Architecture and Modernity : A Critique

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The average European has not succeeded in uniting his life with technology,
because he has clung to the fetish of creative existence. One
must have followed Loos in his struggle with the dragon “ornament,”
heard the stellar Esperanto of Scheerbart’s creations, or seen Klee’s
New Angel, who preferred to free men by taking from them, rather than
make them happy by giving to them, to understand a humanity that
proves itself by destruction. 86
Destruction is crucial because purification is essential for every form of vitality. To
make something, to create it, does not have so much to do with originality or inventiveness
but with a process of purification. Creativity is a false ideal, an idol. The real
aim of those who have the concern of “true humanity” at heart can be found in the
act of destruction that exposes pretense and illusions. Benjamin refers to Karl Kraus,
who used quotations in a destructive fashion and thus succeeded in salvaging certain
vestiges from the ruins of history: “[Kraus] did discover in quotation the power
not to preserve but to purify, to tear from context, to destroy; the only power in which
hope still resides that something might survive this age—because it was wrenched
from it.” 87 Benjamin recognizes the same will to destruction and negation in people
such as Loos, Scheerbart, and Klee. In these men, in their destructive work, the hope
for the survival of culture lay concealed. This is because they understood that the belief
in the “fetish of creative existence” prevents people from adapting their lives to
the demands of the industrial era.
For Benjamin it is clear that the ideology of a false humanism subscribed to by
so many people offers no prospect whatsoever of any mode of life that is equal to
the challenge of the new conditions of existence, let alone one that would take full
advantage of the political vision of a classless society that he regarded as being inherent
in technology. As John McCole puts it, Benjamin “remained adamant that the
idealist tradition of humanism, and the classical ideal of humanity itself, were thoroughly
compromised. Not the preservation of these traditions, but only a purifying
liquidating could hope to save what had once animated them.” 88
For Benjamin the activity of destructive characters was essential if revolution
was to succeed. The destructive character explodes one’s familiar environment and
is averse to comfort, abandoning itself to the cold sobriety of glass and steel: “The
destructive character is the enemy of the etui-man. The etui-man looks for comfort,
and the case is its quintessence. The inside of the case is the velvet-lined track that
he has imprinted on the world. The destructive character obliterates even the traces
of destruction.” 89
Two different concepts of dwelling are contrasted here. In Benjamin’s view,
dwelling should basically be understood as a distant memory of one’s mother’s
womb. The feeling of being protected and of seeking a protective casing is fundamental
to dwelling, but it was an idea that was pushed to an extreme in the nineteenth
century: