173is set against a horizon black as night. The foreground and edges of the visual field
are patched and cut with lines. Barely recognizable in the distance is a structure out
of New Babylon. A few walls and screens point one’s gaze toward the depths. On
closer inspection, the monotonous yellow-white surface that occupies the greater
part of the painting turns out to overlay a more complex background collaged from
newspaper and other imagery. Is this a palimpsest representing the end of history?
The painting’s title means “wasteland,” but it is clear that this land is not really
empty: it is covered with traces and scars that inscribe a very specific history. Con-
sidering that New Babylon elsewhere is pictured as the place of an eternal present
(because no place in it can ever be recognized by its inhabitants), this proves a
strange compilation of images. One is tempted to see Terrain vague as emerging
from an understanding of the incompatibilities between the reality of a wasteland
that is always occupied by hidden memories and the impossible utopia of New Baby-
lon where memories and history are declared irrelevant. And one wonders whether,
after all, Constant does not rather opt for history than for an eternal present.The Tragedy of Utopia
New Babylon depicts a world where people are liberated from all norms, forms, and
conventions. All oppressive ties are dissolved, and there is no longer any fixed pat-
tern of social obligations or of loyalties to family or to a specific place. The law of the
transitory prevails in New Babylon—immediate situations have primacy over per-
manent structures. The commonplace—the ordinary, everyday framework that
gives life its form and that permits one to postpone indefinitely any question about
the ultimate meaning of life—has been abolished. With it, it would seem, the possi-
bility of “dwelling” has also disappeared. For dwelling (inhabitation) has to do with
developing habits, with habituating oneself to a certain pattern, which is exactly what
Constant tells us is impossible in New Babylon. As a utopian vision of the future,
New Babylon therefore arouses feelings of dread rather than of desire: dwelling in a
situation of pure indeterminacy apparently does not respond to our deepest wishes
and desires.
In a certain sense, New Babylon is the fulfillment of the logic of negation that
was characteristic of the avant-garde: in order to achieve the goal of total liberation
from all norms and conventions, all habits and traditions had to be destroyed. Ac-
cording to this logic, poetry and the commonplace are mutually exclusive moments.
On the side of the commonplace one finds banality and mediocrity, the whole body
of petrified outward forms that is purely conventional and that with its sheer weight
crushes to death any inner experience. For this reason the commonplace is consid-
ered intrinsically falseby the avant-garde. Behind this screen of conventionality, one
hopes to find the real, the genuine, and the authentic. This moment of authenticity
is equated with purity and openness, with what is most personal and spontaneous.
Within this logic, poetry is about peeling away all the layers of conventionality to172