David Howard

Abstract

According to Giorgio Agamben, the Greek term for ‘habitual dwelling place,’ or ‘habit,’ is ethos. The rise to prominence in the twentieth century of the modern idea of the suburb, or ‘suburbia,’ held open the door to the potential realization of the American (and Canadian) dream ethos of universal home ownership. The tantalizing appeal of a the ideal of ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ have become key terms in the Post World War Two pursuit of a mode of ‘dwelling’ linked to consumer capitalism. Yet for Frankfurt School critics such as Theodor W. Adorno, the pursuit of this suburban ideal induced a deep sense of ennui such that to feel ‘at home’ in such a suburban environment challenged the very foundations of the dwelling place of Western civilization. “It is part of morality,” Adorno concluded in his book, Minima Moralia, “not to be at home in one’s home.” This text is an exercise in examining this question of “dwelling” and “home” through an allegorical poetical focus (drawn from Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire) focusing on a newly completed suburb in the Canadian city of Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Shadows Between the Signs The following experimental text is drawn from my most recent research project War Machines: Utopia and Allegorical Poetics in the Twenty-First Century. The project is an adaptation of the allegorical poetics developed by the French poet Charles Baudelaire in his scathing attacks on the sweeping transformation of Paris being conducted by Napoleon III's right-hand man, Baron Haussmann. This small excerpt from my new book is a demonstration of my critical and poetical re-framing of Benjamin's work that orients itself more towards the overlooked elements of Benjamin's Marxism, as well as his " weak messianic " perspective, in order to reassert a more radical orientation of his poetics and critical method with the utopian perspectives found in the work of that other great Marxist outlier of the twentieth century, Ernst Bloch, especially as outlined in his book, The Principle of Hope. Thus, unlike the postmodern appropriation of Baudelaire and Benjamin, I want to propose the possibility of bridging the gap between allegorical poetics, Marxism, and utopianism once again as a rigorous, critical option in the twenty-first century.

The allegorical poetics of citation on display in the following two texts are the result of research into the alternate history of allegory that has emerged through the twentieth century in the writings of such critics as Walter Benjamin, Craig Owens, and Paul de Man. Beginning with Benjamin's monumental and obsessive accumulation of citations on nineteenth century Paris and the work of the poet Charles Baudelaire, which was intended to form the basis of a book entitled Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth, this new understanding of allegory moved to subvert the traditional assumed superiority of the symbolic mode over the allegorical in the visual and literary arts. Drawing from Benjamin's colleague Theodor W. Adorno, the literary critic Marjorie Perloff argues that this poetics functions as a meaning making machine which stages and enacts a resistance, through the individual poem, " to the larger cultural field of capitalist commodification where language has become merely instrumental. " Baudelaire's allegorical poetic response to the post-revolutionary society of 1848, with its bourgeois values of progress and consumerism, was central to conceptualizing the most critical poetic responses of the twentieth century's " crisis of representation. " The following works are my interpretation and reframing of this critical poetic legacy following the collapse of postmodernism, as well as the financial collapse of 2008, and my intention that an allegorical poetics in the 21st century needs to reconnect with the more political and quixotic Marxist dimensions of Benjamin's reframing of Baudelaire than what we witnessed in the last few years of the twentieth century.

The following experimental text is drawn from my most recent research project War Machines: Utopia and Allegorical Poetics in the Twenty-First Century. The project is an adaptation of the allegorical poetics developed by the French poet Charles Baudelaire in his scathing attacks on the sweeping transformation of Paris being conducted by Napoleon III's right-hand man, Baron Haussmann. This small excerpt from my new book is a demonstration of my critical and poetical re-framing of Benjamin's work that orients itself more towards the overlooked elements of Benjamin's Marxism, as well as his " weak messianic " perspective, in order to reassert a more radical orientation of his poetics and critical method with the utopian perspectives found in the work of that other great Marxist outlier of the twentieth century, Ernst Bloch, especially as outlined in his book, The Principle of Hope. Thus, unlike the postmodern appropriation of Baudelaire and Benjamin, I want to propose the possibility of bridging the gap between allegorical poetics, Marxism, and utopianism once again as a rigorous, critical option in the twenty-first century.

This is the first segment of Chapter Three entitled, "Between Chesed and Binah," in my new book, "War Machines: Utopia and Allegorical Poetics in the 21st Century."  All six segments of Chapter Three are available on Academia.edu along with the Introduction and the first two chapters.