history

They still radiate the future

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Introduction

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Last night I went to see a preliminary screening of Isabella Willinger’s newly-released documentary Away from all suns. Sammy Medina of FastCo, with whom I frequently collaborate, and Anna Kats of ArtInfo were also in attendance. The movie was being shown as part of  Tribeca Cinema’s “Architecture and Design Week,” an event sponsored by Archtober and a host of other companies/publications (far too numerous to name). Her film focuses on three contemporary individuals whose lives are somehow connected to utopian modernist buildings slowly decaying in Moscow. One building, Ivan Nikolaev’s student commune (1929), is currently being renovated. Another, El Lissitzky’s printing factory, is in danger of being torn down. Yet another, Moisei Ginzburg and Ignatii Milinis’ Dom Narkomfin, is left in a general state of disrepair. Stunning archival footage is mobilized to juxtapose these buildings’ original state against their current dilapidation.

Hopefully I’ll be writing up a review of the film and pitching it to Art Margins or Calvert Journal, so I’ll spare the reader any further thoughts of my own. What follows is an interview with the director Isa Willinger conducted by Boris Schumatsky. It’s being reposted here from the film’s official website. Willinger expresses some sentiments in this exchange that more or less approximate statements that writers like Owen Hatherley, Douglas Murphy, Agata Pyzik, and myself have voiced in the past, independently of or in close dialogue with one another — nostalgia for an age we never knew, awe before the ruins of a past seemingly more futuristic than our own, hope against hope that radical transformation might yet be possible. The line from Willinger I paraphrased for the title of this entry runs as follows: “Many of [these Constructivist buildings in Moscow] are quite run down today, yet they still radiate their futuristic visions.” It recalls, consciously or not, something Owen Hatherley wrote about Il’ia Golosov’s Zuev Club nearby:

The windows might be infilled, the balconies long since disappeared ⎯ what all this damage proves is that buildings with this much power and conviction can still carry you away with them. Or it carries me, anyway. I look at this and I can still feel radiating off the bloody thing the promise of a better society.

Below you can watch a trailer of the film, followed by the edited transcript of the interview.

Away from all suns (2013)

Isa Willinger interviewed
by Boris Schumatsky

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Boris Schumatsky: Your film is about people living in buildings of the Russian avant-garde and about the buildings themselves. You seem to be just as fascinated by the buildings as by your protagonists. What is it that struck you about the Constructivist buildings?

Isa Willinger: To me the buildings seem like ruins from another future. I spent some time in Moscow some years ago and on my walks through the city I discovered these exceptional buildings. They really stick out from the rest of Moscow’s city landscape. Many of them are quite run down today, yet they still radiate their futuristic visions. This, of course, is a stunning paradox: Something is from the past and at the same time it seems from the future.

Boris Schumatsky: Can you tell us about the background of Constructivism?

Isa Willinger: The term was first applied to the abstract works of art by Tatlin, Malevich, Popova, Stepanova, El Lissitzky, and others in the 1910s and 1920s. Soon, the artists’ works transgressed the boundary between geometrical shapes on paper or canvas and architectural drawings toying with those shapes. The first Constructivist buildings were built in the mid 20s only, due to a lack of resources in early Soviet Russia. The Constructivist movement was infused with the hopes of socialist revolution, overcoming a repressive tsarist regime, and building a better, more modern society. Continue reading →

Burying Lenin

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The revolution entombed

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The Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow was first designed by the architect Aleksei Shchusev in 1924. Even outside of Russia, its image is fairly familiar: some kind of cross between geometric modernism and a primeval ziggurat. What is seldom remembered today, however, is that Shchusev had to design and redesign the building more than once. Of course, the public display of Ulianov’s corpse was originally intended to only last a few weeks.

An exceptionally cold winter (Lenin died in January) helped preserve the Bolshevik leader’s remains longer than expected. Despite Lenin’s explicit request that his body be cremated and buried next to that of his mother, the new Soviet administration began making more permanent arrangements.

Soviet architect Aleksei Shchusev

Vladimir Paperny offered a fairly memorable explanation for this fact in his book Culture Two: Architecture in the Age of Stalin. He suggested that a transition was then underway between the two dominant cultural attitudes that define Russian-Soviet history:

Culture One [Bolshevik, avant-garde culture] wanted to burn its limbs [Shklovskii (1919)], wash memory from its soul, kill its old [Maiakovskii (1915)], and eat its children — all this as an attempt to free itself from the ballast that was interfering with its surge into the future. In Culture Two [Stalinist, realist culture], the future was postponed indefinitely. The future became even more beautiful and desirable [the architect Krasin (1937)], and the movement forward was even more joyous [state prosecutor Vyshinskii (1938)], but there did not seem to be an end in sight to that movement — the movement had become an end in itself.

[Stalinism’s] movement “forward, ever forward” changed nothing: The…goal was still the same; therefore, there was no way to determine whether this was movement or rest…Movement in Culture Two became tantamount to immobility, and the future to eternity…The history of the building of the Lenin Mausoleum is a good example of how culture’s idea of the longevity…changed. In Culture One, the idea of a mausoleum evoked a temporary structure, one that was needed “in order to grant all those who wish to, and who cannot come to Moscow for the day of the funeral, a chance to bid farewell to their beloved leader.” Culture Two had no intention of bidding farewell to the beloved leader. The temporary wooden mausoleum erected in 1924 was replaced first by a more solid wooden structure [six months later], and then, in 1930, by one of stone built to last.

Clearly, the different materials implemented in the construction of each version reflect different anticipated durations. The first was to be fleeting, the second durable, the third eternal. While the second is still, like the first, only made of wood, its form already appealed to eternity. Planks and crossbeams combined into regular geometric slabs, beyond real space and time. The upper half meanwhile ascends in pyramidal fashion, evoking that same mute permanence one feels before the ancient pharaohs’ tombs.

Aleksei Shchusev. Lenin Mausoleum, 87.4 × 66.7cm. First version of the final project, 1929-1930. Floor plan, facade, perspective. Ink and gouache on paper.

Lenin’s memory still haunts today’s Left. Just as the post-1991 Restoration in Moscow could not bring itself to finally lay his corpse to rest, neither can the contemporary Left bring itself to discard the legacy of October 1917. Even in rejecting Lenin or Leninism — whatever this might be thought to entail, be it democratic centralism, vanguardism, totalitarianism — it is forced to confront such associations. This is to say nothing of those who seek to take up Lenin’s mantle, with all the competing interpretations and conflicting points of emphasis. Continue reading →

Dialectics and historical reality

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Dialectics is not some sort of thought-trick or rhetorical sleight-of-hand, let alone the so-called “epistemological magic-key to revolutionary tactics or theory.” Of course, I don’t doubt that more than a handful of people (ab)use dialectics in this way. But this is true of practically every discourse, some more than others. There’s literally almost no end to jargon and the obfuscatory use of concepts. But where a feeble mind like Eugen Dühring dismissed Marx as someone “deeply bitten with the Hegelian pestilence,” seeing his dialectics as mere “verbal jugglery,” closer inspection would have revealed an actual content to what Marx was saying. More attention still would have disclosed a rationale as well behind his way of saying it.

Honestly, I’m not even sure something like epistemology is useful to politics, since arguably we’re only able to know the world insofar as we’re able to change it. Joseph Dietzgen, Theodor Adorno, and Alfred Sohn-Rethel critiqued epistemology along precisely these lines. Marx’s own Theses on Feuerbach (1845) set out to articulate this peculiar epistemological quandary and the conditions for its historical supersession. Turning prior materialist philosophies on their head, Marx wrote:

I. The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism — that of Feuerbach included — is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism — which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such.

II. The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice.

This provides the basis for Marxism’s dialectical methodology. “Truth” is not a matter of passive consumption, whether intuited sensuously or conceptualized contemplatively. Rather, objective truth can only be attained only through humanity’s active participation in its own self-transformation.  Continue reading →

Contra Comte

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In Aspects of Sociology, a primer in social theory released by the Institute for Social Research (often referred to as the Frankfurt School), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer explain the bastard etymology of the term “sociology” and its origin in the positive philosophy of Auguste Comte:

The word “sociology” — science of society — is a malformation, half Latin, half Greek. The arbitrariness and artificiality of the term point to the recent character of the discipline. It cannot be found as a separate discipline within the traditional edifice of science. The term itself was originated by Auguste Comte, who is generally regarded as the founder of sociology. His main sociological work, Cours de philosophie positive, appeared in 1830-1842.The word “positive” puts precisely that stress which sociology, as a science in the specific sense, has borne ever since. It is a child of positivism, which has made it its aim to free knowledge from religious belief and metaphysical speculation. By keeping rigorously to the facts, it was hoped that on the model of the natural sciences, mathematical on the one hand, empirical on the other, objectivity could be attained. According to Comte, the doctrine of society had lagged far behind this ideal. He sought to raise it to a scientific level. Sociology was to fulfill and to realize what philosophy had striven for from its earliest origins. (Aspects of Sociology, pg. 1)

Somewhere I remember hearing the quip that the term “sociology” was such an ugly combination that only a Frenchman could have concocted it. Not sure who was supposed to have said it, or if it factually took place, but there seems to be a ring of truth to the assertion. Anyway, Adorno points out in his lecture course Introduction to Sociology that “Marx had a violent aversion to the word ‘sociology,’ an aversion that may have been connected to his very justified distaste for Auguste Comte, on whom he pronounced the most annihilating judgment” (Introduction to Sociology, pg. 143). Continue reading →

The tasks of criticism

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Manfredo Tafuri on
architecture criticism

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Image: Still from Marcel L’Herbier’s
silent film classic L’Inhumaine (1924)
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Introduction

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This post follows up on the recent series that gave advice to critics and sketched out criticism after utopian politics. Since these were more or less confined to art criticism, and did not cover the peculiar situation of architecture critics and historians, I’m posting Manfredo Tafuri’s excellent 1967 essay “The Tasks of Criticism.”
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The tasks of criticism

Manfredo Tafuri

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In trying to clarify the function of some instruments of critical and historiographical analysis, we have intentionally avoided the problem of outlining a theory of architectural syntax and grammar. In defining the architectural codes as a bundle of relationships linking a complex series of “systems,” we were attempting to stress something that seems to us typical of architecture as compared with other means of visual communication: the fact, that is, that the typologies, the techniques, the production relations, the relations with nature and with the city, can in the architectural context, assume symbolic dimensions, charge themselves with meaning and force the limits within which every one of these components plays its own role in the historical context.

Clearly, then, architectural language is polysemic: and not only as an analogy with painting, but in the specific sense. When EI Lissitzky on the one hand and Van Doesburg on the other theorized the experimental function of the new linguistic systems within the field of art, and established the constructive use in industrial production as the specific task of visual art, they had very much in mind the close link between artistic communications, the new methods of production, and the new systems of reception of the communications themselves.

The only way to describe the structures of architectural language seems to be through historical synthesis. All the naïve attempts to single out a component from the complex heap of architecture and elect it as a parameter of architectural language, are bound to fail before the impossibility of outlining a complete history of architecture in this way. Neither the functions nor the space of the tectonic elements can beat the base of a semiological analysis of planning. In the very moment in which we stress the term project in order to designate architecture, it becomes clear that, each time, we should evaluate which new materials have become part of the universe of discourse of architecture itself, what are the new relations between the traditional materials, and which of these materials has a prominent role.

A younger Manfredo Tafuri, before the beard

A younger Manfredo Tafuri, early 1960s, before the beard

One cannot evaluate Laon Cathedral, the Pazzi Chapel, and Berlin’s Siemensstadt within the same linguistic parameters: if one chose purely formal criteria, the symbolic dimension of the first two works would escape completely, while one would miss the intimate contradiction of the third; if one chose the traditional iconological method, one would have to remain mute before Berlin’s Siedlungen; and if one were to trust the analysis of space, one would find no terms of comparison between the spatial narrative of the first, the anti-narrative rigor of the second and the leaving behind of the concept of “space” itself on the part of the third.

The language of architecture is formed, defined and left behind in history, together with the very idea of architecture. In this sense the establishment of a “general grammar” of architecture is a utopia. Continue reading →

Signs of rot

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Kailash Sreeneevasin posted a great quote from Lars Lih today:

When I look back at this period — when you could say that there was a mass movement, a Marxist mass movement that was genuinely alive — what was it that was alive? It was a sense of a world-historical mission, that the proletariat was “the Chosen People” — this metaphor was made many a time, that this group of people was going to bring the world to a final goal. So that’s what I’m wondering: Is this sense of a world-historic mission alive today, even among the Left? This is what I’m asking you: Is there a genuine sense of this group having a mission and a real sense that it is going to happen? That was the baby that the Left has thrown out, keeping the bathwater, which is very useful — Marx’s analysis of this, class analysis of all this stuff. The bathwater is great! But the baby seems dead or gone. Does this sense of world-historical mission exist and must it exist in order for the Left to be anything like what it was? And is there a way of making it happen if it doesn’t exist? You can’t artificially insist that people believe in a mission like this — or even make yourself do it, if the belief isn’t really there.

Lih is asking the right questions. Just fifty years ago, the quasi-Trot historian Isaac Deutscher was able to confidently assert that

Marxism is not an intellectual, aesthetic, or philosophical fashion, no matter what the fashion-mongers imagine. Continue reading →

Lenin on the bourgeois revolutions

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Contra the “Leninists”

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Image: Jacques Louis-David,
The Tennis Court Oath (1793)

Introduction: Against leftist senility

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I am posting this here because of the widespread incredulity witnessed recently on the part of self-declared “Marxists” toward the historical legacy of the bourgeois revolutions. This is, I contend, the flipside to the tendency of leftists to claim all manner of backwater populists like Chavez or Allende — their tendency to disclaim truly revolutionary figures who come out of the bourgeois tradition, Jacobins like Jefferson or Danton and radical Republicans like Lincoln. Since they’ve had so few notable political leaders and organizers in recent decades, leftists have lionized sheepish socialists and reformists of all sorts while denigrating the accomplishments of bourgeois revolutionaries. Engels, addressing a crowd gathered in 1845 to mark the “festival of nations,” commemorated the protagonists of the great bourgeois revolutions, adding that “[i]f that mighty epoch, these iron characters, did not still tower over our mercenary world, then humanity must indeed despair.”

Needless to say, this goes double in a time such as ours. Despite the admirable efforts of historians like Neil Davidson, whose recent book How Revolutionary Were the Bourgeois Revolutions? takes explicit aim at such blatant revisionism, neo-Stalinist academics like Domenico Losurdo insist that the category of “bourgeois revolution”

is at once too narrow and too broad. As regards the first aspect, it is difficult to subsume under the category of bourgeois revolution the Glorious Revolution and the parliamentary revolt that preceded the upheavals that began in France in 1789, not to mention the struggles against monarchical absolutism, explicitly led by the liberal nobility, which developed in Switzerland and other countries. On the other hand, the category of bourgeois revolution is too broad: it subsumes both the American Revolution that sealed the advent of a racial state and the French Revolution and the San Domingo Revolution, which involved complete emancipation of black slaves. (Liberalism: A Counter-History, pg. 321)

In an interview I conducted with him over a year ago, the Italian theorist expanded on this point with reference to bourgeois revolutions, faulting Marx himself. “I criticize Marx because he treats the bourgeois revolutions one-dimensionally, as an expression of political emancipation,” he told me. “I don’t accept this one-sided definition of political emancipation, because it implied the continuation and worsening of slavery…We have numerous U.S. historians who consider the American Revolution to be, in fact, a counter-revolution. The opinion of Marx in this case is one-sided.” (Losurdo conveniently forgets it was Engels — the “late” Engels of Anti-Dühring, no less, not a piece juvenilia penned by a supposedly “young” Marx — who maintained: “What the American Revolution had begun the French Revolution completed”). Continue reading →

Criticism after utopian politics

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Zoltan “Pac” Pobric
The Brooklyn Rail
May 3rd, 2013
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Following up on yesterday’s “advice to critics,” I thought it would be appropriate to include a reflection on the state of criticism today. This short article was written by my friend Zoltan “Pac” Pobric, an editor of the Platypus Review. A few other pieces on the subject have been written lately that I’d recommend, such as Ben Davis’ “Crisis and criticism” and Laurie Rojas’ “Confronting the ‘death’ of art criticism.” Pac’s piece is posted here for its exceptional clarity and concision, qualities lacking in much of what passes for “criticism” in the present.

Originally published on The Brooklyn Rail‘s website. The image is Charles Baudelaire photographed in 1855.

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There has been no lack of talk, for the past ten or so years, of some kind of “crisis” in art criticism. James Elkins, Arthur Danto, Katy Siegel, Hal Foster, et al.; everyone seems to have some stake in the failure or ineptitude or impossibility of critical thought. Elkins says that judgment should return; Danto says it’s unnecessary. Siegel says critics have little, if any, real power, and Foster, when pressed, seems to conclude that contemporary criticism is too confused to pin down, which of course is true. Yet all the hand wringing has little to do with criticism per se. The deeper problem, no doubt, is political, and all the anxiety about whether or not we understand contemporary art and culture is misplaced from a deeper distress: do we even understand the world we live in? What’s unclear is not only how we got to our present historical condition, but also, by default, what progress beyond it would look like.

Jacques-Louis David, Death of Marat, 1793. Oil on canvas, 63 3/4 × 50 3/8". Royaux des Beaux-Arts/Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten, Brussels.

Jacques-Louis David, Death of Marat, 1793. Oil on canvas,
63 3/4 × 50 3/8″. Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels.

Nor does culture seem to offer any directive past the impasse, although the problem isn’t the lack of excellent contemporary art. There is good art today, as there always has been. The deeper problem is that no one seems to be able to recognize it. Art, of course, relies on a receptive audience, and the fundamental question is whether or not one exists today. If even art, like politics, does not seem to be on the verge of a major breakthrough, that may simply be because we cannot imagine what that breakthrough might be.

Our historical moment is a peculiar one. We exist in a quite different universe from the political environments that produced Diderot, writing about the Salon on the eve of the French Revolution; or Baudelaire on Courbet in the wake of the Revolutions of 1848; or even Greenberg, writing about Abstract Expressionism at a time when Trotskyism was still a serious, if increasingly untenable, political position. Our climate is more pessimistic, and progress is more elusive. Revolutionary change is nowhere on the horizon today, as it was for the best critics of the past. Continue reading →

Advice for critics

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Walter Benjamin, Virginia
Woolf, & Roland Barthes

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Image: Raoul Hausmann,
The Art Critic (1919-1920),

Walter Benjamin

“The critic’s technique in thirteen theses” (1928)

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I. The critic is the strategist in the literary battle.
II. He who cannot take sides should keep silent.
III. The critic has nothing in common with the interpreter of past cultural epochs.
IV. Criticism must talk the language of artists. For the terms of the cenacle are slogans. And only in slogans is the battle-cry heard.
V. “Objectivity” must always be sacrificed to partisanship, if the cause fought for merits this.
VI. Criticism is a moral question. If Goethe misjudged Hölder­lin and Kleist, Beethoven, and Jean Paul, his morality and not his artistic discernment was at fault. [One can hear echoes of Kant’s Critique of Judgment in this passage].
VII. For the critic his colleagues are the higher authority. Not the public. Still less posterity.
VIII. Posterity forgets or acclaims. Only the critic judges in face of the author.
IX. Polemics mean to destroy a book in a few of its sentences. The less it has been studied the better. Only he who can destroy can criticize.
X. Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby.
XI. Artistic enthusiasm is alien to the critic. In his hand the artwork is the shining sword in the battle of minds.
XII. The art of the critic in a nutshell: to coin slogans without betraying ideas. The slogans of an inadequate criticism peddle ideas to fashion.
XIII. The public must always be proved wrong, yet always feel represented by the critic.

Man Ray, photo portrait of Virginia Woolf (1935)

Man Ray, Photo portrait of Virginia Woolf (1935)

Virginia Woolf

“The decay of essay-writing” (1905)

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The spread of education and the necessity which haunts us to impart what we have acquired have led, and will lead still further, to some startling results. We read of the over-burdened British Museum — how even its appetite for printed matter flags, and the monster pleads that it can swallow no more. This public crisis has long been familiar in private houses. One member of the household is almost officially deputed to stand at the hall door with flaming sword and do battle with the invading armies. Tracts, pamphlets, advertisements, gratuitous copies of magazines, and the literary productions of friends come by post, by van, by messenger — come at all hours of the day and fall in the night, so that the morning breakfast table is fairly snowed up with them. Continue reading →

Heidegger’s Nazism

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A review of Victor Farías’
Heidegger and Nazism (1987)

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This one’s from the archives. I stumbled across it today while trying to dig up another file. Upon rereading it, I was surprised to see that I still agree with most of the sentiments it conveys. Of course, there are some bits that annoy me that I’d like to change, but I’m going to post it as is. Don’t be too hard on me; it’s from 2006.

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Very little can be written concerning Victor Farías’ polemical Heidegger and Nazism which has not already been extensively discussed. Since its release in French translation in 1987, the book has been the subject of furious criticism, defended by an army of staunch advocates while simultaneously decried by a host of equally resolute detractors. For both extremes this work merely provided a pretext for debate. The battle lines had for the most part already been drawn: the response on either side to its publication was generally automatic. More judicious commentators have since been able to appreciate the truly groundbreaking revelations of Farías’ study, at the same time recognizing its severe limitations. The question of an author’s reasons for conducting this sort of investigation must inevitably arise, after all, given the controversial nature of the issues at stake. This was no small undertaking on his part. The painstaking archival process by which Farías gathered his data was carried out systematically over the course of several years. This no doubt casts some suspicion on his motives. Moreover, the striking lack of ambiguity in his results (which invariably implicate Heidegger as a loyal Nazi all along), combined with a number of questionable arguments and characterizations he makes, only serves to damage the integrity of his otherwise impressive research. So what might then be salvaged from Farías’ contentious analysis? The reader might proceed with cautious reservation, acknowledging the disturbing discoveries it relates while sifting out its more dubious insinuations.

Brief memorandum circulated by Heidegger addressing the students at Freiburg, 1934

Brief memorandum circulated by Heidegger
addressing the students at Freiburg, 1933

We shall begin by examining the general methodology of the text. The technique Farías employs throughout in assessing Heidegger’s thought is primarily external. That is to say, the book does not look to excogitate the subtle nuances and abstractions of Heidegger’s philosophy from within. Instead, Farías devotes most of his attention to relatively minor documents (memos, speech transcripts, personal correspondences, etc.). Continue reading →