The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s

Author: Manfredo Tafuri
Year: 1987 (English trans. by Pellegrino d'Acierno and Robert Connolly of La sfera e il labirinto: Avanguardie e architettura da Piranesi agli anni '70, Einaudi, 1980)
Source type: book
Raw file: raw/books/tafuri-1987-sphere-and-the-labyrinth.md

Summary

Tafuri extends the critique begun in Architecture and Utopia to narrate the entire arc of the historical avant-garde, from Piranesi and Eisenstein through the cabaret, Soviet constructivism, and Weimar, to the neo-avant-garde of the 1970s. His central thesis is that the avant-garde's celebrated "freedom" was never freedom for writing (a new language of the subject) but freedom for techniques — montage, shock, the "theory of the sign," social administration — which capital and the state progressively absorbed and recuperated. The "sphere" (total form: the cathedral, the plan, the Totaltheater, the socialist city, the skyscraper-as-cathedral) is always a myth or mask; the "labyrinth" (the metropolis as "communication machine," the "forest of pure data") is what actually remains. By the 1970s architecture's critical project has been defeated and collapses into a hermetic "Glass Bead Game" of pure, self-referential signs.

Key Claims

• The avant-garde's freedom is freedom for techniques, not for writing: the book's master thesis — the avant-garde's "freedom" nullifies "the Nietzschean discovery of the free acceptance of the necessary," dissolving into the "theory of the sign" (shock technique, montage, biomechanics, Sozialpolitik) that capital and state absorb.
• Piranesi as the origin of the avant-garde dialectic: Piranesi's Carceri, Campo Marzio, and the altar of the Priorato constitute "the first true expression of the 'dialectic of the avant-garde'": a "negative utopia" that dismantles the signified, attacks language as "a mode of acting upon the world," and reveals the "inherence of the aberrant within the real."
• Heterotopia and the voyage: Piranesi's discontinuous montage is read through Foucault's definition of heterotopia (undermining the syntax that makes words and things "hold together"); the heterotopia and the voyage are "locked in a desperate embrace."
• The Piranesian "wicked architect": via Klossowski's reading of Sade, Piranesi is the "monstrously virtuous" figure whose contaminations reveal "the cracks guiltily repressed by a deviant rigor" — anticipating the crisis of the architect's professional identity and the reduction of intellectual work to abstract labor.
• Eisenstein and the historicity of the avant-garde: montage is "the explosion of the shot"; Piranesi's etchings become "simple frames in a cinematic phrase." The avant-garde, "bereft of its utopian potential," "can only fall back on itself," and realism is the heir that "looks backward, and stops to shed a tear for the heroic era of bourgeois ambiguity."
• The metropolis as "communication machine": the avant-garde's privileged field is the metropolis "captured in its essence as a 'communication machine,'" but its intervention is focused on "the microcosm of the object."
• The avant-garde's nonpolitical, amoral essence revealed: the U.S.S.R.-Berlin encounter showed "the only 'politicalness' possible for the avant-garde was that of announcing the advent of a universe of non-values, amoral, elementary: exactly the technological universe of the organized development of great capital."
• The avant-garde betrays itself: in Weimar it is "called upon to 'betray itself'... to dissolve out of extreme fidelity to its own premises"; technique is absorbed into the Sozialpolitik and left "rootless... forced onto a journey... whose obligatory course is circular." The most constructive demands of 1922 find an outlet in the founding of CIAM.
• The "Glass Bead Game" (Part Three): the neo-avant-garde (Stirling, Rossi, Eisenman, Kahn, Venturi) practices an "architecture of cruelty," a "regressive utopia," manipulating emptied signs in an aseptic "boudoir." "The homecoming to language constitutes a roof of failure."
• The "ashes of Jefferson": New York as the "new Venice" — "a system of solitudes wherein the loss of identity is made an institution" — is the metropolis of total indifference; formalism (reducing the sign to pure function) is "much less divorced from the structures of the metropolitan universe than may appear." The Jeffersonian democratic project no longer has a place; "the war is over, but with a checkmate imposed by the enemy."
• Criticism must ask a work's position, not its attitude: following Benjamin's "The Author as Producer," the critical question is the work's function within the relations of production, not its attitude toward them.

Connections

Concepts: Critical Architecture · Ideology · Heterotopia · Spectacle · Everyday Architecture
Authors: Manfredo Tafuri · Sven-Olov Wallenstein · Fredric Jameson · Walter Benjamin · Hal Foster
Debates: Critical vs. Projective
Related source notes: Architecture and Utopia (Tafuri 1976) · Architecture, Critique, Ideology (Wallenstein 2016) · Architecture and the Critique of Ideology (Jameson 1985)

Direct Quotes

"The avant-garde, brought back to its elementary principles, was thus obliged to reveal its cards completely, to recognize its own origins in 'negative thought,' to declare once again not only its own nonpolitical nature, but also its own immoralism." (Ch. 4)

"The specific field privileged by the avant-gardes is the metropolis, captured in its essence as a 'communication machine.' But their intervention into the metropolis is focussed on the microcosm of the object." (Ch. 5)

"The avant-garde, bereft of its utopian potential and of its ideology ready to reconquer the fullness of language, can only fall back on itself; it can only explore the stages of its own development." (Ch. 2)

"The homecoming to language constitutes a roof of failure." (Part Three)

"the only course is to make use of 'battle remnants,' that is, to redeploy what has been discarded on the battlefield that has witnessed the defeat of the avant-garde." (Part Three)

Open Questions

• If the avant-garde's "freedom" was only "freedom for techniques," is there any architectural practice that escapes recuperation, or does Tafuri's genealogy leave only the negative labor of criticism itself?
• How does the book's "Glass Bead Game" verdict on the 1970s neo-avant-garde (Stirling, Rossi, Eisenman) bear on the later post-critical/projective turn that the wiki's critical-vs-projective debate tracks?