CHASE

Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England

Call for participants | The Frankfurt Exotic: broken objects and porous walls in Naples

Following the critical excursion Re-mapping the Arcades Project in Glasgow, and building on the field engagement with the work and cities of Walter Benjamin, we are calling for participants in a critical excursion in Naples: The Frankfurt Exotic: broken objects and porous walls in Naples.

At the beginning of the twentieth century there was a meeting of minds in Southern Italy (paralleled by the Bloomsbury circle’s enthusiasm for the same region). Revolutionaries such as Bertolt Brecht, Vladimir Lenin and Maxim Gorky, as well as key figures involved in the Frankfurt School, such as Walter Benjamin, Asja Lacis, Theodor W. Adorno, Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Siegfried Kracauer and Ernest Bloch all flocked to Capri and Sorrento during the early part of the century. In both Benjamin and Lacis’ text Naples (1924) and Sohn-Rethel’s The Ideal of the Broken Down: On the Neapolitan Approach to Things Technical (1926) the peculiarities of Neapolitan life become a storehouse for the utopian fantasies of a leftist metropolitan intelligentsia stifled by the hyper-rationality of industrial modernization. Meanwhile for Bloch and Kracauer their essays on the cliffside village Positano on the Amalfi Coast (where many of the Frankfurt School reputedly pilgrimaged to an art colony in the twenties) show a fascination for the architectural spectacle of Southern Italian coastal dwelling. Naples was an exotic idyll for many thinkers in the Frankfurt School, a seeming antidote to modern life in the city and underpinned many of their utopian visions of another Europe. Latent within such visions however was all the privilege of a European colonial gaze. This critical excursion will re-trace the movement and thought of these thinkers around Southern Italy and interrogate the role the region played in the utopian imaginaries and visions of Frankfurt School thought.

This critical excursion will take place over 4 nights at the beginning of April 2020 and will involve a series of workshops, walking tours and screenings with the anticipated outcome of a publication recording conversations, presentations, works in progress, creative responses and translation work.

Planned excursions/visits:

  • Capri

  • Arcades

  • Catacombs

    We are looking for participants whose work (theory/practice) or interests would speak to the following themes. We would expect participants to contribute to group work through presentations, engaged dialogue or creative response:

  • Porosity as borders/boundaries

  • Porosity as a model of friendship/comradeship

  • Conception and critiques of generation

  • Mourning and militancy

  • Walter Benjamin’s writings on food

  • The place of sickness and recovery

  • The condition of aftermath, or time suspended

  • Theories and metaphors of geology and volcanicity

  • Déjà vu/memory/remembrance

  • The underground, subterranean – catacombes/camorra/resistance/migration

  • Temporal unevenness as dissident cultural forms (folklore, vernacular, dialect, magic)

  • Colonialism and the European utopian imaginary

  • Political synchronisation and revolutionary rupture

  • Juxtaposition, Montage, Colportage (phenomenon of space)

  • Disasters at the origin of a sense of disaster

  • Silences in the workers’ inquiry and the “cacaglio” (Neapolitan dialect for stammer)

In your application please tell us about your research or practice. Please also send 200 words responding to one or more of the themes above. Deadline 15 January

Suggested reading:
Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis: Naples
Alfred Sohn-Rethel: The Ideal of the Broken Down: On the Neapolitan Approach to Things Technical
Ernst Bloch: Italy and Porosity
Siegfried Kracauer: Cliff Folly in Positano
Evan Calder Williams and Alberto Toscano: The Southern Line The Meridione and the Limits to Periodisation
Maria Antonietta Macciocchi: Letters from Inside the Communist Party to Louis Althusser
Ernesto de Martino: Magic: A Theory from the South

Secondary:
Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project
Henrik Rees: Ornaments of the Metropolis: Siegfried Kracauer and Modern Urban Culture
John Ely: Intellectual Friendship and the Elective Affinities of Critical Theory
Antonio Gramsci: Some aspects of the southern question

Planned excursions/visits:

Capri – we will take a day trip to the island of Capri where Maxim Gorky lived and set up the short-lived proletarian school for revolutionary emigres after the failed revolution 1905. During his exile from Russia Lenin visited Gorky at his home in Capri during these years. We will visit The Gardens of Augustus to see the monument to the revolutionary leader.

Arcades – Following our field inquiries into arcades of Glasgow, we will spend a day exploring the arcades of Naples. Along with the most famous arcade in Naples, Galleria Umberto I, we will map the traces and peculiar development of the architectural form in Southern Italy.

Catacombs – Moving underground, we will explore the Catacombs of San Gennaro. Also known as “The Valley of Death”, the catacombs are underground paleo-Christian burial and worship sites carved out of tuff, a porous stone, consisting of two subterranian levels each adorned with frescoes which mix pagan art with that of early Christianity.

San Paolo Stadium– SSC Napoli’s stadium represents a crucial node of southern Italian identity and one that stands as a defiant reminder of the intranational schism that continues to characterises Italian society. For Napoli fans, football matches become significant arenas in which negotiations with gender, class and national identity are displaced into a kind of mythic folkloric cultural imaginary. Experiencing thebandiera, mass chanting and choreographedtifooffer a multi-sensory history of Neapolitan exceptionalism and a unique way to think through contentious and fractious nature of Italian nation-building and the potentials and dangers of post-colonial localisms.

Terms and conditions

The following groups are eligible to attend the training

By applying you are requesting a place on this training programme or selected sessions that form part of the programme. A member of the CHASE team or the workshop leader will contact you after the deadline to say whether you have been allocated a space.

If you are allocated a place but can no longer attend, please email enquiries@chase.ac.uk so that your place can be reallocated. CHASE training is free to attend and events are often oversubscribed with a waiting list. Failure to notify us of non-attendance in good time (ideally 5 days prior to the workshop/programme) means your place cannot be reallocated and may result in your access to future CHASE training being restricted.