Architecture and the Critique of Ideology

Author: Fredric Jameson
Year: 1985
Source type: article
Raw file: raw/articles/jameson-1985-architecture-critique-of-ideology.md

Summary

Jameson asks whether space can be ideological and whether a non-ideological, utopian "transfigured" space is conceivable. He rejects body-based or phenomenological grounds for evaluating architecture as ahistorical, and moves through structuralist "textual" readings of space toward Tafuri's stark critical position: one cannot anticipate a class architecture, only introduce class criticism into architecture. The essay reconstructs what Tafuri's "negative" critique means — its Althusserian anti-humanism, kinship with Adorno's negative dialectics, its problematic slide toward post-Marxism — and situates it within a dialectical historiography, before appending the late-capitalism and postmodernism periodizations that frame contemporary architectural culture.

Key Claims

• The opening question: "How can space be 'ideological'?" — the possibility of the question is the precondition for any conception of a non-ideological, utopian transfigured space. Arguments from the human body are "fundamentally ahistorical," smuggling in premises about an eternal "human nature"; if the body is a social body there exists "no pre-given human body as such, but rather the whole historical range of social experiences of the body."
• Two inadequate moments: the phenomenological (subject/lived experience) and the structuralist (space as text of signs and codes, subversion/co-optation). Both end in utopianism — the structuralist "negative" criticism now seems "equally utopian in the bad sense," for even "the most negative critical stance ... slowly turns back into yet another critical ideology in its own right."
• A possible third term: Pierre Bourdieu's "practice" ("the social body's programming by its spatial text") moves dialectically beyond both, though tested only on the Kabyl village; Henri Lefebvre's conception of "space as the fundamental category of politics and of the dialectic itself" is "the one great prophetic vision" yet to be grasped and implemented.
• Tafuri's position (stated from Theories and History of Architecture): "one cannot 'anticipate' a class architecture ... what is possible is the introduction of class criticism into architecture." Five consequences: (1) the critic must refuse the role of "ideologist"/visionary; (2) the practicing architect within the closure of capitalism cannot devise a revolutionary or utopian architecture; (3) criticism of buildings collapses into criticism of the ideologies of buildings; (4) in the Althusserian manner politics is radically disjoined from aesthetic practice — "architects can be political ... but their architecture today cannot be political"; (5) an architecture of the future is possible only after total social revolution.
• Tafuri as ideology: Tafuri "is also an ideology, and ... one does not get out of ideology by refusing it." His negative-critical position betrays kinship with Adorno's "negative dialectic" and can slide into post-Marxism (nouveaux philosophes, Cacciari).
• Dialectical historiography: a dialectical history of an art reads works as "so many responses or determinate symbolic acts" to a series of situations, dilemmas, and contradictions; it must involve "a vision of Necessity" and "must always tell the story of failure"; it works by "materialist reversal," undermining the constitutive presuppositions of the specialized discipline. Jameson cites Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music and Barthes's Writing Degree Zero as rare peers of Tafuri's Architecture and Utopia.
• Operative criticism refused: Tafuri rejects "operative criticism" (e.g. Giedion) that reads the past selectively "in the service of ... in reality an architectural manifesto"; rigorous history is bought by "a stoic renunciation of action and of value." Tafuri's "pessimism" is thus a "formal necessity" of dialectical historiography, though it is also "overdetermined by ideology."
• Late capitalism and total system: the argument is framed by the theory of a third stage of capital ("late" or multinational capitalism) as a "total system ... with nothing outside itself," which explains both the new "mood of pessimism" and the neo-Gramscian alternative ("war of position," counterhegemony, enclave theory). Tafuri critiques the modern movement's "enclave theory" (Le Corbusier's conflation of the political and the aesthetic) yet praises the Stalinallee's urban project.
• Postmodernism: the periodization of capital into three stages suggests a matching cultural periodization — high modernism (International Style) corresponding to monopoly capitalism, and a properly postmodern practice of pastiche, "a moment of surface rather than of depth," the "schizophrenic celebration of the commodity fetishism of the image" corresponding to consumer capital. Tafuri refuses this periodization, treating postmoderns as epigones of still high-modernist utopianism.
• Commodity as its own ideology: "in our time the commodity is its own ideology": the immanent practices of daily consumption now occupy the functional position of ideology, one explanation for "the waning power of the utopian ideologies of high modernism."

Connections

Concepts: Critical Architecture · Ideology · Spectacle
Authors: Fredric Jameson · Manfredo Tafuri · Hal Foster · Theodor Adorno · Henri Lefebvre · David Harvey
Debates: Critical vs. Projective · Spectacle vs. Function
Related source notes: Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Jameson) · Architecture, Critique, Ideology (Wallenstein) · Recodings (Foster)

Direct Quotes

"[O]ne cannot 'anticipate' a class architecture (an architecture 'for a liberated society'); what is possible is the introduction of class criticism into architecture." (Tafuri, cited)

"[E]ven 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."

"Architects can therefore be political, like other individuals, but their architecture today cannot be political."

"[T]his position ... can imperceptibly pass over into a post-Marxism ... This is to suggest that Tafuri's position is also an ideology, and that one does not get out of ideology by refusing it."

"[T]he dialectic ... must always involve a vision of Necessity, or ... must always tell the story of failure. 'The owl of Minerva takes its flight at dusk.'"

"[I]n our time the commodity is its own ideology."

Open Questions

• Does Tafuri's resolute "negative" critique remain tenable, or does its refusal of any utopian horizon necessarily collapse into the ideology it denounces (as Jameson argues)?
• How do the three stages of capital (classical, monopoly, late/multinational) map onto architecture's stylistic history — and does the "International Style" correspond to monopoly capital while postmodernism corresponds to consumer capital?
• Where does the neo-Gramscian "war of position" / enclave reading leave architecture as a political practice today?