“Category of illustrative seeing: fundamental for the flâneur. Like Kubin when he wrote Andere Seite, he composes his reverie as text to accompany the images.” Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project
NOTE: I’m republishing this piece by Marco Torres from 2008 because it underscores the shift away from revolutionary optimism toward critical pessimism that took place among more perceptive Marxists during the 1920s and 1930s. The Frankfurt School, as it’s come to be known, is exemplary of this turn. Nevertheless, this does not mean they ceased to be Marxists. Rather, they represented an attempt to grasp the failure of revolutionary Marxism using the tools of historical materialism itself.
As the economist Alfred Sohn-Rethel explained, this critical reappraisal “began towards the end of the First World War and in its aftermath, at a time when the German proletarian revolution should have occurred and tragically failed. This period led me into personal contact with Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Siegfried Kracauer, and Theodor Adorno and the writings of Georg Lukács and Herbert Marcuse. Strange though it may sound I do not hesitate to say that the new development of Marxist thought which these people represent evolved as the theoretical and ideological superstructure of the revolution that never happened. In it re-echo the thunder of the gun battle for the Marstall in Berlin at Christmas 1918, and the shooting of the Spartacus rising in the following winter. The paradoxical condition of this ideological movement may help to explain its almost exclusive preoccupation with superstructural questions, and the conspicuous lack of concern for the material and economic base that should have been underlying it.”
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From their canonization in the 1960s through to their appropriation by postmodernism in the 1980s, the writings of the Frankfurt School have had their Marxian dimension minimized, vulgarized, and ultimately ignored. Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Max Horkheimer — the only names of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Theory’s roster that seem to be remembered today — have instead been characterized as anything from old-timey liberals to mystical eclectics, Left Hegelian hippies to ivory tower elitists. According to the standard narrative, these thinkers abandoned Marxism in the 1940s, when the continued atrocities and political unviability of the Soviet Union turned them into Cold War liberals of varied stripes.
Such narratives, which tend to claim that the deepest insights of these thinkers were accomplished in spite of their Marxism or even in the process of overcoming it, are just plain wrong. From the beginning of Horkheimer’s directorship of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Theory in 1930 through to Adorno’s death in 1969, the goal of the Frankfurt school was to maintain the critical purchase of a Marxian social critique as it was threatened by the accelerated process of decay that the Left began in the 1920s. A look at the Institute’s early history allows us to see how the necessity of this approach came to be. In the early 1920s, the original members of the Frankfurt Institute — half forgotten names such as Carl Grünberg, Henryk Grossman, and Karl August Wittfogel — were social scientists of an orthodox Marxist conviction. They understood their task as an advancement of the sciences that would prove useful in solving the problems of a Europe-wide transition into socialism, which they saw, if not as inevitable, at least as highly likely. But as fascism reared its head in Germany and throughout Europe, the younger members of the Institute saw the necessity for a different kind of Marxist Scholarship. Beyond accumulating knowledge relevant to an orthodox Marxist line, they felt the need to take the more critical and negative approach that is required for the maintenance of an integral and penetrating understanding of society during a moment of reaction. This could be described as the politically necessary transition from Marxist positive science to critical theory.
After the German worker’s revolution of 1918-1919 had been betrayed and crushed by the Social Democrats (SPD), the early 1920s saw a period of relative stability slowly settle upon Germany. Despite the fact that further attempts by the German Communist Party (KPD) to challenge the SPD’s rule were weak and ineffective, the possibility of Europe-wide socialist revolution continued to be a topic of conversation among Leftist intelligentsia in postwar Germany. This sense of possibility seemed justified: the Soviet Union had succeeded in surviving its civil war and from a distance seemed to be on a path to successful stabilization; the KPD’s membership continued to grow in the permissive atmosphere of the Weimar Republic; and, with the exception of Italy, Fascism did not yet appear to be an immediate threat. In spite of their deep conservatism, the Social Democrats continued to hold up Marxism as their ideology, legitimizing it and thus making it into an open, officially sanctioned field of discussion.
It was in this environment that Felix Weil, a young graduate of the Frankfurt University who, at age 20, had fought with the workers during the revolution of 1919, began to use his great inherited wealth to finance initiatives for Marxist theoretical discussion. Having written his dissertation on “the essence and methods of socialization,” financially supported left-wing artists such as George Grosz and taken part in the social circle around KPD members Klara Zetkin and Paul Frölich, his joking self-description as a “Salon Bolshevik†was not far from the truth. One of the initiatives he financially supported was the First Marxist Workweek [Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche] a retreat at a hotel on the edge of the Thuringian Forest in which more than two dozen Marxist intellectuals, most of them affiliated with the KPD, gathered to discuss the latest works by Karl Korsch and Georg Lukács, respectively “Marxism and Philosophy†and the seminal History and Class Consciousness. Among the attendants were Korsch and Lukács themselves, Horkheimer, Zetkin, and economist Friedrich Pollock. As it turned out, thanks to Weil’s efforts, this gathering could retrospectively be seen as the first “seminar†of what would become the Frankfurt Institute of Social Theory, since throughout the next decade most of its participants would become affiliated with the Institute in some function or another.
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Some remarks by Italian architecture critics on the architectural significance of the movie.
The elegant and refined works of Mallet-Stevens, beginning with the De Noailles villa of 1923 in Hyères, were yet another product of an intimate converse with the Cubist vanguard that nonetheless kept its eye on the latest modes and fashions, as in the house on Rue Balzac in Ville d’Avray (1926) or the apartment block of the next year on the street in Paris named for the architect himself. In the sophisticated world of the avant-garde, Mallet-Stevens moved at his eclectic ease: his villa for the Vicomte de Noailles was used as the setting for Man Ray’s film Les Mystères du Chateau du Dé. Already in 1923-24, Mallet-Stevens had collaborated with Léger, Chareau, and Alberto Cavalcanti on a film by Marcel L’Herbier, L’Inhumaine, in which the house of the leading character is one of the finest examples of that scenographic and eclectic synthesis of Cubist, Neo-Plasticist, and Art Deco details of which Mallet-Stevens’ architecture is compounded. (Pg. 233)
— Manfredo Tafuri
& Frencesco Dal Co
Modern Architecture
The human being as inventor and as machine was even transferred to the stage in ballets such as Parade (1917), Alexander Exeter’s L’homme Sandwich (1922), and the Triadische Ballet of Oskar Schlemmer and plays an obvious role in the rhythmic sequencing and montage used as compositional techniques in films such as Fernand Léger’s Ballet mécanique and Marcel L’Herbier’s L’Inhumaine. Photography and the cinema are in fact the two new and popular mechanical figurative arts. If photography offers an alternative to the pictorial representation of nature, cinema provides art with new materials in a new harmony of space and time in movement and a new simultaneity. These were themes that Walter Benjamin was to treat in the 1930s. (Pg. 20)
— Vittorio Gregotti
The Architecture of
Means and Ends
And now for an article by Mallet-Stevens.
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Architecture is an art which is basically geometrical. The cube is the basis of architecture because the right angle is necessary. In practice, walls are generally vertical, floors are horizontal, columns, pillars and posts are vertical, terraces and the ground are horizontal, stone blocks are parallelepipeds, windows and doors are rectangular, the steps of a staircase consist of vertical and horizontal planes and the corners of rooms are nearly always right angles. We need right angles.
A house, a palace, is composed of a set of cubes. At all stages in the history of art the house has been cubical. Each country, each century, each fashion has made its impression on the cube, with sculptures, moldings, pediments, capitals, ornamental foliage, scrolls — so many decorative details which are often of no use to the structure but which give the charm of the play of light and shade. Building in stone, in fact, only allowed a block to be made, composed of various elements, to which the decoration was related as if glued on. Continue reading
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The limit of the space of this house 1 is constructed inexorably from within — from the very substance of its own language. The negative is not an other, but comprises the very othernesses that make up this language. There are no means of escape or “withdrawal” into the “values” of the interior. And the exterior is not designed in a utopian way, taking off from the value of Gestaltung — nor is it possible to save in the interior values that the metropolitan context negates. The work recalls neither Hoffmann, nor Wagner — nor even Loos and his “suspended dialectics” of interior-exterior. The idea of a hierarchically defined conflict between two levels of value is totally absent here. The conflict is with “all that remains,” which cannot be determined or transformed by the limits of this language; hence, it is a conflict with the Metropolis lying beyond this space, a conflict which in this space can only be silence. But, for this very reason, this space ultimately reveals a recognition of the Metropolis as now devoid of mystification or utopism, an acknowledgment of all its power.
In all this lies the truly classical dimension of the Wittgenstein house: the non-expressivity of the calculated space of the building is its essential substance.2 The building’s sole relation with what remains is the presence of the building itself. It cannot in any way determine or allude to the apeiron (infinite) surrounding it. Also classical is the calculation to which every passage is rigorously subjected, as well as the freezing of the linguistic media into radically anti-expressive orders, a phenomenon taken to the point of a manifest indifference toward the material (or rather, to the point of choosing indifference in the material, of choosing indifferent materials, materials without qualities) — but what is most classical here is the relation between the limited-whole of the house and the surrounding space.
The silence of the house, its impenetrability and anti-expressivity, is concretized in the ineffability of the surrounding space. So it is with the classical: classical architecture is a symbol (in the etymological sense) of the in-finite (a-peiron) that surrounds it. Its anti-expressivity is a symbol of the ineffability of the a-peiron. The abstract absoluteness of its order exalts the limit of the architectonic language; its non-power expresses the encompassing infinite. But at the same time, and as a result, this language constructs itself in the presence of this infinite, and cannot be understood except in light of this infinite. This presence of the classical in Wittgenstein represents one of the exceptional moments in which the development of modern ideology reassumed the true problematics of the classical. Webern would conclude his life’s work with this presence, linking himself with the first, lacerating modern perception of the classical — an anti-Weimarian, anti-historicist, tragic vision: that of Hölderlin.3 At this point the immeasurable distance separating Wittgenstein’s classical from Olbrich’s later works and from Hoffmann’s constant tendency is clear. Olbrich’s “classical” is a transformation of the Secession mask into that of a reacquired order, a recuperated wholeness. Hoffmann’s “classical” is an affirmation (or rather, an ever-contradicted, ever-disputed repetition) of the historicist dimension illuminated by a Weimarian nostalgia. But even Loos’s notion of the Roman, as we have seen, is completely averse to any simple idea of recuperation or neo-classical refoundation, or even mere Gemeinschaft. And yet, not even a trace of this Roman element can be found in Wittgenstein’s oikos.
The “Roman” is seen by Loos in terms of functionality and use. Its dimension is that of experience, of the temporal — and hence of social existence. Every project lives immersed in this general historical context: the light that brings it forth is that of time. In this way were the Romans able to adopt from the Greeks every order, every style: it was all the same to them. What was essential was the light that brought forth the building — and not just the building, but the life of the entire society. Their only problems were the great problems of planning. “Ever since humanity has understood the grandeur of classical antiquity, one single thought has united all great architects. They think: I shall build just as the ancient Romans would have built…every time architecture strays from its model to go with the minor figures, the decorativists, there reappears the great architect who leads the art back to antiquity.”4 From the Romans, says Loos, we have derived the technique of thought, our power to transform it into a process of rationalization. We conceive of the world technically and temporally, just as it unfolds in the ribbon of Trajan’s Column; we conceive of the Denkmal as a civil project — as architecture from the point of view of those who live it and reap its benefits. Continue reading
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May Day, Leningrad 1931. A constructivist set design depicting the global forces of reaction — a capitalist with a Howitzer coming out of his hat, an Orthodox priest mounted on top, a policeman straddling a swastika — serves as the centerpiece for a parade outside the Winter Palace in Leningrad. One can see from the pictures in the gallery below that these sets were mobile, adaptable, and collapsible, with different fitted parts allowing for various juxtapositions and transformations.
The group responsible for this monstrous mise-en-scène was IZORAM (the Young Workers’ Visual Arts [Изобразительное иÑкуÑÑтво рабочей молодежи]), a Leningrad collective that combined theatrical constructivism with strong Proletkult overtones. It was led by the rather brilliant Moisei Solomonovich Brodskii, who’d begun his career as a popularizer of cubism in Russia. Didn’t last long, though; founded in 1928, IZORAM would dissolve by the end of 1931. Presumably, this coincided with the forced unionization of the different independent art organizations throughout the USSR, a measure that allowed the Stalinist regime to impose its prescribed brand of “socialist realism” on practitioners.
Credit must go to Architecture of Doom and Semiotic Apocalypse for bringing this to my attention. Naturally, the image was discovered in the course of trawling through Russian Livejournal websites.
If the swastika was “mobilized” toward antifascist ends for Soviet parades (though this should not be mistaken for détournement avant la lettre), then it could quite easily be “mobilized” toward fascist ends as well. Principally by the fascists themselves. Seems the Nazis took to the idea of using the swastika as a gigantic mobile prop, as can be seen from a photograph taken in Hamburg during a speech in 1933. Behold:
Bizarre example of Nazi mobile architecture, a
kind of “walking swastika” in Hamburg, 1933
The swastika could be positively “mobilized” by yet another means — namely, as mass ornament. Continue reading
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Image: Still from Marcel L’Herbier’s
silent film classic L’Inhumaine (1924)
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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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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, 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
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Image:Â Raoul Hausmann,
The Art Critic (1919-1920),
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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 HölderÂlin 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)
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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
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Image: Cover to Lajos Kassák’s
Ma: Aktivista folyóirat (1924)
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Excerpted and partially excised from a generally much more favorable review of Ben Davis’Â Art and Class, a very worthwhile read. Some of this material strayed a little too far off course to be included.
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The one glaring weakness of Ben Davis’ recent collection 9.5 Theses on Art and Class is its conflation of activism and politics. Of course, Davis is not alone in considering them more or less identical. For many who joined the antiwar movement of the mid-2000s, protest marches were the default mode of political participation. Much of Davis’ frustration with the self-important posturing of “radical†artists stems from this formative experience.
Early on in Art and Class, he recalls an exchange he had with an artist during this period. After conversing for a while about their shared opposition to the Iraq invasion, they each agreed to attend the next chapter meeting of the ANSWER coalition in New York. When the artist failed to show, Davis followed up only to find out that he’d spent his evening in front of an easel instead. The artist apparently informed him that “his painting…was his contribution to making the world a safer place.â€[1] Needless to say, Davis was nonplussed by this explanation. Wondering what might lead someone to supply such a dubious alibi, he decided to submit the very idea (or, more accurately, the ideology) of “aesthetic politics†to further scrutiny. Upon closer inspection, he concludes that “[a]s a critical trope, ‘aesthetic politics’ is more of an excuse not to be engaged in the difficult, ugly business of nonartistic political activism than it is a way of contributing to it.â€[2] Repeatedly Davis expresses his consternation at this state of affairs, finding most answers to the problem of art and politics wanting. Worse yet, he alleges, the question is no longer even asked: “The question of what, if any, relation artists might have to activism has receded into the background.â€[3] Continue reading
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Image: Claude Shannon setting
“Theseus” into its rat maze.
Just to clarify, in case my recent post on Bourdieu and de Certeau was misleading, I do not intend to dismiss the role of habituation in art and architecture wholesale:
The human need for shelter is permanent. Architecture has never had fallow periods. Its history is longer than that of any other art, and its effect ought to be recognized in any attempt to account for the relationship of the masses to the work of art. Buildings are received in a twofold manner: by use and by perception. Or, better: tactilely and optically. Such reception cannot be understood in terms of the concentrated attention of a traveler before a famous building. On the tactile side, there is no counterpart to what contemplation is on the optical side. Tactile reception comes about not so much by way of attention as by way of habit. The latter largely determines even the optical reception of architecture, which spontaneously takes the form of casual noticing, rather than attentive observation. Under certain circumstances, this form of reception shaped by architecture acquires canonical value. For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at historical turning points cannot be performed solely by optical means — that is, by way of contemplation. They are mastered gradually — taking their cue from tactile reception — through habit.
Walter Benjamin, “The work of art in the age
of its technological reproducibility” (1935)[1]
There is probably more to this, as well. Frampton’s insistence upon the tactile, tectonic dimension of architecture as opposed to the visual, scenographic qualities celebrated by postmodern architects, likely stems from a similar reasoning.
[1] Â Translated by Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Selected Writings, Volume 3: 1935-1938. (Harvard University Press. Cambridge, MA: 2003). Pg. 120.
From The Arcades Project, pg. 40:
Old name for department stores: docks à bon marché — that is, “discount docks.” <Sigfried> Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich <Leipzig and Berlin, 1928>, p. 31.
Evolution of the department store from the shop that was housed in arcades. Principle of the department store: “The floors form a single space. They can be taken in, so to speak, ‘at a glance’.” Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich, p. 34.
Giedion shows (in Bauen in Frankreich, p. 35) how the axiom, “Welcome the crowd and keep it seduced” (Science et l’industrie, 143 [1925], p. 6), leads to corrupt architectural practices in the construction of the department store Au Printemps (1881-1889). Function of commodity capital!
Cover to Giedion’s Bauen in Frankreich (1928)
Pg. 153.
The first act of Offenbach’s Vie parisienne takes place in a railroad station. “The industrial movement seems to run in the blood of this generation — to such an extent that, for example, Flachat has built his house on a plot. of land where, on either side, trains are always whistling by.” Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich (Leipzig and Berlin <1928>), p. 13. Eugène Flachat (1802-1873), builder of rail-roads, designer.
On the Galerie d’Orléans in the Palais-Royal (1829-1831): “Even Fontaine, one of’ the originators of the Empire style, is converted in later years to the new material. In 1835-1836, moreover, he replaced the wooden flooring of the Galerie des Batailes in Versailles with an iron assembly. These galleries, like those in the Palais-Royal, were subsequently perfected in Italy. For us, they are a point of departure for new architectural problems: train stations, and the like.” Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich, p. 21. Continue reading
