reach the pure kernel of authenticity. The heart of poetry can be reached only if one
strips off the rough exterior of the commonplace and banal. One can achieve real in-
dividuality, it is assumed, only by breaking out of the straitjacket of convention. This
is the conviction that underlies the world of New Babylon.
New Babylon is a visual version of the dream of ultimate transparency that
Benjamin detected in the avant-garde of the 1920s. It presents an image of a social
form in which the desires of the individual and the requirements of the community
are inseparably entwined. As Constant describes it, it is a society where there is no
longer any necessity for secrecy and possessions; it is an absolute collectivity in
which the general interest coincides automatically with the sum of individual inter-
ests. New Babylon, it would seem, is a society without power relations. It is the con-
cretization of Benjamin’s longing to reach the programmatic promise of modernity by
igniting its transitory aspects. A utopia like this, however, is full of internal contradic-
tions, which surface involuntarily in Constant’s drawings and paintings. It is indeed
impossible to imagine a society existing that is so harmonious and free of stress
without its individual members being subtly coerced to adapt and conform—an op-
pression that implies the opposite of genuine freedom. Dynamism, permanent
change, and flexibility are in fact ineluctably in conflict with qualities such as peace,
repose, and harmony.
Constant argues that New Babylon is intended for postrevolutionary society,
for the homo ludensthat will be born of the revolution. Until this revolution takes
place, however, the existing type of human being—homo faber—will continue to be
corrupted by an untruthful society that imposes its norms and values, forcing the in-
dividual to conform, imprisoning him in a straitjacket of conventions and suppressing
his creativity and autonomy. The revolution will bring about a total liberation; authen-
ticity and individual commitment to the collective will be the basic characteristics of
the new society. This faith in the revolution and in the human race’s real potential for
change is characteristic of the intellectual climate of the sixties in which New Baby-
lon is rooted, but it does not take into account what has in the meantime became
known, in Foucault’s phrase, as the “micrology of power.” It ignores the finely
meshed interplay between the principles on which the social system is founded and
the psychological mechanisms that guide individual behavior. There are in fact few
reasons for assuming that a fundamental change in the organization of society would
immediately result in an equally fundamental change in the nature of human beings.
In other words, there is no guarantee whatsoever that the disappearance of the so-
cial struggle for existence would mean that violence and conflicts between individu-
als would disappear like snow melting in the sun. The human condition is probably a
bit more complicated than that.^37
This point is precisely what Constant’s imagery suggests. The drawings and
paintings indeed seem to convey a much more in-depth understanding of the human
condition than the texts. The images are hardly open to being interpreted as fore-
shadowing an ideal future; they appear as a multilayered commentary on the impos-
4
Architecture as Critique of Modernity