In the south of Italy, on the hollow and crumbling shell of the precapitalist order, modern social relations have been shakily, unevenly erected. Avoiding theoretical generalization, Benjamin presents this truth in the visual gesture of an anecdote:
In a bustling piazza a fat lady drops her fan. She looks about helplessly, too unshapely to pick it up herself. A cavalier appears and is prepared to perform this service for fifty lire. They negotiate and the lady receives herfan for ten.6
"Naples" speaks of the routinization of swindle and the professionalization of begging, expressions of the specifically capitalist form of Naples' underdevelopment, where "poverty and misery appear as contagious as they are pictured to be to children."7 Ben-jamin and Lacis record the disorganization of the working class:"With the pawn shop and lotto, the state holds this proletariat in a vice: what it advances to them in one hand it takes back again with the other."8 For this class, self-consciousness is less political than theatrical:
Even the most wretched person is sovereign in the double consciousness ofplaying a part in every corruption, every never-to-return image of Neapolitan street life, enjoying the leisure of their poverty, and following the grand panorama.9 Traditional life goes on, except now, as a tourist show, everything is done for money. Tours and replicas of the ruins of Pompeii are for salelO; natives perform the legendary eating of macaroni with their hands for tourists for a price. I I Artists create their work in pastels on the street on which a few coins are tossed before feet erase it.12 Cows are kept in five-story tenements. 13 Political events are turned into festivals.14 One sees neither an ancient society nor a modern one, but an improvisatory culture released, and even nourished, by the city's rapid decay.
The essay "Naples" by Walter Benjamin appeared in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1926.
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