More from G.H.A.

Stuart Jeffries

While Marcuse dreamed of utopia in America, Adorno despaired in Europe. ‘No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one that leads from the slingshot to the megaton bomb’,‘ he wrote in Negative Dialectics, the book he published in 1966 under the long shadow of Auschwitz and the threat of nuclear Armageddon. The Holocaust imposed what he called a ‘new categorical imperative’ that human beings arrange their thought and action so that ‘Auschwitz would not repeat itself, [that] nothing similar would happen’. In Adorno’s corner of Frankfurt, there was no future in Marcuse’s Californian dreaming. Negative Dialectics is an untimely meditation anti-systemic, anti-utopian and devoid of hope. ‘There can be few works of philosophy that give such an overpowering sense of sterility as Negative Dialectics’, wrote Kolakowski in Main Currents of Marxism. Marcuse may have thought that utopia could be realised in this world and soon, but Adorno’s implicit counter suggestion in Negative Dialectics was that it could only be realised in art, and there by definition only imaginatively. 

‘Negative dialectics flouts tradition’, he wrote in the book’s preface. ‘As early as Plato, dialectics meant to achieve something positive by means of negation . . . This book seeks to free dialectics from such affirmative traits without reducing its determinacy.’ Before Plato, Heraclitus had proposed that the world is constantly in flux. The dialectical imagination takes this thought and tries to impose order on the change: for dialecticians, and Adorno was a lifelong member of that dialectical club, the question is, if the world essentially involves change not stasis, then where is that change heading? 

The suggestion from Plato onwards was that change, and in particular historical change, has a goal or telos. Hegel’s idea was that history unfolds through dialectical process. The paradoxical German term ‘aufheben‘, which means three different and contradictory things to preserve, to elevate and to cancel and which, in its philosophical usage. is usually translated as ‘sublate’, is important here. The translator and philosopher Walter Kaufmann wrote: ‘Hegel may be said to visualise how something is picked up in order that it may no longer be there just the way it was, although, it is not cancelled altogether but lifted up to be kept on a different level." Crucially for Hegel, nothing is discarded in this process everything is taken up from one historical age to the next. For him, history is the unfolding of human freedom towards the Absolute and, what is the same thing, the expression of the Weltgeist, or world spirit. For Hegel ‘everything that is real is rational’, by which he means that everything has its place in the unfolding dialectical process. The result is that there is an ‘identity of identity and non-identity’. History, thus conceived, is like a cosmically large recycling project in which nothing is allowed to become mere landfill. For Hegel, consequently, the whole is the true. For Adorno, in a typically perverse aphorism, the opposite is the case: ‘The whole is the false.’

Throughout his writings Adorno is suspicious of those philosophies that offer harmonious reconciliations. He was doubtful, as Martin )ay put it, of the young Lukacs’s vision of epic wholeness in ancient Greece, of Heidegger’s notion of a fulfilled being now tragically forgotten, and of Walter Benjamin’s faith in a prelapsarian oneness of name and thing." But in Negative Dialectics, he was chiefly concerned, not with deconstructing such regressive fantasies, but with opposing the idea that dialectical historical processes had to have a goal. In particular, he rejected the idea that the narrative of history was destined to conclude with a happy ending. Thus, in opposition to Hegel's ‘identity of identity and non-identity’, Adorno proposed the even more battling notion of ‘the non-identity of identity and non-identity’. In making this suggestion, Adorno was asserting that the object does not go into its concept without remainder. And yet an object has to be subsumed without remainder if identity thinking is to make sense. If the object does not go into its concept without remainder then, because all thinking is conceptual, all concepts misrepresent their objects and all thinking involves an act of brutality to its object. such. at least, was Adorno‘s inference. 

Effectively, Adorno was deploying Marx’s account of the exchange principle retrospectively to put holes in Hegelian identity philosophy: in achieving identity, Adorno suggested, Hegelian philosophy asserts the equivalence of what is not equivalent. Instead of such brutal identity thinking, Adorno tentatively proposed a different approach to knowledge, what has become known as a constellational theory, borrowing the term ‘constellation’ from Walter Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Constellational thinking rejects the identity thinking that understands an object by subsuming it under a concept. To understand an object, for Adorno, was not to subsume it under concept but to set it in dialectical historical relationship with a constellation of other objects. In this sense, there is a strong parallel between constellational thinking and Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image. This use of the term constellation bears affinities with the devices of modernist art and literature that appealed to Benjamin such as cinematic montage, cubist collage, Baudelaire’s correspondances or Joyce’s epiphanies. 

In particular, Benjamin’s constellations were akin to Proust’s notion of involuntary memory. When he tastes a madeleine, the narrator of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu involuntarily brings his whole childhood to life. These sudden flashes of insight were what Adorno hoped for in his constellational theory of knowledge. Through such changing constellations and such evanescent flashes, the truth about an object would emerge to the sympathetic observer. Adorno unveiled this approach to cognition in his inaugural lecture at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt in 1931 to be greeted with incomprehension by his listeners. In Negative Dialectics, he tried to expound a new version, using an analogy that made him sound like a combination of a safe-cracker labouring in a bank’s vault after working hours, a Buddhist virtuoso of mindfulness, and a quantum physicist aware that his investigation is going to change the nature of what he's investigating.

Insight if it is to beattained at all, was to be reached by adepts who had transcended identity thinking, and then on in flashes... constellations.... always changing, flickering in and out of the beholders' grasp. 

When Gershom Scholem read Negative Dialectics, he wondered if critical theory now amounted to Marx’s analysis of capitalism without the class struggle. If so, that could equally be said of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. But while Marcuse spent the 1960s looking for a revolutionary subject to replace the proletariat, Adorno’s philosophy was a reversal of Marxism: it could never help change the world, but only interpret it more profoundly. If it had a role, it was to reduce the systems of other philosophers to rubble and thus help cure the faithful of their delusions. 

In his 1964 book Jargon of Authenticity, for instance, Adorno attacked the post-war tendency in German philosophy to find delusive succour in subjective inwardness. That kind of existential turn in philosophy which he had critiqued in his pre-war works on Husserl and Kierkegaard he found especially intolerable in the writings of Heidegger, Martin Buber and Karl Jaspers. He took their works to be self-mystificatory. Each in their own way devised elitist philosophies with abstruse terms in order to avoid confronting social realities, basking in the purported glow of such words as angst and leap, and thereby distracting themselves from the darkness of the times. What Wittgenstein said of his mission was also true of Adorno’s in Jargon of Authenticity: ‘This sort of thing has got to be stopped. Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It’s my job to put them out of business.’

In 1961, Adorno met Karl Popper in Tabingen at the German Sociological Association. Both were principal speakers at a symposium to debate the methodology appropriate to social science research. It should have been a bruising encounter, a prize fight between two representatives of hostile philosophical positions or a Cold War era confrontation between the representatives of the rival ideologies of liberal democracy and Marxism. 

In the blue corner was the Viennese-born Popper, professor of logic and scientific method at the University of London, of whom his British disciple Bryan Magee once said: ‘He puts me in mind of a blowtorch” Popper was the defender of the Open Society against various forms of totalitarianism, champion of scientific method, acerbic excoriator of what he called pseudo-sciences such as psychoanalysis, and insistent that the dialectical thinking in which the Frankfurt School specialised was not only false but dangerous. 

In the red corner was Adorno, a man whom even his dedicated and sympathetic follower Martin lay found painfully capable of the ‘withering rant'. Adorno doubted that the liberal, putatively open society that Popper extolled against totalitarianism was so very different from the latter. He, like other Frankfurt School critical theorists, had been impressed by Freudian psychoanalysis. Most significant, as the two men squared up, was that Adorno was sceptical about the pretensions of scientific method to be an objective means of establishing truth. ”The idea of scientific truth cannot be split off from that of a true society'. Adorno wrote.” The corollary being that, given that we do not live in the latter, the former is beyond us. This conception of scientific truth was to have ramifications, not just for the natural sciences. but for the topic of the symposium- namely how sociology should work. 

For the Frankfurt School. the sciences, be they natural or social. had become tools used by capitalism’s oppressors to keep the true society from coming into being. Philosophy too, by abandoning a critical perspective on social reality, became a tool of oppression rather than liberation. 

The task facing the Frankfurt School was to free oppressed humanity from a mindset that ensnared individuals in the pursuit of happiness rather than questioning why the sought such an end. Because there was no critical reflection on the irrationality of such ends, Horkheimer thought that the project of Enlightenment became self-defeating. Enlightenment was supposed to involve the use of reason to free humanity from myth and superstition. Instead it replaced one myth with another. "The wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity", they wrote.

Enlightenment creates a world the better to fit its scientific picture of it. But that world is a distortion. We have a false sense of connectedness with the world that gives us a limited sense of how the world can be.

That said, Popper’s views about science were as challenging to scientific orthodoxy as to the Frankfurt School. His 1934 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery followed the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume who had pointed out that there is a contradiction in the notion that all knowledge is derived from experience and that general statements, including scientific laws, are verifiable by reference to experience. This notion was the foundational commitment of empiricism and indeed of positivism. And yet, Hume argued, no scientific hypothesis could be finally confirmed and so no scientific law could be definitively true. For example, if all the swans we have seen are white. that doesn’t mean the proposition ‘All swans are white’ is true. This was the problem of induction, and yet, Hume suggested, we cannot help but use inductive reasoning even if we cannot justify its results as knowledge. 

Hume’s scepticism about the rational basis of induction was inspiring to Popper because it challenged the prevailing view that. only what can be proved by reason and experience can be accepted. This perspective on how science worked, called justificationism, and forming the rhetorical basis for much of science’s endeavour to understand the world (the better, as the Frankfurt School would argue, to dominate it), was opposed by Popper. Like the Frankfurt School, if for utterly different reasons, he sought to clip the wings of science, to undermine its pretensions. For him, the progress of science did not so much expand the frontiers of human knowledge as reveal the vast empire of our ignorance. As he said at Tubingen, ‘Indeed, it is precisely the staggering progress of the natural sciences . . . which constantly opens our eyes anew to our ignorance, even in the field of the natural sciences themselves.’ 

For Popper, every test of a scientific hypothesis involves an attempt to refute or to falsify it, and one genuine counter-example will falsify the whole theory. He argued that the same scientific method of testing hypotheses did not apply in the case of psychoanalysis or Marxism Rather, because there was no evidence that could count as false in either theory, he thought, nothing could refute them. Both psychoanalysis and Marxism were for Popper akin to astrology: by refusing to countenance any counter-examples they made themselves unfalsifiable and therefore superficial. 

To be sure, Popper’s account of the logic of scientific discovery is hardly uncontroversial and it was questioned by later philosophers of science, in particular the American Thomas Kuhn, who pointed out that scientists are more loath to give up cherished hypotheses than Popper suggested. Instead of taking one counter-example to spell doom for a hypothesis, scientists tend to shore it up with auxiliary hypotheses. This so-called ‘conventionalist stratagem’ makes a lot of sense, not least if you have spent a lot of time, intellectual effort and money testing a beloved hypothesis. Scientists, and this is something readily forgotten in the philosophy of science, are human too. 

Indeed, Kuhn argued in his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that science involves competing paradigms, each of which consists of a core theory and auxiliary hypotheses.” The latter change but the former remains constant until that upsetting moment when it proves impossible to support the core theory through modified hypotheses. Then something unusual happens, which Kuhn called a paradigm shift, wherein the core theory is abandoned or radicaly changed- often when the old guard retire or die.

Popper’s perspective on how science worked is important because his 1961 meeting with Adorno was heralded as the start of the Positivmusstreit or Positivism Dispute that rumbled on until the end of the decade at a series of conferences in German universities. The name of the dispute might suggest a clash between the Frankfurt School and the defenders of the hubristic scientific project that arose during the Enlightenment, premised on submitting the world to human understanding and control, but the truth is more complicated. In fact, the Positivism Dispute is really a misnomer. Popper, for all that he had written for the Vienna Circle in the 1930s, was no positivist, or at least refused the description. Indeed, Otto Neurath had called Popper the official opposition to the Vienna School. Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery, republished in an updated English language version only two years before the Tubingen symposium, included an eviscerating attack on the very basis of logical positivism, namely the verification principle, which asserts that a proposition is only cognitively meaningful if it can be definitively and conclusively determined to be either true or false, that is, either verifiable or falsifiable. It was a principle that applied a blowtorch to vast tracts of human discourse: if the verification principle held, then the judgements of ethics and aesthetics were meaningless, perhaps most charitably construed as more or less grunts of approval or disapprobation. And any talk of religion was similarly devoid of sense. 

Popper would have none of this. He applied his own blowtorch to the principle, arguing that instead of verificationism what was needed was falsificationism. The latter meant, as we have seen, that hypotheses can be accepted as probable but never utterly confirmed. 

Human knowledge. he argued. is never conclusive but only conjectural, hypothetical. aspiring to certainty perhaps but achieving only probability. Human knowledge in Popper’s perspective was like the British Empire or the Third Reich it may have seemed to its most blinkered supporters that its borders were conclusively established. that once territory was captured it need never be surrendered, but the truth was that it was provisional and liable to change. 

But if Popper was no positivist, that didn’t stop Adorno and his acolytes during the dispute from describing him and his supporters. including the German philosopher Hans Albert, as such. ‘It must be restated in advance here’, wrote Adorno in a footnote to his introduction to a book about the dispute published in German in 1969 after hostilities had ceased, ‘that Popper and Albert distance themselves from the specific position of logical positivism. The reason why they are nevertheless regarded as positivists should be evident from what follows. What was evident was that Adorno called Popper and Albert positivists because they disdained to do what the dialecticians of the Frankfurt School did, namely to question the authority of science. 

Popper, for his part, described himself as a critical rationalist. which makes drawing up the battle lines in Tubingen a marvellously challenging business. Adorno, after all, described himself as a critical theorist. But what is the difference between a critical rationalist and a critical theorist? Horkheimer in his essay ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ distinguished between the Savant who doesn’t realise that the economic (and thus currently capitalist) structure of society shapes scientific work, and the critical theorist who does. For the Frankfurt School, a self-styled critical rationalist like Popper was just as much a Savant in that sense as other self-declared positivists were. But how did Popper understand the term critical rationalist? He made his own distinction between critical rationalism and ‘uncritical or comprehensive rationalism’. The latter was really another term for positivism. at least as the latter pertained to philosophy and science. It maintained that information derived from sensory experience, interpreted through reason and logic, forms the exclusive source of all authoritative knowledge. 

Christianity localised

From Richard Sennett

In the pagan world, bodily suffering seldom appeared as a human opportunity. Men and women may have confronted it, may have learned from it, but did not seek it out. With the coming of Christianity, bodily suffering acquired a new spiritual value. Coping with pain perhaps mattered more than confronting pleasure; pain was harder to transcend, a lesson Christ taught through His own sufferings. The Christian’s journey in life took shape through transcending all physical stimulation; as a Christian became indifferent to the body, he or she hoped to draw closer to God. 

If the Christian’s journey in time succeeded, away from the body and toward God, the believer would also withdraw from attachments to place. The pagan commands to look and believe, look and obey would not arouse faith; no orientation in space would reveal where God is. God is everywhere and nowhere; Jesus was a wanderer, as were Jewish prophets before Him. The believer following in the 
prophet's path would leave the city, at least spiritually.

The Christian would re-enact the Exile from the Garden, becoming more aware and more compassionate towards other human beings in pain. 

This Christian journey made heroic demands on its followers. A religion aimed at the poor and the weak asked them to find within themselves a superhuman strength. The story of the early Christians in Rome was of a people who clung to that faith yet discovered they, only human, needed ground under their feet. They needed a city. 

1. THE ALIEN BODY OF CHRIST 

Antinous and Christ 

One of the most dramatic passages in early Church history arose from the charge a Christian brought against Hadrian’s most personal building project, a city built in honor of Antinous.

Marguerite Yourcenar had Hadrian consider the possibility that Antinous committed suicide. It was commonly believed in the eastern Mediterranean at this time that one could, through suicide committed using the proper ritual, save the life of a person one loved; the life force would then pass from the dead into the living. Hadrian had been perilously ill shortly before Antinous' death, and Yourcenar conjectured that the young man had killed himself in order to preserve the emperor. In the 1305 the dead Antinous indeed became a popular cult figure as a new Osiris, the young, healing Egyptian god whose death passed his life force into others. 

Because the Antinous cult referred to Osiris, some Romans compared Antinous to other gods who had sacriflced themselves for men. The most famous of these comparisons was made by Celsus, a Roman who wrote a generation after Hadrian in the latter third of the second century; he compared Antinous to Christ. Celsus had declared, probably in a text dating from 177-180, that since Antinous’ suicide to save Hadrian’s life was comparable to the martyrdom of Christ, “the honour which [Christians] give to Jesus is no different from that paid to Hadrian's favourite.“ 

This comparison provoked a generation later a counterattack by Origen, one of the first great Christian intellectuals. He sought to disparage a loving bond between men as weak and unstable: “What is there in common between the noble life of our Jesus and the life of the favourite of Hadrian who did not even keep the man from a morbid lust for women?” But in responding to Celsus, and in challenging the comparison between Antinous and Christ, Origen had a far deeper goal in mind: he wanted to show that the body of Christ IS unlike a human body. 

Unlike Antinous, Origen maintained, Jesus cannot be accused “of having had the slightest contact with the least licentiousness,’ because Christ is not like a pagan god with desires and bodily longings.’ The pagan gods of Hadrian’s time appeared as magnified human beings, endowed with supernatural powers and eternal ltfe. They knew pleasure and fear, jealousy and rage; many of them were monsters of egotism. Jesus, Origen wrote, was different; just as He had no sexual desires, He suffered upon the cross only out of compassion for HIS earthly followers. Christ may well seem strange to pagans for lacking bodily sensations, but this is because He is God, His body is an alien body, unfathomable by human beings. 

Origen dismissed the magical powers of the dead Antinous as mere “Egyptian magic and spells," mocked Hadrian’s construction of Antinopolis, and declared that “the case of Jesus is very different from this." Here Origen took a second, immensely challenging step. He declared that faith in Jesus cannot be created by the state. Christians did not “oblige some king who commanded them to come or to obey the order of a governor.“ In the Pantheon the gods gathered in their niches to attest to the fortunes of the Empire, as they had gathered four hundred years before in the Portico of the Twelve Gods to smile, “agreeing and harmonious," on the felicity of Rome. politlcs and religion were inseparable. Now the state could not decree faith, and all monuments and temples were mere hollow shells. 

The early Christians did not so much publicly challenge the state controlled forms of worship as recoil from them personally. Yet the new religion drew a line with even (he most cosmopolitan and accommodating Christian could not cross. He or she was obliged by the rules of faith, the historian Arthur Darby Nock writes, “to renounce the public cult of the Emperor" Such a divide between politics and faith arose from the very conception of time which marked early Christian belief. 

This belief asserted people are not born Christian, they become Christian; a self-transformation which does not occur by following orders. Faith has to be created in the course of an individual's life, and conversion is not a one-time event; once it starts, it never stops unfolding, Such spiritual time was expressed in theological language by the assertion that believing is an experience of becoming. Conversion separates the person ever further away from dependence on the commands of a dominant power, and so drives a wedge between state and religion. 

When William James came to write about the psychological experience of conversion in The Varieties of Religious Experience, he noted that conversion could take two forms; the first form of conversion is psychologically “cool,” James thought, rather like changing political parties. One may well include bits and pieces of what one believed before in converting, and one preserves a certain measure of detachment about the new doctrine even in subscribing to it. One does not lose one’s place in the world; such an experience is usually a discrete, One-time event. James had in mind people who converted to Unitarianism in New England; reform Judaism might also fit this picture. 

The other experience of conversion, James wrote, is much more impassioned; it comes from a sense that the way one lives now is all wrong, that fundamental change is necessary. But in this form of conversion, "the sense of our present wrongness is a far more distinct piece of our consciousness than is the imagination of any positive ideal that we can aim at." This form of conversion has been expressed by Arthur Darby Nock as a “turning away . . . as much as a turning towards.” Because it does not resemble changing political parties, this turning away is never finished in the course of a lifetime. The early Christians converted in the second manner. that of turning away. In the pagan world, the body belonged to the City; yet free from this bondage, where did one go” There was no clear roadmap; the maps of worldly power were useless. And the confusions of becoming were especially potent among early Christians because in the Judaic origins of Christianity a devout person wandered uprooted from place to place. 

The people of the Old Testament thought of themselves as wanderers, and the Yahweh of the Old Testament was himself a wandering god, his Ark of the Covenant portable. In the theologian Harvey Cox's words “When the Ark was finally captured by the Philistines the Hebrews began to realize that Yahweh was not localized even in it. .He traveled with His people and elsewhere. " Yahweh was a god of time rather than of place, a god who promised to his followers a divine meaning for their unhappy travels. 

Early Christians drew on these Old Testament values. The author of the “Epistle to Diognatus” at the height of the Roman Empire's glory, for instance, declared that 

Christians are not distinguished from the rest of humanity either in locality or in speech or in customs. For they do not dwell off somewhere in cities of their own . . . nor do they practice an extraordinary style of life. . .. They dwell in their own countries, but only as sojourners. . . . Every foreign country is a fatherland to them, and every fatherland is a foreign country.

Even if one does not wander physically, one must lose one’s attachments to where one lives. St. Augustine expressed this injunction as the Christian’s obligation to make “a pilgrimage through time." He wrote in The City of God: 

Now, it is recorded of Cain that he built a city, while Abel, as though he were merely a pilgrim on earth, built none. For, the true City of the saints is in heaven, though here on earth it produces citizens in which it wanders as on a pilgrimage through time looking for the Kingdom of eternity.” 

This “pilgrimage through time” rather than loyalty to physical places drew its authority from Jesus’ refusal to allow His disciples to build monuments to Him, and His promise to destroy the Temple of Jerusalem. To be an ardent citizen, engaged in the life around oneself. conflicted with the values of faith in another world. For the sake of one’s spiritual welfare, one had to break the emotional bonds of place. 

That effort began in one's own body. Origen’s attack on Celsus. Antinous, and Hadrian meant to show that Christianity had revolutionized the pagan experience of the body. Origen sought in his writings against Celsus and in his own life to exemplify that revolution. He wrote that conversion may start intellectually, in pondering how Christ's body is so unlike our own. The convert learns not to identify his or her own sufferings with the sufferings of Jesus, nor to imagine that divine love resembles human desire. For this reason, Hadrian’s sin in deifying Antinous, and Antinous’ sin in dying for Hadrian, lay in connecting physical passion to divinity. Pagan Romans like Celsus, who could make little sense of these assertions, thought the secrecy practiced by Christians came from the fact that they conducted orgies in private-perfectly acceptable behavior, and not foreign to the occasional wild patties staged by the gods themselves. 

The Christian’s next step in conversion would be more radical, a step Origen took to an extreme. In a fit of religious ecstasy, he castrated himself with a knife. Again, pagans frequently accused Christians of mutilating their bodies in the secret rites. If few actually did, Origen saw his own passion as more generally significant in following the Passion of Christ, for the effort to confront and overcome pain is a far more decisive step than the mere resolve to abstain from pleasure. We cannot simply decide to abstain from pain. Origen’s self-mutilation had resonances in ancient paganism, moreover, for instance the self-blinding of Oedipus, which led the pagan king to a new moral understanding; or again in other monotheistic cults like early Zoroastrianism, whose followers sometimes stated at the sun until they went blind; as their bodies transformed, they thought they 
began to sense God. 

A modern person may honor these acts as truly ascetic, yet explain them as deriving from a sense of bodily shame, in the Christian case a shame traceable back to the transgressions of Adam and Eve. For Origen, bodily shame could not be an end in itself. The body of the Christian must step beyond the very limits of pleasure and pain, in order to feel nothing, to lose sensation, to transcend desire. Thus Origen reacted most strongly against the charge made by Celsus, who himself turned a gimlet eye on the orgiastic practices of many of the Eastern cults devoted to Osiris, that Christian discipline of the body was a form of masochism. Celsus wrote that Christians “go astray in evil ways and wander about in great darkness more iniquitous and impure than that of the revellers of Antinous in Egypt." 

By describing this arduous and unnatural bodily journey, Origen came to affirm the two social foundations of Christianity. The first was the Christian doctrine of equality between human beings. In the sight of this God, all human bodies are alike, neither beautiful nor ugly, superior nor inferior. Images and visual forms no longer matter. Thus did the Christian principle challenge the Greek celebration of nakedness. the Roman formulas, “Look and believe,” "Look and obey.” Moreover. though Christianity for a long time held to ancient ideas about body heat and physiology, early Christianity broke in principle with the conclusion about the inequality between men and women based on that physiology. The bodies of men and women are equal, among believers there will be no more "male and female.” St. Paul in First Corinthians argued for strict dress codes separating the appearance of men from women; yet he also maintained that male and female prophets are filled with "one Spirit,” and in this sense gender-free. It was thanks to the alien, revolutionary body of Christ that His followers freed themselves from the prison of worldly appearances based on sex or wealth-or any other visible measure. These had no compelling value in this religion of the Other. 

Secondly, Christianity allied itself ethically with poverty, with the weak, and with the oppressed-with all those who are vulnerable bodies. Of prostitutes,John Chrysostom declared, “For say not this, that she that is stripped is a harIot; but that the nature is the same, and they ate bodies alike, both that of the harlot and that of the free woman.” The Christian emphasis on the equality of the humble and the power of poverty derived directly from the religion’s understanding of Christ's body. Perceived as a low-born, weak man by others, His martyrdom was meant in part to restore honor to those who most were like Him in the world. The historian Peter Brown summarizes this connection of Christ‘s vulnerable body and the bodies of the oppressed by saying that “The two great themes of sexuality and poverty gravitated together, in the rhetoric of John and of many other Christians. Both spoke of a universal vulnerability of the body, to which all men and women were liable, independent of class and civic Status.”

Individualism and seating from Sennett

London can also be taken as the capital of the nineteenth century, based on its exemplary individualism The nineteenth century was indeed often spoken of as the Age of Individualism, a phrase Alexis de Tocqueville coined in the second volume of Democracy in America. The brave side of individualism may be self-reliance, but Tocqueville saw its more melancholic side, which he conceived as a kind of civic solitude. “Each person,” he wrote, “behaves as though he is a stranger to the destiny of all the others. . . . As for his transactions with his fellow citizens, he may mix among them, but he sees them not; he touches them, but does not feel them; he exists only in himself and for himself alone. And if on these terms there remains in his mind a sense of family, there no longer remains a sense of society.”

Individualism of this sort, he thought, might bring a certain order to society-the co-existence of people inward-turned, tolerating one another out of mutual indifference. Such individualism had a particular meaning in urban space. The planning of nineteenth-century cities aimed to create a crowd of freely moving individuals, and to discourage the movement of organized groups through the city. Individual bodies moving through urban space gradually became detached from the space in which they moved, and from the people the space contained. As space became devalued through motion, individuals gradually lost a sense of sharing a fate with others.

The triumph of Tocquevillian individualism in London was very much on the mind of the novelist E. M. Forster in 1910 when he wrote Howard: End. His book opens famously with the epigraph, “Only connect. . .”, a social as much as a psychological command. Forster’s novel shows us a city that seems to hold together socially precisely because people don’t connect personally; they live isolated, mutually indifferent lives which establish an unhappy equilibrium in society.

The novel reflects upon London’s extraordinarily rapid transformation during the larger urban revolution; as to many others of his time, speed seemed to Forster the central fact of modern life. 

Regent Street was an epochal event in urban design. It coupled a continuous, heavy traffic stream to single-function use at ground level. This organization of the street created a division between the sweet and the territory behind the street lining, as in the park Nash bunk to the north. Commerce did not overflow into the side streets; the carriage trade could not penetrate far into the ancient tangle, and the orientation of the pedestrian flow of the Street, as in a basilica, lay along the spine rather than at right angles to it. The single-function street created a spatial division akin to the division of labor, the street line serving only the purposes of up-market trade while spaces nearby served craft or business functions which had no necessary relation to the street. 

The ensemble of Regent’s Park and Regent Street gave a new social meaning to motion. The use of traffic to insulate and thin out space, as occurred in Regent’s Park, diffused the gathering of a purposeful crowd. The pressure of linear pedestrian movement on Regent Street made, and still makes, it difficult for a stationary crowd no form, to listen to a speech, for instance. Instead, both street and path privileged the individual moving body. To be sure, Regent Street was itself, and remains, anything but lifeless.

....the prevailing imaginary landscape of London [shifted] from one that was geographically bounded to one whose boundaries were indiscriminately and dangerously transgressed."‘The transgressors were far more likely to be shoppers than thieves. Yet if the Underground system of arteries and veins in London created a more mixed city, this mixture had sharp limits in time. During the day, the human blood of the city flowed below ground into the heart; at night, these subterranean channels became veins emptying the mass out of the center, as people took the Underground home. With mass transit on the model of the Underground, the time geography of the modern urban center had now taken form: density and diversity by day, sparsity and homogeneity by night. And that mixture by day implicated no strong human contact between the classes. People worked and shopped and then left for home.

3. COMFORT

In the poetry of Baudelaire, speed was depicted as a frenetic experience, and the speeding urbanite as a man or woman living on the edge of hysteria In point of fact, speed took on a different character in the nineteenth century, thanks to technical innovations in transport. These made the travelling body comfortable. Comfort is a condition we associate with rest and passivity. The technology of the nineteenth century gradually made movement into such a passive bodily experience. The more comfortable the moving body became, the more also it withdrew socially, travelling alone and silent. Comfort is of course a sensation easy to despise. The desire for comfort has a dignified origin, however, as an effort to rest bodies fatigued by labor. During the first decades of factory and industrial labor in the nineteenth century, workers were forced to continue at their tasks without a break throughout the day as long as they could stand or move their limbs. By late in the century, it became evident that the productivity of such forced labor diminished as the day progressed. Industrial analysts noticed the contrast between English workers, who by the end of the century worked mostly ten-hour labor shifts, and German and French workers, who labored in twelve, or sometimes fourteen-hour shifts: the English workers were far more productive by the hour. The same difference in productivity appeared among manual laborers who worked on Sunday versus manual laborers who were given the Sabbath to rest; the workers who tested on Sunday worked harder the rest of the week.

Market logic suggested to crude capitalists like Henry Clay Frick that the “better sort of worker" was a laborer who wanted to work all the time, a worker whose energies were aroused by the chance to push his body to the limits in order to make money. But fatigue spoke practically of a different economy. In 1891, the Italian physiologist Angelo Masso was able to explain the relation between fatigue and productivity. He showed, in his book La Fatica, that people feel fatigued long before they are incapable of further effort; the sensation of fatigue is a protective mechanism by which the body controls its own energies, protecting it from injuries which “lesser sensibility” would cause to the organism.” The onset of this protective sensation of fatigue defines the moment when productivity begins sharply to drop.

The pursuit of comfort in the nineteenth century has to be understood within this sympathetic context. Comfortable ways to travel, like comfortable furniture and places to rest, began as aids for recovery from the bodily abuses marked by sensations of fatigue. From its very origins, though, comfort had another trajectory, as comfort became synonymous with individual comfort. If comfort lowered a person’s level of stimulation and receptivity, it could serve the person at rest in withdrawing from other people. 

The chair and the carriage

The ancient Greek in his andron, or the Roman couple in their triclinium, lay sociably on their sides or stood sociably. This sociable posture of the body at rest contrasted to the “pathetic” or vulnerable posture of sitting, as in the ancient theatre. In medieval times, sitting in a near squat became a sociable position, though dependent upon the rank of the sitter. The most common piece of furniture made for rest was the low stool without a back, or low chests; chairs with backs were reserved for people of rank. By the seventeenth century an elaborate etiquette determined how and when and with whom people sat, as in Louis XIV’s Versailles. A countess had to stand in the presence of a princess of the blood, but could sit on a stool in the presence of a princess not collaterally related to the King; the princesses of both sorts sat in chairs with arms, except in the presence of the King or Queen, when a non-collateral princess then stood up, and a princess of the blood could remain seated but only in a chair without arms. Standing became a deferential position; everyone from princesses to servants stood in the presence of their social superiors who enjoyed the comfort of sitting.

In the Age of Reason, chairs became vessels for more relaxed site ting positions. reflecting a gradual relaxation of manners from the court patterns of Versailles. The back of the chair became as important as the seat, and the back sloped, so that the sitter could lean into it; the arms were lowered so that the sitter could move freely from side to side. This change became marked around 1723, appearing in informal chairs with names invoking Nature like the bergére. the “shepherd's chair,” upon which no real shepherd was ever likely to sit. The furniture maker Roubo remarked that in such chairs a person can rest his or her shoulder against the chairback, “while leaving the head entirely free to avoid disarranging the hair either of the ladies or the gentlemen.” Eighteenth-century comfort thus meant freedom of movement even while sitting, the sitter leaning to one side or another, talking easily to people all around. This freedom to twist and move while sitting marks the simplest chairs of the eighteenth century as well as the most expensive; the beautiful wooden “Windsor” chairs which graced poor English and American houses at the time supported the back, as did the aristocrat’s bergere, while opening wide to free the rest of the body. 

Nineteenth-century chairs subtly but powerfully changed this experience of sitting sociably; they did so thanks to innovations in upholstery. By 1830, manufacturers of chairs used springs beneath the seats and on the backs; over the springs the manufacturers set heavy cushions, using for stuffing either pleated horsehair or the wool combings which were by-products of the new mechanized spinning machines. The chairs, divans, and sofas thus became enormous in size, overstuffed by design. The French upholsterer Detvilliets began to manufacture such chairs in 1838, calling them “comfortables." He followed with various models such as the confortable senateur of 1865 and the confortable gondole of 1869, which was like a boat into which the sitter lowered him or herself at the side. In all these “confortables” the body sank into the enveloping structure, engulfed and no longer easily moving. As the processes of mass manufacturing advanced, particularly in the mechanical weaving of cushions, the chairs came within the reach of a large public. The “comfortable chair" in a worker or clerk‘s home served as a point of pride and a place of respite from the cares of the world. Comfort in these chairs came to imply a particular kind of human posture, the historian Siegfried Giedion believes, “based on relaxation in a free, unposed attitude that can be called neither sitting nor lying" by comparison to earlier ages.

The nineteenth-century sitter engaged in a ritual of relaxation by sinking into the upholstered chair, his or her body immobilized. This same surrender marked the nineteenth-century rocking chair. In its eighteenth-century form, as in the Windsor rocking chair, the soothing motion comes directly from the push of the sitter’s feet; when nineteenth-century manufacturers added springs to these chairs, more complicated mechanical motions resulted. In 1853 the first American patent was issued for what we now call the tilting office chair, at the time known simply as a sitting chair. Its rocking action via springs and coils meant that “relaxation” is derived from small and often “unconscious shifts of position.” Leaning back in a spring-held, tilting office chair is a different physical experience from leaning back in a wooden rocking chair; to experience comfort, the body moves less; the springs do the work of the feet. 

The junction of comfort and passive bodily surrender appeared in the most private of seated acts. The development of flush toilets in the middle of the nineteenth century continued the eighteenth-cem (my drive toward hygiene. But the vitreous-glass toilet bowls and wooden seats of the Victorian era far surpassed utilitarian concerns, Their bowls cast in fanciful shapes and their porcelain painted, the more exuberant of these toilets were meant to be furniture; their manufacturers anticipated that people would test when sitting on them, just as people tested in other chairs. Some were outfitted with magazine racks, others with holders for glasses and plates; an ingenious “rocking Crapper”-named after its inventor-was even launched upon the seas of Victorian commerce. 

Defecation became a private activity in the nineteenth century entirely unlike the habit people had a century earlier of talking to friends while sitting on a chaise-percé beneath which lay a chamber pot. In the chamber which now contained bath, sink, and toilet, one sat quietly, thinking, perhaps reading or taking a drink, and literally let go, completely undisturbed. This same withdrawal occurred in easy chairs in more public parts of the house, chairs in which a person exhausted after work had the right not to be disturbed. 

Sitting while travelling came to follow the same trajectory of individualized comfort. Dervilliers’ techniques of upholstery spread to the design of carriage interiors; the springs underneath carriages became ever more cushioning against jolts. The comfort of the carriage made its increase in speed bearable to passengers, who in older vehicles had suffered most when the carriages went fast. 

These changes altered the social conditions of travel. The nineteenth-century European railway carriage placed its six to eight passengers in a compartment where they faced one another, a seating Plan derived from the large horse-drawn coaches of an earlier era. When it first appeared as train seating, the historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues, this arrangement provoked a sense of “the embarrassment of people facing each other in silence," for now the cover of noise in the horse-drawn carriages was gone. The comfortable smoothness of the railroad carriage, however, permitted people to read by themselves. 

The railway carriage filled with close-packed bodies who read or silently looked out the window marked a great social change which occurred in the nineteenth century: silence used as a protection Of Individual privacy. On the streets, as in the railway carriage, people began to treat as their right not to be spoken to by strangers, to treat the speech of strangers as a violation. In Hogarth’s London or David’s Paris speaking to a stranger carried no connotation of violating his or her privacy; in public people expected to talk and be talked to. 

The American railroad carriage, as developed in the 1840s, put its passengers in a position which virtually assured the desire to be left alone in silence. Without compartments, the American railroad carriage turned all passengers looking forward, staring at one another’s backs rather than faces. American trains frequently travelled immense distances-by European standards--yet it struck Old World visitors that one could cross the North American continent without having to address a word to anyone else, even though there were no physical barriers between people in the carriage. Before the advent of mass transport, the sociologist Georg Simmel remarked, people had rarely been obliged to sit together in silence for a long time, just staring. This “American” way of sitting in public transport now also appeared in Europe in the ways people sat in cafes and pubs

Cafés on the European continent owe their origins to the English coffeehouse of the early eighteenth century. Coffeehouses began as mere appendages to coaching stations, others as self-contained enterprises. The insurance company Lloyds of London began as a coffeehouse, and its rules marked the sociabillty of most other urban places; the price of a mug of coffee earned a person the tight to speak to anyone in Lloyd’s room.

More than sheer chattiness prompted strangers to talk to one another in the coffeehouse. Talk was the most important means of gaining information about conditions on the road, in the city, or about business. Though differences in social rank were evident in how people looked and in their diction, the need to talk freely dictated that people not notice, so long as they were drinking together. The advent of the modem newspaper in the later eighteenth century sharpened, if anything, the impulse to talk; displayed on racks in the room, the newspapers offered topics for discussion-the written word seeming no more certain than speech. 

The French café of the Ancien Regime took its name from and operated much like the English coffeehouse, strangers freely arguing, gossiping, and informing one another. In the years before the Revolution, political groups often arose from these café encounters. At first many different groups met in the same café, as in the original Café Procope on the Left Bank; by the outbreak of the Revolution, contending political groups in Paris each had their own place. During and after the Revolution the greatest concentration of cafés was in the Palais-Royal; here, early in the nineteenth century an experiment began which was to transform the café as a social institution. The experiment was simply to put a few tables outside the Wooden galerie du bois running through the center of the Palais Royal. These outside tables deprived political groups of their cover; the tables served customers watching the passing scene, rather than conspiring with one another. 

The development of the great boulevards of Paris by Baton Haussmann, particularly in the Second Network streets, encouraged such use of outdoor space; the wide streets provided much more space for the café to sprawl. Apart from the cafés of the Second Network, there were two centers of café life in Haussmann’s Paris, one clustered around the Opéra, where the Grand Café, the Café de la Paix, and the Cafe Anglais were to be found, the other in the Latin Quarter, whose most famous cafés were the Voltaire. the Soleil d'Or, and Francois Premier. The clients of the great cafés were in the nineteenth century drawn from the middle and upper classes, the price of drinks discouraging poorer customers. Moreover, in these vast cafes, Parisians acted like Americans in their trains; the café-goer expected that he or she had a right to be left alone. The silence of people in these large establishments proved uncongenial to the working classes, who clung to the sociability of the café: intimes in the side streets. 

At an outdoor table in the big café one was expected to remain seated in one place; those who wanted to hop from scene to scene stood at the bar. The speed of service for these fixed bodies became slower than for the standing patrons. In the 1870s, for instance, it became a common practice for the oldest waiters to be relegated to the outer tables of cafes, their slowness no failure in the minds of these patrons. On the terrace, the denizens of the café sat silently watching the crowd go by-they sat as individuals, each lost in his or her own thoughts. 

By Forster’s time there were a few big French-style cafés in London near Piccadilly Circus, but the more universal drinking place in the city was, of course, the pub. For all their coziness, Edwardian pubs in London had assimilated some of the public manners of their continental café-cousins; if people talked freely standing at the bar, elsewhere they could sit, silent and alone. Cafés for the most part in Paris were as much neighborhood affairs as were London pubs; ‘in the boulevard, Opera and Latin Quarter café, the backbone of trade was the habitué rather than the tourist or the elegant out with a demi-mondaine." Of course the pub did not relate spatially to the street as did the cafe; it appeared as a refuge space, fragrant inside with the comforting mixed smells of urine, beer, and sausage. Yet the Parisian dawdling on a café terrace also was disconnected from the street; he or she inhabited a realm rather like that of the American travelling across a continent in silence, the people on the street now appearing as scenery, as spectacle. “Half an hour spent on the boulevards or on one of the chairs in the Tuileries gardens has the effect of an infinitely diverting theatrical performance.‘ the traveller Augustus Hare wrote." Or, in bath pub and cafe, this spectacle could take place in the theatre of one's private thoughts while one sat. 

The exterior crowd composing itself into a spectacle no longer carried the menace of a revolutionary mob-nor did people on the street make demands on the person nursing a beer or a fine. 

'ln 1808,police spies looking for dangerous political elements in Paris spent a great deal of time infiltrating cafes; in 1891, the police disbanded the bureau dedicated to cafe surveillance. A public realm filled with moving and spectating individuals-in Paris as much as in London-a no longer represented a political domain. 

Like the chair, the café thus provided a space of comfort which joined the passive and the individual. Yet for all this the café was, and remains, intensely urban and urbane. One was and is surrounded by life, even if detached from it. The space of comfort took another turn inward when urban architecture began to be mechanically sealed. 

Sealed space 

The designers of the eighteenth century had sought to create a healthy city on the model of a healthy body. As the urbanist Reynet Banham has observed, the building technology of that time hardly served this purpose; buildings were both drafty and stuffy, the movement of air in them irrational, the loss of heat, when heating existed at all, extravagant. In the late nineteenth century, these difficulties of respiration within stone began to be addressed. 

The advent of central heating may not seem a great event in the history of Western civilization, any more than the invention of the overstuffed chair. Yet central heating, like later advances in interior lighting, air conditioning, and the management of waste, did create buildings that fulfilled the Enlightenment dream of a healthy environment-at a social price. For these inventions isolated buildings from the urban environment. 

We owe to Benjamin Franklin the concept of heating a room with radiating hot air, rather than an open fire. Franklin created the first “Franklin stove” in 1742. The inventor of the steam engine, James Watt, heated his own offices by steam in 1784; large buildings began to be steam-heated early in the nineteenth century. The boiler which produced the steam could also produce hot water, distributed by pipes to each room where needed, rather than carried there by servants who heated water in the kitchen. In 1877, Birdsill Holly conducted experiments in New York aimed at providing several buildings with steam heat and hot water from a single boiler. 

The problem with these inventions was two~fold: the buildings were so poorly insulated that the hot air seeped outside; they were so poorly ventilated that hot air did not move inside. The ventilation problem could be. and was in part, solved through the development of forced-air heating in the 1860s by the Sturtevant Company, but this new technology still suffered from the evils of leakage. When architects began to seal buildings, they could also address the probIem of efficient circulation of air, directing its fiow within the building and sucking stale air outside. The development of effective, flexible insulating materials came late, in the 1910s and 1920s; nineteenth-century efforts focused on effective sealing through design. One way of doing so was to use new materials like continuous sheets of plate glass to clad window openings, a development that first occurred in department stores in the 1870s; the other was to make ventilating ducts do the work formerly done by windows. The giant Royal Victorian Hospital, completed in 1903 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, made ducts work in this way. 

Sealing buildings also succeeded thanks to advances in lighting. The gaslights of nineteenth-century buildings usually leaked, often dangerously so. Thomas Edison’s assembly of materials to make electric light became by 1882 a reference point for British builders in new construction, as it became in France and Germany a few years later. In 1882, electric lights for street lighting also began to replace gaslights. The development of electric light for large urban buildings meant that interior spaces could become even more usable, and more independent from the windows giving onto the street; eventually the window could be done away with, in buildings entirely filled with uniform electric light. The new technology broke the necessary lighting tie in earlier construction between inside and outside. 

All of these technologies could be installed in existing urban buildings. The electric lights, for instance, could be fitted into the older gas sockets; heating pipes and ventilator ducts could be cut into floors or put in stairwells. The greatest source of physical discomfort in large buildings, however, generated a new urban form. This was the effort of walking up many flights of stairs; overcoming the rigors of vertical ascent through the technology of the elevator gave birth to the skyscraper. The elevator began to be used in buildings In 1846, at first powered by men pulling on counterweights, later by steam engines; the Dakota Apartment House in New York and 1N Connaught Hotel in London used water hydraulics to move the p18? form up and down. The fortune of the elevator depended on i“ safety, and Elisha Graves Otis in 1857 made it a safe machine bY inventing automatic locking brakes in case power failed. 

We take elevators so much for granted that we do not readily perceive the changes they have wrought in our bodies; the aerobic strain of climbing has been largely replaced by standing still in order to ascend. The elevator, moreover, has permitted buildings to become sealed spaces in an entirely new way; one can in a few seconds time move far from the street and all it contains. in modern buildings which couple their elevators to underground garages. it is possible for a passively moving body to lose all physical contact with the outside. 

In all these ways, the geography of speed and the search for comfort led people into the isolated condition which Tocqueville called “individualism.”