Hardened Flesh

“Flesh and Stone” as a warning to residents of megacities about the loss of humanity

Richard Sennett. Flesh and stone. The body and the city in Western civilization. M.: Strelka Press, 2016. Translation by Peter Favorov.

Professor Richard Sennett spent his childhood in the notorious Cabrini-Green neighborhood of Chicago. Together with his communist parents, he unwittingly found himself participating in a large-scale - and extremely unsuccessful - social experiment to resettle the poorest black families and white emigrants in a relatively small urban area. The score of violence in Cabrini-Green was unusually rich: black clans fought with each other in the bloodiest way, black teenagers fought wall to wall with whites, and the most prosperous African-American families, hoping to climb the social ladder through hard work, were involved in a sharp conflict with communist emigrants who called for radical political protest. Today, the sedate, gray-haired Sennett likes to say that it was the painful experiences of his childhood that led him to study urban sociology.

The theme of the possibility and impossibility of coexistence with others, the theme of violence against the individual in the conditions of modern urban disunity and the theme of the ghetto really became cross-cutting for most of his works - from the very first “The Family Against the City: The Middle Class in Industrial Chicago, 1872-1890” (1970) to just published in Russian (in a very accurate translation by Pyotr Favorov, edited by Varvara Babitskaya) book “Flesh and Stone. The Body and the City in Western Civilization" (1994).

Sennett is an extremely prolific author. For example, in 1969 and 1970 alone, he wrote two books, co-authored another, and also compiled a large collection of essays. Over the past decades, he has published a bookshelf's worth of works (including three fiction novels) and has gained fame as an academic erudite who knows how to speak poetic, artistic language and is not alien to everything bohemian, strange, and avant-garde.

Today, a recognized authority on urbanism, Sennett tirelessly forges connections not only between different disciplines, but also between the worlds of university science and artistic and urban projects. He loves to communicate with planners, officials, city mayors, and is personally acquainted with many stars of modern architecture and art; and, one might say, a star himself. Considering that he is a professor at major universities, the initiator of such large-scale cultural undertakings as Theatrum Mundi , a regular contributor to The Guardian, a guest on countless radio programs, urban forums and conferences around the world (together with his wife, also a very active writer and public speaking sociologist Saskia Sassen ), and also regularly gives concerts as a cellist, the question about the limits of his human and professional capabilities seems quite appropriate.

The book “Flesh and Stone” was published in the same year as the programmatic essay by architect Rem Koolhaas Generic City (in Russian translation “Generic City”) - an alarming manifesto of global urbanism. In the early 1990s, many wrote in various ways about the crisis of the modern city, which seemed increasingly like an airport and threatened to turn into an average space without properties, offering no special bodily experience to its inhabitants. Sennett, however, suggests that in fact no radical degradation of bodily sensations is occurring and that modern cities in this sense differ little from, say, Paris during the French Revolution or London in the 19th century: “Both geography... and... modern technologies only bring to the first "We have a deep-rooted difficulty in Western civilization with creating spaces that allow human bodies to experience each other." It is these varied complexities that Sennett undertakes to trace from antiquity to the present day.

The book consists of three parts - "The Power of Voice and Sight" (Athens of Pericles and Rome of Emperor Hadrian), "Movement of the Heart" (medieval Paris and Renaissance Venice) and "Arteries and Veins" (Paris and London of the Modern Age) - with a conclusion, which describes modern multicultural New York. In the preface, the author writes that it is impossible to be an expert in so many subjects and historical periods, and states that he wrote the book as an interested amateur, partly abdicating responsibility for the reliability of the information presented in it.

Although Sennett himself considers himself a classical writer (“I write as in the nineteenth century”), his fascination with non-linear narratives in various forms of art - from the music of Bartok, whom he performs a lot and passionately, to the cinema of Alexander Kuge, with whom he constantly collaborates - is reflected in Flesh and Stone. The book can be read inconsistently without obvious harm. Let some chapters refer to each other, but all the historical episodes described do not add up to what the historian Fernand Braudel called la longue durée - a time of great duration: there is no elastic coherence between them of the overall narrative. Sennett, of course, warns the reader that he is not aiming at a grandiose chronology in the spirit of Lewis Mumford, but describes only key, from his point of view, moments in the development of “the relationship between the human perception of one’s own body and the spaces in which people lived.” But the point is different. The chapters here are not bricks needed to build a main concept, but rather a collection of witty observations from an educated person on the margins of historical events. He knows something, guesses something brilliantly, somewhere he dares to make risky, sometimes completely unproven assumptions. For the modern reader, the ability to read discretely is convenient because it frees you from the continuous 460-page effort. But for the author’s stated intention to understand the “historical roots” of the problem of “sensory deprivation..., that monotony and that tactile impoverishment that struck the urban environment” - this narrative collage is strange.

There are chapters that Sennett treats with special attention and love. The chapter “Time in the Body,” about early Christians in Rome, is poetically and thoughtfully written. Changing ideas about the difference between the sexes, the use of private space at home for public needs (meetings of believers), the new spiritual value of bodily suffering, conversion to Christianity as an emotional break with one’s habitat - Sennett discusses all this without ambitious generalizations, with careful attention to detail. The history of the first Ghetto (Italian: Ghetto di Venezia - editor's note) in Venice is presented with the same attention in the chapter "Fear of Touch", which describes the life of not only Jews, but also courtesans and German merchants.

It is curious that the sexuality of the townspeople - a topic quite expected from a book with such a title - occupies a rather modest place in Sennett's arguments. He became interested in the topic of sexuality in urban space back in the 1970s, together with his senior colleague Michel Foucault, who was then working on the first volume of The History of Sexuality. In the early 1980s they wrote an article together, "Sexuality and Loneliness" for the London Review of Books , in which Sennett's text frames Foucault's monologue as introduction and conclusion. Already in this relatively early publication, Sennett’s writing style is recognizable - somewhat amorphous, sometimes flashing with bright thoughts, sometimes lulled by its vagueness, which is especially noticeable against the backdrop of Foucault’s aggressive style, which does not tolerate objections.

Foucault is an important figure for Sennett; it was to him that he dedicated his main work of art, the novel Palais Royal. In the preface to Flesh and Stone, he acknowledges that Foucault's struggle with illness in the last years of his life influenced the choice of the main subjects of this work. Sennett began writing the book shortly before the philosopher's death and was able to continue only a few years after the funeral, so that the history of the body in the city was written under the influence of grief; the motives of pain, illness, death received a much more significant place in it than the problems of sexuality.

A book of such wide scope makes it necessary to compare it with other similar panoramic works. Although Sennett does not mention Fernand Braudel in the preface, he exists, as it were, in the shadow of this subtle connoisseur of the everyday, who was able to describe the work of the most important mechanisms of history, comparing non-obvious and, as it sometimes seems, insignificant facts. Without his fundamental “Games of Exchange” or “Structures of the Everyday,” which offered the reader an unusual lens and a completely new way of thinking about the past, there might not have been “Flesh and Stone.” Like Braudel, Sennett has a keen eye for historical detail, masterfully describing episodes that make the past come alive and become more discernible to us today. So the Venetian Senate adopted a decree in 1512 to “mitigate the wrath of God,” prohibiting women from wearing transparent fabrics and lace, and prescribing shirts for men that cover the upper body and are pulled tightly around the neck. Or the architect Etienne-Louis Boullée, a true revolutionary of space, is persecuted during the Great Terror in Paris as an “architectural madman” and inexplicably denounced for designing too “seductive” symbols of freedom. And Baron Haussmann is wasting time in court with the offended descendants of those buried in the Montmartre cemetery: they passionately defend the air above the graves, objecting to the construction of a strategically important viaduct.

With a huge number of fans, Sennett always had angry critics. One of the earliest was Hannah Arendt, whose course at the University of Chicago Richard was unable to complete; Arendt believed that Sennett was completely devoid of the “gift of a philosopher.” She simply did not take the book “The Fall of Public Man” (1977), which brought Sennett fame, seriously and considered it unstructured and full of accidents.

And the meticulous Roger Kimball - an American researcher, editor-in-chief of The New Criterion magazine and head of the publishing house Encounter Books - was not too lazy to carefully analyze Sennett's text The Conscious of the Eye: Design and Social Life of Cities (1991). Without sparing the fashionable author, Kimball notes inaccuracies in the translation of ancient Greek words and concepts (Ancient Greek poïesis cannot be translated as " wanting to do something "), a tendency towards politically correct platitudes ("the professor mutters tiresomely that diversity and difference are valuable to humanity") and some vagueness of thought (“What does the phrase “ In the Renaissance, men and women literally observed the passage of time in everyday life” still mean ?” ).

In Flesh and Stone, Sennett combines broad erudition and the ability to select historical textures with an inexplicable haste in drawing conclusions. For example, an analysis of a little-known (and most likely unfinished) painting by Jacques-Louis David, “The Death of Joseph Bart,” in which a teenager killed while defending a revolutionary outpost in the Vendée is depicted naked and seemingly flying in a barely outlined rural landscape, is summarized as follows: “In During the French Revolution, compassion could be expressed through the body, but not as a place. The moral gap between flesh and stone has become one of the hallmarks of the secularization of society.” Leaving aside the question of in what era compassion could be expressed through a place, one cannot help but note the hasty nature of this thesis: neither the description of a specific picture, nor the entire chapter “The Liberated Body” as a whole does not provide sufficient grounds for such large-scale conclusions.

This idea, however, is developed in subsequent chapters of the book as the main one. After the French Revolution (and Boullé's grandiose fantasies), Sennett argues, architects and planners in Western cities began to produce spaces that primarily served the individual needs of citizens—and this ran counter to the rallying slogans of nationalist or revolutionary ideologies. This era is marked by the growth of individualism and “decent materialism” (Tocqueville), the loss of interest and compassion for others. The sense of the city as a place of common destiny, characteristic of both ancient Rome and Renaissance Venice, gradually disappeared. In twentieth-century New York, despite the outward dynamism of the capital of the world, bodily passivity reigns, and citizens at best agree to “coexist with differences, but deny that coexistence implies a common destiny.” Sennett believes that modern political mechanisms are unable to unite the population for any single purpose and that our cities need an urban civic culture as effective as, for example, the culture of Athens during the time of Pericles.

However, why should today's metropolis, in comparison with which even Paris during the French Revolution was a small village with a handful of inhabitants, solve the same problems as the cities of the past? After all, modern cities - or even entire networks from different cities - are systems of a completely different scale and level of complexity, the relationship between man and space in which is difficult to describe in terms of Jane Jacobs - Sennett refers to her in the conclusion. By comparing New York to Athens (Greenwich Village is a “visual agora”), the author misses the opportunity to identify new properties and tasks of urban space (and the bodies inhabiting it) for which there are no analogues in the past.