In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

368 CODES COLLAPSED
aesthetic but also on ideological qualities. One sees, then, a triple movement:
the recognition of an urban reference, its linking to values, and its
construction as a literary reference. These operations make it possible to
conceive not only a 'realist' vision of the suburb, but also a perspective
from which to observe the suburban space" (Sarlo, 180). At the same
time, the power Center of organized crime in the United States moves
from New York to Chicago-the former Periphery. This change in venue
is a result of the famous "Adonis Club Massacre" on Christmas Day,
1925, in New York, where Al Capone, on a visit from Chicago, singlehandedly
decimated the Irish rivals of his former boss Frankie Yale.
Without ever trying to control New York, Capone manages to reduce
the traditional Center to peripheral status. And even in Chicago, the new
Center, Capone's power base lies primarily in the peripheral areas of the
city (Bergreen, 157f£.).
Similar transformations of the Periphery are occurring in the world of
international politics. Instead of simply facilitating separation, national
borders are now more and more defined as spaces of interaction: "The
world has shrunk since it was enveloped in electric wires and rails. It has
become too small to sustain zones of national economic influence ...
and other such Walls of China. Today, the fates of all states and nations
are closely and inevitably interconnected" (Bittner, 516). Paul Morand
thinks that this development has begun far too early to foster true
understanding among nations: "The horrible beauty of our epoch is that
the races have mixed with one another without any mutual understanding,
and without having had the time to get acquainted and learn
to tolerate one another. We have succeeded in constructing locomotives
that travel more quickly than our ideas" (Morand, 13). On the one hand,
living in border spaces means living without that feeling of "being inside"
which is the ideal of geopolitics. [see Center vs. Periphery] On the
other hand, living in border spaces makes it impossible to see a country,
a culture, or any kind of system from outside. As an existential situation,
this experience dovetails with the standard job-description of architects
and engineers: they build systems of which they are an integral part, and
from which they therefore can never be dissociated or distanced. [see
Engineers] In the draft of one of his last poems, written between June 12
and 18, Rainer Maria Rilke celebrates the window as an emblem for the
centrality of the space-between-spaces and as an important new meta-