5. De
䊏 105 䊏 CHAPTER FIVE De Ánima, de Corpore The Ruins of the Bourgeois World I n his study of Austrian writer Robert Musil, Stefan Jonsson explores an essay in which the central focus is the image of the door. Seen as a portal that faces both past and present, this vestige of the house assumes great importance for the writer. As Jonsson sees it, the door “loses its function in modernity. It belongs to an earlier stage of social development . . . The door is here described as an instrument of knowledge” (Subject 60). Swinging in two directions, as it were, the motif of the entrance to and exit from the human dwelling is, like the Benjaminian convolute, a privileged site of revelation. One can peer into the home, and one can peek out on the social world; one can enter the stratified remains of the psyche and one can delve amid the stones of the city. Aside from the sheer architectural reference , however, something else is at work here. Jonsson writes of modern times that “new ways of building produce new bodies, new modes of perception , and new ways of relating to others” (Subject 61). No longer is it so facile a process to judge a house by its portal, or to define human subjectivity by the appearance of a nation’s citizens; other forces lurk embedded in social institutions and in the deeper recesses of the imagination. What was once a craft—the singular fabrication of a door or, to extend the concept , the assignment of an individual to a role—becomes a process of mechanical reproduction and assembly-line construction. So the door is a ruin of a relationship between worker and craft, as well as between individual and community. And so, as Castañeda sees it, such architectural ruins become runes or visible traces of stories that reveal earlier tales and previous storytellers; they also set up, as Susan Buck-Morss says of Benjamin in the title of her masterwork on the Arcades Project, a “dialectics of seeing.” The chasm or gap between the inside and the outside, separated by the door and its frame in our trope, reflects as well the discrete categories into which modernity separates science, art, abstract thought, technology, and reason. As Krell moves from the spaces of material architecture into the realm of the human body, he points out that “[i]n Western experience these separate realities—art, science, worship—remain huddled in their separate spheres, in isolated and isolating architectures. They never cross the fluid, mucous boundary of the sexual” (169). The dissociation of technology and rapture, of science and art, of the social body and the physical body, of economics and expenditure is revoked (as Klossowski perhaps proposes in his title The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes) for Krell (via Georges Bataille) through a turn toward a new porosity and permeability of these constructs. In the space where the door used to be we find crossings and recrossings (Krell 170), flesh as speaking stone (Paz), openings and not closings , and “fascination” (Krell 170, but also Paz). While for Maurice Merleau-Ponty these permeable structures induce light into the picture, for Bataille they revel in darkness. For our own use of chiaroscuro, both function as the ruins of modernity’s project. The building up (light) is always predicated on the horror of darkness (decay, debris, entropy) that accompanies and haunts all great dreams. The surfaces of architectural bodies and those of the architecture of the human body articulate and disarticulate possibilities, “sedimenting . . . experience” (Krell 171). Neither the impervious door of previous times nor the membrane of modernity keeps things apart in a universe imagined by Merleau-Ponty, Bataille, or García Ponce. The ruins assembled and disassembled in the Mexican writer’s texts are indeed objects of fascination rather than narratives of domination; they collide and disperse much like the convolutes that spin outward from Benjamin’s narrative fragments. The fissures produced by the construction of the modern nation across the face of the capital city also appear on the skin of its inhabitants. Through such fissures erupt “mis más bajos instintos sexuales”(54) [my basest sexual instincts] as García Ponce writes in his essay “Mi primera casa en México,” despite the best efforts to erect the “propicias bardas” [legal divisions of land] (54) in an effort to separate family from family and house from street. Through them also pass back and forth the political ecstasies of characters bound...
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