The Theology Of Tabula Rasa: Walter Benjamin And Architecture in The Age of

Precarity
Author(s): Pier Vittorio Aureli
Source: Log , Winter/Spring 2013, No. 27 (Winter/Spring 2013), pp. 111-127
Published by: Anyone Corporation

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Pier Vittorio Aureli

The Theology
Of Tabula Rasa:
Walter Benjamin
And Architecture in
The Age of Precarity
Since the 2007 economic recession, the culture of architecture
has witnessed the rise of activism and participatory practices.
With the 1990s avant-garde architects on the decline of po-
litical correctness, we are witnessing a new wave of socially
concerned architecture. Symposiums, exhibitions, biennials,
magazines, and journals have amplified this phenomenon by
promoting new ways of practicing architecture that invest
design with a social and political mission. The new genera-
tion of young architects feels the urge to focus not on aes-
thetic and formal concerns, but on the improvement of our
urban condition. In conferences and discussions about ar-

chitecture one often hears the lament that in the past twenty
years architects have overindulged in useless formal acrobat-
ics and irrelevant theoretical discussions and shown little

responsibility toward issues such as public space, housing,

and other "socially oriented" topics. Paradoxically, while the
recession is forcing many people to live in very precarious
conditions, many young, socially concerned architects see
the crisis as an opportunity for their creative acts. The crisis
is "forcing" the architectural discipline to be more inventive,
more disposable, more astute in finding adhoc solutions for
our crumbling urban condition.
Indeed, there is a serious link between crisis and creativity.
The human is distinct from other species precisely because
of its creative impulse. This impulse is triggered by humans*
lack of specialized instincts and permanent inner feeling of
not being at home. This requires humans to adapt to their
environmental situations, even the most hostile. The creative
act is thus the act of "making a world," that is, making
acceptable our own living conditions in any given situation.

ill

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 This kind of creativity is precisely what capitalism has
seized as its main labor-power. From industrial to postin-
dustrial production, the infinite resourcefulness of the
creative subject is the fundamental labor-subjectivity
exploited by capital. Economic crises and recessions are
moments in which this infinite resourcefulness, the urge
to adapt to new (and often more adverse) conditions, is
radically augmented. In this context popular slogans such
1. See as "Doing more withBoeri,
Stefano less,"1 recently launched by a famous
Fare più c
idee per riprogettare l'Italia (M
"engaged"
Saggiatore, Italian architect-cum-politician in order to
2012).
promote anticonsumerist culture, are involuntarily ironic
when used to define our new postrecession ethos. Doing
more with less is precisely what capital demands from us:
more productivity and less welfare, more creativity and
less social security, because creativity becomes more produc-
tive when our "given" conditions grow harder and more
unstable. The new socially oriented architectural activism
poses a dilemma that cannot be avoided. Are these new
practices addressing the possibility of radical change or
are they simply confirming, and to a certain extent subli-
mating, the most regressive effects of the crisis? It is useful
to approach this dilemma through Walter Benjamin's ethical
project, which has found its most radical formulation in
two short essays: "The Destructive Character" and
"Experience and Poverty."

l.

In 1931 Walter Benjamin wrote a short piece titled "The

Destructive Character." This small Denkbild was written in

one of the worst periods in German and European history:

after the crisis of 1929, when European fascism was on the
rise. Benjamin writes:
It could happen to someone looking back over his life that he real-
ized that almost all the deeper obligations he had endured in its
course originated in people who everyone agreed had the traits of
a " destructive character He would stumble on this fact one day,
perhaps by chance, and the heavier the shock dealt to him, the
better his chances of representing the destructive character.
The destructive character knows only one watchword: make
room . And only one activity: clearing away . His need for fresh
air and open space is stronger than any hatred .
The destructive character is young and cheerful. For destroy-
ing rejuvenates, because it clears away the traces of our own age;
it cheers, because everything cleared away means to the de-
stroyer a complete reduction, indeed a rooting out, out of his own

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 condition. Really, only the insight into how radically the world is
simplified when tested for its worthiness for destruction leads to
such an Apollonian image of the destroyer, : This is the great bond
embracing and unifying all that exists. It is a sight that affords
the destructive character a spectacle of deepest harmony.
The destructive character is always blithely at work . It is
Nature that dictates his tempo , indirectly at least , for he must
forestall her. Otherwise she will take over the destruction herself.
The destructive character sees no image hovering before
him. He has few needs, and the least of them is to know what will
replace what has been destroyed. First of all, for a moment at
least, empty space - the place where the thing stood or the victim
lived. Someone is sure to be found who needs this space without
2. Walter Benjamin,
occupying it.1 "The Destr
Character,"
To ain
certain Walter
extent "The DestructiveBenjamin:
Character" can be S
Writings, Volume 2, part 2, Î911-1
Michael read as a paradoxical ode to the same et
W.Jennings aggressive forces
al, trans
Livingstone (Cambridge: The Be
of - capitalism
Harvard and fascism - that would threaten
University Press,the life of 2005
h See Esther Leslie,
(London:
people, and especially
Reaktion
the working Walter
class,
Books,
Benja
in the 1930s. If the2007
1910s and '20s saw the revolutionary forces of socialism
and communism challenge the hegemony of capitalism, the
1930s were a period of restoration of capital through fascist
repression in Europe and the advancement of welfare state
politics in the US. This project would culminate in a final
blow to workers: the 1939 pact of nonaggression between
Hitler and Stalin. Benjamin's destructive character is thus
an image of the destructive impetus that would force many
lives - including his own - to be uprooted and annihilated.
The essay is thus autobiographical: it refers to the increas-
ingly precarious life of its author, who, unable to secure a
stable professional position, earned his living by writing
occasional pieces for journals, newspapers, and radio
programs. On top of this he endured an excruciating divorce
from his wife, the forced separation from his son Stefan, the
ending of his tormented relationship with Asja Lacis, and
constant changes of domicile.* This last seems to have been
one of the fundamental traits of Benjamin's life. Indeed,
there is no other intellectual, not even in the dramatic
decades of the 1930s and '40s - when millions of people
were forced to move from their place of origin - who
changed address so frequently.
The beginning of the short essay clearly points to a
situation in which the destructive character is personified
by unbenevolent figures: those to whom we endure all our
deeper obligations. With such a statement Benjamin makes
clear that the source of the destructive character is not a

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 liberating force, but an oppressive one. And yet for Benjamin
it is precisely the sudden realization - the shock - that our
life depends on forces that are in essence destructive that
introduces us to the use of such forces for our own sake.

This is a fundamental point in the way Benjamin categorizes

destruction. Unlike the art of building, which from Yitruvius
to Alberti is identified not just as a technical expertise but
also as having ethical and moral value, pars destruens refers
to annihilating forces and thus to the loss of any value, of
any stable point of reference. In spite of Benjamin's early
taste for romanticism, and later for the hopeless pessimism
of German baroque drama, he seems to have no illusion
about the destructive character: the destructive character can

only be embraced by accepting it as a force inherited from

those who threaten our existence in the most fundamental

way. There is no doubt that, albeit within a materialist

dimension, "The Destructive Character" can be read as the
cusp of Benjamin's apocalyptic messianism, a "negative" that
evolves throughout his entire oeuvre, as well as in German
Judaism in general. Commenting on the 1930 edition of
Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption, Benjamin's friend
Gershom Scholem, a theologian, remarked that the theory
of catastrophes implied by apocalyptic messianism breathed
4. See fresh air into the tradition
Tamara of Judaic theology in the 1920s.4
Tagliacozzo, "
distruzione, redenzione. Sion
The awareness of apocalittico
messianismo a looming catastrophe supported the idea in G
Scholem," in Le vie della distr
that there was always a potential for destruction within the
 partire da II carattere distrut
Walter historical time of the secular,world.
Benjamin ed. For Scholem, redemp-
Seminar
Benjaminiani (Macerata: Quo
tion was both a liberating force and a destructive one, and
this issue was precisely what many Jewish theologians had
tried to avoid. Such theological desire for destruction was
echoed if not inspired by the political, social, and economic
reality of the Weimar Republic, the turbulence and instabil-
ity of which was for Benjamin mirrored in the hopeless
atmospheres of the German baroque drama, the acid sarcasm
of Dadaism, and the desperate subjectivity of expressionism.
And yet, at the time of "The Destructive Character" Benjamin
was no longer indulgent of the melancholic character of the
protagonists of baroque drama or the anarchism of artistic
avant-gardes such as Surrealism and Dadaism. After having
analyzed in Passagenwerk the archaeology of his contempo-
rary capitalist metropolis, Benjamin saw no room for roman-
tic rebellion. The destructive character, the will to destroy
established forms and values, had to be organized as the
struggle of the proletariat against capitalism. Indeed,
through his observations on Paris, Benjamin discovered the

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 nexus that binds together technology, urban form, and
capitalistic power, and noted that in the 19th century the
arcades introduced a new architecture made of the most

advanced materials and forms. For Benjamin these crass and

valueless commercial spaces had the potential to threaten
the reassuring Gemütlichkeit of bourgeois domesticity. Even
the urban form imposed on Paris by the reactionary Baron
Haussmann after the revolution of 1848 was, for Benjamin,
the appearance of a new and radical urban experience.
Haussmann's dramatically new circulation system of
boulevards gradually replaced the old medieval topography
of Paris with a landscape of endless runs of the same kind of
facade. Even if these transformations were advanced to

counter the threat of another revolution (which eventually

occurred in 1871), the ruthless character of Haussmann's
urban operations had the effect, as Benjamin noted, of
5. See disorienting theBenjamin,
Walter bourgeoisie's trust in their own city.5
The Yet, in Ar
Project , trans. Howard Eiland
McLaughlin
Benjamin's opinion the dreamlike scenario in which these
(Cambridge: The
Press of disruptive
Harvard urban transformations took place had preserved
University Pr

the capital from being annihilated by its own destructive

power. Seen from the vantage point of 20th-century Berlin,
Paris, the capital of the 19th century, was interpreted by
Benjamin as both a warning and a chance. When Benjamin
was writing "The Destructive Character," Berlin was a city
of both cultural emancipation and regressive social condi-
tions. Benjamin saw Berlin as both the city where new
experimental urban projects were being developed by a
radical city planner like Martin Wagner - who, with Bruno
Taut, designed the Hufeisensiedlung, the first Großsiedlung
in Berlin Britz - and the "stony" city, harshly criticized by
Werner Hegemann, where inhumane housing conditions such
as those manifested in the infamous rental houses - the

Mietkaserne - affected the majority of the urban proletariat.

Confronted with this contradictory landscape, Benjamin
saw Berlin as the place in which the destructive character
of modern urban experience could be radicalized in the
form of a tabula rasa - a messianic Jetztzeit - that would
turn the brutal forces of capitalist development against
themselves in the form of a proletarian revolution rising up
from the most reified human subjectivity. For its own sake,
this revolution had to assume the disenchanted and cheerful

spirit of the destructive character and turn it against the

powers from which it originated.
A fundamental point of reference for Benjamin's tabula
rasa was the literary work of Paul Scheerbart and the theater

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 of Bertolt Brecht. In very different ways Scheerbart and
Brecht attacked the most enduring values of bourgeois
culture. In 1914 Scheerbart published Glasarchitektur , a
treatise on architecture centered on the idea that the whole

built world could be transformed into a landscape of total

6. See transparency.6
Paul With this book Scheerbart attacked
Scheerbart, the
Glasar
(Berlin: Verlag Der Sturm, 19
7. See bourgeois interior, the fixed architecture
Benjamin, "Bert of the 19th-cen-
Brecht
tury apartment
Writings, Volume in which the ruling
2, class parti,
had cultivated its Î92

idea of domestic comfort. Scheerbarťs idea of building

architecture in transparent materiality was motivated not
only by a desire for transparency per se, but also by the idea
that the character of the domestic interior should be

completely indifferent to the life of its inhabitants. In a

house made of glass, traditional dwelling was made impos-
sible because the inhabitants would not be able to leave

traces on the glass. In this way domestic space would be

freed from the burden of personal identity and would allow
inhabitants to always start their daily existence afresh.
Scheerbarťs architecture can be considered a tabula

rasa insofar as it intended to remove any ornament, any

superfluous object, and to reduce domestic space to its bare
essence of empty and transparent spaces. His idea of total
transparency and removal of any sense of interiority is also
reflected in the protagonists of his novels. As Benjamin
noted, Scheerbarťs fiction was populated by figures devoid
of any psychological characteristics, completely transparent
in their thoughts and intentions. Moreover, their positive
relationship with technology allowed them to be completely
free of natural resources. Scheerbart thus showed Benjamin
the possibility of a completely constructed and artificial
world in which any myth of nature was erased and technol-
ogy, rather than producing the phantasmagorical landscape
of the Parisian arcades, gave form to a straightforward,
objective urban condition. For Benjamin the science fiction
aspect in Scheerbarťs literary work was the result of the
naive amazement with which he described the achievements

of new building techniques. Benjamin also saw this quality

in the theater of Brecht. Like Scheerbarťs architecture,
Brechťs theater was devoid of psychology and completely
invested in the actions of its protagonists. For Benjamin,
the target of Brechťs destructive character was the idea of
artistic creativity, the alibi through which art and literature
had always been removed from the broader world of
material production.7 By destroying any sense of psycho-
logical refinement in his plot, Brecht made his dramas

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 available as pedagogical devices at the service of participa-
tory spectatorship. In both Scheerbarťs books and Brechťs
theater, Benjamin found the possibility for a "sober"
language that was appropriate to his goal: the invocation
of a messianic revelation from within the most extreme

experiences of modernity.

2.

Two radical architectural proposals express the sober lan-

guage of tabula rasa that Benjamin invoked in his text: Le
Corbusier's Maison Dom-ino of 1914, and Hannes Meyer's
Co-op Zimmer (Room) of 1924. A peculiar characteristic
of these two proposals is that they were invested in the scale
of the house but they addressed the city at large. Maison
Dom-ino and Co-op Zimmer are arguably the two most
radical housing projects conceived in the first decades of the
20th century, and though it is not certain whether Benjamin
ever saw them, it is not difficult to imagine that this kind of
architecture would fit his invocation of inhabitable space as
"empty space."
Developed between 1912 and 1916, Le Corbusier's
Dom-ino model gained momentum at the beginning of
World War I when the destruction of villages in Belgium
and France made clear that housing would be a high
priority for many European governments after the war.
Le Corbusier sought to seize this as the opportunity to
promote large-scale reform of housing conditions, thus
making clear the link between destruction and uncertainty
and the possibility for establishing new living conditions.
For Le Corbusier, the Dom-ino model was not only a
house, but also the place of social reproduction and the
center of architecture's radical reinvention. In order to

give physical form to his new vision, he developed a

pilotis , which left the completion of any internal partitions
8. For one of the most accurate and
interesting discussions of the genesis of Le
Corbusier's Maison Dom-ino, see Adolf
Max Vogt, Le Corbusier, The Noble Savage
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).
structural skeleton composed of horizontal slabs and
and finishings to the building's inhabitant. This reduction
of architectural form to structure is the crucial aspect of
the Dom-ino model. In this reinvented context, architec-
ture becomes mere framework, and the most important
consequence of this model - its success and diffusion in
architecture are indisputable - is the elimination of walls
and facade as fundamental creators of architectural space.
Of course, facade and walls still exist in the Dom-ino
model, but their presence is always relative to the adhoc
use or situation.8

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Le CoRBusffiR, Maison Dom-ino, 1914. Importantly, Maison Dom-ino was the first time that
the technique of the free plan, which was used strictly for
utilitarian buildings such as factories and storehouses, was
used for a house. The free plan consists of an unobstructed
space in which only structure remains. The concept of the
free plan is to accommodate whatever programs or activities
are needed. The technology of the free plan was developed
with the rise of industrialization in order to contain the

fast changing modes of production, both material produc-

tion, like the Fordist assembly line, and immaterial pro-
duction, like office space. In free-plan factories and offices,
interior space is literally emptied out of traditional architec-
tural elements such as ornament and interior partitions,
and reduced to a tabula rasa of open-ended floors punctu-
ated by slim columns.
The logic of the free plan was motivated by the need to
contain the ethos of industrial labor and its ever-changing
spatial logic. The generic nature of such space addresses pre-
cisely the deepest anthropological condition of man reduced
to the basic properties of his species: a lack of specialized in-
stincts, which results in human unpredictability in terms of
actions and reactions. The more this aspect of human nature
becomes the essence of the labor force exploited by capital,
the more space must become neutral in order to contain any
unforeseeable condition.

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Hannes Meyer, Co-op Zimmer, 1926. In the Maison Dom-ino this reality is exposed in a
degree zero of architectural form: the load- bearing struc-
ture. Here the tabula rasa of industrial production finally
conquered domestic space, de facto destroying any sense of
interiority and opening the house to any interpretation.
From the perspective of the social and political emancipa-
tion of workers, Maison Dom-ino showed both the promise
and the threat of new building techniques. The Dom-ino
model was an unprecedented flexible building system
capable of producing unforeseen spatial arrangements for
its inhabitants, but as the Dom-ino model proliferated, that
flexibility and adaptation became an apparatus of social and
political control. Le Corbusier's goal for the Dom-ino system
was to link the design of the housing unit with the develop-
ment of the city as a whole. This concept was unprecedented.
If city planning manuals such as Camillo Sitte's City Planning
According to Artistic Principles , or Reinhard Baumeister^ Town
Extensions conceived the design of cities as a composition of
urban blocks, squares, streets, and monuments, Le Corbusier
was the first to conceive of city making as departing from
the basic housing unit. This principle was later theorized by
Ludwig Hilberseimer in his book Groszstadtarch itektur,
9. See where he wrote that
Ludwig the design of cities must address the
Hilberseimer,
Metropolisarchitecture , trans,
Richard two extreme poles of urban development: the
Anderson individual cell
(New Yor
Source and the overall urban circulation
Books, 2012). system.9 In Le Corbusier's

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 model the link between the single domestic unit and the
totality of the city is made even stronger by the way in
which the Dom-ino model was to be produced. While the
steel form needed for the concrete was to be prefabricated,
the concrete itself would be poured in situ. This construction
method combined the logic of industrial mass production
and unskilled labor to accomplish these simple operations.
The radically simple architecture of the Dom-ino model
was thus not only the result of the logic of the open plan,
but also reflected the subjectivity of its builder-inhabitants,
who are forced to build by "starting from scratch" with
few means and readymade techniques.
While Le Corbusier failed to put the Dom-ino model
into practice, its implicit logic is today ubiquitous in housing
construction systems that combine the formal procedures
of steel-reinforced concrete and the "informality" of
do-it-yourself building practices. For this reason, despite
the tabula rasa effect that destroyed the 19th-century
domestic interior so hated by Benjamin, the Dom-ino model
established a new idea of private property that is no longer
represented by the "traces" left by the inhabitants' abun-
dance of furniture and interior decoration so typical of the
19th-century bourgeois house. In the Dom-ino model
private property is represented by the possibility of self-
construction, which automatically makes the inhabitant
the owner of her/his house. As history has shown, this
model has often been applied to tame and control subjects
by allowing them to build their homes in the cheapest way
possible, thus turning them into small entrepreneurs of
10. See their respective
Pier households.10 Here again the Dom-ino
Vittorio Aureli, M
Giudici, Platon Issaias, "From
model
Polikatoikia," was, at the time of
Domusits conception, both a promise
962 (Oct

and a threat. Its promise of a new beginning for an emanci-

pated form of life was threatened by the possibility of
turning the construction of the basic frame itself into a
vehicle for what Benjamin feared the most: the enduring
logic of private property, which was embedded in the very
constructive logic of the Dom-ino model. The Dom-ino is
thus the most radical example of how, from the very
beginning of modern architecture, the design of the city
was proposed from within the micropolitics of the individ-
ual unit.

For this reason it is interesting to counter Le Corbusier's

Dom-ino with another radical architectural model: Hannes

Meyer's Co-op Zimmer. Like the Dom-ino model, the

Co-op Zimmer was also proposed as an idea of the city

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 11. On developed
the from its most basic component:
Co-Op the room.11 Co-op
Zimmer, se
Heynen, "Leaving Traces: An
in the
Zimmer is made by two blank
Modern
walls and a nondescript floor.
House," in Pen
Anne This architectural framework
Massey, Trevoremphasizes the emptiness of
Keeble,
Martin, eds., Designing the Mo
From the
the room and gives importance to the veryto
Victorians few interior
Today
2009), 12}.
objects. Whereas the emptiness of the Dom-ino suggested
further development, Co-op Zimmer, with its spartan
furnishings, suggests a limit to development precisely
because the presence of the few interior objects is enough.
Unlike Maison Dom-ino, in the Co-op Zimmer the tabula
rasa is not meant to be occupied by further architecture,
furniture, or objects. Rather than instigate a strategy of
property, the Co-op Zimmer suggests a way of life beyond
property. Clearly visible inside the room is a gramophone,
its curvy shape in stark contrast with the blankness of the
room, and a case of jars containing unidentifiable sub-
stances. These "superfluous" objects, even more than the
bed and the folded chair hanging on the wall, evoke a sense
of ephemeral inhabitation driven not only by necessity but
also by choice. The incongruous presence of the gramo-
phone suggests that, contrary to the basic architecture of
Maison Dom-ino, where everything is dictated by the logic
of bare life, the minimal dwelling of the Co-op Zimmer is
not only driven by necessity, but is also the outcome of a
deliberate form of life chosen by the inhabitant. This in turn
questions the very principle of contemporary forms of life:
the idea of the house as private property. In the Co-op
Zimmer the "enduring obligations" that the inhabitants of
the modern metropolis owe to the destructive character of
capital, and which comprise the inhabitants' precarious life,
are turned into a form of living liberated from the oppres-
sive forces of ownership, property, and objects. Thus the
Co-op Zimmer seems to fully accomplish the mandate of
the destructive character. As Benjamin wrote, "The destruc-
tive character knows only one watchword: make room.
And only one activity: clearing away. His need for fresh air
and open space is stronger than any hatred."
Meyer proposed the Co-op Zimmer as a solution for
an increasingly mobile population. At the time of his project,
a large part of the population in big cities like Berlin was
frequently forced to change homes because of the extreme
precari ty of the economic situation. Meyer, like Benjamin
would in the 1930s, forced himself to see in this new condi-
tion the possibility for a form of life uprooted from the
sense of possession represented by the domestic interior.
The latter is reduced to an empty space, which makes clear

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 that permanent occupation is impossible. Meyer's design
seems to address the same living conditions that Benjamin
recorded with sober sympathy during his visit to Moscow in
1926. Contrary to the petty bourgeois house and the "com-
pleteness" it manifested with items such as pictures that
cover walls, cushions on the sofa, and ornaments filling the
mantelpiece, the houses in Moscow were made up of bare
rooms sparsely furnished. "Weekly the furniture in the
bare rooms is rearranged; this is the only luxury indulged
in with them, and at the same time a radical means of
expelling 'coziness' - along with the melancholy with
which it is paid for - from the house. People can bear to
exist in it because they are estranged from it by their way of
12. life. Their dwelling place"Moscow,"
Benjamin, is the office, the club, the street."12 in S
Writings, Volume 2, parti, 192
Once the private room is reduced to a minimum, people can
fully engage in collective life. The destructive character that
originated in the sense of precarity and impermanence of
places like Berlin and Moscow in the 1920s becomes the
possibility of constantly starting anew, a form of life that
sees life itself (and not architecture) as a constant reinven-
tion, a perennially unfinished project. Arguably, while the
potential inhabitant of the Dom-ino house may be the
working class turned small-owner-entrepreneur of his own
household, the inhabitant of the Co-op Zimmer is the
city-dweller turned ascetic. In the Co-op Zimmer there is
no need for further development, and the inhabitant can
focus on her/his ars vivendi , which is the very object of
ascetic practices.

3.

As in the case of the destructive character, the tabula rasa

effect of both Maison Dom-ino and the Co-op Zimmer is
first produced by conditions that are far beyond the decision
of the author (the architect or the inhabitant). These proj-
ects make clear that the destruction of bourgeois interiority
and the rise of the bare forms of modern architecture were

due to the rise of capital and its new forms of production.

As Benjamin wrote in "The Author as Producer," the author
can only decide his/her position within the forces of pro-
duction. And yet, as in Benjamin's case, capital's destructive
character is, in these two projects, made manifest with an
unprecedented intensity that itself becomes liberating. In
these two projects architecture is liberated by design, by the
architect's pretension to shape everything according to his
creative genius. It is not difficult to see how the two projects

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 embody the ethical project Benjamin developed. In both Le
Corbusier's Maison Dom-ino and Meyer's Co-op Zimmer,
the architects are not filling the emptiness they have cre-
ated with another kind of interior, another style, another
interpretation of space. These two projects are simply empty
space whose contents will exist only in a state of constant
uncertainty, always about to disappear, to be removed, to be
thrown awaj. And yet, while the Dom-ino aims to root the
subject in the conditions of home ownership, Meyer's room
suggests the opposite scenario: here human subjectivity is
finally liberated from the comfort of interiority and can
shape itself according to a deliberate form of life no longer
mediated by design.
But who is the subject of this tabula rasa, who is the in-
habitant of this perennially empty space? Perhaps the answer
to this question is offered by the text that must be read as
pendant to "The Destructive Character": "Experience and
1}. Poverty."1* Here "Experience
Benjamin, Benjamin focuses on the ethos of modernityand P
Selected Writings, Volume 2, part
14. Ibid., in which human experience itself is no longer transmissible
7J2.

within the epic narratives of the past. For Benjamin, poverty

of experience does not imply personal poverty, or even an
ascetic restraint from the abundance of things and ideas
that a capitalistic society produces. On the contrary,
poverty of experience is precisely the effect of this abun-
dance. Inundated by all sorts of information, stories, and
beliefs - "the oppressive wealth of ideas that has been
spread among people, or rather has swamped them en-
tirely" as Benjamin put it - we can no longer trust the
depth and richness of human experience. Living in a
context of constant cognitive stimulation, what we experi-
ence is no longer effectively communicable.
If in the past lived experience was transmissible through
the "long-winded eloquence" of proverbs and charismatic
narratives, the impact of modernity on the soldiers who
survived War World I made communicable experience
impossible. For Benjamin the new poverty of human experi-
ence produced a new subjectivity, which he defined as barba-
rism. Benjamin celebrated the new barbarians, because
within the tabula rasa of their impoverished experience they
could find the possibility "to make a new start; to make a little
go a long way; to begin with little and build up further."14 It is
interesting to note that Benjamin associates the new barbar-
ians with constructors who, with very few means - a crude
statement or simple observation, like Descartes's icastic
statement, "I think, therefore I am" - are able to build a new

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 State of things. And indeed, among artists and writers, new
barbarians who assume the "positive energy" of tabula
rasa, there are also architects like Adolf Loos. According to
Benjamin, Loos's opposition to the nostalgic longing for past
styles was the only approach that would turn the negative
energies of an impoverished world into a positive "construc-
tive energy." Here it is interesting to note how Benjamin,
facing the reality of impoverished experience, takes the
same position on the apocalyptic energy of the destructive
character. Impoverished experience is the outcome of the
most "horrific" forces at stake in modern society at the
beginning of the 20th century. Benjamin makes every effort
to avoid any idealization of them. Moreover, he makes clear
that what has been lost - the art of experience - was
something great, something that ennobled human nature.
And yet it is precisely the decision to seize upon the poverty
of experience as a tabula rasa that transforms its negativity
into a possibility, the possibility to create a sudden rupture
through which a new condition can be established.
In the appropriation and reorientation of the cata-
strophic impact of the destructive character and impover-
ished experience, one can see Benjamin's understanding
of the messianic within class politics. At the beginning
of the 1930s, especially after his encounter with Brecht,
Benjamin was very oriented toward materialism, and both
"Experience and Poverty" and "The Author as Producer"
seem clearly to point in this direction. Yet it was precisely
at this point that Benjamin's political theology - his long-
ing for a sudden and messianic redemption - seemed
to intensify in his work, until the climax of the "Theses
on History." Unlike in Christianity, in the Judaic tradition
redemption means the advent of social and political justice,
like the liberation of the people of Israel from their foreign
oppressor. This concept refers specifically to the liberation
of Jews from their slavery under Egyptian rule, and in
this context the messiah is someone sent by God to liberate
15. See the people of Israel.15 In hard times,
Riccardo Di the figure
Segni,of the "I t
e Talmud," in liana Bahbout,
Gentili, and
messiah and the concept of redemption are conceived
Tamara Tagliaco
as the sudden overthrow
Messianismo of the social and political
Ebraico status
(Florenc
2009), 9-16.
quo. Since the 1920s Gershom Scholem had maintained
a strong separation between the Zionist project of libera-
tion put forward by the people of Israel and the religious
dimension of messianic salvation, and Benjamin linked the
latter to his historical materialist approach. The destructive
character too can be seen as precisely the moment in which

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 a catastrophic event corresponds to the possibility of
salvation.

This movement from catastrophe to salvation is also

evident in the last part of "Experience and Poverty," where
Benjamin makes clear that it is precisely the loss of human-
ity that represents a possibility for humanity's redemption.
Yet Benjamin situated this movement of loss and salvation
not as a general redemption of humankind but as materialist
politics for the oppressed class. The idea of a sudden ending
of the status quo evoked by messianic salvation was thought
by Benjamin to be instrumental to the oppressed class,
because such a sudden stoppage was a fundamental critique
of capital's deus ex machina: the idea of history as linear
time, as progress toward the better. Benjamin knew the
story about the Communards, who, when they took Paris
in 1871, first shot out the clocks. This gesture made clear
that the first enemy of those oppressed by capital is the idea
of historical time as a linear development. Through theol-
ogy, Benjamin entered the very materialist core of capital-
istic oppression, that is, the unconditional belief that we
are destined to be part of the unstoppable development of
our means of production - technology, science, and all the
forms of social and political injustice that the development
of our productive (and reproductive) apparatus has histori-
cally always triggered.

4.

Here lies the decisive point on the theology of tabula rasa

and its relationship to the activist impetus in architecture
that is resurfacing in our own historical time. The activist
and participatory practices that are so popular today are the
latest iteration of a reformist syndrome whose pathology is
to preserve social and political conditions as they are. For ex-
ample, much of the design rhetoric on sustainability is based
on the dilemma between survival or extinction. Confronted
with such a dilemma, which focuses on the bare state of the
nature of humanity, the culture of architecture is forcefully
invited to do something, , to be responsible , to find a solution.
In other words, the rhetoric of sustainability eliminates a
priori any possibility of a negative response. Within such
rhetoric we are condemned to optimism.
This positive attitude often coincides with the a priori
acceptance of the given conditions that, as we have seen,
force us "to do more with less," to rely on the possibility
of our adaptation to any given condition in order to accept

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 any condition. The history of urbanism and architecture
has taught us that very often the idea of a better world is a
deceptive way to preserve the same world in which we live.
This condition was once embodied in the top-down "gen-
erosity" of the welfare state, which granted its citizens the
right to housing and the right to free education. This gener-
osity was triggered by the rebellious stance of the working
class toward capitalism. The more the workers threatened
capital, the more capital - through the state - was forced
to grant workers welfare to integrate them with its social
bonds. Such a dialectical process suggests that the conflicting
nature of an organized working class that threatened capital
was the source of capital's "generosity" toward the whole
of society. Once the working class no longer represented a
threat, as has happened in the last forty years of the neolib-
eral economy, capital would dismiss its social democratic
tendency. Ironically, the rise of activism and participation
complements the dismissal of the top-down welfare state.
The self-help, adhoc approach promoted by architect-
activists is perfectly complementary to the idea that citizens
are no longer guaranteed the basic infrastructure for living.
Aestheticizing the self-help living conditions of poor people
squatting in buildings becomes an attractive option when
there is no social housing. And yet even more problematic
is that participatory practices attempt to compensate for this
situation with strategies that see our increasingly precarious
life as something normal, even creative. What these practices
seem to prefigure is an ethos in which a forceful normal-
ity is restored and, to use Benjamin's words "exception has
become the rule."

The ethical project advanced by Walter Benjamin in the

essays discussed here puts forward a radically alternative
position. The theology of tabula rasa implies that we are no
longer expected to do something; rather, we should make
room, we should create the space for something else to hap-
pen. This act of making space (rather than creating some-
thing) requires the gesture of stoppage and starting again
from scratch . The energy for such a gesture will come not
from the invocation of some metaphysical void, but from
the very sense of vacancy that inhabits our postrecession
urban landscape. Instead of solving this vacancy, we need
to invent a new architectural language that, in the same
powerful way as Meyer's Co-op Zimmer, will give radical
form to this vacancy without filling it. Such an architectural
language will have as its main goal not the restoration of

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 good values, nor will it give to our increasingly precarious
city a pleasant image. Rather, this language will hold the
promise of salvation and redemption, as it is already latently
embedded in a condition where we really have nothing to
lose, because surely we will possess nothing. Only then will
the destructive character no longer be the force to which we
endure our deepest obligations, but rather the possibility of
starting anew, starting something truly different.

Pier Vittorio Aureli is an

ARCHITECT AND EDUCATOR. HE
TEACHES AT THE ARCHITECTURAL
Association and works with
his practice Dogma.

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