to know whether the structures formally known as “walls” still exist, much less whether they can be sites of graffiti. These tensions crystallize in the figure of the flâneur, an individual entirely “at home” as he saunters through the urban space of pure façade:
 

The street becomes a dwelling place for the flâneur; he is as much at home among house façades as a citizen is within his four walls. To him, a shiny enameled shop sign is at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to a bourgeois in his living room. Buildings’ walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks. . . .
 

(Selected 4 19)

For the flâneur, the traditional medium of the graffiti artist has become a desk, a prop that facilitates writing, while the protection provided by the study to the bourgeois vanishes, losing its grounding in the neat alignment of private and public with inside and outside.¹³ The stability of the relation-to-self won by penning notebooks in the sanctity of one’s personal space is jeopardized, since one no longer has the luxury of knowing if and when one is writing to, for, or about oneself. Shedding any pretense to being a process of self-actualization, a secreting away of intimate thoughts and feelings in a vault-like diary, writing becomes a way of tossing one’s “interior” self out onto the street. This recoding of the public and private blurs the borders between discourses, as there can be no clear distinction between signs, like a shop placard, that have overt communicative (commercial) utility, and private wall ornaments of a supposedly decorative nature. Once the very notion of personal composition has been imperiled and all words are potentially on display, the basic opposition between language as an expressive medium and language as an aesthetic object is unsettled—henceforth, no writing can defend itself from the charge of being a mere façade. Like the Cyrillic letters on the Reichstag, any set of characters will elicit a host of contradictory assessments as it is alternatively condemned as dirt-like scribbling, dismissed as a misleading or boring message, or ennobled as enigmatic runes.

 
In Benjamin’s Parisian dreamscape of pure façade, walls are templates for the exhibition of script before they are protective barriers or supports for roofs. It is as if architects labored not to shelter their clients from the elements, offer them privacy, or provide them with an imposing edifice with which to impress or intimidate, but in order to let everyone participate as writers and readers in an unstructured linguistic carnival. The political implications of this transformation are as ambiguous as Foster’s commitment to preserving the Cyrillic characters on the Reichstag. By normalizing the wall as a site of inscription, the flâneur may domesticate the medium of the rabble-rousing author who tries to leave his mark on a barricade, robbing graffiti of its provocative power. When the entire city becomes a blank page for scribbling, whether virtual or actual, any individual scriptural intervention loses the ability to manifest itself as a violation. This is arguably the state of affairs in a modern metropolis such as Los Angeles or Tokyo, where the mélange of professional and amateur advertising, street art, and casual graffiti has become so intricate that even the expert eye has trouble distinguishing them.
 
Does the empire of the façade inhabited by the flâneur leave any space for the rebellious writer seeking to pen a transgressive wall script? Benjamin reflects at length on Haussmann’s renovation of Paris, which sought to sweep away the medieval labyrinth of lanes and alleys of which the arcades were a part.¹⁴ Replacing meandering side streets with broad avenues, Haussmann became the engineer of the anti-dreamscape, dispelling the ghostly walkers who respected no distinction between inside and outside and quelling the protests of the rebellious graffiti artists celebrated by Benjamin and Brecht. As historians have frequently observed, the widening of the Paris streets was intended to make it more difficult to erect improvised barricades in future uprisings, and in fact, the Paris Commune of 1871 was quickly crushed due to the ease with which troops could move about the transformed city. With no more makeshift palisades on which to write, partisan scribblers were threatened with obsolescence. Haussmann’s renovations provide a stern warning to fans of Foster’s transparency, reminding us that nineteenth-century pan-optic logics are predicated on an equation between lines of sight and lines of influence. Invariably, “openness” means “open to control.”
 
Nonetheless, Haussmann’s renovations were not entirely successful in preventing the construction of makeshift defenses. Benjamin stresses that in the 1871 revolt, barricades did reappear, if only briefly, on even the broadest new boulevards, as if the one thing that urban modernization could not repress was the return of the makeshift wall. Ironically, the problem with the Communards’ short-lived barriers was not their inability to span the immense spaces across the avenues, but the ease with which they became part of a larger system of porous structures. Like the ghost effortlessly traversing the borders between inside and outside, the regular army forces who put down the Commune tunneled through the walls of surrounding houses to outflank those manning improvised defenses. While Haussmann profoundly altered the city of Paris, he could not eradicate the phantom logics of passing and the en passant in which the wall’s status as defense or barrier is constantly on the verge of becoming incidental.¹⁵
 
In exposing a rupture in the very notion of the wall as a partition, shield, or surface, the paradoxical spaces of nineteenth-century Paris highlight the degree to which modernist graffiti saw concepts of inscription or superscription give way to a more dynamic model of transcription. For Benjamin, the connection between the tortured geometry of the arcades and a theory of language is captured by a line from one of his favorite poets, Friedrich Hölderlin: “the walls stand / dumbstruck and cold” (188, my translation). In the terms of The Arcades Project, this means that the walls are in shock. One of the central concerns of Benjamin’s Paris research is to explain how lyric poetry such as Baudelaire’s could be “grounded in experience for which exposure to shock has become the norm” (Selected 4 318). In his 1940 essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” written shortly after his essay on Brecht’s lapidary texts, Benjamin tries to elucidate the logic of a poetic language that aims to parry shocks, exposing itself to them in order to train itself to defend against them.¹⁶ Crucially, the defenses of Baudelaire’s poems do not assume the form of a wall, as if words could be a barrier behind which one might take refuge. The walls are in shock, which means that the writing is on every wall, and this architextual system is in the grips of the “subterranean tremors by which Baudelaire’s poetry is shaken; it is as though they caused words to collapse” (Selected 4 320). For Benjamin, as for Brassaï, architecture and poetry are two dimensions of a broader discourse in which any sentence is a gesture toward the wall it will mark, if not dismantle, while any wall is a gesture toward the sentence that it will put on display and thereby potentially evacuate of its authority as either a performative act or an expression of an idea or intention. Of course, these gestures gain their power from their inability to assume the solidity of stone monuments or timeless lines of canonical poetry. The core paradox of lapidary writing is its finitude, which explains the abiding sense of futility produced by the discursive shocks that arise at the frontiers of verbal and architectural collisions. Like Brecht’s proletarian, who, “at the mercy of the rain and Gestapo agents scribbles some words on a wall with chalk,” Baudelaire experiences the streets of Paris as a battle he must wage “with the impotent rage of someone fighting the rain or the wind” (Selected 4 240).¹⁷
 
In his critique of the drafts of Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Adorno chastises his friend for “blockading [his] ideas behind impenetrable walls of material” (qtd. in Benjamin, Selected 4 100). If the walls of material Benjamin amassed about the phantasmagoric world of modernist Paris were anything but impenetrable, Adorno’s reproach reminds us that one of Benjamin’s primary arguments was that no writer, and certainly not any writer who writes about writing, can hope to evade walls for long, a point that remains as true today as it was a century ago. We began by suggesting that modernist topoi inform the debates surrounding Foster’s vision for the German Reichstag, from discussions of the democratizing potential of glass architecture to analyses of the relationship between language and buildings. The question is whether in recycling these debates—in putting them back on display—the Reichstag distinguishes itself as a distinctly postmodern construct. In his 1991 Postmodernism, Fredric Jameson brings Brassaï’s interest in the affinities between architecture and photography together with Benjamin’s insight that our day-to-day engagement with buildings is something that occurs en passant. Jameson proposes that as we drive along the freeway past postmodern structures, we scarcely recognize them, and in fact, the only chance we get to enjoy their unique splendor is when we look at photographs of them, in which they “flash into brilliant existence and actuality” (99). Like the arresting moment described by Brassaï when one stumbles upon an instance of graffiti and is suddenly re-confronted with a memory that was always already lost, the experience of buildings mediated by pictures of them is not an engagement with an art of solidity, grandiosity, or monumentality, but an encounter with a phenomenon that is most powerful in the brief instant at which it reveals itself to be most ephemeral, dependent for its very manifestation as a physical presence on a photograph, a reproduction over which it has no control.
 
If Foster’s efforts to create a parliamentary building of democratic transparency are difficult to reconcile with his commitment to preserving a field of wall writing that is far from open or transparent, his building may be an example of the “over-stimulating” ensemble of styles that Jameson calls postmodern pastiche. In these terms, the confluence of controversial Russian graffiti and sensationalist glass spaces constitutes a language that prohibits any recourse to a “healthy linguistic normality” on the basis of which the deviation of a given dialect could be measured (Jameson 17). In the end, Foster’s commitment to preserving the Cyrillic characters ensures only that they will stand as a constant reminder that the free conversation he hopes his legislative chamber and rooftop dome will facilitate is a fantasy. His exhibitionary architecture, his “living museum,” proposes to put the “living” present on display as if it were already part of the “dead” past. The legislative business carried out in the assembly hall thus becomes a blank parody, as Jameson would say, of previous legislative acts, emptying them of their political or historical content and transforming them into recitations of prior messages without the gesture of those messages, as if each time the German Bundestag enacts a law, Brecht’s poem is being rewritten in a new, non-lapidary style.
 

 

 

Click for larger view

Fig. 4.

Reichstag Chamber

© Nigel Young/Foster + Partners.