Architecture, Critique, Ideology PDF

Architecture,
Critique,
Ideology
sven-olov
wallenstein
Architecture, Critique, Ideology
© Copyright 2016 Sven-Olov Wallenstein and Axl Books.
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Architecture, Critique, Ideology
Writings on Architecture and Theory
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Contents
Introduction: Architecture, Critique, Ideology vii
1. Tafuri and the End of Utopia 1

2. 1966: Thinking the City 71
3. The Pyramid and the Labyrinth 127
4. The Recent Past of Postmodern Architecture 173
5. Looping Ideology 255
6. Imagining Otherwise 297
7. Noopolitics, Life, Architecture 363
Introduction:
Architecture,
Critique,
Ideology
This book gathers together essays written over the course of the
last decade, all of which in one way or another deal with the tra-
dition of critical theory, and with the fate of such a theoretical
enterprise within architectural discourse. For some, this tradi-
tion has increasingly come to seem problematic, although the
criticisms are not all of a piece: on closer inspection, it is clear
that they are comprised of several contradictory and incompat-
ible strands, some of which involve the rejection of the idea of a
critical theory altogether, others of which call for a redefinition
and rethinking of some of its basic parameters and assumptions.
This book situates itself among those strands of thought that
defend the legacy of critical theory, although it also argues that
such a defense must remain open to contemporary challenges,
theoretical as well as practical.
The referent of the very term critical theory is by no means
obvious. Historically, the term generally refers to the Frankfurt
School, and the legacy of Adorno and Benjamin in particular; in
a larger timeframe it also denotes the philosophical tradition that
begins with Kant’s Critical Philosophy and continues—more like
a constantly broken and twisted line than a straight one—through
Hegel, Marx, and beyond. My proposal here involves understand-
ing the term as freely as possible, so that it also intersects with
vii
architecture, critique, ideology
the work of thinkers who in many ways stand opposed to the

philosophical tradition in which one would normally locate the
Frankfurt School. The rejection by many of these thinkers, such
as Deleuze and Foucault, of dialectics, as well as of certain models
of subjectivity, the reluctance of such thinkers to accept the di-
agnosis of late capitalism as involving an “administered world,”
and, most fundamentally, the role of theory as such, are issues
that render the unity of such a tradition difficult to uphold. When
confronting these different claims and orientations, my proposal
is not that we need to understand them better so as to make a
more informed choice between them, but instead that we must
explore the possibility of an interaction that will begin by render-
ing the differences more acute, and, in this, will also allow them
to infiltrate and transform each other. This I take to be crucial
for the development of that elusive entity called “theory,” which
sits uneasily between the practices and internal intellectual reflec-
tion of each of the arts (architecture being one of them—and they
all have specific problems that indeed resonate with those of the
others, but they cannot be simply mapped onto one another),
and, on the other hand, that seemingly abstract and forbidding
entity called “philosophy,” which is often understood as an in-
vestigation of concepts and universals (truth, mind, language,
even being as such) taken to be already presupposed in the other
disciplines and practices, although without these concepts being
reflected and thought through.
The relation between theory and practice—presuming that
they even can be fundamentally distinguished, which is doubt-
ful—is a highly contested one, as can be seen in the constantly
recurring claims that theory (and, by implication, even more so
philosophy, existing as it does on the distal side of theory) is use-
less or even harmful for practice, which in turn alternates with the
opposing claim that only a grand theory can save practice from
becoming blindly complicitous with social, economic, or other
viii
Introduction: Architecture,
Critique,
Ideology
forces that transcend and condition it. This divide between the
generality of concepts and the particularity of practices is obvi-
ously not of recent vintage, but it has acquired a particular in-
tensity in the present, where singularity and difference are the
battle cries of the moment, while all things on another level melt
into air precisely because of their maximal interconnectedness. If
all things are singular, local, and specific, and seem to resist the
generality of theories, it is precisely because they form part of a
network that in turn operates by continually differentiating itself,
and in this exerts a systemic power that remains opaque to those
who inhabit its singular points. These two sides must be thought
together without reducing one to the other, which is why there is
no one answer to the problem of the relation between theory and
practice: they call upon each other in specific situations, and the
movement neither proceeds from top to bottom, which is how
one, rightly or wrongly, tends to understand the great idealist sys-
tems (with the possible, partial exception of Hegelianism), nor
from the bottom up, as in the attempts to create a physiological
aesthetic to succeed idealism in the second half of the eighteenth
century, which today find an echo in many claims that aesthetic
issues are fundamentally to be dealt with in cognitive science,
evolutionary theory, or even empirical biology. Instead, this rela-
tion is brought to life from both ends, by works that question their
own status as well as the categories we use to apprehend them,
and by a thought that seeks other determinations than those of-
fered by a seemingly self-enclosed sphere of concepts.
The subtitle of this book, “Writings on Architecture and
Theory,” seeks to point to this indeterminacy, or rather this
quest for singular determinations—which perhaps was what
Adorno, following Benjamin, once aspired to in the idea of con-
stellations.1 The “and” indicates the need for an articulation, or
1. See Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am
Main; Suhrkamp, 1997), vol. 6, 164–169; Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B.
ix
an articulating, in both cases, without specifying in advance,

from an a priori position, what this must look like: the filling
in of the blank left by the conjunction must be the result of a
specific invention, in which the conjoining neither begins from
the solidity of an a priori, nor ends with a fixity laying claim to
have removed the unease associated with the position of theory.
Similarly, the relation that critical theory establishes with its
other, ideology, should avoid freezing the terms in a syntagm that
orders them hierarchically, so that one of them would be general
and the other, or others, specific, as, for instance, in a “critique
of architectural ideology,” once proposed by Manfredo Tafuri,
to which he returned ceaselessly, each time rendering the notion
more and more opaque and self-reflexive.2 Instead, the three
terms, architecture, critique, ideology, must be allowed to co-exist
at the same level, which renders their respective borders fluid, if
not fuzzy, in a way that here calls for an at least somewhat more
detailed, albeit tentative comment, however much their actual
articulation, as always, remains to be seen in each case.
Architecture
In order for such a theory to become productive, it cannot re-
fer exclusively to buildings, bricks, and mortar, nor, by simply
Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973), 162–166.
2. The outer limit of this trajectory was perhaps signaled by his “Per
una critica dell’ideologia architettonica” (first published in Contropi-
ano 1969; trans. Stephen Sartarelli in Hays, Architecture Theory Since
1968 [Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1998]), and the methodological preface
to La sfera e il labirinto, “Il progetto storico” (1980), trans. Pellegrino
d’Acierno and Robert Connolly in Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth:
Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT, 1990), where the self-reflexivity of the very language
of critique strikes back almost with every step at the methodological
assurance of the 1969 essay. If the first text wants to confront architec-
tural discourse with the material contradictions of a reality to which it
offers only imaginary solutions, the “real problem,” Tafuri states in the
second text, “is how to project a criticism capable of constantly putting
itself into crisis by putting into crisis the real.” (9)
x
Critique,
Ideology
zooming out and stepping up to another level, to environments

and large-scale urban structures, but should, more generally,
explore spatial signifying practices that also include texts, im-
ages, and various modes of representation, which, to be sure, all
revolve around that kind of material instantiation that is com-
monly referred to as architecture, but also extend outwards into
intellectual culture as a whole. This fluid status, which conjoins
notions like presentation and representation, reality and its im-
age, materiality and immateriality, is one of the reasons why
theory and practice cannot be opposed as, for instance, the in-
telligible and the sensible might be. There is something sensible
and material in all thought, be it architectural or not: thought
has an embodiment that may take on all manner of guises, but
that is never simply external clothing upon an inner sense. Con-
versely, there is nothing that is purely material and mute: noth-
ing is simply there, in space or time, without extending into the
imaginary and the sphere of concepts, and detaching itself, if
ever so slightly, from the temporal present. Just as all theory
is already a claim about our way of inhabiting the world and
prefigures an embodiment, all ways of being in the world have
their horizons and apertures toward the intelligible, if there is to
be a world at all—a world that is not a closed set, as the image of
administration tends to suggest, but exists by virtue of the gaps
and porosities, the leakages and lines of flight that it produces
inside itself.3
3. Bureaucracy and administration could instead be taken as fields of im-
manence, in the sense suggested by Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of
Kafka; see Kafka, pour une littérature mineure (Paris: Minut, 1975); Kafka:
Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1986). Particularly relevant would be the discus-
sion (chap. 8) of the role of architectural and spatial models in Kafka’s
novels: that the court has no absolute outside means that it constantly
produces multiple outsides on the inside, so that the initially discon-
nected rooms of the court prove to be adjacent in ways that defy the
hierarchical structure, and all openings turn out to be impasses just as
all impasses have their openings.
xi
Architecture, as Hegel famously said, is the first of the arts

(both in the sense that it precedes the others as their ground,
and in the sense that it is the lowest in the hierarchy), because it
deals with gravity, opacity, and that which is inextricably bound
up with use and action, and in this sense it is also the art that
most of all resists becoming aesthetic. The first truly beautiful
art, Hegel suggests, is sculpture, which becomes itself by dis-
engaging from architecture, thereby providing the latter with
the function of surrounding and housing the image of the God
in the temple.4 This material resistance, which has often led to
architecture being placed at the margins of aesthetics, should
however rather incite the opposite move, so that aesthetics is
transformed into a type of inquiry that disengages from beauty
or other similar normative concepts, or, if they are to be re-
tained, requires that we release this inherited vocabulary from
its entrenchment in a normative canon. Beauty—a term that
for a long time seemed useless, but that, today, some want to
revive—could be taken as the name, but a name only, of that
particular constellation of concepts and intuitions, thoughts
and particulars, which gives us a maximum of things to think,
without necessarily ordering them in a logical fashion, instead
gesturing in the direction of a different and spontaneous order-
ing (which is the Kantian definition of the aesthetic idea). But
as such, it cannot escape the historical mediations that situate
it within a horizon of finitude and bind it to a particular time
and place (which is the Hegelian understanding of the historic-
ity of spirit). And finally, it cannot avoid, even though many
4. See Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, Werke, eds. Eva Moldenhauer
and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), vol.
14, 270; Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans T. M. Knox (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 633, and my discussion of this transition
in “Hegel and the Grounding of Architecture,” in Michael Asgaard and
Henrik Oxvig (eds.), The Paradoxes of Appearing: Essays on Art, Architec-
ture, and Philosophy (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2009).
xii
Critique,
Ideology
works actively resist this on the level of content, the promise

of a different world, no matter how veiled and tenuous, simply
by virtue of its stepping out of this world and mimetically ex-
tracting a double that transcends it (which is Adorno’s idea of
the artwork as the placeholder for utopia and reconciliation).
Aesthetics, a term that has been discredited almost as much as
beauty, should not thus be understood as severing works from
the world—which in the particular case of architecture makes
little sense—but as a way to understand their particular purchase
on and inscription in the world: what they give to think, in con-
cepts or otherwise, how they express a world of which they in-
evitably form a part without being reducible to it, and how they
insert a wedge into the world, splitting it from itself without
installing themselves in a different world.
From another, though related angle, architecture’s implica-
tion in power seems equally to condemn an aesthetic reading to
irrelevance or naiveté. For doesn’t architecture, before it crosses
over into the space of the imaginary and sets up a double of the
world, belong to real space, to this world? This it would do not
just in terms of its insistent materiality, but more profoundly be-
cause it orders and segments our lives, imposes divisions of in-
side and outside, up and down, which are just as much economi-
cal, political, and social as they are tangible and physical. But
once more, in keeping with the sense of the aesthetic delineated
above, it is just as true that all such divisions have a dimension
that directly addresses the sensible, and not primarily in terms
of taste, but as an element where higher-order structures of so-
ciety are made palpable, where they are inextricably entangled
with contradictory passions and affects. Thus, if power is actual-
ized in architectures, it is in a way that immediately breeds re-
sistance, so that actions and reactions, subjections and refusals,
continually tap into and feed off each other, which is why archi-
tecture, to a much larger extent than the other arts, is a matter
xiii
of contestation even at the level of affectivity. Architecture is

power in action, never just a symbol of power, and the sphere
of aisthesis as it is taken here, as the domain where the senses are
joined with thought, is the space where this is played out.
Critique
The obvious relation of the term critique to a whole tradition
running from Kant and Hegel through Marx up to Benjamin and
Adorno has already been noted, as has the general sense in which
the term is understood here, such that it comes to include posi-
tions that not only deviate from the legacy of dialectical critique,
but also would appear to stand opposed to it. What is at stake is
the sense of critique as reflection on our historical present that
attempts to excavate conditions, possibilities, and limitations of
aesthetic production, which on the one hand is inevitably in-
scribed in the structures of the current world, and on the other
hand takes issue with it, attempts to go beyond it, or at least taps
into its contradictions so as to set congealed structures in motion.
In order to do this, critique cannot retreat to positions that have
already been absorbed, which is why the broader understanding
of critical theory corresponds to the necessity of rethinking the
concepts that were at the basis of its earlier forms: subjectivity,
experience, contradiction, negation, form, autonomy, nature—all
of which have been subjected to fundamental transformations
both in philosophy and the arts since the 1960s.
Such a rethinking of the basic tenets of critical theory has
been underway for some time within the Frankfurt School it-
self, specifically in Habermas and his followers. In their line of
reasoning, the concept of mimesis—which Adorno understands
not as simple imitation and duplication of some given reality in
artistic form, but as an archaic form of merging with the object
that survives inside representation, as an inner subversion of
identity thinking—must be rejected, since it allegedly sets itself
xiv
Critique,
Ideology
up as an alternative to discursive rationality without being able

to supply any normative criteria for its own application.
These criticisms, first of all, not only seem misguided in rela-
tion to Adorno, but, furthermore, also lead in a direction wholly
opposed to what I am contending is a necessary step: to push
Adorno’s idea even further. Mimesis, Adorno often underlines,
can just as little replace instrumental reason or identity think-
ing (to think, he states unequivocally at the outset of Negative
Dialectics, means to identify) as it can be wholly be suppressed by
it. Rather, it operates as an inner corrective, a reminder of what
this thinking can never exhaust, since its conceptual domination
is built upon the repression of the mimetic, which nevertheless
leaves scars or traces in experience that art and philosophy reg-
ister, each in their own way, without being simply mapped onto
each other.
This criticism on the basis of a misguided understanding of
Adorno’s use of mimesis is then connected to the second and
more far-reaching claim that Adorno would have failed to un-
dertake the turn from a philosophy of consciousness to a phi-
losophy of language, and thus would have remained trapped in
“metaphysical thinking.” This we see, for instance, in Albrecht
Wellmer, who speaks of Adorno’s failure to attain a “postmeta-
physical aesthetics of modernity”5 that would shift the focus to
the communicative role of art instead of remaining entrenched
in late modern strategies of refusal and negation, which in
turn would be based in an outdated philosophy of conscious-
ness. Two things must be noted here. It is clear that the idea
of art as communication, which is what this argument takes to
constitute the solution, is what Aesthetic Theory opposes from
beginning to end, rather than being something Adorno would
5. See Wellmer, “Adorno, die Moderne und das Erhabene”, in Franz

Koppe (ed.), Perspektiven der Kunstphilosophie (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1991), 190.
xv
have overlooked or failed to grasp: communication is what is

demanded of art not only by the culture industry, but also by
those who opt for a culinary high-brow aesthetic, precisely be-
cause it defuses art and makes it into a specific sphere of ex-
periences to be placed alongside the other spheres, eventually
endowing it with a compensatory function. In addition, while
Adorno does indeed in many contexts insist on the constitu-
tive resemblance of art to language, its Sprachähnlichkeit, he adds
that language becomes art precisely as “writing,” i.e., through
that moment of self-reflection, opacity, and refusal of meaning
that makes it into an enigma and calls for a particular type of
interpretation, which is also the basis for his (perhaps unjust)
rejection of hermeneutics.
Third, and most generally, there is a presupposition that a
philosophy of consciousness would be metaphysical, whereas a
philosophy of language would somehow escape this condition,
and constitute an unequivocal and assured progress, since it
would once and for all solve the problems posed by its prede-
cessor. Regardless of how one understands the term metaphys-
ics, it seems obvious that none of this can be taken for granted.
Finally, regardless of whether refusal and negation are suffi-
cient concepts to grasp artistic work, other means are equally
available that just as little give in to the idea of communica-
tion, which probably is, as Heidegger once said of the notion of
Erlebnis, “the element in which art dies.”6
Not unlike the proponents of communication, the advocates
of the post-critical take leave of the idea of art as resistance and
negativity, and instead claim that it ought to operate in com-
plicity or collusion with the production of images, pleasures,
6. Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, in Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann, 1977), vol. 5, 67. In a handwritten marginal note
(b) Heidegger adds that the true task is to “attain a wholly different
element for the ‘becoming’ of art” (“ein ganz anderes Element für das
Werden der Kunst zu erlangen”)
xvi
Critique,
Ideology
and affects in (post)modern capitalism, in order for it to be

“instrumental,” “projective,” or “operative.” At the same time,
while such rejections are themselves based on unacknowledged
theoretical assumptions, and some of them, at least in the form
they are presented, are ideological in a rather simplistic sense,
they can also be taken as pointing to deeper issues that also have
bearings on our third concept, that of ideology.
Ideology
In the most far-reaching sense of the term, ideology would take
us all the way back to the beginnings of philosophy, to Plato’s
theory of forms, which is a logos of the idea or eidos, and as such
the first ideo-logy (which incidentally also holds for the more
restricted sense of the term, as comes across in the necessity of
“noble lies” in The Republic). Most contemporary uses of term
however draw on the model proposed by Marx in The German
Ideology, i.e., the camera obscura that gives us an inverted picture
of the world, so that ideas and not material processes come to be
seen as the determining factors. Against this, Marx suggests that
it is only determined individuals who produce determined social
relations, and what is decisive is not how they represent their
life process to themselves, but how it actually occurs, in what
way they are active and produce material objects. The produc-
tion of ideas, law, metaphysics, religion, etc., is thus inextricably
tied to the material production process, and with the interac-
tion (Verkehr) that it involves, and consciousness (Bewusstsein)
is finally never anything other than conscious being (bewusstes
Sein), i.e., a kind of being-aware that arises directly out of the
actual life process.7 But this direct reflection is nevertheless an
7. “Das Bewusstsein kann nie etwas Andres sein als das bewusste Sein,
und das Sein der Menschen ist ihr wirklicher Lebensprozess. Wenn in
der ganzen Ideologie die Menschen und ihre Verhältnisse wie in einer
Camera obscura auf den Kopf gestellt erscheinen, so geht dies Phän-
omen ebensosehr aus ihrem historischen Lebensprozess hervor, wie die
xvii
inversion, Marx continues; it gives us an inverted image, like a

camera obscura, in the same natural way that objects are repro-
duced in inverted form on the retina. In order to set the picture
straight, we must ascend from the earth to the heavens, not the
other way around, as in the philosophy of German Idealism: we
must start from actual, active human beings, not from how they
are imagined or represented. Thus, Marx concludes, the ideal
forms of ideology will lose all semblance of autonomy, and they
will no longer have a history and development of their own—
which is the beginning of a true “positive science” that gets rid
of “phrases” about consciousness, even though it provides no
sure recipes, and the true difficulty begins with the “actual pre-
sentation” (wirkliche Darstellung).
As a general theory, this formula in many respects seems
far too simplistic and it is surely not a mere coincidence that
the rather crude gesture of a “never anything other” (nie etwas
Andres) is established by way of what looks like a pun; any sus-
tained attempt at proving this point would have shown the limi-
tations of such reduction. First, in a curious trading on meta-
phors from technology and physiology (which Marx is far from
the only one to use),8 it appears to naturalize ideology (it arises
“in the same way . . .”); second, it makes the dispelling of ideol-
ogy’s mirages into the fairly straightforward task of reversing
a picture whose content would be correct in itself. Marx’s idea
of reversal should, however, be seen in the light of the “pro-
cess of decomposition” that he sees existing in the aftermath of
Hegelianism, where everything appears to be played out in the
space of pure thought, and where the gradual putrefaction of
Umdrehung der Gegenstände auf der Netzhaut aus ihrem unmittelbar
physischen.” Marx, Die deutsche Ideologie, in Marx-Engels, Werke (Berlin:
Dietz, 1969), vol. 3, 26.
8. For a discussion of the camera obscura as model in Marx, Freud, and
Nietzsche, see Sarah Kofmann, Camera obscura: de l’idéologie (Paris:
Galilée, 1973).
xviii
Critique,
Ideology
spirit produces new substances both on the left and the right.
Seen in context, these remarks are not so much general claims
about ideology as a settling of accounts with Marx’s own left-
Hegelian past—which in turn raises the question to what extent
he remains a Hegelian, whether there is a break between the
young and the mature Marx, if the concept of alienation in the
Paris manuscripts remains pertinent for the systemic analysis
developed in Capital, and many other related questions. The
central issue here, however, is that of the subject as the bearer
of ideology: is there a way of overcoming ideology that would
not simply discard the “phrases of consciousness” as belonging
to the element of warped reflections, but rather inscribe subjec-
tivity as a complex figure of openings and closures, both condi-
tioned and conditioning?
It was precisely these problems that motivated Althusser’s
new take on ideology as a structure that does not belong to a
subject’s way of representing the world, but rather is constitutive
of subjectivity as such.9 While the general theoretical framework
that underpins these claims has probably crumbled beyond re-
pair—specifically the idea of pure theory or science that breaks
with the empirical object just as much as with the subject, and
installs itself in a “void”10—it may be useful to return to some of
its details, since, surprisingly enough, they might have a produc-
tive relation to architecture in particular. For Althusser, ideology
9. See “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État. (Notes pour une recher-
che)” (1970), reprinted in Althusser, Positions (1964–1975) (Paris: Les
Éditions sociales, 1976); trans. Ben Brewster, in Althusser, Lenin and
Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971) as
well as the more developed argument in Sur la reproduction (Paris: PUF,
1995).
10. While such a void, as a particular experience of the limit of subjectiv-
ity, is not without interesting philosophical implications, it seems too
difficult to claim that it could warrant the authority of theory over
ideology. For a reading of the motif of the void, see François Matheron,
“La récurrence de vide chez Louis Althusser,” in Matheron (ed.), Lire
Althusser aujourd’hui (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997).
xix
is not a flawed or inverted representation, but a material, bodily

encoded practice that establishes normalcy by providing precepts
for actions to be repeated without mental or intellectual consid-
erations, as captured in his paraphrase of Pascal’s instruction for
becoming a Christian: fall on your knees, move your lips, and you shall
become a believer. This normalcy is not limited to skills and vari-
ous forms of unexamined know-how, but includes the very sense
of being someone, of being a subject with a particular identity
and features, so that the subject does not have an ideology, but
is ideology through and through. Rather than originating from
within, Althusser suggests, the subject is constituted by interpel-
lation, i.e., by an address—whose historical forms may vary, from
the divine voice addressing the sinner to the police officer in the
street yelling “Hey, you there!”—to which the subject responds by
turning around, assuming the identity of the address, and hence-
forth knowing who and what it is.
In this context it is crucial that this operation is fundamen-
tally carried out by what Althusser calls “ideological state ap-
paratuses” (the church and the school being the two most sig-
nificant ones), which rely neither on coercion nor on the pro-
duction of false images, but rather on organizing modes of con-
duct. While they are not architectural in any specific sense, they
may be taken to involve the kind of spatial signifying practice
that was proposed above as a general sense of architecture, in
creating divisions, enclosures, and trajectories for the subject.
They are “diagrams,” as Foucault would say of the Panopticon
prison,11 i.e., abstract machines that distribute forces and points
11. Foucault introduces the term with reference to the military camp, as
“the diagram of a power that acts by means of general visibility,” and
later, slightly more systematically, in relation to Bentham’s Panopticon,
which “must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram
of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning,
abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented
as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political
technology that may and must be detached from any specific use.” See
xx
Critique,
Ideology
of application, and as such must be distinguished from the con-

crete physical forms that they might take (schools, hospitals,
prisons, military facilities, etc.).
This architectural connection is further indicated by the
way in which Althusser’s theory recalls the actual origin of the
term at the end of the eighteenth century, in the writings of the
French Idéologues, who in fact had important connections to the
architects of the period, notably Ledoux. As Antoine Picon has
pointed out, Destutt de Tracy, the major proponent of the new
theory of ideology, published his Eléments d’idéologie in 1804, the
same year as Ledoux’s magnum opus L’Architecture considérée sous
le rapport de l’art, des mœurs et de la législation.12 Destutt de Tracy’s
conception of ideology is not the one that would emerge in
Marx—false consciousness, systematic distortion of reality—but
rather a sequel to earlier sensualist epistemologies, from Locke’s
Essay Concerning Human Understanding to Condillac’s Traité des
sensations. For Destutt de Tracy, the analysis of the genesis of
our knowledge coincides with an analysis of the sign: the sign is
both something arbitrary, since it always results from singular
and contingent sensations, and something essential, since it is
that which allows us to form, discern, and hold onto ideas. For
our purpose here, the interesting aspect of Destutt de Tracy’s
treatise is that man’s primordial relation to and sensing of him-
self, as it emerges in and through such signs, comes from the
resistance offered by the outside world, and above all the resis-
tance to movement. This is why architecture can be understood
Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975),
202, 239; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: Penguin, 1977), 171, 205. Foucault’s use of the term might
have been incidental, but it was taken up and developed in a systematic
fashion by Deleuze in his Foucault (Paris: Minuit, 1986); Foucault, trans.
Séan Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
12. See Antoine Picon, “Pour une généalogie du statut du projet,” in Mesure
pour mesure: Architecture et Philosophie, special issue of Cahiers du Centre de
Création Industrielle (1987)
xxi
as a prefiguring or projecting of future human sensations: the

architect composes a pattern of possible movements, a possible
trajectory of the body, and for Boullée and Ledoux this means
that geometrical structures, before they are reflections of some
immaterial and supratemporal order, first and foremost are
tools that have an impact on our affectivity and give rise to a
new type of sentient individual. This could be understood as an
aesthetic turn, although not toward contemplation, but toward
action and doing, which makes it possible for architecture to
be understood as the production of a new sensorium (and here
one may note that the current interest in architecture as some-
thing that bears upon affects and affectivity together with the
vocabulary of a projective architecture, seems to resuscitate such
theories). Ideology in this sense begins its operations already
on a level that precedes reflexive consciousness, and if it works
through images, it is not because they are false or inverted repre-
sentations or pictures of a pre-existing real, but because they are
themselves real, forces and powers that shape the subject.
The idea of critical theory

This shaping is however not exerted on some inert matter, but
is itself a process that splits up into actions and reactions, sub-
jection and resistance, which means the subject constituted is
always more than itself, and it has a unity that is lacking in a both
negative and positive sense; it has both a lack of being and a lack
to be, as Lacan famously suggests, both a negativity emanating
from the past that constitutes it, and one that it has to be as
it is directed towards the future. This idea could be developed
with reference to the Lacanian sources of Althusser’s theory, on
which he draws in a reductive way that, at least in the analysis of
ideology, tends to obliterate the instability and openness of the
subject—the interpellation “never misses its target,” Althusser
writes, to which Lacan might retort that there is a subject, as
xxii
Critique,
Ideology
a structure of self-representation that spans a constitutive gap,

precisely to the extent that the address in fact never exactly hits
it, but opens a trajectory of identifications that inscribe the sub-
ject in ever-widening circles, from the Imaginary to the Sym-
bolic. Or, what would be closer to my concerns here, it could be
seen in relation to Foucault’s claims that resistance comes first,
since the diagram is only realized in a multiplicity that escapes
it, and draws its organizing power from that which refuses to be
organized: the law does not exist in order to eradicate crime, but
to produce a set of proliferating illegalities that can be assessed
and classified, and the visibility of the Panopticon, we might say,
only exists because its luminosity is submerged in an element of
chiaroscuro. If ideology works by constituting subjects, it also
fractures them, produces them as shot through with lacunae and
gaps whose suturing is always temporal, and thus temporary
(from a Foucauldian point of view, there would however not be
one predominant lack or absence, but rather a multiplicity of
crevices, or, perhaps more accurately, a porosity); it works by
always failing, always missing the mark.
So what, then, would be the implications of this for a critical
theory, both in general, and in relation to architecture? In rela-
tion to architecture, there is an initial division to be made—even
though it must remain porous and allow for numerous breach-
es—with respect to time, i.e., between theory as way of reading
and interpreting architectures (once more, in the wide sense of
the term) that already exist, either as past works that need to
be opened up or present ones that call out for judgment, and
theory as a constructing, projecting, and imagining of a critical
capacity belonging to architectures that do not yet exist. The re-
lation between past, present, and future is however not a linear
one, as seems to be presupposed when critical theory is deemed
useless for a practice to come. It seems more promising to un-
derstand the time of critique like a complex loop: it is present
xxiii
work that makes it possible to open up the monuments of the

past beyond mere passive admiration and philology, just as it is
such a reinterpreted past that in turn strikes back at the present,
because both of them, in different ways, come toward us from
the future. The activity of critique, in keeping with the Greek
etymology of the term, would be a splitting that tears apart the
three aspects of time in order to configure them differently; it
is an unhinging of time from its axes, as was glimpsed (but no
more than glimpsed) in Adorno’s understanding of how con-
temporary works burst open past ones and let us discern in them
that which did not add up, but was concealed underneath their
seemingly unbroken surfaces, although Adorno too often seems
to have settled for the linearity of the modern as the experience
of the no longer possible. A more complex version of this idea
can found in Deleuze’s theory of the untimely and the virtual,
in which each temporal segment is opened up to a larger dimen-
sion of pasts and futures that are not merely logical possibilities,
but real without being actual, in the sense that they impact on
the actual, not causally, but by infiltrating it, swarming behind
the scene of representation like so many doubles (Deleuze’s the-
ory draws initially on Bergson and Proust, and later on Leibniz
and cinema, but despite the attention it has attracted, including
in architecture theory, it is in need of further development and
clarification; the general direction in which it points is however
clear).
As for the idea of critical theory in general, here it may suf-
fice merely to delineate a few of the points that I think can be
extracted from the following essays—even though they were not
explicit or articulated at the time of writing; but such is the prob-
lem of any preface, written as it must be at the end, when writing
ought to have begun again—and in which the legacy of critical
theory needs to be confronted with other traditions, subsequent
and parallel to it. Rather than conclusions, they are guidelines for
xxiv
Critique,
Ideology
future research, and if the vocabulary of Adorno here is used as a

guiding thread, it is only one thread among many.
1. Interpretation is a second work. If the object embodies contra-
dictions, and these can be read out of it by an interpretation, the
latter nevertheless remains an invention of theory. While these
contradictions do originate in society, which for us inevitably
means the world of contemporary capitalism, and are reflected
in the work, this reflection is not a simple mirroring that has a
bearing on content or the “objective moment,” as Adorno says,
but occurs through an act of mimesis that in turn generates ten-
sions and contradictions within the construction, form, or im-
manent structure of the work. Teasing out these contradictions
from the object is itself a creation, neither superior nor inferior
to the first work, and in this sense interpretation produces a
second work alongside the first, which in turn cannot avoid em-
bodying contradictions that it itself cannot master. Thus, nei-
ther work nor interpretation is the key to the other; instead,
both have multiple points in common, though without being
reducible to a third underlying matrix. This inevitably entails a
crumbling of the hierarchy between the muteness and opacity of
the work and the eloquence of interpretation that Adorno, not-
withstanding his many precautions, often ends up reproducing.
2. Autonomy is an effect of a frame. Our concept of autonomy
must be articulated differently from the articulation of the con-
cept available to Adorno, since the idea of closure that guided
him is no longer the same as ours. This does not mean that it
would have simply evaporated, but rather that it has been trans-
formed along with the development of technologies of both
production and distribution. These shifts are indicated by, for
instance, the inverted constellation of concepts and particu-
lars in conceptual art and everything that would follow in its
wake, by the open or processual artwork that Adorno indeed
glimpsed but attempted to enclose within the negative concept
xxv
of the “informal,”13 by the incessant interrogation (both theo-

retical and practical) of the status of the art object that under-
stands it as more of a product of discursive conditions than a
perceptual given, and a host of other shifts, all of which belong
to a phase of aesthetic reflection that emerged in the sixties just
as Adorno’s work was drawing to close. Autonomy—as in the
“knight’s move” of the work, its “swerve” (ideas borrowed from
Shklovsky and Russian formalism), to which Tafuri referred to-
ward the end of his analysis of modernism as that which prevents
the work from simply merging with reality14—must not be taken
as an objective property that some things may have while others
simply lack, but as a kind of limiting or framing condition that
determines what belongs to the inside of the work and what to
its outside. Autonomy is the effect, the work, of a beside-the-work,
a parergon, as Derrida noted already in Kant’s aesthetics,15 and
in this sense it cannot be eliminated without the work ceasing
to exist. The process underway since Adorno’s time might be
analyzed as the gradual introjection of such framing conditions
into the work itself, so that they now can become its material
instead of its outer boundaries, as can be seen in many works “at
the limit” of architecture.
3. Contradiction must be rendered more fluid so as to incorporate dif-
13. See Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle” (1961), in Quasi una fanta-
sia, Gesammelte Schriften 16; Quasi una fantasia: Essays on Modern Music,
trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992).
14. See Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, 16, and Shklovsky, Knight’s
Move, trans. Richard Sheldon (Normal. Ill.: Dalkey Archive Press,
2005). The work’s distance from reality is itself conditioned by reality,
it is the way in which reality is taken up and deflected, which does not
make the distance any less real; conversely, the work could be said to in-
ject this distance into the real itself. If in Skhlovsky’s view the sideways
move of the knight occurs because the direct road ahead is blocked, as
Tafuri notes (ibid, 308 note 29), then this move is itself not somehow
less real, but rather introduces a different spacing of the board itself.
15. See Derrida, “Parergon,” in La vérité en peinture (Paris: Flammarion,
1974); The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
xxvi
Critique,
Ideology
ference. This need to rethink the idea of contradiction signals that

negative dialectics, in its massive dependence on the Hegelian
legacy, must be loosened from its fixtures (which obviously does
not rule out that this could also be carried out through a more
attentive reading of Hegel himself). It needs to confront other
traditions that understand difference in another fashion—the
task could be to cross-read Adorno’s Negative Dialectics with,
say, Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, both of which share the
question of how to approach the singular or the “monadic,” of
difference as the limit of the non-identical and the sensible as a
differential, of the limits of conceptual subsumption, although
they reach results that at first may seem opposed to each other,
or perhaps just simply unrelated (almost as if the articulations of
Hegel’s Logic would have been torn asunder and its severed parts
had started to move away from each other at increasing speed).
While a reconstruction of a space in which such different claims
could communicate might seem like an excessively abstract and
even abstruse proposal, it will have an impact on the very vo-
cabulary of critical theory. For Adorno, it was necessary to retain
traditional concepts like subject and object, self-consciousness,
identity, etc., and he always insisted on their double nature: as
sediments of a reified tradition, they also contained petrified
meditations that could once more be set free; just like artworks,
concepts have an inner historicity that does not seal them in the
confines of the past, but rather makes it possible for them to take
on new meanings in other contexts. It may be the case, however,
that the unquestioned presuppositions that many of these terms
carry with them today may block thought rather than open it; the
passage from the language of critique to the critique of language—
which, to stress this once more, is not the same as a linguistic
turn towards communication—is however always a tenuous one.
The antinomy between philosophy as a “creation of concepts”
(Deleuze) and as a de-sedimentation of older ones is no doubt as
xxvii
such too simplified, and yet it cannot be simply dismissed.

4. The critical and utopian work of the work must be pluralized.
Because the work is not simply a reflection, but fundamentally a
movement of working over or working through, and in this akin
to Freud’s Durcharbeitung, it liberates a singular transcendence
that allows us to perceive particulars in a way that releases them
from conceptual subsumption without simply becoming a nom-
inalism—das Miteinander des Verschiedenen, the being-together or
togetherness of the diverse,16 which for Adorno was the moment
of utopia or reconciliation, albeit veiled, ungraspable, and only
accessible in a negative mode. While this moment cannot be
simply erased, as some would like to do,17 if the entire edifice
of Adorno’s aesthetic theory is not to mutate into a series of
16. See Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 153; Negative Dialectics, 150. Both Adorno
and Deleuze are in a sense the conflicting heirs to Hegel’s logic of es-
sence, in which the movement of difference (Unterschied) takes us from
diversity (Verschiedenheit) through opposition (Gegensatz) to contradic-
tion (Widerspruch), and then to a “return to the ground” (Rückgang in
den Grund) that is also a foundering (zu Grunde gehen). For Adorno,
the possibility of a togetherness of the diverse that escapes its binding
together in oppositions and contradictions, would be the utopian limit
of negative dialectics where it ceases to be both negative and dialectical;
for Deleuze, this state of a free difference in the sensible need not rely
on a projection of the future, but determines the place to be reached
as a site constituted in a now-and-here that is also a now/here, or, if we
read this term backwards, as Samuel Butler once proposed (with a mi-
nor transposition of letters to reflect the backwards pronunciation), as
an erewhon. The ideas invented by philosophy—which here seems almost
indistinguishable from artworks—are, Deleuze suggests, “not universals
like the categories, nor are they the hic et nunc or now here, the diversity
to which categories apply in representation. They are complexes of
space and time, no doubt transportable but on the condition that they
impose their own scenery, that they set up camp there where they rest
momentarily: they are therefore the objects of an essential encoun-
ter rather than of recognition. The best word to designate these is
undoubtedly that forged by Samuel Butler: erewhon. They are erewhons.”
Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: PUF, 1968), 364f; Difference and
Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 1994), 285.
17. For instance Wellmer, who suggests that Adorno’s failure to recognize
that he already possesses all the elements of a postmetaphysical aesthetic
is due to the fact that he sees them in the “distorted” optic of reconcilia-
tion; see Wellmer, “Adorno, die Moderne und das Erhabene,” 190.
xxviii
Critique,
Ideology
formalist analyses of modern art, it needs to be broken up spec-

trally, in the sense of refraction as well as that of a haunting,
that which cannot stop returning to us as a ghost, as Reinhold
Martin suggests with particular reference to architecture.18
From Adorno’s point of view, the spectralization of reconcilia-
tion might suggest that its basis in an interpretation of natural
history needs to look different in the age of modern technology:
how can we think a philosophy of nature when the difference
between nature and the artificial has, as Deleuze once proposed,
disappeared?19 In what sense would a non-coercive, non-violent
relation between inner and outer nature be possible in a world
that on one level seems to have erased the last vestiges of oth-
erness, while on another level reproduces it as immanent risks
that proliferate precisely because of the domination of nature?
Interpretation, autonomy, difference, and utopia—to these
four concepts others could no doubt be added. To pursue the
task of critical theory as bequeathed to us by Adorno means to
think through them, with and against him, in order to come
back to him from a vantage point that belongs to the future.
18. See Martin, Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). In Martin’s analysis,
the architecture of postmodernism appears as an integral part of the
spatial or “territorial” ordering of capitalism itself, and rather than
just a symptom or cipher for other forces, it is itself one of their crucial
agents. Architecture produces a powerful tool for the implementa-
tion of capital, and it is precisely its immanence in power that blocks
it from perceiving power other than in the distorted mirror of its own
autonomy. Its various modes of acting and representing, its thinking
in the widest sense, thus also amounts to an active unthinking of other
possibilities, above all the idea of utopia, which then returns, spectrally,
in the form of enclaves and divisions inside social space. For a further
discussion of Martin’s analysis, see chap 4 below.
19. See the interview with Raymond Bellour and François Ewald, on
the occasion of the publications of Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque, “Sur la
philosophie,” Pourparlers (Paris: Minuit, 1990), 212: “On Philosophy,”
Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1995), 155.
xxix
***
The first chapter, “Manfredo Tafuri and the End of Utopia,” lo-
cates a starting point in the work of Manfredo Tafuri, and more
generally, the Venice School, which during a period of intense
activity and debate constituted the focal point of the debates on
the legacy of Marxism and the possibility of a “critique of archi-
tectural ideology,” as was the title of one of Tafuri’s program-
matic essays, published in 1969.
Tafuri has an enduring and even haunting presence in con-
temporary architectural discourse. To some, his type of Marxist
analysis, deeply embedded in the conflicts of the Italian left in
the 1970s, would today seem simply outdated—or at least this is
what many would wish. The question of the ideological role of
modern architecture—which Tafuri and his colleagues studied
in great depth, drawing on analyses of architecture and urban
planning in the Soviet Union, in the social-democratic state of
the Weimar Republic, and in American capitalism—however re-
mains just as pertinent today, and the impasse with which this
analytical work has left us, in the guise of the divide between a
critical and an operative reading of history, remains a crucial is-
sue, no matter how much we would like to mitigate and even re-
press it. In fact, the idea of the Metropolis as the essential site of
capital, developed by Tafuri and Massimo Cacciari, is still very
much alive today, although approached from the opposite angle,
most famously in the writings and projects of Rem Koolhaas,
who can be understood as a rebellious disciple of Tafuri. The
question remains to what extent this type of reworked avant-
garde sensibility—to analyze the structures of the emergent as
opposed to the residual, and then declare an unconditional sup-
port for the new—intends to simply identify with the aggres-
sor, or to what extent it can be understood as a more fluid and
flexible way to deal with the present. Tafuri’s critical analysis
xxx
Critique,
Ideology
of the restructuring of capitalism after the 1929 crash, and the

emergence of the plan as an instrument that effectively trans-
forms architecture into a tool and displaces its earlier utopian
projections, undoubtedly provides an essential subtext for these
current debates.
The second chapter, “1966: Thinking the City,” develops
the idea of the city as it emerged as a general problem in the
writings of, on the one hand, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott
Brown, and on the other hand, Aldo Rossi. While seemingly
opposed on all levels—the relation to history, materiality, tech-
nology, aesthetic sensibility, the choice of architectural models—
both sides drew on the idea of the city as a force that resists
the capacity for control and planning claimed by a tradition
that henceforth would appear as modern, and thus opposed
to something like that which is known as postmodern, which
soon came to appear as a blanket term for a whole set of rather
divergent tendencies. As Tafuri had suggested, the problem of
how to grasp and take charge of the city had already emerged
as essential in the eighteenth century, but took a new turn with
the invention of urbanism as a new discipline in the writings
of Ildefonso Cerdá in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Rather than subjecting the city to a gridded and disciplinary
structure imposed from above, must we not understand it as a
living entity whose powers must tap into, create conduits for,
its flows—in short, as a biopolitical entity? The problem of how
to control the city would subsequently be at the center of the
modern discourse of urbanism, particularly in the development
of CIAM, and the task of reintroducing complexity was one of
the key factors in its demise. For both Venturi-Scott Brown and
Rossi, this layered and non-totalizable nature of the city is what
renders it resistant to planning and control, although they see
the problem from opposite ends: for Venturi-Scott Brown, it
is the simulated history, the stylistic plurality, and the quality
xxxi
of images that make Las Vegas into a paradigm; for Rossi, it is

the depth of actual history, the basis of all styles in underlying
types, and the material presence that makes Rome into a model.
In both cases there is, however, a crucial moment of fiction that
draws on artistic models—for Venturi-Scott Brown, the photo-
graphically based work of early pop art, for Rossi, Renaissance
painting, both of which moments signal a crisis for the inherited
vocabularies of form, order, and structure, but also the neces-
sary incursion of fantasy if these problems are to be thought
through (the presence of cinematic imagery would later play the
same role in Koolhaas).
The following chapter, “The Pyramid and the Labyrinth,”
approaches the question of control from another angle, in which
the dissolution of architecture, or its reduction to the underly-
ing, fluid and intensive element of space in general, was not so
much a threat to its capacity for ordering social relations as a
precondition for it. The idea of space as such emerged out of a
long debate on the role of empathy in nineteenth-century aes-
thetics, and, through the works of August Schmarsow, it was
relayed into early architectural modernism. In Sigfried Giedion
this was understood in terms of a “stream of motion” that draws
all elements into its dynamism, at once rendering the idea of
architecture as the creation of stable forms problematic, and
opening up a different avenue, where architecture could become
a means of shaping space by tapping into an underlying infor-
mal element where all things exist in a state of “interpenetra-
tion.” As one of the primary tools for the creation of conduits,
architecture through this in fact attains an even greater power
than before, precisely because of its capacity to striate a first,
smooth space and make it into a secondary, legible, and control-
lable element. For some, this new power heralded a possibil-
ity of shaping life in terms of transparency—affirmative in the
case of Walter Benjamin, more hesitant in some of the projects
xxxii
Critique,
Ideology
and writings of Sergey Eisenstein. This dialectic of control and

its various others—freedom, latitude, the right to reversal and
upheaval—continues in the planning discourse of the postwar
period, but also in the situationist project to construct moments
that would unleash the hidden force in a given situation, bring
its congealed passions back to life, even though they too, as can
be seen in the clash between Debord and Lefebvre, repeated the
same conflict between the creation and imposition of a condi-
tion for freedom, and its actual exertion. Finally, in the work
of Bernard Tschumi, this is brought out in terms of a tension
between the “pyramid” and the “labyrinth” (terms themselves
derived from Bataille), i.e., between the creation of higher-level
orders that transcend the sensory, and the immersion into the
labyrinthine and erotic space of the body that proposes to ex-
tract a sense of the event of architecture, a form of deregulation
that however enters into a problematic proximity to the very
spatial logic of capital itself, in which pyramid and labyrinth
may be no more than the two sides of the same loop.
Chapter four, “The Recent Past of Postmodern Architecture,”
traces certain key themes in the debate on the postmodern as it
emerges from the sixties onward, and passes through philoso-
phy, social theory, the visual arts, and architecture. While post-
modernism, or postmodernity, or the postmodern—terms that
by no means had, and still do not have, any clear historical de-
marcation—may seem like last year’s embarrassing outfit, and
to this extent the vocabulary suffers the fate of most such recent
pasts, its pastness is also a recentness that haunts the present, a
ghostlike return in theory as well as in practice. The questions
posed under this umbrella term—the philosophical legacy of
the Enlightenment idea of progress and the continuation of a
Kantian critique of reason that turns against the metaphysical
foundations of the critique itself (Lyotard), the impact of late
capitalism and globalization on the imaginary and the arts, and
xxxiii
our capacity for a “cognitive mapping” that locates subjective

experience in relation to a systemic order (Jameson), the dis-
solution of medium specificity of the arts and their entry into
the general or “expanded field” of inscription (Rosalind Krauss)
that opened up in conceptual art and its various successors—
remain just as pertinent, though we are less inclined today to
bring them together into one single narrative. In this debate,
however, architecture held a particular place of importance,
both because if was perhaps the first of the arts to turn the post-
modern into a stylistic phenomenon, thus unwittingly bringing
about its obsolescence, but also because it just as often became
that out of which postmodernism was read as a general cultural
condition, a paradigm with which other expressions were un-
derstood and measured. Two recent studies, by Jorge Otero-
Pailos and Reinhold Martin, are here used as equally paradig-
matic ways to discuss the presence of postmodernism’s past in
the present. In the first perspective, it appears as emerging out
of an interior debate in architecture, where a new experientialist
approach gradually displaced the technological and art-histori-
cal ones, making way for the emergence of a new type of theory
that could draw first on phenomenology, but subsequently also
on many other philosophies, and of a new type of theorist, the
architect-historian, who could lay claim to a new and more pro-
found access to history. In the second, it appears as an integral
part of the spatial or territorial ordering of capitalism itself, for
which architecture is not just a symptom or a cipher, but just
as much a crucial agent: architecture produced a powerful tool
for the implementation of Capital, and it was precisely its im-
manence in power that barred it from perceiving it other than
in the distorted mirror of its own autonomy. Its various modes
of acting and representing, its thinking in the widest sense, thus
also amounts to an active unthinking of other possibilities, above
all the idea of utopia.
xxxiv
Critique,
Ideology
The fifth chapter, “Looping Ideology,” examines the work

of a particular architect who for decades has been a key refer-
ence in the debate on architecture’s capacity to intervene in so-
ciety, and whose provocative claims have fueled almost infinite
discussions: Rem Koolhaas. Tracing the themes of inside and
outside, a split or division that relates and sets apart, through
the projects of Koolhaas and the OMA, provides a framework
for a reading of a particular work, the CCTV center in Beijing.
Conceived both as a signature building and a technological
marvel, and as a means of reflecting on the current relation be-
tween media and architecture, the CCTV center proposes a par-
ticularly acute version of architecture’s critical purchase on the
world and of its surrender to it. It is, OMA suggests, a “singe
loop of interconnected activity”—this, in many senses: on the
level of structure and program, in comprising two physical tra-
jectories, one dedicated to broadcasting, the second to research
and education, both of which merge at the management head-
quarters at the top of the building; on the level of psychological
impact, in proposing a behavioral effect on the employees, so
that the adjacency of different functions should foster a spirit of
collaboration; and finally, in allowing for a path of public access
that runs through the entire structure, and offering views not
only of Beijing, but also of the production process itself in all
of its details, therewith producing a sense of transparency, liter-
ally as well as metaphorically. In this sense, it projects the idea
of transparency and openness while at the same time making
legible and visible the current constraints on this idea, holding
these two aspects together without erasing the difference be-
tween them. The building stages their inner contradiction, it
promises something that it at same time cancels, materializing
repressive mechanisms while simultaneously allowing us to see
through them. Its critical operation in this sense has to do with
the production of divisions and conflicts in the real itself, rather
xxxv
than with an adopting of an external stance outside the system

in order to pass judgment on it.
Chapter six, “Thinking Otherwise,” revisits the problem of
resistance and intervention from a different angle, the problem
of utopia and heterotopia. If utopia was actively unthought in
postmodernism, as Reinhold Martin suggests, might we not ap-
proach its “no-,” the no-place of the ou-, in terms of an other
place, a heteros topos that does not locate itself in some other-
worldly outside of our spatial system, but at its margins, twist-
ing and skewing the world of the everyday so that it releases a
virtual double of itself, an imaginary place that would also entail
something like the placing or materializing of the imaginary?
This may be taken as the proposal of Michel Foucault’s 1967
lecture “Of Other Spaces,” which has had a long and confus-
ing reception in architectural discourse. In fact, the lecture be-
longs to a whole series of reflections on the various senses of
utopia and heterotopia that engaged Foucault in the later part
of the sixties (and in which one must note that he never rejects
the concept of utopia but always sees it emerging from within a
constellation of other concepts), and in hindsight it can be read
as already pointing beyond the analysis of discourses and epis-
temic regularities, the archaeologies of knowledge and of the
human sciences that ran the risk of ending up in a linguistic ide-
alism. Connecting Foucault’s reflections on the place as inhab-
ited by an otherness that calls for a particular kind of invention
also provides a perspective on the various new takes on the site
that would emerge in the visual arts and architecture from the
late sixties onward. Thus the work of Robert Smithson, begin-
ning in the dialectic of institutional space and its outsides, “site”
and “nonsite,” soon developed into a mobile practice for which
the site was just as much discursive as physical and institution-
al. Similarly, the projects that would follow Peter Eisenman’s
Houses, his “artificial excavations,” explore the site as a layer of
xxxvi
Critique,
Ideology
different times and narratives, and bring together the heteroto-

pias of space and language in an architectural poetic located at
the very limit of architecture.
The seventh and concluding chapter, “Noopolitics, Life,
Architecture,” looks at the impact of the affective and corpo-
real in architectural discourse. Such an affective turn has had
extensive ramifications in the human and social sciences, but,
in architecture, was particularly bound up with the idea of the
post-critical. If architecture ultimately aspires to reach us at a
visceral level, what sense could there be in attempting to provide
it with a critical and reflexive function? In their demand for im-
mediacy and presence, such claims are in many respects echoes
of the vitalist philosophies from the beginning of the twentieth
century, but they can also appear as allied with recent philoso-
phies of life and desire, from Foucault’s analyses of biopolitics to
Deleuze’s reinterpretations of Nietzsche and Spinoza, as well as
Agamben’s search for a potential of life that would lie at the lim-
it of sovereign power. While each of these theories in their spe-
cific way attempts to discover a dimension other than that of the
reflexive subject, none of them simply proposes to take leave of
the critical, but rather to reinvent it by locating a level of agency
and resistance located beneath the subject, in its multiple, con-
tradictory, and affective ways of being imbricated in the world.
As Maurizio Lazzarato proposes, drawing on both Foucault
and Deleuze, what is at stake here is a dimension of power that
reaches into the noetic, the possibility of a control that bypasses
our cognitive screens and aims at the most profound reality of
the mind, against which he suggests that we must tap into what
is the other side of such power, the “General Intelligence” that
these technologies also make possible, and whose capacities for
reversal and flight Capital must always strive to contain. In the
case of architecture, it is clear that, however much it not only
participates in such technologies, but also propels their develop-
xxxvii
ment and constitutes an essential testing ground, this does not

necessitate any abandonment of critique or theory as such, only
a critique and a theory that does not lag behind its object, which
is why critical theory is in need of a constant reinvention.
I would like to thank my colleagues at the Department of Cul-

ture of Communication at Södertörn University, and my fel-
low editors at Site, all of whom have provided insightful com-
mentaries on the following chapters during various stages of
completion. Special thanks must go to the participants in the
research project “Power, Space, and Ideology”: Tor Lindstrand,
Helena Mattsson, Håkan Nilsson, and Kim West.
The project and the generous funding provided by the Baltic
Sea Foundation, together with the support from the Publications
Committe eat Södertörn University, made the completion of
this book possible.
Finally, thanks to Brian Manning Delaney, who provided
crucial remarks on both style and content.
Some of following chapters have been published in earlier
versions, but have all been substantially reworked: chapter 3
in the exhibition catalog Fluid Street (Helsinki: Kiasma, 2008);
chapter 5 in Staffan Ericsson and Kristina Riegert (eds.), Media
Houses: Architecture, Media, and the Production of Centrality (New
York: Peter Lang, 2010); chapter 6 in Mats Leffler, Johan Linton,
and Johan Stålberg (eds.), In i kulturen: En vänbok till Per Magnus
Johansson (Gothenburg: Psykoanalytiska föreningen, 2010), and
chapter 7 in Deborah Hauptmann and Warren Neidich (eds.),
Cognitive Architecture: From Bio-politics to Noo-politics: Architecture
& Mind in the Age of Communication & Information (Rotterdam:
010, 2010).
xxxviii
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
The past and present of critique

“To dispel anxiety by understanding and internalizing its causes:
this would seem to be one of the principal ethical imperatives of
bourgeois art.”1 The opening lines of Manfredo Tafuri’s Progetto
e utopia (1973) provide a condensed view of his complex and tor-
tuous relation to the modernity of architecture, and indicate his
rather bleak view of the capacity of artistic practices under capi-
talism to transcend the structures that determine them. Under-
standing the ambivalence that marks architecture in particular,
Tafuri suggests, may allow us to understand the reasons for the
diremptions and anxieties that haunt the modern subject, not
only as a psychological diagnosis,2 but above all in terms of how
they condition a whole discourse of form and design that in turn
produces an illusion of mastery, leading us to affirm, even de-
sire, the most troubling aspects of our existence as if they were
1. Tafuri, Progetto e utopia: Architettura e sviluppo capitalistico (Bari: Laterza,
2007 [1973]), 5. Translated by Barba Luigi La Penta as Architecture and
Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT,
1976), 1. Henceforth cited as PU (Italian/English). The disputable qual-
ity of the English translations of some of Tafuri’s early work has often
been noted, and I have sometimes modified them. In the case of Progetto
e utopia, Jean-Louis Cohen even speaks of a “massacre”; see Cohen
“The Italophiles at Work,” in K. Michael Hays (ed.), Architecture Theory
Since 1968 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1998), 514.
2. “Anxiety” (angoscia) should here not be understood merely as psycho-
logical concept, but as an idea that amalgamates an existential ontology
and a Freudian and Marxian vocabulary; see Anthony Vidler, Histories
of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT, 2008), 180ff.
1
an expression of our own will. For Tafuri, breaking this spell,

one both theoretical and practical, means taking up a truly criti-
cal stance towards the present, an initial consequence of which
is the seemingly sharp divide between the “operative” history
that he saw in predecessors such as Sigfried Giedion, Bruno
Zevi, and Reyner Banham—who remained under the spell of the
utopian enchantment of the project—and a critical history that
would reveal the present to be the result of contradictions lo-
cated beyond the reach of architecture and urbanism.
But there is yet an additional move, in which the first is in-
scribed, beginning in the vast historical survey L’architettura
contemporanea (1976), and leading up to the “historical project”
announced in the introduction to La sfera e il labirinto (1980),
which counters the utopian project by dismantling its unitary
pretension, but in this also makes possible a different kind of
relation between the operative and the critical. To some extent
this may seem like a straightforward affirmation of philology,
close reading, and the attention to minutiae that separate the
historian’s craft from the speculations of theory—and Tafuri’s
subsequent works on the Renaissance constitute monumental
examples of such close reading—which is why it has sometimes
been taken as an indication that there would be two sides of
his work: the highly polemical readings of modernism that
tend toward overarching theoretical claims, and the subsequent
interpretations of the Renaissance that immerse themselves
in historical details and micro-histories that would seem to
burst asunder any possible global synthetic framework. This
division seems even more firmly established by the attempt to
locate different periods in Tafuri’s oeuvre: after a first period
in the 1960s, where he established his intellectual and institu-
tional credentials with publications largely devoted to histori-
cal issues, he turns to polemical interpretations of modernism,
roughly from Teorie e storia dell’architettura (1968) to the Storia
2
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
dell’architettura italiana, 1944–1985 (1982, 2. ed. 1986), after

which he then turns back to historical work on the Renaissance,
first in the monograph L’armonia e i conflitti: La chiesa di San
Francesco della Vigna nella Venezia del Cinquecento (1983)— a book
significantly dedicated to a single building read as a conden-
sation of a whole period and its conflicts, and in this sense a
paradigm for the micro-historical approach—and then in the
two mighty tomes Venezia e il rinascimento (1985) and Ricerca del
rinascimento (1992). This picture, which for a long time marked
the Anglophone reception of Tafuri’s work, was in fact largely
due to the chronology of translations, and is ultimately mis-
leading. Today there is rather a tendency towards a “maximum
integration”3 of its various facets. Tafuri publishes important
works on the Renaissance throughout his career, and rather
than speaking of different periods, we should perhaps speak of
two tendencies or motifs that span his entire development, and
often co-exist in the same work. In the following however, I
will leave aside Tafuri’s many studies of the Renaissance tradi-
tion, as well as the question as to whether his work is split into
two parts, one dealing with the contradictions of the present,
the other with historical accounts, or whether it displays a fun-
damental unity. This is because my aim here is not to produce
an in-depth portrait of Tafuri’s thought as a whole, but only to
discuss some aspects of his contribution to a critical theory of
modern architecture with bearings on the present.4
3. Marco Biraghi, Progetto di crisi: Manfredo Tafuri e l’architettura contem-

poranea (Milan: Christian Marinotti, 2005), 6. As will become clear,
my reading takes a different direction, and instead seeks to locate such
a tension inside the unfolding of Tafuri’s reading of modernism in its
integrality, whereas Biraghi largely draws on Tafuri’s later, or even final,
position in La sfera e il labirinto (1980).
4. When, in the 1980s, he begins to refocus on historical studies, it is how-
ever undeniable that his comments on the contemporary development
become more distanced and estranged; see for instance the interview
with Pietro Corsi, “For a Critical History,” Casabella 619–620 (1995).
3
What will be in focus here is rather the tension between

two other, albeit related claims made specifically in relation to
modern architecture: on the one hand, that we must grasp the
modern movement as the unfolding of a series of central con-
tradictions, which always involves the movement of a dialectic
that ends up producing a totality, no matter how negative; on
the other hand, the desire not only to return all such overarch-
ing narratives to a more distant historical soil, but also to show
that any such soil must be fractured from the outset. This ten-
sion permeates Tafuri’s writings, and it engages all the senses
of crisis, critique, and the critical: bifurcation, turning point,
division, conflict, discord, judgment. What his heritage is—if it
indeed is unitary, or deeply divided, or simply contradictory,
and if so, what kind of logic organizes its contradictions—is in
this sense already a question posed in the work itself, its own
moment of crisis.
Following the initial quote above, Tafuri’s work on modern-
ism would seem to be about retrieving and even intensifying
the anxiety constitutive of modernity, and allowing it to have
its full impact on us—eventually, as we will see, letting it strike
back at the very writing of history as a project in its own right,
a project that must be subjected to the same fragmentation as
the project of the avant-garde. From Tafuri’s own point of view,
the fatigue, even rejection, that his work occasions today among
some contemporary theorists might then simply be understood
as a repression or refusal of this anxiety, on all levels; similarly,
the rejection of theory as unproductive often amounts to little
more than a return to the most naïve aspects of theory. The fad-
ing of the dialectical models inherited from early twentieth-cen-
tury avant-garde culture—which, it is often claimed, ought be
abandoned, sometimes in favor of a transformed way of think-
ing difference and resistance, but increasingly often, and even
more radically, in favor of an attitude that has for a while gone
4
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
under the label “post-critical,”5—would thus simply appear as a

regression, a return to an intentionally blind and self-sufficient
version of ideology.
The question, however, is what such a Tafurian point of view
might amount to, both in terms of a historical question of what
was once at stake in a past that seems to move away from us
at increasing speed, and in terms of a present that requires of
us that we project this past towards a possible future; together
these two aspects add up to something like a conflict between
what Tafuri called the critical and projective, although this time
in relation to our own recent past. To stubbornly uphold the
ethos and conceptuality of a critique of ideology inherited from
the 1960s and 1970s does not seem to live up to the phrase from
Franco Fortini to which Tafuri sometimes refers: to be “cun-
ning like doves” (“Astuti come colombi”).6 The mobility and
intelligence of critique cannot lag behind the ruses of capital
itself, lest the former condemn itself to fighting an arrière-garde
battle that often becomes little more than a means to produce
the false security provided by a moralizing and fundamentally
empty rejection of the present; in short, it cannot simply eschew
the operative dimension if it is to remain a source of creation
and invention. Whether Tafuri’s monumental work, incompa-
rable in its erudition, depth, and complexity, might serve as the
basis of such rethinking—whether, that is, it can engage us in
a productive exchange of antiquarian, monumental and critical
history in the Nietzschean sense—is an open question.
The shifts in cultural production that have marked the last
decades, taking us through the debates about postmodernism,
5. For more on this, see chap. 7 below.
6. Franco Fortini (pseudonym for Franco Lattes, 1917–1994) was an Ital-
ian author and literary critic. For his connection to Tafuri, see Pier Vit-
torio Aureli, “Intellectual Work and Capitalist Development: Origins
and Context of Manfredo Tafuri’s Critique of Architectural Ideology,”
Site 26–27 (2009).
5
globalization, electronic capitalism, post-Fordism, and several

other concepts created in order to grasp a fleeting and increas-
ingly liquid present, can be read as a gradual abandonment of
the Marxist conceptuality that once formed the matrix of the
Venice School, but it can also be read as a continual displace-
ment of a fundamental problem: how to connect the present
mode of production to the artistic, architectural, and urban
forms that surround us, in a way that doesn’t simply render
them legible as ciphers of power, even of regression,7 but en-
dows them with reflexive and critical agency that is nonetheless
never simply present, but itself requires an act of invention.
In this perspective, the split between operative and criti-
cal history opened up by Tafuri belongs to the crisis of Marxist
theory itself, which emerged at the moment when theory and
practice no longer appeared capable of coming together. Many
7. “Ciphers of Authority, Figures of Regression,” was the title of an essay

by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (first published in 1981 in October) that
spawned a long debate on the significance of the return of traditional
painterly styles in the late seventies and early eighties, and many of
the arguments put forth echo those of the earlier debates on eclecti-
cism in postmodern architecture. Considered as a judgment of taste—
which runs counter to the essay’s theoretical claims—few would today
dispute Buchloh’s verdict, and very little of the work that he attacks
has withstood the test of time. On the theoretical level, however, the
genealogy that the essay traces ought to be questioned. The epigraph
as well as many of the critical remarks that Buchloh makes are drawn
from Lukács’s “Grösse und Verfall des Expressionismus” (1934), but he
seems strangely oblivious to the rather problematic nature of the anal-
ogy he establishes between his own rejection of the neo-expressionism
of the seventies and Lukács’s attacks on modernism. Lukács’s position
is decidedly anti-modernist—expressionism is for him virtually synony-
mous with modernism in all of its forms—and as such in fact close to
the various calls for a “return to order” that Buchloh associates with the
expressionism of his own present moment. Virtually everything that
Buchloh supports as progressive in the historical avant-garde would be
deemed reactionary and proto-fascist by Lukács (as comes across par-
ticularly in the latter’s remarks, as contemptuous as they are ignorant,
on modern painting and music): his quarrel is not with the continued
use of historical forms, whose relevance for the present he endorses, but
with what he sees as the modernist dissolution of form as such.
6
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
other solutions imposed themselves at roughly the same time,

some of which grappled with the status of theory as a stand-
in for deferred action, endowing it with a tenuous and angst-
ridden autonomy precisely because the moment to realize it
was missed, as Adorno notes in the opening lines of Negative
Dialectics; others turned the tables and transformed the divide
into a positive starting point, as in the idea of pure theory in
Althusser, in which the entire subjective dimension appeared
as something caught up in the imaginary and unable to cross
over into the space of thought. As a result of this disjunction,
the critique of ideology began to point less to a set of clear-
cut alternatives to the present state than to a kind of reflexive
self-dismantling. In Tafuri’s immediate vicinity, we find the
“negative thought” envisaged by Massimo Cacciari as a nega-
tivity that breaks away from all ideas of reconciliation, and owes
just as much to Nietzsche and Heidegger as to the critique of
political economy.8 The analysis of architecture and urbanism
for Cacciari becomes one, although privileged, moment in the
reading of modernity as an infinite crisis—infinite in the sense
that there is no way of overcoming it, no movement that would
take us “post” modernism or modernity, only an ever more
profound descent into its formative contradictions.9 The tonal-
8. For the idea of negative thought, see Massimo Cacciari, Architecture and
Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture, trans. Stephen Sartarel-
li with a preface by Patrizia Lombardo (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1993). For a discussion of the connection to Heidegger’s analysis
of nihilism and technology, see my The Silences of Mies (Stockholm: Axl
Books, 2008), 22–40.
9. The idea of a “beyond” of modernity is constantly rejected by Tafuri,
who prefers to speak of a “hypermodernity,” which for him seems like
a wholly negative term; see chap. 14 in Storia dell’architettura italiana
(Turin; Einaudi, 1986); trans. Jessica Levine, History of Italian Architec-
ture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1989). The postmodern here appears as
the dream of a “gay errancy” that thrives on the myth of a monolithic
modern movement, to which it opposes an “end of prohibitionism.”
Vittorio Gregotti rightly notes that Tafuri’s central theme in the writ-
ings on modernism is never overcoming, overturning, transgression, or
7
ity that permeates Tafuri’s work is similarly that of a constant

self-questioning, suffused with precisely the type of anxiety that
modern art and architecture, as he interprets them, once set out
to master; it is a discourse that increasingly comes to return to
its conditions of possibility, not in order to rediscover a lost
foundation or project a possible utopian future, but to undo the
nexus between project and utopia characteristic of modernity.
In this sense, the crisis is not a given situation that motivates
the work, but its own aim and telos: the crisis is itself the project,
as becomes increasingly evident in his writings from the end of
the seventies.10
Tafuri draws on a wide array of often conflicting influences:
Marx and Nietzsche, Adorno and Benjamin, Heidegger, Simmel,
Weber, and the classic texts of German sociology from the first
decades of the twentieth century, and all of these divergent tradi-
tions are brought together in a way that appears more as a violent
enactment of tensions than as a synthesis. Thus, it would be ut-
terly misleading to reduce his work to one figure or formula; it
is rather a fusion of several motifs held in a precarious balance,
sometimes entering into what seems like irresolvable conflicts.
And furthermore, his work must be located in the context of the
Venice School as a whole through its various phases, a history
of crises, splits, and divisions that belong to the context of the
Italian left of the sixties and seventies, all of which amounts to
an extremely complex story that far exceeds the limits of our dis-
any other concept that would denote a going beyond, but rather comple-
tion; see Gregotti, “The Architecture of Completion,” Casabella, op. cit.
To this it must be added that while Tafuri never suggests that moder-
nity could be overcome or left behind, there is still, and specifically in
the work that emerged at the time of the book on Italian architecture, a
kind of transgression and disruption of unity in the reading of the past,
which lies at the basis of his idea of a “historical project” as presented in
the introduction to La sfera e il labirinto.
10. For a sustained analysis of this idea, see the introduction in Biraghi, Pro-
getto di crisi, 9–53.
8
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
cussion here.11 This meandering quality notwithstanding, there is

something like a basic intuition that recurs throughout most of
Tafuri’s various stories of modern architecture and his attacks on
the illusions of operative history, and eventually folds back on his
own writing: Architecture is structurally incapable of solving the
contradictions that it addresses, which is just as much a theoreti-
cal presupposition as an empirical observation. The nature of this
contradiction, however, will shift, from the fairly identifiable dia-
lectic of city and nature, subjectivity and Plan, in the early work,
to the multiple and shifting forces that in the later work finally
make the very idea of contradiction tenuous, and instead neces-
sitate a plurality of approaches that only with great difficulty can
be brought into a dialectical matrix.
The earlier claim about a central contradiction underlies
his analysis of how the modern masters were caught up in uto-
pia—for the project is always also a utopia, as is stressed in the
title Progetto e utopia, which is lost in the flattened English title,
Architecture and Utopia—and thus also caught up in an ideology,
which was further reinforced by generations of historians that
attempted to show how these projects, if correctly understood,
could contain the “hidden unity” and “secret synthesis” that will
eventually heal our culture (Giedion),12 or the “organic architec-
ture” of the future (Zevi),13 to cite two of the most influential
11. For discussions of the relevant political context, see Patrizia Lombardo,
“Introduction: The Philosophy of the City,” in Cacciari, Architecture
and Nihilism. Pier Vittorio Aureli discusses the background in the Italian
Autonomy movement, in The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture
Within and Against Capitalism (New York: Princeton Architectural Press,
2008). For surveys of Tafuri’s intellectual background, see Andrew
Leach, Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History (Ghent: A & S, 2007), and Rixt
Hoekstra, Building vs. Bildung, unpublished diss. (University of Gronin-
gen, 2005).
12. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1941), vi.
13. Zevi proposes a large-scale revision of modern architecture just after
the war in a trilogy of works, beginning with his Verso un’architettura
organica (1945), followed by Sapere vedere l’architettura (1948), where
9
exegeses of modernism. Tafuri’s critical take on his predecessors

can in this sense be located within a third wave of modernist
historians: the first (Giedion, Kaufmann, Pevsner) attempted
to create a historical synthesis that would lend credibility to the
modern movement as the true heir to the tradition; the sec-
ond wanted to rethink modernism as a more complex phenom-
enon and retrieve aspects that had been lost or had remained
underdeveloped (Zevi, Banham); those of the third wave de-
voted themselves to a reading of the critical limit of modernism,
beyond which it could neither be simply continued nor begun
anew, and which called for a step back that would take us out of
architectural discourse and into a critique of modernity as such.
Tafuri’s work locates itself, uneasily and anxiously, on this criti-
cal line—sometimes retreating into the expertise of architectural
culture, sometimes demanding a wholesale critique of society
and a revolutionary action for which neither the architect nor
the historian would be equipped; it lives off its own violent con-
tradictions and its unfulfilled promises.
These contradictions are no longer directly translatable into
the present, at least not in the specific form that they assumed
in the landscape of Italian cultural politics of the sixties and sev-
enties; the sharp division between operative and critical history
seems difficult to uphold in the light of contemporary theoreti-
cal work on how history is written; the forms of power and sub-
ject production in the world of capitalism have become far more
insidious and diversified than they were some forty years ago;
he launches a project to write a history of space, in the footsteps of

Wölfflin, and finally by Storia dell’architettura moderna (1950, a revised
edition of the 1945 book) The same year he also publishes Architettura
e storiografia, where he constructs a monumental genealogy for organic
architecture that takes us all the way back to the Stone Age, which
makes him one of the most striking cases of an operative historian in
Tafuri’s sense. For a discussion of Zevi’s historiography, see Panayotis
Tournikiotis, The Historiography of Modern Architecture (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT, 1999).
10
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
and architecture, both as practice and theory, has moved into

the digital and virtual, merging with the most sophisticated im-
age technologies and post-Fordist forms of production, to the
effect that ideas of resistance and critique might seem relics
from the past, no longer capable of grasping what is in fact un-
derway in the present.
And yet the task of critical theory remains as urgent as ever,
precisely in the face of new power structures that demand a re-
thinking of the tools and procedures of critique. What, if any,
would be the place of Tafuri and the critique of architectural
ideology in this context? In the following, I will unearth some
crucial aspects of Tafuri’s legacy, which resonate with the ques-
tion of what a critical theory—not only of architecture as a spe-
cific discipline, as an object of theory, but also in the widest pos-
sible sense, for which architecture however might hold crucial
keys, so that such theoretical work might benefit from being
translated out of architecture14—could mean today, and in this
these issues are just as relevant to historical research as to an
understanding of the present moment.
Towards a critique of
architectural ideology
The work that established Tafuri as a central reference in ar-
chitectural discourse, Teorie e storia dell’architettura (1968),15
launches a fundamental attack on what he calls “operative criti-
cism.” By this he means an analysis that scans history in search
14. I borrow the expression “out of architecture” from Reinhold Martin,
Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2010). For more on this, see chap. 4, below.
15. Obviously, Teorie e storia does not appear ex nihilo, but came to be after a
decade of work on both Renaissance and modern architecture. For this
background work, see Giorgio Ciucci, “The Formative Years,” Casabella,
op. cit., the interview with Luisa Passerini, “History as Project,” Any
25–26 (200), and Andrew Leach, Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History. This
period however remains peripheral to my question here.
11
of aesthetic norms, and which constructs its genealogies of the

present in search of future action. Operative criticism “has as
its objective the ‘planning’ (‘progettazione’) of a precise poetical
tendency, anticipated in its structures and derived from histori-
cal analyses programmatically distorted and finalized,” it is a
“meeting point of history and planning” and “plans (progetta)
past history by projecting it (proiettandola) towards the future.”16
This attitude is reflected in, and underwritten by, its prac-
tical counterpart: a critical architecture that in its attempts to
prefigure future social relations oscillates between utopia and
playfulness, and forms an integral part of the effort to criticize
architecture by architecture. The historical critique advocated
by Tafuri lays claim to undo this equation, first by showing his-
tory to be a domain of problems that resists instrumental use,
and then in the further claim—less an empirical observation and
more a theoretical starting point, as we have noted—that it is
simply illusory to believe that architecture would be capable of
solving the social contradictions of the present (and, as seems to
follow from this, solving any social contradiction).
What Tafuri calls for is not yet another analysis that would
seek to uncover the essence of architecture, through various for-
16. Teorie e storia dell’architettura (Bari: Laterza, 4. ed. 1988), 161; Theories
and History of Architecture, trans. Giorgio Verrecchia (London: Granada,
1980). 141. Henceforth cited as TS (Italian/English) Progettazione has
here been translated as “planning,” in other passages as “design.” It
would perhaps not be far-fetched to hear as well connotations of the
idea of “project” (Entwurf, projet) in existential ontology from Hei-
degger to Sartre (and even more so in the case of Progetto e utopia, where
the first term in the English translation is changed to “architecture”),
which would imply that the project is a projection of a nature and aims for
mastery and control. Tafuri’s “project” merges several problems: apart
from architectural design, we can also see traces of Heidegger’s analysis
of modernity and technology, Marx’s theory of capital, the analysis of
disenchantment in Weber, and of the dialectic of Enlightenment in
Adorno and Horkheimer. Tafuri can in this sense be said to ground
the modern architectural project in an encompassing analysis of all the
dimensions of modernity, from metaphysics and aesthetics to technol-
ogy, politics, and modes of production.
12
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
mal analyses or readings of history that retrieve unrealized pos-

sibilities, but a critique of architectural ideology, or as he puts in
the preface to the second edition of the book (1970): “just as it
is not possible to found a Political Economy based on class, so
one cannot ‘anticipate’ a class architecture (an architecture ‘for
a liberated society’); what is possible is the introduction of class
criticism into architecture.”17 Any such prefiguring or anticipa-
tory architecture is for Tafuri locked into the illusion of a solution
through form or design, which is its primary ideological function.
And while it is true that he mobilizes a vast array of methods
and tools, in particular semiotic and structuralist, in order to ac-
count for the inherent dialectic of modern architecture, he never
undertakes any positive attempt to theorize what architecture
is, for instance in terms of linguistic or material structures, phe-
nomenological experience, or something else, which in fact, given
his aims, would be counter-productive. Instead, as we will see,
what he wants to show is that the almost desperate attempts in
his own present, i.e., the late sixties, to grasp the language dimen-
sion of architecture, themselves result from the current crisis of
architectural language, from the very refusal of the architectural
sign to produce meaning anymore. In a certain way, one could
perhaps say that just as much as, on the one hand, Tafuri’s radi-
cal historicizing seems to rest upon a conviction that architecture
indeed once was a language, he remains on the other hand just as
convinced that this is no longer the case, or that it at best is only
a dying or dysfunctional language that cannot be saved by any
attempted rescue rooted in semiology or communication theory;
in fact, the obsession with linguistic analogies that he sees in his
own present indicates that the “emergence, within architectural
criticism, of the language problem, is [...] a precise answer to the
language crisis of modern architecture.” (TS 200/174)
17. Cited from the English translation, xv (the 1988 Italian reprint excludes
this preface).
13
The optimism and visionary power of the first generation of

modernists has faded, and for Tafuri the postwar period heralds
a false or incomplete self-critique that in turn generates a series
of equally false returns, historicisms, humanisms, and empiri-
cisms, all of which attempt to mitigate the thrust of the avant-
garde by reconnecting to a past that cannot be anything but a
mirage. The anti-historicism of the avant-garde was its moment
of truth, Tafuri claims, in fact theirs was the only accurate re-
sponse to history, and in a surprising move he traces the genealo-
gy of the avant-gardist gesture all the way back to the Renaissance
and Brunelleschi, whose intervention in Florence amounted to
a radical critique of the medieval city and a new ethical impera-
tive: “From the moment in which Brunelleschi institutionalized
a linguistic code and a symbolic system based on a suprahistorical
comparison with the great example of antiquity,” an act that was
“the first great attempt of modern history to actualize historical
values as a translation of mythical time into present time,” a “de-
historicizing” began, since “the autonomous and absolute archi-
tectural objects of Brunelleschi were intended to intervene into
the structures of the medieval city, upsetting and changing its
significance. The symbolic and constructive self-sufficiency of the
new three-dimensional spatiality radiated into the urban space a
rational order that was nothing other than the absolute emblem
of a strict ethical will.” (TS 18f/14f)
The moment when Brunelleschi “broke the historical conti-
nuity of figurative experiences (esperienze figurative), claiming to
be autonomously constructing a new history” (20/16), is also the
remote origin of the guilt complex of modern historicists (as ex-
emplified in Tafuri’s text by Vittorio Gregotti and Louis Kahn)
toward history, which thus is rooted in a more encompassing
temporal structure that extends all the way back to the dawn of
the early modern period. Repeating Brunelleschi’s gesture, “the
artistic avant-gardes of the twentieth century have pushed aside
14
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
history in order to construct a new history,” which is why this “neat

cut with preceding traditions becomes, paradoxically, the symbol
of an authentic historical continuity,” and it constitutes “the only
historically legitimate act of the time” (39/30). In the distance be-
tween us and Brunelleschi the problem of history unfolds, and it
is set in motion by an inaugurating gesture that Tafuri described
as an almost Nietzschean active forgetfulness; negation and not
preservation is what sets temporality and historicity in motion,
and the attempt to return to any of the intermediary phases is just
as naïve as it is unhistorical.
This uncompromising attitude also sheds a certain light
on the title of the book, the theories and history of architecture,
which somewhat surprisingly amalgamates the singular and the
plural. It is as if Tafuri would succumb to a rather naïve con-
ception of a single and true history that would lie at the basis
of all the different theories that attempt to capture it, making
them all possible while also showing their radical insufficien-
cy; yet it is difficult to see, on the other hand, how he could
avoid acknowledging the existence of a multiplicity of histories
or even stories that could be written, and that the idea of one sin-
gular history (that comes close to History in a Hegelian sense)
to a great extent is the creation of the operative historians and
their stylized versions of the past. In short: why not two plural
forms? Teorie e storia is indeed as far removed as possible from
conventional historiography, of which the book undertakes a
ruthless methodological revision, and in its elliptic and erratic
density it seems to resist all forms of instrumental use. While it
is still “possible to badly misuse the book by using it for infor-
mation purposes,” as Tafuri says in an interview, “I wrote the
book purely for my own ends [...]. It was a strange book, written
without the public.”18 Conceived as a fundamental disruption or
18. “The Culture Markets,” interview with Françoise Véry, Casabella, op.
cit., 39.
15
re-evaluation of previous historiography, its claim was nothing

less that “all history had to be reassessed from the bottom up,
in order to discover its theoretical foundations. We found—and
personally speaking I was appalled—that even these foundations
were rotten to the core [...]. This was true of the language of the
avant-garde, the theoretical framework of architectural history
and modern art history in general. . . we were locked in a castle
under a spell, the keys were lost, in a linguistic maze—the more
we looked for a direction, the more we entered magic halls full
of tortured dreams.”19
Regardless of the maze in which he admits to be trapped,
Tafuri sometimes appears to claim that his version of historical
critique is the only true science, which unlike the different ver-
sions of theory accepts that architecture cannot be grounded in
itself, and in this it would be able to reach the true foundation,
the ultimate bedrock of history.20 This tension between a ruth-
19. Ibid, 37.
20. Aldor Asa Rosa, whose work during the seventies evolved in close paral-
lel to the Venice School, defines the link between the critique of ideol-
ogy and historical research such that it ends up almost as a argument for
positivist objectivity, while still gesturing in the direction of a magical
intuitionism. Referring to Tafuri’s writings on the Renaissance, Rosa
writes, “the ‘critique of ideology’ precedes and determines the discovery
of ‘philology,’ and makes it both possible and necessary. Think about
this: once no veil any longer exists, all that remains is to study, under-
stand and represent the mechanisms of reality, for which one should
refinedly use the instruments of objective inquiries (clearly, with some
limits). Total disenchantment produces great historians. And Manfredo
Tafuri was a great historian of this kind.” (Rosa, “Critique of Ideology
and Historical Practice”, Casabella, op. cit., 35, Rosa’s italics) To find
true reality behind the veil seems not to be a far cry from the magical
positivism that Adorno once detected in Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk, and
which is not wholly absent from Tafuri’s historical work. And as Jean-
Louis Cohen points out, “The notion of critica operativa, which Tafuri
initially put out of doors, seems to have found its way back through
the window,” not because Tafuri at some particular moment would
abandon his critical attitude and return to the propagandistic claims
of classical modernist historians, but simply because what triggers the
very writing of history is the perception of a current crisis, and not
some disinterested stance toward past facts; see Cohen, “Ceci n’est pas
16
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
less questioning of History and the simultaneous continuation

of a project to once and for all state the truth of history (the his-
tory of histories and theories) pervades these analyses, and it is
no doubt a fundamental aspect of the crisis that lies at the origin
of his writing, and which eventually will produce an anxiety on
the level of his own discourse, akin to the one that was both
acknowledged and repressed by the avant-garde.
Beyond the suggestion of a simple divide between theory
and practice, the question must be asked as to what kind of
non-relation they nevertheless in some way must entertain, a
question to which Tafuri cannot be indifferent. Even if demysti-
fication only amounts to an intensified awareness of the insolv-
ability of the constitutive contradictions, all ways of negotiating
the situation cannot be equally valid. This seems to be why, on
the one hand, architectural practice in Tafuri’s discourse ap-
pears to be displaced by the task of the critical historian, and
the choice he presents us with is a stark, even brutal one: ei-
ther to develop a historical critique that unmasks ideology, or
to engage in a practice subjected to the power of ideology, with-
out the two being able to learn anything from each other. On
the other hand, however, if “‘[s]solutions’ are not to be found
in history,” if “the only possible way is the exasperation of the
antitheses, the frontal clash of the positions, and the accentua-
tion of contradictions” (TS 270/237), and the “use we suggest
for semiology and structural analysis should be to undertake a
pitiless scrutiny of the meanings underlying ‘innocent’ forms
and choices,” then the ultimate aim is nevertheless to “confront
the doer with his responsibilities” (256/214). To the question
une histoire,” in Casabella, op. cit., 53. Some of Tafuri’s own statements,
where he totally rejects the idea of a “critique” that would mediate his-
torical writing and practice seem exaggerated and philosophically naive,
and to be contradicted by his own work, which is far more fluid; see the
interview with Richard Ingersoll, “There is no Criticism, only History,”
in Casabella, op. cit.
17
of what such a responsibility entails, Tafuri seems to give an

implicit answer in the reference to Max Weber’s idea of value-
free science that concludes the penultimate chapter: “We offer
[...] those who act the possibility of measuring the unwanted
consequences of their actions [...]. The translation of that mea-
suring into decision is not the responsibility of science but of the
man who acts freely” (257/216f, my italics). If the chasm between
critique and practice first seems unbridgeable and appears sim-
ply to immobilize action to the extent that it would require a
theoretical base, then we must also note the decisionist ring of
expressions like “responsibility” and “freedom,” which appear
to have no strict theoretical signification within Tafuri’s histori-
cal critique, but on the other hand, by appealing to an entirely
subjective register, somehow binds or sutures (to use a Lacanian
vocabulary) the imaginary self-understanding of the architect to
the constitutive rifts of a symbolic order.21
This dualist scenario, where the Weberian Wertfreiheit es-
calates almost into a negation of the idea of value as such, is
however contradicted by many of Tafuri’s other writings. In his
remarks on architects like Vittorio Gregotti and Aldo Rossi it is
obvious that he perceives some attempts at responding to the
crisis as more relevant than others. This appears to be based on
aesthetic choices that nevertheless remain difficult to ground in
his historical and theoretical analyses. A famous case of this is
the often-cited words in his preface to the American translation
21. The use of psychoanalytical vocabulary may seem out of place here,
but I think it captures well how Tafuri’s discourse functions on this
point. The suture in Lacan is what creates a temporary link between
the imaginary and the symbolic, and provides the subject with the place
from which it may perceive itself and its actions as a unity. The suture
cannot simply be taken as a false position in the sense that it would
stand to be corrected by some improved perception of the self, and yet
it obscures the dimension of truth in its fullest extent, because the latter
cannot be accounted for within a theory of the subject as consciousness.
For a discussion of Lacan’s use of the term, see Stephen Heath, “On
Suture,” in Heath, Questions of Cinema (London: Macmillan, 1981).
18
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
of Progetto e utopia, where Tafuri sees the possibility of a return

to “pure architecture, to form without utopia,” to “sublime use-
lessness,” as a strategy to counter the forces of the present, and
claims that he “shall always prefer the sincerity of those who
have the courage to speak of that silent and outdated ‘purity’;
even if this, too, still harbors an ideological inspiration, pathetic
in its anachronism” (PU 1/39).22 The rejection of operative cri-
tique notwithstanding, it seems reasonable to follow the sugges-
tion of Panayotis Tournikiotis,23 who reconstructs a Brechtian
poetics of sorts between the lines in Teorie e storia. Such a po-
sition would in a sense be a substitute for the kind of critical
architecture that is a priori impossible, and yet, a posteriori, one
must be able to glimpse somewhere if critical thinking is not to
end up in a pure misérabilisme—an architecture that in a planned
estrangement dissolves myths without offering any reconcilia-
tion, places us before impossible contradictions and yet claims
certain responses to be more adequate than others.
Project and utopia

In Progetto e utopia Tafuri provides us with his most concentrated
and polemically acute version of modern architecture, understood
as a process unified by its inherent contradictions.24 The dense and
22. It is sometimes assumed that the reference here is to Peter Eisenman,
although he is never named. The relation between Tafuri and Eisen-
man, and more generally between the New York avant-garde and the
Venice School is a long-term—and indeed complex and contradictory—
love affair that involves scholarly collaborations and many publications
during the seventies, including the journal Oppositions, which played
a key role in acquainting the anglophone world with Tafuri. For the
institutional connections, see Joan Ockman, “Venice and New York,” in
Casabella, op. cit., and Diane Ghirardo, “Manfredo Tafuri and Architec-
ture Theory in the U.S., 1970–2000,” Perspecta, Vol. 33 (2002).
23. Tournikiotos, The Historiography of Modern Architecture, 214–19.
24. The first draft for the book, “Per una critica dell’ideologia architet-
tonica”, was published in Contropiano 1969; trans. Stephen Sartarelli
in Hays, Architecture Theory Since 1968. Pier Vittorio Aureli notes that
Tafuri’s conception of a “critique of architectural ideology” and his
19
schematic form of the argument is no doubt problematic, and the

perception of Tafuri as a totalizing theorist largely derives from
this book; on the other hand it is the only text where he presents
he something like a sustained analysis of the logic of modern ar-
chitecture as a conflicted and internally broken unity, first on the
level of the relation between architecture as a single artifact and
the city and then, in turn, between the city and capital. This nar-
rative, which remains a tacit presupposition, as it does—albeit in
a more subdued form— in many of his other writings, fractures
the synthetic unity of operative history while re-establishing this
unity on another level beyond architecture, and it is admittedly
what generates the dystopian mood of the text. The idea that Ta-
furi proclaims the death of architecture (made more emphatic by
the drawing of Aldo Rossi, L’architecture assassinée, which became
the cover of the US edition),25 something that he himself always
denied, is occasionally difficult to avoid, and even if it is not gen-
erated by a clash between theories—of architecture and (real and
rejection of operative criticism should be seen in the context of a new
understanding of intellectual work, where intellectuals have become
workers in a system that incorporates the forces that used to resist.
Rationally planned and reformed capitalism, scientific management and
modernization, became attractive options, and were identified as the
new strategy of capital by the Operaista movement. The strategic inven-
tion of a “counter-plan” (Contropiano) implied an appropriation of the
most advances parts of capitalist culture (all of which finds its echoes,
Aureli notes, in current Italian political thought on cognitive work as
“immaterial labor”). This required that the architect and planner were
understood as intellectual workers, and not just as manipulators of for-
mal design solutions. Seen from the perspective of the larger political
context, Aureli argues, the reading of Tafuri’s work as the promotion of
a “death of architecture” proves to be misleading. See Aureli, “Intellec-
tual Work and Capitalist Development.”
25. For Tafuri’s shifting assessments of Rossi, from the positive claims in
Teorie e storia about Rossi’s L’architettura della città as delineating a genu-
ine possibility for critical invention in the city to the negative judgment
of the later work on the analogous city and its retreat into subjective
fantasy, see Teresa Stoppani, “L’histoire assassinée: Manfredo Tafuri
and the Present,” in Soumyen Bandyopadhyay et al. (eds.), The Hu-
manities in Architectural Design: A Contemporary and Historical Perspective
(Milton Park: Routledge, 2010), and Biraghi, Progetto di crisi, 185–197.
20
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
effective) history—it is closely aligned with a certain theory of his-

tory that Tafuri’s later work would submit to a severe scrutiny.
The already cited introductory definition of the task of bour-
geois art, to “dispel anxiety by understanding and internalizing
its causes,” points to the unconscious entente between capital
and the intellectual avant-garde, or a kind of malevolent ruse
of reason, whose entanglement of sublimation and affirmation
eventually reaches its point of culmination in the heroic phase
of modernism. In this process, architecture, together with other
arts, plays the role of trailblazer: in anesthetizing the subject it
paves the way for another compliant subjectivity, it programs a
new experience through a subterfuge that lets modernism ap-
pear as a protest against alienation and fragmentation while it
in fact is one of the primary instruments for accelerating and
rendering it not only acceptable, but also desirable.
This double move takes the form of a process of naturaliz-
ing, the initial steps of which Tafuri locates as far back as the
first part of the eighteenth century. Here the mimetic exchange
between art and nature enters into a phase organized around
the city, which becomes the locus of a new type of architectural
discourse that is made possible by a repression of its own con-
ditions. When architecture assumes the task of shaping social
relations required by the emerging capitalist order, it becomes
caught up in a negative dialectic between urban form and the
solitary object that will eventually dissolve the classical tradi-
tion. This opposition between object and milieu is spelled out
by Abbé Laugier, when he reduces the city to nature by portray-
ing it in terms of painting and the newly emerging theory of the
picturesque, i.e., understands the city as an image. “Whoever
knows how to design a park well will have no difficulty in trac-
ing the plan for the building of a city,” Laugier writes, for in
both there must be “regularity and fantasy, relationship and op-
positions, and casual, unexpected elements that vary the scene;
21
great order in the details, confusion, uproar, and tumult in the

whole.”26 Laugier’s anti-perspectival and anti-Cartesian gesture
places nature and reason, landscape and townscape, on the same
level, and just as the metaphorical grasp of the city as a piece of
nature dehistoricizes it, it will also turn the process of industri-
alization into a natural phenomenon. Urban naturalism covers
over the rift between the emerging city and a pre-capitalist rural
order, and the task of architecture, or rather a certain discourse
(the theories) of architecture, is to allow the Enlightenment
to avoid a confrontation with its own premises. In this way,
Tafuri’s narrative of modern architecture combines the logic of
Capital with the dialectic of Enlightenment: to hide the contra-
dictions by formal manipulations, and to make it possible for us
to enjoy them as an aesthetic-picturesque complexity, is for the
Tafuri of Progetto e utopia the properly ideological role of archi-
tecture, which extends throughout the whole cycle of modernity
up to the postwar attempts to recast architecture in terms of pop
culture imagery and theories of complexity and contradiction,
as in Venturi, or as a return to the typologies and the analogous
city that lie dormant in history, and symptomatically may be ac-
cessed through a painterly imaginary, as in Rossi.27
This compensatory role of architecture, to cover over those
contradictions that it itself is unable to solve, produces an inner
unease that comes across in the eighteenth-century fascination
with the exotic, with Indian and Chinese architecture, pavil-
ions and false ruins—all of which are different ways of finding
an “authentication from outside architecture,” but that in fact
initiated a “systematic and fatal autopsy of architecture and all
its conventions” (PU 14/11). For Tafuri, this anxiety bears the
name Piranesi, to whom he would return in many later publica-
26. Abbé Laugier, Observations sur l’Architecture [1765; reprint Westmead,
Farnborough Hants: Gregg Press, 1996, 312f.], cited in PU 7f/4.
27. For more on Venturi and Rossi, see chap 2, below.
22
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
tions. Piranesi stages a violent fragmentation of the tradition,

where a plethora of historical references whirl by in the desper-
ate attempt of architecture to provide form to a reason whose
newfound wakefulness seems to breed ever more monsters. In
this, his work forebodes the danger of a complete loss of organic
form, Tafuri suggests, which leads to a situation when rational-
ity and irrationality can no longer be separated. In the visions
of Piranesi’s Campo Marzio dell’antica Roma (1761–62) we see
the struggle between architecture and city, and how the ensuing
crisis takes on “epic” dimensions, where the excesses of archi-
tecture, turning back to face its own aporias, disclose the truth
of the dialectic of enlightenment: “In the attempt to absorb all
of its own contradictions, architectural ‘reasoning’ applies the
technique of shock to its very foundations” (18/15), and the
city, whose overall unity was intended to provide a meaningful
milieu for the single edifice, becomes a “gigantic ‘useless ma-
chine’” (ibid). Similarly, and perhaps even more threateningly,
the infinite interiors of the Carceri (1760) become co-extensive
with reality, showing “the new existential condition of human
collectivity, liberated and condemned at the same time by its
own reason” (21/18), a condition of anonymity that reflects the
“silence of things” (21/19).28
But in the wake of this loss of language there is also an op-
posite movement, where architecture discovers a scientific voca-
tion that makes possible the construction of a rationalist typolo-
gy, as in Durand and the “geometric silence” (PU 16/13) that his
works declare in relation to the tradition, as well as, on the other
hand, a new analysis of sensations, as in Ledoux and Le Camus
28. Drawing on José Lopez-Rey’s comparative analysis of Piranesi and

Goya, Tafuri notes that the characters in Piranes’s Carceri are present
“more to allow the instrument of torture to function than to com-
municate the horrors of torture” (PU 21/19, note 10), a phrase that
could have come straight out of Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of
Enlightenment.
23
de Mézières— although these two are finally only two sides of

the same coin, i.e., the loss of a stable order of architectural lan-
guage. Rational typology and the architecture parlante addressing
sensations are the two answers to the language crisis produced
by the Enlightenment. The seemingly fantastic and unrealizable
quality of the projects of Boullée and Ledoux, which is what
normally lends them the epithet “utopian,” is thus not what is
essential, rather we should see them as experiments aiming for
a new design method where architecture seeks to “redimension
itself, dissolving into the uniformity ensured by the preconsti-
tuted typologies” (16/13), even though the technical means for
this were obviously lacking at the time.
On the level of the city, we see two analogous reactions: on
the one hand a fascination with the picturesque and the com-
plex, as in Laugier, of which Piranesi will draw the most threat-
ening conclusions, and on the other hand a new relation to the
tradition, exemplified by Giovanni Antolini’s criticism of the
plan for Milan. The radical architect here appears to discard all
references to the historical city in favor of an integral structure
that would bring all its parts together in a new way. In this bi-
furcation, Tafuri suggests, we can already discern how the two
main currents in modern art and architecture begin to take
shape via two types of response, the responses of “those who
search into the very bowels of reality in order to know and as-
similate its values and wretchedness,” and “those who desire to
go beyond reality, who want to construct ex novo new realities,
new values, and new public symbols.” (25/24)
Both of these options indicate a pervasive crisis of the idea
of form as a mediating instance between architecture and ur-
banism. On the level of the city, the single object finds itself
under the pressure of locating itself within a larger order, at
the limit dissolving into the “absurd machine” envisaged by
Piranesi. This is why, for Tafuri, early utopian urban theorists
24
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
like Fourier, Owen, and Cabet contribute only tangentially to

the experience of modernity: to the extent that they attempt
to arrest the development at some earlier stage and prevent all
that is solid from melting into air, they are doomed to fail, and
in this, they already prefigure the corresponding failure of the
moderate modern movements in the first part of the twentieth
century.
Architecture was in fact the first art form that was com-
pelled to accept reification, and it was faced with the task of
integrating design into a single overarching project to organize
production, distribution, and consumption within the space of
the city. This it did, however, in the guise of a “Utopia of form”
that made it march backwards into the future. Tafuri divides
this process into three steps: 1. The creation of an urban ideology
that overcomes the romantic critique of modernity, which still
resonates in the urban utopias of the nineteenth century. 2. The
artistic avant-gardes, which prepare the synthetic proposals of
architecture in the form of seemingly contradictory and even
destructive moves, which however coalesce through a kind of
cunning of reason. 3. The development of the Plan as ideology, which
Tafuri reads as the final stage of architectural modernism, before
the advent of the Wall Street crash and the fundamental restruc-
turing of capitalism, a restructuring that transferred the agency
of planning from architecture to government bureaucracies and
international capital.
The most provocative steps in this analysis are the second
and third, which form the nucleus of Tafuri’s negative dialectics
of modern architecture. In the second, we encounter the disrup-
tive gestures of the historical avant-garde, whose logic however
leads it to re-create the shock of the Metropolis as an inner ex-
perience that we eventually end up affirming, as if it were the
highest expression of our freedom. Baudelaire (Tafuri’s inter-
pretation here largely follows Benjamin) registers this in his re-
25
flections on the collision of mass and individual, even though

the poet has yet to internalize the Metropolis as his own nature,
and he remains torn between the attempt to save his individual-
ity and a desire to throw himself into the anonymous flux of the
city. He is driven by the urge to re-create the plentitude of the
work, drawing on mythical correspondences between signs and
ideas, while he is just as much conditioned by the prostitution
of the commodity world and a leveling of the symbolical dimen-
sion that enters into the innermost core of his work.
For the ideology of consumption to be developed fully,
Tafuri suggests that it must be understood as the only authentic
use of the city. This means that the blasé attitude of the flâneur
has to be transformed into active participation, and the process
of liquefaction of values must appear to the emerging metro-
politan subject as flowing from its own spontaneity. This will be
the complex task of the historical avant-garde, which involves
a whole set of nested operations: to liberate the experience of
shock from automatism; to develop visual codes expressive of
speed, transformation, simultaneity, and eclecticism; to reduce
artistic experience to a pure object, which in turn can function
as a cipher for the commodity; to involve the audience in anti-
bourgeois ideology that transcends class distinctions. Across the
artistic spectrum Tafuri discerns such moves being prepared and
tried out, in cubism, futurism, Dadaism, and constructivism,
which, even though they deploy these strategies with different
aims, converge in the technique of collage or assemblage, where
“the picture becomes a neutral field on which to project the ex-
perience of the shock suffered in the city”—the next task being that
“one is not to ‘suffer’ that shock, but to absorb it, introject it as
an inevitable condition of existence.” (PU 80/86)
Tafuri here draws on Simmel’s analysis of the new personali-
ty produced by monetary economy. This would be a subject who
is able to deal with an intensified “nervous life” and the over-
26
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
whelming assault of impressions in the Metropolis, by perceiv-

ing all singular values as devoid of substance. “All things float,”
Simmel writes, “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 the size of the area which they
cover.”29 Does not such a description, Tafuri asks, where objects
are transformed into interchangeable signs located on the same
plane, already apply to Schwitters’s Merzbild—and even more so
if we see “-merz” as a truncated part of Commerz? The avant-
garde taps into the new energies released by the downfall of in-
herited values and symbolical forms, and does so in order to
transform shock and anguish into a productive force—it moves
“from the anguished discovery of the nullification of values, to
the use of a language of pure signs, perceptible by a mass that
had completely introjected the universe without quality of the
money economy” (PU 82/ 89). This also means that the old
question of the unpopularity of the avant-garde, of its inabil-
ity to reach the masses, regardless of whether this allegation is
voiced by the right or the left, misses the point: the task of the
avant-garde is to prepare, program, and project the future, to
create new models for action that only later are to become fa-
miliar and be put to use in everyday life.
For Tafuri, cubism, in all of its seeming inwardness and focus
on interiors and domestic utensils, is precisely such a project to
organize human behavior within a machine universe, but also a
strategy in which the will to master form strikes back at the art-
ists. Form becomes the subjective response of the artist within an
29. Simmel, “Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903), cited in PU 81/87f.

Tafuri’s reading of Simmel here draws on Massimo Cacciari, who,
rather idiosyncratically, takes Simmel’s analysis to be pointing to an
eradication of subjectivity, instead of to the specific and new forms of
subjectivity and “mental life” (or better: “spiritual life,” Geistesleben)
that develops in the Metropolis because of the predominance of “objec-
tive spirit,” which Simmel understands in a Hegelian sense.
27
objective universe of production, at the same time that cubism as

a movement rejects subjectivism in order to discover the collage
as a momentarily resolved tension between freedom and neces-
sity, a dynamic contradiction that provides an “absolute form to
the discursive universe of the civilisation machiniste” (84/91). And
when Mondrian finally shows that it is the city itself that is the
proper object of art, then painting must either die or be sublated
in an almost Hegelian fashion, as if to underscore the transitory
quality of the works of the avant-garde, their hidden intention to
become part of a productive logic that annuls their status as art.
Here it can be noted that Tafuri’s interpretation is at once
close to and opposed to the one that would be suggested by
Peter Bürger a year later, in his Theorie der Avantgarde (1974).
For Bürger, the historical avant-garde fails to break down the
barrier between art and life that had been set up by late nine-
teenth-century aestheticism, and what its project to rebuild
everyday life on an artistic basis in fact achieves is a limitless
expansion of the institution art, which makes it possible for the
subsequent postwar neo-avant-garde to repeat the tragedy in-
herent in the first gesture in the form of a farce. Tafuri’s per-
spective is more complex, however, since he includes architec-
ture (which Bürger leaves out of the picture) as the organization
of an entire cycle of production, within which the attempts of
the other avant-gardes in literature and the visual arts to rebuild
life are passing moments that in themselves tend toward a syn-
thesis in architecture and design, whose utopias, as we will see,
in turn were predetermined to be dissolved in Capital. Thus, for
Tafuri just as for Bürger, the failure of the avant-garde lies in its
success, although in Tafuri’s case not in the creation of a hence-
forth fully autonomous art, but in the remodeling of the subject
as the active participant in a universe of commodities, in which
the autonomy of the institution art may be taken as a specific
but limited consequence.
28
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
Before this process is completed, its penultimate stage ap-

pears in the form of a dialectic between form and chaos, where
on the one hand movements like De Stijl aspire to control pro-
duction and absorb chaos, and Dadaism, on the other hand,
claims to show the absurdity of the world. But, Tafuri suggests,
the nihilism of the latter is only propaedeutic, and finally ends
up under the control of the former: Dadaism demonstrates the
necessity of the Plan without being able to name it, which is
shown by the convergence of these movements in the beginning
of the twenties.30 Dissolution of form and leveling of content
give rise to a new constructive program that takes its point of
departure in the limitless availability of materials and signs pro-
duced as an involuntary result of the preceding avant-garde.
In this way the various and diverging avant-garde move-
ments are eventually absorbed in an expanded concept of ar-
chitecture, which also throws them into crisis by presenting
them with a systematic answer to their questions. This can be
seen in the case of the Bauhaus, Tafuri claims, which operated
as the “decantation chamber of the avant-garde” (PU 90/ 98),
by systematically testing all the previous strategies with a view
to their efficiency in reality and to the demands of production,
and dissolved the utopian moment into an ideology operative as
a moment immanent in activity itself.
In creating such an immanent ideology, architecture found
itself suspended between two positions: it affirmed the plan as a
way to organize the whole of production and consumption, but
at the same time wanted to retain its autonomy as architecture,
30. A singular and interesting example of this analysis would be the fate
of the Dada poet Paul Dermée, who was replaced as editor-in-chief
of L’Esprit Nouveau after the subtitle of the journal was changed from
esthétique contemporaine to activité contemporaine, which indicates the
shift from an intra-artistic program to one that aspires to take on the
environment in its integrality; see the comments on this shift in Beatriz
Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Medium
(Cambridge, Mass.: MT, 1994), 361 note 1.
29
i.e., as a unique producer of aesthetic form, as can be seen for

instance in Le Corbusier’s claim to having revived a classical
canon of beauty, or, as Reyner Banham suggests, in the contin-
ued presence of the Beaux-Arts tradition in modernist architec-
tural composition.31
It is on the basis of these contradictions that Tafuri analyzes
the attempts of the New Objectivity (“die Neue Sachlichkeit”)32
to adjust to the model of the assembly line, and all the com-
promises that characterize the struggle between Objectivity and
expressionism. In its profound fascination for Taylorism in all
of its forms, Tafuri sees an attempt—after the disappearance of
the aura, i.e., the entry of the architectural work into the age of
mechanical reproducibility as analyzed by Benjamin— to seize
control over the entire process from the singular element to the
city-totality, within which the individual object is dissolved in
a cycle that also mobilizes the user and lays claims to displace
31. See Banham’s introductory discussion in Theory and Design in the First
Machine Age (London: Architectural Press, 1960), 14–23.
32. Die neue Sachlichkeit was an artistic movement that went far beyond
architecture. Its roots were in literature, painting, photography, and
cinema (the term was first used by Felix Hartlaub in 1923 with refer-
ence to a planned exhibition of post-expressionist art in Mannheim that
eventually took place in 1925), and its general significance cannot be
reduced to Tafuri’s rather cursory reading. It is true that Sachlichkeit was
generally perceived as opposed to the subjectivism of expressionism, but
we must also bear in mind that the adjective “sachlich” may be translat-
ed more precisely as “relevant to the matter,” “pertinent,” etc., and that
it also contains a reference to the Sache, the “matter” or “thing.” In this
sense Sachlichkeit means to pay heed to the things themselves, without
prejudices, and it contains a stroke of pragmatism—a term, it should be
recalled, derived from the Greek pragma, “thing”. For a general survey
of Sachlichkeit in literature, with a rich collection of source documents,
see Sabina Becker, Neue Sachlichkeit, 2 vol. (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000);
for the application of the term to painting and photography, see Hans
Gotthard Vierhuff, Die Neue Sachlichkeit: Malerei und Fotografie (Co-
logne: DuMont, 1980). The most imprecise use of term is in fact in the
field of architecture, where the term (sometimes used as a synonym for
“Neues Bauen”) often seems equivalent to the Bauhaus or even modern
architecture in general, and its roots lie in the conflict in the Werkbund
over industrial “typification” vs. traditional crafts.
30
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
older forms of aesthetic experience.33 The open spaces of Mies

and Gropius aspire to include the user in the organization of
a collective life where, as Tafuri sarcastically notes, “Morris’s
romantic socialist dream—an art made by all for all—takes ideo-
logical form within the iron-clad laws of profit.” (PU 94/101f)
Tafuri’s main example is Ludwig Hilberseimer’s visionary
manifesto Großstadtarchitektur (1927), which proposes the most
radical model for the dissolution of the traditional architec-
tural language.34 Hilberseimer constructs an unbroken conti-
33. In relation to a traditional humanist culture this may be perceived as a
loss of substance, akin to the Nietzschean “devaluation of the highest
values.” This could be seen as situation where man errs into nothingness
and becomes a “sleepwalker,” as the novelist Hermann Broch portrays
this transformation in his monumental trilogy Sleepwalkers (1931–32),
whose respective parts each signal a crucial historical moment, taking us
from the end of romanticism, through anarchy, to objectivity: The Roman-
tic, The Anarchist, and The Realist (the original German titles also contain
references to the respective main protagonists as well precise chrono-
logical markers: 1888: Pasenow, oder, Die Romantik; 1903: Esch, oder, Die
Anarchie; 1918: Huguenau, oder, Die Sachlichkeit). In the last part, in a series
of essays called “Excursus on the Disintegration of Values” (in the novel
presented as the works of “Bertrand Müller, doctor of philosophy”),
Broch elaborates a vision of modernity in terms of a fragmentation of the
different spheres of value—war for war’s sake, art for art’s sake, profit for
profit’s sake, etc.—and in the end, the main character Huguenau seems
to embody an idea of “Sachlichkeit” as sheer opportunism, so that he in
opting for personal gain in fact returns us to an empty and directionless
subjectivism. Others understood Sachlichkeit as a possibility of extract-
ing a different from of experience, endowed with a particular truth of its
own, from the mechanization and serialization of the metropolis. For a
analysis of Sachlichkeit along these lines, which also draws on the writings
of Kracauer, Benjamin, and others proponents of the avant-garde, see K.
Michael Hays, Modernism and the Posthumanist Subject: The Architecture of
Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilberseimer (Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1992).
34. Ludwig Hilberseimer, Grossstadtarchitektur (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffman,
1927). Tafuri limits himself to Hilberseimer’s radical proposals from
the late twenties, and disregards his later work on the decentralization
of cities, which leads up to a complete integration of landscape and
urban space. Hilberseimer developed these ideas in his work in the US
(The New City, 1944), at the IIT, where he worked closely with Mies van
der Rohe. For a comprehensive analysis of Hilberseimer’s successive
theories of city planning, see Markus Kilian, Grossstadtarchitektur: Eine
planungsmetodische Untersuchung der Stadtplanung Ludwig Hilberseimers
(unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Karlsruhe, 2002).
31
nuity from the basic cell to the city in its totality, so that they
in the end appear as the two endpoints of a single chain. The
Metropolis is one big machine, where the basic unity lies on
this side of traditional form, and the unity to be created lies
beyond it, which means that the single edifice no longer consti-
tutes a privileged or even interesting object, only a relative and
mobile cut in a more encompassing structure. Place and space,
nuances and exceptions must disappear in the Metropolis,
Hilberseimer argues, and with them all of architecture’s tradi-
tional dimensions. The strict reduction to cubic and geometric
shapes, which in a sense are scale-less because of the erasure of
all natural models, takes us away from the experiencing subject,
or, more precisely, takes us in the direction of a transformed
experience in which exchangeability and uniformity can be af-
firmed as such.
Hilberseimer thus states with cold precision, more clearly
than any of his contemporaries— Taut, Gropius, or Mies—what
modern capitalism needs. The architect as a producer of objects
belongs to the past, and the real task is to organize the city as
a cycle of production and to invent organizational models. In
this Großstadtarchitektur, there is simply no more crisis of the
object, Tafuri notes, since the object has already disappeared.
Consequently, Hilberseimer no longer understands architec-
ture as an instrument of knowledge, and the conflict between
Objectivity and the expressionism of architects like Poelzig and
Häring signals in a precise manner this divide between the cog-
nitive and the technological, with no possibility of an exchange
between them. The expressionist arrière-garde could in one
sense have been able to play a critical role in relation to the re-
ductive program of Objectivity, Tafuri suggests, but they were
unable to propose true alternatives on the same level of techno-
logical objectivity, precisely because they depended on a model
that belonged to the residual and not the emergent.
32
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
These two sides eventually clash in what constitutes the dra-

matic turning point in Progetto e utopia, when the reformist com-
promise that believes it possible to restore a natural equilibrium
enters into a final crisis in the Siemensstadt project (1929–31).
For Tafuri, this is the place where “one of the most serious rup-
tures within the ‘modern movement’ became evident,” and he
sees it as “incredible that contemporary historical study has not
yet recognized this” (PU 107/116). The affirmation of a uniform
design method that can be applied on different scales is derived
directly from the utopian aspect, but the resulting dissolution
of the architectural object only exacerbated the inner contradic-
tions. For Tafuri this is the emergence of the unsolvable conflict
between those architects whose aim was to save the aura, subjec-
tivity, and expression (Scharoun and Häring) and those who ad-
opted the assembly line as their model (Gropius and Bartning).
Siemensstadt is only one example out of many of the crises
that the idea of the city traversed, although for Tafuri it takes on a
paradigmatic value. He applies a similar argument to Ernst May
and the large-scale undertaking “Das neue Frankfurt,” which
begins in 1925 and is the most systematic attempt at a concrete
politicizing of architecture on the basis of a social-democratic
model. Other cases are the plans of Martin Wagner (for Berlin),
Fritz Schumacher (for Hamburg), and Cor van Eesteren (for
Hamburg), each of which met with varying degrees of success
(the most successful for Tafuri being Amsterdam), although
they ultimately were caught up in a negative dialectic between
the restoration of traditional values and the ineluctable logic of
the Metropolis. Everywhere we find the same aspirations for
a close alliance between leftist intellectuals, advanced parts of
capital, and political administrations, but only a limited appli-
cation in practice. For Tafuri this is due to the rootedness of
the Siedlung structure in an anti-urban ideology, in an idea of
Gemeinschaft that has already been devoured by the urban logic.
33
The Siedlung “was to be an oasis of order, an example of how it

is possible for working-class organizations to propose an alter-
native model of urban development, a realized utopia. But the
settlement itself openly set the model of the ‘town’ against that
of the large city. This was Tönnies against Simmel and Weber”
(PU 109/119); it was unavoidable that it end up being swal-
lowed by the all-consuming development of capital. For Tafuri,
any reformist attempts at restoring a lost balance are doomed
in advance, and in the Siemensstadt project he locates the de-
cisive internal crisis of the modern movement, already before
the totalitarian repression would set in. The tension between
those who wanted to save the aura of architecture, and those
who opted for seriality and standardization, could no longer be
mitigated, and from this moment on everything that followed
was self-deception.
In the story presented in Progetto e utopia, where the postwar
period only appears as a negative echo of a history already hav-
ing traversed a full cycle, there is another hero, whose work by
no means escapes the contradictions of the Siemensstadt mo-
ment, but somehow manages to transform them into a personal
poetic: Le Corbusier, whose attempt to combine the “maximum
level of programming of productivity” with the “maximum lev-
el of the ‘productivity of spirit’” was carried out “with a lucidity
that has no comparison in progressive European culture” (PU
115/125). In Corbusier we find a strict and yet flexible form of
organization, in which capital, planners, and users were to col-
laborate in the most efficient way, and technology was to appear
authentic and natural (whereas in someone like Hilberseimer
it still appears as something rigid, external, and imposed from
above, and thus as something that would simply overtake sub-
jective experience instead of being its self-expression). Tafuri
traces Corbusier’s successive elaborations throughout the twen-
ties of a series of concepts and analytical models, with a focus on
34
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
his urban visions, in which the landscape as whole must become

an integral part, and the natural site is absorbed into the proj-
ect, as if in a final reversal of the Enlightenment analogy of city
and landscape. The main case here is the Plan Obus for Algiers
(1930), which summarizes this phase in a supreme gesture that
understands the landscape elements as so many “true and prop-
erly ready-made objects” (117/127), and that takes possession of
space in its entirety, and reduces it to a field of transformational
possibility: “The technological universe ignores the here and
the there,” and the space of its operations is a “pure topological
field” (118/128).
This system requires that we create a systematic articulation
between production and consumption. Later, when Corbusier
would say in Poème de l’angle droit (1955) that he wants the entire
landscape to form a single image, a “dance of contradictions,”
then it is because only such an image allows the freedom of indi-
vidual response and the necessity of the plan to come together.
The techniques of shock, embodied in the various objets à réac-
tion poétique proposed by Corbusier, are intended to involve the
users at every level, to make them feel like active planners when
they indulge in their own eccentric behavior, or in Tafuri’s
more cynical formula: to allow the public to “express its own
bad taste” (PU 121/132). Similarly, on the level of technology
there is a demand for flexibility and modulation in details, and
with the Plan Obus we are confronted with the highest form of a
civilisation machiniste —which is why we here, too, can detect the
decisive crisis of the modernist Plan around 1930.
The question why none of Corbusier’s large-scale projects
were ever realized for Tafuri becomes synonymous with the
question why the modern movement as such suffered a ship-
wreck against the rock of reality, or more precisely, of capital.
To be sure, Corbusier can be taken as a paradigm for a pure
intellectual who works without assignment, and his projects
35
become visions without a basis in political and industrial pro-

cesses. But more than just a personal shortcoming, this is also,
above all, a symptom of a more profound inner contradiction in
modern architecture as such, and it is this level that the reasons
for Corbusier’s failure must be sought.
Many historians have accounted for the crisis of modernism
through references to the emergence of Stalinism and Nazism,
but for Tafuri this obscures the question of architecture’s own,
internal relation to capital. This relation undergoes a profound
mutation after 1929, which can be seen in the global restructur-
ings within the New Deal as well as in the first five-year plans in
the Soviet Union. The model we find in Keynes’s General Theory
of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) is the same as the one
underlying the poetics of modern art, Tafuri suggests: to absorb
and control the future in the present, and this is the moment
when the plan as ideology (of architecture) passes over into re-
ality (of political economy). The crisis of architecture sets in at
the precise junction in history when capital and government
bureaucracies make the objectives of the plan their own, which
severs the link between architecture’s project and its utopia, or
rather renders its project obsolete and possible to uphold only
on the level of personal fantasies, as in the case of Corbusier.
Later, in the postwar development that Tafuri only sketches
as a kind of postscript, the response of architects was to develop
a critique of technological civilization, or a new focus on the
immanent problems of design itself. This is also the period of
humanist revivals and various kinds of empiricisms, as well as
of attempts to overcome the contradictions by providing them
with aesthetic representations in a new image culture or theo-
ries of complexity. In a couple of strokes, as bold as they are
reductive, Tafuri surveys the theoretical discussions of late mod-
ern architecture: the city as image (Lynch), the discussion with
pop art (Venturi), architecture as situation (Constant), anti-
36
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
design, attempts to control technology through a new apprecia-

tion of fantasy,35 as so many attempts to evade the real problem,
which is the degradation of architecture to a mere tool. And
even though Tafuri never speaks of the death of architecture,
one must nevertheless acknowledge that Progetto e utopia ends on
a somber and pessimistic note; if architecture’s death is not im-
minent, this does not imply that it lives on as before, but instead
that it no longer constitutes the place where the true stakes are
located, which is why it can mobilize all the resources of the
imaginary, precisely as dissociated from the real.
It would be tempting to relate this diagnosis to the many
similar endgames proposed at the same time, none of which,
to be sure, entail any kind of simple cessation, but rather varia-
tions on a closure that calls for acts of anamnesis and working-
through:36 painting, the novel, even art as such, variation on the
end which in hindsight all seem like reactions to the loss not
only of the great organic forms of the nineteenth century, but,
more profoundly, also of the category of the work as such. For
a moment, admittedly brief, the epithet “postmodern” offered
itself as an affirmative—or perhaps operative in Tafuri’s sense—
concept for this shift, and his work no doubt inadvertently con-
tributed to this perception. What he offers can however in fact
be seen as a highly critical analysis of the conditions of emer-
gence of such a concept, which for him would be doomed to
repeat the gestures of the historical avant-garde, although of-
35. Tafuri stresses the role played by Pierre Restany, whose role as a critic
was crucial for the development of a French version of Pop Art, Le
Nouveau Réalisme, and he notes that while many of its proposals were
similar to those of the first avant-garde, in Restany’s case they acquire
a wholly different sense. For him, alienation must be overcome by a
synthesis of technology and imagination, a “prospective aesthetic” that
joins high-tech and Marcuse as a way of realizing Utopia here and now
without any transformation of the relations of production.
36. For the connection between “endgame” and the Freudian “working-
through” (Durcharbeiten), see Yve-Alan Bois, “Painting: The Task of
Mourning,” in Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1990).
37
fering us neither project nor utopia, only the simulacrum of a

transgression since long sunk into obsolescence and destined to
become part of a culture of image consumption.
In this perspective, the obsession of the sixties with models
derived from linguistics and communication theory appears like
a repetition of the strategies of the avant-garde, “the first—still
utopian—attempt at capital’s complete domination over the
universe of development” (PU 140/151), now remodeled into
a project for achieving global cybernetic control. In this these
models are the heirs of formalist theory, one of the decisive lega-
cies of the early twentieth century, which reduced the symboli-
cally dense forms of the tradition to pure signs, but was funda-
mentally unable to create anything but a technological utopia
that in the end was apolitical,37 and thereby easily could be
adapted to modern marketing, so that the permanent destruc-
tion of values that was once the strategy of the avant-garde so
seamlessly could pass over into the logic of consumption: “it is
not by pure chance,” Tafuri writes, “that historically the end of
formalism is always to end by the work on form being used for
‘advertising’” (153/163). In the case of architecture, this loss of
37. “This is completely clear in the case of such figures as Moholy-Nagy,

Hannes Meyer, Schwitters, or Walter Benjamin,” Tafuri writes (PU
142/153). Tafuri here bases his claim on Moholy-Nagy’s brief 1922 essay
“Constructivism and the Proletariat” (see Richard Kostalenetz [ed.],
Moholy-Nagy [New York: Praeger, 1970], 185–86), which might seem
far too meager a basis for his claims, both with respect to Benjamin
and Russian constructivism, none of which proposed the idea of a
pure, non-political technology. As Christina Kiaer points out, Tafuri’s
interpretation converges with the one proposed by Jean Baudrillard in
Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe (1972), against which she
oppose an analysis that does justice to the dimension of fantasy and
bodily experience in constructivism: see Kiaer, “Rodchenko in Paris,”
October 75 (Winter 1996). Furthermore, that Benjamin’s understand-
ing of technology would have been non-political seems like a curiously
misguided proposal, and Tafuri on many other occasions argues the
opposite. Regardless of such particular debatable cases, the question
however remains whether, in the end, this affects Tafuri’s general thesis
about the avant-garde and technology.
38
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
authority finally leads to an ironic reversal: since it no longer is

capable of taking control of the environment, architecture turns
inwards, perhaps as the last and distorted echo of the “fatal au-
topsy” undertaken by Piranesi, and discovers the historical heri-
tage that it was itself instrumental in breaking down, revealing
it to be so many aestheticized illusions.
The plural ends of modernism

Tafuri’s argument in Progetto e utopia rests on an unmistakable
determinism, which in classic Marxist fashion, and in the name
of a faith—never explicitly acknowledged as such, and yet surely
one of its operative tools—in the linear development of history,
a priori rejects all reformism as ideology, and as a refusal to ac-
knowledge the true problem. As Hilde Heynen remarks,38 Ta-
furi analyzes all the theories that could be seen as attempts to
redirect the development—the garden city in all its varieties, the
American Regional Planning Association, Frank Lloyd Wright’s
Broadacre City, Bruno Taut’s Auflösung der Stadt—in terms of a
nostalgia for Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft, and their anti-capitalism
is scorned as a “rejection of the highest level of capitalist orga-
nization, the desire to regress to the infancy of humanity” (PU
112/122).
If Progetto e utopia leaves us with rather gloomy prospects, this
is already inscribed into the very force of its argument, which
often becomes just as much a weakness. The desire for system-
atic closure generates a problem that seems like an inversion
of the problem of operative criticism diagnosed five years ear-
lier in Teorie e storia, this time however as a conflict between the
demands of a singular theory, and the empirical vicissitudes of
38. See Heynen’s discussion of “Das neue Frankfurt” in Architecture and

Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1999), 44–71, and of Tafuri, ibid.,
130–137; cf. also Michael Müller, Funktionalität und Moderne: Das neue
Frankfurt und seine Bauten 1925–1933 (Cologne: Rudolf Müller, 1984).
39
the many histories whose multiplicity is reduced on the level

of conceptual organization, already from the initial analysis of
the Enlightenment dialectic between city and nature onward.
As Fredric Jameson notes, the monolithic picture of history in
Progetto e utopia is closely connected to the rejection of operative
criticism, and together they risk producing a paralyzing image.
Regardless of the non-synchronicities that Tafuri discerns in sin-
gular architects and individual works, and in all those moments
where the course of history seems undecided, they are neverthe-
less realigned with the general narrative, within which the end
seems prescribed by the beginning. Jameson reads Tafuri here
in parallel with Adorno’s idea of a negative dialectic, which is
of course quite justified, as long as one bears in mind that, for
Adorno, this dialectic has as its aim to unravel the capacity of
the work to preserve something of the non-identical, and that
the monadic quality of the work cannot be thought without
some trace of an imageless utopia, no matter how feeble, be-
ing retained, whereas Tafuri, at least as portrayed by Jameson,
seems to end up as an account of the final stage of an adminis-
tered world without exit.39
39. See Jameson, “Architecture and the Criticism of Ideology” (1985),

in The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986. Vol. 2, The Syntax of History
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). Jameson compares
Progetto e utopia to Roland Barthes’s Le dégre zéro de l’écriture, and above
all to Adorno’s Philosophie der neuen Musik, to which it has many striking
affinities. Adorno proposes a reading of the development of modern
music since Beethoven and the demise of classical forms up to the
dialectical conclusion in Schönberg, where a subjectivity externalized in
the technical system of dodecaphonic composition procedures strikes
back at the mimetic impulse, and eventually leads to a stasis: the dialecti-
cal composer brings the dialectic to a halt, in Adorno’s dense formula. This
is close to Tafuri’s analysis of how the singular objects are dissolved in
the assembly line conceptions of Sachlichkeit, in which the architect, just
as the composer in dodecaphony, encounters his own subjectivity in the
form of an external and estranged system, which in turn had been creat-
ed in order to safeguard the artist’s own rationality, control, and capac-
ity to plan and project—the artist has been reduced, as Adorno suggests
with an intricate paradox, to simply carrying out his own intentions.
40
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
These hard and seemingly uncompromising statements in

Progetto e utopia are mitigated considerably in Tafuri’s subse-
quent work on modernism (leaving aside here the formidable
scholarship on the Renaissance that would follow, and the pub-
lication of Storia dell’architettura italiana, which is the last book-
length study devoted to the present). It is as if the unswerving
negativity of Progetto e utopia somehow was a necessary step, a
way of getting rid of modernism’s utopias and linear histories,
by presenting them with grimmest possible counter-version of
their own claims, in order to free a different sense of history as
multiple and undecided.
Three years after Progetto e utopia Tafuri returns to the same
moment in the monumental historical survey L’architettura
contemporanea (co-written with Francesco Dal Co), where the
dystopian tone of the earlier book has been subdued, no doubt
first of all because of the very character of the historical survey,
which demands attention to details and the inclusion of materi-
al refractory to the dialectical dramatization of the former book,
whose intent was fundamentally polemical, or a “critique of ar-
chitectural ideology,” as was the title of a draft from 1969. But
while many details remain the same, including some, though
not all, of the crucial points of articulation, the overall approach
has undergone important shifts, and rather than attempting to
As Hilde Heynen remarks (Architecture and Modernity, 248, note 185),
Jameson pays little attention however to the specific philosophical con-
text of Tafuri’s claims, i.e., the theory of a non-dialectical, non-Hegelian
negativity in Cacciari, which draws more on Benjamin than Adorno. As
far as Progetto e utopia is concerned, it is true that Benjamin’s analyses of
Baudelaire and Paris in Tafuri are integrated as descriptive moments,
but the question is whether anything remains of the idea of a dialectic
“standing still”, and of the dialectical image as the irruption of utopian
forces from prehistory; the negative remarks on Benjamin’s allegedly
non-political understanding of technology suggest that this is not the
case, or at least that these more positive Benjaminian concepts are left
in a mere juxtaposition to a narrative that seems to preclude them.
Tafuri’s later writings in this respect indicate a more complex reading
of Benjamin.
41
survey the almost 450 pages of dense analyses as a whole, in the

following some of these displacements will constitute the guid-
ing thread: first the introductory part that suggests a new meth-
odological caution, and then the analysis of the postwar crisis of
modernism, which, as we will see, proposes a reading of multiple
endings instead of a movement leading up to a decisive contra-
diction that secretly had been guiding the dialectic throughout
its entire course.
In the first paragraph of the introduction, Tafuri and Dal
Co begin by pointing out the Janus-faced nature of modern ar-
chitecture, but also its divergent, rather than simply dual na-
ture: born out of a loss of identity inherited from humanism, it
consists of a series of subjective efforts to retrieve this identity,
which, however, all point in different directions; indeed, the
very idea of a modern movement as a “collective and teleologi-
cal doctrine” is “itself the product of a reassuring, but entirely
inoperative fable, one whose origin we must seek out, whose
function we must analyze.”40 They stress the complexity of their
task, and that the history of architecture comprises many lev-
els and intersections, from the control over the environment to
intellectual labor in all of its aspects: “Obviously,” they now
write, “the intersection of all those manifold stories will never
end up in a unity.” (MA 7) Instead of the unidirectionality that
gave Progetto e utopia its monolithic quality, what must now be
made visible in this history is “whatever cracks and gaps [that]
break up its compactness” (ibid.), which, as we will see, is also
what provides the future with a different sense of openness.
Rather than in the dialectic of nature and city in the eigh-
40. L’architettura contemporanea (Milan: Electa, 1976); trans. Robert Erich

Wolff, Modern Architecture (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 7. Hence-
forth cited as MA with page number. That this “fable,” once the stock
in trade of operative criticism, is now deemed “inoperative,” may be a
coincidental remark, yet it signals a different use of these terms than
before.
42
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
teenth century, in Laugier and Piranesi—who earlier formed the

outer limit of an entire cycle ending somewhere in the postwar
period—the narrative now takes a new and chronologically less
distant departure in the nineteenth century and Art Nouveau
(which had disappeared from sight altogether in Progetto e uto-
pia), thus bringing us closer to traditional modernist histori-
ography, but also signaling the desire to avoid the sense of an
encompassing dialectic. As a “negative prologue” (MA 12), Art
Nouveau was an attempt to save a lost totality, “more the ex-
haustion of a world than the advent of new horizons” (13), after
which the narrative moves to urbanism in nineteenth-century
America, the birth of modern town planning, the architecture
of American cities from 1870 to 1900, Catalan Modernism
and Northern Romanticism, until it reaches the drama around
the Werkbund, the Bauhaus, and the “Role of the Masters.” In
Progetto e utopia the analysis of the early modern masters formed
the nucleus of the argument, the moment of peripeteia in mod-
ernism, after which it could only continue as self-deception or
as a series of retreats, gradually delinking project from utopia in
various aestheticizing moves; something of this indeed remains
here, although the overall framing has been substantially dis-
placed.
The analysis of the Siemensstadt case, whose crucial role on
Progetto e utopia we have noted, at first sight remains the same,
and it is once again staged as a conflict between the model of
the assembly line and the lingering idea of expression: here
there was a “head-on clash between the two dominant trends of
central European avant-garde architecture: the ‘formal void’—
homage to the ascetic rigorism of the new objectivity—was chal-
lenged by the return to an architecture of images justified by
appealing to an ‘organic’ myth.” (MA 161). But rather than a
dramatic shift, taking us from one sense of ideology to anoth-
er—from the affirmative link between project and utopia that
43
undergirded the fantasy of Architecture, to the repressed insight

into its impossibility, subsequently generating a series of dis-
torted compromise formations and defense mechanism, in an
almost Freudian sense—it is now a moment in a dialectic that
has many more stages and possibilities. This does not mean that
modernism simply continues with its business as usual, only
that the trauma is as it were built into what is to come as a gen-
erative possibility, and must be accounted for in much greater
detail. Modernism now ends in many ways: tragically, by fad-
ing away, in stale repetitions, in weak compromises and loss of
creative power—all of which are options worked out in detail in
the chapter “The Activity of the Masters After World War II,”
which will be in focus in the following.
Generally, what the postwar period brought about was a
dissolution of the “common language” that still remained on
the horizon before the war, and a “multi-faceted debate which
has now arrived at a final accounting” (MA 306), i.e., an ac-
count that surveys the various dissolutions of modernisms, all
of which followed individual and highly sinuous trajectories, but
can still be sorted into a few basic categories.
In the first group we find Auguste Perret, Walter Gropius,
and Erich Mendelsohn, all of whom attempted to retain their
prewar styles, but were unable to come to grips with the reality
of the postwar landscape other than as surrender or a flight into
the merely personal; in this sense, they are examples of an in-
creasing irrelevance, and receive rather scant attention. Perret’s
persistent esprit de géométrie, only apparently rooted in technol-
ogy, Tafuri and Dal Co suggest, on one level made it possible for
him to extend his private language to the city, while he was con-
tinually aware that he was defending an anachronistic tradition,
and his attempts at welding together the Beux-Arts language
with new urban contexts was not, in the end, a way forward.
Gropius and Mendelsohn, on the other hand, were marked by a
44
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
rupture with Weimar and more generally European culture, and

if Gropius remained faithful to rationalism, in the US he suc-
cumbed to an impersonal teamwork in which he was reduced to
the role of a methodologist, leading his personality to disappear
into the anonymity of American professional life. Mendelsohn
for his part wanted to remain a master, and his expressionist
prewar work was overtaken by personal lay mysticism, which
only amounted to weary variations on older themes, Tafuri and
Dal Co conclude.
If this first group is treated rather cursorily, the core of the
chapter, at least the section that has provoked the most respons-
es, deals with Mies (who had remained in the background in
Progetto e utopia, where the position of radical reductionism and
objectivity was ascribed to Hilberseimer). Instead of the kind of
waning of creative power or mere repetition that characterize the
first three protagonists in the postwar drama, Mies’s American
trajectory takes him toward a negation, alternately described
as silence, withdrawal, and resistance to the kind of modernity
that his work nevertheless inhabits to the fullest extent—a nega-
tion that can only become effective by pushing the present to its
utmost limit.41 Entering into the zeitgeist is for Mies a “categor-
ical imperative” that, paradoxically, breeds a “supreme indiffer-
ence” (MA 309) which marks both his pre- and postwar work, a
nihilism closely related to the famous “almost nothing” (beinahe
nichts, later transformed by Philip Johnson into the more catchy
and no doubt misleading “less is more”) that also, equally para-
doxically, means to take on the transformed postwar cityscape.
Beginning with Mies’s first major work in the US, the cam-
pus at Illinois Institute of Technology, Tafuri and Dal Co sug-
gest that the isolation of the work from its context, a feature
already present in early Mies, is the key issue. At the IIT, Crown
41. For a more detailed overview of various interpretations of this idea of
silence and withdrawal, see my The Silences of Mies.
45
Hall constitutes a geometric prism lifted up from the ground,

further emphasizing the caesura from the surroundings that had
characterized Farnsworth House two years earlier. But rather
than a purism, Tafuri and Dal Co perceive this as a reduction to
minimal signs that create a kind of collusion of fact and value,
which they summarize with Karl Krauss’s laconic statement:
“Since the facts have the floor, let anyone who has anything to
say come forward and keep his mouth shut.” (MA 311) These
signs no longer signify, no longer speak of anything except the
imperative to obey what is necessary: it is a “renunciation that
makes it possible to dominate the destiny imposed by the zeit-
geist by interjecting it as a ‘duty’” (312), and the Miesian spaces
“assume in themselves the ineluctability of absence that the
contemporary word imposes on the language of form.” (ibid.)
His architecture takes control over chaos by distancing itself,
but in this also renounces anything like an architecture parlante;
it sets up an interior distance that does not produce the full-
ness of self-possession, but a fundamental absence and void,
recalling the “formal void” that was earlier placed at the lim-
its of modernism as project and utopia in Siemensstadt. Now,
the void is endowed with a high level of consciousness, and it is
not the passive outcome of a doomed compromise, but an act of
thought, a particular form of architectural thought that must be
deciphered rather than explained as a mere symptom.
These figures are condensed in the analysis of the Seagram
building (1954–58), where the conflict between structure and
subjectivity reaches its climactic point. This takes place through a
series of reversals that all hinge on the idea of the void, or rather
a series of absences that replicate and begin to resonate with one
another. First, the building is set back from the street, creating a
gap in the otherwise dense fabric of Park Avenue, to which it itself
responds by turning into an absolute object, displaying a “maxi-
mum of formal structurality” coupled with a “maximum absence
46
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
of images.” (MA 312). Then, in a further move, this absence is

projected back onto the void generated by the building’s separa-
tion from the street, the plaza in front, which constitutes a “pla-
nimetric inversion of the significance of the skyscraper: two voids
answering each other and speaking the language of the nil, of the
silence which—by a paradox worthy of Kafka—assaults the noise
of the metropolis.” (ibid.)42 The Seagram building exposes itself
to the city in renouncing it, and the void that it creates becomes,
through the resonances it produces, a “phantom of itself” (ibid.).
The absence that it creates is not the stand-in for a supersensible
truth, no longer the “language of the soul” that still animated
early abstract art, but “contradiction interjected,” in a formula
that draws the analysis close to Adorno.43
42. The “paradox worthy of Kafka” no doubt refers to the short story
“Das Schweigen der Sirene,” where Kafka presents us with a series of
interpretations of the encounter of Ulysses and the sirens. In Homer,
Ulysses ties himself to the mast and blocks the ears of his oarsmen with
wax in order for them to escape the deadly seduction of the song and
keep working, while he is able to enjoy it without fear of being lured
into acting. This is a division that Adorno and Horkheimer famously
understand in Dialectic of Enlightenment as an archaic model for the
genealogy of aesthetic disinterest, both in terms of a division of labor
and as the origin of the traces of a first nature that subsists in art, to
the effect that all singing henceforth has remained internally broken.
Kafka inverts the story, and suggests that what is truly deadly is rather
the silence of the sirens, and that while some may have escaped their
song, no one has escaped their silence, which in the case of Ulysses was
prompted by the look of happiness on his face upon seeing them. In
Kafka, it is thus Ulysses who blocks his ears with wax, which prevents
him from noticing their silence. At the end Kafka proposes another pos-
sibility, that Ulysses in fact knew that the sirens were silent, but faked
not to notice this (“in a certain way held this appearance as a shield
against the sirens and the gods,” Kafka writes) in order not to receive
divine punishment because of his victory. Finally, he suggests that this
mystery is beyond human comprehension.
43. For a reading that follows Adorno, which also picks up the motif of the
siren song, although in the version of Dialektik der Aufklärung, and leaves
out the reference to Kafka’s inversion of the story, see K. Michael Hays,
“Odysseus and the Oarsmen, or, Mies’ Abstraction once again,” in The
Presence of Mies, ed. Detlef Mertins (New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 1994).
47
As a singular end point, Seagram building is however already

inscribed in a structure of doubling, repetition, and haunting
(which is perhaps already a further implication of its being a
“phantom of itself”). The ending that it proclaimed was in fact
nothing but a beginning, as in the Chase Manhattan Building, the
Union Carbide Building, and a proliferating series of further cor-
porate high-rises. For Tafuri and Dal Co, this repetition follows
the logic of tragic and farce proposes by Marx in The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “What is tragic in the Seagram build-
ing is repeated as a norm in these in the form of farce.” (MA 312)
The ubiquity of the curtain wall, little plazas adorned with foun-
tains, all proved to be the stock in trade of corporate architec-
ture—which it would be “wrong to consider contrary to the inten-
tions of Mies,” just as it would be “wrong to reduce his intentions
to just that.” (ibid.) If Mies draws a kind of critical line, it never-
theless proves impossible to respect, and the farcical betrayal is
already inscribed in the tragedy; the distinction between them
proves unstable, as if the repetition would insinuate itself into
the tragic division itself, multiplying it in a series of echoes, pro-
ducing precisely the kind of flowing modulation and image profu-
sion that was already part of the initial modularity with its “formal
structurality” and “absence of images.”44 Just as the iconoclastic
gesture is already teeming with images, the silence proclaimed by
the return to facts reflects the noises of the Metropolis, as if to
raise the sensory overload into an object of thought.
The idea of reflection is further developed with reference to
the project for a federal court building in Chicago. Here, the ho-
mogenous glass surface becomes a mirror, transforming the “al-
most nothing” into a “large glass,” as an echo of Duchamp. But
rather than pursuing the Duchampian legacy, with its intricate
visual and linguistic play, joining space and time in the famous
44. For this reading, see Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex:
Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2004).
48
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
“delay in glass,” in which the gaze must enter and eventually

even lose itself, Mies’s surface is a reflective emptiness, without
interior depth, throwing everything back onto the spectator and
finally onto the world itself. Instead of Duchamp, it is ultimately
Schwitters’s Merz pictures that are cited as models, although in
a slightly different sense than was the case in Progetto e utopia,
where they signaled the transformation of everything into in-
terchangeable signs, a process that preceded and prepared their
integration in the architectural project. Here too the glassy ex-
panse welcomes all phenomena, it “absorbs them, restores them
to themselves in a perverse multi-duplication, like a Pop Art
sculpture that obliges the American metropolis to look at itself
reflected.” (MA 314) But the result—the operation being as it
were carried out from the opposite end of Schwitters’s—is in-
stead that “architecture arrives at the ultimate limits of its own
possibilities,” so that “alienation, having become absolute, tes-
tifies uniquely to its own presence, separating itself from the
world to declare the world’s incurable malady.” (ibid.) Rather
than gesturing toward an integration of sign and experience,
Mies declares their difference and division, in a gesture that
marks an end and a series of beginnings, in which the divide be-
tween tragedy and farce remains unstable, undecidable, and per-
haps even irrelevant, as the trajectory of Pop abundantly shows.
If the Miesian ending is tragic, although shot through with
farcical and no doubt other possibilities too, the place reserved
for Le Corbusier is somewhat different. In Progetto e utopia he
was portrayed as the most versatile and multi-faceted of the
modern masters, with a “lucidity that has no comparison in
progressive European culture,” even though the “dance of con-
tradictions” that his work staged on every level finally ended
up being absorbed in the dialectic of the plan. After the war,
Corbusier’s path would lead him in other directions, although
perhaps in the end, towards the same contradiction.
49
This is visible in the Unité d’habitations (Marseilles, 1947–

52), which was conceived as a self-sufficient universe with all
possible amenities and a high-level flexibility, and yet was un-
able to deliver what it promised: its self-sufficiency is in fact
a withdrawal due to practical necessities that prevent it from
giving form to the entire landscape, as was once the claim of
the Plan Obus; the interior streets that were to connect the mo-
bile homes through real mechanical vehicles in the end became
little more that broader corridors; the surreal forms on the roof
do not speak of the unity of space, but rather of discontinuity
and indomitability. The Unité is in the end “a hypothesis not
brought to conclusion, a gigantic fragment of a global concep-
tion of the city destined to remain pure ideology.” (MA 317)
This period of Corbusier’s oeuvre was also particularly rich
in paintings and sculptures, and in this line of work Tafuri and
Dal Co detect a turn to the oneiric and unconscious as a way
to a spiritual transcendence that stands opposed to the uncon-
ditional demand for factuality in Mies: if the latter rejected
such spirituality “in homage to a Kantian imperative,” then Le
Corbusier “welcomed it in homage to an effort to transcend
the finiteness of subjective individuality.” (MA 319) This was
a way of bringing the contradictions that his prewar work had
managed to contain out into the open, and Tafuri and Dal Co
locate this in the church Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp.
Conceived as a “landscapal acoustic” (acoustique paysagiste) that
would give rise to “inexpressible spaces” (espaces indicibles), this
was a work made up of interruptions, “rendering absolute the
programmatic loss of center” (ibid.); rather than a synthesis of
signs, it is a “dialectical labyrinth” that underscores the division
of illusion and reality while trying to surmount it.
The Chandigarh project, while not originally conceived by
Corbusier—who was only brought in at a fairly late stage and
limited himself to corrections of the original plan—has for its
50
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
part been the object of much criticism, specifically for the rigid
application of the Athens Charter, and it constitutes one of the
few actual tests of the feasibility of his urbanist vision. What
Tafuri and Dal Co see, is buildings that “call to each other across
the distances” in an “unattainable colloquy” (MA 323), remain-
ing alone and isolated, and an emphasis on the intervening
space that no longer connects but disconnects. In many of these
late projects, Tafuri and Dal Co conclude, hermetic symbols be-
come the residential model, withdrawn from productive reality,
and the “present becomes manifest as space that ruptures all
relations between processes of economic valorization and au-
tonomy of the word,” to the effect that “‘Speaking’ is possible
only by taking onto oneself the burden of such trauma.” If ar-
chitectural language here finds itself in a checkmate, it realizes
that it can only speak by taking refuge in mystic spaces, “with-
drawing from the metropolitan reality that it had mistakenly
believed could be reconciled with itself.” (ibid.)
As a kind of coda to the more grandiose battles with the im-
possible staged by Mies and Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright,
the final of the masters, pursued the quest for his imaginary
Usonia, and gradually came to identify with his own myth.
Rooted in eighteenth-century anarchism with its visions of
universal harmony, Wright’s vision of a “great peace” coincid-
ing with maximum mobility became increasingly remote from
the existing city, and the mythical spiral that pervades many of
his later works operated as a symbol of the interpenetration of
nature and artifice, as a spiritual principle that would establish
a “link between the contingent and the infinite” (MA 328).
Yet rather than a purist asceticism, Wright’s geometry, like
technology, is only “an obstacle to be overcome,” in the end
“indicating the possibility of transcending the civilization of
labor”—a gesture of romantic anti-capitalism that however re-
mained powerless in the face of reality, and had to have recourse
51
to elements whose “aggregation no longer shows the slightest

necessity” (ibid.). Similarly, the fantasies of flying saucers that
populate Wright’s drawings and projects from the period may
seem like graphic jokes, and while they, with their desire to take
leave of the world, are rooted in the visions of the early avant-
garde, from the Letatlin to Malevich’s Planits, when these ideas
come together in the spiraling structure of the Guggenheim
Museum—the one building where “his flying saucers do truly
soar in the city, even though anchored on the ground for a tem-
porary landing” (329)—this was in a certain way his final attack
on avant-garde art, aiming to create a “global experience” that
involves both the space of existence and that of memory, but in
this also obscuring the artworks on display. This “Pantheon,” as
Wright famously called it— displaying “the atmosphere of the
quiet unbroken wave: no meeting of the eye with abrupt chang-
es of form”45—was a synthesis of his desire to find hidden roots
and an “ever more hermetical handwriting,” which, eventually,
returning to the city as the place where frontier ideology could
communicate with post-technological future, “coincided with
the sublimation of the immense American suburb”, or quite
simply “Disneyland” (ibid.).
What, then, can be learned from these various endings?
“Autobiographies, returns to origins, ruthless and perverse sub-
jective testimonies—these are last messages of the masters of the
modern movement.” (MA 330) To the succeeding generation,
Tafuri and Dal Co note, these messages could only appear as
“hermetic, if not simply useless” (ibid.), and the final outcome
of utopia was a split between an architecture that became preoc-
cupied with its own “being” (for which one can no doubt sub-
stitute the “sublime uselessness” of the preface to the English
translation of Progetto e utopia), and one that pursued the initial
45. Wright, A Testament (New York: Horizon Press, 1957), 169, cited in
Tafuri and Dal Co, MA 329, without reference.
52
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
goals of the avant-garde, i.e., to achieve an overall control of

the urban reality—which is the “dramatic dichotomy” facing the
generation succeeding the modern masters.
The repercussions of this division extend throughout the
following chapters, but rather than leading up to the kind of
stark choice between delusion and uselessness that was the out-
come of Progetto e utopia, in 1976 they usher in a state of trans-
formation, uncertainty, and loss of direction. The concluding
chapter, “The Experience of the Seventies,” brings us into the
present, and begins, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, with a se-
ries of references to Heidegger’s reading of Stefan George in
Unterwegs zur Sprache. Slightly misquoting a line from George’s
poem “Das Wort”: “Kein Ding wo das Wort gebricht,”46 which
for Heidegger leads to the question of how poetry and thought
inhabit language in ways that are parallel yet profoundly differ-
ent, and that finally signals a positive poetic, the disappearance
or lacking of the word here seems to point to an absence or least
precariousness of the architectural thing once the unity of its
language was shattered. Tafuri and Dal Co suggest that the par-
allel lines that can sometimes be detected in modern architec-
ture just as much indicate a diversity and pluralism: we should
not too quickly weld them into a unity, but rather, and here too
following Heidegger (at least as Tafuri an Dal Co read him),47
46. The full citation from George’s poem reads: “kein ding sei wo das wort
gebricht.” Tafuri and Dal Co overlook George’s idiosyncratic spelling,
which avoids capitalizing German nouns, but above all the optative
form sei, which is missing in the citation above. The optative is crucial
for Heidegger’s reading, since it shows the positive dimension of the
lacking of the word: the confidence in the power of traditional poetic
language to name the thing must be shattered for a different relation
between word and thing to appear, and the poem describes a process of
renunciation (Entsagung) necessary for this relation to emerge. See Hei-
degger, “Das Wort,” in Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959).
47. The reading of Heidegger here seems close to the one proposed by Cac-
ciari, as also comes across in the latter’s review of the book, “ Eupalinos,
or Architecture,” trans. Stephen Sartarelli, in Hays Architecture Theory
since 1968.
53
perceive the difference between world and thing, i.e., how archi-
tecture refuses to be subsumed under the social and historical
universe of which it is nonetheless a part. There is an irreduc-
ible “estrangement” or “distancing” (MA 364) that governs
contemporary work, Tafuri and Dal Co suggest, which opens
“new lines of conduct” that must be acknowledged and made
into a poetic based on difference and renunciation—obviously
echoing the claims earlier made on behalf of Mies—that would
dispel the myth of unitary origins and unidirectional historical
genealogies.
Surveying a wide spectrum of responses to the demise of the
modern movement, from the flight to technological objectiv-
ism (Piano and Rogers), returns to nature (van Eyck), formal
experimentations that draw on architectural history (Stirling),
nostalgic claims for an architecture that aspires to retrieve classi-
cal monumentality (Kahn) or the commercial flow of Las Vegas
(Venturi), Tafuri and Dal Co detect a surrender of all hope of
seizing control over the city, of which the isolated super-sky-
scraper is the most telling indication. As “isolated monsters”
whose own “inflexible organization acts as surrogate for the or-
der lacking in the city itself” (MA 372), they constitute new
forms of publicity, or as in the case of works by Roche and
Dinkeloo, “a screen on which the images of surrounding life
are projected, but without the ‘renunciation’ of Mies.” (ibid.)48
The resulting divide has cut off the avant-garde from the real,
spawning an infinite series of attempts at recapturing what has
been lost. And yet, Tafuri and Dal Co conclude, this is by no
means an end: “If this book aims to demonstrate anything, it is
precisely the impossibility of writing the word finis at any point
in history.” (392) The figure of the end remains operative, al-
48. In chap. 4 below we will return to different readings of this game of

reflections, which complicate the divide between renunciation and mere
reflection, in Fredric Jameson and Reinhold Martin.
54
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
most like a gravitational pull impossible to resist, but as endings

multiply, echoes intermingle, and repetitions begin to cut across
and blur lines of division, as if the end of utopia was also the end
of the utopia of the end.
The labyrinth of history

In the last of Tafuri’s major works that deal with modern ar-
chitecture as a whole, La sfera e il labirinto, which gathers essays
written during the seventies, he once more speaks of the neces-
sary plurality of languages that the historian must acknowledge,
rejecting yet again, to be sure, any direct and simple operative
relation to practice, but now for the additional reason of trying
to undermine the claims of the Historian that seemed to under-
lie at least some of his earlier writings. The opposition between
sphere and labyrinth seems to signal the conflict between two
desires: first to step out of the flux of history, even in the guise
of a self-confident writing of history that ultimately dominates
and subsumes the event—as it were internalizing and mastering
anxiety by producing the account of its causes, no matter how
inevitable and irreversible these might be—and then the desire
to enter the maze, to lose oneself in the labyrinth, with the risk
of giving in to an aestheticizing infinity of interpretation that
leaves everything as it is. The task of critical work is to acknowl-
edge both these demands, to create a maximum tension between
them without letting any one of them subsume the other.49
The essays develop themes ranging from Piranesi to the pres-
ent, and in many respects they trace the same historical trajec-
tory as Progetto e utopia. The larger theoretical claims that will be
in focus here are however laid out in the introductory section,
“The Historical Project,” which presents a set of new method-
ological perspectives. While continuing his attempts to devel-
49. Later, in chap. 3 below, we will look at a similar opposition, that be-
tween the pyramid and the labyrinth, in the work of Bernard Tschumi.
55
op an account of architecture rooted in historical materialism,

Tafuri also introduces a whole spectrum of other materialisms—
of the body, the signifier, of language and discourse—that give
rise to many unresolved tensions relating 1) to the very sense
of architecture itself as both heteronomous and fragmented,
yet endowed with a particular distance toward the world that
conditions it, 2) to the role of critique as a form of writing that
continually must question its own status and tendency toward
closure, and 3) to the status accorded to ideology as something
that cannot be dispelled as mere false consciousness, but in fact
permeates the whole of intellectual labor, while at the same
maintaining the ability of the analysis to be able somehow to
situate and pierce through its veils so as to point towards its
material conditions. Confusing, sometimes even contradictory,
and more like the record of an inner struggle than a systematic
exposition, his reflections stage the tension between pyramid
and labyrinth in all its aspects, often to the point that a particu-
lar paragraph seems to be canceled by the following. History,
Tafuri writes, citing Carlo Ginzburg, is akin to a jigsaw-puzzle
that can never brought to a conclusion, a labor of Sisyphus that
not only results from the complexity and wealth of materials to
be treated, but also must take upon itself the task of questioning
the nature of the object, even the very nature of reality as such.
“The real problem,” Tafuri states, “is how to project a criticism
capable of constantly putting itself into crisis by putting into
crisis the real.”50
The reference to Carlo Ginzburg and the project of a micro-
historical writing sets the tone for a work that was explicitly
begun three years later in L’armonia e i conflitti, but was already
prefigured in an earlier book, the little noticed collective work
50. The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to
the 1970s, trans. Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT, 1990), 9. Henceforth cited as SL with page number.
56
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
Via Giulia (1975, with Luigi Salerno and Luigi Spezzaferro),51

whose thick description of a particular street in Rome reveals
it to be a condensation of larger urban and political processes
that must be approached from multiple perspectives. On the
one hand, this approach focuses on a highly specific object that
ultimately must be taken as a contingent part of the urban web,
on the other hand it opens the object to an infinity of readings;
the critical act cuts out something from a larger whole while
at the same time showing how the part, as a monad of sorts,52
reflects the whole. The crisis of the object, long since underway
in the kind of modernism that Tafuri had already analyzed in
Progetto e utopia via the case of Hilberseimer, where the logic of
the assembly line dethrones the object as well as the subject if
experience, here, and in a more general fashion, opens onto a
critical act that itself must begin by dismantling and decompos-
ing the object (the edifice, the street, the city, or any other entity
assumed to be given in and through itself), and then proceed to
a recomposing that understands it as a crystallization of more
distant structures. But rather than just creating an effect of a
temporary intersection, the object also produces something of
its own that makes it possible for analysis to decipher the real
as itself split and contradictory, which is what provides it with a
certain distance that Tafuri, as we will see, eventually analyzes
in terms that draw on Russian formalism as well as, albeit with
more reserve, Adorno. This, I think, is the sense of the crisis of
the real, its krisis in the Greek sense of division and splitting,
which does not imply any rejection of the claim that there would
51. Via Giulia: Un’ utopia urbanistica del ‘500 (Rome: Staderini, 1975).
52. The term “monad” is not used by Tafuri, but the logic of the argument
draws him close to Adorno’s understanding of the term: the monad
concentrates the world within itself, and in this it lets us understand
the contradictions of the world in a condensed form. For Adorno on
the monadic structure of the work, see Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert
Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 1997), 237–239.
57
be a real as such. Even though Tafuri occasionally seems to en-

ter into the vicinity of the various theories of simulation and of
reality as merely an effect of discourse that were emerging at the
time, he ultimately rejects them, although not without first let-
ting them infiltrate his own writings, which is one of the reasons
for their meandering and hesitant quality, attributes that that
go so far as to make the texts cry out to be deciphered rather
than read, more so than any of his previous texts.
Ultimately, Tafuri suggests, for historical writing this is
a problem of language, and the language problem that earlier
was diagnosed in architecture now invades critical discourse
itself. This discourse cannot avoid speaking a multiplicity of
languages, and it must draw on a vast array of vocabularies bor-
rowed from disciplines whose reduction to a common structure
remains fundamentally tenuous. Architecture, as shorthand for
many overlapping fields, cannot be reduced to a language that
would be its own, but can only be grasped as a dispersal—which,
Tafuri notes, while still distancing himself from such a conclu-
sion, seems like the final outcome of a “Lacanian left” (SL 2).53
But is it at all possible to write a history that respects such
multiplicity? Does not the act of writing necessarily produce
53. The meaning of terms like “left” and “right” is far from obvious. Ta-
furi’s formulation might be taken in the sense that the “left” would un-
derstand the symbolic order as historical through and through, whereas
the “right” would uphold a more emphatically structural view that sees
historical transformations of language as mere fluctuations, ripples that
can never shake the great Law of the Father and the Signifier. A bit
further on, Tafuri cautions us that the “privilege attributed by Lacan to
the pure materiality of the signifier” should not be identified with any
“infantile attempts at reconstructing a lost fullness for disenchanted
words” (SL 6), but he leaves the positive meaning of this materiality
unexplained. K. Michael Hays has attempted to formulate a systematic
theory of architecture on the basis of the Lacanian symbolic, but only
with a general reference to Tafuri’s negative view of the resurgence of
the “language problem” in the sixties; see Hays, Architecture’s Desire:
Reading the Late Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass.; MIT, 2010), 1–21, on
Tafuri 3–4.
58
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
a particular reduction, and more specifically, does the Marxist

framework to which Tafuri—although with increasing distance—
still adheres not require a concept of totality and determination
in the last instance that must always override fragmentation,
as merely a surface effect in consciousness, i.e., as ideology? The
writing of history, Tafuri suggests, is, to be sure, always a pro-
duction, an analytical construction just as much as a “decon-
struction of ascertainable realities” (SL 3); but that writing is
itself implicated in the objects that it treats means that the his-
torical project must always be a project of a crisis. Still, in order
for discourse to not just turn around itself, it must also point to
that which resists its appropriating force, fracturing and impli-
cating it while yet providing it with an object that still, no mat-
ter how distantly, promises a truth—a truth that cannot, even
though there is no way to simply release it from the veils that
cover it, be understood as just one more move in the space of
ideology. Writing is a movement that loses itself in the object,
decomposes and recomposes it, guiding a truth that remains
just as elusive as indispensable.
As a preliminary name for that which resists the historical
project as a fantasy of externally dominating and subsuming the
object, Tafuri suggests, somewhat surprisingly, the body, which
he here understands through the optic of Nietzsche’s geneal-
ogy of morals. This would be the material origin of values that
proves to be fundamentally multiple, as Foucault had already
suggested in his reading of Nietzsche, and in opposition to
many other such claims to locate an originary dimension in the
physical and elemental, it shows that the knowledge brought to
bear on the body, but also implicated in it, no longer provides
any recognition or consolation, but that it in fact will take us
away from ourselves.54
54. The reference to the body, here filtered through the writings of Franco
Rella, obviously contains deep problems, not simply because it seems
59
But in this, Tafuri notes (as if he felt the need to immediately

undo his own claim, in line with the hesitation that permeates
the text in its integrality), there lies the risk of performing a
dissemination for its own sake that he here indiscriminately as-
cribes to both Derrida and Foucault, and which he sees as even-
tually ending up in the production of new units, fragments of
meaning that somehow would be significant in themselves. If
we must inject “the profound fragmentation of the real itself”
(SL 5) into the analysis, so that it becomes visible as made up
of several levels, this does not yield mere differences; if architec-
ture does not form a unitary ideological block, and the critique
of architectural ideology has still only identified its most im-
mediate and visible aspects, this implies that there is need for an
analysis that probes even further into its constitution.
Form, Tafuri suggests following Simmel, should rather be
understood as a boundary of the object that at the same time is
a limit of language, imposed as a historical crisis that prevents
any fullness of form, subjective or objective, from ever being
established. There will be no unique name or term for this crisis,
as Nietzsche, as well as Marx, has taught us, and “words that
are petrified and hard as stones”55 must be taken apart so as not
to introduce a level that only with great difficulties, if indeed at all,
can be integrated into a Marxist analysis. Furthermore, it can be asked
what body is implied here: the phenomenological, affective, desiring,
fantasmatic, constructed? The reference to Foucault’s 1971 “Nietzsche,
Genealogy, History” might seem to indicate that Tafuri would be
following the path toward an analytic of knowledge and power, but in
fact he only preserves the negative moment in Foucault’s essay, i.e., the
moment of dispersal in relation to a philosophy of the subject. Gener-
ally, Tafuri’s comments on Foucault are, as we will see, confusing to say
the least, moving between praise and scorn without ever settling down
to provide a clear argument. This comes across above in the collective
volume Il dispositivo Foucault (1977), which documents the only system-
atic confrontation with Foucault undertaken by the Venice School, and
which is fraught with confusions and misleading interpretations; for
more on this, see chap. 6, below.
55. Nietzsche, Morgenröte, No. 47, cited in SL 7. Today, Nietzsche writes,
we must, unlike the ancients who thought that they had made a dis-
60
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
to turn into the impenetrable monuments that are particularly

erected by architectural history. The stones pile up, but it is nei-
ther sufficient just to tear them down again, nor to probe the
interstices between the rocks where new crevices can always be
found, new subterfuges invented, and new games played; what
is needed is an analysis of the battle that is constitutive of space
as a contradictory layering. This battle, however, can not as
such be dated to any specific point or event in time, as if there
first would have been a harmonious order that subsequently
was lost, which to some extent was the underlying hypothesis
of Progetto e utopia—a kind of negative foil that Tafuri would no
doubt have rejected, but which his narrative cannot help repro-
ducing—where the moment signaled by the name Laugier was
the turning point. The “historic space” that must be uncovered
is now understood as inherently complex, made up of words,
stones, technologies, and practices, none of which can be given
exclusive priority.
But what, then, would be the direction in which this spectral
analysis is moving? The unavoidable conclusion of the forego-
ing, which, however, Tafuri must attempt to avoid, seems to be
that analysis simply has no end: no level, neither base nor super-
structure, neither consciousness or discourse nor the spaces of
practices and actions, is absolute, and the infinite analysis that
Freud perceived as a constant threat to the success of psycho-
analysis appears as the inevitable result. The reference to modes
covery when they forged a word, stumble over rock-hard, immortalized

words, and rather break a leg than a word (“Jetzt muss man bei jeder
Erkenntnis über steinharte verewigte Worte stolpern, und wird dabei
eher ein Bein brechen, als ein Wort.”) The image of stone and petrifica-
tion plays a similar role in Marx, where the role of critique is to set
hardened relations in movement, force them to dance, by singing back
to them their own melody: “man muss diese versteinerten Verhältnisse
dadurch zum Tanzen zwingen, dass man ihnen ihre eigne Melodie
vorsingt!” Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, Karl Marx/Friedrich
Engels Werke (Berlin: Dietz, 1976), vol.1, 381.
61
of production cannot be an ultimate reference, since they are

themselves traversed by ideologies that help to produce them;
“isolated in themselves, [they] neither explain nor determine,”
Tafuri writes (SL 10).
But how should we then understand the term “ideology”,
if it no longer can be understood as mere superstructure? First
of all, it acts in groups (per fasci; the Italian term is certainly
not fortuitous here), as can be seen in the case of the poetics of
the avant-garde, which displays the full political spectrum, from
left to right. This polymorphous quality, and the way in which
ideology is capable of performing all kinds of functions, indi-
cates that it cannot simply be eliminated by analysis, as if it were
only a mirage to be dispelled by the clarity of consciousness.
The distance that this sets up in relation to the earlier work is
marked out when Tafuri claims that it would be useless to “tear
into the methods of ‘operative criticism’” (SL 11), at least to
the extent that this would pave the way toward a restructuring
of the disciplines. Operative criticism is no doubt ideology too,
but as the analysis of project and utopia gradually folds back
into the idea of a historical project that, itself, although without
being utopian, must question and perhaps even negate (ou-) its
own place (topos), the distinction between the operative and the
critical turns out to be far from clear. If analysis and project at
present are divided, Tafuri writes, this is no longer just in the
sense that had been suggested earlier, i.e., that the first would
be unable to give precepts to the latter, but also, and more fun-
damentally, because the very project of history finds itself chal-
lenged, and any claim to the opposite means that it would be
“obliged to betray itself consciously” (11). The final page of a
historical account must be taken only as a suspension, a “pause
that implies ellipsis marks” (12), and in this it further intensifies
the “unease” confessed at the final page in L’architettura contem-
poranea (MA 392).
62
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
A history that in this way reconstructs itself as a perennial

transformation must become a criticism and a doubt capable
of continually turning back on themselves; it is not a series of
philological proofs,56 or the establishing of links between dif-
ferent fields, but rather “probes what appears to be a void” (SL
13); it seeks the interstices between technologies and languages
without suturing them into a signifying whole, and “projects
the crisis of techniques already given” (ibid.), by which we should
no doubt also understand the techniques of historical inter-
pretation. But—and Tafuri immediately turns the tables once
more—if there is no solution to the project of history as crisis,
we must just as little simply stop in the face of the multiple, “in
astonishment at the edge at the enchanted forest of languages”
(ibid.). If historical analysis is incapable of demystifying per se,
it is nevertheless part of a social struggle, and must risk a tem-
porary “inactuality,” which seems to detach it both from the
past as a set of given facts and documents, as well as from the
present as a circumscribed contemporaneity. While its immedi-
ate relation to practice remains blocked, it upholds a place in
the battle of space, and its instruments, we might say with and
against Tafuri, while lacking any definitive instrumentality, can-
not avoid being made to operate, become operative, precisely
because they cannot, must not, form a self-enclosed whole that
could be presented in a discourse on method.
But even though the battle of space as such cannot be dat-
ed, there is nonetheless a specific fragmentation of architecture
since the Enlightenment, Tafuri notes, the seemingly disjointed
56. All of which is of course a profoundly Nietzschean distrust, and can be
understood as the attempt to wrest another sense from the term “phi-
lology.” The task of history, as Nietzsche suggests, is not the reestablish-
ing of a first unity, but an explosion of terms into divergent signifying
chains, which affects the reading of both ancients and moderns. See the
notes from 1875 for a planned work on the theme “Wir Philologen,”
Kritische Studienausgabe, eds. Colli-Montinari (Berlin and New York: de
Gruyter, 1988), vol. 8.
63
nature of which may be taken as a positive point of departure,

instead of the established “texts” of finished works; this frag-
mentation signals a constant “beyond” against which analysis
must measure itself, and which produces the constant ruptures
in modern architecture that the “monumental constructions
of the Modern Movement” (SL 14) and its official historiogra-
phers attempt to cover over. To trace this process of fragmenta-
tion—and here Tafuri strikes a more recognizable Marxist note—
means to follow the dialectic of concrete and abstract labor,
intellectual labor and modes of production, and the history of
architecture must relate both to concrete projects and their im-
plications for a general history. This amounts to an “explosion”
of the work and dissemination of its unities, all of which must
become the object of separate analysis, and in this sense there
can be no single methodology that takes account of the totality
of the work; the critical act is rather a “recomposition” or “re-
montage” that breaks the magic circle of language by showing
its foundations, but also indicates the mode of functioning of
this language, which is not merely that of a distorted reflection
that analysis could correct.
Here, the alternative that permeates these methodological
reflections recurs: either we may simply immerse ourselves in
the free play of valences, following Barthes and the plaisir du texte,
or we must return to external factors. Both are to some extent
legitimate: the former is the operation performed by operative
history, which notwithstanding its claims to historical analysis
floats outside of time and space, and forms a “mass of weightless
metaphors” (SL 15); the second, with which Tafuri no doubt
aligns himself, measures language against its outside, which, he
underlines, need not be taken as vulgar Marxism that erases the
specificity of architecture. The model here is Benjamin’s “The
Author as Producer,” which suggests that neither form nor con-
tent should be taken as essential in themselves, since what must
64
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
be analyzed is the position of the work within the relations of

production.57
At every step, this Benjaminian idea of production calls into
question the capitalist division of labor, as well as signals the
need for an analysis of “structural cycles,” i.e., the way in which
architecture is integrated into larger historical processes. This is
indicated by the historical role of ideology, and the historicizing
of its concrete intervention opens up a new field of inquiry: we
must, Tafuri writes, “enter into the magic castle of ideologies” in
a way that prevents us from being caught up in a “hypnosis” and
an “engrossing game of mirrors” (SL 16) This means to “unravel
the intricate and labyrinthine paths traveled by Utopia” (ibid.),
which was already the proposal of Progetto e utopia. Here, how-
ever, there is also a different move that just as much must be ac-
counted for, the “knight’s move,” as this idea was formulated by
Viktor Shklovsky,58 which is an idea significantly missing from
Progetto e utopia. There is a “swerve” that gives the work a particu-
lar autonomy by taking a step aside from the real, producing an
estrangement,59 in terms that were also picked up by Brecht, or
57. Here it must be noted that Tafuri shifts the perspective of Benjamin,
which in “The Author as Producer” is not that of the historian, but
precisely the one that Tafuri wants to avoid, i.e. that of a partisan critic
supporting particular forms of contemporary work. The context of
Benjamin’s essay is the debate of the period on the political efficacy of
literature, and on whether a formalist or the content-oriented criticism
is the most relevant, to which Benjamin responds by declaring the
distinction invalid.
58. See Shklovsky, Knight’s Move, trans. Richard Sheldon (Normal. Ill.:
Dalkey Archive Press, 2005).
59. The notion of art as a device or technique of estrangement (priem
ostranenija), and Shklovsky’s demand that the artist must “make the
stone stony” by removing the “algebraization” of knowledge, in fact
have a strong resemblance to the phenomenological quest for originary
intuitions and the “things themselves,” and they draw on a long series
of influences leading back through Bergson to Novalis and German
Romanticism. On Husserl and Russian formalism, see Victor Erlich,
Russian Formalism (The Hague: Mouton, 1980). For the connection
to Bergson, see James M. Curtis, “Bergson and Russian Formalism,”
Comparative Literature, vol. 28, No. 2 (Spring 1976): 109–121. Tzvetan
65
a kind of “surreality.”60 It is useless to define ideology simply as

false consciousness, Tafuri writes, since no work simply reflects a
preexisting ideology, which does not mean that the swerve itself is
not charged with ideology; there is always a margin of ambiguity,
as well as compromises that must be made for the distance to the
real to become effective.
As a reaction to this, the avant-garde attempted to reduce
the swerve in order to take control of the world; the decanta-
tion chamber of the Bauhaus, analyzed in Progetto e utopia, would
be a perfect case of this, in its implicit claims to test various
earlier strategies with a view to the efficiency and capacity to
become functional within a universal design strategy. In the ear-
lier analysis, this strategy was understood as a temporary link
in a larger chain, beyond which the Plan as a comprehensive
instrument was gradually transferred from architecture to the
level of State and Capital, with the 1929 crash as the decisive
turning point. Now, the claim seems inverted: the unity must
be fractured from the outset, and progressive and regressive
tendencies, anti-urban nostalgia, communalist and anarchist
elements intermingle, cross and fuse, to the point of making
many of these projects impossible to locate in terms of politi-
cal claims. This complexity in turn necessitates methodological
eclecticism, on the part of the historian, so that finally the very
Todorov points to the connection to Novalis and Romanticism in

Critique de la critique: Un roman d’apprentissage (Paris: Seuil, 1984). For
a discussion of the relation between theories of estrangement from
Shklovsky to Brecht, and the architecture of the early avant-garde, see
Alexandra Vougia, Estranging Devices: Architectural Modernism and Strate-
gies of De-alienation, diss. (London: Architectural Association, 2016).
60. Tafuri here draws on Max Bense’s Aesthetica: Einführung in die neue
Aesthetik (Baden-Baden: Agis 1965). For Bense, aesthetics must draw
on mathematical form, which he found in dimensions like metrics and
rhythm in literature, just as he, conversely, wanted to discern an idea of
style in mathematics. Both are based in universal operations carried out
on simple elements or signs that ultimately lead to a general theory of
informatics, which remains far from Tafuri’s proposals.
66
1. Tafuri and the
end of utopia
term architecture, Tafuri writes, must be used in the broadest

sense: there are no common denominators that would allow for
a clear-cut classification of all its uses and ramifications. But if
this means to destroy the work, Tafuri cautions us that it is not
done in order to reach something like the “Word,” which he
here associates to Foucault’s archeology, i.e., a set of rules that
would organize things solely through the schemata of discourse.
Instead, the avant-garde hypotheses must be seen in relation the
history of urban planning, which follows a different trajectory
described by the medicalization of the city that was intrinsic to
physiocratic thought, a process that must not be taken as simply
equivalent to the industrial revolution.61
And yet the problem of relative autonomy, as in the images
of the swerve and the knight’s move, remains, and Tafuri points
to the analysis proposed by Robert Klein of the gradual disap-
pearance of the referent and the emergence of abstractionism in
modern art as a model. There is, Klein suggests, an unfolding cri-
sis of the “nonfigurative norm” against which the image could be
measured, a norm that eventually ends up being absorbed inside
the work itself, and renders obsolete the twofold figure of impres-
sionism and psychologism.62 But how can this shift be connected
to architecture? It must be understood in terms of a pervasive
61. The appeal to a “Word” here rejected by Tafuri applies in fact only to
some of slightly apocalyptical concluding sections of Les mots et les choses,
and has little or no relevance in relation to Foucault’s work on power/
knowledge from the seventies, which would have been the obvious
reference here. Ironically, the “medicalization of the city” is precisely
one of the central themes of Foucault’s work from the mid-seventies
onward, as is visible not only in his lectures (which Tafuri could not
have known), but also in several interviews and writings that were
published at the time, notably the collaborative volume Les machines à
guérir (Brussels: Mardaga, 1977). I discuss some of these texts and the
relevance to architecture in my Essays, Lectures (Stockholm: Axl Books,
2007), chap. 8, and Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009).
62. See Klein, La forme et l’intelligible: Écrits sur la Renaissance et l’art moderne
(Paris: Gallimard, 1970).
67
dialectical opposition to classicism, Tafuri proposes, which con-

stitutes the basic problem of modern art, but also must be able to
inform our reading of the pre-modern forms, and in this sense—
which echoes the claims about Brunelleschi’s avant-garde gesture
in Teorie e storia—“Tuscan humanism can function as a rearview
mirror” in which “are reflected the ghosts of the contemporary
bad conscience.” (SL 19) Against the too facile rejections of
autonomy, Tafuri also points to Adorno’s warning in Aesthetic
Theory: the dissolution of the art character, “de-artification”
(Entkunstung) should not be made into a slogan, and the theory of
the aura and its disappearing in the age of mechanical reproduc-
ibility must be handled dialectically. In Tafuri’s reading, Adorno’s
caution however bespeaks a certain nostalgia, which also is sup-
posed to transpire in his treatment of the notion of fragment as
belonging to the totality as that part which resists it.63 There can
be no nostalgia, no pre-existing totality, only a subsequently con-
structed whole in analysis that can be broken at any point.
What is needed on a more specific level, Tafuri proposes, is
a new history of intellectual labor, as it has been anticipated by
63. Tafuri here engages in a strange misreading of the exchange between

Benjamin and Adorno. When Adorno says that the “exhibition value”
(Ausstellungswert) suggested by Benjamin as the progressive and emanci-
patory quality of post-auratic art is merely an afterimage of the process
of exchange, it is difficult to see that this is something that “does not
in reality greatly modify Benjamin’s original thesis, which could quite
readily admit that that the ‘exhibition value’ is the ‘imago’ of the
exchange process, but only in works that have not completely incorpo-
rated that process within themselves” (SL 20). What is stake, and more
patently so in the correspondence in 1936 around the Artwork essay
(whereas Adorno’s critique is more subdued in Aesthetic Theory), is in
fact the idea of autonomy, which Adorno defends against Benjamin’s
avant-garde and “anarchist” (so Adorno) desire to “liquidate” (so Ben-
jamin) high art in the name of immediate political efficiency; see the
commented translations of the letters in Aesthetics and Politics (London:
Verso, 1979). Tafuri’s position in fact seems much closer to Adorno
than to Benjamin, at least in this context. His claim that Adorno’s
understanding of the fragment would be nostalgic is equally misleading,
and follows from the same skewed reading of this debate.
68
Rodchenko, Corbusier, and others: a history of planning that
goes beyond the architect, and shows how the avant-gardes have
been transformed into techniques. This means to undo the tradi-
tional role of the architect, and, seen in this light, the proposals of
Progetto e utopia were less a series of statements of end and closure,
and more an invitation to pursue the task of linking architecture
(understood in a broad sense that includes technologies, models
of organization and planning), critique (as the project of a history
that would be able to decompose and recompose the elements of
the trajectory of modernism in a way that cuts across disciplin-
ary borders), and ideology (as the element of thinking and acting
that includes illusions and well as partial truths, and does not al-
low for a thought that would simply see reality at is, since this re-
ality its itself made up of subject and object positions that include
the historians own). What this analysis can offer, Tafuri writes, is
“an intermittent journey through a maze of tangled paths, one of
the many ‘provisional constructions’ obtainable by starting with
these chosen materials. The cards can be reshuffled and to them
added many that were intentionally left out: the game is destined
to continue.” (SL 21)
2. 1966:
Thinking the City
“We seek the crowd. Events, choices, changes, contrasts. The

Metropolis is more than just work, school, career. It is freedom,
anonymity, choice, chance, adventure, play. The whole complex.
The resistance of distances and queues. The similarity of mo-
ments in the press, in radio, and television. The movement of
individuals and groups, cars and buses. Participation is a con-
dition of life.”1 The opening statement by the curators of the
exhibition “Hej stad” (“Hello City”) at Moderna Museet in
Stockholm in 1966 seems to capture the particular energy of the
debate around the urban form that exploded during the 1960s.
To some extent a rare event in Sweden, where the discussions
on architecture and urbanism were still largely conditioned by
the planning discourses of functionalism and social engineering,
this exhibition, both defiant and open in its attitude, inserted
itself into a wider context. Drawing on what at the time were
the most advanced forms of artistic expression available, it at-
tempted to rethink the city as a zone of conflict and intensity, to
open it up towards a future that was in fact unknown, but it also
looked back to a debate on the city that is as old as modernism
itself, and that had haunted the architectural avant-garde since
at least the 1920s. Revisiting the terms of this debate, and per-
1. Hej Stad, catalog (Stockholm: Arkitekturmuseet, 1966), 5. The exhibi-

tion was curated by Sture Balgård, Eva Björklund, and Jörgen Lindvall,
at the time students at the School of Architecture at the Royal Institute
of Technology in Stockholm, as well as Mårten Larsson, from the
Arkitekturmuseum. The exhibition was the opening exhibition of the
recently relocated museum, and in this sense a highly symbolic event.
71
ceiving that which earlier had been seen as a problem as rather

a possibility, “Hej stad” assumed the task of projecting the past
toward some unknown future, and it did so in the mode of a
greeting (“Hello”), as if to underscore the suddenness of a dis-
ruptive encounter, but also of an event that must be seen as a
promise.
“Hej stad” was the sequel to a previous exhibition, “Alarm,”
organized the year before at Teknorama and curated by the
same team, which likewise had posed the question of urban re-
newal. Reviewers of “Hej stad” describe a feeling of confusion
and sensory overload, which was already present in the former
exhibition, but here seems to have escalated even further: “A
chaos of light and sound sensations. One attempts to find a
common thread. Was it right to retain the exhibition format
from ‘Alarm’? To add even more images? And even more wail-
ing sinus notes? And even more ambitious intentions?”2 The
combination of electro-acoustic music (by Ralph Lundsten and
Leo Nilsson), texts, images, and statistic information of vari-
ous kinds, seems to have aspired to the creation of a total work
of art, somewhat uneasily straddling the divide between the at-
tempt to produce an immersion in the present and a pedagogic
ambition that calls for an intellectual distance.
This ambition echoes the program launched previously in
the earliest manifesto of Swedish modern architecture, Acceptera
(1931, a the year after the Stockholm Exhibition), which was
cited on the first page of the catalog for “Hej stad” (reprinted
above a cartoon that speaks of the need for a better understand-
ing between cultures, adding a non-nationalist flavor that marks
an important shift with respect to much of the rhetoric in 1931):
“Accept the reality at hand—only then do we have the prospect
of mastering it, of getting the better of it in order to change it,
2. Bo Grönlund, “OOOOOOH AAAAAAH hej stad,” review in Göteborgs
Handels- och Sjöfartstidning, April 13, 1966.
72
2. 1966:
Thinking the City
and of creating a culture that would be a flexible tool for life.

We have no need for the out-grown forms of an old culture in
order to uphold our self-esteem. We cannot sneak out of our
own time from the rear. Neither can we jump over that which is
troublesome and unclear into a utopian future. We can do noth-
ing other than look reality in the eyes and accept it in order to
master it.”3
We should note that the use of the verb form “accept”—in
Swedish, as well as English, at once an infinitive and an impera-
tive form—does not simply signify, in 1931 or in 1966, a simple
and uncritical surrender to the forces that be, but rather the
necessity of entering into the contemporary moment in order
to channel and steer its processes: acceptance is not obedience,
but rather the means to acknowledge the present in order to
asses its possibilities, predict the outcome of actions, and plan
for the future. On the other hand, a profound fascination with
the present is manifest, along with a desire to identify with that
which is emerging, for better or worse, even with the logic of the
spectacle, which to some extent seems an integral part of most
avant-garde architectural discourse. If the idea of future urban
forms always appears to release a vast array of both utopian and
dystopic energies, the most interesting cases of this are perhaps
those that manage to include both of these positions, play them
off against each other and generate a profound insecurity that
allows us to enter into a “beyond good and evil” experience—
not necessarily in order to remain there, but to use this leveling,
3. Acceptera (Stockholm: Tiden, 1931), 198. The book was published

the year after the Stockholm Exhibition, and was co-written by six of
the most prestigious architects and intellectuals of the time: Gun-
nar Asplund, Wolter Gahn, Sven Markelius, Gregor Paulsson, Eskil
Sundahl, and Uno Åhrén. For a reading of this text and the way it con-
structs a highly strategic version of Swedish history and architectural
modernism, see the introduction to Helena Mattsson and Sven-Olov
Wallenstein (eds.), Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption and the
Welfare State (London: Black Dog, 2010).
73
or willing suspension of previous aesthetic and socio-cultural

hierarchies, as a means to grasp what is emergent instead of re-
sidual in our present.
The exhibition was organized in a series of stations that dealt
with themes ranging from “Change, event” to “Contrasts and
combinations in the structure of the city,” “Individuals and
groups,” Old and new pleasures and playgrounds,” “Scales of
various traffic machines,” “Human scale and attitudes toward
traffic,” and a host of other thematic juxtapositions that reflect-
ed the urban debate of the time in what one must assume was
a dialectical, even pedagogical way. The structure of the catalog
on the other hand emphasized the sense of immersion: consist-
ing almost entirely of citations, from the Bible to current jour-
nalism and political debates, it demanded a response from the
visitors, but at the same time also deprived them of their sense
of orientation. Some of the texts expressed an anxiety over ur-
banization and the loss of earlier forms of life; others reveled
in the marvels of technology; some deplored the alienation of
modern Metropolitan life; others cherished it as the possibil-
ity of freedom and movement. It was more like a manual for
thinking further than an imperative to affirm or reject. In this
it reflected a sense of openness, also encapsulated in the quote
drawn from one of the key texts of the historical avant-garde,
Bruno Taut’s Stadtbaukunst alter und neuer Zeit, which propheti-
cally concluded the catalog with a praise of “eternal building,”
not in the sense of a noun, but of a verb: eternity belongs to the
process, to the activity of bauen and not to the resulting edifice.
“Hej stad” was a rare moment in attempts to capture and chan-
nel that openness and energy, which, subsequently, for many
reasons, largely disappeared from Swedish architectural culture;
it was an attempt to tap into an energy that seemed to be in the
air.
74
2. 1966:
Thinking the City
Metropolis and the limits of modernism

During the 1960s, the city began to emerge as the essential co-
nundrum of modern architecture, perhaps even as that which
would eventually force it to become something other than mod-
ern, although the prefix “post-” would soon be appropriated by
those who advocated a revival of historical styles. Modernism,
both as a concept and as an effective historical reality, had al-
ready been questioned from a number of perspectives in the
work of historians emerging after the Second World War, all
the way from the attempts to retrieve lost organic possibilities
in Bruno Zevi, to Reyner Banham’s vision of renewed modern-
ism that would finally cut the ties to the Beaux-Arts tradition
and become truly modern.4 In these and other successive re-
readings of the past, the possibility of retrieval however came to
appear increasingly remote, and it was overlaid with new con-
cepts and experiences derived from a transformed technological
landscape. Urban space suddenly became the object of reading,
it appeared as a text or a historical palimpsest, or a collage; or
it became an organism based in processes of metabolism, or a
system or assemblage of flows and conduits.5 Sometimes this
4. For discussions of the successive generations of postwar historians, see
Panayotis Tournikiotis, The Historiography of Modern Architecture (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1999), and Anthony Vidler, Historians of the
Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT, 2008).
5. A particularly interesting case of this transformation, although less
known and situated at the margins of the architectural discourse of
the late sixties and early seventies, is the work of the French research
collective Cerfi (Centre de recherche et de formation institutionnelles).
Drawing on Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari, they began to theorize the
city as an assemblage of “collective facilities” that channel, block, and
incite desire. In the end, they suggest, this implies that the city cannot
be taken as an ultimate category, but emerges as a higher level of col-
lective facilities that in turn is inscribed in a larger territorial organiza-
tion that again is part of an even larger system, and so on, without any
defined limits. The city becomes a fixating and stabilizing machine, or
a kind of relay or switch that on a certain level overcodes and connects
flows that originate on a lower level and continue on a higher one. See
75
transformed perception was intended to lay the foundation for

a new urban science, but first and foremost it was perceived as
heralding a time of experimentation, a hedonist affirmation of
the imaginary, chance, and openness, in the face of which many
(though not all) of the earlier modernist utopias simply seemed
far too bereft of pleasure to sustain interest.6
To some extent, the city had always remained on the hori-
zon as the key problem ever since the final break-up of the clas-
sical paradigm in the beginning of the nineteenth century, or
even earlier. Manfredo Tafuri, in his influential Progetto e utopia
Cerfi, Recherches No. 13 (1973), Généalogie du capital: 1. Les équipements
du pouvoir, and my “Genealogy of Capital and the City: Cerfi, Deleuze,
and Guattari”, in Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson, and Jonatan
Metzger (eds.), Deleuze and the City (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2016).
6. “Urbanism,” writes Jonathan Crary in a study of the urban imaginary
of J. G. Ballard, “collided with that moment in capitalism when the
rationalization of built space became secondary to problems of speed
and the maximization of circulation. Urbanism continued to operate in
an increasingly bereft domain: it sought to impose spatial intelligibil-
ity onto a locale that was being transformed by the antiterritoriality of
capital.” See Crary, “J. G. Ballard and the Promiscuity of Forms,” Zone
1/2 (1986), 159. The reactions to such deterritorializing forces were of
course highly variable, from attempts to regain control, to more celebra-
tory modes, as in the case of Archigram and others who perceived these
forces as heralding a culture of individual desire and fantasy. This devel-
opment finds an interesting parallel in the trajectory of Roland Barthes,
leading from the early critique of ideology (Mythologies, 1957) through
a scientistic structuralism (Elements de sémiologie, 1963) to a hedonism
of reading understood an act of writing, as in his famous distinction in
Le plaisir du texte (1973) between texts that are “lisible” and those that
are “scriptible.” A crucial turning is the remarkable self-destructing
analysis of Balzac in S/Z (1970), where the sheer “scientificity” of the
categorical system leads to an almost total dispersal of the object of
study. What is important, Barthes often underlines in the later work, is
not so much to dispel the illusions of ideology, but rather to dismantle
the very idea of truth. Interestingly enough, these statements can be
read in conjunction with his understanding of the city as a text, which
Barthes first formulates in terms of the possibility of an urban semiol-
ogy (“Sémiologie et urbanisme”, 1967), but then gradually transforms
into a new type of jouissance in the drift of signs and in the temptation
of the late modern flâneur to lose himself in a forest of symbols, as in
L’empire des signes (1970).
76
2. 1966:
Thinking the City
(1973), goes so far as to locate the beginning of this crisis in the

mid-eighteenth century and the paradigmatic attempts of Abbé
Laugier, in his Observations sur l’architecture (1756), to cover over
the gap opened up between the nascent urban form and nature
by representing the former in terms of landscape painting. This
crisis—which in Tafuri’s chronology antedates the invention of
proto-modernist architectural languages, and the unhinging of
style from the classical orders in the 1820s—could, he suggests,
be kept at bay throughout the nineteenth century by the various
projects for urban reform and renewal, but became rampant once
more at the time of the early modern masters. If the activities of
the avant-garde aspired towards a synthesis based on architecture
and design, these disciplines were soon faced with problems ema-
nating from the level beyond their own technical competence,
from the city as a big machine, and finally, they were shipwrecked
on the rocks of capital itself, the ultimate machine, whose con-
crete effects on the spatial ordering of social relations could not
be theorized within a discourse of architectural form.
During a transitional stage, the idea of the plan seemed like
the instrument that would finally allow architecture to exert its
own competence over the whole urban territory, although this
illusion, Tafuri suggests, was soon dispelled by the global eco-
nomic restructuring that occurred in the wake of the Wall Street
crash. Within the policies of an expanding and active state, ar-
chitecture became a mediating link between utopian projection
and political realism, and the avant-garde urban visions of the
1920s were in fact only failed attempts to provide formal solu-
tions to problems whose answers could not be found at the level
of design.
One of the most telling of these visions was the attempt
within the Neue Sachlichkeit to adjust to the model of the assem-
bly line. This was an attempt to recast the task of architecture
on the basis of a generalized Taylorism, and to seize control over
77
the entire process that leads from the singular element to the
city-totality, within which the individual object is dissolved in
a cycle that also mobilizes the user and lays claims to displace
older forms of aesthetic experience. This is displayed in Ludwig
Hilberseimer’s manifesto Großstadtarchitektur (1927), which
proposes a reading of the city as a continuous chain where no
link has priority, and where eventually the moment of groß takes
precedence over Stadt. The issue is no longer the Metropolis as a
bounded place with a specific identity, the “mother city”—thus
severing the “metro-” from its Greek root meter, mother—but
the Metropolis-machine, whose basic habitat unity is the sin-
gular cell, while the edifice, and eventually the city, ceases to
be a basic form. Just as place and space, nuances and exceptions
must disappear for this Metropolitan logic to unfold, and with
them all of architecture’s traditional dimensions, so too the
new scaleless architecture takes us away from the experiencing
subject and its identification with an affective environment, or
more precisely, opens up the possibility of a subjective percep-
tion whose anonymity constitutes a moment of inescapable
truth condensed in the image of the assembly line.
Significantly enough, this loss of place, which extends from
the disruption of the image of the city, to use Kevin Lynch’s
expression, to the violent displacement of the phenomenologi-
cal space-time coordinates of the perceiving subject, could also
be reinterpreted as a kind of emancipatory nihilism, as was the
case in the writings of Massimo Cacciari, whose early work de-
veloped in close connection to Tafuri’s. Cacciari takes his cues
partly from Heidegger, and somewhat surprisingly argues that if
modernity does not allow for dwelling as that which Heidegger,
in most traditional readings, would appear to mourn,7 then the
lesson to be drawn from his work is that this condition is not
7. For more on this, see chap. 4 below.
78
2. 1966:
Thinking the City
just de facto irreversible, but must be affirmed. In the essay

“Eupaulinos, or Architecture,” written in the form of a review
essay of Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co’s Modern Architecture,8
Cacciari emphatically denies that Heidegger’s writings on tech-
nology and dwelling advocate a return to an authentic world, or
any nostalgia for a pre-modern unity of man and world. Their
task, Cacciari suggests, is rather to create the conceptual un-
derpinning of an authentic housing for inauthenticity, and for an
architecture that testifies to the absence and impossibility of
dwelling in the modern Metropolis. Heidegger thus points to
the double nature of modern architecture, its misunderstand-
ing of itself: he renders “impossible or inconceivable the Values
and Purposes on which this architecture nourishes itself,”9 but
he also shows what it in fact performs. Modern architecture,
Cacciari later claims, in fact undertakes a radical “uprooting
from the place (as a place of dwelling),” which is the “exact
opposite of Heidegger’s Holzwege.” The architecture “‘without
qualities’ of the Metropolis—a conscious image of fulfilled nihil-
ism—excludes the characteristics of the place.”10
This uprooting, of which Cacciari finds the clearest expres-
sion even as early as in Adolf Loos, is not just simply nothing-
ness or a negative nihilism, but rather is an understanding of
dwelling itself as an act of resistance. The nostalgia that per-
8. “Eupalinos, or Architecture,” trans. Stephen Sartarelli, in K M. Hays

(ed.): Architecture Theory since 1968 (Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1998);
Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Modern Architecture, trans. Er-
ich Robert Wolf (New York: Rizzoli, 1980), 2 vols. Another important
aspect of the background to Cacciari’s discussion can be found in Dal
Co’s introductory essay “Dwelling and the Places of Modernity,” in Fig-
ures of Architecture and Thought: German Architectural Culture 1890–1920,
trans. S. Sartarelli (New York: Rizzoli, 1990). For a discussion of Cac-
ciari’s relation to Heidegger, see my The Silences of Mies (Stockholm: Axl
Books, 2008), 22–40.
9. Cacciari, “Eupaulinos,” 394.
10. Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture, trans.
Stephen Sartarelli (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 199f.
79
meates both the Werkbund and expressionism (specifically

in the latter’s resistance to the Sachlichkeit of someone like
Hilberseimer, to which it opposes a synthetic and mediated
return to the symbolic and humanist features of the tradition)
has, in Loos, already been transformed into a project that radi-
cally accepts its own finite condition, but in this it also opens up
another time, or rather “the multiplicity of times that must be
recognized, analyzed, and composed,” so that “no absolute may
resound in this space-time.”11 Throughout Cacciari’s various re-
readings of Loos, he stresses the need for a complete acceptance
of the disruptions of modernity, but also the demand that this
condition be accounted for again and again, in continuous acts
of displacement and transformation. In this, it can paradoxically
enough become the basis of a positive and productive nihilism,
which is the other side of that which first appears as a purely
“negative thought,” and that “registers the leaps, the ruptures,
the innovations that occur in history, never the flow, the tran-
sition, the historic continuum.”12 The Metropolis becomes the
limit of the project of modern architecture, its moment of crisis,
but also an opening and a possibility, in the sense that there can
be something like a “project of crisis,”13 a way to understand the
loss of unity as a moment of freedom.
Controlling space
The problem of how architecture and urban planning could
seize control over the forces and dynamisms of the Metropolis
had been closely connected to the emerging social sciences at
the turn of the century, as can be seen in the writings of Ger-
man sociologists such as Weber, Simmel, and Sombart, and in
11. Ibid., 203.

12. Ibid., 13.
13. For this reading, see Marco Biraghi, Progetto di crisi; Manfredo Tafuri e
l’architettura contemporanea (Milan: Christian Marinotti Edizioni, 2005).
80
2. 1966:
Thinking the City
the theories developed by their French colleagues, most notably

Tarde and Durkheim. If the city was sick, it needed to be cured,
and only a joint effort of the sciences and the discourse of urban-
ism could set it back on the right track.
But at the time when urban sociology was emerging as a
systematic field of inquiry, urbanism as a discursive tradition
had in fact already been inaugurated in Ildefonso Cerdá’s Teoría
general de la urbanización (1867), a massive unfinished work that
attracted few readers, and whose influence on posterity was
largely indirect.14 Published the same year as the first volume
of Marx’s Capital, Cerdá’s Teoría general proposed an analysis of
modern society that in some respects was just as encompassing
as its German counterpart. While it was conceived as a theo-
retical reflection on, and ideological support for, his 1859 exten-
sion plan for Barcelona, Cerdá presents his treatise with great
self-confidence as an entire new science that requires a new
vocabulary—“the study of a new subject, a completely new, in-
tact, virgin one, in which everything being new, even the words,
which I had to seek and invent, had to be new”15—covering both
the object (urbanization as a physical process) and the discourse
(urbanism, city planning), and that should give us access to the
14. Teoría general de la urbanización (Madrid: Imprenta Española, 1867);
partial English translation as The Five Bases of the General Theory of Urban-
ization, ed. Arturo Soria y Puig, trans. Bernard Miller and Mary Fons
i Fleming (Madrid: Electa España, 1999); partial French translation
by Antonio Lopez de Aberasturi, with an introduction by Françoise
Choay, La théorie générale de l’urbanisation (Paris: Europan, 2005). The
absence of immediate posterity can to some extent be explained by the
accusations of socialist leanings that Cerdá soon faced, but the most
likely reasons is the unfinished state of the book, as well as its size (the
first part, the only part published, comprises two volumes, 800 pages
each). Among his immediate successors, only Arturo Soria y Mata
mentions him explicitly, in his 1894 treatise Ciudad Lineal. For general
studies of Cerdá’s work and his influence, see Fabian Estape, Vida y obra
de Ildefonso Cerdá (Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 2001), and Ernst
Christian Hengstenberg, Ildefonso Cerdá und sein Einfluss auf Theorie und
Praxis des Städtebaus, diss. (Munich: Technische Universität, 1986).
15. Cerdá, The Five Bases, 80.
81
general principles that govern the connections of human beings

and their objects.
Urbanism is the object of a treatise that must be able to com-
prehend the entirety of social life, and it deals not only with
technical issues in a restricted sense, as can be seen in the over-
all plan of the book. The two volumes published were in fact
only the first of four parts: the first part deals with urbanism
as a concrete phenomenon, and provides us with a “dissection”
(consisting of a general exposé followed by statistical material
relating to the city of Barcelona), the second part would have
established the theory, the third would have laid out its techni-
cal applications, and the fourth, finally, would have returned us
to a concrete application in the case of Barcelona.
In the first part, where he outlines his universal theory, Cerdá
emphasizes that nothing of importance has been written on the
topic before his own book, but that such a theory is required by
a new civilization based on movement and communication, on
speed, the steam engine, electricity, and various systems of trans-
port and telecommunications.16 This also demands that it go be-
yond traditional forms of how to think the city—thus the neces-
sity of forging a new vocabulary, and Cerdá stresses that urbs and
its various derivations captures this better than city, ciudad (the
term still used in his earlier treatise Teoría de la construcción de ciu-
dades, 1859–61) with its roots in civitas, and whose associations
to citizenship and legal and political issues tends to obscure the
material dimension that he wants to highlight. Materiality does
however exceed the idea of stability and permanence of physi-
cal structure derived from the Vitruvian lexicon: urbanism must
comprehend the link between rest and movement, housing and
circulation, in the widest possible sense, with movement as the
16. As comes across in his earlier Teoría del enlace del movimiento de las vías
marítimas y terrestres (1863), written as a companion to project for an
intermodal freight transportation system for the port of Barcelona.
82
2. 1966:
Thinking the City
key issue: “a vast swirling ocean of persons, of things, of inter-

ests of every sort, of a thousand diverse elements.”17 The history
of the urban, Cerdá suggests, is in fact nothing but the history
of man based on technical mutations that above all become vis-
ible in forms of locomotion and transport. The theory that Cerdá
proposes significantly eschews traditional symbolisms and cen-
trality, and instead advocates a lateral grid structure that is in
principle extended infinitely, so that the difference between the
rural and the urban eventually would be dissolved. The task is to
create a continuous and optimally governable system,18 includ-
ing on the level of social inequities. When read alongside Marx,
Cerdá may at first sight appear as one more reformist theoreti-
cian, for whom the balancing out of class differences was the es-
sential task, as comes across in the plan for an even distribution
of parks, churches, social services, etc. throughout the urban grid,
in order to avoid unrest and conflict. But the reforms that he pro-
poses are not simply additions to existing structures or piecemeal
engineering intervention, but more like a re-forming from the
bottom up, a way of reordering the logistics of the life process
itself, in which the particular spatial and architectural structures
deployed are tools that as such can be exchanged for others within
the larger project.
This new science needs to combine a quantitative as well as
a structural approach, the first based in statistics, whereas the
structural models as well as the tools of historical analysis are
derived from anatomy and biology, with Cuvier and Saint-
Hilaire as primary sources. Dissection is the key word for the
urban anatomist, and the body provides the structural model,
which on one level is a traditional motif derived straight from
Alberti, but, here, also relates to a developing discourse of the
17. Cerdá, The Five Bases, 79.
18. For this reading, see Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute
Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2011), 9ff.
83
life sciences, which gives it a particularly modern inflection.

Cerdá’s work can in this respect be located at a crucial position
within what Adrian Forty calls the formation of a modern archi-
tectural vocabulary, in which we find a set of new alliances with
the sciences.19 The body is no longer a model for architecture in
the symbolic sense—an idea that had already begun to be phased
out at the beginning of the century, from Durand onward—and
instead emerges as a living entity, on which urbanism in turn
acts as an organic structure on a superior level.
In her study of the interplay between “rule” (the formation
of a systematic language of architecture) and “model” (utopian
projection), Françoise Choay proposes that we should under-
stand the nascent discourse of urbanism in the second part of
the nineteenth century as a mode of instauration that performs
a gesture similar to Alberti’s in his De re aedeficatoria. This in-
stauration has five fundamental aspects, Choay suggests, all of
which she locates already in Alberti: it should form an organic
totality; it should be signed by an author that presents himself
in the first person singular; it should be autonomous, i.e., not sub-
jected to any other tradition or discipline; it should propose uni-
versal principles and generative rules that allow for the creation of
new things, and not just transmit a body of practical precepts;
and finally, its rules must apply to architecture as a whole, from the
singular edifice to the city in its totality.20 As an instauration, the
treatise is scientific (it is body of rules), it opposes a negative and
19. See Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture

(London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), for instance the discussion of the
concept of “circulation” and its connection to the life sciences, 87–101.
The section that deals with urbanism (103–117) however contains no
reference to Cerdá or to the specific history of the term “urbanism.”
20. See Choay, La règle et le modèle (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 30. For Choay, this
instauration is what constitutes Alberti’s modernity, and sets him apart
from Vitruvius, in whom we find merely a survey of empirical observa-
tions not organized into a systematic structure; se La règle, chap. 2, esp.
146–155.
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2. 1966:
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a positive image of the city, in order to propose a remedy (it is a

model); and finally projects the idea of the constructor as a hero,
a master Architect who is the subject of the instauration.
While it is true that all these features are abundantly present
in Teoría general, Choay’s analysis may also downplay something
of the newness of Cerdá’s theory, precisely by portraying it as
an almost Cartesian set of rules for the direction of the mind, a
move that may also have lead her to inscribe Alberti’s modernity
in an epistemic order that would have to wait for Cartesianism
to emerge.21 Cerdá’s Teoría could perhaps more fruitfully be read
as a biopolitical treatise in the sense of the term proposed by
Foucault,22 i.e., not so much as a body of universal rules as a way
of monitoring and surveying the physical, material, and spatial
conditions of the population, which now displaces the old body
politic, or more precisely comprehends it as living multiplicity
21. The characteristics ascribed to the inaugurating treatise come close to
the idea of the philosophical system that we find delineated in Descartes
and the tradition of rationalism, and is only consolidated in a full-blown
form in German Idealism, in Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. The emphasis
on the system as the projection from a subject is foreign to Renaissance
thought as it is most often understood, as still largely dependent on Neo-
Platonism, and for which the world still appears an infinitely interpre-
table text, a web of analogies and correspondences that cannot be fully
grasped within a first-person perspective; see, for instance, the analysis
of the “prose of the world” in Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris:
Gallimard, 1966), 32–59, and, from a different perspective, Hans Blu-
menberg, Die Lesbarkeit der Welt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986),
69–85. These interpretations, however, tend to focus on the sciences, and
downplay the new claims made for art in the Renaissance, which is the
focus of Choay. The question remains as to what extent we can project
later philosophical claims back in time, or inversely, see these later claims
as already prefigured in earlier artistic practices.
22. For this reading, see Andrea Cavaletti, La città biopolitica: Mitologie della
sicurezza (Milan: Mondadori, 2005). Françoise Choay also reads Cerdá
in a Foucauldian perspective, although largely drawing on the theory of
discipline and Foucault’s collaborative research on the hospital and the
medicalization of urban space; see La Règle et le Modèle, 280–84. From
the vantage point of the present it seems that Foucault’s later work on
biopolitics, especially the 1977–78 lectures on Security, Territory, Popula-
tion (still unpublished when Choay’s book was written), would be more
relevant to Cerdá.
85
that can no longer be simply controlled and disciplined through

the imposition of a geometric segmenting of space, but must be
seen as a political nature. Politics is a physics, as the physiocrats
had already said, which is why it requires particular forms of
governing capable of drawing on, channeling, and extracting
a surplus value from the population’s life. What is at stake, at
least if we look at what would develop on the basis of Cerdá, is
not a defined set of precepts, but a fluid and impure concept of
theory that requires conceptual tools borrowed from a host of
other disciplines; the attempt is not to unearth something like
an essence of architecture or of the city, but to understand them
as living and evolving entities.
Perhaps it would not be wholly misleading to say that the
discourse of modern architecture has two main roots: one the
one hand it launches the idea of an architectonic form that at
a certain point could claim to break away from the eclecticism
and stylistic profusion of the nineteenth century and to discover
a new coherence, a universal (or later, “international”) style—
i.e., a style that in fact no longer aspires to be a style, but the
expression of the truth of the epoch, gathering its industrial and
technological advances into an optimal solution to a problem.
Le Corbusier’s early writings, from his 1923 Vers une architecture
onward, is a paradigmatic case of this, and for a long time this
narration tended to inform a certain type of architectural his-
tory, which could draw selectively on the statements of the early
modern masters themselves. This is a narrative that purports to
take us from confusion to clarity, simplicity, honesty, and truth,
and it is predicated upon certain visual and morphological char-
acteristics that locate the trajectory of architecture as closely
parallel to that of painting and sculpture, for instance as a com-
mon path toward abstraction. On the other hand, architecture
may be understood as a way of spatializing power relations, as a way
of implementing diagrams and providing materiality to the ab-
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stract machine of Capital,23 and here urbanism, with its focus on

larger processes, flows, and networks, becomes essential. In this
second story, the debates on style, ornaments, monochromatic
surfaces, etc., appear as effects of a more profound development,
which can be understood as the spatial regimentation concomi-
tant with the production of the modern subject—a theme which
on closer inspection in fact can be seen to permeate the writings
of the early modernist architects themselves, in which the as-
sumed emotional and affective responses of the subjects inhabit-
ing modern architecture are always present. Corbusier’s machine
à habiter is in this perspective not at all the epitome of a machine
aesthetic that looks to formal models, but precisely, literally, a
machine that on the basis of a given input produces life, enhanc-
es the living body, and steers its vital flows, whose achievement
of an optimal solution to the problem of the habitat is closely
aligned with an analysis of family, sexual reproduction, and a
whole biopolitical discourse.
Any straightforward alternative between these two stories
can of course only result from an idealization. In reality they are
intertwined at each historical moment and can only be artifi-
cially separated; and yet the tension between them can be taken
to organize many of the debates of the twentieth century, rang-
ing from differing claims made in the name of modernism about
which one of them is truly modern, to the later claims that one
of them must be discarded in order for modernism to be over-
come. One such problem with repercussions across the whole
field of culture and politics emerged in the postwar attempts,
23. “Diagram” and “abstract machine” are here used with reference to
Deleuze and Guattari; cf. Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (London:
Athlone, 1988), and Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, trans. Bri-
an Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). These
terms are obviously highly fluid; for a discussion of various uses and
applications to architecture, which however have tended towards largely
formalist interpretations that are distant from the emphasis on relations
of power in Foucault and Deleuze, see Any 24 (1998), “Diagram Work.”
87
inside and outside the CIAM,24 to rethink the idea of control

that seemed to have obsessed early modernists, and it sparked
the question how to achieve complexity and unpredictability
without surrendering to chaos. How to find techniques for plan-
ning the unplanned and even unplannable, how to approach the
event in its sheer contingency as that which architecture must
not only tolerate, but also support, was a question that directly
engaged the biopolitical dimension, but also that of form: were
there particular forms, structures, assemblages, etc., that would
allow and even incite a free behavior, that would engage the
user’s capacity for reinterpreting the environment and making
dwelling and inhabiting into active modes of being rather than
adjustment to given parameters?
At the historical juncture that is our theme here, the expe-
rience of the city as something beyond control, as something
that not only de facto was out of control, but perhaps ought to
be allowed to unfold in a way that defied rational planning, re-
sulted from the tremendous shifts that occurred in the postwar
period and reached its first climactic point in the sixties. The
models of urbanism that would emerge from the break-up of
the modernist city could however at first sight not have seemed
further apart. Some turned towards futurist visions of technol-
ogy, as in the case of collective projects like the British group
Archigram or the Italian Archizoom, or to a heretic reading of
the history of architecture in the light of pop art, as in Robert
Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966),
later transformed into a new appraisal of the semiotic flows of
capitalism itself, which demand of us a certain “learning from
Las Vegas,” as Venturi and Denise Scott Brown would famously
claim in their 1972 book. Others took a turn towards various
versions of history as the reservoir of depth, as in the case of
24. For more on CIAM and the problem of planning vs. contingency, see
chap. 3 below.
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Aldo Rossi, who in L’architettura della città (1966) proposed that

the architectural process as the preservation of sense must be
re-grounded in an inescapable historical contingency. The ur-
ban fabric, Rossi claimed, was organized around a set of artifacts
and monuments that constituted a memory, a more profound
permanence that makes both repetition and difference possible.
Consciously or not, “Hej stad” at Moderna Museet partakes of
all these tendencies, and coincidental as it may be, the year 1966
seems to form something of a crucial juncture.
Grasping this moment in all its inner contradictions is no
doubt a momentous task, and in the following, I will merely
attempt to delimit its outer perimeters, as they appear in urban
models of Venturi and his colleagues, and in Rossi. Many oth-
er versions were proposed, but it makes sense to say that most
other proposals could be located somewhere between these two
extremes. On many levels they are diametrically opposed, in the
sense that the answers they provide diverge completely; on clos-
er inspection, the difference begin to resonate, as if they were
revolving around some absent center.
Style and image

Venturi’s revolt is part of modern architecture’s extended and
complex exchange with mass culture, which for a long time led
a clandestine life in architectural discourse, at least in its official
historiography. The focus has however shifted, and the recent
emergence of this connection as an object of research corre-
sponds to a step back from some of the most visible claims of
early modernism, or at least those claims that for a long time
guided modernist historians. For most architects—no matter
how much they may have understood their work as a break with
the past, undertaken in the name of formal purity, abstraction,
or some other concept that today is little more than an object
of suspicion or even disdain—it was patent that any modernity
89
in search of its own style must also include and project a new
lifestyle, that it must be able to influence everyday behavior,
generate a distinctive look, and fashion desirable objects, if it
is to seize hold of the general public and become desirable. The
utopian moment in modernism is in this way an integral part
of a new visual culture and the system of media and image dis-
tribution that had already begun to emerge in the middle of
the nineteenth century—the age of mechanical reproducibility,
as Benjamin said with reference to photography and cinema,
although he, too, though more obliquely, references architec-
ture—and it has as one of its main objectives the production of
a desiring subject that itself exists as an agent of consumption,
first and foremost precisely of the image of modernity.
This is why it can arguably be deemed superficial simply
to reject the problem of style as superficial; instead it must be
thought as an element belonging to the very substance of archi-
tecture, if the latter is understood as a means of persuasion and
identification through form and image, which it can and must
be. This issue had been raised sharply by Schinkel, as a ques-
tion of what could be accepted as the organic expression of the
contemporary moment, which in his case meant to oppose the
imminent threat of fashion as a severing of form and content.
In 1826, returning to Berlin from his journey to England, where
he had encountered the technological marvels of industrialism,
he notes “the modern age makes everything easy, it no longer
believes in permanence, and has lost all sense of monumental-
ity.” This is an epoch, he continues, “in which everything be-
comes mobile, even that which was supposed to be most du-
rable, namely the art of building, in which the word fashion
becomes widespread in architecture, where forms, materials,
and every tool can be understood as a plaything to be treated as
one wants, where one is prone to try everything since nothing
is in its place (weil nichts an seinem Orte steht), and nothing seems
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required.”25 These questions were then pursued in what would

become known as the German style debate, opened by Heinrich
Hübsch in 1828 with his simple question: “In what style should
we build?” 26 This idea of a style that would not be a superficial
appendix, but express the inner constructive logic, also informs
the later discourse of tectonics, where the truth of architecture
was dependent on whether a new “juncture” between inside and
outside could be established, an organic bond between Stilhülse
and Kern, Kunstform and Kernform.27 The title of Corbusier’s first
book shows his aspirations to attain such a reunification: Vers
une architecture, “towards an architecture,” i.e., a situation where
architecture would begin to exist at all in the emphatic sense,
which was lost in the first English translation in 1927, Towards
A New Architecture, which emphasizes mere novelty. Just as for
Schinkel, newness as such is not essential, but it is rather truth,
in the sense of a formal language consonant with the current
standard of technology and social development; if the answer
seems new, it is only because the question remains the same—
for Corbusier even explicitly the same as in ancient Greece. As
he famously states, the modern racecar is just as much as the
Parthenon the solution to a well-posed problem, and as such, it
is dependent on a long process of type formation that eventually
25. Schinkel, cited in Fritz Neumeyer, “Tektonik: Das Schauspiel der
Objektivität und die Wahrheit des Architekturschauspiels,” in Hans
Kollhoff (ed.), Über Tektonik in der Baukunst (Braunschweig: Vieweg &
Sohn, 1993), 59. This threatening idea of fashion would, just like the idea
of technology, become transformed into an instrumental one in the
beginning of the twentieth century, where the question no longer bears
on whether architecture resembles fashion, but on what type of fashion it
should choose as its model, as can be seen in the writings of Adolf Loos
and Le Corbusier. For further discussion, see Mark Wigley, White Walls,
Designer Dresses (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT, 1995).
26. For this discussion, see Wolfgang Herrman (ed.), In What Style Should
We Build? The German Debate on Architectural Style (Santa Monica: Getty
Center, 1992).
27. See Werner Oechslin, Stilhülse und Kern: Otto Wagner, Adolf Loos und der
evolutionäre Weg zur modernen Architektur (Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1994).
91
reaches perfection.
Corbusier’s understanding of modern architecture as a
mass medium that must utilize the most sophisticated tech-
niques of publicity, which has been analyzed in detail by Beatriz
Colomina,28 does not contradict the search for classical per-
fection; it is precisely its modern condition of possibility. His
editorial work with Esprit nouveau as well as his own publica-
tions show his command of marketing and visual techniques,
and how eternal values can only be realized through a strategic
intelligence that employs all the tricks of a new trade. The one
and unique style, embodying not taste but universal necessity—
and which thus may present itself as non-style—can then, on the
level of affective impact, be understood as yet another image,
just as functionalism in order to impose itself as a desirable look
need not function better than anything that preceded it, only
project the image of modernity and progress in a convincing
way.29
When early modernism is viewed in this perspective, the
idea of an overcoming of a “great divide” between avant-garde
and mass culture as the basis of the shift between the postmod-
ern and the modern becomes tenuous.30 The image of such a di-
vide was perhaps for the first time visible in the debate between
Benjamin and Adorno in the thirties, where we in Benjamin
would find an affirmation of new reproduction technologies,
the decay of the aura, and the entry of the artwork into the
28. See Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass
Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1994).
29. See, for instance, Jean Baudrillard, Pour une critique de l’économie politique
du signe (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 229–255, and the concluding discus-
sion in Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the first Machine Age (Lon-
don: Architectural Press, 1960), 320–25.
30. I borrow this expression from Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide:
Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1987). Many other similar discussions could be cited,
although Huyssen seems to me to formulate it in the most concise and
systematic fashion.
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sphere of social circulation (“exhibition value,” as Benjamin

somewhat curiously calls it), in Adorno the consistent attempt
to uphold a Kantian claim for aesthetic autonomy and to save
the negative transcendence of the work from being submerged
into the world of the commodity—a claim that eventually, in the
postmodern era, would finally have become antiquated.31 But
against a dualist reading of this discussion, it may be argued that
purity and transcendence were always values resulting from a
particular twist within the logic of the commodity rather than
a break with it, and that the various forms of exchange between
the work and commodification in fact are what have defined the
dialectic of autonomy from the outset. This does obviously not
mean that autonomy would be an illusion or a simple mirage,
only that it is always conditioned by its other, and that the re-
sistance that the work puts up to the world, the distance that it
produces to the world, always needs to borrow its resources from
this same world, and that these resources will always return in-
side the work, although not necessarily, perhaps even not at all,
as an objective moment, as a depiction of representation of an
empirical outside—all of which is already there in Adorno’s early
argument against Benjamin, and will subsequently become an
integral part in his theory of autonomy.
Learning from Pop

Coming back to Venturi, it is undeniable that we find here a
new sensibility, and a highly effective rhetoric that sets up a
whole series of oppositions between new and old, but rather
than seeing this as a break with the past, it may be more pro-
ductive to see it as a re-activation of elements that were already
there, and are simply reconfigured in a new way. While his two
manifesto-like works, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture
31. The letters of Benjamin and Adorno are translated in Aesthetics and
Politics (London: New Left Books, 1977), 100–141.
93
(1966) and Learning from Las Vegas (1972, co-authored with De-
nise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour), are replete with negative
judgments about the past, they can also, and more positively,
be seen as the beginning of an American tradition of cultural
studies32 that emerges from a dialog with pop art, attempting to
map the experience of the commercial landscape as a different
type of order: “Some of the vivid lessons of pop art, involving
scale and context,” Venturi writes in the conclusion to the first
book, “should have awakened architects from prim dreams of
pure order,” and henceforth it is “perhaps from the everyday
landscape, vulgar and disdained, that we can draw the complex
and contradictory order that is valid and vital for our architec-
ture as an urbanistic whole.”33
Not without irony, Venturi presents Complexity and
Contradiction as a “gentle manifesto,” and, in the introductory
sections, he manipulates his historical references with subtle
displacements, reinterpreting rather than simply rejecting the
modernist legacy. His examples are drawn from the whole of
architectural history from the Renaissance to Le Corbusier,
Aalto, and Kahn, in order to delineate a different take on tradi-
tion than the one championed by predecessors like Pevsner and
Giedion. The examples are widely separated in space and time,
not in order to point to eternal principles, but rather to provide
a kind of counter-historical thrust to the linear narratives of
progress.34 Just as the images in Complexity and Contradiction still
32. See Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994), 141. In this sense there is a straight line leading from Ven-
turi to Koolhaas; see the comments on Venturi in The Harvard Guide to
Shopping (Cologne: Taschen, 2001).
33. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York:
The Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 104. Henceforth cited in the text
as CCA.
34. On one level there is no fundamental methodological difference
between Giedion and Venturi: both of them mobilize different ele-
ments from the past to justify current production, and from Tafuri’s
perspective they are equally operative. What Venturi opposes is rather
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2. 1966:
Thinking the City
obey—gently, one might say—the codes of architectural photog-

raphy, the argument of the book, even though it proposes new
criteria, largely remains within the confines of architectural-his-
torical analysis with its connoisseurship and erudite references.
Learning from Las Vegas on the other hand draws on a descrip-
tive phenomenological technique, and the order on the Strip
paradigmatically appears as an image seen through a wind-
screen.35 In its flattened and serial quality, the imagery shares
some of the features of certain groundbreaking art works from
the period, most patently Ed Ruscha’s laconic Twentysix Gasoline
Stations (1963) and Every Building on the Sunset Strip (1966),36 but
also, perhaps more obliquely, Dan Graham’s Homes for America
(1966). Both employ seriality to dismantle the autonomy of
high modernism, although with different intentions and results:
Ruscha aims for a deadpan pop matter-of-factness and an emp-
tying out of signification, whereas Graham draws on the genre
of photojournalism to produce a conceptual work that explores
the hidden social connotations of minimalist reductionism.37 In
a normative trajectory leading from past to present, which is why he
eventually embraces the posthistorical model in Learning from Las Vegas,
where all styles and forms exist in a total availability.
35. Which perhaps makes the method phenomenalist rather than phenomeno-
logical, the point being that the gaze through the windscreen, together
with the sense of movement, tends to suspend the worldly anchoring of
both subject and object in favor of a series of disincarnate images. Such
distinctions may seem out of place here, but given the importance that
phenomenology would have somewhat later in discussions of embodi-
ment, anchoring, grounding, etc., it makes sense to read Venturi et al as
deploying a kind of phenomenalist counter-strategy.
36. Ruscha’s work even appears in a mock version, as an “‘Edward Ruscha’
elevation of the strip,” Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT,
1977 [1972], 32–33. Henceforth cited as LLV.
37. For a discussion of these different pictorial strategies, see Jeff Wall,
“Marks of Indifference: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual
Art,” in Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer (eds.), Reconsidering the Object
of Art: 1965–1975 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996).
The seeming emptiness in Ruscha is of course teeming with possible
narratives; for an imaginative reading that establishes a connection to
the cinema of the period, see Walead Beshty, “The City Without Quali-
95
the case of Learning from Las Vegas, the aim is that we should
suspend our value judgment, at least temporarily, in order to
transform the very ideas of value and judgment, thus making
possible a mode of perception that thrives on precisely those
values that had been eradicated from the canon of modern ar-
chitecture. Irony, ambiguity, and polysemy are the weapons
wielded against the imperatives of modernist utopianism, and if
architecture is a mode of communication on all levels, it should
not insulate itself as a utopian counter-image against the messi-
ness of the historical city, or as a semiotic surplus in relation
to its contemporary, commercial, and low descendant: in short,
learning from Las Vegas means to learn how to take a new look
at, and take on the look of, everyday life.38
Complexity and contradiction in architecture for Venturi
result from its necessary participation in an equally complex
and contradictory social and communicative urban form; its
language is inevitably that of a multiplicity of styles and lay-
ers that need not be reformed on the basis of some radical new
grammar.39 If we are to reinstall the social function of archi-
ties: Photograph, Cinema, and the Post-Apocalyptic Ruin,” Site 7–8
(2004).
38. In the most systematic interpretation of Venturi and Scott Brown’s
work so far, Aron Vinegar stresses that we should not reduce the book
to a precursor to the subsequent debate on postmodernism, or to a
mere apotheosis of consumer culture, as is often the case, but rather un-
derstand it as a new take on everyday life. Drawing on Stanley Cavell’s
distinction between skepticism and the ordinary, Vinegar proposes that
the proposal is that we should strive to attain a different mood, open to
the ambiguities of perception and sensibility, rather than to settle for a
choice between the modern and the postmodern. See Vinegar, I Am a
Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2008),
and Aron Vinegar and Michael J. Golec (eds.), Relearning from Las Vegas
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009).
39. As we will see in chap. 4, other readings are possible. As Reinhold
Martin suggests, Venturi and Scott Brown’s ideas may be understood
less in terms of a plea for populism and the dissolution of the high–low
distinction than as a normalization, i.e., an adjustment of architecture’s
language through the methods of social science, drawing through the
models of Levittown and Las Vegas.
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tecture, we must speak the vernacular, and not escape to the

inventions of ideal languages cleansed from the polysemic drift
of actual history. Robert Stern has summarized these claims in
three theses: ornamentalism, the detachment of the exterior from
the interior, which is the basis of the famous thesis on the “dec-
orated shed”; contextualism, the reinsertion of the building into
the texture of the city; allusionism, the transformation of histori-
cal memory into a reservoir of available forms that no longer
require an overarching formal unity.40
Current experience, Venturi suggests, has freed us from the
weight of Puritanism, and we are able to affirm a richness of
sense instead of a misguided clarity, which does not mean that
we must jettison unity and truth, only that this now refers to
the “difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of
exclusion” (CCA 16). Such an inclusion opposes the idealized
versions of the primitive and elemental, and it shows that Mies’s
“less is more” only makes sense as long as we pose strictly lim-
ited problems, whereas in the case of Philip Johnson’s version
of the Miesian glass boxes it shows its true face, in Venturi’s
famously laconic quip: “less is a bore” (17). This need not con-
tradict the “desire for simplicity” (ibid.) in someone like Kahn,
but simplicity must come from an inner complexity, just as the
simple image offered by the Doric temple results from complex
displacements and distorted geometries. Positive cases of this in
the modern period include Le Corbusier (to the extent that he
does not follow his own precepts) and Aalto, whose “complexity
is part of the program and structure of the whole rather than a
device justified only by the desire for expression” (18f).
We need to begin in the ambiguity belonging to perception
40. Robert Stern, “New Directions in Modern American Architecture:

Postscript at the Edge of Modernism” (1977), reprinted in Kate Nesbitt,
Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural
Theory, 1965–1995 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996).
97
itself, Venturi suggests, in what he, following the gestalt theo-

ry of Josef Albers, understands as the unavoidable discrepancy
between physical fact and psychological effect—a theory that is
just as applicable to abstract expressionism as it is to pop, al-
though Venturi’s preferred models are the recent pop painters.
Apart from Gestalt psychology, Venturi also, and more surpris-
ingly, draws heavily on literary New Criticism, normally type-
cast as the epitome of high modernist autonomy. In parallel to
their discovery of the metaphysical poets, Venturi reassesses
mannerism, less in terms of a historical investigation than as
a search for elements for a new poetics that at the same time
finds support in a venerate classical and humanist tradition. He
cites the works of T. S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, Kenneth Burke,
and William Empson, and their exploration of the ambiguity of
poetical language (the most important source being Empson’s
Seven Types of Ambiguity, 1957). Architecture, Venturi states, is
always “form and substance—abstract and concrete—and its
meaning derives from inner characteristics and its particular
context” (CCA 20). The and indicates an oscillation, which is
the source of the “ambiguity and tension characteristic to the
medium of architecture” (ibid.). Venturi’s aim is however dif-
ferent from that of New Criticism, in the end even opposed to
it: instead of using ambiguity to undermine referentiality in the
name of aesthetic autonomy and the aloofness of the work, he
perceives it as a condition for participation in the messiness of
the world. An analogous displacement occurs in his use of T. S.
Eliot’s technique for using citations: if these in Eliot become
signs of modernity as a wasteland, of a history that can only be
retrieved in fragments, and fundamentally display a tragic sen-
sibility, in Venturi they become the material for an affirmation
of the present as plenitude and richness of sense.
It is instructive to compare this semantic analogy between
architecture and language with the syntactic analysis launched
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at the same time by someone like Eisenman. Both of them as-

pire to ground architecture in language, and both perform a
kind of decontextualization, in the sense that historical material
is detached from its organic dependence on particular moments
in time, although this leads in different directions: for Venturi,
the language dimension is semantic, that which transmits his-
torical meaning and tradition, and the faith in this continuity of
meaning is what allows him proclaim a distance from a type a
modernism perceived as destructive of meaning; for Eisenman,
language is a generative syntactic structure that permits new and
unexpected statements to be produced, and makes it possible
for architecture to finally become a modernist, self-referential
art by neutralizing its inherited humanist desire to signify.41
At the end of the essay “A Significance for A&P Parking Lots,
or Learning from Las Vegas,” two years after Complexity and
Contradiction, Venturi and Scott Brown reference both Joyce
and Eliot, and speak of a recycling of fragments and citations
as a “decreative” impulse in literature, connecting it to a pop
sensibility that would be able to extract new values from old
clichés by integrating them in a new context; for Eisenman the
issue is rather to call upon a new avant-garde and an abstract
generative capacity that breaks with the very idea of meaning
in architecture.42
41. Once more, readings that align them rather than oppose them are
equally possible, as in the case of Reinhold Martin, who suggests that
both options depend on the insertion of architecture in an ecology of
signs, in which the tension between semantics (Venturi) and syntax
(Eisenman) is merely an inner fluctuation; see chap. 4, below.
42. Significantly, Eisenman’s work during this early phase makes virtually
no reference to the city and urbanism, but remains within the orbit
of the singular object, as in his series of Houses, or even the single
architectural element that must be freed from its traditional semantic
dimension. In this sense his work during this phase is a constant quest
for autonomy, or for architecture to simply, once and for all, become
modernist, as he understands the term. On the level of the city, a pure
syntax would seem like a much more difficult proposal. Later, when
Eisenman in the seventies begins his project “Cities of Artificial Excava-
99
The new complexity is a “both-and,” an open additive process

that is intended to generate a semantic surplus, unlike modern
architecture, which for Venturi appears as an “either-or” where
every element is required to be precisely itself and nothing else.
Citing Louis Kahn’s statement, that “Architecture must have
bad spaces as well as good spaces” (CC 25), he advocates a mul-
tiplicity of signifying levels, which also may involve errors and
distortions—details detached from the whole, scalar incongrui-
ties, contradictions between parts—that nevertheless contribute
to the whole. Further on, with ironic reference to Giedion, he
also determines this as “another dimension of ‘space, time and
architecture’ which involves the multiple focus” (32). Complexity
emerges when singular elements or whole assemblages have dou-
ble or multiple roles, which for Venturi constitutes a more ad-
equate response to the demand for flexibility than the separation
between materials and functions in modernism. As always, the
examples are garnered from sources far apart—Sant’Elia’s futurist
Città Nuova with its continually shifting functions, Corbusier’s
Plan Obus for Algiers, where the residential building at the same
time constitutes the support for a highway, and Rauschenberg’s
Combines, where the pattern on the painting’s surface are trans-
ferred to contiguous physical objects in order to produce an oscil-
lating perception of the medium—with the purpose of showing
that the modernist version of the tradition is in fact highly selec-
tive, and that it, when seen in a broader perspective, in fact dis-
plays a constant interest in complexity. The latter is not opposed
to order, for it is only a strong order that may contain transfor-
mations and draw its energy from them: “Our buildings must
survive the cigarette machine.” (42)
The order that he advocates is a “difficult whole,” which su-
tion,” the new reference to the city also entails a return to semantics
(without the term being used), even though of very different nature; see
chap 6, below.
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2. 1966:
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persedes the organic and expressive model of form that radi-

ates from the center outward: the outside must be able to dis-
connect from the inside, a claim that eventually would lead to
the thesis of the decorated shed. In these initial formulations
the task is rather to show that the modern tradition too of-
ten makes use of gradual transitions and residual spaces, and
Venturi suggests that we “break away from the contemporary
concept (call it sickness) of spatial continuity and the tendency
to erase every articulation between spaces, i.e., between outside
and inside, between one space and another (between one real-
ity and another)” (CC 82). This rejection of the inside-outside
model, with its claim for expressive continuity, turns it back on
a long legacy extending back at least to Louis Sullivan’s famous
form-function equation, itself based in a romantic philosophy of
nature,43 and instead opts for what we could call an allegorical
method that emphasizes the separation of outward signs from
inner core, and the need to understand the unity as the effect
of interacting fragments, but also a contextualism acknowledg-
ing that the limit between inside and outside is the place where
architecture begins to exist. “Since the inside is different from
the outside,” Venturi writes, “the wall—the point of change—
becomes an architectural event,” and architecture “occurs at the
meeting of interior and exterior forces of use and space,” so that
the wall becomes “the spatial record of this resolution and its
drama.” (86)
The emphasis on fragments as the source of the whole also
implies an idea of a series of inflections that mediate between the
two: a maximal inflection generates complete continuity, a mini-
mal one the autonomy of parts, which opens for a set of different
possibilities rather than a normative ideal. This becomes particu-
larly relevant on the urban scale: “An architecture that can simul-
43. For a discussion of Sullivan’s indebtedness to a romantic philosophy of
nature, see Forty, Words and Buildings, 177–79.
101
taneously recognize contradictory levels should be able to admit

the paradox of the whole fragment: the building which is a whole
at one level and a fragment of a greater whole on another level.”
(CC 103) Thus, it is on the level of urbanism that complexity and
contradiction may be played out to the fullest extent, and where
the inflected part-whole relationship attains maximal efficacy; it
is here that the fragmentation of the urban landscape shows itself
not as lack of order, and but as different and more difficult one
that requires a multi-focus vision.
Learning from Las Vegas

Two years after Contradiction and Complexity, Venturi and Denise
Scott Brown publish the article “A Significance for A&P Parking
Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas,”44 which would then reappear
with slight alterations as the opening chapter of Learning from Las
Vegas. Here we enter directly into the present, and we move be-
yond the tone of the gentle manifesto with its erudite historical
references. To be sure, at the end of the article they underline that
their only claim is to analyze Las Vegas as architectural commu-
nication, and not to pass a value judgment—but they also add that
there is no reason to believe that “the methods of commercial
persuasion and the skyline of signs analyzed here should not serve
the purpose of civic and cultural enhancement” (LLV 6), and the
reluctance to judge seems largely like a rhetorical move made in
order to overcome the resistance of the modernist reader by in-
citing a willing suspension of disbelief. What we must strive for,
they claim, can no longer be a radical reform, but to learn from
the existing urban landscape, and this is why we must suspend a
44. The initial article was published in Architectural Forum (March 1968),
and reprinted in Nesbitt, Theorizing a New Agenda. The text cited here
is the later version in Learning from Las Vegas. There are also important
differences in terms of layout and the use of images from the first edi-
tion 1972 and the second 1977; see Vinegar, I Am a Monument. The texts
cited in the following however remain the same.
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2. 1966:
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judgment whose roots have become invisible to us. This suspen-

sion is a precondition for an immersion in a new visual experi-
ence, and once more pop shows the way.
Here, too, the argument commences with an attack on the
modern obsession with space, which has made us “bewitched by
a single element of the Italian landscape: the Piazza” (LLV 6)
and eclipsed the experience of Los Angeles and Route 66. For
the authors of Learning from Las Vegas, the key problem is instead
the sign—or, more precisely, if we think of this as a transfor-
mation wrought upon Giedion’s modernist space-time: space
thought on the basis of information given through a sign, a sign-
space, and time as understood through the sequential perception
of signs, a sign-time. This space-time must include advertising,
billboards, neon signs, and a whole spectrum of details that only
existed as external and unessential additions to buildings as they
were conceived in modernism, but now form the elements of
the language of the street, within which the building is only one
part of a complex message that eschews the unambiguous, an
instead thrives on its multi-level address.
Modernism’s fixation on the specificity of the medium and
the demand that we should not mix media, genres, and styles
have in fact, Venturi and Scott Brown suggest, produced an aver-
sion to the iconological and the pictorial—a sign intended for ori-
entation is only used under protest, since it indicates a weakness
in spatial organization, assumed to present itself as immediately
legible without external aids. But while the pervasive ideal of ab-
straction was intended as a reduction taking us back to the es-
sence of architecture, the pictorial moments still asserted itself—
as in the machine, the airplane, the silo, and all the other models
constantly called upon to support the look of modernity—and
we might as well acknowledge and make use of this insistence of
the image, Venturi and Scott Brown propose, since it allows us
to link up with the iconography of commercial culture and the
103
visual ecology that unfolds around the highway. If the architec-

ture of signs first seems anti-spatial and communicative, it is to
a great extent because it is oriented towards the landscape scale
of the car and the highway.45 Three decades ago (approximately
the year of publication of Giedion’s massive work) a psychologi-
cal sense of space was enough, they note, but now, one must turn
left to turn to the right, and put one’s trust in “enormous signs
in vast spaces at high speed” (LLV 9). These new messages are of
the same order as the signs placed perpendicular to the street so
as to communicate the price of products: the graphic sign in space
is the building block of the new landscape.
The historical significance of the A&P parking lots is ulti-
mately that they signal a “current phase in the evolution of vast
space since Versailles” (LLV 13). They are an integral part of
a landscape now determined as “megatexture,” where space is
organized by symbols in such a pervasive fashion that the build-
ing itself can become a sign: the restaurant itself can look like
a hamburger. Fake facades are a typical case of the architectural
symbolisms that pervades the nature of the commercial Main
Street, as indicated by the morphology of the desert city, visible
precisely as signs placed at right angle to the highway. If they are
removed, the city itself vanishes, and in this sense, Las Vegas can
be taken as the apotheosis of the desert city.
Venturi and Scott Brown predict that Las Vegas will be pos-
sible to cite in the same way that Rome was once marshaled as
45. Venturi’s claims have an obvious background in the construction of the

interstate highway system in the mid fifties, which produces a qualita-
tive leap in a spatial modernization. As Jorge-Otero Pailos shows, the
(unacknowledged) influence behind this thesis seems to have come
from Venturi’s teacher, Jean Labatut, who in turn drew on his work on
camouflage techniques during the First World War, as well as cubist
painting and the philosophy of Bergson; see Otero-Pailos Otero-Pailos,
Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). For more on this
connection, see chap. 4, below.
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a contrast to the anti-urban American landscape: “Las Vegas is

to The Strip what Rom is to the Piazza” (LLV 18). The refer-
ence to Rome may seen far-fetched, but in fact remains decisive
for their claim, just as the link between the A&P parking lot
and Versailles, and not only as the substitution of one historical-
aesthetic paradigm for another: in both cases a higher and more
abstract spatial grid (shopping-religious capital-entertainment
capital) is projected onto the local configuration (mall-church-
casino), resulting in “violent juxtapositions of use and scale”
(ibid). On the Nolli map of eighteenth-century Rome, the rela-
tion between private and public formed the underlying matrix;
in Las Vegas, Fremont Street is oriented toward the railway sta-
tion and The Strip toward the airport, and in this, they signal
the symbolic opposites of our time.
The important thing is to realize that commercial space is
not some visual chaos, but that system and order rule on The
Strip. To the innocent eye—or rather, to the eye unconsciously
modeling its gaze on modernist architectural purism—the image
may seem simply disorderly, but through an active unlearning
of such prejudices, they suggest, we will see an underlying logic
based in the highway, resulting in an easy visual order on the
street, and a difficult order of buildings and signs. The highway
system constitutes the common order, the roadside the individ-
ual counterpart, and together they produce a sequential unity of
opposites organized by the car, and not the pedestrian, as in the
European model, thus also indicating the central mediating role
of the parking lot. This new logic, while reorganizing space so as
to become a non-continuous and parceled order, also resists the
visual capacity of the pedestrian with his camera: it is difficult
to photograph, since it must be seen as a moving image.46 In ar-
46. As Denise Scott Brown suggests, “New analytic techniques must use
film and videotape to convey the dynamism of sign architecture and the
sequential experience of vast landscapes; and computers are needed to
105
chitectural terms, this translates into the increased importance

of the side elevation, which becomes as important as the façade,
since it is the surface that is exposed to the traffic for the longest
period of time. A new typology of signs is what is needed, rather
than a formalist analysis of architecture.
Stylistically, architecture can have no restraints; forms are
universally available, and their point of convergence is the gam-
bling room, where we, in contrast to the brightly lit and shim-
mering outside, find ourselves in a constant semi-darkness that
dissolves limits and contours, in a space-time that is disconnect-
ing, disorienting, and aspires to create a world of its own. The
casino is a big, low space, partly for technical and economic rea-
sons, but more fundamentally because the contemporary per-
ception of monumentality has been transformed. Maybe our
cathedrals are chapels without a nave, Venturi and Scott Brown
propose, public spaces adjusted to “anonymous individuals
without explicit connection with each other,” which is the truth
of our time: “You are no longer in the bounded piazza but in the
twinkling lights of the city at night.” (LLV 50)
Depth and memory

In Aldo Rossi’s L’architettura della città we encounter what at first
sight appears as the complete opposite of Venturi’s fascination
with the sign, the open expanse of the highway, and the avail-
ability of a historical language that has severed all substantial ties
aggregate mass repeated data into comprehensible patterns.” See Scott

Brown, “Learning from Pop” [1971], reprinted in Hays, Architecture
Theory since 1968, 64. The reference to repeated data, computer aggrega-
tion, and patterns should be noted just as much as the introduction of
film and video; as Reinhold Martin stresses, the form of the feedback
loop together with the theory of pattern recognition, originating in
György Kepes’s work at MIT during the war (first publicized in his
Languages of Vision, 1944), was crucial for the formation of postmod-
ern as an immanence that could be analyzed and surveyed by systems
theory; see chap 4, below.
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to the past. “By architecture,” Rossi states in the introduction,

“I meat not only the visible image of the city and the sum of its
different architectures, but architecture as construction, the con-
struction of the city over time,” which is “the ultimate and defini-
tive fact (dato) in the life of the collective.”47 Architecture gives
concrete shape to the rhythms of collective life, it adds layer upon
layer, temporally as well as spatially, and it can be compared to a
memory or a consciousness. It brings together the particular and
the general, individual and collective, in the building of a city that
is both a rational process and the production of the value of place,
a locus that is always individual, a locus solus.
Architecture produces urban “facts” (fatti urbani), which is
one of Rossi’s basic categories. The fact is something made, and
by human hand (manufatto), which finally applies to the city in
its entirety; on the other hand, over time these facts become
detached from their initial meaning and form a permanence,
something that remains through the flow of history and can be
overlaid with new meanings.
The paradigm for such facts or “primary elements” are monu-
ments—“signs of the collective will as expressed through the prin-
ciples of architecture, [which] offer themselves as primary ele-
ments, fixed points in the urban dynamic.” (AC 12/22)48 These
47. L’architettura della città (Milano: CittaStudiEdizioni, 1995 [1966]), 9;
The Architecture of the City, trans. Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman
(New York: Opposition Books, 1982), 21. Henceforth cited as AC (Ital-
ian/English). Rossi’s prefaces to later editions are cited from the English
translation.
48. Rossi’s theory of the monument can be contrasted with other attempts
at reviving monumentality, most obviously the ideas of Giedion, Léger,
and Sert in their co-authored manifesto “Nine Points of Monumental-
ity” (1943), which starts from atomized entities and then proceeds to
construct complexity, in response to a need for “powerful accents” in
the “vaster urban schemes,” as their fifth thesis claims; see the reprinted
text in Giedion, Architecture, You, and Me: The Diary of A Development
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958). For Rossi, as
we shall see, the complexity of the city is always prior to its singular
elements. For a discussion of the “Nine Points” and the context in
107
permanences are in turn the foundation for an “urban science”

(scienza urbana) that on the one hand aspires to autonomy, since
its basic datum is the architecture of the city, which has no other
foundation than its own existence. On the other hand, Rossi bor-
rows concepts and tools from a host of other disciplines and theo-
rists, often anthropology and the study of myth. “For if ritual is
the permanent and conserving element of myth,” Rossi, writes,
“then so too is the monument, since, in the very moment that it
testifies to myth, it renders ritual forms possible.” (16/24) This
idea of myth and ritual is borrowed from Fustel de Coulanges
(above all his La Cité antique, 1864) who emphasizes their role in
the construction of institutions: by being continually re-narrat-
ed, myths take on new meanings, while the ritual aspect provides
a fixed form. Rossi’s sources are however many and variegated:
Adolf Loos, Maurice Halbwachs, Friedrich Engels, Ferdinand de
Saussure, Lewis Mumford, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Quatremère
de Quincy, to cite but a few, and he synthesizes many different
and conflicting perspectives.49
It has been noted that the wide array of references, the many
themes addressed, and the absence of a clear method, produce a
particular disorder; the book, in Françoise Choay’s harsh judg-
ment, is a “florilegium of absurdities.”50 But at the same time,
might we not say that the experience accumulated—above all that
1943, see Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism ((Cambridge,

Mass.: MIT, 2000), 150–52.
49. The spatial conditions of memory and the work of Halbwachs have
recently been suggested as a key influence, in Mattias Ekman, Edifices:
Architecture and Spatial Frameworks of Memory, diss. (Oslo: Oslo School of
Architecture and Design, 2013). Others have pointed to Loos and Lévi-
Strauss as the decisive sources, both theoretically and for the essayistic
techniques; see the Italian architecture collective Baukuh, “Le promesse
non mantenute di L’architettura della città,” in Due saggi sull’architettura
(Genua: Sagep, 2012), 77ff.
50. Choay, “Conclusion,” in Choay, Pierre Merlin and Ernesto D’Alfonso
(eds.), Morphologie urbaine et parcellaire (St. Denis: Presses Universitaires
de Vincennes, 1988), 156.
108
2. 1966:
Thinking the City
relating to the vicissitudes of the European city during the phase of

postwar reconstruction, which Rossi observed closely as an editor
of Casabella—necessitated a particular form, a construction from
parts no longer linked by any order than that given by the flow of
time and history? The erratic, at once fragmented and repetitive
quality of the book, where themes seem to disappear and return
haphazardly, and key concepts are given varying definitions, as if
the idea were to gradually enrich them by approaching from many
angles, one after the other without synthesis, can be taken as a
conscious strategy. The disjointed composition of text, its lack of
theoretical closure and direction, would then reflect its object of
study, and in this Rossi’s work has also been deemed a supremely
“urban book”51—and, might we not say, that the science imagined
by Rossi is not just of the urban, but integrates essential features of
its objects, so as to itself become urban, even urbane?
The common thread that he extracts from all of these seem-
ingly confusing sources is, however, a critique of progress and
a sense of cultural continuity: the question is not to add new
things, but to appreciate and perceive in a new way what already
exists. Creation is not individual, but a collective and largely un-
conscious process, whose irrational associations, predominant in
Loos, Rossi corrects through his reading of Lévi-Strauss. On a
methodic level, this divide translates into a tension between a sci-
entistic dimension that lays claim to universal models and ratio-
nal principles, based on quantitative methods (one of the prelimi-
nary titles for the book was in fact Manual of Urbanism), and an
acknowledgment of the finitude of all understanding, due to the
51. Baukuh, “Le promesse non mantenute,” 64. For the genesis of the book
on the basis of Rossi’s many preceding articles, see Hendrik Tieben,
Aldo Rossis Auseinandersetzung mit Geschichte, Erinnerung und Identität
am Beispiel des Projekts des Deutschen Historischen Museums, diss. (Zurich:
ETH, 2005), and Elisabetta Vasumi Roveri, Aldo Rossi e L’architettura
della città: Genesi e fortuna di un testo (Turin: Allemandi, 2010). Rossi’s es-
says have been collected in Scritti scelti sull’architettura e la città, 1956–1972
(Milan: Clup, 1975).
109
irreducibly qualitative and singular of each locus: “In fact, while

each urban intervention seems fated to rely on general criteria
of planning, each part of the city seems to be a singular place, a
locus solus.” (AC 10/21) In the end this might even lead to a tragic
insight, as when he in the end of the book notes: “Perhaps the
laws of the city are exactly like those that regulate the life and des-
tiny of individual men,” like a “biography” with “its own interest,
even though it is circumscribed by birth and death.” (229/163)
If the tension between universal principles and finitude gen-
erates an oscillation between the urban structure as a whole,
and the particular urban facts with their individual form and
history, this implies that the “architecture of the city” can be
read in two ways, as a subjective or an objective genitive, but at
least in some passages Rossi seems unequivocally clear: “archi-
tecture presupposes the city” (AC 151/113, mod.). It proceeds
from complexity to unity, from the city to its parts, and the in-
dividual entities exist by virtue of their differential relation, as
he proposes with reference to Saussure (13/23). The priority of
the city means that it is like a universe of its own; it cannot be
viewed from the outside or be provided with an origin exter-
nal to itself. Rossi’s world is already replete with objects and
significations that do not form any natural hierarchy or order,
and in this sense architecture need not be provided with com-
plexity by given additional features, instead it exists in a field of
an originary complexity that it then proceeds to simplify and
reduce, also on the level of functions, which is why no particular
function can be assumed as its basis. This clam about the city’s
autochthonous nature also means that references to nature tend
to disappear, which opposes Rossi’s analysis to Tafuri’s, where
architecture, at least in its theory, was called upon since the mid-
eighteenth century to cover over the rift with nature by project-
ing the image of the city as a spatial continuity with “artifacts of
a homogenous nature” (69/63). But because of this primordial
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2. 1966:
Thinking the City
complexity, the city’s immanent origin can, paradoxically, only

be thought in the plural, which is why Rossi’s structural science,
while drawing on Saussure and Levi-Strauss, must end in the
monographic analysis and the close description of individual
urban facts. There can be no general rules or principles, and the
basic category remains that of the urban fact, that which is done
(fatto), and, by being preserved, instigates a temporal horizon of
future overlays and modifications.
In order to introduce us into the problem, Rossi cites edifices
whose function has shifted completely (the first example is the
Palazzo della Ragione in Padua, and he returns to it in varying
perspectives throughout the book), and which in this sense seem
independent of their form, at the same time as it is precisely this
unique form that we immediately perceive and experience. The
individuality of the edifice thus resides both in the form, and
in its existence in space and time, which overlays it with sig-
nifications dependent on contingent events and unpredictable
uses (of which our subjective memories and psychological as-
sociations form a part). These accumulated differences, together
with a presupposed underlying substratum, is what constitutes
an urban fact. It is only by way of a rigorous and multi-faceted
description of such complex facts, which are once is material and
psychological, quantitative and qualitative, that we can claim to
grasp something like the “soul” of a city, a concept that on some
occasions may seem close to a concept like Norberg-Schulz’s ge-
nius loci, but in fact is something essentially different in stressing
the non-natural, man-made, and artificial dimension of the city,
whereas the theory of genius loci draws on a phenomenological
grounding of architectural forms in the passage from nature to
culture that preserves, intensifies, and gives a conscious design
to what was already there in nature.52
52. For more on Norberg-Schulz and the phenomenology of place, see
chap. 4, below.
111
Permanences have a dual quality: they provide productivity

with a necessary substratum, but they can also turn pathological
when severed from the system of the city (Rossi’s example is the
Alhambra in Granada); they can connect the layers of the city by
bringing the past into the present, but also cut us off from both
past and present by violently arresting time. Productive perma-
nence, or the “monument” as Rossi often simply says, supports
development rather than checking it, since it always remains open
to the future. The paradigm of monumentality is Roman through
and through: the Forum Romanum “constitutes one of the most
illustrative urban artifacts that we can know; bound up as it is
with the origins of the city; extremely, almost unbelievably trans-
formed over time but always growing upon itself; parallel to the
history of Rome as it is documented in every historical stone and
legend,” ultimately “reaching us today through its strikingly clear
and splendid signs” and pointing forward by its “extraordinary
modernity” in an almost utopian fashion: “in it was everything
that is inexpressible in the modern city.” (AC 163f/120)
Alongside the monumental permanences, urban facts can
also be grasped in more fluid concepts like “area” (area), which
can be marked off by natural limits, but in the end must be un-
derstood as the “projection of the city’s form on a horizontal
plane” (AC 70/63). The area is the minimal context required
for the analysis of an urban fact, and in this respect it is an ana-
lytical abstraction that makes it possible to discern the relation
between the city as totality and the various parts with their
respective character. It can be concretized as “neighborhood”
or “district” (quartiere),53 which have a relative autonomy and
distinctive features that can be described typologically, socio-
53. Rossi emphasizes the varying senses of the term: it can mean a block,
a neighborhood, a residential district (the English translation uses
district and residential district), but it can also be used as a translation, “as
imprecise as it is useful” (AC 97/81), of the German Siedlung.
112
2. 1966:
Thinking the City
logically (working class district, upper class district, etc.), and

in a number of other ways, and in their differential interplay
they constitute a social ecology. Unlike the primary elements
they do not preserve their singular parts, only a basic structure
that gradually shifts its contents, and in this they display a dif-
ferent set of space-time functions; their unity, Rossi claims,
however always requires the primary elements, which are what
ultimately makes up the unity of the city: The primary elements
“possess a value ‘in themselves,’ but also a value dependent on
their place in the city. In this sense a historical building can be
understood as a primary urban artifact; it may be disconnected
from its originary function, or over time take on functions dif-
ferent from those for which it was designed, but its quality as
an urban artifact, as a generator of a form of the city, remains
constant.” (106/87) Such facts have the capacity to act as cata-
lysts and enhance the process of urbanization, which is why they
must be understood in such a wide sense that they in the end
may seem to dissolve the materiality of the fact, or a least the
idea of a stable support: “Frequently they are not even physical,
constructed, measurable facts; for, sometimes the importance of
an event itself gives place to the spatial transformations of the
site.” (107/ibid., mod.)54
Typology and fantasy

A key concept in Rossi’s theory is place, which he defines as both
singular and universal, and as constitutive of the individuality
of urban facts. His conception draws on a long tradition from
the sacred sites of antiquity, echoes of which he finds in Palladio
and Milizia, as well as in the places of Christian pilgrimages,
54. In some passages Rossi comes close to the expanded idea of monument
launched by Alois Riegl. For a discussion of Riegl on monuments, see
Thordis Arrhenius, The Fragile Monument: On Conservation and Moder-
nity (London: Artifice, 2012), 92–107.
113
outer spatial markers of an inner invisible grace that make up

the miraculous geography of Catholicism. Building, monument,
and city are fundamentally linked to a “first sign” (primo segno,
AC 141/106); and who, Rossi continues, “can distinguish any-
more between an event and the sign that marks it?” (142/ibid).
But if the singularity of the urban fact is thus grounded in
the indiscernibility of event and sign, then the act or gesture
of marking that inscribes the event and generates the fact or
work opens onto myth and fiction, where the exchange between
the city as work and the work as city unfolds: “I often think,”
Rossi writes, “of the piazzas depicted by the Renaissance paint-
ers, where the place of architecture, the human construction,
takes on a general value of place and of memory because it is so
strongly fixed in a single moment. This moment becomes the
primary and most profound idea of the piazzas of Italy, and is
therefore linked with our spatial idea of the Italian cities them-
selves.” (AC 141/106) The architecture of the city is for Rossi
essentially, and not just metaphorically, akin to an artwork: it
is the ultimate “human thing” (cosa umana”, 33/26), and urban
facts are expressions of an “aesthetic intentionality” (107/87).55
But through what kind of conceptuality can we approach
such a work? The tension between singular and universal re-
turns, in that here, too, the experience of place, a street, a build-
ing, etc., is always individual, while we on the other hand cannot
avoid describing these singular facts in categories with a general
55. Rossi’s cosa umana draws on Lévi-Strauss’s famous proposal that the
city is “la chose humaine par excellence”; see Tristes tropiques (Paris:
Plon, 1955), 122. The analogy between a city and a poem or a sym-
phony is relevant, Lévi-Strauss says, because they are all located “in
the encounter between nature and artificiality” (121), which for Rossi
means: in the encounter between collective, i.e., non-conscious, and
conscious processes. Rossi’s persistent use of “aesthetic intentionality”
can however be confusing, since what he in fact shows is that the urban
fact in its very facticity is independent of its origin, and that the initial
intention in no way guides later overlays of new uses and senses.
114
2. 1966:
Thinking the City
value, in typologies, if we are to understand the city as a collec-

tive work. All manifestations of social life, Rossi claims, have
in common with the artwork that they are born in the uncon-
scious, and, ultimately, the difference between individual and
collective must be reduced.
The concept of typology has a long and stratified history that
takes us back at least as far as to Quatremère de Quincy who, at
the time when Vitruvian discourse, understood in the most gen-
eral sense, as a system of mimetic figures that reference an ideal
conception of Greek and Roman sources, was beginning to loos-
en its grip on architecture, formulated it in an attempt to forge a
new sense of tradition. First, the type is not the image of a thing
that is to be imitated or copied, as in the case of the model, but
situated at one further remove, or in Quatremère’s terms, an
“element that itself must serve as a rule for the model,” which is
why it, unlike the model, can produce works that do not in any
way look like each other: “Everything is exact and given in the
model; everything is more or less vague in the type.” Secondly,
since “nothing comes from nothing,” any creation of something
new involves a reference to type, as it were a “kernel around
which the development and variation of forms is gathered and
ordered.”56 The type is a “logical principle that is prior to form
and constitutes it.” (AC 32/40), Rossi says, and this is why it
must be separated from the model, which is a material copy lo-
cated at a lower level of abstraction. In acting as a generative
rule, the type preserves a potential to breed new forms, while
it from the opposite end may be used as an analytical instru-
ment to order and classify a given multiplicity of concrete mod-
els or architectures. “No type can be identified with only one
form,” Rossi notes, “even if all architectural forms are reducible
to types.” (34/41) For instance, the type of the domicile has not
56. Quatremère de Quincy, Dictionnaire historique, vol. 2, entry “Type,”
cited in AC 32f /40.
115
changed from antiquity to today, even though our ways of living

have been radically transformed, and new ways are possible. In
this sense, the type can be understood as “the very idea of archi-
tecture, that which is closest to its essence.” (ibid./ibid.)
Rossi intervenes in a discussion current at the time, where
his most important recent predecessor in the Italian context was
Giulio Carlo Argan. Citing Quatremère, Argan understands the
type as an abstraction from a set of given models, leading to
a “root form” that contains the possibility of future variations
and is independent of particular functions. In the relation be-
tween type and model, abstraction and tradition, Argan sees
a dialectic of creation: “Through this reduction of earlier art-
works to a ‘type,’ the artist is emancipated from the dependence
on determined historical forms, and he neutralizes the past. He
assumes that the past is absolute and no longer capable of pro-
gression.” This, Argan continues, separates the type from the
model, which implies a value judgment (something is assumed
to be perfect and worthy of imitation): “The acceptance of a
‘type’ implies the suspension of historical judgment, it some-
thing negative,” but in this the abstraction of the type prepares
something new, to “handle the demands of the present situation
by criticizing and overcoming past solutions that have been de-
posited and synthesized schematically in the type.”57
After Rossi’s invention, the debate was continued by Alan
Colquhoun, who sees the rediscovery of typology as a critique of
the alleged scientific basis of modernist design methods, within
which the “biotechnical determinism” that in the end imagines
a synthesis of biology and technology (Buckminster Fuller is his
example) always needs to refer to an element of intuition and
genius, or “expressionism,” if it is to arrive at a definite result,
all of which means to evoke two irreconcilable bases for design.
57. Argan, “Sul concetto di tipologia architettonica” (1962), reprinted in
Argan, Progetto e destino (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1965), 79, 81.
116
2. 1966:
Thinking the City
For typology becomes an acknowledgment of the necessary role

of the past, above all on the level of providing a language for
which expressionism appears primitive and consisting of “sin-
gle-word exclamations.”58
The final step in the discussion was taken by Anthony Vidler,
who locates a decisive historical displacement in the concept of
typology itself. In the first phase (from Laugier to Quatremère),
nature is at the center, and all the tectonic elements and ge-
ometries of architecture are prefigured in the rational order of
nature. In the second phase, the machine and industrial produc-
tion take center stage, but in both cases, architecture is ground-
ed in an order outside of itself. In the third phase, with Rossi
as the main case, the city itself becomes a source of types; it is
“emptied of specific social context from any particular time and
allowed to speak simply of its own formal condition,”59 Vidler
suggests, which seems somewhat misleading, at least in relation
to L’architettura della città. Vidler’s “third typology” is not based
on earlier forms or types, but “de-composes” them to fragments
that may be “re-composed” in new contexts; it is a radical “on-
tology of the city” that breaks with the form–function equation
in a way that is also claimed to be radically political in a some-
what obscure way. The example given is Rossi’s project for a city
hall in Trieste, whose form refers back to the eighteenth-cen-
tury prison, which, today, Vidler suggests, indicates the “am-
biguous condition of civic government.” Rather than merging
the type city hall and prison, Rossi makes then contradict each
other, resulting in a dialectic “as clear as a fable: the society that
understands the reference to prison will still have need of the
reminder, while at the very point that the image finally loses all
58. Alan Colquhoun, “Typology and Design Method” (1967) reprinted in
Essays in Architectural Criticism: Modern Architecture and Historical Change
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1985), 49.
59. Vidler, “The Third Typology” (1976), reprinted in Nesbitt, Theorizing A
New Agenda, 261, Vidler’s italics.
117
meaning, the society will either have become entirely prison,

or perhaps, its opposite.”60 This concept of a third typology
seems torn between options that appear irreconcilable, or at
least in need of meditation: a de-composing of older forms into
fragments, and a humanist rejection of the “fragmentation,
de-centralization, and formal disintegration introduced into
contemporary urban life by the zoning techniques and techno-
logical advances of the twenties”;61 an affirmation of the formal
autonomy of architecture, and a claim for its pervasively politi-
cal nature. These tensions are, to be sure, already there in Rossi,
but here they have come to the fore in a much more explosive
fashion.
Generally, what gradually unfolds in this series of displace-
ments of the concept seems to be the consequences of the ten-
sion between the idea of the city as founded on contingency and
singular gestures crystallized into urban facts, and the theory
of types as a set of universal principles. Rossi for his part un-
derstands the concept of type as radically opposed to a func-
tionalist analysis, first and foremost since he perceives the latter
as caught in an organicist analogy that deprives the fact of its
autonomy by automatically explaining it through the particular
purpose that it serves, and thus transforms the type into a spe-
cific model whose role would be to organize a given function.
Functions (in the plural) are obviously always part of the game,
but only have a partial explanatory force; as we noted in the
case of Palazzo della Ragione, they may come and go, and are
more like accidences on the surface of the urban fact’s substance
than its telos, and as such they cannot on their own account for
its complexity, which lies in the interplay of permanence and
transitory features. But the question is whether Rossi, with the
idea of typology, doesn’t give in to his rationalist tendencies, in
60. Ibid., 262
61. Ibid., 263.
118
2. 1966:
Thinking the City
a way that in fact brings him close to the “disingenuous func-

tionalism” that he otherwise rejects.62 The emphasis on the
groundlessness of the city, or rather its constitutive multiplicity
of grounds and origins, seems here to succumb to a rationalism
that a priori organizes all future developments, as a condition
of possibility of empirical form—one must note that the idea of
type is originally and irrevocably Platonic, and when, in Rossi, it
eventually becomes transposed to the psychology of the creator-
architect, this changes little of its founding structure.63
The idea of typology is extended further in the later concept
of analogous cities, where the dissolution of the fact–fiction di-
vide is taken one step further. Rossi starts off with a painting
by Canaletto, showing an imaginary Venice where buildings
by Palladio (in reality located in different places) are brought
together in a single space, and proceeds to construct an anal-
ogy of a possible Venice that belongs to no particular time and
place. In the preface to the second edition of L’architettura della
città he speaks of this as the answer to a need to formulate “a
more complex rationalism than the schematic one offered by
the historiography of modern architecture,” in the sense that
the “geographical transposition of the monuments within the
painting constitutes a city that we recognize, even though it is
a place of purely architectural references.”64 The analogous city
62. As is argued in Baukuh, “Le promesse,” 104ff (thus the title of essay:
this is one of the “promises not kept” by Rossi).
63. The typos plays in important role in Plato, where it often designates
the “imprinting” activity whereby a form is inscribed in matter. This
has been read in different ways, either as a violent imposition, or as
mediation between the form and the receptacle, which still echoes in
the much later architectural application of the concept. For a discussion
of the term in Plato, see Serge Margel, Le tombeau du dieu artisan (Paris:
Minuit, 1995), 132ff. Rossi’s transference of the type to the mind of the
architect takes place just after L’architettura della città, in the preface to
the Italian translation of Boullées L’architecture. See Rossi, “Introduzi-
one a Boullée”, in Scritti scelti.
64. Architecture of the City, 166 (this preface is not included in the Italian
reprint). The concept of the analogous city is subsequently developed
119
is a fiction, and yet it lays claim to a truth, a pure architectural

language that fuses the universality of typology with the gen-
erativity of analogy.
Inventing the city

In the preface that accompanies the English translation of the
L’architettura della città, Peter Eisenman highlights the complex
relation that Rossi establishes to the modernist as well as hu-
manist tradition, in which the reduction of urban facts brought
about by analogy is the key issue. If the urban facts of various
kinds that Rossi analyzes can be taken as a skeleton, a system of
real anchoring points in history, then the movement of analogy
will rather distance us from any such material structures: “the
analogue is detached from specific place and specific time, and
becomes instead an abstract locus existing in what is a purely
typological or architectural time-space,” which for Eisenman
is a symptom, in the end of a failed and finally impossible at-
tempt, “through the erasure of history and transcendence of real
places to reconcile the contradictions of modernist utopia—lit-
erally ‘no place’—and humanist reality—built ‘some place.’”65
When real history is transposed to a collective memory, and the
more systematically in a study of the Veneto region; see “Caratteri

urbani delle città venete,” in Aymonino et al, La città di Padova (Rome:
Officina, 1970), which is the only text where Rossi engages in the mono-
graphic writing that he earlier deemed the only possible way forward.
In the preface to the Portuguese translation (1971) of L’architettura della
città we can see how typology eventually fuses with analogy: “Ultimate-
ly, the history of architecture is the material of architecture,” Rossi suggests,
and if typology in L’architettura della città had a “major though not
primary importance,” it now constitutes “the essential basis of design”
(Architecture of the City, 170). The thesis of the autonomy of form in rela-
tion to functional organization has become crucial, and it does not just
point to a multiplicity of functions that precludes any particular one of
them from being decisive: “Form is absolutely indifferent to organiza-
tion precisely when it exists as typological form.” (174)
65. Peter Eisenman, “The Houses of Memory: The Texts Analogy,” preface
in Architecture of the City, 8.
120
2. 1966:
Thinking the City
original function to a reservoir of abstracted typologies, we find

ourselves in a nowhere whose relation to actual history is basi-
cally rhetorical. Place and scale are dislocated, while Rossi still
aspires to anchor his claims in a humanist tradition from Alberti
onward, which for Eisenman is an impossible task. “For Aldo
Rossi,” Eisenman writes, “the European city has become the
house of the dead,” like a “giant or collective house of memory,
it has a psychological reality which arises from its being a place
of phantasy and illusion, an analogue of both life and death as
transitional states.”66 Rossi’s book itself becomes a project for
an analogous city, a model of historical analysis that lays claim
to truth and science, but which also wants to become a genera-
tive instrument that only half-heartedly and as it were against
itself acknowledge its fictional status.
Regardless of whether Eisenman projects his own themes
onto Rossi (which he undoubtedly does, above all the concepts
developed in his own “Artificial Excavations” during the same
period),67 in a certain way, his reading makes it possible to see how
the models proposed in Learning from Las Vegas and L’architettura
della città, precisely as two extremes, also end up touching each
other, almost like the two sides of a membrane or sheet of paper
that are in contact at every point and yet stay infinitely separated.
We might say, somewhat twisting Saussure’s famous image, that
none of them is simply a signifier or a signified of the other, but
both are signifier-signifieds that encircle a common absent cen-
ter, a master signified that would be the City-Architecture, for-
ever lost yet continually promised anew. This is why they both,
their differences notwithstanding, move within a space of history
as simulation, to be sure acknowledging this in various degrees,
oscillating between re-creation and invention, and in the end be-
come indistinguishable from a particular type of fiction.
66. Ibid, 10.
67. For more on this, see chap. 6, below.
121
Perhaps we might venture the following equation: as Las

Vegas relates to Rome, Rome will relate to Las Vegas—two im-
ages, generated through a similar process of analogy, fiction, and
simulation, neither of which can lay claim to a more substantial
truth than the other, and which appear to exchange their defin-
ing characteristics the longer and more closely we look at them.
To be sure, Rossi’s Rome is, his emphasis on close description
notwithstanding, not the factual Rome, but as it were its idea,
which becomes even more pronounced in the case of Venice and
the analogous city; similarly, Learning from Las Vegas, in spite
of its many accounts of the experiential dimension of the city
and its particular moods, is in the end only about a fictional Las
Vegas. In both cases, the empirical and the rational intersect,
in Rossi’s types and in the movement of “learning from,” even
though the examples chosen are never mere examples, but as
it were exemplary examples, paradigms that orient architectural
thought.
For Rossi, the material is the sedimented historical depth of
the European city, and his problem is how this tradition can be
continued without giving in to those permanences he calls path-
ological. This problem is foreign to Venturi and Scott Brown,
for whom the opposite to modernist abstraction and its erasure
of history is commercial mass culture and the new megatexture
of the recently invented cityscape with its surrounding highway
system, for which the term “sprawl,” they underline, merely sig-
nals the absence of an adequate analytical vocabulary. Arguably,
both of them remain caught in their specific traditions—which
is in fact what they each in their own way might claim as an an-
tidote to a false universalism—and any exchange between them
might seem pointless; and yet, reading them together produces
a new optic, since they see the same crisis from opposite per-
spectives. Both of them want to counter a loss of sense and
rethink architecture as symbolic communication, but whereas
122
2. 1966:
Thinking the City
Rossi scans the depth of time vertically in search of a dialectic of

permanence and change, Venturi and Scott Brown perceive it as
a surface, upon which signs and symbols detached from histori-
cal depth have become freely available for new uses.
When Rossi conceives the city as a language and a history, it
is on the basis of the highly stratified cultural material offered
by the traditional European city, with Rome as the paradigm;
in Venturi, the material is given by the flow of sign and com-
modities in late capitalism, which has become a kind of second
nature—behind Las Vegas there is nothing else apart from the
empty desert, as if to indicate the meaninglessness of nature.68
In both of these models, everything is already culture, although
in different ways: in Rossi every sign points downward through
the layers of time toward the permanences that safeguard the
continuity of urban facts, in Venturi and Scott Brown signs are
scattered along the Strip, and in the intertextuality (a concept
not yet in use at the time, but which in many respects seems
more suited than the late-modern formalist vocabulary of New
Criticism) of the commercial megatexture images refer to noth-
ing else than to simulacra of history. In Las Vegas, the semiotic
field has no outside, and every new image of history, preferably
seen through the windscreen at high speed, is just another im-
age soon to be replaced by yet another; in Rome, the external
sign is anchored in the depth of time, even though this too in-
volves fantasy and fiction, and eventually a theory of analogy
that brackets historical references in favor of a virtual space of
combinatorics that projects Rome back onto Las Vegas.
68. In a passage Venturi describes the limit of the city as a total break, which
the absolute indifference to the nature: “Beyond the town, the only tran-
sition between The Strip and the Mojave Desert is a zone of rusting beer
cans. Within the town, the transition is as ruthlessly sudden. Casinos,
whose fronts relate so sensitively to the highway turn their ill-kempt
backsides toward the local environment, exposing their residual forms
and spaces of mechanical equipment and service areas.” (LLV 35)
123
Depth and surface, historical memory and the transitory

quality of the present, Rome and Las Vegas would be like two
extreme models, both of which also understand the city through
the lens of artworks, Rossi drawing above all on Renaissance
painting, Venturi on the photographically based work of early
pop art. They seem at first, as we noted earlier, like the outer
markers of a debate that marked the period, and between which
many other alternatives were suggested, but as they begin to
trade places and exchange their attributes, they also move into
the very center of the debate, ceaselessly revolving around a gap
left by what in one sense may be taken as the effect of the ab-
sence of Architecture, but on the other hand, and inversely, just
as much as en effect of the presence of the City as a stucturing-
destructuring force for which the inherited languages of form,
order, and structure no longer provided sufficient analytical vo-
cabularies.
124
3. The Pyramid and
the Labyrinth
Space and interpenetration

In a book that posterity has come to rediscover as one of the
most decisive texts of early modernist architectural theory, al-
beit one that received little attention in its own time, Sigfried
Giedion’s Bauen in Frankreich (1928),1 it is proposed that the
division between subject and object, and between the organic
and the technological, is undergoing a fundamental change. In
the modern world, Giedion prophesizes, individual things will
be dissolved into a single, intense, and malleable space, where
mind and machine are absorbed into a new kind of spatial unity
that he terms “interpenetration” (Durchdringung).2 This space
of interpenetration, however, does not depend exclusively on a
series of technological achievements, it also signals, through the
changes that it effects in consciousness, a political shift toward a
space of communality, a being-together of subjects and objects
as well as of classes and social groups; it is an emancipation that
heralds a collective order, while at the same time providing ar-
chitecture with a decisive yet diffuse role in the creation of this
order.
1. Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eiesenbeton
(Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann Verlag, 1928); Building in France,
Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete, trans. J. Duncan Berry (Santa
Monica: Getty Center, 1995).
2. For a discussion of Giedion’s various uses of “interpenetration,” see
Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Modernity: A Critique (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT, 1999), 30ff, and my Essays, Lectures (Stockholm: Axl Books,
2007), chap. 5.
127
The examples cited are drawn to a great degree from mod-

ern engineering, the Eiffel Tower and the Pont Transbordeur
in the harbor of Marseille,3 and from the architecture of Le
Corbusier and Gropius. The concept of interpenetration used
to bind all these cases together first involves a set of architec-
tural parameters: spatial volumes that intrude upon each other,
levels that are made to intersect by the partial removal of floors,
osmotic relations between interior and exterior, buildings com-
posed of several intersecting volumes that create a fluid whole.
But beyond the architectural domain in a more specific sense,
Giedion also discerns general implications for social space as a
whole. The leveling of compositional and tectonic hierarchies,
as it extends along a continuum from the single building to the
city—eventually depriving these two poles of the their absolute
status, if not rendering them obsolete—corresponds to a level-
ing of social divisions between forms of labor and social classes.
A common task begins to emerge, Giedion suggests, although
it requires that we discard traditional ideas of architecture as a
bearer of merely aesthetic and formal values if we are to perceive
the true stakes. This incipient space is indissolubly at once ar-
chitectural, perceptual, and social, and in drawing together the
subjective and the objective, the social and the aesthetic, it pre-
pares and promises a new form of life. Space no longer appears
as an empty, neutral container for things or as a set of abstract
coordinates, but rather as a field of transformation, traversed
by forces—it is, we might say, using a term forged much later,
a smooth space made up of virtual relations, rather than an al-
ready striated geometric space into which entities would be in-
serted—and architecture faces a new task: no longer to produce
self-sufficient forms that symbolize, represent, or even express
3. The bridge was one of the technological icons of the time and the
subject of photographs by Germaine Krull as well as a film by Moholo-
Nagy, Marseille, Vieux Port, from 1929.
128
3. The Pyramid and
the Labyrinth
something that would precede them, but rather to create spe-

cific conduits for a stream of life that flows through them and
to enhance its potential; to striate the smooth, so as to extract a
surplus value for form out of what otherwise would remain a
threatening formlessness.
Giedion here synthesizes a long historical development that
he edits and transforms into a story of his own. In relation to
recent architectural history, he emphasizes the role of construc-
tion, which finally, after having been pushed down into the un-
or subconscious throughout a long and confusing nineteenth
century, in the twentieth century is raised up to the conscious
level: “Construction in the nineteenth century plays the role
of the subconscious (des Unterbewusstseins). Outwardly, construc-
tion still boasts the old pathos; underneath, concealed behind
facades, the basis of our present existence is taking shape.”4
The new conception of space would then be both the result of
construction and the element in which it unfolds, a product
and a precondition, an invention and a discovery. Here Giedion
seems oblivious to a long legacy of predecessors, and with this
question of space as a foundational category we enter into one of
the most decisive prehistories of modernist architectural theory,
which still reverberates in many discourses that would claim to
either disown or pursue the modernist legacy, both with and
against the later and more general use that Giedion would make
of the term from Space, Time and Architecture (1941) onward.5
The discourse of space as an explicit category in aesthetic
theory has a short but dense history, and it can be traced back
4. Building in France, 87.

5. Giedion’s later work, notably the massively influential Space, Time and
Architecture (1941, with many subsequent expanded editions), in fact
constitutes a step back from the radicalism of the positions in 1928. The
radical transformative, social as well as technical, potential of interpen-
etration has faded, and the concept of architecture in a fairly traditional
sense is reinstalled.
129
to the turn towards new psycho-physic theories that emerged in

the mid-nineteenth century, and then to the discussions of “em-
pathy” (Einfühlung) from the 1870s, as they developed from the
pioneering work of Robert Vischer, through Adolf Hildebrand
and Heinrich Wölfflin, up to the first explicit claims for space as
the founding idea of architecture made by August Schmarsow
in the 1890s.6 Drawing on the legacy of Kant’s transcenden-
tal turn—in which space and time were reinterpreted as forms
of intuition and thus as conditions of possibility for knowledge
rather than as features of the things themselves—but filtering
it through a new experimental science that aspired to displace
traditional philosophy, categories and forms of intuition were
here understood on the basis of scientific data. Superficially,
this may be seen simply as a curious and easily refutable mis-
understanding of Kant’s project, but more productively it can
be interpreted as part of a gradual transformation of the very
idea of the a priori into what, following Foucault’s analysis of
the epistemic formation of this period, could be called objective
transcendentals, in which the contents of knowledge are made
to function as transcendental reflection: they are both empirical
givens and the conditions for any empirical givenness as such.7
These data were mostly drawn from psychology, although his-
tory and the emerging social sciences also made their respec-
tive contributions, resulting in the emergence of the kind of
psychologism or historicism against which the two major new
movements at the turn of the century would subsequently re-
act, analytic philosophy with Frege and phenomenology with
Husserl. While the anti-psychologistic gesture of Husserl was
instrumental in bringing about the renewal of transcendental
6. For a collection of source documents, with a detailed historical intro-
duction, see Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (eds.),
Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893 (Santa
Monica: Getty Center, 1994).
7. See Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Minuit, 1966), 329–333.
130
3. The Pyramid and
the Labyrinth
philosophy (whereas Frege’s analysis of thoughts as entities sep-

arate from the mind eventually gave rise to the linguistic turn),
the sharp divide it at first seemed to set up against its own im-
mediate past was misleading, and the dynamic and genetic di-
mension of the subject soon returned in phenomenology, which
indicates the extent to which it was never a question of simply
returning to Kantian a priori structures. Husserl’s true problem
was rather that of a dynamic transformation of the transcenden-
tal for which the preceding investigations into the psychological
genesis of knowledge could neither be ignored nor simply as-
sumed as factual answers to the problem of epistemology, but
instead called for a different type of founding. In aesthetics, the
attempt to reground the discipline through a rapprochement
with the new forms of psychology and psychophysiology had
already been particularly fertile, and it is this line of thought
that can be followed up in relation to the statements of Giedion,
who unwittingly synthesized a whole gamut of theories and dis-
courses.
The historically decisive formulations of this new field of in-
quiry can be found in Gustav Fechner, who advocates the shift
in the most general terms: aesthetics, in order to finally become
a science, must be developed from below (von unten), starting
in empirical observations, and not from above (von oben), as in
the idealist tradition from Schelling and Hegel.8 We should
not analyze abstract ideas of art and beauty, Fechner suggests,
but investigate our actual experiences, and aesthetics in this ver-
sion becomes an experimental psychology that seeks the laws
governing psychological processes, which in turn are ultimately
grounded in physiological states.
8. See the introduction in Gustav Theodor Fechner, Vorschule der Ästhetik
(Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1876), 1–7. The book, which contains the
most cited formulas, is Fechner’s last, but the ideas of an “experimental
aesthetics” had appeared in many of his earlier writings, and he can be
said to have initiated the new turn.
131
The theory of empathy was an attempt to account for this

lawfulness, and if we bracket the earlier discussions of the term
in Schleiermacher, whose main interest was the hermeneutics
of historically distant texts, we encounter its first relevant use
in the young Robert Vischer’s dissertation, Über das optische
Formgefühl: Ein Beitrag zur Ästhetik (1873). Vischer distinguishes
between everyday seeing (Sehen) and the specific and focused
look (Schauen) that we direct towards artworks, and his ques-
tion is why, in the latter case, we have a tendency to appreci-
ate certain forms. The answer lies in a transference that occurs
spontaneously between the mind and objects, on the basis of
our physical interaction with them: in empathy we become part
of what we see. For Vischer this ultimately depends on a process
of natural identification, an empathic transference that occurs
in relation to all things, but attains a higher level in art and the
optical sense of form, through which we get access to “a higher
physics of nature,”9 with a formula that might have been gar-
nered directly from Schelling. Consequently, empathy is present
just as much in the production as in the reception of artworks,
and the process of which these two moments are part goes be-
yond the subject-object divide towards an integral philosophy
of nature: empathy works in two ways, and the Ein-fühlung is a
“feeling-in” of the subject in the object as well as of the object in
the subject.10 Ironically, the demand for empirical science made
9. Über das optische Formgefühl: Ein Beitrag zur Ästhetik (Leipzig: H. Cred-
ner, 1873), 40.
10. In Husserl and other early phenomenologists, notably Edith Stein (Zum
Problem der Einfühlung, 1917), the problem of empathy is mostly seen
as an epistemological issue, and aesthetics plays no role; conversely,
as phenomenological aesthetics begun to develop in the circle around
Husserl, empathy received little attention, and when Werner Ziegenfuss
summarized the early discussions in his dissertation Die phänomenolo-
gische Ästhetik (Berlin: Arthur Collignon, 1928), the concept does nor
appear. Later scholars have attempted to retrace these connections,
although they are still relatively obscure; see Gabriele Scaramuzza’s
pioneering Le origini dell’estetica fenomenologica (Padua: Antenore, 1976),
132
3. The Pyramid and
the Labyrinth
by Fechner almost immediately reverts to its speculative oppo-

site, although not necessarily as a misunderstanding, but rather
as a working out of an inner tension that is constitutive of the
new physiological aesthetic as such. When art is brought back
into and grounded in the sensorium—a process that had been
underway since the initial stages of aesthetics, in Baumgarten’s
writings from the first half of the eighteenth century—the sen-
sible, the sphere of aisthesis, does not remain the same, i.e., it is
no longer a lower domain subordinated to our higher faculty
of reason, to which it merely would deliver material in a raw
and unprocessed state, but begins to acquire a relative auton-
omy that also demands a new and expanded understanding of
thought itself.11 The hierarchy between the sensible and the
intelligible is transformed into a fluid exchange, continuing
through the ambivalent position of aesthetics in Kant (on the
one hand a transcendental aesthetic, with space and time as the
sensible elements of pure reason, on the other hand a new di-
mension of the faculty of judgment that requires a critique of its
own), the rapidly shifting theories of philosophy’s grounding in
intellectual and aesthetic intuition in Schelling, the fluctuating
evaluations of art in Nietzsche, and beyond Nietzsche to a long
legacy of twentieth-century thinking on art. Nietzsche’s own
treatment is in fact exemplary of these ambivalences, from the
early claims in The Birth of Tragedy, where art is determined as
the “highest task and the proper metaphysical activity of life,”
through his middle period, where he turns to a positivist cri-
tique of speculative aesthetics—which echoes in some of his last
writings, where aesthetics is mockingly portrayed as “nothing
but applied physiology”—to his final period, where art is under-
chap. 1. To my knowledge the relations between early modernist archi-
tectural theory and phenomenology remain uncharted.
11. I discuss the new determination of sensibility in Baumgarten in more
detail in my “Baumgarten and the Invention of Aesthetics,” Site 33
(2013).
133
stood in terms a perspectivism that calls for an entire reevalua-

tion of the sensible, outside of the Platonic hierarchy.12 As these
examples show, the trajectory of the aesthetic is anything but a
straight and linear development; it sidetracks, backtracks, and
follows a sinuous line that nonetheless eventually ushers in an
important strand of twentieth-century art theory, where anoth-
er feature becomes decisive, which was also there from the be-
ginning, albeit relegated to the margins, i.e., that the sensorium
is itself something that is produced by technological means.13
Within the nascent theory of empathy, Vischer’s ini-
tial intuitions were developed further in Heinrich Wölfflin’s
“Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture” (1886), which
asks the question how pure tectonic forms can be understood
as expressive. Here too the human body is taken as the ground,
and the physiological aspect is even more pronounced, whereas
Vischer largely remained within a more limited optical dimen-
sion. It is because of our body that we can understand weight,
12. For the idea of a highest metaphysical activity, see the final sentence in
the “Preface to Wagner” in Der Geburt der Tragödie, Kritische Studien-
ausgabe, eds. Colli-Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999), vol. 1, 24.
The later remark on aesthetics as “applied physiology” is made in the
context of an attack on Wagner, and we should not immediately see
this as exhausting the possible meanings of aesthetics for Nietzsche:
“My objections to Wagner’s music are physiological objections: and
why still dress them up in aesthetic formulas? Aesthetics is, to be sure,
nothing but applied physiology.” (“Meine Einwände gegen die Musik
Wagners sind physiologische Einwände: wozu dieselben erst noch unter
ästhetische Formeln verkleiden? Ästhetik ist ja nichts als eine ange-
wandte Physiologie.”) Nietzsche contra Wagner, Kritische Studienausgabe,
vol. 6, 418. On perspectivism and the overthrowing of Platonism as a
“new interpretation of sensibility,” see Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche I
(Pfullingen: Neske, 1961), 231–254.
13. In order to correctly use the “weapons of the senses,” Baumgarten sug-
gests, we need to immerse ourselves in “aesthetic empirics” (ästhetische
Empirik), which involves all aspects of the situation, from the purely
physiological responses of the body to technical instruments like micro-
scopes and telescopes, barometers and thermometers, all of which have
in common prolonging and expanding our senses. See the second of his
“Letters to Aletheiophilus,” in Baumgarten, Texte zur Grundlegung der
Ästhetik, ed. Hans Rudolf Schweizer (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1983).
134
3. The Pyramid and
the Labyrinth
contraction, pressure, the bearing of loads, etc., which for

Wölfflin ultimately stems from of a dynamic inherent in nature
itself. Matter strives to descend and to attain a state of form-
lessness, while the “formative force” pushes towards gathering,
elevation, and a higher unity. Forms can thus be taken to de-
velop organically out of matter because of an “immanent will”
that wants to “break free,” and while Wölfflin perceives himself
as Aristotelian, he seems to be more of a Baroque thinker, and
there is an unmistakable Leibnizian inspiration in this idea of
“plastic forces.”14 In Wölfflin the concept of space as such, how-
ever, tends to recede into the background in favor of the bio-
morphic drive, and it comes to be understood more in the sense
of an environment or an “Umwelt” of an organism that itself
remains the center.
Seven years later the theme is brought to a new level
in the works of Adolf Hildebrand and August Schmarsow.
Hildebrand’s “The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts” analyses
the perception of sculpture, and for him space is a continuum,
like a basin of water where individual bodies form separate vol-
umes. In architecture our relation to space is expressed directly,
it becomes present in terms of a “total spatial image” within
which all tectonic relations acquire their significance. This con-
ceptual development culminates in Schmarsow’s “The Essence
of Architectural Creation” (1893), where the autonomy of the
single architectonic elements is even further reduced in favor
of a total experience. We cannot understand the work of archi-
tecture if it we see it as stones and vaults, Schmarsow claims;
instead it relates to a total sense of space originating from our
body as a zero-point where the spatial coordinates intersect.
Architecture produces a “feeling of space (Raumgefühl), it is a
14. For the connection between Leibniz’s conception of vis plastica and
Wölfflins’s analysis of Baroque art, see Gilles Deleuze, Le Pli: Leibniz et
la baroque (Paris: Minuit, 1988), 6.
135
“creatress of space” (Raumgestalterin), and only on this basis can

its parts and tectonic details be expressive and have a specific
meaning.
The radical conclusion that could be drawn from this is that
the body is not simply—primordially speaking not at all even—in
space, as if in a container: the objectivity of space is fundamentally
a projection, arising from or woven out of the subjectivity of the
subject. While these ideas are only germinating in Schmarsow,
he anticipates many of the themes that will become central in
the phenomenological tradition from Husserl to Heidegger: the
reduction of objective Cartesian extension, the analysis of the
kinesthetic sphere through which the ego organizes a system of
motility and tactility, the difference between the objective-physi-
ological Körper and the living Leib, even the idea of the earth as an
ontological ground of the tectonic categories.15 But he also lays
the ground for something that would only enter phenomenology
in Husserl’s late work, and then in Heidegger, i.e., a historicizing
of the ground, in which this foundational space is itself pried open
and turned into a techno-corporeal assemblage. The history of
architecture, Schmarsow proposes, should be written as the his-
tory of the “senses of space,” which also means to write a history
of the body, and of the changing character of intimacy and self-
relation. Architecture is rooted in an experience of space, which in
turn is founded upon the body, but this body is itself subjected to
change; it is inscribed in all those technological assemblages that
15. As Husserl deepens the analysis of intentionality and its embodiment,

he eventually hits upon the earth as the unmovable background of all
theoretical acts, an “originary ark” that grounds all of our categories.
Husserl’s fragment, “The Earth as Originary Ark Does not Move,” was
written in 1934, the year before Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work
of Art,” with which it shares many motifs. For an attempt to cross-read
some of these issues, see my “Husserl and the Earth,” in Tora Lane and
Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback (eds.), Disorientations: Philosophy, Litera-
ture and the Lost Grounds of Modernity (London: Rowman & Littlefield,
2014).
136
3. The Pyramid and
the Labyrinth
condition our experience of space, so that it becomes a subject-

object compound, able to orient itself in the world because it is
itself a product of this world.
The project of the avant-garde as we find it in Bauen in
Frankreich and many other similar texts from the period is one
possible outcome of this,16 even though it in the end probably
takes Schmarsow’s own ideas far beyond their original meaning:
the task becomes to actively produce a new space, to break down
the barriers between subjects and objects, people and things, in
order to allow for a new structuring of everyday life from the
bottom up, based on interpenetration. In claiming that archi-
tecture is not first and foremost a set of forms and structures
placed in a neutral and pre-given spatial container, but a tech-
nique for generating space and the experience of the subjects
that inhabit it, Giedion is thus drawing a conclusion that was
already prefigured in at least half a decade of intense research in
aesthetic psychology.
This conclusion will in the last instance strike back at the
traditional concept of architecture, something Giedion does not
fail to notice. If we must abandon the idea of architecture as an
art form that produces autonomous and free-standing objects
to be judged according to inherited aesthetic and morphologi-
cal criteria, this means that it must be understood as part of a
larger process, a “stream of movement” (Bewegungsstrom) that
will require different analytical tools and concepts. “It seems
doubtful,” Giedion notes in the beginning of his book, “wheth-
16. Other important texts from the period include Theo van Doesburg,
Grundbegriffe der neuen gestaltenden Kunst (1925), and Moholy-Nagy,
von material zu architektur (1929). The latter concludes with a celebra-
tion of Gropius’s Bauhaus building in Dessau and Brinkmann and van
der Flugt’s Van Nelle factory in Rotterdam, both of which evince an
“illusion of spatial interpenetration of a kind that only the subsequent
generation will be able to experience in real life—in the form of glass
architecture.” Moholy-Nagy, von material zu architektur (Berlin: Gebr.
Mann, 2001), 236.
137
er the limited concept of ‘architecture’ will indeed endure. We

can hardly answer the question: What belongs to architecture?
Where does it begin, where does it end? Fields overlap: walls no
longer rigidly define streets. The street has been transformed
into a stream of movement. Rail lines and trains, together with
the railroad station, form a single whole.”17
The idea of a stream, flow, or flux (Strom) might here seem
merely metaphorical, but it shows the profound link not only
to the tradition of empathy, but also to contemporary philo-
sophical thought, above all Husserl and Bergson, both of which
seemed equally oblivious to their recent past. Rather than a con-
tainer or a Cartesian substance undergoing modifications, for
Husserl phenomenological consciousness is a “stream of expe-
riences” (Erlebnisstrom) held together by its inherent temporal
structure of retentions and protentions, just as Bergson’s vital-
ism speaks of an élan vital held together by the power of memo-
ry. Giedion’s stream belongs to the same philosophical conjunc-
ture, the difference however being that it does not take place in
the immanence of a consciousness, but in a movement pertain-
ing to an exterior of which consciousness is itself part; rather
than a mere objectivity, this exterior now assumes itself some
of the characteristics of subjectivity, or more precisely becomes
a kind of subject-object, an intensive field out of which enti-
ties emerge.18 Whether this is closer to Husserl or to Bergson is
perhaps a moot question (the element of exteriority is probably
closer to Bergson, at least if we follow Deleuze’s interpretation);
it is a possibility inherent in both of them.
17. Building in France, 90.

18. Elsewhere I have tried to show how the same thing can be applied
to Malevich’s “non-objective world” (gegenstandslose Welt, literally
“without objects,” bespredmetnost). It is not world that would be simply
lacking objects, but a field that art must attain through a process akin to
the phenomenological reduction, and out of which objects emerge. See
my Essays, Lectures, 186ff.
138
3. The Pyramid and
the Labyrinth
At the same time, this stream of motion into which architec-

ture is as it were submerged, is also what is produced by architec-
ture, no longer taken in the “limited sense,” but as generalized
constructive activity; it is not simply dissolved, but retains a ca-
pacity to give shape to a stream that otherwise would be simply
formless. And what its techniques for spatial interpenetration
produce is a particular kind of transparency that allows subject
and object to remain on the same plane, open to each other, but
also an instance of control and regimentation; the openness of
interpenetrative space is a function of a constructive power that
produces transparence.
Dialectics of transparency
Giedion’s proposals might be understood as utopian, and his
interpretations of the past were never mere records of facts,
but always were oriented toward the opening up of possible fu-
tures—they are indeed operative, as Tafuri suggested, but self-
consciously so—which is one of the reasons why his idea of a
constructive subconscious had such a massive influence on Ben-
jamin’s work on the Parisian arcades, most directly in the case
of the sections on architecture, but also as a general theoretical
model for the way in which technology impacts on structures of
consciousness and perception, in tearing open a gap in the fabric
of time that heralds a coming transformation.19
19. Upon receiving the book, Benjamin writes to Giedion: “When I

received your book, the few passages that I read electrified me in such
a way that I decided not to continue with my reading until I could get
more in touch with my own related investigations.” (Benjamin, letter
to Giedion February 15, 1929, cited in Sokratis Georgiadis’s preface in
Giedion, Building in France, 53). For the relation between Benjamin and
Giedion, see Detlef Mertins, “Walter Benjamin’s Tectonic Uncon-
scious,” Any 14 (1996), and “The Enticing and Threatening Face of
Prehistory: Walter Benjamin and the Utopia of Glass,” Assemblage 29
(1996). Tafuri, notwithstanding his constant references to Benjamin,
seems to have overlooked this connection, which places both Benjamin
and Giedion on the operative side.
139
Benjamin’s suggestions that modern architecture heralds a

culture characterized by a positive “poverty,”20 where the use of
transparent materials like glass would reduce the space of bour-
geois interiority and its psychological depth, are largely derived
from Giedion. In this world of poverty, the organic synthesis
promised by late nineteenth-century culture would be displaced
by the rationalism of the engineer that releases us from a false
culture, and makes possible a life that can be lead without “leav-
ing traces.”21 The traces that bourgeois life secretes and accu-
mulates in its shielded interiors sever us from the collective in
becoming reified markers of an equally reified individuality,
whereas for Benjamin the true task is to forge a mode of life
that opens us up to the communal, for which the transparency
of new materials, and eventually the new sense of space, is a
precondition. “Things made of glass have no ‘aura,’” Benjamin
suggests, and “generally speaking, glass is the enemy of the se-
cret. It is also the enemy of possessions.”22
Like Giedion, Benjamin imagines that the new technology
will fundamentally change our capacity for perception, even
remodel the very categories of space and time, as when in the
essay on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproducibil-
20. See Benjamin, “Erfahrung und Armut” (1933), Gesammelte Schriften
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), vol. 2/1, 213–19. Cf. Das
Passagen-Werk: “It belongs to the technical forms of Gestaltung that
their progress and success are proportional to the transparency of their
social content (glass architecture comes from this)” (GS V, 581).
21. “This was something to which Scheerbart with glass and Bauhaus with
steel had opened a path: they have created rooms where it is difficult to
leave traces.” (“Erfahrung und Armut,” 217) To “erase the traces” is the
theme for Benjamin’s commentary to a poem by Brecht from Lesebuch
für Stadtbewohner; see Benjamin, Versuche über Brecht (GS II/2).
22. “Erfahrung und Armut,” 217. The idea of a world without possessions,
or rather one that would make possible a different relation to the object
than the one organized along the lines of use and exchange value (with
their concomitant tendency to fetishism), was a crucial theme among
some constructivist theoreticians, notably Boris Arvatov. See Christina
Kiaer, Imagine no Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2005).
140
3. The Pyramid and
the Labyrinth
ity, he argues that cinema functions as a kind of psychoanalysis

of the “optical unconscious” that will allow us to see and take
possession of space in a different way. Similarly, Giedion and
Benjamin both understand the Pont Transbordeur as a con-
densation of the same kind of technological sensibility that
we encounter in the microscope, the telescope, the X-ray im-
age, and the aerial photograph, which eventually would usher
in a transformed concept of nature. Benjamin tends however
more to stress the role of photographs in allowing us to deci-
pher the city and the relations of labor in a changed perspec-
tive, and that technology as such is insufficient, even though
he too is ambivalent on this point, as comes across particularly
pointedly in the Reproduction essay. For both of them what is
ultimately at stake is the possibility of a fusion of nature and
technology, or, as Benjamin suggests in a note in the Passagen-
Werk: “One could formulate the problem of the new art in the
following way: when and how will the worlds of mechanical
forms, in cinema, in the construction of machines, in the new
physics, etc., appear without our help and overwhelm us, make
us conscious of what is natural in them?”23
This opening up, or de-auratization, of the architectural ob-
ject was intended as a way to create a new social mobility and
an openness between groups and classes, and Giedion’s and
Benjamin’s proposals can in this respect be taken as paradigmat-
ic for a whole generation of avant-garde thinkers and artists. In
hindsight, it is clear that this among many of them (though by
no means all) this was based on a fantasy of control and exertion
of power: transparency erases the division between inside and
outside, private and public, and in this it produces a new subjec-
tivity that is attuned to new social demands and programs, for
which the architect or artist becomes a Demiurge.
23. Das Passagen-Werk, GS V, 500 (my italics).
141
The idea of transparency forms an integral part of early mod-

ernist architecture, although its underlying motifs are multiple
and entangled. The glassy surface may be read as an instrument
for an openness and candor that are imposed from the outside
rather than emerging from the inner spontaneity of the subject,
but can also be read as a means of producing opacity or a variable
light in order to enhance a sense of pleasure and enjoyment;24 it
may fuse interior and exterior in a sweeping movement, or ren-
der the passage impossibly difficult by multiplying reflections
and doubles. There is a whole history of modern architecture
to be written, which would investigate how this phantasm has
been negotiated, the contradictions that it harbors, and the way
in which it continues to inform the architectural imaginary far
beyond the projects of the early modern masters.25
24. Benjamin’s direct reference when it comes to the use of glass is the poet
Paul Scheerbart, whose visions in Glasarchitektur (1914) of a world based
on transparency acted as a catalyst for many in the early avant-garde.
Scheerbart’s book was aiming at a moral change of man, but it was also
a poetic sketch that resists any unambiguous and programmatic read-
ings. Scheerbart imagines how glass architecture would evolve from a
singular building until it covered the whole face of the earth, provid-
ing a complete enlightenment, an infinite luminosity. While there is
a austerity and poverty in Benjamin’s fascination with transparency,
Scheerbart stresses the sensuous and voluptuous aspects of glass—what
attracts him is not so much transparency, and definitely not any kind
of austerity (and on this point he seems to have been fatally misread by
many avant-gardists) as the possibility of modulating light and shade,
heat and cold, and the achievement of a state of maximum comfort and
luxury, where interior and exterior blend together in a delightful conti-
nuity and our homes become “cathedrals” for the fulfillment of desires.
We have to get rid of our nostalgia for the heavenly paradise, Scheerbart
suggests, so that we may realize it here and now in terms of a hedonist
culture based on luminosity.
25. A crucial reference would here be Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky’s
1964 essay “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal,” which attempt
to spiritualize technology by defending the autonomy of architecture
as art from the attacks mounted by the historical avant-garde. Rowe
and Slutzky weld together the themes of transparency, interpenetra-
tion, and space-time in a formalist conception that makes it possible to
think the trajectory of modern architecture as a way to an autonomy,
self-referentiality, and aloofness from the world that preserve the depth
142
3. The Pyramid and
the Labyrinth
As a slight sidetrack from our theme here, we can note there

is a strikingly parallel take on this debate to be found in Sergei
Eisenstein’s unrealized film project Glass House, and the notes
and sketches that accompanied it, which cast a particular light
on many of the architectural aspirations of the period. First
conceived in 1926, during a stay in Berlin where he was to
oversee the premier of The Battleship Potemkin, Eisenstein takes
issue with the fantasy of glass architecture as social utopia.
He imagines a completely transparent skyscraper replete with
paradoxical interpersonal situations, as if to display the impos-
sibility in a capitalist society of achieving any reconciliation
between its centrifugal forces, propelling people into solitude,
and the demands of mass society for participation and com-
munal life.
One the one hand, Eisenstein’s reading of glass architecture
and its social claims is negative and ironic: Western architects,
in spite of their formal skills in manipulating concrete, glass, and
steel, forget about the “real man,” who becomes only an image
and not a “tenant” with his “luggage in his hand, his wife and
kids.” But on the other hand, for Eisenstein transparency is also
a crucial formal discovery, an architectural device for breaking
out of cinema’s architectural confines, even to make it “step out
if itself.” The Glass House project allows Eisenstein to elaborate
on the possibility of a non-naturalist cinema, an art of multiple
points of view and entries (which he connects to Joyce, whose
Ulysses he discovered at the same time), and in this sense the
project remains on the horizon as a theoretical resource, long
after the shooting of the actual film had been finally abandoned
after the disappointments in Hollywood in the early thirties—in
fact, until the very end of his life. On May 22, 1946, Eisenstein
and values of a humanist culture, and for which the analogy with paint-
ing will be essential. For a discussion of this, see my The Silences of Mies
(Stockholm: Axl Books, 2008), 59-63.
143
writes in his diary: “Everyone, once in a his life, writes his ‘mys-
tery play’; mine was the Glass House.”26
In many respects the Glass House notes are close to Eisenstein’s
working notes toward the film version of Marx’s Capital, in radi-
cally exceeding the strictures of cinematic language and even the
domain of the visual as such: it was “an impossible film,” François
Albera says, “a project destined to remain virtual.”27 But this vir-
tuality was indeed a highly productive one, and it continued to
inform much of Eisenstein’s subsequent work. The transparency
of the glass house condenses the formal and the political into
one charged image, with multiple intersecting points of view,
and where the interpenetration not just of subjects and objects,
but also of actions, generates a dialectical drama that shows the
promised transparency to be ridden with fears and tensions; it
harbors a mystery: that transparency and interpenetration on an-
other level produces opacity, confusion, and division. The ques-
tion of how to negotiate the relation between political agency and
formal complexity, how to transform the dislocation of percep-
tion into a model for social critique, traverses the avant-garde in
all of its guises, and whether the quest for transparency, material
as well as social, will help bring about this model for social cri-
tique, constitutes one of its founding problems.
Producing complexity,
or the planning of chance
When Giedion notes that “walls no longer rigidly define
streets,” and that “the street has been transformed into a stream
of movement,” his vocabulary is derived from a first machine
age discourse on energy, movement, and velocity, claiming to
dissolve all firm objects that pose obstacles to a new type of free-
26. Cited in François Albera, “Introduction,” in Eisenstein, Glass House
(Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 2009), 11.
27. Ibid, 9.
144
3. The Pyramid and
the Labyrinth
dom, which however itself needs to be organized along the lines

of rational construction. From the point of view of the postwar
developments, it would be possible to see this as already point-
ing ahead to the need for a more stratified analysis that describes
the conduits of such forces, how they are channeled and rerout-
ed—in short, we could say that the futuristic energetics of the
first wave of the avant-garde already calls upon the cybernetic
reconstruction that was to be undertaken in the second wave. If
architecture in Giedion’s vision ceased being the paradigm for
order and stability to the point that its limited concept would be
dissolved, then this transformation, which we could perhaps un-
derstand as its general concept, indicates a new role within the
emergent network space: architecture provides a spatial form to
the flows themselves, and must henceforth be seen as part of a
more encompassing organizational technology.28
The erasure of the boundary between street and building,
and in the next step between inside and outside in a more gen-
eral sense, can then be taken as one of the fundamental modes
in which modern architecture attempts to exert a generalized
spatial control. On the other hand, this just as much implies an
increasing capacity for free movement, the creation of a space
that allows for variegated subject trajectories and modes of per-
ceiving, of which Corbusier’s idea of the plan libre is probably
the most famous case. The machine of architecture is not just
a machine for living, but also a viewing machine, a movement
machine, and perhaps at the most general level a war machine in
the twofold sense proposed by Deleuze and Guattari: it points
to the idea of a smooth and non-segmented space, it breaks
down an earlier segmented space, and yet it always re-creates,
as a kind of counter-effect, various new forms of striated and
segmented imperial spaces that function like apparatuses of cap-
28. For this reading, see Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex:
Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2004).
145
ture.29 This double-edged quality of the machine may account

for the conflicted reactions that it produces, but also for the fact
that these reactions themselves reproduce the same ambiguity:
the revolt undertaken in the name of freedom and the right to
movement always carries within itself, as a shadow impossible
to cast off, new regimentations—all of which implies that, as
Foucault noted, there is nothing that could guarantee freedom,
no legal or physical institutions, or any other types of structures,
that could once and for all define a space of liberty.30
When modernist architecture after the Second World War in-
creasingly came under fire, it was thus perhaps not only because
of its failure to fulfill its promises, but also because it in fact began
to realize them, in a process that, as Tafuri notes (even though
he dates this back to the shift between the twenties and thirties
and the reactions to the Wall Street crash), deprived architecture
of one of its most cherished self-images, i.e., that it could remain
the sovereign subject of this process. The most obvious case of
this is the program for a “functional city” based on zoning, first
proposed in the 1933 Athens Charter, but published by Corbusier
nine years later, and which began to exert a profound influence
on postwar urbanism and decision-making at the same time that
its theoretical foundations were questioned by a new generation
of architects, to some extent also by Corbusier himself. The rejec-
29. For the war machine and the apparatus of capture, see Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), chap. 9 and 10.
30. The analysis of this predicament proposed by Foucault, responding to
a question in an interview by Paul Rabinow on whether architecture
has a possible emancipatory power, remains pertinent: “I do not think
that there is anything that is functionally—by its very nature—abso-
lutely liberating. Liberty is a practice. So there may, in fact, always be a
certain number of projects whose aim is to modify some constraint, to
loosen, or even to break them, but none of these projects can, simply
by its nature, assure that people will have liberty automatically, that it
will be established by the project itself.” Foucault, “Space, Knowledge,
and Power,” Essential Works, eds. Paul Rabinow and James D. Faubion
(London: Penguin, 2001), vol. 3, 354.
146
3. The Pyramid and
the Labyrinth
tion of modernist architecture and planning discourse as authori-

tarian, ignorant of the specificities of place and space, and based
on an abstract universalism that erases the local and regional in
favor of a flattened corporate architecture, was in fact voiced most
clearly by the architects themselves, and the gradual breakdown
of the CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) can
be seen as the most visible symptom of this process. Founded in
1928 with Giedion as one of its initiators and the first secretary-
general, the trajectory of CIAM until its final demise in 1959—
when Corbusier had already left, and a series of dissidents, above
all Alison and Peter Smithson and then the Team X, had come
to radically challenge its founding principles—constitutes like a
seismic curve reflecting this process.31
On the level of formal solutions, we find a critique that
claims that the apparent rationalism of modernism is simply
another style, a mere rhetoric that in fact is just as much (or lit-
tle) functional as any other style, as for instance in the readings
proposed by Reyner Banham of the machine aesthetic of early
functionalism. The modernists, too, came under the influence
of this critique, in particular Le Corbusier himself, who dur-
ing this period began to look for a more informal strategy, “un
art autre” as he named it after the survey published by Michel
Tapié in 1952.32 This rejection was to a large extent based on a
recovery of certain humanist values that were assumed to have
been eradicated from prewar urbanist discourse, as in the case
of the neighborhood and its possibilities for social interaction
that was opposed to the rarefaction of the Ville Radieuse of early
31. For the history of CIAM, see Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on
Urbanism, 1928–1960 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2000). On the activities
of Team X, cf. Max Risselada and Dirk van den Heuvel (eds.), Team 10,
1953–1981: In Search of a Utopia of the Present (Rotterdam: NAi, 2005).
Important source documents can be found in Alison Smithson (ed.),
Team 10 Primer (Boston: MIT, 1968).
32. Miche Tapié, Un art autre, ou il s’agit de nouveaux dévidages du réel (Paris:
Gabriel-Giraud et fils, 1952).
147
Corbusier. The question of form as style was however a limited

one, and when the idea of the street as a place of encounter was
re-introduced, it was as a tool to articulate—or, more precisely,
to plan, which already begins to indicate the dialectics of this
process—a spontaneous complexity emerging out of unpredict-
able encounters. Rather than a wholesale rejection of earlier so-
lutions, this implied a continued emphasis on the emancipatory
aspects of urbanism, and together with the task of carrying on
a tempered and moderated rationality whose disenchantment
of aesthetic hierarchies were to form the basis of a democratic
and egalitarian social order. But that the complexity was to be
planned and produced testified to the inherent contradictions
of these proposals: the discourse of planning somehow had to
undo itself, or produce its own counter-discourse in order to
retain its legitimacy, and a complexity that defeated prediction
must be engendered on the basis of a few a priori principles. It
would no doubt be possible to write a history of postwar archi-
tectural theory on the basis of the question of how to create this
type of complexity: from the Team X and the splinters groups in
CIAM, through Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in
Architecture, Aldo Rossi’s Architecture of the City, and Colin Rowe
and Fred Koetter’s theory of collage, and up to Rem Koolhaas’s
dynamique d’enfer, the question of how to affirm chance and con-
tingency without simply destroying the profession of the plan-
ner imposes itself as a question of great theoretical as well as po-
litical urgency. In all of them the same dialectical problem sur-
faces, with varying degrees of lucidity and self-consciousness:
how can the unpredictable be organized, at once unleashed and
contained, and what is the role of architecture, traditionally the
very model of stability in the arts, in setting up the conditions
for something like a programmatic instability?33
33. For Venturi and Rossi, see chap. 2, above; for Rowe and Koetter, see Col-
lage City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1978); for Koolhaas, see chap. 5, below.
148
3. The Pyramid and
the Labyrinth
In this context it is not irrelevant to note the very term func-

tion has a decisive background in biology, not just as in the
machine aesthetic and its mimesis of particular technological
forms, or the tyranny (or poem, as in Corbusier) of the straight
angle, but in the sense of a process of adaptive process where
living being interacts with its surrounding world and forms a
dynamic whole, which is the true source of Sullivan’s famous
formula “Form follows function.” The biological background
highlights the extent to which modern architecture from very
the start was a program to administer and control life, to ren-
der it productive and useful, all of which could be subsumed
under the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics, which is why the
surface qualities of style and aesthetics should be reintegrated
into an analysis that accounts for a deeper underlying logic that
goes all the way back to the latter half of the eighteenth centu-
ry.34 As the Swedish modernist manifesto Acceptera (1931) says,
using a phrase from first Bauhaus manifesto, the task of mod-
ernist architecture is not to engage in any “non-sensical talk of
aesthetics,” but to provide a “Gestaltung von Lebensvorgängen,” a
“shaping of life processes.”35 The idea of regimentation of space
34. I discuss this extended genealogy of modern architecture, which breaks
with idea of modernism as predicated upon particular aesthetic, mor-
phological, and tectonic features and instead locates it within a complex
of knowledge and power in which the modern subject emerges as an en-
tity that is both disciplined and free, in my Biopolitics and the Emergence
of Modern Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008).
35. The claim is that utilitarian art has a beauty of its own, an evident
and transparent form, an “intuitive Gestaltung” of the form-function
complex rather than a “mechanical romanticism”. The Germans, the
authors of Acceptera say, speak of this in terms of Gestaltung von Lebens-
vorgängen, the “shaping of life processes,” in order to withdraw from
“aesthetic debates with their endless nonsensical talk”—but, they add,
there is, indeed, just as much nonsensical talk with respect to the practi-
cal sphere. Opposing both of these nonsensical discourses, they propose
that “art is order,” i.e., “an object displaying a perfect order and an
unbroken continuity between form and function.” This is, of course,
the ideological operation par excellence: a naturalization that also
involves the “process of life” in its integrity and postulates a continuity
149
that could be taken as the secret aim of Giedion’s “interpenetra-

tion” is an integral part of this: if architecture ceases to refer to
some eternal canonical reservoir of beautiful forms (although
in many cases it preserves, intensifies, and even claims to be the
only valid contemporary meaning of the classical reference, as in
the case of Corbusier), this is because it undertakes a different
task, i.e., to provide a spatial and territorial machinery for the
production of the modern subject.
Constructing the moment

One highly significant countermove to this understanding of
architectural and urban order—and which, as if at the same time
extending and inverting Giedion’s claim by placing an emphasis
on the role of the street and the kind of unpredictability that
is produced by movement, as well as on Benjamin’s belief on
the strategic use of modern image culture—can be found in the
situationist movement.36 In fact, many of those who criticized
the early modern movement argued that if architecture should
re-connect to the fabric of urban life, it must also accept the new
consumer society with its concomitant technologies and mass
cultural forms. This was the basic outlook of the British Inde-
among object, function, and user that allows for no further questions
because it is intuitive, evident, and transparent. See Acceptera (Stock-
holm: Tiden, 1931), 139f. “Germans” in the above quoted no doubt
refers to Walter Gropius and his introductory remarks to the 21 theses
on “Systematische Vorarbeit für rationellen Wohnungsbau,” in bauhaus
1, no. 2 (1927): “Bauen bedeutet Gestaltung von Lebensvorgängen.
Die Mehrzahl der Individuen hat gleichartige Lebensbedürfnisse. Es
ist daher logisch und im Sinne eines wirtschaftlichen Vorgehens, diesen
gleichgearteten Massenbedürfnisse einheitlich und gleichartig zu be-
friedigen.” (“Building means shaping of life processes. The majority of
individuals have similar vital needs. Thus it is logical, and in the spirit
of an economical undertaking, to satisfy these mass needs in a uniform
and similar way.”)
36. For an overview of how situationist theory engages with the legacy of
modernist architecture and city planning, see Simon Sadler, The Situ-
ationist City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1999).
150
3. The Pyramid and
the Labyrinth
pendent Group with its proto-pop strategies, for instance in the

use of collage techniques, which were at once formally close to
and yet ideologically wholly opposed to the détournement of the
situationists, and later of the French and American versions of
pop art. The reuse of commercial images in situationism instead
aimed for a total revolution: to overthrow consumer society
from within by appropriating and perverting its images, to at-
tain the revolutionary moment in a given society be exacerbat-
ing and intensifying its contradictions at strategically located
points, and not to indulge in the kind of permissive and liberal
attitudes toward desire and fantasy that permeated other influ-
ential theories of images and consumption, like Banham’s “aes-
thetic of expendability.” From 1963 and onward, the opposition
to pop art and its alleged political indifference even became an
officially professed aim of situationism.
In bringing together art, politics, and revolutionary activities
in terms of an analysis of the spatial ordering and regimentation
of everyday life, situationism can to some extent be understood
as a retrieval of motifs from the historical avant-garde,37 and it
was undoubtedly beset by the same contradictions, on the level
both of group psychology and of its theoretical premises. The
project to produce freedom, to create a “situation” that would
liberate the subject not only from social constraints, but also
from a self that is the result of an introjection of a social imagi-
nary (the society of the spectacle) is a highly tenuous operation
that might easily slip into authoritarianism and repression.
In spite of its short life-span and more or less imaginary
37. It has often been pointed out that their critique of modern architecture,
together with the discovery of a kind on urban unconscious, retrieves
motifs that can be found already in surrealism and perhaps even in
Baudelaire (the dérive can of course be understood as a postmodern ver-
sion of the flaneur). As Benjamin prophetically noted, “To comprehend
Breton and Corbusier would mean to bend the spirit of contemporary
France like a bow, so that knowledge hits the moment straight in the
heart.” (Das Passagen-Werk, Gesammelte Werke V, 573)
151
existence, a feature shared by many situationist projects, the

“Imaginist Bauhaus” created by Asger Jorn after breaking
away from the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm (which un-
der the direction of Max Bill at the time was the epitome of a
certain type of rationalist modernism) can be taken as one of
the formative events of the situationist analysis of modernism,
although, as we have seen, it also resonates with many other
similar revolts against modern town planning in the first two
postwar decades. For the situationists, the fate of modern ar-
chitecture and its instrumentalization under the aegis of the
CIAM appears as wholly inscribed in a process of rationaliza-
tion and bureaucratization that permeates both capitalism and
socialism, in relation to which the suggestions of situationism
may on the one hand simply appear as a willfully anarchistic
counter-rhetoric doomed to be remain at the margins, and on
the other as an almost uncanny intensification of certain fea-
tures of modernism itself. We have already noted the extent to
which this perpetual oscillation between freedom and subjec-
tion is already at work in the initial modernist program, and
what these revolts in fact imply should perhaps not be seen as
an outright rejection—although this is undoubtedly how situa-
tionism understood itself—but could perhaps more productively
be understood in terms of a re-working or a working-through
in an almost Freudian sense. Against the tyranny of the grid
and the straight angle situationism may propose a radical in-
dividual freedom that significantly enough must endorse the
intentionally useless, as in Günther Feuerstein’s 1960 projects in
the German section SPUR for radically impractical apartments,
which included sensations of physical pain and discomfort pro-
duced by destroying air-conditioning, walls, and windows,38 or
38. “By declining labor-saving devices, devising tortuous routes through his
apartment, and fitting it with noisy doors and useless locks, Feuerstein
refused to allow his own home to become another cog in the mecha-
152
3. The Pyramid and
the Labyrinth
in more complex way, in their refusal to accept renovations that

lead to higher housing standards, since this would solidify the
idea of the two-room apartment unit as a monadic satellite dis-
connected from the social world, where media and communi-
cation systems intensify alienation and render political action
impossible.39
But on the other hand, situationist architectural projects on
a more grand scale, such as Constant’s New Babylon, can just as
much be understood as another and even more radical way to
first dislodge, and then reprogram subjective experience, and in
their emphasis on unpredictability and on strategies for block-
ing out the repetitive aspect of experience and short-circuiting
possibilities for spatial identification, they radically circum-
scribe individual freedom: whoever enters the maze of the New
Babylon is supposed to never return to the same place, and must
be subjected to a very strict regimentation of movement, and the
openness ascribed to the trajectory is in fact, on the level of ar-
chitectural strategy, a result of the most precise and refined tech-
niques.40 Feuerstein wants to allow the body to break free from
nized world. It would no longer protect him from the environment nor
the sensations of his own body: ripping out his air conditioning and
throwing open his windows, he could swelter, shiver, and struggle to
hear himself think above the roar of the city; later he might bump and
hurt himself against one of the myriad sharp corners in his flat, and sit
at his wobbly table and on his uncomfortable sofa. Or he might unwind
by throwing paint against the walls and drilling holes through them,
filling out his flat with traces of his own ideas and history” (Sadler, The
Situationist City, 7–8).
39. For a discussion of this theme in relation the new French suburbs,
which fueled the imagination of artists and thinkers from Godard
(Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle, 1966) to Debord and Lefebvre, and
the emergence of a French consumer society in the 1950s and ’60s, see
Sylvère Lotringer, “Consumed by Myths,” in Bernard Blistène et al.,
Premises: Invested Spaces in Visual Arts, Architecture & Design From France,
1958–1998 (New York: Guggenheim, 1998).
40. For this reading of Constant, see Hilde Heynen, Architecture and Moder-
nity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1999), 151–173. See also Mark Wigley,
Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (Rotterdam, Witte
de With, 1998), and the contributions in Catherine de Zegher and Mark
153
the cage of reason by subjecting it to random events that become

possible through erratic acts of destruction of an existing archi-
tecture (smashing the window, tearing holes in walls and floors);
Constant wants to ensure, on the level of an architectonic struc-
ture that itself is wholly controlled, that randomness will always
prevail over the repetition and identification of singular places
and locations, and thus his environment must in some respects
become infinitely more coercive and constraining than any mod-
ernist plan libre. The belief that there is authentic life beyond the
spectacle, a beach buried somewhere deep below the pavement,
not only is a romantic fantasy, but also entails the idea of how this
authentic life could be (re)produced and as it were suggested to
the subject as an offer that it simply cannot refuse.
Most of the concepts proposed in situationist theory—the
dérive, psycho-geography, unitary urbanism, and most funda-
mentally the very idea of situation itself—contain this ambiguity.
On the one hand, they are meant to make possible a reflexive
use of the materials in a given culture by enabling the construc-
tion of a situation or a moment—a tactics for re-mapping the
spatial structures of a city whose secrets can be unearthed by,
for instance, performing semi-distracted strolls that establish
previously unseen connections, or for refunctioning images and
artifacts that contain within themselves the potential for a revo-
lutionary momentum if combined in the right way, a tactics that
must be seen in terms of more encompassing strategy for the sub-
version of society in its totality.41
This is also the source of the conflict that led to the rift be-
Wigley (eds.): The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from
Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond (New York: Drawing Center, 2001).
41. The question of tactics vs. strategy in avant-garde movements would
require a separate analysis; for a study of situationist architectural
discourse that takes its cues from Debord’s retrieval of Clausewitz and
his construction of a model for a “war game,” see McKenzie Wark, 50
Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 2008).
154
3. The Pyramid and
the Labyrinth
tween Debord and Henri Lefebvre. For the latter, whose analy-
sis of the structures of everyday life forms the backdrop of many
situationist concepts, it is decisive that fantasy and historical
moments (with the Paris commune constituting the paradigm
for both of them) can be integrated in a systematic theory capa-
ble of accounting for the subjective dimension of history with-
out reducing it. But rather than the systemic analysis that at
the time claimed to move away from subjectivity and experience
toward the construction of a pure Theory (most obviously in the
case of Althusser and his followers), for which individual experi-
ence would be caught up in the order of the imaginary, Lefebvre
insists on the power of the subject and imagination to engage
in the concrete dialectic of everyday practice, even to the point
that he would insist on being a “romantic revolutionary” and on
the need for resuscitating the dimension of feast and carnival,
against the kind of critical analysis whose obsession with struc-
tures for him merely reflected and reinforced the technocratic
world that it aspired to overthrow. In this there is also a moment
of pleasure or enjoyment (jouissance) that is essential for theory
to be meaningful, but also belongs particularly to architecture,42
a bodily encounter with the built environment that cannot be
reduced to the particular ways in which it spatializes the social
order, but that also transgresses this order in a form dispersal
and expenditure that still belongs to the capacity of the subject,
not to its undoing.
This idea of a theory that begins in and returns to the com-
plexity of the concrete was crucial throughout Lefebvre’s work,
and it emerges in the aftermath of the Second World War43 in
42. As comes across in the recently rediscovered text, Towards an Architecture
of Enjoyment, ed. Lukasz Stanek, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
43. Sylvère Lotringer notes that Lefebvre initiates his program for a
critique just after the Second World War, and the first volume is con-
temporary with the emergence of new housing programs and suburbia.
155
the guise of a “Critique of Everyday Life” (Critique de la vie quoti-

dienne, 1947), a title that would recur in two later works, Critique
de la vie quotidienne II: Fondements d’une sociologie de la quotidien-
neté (1962), and Critique de la vie quotidienne III: De la modernité
au modernisme (1981), and may be taken as a guide through his
labyrinthine oeuvre. Lefebvre’s re-anchoring of the analysis of
capital in the realm of the everyday calls for a mediation of in-
dividuality and history; and experience, as the place where alien-
ation and reification appears, to a large extent replaces work as
the founding analytical category—which also entails the need to
account for the irruption of pleasure as a particular and ineradi-
cable phenomenon. In this his work is obviously part of a more
encompassing process of revision in Marxist theory, shifting the
accent from the economic sphere to socio-cultural processes,
and in many ways it runs parallel to the Frankfurt School, of
which he however never seemed to have taken any notice. More
generally, this displacement translates the postwar integration
of economy in the production of a symbolic order, which in
turns weakens, or as some would argue, obliterates the socio-
logical distinction between avant-garde and cultural industry
that a previous generation of critical theory could rely on.
In the case of Lefebvre, this emphasis on concrete experience
comes across in a thoroughgoing critique of the idea of planning
(in many ways parallel to that of Tafuri), as the way in which a
state-controlled capitalism colonizes the lifeworld.44 This critique
This is also the moment when a new society of consumption begins to
take form, which Lefebvre would ceaselessly criticize throughout his
subsequent work. This is however also what lends a retroactive and
nostalgic tone to his writings—everyday life is that which has been lost,
and the possibility of reinventing it must draw on older models. See
Lotringer “Consumed by Myths”, and Lefebvre’s own comments in the
introduction to the third volume of Critique de la vie quotidienne.
44. In the second volume of Critique de la vie quotidienne Lefebvre develops
the idea that this colonization constitutes a projection back onto the
French territory of the techniques of domination that earlier had been
applied to the colonies; see the discussion in Kristin Ross, Fast Cars,
156
3. The Pyramid and
the Labyrinth
however perhaps retains a Kantian inspiration in not merely

being negative, but in proposing something like a complex en-
tanglement of possible experience, limits, and negative illusions,
of an Analytic and a Dialectic. Everyday life is on the one hand
regimented by the state and capital as the twin faces of the same
systemic power, on the other hand it always harbors a potential
for reversal and transgression. It is via an analysis of the street,
the café, the store—and, perhaps more surprisingly, the holiday
resort—that we may understand how structures are produced and
reproduced as a spatial ordering (which in this sense can be ac-
counted for exclusively neither in terms of base nor superstruc-
ture), but also as the permanent possibility of upheaval.
Both Lefebvre and situationism—the first immediately be-
cause of personal experience, the second through a historical
mediation that passes through the lettrist movement and a liter-
ary avant-garde that remains to be charted—are the heirs of sur-
realism, and they both echo a critique of early functionalism and
modernism that was already present in Bréton. Precisely because
of the historical distance, this heritage and its fascination with
immediacy is more pervasive in situationism, whereas it is tem-
pered and held up to scrutiny in Lefebvre. For him it is neces-
sary that imagination and historical moments be integrated into
a coherent theory that inscribes subjectivity and immediacy, al-
though without betraying it. The situationist situation is close
to Lefebvre’s moment, but also comprises the claim that this sit-
uation should be constructed, which unwittingly reproduces the
paradox in most Marxist theories of revolution, and no doubt
goes back to Hegel or even Rousseau: one must determine the
situation of freedom, while any substantial definition of it does
an unacceptable violence to it. For Lefebvre this points to a the-
oretical as well as moral shortcoming: to construct the situation
Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT, 1995).
157
means to underestimate the objective dimension of history in

the name of voluntarism, but also to reduce the subjective con-
tingency of the moment that is the condition of the emergence
of freedom. In spite of the considerable intelligence and often
mischievous ruses dedicated to bringing about such situationist
situations, the concept of situation still remains problematically
empty as to its ulterior purpose, which is why it must be given
to us from the outside, in an act that cannot avoid becoming
repressive. Using a Kantian vocabulary that is to be sure not the
one used by Lefebvre here, but yet constitutes a background for
his idea of critique, we might say that the situationist situation
is both blind and empty: blind because its intuitive immediacy
lacks the dialectical categories that would mediate it with the
totality, empty because its categories must be imposed from the
outside by an act of will that does not emerge out of the sensible
and intuitive material. In this way, the split between Lefebvre
and Debord is not just a personal one, but might by taken as
translating a constitutive rift in the avant-garde and the dialec-
tic inherent in its promise of an emancipatory architecture: to
plan the unplannable, losing control by immersing itself in the
formless while extracting another level of mastery from it.
Constructing the event

Using a conceptual pair devised by Bataille, we could perhaps
say that situationism, along with all the various political and/or
artistic movements that would follow in its wake, pits, against
the “pyramid” of modern architecture with its fantasies of con-
trol, the “labyrinth” of the street with a corresponding fantasy of
a controlled loss of control.45 If the pyramid is a thought of altitude
45. Bataille develops the opposition between the labyrinth and the pyramid
in several of his writings, above all L’expérience intérieure. For a discus-
sion, see Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges
Bataille (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1989), 57–73. The English title chosen
for Hollier’s book—whose French title is La prise de la Concorde—some-
158
3. The Pyramid and
the Labyrinth
and omnivisibility, the labyrinth opens up a space of eroticism

and jouissance, it is a transgression that turns not only against
an alleged Puritanism of modern architecture, but also “against
architecture” as such, as the very paradigm of the attempt to
subsume events under their concept; and yet the labyrinth is
an architecture too, equally if not even more meticulously con-
structed in order to produce a particular spatiality.
At a later moment in the unfolding in this chain of concepts,
Bernard Tschumi, whose early work picks up important themes
from situationist theory, would propose that architecture must
always be both pyramid and labyrinth at the same time: it must
transcend the sensuous and concrete in the direction of an au-
thoritative form from which the world can be surveyed, and de-
scend into a multiplicity of events that upsets all perspectives;
in Tschumi’s own terms, which once more revisits the clams of
Giedion, it must be both space as concept and spacing as event,
without dreaming of finally becoming the one or the other.46
From early on, Tschumi’s question deals with architecture as
event and social process, as in Do-it-yourself-city (1968),47 where
the idea of participation in planning shows an aspiration to
create an architecture of involvement, as well as a proximity to
Archigram and the idea of an ephemeral and in the end imagi-
nary architecture. He however opposes the idea that we should
attempt to extract new forms from early modernism, since mod-
ernism in his view has implied a continual idealization and de-
materialization, for which the forging of a concept like space
around the turn of the century was a decisive step, followed by
what exacerbates the claim, even though it has an obvious base in

Bataille’s own writings.
46. See Tschumi, “The Architectural Paradox,” in Tschumi, Architecture and
Disjunction (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1994). This volume cited in the
following as AD with page number.
47. See Ferrando Montes and Bernard Tschumi, “Do-It-Yourself-City,” in
L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui no. 148 (Feb-March 1970): 98–105.
159
the insistence that architecture be understood as a language. The

concept of space is not itself space, he emphasizes, and instead of
giving in to an abstract and scientific-sounding vocabulary, we
must attempt to develop practices based on corporeal experience,
and approach the dimension of the sensible as a non-totalizable
and disjunctive field. At first, this may seem like a rather straight-
forward Kantian turn: space is not a concept, and it cannot be
constructed, but refers us to an irreducible sensibility. But as we
have seen, Tschumi’s proposal is in fact in line with the formative
development of modernist space, or rather picks out one aspect,
and in no way is simply opposed to it; his claim is not that space is
simply there, as a pre-given form, but that it itself results from ac-
tions and events, and constitutes a flow that fuses subject and ob-
ject. He does, however, sometimes tend to see the sensible dimen-
sion as an underlying level, as if it were a question of a dualism in
a sense reminiscent of the young Nietzsche, so that order would
be only a mask for an underlying stream: “Behind all masks lie
‘dark’ and unconscious streams that cannot be dissociated from
the pleasures of architecture. The mask may exalt appearances.
Yet by its very presence, it says that, in the background, there is
‘something else.’”48
This something else is what provides architecture with its
autonomy: its uselessness is its necessity, a surplus in relation
48. Tschumi, “The Pleasure of Architecture,” AD 91. K. Michael Hays reads
the early work of Tschumi through Lacan, casting it as a desire con-
fronted with an impossible Real, “both the hard, impenetrable core that
resists discursive appropriation (it is prior to symbolization) and at the
same time the exorbitant emptiness that remains after symbolization
is complete (even as it is produced by symbolization itself […] it can
never be translated or rendered knowable as a positivity, this architec-
tural Real, but only experienced through an unassimilable, negative
Other—spaced out and projected backward, as it were, out of its own
structural effects.” See Hays, Architecture’s Desire: Reading the Late Avant-
Garde (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2010), 135. My interpretation here
crosses Hays’s at several points, although my focus on the dialectic of
control and openness as a generative problem places the accents slightly
differently.
160
3. The Pyramid and
the Labyrinth
to function as use value, even though this paradoxically seems

to appear only as a lack: “I would therefore suggest that there has
never been any reason to doubt the necessity of architecture, for the ne-
cessity of architecture is its non-necessity. It is useless but radically so.
[...] Defined by its questioning, architecture is the expression of
a lack, a shortcoming, a non-completion.”49 The other side of
this negativity of non-completion is however the event, an affir-
mative gesture that draws on experienced space as a becoming.
Rather than something subjective and interior, or an objective
outside given over to conceptual schemata, this is an undoing of
the subject-object divide that implicitly and explicitly draws on
the series of more or less distant historical models that we have
been tracing here, from Giedion’s stream of movement and the
interpenetration of inner and outer, to Lefebvre, situationism,
and Bataille.50 But if Giedion’s idea of architecture ultimately
49. “Questions of space,” AD 47, 49, Tschumi’s italics. As Hays notes (Ar-
chitecture’s Desire, 138), this can be read as a rejoinder to Tafuri’s remarks
in the preface to Progetto e utopia on the “sublime uselessness” that he
prefers to the “deceptive attempts to give architecture an ideological
dress (for further discussion of Tafuri’s claim, see chap. 1 above). While
the “sublime” in this sublime inutilità is probably intended only in the
sense of something extreme, would it not also be possible, only slightly
overinterpreting the term, to hear an echo of the Kantian sublime as the
mode of appearing of a concept that cannot be exhibited in intuition,
that defies the productive imagination’s capacity to present a case,
precisely because it is infinite? Kant’s example in the third Critique is
freedom, which in Tafuri’s case could be taken as the freedom of archi-
tecture from use value and ideology, even though this too, he quickly
adds, “harbors an ideological aspiration, pathetic in its anachronism.”
50. In the introduction to La production de l’espace (Paris: Anthropos, 1974),
48ff, Lefebvre famously distinguishes three senses of space: space as
perceived (l’espace perçu) or as the object of spatial practices (pratiques
spatiales), space as represented conceptually or as a representation
of space (représentation de l’espace), and space as lived or experienced
(l’espace vécu), the space of representation (l’espace de représentation), even
though he later in the book seems to largely disregard it. Tschumi’s “ex-
perienced space” is aligned with Lefebvre’s third space (or “thirdspace,”
espace tiers), which seems to come last, as a surplus added to the preced-
ing two terms or resulting from their interaction, but in fact must be
understood as the primordial one, a kind of existential-ontological
space from which other two are abstracted, and in this sense it comes
161
was that of a discipline capable of organizing and rationalizing

this dynamic stream, giving form to that which always threat-
ens to overflow it, then Tschumi’s event-space signals an un-
derstanding of form that proceeds inversely and thinks form on
the basis of its continual undoing and displacement, as in the
idea of a cross-programming that overlays normally incompat-
ible activities.
In the three-part essay “Architecture and Limits” (originally
published in Artforum 1980–81, where it had an impact far be-
yond a specialized audience of architects), Tschumi surveys the
field of contemporary architecture as it appeared in the begin-
ning of the eighties, and points to certain works, located at the
limit of architecture, which are nevertheless indispensible in re-
sisting “the narrowing of architecture as a form of knowledge as
mere knowledge of form” (AD 105), while he at the same time
rejects the solution of a simple affirmation of autonomy that
would simply turn architecture into art: architecture cannot
avoid programs and functions, even though it must always also
be something more. If the twentieth century has irrevocably
fractured the Vitruvian conceptual triad, this poses new prob-
lems. Beauty (venustas) disappears or is absorbed in the discourse
of linguistics or semiotics, which no longer supplies rules for
beauty, but instead interrogates the limits of the “‘prison-house’
of architectural language” (110), which for Tschumi necessitates
that we once more pose the question of subjectivity in architec-
ture. Structural stability (stabilitas, or firmitas, to use Vitruvius’s
term)51 too is a faint memory, and the idea of an integrity or
close to many of Heidegger’s proposals. For an attempt to systematize
Lefebvre’s terminology on this point, se Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Jour-
neys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge, Mass.:
Blackwell, 1996), 53–82.
51. In fact, De architectura presents us with a chain of loosely related
concepts, and it is above all the tradition emanating from Alberti’s De
re aedificatoria that has seen the triad firmitas, utilitas, venustas as the
organizing figure. This triad however only appears once in De architec-
162
3. The Pyramid and
the Labyrinth
natural expressivity of materials can only be maintained as an

ideology.52 It is only in relation to the third Vitruvian term,
utility (utilitas) that Tschumi perceives a potential for devel-
opment, particularly to the extent that architecture would be
able to take body, desire, and movement as its guiding threads.
“Movements,” he writes, “are the intrusion of events into ar-
chitectural spaces” (111), and in order to both account for and
generate such events, we must look to the complexity pertaining
to the program, which he suggests has been downplayed both
in modern functionalism and the postmodern manipulations of
style. It is in relation to the programmatic in a wide sense, and
not the aesthetic or technological aspect, that inventions can be
made, even though this requires that we rethink what it means
to pro-gram as an act that opens towards something aleatory
rather than subjects itself to a set of already given requirements.
In the collage work Manhattan Transcripts (1976–81), com-
pleted at same time as the Artforum essay, Tschumi attempts to
articulate what such a space, an “event space,” would be. This
takes him in the direction of new notation methods drawing on
cinema as well as music and the visual arts. These transcripts
consist of series of tripartite diagrams: fragments of photo-
graphs that show a murder in Central Park and the perpetrator’s
escape toward 42nd Street, drawings of architectural fragments,
and finally a choreographic script of sorts, with arrows indicat-
ing the paths taken. The three systems of notation provide a
series of shifting and incomplete perspectives, while architec-
tura, at 1.3.3, and venustas comes back parenthetically at 6.8.10, but in a
different combination, together with convenience (usus) and propriety
(decorum). Thus, several other conceptual structures may be taken as
equally important, and bringing them all together into a unified system
seems impossible.
52. Or, which Tschumi does not say, as an aesthetic. The strength of a posi-
tion like the one of Kenneth Frampton’s critical regionalism, is that
assumes this aesthetic dimension and tries to articulate its relation to
both politics and technology. For more on Frampton, see chap 4, below.
163
ture, to the extent that we conceive of it as a bounded object,

only appears on the horizon, both as something that ultimately
might envelop the whole flow of frames and cut-up vistas (the
Pyramid as the Idea that can only be partially glimpsed), and
as a fluid and indeterminate whole that results from the events
themselves, and whose quality changes as we move through the
series (the order arising from the choices made in the labyrinth),
as it takes us from Central Park to 42nd Street.
Beyond the visual and notional complexity of the Transcripts,
the crucial idea here, too, is the idea of an expanded sense of pro-
gram: rather than a return to the dialectic of function and form,
the prying open of these parameters so that they enter into new
and unforeseen constellations—not necessarily contradicting or
negating each other, not pitting the autonomy of form against
the heteronomy of function, but inventing or uncovering a mul-
tiplicity inside the congealed notion of utilitas—means that the
program should not just welcome the event, but itself be consti-
tuted by it, just as the sequence of frames in the Transcripts lets
us glimpse something like a continually displaced architecture.
Paradoxically, the program becomes a term for that which cannot
be regulated in advance, while it still, as architecture, and not just
etymologically, cannot avoid being a writing in advance, a script
that precedes the events and provides them with an enabling as
well as limiting frame. Tschumi emphatically opposes this move-
ment of “de-,” dis-,” and “ex-,”53 of decentering and splitting,
to the historicism of the “post-” and the “neo-,” but at the end,
and equally significantly, he also connects it to a movement that
transfers power and agency away from the subject, towards an-
other Pyramid that remains or is re-created on the horizon as a
vague threat: “Today we have entered the age of deregulation,
where control takes place outside of society, as in this computer
53. Se “De-, dis-, ex-,” AD 215–225.
164
3. The Pyramid and
the Labyrinth
programs that feed on another endlessly in a form of autonomy

recalling the autonomy of language described by Michel Foucault.
We witness the separation of people and language, the decenter-
ing of the subject. Or, we might say, the complete decentering of
society.” (AD 225) Apart from the rather misleading remark on
Foucault, what these, admittedly brief, remarks seem to signal is
the ambivalence, or rather the undecidability, of the pyramid-laby-
rinth opposition: the labyrinth always refers to some distant, ob-
scure, and yet insistent pyramidal logic, just as the pyramid itself
can be considered as a emerging from a multiplicity of labyrinths.
Thus, rather than a dualism, we should see their relation as mutu-
ally implicative; they are two vectors that traverse the same force
field. Similarly, the decentering or deregulation (a term that it is
difficult not to associate with neoliberal market policies) of soci-
ety is recalibrated through the loop,54 programs that recursively
feed on one another, re-creating an order that no longer seems to
have a localizable subject or agent.
Dislocation and mapping

More than thirty years ago, Fredric Jameson proposed that a
certain spatial dislocation was one of the basic features of post-
modernism and the cultural logic of late capitalism.55 Gener-
ally, in Jameson’s take on postmodernism, the inherited model
of depth that undergirded such conceptual pairs as essence-
appearance, interiority-exteriority, and signifier-signified, was
presumed to have been flattened out and turned into a mere
effect of the folding of surfaces, producing a hallucinatory pres-
54. In the following chapter, we will see how Reinhold Martin’s interpreta-
tion of postmodernism makes extensive use of the idea of the feedback
loop, in a way that seems consistent with Tschumi’s proposal.
55. See “Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”
(1984), reprinted in expanded form in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural
Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. See also
chap. 4, below.
165
ence in the face of which the subject, incapable of withstanding

the influx of affects, would be reduced to state of fragmentation,
just as the chain of signifiers that hold language together would
be broken into a state of schizophrenia. Fusing together radical-
ly different and even opposed concepts from Derrida, Deleuze,
Lyotard, and Baudrillard (without mentioning any one of them,
or considering the very different contexts from which they had
emerged) Jameson produced a theoretical amalgamation that in
hindsight appears in need of a careful reconsideration and dis-
mantling, but which at the time was crucial in establishing the
unity of something like the postmodern.
For Jameson, these momentous shifts, whose effects extend
throughout culture, are most vividly displayed in the kind of
spatial dislocation occurring in architecture, represented, in his
postmodernism essay, by John Portman’s Westin Bonaventure
Hotel (Los Angeles, 1974–76). Portman’s architecture con-
stantly confuses the perceptions of the spectator, its mirror
facade replicates twisted images of the exterior as if it were it-
self nothing but a screen, and its interior does not provide the
sense of a spatial whole, but rather that of a labyrinth or a set
of disjointed parts. In Jameson’s reading this maze-like quality
does not, however, produce the sensuous and erotic jouissance
that Tschumi in the wake of situationism ascribes to his “event-
space,” instead (and Jameson here draws on a somewhat skewed
Lacanian vocabulary, whereas the problem he locates would be
much more readily grasped in Lefebvre’s terms) it exacerbates
the split between the subjective level of an Imaginary too close
to be made into an object, and a systemic Real too far away to
be able even to provide a horizon, leaving the Symbolic emp-
tied out, as it were, and without a signifying order that would
convey orientation.56 Or more precisely, this Real can only be
56. For Jameson, the Lacanian Real can in the end be understood as “His-
tory,” and in this respect he is followed by Hays. While this interpreta-
166
3. The Pyramid and
the Labyrinth
grasped on the level of theory, but never understood within sub-

jective space, since the latter is, in turn, condemned to remain
within a state of fragmentation, which is how the world system
appears when it is reflected in individual consciousness. Thus,
Jameson says, there is a need for a Symbolic dimension that
would be able to overcome this divide, a “cognitive mapping”
that sutures together these two seemingly irreconcilable dimen-
sions. The waning of affect experienced on the subjective level
would then be the outcome of a situation where such cognitive
mapping is lacking: waning and overload are two sides of the
same coin, and the task of art would be to produce an affect that
would be theoretical, or inversely, the task of theory would be
to connect to affectivity without letting go of systemic thought.
Pyramid and labyrinth must be understood as intertwined if a
dialectical totality is to emerge, and sacrificing one for the other
means to sacrifice experience as it must unfold as a whole.
Perhaps it is starting from this divide between the subjective
and the systemic that will allow us to understand the continued
relevance of concepts developed in and around situationism for
current thinking. Echoes of these ideas can be heard in politi-
cal movements that celebrated passion, dancing in the streets
with a highly symbolic and often nostalgic violence—the highly
theatrical skirmishes with the police and opponents as a way
to ensure that power is still there in a defined spatial sense, that
it can be confronted head on through the use of physical force.
At the opposite end we find Rem Koolhaas’s remark that the
dispersal within the generic city, which for him constitutes the
likely future of our urban forms (apart from their resuscitation
tion is attractive to the extent that it provides a general link between

subjectivity and social structures, it also risks doing a disservice to both
Lacan and social theory: it empties out the ontological thrust of the
Lacanian Real, and at least implicitly construes it as something to be
grasped in a pure theory, just as it inversely pushes actual history into
the dim and unspecific beyond of History with a capital H.
167
as museums over various phases of modernity, as in the case of

Paris or New York) has led to a street that is altogether dead,
yet replete with public art and bristling with motion—as if “two
deaths” could come together and produce a new life.57 In this
perspective, reclaiming the street would be a useless fantasy, or
perhaps more diabolically: a highly useful fantasy that diverts at-
tention from the merely compensatory character of the street as
the locus of true public life, which re-emerges a second time, at
the precise moment when life has moved into electronic space,
turning the street into a kind of appendix, at best indifferent, at
worst the source of confusion.
Should this simply be construed as an opposition between a
youthful naiveté and revolutionary fervor, and the slightly cyni-
cal posturing of the blasé and/or historically (or in Koolhaas’s
case, perhaps posthistorically) conscious architect? Even though
this construal might well be true, perhaps something more can
be said, in relation both to the historical roots of this aporia as
well as to our present condition.
“The street is once and for all what characterizes modern
politics. Whoever can conquer the street, can also conquer the
masses; and whoever can conquer the masses, thereby conquers
the state,” wrote Joseph Goebbels in his 1934 pamphlet Kampf
um Berlin.58 From the far left to the far right, the street—indeed
no longer “rigidly defined” by walls, but more like a stream of
movement that must be channeled and tapped for its energy—was
understood as the violent nucleus of modern politics, and from
this labyrinthine order radiates those lines of force that finally
57. “The street is dead. That discovery has coincided with frantic attempts
at its resuscitation. Public art is everywhere—as if two deaths make a
life. Pedestrianization—intended to preserve—merely channels the flow
of those doomed to destroy the object of their intended reverence with
their feet.” “Generic City,” in Rem Koolhaas, S, M, L, XL (Rotterdam:
010, 1995), 1253.
58. Joseph Goebbels, Kampf um Berlin; Der Anfang (Munich: Eher, 1934),
cited in Paul Virilio, Vitessse et politique (Paris: Galilée, 1977), 14.
168
3. The Pyramid and
the Labyrinth
come together in the pyramid of the state apparatus. When Paul

Virilio cites Goebbels’s phrase at the outset of his “dromologi-
cal” treatise Speed and Politics (1977), the questions he seems to
be asking is to what extent this claim for the street can still be
valid, and, consequently, how we should conceive of the order
that transcends it. In a society dominated by telematics and in-
formatics, could such a physical locus, where forces are pitted up
against each other and deadly blows are exchanged, still exist as
the source of politics? Have we moved into another spatial order,
although it significantly enough seems possible to name it only
by using concepts from the former: the site, the city of bits, the
information highway, etc., as if virtual and electronic space could
only exist by mimicking the set-up of the first-order space and
life? What does this exchange of concepts mean? Does it speak
of the incapacity of contemporary culture to properly name its
own space, a loss of the sensible that may call for either a violent
restoration of the old gods, or a detached observation of how all
that was once solid now has vaporized into air?
The historical lesson that can be learned from a re-reading
of the texts and works of early modernism, through the pro-
posals of situationism up to their legacy in later architectural
discourse, is that such an anxiety, or euphoria, perhaps was there
from the start. Instead of proposing alternatives between which
there would be a simple choice, it is more worthwhile to medi-
tate on those new imbrications that are in fact produced at the
intersection of electronic and physical space. It is true that we
for a long time have lived off the energies unleashed by the fan-
tasies of dematerialization that began somewhere in 1960s, in
the theories of conceptual art or of the step into the information
society, and whose most recent echo is the theory of immaterial
labor—all of which, on different levels of theoretical sophistica-
tion and empirical precision, are marked by a certain desire to
leave the body, that tiresome image of facticity and mortality,
169
and to move in the direction of some new and glorious body

that will open ever new avenues of pleasure and desire and re-
lieve us of the specter of the Real. But it is undoubtedly true
that matter and materiality do not go away or become in any
way less important, only that they change their status and mode
of being in relation to new forces and relations of production,
without ever becoming more or less real. If the Real withdraws
from experience, or rather fragments, leaving us with the alter-
native of jouissance, or of schizophrenia, as Tschumi and Jameson
respectively suggest, where does that leave architecture?
If one is willing to abide by an inherent vocabulary, the ques-
tion would be what kind of tectonics will emerge in our present
type of space, once it succeeds in formulating its own vocabu-
lary—which indeed presupposes that there is or once was some
vocabulary of first-order space that could be taken as somehow
directly referential, true and transparent, although that this is
so is of course by no means obvious. On the level of urbanism,
it would mean neither to turn the street and its concomitant
spatial order, as the site of corporeal passions and affects, into an
object of nostalgic affirmation, nor to declare it dead and a thing
of the past (both strategies will eventually, within a slightly dif-
ferent time frame, transform it into a museum), but to investi-
gate what it may become, with full awareness there is no natural
state, that there is no point at which there would be a natural
balance between the labyrinth of sensible experience and the
pyramid of systemic theory. This type of dispassionate reading
of the street, and/or of urban space in general, would then per-
haps not so much imply a waning of affect, as Fredric Jameson
proposes, so much as an invention of other possible affects and
passions—which also harbor their resistant counter-affects and
counter-passions that reinvent the street by connecting the
physical concreteness of the site with the systemic horizon.
170
4. The Recent Past
of Postmodern
Architecture
Recentness and the present moment

To every present there belongs something like a historicizing
of the recent past. This past is that from which we set ourselves
apart, that which we have just ceased to be, and must discard
in order to seize the momentum of our own moment, two words
that at least since Hegel have shared a semantic field. Sometimes
such a rejection may simply obey the logic of fashion (nothing
is more degraded and embarrassing than last season’s outfits),
sometimes it may aspire to a retrieval of the true tradition, as
in many important strands of early modernism: yesterday was
a moment of confusion, eclecticism, even moral deprivation,
whereas the present allows for a grasp of the true tradition that
will resuscitate the sense of a profound task to be carried on into
the future.1
But how should we then relate to our own moment?
Undoubtedly there is a curious twist to be detected in a present
whose most recent past would be the characterized by the insis-
1. The alternative between fashion and moral claims is obviously not

just insufficient, so that there would be many nuances in between that
should be respected, but in fact part of the problem: the moral discourse
of early modernism was itself an intellectual haute couture that aspired
to render all other discourses embarrassingly outmoded, which is lost
when one assumes the distinction as such as somehow already unprob-
lematically given.
173
tence of the prefix “post-,” i.e., a postmodernity that claimed

to have superseded the historicist one-upmanship of modernity
(which in turn made it possible to unmask the postmodern as
yet another version of the modern) and to have made the past
accessible in a kind of posthistorical montage culture beyond
which there can be only more of the same. To move beyond
this canceling out of historical differences and this flattening of
depth, does it simply mean to reinstall a modernist ethos, or
does it call for some other type of historical reflection?
The terms “postmodern,” “postmodernity,” and “postmod-
ernism” have had a strange destiny, and their different trajecto-
ries through the arts, the humanities, and the social sciences are
difficult to piece together into a single narrative; it is nonethe-
less true that architecture in many of them served as the point
of departure, either as a symptom to be decoded or as a para-
digm for a positive theory. During the early and mid 1980s, it
however seemed both possible and productive to use the term
as an overarching concept to denote a wide set of tendencies
in philosophy, aesthetics, sociology, and political theory. This
was a possible point of convergence that we today mostly per-
ceive as an illusion, and from which things could only diverge,
which is probably why the term sank into oblivion or at least
came to be seen as part of the problem rather than of the solu-
tion—and particularly so in the case of architecture, where the
term quickly often came to denote a new style rather than a set
of problems, and so was destined to become irrelevant almost
from the outset.
Or, perhaps we simply became postmodern in the sense that
the questions and types of research that emerged under its blan-
ket became normal sciences in Kuhn’s sense, and thus there was
no longer any need to use the term as a polemical marker in
order to delimit a Then from a Now. The challenging task thus
rather became to find new connections to the past, to reevalu-
174
4. The Recent Past of Postmodern Architecture
ate earlier phases of modernism in order to see how they were

re-actualized in the present, as well as how current problems
allowed for a kind of spectral analysis (a term that not only has
optical connotations, but also harbors a ghostlike presence) of
the past. This is undoubtedly one of the salient and most posi-
tive outcomes of these debates: an irreversible distance (which
need not imply rejection) from modernism that made possible
a series of new takes on the past, liberated historical research
from preconceived ideas, and in the end showed modernism to
be an inherently multiple and polymorphous entity made up of
innumerable regional inflections and versions, so that all single
and massive divisions between before and after proved to be
only local effects.
While the term postmodern has come to seem increasing-
ly misleading as a productive characteristic of contemporary
thought, there is today a kind reverse movement that has gained
currency in many popular descriptions of what is perceived to
be wrong with the contemporary world: cultural relativism,
skepticism against objective knowledge, leveling of qualitative
distinctions, and the postmodern appears once more as a nebu-
lous concept that must be fought in the name of values, tra-
dition, humanism, culture, etc. This use is mostly (though far
from exclusively) found in neo-conservative discourses, and it
has little chance of proposing anything meaningful about the
past, let alone the present. Even though such a tendency should
be resisted, this cannot be done by simply reclaiming the term,
whose former imaginary unity is precisely what is being once
more retrieved in these wholesale rejections, even though in an
infinitely more shallow and vacuous form than previously.
The problem, then, would rather be: what was the postmod-
ern moment, why did it appear possible to gather together a
series of questions, each with their own history, rhythm, and
horizons, into a unified complex; and, in the present context,
175
what was the role played by architecture in all of this? Such a

question does obviously not mean to invalidate the respective
problems posed in an earlier phase, but rather that we should al-
low present and past to question each other, without any spuri-
ous claim that we today would know better. The terms proposed
to grasp the present will undoubtedly not fare any better than
“postmodernism,” and if we from the vantage point of the pres-
ent can discern the illusions of past grand syntheses, this does
not mean that we are not caught up in our own illusions.
Furthermore, the very semantic profusion that characterizes
the term would no doubt make any survey of the various ver-
sions that have been proposed a momentous task, and the out-
come would probably be the same confusion. Rather than aim-
ing for generalities that just as quickly produce their counter-
examples, I will here instead briefly look a three spheres, each
with a particular complex of questions, and each with a decisive
input into the amalgam known as the postmodern.
Postmodernism as an interrogation
of the legacy of the Enlightenment
This was the version closely associated with Lyotard and the
debates initiated by Habermas, and it engendered a vast amount
of the misunderstandings that have circulated in the discussion
for such a long time that they have become almost unquestion-
able truths. One of the reasons for this confusion is the crucial
shift that occurs in Lyotard’s own work between an epochal and
a modal version of the postmodern. The modal version, which
is the one that he would continue to defend throughout most
of his later writings, is launched in a programmatic essay from
1982, “Answering the Question: What is the Postmodern?”
Here he proposes a curious temporal twist, when he says that
the postmodern precedes the modern as a futur antérieur, a future
that is seen from the point of view of the past:
176
It [the postmodern] is undoubtedly part of the modern

[...]. The “generations” flash by at an astonishing rate. A
work can become modern only if it is first postmodern.
Thus understood, postmodernism is not modernism at
its end, but in a nascent state, and this state is recurrent.
[...] The postmodern artist or writer is in the position of
a philosopher: the text he writes or the work he creates
is not in principle governed by pre-established rules and
cannot be judged according to a determinant judgment,
by the application of given categories to this text or work.
Such rules and categories are what the work or text is
investigating. The artist and the writer therefore work
without rules, and in order to establish the rules for what
will have been made. This is why the work and the text can
take on the properties of an event; it is also why they
would arrive too late for their author or, in what amounts
to the same thing, why their creation would always begin
too soon. Postmodern would be understanding according
to the paradox of the future (post) anterior (modo).2
In this sense, the question posed here about the recent past
of the postmodern can itself be taken as a continuation of the
modal version of the postmodern in its relation to the modern,
in a way that also puts the present at stake. The recent past of
the postmodern would then pose the question of what kind of
event it constituted, an event that still finds echoes in the pres-
ent, and whose conceptualization by no means needs to have
been accessible at the time, but rather reaches us in the form
2. Lyotard, “Answering the Question: What is the Postmodern?” in The

Postmodern Explained to Children (Sydney: Power Publications, 1992),
22–24. The question in Lyotard’s title has sometimes been rendered
as “What is Postmodernism,” which is a grave distortion, since the
interpretation of the postmodern as a particular “ism” is precisely what
Lyotard opposes.
177
of a deferred action in the Freudian sense that was also crucial

for Lyotard. Furthermore, in its resistance to a cumulative and
linear time, the postmodern is for Lyotard also, which may seem
paradoxical, a continuation of the avant-garde. This transpires
in his many essays that attempt to locate the postmodern in the
wake of the Kantian sublime, and in his emphatic rejection of
any interpretation of the term that aligns it with an afterness
characterized by a posthistorical consumer culture, populism,
and the frictionless availability of old style and forms divested of
their explosive charge—all of which for him would rather be fea-
tures of a satiated and complacent modernity. His version of the
postmodern is instead an imperative to experiment that stands
opposed to any rappel à l’ordre, which is why it often appears,
his own distinction notwithstanding, simply like a radicalized
modernism.
The temporal twist or loop of the future anterior decisively
modifies the more conventional hypothesis of the earlier book,
The Postmodern Condition (1979), where Lyotard had launched an
influential diagnosis of the dissolution of the “grand narratives,”
i.e., those universal syntheses that had been promised in the name
of History and/or Science, and instead proposed a sketch for a cri-
tique of reason that drew on both Kant and Wittgenstein. Today,
he claimed, we live in a plurality of language games that neither
need nor can be gathered into a unity called Language. Later on,
above all in The Differend (1983) and adjacent texts, where the
modal version takes precedence, this dispersal of language games
would become an ethical demand instead of a statement of a
purported historical fact: in consonance with his fidelity to the
avant-garde, and against a discourse of Capital as infinite prog-
ress, power, and control, where language becomes information
and performance the main criteria of intellectual work, he op-
posed an idea of an artistic, philosophical, and political experi-
mentation that both uncovers and actively produces incommen-
178
surabilities and gaps in our experience. That experience does not

form a whole is no longer a historical truth to which we would
have to adjust, but the normative basis for a philosophical proj-
ect, in many ways reminiscent of Adorno’s negative dialectics, al-
though pushed further so that it eschews Adorno’s founding idea
of a utopian reconciliation.3
The key reference in the work that turns towards a modal
rather than an epochal understanding of the postmodern, is how-
ever Kant. The title of the 1982 essay cited above, “Answering
the Question: What is the Postmodern,” is an unmistakable ref-
erence to Kant’s 1784 text “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist
Aufklärung” and to the task of continuing critical philosophy
in a new setting, even though the connection of Kant in this
particular text is mainly brought to the fore in relation to the
sublime. In the many essays on Kant, eventually leading up to
the systematic readings in L’enthousiasme: La critique kantienne
de l’histoire (1986) and Leçons sur l’analytique du sublime (1991),
Kant’s critical division of reason into autonomous yet subtly in-
3. The idea of a systematic aesthetic theory is something that haunt’s

Lyotard’s work from beginning to end, and at least since the begin-
ning of the seventies the idea of a critical function of art unfolds in a
constant debate with Adorno. For Lyotard, this takes place through an
emphasis on the visual arts, and a resistance to theories of textuality,
reading and interpretation, against which he proposes a long and me-
andering reflection on the figural, the libidinal, the affective, passibility,
resistance, touch, presence, and a host of other terms that translate the
necessity for philosophy to always refer to a dimension of the sensible
that overflows it. Lyotard’s work on the visual arts also comes across
in his work as a curator: with “Les Immatériaux” (Centre Pompidou,
1985) he created one of the first major thematic exhibitions on the
theme of the postmodern. For details on the exhibition, see Antonia
Wunderlich, Der Philosoph im Museum: Die Ausstellung “Les Immatériaux”
von Jean François Lyotard (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2008), Francesca Gallo,
Les Immatériaux: Un percorso di Jean-François Lyotard nell’arte contempo-
ranea (Rome: Aracne, 2008), and Yuk Hui and Andreas Brockmann
(eds.), Thirty Years after Les Immatériaux (Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2015).
For a discussion of the exhibition in relation to Lyotard’s development,
see Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Spacing Philosophy:
Jean-François Lyotard and the Philosophy of the Exhibition (forthcoming).
179
terwoven spheres is what inaugurates a postmodern critique of

reason, whereas Hegel’s speculative philosophy of history, where
gradually emerging totalities integrate ever widening circuits of
experience, would be an eminently modern figure of thought.
Compared to the later work, it is obvious that The Postmodern
Condition in spite of its own claims presents us with a histori-
cal narrative, or a “meta-narrative,” in Lyotard’s vocabulary,
which takes us from a (naïve?) faith in narratives to a new (and
more sophisticated?) distrust, and in this sense the book itself is
a self-defeating story of the progress of consciousness, as many
of his critics pointed out. The modal shift towards the idea of
the postmodern as the future of the past, a temporal duplication
that recurs at every moment, can be takes as a response to these
objections, but it also dilutes the former hypothesis if consid-
ered as a diagnosis of our specific historical present.
At the same time, this rejection of the idea of break located
at some point in time, and the turn towards a theory of the co-
existence of modern and postmodern figures that returns to a
reading of Kant and his idealist aftermath, indicates the complex-
ity of the relation to the Enlightenment, and also why Lyotard’s
version under no circumstances can be understood as a simple
rejection of reason. Rather it must be understood as continuation
of a self-reflexive and self-critical tendency that begins in Kant,
which today, Lyotard suggests, should take leave of those par-
ticular metaphysical presuppositions that once grounded Kant’s
critical philosophy (the teleological unity of subject’s faculties,
the underlying idea of an order of creation, the unitary idea of
experience grounded in Newtonian science, and no doubt many
other as well), which in fact may be understood as a fidelity to
the Kantian project, as Lyotard suggests that it must look today.
The idea of a wholesale rejection of Enlightenment and rea-
son was however the basis of the criticism that Habermas voiced
against postmodernism. Curiously enough he rarely discussed
180
any of Lyotard’s claims, instead, in his most sustained and thor-

ough discussion he shifted the terrain and addressed what he
took to be an irrationalist strand in the whole of post-Hegelian
philosophy, running through Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno,
and up to contemporary French philosophy.4 The contempo-
rary targets for his attack were Derrida and Foucault, for whom
the term postmodernism was in fact irrelevant. Neither Derrida
nor Foucault made any claims about decisive breaks in or with
modernity, and both of them were indifferent to all talk of the
postmodern as a countermove to the Enlightenment. Derrida’s
deconstruction began a reflection on a much longer process, the
unity of metaphysics as it as unfolded from Greek philosophy to
the present, which he analyzed in the wake of Heidegger, even-
tually rejecting the entire idea of one metaphysical tradition in
the singular as a far too totalizing idea; for Foucault the question
was how we should understand the deep and complex genealogy
of the modern subject, which eventually led him back from the
eighteenth and seventeenth centuries to early Christianity and
Greek thought, and not at all to a question whether there had
occurred a major shift in the twentieth century that would have
made it necessary or desirable for us to abandon the legacy of the
Enlightenment—a term that only begins to appear in Foucault’s
later work, and when he was asked whether was for or against it,
he responded that such an alternative was a case of blackmail.5
For Habermas, these highly different and at times radically
opposed trajectories could nevertheless be brought together as a
rejection of modernity and/or the Enlightenment. To this he op-
4. See Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick

G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1987).
5. See, for instance, “What is Enlightenment?” in Ethics, Subjectivity and
Truth: Essential Works of Foucault, vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow (London:
Penguin, 2000), or the interview with Gérard Raulet, “Structuralism
and Post-Structuralism,” in Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential
Works, vol. 2, ed. James Faubion (London: Penguin, 2000).
181
posed the idea of the Enlightenment as an “unfinished project,”6

to be sure with many negative and repressive consequences, for
instance the colonization of the lifeworld brought about by the
expansion of technological and instrumental reason, to which
he opposed a communicative reason that cannot be subjected to
an undifferentiated and totalizing critique otherwise than at the
price of self-contradiction. Regardless of the merits of Habermas’s
work on communicative reason and modernity, it however re-
mains true that his analyses of many of the alleged postmodern
philosophers are one-sided and unproductive as points of depar-
ture for discussing their more precise claims.
Postmodernism and late capitalism

An affirmative and historicizing version of postmodernity,
based on the kind of narrative that Lyotard had rejected, was
however developed at roughly the same time by Fredric Jame-
son, in his 1984 essay on the “cultural logic of late capitalism.”7
Jameson takes his cues from Ernest Mandel’s analysis of late
capitalism,8 and interprets postmodern culture as a series of
specific responses to the transition to the third stage of capital-
ism occurring sometime in the 1960s.9 These responses make
up the various postmodern styles, characterized by features such
as the dismantling of expressivity, subjectivity, and other depth
6. Se Habermas, “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” trans. Nicholas
Walker, in Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib (eds.),
Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity: Critical Essays on The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (London: Polity Press, 1996).
7. See Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capital-
ism,” New Left Review 146 (1984). This highly influential essay was
subsequently expanded in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991, where it forms the
first chapter,
8. See Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, trans. Joris de Bres (London: Verso,
1978).
9. On the problem of periodization, see Jameson, “Periodizing the ’60s,”
in Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986. Vol. 2, The Syntax of
History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
182
models, leading to a focus on the surface of language instead of

hermeneutical and/or dialectical interpretation, a schizophrenic
proximity of things and images, the reconstruction of history as
pastiche, and a new type of spatial disorientation. It is also with
reference to this final feature, which Jameson details through an
analysis of John Portman’s Westin Bonaventure Hotel (Los An-
geles, 1976),10 that he proposes a cure in the form of a “cognitive
cartography” capable of accounting for the unity of postmodern
space-time by reconnecting its surface fragmentation to an un-
derlying systemic order.
It is crucial for Jameson’s theory that we must be able to
separate and articulate relations between those dimensions that
postmodernity folds together into an intense and seemingly in-
tractable unity: subjective experience and objective structure,
surface and depth, signifier and signified. In this sense, there is
nothing postmodern about the analysis itself, and the distinction
between postmodernity as a third phase in the capitalist mode of
production, and postmodernism as a set of styles and modes of
cultural expression, obeys a Hegelian logic, or more precisely the
logic of essence, which was an integral part also of Marx’s Capital.
Appearance or semblance (Schein) is that which has to appear as
a coming-apart of essence if essence is to realize itself, and the
splitting up of phenomena into seemingly disconnected parts at
the surface level testifies to the underlying unity—a unity which
is not a substance, substrate, or thing, but precisely the principle
governing the appearing and the solution of the contradictions,
and which we can only grasp fully at the endpoint of the process.
10. It is obvious that Portman’s architecture cannot represent the entire
complex of postmodern spatiality, and Jameson’s analysis has been
criticized on many points. He returns in much more detail to the
variety of architectural responses late capitalism in “The Constraints of
Postmodernism,” in Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), where Portman no longer appears at all. For a
more thorough discussion of Portman, see Reinhold Martin, “Money
and Meaning: The Case of John Portman,” Hunch 12 (2009).
183
It is significant that this Hegelian model was already at work

in Jameson’s afterword to the influential anthology Aesthetics
and Politics (1977), where he reconstructs the debates from the
later part of the 1930s between Lukács and Bloch on expression-
ism, which at the time was used as a blanket term for modern-
ism as a whole. To the surprise of many readers Jameson here
partly resuscitates Lukács’s position with its claim to grasp a
dialectical totality, in a way that prefigures the theory of post-
modernity: negative fragmentation of the surface occurs only
because society in a state of crisis is drawn together around its
central contradiction, whereas the normal state of affairs allows
the different levels to co-exist in relative and peaceful autono-
my. For Jameson, the different artistic and cultural expressions
that we call postmodernism—whose multiplicity and divergenc-
es are, after all, not greater or more impossible to survey than
those previous phenomena that we have become accustomed to
call modernism—form a contradictory totality that in the end is
dependent on the late capitalist mode of production.
On this point he was often misunderstood. There is no reason
for him be to for or against the phenomenon called postmod-
ernism, no reason for celebration or melancholy; rather post-
modernism contains symptoms to be analyzed. Postmodernism,
in its stylistically polymorphous appearances, offers a series of
subjective articulations of the underlying structure of postmo-
dernity, which often, and without contradiction (i.e., except the
formative contradiction that traverses them as belonging to
the logic of capital as such, whose late phase is a continuation
and intensification of the earlier, but not the introduction of
another logic), takes on the form of a second-order destruction
of subjectivity and articulation. In this, these expressive forms—
whose dismantling of the aesthetic depth-structure of expressiv-
ity, and this must be underlined, does not prevent them from
being analyzed in Jameson’s interpretative discourse as expres-
184
sive of Capital, in fact, the first moment is the very condition of

the second—perform the same task as once Balzac and Courbet,
who gave us the keys to unlock the interlacing of commodity
and artistic articulation in the nineteenth century,11 or as the
historical avant-garde, when it began to conjugate the arts ac-
cording to the pattern of industrial and serial production in the
first decades of the twentieth century. This why it makes perfect
sense for Jameson to interrogate the possibility of a postmod-
ern realism, with and against Lukács: it cannot be a question of
returning to the narrative and mimetic techniques of the nine-
teenth century, or to the heroic undoing of these forms in the
avant-garde, instead we must see the possibility of realism as
bound up with the development of modern media and the way
in which they transform discourse and its link to the referent.
There is indeed a “reality effect” today that is different from
the one Roland Barthes once described as the basic technique
of classical realism,12 which does not mean that the Real as such
has evaporated, only that the means for letting it touch us, for
letting it irrupt and explode in all of its weight and in all of
the idiocy that it breeds in our complacent consumption of art,
must be sought at the highest level of capitalist development.
The Hegelian tendency comes across in how Jameson under-
stands individual works, expressions, and theories as translating
a logic at work behind their back, and in how various philoso-
phies are ingeniously marshaled in order to piece together the
structure of postmodern thought are a series of surface effects,
both in the sense that they negate dialectical depth models, and
that this negation itself is a surface belonging to a depth that the
11. For Jameson’s most recent take on nineteenth-century realism, see The
Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2015).
12. Se Roland Barthes, “L’Effet de réel”, Communications 11 (1968), reprint-
ed in Barthes, Le bruissement de la langue: Essais critiques IV (Paris: Seuil,
1984). See also the detailed discussion of Balzac and the code system of
realism in S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974).
185
analysis must discover. In this way he reconstructs the postmod-

ern sublime as an effect of a world system that has eradicated
the last vestiges of nature, and as such constitutes the proper
object of the sublime, as it appears for the subject in the form of
various aesthetically mediated fractures in its experience. This is
what for the individual is “unpresentable,” and unlike Lyotard—
for whom the sublime points to the ontological enigma of the
event, of the “it happens” or “is it happening” that dispossesses
the subject and opens onto a domain of touching, passibility,
and a presence beyond the mastery of intentions, concepts, and
systems13—Jameson instead draws on its phenomenological fea-
tures in order to locate what he perceives as its proper cause,
namely the system itself. For Lyotard, this reinscription would
be a typically anti-postmodern figure of thought that suppresses
the unpresentable within a master narrative that always ends up
neutralizing the temporal twist of deferred action in a schema
of cause and effect. The leitmotif of Jameson’s work, “Always
historicize!” which he takes to be “the one absolute and we may
even say ‘transhistorical’ imperative of all dialectical thought,”14
may be seen as placing the historian outside of any historiciz-
ing; on the other hand, Lyotard’s modal postmodern as a con-
tinually recurrent and evasive futur antérieur would for Jameson
13. The term “passibility,” which is developed in Lyotard’s late work from
the mid-eighties onward, originally stems from medieval theology,
where it denotes God’s capacity to be affected by the course of the world
instead of simply remaining sealed in a state of impenetrable plenitude or
“impassibility.” For Lyotard, passibility gestures toward an intermediary
zone, neither simply active nor passive—which in the theological register
would amount to a divine middle voice of sorts—and opens an obscure
domain of the in-between, neither first nor second, neither the stuff of
givenness nor the forming concept, which is always withdrawn in knowl-
edge and yet conditions it. For a discussion of this and other related terms
in Lyotard, see Daniel Birnbaum and Sven-Olov Wallenstein, “From
Immaterials to Resistance: The Other Side of “Les Immatériaux,’” in Yuk
Hui and Andreas Brockmann, Thirty Years after Les Immatériaux.
14. Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1981), 9.
186
appears as a nostalgic quest for a sublime in a world that has

already devoured it and turned into yet another special effect.
That these two versions of the postmodern, which can be called
the Kantian and the Hegelian, in this way are able analyze each
other and to inscribe the opponent as a symptom, indicates that
we should not seem them as simply opposed, but rather as an
oscillation inside contemporary thought, regardless of whether
this contemporaneity is called postmodern or not.
Postmodernism and formalism

A third version of the postmodern—in fact, chronologically the
first—emerges out of the arts themselves, and it belongs pre-
dominantly to the context of the American 1960s and the de-
velopment of visual and the performing arts. This gave rise to
many historical displacements and distortions when the term
traveled across the Atlantic and entered into a productive alli-
ance with, above all, French philosophical ideas that had been
developed simultaneously, although mostly in connection with
literary discourse, eventually forming the amalgamation “post-
structuralism,” in many respects just as misleading as “post-
modernism,” and sharing much of the same historical trajectory.
As has often been noted, the term “postmodernism” was
used in art criticism for the first time, in a way that makes sense
in relation to what would follow in its wake, by Leo Steinberg,
in his 1968 lecture “Other Criteria.”15 Steinberg takes his
implicit point of departure in the formalist vocabulary estab-
lished by Clement Greenberg, and locates a decisive shift in the
dialectic of modernist painting between illusionist depth and
materialist flatness in the treatment of the surfaces in Robert
Rauschenberg’s works. Here, Steinberg proposes, surface and
depth, figure and ground, have been erased in favor of a con-
15. Reprinted in Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-
Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972).
187
ception of the surface as a depository for cultural debris, and

the traditional hierarchies of painting have been broken down,
which is expressed formally in the tilting of the upright vertical—
the picture plane at right angle to the spectator’s gaze, which
since Alberti’s window has defined painting as the art of illusory
depth—by 45 degrees, so that it becomes a “flatbed,” a reclining
horizontal, more like the surface of a desk or a floor. The ma-
terials attached to Rauschenberg’s surface—paint, photographs,
cigarette ends—no longer calls forth a dialectic of illusionism,
but are rather present as such, on the same level as the surface
on which they are deposited. This, Steinberg concludes, places
us in a situation outside of the gambit of modernist painting, for
which the term “postmodern” might be used.
Steinberg’s flatbed was perhaps little less than an ironic com-
ment on the much elaborate discourse of flatness in Greenberg,
and his use of the term postmodern incidental, but in hindsight
it may be seen as part of a rethinking of the visual arts already
well underway in 1968. For Greenberg, the trajectory of mod-
ernism was determined by an increasing emphasis on specific-
ity, in a Kantian move that understood each art as oriented to-
ward self-reflection on its constituent features, which in the case
of painting was “flatness” and the “delimitation of flatness.”
While the terms are made explicit only in Greenberg’s late pro-
grammatic statement “Modernist Painting,”16 the underlying
conceptual structure had been worked out already in 1940, first
presented in the seminal essay “Towards a Newer Laocoon,”17
where Greenberg locates his work in the legacy of Lessing. As
16. The essay goes back to a radio talk from 1960, and was first published in
Arts Yearbook 1961. See Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol.
4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993), 85-94.
17. Reprinted in Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 1: Percep-
tions and Judgments, 1939-1944, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986).
188
American painters in the postwar period increasingly came to

take these limits as the very content of their work, Greenberg
was led to interpret them in a more narrow way. Even though
the path from abstract expressionism to color-field painting
seemed like a logical progression, with the late modern artist
as a specialist in formal and technical problems, for Greenberg
this was a development that contained several dangers, above
all in presenting artist with a seemingly unidirectional path to
follow, which eventually would ruin the claims of taste by mak-
ing them dependent on a concept of art that could be extracted
from historical analysis. Many of the artists that ended up on
the other side of Greenberg’s demarcation line of modernism
seemed to be pursuing the same goals that he had himself set up,
but in fact the reflection on the specifics of painting and sculp-
ture led to a new form of insistent materialism that inevitably
blurred those distinctions that were at the basis of the formal-
ist interpretations of modernism. Moreover, they appeared to
short-circuit the autonomy of judgment that is the other and
equally necessary side of the formalist enterprise: formalism is
not there for the sake of form alone, but “a kind of bias or tro-
pism: towards esthetic value, esthetic value as such and as an
ultimate,” as Greenberg would say a decade later.18 In the mid-
sixties, a host of concepts—the specific objects of Donald Judd,
the expanded situation of sculpture in Robert Morris that would
eventually lead him to claim a position “beyond objects” in the
fourth of his “Notes on Sculpture,”19 both rejected as instances
of “objecthood” by Michael Fried,20 to cite only the three most
18. Greenberg, “Necessity of Formalism” (1971), in Richard Kostelanetz
(ed.), Esthetics Contemporary (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1989), 191.
19. See Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 4: Beyond Objects” (1969), in
Morris, Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris
20. See Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1968), rpr. in Fried, Art and Object-
hood: Essays and Reviews Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
For an analysis of this rapid development, see Frances Colpitt, Minimal
189
famous instances in this rapidly evolving dialectical drama—

were proposed in order to analyze this situation, eventually co-
alescing into the terms Minimal Art and Conceptual Art. The
general effect of these discussions was a disconnection from me-
dium specificity and an opening up of the visual arts toward an
indeterminate set of techniques, practices, materials, mediums,
etc., which, given the particular identification of modernism as
such with its formalist interpretation, for some critics made it
irresistible to understand this as a shift towards postmodern-
ism. “Within the situation of postmodernism,” Rosalind Krauss
suggested a decade later, in an essay that looks back to this ex-
plosive development with a focus on the domain of sculpture,
“practice is no defined in relation to a given medium—sculp-
ture—bur rather in relation to the logical operations on a set
of cultural terms, for which any medium—photography, books,
lines on walls, mirrors, or sculpture itself—might be used.”21
Similar tendencies were spread across all the other arts in
the sixties, and particularly in dance, they seemed to herald a
postmodern shift, which is no doubt also due to the proximity
of the visual and the performing arts in the period. Against the
theory of dance that perceived it in relation to an inner center, a
psychological space subsequently externalized into outer space,
a choreographer like Yvonne Rainer would propose “an alterna-
tive context that allows for a more matter-of-fact, more con-
crete, more banal quality of physical being in performance,” and
which could be materialized in everyday activities like to “stand,
walk, run, eat, carry bricks, show movies, move or be moved by
some thing rather than oneself.”22 Just as in the new limit forms
Art: The Critical Perspective (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1993).
21. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” (1978), reprinted in
The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT, 1986), 288.
22. Yvonne Rainer, “A Quasi Survey of some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the
190
of painting and sculpture, the emphasis was not on illusion, but

on the material facticity of movements, and how they could be
organized into open serial structures: “simply order, like that of
continuity, one thing after another,” as Donald Judd famously
suggested,23 “The series progresses by the fact of one discrete
thing following another,”24 in Rainer’s version.
The polemic was largely directed towards the kind of formal-
ist interpretation that had become hegemonic in certain parts of
postwar American art criticism, which is why this type of post-
modernism would be more accurately described as postformal-
ism. In hindsight it can also be understood as a rediscovery of
those parts of the European avant-garde that had been rendered
invisible by formalist art-historical narrative (Dadaism, con-
structivism, the legacy of Duchamp), and thus a kind of repeti-
tion through deferred action, as Hal Foster has proposed,25 or,
in a more negative vein, as a repetition that turns the tragedy
of the historical avant-garde’s attempt to dismantle autonomy
into a farce played out inside the institutionalized art system, as
was suggested by Peter Bürger already in the early seventies.26
For some, this historical distance from the heroic phase of the
avant-garde signaled the latter’s inevitable demise, and the en-
try into a posthistorical stage, where the linear time of mod-
ernism had come to an end, so that styles and techniques from
the past were once more available, neutralized and divested of
Qualitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analy-

sis of Trio A,” (1968), in Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical
Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995 [1968]), 267f.
23. Donald Judd, “Specific Objects” (1965), reprinted in Complete Writings
1959–1975 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design,
1975), 184.
24. Rainer, “A Quasi Survey,” 271.
25. See Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1996).
26. See Peter Bürger, Theorie der Avantgarde (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1973); Theory of the Avantgarde, trans. Michael Shaw (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
191
their former historicist and teleological charge—it seemed, for

instance, once more possible to be a Painter, and to redeploy
expressionist and other now classically modern gestures, as in
the case of the heftige Malerei in Germany, or the Italian transa-
vantgarde.27 For others, the disruption of linear history rather
implied the imperative to continue the avant-garde with other
means (which, as we noted, was the proposal of Lyotard), and
the critical task of art remained as important as ever, although
it now had to find other tools that were drawn from sociology,
philosophies of language, psychoanalysis, and many other dis-
ciplines. In the first version, postmodernism thus seemed like a
unabashed return of the intuitive artist, subjectivity, and styles,
in the second it was an intensification of art’s claims to consti-
tute a kind of theoretical research in its own right, prolonging
themes that had been formulated in the early phases of concep-
tual art. As we will see, these developments in the visual arts
had close counterparts in architecture, sometimes antedating,
sometimes postdating them: the relation between the eclecti-
cism of Venturi and Scott Brown and the formal researches of
Eisenman, and later the debate between Whites and Grays, dis-
play an obvious structural affinity to the somewhat later debate
on the revivals of painting vs. the continuation of the avant-
garde. At the time these cross-connections however appear to
have gone largely unnoted: architects sometime gesture toward
the other visual arts, so Venturi and Scott Brown’s appeal to
27. An intense and principally interesting polemic was triggered by Ben-

jamin Buchloh’s essay “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression”
(1981), which posed the question not only of the viability of expression-
ism in the present, but also, implicitly, whether painting, as a figure of
art-historical authority, as such can be of relevance today. For Buchloh
all the various returns to tradition that were proclaimed in the 1920s—
the neoclassicism of Picasso, Cocteau’s rappel à l’ordre, the Italian valori
plastici and pittura metafisica—were bound up with a political regression
ultimately ushering in Fascism, and he detects an echo of this in the
revival of historical styles and techniques in the early eighties.
192
pop and Eisenman’s at least implicit references to minimalism,

whereas artists and art critics seem to have been largely oblivi-
ous of the parallel developments in architecture.28
The tension inside the concept between the populist and
the avant-gardist version was there from the start, which is no
doubt why it became less useful and eventually was discredited;
what calls for an explanation is instead the unity of opposite
claims that it once seemed to herald, even though it seems just
as doubtful that this unity could be found inside one or sev-
eral of the arts and their respective histories, just as it seems far
too reductive to simply take the opposite turn and explain it
from the outside, as a simple byproduct of the logic of capital.
The link between the sociopolitical and the aesthetic was itself
one of the key problems in the postmodern, not always for the
practitioners, but consistently so for those who have attempted
to theorize it, often in terms of a disconnect in relation to ear-
lier models of critical theory, a break that in hindsight cannot
be dismissed as just an ideological phantasm, although it surely
often was this too. To the extent that we perceive the problems
broached by the postmodern as still relevant, its insides and
outsides must be linked in some other way—and perhaps espe-
cially in the case of architecture, which not only is the art that
is most closely aligned with the mode of production in all of its
economic, technological and social aspects, but was also used as
an exemplary case, negatively or positively, in most of the early
theorizations of the postmodern.
28. Some attempts were made to connect minimal art to architecture, but
mostly in very general and unspecific terms. In Gregory Battcock’s
influential anthology Minimal Art (1968), only one out of the almost
thirty contributions explicitly address the connection to architecture,
Michal Benedikt’s “Sculpture as Architecture” (1966-67), but does so
in general terms, without giving any reference to actual architectural
works of the period.
193
Histories of the postmodern

So far, we seem to be faced with three divergent stories. The
first one (at least in the modal version) lays claim to a Kan-
tian critique of reason that interrupts the historical narrative,
although pushing the idea of critique far beyond the limits as-
signed by Kant. The second pursues a historical analysis in the
wake of Hegel and Marx, and interprets postmodernity as the
most recent, perhaps final, at least late phase of capitalism, and
the question it poses on the aesthetic level is whether this phase
can produce a realism, in the sense of an art that would be able
to brings its contradictions together into a legible whole that
makes the systemic order and subjective experience communi-
cate. The third takes its point of departure in the undoing of a
certain interpretation of modernism, and asks to what extent an
avant-garde, or at least a radically transformative artistic praxis,
is still possible, and in this sense it can integrate element from
the first version (the continuation of the avant-garde with other
means, as in Lyotard), or from the second (the dismantling of
expressive forms, or pastiche as a posthistorical montage, as in
Jameson).
In architecture, the debate around the postmodern became
particularly intense, as if the fate of the concept of the postmod-
ern would be inextricably tied up with architectural discourse.
Even though, as we have noted, the sources of the term and is
various cognates (postmodernism, postmodernity) may differ
depending on what particular field that is taken as point of refer-
ence (philosophy, social theory, one or several of the arts), archi-
tecture seemed to be a pervasive theme, at least if one looks to by
the early programmatic essays by Jürgen Habermas and Fredric
Jameson. It is also within architecture that the term first congealed
into a stylistic notion and postmodernism was transformed from
a problem into a particular look: the return of ornament and dis-
connected parts of the classical heritage and the Beaux-Arts, vari-
194
ous types eclecticism and iconicity that could lay claim to being
a “vernacular” (Venturi) or return us to a comprehensible lan-
guage of forms, often drawing on a humanist heritage. This was a
look that obviously just as quickly could be superseded by others,
and it immediately became just as dated as its predecessors, and
shot through with a kind of irony and doubly invisible quotation
marks. These markers were, it must be remembered, however
also part of the postmodernism’s own claim to dismantle ideas of
originality, authorship, and authenticity, and it appeared as if the
phenomenon postmodernism in some hyper-reflexive twist itself
immediately became postmodern.
The reason for the early and massive impact of the post-
modern in architecture must also be sought in the history of
the discipline itself. The reactions against modernism began al-
most immediately after the Second World War, and one could
even claim that architectural discourse had already entered into
a postmodern phase, even if it was not named as such, just as
the late modern formalist interpretations of the others arts were
being consolidated. The discovery of everyday life, from Aldo
van Eyck to Team X, and many other critical analyses, above all
in relation to the urban form, which would eventually lead up
to the symbolic dissolution of CIAM in 1959, predate the major
symbolic publications in the mid-sixties, Venturi’s Complexity
and Contradiction in Architecture and Aldo Rossi’s L’architettura
della città.29 A decade later these developments would be
brought together into Charles Jencks’s Language of Post-Modern
Architecture (1977),30 where the synthesis in terms of style, or
rather a plurality of styles that co-exist in a neutral availabil-
29. For more on Venturi and Rossi, see chap. 2, above.
30. Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (London:
Academy Editions, 1977. The book has since 1977 gone through many
editions, and has become a standard reference, also because Jencks is
one of the few who has consistently held on to the term “postmodern,”
in a long series of publications..
195
ity, became the guiding idea, which limited the analytic value of
the concept, but also made it more useful and effective for jour-
nalistic polemics. From Jencks onward, the idea of break some-
where in the sixties had imposed itself, regardless of whether it
is described as postmodern or not, and of what its basic reasons
were supposed to have been. Ten years after Jencks, the term
“postmodern” is still retained in Heinrich Klotz’s ambitious
Moderne und Postmoderne: Architektur der Gegenwart, 1960–1980,31
while ten years further ahead, the equally ambitious anthologies
edited by Kate Nesbitt, Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture:
An Anthology of Architectural Theory, 1965–1995,32 and K. Michael
Hays, Architecture Theory Since 1968,33 settle in their titles for
more neutral markers, “a new agenda,” or simply “since,” even
though they too in their respective ways suggest a break some-
time in the sixties after which things no longer remain the same.
Rather than to write the history of the rise and decline of
31. Klotz, Moderne und Postmoderne: Architektur der Gegenwart, 1960–1980
(Braunschweig: Vieweg & Sohn, 1984); one can note that the English
translation, published four years later, gives the title a backward-
looking inflection: The History of Postmodern Architecture, trans. Radka
Donnell (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1988). Klotz aims to avoid purely
stylistic criteria and the idea of eclecticism, and for him the postmodern
is not so much a rejection of the modern as it is an attempt to integrate
a moment of fiction in function.
32. Kate Nesbitt (ed.), Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology
of Architectural Theory, 1965–1995 (New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 1996). In the introduction, Nesbitt notes, “While only the first
chapter is so titled, postmodernism is in fact the subject and point of
reference for the entire book. I hope to make clear that postmodernism
is not a singular style, but more a sensibility of inclusion in a period of
pluralism.” (17)
33. K. Michael Hays (ed.), Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT, 1998). Hays notes that many point of chronological departure
could be chosen, but that “in the long run, the coupling of Marxist
critical theory and poststructuralism with readings of architectural
modernism has been what has dominated theory in the main, subsum-
ing and rewriting earlier texts; and ‘since 1968’ covers that formation.”
(xiv) In this sense, his conception of theory, unlike the one adopted
by Nesbitt, is normative, which no doubt accounts for the otherwise
bewildering absence of the term postmodernism from the introduction.
196
the term “postmodern,” or to write a history of the different

histories that has been written about it, the task here is to ask
what such a historicizing of our recent past amounts to. In order
to do this, two recent examples will be extricated from this huge
and labyrinthine literature, each of which constitutes a pro-
found take on this complex phenomenon as it was staged in ar-
chitecture, and also because they provide paradigmatic versions
of what such a historicizing might entail: Jorge Otero-Pailos’s
Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the
Postmodern, and Reinhold Martin’s Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture
and Postmodernism, Again.34
Otero-Pailos pursues what he calls a “polygraphic” historical
account, tracing both the development of a series of concepts as
well as individual trajectories and institutional shifts. Martin,
on other hand, surveys the postmodern phenomenon as a set of
theoretical problems, and develops a reading that perhaps could
be called “symptomal,”35 in the sense that the visible evidence
is understood as conditioned by certain structurally necessary
blind spots. In this reading, such spots do not impair or obscure
vision, but open it, they render forms legible and visible, and
allow the surface conflicts and debates to unfold as if they were
propelled ahead by an inner and autonomous logic, whereas
they in fact belong to a larger discursive formation that they
34. Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the

Rise of the Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2010), and Reinhold Martin, Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodern-
ism, Again (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). Hence-
forth quoted as AHT and UG with page number.
35. The idea of “symptomal reading” (lecture symptomale) stems from Al-
thusser, and does not appear as such in Martin’s book. For a systematic
discussion, see Althusser’s introduction to the collective volume Lire le
Capital. (The book has since its first publication in 1965, with contribu-
tions by Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey,
gone through many versions; the current standard edition containing
all variations and subsequent additions is the one edited by Etienne
Balibar on PUF, 1996.)
197
both reflect and help to set in motion.

Otero-Pailos’s polygraphic analysis provides us with a fairly
recognizable historical trajectory; Martin is reluctant to “simply
historicize,” and instead chooses to emphasize the “untimeli-
ness” and “asychronicity” of the postmodern with respect to the
concerns of the present—in short, to read it as a phenomenon
that refuses to be placed firmly within any kind of reassuring
historical narrative. In this sense these two books exemplify
two different methodologies: the first offers a reconstructive
hermeneutic that remains largely respectful to intentions and
projects, the second could be called hermeneutics of suspicion,
which reads surface statements and claims as effects of underly-
ing structural conflicts. These two histories might, to be sure
with some caution, respectively be called internal and external:
either the break is understood as effected by a series of questions
proper to architecture, or as emanating from a displacement of
the spatial or terroritial ordering of capitalism itself, for which
architecture becomes not just an eminent cipher, but also a cru-
cial agent.
Reading the inside: phenomenology

and the return of history
In hindsight postmodernism has come to be reduced, and un-
doubtedly not without good reasons, to a superficial stylistic
phenomenon: eclecticism, a free use of historical material, an
exploration of contradictions, a mix of high and low. This em-
phasis on style, surface, and ornament has consequently gener-
ated accusations of aestheticism, political irresponsibility, anti-
Enlightenment irrationality, and many other notoriously bad
things. But while all of these features no doubt have played a
role, a more intellectually ambitious genealogy also needs to un-
earth that which, given certain conditions, made the postmod-
ern phenomenon not only possible, but perhaps also necessary
198
as a moment in the reflection on the legacy of modernism.

Otero-Pailos traces the ascendancy of a new generation in
the sixties, whose break with modernist ideology was condi-
tioned by a fatigue with technological utopianism, the level-
ing of International Style to a universal corporate language,
and the loss of historical traditions. Reconnecting to the past
seemed to be a logical solution, and phenomenology as a pos-
sible philosophical ally, in its by that time well-established cri-
tique of abstract concepts of space and form, and in its attempts
to ground them in more profound analysis of the “lifeworld”
(Husserl), or of “being-in-the-world” and “dwelling” (early and
late Heidegger). Through the impact of phenomenology, archi-
tectural history increasingly became a search for sense, a demand
not just for history, but more profoundly for historicity, and to
this extent it undoubtedly continued the modernist legacy of
operative history, i.e., a writing of history that aspired to legiti-
mize future production, as it was diagnosed in the same period
by Manfredo Tafuri (whose rigorous divide between operative
and critical history in hindsight, in spite of all the theoreti-
cal tools that it wields, on the methodological level may seem
strangely antiquated in sometimes running the risk of repeat-
ing, albeit in a self-consciously tragic mode, the positivist dis-
tinction between fact and value).36 This operative dimension,
to the extent that it retained its philosophical aspirations, was
however grounded in larger claims about the ground of sense,
not just in theories of functional form, but in an understanding
of empirical form as itself based in essences that lay at the foun-
dation of human experience as such.37
36. For more on this division, see chap. 1, above.
37. Such claims, one must note, were just as decisive for someone like
Giedion, whose Space, Time, and Architecture explicitly set out to recon-
nect the “new tradition” to the past, bridge the gap between “rational
construction” and emotional needs; “in spite of the seeming confu-
sion,” he writes in the first preface dated 1940, “there is nevertheless
199
To account for the depth of history on the basis of an experience

of meaning in the present in the end however formed a complex
and eventually also contradictory task: on the one hand this
was a new access to the dimension of history, which aspired to
bypass the art historian’s traditional reliance on written docu-
ments by appealing to the particular capacity of the architect to
re-enact the past as a project of sense and embodiment, on the
other hand this experientialist paradigm could just as much be
taken as a rejection of theory in the name of the immediacy of
meaning. The results of this double orientation proved to be
nothing short of paradoxical: on the one hand, as Otero-Pailos
shows, phenomenology was a key element in the emergence of
what we today know as “architectural theory,” which has moved
far beyond the particular claims of phenomenology, on the oth-
er hand its intuitionism and experientialism fostered an anti-in-
tellectual attitude, which became more pronounced as the wave
of theory rose higher in the eighties, with Derrida as the first
major reference, who would then be followed by many others,
for which the experientialism of the earlier generation became
an object of suspicion.
The reference to phenomenology must however not be taken
to suggest that these debates were exclusively the result of a re-
ception of certain philosophical works—in fact, seen in this way,
they in fact appear as a strangely belated echo of phenomenol-
ogy from the twenties and thirties (which in its own time seems
to have gone wholly unnoticed in architecture), whereas those
philosophers that pursued this tradition in the sixties, most vis-
ibly Derrida, were in fact profoundly questioning the rhetoric
a true, if hidden, unity, a secret synthesis, in our present civilization.”

See Space, Time and Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, thirteenth printing 1997), vi. For Giedion, this synthesis is
however rooted in the new space-time conception that welds together
elements from contemporary physics, contemporary art, and the new
engineering sciences, rather than from the philosophical tradition.
200
of roots, soils, and foundations that were paramount in the first

wave of architectural phenomenology. As Otero-Pailos shows,
equally decisive were new uses of graphic design and photogra-
phy, a whole new visual rhetoric that was instrumental in lifting
the boundaries between scholarly work, previously relegated to
the discipline of architectural history, and the “project,” which
now began to mobilize a vast array of sources—all of which by
no means had been foreign to the period of the early modern
masters, as is abundantly clear in the case of Le Corbusier. Just
as in the case of the other visual arts, it would make more sense
to speak of this as a retrieval of those aspects of the historical
avant-garde that had been obscured by contemporary criticism.
Breaking with the past thus often simply meant to return to a
more full appreciation of it, just as the reading of philosophical
texts on another level displayed a belatedness that made certain
contemporary developments invisible; together, these two ten-
dencies produced a strange amalgamation of avant-garde and
arrière-garde attitudes that still remains a defining feature of
architectural phenomenology.
Otero-Pailos focuses on four particular intellectual trajecto-
ries, each of which illustrates an important dimension of the
postmodern: Jean Labatut, today largely ignored, but who as a
teacher exerted a decisive influence on the generation that would
later become known as postmodernists; Charles Moore, a stu-
dent of Labatut, and one of the signal architects of postmodern-
ism; Christian Norberg-Schulz, whose theoretical and historical
work was pivotal in bringing phenomenological concerns into
the architectural debate, and finally Kenneth Frampton, whose
historical surveys and theories of tectonics and critical region-
alism have contributed to the opening up of phenomenology
to critical theory and many other strands of contemporary
thought.
201
Phenomenology avant la lettre:

Labatut and Moore
Jean Labatut is treated under the rubric “Eucharistic Architec-
ture,” which points to the intertwining of a religiously tinted
transcendence and bodily presence that is characteristic not
only of Labatut (who in fact remained suspicious of phenom-
enology, partly for political reasons), but of large parts of phe-
nomenology as such. Labatut was trained in the French Beaux-
Arts milieu to which he always retained a certain loyalty, but he
also drew important inspiration from his work on camouflage
techniques during the First World War. This required a capac-
ity for calculating and understanding the cultural, technologi-
cal, and physiological dimensions of perception, and it would
become the basis for Labatut’s conception of architecture as a
broader visual medium. Drawing on cubism as well as Bergson,
this was an exploration of subjective experience as the unify-
ing function with respect to the object’s dynamic transforma-
tions, and in this sense Labatut’s relation to phenomenology is
indirect, more that of someone who opened a set of avenues for
further questioning, and principally through his teaching rather
than writing.
From 1927, Labatut’s classes at Princeton continued the in-
terrogation of circulation and movement, and his experience of
camouflage of boats pushed him toward a conception of water as
the modern element par excellence. Unlike architects from the
Corbusean tradition, Labatut did not look to the steamliner as
the model to emulate, but to water itself: it has no shape, it is
all movement and flow, and his question was how architecture
could achieve such a state of permanent fluidity and dissolve
into pure motion and experience.
The 1939 World Fair became the setting for Labatut’s first
synthesis of this work, partly in his contribution to the com-
mercial building fair, but above all in his design for the Lagoon
202
of Nations, which turned into the fair’s major public magnet.

Using fountains and artificial lighting to create a dazzling spec-
tacle, Labatut mobilized a vast array of commercial display
techniques in order to forge an evanescent and perceptually
based architecture.38 But rather than a mere play on the senses,
Labatut’s version of abstraction, or the experience of movement
as pure sensation uncoupled from figurative references through
manipulation of perception, also involved the quest for a deeper
spiritual dimension. This separated him from the Bauhaus con-
ception of architecture as a science of construction and engi-
neering, and he always emphasized the importance of a general
liberal education that draws on historical experience, although
understood in a particular way.
In the 1940s he began discussions with Jacques Maritian,
who would play a decisive role in his future development.
Maritain, a leading Catholic philosopher, had set out to rectify
the modern Cartesian split between mind and body by going
back to a philosophy that emphasizes the nexus between mind
and world, which Maritain erroneously, maybe because of his
politically motivated distaste for Sartre (who indeed also re-
tained a substantial amount of Cartesianism), understood as
being in opposition to Husserl and Heidegger. Both Maritain
and Labatut instead looked to Bergson in their emphasis on in-
tuition as a pre-conceptual access to reality, which for them was
attainable not only through science, but also through poetry,
art and various types of mystical experiences. For Labatut these
conversations became the basis for an architecture that stressed
38. While acknowledged by journalists and music critics, Labatut’s con-
tribution was however largely ignored by the architects The important
exception is Sigfried Giedion, who included Labatut’s Lagoon among
the attempts to create a new monumentality. As Otero-Pailos notes, this
may be seen as a parallel to the spectacles of Speer, although Labatut
“came down strongly against the univocal dimension of politicized art,
searching instead for a more apolitical, spiritually uplifting, but still
hypnotic architecture” (AHT 57).
203
embodiment as a source of meaning, and he aligned them with

his own research into everyday sign systems and symbols as it
developed in the Bureau of Urban Research, which he founded
in 1941. The experience of mobility and speed in urban space,
but above all as it emerged for the traveler on the new highways,
the impact of night lighting and scenic vistas on the percep-
tual habits of a subject in constant motion, were the focus of a
new kind of research (as Otero-Pailos points out, this emphasis
on signs was to exert a massive influence on Labatut’s student
Robert Venturi, although the latter never acknowledged the im-
portance of his teacher).
Maritain soon understood the possible implications of this
research for the possibility of the invention of a new conception
or religious buildings. In the wake of demands for a modernized
church, catholic thinkers doubted the capacity of abstraction
(rejected by the pope Pius XII in his 1947 encyclical Mediator
Dei as the “illusion of a higher mysticism”) to attract a wide au-
dience, and Labatut seized the opportunity to create a new type
of church that would integrate religious symbolism with the
persuasive power of commercial architecture, establish a middle
ground between high modernism and mass culture, and in this
sense formulate a truly universal architectural language. In its
first version, Labatut’s projected Church of the Four Evangelists
was to function like a movie-theater, with the congregation fac-
ing a large convex parabolic screen using the sun a source of
light, while its exterior envelope would consist of sheets of col-
ored glass allowing the sunlight to enter at the same time as
it would project a dazzling display for the passersby; later he
envisaged using figurative glass murals in order to stage a play
of transparency and reflection, and to produce what he called a
“truly twenty-four hour architecture” capable of affirming its
place within the visual overload of the urban landscape while
also retaining a dimension of aloofness and abstraction.
204
Labatut’s conception of an experiential architecture as way

to the unity of body and mind, the material and the spiritual,
took concrete form in the school in Princeton, designed in 1961
for the Catholic Society of Sacred Hearts. Here Labatut devel-
ops the idea of an architectural transubstantiation as the “real
presence” of the spiritual, an incarnation that aspires to become
a “Eucharistic” architecture, and in this sense the theological
quarrels over the meaning if transubstantiation were to take real
physical form: it is the building itself which should give us the
body of Christ, offered to the body of the visitors, so that they
in turn can be directed back to their own incarnated soul and
“feel the movement of immobile things,” as Labatut claimed.
Charles Moore, the second case in point, has often been seen
as something of a trickster character, but Otero-Pailos shows the
extent to which his playful and occasionally whimsical projects
emerge out of a set of distinct problems that took the teaching of
Labatut one step further, specifically in sidestepping its theologi-
cal dimension and bringing it closer to phenomenology (which in
turn often displays a kind of non-confessional spirituality that has
undoubtedly facilitated the encounter with certain types of art).
Moore soon found himself in opposition not only to the
modernist establishment, but also to its art-historical counter-
part, particularly in his crucial emphasis on the role of histori-
cal buildings in conveying an intuitive meaning that was itself
transhistorical, so that history was both a point of entry and
something that must be reduced or even forgotten in the future
project, which is one of the key elements in the making of the
architect-historian as a new kind of theorist. This was rooted in
Moore’s reflection on the material imagination of architecture,
which pitted him against textual versions of history. While his
dissertation on the role of water in architecture pursues the quest
of Labatut, but through his constant reference to Bachelard,
specifically the latter’s Water and Dreams, he also brings phe-
205
nomenological motifs to bear on architectural theory (whether

Bachelard in any strict theoretical sense belongs to phenome-
nology, understood as a tradition beginning with Husserl, and
which attempts to ground the sciences and experience in some
more primordial access to things, is another question).39 Crucial
for this was the idea of an imagination that would “see matter
beneath the object,” as Bachelard puts it, which is what makes
the element of water instrumental for the “task of de-objectify-
ing and dissolving substances.”40 This imagination is not a mere
projection of our mind, but “projections of a hidden soul”41 that
gives us a glimpse of a union of subject and object, poetic images
emerging inside the subject as a primordial force through a state
of reverie that cannot be grasped by logical judgments, or the
“formal imagination,” and yet are to be taken as “primitive and
eternal,” so that they “prevail over reason and history.”42
Moore’s thesis extracted such poetic implications from
39. Bachelard’s work is often divided into two parts, the first relating to
the philosophy of the sciences, where his theory of epistemological
breaks and the constitution of theoretical objects, and the emphasis
on “phenomenotechnics” as a way to produce phenomena, in many
respects opposes him to Husserl, particularly on the issue of a possible
grounding of the sciences in the lifeworld. The second part, where he
addresses the material imagination, reveries, and the autonomous status
of poetic fantasy, might at first hand seem to bring him closer to certain
phenomenological motifs, although the break between imagination
and sensibility on the one hand, and science and rationality on the
other, which underlies his work, renders this proximity problematic.
For a discussion of Bachelard’s long-standing and complex relation to
Husserl, see Bernard Barsotti, Bachelard critique de Husserl: Aux racines de
la fracture épistémologie/phénoménologie (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002). The
recently published Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics (Dordrecht:
Springer, 2010), edited by Hans Rainer Sepp and Lester Embree, has
no separate entry on Bachelard, and he is only mentioned in passing,
although the editors note that he is “related to phenomenology in the
broader sense” (xvii).
40. Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans.
Edith. R. Farrell (Dallas: Dallas Institute of Humanity and Culture,
1983), 12
41. Ibid, 17.
42. Ibid, 1.
206
works far apart in space and time, on the basis of what he called
an experiential immediacy, which to be sure involves an essen-
tial moment of fiction, and in this it is in some respects not so
far apart as one might think from the more strict procedures
of someone like Husserl.43 For Moore it is however not varia-
tion that gives us the essence, but memory, but as Otero-Pailos
stresses, the memory in case was in fact there in order to be
forgotten, or transformed into a creative act outside of history,
and in this sense Moore can criticize his modernist predecessors
for not being modern enough in relying on objective, pre-given
forms handed down by an equally objectified history.
Escaping from the modernist box also implied a stance
against the political McCarthyism of the time and a defense of
the irreducibility of individual experience, and Moore’s projects
for additions to existing buildings, such as fountains at signa-
ture works like the Lever House and the Seagram building, pro-
vide a sense of breaking out. But as Otero-Pailos demonstrates,
Moore’s fascination for decoration and superficiality ultimately
had in fact more to do with his understanding of the interior,
which is the space of the human mind as such, with its layers of
fantasy and memory, and here too his poetics of space comes
close to Bachelard.44 The aedicule became the vehicle for the
43. See, for instance, Husserl, Ideas I, § 70, where fantasy (Phantasie) is
understood as the basis for the method of eidetic variation, and thus
as the “vital element” (Lebenselement) of phenomenology. For Husserl
fantasy takes us away from the singularity of experience toward the
essence, whereas in Moore, it is the overlay of memory that reduces he
immediacy of the thing.
44. Bachelard’s Poetics of Space is almost exclusive dedicated to places that
we once loved, to the exploration of “topophilia.” His topo-analysis
provides us with a profound account of intimacy and of the path to the
house that takes us back in time, a regressive route that mobilizes a fan-
tasy essentially predicated upon memories that are “housed” in our soul.
We inhabit houses just as much as they inhabit us, Bachelard says, but
in terms of tradition and memory, not as a transformation and opening
toward something new. The house is our first universe, and Bach-
elard emphatically rejects those philosophers that “know the universe
207
material imagination, as in Moore’s later book Body, Memory,

and Architecture (1977, co-authored with Kent Bloomer), where
water as the primary element has been replaced by fire: the min-
iature size of the aedicule brings the building into contact with
the body, kindling an “inner fire.” Here too Bachelard was a
forerunner, particularly his The Psychoanalysis of Fire, which sug-
gested that the origin of fire was not in some outer accident—
before they know the house, the far horizon before the resting-place.”
(Bachelard, The Poetics of Space trans. Maria Jolas [Boston: Beacon Press,
1969], 5) All subsequent worlds and spaces—and not least the city, which
for Bachelard seems to have only a negative function as an agent of the
dissolution of the house—are inscribed into this first non-geometric,
non-objective space, and to this extent it can only be given to us as a
remembered, or even dreamt space: “the house we were born in is more
than the embodiment of home, it is also an embodiment of dreams […]
there exists for each of us an oneiric house, a house of dream-memory,
that is lost in the shadow of a beyond of the real past. I called this oneiric
house the crypt of the house that we were born in.” (15). In this, the
protective enclosure plays a decisive role, and in many detailed and
intriguing reflections on secret spaces (closets, drawers), non- or proto-
human dwellings (nests, shells) that already point in the direction of
minute and intimate slices of space (corners, nooks), Bachelard wants to
show how the “phenomenology of the verb to inhabit” (xxxiv) means to
live intensively, to be in an enclosure; further on, he speaks of the “hut,”
whose truth derives from “the intensity of its essence, which is the
essence of the verb ‘to inhabit.’” (32) Bachelard here obviously comes
close to Heidegger’s essay on “Building Dwelling Thinking,” although
his own references are mostly negative remarks on the idea of “thrown-
ness” in early Heidegger. In accordance with Bachelard’s amalgamation
of oblivion and modernity, this world is however always one that is on
the verge of disappearing, it is a rural sphere threatened by modernity’s
disruption of interiority. If the world described by Bachelard is a crypt,
it is also a melancholy introjection that would require a “working-
through” or “perlaboration,” a Durcharbeiten in the Freudian sense, and
needs to ask the question whether we must take leave of the topophilia
that chains us to the lost thing. Nothing would at first sight be more op-
posed to Bachelard’s spatial poetics than Corbusier’s vision of transpar-
ency, where the subject must take up a new relation to the thing and to
visibility as such. Uwe Bernhardt, discusses Corbusier’s housing project
Citè Frugès, Pessac, and interestingly suggests that the changes eventu-
ally introduced by the inhabitants can be understood as attempts to
“reestablish the dimension of ‘dream’ advocated by Bachelard in dwell-
ing.” See Berhardt. Le Corbusier et le projet de la modernité: La rupture avec
l’intériorité (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 105.
208
lightning striking, or two branches rubbing against each other,

which, not incidentally, is also the first explicit myth of the ori-
gin or architecture in Vitruvius—but in bodies rubbing against
each other in sexual intercourse and generating heat, a process
that only subsequently was transferred onto nature. For Moore,
the aedicule became not just an origin of sense, but was also en-
dowed with the task of folding the cosmic vectors together, cre-
ating a secularized version of Labatut’s Eucharist architecture,
and which also communicated with a whole counter-cultural
discourse of mind expansion through drugs and channeling of
sexual energies, as in Reich’s “orgone accumulators.”
If this inward turn was still connected to a cosmic dimen-
sion, it also affected the surface, which perhaps is what is most
commonly associated with postmodernism, in Moore’s idea
of “supergraphics.” Visually closely aligned with pop art, this
type of interior decoration soon expanded into an overall vi-
sual strategy for the implementation of Moore’s subjective vi-
sion of architecture, applicable to all kinds of surfaces, even
though it too in the end, just as the aedicule, aspired to achieve
an inner experience. The language of advertising, cherished by
Venturi, here converges with a phenomenology of inner experi-
ence, which indicates the malleability of these concepts, as was
already the case in Labatut, whose Eucharist language friction-
lessly can move over into the domain of consumer psychology.
As Otero-Pailos demonstrates, this inner experience, while
nourished by references to phenomenological philosophy, even-
tually also produced an anti-intellectual stance. The emphasis
on immediacy and on an intuitive access to history, bypassing
critical analysis of sources and in the end relying on the author-
ity of the teacher, gave architectural phenomenology a particu-
lar slant that one the one hand brought it far from the project
that set phenomenology at its course as a philosophy, precisely
because it pushing one of its implicit potentials to the extreme.
209
It is an experientialism that wants to have everything, including

universals and essences, given to it in the flesh, that demands
that everything be given in intuition, and thus only with great
problems, and at a cost of extreme tensions, can account for the
necessity of historical mediations that always introduce a mo-
ment of contingency in sense, just as it, seen from the other
end, appears to drag essences down into the flux of subjective
experience and thus deprive them of their universality. These
problems will become even more pressing in the next two cases,
where the philosophical stakes are placed at a much higher level,
and where phenomenology’s dual heritage in architecture—on
the one hand a tool for accounting of experience in all of it vicis-
situdes, on the other hand almost always trading on more or less
hidden, normative agendas—becomes explosive.
The images of truth:

Norberg-Schulz and Frampton
If Labatut’s and Moore’s relation to phenomenology in the
more strict sense is indirect or unsystematic, Christian Norberg-
Schulz was the one who provided its application to architecture
with a systematic foundation. Beginning in Gestalt psychology
(Intentions in Architecture, 1965), he soon moved on to more phe-
nomenologically oriented concerns (Existence, Space and Archi-
tecture, 1971), which then were summarized in his Genius Loci:
Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (1980), where Heidegger
becomes the major philosophical source.
Otero-Pailos chooses to bypass most of Norberg-Schulz’s
actual comments on Heidegger, and instead reads him through
the way in which his books make use of photographs in order
to construct a visual narrative that purports to give us “aletheic”
images, i.e., images that claim a truth outside of both the works
depicted and of the historical moment of their production. While
this portrayal of Norberg-Schulz as “visual thinker,” casting him
210
as someone who in the vein of Moore forged a kind of image ped-

agogy that also included graphic design and lay-out, does uncover
a neglected aspect of his work and demonstrates his crucial role
in the development of an experiential conception of history, it
also tends to obscure his phenomenologically inspired critique of
technological modernity, which is where his substantial relation
to phenomenology and Heidegger in particular must be located.45
As we will see, this has particular bearings not only on Norberg-
Schulz, but also on the role of phenomenology as such in “archi-
tecture’s historical turn” and the “rise of the postmodern.”
Otero-Pailos in fact analyzes Norberg-Schulz as a fundamen-
tally modernist theorist, whose very project was to rescue mod-
ernism from its threatening relapse into mere repetition of histor-
ical models. The decisive influence on Norberg-Schulz’s attitude
to history came from Giedion, both in the overall sense that the
present moment is one of crisis, and that the transition to the
new must be affected through a synthesis of art and science, as
well as in the more specific use of the method of Metodengleiche,
i.e., the juxtaposition of decontextualized images that were sup-
posed to provide an intuitive access to formal essences (a move
that we also found in Moore, even though he drew on different
sources). Becoming an architect-historian meant to appeal to an
intuition of what Norberg-Schulz called “topology,” i.e., formal
invariants that were themselves invisible but lay at the founda-
tion of visual forms. The cultural task of the architect historian
is to restore meaning, which must come through visual order,
and not through the retrieval or invention of styles, and here too
Norberg-Schulz pursues Giedion’s project, although he no lon-
ger aims to capture the dynamism of space-time, but to retrieve a
stable and underlying structural order.
45. For a discussion of Norberg-Schulz’s actual interpretation of Heidegger

in more detail, see my Essays, Lectures (Stockholm: Axl Books, 2007),
344–348.
211
In the first book, Intentions in Architecture, the theoretical

sources for this task came from Gestalt psychology, particularly
in the version of Rudolf Arnheim (a theory already that by that
time had run its course in the visual arts and begun to be re-
placed with other models),46 whose defense of the untrained eye
had put him in opposition to the art historians and their analy-
sis of disparate elements: to understand a work for Arnheim
meant to grasp an intuitive whole, not to piece together dis-
tinct elements, each with their own meaning. For Norberg-
Schulz this implied that historical analysis and design practice
must proceed from the same premises of an a priori visual or-
der. Oddly enough, the term “intention” does here not signify
any allegiance to phenomenology, and Otero-Pailos notes that
this might be due to Norberg-Schulz’s awareness of the strong
anti-psychological stance of Husserl (which in fact is the very
condition of possibility of phenomenology as the ground of the
other sciences, i.e., the uncovering of a dimension of constitu-
tive consciousness that lies beyond any of the empirical sciences,
not only psychology, but also anthropology, sociology, history,
etc., and that later would lead Husserl to understand himself as
the true heir of Kant’s transcendental philosophy).
Psychology in the end however proved to be a shaky founda-
tion, and from Existence, Space and Architecture onward Norberg-
Schulz would rethink his relation to phenomenology. The privi-
leged term for the invisible topological order now begins to shift
towards the place or “existential spaces”, of which architectural
space is the “concretization.” Here the concept genius loci appears
46. For the impact of Gestalt psychology on art education in the US, see
Howard Singerman, Art Subjects: Making Artists in the American University
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). The first of Robert
Morris’s “Notes on Sculptures” engages in detail with this tradition,
and while he continues to use its vocabulary, it is gradually being
dismantled as the field of experience is understood in a more expanded
sense. See Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1995), 1-8.
212
for the first time, as a name for places saturated with objects that
provide direction and centrality, ranging from the minute size
of the hand to entire urban structures and landscapes, between
which there is a continuity that architecture has to respect, al-
low to spring forth, and eventually concretize through its own
artifacts.
Otero-Pailos provides a detailed analysis of how this con-
clusion is conveyed to the reader by means of a visual imagery,
which gives a persuasive visibility to an order assumed to it-
self be derived from an invisible essence. Composing his books
both as textual and photographic essays, Norberg-Schulz gave
the final words to the images that provided the synthesis of the
argument, but as such they were deprived of context, so that
textual and visual rhetoric supplemented each other’s lack. As
Otero-Pailos notes, there is something deeply paradoxical in
this photographic strategy, given Norberg-Schulz’s dependence
on Heidegger, for does not the latter’s analysis of how the world
become a “picture” (Bild) from Cartesian philosophy onward,
and even more so when combined with his later analysis of
modern technology as “framing” (Gestell), quite simply render
any claim that photography—together with cinema a specifi-
cally modern art form, whose profound impact on the aura, aes-
thetics, subjectivity, space-time, desire, fetishism, etc. has been
detailed by an infinity of theorists at least from Benjamin on-
ward—might be “aletheic” in the sense suggested by Norberg-
Schulz wholly impossible?
While such claims about the aletheic image are no doubt un-
tenable, and belong to a historically dated phase of art theory—
as Otero-Pailos rightly notes, it seems impossible to deny that
the interpretation of any such image is always mediated through
subjectivity as well as a set of historically specific conventions—
Norberg-Schulz’s issues with Heidegger perhaps lie elsewhere,
which is also where the conflicted heritage of phenomenology
213
itself becomes visible, and of which his use of photography is

an indication, though not the problem itself. His reading em-
phasizes the possibility of a return to an order already given in
nature, beyond the mediation of history, for which the aletheic
image is an instrument or mediator, but not truth itself: put
briefly, the problem is not truth conveyed by an image, but truth
itself. This comes across in the theoretically central introducto-
ry chapter in Genius Loci, “The Phenomenon of Place.”47 This
time starting out not from photographs, but from Heidegger’s
reading of Georg Trakl’s poem “Ein Winterabend” in Unterwegs
zur Sprache,48 Norberg-Schulz wants to show how space can
be articulated by an architecture that follows the movement of
nature’s own spacing, locating itself as the mediating juncture
between nature and culture, and thus preserving them in their
difference and harmonious unity, i.e., in their truth. Picking up
on the difference between the inside and the outside that struc-
tures the poem, and the image of the falling snow that sets up a
relation between heaven and earth as a comprehensive environ-
ment, Norberg-Schulz reads the interiority as shelter and pro-
tection, and as opposed to the wanderer coming from the out-
side into the house, crossing a “threshold turned to stone” that
47. The essay was first published in 1976, and then reprinted in a slightly
modified version as the introductory chapter in Genius Loci: Towards
a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1980). Henceforth
cited as GL.
48. Norberg-Schulz’s reading proceeds to a rather literal interpretation of
the poem, and effectively disregards what Heidegger in fact says about
language and space. Elsewhere I have tried to elucidate this connection;
see my “The Vicinity of Poetry and Thought,” in Marcia Sá Caval-
cante Schuback and Luiz Carlos Pereira (eds.), Time and Form: Essays on
Philosophy, Logic, Art, and Politics (Stockholm: Axl Books, 2014). Cf. also
the rather different interpretation of the current state of architecture
developed four years earlier by Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co
in the final chapter of their L’architettura contemporanea; Heidegger’s late
work on poetry in Unterwegs zur Sprache her too provides the point of
entry, although the emphasis lies on the absence of a relation between
word and thing, and the impossibility of forging a stable language (for
more on this, see chap. 1 above).
214
marks the “rift” between “otherness” and “manifest meaning”

(GL 9). To inhabit the house is thus to inhabit the world from
the point of view of a center, a focal point that gathers together
the inside and the outside, meaning and otherness (and in this
we can recognize motifs developed a few years subsequent to
Heidegger’s essay by Bachelard, and then by Moore). The land-
scape is never purely natural, but always on the way to culture,
and is as it were completed by the intervention of artifacts:
settlements, paths, and landmarks form focal points that “ex-
plain” the landscape, “condense” the natural environment into
a meaningful totality, and actualize its capacity for sense. The
genius loci is only achieved when all of these determinations—the
natural and the man-made, the categories of earth-sky (hori-
zontal-vertical) and outside-inside, and finally “character,” the
how of the presence of things—are brought together in terms of
concentration and enclosure.
The interaction between landscape and settlement is re-
peated in the structure of the edifice: floor, wall, and ceiling,
which condense and focus the triad ground, horizon, and sky,
and a phenomenology of place and space, Norberg-Schulz says,
thus necessarily comprises “the basic modes of construction and
their relationship to formal articulation” (GL 15). In this way
we can say that architecture receives an already given environ-
ment in order to focus it in buildings and things, and that things
and artifacts thereby “explain the environment and make its
character manifest” (16), i.e., they uncover the meanings po-
tentially present in the given environment. For Norberg-Schulz
the life-world is built up in a series of nested operations, in an
ascending movement leading from a first visualization of our un-
derstanding of the place, through a symbolization that detaches
signification from the immediacy of its context and turns it
into a cultural object, and finally the gathering of all the param-
eters into an existential center (as the paradigm case, Norberg-
215
Schulz refers to Heidegger’s discussion in “Building Dwelling

Thinking” of the bridge that does not just connect banks that
are already there, but lets them emerge as banks as it crosses the
stream).
Through this we are supposed to reach back into a sphere of
dwelling and re-establish contact with the world in a way that
releases us from the demands of technology and the objectify-
ing machinations of modern planning. “Human identity pre-
supposes the identity of place,” Norberg-Schulz states, and the
priority accorded to transformation and movement as a key to
freedom in modernity —we can here think of Giedion’s “stream
of movement” or the fluidity and malleability of “space-time”
as the very element of architecture— must be reversed: “It is
characteristic for modern man,” Norberg-Schulz claims, once
more picking up a figure from Trakl’s poem, “that for a long
time he gave the role as a wanderer pride of place. He wanted to
be ‘free’ and conquer the world. Today we start to realize that
true freedom presupposes belonging, and that ‘dwelling’ means
belonging to a concrete place.” (GL 22)
As Otero-Pailos points out, many readers have criticized
Norberg-Schulz’s reading of Heidegger for being simplistic, and
while this may be true, it nevertheless brings out one particular
dimension that is undoubtedly there in the phenomenological
tradition: Norberg-Schulz’s reading of Heidegger is one-sided
and selective, but it is difficult to say that it is simply wrong.
What he claims as the true heritage of Heidegger has been
equally noted by readers of all kinds, from Adorno to Deleuze
and Derrida (who always remained something of a paradoxically
loyal heretic): the desire for absolute foundations, grounds, and
certainties that would already, in their truth, be given in physis.49
49. While the Greek physis in Heidegger’s interpretation cannot be identi-

fied with nature in the modern sense, it is the nevertheless the distant
and obscured origin of all modern natures, as it were the first name of
216
This quest for origins was however always marked by the sus-
picion—perhaps even promise, at least in its later versions—that
it would be infinite. This was already the case in Husserl’s search
for the depths and recesses of experience, and his understanding
of transcendental subjectivity as necessarily embodied not just
in a physical side, but also in intersubjectivity and history; in
Heidegger, the quest for foundations is rejected in the early thir-
ties, and yet returns in constantly new guises, one of which un-
doubtedly would be mythologically tinted “Fourfold” (Geviert)
that organizes his understanding of world in the later texts, and
is operative throughout the interpretation of Trakl. The tension
between these two motifs, or better this tension between two
sides of the same motif, cannot be resolved, and in fact should
not be: it is constitutive of phenomenology as such, which is
why any appeal to it as a figure of philosophical authority to
be applied to another discipline necessarily involves a moment
of deception, and even more so when it is called upon to de-
liver a normative aesthetic agenda, as is undoubtedly the case in
Norberg-Schulz. This need obviously not be intended, rather it
belongs to the phenomenological tradition as such, and beyond
this undoubtedly to any philosophical tradition that eschews the
search for empty generalities and pursues the exchange with art-
works at the kind of depth where the issue is their truth, their ca-
pacity to reveal something hitherto unknown to thought, which
is why it can be taken neither as an objection nor as a defense of
phenomenology (or any other philosophical tradition), only as
a constant temptation that must be accounted for.
For Kenneth Frampton, the last case studied by Otero-
being before all subsequent oppositional structures—physis as distinct

from techne, nomos, polis, and all concepts that would derive from this
split—or rather the name of being at that moment where it contained
this difference within itself, in the movement of truth as a-letheia, as a
duplicity of hiding and showing that only later, through the emergence
of philosophy in Plato, was caught up in a series of external oppositions.
217
Pailos, these issues have become key elements for reflection, and
the necessity of a historical meditation inherent in any ground-
ing can be taken as the pivotal theme of his mature theory of
critical regionalism and tectonics. The notion of experience, or
“experiential surplus,” here functions as the guiding thread, and
Otero-Pailos follows it through Frampton’s early engagement
with Art and Crafts ideals, and traces the sustained importance
he gives to manual labor and practice throughout his work, for a
long time conceptualized under the rubric of “constructivism,”
until it eventually ushered in the vocabulary of critical regional-
ism and tectonics from the early eighties onward.
For Frampton too, the power of the image was important,
which he developed during his year as en editor of Architectural
Design (1962–65). But instead then seeking for “aletheic” imag-
es that would disclose a hidden topology, Frampton’s editorial
strategy, strongly influenced by Ernesto Rogers’s Casabella,50
was to use images to convey detailing, tactility, and material-
ity, which remain key term in his later work that often posi-
tions itself in opposition not only to the conventions of archi-
tecture photography as such, but also and more generally to the
consumption of works through images and “information” that
in turn feeds a particular kind of photogenic architecture. But
rather than a general rejection of the image, Frampton’s propos-
al was that these graphic techniques could themselves become a
way to achieve a surplus experience, which is what transforms
mere building into architecture, i.e., takes us out of the sphere
of pure necessity into the space of freedom and reflection, and
Otero-Pailos shows how this theme emerges in Frampton’s ear-
ly encounter with the works of Hannah Arendt, as well as his
50. Roger’s own writings, which Frampton did not notice at the time, were
in fact steeped in phenomenology, even though not in any technical
sense of the term. See for instance Rogers, “The Phenomenology of Eu-
ropean Architecture”, Daedalus Vol. 93, No. 1 (Winter, 1964): 358-372.
218
exchanges with the phenomenological circles in Essex, which

fostered a more anti-modern attitude.51
If Arendt’s The Human Condition and its tripartite schema of
labor, work, and action became decisive for Frampton, the ques-
tion was how to translate this into architectural discourse, for
which the triad of building, architecture, and, somewhat more
vaguely, surplus experience—the extra dimension of experience
that makes architecture into a liberating art—offered a solution.
For Arendt labor was the toil of physical necessity, that which
keeps us alive, work was the production of tools and technical
forms with a continued existence of their own, or instrumental
rationality, and action, finally, was the capacity for beginning,
for bringing something new into the world in an act of freedom,
which is essentially related to the possibility of an exchange be-
tween equals taking place in language. This exchange in turn
requires a “space of appearance,” i.e., a public sphere, which for
Arendt is essentially made of intersubjective linguistic practices
rather than material things, and as such has no existence over
and above those who take part in them.
Frampton’s transposition of these terms is not without prob-
lems, as Otero-Pailos notes, especially since he neglects Arendt’s
stress on language and identifies the sphere of action with the
production of a particular kind of architecture, or sometimes
with a particular dimension of architecture as such. But rather
than seeing this as a misreading based on the “structurist notion
that all human experiences could be constructed in material and
visual terms” (AHT 226), it is probably more fruitful to read it
as a necessary critique that attempts to correct the unmistak-
51. The Essex circle notably comprised Joseph Rykwert, Dalibor Vesely, and
Alberto Péréz-Gomez, all of which have produced eminently erudite
historical work. In this context the latter’s Architecture and the Crisis of
Modern Science (1983) must be mentioned, not least because it shows
that a phenomenological analysis of conceptual history in no way im-
plies an impressionistic treatment of historical documents and sources.
219
ably idealist tendency of Arendt’s theory of the public sphere,

whose emphasis on language neglects that it cannot do with
specific and materially embodied institutions. If this sphere ex-
ists in a physical environment to which it undoubtedly cannot
be reduced, its physical features can nevertheless not be entirely
contingent in relation to the exchanges that take place within it;
for what would “space of appearance” be, which simply lacked
all spatial coordinates and features? The “act of human public
appearance,” Frampton writes in the essay “Labor, Work and
Architecture” (1969), “depends upon ‘work’ as the sole agency
through which relative permanence of the human world, testify-
ing to human continuity, may be established.”52
In the early theories of Frampton, put forward in the journal
Oppositions that was at the crossroads of the theoretical debates
of the period,53 he presents architectural history as a conflict
between building and architecture, passing though critical mo-
ments like the first separation between engineering and architec-
ture in the mid eighteenth century, the subsequent assumption
of power by the engineer a century later, signaled by Paxton’s
Crystal Palace 1851 (in fact largely designed by the railway engi-
neer Charles Fox), and most recently the period around World
War I and the introduction of industrial production. This last
step, Frampton suggests, created a situation in which “the tra-
ditional cultural system is totally vitiated,”54 and after which all
that was left was a process in which building displaced architec-
ture and eradicated the possibility of surplus experience.
52. Cited in AHT 226.
53. These debates significantly pitted Frampton against Eisenman, whose
project was to restart modernism, emancipated from its humanist
legacy, and for whom the historical attitude of Frampton was leading in
the wrong direction. Later, in 2007 Eisenman would look back and say,
“We were starting out to build a modernism in America, and unfortu-
nately Postmodernism, as it came to be in this country, was one of the
effects of Oppositions” (cit. in AHT 229).
54. “Industrialization the Crises in Architecture” (1973), cited in AHT 232.
220
This renders the concept of architecture systematically am-

bivalent: on the one hand it points to building, on the other
hand to an experience beyond its own material facticity. In
Frampton’s subsequent work, the search for this kind of ex-
perience took two paths, one leading towards history and one
towards politics. The historical option presented the task of re-
trieving the experiential dimension that had been repressed in a
culture of engineering, which also, and somewhat paradoxically,
meant to focus on constructive details, how units and elements
are joined. But rather than opposing itself to politics, this seem-
ingly formalist attention to details aspires to show how they
condense history and politics in a form specific to architecture,
in the joint, which for Frampton assumes a particular, even on-
tological significance, and is where he most fruitfully encoun-
ters Heidegger, as we will see.
The larger reflection on architecture’s place in culture and
history would in the early eighties come to be phrased in terms
of “Critical Regionalism.” While the term itself was borrowed
from Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, as Frampton is al-
ways careful to stress, he nevertheless gave it a much wider sig-
nificance. First put forth in the programmatic essay “Towards
a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of
Resistance” (1983),55 critical regionalism launches a six-point
program as a strategy of aesthetic resistance, opposed to both a
postmodern compensatory eclecticism and its remodeling of ar-
chitecture as symbolism and scenography, and to a pure techno-
logical universality.56 Drawing on Paul Ricoeur, the first three
points sketch a general sense of modernity and its historical
55. First published in Hal Foster (ed.): The Anti-Aesthetic (Seattle: Bay
Press, 1983). The following citations are from this version.
56. For a precise analysis of Frampton’s simultaneous battle against these
two opponents, and which also reads his strategy on the basis of Hei-
degger, see Deborah Fausch, “The Oppositions of Postmodern Tecton-
ics,” in Any 14, 1996.
221
trajectory, the first setting up a conflict between local culture

and universal civilization, which has to be understood as a dia-
lectical opposition with the regional as the mediating term. The
second signals a farewell to the avant-garde as a viable model,
an argument continued in the third, which speaks of an increas-
ingly leveled and false “world culture” made up of media and its
images, substituting information for experience (and even more
so for “surplus experience”).
The following three points contain the positive program,
and here we find that which comes closest to what could be
called Frampton’s aesthetic. Point four proposes the idea of a
resistance of the place-form, where Frampton derives his fun-
damental analytical tools from Heidegger (especially the 1951
essay “Building Dwelling Thinking”) and with some reserva-
tions he shares the suspicion against the mathematical objecti-
fication of space, and the need for a return to the concrete and
the communal as a way to resist the limitlessness of technology.
After Heidegger, Frampton suggests, “we are, when confronted
with the ubiquitous placelessness of our modern environment,
[brought to posit] the absolute precondition of a bounded do-
main in order to create an architecture of resistance.” (24) This
also means to emphasize a series of concepts that all inscribe
themselves in a tension between “nature and culture”: topog-
raphy, context, climate, light, and tectonic form. Connecting to
local situations, critical regionalism marshals these tools in the
name of inertia, and it professes to be a programmatic arrière-
garde that mediates between local and specific traditions and
an increasingly homogenized universal civilization. In this way
it wants to protect us from a universal leveling by focusing on
what is highlighted in the sixth and final point, physical and
tactile elements, which work against what Frampton perceives
as a one-sided emphasis on visual elements. Regionalism asserts
such qualities that tend to get lost in an architectural culture in-
222
creasingly permeated by images and reproduction technologies,

it counters the “loss of nearness” by preserving the “place-form”
against both modernism and its obsession with the tabula rasa as
well as all forms of sentimental and populist counter-reactions—
but in doing this, it must remain within what Frampton himself
calls a “double mediation,” for instance as in the interplay of
the “rationality of normative technique” and the “arationality of
idiosyncratic forms” (21–22).
This arational rationality is what comes to the fore in the
idea of tectonics. Historically, the concept draws on a long tra-
dition extending back at least to the mid-nineteenth century
and the moment when a certain threshold of modern architec-
ture was crossed, and the classical heritage seemed irrevocably
dispersed. From that point onward there emerges a symptom-
atic, long, and inconclusive debate on the relation between the
technical “core-form” (Kernform) and the aesthetic “art-form”
(Kunstform),57 of which Frampton is one of the last heirs. While
this is obviously a fundamentally modern problem that trans-
lates a fundamental insecurity about the value of the inherited
formal language, one can also note that the question that ini-
tiates the discussion, posed by Bötticher in his analysis of the
“tectonics of the Greeks,”58 bears on the possibility of retriev-
ing the classical within the modern, i.e., if it is at all possible to
re-create, within modern architecture, the natural and organic
bond—the “juncture” (Junktur)—that in the Greek temple unit-
57. For discussions of the nineteenth-century discourse on tectonics and re-

lated concepts, see Werner Oechslin, Stilhülse und Kern: Otto Wagner, Ad-
olf Loos und der evolutionäre Weg zur modernen Architektur (Berlin: Ernst
& Sohn, 1994). For contemporary discussions, see for instance Hans
Kollhoff (ed.), Über Tektonik in der Baukunst (Braunschweig: Vieweg &
Sohn, 1993), and Any 14, “Tectonics Unbound.”
58. See Karl Bötticher, Die Tektonik der Hellenen, 2 vol. (Berlin: Ernst &
Korn, 1844–52). For an analysis of Bötticher’s program, see Hartmut
Meyer, Die Tektonik der Hellenen: Kontext und Wirkung der Architekturtheo-
rie von Karl Bötticher (Stuttgart: Axel Menges, 2004).
223
ed statics and expression, technology and art. The discourse on

tectonics that begins in the middle of the nineteenth century in
this sense emerges as a melancholy reflection on the loss of the
classical heritage, which in turn echoes in the idea of a loss of
“surplus experience.”
For Frampton, tectonics functions as a complex mediation
between the autonomous dimension of formal compositional
language and a given setting that is at once historical-cultural
and environmental; it is not something purely technical, but
rather the necessary basis for a structural poetic that would be
able to inscribe the inevitable impact of modern technology
while transforming it to a conscious expression of form. In an
essay from 1990, “Rappel à l’ordre: The Case for the Tectonic,”59
Frampton adds another distinction, which also highlights the
Heideggerian background to his concepts: the tectonic object
is not only opposed to its scenographic and technological coun-
terpart, but is itself divided into an ontological and a represen-
tational aspect. These two aspects are associated to Semper’s
distinction between the tectonics of the architectural frame, and
the compressed masses of stereotomy (i.e., a massing of similar
elements like bricks), and the frame is now understood as tend-
ing toward the “aerial element,” while the telluric mass-form
descends downward into the earth. This duality for Frampton
becomes an expression of “cosmological opposites” endowed
with a “transcultural values” (95), which make up the founda-
59. Reprinted in Labour, Work, Architecture (London: Phaidon, 2002). The

following citations with page number are from this version. Frampton’s
reference to Cocteau’s neoclassical “return to order” should prob-
ably to some extent be understood ironically, and yet it unmistakably
gestures, across the chasm opened up by modernism, in the direction
of the classical tradition, even of the “orders” in architecture, which on
the surface were precisely what appeared to be displaced by tectonics in
the nineteenth century, basically from Semper onward and yet survive
in the sense of an order that is already incipient in nature, and to which
architecture constitutes a reflexive response.
224
tion of our life-world, and it is not difficult to understand these

concepts as a somewhat demythologized version of Heidegger’s
Fourfold, which seeks to establish specific architectural interpre-
tations of his seemingly religiously tinted notions
Following Semper, but in a certain way Heidegger too,
Frampton proposes that the joint be understood as the essen-
tial element of architecture: it forms a fundamental syntactical
transition from stereotomic base to tectonic frame, it provides
an “ontological condensation” (95) of the very idea of tikto
as bringing-together, and allows the other elements to come
forth—the joint establishes connections and separations, first
between stereotomic earth and tectonic lightness, then unfold-
ing its operations throughout all the other constructional de-
tails. Sense, Frampton says, must be understood as an interplay
between connecting and disconnecting, a “dis-joint” (102) that
produces a gathering and assembling while also letting the dif-
ferent elements come forth in their difference.
These threads are finally drawn together in the massive
Studies in Tectonic Culture (1996, curiously enough not discussed
by Otero-Pailos), which develops the theory of tectonics in the
framework of an encompassing analysis of the path of moder-
nity. Through a series of extended in-depth analyses of paradig-
matic architectural works that attempt to grasp how their over-
all significance as cultural objects are reflected and expressed in
the smallest technical details of their construction, Frampton
traces a “tectonic trajectory” leading from the origins of mod-
ernist architecture into the situation of late modernity. Here too
he construes the dialectic of modern architecture as a tension
between the representational and ontological, with tectonics
as the meditating force that allows construction to assume the
form of a poetic practice—it is what raises the technological into
a form of art, and what conveys the surplus experience— that
would have the power to resist technology’s transformation
225
of the earth into a depository of material, and its flattening of

things, ultimately of space itself, into calculable entities devoid
of density and presence. Tectonics would be that which allows
construction to shine forth in a transfigured form as truth, in
bringing forth the necessary difference and togetherness of
things.60
The legacy of phenomenology

Finally, what is then the legacy of architectural phenomenology,
and to what extent does it fit into the theme of the postmodern
as a historical turn? In the epilogue Otero-Pailos points to the
ambivalence and conflicted nature of this legacy. It introduced
a new set of visual techniques and brought about an expanded
sense of architectural intellectuality, but also set specific limits
to theory, and eventually ended up opposing what it had made
possible. The problem of how to link intellectuality, bodily ex-
perience, and history in a unity was as such surely not a new
one, and it had a long genealogy extending back to the nine-
teenth century and the psychologizing of aesthetics. Connected
to modern technologies of perception and representation it had
however gained a new depth and intensity, as in Giedion, and
through him to his students, notably Norberg-Schulz, whose
aletheic image can be read as a development of the Methoden-
gleiche.
60. For a reading not unsympathetic to such claims, but that nevertheless
fundamentally problematizes the claim to truth, see Fritz Neumeyer,
“Tektonik: Das Schauspiel der Objektivität und die Wahrheit des
Architekturschauspiels,” in Kollhoff, Über Tektonik in der Baukunst.
Neumeyer shows that it is indeed the case that this truth is often an
“image” of truth, a rhetorical display of structural honesty, more than
organic relation between the demands of engineering and architectural
expressivity. Even more emphatically than Frampton he also notes the
extent to which the value of the tectonic, particularly in its constant
referencing of the phenomenological body as a source of meaning, can
only be defensive: its task is “not to once more make the disappearing
body appear, but to prevent it from completely disappearing” (59).
226
If architectural phenomenology was an attempt to bring

us back to authentic experience, its way of doing so was still
through various means of representation (which does not exclu-
sively mean texts, as Otero-Pailos stresses, but also graphic tech-
niques layout, editing of images, the photographic essay in all of
its guises): “Architectural phenomenology was not so much a
representation of real architectural experiences. Rather, it was a
discursive fabrication of a new sort of technologically mediated
architectural experience.” (AHS 255) In this it poses an explicit
and highly conscious challenge to the protocols of art history,
in proposing a different way of conveying experience, which in
the end also introduced an element of anti-intellectualism into
the new intellectuality that was the prerogative of the architect-
historian.61
In relation to the modernist legacy, architectural phenom-
enology played a complex and sometimes even contradictory
role: inside the postmodern turn to historical styles it upheld
a modernist claim to an essential experience that would ground
them outside of history, and thus was instrumental, Otero-
Pailos suggests, in reconciling “the postmodernist fascination
with history and the modernist repulsion from it.” (AHT 256)
In this sense it occupied a Janus-faced or transitional position,
which is also why it toward the end of the eighties could be at-
tacked from within by a new generation that turned against
the whole idea of grounding and foundation, for which a new
reading, or sometimes a rejection, of Heidegger could be instru-
mental (in these discussions, it seems to have been little noticed
that Heidegger himself had rejected the idea of fundamental
ontology more than fifty years earlier). Rather than a return to
61. At the same time as these new means were tested in architecture, they
were being mischievously dismantled in the visual arts. Dan Graham’s
Homes for America (1966) is an obvious example, and even more so Rob-
ert Smithson’s early photo-text-essays; on Smithson, see chap 6, below.
227
the essential structures of experience, the body, or nature as the

ground of dwelling, the task now became to account for its im-
possibility in the modern world, for the irrevocable division be-
tween forms and grounds, and the detachment of language from
its anchoring in some natural or pre-given order of perception.
In the end, phenomenology, both as a philosophical move-
ment and as a particular form of architectural thought, seems
difficult to place in the modern-postmodern schema, regardless
of what content we choose to give the latter. Historically its first
phase is coextensive with early modernism and the discovery of
the temporal dynamic nature of subjectivity, which is why its
influence sometimes may be seen as running parallel to that of
Bergson (as Otero-Pailos shows to be the case in Labatut); the
invention of consciousness as a transcendental field takes at the
same time as the invention of abstraction in art, as can be seen in
Husserl’s early work,62 long before phenomenology’s postwar
ascendancy, through the influence of Merleau-Ponty, to the role
of one of the major interpretative paradigms for early twentieth-
century painting and for at least certain parts of recent abstract
art; it may no doubt be read as a resistance to the technologizing
of perception, but just as much as an attempt to understand the
ground of technology, as in the case of Heidegger, who can in no
way be cast as merely a backward-looking opponent to modern
art.63 In this sense, to the extent that such labels at all make
62. See Husserl’s letter to Hofmannsthal from January 12, 1907, which
sets up a close parallel between aesthetic autonomy and Husserl’s own
recently discovered phenomenological reduction. I discuss this in more
detail in “Husserl’s Letter to Hofmannsthal: Phenomenology and the
Possibility of a Pure Art,” Site 26–27 (2009), where there is also an
English translation of Husserl’s letter; German original in Briefwechsel,
Husserliana Dokumente, eds. Elisabeth Schuhmann and Karl Schuh-
mann (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), vol. VII, 133–36.
63. It is well known that after the war Heidegger was planning to write a
sequel to The Origin of the Work of Art that would start out from the work
of Klee, and his meditations on the essence of technology are intimately
connected to those on art, as can be seen in texts like “Bauen Wohnen
228
sense, phenomenology is a quintessentially modern and even

modernist philosophy, in focusing on subjectivity and its rela-
tion to otherness (other human beings, the social order, history)
as the nexus in which sense is constituted, rather than on ideal
logical or linguistic structures, as in the first wave of analytic
philosophy, which is no doubt why the former has been such an
attractive ally for the modern arts in general, whereas the latter
has only had a marginal influence.
The two moments, grounding in the subject and the un-
grounding of the subject, are like the two facets of phenomenol-
ogy, and if we take the first to be modern, the second postmod-
ern—as in all the attempts that were made to understand the
postmodern as a “decentering of the subject”—it belongs just
as much to both, as is evidenced by the second phase of archi-
tectural phenomenology that Otero-Pailos situates in the late
eighties. In this sense, this is more like an oscillation between
two poles inside the same problem: no matter how we draw the
line, the postmodern will always be inside the modern and in-
versely, as was suggested by Lyotard in his conception of the
futur antérieur.
To some extent this strange and confusing crisscrossing of
before and after is an effect of the non-synchronicity of philoso-
phy and architectural thinking, which is further complicated if
we include the thinking in and around the visual arts. There will
be different genealogies depending on how we draw the lines,
and the result is inevitably a story of projections, decontextual-
ized and belated readings, willfully aberrant interpretations and
applications that refuse to yield a unity. And if he term “post-
modern” for a while offered itself as a common denominator
for all of these trajectories, as if they all at a given point in time
would had begun to move in lockstep and adjust their relative
Denken” and “Die Frage nach der Technik,” which are the most fre-
quently cited in the architectural reception.
229
speeds to one another, this was no doubt an optical illusion

produced by a desire for interpretative mastery, no matter how
much many (though not all) of these interpretations emphati-
cally rejected such mastery.
The inverse solution would then be to reject the idea of an
internal history, and instead opt for a theory of the postmodern
not as a series of continuous problem given by a singe discipline,
or even by the interaction of a multiplicity of disciplines, but by
the outside, by the forces of Capital and the way it transforms
the world which all of these theories and practices inhabit. This
need not imply to see these disciplines as mere passive reflec-
tions, but rather as overdetermined responses, which however
in the end cannot form a exclusive history of their own. Neither
a mere symptom nor an autonomous force, architecture would
then be situated at the limit, its particular competence and
agency forming a kind of disciplinary interiority that reflects,
monadically, that which surpasses it, in a topological twist;
whether this restores its agency or even more effectively neu-
tralizes it, can be taken as precisely the problem of the postmod-
ern that still remains with us.
Reading the outside: globalization

and the return of the repressed
This opposite route into the postmodern complex—and just as
much out of it, in way that complicates the inner-outer divide—
is the one taken by Reinhold Martin. In consonance with this
move, instead of simply historicizing the concept as a past and
sealed-off object offered up for dispassionate scholarly work, his
claim is rather that the postmodern in relation to the present is
characterized by a particular untimeliness itself in need of a new
analysis. It is like a recent past that refuses to be aligned with
the present just as much as it cannot be consigned to the past,
first and foremost because it belongs to a larger socio-historical
230
structure that we still inhabit in all of its ramifications, including

those that concern the sense of historical sequences and order.
Postmodern architecture, Martin suggests, must first of all
be understood as part of a transformed universe of production
and consumption, and if it rejects the machine aesthetic of mod-
ernism, it is because it is itself part of a machine of a different
order, which it however does not simply mirror, but also effec-
tuates and sets in motion. Postmodernism must thus first be
“translated out of” architecture (UG xii), but this translatability
also makes it possible for its particular disciplinary knowledge
to become a key for unlocking a more general context, which is
why it is no coincidence that many of the earliest theorizations
of postmodernity, from Fredric Jameson to Jürgen Habermas,
picked architecture as their main exhibit. In relation to these
predecessors, Martin’s project is not to zoom in and narrate a
more specific history of architectural theories or practices with
one stage leading to another (as was the proposal in Otero-
Pailos), but to study a set of concepts that by the end of the mid
eighties had become a discursive formation called postmodern-
ism, and which all clustered around architecture rather than
emerging out of it as from an inner disciplinary dialectic. The
method, he says, is not to contextualize architecture, but rather
to decontextualize it in relation to established narratives in or-
der find other connections and constellations. These constella-
tions however do not form a set of parallel tracks that would
simply reflect each other, but are related so that each of them
generates its own outside, dispersed over contemporary history,
from the close to the far away, which is also one of the pervasive
ways in which postmodern architecture partakes in a certain
territoriality, both conceptually and socio-politically, i.e. in the
ordering of late capitalist space.
Ultimately, Martin’s interrogation bears on architecture’s
immanence in a power that it remains barred from perceiving
231
other than in the distorted mirror of its own autonomy, and on

how its various modes of acting and representing, its thinking in
the widest sense, also amount to an active unthinking of other
possibilities, above all the idea of utopia. In its focus on auto-
regulation and on its own history and language, postmodern
architecture, through all of its many and seemingly contradic-
tory shapes, was an embrace of the status quo, which in turn was
obscured, Martin suggests, by a return to an idea of Architecture
conceived as an act of freedom that claims to break with the tele-
ologies and historical necessities of modernism. The newfound
exercise of freedom and autonomy, with its unmistakable echoes
of the historical avant-gardes, could engage in an almost endless
variety of experiments with representation (some of which are
detailed in Otero-Pailos book, although from a rather different
angle) that all had in common a gradual severing of the ties to
historical truth, eventually leading to the insight into truth’s
radical contingency, which itself, Martin proposes, must be seen
as the product of the naturalized narrative of capital.
In this sense, the postmodern was a “cruel combination of
freedom and servitude, truth and lies” (UG xv), and the role
of its architectural avatar, as a fully materialized “immaterial
production,” both production and representation, was to reor-
ganize the imaginary as well as space, or as Martin prefers to
say, territory. Drawing above all on Agamben’s theory of the
contemporary generalization of the structure of the state of ex-
ception, Martin sees a new regimentation of territory at work,
moving between the poles of the network and the island, on the
one hand creating intense connection between all entities, on
the other producing a proliferating set of boundaries that cut
through social space, both in the form enclaves and gated com-
munities, and of zones that divest their inhabitants of legal sta-
tus as they slice through the fabric of everyday life. But if this
new regimentation erases utopia as the thought of an outside
232
and replaces it with immanent loops of auto-regulation, these

in turn generate their own outsides on the inside: utopia’s ghost
that returns in the guise of outsides that haunt the inside from
which it has been expelled, in a figure that runs through many
of Martin’s analyses. His often repeated claim that the further
inside you get, and the more architecture folds back on its own
specificity and competence, the further outside you get, is it-
self reversible: the more architecture is deterritorialized in the
world, the more its own specific procedures can be read as a
cipher of the totality.
In the world of late capitalism the ubiquity of corporate
models calls for what Martin calls a “phenomenology of capital”
(xvii), and while the term—itself picked up from Ernest Mandel,
who speaks of the corporation as “the main phenomenal form
of capital”—may be incidental in this context, it can neverthe-
less be placed in a significant opposition to the tradition delin-
eated by Otero-Pailos. Rather than the search for an experiential
take on architecture grounding itself in the discovery of formal
essences or the depths of subjectivity (in fact, phenomenology
aligns the two, since essences have sense only in relation to a
subjectivity that apprehends them), phenomenality here seems
to imply the opposite, i.e., the way in which an objective or-
der not only appears before a subject, but also subjectivizes the
subject, in a way that renders the latter’s own level of agency
problematic.
The postmodern obsession with the question of the disci-
pline: is there at all an architecture—echoing Le Corbusier’s old
dictum, that we first must ascertain whether we are at all mov-
ing “towards an architecture,” vers une architecture, before we in-
terrogate its possible newness, belatedness, or timeliness— and
the incessant claims to ground the discipline in history, some
version of formal analysis, or some specific technology, surely
testified to an almost neurotic anxiety. To some extent this is
233
reminiscent what Tafuri at the outset of Progetto e utopia claimed

to be “one of the principal ethical imperatives of bourgeois
art” characterizing the whole cycle of modern architecture: “to
dispel anxiety by understanding and internalizing its causes.”
The many versions of this anxiety that traverse the postmodern
for Martin however all derive from a common problem, which
remained invisible in all the solutions that tried to overcome
it, and his many critical comments on Tafuri notwithstanding,
Martin’s theory is in many respects an updated version of the
latter’s analysis, the difference being that what Tafuri perceived
as an end for Martin appears as an intensification (which is
not entirely foreign to Tafuri, who instead of “postmodernity”
would speak of “hypermodernity”). So for instance the with-
drawal into private games, the idea of a radical autonomy that
would amount to a resistance to reification, which in Martin’s
reading, echoing Tafuri, signifies the exact opposite: “It is some-
times mistakenly thought,” he writes, “that by stepping away
from functionalism, which by the late 1950s had been appropri-
ated by the corporations, and into a renewed art for art’s sake,
architecture steps away from capital. This overlooks the fact that
corporate capitalism had, by then, expanded into the aesthetic
realm to such a degree that architecture’s claims to formal au-
tonomy played right into the demand for a maximum of spec-
tacularization (in what is now called ‘signature architecture’)”
(UG xx). That the step into self-reflexive language does not
shield architecture from capital and the corporate world, but in
fact opens it up to the latter’s intensified power as it moved into
its aesthetic phase, is a claim that would seem to follow from
Tafuri’s conclusion. Inversely, the populism that wants to merge
with mass culture still remains within a quest for autonomy, and
exists by virtue of a dialectical interplay with historical connois-
seurship, as in the case of Venturi: the order of Versailles and
the A&P parking lot reinforce each other, and the erasure of
234
the high-low division becomes architecture’s own loop as it at-

tempts to ground itself.
Many of these features are obviously in continuity with
modernism, which itself by no means constituted a monolithic
movements, and any simple periodization will lead astray (in
some respects, Martin notes, this comes close to the formal
structure of Lyotard’s futur antérieur, even though one must
note that the latter was conceived precisely in order to avoid
the kind of macro-historical hypotheses that underlie concep-
tions like that of late capitalism, which still informed Lyotard’s
earlier book The Postmodern Condition). The “post-” in postmod-
ern does not refer to any chronological marker, but rather to
a defining feature, the “quasi-consensual ban on utopian pro-
jection” (xxi) that however only leads the repressed to return,
this time in the form of the ghost. Postmodernism is on one
level simply what later came to be known as globalization, even
though Martin wants to avoid the before and after, and speaks
of a “progressive circularity” (xxii). If postmodernism in insepa-
rable from the discourses of the cold war, consumer culture, and
eventually globalization, it becomes neither before nor after
such terms, Martin stresses, and he wants to avoid the language
of economic causality; his proposed vocabulary is instead that of
the feedback loop, elements that enter into resonance with and
reinforce each other, becoming input as well as output.
This idea of the loop organizes the argument as well as the
book as a whole, which moves in circles, coming back to similar
figures from different perspectives. But while it has the obvious
advantage of avoiding the reductionist language of base and su-
perstructure, the loop also performs a bit of magical actio in dis-
tans: it allows elements far apart to be related without specify-
ing their more precise relation, and even though causal relations
may be suspended in order to avoid reductionism, they cannot
in the end simply be evacuated. If one would want to retain the
235
image of the loop, one must also bear in mind its acoustic result:
it eventually renders the elements that initially enter into it in-
discernible. In this sense, feedback and all of its kindred terms
(control, self-regulation)—and in this they belong to same or-
der as those features singled out by Jameson (collapse of depth
models, the waning of affect, history returning as pastiche)—are
phenomenal characteristics of the cultural logic of late capital-
ism, and they belong to its own self-image, to its appearance
(Schein in Hegel’s sense, which must not be conflated with mere
illusion; appearance is perfectly real, although not the all of the
real), but are equivocal and slippery when understood as ana-
lytic or epistemological tools.
Or, to put it as simply as possible, there is an imminent risk
that the analysis of the postmodern absorbs the features of its
objects so as to eventually merge with it, that it itself becomes
postmodern, which is no doubt a problem that any analysis that
wants to remain in the Marxist tradition (which surely applies to
Jameson) must face—it is a risk that one cannot avoid running,
if the analysis is to reach the same level of sophistication and
self-reflexivity, the same level of Hegel’s “cunning of reason,” as
its object, which is needed if there is to be a possibility of going
beyond or break away from it. Martin’s vocabulary retreats from
the affirmative Beyond, instead his attention to the recurrence
and return of ghosts of utopia, to the way in which all carefully
sealed and safeguarded disciplinary insides just as insistently as
unconsciously produce their own outsides, testifies to the need
to find a different exit, one that remains faithful to a kind of im-
manence, both practically and theoretically. That network are
never closed, but always contain moments of reversal, and that
the topology of globalization is never a simple extension out-
wards, from center to periphery, but that every inclusion also
excludes, is both a threatening No way out and a promise of a
return that would not simply present us with ghosts.
236
As Martin’s analysis moves through the seven distinct con-

cepts that also make up the chapter headings, Territory, History,
Language, Image, Materiality, Subjects, and Architecture—all of
which can be taken as a set of multiple entries, so none of them
should be seen as the foundation of any other—the loop con-
tinually becomes more dense. But it also unfolds between two
poles that mark beginning and end, Territory and Architecture,
which taken together pose the problem of the place and agency
of architecture, both in the material world and in the discursive
formation that we still inhabit: what does architecture do, and
to what extent can what it does, at the place, site, or territory
that it occupies, signify something other than a system that con-
tinually folds back on itself? Is the promise of an architecture
that would reinvent utopia just another ghost in the machine,
or does it have some other purchase on a seemingly monolithic
real?
From Territory to Architecture

Territory, first of all, is not space, which may seem like a small
terminological displacement, but in fact signals a crucial shift.
Instead of the category that since its first emergence as a ge-
neric term in architectural thought at the end of the nineteenth
century, and through its various versions from Giedion to Zevi
and onwards, eventually became “sacrosanct,” as Venturi once
quipped (and who significantly wanted to replace it with the
concept of sign),64 territory wants to point to “the oscillation
between the territoriality of thought—its epistemic delimita-
tion—and thought concerned with the city and its territories”
(UG 1). Unlike space, as the infinitely malleable element of ar-
chitecture, the territory is bounded, it is produced through acts
of territorialization that always relate to an outside.
64. For the emergence of the category “space,” see chap. 3, above.
237
In keeping with this conception, Martin displaces the stan-

dard reading of the classical documents of early postmodernism:
what they propose is a not a decentering or unhinging of the
modernist signifier, but rather a reterritorialization of modern-
ism’s urban imaginary. From Rossi to Venturi and Scott Brown,
from Banham to Archigram, the general claim was in fact a call
back to order, to various forms of architecture parlante that would
“re-semanticize” (in Tafuri’s words) architecture and produce a
new immanence. At stake for Venturi and Scott Brown was thus
less a populism and a dissolution of the low-high division than
normalization, i.e., an adjustment to the methods of social sci-
ence, filtered through the models of Levittown and Las Vegas.
Rossi on the other hand takes the route via a deeply embedded
cultural memory and a collective will inscribed in the city and
its artifacts, but in the end he approaches the same problem as
Venturi and Scott Brown, although from the opposite angle, i.e.,
how to represent unity. Venturi and Scott Brown must attempt
to extract a “difficult whole” out of the seeming random order
of the Strip and Main Street, Rossi an underlying diversity out
of the seeming permanence of the city.
Following a second axis, no longer that of representation of
insides and outside, but that of their production, leading from
the center-suburbia division to the gated communities and their
negative foil in poor residential areas, Martin takes the 1972
destruction the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex—emblematized
by Charles Jencks and innumerable subsequent publications as
“death of modern architecture”65—as a prism through which
he reads the unfolding of a territorial discourse on security.
The Pruitt-Igoe complex had the same year as its demolition
become the object of an analysis in Oscar Newman’s Defensible
65. Jencks, The Language of Postmodern Architecture, 9. The photograph of the

event also appears on the back cover, which even more contributed to
making it into an iconic event in all senses.
238
Space, which pointed to the efficiency of fences and boundar-

ies for the enhancement of security, and to the need to develop
architectural techniques for what also in Newman’s vocabulary
is termed “territoriality.” Parameters like density and cost ef-
ficiency were here correlated to the variation of crime rate in or-
der to produce a concept of “defensible space” as the “last stand
of the urban man committed to an open society” (Newman, cit.
in UG 18). In Newman’s discourse, which forms the other side
of postmodern claims for the liberation of style and aesthetic
complexity, urbanism essentially becomes a problem of risk
management, and security issues an integral part of a neoliberal
form of governing that in its archipelago structure realizes the
utopian diagram on the interior, instead of projecting it onto a
distant, exterior, and non-existing (ou-) topos, in a double move-
ment that is “[a]ctively unthought by postmodernism” (21). The
island or enclave becomes a basic unity of the postmodern city,
mirroring the slum and the refugee camp; it is however both
closed and open, just as the Utopia once imagined by Thomas
More.66 There is not simply an opposition between the island
and the network, but a mutual implication that organizes the
topological structure of postmodernity.
Considered as an ending of modernism, this topological twist
similarly impacts on History, the second of Martin’s chosen points
of entry. Starting out from Tafuri’s diagnosis of the exhaustion
of the avant-gardes, as they were being replayed in the seventies,
specifically in the debate between “Grays” and the “Whites,”
and continuing through Fukuyama’s “end of history” proclaimed
66. Martin here draws on Louis Marin, Utopiques: Jeux d’espaces (1973) and
Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and
Other Science Fictions (2005). Curiously enough he here (as well as in the
reference to literature on utopia, UF 208 note) omits Françoise Choay’s
La règle et le modèle, which derives a systematic and specifically architec-
tural theory of utopia as a “model” on the basis of More, and follows its
ramifications up to early modernism. See also chap. 6, below
239
some fifteen years later, Martin refuses to see these figures in terms
of an end, neither as the tragic endpoint of the avant-garde as in
Tafuri and Dal Co’s reading of Mies’s Seagram building,67 nor as
the triumphant fulfillment of liberalism, but as a mutation on
a different level, unwittingly captured by Fukuyama’s image of
the end of history as the “victory of the VCR.” What this im-
age signals, is rather a sense of history as reruns and bootleg cop-
ies, rewind and fast forward, which for architecture implies that
it is no longer faced with media from the outside, but has itself
become one of them and forms part of a continual modulation.
Tafuri’s assessment, “the war is over,”68 i.e., that the battles of
the avant-gardes no longer make any sense given their exhaustion
as possibilities for a radical change, is for Martin premature; in
fact it marks a moment of transition to a situation where Tafuri’s
“plan”—the project aiming to plan and control the future that af-
ter the 1929 crash was absorbed into the State-Capital complex,
depriving modernism of its founding illusion—gives way to a dif-
ferent kind of game, the two sides of which are the simulations of
nuclear war and risk, and Buckminster Fuller’s more benevolent
version in the World Game whose stake is the fate of “Spaceship
Earth.” Both of them play with “the very idea of the graspable”
(UG 34), and indicate the extent to which history is remodeled
as a permanent instability that calls for preemptive risk manage-
ment strategies and displaces the modernist utopias of form as a
blueprint for the future.
The famous reading of John Portman’s Westin Bonaventure
Hotel in downtown Los Angeles proposed by Jameson is thus
67. This interpretation, which suggests that Mies’s late work should be
understood in terms of silence and a withdrawal of language, has gener-
ated a long series of responses. For a discussion of the idea of silence as
negation, see chap. 1 above, and in more detail, my The Silences of Mies
(Stockholm: Axl Books, 2008).
68. See Tafuri, “The Ashes of Jefferson,” in The Sphere and the Labyrinth The
Sphere and the Labyrinth, trans. Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Con-
nolly (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1990), 301.
240
only half of the story, and Martin proposes that the spatial
dislocation characteristic of late capitalism’s cultural logic on
another level gives way to integration in a flexible system of
pattern-based networks. As it is made visible in gridded surface
of the curtain wall, which can be taken as an epitome of post-
war corporate architecture’s remodeling (rather than betrayal)
of prewar modernism, the organizational complex, of which the
later postmodernism is a continuation and intensification, con-
stitutes an organicism, rather than a denaturalization and a dis-
enchantment of an earlier auratic experience; the aura that once
signaled the autonomy of art is neither falsely perpetuated nor
destroyed, as was once Benjamin’s alternative in the face of me-
chanical reproducibility, but dispersed and spread out on a sys-
temic level that operates by way of integration through images,
patterns, and a technique for handling stimuli and affects. As
such, this complex is equally a biopolitical machine, and it does
not work by substituting ornament for structure or image for
substance, as was initially argued in Venturi and Scott Brown’s
opposition between the duck and the shed, and then repeated
in countless analyses, but through a technology of organization
that makes all such oppositional terms ceaselessly trade places
in a “total flow” (Jameson) of modulation, which in turn is inte-
grated in a network of networks.
These shifts, Martin suggests, fundamentally depend on
the translation of all variables to an ecology or environment
of (proto)-linguistic unities, a concept that extends from the
natural to the political and the aesthetic, which is also how he
proposes to understand the third parameter of the postmodern,
Language. Once more referencing the Gray-White debate, which
opposed the proponents of autonomous form, purified of its
social mission, to those opting for a content derived from his-
tory or mass culture, Martin proposes that it “made no differ-
ence that one side spoke of semantics while the other spoke of
241
syntactics, because these two levels ultimately converge—again,

quite pragmatically—in architecture’s new home within an ecol-
ogy and an economy of signs” (UG 66). Just as the domain of
History, this ecology or economy is a space of risk that must be
stabilized and contained through techniques that draw on the
“arts of the environment,” a concept that goes back to Kepes
and the project to establish a language of vision as the basis for a
universal semantics. The discovery of architecture as a language
with its own rules provides it with an illusory disciplinary au-
tonomy inside a more general sign ecology, at the same time as it
also turns it into a key for the deciphering of this totality, which
is no doubt the reason why it lends itself so easily to becoming
a monadic representation of the postmodern as a whole. Martin
traces this development through several steps up to Eisenman’s
project for a pure architectural syntax, which on the one hand
wanted to emancipate itself from the legacy of humanism, on
the other hand can be read as its most far-reaching affirmation,
as an inquiry into the deep structure or general grammatical-
ity that a priori conditions all possible architectural statements.
It is, Martin suggests, a “preemptive effort [...] to retain sover-
eignty over an environment that attains to existence only as a
signifying system,” which is also “a very real global economy
naturalized as a global media-ecology” (66f), and in this sense
the search for deep structures is also a language of power, a unity
of language that is fundamentally political.69
“We shall emphasize image,” Venturi and Scott Brown once
declared, and ever since, the idea of postmodernism as a reign of
images without anchoring, of free-floating simulacra that strike
back at and undermine the real, copies without originals that
69. Martin here draws on the polemic against Chomsky’s linguistic tree-
structure in Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus, which asserts that
language is fundamentally as transmission of slogans, but also orders or
“order-words” (mots d’ordre).
242
subvert the hierarchy from which they nevertheless derive, has

become deeply engrained. For Martin, this fourth parameter,
Image, must however not be understood in terms of an opposi-
tion, dialectical or not, to reality, where one of the two in the
end must take precedence over the other, but as a problem of
what we could perhaps, following Deleuze’s analyses of cine-
ma’s movement-images and time-images, call the space-image:
how architecture organizes the real precisely through its capac-
ity to become and generate images that themselves are part of it
rather than disembodied simulacra floating in a general imagi-
nary.
An interesting case of this would be the decorated shed of
Venturi and Scott Brown, which famously opposed itself to the
duck in terms of surface and ornaments supposedly emancipated
from the demand to express and render legible the inner struc-
ture, and in this sense could be taken as paradigmatic examples
of free-floating signifiers. But as Martin shows,70 this cannot be
simply identified with an opposition between authenticity and
inauthenticity, truth and illusion, as is often the case. Later on,
Venturi and Scott Brown would sometimes invert their former
claim and ascribe truthfulness and authenticity to the sign, as
opposed to the false and illusionary transparence of modern-
ist buildings: truth now belongs to signage and decoration that
simply say what they need to say, it belongs to surfaces and im-
ages that are rooted in everyday understanding, not to arcane
experiences of modernist space and structure that in fact are
mere illusions.
For Charles Jencks, who a decade later claims to draw the
correct conclusions from these earlier debates, the populism
70. And in fact, already the shed-duck opposition is unstable on its own
terms. Martin here draws on the analyses of Aron Vinegar; see Vinegar
I Am A Monument: On Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT,
2008), 49–92, and chap. 2, above.
243
of Venturi and Scott Brown is inadequate in that it simply in-

verts the elitism of modernism, and what is required is instead a
more comprehensive understanding of architecture as language,
which he too develops along the lines of Kepes, eventually pro-
posing an “evolutionary tree” of architectural styles leading up
to the natural conclusion of the “radical eclecticism” of a real-
ized postmodernity. But as Martin notes, radicality here means
assurance that nothing radical will ever happen, that styles will
come and go without ever disturbing the fluctuating yet perma-
nent ecology of global consumerism, which is Jencks’s version
of the end of history, and in this close to Fukuyama’s later pro-
posal. Here too there movement toward dispersal and diversity
is just as much integration into a continually recreated systemic
equilibrium that feeds on local stylistic innovations.
On the level of Materiality, the thesis that any attempt to
reach a secure inside will only takes us further out is brought to
bear specifically on the relation to the oil industry. Starting out
from Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s Pennzoil Place (1976) in
downtown Houston, Texas, Martin asks how the architectural
works partakes and helps to produce the fetish “oil” (itself com-
posed of many parameters), by placing itself at the intersection
of finance, technology, aesthetics (the theory of the corner, from
Mies onward, by which “architecture can be judged,” as Johnson
proposed), and organization.
Architecture has, Martin suggests, following David Harvey,
something of a premonitory function in signaling the develop-
ment of capitalism at the same as it, acting in the role of a vi-
sual fetish, covers up its real effects: “wherever capitalism goes,”
Harvey writes, “its illusory apparatus, its fetishisms, and its sys-
tems of mirrors comes not far behind.”71 In the case of archi-
tecture, this illusory mirroring apparatus materializes the work
71. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 344.
244
of ideology, and the ubiquity of reflecting surfaces seems like a

perfect illustration of a visuality that in fact conceals by virtue
in its spectacular specularity.72 But as Martin proposes, maybe
we should look at the mirror instead of in it,73 if we are to grasp
what it in fact performs as an architectural device. What these
surfaces stage is precisely the ubiquity and placelessness that
overtook modernist universality, and their essential character
is the modular structure, reflection upon reflection, which pro-
vides “the materiality of flexible accumulation” that for Martin
is less the “time-space compression” of Harvey than the “quasi-
stasis” of the feedback loop (UG 105f) doubling back of the sur-
face onto itself. Rather then mimetically rendering late capital-
ism, the mirror belongs to it, so that culture becomes immanent
to capital instead of remaining an exterior reflection. Extending,
but also inverting, Jameson’s famous and now canonic analy-
sis of the Bonaventure Hotel (its status almost having become
equal to Tafuri and Dal Co’s interpretation of the Seagram
building), which suggests that “the distorting and fragment-
72. In some respects, the architectural image as it has come to be used in
postmodernity intensifies a situation already diagnosed by Benjamin.
Drawing on a quote from Brecht—“The situation is complicated by the
fact that less than ever does the mere reflection of reality reveal any-
thing about reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or the AEG tells
us next to nothing about these institutions”—Benjamin suggests that
what is needed is a new visual literacy that reads images in search of
their hidden social conditions. See Benjamin, “Little History of Photog-
raphy,” Selected Writings, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1999), 526; for the citation from Brecht, see “Der Dreigroschen-
prozess: Ein soziologisches Experiment,” in Werke, eds. Werner Hecht,
Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, and Klaus-Detlef Müller (Berlin:
Aufbau, 1988), 469.
73. Interestingly, the at that displaces the in implies that we should try to
discern something else than the subject as it consolidates and assembles
itself by identifying with its mirror image, which in a tradition from
Lacan to Althusser has been an influential version of the theory of
ideology as an imaginary solution to a real problem, and also situates
the subject as caught in the imaginary. There are however also other
resources in the Lacanian theory of the gaze and the visible; see note 76
below.
245
ing reflections of one enormous glass surface to the other can

be taken as paradigmatic of the central role of process and re-
production in postmodernist culture,”74 Martin proposes that
what is reflected is not the distorted images of the surrounding,
the city as an Other that in this doubling becomes dislocated
and unreal, as Jameson contends, but the mirror itself, dupli-
cating itself to infinity in the feedback loop that replaces the
vertigo of the doppelgänger with a seriality recursively turning
back onto itself, which Martin associates with the use of serial
compositions in minimal art and Warhol.
Such self-reference in one sense seems to prevent there from
being anything to discover behind the surface, and yet we must
proceed to another level, at which the mirror in inscribed in a
larger order, and where its role is to render the outside world
invisible: rather than hiding something in its interior, its con-
ceals the exterior, which is the modus operandi of postmodern
architecture’s particular fetishism. The illusion that it produces,
Martin suggests, is precisely that there is just illusion, that materi-
als have become unreal and dematerialized, and in order to per-
form this trick, it requires materials organized and assembled in
a particular way.
But if the mirror in all of its illusionistic and concealing
functions is the paradigmatic object of postmodernism, what or
who is then the Subject that looks into or at it? Bypassing the
Lacanian legacy in most of its ramifications, Martin once more
looks at architecture’s reflective surfaces, first in order to discov-
er how they dissolve subjects as well as objects, but then to ask
who this subject is that disappears and then reappears, particu-
larly in the form of a new subject of mass-customized consump-
tion: a subject whose personality is continually constructed on
the basis of available choices and modulations in digital produc-
74. Jameson, Postmodernism, 42.
246
tion and reproduction, but at the same time becoming invisibly

visible in the play of mirror as a second subject on the outside,
a bare life that is not recognized, counted, and valued, and yet
inextricably intertwined with the first so that the form two sides
of the same figure.
Analyzing the prehistory of this development, Martin inter-
rogates two corporate headquarters built for Union Carbide
in 1960 and 1982. The first, designed by SOM and Gordon
Bunshaft, set in midtown Manhattan, was explicitly intended
in order to provide a “striking corporate image,” the second,
designed by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, located
in the rural setting of Danbury, Connecticut, instead turns in-
ward and assumes a stealth mode towards the exterior, which
however return as a haunting reflection, a ghost, on the inside.
The Park Avenue building can on the one hand be taken as an
epitome of the postwar corporate architecture as it entered its
generic phase, with its modular, gridded curtain wall, standard
office partitions, and rationalized design all the way down to
its drinking fountains and light switches. On the other hand it
was already deeply marked by the new discourse of human rela-
tions, as comes across in the stress of flexibility; intended for the
“Orgman,” the emerging corporate subject baptized by William
Whyte, it also signals a shift inside the organizational complex
toward the idea of the corporation as a family and its employees
as sentient beings in need of psychological monitoring and sup-
port.75
In the second building these incipient features have become
essential; intended to be as invisible from the exterior as pos-
sible, the new headquarters was to be a world closed in upon
itself, with each of the 3300 identically sized office rooms fur-
75. On Whyte and the Organ, see Martin, The Organizational Complex:
Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2003),
121.
247
nished and decorated according to the individual taste of its

occupant (with a limited choice among thirty preset styles).
Based on extensive analyses of interview material gathered from
employees in the former building, the design flattened spatial
hierarchies and eventually turned into a snowflake structure,
developed with the help of computers, that would provide all
offices with views and adjacent parking facilities, diminishing
the need to spend time outside the building. Through this per-
sonalizing strategy, each employee becomes an individual sub-
ject, equipped with a particular taste and capacity for choice, all
of which was fed into computer banks to ensure optimal quality
and fit between form and individual.
Two years after the completion of the building, the catas-
trophe at the manufacturing plant in Bhopal, India, took place,
resulting in more than three thousand casualties. Martin details
the efforts of Union Carbide to avoid legal and financial respon-
sibilities, and what emerges is first the moral disconnect be-
tween the architectural inside, designed for maximum comfort
of those in the “family,” and the almost complete indifference
toward the victims for a disaster that most likely was caused by
negligence and cost-cutting. Between these two sides, the inside
and the outside, there is however not a relation of mere exter-
nality, but a mutual implication that belongs to the logic of cor-
porate action on a globalized world. On the level of architecture,
Martin projects this connection back into one of the central sec-
tions of the building, containing the cafeterias or “living rooms”
adorned with mirrors, where the postmodern Orgmen were sur-
rounded by scintillating reflexes of themselves. These mirroring
surfaces, while performing a perfect closure where the corporate
subject meets only fragments of itself, also indicate something
like a gap, a breach or tear in the screen,76 where the ghosts of
76. The use of the term screen may be incidental here, but can be extended
in the direction of a different Lacan than the one of the mirror stage,
248
Bhopal can be glimpsed. This generates a double result: first

the hyper-individuated subject, a “dividual” in Deleuze’s term,
continually fashioning itself through new choices and through
the production of infinitesimal differences in taste; then, as its
ghosting double, a subject that is not counted, a “bare life” that
remains outside while still being the precondition and material
base for the production of the inside, from its architectures to
all other technological, social, and economic assemblages that
uphold the division between the two. In this sense, the archi-
tecture in Danbury can be said to be haunted by the victims in
Bhopal already before the event as such; it is a “counter-memo-
ry,” an “inverted memorial” or a “memorialization in advance”
(UG 143) of the deaths that it must attempt to exclude in order
to secure the innermost interior of the corporate world.
And finally, the question of Architecture—or, put more
straightforwardly, “What is to be done?” (UG 147) Is there a
possibility of acting in another way than to register and multi-
ply symptoms, an agency of architecture that would provide it
with a way of both moving inside itself and yet taking a stance
outside of its illusory autonomy? Towards the end Martin calls
upon the idea of utopia as projection in a way that once more
who would also be contemporary with the initial stages in Martin’s

version of postmodernism. The 1964 seminar on The Four Fundamen-
tal Concepts of Psycho-Analysis develops an interpretation of the gaze
as objet a, which takes several steps beyond the mirror stage and the
earlier theory of the Imaginary, in fact comes close to the theory of
the breach on the visual field sketched out in Martin’s analysis of the
second Union Carbide headquarters (even though Lacan’s theory has
no explicit political connotations, nothing prevents us from adding
them from our present vantage point). What dispossesses the subject,
Lacan suggests, is gaze that does not belong to the subject, but comes
from the outside, from the visible as such, and the artwork is set up as a
screen, or a “taming of the gaze” that allows the subject to play with the
threat emanating from the visible, although always with the risk that
the screen will be pierced through. For a reading of Warhol, particularly
the Disaster series, along these lines, see Hal Foster, The Return of the Real
249
draws him close to Tafuri’s damning analysis of modernism

as “project and utopia,” and yet wants to stake out a different
path.77 The first step in this is that the real, in the sense of vari-
ous cynical “realisms” that have been opposed to modernism’s
utopias, must be “derealized,” dislodged from its seeming mas-
sivity and inevitability, which however cannot mean to sim-
ply opt for utopia as the simply unrealizable other, but rather,
Martin suggests, means to learn to live with its ghosts.
As a concept that signals the limit between the real and the
unreal, the present and the haunting of the past (even of the
future, if we follow the reading of the second Union Carbide
headquarter), for Martin the ghost harbors the possibility of
projection that re-arranges past, present, and future, not by
replacing what exists with something entirely new that often
stands in for the lost Whole, but by extracting something other
from a past that remains non-actualized.78 If the postmodern
moment was a crisis of projection as the possibility of a practice
envisioning radical alternatives to the status quo, it also ren-
dered utopian thought unthinkable, against which Martin pro-
poses not a simple revival, but more something like an atten-
tiveness to how certain figures of thought will not go away, but
ceaselessly return inside that which is meant to exorcize them,
calling upon a different use of our imagination, first in order to
77. The terms progetto and progettazione are highly polysemic in Tafuri, as
Martin notes, especially if one also looks at the earlier book Teorie e
storia, and it is doubtful that it can be reduced to something that would
be a mere “ideological phantasm” (UG 149). See also chap. 1, above,
note 16.
78. Martin here comes close to what Deleuze has called the virtual, which
cuts through the divide between possible and real, and introduces
another sense of temporality. The absence of a reference to Deleuze
here is probably due to Martin’s implicit polemic against how he has
been appropriated in certain strands in contemporary architectural
theory, notably as a precursor of the digital. There is however no need
to restrict the relevance of Deleuze’s thought to this particular reading;
for more on this, see chap. 6 and 7, below.
250
simply see them in architecture’s mirror, and then possibly to

break out of it.
Surveying a series of cases, meandering from the mid seven-
ties to mid eighties, from Paolo Portoghesi’s Venice Biennale
and the historical props of the Strada Novissima (1980), via
James Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie (Stuttgart, 1983), Oswald
Mathias Ungers’s project for the Wallraf-Richartz Museum
(Cologne, 1975) and his Deutsches Architekturmuseum
(Frankfurt am Main, 1984), Charles Moore’s Moore-Rogger-
Hofflander condominium complex (Los Angeles, 1978), and
up to the Internationale Bauausstellung (Berlin, 1984), Martin
traces the ghost of a utopia that returns inside structures whose
claim is to not add up, and not to do so once and for all, as if inad-
vertently obeying utopia’s call for a future beyond which only
more of the same is to be expected (the same in postmodernism
being the surface fluctuations of styles that only confirm the ho-
meostasis, as in Jencks). So for instance do the various forms of
the promenade architecturale proposed by Stirling and Ungers no
longer lead to synthesis: the Neue Staatsgalerie stages a “narra-
tive of passage with no end “ (UG 157), while the gridded forms
of the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, in their seemingly classicizing
axiality and symmetry, intensify the desubjectifying traits of a
functionalist like Hilberseimer, effectively dislocating the sub-
ject that appears in the drawings only to be excluded. The most
obvious derailing of the promenade takes place in Moore, whose
Los Angeles condominium excels in passages and stairways that
“lead nowhere, but with great precision” (161). Martin’s sug-
gestion is that there remains something utopian in this very
refusal—which itself is carefully constructed, it must be remem-
bered—to add up, a refusal of the project that itself takes on the
form of a project: it is the forever deferred possibility of arrival
that lends these works their aesthetic significance, and they are
always haunted by the modernist specter that they are trying
251
to exorcize, in the process becoming like props or frames for

the return of the undead (the “visor effect”).79 Similarly, it is a
ghostly presence that is conferred onto the props of the Strada
Novissima, just as Ungers’s Architekturmuseum, with a house
set inside the house, acts as kind of memory of architecture—a
house haunted by Architecture as it comes to frame itself the
space of the museum.
But if the path of haunting leads inwards, into Architecture
and its memory, what routes would take us out? Maybe, Martin
proposes, there is something deep inside architecture that can
be retrieved for other purposes, although his final suggestions
remain insecure and tentative. As we have seen, in the territorial
form of the island there survives something like an echo, to be
sure ghostly, of utopia, precisely in its otherworldly aspirations,
and Martin looks to, among others, two projects for Berlin,
John Hejduk’s Berlin Masque (1981) and Cities within the
City (Ungers, Koolhaas, Riemann, Kollhoff, and Olaksa, 1977).
Hejduk’s project is an image of the divided city: two blocks
separated by a twelve foot hedge and only connected by a small
bridge, each inhabited by only one person, the east one looking
toward the future, the west one toward the past; they are wait-
ing, disconnected, for a history that would allow them to cross
the bridge, but at present seems unthinkable, like a forbidden
exit or entry. Cities within the City, “the most comprehensive
diagram of postmodernism’s topological cascades” (UG 173),
instead works by an internal multiplication, redrawing Berlin
as an interior archipelago of enclaves (a theme treated the year
after in Koolhaas’s Delirious New York with the Manhattan grid
as the organizing geometric parameter, splitting each lot from
79. Derrida develops this on the basis of a reading of Hamlet, of how the
ghost always requires a technical supplement, a material device in order
to appear at the very limit of appearing; see Derrida, Spectres de Marx
(Paris: Galilée, 1993), chap. 1.
252
the other while ascertaining an overarching order). Its utopian
gesture is not divisive but conciliatory, in attempting to provide
for as variegated architectural spectrum as possible—a multitude
of small utopias, which, as Martin note, however runs the risk of
wholly fragmenting all collective identities into so many private
spheres, neighborhoods, and gated communities.
The promise of a rethought postmodernism, thought
through to its innermost contradictions and beyond them, the
task of “learning to think the thought called Utopia once again”
(UG 179), is poised at the precise point of this reversal, where
the retreat into the interiority of Architecture would not take
us back to an illusory autonomy of forms, but perhaps to a differ-
ent form of autonomy that would restore architecture’s emancipa-
tory agency; a way of bringing together inside and outside that
would render them legible precisely in their contradiction, a cri-
tique of ideology that provides an agency to forms by allowing
them to signal their own incompletion, rather than presenting
them as a compensatory fantasy. The recent past, read in such
a way, would be not be consigned to a past offered up for an
analysis that scans its shortcomings in order to know better, but
rather constitute a recentness that impacts just as much on the
present by splitting it, estranging us from its simple thereness
and solidity.
5. Looping Ideology
Architecture, media, and materiality

The relation between architecture and media is intimate, to the
point that is seems true that architecture has simply become an
integral part of the culture industry of late capitalism. It projects
images of cities, regions, and countries, it generates a star system
of its own, and it continually feeds contemporary visual culture
with a never-ending flow of desirable photogenic material. While
this spectacularization on one level is undeniable and forms the
general condition of modern aesthetic experience—the same cul-
ture of the spectacle pervades the other arts to such an extent that
a moralizing critique almost seems redundant, since it often tends
to merely duplicate the vocabulary in which the products them-
selves are couched—other reactions may be more productive than
lamenting or welcoming the liquidation of autonomy, and other
ways of responding to this situation more fertile than the alterna-
tive between rejection and submission.
If the relation between the built environment and the spa-
tialization of power in the electronic media age is to be grasped
at a more fundamental level, we must investigate how architec-
ture not only symbolizes or represents media logics on the icon-
ic level, but also how it integrates them into its very tectonic and
organizational structure. This integration is not a specifically
modern feature, although it is probably the case that our con-
temporary perception of it has been sharpened, and has made
it possible to locate our own position in an unfolding of the
media-architecture nexus going all the way back to the inven-
tion of the architectural treatise and the new relation between
255
printing and building in the Renaissance, or, depending on the

generality at which one defines media, even back to Antiquity.1
But today architecture also undergoes an inverse movement,
where it reaches out to include an urban environment that in-
creasingly appears as a media- or even brandscape,2 inserting
itself into a city that more than ever consists in the production
and circulation of desirable images, to the effect that it in the
end becomes one more image, perhaps in terms of what Edward
Soja has called a “postmetropolitan” condition where old urban
forms only remain as an aestheticized scenography.3 The ques-
tion seems unavoidable: What would it would mean for archi-
tecture to respond critically to this process, not just in terms of
a rejection or refusal (such strategies are not infrequent, and not
necessarily regressive, although they fall outside of the question
here), but in the qualified sense of taking on this process in order
to introduce a moment of suspension, division, and reflection?
While pressing, such a question might also be too general
and diffuse for any singular answer to be appropriate, and in-
stead of pursuing it on a purely conceptual level, we might do
1. See Mario Carpo, Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing,
Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory, trans.
Sarah Benson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2001), and The Alphabet and
the Algorithm: Form, Standards, and Authorship in Times of Variable Media
2. Pioneering efforts in this area have been in the last decade and a half by,
among others, Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Archi-
tecture as a Mass Media (Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1994), Bart Lootsma
and Dick Rijken, Media and Architecture (Amsterdam: Berlage Institute,
1999), Reinhold Martin, The Organizational Complex: Architecture, Media,
and Corporate Space (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2003), Kester Rattenbury
(ed.), This is Not Architecture: Media Constructions (New York: Routledge,
2002), Mitchell Schwarzer, Zoomscape: Architecture in Motion and Media
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), Omar Calderón,
Christine Calderón, and Dorsey Peter, (eds.), Beyond Form: Architecture
and Art in the Space of Media (New York: Lusitania Press, 2004), and
Scott McQuire, Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space (Los
Angeles: SAGE, 2008), to name but a few.
3. See Edward Soja, Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (Ox-
ford: Blackwell, 2000).
256
5. Looping Ideology
better to interrogate particular works. This is not because any

individual work or body of works would answer it by present-
ing methods or strategies that could subsequently be general-
ized—the confidence in the general, generic, and ubiquitous is
in fact part of the problem—but because some of them intensify
this condition, render it legible in the form of a specific con-
stellation, and in this force us to think the intersection of con-
cepts and particulars, general structures and individual experi-
ences. The trajectory of Rem Koolhaas and the OMA (Office
of Metropolitan Architecture) in this respect seems exemplary,4
and the particularly exemplary example that will guide us here
is the new television center in Beijing. At present still unfinished
and not in use, it condenses in a singular gesture many of those
issues that seem ambivalent and undecidable, which also means
that it detaches itself from the present moment in ways that en-
gage the sense of time, and the limit or framing of what is con-
temporary. In an obvious sense, the current incompletion, even
though accidental, is one such dimension, and writing about a
work that presently only exists in part poses problems of meth-
od.5 But in this case it also highlights the relation between me-
4. To be “exemplary,” Kant says in the Critique of Judgment (§ 46),
exemplarisch, is not the same as to an “example” (Beispiel) of a general
concept. The exemplary work does not depend on imitation or on the
following of a rule, but it can serve as a rule for the judgment of other
artists. The reference to Kant’s aesthetics may seem to skip over far too
many historical mediations and take us back to a historical moment that
is irrelevant to present concerns, but it still points to a valid intuition of
what it means for any type of artwork to be singular and non-deducible
from any preceding determinations, and yet call upon a judgment, both
in the spectator as well as in another artists that picks up predecessor’s
problem and in this necessarily transforms it. For Kant, judgment refers
to taste, which first seems to enclose it in a particular sphere severed
from cognitive and normative issues, and in the sense the judgment pro-
voked by works like OMA’s would be thoroughly different; on the other
hand, as Kant also suggests, judgments of taste have a profound bearing
on cognitive and moral issues, precisely because of their autonomy.
5. During a visit in Beijing in November 2008, the author and a colleague,
Helena Mattsson, were granted access to the building site. The outer
257
dia and architecture: the material that will be examined consists

largely of texts, statements, and images, and in this sense it is an
architectural work that for most people still exists only in a me-
diated form. And finally, as we will see, the interpretation also
engages the work’s own future social and political performance,
which is still in the balance in a non-trivial sense.
The imbrication of architecture and media, in the widest
sense of the term that includes images and the transmission of
information in general, is a recurrent theme in Koolhaas, and it
calls for a type of questioning and reflection that transcends ap-
proaches that focus primarily on the formal aspects of buildings.
In fact, as we will see, the need to rethink the formal perspective
in architecture, both with respect to production and analysis,
is a constant theme in his writings and projects, from the early
texts on Manhattanism, through the ideas of bigness and the
generic city, and up to his present work. As an “incubator” or
“condenser” of new social forms, he suggests, architecture must
actively approach a positive condition of formlessness that dis-
places perceptual wholeness and integration, and attain an in-
tractability to formal decoding that does away with traditional
legibility and aesthetic analysis.
It is however equally true that such a refusal of legibility in
itself produces a different type of image quality, which has been
projected in a long series of publications and exhibitions that
undoubtedly are one of the reasons why the work of Koolhaas
shells of the buildings were at the time in principle ready, while the
floors and interiors, i.e., most of those aspects belonging to the organi-
zational logic that the present essay addresses, were still under construc-
tion. Since then one of the three buildings in the complex, the TVCC
(Television Cultural Center), was partly devastated by fire in 2009, and
has been undergoing repair. The main building was ready in 2012, and
today [at the moment of the final revision of this text: January 2016],
the Center is completed, and many of its projected features have turned
out differently. I have however left those parts of the text that relate to
the Center’s unfinished state as they are; rewriting them today would
amount to writing a different text.
258
5. Looping Ideology
and the OMA has gained such immense visibility also outside
the architecture world. The projects, writings, and books of
Koolhaas and OMA have succeeded in straddling the divide be-
tween theory and practice, sophisticated thinking and popular
culture, presumably because the sense of urgency they radiate,
and because of their refusal to take commonplaces for granted.
From the seventies onwards, he has ceaselessly asked the ques-
tion—which to many might seem to border on the senseless,
since it appears to defy the codes of intellectual responsibility as
such—why we perceive our present, our cities and architectures,
as lacking something, as imperfect, and why we expect architec-
ture to provide us with this missing thing that would once more
make the socius whole. In this there is an unmistakable affin-
ity to the reversal of inherited judgments undertaken by Robert
Venturi and Denise Scott Brown in the sixties and early seven-
ties, closely linked to the emergence of pop art, which was one
of the defining earlier moments when the culture of media and
electronic images came to disrupt the order and hierarchy of the
fine arts, including architecture.6 The idea of a transformed per-
ception of the architectural lowlands however no longer relates
to Las Vegas and the disdained commercial landscape around
Route 66, but to urban forms outside the Europe-America axis,
and it no longer defines itself in relation to the divide between
the modern and the postmodern, even though traces of this can
be mobilized for ironic purposes.7 The shift in perception pro-
posed here however only marginally thrives on formal ambigui-
ties of architectural language, and instead engages the multiva-
6. For the relation to Venturi, see Rem Koolhaas and OMA, Harvard
Design School Guide to Shopping (Cologne: Taschen, 2001), 590–617.
7. See, for instance the “Generic City,” in Koolhaas and OMA, S, M, L, XL
(New York: Monacelli Press, 1995): “The style of choice is postmodern,
and will always remain so. […] Instead of consciousness, as its original
inventors may have hoped, it creates a new unconscious. It is modern-
ization’s little helper.” (1262)
259
lence of programs and social forces, ultimately the very place of

architecture in the socio-political world. In a way that is much
more radical than Venturi, Koolhaas challenges us to perceive,
feel, and think differently, in order to see whether this could
release a new of inhabiting social space, and from the analysis of
Manhattanism to the work on shopping, and Asian and African
urban forms, the task he as set has been to trace a genealogy
of urbanity as a radically unfounded experience, liberated from
traditional humanist, moral, and aesthetic values.8
These more overarching claims about urbanism and politics
are then reflected back onto the architectural level, where the
condition of non- or aformality that extends from the percep-
tual to the tectonic, on the one hand rejecting traditional ideas
of form, one other hand approaching a kind of formal extreme,
seems to be able to tell us something about our present cultural
condition, not just about a particular stage in the development
of design discourse, but also about our desire for an architecture
that would articulate the contemporary moment in its very il-
legibility and its contradictory qualities.
From the vantage point of media studies, the relation to ar-
chitecture may seem fairly straightforward and pragmatic. The
8. The beyond-good-and-evil perspective often adopted by Koolhaas

may have a background in Nietzsche, although he is to my knowledge
never mentioned in Koolhaas’s writings. This connection may seem
far-fetched, but in fact Nietzsche’s writings had a profound influence
on many of the early modernists (Corbusier, Behrens, Mies,, etc.), for
whose large-scale projects Koolhaas shows a great sympathy; he may
even be said to be one of the few to continue modernism with other
means, in the transformed socio-political space of a globalized postmod-
ern capitalism. For Nietzsche’s influence on early modernism, see Alex-
andre Kostka and Irving Wolfarth (eds.), Nietzsche and “An Architecture of
Our Minds” (Santa Monica: Getty Institute, 1990), and Fritz Neumeyer,
Der Klang der Steine: Nietzsches Architekturen (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2001).
For a critical discussion of Koolhaas’s writings on urbanism as an at-
tempt to retrieve a Nietzschean position, see William S Saunders, “Rem
Koolhaas’s Writings on Cities: Poetic Perception and Gnomic Fantasy,”
Journal of Architectural Education, Vol. 51, No. 1 (1997).
260
5. Looping Ideology
discourse of media architecture has largely occupied itself with

questions of organizational, political and financial conditions,
whereas the buildings that house them have appeared more as
practical solutions, although sometimes as part of a symbolical
surplus value and marketing strategies. And yet, here too there
is a possible convergence that might take it into the heart of the
problem at stake. Precisely because of the global nature of media,
and of the ubiquity of identical images and info bits that encircle
the planet, there has been a recent emphasis on issues of how me-
dia, in the increasing detachment of their mode of production
from a national level, organize a perception of transnational space
that in turn impacts both the national and the local levels. They
are instrumental in producing, and not simply mirroring, a geo-
political order of the near and the distant, the relevant and irrel-
evant, danger and safety, into which the subject and its agency are
inscribed, an order that then through local institutional systems
on a descending scale exert a profound influence on our experi-
ence of everyday space. This “spatial turn”9 within media studies
thus emphasizes location as an active creation of place, as a pro-
duction of a system of centrality and periphery through which
differences in the social order (political and public vs. private and
individual, corporate vs. public facilities, public vs. restricted ac-
cess) are negotiated. Ranging from the individual experience in
front of the screen to the way in which society as whole is ex-
perienced and organized in terms of spectacle and participation,
enjoyment and repulsion, identification and alienation, the space
creation of media is operative on all levels.
In this process, physical architectures may seem peripheral
and merely as outward symbols of networks that shape space
9. For a discussion of this, see the introduction in Staffan Ericson och

Kristina Riegert (eds.), Media Houses: Architecture, Media, and the Produc-
tion of Centrality (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), where a first version of
this chapter was originally published.
261
on a more diffuse and yet decisive level. But as works of archi-

tecture, they also give a specific materiality and concrete lo-
calization to the nodal intersections that tie together vast in-
formational networks that seem independent of spatial form.
Architectures bind immaterial networks to locations, and while
each one of them is contingent and expendable from the point
of view of the media system, they sometimes produce a surplus
of sense that make them into instruments of thought instead of
just reflexes of an order that transcends them.
In this sense we may say that the two modes of analy-
sis evolve toward what perhaps could be called a “zone of
indiscernibility”10 where they are entangled, but also undergo
transformation: the spatialization of media necessitates a differ-
ent take on materiality, a kind of immaterial materiality, just as
the informatization of architecture loosens if not severs it ties
to the obdurate identity of the physical object. The introduc-
tion of the architectural object into this more extended form
of spatial analysis implies that it too be understood as a part
of a flow of information that it both reflects and attempts to
control; inversely, it also means that flows of information must
always have forms of spatial anchoring, points of centrality that
are produced through particular technologies.
As have been shown by Saskia Sassen in a series of works,11
10. I borrow this term from Deleuze, who often employs it to designate an
interstitial dimension where two seemingly opposed terms: human-
animal, body-soul, image-virtual image, etc., enter into a mutual
“becoming” that transforms both of them without establishing a third
synthetic term. The term can be taken as a transformation of Leibniz’s
thesis on the “identity of indiscernibles,” i.e., that two entities that have
all internal properties in common are identical, an argument that Leib-
niz sometimes uses to refute the objective reality of space and space and
time; for Deleuze, indiscernibility does not imply identity, but rather
proliferation of infinitesimal differences, so that the two indiscernibles
does not become one, but are opened toward a common multiplicity.
11. Among Sassen’s many writings, see “The Topoi of e-space: Global Cit-
ies and Global Value Chains”, in documenta x: Politics Poetics (Stuttgart:
Cantz, 1997), Globalization and its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility
262
5. Looping Ideology
globalization in no way implies that place and space simply lose

their significance, instead it depends on a new spatial system
with centralized nodes that control flows of money and infor-
mation, and organizes certain types of financial, legal, and tech-
nical skills and competences. These places constitute points of
intersection in the “global value chain,” and while they on one
level may break out of the national system and their surrounding
hinterland, they are nevertheless dependent on national policies
as frameworks for the production of centrality. For Sassen this
means that we must reconceptualize the very notion of local-
ity or place-boundedness, which also has consequences for our
understanding of architecture as built form. Objects like build-
ings and various forms of real estate, in fact all types of concrete
environments, are in the process of becoming liquefied, both
due to the invention of new financial instruments and to the
increasing presence of electronic communication that these in-
struments presuppose. The city becomes an amalgamation of
various informational circuits that loop through it, and Sassen
proposes that we should think of these spaces as topological (con-
necting that which in normal metric space is remote) rather than
topographical. Instead of a dematerialization or a general loss of
place, this is a production of new forms of centrality: worldwide
dispersal of financial and corporate operations requires central
managements with their specific corresponding material struc-
tures, hypermobility always has an irreducible physical side, and
the important issue is what kind of materiality and place-bound-
edness this imbrication produces, how it engenders differently
organized space-times that also makes possible other forms of
political acting. Architecture is one such means of production,
and furthermore one that in privileged moments may be able to
of People and Money (New York: New Press, 1998), and Territory, Author-
ity, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2006).
263
reflect and express these processes, prying them apart and mak-
ing them into objects as well as moments of critical thought.
Inserting the building into a network structure, where it is no
longer solely a form that can be characterized by morphologically
based concepts drawn from the history of art or architecture (is it
still modernist, or postmodernist, or something else?), or simply
a reflection of external functions, but a conduit for information,
behavior, actions, and perceptions that works equally by way of
its material structure, the image quality that it projects, and the
abstract machine or diagram of power relations that it actualizes,
thus requires a different kind of theoretical approach. The ma-
teriality of architecture is in this sense only to a limited extent
equivalent to the matter that it contains, and if the technological
framing that enables matter to hold together in a particular con-
figuration pervades matter itself into its innermost fibers, the idea
of architecture as an art that in essence deals with gravity, with
matter as opacity, weight, and resistance, must be rethought.12 On
the other hand, this does not simply eradicate form, but pushes it
in a different direction, so that it comes be generated from a much
wider set of parameters, of which Koolhaas’s “informal” may one
important indication, as long as we don’t take it as simply a nega-
tion, but rather a way of taking form to the limit.
The founding work for any such analysis remains Beatriz
Colomina’s analysis of architecture as a mass medium, which
was instrumental in taking architectural history beyond its nor-
12. Hegel seems to have been the first to develop a systematic analysis of
gravity and opacity as the foundation of architecture, which is why it for
him is the first, but also lowest art form, destined to be superseded by
other forms that gradually detach themselves from matter and weight.
For a discussion of this, and of Hegelian motifs inform the nineteenth-
century discourse of tectonics, see my “Hegel and the Grounding of
Architecture,” in Michael Asgaard och Henrik Oxvig (eds.), The Para-
doxes of Appearing: Essays on Art, Architecture, and Philosophy (Baden: Lars
Müller Publishers, 2009).
264
5. Looping Ideology
mal confines and sources.13 Drawing on close readings of build-

ings and plans, texts and statements by Le Corbusier and Adolf
Loos, but also on a rich material of images from the archives, she
theorizes the architectural object as only one part of an entire
cycle of representation that aims to generate a global effect on
the perceiving subject. The look of modernity achieved in dif-
ferent ways by Corbusier and Loos was fundamentally invested
with desire, it called for an affective response, and mobilized a
whole structure of fantasy. In producing a set of distinctive im-
ages of what architecture could be, traversing all available me-
dia, they also launched a pedagogy of vision in several senses.
Their works wanted to teach us a way of looking and perceiving,
also in the sense that the buildings themselves were intended
as machines for viewing, as Colomina shows in Loos’s self-
contained and theatrical interiors, and Corbusier’s framing of
the exterior through the building itself understood as a camera.
Finally, in presenting us with vistas framed and edited by archi-
tecture, they made the subject enter into visibility as itself an
image—a possibility for a “publicity” of the subject that would
later be theorized in varying fashions, from the expanding sense
of an involvement in and a grasp of the social, to the objectively
paranoid structure of a gaze emanating from the world itself as
a terrifying Other,14 which still echoes in many debates on the
13. Another aspect of such a “look” would lie in how it mobilizes a discourse
on fashion, which is no doubt also relevant for Koolhaas, and not only
because of his work with Prada. For a discussion of fashion and early
modern architecture, see Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The
Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 1995).
14. This is developed in Lacan’s model of the gaze as objet a, in his 1964
seminar. For Lacan the gaze (le regard) comes primarily from and
belongs to the visible as such, which means that it threatens the subject,
which in turn uses the image as a “screen” (écran) to protect itself,
which is the function of art as “gaze tamer” (dompe-regard). He develops
this with reference to Baltrusaiti’s analysis of Holbein’s painting The
Ambassadors, in which the anamorphous pictorial structure plays a
central role, which allows the subject to hold death and finitude at bay
while still acknowledging it. See Lacan, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux
265
nature of public space.15

If we concieve of the architectural object in terms of a uni-
laterally understood late modern theory of autonomy (which
is often, too simplistically I think, attributed to Adorno),16 this
type of reading may seem to simply dissolve it into an set of
cultural determinations that deprives it of its status as work,
and thus of its capacity to negate, resist, and make a difference
in the world. Material forms are increasingly defined in relation
to their communicative potentials, which is interiorized into
their very fabric, and architecture morphs into what was once
called “electrotecture,”17 in a process which could be traced into
the minute details of architectural production, from building
materials to designer software and the virtual ubiquity of the
computer, not only as tool, but as a generative instrument in
its own right. Some theorists and architects, no longer arguing
de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1973). The paranoid (a term not used by

Lacan) dimension of this theory is underscored in Norman Bryson,
“The Gaze in the Expanded Field,” in Hal Foster (ed.): Vision and
Visuality (Seattle: Bay Press, 1988). See also chap. 4 above, note 76, for
a similar use of the screen in Reinhold Martin’s analysis of the Union
Carbide Headquarters.
15. I discuss this further in “The Antinomy of Public Space,” in Maaretta
Jaukkuri (ed.), Art and Common Space (Trondheim: The Trondheim
Academy of Fine Art, 2013).
16. While such an attribution is obviously not simply false, it does not
exhaust the possibilities of continuing his problem into the present, in a
way that reframes some, thought not all, of his philosophical presup-
positions. In architecture, this would bear specifically on autonomy as
an effect of the frame (see the Introduction above for more on this):
architecture in the most general sense frames things and events, and
to this extent is would be the precondition for autonomy; but at the
same time, it has the capacity of turning this framing condition into a
work in its own right, which thus would inhabit the limit of autonomy.
Such a “parergonal” (Derrida) status would indeed withdraw it from
aesthetic theory in the traditional sense, which is why it is becomes
particulary pertinent for the kind of aesthetic reflection I am trying to
develop here.
17. See the pioneering discussions in ANY 3, 1993, Electrotecture: Archi-
tecture and the Electronic Future, and Mark Taylor and Eesa Saarinen,
Imagologies: Media Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1994).
266
5. Looping Ideology
from the point of view of historical research, but from a stand-

point closely associated with certain strands in contemporary
image production in media and publicity, have suggested that
this mediatization implies that we must take leave of an older
model of critique and theory, even that the very idea of critique
as such is obsolete, and that we have to move on to a purely af-
firmative stance. For, given this type of implication of the archi-
tectural object into a larger set of parameters,18 which introduce
themselves at the most basic physical level, what sense could
there be in talking of autonomy, let alone resistance?
Today the development seems to follow two tracks (which
obviously often cross in any given case, sometimes reinforcing,
sometimes contesting each other): in the first, the structure
of electronic capital is interiorized into the design process it-
self, and becomes a type of generative aesthetic, and in this it
can be seen as a sequel to the industrial look, the machine aes-
thetic, of early modernism, which is now being redeployed on
another technological plateau.19 While many of its proponents
18. The term “parameter” has become a key term in what is today
understood as “parametric design,” which, apart from its obvious
practical usefulness, in many cases appears to pursue a quest for an
all-encompassing scientific discourse from which design solutions
could be generated. If parametric design, at least according to one of its
most vocal proponents, Patrik Schumacher, is a “New Global Style,”
or the “autopoiesis of architecture, which is the self-referential, closed
system of communications that constitute architecture as a discourse in
contemporary society” (Schumacher, cited in Staffan Lundgren, “The
Digital Dissolution of Disegno,” Site 33 [2013]: 279), then the pushing
of form to the limit I think points in the opposite direction, and shows
the self-reference and closure of the system of communication to be a
technological and ideological fantasy.
19. The key theorist in this development was for a long time Greg Lynn,
whose writings and projects were instrumental in developing a new
kind of morphogenetic aesthetic. Lynn was also significantly enough
the first, at least to my knowledge, to introduce Deleuze in a more pro-
ductive fashion in the debate on architecture; see Lynn, “Forms of Ex-
pression: The Proto-Functional Potential of Diagrams in Architectural
Design,” El Croquis 72 (1995), and the essays collected in Folds, Bodies
& Blobs (Brussels: La lettre volée, 1998).To some extent this was also
267
stress the objective, scientific, and even deductive nature of such

work, it is however still part of aesthetic based in a reading of
form, with all the limitations that this implies. The second op-
tion, which I think is the proposal by Koolhaas and OMA (even
though metaphors and tropes from the first version are frequent
here too, I find this less important for what is at stake), is to ad-
dress the new form of capital on the level of urbanism. In this
version, aesthetics is usually repudiated in favor of politics, even
though it is a politics that is often understood in a very broad
sense—which, to be sure, is not in itself a guarantee that this
does not amount to yet another aestheticized version of politics,
this time transferred to the levels of infrastructures and urban
systems, or that it avoids the risk of becoming another version
of the technological sublime, where the marvels of engineering
and computational power foreclose all critical questions. The
particular quality of the work of Koolhaas and OMA, is that it
willingly and explicitly meets those risks head-on, and to the ex-
tent that it is successful, it also allows us to understand why such
risks can be neither simply avoided nor embraced. The critical in
this sense has to do with the production of divisions and conflicts
in the real itself, rather than with assuming an external stance
outside of the system in order to pass a judgment. The image of
surfing, or riding the crest of a wave sometimes us by Koolhaas
has not surprisingly led him to be perceived as advocating cyni-
an emphasis on form as non-semantic, diagrammatic, and as resulting

from the application of a highly specialized technological design exper-
tise. For Koolhaas, the emptying out of the semantic in favor of an idea
of pure performance and operation misses what is actually happening:
“Semiotics is more triumphant than ever—as evidenced, for example, in
the corporate world or in branding—and the semantic critique may be
more useful than ever.” Rem Koolhaas and Sara Whiting, “Spot Check:
A Conversation Between Rem Koolhaas and Sara Whiting,” Assemblage,
No. 40 (1999): 46. For a general discussion of how Deleuze was intro-
duced into architectural theory, see Marko Jobst, “Why Deleuze, why
Architecture” in Hélène Frichot and Stephen Loo (eds.), Deleuze and
Architecture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).
268
5. Looping Ideology
cism and opportunism, but it may also be understood as point-

ing to the moment when things are about to break up, where
they unleash those forces whose cohesion can make something
at one moment emerge as entirely solid, another moment as
consisting of myriads of disjointed parts—none of which is an
illusion, but belong the wave itself.20
The image of the crest, then, rather than implying a simple
affirmative stance, or an outright acceptance of the powers that
be, can be read as an attempt to insert a prismatic wedge into
the light of the present, so that it is split up in several possible
directions and paths; it makes it possible to think the present as
an intersection of many times, pasts, and futures, and it releases
an unmistakable critical and reflexive potentiality, precisely by
suspending the kind of judgments that we normally make.
CCTV: Program and image.

The CCTV center in Beijing is a key work in the contempo-
rary discussion of media and architecture: it combines a superb
visibility and an iconic status with a highly complex architec-
tural treatment of the program, and it claims to integrate the
development of digital media into the structure itself, which
in turn is assumed to project a different mode of behavior.
There is no doubt a split here between the fascination with the
achievements of technology and engineering, and an underly-
ing political agenda: OMA themselves sometimes take pride in
20. See for instance the retrospective comments on Delirious New York,
where Koolhaas speaks of Manhattanism as a “divorce between appear-
ance and performance: it keeps the illusion of architecture intact, while
surrendering wholeheartedly to the needs of the metropolis. This archi-
tecture relates to the forces of the Grossstadt like a surfer to the waves.”
“Elegy for the Vacant Lot,” in S, M, L, XL, 937; see also “New York/
La Villette,” in OMA-Rem Koolhaas: Architecture 1970–1990, ed. Jacques
Lucan (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991), 160. For the
non-cynical reading of “surfing” adopted here, see Jacques Lucan, “The
Architect of Modern Life,” in ibid, 37.
269
describing it as “the world’s most advanced postmodern build-

ing,” whereas they on other occasions stress the political role,
presenting the building as a possible blueprint for a more demo-
cratic and transparent society.21
The complex is set on a 10-hectare site in the new Central
Business District in Beijing, and comprises two high-rise build-
ings and a service center. The main headquarters is 230 meters
high, with a floor space of app. 400.000 m2 (which makes it into
the world’s second largest office building, and no doubt also the
most complex: all the 55 stories have individual floor plans), and
is intended to house more than 10.000 employees. It contains
administration, broadcasting, and various production facilities,
with the intent of integrating the whole production process in
a “singe loop of interconnected activity.”22 OMA describes it
as two structures arising from a common production platform
partly located underground: one dedicated to broadcasting, the
other to research and education, both of which merge at the top
to create a cantilevered headquarters for the management. On
this sense the building forms a loop not just in terms of pro-
gram, but also in a physical sense, comprising horizontal and
vertical sections whose aim is to “establish an urban site rather
21. “We are engaged,” Koolhaas says, “with an effort to support within
[China’s] current situation the forces that we think are progressive and
well-intentioned |…] We’ve given them a building that will allow them
to mutate.” Time Asia, May 2, 2004. To some extent the split between
these two agendas is due to the context of presentation, as we will see,
but it also corresponds to a deeper problem lodged within architectural
practice and theory as such. This problem is obviously not particular
to Koolhaas, although his projects tend to make it acutely visible in a
reflexive form, which is why he becomes an easy target for criticism, but
also the reason why, as the present essay argues, his work indeed consti-
tutes works in a qualified sense, and call upon, even demand, a response
not just from within the architectural profession.
22. These and the following quotes relating to the CCTV project are all
taken from one of OMA’s official websites, as accessed January 22,
2009. The same text, with small variations, can be found in Koolhaas,
Content (Cologne: Taschen, 2004).
270
5. Looping Ideology
than point to the sky,” eschewing the two-dimensionality of the

“soaring tower” for a “truly 3-dimensional experience.”
Beyond this visual impact, the loop structure is also intended
to have a behavioral effect on the employees: the adjacency of dif-
ferent functions is intended to produce an awareness of the activi-
ties of the co-worker and foster a spirit of collaboration, material-
ized in the structure of the building, inwardly as well as outward-
ly. The third and perhaps most striking dimension of the loop is
that the building, although a high-security complex, is planned
to allow for a path of public access that runs through the entire
structure, and offer views not only of Beijing CBD, but also of
the production process itself. Through glass partitions the visitors
are to be able to inspect the making of television, at least ideally
speaking in all of its details, thus producing a sense of transpar-
ency, literally as well as metaphorically. As we will see, this loop
is what brings together, in a contradictory unity, the program
and the (still conjectural, it must be remembered) reality of the
building’s modus operandi: it projects the idea of transparency
and openness while at the same time making legible and visible
the current constraints on this idea, holding these two aspects
together without erasing the difference between them.23
The second major building, the Television Cultural Center
(TVCC), is a more traditional 115,000 m2 high-rise (although
designed to comprise a number of variations, ranging from the
irregular façade to the hotel rooms, which all have an individ-
23. My proposal here intersects with the analysis proposed in Shannon
Mattern, “Broadcasting Space,” International Journal of Communication
2 (2008), from which I have drawn many valuable insights. My accent
however falls slightly differently; for Mattern, the fact that the building
embodies contradictions runs “contrary to the designer’s claims” (869);
in my reading, the point is that the embodiment, even exacerbation, of
such contradictions has been part of Koolhaas’s different projects from
the outset. The strategically planned introjection of social conflicts is,
I would argue, what makes it possible for them to achieve the status of
“works” in a qualified sense, and this is what warrants my understand-
ing of them as allegorical.
271
ual layout), and includes a five-star hotel, a visitor’s center, a

large public theatre, and exhibition spaces. Unlike the CCTV,
this second building is meant to be freely accessible to the pub-
lic, and it has a more conventional layout. These two buildings,
together with the third low-rise structure containing technical
facilities, are set in the Media Park, which is intended as a land-
scape for public entertainment and outdoor filming areas that
will form an extension of the central green axis of the CBD,
all of which indicates the extent to which the complex is itself
intended as a spectacle or amusement park, and forms part of a
kind of “spectacularization” of media production itself.24
The location of the CCTV in the urban fabric of Beijing is
also understood to be a decisive factor in the production of a
new image of centrality. From the point of view of the symboli-
cal geography of Beijing, it is an efficient way to forge a different
Chinese identity, more oriented towards economic growth than
party power, or, more precisely, a projection a particular type of
state-run capitalism. Located on the West-East axis defined by
the Chang’an Avenue, and not the North-South axis of impe-
24. Helena Mattsson has analyzed how the corporate takeover of public
spaces tends to transform architectural boundaries between interiority
and exteriority, public space and workplace, through the creation of
“event zones,” where production and spectacle come together, also as
a means of compensating for the gaps and losses in our understanding
of the real processes of production and consumption on a global scale.
Specifically in media institutions, these assemblages are geared towards
the production of a public, a public that, precisely, is seen more as con-
sumers of a spectacle. These architectural structures, she argues, should
not be understood as disciplinary, but rather as “spaces of security” in
Foucault’s sense of the term: instead of regulating everything by clear-
cut spatial divisions, they “let things happen,” even though they entail
new forms of discipline that operate through desire and affect instead
of regulation, and in fact can be reconnected to certain aspects of
Bentham’s Panopticon overlooked by Foucault. See Mattsson, “Staging
a Milieu,” in Jakob Nilsson and Sven-Olov Wallenstein (eds.), Foucault,
Biopolitics, and Govermentality (Huddinge: Södertörn Philosophical
Studies, 2013), and, on the particular spatial strategies used in the BBC
headquarters in London, Mattsson, “The Real TV: Architecture as
Social Media,” in Ericson and Riegert, Media Houses.
272
5. Looping Ideology
rial power, where we find the Forbidden City and Tien’an Men
Square, the building symbolically redraws the map of Chinese
power, by opposing itself to the old television center located
close to the centers of political administration. Built a Soviet
style in the early 1980s, the old building is a fairly anonymous
high-rise, heavily guarded and allowing for no public access, and
it can be taken as an epitome of all the qualities from which that
new leadership in China is attempting to move away.
On the level of imagery, the new CCTV building has a clear-
ly iconic status (the idea of an icon is also embraced by OMA,
who regularly use the term in their publicity). The iconic func-
tion also comes across in the way in which the building has
already long since been used in advertising, as a symbol for a
new Chinese modernity that is opening up towards a global
mediascape. On the local level, its impact can be measured by
its frequent present in cartoons, and it has come to form part
of common jokes, where it is compared to a pair of trousers.
But as a political brand, it must also unite several contradictory
features: the emphasis on openness and communication flows
must co-exist with an image of centrality and authority, above
all because of the role played by CCTV as a unifying mechanism
in Chinese media culture, This iconic quality can thus obviously
also meet with negative reactions, even a sense of fear, since the
building is sometimes understood as an image and embodiment
of governmental power and repression.
The role of the CCTV headquarters as a window to the
world is however just as insecure as its status in the quickly
changing domestic Chinese mediascape.25 There is at present
only one English-language channel being broadcast by CCTV,
25. For an analysis of the Chinese media system as it appeared in the initial
stages of the CCTV project, see Zhengrong Hu, “Towards the Public?
The Dilemma in Chinese Media Policy Change and Its Influential
Factors.” Research Paper, John F. Kennedy School of Government,
Harvard University, 2005.
273
and it is debatable to whom this test probe is in fact directed:

presumably not to the Chinese population, but just as little to
the foreigners, who would undoubtedly choose other means to
acquire information. The Chinese-language channels are mostly
perceived as mouth pieces of the government, and have little
credibility, and especially so since the dominance of CCTV goes
hand in hand with many recent attempt to thwart local media,
and to integrate them in a system of central command.
Furthermore, an additional question posed to any central-
ized media system, and CCTV in particular, is how to make
the shift into the digital age. The current phase of growth may
be seen as a way to meet the challenge of new media through
expansion and diversification. This attempt is however not un-
likely to fail, which would mean that a project like the CCTV is
doomed in advance, and that the creation of a symbolical and
highly prestigious architectural gem may in fact be read as an
act of desperation. Given the insecurity of the current media
situation, and the role of central television in an increasingly
digitalized media environment, there is a fatally ironic sense in
which the building may be understood as the future tomb of
CCTV, a way of embalming the past—and in this sense it would,
in a curious twist, corroborate Adolf Loos’s claim, made at the
beginning of the media age, and by an architect who wanted to
resist the modernist culture of images and representation, that
the only authentic architecture is the tomb.
Inside/outside
The CCTV project picks up many formal characteristics from
Koolhaas’s previous works, some of which can be traced back
to his earliest works, the projects at the AA, The Berlin Wall as
Architecture (1972), and Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Ar-
chitecture (1972, together with Elia Zenghelis, Madelon Vries-
endorp, and Zoe Zenghelis), above all the idea of split between
274
5. Looping Ideology
inside and outside that is not there to be overcome in terms of

an underlying or projected unity to be achieved, but rather exac-
erbated to the highest degree so that it itself becomes a reading
instrument of sorts, almost like an optical tool that allows us to
see in split fashion.
The student work on the Berlin wall, while staying within
the limits of an interpretation of an already existing structure
(as was the requirement for the AA “Summer Study”), proposed
a reading of the wall as form, or rather as a cut at the limit of
form, a “formless modern,”26 which announces several of the
themes that would later occupy Koolhaas. The title is obviously
provocative, and its neutral, or even indifferent and cynical ring
seems to place it a no-mans-land beyond good or evil. But, as
Koolhaas would later say, it also recorded a moment in his own
development that hinges on the question of architecture’s place
in the world: confronted with the reality of the wall, it was “as if
I had come eye to eye with architecture’s true nature,” and “the
sixties dreams of architecture’s liberating potential [...] seemed
feeble rhetorical play. It evaporated on the spot.” (225–26) The
division, exclusion, and imprisonment produced by the wall,
was it not “the essential stratagems of any architecture?” (226),
and a “warning that—in architecture—absence would always win
in a contest with presence” (228)?
Connecting the shifting morphologies of wall as it mean-
dered around West Berlin to minimalist sculpture, Japanese
gardens, Sol LeWitt, Frank Gehry, John Hejduk, Schinkel, and
many others, Koolhaas was struck by its “total mockery of any of the
emerging attempts to link form to meaning in a regressive chain-and-
ball relationship” (227). Discovering that its meaning changed al-
most by the hour, that it reflected events and decisions far away
26. Koolhaas, “Field Trip: A (A) Memoir (First and Last…),” in Koolhaas
and OMA, S, M, L, XL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), 22. The fol-
lowing quotes with page number are all drawn from the same text.
275
and “forever severed the connection between importance and

mass” (228), implied that one must cease to “believe in form
as the primary vessel of meaning” (227). Rather than a form
or an object to which a stable meaning might be ascribed, the
wall should be approached as a “situation” (219) that evolved
from moment to moment, precisely because it itself was only
an “erasure, a freshly created absence,” a “first demonstration
of the capacity of the void—of nothingness—to ‘function’ with
more efficiency, subtlety, and flexibility than any object that you
could imagine in its place” (228).
But beyond this experience of the ultimately vacuous nature
of any discourse that would settle for mere form, there was anoth-
er discovery that blurred the line between different types of judg-
ments in an even more disturbing way: “The greatest surprise:
the wall was heartbreakingly beautiful [...] it was the most beautiful
remnant of an urban condition, breathtaking in its persistent
doubleness. The same phenomenon offered, over a length of 165
kilometers, radically different meanings, spectacles, realities. It
was impossible to imagine another recent artifact with the same
signifying potency.” (222) And furthermore, as if to suspend,
or corrupt, the ethical-political aspect of this beauty, the wall
“suggested that beauty was directly proportional to its horror”
(226).27 But rather than an aestheticizing of politics and violence,
as seems to lie implicit in the title—which in a sense could be also
read in reverse: architecture as a Berlin Wall—the project implied a
radical questioning of architectural aesthetics. The void produced
by the wall, the violence and death that it inflicts, belong to ar-
27. In a later text on “The Terrifying Beauty of the Twentieth Century,”
Koolhaas returns to the Berlin Wall project and proposes that “the
interpretation of the Berlin Wall as a park enlivened by a Zen sculpture
made it possible to imagine the villas along with it” (S, M, L, XL, 208).
The association to terror would of course traditionally be understood in
terms of the sublime rather than beauty in the line running from Burke
to Kant and onward. Many of the characteristics that Koolhaas later
would ascribe to “bigness” also echo the traditional sublime.
276
5. Looping Ideology
chitecture’s founding moments, and there is no way architecture

can extricate itself from it, just as the “attraction” it generates,
precisely when it in its most violent and terrifying moments be-
comes “hypnotic” (229), must be analyzed as a moment in our
desire, and not as an unfortunate accident that could be undone.
Exodus, the second and more ambitious project, develops the
theme of separation and violence, although at first in a seem-
ingly benign inversion of the Berlin Wall. It does not deal with
an architecture whose disastrous ethical and political implica-
tions are beyond doubt, instead, in opposition to a wall that po-
sitions architecture as the “guilty instrument of despair,” it asks
whether it is “possible to imagine a mirror image of this terri-
fying architecture, a force as intense and devastating, but used
instead in the service of positive intentions.”28 If the Berlin Wall
was an imposed structure, Exodus was based on free choice—but
in the end, both of them however lead to dystopian results that,
even though not equal, yet have a disturbing proximity.
The basic gesture of Exodus, presented in a sci-fi language that
both mimics and mocks the rhetoric of the project description,
was the creation of a gigantic architectural enclosure, formally
akin to the earlier typology of megastructures,29 to be placed
over the whole of central London. The residents would freely
28. From the project description in S, M, L XL, 5. The following quotes
with page number are all drawn from the same text.
29. As Reyner Banham noted, the idea of megastructure had by the early
seventies lost much of its appeal, and the flexibility that it earlier had
promised now appeared as part of a control society; see Banham,
Megastructures: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1976). Koolhaas would later set his idea of bigness apart from
the idea of megastructures, and suggest that the latter was only “a very
safe Bigness” that “never lands, never confronts, never claims its right-
ful place—criticism as decoration” (“Bigness,” S, M, L, XL, 504). Exodus
may be read as an attempt to bring out the dystopian implications of
this idea by pushing it to the limit; the ironic take on megastructure
surfaces already in the notes to the Berlin wall project, where “‘Famous’
students present megastructures made of sugar cubes to universal ap-
proval of grinning Archigramesque teachers.” (S, M, L XL, 215)
277
decide whether they would choose to live inside the structure,

in a life of luxury, lacking nothing, but without the possibility
of ever leaving, or outside, in a life of misery and deprivation,
but with the freedom of movement. Thus, here too were find
“Division, isolation, inequality, aggression, destruction: front-
line of architectural warfare” (11), and the transformation from
guilt and despair to a secluded and enclosed happiness proves to
be almost entirely reversible: the exodus only takes us into the
heart of the world’s irresolvable contradictions.30
The attempt to solve urban problems by radical planning
was here turned on its head: the creation of two “totally desir-
able alternatives” becomes a brutal division that reinforces the
logic of incarceration, which is implicitly revealed to have been
an integral part of the architectural utopianism of the preced-
ing decade, and one might add, in turn reflects the projects of
revolutionary architecture in the late eighteenth century.31 The
30. As Felicity D. Scott points out, the idea of exodus has strong parallels
in the Italian Autonomia movement from the same period, which may
have indirectly influenced Koolhaas through the work of Superstu-
dio; see Scott, “Involuntary Prisoners of Architecture,” October vol. 16
(Autumn 2003). The theory of exodus, as it has later been presented in
a systematic fashion by Paolo Virno, implies a step out of the capitalist
logic that draws on its most advanced forms and sets up an alternative
social form; see Virno, “Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theo-
ry of Exodus,” in Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno (eds.), Radical Thought
in Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1996). The strategy of Superstudio can however be read in many ways,
and as Pier Vittori Aureli suggests, it can also be understood as a way
of exacerbating the spatial logic of capital to the point where it breaks
up from within, although this in the end proved to be a mere duplica-
tion of the same logic; see Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2012). To me this seems to be the underlying
proposal in Exodus, which in this sense can be read as grim parody of
the idea of radical autonomy. The idea of autonomy obviously contains
all these possibilities, from immanent intensification to a radical step
outside, and many of the projects of the period are characterized by
this polyvalence. For an overview of the context of the Italian left, see
Aureli, The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture with and against
Capitalism (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008).
31. Exodus antedates Foucault’s reading of the Panopticon by three years,
278
5. Looping Ideology
interiority produced by the exodus from the deteriorating out-

side—which in turn would lead to the latter degenerating into a
“pack of ruins”—sealed off by the prohibition against receiving
messages from without by the “Jamming Station” (9), in the
end proves to be not the infinity of pleasure, but imprisonment
In a series of variations, Exodus calls this upon to the radical
utopianism of infinite desire—the inhabitants of this “strip of in-
tense metropolitan desirability” are those that are “strong enough
to love” architecture, they are “ecstatic in the freedom of their ar-
chitectural confines,” and will be provided with “collective facili-
ties that fully accommodate individual desires” and offer an “or-
namental frenzy and decorative delirium, an overdose of symbols”
(7).32 This theme culminates in the final section, “Avowal,” where,
in order to “express their everlasting gratitude the Voluntary
and may be read as developing, avant la lettre, the possible transforma-
tions of panopticism in late capitalism. As Felicity D. Scott suggests,
“The ‘voluntary prisoners of architecture’ would reside in a postdis-
ciplinary structure, but one haunted by an archeology of disciplinary
society as it gave way to a logic of control” (“Involuntary Prisoners of
Architecture,” 86). This can be seen in OMA’s 1979–81 study for the
renovation of the Koepel prison in Arnhem, Netherlands. The prison
was based on the Panopticon principle and solitary confinement, which
today have been reversed, even though this, paradoxically enough, has
not meant that the Koepel has suffered the same fate as other and later
model prisons, since its “spatial surplus” in the end has proven more
open to flexibility than later architecture with its claim to a form-
function fit. If no particular spatial order, OMA argues, as such seemed
capable of allowing for the new and unpredictable uses that inevitably
would become necessary due to shifting ideas about detention, the pro-
posal must instead be a “prospective archaeology, constantly projecting
new layers of ‘civilization’ on old systems of supervision,” so that the
“sum of modifications would reflect the never-ending evolution of sys-
tems of discipline.” See “Revision,” S, M, L, XL, 234–252, cit. at 241.
32. Jonathan Crary, who crossreads Koolhaas and the urban futures of J. G.
Ballard, interprets Koolhaas on the basis of Tafuri’s claim that the recur-
ring problem in modernism was how to deal with the anguish of urban
experience: Koolhaas’s proposal in Exodus, Crary suggests, is neither to
cherish speed, freedom, and the expansion of perception brought about
by technology, nor to lament the richness and depth of experience oblit-
erated by modernism, but the creation of an anachronistic interstice. See
Crary, “J. G. Ballard and the Promiscuity of Forms,” Zone 1/2 (1986).
279
Prisoners sing an ode to the architecture that forever encloses

them.” (20) In the end, the hedonist utopia however proves to
install a circuit of pleasures and desires that merely revolves end-
lessly around an empty satisfaction, as in the section “Allotments,”
which is poised as an place of quiet and repose, where the volun-
tary prisoner may “recover in privacy from the demands of intense
collectivism,” and yet seems to summarize the whole of the un-
derlying logic: “Time has been suppressed. Nothing ever happens
here, yet the air is heavy with exhilaration.” (19)
If these early student projects are suffused with a critique
of the innocence of the utopianism of the sixties, and call for
an understanding of the “ambiguous and dangerous” power of
architecture,33 they are also testing grounds for ideas that would
later become central in Koolhaas’s later work. Both in the Berlin
Wall and Exodus, there emerges the idea of an architecture that
breaks free from traditional legibility by its sheer size (which he
later would speak of in terms of “bigness”),34 a fascination for ar-
33. Koolhaas, “Sixteen Years of OMA,” in OMA-Rem Koolhaas: Architecture

1970–1990, 162. Here Koolhaas explicitly takes on some of his prede-
cessors, notably Archigram, Archizoom, and Superstudio: “The tone
of these productions was anti-historical, relentlessly optimistic and
ultimately innocent. ‘Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architec-
ture’ was a reaction to this innocence: a project to emphasize the power
of architecture is more ambiguous and dangerous.” Continuing through
Delirious New York, this was a “polemic with the aspect of European
Modernism” (ibid). There are to be sure also many links and allusions
to early utopianism, notably Thomas More’s Utopia, whose spatial
implications became the object of an extended analysis a decade later by
Françoise Choay, in La Règle et le Modèle: Sur la théorie de l’architecture et
de l’urbanisme (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 171–213.
34. As seems to be the case in the theory of the skyscraper as “automonu-
ment,” presented later in Delirious New York: “Its physical manifestation
does not represent an abstract ideal, an institution of exceptional im-
portance, a three-dimensional readable articulation of social hierarchy,
a memorial; it merely is itself and through sheer volume cannot avoid
being a symbol—an empty one, available for meaning as a billboard is
for advertisement.” Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto
for Manhattan (New York; Monacelli Press, New York, 1994 [1978]),
100; henceforth cited in the text as DNY with page number.
280
5. Looping Ideology
chitecture as a practice that acknowledges and even exacerbates

divisions and contrasts, and perhaps also, in a germinating form,
the idea of a loop or Möbius strip: a figure with two sides that run
in parallel and never intersect, two separate worlds in an infinite
division: inside and outside, East and West, affluent and poor,
where freedom and restriction are not opposed as plus and minus,
but are shown to be implicated in a structure that folds back on
itself. The theme of an inside and an outside that are both au-
tonomous and joined together to form a contradictory whole has
continued to be operative in Koolhaas’s subsequent work, and we
will see its both structural and metaphorical, or, as the term will
be, “allegorical,” implications for the CCTV center.
The work that first gained Koolhaas international fame was
the book Delirious New York (1978), where many of the ideas that
still influence his work were first developed, even though they lat-
er may survive only in a displaced or inverted form. Here we find a
radical farewell to any idea of a an urban form that would be rooted
in nature, and a celebration of a “culture of congestion” that radi-
cally accepts and even attempts to intensify those traits in modern
urban culture, which in so many of the postwar recantations of
modernism appeared as its disastrous result. Koolhaas’s is a differ-
ent modernity, opposed to the version provided by Corbusier and
early CIAM, excavating other names and resources; it is a “history
of the fantastic,”35 which is also the history of fantasy and desire,
which takes us from the city to the idea of Metropolis.36
35. Jean-Louis Cohen, “The Rational Rebel, or the Urban Agenda of
OMA,” OMA-Rem Koolhaas: Architecture 1970–1990, 9. The retroaction
proposed by Koolhaas, Cohen writes, “measures and slices the body of
architectural history with his retroactive scissors,” and “transforms, by
detaching them from their contexts, grand simplifying paradigms which
characterize certain projects of the German neues Bauen or the Russian
constructivists into complex and pertinent structural agendas” (ibid).
36. Among the many predecessors to the idea of Metropolis, the case of
Hilberseimer is rarely cited, even though his book on Grossstadtarchitek-
tur (1927) in many respects seems an important ancestor of Delirious New
York. The “cell,” which in Hilberseimer’s Metropolis is what through its
281
This rewriting takes the form of an inversion of the classical

idea of the manifesto, which attempts to program, project, and
control a not yet existing future,37 and Koolhaas instead propos-
es a “retroactive manifesto” for Manhattan: Given that “to exist
in a world totally fabricated by man, i.e., to live inside fantasy” is
what we desire, and that what fuels our imagination is a vision
of a “hyperdensity” and the city as a “paradigm for the exploita-
repetition dislocates the traditional urban form, may be taken as an early

version of the parceled structure that the grid makes possible.
37. This would confirm to the temporal logic of the plan, as analyzed by Ta-
furi (see chap. 1, above). Koolhaas’s relation to Tafuri’s critical history is
complex: on the one hand, his way of reading history, decontextualizing
it in order to find material for his own projects, is in many respects emi-
nently operative; on the other hand, he sometimes appears to subscribe
to Tafuri’s dismantling of the amalgamation of project and utopia, i.e., of
any idea of an architecture that would proscribe the future and anticipate
a liberated society, and instead embrace the idea proposed in Teorie e
storia dell’architettura that “the only possible way is the exasperation of
the antitheses, the frontal clash of the positions, and the accentuation of
contradictions.” From Tafuri’s point of view, Delirious New York seemed to
have appeared too late to become part of his reading of American mod-
ernism, and the references to “the cynical play of Koolhaus” (sic), and
the “‘jokes’ of Koolhaas” in the essay “The Ashes of Jefferson” (written
between 1976 and 1978) seem incidental; see Tafuri, The Sphere and the
Labyrinth, trans. Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT, 1990), 279 and 300. Interestingly, the text which begins by
locating itself at the precise moment in time when Koolhaas’s book was
published, and points to a blockage: “New York, 1978: few large build-
ings under construction […] while an economic crisis of uncommon
proportions grips the ‘capital of the twentieth century.’” (ibid., 291) The
general matrix for Tafuri’s reading of New York is however close to sev-
eral of Koolhaas’s proposals. Citing Nietzsche’s fascination with Venice,
Tafuri speaks of “the prophecy that the city of lagoons launches to the
future: the city as a system of solitudes, as a place wherein the loss of identity
is made an institution, wherein the maximum formalism of its structures
gives rise to a code of behavior dominated by ‘vanity’ and ‘comedy’” in a
“metropolis of total indifference and therefore of the anguished consump-
tion of multiplied signs.” (ibid) Perhaps one could say that Koolhaas is
the most conscious, monstrous, and yet paradoxically loyal disciple of
Tafuri, who cannot be accommodated within the latter’s conceptual and
historical schemata that he as it were observes from the other side, from
the vantage point of what he often refers to as a modernism without guilt,
which applies particularly to the archeology of Manhattanism proposed
in Delirious New York.
282
5. Looping Ideology
tion of congestion” (DNY 10), what would a manifesto have looked

like, which would have produced exactly this result? In this he
obviously opposes, but also inverts Le Corbusier’s famous criti-
cism of Manhattan for lacking a generating idea: the point is to
find this idea post factum, a “theoretical Manhattan, a Manhattan
as conjecture” (11).
This inversion of the temporal logic of the manifesto requires
a different form of analysis, and Koolhaas, assuming the role of
“Manhattan’s ghostwriter” (DNY 11), provides us with a miss-
ing story, from the first settlements to the skyscraper, which
also highlights names that had been if not erased, then at least
marginalized in official architectural discourse (notably Wallace
Harrison, Raymond Hood, and Hugh Ferriss, who emerge as the
true heroes of Manhattanism). The developmental line he traces
was unconscious, and necessarily so: it results from a logic that
was never planned, but is more akin to a natural process. The ret-
roactive dimension however also contains a projective part, which
surfaces in the “Fictional Conclusion, “ which presents a number
of architectural projects as the bearers of a future Manhattanism
that still remains to be practiced and elaborated. The theo-
ry is thus retroactive in the sense that it unearths a possibility
that was lost, or at least obscured, in the postwar period, when
Manhattanism began to dilute and eventually abandon its princi-
ples. The grid structure of “Manhattanism” was only a transitory
phenomenon—and in fact, as Koolhaas suggests, the subject of
Delirious New York “passed into premature senility before its ‘life’
was completed” (DNY 11; see also the “Postmortem,” 283–292,
that leads over to the fictional conclusion).
What, then, are the basic tenets of Manhattanism, devel-
oped in a particular place and time, and yet endowed with a
power that will allow them to mutate into other urban forms?
The founding concepts, the grid, lobotomy, and the schism, all fol-
low from a first division that is never an explicit theme and yet
283
guides all the subsequent formal moves: the absolute distance

from nature, which is then repeated as we descend further into
the urban structure.38
The first explicit principle, the grid, develops the split be-
tween inside outside in terms of a radical discontinuity between
buildings that all negate each other and their context. This divi-
sion is made possible by the grid structure remaining indifferent
to the content that it distributes, so that it allows maximum
stylistic and programmatic freedom inside a given enclosure,
and provides maximum regulation through an overall structure.
In “The City of the Captive Globe,” one of the projects that
make up the fictional conclusion, Koolhaas pushes this to the
extreme: each lot contains a heavy base of polished stone, con-
stituting a series of “ideological laboratories” from out of which
“each philosophy has the right to expand indefinitely toward
heaven” (DNY 294). The competition for the sky is generated
by the grid structure, originally comprising a set amount of lots
38. Marco Tabet reads this divide from nature as an echo of Worringer’s
analysis of the twin roots of art: empathy derives from a sense of
belonging in the world that is developed in the Greco-Roman tradi-
tion, abstraction from a sense of fear and terror in the face of a hostile
nature, and a corresponding need to create a world of autonomous
form, which was developed in the Northern tradition. See Tabet La
terrifiante beauté de la beauté: Naturalisme et abstraction dans l’architecture de
Jean Nouvel et Rem Koolhaas (Paris: Sens & Tonka, 1996), and Wilhelm
Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1996
[1908]). As Tabet notes, Worringer’s book was published by Piper Ver-
lag in Munich, which four years later would publish Der Blaue Reiter and
Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst, and even though Worringer
had no interest in the art of his own time, and his theory of empathy in
fact was opposed to the long tradition that made the discourse of em-
pathy one of the passageways towards modernist abstraction, his book
nevertheless may have exerted an important influence in the artistic mi-
lieus of expressionism. In Koolhaas’s case, this divide however seems to
me to result much more from the radical auto-affirmation of architecture,
in opposition to all pre-given models, whether derived from nature,
the sciences or any other source. To be sure, the emphasis on program,
events, and social forces can be understood as a step back from claims
of autonomy in a simplistic sense, but it does not make architecture
subservient to any formal model.
284
5. Looping Ideology
with no possibility of lateral expansion, so that the race for the

sky becomes the only solution, producing the skyscraper mor-
phology as a logical outcome. This is an “archipelago” of “Cities
within Cities” that each celebrates its own values and develops
its own folklore while still reinforcing the system, creating a
“city where permanent monoliths celebrate metropolitan insta-
bility” (ibid.).
This division is then reflected in an analogous discontinuity
inside the building itself, where an act of “lobotomy” discon-
nects the outside from the inside, so that the skyscraper comes
to form a universe of its own: the exterior is only formalism, the
interior only functionalism. Finally, in turning each floor into
a separate world, the “schism” makes each skyscraper-universe
into a multiverse of different uses: “From now on each met-
ropolitan lot accommodates—in theory at least—an unforesee-
able and unstable combination of simultaneous activities, which
makes architecture less an act of foresight than before and plan-
ning an act of only limited prediction.” (DNY 85)
These and many other similar early statements were at first
sometimes seen as provocations, and to some extent they were;
but on another level we can read them as attempts to rethink
the basis of architecture, above all, the idea of the city as it
morphs into the Metropolis, which has more and more become
predominant in the work of Koolhaas and OMA. The analysis
of Manhattanism can thus be read as first systematic attempt
(prefigured on the earlier student projects, which however still
largely remained within the sphere of critique and irony) to
emancipate urbanism from a certain idea of planning whose
foundational power still determines our imaginary. It would be
followed by many other similar although less systematic writ-
ings that explore other phenomena normally relegated to the
disdained margins of architectural culture: the sprawl of the
edge city, the blandness, boredom and neutrality of suburbia,
285
the extensive research projects at Harvard, which have resulted

in several publications dealing with emerging urban forms in
Asia and Africa, as well as forays into the world of shopping.
These investigations may seem unrelated and even opposed, and
yet they should no doubt be understood as derived from a cen-
tral issue, which is the question of how we should conceptualize
the urban form of the future without nostalgia.
A decade and a half after the initial analysis of Manhattanism,
the central essay “Generic City,” which can be understood al-
most as a kind of cinematic fantasy,39 would push the decenter-
ing of urbanism to one possible conclusion. This is a city beyond
any question of historical identity, made up of simulated his-
tory, without distinctions between center and periphery, always
ready to be reconstructed according to current needs, also on
the level of its self-understanding. Those values that once per-
tained to the European city, and then to its various extensions
and dialectical reversals in the US—the delirium of New York
being a kind of second beginning of modernity, haunting the
consciousness of a European modernist like Le Corbusier—have
here mutated into a post-historical state: “the generic city is a
city liberated from the captivity of center, from the straitjacket
of identity. The Generic City breaks with this destructive cycle
of dependency: it is nothing but a reflection of present need and
present ability. It is a city without history.”40
In its fascination with grand scale mutations, the idea of the
generic city in a certain way joins the planning visions of the
39. See for instance the final sections in “Generic City,” which are shot
through with sexual imagery (S, M, L, XL, 1263–64). It is perhaps not
entirely coincidental that Koolhaas, before embarking on a career as
an architect, attended film school and co-wrote The White Slave, a 1969
Dutch film noir, and subsequently wrote a script for legendary soft-
porn director Russ Meyer, which was never shot. In the first project,
the Berlin wall at one point is likened to a “script, effortlessly blurring
divisions between tragedy, comedy, melodrama” (S, M, L, XL, 222).
40. “Generic City,” S, M, L, XL, 1251f.
286
5. Looping Ideology
modernism of the 1920s and ’30s, from avant-garde urban theo-

ries of Russian “disurbanism”41 to the Ville radieuse, although
with the decisive difference that it now aspires to dislodge the
Planner in favor of a process that integrates chance and con-
tingency. Already in the book on New York, hyperdensity and
the lobotomy of the skyscraper were meant to ensure “perpetual
programmatic instability” (DNY 87) and later, in relation to
the project for the Eurolille terminal, Koolhaas speaks of a “dy-
namique d’enfer”42 that replaces overview with a process that
inevitably links parts together into a new kind of aleatory unity
that can only be surveyed and controlled at a meta-level.
These theoretical investigations into large-scale urban struc-
tures however also have their parallel in singular projects that
attempt to articulate them in individual objects, and one way to
approach the CCTV project would be to see it as such a point
of crystallization between different lines of research. Here I will
just briefly look at two earlier projects, both from 1989, where
we can see the ideas germinating that would eventually be de-
veloped in the CCTV headquarters.
In the project for the new National Library in Paris, Koolhaas
addresses the issue of how to conceive of a building whose main
role is to contain and transmit information, and which in a
41. The project that first took Koolhaas to New York in the 1970s and the
Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies led by Peter Eisenman, and
eventually led to the publication of Delirious New York, was the writing
of a thesis on Russian constructivism and Ivan Leonidov. Parts of this
material were eventually published as, “Ivan Leonidov’s Dom Narkom-
tjazjprom, Moscow,” co-written with Gerrit Oorthuys, Oppositions 2
(1974).
42. The phrase was coined in a lecture from 1993 entitled “Beyond
Delirious,” where Koolhaas reflects on different ways to organize the
planning process, and proposes a “a dynamic from hell, which is so
relentlessly complex that all the partners are involved in it like prisoners
chained to each other so that nobody would be able to escape.” Cited
from the reprint in Kate Nesbitt (ed.), Theorizing a New Agenda for
Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory, 1965–1995 (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 336.
287
certain way encloses a whole world within itself. The concrete

question of how we can rethink the idea of a library in the pres-
ent of course resounds with the CCTV project, and the techno-
logical transformations since 1989 have indeed only sharpened
the problem.43
The first answer in the Paris library was to understand the
rooms in the building as empty spaces hollowed out of a dense
cube comprised of information, and then to work with a high
degree of “cross-programming” that would render the tradition-
al divisions of labor within the library insecure and unstable.
The rooms hang like suspended organs within the translucent
cube, while they at the same time may be described as voids: “In
this block,” Koolhaas says, “the major public spaces are defined
as absences of building, voids carved out from the information
solid. Floating in memory, they are like multiple embryos, each
with their own technological placenta.”44
As Fredric Jameson suggests, the emphasis on formal non-
legibility (the “block” that contains all the interior organs seems
to lack specificity) may be seen as a typical attempt to evade
aesthetic perception, just as it opposes Corbusier’s idea of the
outside as an expression of an inner organization, and instead
43. Already in 1989, Koolhaas writes: “At the moment when the electronics
revolution seems about to melt all that is solid—to eliminate all neces-
sity for concentration and physical embodiment—it seems absurd to
imagine the ultimate library” (S, M, L XL, 606). For a discussion of the
other entries in the competition (which was won by Dominique Per-
rault), see Anthony Vidler, “Books in Space: Tradition and Transpar-
ency in the Bibliothèque de France,” Representations 42 (1993). Vidler
suggests that “Koolhaas’ mistake was to configure information under
the sign of translucency and shadowy obscurity; the politics of the mo-
ment insisted, and still insist, on the illusion that light and enlighten-
ment, transparency and openness, permeability and social democracy
are not only symbolized but also effected by glass” (131f). As we will
see, the play with transparency in the CCTV center takes this idea one
step further, and shows how transparency as such can be a means of
hiding, and how visibility can become a means of obscuring.
44. S, M, L XL, 616
288
5. Looping Ideology
proposes an idea of “incommensurability.”45 But the condition

of “non-” or “aformality” here also results from the program
itself, of rather from the impossibility of defining and circum-
scribing the program: the information solid (the image of the
network was here only on the horizon, and it would undoubted-
ly have modified the spatial schema: depicting information as a
“solid” today appears counter-intuitive) only allows for embry-
onic spaces that do not come together into a structural totality.
Something similar takes places in the Seebrügge Sea
Terminal project, which, as Jameson notes, even further high-
lights the quality of a “container” and the co-existence of radi-
cally discontinuous activities. Heterogeneity may be to weak
a word to capture what is happening here, Jameson suggests,
since the co-existence created here implies a “radical absence of
ground,”46 a new groundlessness that begins to produce a cat-
egory of its own, opposed to the schema of totality vs. part, and
instead must be understood in terms of “replication,”47 i.e., a
way to interiorize the split between object and urban fabric that
was characteristic of modernism.
The work of allegory

Coming back to the CCTV project, we can see how it inserts these
themes—producing and maintaining divisions and yet allowing
for an overlap of previously compartmentalized functions—into
a new and highly charged ideological context, where the formal
45. In his discussion of Koolhaas, Jameson points to the analogy between

Corbusier’s idea and what Althusser in a rather different context called
“expressive causality,” i.e., the conception of society as a totality that
expresses itself in all of its minute details and all of its levels, against
which Althusser pits the theory of a “structural causality” that allows
each level to have a semi-independence, while still hanging on to the
idea of a determination in the final instance: see Jameson, The Seeds of
Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 135.
46. Ibid., 139.
47. Ibid., 140.
289
layout of the building constitutes a complex allegory of the role

of media in contemporary China, but also and on a more general
level, the role of media in the culture of current capitalism. But
rather than just conforming to a set of predefined protocols, it
stages their inner contradiction, delivering promises that it at the
same time cancels, materializing repressive mechanisms while at
the same allowing us to see through them in a in oscillation be-
tween metaphor and reality, imaginary solutions and actual con-
flicts, all of which, as we will see, amounts to a kind of ideological
operation that also operates on ideology.
The project in its current state is in fact the second of two
proposals: the first, a traditional hudong structure, was rejected,
and the second one claims to incorporate the first, and to project
the traditional labyrinthine low-rise building into a new spatial
configuration Both of these proposals were directed against the
idea of the skyscraper, which, as we have noted, was a recurrent
typological idea in Koolhaas’s and OMA’s previous theories,
from the grid, lobotomy, and schism that were at the basis of the
culture of congestion celebrated in the late seventies, to the idea
of the high-rise as the “only remaining typology” in the mid
nineties, as is claimed in the essay on the Generic City. Instead,
we are now faced with what OMA on their official website bap-
tize the “tragedy of the skyscraper.” Today, they suggest, this
typology is caught up in a pointless “race for ultimate height”
that can only be lost as time goes on, and although it claims to
mark the place as significant, it produces repetitive banality, and
is unable to act as “Incubators of new cultures, programs, and
ways of life.” The location of the CCTV center at the heart of
new Beijing CBD, replete with high-rise buildings, makes this
statement more significant; many comments, also critical ones,
have been made about the grand scale of the building, which
is probably an effect of the way is presented on websites and
in publicity, as a kind of luminous icon that hovers over the
290
5. Looping Ideology
cityscape, detached from its surroundings. Seen its actual urban

context it in fact appears neither overbearing nor grandiose; it
indeed actively challenges and attempts to deal with the cha-
otic surroundings of the CBD, but not through the exertion of
power or by attempting to dominate the environment.
But if the earlier praise of the skyscraper is now rejected, the
idea of the container building as a city of its own remains, as
a transformed “bigness” and a renewed emphasis on iconicity.
This iconic quality is longer achieved through phallic erection,
but through a pliant form, which we might understand as a col-
lapsed skyscraper, or a structure that refers back to traditional
hudong typologies, although it must in the end obviously be seen
as something new, also in the sense in which it organizes what I
here propose to call an allegorical operation.
The organizing structure of the building, which establishes
both its outer form as well as the inner trajectory, is the loop. As
we have seen, this loop has three senses: the first is the physical
lay-out the building itself, which loops around itself or forms a
kind of knot; the second is the production process as a “loop of
interconnected activity”; the third, and for my proposal most
essential aspect, is the loop as a continuous transparency im-
plemented in the structure of the building, a Möbius strip that
allows a public pathway through the edifice to co-exist with a
closed and sealed-off section for the employees, thus creating
a continual sense of public space and communication while at
the same time marking the division by impenetrable glass parti-
tions. In this way, production and consumption of media remain
separate, and yet they are united in the structure of a building
that itself claims to constitute a common space as a spectacle, or
a viewing machine that produces the sense of a political unity
while at the same time prohibiting it at every level.
Throughout all of its programming, the CCTV complex can
thus be taken as part of a general process that shifts the param-
291
eters of commodity fetishism by transferring the logic of the

spectacle back onto production itself: the commodity no longer
being a material object that crystallizes labor, but itself an im-
material entity called information, this transferal is as it were the
loop of ideology itself as it transforms its own production into
a spectacle. If Marx’s analysis in Capital I: 4 proposed that the
material production process was concealed in order to endow
the commodity with a spectral and mysterious life of its own,
making it into “a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical
subtleties and theological niceties,”48 it is now the process that
is displayed, often couched in a vocabulary of participation and
interactivity. While this process is not particular to media, it is
here that it reaches its highest point of visibility, precisely by
folding this visibility back on itself. In the rhetoric and reality
of transparency—which should not be distinguished as the false
and the true, but rather as two moment of the same process—the
production of images is laid out before us a spectacle to be en-
joyed, consumed, and in which we are called upon to verify our
own participation and agency. Even though certain essential
features of this machinery will remain hidden, it would be too
simple to say that nothing has changed, and that the workings
of ideology production would remain just as concealed as be-
fore: the fetishizing of the means of production does not abolish
fetishism, but pushes it to a new level, that of a fetishism unfold-
ing through the visible and transparent, in which the desire that
holds the subject captive is the desire to itself become part of
this very visibility; to monitor and to be monitored, in the end
to assure itself of its own existence by applying to the panoptic
machinery to itself.49 It as if the analysis of ideology once pro-
48. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976),
164.
49. See Žižek, Enjoy your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New
York: Routledge, 1992). Certain strands of Hollywood cinema, par-
ticularly during the seventies, developed the theme of conspiracy to the
292
5. Looping Ideology
posed by Marx—the mechanism of a camera obscura that gives

us the image of the world turned upside down, so that ideas,
endowed with an agency of their own, would be the source of
reality instead of reality the source of ideas—would have been
transformed into a theater of sorts, in which the desire to have
the real thing is what drives the illusion.
The CCTV project can be read as an allegory of this co-
implication of openness and closure, and in this way it can be
said to already display and unmask its own ideological opera-
tion, precisely as an occultation at the same time produced and
denounced immediately in what it gives to see. The work of
Koolhaas is in this sense not so much beyond good or evil—a po-
sition that he, as we have seen, often seems to assume, as in his
statements about the necessity for architecture to ride the crest
of the wave, the necessarily “uncritical” stance that must be as-
sumed for there to be any architectural creation at all, or the cre-
ation of a “dynamique d’enfer” that empties out the subjectivity
of the architect—as it is both good and evil in an inextricable
double-bind. It carries out the task of projecting an image of
openness while at the same time rendering physically legible the
current constraints on this promise; it displays its own symptom
level of specific visual paranoia: the surveying gaze that everywhere has
to be identified and rejected can, ultimately, be duplicated and directed
at the surveyor, as in Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), in which, in
the final scene, the surveillance expert Gene Hackman takes his entire
apartment apart in order to find the hidden surveillance camera, but
without discovering it, with the ultimate implication that it is the film
itself that is surveying him, or on the role figure’s subjective level: that
the entire visual field has become a single gaze that threatens him, a
Gaze from nowhere that is no longer human, but which belongs to
the system’s elusive order. Thomas Y. Levin reads this inversion as an
extension of Guy Debord’s theory of society of the spectacle, and as
a desire for the reality of the image as index; see Levin, “Rhetoric of
the Temporal Index: Surveillant Narration and the Cinema of ‘Real
Time’,” in Thomas Y. Levin, Peter Weibel, and Ursula Frohne (eds.)
CTRL-[SPACE] (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2002), but it can no doubt
equally well be understood in Lacanian terms, as the threat emanating
from the gaze as objet a, i.e., from the order of the visible as such.
293
in its very structure, and perhaps it can even be said to enjoy its
symptom, in the sense that the particular joy that it produces is
always and necessarily entwined with fear, violence, and repres-
sion, also in a political sense, so that “beauty” becomes “directly
proportional to horror,” as in the case of the Berlin wall project.
The alternative between a reading that ultimately finds
compliance and submission, and one that sees a subversive and
emancipatory potential, is also reflected on a more straightfor-
ward level in a difference in the communicative strategies em-
ployed by OMA. In their various public appearances, they tend
to emphasize different things in the Western and the Chinese
context, so that the idea of openness seems be aimed at Western
intellectuals, whereas in China the technical complexity and the
sophisticated engineering solutions are highlighted. While un-
doubtedly an effect of the different intellectual and ideological
contexts of Chinese politics and a Western audience of archi-
tecture critics and intellectuals, this can also be taken as symp-
tomatic of a split in the role of the architect, of which Koolhaas
would be a paradigmatic case at the present moment: is he a
provider of high tech solutions and a seductive imagery that in
the end must accommodate themselves to the political order,50
or a producer of political or social visions that may have the
capacity to challenge this very order? On the one hand, the com-
plex publicity maneuvers of the OMA testify to the delicacy of
these issues, and to the limitations of architectural work. But
50. A significant amount of criticism has been leveled against the build-
ing from the point of view of engineering, most vocally in a speech at
Harvard University in March 2008 by Alfred Peng, who can be seen as
representative a more traditionally “official” view of architecture. This
stress on technological efficiency also comes across in Peng’s state-
ment that the architect has no responsibility for the organization of the
building in terms of social structures (interview conducted by Helena
Mattsson and the author in Beijing in November, 2008). The source
of this conflict is obviously two wholly different ideals of the architect,
where Peng and OMA can be located at the extremes of the spectrum.
294
on the other hand, the materialization of ideology is also the
becoming-physical of its contradictions, which allows us to read
the work precisely as a work in the emphatic sense, in the same
way that we read other works of art not just as passive reflec-
tions of an existing order, but as interventions, as resistance and
transformation.
The work of Koolhaas has been labeled as “postcontempo-
rary,”51 and maybe this term (which in Jameson’s case seems to
displace the idea of the “postmodern” in a somewhat obscure
manner) can provide us with a clue to the reading of this strange
work that is the CCTV headquarters. On the one hand it re-
mains sealed in the contradictions of the present moment, on
the other hand it points to a future that it projects, but also em-
balms already in advance, and in this sense it constitutes a point
of intersection between different times and histories, between
ideological masking and unmasking, which is what I have here
attempted to grasp in the term “allegory.” It makes our present
readable precisely by staging the conflicts inherent in any at-
tempt to grasp it.
51. Jameson, The Seeds of Time, 134.

296
6. Imagining Otherwise
Utopia and heterotopia

The desire to invent artistic practices that not only intervene in
everyday life, but also point to a different form of existence, is
at least as old as the avant-garde. Such a desire has often been
labeled utopian, but then often in order to be just as quickly dis-
missed in the name of a return to the safe haven of established
institutions and normalized practices, which offer the prospect
of normal procedures, predictable outcomes, and consensual
communities. Utopia seems discredited: it either takes us away
from our immediate tasks, and seals us in an imaginary and even
compensatory fantasy, or, worse, it becomes realized in a violent
and coercive fashion, and in fact turns out to be the most repres-
sive of systems, since it, to the extent that we understand it as
an actual state, by definition must exclude any transcendence.
In architecture, utopian fantasy has a long legacy, and as
Françoise Choay has argued, it can even be taken as one the
two founding moment of a modernity beginning in Renaissance
architectural theory. The architectural treatise provided a set of
rules with general applicability, with Alberti’s De re aedificatoria
as the paradigm, in which the eclectic and merely aggregated
form of Vitruvius’s De architectura was subjected to a radical re-
structuring, becoming a generative logic that starts out from
general axioms, descends to particular applications, and finally
aspires to create and all-encompassing spatial logic. Utopia, on
the other hand, whose initial moment Choay locates in Thomas
More, provided both “a critical approach to a present reality
and the spatial modeling of a future reality,” and an “instru-
297
ment for the a priori conception of built reality, at the level of

the imaginary.”1 The rationalist theory organized around rules
however had a complex relation to its utopian counterpart, and
for Choay it is the tension between these two conflicting views
have organized architectural discourse up to the mid-nineteenth
century, where the invention of “urbanism”—with the work of
Cerdá as the essential turning-point—brought them together
and set modern architectural theory on its course.
Starting from a different perspective, we can note that the
late eighteenth century marked the beginning of an almost in-
finitely ramified discourse of the “project,” the unrealized and
often unrealizable conception of buildings, cities, and envi-
ronments, encompassing spatial structures that straddled the
divide between architecture and all the other arts, and that it
aspired to form the blueprint for a coming society. The title of
Manfredo Tafuri’s classic 1973 study, Progetto e utopia, points to
the intimate link between the projective and the utopian mo-
ment, and to the fact that their conjunction can be taken the
basic structure of modern architecture from the Enlightenment
to its eclipse, which Tafuri locates in the interwar period.2 In
this interpretation, utopia is not primarily an invention of the
Renaissance, but belongs to the dialectic of enlightenment, be-
ginning somewhere in the middle of the eighteenth century,
when the architectural project assumed the function of covering
over the conflicts between nature and the emerging capitalist
order embodied in the city, as in Abbé Laugier’s famous claim
that we should understand the city itself in terms derived from
landscape painting and the theory of the picturesque, i.e., as a
new nature.
1. Françoise Choay, La Règle et le Modèle: Sur la théorie de l’architecture et de

l’urbanisme (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 21. For more on Choay’s interpretation
of Cerdá, see chap. 2, above.
2. For more on Tafuri, see chap. 1, above.
298
6. Imagining otherwise
While the outer limits of both Tafuri’s and Choay’s chronol-

ogies may be debatable—and they cannot be superimposed so as
to form a single coherent narrative—it has become a common-
place to say that the projects of modernism pursued utopian
goals, fueled by advances in technology and the social sciences.
Consequently, the rejection of modernism that would follow
may be taken as an anti-utopian quest for the everyday, the
already given forms of language, tradition, sense, history, etc.
From the various postwar rediscoveries of the classical language
of architecture as a continually available depository of forms,
ornaments, and styles, to the return to the foundation of mean-
ing in the phenomenological dimensions of place and space, to
the acceptance of semiotic flows of Las Vegas as the vernacular
of modern culture, the historical depth of Rome or Venice, or
the resistance of the regional culture to the false universality of
corporate civilization, the rejection of utopia seemed like a com-
mon denominator for the postmodern in all of its contradictory
guises. While all of these moves obviously cannot be summa-
rized under a return to some imagined past as it was assumed to
have existed, but must rather be understood as various ways of
remodeling and reinventing architecture’s relation to its histo-
ry—one of the results being the creation of the new figure of the
architect-historian who claims a different access to history than
the one practiced by earlier art historians, another one Kenneth
Frampton’s professed “arrière-gardist” position, which can un-
derstand itself as strategy for mobilizing history as a resistance
against a false theory of progress, and thus as opening a more
reasonable path towards true progress—this nevertheless signals
something like a waning of utopian energy in the face of a con-
temporary world increasingly hostile to any radical challenge to
the prevailing order.
And yet, beyond the rejection of utopia in its more em-
phatic forms, the question whether artistic practice can be
299
understood as a site for the emergence of alternative ways of

“worldmaking,”3 of a production of sense that would eschew
pre-conceived protocols, refuses to go away. The repression of
utopia may lead to its return as a “ghost,”4 or to the re-chan-
neling of its energies through other conduits, and the project,
3. “Worldmaking” does here not refer to the form of the creator-God

of medieval metaphysics who engenders a universe ex nihilo, nor to
the form of the Platonic demiurge, who takes on a cosmos threatened
by chaos and restores it to a beautiful order, but rather to the idea of
philosophy a creation of concepts, that we encounter both in the ana-
lytical and the continental tradition of philosophy. There is something
to be discovered as soon as we begin to overhear a resonance between
the work of philosophers that one many levels are as far apart as, say,
Nelson Goodman and Gilles Deleuze. For Deleuze philosophy must
in no way be understood as approaching its exhaustion or its end,
but ought to reassume its task of creating and constructing concepts.
Philosophy, Deleuze suggests, indeed has an autonomy of its own, and
should not settle for a mere “reflection” on other spheres of experience
(science, politics, art), just as little as the other disciplines need to wait
for philosophy in order to reflect upon their own activities. In the case
of Goodman, philosophy must accept not only the loss of the ultimate
given and the fact that there will be no “unified science” in the sense
envisaged by positivism, but also that this was a myth that fundamen-
tally impeded our understanding of the sciences and the arts as “ways of
worldmaking.” The raw material of this worldmaking must be under-
stood as already existing other worlds, Goodman stresses, and not some
brute stuff that would be simply available outside of our categorical
schemes. There is no “one” world awaiting us at the end of science, art,
or philosophy, although this is no reason for despair. The attitude pro-
posed by Goodman and Deleuze instead implies a constructivism not
only with respect to theories, but also of the movement of experience
itself—experience is always a kind of experiment before it is the interpre-
tation of something given, it is the capacity to transform oneself and
to think of a multiplicity of centers, grounds, and worlds. See Good-
man, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), and Deleuze
and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham
Burchell (London: Verso, 1994), chap. 1. For the link between Deleuze
and Goodman, see Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political
Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 31ff, where he
interestingly enough discusses it in term of “governable spaces,” i.e., in
relation to Foucauldian themes that will be in focus in the following.
4. As is suggested by Reinhold Martin, in Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and
Postmodernism, Again (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2010). For more on the details of Martin’s interpretation of postmod-
ernism, see chapter 4, above.
300
although now in the guise of a transformed sense of the pro-

jective, has indeed returned in architectural discourse, although
often in a sense that seems to simply adjust to the imperatives
of commodity culture and marketing.
But other avenues should also be possible, ways in which
the critical force of architecture could be reinvented, although
in a sense that must also imply a transformation of the idea of
critique; perhaps we need to reinvent the moment of division,
splitting, and shifting—the very etymological root of critique, in
the Greek krisis—so as to reclaim the force of difference, of that
which tears the present apart and shows its layered temporal
structure, instead of solidifying it into a monolithic contem-
poraneity that sees he future as only more of the same. It may
be that we need to invent some other vocabulary than that of
utopia to grasp these possibilities, and that we need to free the
imagination from the alternative between the utopian and the
real, in order to think the work done by work, the action per-
formed by works on our perceptual habit. In short, to imagine
otherwise may be tantamount to a profound rethinking of the
domain or site of the imaginary as the realm in which artistic
practice is supposed to be located. Neither simply the a priori
conception of built reality (Choay), nor a covering over of in-
soluble contradictions of reality (Tafuri), the imaginary could
instead be taken as the space of an indetermination that is not
simply opposed to a fixed order, but rather uncovers the trans-
formational capacities or virtualities inherent in any ordering.
To ask for the site of the imaginary may seem less than obvi-
ous, but is has the advantage of already locating the question in
a proto-architectural domain, which also, somewhat paradoxi-
cally, means to resist, at least initially, theories that locate it in
a specific modality of consciousness, or in the relation to the
unconscious, even though the question of how, or if, these dif-
ferent versions of the imaginary are ultimately entangled must
301
remain open.5 To intervene in the site might consist in linking

its actual presence to a certain double, so that they together en-
ter into an incessant oscillation where they pass over into each
other,6 a virtual place in the sense of an as yet undefined capac-
ity for transformation, linking it in new ways to the past—which
obviously may, but need not, involve representation in digital
media that rather tend to impose a reified and technological
idea of the virtual that too simply and quickly codifies and seals
the rich philosophical tradition extending from Deleuze back to
Bergson and Leibniz.
Freeing practices, things, and situations from their normal
use, either by decontextualizing and rendering them “inopera-
tive,” 7 but in this also preparing for a different use, or by re-
5. The rethinking the imaginary is postwar phenomenology and psycho-
analysis, above all Lacan and Merleau-Ponty, provides essential steps in
this discussion, and they form a matrix for the discussions of Foucault’s
later interventions. Lacan’s trajectory is exemplary, from the early clas-
sic theories of the mirror stage, through the discussion on the “topic
of the imaginary,” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 1, Freud’s Papers
on Technique 1953–1954, trans. John Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), where he still understands the imaginary in
terms of a “lure” that ensnares the ego, up to the later work on the Bor-
romean knots. A similar path can be traced through essays of Merleau-
Ponty from the 1950s, where he is gradually moving away from the
phenomenology or perception based in Husserl toward and ontology of
the visible and of the flesh based in Heidegger.
6. The imaginary, Deleuze writes in 1972, is defined “by games of
mirroring, of duplication, of reversed identification and projection,
always in the mode of the double.” Deleuze, “How Do We Recognize
Structuralism?,” in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, ed. David
Lapoujade, trans. Melissa McMahon and Charles J. Stivale (New York:
Semiotext(e), 2004), 172. The productivity of this theme is indicated by
Deleuze’s later exploration of the “time crystals” in cinema; see Cinema
2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London
: Continuum, 2005). In a recent study, Jakob Nilsson develops the
dimension of untimeliness in the cinematic image in the direction of a
theory of utopia that comes close to many of my proposals here; se Nils-
son, The Untimely-Image: On Contours of the New in Political Film-Thinking,
diss. (Stockholm: Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, 2012).
7. This is a theme developed by Giorgio Agamben in the final chapter of
his Il Regno e la Glori: Per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e del governo
(Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 2007). Such an “inoperativity” (ino-
302
trieving a potential that lies hidden inside them, by prying them

apart through a kind of spectral analysis, might then be a way to
allow such practices to act as a transformative power. This need
not rely on a defined projection of the future, but determines the
place to be reached as a site constituted in a now-and-here that
is also a now/here, or, if we read this term backwards, as Samuel
Butler once proposed in a visionary novel, as an erewhon.8
References to the various theoretical ramifications of these
ideas of site, space, and virtuality could be multiplied infinite-
ly, but instead of pursuing such an undoubtedly endless task,
it might be useful to return to a moment that within, or least
at the margins of, modern architectural discourse, was one of
decisive articulations of the place as same and other, as a no- (ou)
or other (heteros) place (topos). Such a place was be the co-impli-
cation, interweaving, and perhaps even confusion of utopia and
heterotopia in Foucault’s early work, which since the late sixties
has been a continually present reference, with many divergent
perosità) does not imply a passive or contemplative stance, but rather

opens up the possibility of a different mode of action that Agamben
determines as “groundless” and “anarchic,” and it no doubt belongs to
what he in an earlier work calls a “coming community,” although the
more precise political implications of this remain fairly vague.
8. Deleuze suggests that we should see the ideas invented by philosophy
(which here indeed bear a striking resemblance to artworks) as “no-
madic and phantastical notions”; they are “not universals like the cat-
egories, nor are they the hic et nunc or now here, the diversity to which
categories apply in representation. They are complexes of space and
time, no doubt transportable but on condition that they impose their
own scenery, that they set up camp there where they rest momentarily:
they are therefore the objects of an essential encounter rather than
of recognition. The best word to designate these is undoubtedly that
forged by Samuel Butler: erewhon. They are erewhons.” Deleuze, Dif-
ference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 1994),
356. This proximity to the space-time of art, at once virtual and wholly
actual, seems to be somewhat downplayed in Deleuze and Guattari’s
later theory of art, where the role of art is circumscribed as a way of
rendering composites of affects and percepts autonomous, which sepa-
rates it from the conceptual creations of philosophy. See the chapter on
“Percept, Affect, Concept,” in Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?
303
and even contradictory ramifications. As we proceed, these con-

cepts, which on one level seem simply opposed, will themselves
appear to be entangled in multiple and productive ways, and
they form a constellation that often has gone unnoticed, and
while heterotopia has become the object of many commentar-
ies, which have made it into a reference just as pervasive as it
is diffuse in many contemporary artistic practices,9 utopia has
remained in the background, even to the extent that Foucault
has been understood as simply rejecting the concept as such.
On a more general level, the work of Foucault overlays pres-
ent concerns and a both distanced and passionate archaeology of
the past, and it has itself become something like a “site” that can
be excavated in many different ways, and from which many cur-
rent intellectual movements and critical practices can draw their
energy. In the present context, it is particularly relevant that
Foucault’s quest for a different form of materialism that would
cut through the divisions between bodies (actions, things) and
minds (thoughts, texts), and open up a questioning of estab-
lished conducts and disciplines, also implied a rethinking of the
imaginary in terms of space and materiality, even though this at
first may have seemed like a marginal problem. This rethinking
also made possible a different understanding of the “event,”10
9. For a collection of texts that trace the influence of the idea of heteroto-
pia with particular emphasis on the transformations of public space, see
Michiel Dehaene and Lieven De Cauter (eds.), Heterotopia and the City:
Public Space in a Postcivil Society (New York: Routledge, 2008).
10. Foucault understands the event as a non-corporeal entity, and yet not
as something mental. What he proposes is a non-corporeal material-
ism that accounts for the “dispersal of the subject” due to the “chance,
difference, and materiality the very roots of thought.” See Foucault,
L’ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 58–62. Foucault’s concep-
tion of the event as an autonomous dimension parallel to that of the
series of bodies and ideas comes very close to the theory of Deleuze
in Logique du sens, a book that Foucault reviews the same year as the
introductory lecture at the Collége de France; see Foucault. “Theatrum
Philosophicum” (1970), in Dits et écrits (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), vol.
II. The idea of “event” has recently been brought into focus by Alain
304
both in terms of ontology and of practice, an “event infiltrated

by other events,” as Molly Nesbit says in an essay where she con-
nects Foucault’s work from the late 1960s to the counter-cultur-
al practices of the period, evoking a time when “philosophy and
art stay separated, sharing a situation shaken by incongruity and
shift,”11 but in this also suggesting that today we are precisely in
the midst of such an incongruous and shifting moment.
Impasses
The concept of heterotopia plays a complex and even contradic-
tory role in Foucault’s early work, and some interpreters have
seen it as their task to restore order, either by constructing a sys-
tematic theory, or by criticizing what they perceive as Foucault’s
confusions.12 But perhaps what is needed is neither to dispel
the confusion by showing it to be a surface illusion that can
be corrected at a deeper level, nor to understand it as merely a
case of inconsistency, but rather to enter into the contradiction
as such, i.e., to see it as that which demands and even “gives”
something to think. As Deleuze suggests in his interpretation,
that Foucault’s trajectory leads him into a series of impasses is
not a sign of inconsistency, since these impasses are more like
Badiou, whose conception however is that of major and unprecedented
shifts in thought, and the event is for him unique and wholly extraordi-
nary, whereas Deleuze’s idea, which I think applies to Foucault as well,
is oriented towards taking hold of a different dimension of the ordinary.
I discuss these differences in more detail in my “Framing the Event,” in
Ingrid Gareis, Georg Schöllhammer, and Peter Weibel (eds.), Moments:
A History of Performance in 10 Acts (Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2013).
11. Molly Nesbit, “Light in Buffalo,” in Joseph Backstein, Daniel Birn-
baum, and Sven-Olov Wallenstein (eds.), Thinking Worlds: The Moscow
Conference on Philosophy, Politics, and Art (New York and Berlin: Stern-
berg Press, 2007), 108.
12. The systematizing tendency prevails in Edward Soja’s influential Third-
space: Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996). For Soja, Foucault is part of a general “spatial turn” in
the humanities and social sciences, which for him also includes thinkers
as different and Benjamin and Heidegger, as well as many others, which
in the end renders the concept too fluid and imprecise.
305
objective illusions forced upon thought by reality itself; they

must rather be endured and traversed, and not simply avoided
as if they were mere subjective mistakes.13
Heterotopia has at least two distinct meanings that we must
begin by recognizing: the first, presented 1966 in The Order of
Things, relates to the order of language and discourse, the sec-
ond, first presented in a radio talk in 1967, to lived social space.
As we will see, this distinction does not preclude these two sens-
es from being knit together at another level, within the space
of a problem that however requires an act of invention on the
part of the reader. And furthermore, a closer examination of the
emergence of these two versions of heterotopia will show them,
in each case, to be bound up with contrasting ideas of utopia.
The two utopias and the two heterotopias thus form an unstable
and contorted quadrant, but also engage in a continual exchange
in which they will prove to reflect and presuppose each other.
It is true that these and many other analogous tensions may
be seen as resulting from the fact that Foucault in the early years
was trying various avenues of thought that did not necessarily
cohere—but this he in fact pursued throughout his life, and few
thinkers would to such an extent live up to the motto of another
great historian of the present or even the immediate future, the
architectural critic Reyner Banham: “the only way to prove you
have a mind is to change it occasionally.”14 Rather we should
13. See Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Séan Hand (London, Athlone, 1988). De-
leuze reads the archeology of knowledge in Foucault as a continuation of
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and suggests that the shift to the analytic of
power is akin to Kant’s move the pure practical postulates in the second
Critique. Perhaps there is a further echo of Kantianism in Foucault at the
point of intersection between these two domains—theory and practice in
Kant, knowledge and power in Foucault—and the problem of a transcen-
dental illusion as something that we must see through although without
ever being able to dispel it, is something that they share.
14. Banham, cited in Nigel Whiteley, Reyner Banham: Historian of the Imme-
diate Future (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2002), xv. Foucault develops the
theme of a “history of the present” in his later writings, in particular in
306
see it as resulting from the matter of thought itself, from the dense
interplay of language and space that ties together the fabric of
the early works.
It is equally true that both versions of heterotopia, whose
relation Foucault curiously enough never discusses, as if they
would simply be a case of mere homonymy, are presented in
opposition to utopia, and can be understood as yet another case
of a critique of utopian thinking. Such an opposition would be
in line with Foucault’s later genealogy of knowledge and power,
which often implied a resistance toward what he felt to be the
all too facile themes of utopia and transcendence as they had
been bequeathed to us by a long tradition. But this resistance
is obviously a complex and delicate task; a counter-history, if
it is to generate possibilities for acting differently, and operate
as a strategic history of the present or an ontology of actual-
ity, also requires that we are able to free a virtual becoming, or
a becoming-virtual, inside the present in its relation to a past
that is no longer simply past, in relation to a future that is not
just an extension of the present. It calls upon us to release a
swarm of other pasts and futures that constitute a proliferation
of doubles, so as twist free from the historicist version of history
as a burden that enforces an already formed, and thus in a sense
past future upon us. In this sense we may take heterotopia as a
reformulation of utopia, or as attempt to excavate an untimely
moment inside utopia, for which the other, the heteron, at a cer-
his comments on Kant. The most systematic explication can be found in
Le gouvernement de soi et des autres: Cours au collège de France (1982–1983),
ed. Michel Senellart (Paris: Seuil, 2008). For a discussion of Foucault’s
shifting attitudes towards Kant, which extend from his translation of
and long preface to the Anthropology, to the last texts that in a certain
way takes him back to the initial problem, although now seen in much
more positive fashion, see my “Governance and Rebellion: Foucault as
a Reader of Kant and the Greeks”, Site 22–23 (2008). For investigations
of the temporal structure of Banham’s history, see Anthony Vidler,
Histories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT, 2008).
307
tain point appeared like a more apt term than the negative ou,
the negative “non-” of place in u-topia.
Such a counter-memory, in its attention to what has been
effectively said, to the specific dimension that Foucault tried to
circumscribe in the concept of “statement,”15 must thus not shut
us off from the space and time of actions—a foreclosure of prac-
tice that for many readers, if not for Foucault himself, seemed
like an unavoidable effect of the dispassionate and distanced
gaze of the archeologist. The work on the “order of discourse”
must also make it possible to interrupt a discourse that issues
orders that we are assumed to obey and accept. In Foucault’s lat-
er work, the many analyses of power and resistance, of processes
of subjectivation and the complex of governing that came to
the fore from the mid seventies onwards, obviously take on this
task. This also means that the earlier work in some sense may
be retroactively understood as an impasse that would trap us in
discourse as opposed to things, which would amount to a highly
sophisticated form of modern idealism, from which Foucault in
fact always sought to break away.
Tracing the concept of heterotopia in its relation to utopia
would be one way to see how these problems were already ger-
minating in the early texts, but also, in a certain sense, to un-
derstand the extent to which this impasse (if it is one) remains
valid even for us, today. To some extent this means that it would
be misleading to ask whether Foucault succeeded in undoing,
15. The statement (énoncé) which forms the proper object of archeology,
must be distinguished from the phrase, which relates to the depth of
the subject and is an object of interpretation, and the proposition, which
can be formalized and inserted into an axiomatic system. Whereas the
phrase is dialectical (one phrase represses another), and the proposi-
tion generates a typology (they form hierarchies and may include each
other), the statement belongs to a topology. The statement is essen-
tially “rare,” Foucault says, and should be related neither to the subject
nor the object, and the uncovering of such an autonomous dimension
is decisive for the archeological method. For an analysis of these three
levels, see Deleuze, Foucault, chap. 1.
308
traversing, or overcoming them—for in this case success would

inevitably also imply failure, not so much in the sense that the
formative contradictions would have been left behind, but
above all that the solutions would have congealed into precepts
that we would be called upon to repeat. The task must rather
be to enter into these impasses, to struggle with them, and it
must always be begun anew, just as Nietzsche once said that
each thinker must pick up an arrow shot from some obscure past
and pass it on into some equally dim future, not on the basis of
knowing what future time means, but by reaching out into the
dimension of the “untimely,” that which suspends meaning by
unhinging time from its repressive and depressive cardinal axes.
The quadrant
The idea of a systematic analysis of “other places,” what Fou-
cault not without a certain irony calls a “heterotopology”—for a
science, a logos of the topos of the other as a disruptive force, seems
paradoxical through and through—initially appeared in the first
of two radio talks broadcast in December 1966, “Les Héteroto-
pies” and “Le Corps utopique.” The two talks were part of a
series of radio shows entitled “Utopia and Literature,” and in
the first of these two brief excursions Foucault presents the basic
outlines of heterotopia as a spatial otherness. This would be fur-
ther developed in the public lecture from 1967 known under the
name “Des espaces autres,”16 which has become the principal
16. This text, which forms the basis for most discussions of heterotopia in
Foucault, for a long time remained unpublished. There was a partial trans-
lation into Italian as early as 1968, but the integral text was published
only in 1984, the year of Foucault’s death, when it translated into German
in the catalog to the Internationale Bauausstellung in Berlin, where it
could pick up obvious resonances from the particular status of the city as a
no-place between East and West. Since then is has been republished many
times. The French text can be found in Dits et écrits (Paris: Gallimard,
1994), vol. IV, 754f; trans. by Robin Hurley as “Different Spaces,” in Es-
sential Works, ed. Paul Rabinow and James D. Faubion (London: Penguin,
2001), vol. 2, 177ff. Henceforth cited as EW, with pagination.
309
source for contemporary discussions of the concept of heteroto-

pia in terms of social space.
The conjunction of these two presentations must however
caution us from understanding utopia and heterotopia as simply
exclusive terms, which is an interpretation that results when one
moves directly from the first radio talk to the lecture in 1967.
The second radio talk in fact takes the opposite route, and in
addressing what Foucault calls the “utopian body” in terms of
an inner ego-oriented space, it retrieves many of the phenom-
enological themes that Foucault was struggling with at the time.
In close parallel to Merleau-Ponty he here wants to show how a
utopian desire emerges out of a body that is riveted to an irre-
ducible and ineluctable facticity, in a fantasy of another and glo-
rious body, or of a soul that would be able to wholly escape the
body. From within a certain phenomenology, but also by brush-
ing it against the grain, Foucault here provides what we could
call a genealogy of transcendence. This brief exposé has many
important connections to Foucault’s other essays from the pe-
riod, above all those that draw on certain forms of literature as
resistance, and they indicate the centrality of his rethinking of
the idea of the imaginary.
As already noted, this initial divide between heterotopia as
connected to social space and utopia as connected to the phe-
nomenology of the body is however complicated by the fact that
the idea of heterotopia had already appeared earlier in 1966, be-
fore the radio talks, in a rather different way in the introduction
to The Order of Things. Unlike in the later radio talk, heterotopia
is here not presented, even playfully, as the outline of a science
or a taxonomy—in fact, if anything, it is rather the limit of sci-
ence and taxonomy in several senses. And even if the concept
as such plays no part in the subsequent analyses carried out in
the book, where Foucault goes on to propose an archeology at-
tempting to uncover the rules (the “episteme”) that have or-
310
ganized knowledge in the Renaissance, the Classical age, and

post-Kantian modernity, it occupies a highly strategic place in
the introduction, in pointing to that which makes thought itself
possible. Heterotopia, he here suggests, is an experience of or-
der and structure as a groundless event that itself must remain
extra-epistemic, but as such it is also what allows us to see the
taxonomic structures from a certain outside; it is a kind of qua-
si- or hyper-transcendental sphere, a void of reason that at the
same time is the place of emergence for all forms of reason. It
is the limit of reason, first in a twisted Kantian sense of making
thinking possible,17 and then in the much more radical sense of
resisting any kind of discursive appropriation.
When Foucault in The Order or Things sets up an opposition
between heterotopia and utopia, it is thus not because the lat-
ter would transcend the body in its material facticity, as in the
second radio talk on the utopian body, but, he says, since it un-
folds in the dimension of fabulation and myth, which was not
altogether absent from the radio version, although it mostly re-
mained on the horizon as one possible development of the space
of the imaginary.
In the following 1967 lecture on other spaces, Foucault re-
turns to the version of heterotopia suggested in the first radio
lecture the year before, and does not draw on any of the quasi-
transcendental implications ascribed to it The Order of Things.
So, all in all we have two different versions of heterotopia (if
we here disregard the rather small differences between the first
17. In the first Critique Kant explicitly places the question of how the
faculty of thought itself is possible outside of the scope of transcenden-
tal philosophy (A xvi), since this would be either an empirical question,
or overstep the boundaries of what can be known and take us into the
sphere of the noumenal. Foucault’s project to uncover a dimension of
the a priori that at the same time would be historical in this sense con-
stitutes a kind of anti-Kantian (in appealing to empirical and historical
changes) Kantianism (in claiming to locate conditions of possibility for
empirical experience).
311
radio talk and the public lecture), both of which seem to reject
utopia, although the meaning of the latter concept seems far
from unequivocal. We seem to be have entered into something
like a conceptual quadrant: in the first pair, heterotopia is op-
posed to utopia as real social space is opposed to the phenome-
nological dialectic of the lived body; in the second, it is opposed
to utopia as a radical experience of ungrounding is opposed to
the false security provided by myth and fabulation. What are we
to make of this constellation, this rapid succession of seemingly
incompatible statements presented in the space of less than a
year? In what sense, if at all, could they be taken as different as-
pects of the same investigation into the multidimensionality of
the topos? In order to grasp the dynamic of this enigmatic quad-
rant, we must look at the successive versions in more detail.
Heterotopia and the condition

of possibility of archaeology
Foucault famously opens The Order of Things by citing Borges’s
imaginary Chinese encyclopedia, the encounter with which he
also points to as the origin of his own investigation. Borges’s
text seems to defy all normal logic, although the precise episte-
mological function of this amusing literary example—or better,
the tension that it both acknowledges and helps to conceal—has
not been sufficiently acknowledged. As we have noted, it is not
just an example of taxonomic contingency, but points to the
other place, the heteros topos, from and to which Foucault’s analy-
ses claim to proceed: it is the experience of the limit of order and
reason that makes it possible for archeology to begin, as well as
the limit toward which it moves, in designating the possibility
of another form of thought than the present one.
Animals, the encyclopedia says, should be divided in cate-
gories like: “(a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c)
tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h)
312
included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumer-

able, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera,
(m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long
way off look like flies.”18 The categories proposed are not simply
incongruous but also involve classical set-theoretical paradoxes
(“included in the present classification”), which is why Borges’s
text, Foucault suggests, creates a self-reflexive and impossible
taxonomy that can only exist in the non-place (non-lieu) of lan-
guage. In this non-place—which will soon be identified with the
other place, the heteros topos—the impossibility of co-existence is
suspended, and in this, it destroys the “table upon which, since
the beginning of time, language has intersected space” (MC 9/
xvii). This table is the surface on which categories may co-ex-
ist and distribute their respective content, and its destruction
first produces an absolute disorder from which nothing would
come. But in this it also proves to be the condition of possibil-
ity for the crucial experience that there is a contingent order of
things and words, and that the link between them is the result
of an event that eludes the acts of consciousness as normally
understood, and must be sought at level of an archeology. This
is why Borges’s encyclopedia, Foucault claims, should not be
understood as a utopia, which he now describes as a place sim-
ply located somewhere else, beyond the vicissitude of time, in the
space where myths and fables can unfold in the eloquence of a
discourse that rests confident in its power to name and signify,
and thus also in its power to “intersect space” at some later mo-
ment in time. Instead, Foucault refers to the encyclopedia as a
heterotopia that runs against the grain of language, “desiccates”
it by destroying in advance the syntax that holds words and
things together and safeguards the power of naming; it allows
18. Les mots et les choses, (Paris: Gallimard, 1966) 7; The Order of Things, trans.
Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1989), xvi, Henceforth cited in the
text as MC with pagination (French/English).
313
the other to irrupt inside the same, but in this it also renders
these otherwise fixed oppositions fluid and mobile, and makes
them available for archeological analysis.19
This experience of otherness is where Foucault finds the
point of entry to his own archeological project, i.e., the possibil-
ity to uncover a interstitial dimension that he would lie between
the basic codes of a culture that determine what can be under-
stood as “empirical,” and those scientific or philosophical theo-
ries that account for the existence of order in general. The idea
of a between introduces a certain ambiguity into the argument,
as if this dimension would both underlie and be juxtaposed to
the others. This is not incidental, and it already points ahead
to a crucial question that will at least be hinted at in the spatial
concept of heterotopia, i.e., if the epistemic rules do not them-
selves already presuppose some other form of ordering that can-
not be discursive, and if so, how these two moments are to be
articulated in relation to each other. The heterotopia created
in Borges, Foucault says, opens onto an archeological space, an
19. It is indeed true that this heterotopic non-place in Borges’s text still
bears a concrete geographical name: China, the mythical other, which
functions as “a precise region whose name alone constitutes for the
West a vast reservoir of utopias,” as Foucault remarks, whose “culture
is the most meticulous, the most rigidly ordered, the one most deaf to
temporal events,” and whose writing “does not reproduce the fugitive
flight of the voice in horizontal lines,” but rather “erects the motion-
less and still recognizable images of things themselves in vertical
columns”—all of which, in our “dreamworld,” makes China into the
“privileged site of space” (MC 10/xix). While undoubtedly part of an
Orientalist projection that designates the East as the other of the West,
and whose philosophical roots lead back to Leibniz and his fascination
for the kinship between non-phonetic writing and the idea of an uni-
versal characteristic, this also indicates the unavoidable link that binds
alls “others” to a “place,” indeed to an imaginary and ideological place:
see Leibniz, Discours sur la théologie naturelle des chinois, ed. Christian
Frémont (Paris: L’Herne, 1987). But it also points to an unavoidable
embodiment of the heterotopic, although it would be reductive to claim
that this makes heterotopia something purely imaginary. Accounting for
the necessary co-implication of these moves is one of Foucault’s major
problems, also beyond these particular texts from the 1960s.
314
obscure region that is at once intermediary and fundamental,

where a culture deviates from its codes in such a way that they
become visible in their naked existence and contingency, and in
this way it forms the limit of culture. But as a limit situated on
this side of words, perceptions, and gestures, as well as on this
side of the subject that would comprehend or constitute them,
it is also the place of critique and transformation, in a way that
picks up certain motifs from the Kantian critique while also dis-
placing others, most famously in the term “historical a priori”
that inscribes the transcendental subject and its unity of experi-
ence as one possibility among many.
At first this seems to amount to a rejection, or better, a
bracketing of the subject, which is carried out in a non- or coun-
ter-phenomenological fashion: it is a reduction of meaning, and
not to meaning, a reduction of constitutive intentionality to an
anonymous event of ordering. Instead of a consciousness that
would ground the various classes or regions of objects, as in
Husserlian phenomenology, there is something like a structur-
ing without an agent. And yet, Foucault enigmatically still sug-
gests that archeology approaches this limit as a kind of experience,
a “pure experience of order” (MC 13/xxiii) that would allow us
to uncover and describe the historical a priori conditions that
make it possible to see and enunciate in an orderly and regulat-
ed fashion inside a given epistemic order. If archeology lays bare
a “ground” (sol), then the form and nature of this ground, and
even more so the possibility of experiencing it, seem difficult
to locate and circumscribe. As we have seen, this sol is neither
a subject that relates to the world in meaning-bestowing acts,
but nor can it be located within a phenomenology that moves
beyond the subject, as the ground of fundamental ontology in
Heidegger’s sense, where the regions of objects are determined
in relation to ecstatic temporal projections of Dasein. Both of
them for Foucault still retain the structure of subjectivity, which
315
also entails continuity between the object of knowledge and the

ground that cancels out the ruptures of history. In emphasiz-
ing discontinuity, he first seems close to Bachelard’s analysis of
epistemological breaks, which attempts to locate the threshold
at which a science takes leave of its prehistory by constituting a
new object irreducible to immediate sensory experience.20 But
discontinuity for Foucault does not set up a relation to an ideal-
ity or objectivity that breaks with prehistory, only to a discur-
sive object that is itself a moment in history, and in this sense his
alliance with Bachelard is only momentary.
This vacant space, encountered in an experience that does
not belong to a consciousness, points ahead to many of the
transformations that would follow: first, the discovery of power
relations as the informal element in which the forms of dis-
course and knowledge take on stability as archives, then the
various forms of self-relation that moulds a provisional subject
capable of governing itself and others. The silent ground of our
culture, “the same ground that is once more stirring under our
feet” (MC 16/xxvi), is shot through with displacements and
fault lines, and the possible experience of its ungrounded na-
ture at first needs to circumvent the form of the subject, which
encloses this experience in a form that neutralizes it in advance.
The ground laid bare is thus on the one hand a set of rules that
remains fixed when seen from within a given empirical order,
20. For a brief and concise discussion of Bachelard’s theory of science, see
Domique Lecourt, L’épistémologie historique de Gaston Bachelard (Paris:
Vrin, 2002 [1967]). The essential difference is that the epistemological
break for Bachelard constitutes an object of science by severing it from
its “prehistory” in sensuous experience, whereas the break for Foucault
simply takes us from one discursive object to another, all located on
the same level. His constant resistance to the term “ideology” is rooted
in this, and the concept of savoir is intended to suspend the opposition
between science and ideology, a distinction that at the time was crucial
for Althusser’s use of Bachelard to establish an epistemological break in
Marx. These two readings of Bachelard developed in parallel, although
with diametrically opposed results.
316
but on the other hand, when seen as a limit, it displays the cracks
and fissures that provide mobility to the historical conditions.
At this point, Foucault however seems more bent on rejecting
traditional solutions to the problem of change, and his propos-
als remain largely negative, in that they leave open a space for
transformation without determining it more precisely.
In this sense, the heterotopia that we encounter in the en-
cyclopedia of Borges would be the provisional name for this
site, the Outside, that from out of which thought emerges and
which opens the possibility of thinking the Other as the void
that always inhabits the Same. This heteros topos is neither dia-
lectically nor logically opposed to the topology of everyday lan-
guage, to its orders, categories, and linkages, but situated below
or in between them—to once more repeat the symptomatically
ambiguous formula that Foucault provides— so as to form the
condition of possibility of any stable signifying order, while si-
multaneously showing all such stability to be situated and local,
and thus, at the limit, always struck by a certain impossibility. It
is only on the basis of this non-ground, or of a ground that im-
mediately breaks open, that archeology can begin to articulate
itself as an experience in search of a subject and an object, and of
the tenuous and instable link that for a certain period will bind
them together.
Utopia as transcendence
As we have noted, the two versions of heterotopia given by
Foucault—the first pointing towards the abyssal condition of
language and classification, the second, to which I will return
in the next section, toward the spatial ordering of society—are
however as it were syncopated by the reappearance of utopia.
To be sure, the second radio talk from 1966 may be taken as a
reminiscence of older themes, or as a hesitation with respect to
the rejection of phenomenology and humanism in The Order of
317
Things (or possibly, given the context, simply as a concession

to a rubric that Foucault had not himself set). But it may also,
and more productively, be seen as an indication of Foucault’s
attempts to rethink the imaginary at the limit of the inside and
outside, or as the intersection of space and language, heteroto-
pia and utopia.
In this context it is essential to note that the imaginary is also
the domain of art, and particularly so in the trajectory of moder-
nity that was initiated by the invention of aesthetics in the first
half of the seventeenth century, which however is a development
that in Foucault’s archeology of the human sciences curiously
enough receives no attention.21 The problem of the imaginary is
particularly relevant since Foucault in this period appears to have
perceived the possibility of transgression as essentially connected
to modern literature and art, as he suggests in the final sections of
The History of Madness, with its references to Nietzsche, van Gogh,
and Artaud. Madness, he proposes, is the absence of work,22 not in
the sense of something simply negative, but as the truth of the
modern work, a moment of unreason that opens the pathway to
what The History of Madness calls the undivided experience of the
division between reason and madness. Here we find the traces
of another experience, a resistance that articulates itself by with-
21. This is perhaps because artworks, in The Order of Things but also else-
where in the early writings of Foucault, seem to be endowed with a
capacity to, if not entirely step out of their historical frame, then at least
achieve a reflexive transcendence in relation to it, and in this way they
are like “operators” of the historical analysis. Their function seems to
be to herald, but also embody, and even point beyond, their epistemic
location, as in the case of Velázquez, but also Cervantes, who marks the
threshold between Renaissance and the “prose of the world,” and the
analysis of order of the Classical Age. For the idea of artworks as opera-
tors, see Jean Starobinski, “Hamlet et Freud,” preface in Ernest Jones,
Hamlet et Oedipe (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), and my “The Place of Art in
Hegel’s Phenomenology,” in Brian Manning Delaney and Sven-Olov
Wallenstein (eds.), Translating Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit and
Modern Philosophy (Huddinge: Södertörn Philosophical Studies, 2012).
22. See “La folie, l’absence d’oeuvre” (1964), DE, vol. 1.
318
drawing into silence, into the margins of discourse. At the same

time that Foucault sees madness as an entity constituted by being
placed in various moral and medical institutions and discourses,
he draws on an idea from romanticism: art as the bearer of an-
other truth that is somehow open to madness, a non-dialectical
negativity or experience of limits that cannot be reduced to ra-
tional ordering. The infinity and excess of language transgresses
reason and order, it scrambles and disassembles the law of the
Father, and literary writing is positioned as the primordial reser-
voir for this resistance.
This motif unfolds in a of series texts, “Hölderlin and the
Question of the Father” (1962), “Preface to Transgression”
(1963, on Bataille), the book-length study of Raymond Roussel
in 1963, “Fantasia of the Library” (on Flaubert, first published
as a postface to the German translation of Flaubert’s La ten-
tation de Saint Antoine, in 1964), and “La prose d’Actéon,” on
Pierre Klossowski, 1964).23 Foucault’s literary essays may seem
as asides in relation to his historical work on madness, the clinic,
and the emergence of the human sciences, and yet, in all their
diversity and circumstantial quality, they display a cumulative
movement, which can be taken to culminate in the text from
1966 on Blanchot, “La pensée du dehors.”24 In the latter he ex-
plicates the underlying idea of literature as the relation of lan-
guage to the Outside (le Dehors), a dimension of emptiness that
dissolves the subject into a space of pure dispersal. This concept
would also later become crucial for Deleuze’s interpretation,
which traces it in its various forms throughout Foucault’s work,
not just as a negative void and absence, but as space of openness
out of which thinking emerges, and in this sense it belongs to
23. All of these are reprinted in DE, vol. 1; the essays on Hölderlin, Bataille,
and Flaubert are translated in Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory,
Practice, ed. Daniel Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).
24. In DE, vol. I; Eng. trans. in Foucault/Blanchot, Thought from Outside /
Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him (New York: Zone Book, 1987).
319
the same order as the heterotopia of language that underlies the

archeological analyses.
Just as in the case of heterotopia, this idea of a resistance in-
herent in certain types of literature is however complicated by
many other of Foucault’s statements from the period that in-
scribe it as a situated and finite possibility, which shows his hesi-
tation in front of the theme of the imaginary. The same year as
the essay on Blanchot, The Order of Things provides an account of
the archeological possibility of literary counter-discourse, which
to some extent deprives it of its radical quality by inserting its
thrust in a historical narrative. The experience of literature as a
limit, he here suggests, is conditioned by the modern epistemic
order, it is born out of the same conjuncture, and constitutes an
integral part of its metaphysical contortions. Emerging as the ob-
verse side of modernity’s anthropological humanism, literature
harbors an experience of the being of language that already from
the beginning will haunt modernity and signal its limit, but as
such it also belongs to it as an internal oscillation.25 While this on
the one hand continues to give literature a singular place inside
the episteme, it also seems to reject its claims for an exorbitant
position. A possible conclusion of this would be that insurgence
inside language, even though indispensable, is not enough, and
requires to be prolonged into a dimension that transcends the dis-
cursive. For the Foucault of the late sixties, who begins to orient
his work towards the new question of power, literature gradually
25. The return of language as a historical opacity is what heralds the break-
down of the system of representation that characterized the classical
age, although language is now spread out in many functions, from the
formalist attempts at finding a pure universal language to the celebra-
tion of its infinity in literary writing. For modernity, Foucault suggests,
the problem of language unfolds in the distance between Nietzsche’s
question “Who speaks” and Mallarmé’s answer: the being of the Word
itself, to which the intransitivity of literary writing testifies in the
highest degree. See MC 314–318/303-307. For a discussion of this, see
Tilottama Rajan, “The Phenomenological Allegory: From ‘Death and
the Labyrinth’ to ‘The Order of Things,’” Poetics Today, 19:3 (1998).
320
ceases to appear as an ontological phenomenon, and increasingly

comes to be understood in terms of a particular type of discur-
sive regulation; “literature” becomes a way of delimiting texts, in
which the function of the author plays a crucial role in the order
of discourse by indicating a particular kind of origin that sets it
apart from scientific and other types of texts. Later on, Foucault
would even appear entirely to be dismissive of his early texts and
the search for an ontology of literature.26
In the lecture on the utopian body, the theme of literature re-
mains in the background. Utopia, Foucault suggests, should not
be reduced to a motif inherited from history or simply sealed
within the domain of “fabulation” (which is precisely what he
had suggested the year before in The Order of Things), but is root-
ed in the doubling of the body itself, in its capacity to transcend
itself into a virtual dimension. The question of the imaginary
however forms a bridge to the literary essays, in the sense that a
certain experience of the body can be understood as the origin
of a utopian fantasy that is particularly present in writing.
The contours of the imaginary are traced with reference to
the body’s constant quest for going beyond itself into an oneiric
dimension, which is also what the initial scene of the text locates
an a kind of immediate past, which is also the only literary ref-
erence: the narrator in Proust’s Recherche, anxiously awakening
in each new place, once more finds himself relocated to his own
body. In spite of the potentials of the Proustian virtualization
of space and time (of which Deleuze’s Proust et les signes had pro-
vided a striking analysis only three years earlier), we are here
brought back to a place from which we “cannot escape” (9),27
26. For the role of the author, see “What is an Author,” in Language, Counter-
Memory, Practice; for the rejection of the earlier texts from the sixties, see,
for instance, “Structuralism and Poststructuralism,” in EW 2.
27. Page references in the following are to the text in Foucault, Die Heteroto-
pien, Der utopische Körper: Les hétéropies, Le corps utopique: Zwei Radiovor-
träge (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005).
321
and Foucault sets out by painting a rather negative and restric-

tive picture of an objective body, understood as a limitation on
my freedom. I am chained to my body: “I cannot move around
without it, I cannot leave it where it is to go somewhere else”
(ibid). It is an inescapable or pitiless place, the “topia” (topie), to
which the subject is riveted, as when it seems itself in the mirror
every morning, “shortsighted, bald: not beautiful, to be sure”
(10), thus the very “contrary of a utopia” (9).28
It is against this that a first utopian movement emerges:
fairy-tales that depict a different, glorious body, moving at the
speed of light, becoming invisible at will, capable of all kinds
of tricks and transformations, or images of a soul that ascends,
hovers outside the body, and even may survive it. These fanta-
sies are however themselves rooted in the body, in the “fantas-
tic” relation it is capable of having to itself outside of its objec-
tive constitution, which also means that it cannot know itself
in any exhaustive way: “It also possesses places without place,
more profound places, places more insistent than the soul, than
the tomb, than the enchantment of magicians.” (12) It is an en-
tity with many dimensions, it is both open and closed, visible
and invisible; it is always outside of itself, and as such also the
origin of all utopian fantasies.
This ecstatic capacity is then externalized and inscribed back
onto the objective body, as in tattooing or other ritual practices
28. Even though Foucault makes no reference to his philosophical pre-

decessors, these initial description seems less related to the classical
Husserlian opposition between Körper, the body seen as an objective
physical entity from a third-person perspective, and Leib, the body lived
from within as the source of my spatial orientation and the point where
kinesthetic processes are knit together, which is the point of departure
for Merleau-Ponty. Without pressing these brief passages to much—
they are no doubt intended as a rhetorical contrast to the subsequent
movement of transcendence, which is shown to be more originary—it
seems reasonable to say that this description is in fact surprisingly close
to the Cartesian conception of the body as an inertia in relation to the
for-itself of the ego that we find in Sartre and the early texts of Levinas.
322
that prolong the virtual doubling already present in our first

self-relation, and transform it into a “fragment of imaginary
spaces that will communicate with the universe of divinities
or with the universe of the other” (15). Rather than something
added onto an objective being, this vertiginous virtuality now
proves to be primordial, and the place of the body is at once
here and nowhere: “The body is as the heart of the world, this
small utopian kernel from which I dream, I speak, I proceed, I
imagine, I perceive things in their place, and I negate them by
the indefinite power of the utopias that I imagine. My body is
like the City of the Sun. It has no place, but it is from it that all
possible places, real or utopian, emerge and radiate.” (18)29
This movement is however also always brought back to my
facticity, as the moment of restriction or finitude that it also
what reestablishes identity: the mirror that gives my reflection
back to me, and the experience of death where I once more will
be reduced to my objective body. And finally, in the last words
of the text, the act of making love shows me that “the body is
here” (20), i.e., it shows how the body of the other puts a defi-
nite limit, although no longer in a negative sense, to the utopian
movement, perhaps thereby restoring a different dimension to
facticity in relation to an other that is another subject.
Other spaces
If we now pass on to the second instance of heterotopia, pre-
sented in the public lecture from 1967, “Of Other Spaces,” we
immediately notice that it opens up a rather different perspec-
tive than the linguistic version offered in The Order of Things, but
also takes a route that at first seems opposed to the meditation
on the utopian body. Heterotopia now appears as connected to
29. The reference here is to Tommaso Campanella’s classic utopian work

La città del sole (1602), although Foucault does not develop any of its
architectural implications.
323
the production and reproduction of social space, it is like a nega-

tive foil to discipline (even though this concept still remains on
the horizon), and the order that it at once mirrors and subverts
is less a question of classification and taxonomy than of com-
mand. These two themes, discourse as structure and command,
will be joined together a few years later, and it becomes an ex-
plicit theme in the inaugural lecture at the Collège de France
in 1970, L’ordre du discours (rather misleadingly translated into
English as The Discourse on Language, which obliterates the prob-
lem of order by covering it under the blanket term “language”).
Here the order of things appears more as an ordering, a relation
of power where inclusion and exclusion are not just classificato-
ry terms on a discursive level, but also, and even predominantly,
institutional relations that make possible and prohibit varieties
of movement, passage, and circulation. Ultimately, as Foucault
will say in 1970, any such order of discourse rests on the exclu-
sion performed by the will to truth—which, he adds, is the most
enigmatic of exclusions since it makes truth itself into a problem,
a result of a battle or struggle rather than something emanating
from the good will or spontaneous rectitude of the subject’s fac-
ulties.30 In L’ordre du discours Foucault suggests that we should
look to the initial stages of Greek thought in order to discover
the emergence of this division, an analysis that he then begins
in the 1970–71 lectures on the will to knowledge.31 In the lecture
30. This is one of the many points that would connect Foucault to De-
leuze’s work of the period, for instance to the analysis of the “image of
thought” in the third chapter of Difference and Repetition. In L’ordre du
discours, Foucault sketches the outlines of an analysis of the transforma-
tion of the idea of truth (aletheia) in ancient Greece, whose basic features
had recently been investigated in Marcel Detienne’s 1967 study, Les
maîtres de vérité dans la Grèce archaïque (Paris: Maspero, 1967), on which
Foucault draws heavily. This transformation would occur roughly with
the advent of Platonic philosophy, where truth no longer depends on a
figure of mastery and authority, as in the sixth-century poets where the
one who speaks is an index of truth, but is transferred to the statement.
31. See Foucault, Leçons sur la volonté de savoir: Cours au Collège de France
324
from 1967, this theme is still only implicit, and while the analy-
sis of the way in which a given society orders its categories and
its social relations remains at a tentative and largely descriptive
level, it nevertheless engages a whole set of material and spatial
issues that would not reenter his work until much later.
The 1967 lecture begins by noting that if the nineteenth cen-
tury was obsessed with history and chronology, with the problem
of the originary and the derivative, today we imagine ourselves in
a space of simultaneity, of networks and interlinking. And when
structuralism acknowledges this, Foucault notes, this is not sim-
ply in terms of a negation of temporality and a predilection for
some frozen eternal order—which at the time were commonplace
accusations in the wake of the debate between Sartre and Lévi-
Strauss—but a way to rethink the interlacing of time, space, and
event, which is also how we might understand Foucault’s own
positive connection to structuralism, rather than in terms of the
strange idea that historical change would somehow be impossible
to understand, which was often ascribed to him.32
Space indeed has an entangled history of its own, and
Foucault parenthetically gives us a few hints of what such a his-
tory might look like, from the ancient and medieval hierarchy of
(1970–1971), ed. Daniel Defert (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2011). Here the

perspective shifts somewhat, and Foucault traces the idea of a “will to
truth” through several agonistic juridical forms from Homer through
Hesiod and up to Sophocles; the debate between Plato and the Soph-
ists however fades from sight, and it is now Aristotle’s analysis of the
apophantic proposition that signals the decisive step in the expulsion of
the sophists and the creation of a purified knowledge (connaissance) that
aspires to transcend the disruptive forces of “knowing” (savoir).
32. The allegation often directed against Foucault’s early work, that he
would deny change, seems misguided. While it is true that some of the
analyses performed in The Order of Things have a structuralist leaning,
above all in the emphasis in rules that would govern the formation of
statements inside a given episteme, it us just as true that there is no
general theory of language, structuralist or other, and the book is just as
occupied with change between the epistemic order as their respective
inner structure.
325
places, which remained operative in everyday life as well as on a

cosmological level, and then was pried open by the intrusion of
the infinite, in a series of upheavals leading up to the Cartesian
extensio that renders all sites equivalent in the mathematical
projection of the coordinate system. This historical background
is however less important, and Foucault soon passes over to
the present: today, he claims, we tend to think more in terms
of sites, nodal intersections understood in relation to series,
networks, and a vocabulary derived from information theory.
Our space has thus once more become a relation between sites,
although not in the sense of the Aristotelian analysis of topos
that inscribes places within a stable order, but rather, Foucault
somewhat enigmatically adds, in a way that forms the basis of
our modern anxieties.33 Bachelard and phenomenology, he con-
tinues, has taught us that space is not simply a homogeneous
extension, but always fantasmatic and projective (as was the
case in his own preceding lecture on the utopian body); there is
however also another type of space, which is what will introduce
us to the new definition of heterotopia: a place that “eats and
scrapes away at us,” where “the erosion of our life, our time,
and our history takes place”; places that resist the operations
33. Maybe such an intuition also lies behind Heidegger’s remark in one of
his last texts, when he, in the context of a discussion of how modern
technology transforms space, notes that the latter must be under-
stood on a pair with Goethe’s Urphänomen: it cannot be derived from
anything else, it is neither subjective nor objective, but precede this
alternative—and, he adds, this impossibility of reducing or turning away
from the phenomenon toward something else is what produces anxiety.
See Heidegger, “Die Kunst und der Raum” (1969), in Aus der Erfahrung
des Denkens, Gesamtausgabe vol. 13 (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann,
1983), 206. This brief essay was originally conceived in dialog with the
work of the Basque sculptor Eduardo Chilida; for discussions of this
encounter and Chilida’s work, see Otto Pöggeler, Bild und Technik (Mu-
nich: Fink, 2002), 225–31, and Andrew J. Mitchell, Heidegger Among the
Sculptors: Body, Space, and the Art of Dwelling (Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 2010), 66–94, none of which however address the question of
anxiety.
326
of consciousness, even subvert it; places that relate to all other

spaces in the sense that they “suspend, neutralize, or reverse the
set of relations that are designated, reflected, or represented by
them” (EW 2, 177f).
It is true that these spaces could be called both utopias and
heterotopias, and Foucault proposes that we should differenti-
ate them in the following way: utopias are inverted or perfected
imaginary forms of present society, and they cannot be localized
inside of it; heterotopias, on the other hand, are real places34
that are formed in the very founding acts of society; they are
contrary locations that on one level represent, question, and in-
vert all other spaces, but in this they also form a coherent sys-
tem together with their opposites (and here we may recognize a
typical feature of cybernetics, to which Foucault referred earlier,
namely the idea of self-regulation). One could even imagine a
“heterotopology,” Foucault says, a systematic description, if not
a science (and here he retracts the claim in the radio talk the
year before) of such places, and he proposes six principles for
this type of analysis.
1. These places exist in each society, but can be divided into
two major groups: heterotopias of crisis, as in the case of sa-
cred or forbidden places, or places of passage like the board-
ing school, military service, or the honeymoon trip, and het-
34. Foucault suggests that an intermediary form would be exemplified by

the mirror, which brings us closer to aesthetic issues: in producing an
imaginary double, the mirror shifts my identity so that I am both here
and not-here, both there and not-there. This brief aside may be read
in conjunction with the figure of the mirror in the famous analysis of
Velázquez in The Order of Things, where the gaze of the painter, the royal
couple, and the spectator are superimposed so as to form a “metathesis
of visibility.” This interpretation of Las Meninas in fact forms another
introduction to the book, located after the Borges citation, and unlike
the literary example it forms an essential part of the narrative of the
text itself, by prefiguring the close of the classical episteme of repre-
sentation and the birth of Man, who will come to occupy the place left
vacant in the painting.
327
erotopias of deviation, as in the case of rest homes, hospitals,

and prisons, places which, Foucault notes, may have become
more common today.
2. Their functions may change due to the structure of society,
for instance the cemetery, whose location is dependent on
the varying perception of death; once at the center of soci-
ety, it has today been pushed to the margins and rendered
invisible.
3. They may juxtapose incompatible sites in one place, like the
theater, the cinema, or the garden.
4. They are linked to particular slices of time, “heterochronies”
that break away from the flow of everyday events, as in the
case of museums and libraries that accumulate past time, or
fairgrounds and festivals that are connected to the transi-
tory nature of time; and finally there is the case of the vaca-
tion village that brings together both of them in a time that
stands still.
5. They constitute systems of opening and closure, they are not
generally freely accessible like public space, and require a
function of gatekeeping. Some may even include and exclude
at the same time, and create a kind of spatial pocket (for in-
stance the Brazilian bedrooms where the visitor could enter
without meeting the family, or the American motel room).
6. Finally, they have two extreme functions: either to expose
all of normal life as illusory, or to create another and more
perfect space. In this they are places of illusion and compen-
sation; the first can be exemplified by the brothel, the second
by certain colonies, for instance Puritan societies in North
America.
This is obviously a rather loose and improvised description,
which takes us from graveyards and libraries to museums and
brothels, from cinemas and motels rooms to rites of passage and
initiation. It would be easy to criticize Foucault for certain in-
328
consistencies—but maybe, just like Borges, he is making fun of

our desire to classify, of our desire to create precisely a logos of
the heteron. This notwithstanding, the fundamental feature of
all these places is that they have a productive and a subversive
relation to everyday spaces. A heterotopia is a place where we
can find rest and withdraw (the holiday resort, the convent, the
library), but it also allows for a certain overturning of the rules
of everyday conduct. But precisely because of this duality, it op-
erates as an integrated and functional part of the spatial cycle of
(re)production, or of “the production of space,” as Henri Lefeb-
vre would say. To go on holiday is already to envision returning
to work—but it also produces fantasies of subversion that both
form part of the cycle or reproduction and destabilize it: hetero-
topias always threaten to overflow their boundaries, they are a
source of uprisings and unrests that the social order attempts to
contain and even integrate as disciplinary mechanisms.
Heterotopias thus function both as an instrument for the
reproduction of the social order, and as a constant source of dis-
order and contestation that has to be contained within precise
limits. They can be taken as materialized instances of order as
ordering, but also as materialized experiences of the contingen-
cy of order—they are conditions not of an archeology of epis-
temic rules, but of spatial and temporal boundaries that in any
given culture determine what should and what should not be
done, when to do or not to do it. In this their otherness may
seem less radical and more straightforwardly empirical than the
vertiginous non-ground of the epistemic orders excavated in the
archeology of knowledge, but they are also what provides these
orders with a physical instantiation and practical application:
the heterotopias of language and space are different, and yet
knit together in the fabric that binds words, things, and actions
together, and constitute the normality of knowing and acting in
a given epoch.
329
Limits of heterotopia
The idea of heterotopia was early on picked up in a critique of
Foucault, proposed from a Marxist perspective by some of the
key figures in Venice School in the late 1970s. These polemics
tend to assume that Foucault not only wanted to reassess Marx-
ism, but in fact to simply discard its lessons in favor of an ideal-
ism that dissolves all material specificity of the social order. In
the collective volume Il dispositivo Foucault (1977, with contri-
butions from Franco Rella, Manfredo Tafuri, Georges Teyssot,
and Massimo Cacciari), Foucault’s conception of power was
scrutinized in a highly critical but ultimately misleading fash-
ion.35 But while it was misguided, the polemic can still be seen
as instructive, since it provides a negative relief against which
Foucault’s conception becomes clearer, and also because it ar-
ticulates parts of its polemic in terms of architectural issues.
In the introduction Franco Rella proposes an interpreta-
tion that sets the tone for the following discussions, in which
Foucault’s rejection of the juridical (prohibitive, negative) and
unitary concept of power leads to the idea that power would be
nothing but a plurality of dispositifs that attempt to “suture an
empty center,” something wholly “other,” a blank or a void in
being (DF 10 note).36 For Rella, Foucault’s understanding of
35. Il dispositivo Foucault (Venice: Cluva, 1977)). Henceforth cited as DF
with pagination.
36. In the following I will focus on the texts by Rella and Teyssot, which
are the most rewarding. Cacciari aligns himself with Rella’s claims, and
suggests that “The anarchical dispersal of power, understood simply as
disciplinary techniques, coexist with a fetishistic conception of power”
(DF 61), to the effect that Foucault’s analysis is claimed to ultimately
rest on “mystical-ideal” (62) dialectic between Unity and Multiplicity.
Tafuri’s contribution is strangely enough the most disappointing, since
one would have expected more: after a few interesting although tan-
gential remarks on the relation between word and image in The Order
of Things, he too succumbs to idea that power in Foucault would wholly
dispersed, ungraspable, even mystical. He ends up equating it with an
equally misguided interpretation of Derrida’s idea of dissemination: “a
kind of private game without rules whose social effects can be verified”
330
power would be that of a non-place, a “mysterious noumenon”

(DF 12) that transforms all concrete spatial orders, even space
itself, into a heterotopia: “Space is always ‘other,’ always hetero-
topic” (ibid). For Rella this also means not only that the concept
of ideology is rejected (which is indeed Foucault’s thesis), but
also that in the end analysis itself becomes useless, which is far
from Foucault’s claims: “Transparence is absolute. Thus there
is nothing to dissolve. Nothing to analyze.” (13) Power, Rella
suggests, is for Foucault a “non-place” that can only be grasped
through its “infinite heterotopic localizations” (ibid), which is
an exact inversion of Foucault, for whom power is always local-
ized, specific, and belongs to a precise constellation, rather than
being diffuse phenomenon that permeates everything in the
same manner. For Rella, Foucault cannot reach the level of de-
terminate contradiction—which is simply another way of saying
that he does not subscribe to a traditional class analysis—and his
concept of power in the end becomes useless and counterpro-
ductive. In his own subsequent essay in the book, “The Political
Economy of the Body,” Rella draws the even sharper conclusion
that Foucault’s discourse, by virtue of its mystifying quality, “in
the end becomes not a critical discourse on power, but the dis-
course of power itself” (55, my italics), a kind of idealist veil
(45). While other writings by Tafuri are more appreciative of Foucault’s

genealogies, especially the essays gathered in The Sphere and the Labyrinth
(1980), they ultimately remain at the same impressionist level and
show little sign of any sustained reading. The absence of a productive
encounter between Tafuri and Foucault is indeed one of the missed
opportunities of postwar architectural theory, and it was no doubt to
the detriment of both. Tafuri could have given Foucault a much sharper
perception of architectural history, which always remains slightly out
of focus in his research on spatial and urban assemblages, and Foucault
might have forced Tafuri to rethink the philosophical eclecticism that,
while not a problem in itself, led him into problems that for a while
may have been essential on the personal level—in this not unlike the
“objective impasses” in Foucault—but sometimes generated false solu-
tions, such as the massive and, I think, untenable divide between opera-
tive and critical history. For more on this, see chap. 1, above.
331
draped over reality so as to hide its true contradictions.

It is ironic that Rella’s criticisms on one level seem almost
identical to Jean Baudrillard’s diagnosis presented the same year
in his Oublier Foucault. Baudrillard is however less interested in
correcting Foucault in the name of Marxism than to intensify
his claims so as to pass beyond, or “forget,” him (in the infinite,
not imperative, it must be added, oublier and not oubliez; the
suggestion is that we ask ourselves what if would mean to forget
Foucault, not that we ought to do it, even though this distinction
is of course inaudible in French). For Baudrillard—who largely
supports his reading on Discipline and Punish and the first vol-
ume of The History of Sexuality, rather than on the idea of het-
erotopia—the ubiquity of power and sex that allegedly results
from Foucault’s analysis means that these have ceased to be ap-
plicable concepts, which however does not imply that we should
return to more traditional formulas, but that the “principle of
reality” that still guides Foucault’s use of them must be aban-
doned. Since power and sex are everywhere in Foucault’s analy-
ses, Baudrillard suggest, they are in fact nowhere, they have im-
ploded, and the path we must choose is not to rectify Foucault,
but to intensify those features that in Rella’s reading made him
problematic.37
It is important to note precisely how and in what respect
both of these readings are misleading. First, on the general level
37. “It may be that Foucault only speaks so eloquently of power (and, let
us not forget this, in real and objective terms, as dispersed multiplici-
ties, but in terms that do not question the objective perspective he
assumes on them—an infinitesimal and pulverized power, but whose
reality principle is not put into question) because power is dead, and
not just irreparably dead through dispersal, but quite simply dissolved
in a way that still escapes us, dissolved through reversibility, by having
been annulled and hyperrealized in simulation.” Baudrillard, Oublier
Foucault (Paris: Galilée, 1977), 13. Immediately before this Baudrillard
also states, similarly to Rella, that “Foucault’s presentation is mirror of
those powers that de describes” (11). Rella inversely connects Foucault
to Baudrillard and the “nouveaux philosophes” (DF, 17, note 16).
332
of the question of power—which, it must be remembered, is not

yet explicitly in question in the essays on utopia and heteroto-
pia—it is simply wrong that Foucault in his later writings would
have presented it as a “non-place” or a “mysterious noumenon,”
or that it is simply everywhere in the sense of a fleeting and
atmospheric phenomenon. While is true that he wanted to
move away from what he saw as the far too massive dualisms
of Marxism, and that this move was perhaps never sufficient-
ly reflected except than on the level of personal reactions, he
did this in order to investigate the realities of power through a
more differentiated analysis that pays attention to complexity of
singular and local conditions.38 Far from dissolving the power
relations into a non-localized noumenon, he wants to under-
stand the materiality and spatiality of power in the most con-
crete possible manner, as it takes on form in prisons, schools,
hospitals, factories, etc. Power is always specific, particular, and
it is exerted in singular dispositifs with their singular objectives
(to teach the student, to cure that sick, to correct the deviant, to
discipline the soldier, to render the worker productive, to make
the delirious reflective and reasonable, etc.), and the problem, if
there is one, is not the noumenal character of Foucault’s concept
of power, but inversely its extreme specificity and locality, an
almost nominalist quality that makes it hard to make general
claims outside a particular context.
It is true that Foucault resisted the division between science
and ideology, but this too he did not in order to turn his own
38. For a discussion that attempts to combine Foucault with Marx, see
Richard Marsden, The Nature of Capital: Marx after Foucault (London:
Routledge, 1999). In this reading, Marx explains the “why,” the struc-
tures that limit social action, but not the “how,” the mechanisms that
make these structures operative, whereas Foucault explains the “how”
of power mechanisms, but not the ultimate goals of disciplinary power.
While to some extent attractive, this solution however introduces pre-
cisely the crucial moment of teleology that Foucault rejects, and for him
the “why” will always be a shifting and unstable effect of the “how.”
333
analyses into some ungraspable and atmospheric discourse on the

void in being, but to interrogate a different level, that of savoir
(a term that only with great caution can be translated into the
English “knowledge”), a neutral term that encompasses both the
talk of the delinquent, the madman and the pervert as well as
that of the prison warden, the psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst.39
This does not mean that everything in the end becomes the same
and that all distinctions are obliterated, only that a genealogical
analysis of the formations of knowledge of power should not take
the teleology of truth as its guiding principle, and that there is
conflict, asymmetry, reversal, and contestation involved in any
relation. Truths about human beings, their crimes, insanities, and
desires, are always caught up in struggles, which does not simply
falsify them, but shows that any establishing of such truth will
entail asymmetry as well the possibility of reversal.
39. On this point, there is an encounter between Foucault and Lefebvre.
The relation between them seems to have been highly antagonistic,
at least on Lefebvre’s part. They however share the interest in how
mechanisms of power and knowledge intersect with everyday life,
and how subjective experience is at both an effect and the locus of
resistance. A Foucauldian-style critique of Lefebvre would single out
his belief in the “given,” and his overemphasis on subjectivity as a free
and spontaneous; Lefebvre on his part explicitly charged Foucault with
blindness to the contradictory and dialectical dimension of everyday
life, and suggested that he somehow deduced them immediately from a
transcendent structure of power. This is also the point where Lefebvre
underscores the distinction between savoir and connaissance, and claims
that Foucault symptomatically does not pay any attention to the second
with its connotation of skills and concrete practices, thus forfeiting the
dialectic between the sphere of epistemology and the world of practice.
But as we have noted, the use of the term “savoir” is not intended to
render everyday life invisible, but rather to suspend the opposition
between ideology and science, which is a motif Foucault shares with
Lefebvre. Edward Soja’s attempt to bring them together in terms of
“thirdspace” provides a good analysis of the idea of space in Lefebvre,
but remains confusing on Foucault, not least since he connects hetero-
topia directly to the space of discipline. As Łukasz Stanek notes, the
term “heterotopia” in fact figures in Lefebvre too, although it refers to
the sense of being excluded from central urban space, with reference to
the Nanterre University; see Stanek, Henri Lefebvre on Space (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 178.
334
The concepts of “heterotopia” and “non-place” proposed by

Rella are in fact derived from the version of heterotopia proposed
in The Order of Things, and as Daniel Défert points out,40 what all
the authors in Il dispositivo Foucault curiously enough miss, with
the exception for Georges Teyssot, is that other concept of “het-
erotopia” that indeed relates to real and material places in the
world. Teyssot’s contribution to Il dispositivo Foucault, “Eterotopie
e storia degli spazi,”41 is the only one that takes note of Foucault’s
different uses of the term heterotopia, but he too still understands
the term basically in a taxonomic way, and his main reference is
The Order of Things. But in spite of the rather foreshortened read-
ing of Foucault, Teyssot extracts a highly productive question. He
applies the heterotopic model of classification to a hospital from
the eighteenth century, and in the first step his analysis seems
merely to confirm that the taxonomy of patients from our per-
spective appears as wholly arbitrary. But then he proceeds to
another question: does architecture belong to the episteme of its
age, to a set of rules that under a given time would regulate the
visible and the sayable? Or must architecture be understood es-
sentially as a hybrid entity, a result of many conflicting interest, a
composite that analysis must decompose? This second question
points to the passage between the linguistic and spatial versions
of heterotopia, in the sense that the ground that is “once more
stirring under or feet” must necessarily also be a material ground,
the physical instantiation of taxonomic structures that regulates
the interplay of the heterotopic and the “autotopic” (the “same”
and not “other” space, to coin a term that Foucault himself did
not use). If the concept of heterotopia points to specific places
where our everyday life is subverted and where something “oth-
40. See Defert, “Foucault, Space, and the Architects,” in Documenta x: Poet-
ics/Politics (Stuttgart: Cantz, 1998).
41. Teyssot’s essay has been translated by David Stewart as “Heterotopia
and the History of Spaces,” in K. Michael Hays (ed.,) Architecture Theory
Since 1968 (Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 1998).
335
er” or “different” appears in the cracks in the fabric of normality,

they must also be seen in relation to the “sameness” of spaces and
language that uphold this very normality.
Reinventing the site

Returning to our initial question, we can now see how art prac-
tices that intentionally situate themselves outside the divisions
between the aesthetic and the everyday sphere, between the tem-
poral layering of time as it appears in institutions and the hori-
zontality of mundane life, may be connected to the idea of het-
erotopia. Abandoning its pretenses to utopia in the sense of an
other place radically outside of the sameness of space, and asking
for that which is other in the same, that which ruptures the pres-
ent without being elsewhere, in what sense do such moves entail a
different understanding of the site of the work—both in the sense
of its physical setting, as well as in terms of its place in the imagi-
nary? Or more generally, how does this impact on the place of the
imaginary as such, in between what has been traditionally called
the faculties (reason and sensibility), or in psychoanalytic par-
lance, as an order that precedes—even while remaining inside—
the symbolic, and is farthest away from the real?42
The desire to return to the concreteness of the site, as in
the various claims about “site specificity” that were opposed
to the alleged abstraction of modernist visual art, emerged in
the various practices in and around minimal art. Independently,
and yet in parallel to the visual arts, the rediscovery of place in
architecture, notably in the theory of genius loci and its vari-
ous cognates, appeared as an equally radically challenge to the
technological universality of postwar building. While these dif-
42. Those of my comments in the following that draw on Lacan intersect

in several respects with those of K. Michael Hays’s Architecture’s Desire:
Reading the Late Avant-Garde (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2010), even
though my conclusions differ somewhat from his.
336
ferent reactions do not form a unity on the level of the forms

produced, or that of theoretical programs, we might see it as
responses to an underlying worry that the physical sensorium
was in the process of dissolving, thus the sense of a return to
something overlooked or lost, a longing for concreteness and
embodiment, which at least in architecture was directly linked a
critique of technological modernity
As Fredric Jameson suggests, “We need rather to take into
consideration the possibility that the renewed attention to the
problem of the site is itself a function of the imminent extinc-
tion of the very category in question: an urgency and a des-
peration that then washes back over this theme to lend it a kind
of second-degree historical content in its own right, the return
of ‘content’ itself as a new event.”43 The theorist of genius loci,
Christian Norberg-Schulz, similarly proposes that the “loss
of place” is the basic experience of our era,44 just as Kenneth
Frampton, although with more emphasis on the necessity of his-
torical mediation, launches the idea of critical regionalism and
the “tectonic” as a mediation of the autonomy of the formal
language of architecture with its cultural context.45 Regardless
of the considerable differences between these theories, they
share an experience of loss that must be countered by a restor-
ing praxis; but maybe such a loss of place is simply a necessary
consequence of what has been called our “supermodernity,”46
where other forms of places, largely modeled on transit, have
become part and parcel of everyday life, and in fact must be de-
43. The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 165.
44. See Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of
Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1980), above all chap. 1.
45. Se Frampton, “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an
Architecture of Resistance” (1983) and “Rappel à l’ordre, The Case of
the Tectonic” (1990), both reprinted in Frampton, Labour, Work and
Architecture (London: Phaidon Press, 2002).
46. See Marc Auge, Non-Lieux, Introduction à une anthropologie de la supermo-
dernité (Paris: Seuil, 1992).
337
scribed in terms of the new experience they give rise to. And
furthermore, intentional re-creations of places may seem like a
resistance to the emptiness of universal placelessness, but are in
fact and integral part of global spatial system that works pre-
cisely by diversification, localization, and regionalization. The
various claims for the place made in art and architecture, frag-
mentary and contradictory as they are, cast a particular light on
this process.
In many respects, contemporary artistic practices, especially
in claiming to intervene into the fabric of everyday life and to
detach our perceptual and mental habits from an unquestioned
anchoring, aspire to release a heterotopic energy belonging both
to language and space, and particularly to the interstitial ele-
ment that articulates them upon each other. Foucault’s inclu-
sion of the museum as a heterochrony that accumulates past
time points to one aspect of this process, in which the horizon-
tal flow of events is folded back upon itself, twisted out of joint,
and laid out before us in order to be evaluated anew. The es-
tranged gaze on the contemporary moment made possible by
the museum and similar institutions of accumulation shows our
current practices in a different light, reveals the contingencies
and necessities that permeate them, and in this it also asks to
what extent we could do things otherwise.
The crucial issue seems to be to retrieve a sense of mobility,
of inventing a capacity for displacement that would not simply
congeal into objects of appreciation, but release a similar energy
in whoever encounters such events. And perhaps it is not coin-
cidental that the last example Foucault provides us with at the
end of the 1967 lecture on other spaces is the boat. It is presented
as the heterotopia par excellence that condenses all the ambiva-
lences of the preceding examples, and it is difficult not to recall
the glorious description of the Ship of Fools, at the outset of The
History of Madness, located at the moving frontier between inner
338
and outer, as the inner of the outer and inversely—as a figure of

freedom and enclosure at once. In the final lines of the lecture
this limit begins to resonate even more with the idea of move-
ment and displacement, with the oneiric and the imaginary, and
it points to the possibility of a heterotopia of resistance: “In
civilizations without ships the dreams dry up, espionage takes
the place of adventure, and the police that of the corsairs.” (EW
2, 185).
Coming back to these texts by Foucault from the late six-
ties, partly in order to read them as impasses, or perhaps better
prismatic points of intersection from which many of his later in-
terrogations would unfold, might we not also follow the sugges-
tion by Molly Nesbit and see them as “event infiltrated by other
events,” i.e., as engaged in a subterranean dialog with many of
the radical artistic movements of the period, which themselves
form equally prismatic points of intersection with respect to the
present? The site-specific practices that emerged in the 1960s
were surely not on Foucault’s horizon when he gave the lecture
in 1967, and yet the questions he posed appear particularly rel-
evant when read through this connection. His own writings on
the visual arts at the time were mostly engaged with problem
of painting and representation, as in the book-length study of
Magritte (and most famously in the reading of Velázquez Las
Meninas placed at the beginning of The Order of Things), or the
series of lectures on Manet and the origin of modernist paint-
ing. The latter he interprets in way that in hindsight is surpris-
ingly close to the formalist criticism developed by Greenberg
and Fried, unlikely as it may be that Foucault would have under-
stood the Manet lectures as a contribution to this debate, which
was focused on the issue of the flatness, materiality, and “ob-
jecthood” of painting, i.e., the demarcation line between an art
that would continue a modernist quest for autonomy in terms
of a residual illusionism, and one that collapses autonomy into
339
the world of real objects.47 From our vantage point, the produc-
tive link is however not to the status of late modernist paint-
ing, but to the emerging artistic practices in which the ideas of
site and space were radically transformed, precisely in terms
of a heterochrony and a heterotopy that overlays time, space,
and language in a new way. Locating them within Foucault’s
heterotopia-utopia quadrant will to be sure not provide them
with a general grid of intelligibility, but rather give rise to a set
or resonances, sometimes collapsing concepts into each other,
sometimes breaking them apart. In this, it remains faithful to
the idea of impasses that are not there to be surmounted, but
explored as that which gives thought mobility, pushes it ahead,
from one place to another.
Varieties of sites and non-sites

The artist who more than anyone else embodies these shifts,
and whose investigations run parallel to the researches of Fou-
cault that have been in focus here, is no doubt Robert Smithson,
whose work soon expanded beyond the vocabulary of mini-
mal art precisely because of his understanding of the site as a
complex of same and other, of language and space. Working in
remote places, often incorporating geological and natural pro-
cesses in a way that displaces the parameters of aesthetics and
the art object, he still refused any understanding of the land of
land art as a lost Arcadia; there is no originary place to be recre-
ated. Nature for Smithson is rather a time of oblivion and era-
sure, a process of entropy that bars any identification of it as our
true home; his quest is not for a return to some prior state of
sanctity, but for a state of “dedifferentiation,” an oceanic state
where words, things, and images begin to fuse. This also why it
47. For a discussion of these different readings of Manet, see Carole Talon-
Hugon, “Manet ou le désarroi du spectateur,” in Maryvonne Saison
(ed.). Michel Foucault, La peinture de Manet (Paris: Seuil, 2004).
340
is difficult to distinguish his theoretical statements from his ar-

tistic practice, his criticism from his art, which is a consequence
of his multivalent understanding of the site of the work.48 If
there is “a museum of language” in the “vicinity of art,” it is not
because any of the terms would be reducible to the other, but
because they share a similar condition of dedifferentiation that
will eventually lead all stable structures to collapse.49
Just as little as the insistence on the site implies any claim
about a return to the originary does his move toward the blur-
ring of boundaries exclude the problem of reality and represen-
tation in favor of a direct presence; in fact it intensifies it to the
point that it transforms the institutional frame into an means
of aesthetic production.50 So for instance in his 1969 Yucatan
48. It is true that Smithson himself did not consider his writings as part of
his art; posterity has however not hesitated to see his texts and works
as a single continuum. So, for instance, in Craig Owens’s often-cited
review of the posthumous collection of Robert Smithson’s writings,
where he famously suggests that we in the case of Smithson can observe
a fundamental displacement of visual art from the visual to the field
of language. In Owens’s perspective, Smithson’s work with texts and
images, ranging from the early non-sites and text-photo essays to the
later monumental projects, constitutes a kind of Baroque practice that
allows for a return of the repressed unconscious in late modernist art,
the “eruption of language into the field of the visual arts.” See Craig
Owens, “Earthwords,” October no. 10 (Fall 1979); reprinted in Owens,
Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1992), 45. For a discussion of Smithson as a
critic, see Lars-Erik Hjertström, “Robert Smithson and the Importance
of a Sovereign Criticism”, Site 26–27 (2009). For a discussion of Smith-
son’s philosophical views, which equally emphasizes the importance
of language, see Gary Shapiro, Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art after
Babel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
49. See Smithson “A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art” (1968),”
in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1996).
50. In a discussion with Dennis Oppenheim and Michael Heizer, Smithson
responds to the question how he understands the relation between gal-
lery spaces and nature: “I think we all see the landscape as coextensive
with the gallery. I don’t think we’re dealing with matter in terms of a
back to nature movement. For me the world is a museum. Photography
makes nature obsolete.” See “Discussions with Heizer, Oppenheimer,
Smithson,” The Collected Writings, 246, my italics.
341
Mirror Displacements (1–9), which together with the essay pub-

lished the same year in Artforum, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in
the Yucatan,” in this respects constitutes one of his most signifi-
cant works.51 Moving between texts, photographs, and a series
of actions all existing at different times and places, the work “it-
self” is impossible to access outside of the multiple sites of entry
that it creates (or, which amounts to the same, infinitely acces-
sible), none of which are more correct or true than any other.
In the concluding section in the essay that constitutes one layer
of the work, Smithson writes: “If you visit the sites (a doubt-
ful probability) you will find nothing but memory-traces, for
the mirror displacements were dismantled right after they were
photographed. The mirrors are somewhere in New York. The
reflected light has been erased. Remembrances are but numbers
on a map, vacant memories constellating the intangible terrains
in deleted vicinities. It is the dimension of absence that remains
to be found. The expunged color that remains to be seen. The
fictive voices of the totems have exhausted their argument.
Yucatan is elsewhere.”52
Mirror Displacements embodies in a more complex form fash-
ion the dialectic between “Site” and “Nonsite” that Smithson
had begun to investigate the year before his trip to Yucatan.
Inspired by a visit to the slate quarries of Bangor-Pen Argyle,
Pennsylvania, Smithson had initiated an exploration of the
boundary between inside and outside, nature and art, by return-
51. The same things could undoubtedly be said about Smithson’s most fa-
mous work, The Spiral Jetty. Here too the work can be accessed through
photographs, films, and texts, as well as through its physical manifesta-
tion. The latter has however come to overshadow the other dimensions
of the work, transforming the “elsewhere” into a physical difficulty of
actually getting to the site, or into a kind of ironic Fort-Da game because
of the sinking and rising of Great Salt Lake, which in certain periods
have made the work invisible.
52. Smithson, “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan,” The Collected
Writings, 132f.
342
ing materials picked up at the quarry to the gallery and present-

ing them together with maps, photographs and geological infor-
mation, which together formed the “Nonsite” that reflected and
undermined the integrity of the “Site” as both were drawn into
a process of mirroring and imbrication. This was, Smithson re-
marked in a statement accompanying the exhibition, a “course
of hazards, double path maps that belong to both sides of the
dialectic at once.”53
The site-nonsite dialectic was however still caught up in a bi-
nary play of inside and outside, which in the Mirror Displacements
is taken further and becomes more like a trajectory meandering
though time and space. The latter work brings together many of
his basic themes: a fascination with the prehistory and geologi-
cal past of modern society, which still remains lodged inside our
modern systems and artifacts,54 the mirror as model for art that
duplicates and dislocates itself in infinity, both of which point to
a particular structure of temporal reversibility and duplication;
of crucial important in this context is however also the fact that
the movement out of the gallery space ends up taking us back
to he institution, so as to transform the site itself into a mobile
construction. The “elsewhere” that both is and is not Yucatan
is framed, by photography and writing, by the gallery space and
the pages of the magazine, and all of these parts are swept along
in a transversal movement that shows the instable and funda-
mentally mediated character of the place that the critical art of
the period wanted to retrieve beyond the abstractions of mod-
ernism.
53. Cited from the reprint in Robert Smithson: Sculpture, ed. Robert Hobbs
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 110.
54. For Smithson, the monuments of modernity are monuments of entropy
and decay, and upon closer inspection they prove be “ruins in reverse.”
See for instance the reading of minimalist sculpture in “Entropy and
the new Monuments” (1966) and “A Tour of the Monuments of Pas-
saic, New Jersey” (1967).
343
Closer to architecture we find works like Hotel Palenque

(1969), Partially Buried Woodshed (1972), which each in their
particular way draws out the implication of the temporal lay-
ering of the sites and spatial structures, how they come to be
inhabited, even haunted, by events that not only pre- but also
antedate them. Hotel Palenque, conceived during the same trip
to Mexico that was at the origin of the mirror displacements,
constitutes what Smithson sometimes talked of in terms of a
“ruin in reverse.” Here too issues of representation and tempo-
ral layering are crucial: during the trip Smithson took a series of
photographs of a hotel where he was staying, and which seemed
to be undergoing a continual renovation that only furthered its
dilapidation; additions were made that only contributed to the
disorder, repairs that lead to even more damage, in an endless
cycle of self-deconstructing restoral. Subsequently these images
served as the basis for a lecture to architecture students at the
University of Utah in 1972, at the occasion of his last completed
and most famous large-scale project, Spiral Jetty in Great Salt
Lake, where the “de-architecturalized” site of Hotel Palenque
was presented as a meditation on the co-implication of entro-
py and structure (the work today exists the typically mediated
and yet congenial form of a slide installation with a tape re-
cording of the lecture). Instead of marveling at the Mayan ru-
ins that have made the site famous—which could be glimpsed
from the window, as Smithson notes in passing—he meditates
on the hotel’s emptied pool, the deserted dancehall, and vari-
ous architectural oddities, as if the depth of prehistory had to
be released from its grandiose and picturesque dimension, and
brought back into the ephemerality of the Instamatic to be ex-
perienced.55 The task of hotel restoration becomes as infinite as
55. As Jeff Wall points out, Smithson engages in a kind of parody of

photo journalism, beginning in text-image works like the essay on the
monuments of Passaic, where the travel description at first hand seems
344
time itself (or, from another perspective, just as finite, since it

is doomed to perpetual incompletion), it is ceaselessly begun
anew and just as quickly abandoned, allowing the architectural
mishaps to unfold in a rhythm that belongs to an order outside
of our plans and projects.
Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) is a more direct take on decay
and the presence and power of the earth to dislodge our archi-
tectural quest for stability and permanence. Located at the cam-
pus of Kent State University, Ohio, it consisted of an abandoned
woodshed on which twenty cartloads of earth and dirt hade been
poured, until the central beam cracked. Smithson wanted the
work to remain on site and be subjected to natural decay, and
it stayed there until the final remains were removed in 1984.56 A
couple of months after the completion of the work, on May 4,
four students were killed and nine wounded by the Ohio National
Guard during a protest on the campus against the American in-
vasion of Cambodia. While this event as such obviously had no
direct link to the work—which at the time had been little no-
ticed—associations could easily be made between the cracking of
the house and the cracking of the political system, “infiltrating”
one event with another, most visible in the anonymous message
“May 4 Kent 1970” painted on the woodshed during the summer,
which brought the work to public attention.
just as meandering and directionless as his photographs are devoid
of the qualities of “professional” photography; see Jeff Wall, “‘Marks
of Indifference’: Aspects of Photography in, or as, Conceptual Art,”
in Ann Goldstein and Anne Rorimer (eds.), Reconsidering the Object of
Art: 1965–1975 (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996).
But while there is undoubtedly an element of “deskilling” involved
here, one must not overlook the particular poetic of Smithson, which
is precisely to invest the sites that he documents with a temporal and
existential depth that is largely absent from the dialectical narrative of
conceptual photography that Wall constructs.
56. For a thorough documentation of the work’s genesis and subsequent
historical fate, see Dorothy Shinn, Robert Smithson’s Partially Buried
Woodshed, exh. cat. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University School of Art
Gallery, 1990).
345
Such contingencies are however from the outset part of the

conception of the work: the accelerating process of dilapida-
tion is proportional to the profusion and weight of accumulated
meanings. Entropy is on the one hand a loss of information, but
on the other hand just as much an increase, in the sense that
the structure becomes inhabited by otherness, chaos, and de-
structuration, “de-architecturized,” in a movement which is not
simply opposed to architecture as an external contingence, but
in Smithson’s version belongs to its temporal nature. Similarly,
the task of restoration or preservation of the work (a question
that became increasingly acute as its fame grew) brings out the
multi-layered dimensions of this temporality: how can one pre-
serve that whose purpose is to disintegrate, to what point in
time should the work be brought back so that its disintegra-
tion and eventual disappearance become possible to experience
at the right speed, at the right parallax between the work’s own
temporal trajectory from beginning to end and the point of in-
tersection of the spectator?57 Partially Buried Woodshed is at once
a directly palpable breaking up of architectural form through
the intrusion of nature, and a receptacle of sorts for other stories
that can and will be woven around it approaches the state of a
final formlessness.
These multiple relations to the site can be understood in
terms of the development of minimalist and postminimalist
sculpture, as it has been analyzed by Miwon Kwon.58 She distin-
guishes three stages, in all of which we might locate particular
works and texts by Smithson. The first is the phenomenological
57. In this, Smithson’s reflections on the (anti)-monuments, from his first
writings on the industrial landscapes of Passaic onward, only bring out
the temporal paradox that was inherent in the discourse on preservation
from its start in Viollet-le-Duc. On the paradoxes of preservation, see
Thordis Arrhenius, The Fragile Monument: On Conservation and Modernity
(London: Black Dog, 2012).
58. See Kwon, “One Place After Another: Notes on Site Specificity,” Octo-
ber, Vol. 80 (Spring, 1997).
346
place that we encounter in early minimalism, for instance in

Robert Morris, where the sculpture is related to the qualities
of the surrounding physical space and the movements of the
spectator. This, Kwon suggests, is a “radical restructuring of the
subject from an old Cartesian model to a phenomenological one
of lived bodily experience,” which furthermore is an attempt to
“resist the forces of the capitalist market economy, which circu-
lates art works as transportable and exchangeable commodity
goods.” 59 The second is the institutional place, defined by all
those ideologies, theories, and symbolical orders that make up
the frame of the artwork’s legibility, and which in turn are part
of a network of places (the studio, the museum, the gallery, the
private collection, the art market, the public space of criticism)
within which it circulates. It is here that we encounter the de-
materialization and de-aestheticizing of the work and place in
conceptual art; producing art is no longer essentially the pro-
ducing of an object (though it can be that too), but more of an
investigation into is framing conditions, all the “parergonal” ap-
paratuses that make up to institution, and that also at the time
began to be examined by thinkers as different as Danto, Dickie,
and Derrida.60 In the third step, this network is expanded so
as to become a discursive site, understood as a “field of knowl-
edge, intellectual exchange, or cultural debate,”61 in which the
preceding interrogations of the specific mode of production of
59. Ibid, 86.
60. The two classic cases are Danto’s pioneering essay “The Artworld”
(1964) an Dickie’s “Defining Art” (1969). Derrida’s extended medi-
tation on the structure of the “parergon” in Kant may seem wholly
remote from these discussions, which at least in the case of Danto had a
close connection to current art practices, but in fact, in its interrogation
of the dynamic role of the frame for the determination of what should
count as properly belonging to the work and what not, it draws out
precisely those questions of limits that were ay the center of conceptual
art. See Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian
McLeod. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)
61. Kwon, “One Place After Another,” 92.
347
the art institution give way to mobile interventions in the real

world. Rather than a physical and phenomenological site corre-
lated to the body and its kinesthetic field, or the inside/outside
dialectic of the art institution, this third site is a linking together
of different physical localities, texts, and all possible forms of
documentation. Its model, Kwon suggests, is “not a map but an
itinerary, a fragmentary sequence of events and actions through
spaces, that is, a nomadic narrative whose path is articulated by
the passage of the artist”62—a series of “transitive places,” “one
place after another,” with a paraphrase of Donald Judd’s famous
program for a non-hierarchical aligning of “one thing after an-
other” in the new domain of “specific objects” that would su-
persede the syntactical anthropomorphism of traditional sculp-
ture, but which here has come to signify the detaching from the
physical site rather than its rediscovery.
Dislocating the site

Similarly to Smithson’s expanding dialectic of site and nonsite,
Peter Eisenman’s “artificial excavations” open the question of
the space-time of work in a way that dislodges most of its tra-
ditional parameters.63 In the terms defined by Kwon, Eisen-
man’s works would just like Smithson’s traverse all three lev-
els: his early architecture is formally close to minimalist sculp-
ture, while operating with categories that aspire to subvert any
grounding in a phenomenology of the body; the part of his sub-
62. Ibid, 95.

63. Or, we might say, in fact continues and radicalizes the kind of explora-
tion that we find adumbrated in someone like Giedion, from the idea
of “interpenetration” to the “space-time” drawing on physics, cubism,
and a host of other sources in his 1941 magnum opus Space, Time and Ar-
chitecture—which would be in line with Eisenman’s claim that we have
still not become truly modern, and that the promises of the avant-garde
must finally be fulfilled in architecture in the same way that it had been
in music, literature, and the visual arts. For more on Giedion, see chap.
3, above.
348
sequent work that will be in focus here examines the concept of

architecture as both an institution and a discursive site, but also
draws on an idea of fiction that is difficult to reconcile with the
claims to disclosure and truth that still form the regulative idea
of institutional critique in the other visual arts; it thrives on an
indeterminacy, a kind of drift that is particular to the third level
understood as a discursive site.
This phase of Eisenman’s work is often read in close connec-
tion to deconstruction, but while it is true that this term and his
various encounters with Derrida have generated a lot of atten-
tion and a huge literature, what will be understood here as the
motivating thrust of his development is rather that the question
that animated his work from the start, i.e. whether architecture
at all can become a modernist art, in the sense that it would be
able to autonomously interrogate its own forms, its site, and
its structural parameters, developed in a way that “textualizes”
the site and eventually pushes all of these terms to their lim-
it.64 Already from the outset this placed Eisenman in opposi-
tion to all types of historicism, revivalism, and eclecticism that
aspired to recreate “meaning” in architecture. While his linguis-
tic and semiotic analogies assume that architecture is language
throughout, it is a language that has ceased to communicate a
content exterior to itself (symbols, functions, references to na-
ture, the body, etc.), at the same time as this “self”-reference
always entails an otherness inside this self, a perpetual dislo-
cation rather than a regained self-sufficiency.65 If this disloca-
64. For the idea of textualization of the site, I draw on Hays, Architecture’s
Desire, 51–89. Hays places Eisenman’s work at the endpoint of a logic of
commodification and reification, at which the only remaining possibil-
ity would be a self-reflexive staging of the depletion of all architectural
signs. While this reading is entirely consonant with many of Eisen-
man’s own statements, and has a (perhaps too) powerful logic of its
own, the path I choose here is somewhat different, as will become clear
in the following.
65. The ultimate question here of course being what this otherness implies:
349
tion leads to the discovery of the other of the discursive place

of architecture—i.e., in the first of Foucault’s formulas for het-
erotopia, to a disruption of “table upon which, since the begin-
ning of time, language has intersected space”—then it seems just
as true this language, freed from its semantic ties to the world,
must itself be infiltrated by a material otherness, if it is not to
simply revert to a crystalline order of pure forms; it must some-
how be affected by time, where, in Foucault’s second formula,
“the erosion of our life, our time, and our history takes place.”
The question would then be what might account for the relation
between the two heterotopias, the one of language and the one
of space-time, without reducing one of them to the other. For
the Foucault of the late sixties, this was still an open question,
and it was not until the relation between the discursive and the
non-discursive—at what point language, after having been freed
from its essentiality, in fact intersects space in historically vari-
able ways—began to be framed in terms of power as a spatial and
temporal ordering that a new understanding of this relation be-
come possible. Eisenman’s path never reaches this conclusion,
or possibly evades it, which has not prevented his interpreters
from filling in this gap for him, above all in proposing History
(which here generally means late capitalism) as the absent cause.
The initial steps taken in Eisenman’s early projects and texts
from the sixties are in one respect close to minimal art and
what Michael Fried, to be sure not a sign of appreciation, called
“objecthood,”66 i.e., a purely material presence of the work that
the ultimate groundlessness and abyssal of architectural language as
such, or a much more determined other, such as the pressure exerted
upon architecture by the mode of production of late capitalism. As
Reinhold Martin proposes, the more one attempts to penetrate into the
inside of architecture, the further out you end up. See Martin, Utopia’s
Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2010), and my discussion of this in chap. 4, above.
66. See Fried, “Art and Objecthood” (1967), in Fried, Art and Objecthood:
Essay and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
350
short-circuits any metaphorical reading. Just as the new sculp-

ture, architecture must in Eisenman’s version be understood
as direct physical presence, or signs referring to themselves—
which, one must note, introduces an imperceptible difference
and dislocation that is essential, precisely because the structure
of referral is what lets the “self” appear. This, Eisenman ar-
gues, is the lesson of modernist pioneers like Terragni and Le
Corbusier,67 whose legacy he sets out to retrieve for the present.
But there is also a decisive difference in relation to minimal art
and its exploration of presence and objecthood, since Eisenman
wants to displace the phenomenological model and the body
as a source of meaning, which in his interpretation is what
impeded architectural modernism from becoming truly mod-
ern: “When conventions and external references are stripped
from an object, the only reference remaining is the object it-
self. Hence, all those extraneous meanings like the column as
the surrogate for a man’s body, doors and windows oriented in
relation to man’s verticality, rooms scaled to his size, ordering
principles and plans in conformance with the classical hierar-
chies—all of which, however, remained disguised in the work of
modernism—have been suspended.”68
That which here severs the object from the bodily system of
references, is that it is ultimately understood as part of a linguis-
tic act akin to the one Foucault’s archeology proposed to call an
enoncé,69 which is also how one might understand Eisenman’s
idiosyncratic take on generative grammar. For Chomsky this
was an attempt to locate, underneath the surface of language,
67. For Eisenman’s relation to Terragni, see the texts assembled in Eisen-
man, Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques (New
York: Monacelli Press, 2003). Corbusier is treated systematically for the
first time in “Aspects of Modernism: ‘Maison Dom-ino’ and the Self-
Referential Sign”, Oppositions 15–16 (1979).
68. Peter Eisenman, “Misreading”, in Eisenman, Houses of Cards (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 172.
69. For Foucault’s énoncé, see note 15, above.
351
those mechanisms or syntactic deep structures that would allow

for all types of meaningful surface statements (whereas it would
exclude statements like the famous “colorless green ideas sleep
furiously”). For Eisenman, the idea of deep structures became
an instrument for breaking away from a phenomenological es-
sentialism that assumes the meaningfulness of architectural and
sculptural objects to be rooted in the body’s primordial relation
to the world. The discovery of such structures instead make pos-
sible, as Eisenman sometimes suggests in a move that would
hardly make sense in generative grammar, a suspension of the
semantics of the architectural sign, a severing of its meaning-
ful relation to the world in terms of function or symbolism, in
favor a pure syntax, i.e., those rules for forming and connecting
that make a statement acceptable as pertaining to architecture
without yet ascribing any particular architectural meaning to it.
When he in the essay “Postfunctionalism” (1976) suggests
that architecture has yet to become a truly modernist art, it is
because its language in his view remains tied to a Renaissance
paradigm that puts man at the center and organizes all of its
signs in relation to an ultimate vanishing point, which in this
general sense would also include the category of function.70
The particular context of this text, published as en editorial in
Oppositions, is a debate on the idea of typology that pitted “ne-
orationalists” against “neorealists,”71 but it also makes sense to
read it as a reflection on Eisenman’s own long-term projects to
work through the formal language of modernism (beginning in
1967 in the series Houses, and extending up to the end of the
seventies) and to continue the avant-garde with other means. As
we have noted, this may on a purely formal level have brought
70. Eisenman, “Postfunctionalism,” reprinted in Kate Nesbitt, Theoriz-

ing A New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural theory,
1965–1995 (New York : Princeton Architectural Press, 1996).
71. See Hays, Architecture’s Desire, 10.
352
him close to certain features of minimal art, while his ultimate

aims were something else. Rather than being unique works that
emphasize a material presence in the world, their “cardboard”72
version of materiality gives them a paradoxical status, and the
houses in fact more take on the guise of thought objects than
objecthood: they are instruments of reflection. It is this ideal,
immaterial materiality that allows them to operate as tools for
a historical anamnesis or reactivation, while the attempt to
begin modernism anew by a fundamental reorientation of its
own social claims is made possible by their self-reflexive, inward
turn that aims at the individual subject, but finally in order to
dissolve it: “The houses herein proposed the converse of mod-
ernism’s ostensible social project. They attempted to deal with
modern alienation by inverting the outward thrust inward, to-
ward the individual and his house […] Thus they emerged from
a discourse informed by modernism, but were ideologically dis-
tanced from its concern with changing outward surroundings
and circumstances of life. They turned the discourse upon itself
and, in that sense, began again the project of modernism. In this
sense they used the idea of autonomy as an attempt to dislocate
the metaphysics of architecture.”73
The dislocation of the house above all has to do with its vari-
ous symbolic functions: sheltering may remain indispensible,
but need no longer be expressed or symbolized, since such sym-
bolisms have become “meaningless and merely nostalgic,” not
least as they appear in the form of postmodern attempts to re-
store a meaningful language from the past: “The estranging vec-
tor moving out from the center is not subject to man’s volition,
and no postmodern retreat into simulated symbols of benign
72. See Eisenman’s programmatic 1965 essay “Cardboard Architecture,” in

Five Architects: Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier (New York:
Oxford University Press, New York, 1975), 15-17.
73. Eisenman, “Misreading,” 172.
353
past can mask it.”74

In the House series, the focus lies more on the formal orga-
nization of the structure, less on the way in which it interacts
with its surroundings—it is as if an attention to site and con-
text would inevitably entail some kind of recreated unity and
continuity of sense, whereas the inward turn would be a pre-
condition for the act of dislocation. The last works in the series
however form a transition to the phase that will occupy us in
the following, and here we find a renewed interest in concrete
topographic organization, for the terrain as point of departure
that now, after having been divested of its stabilizing and natu-
ralizing connotations—the genius loci that already whispers
sense to us and prefigures the order we are extract out of it—can
incorporate earlier formal ideas and push them further ahead.
House 11 a picks up the L-shape from the preceding House X,
but transforms it into a descent into the earth, so that half of the
building is located under ground, half above, with the surface
as a mirroring plane; House el Even Odd takes yet another step
by being situated entirely under ground, as a total inversion of
the idea of house as such, which now achieves a state of almost
complete concealment, even though this is further complicated
by the play of transparent and opaque surfaces, which renders
the under/above distinction fluid and insecure. Just as the ear-
lier houses drew on the elements and primordial relations of ar-
chitectural language (the wall, the stair, the floor, the relation
between load and bearing), the integration of topography here
uses the physical environment as an abstracted raw material di-
vested of it spatiotemporal specificity, and as a source for further
transformational moves.
This is what is at stake in the series of projects entitled
“Cities of Artificial Excavations,” comprising eleven works that
74. Ibid.
354
extend over more than a decade. If the Houses start off from the
isolation of syntactic features in order to attain a state of self-
reference that also lets the formal other, form’s otherness, irrupt
inside autonomy, the excavations take the opposite route and
present us with a formidable semantic profusion that overlays
systems of representation and draws on a vast array of literary,
scientific, and historical references, in order to attain a maxi-
mum density; the “palimpsest” is not by chance one of the re-
current concepts. Here, three of these works will be in focus: the
project for Cannaregio (1978), for Parc de la Villette (1985–86),
and for an art museum in Long Beach (1986).
In the Cannaregio project, three different forms of memory
traces are superimposed: the plan for hospital that Le Corbusier
had projected for the area; the writings and speculations of
Giordano Bruno, who resided in Venice in the 1590s, and was
burnt at the stakes in 1600; and finally a general reflection on
memory as such, which each in their respective ways produce a
temporal loop that Eisenman contrasts to the nostalgia for the
future in modernism, for the past in postmodernism, and for
the present in contextualism.75. Eisenman’s proposal consists of
three brief textual statements (“Three texts for Venice”), and
an overarching plan in which echoes of Le Corbusier’s hospital
and forms drawn from House 11 a are overlaid on the topogra-
phy of Cannaregio. The encounter between the first text, “The
Emptiness of the Future,” and the site generates a series of voids,
zones of absence that indicate the ghostly presence of Corbusier
and early modernism. The second text, “The Emptiness of
the Present,” produces a diagonal line across the plan, like a
cut that partly uncovers a deeper layer, partly activates the se-
ries of L-shapes drawn from House 11 a, all of which operate as
75. Eisenman, “Three texts for Venice”, in Jean-Louis Bédard (ed.), Cities of
Artificial Excavations: The Work of Peter Eisenman, 1978–1988 (Montreal:
Centre Canadien d’Architecture & Rizzoli, 1994), 47.
355
scalar displacements of a “normal house.” The third text, “The

Emptiness of the Past,” draws on Bruno’s mnemotechnics and
alchemical works, and proposes to transform “the gold of Venice”
into a memory of a “loss of memory,” a seemingly “rational proj-
ect” that pushes rationality toward its limit. Together these three
texts, Eisenman proposes, produce a dislocation of the idea of the
house, and thus of the limit condition of architecture as such. He
writes: “The question is, Which object is the house, if in fact one
of them is a house? Which one is the correct size? […] These
three objects together stand at the limit of architecture, in terms
both of their scale and of their naming.”76
These shifts brought about by shifts in “scaling” once more
deprives the body of its central referential role, but even more
so the site as something that would determine the architecture:
the objects are divested of their spatial and temporal identity so
as to become capable of migrating from one system to another
and be grafted onto each other according to a non-linear and
non-causal linking. There is no proper historical connection be-
tween the different systems, no suggestion of a deeper underly-
ing unity that would make them into surface manifestations of a
more profound order, but rather a suspension of the idea of the
proper and the affirmation of a seemingly limitless possibility of
grafting one thing onto another.
The subsequent project for Parc de la Villette (which marks
the first collaboration with Derrida) pushes this logic even fur-
ther. Here, the structures generated in Cannaregio are once
more rescaled and transferred to a new site. Eisenman com-
pares this multiple overlay of overlays, superimposing places,
plans, and texts, to Freud’s dreamwork, but as we have noted, an
equally pertinent model would be Kwon’s theory of the third,
discursive site, made up of “one thing after another,” a “frag-
76. Ibid, 48.
356
mentary sequence of events and actions through spaces, that is,

a nomadic narrative whose path is articulated by the passage of
the artist.”
In the third case under consideration here, the project for
the Long Beach Art Museum, Eisenman once more refers to
the idea of a palimpsest of superimposed narratives. Spanning
two centuries—from 1849 and the settlement of California,
1949 and the creation of the campus, and finally the fictive re-
discovery of the museum in 2049—as well as superimposing six
different maps that relate to geological, political, and scientific
structures, the museum wants to dislocate the scale that would
be commensurate with the subject. It produces superpositions
that “reveal relationships that were never visible when some
things, such as social delineations, were given more importance
than, for instance, the site of a riverbed”; it is “about the telling
of stories, and this stone text that is being written, this fiction,
might tell a very different story about Long Beach than has ever
been recorded before.”77
Rather than a phenomenological given or a permanent phys-
ical location, in all of these three cases the site is the object of a
particular type of production,78 and its identity is nothing else
than a plurality of stories that may be told; there is however
none that has any truth, which in the end runs up against the
figure of thought that both Eisenman and even more so some
interpreters of his work has assumed, drawing on psychoanalysis
and critique of ideology, i.e., that the new text produced is an
uncovering of something previously repressed that in some way
or another may be brought out from its latency or concealment.
His commentators are however divided on this point. At one
77. Eisenman, project description, Cities of Artificial Excavations, 132.
78. For an analysis of the idea of place as produced, see Ignasi de Solà-Mo-
rales, “Place: Permanence or Production,” in Solà-Morales, Differences:
Topographies of Contemporary Architecture, trans. Graham Thompson
357
end point, we find Fredric Jameson, who speaks of the artifi-

cial excavations as a “the return of history, via the discontinui-
ties of the site itself: the layerings are now historical, ghosts of
various pasts, presents, and futures, which may in fact be alter-
nate worlds but whose tensions and incompatibilities are all
mediated through some larger absent cause, which is History
itself.”79At the other end, Yve-Alain Bois sees these narrative
structures as little but an excuse, finally an unnecessary one—
“shrewd” but “far too metaphorical”80—for he creation of new
abstract forms. Both of them seem to exclusively focus on one
particular aspect, and thereby miss the essential tension that
exists between abstraction and historical and narrative refer-
ences. Jameson, confident in the power of History, tends to un-
derstand the actual form of the works as a mere appearance,
an ideology, or even a “scam,” in which “a batch of disparate
materials—a kind of lumber room of all kinds of different con-
tents, partial forms, linguistic phenomena, social and psycho-
logical raw material, semi-autonomous ideological fantasies,
local period concepts, scientific spare parts, and random topical
themes—are forcibly yoked together and fused by the power of
aesthetic ideology into what looks like an organic whole. What
used to be considered a ‘work’ therefore is now to be treated as
best as a kind of anthology of disconnected parts and pieces and
at worst as a kind of dumping ground for objective spirit.”81
This seems too reductive, and largely bypasses the problem of
accounting for the unity that in fact is there; not all piles of junk
or juxtapositions of incongruent fragments are works in a quali-
79. Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time, 174.
80. Bois, “Surfaces,” in Cities of Artificial Excavations, 41.
81. Jameson, The Seeds of Time, 168. The idea of organic unity as an ideo-
logical illusion is derived from Pierre Macherey (Pour une théorie de la
production littéraire, 1974), ultimately from Althusser. While Jameson
somewhat distances himself from it, it nevertheless leads him to down-
play the actual work produced in favor of a “symptomal” reading that
quickly moves to the level of “History.”
358
fied sense that would merit our interest. And when Bois takes
the opposite direction and reduces the narrative poetic that
gives these works their specific fragmentation to techniques for
achieving a “moiré effect”82 this transforms them into a version
of late modernist painting, which evacuates their claim to still
be works precisely at the limit of architecture, located in a par-
ticular tradition that they both question and affirm (and, one
might add, reduces them to a painting that at the time would
hardly have merited such extended exegetical efforts).
Beyond this alternative, and perhaps also as synthesis of
their respective claims, the reading of Michael Hays proposes
that these works are emblematic of the predicament of the late
avant-garde, precisely in amalgamating the acknowledgment of
the impact of history (or History, in an emphatic sense) and the
flattening of historical depth brought about by the universal rei-
fication brought about by late capitalism. What Eisenman does,
so Hays, is to inscribe these effects of loss, render them readable
and palpable, and so allow us to reflect on them in a critical way.
Neither a mere surrender to the collapse of objective spirit (the
Symbolic, in Hays’s Lacanian vocabulary), nor a flight into the
aesthetic pleasures of abstract forms, his work forms a last line
of resistance that upholds Architecture in the face of its immi-
nent impossibility, as it were oscillating between a negativity
that is still a determined negation of this world, this phase in
history, and an infinite negativity for which there is no more
determined content to be grasped.
The question might be put in slightly simpler terms, which
however soon enter into a vertiginous self-reflection: in what
sense can these artificial excavations lay claim to uncover some-
thing repressed, if this still excludes any access to a real that
would precede it? In an essay on the status of the rhetorical fig-
82. Bois, “Surfaces,” 41.
359
ure, written one year after the Long Beach project, Eisenman,
with reference to the techniques of scalar displacement and su-
perposition, writes: “Because elements along each of these axes
are relocated, they began to also superpose on other elements
to reveal unexpected correspondences which in their former
reality would have remained unintelligible. What is revealed
from the initial superpositions cannot be predicted. These are
the so-called “repressed texts” that are found by reading these
new rhetorical figures [---] This repressed text is a fiction which
recognizes its own fictive condition. In its way, it begins to ac-
knowledge the fictional quality of reality and the real quality of
fiction.”83
Eisenman would sometimes speak of this fictive reality and/or
real fiction in terms borrowed from Derrida, as a “logic of
grafting,”84 where the grafted elements produce new and incal-
culable rhetorical effects that cannot be calculated in advance.
Time, narrative, and the history to be recreated are all results of
operations without any proper ground, and architecture’s mem-
ory is fabricated in the present so that whatever is preserved and
recollected is nothing but the result of a stratigraphic overlay
that modifies what is visible underneath as the sheets on top are
moved around—all of which would once more locate Eisenman’s
work at the third level of Miwon Kwon’s typology of sites, i.e.,
the discursive site that emerges from a superimposition of times
and spaces: a fiction in the sense of being made and produced,
rather than discovered.
And yet, as Kwon notes, there would still remain a question
to be asked: “What would it mean now to sustain the cultural
and historical specificity of a place (and self) that is neither a
83. Eisenman “Architecture and the Problem of the Rhetorical Figure,”
reprinted in Nesbitt, Theorizing a New Agenda, 180–81, my italics.
84. For Eisenman’s use of grafting, see Eisenman, “The End of the Classi-
cal: The End of the Beginning, the End of the End” (1984), reprinted in
Nesbitt, Theorizing a New Agenda.
360
simulacral pacifier nor a willful invention?” The answer she
gives draws on Kenneth Frampton’s idea of a necessary media-
tion between the local and the universal, and the necessity of
“a terrain between mobilization and specificity,” the “relational
specificity” that addresses “the differences of adjacencies and
distances between one thing, one person, one place, one thought,
one fragment next to another, rather than invoking equivalen-
cies via one thing after another.”85 To this Eisenman’s answer,
at it emerges from his artificial excavations, would probably be
that any such finding must be an invention, and to this extent
yet another fiction of a ground, no matter how shifting and un-
stable, to which we could return. To this one must however add
that fiction is not just simply what is imaginary in the sense
of unreal or contained in the space of mental interiority, but is
something made, and in this it draws along with it a whole com-
plex of spaces and times; it folds the heterotopias of language
and space together, and in tearing apart those inherited forms
in which “since the beginning of time, language has intersected
space,” it also renders possible a thinking otherwise, so that the
site as fiction is not just, and to the extent that we remain open
to its virtuality, not even primarily, a story of the depletion and
loss of forms, but of that which calls upon creation to be expe-
rienced.
85. Kwon, “One Place After Another”, 109, Kwon’s italics.

7. Noopolitics, Life,
Architecture
Retrieving the philosophy of life

There has been a recent urgency to connect architecture, and
more generally visual culture as a whole, to a strand of thought
that in a somewhat antiquated vocabulary would be called vital-
ism, Lebensphilosophie, or philosophy of life, and which is still seek-
ing an adequate name.1 But regardless of what terminology we
choose, this shift may be said to occur in opposition both to the
linguistic turn that seemed to place everything under the aegis of
language, and whose high point was the advent of structuralism
and its various aftermaths in the mid to late sixties, as well as to a
long tradition of critical theory based in negation, negativity, and
contradiction, i.e., the legacy of Hegelian dialectics. Displacing
the model of consciousness and negativity, as well the obsessions
with signs, language, and discourse, this neovitalist thinking once
more looks to the body, affectivity, and “presence” as something
that addresses us below the threshold of interpretation and reflec-
tion, and that requires that we remodel our theoretical tools, even
the idea of theory as such.
1. For a collection of texts addressing this topic, and where the present
text was published in a first version, see Deborah Hauptmann and
Warren Neidich (eds.), Cognitive Architecture: From Bio-politics to Noo-
politics: Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication & Information
(Rotterdam: 010, 2010). In media theory, the idea of vitalism has been
put forth most eloquently in the writings of Scott Lash, who extends
its genealogy back to Tarde, Bergson, and Simmel, and inscribes it in a
general movement towards a new philosophy of life; see Lash and Celia
Lury, Global Culture Industry (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).
363
This line of research in many cases draws explicitly on ear-

lier philosophies based in traditions of vitalist thinking from
the turn of the former century, for instance Henri Bergson and
Gabriel Tarde, but it also rethinks these themes in the context
of contemporary global capitalism, whose production of ideol-
ogy and consent is increasingly geared towards the dimension
of affectivity and corporeality,2 attempting to penetrate into
a dimension that underlies our conscious mental operations
and extends all the way down to our biological existence. In this
sense it differs significantly from earlier vitalist thought, which
often positioned itself in opposition to the disruptive effects of
modernity, capitalism, and technology, and aspired to retrieve
an originary stream of life, supposedly untouched by alienation
and instrumentality. Current vitalisms break with this type of
anti-modernism, and instead claim that it is only by immersing
ourselves in the transformative processes of technology that we
can fully grasp our being-in-the-world; it no longer opposes the
organic and non-organic, the self-possession and interiority of
living subjectivity and its externalization in various hypomnema-
ta and mediating circuits, but rather understands them as facets
of one continual process of differentiation.
On one level, this seems like a highly unexpected break with
the past. Vitalism and Lebensphilosophie for a long time remained
2. The literature on affect and the affective turn—which can be considered
as a particular aspect of what is here referred to under the more general
rubric vitalism—has been growing the last decade, and it has already
become of field of research in its own right that cuts across the borders
of the social and human sciences. See, for instance, Brian Massumi,
Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2002), Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space,
Politics, Affect (Milton Park; Routledge, 2007), Patricia Ticineto Clough
and Jean O’Malley Halley (eds.), The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), Paul Hoggett and Simon
Thompson (eds.), Politics and the Emotions: The Affective Turn in Contem-
porary Political Studies (London: Continuum, 2012), Iain McCalman
and Paul A. Pickering (eds.), Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the
Affective Turn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
364
7. Noopolitics, Life, Architecture
an anathema in much twentieth century philosophy, not only in

analytic philosophy, with its early and formative emphasis on
idealized systems of language and logic, but also in traditions
that claim a proximity to the movement of experience, such
as phenomenology and the current of critical theory emanat-
ing from the Frankfurt School. It was consistently rejected as
part of an irrationalist attack against reason and the capacity
for theoretical reflection, and often the simple association to
Lebensphilosophie would count as refutation of an opponent.3
In hindsight such polemics should however not prevent us from
interrogating the proximity between these various figures of
thought and the kind of contradictory unity they form; rather
than opposing a philosophy of life to a philosophy of reason, we
should attempt to understand their imbrication, and the circu-
lation of philosophical motifs that form the underlying matrix
of the period, and which returns today, albeit in a form that
subverts many of the earlier motifs.
For instance, it is clear that the idea of life, as a counterpoint
to the abstractions of certain parts (though by no means all) of
the philosophical tradition, plays a crucial role in the writings of
Benjamin and Adorno, first and foremost for the obvious rea-
son that their persistent appeal to a true life as opposed to a false
one—no matter how tenuous, dim, and obscure this life may be, at
present even almost unthinkable, hidden behind the “black veil”
of utopia—would make little sense outside of a basic intuition of
what life might mean outside of the administered world. Rather,
3. The accusations of a life-philosophical irrationalism was perhaps one

of most frequent allegations exchanged throughout postwar twenti-
eth century philosophy, and it seems like a successor to psychologism
from the turn of former the century, although the mistake is no longer
merely a theoretical one, but has profound ethico-political dimensions.
This is how Adorno reacts against Simmel, then Lukács in turn against
the Frankfurt School and a whole tradition dating back to Schelling,
then Habermas and several of his followers against Heidegger, certain
parts of Adorno, and most postwar French philosophy.
365
their claim would be that the life imagined by other strands of

Lebensphilosophie is a disfigured one that remains caught up in a
blind and non-reflected opposition to the instrumental rational-
ity that it merely parodies, as becomes clear in Adorno’s recurrent
critique of Bergson. To extract a different sense of life that would
go beyond instrumentality, while not discarding the latter’s con-
tributions to the necessary disenchantment of modernity, is fun-
damental for Adorno as well as Benjamin, even though this idea
undergoes different inflections, for Adorno passing through the
mediation of art and aesthetics, for Benjamin, although less clear-
ly, through a messianic disconnection from the law.4
4. This seems to be the direction in which Giorgio Agamben’s reading

of Benjamin would lead, i.e., towards a “form of life” (forma-di-vita)
that would disconnect from the subjugation of life to sovereignty. It is
arguably in this context that one should understand the recurrent rubric
“Threshold” in Agamben’s books: it is not just an element that links
chapters and sections, but also a conceptual move. In the early volumes of
the Homo Sacer series, we often encounter expressions such as “threshold
of indifference,” “threshold of non-discernability,” “threshold of non-
differentiation,” etc., all of which seem to indicate a state where those op-
positions that have structured political philosophy from Greek thought to
the present have entered into a confusion because their internal logic has
been fully played out, but in this also indicating a possibility of thinking
otherwise. The threshold is a place of extreme confusion and obscu-
rity, where all things seem to become blurred, but also the place where
thought may begin anew. For Agamben, this possibility is intimately
bound up with a new relation between politics and ontology, which is
also the place where he encounters Heidegger. In the last pages of Homo
Sacer I he calls upon “the analogies between politics and the epochal situ-
ation of metaphysics,” a state of exhaustion where we return to “the task
and the enigma of Western metaphysics,” that is to the question what
constitutes “simple being,” to haplous on, but also naked life, the “form
of life” that “is only its own bare existence.” See Agamben, Homo Sacer,
trans. Daniel Heller-Rozen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998),
105. At the end of State of Exception, where the question of praxis displaces
the role of life, he similarly suggest that to “show law in its nonrelation to
life and life in its nonrelation to law means to open a space between them
for human action,” and that to “a word that does not bind, that neither
commands nor prohibits anything, but says only itself, would correspond
an action as pure means, which shows only itself, without any relation to
an end.” See Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005), 88.
366
In hindsight, it is equally obvious that the way in which

Husserl throughout his philosophy connects life, experience,
and the living present (Leben, Erlebnis, lebendige Gegenwart), or
the analyses pursued in his late works of the grounding of ideal
objects in the life-world (Lebenswelt), have intimate links to a
philosophy of life.5 Thus, in Husserl too, it cannot be a question
of erasing life from philosophy, instead the challenge would be
to understand life from a transcendental point of view. When
Husserl once claimed, “We are the true Bergsonians,”6 this was
a gesture that seemed to both acknowledge the necessity of the
opponent’s claims and point to their philosophical inadequacy.
Similarly, the theme of life forms a pervasive reference in many
of Heidegger’s works, from the early pursuit of the problem
of facticity and factical life, through the later explorations of
Dasein’s complex relation to animality, up the problem of body
and perspectivism in Nietzsche.7
5. This theme was first emphasized by Klaus Held, Lebendige Gegenwart
(The Hague: Nijhoff, 1966), and has since then been a central theme
in much phenomenological research. The concept of “drive” (Trieb)
is in fact central in many of Husserl’s manuscripts, and points to the
entanglement of the transcendental sphere, once it is understood as a
genetic dimension, with concepts of will, desire, and affectivity, and to
his encounter with many Freudian themes. For a recent discussion that
attempts to ground psychoanalysis in such an expanded idea of phe-
nomenology, see Nicholas Smith, Towards a Phenomenology of Repression:
A Husserlian Reply to the Freudian Challenge, diss. (Stockholm: Depart-
ment of Philosophy, Stockholm University, 2010).
6. So Husserl is supposed to have said to Alexandre Koyré; see Bern-
hard Waldenfels, Phänomenologie in Frankreich (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1987), 21.
7. The pioneering systematic study is David Farrell Krell, Daimon Life:
Heidegger and Life-Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1992), and it has been followed by many others, for instance Timothy
C. Campbell, Improper Life: Technology and Biopolitics from Heidegger to
Agamben (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), Havi
Carel, Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006),
and in a way that establishes a link to Hegel, Susanna Lindberg, Entre
Heidegger et Hegel: Éclosion et vie de l’être (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2010).
Many of these studies are implicitly indebted to Derrida’s many analy-
ses of the theme of Geschlecht, animality, and sexual and ontological
367
From the vantage point of the present, we might say that the
problem of life was always there, and without attempting here to
undertake the massive task of tracing an encompassing genealogy
of Lebensphilosophie in the twentieth century,8 it can still be safely
conjectured that the relations to be traced between its past and
its current return would not obey the simple schema of repres-
sion and return, rejection and reappraisal, but would rather con-
stitute a set of complex retrievals and repetitions, bringing other
constellations of the past to bear on the present, and discovering
subterranean links between past moments where a congealed po-
lemic only perceived massive oppositions. Furthermore, the way
in which the concept of life re-enters the scene today, through
the works of Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben, and many others, is in
crucial respects conditioned by recent transformations in the life
sciences that have opened a set of new issues in ontology, politics,
ethics, and aesthetics, which in turn may incite us to re-read earli-
er positions as already engaging such questions as they appeared,
consciously or not, to the thinkers of the early twentieth century.
In relation to architecture and visual culture, the re-emer-
gence of themes from vitalist philosophy sometime seems to
be conditioned by a transformed understanding of the image.
Today, visual objects are increasingly understood as having an
agency of their own, a capacity to act on us in unforeseen ways.
This is undoubtedly on a more straightforward level due to their
sheer ubiquity. At what we can take as the historical limit of
classical critical theory, they were theorized under the rubric of
“simulacra,” a concept that still betrayed an unmistakable yet
difference in Heidegger, which can be found in several of his essays and

books from the early eighties onward.
8. For overviews of the history of Lebensphilosophie, see Karl Albert, Leb-
ensphilosophie: Von den Anfängen bei Nietzsche bis zu ihrer Kritik bei Lukács
(Freiburg: Alber, 1995), and Karl Albert and Elenor Jain, Philosophie
als Form des Lebens: Zur ontologischen Erneuerung der Lebensphilosophie
(Freiburg: Alber, 2000).
368
rarely acknowledged nostalgia for a Real beyond representation,

and which in turn may be related to the earlier concept of the
fetish, both in its Marxist and even older ethnographic sense: an
inert object that through some magical operation of the mind
has been endowed with mana or “theological niceties,”9 a capac-
ity to move on its own that in reality does not belong to it. Today,
the image in its unfettered state has instead become an autono-
mous power that neither reveals nor conceals, but is itself fully
real.10 This cuts through its status as a mere representation, and
also renders questionable the classical concept of “ideology,”
which ever since Marx’s somewhat simplistic use of the camera
obscura model in many cases has been modeled on a rather re-
ductive view of consciousness as a deformed and distorted rep-
resentation of an objective given.11 Today, it is claimed, images
are presentations, and even if any trust in a clear-cut distinction
9. The classic discussion can be found in Marx, Capital 1:4. The untainted
Real that haunts Marx’s claim is that of a pure and direct use-value, as
has been pointed out by many commentators, most recently Jacques
Derrida, Les spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1993), 253ff.
10. One of the most significant and philosophically far-reaching cases of
this would be Deleuze’s work on film, in Cinéma 1: L’image-mouvement
and Cinéma 2: L’image-temps (1983 and 1985). Deleuze wants to move
beyond both a phenomenological realism, rooted in Jean Bazin’s theo-
ries, and the linguistic theories of Christian Metz (to name two very
influential models) since both of them reduce the images of cinema to
something else, a theory of the subject and perception, or of language
and the unconscious, eventually as part of a cinematic apparatus that
produces subjectivity as ideology. For Deleuze we have to liberate our-
selves from the idea of a natural bearer of perception that would unify
all images in an intentional consciousness, or in the suturing of the
imaginary and the symbolic, and instead understand this partial bearer
as itself constructed through the movement- and time-images. These
images can be grasped in themselves, as belonging to things or matter,
or as related to a subjective center, but none of these two have priority,
and in this sense experience does not necessarily coincide with subjec-
tivity. The task of philosophy (and cinema) would then be to discover
these other dimensions, or as Bergson says in La pensée et le mouvant,
philosophy should be an attempt to go beyond the human condition.
11. Which obviously does not imply that this model exhausts the possibili-
ties of the concept of ideology. For further discussions of this, see the
Introduction, above.
369
between presentation and re-presentation, for instance in the

form a massive split between some immediate access to reality
and its linguistic mediation, seems naïve on the philosophical
level and should be treated with caution, the claim that we must
retrieve the efficacy of the visual, its visceral and physical effects
and affects, as a problem within theory itself, is however highly
significant. The emphasis on reading the world may to some
extent have blinded us to its being, as Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht
suggests (although this is indeed too a distinction that must
be subjected to scrutiny). There is, he claims, an intentional-
ity within the objects themselves, a way in which they produce
presence effects that must be accounted for.12
But even though these debates obviously become highly
complex as soon as one enters into the details, on a more gen-
eral level they tend to split up along axes that remain distinctly
recognizable. On the one hand, there are those who understand
the return of the affect and the visceral dimension as pointing
towards the necessity of an affirmation that would reject theory
as an obstacle to experimentation and production, on the other
hand those who perceive affectivity as a renewed possibility of
resistance that would be based in the hidden potential of the
body itself, beyond or beneath the conscious level.13 Ideas of a
12. Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot
Convey (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004). It must be noted that Gum-
brecht’s idea of presence both draws heavily on Heidegger and argues
for the continued relevance of Derrida (in close connection to the idea of
“birth to presence” through touching in Jean-Luc Nancy, to which Der-
rida’s On Touching constitutes a thoughtful response), which should make
the distinction between being and reading difficult to uphold. In fact,
already in Merleau-Ponty any sharp divide between being and reading
seems impossible, if the latter is understood as diacritical movement of
spacing and temporalization that engages our being-in-the-world to the
fullest extent. For the idea of presence in architecture, see the special issue
of Archplus 178 (2006), “Die Produktion von Präsenz.”
13. These claims to some extent appear to return us to certain aporias
within earlier versions of (the death of) critical theory, for instance in
the fascination with intensity in Lyotard’s work from the early seventies
370
post-critical or projective architecture have been used to under-

score the necessity to move beyond inherited models of resis-
tance, negativity, and rupture, sometimes even as a rejection of
the idea of theory as such, in order to invest in a more fluid
and affirmative attitude. The affective turn within the humani-
ties and social sciences cannot but have profound implications
for how we think theoretical work as such, and that the way
in which our contemporary sensorial and noetic environment
impacts on our existence renders must imply a questioning of
the categories that were once used to underwrite the claims of
critical theory seems warranted; the claim that they must simply
be rejected seems less convincing.
Thus, while the return of vitalist philosophy on one level
translates a general and widespread fatigue with, and even a re-
jection of, inherited models of critique that are based on fixed
models of experience and subjectivity, it seems more productive
to understand it as a call for a more malleable and flexible way of
understanding the way our sensorium is constructed. It would
be misleading to claim that the noetic, affective, and biopoliti-
cal dimensions of power would render theory as such unneces-
sary or useless; rather they demand that we invent a theory that
(and in fact, Lash and Lury place their investigations into the contem-
porary culture industry under the rubric “libidinal economy”). For
Lyotard, the idea of intensity was opposed to Hegelian dialectics and
its modern avatar in the critical theory of Adorno, and then to theory
in general, in what seems like a consciously self-defeating move, or
perhaps as in instance of a death drive inherent in theory as such, which
seems to be implied in some of his statements. For Lyotard’s initial
responses to Adorno, see my The Silences of Mies (Stockholm: Axl Books,
2008), 68–80. After these first and dismissive remarks, Adorno in fact
became an insistent if not always acknowledged presence in Lyotard’s
attempt to formulate a systematic aesthetic theory, and the renewed
attention to affectivity and “passibility” in his writings from the mid
eighties onward in many ways crosses my final proposal here. For a
discussion of Lyotard’s work in this respect, see Daniel Birnbaum and
Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Spacing Philosophy: Jean-François Lyotard and the
Philosophy of the Exhibition (forthcoming).
371
would be able to analyze the modes of affectivity and subjection

that occur within this new formation of power. In this sense the
problem of how to analyze politics, capitalism, and the possibil-
ity of resistance, have not disappeared, but have become increas-
ingly acute, and perhaps need to be reformulated at a depth that
goes beyond inherited models of mind and consciousness.
The claim for a presence of the visual, that there is a life lodged
within images to which we must respond, indeed flies in the face
of a certain type of interpretation that seals the visual object with-
in an analysis of ideological formations whose representation it
would be, and that consequently calls for a mode of deciphering
that eventually uncovers the true meaning, a truth that in turn
becomes all the more compelling by breaking away from the sur-
face order of phenomena. A critique of images that reduces them
to mere ideological reflections seems to deprive them of life, in
transferring all of the movement and intelligence to the one who
reads them; against this, the theory of presence demands that we
restore the violence and force of the encounter, the way images
confront our bodies with a physical texture, in a movement that
belongs both to surface and depth, although organized differently
than in a model of outer envelope and inner recesses. In some
respects it may be true that the surface is what conditions depth—
for the deepest in man is his skin, “Ce qu’il y a de plus profond
dans l’homme, c’est la peau,” as Valéry famously said.14 This does
however not imply that we should simply discard depth in favor
of a simple immediacy, instead it should make us aware of the in-
14. L’Idée fixe (1931), in Œuvres II (Paris: Gallimard / La Pléiade, 1960),

215. Gilles Deleuze cites Valery’s statement in Logique du sens (Paris:
Minuit, 1969), 18, and reads it in terms of his theory of the event as an
“extra-being” distinct from the interactions and states of bodies. Similar
to the dimension of sense in language, events are incorporeal entities
that cannot be reduced to their material instantiation, although they are
always connected to them as that which actualizes them. Events belong
to a virtual temporality of the Eternal, the Aion of the infinitive verb,
whereas actualization belongs to the finite tenses of Time, Chronos.
372
tricacies of the surface/depth model, as is abundantly displayed by

the surfaces, folds, and crevices of art, from painting and poetry
to the “hypersurfaces”15 of modern architecture.
To some extent, it has seemed as if the emphasis on presence
and affect would attempt to relocate the object and/or subject
of critical theory—presuming that term critical theory should
be preserved, as I do—to a new region, where the entanglement
of the subjective and the objective is more acute, and where the
conception of an appropriating hermeneutics must come to an
end. But we must note that this may be a struggle against a non-
existent enemy, provided that we not weaken the case of the al-
leged adversary beyond recognition. Indeed, few thinkers have
emphasized the power of the musical work to undo our concep-
tual schemes to such an extent as Adorno, which for him too sig-
nals that there is a decisive limit of hermeneutics,16 and few have
highlighted the capacity of the visual art object to question all
inherited views of perception more than Merleau-Ponty—all of
which indicates that the difference between interpretations that
seal the work in pre-given categories (of art history, literary his-
tory, cultural studies, critique of ideology), which undoubtedly
do not only exist but in fact make up the mainstream of aca-
demic discourse, and those that put these categories themselves
at risk, runs within these traditions themselves, and should not
be used to force us to make premature decisions in favor of one
or the other.
15. See for instance the volumes of Architectural Design on “Hypersurface

Architecture”, ed. Stephen Perrella (London: Academy Editions, 1998
and 1999). This would undoubtedly necessitate a rethinking of the too
simplistic depth–surface divide that organizes Fredric Jameson’s by now
classic analysis of postmodernism and late capitalism.
16. We must note Adorno’s emphatic resistance to at least a certain concept
of hermeneutics: “The task of aesthetics,” he claims, “is not to compre-
hend artworks as hermeneutical objects; in the contemporary situation,
it is their incomprehensibility that needs to be comprehended.” Aesthetic
Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 1997), 157.
373
Foucault, Deleuze, and the power of life

In order to get a perspective on these entangled issues, a good
way to start out is from the research of Michel Foucault on bio-
politics and biopower, which constitutes a common point of
reference for most of the later theorizing. As we will see, Fou-
cault’s investigations however take him in different directions,
and conflicting readings of his legacy are possible, perhaps even
on the level of terminology: at first, Foucault does not seem to
make any distinction between the power and the politics of the
bios, and when the gradual (and never thematized) shift towards
the latter term takes place, the theoretical frame changes too.
When the term is introduced, the power and/or politics of
the bios generally refers to those mechanisms and forms of power
that invest the human body as a locus of productivity and action,
thus as a fundamentally living entity that obeys laws of its own,
which must not only be respected as an external limit for what
can be accomplished, but must be integrated into politics itself
as the source from which it draws its energy. As his investigations
unfold, Foucault begins to stress that this dimension of a living
and unpredictable force is also what will eventually position the
subject as free, or at least endowed with a certain agency. From
this point onward, he will more speak of biopolitics, a concept
that gradually severs its ties to theory of subjection or disciplining
of the subject, and instead comes to denote a more subtle, gentle,
and strategic governing that uses freedom as a leverage.
These theories, developed by Foucault in the latter half of the
1970s—first on the basis of a reading of the transformations of
political theory in the eighteenth century and the emergence of
the population as the physical and natural substratum of politics,
but then also drawing on discussions of twentieth century liberal
theory—have generated a highly complex reception across many
disciplinary fields, from philosophy and the social sciences to ar-
tistic practices and researches in the history of sciences. Foucault’s
374
relation to the life-philosophical tradition is however by no means

simple; if his initial formulation of biopower may be taken as a
way to reinvent the notion of life as resistance, his subsequent lec-
tures on biopolitics seem to downplay this possibility, or rather
see it as a surface effect of underlying shifts in modern forms of
governing, or “governmentality.” Beyond shifts in Foucault’s own
intellectual biographical, this ambiguity can be understood as be-
long to the problem of the bios as such: is there a different poten-
tial inherent in the idea of life, or is it simply an effect of shifts in
power relations, not in the sense that would be something unreal,
but in the sense that its reality is precisely what modern forms of
governing tap into in order to become operative?
Foucault develops these concepts at a crucial juncture in his
work, where he begins to doubt the explicative force of the disci-
plinary model of power that he had developed systematically in
Discipline and Punish (1975). From this point onward his research
begins to diverge in a prismatic fashion, which also means that the
rather clear-cur division of his work into three parts that we find
for instance in Deleuze’s elegant and coherent reading,17 must be
questioned, at least with respect to the last phase. In Deleuze’s
interpretation, an archeological phase, focused on the regularities
of discourse, is followed by a genealogical period where Foucault
investigates the mechanisms of power in their interplay with dis-
course, eventually leading up to a third stage, revolving around
the theory of subjectivation, where Foucault returns to Greek and
Roman material in order to reinscribe the subject, although in a
more historically flexible and conditioned way than in traditional
philosophies of consciousness.
This division is based on Foucault’s published works, where
17. Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Séan Hand (London: Continuum,
2006). For a discussion of the place of biopolitics in relation to the
other themes in the later work, see the introduction in Jakob Nilsson
and Sven-Olov Wallenstein (eds.), Foucault, Biopolitics, and Govermental-
ity (Huddinge: Södertörn Philosophical Studies, 2013).
375
there is large gap between 1976, the year of the first volume of
The History of Sexuality, and the subsequent two volumes on sex-
uality published shortly before his death in 1984—a long caesura
which was a time of reflection but probably also of crisis (the
“inability to cross the line,” of which Foucault speaks in the im-
portant preface to the second volume), that seemed to have end-
ed with the return to a modified reflection on subjectivity, eth-
ics, and freedom. Today however, this eight-year gap has been
filled with the published courses from the Collège de France,
and reading these texts we can see how Foucault already around
the time of the 1976 lectures series “Society Must Be Defended” in
fact began to re-orient himself in multiple and not necessarily
coherent ways. From this point onward he develops the idea of
a history of forms of governmentality, he works on the idea of
the technologies of the self and on the idea of candor and truth-
telling (parrhesia) in Greek and Roman texts, he returns to Kant
and the enlightenment, and claims to pursue the question of
modernity as a question of the “ontology of actuality,” in the
wake of Weber and the Frankfurt School—all of which can only
with great difficulty be brought together into a unified set of
problems that would amount to a distinct third phase. And it
is in this context that the idea of biopolitics emerges, sometime
between 1976 and 1977, and in Foucault’s own development it
in fact appears more like a transitional idea than a sustained
theme.
When the idea emerges in the first volume of The History of
Sexuality, it first seems like an extension of the analysis of dis-
cipline. Discipline and Punish had already pursued this in terms
of the inscription of the body into an institutional field: the
army, school, hospital, prison, etc., and this is where Foucault
could be said to undertake a kind of proto-architectural analy-
sis, most famously in the case of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon.
The investigation of disciplinary power had traced a transfor-
376
mation from the naked violence of visible punishment to a form

of correctional techniques that assembled around the body, and
generated a form of political technology that produced a soul as
a new object of knowledge—the soul, which in this sense also
becomes the prison of the body. Discipline, Foucault famously
says, is not primarily about prohibiting, just as power in a more
general sense is not essentially repressive, but works in terms of
a positive organization of space and time, a partition and cre-
ation of segmented unities, and a breaking down and analysis of
movements down to their smallest detail, as in military exercise,
control of body postures in school, etc. Space, time, and bodies
are parceled up, and then reassembled so as to become parts of
larger and more efficient unities.
Military camps, prisons, hospitals, school, factories each in
their respective ways thus become places for the creation of
“docile bodies,” and in conjunction with this, there is a develop-
ment of corresponding discourses on military regulations, crim-
inal law, pedagogy, political economy, etc. Discipline encoun-
ters new types of discourse, and together—in a kind of circular
causality, or rather resonance, which displaces the base-super-
structure model— they form a complex of power and knowledge
complex that however does not simply produce homogeneity,
but rather draws on its own limits, and unfolds through the pro-
liferation of that which escapes it. Instead of a binary structure of
law and transgression, the emphasis on norms produces an in-
finity of possible deviations that do not pre-exist the norm, but
emerge as infinitesimal fluctuations around it, and the object of
the legal as well as sexual apparatus can thus be understood as
the production of various forms of illegality, criminality, and
perversion, which they then integrate into larger wholes.
This at least begins to answer the question often posed to
Foucault as to where the possibility of resistance could be located.
If power and knowledge, although without being reducible to each
377
other, form an interlocking structure, they always do so in relation

to an outside that provides thinking and acting with an unruly
mobility. The archive of knowledge is itself shot through with frac-
tures that the mechanisms of power stabilize, but only by them-
selves being virtual and fleeting, since they exist in a field of action
and reaction defined by reversibility and overthrows. This field is
like a general externality, an outside that forms element or mi-
lieu in which the creation of docile bodies, becomes possible, but
which then also subsists under any such body as a virtual double, a
multiplicity of non-bound forces.
The theoretical model for such a resistance can undoubt-
edly be found in a Nietzsche’s genealogy of consciousness and
conscience, in his reflections on the amount of “pre-historical
work” that is required for the formation of a responsible agent,
on which Foucault draws implicitly. Here he may have been
particularly influenced by the ideas of Deleuze in Nietzsche and
Philosophy (1962), where Deleuze suggests that Nietzsche’s ge-
nealogy should be understood as a critical analysis of power re-
lations that takes the body as a focal point of analysis, not in the
sense of phenomenological ground of living sense (the Leib as
lived from within subjectivity, in opposition to the external and
objective Körper),18 but a constantly undone and reconstructed
assemblage of affects and responses. To propose a model for
philosophy in a new understanding of the body is also one of
the key themes in Deleuze’s later readings of Spinoza, which
18. Foucault sometimes appears close to the phenomenology of Merleau-
Ponty, with its “vertical” or “savage” being outside of institutionalized
and sedimented forms of experience and discourse. He however always
rejected this link, undoubtedly because of the teleology inherent in
phenomenology, where the ante-predicative layers often seem to be ac-
knowledged only in order to be taken up in signifying acts and brought
to consciousness. As Deleuze notes, for Foucault there is an “archeo-
logical break” rather than a continuity between the discursive and the
non-discursive, at least in his early work. Foucault’s later lectures on
the hermeneutics of the subject however re-open many of these issues
again, and would require a discussion than I cannot undertake here.
378
develop the idea that the soul, or more precisely a certain in-
terpretation of the soul, constitutes the prison of the body, and
that we are not aware of what a liberated body might be capable
of outside of its relation to the soul understood in terms of its
Aristotelian form. As Spinoza famously writes in the Ethics: “in
fact, no one has been able determine what a body is capable of
(quid corpus possit), that is, experience has not yet enlightened us
as to what the body—to the extent that is not determined by the
soul—can or cannot do according to the laws of nature, if the lat-
ter is considered solely as corporeal.”19 But, Deleuze cautions us,
we should not understand this as a simple reversal that subjects
the soul to the body. Spinoza’s famous parallelism does not set-
tle for a mere inversion of the hierarchical schema, but instead
configures its parts into a new dynamic interrelation: “the body
surpasses the knowledge we have of it, just as thought surpasses the
consciousness we have of it,” and if the “model of the body, accord-
ing to Spinoza, does not imply any devaluing of thought in rela-
tion to extension,” it is because it, more importantly, “implies
a devaluation of consciousness in relation to thought: a discov-
ery of the unconscious, which is an unconscious of thought no less
profound than the unknown of the body.”20 This unconscious of
19. Spinoza, Ethics, Book III, Theorem 2, Remark. This capacity is crucially
linked to the idea of affects, which must be distinguished from psy-
chological states such as emotions. Affects are both confused ideas in
the mind and a corresponding increase or decrease in the body’s vital
force or power to act, its potentia agendi. As potentia, affect is both the
capacity to affect and to be affected; it is an openness to the world that
cannot be reduced to mere modifications of consciousness, instead our
conscious relation springs from a deeper affective level.
20. Deleuze, Spinoza: Philosophie pratique (Paris: Minuit, 1981), 29. The
theme of a “mere reversal” is a well-known leitmotif in Heidegger’s
reading of Nietzsche, and one of the main reasons why Nietzsche would
have been unable to escape Platonism, and Deleuze may be taken to
respond here to an objection of the Heideggerian kind. However, for
Deleuze, neither Spinoza nor Nietzsche can be understood as failed at-
tempts to step out of an epochal structure called “metaphysics”; they do
not announce, however imperfectly, its end or overcoming, but rather
perform transformations that can be picked up by us and developed in
379
thought opens consciousness and the body to a domain that

exceeds them, in Spinoza’s case the infinite substance of God-
Nature, which in Deleuze’s own ontology will receive various
names: chaos, the outside, exteriority. In his interpretation of
Foucault, this is the outside (le Dehors), an “abstract storm” from
which thought emerges, and thinking is an event that happens to,
comes to, thought.21
This domain that in Deleuze’s metaphysics underlies the
formed body, of which he has provided many versions, drawing
on Nietzsche, Bergson, Spinoza, and Leibniz, but also writers and
painters like Proust, Kafka, Artaud, and Bacon, is also what he
uncovers in microphysical domain of power in Foucault. It is pre-
cisely because of its instability—virtual relations are a kind of “ex-
tra-being” that while being perfectly real yet go beyond the actual
and envelop it in a “becoming”—that power relations remain un-
stable and that a “distant roar of battle,”22 as Foucault says, can
always be heard behind the official eloquence of institutionalized
discourses of knowledge. This does not mean that there is some
true or authentic corporeal life beneath the discursive order, a
life that would be deformed by an external force and to which we
finally could return, only that this unbound multiplicity remains
new ways. The end of metaphysics is, as is well known, a Heideggerian

theme that is rejected throughout all of Deleuze’s writings.
21. In the reading of Foucault, the parallelism does not relate to thought
and extension, but to speaking and seeing, the “sayable” and the “vis-
ible,” but here too their interplay is not that of a synthesis, but a violent
struggle, developing through “captures” that make them encroach
upon each other, and thinking is what occurs outside of and between
them: “To think is to reach the non-stratified. Seeing is thinking, and
speaking is thinking, but thinking occurs in the interstice, or in the
disjunction between seeing and speaking. […] thinking belongs to the
outside insofar as the latter, an ‘abstract storm,’ is thrown down into
the interstice between seeing and speaking. The appeal to the outside is
a constant theme in Foucault and signifies that thinking is not the in-
nate exercise of a faculty, but must come to thought.” Deleuze, Foucault,
trans. Séan Hand (London: Continuum, 2006), 76, mod.
22. Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1977), 308.
380
a source of resistance, which indicates why resistance that comes

first, as Foucault often said. The “diagram” of power relations can
only be actualized if it at the same time releases a multiplicity of
forces that eventually may become integrated, but which as such
fundamentally oppose themselves to integration.
This proximity notwithstanding, there are important differ-
ences between Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) philosophical con-
structivism and Foucault’s analytic of power.23 Foucault’s in-
terrogates how we have become the kind of subjects that we are
(sexed, normalized, deviant), i.e., what kind of self-technolo-
gies, discourses, and mechanisms of power that have been taken
up and used in this process of self-fashioning, and in the latter
part of the seventies his investigations tend to become more
and more historical in a traditional sense. Deleuze and Guattari
on the other hand are engaged in the construction of synthetic
and universal-historical models. Their project is to discern those
lines of flight that always open up in every assemblage, on the
basis of a general theoretical model: a society, they suggest, is
not held together but its solid parts, but by what flees and leaks
out of its segmentations and grids. Initially, this structure was
theorized under the name of “desire,” although other concepts
would follow. Foucault, on the other hand, becomes increas-
ingly critical of all such a priori, transhistorical and ontological
conceptions, and for him a term like desire cannot be under-
stood as a general productive force, only as a specific product of
modern confessional technologies.
And in fact, it is in relation to the issue of biopolitics that
we may in a productive fashion understand the divide between
Deleuze and Foucault. Regardless of what other reasons, politi-
cal and personal, there may be for their split in the later part
of the seventies, the question of the metaphysics of life seems
23. See Deleuze, “Désir et plaisir,” in Deux régimes de fous (Paris: Minuit,
2003).
381
the philosophically most interesting one to examine. We should

thus look more precisely at this point of divergence between
them, which is also where Foucault begins to question his ear-
lier work on discipline and his inquiries begins to proliferate in
many divergent directions.
Foucault’s first presentation of the theme of biopolitics, in
the final section of the first volume of The History of Sexuality,
still remains largely within the disciplinary model. In this ver-
sion it can understood as operative according through a three-
tier model: on the micro-level it works by individualization, by
producing individuality in the form of sexed and desiring subjects
that are increasingly endowed with a depth to be deciphered,
which can be taken as a culmination of a long development. On
the macro-level we see the emergence of population, which is a
statistical phenomenon, individuals as they appear in terms of
collective health, birth and mortality rates, etc. Between them
there is an intermediary link, the family as the site of exchange
between individuality and collectivity, the relay through which
all individuals have to pass in order to become members of the
reproductive body politic. On all three levels, life becomes the
object of regulation and discipline, but at the same moment
there emerges an opposite power inside of life that resists. This
is the condition of possibility of all kinds of philosophical vital-
ism, from Nietzsche onward, each of which will attempt to ex-
tract a different life from the monitoring and correctional appa-
ratuses within which it is made to appear as a calculable entity.
In this sense, the power exerted over life, Foucault suggests, is
also an emancipation of a resistant force inside of life, just as the
disciplinary diagrams could not be deployed without creating a
swarm of virtual actions and reactions that overflow them. The
first model of biopower can in this sense be taken to develop
the analysis of discipline on another level, not with reference
to possible actions, but to modes of life and experience. Even
382
though this remains peripheral in Foucault’s published work,

this theory also has architectural implications, for instanced in
the discussion of the role of the hospital and the medicaliza-
tion of urban space, where the mimetic paradigm comes to an
end, and architecture begins to be understood as an ordering
and production of space instead of as an representation of a pre-
existing order, natural, cosmic, or other.24
But—and here we can see how Foucault’s research at this mo-
ment breaks up in a prismatic way—this line of thought is pre-
cisely what he will question in following lecture series, Security,
Territory, Population (1977–78) and The Birth of Biopolitics (1978–
79). In addition to the idea of population, Foucault here also
points to the emergence of a new concept of security, which be-
comes central since threats now emanate from within, from the
population itself and its inherent tendency to create imbalances,
deviations, and unpredictable crises, whereas the old model of
sovereignty, which aimed to seize and preserve control over a
territory, predominantly understood dangers and enemies as
coming from without. In the lectures from 1977–78, biopolitics
thus comes to be connected to security, and it is explicitly dis-
sociated from discipline, which is tantamount to a fundamental
self-critique, as Foucault himself notes.
Using the question of theft as a paradigm for transgressive
behavior, Foucault discerns three possible avenues. First, theft
can be understood as an infraction that must be punished ac-
cording to a predetermined scale of punishment, i.e., as a juridi-
24. A document of these researches can be found in Les machines à guérir

(aux origines de l’hôpital moderne) (Brussels: Mardaga, 1977). See also
Foucault’s condensed statement of these themes in “The Politics of
Health in the Eighteenth Century,” and “The Birth of Social Medi-
cine,” in Essential Works, eds. Paul Rabinow and James D. Faubion
(London: Penguin, 2001), vol. 3. I have attempted to discuss some
aspects of this shift in Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), and Essays, Lectures
(Stockholm: Axl Books, 2007), chap. 8.
383
cal problem with a basis in law. Second, it can be taken as a form

of deviant behavior that must be corrected through various
techniques, i.e., as a disciplinary problem. But third and finally,
it can also be theorized as a statistical phenomenon, where one
must balance the losses and gains of disciplinary measures, and
perhaps allow for a certain latitude of crime, which is a way to
formulate the problem in terms of security. This a model based
on probabilities, a calculus of cost within which the task is to
attain an optimal balance, and not simply to make the transgres-
sive phenomenon go away once and for all.
While these shifts first appear as merely small displacements
inside the analytic of power in place since Discipline and Punish, as
Foucault explores the theme further, it becomes increasingly clear
that he is moving in a new direction. If sovereignty is exerted over
a territory and a multiplicity of political subjects, and discipline
is applied to singular bodies, to their affects and passions, then
security can be said to work with a set of fluid conditions, con-
stantly fluctuating quantities, and future probabilities. Posing the
problem in terms of security means to invent a multifunctional
order, and to calculate the negative and positive outcome of any
given measure: security does not apply to a fixed state, but relates
to a series of future events. If sovereignty monopolizes a territory
and locates a central command, while discipline structures a space
and sets up a hierarchy, then security attempts to plan an environ-
ment or a milieu in relation to a set of possible events. Discipline
is centripetal, it isolates spaces and creates segments, it focuses
and encloses; apparatuses of security, on the other hand, are cen-
trifugal, and they aim to integrate new things in ever widening
circuits. Discipline strives toward a regulation of details, whereas
security allows things to run their course at a certain level, it “lets
things be,” and in this sense biopolitical power is what is truly at
stake in the doctrine of laissez-faire of early liberalism. Discipline,
Foucault says, divides things into licit and illicit, and to this ex-
384
tent it is still based on a law that is to be increasingly specified. In

law, order is what is remains once everything prohibited and dis-
orderly has been removed, all of which is intensified in discipline,
since it also tells you what to do, which is why the convent can be
taken as its the ideal form.
In all of this, we can detect an important shift away from the
earlier work, where the juridical conception based in binary divi-
sions was opposed to the attention to detail and modulations in
discipline; here they sometimes appear as two stages of the same
process, whose opposite would be security, which in turn as its
correlate has an idea of freedom, not as some abstract faculty of
quality of the will, but as that which is always presupposed as the
other side of apparatuses of security, the vital condition that they
must learn to master and from which they draw their own force.
In the apparatuses of security, the question is not panoptic
surveillance, but how to take a step back and observe the nature of
events, not in order to attain some immutable essence of things,
but to ask whether they are advantageous or not, and how one
can find a support in reality itself that makes it possible to chan-
nel them in an appropriate direction. In this respect we can say
that the law operates in the imaginary, it imagines something
negative; discipline is applied in a sphere which is complementary
to reality; security, finally, operates within reality itself, in order
to make its components interact and cohere in a more profitable
fashion—which is what the physiocrats meant, Foucault sug-
gests, when they said that economy in fact is a physics, and that
politics still belongs to nature.
If the idea of life as a multiplicity of unbound forces set free
by biopolitical power earlier was the source for a theory of resis-
tance, the later lectures shifts the perspective: the process of life
and nature becomes a correlate to security, which means that the
vitalist ontology that subtended the work on discipline is put in
question, if not entirely jettisoned. The correlation between secu-
385
rity and freedom is not that of a formed segment to an unformed

element, but much more of a functionalist co-existence, where
the two sides reinforce each other in order to achieve a greater
result, and as such it belongs to the order of governing and calcu-
lation. As a consequence of this, the ontology is life is replaced by
a more thoroughgoing historicizing, which also comes across in
Foucault’s rejection of the implicit theory of an underlying multi-
plicity that provides the body with a surplus of resistance.
To this it may be objected that any account of the idea of vital-
ism as a general philosophical question must provide a much more
encompassing history than the one beginning somewhere in the
eighteenth century, and needs to take us back to Greek philoso-
phy. In order to understand the depth of the question we would
need, for instance, to revisit the divide between Plato’s forms,
based in mathematics and geometry (the mathemata, the “know-
able things” that precede individual objects), and Aristotle’s in-
dividual substances, modeled on the living being who strives to
sustain itself, overcome obstacles, and reach its maximum state of
actuality, the entelechia.25 In this longer perspective, the mathema
and the bios and/or zoe form a couple whose mutations traverse the
history of western metaphysics as a whole, and their effects cannot
be limited to, or meaningfully accounted for within, modernity.26
This frame may be established in very different ways: the his-
tory of metaphysics, as understood by Heidegger, would be one
possible avenue, which finds its echoes in some of the works of
25. This division between the bios and the mathema is emphasized by Alain
Badiou in his review of Deleuze’s Le Pli, in L’annuaire philosophique
(1988–1989), which is a much more nuanced confrontation that the
more known, although rather one-sided reading proposed in his De-
leuze: “La clameur de l’Être” (Paris: Hachette, 1997).
26. This is one of the basis claims in the first volume of Giorgio Agamben’s
Homo Sacer series. For a critical discussion of Agamben’s proposals, es-
pecially the sharp distinction between zoe (qualified life) and bios (mere
life in general), see Jacques Derrida, Séminaire: Le bête et le souverain, vol.
1 (2001–2002) (Paris: Galilée, 2008), 419ff.
386
Giorgio Agamben, who sometimes sets out to correct Foucault,

or provide his analysis of modern biopolitics with a larger
frame, but takes a fundamentally different direction. Foucault
too would in the last lecture series, from Du gouvernement des
vivants (1979–1980) onward, return to Greek, Roman, and early
Patristic thought in order to analyze the problem of governing
as a shaping of conduct (one’s own and that of others), and here
too the theme of bios returns at the end, although now in terms
of a modeling of an existence that lays claim to a truth, or a
courage to truth, opposed to the prevailing order. Beginning
in Plato’s hermeneutics of the subject and the metaphysics of
the soul, continuing through the governing of oneself and oth-
ers in public life, the Cynical reinterpretation of the teachings
of Socrates, Christian asceticism, and eventually pointing to-
ward the figure of the modern revolutionary, Foucault’s lectures
trace a genealogy of the bios that bypasses the traditional sta-
tions of the history of metaphysics, or approaches them from
a very different angle. His ultimate suggestions for further re-
search however remain open-ended, and extracting a systematic
theory from them seems just as baseless as it runs against the
very grain of what he was attempting. It is nevertheless clear
that the term “governmentality,” initially proposed to denote
a crucial shift at the threshold of modernity, gradually sheds its
first chronological specificity, and eventually, to the extent that
it is retained at all, becomes a term denoting any kind of shaping
of conducts and practices. In this sense, rather than developing
through radical shifts and breaks, it is now part of those long
temporal chains, in which, as he suggested already at the time of
The Archeology of Knowledge, the “rhythms become broader,” and
which point to “apparently unmoving histories.”27
27. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Alan Sheridan (London:

Routledge, 2004), 3–4. For Foucault in 1969, this slower history is
still exemplified by “the history of sea-routes, the history of corn or of
387
Vitalism, noopower,
and the philosophy of life
But while it is true that the ubiquitous references to Foucault
in most contemporary discussions of biopower and biopolitics
necessarily involve a highly selective reading, the relevance of a
philosophy of life, or more generally, of theoretical work that
takes the contested nature of the living being as its problem, can
not be settled simply by discussing the merits of various exegeti-
cal investigations of Foucault’s work, especially so given the in-
conclusive and tentative character of his last researches. Many
avenues of thought were left undeveloped as Foucault progress-
es, and some of them have been pursed by others, regardless of
whether this contradicts Foucault’s own trajectory or not.
As we have noted, in the first take on biopower, Foucault
suggested that in modernity life not only becomes the object of
a science that discovers that it has a history and a depth (evo-
lution), it also appears as a multiplicity that must be surveyed
and channeled, both on the level of the individual (sex) and the
collective (population). And as the other side of this new mode
of knowledge and power, there also emerges a life that resists, a
series of counter-definitions that extend at least from Nietzsche,
through pragmatism (James, Dewey), the ontologies of Bergson
and the sociology of Tarde, but also important strands of phe-
nomenology from Husserl through the early Heidegger and
Merleau-Ponty, and up to Deleuze. And indeed, many others
have, in parallel to Foucault or as an explicit transformation of
his work, understood this type of vitalism as his essential legacy.
gold-mining, the history of drought and irrigation, the history of crop

rotation, the history of the balance achieved by the human population
between hunger and abundance” (4), i.e., basically those features that
had been explored by the historians of longue durée from the Annales
school, whereas his own interested lay in the rapid shifts on a higher
level. The later work tends to, if not obliterate then at least question
these temporal divisions.
388
In fact, the ideas of biopower and biopolitics have been devel-

oped in so many directions that the differences between the
various versions seem to outweigh the similarities, even though
Foucault, as we noted, rightly or wrongly remains a central ref-
erence in most of then.28 Here I will just cite one particular
version, which draws freely on both Foucault and Deleuze, the
work of Maurizio Lazzarato.
Lazzarato begins from Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary
societies, which he develops further by drawing on Deleuze’s
brief sketch for a theory of the “societies of control.”29 In this
essay Deleuze suggests that discipline and panopticism are pre-
cisely what we have left behind, and his account, while obvi-
ously not referencing Foucault’s at the time still unpublished
lectures, crosses many of themes addressed by Foucault in the
second half of the seventies, above all in analyzing the relation
between a situated agency and a flexible space of security. The
structure of individuation and localization once brought about
by discipline today works through the “dividual,” Deleuze pro-
poses, a waveform that supersedes the old individual as a basic
unit. The centralizing function (the Panopticon tower with its
28. Other competing versions of biopolitics would, apart from Giorgio
Agamben’s Homo Sacer, also include Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt,
Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), Roberto
Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell
(Minneapols: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Andrea Cavalletti,
La città biopolitica: Mitologie della sicurezza (Turin: Mondadori, 2005),
to cite but a few. The reference to Foucault is common to them all,
although they interpret it in highly different ways.
29. “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” trans. Martin Joughin, in
Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations: 1972–1990 (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 1995). Written in 1990, Deleuze’s text is located at the
beginning of a formation of power-knowledge whose current intensity
and complexity could of course only be glimpsed twenty-five years
ago. Its basic schemata however remain just as pertinent, and the main
difference lies in the profound level at which they have penetrated into
the formation of subjectivity, so that the techniques of control and the
production of dividuality have themselves become the means of the
subject’s desire and jouissance.
389
unidirectional visibility) has been fragmented into a multiplic-

ity of flexible monitoring instances, and a structure of universal
modulation has replaced the disciplinary mold. In discipline we
moved from one closed segment to another—from the school
to the factory, from the factory to the hospital, the prison, and
so forth, but today these compartmentalized milieus have been
replaced by new, smooth functions. Control, on the other hand,
is exerted over open spaces; it locates an element in an open
environment, as in the case of an electronic bracelet worn by a
prisoner, which provides or denies access to a given segment of
space at a certain point in time. If the carceral system produced
independent but analogous subsets, control spaces are intercon-
nected and numerical, like sieves whose mesh constantly shifts
its permeability. Unlike the former disciplinary matrix, the new
structures operate through passwords that regulate access to in-
formation banks, and that can be recalled at any moment. What
all this signals, Deleuze suggests, is a fundamental mutation of
capitalism: the enclosed factory has been replaced by a service
economy characterized by dispersal. The disappearance of the
factory as the model of production in advanced capitalist societ-
ies is reflected in similar transformations of other spaces, for in-
stance in offices, and increasingly also in academic institutions,
where older forms of spatial hierarchies have been or are being
replaced by flattened structures that promote an ideal of flexibil-
ity and participation, and reinvents a whole “psy-” vocabulary,
from William Whyte’s “Orgman” to Deleuze’s laconic observa-
tion that the corporation has acquired a “soul.”30
30. See William Whyte, The Organization Man (New York; Simon &
Schuster, 1956). It is just as striking as symptomatic that Deleuze’s idea
of control has also been used in ways that appear to be more “genera-
tive” than critical. This symptomatic malleability, even reversibility, of
critical concepts is one of the underlying motifs of the idea of the post-
critical, but must be understood as a necessary condition of all concepts
that are as advanced as the system they are describing (it is coincidence
that many of Foucault’s concepts suffered the same fate in architectural
390
For Lazzarato, these brief remarks by Deleuze form the start-

ing point for his theory of “noopolitics,” which also draws deep-
ly on the sociology of Gabriel Tarde, whose micro-sociological
analyses of imitation and invention, and of the individual as a
monadic (in Leibniz sense) entity or a society of its own, are
only beginning to be appreciated.31 Contemporary capitalism,
Lazzarato suggests, no longer has its base in labor, the factory,
and the institutions that regulate the relations between them,
but in a “collaboration of brains,”32 i.e., the networked intel-
theory). See, for instance, the analysis of shopping facilities as “control

space,” in Rem Koolhaas, Stefano Boeri, Sandford Kwinter et al., Muta-
tions: Rem Koolhaas, Harvard Project on the City (Barcelona: Actar, 2000),
which, without mentioning Deleuze, transform his concept into a
technique for the planning of malls.
31. The reemergence of Tarde in theoretical work is a significant phe-
nomenon, and many aspire to be the true interpreters of his legacy;
for an overview of the recent reception, see David Toews, “The New
Tarde: Sociology After the End of the Social,” Theory Culture Society,
2003 (20(5). It seems likely that the context for Tarde’s return is the
necessity to rethink our inherited conceptions of individuality and
collectivity in the light of current modes of exertion of power in the age
of telematics and electronic space. Here too, there is a link to Deleuze,
and many have pointed to his footnote in Difference and Repetition,
where he, already in 1968, rejects the psychologistic reading imposed
on Tarde by Durkheim and his followers, and suggests that “the little
ideas of little men” and the “interferences between imitative currents”
constitutes a “microsociology” already at the level of the person: “hesita-
tion understood as an ‘infinitesimal social opposition’ or invention as
an ‘infinitesimal social adaptation.’” Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul
Patton (London: Athlone Press, 1994), 313–314, note 3. Equally impor-
tant—although for some reason often overlooked—references to Tarde
can be found in Deleuze, Le Pli (Paris: Minuit, 1988), 147 (on the rela-
tion between the ontology of “being” and the “echology” of “having”),
and in the monograph on Foucault, where Deleuze locates Foucault’s
analysis of power in the wake of Tarde’s appreciation of “diffuse and
infinitesimal relations, which are not those of large sets of great men
but are rather the tiny ideas of little men, a civil servant’s flourish, a
new local custom, a linguistic deviation, a visual twisting that becomes
widespread.” (Foucault, 142, note 7)
32. See Lazzarato, Les Révolutions du capitalisme (Paris: Empêcheurs de
penser en rond, 2004). Lazzararo’s recent ideas have grown out of his
earlier work on “immaterial labor,” although I will here stick to the
theory as it is formulated in the later writings.
391
ligence that we find for instance in contemporary software de-

velopment, which the capitalist mode of organization taps into
and over which it attempts to seize control, at the same time
generating a plethora of countermoves that it both fears and
condemns, and needs in order to expand. Generally, the concept
of noopolitics implies that capitalism not so much exploits our
labor as our cognitive capacities, i.e., the new productive forces
that it must contain and channel into the corporate network,
but in this also forges a proliferating array of tools to resist it.
In order to achieve this, modern capitalism has long since
operated by creating a consent through images, sound bites,
brands, and various visual technologies that impact directly on
our brain, bypassing the censorships and reflective mechanisms
of consciousness—all of which demands that we reflect on the
way in which images act, but also on what kind of “image of
thought” that this makes possible, not just as a passive causal
effect, but as an active and constructive response.33 Is there
something like a resistant form of subjectivity that can be con-
structed, more fluid and less constrained by inherited models of
autonomy, authenticity, inside-outside etc., and that would al-
low for a “being-together of the diverse” (Adorno) in what that
neither subsumes nor merely affirms its own dissolution?34 In a
33. Deleuze and Guattari develop the idea of “noology” as a study of the
various images of philosophy that lie before the development of any
specific theories, particularly in What is philosophy? The theme is how-
ever announced already in works from the late 1960s, for instance The
Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition. Perhaps we could understand
noopower and noopolitics in the same vein, i.e., as way to shape our
sense of what it means to act and exist politically, before we make any
particular political choices.
34. See Adorno, Negative Dialektik, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6, 153. Such a
task would at the same time be a question of metaphysics and epistemology
(what would the ontological status of the non-identical be to the extent
that it is freed from identity, and how can we know it), ethics (what
would it mean to relate to others without making them into versions of
myself, and yet without giving up the quest for equality and universal-
ity), politics (which political forms would allow for a polity that respects
392
certain way, this remains close to what Foucault said about early
liberalism: it is first and foremost not an ideology in the sense
of a false, distorted, or imaginary representation of reality, but
a new form of governing by affecting and channeling conducts,
i.e., a way to work with reality; liberalism does not simply pro-
vide us with an theoretical and/or ideological smoke-screen be-
hind which other and more real things (actions, practices, mate-
rial events) are taking place; instead, itself a practice, it is a way
to make certain things real by working with and intensifying,
tempering, or redirecting processes already underway in reality
itself. And furthermore, it even more acutely poses the problem
of resistance: where would we locate an outside that could be a
resource for experiencing, thinking, and acting in some other
way than those that are not even imposed on us, but emerge as
if out of our own most spontaneous preferences?
In a wider context, visual arts, architecture, advertising, and
media in general can be seen as part of the same process, whereby
our minds are governed (in the Foucauldian sense of “conduct of
conduct,” and not as repression or coercion) in order attain new
levels of action and reaction, and the noetic has in a sense that
by far transcends the traditional analysis of ideology become a
site of conflict, even of political struggle, at a level which extends
below that of human subjectivity and integrates consciousness in
a process of transformation which is neither nature nor culture.
This power and this politics would inscribe themselves on the
most fundamental level of mental life, at which our most basic
affects and ideas are organized, where memory, fantasy, and in-
telligence emerge, and which recently has come to be described
in terms of a certain “plasticity.”35 The connection to visual arts
the singular and yet forms a community), and, finally, aesthetics (to what
extent can this being-together be prefigured in works of art, without
becoming an already defined content that is enforced upon them).
35. For the philosophical idea of plasticity, which on the one hand has its
roots in Hegel, on the other hand in neuroscience, see the extended
393
is here particularly relevant: if the position they occupy in this

transformation concerns not only images as we normally appre-
hend them through media or in institutionalized spaces of art,
but in fact extend into the sphere of what used to be called the
unconscious, the articulation of life and consciousness on a pre-
subjective level, would it be possible to attempt to provide pock-
ets of resistance, residual modes of experience that yet remain to
be colonized by technology, or must they be content with sim-
ply recording and reflecting a process whose determining factors
are located elsewhere? The question is whether we still need to
think the capacity of the work of art, for instance the architectural
work, to open up a space of freedom in the same way as we have
been doing since late modernist theory—basically, in a figure of
thought that has been most succinctly formulated by Adorno, as
an internalizing of the formal contradictions of society, which in
the second moment produces a critical distance (transcendence,
reflection, negation, or whatever vocabulary we might use)—or if
the rethinking of critical theory that has been underway at least
since the seventies in fact entails a dismantling of the very idea of
resistance and the critical.
Lazzarato’s proposals move in the direction of a possible
“General Intelligence” that must be conquered, and in this they
are similar to ideas that have been developed by Paolo Virno in
his analysis of post-Fordist labor as subjectivity and the devel-
opment of a new “virtuosity.”36 Virtuosity here has connota-
reflections of Catherine Malabou, beginning in L’Avenir de Hegel: Plastic-

ité, Temporalité, Dialectique (Paris: Vrin, 1996), and continuing through
a series of works that increasingly focus on epigenetics. In her recent
research she has developed a critique of both Foucault’s and Agamben’s
conceptions of life for lacking a support in scientific biology, which,
while misguided in relation to their respective claims and philosophical
projects, is highly indicative of the current desire to find a new point of
articulation between nature and mind.
36. See for instance his A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles: Semio-
text(e), 2004).
394
tions not just of skill and dexterity, but also of the Machiavellian
virtù, which in his time was largely (though no exclusively) the
prerogative of the prince, but today can be made into something
common: it is the capacity to seize the moment, to adjust to sit-
uations and shifts in the balance of power, in order to extract a
new force, even and perhaps even primarily, by extracting some-
thing from the opposing forces and turning them against them-
selves. Such a mutation should be understood as transcending
the sphere of art as well as politics on the inherited sense, and it
affects the very fabric of life, the underlying substructures of the
mind. The political challenges of such a shift are of course for-
midable: how should we conceive of an ethics or a politics, how
should we account for a possible formation of a possible ethi-
cal or political agency, when the “multitude” that it must orga-
nize and integrate—without reducing it into the all-too classical
form of a subject, individual or collective—extends beyond what
we normally circumscribe by the use of our inherited political
categories? Whether such a turning around, or stepping out—
“Exodus,” as Virno calls it—is the kind of radical shift that it
claims, or a mirage produced by the powerful logic of Capital
itself, as many of those who uphold the ethos of the traditional
Left have argued, remains to be seen.
Critique and beyond:

the case of architecture
If we accept the claim that the current mode of production has
moved not only beyond the level of material goods, but also
beyond the one of information and communication, and en-
tered into the space of the noetic and affective, that it invests
our mind as a plastic entity before all reflexive and conscious
responds, then the question might be asked if it is at all possible
to uphold the ethos a critical culture based on ideas of resistance
and negation. And, beyond this, whether the idea of resistance
395
indeed at all makes sense—for, in the name of what should we

resist, and what resources could be mobilized if our bodies and
cognitive faculties are formed and governed all the way down
to the neural substratum by forces that exceed consciousness?
The demand that we must move beyond the critical approach
to architecture, and perhaps to cultural production at large—a
discussion has mostly occurred within architectural discourse,37
although the claims, if they are warranted, obviously must have
a general applicability—need not base itself in a theory of the
noetic and affective, although this connection is probably what
gives it its highest persuasive power. In an essay that triggered
a lot of the following discussion, “Notes around the Doppler
Effect and other Moods of Modernism,”38 Robert Somol and
Sarah Whiting wanted to discern a move from the critical to the
projective, claiming that the inherited notions of autonomy as a
precondition for engagement has in fact become obsolete, and
that what is required, is not so much a critique of reification or a
dialectical opposition to society, as an analysis of the conditions
of emergence that make possible a more fluid practice. As an ex-
ample of this different stance, they cite Rem Koolhaas’s appro-
priation of American mass culture, where architecture produces
social life, and not a text meant for reflexive reading: its aim is
to seduce and instigate new events and behaviors. The tools for
this are what Somol and Whiting describe in terms of force and
affect, and they develop their reading on the basis of the project
for the Downtown Athletic Club (included in Koolhaas’s book
Delirious New York). The Club, as Koolhaas proposes, represents
the complete conquest, floor by floor, of the Skyscraper by so-
cial activity; with the Downtown Athletic Club the American
37. For a general survey of this discussion, see George Baird, “Criticality
and Its Discontents,” Harvard Design Magazine, No. 21, Fall 2004/Win-
ter 2005.
38. Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting, “Notes around the Doppler Effect
and other Moods of Modernism,” Perspecta 33 (2002).
396
way of life, know-how, and initiative definitively overtake the

theoretical lifestyle modifications that the various twentieth-
century European avant-gardes have been insistently propos-
ing, without ever managing to impose them. The skyscraper
becomes a machine for generating and intensifying desirable
forms of human intercourse, which in this case means that the
metropolitan bachelor is the ultimate form of life, and the Club
the ultimate bachelor machine.39
Instead of dialectics and negation, Somol and Whiting see
in this what they call a “Doppler effect,” where perception de-
pends on the location and speed of the viewer and the source.
The disciplinary quality of architecture lies in performance, and
here we can note that discipline as analyzed by Foucault (who
is cited repeatedly in the essay) is transformed without further
ado into an ideal for practice: the diagram and the distribution
39. We should note that Koolhaas’s writing as always incorporates massive

doses of an almost diabolical irony, where different claims seem to cancel
each other out, which is a dimension that gets wholly lost in inter-
pretations such as the above one. This is his superbly tongue-in cheek
description of the project: “With its first 12 floors accessible only to
men, the Downtown Athletic Club appears to be a locker room the size of a
Skyscraper, a definitive manifestation of those metaphysics—at once spiri-
tual and carnal—that protect the American male against the corrosion of
adulthood. But in fact, the club has reached the point where the notion
of a ‘peak’ condition transcends the physical realm to become cerebral.
It is not a locker room but an incubator for adults, an instrument that per-
mits the members—too impatient to await the outcome of evolution—to
reach new strata of maturity by transforming themselves into new
beings, this time according to their individual designs. Bastions of the
antinatural, Skyscrapers such as the Club announce the imminent segre-
gation of mankind into two tribes: one of Metropolitanites—literally self
made—who used the full potential of the apparatus of Modernity to reach
unique levels of perfection, the second simply the remainder of the hu-
man race. The only price its locker-room graduates have to pay for their
collective narcissism is that of sterility. Their self-induced mutations are
not reproducible in future generations.” Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A
Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (New York, Monacelli Press, 1994),
157–158. The theme of a division between non-communicating spaces
(“two tribes”) can in fact be read as way to reinvent critique not as op-
position, but as materializing of contradictions; see chap 5, above.
397
of singularities, particularly as these concepts have been analyzed

by Deleuze, are no longer structures of action and reaction whose
integration immediately produce deviations and resistances, but
have simply become instrumentalized as design tools.40
In the projective mood, Somol and Whiting continue, no
doubt consciously echoing a retrieval of a postmodernized
pop art sensibility (as is indicated by the reference to Jean
Baudrillard), we move from hot to cool, architecture ceases to
worry about separating itself from everyday in terms of auton-
omy and resistance, and becomes just as relaxed about reality
as television. Curiously enough, they end by ascertaining that
such a projective and instrumental practice “does not necessari-
ly entail a capitulation to the market forces, but actually respects
or reorganizes multiple economies, ecologies, information sys-
tems, and social groups.”41
That such a conclusion contains an element of wishful
thinking was ruthlessly brought forth by Michael Speaks, in
a series of essays that unabashedly called for the end of theo-
ry as critique, and an adaptation to the forces of the market.
Particularly referencing education, he lashed out against archi-
tecture school for having failed to develop an intellectual cul-
ture in tune with the real world, and instead have been given
40. Deleuze understands the epistemological breaks that Foucault locates
in his archeology of knowledge in terms of a divide between the “vis-
ible” and the “sayable,” which in their conjunction forms and archive,
whereas the disciplinary dimension belongs to the level of the diagram
of power and forces, which it what gives a temporary stability to the ar-
chive. The concept of diagram has since Deleuze’s book been applied in
a wide variety of ways to contemporary architecture, first by Greg Lynn
in a discussion of the work of Ben van Berkel, in Lynn, “Forms of Ex-
pression: The Proto-Functional Potential of Diagrams in Architectural
Design,” El Croquis 72 (1995). For an overview of various uses, see the
contributions in Any 23, “Diagram Work” (1998). Common to them
all is however the symptomatic absence of the dimension of power,
struggle, and resistance that was an essential dimension in Deleuze’s
interpretation.
41. Somol and Whiting “Notes around the Doppler Effect,” 77.
398
over to “Deconstruction and Marxism,” creating an “aversion

to the marketplace, the very milieu of intervention and shaper
of any future architecture.”42 Unlike the comparatively subtle
theoretical exercises of Somol and Whiting, Speaks makes no
excuses: his essay can be read as call to order, a demand that
we should abandon theory in general, and assume a stance that
unapologetically opts for the fashionable instead of intellectual
reflection. “Theory,” Speaks claims, “is not just irrelevant but
was and continues to be an impediment to the development of
a culture of innovation in architecture.”43
Such claims could easily be dismissed because of their brutal
and summary quality,44 or because they are merely the echoes
of generational conflicts and skirmishes in American academia.
And yet they point to a deeper problem, which we noted above:
to what extent can the emphasis on the affective, the senses, and
the dimension of the noopolitical create concepts that would al-
low us to gain a distance from the world? Can they all avoid be-
ing co-opted by a capitalism that colonizes even the last vestiges
of nature and the unconscious?
Jeffrey Kipnis has argued that the strategies of negation must
give way to a resistance that instead works by way of sensations,
suggesting that architecture should work more like a sound-
track in a film, which would allow it to unfold a political power
that draws directly on the way it impacts on our nervous system.
The analogy with the soundtrack is however not (and is prob-
ably not meant to be) unambiguous: on one level, a soundtrack
can be taken as a highly specialized service, called upon to sup-
port and highlight features in an already set narrative; rarely, if
42. Michael Speaks, “After Theory,” Architectural Record 06.05, 73.
43. Ibid, 74.
44. A quality that appears even stranger when one reads other essays by
Speaks, where “theory” is indeed operative. See for instance the phe-
nomenologically oriented analysis of Olafur Eliasson’s Green River Proj-
ect, in Daniel Birnbaum et al, Olafur Eliasson (London: Phaidon, 2002).
399
ever, is it given an agency and critical power of its own. On an-

other level, it contains a whole gamut of possibilities not just for
supporting, but also for redirecting or even derailing the narra-
tive, and for establishing unexpected links in an infra-conscious
dimension that, as it were, envelops the order of the visible
and the spoken.45 The task of architecture as resistance, Kipnis
claims, would be to create new sensations and alliances, and in
this he comes close to Lazzarato: the possibility of resistance in
the society of control lies in creating connections that resist be-
ing appropriated, which is a task that can never be completed;
in fact, reversibility might be taken to be their defining feature.
The emergence of something like a control logics on the no-
etic level seems to demand that the idea of a critical theory be
rethought. The various claims that adversary models based on ne-
gation, dialectics, and contradiction are obsolete, no matter how
exaggerated and one-sided they may be (and some of them are
doubtlessly mere ideology in an unsophisticated sense), nonethe-
less point in the same direction, and cannot be simply dismissed.
Here there are of course many avenues that open up, and unlike
the theorists of noopower, almost as an inversion of their propos-
als, some theorists take the step into a full-blown naturalizing of
45. Jeffrey Kipnis, “Is Resistance Futile?” in Log 5 (Spring/Summer 2005).
Kipnis draws on Francis Bacon, and his reading of Bacons work in
terms of affects and sensations is indebted to Deleuze, Francis Bacon:
Logique de la sensation (Paris: Editions de la Différence, 1981). Something
of this transpires already in Kipnis’s essay on “The Cunning of Cosmet-
ics,” in El Croquis 84 (1997), which discusses the role of surface, orna-
ment, and the “transformative power of the cosmetic” in Herzog & de
Meuron’s work, in where he discerns an “urbane, cunning intelligence,
and an intoxicating, almost erotic allure” (407). These works function
like “sirens,” Kipnis says, recalling the famous analysis of Horkheimer
and Adorno, although he provides a wholly different reading of the mo-
ment of seduction. The discourse of seduction has become widespread
in architecture; see for instance the contributions by Sylvia Lavin,
Jeffrey Kipnis, and Alejandro Zaera-Polo, in Quaderns 245 (April 2005).
The various uses of this term, ranging from the “urbane and cunning”
to the desire to simply attract clients, testifies to its ideological and
theoretical malleability.
400
consciousness—akin to the various versions of neural materialism

that have become widespread in many strands of analytical phi-
losophy—and attempt to ground aesthetic and formal solutions
(often reviving classical canons of beauty, as if the whole post-
Hegelian tradition of aesthetic philosophy had never existed) to
architectural and artistic problems directly in a neuroscience and
evolutionary biology. This however seems simply to bypass the
question of historical mediation, and moreover renders the ques-
tion of what a theory could be that understands architecture on
the basis of an analysis of contemporary society and power rela-
tions vacuous from the start.46
But what, then, is this thing that we have referred to in a
rather imprecise way as critical theory? What is critical about
it, and in what sense is it a theory? These questions cannot be
settled by references to the past, or to any particular form of
artistic practice that is supposed to hold the key; answering
them requires acts of invention. Such acts cannot help but be
inextricably bound up with the current state of affairs, and they
must draw on the most advanced productive forces while still
trying to imagine other possible social relations. In this they
always run the risk of becoming indistinguishable from what
they attempt to analyze, which is however not something to be
deplored; it is in substance the same situation as that of Marx’s
Capital with respect to the world of nineteenth-century capi-
talism. Critical theory can obviously not congeal into some in-
cessant referencing of the past (the historical avant-garde, the
1960s, or some other moment in time), nor can it leap ahead
into a utopian future where it would become sealed in the purely
imaginary, even though it cannot abandon the imaginary as an
outdated relic from the philosophy of consciousness.
46. This seems to me to be the claim by Harry Francis Mallgrave, in his

recent The Architect’s Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture
(London: Blackwell, 2010).
401
Critical theory must be an immanent practice, moving with

its time, always ready to invent new tools. At present, the soci-
ety of control—which, one must remember, is only one part of
a global order that contains many levels of technological refine-
ment, and from which the power regimes of sovereignty and
discipline have by no means receded—constitutes our horizon,
it generates many images of thought, from the most complex
to the most facile, and to extract from them a transformative
power of philosophy, art, and politics is a task that always re-
mains to be undertaken anew.
402
Tor Lindstrand, Proposal for Perth To what extent can the relation be-
(Entertainment Centre), (2012). tween the theory and practice of ar-
chitecture be understood as critical?
Instead of setting one against the
other, should we not instead linger
on the “and” that links them here,
which not only allows us to under-
stand their conjunction as a histori-
cally variable intersection, but also
highlights the idea of critique as an
activity that points towards a split-
ting and a division that shatters the
present, and renders not just the
future but even the past open? And
might not such a dissolution of a
conventional temporal axis provide
us access to a history that is, precise-
ly like the future, a space of possibil-
ities, in which critique and creation
continually call upon each other?
Drawing on a long philosophi-

cal tradition from Kant to Adorno
and Deleuze, as well on a series of
debates in architectural and artistic
discourse from the sixties onward,
this book explores the possibility of
reframing critical theory in a con-
temporary theoretical landscape
that today seems more difficult
to chart than ever. Thinking phi-
losophy through architecture, and
architecture through philosophy,
it argues for a critique as an inter-
ISBN 978-91-86883-13-3
vention that must continually re-
draw the line between concepts and
things, words and objects.
sven-olov wallenstein is pro-

fessor of philosophy at Södertörn
University.
Axl Books
www.axlbooks.com

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Introduction: Architecture, Critique, Ideology vii

1. Tafuri and the End of Utopia 1

the work of thinkers who in many ways stand opposed to the

an articulating, in both cases, without specifying in advance,

zooming out and stepping up to another level, to environments

Architecture, as Hegel famously said, is the first of the arts

works actively resist this on the level of content, the promise

of contestation even at the level of affectivity. Architecture is

up as an alternative to discursive rationality without being able

5. See Wellmer, “Adorno, die Moderne und das Erhabene”, in Franz

have overlooked or failed to grasp: communication is what is

and affects in (post)modern capitalism, in order for it to be

inversion, Marx continues; it gives us an inverted image, like a

is not a flawed or inverted representation, but a material, bodily

of application, and as such must be distinguished from the con-

as a prefiguring or projecting of future human sensations: the

The idea of critical theory

a structure of self-representation that spans a constitutive gap,

work that makes it possible to open up the monuments of the

future research, and if the vocabulary of Adorno here is used as a

of the “informal,”13 by the incessant interrogation (both theo-

ference. This need to rethink the idea of contradiction signals that

such too simplified, and yet it cannot be simply dismissed.

formalist analyses of modern art, it needs to be broken up spec-

of the restructuring of capitalism after the 1929 crash, and the

of images that make Las Vegas into a paradigm; for Rossi, it is

and writings of Sergey Eisenstein. This dialectic of control and

our capacity for a “cognitive mapping” that locates subjective

The fifth chapter, “Looping Ideology,” examines the work

than with an adopting of an external stance outside the system

different times and narratives, and bring together the heteroto-

ment and constitutes an essential testing ground, this does not

I would like to thank my colleagues at the Department of Cul-

The past and present of critique

an expression of our own will. For Tafuri, breaking this spell,

dell’architettura italiana, 1944–1985 (1982, 2. ed. 1986), after

3. Marco Biraghi, Progetto di crisi: Manfredo Tafuri e l’architettura contem-

What will be in focus here is rather the tension between

under the label “post-critical,”5—would thus simply appear as a

globalization, electronic capitalism, post-Fordism, and several

7. “Ciphers of Authority, Figures of Regression,” was the title of an essay

other solutions imposed themselves at roughly the same time,

ity that permeates Tafuri’s work is similarly that of a constant

cussion here.11 This meandering quality notwithstanding, there is

exegeses of modernism. Tafuri’s critical take on his predecessors

he launches a project to write a history of space, in the footsteps of

and architecture, both as practice and theory, has moved into

of aesthetic norms, and which constructs its genealogies of the

mal analyses or readings of history that retrieve unrealized pos-

The optimism and visionary power of the first generation of

history in order to construct a new history,” which is why this “neat

re-evaluation of previous historiography, its claim was nothing

less questioning of History and the simultaneous continuation

of what such a responsibility entails, Tafuri seems to give an

of Progetto e utopia, where Tafuri sees the possibility of a return

Project and utopia