The Empire Strikes Back
By HERBERT MUSCHAMP
The New York Times May 15, 2005 // wickedly good. .edu fair-use
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/travel/tmagazine/15T-VENICE.html
I spy for dead empires. It's my way of coping with the imperial ambitions of the living. I spy for Venice, Vienna, Istanbul: any imperial city that has lost its global reach.
May I recruit you? We'll dress like American tourists, sip drinks on the terrace of the Gritti Palace and wave to passing groups of fellow agents disguised as Germans, Britons and Japanese. We'll wink knowingly at Russian impostors and counterfeit Swiss. No one will be the wiser, except possibly ourselves.
The dead imperial city is a global place unto itself, an international state of mind built and operated by the curious and doubtful: it is the republic of the inner life. Let others struggle to become a superpower. We prefer the underpower, in superunderwear. Our undercover mission is to form alliances and pacts with the poets and dreamers who have preceded us. We work for them.
Of all the great imperial cities, Venice is the most intact. Its enduring integrity is as scandalous as the fact of its existence.
A swamp is not supposed to produce a great city, much less the most dazzling archipelago. Despite the decay of centuries, and partly because of it, Venice is remarkably unchanged from the day in 1797 when the last doge took off his hat.
We start with Venice because Venice is our home. The information network was born there, at almost precisely the moment that Columbus stepped into the New World. That event precipitated the slow decline of Venice as a maritime power. The opening of Atlantic trade routes eventually enabled Genoa to overtake Venice as a center of international trade.
But in 1490, two years before the Italian explorer sailed into the Caribbean, something occurred in Venice that would transform the relationship of European minds to the world. Aldus Manutius founded the Aldine Press. Whether you are reading these words on the printed page or on a computer screen, your access to them is a consequence of that event. While Gutenberg is fairly credited with the invention of movable type, it was Manutius who devised the first mass-distribution system of the information age. The technology of humanism stems from him.
Smaller typefaces, reduced page sizes, longer print runs, bulk marketing to universities: such innovations produced more than books. They also produced literacy. People had to learn how to read the texts they could now afford to buy. Literacy, in turn, produced independence of mind. People of moderate means now had access to the ideas of Aristotle, Plato, Herodotus, Aristophanes and other classical authors who made up the core of Aldine's list. The Inquisition was not pleased, but the Venetians didn't care as long as the inquisitors agreed to pay for all the books they planned to burn.
But the inner life needs more than books. It also craves what psychologists call implicit learning: the attainment of insight that occurs when we're not consciously focused on an object of study. Implicit learning is contingent on context, or situation. Fleeting stimuli from the outer world gives rise to enduring perceptions from within.
The Romantics celebrated the natural environment for its power to induce insight. Quite a few of them reviled cities for presenting so many distractions that reflection becomes impossible. The truth is that certain kinds of learning benefit from the distractions that cities offer. The concept of the flaneur, or city wanderer, is based upon this principle. While taking in the sights of Berlin, Paris or Vienna, the flaneur is secretly spying on the self.
''Death in Venice'' is a great spy story. Aroused by a ''personal and lyrical experience'' while visiting Venice in 1911, Thomas Mann set out to discover what he wanted and why he wanted it. He imagined that he wanted classicism, a style that stands for the official reality of the public realm. Like Palladio's facade for the church of San Giorgio Maggiore, classicism represents the restraint of feeling by harmonious proportion.
Mann was less than careful in choosing what he wished for, however. The classical facade turned out to be a doorway to the realm of unmanageable passion where his protagonist would meet his death. The entrance into Venice opens a secret doorway into the self, and though Mann felt compelled by social convention to give his story the appearance of a tragic ending, there is no evidence that he regretted walking through the door. So perhaps he chose carefully after all.
The story can also be read as a guidebook, a Baedeker of the threshold between our inner and outer worlds. For every step Mann takes in the world of reality, his private eye surveils an equal measure of his psyche. Punching through the membrane of the reassuringly familiar, the spy uncovers a previously hidden recess of the world within. The result is a map where subjective perception and objective reality appear to merge.
Millions have ''mapped'' themselves in Venice, and although the city map has changed little, ''nothing can be said here . . . ,'' as Mary McCarthy wrote, ''that has not been said before.'' Seldom has familiarity bred greater contempt, or more fear. Gosh, I might be unoriginal! To be the cliched Venetian tourist is surely a fate worse than death, unless you are Katharine Hepburn and willing to fall into a canal while the camera is rolling.
But (and this has also been said millions of times before) I find it incredibly liberating to know that original insights are not possible in Venice. What matters is not that your insights are original but that they are yours. Fear of familiarity is the first membrane you must break through to make them so. At that point, you are not over the threshold. You are on it. And vice versa.
An empire must do more than acquire and maintain foreign territories. It must colonize minds as well. It fell to the architects and artists of Venice to perform this psychological task. As Garry Wills has written, the Venetian empire was more than a political and economic system. It was a state religion. The function of the city was to translate the religion into a visual and spatial code. Geography was key. The code had to represent the religion's global mastery of time and space.
The Piazzetta, the traditional gateway to Venice, symbolically encompasses the visitor within the city's cosmopolitan sphere. The Doge's Palace, for example, is a fusion of architectural styles from east, north and south. For this reason, Ruskin called it ''the central building of the world.'' The Doge's chapel, St. Mark's Basilica, is as much a political edifice as a religious one. The basilica's Byzantine style looks eastward: it embodied the city's view of itself as the Third Rome, Constantinople's heir to the imperial authority of the ancient world.
On the exterior of the basilica, symbol and material become one. The walls are encrusted with booty brought back from Venice's imperial exploits in the eastern Mediterranean: sculptures, columns and decorative panels. Secular equivalents of the relics of St. Mark interred beneath the altar inside, these precious stones reinforced the legitimacy of the city's global ambitions. We never wanted this loot for ourselves, heaven forbid. The saints made us do it.
By 1591, when the architect Jacopo Sansovino's exquisite library was completed, the imperial ethos had found more sophisticated ways to express itself. People were willing to accept representations of the past instead of ramming raw chunks of it into the walls. This was a huge convenience, because by then a new past had been invented for much of Italy, and eventually Venice had to go along with it. Rome was back!
Renaissance classicism came late to Venice. The city's Byzantine roots, while spurious, died hard. The adjustment required a change in outlook as well as geography, but this meant adjusting to the likelihood of its own decline. Recasting itself as a Renaissance city implicitly acknowledged that the Mediterranean was turning into a backwater of the Atlantic. Who wanted to face that? It was like New York having to face the rise of L.A., or the United States trying to cope with the perception that the Old World has left the New behind as an embodiment of Enlightenment ideals. Ouch!
But the tough could still go shopping. And no city has ever excelled like Venice at moving the merch. The key is knowing how to move minds. An empire of the inner life must be absolute, nothing must be excluded. Every emotion, mood and pattern of thought must be symbolically accounted for. Range, rather than depth, is the guiding principle. Every fantasy has been anticipated, often pictorialized by genius. And if genius isn't available, excess will do.
If heaven is a golden dome, we will equip St. Mark's Basilica with a minimum of five golden domes, so a wandering eye will not miss the point. But it could be that heaven is draped with green and white damask.
In that case, we will add tassels and fringe and figure out how to turn marble into drapes. To heighten the celestial impression, we will include an image of hellish suffering, Titian's ''Martyrdom of St. Lawrence.'' Hugh Honour has written that ''apart from Raphael,'' Titian's work is ''the first successful nocturne in the history of art.'' It's impossible to imagine that a surveillance society like Venice would let itself be outdone in the business of depicting nightmares. So long as the pieties are observed, the most horrific fantasies can be represented.
Hospitals will not suffice to treat the sick. There must be a statue of the Plague, and she must be surrounded by a church called Health. Special masks will be designed for specialized plague doctors. Featuring long beaks and painted-on glasses, the masks bring to mind Walt Disney by way of Hieronymus Bosch. Dried botanicals placed inside the beak enable the physician to inhale pleasing aromas while attending the mortally stricken.
Absolutism is a symptom of histrionic personality disorder; that is to say, an absolute empire is absolutely hysterical. One must be the center of attention, or all hell breaks loose. Forget La Serenissima. Venice is Maximum Hysterissima. Its function is to embed the mind, or to seduce, as we once put it. The city was a Casanova before the man himself was born.
The death of the empire did not diminish Venice's seductive powers. It enhanced them. Soft power is even more enticing without a gun pointed at your head. And the generation of soft power has been Venice's specialty since its empire collapsed.
It's often assumed that the Industrial Revolution bypassed Venice, and that accounts for much of its charm. There are no cars, no trains. The bell towers have not given way to belching smokestacks. But in fact the empire would not have been possible without the technology to produce ships. The Arsenale, the Venetian shipyard, is generally considered to be Europe's first factory.
And there can be little doubt that what followed the Industrial Revolution had its start in Venice. While the rest of the Continent was catching up to the Arsenale, Venice was retooling to produce the concept of contemporaneity. In the 19th century, Venice was Manchester's significant other, the refuge for romantic souls who recoiled from the industrial cities of the north. Some of Europe's most influential imaginations were fertilized by the city in decay. Ruskin argued passionately, and with alarming success, that Victorian architects should ornament the machine age with designs inspired by Venetian Gothic. The modern psychological novel derives as much from Proust's morbid obsession with Venice as from his observations of Belle Epoque society.
The 20th century saw the conversion of Venice into what it is now: the world's leading showcase for advanced taste in art, architecture and motion pictures. When the Biennale took up quarters within the Arsenale, the onetime bastion of hard power became a distribution center for the soft. Eat your heart out, Genoa, if you still have one. These developments anticipated the techniques later adopted by other cities set on transforming themselves into centers of cultural consumption.
But Venice intuitively grasped another aspect of contemporaneity. It didn't have to recruit you to its cause. You enlisted the instant you signed your passport. Like it or not (and implicit learning works best when you don't even know you're doing it), you became, at the least, a fellow traveler in the cause of fellow traveling. Fasten your seat belt: you're changing history simply by boarding the plane.
Disembedding without re-embedding: that's Ulrich Beck's definition of the impact of globalization on individual consciousness. The traditional roles that have defined our identities in modern society are dissolving along with modern society itself. You're not just (a) an auto mechanic, (b) a talk-show host, (c) a housewife or (d) a red state or blue state. You're also, and mainly, an (o), for ''other'': an alternative to any identity imposed on you by social circumstances. Any experience that calls this identity into question: that is where you actually live. That's what qualifies you to participate in what Beck calls ''cosmopolitan republicanism,'' the fluid network of global affinities now emerging.
Venice presents this network in microcosm. It is at once a stand-in for traditional social roles and a training ground for those unwilling to be trapped by them. Casanova managed to escape the city's prison. But the reason to visit Venice is to discover how much harder it must have been to break the imperial spell.
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(see also: 1st Person - 25 St. James's Street. By Herbert Muschamp
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/magazine/15FIRST.html )