physical and tactile values, and to eschew the dissonances of what exceeds or maims or
diminishes the human frame: what administers shocks to it for whatever purpose.
The same set of values can of course also be detected in urbanism: ‘good city form’,
the ideal of the city somehow memorizable and mappable (Kevin Lynch) and organized
around the human body to a human scale—this is phenomeno-logical humanism on the
level of the urban itself. It may well involve a certain tension with purely architectural
phenomenology, asking certain buildings to accept a reduced position within the
perception of the whole, rather than to strive to become themselves microcosms and
models of the totality (and thereby the totality of perception). But the same implicit belief
in the scale of the human is at work here.
Now these visions are glorious moments in our history, and reflect certain extreme
conquests: one can deconstruct them, as Derrida did with Husserl; one can also make an
ideological analysis of their function at a given time in which they are re-elaborated with
a whole inner situation logic. Thus it seems clear that they represent a response to spatial
alienation and an attempt to restore non-alienated experience to the modern industrial
city. But the modern was also a response to that alienation, of a radically different type;
and we can grasp something about what makes the phenomenological-humanist position
reactionary by comparing its harmonious serenity to the desperate violence of the modern
itself.
The phenomenological view of architecture is Utopian, in so far as it promises to
restore or to resurrect from within the fallen body of the modern city-dweller—with
clogged and diminished senses, therapeutically lowered and adjusted feelers and organs
of perception, maimed language and shoddy, standardized mass-produced feelings—the
glorious Utopian body of an unfallen being who can once again take the measure of an
unfallen nature. Architecture serves as the intermediary of this resurrection by exercising
those new or heightened faculties in a therapeutic way and organizing the external world
for perception itself. Heidegger does not altogether fall into this category, yet his notion
of the way in which the building stands at the centre of the universe and articulates,
indeed, reinvents, what he calls the Geviert: the relationship between heaven and earth,
between man and the gods, is somehow analogous to the aims of phenomenology and a
good illustration of one dramatic version of that programme.
This is the case when you read Christian Norberg Schulz (or as I have said in a
different way for the city: Kevin Lynch). It is difficult to argue against these visions,
since such an argument would seem to stand out for ugliness and squalour, for lack of
perception, and so forth. But two things need to be pointed out: first, that this is bad
Utopianism in Marx and Engels’ early sense: it asks for resurrection without paying the
price; change without politics; transformation by simple persuasion and common sense—
people will react directly to this beauty and demand it (whereas the argument started from
the premise that people could no longer perceive fully in the first place).
The second point is a class one: when one then reads something like Roger Scruton’s
Aesthetics of Architecture, it becomes clearer that we have to do not merely with a class
vision, a description of the way in which the upper classes (like Hölderlin’s gods) inhabit
their spacious dwellings and live their bodies, but with even more, all the complex
mirror-dialectics of envy involved in class perceptions. What is being excited here is not
the will to restore my perceptions, but rather the envy of those full perceptions as they are
exercised by another class (and not by the bourgeoisie, but by the aristocracy: thus these
Fredric Jameson 253