English
FrançaisIn our reading books there was the fable of the old man who on his deathbed makes his children believe that a treasure is hidden in his vineyard. They only have to look. The children dig, but there is no trace of treasure. When autumn comes, however, the vineyard yields like no other in the whole country. They then understand that their father wanted to bequeath to them the fruit of his experience: true wealth is not in gold, but in work. It was experiences of this type that were opposed to us, as a threat or as a reassurance, throughout our adolescence: “He’s still snotty and wants to give his opinion.” “You still have a lot to learn.” We knew exactly what experience was: the elders had always brought it to the younger ones. Briefly, with the authority of age, in the form of proverbs; at length, with his way of, in the form of stories; sometimes in stories from faraway lands, by the fireside, in front of children and grandchildren. – Where has all this gone? Are there still people who can tell a story? Where do the dying still utter imperishable words, which are passed down from generation to generation like an ancestral ring? Who, today, knows how to find the proverb that will get him out of trouble? Who would seek to shut up the youth by invoking his past experience?
No, one thing is clear: the course of experience has fallen, and this in a generation that in 1914-1918 underwent one of the most terrible experiences in world history. The fact, however, is perhaps not as astonishing as it seems. Was it not then observed that people returned from the battlefield mute? Not richer, but poorer in communicable experience. What spread ten years later in the flood of war books had nothing to do with any experience, because experience is transmitted by word of mouth. No, this devaluation was not surprising. For never have experiences been so radically denied as strategic experience by the war of position, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by the test of hunger, moral experience by the maneuvers of governments. A generation that had still gone to school by horse-drawn tram found itself exposed in a landscape where nothing was recognizable, except the clouds and in the middle, in a field of forces crossed by tensions and destructive explosions, the tiny and fragile human body.
This terrible deployment of technology plunged men into a completely new poverty. And this had as its reverse the oppressive profusion of ideas which the revival of astrology and yoga, of Christian Science and palmistry, of vegetarianism and gnosis, of scholasticism and spiritualism aroused among people – or rather, which spread over them. For it is not so much a genuine revival as a galvanization which is taking place here. Let us think of Ensor’s magnificent paintings, showing streets of large cities full of tumult, where a cohort of petty bourgeois in carnival costumes, grimacing and powdered masks with their foreheads adorned with crowns of sequins, pours out as far as the eye can see. These pictures perhaps illustrate first and foremost the frightening and chaotic renaissance in which so many people place their hopes. But here we see most clearly that our poverty of experience is only one aspect of that great poverty which has once again found a face – a face as clear and distinct as that of the beggar in the Middle Ages. What is the value of our entire cultural heritage if we do not hold on to it, precisely, by the bonds of experience? What one ends up with by simulating or distorting such an experience, the terrible mishmash of styles and world views that reigned in the last century has shown us too clearly for us not to consider it honourable to confess our poverty. Let us admit it: this poverty does not only concern our private experiences, but also the experiences of all humanity. And it is therefore a new kind of barbarism.
Barbarism? Yes indeed. We say this in order to introduce a new, positive conception of barbarism. For to what does his poverty of experience lead the barbarian? It leads him to start again at the beginning, to start from scratch, to get by with little, to build with almost nothing, without turning his head from right to left. Among the great creators, there have always been those ruthless minds, who began by making a clean slate. They needed a drawing board, they were builders. Descartes was one of those builders, who wanted at first for all philosophy only this single certainty: “I think, therefore I am”, and who started from there. Einstein too was such a builder, who suddenly had eyes, in the whole vast universe of physics, only for a tiny divergence between Newton’s equations and the results of astronomical observation. This same desire to start from scratch animated the artists who, like the Cubists, adopted the method of the mathematicians and undertook to construct the world from stereometric forms, or who, like Klee, were inspired by the work of engineers. For Klee’s figures were, so to speak, conceived on the drawing board, and, like a good car whose bodywork responds above all to the imperatives of mechanics, they obey in the expression of the faces above all to their inner structure. To their structure more than to their inner life: this is what makes them barbaric.
Here and there, the best minds have long since begun to form an idea on these questions. They are characterized both by a complete lack of illusions about their time and by an unreserved adherence to it. It is the same attitude that we find when the poet Bert Brecht notes that communism consists in the just distribution, not of wealth, but of poverty, and when the precursor of modern architecture, Adolf Loos, declares: “I write for men with a modern sensibility. … I do not write for men who are consumed with nostalgia for the Renaissance or the Rococo.” An artist as complex as the painter Paul Klee, an artist as programmatic as Adolf Loos – both reject the traditional, noble, solemn image of a man adorned with all the sacrificial offerings of the past, to turn to their contemporary who, stripped of these tinsel, cries like a newborn in the dirty swaddling clothes of this time. No one has given him such a joyful, such a laughing welcome as Paul Scheerbart. There are novels of his that from a distance resemble a Jules Verne, but unlike Verne, in whom the most extravagant vehicles only transport small French or English rentiers through space, Scheerbart wondered into what completely new, amiable and curious creatures our telescopes, our planes and our rockets will transform yesterday’s man. These creatures, moreover, already speak a completely new language. The decisive element in this language is the attraction to everything that is part of a deliberate construction project, in particular as opposed to organic reality. This trait is the infallible sign of the language of men – let’s say rather: of people – in Scheerbart. For they reject precisely any resemblance to man, the principle of humanism. Even in their proper names: in the book entitled Lesabéndio, after the name of the hero, people are called Peka, Labu or Sofanti. The Russians also like to give their children “dehumanized” names: they call them “October,” after the month of the Revolution, “Piatilietka,” after the five-year plan, or “Aviakhim,” after the name of an aviation company. The language does not undergo any technical renewal, but is mobilized in the service of struggle or work; in the service, in any case, of the transformation of reality, rather than its description.
Scheerbart, to return to himself, attaches the greatest importance to installing his characters – and, on their model, his fellow citizens – in housing worthy of their rank: in mobile glass houses, such as Loos and Le Corbusier have in the meantime made. Glass, it is no coincidence, is a hard and smooth material on which nothing has a hold. A cold and sober material, too. Glass objects have no “aura.” Glass, generally speaking, is the enemy of mystery. He is also the enemy of property. The great writer André Gide once said: Every object I want to possess becomes opaque to me. If people like Scheerbart dream of glass buildings, is it because they are the apostles of a new poverty? But perhaps a comparison will tell us more about this than theory. When you enter the bourgeois living room of the 1880s, no matter how cosy and intimate it may be, the dominant impression is: “You have no business here”. You have no business here, because there is no corner where the inhabitant has not already left his mark: on the cornices with his trinkets, on the upholstered armchair with its doilies, on the windows with its transparencies, in front of the fireplace with its firescreen. A nice word from Brecht helps us get out of there, far from there: “Erase your traces!” ” says the refrain of the first poem of the Handbook for City Dwellers. Here, in the bourgeois living room, it is the opposite attitude that has become a habit. Conversely, the “interior” forces the inhabitant to adopt as many habits as possible, habits that reflect less concern for his own person than that of his domestic setting. To be convinced of this, one only has to recall the absurd state into which the inhabitants of such cocoons put themselves when something broke in the household. Even their way of getting angry – and they knew how to play virtuosos with this affect, which today tends to wither away – was above all the reaction of a person from whom “the trace of his earthly stay” has been erased. Scheerbart with his glass, the Bauhaus with its iron, have overcome this: they have created spaces in which it is difficult to leave traces. “Everything that has been said in this work,” Scheerbart said twenty years ago, “certainly authorizes us to speak of a “glass civilization.” The new environment that it will create will completely transform man. And we can now only hope that the new glass civilization will not encounter too many adversaries.”
Poverty in experience: this does not mean that men aspire to a new experience. No, they long to be free from all experience, they long for an environment in which they can assert their poverty, external and ultimately also internal, to assert it so clearly and so distinctly that something decent comes out of it. They are not always ignorant or inexperienced. One can often say the opposite: they have “swallowed” all that, “culture” and “man”, they are disgusted and tired of it. No one feels more concerned than they by these words of Scheerbart: “You are all so tired – for this reason alone that you do not concentrate all your thoughts around a very simple, but really great plan.” Tiredness is followed by sleep, and it is not rare for dreams to compensate us for the sadness and discouragement of the day, by realizing the very simple, but really great existence that we do not have the strength to construct in the waking state. The existence of Mickey Mouse is one of these dreams of today’s men. This existence is full of wonders that not only surpass those of technology, but also make a mockery of them. For what is most remarkable about them is that they do not involve any machinery, that they arise unexpectedly from the body of Mickey, from his followers and his persecutors, from the most everyday furniture as well as from trees, clouds or waves. Nature and technology, primitivism and comfort are here perfectly merged, and before the eyes of people tired of the endless complications of daily life, of people for whom the goal of life appears only as the ultimate vanishing point in an infinite perspective of means, there arises the liberating image of an existence that in all circumstances is sufficient unto itself in the simplest and at the same time most comfortable way, an existence in which an automobile weighs no more than a straw hat, and where the fruit on the tree rounds as quickly as the basket of a balloon. But let us keep our distance, let us take a step back.
Poor, that is what we have become. Piece by piece, we have dispersed the heritage of humanity, we have had to leave this treasure in the pawnshop, often for a hundredth of its value, in exchange for the coin of the “current”. At the door stands the economic crisis, behind it a shadow, the war that is preparing. Holding on has today become the business of a handful of powerful people who, God knows, are no more human than the many who are often more barbaric, but not in the good sense of the term. The others must manage as best they can, start anew on a different footing and with little. They make common cause with the men who have taken it upon themselves to explore radically new possibilities, based on discernment and renunciation. In their buildings, their paintings and their stories, humanity is preparing to survive, if necessary, the disappearance of culture. And, above all, it does so by laughing. This laughter can sometimes seem barbaric. Let us admit it. Nevertheless, the individual can from time to time give a little humanity to this mass that will one day give it back to him with interest.