Architecture and the Critique of Ideology

Fredric Jameson

How can space be "ideological"? Only if such a question is
possible and meaningful — leaving aside the problem of
meaningful answers to it — can any conceptions or ideals
of non-ideological, transfigured, utopian space be developed.
The question has itself tended to be absorbed by naturalistic or
anthropological perspectives, most often based on conceptions of
the human body, notably in phenomenology. The body's limits
but also its needs are then appealed to as ultimate standards
against which to measure the relative alienation of older commercial
or industrial spaces, of the overwhelming sculptural
monuments of the International Style, or else of the postmodernist
"megastructure.
" Yet arguments based on the human body
are fundamentally ahistorical, and involve premises about some
eternal "human nature" concealed within the seemingly
"verifiable" and scientific data of physiological analysis. If the
body is in reality a social body, if therefore there exists no pregiven
human body as such, but rather the whole historical range
of social experiences of the body, the whole variety of bodily
norms projected by a series of distinct historical "modes of production"
or social formations, then the "return" to some more
"natural" vision of the body in space projected by phenomenology
comes to seem ideological, when not nostalgic. But does this
mean that there are no limits to what the body, socially and historically,
can become, or to the kind of space to which it can be
asked to "adapt"?
Yet if the body ceases to be the fundamental unit of spatial
analysis, at once the very concept of space itself becomes problematic:
what space? The space of rooms or individual buildings?
Or the space of the very city fabric itself in which those
buildings are inserted, and against whose perceptual background
my experience of this or that local segment is organized? Yet the
city, however it is construed, is space-in-totality; it is not given in
advance as an object of study or analysis, after the fashion of the
constructed building. (Perhaps even the latter is not given in this
way, either, except to the already abstract sense of sight: individual
buildings are then "objects" only in photographs.)

It is important to recognize (or to admit) that this second
series of questions or problems remains essentially phenomenological
in its orientation: indeed, it is possible that the vice of our
initial question lies there, that it still insists on posing the problem
of the relationship of the individual subject and of the subject's
“lived experience" to the architectural or urban spatial object,
however the latter is to be construed. What is loosely called
"structuralism" is now generally understood as the repudiation
of this phenomenological "problematic" of such presuppostions
as "experience": it has generated a whole new counterproblematic
of its own, in which space — the individual building or the
city itself — is taken as a text in which a whole range of "signs"
and "codes" is combined, whether in the organic unity of a
shared code, or in "collage" systems of various kinds, in structures
of allusion to the past, or of ironic commentary on the present,
or of radical disjunctures, in which some radically new sign
(the Seagram Building or the Radiant City) criticizes the older sign
system into which it dramatically erupts. Yet in another perspective
it is precisely this last possibility that has been called back
into question, and that can be seen as a replication, in more modern
"structuralist" language, of our initial question. In all the
arts, the new "textual" strategies stubbornly smuggled back into
their new problematic the coordinates of the older political question,
and of the older unexamined opposition between
"authentic" and "inauthentic": for a time, the newer mediations
produced seemingly new versions of the older'(false?) problem,
in the form of concepts of "subversion,
" the breaking of codes,
their radical interruption or contestation (along with their predictable
dialectical opposite, the notion of "co-optation"). It is the
viability of these new solutions that is today generally in doubt:
they now come to be felt as more utopianism, only of a negative
or "critical" variety. They seemed at first to have repudiated the
older positive and nostalgic ideals of a new utopian — authentic,
non-alienated — space or art: yet their claim to punctual negativity
— far more modest at first glance — now seems equally utopian
in the bad sense. For even the project of criticizing, subverting,
delegitimating, strategically interrupting, the established
codes of a repressive social and spatial order has ultimately come
to be understood as appealing to some conception of critical
"self-consciousness,
" of critical distance, which today seems
problematic; while on a more empirical level, it has been
observed that the most subversive gesture itself hardens over into
yet another form of being or positivity in its turn (just as the most
negative critical stance loses its therapeutic and destructive shock
value and slowly turns back into yet another critical ideology in its own right).

Is some third term beyond these two moments — the phenomenological and the structural — conceivable? Pierre Bourdieu, in his Outline of a Theory of Practice, explicitly attempts just such a dialectical move beyond these two “moments,” both of which are for him indispensable, yet insufficient: the concept of “practice” — the social body’s programming by its spatial text, now taken to be the “bottom line” both of everyday experience and of the legitimation of the social structure itself — while offered as just such a solution, has only been “tested” on the much simpler materials and problems of precapitalist space in the Kabyl village. Meanwhile, Henri Lefebvre’s conception of space as the fundamental category of politics and of the dialectic itself — the one great prophetic vision of these last years of discouragement and renunciation — has yet to be grasped in all its pathbreaking implications, let alone explored and implemented: although Lefebvre’s influential role as an ideologist and critic of French architecture today must be noted and meditated upon.

It is precisely a role of this kind that yet another logically possible position — faced with the dilemmas we have outlined above — explicitly repudiates: this is the position of Manfredo Tafuri, which in at least some of its more peremptory expressions has the merit of a stark and absolute simplicity. The position is stated most baldly in the note to the second Italian edition of Theories and History of Architecture: “one cannot ‘anticipate’ a class architecture (an architecture ‘for a liberated society’); what is possible is the introduction of class criticism into architecture.”

Although Tafuri’s working judgments — in texts written over a number of years — are in fact far more nuanced and ambiguous than such a proposition might suggest, certain key elements can at once be isolated: 1) The architectural critic has no business being an “ideologist,” that is, a visionary proponent of architectural styles of the future, “revolutionary” architecture, and the like: her role must be resolutely negative, the vigilant denunciation of existent or historical architectural ideologies. This position then tends to slip into a somewhat different one, namely that 2) the practicing architect, in this society and within the closure of capitalism as a system, cannot hope to devise a radically different, a revolutionary, or a “utopian” architecture or space either.

Without any conceivable normative conception of architectural space, of a space of radical difference from this one, the criticism

of buildings tends to be conflated with the criticism of the ideologies of such buildings; the history and criticism of architecture thus tends to fold back into the history and criticism of the various ideologies of architecture, the manifestos and the verbal expressions of the great architects themselves. 4) Political action is not renounced in such a position, or not necessarily (although more "pessimistic" readings of Tafuri are certainly possible). What is, however, affirmed here is consonant with the Althusserian tradition of the "semi-autonomy" of the levels and practices of social life: politics is radically disjoined from aesthetic (in this case, architectural) practice. The former is still possible, but only on its level, and architectural or aesthetic production can never be immediately political, it takes place somewhere else. Architects can therefore be political, like other individuals, but their architecture today cannot be political (a restatement of proposition 2, above). It follows, then, that 5) an architecture of the future will be concretely and practically possible only when the future has arrived, that is to say, after a total social revolution, a systemic transformation of this mode of production into something else.

This position, which inevitably has something of the fascination of uncompromising intransigence and of all absolutes, must be understood, as I shall try to show below in more detail, first of all within the history of contemporary Marxism, as a repudiation of what the Althusserians called Marxist "humanism" (including very specifically its "utopian" component as symbolically represented by Marcuse or by Lefebvre himself). Its refusal to entertain the possibility of some properly Marxian "ideology" (which would seek to project alternate futures), its commitment to a resolutely critical and analytical Marxian "science" — by way of a restriction to the operation of denouncing the ideologies of the past and of a closed present — all these features betray some kinship with Adorno's late and desperate concept of a purely "negative dialectic." The ambiguity of such a position lies in its very instability, and the way in which it can imperceptibly pass over into a post-Marxisism of the type endorsed by the French nouveau philosophes or by Tafuri's collaborator, Massimo Cacciari. This is to suggest that Tafuri's position is also an ideology, and that one does not get out of ideology by refusing it or by committing oneself to negative and critical "ideological analysis."

Yet at this stage, such an evaluation remains at the level of mere opinion and in that form has little if any interest in what

This dilemma will not bother those for whom history-writing is not an essential task; if you are satisfied to do small-scale semiotic analyses of discrete or individual texts, or buildings, then presumably the problem of the writing of history, the telling of a historical story, will not unduly preoccupy you. I say "presumably" because I think that this problem also leaves its traces on such static analyses, and indeed it seems to be an empirical fact that the issues of history are returning everywhere today, not least within semiotics itself (the history of semiotics, the turn of semiotic analysis to the problem of genres, the problem of a semiotic of historical representation).

However, leaving other people to their concerns it will be clear that no issue is more central or more acute for those with some commitment to a dialectical tradition, since the dialectic has always for better or for worse been associated with some form or other of historical vision. For myself, I am much attracted by Louis Althusser's solution, which consists in proposing, in the midst of the crisis of historical representation and of narrative history, that the historian should conceive her task, not as that of producing a representation of history, but rather as that of producing the concept of history, a very different matter indeed.

But how is this to be done? Or rather, to be more modest about it, how has this actually been done in practice? From this perspective, it will be of interest to read Architecture and Utopia with a view toward determining the way in which it suggestively "produces the concept" of a dialectical history of architecture. But this is a rare enough achievement for one to want, initially, to juxtapose Tafuri's text with those very rare other realizations of this particular genre or form. I can think of only two contemporary dialectical histories of comparable intensity and intellectual energy: they are Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music (a seminal text, on which Thomas Mann drew for his musical materials in Doktor Faustus) and, in the area of the history of literature, Roland Barthes's early and unequaled Writing Degree Zero. You will understand that this limited choice does not imply a lack of interest in the contributions that a Lukács, a Sartre, an Asor Rosa, or a Raymond Williams, among others, has made to the restructuring of traditional paradigms of literary history. What the three books I have mentioned have in common is not merely a new set of dialectical insights into literature, but the practice of a peculiar, condensed, allusive discursive form, a kind of textual genre, still

to see as the ultimate precondition to which they must painfully submit in order to practice dialectical thinking: this is the sense of necessity, of necessary failure, of closure, of ultimate unresolvable contradictions and the impossibility of the future, which cannot have failed to oppress any reader of these texts, particularly readers who as practicing artists — who identify architects, composers, or writers — come to them for suggestions and encouragement as to the possibility of future cultural production.

Adorno's discussion of musical history culminates, for instance, in Schoenberg's "in extraordinary" "solution" — the twelve-tone system — which solves all of the dilemmas outstanding in previous musical history so completely as to make musical composition after Schoenberg superfluous (or at least regressive) from Adorno's perspective, yet at the same time ends up as a baleful replication or mirror image of that very totalitarian socio-economic system from which it sought to escape on the first place. In Barthelemy's "Writing Degree Zero" the well-known ideal of "white writing" — far from being what it often looks like today, namely a rather complacent account of postmodernist trends — stood in its initial historical context and situation as an equally impossible solution to a dilemma that rendered all earlier practices of writing or style ideological and intolerable. Tafuri's account, finally, of the increasing closure of late capitalism beginning in 1931, and intensifying dialectically after World War II, by systematically shutting off one aesthetic possibility after another, ends up conveying a paralyzing and asphyxiating sense of the futility of any architectural or urbanistic innovation on this side of that equally inconceivable watershed, a total social revolution.

It would be silly, or even worse, frivolous, to discuss these positions in terms of optimism or pessimism. Later on I shall have some remarks to make about the political presuppositions that account for (or at least overdetermine) some of Tafuri's attitudes here; what I prefer to stress now is the formal origin of these somber visions of the total system, which, far worse than Max Weber's iron cage, here descends upon human life and human creative praxis. The strengths of the readings and insights of Adorno, Barthelemy, and Tafuri in these works are for one thing inextricably bound up with their vision of history as an increasingly total or closed system. In other words, their ability to interpret a given work of art as a provisional "solution" is absolutely dependent on a perspective that reads the artwork against a context reconstructed or rewritten as a situation and a contradiction.

More than this, I find confirmation in these books for an intuition I have expressed elsewhere, namely that the dialectic, or powerful dialectical history, must somehow always involve a vision of Necessity, or, if you prefer, must always tell the story of failure. "The owl of Minerva takes its flight at dusk": dialectical interpretation is always retrospective, always tells the necessity of an event, why it had to happen the way it did; and to do that, the event must already have happened, the story must already have come to an end. Yet as this will sound like an indictment of the dialectic (or as yet one more post-Marxist "proof" of its irre-cuperable Hegelian character), it is important to add that such histories of necessity and of determinate failure are equally inseparable from some ultimate historical perspective of reconciliation, of achieved socialism, of Marx's "end of prehistory."

The restructuring of the history of an art in terms of a series of situations, dilemmas, contradictions, in terms of which individual works, styles, and forms can be seen as so many responses or determinate symbolic acts: this is then a first key feature of dialectical historiography. But there is another no less essential one that springs to mind, at least when one thinks in terms of historical materialism, and that is the reversal associated with the term "materialism itself, the anti-idealistic thrust, the rebuke and therapeutic humiliation of consciousness forced to reground itself in a painful awareness of what Marx called its "social determination." This second requirement is of course that which sets off the present texts sharply from old-fashioned Hegelian spiritual historiography, but which in turn threatens to undermine the historiographic project altogether, as in Marx's grim reminder in The German Ideology:

We do not set out from what people say, imagine, or conceive, nor from people as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at people in the flesh. We set out from real, active human beings, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain their semblance of independence. They have no history, no development, in their own right; but it is rather human beings who, developing their material produc-

tion and relationships, alter, along with this,
their real existence, their thinking, and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.

Now the slogan of "materialism" has again become a very popular euphemism for Marxism: I have my own reasons for rejecting to this particular ideological fashion on the left today: male and dishonest as a kind of popular-front solution to the very real tensions between Marxism and feminism, the slogan so seems to me extraordinarily misleading as a synonym for historical materialism" itself, since the very concept of materialism" is a bourgeois Enlightenment (later positivist) concept, and fatally conveys the impression of a "determinism by the body" rather than, as in genuine dialectal Marxism, a determination by the mode of production." At any rate, in the context that concerns us here — the description of "dialectal historiography" — the drawback of the word "materialism" is that it tends to suggest that only one form of dialectal reverence — the overthrow of idealism by materialism or a recall to materiality — is at work in such books.

Actually, however, the dialectal shock, the reversal of our habits of idealism, can take many forms; and it is evident that the dialectal history of an art its privileged targets will be the realistic habits we have inherited in thinking about such matters, in particular, Hegelian notions of the history of forms and styles, but also empiricist or structuralist notions of isolated texts. Still, it is best to see how these reversal-effects have been achieved in practice, rather than deducing them a priori in some pragmatic manner. And since none of these works ever raises one key issue of concern to everyone today, it is appropriate to preface a discussion of them with the indication of a fundamental term of contemporary "reversal" which may not leave them distracted either: namely the way in which contemporary feminism critiques cut across the whole inherited system of the histories of art and culture by demonstrating the glaring absence from them, not merely of women as such, but, in the architectural area, of any consideration of the relationship between women's work and interior space, and between the domination of women and the city plan itself. For male intellectuals, this is the mostunning materialist reversal of all, since it calls us effectively into question at the same time that it disturbingly seems to discredit the very foundations and institutional presuppositions of the disciplines in question.

Indeed, the lesson for us in criticism of this kind may well be, among other things, that: that a materialist or dialectical historiography does its work ultimately by undermining the very foundations, framework, constitutive presuppositions, of the specialized disciplines themselves by unexpectedly demonstrating the existence, not necessarily of "matter" in that limited sense, but rather in general of an Other of the discipline, an outside, a limit, the revelation of the extrinsic; which it is felt to be scandalous and unscholarly to introduce into a carefully regulated traditional debate.

Adorno's book perhaps goes least far in this direction: the Philosophy of Modern Music operates its particular reversal by shifting from the subject (the great composers and their styles and works) to the object, the raw material, the tonal system itself, which as a peculiar "logic of content" has its dynamics and generates fresh problems with every new solution, setting absolute limits to the freedom of the composer at every historical moment, its objective contradictions increasing in intensity and complexity with each of those new moments, until Schoenberg's "final solution" — the unification of vertical and horizontal, of harmony and counterpoint — seems to produce an absolute that is a full stop, beyond which composition cannot go: a success that is also, in genuine dialectal fashion, an absolute failure.

Barthes's reversal is useful in that his problematic (which is essentially that of the Sartre of What Is Literature?) is the most distant from the rhetoric of materialism and materiality and consists rather in a vision of the nightmare of history as blood guilt, and as that necessary and inevitable violence of the relationship of any group to the others which we call class struggle. Both writers — Sartre and Barthes — reverse our placid conceptions of literary history by demonstrating how every individual text, by its institutionalized signals, necessarily selects a particular readership for itself and thereby symbolically endorses the inevitable blood guilt of that particular group or class. Only whereas Sartre proposed the full utopian solution of a literature of praxis that would address itself to a classless society, Barthes ingeniously imagines a different way of escaping from the "nightmare of history," a kind of neutral or zero term, the projection of a kind of work from which all group or class signals have been eliminated: white or bleached writing, an escape from group blood guilt to the other side of group formation (which in later Barthes will be reoriented around reception rather than production and become the escape from class struggle into an equally non-individual kind of jouissance or punctual schizophrenic or perverse ecstasy, as in

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opment of advanced music beyond his “final stage,” repudiating Stockhausen, electronic music, all of the developments of the fifties and sixties, with the same stubborn passion that leads him to bracket any conceivable political future in Negative Dualectics.

We have examined already the more ingenious conception of a “negative way” in Barthes’s ideal of a zero degree of writing or in Tafuri’s passing homage to Mies. What must now be underscored is the constitutive relationship between Tafuri’s possibility of constructing dialectical history and his systematic refusal of what, in Theories and History of Architecture, is called “operative criticism”; that is, a criticism which, most strikingly in classical works like Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture, reads the past selectively and places an illusory historical analysis, the appearance of some “objective” historical narrative, in the service of what is in reality an architectural manifesto, the “normative” projection of some new style, the project of future work and future possibilities: “the planning of a precise poetical tendency, anticipated in its structures and derived from historical analyses programmatically distorted and finalized.” — in short, “ideological criticism [that] substitutes ready-made judgments of value (prepared for immediate use) for analytical rigor.” But this judgment on the spurious appropriation of the past in the service of an endorsement of aesthetic action in the present implies that “rigorous” analytical history must in turn be bought by a stoic renunciation of action and of value, and a well-nigh Hegelian renunciation of all possible futures, in order that the owl of Minerva be able to wing its flight into the past. Tafuri’s “pessimism” is thus to be seen as a formal necessity of the generic structure of his text — dialectical historiography — rather than an “opinion” or a “position” in its own right.

Unfortunately, one also cannot help but read it as just such an opinion or position; and at this point a purely formal and textual necessity intersects with and is overdetermined by ideology, and becomes the vehicle for a whole set of ideological messages and signals that has real content and that can best be appreciated by way of the Marxian traditions from which it emerges.

It seems to me most convenient to decode these signals in the context of a current and general left appropriation of the older right-wing “end of ideology” slogans of the late 1950s. In the period of the Fisenbower era and the great American celebration

to explain the originality of the features of so-called post-industrial society as a new stage of capitalism proper, in which the old contradictions of capital were still at work, but in unexpectedly new forms. The features enumerated by people like Bell — for example, the primacy of science, the role of bureaucracy, and so forth — would be retained, but interpreted very differently in the light of a new moment that can be called "late capitalism" or the multinational world system (in the traditional Marxian periodization this would be a third moment of capitalism, after those of classical market capitalism and of imperialism and monopoly, and could be dated from the immediate postwar period in the United States and the late 1950s in Europe). I do not have time to go into this extremely important new Marxian theory of the contemporary world, but must, before returning to Tafuri, underscore two of its significant features.

First, it is the theory of something like a total system, marked by a global deployment of capital around the world (even, on many accounts, reaching into the still far from autonomous economic dynamics of the nascent socialist countries), and effectively destroying the older coherence of the various national situations. The total system is marked also by the dynamism with which it now penetrates and colonizes the two last surviving enclaves of Nature within the older capitalism: the unconscious and the precapitalist agriculture of the Third World — the latter is now systematically undermined and reorganized by the Green Revolution, while the former is effectively mastered by what the Frankfurt School used to call the "culture industry," that is, the media, mass culture, and the various other techniques of the commodification of the mind. I should also add that this new quantum leap of capital now menaces that other precapitalist enclaves within older capitalism, namely the non-paid labor of the older interior or home or family, thereby in contradictory fashion unbinding and liberating that enormous new social force of women, who immediately then pose an uncomfortable new threat to the new social order.

On the other hand, if the new expansion of multinational or late capitalism at once triggers various new forms of struggle and resistance, as in the great revolts of the 1960s, it also tends to be accompanied by the mood of pessimism and hopelessness that must naturally enough accompany the sense of a total system, with nothing outside itself, called "the other."

come to be seen, not as the emergence of new forces
logic of a radically different future, but rather mere
within the system, punctual reversals of this or that
feature: no longer dialectical in their force, but merely
until. The Marxist response to this increasing windless
will be varied: it can take the form of a sub-
the time-scale of the prognosis of the Grundrisse for
imminent, of Capital proper. $^{9}$ In the Grundrisse, we seem to project a far greater resiliency for capital,
Capital itself, one which better accommodates the
new vitality and dynamism of the system after World
key feature of this position will be the insistence on
all, a classical notion of Marx, namely that a socialist
and a socialist society are not possible until capital
is exhausted all its possibilities, but also not until
it has become a worldwide and global fact, in which
communication is combined with a global proletarian
work force, a transformation of all humanity
the peasants of the Third World) into wage workers.
In the chances for socialism are relegated into some far
other positive again, since it marks precisely the quan-
tion toward that final global state. But this means, in
that not only can there not be socialism in one country,
but be anything like socialism in one block of countries:
Solution here is by definition global revolution or it is
and equally obviously, there can be no emergence of a
social system within the interests of the old, within
sector of capitalism proper. Here, I think, you will
only recognized the perspective that is characteristic of
work: there can no qualitative change in any element
capitalist system — as, for instance, in architecture or
without beforehand a total revolution and sys-
formation. (Total systems theory can, of course, also
in terms of the kind of textual determinism already
have the purpose of the theorist is to build as powerful a
capital as possible, and as all-embracing, systemic,
and self-perpetuating. Thus, if the theorist succeeds,
are the more powerful the model constructed, the less
will be foreseen in it for any form of human resistance,
of structural transformation.)
the meaning of this stark and absolute position, this

diagnosis of the total system of late or multinational capital, cannot be grasped fully without taking into account the alternative position of which it is the symbolic repudiation: and this is what may be called neo-Gramscianism, the more "optimistic" assessment of some possible "long march through the institutions," which counterposes a new conception of some gradualist "war of position" for the classical Leninist model of the "war of maneuver," one or nothing seizure of power. There are, of course, many reasons why radical Italian intellectuals today should have become fatigued with the Gramscian vision, paradoxically at the very moment in which it has come to seem reinvigorating for the last in other national situations in Europe and elsewhere: most obvious of these reasons is the thirty-year institutionalization of Gramsci's thought within the Italian Communist Party (and the assimilation of Gramsci, in the Italian context, to that classical form of dialectical thought which is everywhere systematically repudiated by a Nietzschean post-Marxism). Nor should we forget to underscore the structural ambiguity or polysemousness of the basic Gramscian texts, which, written in a coded language beneath the eyes of the Fascist censor, can either be "translated back" into classical Leninism, or on the contrary read as a novel inflection of Leninism in a new direction, as a post-Leninism or stimulating new form of neo-Marxism. There are therefore "objectively" many distinct Gramscis, between which it would be frivolous to attempt to decide which is the "true" one. I want, however, to suggest that with some Gramscian alternative, the possibility of a very different perspective on architecture and urbanism today is also given: so that the implications of this further digression are not a matter of Marxist scholastic, nor are they limited to purely political consequences.

At least two plausible yet distinct readings of the Gramsci slogan, the struggle for "hegemony," must be proposed at this point. What is at stake is the meaning of that "counterhegemony" which oppositional forces are called upon to construct within the ongoing dominance of the "hegemony" of capital: and the interpretive dilemma here turns on the (false) problem of a materialist or an idealist reading. If the Gramsci struggle, in other words, aims essentially at the preparation of the working class for some eventual seizure of power, then "counterhegemony" is to be understood in purely superstructural terms, as the virtual or anticipatory, in the sense that they "correspond" to a material, institutional base that has not yet "in reality" been secured by political revolution itself.

The temptation is therefore to argue for a "materialist"

The image contains a block of text from an academic article. It discusses the Gramsci on the basis of certain key figures or tropes in historical texts, one recalls, for example, the formulations of the 1859 Preface to the Critique of Politics by New, higher relations of production never appear in material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society... productive forces develop in the womb of bourgeois society create the material condition of the antagonism [of all previous history as distinct]. There must also be noted the celebrated figure in this, the Marx of Capital characterizes the state commerce within the quite different logic of the mode of production: "existing in the interests of the world, like the gods of Epicurus in the intermundia or the pores of Polish society."

Much figures suggest something like an enclave theory of transition, according to which the emergent future, the still nascent social relations that announce a mode of life that will ultimately displace and subsume the as yet dominant one, is theorized in terms of small yet strategic beachheads within the older system. The essentially nature of the characterization is no accident and conveys like a historical tension between two radically different spaces, in which the emergent yet more powerful kind actually extend its influence and dynamism over the older ones coming out from its initial implantations and gradually going what persists around it. Nor is this a mere poetic one; political realities that have been taken as the nation and the concrete embodiment of "enclave theory" in temporary society are the legendary "red communes" of history, most notably Bologna, whose administration by the Austrian Party has seemed to demarcate them radically from emption and inefficiency of the capitalist nation-state which, like so many foreign bodies, they are embedded in assessment of such communities is particularly instructive:

"The debate over the historical centers and the experience of Bologna have shown that architectural and urbanistic proposals cannot be put to test outside definite political situations, and when only within improved public structures for control. This has effected a substantial modification in the role of the architectural profession,

even further redimensioned and characterized by an increasing change in the traditional forms of patronage and commissioning... Although what [the new left city administrations] have inherited is in a desperate state and the financial difficulties are staggering, one can hope that from this new situation may come the realization of the reforms sought for decades. It is on this terrain that the Italian workers' movements are summoned to a historical test, whose repercussions may prove to be enormous, even outside Italy."

These lines (written, to be sure, in the more favorable atmosphere of 1976) betray a rather different Tafuri than the somber historiographer of some "end of history" who predominates in the preceding pages.

What complicates this picture, however, is the discovery that it is precisely some such "enclave theory" that in Tafuri's analysis constitutes the utopianism of the modern movement in architecture; that, in other words, Tafuri's critique of the International Style, the informing center of all his works, is first and foremost a critique of the latter's enclave theory itself. Le Corbusier, for example, spoke of avoiding political revolutions, not because he was not committed to "revolution," but rather because he saw the construction and the constitution of new space as the most revolutionary act, and one that could "replace" the narrowly political revolution of the mere seizure of power (and if the experience of a new space is associated with a whole transformation of everyday life itself, Le Corbusier's seemingly antipolitical stance can be reread as an enlargement of the very conception of the political, and as having anticipatory kinship with conceptions of "cultural revolution," which are far more congenial to the spirit of the contemporary left). Still, the demurging hubris of high modernism is fatefully dramatized by such visions of the towers of the Plan Voisin, which stride across a fallen landscape like H. G. Wells's triumphant Martians, or of the gigantic symbolic structures of the Unities d'habitation, the Algiers plan, or Chandigarh, which are apocalyptically to sound the knell of the cramped and insalubrious hovels that lie dwarfed beneath their prophetic shadow. We shall enter shortly into the terms of Tafuri's critique of modernism itself: suffice it to say for the moment that its cardinal sin is precisely to identify (or conflate) the political and the aesthetic, and to foresee a political and

Third Worlds, of projects and constructions that are not possible in the First: this concrete existence of radically different spaces elsewhere (of whatever unequal realization) is what objectively opens the possibility for the coming into being and development of "counterhegemonic values" here. A role is thereby secured for a more "positive" and Gramscian architectural criticism, over against Tafuri's stubbornly (and therapeutically) negative variety, his critical refusal of utopian speculation on what is not possible within the closure of the multinational system. In reality, both of these critical strategies are productive alternately according to the situation itself, and the public to which the ideological critic must address herself; and there is no particular reason to lay down either of these useful weapons. It is at any rate worth quoting yet another appreciation of Tafuri — this one, unexpectedly, of the Stalinallee — in order to show that his practical criticism is often a good deal more ambivalent than his theoretical slogans (and further to dispel the feeling that the celebration of Mies's negative mysticism, quoted above, amounts to anything like a definitive position):

However, in the case [of the Stalinallee, in East Berlin] it would be wrong to regard what resulted as purely ideological or propagandistic; in reality, the Stalinallee is the fulcrum of a project of urban reorganization affecting an entire district, establishing an axis of development toward the Tiergarten different from that developed historically. In addition, this plan inverts the logical manner in which a bourgeois city expands by introducing into the heart of the metropolis the residence as a decisive factor. The monumental bombast of the Stalinallee — now renamed Karl Marx Allee — was conceived to put in a heroic light an urbanistic project that set out to be different. In fact, it succeeds perfectly in expressing the presupposition for the construction of the new socialist city, which rejects divisions between architecture and urbanism and aspires to impose itself as a unitary structure.

Such a text can evidently be used to support either position: the negative one, that such a collective project, with its transcendence of the opposition building city, is only possible after a re

more Gramscian one outlined above, that the very existence of such an ensemble in some other space of the world creates a new force field that cannot but have its influence even over those architects for whom such a project is scarcely a “realistic” possibility.

Still, until now we have not considered what kind of "total system" it is that sets limits to the practical transformation of space in our time; nor have we drawn the other obvious consequence from the Marxian theorization of "consumer society" or of the new moment of late capitalism, namely, that to such a new moment there very well may correspond a new type of culture or cultural dynamic. This is therefore the time to introduce our third theme or problem, namely that of postmodernism and of the critique of classical or high modernism itself. For the economic periodization of capital into three rather than two stages (that of "late" or multinational capitalism being now added to the more traditional moments of "classical" capitalism and of the "monopoly stage" or "state of imperialism") suggests the possibility of a new periodization on the level of culture as well: from this perspective, the moment of "high" modernism, of the International Style, and of the classical modern movement in all the arts — with their great auteurs and their utopian monuments, Mallarméan "Books of the World," fully as much as Corbusian Radiant Cities — would "correspond" to that second stage of monopoly and imperialist capitalism that came to an end with the Second World War. Its "critique" therefore coincides with its extinction, its passing into history, as well as with the emergence, in the third stage of "consumer capital," of some properly postmodernist practice of pastiche, of a new free play of styles and historicist allusions now willing to "learn from Las Vegas," a moment of surface rather than of depth, of the "death" of the old individual subject or bourgeois ego, and of the schizophrenic celebration of the commodity fetishism of the image, of a now "delirious New York" and a countercultural California, a moment in which the logic of media capitalism penetrates the logic of advanced cultural production itself and transforms the latter to the point where such distinctions as those between high and mass culture lose their significance (and where the older notions of a "critical" or "negative" value of advanced or modernist art may also no longer be appropriate or operative).

As I have observed, Tafuri refuses this periodization, and we shall observe him positioning his critique of the postmoderns beneath the general category of a still high modernist utopianism, of which they are seen merely as so many epigones. Still, in this country and for this public, the thrust of his critique of utopian

for securing the unity of the state; while in our own time, until recently, what is generally called New Deal liberalism (or in Europe, the social democracy of the welfare states) performed an analogous function.

It is all this that would seem to be in question today. We shall want, Adorno says somewhere, to take into account the possibility that in our time the commodity is its own ideology: the practices of consumption and consumerism, on that view, themselves are then enough to reproduce and legitimate the system, no matter what "ideology" you happen to be committed to. In that case, not abstract ideas, beliefs, ideologies, or philosophical systems, but rather the immanent practices of daily life now occupy the functional position of "ideology" in its other larger systemic sense. And if so, this development can serve clearly as one explanation for the waning power of the utopian ideologies of high modernism as well. Indeed, Tafuri explicitly associates the demiurgic value of architectural planning in the modern masters with the Keynesian ideal of the control of the future. In both versions, utopia is the dream of "a rational" domination of the future, the elimination of the risk it brings with it." Even for Le Corbusier the absolute of form is the complete realization of a constant victory over the uncertainty of the future." It is therefore logical enough that both these ultimate middle-class ideologies or utopias should disappear together, and that their concrete "critique" should be less a matter of intellectual self-consciousness, than simply a working out of history itself.

But "ideology" has a somewhat different focus in Tafuri's schematic overview of bourgeois architectural thinking, from the dissolution of the baroque to our own time, where these varied aesthetic utopias are analyzed in terms of something closer to a Hegelian "ruse of reason" or of history itself. Their utopian form thus proves to be an instrument in the edification of a business system and the new dynamism of capital. Whatever content they claimed in themselves, their concrete effects, their more fundamental function, lay in the systematic destruction of the past. Thus the emergence of secular conceptions of the city in the eighteenth century is first and foremost to be read as a way of clearing away the older culture: "The deliberate abstraction of Enlightenment theories of the city served ... to destroy baroque schemes of city planning and development." In much the same way, the dawn of modernism proper — the moment in which

Plan of Karlsruhe, mid-eighteenth century

OBSERVATIONS
regarding of the Plan.

Circumference of the Plain.

consumer for life in the industrial city, teaching "the ideology of
the correct use of the city," freeing the aesthetic consumer from
"objects that were offered to judgment" and substituting "a pro-
cess to be lived and used as such." This particular strategy now
prolongs itself into, revitalizes itself in the postmodernist ideolo-
gies and aesthetics of the present period, denounced by Tafuri in
a memorable page:

Thus the city is considered in terms of a suprastructure. Indeed art is now called upon to give
the city a suprastructural guise. Pop art, op art,
analysis of the urban "imageability," and the
"prospective aesthetic" converge in this objec-
tive. The contradictions of the contemporary city
are resolved in multivalent images, and by figur-
atively exalting that formal complexity they are
dissimulated. If read with adequate standards of
judgment this formal complexity is nothing other
than the explosion of the irremediable disso-
nances that escape the plan of advanced capital.
The recovery of the concept of art thus serves this
new cover-up role. It is true that whereas industrial
design takes a lead position in technological
production and conditions its quality in view of
an increase in consumption, pop art, reutilizing
the residues and castoffs of that production,
takes its place in the rear guard. But this is the
exact reflection of the twofold request now made
to the techniques of visual communication. Art
which refuses to take its place in the vanguard of
the production cycle actually demonstrates that
the process of consumption tends to the infinite.
Indeed even the rejects, sublimated into useless
or nihilist objects which bear a new value of use,
enter into the production-consumption cycle, if
only through the back door. This art that deliber-
ately places itself in the rear guard is also indicative of the refusal to come to terms with the
contradictions of the city and resolve them com-
pletely; to transform the city into a totally organized machine without useless squanderings of an archaic character or generalized dysfunction. In

chase it is necessary to persuade the public
the contradiction, imbalances, and chaos
of the contemporary city are inevitable.
And the public must be convinced that this
contains an unexplored richness, unlimited
able possibilities, and qualities of the
city now made into new fetishes for society.

Power of such negative critiques of ideology (which
ideology exclusively in terms of "false consciousness")
insumption that everything does not effectively
special reproduction of the system may be considered
carrier of the reproduction of that system. The anxie-
tion in almost everyone by such an implicable and
action are probably healthy and therapeutic in one
er. As I have begun to suggest before, however, the
in such an analysis lies elsewhere, in the assump-
tional reproduction" in late capitalism takes much
in the earlier period of high modernism, and that
us call the "postmoderns" simply replicate the old
nutions at lower levels of intensity and originality.
Johnson's "ambiguous eclecticism ends up as mere
the works of Louis Kahn and the British architect
represent two opposite attempts to breathe life into
moribund art".30 Robert Venturi's Complexity and
Architecture flattens out the New Critical concepts
and contradiction, dehistorizing them and empl-
ying their tragic (and properly high modernist) tension,
toward "justifying personal planning choices rather
than ambiguous."31

There would seem to be a certain inconsistency in the
newer architects fail to achieve even that tragic
was itself considered to be utopian and ideological.
The other face of this inconsistency can then be
the consonance and profound historical kinship
viris analysis of modernism and the onslaughts of
crists, most notably Venturi himself, a critique that
and the usual themes of the hubris of central plan-
agle-function conception of space, and the puritan-
emlining abhorrence of ornament. Venturi's anal-
lysis in Learning from Las Vegas, centers specifically on

Utopia, 137,139.
Architecture, 397.

History, 213.

The critique of central planning, as in Peter Blake, is powerful and persuasive as it is, seems to me extremely ambiguous for the following reason. A perfectly correct and well-documented thesis of this kind can also be the occasion for the production of, or investment by, a whole ideology or metaphysics: most notably in the binary opposition between intention or plan and tradition or organic growth in the already present of Christophe Alexander.32 City is Not a Tree," but its full-blown transformation into a metaphysis can most dramatically be observed in Deleuze and Guattari's "Rhizome" (in Mille Plautaux). In this form, of course, it recapitulates the oldest counterrevolutionary position of allure in the Rohismus or the French Revolution, where Jacob Hubris is counterposed against the slow and organic growth of social life. On the political level, the left traditions include a number of counterpositions that work against the emergence of such a stark and ideological opposition: most notably in concepts of liberation and the "withering away of the state" (the Paris Commune), of antagonism or workers' self-management, and of council communism.

But in the area of architecture or urbanism it is rather hard to see what form such counterpositions might take: least persuasive, to my mind, is the idea that people will be welled up as they go along free for example Philippe Rousseau, Lire de Architecture (Cambridge; MIT Press, 1972), where the idea that Le Corbusier would have approved of all this, let alone intended it to happen that way, seems most disingenuous indeed. I have been attracted by Rem Koolhaas's Dairy New York for a rather high idiosyncratic way of cutting through this ideological double-band, he historizes the enemy by transforming "planning" into the unique and historical decision, in 1811, to impose the "grid" on Manhattan: from this single "centralized" decision, then both the anarchy and the urban classicism (streets and blocks) at once develop.

Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Caesar's statuary, from Learning from Las Vegas, 1972

Aldo Rossi, Il San Carlone, 1977

as the suspicious prefix “post-” suggests, kind of parastical relationship with the extinct repudiates; yet what must be explored is the postmodernism a whole new aesthetic in arguing which is significantly distinct from that.

An perhaps most effectively characterized writer’s notion of “expressive causality”) as an or of organic unification. To demarcate the aesthetic from this one, two familiar themes may reference: the dialectic of inside and outside ornament or decoration. For Le Corbusier, as the plan proceeds from within to without, the suit of an interior” in such a way that the outside expresses its interior: stylistic homogeneity is made by unifying these two opposites, or better bring one of them — the exterior — to the other.

It’s “contradiction” with the reality of the wall by the hygienic exclusion of the offending scene observed briefly now is that Robert Ventura the “decorated shed” seeks on the contrary to positions and thereby to valorize contradiction longer way than his earlier terminology of ambiguity” might suggest). The philosophical view very different aesthetic move might be found in poststructural or postmodernist) idea that An aesthetic of homogeneity is here disname of a random heterogeneity, a set of inert being, than in the service of a new kind of pertension, contradiction, the registering of the clashing, is in and of itself a strong mode of mensurable elements, poles, or realities. If, as being like this characterizes the specific internalism, it must be seen at the very least as conflated aesthetic and one quite distinct from the high which it seeks to disengage itself.

It doubt be observed that the symbolic act of high seeks to resolve contradiction by stylistic fiat resolution may remain a merely symbolic one), intent order and quality from that of a postmodernity ratifies the contradictions and fragmented way of an intensified perception, or a mesmerized and well-nigh hallucinogenic fascination with, those very contradictions themselves (contenting itself with eliminating the affective charge of pathos, of the tragic, or of anxiety, which characterized the modern movement). In this sense, no doubt, Marx’s early critique of Hegel’s theory of religion retains its force for postmodernism: “self-conscious man, insofar as he has recognized and superseded the spiritual world ... then confirms it again in this alienated form and presents it as his true existence; he reestablishes it and claims to be at home in his other being.”

I must add to this juxtaposition my feeling that moralizing judgments on either of these aesthetics are always the most unsatisfactory way to reach some ultimate evaluation of them; my own perspective here is a historicist one, for which any position on postmodernism must begin by being a self-critique and a judgment on ourselves, since this is the moment in which we find ourselves and, like it or not, this aesthetic is a part of us.

That is, however, not the most important point to be made in the present context. One of the more annoying and scandalous habits of dialectical thought is indeed its identification of opposites, and its tendency to send off back to back seemingly opposed positions on the grounds that they share and are determined and limited by a common problematic, or, to use a more familiar language, represent the two intolerable options of a single double-bind. One is tempted to see something of the sort at work here, in the opposition between Tafuri’s cultural pessimism, with all its rigor and ideological asceticism, and the complacent free-play of a postmodernism content to juggle the pregiven tokens of contemporary social reality, from which even the nostalgic memory of earlier commitments to radical change has vanished without a trace.

Is it possible that these two positions are in fact the same, and that as different as they may seem at first, both rest on the conviction that nothing new can be done, no fundamental changes can be made, within the massive being of late capitalism? What is different is that Tafuri’s thought lives this situation in a rigorous and self-conscious stoicism, while the practitioners and ideologues of postmodernism relax within it, inventing new modes of perception in order to “be at home” in the same impossible extremity: changes of valence, the substitution of a plus sign for a minus, on the same equation.

Perhaps, in that case, something is to be said after all for Lefebvre’s call for a politics of space and for the search for a properly Gramscian architecture.