MANFREDO TAFURI IS DEAD: LONG LIVE 'MANFREDO TAFURI'

"Every day I write the list / Of reasons why I still believe they do exist / (A thousand beautiful things) / And even though it's hard to see / The glass is full and not half empty / (A thousand beautiful things) / So ... light me up like the sun / To cool down with your rain / I never want to close my eyes again / Never close my eyes / Never close my eyes" --Annie Lennox (2003)

In accordance with the principles of structural linguistics, Roman Jakobson proposed (in 1935) that every age may be seen to exhibit a dominant characteristic (spirit). That is to say, 'in the arts and humanities' an operational datum may be discerned within the spirit of an age to which multiple and disparate disciplines nonetheless aspire. In the 20th century this datum was nominally 'science', or, more precisely, 'rationality' and its synonyms -- e.g., objectivity, positivism, empiricism. As the dominant tone in progressive activities (including modern architectures), all forms of dissonance, rebellion, and -- indeed -- radicality were automatically conditioned by this dominant (taking refuge from, or taking up residency near, in relation to, or alongside of 'rationality'). For this reason Manfredo Tafuri effectively denounced all readings of the so-called irrational nature of Dada and Surrealism as misunderstandings of either movement's automatic obeisance to the mechanistic and nihilistic anti-spirit ruling and ruining the first third of the 20th century (as if they were merely irritants to an otherwise monolithic structure).

And even if, as some say, "the sign has set" (that Structuralism and Post-Structuralism are past), we are still collectively (by virtue of our shared humanity) living in the state of semi-darkness that permeates Tafuri's c.1968 reading of the ship of modern architecture cut free from its moorings -- a state of disarray regardless of whether Tafuri's negativity (his negative dialectic) has fallen, in the meantime, into disuse and/or abject disregard. This late-modern darkness -- situated, in turn, in a temporal high-capitalist moment -- reveals as much as obscures certain other options outside the categorical rejection (dis-embodiment) of ideology foretold by Tafuri, as a renascent surreptitious spirit may also be discerned in non-structural arts (especially criticism and philosophy, but also literature). The complete surrender to technical issues (symptomatic of post-theory), the unofficial operative datum within most modern and neo-modern architectures, is therefore premature. If Tafuri could find little solace in the loss of architecture's ontological significance (a way out of the labyrinth of instrumentalized orders and intentional dis-orders), it was primarily due to the highly-anachronistic and abstract reading he rendered of a discipline caught near the end of a relatively long-term death spiral -- a death to be followed by a possible rebirth. This fall and subsequent rise is always already written within the pages of architectural history and historiography but prefigured preeminently in the now-bankrupt casuistry of architectural historicism. So much for so-called 'progress', rationality's endless excuse (and curse).

During Hurricane Isabel (September 17-18, 2003), while parked in Norfolk, VA, and without power, I re-read Tafuri's seminal Architecture and Utopia (1973), revisiting the collapse of utopian presentiments in the face of the all-pervasive, all-consuming machine that 20th-century architecture resembled in its most minute (mute) particulars; and in its prescient capitulation (devolution) towards a mere material economy devoid of any significance other than productive and technical tasks consistent with the technological atopia prefigured in its apparent late 19th-century, 'industrial' origins. Indeed, since the collapse of planning -- since the 1960s and its usurpation by mere real estate speculation -- architecture has lost almost every ability to express anything comprehensive or utopian except through the fragment (piece work) or the personal utopia of the private residence. The collapse of planning per se lead directly to the rise of anti-planning, a form of ad hoc planning that justified the conversion of former 'provisional' public resources, and the interconnections between them, to additional opportunities for structural manipulation (which leads almost always to exploitation). This is also why current proclamations regarding landscape urbanism are not quite good enough a response to the urban crisis of space and the attendant marginalization of everything (meaning the conversion of everything real and/or unreal to futures, options, flows, datascapes, etcetera) within an advanced capitalist 'topology' -- a sinister topology premised on an endlessly-shifting 'nothingness' insofar as universals (humanistic concerns) are stowed in the negative forms (spaces) of this fast-moving and contorted facsimile world.

Tafuri travelled widely through the terrain of 20th-century architecture unmasking the various pretensions of form (especially forms of formalism) to counter the worst ravages of the on-rushing capitalist machine, citing en route the completion of the first Soviet Five Year Plan as foil (even if the results of this plan are now proven to have been thoroughly cooked). His animosity to purely 'useless' (formal) exercises in architectural rhetoric or poetics is purely performative, however, given his measured embrace in the 1980s of acts of demolition and resistance to the machine (e.g., deconstructivist architectures). Tafuri illustrated for us all the maneuvers of the machine as it jettisons old forms of ideology (as it moves forward); those discarded forms, in turn, forming often the immediate nature of a 'useless' past partly inhabited by capitalism's interlocutors (i.e., ruins inhabited by hermits, or cast-off shells appropriated by so-called critical inquiry). This useless immediate past is, in effect, a picturesque debris field left behind as the machine moves on mowing down everything in its path. Tafuri's pessimism was well-founded, even if it was also unnaturally aimed in the wrong direction -- i.e., at the system, versus beyond the system, or not quite reaching the actual locus of the true coordinates of ideological production. 

Yet, given the rhetorical blinders (and blunders) symptomatic of this time (the 'manifestos' of Christopher Alexander, Robert Venturi and/or Ian McHarg, for example), and given Tafuri's materialist anti-aesthetic, the time was not then ripe for a shift from purely technological concerns to some-thing else, despite the darker works of Aldo Rossi, Robert Smithson, and Michael Heizer, or the precise, anti-expressionist formulations of Donald Judd and Richard Serra. The post-1960s turn (detour) into semiotics, also denounced by Tafuri in the essay "Architecture and Its Double", was (and remains in its latterday hermeneutic and narratological forms) a matter, for the most part, of re-tooling or undermining established ('dominant') discourses rather than a departure of any significance. This nearly-missing some-thing else might be described today as a non-dialectical plunge to the ground that supports architecture; a plunge that necessitates architecture's re-embrace of landscape and its former (pre-Olmstedian) sub-linguistic cognates (something already underway anyway). These cognates represent the structure of thought itself, as the term 'architectonic' implies when shorn of its modernist gambit on tectonic jouissance (Kenneth Frampton's error), and the inter-relation of things and thought in an intellectually-charged field of immediately present representations (built or otherwise). It is the departed spirit of John Hejduk, perhaps, that will assist the rebirth of architecture, at some point, given the posthumous incorporation of two formerly site-less towers he designed in Peter Eisenman's Cultural Center at Santiago de Compostela, a work clearly 'from the future' yet set to arrive anyday and sure to constitute the first canonical work of 21st-century architecture.

While Tafuri could appreciate aspects of Walter Benjamin's critique of the technological hubris consuming the modern world, he was also unable to invest much personal capital in Benjamin's more unworldly (nominally 'mystical') concerns -- or Benjamin's hyper-radical, eschatological vision -- insofar as this side of Benjamin's work remained unassimilable to then avant-garde materialist readings of architecture and its other, 'utopia'. It is for this reason that Tafuri's pessimism seems almost diabolical (at times), as if a Marxist Mephistopheles had slipped under the door of his study in Venice and whispered dark secrets regarding the future of architecture while also offering up the image of a cultural, burnt tableau as architecture's end (its final state).

It is Tafuri's automatic (reflexive) animosity to subjective models of resistance that seems dated today, given that every attempt to socialize architecture has proven singularly ineffective (as if Tafuri's spectral 'ideology of the plan' actually foresees and preempts such things). Due to High Capitalism's ceaseless conquest by way of de-materialization of all things once 'given' (the liquidation of things and the production of endless de-materialized flows), the subject (subjectivity itself) is indeed suspect terrain. Tafuri's rejection of subjective autonomy (in art or any cultural discipline) and his pronouncements regarding the death of intellectual work was correct, then, as long as culturally productive disciplines remained disconnected and neutered, per force, by the advanced prognostics of the machine moving closer with each passing day towards the last speck of autonomous territory represented by the human heart. 

Yet, as things became increasingly caught up within the web of expanding nerve networks (including erstwhile, purely 'humanistic' concerns) the necessary resistance remained 'off-stage' in the form of that thing that could not ever be fully assimilated by technological and materialistic forces -- i.e., the original source of everything, the texture and seeming irreality of language and representation as it exists as a complex below the level of received discourse and antecedent to all manipulations of advanced technological systems (including present-day forms -- i.e., computers and all forms of programming, surveillance, and data mining). 

It is, today (as always), these two non-things -- ur-language and ur-representation -- that cannot be turned into facsimile things or instrumentalized non-things. And it was these two non-things that the spirit of structuralism and post-structuralism addressed, even if Structuralism and Post-Structuralism (each in its own way) produced an advanced discourse based on an apparent tyranny of the sign. For such tyrannies to fall is axiomatic. 

"The world was meant for you and me / To figure out our destiny / (A thousand beautiful things) / To live / To die / To breathe / To sleep / To try to make your life complete / (Yea Yea) / So ... light me up like the sun / To cool down with your rain / I never want to close my eyes again / Never close my eyes / Never close my eyes ... / That is everything I have to say / (That's all I have to say)" --Annie Lennox (2003)

Yet, what Tafuri sensed has come about anyway. And that is that the increasingly unitary machinistic force operative within late-modern culture has now set its collective sight on the human soul. This last conquest is the ultimate battleground. One might then think that Walter Benjamin's apocalyptic vision was not entirely mistaken. The hurricane raging outside, just now -- and I go out to see, hear and feel her force -- is a force that one must reckon with within oneself, as one must reckon with everything that appears to appear of its own volition. That the current state of affairs (the advanced state of economic-deterministic totalization, the rush towards nothingness) is a force of an unnatural, almost abstract nature only reinforces the necessity of forging a 'way out' -- i.e., that we must now fight for everything that is presumed to be given when it is instead a form of taking (an abstract act of eminent domain) that is always presented as fait accompli. That what was given and what is taken is also constructed (but increasingly in the gaps and artificial memories of data banks in-between real things) underscores the gravity of the necessary plunge to a source beyond, below, above the machinistic spirit consuming everything. The coordinates (the cognates) are no longer to be found in mere things but in the place where mere things are turned into real (illuminated) things. That is to say, advanced thought (and advanced architectures) will always return to thought and language, the non-place where life emerges from the experience of what is left of the world.

While the time of Tafuri's analysis has passed, it is not without its own time (its own universalizing merit). What has occurred in the meantime is that the imaginative terrain of the world has been revealed as ruled, after all, by subtle yet malleable instances of figuration and conjecture. And if Massimo Cacciari's shadow falls forward from within Tafuri's critique, forward and into the present, we might discern a second wind for the fabled School of Venice's investigations into the significance of architectural figuration, even if Cacciari has moved on towards what appears to be the precise ground of the impending battle, 'radical subjectivity' and a 'sublime aesthetics', extracted in part from the ruins of Post-Structuralism but also the more abstruse writings of Walter Benjamin, Adolf Loos, and Robert Musil (all adherents, perhaps, to a perennial, synchronic pre-structuralism).

This other terrain vague (perhaps resembling an out-of-focus photograph by Thomas Ruff, but certainly antithetical to Koolhaasian junk space) is the shared ontological ground in the forward-leaning works of Giorgio Agamben and Cacciari. It also moves in renascent rhetorical and critical-poetical forms of literature, art criticism, and cultural history. This residue (ash?) is the so-called philosopher's stone, the byproduct of the on-going conflagration at the most foundational levels of discourse, at the elemental level of experience of the world. Some-thing else, meanwhile, is percolating off the map and in the anterooms of cultural production, in the ateliers and workshops of the hard-pressed 'useless' intelligentsia, Tafuri's out-flanked and out-moded 'intellectual workers'. These workers are drawn, not unlike moths, to the aesthetic flame at the center of the world ('inside' the world of representations that form the world, but also productive of all cultural representations and all language games, Agamben's state of 'infancy' within poetic forms of language). This is the place of reckoning now revealed for what it is and might be, an elective void (nothingness) or an electrifying some-thing else, a landscape of ur-facts (Aggamben's urfaktum). This some-thing is constructed of things not subjugated (free subjects) and non-things (concepts) that inform things. It is a zone, then, where dreams are not de facto nightmares, and where darkness is illumined by the flame of imagination and language.

"Among all the historical avant-garde movements, autonomy of formal construction no longer necessarily meant controlling daily existence through form. They were now disposed to accept the idea that it is experience that dominates the subject. The problem was to 'plan the disappearance of the subject', to cancel the anguish caused by the pathetic (or ridiculous) resistance of the individual to the structures of domination that close in upon him [/ her], to indicate the voluntary and docile submission to those structures of domination as the promised land of universal planning, paradise on earth is realized through the 'disappearance of the tragic.'" (Tafuri, p. 73)

Thus, Tafuri delivered the death blow (coup de grace) to the historicized concept of Kultur (19th-century Spirit) -- but he also delivered us, by way of this end reading, into the hands of instrumentalized everything (reason stacked upon reason), since, for him, there was no apparent alternative.

Nowadays, the idea of the city-machine reigns supreme (hence landscape urbanism) and its nervensleben (nervous system, nerve network) rises to the proverbial surface of neo-modern attempts to come to terms with the thickened, clotted, complexified physical and virtual coordinates of this condition. This term, 'nervensleben', is to be found both in Tafuri's work (in the form of Georg Simmel), and in Cacciari's work (in the form of attempts to incite new heretical readings and acts apropos the technocratic appropriation of everything now underway). Thus Cacciari's essay "Nomads in Prison" (Casabella), and thus Cacciari's exit from politics and his embrace of philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics (plus his 'tell-tale' downtime spent up on Mount Athos). For Simmel, the modern metropolis resembled a permanent, concretized Newtonian calculus writ large: "All things float with equal specific gravity in the constantly moving stream of money. All things lie on the same level and differ from one another only in size of the area which they cover." (Tafuri, pp. 87-88) ... Or, as many have repeated (after Marx), "All that is solid melts into the air ..."

For Cacciari (after Simmel), "Intellectualization [...] and commercialization are brought together in the blasé attitude: with it the metropolis finally creates its 'type', its structure 'in general' finally becomes a social reality and a cultural fact. It is money that has here found its most authentic bearer ..." (in Angelus Novus 21, cited in Tafuri, footnote 58, p. 88)

Given the evolution of Massimo Cacciari's thought, and given that he is the most prominent heir to Tafuri's intellectual legacy, it is then highly significant to detect in his recent work the conceptual sign of that some-thing else that is always at stake. The game has quickened in the past thirty to forty years. This some-thing else is a heightened sense for things as they represent formal and informal aspects of representation itself. And if this leads straight into the terrain or landscape of Idealism, so be it; and it need not be re-worked German Idealism (Kultur). If this renascent idealism implicates an aesthetics of the Sublime, it is perhaps time to properly locate the Sublime in cultural terms versus in nominal natural forces (hurricanes included). This sublime aesthetics is the source of nearly everything important anyway. It is, in humanistic terms, the actually-existing origin of all things buried in all things. For Walter Benjamin it was quite simply the revolutionary moment present in all moments.

Gavin Keeney (Draft 09/23/03)

ENDNOTES:

"The beauty that you gave / Has turned upon itself / And all the things you said / Evaporated / Evaporated ... / Was I blind / Deaf and dumb / To the words slipped from your tongue?" --Annie Lennox (2003)

All song lyrics from Annie Lennox's "A Thousand Beautiful Things" (BMG Music Publishing Ltd., 2003), except those immediately above (from "Honestly"). Annie Lennox's song cycle Bare (2003) is an intensely introspective work of art that bares the final frontier for the machine that is always already eating the garden, i.e., the human heart.

Regarding the Jakobson's idea of the dominant [with insertions]: "The dominant specifies the work. The specific trait of bound language is obviously its prosodic pattern, its verse [structural] form. It might seem that this is simply a tautology: verse is verse [architecture is architecture]. However, we must constantly bear in mind that the element which specifies a given variety of language [form] dominates the entire structure and thus acts as its mandatory and inalienable constituent dominating all the remaining elements and exerting direct influence upon them [...] We may seek a dominant not only in the poetic [architectural] work of an individual artist [architect] and not only in the poetic [architectural] canon, the set of norms of a given school, but also in the art of a given epoch, viewed as a particular whole." --Roman Jakobson, "The Dominant" [lecture delivered at Masaryk University, Brno, 1935], in Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (eds.), Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971; Chicago: Dalkey Archive, 2002), pp. 82-83

Regarding the work on language of Massimo Cacciari and Giorgio Agamben, the key works are Cacciari's Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point and Architecture and Nihilism, and Agamben's Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, The End of the Poem, and Potentialities. Parallel moves in political ontology are to be found in the recent works of Slavoj Zizek (The Ticklish Subject) and Alain Badiou's (Infinite Thought). A similar spirit of inquiry re-accessing lost ground occurs in Terry Eagleton's Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic, Frederic Jameson's A Singular Modernity, and Jean Nouvel and Jean Baudrillard's Singular Objects of Architecture, all publications that have appeared within the last two years.

All passages above attributed to Manfredo Tafuri are from Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigi La Penta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976)