5 - The Arabesque City

Summary

By naming his 1835 collection of essays and stories Arabesques, Gogol connected it to an aesthetic form at the intersection of architectural design and literature – not to mention music, art and dance – as well as a set of debates that had animated German Romanticism in the preceding decades. Taking Gogol's usage as inspiration, this chapter ranges across art, design, architecture, literature, philosophy and theory in order to argue for the value of the arabesque as a concept for reading the nineteenth-century city. In my readings, the arabesque functions partly as a metaphor which attracted increased attention in Europe and America at exactly the period modern cities were developing, and partly as a form with direct links to urban architecture and writing.

The arabesque's value as a conceptual framework for the modern city is due firstly to its persistent links with ‘movement and multiplicity’, as articulated in different ways by Kant, Goethe and Schlegel, and secondly to its position on the border between meaning, order and structure on the one hand, and meaninglessness, chaos and the unnatural on the other. At the risk of oversimplification, we might say that Western responses to the arabesque have tended to raise the question of whether it is purposive or non-purposive, and if purposive, whether this is in the Kantian sense of purposiveness which exists ‘apart from a purpose’. As Winfried Menninghaus observes, ‘without directly using the concept, Kant's Critique of Judgement (1790) formulates and elaborates a philosophy of the arabesque that then serves as a major touchstone for the reevaluation of the arabesque in early Romanticism’. Kant associates the arabesque with ‘free beauty’, which exemplifies purposiveness-without-a-purpose, when he writes that ‘designs à la grecque, foliage for framework or on wall-papers, etc., have no intrinsic meaning; they represent nothing – no object under a determinate concept – and are free beauties’. Free beauty does not conform to a particular purpose or structure, but instead activates the imagination (as opposed to pure or practical reason). It formally imitates nature, but does not reproduce it.