Image: Mt. Vesuvius, near Naples
This unusual book prompted a lengthy essay in The New Yorker magazine on Nov. 25, 2024. It was written by the editor of Granta, Thomas Meaney, and I will not presume to improve upon that analysis here. I will however, offer some thoughts, fractal in nature, that might offer the reader a way into the psychic reconstruction of several left-wing German philosophers in Naples exactly a century ago.
To set the stage, I will quote from two issues of Meaney’s own magazine, Granta. First is issue 133, Autumn 2015. There, Barry Lopez wrote an essay entitled The Invitation: “The effort to know a place deeply is, ultimately, an expression of the human desire to belong, to fit somewhere. The determination to know a particular place, in my experience, is consistently rewarded. And every natural place, to my mind, is open to being known. And somewhere in this process a person begins to sense that they themselves are becoming known, so that when they are absent from that place they know that place misses them. And this reciprocity, to know and be known, reinforces a sense that one is necessary in the world.”
Second is issue 164, Summer 2023. There, Adam Mars-Jones wrote an essay entitled The Index of Porosity: “Is music absorbent? Is it dyed by the listener’s emotions so that they become fixed in its fabric (for that one person, naturally)? Perhaps there’s a spectrum involved, from which it might be possible to compile an Index of Porosity. At the high-absorbency end would be most popular music, whose success depends on the welcome it offers to chains of association (‘Oh, I remember where I was when I first heard this. . .’). These associations become the materials of a fond recall, the nest in which nostalgia will hatch. Bach’s music would be at the other end, where the porosity quotient is close to zero. It’s like a wall treated with anti-graffiti coating.”
The application of these quotes will become apparent as we continue. Naples 1925 was written by Martin Mittelmeier in 2013, and translated into English by Shelley Frisch for this 2024 release. Writing the review exactly at the 100-year mark seemed most appropriate to me. Will any tour operators be hosting Adorno & Benjamin trips to Naples and Capri this year, like many will be doing in England in 2025 for the 250th birthday of Jane Austen? Alas, no, but I would sign up for it.
Mittelmeier examines the influence a visit to Naples had on a seminal group of six German Marxists: Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Bloch, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, and Asja Lacis.
Adorno in 1964
The nimble reader can hopscotch from one fractal shard to another, on the surface of the 6-dimensional space Mittelmeier has constructed. Care must be taken to land cleanly on the shards I am offering, lest one fall into the abyss of critical theory. I liken it to a fantasy of emerging from volcanic depths, quite literally getting to ‘know a place deeply.’ It was written by Adorno in 1928 for the 100th anniversary of the death of the musical genius Schubert. The essay was printed in the journal Die Musik. The essay was inspired by Mt. Vesuvius near Naples which was largely built from the porous tuff ejected by the volcano. Here is Adorno:
“Stepping out of the abyss, he enters the landscape that surrounds it and makes visible its bottomless depths solely by defining its outlines with its vast stillness and readily receiving the light that the glowing mass had just swirled blindly toward it.”
A year later, Sohn-Rethel turned to astronomy for an evocative description of this moment. “Moonlit spikes rose up in the cool, silvery green glow of the jagged rocks bordering the outer crater. For a long time I couldn’t tear myself away from the overwhelming beauty of this astronomical landscape.”
“The stars shine only for those who have escaped the abyss,” writes Mittelmeier of Adorno’s essay. Patterns of stars are known as constellations: “Ideas are timeless constellations,” wrote Benjamin. Mittelmeier explains that for Benjamin, a constellation “is more than just another example of star imagery. It designated the process by which something can take on the characteristics of stars while bearing no actual resemblance to them, joining together broken, porous things to form something ‘surprising and new,’ as Sogn-Rethel observed in his work.” Adorno also adopted the term constellation.
“For Adorno, the constellation is part and parcel of the dialectical image. Now it finally becomes clear what is meant by ‘truth’ of the Schubertian landscape, and what Vesuvius has to do with Schubert.” [note here the conflation of music and a ‘natural place’ – landscape]. “The bursting apart and constellation of the landscape of Schubert’s music by means of the dialectical image of the potpourris leads to nothing more – but also nothing less – than to insight about the truth of the dialectical image and constellation. Adorno had discovered an illustration of his evolving theory at the edge of the Vesuvius crater. Adorno landed on a powerful image for his concept of natural history when he determined that the apparently hellish, primeval landscape was actually the ruins of bourgeois culture burst asunder.”
Benjamin was in Naples to finish a book on German Baroque drama. Sohn-Rethel “often explored the city with Benjamin,” and climbed Vesuvius “on horseback and foot,” bypassing any mechanized forms of transportation. Benjamin was also accompanied by Lacis on exploring the city, getting to ‘know the place deeply,’ writing “As porous as this stone is the architecture.” In that brief sentence, Mittelmeier claims, Benjamin and Lacis “encapsulated the transformation of a landscape into a philosophy, the transition from nature to culture.” It was this deep understanding of Naples, our author writes, “and its attendant philosophical implications, that Benjamin brought to the philosophical battle.” The Naples essay of Benjamin and Lacis was published in the Frankfurter Zeitung in August 1925. “Benjamin’s Naples essay is extraordinary,” Adorno wrote to Kracuaer.
Benjamin in 1928
“Both writers,” our author states, “were primed to see the structural and philosophical possibilities afforded by the Neapolitan landscape. And with the Naples essay, Lacis and Benjamin turned its contents, the structure of porosity, into its form. Not only did they write about porosity; they did so in a porous way.” Thus was born the style of dialectically attuned analysis that resists resolution, a key element in Critical Theory, that body of Continental thought known as the ‘Frankfurt school.’ Its members did indeed make themselves ‘necessary in the world.’
Bloch, who first went to Capri in 1924, was so impressed by the Naples essay that he “referred to it by name in his article Italy and Porosity.” But the texture of his essay is “utterly dissimilar. Formally, Bloch filled the porous holes right back up. Bloch invokes the term porosity not as an augmentation of the ‘capitalist division of labor,’ but as a contrast to it; he romanticizes porosity and makes it a conceptual trophy.”
Any reader of my review who has managed to avoid falling into the abyss will now be well prepared to read Naples 1925. Take a copy of your trip to Italy this year. Highly recommended.
Naples 1925: Adorno, Benjamin, and the Summer that made Critical Theory. It is published by Yale University Press, and lists for $26.
Image of Mt. Vesuvius, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.
Adorno: courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Benjamin: courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Source: Akademie der Künste, Berlin – Walter Benjamin Archiv