Re-visiting the Political Context of Manfredo Tafuri’s
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”:
‘Having Corpses in our Mouths’
Emre Özyetiş
B.Arch.
2013
RMIT
Re-visiting the Political Context of Manfredo Tafuri’s
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”:
‘Having Corpses in our Mouths’
A thesis submitted in fulillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Architecture
Emre Özyetiş
B.Arch.
School of Architecture and Design
Design and Social Context Portfolio
RMIT University
March 2013
iii
DECLARATION
I certify that except where due acknowledgements has been
made, the work is that of the author alone; the work has not
been submitted previously, in whole or in part, to qualify for
any other academic award; the content of the thesis is the
result of work which has been carried out since the oicial
commencement date of the approved research program; and,
any editorial work, paid or unpaid, carried out by a third
party is acknowledged.
Emre Özyetiş
March 31, 2013
iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wrote this thesis on the occupied land of Wurundjeri
people of the Kulin Nations. I acknowledge the traditional
Custodians of the Land and pay my respect to Elders past
and present. As an international student from Turkey, I am
compelled to state that I support the ongoing struggle of
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people for land rights,
self-determination, and justice.
I am grateful and indebted for their generous advice,
patience and support to Andrew Leach, Juliette Peers,
Damian Grenfell and Steve Wright.
I do not have words to express my gratitude for the
continuing support, guidance as well as tremendous eforts
to help transforming my work into a comprehensible text by
my supervisor Jane Burry.
Hellen Sky, Mike Hornblow, Naman hakar, Peta Carlin
and fellow colleagues at SIAL had contributed to my research
with their comments, feedback and companionship. I would
also like to thank to Niccolo Palandri for sharing his overthe-top linguistic skills with me.
Without the inancial support from the Ministry of
Education of Turkey and Mardin Artuklu University, Turkey,
I would have not been able to conduct my research at all.
hanks for the kind assistance provided by Mahmut Ayhan
and Mükerrem Yahyaoğlu for facilitating this support.
I would not have considered doing this research without the
help and motivation from Zeynep Mennan. I am grateful to
her and her support which made this research possible in the
irst place.
Ani T. Superstar, Alice Goddard, Biddy Boudislayer, Burak
Acıl, Ceren Özyetiş, Dosta Dyareah, Elvan Aynal, Gülten
Özyetiş, Hellen Sky, James J. Bonger, Kayle Goddard, Lucy
Berglund, Nejat Özyetiş, Orr Guilat, Özlem Arslan and
Steph Wogton D. Ago have supported me in numerous ways
in the last two years. I love them.
v
CONTENTS
Abstract
1
1. Introduction
5
1.1 Document Structure
11
Section I: Presenting the problem and the work
2. Problem - Prelude
2.1 he role of the architect in the contemporary socio political framework
2.1.1 Architecture as a profession
2.2 Confronting the Contemporary Role of the Architects
2.3 Understanding the Contemporary Circumstances with the Aid of Post-1968 Discourse
2.4 Manfredo Tafuri Haunts (Again)
3. “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
3.1 Introduction to Chapter hree
3.2 A Cross-section of “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
3.3 Problems with Approaching the Essay
3.3.1 Problems with approaching the essay via Architecture and Utopia
3.3.2 Problems with approaching the essay via Manfredo Tafuri
3.3.3 Problems with approaching the essay via Tafuri’s audience
3.4 Conclusion to Chapter hree
17
17
17
25
31
34
41
41
43
47
50
55
75
85
Section II: Examining the Relevance of the Work in the Context
4. Political Framework of “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
4.1 Introduction to Chapter Four
4.1.1 A note on autonomist-Marxism and operaismo
4.2 Operaismo as a Political Project in Italy
4.2.1 he new left and the operaisti
4.2.2 Quaderni rossi
4.2.3 Classe operaia
4.2.4 Contropiano
4.2.5 Italy 1967-1970
4.3 Conclusion to Chapter Four
5. Writing that Returns to the Political Framework of the Essay
5.1 Introduction to Chapter Five
5.2 Pier Vittorio Aureli and his narration of 1960s and 1970s Italy
5.3 Gail Day and her take on Tafuri
5.4 Conclusion to Chapter Five
93
93
96
101
103
106
114
118
133
143
147
147
149
166
172
Section III: Recapitulation
6. Conclusions
Epilogue
181
189
Bibliography
193
vii
ABSTRACT
In this thesis I revisit Manfredo Tafuri’s 1969 article “Per
una critica dell’ideologia architettonica” (Toward a Critique
of Architectural Ideology) within the political context of
Italy in the 1960s. I address the research question: what is
the contemporary relevance of the essay read in this context?
I suggest that testing the arguments in Tafuri’s 1969 essay
against his complete oeuvre and his subsequent career as a
critic or a historian obfuscates and misconstrues the context
and the essay.
I argue that the essay was published in a moment when operaisti
protagonists were processing the implications of the operaisti
discourse they constructed in relation to the intensiication of
the social conlict in Italy in the late 1960s and the 1970s. his
provides a convincing context for Tafuri’s application of this
discourse as a total rejection of the possibility of the existence
of an architectural profession outside participation in capitalist
development. I conclude that, located with precision within
the context of the journal Contropiano, where his essay was
irst published,“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
is more likely to agitate intellectuals and architects than it has
previously.
It is important for the generation who has not yet acquired
professional autonomy, such as architectural students or
interns, to be reminded of Tafuri’s critique within its context
as they assume their social vocation. hus this is my target
readership for this thesis. It is particularly important to
revisit Tafuri and his 1969 essay at a time when there is a
growing discussion around a social vocation or discourse on
sustainability, participatory design, radical architecture and
such. he social agenda still makes the art and the profession
of architecture resilient to transforming political, economic
and social structures. In this light, it is not only necessary but
1
ABSTRACT
also relevant to revisit the nature of the social vocation of architects as it
had been criticized in Tafuri’s 1969 essay within the intellectual debates
Italian operaisti project initiated.
Intellectuals and architects writing following Tafuri’s death point to the past
misinterpretation of the radical threads they attribute to Tafuri in Progetto e
utopia. Since then, and predominantly in the twenty-irst century, a group
of writers such as Asor Rosa, Ghirardo, Day, Aureli and Leach identify
this admission of past misappropriation of Tafuri’s project. Among these
architectural historians and theoreticians, Asor Rosa, Day and Ghirardo
have shown that Tafuri’s arguments have frequently been too hastily
dismissed for being too apocalyptic and/or too nihilistic: an interpretation
that they do not accept. I argue that to counter this interpretation they have
also obfuscated the arguments in Tafuri’s essay by making reference to his
other works in order to prove that he was not really attacking architectural
practice and theory. Similar to works that overlook the political context
of Tafuri’s essay, the recent attempts to include it also fail to confront the
implications of the arguments raised in the essay.
In twenty-irst century architectural discourse, Aureli and Day are arguably
the authors who pay most attention to the political framework for Tafuri’s
essay. hey look for the relevance of the political projects initiated by
operaismo and autonomia to contemporary architectural discourse. hey
return to the context for one of two objectives. Aureli returns to the historical
political context in order to dismiss the relevance of the autonomist
arguments to today. Day returns to the context to neutralize both the
context and the arguments by writing a defense from the perspective of
the intellectual and the architect who is criticized in Tafuri’s article. hese
contemporary attempts that do re-visit Tafuri within the economic,
political and social context of 1960s and 1970s Italy fail to move beyond
certain post-1960s rhetoric that justiies the apathy of intellectuals and an
impasse in relation to social conlicts. his is encapsulated in the mood: “If
you can’t beat them, join them.” he arguments present in the 1969 essay
were expanded and elaborated by Tafuri in 1973. he ainity between the
1969 essay and the 1973 volume in which the impact of the 1968 political
agenda was less extreme, eases architects, intellectuals and Tafuri scholars
into a position where they do not need to confront the implications of the
essay and its political framework.
In response to the research question I address, I conclude that if we can
approach “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology” in the precise
moment it occupies within the context of Italy in the 1960s and the
ongoing debates amongst operaisti – ailiated intellectuals, we can embrace
the essay as a critique of the limits of intellectuals and professionals in
2
ABSTRACT
social conlicts, that is indeed nihilistic and apocalyptic for those who insist
on their role as architects or academics. I ind this a relevant and important
gesture as it may make us more open to be agitated, for us to question our
own participation in capitalist development in order to confront the post
1960s as well as contemporary architectural discourse and practice.
3
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
In 1969 Manfredo Tafuri (Rome 1935-Venice 1994) raised one of the most
inluential and radical critiques of architecture with his essay “Per una critica
dell’ideologia architettonica” in the Italian journal Contropiano.1 In 1973 he published
the pamphlet Progetto e utopia that was based on his 1969 essay.2 His critique shaped
his reputation amongst his audience as a Marxist historiographer. Arguing for the
incapacity of architecture to challenge capitalist development due to its inherent and
necessary relationship with capitalist structures, Tafuri’s inquiry set the lens through
which his project was perceived especially in English-speaking architectural discourse.
Apart from Tafuri’s own critique of his audience, his contemporaneous generation of
architects, architectural historians and theoreticians as well as a subsequent generation
of architectural theoreticians and historians after his death in 1994 have subjected
conlicting and problematic interpretations of Tafuri’s works to criticism.3
In twenty-irst century architectural discourse, the return to Tafuri’s works, especially
by Andrew Leach catalyzed the establishment of the recognition of his oeuvre as a
whole.4 With the publication Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History, Tafuri’s contribution
1
Manfredo Tafuri, “Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica,” in Contropiano:
Materiali marxisti 1 (1969): 31-79. Translated into English by Stephen Sartorelli as “Toward a
Critique of Architectural Ideology,” in Architecture Theory since 1968, ed. K. Michael Hays
(Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1998): 6-35.
2
Manfredo Tafuri, Progetto e utopia: Architettura e sviluppo capitalistico (Bari: Laterza,
1973). Translated into English by Barbara Luigia La Penta as Architecture and Utopia: Design and
Capitalist Development (Cambridge & London: MIT Press, 1976).
3
Vittorio Gregotti, ed. “Il progetto storico di Manfredo Tafuri” / “The Historical Project of
Manfredo Tafuri,” special issue Casabella, nos. 619-620 (1995); Ignasi de Solà-Morales, ed.,
“Being Manfredo Tafuri,” special issue Architecture New York (ANY), nos. 25-26 (2000). Those
two monographic issues which were published on Manfredo Tafuri after Tafuri’s death in 1994 at
the age of 58.
4
Andrew Leach, Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History (Ghent: A&S Books, 2007). In his
PhD Dissertation, which constituted the basis of his book, Leach provides a more articulated
account of this reading. See Andrew Leach, “Choosing History: A Study of Manfredo Tafuri’s
Theorisation of Architectural History and Architectural History Research,” (PhD diss., University
of Ghent, 2006). Leach’s 2006 PhD dissertation on Manfredo Tafuri is preceded by his
publications, such as: “‘Everything we do is but the larva of our intentions’: Manfredo Tafuri and
Storia dell’architettura italiana 1944-1985,” in Additions to Architectural History: XIXth Annual
Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, ed. John
Macarthur and Antony Moulis (Brisbane: SAHANZ, 2002): 1-12; “Death in Venice: Tafuri’s Life
in the Project,” in Architectural Theory Review 8, no.1 (2003): 235-244; “Inoperative Criticism:
Tafuri and the Discipline of History,” in Architectural Theory Review 8, no.2 (2003): 85-93; as
well as his contribution to 2004 meeting of “Critical Architecture” conference organized by the
Architectural Humanities Research Association, that is published later as “Criticality and
Operativity,” in Critical Architecture, ed. Mark Dorrian, Murray Fraser, Jonathan Hill and Jane
5
CHAPTER ONE
to the history of architecture is acknowledged instead of clinging to the political
persona of Tafuri that was created by his critique of architectural ideology and his irst
book that was translated into English: Architecture and Utopia.5 Regardless, Tafuri’s
works are still being revisited to re-establish the context and political framework
of his works in order to deliver a more appropriate understanding of Tafuri in
response to the generation of architects, theoreticians and historians who seemed
to misconstrue Tafuri’s intentions. hese are contemporary inquiries into a more
accurate understanding of Tafuri, which are important as they confront a generation
of architects, historians and theoreticians for constructing various Tafuris.6
However, with this thesis I argue that such inquiries are still inclined to fail to address
the particularity of the political framework of “Toward a Critique of Architectural
Ideology,” and can not go beyond the already existing debates around Tafuri and his
Rendell (London and New York: Routledge, 2007): 14-21.
5
Tafuri’s irst work that appeared in English was “Design and Technological Utopia,” in
Italy: The New Domestic Landscape, Achievements and Problems of Italian Design, ed., Emilio
Ambasz (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972): 388-404.
6
In 2006, at Columbia University and Cooper Union, New York, a conference titled “The
Critical Legacies of Manfredo Tafuri” was organized by Daniel Sherer, who is also the English
translator of Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architectures (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2006): Tafuri’s last book that had been released at this event 14 years later
than its original publication in Italian. In this gathering, “the elite of the international scene of
architecture history and theory,” referred by Teresa Stoppani, addressed:
Tafuri’s trajectory both on the historiographical and the theoretical
levels and in terms of the complexities of his reception in Europe and
the United States [...] to move beyond reductive characterizations that
have tended to impede the understanding of his work - the end of
architecture, nihilism, political and economic determinism, and a
nostalgic disconnection from the present - in order to renew the
dialogue Tafuri opened between architecture and history. (see Teresa
Stoppani, “The Building of Tension - Manfredo Tafuri’s Legacy: from
Operative Criticism to Historical Project, Between Critical Practices
and Material Practices in Architecture,” in Relections on Creativity:
Exploring the Role of Theory in Creative Practices, 21 and 22 April
2006, ed. Hamid van Koten (Dundee: Duncan of Jordanstone College,
2007).
As Jon Goodbun reports: “now-aging generation of theorists and critics, including Anthony Vidler,
Kenneth Frampton, Diana Agrest and Joan Ockman [...] all concluded with the idea that it might
be Tafuriʼs very indigestibility within consumer culture that keeps this project critical, as well as
obscure.” Suspicious about the commitment of this group to what extent Tafuri’s project is relevant
to their own tasks, Goodbun mentions contributions by Sherer, Andrew Leach, Marco de Michelis,
Carla Keyvanian, Marco Biraghi Mark Rakatansky, Beatriz Colomina, Alessandra Ponte, JeanLouis Cohen and James Ackerman’s contributions as rather different or memorable scholarly
works. Yet, Goodwin suggests that in this conference what was signiicantly omitted was the transdisciplinary aspects of Tafuri’s reception by authors such as Gail Day and David Cunningham (See
Jon Goodbun, “The Assasin: The Critical Legacies of Manfredo Tafuri, Columbia University, New
York, 20-21 April 2006,” in Radical Philosophy 138 (July/August 2006).
6
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE
project.7
7
Alberto Asor Rosa, with his article “Manfredo Tafuri, or, Humanism Revisited,” calls to
revisit Tafuri and his Architecture and Utopia with reference to the roles played by the “Marxist
‘political theory.” Alberto Asor Rosa, “Manfredo Tafuri, or, Humanism Revisited,” trans. Ruth
Taylor with Daniele Pisani and Manuel Orazi in Log 9 (Winter/Spring 2007): 29-38, 29. This is not
the call that lays the foundations of such a project though. Asor Rosa himself raised the relevance
of the political context of 1960s and 1970s Italy to Tafuri’s project as a historian in 1995 with his
contribution to the monographic issue of Casabella on Tafuri, see Alberto Asor Rosa, “Critica
dell’ideologica ed esercizio storico” / “Critique of Ideology and Historical Practice,” trans.
Sebastiano Brandolini in “Il progetto strocio di Manfredo Tafuri” / The Historical Project of
Manfredo Tafuri,” ed. Vittorio Gregotti, special issue, Casabella nos. 619-620 (1995): 28-33. I will
elaborate more on the progression of attempts to bring Tafuri’s works’ political dimensions into the
discourse. However at this stage it is worthy mentioning that; in the twenty-irst century, there
appears what seems to be a reiteration of what Mark Wigley and his writing on the legacy of
Tafuri. He depicts this legacy as haunted by Tafuri’s “ghost” and “remystiied” by the
“Continentals” and “Anglo Saxons.” See Mark Wigley, “Post-Operative History” in “Being
Manfredo Tafuri,” ed. Ignasi de Sola-Morales, ANY, nos. 25-26 (February 2000) 47-53. Diane
Ghirardo and Gail Day are English-speaking theoreticians who study Manfredo Tafuri in the light
of the critique Mark Wigley and Alberto Asor Rosa address. Their critique is shaped with reference
to Tafuri’s audience who overlook the political project Tafuri can be located within. Apart from
those authors who I pay most attention to; Teresa Stoppani, David Cunningham and Hilde Heynen
are igures who acknowledge Tafuri in their inquiries with their contributions in Mark Dorrian,
Murray Fraser, Jonathan Hill and Jane Rendell, eds., Critical Architecture (London and New York:
Routledge, 2007).
At irst sight, Pier Vittorio Aureli might give the impression he is infatuated with Tafuri and
operaismo to his readers who also engage with Tafuri. To some extent, this hasty judgment is
concreted in the form of a relation drawn between the two, most evidently, in his essay
“Intellectual Work and Capitalist Development: Origins and Context of Manfredo Tafuri’s Critique
of Architectural Ideology,” on the internet portal The City as a Project (2011), which had been
published in 2009 at the Swedish Journal SITE. See Pier Vittorio Aureli, “Intellectual Work and
Capitalist Development: Origins and Context of Manfredo Tafuri’s Critique of Architectural
Ideology” in SITE 26-27 (2009): 18-23. However, to some extent diverging from the other writers
who study Tafuri in relation to his works’ political dimensions, he is not convinced that returning
to this context is relevant nor Tafuri’s project should be limited within this context merely as his
publications The Project of Autonomy (2008) and The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture
(2011) suggest. See Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture within
and against Capitalism (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008); Pier Vittorio Aureli, The
Possibility of an Absolute Architecture (Cambridge, London: MIT Press, 2011).
Apart from the relevance of Tafuri’s works’ political context to Tafuri’s complete oeuvre, there are
inquiries on this context, that can be roughly identiied as operaismo, within the domain of design
and architecture which do extend beyond debates on Tafuri: and probably Aureli’s The Project of
Autonomy can be located more precisely amongst such attempts. Alexandra Brown’s recent
research project at the University of Queensland on “Radical Restructuring: Aesthetic and Political
Autonomy in Italian Architecture & Design, 1963-73” is another example which we can have an
idea about via “Operaismo, Architecture & Design in Ambasz’s New Domestic Landscape: Issues
of Redeinition and Refusal in 1960s Italy,” in Imagining: Proceedings of the 27th International
SAHANZ Conference, ed. Michael Chapman and Michael Ostwald (New Castle: SAHANZ, 2010):
52-57. Through Alexandra Brown, I became aware of Jacopo Galimberti’s research on
“Collectivism: Politics and Authorship in the Art of the 1960s,” which is accompanied by his
publications such as “The Intellectual and the Fool: Piero Manzoni between the Milanese Art
Scene and the Land of Cockaigne,” in Oxford Art Journal 35, no.1 (2012): 75-94; “The N Group
Introduction
7
CHAPTER ONE
Contemporary inquiries into Tafuri’s work do not necessairly problematize with the
forced relationship of the 1969 essay to later works of Tafuri. his may suggest a
better understanding of the work if we believe it is a necessary, or even as the only
way to understand a work by contextualising the work within an author’s career.
However, I argue that if we isolate Tafuri’s 1969 essay from Tafuri’s later works,
including the essay’s later edition in 1976, then the pessimistic and apolcalyptical
implications of the essay can be acknowledged and even embraced. By returning
to the essay and its speciic chronological and political context, motivated by a
critique of both political and architectural post-1960s discourse and contemporary
architectural discourse, the particularity of the context in which the essay was written
is highlighted. Guided by this conviction, I examine the relevance of re-visiting the
political context of Tafuri’s 1969 essay and construct the thesis by irst addressing the
diiculties of approaching Tafuri and his project in general and then providing an
account of the political context of 1960s Italy in order to demonstrate the limitations
of returning to this context within an architectural discourse.8
and the Operaisti: Art and Class Struggle in the Italian Economic Boom,” in Grey Room 45 (Fall
2012): 80-101. I believe they deserve more attention as they contrast with what we observe that in
the dominant twenty-irst century architecture discourse where the political trajectory opened up
by operaismo is taken into consideration are still most likely through attempts to appropriate
theories and writings of operaismo’s controversial subsequent movement autonomia. For example,
we should acknowledge that apart from inquiries by academics listed above, Antonio Negri is
simultaneously being drawn into architectural debates. This is demonstrated most recently, at the
time of writing, by François Roche in “A Dialogue: Negri and Roche,” interview with Antonio
Negri in “Reclaim Resi[lience]stance,” ed. François Roche, Log 25 (New York: Anyone
Corporation, 2012): 104-117; which had been preceded by Hans Ulrich Obrist, “In Conversation
with Antonio Negri,” in e-lux journal 18 (September 2010), http://www.e-lux.com/journal/inconversation-with-antonio-negri/ and Negri being asked to commentate on Rem Koolhaas in
Radical History in 2009. See Antonio Negri, “On Rem Koolhaas,” trans. Arianna Bove in Radical
Philosophy 154 (March-April 2009): 48-50.
8
Not having access to original documentation in Italian is a limitation for inquiries into
Manfredo Tafuri and his works. Having said that, in response to my research question in this
thesis, which seeks the relevance of returning to Manfredo Tafuri and his 1969 essay in the
contemporary context, I avoid suggesting a more proper or a more accurate reading of Tafuri or his
works. Instead, I try assessing the implications of isolating his inquiry in 1969 as a response to the
reception of Manfredo Tafuri and his works amongst architectural theoreticians and historians
today. The body of works I focus on is either translations of Manfredo Tafuri’s works; secondary
literature on Manfredo Tafuri; his works, as well as the context that is described in the studies
study Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. Although I tried my best to study and address crucial texts and
interviews in Italian, most works in Italian that are not translated into English, and similar studies
in languages other than English, have not been studied in depth within the conines of this
research. It is worth mentioning that the given emphasis on the political dimensions of Tafuri’s
works that dominates the discourse around his in English speaking audience is also present in the
works of Italian authors. An example is Felice Mometti’s research on Manfredo Tafuri he is
undertaking at Paris VIII and his article “La crisi come progetto: Architettura e storia in Manfredo
Tafuri” (“The crisis as the project: Architecture and History in ManfredoTafuri”) where the author
establishes a link between the Italian operaismo movement, particularly with reference to Tafuri’s
contributions to Contropiano. See Felice Mometti, “Le crisi come progetto: Architettura e storia in
ManfredoTafuri” in Marx au XXI siècle :l’esprit& la lettre (n.d) http://www.marxau21.fr/index.
8
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE
Located within the context of 1960s Italy, the essay occupies a precise moment within
the operaisti project when fractures between the operaisti intellectuals deepened with
reference to their position on their roles as intellectuals in relation to the working
class struggle against capitalist structures and the State after 1968. By returning to
this context, we see neither operaisti nor autonomists actually exhaust the political
framework of the 1960s with the tactics they adopt in the 1970s. heir eforts need
to be acknowledged as part of a wider context that shaped the culture of struggle in
Italy at that time.9
In the contemporary discourse, Pier Vittorio Aureli and Gail Day can righteously
claim that they pioneered the discourse that re-introduces operaismo and autonomia
movements into the architectural discourse for English-speaking audience. However
their return to this context is bound within their academic inquiries and fails to
go beyond a particular strand of post-1960s rhetoric, or simply they do not intend
it to. his rhetoric takes it for granted that surrendering to capitalist development
is the a priori condition without tackling how the revolutionary rhetoric of the
context they re-visit came to that conclusion. Especially in the architectural
discourse, not acknowledging the eruption of social conlicts that threatened the
State and its institutions is a common way to approach the role Tafuri adopted in
the 1970s. Tafuri’s critique of architectural practice, which he raised in 1969 in Italy,
php?option=com_content&view=article&id=175:manfredo-tafuri-la-crisi-comeprogetto&catid=54:culture-arts-a-esthetique&Itemid=77. In his research, Mometti does address the
content of Marco Biraghi’s Progetto di crisi: Manfredo Tafuri e l'architettura contemporanea
(Milan: Marinotti, 2005). Via Silvia Micheli, I am aware of the translation of this volume, which
has not been released at the time of writing, as Project of Crisis: Manfredo Tafuri and
Contemporary Architecture (New York: MIT Press, forthcoming).
9
In English, Steve Wright’s Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian
Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2002) is still the most comprehensive study of the
period studied by an English-speaking scholar since it was published in 2002. Probably due to the
lack of accessibility to seminal texts and pamphlets other than those predominant igures of the
operaisti thinking had produced, operaismo suffers from lack of complete apprehension in
English-speaking readers, that does not translate what the interviews with what operaisti thinkers
and intellectuals suggest with their relections on their intervention in the 1960s and 1970s. In
Italian, for one of recent surveys of the period, see Guido Borio, Fracesca Pozzi, Gigi Roggero,
eds., Futuro anteriore: Dai “Quaderni rossi” ai movimento globali – Richezze e limiti
dell’operaismo italiano (Rome: DerriveApprodi, 2002). Steve Wright’s Storming Heaven contains
a dedication to overcome the limits and ilters of approaching the operaisti project in English, even
though Wright does not enmesh the interviews present in Futuro anteriore. He inquires into those
interviews though, in his later publications such as: review of Futuro anteriore. Dai ‘Quaderni
rossi’ ai movimenti globali: ricchezze e limiti dell’operaismo italiano, edited by Guido Borio,
Fracesca Pozzi, Gigi Roggero and La nefasta utopia di Potere operaio: Lavoro tecnica movimento
nel laboratorio politico del Sessantotto italiano by Franco Berardi: “Children of a Lesser
Marxism?” in Historical Materialism 12, no.1 (2004): 261-274; “Back to the Future: Italian
Workerists Relect Upon the Operaista Project,” in ephemera 7, no.1 (2007) 270-281. For other
comprehensive studies on operaismo in English, see Sidney Tarrow, Democracy and Disorder:
Protest and Politics in Italy 1965-1975 (Oxford: 1989) and Robert Lumley, States of Emergency:
Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (New York: Verso, 1990).
Introduction
9
CHAPTER ONE
is too hastily identiied with the trajectory immediately following that Tafuri and
Contropiano conformed to. his happens to be the case without tackling the debates
on the role of the intellectuals, artists as well as professionals in capitalist development
when they ind themselves in the moment of social conlicts reaching to their peak by
the late 1960s. Whereas within the broader cultural intervention operaisti intellectuals
attempted before the 1970s, the potential of the essay to agitate intellectuals and
architects to question their own participation in capitalist development is genuine
enough to generate a conviction that the text needs to be treated as an agitating tool
rather than a project in itself.
I conclude that in order to re-visit 1960s and 1970s Italy to locate Tafuri’s 1969
essay, it is crucial to be willing to challenge the imagery of the cultural subversion
attached to the 1960s which is now encapsulated in the mood of ‘If you can’t beat
them, join them.’ I attempt to demonstrate contemporary eforts in English-speaking
architectural circles to re-visit Tafuri in that context fail to do so as in the cases of
Aureli and Day. I argue that revisiting the essay itself loses the signiicance of such an
attempt, if we are not prepared to confront Tafuri’s 1969 essay as an agitation in itself.
In response to my research question, my conclusion is that a return to Tafuri’s
1969 essay is relevant within the contemporary context not only because it exposes
problems with the reception of Tafuri and his 1969 essay amongst architects,
architectural historians and theoreticians.
he primary motivation for my inquiry into Tafuri and the political context of
the 1960s and 1970s Italy, comes from what I try to depict in the contemporary
discourse around a social vocation that promotes the potential of architecture as a
progressive profession. he contemporary architectural discourse falls beyond the
post-critical architectural discourse with the architectural trends such as participatory;
socially sustainable; green/ecological that embrace the contemporary tools which are
accessible to architects and engineers today. hey address the problems which are also
the consequences of the possibility of having access to those tools. Capacity to address
those problems via architectural design is presented as necessary for the survival of
architect and architecture. In other words, I argue that the presence of a social agenda
still makes the art and profession of architecture resilient to political, economic
and social structures that transform it. Hence it is important to the generation of
architects who have not yet acquired their professional autonomy as architects in the
built environment construction and design industry, such as students or interns, to
be reminded of Tafuri’s critique within its context before they appropriate a social
vocation and become professionals. It is more valuable for us to be agitated, rather
than appropriate the actions of our prior generations without necessarily interrogating
their own practice. One of the most signiicant implications of the conclusions we
may draw from revisiting “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” in its proper
context, may be our need to be challenged to become more critical in our professional
role as architects, whether progressive or not, which would take more than clinging to
10
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE
the comfortable chairs professions grant to architects, artists and intellectuals.10
1.1 Document Structure
Following this introduction chapter, I execute my thesis in the subsequent three
sections. Both Section I and Section II are composed of two chapters and Section III
has the concluding chapter and an epilogue.
With Section I, I depict a setting as described above and re-visit Manfredo Tafuri
within this setting after postulating the problems with approaching Tafuri in
the contemporary discourse. In Chapter Two, I present the problematic of the
implicit and necessary relationship between the architect and capitalist structures
and introduce the work of Tafuri as he addresses this relationship in his 1969
essay “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology.” I focus on relections on
professionalism and architectural practice in the 21st century to address Manfredo
Tafuri’s relevance to these debates. I pay attention to attempts where architects are
located within the contemporary economic, political and social structures and are
confronting ethical dilemmas in their participation in production of spaces and
relationship that fails to go beyond advancing capitalist structures which thrive on
globalization.
With Chapter hree, I look at Manfredo Tafuri’s “Toward a Critique of Architectural
Ideology” and locate his essay within the reception of his works in the post 1960s
architectural discourse. After demonstrating the problems which are associated
with approaching Tafuri in the political framework to which his work is assigned, I
argue the essay’s political implications should not be equated and reduced to Tafuri
himself or to his other works but instead those implications should be understood
precisely within the context which his essay was produced, published and circulated.
I conclude Section I with my argument that the precise context of Tafuri’s essay
needs to be acknowledged without positing Tafuri or his complete oeuvre as the
reference to identify the implications of the arguments present in the essay. I further
10
Implications of approaching Tafuri’s essay within the political framework of 1969 Italy by
embracing the agitating tone of the essay could be demonstrated against Raymond J. Cole and
Richard Lorch, eds., Buildings, Culture & Environment: Informing Local & Global Practices
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003); Simon Foxell, ed., The Professionals’ choice: The Future of
the Environment Professions (London: Building Futures, 2003); Nicholas Ray, ed., Architecture
and its Ethical Dilemmas (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2005); Danial A. Barber, “Militant
Architecture: Destabilising Architecture’s Disciplinarity,” in Dorrian, Mark, Murray Fraser,
Jonathan Hill, et al., eds. Critical Architecture (London and New York: Routledge, 2007): 57-66;
Graham Owen, ed., Architecture, Ethics and Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2009);
Aggregate, Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012). Those works point out how architecture and
what it can yield is demarcated by the economic, political and social structures, with which
capitalism has been advancing. Within the limits of this thesis, I avoid testing the implications of
my conclusion against those contemporary inquiries.
Introduction
11
CHAPTER ONE
argue that by equating the 1969 essay with its 1973 version that was published as a
volume, architectural historians and theoreticians have been avoiding confronting the
implications present in the 1969 essay. In response to this, I suggest it is important
to be able to confront the essay as it is: an agitating piece that is located in a wider
context that goes beyond the art and practice of architecture.
In Section II, irstly I address the context in which Tafuri’s 1969 essay was written,
published and circulated and then inquire into this context and how it is adopted by
the contemporary architectural discourse in relation to works by Pier Vittorio Aureli
and Gail Day.
In Chapter Four, I present a narration of the political project, which the Italian
operaisti opened up in the 1960s Italy. In this narration I identify the journal
Contropiano, where Tafuri’s 1969 essay was published, as a medium where
intellectuals, especially Massimo Cacciari, constructed one of the pathways for the
intellectual to claim a role within the struggle against capitalist society that fell
beyond being an agitator. I argue it is important to acknowledge the intensiied
social conlict in the late 1960s to approach this shift within the operaisti discourse
as it grants intellectuals a role in the struggle with their intellectual work without
relinquishing the work they deliver as intellectuals totally. I conclude that this later
approach can explain the project associated with Tafuri’s 1973 volume, however it
fails to exhaust the implications of the 1969 essay.
In Chapter Five, I look at Aureli’s and Day’s attempts to return to the same context.
Without studying the shift the operaisti discourse went through in the late 1960s,
Aureli and Day appropriate the subsequent trajectory of Contropiano and the cultural
intervention intellectuals self-assigned themselves as constituting a moment in the
class struggle as granted. I argue that their commitment to explain the impasse or
the deadlock, which Tafuri’s project was/is attributed with, in their inquiries prevents
them from approaching Tafuri’s 1969 essay in relation to its context.
I conclude Section II by suggesting that unless we return to this context to tackle and
go beyond its consequences, and embrace Tafuri’s essay with its agitating qualities,
it is unlikely that we will overcome the existing debates on architecture and limits of
architecture as an art and profession to address social problems and conlicts. After
inquiring into the works of Aureli and Day, I conclude that this is not the case with
the sector of Tafuri’s audience who inquire into the political framework associated
with Italian operaismo and autonomia movements.
With Section III, irst I provide a summary of my conclusions that lead to the
demonstration of the inaccuracy of the assumption with regards to Tafuri’s 1969 essay
and his 1973 volume In response to my research question which seeks the relevance
of re-visiting Tafuri’s 1969 essay in its political context: I conclude that it is relevant
and to some extent necessary to do so, since the problems raised in the essay have
12
Introduction
CHAPTER ONE
been avoided instead of being confronted by the architects. What is more, in regard
to the contemporary questions of the future of the architect and the changing nature
of the practice of an architect within transforming social, political and economic
structures, it is timely to confront Tafuri’s 1969 essay as it is.
With Chapter Six, the conclusion, I reiterate that the implications of the 1969 essay
are not present in the 1973 volume, due to the fact that the moment 1969 essay
occupies within the political and social context of Italy in the late 1960s is not the
same moment which the 1973 volume occupies, especially in relation to the role
intellectuals attributed to themselves in relation to their intellectual endeavours. hat
assumption that 1969 essay and 1973 volume are identical itself may explain why the
dominant theme around Tafuri is constructed in order to address the impasse and
deadlock his project is associated with, and hence we need to approach those inquiries
which return to the political framework of Tafuri’s 1969 essay with more scrutiny
as they fail to address the problematic assumption. In the light of this conclusion,
it appears to be more appropriate to treat Tafuri’s 1969 essay as an agitating piece
than a critique that opens up trajectories for architects, architectural historians and
theoreticians to justify their professional engagement. he relevance of returning to
the political framework of Tafuri’s 1969 essay to contemporary discourse comes from
the potential of re-approaching Tafuri’s 1969 essay in the light of the conclusions I
draw. Hence if we are returning to Tafuri and his critique of architectural ideology in
order to seek his projects’ relevance to struggling against capitalist structures, we irst
need to confront the implications of Tafuri’s 1969 essay. Architectural theoreticians
and historians have avoided confronting or addressing these implications, which are:
refusal to practice by architects challenging capitalist structures.
In the epilogue, I argue that for my generation of architects, architecture students
and interns need to be more willing to be critical. We are currently captivated by
the rhetoric and discourse constructed by Tafuri’s and his subsequent generation of
architects, architecture historians and theoreticians who insisted on shoring up the
profession.
Introduction
13
SECTION I
Presenting the Work and the Problem
CHAPTER TWO
PRELUDE-PROBLEM
Before studying Tafuri’s 1969 essay and its context, in this chapter I will establish a
reading of the contemporary setting from which I will be approaching my research
question “What is the relevance of re-visiting Tafuri’s 1969 essay in relation to
its political context?” In the Epilogue of my thesis, I am returning to the setting
established in this chapter after my inquiry into the political context of “Toward a
Critique of Architectural Ideology,” to address the signiicance of my inquiry as a call
to my generation of architects, architecture students and interns to reconsider their
practice in light of the critique Tafuri made in 1969.
2.1 The role of the architect in the contemporary socio political
framework
Tahl Kaminer, in his book Architecture, Crisis and Resuscitation, states “architecture,
as a discipline, is not the building.”1 In his accurate archeology of the discipline
architecture as we know it today, he traces the origins back to the attempt to
establish a break from the crafts during the Renaissance in favor of an autonomy of
architecture. he attempts of architects to distinguish themselves from the craftsmen,
shifts the “centre of architecture from the material object itself, from the building,
to the ideal object, and further, to the process of thought and the knowledge of the
architect.”2 Kaminer’s approach to architecture urges us to question assumptions we
might possess about architects and architecture.
2.1.1 Architecture as a profession
Jeremy Till puts the kind of knowledge professionals hold to justify their professional
claim to “being a igure of authority” in relation to architecture rather bluntly: “we
would be deeply concerned if the knowledge base of the profession was not directly
played out in practice; without this instrumental application people would die,
buildings would fall down.”3 According to Till, the knowledge which professionals
require to claim the roles they claim seems to be “instrumentally transferred across to
become the rules and procedures of practice,” as in the cases of, for example, medicine
and engineering.4 Leaving aside the genealogy of our presumptions about depending
on this knowledge to survive, we can agree that the knowledge one demands from the
1
Tahl Kaminer, Architecture, Crisis and Resuscitation: The Reproduction of Post-Fordism
in late-twentieth-century Architecture (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 3.
2
Ibid.
3
Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends (New York and London: MIT Press, 2009), 161.
4
Ibid.
17
CHAPTER TWO
professionals stands on the assumption that we require their expertise to be able
to sustain, at least, our physical and spatial ‘integrity’. In the case of architects,
the territory of the expertise we, who are not clients nor employers, quite naively
expect from the architects is that the space and/or form in which we ind ourselves
do not threaten our well-being.5
here are diferent deinitions that address what architects do, yet the Australian
Institute of Architects’ (AIA) deinition of their professional service is the closest
deinition we can get to address what their role is. As generalists they “manage
the entire architectural design and construction process.”6 In this version of the
deinition of the architect’s expertise, it would be quite easy to dismiss the architect
from the equation, as engineers and other professionals from other disciplines
could be the ones in the most crucial and essential role that relates, literally to
everyone.
Referring to the knowledge of the architect, Raymond J. Cole and Richard
Lorch make use of explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge (know-how), as they
distinguish knowledge from information in order for the architectural discipline to
acquire professional status.7 According to Cole and Lorch, knowledge is attached
5
Rather than well-being the correct assumption would be about architect’s professional
and/or disciplinary engagement not threatening our existence. Although this sounds simplistic
and uncomplicated, in Mike Davis’ inquiry into the sprawl of urbanization as a global
phenomena, the conditions of survival in the ‘slums’ of the physical space of the global capital
impacts a population of more than one billion people. With reference to infrastructures that
constitute the biopolitical elements of the urbanization, not only via buildings but with sanitary
sewer systems, transport and power infrastructures, planners’, developers’, capital holders’ and
governments’ appropriation of those structures with reference to their agendas, is argued to be
used for suppressing the ‘mobilization’ of marginalized ‘majority’ and ‘minority’. What is
more, this creates a vulnerable condition of ‘being’ for those groups, by being forced to depend
on those services to simply survive, which are appropriated to suppress and exploit their land,
actions and labour at the irst place. Located within the picture Davis portrays, from the
architects who are not already addressing the problems pointed out by Davis’ inquiry, for
example, one would simply expect not to create further problems with the way they intervene
to the built environment via their design. See Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (London and New
York: Verso, 2006). On the issue of how design is utilized in different levels of governance that
allows sustaining the picture portrayed by Davis, see Aggregate, Governing by Design.
6
“What Architects Do”, Australian Institute of Architects, accessed October 2, 2012,
http://www.architecture.com.au/i-cms?page=13274. See the Winter 2011 issue of Architect
Victoria where architects relect on the question of the role of the architect. Especially Timothy
Hill’s contribution to the magazine dwells on the common ‘expectations’ from the architect and
the actual role architects possess with reference to the work they produce. See Timothy Hill,
“Newsworthy: People Clear About Architect’s Role,” in “Bring me the Horizon,” ed. Anthony
Parker, Architect Victoria: Oficial Journal of the Australian Institute of Architects Victorian
Chapter (Winter 2011): 4.
7
Raymond J. Cole and Richard Lorch, introduction to Buildings, Culture and
Environment: “Knowledge, Values and Building Design,” in Raymond J. Cole and Richard
Lorch, eds., Buildings, Culture and Environment: Informing Local and Global Practices
18
Prelude - Problem
CHAPTER TWO
to an individual or a group that is not as easily transferable as information is; it is
more than mere data which are assumed to provide a factual basis of reasoning;
but rather “a deeper understanding of a subject (the why),” which also “entails
capabilities of assessment to form judgment, interpretation and understanding.”8 It
can be argued that, to distinguish architects as professionals within their industry
of built environment design and practice, “formal exchange of explicit knowledge
between researchers and practitioners,” is not as helpful as it is in medicine or
engineering, in making them igures of authority through their expertise. Cole
and Lorch, who put tacit knowledge at the centre of the kind of knowledge
for the design and construction process, describe it as the knowledge that “is
provided largely through the experience of the diverse members of the design
team.”9 Architects’ participation when they “join a wide circle of other skilled
professionals to provide a service leading to the construction and operation of a
suitable environment it for its purpose” as Giles Oliver describes what acting as an
architect is.10
Establishing the dialogue between diferent parties in the construction process
appears to be a crucial aspect of the architect’s professional service. Citing Willis
and George’s description of the duties of an architect in the text book he Architect
in Practice which dates back to 1981, Cole and Lorch link this service to Soane’s
description of the business of the architect. he professional ground on which
architects can claim and justify their position as igures of authority: “the ideal
of the architect as impartial arbitrator between client and builder,” is what Soane
puts forward as the business of the architect: “to make the designs and estimates,
to direct works and to measure and value the diferent parts; he is the intermediate
agent between the employer, whose honor and interest he is to study, and the
mechanic, whose rights he is to defend.”11
Yet, this vocation, as an arbiter, is only one aspect of the architect’s professional
service. In the RIBA’s 2008 publication Explaining an Architect’s Service, for
example, the architect’s role as an arbiter in the relationship with the client, comes
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003): 1-8, 2. Cole is an academic who focusses on built
environment research and teaching, and Lorch is an architect and the editor of the journal
Building Research and Information.
8
Ibid.
9
Ibid., 3.
10
Giles Oliver, “Responsive Practice,” in Architecture and its Ethical Dilemmas, ed.
Nicholas Ray (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2005): 55-68, 61. Oliver is a practicing architect
who was also a member of the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment’s
research steering group in the UK.
11
Andrew Saint, “Practical Wisdom for Architects: The Uses of Ethics,” in Architecture
and its Ethical Dilemmas, ed. Nicholas Ray (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2005): 7-21, 8. Saint
is an academic and the author of the books: The Image of the Architect (1983) and Towards a
Social Architecture (1987).
Prelude - Problem
19
CHAPTER TWO
into the scene at the stage of “Monitoring Construction” only if the architect is
appointed as the “contract administrator” or “construction overseer.”12 Before this
last stage of actualization of the material object, the architect and the client have a
diferent relationship that involves architect estimating building costs and informing
the client of the progress of the project, while the architect is working on the design
proposal. At the very last stage, the contract between the client and the contractor
is administered for the project to be delivered, and hence architect becomes a true
intermediate agent.
We may rightly suggest there is a contention among the architects that the title
architect does not entail authority over the space. he architect’s professional
authority depends on their ability to deliver a design as long as they are able to
facilitate and manage the responsibilities the client expects from the architect. As
Cole and Lorch suggest, the tacit knowledge is central to the authority the architect
can claim. On the other hand, as Andrew Saint puts it, architects’ knowledge is not a
form of a knowledge that grants them a de facto a professional status:
Neither the state nor the public thinks architecture awfully
important … in the governance, prosperity and welfare of
the country, even in the procurement and maintenance of its
built estate, architects remain bit-part players. Few buildings
are put up without their help along the way, because even a
modest hut has at some stage, after all, to be ‘designed’. But
most are procured in a manner remote from the Soanean ideal,
whereby the architect holds the scales impartially between
client and builder.13
12
RIBA, Explaining an Architect’s Services: General Information on the Usual Tasks
Undertaken by an Architect (London: RIBA, June 2008). For this and other guidelines see http://
www.architecture.com/UseAnArchitect/GuidanceAndPublications/PracticalMatters/
PracticalMatters.aspx
13
Saint, “Practical Wisdom for Architects: The Uses of Ethics,” 9.
Mark Crinson and Jules Lubbock formulate the Soanean ideal in relation to the ideal
architect depicted and advocated by the English architect John Soane (1753-1837). As Soane’s
lectures at the Royal Academy portray: “Soane’s ideal was of an architect who was a poetic
designer, an intellectual and a manager imbued with high ethics, who could lead by virtue of his
very distance from mechanical work.” Mark Crinson and Jules Lubbock, Architecture: Art or
Profession? Three Hundred Years of Architectural Education in Britain (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1994), 26.
As Crinson and Lubbock stress, Soane himself was an architect who received an education which
was different than what his own pupilage prompted. Soane’s training as an architect came close to
what was formulated as an ideal training of the architect in 1773 pamphlet An Essay on the
Qualiications and Duties of an Architect. In this rare formulation of the ‘ideal training’, in print,
the training of the architect involved an ideal education that aimed at mastery in drawing and
design by studying and observing classical monuments by comparing them with the modern ones
in order to improve upon both in their own Designs. Ibid., 24-25. It is argued that this anonymous
20
Prelude - Problem
CHAPTER TWO
Even if the architect was able to provide their service as an intermediate agents,
they would depend arguably most on the client who holds the capital, which
may constitute another problematic of this agency. heir professional expertise
as the designer, project coordinator, documenter and the intermediate agent for
procurement and construction, is of more value to the client than to anyone else.
In order to resolve this, Andrew Saint suggests through “the moral hegemony,”
architecture invents two sides to the coin as “the personal” and “the collective.”14
he personal side focusses on the personal merits of the architect: their talent as an
artist-architect.15 Saint argues: “When social hierarchies and norms slumber, the
architect and his client meet on potentially equal terms.”16 Hence the architect needs
to convince the client that their talent will change their life “for better.”17 However
for this talent to be legitimized on a professional ground with which architects can
claim a role in shaping the built environment; the public, not only the capital holder,
needs to be convinced that the architect is an agent who should be involved in the
production of the built environment. his allows architects to be able to cope with
this dependency on the capital holder, or the client. he capital holder needs to
pamphlet was written by James Peacock who worked in the ofice of George Dance (1741-1825).
Crinson and Lubbock offer a repost of the pamphlet, as they cite Kaye’s reprint of the pamphlet as
follows:
Here the prospective architect is from a middle-class family and has
had a good general education until the age of ifteen. He is then
articled to an architect. In his irst year or two he learns to measure and
improves his drawing. Then he is taught to design and to draw plans,
sections and elevations; he is instructed in mechanics, hydraulics and
perspective, improves his French and inally travels abroad. During his
tour he draws and measures classical monuments, ‘studies their
Proportions, searches into their Antiquity, explores the Materials of
which they are composed, and the Manner in which they are put
together, and makes every Observation that is likely to prove of the
least Utility’. He then compares these buildings with modern ones and
‘improves upon both in his own Designs’. When he returns home he is
well prepared in the studiousness and probity required to become an
architect. Ibid., 24-25.
What is left out in this pamphlet: “practical side of building and its materials, tools, skills and
surveyance,” were parceled out in the ofice practice supplemented to Soane by George Dance and
Henry Holland (1745-1806) as well as by the familiarity with craftsmen’s work Soane must have
developed from his father, who was a bricklayer. Ibid., 25. Ironically, the contemporary debate on
the knowledge of the architect which depends on the communication between other members
involved in the process of designing and building the built environment, resonates with the late
18th century Soanean ideal: almost attempting calibrate it for the contemporary construction and
built environment industry market.
14
Saint, “Practical Wisdom for Architects: The Uses of Ethics,” 16.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid.
17
Ibid.
Prelude - Problem
21
CHAPTER TWO
relinquish his absolute authority in the process, as the product of the process which
architect coordinates, is more than the building and what is more, has a collective
aspect: the public believes the architect will demonstrate high ethical merits with
their interventions to the built environment, which, otherwise, could have been less
desirable, if not catastrophic.
Where Till understands this aspect of professions with reference to their pragmatic
approach to the political economical and social structures. He is more cynical as he
says:
Professions are quick to engage with politics when it directly
afects their professional status in terms of protection of title
or funding for their actual practices but much less quick to
acknowledge the political constitution of their actual practice
or the wider consequences of their products …architects are
complicit in this appropriation of professional values by the
market. Yet they prefer not to acknowledge this raid on their
professional capital, and instead focus on the pursuit of the
higher ideals, using the smokescreen of perfection and beauty
to disguise any dealing with dirty reality.18
his description might hold true for any other discipline and/or profession. However
the knowledge of the architect is an especially suspect form of knowledge, sometimes
discredited by the image of the architect in contrast to what Colin Ward espouses
when he writes: “I’ve met more anarchist, paciist and socialist architects than
dissident members of most jobs, professions or trades.”19 Andrew Saint goes beyond
Ward’s observation and postulates this as a survival kit of the profession as he asks:
For how can any architect enter maturely into designing
something … in the public realm, without imagining or
hoping that in some way it will make a diference to the lives of
others, sooth them, impress them, teach them, inspire them,
terrify them? … In order to operate, most architects have to
believe that that diference is needed as a beneicial part of
human activity, and that only design of a speciic nature …
can achieve it. hat constitutes not only the underlying ethical
‘code’ of architecture, but also its survival kit.20
18
Till, Architecture Depends, 163.
19
Colin Ward, Talking to Architects: Ten Lectures by Colin Ward (London: Freedom Press,
1996), 7. Ward (1924 – 2010) was an anarchist writer who was concerned with urban and housing
issues.
20
Saint, “Practical Wisdom for Architects: The Uses of Ethics,” 10.
22
Prelude - Problem
CHAPTER TWO
he perception is that architects are either genuinely collective-oriented individuals
or they appropriate such a persona in order to solidify their privileged role within the
society. Regardless what the real motives are, architects do not seem to be satisied
with the vocation of being an intermediate agent. In fact, in many instances this
vocation is subcontracted to certain specialist architects, who act as subcontractors
to other architects, developers, or project managers. his can be regarded as critical
because it means architectural institutions need to provide diferent kind of experts
with special involvement with the design regardless and at the end of the day they will
be placed to be a dispassionate arbiter between client and builder. As intermediate
agents, architects depend on outsiders, as they need to establish the dialogue between
them. his is a challenge to the logic of the profession as deined by Jeremy Till
who writes, “the deining feature of any profession is to distinguish itself from the
ordinary; professions inscribe territories in order to better control them, and thereby
give themselves status and economic power.”21 he ongoing debate suggests despite
the understanding of the necessity of the arbiter and criticality of this being done
competently and cost efectively, this job for experts in this aspect of work is still not
regarded as the one and only job of the architect. his may be one way to understand
this dissatisfaction.
However, besides architects having a role as being the intermediate agents in the
process of actualization of the material object: the building; their design already
embodies the existing conditions of not only civil engineering structures but/hence
economic, political and social structures. Ian Cooper elaborates on this embodiment
in built environment as “patterns of power and privilege between people and preferred
relationships between humans and other species, materials and other resources.”22 We
may ask: regardless the common perception of architects as agents who are already
working within structures that are exterior to their design, why are architects having
troubles with being an intermediate agent who facilitates a common ground for
outsiders to establish a dialogue?
his resonates with Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s analogy of which Kaminer reminds
us: “architecture is a social institution related to building in much the same way that
literature is to speech.”23 Kaminer goes beyond Koetter and Rowe’s argument though.
21
Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends, 154.
22
Ian Cooper, “Understanding Context,” in Raymond J. Cole and Richard Lorch, eds.,
Buildings, Culture and Environment: Informing Local and Global Practices (Oxford: Blackwell
Publishing, 2003): 11-17, 11. Coopers is an independent research consultant who works in the
private sector.
23
Kaminer, Architecture, Crisis and Resuscitation, 3. Koetter and Rowe argue:
For, the requirements of professional empire building apart, the
demand that all buildings should become works of architecture (or the
reverse) is strictly offensive to common sense … one might possibly
stipulate that architecture is a social institution related to building in
Prelude - Problem
23
CHAPTER TWO
Koetter and Rowe challenge the “myth of the architect” as “eighteenth century
natural philosopher,” with their analogy, where Kaminer returns to this analogy as
he reminds us also of the attempts to regulate the speech. For Koetter and Rowe,
the analogy works only when the literature can claim an autonomy from the speech,
and the inlections imposed on the speech do not afect the language or vice versa.
On the other hand, there exists the possibility of the language being altered and
manipulated by its own products. he limits of both literature (architecture) and
speech (building) in relation to their dependency on one another as they are both
afecting and are afected by the tool they depend. Where the syntax of the language
(codes and regulations that govern construction) is controlling, possible alterations
in the semantics of the language simply by introducing a new piece of literature and/
or speech (the city and how its inhabitants occupy, use the space) demonstrates the
intertwined relation between built environment professionals and the outsiders.
Kaminer approaches architecture, not necessarily in relation to the distinction
‘literature’ is attributed by Koetter and Rowe; but as a discipline from the
“multiplicity of meanings ‘architecture’ stands in the territory that is dominated by”,
as he lists, “schools, publications, regulations, ateliers, representational organizations
and drawing.”24 Outsiders to the product of the architect, include not only other
professionals but also a number of regulatory institutions, agents, as well as a
complex network of participants where ‘clients’ are directly or indirectly involved,
due to the contemporary structure of accumulation of the capital, whose inancial
stakes may constitute or be part of those outside factors.25 In this picture, within
the transforming social, economic and political structures, the autonomy, which
architects have been enjoying so far with their ‘art’ and/or design, is threatened
more than before. he transforming structures demand that architects make more
compromises in their role amongst other built environment professionals.
much the same way that literature is to speech. Its technical medium is
public property and, if the notion that all speech should approximate
to literature is, ipso facto, absurd and would, in practice be intolarable,
much the same may be said about building and architecture. Fred
Koetter and Colin Rowe, Collage City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983),
101.
24
Ibid.
25
Without necessarily giving enough emphasis to the role of the architect, the role of the
built environment and ascribed power relations of the sovereign over the ‘oppressed’ is a very
common theme in sociology, urban planning, critical geography, and even architectural theory.
Henri Lefebvre (1901-1991), David Harvey, Manuel Castells and Saskia Sassen are quite infamous
writers on the appropriation of the space by the ‘capital’, that ascribes ‘the conditions of existence’
prior to the existence of the people or the multitude in the built environment. A study of extending
this power relation embedded in the city, that is not necessarily ascribed by the ‘global capital’ but
its genealogy is found in Simon Parker’s Cities, Politics and Power (New York: Taylor and
Francis, 2010).
24
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2.2 Confronting the Contemporary Role of the Architects
In he Professionals’ Choice, which is published by a joint initiative between Royal
Institute of British Architects (RIBA), Commission for Architecture and the
Built Environment (CABE), Davies and Knell depicts the transition from the
industrial society to the ‘professional society’. hey describe a context to which built
environment professionals, including architects, need to adjust, respond or intervene
in order to sustain their profession.26 In ive diferent scenarios: “regulatory scenario;”
“economic scenario;” “social scenario;” “technological scenario;” and “managerial
scenario,” diferent authors are asked to depict the future of the architect in diferent
contexts in which built environment professionals operate. By depicting diferent
pressure points, which the group believes afecting the construction industry, the
publication aims to expose the compromises and beneits design professionals are
faced with as social political and economic structures transform. In those scenarios,
architects are depicted as sharing a common ground with other built environment
professionals. his does not only include the client, the constructor and the architect;
but includes various agents representing governmental and professional bodies,
institutions, investors, insurance companies and such.
As one of Building Futures’ objectives is to build upon and complement the existing
work, there is no break from the existing political social and economic structures in
any of their scenarios or projects. Instead they establish the existing dominant social,
political and economic structures and their transformation as given. Hence theirs is
an attempt to perfect this as a development of and acquisition of new ideas and skills,
which predominantly refers to the need to give more emphasis to the tacit knowledge
component of the discipline.
26
William Davies and John Knell, “Context” in The Professionals’ Choice: The Future of
the Environment Professions, ed. Simon Foxell (London: Building Futures, 2003): 17-34, 20. The
Building Futures group, that was established to address the future of the built environment,
promotes the tacit knowledge as the group seems to embrace even by the schema they operate
with. Consisting of a ‘steering group’, an advisory group and a RIBA Team, Building Futures is a
think tank that tries to perceive the ‘bigger picture’ architects it into to. The steering group plans
the work program and decides on the key discussion issues, supported and inspired for future
directions and projects by the Advisory group where the RIBA Team administers as well as
managing, co-ordinating the activities of Building Futures. Through a designed and curated
interpersonal communication between the groups and the individuals in the groups, Building
Futures publishes the outcomes of its projects in order to “inluence relevant professionals, clients,
educationalists, decision-makers and policy makers.” Since 2003, they provided 25 projects and
published their outcomes, made widely accessible on the internet, mostly free of charge, and work
on 8 on going projects at the time of writing. By 2016, RIBA aims to “strongly inluence
government policy, legislation and regulations to relect RIBA policy areas,” to accomplish the
objective “inluence the formation and implementation of public policy, the regulatory framework,
and the environment in which architecture can lourish internationally, nationally and locally.”
Their “Inluencing Policy” objective involves the future studies program, Building Futures, which
is active since the restructuring RIBA went through in 2003-2004. See “About Building Futures,”
Building Futures, accessed March 18, 2013, http://www.buildingfutures.org.uk/about
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With their ideal to promote the advancement of society, built environment
professionals’ skill to know-how to make things happen do not only constitute a
model with the process of realization of their ‘material object’: the building, but
also ascribes a social agenda to it: the need to address problems associated with
‘building’. his is concretized and narrated in Cole and Lorch’s work with the aim
to improve “the environmental performance of buildings,”27 that underpins one of
the most contemporary ‘social’ role of architectural design and practice: sustaining
the state that is prior to the architect’s intervention with the building, as the worst
case scenario. his vocation they seek commonly evolves around the notion of a
more ‘sustainable’ future: an environmentally sustainable built environment that is
further articulated via notions of such as participation and social sustainability for
the vocations professionals to occupy to ensure social well-being.28 While with this
approach built environment professionals are expected to acknowledge the structures
which they are part of; it does not necessarily promote an explicit understanding of
them to practice their art and profession.
On this note, Paolo Tombesi, in his paper “Capital Gains and Architectural
Losses: he Expansion Journey of Caudill Rowlett Scott: 1948-1994,” points to
the tendency among architectural scholarship to ignore and understand those
structures, particularly economic structures. Putting emphasis on the need to consider
outside factors, including outside investors and board members with inancial
stakes, he suggests the contemporary context can facilitate a redeinition of a social
vocation for architects that is not merely proit-oriented, but allows a special kind
of enterpriser whose performance in the market can provide a model for public
sectors. his position comes from design work’s strategic role in the economy with
“the combination of market scanning and industrial foresight, problem seeking and
research development.”29 Apart from the problems regarding the changing modes
of production and fabrication that architects need to address, the exploration of
the socioeconomic complexity of the industry is a challenge for architects to tackle.
Tombesi writes in his paper “On the Cultural Separation of Design Labor”:
Understanding architecture … requires understanding of
both the practice and policies of building, because the way
27
Cole and Lorch, “Knowledge, Values and Building Design,” 2.
28
See Ian Cooper, “What is the Problem?” in Buildings, Culture and Environment:
Informing Local and Global Practices, ed. Raymond J. Cole and Richard Lorch (Oxford:
Blackwell Publishing, 2003): 109-124,
29
Paolo Tombesi, “Capital Gains and Architectural Losses: The Expansion Journey of
Caudill Rowlett Scott: 1948-1994” in LIMITS: from the 21st Annual Conference of the Society of
Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand, ed. Harriet Edquist and Hélène Frichot, vol.2
(Melbourne: SAHANZ, 2004): 485-491, 490. Tombesi is an academic and a major igure in the
debate that acknowledges the presence of ‘outside’ factors to architecture, and studies the
transformation of those ‘outside’ structures with reference to contemporary capitalist development.
26
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technical responsibilities and capital investments [that] are
socially allocated afects not only who architects are and what
they are supposed to do, but also what they are in fact asked to
do and what they can do.30
Tombesi argues that in the contemporary context, for the architect to sustain
their professional ground between the employer and the industry, the architect
simultaneously needs their attention in and on what Cooper refers as: “the political
economy of the production and consumption of the built environment in both
developed and developing countries its relationship to the engines and trajectory of
globalization.”31
Tombesi’s point is crucial in light of Oliver’s depiction of this context signals one
of the ‘threats’ professionals face with: “one can immediately recognize the signs of
consumer culture and relatively abundant private capital impacting on a professional
milieu.”32 If architects are to lose their professional ground due to the transformation
of social, economic and political structures, studies which study the future of
the architectural profession point to a vocation in those structures, that does not
necessarily transcend but where they demonstrate the capability to cope with those
structures. he social vocation architects can claim, in this picture, is pragmatically
appropriated through an understanding of the development of capital in the twentyirst century.
What diferentiates those works from works which tackle ‘ethics’ of the profession in
the context of globalization, is their pragmatic use of the social role of the architect
that needs to be addressed by the professionals. Rather than attempting to ‘transcend’
the context of globalization, works mentioned above establish the understanding
of architects’ dependency on the industry and hence outside factors. Within this
relationship, they seek a vocation which not only sustains architects’ professional
ground, but thrives it via putting emphasis on the ‘social’ aspect of the profession.
With “Replicant Urbanism: he Architecture of Hadid’s Central Building at BMW,
Leipzig” Douglas Spencer provides a study of a built environment that produces; and
in return is produced through the complex situation built environment professionals
are inding themselves in today.33 Spencer’s research adds to the setting, which I
30
Paolo Tombesi, “On the Cultural Seperation of Design Labor,” in Building (in) the Future:
Recasting Labor in Architecture, ed. Peggy Deamer and Phillip G. Bernstein (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 2010): 118-136, 135.
31
Cooper, “What is the Problem?” 120.
32
Oliver, “Responsive Practice,” 63.
33
Douglas Spencer looks at the contemporary examples where built environment and the
actors involved in its design served the contemporary coniguration of economic, political and
social structures by utilizing a discourse which was developed as a critique of those structures.
Speciically referring to the work of Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA), FOA and Rem Koolhaas/OMA,
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attempted to establish in this chapter, as it exempliies a form of practice which is not
necessarily threaten by the transformation of contemporary capitalist structures. It
narrates a practice which thrives on by addressing and adjusting itself to the demands
of this transforming climate.
Spencer points at a pairing of an architecture oice with a corporation: ZHA with
BMW.34 Rather than putting the architect in an asymmetrical relationship in the
conlict between market demands and professionals, Spencer presents the corporates
and the design professionals as equivalent players which both increase the value of
their brand through the partnership they develop. Similar to eforts of Albert Kahn
(1869-1942) for the Fordist mode of production by introducing the standardized
space for Fordist production to take place in, BMW Central Building design by ZHA
allows post-Fordist production to thrive.35
It is interesting to note how Zaha Hadid, along with the architects and designers who
have delivered the project, approach to their commitment to their client’s project.
Bruce Ferguson is reported as saying BMW Central Building is the irst twenty-irst
century building he experienced in a conversation between Todd Gannon and Zaha
Hadid.36 Zaha Hadid replies to this complimentary comment by suggesting “ … it
springs from the idea that everything moves through the building. he blue-collar
and white-collar workers, the public, and of course the cars themselves.”37 For her it
is the idea of movement and velocity that makes BMW Central Building a twentiethcentury project. Where as most probably, it is the contemporary city presented to
the site of the factory is possibly what makes BMW Central Building a twenty-irst
century building; hence the design brings the movement and the velocity to the site.
his way the space for the contemporary factory is produced that houses the tools for
the most advanced capitalist development in the twenty-irst century.
In the design of ZHA, Central Building, where the urban is replicated, is illing the
gap between previously designed standard factory buildings; connecting sheds where
which acquired a radical or progressive status through their untenable status of ‘Deleuzian
architectures’, Spencer’s research synopsis promises a study which exposes how the architectures
of those ofices had been willing and useful instruments of “capital’s current mode of power as a
‘society of control’.” See Douglas Spencer, thesis synopsis of “Smooth Operators: Architectural
Deleuzism in Societies of Control,” accessed March 15, 2013, http://www.westminster.ac.uk/
about-us/schools/architecture/research/research-students/douglas-spencer.
34
Douglas Spencer, “Replicant Urbanism: The Architecture of Hadid’s Central Building at
BMW, Leipzig,” in Journal of Architecture 15, no.2 (2010):181-207, 181.
35
Ibid., 190
36
Todd Gannon, “Conversations with Zaha Hadid,” interview with Zaha Hadid, Patrik
Schumacher, Lars Teichmann by Todd Gannon in Zaha Hadid: BMW Central Building, ed. Todd
Gannon (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006): 13-22, 13.
37
Ibid.
28
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Fordist linear production takes place.38 he contemporary city, which is identiied as
complex and unpredictable by Schumacher, urbanizes the site to point to instruments
the relationship between the metropolis and the general intellect, reports Spencer.39
“Architect’s Statement” by Lars Tiechmann adds to Zaha Hadid’s rather too literal
approach to their design: “commingling of typically disconnected functions” integrate
blue-collar and white-collar workers: “engineering and administrative functions
are located within the trajectory of the manual work-force’s daily movements
… the plant’s restaurant, for example, is located right in the middle of the oice
loors attracting all workers amidst the administrative areas.”40 It is referred as a
“communication hub” ofering a new interpretation of oice design, suggested by
Teichmann, with “oice desks loating randomly on air-conditioned loor plates …
with its cascades and platforms, provides maximum transparency and a high degree
of spatial identiication” within one volume.41 he Central Building, Teichmann
says, “exposes the heart of the plant to the public by avoiding any factory gates
or fencing.”42 Concepts or literal applications of transparency, mobility, selectiveinclusiveness are assumed to publicly represent the ideal conditions of experience
within contemporary capitalism.
As Spencer reports, since the 1970s BMW shifted the labour organization from
Fordist modes of production towards the “‘Toyota system’ of ‘lean production’.”43
his requires ZHA to develop a participatory design; one of which that does not
necessarily aim to include the complete spectrum of the users of the building
as participants in the design process; but rather those who inance and own the
building. he program and scenario BMW implements into the site in Leipzig is
not only a product of their corporate agenda; but a product developed by the EU’s
developmental bodies as Spencer reminds. he site BMW chose allowed for an EU
subsidy; it was also inluenced by the work councils and metal workers’ union IG
Metall as BMW convinced them to set wages at 20% below the standards thanks
to high unemployment rate in Leipzig; local government played a part, as did
employment agencies; University of Halle established a training and recruitment
program for BMW to manage efectively the demographics of its workforce.44
As Spencer argues through out the paper, it is capital that produces its own version
38
Except as Hadid points out in the conversation between her and Gannon, the serial
production taking place in those sheds allows assembly of 10 x 1017 different conigurations.
39
Spencer, “Replicant Urbanism,” 194
40
Lars Teichmann, “Architect’s Statement,” in Zaha Hadid: BMW Central Building, ed.
Todd Gannon (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006): 9-11, 10- 11
41
Ibid., 11.
42
Ibid.
43
Spencer, “Replicant Urbanism,” 183.
44
Spencer, “Replicant Urbanism,” 182-183.
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of space for cognitive capacities of general intellect to be elicited and channeled to.
In this case, it produces a space where “the technical communication between the
diferent stages of production” enhances the verbal communication and stage “a more
transparent production process along lexible oice areas within a communication
network.”45 Design professionals come later into the picture to design the space which
had been negotiated and designed beforehand by multiple agents. Designers willingly
lend their skills to innovate which has the potential to generate proit and hence be
applied by capital. To some extent, this shows that built environment professionals,
architects, interns and researchers at ZHA do not need to feel threatened by their
role to which they are assigned by the most advanced form of capital. It looks like as
though, every agent involved in the process at ZHA seems to fulill their role quite
successfully.46
he “urbanization of the site and reproduction of the complexity and unpredictability
of city life” responds well to the program BMW asked for.47 However whether things
are ideal in this built environment or not is open to discussion.48 As Spencer also
points out, BMW’s model creates what the Western academics and intellectuals
refer as “precarious existence for labour” due to the contractual arrangements by
BMW’s management, the hours of work and wage levels in this twenty-irst century
building.49 As being a tool for “power of control within this realm of production”, the
built environment no longer exercises control through “the measurement of outputs
and the observation of labour by foremen and supervisors.”50 his old way, which was
simply Foucault’s identiication of the pan-optical means with disciplinary societies;
now exercises its power through replicating the complexity of and instrumentalizing
urban organization within the factory to achieve real subsumption of the labour.51
In the picture Spencer provides, the product of the architect is the transformation
of the built environment that addresses the needs of the dominant political and
economic structures while making it more resilient to any possible alteration of
45
Teichmann, “Architect’s Statement,” 9.
46
For the complete list of agents involved in the design and construction of the project, see
“Credits,” in Zaha Hadid: BMW Central Building, ed. Todd Gannon (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 2006): 158-159. Some of those agents and/or roles are listed as follows:
‘Design Architect’ (Zaha Hadid); ‘Architectural Design’ (Zaha Hadid and Patrik Schumacher);
‘Project Architects’ (Jim Heverin and Lars Teichmann); ‘Design Team’ (Lars Teichmann with
nineteen more people); ‘Project Team’ (thirteen people).
47
Spencer, “Replicant Urbanism,”194.
48
Spencer reminds the reader that in 2009, 500 temporary workers were dismissed from
employment at the Leipzig plant. See Ludwig Nitehammer, “Germany: Temporary workers are
irst victims of recession,” World Socialist Web Site (January 12, 2009) http://www.wsws.org/
articles/2009/jan2009/germ-j12.shtml.
49
Ibid., 205.
50
Ibid., 198.
51
Ibid., 181-198.
30
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the contemporary structures through the advancement of the ‘control society.’
he relation between the architect and the capitalist structures in relation to the
advancement of the ‘control society’ may have been established with the victory
of the capitalist society in the aftermath of 1968. his is most likely to be another
consequence of the transformed modes of productions of the highest level of capitalist
development. However, does this point to a new form of relation between the
architect and capitalist development?
2.3 Understanding the Contemporary Circumstances with the Aid of
Post-1968 Discourse
Both Till and Kaminer elaborate on the inherent relationship of architecture and
outside factors that architecture depends on, by studying the transformation of
architecture from the 1960s to today. Till refers to the architectural community of the
1970s and 1980s, to study reproduction of post-Fordism in late twentieth-century
architecture. Till explains, for architecture to be a profession as it is today, architects
had to have “a revised version of professional values, asking them to come down from
their detached heights and instead engage as one set of informed principles among
many.”52 Referring to modernism and ‘crisis’ architecture was found in back in the
1960s, Till argues engaging in object-making to provide an architectural agency rather
than problem-solving, architectural knowledge was “reconsidered away from any
notions of authority and certainty.”53
he modeling of the architect as an interpretative agent rather than a despotic agent
who forces his “utopia” on others reconciles with Kaminer’s depiction of a change in
perception among the public towards architecture in the 1960s. Kaminer oberves in
the 1960s and onwards that among the architects, either as a response to the change
of perception among the public or not, the project of modernism was perceived
as “dystopian, dark and authoritarian.”54 Kaminer suggests this was an outcome of
the emergence of post-Fordist society “with its distinctive worldview, with its lack
of interest in equality and its stress on individualism.”55 he aftermath of the crisis
of modernism brought about an advancement of the “real:” the material object
of architecture. Kaminer argues that: “he real challenged the Ècole des Beaux
Arts: the Arts and Crafts movement, the need for mass-housing, the inluences
of industrialization on architectural production - new materials and engineering
practices - and inally, modernism itself,”56 which resuscitated architecture by
52
53
54
55
56
Till, Architecture Depends, 169.
Ibid., 165.
Kaminer, Architecture, Crisis and Resuscitation, 26.
Ibid.
Ibid., 77-78.
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achieving a form of autonomy which the discipline failed to experience in 18th
century as ine arts did “beyond expansion of its clientele to the growing middle
class.”57
Despite the fact that “the social and economic crisis of the era was being assessed and
analyzed by sociologists, economists, politicians and journalists,” the architectural
crisis of modernism back in the 1960s assumedly took place in a distant realm
conined to discipline.58 his crisis lead to the shift in the revision of professional
values within the discipline: “disgust with formal, igurative architecture, which
pervades the projects of Archizoom and Superstudio, expresses the perception of
architecture as a camoulage of ideology, the logic of projects leads to exposing the
ideology and undermining the institution of architecture.”59 Kaminer argues criticism
embedded in the works of “radical architecture” of the 1960s are “the most explicit
expression of architectural autonomy, reducing architecture to its own medium
-drawing- and bypassing the building, the end product of design which depends not
only on the work of the architect but on investment, engineering, regulations and
labour.”60 However even this, Kaminer reminds, “exposes a certain acceptance of the
commodity market,”61 as the architects could not overcome, what he quotes from
Violeau: “necessity to actually materialize an object.”62
he anxiety coming from the dissolution of the promises and solutions that
modernist architecture could not deliver, was suppressed by the ‘real’ architecture,
creating an advent of the real, providing a solution to the crisis of modernity “by
concentrating on the present, on the already existing, and accepting the emerging
post-industrial society.”63 Deining the role of the architect within this ‘real’ realm
brought back the ‘intermediate agency’ of the architect between the client and
the rest. Although this was as near as it could get to overcoming the dependency
on structures which imposed an ideology on the discipline, “its renouncement of
a possibility of a diferent future, its rejection of critique, and its endorsement of
reality” acted as a “legitimation of neoliberal reality, rejecting the need to reevaluate
the already existing.”64
Kaminer attributes an anxiety coming from the advent of real and the discipline of
architecture completing a circle that actually “never undermined its preference of the
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
32
Ibid., 77-78.
Ibid., 25.
Ibid., 39.
Ibid., 87.
Ibid., 39.
Ibid.
Ibid., 166.
Ibid.
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ideal … ofering solutions, which in the long run, were exposed as piecemeal and
partial at best,”65 and observes:
he emergent consciousness of crisis in the irst years of the
twenty-irst century marked the end of the euphoria of the
1990s. he ‘end of history’ and the belief that Western economy
had moved beyond recession into a trajectory of continuous
growth appear, only a few years later, inconceivably naive. he
developing crisis has posed a challenge to the stasis of the real,
suggesting the need for change and brave decisions, ofering
forking paths to a future, and, to some extent exposing the
artiiciality of the veneer of movement.66
On the outer most layer, the construction industry that is afected by the
transformation and reconiguration of modes of production are arguably dominated
by capitalist development. Capital grows by infusing into everyday life physically and
socially, forces the architect to position themselves in a more complex network than
they used to. his is not only due to the change in the production and construction
methods. It can be considered as a consequence of changing of the requirements
and expectations architects need to acknowledge and address within their work.
Architects do not need the hats of social ideologues for their profession to entail what
is ‘more than the building.’ Partially relinquishing their power and participating in
a network with multiple agents in order to provide their service, are compromises
already made in the advance of late capitalism that lets go the active social ideologue
role they did possess within modernist discourse. Capitalist development that thrives
on globalization today challenges the profession with creating a division of labour in
architecture on a global scale. Vulnerability of the discipline of architecture to outside
factors, especially economic factors, challenge the last legitimation which Peter
Eisenman mentions as quoted by Till: “When one denies the importance of function,
program, meaning, technology and the client-constraints traditionally used to justify
and in a way support form-making- the rationality of process and the logic inherent
in form become almost the last ‘security’ or legitimation available.”67 Yet “the logic
inherent to form” can be overtaken by codes and conducts based on construction,
building regulations, imposed by actors with inancial stakes, on energy consumption,
safety and economic constraints, as they are threatening the profession to be conined
within a very limited domain today. For those, who are following in the footsteps
of those who claimed the form-making as their last domain to hold on to, there
might be another crisis waiting them. he post 1960s ‘autonomous’ architecture
no longer fails only to address the impact it has on the rest of the society and built/
65
66
67
Ibid.
Kaminer, Architecture, Crisis and Resuscitation, 166.
Till, Architecture Depends, 160.
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unbuilt environment. he contemporary economic factors also signal that the ‘form’
can no longer be supported on its own. his brings about an old problem which
older generation of architects, including Eisenman, should be familiar with: how
to confront capitalist structures which the architects are necessarily and inherently
bound to, for the sake of not giving away their professional autonomy?
2.4 Manfredo Tafuri Haunts (Again)
Jeremy Till, reminds us about the prison Manfredo Tafuri conined architects to with
his identiication of crisis of architectural ideology. Till quotes Tafuri: “architecture
obliged to return to pure architecture, to form without utopia; in the best cases to
sublime uselessness.”68 As Jeremy Till points out, the position Tafuri grants architects
within the structures of capitalism is a constraining one:
In the last chapter of Architecture and Utopia, Manfredo Tafuri
writes of the impossible position of the architect caught within
the structures of capitalism, the architect has lost any means
of resistance … architecture has deluded itself into believing
that the production of form alone can intervene productively
in the social world, and that this delusion has hidden the real
state of afairs in which fresh form has been appropriated
by the very forces of capital that it presumes to escape. …
[Tafuri] talks of being ‘uselessly painful’ because it is useless
to struggle for escape when completely enclosed and conined
without an exit.69
Till’s argument is problematic, and to an extent ironic, as he returns to the last
chapter of Tafuri’s Architecture and Utopia in the last chapter of his book Architecture
Depends: “Hope against Hope.” Till attempts to “see opportunities in the smallest
gap,” to overcome the “seamless barrier of capital contra architecture,” which Tafuri
constructs.70 As he does so, he too hastily reduces architectural culture to a culture
that is uncritical of perpetuation of social conditions and of iconic buildings and
prize ceremonies and implies if the architect could become critical of this culture,
there is still hope for architecture.71
Till’s identiication of the prison, that Tafuri conines architects within, does not seem
to have an impact on Till himself. Instead, Till seems to appropriate Tafuri’s critique
to grant himself his own position as a critic who reminds architectural circles of
68
69
70
71
34
Till, Architecture Depends, 189.
Ibid.
Ibid., 193.
Ibid., 191.
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their practices’ contradictions. However, it is questionable whether Till goes beyond
paying lip service “to open spaces for new possibilities” for struggles against capitalist
structures.72
Andrew Leach’s inquiry into Manfredo Tafuri provides a substantial and balanced
critique of Tafuri’s audience which is valuable for twenty-irst architectural historians
and theoreticians who study Tafuri. Leach depicts two strands of Tafuri’s audience
with reference to the monographic issues published by Italian Casabella and American
Architecture New York (ANY). he irst group of Tafuri’s audience is most likely
to be Italian or at least Italian-literate, who were “capable of claiming irst degree
knowledge of Tafuri’s ‘project;’” where the latter group is most likely to be submerged
in Anglophone literature who mediated Tafuri and his project by mechanisms
of reception.73 Regardless, according to Leach, both publications are helpful to
72
73
Ibid.
Leach,“Choosing History,” 9.
For a quick survey, it is relevant to irst look at the compilation of theoretical works by
Michael Hays, Kate Nesbitt and Krista Sykes and their relection on the role of Manfredo Tafuri in
the post-1960s architectural discourse in relation to architectural theory today. See Michael K.
Hays, ed., Architecture Theory since 1968 (MIT Press, 2000); Kate Nesbitt, ed., Theorizing a New
Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965 – 1995, (Princeton
Architectural Press, 1996); Krista, A. Sykes, ed., Constructing a New Agenda: Architectural
Theory 1993-2009 (Princeton Press, 2010). For a brief portrayal of Tafuri in those works, we can
refer to Michael Hays who starts his chronologically ordered compilation Architecture Theory
since 1968 with “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology.” He attributes a crucial role to
Tafuri in the architectural discourse as he suggests Tafuri radically theorized contemporary
architecture’s situation more than anyone. Andrew Leach holds Hay responsible for the precise set
of “politico-theoritical coordinates” in the North-American perception of Tafuri’s contribution to
architectural discourse as a demonstration of “the capacity and limitations of a Marxist critique of
architecture, and thus of architecture as a system subject to economic and social theories in a
Marxist tradition.” Leach, “Choosing History,” 4. For Hays, Tafuri’s work on modernism is “the
maximization of the classical mediating term of critical theory, reiication … but now with the
twist that architecture’s utopian work ends up laying the tracks for a general movement to a totally
administered world.” Hays, Architecture Theory since 1968, xi. Tafuri’s contribution with this
approach is portrayed as crucial if not seminal, as it is part of a multitude of architectural theories
that “freely and contentiously set about opening up architecture to what is thinkable and sayable in
other codes.” Ibid. Where for Nesbitt the capacity and limitation of Tafuri’s work is regarded as a
pessimistic and an extreme skeptic point of view about the possibility of resistance to status quo
through design. Nesbitt, Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture, 361. From Nesbitt’s
perspective, the grim future Tafuri posits to the architects, provides the space for more optimistic
igures such as Fredric Jameson who are not necessarily as critical of architecture and its
institutions, with their response to Tafuri’s “restricted deinition of architecture” as Tafuri’s work is
regarded as a pathway to “disseminate” Walter Benjamin and other Frankfurt School members.
Also see monographic issues on Tafuri published by Casabella and ANY. After Tafuri’s death,
theoreticians and practitioners who claim upon Tafuri’s legacy in architectural culture, relect on
their own appropriation of a reduced image of Tafuri especially via those two monographic issues.
In those publications, especially the English-speaking audience of Tafuri, give the impression as if
they want to move on from the multitudes of legacies of Tafuri by paying a last tribute to Tafuri (as
well as to his ghosts as the title of Michael Hays essay published in monographic issue by ANY is
Prelude - Problem
35
CHAPTER TWO
“approximate the ‘production’ of [Tafuri’s] intellectual life in its irst and second
iterations,” and ofer “helpful supplementary material and contextual information
that can aid the contemporary reading of Tafuri’s published writing.”74 However
they also demonstrate the problems and complexities of explaining Tafuri’s oeuvre
“both within its recent reception and in studies concerning its reception.”75
From Leach’s point of view, Casabella provides a more “balanced and thoughtful
analysis of [Tafuri’s] contribution to architectural debate.”76 his audience who
had access to Tafuri’s works without being biased by a selective spectrum of Tafuri’s
oeuvre through translations, were able to confront Tafuri within his own context,
who in return approximated his own legacy with his works, his engagements
and his academic career in Italy.77 Whereas the relationship of the Anglophone
audience of Tafuri with his works is portrayed as more likely to be ixed and
iltered through a less accurate lens which failed to comprehend Tafuri’s project
in its completeness: an image that was more or less ixed through “‘a reading
programme’ for a community in New York concerned with the Marxist critique of
architecture.”78
“Tafuri’s ghosts”) and then forget it (as the title and the paper “Oublier Tafuri?” by Evelina
Calvi’s contribution to ANY implies). Tafuri’s historiography and criticism is postulated as
something to be overcome as Ignasi de Solà-Morales writes: “Today, what we ind somewhat
cruelly revealed are his own historical dependencies, together with the evident presence of an
ideological discourse that is not too dificult to identify, linked to certain prejudices
characteristic of his theoretical sources and the currents of thought dominant at the time,” and
argues that it would not make sense to “develop a new radical critique grounded in some new
discourse designed to unmask of all ideology.” Hence “Toward a Critique of Architectural
Ideology,” no longer helps us to “carry on with the struggle.” Ignasi de Solà-Morales, “Beyond
the Radical Critique: Manfredo Tafuri and Contemporary Architecture,” in “Being Manfredo
Tafuri,” special issue, ed. Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Architecture New York, nos. 25-26 (2000):
56-60, 60.
74
Leach,“Choosing History,” 9.
75
Ibid.
76
Ibid., 6.
77
Ibid., 5-6.
78
Ibid., 4.
Here it is relevant to note Joan Ockman edited Architecture Criticism Ideology (New
York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1984) which had contributors -other than Manfredo Tafuri
himself- such as Fredric Jameson, Joan Ockman, Demetri Porphyrios, and Alan Colquhoun. A
further articulation on this group is present in the next chapter. This North American and the
architectural community which was formed around Peter Eisenman’s Institute for Architecture
and Urban Studies in Manhattan in the 1970s and 1980s and their appropriation of Tafuri’s
works are attacked by Dianne Ghirardo as I will elaborate later in Chapter Three. Someone who
-to some degree- evades Ghirardo’s attacks is Fredric Jameson (most probably because they are
not a practicing architect). Jameson is an important igure who ixes the North American
Marxist discourse around Tafuri. James O’Brien suggest that Jameson was invited to the
architectural critical theory debate by the architectural historians themselves, who failed to
contest or review his arguments. James P. O’Brien “The Possibilities for Architectural
36
Prelude - Problem
CHAPTER TWO
At the end of the day, Tafuri’s reception in both Italian and Anglophone audience
sufered from what Leach lists: “repetitive, formulaic devices as Tafuri’s divisibility
into ‘early’ and ‘late’ periods, the diiculty of translating his work from Italian
being responsible for his poor accessibility elsewhere, the absolute dominance of
political factors in his critical thinking, the interchangeability of the thinking of the
key theoreticians of the so called ‘Venice School’ (Tafuri, Cacciari, Dal Co) and so
on.”79 Leach argues once Tafuri’s complete oeuvre itself is used to test constructions
of such altered Tafuris, those constructs can be undermined, as Leach demonstrates
with his own study.
To some extent, Leach is critical of reading Tafuri merely as a politically charged
theoretician, placing emphasis on his persona as an architectural historian. Looking
at Tafuri’s works and his words beyond his works, such as the interviews he has
given since the 1980s, it is clear that Tafuri’s architectural historian persona is
consciously chosen over ‘the architect’ whether he was politically motivated or not.
It would be putting words into Tafuri’s mouth to suggest that his “rejection” of
being an architect and choosing to reside as an historian after the year 1964 was
only related to and a consequence of his critique of the crisis architecture was found
in the 1960s. Although Contropiano and the political project surrounding it were
Production under Capitalism” (PhD diss., MIT, 2007). In the early 1980s, Jameson’s
engagement with Tafuri is published as an essay “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology” in
Architecture Criticism Ideology in Architecture Criticism Ideology, ed. Joan Ockman (New
York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1984): 51-87; and his publication Archeologies of the
Future (London and New York: Verso, 2005) re-postulates Tafuri’s crucial role in Jameson’s
theoretical endeavors in the twenty-irst century. That is today most furiously challenged by Gail
Day.
My approach to this audience of Tafuri is primarily shaped around Andrew Leach’s
contemporary efforts which put light on Manfredo Tafuri as an architectural historian. As
mentioned in the introduction, Leach is an author who is accountable for bringing Manfredo
Tafuri back into twenty-irst century architectural discourse from a more critical perspective than
the past relections on Tafuri by Tafuri’s contemporaneous or subsequent generations possessed.
He elaborates on Progetto e utopia and the lens ixed by the English speaking audience of Tafuri
to approach Tafuri, and his subsequent works, in the book Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History.
Beatriz Colomina and Craig Buckley co-edit the project Clip Stamp Fold in 2010, which is
dedicated to “radical architecture of little magazines” from the 1960s and the 1970s. Principally
surveying the magazines which had impact on Anglo-Saxon architectural culture of the post
1960s, the editors as well as the contributors to the project participate in discussions, exhibitions
and the publication. Contributors to the project include editors of the magazines and
predominant igures, authors and intellectuals who contributed to the domains of those
magazines; such as Kenneth Frampton, Peter Cook, Peter Eisenman. In this publication,
contributors refer to Contropiano through speciically Manfredo Tafuri and his 1969 essay
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology.” See Beatriz Colomina, et al., introduction to Clip
Stamp Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196x to 197x by Beatriz Colomina
and Craig Buckley, eds. (Barcelona: Actar, 2010): 6-15; and Bernard Tschumi, “London-MilanParis-Florence,” in Clip Stamp Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196x to 197x,
ed. Beatriz Colomina and Craig Buckley (Barcelona: Actar, 2010): 47-57, 51.
79
Leach,“Choosing History,” 10.
Prelude - Problem
37
CHAPTER TWO
signiicant constituents of the framework within which Tafuri was writing in the
1960s, they can not be reduced to be the limits of his inluence and project. Leach
does not address this aspect of Tafuri’s project with his inquiry:
How can we … explain the equivalence of the terms invoked
by means of a contemporary Marxist vocabulary, proper to
the discourses of Contropiano and Quaderni rossi, with the
disciplinary schemes that surround Tafuri’s initial ‘choice’ for
history, and that extend into his mature historical practice,
widely perceived to have left aside his ‘militant’ Marxism?
hese questions circumnavigate a vacuum that we have
deliberately left as such.80
With my research, to some extent, I address the vacuum which Leach leaves
intentionally. However unlike Day and Aureli, who also address this vacuum, I
believe Tafuri’s ‘militant’ Marxism is less likely to be related to Tafuri himself, Tafuri’s
oeuvre nor Tafuri’s audience, and transcends the architectural discourse.
Standing out as the most politically charged piece of Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia
is signiicant. His 1969 essay “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology” forms
the basis of Architecture and Utopia which was originally published in Italian in
1973 as the volume Progetto e Utopia. Whether intentional or unintentional,
an amnesia or short term attention span is dedicated to “Toward a Critique of
Architectural Discourse,” which can explain why implications of Tafuri’s arguments
in 1969 are treated identical with what he presents in Architecture and Utopia; with
his subsequent career as a historian or with his complete oeuvre. I argue, once his
essay is located precisely within its particular context with reference to the political
framework of the journal Contropiano taken into account, the deadlock of Tafuri’s
politics and politics of his works is easy to be resolved. his deadlock of the role of an
architectural historian, theoretician and professional had dominated the post-1960s
discourse on Tafuri and to the extent of its inluence, the capacity of architecture to
make a radical change in society in the post-1960s discourse. In order to seek the
relevance of the political framework of the essay, the irst thing we need to avoid is
the inclination to assess this context against Tafuri, constructions of a multitude of
Tafuris or his works including his book Progetto e utopia.
I do not argue that establishing a proper reading of Tafuri, especially in relation
to his 1969 essay “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” in contrast to his
1976 volume Architecture and Utopia, will resolve the problems which architects
feel obliged to confront today. However it may provide a diferent perspective to
the origin of those problems, namely to the inherent and necessary relationship
architects have with the capitalist structures. Hence the contemporary generation
80
38
Ibid., 120.
Prelude - Problem
CHAPTER TWO
of architecture students, interns and architects who are facing the transformation
of their profession before their eyes can be reminded of not only an earlier version
of a similar confrontation but also the existing possibilities of more radical ways to
confront this transformation, which are signiicantly lacking in the contemporary
debates in or outside the architectural discourse.
Prelude - Problem
39
CHAPTER THREE
“TOWARD A CRITIQUE OF
ARCHITECTURAL IDEOLOGY”
3.1 Introduction to Chapter Three
he starting statement of “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology” is:
“bourgeois art’s primary ethical imperative is to dispel anxiety by understanding and
internalizing its causes.”1 his ethical imperative is valid for architects as well. In his
essay Tafuri confronts architects with their implicit and necessary relationship with
capital. He goes further and suggests that the ideology of architecture was a necessary
endeavor by architects to grant themselves a symbolic role as the “agents of politics
who continuously invent advanced solutions at the most generally applicable levels.”2
Writing in the midst of the crisis that modern architecture was going through, Tafuri
puts emphasis on the role of the architect in this crisis. According to Tafuri, architects
themselves marked “the paths of [modern architecture’s] own destiny by becoming
the bearers of ideals of progress and rationalization to which the working class is
extraneous, or in which it is included only in a social democratic perspective.”3
Instead of explaining the crisis as laid “at the feet of the Fascisms of Europe on the
one hand, and Stalinism on the other,”4 Tafuri proposed that the crisis was the crisis
of the ideological functions of architecture, on which some architects had to rely to
dispel their anxiety coming from their implicit relationship with capital. he social
mission that architects could facilitate was implied to be inherently related with
the capital, as any project architecture could deliver was bound to be commodiied
to sustain “the substratum of production techniques corresponding to the new
conditions of bourgeois ideology [as in the case of Modern architecture] and laissezfaire economics.”5 Hence the anguish of “leftist” architects was as valid as it was
historically inevitable, but useless at the same time, according to Tafuri.6
Every call by scholars to take Italy in the 1960s and 1970s into consideration
while revisiting Tafuri is initiated by recalling Tafuri’s comments in the preface of
Architecture and Utopia. In 1976 with the English translation of his 1973 volume
Progetto e utopia, Tafuri makes it clear that in order to approach his essay, we need
1
2
3
4
5
6
Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” 6.
Ibid., 9.
Ibid., 32.
Ibid., 28.
Ibid., 9.
Ibid., 32.
41
CHAPTER THREE
to understand it within the political framework which the journal Controipiano
provided. Referring to the essay “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” Tafuri
argues:
he journal that published this essay (and others by myself
and by colleagues working along the same lines) was so clearly
deined in its political history and particular line of thought
and interests, that one would have supposed that many
equivocal interpretations might a priori have been avoided.
his was not the case. By isolating the architectural problems
treated from the theoretical context of the journal, the way
was found to consider my essay an apocalyptic prophecy, ‘the
expression of renunciation,’ the ultimate pronouncement of
the ‘death of architecture’.7
In the light of what Tafuri points to, I return to this context in order to seek the
relevance of reading Tafuri’s essay within the political context of 1960s Italy following
the tracks laid out by preceding attempts by Asor Rosa, Ghirardo and Day. However
with my study I am reconsidering how convincing it is to treat “Toward a Critique
of Architectural Ideology” from the late 1960s and Architecture and Utopia from
the 1970s as if they are identical; given that returning to this context reveals the
fractures amongst the intellectuals in regards to their role in social conlicts that
were happening at the time in Italy. herefore, we need to ask ourselves how much
Tafuri’s direction in 1975 helps us with approaching Tafuri’s essay to address the
contradictions and limitations of the architect which Tafuri exposes in his essay when
the Italian 1968 was not yet dissipated.8
If we study the political framework of 1960s Italy in order to apprehend Tafuri’s
project, the context of “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology” is exposed
as not necessarily the proper context that we can position Tafuri and his complete
historiography in. he problems with the assumption that the essay’s context should
be unveiled with reference to Tafuri’s personal politics as well as with attempts for
approaching this context via Tafuri’s complete oeuvre are demonstrated in ongoing
debates on Tafuri’s legacy. If we can overcome those problems, we can establish a
better understanding of the context which informs Tafuri’s 1969 essay where Tafuri
presents the problematic relationship between architects and capital. After that we
can consider approaching Tafuri’s essay in relation to the most advanced levels of
capitalist development to date. And instead of avoiding the problematic relationship
between the architect and capitalist structures, we can confront that relationship in
the light of Tafuri’s 1969 essay.
7
8
42
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, vii–viii.
Tafuri wrote the preface to the English translation of Progetto e utopia in 1975.
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
CHAPTER THREE
3.2 A Cross-section of “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
“Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica” by Manfredo Tafuri was published in
the Italian journal Contropiano in 1969.9 his essay formed the basis of the 1973
volume Progetto e utopia: architettura e sviluppo capitalistico. Translated into English
as Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development by Barbara Luigia La
Penta in 1976; the volume is a rework and enlargement of the essay.
Architecture and Utopia is constituted of eight chapters with a preface to this English
edition. Each chapter in the book is an enlargement of arguments present in the
essay, except the third and seventh chapters. he third chapter, titled as “Ideology and
Utopia” is the irst fourteen pages of Tafuri’s forty page long 1970 Contropiano article
“Lavoro intellettuale e sviluppo capitalistico” (“Intellectual Work and Capitalist
Development”).10 he seventh chapter is titled “Architecture and Its Double:
Semiology and Formalism,” where Tafuri enmeshes semiology, the use of language
and structures by capitalist development in his arguments he presented in 1969 essay.
“Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica” irst appeared in English as “Toward a
Critique of Architectural Ideology” in Hays’ compilation Architecture heory Since
1968 in 1998: four years after Tafuri’s death. In this translation by Stephen Sartarelli,
section headings were added to the text as an aid for the reader; following the Spanish
version of the essay as Hays explains.11 hose headings mostly correlate the chapter
9
From the 1970s onwards, Tafuri had given various interviews where he relects on his
own practice and project. In one of those interviews, we learn from Tafuri himself that his 1969
essay was “written somehow earlier.” Manfredo Tafuri, “History as Project,” interview with
Manfredo Tafuri by Luisa Passerini, trans. Denise Lynne Bratton in “Being Manfredo Tafuri,”
special issue, ed. Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Architecture New York, nos. 25-26 (2000): 10-70, 33.
Tafuri mentions this in the most extensive interview he had given two years before his death, in
1992, to Luisa Passerini in Rome, Italy on February 10, 1992 and March 28, 1992. It was part of
the Oral History Program at the University of California Los Angeles and the Getty Center for the
History of Art and the Humanities. The English version of the interview appeared in ANY’s
monographic issue on Tafuri, which was edited by Denise Lynne Bratton for the magazine. For
other interviews see Manfredo Tafuri, “I mercati della cultura: Françoise Very intervista Manfredo
Tafuri” / “The Culture Markets: Françoise Very interviews Manfredo Tafuri,” interview with
Manfredo Tafuri by Françoise Very, trans. Kenneth Hylton in “Il progetto storico di Manfredo
Tafuri” / “The Historical Project of Manfredo Tafuri,” special issue, ed. Gregotti, Vittorio,
Casabella nos. 619-620 (1995): 36-45, originally published as “Entretien avec Manfredo Tafuri,”
in Architecture mouvement continuité, 39 (June 1976): 64-68; Manfredo Tafuri, “Manfredo
Tafuri,” interview with Manfredo Tafuri by Fulvio Irace in Domus 653 (September 1984): 26-28;
Manfredo Tafuri, “There is No Criticism, Only History,” interview with Manfredo Tafuri by
Richard Ingersoll in Design Book Review 9 (Spring 1986): 8-11 and Giacinto Di Petrantionio in
Flash Art, 145 (March-April 1989): 67-71.
10
Manfredo Tafuri, “Lavoro intellectuale e sviluppo capitalistico,” in Contropiano:
Materiali marxisti 2 (1970): 241-281.
11
Michael Hays, introduction to “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” in Michael
K. Hays, ed., Architecture Theory Since 1968, 5. Spanish version of the essay was published in the
book which Manfredo Tafuri co-edited with Massimo Cacciari and Francesco Dal Co in 1972: De
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
43
CHAPTER THREE
titles of Architecture and Utopia to the sections of the essay, which are elaborated
as chapters in the volume; except the two chapters which were additions to the
arguments in the essay. Also the inal section heading of the English translation of
the essay is: “Capitalist Development Confronts Ideology,” where the inal chapter of
Architecture and Utopia is titled “Problems in the Form of a Conclusion.” Although
the main arguments follow the order of the last section of the essay in “Problems in
the Form of a Conclusion;” in the volume Tafuri introduces “the new phenomena
and new participant forces.”12 He elaborates on them via semiology and cybernetic
system theories in the 1973 volume to articulate his concluding remarks. hose
remarks in the 1973 volume also have some indistinctive yet subtle changes in his
relections in comparison to the 1969 essay.
Other chapters of the book which happen to be also the subsection headings of
the English translation of the essay are titled subsequently: “Reason’s Adventures:
Naturalism and the City in the Century of the Enlightenment;” “Form as Regressive
Utopia;” “he Dialectic of the Avant-garde;” “‘Radical’ Architecture and the City”
and “he Crisis of Utopia: Le Corbusier at Algiers.”
he last sentence of “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology” sums up three
endeavors Tafuri undertakes with his essay. First, Tafuri presents architecture as the
practice of concretizing ideology. hen he sets up the objective which he puts as: “the
systematic destruction of the mythologies” that sustained architecture’s development.
Lastly, and most likely to be the most controversial for those who believe in a
progressive or positive change through design and architecture, he postulates the
fundamental exteriority of the architect with regards to class struggle.13
la vanguardia a la metrópoli: Crítica radical a la arquitectura (Barcelona: Gili, 1972) before the
publication of the 1973 volume Progetto e utopia. Cacciari’s contribution to this volume was his
essay “Dialéctica de lo negativo en la época de la metrópoli” (“The dialectics of the negative in the
age of the metropolis”).
12
See Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 172-76; compare with Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of
Architectural Ideology,” 31.
13
Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” 33. Here is the last paragraph of
Tafuri’s 1969 essay with its English translation by Stephen Sartarelli:
La rilessione sull’architettura, in quanto critica della ideologia
concreta, “realizzata” dell’architettura stessa, non può che andare
oltre, e raggiungere una dimensione speciicamente politica, di cui la
distruzione sistematica delle mitologie che no sostengono gli sviluppi
non è che uno degli obbiettivi: e solo le condizioni future della lotta di
classe daranno modo di sapere se questo che ci preiggiamo è compito
di avanguardia o di retroguardia. Tafuri, “Per una critica dell’ideologia
architettonica,” Tafuri, “Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica,”
in Contropiano 1 (1969), 79.
(Relection on architecture, as a critique of the concrete ideology
‘realized’ by architecture itself, can only push further, and strive for a
speciically concrete dimension in which the systematic destruction of
44
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
CHAPTER THREE
As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, written in the 1960s, it is the crisis
of modern architecture which lays in front of the architects that Tafuri attempts to
expose by addressing “how one of the most functional proposals for the reorganizing
of capital has come to sufer the most humiliating frustrations.”14 To do so, Tafuri
undertakes the “systematic exploration of the Enlightenment debate” in order to trace
the origins of the “increasingly generalized interest in the Enlightenment” within
architectural culture among his contemporaneous.15 his study Tafuri undertakes is
an earlier demonstration of what constitutes Asor Rosa’s admiration of Tafuri: his
“almost ‘scientiic’”examination of the “documentation of sources” and “a knowledge
of texts, all examined with impeccable precision.”16 It is in the irst three subsections
of the essay: “Reasons’s Adventures: Naturalism and the City in the Century of the
Enlightenment;” “Form as Regressive Utopia” and “he Dialectic of the Avant-garde”
that Tafuri interprets the total absorption of architecture into the process of capitalist
rationalization from the Enlightenment to the Modern Movement.17 Via this hardlabour, Tafuri demonstrates his primary thesis: architectural thinking that inds its
roots in the Enlightenment is the demonstration of the architectural ideology, which
lends itself as a tool for capitalist development.
With subsequent two subsections “‘Radical’ Architecture and the City” and “he
Crisis of Utopia: Le Courbusier at Algiers,” the crisis Modern Architecture had
entered is elaborated on. Within the setting which Tafuri established prior to his
dissection of modern architecture’s ideology, the crisis is depicted as the moment
when architecture exhausts the functions it had been granted by the capitalist
development with or without the consent of the architect.18 Even when architects
were committed to a ‘progressive’ architecture or planning attempts; like what modern
architects envisioned their “Utopias” to be, architects had been lacking the capability
the mythologies sustaining its development is only one of the
objectives. But only the future conditions of the class struggle will tell
us whether the task we are setting ourselves is that of an avant-garde
or a rearguard. Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,”
33.)
14
Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” 6.
15
Ibid.
16
Asor Rosa, “Critique of Ideology and Historical Practice,” 31.
17
For Tafuri’s analysis of the introduction of the Enlightenment and how it is spread and
inherited by architects and planners who politicize their practice, see Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of
Architectural Ideology,” 6-10. For Tafuri’s analysis’ progression towards the exposure of the
dialectics played out in this task of politicizing that lead to the assumed autonomy of architectural
practice and profession, see ibid., 10-13. For Tafuri’s identiication of the initiation of the “modern
movement” with reference to architects committing to the bourgeoise project, architectural practice
had internalized for the plan of the Capital to appropriate architecture to advance itself, see ibid.,
13-15. For the depiction of the exposed contradictions of the modern movement via the avantgardes’ attempts to confront or afirm the project of modernism, see ibid., 16-21.
18
See ibid., 21-25.
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
45
CHAPTER THREE
or willingness to understand the reality of the economic and political structures.
his, Tafuri demonstrates, resulted in the failure of their work and its appropriation
within capitalist development.19 In response to this, in the last part of the essay, Tafuri
articulates the mesh of the political framework for his work.20
With the last subsection “Capitalist Development Confronts Ideology,” Tafuri
argues that the crisis of the ideological functions of architecture is a consequence
of architects paving the way for their own destiny with their commitment to the
bourgeoise project: “Architecture as the ideology of the Plan is swept away by the
reality of the Plan the moment the plan came down from utopian level and became
an operant mechanism.”21 Tafuri refers to Antonio Negri and his reading of John
Keynes’ General heory (1936) in “La Teroria capitalista dello stato nel ‘29: John M.
Keynes,” (“John M. Keynes and the Capitalist heories of the State Post-1929”), to
explain the fundamental ideological overtones of the poetics of modern architecture:
“To free oneself from the fear of the future by eyeing that future as present.”22 Keynes
aiming “at coopting [the catastrophe’s] threat by absorbing it at ever new levels,”
was taken to a next level in modern architecture as “the public” was integrated as
the “operator and active user of the urban mechanism of development:”23 airming
the reality of the new class of the modern city. As architects realized the ideology of
the Plan, they obliterated their role as ideologues. In other words, the whole cycle
of modern architecture with its birth, advancement and crisis was a consequence of
the application of the ideology of the Plan by the architects who lacked the vision
to perceive themselves within the economical and political reality of the capitalist
society. By promising to resolve “the imbalances, contradictions and delays typical
of capitalist reorganization of the world market,” without acknowledging their own
role in concretizing those with their practice, the architectural ideology inally found
itself in crisis.24 Tafuri concludes, as the consequence of relecting “on architecture, as
a critique of the concrete ideology ‘realized’ by architecture itself,” architects would
eventually need to confront the roles they were given by capitalist development.25
hrough this relection and understanding of the architect’s role in the realization
of the ideology that Tafuri articulates, architects are posited exterior to the actual
19
See ibid., 25-28.
20
See Ibid., 28-33.
21
Ibid., 28.
22
Antonio Negri, “John M. Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of the State in 1929,” in
Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis and New Social
Subjects 1967-1983, trans. Ed Emery and John Merrington (London: Red Notes, 1987):177-197.
Originally published as “La teoria capitalista dello stato nel ‘29: John M. Keynes,” in Contropiano
1 (1968): 3-40 quoted in Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” 28.
23
Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” 28.
24
Ibid., 32.
25
Ibid., 33.
46
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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working class struggles since “just as there can be no such thing as a political
economics of class, but only a class critique of political economics, likewise there
can never be an aesthetics, art or architecture of class, but only a class critique of
aesthetics, art, architecture and the city.”26 Hence, Tafuri dismisses the possibility or
assumptions of being a critical architect, artist or intellectual.27 However, regardless of
the “useless” anxious state the architects were found in back in the 1960s with the fear
of “the proletarianization of architects and his [sic] insertion … within the planning
programs of production;”28 Tafuri implies that there may still be hope for architects
to confront their role in the capitalist development. “For a liberated society,”
architects needed to address whether “such an objective could ever be sought without
a linguistic, methodological and structural revolution reaching well beyond the
simple subjective will or the simple updating of a syntax.”29 He concludes his essay by
reminding architects: “but only the future conditions of the class struggle will tell us
whether the task we are setting ourselves is that of an avant-garde or rearguard.”30
3.3 Problems with Approaching the Essay
It is not a matter of debate whether Tafuri actually argued for the incapacity of
architects to escape capitalist structures or not. He makes this argument. Rather
than the argument Tafuri makes, it is the implications of his argument which dictate
the way Tafuri’s work is problematized by architects, architectural historians and
theoreticians. With the picture Tafuri depicts in 1969, unless an architect is willing to
lend their practice to capitalist development, there is no domain for them to practice
architecture as their profession. Hence if one is to take Tafuri and his arguments in
1969 seriously, there is no point of practicing architecture as an architect and pretend
26
27
28
29
30
Ibid., 32.
Tafuri says:
Order and disorder, in this light, cease to be in opposition to each
other. If we interpret them according to their true historical
signiicance, it becomes clear that there is no contradiction between
constructivism and “protest art,” between the rationalism of building
production and informal subjectivism or Pop irony, between the
capitalist plan and the urban chaos, between the ideology of planning
and the poetics of the object.
The destiny of capitalist society, in this interpretation, is not at all
extraneous to the project . The ideology of the project is as essential to
the integration of modern capitalism, with all its structures and
superstructures, into human existence, as is the illusion of being able
to oppose that project with the tools of a different project or with
those of a radical “anti-project. Ibid.
Ibid., 31
Ibid., 32.
Ibid., 33.
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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struggling against capitalist society.
In the context of 1960s Italy, pleading for not lending oneself to the service of
capitalist development does not necessarily mean a portrayal of an apocalyptic vision
or a pessimistic critique. In 1966 Tronti writes in “he Strategy of Refusal”: “When
the development of capital’s interest in the factory is blocked, then the functioning of
society seizes up: the way is then open for overthrowing and destroying the very basis
of capital’s power.”31 Tronti distanced himself from this strategy which was calling
for refusal to work and instead started adopting a diferent discourse which Cacciari
articulates further in Contropiano at a time when agitated political subjects in Italy
intensify their struggle against capitalist structures and the State with the Italian
1968. ‘Negative thought’, with which former operaisti agitators established a discourse
as a potent political autonomy is assigned for intellectuals through which they were
expected to radicalize the institutions of the labor movement. Where this later
project, which was elaborated until and after Contropiano ceased to be published, is
what Tafuri adopts in his 1973 edition of his 1969 essay; the 1969 essay is more likely
to be a translation of the earlier common call that had been vocalized frequently in
1960s Italy within the architectural discourse.
Instead of approaching the essay as it is within its political framework; architects,
architectural historians and theoreticians adopted the less controversial approach to
reading Tafuri’s 1969 essay, which was via the 1973 volume. A postulation of the
pessimistic outlook presented in Tafuri’s work is crucial for this approach. With this
approach, architects, architectural historians and theoreticians commit their inquiries
into inding a way around Tafuri’s pessimism in order to justify not retreating as
architects whose work will never contest capitalist development.
For architectural circles who choose not to go beyond the limits of the architectural
discourse, this can be a legitimate way to approach Tafuri’s essay. With this approach
one can numb the implications Tafuri’s essay points out to architects in the 1969
essay. So far this had been the case. Yet, if we intend to approach the essay within its
political framework, demarcating Tafuri’s arguments within the scholars’ disciplinary
endeavors obfuscates the relevance of the contemporaneous operaismo movement to
the essay.
In the English-speaking audience, this approach inds its origins in 1982 with
the publication of the collaborative book Architecture Criticism Ideology, and most
recently taken over in the contemporary discourse by Gail Day.32 Given that Tafuri’s
31
Mario Tronti, “The Strategy of Refusal,” trans. Red Notes, in Autonomia: Post-Political
Politics, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007): 28-35,
28-29. Originally published as “12. La strategia del rigiuto,” in Operai e capitale (Torino: Giulio
Einaudi editore, 1966): 234-252.
32
On 13 March 1982, The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York held a
48
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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essay starts with referring to the “anxiety” caused by “understanding and internalizing
its causes;”33 it should not come as a surprise when Tafuri’s audience fail to overcome
this anxiety and try to numb the controversial implications of Tafuri’s arguments
symposium which involved Deborah Berke, Walter Chatham, Alan Colquhoun, Pe’era Goldman,
Denis Hector, Christian Hubert, Michel Kagan, Beyhan Karahan, Mary McLeod, Joan Ockman,
Alan Plattus Michael Scwarting, Bernard Tschumi, Lauretta Vinciarelli. This group’s interest in
politics and architecture lead them to realize the little attention the subject had received in North
American architectural discourse. In order to widen their perspective, they turn their attention to
“young post-Marxists” of Italy, especially Manfredo Tafuri, and this attempt of theirs marks the
introduction of the most generic approach to Manfredo Tafuri and his work within Englishspeaking architectural circles. One problem with their approach was that they did not attempt to
understand the political project Tafuri’s work had been preceded by, not until after Tafuri’s death
when the architectural circles tried to confront Tafuri without his presence in two monographic
issues published in architectural magazines Casabella (1995) and ANY (2000). Jameson’s
“Gramscian alternative” to Tafuri’s pessimistic outlook for architecture, involved “a limited notion
of ‘progress’ into the endless historiographic cycle of deconstruction and reconstruction,” within
the “intellectual marketplace.” Joan Ockman, postscript to Architecture Criticism Ideology:
“Critical History and the Labors of Sisyphus,” in Architecture Criticism Ideology, ed. Joan Ockman
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1984): 182-189, 184 and see Fredric Jameson,
“Architecture and the Critique of Ideology” in the same book. Where in 1981 Sandra Pescarolo
brought into the attention of the English-speaking audience how the operaisti critique of the early
1960s diffused into a number of trajectories after 1969. And one of the emphasis she puts on is the
connection and the disconnection of this critique in relation to Gramsci. See Sandra Pescarolo,
“From Gramsci to ‘Workerism’: Notes on Italian Working-class History,” in People’s History and
Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981): 273-78. One of
the seminal criticisms the operaisti had was against the Gramscian notion of “organic intellectual”
and “progress” which was diluted in the policies of the Communist Party back in the 1950s and
1960s Italy. See Mario Tronti, “Our Operaismo,” trans. Eleanor Chiari in New Left Review 73
(January-February 2012): 118-139. The operaisti project required a reassessment of the notion of
progress and the efforts of those who were exterior to the working class yet still assumed a role
within the working class struggles. As my primary interest is not in the way North American
audience of Tafuri understood Tafuri, I am not going to dwell on this too much. However in the
following chapter, the reader will come across another footnote on Gramsci and Gramsci’s notion
of ‘organic intellectual.’
In the twenty-irst century, the lack of understanding of the political dimensions of Tafuri’s work is
started to be addressed to confront approaching Tafuri’s work via the lenses set by the North
American audience. See Gail Day, “Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson and the Contestations of
Political Memory,” in Historical Materialism 20, no. 1 (2012): 31-77. Still, it is arguable how
much Gail Day herself is able to confront Tafuri’s 1969 essay in its political framework without
iltering it through further obstacles to be able to avoid addressing the implications Tafuri’s essay
may actually possess.
On this note, it worth mentioning Marco Biraghi: an Italian scholar of Tafuri. Biraghi grants
“Project of Crisis” as one of the fundamental aspect of Tafuri’s project. I do not inquire into his
approach to Tafuri’s works and project, as it has limited reception in the English-speaking audience
of Tafuri, at the time of writing. Felice Mometti’s research on Manfredo Tafuri, which I have
mentioned earlier in Chapter One, is an example where the author establishes a link between Italian
operaismo movement, particularly with reference to Tafuri’s contributions to Contropiano. He does
this in the light of the work of Biraghi, as well as other writers who inquire into Tafuri;s
scholarship such as Leach and Day.
33
Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” 6.
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
49
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which he raised in 1969.
What is more, a similar approach to his 1969 essay can be observed in Tafuri himself,
if we consider his complete oeuvre and his career as a historian. Tafuri’s 1992
relection on his practice as a historian exposes the breaking up from the operaisti
discourse with his intentions he narrates; and what his works demonstrate. Beside
the image he portrays of himself in the oral history documented by Luisa Passerini
in 1992, in the light of the basis of his formation as a historian in the 1960s and his
complete historiography, Leach and Asor Rosa identify the impasse in which Tafuri’s
project as a historian is conined which establishes the limits of assigning Tafuri as a
political igure whose project was a demonstration of the ‘militant’ Marxist discourse
of 1960s radical Italy.
In this picture, neither Tafuri himself or his complete oeuvre will actually address
the political framework of his 1969 essay, but will only expose the obstacles on our
way to return to this context. Hence if we intend to revisit “Toward a Critique of
Architectural Ideology,” in the light of the political framework of 1960s Italy, we
need to bracket out the 1973 volume, Tafuri himself with his complete oeuvre, and
his audience from our inquiry as they easily delect our attempts and hinder our
approach to the essay in its particular context.
3.3.1 Problems with approaching the essay via Architecture and Utopia
Amongst the English-speaking audience, arguments present in Tafuri’s essay are
most likely to be approached via Architecture and Utopia. Andrew Leach argues that
Progetto e utopia was the work of Tafuri that gained the most wide-spread attention.
He describes Progetto e utopia as
an indictment of contemporary architectural theory as the
barren endpoint of a ive-hundred-year-long trajectory
extending from Architecture’s artistic ‘liberation,’ its evolution
from complete integration in a wide range of institutions
-individual, social, religious, economic and political- to
its modern status as an isolated practice insulated by selfreferential theoretical limits.34
he fact that the volume was translated into English only three years after the Italian
text was published, where the essay was translated into English not until 1998 may
indicate the indiference to the potential diference between two texts. Yet, the link
which Tafuri himself established between the essay and the volume appears to be an
obstacle for us to return to the political framework of the essay.
Regardless of the link Tafuri establishes between the two works: the 1969 essay
34
50
Andrew Leach, “Choosing History,” 4.
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
CHAPTER THREE
and 1976 book and their identical content in the arguments Tafuri delivers, those
two works should not be treated as one and the same. Even if they do not seem to
deviate on an argumentative level, implications of the arguments difer once the
political framework within which Tafuri had written, published and circulated his
work is taken into account. Leach briely touches on this subtle distinction as he
says: “Progetto e utopia directly indexes the vivid and engaged debates for which he
irst wrote ‘Per una critica dell’ideologia architetonica,’ drawing from and adding to a
discussion centered (in part) on the Leftist Roman journals Quaderni rossi (1960-66)
and Contropiano (1968-1972 [sic]).”35
In the preface to his book Progetto e Utopia’s English translation Architecture and
Utopia; Tafuri says what he presented as a working hypothesis back in 1969, stood up
on the basis of analysis and documentation in 1975.36 Tafuri suggests that studies of
the relationship between the historical avant-garde movements and the metropolis;37
the relationships between intellectual work and capitalist development;38 researches
on ideology and the planning practices of the Soviet Union;39 on architecture and
American cities;40 on German sociology of the early twentieth century41 provided “the
basis of analysis and documentation” for his argument to be developed.42 hrough
critical analysis of the basic principles of 1960s contemporary architectural ideology,
Tafuri says his attempt was to identify “those tasks which capitalist development”
had taken from architecture.43 Despite Tafuri’s association with the pronouncement
of the “death of architecture,” he says clearly, such a misinterpretation of his essay
35
Leach, Manfredo Tafuri, 140. Although the last issue of Contropiano was numbered 3 of
1971, it was published in 1972.
36
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, viii.
37
See Massimo Cacciari, Francesco Dal Co and Manfredo Tafuri, De la vanguardia a la
metropolis: Crítica radical a la arquitectura.
38
See Tafuri, “Lavoro intellectuale e sviluppo capitalistico.”
39
See Alberto Asor Rosa, ed., Socialismo, città, architettura, URSS 1917-1937: Il
contributo degli architetti europei (Rome: Oficina, 1971); “Les premières hypotheses de
planiication urbaine dans la Russie soviétique, 1918-1925,” in “Sozialistische Architektur?
UdSSR / Architecture socialiste? URSS 1917-1932,” special issue, Archithese 7 (1973): 34-41.
40
See Giorgio Ciucci, Francesco Dal Co and Mario Manieri-Elia, eds., La città americana
dalla Guerra civile al New Deal (Bari: Laterza, 1973) translated into English by Barbara Luigia La
Penta as The American Ctiy from the Civil War to the New Deal (Cambridge and London: The MIT
Press, 1979).
41
Manfredo Tafuri, “Socialdemocrazia e città nella Repubblica di Weimar,” in Contropiano
1 (1971): 207-223; “URSS-Berlin: Du populisme à l’‘internationale constuctiviste’,” in
“L’architecture et l’avant-garde artistique en URSS de 1917 à 1934,” special issue, VH101: Revue
trimestrielle nos. 7-8 (1972): 53-87, English edition published as “USSR-Berlin, 1922: From
Populism to ‘Constructivist International’,” in Architecture Criticism Ideology, ed. Joan Ockman
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1984):121-181.
42
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, viii.
43
Ibid., ix.
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
51
CHAPTER THREE
would be possible by “isolating the architectural problems treated from the theoretical
context of the journal” in which his essay was published: Contropiano.44 Apart from
the possibility of misinterpreting his argument, he acknowledges he might also be
interpreted as favoring a “return to pure architecture, to form without utopia; in the
best cases, to sublime uselessness.”45 Tafuri says he would give more credit to those
who sincerely refer to “purity” than “the deceptive attempts to give architecture an
ideological dress,” however his inquiry is not a blueprint provided for architects to
follow.46
Instead of presenting a method or a solution, in relation to the crisis of modern
architecture or narrating “an apocalyptic prophecy” in relation to architecture’s role;
Tafuri was making an observation, which was “actually taking place” before architects’
eyes.47 Since his 1969 essay it became clear that: “Ideology is useless to capitalist
development, just as it is damaging from the working-class point of view.”48 Fortini’s
Veriica dei poteri along with Tronti, Asor Rosa and Cacciari demonstrated this fact
already, Tafuri says. Simultaneously, he demarcates his own inquiry as he postulates
that he is not in a position to put forward “what instruments of knowledge might be
immediately useful to the political struggle.”49 However even if he does not speculate
on the instruments themselves, Tafuri can be argued to assign the kind of political
struggle to the architects, more lucidly in 1973, than he did in 1969.
If one is to take his 1969 argument echoing in his 1976 book seriously, as he says
in the preface: “one certainly does not see on the architectural horizon any ray of
an alternative.”50 he question of how to deal with this “pessimism,” which Tafuri
dismisses in 1975, underlines the change of Tafuri’s tone and the possible diferent
contexts in which the essay and the book are found. Tafuri’s change of tone in
his 1973 book in comparison to his 1969 essay may come to one’s attention only
after returning to the precise context of the essay. However there are some rather
interesting articulations in Tafuri’s arguments which are especially signiicant in the
concluding chapter of the book when we compare it with conclusive remarks Tafuri
makes in the essay. hose ine shifts and changes in Tafuri’s argumentation and tone,
will hopefully make more sense at the end of my inquiry into 1960s Italy.
Tafuri identiies two concurrent phenomena architects were faced with back in 1969.
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
52
Ibid., viii.
Ibid., ix.
Ibid.
Ibid. ix-x.
Ibid., x.
Ibid.
Ibid., x.
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
CHAPTER THREE
he irst one is that architecture’s ideological role, is no longer functional.51 Hence
this causes the crisis amongst the architects who ind their practice transforming into
a profession as the transforming economic and political structures dictate. he second
phenomena is that the identiication of “the economic and social conlicts exploding
with ever greater frequency within urban and outlying areas,” which impose a “pause
on capitalism’s Plan,” if not an end.52 Tafuri considers those two simultaneously
happening phenomena had forced architects to “a return to activism -to strategies of
stimulus, critique and struggle- on the part of the intellectual opposition, and even
of class organizations, which to this day have assumed the task of ighting to resolve
such problems and conlicts,” even if this source of anxiety is mostly benumbed with
“the illusion that the ighting for planning could actually constitute a moment in the
class struggle.”53 In 1969, Tafuri delivers the descriptive analysis of the state of things
and the limits architects are conined within their professional ground that would
challenge this illusion.
In 1973, Tafuri reiterates those two phenomena.54 However the mentioning of the
“forced return to activism” is replaced with an observation that suggests “the ‘radical’
opposition (including portions of the working class) has avoided a confrontation
with the highest levels attained by capitalist development.”55 Even though this was
a prevailing theme in 1969, apart from the need for architects’ to acknowledge the
“new professional situation -already realized in advanced capitalist countries like US
or in countries of socialized capital such as the USSR,”56 in 1969 the confrontation
with the capitalist structure did not require further engagement with the highest
level attained by the capitalist development as Tafuri puts forward repeatedly in
1973. In 1973, even if Tafuri is not putting forward it as a method, he postulates
the embracement of the highest level attained by the capitalist development as a
prerequisite for architects to move on.
he identiication of those two simultaneously happening phenomena leads Tafuri
to elaborate on the need to go beyond the “criticism of ideology” as a kind of a task,
which “concerns the working class point of view and that only in a second instance
regards capital” in 1973.57 Tafuri borrows this from Tronti’s 1966 essay “Marx, forza
51
Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” 31; Tafuri, Architecture and
Utopia, 170.
52
Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” 31; the English translation of the
1973 volume says: “economic and social contradictions, which explode in an always more
accelerated was within urban agglomerations, seem to halt capitalist reorganization.” Tafuri,
Architecture and Utopia, 170.
53
Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” 31.
54
See Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 170.
55
Ibid.
56
Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” 31.
57
Mario Tronti, “Marx, forza lavoro, classe operaia,” in Operai e capitale (Torino: Einaudi,
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
53
CHAPTER THREE
lavoro, classe operaia,” (“Marx, Labour, Working Class”): one thing he does not
mention in his 1969 essay. In this light, his 1973 concluding remarks stand on the
analysis that “all the functional apparatus of bourgeois ideology has been consigned
by capital into the hands of the oicially recognized working class movement.
Capital no longer manages its own ideology; it has it managed by the working
lass movement.”58 he relevance of Tronti’s 1966 essay, in comparison to 1969, is
somehow clearer to Tafuri in 1973 in terms of what is beyond this analysis:
here exists the ‘partisan’ analysis of such a reality … It seems
to me that, for an architectural culture that would accept such a
terrain of operations, there exists a task yet to be initiated. his
task lies in putting the working class, as organized in its parties
and unions, face to face with the highest levels achieved by
the dynamics of capitalist development and relating particular
moments to general designs.59
Another analysis Tafuri avoids in 1969 but presents in 1973 is the rather long
elaboration on the great complexity of the most advanced level of capitalist
development and the need to confront it face to face within the institutions of the
working class movement.60 he advancement of capitalist development between
1969 and 1973 must be signiicant for Tafuri as his 1969 conclusion: “only the
future conditions of the class struggle will tell us whether the task we are setting
ourselves is that of an avant-garde or a rearguerd,” is no longer as relevant as it was in
1969.61 After “having done away with any disciplinary ideology,” with a “relection
on architecture, inasmuch as it is a criticism of the concrete ‘realized’ ideology of
architecture itself;” Tafuri is conident that for architects, it is now
… permissible to take up the subject of the new roles of the
technician, of the organizer of building activity, and of the
planner within the compass of the new forms of capitalist
development. And thus also to consider the possible tangencies
or inevitable contradictions between such a type of technicalintellectual work and the material conditions of the class
struggle.62
he leap Tafuri makes from 1969 to 1973 needs emphasis and consideration. It
is signiicant that in 1973 Tafuri prescribes architects what he did not in 1969:
1966), 171, quoted in Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 171
58
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 171
59
Ibid., 172.
60
Ibid., 170-79.
61
Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” 33.
62
Ibid., 182.
54
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
CHAPTER THREE
confronting the highest levels attained by capitalist development to embrace the new
professional condition architects are granted. In 1969, acknowledgment of those
new roles was equally central to Tafuri’s arguments, yet the confrontation with the
highest level attained by capitalist development was not necessarily in the form of an
embracement to revolutionize the “architectural language, method, and structure”
“for a liberated society.”63 he essay was simply lacking the what the 1973 volume
possess: a call for architects to adopt the new roles they ind themselves in whether
as a method or not. What used to be a pessimistic and confronting piece in 1969,
becomes a demonstration of Tafuri’s analysis and arguments’ competency in 1973,
which is clearer about the implications of the analysis Tafuri made in relation to the
architectural ideology.
he major outcome of returning to “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
is found in the fact that the essay and the volume are not identical in terms of their
implications. I have not yet come across an attempt to challenge the inclination to
equate “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” and Architecture and Utopia to
one another. As we return to the context of the essay, however, it is likely to expose
the fact that the emphasis given on Architecture and Utopia over “Toward a Critique
of Architectural Ideology,” whether intentionally or not, indicate something more
than prioritizing a mature version of the seminal text.64 Collapsing Tafuri (as an
operaista and/or historian) or his complete oeuvre over the essay equally obfuscate and
misconstrue the implications of the essay which appear to be unique to “Toward a
Critique of Architectural Ideology,” and its political framework.
3.3.2 Problems with approaching the essay via Manfredo Tafuri
3.3.2.1 Tafuri the operaista
When Tafuri was speaking about the crisis of contemporary architecture in his 1969
essay he was speaking from the Italian society that was growing to be antagonistic
within the transition from an industrial society to a late capitalist; post-industrial
society. his context, as portrayed in Steve Wright’s book Storming Heaven, can
be articulated within the midst of an the attempt to ind a ‘Left’ alternative to the
politics of Communist Party (PCI) and Socialist Party (PSI) by young dissidents in
the Italian post-war period.65 It is the discourse which Italian New Left elaborated on
63
See ibid., 179-180 and “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” 32-33.
64
For a demonstration of the emphasis given on Architecture and Utopia, in order to
address the effect of the architect and architecture in economic realm and vice versa, James
O’Brien, with his dissertation, provides the reader a chance to compare a different approach to the
inherent relationship of the architect and capitalist structures which Tafuri points to, particularly
when his work in the 1960s and his formation as a historian are not contextualized in relation to
the political framework of 1960s Italy. See O’Brien, “Possibilities for Architectural Production
under Capitalism.”
65
Steve Wright, Storming Heaven, 3. Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) was in the
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
55
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with their critique and theories in light of the post-fascist Italy after the second World
War, within which Tafuri’s 1969 essay was written, published and circulated. Post-war
Italy presents the setting that initiated the discourse which the Italian operaisti would
adopt in their critique and analysis in the 1960s.
post-war Italy
With their leader Palmiro Togliatti’s return to Italy from Moscow in 1944, the
strategy of PCI was shaped around “national unity, progressive democracy, a
lasting coalition of mass popular parties,” since Togliatti insisted “the unity of the
war years should … be continued into the period of reconstruction.”66 Part of
this policy was due to the needs of the Russian war efort, according to which the
parameters of PCI strategy was determined. Ginsborg argues, untimeliness of Italian
Communists’ pursue of an independent policy for Stalin, such as Tito’s dictatorship
of the proletariat, was accompanied by Togliatti’s adaptation of Gramsci’s theoretical
relections, with whom he was in Turin after the First World War.67 Ginsborg
draws the relation between Gramsci and Togliatti’s bottom upwards social alliances
-including the one with DC- with Gramsci’s emphasis on the long-term success of
any revolutionary moment necessarily being “dependent upon the outcome of the
prior struggle for hegemony.”68 On this note, later, Ginsborg suggests that Togliatti’s
conviction about DC being a progressive force in Italian society, lead to: “in the
hands of left, working-class militancy” becoming “virtually discarded, in the major
political battles of the time.”69
On the other end of the spectrum the Christian Democrats (DC), while paying
lip-service to Vatican’s warning against “the efects of industrial society;” in practice
“fully espoused the cause of ‘modernization’.”70 his was shaped by American
inluences which Ginsborg lists as: “the liberty of the individual and of the irm, the
unfettered development of technology and consumer capitalism, the free play of
government from 1945 to 1947. It was the Socialist Party (PSI: Partito Socialista Italiano), the irst
workers’ party in Italy, that was greatly weakened by fascism. After the irst parliamentary election
of Republic in 1948, the Italian Socialists (PSI) remains in pact with PCI until 1956. As of 1963,
PSI, like Giuseppe Saraga’s Italian Democratic Socialist Party (PSDI: Partito Social Democratico
Italiano) which was formed after splitting from PSI in 1947; starts cooperating with DC
(Democrazia Cristiana): a path, which PCI undertakes in the 1970s as the ‘historical compromise’:
the strategy of alliance with the ruling Christian Democrats. DC had been in the government since
1948 until 1994, the year of the demise of the party, due to corruption allegations. For further
detail of organizations including unions and political parties of the 1960s and 1970s Italy, see
Lumley, glossary of organizations in States of Emergency, ix-xii.
66
Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943-1988
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1990), 42-43.
67
Ibid., 42-45.
68
Ibid., 45.
69
Ibid., 83.
70
Ibid., 153.
56
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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market forces.”71 he plan presented as the Vanoni Plan in 1954, which was referred
as laissez-faire policies of the DC that covered the decade 1955-64 with objectives
encouraging growth “while ensuring government control of economic priorities,
and the government intervention to correct imbalances and distortions,” was never
realized.72 However Amintore Fanfani committed himself to the Vanoni plan, even
if “politics and planning were bound to clash when the DC’s prime concerns were to
establish its own power base within the State and to cater to the needs of the diferent
sections of its electorate.”73
Architects and architecture students would ind themselves in the midst of this
transforming social fabric and structure with social-conlicts happening mostly
around workers’ struggles, along with debates on architecture and planning as this
period covers also the ‘great building boom.’ In this period, the government allowed
“the maximum degree of freedom to private initiative and speculation in the building
sector,” while abandoning the idea of “any serious government intervention.”74
Gail Day writes a repost to Ginsborg’s study and suggests that the wave of attempts
of “progress,” promised by DC, came to an end by 1962 with law 167, which
meant “state acquisition of land by compulsory purchase-order” that resulted with
“prices being forced up in response to the law’s ‘freezing’ of sections of the urban
fabric.”75 With Tiburtino, which represented the “archetypal development;” installing
the infrastructure in order to “sell back the plots for private development but at
controlled prices,” or other progressive attempts in architecture and planning without
radical changes in institutions and structures that urban planning was governed by,
was proven to be bound to failure.76 In her return to Tafuri’s critical practice’s political
framework, Day suggests this and other failures of the politics shaped by DC, along
with the frustration with the Socialist Party entering a coalition with the government
as of 1963; prompted an organized militant resistance as a result of the growing
disafection amongst architecture students.77 he mood architecture students found
themselves in, was actually resonating with the radical left and dissidents of that time,
as Day iterates:
71
Ibid., 153-54.
72
Ibid., 165.
73
Ibid., 166. Fanfani became the secretary of the DC in 1954, and then became president of
the council of ministers until 1963, with Antonio Segni and Fernando Tambroni of the DC briely
taking over the presidency subsequently in 1959 and 1960.
74
Ibid., 246. As a matter of fact, Ginsborg also reports that in this period, only 16 percent of
total investment in the construction of houses was initiated by public housing schemes with the
most notable one being INA-Casa. Ibid., 247.
75
Gail Day, “Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson and the Contestations of Political Memory,”
57-58.
76
Ibid.
77
Ibid., 58.
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CHAPTER THREE
he lessons of Tiburtino -and other projects like it- were
similar to those that had contributed to frustrations in the
architectural schools in the early 60s (and which contributed
to the left-rejection of the policies of the PSI’s coalition with
the Christian Democrats, and its disappointment with the
PCI’s incapacity to propose an alternative). Essentially, what
concerned the operaisti - and those taken by their ideas- was
the way in which ‘reform’ and ‘development’, led under the
socially-oriented struggles of the oicial Left, became practice,
leverage for capitalist developers.78
Contropiano (1968-1971), with other journals such as Quaderni rossi (1961-1966)
and Classe operaia (1964-1967) was founded along the lines of the Italian operaismo
movement; and it is the journal which opened up the trajectory that lead to Potere
operaio (1969-1973): a newspaper which came into the scene as Antonio Negri split
from the editorial board of Contropiano after its irst issue was published. his split
eventually leads to the advancement of the rhetoric, which Negri was held responsible
by the Italian State in 1979, for various extra-parliamentary struggles in the 1970s.
A critique of orthodox Marxism and institutions ailiated with it, constituted the
theoretical framework preceding Contropiano. With the emphasis given on the praxis
of resistance, as Tronti convincingly proposed: “act as if the revolution was taking
place,”79 operaismo and rather controversially closely related consequent autonomia
movements became most active in Italy between the 1960s and the 1970s. By
revisiting Marx and challenging Marxism to that day; Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti,
Antonio Negri, Sergio Bologna, Alberto Asor Rosa along with other philosophers,
sociologists and intellectuals depicted a society that was being produced in the factory
along with the material goods in response to restructuring of capitalism. In contrast
to orthodox Marxists who perceive class struggle as taking control over the means of
production that capitalism alienates workers from, operaisti perceived taking control
of the labour process constituted the class struggle. he tactics to do so, however,
would later cause the dissolution of the operaisti.
he Workers’ movement in Italy continued ascending in an intensiied manner
until 1977 and inally experienced the “historic defeat” after the loss of the 1980
Fiat Strike; where in the rest of the Europe and the USA, the events of 1968 were
efectively over by 1969.80 Revolts starting at 1968 in Europe and around the
78
Ibid.
79
Alisa Del Re, “Feminism and Autonomy: Itinerary of Struggle,” trans. Arianna Bove in
The Philosophy of Antonio Negri: Resistance in Practice, ed. Timothy S. Murphy and AbdulKarim Mustapha (London: Pluto Press, 2005): 48-72: 57-58.
80
Patrick Cuninghame, “‘Hot Autumn’: Italy’s Factory Councils and Autonomous Workers’
Assemblies,” in Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present,
58
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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world, continued for ten years in diferent forms of struggle in Italy; which were
preceded with the Piazza Statuto revolt in 1962, intensiied with constant revolts;
through 1968 and 1969: marking the long Italian 1968, and the 35-day strike at
FIAT factory in Turin in 1973. In 1973, the Historic Compromise of PCI lead to
the auto-dissolution of a number of groups which were formed on the left line of
Communist Party in 1969. As operaismo was dissolving from the late 1960s onwards
within the debates predominantly around the question of entering the Party or
not; autonomia started shaping the working class struggle with the formations of
autonomous committees inside the factories that were illed with younger and
more militant generation of workers. he refusal of organizational forms and the
deinition of new needs and objectives for liberating everyday life from labor time
uniied the autonomous collectives such as women’s groups, radical youth, students,
ecologists and environmentalists, which were not part of the “working class”
analyses before.81 As the struggles intensiied from 1968 and onwards, autonomous
groups found themselves on the streets most of the time, to protest “the politics of
‘austerity’ and ‘sacriice’ that everybody -including the unions and the Communist
Party- demanded of the ‘working class’.”82 Such uprisings and civil disorder
ascended along with a militant rhetoric accompanied by strikes, clashes with police,
rejection of work becoming the expression of masses of their dissent and struggle
accompanied by militant and armed-struggle in the 1970s, such as Brigate Rosse
(Red Brigades) bitterly opposing the Communist Party’s coalition with Christian
Democrats which lead to kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro, the former
prime minister of Italy. In the aftermath, the coalition of the historic compromise
installing “a highly repressive regime of state terror,” resulted with intellectual leaders
of autonomia, Antonio Negri receiving most of the attention with charges “association
and insurrection against the state” which were dropped later, but sentenced for
“masterminding” the Red Brigades.83
With the method operaisti appropriated, and the global point of view it presented;
operaismo is the political movement which Tafuri’s “Towards a Critique of
Architectural Ideology” was written, published and circulated in relation to. I will
elaborate on operaismo movement in Chapter Four. Nevertheless, in the context
depicted so far, I argue the essay to be a product of 1960s Italy where Tafuri opens up
the trajectory for the architect to struggle against capitalist development by agitating
them.
ed.Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini (Chicago: Haymarket Books: 2011): 322- 337, 322.
81
Jim Fleming, editor’s preface in Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse by
Antonio Negri (London and New York: Pluto Press and Autonomedia, 1991): vii-xiii, ix.
82
Ibid.
83
See Sylvère Lotringer, “In the Shadow of the Red Brigades,” in Autonomia: Post-Political
Politics, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007):
v-xvi, v.
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Tafuri in relation to 1960s Italy
Having said that, Tafuri’s personal politics can not be framed restrained with one line
of thought inluenced by operaismo. In his last and the most extensive interview he
gave to Luisa Passerini before his death, Tafuri relects on the 1960s in length. His
tone and his account for his political actions and ailiations hardly allow the reader
to assign a central political role to Tafuri and his oeuvre if our reference is Tafuri in
1992. However as Asor Rosa notes, Tafuri’s collaboration with groups and individuals
who refer themselves as operaisti do suggest and to some extent prove the presence
of Tafuri’s contribution to their discussions and debates especially with reference to
Contropiano.84
In the interview he gave to Passerini, Tafuri reports that he had been actively involved
in demonstrations at the University of Rome by architecture students and graduates
to “stage something that would violently shake up the entire department.”85 In 1958,
demonstrations framed as “freedom of teaching” and “freedom of learning;” were
actually targeted to confront Saverio Muratori: as Tafuri suggests, Muratori was
against “everything modern.”86 In a period where the idea of “everything starting
over again” was meant to be an end in itself, dissident students and graduates of
architecture felt the need to stir their “ignorant colleagues to action,” in order “to
efect disruption.”87 He recalls: “We use to say that we had a little bit of the whole
world concentrated within the department. But the whole world was conceived, as
Antonio Cederna taught, as a protest against corrupt building practices from which
emerged a political comprehension of the situation.”88 he demonstration in 1958
was followed by another in 1963: “an extended occupation of the department, the
longest and the most famous one before 1968.”89
In the early 1960s, Tafuri was convinced that it was not an option for them to
continue without a party ailiation after the incidents Tambroni government, hence
Tafuri became member of the Socialist Party, “for obvious reasons,” as he says.90 In
84
Alberto Asor Rosa, “Critique of Ideology and Historical Practice,” 29.
85
Tafuri, “History as Project,” 22.
86
Ibid. As Tafuri reports, Muratori was the architect of the Christian Democrat ofice at the
Esposizione Universale Roma (EUR) and back then teaching at architecture department in
University of Rome. Tafuri portrays Muratori as believing “true modernity meant that everything
should start over again:” a thought Tafuri was fascinated by.
87
Tafuri, “History as Project,” 22.
88
Ibid.
89
Ibid., 23.
90
Ibid., 26. In 1960, Tambroni government allowed neo-fascist party Movimento Sociale
Italiano (MSI) to hold a congress in Genoa, which is referred as “the traditional working-class
citadel.” Tamborini resigns, in the aftermath of the street ights sparkled by the government’s
decision. The resignation of Tambroni is followed by a centre-left coalition government. See
Wright, Storming Heaven, 35-36.
60
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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those years, Tafuri publishes what he calls as “the most insigniicant things in minor
magazines like Argomenti di architettura and Superici.”91 It is one of those publications
in Argomenti di architettura which would be referred later by Galvano Della Volpe in
his notes to he Critique of Taste as portraying “the crucial question of architecture
today.”92 Tafuri reminded that, according to Della Volpe, with the embracement of
the architecture as built environment that sought to meet human needs by altering
the physical environment, the contradiction in architects’ attempts needed to be
exposed.93 Tafuri showed “quite rightly, that the deinition of those ethical and social
contents which are ‘the starting-point’ of the modern revolutionary movement in
architecture, owes much to the Enlightenment.”94 For Della Volpe, the modern
architecture was understood through the “mass ordinary people” of the agnostically
accepted “mechanistic, ‘functional’ rationality, in a cultural and social automatism,
in an ever more uncontrolled process of ‘quantiication’ (implicitly divorcing the
architect and the engineer).”95 Hence according to him, Tafuri’s work was signiicant
as he had depicted that to “give ‘a very precise content’” to the continuity which “the
most committed contemporary architects are tending to look for,” in “the modern
revolutionary movement in architecture,” which needed to aim “the human condition
of the architect in the web of its relations with the social world towards which his
activity is directed.”96
In spite of his disinterest in his works produced in the 1960s, Tafuri assigns the
1960s a signiicance in his political as well as intellectual formation. Described as
“scholastic,” Tafuri says he despised all the Marxist works published at that time.97
However, the problems contemporary dissident Leftists were occupying themselves
with, were arising as “entirely new in political terms” with the inluence of Raniero
Panzieri and Quaderni rossi; making Tafuri return to Marx- for whom his original
interest was found in the critique of the “philosophical teachings of Bruno Widmar
-a non Marxist doctrine.” 98 For Tafuri, Panzieri’s return to Marx meant “to negate
91
Ibid. Tafuri says in the early 1960s he was in a crisis because he did not “have an
individuality,” and could not act on in his interest in history over architecture as he felt guilty as
“someone who had followed Panzieri and Basso;” he considered “history was an escape,
something to be renounced in favor of action. Ibid., 29.
92
Gelvano Della Volpe, Critique of Taste, trans. Michael Caesar (London: NLB, 1978), 246.
Della Volpe is an important igure for the operaisti as he is a stepping stone for Panzieri, Tronti,
Asor Rosa and others to break apart the orthodox Marxism. I will articulate on this later in Chapter
Four. Critique of Taste is his attempt to systematically expose “an historical-materialist aesthetic,
and by extension, an orderly sociological reading of poetry and art in general.” Ibid., 11.
93
Ibid., 246-47.
94
Ibid., 247.
95
Ibid.
96
Ibid.
97
Tafuri, “History as Project,” 26.
98
Ibid., 27.
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Marx himself;” and Tronti’s relections grafted onto the questions “to whom the ideal
of social and urban justice refers” meant “the whole of leftist thought is impeded by
its own ideological constructions.”99 According to Tafuri, the critique of ideology
meant the critique of the Left.100 From this perspective, in the interview he deines
the critique of ideology as the advancement of “the idea that it is possible to do
theoretical politics, which becomes in practice the critique of ideology.”101 Tafuri
identiies his need back in the 1960s as a consequence of his professional concerns,
which made him seek “a critique of ideological thought, which has embedded itself in
the history of architecture and the history of art in general.”102 Yet, similar to the way
he approaches his earlier works in the 1960s, Tafuri fails to understand why his 1969
essay and the version he publishes in 1973 as Progetto e utopia attracted the attention
they had.103
It is with his irst teaching position on the faculty at Palermo in 1966, when Tafuri
99
Ibid., 32.
100
This rather questionable image of the 1960s political rhetoric is articulated in such a
fashion by Tafuri in 1992, as he seems to feel obliged to elaborate on his account of the operaisti
project as he reminds the reader about the dispute he had with Asor Rosa over Rinascita in the
earlier 1990s. The dispute is his polemical reside with Massimo Cacciari from the editorial board
of Rinacista, which was the magazine of IPC, that resumed publication in January 1990 under the
direction of Asor Rosa. See “Rinascita Torna in Edicola Polemica Asor Rosa – Cacciari,” La
Repubblica, February 4, 1990, http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/
repubblica/1990/02/04/rinascita-torna-in-edicola-polemica-asor-rosa.html; Leonard Weinberg, The
Transformation Of Italian Communism, (New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1995), 118.
101
Tafuri, “History as Project,” 32.
102
Ibid. Leach argues that “[Tafuri’s] speciic motivations and a great deal of language from
Mario Tronti’s political critique- from which essay “Critica dell’ideologia” his own title [of the
essay] comes,” had been preceded in his earlier book, Teorie e storia (1968). Leach, Manfredo
Tafuri, 158; Tronti, “3. Critica dell’ideologia,” in Operai e capitale (Torino: Giulio Einaudi
editore, 1966): 152-159. In 1968 Tafuri “identiies the Renaissance as a moment wherein
architecture entered a state of artistic autonomy conditioned by the new intellectual value-setting
inherent to architectural theory.”Leach, Manfredo Tafuri, 141. This publication sets the target for
the historian that is further elaborated in his book L’Architettura dell’Umanesimo (1969):
“humanism” and “its origins and deformations relative to the rise of the Renaissance.” Ibid.
103
Ibid., 33. Aureli reports that Tafuri avoided speaking about his earlier works in his classes
at IUAV. See note 16 in Pier Vittorio Aureli, “Intellectual Work and Capitalist Development:
Origins and Context of Manfredo Tafuri’s Critique of Architectural Ideology,” in The City as a
Project (blog), March 11, 2011, http://thecityasaproject.org/2011/03/pier-vittorio-aureli-manfredotafuri/. In 1992, Tafuri gives more emphasis to writing his irst book on Quaroni in 1963. Tafuri
explains his interest in Quaroni as: “it wasn’t easy to ind an architect who had spent so much of
his time doing research for the parliamentary commission on poverty.” Suggesting the questions
Quaroni posed as crucial, instead of Quaroni’s architecture and his reputation as an architect,
Tafuri says: “he posed the same questions I would pose for myself in the 1960s and 1970s: “Where
are we coming from?” and “Where are we?”- not so much “Where are we going?” On this remark
Tafuri inds what Quaroni did was “very important, in the same sense as us abandoning our books
(or the graphic designers their drawing tables) to go and throw rocks at the police.” Tafuri,
“History as Project,” 30.
62
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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turns his attention to the operaisti and the revisionist study inspired by Tronti, Asor
Rosa and the circle around Raniero Panzieri.104 With his arrival in Venice, and his
experiment with his institute of history in IUAV, Tafuri becomes closer to Cacciari
and starts participating in the discussions with the Contropiano group forming around
Negri along with Marco de Michelis and Francesco Dal Co; who were active in
organizing demonstrations in the University of Venice.105 Asor Rosa suggests as he
refers to Tafuri’s contribution in Contropiano, their collaboration was “accompanied,
or even preceded, by the work of conspicuous group of architectural students, who
had made their theoretical and political beginning in Angelus novus.”106 he group
which was organizing the demonstrations in the University of Venice, published
the journal Angelus novus (1964-1974) with Cacciari. Tafuri refers to Angelus novus
as with it they spoke “a common language that probably harked back to an earlier
discourse: that which is worldly must only be worldly, and therefore ideology for us
was not so much the phrases of Marx as a spurious practice somewhere between the
sacred and the practice. And thus there was direct confrontation.”107
As though he has to testify to Tafuri’s involvement in Contropiano, Asor Rosa argues
that
the excursus on the history and identity of the journal is not
external to Manfredo Tafuri’s segment of intellectual history …
Tafuri, in fact, accepted toto corde [with his heart] the deinitive
structure of the journal, and participated to it with enthusiasm
104
Tafuri, “History as Project,” 36.
105
In 1968, Tafuri was appointed as the Chairman of the Faculty of History of Architecture
and the Director of Venetian Istituto di storia dell’architettura, the Institute of History at the IUAV,
which in 1972 would become a department. There he tries out his pilot experiment to create “a
history department composed of all histories of the present” by unifying “the history departments
of the University of Venice Ca Foscari and the IUAV in such a way that the art historian, instead of
always looking at paintings and drawings of architecture, would come into direct confrontation
with those who study social history, the history of women in the Veneto, and so on.” Tafuri,
“History as Project,” 47.
Antonio Negri refers to 1968 through his experience in Venice: “Nineteen sixty-eight was
marvelous, because in reality it had begun long before: the school of architecture at the university
there had been a center of student resistance since 1965. This was a truly ine department, very
distinguished, and there were a number of very important artists who lived in the city during this
period as well. And you had only to cross a few bridges before you came to dry land and the largest
petrochemical complex in Italy, Porto Marghera. This is where I started out as an activist.” Antonio
Negri, Negri on Negri: Antonio Negri with Anne Dufourmantelle, trans. M.B. DeBevoise (New
York and London: Routledge, 2004), 168.
106
Asor Rosa, “Critique of Ideology and Historical Practice,” 29.
107
Tafuri, “History as Project,” 54. Bernard Tschumi reports that Angelus novus was the
discovery of Walter Benjamin by the Italians, whose texts were published in early 1960s with the
title ‘Angelus Novus.’ According to him it was Tafuri, who introduced architecture to the
magazine’s agenda. Tschumi, “London-Milan-Paris-Florence,” 51.
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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CHAPTER THREE
and through the speciic instruments of his discipline, on both
the chosen lines of research. And what’s more, I would say that
in those years his collaboration with Contropiano became the
most characteristic element of his work.108
Tafuri produces four essays for Contropiano. After his 1969 “Toward a Critique
of Architectural Ideology,” Tafuri publishes “Intellectual Work and Capitalist
Development” in 1970; “Socialdemocrazia e città nella Republica di Weimar” (Social
democracy and cities in the Weimar Republic) and “Austromarxismo e città: ‘Das
rote Wien’” (Austromarxism and cities: ‘he Red Vienna’) in 1971.109 Both works
in 1971, according to Asor Rosa, provide examples of architectural “catastrophic
clash, with the economic necessities of the Plan, and triumphant and spectacular
expectations of ‘accomplished socialism’ (in one country).”110
With regards to his earlier two essays, Asor Rosa argues that Tafuri’s clear position
provided: “a battle of two fronts.”111 hose fronts were:
First, against that architectural thinking which presents itself
as an ideology and as an instrument of civil cohabitation,
and thus becomes the secular arm of capitalism; second,
against that architectural thinking which derives from certain
aspects of urban proletariat organization … and elaborates
an ‘alternative ideology’, this too totally submitted to the
guidelines of capitalist development.112
Asor Rosa reminds the reader one of the intentions of Contropiano: the critique of
ideology, formulated as demystifying “all those intellectual and political manifestation
related to the workers’ movement tradition, which over time and in diferent
ways had attempted to better deine a level of integration with the social realm of
capitalism.”113 He places Tafuri’s project in this completed picture of Contropiano as
argues:
For Tafuri, leaving the ‘critique of ideology’ behind did not
mean returning to architectural ideology, not even to the
discipline closer to architectural historiography; rather, it
108
Asor Rosa, “Critique of Ideology and Historical Practice,” 29.
109
Asor Rosa summarizes: with “Socialdemocrazia e città nella Republica di Weimar” Tafuri
studies “the critique of the Austrian-German social-democratic experiment,” and with
“Austromarxismo e città: ‘Das rote Wien’,” Tafuri develops “the critique of those illusions of the
European architectural avant-garde with a democratic and anti-fascist message.” Ibid.
110
Ibid.
111
Ibid.
112
Ibid.
113
Ibid.
64
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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meant understanding that in this ield too one should come as
close as possible to the certainty of the datum, resisting, both
for the present and the past, all ideological seductions, even
the fascinating ones generated by the enlightened Venetian
patriciate of the early 16th century.114
Tafuri’s personal politics is not necessarily what operaisti project embraced nor
constituted. In fact, while his formation as a historian and an intellectual was
clearly inluenced by the discourse the operaisti were developing in the 1960s,
Tafuri’s participation in this discourse hardly went beyond his attempts to utilize it
in his intellectual inquiries, as “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology” also
demonstrates. We need to acknowledge this before assuming Tafuri’s subsequent
career as a historian in the years following the 1960s and 1970s can provide us
guidelines to approach his 1969 essay. On this note, Asor Rosa convincingly argues
that:
he ‘critique of ideology’ precedes and determines the discovery
of ‘philology’, and makes it both possible and necessary. hink
about this: once no veil any longer exists, all that remains is to
study, understand and represent the mechanisms of reality, for
which one should reinedly 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.115
Tafuri inds himself in dichotomy between politics and history which he eventually
resolves by committing himself to the idea that: “History is history,”116 in response
to the use of history as a political tool. His commitment to history happens
simultaneously as he was getting more ailiated with intellectuals whose works Tafuri
was inluenced by, such as Mario Tronti and Raniero Panzieri.117 his quandary, which
Tafuri depicts in his relections to his choice over history and his embracement of the
opearisti critique, is left unresolved. His choice of history in contrast to the political
critique of ideology he appropriates in the 1960s leaves the deadlock which Leach
identiies with reference to Tafuri’s role as a historian: “he practice of historiography
will therefore involve, at some level, an encounter with an historiographical ideology
that applies burdens that the historian cannot but pass on to their audience.”118
Tafuri’s utilization of the discourse, which the opearisti initiated with their critique of
114
115
116
117
118
Ibid., 33.
Ibid.
Ibid., 31.
See ibid.
Leach, Manfredo Tafuri, 158.
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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ideology, demonstrates the limits of the operaisti persona one can assign to Tafuri. In
1992, we encounter a Tafuri who identiies his practice and project with his academic
career after 1968 as follows:
I realized that the profession of the architectural historian
could be completely autonomous in relation to architecture
because its objective was to start from the discipline and
embrace history itself. I wanted to elevate the history of
architecture to the same level as all the other histories. …
In the built environment, particularly in Venice, there is no
stone that doesn’t have an institutional meaning. Ultimately,
nothing about a building can be understood unless we know
not only who the patron was but also to which faction he
belonged, because the work is always expressive of him in one
way or another. he kind of history that I am doing today
is somehow a manifestation in myself, in my work, of what
I hoped an institution could be or accomplish. However,
for me, the institutionalization of this practice remains the
objective.119
Hence Tafuri’s objective lacks a method or a guideline apart form what Tafuri’s
own practice stands in its completeness. However Tafuri is powerless in terms of
institutionalizing this as it is not Tafuri himself but the reader who can initiate that
process. Like this compromise the historian accepts de facto, Tafuri had other limits
in terms of his personal politics which he could not over come at that time such as
the elitism that he perceived to be attached to his and others ‘radicalism’. It is in the
early 1970s when Tafuri joins PCI as he recalls:
We worked on our research without prejudices, always
stressing the connection between politics and culture. But
we had this elitist attitude and were snobs about the trends
of the time … One tragic night we decided to enroll in the
Partito Comunista after weighing the possibility of joining
the Democrazia Cristiana. hose who don’t have ideology
don’t have such problems. We were rigid and radical, like
the atmosphere around us, but we didn’t see ourselves in that
way.120
119
Ibid., 44-47.
120
Ibid., 55. It is worth mentioning that chronologically, between Tafuri’s 1969 essay and his
decision to join PCI, lies the 12 December 1969 Piazza Fontana bombings in Milan, which killed
16 people.Tafuri leaves the Party before 1976 as PCI prepares for the historic compromise. In
1976, Cacciari would join the party. The relevance of the context will be hopefully clearer for the
reader in Chapter Four.
66
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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Tafuri explains the role they attributed to themselves within the academia, assumed
a form of autonomy, along with Francesco Dal Co, Marco de Michelis and other
members of the History department in IUAV whom Tafuri had power to appoint.
With their decision to join PCI, they maintained that they should begin the
transformation in the university rather than departing from it.121 Tafuri refers to
Contropiano and Angelus novus and reiterates his perception of himself and fellow
members of the magazines: “We felt we were some kind of elite. We knew that the
Partite Comunista was all wrong but that we should stay with it out of a genuine
pragmatism.”122
he connection between Tafuri in 1969 and Tafuri in 1992 in terms of their critiques
and their politics is a hard one to sustain.123 It is questionable, whether it is justiiable
121
122
Ibid., 42.
Tafuri, “History as Project,” 54.
Reminding the reader about the generation difference between Cacciari, Dal Co and de
Michelis against Negri, Asor Rosa and Tafuri may have further signiicance which I am not taking
into consideration. In 1968, Cacciari was 24, De Michelis and Dal Co were 23 years old. Where
Tafuri was 33, Negri and Asor Rosa were 35 years old. In this light, Contropiano, which Negri
leaves Cacciari and Asor Rosa in the editorial board after his departure, is a medium where the
young founders and members of Angelus novus intermingle with a slightly older generation of
dissidents whose experience of post-war Italy must be reasonably different.
123
It should be noted that, Tafuri in 1992 does not necessarily address every single persona
Tafuri has been attributed to via his practice as a historian, as an intellectual, as a teacher, as a
Marxist or a reactionary and so on. As Andrew Leach argues, Passerini’s record of this oral history
can not say the “inal word” on Tafuri. Though this interview, especially via the version ANY
published in 2000 as “History as Project,” established “the terms of his own reception by a new
generation of scholars, and to undermine the image of his work that dogged his later practice as an
historian.” Andrew Leach, “Tafuri’s eyes: the Biographical Subject and Subjectives of Reception,”
in Contested Terrains: Proceedings of the 23rd Annual conference of the Society of Architectural
Historians, Australia and New Zealand, ed. Steve Basson, Terrance McMinn and John Stephens
(Perth: SAHANZ, 2006): 293-298, 295.
Leach further suggests that this documentation of Tafuri in 1992 offered a challenge to the image
of Tafuri as a Marxist, which his image in the 1970s was dominated by, and is now provoking a
younger generation of Tafuri to “expand the number of his writings that receive critical attention.”
Ibid. Leach is critical of postulating “History as Project” as a foundation to approach to Tafuri and
asks: “How can we bring Tafuri’s ‘explanations’ of his work into discussion without either
unnecessarily diminishing his authorial stance through suspicion or turning to his account for
concrete answers, for the truth?” With his own research as part of a younger generation of Tafuri’s
readers, Leach addresses this problematic and chooses the “evidence” over the “essence.” See ibid.
295; 298n13. Hence he prefers to construct a persona around Tafuri’s practice as a historian within
a complete picture, rather than prioritizing Tafuri in the interview of 1992 who seems to contradict
with his prior practice. Having said that, it needs a further critical assessment of Leach’s attempt in
comparison to those who prioritize Tafuri’s relection on his own work over what Leach considers
to be the evidence: the works themselves.
Where in my case with this thesis, since I do not postulate Tafuri himself or his complete oeuvre as
the subject of my inquiry, I grant myself a degree of resilience against Leach’s criticism. I do not
consider my research as an attempt for a better apprehension of Tafuri’s works and legacy, but
instead demarcate my intention within “a better understanding of how to approach the political
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to revisit Tafuri’s 1969 essay in its political framework with reference to Tafuri
himself, to his career as a historian and to his complete oeuvre unless we believe
every possible implication of “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” needs
to be demonstrated with and by Tafuri. However if that is the case, then Tafuri’s
disinterest to his works in the 1960s suggests that returning to his 1969 essay might
be lacking prospective implications. And to some extent, this is demonstrated with
contemporary attempts which do revisit the political framework operaismo constituted
in order to have a better apprehension of Tafuri’s project, and their conclusion is most
likely to point to an impasse, which Tafuri is conined in.
Tafuri’s personal account of his personal politics and his political engagements are
more likely to address the vacuum which is left by Tafuri’s initial “choice” of history
over architectural design and practice. It is in this vacuum, a wide audience, with
their “ever-political” image of Tafuri but dismissal of his “intentions,” is more likely
to hope for or promise a form of resistance to capitalist structures within architectural
design, practice, theory and discourse.124 Yet, it is again in this vacuum, where the
deadlock which the intellectual and the historian is conined to appear when one
assumes to take Tafuri’s persona as a historian, into consideration.
3.3.2.2 Tafuri the historian
From a naive point of view, Tafuri’s choice of history over architecture may suggest a
break from architecture because of Tafuri’s frustration with architecture as a discipline
and practice whose institutions are too constraining to break away from. He portrays
this in “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology.” Somehow complementary
to this expectation, Tafuri narrates his break up from architecture as a result of an
existential anguish, in 1964, after a “big Michelangelo exhibition” opening. Tafuri’s
frustration with the way history was treated as an instrument of politics lead Tafuri to
his choice of history over architecture:
From a subjective point of view, you could say that I resolved
my destiny in one night … One tragic night I was miserable
because I had to decide between practice and history. I
remember I was sweating, walking around, felt ill, had a
fever. At the end, in the morning, I had decided, and that
was it! I gave up all the tools of architecture and determined
framework of the inluential 1969 essay “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology.” The
document by Passerini nevertheless, does demonstrate the disconnectedness between the evidence
and the essence, or Tafuri’s intentions and his practice. Hence I ind it as a primary reference to
refer in order to remind ourselves that Tafuri himself nor the various personas he had been
attributed through his work can provide us guidelines to approach to the arguments in Tafuri’s
1969 essay, but instead expose the potential distractions we need to tackle and bracket out before
returning to the context of his 1969 essay.
124
Leach, “Choosing History” 120.
68
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to dedicate myself entirely to history. What kind of history, I
didn’t know.125
If we address Tafuri’s project as a historian, even though we can apprehend better his
intentions and motivations as a historian, the relevance of the political context of the
1960s and 1970s Italy do not necessarily help us to move on from the already existing
debates on Tafuri, nor address any implications of returning to this context apart
from the need to internalizing the impasse which Tafuri’s project as a historian also
failed to resolve.
his impasse is addressed in Andrew Leach’s “‘Everything we do is but the larvae of
our intentions’: Manfredo Tafuri and Storia Dell’Architettura Italiana, 1944-1985.”
In his paper, Leach elaborates on the general tendency to approach Tafuri’s career
as “an ‘early’ theoretician of modern architecture and its institutions, and a ‘later
historian of the Renaissance.”126 his explains the tendency to perceive a retreat in
Tafuri’s oeuvre which in return becomes an attempt to overlook to the deadlock
Tafuri’s project as a historian is conined within. Instead of approaching Tafuri with
this problematic perspective, Leach returns to the political framework of 1960s and
1970s Italy and posits Tafuri the historian as he points out to the need to embrace the
impasse Tafuri’s project was bound to, for a proper apprehension of Tafuri’s oeuvre.
By referring to the “left-wing intellectual activity in Italy during the 1960s and
1970s,”127 Leach attempts to inquire into Tafuri’s “absence as ‘actor’ within the text in
terms of his ‘authority’ as a writer.”128 He does this in order to portray Tafuri applying
the critical mechanisms with the histories of “his contemporary milieu, and … in his
Renaissance studies,” as a strategical response to the context architecture was found
in, from/within that context.129
To come to this conclusion, Leach argues that the contents of Teorie e storia
dell’architettura along with Progetto e utopia were being explained by Storia
dell’Architettura Italiana, 1944-1985.130 Identiication of “obstacles contained in
the discipline” and the “conirmation of the availability of institutions” fail to be
relevant with “building and development,” as Leach argues: “Tafuri poignantly
observes while introducing the fourth (1976) edition [of Teorie e storia]: ‘What
seems most valid … is the efort to show how inefectual are the brilliant gymnastics
carried out in the yard of the model prison, in which architects are left free to move
125
126
127
128
129
130
Tafuri, “History as Project,” 30-31.
Leach, “‘Everything we do is but the larva of our intentions’,” 1..
Ibid., 4.
Ibid., 1.
Ibid., 12.
Ibid., 7.
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about on temporary reprieve’.”131 his was already conirmed in Architecture and
Utopia, according to Leach, where “Tafuri’s ‘revolution’ is played out on a ield where
knowledge and institutions are at stake.”132 He continues: “architecture becomes
an example in that setting of an institution that has cloaked the gradual loss of its
authority in a rhetorical metanarrative reinforcing the power of hypothetical action
to implement change.”133 With Leach’s narration, Tafuri’s project appears in its
completeness without overlooking its formation as Tafuri attempts to utilize the
discourse the operaisti constructed as his practice as a historian evolved in relation to
his take on the critique he initiated his historiographical studies.
Storia dell’architettura italiana 1944-1985 is signiicant as it demonstrates what
Tafuri’s strategy allows Tafuri: to “act” via “withdrawal from ‘action’” that granted
the “authorship” in writing a history within which [author] is involved subjectively
as an ‘actor,’ albeit in absence.”134 his efort of Tafuri, Leach quotes James Ackerman
coining “special efort to achieve ‘distance’” identiies the moment of Tafuri’s
historiography being activated rather than ‘operative’ that required engagement and
complicity.135
Portrayed as Tafuri’s challenge by Leach: the “illusion of critical distance from his
subject, by extension from the shortcomings of the institution torn open by critical
history,”136 is referred as a paradox by Alberto Asor Rosa in his relection on Teorie
e storia dell’architettura where Asor Rosa inds the signals of Tafuri’s criticism of
operative critic (critica operativa). It is the militant critic (the operative critic) which
corresponds to what Tafuri tries to distance himself to deliver a critique, of this form
of criticism along with the institution of architecture, as a “pure critic.”137 Asor Rosa
argues, Tafuri “traveled this road in both directions several times in the course of his
research, without ever arriving at deinitive, ixed conclusions:”138
Insofar as the critic detaches himself from the Modern
Movement and is predisposed to consider it from the
perspective of an autonomous historical context, the “militant
critic,” working in defense of the Modern Movement, is
inevitably replaced by the “pure critic” who takes no stand,
131
Tafuri, “Note to the fourth (Italian) edition,” in Theories and History of Architecture
quoted in ibid.
132
Ibid., 8.
133
Ibid.
134
Ibid.
135
Ibid., 9.
136
Ibid.
137
Asor Rosa, “Manfredo Tafuri, or, Humanism Revisited,” 31.
138
Ibid.
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since he maintains his role is to understand, to discover
contradictions, and eventually to deconstruct. … while the
pure critic might aspire to the overall transformation of the
world by criticizing, demystifying, and denouncing, on the
other hand, by analyzing and furthering knowledge, he takes
up the cause of the historian and tends to identify with that
role.139
Asor Rosa suggests between two extreme positions, the critic and the historian,
lies Tafuri’s personal history and “an important piece of architectural and cultural
historic thought … in the period between the triumph and the decline of the idea
of the mass-worker and its strong political and ideological connections.”140 Tafuri
“the historian” is argued to be a product of the “accuracy and depth of [Tafuri’s]
disciplinary knowledge” that illed the “framework of ideological criticism with
real content, just as the framework of ideological criticism introduced a revitalizing
ferment into the then paralyzed structures of each discipline.”141
According to Asor Rosa, if we are to make a maneuver to give an account of Tafuri’s
assumed prevalence of history over criticism which appear to be “alternating phases”
in Tafuri’s works, we need to provisionally put history aside in order to relect
on criticism Tafuri’s work possessed.142 In his revisit to Tafuri’s Progetto e utopia,
Asor Rosa irst underlines the connection between criticism and history in -and
with reference to- Tafuri’s later works.143 hrough the critique of “architectural
ideology” which led “every case to the discovery of nihilism as the true driving
force of bourgeois intellectual research in the 20th century;”144 Asor Rosa argues,
“demystiication of the false bourgeois consciousness hidden beneath this particular
attitude,”145 produced the same afect with working-class thought with reference
to Tafuri’s criticism of architectural-urban planning project of European social
democracies.146
Asor Rosa’s endeavor to go back to the context of Contropiano to identify and
understand crisis depicted in Architecture and Utopia in order to tackle “the issue of
Tafuri’s historical thought,” is not necessarily intended to address the issues Tafuri
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
Ibid.
Ibid., 32
Ibid., 30.
Ibid., 32.
Ibid., 31.
Ibid., 34.
Ibid., 31.
Ibid., 33.
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raises in his 1969 essay.147 Revisiting Tafuri within this picture is crucial in order
to understand Tafuri and particularly his book Progetto e utopia as Asor Rosa refers
to this period as “an attempt to construct upon the same ideological foundations a
shared interpretative grid in which to it diferent cultural objects.”148 he labour
in Asor Rosa’s revisit to Tafuri is to reunite “two parts of Tafuri’s critical-historical
discourse”149 and to overcome the deadlock the researcher is bound after Tafuri’s
identiication of the crisis of criticism. Asor Rosa argues Tafuri found this experience
“exhilarating and tragic” which lead to Tafuri’s choice of history over criticism.
herefore the choice of history was established as an “empirical, highly problematic,
and slightly desperate response to the vacuum created by the “crisis of criticism.”150
Asor Rosa raises a similar point which Diane Ghirardo raises with reference to Tafuri’s
interview with Françoise Very in 1976. Ghirardo reports Tafuri saying “acting, or
movement, … mattered more than results, and the movement that ‘tends toward
something’ constitutes the ‘rectitude of all political activity’.”151 However this does
not necessarily mean that Tafuri himself, even with his complete historiography,
can be regarded as a igure from whose acts, practice and life we can postulate he
accomplished what he set out as a challenge for himself.
As Leach and Asor Rosa identiies, Tafuri’s project does not allow necessarily a guide
to the architectural critic or historian or architects themselves to cope with the future
147
Asor Rosa’s revisit to Tafuri is to some extent personal since via revisiting Tafuri he
constructs somehow a nostalgic Tafuri whose research would demonstrate “an equilibrium the
uncertainty and precariousness of which do not prevent … us from continuing to search for it as
the ultimate goal of our common research.” Ibid., 38. I feel I need to mention that Asor Rosa’s
lecture, in its English translation, sounds more like an account to justify the impasse encountered
by his own and Tafuri’s audiences via Tafuri’s choice over history, in contrast to the provocative
tone “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology” had. Asor Rosa concludes with the “inevitable”
reduction of the “greatest project” of any “intellectual worker” corresponding to the “greatest
impasse.” In a recursive manner, the greatest impasse corresponds to the greatest project, from
Asor Rosa’s point of view. This, he justiies through a revisited humanism, which “Tafuri would
have said,” Asor Rosa speculates, “in a perennially unsteady equilibrium between reason and
destiny: an equilibrium the uncertainty and precariousness of which do not prevent -and should not
prevent- us from continuing to search for it as the ultimate goal of our common research.” Ibid.,
38. Once I elaborate more on operaismo, the contrasting relections ie., by Antonio Negri and
Mario Tronti, on the context of Italy in the 1960s, with reference to strategies and tactics the
operaisti appropriated; Asor Rosa’s attempt to give an account for the impasse the “intellectual”
seems to be bound; and actually referring to one of the distinctive features of the trajectory opened
up after the dissolution of operaismo as the movement autonomia ascends. On this account, the
lack of the mention of Massimo Cacciari’s articulations on Krisis and “negative thought” by Asor
Rosa, for example, is a curious case.
148
Alberto Asor Rosa, “Manfredo Tafuri, or, Humanism Revisited,” 29.
149
Ibid., 37.
150
Ibid., 34.
151
Diane Y. Ghirardo, “Manfredo Tafuri and Architecture Theory in the U.S., 1970-2000,” in
“Mining Autonomy,” Perspecta 33 (2002): 38-47, 39.
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his essay condemns architects to. What is more, with his own practice, Tafuri himself
needs to be subjected to a fair bit of interrogation about whether the lessons we draw
from Tafuri today are truly applied by Tafuri. 152 herefore, where returning to Tafuri
and the political project his career was founded upon may expose the limits and to
some extent the failure, Tafuri was confronted with as a critic and as a historian, it
does not necessarily justify the impasse as the ultimate condition the intellectual or
the academic should aim for.
What is more, Leach raises an important point which I briely mentioned earlier:
Tafuri is institutionalized with his Venetian Istituto di storia dell’architettura. As
Leach observes, instead of graduating “Historians” who would correspond to the call
for a historical research of “the distant past as analyzable in the present while forcing
neither ‘resolution’ nor reconciliation with the present, Tafuri’s institution actually
graduated “Architects.”153 Leach elaborates on this aspect of Tafuri’s project as a
historian, in “Criticality and Operativity” as he refers to the instrumentality of history
by elaborating on the notion “instrumental history.”
“Instrumental history,” Leach argues, “appears to ofer an historically grounded
logic to the direction taken by the present and immediate future”154 which Tafuri
“famously accuses the modern movement’s historians (Sigfried Giedion, Nikolaus
Pevsner, Bruno Zevi, Paolo Portoghesi) of maintaining too heavy an investment in
architecture’s future.”155 Within the impasse Tafuri’s project is founded upon, there
lies the pragmatic appropriation of this impasse as an intellectual, which granted
Tafuri a position in the academia for him to experiment his approach to architectural
practice and history.
What Tafuri opens up, according to Leach, is the suggestion that one can either
“stand in the present looking back while looking forward” as “the operative;” or
“from the present, look back in order to communicate the past to the present” as “the
critic.”156 Tafuri’s attempt to confront the values of the present and the past targeting
“ideological insularity” through “testing architectural knowledge solely against
architectural theory” is confronting; however it is equally problematic since Tafuri
152
Ghirardo also reminds Tafuri’s remarks on Architecture and Utopia: “it was to the critic
and the historian that he addressed his remarks as an approach to the criticism and history of
architecture,” particularly referring to Tafuri’s criticism of the works of New York Five. Yet, as she
continues reporting from Tafuri: “if architecture demands engagement with political, social, and
economic systems and institutions, criticism requires distance, Tafuri insisted, something in short
supply today.” Ibid. 46.
153
Leach, “Criticality and Operativity,” 18-19.
154
Ibid., 18.
155
Ibid., 16.
156
Ibid. 18.
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himself constitutes the only igure who is granted that right.157
Leach points to the case of Tafuri as the “historian’s new standing” in architectural
discourse where he occupied a position “within architectural culture but ‘beyond’
architectural ideology, even if not beyond … history’s disciplinary ideologies” as a
unique case also in regards to its “ethical” dimensions.158 According to Leach, even if
Tafuri himself appropriated an operative position with reference to his engagement
with architectural history in order to expose the disciplinary limits it possess, he
simultaneously performed the role of a critic by laying out diferent functions
than what past-operative historians contributed to architectural knowledge. his
aspect of Tafuri’s works binds together his historiography all together. Regardless
the lack of attention given to his later histories Venezia e il rinascimento (1985),
Storia dell’architettura italiana 1944-1985 (1986) or Giulio Romano (1989) than
his more “‘theoretical’ histories” such as Progetto e utopia, La città americana or
Architettura contemporanea (1976): in complete they present the reinement of
Tafuri’s “methodology of reporting historical research in a manner that undermined
the utility of historical narrative.”159 his reinement was possible via the ethical
imperative that colored Tafuri’s practice: the reiteration of the operativity of the
historian being misleading, and Tafuri as the historian who constantly struggled with
his own practice to overcome the operative historian deined the legacy of Tafuri as a
historian.160
his critical approach to Tafuri and his historiography addresses and to some extend
resolves the problems with the “phenomenon of Tafuri’s reception,” as it exposes his
audience’s failure to approach Tafuri as a historian through their somehow faulty
understanding of his oeuvre. With Tafuri the historian we can demonstrate what
his project can provide to architectural historians today when we postulate Tafuri’s
project as a challenge to the culture of operative historians as well as to himself. And
this legacy can be well founded upon the formation of Tafuri as a historian in the
light of 1960s and 1970s Italy. If it is the political Tafuri we identify with reference to
the project of the operaisti of the 1960s, on the other hand, the identiication of those
formative years do not go beyond the impasse his politics leads to.
Yet again, there is still a crowd amongst Tafuri’s audience who trouble themselves to
ind the operative aspects of Tafuri’s impasse as a historian and an intellectual, with
reference to his political ailiations in the 1960s. his leads to the inal problem I will
address before moving on to looking at the political framework of Tafuri’s 1969 essay:
Tafuri’s audience who appropriate a political Tafuri with their inquiries.
157
158
159
160
74
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 19.
Ibid., 19-20.
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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3.3.3 Problems with approaching the essay via Tafuri’s audience
As Leach points out, “a generation of theoreticians, in equalizing … [Tafuri’s
thinking on ideology and his personal politics], or at the very least promoting them
as unconditionally interdependent, has failed to unfetter the wider implications of his
thinking.”161 One of the reasons for failing to address wider implications of Tafuri’s
works, Leach points to, is Tafuri’s “incessant interrogation of the basis of historical
knowledge in architectural culture.”162
Architecture and Utopia and the books where Tafuri inquires into the “survival (or
demise) of architectural thought in the face of the rising dominance of the capitalist
mode of production,” demanded scholarly communities to return to the early
moment that Tafuri refers to.163 Tafuri, in his work, referred back to Renaissance;
project of humanism and Enlightenment thought, questioned “the reassuring
postulates accumulated since the twenties,” as Leach quotes from Jean-Louis Cohen,
and “imposed a long, regenerative return to the archives … innovated in terms
of both discourse and project, and practiced an authentic ‘deconstruction‘ (in the
Freudian sense) before the term was adopted by the architectural profession.”164
Researchers, who were “concerned with the twentieth century and particularly those
preoccupied with the European avant-guard,” Leach suggests, found it diicult to
return to those earlier moments.165 In this light, Leach mentions:
A number of readings, ranging from the meticulous to the
clumsy, of his Progetto e utopia in all its editions and earlier
incarnations -including the Contropiano articles ‘Per una
critica dell’ideologia architettonica’ and ‘Lavoro intellettuale
e sviluppo capitalistico’- enmesh his intellectual history; the
tangled voices at once demonstrate a high level of attention to
and empathy with his ‘strong’ argument for the relationship
between ideology and architecture, as well as a general
agreement to latten out the aforementioned complexities of
this subject in order to raise him up as a hero of the ‘cause’.166
3.3.3.1 Phenomenon of Tafuri’s reception
In the light of this critique, Leach points to how Tafuri had been received and
appropriated in architectural discourse especially in an “Italophillia”-inclined
American audience led by Peter Eisenman, Diana Agrest and others, who assimilated
161
162
163
164
165
166
Leach, “Choosing History,” 102.
Leach, Manfredo Tafuri, 158.
Leach, “Choosing History”, 102.
Cohen quoted in ibid., 12.
Ibid., 102-03.
Leach, Manfredo Tafuri, 139.
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his work in the pages of Oppositions.167 he “Anglophone public,” as Leach refers
to, which is “an American academic public in particular,”168 led to the “oft-repeated
trajectory of a political Tafuri becoming, in time, a philological Tafuri” that leads to
“less obviously politically engaged writing.”169
Leach refers to Tafuri’s letter to Ockman, as a demonstration of “the distance
between Tafuri’s view of his work and that maintained by his American readership,”
where “Tafuri admits to inding his ‘image‘ in her book … completely alien to his
self-perception.”170 Tafuri distances himself from this interpretation that is found
in Joan Ockman’s edited book project Architecture Criticism Ideology where Tafuri’s
work is portrayed as: “working on the Renaissance to be recognized as a vehicle for
reconsidering his image as a politicized theoretician.”171
Leach further elaborates on the distance between Tafuri’s “intentions” which are
more likely to lie in “the default characterization of Tafuri’s critical program as
inextricable from the political objectives of Contropiano,” and his reception by the
architectural theoreticians.172 Leach points to the distance of Tafuri’s intentions’ from
his interpretation by his North American audience, as it is reiterated with the gulf
between his 1992 interview’s translated edition that runs along the top half of each
page of ANY’s monographic publication on Tafuri and the essays below.173
Referring to his engagement with this crowd and their capacity to transform the
institutions they were found in, Tafuri says: “Above all, I have come to understand
that it is impossible in the United States. In my view, it is always about closing ranks,
the arroccamento of disciplines, the academy … his is the corruption that moved
me to say I would try to accomplish these goals on my own.”174
Tafuri protesting about his work’s reception provides a pivot for future studies on
167
Leach, “Choosing History”, 7.
168
Ibid., 102.
169
Ibid., 6.
170
Ibid.
171
Ibid., 7.
172
Ibid. 7-9.
173
Ibid., 7.
174
Tafuri, “History as Project,” 48. Tafuri was invited to the 1974 conference at Princeton
University which was organized by Diana Agrest: “Practice, Theory and Politics in Architecture”
to give the lecture “A Theory of Criticism.” Later, “L’Architecture dans le Boudoir” was published
in Oppositions. Rem Koolhaas, Jorge Silvetti, Mario Gandelsonas, Adolfo Natalini, Peter
Eisenman, Lionel March, Kenneth Frampton, Melvin Charney and Francho Raggi were some other
speakers at the conference. See Manfredo Tafuri, “L’Architecture dans le Boudoir: The Language
of Criticism and the Criticism of Language,” Oppostions 3 (1974); an edited version appears as
Manfredo Tafuri, “L’Architecture dans le Boudoir: The Language of Criticism and the Criticism of
Language,” in Architecture Theory since 1968, ed. K. Michael Hays (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1998): 148-173, 146-147.
76
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the phenomenon of Tafuri’s reception. I believe that this phenomenon was most
iercely raised as a problem of/in the English-speaking audience of Tafuri, by Diane
Ghirardo with her critique of Eisenman, Jameson and Hays in “Manfredo Tafuri
and Architecture heory in the U.S., 1970-2000.”175 Diane Ghirardo reminds us
175
In 1994, Diane Ghirardo polemically and viciously attacked Peter Eisenman as a “bogus”
avant-garde in her paper “Bogus Avant-garde”. Her paper attracted more attention than it deserved
according to Rosalind Krauss, in “Eisenman (and company) respond,” in Progressive Architecture
76, no.2 (1995), 88-91. Ghirardo argues Eisenman and his persona as an ‘avant-garde,’
demonstrates Eisenman’s prominence as the “preempting the notion of the radical.” For the
younger generation of architects to be able to challenge and explore “the network of power
relations that sustain the entire institution of building as a panacea for the upheavals of
deindustrialization and unemployment,” Ghirardo argues, Eisenman represents a igure to be
tackled and to an extend that needs to seize to exist. Apart from demonstrating a showcase for how
those power relations operate in academia, as Rosalind Krauss reminds of John Searle and Jacques
Derrida quarrel in the 1980s, Ghirardo’s polemical attack, I must say, is a righteous one, and that is
worth mentioning. Ghirardo’s hostility towards Eisenman and his persona can be argued to date
back to Ghirardo and Eisenman’s debate regarding the relevance of politics to architecture.
Referring to Giuseppe Terragni’s Casa del Fascio, Eisenman insists, as Ghirardo reports, the work
should be completely understood without any reference to Fascism. This is to some extent Tafuri’s
criticism of Eisenman where in an interview in 1986 he would publicly denounce interest in
Eisenman’s as he would state:
The work of Eisenman and Hejduk was much mire interesting ten
years ago than it is today because it showed a curious problem of
Americans looking to Europe, and what they chose to look at was an
“Americanized” Europe -Eisenman’s Terragni is an architecture
without human history. Using the theoretical percepts of Chomsky and
Lévi-Strauss (rather than the more characteristic American
pragmatism), they succeeded in emptying their historic sources of the
human subject. Tafuri, “There is No Criticism, Only History,” 10.
Gail Day also mentions an essay which was commissioned by Oppositions as the Introduction to
the Eisenman’s planned volume on Giuseppe Terragni that was not published by MIT in 1979 until
it appeared as Eisenman 2003. Day, “Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson and the Contestations of
Political Memory,” 50. This delay, Day suggests, was due to the “souring of relations between
Eisenman and Tafuri.” Ibid.
I believe Ghirardo’s polemical essay possesses the precursors of her inquiry into Manfredo Tafuri’s
reception by his North American audience in her 2002 essay to contest Eisenman and his
“company’s” response to Ghirardo in 1995. In their responses, they hardly go beyond the rhetoric
of “if everything is political, what is political after all?” -as Rem Koolhaas argues quite bluntly:
“Even more problematic than the deinition of the formal today is the deinition of the political.
Bush? Balladur? Berlusconi? The political is now everywhere and nowhere.” It is also worth
mentioning that in an interview given in 2011, Rem Koolhaas argues with reference to the case of
HafenCity, regardless only “the upper 10 percent live there,” one should “take notice the fact that
these upper 10 percent are completely happy with this type of architecture.” Rem Koolhaas,
“We’re Building Assembly-Line Cities and Buildings,” interview with Rem Koolhaas, in Spiegel
Online, December 12, 2011, http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/interview-with-stararchitect-rem-koolhaas-we-re-building-assembly-line-cities-and-buildings-a-803798.html. In the
same interview, he elaborates on CCTV in Beijing saying their involvement in the process was
very democratic, “even there,” he adds as “the buildings’ users are involved in the process [of
design and use of space]. We listen to them and their suggestions.” Ibid. This interview in 2011
seems to be addressed in Ghirardo’s 2002 paper, where she posits architects divorcing
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of the future depicted in Manfredo Tafuri’s Architecture and Utopia as she argues
“architectural theory machine” in the United States; while embracing Tafuri’s critique
and position, gave hardly any emphasis on Tafuri’s book Architecture and Utopia’s
political dimensions.176 She makes a rather simple but a valid observation: with the
future Tafuri posited as bleak and all actions inevitably compromised by capitalism,
one would not build at all as it would not be possible to do anything when every act
is only a repeat of the initial capitulation.177 Her cynical fascination with the audience
of Tafuri in the U.S. comes from the “misreadings of Tafuri, and the cues for a new
attitude toward architecture erroneously deduced from his critique.”178
Instead of going back and exposing the political dimension that she herself posits to
be fundamental to Tafuri’s critique, however, Ghirardo only contests the “intellectual
baubles of university faculty, graduate students and journal editors”179 who do not
necessarily penetrate the realm of practice.180 Referring to Eisenman, Jameson and
Hays, Ghirardo problematizes the phenomenon of Tafuri being represented as a
wicked critic; a nay-sayer; or an inefectual pessimist; suggesting Manfredo Tafuri’s
point was to call for political choices to be made and acted upon.181
“architecture from the contamination of the real world,” except she refers particularly to the NorthAmerican audience of Tafuri.
The same audience is contested in a more substantial and relatively more subtle way with Gail
Day. Day does so, by acknowledging Ghirardo’s earlier attempt as she refers to her work and
elaborate on the American audience of Tafuri as with “the misapprehension of Tafuri’s ‘gloom’,”
legitimatising a retreat into “autonomous architecture.” Day, “Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson
and the Contestations of Political Memory,” 49. This, actually is afirmed by George Teyssot, a
former student of Tafuri who is a victim of “Tafuri’s pointed and permanent abandonment,” along
with Eisenmann, as Leach calls them to be. Leach reports that Teyssot admits they were able to
“‘explain’ Tafuri from the position of privileged insight, but paint … mere portraits.” Leach,
“Choosing History,” 8.
176
Ghirardo, “Manfredo Tafuri and Architecture Theory in the U.S., 1970-2000,” 39.
177
Ibid.
178
Ibid., 40.
179
Ibid., 39.
180
Ibid., 40.
181
Ghirardo’s preoccupation in her critique seems to be to contest and confront Tafuri’s
audience, rather than providing a different insight to approaching Tafuri. For this reason, I believe
her efforts are more unique and true to Tafuri’s project, even if they can come across as attacks on
a group of academics. Following lenghty quote is a demonstration of her rhetoric in a case where
her cynicism towards a group of academics can be intuited:
Even though architecture became instrumental to late capitalism, this
need not be its only result, nor did this mean that the architect should
retreat into contemplative games … In a 1976 interview by Françoise
Véry, Tafuri spoke of ‘architecture without a capital A’ as the most
interesting because it does not wallow in its crises and problems;
instead of talking, it acts.’ Acting, or movement, Tafuri insisted,
mattered more than results, and the movement that ‘tends toward
something’ constitutes the ‘rectitude of all political activity.’ It is
78
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For Ghirardo, Architecture and Utopia proposes an “interpretation of history roughly
from the Enlightenment to the Modern Movement,” that understood history as a
sequence of “events, contradictions, dialectics, ideas, and actions” which implies the
“absorption of architecture into the process of capitalist rationalization.”182 It can be
suggested that this perception of Tafuri, a igure who, according to Ghirardo, used
criticism “to expose a view of that history at variance with standard ones,”183 urges
the need to refer to the political dimensions and context of Tafuri’s Architecture and
Utopia as much as the reception of Tafuri by the audience who Ghirardo is critical of.
Ghirardo’s argument rests upon the assumption that Tafuri’s critique is appropriated
by his contemporaries and subsequent generation of architects, theoreticians and
historians to deploy and substantiate their own agenda. With reference to Architecture
and Utopia Ghirardo portrays Tafuri’s work as a mere attempt to be radical. It is
questionable whether Ghirardo’s harsh attack, in this instance, can be substantiated.
As Jane Rendell’s reading of Ghirardo’s essay implies, “believing that architectural
resistance to capitalism was impossible,” while still sustaining a ground where an
architecture which can attempt to redistribute “the capitalist division of labour”
is conlicting if not an oxymoron.184 If Tafuri perceives the work of Raymoond
Unwin, Ernt May and Hannes Meyer as demonstrations of “realistic possibilities of
a democratic administration” by the “drawbacks to work by these architects in their
struggle to accomplish real projects for the middle and working class,” as Ghirardo
argues, then there is an implication of a blueprint or a method for architecture to
achieve projects for the middle and working class.185 his blueprint or method cannot
be found in Tafuri’s work, and, as Ghirardo herself agrees, his work is not a blueprint
unless we collapse what the rest of his oeuvre carries along on top of his 1969 essay
and his 1973 volume.186
In this light, her legitimate critique of the assertion “architecture is autonomous and
therefore not instrumental to political ends covers the fact that architecture is deeply
imbricated in politics” fails to overcome the instrumentality, which herself is critical
of in the case of when Tafuri’s views were “subdivided ‘into little tasteless pieces
therefore puzzling that an astute critic such as Michael Hays could
describe Tafuri’s position as expressing the ‘ineffectuality of any
resistance [to modernism].’ Even worse, Fredric Jameson excoriated
Tafuri for his pessimism and for setting up a scandalous political
impasse in his work. Ibid., 41.
182
Ibid., 44.
183
Ibid.
184
Ibid., 40. Also quoted in Jane Rendell, introduction to Critical Architecture: “Critical
Architecture: Between Criticism and Design,” in Mark Dorrian, Murray Fraser, Jonathan Hill and
Jane Rendell, eds., Critical Architecture (London and New York: Routledge, 2007): 1-9, 3.
185
Ghirardo, “Manfredo Tafuri and Architecture Theory in the U.S., 1970-2000,” 40.
186
Ibid., 39.
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for consumption by the Anglo Saxons.’”187 Ghirardo, however, is not the only one
who asserts that there are problems with the way Tafuri is consumed “by the Anglo
Saxons,” while suggesting his work should be digested in a diferent way.
As mentioned earlier, Asor Rosa believes it is impossible to imagine today the context
in which Contropiano occurred, yet argues it is crucial to revisit Tafuri, since Tafuri’s
project’s fundamental role that “would be played by Marxist ‘political theory’” is
not clear anymore.188 his aspect of Tafuri’s project is what Ghirardo is pointing
to without bothering to inquire deeper in her study. On the other hand, Gail
Day returns to the moment Asor Rosa posits exchanges between diferent cultural
ields, in order to demonstrate the problems with the audience of Tafuri who had
adopted a political Tafuri as they approach Tafuri’s works, yet failed to comprehend
Tafuri’s project in its completeness. Although both Leach and Asor Rosa refer to the
signiicance of the context of Contropiano, it is most probably Gail Day’s inquiry
that delves into this context more deeply in order to identify the problems associated
with Tafuri’s audience with their (mis)interpretation of Tafuri’s works’ political
implications.
3.3.3.2 Beyond the phenomenon of Tafuri’s audience
Day suggests “most English-language reception of Tafuri was essentially blind to
the speciic political dimensions of his account,” and treated him “as architectural
historiography’s generic representative of ‘Marxism’.”189 In the light of this argument,
Gail Day tackles Fredric Jameson, from a diferent critical point of view which
Ghirardo’s argument runs tangent to. According to Day, Jameson’s ‘pessimistic’
Tafuri, “through the prism of Dialectic of Enlightenment,”190 is charting “capitalism’s
progression to a state of ‘total’ bureaucratization,” where “artists and thinkers
of the avant-garde contributed to the critique of capital but to reinforcing its
‘instrumentalizing and desacralizing tendencies’,” as she quotes from Jameson’s 1984
“he Politics of heory.”191 Day argues that Jameson reads Tafuri’s argument with the
notion of capitalism as a ‘total system‘ which he inds consistent with “the classical
Marxist tradition,” but remains “open to post- or anti-Marxist interpretation of the
type associated with Marleau-Ponty, Horkheimer, the ex-Trotskyists of 30s and 40s,
and ex-Maoists of the 60s and 70s.”192 Jameson’s postulation of an ever-political
image for Tafuri may demonstrate Jameson’s representation of a igure, adopted
187
Wigley, “Post-Operative History,” 53; quoted in Ghirardo, “Manfredo Tafuri and
Architecture Theory in the U.S., 1970-2000,” 46.
188
Alberto Asor Rosa, “Manfredo Tafuri, or, Humanism Revisited,” 29
189
Gail Day, “Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson and the Contestations of Political Memory,”
37.
190
Ibid., 44.
191
Ibid., 45.
192
Ibid., 46.
80
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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by Michael Hays, Joan Ockman, and Hal Foster. his is what Day refers, citing
Ghirardo, as displaced and disembodied versions of Tafuri.193 But Day goes further
and portrays Jameson’s agenda for reading Tafuri was:
not simply as a diagnostic of late capitalism’s unique cultural
logic, but, more signiicantly, as a political prognosis,
which treated postmodernism as the horizon against which
contemporary political resistance must be set. … he world
was entirely ‘within the culture of postmodernism’; the
radical project, he insisted, was no longer to make ‘absolute
moralizing’ or ‘global moral judgments’ but to focus on the
more limited task of assessing the culture before us.194
It is the implications of the politics ascribed to Tafuri, for the sake of demonstrating
the limits of Tafuri’s version of Marxism in comparison to Jameson’s own version
of Marxism, which Day contests. Jameson’s reading of Tafuri as a pessimist, “which
reverberated through the Anglophone reception,” does more than portray Tafuri as
a “grumpy ‘naysayer,’ … ‘anti’ this-and-that,” Day argues; it “brings to the fore the
question of political and social transformation.”195
he problem with Jameson’s reading goes hand in hand with a crucial point in Tafuri’s
1969 essay as Day reports Jameson arguing that Tafuri was convinced “nothing new
can be done,” by positing “the impossibility of any radical transformation of culture
before the radical transformation of social relationships themselves.”196 Day seems to
understand this through Jameson’s description of Tafuri’s vision of history along with
193
Ibid., 49. To some extent, Jameson’s reading of the political project and Tafuri’s
subsequent engagement with Cacciari and “negative thought” is accurate in the light of the
discussions I will refer to in Chapter Four: He refers to Tafuri as a representative of “antimodernist” and “anti-postmodernist” and suggests that “Their ‘anticapitalism’ … ends up laying
the basis for the ‘total’ bureaucratic organization and control of late capitalism, and it is only
logical that Tafuri should conclude by positing the impossibility of any radical transformation of
culture before a radical transformation of social relations themselves.” See Fredric Jameson, “The
Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism Debate,” in “Modernity and
Postmodernity,” New German Critique 33 (Autumn 1984): 53-65, 61. I believe his identiication of
Tafuri’s anti-capitalism is able to depict some aspects of the discourse Tafuri adopted in the 1970s.
However the problem with Jameson’s identiication comes from the fact he fails to challenge the
seminal critique Tafuri’s project is founded upon by overlooking the 1960s discourse that
operaismo delivered. The lack of confrontation with the discourse operaismo developed from the
early 1960s until 1968, allows Jameson’s version of Marxism to be prone to the orthodox criticism
that re-introduces the fear of Stalinism into the twenty-irst century discourse with a fear of utopia,
cf. Andrew Milner, review of Archeologies of the Future by Fredric Jameson: “Jameson’s Utopia or
Orwell’s Dystopia?” in Historical Materialism 17 (2009): 101-119.
194
Ibid., 60.
195
Ibid., 44.
196
Jameson, “The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism Debate,”
61; quoted in ibid., 45.
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the notion of capitalism as a “total system” that is “necessarily concurrent with an
‘apocalyptic notion of the total social revolution’.”197 According to Day, by opposing
Tafuri’s account, Jameson instead insisted “that something is possible this side of
revolutionary rupture,” in enclaves where “potential radical social forms that might be
‘emergent’ within capitalism.”198
However, Day reminds Jameson that it is those enclaves of unsuccessful attempts,
which Tafuri was aimed to reveal in his historiography.199 While challenging the
contestants to Tafuri’s arguments via “hope” and “enclaves,” she attempts to dismiss
the image of Tafuri as a “despondent declarer of ‘futility.’”200 Day puts emphasis on
the array of politics she formulates to be “initiated by workerism” in the 1960s which
later in the 1970s developed as “autonomism,” in order to provide a foundation for
Tafuri’s arguments.201
Day contests Tafuri’s audience, including Jameson, with their assumption that Tafuri’s
“critical exploration of particular histories of European architecture and politics
amounted to the total condemnation of all possibility.”202 She argues, instead, “the
point he was making was not the inevitability of appropriation, but the problems
that resulted from half-applied strategies, the limitations on social goals, in light of
building programmes of Italy’s red municipalities,” as she quotes Tafuri from the
1976 interview with Françoise Véry:
We know so much about the poverty of attempts to resolve
the housing, but there is no doubt that the cooperative
movement regroups and shapes a working class movement
that is otherwise divided. So it’s not so much what’s done
that is important, but the movement created in the process,
something that cannot be seen or touched.203
Elaborated further by Day’s inquiry into Tafuri’s reading of Red Vienna, Day puts
emphasis on Tafuri’s 1976 account about those movements’ signiicance in terms of
their help or hindrance in the movements’ struggles.204 Day repeats Tafuri’s statement:
“historical experience can teach us things, but it’s far from clear that history must
always repeat itself.”205
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
82
Ibid.
Ibid., 60.
Ibid., 57.
Ibid., 73
Ibid., 72.
Ibid., 60. Day’s italics.
Ibid., 62.
Ibid.
Ibid.
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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Prior to elaborating on Red Vienna and the Karl Marx-Hof as oppositions to the “city
of the bourgeoisie,” regardless their twofold tragedies, Day refers to public initiatives
that were launched by the schemes of the Fanfani Plan in the 1950s. Day argues,
Tafuri’s critique of the European social-democratic and Austro-Marxist projects for
urban reform was shaped in light of the disappointment in he Vanoni Plan and
INA-Casa’s “ambitions for social reform through housing.”206 According to her, “the
limitations of, and defeats encountered by, the early-twentieth-century projects that
Tafuri addressed in a way that seems to be an allegory of contemporary policies on
mass-housing.”207
In contrast to Jameson’s reading, Tafuri’s attitude towards those historical experiences
did not conclude that social practice was necessarily predestined for appropriation.
he only prediction we could borrow from Tafuri, Day postulates, was that capital’s
success is predictable when “the opposition restricts its aim to delivering reforms or to
ameliorating capital’s efects, or when these come to substitute for the goal of social
transformation.”208
To substantiate her version of Tafuri, Day argues that Tafuri situates “avant-garde,
social-democratic urban projects, and twentieth-century architectural practice in
general,” in a framework with which she refers to Tronti and Negri positing “the
failure of the workers’ movement to recognize this recalibration of the ruling classes‘
agenda put it at a strategic disadvantage.”209 “Within this framework,” she continues
arguing: Tafuri explored “how the avant-garde’s practices of negation had – often
206
Ibid., 51. Tafuri understands the Vanoni plan through “the dream of equilibrium.” He
reports the Vanoni plan stated: “The policy of the building sector … will have to be to promote or
restrain investments in the construction industries insofar as the demand for consumer goods
unrelated to housing is respectively insuficient or excessive in relation to the possible process of
expansion.” Manfredo Tafuri, “The Myth of Equilibrium: The Vanoni Plan and INA-Casa’s Second
Seven Years,” in History of Italian Architecture 1944-1985, trans. Jessica Levine (Cambridge and
London: The MIT Press, 1989): 41-49, 42.
With projects such as INA-Casa, GESCAL and IACP, Christian Democrats were meant to address
the Party’s weakness in civil society in contrast to its “over-dependence on the mass organizations
of the Catholic church and its lack of eficient organization when compared to the
Communists.”Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 167. According to Ginsborg, those
“public interventions” would signify examples of “what could have been achieved had government
policy been different.” Ibid. 247. As Tafuri notes: “Italy’s building policy took shape through a
collage of arrangements deined by sector, rather than by way of programmatic declarations.” This
would have consequences of decay and congestion in urban centers, due to the migration of the
new class with the new housing schema, which would be reabsorbed back to the industry by
providing the “untrained reserve labor” while a luxury market was being created for historical
centers. See Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture 1944-1985, 41-49.
207
Ibid., 51.
208
Gail Day, “Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson and the Contestations of Political Memory,”
61.
209
Ibid., 58-59.
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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contrary to the intentions of its practitioners – become isomorphic with capital.”210
Day holds being a “leverage for capitalist developers” true for the avant-garde
cultural activists, as Tafuri did argue “without a radically anti-tragic politics and the
broader perspective of revolutionary social transformation, what was intended as
‘anticapitalist’ practices … would turn against their authors and end up serving the
needs of capital.”211 But for architects, the public initiations by the DC along with
the urban projects of the Austrian Marxism, do imply a potential for progressive
architecture that would be applicable when reforms are not applied to a single sector,
housing as in the case of Red Vienna. However this is only possible if the external
factors were ixed, which means a true revolution in the economic, political and social
structures that initiate those reforms.212
What was raised as a critique in 1969: progressive architecture that lacks an
apprehension of the primacy of a radical change in the economic, political and social
structures; is narrated by Day in 2012, in such a way that the arguments which are
reiterated no longer confronts architects, and almost takes no notice of the 1969
critique that aimed at the architectural ideology with which architects disillusioned
themselves with.
Where she is critical of Jameson, who she convincingly argues to be “less interested
in the possibility of enclaves as actual challenges to spatial hegemony than he is in
preserving just the idea of them,” with her contestation to Jameson, her argument
seems to avoid pushing the wider implications of Tafuri’s works’ political dimensions
just for the sake of refuting the image Tafuri the pessimist, without necessarily
arguing political dimensions of Tafuri’s work had implications that are overlooked.
In this picture, Day’s dismissal of the “social practice as necessarily predestined
for appropriation” as a “favorite theme within the left-postmodern debates”213
is hardly any more substantial than Jameson’s dismissal of Tafuri’s arguments as
“rhetorical mode of dialectical writing” reduced within a supericial “classical Marxist
tradition.”214
Day brings the politics initiated by operaismo to today, under the inluence of Micheal
Hardt and Negri’s collaboration in the twenty-irst century and its relevance with
“theme of precarious labour, the ight to protect workers from the toxicity of their
employment, and the resistance to the practice of subcontracting (with its structural
210
Ibid.
211
Ibid.
212
See ibid., 67-68.
213
Ibid., 60. See Jameson, “The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the
Postmodernism Debate,” 61-62.
214
Ibid., 69.
84
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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evasion of responsibility)” to the contemporary debate on Tafuri’s legacy.215 However,
in her application of returning to the political framework of 1960s and 1970s Italy,
in order to have a better apprehension of Tafuri’s project, she seems to ilter operaismo
and its subsequent movement autonomia through a calibrated perspective that
overlooks the signiicance of those movements in the Italian Radical Left.
At the end of the day, Day’s construction of Tafuri is not any less prone to refutation
than Jameson’s or others’. In Day’s case, the problem with Tafuri as an ever-political
igure comes to surface, as Tafuri’s works all together being attached to one line of
his political inclination is hardly substantial, even if this is a useful way to approach
Tafuri and his 1969 essay when we are not willing to confront the implications of the
essay.
3.4 Conclusion to Chapter Three
We may read Tafuri’s “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology” with reference
to Italy in the 1960s in order to place the essay and the magazine Contropiano within
their proper political framework. Once we do so, though, we might feel we are
deceiving ourselves if we suggest the suspicion present in the critique of Tafuri is only
towards modern architecture with its social agenda that promises a critical (and/or
“class”) architecture. With his critique, Tafuri’s reservation about architectural practice
being restructured as a consequence of the reconiguration of capitalist structures
in late capitalism is noticeable. However the role of the architects, theoreticians and
architecture historians who take part in the formation of the discipline, and their lack
of acknowledgement of their actual role within capitalist development deserve a fair
amount of cynicism, as well.
Within this cynicism; the pessimism found in Tafuri’s essay can not be ignored
but instead should be emphasized and embraced, if we believe the political context
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” is relevant to the way that we
approach the essay. As within this pessimistic outlook for architecture is where the
architect would ever challenge the state of things along with the antagonistic political
subjects whose struggles were intensifying the social conlict against the State and
capitalist society while Tafuri was developing his critique. It is this agitating aspect of
the essay which appears to be relevant once we return to the political framework it
was written and published in; more than anything.
With Architecture and Utopia, Tafuri tones down the implications for architects
who are confronted with their role within the capitalist development. It should not
come as a surprise that architects, who were confronted in the essay, and later in the
215
72.
Gail Day, “Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson and the Contestations of Political Memory,”
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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book with the challenging analysis of their roles in capitalist society, adopted the
less provocative version to approach their inherent and necessary relationship with
capitalist structures, compared to the more agitating version which was open ended in
terms of its implications. In 1999, George Teyssot, a former student and colleague of
Tafuri, would identify Tafuri as a radical thinker with reference to the consequences
of Tafuri’s arguments.216 However he would do so in the light of his complete
oeuvre as a historian, which allowed Teyssot to constrain the implications of Tafuri’s
arguments to a smaller set of architects in Italy, who were both architectural historians
and practicing architects and involved in restoration and conservation projects in the
1960s and 1970s:
Tafuri would deny architectural history’s connection to
practice. his critique of history as instrumental disturbed
many academic luminaries. … he fact is that many socalled “historians” of architecture were also running private
architectural practices, with signiicant building production
… In Italy many of these tenured professors, running at the
same time large oices, felt in a way threatened by Tafuri’s plea
for a separation between scholarly pursuits and professional
activities.217
By returning to “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology” as it is, without
introducing Tafuri’s future career as a historian, his further works, or articulations of
the arguments in his essay; we should be able to see that Tafuri’s critique applies to a
greater set of architects which comprises those who believe their practice is progressive
and assume there is value in struggling against capitalist development in the 1960s.
Tafuri’s relection on the attention his essay attracted after being published in
Contropiano, suggests there is an inclination to ignore the actual political discourse
Tafuri was adopting in his inquiry, hence his critique is treated as a prophecy of
death of architecture that needs to be addressed to sustain the role of the architect
and architecture as a discipline. Today, we see that the problem Tafuri refers to with
his work’s reception has only grown bigger and also became more obfuscating than
before, as we are losing our sight in order to approach the framework in which
Tafuri’s project was initiated at the irst place. he political dimensions of Tafuri’s
works need to be revisited with an awareness of how signiicant strands of his projects
are being (and had been) particularized and contained within the “particular context
of Italy in the given particular period of time” while simultaneously certain aspects
are (and had been) “universalized” in order for a certain critical cultural theory to
216
See Georges Teyssot, “One Portrait of Tafuri,” Paul Henneger interviewing George
Teyssot, in “Being Manfredo Tafuri,” special issue, ed. Ignasi de Solà-Morales, Architecture New
York, nos. 25-26 (2000): 10-16, 10.
217
Ibid.
86
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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appropriate the work within the context they project to, say the United States for the
Anglophone critical cultural theory.
Tafuri himself and his subsequent career as a historian do not make things any clearer
for architectural circles either. Tafuri’s own problematic relationship with his own
work from the 1960s, especially “Towards a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” can
understandably form the basis for approaching to Tafuri’s essay within the context
of his complete historiography, in order to reveal what Tafuri actually meant in his
essay, rather than what the arguments are. However why would one need to interpret
the arguments present in the 1969 essay, through later works of Tafuri, especially if
the essay is not written in a cryptic fashion, is in need of an explanation. I believe
we need to consider the fact that it is the consequences of the implications present
in the arguments, which architects did not want to confront hence leading to the
obfuscation of the essay and as the political framework it was found in, became more
and more obscure in the post-1960s rhetoric.
On one hand, in the light of the problems that are revealed within the ongoing
debates on Tafuri’s legacy, by returning to the context of the “Toward a Critique
of Architectural Ideology,” we can only expect to locate Tafuri’s work in its proper
historical and political context from the contemporary eforts. Only after that such
eforts would be critical and open to confront the failure of architects, architectural
historians, theoreticians as well as intellectuals in addressing the critique and the
implications of it.
On the other hand, contemporary attempts to return to operaismo to study the
political framework of Tafuri’s works pathologically fail to address the relevance of
returning to this context outside the disciplinary limits of Tafuri or architectural
discourse. As returning to this context will substantiate the treatment of “Toward a
Critique of Architectural Ideology” as lying within the limits of architectural theory,
overlooking the moment it occupies within the transformation of the operaisti
discourse in the late 1960s. Treating the essay as more than an agitating piece
that challenges architects as well as artists and intellectuals, results in the context’s
relevance to the arguments present in essay not only becoming obfuscated but
bastardized and benumbed.
Today, 1960s and 1970s Italy accompanies somehow contemporary interest and
“revived and updated as the theory of ‘exodus’”218 through works and collaborations
of Italian operaisti and autonomist igures with French intellectuals, especially after
Micheal Hardt and Negri’s Empire as of the beginning of 21st century. With the
incarceration of Negri in 1979 autonomia movement received international attention,
which quickly became distorted and focussed merely on one individual, reducing
both autonomia and also the seminal operaismo movements to Negri’s ideas. What is
218
Day, “Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson and the Contestations of Political Memory,” 72.
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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more, as Wright notes on Negri’s later collaboration with French intellectuals in his
exile days: with autonomia “iltered via French theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari,
… as became fashion in certain circles, the resulting melange -if not unfaithful to
Negri’s own thought- served only to obscure often fundamental disagreements that
existed between diferent tendencies within both workerism and autonomia.”219
In the non-Italian speaking left, “the memorialist-autobiographical tradition and the
widespread production of perfunctory and often dismissive accounts”220 along with
the lack of translations of those accounts, limited the success of operaismo to inluence
struggles outside Italy.221 Today under the label of autonomist-Marxism, however,
the global anti-capitalist struggle; within the agenda of direct action protest and
insurrectionary politics, concepts such as grass roots politics, construction of identity,
precarious labour and civil disobedience ind their precursors in the literature which is
more accessible, at least to English-language readers via anthologies published in the
late 1990s. Still, Wright notes “the equation … of workerist and autonomist theory
with Negri and his closest associates remains a common one,”222 whereas operaismo
and autonomia are two diferent movements as operaisti and autonomists can not
emphasize enough, but also connote diferent movements and eras to a contemporary
audience, although they share same seminal theory and critique.223
219
Wright, Storming Heaven, 2.
220
Sergio Bologna, review of Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian
Autonomist Marxism by Steve Wright, trans. Arianna Bove, in Strategies: Journal of Theory,
Culture and Politics 16, no.2 (2003): 97-105, 97.
221
Except Zerowork, Wages for Housework movements as Wright exempliies. What is
more, autonomia in the 1970s, did attempt to go beyond the context of Italy, with the interest of
Black Panthers and such movements in the States; and as Cleaver covers under the “autonomistMarxism” label, there are movements outside Italy which made similar critiques of orthodoxMarxism, with similar strategies and emphasizes autonomous struggle of working class.
222
Ibid.
223
Especially for some, the autonomia movement is a reminder of an era of political
violence equated with attacks by Red Brigades. See Alexander Stille’s reply to Antonio Negri’s
response to Stille’s review of Antonio Negri and Micheal Hardt’s Empire: “‘Apocalypse Soon’: An
Exchange,” http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2003/feb/27/apocalypse-soon-an-exchange.
On top of that, for some it was “disarming of the Left in Italy and general depoliticization of
postmodern society.” See Aureli, The Project of Autonomy, 85. Counter to their perception, Sylvère
Lotringer and Christian Marazzi argue autonomia movement spoke and developed a different
language other than what Red Brigades appropriated, that lead to the arrest of almost the entire
Political Science Faculty of Padua University in 1979 and the staging of dubious trials. Lotringer
and Marazzi, “The Return of Politics,” 20. Stille and to some extend, Aureli perceive Red
Brigades as the “rigid screen” of autonomia, where Marazzi and Lotringer argue this is a result of
“the logical delirium of the State” which failed to respond to the language autonomia spoke by
developing “forms of organization and subjectivity against which there exists no “classic”
response.” Ibid. What is more, the group formed around autonomia and their criticism towards late
1960s’ PCI are received as autonomia is an anti-communist movement in contrast to operaismo
which had a communist theoretical framework Alexandra Brown, “Operaismo, Architecture &
Desing in Ambasz’s New Domestic Landscape,” 54. Autonomia: Post-political Politics provides a
88
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What Tafuri’s audience sufered as portrayed as the phenomenon of Tafuri’s reception,
was a tendency to overlook the political framework in which Tafuri’s project started
taking shape. However, as I tried to portray in this chapter, this framework does
not necessarily dominate Tafuri’s personal politics nor complete oeuvre if we are
willing to “learn” from Tafuri as a historian. As Leach, Asor Rosa, Ghirardo and
Day demonstrate, until recently, Tafuri’s radical critique of architectural ideology
dominated his project yet it is only a component of Tafuri’s historiography. hen
again, in the light of their inquiries, and given the limitations of Tafuri, Tafuri the
historian and his project to resolve the problems he identiied in 1969, returning
to the political project he adopted in 1969, without being willing to move on from
Tafuri, is bound to submerge us in the same impasse that assailed Tafuri himself.
Similar is true for the operaisti project itself. As Wright quotes Roberto Battagia: “he
best way to defend workerism today is to go beyond it,”224 which should remind
those who uncritically approach operaismo to grant themselves a position in academia
to argue for; a more accurate understanding of Tafuri’s works. Wright elaborates on
this with reference to Bologna: “Having helped to force the lock obstructing the
understanding of working-class behavior in and against capital, only to disintegrate in
the process, the workerist tradition has bequeathed to others the task of making sense
of those treasures which lie within.”225 As Mario Tronti reminds us, operaismo does
not entail a moment where the political intellectual, or university lecturer, doctor,
physicist, sociologist, lawyer, architect were actually able to ight against the capitalist
development, but instead served a social role within the capitalist power that is later
referred as their moment of defeat as capitalist exploitation increased arguably via
their reformist roles.226 Tafuri and his persona as a historian stand out as examples
for architectural circles that resonate with what Bologna attributes to the operaisti
thinkers of the 1970s, referring to their role at Primo maggio; as he says:
We aimed to change the rules of the status of disciplines; we
were interested in innovating in the areas of the methodology
of history, sociology, economics and political science … we did
not think of ourselves as new Braudels or Einsteins or Webers,
we … felt that in the end the most important objective was
that of changing the ‘social role’ of the university lecturer,
compilation of essays and pieces that allows a reassessment of some assumptions regarding
militancy autonomia favored and limits it possessed against capitalist development.
224
Wright, Storming Heaven, 227.
225
Ibid.
226
Tronti refers to Panzieri’s limitations as well as to his limitations he depicts in 2012 as not
really being able to organize anything regardless their intentions to go beyond from “being an
organizer of operaismo to being the organizer of workers’ culture.” He then acknowledges their
“culturally advanced struggle” actually “ushered in a vengeful capitalist resurgence.” Tronti, “Our
Operaismo,” 123-128.
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doctor, physicist, sociologist, lawyer, architect and so on. On
this premise the role of the political intellectual needed to
change too, from being a new Lenin or a new Robespierre,
into being a ‘service provider’ for the decentralized movement,
capable of ofering the movement a better understanding of
itself, of opening up new possibilities.227
For this “social role” to be claimed by the intellectuals to provide the services Bologna
lists above to the, working class movement had to be decentralized by the same
intellectuals, from the early 1960s onwards. In this picture, Tafuri’s 1969 “Toward a
Critique of Architectural Ideology” needs to be considered as an agitation directed
towards architects, as well as intellectuals, artists, academics, historians and so on,
rather than attributing to it a role that it can only possess via the 1970s rhetoric with
which intellectuals were able to rationalize their impasse.
Similarly, Bologna reminds operaisti saying that “working-class struggle accelerated capitalist
development” in relation to the “wars” won and lost by operaisti back in 1960s and in the
aftermath of 1970s:
The seed of operaismo can still be fertile, precisely at a time when –
revenge of history!- FIAT collapses, destroyed by an inept and
irresponsible management and withered away by a passive and
subaltern labor-force, accomplice of a political and union left that,
with the helping hand of center-left governments that pushed to the
extreme the ‘inancialization’ of the economy, settled for small returns
with the strategic decisions of the Italian capitalist class. Fiat came out
of 10 years of class conlict (1969-1980) full of innovative energies.
Now, after 22 years of social peace (1980-2002), it emerges in pieces.
Bologna, Review of Storming Heaven, 104.
227
Bologna, Review of Storming Heaven, 103. Primo maggio was a workerist journal from
the 1970s.
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“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
SECTION II
Examining the Relevance of the Work in the
Context
CHAPTER FOUR
POLITICAL FRAMEWORK OF
“TOWARD A CRITIQUE OF
ARCHITECTURAL IDEOLOGY”
4.1 Introduction to Chapter Four
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology” is a product of 1960s Italy in which
Tafuri adopts the operaisti discourse in his critique of architectural ideology. It was
written, published and circulated at a moment when the operaisti were confronted
with the consequences of the discourse they adopted in their earlier analysis and
critique of Marxism in relation to the Italian society and labour movement. If we
take the context it was found in into our consideration, without collapsing further
articulations of that discourse in the 1970s on top of the essay and its political
framework, the essay can be approached as a piece that confronts architects with their
attempts to contest and struggle against capitalist development.
To do so, we irst need to acknowledge the shift in the rhetoric operaisti adopted in
the early 1960s in comparison to the late 1960s and 1970s as it represents more than
a dichotomy between operaismo and autonomia. From the early 1960s and onwards,
with the discourse operaisti constructed, intellectuals attempted to align themselves
with working class struggle with the intention to confront capitalist structures and
institutions in order to abolish them. With the late 1960s the operaismo dissolved as
autonomia formed. With this transition a fundamental shift in the operaisti discourse
is observed; which needs further articulation than the identiication of the dichotomy
between operaismo and autonomia.1
he more we inquire into the debates amongst the operaisti of the 1960s and the
paths they assign themselves with the 1970s, the less likely it becomes to approach
Tafuri’s 1969 essay with later articulations of the arguments it contains. Having said
that, unless we are willing to move on from the already existing trajectories “Toward
a Critique of Architectural heory” is assigned to, there seems to be no reason to
go beyond approaching the essay via its later edition Architecture and Utopia and/
1
Bologna refers to intellectuals approaching struggle in the 1960s and the consequences of
their earlier attempts in the 1970s: “It was much easier to be an intellectual in the seventies,
because basically you had before you such a wealth of subversive behaviors, of rebel fantasies, of
desires, of innovation etc. that, when all is said and done, your behavior was that of formalizing
things a bit.” Bologna, in Futuro Anteriore, interview with Sergio Bologna, trans. Steve Wright in
“Back to the Future,” 279.
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or through “negative thought,” which Contropiano gave Cacciari the medium to
articulate. At the end of the day, negative thought and its implications for the
built environment professionals convincingly demonstrate how Tafuri approaches
Architecture and Utopia as well as the rationale behind the impasse to which Tafuri’s
project as a historian and as a critic was bound. However if we do not attempt to
go beyond the existing trajectories assigned to Tafuri’s project and his critique, we
ind ourselves bound to what we ind the operaisti thinkers in today: a state of everimpasse and repentance over the state of things.
After reminding us of the questions that operaismo posed back in the 1960s
“stubbornly” refusing “to go away,” Sergio Bologna raises a question addressing those
who take up the history of operaismo:
Is it possible to apply the category of continuity to this
movement? Doesn’t continuity belong to the traditional
methods of writing history? Is it not proper to the history
of dynasties and parties? hose who, from the beginning,
positioned themselves outside of a party perspective, who
regarded the revolution as a lifeblood rather than an event, do
they have a right to continuity, do they have to be subjected
to it?2
In response to Bologna’s reminder to those who do acknowledge operaismo’s radical
threads and yet still apply the category of continuity to the history of it, I propose
that one can raise the following question: how come can we consider operaismo as
diverging from any other Marxist traditions given the consequences of the trajectories
operaisti thinkers chose to take from 1970s on?3
2
Sergio Bologna, Review of Storming Heaven, 104-105.
3
Especially when Mario Tronti suggests reconsidering the elitist critique of democracy in
his 2009 essay “Critique of Political Democracy,” and Antonio Negri re-situates the operaisti and
their “revolutionary” attempted-praxis with reference to the tradition of Western philosophy
through positing Gramsci as a igure who puts the philosophy (of Giovanni, to be more precise)
back to its place: amongst ordinary people. See Tronti, “Towards a Critique of Political
Democracy,” trans. Alberto Toscano in The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics,
ed. Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano (Melbourne: Re.press, 2009): 97-106; and Negri “The
Italian Difference,” trans. Lorenzo Chiesa in ibid.: 13-23. As mentioned before, Tronti is one of the
igures who is most apologetic about the operaisti experience in the 1960s and that is not only
evident in his interview in Futuro anteriore but also in his most recent memoir “Our Operaismo.”
Sergio Bologna puts emphasis to the need to move on and go beyond operaismo while echoing
Tronti as Bologna repeats what he says in his interview in the book Futuro anteriore in the quote
above which is from his review of Steve Wright’s book Storming Heaven. To some extent in Asor
Rosa’s dismissal of the autonomia movement, represents the general perception on autonomia as a
mistook step from the split of Contropiano and formation of Potere Operaio. Asor Rosa explains
this via Negri’s romanticized imagery of the student revolts in 1968s and his optimism while
Bologna argues autonomists such as Negri have “washed their hands of the mass worker’s recent
dificulties,” by introducing the social worker as rising from the ashes of the mass worker in the
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CHAPTER FOUR
I seek the operaisti implications found in Tafuri’s 1969 essay in the light of Bologna’s
reminder and I argue those implications are not exhausted with Cacciari’s “negative
thought”; Tafuri’s future career as an internationally acclaimed architectural historian;
nor Negri’s autonomia.
By observing how the disconnections between intellectuals and their theoretical
interventions make their way through the intellectuals’ further inquiries into
radicalization of struggle or a retreat from their role as agitators; it is easy to approach
and appreciate Tafuri’s essay as an agitating piece that was written in the middle
of those conlicting threads. he operaisti implications of the essay come from its
agitating aspects and their foundations within the context the essay was found in,
not from the method or the tactic it ofers architects to follow in order to confront
capitalist development. If we return to the context of the essay, and provide a history
of the operaisti critique and how it evolved to the point when Tafuri’s essay was
written, published and circulated, we will be able to locate the essay in its proper
place, rather than assigning it another role to avoid confrontation with Tafuri as an
factories with their post-operaisti rhetoric. Alberto Asor Rosa, “Critique of Ideology and Historical
Practice,” 28-33; and Bologna quoted in Wright, Storming Heaven, 170-171. This perception is
also commonly accompanied by mentioning of Negri’s strong personality along with his intellect.
Given the operaisti critique itself was a critique of Left, or rather orthodox-Marxism and such
projects’ lack of critical self-interrogation; debates happening today do not come as a surprise. Yet
operaisti themselves also fail with their self-interrogation as their dominant apologetic agenda
demonstrates today: a form of justiication for their roles in the 1960s and 1970s.
What is more, one can easily regard operaismo and autonomia as historical movements that are no
longer able to provide a critical analysis for today, as their analysis of the 1960s and 1970s are no
longer applicable to contemporary forms of networks, power, oppression and structures we can
understand the contemporary society. Although their analyses might have foreseen this transition,
with their attempts to translate their analyses into antagonism, they were not only benumbed by a
violent state intervention that lead to mass arrests and imprisonment, but also failed to respond to
such interventions as well as to the advancement of capitalist development, regardless their
commitment to their strategies. It is common to argue that they, autonomists particularly,
introduced counter-revolutionary elements into the working class struggle that lead further
constrains to the workers’ struggle and advanced capitalist development in the favour of the
capitalists, as Pier Vittorio Aureli does. However Tronti also mentions their contribution to the
capitalist development which they were initially critical of and were antagonising via their
assumption that as great reactionaries they would be able to subvert it within in “Our Operaismo”
and the interviews he has given to Futuro anteriore. For further elaboration on operaismo and
autonomia with reference to their impact on the Left, as well as operaisti and autonomists’
contemporary “reformist” grounds within academia, see Aufhaben, Review of Storming Heaven:
Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism by Steve Wright and Reading
Capital Politically (2nd edn.) by Harry Cleaver: “From Operaismo to Autonomist Marxism,” in
Aufhaben 11 (2003) http://www.prole.info/texts/automarx.html; Aufhaben, “‘Must try harder!’:
Towards a Critique of Autonomist Marxism,” in Aufhaben 13 (2005) http://libcom.org/library/
aufheben/aufheben-13-2005/must-try-harder-towards-a-critique-of-autonomist-marxism.
On this note, for a contemporary debate on intellectual work, academia and the role of intellectuals
with reference to social conlicts, the controversy around Aufhaben and its role within struggle
against sovereign structures: see Sam FantoSamotnaf, “cop-out-the signiicance of Aufhebengate,”
dialectical delinquents (blog), January, 2013, http://dialectical-delinquents.com/?page_id=9.
Political Framework of “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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CHAPTER FOUR
agitator.
4.1.1 A note on autonomist-marxism and operaismo 4
We are limited with approaching the Italian operaismo and autonomia movements
which are inevitably colored coming after: “the arrests of 1979 onwards, led by Judge
Calogero (himself close to the PCI),” which “put the inal nail in autonomia as a mass
phenomenon, and marginalized operaismo as a current within Italy’s cultural and
political life.”5 Wright reminds us of a general tendency to approach 1960s and 1970s
political framework of Italy, in the posthumous light of this marginalized version of
operaismo to which Negri is credited with being the leading igure after his arrest and
trial in the late 1970s and 1980s. However, as stated before, this is problematic as:
Negri’s work is far from the sum total of operaismo, just as
4
Cleaver argues that he coined the term autonomist-Marxism after the 1979 publication of
Reading ‘Capital’ Politically, in the preface to the same book’s second edition in 2000. By using
the autonomous-Marxism instead of autonomist-Marxism, I thought I would make an ingenious
move to overcome the criticism autonomist-Marxism encounters as I intend to revisit Tafuri’s
work and its relevance to today. The attempt to invent a common thread within the Marxist
tradition which puts emphasis on the autonomy of working class, is a contemporary trend, and to
an extent, it might confuse rather than making things clearer: as in my case it is particularly the
Italian context Tafuri’s work is found. Unfortunately, most probably due to a misunderstanding
rather than a typo, Zanny Begg’s article on autonomist-Marxism coined the phrase with her
contestation of Cleaver in Reading ‘Capital’ Politically. Begg is an architect and artist from
Sydney, and the critique she raises against autonomist-Marxism was published in Green Left
Weekly, which was run by the Democratic Socialist Party of Australia. Begg refers to
“‘autonomous organizing’ of the oppressed” and their “tactical discussions about the best path
towards liberation for groups such as women, gays and lesbians, and indigenous people,” are
afirmed via “autonomous Marxism” being the theoretical justiication of their autonomous
organizations. Zenny Begg, “Autonomous Marxism – DIY revolution,” in GLW 384 (November
10, 1999) http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/18943. Cleaver responds to their article via libcom.org
(Libcom.org is a database “for all people who wish to ight to improve their lives, their
communities and their working conditions” kept running by a collective of individuals who are
referred as “libertarian communists based mainly in the UK and the US,” see “About,” libcom.org,
September 11, 2006, http://libcom.org/notes/about.) and corrects Begg’s use of autonomousMarxism:
The term “autonomous Marxism” suggests that this Marxism is
autonomous from something, but from what? From “orthodox
marxism”? Certainly. But it was to avoid such interpretation that I
coined the term “autonomist Marxism” (-ist not -ous) to describe a
thread within the Marxist tradition in which the idea of working class
autonomy was central to both theory and politics. Harry Cleaver,
“Response to Sergio Fiedler’s Attack on Autonomous Marxism,”
libcom.org, August 10, 2005, http://libcom.org/library/responsesergio-iedler-attack-autonomous-marxism-cleaver.
For me, the interplay of the words autonomous and Marxism would have been with reference to
operaismo and autonomia movements’ critique of Marxisms preceeding them. Tafuri’s 1969 essay
was a product of this critical approach and probably this aspect of operaismo was the most
convincing and inluential aspect of the operaisti discourse for Tafuri.
5
Wright, “Children of a Lesser Marxism?” 261.
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CHAPTER FOUR
his politics of the seventies hardly exhausted the range of
views then to be found either within Potere operaio or the
later movement of autonomia. More to the point, workerism’s
preoccupation with workers’ eforts to overcome the divisions
imposed upon them in a given time and space by capital make
its precepts of ongoing interest in this age of dynamic class
relations.6
Keeping in mind the problems with the context of the 1960s and 1970s Italy, along
with the complex and diverse intertwined threads of operaismo and autonomia, today,
autonomist-Marxism suggests a reference to contemporary struggles via autonomia
and operaismo, as:
for many of those dissatisied with the versions of Marxism
and anarchism available to them … the notions of ‘autonomy’
and ‘autonomist’ have positive associations … ‘anti-capitalist’
mobilizations of J18 and Seattle both drew on themes and
language associated with autonomia, such as autonomous
struggles and diversity.7
However, appropriating the label “autonomist-Marxism” with reference to the
implications that I argue to be present in Tafuri’s essay, when it is approached as a
piece that confronts architects in relation to their practice and its innate relationship
with the capitalist structures, would be too hasty and overlook certain aspects of both
autonomist-Marxist discourse as well as the operaisti discourse of the 1960s Italy.
Harry Cleaver label “autonomist-Marxism” addresses the line of Marxism that
diverged from the ones he was espousing until his revisit of Marx. his line of
Marxism becomes evident as he undertakes an archeology of the evolution towards
an extension of the political appreciation of the ability of
workers to act autonomously, toward a reconceptualization of
crisis theory that grasps it as a crisis of class power, toward a
redeinition of ‘working class’ that both broadens it to include
the unwaged, deepens the understanding of autonomy to
intraclass relations and also recognizes the eforts of “workers”
to escape their class status and to become something more8
6
Wright, “Children of a Lesser Marxism?” 262.
7
Aufhaben, “From Operaismo to Autonomist Marxism.”
8
Harry Cleaver, preface to Reading ‘Capital’ Politically, 2nd ed. (Leeds, Edinburgh and
San Francisco: AK Press, 2000): 9-21, 18. In order to understand and intervene to the dynamics of
struggle, Cleaver says, he reworked and interpreted Marx’s value theory and knitted which “took
the form of a manuscript organised around the irst three sections of chapter one of volume one of
Capital -- in many ways Marx’s most pedantic yet also most systematic exposition of the theory”
Political Framework of “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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Cleaver deepens his research as Keynesian growth management was being replaced
by policy makers with “a more repressive use of money: cut backs in social spending,
lexible exchange rates, inancial deregulation and eventually severely tight monetary
policies and an international debt crisis.”9 From 1975 to 1979 Cleaver studies this
shift and starts becoming familiar with whom he refers as “autonomist-Marxists.”10
Cleaver explains his eforts as attempts to “situate the theory within the history of
Marxism” after he studies Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, the Grundrisse, Capital and
other fragments and notes by Marx on value theory.11 It is the failure of the existing
interpretations of Marx to respond to the early 1970s in the US that lead Cleaver to
undertake his inquiry into Marx as he observed:
he introduction of new agricultural technology in the hird
World had been a reaction against peasant struggle, so too was
the shift from Keynesianism to monetarism a reaction against
popular struggle, in this case the international cycle of struggle
that swept the world in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a cycle
of which Vietnam was only one moment.12
In order to understand and intervene in the dynamics of struggle, Cleaver says, he
reworked and reinterpreted Marx’s value theory and knitted these into his own work
which “took the form of a manuscript organized around the irst three sections of
chapter one of volume one of Capital -- in many ways Marx’s most pedantic yet also
most systematic exposition of the theory” that later was published in 1979 as Reading
‘Capital’ Politically.13 Cleaver’s ailiation with the North American Zerowork brings
the Italian Marxists into Cleaver’s attention, which he reports that he was unfamiliar
before.14 His attempt to understand this new thread with reference to his own project,
that later was published in 1979, the irst edition of the book Reading Capital Politically.
9
Ibid., 10.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid., 12-14.
12
Ibid., 10-11.
13
Ibid.,
14
Ibid., 12-13. Zerowork is a North American journal that published two issues between
1975 and 1977. In the introduction to their irst issue in 1975, editors make a similar critique
operaisti make:
The contemporary Left sees the crisis from the point of view of
economists, that is, from the viewpoint of capital. The Left is basically
for work. It cannot grasp either in theory or practice that the working
class struggle against work is the source of the crisis and the starting
point of organization. Hence the Leftist image of the crisis is still
mired in the Paleo-Marxist view that sees the crisis as the product of
capital’s lack of planning of production. The ‘anarchy of production’
is an external irrationality of the capitalist mode of production that
dooms it to crises of inter-capitalist competition and imperialist wars.
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and various other threads he became familiar since the early 1970s, along with his
study of historical material such as Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, Paul Mattick
as well as “anarcho-communists like Emma Goldman and Peter Kropotkin,” and “the
early tradition of British ‘bottom-up’ Marxist theory,” revealed the recurring theme
“in the work of diverse Marxist writers and militants” as the “common perception
and sympathy for the power of workers to act autonomously.”15 He acknowledges the
problems with commonality, as there were “substantial diferences among them about
many key issues including crisis theory, through those works and their deinition
of the working class, attitudes toward work and the notion of the future in the
present.”16 Regardless, Cleaver’s studies allow him to label “autonomist-Marxism” as a
thread in the political and strategic reading of Marx.
Autonomist-Marxism, in Cleaver, refers to a tradition of Marxism that emphasizes
not only the autonomy of the working class but also autonomy of various groups in
relation to others of their class; which can easily be understood as a shift of attention
to the middle class or an equation drawn between the working class and the middle
class within the contemporary structures.17 Despite such problems which have not
been overcome yet, “Autonomist-Marxism” had been used by others and found
itself a place in Marxist literature today. Nick Dyer-Witheford, for example, adopts
“autonomist-Marxism” even if he would be critical of an assumption that would
suggest the way working class used to be understood before the advancement of
For the Left the working class could not have brought about the crisis;
it is rather an innocent victim of the internal contradictions of capital, a
subordinate element in a contradictory whole. This is why the Left is
preoccupied with the defense of the working class. Introduction to
Zerowork: Political Materials 1 (December 1975), http://zerowork.
org/3.1Introduction.html. Emphasis by them.
15
Ibid., 14-17.
16
Ibid., 15.
17
This is a critique raised by Aufhaben in their review of Cleaver’s Reading ‘Capital’
Politically :
The ‘middle class’ is a label largely absent from Reading ‘Capital’
Politically, which is because for Cleaver it largely doesn’t exist, except
perhaps sociologically. The ‘autonomist Marxist’ argument seems to
be that, in conditions of the ‘social factory’, the middle classes are just
a sector of the working class. ... Some groups, such as the
professionals - doctors, lawyers, academics - who retain control of
entry into their profession, should obviously be deined as middle
class. But there are other groups for which the situation is less clearcut. For the most part dealing with the thorny issue of class, and in
particular the status of the middle classes, is inevitable messy. This is
because class is a process not a box into which we can simply
categorize people, as in sociology. Aufhaben, “From Operaismo to
Autonomist Marxism.”
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post-industrial or mode of productions no longer exists.18 For him, with reference
to Cleaver’s mapping of the theoretical positions and historical unfolding of
autonomist-Marxism as showing “how the work of the Italian stream discussed here
was overlapped and inluenced by that of the American Johnson-Forest tendency and
the French Socialisme ou Barbarie group,” the term inds its application in theory.19
Wright’s use of “Autonomist-Marxism,” concertizes the term to refer to operaismo
and autonomia movements in the 1960s and 1970s Italy with his book Storming
Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism, which is
argued, at some instances, to posses the odd case that “seems wrong and confusing”to
put diferent traditions of Italian operaismo and subsequent movements in the same
basket.20 Nevertheless, autonomist-Marxism is in circulation today amongst academic
and activist circles.
A strategic reading of Tafuri’s essay as an agitation directed towards architects
to question their role in relation to working class struggles could be referred as
identifying autonomist-Marxist threads in “Toward a Critique of Architectural
Ideology” in the light of Cleaver’s intentions as a “return to what [Cleaver believed]
was Marx’s original purpose: he wrote Capital to put a weapon in the hands of
workers.”21 Having said that, what autonomist-Marxists facilitate today with the
discourse they construct is not necessarily equivalent with the political project I
intend to refer to, and I do not have any intention to make the connection between
the two. Although it is important to acknowledge autonomist-Marxism as a guide to
approach the relevance of the political framework of Tafuri’s essay to contemporary
discourse, it is neither my intention nor what I am doing.22
18
See Nick Dyer-Witheford, “Cyber-Negri: General Intellect and Immaterial Labor,” in The
Philosophy of Antonio Negri, ed. Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha (London: Pluto
Press, 2005): 136-162.
19
Nick Dyer-Witheford, Autonomist-Marxism and the Information Society (Canberra:
Treason Press, 2004), 5. This essay which is accessible at http://multitudes.samizdat.net/
Autonomist-Marxism-and-the.html (Accessed December 4, 2012).
20
Bologna, review of Storming Heaven, 103.
21
Claver, introduction to Reading ‘Capital’ Politically, 23.
22
On this note, even though I try to diversify my narration of the period with other studies,
especially when I refer to the particular context of Contropiano, Wright’s take on on the period, is
signiicantly dominant in my apprehension of the period. As mentioned earlier in Chapter One, his
book Storming Heaven is seminal for English-speaking audience to approach 1960s and 1970s
Italy in relation to opreaismo and autonomia movements. Considering the fact that architectural
theoreticians and historians who return to the political framework of the 1960s and 1970s Italy
refer to Wright’s work as a ‘reliable history’ without necessarily providing a study of the period in
relation to his narration, my limitations in diversifying the resources can be legitimized, yet needs
to be overcome. Before looking at the works by Aureli and Day in the next chapter, providing a
repost of the period with reference to Wright’s work can help to establish a ground for us to
consider those authors’ approach to the period, given they both suggest the reader to see Wright’s
Storming Heaven without actually telling why or for what purposes. See Aureli, The Project of
Autonomy and Gail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory (New York:
100
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4.2 Operaismo as a Political Project in Italy
As mentioned above, it is most likely to be via the label autonomist-Marxism
that operaismo and autonomia movements can be perceived today as precursors
to contemporary struggles around identity politics, queer movement, grassroots,
insurrectionary politics, and so on. Steve Wright suggests this connection with the
contemporary struggles and operaismo / autonomia is “consigned to oblivion along
with the turbulent sixties and seventies of rebellious youth, women, and factory
workers (irst and foremost, the ‘mass workers’ of assembly line production).”23 He
further elaborates on the contemporary interest around operaismo and autonomia as
follows:
A large part of this curiosity is a consequence of the attention
recently paid, in academic but also activist circles, to the work
of former Operaisti such as Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno,
as well as associated thinkers like Giorgio Agamben. Having
once been treated primarily as a footnote to the intellectual
phenomenon that is Deleuze and Guattari, such authors
(and Negri above all) have become increasingly the subject
of attention in their own right, through the publication and
circulation of texts such as Empire, Multitude, Homo Sacer and
Grammar of the Multitude.24
Within this picture, “in an epoch where the worker movement in crisis was
dominated by excessively ‘ideological’ debates’,” says François Matheron, “operaismo
was characterized essentially by proposing a ‘return to the working class’.”25
he operaismo and autonomia movements shared the seminal reformulation of
Marxism.26 Yet they are perceived radically diferent, and not only by the operaisti
and autonomists. Especially within the debates on armed struggle and actions of
Red Brigades in the 1970s, amongst Italians and those who study the Italian left in
the 1960s and 1970s; operaismo represents a legitimate and rational critique of the
orthodox left and capitalist structures. On the other hand autonomia is likely to be
Columbia University Press, 2011).
23
Steve Wright, “Back to the Future,” 270.
24
Ibid. For a comprehensive analysis of how operaismo had been received within Englishspeaking circles, see Steve Wright, “Operaismo, Autonomia, Settantasette in Translation: Then,
Now, the Future,” in Strategies 16 (2003): 107-120.
25
François Matheron, “Operaismo,” trans. Nate Holdren, in multitudes, http://multitudes.
samizdat.net/Operaismo; originally published as François Matheron, “Operaïsme” in BensussanLabica: Dictionnaire Critique du Marxisme (Paris: Presses Universitaired de France, 1999).
26
Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, “The Return of Politics,” conversation between
Lotringer and Marazzi in Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Christian
Marazzi, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007): 8-21, 9.
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perceived through the ilters of accusation of autonomists with terrorist activities.27
Transition from operaismo to autonomia and disengagement of certain operaisti
igures, such as Tronti, from the autonomists, happen as discussions on theory and
praxis of resistance advance and sharpen the diferences to approach working class
struggle amongst intellectuals who, in the early 1960s, joined the workers’ struggle in
the factories and “sought the factory as a point of identiication.”28
Beneath the limits of theories and strategies operaisti critique addressed, there lies a
fundamental problematic of the intellectual formation and its relation with the labour
movement and the working class. Whether believing that they were going through
the immediate prelude -“April days”-to an Italian revolution29 or not; today the
operaisti acknowledge their limitations and to some extent failure with their radical
critique of the left in the interviews they have given to students of Romano Alquati
which were published in 2002.30 he operaisti’s self-interrogation, which constituted
27
Timothy S. Murphy draws our attention to this way of approaching operaismo and
autonomia with reference to Richard Drake’s account of the period. cf. Richard Drake, The
Revolutionary Mystique and Terrorism in Contemporary Italy (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1989). Drake’s narration evolves from a rhetoric that uncritically appropriates the language
of the Italian state and the prosecution, Murphy argues. Those accusations were proven to be
illegitimate after the year his book was published. Along with Drake’s, Dyke’s and Sterling’s The
Terror Network: The Secret War of International Terrorism (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston,
1981) demonstrates the circulation of rumor, innuendo and slander that do not have any historical
evidence or court verdicts to support, but regardless exist to this day. Murphy argues that Drake, in
1995, irst acknowledges his book’s limitations and then in 2003 admits: “The extra parliamentary
left movement was not always or even mainly terroristic. … Tactical differences of the sharpest
kind separated Panzieri, Negri and the Red Brigadists.” Drake, Apostles and Agitators: Italy’s
Marxist Revolutionary Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 226; quoted in
Timothy S. Murphy, editor’s introduction to Books for Burning: Between Civil War and
Democracy in 1970s Italy by Antonio Negri (London and New York: Verso, 2005): ix-xxviii, xxvii.
28
Antonio Negri, The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century,
trans. James Newell, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 48.
29
Antonio Negri quoted in Michael Hardt, “Into the Factory: Negri’s Lenin and the
Subjective Caesura (1968-73)” in The Philosophy of Antonio Negri: Resistance in Practice, ed.
Timothy S. Murphy and Abdul-Karim Mustapha (London: Pluto Press, 2005): 7-37, 7.
30
At least two of those igures who dominate the literature the most do so: Antonio Negri
and Mario Tronti. In 1986, Negri’s account on the transition operaisti and the consequences of this
is approached from an optimistic retrospective outlook: “we have witnessed the emergence of a
new social subject: an intellectual subject which is nonetheless proletarian, polychrome, a
collective plot of the need for equality; a subject that rejects the political and immediately gives
rise to an ethical determination for existence and struggle.” Negri, The Politics of Subversion, 47.
Today, Negri insists on this and seems to be one of the operaisti who “moved on” from their
experience in the 1970s.
Where Tronti’s relections on the 1960s and the 1970s are bitter than Negri’s; they still contain a
sense of nostalgia as present in his 2012 memoir: Tronti, “Our Operaismo.” Also see the series of
interviews conducted between 1999-2002 with operaisti thinkers, activists and intellectuals of the
1960s and 1970s Italy, which later constituted the Futuro Anteriore and Gli Operaisti as part of the
series on history of operaismo published by DeriveApprodi. This project is accessible via internet
as well: http://www.autistici.org/operaismo/index_1.htm. In those interviews, Alquatti, Tronti, as
102
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a primary aspect of the operaisti critique, needs further attention than it has gained so
far amongst intellectuals and academics.
4.2.1 The new left and the operaisti
We can trace the operaisti’s project back to Panzieri’s break from Socialist Party (PSI)
and his evaluation of the orthodox Marxism. his is the task what Robert Lumley
has called “the New Left” set themselves to in the 1960s. “New Left” who initiated a
review of the existing Left, is argued to be composed of “groups of people peripheral
to the political parties, who teach in universities, often on a temporary basis, or
in a liceo[school].”31 Lumley cites Giovanni Bachelloni and explains this group’s
signiicant marginality as “the result of a choice that involves an alternative intellectual
route, which is cosmopolitan.”32 Bachelloni describes their task as
a political culture which aimed to break with the heritage of
idealism (a heritage which appeared in the thinking of the Left
parties in the shape of historicism, Gramscianism, neo-realism
and the philosophical Marxism); to do this, it re-read Marx
as the sociologist of capitalist society, but the return to Marx
was characterized by a tension between theoretical inquiry and
political commitment.33
Within the social, political and economic conditions of Italy in the 1950s and in
the aftermath of the 1956 events in Hungary; the “new levy of Italian Marxists,”
sought “to escape the political hegemony of the PCI.”34 PSI faiclitated this escape for
a period of time as Negri suggests, Socialist Party was a variance from the politics of
Togliatti and Stalinism.35 Mondo operaio, he theoretical review of PSI, provided a
vehicle for critical self-relection of the left to Raniero Panzieri who already noticed
well as Negri talk about their limits and sometimes adopt a rhetoric that comes across as only if
they had done that and not this. For example Alquatti implies the knowledge or discourse operaisti
articulated needed to be more self-relexive by intellectuals constantly reminding themselves of the
reason why such kind of an intellectual intervention which they appropriated was needed. See
Romano Alquatti, Gli operaisti, interview with Romano Alquatti, 44. Beyond such an ‘only if’
rhetoric, Asor Rosa puts emphasis on the fact that the consequences of the operaisti and the
autonomists’ intervention do not exhaust the project of the operaisti; yet concertize the limited way
we approach to the project by assuming that the outcome of the struggles happened in the 1960s
and 1970s Italy had to be as they had been and the operaisti knew it from the start; reminding the
reader about the post-1968 discourse and the readers’ limitations to approach to a revolutionary
discourse in the aftermath of 1968. See Segio Bologna, Gli operaisti, interview with Sergio
Bologna, 61.
31
Lumley, States of Emergency, 34.
32
Ibid.
33
Giovanni Bechelloni, Cultura e ideologia nella nuova sinistra (Milan, 1973), xii, quoted
in ibid.
34
Wright, Storming Heaven, 15.
35
Negri, Gli operaisti, interview with Antonio Negri, 237-38.
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by then, according to Wright, “the much vaunted ‘organic intellectuals‘ of Gramscian
memory were now in practice organic only to the party machine.”36 According to
Panzieri, an “examination of ‘the reality of the political and organizational movement
of the popular classes’,”37 was needed. Under Panzieri’s co-direction, Mondo operaio
examined works by such as Lukács, Luxemburg and Trotsky: who were “long passed
over by the socialist left.”38
In 1958, Panzieri with Lucio Libertini, published “Seven heses on Workers’
Control”: a study on the contemporaneous historic experience of the left, particularly
FIOM’s defeat in 1955 election of the grievance committee at the FIAT.39 he
institution of the grievance committee itself was already being questioned by young
communists and workers themselves for being too far from the concerns of shop-loor
workers and hence lacking power to negotiate agreements with management and the
knowledge necessary to implement the new policy of contracting all aspects of the
work relationship in every shop.40 Asor Rosa recalls the discussions in the aftermath
of the defeat of the 1955 elections in FIAT happening along with the debates mainly
focussing around the nature of the State and of Soviet society to underpin the
reasons for degeneration of the socialist system with reference to the 1956 revolts
in Hungary.41 To which, Asor Rosa argues, Panzieri and Libertini responded with
the idea of formation of a proletarian democracy.42 For the labour movement to be
renovated “from below and in forms of total democracy:”43 “new institutions were
needed, ones which must ind their roots in the economic sphere, ‘the real source of
power’,” so that “the ‘democratic road’ would not become ‘either a belated adherence
to reformism, or simply a cover for a dogmatic conception of socialism’.”44 his
needed particularly the revolutionary autonomy of the working class to be expressed
since “the demand of the workers’ control … could not be ‘a literary motivation for
36
Wright, Storming Heaven, 17. See the footnote 232 in this chapter for an account of
Gramsci and his concept of “organic intellectual.”
37
Ibid.
38
Della Mea, “Panzieri tra ‘Mondo Operaio’ e ‘Quaderni rossi’,” Giovane Critica 15-16
(1967): 98, quoted in ibid., 17-18. FIOM (Federazione Impiegati Operai Metallurgici) was part of
the CGIL (Confederazione Generale Italiana dei Lavoratori: the biggest trade union organisationin
Italy back then, which was composed of mostly Communist and Socialist party members). FIOM
was composed of engineering manual and white-collar workers.
39
Lucio Libertini and Raniero Panzieri, “Sette tesi sul controllo operaio,” in Mondo
Operaio (February, 1958).
40
Grant Amyot, The Italian Communist Party: The Crisis of the Popular Front Strategy
(London: Biddles, Guildford and King’s Lynn, 1981), 121.
41
Asor Rosa, Gli operaisti, interview with Asor Rosa, 56.
42
Ibid., 57.
43
Raniero Panzieri, La crisi del movimento operaio: Scritti interventi lettere, 1956-60
(Milan: Lampugnani, 1973), 102; cited in Wright, Storming Heaven, 18.
44
Ibid.
104
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re-exhumations, much less a miracle cure,’ but ‘must emerge and make itself concrete
within the reality of the working class.”45
With the 33th congress of PSI, “the goal of a joint government of SocialistChristian Democrat government was brought one step nearer.”46 In the midst of the
transformation of PSI into a party of government, Panzieri was removed from Mondo
Operaio, as Wright puts it as “one of the minor causalities of the new line” PSI was
taking.47 Leaving PSI, Panzieri moved to Turin, believing in “‘full and direct political
action,’ that a new, revolutionary role for intellectuals could inally be realized.”48
Wright articulates on Panzieri’s departure from the Party as follows:
If the crisis of the organizations -parties and union- lies in
the growing diference between them and the real movement
of the class, between the objective conditions of struggle and
the ideology and policy of the parties, then the problem can
be confronted only by starting from the conditions, structures
and movement of the rank-and-ile. Here analysis becomes
complete only through participation in struggles. 49
In this chapter, I am approaching the dissolution of the operaismo through this
postulation which can be followed by the question: to what extend “participation
in struggles” becomes legitimate for a complete analysis by those who commit
themselves to deliver such an analysis?
Before moving forward, prematurely, I would like to draw the reader’s attention to
my argument that I conclude this chapter with: for the operaisti, the limit intellectuals
draw for their participation in the struggles between 1967-1970 appears to be the
deining feature for the rhetoric they start to adopt after May 1968 and 1969. In the
light of this reading, I argue that Tafuri’s 1969 essay, which delivers an analysis yet
lacks a method or a blueprint, should not be expanded to the whole of Architecture
and Utopia as that would dilute the original impact and possibly the intent of the
essay in 1969. he 1969 essay is an example where Tafuri adopts and applies the
operaisti discourse, before drawing its limits. It is by 1973, when the analysis Tafuri
delivers points to a direction, which will be towards the “negative thought” Cacciari
articulates via Contropiano. Hence the essay should be considered in relation to the
emphasis given to the ‘participation in struggles’ for the analysis to be completed.
As we revisit the late 1960s, we are forced to acknowledge the fact that even if the
45
46
47
48
49
Ibid., 19.
Ibid., 19-20.
Ibid., 20.
Ibid., 21.
Panzieri, La crisi del movimento operaio, 254; cited in Wright, Storming Heaven, 21.
Political Framework of “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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limits of the degree of participation had been drawn historically by the predominant
operaisti igures, the trajectories which they adopted in the late 1960s and 1970s can
not exhaust the implications of the political framework which I align Tafuri’s 1969
essay with. In fact, intensiication of the social conlict and struggles were directly
linked with such further implications of the discourse operaisti constructed. We see
the trajectories intellectuals adopt were not found in a vacuum, but surrounded by
agitated and antagonistic subjects whose struggles within the growing social conlict
forced intellectuals to reassess their role as agitators. his can not be emphasized
enough as they have direct consequences on the intellectual intervention the operaisti
initiate with Quaderni rossi.
4.2.2 Quaderni rossi
Quaderni rossi, “an experiment which was to have enormous repercussions for the
development of the Italian new left,”50 as referred to by Wright, was born through
the mediations amongst groups which Asor Rosa identiies as: the Romans who were
communists from Faculty of Arts and Philosophy at La Sapienza of Rome, including
Asor Rosa himself along with Mario Tronti, Umberto Coldagelli, Gaspare De Caro
with radical “Gatto selvaggio” (wildcats) such as Rita di Leo; the Northerns who
were Romulus Gobbi and Pierluigi Gasparotto from Milan and Turin forming a
group around Panzieri, to whom Antonio Negri would join; and young communists
and sociologists like Rieser, Mottura, De Palma, la Beccalli, and Romano Alquati.51
As both Asor Rosa and Negri imply; this peculiar and young group all together
allowed a rich experience to the central axis of labour movement that were previously
dissatisfying.52
Breaking the traditional monolithic of socialists and communists, Quaderni rossi
utilized what is referred as “parallel sociology,” that was formed at the “intersection
between the group’s rediscovery of Capital and its examination of certain recent
developments in radical social science.”53 he group’s concern for utilizing “bourgeois’
sociology as means to understand the reality of the modern working class” constituted
the “great theme Quaderni rossi appropriated from the dissident Marxism of the
1950s,” along with “autonomy” of the struggles from the institutions of orthodoxMarxism.54 he importance Wright ascribes to Panzieri in this picture is his “openness
to a critical use of sociology,” which, after his death in 1964 would be lost.55 Panzieri’s
criticality with “his critique of technological rationality, reveals a debt to Adorno,”
50
51
52
53
54
55
106
Wright, Storming Heaven, 21.
Asor Rosa, Gli operaisti, interview with Asor Rosa, 57.
Ibid.; Negri, Gli operaisti, interview with Antonio Negri, 238.
Wright, Storming Heaven, 21.
Ibid.
Ibid., 21, 62.
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Wright argues.56 However precursors to Panzieri’s theoretical and political framework
are found in Italy: “its direct inspiration lay much closer to home … what might
loosely be termed an Italian sociology had already emerged after the war.”57 On those
grounds “the ‘novelty’ of Quaderni rossi consisted in the inchiesta operaia (workers’
enquiry),” says Sergio Bologna and continues:
To the pressing question of where to start from, this publication
replied: ‘from an understanding of the working class, of the
‘new’ working class, and more precisely of the mentality of the
new generations that, ighting the police in the streets in July
1960, had defended a democracy from the new outbursts of
fascism’.58
Departing from the existing struggles in the factories, the common view the editors
of Quaderni rossi shared as “Marxism being itself a theory of capitalist society.”59 Yann
Moulier says the knowledge of Italian Marxism, which was mostly shaped by Togliatti
to that day, was through Gelvano Della Volpe and Lucio Colletti’s works along with
the “legend created around Gramsci.”60 However it was mostly Della Volpe’s works
that inluenced the editors of Quaderni rossi in their understanding of the class
struggle.
According to Asor Rosa, Della Volpe and Colletti’s lectures in Istituto Gramsci,
were rare examples of theoretical discourse, cultural, analytical, literary criticism
and ilmography.61 hey were on the same lines with Lukács, who was also opposing
Gramsci’s historicist vein with History and Class Consciousness, a publication that
was not widely circulated among Italian readers back then, as Asor Rosa reports.62
Della Volpe set the political and theoretical problems in reading Marx while he
was invoking the idealistic mould around Hegel and demolishing the hypothesis
of dialectic.63 “he inability of the dominant class to exclude from its enquiry the
subjective assumption that capitalist production relations were both natural and
eternal,” allowed Della Volpe expressing a “general admiration for the progress under
capital which positive science … had achieved in developing coherent explanations of
56
Ibid., 21.
57
Ibid., 21-22.
58
Sergio Bologna, review of Storming Heaven, 98.
59
Wright, Storming Heaven, 25.
60
Yann Moulier, introduction to The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the twenty-First
Century, by Antonio Negri, Philippa Hurd, trans., (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005): 1-44, 4.
61
Asor Rosa, Gli operaisti, interview with Asor Rosa, 59-60. Complete version of Asor
Rosa’s interview is found at www.autistici.org/operaismo/asor/.
62
Ibid., 60.
63
See “Intervista ad Alberto Asor Rosa – 24 Ottobre 2001: 5” in Conricerca interview with
Asor Rosa on October 24, 2001, http://www.autistici.org/operaismo/asor/5_1.htm#7.
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natural phenomena.”64 Wright continues arguing:
To Della Volpe’s mind, the abandoned 1857 ‘Introduction’ to
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy possessed
a fundamental importance in this regard, for within it Marx
could be found scrutinizing the basic building blocks of that
conceptual apparatus later applied ‘with maximum rigor and
success’ in Capital.65
From an Italian left which was not familiar with the critique of postulation of
“ideological” and “economical”; the actuality of Capital for a critique of political
economy was crucial to Panzieri and Mario Tronti, as well as for the circles formed
around them.66 Tronti, who submitted a thesis on the logic of Capital at the
University of Rome in the mid-1950s, echoes Della Volpe as Wright quotes Tronti via
Asor Rosa:
If the logic of ‘Capital’ is again substantiated today, it is
because for working-class thought, the objective necessity
of an analysis of capitalism has returned to the fore. he
instruments of analysis are revised when the object of this
analysis is rediscovered. If the object is capitalist society in
the concrete -the modern world moment of capitalism- then
the instrument can only be Marx’s method that has provided
the irst and only scientiic description of this object. One
returns to Capital each time one starts from capitalism, and
vice versa: one cannot speak of the method of Capital without
transferring and translating this method into the analysis of
capitalism.67
4.2.2.1 Constructing the operaisti discourse
Later to be referred by Asor Rosa as breaking down dogmas of the intellectual
tradition and proposing a version of Marxism that is diferent than the dominant
ones,68 Tronti introduced one of the innovative lines of thought operaisti opened
up within the struggle of the worker class in Italy: the plan of the capital. With the
essay “he Plan of the Capital” in Quaderni rossi,69 Tronti put emphasis on Marx’s
distinction between “the direct process of the production of the capital” and “the total
64
Wright, Storming Heaven, 26.
65
Ibid.
66
Ibid., 28.
67
Ibid., 28.
68
Asor Rosa, Gli operaisti, interview with Asor Rosa, 60.
69
Originally published as “Il piano del capitale,” in Quaderni Rossi 3 (1963): 44-73.
Translated into English from as “Social Capital.” Telos, no. 17 (Fall 1973): 98-121.
108
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process of its reproduction”:
Capital’s process of socialization is the speciic materials base
upon which is founded, on a certain level, the process of
development of capitalism. he determinate formation of a
capitalist society presupposes the production of social capital
as an already accomplished historical act, which is already
acknowledged as a natural fact.70
According to Tronti, the capital depended on the production, which was not merely
physical but social as well: in late capitalism, the factory was extended to life. Hence
productive power of waged labour, reproducing the capital, constituted the capitalist
development. his capitalist development was able to thrive through capitalist
structures’ response to improve treatment of the working class with workers’ struggles
and labour’s pressure, which actually served as implementing waged-labour in every
aspect of society as capitalist development advanced. Working class’ revolutionary
agency was being subsumed in late capitalism under the organization of working
class by capital through the labour movement which was institutionalized under
research institutions, parties and unions. Under the umbrella of “the rights of labour”
capitalist modes of production exploited the working class:
he growing rationalization of modern capital must ind
an insurmountable limit in the workers refusal to political
integration within the economic development of the system.
hus, the working class becomes the only anarchy that
capitalism fails to socially organize. he task of the labor
movement is to scientiically organize and politically manage
this labor anarchy within capitalist production.71
From a similar perspective, Panzieri challenged orthodox Marxism that favours
the “techno-romantic image” in his essay “he Capitalist Use of Machinery”72:
“he process of industrialization, as it achieves more and more advanced levels
of technological progress, coincides with a continual growth of the capitalist’s
authority.”73 he despotic political power that capitalism holds is founded in
capitalism’s mastery of production with advancement in technology, which is not a
70
Tronti, “Social Capital,” 98.
71
Ibid., 119.
72
Originally published as “Sull’uso capitalistico delle macchine nel neocapitalismo,” in
Quaderni rossi 1 (1961): 53-72. Translated into English as “The Capitalist Use of Machinery:
Marx versus the Objectivists,” by Quintin Hoare, in Outlines of a Critique of Technology, Phil
Slater, ed., (London: Atlantic Highlands, 1980): 44-69.
73
Ibid., 48.
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distortion or a deviation of “some ‘objective‘ development that is in itself rational.”74
It was argued that via “the science, the gigantic natural forces, and the mass of social
labour” that were “embodied in the system of machinery:” what presented itself as
the technological development, which constituted the power of the “master,” was in
fact capitalist development itself.75 Panzieri suggested that in order to avoid workingclass activity from being reabsorbed into capitalist development become degenerated
by the already established institutions of the labour movement, which were already
absorbed in the capitalist development, taking control over the means of production
which workers were alienated from, was problematic:
Workers’ control expresses the need to bridge the chasm which
exists today between even the most advanced working-class
demands at the trade-union level and the strategic perspective.
It thus represents, or rather can represent, in a non-mystiied
version, a political line that is a direct alternative to those
currently being put forward by the working-class parties.76
he critique Panzieri raised came from the relationship between the development
of capitalism and worker class’ struggle. By shifting the perspective of capital and its
reproduction, operaismo and autonomia would later evolve around the attempt to
theorize Marxism from the perspective of the workers and their potential to subvert
power.77 he underlying premise was that the advancement of capitalist structures
and worker’s conditions were not separable, or extraneous from each other. Historical
reality in which the working class movement found itself was the accomplishment
and implement of capitalism’s plan, which did not transcend workers’ struggles as
neither workers’ struggles did transcend the plan of the capital. What was crucial for
the working class struggles was to see how capitalist development was advanced with
workers’ struggles as long as struggles were organized under the control of the capital.
4.2.2.2 Critique of the limits of the intellectuals’ interventions to the working class
struggle
To explain their radical approach to class struggle via the discourse they were
advancing with their engagement to Quaderni rossi, Tronti relects on Della Volpe’s
74
Ibid., 47.
75
Ibid.
76
Ibid., 68.
77
For an analysis of refusal of work, see Kathi Weeks, “The Refusal of Work as Demand
and Perspective” in The Philosophy of Antonio Negri: Resistance in Practice, Timothy S. Murphy
and Abdul-Karim Mustapha, eds., (London: Pluto Press, 2005): 109-135 and for a further
elaboration of Weeks’ analysis more in relation to contemporary struggles, see Weeks, The
Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham
and London: Duke University Press, 2011).
110
Political Framework of “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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inluence on him and Italian dissidents of the late 1950s as:
Della Volpe took apart, piece by piece, the cultural line of the
Italian Communists, paying no heed to orthodox allegiances.
To be honest: we freed ourselves from the PCI’s Gramscian
‘national-popular’, but a certain intellectual aristocratism
clung to us still. Understanding was more important than
persuasion; toiling over the concept created diiculties with
the word.78
Where “Della Volpe’s eforts to return directly to Marx cleared the ground for a new
appropriation of the latter’s thought able to bypass the dominant traditions of the
Communist Party altogether,” Wright also reminds us “the debt owed Della Volpe
by the Italian new left, and Quaderni rossi in particular, remains a controversial
question.”79 Being referred as a marginal igure within PCI before 1956, Della Volpe’s
critics attacked dellavolpism. According to them “by marking Marxism a materialist
sociology, that is a science of the modern bourgeois social-economic formation,” the
common features among the advanced capitalist societies were emphasized more than
“‘particular’ and ‘national’ features that distinguished one country from another.”80
In the case of Tronti and Asor Rosa, their dissatisfaction with Della Volpe came
from the critique of Della Volpe’s “own failure to follow through the radical thrust
of his thought.”81 Wright refers to Coletti to explain Della Volpe’s avoidance of party
politics being “true to his self-image as an ‘intellectual of the old style.”82 Instead
of claiming to be an antagonist himself, Della Volpe’s critique only remained in
the academic exercise, shaped by his admiration in positive science coming from
application of Galileo’s experimental method constituting his “Galileanist” morals.83
However even outside the party, if expunged Marx from its “ambiguities and laws”
was crucial for confronting the vulgar interpretations of Marx within the labour
movement itself on the way to a critique of political economy’s actuality, equally
if not more crucial was the internal critique. Wright poses with what he quotes
from Tronti: “‘An ideology is always bourgeois,’ … to it the revolutionary must
counterpose Marx’s proletarian science and its ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists.”84
he problem of this critique not being sustained within academia performed by
78
Tronti, “Our Operaismo,” 121. Tronti continues: “Today the opposite is true—ease of
discourse means dispensing with thought.”
79
Wright, Storming Heaven, 27.
80
Bedeschi quoted in ibid.
81
Ibid., 29.
82
Ibid., 26.
83
Ibid.
84
Ibid., 29. Wright’s emphases.
Political Framework of “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
111
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“pure Marxists,” as Asor Rosa refers to “unnamed ‘scholars’ who in recent years had
‘dedicated their whole activity to reaching a more exact reading of Marx’s thought’,”
needed to advance in a “real notion,” if theory could step “down from its ivory tower
and present itself within the class struggle, since ‘the only way to understand the
system is through conceiving its destruction’.”85 Having said that, addressing this, in
Operai e capitale, Mario Tronti would later conclude: “the autonomous organization
of the working class … is the real process of demystiication, because it is the material
basis of revolution.”86
Apart from establishing the operaisti critique of the theoretical endeavors in relation
to class struggles, Quaderni rossi supplied the experiment to study how the large
modern factory working was understood through “the essentially social character
of capital’s power” and “the determining role of the working-class struggle in the
dynamism and ruptures which lie at the heart of capitalist relations of production,”
which constituted essential discoveries of operaismo, as Moulier suggests.87 Romano
Alquati, with Romolo Gobbi and Gianfranco Faina laying down the “methodology
of conricerca (joint research)”88 in their studies of two major Italian irms FIAT
and Olivetti, unfolded the “public myths” attached to those irms.89 Having rather
traditional political outlooks in the irst piece by Alquati with studies on FIAT, which
was published in the irst issue of Quaderni rossi, Wright suggests Alquati was shied
back from “extremist conclusions, locating the main problem not in the union’s
function or organizational structure as such, but in the distortions introduced into
85
Alberti Asor Rosa, ‘Il punto di vista operaio e la cultura socialista,’ in Quaderni rossi 2
(1962), 122-3, 125; quoted in ibid.
86
Tronti, Operai e capitale, 37 quoted in ibid. Wright argues Quaderni rossi’s critique of
Della Volpe is incomplete as they failed to see how Della Volpe’s use of Marx’s 1857
“Introduction” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy was lawed. As a
consequence of the uncritical use of “Introduction” by Panzieri and other workerists, Wright
explains the “continual dificulties in disentangling the logical and historical moments of the
critique of political economy.” Ibid., 30. Wright argues that nevertheless the insistence on
categories being historically determinate was a line of thought Della Volpe’s reading of Marx
provided; -referring to Alquati- allowed operaisti to theorise many “determinate abstractions,”
which Wright suggests dividing the group later. Sergio Bologna, however, suggests Wright’s reply
to why Panzieri’s group was divided as “curt, but the little he says is true.” Bologna later touches
on Panzieri’s disapproval of the methods rest of the group was willing to undertake as a
determinate factor, which would also deine the determinate factor of his break from autonomia.
Bologna, review of Storming Heaven, 98-99.
87
Moulier, Introduction to Politics of Subversion, 15.
88
Bologna, review of Storming Heaven, 98. Bologna argues Faina’s contribution to the joint
research was crucial, yet not mentioned. Faina, Bologna reports, “took part in the experiences of
Classe operaia,” the publication where Tronti and Alquatti were major igures after Quaderni rossi
ceases to exists as Panzieri dies in 1964, and its last issue issue is published in 1966, Faina had
relations with anarchist groups who were involved in armed struggles during the 1970s, and put in
jail where he dies in 1981.
89
Wright, Storming Heaven, 53.
112
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these by the interests of the PCI and PSI leadership.”90 On the other hand, with his
work on Olivetti workers, enriched by Tronti and Panzieri’s “relections upon the
labour process,” the new emphasis was placed upon “the relation between workers
and machines.”91 he abandoned view of proletariat as “a class whose rightful place
in command of the labour process had been usurped by a parasitic bourgeois,” was
replaced with the worker who “appears as executor only in the role of ‘fulilling’ the
plan, a role delineated in an abstract, global, generic, but political way.”92 Alquati
continued arguing, “if workers today are ‘executors’, the sense of this word refers
only to their political reiication.”93 Similarly, what Mario Tronti refers to dialectical
materialism’s‘ “fables” in Operai e Capitale, formulated as “the ‘socialist‘ mode of
production will follow the capitalist mode of productive forces (science, technology,
the accumulation of capital) bursts through the chrysalis of obsolete superstructures,
particularly juridical and political ones,”94 was inverted. With their analyses in the
early 1960s, operaisti emphasized the “theme of the refusal to work” as a fundamental
dimension of the class struggle along with the rejection of the utopia of “liberated
labour” with an “image of a working class which is exploited but ‘not submissive.’”95
his would be elaborated in the “Initial hesis” in Tronti’s Operai e Capitale as “he
Strategy of Refusal” as
working class articulation of capitalist development: at irst as
an initiative that is positive for the functioning of the system,
an initiative that only needs to be organized via institutions;
in the second instance, as a ‘No’, a refusal to manage the
mechanism of the society as it stands, merely to improve it - a
‘No’ which is repressed by pure violence.96
With the strike at FIAT in 1962 and the irst major spontaneous strike in Porto
Marghera in 1963, the assessment of what to do after those gigantic strikes leads the
groups’ irst major political crisis. Back then, Tronti saw the biggest threat as “the
true organic integration of the labour unions within the programmed development
of capitalist society.”97 he group formed around similar sentiments, appointed
themselves the roles in those struggles, in terms of their role as intellectuals,
to organize workers’ newspapers in order to go beyond making theoretical
breakthroughs that lack the connection with the actuality of the working class
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
Ibid.
Ibid., 55.
Alquati quoted in Ibid., 56.
Ibid.
Moulier, Introduction to The Politics of Subversion, 19.
Ibid., 24.
Tronti, “The Strategy of Refusal,” 34.
Tronti, “Social Capital,” 109.
Political Framework of “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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struggle. Classe Operai appeared irst in Genoa as a newspaper distributed in front of
factories along with Potere operaio in Milan, Potere operaio di Porto Marghera in Padua,
Gatto selvaggio in Turin.98 his moment signiied the break up with Panzieri. Even
though “he had nonetheless reconciled himself to the view that the existing unions
and parties were no longer ‘a valid instrument for the generation of struggle’;”99
Panzieri distanced himself from “the ‘biological hatred‘ of some in the Turin group
for the left parties and unions.”100
On the other hand, for those who wanted to organize local “workers” editorial stafs
and factory newspapers, the great strikes had opened up a process of a certain nature
that had “more advanced forms of organizations … ones which could break the
conines of the individual workplace.”101 Bologna argues Negri was the most willing
to undertake an “experiment with a new way of doing politics with the working
class,” in contrast to Panzieri whose political objective is argued to produce “a shift
‘within’ the workers’ movement.”102 Negri tried hard to convince Panzieri, Bologna
reports. Regardless, Panzieri would break from the group and continue with Quaderni
rossi. Bologna recalls: “the deinitive break occurred at the beginning of September
1963 in my room in Milan, in a lat that I shared with other two comrades from
the Quaderni rossi group,” which would later reiterate itself with the formation of
movement autonomia operaia (Worker’s autonomy) and dissolution of operaismo.103
4.2.3 Classe operaia
According to Bologna, Quaderni rossi was the place where the language of operaisti
was established, and with Classe operaia this language was taken one step further
in terms of operaisti thinkers’ participation in the struggle.104 Negri, on the other
98
Bologna, “Workerist Publications and Bios,” Lawrence Venuti, trans., in Autonomia:
Post-political Politics, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi 178-181, 179.
99
Wright, Storming Heaven, 61
100
Panzieri, quoted in ibid. On this note, Negri suggests that despite Panzieri’s engagement
and endorsement of the culture of the Left which peaked with Panzieri as, at some point, a leading
igure of the party and had connections with workers’ movements outside Italy; Panzieri had little
practical experience and individual practical involvement in the labour movement. Borio et al.,
eds., Gli operaisti, 240.
101
Wright, Storming Heaven, 58-60. Wright speciically refers to Romolo Gobbi, who
elaborated on sabotage that was preceded by wild cats as:
open struggle was blocked by the unions, the workers, consciously
and collectively coordinated by the worker-technicians, immediately
intensiied sabotage within decisive areas identiied through collective
discussion. After the separate agreement they CONTINUED THIS
STRUGGLE IN MORE HIDDEN BUT POLITICALLY RELEVANT
FORMS [sic]. From Gatto selvaggio, 1963, quoted in ibid.
102
Bologna, Review of Storming Heaven, 99.
103
Ibid.
104
Bologna, “Intervista A Sergio Bologna – 21 Febbraio 2001: 2,” interview with Segio
114
Political Framework of “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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hand, refers Classe operaia as a training which formed and extended the language of
operaismo and led it spread without major theoretical interventions.105 He attributes
those inventions of Classe operaia to theoretical and political inluence of Quaderni
rossi which were infatuated with Socialisme ou Barbarie at most.106
According to Tronti, however, Classe operaia would serve to unite the theory with “all
its exponents: the identiication of the working class with the labour subsumed to
the immediate process of production; an emphasis upon the wage struggle as a key
terrain of political conlict and the insistence that the working class was the driving
force within capitalist society.”107 What Panzieri would criticize as “very Hegelian”: the
reversal of primacy between capital and labour was set out, argues Wright, for the irst
time with “Lenin in England”:
A new era in the class struggle is beginning. he workers
have imposed it on the capitalists, through the violent reality
of their organized strength in the factories. Capital’s power
appears to be stable and solid. … the balance of forces appears
to be weighted against the workers … and yet precisely at
the points where capital’s power appears most dominant, we
see how deeply it is penetrated by this menace, this threat of
the working class. … Capitalist exploitation can impose its
political domination through a hundred and one diferent
forms — but how are we going to sort out the form that will
be taken by the future dictatorship of the workers organized
as the ruling class? his is explosive material; it is intensely
social; we must live it, work from within it, and work patiently
… We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist
development irst, and workers second. his is a mistake. And
now we have to turn the problem on its head, reverse the
polarity, and start again from the beginning: and the beginning
Bologna on 21 February 2001 in Conricerca, http://www.autistici.org/operaismo/bologna/2_1.htm.
105
Negri, Gli operaisti, interview with Negri, 242.
106
Negri, “Intervista A Toni Negri – 13 Luglio 2000: 7” interview with Antonio Negri on 13
July 2000 in Conricerca, http://www.autistici.org/operaismo/negri/7_1.htm.
Socialisme ou Barbearie (1949-1965) was a review published in France as an opposition to
Communist Party of France with Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort being predominant
igures. Like Quaderni rossi, the review was interested in the factory and its advancement as the
industrial mode of production was advancing to a social one. In 1958 the group formed around the
journal would split around debates on the praxis of theory and militancy, again like Quaderni rossi
does. Later operaismo would dissolve as a movement with similar debates. See Andre Liebich,
“Socialisme ou Barbarie: A Radical Critique of Bureaucracy,” in Our Generation 12, no.2 (Fall
1977): 55-62; Marcel van der Linden, “Socialisme ou Barbarie: A French Revolutionary Group
(1949-65), in Left History 5, no.1 (1997): 7-37.
107
Wright, Storming Heaven, 63.
Political Framework of “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
115
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is the class struggle of the working class.108
he detachment from the project of Quaderni rossi comes to the surface as within
Classe operaia, as the group starts seeking ways to translate their critical theories into
the existing working class struggle. his new era brings the problem that sought
answers to how and why intellectuals have been analyzing the “formation of the
industrial proletariat of the 1960s, the passage from countryside to factory,” and
using the theory as a weapon “both as a scientiic lever and as a practical club,” as
in the case of classical operaismo.109 What was ‘revolutionary’ with their attempts
in comparison to prior or already existing class analysis and Marxist schools which
operaisti did not align themselves with? he signiicance of going beyond the history
capital had already, was addressed in Negri’s 1967 paper “Keynes and the Capitalist
heory of the State post-1929,” after Classe operaia ceases, but before the determinate
split between the operaisti:
Unless we grasp this class determinant behind the
transformation of capital and the state, we remain trapped
within bourgeois theory. We must go beyond banal descriptions
of “the process of industrialization”; our starting point is the
identiication of a secular phase of capitalist development in
which the dialectic of exploitation was socialized, leading to
its extension over the entire fabric of political and institutional
relations of the modern state.110
To address the problems with theories the operaisti were working with, Negri was
developing the substratum for analyzing the contemporary autonomous class. His
articulation on the possibility of antagonism beyond the ones that were already
bound to be trapped within bourgeois theory was found in his critique of the
bourgeoisie thought, which would be published in 1970 as Political Descartes. For
Tronti, on the other hand, it was clear that “the existence of groups such as Classe
operaia was symptomatic of the labour movement’s current weakness, and could
only be short-lived.”111 he discourse operaisti articulated was meant to confront and
subvert the Party or the unions. In his 1964 essay “Class and Party” Tronti suggested:
Beyond all the chatter on the concept of autonomy, one
108
Mario Tronti, “Lenin in England,” in Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis: Italian
Marxist Texts of the Theory and Practice of a Class Movement: 1964-79, ed. Red Notes (London:
Red Notes/CSE Books, 1979): 1-6, 1. Originally published as “Lenin in Inghilterra,” in Classe
operaia 1 (January 1964): 89-95. Also a version of the essay can be found as Mario Tronti, “Lenin
in England,” in marxists.org, http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/it/tronti.
htm
109
Wright, Storming Heaven, 81-82.
110
Negri, “Keynes and the Capitalist Theory of the State in 1929,” 9.
111
Wright, Storming Heaven, 86.
116
Political Framework of “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
CHAPTER FOUR
cannot deny that there are some completely current occasions
where tying the union to the party as its transmission belt
seems again the most feasible method of class struggle. But
it is clear that with the exception of these occasions, the belt
tends to break and the relationship [tends to reverse] itself.112
By 1967 Tronti started putting emphasis on the previous entryist policies of the
dissident communists to the party that were lacking a “general perspective truly
alternative to the oicial one,” while observing that “the class was neither strong
enough nor mature enough to overthrow the capital relation, although it was now
possible to manage the latter through the party.”113 As the working class intensiied
their struggle against the State and capital, the form of antagonism Tronti proposed
shifted “from the earlier strategy of workers within and against capital, and
revolutionaries within and against the party,” to “the party inside and against the
state.”114
Classe operaia, a time of apprenticeship according to Negri,115 ended with the
debate on “entryism”: what Asor Rosa calls as vague internal discussions on the
representation of the working class and renewed relationship with the Communist
Party.116 At the end of which, Tronti and his closest associates returned to PCI,
including Cacciari, who, Negri adds, built a political career with a total cynicism
toward the Party after 1969.117
Negri’s perception of the debates happening in Classe operaia on non-existent lines as
theory hardly confronted “things”118 would later be the deining feature of autonomia
with his interest in applying the theory with the militancy in factory to distinguish
his trajectory from his former operaisti circle. However, “while the Northern
workerists were more sanguine than Tronti about the prospects of their continued
organizational autonomy,” Wright argues, “they too saw the revolutionary renovation
of the historic left as an unavoidable task.”119 Wright refers to Negri’s autobiography
where he relects on this as follows:
112
Tronti, “Class and Party,” Alex Diceanu, trans., in libcom.org (2006) http://libcom.org/
book/export/html/30013. Originally published as “Classe e partito” in Operai e capitale (Torino:
Giulio Einaudi editore, 1966): 110-120.
113
Wright, Storming Heaven, 87.
114
Ibid.
115
See Negri, Gli operaisti, interview with Negri, 242-44.
116
Ibid., 60-61,
117
Negri, “Intervista A Toni Negri – 13 Luglio 2000: 6” in Conricerca, http://www.autistici.
org/operaismo/negri/6_1.htm.
118
Negri, Gli operaisti, interview with Negri, 242.
119
Wright, Storming Heaven, 87.
Political Framework of “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
117
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hroughout those years our conviction was that, given a
determinate level of consistent crises and the construction of
[new] moments of organization, the oicial labour movement
would line up within the revolutionary process. It would
be forced to. What a frightening error! How ingenious and
myopic on our part.120
Tronti would refer to the error, on behalf of Negri’s, as “the radicalization of discourse
on the autonomy of the political from the early 70s was born from this failure of the
insurrectionary movements, from the workers’ struggles to the youth revolt, that had
spanned the decade of the 60s,”121 and says:
‘Workers without allies’, cried the title of Classe operaia in
March 1964, which had an editorial by Negri. hat was a
mistake. he system of alliances—employees, middle classes,
Red Emilia—that the oicial workers’ movement had built
on the basis of an advanced pre-capitalism certainly needed to
be criticized and opposed. But a new system of alliances was
coming into view within developed capitalism, with the new
professionals emerging from the context of mass production,
the consequent expansion of the market and spread of
consumption, and the civil transformations and cultural shifts
under way in the country.122
4.2.4 Contropiano
In the midst of such debates Contropiano was found by -with Mario Tronti in the
120
Negri, Pipe-line: Lettere de Rebibbia (Turin: Einaudi, 1983), 98; quoted in ibid.
Similarly, Bologna recalls their self-assigned roles as ‘service providers’ for the decentralized
movement, since they assumed as intellectuals they would be capable of offering the movement a
better understanding of itself. However there are traces of regrets coming from the fact that they
were convinced within the body of the working class there was already full knowledge of
liberation, wisdom, solidarity, cohesion, rebellion. See Bologna, “Intervista A Sergio Bologna – 21
Febbraio 2001: 12,” interview with Sergio Bologna, in Conricerca, http://www.autistici.org/
operaismo/bologna/12_1.htm. In the light of Bologna’s comments, the apologetic voice of Negri
seems to join the mourning over the intellectuals’ biased perception of the working class and their
struggle. On this note, for those who are cynical about Negri’s and/or Bologna’s contemporary
relections on their relation with the movement autonomia, it is worth reminding that, in addition
to Negri’s career as an academic, Bologna was working as a director at Pubblicitá e Stempa della
Olivetti in Milan; the forefront in Europe for graphics and advertising back then: a company that is
argued to be writing the history of advertising in Europe by Bologna. He suggests he left the
company voluntarily after being transferred twice for indiscipline and maladjustment in the same
interview where he refers to the lack of knowledge of liberation, wisdom, solidarity, cohesion,
rebellion amongst the working class.
121
Tronti, “Our Operaismo,” 134.
122
Ibid., 138.
118
Political Framework of “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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background-: Asor Rosa, who was a member of PCI back then, and had always
committed “to an operaista direction within the party;” Negri, who would leave the
journal after its irst issue; and Cacciari who was in his mid-20s, being the youngest
member of the editorial board, known to have been actively involved in “factory
agitation and other working-class ights since 1968.”123
Tronti refers Contropiano as the completion of the cultural framework of operaismo
with reference to the articulation of the “negative thought” and the culture of
crisis, which were opened by Classe operaia and his Operai e capitale.124 Especially
by Cacciari, Tronti’s use of intellectual inquiry as a negative thought was grown,
deepened, brought forward and revisited in a unique way.125 his and the question of
the real signiicance of the Italian 1968 and 1969 characterized the cultural project
of the magazine in the longer term clearer than former operaisti publications. Later,
those would pin down the dissolution of the group in terms of their understanding
of what was opened up in Italy after 1968 as well as the roles the members of the
editorial board and contributors ascribed themselves to within the state of things in
Italy.
Negri’s departure from the magazine is reported by Asor Rosa as a consequence of
1968 which “shook the world upside down.”126 Negri eventually perceived the journal
merely as “a tool of long-term debates.”127 Asor Rosa elaborates on Negri’s departure
from the magazine as follows:
he pretext was the publication, on the second issue, of an
essay by Mario Tronti [he Party as a Problem]. Negri, to
stay in the group of editors, demanded that this essay should
not be published: coherently, when the other two editors
defended and imposed the opposite, he left … what had
divided us was the interpretation to give to the students’ and
workers’ struggles which had started in Italy and in Europe.
Negri explicitly considered these to be the beginnings of a prerevolutionary process: we on the other hand, while accepting
their importance, thought that the fortress of bourgeois and
capitalistic defense demanded a far longer and articulated
process, to be built also by means of theoretical argumentations
123
Patrizia Lombardo, introduction to Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of
Modern Architecture by Massimo Cacciari: “The Philosophy of the City,” (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1993): ix-lviii, xv-xvii.
124
Tronti, Gli operaisti, interview with Tronti, 301-302.
125
Ibid.
126
Asor Rosa, “Critique of ideology and historical practice,” 29.
127
Ibid.
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(plus or course of militant organization).128
According to Asor Rosa, after Negri’s departure from the editorial group,
Contropiano, which was emerging without an editorial statement nor any explanation
of its aims, “took on the violent and exhilarating overtones of the movement then
underway.”129 In the second issue published without Negri amongst the editors,
Asor Rosa and Cacciari postulated two lines of research Contropiano with “Primo
Bilancio,” (“First Assessment”) via their description of the status of the magazine.130
hey insisted on “the analysis of the questions to do with class struggle, both at
an historical-theoretical level and at a contemporary-militant level … and on the
other hand, the analysis of the ideal and cultural superstructures of mass capitalistic
society:” the former being referred as “workers’ science” and the latter “critique of
ideology.”131
Contropiano published its last issue with a set of indices in the very last pages of
the magazine.132 “Index of Articles by heme,” and “Index of Articles by Author,”
were revealing “the political and social climate out of which Contropiano’s articles
emerged and how the magazine responded to its contemporary context.”133 However,
apart from positing the editors’ “commitment to the grounding of the theoretical
in the material;”134 what those indices revealed by the way the editors conclude
the magazine: it was the case that Contropiano was shaped mostly by addressing its
contemporary context, rather than a plan which the editors committed themselves
to from the start, unlike prior publications of the operaisti such as Quaderni rossi and
Classe operaia.
Contropiano was the magazine where Manfredo Tafuri along with Cacciari, Francesco
Dal Co not only adopted but also contributed to the operaisti discourse, while the
movement of the 1960s was undergoing substantial shifts.135 While the magazine was
128
Ibid.
129
Ibid.
130
See “Primo bilancio,” in Contropiano 2 (1968): 237-244. With this “irst assessment” the
editors, Cacciari and Asor Rosa make, bringing attention to the class issues was set as the initial
goal. Apart from Negri’s second and last essay published in Contropiano was in this second issue:
“Marx sul circlo e la crisi: note,” in Contropiano 2 (1968): 247-296.
131
Asor Rosa, “Critique of ideology and historical practice,” 29.
132
Colomina, et. al., eds., Clip Stamp Fold, 125.
133
Ibid.
134
Ibid.
135
In 1969, Paolo Portoghesi founded Controspazio, which is referred as the “principal gobetween in Italy for the diffusion of Postmodernism.” (See Valentina Croci, “The Italian Architectural Press,” trans. Paul David Blackmore in Architectural Design 77 no. 3 (2007): 106-107.
It is a fair call to suggest that Tafuri’s intellectual activity greatly inluenced Controspazio and
Portoghesi in their ideological opposition to Contropiano. Editorial style in this magazine “demonstrated a precise editorial approach in the selection of topics dealt with and their own recognizable
120
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not particularly an architecture magazine, however with contributions by Cacciari,
Dal Co and especially Tafuri, the magazine would later have “a profound inluence
on the architectural debate in Europe and in the United States.”136 With the debates
on praxis of ighting against and within capitalism; the magazine and its editorial
board re-visited the operaisti discourse and provided the ground for their further
engagement as intellectuals in the1970s.
Cacciari believed the magazine to be the “Trojan horse of Potere operaio into the
walls of the organized labour movement.”137 Ironically, this analogy which is used to
describe how Cacciari perceived Contropiano, is similar to how Tronti perceives the
aftermath of their eforts in the late 1960s after Classe operaia. Except in Tronti’s 2012
version, intellectuals and their eforts are the Trojan horses of neo-capitalism:
Capital would need a new levy of political professionals, armed
with a diferent cultural tradition—yet to be constructed—
and with new intellectual tools. his would be a igure brought
up to date for neo-capitalism, a combined specialist-cumcritical style.” (Ibid.) Tafuri, in his 1969 essay, refers to Controspazio indirectly as he argues that
“there can be no proposals of architectural ‘anti-spaces’: any search for an alternative within the
structures determining the mystiication of planning is an obvious contradiction in terms.” (Tafuri,
“Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” 33). As Stephen Sartorelli reminds us, the Italian
word used by Tafuri for “anti-space” was controspazi, which was an “obvious polemical reference
to the polemical contemporary architectural journal, Controspazio” (Translator’s note in ibid., 35).
136
See the Contropiano entry in Colomina, et al., eds., Clip Stamp Fold, 106. Before Tafuri,
Dal Co had published an essay on the critique of ideology of modern architecture: “Note per la
critica dell’ideologia della architettura moderna: da Weimar a Dessau,” in Contropiano 1 (1968):
153-170 (Asor Rosa draws our attention to the particularly signiicant titles of Dal Co’s piece and
Tafuri’s essay) and also “Riscoperta del marxismo e problematica di classe nel movimento
studentesco tedesco: Rudi Dutschke,” in Contropiano 2 (1968): 423-446. Some of Cacciari’s early
essays published in Contropiano are “Dialettica e tradizione” in Contropiano 1 (1968): 125-152;
“Forza lavoro e/o classe operaia nel revisionismo italiano,” in Contropiano 2: 447-454; “La
Comune di maggio,” in ibid.; “Sviluppo capitalistico e ciclo delle lotte. La Montecatini-Edison di
Porto Marghera,” in Contropiano 3 (1968): 579-628; “Sulla genesi del pensiero negativo,” in
Contropiano 1 (1969): 131-200; see also “Vita Cartesii est simplicissima,” in Contropiano 2
(1970): 375-399. As Day notes, his essay on negative thought: “Sulla genesi del pensiero
negativo,” becomes the basis of his book Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern
Architecture. Marco De Michelis also contributed to the architectural strand of the magazine with
Marco Venturi “Il centro direzionale di Bologna: la gestione del problema urbano nel P.C.I.,” in
Contropiano 3 (1968); “La via urbanistica al socilaismo,” in Contropiano 1 (1969).
137
Alessandro Carrera, introduction to The Unpolitical: On the Radical Critique of Political
Reason: “On Massimo Cacciari’s Disenchanted Activism,” (New York: Fordham University
Press): 1-44, 6. Potere operaio was an organization and a newspaper which Negri would actively
participate in their foundation from 1969 to 1973. According to Negri, Contropiano was an attempt
to hold together the intellectual discourse that was, to some extent, independent from Potere
operaio and the factory, and regardless the almost-academic discourse of the magazine- even with
relays of the university- was still considered extremely important in the production of a cultural
discourse. Negri, “Intervista A Toni Negri – 13 Luglio 2000: 6” in Conricerca, http://www.
autistici.org/operaismo/negri/6_1.htm.
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politician, able to operate skillfully within the contingencies
of the disorder to come.138
“Modernization of 1968 and the dawning post-modernity of 1977,” was already
anticipated by the workers in the factories of Olivetti and FIAT in the early
1960s.139 Tronti argues that “the appearance of 1968,” which was anti-authoritarian
in character, was extinguished and absorbed in individuals and got diverted and
bastardized in groups.140 Similarly, apart from its successful attempt to break with
Marxist orthodoxy, operaisti’s attempt at a cultural revolution, which was mostly
signiicant through Contropiano, hardly went beyond producing “signiicant
intellectual igures” rather than determining historical events:141 “To criticize power
is one thing, to put it in crisis is another.”142 As in his relection to the 1960s,
“emancipation of the individual led to the restoration of the old balance of forces,
now burnished with some new reforms:” Tronti suggests operaisti were the “sacriicial
victims in this process.”143 Referring back to operaismo, he accepts defeat, saying:
It emerged at the exact moment of transition when the
tragic greatness of the century turned on itself, moving from
a permanent state of exception to new ‘normal’, epochless
time. Looking back on the 1960s, we can see those years had
a transitional function. he maximum disorder renewed the
existing order. Everything changed so that everything essential
could stay the same.144
4.2.4.1 Beyond Contropiano
Intellectuals were not blind to the roles they were ascribed by the capitalist
development back then. In fact what lead to the dissolution of operaismo in the
late 1960s and the early 1970s can be understood in relation to the intellectuals’
acknowledgement of their roles and their theoretical endeavors which were shaped
within the discourse of the operaisti. Operaismo versus autonomia dichotomy is
mostly approached via Tronti and Negri in terms of strategies and tactics they adopt
and promote after 1968. However to demonstrate the split between the operaisti,
the conlicting views of Cacciari and Negri, which Contropiano facilitated for those
views to come to surface, is equally important. his does not only provide us a
deeper insight to the political framework of the Italy in the 1960s and the 1970s,
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
122
Tronti, “Our Operaismo,” 136.
Ibid., 138.
Ibid., 133.
Ibid., 131.
Ibid., 127.
Ibid., 127-28.
Ibid., 126.
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but also a better apprehension of the fundamental departure of the operaisti with the
transformation of the project Contropiano is assigned to.
he debate between Cacciari and Negri culminates with Cacciari’s decision to join
the PCI, however their conlicting views date back to an earlier debate after Negri’s
departure from Contropiano and advancement of his thoughts on mass worker in
the aftermath of 1968. his debate demonstrates the two predominant igures’
opposing stance regarding their attempts to agitate the workers in front of the
factories from the early 1960s until the events of 1968. It is worth mentioning, as it
also demonstrates how operaisti diverged in their understanding of their intellectual
endeavors within a political framework that was determined to expose contradictions
of the working class struggle for being the protagonist of the capitalist development
within the plan of the capital.
Negri publishes Political Descartes, “immediately following 1968,” as he says.145 His
book, which was written irst for an academic qualiication, came as a surprise to the
fellow operaisti as it was not clear what a “Marxist” could do with Descartes.146 On
this note, Negri describes his concern prior to 1968 as “the analysis of the political
movements of the workers and the critical excavation of Marxism.”147 By drawing
the connection between his prior concern and the relevance of the context of 1968
to study Descartes, Negri posits that Descartes developed his own philosophy “in the
very midst of that period of social and political transition that forms modernity.”148
Referring to the bourgeois, who confronted power of the State, Negri believed the
context in which Descartes developed his philosophy constituted the “process of crisis
which bears many analogies,” to the one that was opened up after 1968:
he historical period Descartes lived through is referred
to as the epoch of the construction of the Renaissance and
the irst forms of bourgeois government and concluding
with the deinition of the Absolutist state. In that period,
the revolutionary process of the bourgeoisie … underwent a
grave crisis … the collapse of the ideological model that had
nourished the irst revolutionary insurgencies, accompanied
however by the persistence of the unstoppable and irreversible
productive and social force of the new historical subjects:
whence the crisis.149
145
Negri, postface to the English edition of Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology and the
Bourgeois Project (London and New York: Verso, 2006): 317-338, 317.
146
Ibid.
147
Ibid.
148
Ibid., 320.
149
Ibid., 320-321.
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he relevance of the critique of ideology and Negri’s interest in Descartes was
found in the proposition that the hypothesis of the “reasonable ideology.” his was
in reaction to the crisis that deined the genesis of modernity and determined the
autonomy of bourgeois reason “I think,” via presenting itself as the “hegemonic class,
capable of constructing a new civilization,” as it recognized the foundation of that
civilization as “a new productive force -that of labour.”150 he open and reformist
project, Negri argues, “would allow bourgeoisie to develop the idea of progress and,
little by little, to broaden its hegemony within new structures of the Absolutist
state.”151 he idea of freedom which was introduced by the humanist revolution was
under threat with the “overpowering arrogance of the reigning aristocracies and the
continuity of the patrimonial and charismatic monarchical order, but also, and above
all, by the uprisings and revolutions of the new peasant and artisan multitudes.”152
Descartes’ philosophy in this picture was read as a reasonable ideology, “rooted in the
awareness of the actual relationships of forces and the progressive possibilities that
could potentially open up to that new social body and to that truth.”153
In 1970, Cacciari would reject “Negri’s framing of Descartes’ relationship to
Renaissance humanism,” in his essay published in Contropiano “Vita Cartesii est
simplicissima” (“‘he Cartesian Life is the Simplest”): a joint review of “Negri’s
text along with Lacan’s Écrits, Chomsky’s Cartesian Linguistics and a text by Max
Bense.”154 Matteo Mandarini and Alberto Toscano explain this due to the diferent
methodological choices in the approaches of Negri and Cacciari to the history of
philosophy, which were determined by the political motivations at stake.155 Where
Cacciari posed “the role of the party and workers’ movement as assuming a kind of
transcendent potestas over the process of rationalization,” Negri airmed “proletarian
potentia, immanently creating its world” with his reading of real subsumption.156
According to Cacciari, Negri was maintaining “the thematic of a humanist nostalgia,”
which did not do justice to “Descartes’s role in opening up the potent, airmative
movement of a rationalization and disenchantment of the world.”157 his was in
response to Negri framing Descartes’ relationship to Renaissance humanism to be
the “formulation of the bourgeois project as an attempt to rekindle the Renaissance
hope in a possession of the world whilst accepting the reality of defeat and the
150
Ibid., 322.
151
Ibid., 322-23.
152
Ibid., 322.
153
Ibid., 323.
154
Matteo Mandarini and Alberto Toscano, translator’s introduction to Political Descartes:
“Antonio Negri and the Antinomies of Bourgeois Thought”: 1-25, 16.
155
Ibid., 18.
156
Ibid.
157
Ibid., 17.
124
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new conditions this defeat had brought into being.”158 For Cacciari, on the other
hand, confronting with the state of things in capitalism was meant to happen with
a diferent approach than Negri’s. Cacciari, “from an airmation of the inevitable
and irreversible character of the process of rationalization,” according to Mandarini
and Toscano, “drew the conclusion that the political task of the working class and its
leadership was not that of airming its own needs and constructing its own world
through organization and revolution.”159 Cacciari believed, argue Mandarini and
Toscano, the working class needed to prove itself as “more eicacious than capitalists
in dominating the process of rationalization, establishing its political command
over a process whose technological coordinates and demands were not immediately
politicizable,” which was “profoundly linked to a theme that would pit Cacciari and
his cohorts against Negri throughout the 1970s and onwards, that of the autonomy of
the political.”160
Negri’s attempts to “diagram the historical force-ields and antagonistic conjunctures
wherein a given metaphysics is produced,” was conlicting with Cacciari’s treatment
to political character of Cartesian caesura in terms of “epochal terms.”161 Espousing
“Heideggerian epic of the metaphysics of modern subjectivity,”162 Mandarini
and Toscano argue, “Cacciari and other PCI intellectuals” depended on “the
presupposition of an ‘essential simple line running through the historical contexts,’
on a metaphysics of ‘the West’ which is marked by radical disenchantment.”163 As
according to Cacciari, in a state of mere nostalgia, autonomists like Negri, were
refusing making the autonomy of the political conined in the metaphysical ‘iron
cage’.164 On the other hand, “negative thought” which Cacciari articulated on
predominantly, was “so resolutely committed to a Heideggerian understanding of
the link between metaphysics, technology, mathesis and rationality that it takes on a
decidedly determinist or necessitarian hue.”165
Referring to Étienne Balibar’s elaboration on the “philosophical panorama presented
in Heidegger’s Nietzsche,” Mandarini and Toscano articulate the “standpoint of
political ontology” that was found in autonomia with reference to Negri’s Political
Descartes.166 Balibar argues, as reposted by Mandarini and Toscano, by referring
to the tradition from Kant to Hegel to Husserl to Lukács: that the tradition
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
Ibid., 16.
Ibid., 18.
Ibid., 17-18.
Ibid., 18.
Ibid.
Ibid., 19.
Ibid., 19.
Ibid., 18.
Ibid., 19-21.
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which “repeatedly asserts” Descartes for the philosophy of becoming conscious of
“subjectivity” and putting “the subject” at the centre of the universe, “was forged
by the systems, the philosophies of history and the teaching of philosophy in the
nineteenth century.”167 Mandarini and Toscano argue that Negri touched on the
“‘epistemological’ issue of separation and correlation of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ and
transcended “Balibar’s potent philological rectiication.”168 By doing so, Negri
identiied that “the subject of science and of metaphysics which is isolated by
Heidegger and Cacciari is in a sense a by-product of the precarious and ambiguous
solution that Descartes gives to the problem of a historical and material subject: the
bourgeoisie.169
In this picture, Negri’s efort in the 1970s needs to be understood in terms of
confronting the traces of the Cartesian solution in his own version of autonomy. His
efort would reach to its limit by in April 7, 1979 Antonio Negri would be arrested
on the charges including being the mastermind behind the assassination of the
former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro. As of 1976, Negri’s and Cacciari’s political
engagements diverge completely and Cacciari’s career as a politician starts after
joining PCI in 1976. But how does someone who adopts a critique of the institutions
of capitalist development, and especially the Party become a successful politician in
PCI?170 he answer to this question lies within the articulation of “negative thought”.
negative thought
Mandarini, in his paper “Beyond Nihilism,” argues that by 1976 Cacciari’s early
articulations on “negative thought,” which more or less started taking shape in his
1969 Contropiano article “Sulla genesi del pensiero negativo” (“On the origins of
negative thought”), reached the concept of “pansiero debole” (“weak thought”)
and was adopted by some of the leading intellectuals of the PCI including Cacciari
himself.171 he contrasting position between Negri and Cacciari would reach its
climax by this date, marking the “point of irreducible conlict between two tendencies
within Italian communist philosophy and politics.”172
Mandarini presents “negative thought” as the instrument articulated by Cacciari,
167
Ibid., 20.
168
Ibid., 21.
169
Ibid., 21.
170
In Chapter Three, I cited Tafuri about his decision to join PCI where he pointed out how
unexpected it was for him and for Cacciari to do so in light of the critical attitude they had against
PCI. However, contrasting with Cacciari, Tafuri joins the party after 1968 and leaves it before
1976; the year PCI starts considering the “historical compromise.”
171
Matteo Mandarini, “Beyond Nihilism: Notes Towards a Critique of Left-Heidegerrianism
in Italian Philosophy of the 1970s,” in Cosmos and History:The Journal of Natural and Social
Philosophy 5, no.1 (2009): 37-56, 38.
172
Ibid., 39.
126
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along with Tronti, to rule out “any possible synthesis turned, in the 1970s, into an
analysis of the means for the technocratic construction of ‘new orders,’ founded on
nothingness and crisis.”173 He observes the operaisti thinkers’ shift from the centrality
of the working-class political subjects’ antagonism towards capitalist society to “a
‘revolution from above’ for the management of development by the representatives of
the working class.”174 He argues, the tendency which had been stitched since the late
1960s as a line “leading from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche through to Wittgenstein
and Heidegger that wove together Das Grundlose of being with the trajectory of
nihilism,” transigured “the foundation by stripping down being and, ultimately,
authorizing philosophical mysticism and political opportunism.”175
Both for Negri and Cacciari, the Hegelian dialectic represented the “highpoint in the
victorious and expansive cycle of capitalist development, in which all contradictions,
all conlicts are turned directly into productive moments of capital’s advance as the
self-realization of Spirit.”176 Mandarini suggests the concept of negative thought was
developed in “the nineteenth century by bourgeois theorists such as Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche and Mach, and in the twentieth century by Wittgenstein and Heidegger
amongst others” in contrast to Hegel’s “virtuous” dialectic.177 Mandarini says Hegel’s
“positivation of the negative,” was the engine of the production-consumption circuit
as a disciplined moment, a systematic and integral moment of the “determinate
negation,” and argues that with the concept developed, the circuit of Geist was
interfered. On this note, according to Mandarini, “negative thought” was coined
in the late 1960s in order to diferentiate it from that engine: Hegel’s dialectic’s
“positivation of the negative.”178
Alessandro Carrera provides an insight to Cacciari’s 1969 essay “On the origins
of negative thought,” which was published in the same issue of Contropiano with
Tafuri’s “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology.” In the essay, Cacciari posits
Schopenhauer as the irst philosopher who addressed “negative thought.”179 hrough
173
Ibid.
174
Ibid.
175
Ibid., 38. Mandarini’s paper is an elaboration on this mysticism of the “LeftHeidegerianism,” a label he borrows from Negri. However, Mandarini does not necessarily posit
Negri as a counter igure to Cacciari. Though at the time of debates happening in the 1970s
between Negri and Cacciari; it is fair to assume them representing conlicting poles and different
positions in terms of the application of “the negative thought.” However after Negri’s
imprisonment and exile days, Mandarini suggests Negri’s intellectual endeavor achieved a
“thought and practice of the negative that would integrate the lessons of negative thought while
refusing the logic of integration and the correlative state-terrorist repression.” Ibid., 52.
176
Ibid., 40.
177
Ibid.
178
Ibid.
179
Carrera, “On Massimo Cacciari’s Disenchanted Activism,” 9.
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Schopenhauer, who addresses all the ramiications of “negative thought,” Cacciari
understands “negative thought” as a mean to strive to develop “a system that aims
to be more consistent than dialectics” that exposes the “contradiction” it possess
(the Hegelian dialectics; the contradiction between subject and object) rather than
attempting to “overcome” it.180 Cacciari formulates: “he form of the dialectic is the
form of the negative that is airmed positively- the recoverable contradiction. he
whole system posits itself and maintains itself in terms [nel segno] of negativity: a
movement of universal alienation is true-real [vera-reale] totality.”181
Hence contradiction is not understood as “an aporia” or “an anomaly” in
Schopenhauer’s “reactionary point of view:” “It can be denied only ideologically, by
overlooking life’s violent aspect.”182 For Schopenhauer, however, life results in selfdenial where for Cacciari, and in his appropriation of the “negative thought,” for
contradiction is meant to be lived.183 In this light, Cacciari turns to Kierkegaard as
he demonstrates that “Schopenhauer, as long as he is still convinced that it is possible
to achieve freedom from the evils of life, is still an optimistic bourgeois.”184 For
Kierkegaard, the “man[sic]” needs no intention to “free the world from the evil,” as it
would be an “impossible abstraction.”185 Positing religious faith as the only moment
of realization of dialectics with “not by reconciliation but by annihilating one of its
opposites;” Kierkegaardian “individual” is still found within a society where faith has
practical consequences both in personal and collective lives.186
Cacciari’s narration of the story of “negative thought” reaches to its fulillment
only in Nietzsche, with the dialectical synthesis “once devoid of any moralistic or
metaphysical value, is reduced to pure immanence without justiication.”187 Along
with Max Weber’s “disenchanted intellectual,” Nietzsche’s Übermensch constitute
the Nietzschean-Weberian system which “wants only power; it is the will to power
incarnate.”188 he aristocratic distance of Nietzsche’s Übermensch is annihilated in
Weber’s demand of “an active tole for his intellectual and/or politician.189 Carrera
narrates the formation of Cacciari’s “negative thought” via Nietzsche as follows:
180
Ibid.
181
Massimo Cacciari, “Sulla genesi del pensiero negativo,” in Contropiano 1 (1969), 131.
Translation by Matteo Mandarini in “Beyond Nihilism,” 39-40. Brackets and emphases by the
translator
182
Carrera, “On Massimo Cacciari’s Disenchanted Activism,” 10.
183
Ibid.
184
Ibid.
185
Ibid.
186
Ibid.
187
Ibid.
188
Ibid., 11.
189
Ibid.
128
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he ruler of the Weberian “administered world” has no time
for systems of values that are not functional to the stage
reached by the capitalistic organization. he Protestant phase
of capitalism is over, and the system is on the way of becoming
a pure manifestation of power. Nietzsche knew that already.
No transcendence is left outside the system. As a matter of
fact, there is no outside. he situation is unprecedented, but
it captures perfectly the tragedy of capitalism’s mature phase.
he will to power is the new substance, the new perfect
form. Life is not synthesis, but will- toward domination and
incorporation. … his is the meaning of Nietzsche’s eternal
return: the capitalistic system has now taken the place of the
tragic destiny.190
Even though Cacciari was able to give an account for the “history of negative
thought,” in his essay, Carrera says that from 1969 onwards for ten years, Cacciari
struggled with his arguments’ aporia.191 Carrera points out that Cacciari’s account
of the “history of negative thought” was strongly deterministic; without any
autonomy left to the authors he appropriates within the historical phase of capitalistic
development; and it “annihilates the very possibility of theoretical and social
antagonism.”192
One of the lines of attacking to Cacciari’s articulation on “negative thought” was
in the incapability of his narration to explain the determinism embedded in the
history of the negative thought. Against those who assumed negative thought
possessing a mysticism of attempting to express what is inexpressible to reach what is
unconditioned, Carrera reports that Cacciari accused Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari
of being intellectually indecent “on the account of their claim to an immediacy
of thought.”193 his is not what negative thought stands for, for Cacciari. Instead,
Cacciari believed “every set is limited, but there is no game outside the game, no
privileged position from which one can look at the whole system and decide to
change it without being afected by the change.”194 Hence he concludes that “our
language games cannot be ‘situated’ … ontologically.”195 Mandarini reports that
for Cacciari, “the rational lacks all exogenous foundation. here is no Ratio to be
sought in the world -all we have is a proliferation of rationalities, of ‘language games,’
of ideological structures irreducible one to another, that are circumscribed by a
190
191
192
193
194
195
Ibid.
Ibid., 12.
Ibid.
Ibid., 12.
Ibid., 12-13.
Mandarini, “Beyond Nihilism,” 41.
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nothingness.”196
he polemical objective of Cacciari’s application of negative thought into his politics
was “not-so-hidden” as Carrera argues: it was against “Negri’s ‘total autonomy’ of the
revolutionary subject- which Cacciari discarded as mere mythology.”197 In 1978 he
would conclude that:
Let us therefore, understand the autonomy of each technology,
of each game, to mean that it possesses only one-law-of-itsown [una-propria-legge] (which is the result of an ininity of
variations, which has been played and re-played, which is
transformable and in-transformation because it is played). Let
us understand the term ‘autonomy’ in this sense of limit.198
196
Ibid.
197
Carrera, “On Massimo Cacciari’s Disenchanted Activism,” 13.
198
Massimo Cacciari, “Critica della ‘autonomia’ e problema del politico,” in Crisi del sapere
e nuova razionalità, ed. V.F. Ghisi (Bari: De Donato, 1978): 123-35, 131. Translated and quoted in
Mandarini, “Beyond Nihilism,” 42. Brackets and emphases by Mandarini. Pier Vittorio Aureli’s
Absolute Architecture is praised and marketed with Peter Eisenman’s review on the back cover of
the book:
What at irst glance appears to be a book of architectural history is in
fact a radical attack on theory, sweeping away the foundations of
current thought in its wake. Aureli’s work stands against the forces of
an unlimited urbanization, proposing an idea of absolute architecture
as a confrontation with the forces of global capital. A must read for
those passionate about architecture and its future.
In light of the critique Tafuri delivered in 1969, and Tafuri’s reiteration of his critique in the
preface of Architecture and Utopia in relation to how it is approached by some of his readers: as a
call to retreat to pure form; may irst trouble us to be convinced by Eisenman’s claim and also to
convince ourselves what Eisenman is claiming can be Aureli’s intention, considering the fact that
Aureli neither confronts nor refutes Tafuri’s criticism and analysis in any of his inquiries into
Tafuri’s works. However, in the light of Cacciari’s elaboration on “negative thought,” and the
relation between Cacciari’s and Tafuri’s projects’ which are drawn in the 1970s, and given
emphasis on by Tafuri’s audience, Aureli’s notion of “absolute architecture” seems to ind its
precursors. Here is Aureli’s deinition of “absolute architecture,” for the reader who might be
interested:
An absolute architecture is one that recognizes whether these limits
are a product (and a camoulage) of economic exploitation (such as the
enclaves determined by uneven economic redistribution) or whether
they are the pattern of an ideological will to separation within the
common space of the city. Instead of dreaming of a perfectly
integrated society that can only be achieved as the supreme realization
of urbanization and its avatar, capitalism, an absolute architecture
must recognize the political separateness that can potentially, within
the sea of urbanization, be manifest through the borders that deine the
possibility of the city. Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute
Architecture, 45.
130
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“After the great tides of 1968 and 1969 began to recede, operaismo needed a strong
theory of counterplan in order to oppose capitalistic planning,” explains Carrera
in their account of Cacciari’s decision to join PCI later in 1976.199 his, Carrera
suggests, created even “more of a fuss than Tronti’s retreat.”200 1976 seems to be the
“breakthrough” year for Cacciari as it is the year he would also publish Krisis (Crisis);
irst of Cacciari’s “negative thought trilogy” the other two being: Pensiero negativo e
razionalizzazione in 1977 (Negative hought and Rationalization) and Dallo Steinhof
in 1980 (Translated into English as Posthumous Men in 1996). he validity of the
application of “negative thought” in the working class struggle was demonstrated
through the “historical efectiveness of negative thought” as well as “its intrinsic
rationality,” in Krisis.201 Against Cacciari and his Krisis, Carrera records that
Marxists who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s reading Lukács
and Adorno were outraged. Even worse, they felt bypassed.
he respected poet and essayist Franco Fortini went as far as
to call Cacciari and some other young philosophers the ‘last
Cains,’ eager to prostrate before the violence of history in
order to sole their Oedipal problems with their own bourgeois
upbringing.202
In response to Cacciari, Negri would publish his critical review of Krisis in the Italian
journal aut aut.203 Echoing with Gianni Vattimo according to whom Cacciari chose
“speculative abstraction at the expense of revolutionary praxis,” Negri “accused
Cacciari of mysticism pure and simple” as “it was based on an assumption of
naturalness about the economic datum:”
It celebrated the organization of labour as a pure game devoid
of any values, but forgot to explain how the capitalistic division
between value and labour was determined in the irst place.
Cacciari, in Negri’s opinion, was turning into one of those
negative thinkers he was writing about- a negative theologian
of bourgeois humanism, ready to brush aside the question of
labour because he was fearful of its revolutionary power.204
Mandarini argues that Negri makes it clear in response to Cacciari’s Krisis that
“what we are left with is a calculable and manipulable set of elements, circumscribed
by nothingness that delimits the serialized elements into language-games or
199
200
201
202
203
204
Carrera, “On Massimo Cacciari’s Disenchanted Activism,” 6.
Ibid., 6-7.
Ibid., 9.
Franco Fortini, “Gli ultimi Cainiti,” in Questioni di frontiera, 91-106; quoted in ibid., 9;
Mandarini, “Beyond Nihilism,” 38.
Carrera, “On Massimo Cacciari’s Disenchanted Activism,” 13.
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rationalization procedures, all of which are organized by a political decisionism.”205
Mandarini cites from Tronti to underline what Negri refers to with “political
decisionism.”206 It determines:
… historical necessity … of a political class and a professional
political class to which the management [gestione] of power
is to be entrusted … In this way arises the moment of a war
maneuver [guerra manovrata], made-up of successive moves,
all of which are scientiically calculated [previste] and tactically
prepared.207
Tronti’s uncanny argument that sweeps away the seminal operaisti critique which
was evolved around the centrality of the working class itself within working class
struggles; along with Cacciari’s almost total abandonment of radical politics of the
1960s; stand on a “de-ontologized, even skeletal grasp of actuality (Wirklichkeit),”
Mandarini argues.208 He asks:
How else is the autonomy of the political to be understood
if not as the decisionistic management of the multiplicity
of fragmentary rationalities, as the working class -in the
form of the PCI- taking control of the administration of the
state, making up for a ‘deiciency in rationalization … the
ineiciency of the political apparatus? 209
In his answer, Mandarini refers to Sergio Givone and suggests that “it is only
once one has abandoned faith in a political subject as foundation of revolutionary
political change that one can rediscover a professional political class that can take
over the administration of the actual to bring change from above.”210 In the light
205
Mandarini, “Beyond Nihilism,” 45.
206
Ibid. Political decisionism, according to Negri, is what we are left with Cacciari’s version
of nihilism which is faithful to Heidegger with his denial of a whether ethical or logical pre-given.
The “calculable and manipulable set of elements, circumscribed by nothingness that delimits the
serialized elements into language-games or rationalization procedures” are organized by “Will to
Power,” “Will to Rationalization,” that determine the political determinism. Mandarini refers it as
“to employ ‘mysticism’ for the task of a political technics.” Ibid., 44-45.
207
Ibid., 45; Mario Tronti, Sull’autonomia del politico (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1977), 17-18.
Translation, brackets and emphasis by Mandarini.
208
Mandarini, “Beyond Nihilism,” 42.
209
Ibid.
210
Ibid. Cacciari was successful to some extent in his politics after his departure from the
radical threads of operaismo, as after joining PCI, he served as a representative to the Italian
Parliament from 1976 to 1983. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he saw “the broad ideological
changes” which the oficial Left was “reluctant to accept” and he decided to act “at the grassroots
level” and was elected as mayor of Venice from 1993 to 2000 and 2005 to 2010. See Carrera, “On
Massimo Cacciari’s Disenchanted Activism,” 1.
132
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of Mandarini’s questions, I believe it is more than relevant to remind ourselves how
Italian 1968 afected the revolutionary and radical project of the Italian New Left.
he shift from the operaisti critique that put emphasis on the worker within and
against the capital to the emphasis of the Party within and against the State is more
comprehensible if we are willing to confront this rift Contropiano houses.
4.2.5 Italy 1967-1970
Italy was no exception with the May 1968 phenomenon in relation to the students
coming out as political protagonists around the world. However, for Italy it was
a “creeping May,” more so than any other advanced capitalist society, as Wright
translates “maggio strisciante” in English.211 Francesco Santini explains the long
1968 in Italy with the cycle of struggles of 1967-1970 to which he refers as “a cycle
heralded by an ostensible rejuvenation of the class struggle, held at by the PCI and
the CGIL after 1960.”212
Having said that, according to Lumley, operaisti had not necessarily contributed to
this cycle until after the student movement in 1968 as the signiicance of agitators
such as Panzieri or Tronti and their alternative organizations of the New Left had
limited impact prior to 1968.213 Regardless, Lumley acknowledges the fact that
Panzieri and Quaderni rossi along with the emergence of the sociology of the workers’
movement, did indeed give “signiicance to workers’ opinions and experience.”214
What is more, one can not ignore the operaisti preceding, what Santini refers as the
211
Wright, Storming Heaven, 89. Lumley translates “maggio strisciante” literally as: “the
drawn-out May,” and suggests it pointed to “how the movement in the workplaces was a process
stretching over months, rather than a phenomenon identiiable with a major event.” Lumley, States
of Emergency, 169.
212
Francesco Santini, Review of Critica dell’utopia capitale by Giorgio Cesarano:
“Apocalypse and Survival,” Alias Recluse, trans., in libcom.org (January 16, 2013) http://libcom.
org/library/apocalypse-survival-relections-giorgio-cesaranos-book-critica-dell’utopia-capitaleexpe. Originally published in 1994 as “Apocalisse e sopravvivenza: Considerazioni sul libro
Critica dell’utopia capitale di Giorgio Cesarano e sull’esperienza della corrente comunista radicale
in Italia.”
213
Lumley refers to Beschelloni who suggested that the intellectual culture of the 1960s was
limited within intellectual circles without necessarily reaching out to the actual antagonizers such
as workers whether they were militant or not. Lumley argues as follows:
Most people, if they had been asked this question in 1967, would
undoubtedly have dismissed as irrelevant the reviews and the
alternative organizations of the New Left. The circulation of the
former were highly restricted; in late 1967 Quaderni piacentini sold
4,000 copies, and Classe operaia sold a maximum of 5,000 before it
ceased publication in 1966.The organizations were weak. An inquiry
by the review Nuovo lmpegno in 1967 found that they numbered
eighteen, but they had ‘virtually no workers inside them, and little
effect on struggles or presence in the factories’. Lumley, States of
Emergency, 38.
214
Ibid. 38.
Political Framework of “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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phenomena of “revolutionizing the revolutionaries,” and opened up the trajectories
for practice beyond “the traditional schemas of tactics/strategy, economic struggle/
political struggle, party/trade union.”215
No matter how underground this culture was, it was prior and also seminal to
the 1968 discourse and practice. From that seminal critique and movement,
“occupations, interruptions of classes, sabotage, the practice of free love and the revolt
against the family,” came out with which students demonstrated their discontent
against authority via “the abstract demand of the right to hold assemblies in the
schools, series problems afecting the entire educational system.”216 At the end of the
day, what was underground prior to 1967-68 as “countercultural and communitarian
groups” would later be “taken up, in other terms, by the revolutionaries, who
incorporated it together with that of the Situationist International” and “would end
up irreversibly changing the life of an entire generation, leaving its mark on all of
society.”217
We need to note that consequences of the transformation of the industry in Italy were
peculiar to the Italian capitalism in the 1960s such as: “the growing homogenization
of labour by age and gender;” “declining weight of skilled manual labour amongst
workers as a whole;” and its efects on the apprentices; changing conditions of the
skilled workers and so on.218 In this context, the early months of 1968 saw the
“development of a collective bargaining to a degree not experienced since 1960-1”
says Lumley.219 However with the workers’ frustration with the unions and their
incapacity to “articulate the demands of the workers,” which was already attacked
by the operaisti in the early 1960s; the struggles at Marzotto, at Fiat in Turin and at
215
See Santini, “7.The Content of Radical Communism” in “Apocalypse and Survival,”
http://libcom.org/library/sections-1-7.
216
Ibid. Tronti’s comments could be mentioned here to compare his version of the seminality
of operaismo to 1968 to Santini’s:
Those of us who had lived through the struggles of the factory
workers in the early 60s looked on the student protests with
sympathetic detachment. We had not predicted a clash of generations,
though in the factories we had met the new layer of workers—
especially young migrants from the South—who were active and
creative, always in the lead (certainly compared to the older workers
who were exhausted by past defeats). But in the factories, the bond
between fathers and sons still held together; it was among the middle
classes that it had snapped. Tronti, “Our Operaismo,” 134.
217
See Santini, “4. International Precedents” in “Apocalypse and Survival,” http://libcom.
org/library/sections-1-7.
218
Wright, Storming Heaven, 108. See ibid.,107-130; and Lumley, States of Emergency, 167180.
219
Lumley, States of Emergency, 170.
134
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Montedison of Porto Marghera broke.220
By that time, many student activists, as Wright reports, “were then discovering,
their eforts to support industrial struggles … met not only with frequent interest
on the part of workers, but also hostility from union oicials jealously protective
of their ‘turf ’.”221 Until then, Potere operaio veneto-emiliano (Pov-e), a Workers’
power group formed in Venice with Negri being one of the leading igures, was still
“overwhelmingly working-class” in relation to students claiming their own role as
political subjects.222 hroughout 1968, Pov-e started responding to the direct contact
eforts by the students with the working class. With the Porto Marghera strike, “while
the ambiguities inherited from Classe operaia’s discourse on the historic left did not
long survive the conlict … the chemical workers’ struggles only conirmed the group
in its interpretation of worker-student relations.”223
Wright cites a Pov-e pamphlet on Porto Marghera, Montedison and 1968: “Only if
the union between workers and students, under the leadership of the working class,
becomes an organizational and continuous fact, will the student movement conserve
its political weight and signiicance.”224 Where within Potere operaio, this rhetoric
would evolve into the lines of an acknowledgement of the students as legitimate
political subjects: “If we do not maintain a continuous relation between new forms of
organization and mass struggles, we can safely say that the rank-and-ile committees
will end up as nothing more than one of the many articulations of the union in
the factory.”225 With the student movement, prolonged amounts of struggles inside
factories and outside factories in universities, art expositions, ilm festivals and so on;
“the energy and creativity of the mass worker of 1969 was to bubble over into the
early 1970s as the years of ‘permanent conlictuality.”226
Negri refers to 1969 as the year of the factory working class after which “the students,
other social protagonists emerged to make their mark on the political scene.”227 Negri
220
Ibid 172-173. Lumley writes that on 19 April 1968
workers from the textile factories of Valdagno in the Veneto pulled
down the statue of Gaetano Marzotto from its pedestal in the town
square,” Lumley reports. The ongoing strikes at FIAT through out
April and May; along with Porto Marghera petrochemical plant
wildstrikes allowed workers to show themselves “ready to destroy
plant by totally withdrawing their labour. Ibid., 173.
221
Wright, Storming Heaven, 98.
222
Negri quoted by Wright in ibid., 96.
223
Ibid., 99. Wright mentions that Tronti’s closest supporters were still unclear about Pov-e at
that time, and its efforts to maintain relations with the students.
224
Ibid., 100.
225
Ibid.,129.
226
Ibid., 131.
227
Antonio Negri, “Reviewing the Experience of Italy in the 1970s,” trans. Ed Emery in
Political Framework of “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
135
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suggests, after the phase of Factory Councils, would come the “legislation of divorce,
the implementation of regional decentralization, the recognition of conscientious
objection,” to argue “there were a variety of institutional responses to the continuos
unfolding of struggles.”228
Such social movements and the ascending antagonistic attitude against almost
every established institutions of the State as well as the labour movement provoked
counter-movements rapidly. John Pollard points at this as follows:
Right-wing political violence most strongly manifested itself
in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. his was a period of
student and youth agitation, new social movements including
women’s and gay liberation, widespread social unrest and trade
union militancy in Italy. his was accompanied by a massive
increase in electoral support for the Communists - peaking at
over a third of the vote in the 1976 elections. he neo-Fascist
terrorists groups of this period were a backlash against all this
left wing activity and also against the emergence of left wing
terrorist groups such as the Red Brigades.229
Within this context, in the late 1960s what is today known as “Strategy of Tension”
began a campaign of terror and murder, which itself was “designed to lead to a
breakdown of law and order and a consequent collapse of public conidence in
democratically elected government, precipitating a takeover by the army.”230 Using
LeMonde diplomatique (September 1998) http://mondediplo.com/1998/09/11negri.
228
Ibid. Negri explains this period and its projection towards the 1970s as:
Beyond the simple exercise of that ‘counter-power’ which they had
embodied since 1968, the social movements were also nurtured by the
consequences of Italy’s monetary delation policies and by the
industrial restructuring through which an initial - but deinitive ‘emergence from Fordism’ was taking place, in terms of Italy’s
systems of manufacture and production. As it happened, the ‘historic
compromise’ was built around precisely these ‘austerity policies’
against which the social protest movements were being organised.
Ibid.
229
John Pollard, The Fascist Experience in Italy (London and New York: Routledge, 2005),
136.
230
Ibid. Against Pollard’s identiication of “The Strategy of Tension,” as a mere neo-fascist
campaign, it is worth mentioning that the Italian State had not acknowledged this campaign until
2000. Even though Guido Salvini had been investigating the Piazza Fontana bombings since 1988,
there had not been any one or any particular organization who had been charged or sentenced to
the date. On this note, it is also worth mentioning approaching “The Strategy of Tension,” as a
campaign against the rise of the “Left” may also fail to see the complete spectrum. Sylvère
Lotringer visits Italy in 1979, after the arrests of April 7, 1979 to meet with members of
autonomia. In 2007, in the second edition of Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, Lotringer
publishes some notes from his journal in the summer of 1979. In the notes on July 23, 1979,
136
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the tactic to “blame their acts on the Left so as to legitimize more power” for the
State and the government, on December 12, 1969 the bombing began in Milan and
Rome.231 Referred as Piazza Fontana bombings, the attack in Milan left seventeen
killed and eighty-eight injured in Milan. Police, acting on the information from
Military Intelligence and Security Service (SID), arrested two anarchists; one of them,
Giuseppe Pinelli died as a result of falling out of the police station window.232 It was
not until October 1974 when “he Strategy of Tension” came to light in a number of
dispatches sent to Lisbon by Italian correspondences of Aginter Press.233
From Carrera’s perspective:
Lotringer mentions a meeting to denounce “the climate of violence caused by those who practice
and advocate terrorism,” in response to a young Somali who was burnt alive the night before.
Lotringer, “In the Shadow of the Red Brigades,” vii. Lotringer elaborates on this climate of
violence as: “The PCI really wastes no opportunity to confuse the issue, playing down the fact
that, between 1969 and 1974, a wave of fascist crimes encouraged by the secret service- it was
blamed on the anarchists- was used to regain the ground lost in in 1968. They called it,
euphemistically: “The Strategy of Tension.” It is at that point that a fraction of the revolutionary
Left went underground and that the RB (and a few other terrorist groups like Prima Linea) began
their slow ascension into the sky of urban guerrilla warfare.” Ibid.
231
Stuart Christie, Stefano Delle Chiale: Portrait of a Black Terrorist (London: Anarchy
Magazine/Refract Publications, 1984), 26.
232
Ibid., 27-29. Police claimed it was a suicide, where it was the common belief that the
police killed him, which later would be made famous by the play Accidental Death of an Anarchist
by Dario Fo.
233
Ibid. 17. Aginter Press was founded by an ex-French army oficer and a member of OAS,
the pro-settler terrorist conspiracy within the French army in Algeria (1961-62) with an intention
to
counter nascent national liberation movements in Africa and Asia in
such a way that while it might not be possible to prevent the
emergence into sovereign statehood of the old colonies and
dependencies it should be possible to keep them within the western
‘sphere of inluence’ by securing the eclipse or demise of the more
virulently nationalist leaders and their replacement by ‘friends of the
west.’ Ibid.
The declared aims of this agency is reported by Christie as “to focus the attention of an anxious
elite upon the perils of insidious subversion which slowly iniltrates through everyday reports, to
denounce its methods and the mechanics of its manoeuvres.” Ibid. In 1974 May, after the
revolution in Portugal, the revolutionary investigators from the Portuguese Armed Forces
Movement discover the true functions via such dispatches. In one of those dispatches, the intention
is stated as
the irst phase of political activity ought to be to create the
conditions favouring the installation of chaos in all of the regime’s
structures … That will create a feeling of hostility towards those who
threaten the peace of each and every nation, and at the same time we
must raise up a defender of the citizenry [sic] against the
disintegration brought about by terrorism and subversion. Ibid., 17.
Also see “Gladio: The Strategy of Tension,” in Moonlight 2 (Spring 1998) http://struggle.ws/
freeearth/fe3_italy.html.
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After 1969, the magical moment that had brought together
the radical groups and the traditional workers was over. he
workers’ unions were exhausted after the long struggle to force
the government to sign the Statuto dei Lavoratori (Statute
of Laborers). Right-wing reaction was mounting against the
labour movement (a neofascist bomb in a Milanese bank on
December 12, 1969, signaled the beginning of the terrorist era
in Italy), and the gap between students and workers widened
again.234
On the other hand, Francesco Santini points out December 12, 1969 is a date that
concluded the cycle of 1968, only relatively. For Santini, for example, 1970 was
equally, if not more signiicant in Italy once the international context was also taken
into account.235 Regardless the decline and considerable cessation of “hot autumn”
after the 1969 events, 1970 was still a year of major social agitation: “he universities
and the high schools were still occupied, while the core groups of the workers avoided
being absorbed by the “extra-parliamentary” groups, creating their own autonomous
networks for mutual contacts.”236
234
Carrera, “On Massimo Cacciari’s Disenchanted Activism,” 5.
235
Santini, “9. The Retreat. Azione Libertaria and Invariance” in “Apocalypse and Survival,”
http://libcom.org/library/sections-8-102. He refers to the Polish revolt, Vietnam War and the
famous events of Ohio which was violent demonstrations and confrontation with the police in
Ohio between May 4 and May 8 as a consequence of Ohio National Guard murdering four students
after a demonstration against the war; American invasion of Cambodia.
236
Ibid.
In this context, Potere operaio was published as the newspaper of the organization, which
appeared in 1969 for the irst time at the time of the extensive strikes at Fiat in Turin and after the
worker-student assembly was formed, along with the organization ‘Lotta continua’. Bologna,
“Workerist Publications and Bios,” 179. It was a project out of frustration that “combativity then
expressed in the factory had not led to an explicit challenge to capital’s rule.” Wright, Storming
Heaven, 132. Composed of Negri, Bologna, Piperno and other operaisti igures such as Cacciari,
Asor Rosa; Wright identiies the project of the group that was initiated after Classe operaia as “not
only to re-examine the relation between class composition and organization, but to reconsider the
very meaning of its central category.” The latter project was lent urgency especially after the
December 1969 bombings. Ibid. From its factory-oriented stage, Potere operaio evolved into a
denial of any necessary relationship between the labour process and class behavior, as the group
started rejecting “the conception of the working class tied to the structure of production- by
necessity therefore tied statistically to employment.” Ibid., 137-38. Through interpreting the
“political upsurge of ‘Black Power’ in the American ghettos;” “emergence of women as collective
subjects of social change,” and its elaborations on “the restlessness of Italy’s Southern population,”
and migrant workers; Potere operaio broadened its initial “factoryist” mould to perceive workingclass. Ibid., 132-35. Before dissolving in the mid-1973; Lotta continua and Potere operaio would
start splitting on the concept of what were the “positive goals proletarians were pursuing in their
struggle against capital,” which had never been clear in Classe operaia, Wright notes. Where Lotta
Continua was against what capitalist society produced as commodities, not social wealth; by
abandoning the central category of labour and rejecting the essential category Marxists had
traditionally assigned as “to the goal of labour freed from the domination of capital,” was replaced
138
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We need to acknowledge 1967-1970 as the period when we see the operaisti
confronting the consequences of the rhetoric they promulgated until then. he
increase in workers’ struggles along with newly emerged political subjects against
the State, the Party and the unions and the intensiication of conlicts amongst the
society would not have been possible without the apocalyptic vision the operaisti
discourse delivered from the early 1960s.237 his discourse spans from Panzieri’s
critique of technology in 1961 to the discourse which Tronti prompted “suppression
of labor by the working class and the violent destruction of capital are one and the
same,” in 1966.238 As Slater argues: “his apocalyptic vision was fundamental to
the development of the Italian class struggle in the 1960s and 1970s, even if Tronti
himself beat a hasty retreat to the PCI that he had earlier abandoned.”239 As the
working class struggle intensiied the operaisti was forced to either take things further
or re-assess their discourse.
Tronti perceives the 1970s with an assumption which suggests: with autonomia,
“a violent waste of precious human resources had passed hopelessly on the wrong
side.”240 Instead of bluntly considering those who participated in autonomia operaia
as placing themselves “dangerously against” the worker’s movement,241 we need to
be able to be more open to understand why some operaisti had passed to the “wrong
side” of the movement, where some did not and instead conined themselves in
an impasse. his would not provide an answer, but allow us to approach to the
trajectories which the operaisti assigned themselves with after 1968 with scrutiny.
he period of 1967-1970 is signiicant when we compare the discourse protagonists
and antagonists including the operaisti and intellectuals such as Tronti, Negri,
Cacciari, as well as Tafuri. he operaisti revisited their roles as activists, agitators
and intellectuals as the real social conlicts of 1967-1970 started shaping the radical
workers’ struggles, rather than the operaisti’s analyses. his is a signiicant period
which can reveal us the limits of the intellectuals with their theoretical interventions
with an “ethic consumption unfettered by the dictates of accumulation. Ibid., 139. However in
1972, Negri’s Potere operaio that was on its transformation to Autonomia Operaia, would declare
“in order to break free, the tendency would be forced to refuse ‘blind voluntarism’ and confront
‘the sour taste of crisis,’” with almost an insurrectional rhetoric. Ibid., 141. Negri would later refer
as “the whole strategy of the extra-parliamentary groups -Potere operaio included- had been on the
wrong side of the track since at least 1971.” Ibid., 148.
On this note, Santini reports Potere operaio and Lotta contunia were occasionally allied with
radicals and anarchists up until 1971. Santini, “9. The Retreat. Azione Libertaria and Invariance” in
“Apocalypse and Survival,” http://libcom.org/library/sections-8-102.
237
Phil Slater, “Introduction to Panzieri,” in Outlines of a Critique of Technology, ed. Phil
Slater (London and Atlantic Highlands: Ink Links and Humanities Press, 1980): 39-43, 42.
238
Ibid. See Mario Tronti, “Struggle Against Labor,” in Radical America 6, no.3: 22-27.
239
Ibid.
240
Tronti, “Our Operaismo,” 138.
241
Ibid. .
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to the culture of struggle and the applicability of their own rhetoric for themselves as
intellectuals.242
242
Robert Lumley refers to Italy in 1968 and 1969 as experiencing such a Gramscian
“organic crisis:”
There was a massive withdrawal of support and delegation with
respect to the structures of representation, especially in the light of the
failure of the Centre-Left government to live up to its promises. It was
a clear case of the ‘ruling class failing to achieve a noteworthy
political enterprise for which it had demanded their approval’.
Disappointment and disillusionment were registered in the general
elections of May 1968 ·when the Socialist Party votes fell
dramatically, and the small rival to the left, the PSIUP, won ground.
However, the rift between representatives and represented went
further.” Lumley, States of Emergency, 43-44.
Antonio Gramsci, when he was in prison between 1929 and 1935, referred to organic crisis as
identifying the moments when social classes come to a point where they no longer identify their
traditional parties as their representatives. Party no longer constitutes, represents nor leads them as
it is no longer recognised by its “class (or fraction of a class) as its expression.”Antoni Gramsci,
“State and Civil Society: Observations on Certain Aspects of the Structure of Political Parties in
Periods of Organic Crisis,” in Selections From the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed. and
trans. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London: ElecBook, 1999), 450. He further
elaborates
These situations of conlict between “represented and representatives”
reverberate out from the terrain of the parties … throughout the State
organism, reinforcing the relative power of the bureaucracy (civil and
military), of high inance, of the Church, and generally of all bodies
relatively independent of the luctuations of public opinion. … The
crisis creates situations which are dangerous in the short run, since the
various strata of the population are not all capable of orienting
themselves equally swiftly, or of reorganizing with the same rhythm.
The traditional ruling class, which has numerous trained cadres,
changes men and programmes and, with greater speed than is achieved
by the subordinate classes, reabsorbs the control that was slipping
from its grasp. Perhaps it may make sacriices, and expose itself to an
uncertain future by demagogic promises; but it retains power,
reinforces it for the time being, and uses it to crush its adversary and
disperse his leading cadres, who cannot be very numerous or highly
trained. Ibid., 450-51.
Keeping in mind that since the early 1960s the operaisti were developing the discourse which was
critical of orthodox-Marxism and Italian Left, including Gramsci and his version of the PCI; it
might as well be assumed this organic crisis was an intentional consequence of the operaisti
intellectuals. On this note, I found no particular critique of the operaisti in English, in terms of
their approach to Antonio Gramsci. On the other hand, Negri’s recent account on Gramsci is a
portrayal of Gramsci as representing the “Italian difference.” See Negri, “The Italian Difference,”
in The Italian Difference, ed. Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano:13-23. Where it is clear how
their understanding of class struggle and labour movement is quite critical of Gramsci and his
notion of the “hegemony,” I reckon most of operaisti in their post-operaismo discourse lose their
distance to Gramscian thought yet simultaneously distance themselves from what I assume to be
an intentional effort to confront Gramsci’s critique of the intellectuals. Where I can not afford
elaborating on this in my thesis, with my emphasis on the role of self-interrogation of the
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he picture I draw in this chapter with regards to the operaisti of the 1960s suggests
that the operaisti discourse for intelelctuals themselves was a mere intellectual
intervention in the culture of struggle that had limited consequences for the working
class struggle. Quaderni rossi is signiicant in this picture as it is where the discourse
and the critique the operaisti articulated irst. With Classe operaia the operaisti
attempted to translate their theoretical analysis into the existing working class
struggle, which meant agitating the workers with the magazines, newspapers and
journals, which they edited, in front of the factories.243 Finally, between 1967-1970,
the operaisti were confronted with the consequences of the radicalism of their critique
and the discourse they adopted. Within this confrontation, the operaisti dissolved into
various tendencies amongst intellectuals; with autonomia being one of the threads
that tried to project the radical operaisti project of the early 1960s by bridging its
working class analysis with the newly emerging political subjects of the 1970s.
he operaisti discourse might have agitated workers, and students, but had not
provided a method or a tactic to confront capitalist development in order to abolish
the capitalist society. We need to remind ourselves this was a movement which was
critical of the already existing culture and instead prioritized the central role of the
working class in their struggle and resistance; in response to the discourse which
lacked the emphasis on being the antagonist political subject as well as being the
protagonist of the capitalist development. Hence not imposing a counterplan to
capitalist development for that subject to follow is not a deiciency but an application
of the rhetoric the operaisti constructed. As long as we do not attack the operaisti
discourse from this aspect of their analysis, we can be content with their discourse
being merely agitation directed at the protagonists of the capitalist development in
order to airm their subversive political subjectivity as they become antagonistic.
However for those who ‘agitate,’ it is a diferent story, especially when the agitators
happen to be ‘intellectuals.’ If we choose to be as critical as the operaisti were to their
precursors, like they were towards Della Volpe or even Panzieri; we are entitled to
expect more self-interrogation that inquires into the role of intellectuals within the
intellectuals, I believe there is a missing thread I am leaving left-out and I hesitate this. For
example, the critique Panzieri delivers in response to the Gramscian “organic intellectuals,” in the
late 1950s and his identiication of those organic intellectuals as merely having their organic ties to
the institutions of the working class such as the Party, rather than the working class itself; seem to
be altered and progressively overlooked from 1968 and onwards. Wright, Storming Heaven, 17.
For a contemporary effort to revisit Gramsci’s critique of intellectuals, without necessarily being
critical of the “organic intellectuals,” see Emanuele Saccarelli, “The Intellectual in Question,” in
Cultural Studies 25, no.6 (2011): 757-782; or Boone W. Shear, “Gramsci, Intellectuals, and
Academic Practice Today,” in Rethinking Marxism 20, no.1 (January 2008): 55-67.
243
Tronti reports: “I have never forgotten the lesson we learned at the factory gates, when we
arrived with our pretentious lealets, inviting workers to join the anti-capitalist struggle. The
answer, always the same, coming from the hands that accepted our bits of paper. They would laugh
and say: ‘What is it? Money?’” Tronti, “Our Operaismo,” 120.
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capitalist development. Given the radicalism of the operaisti critique back in the
1960s, intellectuals not being able to practice what they injected to the culture of
struggle with their theoretical interventions is a symptom Negri, Tronti, Bologna,
Asor Rosa, Cacciari and many others who today are respected as Italian inluential
philosophers and thinkers sufer from, including Tafuri. In their failure to address
the limits of their own roles as intellectuals, we see that they had bitten of more than
they could chew with their radical critique of the Left, Marxism, and the capitalist
society in the 1960s.244
244
In his interrogation after his arrest Negri deines his role as “an intellectual who writes
and sells books.” See “Negri’s Interrogation,” trans. III WW and Phil Mattera in Autonomia: Postpolitical Politics, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007):
188-194. For Aureli, Negri who was an ‘academic’, portrays a problematic image of an
intellectual, in comparison to, for example, Tronti. Because Aureli believes, along with Panzieri,
Tronti had no interest in “promoting their theories outside the context of political militancy,”
where Negri “has always been keen to cultivate his position in academia both in Italy and in
France.” Aureli, The Project of Autonomy, 84. Negri is the scapegoat in this critique, which is
avoided to be raised to others who were not as enthusiastic and optimistic about the struggles as
Negri was. Wright also refers to Negri’s academic career ascending in the midst of the riots and
protests in the late 1960s, as he was assumed the Chair of State Doctrine in the University of
Padua and was “now busy establishing a foothold for the tendency within the academic world,”
which would later end up with almost all of the department of Political Science at the University of
Padua getting arrested, “accused of ‘subversion‘ for having organized and led a group called
‘Potere operaio’ (dissolved in 1973!)” Cari, “April 7: Repression in Italy,” in Autonomia: Postpolitical Politics, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007),
172. Lucio Castellano in 1979, who was a member of Metropoli, refered to the contradiction in
terms of intellectuals’ takeoff of the antagonism with reference to studies conducted in England
back then, that stated the obvious: “statisticians classiied various professions on the basis of the
life expectancy of the people practicing them … miners have the shortest life expectancy … while
those with the longest life expectancy are professors, lawyers and politicians.” He continues
saying:
It is an observation, in part banal, which should be brought to the
attention of the recent gloriiers of manual labor, and which has been
wrongly kept out of the ongoing debate on democracy, on violence
and death, on the body and on personal daily needs. It could be
caustically stated in this manner: the probability that Coletti will live
longer than a large majority of his students is well grounded. See
Lucio Castellano, “Living with Guerilla Welfare,” , trans. Felicia Czin,
in Autonomia: Post-political Politics, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and
Christian Marazzi (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007): 228-233, 228.
Similarly, with a satirical tone though, Franco Piperno who was wanted by the police, back when
he participated in the parodical interrogation to indirectly comment on “the ‘seriousness’ of the
accusations and the theatricality of the media,” suggests Negri was able to “pass off political
punches that he writes as scientiic publications. Something which is not accepted by me, being a
physicist. With this system, he has gained the professorship, while I am stabilized.” Franco
Piperno, “The Naked Truth about Moro’s Detention,” in Autonomia: Post-political Politics, ed.
Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007): 202-205, 203. While
he is ironic in his comments, to some extent, Deleuze actually does imply Negri’s professorship
needed to be acknowledged as “Negri is a political scientist, an intellectual of high standing in
France as well as Italy,” who faces a repression “that no longer feels the need to be juridically
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4.3 Conclusion to Chapter Four
When we revisit the political framework of Tafuri’s 1969 essay in relation to
operaismo, we need to engage deeper with the context and the events which resulted
with the dissolution of operaismo and the adoption of various revised readings of the
seminal critique the operaisti delivered in the 1960s.245 In the light of this critique,
legitimated -since its legitimation is carried out in advance by the Press, the media, ‘the organs of
public opinion’.” Gilles Deleuze, “Open Letter to Negri’s Judges,” trans. Committee April 7 in
Autonomia: Post-political Politics, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi (Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e), 2007): 182-184, 184. None of those, however, answers the question what is the role
of an operaisti thinker in comparison to the worker whose militancy is studied, appropriated and
promoted.
245
On this note, we need to mention that elaborations on the limits of the movements
operaismo and autonomia are haunted by what Gilles Deleuze criticizes in his critique of the legal
basis of the arrests and trials that conined the movement. In “Open Letter to Negri’s Judges,”
Deleuze touches on what today seems to be dominating the perception of the extra-parliamentary
aspects of autonomia: “If we are to believe one French paper (Le Nouvel Observateur), we get the
following result: even if Negri were not in the Red Brigades, he is an Autonomist, and ‘we all
know who the left Autonomists in Italy are’. Whatever the facts, the treatment of Negri becomes
justiied.” Gilles Deleuze, “Open Letter to Negri’s Judges,” 184.
See, for example, “Interview with Steve Wright on Storming Heaven,” in Wildcat no.70 (Summer
2004): 9-12. http://www.wildcat-www.de/en/wildcat/70/w70_steve_en.htm. Even though Wright
claims he is critical of most of the operaisti because they shied away from following their “truly
radical intuitions,” his identiication of the “rationals,” who “kept trying to ‘look for political
content and strategy within class composition itself’ – as opposed to the likes of Negri, who just
‘took their dreams for reality’,” fails to push us outside and beyond the project of operaismo nor
touch upon the role of the intellectuals’ in with their analysis and studies of the labour movement.
In his critique, Deleuze identiies the lack of engagement of those who with the context and events
which resulted with assaults of people by armed groups and “Legge Reale.” See Deleuze, “Open
Letter to Negri’s Judges,” 182-184. This piece was originally published in La Repubblica, after the
1979 arrests. “Legge Reale” was a body of laws introduced in 1975 that extended custody period
for up to four years before an actual trial and was reinforced by the referendum of 1978 with the
joined forces of Christian Democrats and the Communist Party: “purportedly against terrorism,
which severely curtails personal freedom giving the police the right to shoot individuals without
any legal consequences.” Lotringer, “In the Shadow of the Reg Brigades,” v.
The dichotomy between operaismo and autonomia already fails to contain the complete spectrum
of the culture of struggle the Italian Left experienced in the 1960s and the 1970s. Even within this
dichotomy, there are a number of tactics and methods political subjects adopted, which are equally
overlooked. Cuninghame’s study on Autonomia, for example, demonstrates that autonomia as a
political movement in the 1970s cannot be reduced to one but comprises many autonomies. Those
autonomies ranging from “microfractons” that seek for a “party” hegemony to clandestine groups
to protect members from police and fascists at demonstrations; from workplace militants to “a
creative wing” that was preoccupied with the politics of subversive communication Steve Wright,
“A Party of Autonomy?” in The Philosophy of Antonio Negri: Resistance in Practice, ed. Timothy
S. Murphy and and Abdul-Karim Mustapha (London: Pluto Press, 2005):73-106, 76. Having said
this, it would not be unjust to distinguish the operaisti from the autonomists of the 1970s from one
another in light of the strategies and tactics autonomists theorized and applied in contrast to the rest
of the operaisti group who instead believed in re-consolidating the working-class struggle within
PCI. However it is equally, if not more, crucial to point out that from 1968 onwards, intellectuals’
different approaches and understanding of the operaisti theoretical endeavors that was accumulated
Political Framework of “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
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the leap from 1969 “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology” to 1973 Progetto e
utopia is a big one which is not substantial unless we inquire deeper in order to justify
why we assume those two works need to be considered identical and why we equate
their political frameworks to one another.
Within the reading of the period I provided with my narration of the operaisti project
Contropiano stands out to be a medium which nourished growing ruptures amongst
the operaisti. Negri’s departure in 1968 marks the irst fracture via Contropiano in the
project, while Cacciari’s debate with Negri and his articulation of “negative thought”
as of 1970 mark further fractures. In this picture, the later version of Tafuri’s 1969
essay in 1973 volume as well as his project as a historian ind their proper context.
Once we re-visit “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology” and Architecture and
Utopia from this perspective, we can see that Tafuri re-visits his arguments in his
1969 essay with the 1973 volume. In 1973 Tafuri posits that:
‘Negative thought’ had enunciated its own project for survival
in its refutation of the Hegelian dialectic and a recovery of
the contradictions this had eliminated. ‘Positive thought’ does
nothing but overturn that negativeness on itself. he negative
is revealed as such, in its ‘ineluctability’. Resignation to it is
only a irst condition for making possible the perpetuation of
the intellectual disciplines; for making possible the recovery
for intellectual work (at the price of destroying its ‘aura’) of
the tradition of its ‘sacred’ extraneousness to the world; for
providing a reason, no matter how minimal, for its survival.
he downfall of reason is now acclaimed the realization of
reason’s own historic mission. In its cynicism intellectual work
plays its cards to the ambiguous limit of irony.246
Hence for Tafuri, the arguments he presented in his 1969 essay can not be perceived
as asserting the prophecy of “death of architecture,” but quite the opposite: a
since the early 1960s started to reveal the limits of the intellectuals that lead to the dissolution
within the operaisti. What we fail to acknowledge is that the dissolution of the operaisti and
trajectories opened up by 1968 were not happening in a vacuum that was only constituted of
intellectuals’ intervention to the culture of struggle. The social conlict that was reaching its peaks
was encapsulating the political framework which we tend to reduce to an almost natural dichotomy
between an early operaismo movement against a later autonomia movement.
246
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 76. Tafuri’s essay “Toward a Critique of Architectural
Ideology” was published in the January-February 1969 issue of Contropiano; written somehow
earlier as Tafuri says. December 12, 1969 bombings took place approximately ten months after
Tafuri’s 1969 essay, and ive months before his 1970 essay “Intellectual Work and Capitalist
Development” was published. Cacciari’s essay on negative thought; and Tafuri’s publication of
Progetto e utopia are respectively in 1970 and 1973.
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potential for the architect to continue practicing without relinquishing their
professional ground. In the concluding chapter he addresses the need to embrace
the roles assigned to the architects within the new forms of capitalist development
to be able to move on from the analysis and the critique in the 1969 essay. Right
before dismissing “hopes in design,” he concludes his arguments in the conclusion of
Architecture and Utopia as follows:
Only at this point-that is after having done away with any
disciplinary ideology- is it permissible to take up the subject
of the new roles of the technician, of the planner, within the
compass of the new forms of capitalist development. And
thus also to consider the possible tangencies or inevitable
contradictions between such a type of technical-intellectual
work and the material conditions of the class struggle.247
he 1969 essay is an agitation where Tafuri adopts the discourse which inluences
his intellectual and academic formation. he essay is not a blueprint, nor a prelude
to Tafuri’s project as a historian. It is an utilization of the discourse which exposes
the architectural practice’s inherent relationship with capitalist structures in terms
of materializing ideology of the bourgeoise project, and in terms of its own ideology
as a discipline that is in the service of capitalist development. It also points to the
architects’ past, present and possible-future contradictions when they assume a role in
the working class struggle. On the other hand, Progetto e utopia and/or Contropiano,
do indeed fulill the roles they have been granted by writers who return to the 1960s
and the 1970s political context in Italy to have a more appropriate understanding
of Tafuri’s project. Both Progetto e utopia and Contropiano provide a political as well
as a theoretical framework for Tafuri’s pursue of the struggle which he, along with
other intellectuals, granted themselves the roles on behalf of the working class as
analyzing the questions to do with class struggle at an “historical-theoretical level”
and at a contemporary-militant level (recalling the early 1960s sociology initiated
with Panzieri and Quaderni rossi: workers’ science) as well as the “ideal and cultural
superstructures of mass capitalistic society” (critique of ideology).
It is the readers decision to judge whether such a role intellectuals including the
one Tafuri assigned to himself, had delivered anything more than what operaisti
intellectuals had foreseen with their analyses regarding workers’ struggles contribution
to capitalist development once workers’ subjective political agency had been
appropriated by institutions or other classes who claim and acquire rights to intervene
to the working class struggle within labour movement. And in the light of the answer
to this question, we might grant ourselves the right to assume the projects associated
with the magazine Contropiano and the 1973 volume Progetto e utopia to collapse on
247
Ibid., 182.
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top of the essay or not.
In this picture, approaching the essay via Tafuri, his later works and his later career
as a historian is problematic. As it simply overlooks the particular context of Tafuri’s
1969 essay; which we should expect the otherwise from those who return to the
1960s and 1970s Italy. In architectural discourse, this confrontation is possible via revisiting Tafuri’s 1969 essay as it stands out as a piece which loses its potential impact
and becomes diluted as the 1960s operaisti discourse becomes equally difused. From
this perspective, Aureli and Day who revisit Tafuri and the political framework of the
1960s and 1970s Italy, fall short of what I expect. With their inquiries, they do not
acknowledge the diference between the context of Tafuri’s 1969 essay and his 1973
volume. Instead they take it for granted that those two works are the same, in spite
of their return to the political framework encompassing operaismo and autonomia.
Hence I approach their inquiries critically.
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CHAPTER FIVE
WRITING THAT RETURNS TO
THE POLITICAL FRAMEWORK
OF THE ESSAY
5.1 Introduction to Chapter Five
To establish the connection between the 1969 essay and the 1973 volume, we irst
need to take into consideration the 1970 essay on intellectual work which Tafuri
publishes in Contropiano and how he enmeshes his arguments in the 1970 essay along
with the political project Cacciari and other contributors to Contropiano articulated
from 1968 to 1971 in his 1973 volume. Unless we do so, and convince ourselves that
the link we establish between the two works grants us the right to overlook the essay’s
particularity in favor of its later articulation, we have to confront the contents of the
essay in relation to its particular context.
We can pragmatically establish the historical continuity between 1969 and 1973 Italy
without confronting the factors which lead to the dissolution of operaismo between
1967-1970 and the signiicance of the transformation of the discourse the operaisti
adopted in relation to those factors in the early 1970s. However this would still
not substantiate reducing or expanding the 1969 essay and the 1973 volume with
one another, as they stand out to be exclusive from one another within their proper
contexts.
As I stated in the introduction to my work, I ind it is crucial for my generation
of architects, interns and architecture students to be able to approach the post
1960s architectural discourse from a critical perspective as the transformation of
the contemporary economic, political and social structures signal a reevaluation of
that discourse. he signiicance of identifying the particularity of the 1969 essay
points out trajectories critiquing architectural ideology. hose are the trajectories
that the preceding generation of architects, architectural historians and theoreticians
overlooked. What is more, the discourse which is built on the rationalization of the
inherent and implicit relationship of the architect with capitalist structures is not as
useful as it was to overcome the crisis architects faced back in the 1960s. Re-visiting
Tafuri’s 1969 essay in its particular context may initiate an interrogative analysis and
understanding of contemporary art and practice of architecture with a more critical
approach to the preceding generations. In the light of this argument, in this chapter
I look at contemporary writing which returns to the political framework of Tafuri’s
essay.
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CHAPTER FIVE
Pier Vittorio Aureli’s long essay that was published in 2008 as he Project of
Autonomy: Politics and Architecture within and Against Capitalism is a seminal
text in twenty-irst century architectural discourse for those who are interested in
architectural theory and history of the 1960s and 1970s. It provides a comprehensive
study of 1960s and 1970s Italian politics within architectural discourse. Except, he
too hastily reduces operaismo to the work of one operaista: Mario Tronti. He tests
autonomia against operaismo in order to demonstrate the irrelevance of autonomia to
contemporary architectural debates and resistance to capitalist structures.
In his 2009 paper “Intellectual Work and Capitalist Development: Origins and
Context of Manfredo Tafuri’s Critique of Architectural Ideology,” he pays attention
to Manfredo Tafuri’s 1969 essay and provides an important re-contextualization for
Tafuri’s work to ind its proper political framework. With his account, however, the
agitating arguments in the 1969 essay are neutralized as Tafuri’s impasse as a historian
of his kind is rationalized.
It may be the case that Aureli favours a Tafuri whose critique of the implicit and
inherent relationship between the architect and the capitalist structures cannot
have any further implications than what it already provided. he limit of those
implications may lie in the limit Tafuri himself possess in relation to his project
as an intellectual endeavour. What I ind problematic with Aureli’s position is not
necessarily the rationalization of the impasse Tafuri’s project, and it being yet another
inquiry in order to legitimize the post-1968 rhetoric architectural discourse adopted.
I ind Aureli’s account problematic because he fails to address the distinction between
the 1969 essay, and the 1973 volume, despite the fact that he returns to Tafuri and
his 1969 essay while he is addressing its relation to Tafuri’s 1970 essay “Intellectual
Work and Capitalist Development.” I argue that with his inquiry, the political
framework of the essay is obscured and misinterpreted. In his attempt to tune the way
architectural circles approach to Tafuri’s 1969 essay, as we inquire more into Aureli’s
study on this context and Tafuri’s works, it becomes clear that he shows no intention
to contest or challenge the post 1960s architectural discourse and their reading of
Tafuri.
In 2005 Gail Day publishes her essay “Strategies in the Metropolitan Merz: Manfredo
Tafuri and Italian Workerism” which can be considered as another seminal work for
architectural circles that return to the political framework of Italian operaismo and
autonomia movements.1 In 2011 she publishes her book Dialectical Passion where
she further articulates her essay, which becomes a chapter in her book that deals with
twentieth century post-war culture of art and theory that developed “in the wake
1
Gail Day, “Strategies in the Metropolitan Merz: Manfredo Tafuri and Italian Workerism,”
in Radical History 133 (September/October 2005): 26-38.
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Wrıtıng that Returns to the Political Framework of the Essay
CHAPTER FIVE
of the New Left.”2 Her study of the period is well-grounded, more substantial than
Aureli’s. She provides a well-sustained political framework for Tafuri’s Architecture and
Utopia.
Day approaching Tafuri can be compelling for those who intend to go beyond the
pessimistic outlook Tafuri’s work may possess. However her lack of emphasis on the
diference between the political formation of Tafuri’s project and the political project
she ascribes to Tafuri in relation to 1960s and 1970s Italy is problematic. he more
we try to apprehend Day’s apologetic approach towards Tafuri and his project in
order to ind a relevance to his project in twenty-irst century architectural discourse,
the more we see that the political context of the 1969 essay is obscured while the
agitating aspects of the essay are overlooked.
5.2 Pier Vittorio Aureli and his narration of 1960s and 1970s Italy
Aureli’s inquiry in 2008 stands as a primary source for us to try locating architectural
practice and theory in 1960s and 1970s Italy with reference to operaismo and
autonomia movements. Unfortunately Aureli’s work further obscures the political
framework that operaisti thinking presented which is already hardly accessible to
English-speaking audience at the time of writing.
To have access to the complete spectrum of pamphlets and publications is already
limited for the English-speaking audience. Unless one is literate in Italian, one is
bound to fail to grasp an objective apprehension of the movement. Only if we put
extra-efort and insist on digging under the surface of readings of the period, we
acquire a slightly less ixed and biased understanding of the period. On top of this
already selective literature in English, Aureli prioritizes certain authors and aspects
of the movement that draw a particular image of the period. If one is not willing to
expand on Aureli’s study to see a slightly bigger picture, it is hard for a generation
who are not irst-hand participants of that context to be able to return to such a
context and ind relevance of it to today. Especially with regards to he Project of
Autonomy, Aureli’s work needs to be approached with scrutiny.3
2
Gail Day, Dialectical Passions, 23.
3
I am not after reviewing Aureli’s book in my thesis. However for a review of Aureli’s
book by another writer whose research interest overlaps with his, see Gail Day, review of The
Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture Within and Against Capitalism by Pier Vittorio
Aureli in “Review Articles,” Historical Materialism 18 (2010): 219-236. Gail Day is also critical
of Aureli’s approach to the political framework of Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. Unlike mine
though, her critique targets the centrality of Aldo Rossi in The Project of Auotonomy, as she argues
Aureli’s preoccupation with Asor Rosi shadows the emphasis which Tafuri deserves. Day, review
of The Project of Autonomy, 222. Regardless, Aureli’s prioritization of one aspect of operaismo is
problematic according to Day as well. She thinks Aureli fails to do justice to what Day refers as
the “Trontian,” perspective. For Day, Aureli is speaking from this perspective in terms of “its
analysis of the present, and in terms of both its approach to questions of architectural
Wrıtıng that Returns to the Political Framework of the Essay
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CHAPTER FIVE
For Aureli, operaismo spans the decade 1961-1971, which encompasses journals
Quaderni rossi, Classe operaia and Contropiano.4 Aureli summarizes the sequence of
three journals as follows:
If the theoretical contribution of Quaderni Rossi had
been focussed on the concept of autonomy as a critique
of technological development, and if Classe operaia had
taken autonomy to be a form of workers’ initiative, Tronti’s
subsequent relections on the autonomy of the political
turned the Operaist approach to the level of State institutions,
posing a Marxist-Communist ‘counterplan’ to the one of
liberal capitalism. Around this hypothesis was launched the
inal journal of the Operaist movement, Contropiano.5
According to Aureli, the project set up by Contropiano was “to develop … a radical
political class culture, which, instead of taking for granted the imminent revolution
… opted for a longer-term, realistic counterplan to capitalism.”6 On this point, it is
important to question whether Contropiano was an attempt to be a “counterplan” as
itself, or attempted to provide a medium for this counterplan to be developed. I argue
for the latter. However Aureli is not clear whether Contropiano, which eventually
became an experiment for the efectiveness of “negative thought” as a method to
confront neocapitalism, is itself the counterplan or not.
Aureli seems to automatically assign what Contropiano ofered was along on the lines
with Tronti’s embracement of the autonomy of the political elite who he assumed
would subvert the Party. his however, is to assume such intellectual interventions
were happening in a vacuum which were only afecting the subjects of their
inquiries, without being afected by their struggle and conlicts. Contropiano did
acquire this role in time, as Cacciari developed his philosophy and as contributors
to Contropiano aligned themselves with Tronti as well as Cacciari’s philosophy.
historiography and to debates relevant to the emancipatory project.” Ibid., 229. In the position
which Aureli conines himself, however, the emphasis on Rossi misses the real contribution of
Aureli’s perspective would provide. Ibid., 230. Day suggests Aureli ignores the “more classicalMarxist” approach Rossi actually possessed and concludes “Rossi does not propose an
architectural equivalent of the Trontian.” Ibid, 229. Apart from partaking in “the mutations within
Marxist cultural thought in the mid-twentieth century,” Day inds it unclear what Rossi’s approach
share with “workerism” at the irst place. Ibid., 228. What Aureli should have done instead was,
Day argues, to confront “discorso tafuriano [Tafurian discourse] or bourgeoining academic
industry of ‘Tafuriana’” and give more attention to the key moment Contropiano was found after
the split of the magazine and output of the Venice-school, which Aureli tried to sidestep. Ibid., 230.
Day does not mention or refer to Aureli’s 2009 paper where to some extent he does so.
4
Aureli, The Project of Autonomy, 84.
5
Ibid., 43-44.
6
Ibid., 45
150
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However, Contropiano, in contrast to Quaderni rossi and Potere operaio; did not start
with an objective, as I mentioned in Chapter Four. After the second issue it assumed
for itself a role as an intervention on a cultural level, without necessarily contesting
its elitist attitude to ascribe itself as a Trojan horse for the workers to the “walls of
organized labour movement.”7 Besides this assumption at the time of publishing, it
was not necessarily a “counterplan” that was aimed at the level of State institutions:
it was a ground for analysis and critique for such a counterplan to be possible. hose
debates which stayed on the level of intellectual endeavours were petriied as “the
counterplan” in time, with the help of eforts similar to Aureli’s. And this counterplan
got eventually adopted in order to legitimize the postulation of yet another
autonomous political class other than the one the operaisti were critical of in the
1960s to represent the working class struggle.
Clearly Aureli is not the only intellectual who approaches Contropiano as such.
Aureli’s account for Contropiano and the role he ascribes to it through Tronti’s politics
seem to resonate with Patrizia Lombardo’s narration of the journal. Lombardo argues
the second issue of Contropiano was crucial in terms of its signiicance in the debates
on joining the party “in spite of disagreements with its main tenet” against reinforcing
the operaisti thought of anti-state interventionist position.8 Lombardo argues
Contropiano
insisted on the balance between theory and action …
Knowledge and action -or theory and practice- were perceived
as equally impotent, but the emphasis on the priority of
knowledge, description and analysis of phenomena implied
the criticism of an agitation for its own sake. his criticism,
particularly important coming from operaisti activists, shows a
certain faith in institutional forms.9
Lombardo establishes the connection between Cacciari and Contropiano in a crooked
way as she reports “after the irst issues of Contropiano appeared, Cacciari joined the
PCI.”10 We should note, however, it is reported that Cacciari would not join the
PCI until 1976.11 Although one can conclude that Contropiano as the “counterplan,”
7
Carrera, “On Massimo Cacciari’s Disenchanted Activism,” 6.
8
Lombardo, “The Philosophy of the City,” xvi.
9
Ibid., xvi
10
Ibid., xvii.
11
Carrera, “On Massimo Cacciari’s Disenchanted Activism,” 1. Still, Lombardo would be
correct chronologically, since 1976 is after the publication of irst issues of Contropiano indeed, as
well as the last issue, though. Lombardo does mention Cacciari waited until Berlinger’s historic
compromise to change the wind within the PCI to have a tendency toward a social-democratic
position. Which is only after 1972, when he becomes the secretary and declares his party’s
autonomy from the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow in 1976. Tafuri, for example, on the other
hand would leave the party after the congress of Communist Party in 1976 where Berlinguer’s talk
Wrıtıng that Returns to the Political Framework of the Essay
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CHAPTER FIVE
which played a role in substantiating and developing the theoretical ground for some
intellectuals to endorse PCI as a legitimate medium to contribute to the working
class struggle, Contropiano can hardly be argued to have been launched around
the agenda that operaisti approach should turn to the level of State institutions,
especially the Party. It was more of a medium where articulation of such a hypothesis
happened eventually. We also need to remember that what Contropiano is portrayed
to be presenting as the “counterplan” was not only controversial amongst operaisti
intellectuals, but also for the contributors to the journal itself, as it housed one of
the last fractures amongst operaisti intellectuals with regards to their understanding
of their roles as intellectuals. Even after the irst issue the journal is assigned a role
by the editors, its role was more related to its insistence on what Asor Rosa identiies
as “analysis of the questions to do with class struggle;” and ”analysis of the ideal
and cultural superstructures of mass capitalistic society.”12 Today, we may look back
and conclude that the role which Contropiano was assigned, was to test the Trontian
hypothesis. “Indici,” published in the last issue of Contropiano, demonstrates this
fact, as the editors assign a theme to every contribution made to the magazine by
intellectuals as they list and index the articles.13 However, it would be overreaching
to grant this role to Contropiano as if the magazine was meant to be this sort of
a counter-plan against the plan of capitalist development since the moment the
magazine was conceived.
If we approach Contropiano in relation to the early 1960s operaisti discourse, we
need to remind ourselves of how this discourse was constructed: it was through the
identiication of the problems with institutions and groups which were exterior to the
working class imposing their strategies and tactics to the actual working class struggle.
As readers, if we were satisied with Aureli’s narration, then we could be convinced
that the conlicting positions of Tronti himself as an operaista demonstrated the
general tendency amongst intellectuals. Hence the disconnection between the
earlier operaisti discourse and the one Cacciari adopted could have been assumed as
insigniicant. Once we return to 1960s and 1970s Italy in order to study operaismo
and autonomia movements, we can not help but become aware of the debates
amongst intellectuals as well as the social conlict and struggles that encapsulate the
social and the political context all together. It seems, however, Aureli is convinced
that the Trontian perspective, in terms of its progress from the early 1960s to the
1970s needs no further articulation.
Aureli quotes Tronti in 1964 where he argues:
the tasks of the workers’ party are: not to support capitalism’s
made Tafuri think that Berlinguer was negating all of their work. Tafuri, “History as Project,” 61.
12
Asor Rosa, “Critique of Ideology and Historical Practice,” 29.
13
See "Indici per autore e per tema (1968-1971)." in Contropiano 3 (1971): 679-.
152
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needs, not even in the form of worker’s demands; to force
the capitalist to present their objective necessities and the
subjectively refuse them; to force the bosses to ask so that
the workers can actively -that is, in organized forms- reply to
them: no.14
After a few pages, he quotes Tronti from 1972 and later his 1996 book La politica al
tramonto (he Sunset of Politics) in order to justify the position when Tronti literally
turns his attention to the level of State institutions but now argues for workers
to appropriate, as Aureli puts: “the very weapon that had so far been employed
by the bourgeoise as a means of achieving their defeat: the notion of negativity as
an extreme form of capitalist mastery.”15 Aureli appropriates from the irst line of
argument of Tronti to suggest how operaisti thinking allowed an alternative to the
orthodox Marxism; which was indeed seminal for the operaisti critique: in order
to legitimize Tronti’s later commitment to the Party politics. Establishing Tronti’s
further articulation on his own politics as the operaisti project begs the question how
convincing to treat Aureli’s approach to 1960s and 1970s Italy as an objective inquiry.
Aureli returns to Classe operaia, Tronti’s “Lenin in England,” and Negri’s “Workers
without allies,” in order to provide the foundations of Trontian perspective he favours.
Between those texts, lies the fundamental diference of Tronti’s autonomy of the
political from Negri’s in relation to working class and the Party, he argues.16 his
diference would come to surface in 1971 with the second edition of Tronti’s Operai e
capitale. As Aureli says:
he second edition of Tronti’s Operai e capitale … concluded
not with a discussion of the workers’ strategy of refusal but
with its counterpart: the political development of capitalism
under Roosevelt during the 1930s, understood as the most
advanced answer to the most advanced form of workers’
struggle -the American working-class movement.17
In between two editions of Operai e capitale and Tronti’s re-consideration of the
“Strategy of Refusal;” in other words, between Negri and Tronti’s concept of working
class struggle, are the events and writing that Aureli does not mention. Indeed,
14
Aureli, The Project of Autonomy, 39. Aureli cites Tronti, “Forza-lavoro classe operaia,” in
Operai e capitale.
15
Ibid., 41. See ibid., 39-41 where Aureli spans the Trontian perspective from early 1960s
with his Operai e capitale to to 1972; Tronti, Sull’autonomia del politico (Milan: Fetrinelli, 1977)
which originally was articulated by Tronti as the autonomy of the political in 1972 at a seminar
organized by Noberto Bobbio at the faculty of political science in Turin; and La politica al
tramonto (Turin: Einaudi, 1998).
16
Aureli, The Project of Autonomy, 44.
17
Ibid., 42.
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Tronti’s analysis on the American workers’ struggle may have afected his perception
on the working class movement in Italy. Equally important are: the 1968 movement
and Tronti’s hesitation towards the new class in comparison to Negri’s enthusiasm;
the Party’s and the Unions’ approach to the new political subjects who started
claiming the political domain from 1968 onwards in Italy; the intensiication of the
social struggles as of 1969 and the atmosphere of terror created by the “Strategy of
Tension:” a few items which I tried to put relatively more emphasis on in Chapter
Four to understand the dissolution of the operaisti critique in the late 1960s.
Without mentioning those other components of the political framework for Tronti’s
operaismo, it is too much of a reduction to imply that for the operaisti, Tronti’s line of
thinking was irrefutable and provided a rigid opposition to Negri’s. Aureli resolves or
embraces the possible problems or conlicting aspects of Tronti’s politics a little too
readily, but it does not stop him from endorsing it as he refers to Tronti’s 1998 work
in order to explain his autonomy of the politics in the 1970s:
It was necessary to draw on what the great bourgeois thinkers
had discovered in the relations between the bourgeoisie and
capitalism, namely the role of crisis within the economic
system and ability of capitalism to internalize the collapse
of the rigid teleological foundations of modern politics by
means of a culture that systematically turned negativity into
an engine of its own reproduction.18
Within this picture, Tafuri’s 1969 essay is assigned a place in Contropiano after
Tronti’s “Estremisti e riformisti” (“Extremists and reformists”). According to Aureli, in
his essay Tronti “declared that neither reformist nor extremist political attitudes could
be the weapon of the working-class movement with respect to the negative modus
operandi of capitalism, since the latter had the capacity to absorb and inally resolve
every crisis within its structures.”19 Contropiano’s project was, as Tronti believed,
envisioning the possibility of the antagonistic culture’s own institutionalization,
according to Aureli. It was meant to be “a political critique of political economy
and its stubborn assumption of economics as the primary determinant of historical
development.”20 herefore, within this narration of the project, Tafuri’s 1969 essay
was “meant to be the institute’s methodological blueprint.”21 But the answer to the
question, what it was meant to achieve with the blueprint, is unclear.
Tronti’s aim to re-appropriation of the Party by the help of the intellectuals’
instrumentalization of party politics failed in 1976 with the Historical Compromise.
18
19
20
21
154
Ibid., 41.
Ibid., 48.
Ibid.
Ibid., 49.
Wrıtıng that Returns to the Political Framework of the Essay
CHAPTER FIVE
For Aureli it seems that the success or failure of the project that depended on “the
radical political elite” of Tronti, “who acted outside the Communist Party but
eventually taking it over and pushing it in the direction of a more radical political
position,”22 does not matter too much. Or at least, his intention is not directed
towards giving an account of failure or success of this version of operaismo.
Instead Aureli contemplates the failure of “the post-Operaist Autonomia,” as he
seems to adopt an attitude a little too cynical towards the possibility of believing in
the destruction of capitalist society and its institutions:
hroughout the 1960s all the protagonists of the cultural
project of autonomy had used theory as a strategic preparation
for the new role that their disciplines were to play in the
public arena. … However, if the 1960s were characterized
by a messianic expectation of a new revolutionary subject, the
1970s was a period in which many militants discovered that
revolutions in the aluent countries of Western Europe could
only take the form of isolated revolts. If this reality pushed
militant creativity toward innovative but less politicized
forms of struggle, it left unchallenged the whole political class
dominating the ruling institutions … What arose within this
desolate scenario of the collapse and confusion of the political
… was a radicalism without any urgency.23
I do not argue for or intend to suggest Aureli’s narration of Trontian perspective is
wrong, biased or misleading. his would be quite a separate argument from the one
I intend to make. However, in the light of what I tried to demonstrate in Chapter
Four, what Aureli does not mention, and chooses to put emphasis on instead, exposes
the problems with Aureli’s position and approach to this context.
Aureli posits right from the start that “Tronti’s notion of the autonomy of the
political: the discovery of an autonomous dimension of political power within
the tradition of working class” is “the most legitimate theoretical consequence of
Operaism.”24 His argument stands on an assumption, which he is not troubling
himself to substantiate.25 On top of this assertion, he argues that the autonomia
22
Ibid., 45.
23
Ibid., 80.
24
Ibid., 9.
25
Except his footnote where he says, referring to Tronti’s seminar in 1972 on the notion of
political autonomy, “in my view, it is precisely the argument of autonomy of the political from
economic determination- as presented by Tronti in 1972- that is the core and essence of
Operaism.” Ibid., 84. His argument stands on the “most detailed and precise reconstruction of
Operaism,” he refers to the interview with Rita di Leo in Giuseppe Trotta ed., “Per una storia di
Classe Operaia,” in Bailamme 24/2 (1999) 173-205.
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CHAPTER FIVE
movement was able to explain how “capitalism had changed and evolved into its
present form,” yet it is not able to explain how “the subject struggling against the
Empire of capitalism had moved … forward.”26 he operaisti of the 1960s had
elaborated, pretty much solely, on this in their critique of orthodox Marxism: those
two moments (advancement of capitalist structures and reforms through which
antagonists’ struggles were instrumentalized by capitalist development) are not
distinguishable from one another; nor they are separate phenomena. his is the
underlying premise on which Panzieri criticized the orthodox labour movement and
demonstrated how capitalist structures depended on the workers as protagonists of
the development; hence Tronti articulated the plan of the capital and agitated the
workers in front of factories to say no to work; hence Negri believed in sabotaging the
production line, and so on.
What Aureli misses, overlooks, or forgets is that the operaisti project, until its
dissolution, was not a project to resolve the crisis the middle class or the bourgeoise
was facing in the 1960s as intellectuals, academics or architects. Both operaismo
and autonomia were projects, which sought to, literally, destroy capitalist society.
herefore if we are to expect something from those movements, beyond explanations
of the phenomenon of capitalist development, it should be an endeavour which actually
challenges or contests capitalist structures and the society. To some extent, after the
experience at Quaderni rossi, Tronti proposed the ultimate answer which he later
distanced himself from the militant version of this refusal: to say no to capitalist
structures. And it was on this note that Negri perceived the debates happening in
Classe operaia on non-existent lines as theory hardly confronted “things.”27 his would
later be the deining feature of autonomia from operaismo with the interest in applying
the theory with militancy in factory. Later to be appropriated by the autonomistMarxist discourse in twenty irst-century, as Kathi Weeks would argue: “the call to
refuse the present system of work rather than simply reconsider or re negotiate a
few of its terms and conditions:” would come from the perception of worker as a
potential subjective political agent whose anarchy can subvert capitalist structures,
the theoretical framework that was supported by grass root worker militancy in Italy
depended on the tradition of civil disobedience.28 She extends this analysis with
reference to Hardt and Negri’s Empire:
he refusal of work … as both activism and analysis, does not
only pose itself against the present organization of work; it
should also be understood as a creative practice, one that seeks
reappropriate and to reconigure existing forms of production
and reproduction. … Rather than being a goal in itself, ‘he
26
27
28
156
Aureli, The Project of Autonomy, 10.
Antonio Negri, Gli operaisti, interview with Negri. 242.
Weeks, “The Refusal of Work as Demand and Perspective,” 129.
Wrıtıng that Returns to the Political Framework of the Essay
CHAPTER FIVE
refusal of work and authority, or really the refusal of voluntary
servitude, is the beginning of liberatory politics.’29
Regardless what trajectory Tronti adopted after 1968, it would not be unjust to
suggest Tronti’s take on the “autonomy of the political” aimed at the “liberatory
politics.” hen again, Tronti would refer to what Negri believed to be the praxis of
operaisti critique as “the radicalization of discourse on the autonomy of the political
from the early 70s.”30 For Tronti, this trajectory which was opened up by his analysis
“was born from this failure of the insurrectionary movements, from the workers’
struggles to the youth revolt, that had spanned the decade of the 60s.”31
Operaisti targeted the capitalist society, capitalist structures, its institutions, its
dominance. Regardless their conlicting approaches after a series of fractures, Negri
and Tronti were part of this culture that was against the capitalist society. However,
both Tronti and Negri would acknowledge their projects’ failure. Unlike Tronti,
however, Negri does so without necessarily calling the prevailing dominance of
capitalist structures as a defeat:
he victory of the authorities in the late 1970s did not reairm
the old system but, on the contrary, profoundly modiied it,
making possible new forms of resistance and struggle, new
lines of light. … his was a moment, then, of great historical
changes: the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism, from
the modern to the postmodern.32
In short, operaisti critique was aimed at capitalist society, in order to relinquish it, but
failed. For Aureli, such a project must be incomprehensible. hat might be why he is
confusing the limited tactics and strategies of the operaisti with their intentions. On
this inlected approach to the project of the operaisti, Aureli structures his version of
the narration of those projects. By doing so, Aureli can be considered as returning to
their political context for mere pragmatic reasons one can argue and as an academic
inquiry.33
29
Ibid., 122.
30
Tronti, “Our Operaismo,” 135.
31
Tronti, “Our Operaismo,” 134.
32
Antonio Negri, Negri on Negri, 41-42. I guess it would be a more fair to call Tronti would
probably agree with the “victory of the authorities” and the historical signiicance of the moment,
rather than Negri’s articulations on the new forms of struggle and resistance which he had been
elaborating on with Hardt since the bestseller Empire. To repeat what I cited from Tronti earlier:
“The maximum disorder renewed the existing order. Everything changed so that everything
essential could stay the same.” Tronti, “Our Operaismo,” 126.
33
Or we can be more cynical and suggest he is intentionally delivering an ideological
endeavour. As Aureli suggests, in his demonstration of two different types of autonomies he depicts
in his narration of the period, he argues “these two types of autonomy projects -one applied to
Wrıtıng that Returns to the Political Framework of the Essay
157
CHAPTER FIVE
One year after he publishes he Project of Autonomy, Aureli returns to the same
context in his essay “Intellectual Work and Capitalist Development: Origins and
Context of Manfredo Tafuri’s Critique of Architectural Ideology.” In this piece Aureli
speciically focuses on Tafuri within the context which he had already established in
he Project of Autonomy.34 It is via Tafuri’s work on intellectual labour, Aureli posits
Cacciari’s “negative thought” to encapsulate the political project at stake in Tafuri’s
two essays published in Contropiano: “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,”
and his 1970 article “Lavoro intellettuale e sviluppo capitalistico” (“Intellectual
Work and Capitalist Development”). Within this framework Aureli explains -or
rather justiies-, along with other writers who study Tafuri, Tafuri’s impasse as an
intellectual.
Aureli says, Tafuri’s 1970 article “Intellectual Work and Capitalist Development”
remained in the shadow of his 1969 essay “Toward a Critique of Architectural
Ideology.” It is the connection between two articles Aureli wants to expose. He
proposes that if we re-approach Tafuri in the light of his 1970 essay where he relects
on the nature of intellectual work itself, we see that Tafuri’s critique “was not only
directed towards architecture and its project, but also concerned with the theme of
‘intellectual work’ and with culture in general.”35
To some extent, it would be unfair to suggest Aureli misses the crucial aspect of
the debates on the role of the intellectuals. In he Project of Autonomy under the
subsection “Autonomy and Intellectuals,” Aureli touches on this issue with reference
to Italo Calvino and Pier Paolo Pasolini who, Aureli argues, “accepted … their own
position vis-à-vis the social relationships imposed by the new system of production,”
in contrast to Franco Fortini who “went beyond the myth of cultural consumption
in order to question the role of intellectuals as producers of culture, and eventually
of an autonomous position within capitalism.”36 Fortini, as Aureli cites perceived
this group’s “initial and radical refusal of the historical ‘reality’ that surrounds them,”
resembling certain aristocratic societies.37 Aureli takes this notion of intellectual
politics, one applied to the city- were not about the destruction of capitalist culture and bourgeois
history per se but on the contrary, their deep analysis and instrumental use.” Aureli, The Project of
Autonomy, 14. Readers may recall an earlier footnote on Aureli’s efforts in 2011 with his book
Possibility of an Absolute Architecture. I will not inquire into his 2011 work, and it should be at
reader’s discretion to decide whether Aureli’s work brings about what Eisenman suggests.
34
Aureli, “Intellectual Work and Capitalist Development: Origins and Context of Manfredo
Tafuri’s Critique of Architectural Ideology” in SITE 26-27 (2009): 18-23. The essay is re-visited
and re-circulated through the internet portal The City as a Project in 2011. See http://
thecityasaproject.org/2011/03/pier-vittorio-aureli-manfredo-tafuri/.
35
Aureli, “Intellectual Work and Capitalist Development: Origins and Context of Manfredo
Tafuri’s Critique of Architectural Ideology,” in The City as a Project (blog) March 11, 2011. http://
thecityasaproject.org/2011/03/pier-vittorio-aureli-manfredo-tafuri/.
36
Aureli, The Project of Autonomy, 19.
37
Ibid., 20.
158
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CHAPTER FIVE
groups as social aristocracy seriously as he concludes that this was the airmation
of the “open-ended forms of cultural debate typical of a liberal society.”38 his, he
believes does not contradict with Fortini’s identiication of “intellectuals” vocation in
the society transforming into a “profession” in the 1960s as:
against pluralism, the group airms the superiority and
irreducibility of the position it represents, not by asserting the
presumed scientiic truth of its own analysis, but by ofering the
possibility of transforming its position into a critical weapon
in the service of the part of society it wishes to support.39
Aureli iterates in “Intellectual Work and Capitalist Development”: “For a philosopher,
an artist, a ilmmaker, a writer, or a scientist, adopting the form of the critical essay
challenges intellectual work by transgressing the way culture was managed as a system
of production in terms of its specializations.”40 Aureli refers to “critical essay” via
Adorno as a “self-interrogative (performative) literary art form in which the work is
critical, not through its message, but through its medium and its construction.”41
However in contrast to the perception of intellectuals as a group who has the
transforming power which Aureli mentions, I believe Fortini’s articulation on
intellectuals is more likely to be approached in relation to Toscano’s approach to
Fortini and the question of intellectuals: “A communist cannot be an intellectual. A
communist can only be an intellectual.”42 Toscano reports Fortini strove towards a
“solitary pursuit of poetry and of personal polemic” in his struggle within the tension
of “the universality of a traditional, ideological vision of the intellectual and the
particularity of his [sic] instrumental role in class society.”43 his was accompanied by
his “practical attention to the political valence of intellectual collectives” including
38
Ibid.
39
Ibid.
40
Aureli, “Intellectual Work and Capitalist Development.”
41
Ibid. Aureli suggests Tafuri had embraced this tool more than any other architectural
historian had.
42
Alberto Toscano, “The Non-State Intellectual: Franco Fortini and Communist Criticism,”
in Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities 3 (March 1, 2012) http://occasion.
stanford.edu/node/73: 1-18, 2. What Aureli speaks of in terms of intelelctuals’ role is not alien to
Italy. Futurists of early nineteenth-century Italy, surely assigned themselves a similar role.
Acknowledging, and promoting their position as the transformative force in the service part of the
society, and supporting the “nation of Italy,” Marinetti, the key igure of Italian futuristic
movement argued for the transformation to a society of “the proletariat of geniuses, in co-operation
with the growth of mechanised industry,” which will “arrive at the maximum salary and minimum
manual labour,” the “intellectual art-alcohol must be distributed to everyone.” Then again, this role
would eventually cease with the rise of the fascist state of Mussolini, Marinetti’s ex-political
partner. Günther Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist
Reaction, 1909-1944 (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996): 134.
43
Toscano, “The Non-State Intellectual,” 11.
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Quaderni rossi, and Quaderni piacentini (1962-1984): “one of the most important
political and cultural journals of the 1960s” as Aureli posits.44 Fortini was not
necessarily a pre-eminent operaisti himself; but he indeed was an important igure
for the operaisti, as he seems to had inluenced the leading operaisti igures in their
formative years, including Tronti, Bologna, Negri apart from Tafuri. As Aureli
suggests, it is reasonable to place Tafuri’s criticism in his 1969 essay “within the
context of the critique of reformism as this critique was elaborated by Panzieri and
Fortini.”45 his is hardly disputable. But against this, Aureli writes that the limitations
of Tafuri’s project are unavoidable. 46
44
Aureli posts Quaderni piacentini as “one of the most important political and cultural
journals of the 1960s.” Aureli, The Project of Autonomy, 20. It is Fortini’s interpretation of
intellectuals’ naivety regarding their role as intellectuals that seem to most trouble the operaisti. As
in their relections to the period, they seem to understand their defeat or limits through Fortini’s
“Cunning as Doves.” Tronti, for example, in 2012 with his relection on his own interpretation of
operaismo, says: “Blessed naivety which made us—Fortini said it well—‘as wise as doves’.
Operaismo was our university; we graduated in class struggle—entitling us not to teach, but to
live.” Tronti, “Our Operaismo,” 127. Where Negri refers to this “naivety” Tronti mentions, again
with reference to Fortini and argues in his distancing from Quaderni rossi and eventually taking a
path where “interpretation” required a consequent action to the ambiguity of Quaderni rossi’s
stance towards existing institutions of labour movement was to avoid himself “cunning as doves:”
this ambiguity seems a fully conscious one, relecting acutely the
precariousness of Quaderni Rossi’s relations with the CGIL.
According to Negri, many in the group had already come to accept the
characterisation of unions – advanced by Socialisme ou Barbarie,
Correspondence and much of the traditional ultra-left – as ‘completely
bureaucratised’ institutions functional only to capital. That the
advocates of such a view had been swiftly dealt with in the past was a
fact of which Alquati and others like him were only too aware. To
avoid a similar fate, therefore, they found themselves forced to be, in
the words of a Fortini essay, ‘As Cunning as Doves’” Wright,
Storming Heaven, 83.
45
Aureli, “Intellectual Work and Capitalist Development.”
46
Intellectuals, who were part of Contropiano and Angelus novus were familiar and
inluenced by Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Aureli reports. Still, Franco Fortini is paid a
special tribute by Aureli regarding his inluence on Tafuri as Tafuri also acknowledges Fortini’s
role in his formative years. In the interview Tafuri gave to Françoise Very, he mentions Veriica dei
Poteri and its signiicance in his intellectual formation. Tafuri, “Entretien avec Manfredo Tafuri,”
64. In 1992 Tafuri refers to the conference organized by Fortini in Venice “Candidi come serpenti”
(White as snakes); articles “Fine dell’antifascismo” (“End of Anti-fascism”), “Veriica dei potere”
(“Veriication of the Powers”) and Panzieri’s insistance that “starting all over again called for an
enormous work of destruction” as fundamental for his intellectual formation between 1966-1967.
Ibid., 37. This period is when Tafuri is assigned his position on the faculty at Palermo in 19661967: when Tafuri was preoccupied by his own work as well. Tafuri elaborates on this as he recalls
the context that led to his Teorie e storia dell’architettura:
What bothered me was the nature of the work -secondary courses. The
time passed very slowly, but in fact one could do three times the
amount of work we can do today. I turned my attention to a number of
issues that had preoccupied me, and began a sweeping revisionist
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Aureli attempts to excuse the limitations of Tafuri’s project by understanding it
within the role of the intellectuals ascribed by Fortini. his includes the constant
interrogation of this role of intellectuals without necessarily proposing an alternative.
Just as Panzieri had been criticized by the operaisti in the early 1960s in regard to his
hesitation to confront the consequences of his theories not only in the factory but
also in the struggles in front of the factory, Fortini is also prone to a similar critique.
Even what Aureli himself portrays of Fortini suggest a necessity of constant selfinterrogation by the intellectual, however Aureli does not dwell on this though:
Fortini directed his critique at this ideological use of cultural
experimentation [avant-garde techniques such as collage,
estrangement and so on by leftist “progressive” intellectuals and
artists such as Umberto Eco’s Gruppo 63] in order to mediate
(and mystify) the efects of production both on society and
especially intellectual work … Political economy, was used
by Fortini as a tool to describe the way capitalist airmation
within society manifested itself through its systematic cultural
self-deception. … he main objective of Fortini’s critique was
to demonstrate how capitalist development was the source
of a number of ideological manifestations that not so much
represented bourgeoise power, but rather the good conscience
of progressive intellectuals. … Fortini’s conception of being
critical involved becoming ‘cunning as doves and innocent
as foxes:’ meaning to constantly adjust the terms of criticism
to the standard cunning of capitalist ideology and not to
surrender to the easy narcissism of good intentions typical of
reformist approaches.47
Within the limits of Aureli’s perspective, Fortini’s exposure of the intellectuals’
situation was to be embraced as it is, without necessarily contesting or challenging it,
as the situation was a given, a priori, for those who were “intellectuals.”
To posit the deadlock, as if Fortini identiies as the ultimate end, is to benumb
the possibilities of such a critique. Fortini’s conception of being critical involved
becoming “cunning as doves and innocent as foxes,” but constant self-interrogation
needs to be directed against this deadlock of contradiction. Aureli misconstrues the
intellectuals’ intention by assigning the situation they ind themselves in to their
47
study inspired by Tronti, Asor Rosa, and the group connected with
Romero [sic] Panzieri. … Why? Well, those of us in my circle -and
this didn’t include architects, because I had abandoned them
completely – felt a strong bond with Gruppo ‘63, with Umberto Eco
and Franco Fortini.” Ibid., 36.
Aureli, “Intellectual Work and Capitalist Development.”
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failure to resist capitalist development and to reduce this deadlock to their intentions.
he reason that Aureli inds both Tafuri’s and Fortini’s works less problematic than
the work of the autonomists in the 1970s seems to be that both Tafuri and Fortini
are gradually submersed into the endorsement of their roles as intellectuals with a
growing impasse to intervene in struggles against the capitalist development. hey
identify the barriers to acting as antagonistic political subjects other than as an elite
avant-guard on behalf of the rest of the radical workers and revolutionaries.48
Toscano explains this phenomenon which Aureli seems to sufer from, in his account
of the “communism” of Franco Fortini:
Our present distance from the problem of intellectuals is
easily ascribed to epochal shifts in our political culture. Signal
texts of the ifties and sixties are marked by a seemingly
unalterable anachronism. Yet the supposed desuetude of this
problem -notwithstanding its periodic and almost invariably
supericial exhumations and re-interments- blinds us to some
of the crucial analyses and unfulilled projects thrown up by
that period’s intense debates.49
When Aureli argues that Fortini’s “cunning as doves and innocent as foxes” meant
to “constantly adjust the terms of criticism to the standard of the cunning of
capitalist ideology and not to surrender to the easy narcissism of good intentions
typical of reformist approaches,”50 one would expect a criticism of Fortini, Tronti,
Cacciari, Negri, as well as Tafuri. However, for Aureli, Fortini’s criticism was limited
with exposing “the seemingly most genuine attempts of social reform advanced by
leftist movements and institutions that often revealed the true features of capitalist
domination.”51 When this is exposed via the works intellectuals delivered, for Aureli,
this was always bound to an impasse, which the real intellectual would not even
bother to overcome. Similar to what Toscano notes:
On one column … we note the speciically bourgeois character
of the intellectual’s role … on the other column, we register
the programmatic conviction that intellectual life is both a
generic condition of human beings in society and something
that will lourish only after capitalism’s demise, through
revolutions in pedagogy and the pedagogy of revolution.52
48
Tafuri secures a position in the university as of 1968; so does Fortini in 1976.
49
Toscano, “The Non-State Intellectual,” 2.
50
Aureli, “Intellectual Work and Capitalist Development.”
51
Aureli, “Intellectual Work and Capitalist Development.”
52
Toscano, “The Non-State Intellectual,” 2. Rita Di Leo, says they were atypical
intellectuals who were not satisied with being intellectuals. Their atypicality, according to Di Leo,
162
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Where it is relevant to argue Tafuri’s critique of ideology took its form from those
premises, the consequences of the role to which he appointed himself do not have
to and in reality, do not follow this form.53 As mentioned earlier, what Tafuri
taught was not necessarily what he was doing as a historian.54 Hence this lead to the
institutionalization of Tafuri as a historian that did not produce any antagonists in
contrast to what Tronti had argued with penetrating the institutions and taking power
would allow one to subvert those institutions. his tactic not only failed for PCI
in the case of Tronti or Cacciari, but also failed for the university and academia in
general.
Quite righteously, however, Aureli argues that one can approach Tafuri’s critique as
an understanding of capitalism, which acknowledged there was no outside position
to capitalist development, as this development consisted of “waged labour” that
also “incorporated the role of intellectual.”55 his is how Aureli approaches Tafuri’s
critique. However this does not lead to arguing for the extreme implication of
overturning the waged labour by refusing to participate, but instead Aureli uses it
to explain the apathy to do so. herefore “any critical and political discourse needed
irst of all to be addressed toward intellectuals as workers, rather than addressed to
came from “trying to be anti-bougeoise.” See Rita Di Leo, Gli operaisti, interview with Rita Di
Leo, 159.
53
Remember the opening paragraph of “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology:”
“Culture in its intermediary role, has so deined its distinguishing features in ideological terms that
in its shrewdness it has reached the point -beyond all intellectual good faith- of imposing forms of
contestation and protest upon its own products.” Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural
Ideology,” 6.
54
It is relevant to quote Tafuri at length:
In 1968 and 1970, in an elite faculty like the one at Venice, where a
hundred people attend your lectures but only seventy of them take the
examination, where students from other faculties come to audit, it
seemed that everything could be taken for granted. It’s the ingenuity of
the young student that leads him to take classes that are too advanced,
but in taking everything for granted, he comes to think of them as
common merchandise. Therefore, what must be taught is a
transmission not only of the information or the methodology but also
the art of constructing interconnected histories. When I started to direct
my irst dissertations, I understood that I couldn’t actually teach this.
What was more important was the method of investigation, a very
different thing. I gradually realized how much the technical side of the
ield had been neglected and how idealistic I had been. I understood
that I should not lecture about what I do: many of the students study
history because they will become conservators of buildings, not
historians. These grand intellectual constructions should be addressed
to my colleagues who are historians in other disciplines, rather than
my students, who in any case will need to know very well how a
building was made in order not to make errors in the practice of
conservation. Tafuri, “History as Project,” 65.
55
Aureli, “Intellectual Work and Capitalist Development.”
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‘others’ (workers), contradicting the notion that the social and political mandate
given to the intellectual could be taken for granted.”56 his is a problematic approach
to intellectuals.
Reminding ourselves of what Aureli reiterates as what Contropiano proposed as “a
valid counter-plan,” he says it “would consist in the working-class appropriation of
the most advanced bourgeois culture within modernity, especially the bourgeoise
intellectual tradition that Cacciari deined as ‘negative thought’.”57 his plan only
works as a “valid plan” if the intellectuals are acknowledged and treated as “workers”,
like Aureli does. he role of intellectuals assumed in 1960s and 1970s Italy, and to
some extent today, does not substantiate Aureli’s conviction of an intellectual being a
worker.58
Behind Aureli’s reading of “intellectual work,” lies what could misconstrue the
understanding of immaterial labour:
If Fordism integrated consumption into the cycle of
the reproduction of capital, post-Fordism integrates
communication into it. From a strictly economic point of
view, the cycle of reproduction of immaterial labor dislocates
the production-consumption relationship as it is deined as
much by the “virtuous Keynesian circle” as by the Marxist
reproduction schemes of the second volume of Capital.59
In other words, to understand intellectual labour as the bourgeoise intellectual being
treated as a worker and hence gaining subversive antagonistic power through the tools
they already possess, is a reduction on the edge of a fetish. he role of the intellectual,
in the post-1968 context can be deined within “continual innovation in the forms
and conditions of communication … [which] gives form to and materializes needs,
the imaginary, consumer tastes … enlarges, transforms, and creates the ‘ideological’
56
Ibid.
57
Ibid.
58
Tronti’s 1963 analysis may come handy to understand how Aureli grants the intellectual
the role of a worker:
If this corrupted word [alienation] still has a meaning, it is only that of
expressing a speciically determined form of direct exploitation of
labor on the part of capital: total estrangement of labor with respect to
the worker; useful, concrete labor which becomes objectively
estranged, external and indifferent to the worker; the end of the trade,
of the profession, of this last appearance of individual independence of
the worker, the extreme survival of a bourgeois person in the body of a
worker. Tronti, “Social Capital,” 116-117.
59
Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” trans. Paul Colilli and Ed Emory in “Radical
Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics,” ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, Theory Out of Bounds
7 (1996): 132-147, 139.
164
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and cultural environment of the consumer … transforms the person who uses
it.”60 Tronti or other operaisti perceiving their failure as intellectuals to contest the
production of a “social relationship” do not necessarily imply the hegemony of this
labour; but instead iniltration of capitalist structures to life itself that transforms
the “lives” of the working class.61 his, however, is not to propose that “mass
intellectuality” ascends the working class to the level of bourgeoise intellectual, nor
bourgeoise intellectuals descend to the working class.62 Neither Tafuri, Cacciari, nor
Tronti can be or had been considered as workers. hey always were very much aware
of their elitist position in regards to the theoretical endeavors they were undertaking.63
Assigning “the intellectual worker” as a category from which Tafuri was speaking
from as an ‘exploited’ and ‘whose struggles had been appropriated by the capitalist
development’ class in the late 1960s and 1970s Italy, can not be sustained. his would
be overlooking the analysis and the discourse the operaisti constructed, and collapsing
the consequences of the failed attempts of the opearisti -to adopt the discourse they
constructed to contest capitalist development- on top of their project.
One of the consequences of the problem of the attempts of architectural circles
to return to the context of Tafuri’s 1969 essay can be read in this light: their
unwillingness to except Tafuri’s project is an unfulilled project, apart from his
historiography. And even when we consider Tafuri as a historian, we still need to go
to the trouble of excavating the debates or events which lead to his choice of history
over something else. Instead, however, there is a tendency to reach the conclusion
that by re-contextualizing Tafuri’s critique within the precise project “where the
possible relationships between cultural disciplines and class struggle were at stake,
not architectural discipline itself;” that the argument and the common conclusion
architectural critics reached from Tafuri’s analysis’ implication of the “death of
architecture” is wrong.64
60
Ibid., 137.
61
Ibid.,
62
Hardt and Virno suggest mass intellectuality (intelletualità di massa) “refers to the
collective intelligence and accumulated intellectual powers that extend horizontally across society.”
See the glossary of concepts in “Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics,” for further
inquiries. Also to have a rather quick idea of the transition from the late 1960s concept Negri
worked through “mass worker” to the 1970s “social worker” and further contemporary elaboration
on the advanced capitalist modes of production, see Antonio Negri, “Archeology and Project: The
Mass Worker and the Social Worker,” in Revolution Retrieved: 203-228; Paolo Virno, A Grammar
of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, James
Cascaito and Andrea Casson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004) and Dyer-Witheford “Cyber-Negri:
General Intellect and Immaterial Labor.”
63
At least Tafuri was, as I have been reposting from Tafuri’s 1992 interview in Chapter
Three.
64
Aureli, “Intellectual Work and Capitalist Development.”
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To what extent Tafuri’s historical project delivers what the political project, which he
adopted in his formation as a historian, attempted is questionable, if not irrelevant.
However, through assigning Tafuri’s project with “a will to understand” rather than
“a will to power,” Aureli depicts a Tafuri, who stands in deadlock with himself.65
Avoiding interrogating more deeply the deadlock of Tafuri’s, Fortini’s or other
critiques’ failure to overcome the role assigned by capitalist structures to them, as well
as their failure to address the role they assigned themselves as intellectuals; seems to
be considered a deliberate strategy according to Aureli. Aureli argues:
this will to understand, which Tafuri never expected to be
satisied, was only used as a trigger for his research, and it
was implicitly aimed at what Fortini would have called the
recuperation of the totality of intellect, or, in other words, the
possibility of transgressing the disciplinary specializations and
expertise imposed by the political economy of neo-capitalist
work and production.66
However, as Toscana reminds the reader in his paper on Fortini, we are far removed
from the conlicts regarding the context in which Fortini shaped his critique and
stance, which overlaps and/or coincides with/extends Tafuri’s. He argues, with
reference to Fortini and approaching his articulation on the intellectuals:
Without both the drive toward totality and the horizon
of collective pedagogy as well as the incessant work on the
forms and contents, the relations and institutions, of cultural
production under capitalism to speak of the intellectual will
be, to borrow the situationist adage, to have a corpse in one’s
mouth.67
Aureli, who assigns Fortini’s intellectual as transcendental to reality and not bringing
it back to the ground, not even to self-interrogation, seems to ind it more than useful
to have a corpse in his mouth.
5.3 Gail Day and her take on Tafuri
Where Aureli focusses on the Tronti’s operaismo and understands the context of
Contropiano only in relation to Tronti and Cacciari’s political formation; Day tries to
provide a more comprehensive study of the context. At least, Day does mention the
shared opposition the magazine had with Negri and other autonomist igures against
Left-Hegellianism. In relation to the common thread, dialectical synthesis where the
65
66
67
166
Ibid.
Ibid.
Toscano, “The Non-State Intellectual,” 18.
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negative’s power is “compromised by capital’s appropriation of negation’s dynamic,”
and “nihilism” that “requires the strength to face capitalist negativity,” are elaborated
by Day to locate Tafuri and Cacciari within this opposition to orthodox-Marxism.68
However her study is instrumental in presenting Cacciari’s “negative thought” and its
relevance to Tafuri’s project, without necessarily mentioning the rest of the spectrum
of the opposition to Left-Hegellianism of the 1960s and 1970s.69
Against those who assume Tafuri’s pessimism deplores any attempt avant-gardes or
architects can deliver, she presents her analysis of Tafuri in her 2012 essay “Manfredo
Tafuri, Fredric Jameson and the Contestations of Political Memory:”
here are certainly limitations to Tafuri’s account, but it is
remarkable the extent to which they are discussed as if they
loated in political ether, severed from the discourses and
histories that animated them. As an intervention into the
reassessment of key political moments of the twentieth century,
his work was always likely to be provocative, but it remains
curious how the historical speciics are themselves translated
into the lingua franca of cultural theory. he problems with
Tafuri are addressed neither by the routine casting of him
as despondent declarer of ‘futility’, nor by countering his
arguments with calls for ‘hope’ and ‘enclaves’.70
I do not intend to argue against Day’s version of Tafuri, I have already dealt with
it briely above in Chapter Two. And to some extent, Day does acknowledge the
provocative nature of Tafuri’s work, which I appreciate as I argue for this nature
in my postulation of Tafuri’s 1969 essay as a piece of agitation. hen again, Day is
committed to provide a Tafuri whose nihilism is not useless due to the pessimistic
outlook it presents for architecture. Day inquiries into the formation of the political
framework of Tafuri’s project to make the point that Tafuri’s pessimism was not a
total rejection of the possibility of progressive architecture. However while doing so,
Day fails to give the speciic characteristic of the Italian radical Left, beyond Cacciari;
hence omits the consideration to approach to Tafuri’s 1969 essay in its particularity.
Day argues, the moment of overcoming the Hegelian dialectics within operaisti
discourse is identiied with “the critique of the avant-garde, the Left-Nietzscheanism
68
Day, Dialectical Passions, 101-09.
69
Though Day refers to Cacciari’s and Tafuri’s acceptance of “many of the dialectic’s tropic
turns and transitory characteristics, its movements of internalization, integration, introjection, and
immersion.” Ibid., 107. Even though Day does not mention, or criticize Cacciari and Tafuri’s
position, she seems to touch on what Mandarini refers as Negri criticizing Cacciari and his Krisis
for Cacciari paying “a heavy price for having saved the negative from its positivation in the
development of Capital-Geist- he effectively domesticates it.” Mandarini, “Beyond Nihilism,” 48.
70
Day, “Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson and the Contestations of Political Memory,” 73.
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and embrace of the completed nihilism, the opposition to the Universal History, and
the rejection of dialectical synthesis.”71 his approach to operaismo was announced
in Cacciari: “our progression should be from the negative, to the Metropolis as an
instrument of class, to its negativity as a contradiction of class: from the perspective
of the negative to the perspective of class.”72 Similarly to Aureli’s purpose in arguing
for an “intellectual worker,” Day’s depiction of “diferent groups and tendencies of
operaismo,” which “acquired a large base of support among intellectuals and industrial
workers,” assumes a role for intellectuals alongside the workers in their struggle
against capitalist society. Where this role failed to go beyond participating in the
workers’ struggle as agitators, organizers of reading groups of Capital in factories,
and interventionists to Party and Union on behalf of the workers to subvert those
institutions.
For Day, “the decision by a number of prominent operaisti to enter the PCI, and
the split in Contropiano, is central, not only to the political history of workerism/
autonomism, but also to the history of the Venice-school.”73 Day herself questions
whether the use of “tactical entryism” is a correct one or not as she notes “intellectuals
who made this move into the PCI appear not to have organized to do so.”74
Although, it is quite clear what Day means by it: it is the trajectory, which had been
chosen by those intellectuals who were convinced they needed to embrace the reality
of the plan of the capital, as well as their role in this plan as intellectuals. Rather
than overcoming the contradictions of being an intellectual, which they collectively
exposed, they assigned themselves roles within the Party, unions, and also universities
where they represented the “rights” of the workers. Whereas operaisti were critical of
institutions of capitalist structures conforming the subversive antagonistic potential
of the political working class back into the plan of capital. Day, clearly chooses not
to expose this contradiction or dwell on it and it does make sense on a practical level
as it would hi-jack her own project: contesting the view of Tafuri’s project as blunt
pessimism, and instead takes up Carrera’s invitation to read Tafuri: “within the frame
of mind of a theory of the Metropolis.”75
his theory of Metropolis grants Cacciari a more central role in approaching Tafuri’s
project: combining the theory of Metropolis “with the militant practice in the factory
as Italy experienced its own industrial revolution through workers’ struggles.”76
71
Day, Dialectical Passions, 123.
72
Massimo Cacciari, “Metropolis,” in Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of
Modern Arhcitecture, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (New Heaven and London: Yale University Press,
1993): 3-22, 16.
73
Day, review of The Project of Autonomy, 229.
74
Day, Dialectical Passions, 271.
75
Carrera, “On Massimo Cacciari’s Disenchanted Activism,”, xxxiii-xxxiv.
76
Ibid., xxv.
168
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Day takes of from here, bringing Tafuri, Metropolis and the negative thought into
the same pot, to allow a reading of more appropriate Tafuri, most likely in its more
appropriate context.
Day initiates her analysis citing Tafuri’s notes to the second edition of 1968 Teorie e
storia dell’architettura which was published in 1970. In this note, Tafuri reiterates the
criticism of “the use of negation” to argue that “architecture was in the forefront in the
battles of the dialectical conversion from Negative to Positive,” for the transformation
of crisis into models of capitalist development.77 Day portrays what Tafuri presents
as “the use of avant-gardist” negation as: “once-radical thing that had unfortunately
been appropriated by capitalism’s commercial and political machinery.”78 “Despite his
trenchant criticism of avant-gardist negation, negation was nevertheless at the core
of Tafuri’s method,” Day argues, and tries to ind explanations for Tafuri’s stance via
Cacciari.79 In reality, the link between Tafuri and Cacciari is not hard to establish and
to some extent, it is already out there and does not take too much excavation.
In the chapter on intellectual work and ideology of Architecture and Utopia, Tafuri
argues “in order to survive, ideology had to negate itself as such, break its own
crystallized forms, and throw itself entirely into the ‘construction of the future’.”80
Day explains this was to argue for the avant-garde to “acclimatize the public to the
disruptions of the urban world,” quoting Tafuri from 1976 Modern Architecture, to
report Tafuri stating avant-garde’s “objective role in the process (however marginal)
was to function as a force for modernization, thereby contributing to capitalism’s
changing requirements.”81 We can go back to the 1969 essay as there Tafuri refers
to the “experience of shock, sufered in the city” and the role of the artists to allow
absorption and internalization of this shock, as an inevitable condition of existence.82
Tafuri argues: “he public had to be provoked. hat was the only way people
could be inserted actively into the universe of precision dominated by the laws of
production.”83 Metropolis, as Tafuri postulated in 1969, was the “foundation of the
avant-garde and ‘the real proving ground for all its proposals’.”84
Having said that, to understand the implications of Tafuri’s account of the European
avant-gardes, as Day argues, “we need to keep in mind the proile of the Metropolis”
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
Day, Dialectical Passions, 79.
Ibid., 79.
Ibid., 80.
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 50.
Day, Dialectical Passions, 82.
Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” 18.
Ibid., 19.
Ibid.
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Cacciari provided.85 In this work of Cacciari, he posits that “the entire avant-garde
and its crisis” fell in between Georg Simmel’s 1903 “he Metropolis and Mental Life”
and “Walter Benjamin’s fragments on Badelaire and Paris.”86 his proile consisted of
“a category employed to describe a process of social abstraction,” through Simmel’s
view where “individuality and emotion take on the characteristics of exchange value
and are deined by the equivalence and quantiication,” in the Metropolis.87 What is
more, Metropolis was postulated as an abstract category where it “names capitalism at
a certain stage of its development, along with capital’s most widened social efects and
impacts on individual consciousness.”88
Day arrays Tafuri’s works from 1969 to 1980 Sphere and the Labyrinth to portray
the brutal criticism of the avant-gardes, with which he anticipated that avant-gardes’
complete eforts were subsumed back into capitalist development with their attitude
to overcome their anxiety for being forced to remain “forever dumb in the face of ”
capitalism.89 Day argues, with reference to the Metropolis and negative thought
that “the concept of revolution is not,” for Tafuri, some general panacea. Rather it
is simply the condition for beginning to work on reality in a non-illusory fashion.
Commencing this task, Tafuri believes, must entail confronting the new Metropolitan
situation in all its negative force: grasping its conditions, entering into, and working
with and through, them.”90 Day reiterates from Tafuri’s 1980 book Sphere and the
Labyrinth:
he new language emerging from the Metropolis -the
possibilities presented by the breaking up of syntactical
connections and the disenchanted sign- could only be
unleashed once the avant-garde had ‘neutralized the
paralyzing anguish that can only contemplate itself.’ he fear
of the present conditions and nostalgia for an imagined older
social order could only end in a disconnected solipsism and
was hopelessly unrealistic. For Tafuri, the way ahead involved
actively embracing the given situation.91
However, this embrace was not in order to solve ‘the crisis of the intellectuals’ in
the identiication of their contradictory roles as the avant-gardes of the bourgeoise
ideology, or their role in the capitalist development. As we inquire into the formation
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
170
Day, Dialectical Passions, 86.
Cacciari, “Metropolis,” 3-4.
Ibid., 84-85.
Ibid., 85.
Ibid., 94.
Ibid.
Ibid., 95.
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of the discourse Tafuri adopts in his identiication, we can conclude that embracing
the given situation as it is, was aimed at identifying the problems with the assumption
that the intellectuals, the bourgeoise or the middle class was in crisis, in attempts to
struggle against capitalist society.
As we return to understand this political framework, I tried to demonstrate in
Chapter Four, it needs to be acknowledged that the essay and Contropiano stand at
a critical moment: ‘the Italian 1968’. he Creeping May; between May 1968 and
December 1969 was when the trajectories for the Italian new Left were opening and
closing at the same time. In the case of intellectuals, they questioned their own role
within the social conlict as the operaisti they identiied themselves to be. hey tried
to become the social scientists of the workers, as in the case of Panzieri; though they
needed further airmation to believe they were actively participant in the struggle
and hence became agitators in front of the factory gates like Tronti, Asor Rosa, Negri
and Cacciari until 1968. Somehow one of the logical conclusion to become active
participants of the struggle caused another split amongst operaisti right after the May
1968 of Italy. his date is symbolic in terms of the dominance of the revolutionary
rhetoric amongst students as well as workers as is December 1969 when the counterrevolutionary attacks in Italy were initiated oicially that would start an atmosphere
of terror.
Day’s interest in the period can be understood with reference to what she observes
as the renewed contemporary interest in operaismo. “his renewed interest,” she
says, “in the Italian-Left debates of the 60s and 70s is not understood as speciic to
Italy, but has itself become deployed by many sections of the current anti-capitalist
movement as a mode of resistance and struggle, a strategy of ‘counter-empire’.”92 he
resurgence of operaismo amongst anti-capitalist movements today, she further explains
“as activists have sought to develop understandings that exceed both the fascination
with autonomism (where the belief in the inversion was more exaggerated and yet
less determinate) and the debilitating stream of constant reminders of capital’s total
domination.”93 She acknowledges “the approaches taken, and terms developed, by
Italian workerism were and are, deserving radical criticism.”94
For example, she suggests Trontian inversion was a tendency to “political blindness,”
and further reminds the reader about Tronti himself distancing from his own theses
and insists “operaismo should be seen as speciically tied to the practices of Fordist
and Taylorist workplace.”95 “Nevertheless,” Day continues, “for a while, the culture of
this Italian Left had grounds for its sense of growing strength and wrought tangible
92
93
94
95
Day, “Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson and the Contestations of Political Memory,” 72
Day, Dialectical Passions, 126.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Wrıtıng that Returns to the Political Framework of the Essay
171
CHAPTER FIVE
gains.”96 However she fails to provide what those “strengths” and “tangible gains” are,
apart from a handful of prominent Italian intellectuals, art and architecture historians
and philosophers.
What is more, Day also argues that readers need to be reminded of operaismo’s
assertion about “the primacy of living labour over capital, that is, its emphasis on
the role of the workers as the active and the determinate force in the struggle with
capital.”97 She presents Cacciari and Tafuri’s interventions in the culture of struggle
through the concept of “negation.” But she does not question whether it can be really
referred as a class concept that is an autonomous instrument for the class, which
does not feed the capital, a moment of a struggle that resists being subsumed back
into capitalist development.98 Instead, for the sake of convincing the reader that
Tafuri’s project and its nihilistic aspects have functional value for the contemporary
architectural discourse, she overlooks “the critique of wage labour, its refusal on a
mass scale,” which gave substance to the “mass challenge directed against professional
roles and hierarchies … to the attack on the organization of social knowledge;
to qualitative demands for changes in the structure of everyday life,” as for the
contemporary reader, these must have no pragmatic attribute.99 Hence questioning
the link between “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” and Architecture
and Utopia: as the particular context of the 1969 essay would not help Day with her
Tafuri.
5.4 Conclusion to Chapter Five
One does not necessarily expect Aureli to acknowledge that operaismo was a
failed project in order to be able to go beyond what operaisti attempted with their
antagonism towards capitalist structures. Day refers to Aureli as a “rising star on the
circuit of critical-architectural and urban theory,” who combines “art-radicalism with
hard-line political critique of all that is (merely) ‘radical’,” with his commitment
to form.100 In light of Aureli’s own contradictions with his “left avant-gardist”
position, which Day picks up on, it is beside the point to expect Aureli to approach
operaismo or autonomia with an intention to interrogate the role of the intellectuals
in the failure of contesting the capitalist society. Aureli is a good demonstration
of a “bourgeoise intellectual,” except now the intellectual is immersed in the post1968 rhetoric that perceives surrendering to capitalist development as the same as
acknowledging the reality and actuality of capitalist society. Hence the justiication
96
Ibid., 127.
97
Ibid., 123.
98
Ibid., 125.
99
See Antonio Negri and et.al., “Do You Remember Revolution?” in Revolution Retrieved,
229-243.
100
Day, review of The Project of Autonomy, 221.
172
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CHAPTER FIVE
of the apathy of Tafuri as an intellectual who is romanticized and further fetishized
through the concept of ‘will to understand’ that is portrayed as conlicting with ‘will
to power’. In this picture, it is easy to miss the irony in Tafuri’s ‘will to understand.’
his ‘will to understand’ is what allowed Tafuri to secure his position within the
academia in an institution which graduated architects who needed “to know
very well how a building was made in order not to make errors in the practice of
conservation.”101
Aureli approaches the political context of Italy in the 1960s and the 1970s with a
particular point of view. He inds it “fascinating and at the same time exhilarating
that those from abroad consider [the legacy of autonomy] interesting and appealing,
while in Italy it is not only neglected but even despised, and not always for the wrong
reasons.”102 Aureli’s perspective becomes problematic when he, almost intentionally,
misconstrues the context by “not saying” things after granting himself the right to
hold on to his point of view as an “Italian architect working mostly outside of Italy
today.”103 Apart from what Aureli does not say, what he does say is not necessarily
always substantiated, as in the case of “intellectual workers” or Fortini’s understanding
of the role of intellectuals as discussed above. Hence his works need scrutiny, even
though they are some of the seminal resources in architectural discourse that revisits
the political context of 1960s Italy.
When it comes to Day, however, it is crucial to remind her that the moment, which
she returns to in order to seek a strategy that is “counter-empire” or counter-capitalist
society, is a context that might not have exhausted itself, but exhausted the tactics it
granted to intellectuals. What Day wants to do by returning to this context, is not
necessarily establishing the relationship between Cacciari’s negative thought, and
Tafuri’s project as a historian. his link is easy to make. he negative thought is where
the contradictions and internal conlicts of the society are exposed for Cacciari and
it is demonstrated in Tafuri’s project as a historian: where “negativity” is “made to
101
Tafuri, “History as Project,” 65.
102
Aureli, The Project of Autonomy, 82. Aureli’s irm stance against autonomia and the
thread of it which Hardt and Negri extend to today via their trilogy Empire, Multitude and
Commonwealth; may lead him to present a biased account of the 1960s and 1970s Italy, without
necessarily acknowledging the limitations of his position. Aureli deliberately does not attempt to
portray a picture that aims for a complete apprehension of the period, but he does not say so. As an
Italian-speaking architectural theoretician, who inquires into operaismo and autonomia, his work
could have been a valuable resource for us who ind a relevance of returning to this context within
contemporary debates on globalization of capitalist structures and architectural practice and
design, for example with his account for the interviews operaisti gave in 2000s. However, he only
refers to Tronti’s interview amongst more than ifty operaisti-afiliated igures, and I must say the
parts he cites are very selective and to some extent open to interpretation, where, for example,
Tronti says “it is better to have a greater number of reactionaries then petite revolutionaries,” in
relation to Contropiano. See Borio and et.al. eds., Gli operaisti, interview with Mario Tronti, 301302.
103
Ibid.
Wrıtıng that Returns to the Political Framework of the Essay
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CHAPTER FIVE
speak: speak of its making, its becoming, its function, and its conlicts.”104 Tafuri as
a historian is the torturer and the one who is tortured at the same time.: “Distance is
fundamental to history;”105 which is not always an option however, and indeed that
is why the historian “must create artiicial distance.”106 Hence, as Tafuri remarked
the relationship between architectural theory and practice, this contradiction of
the historian is legitimized as: “it is the conlict of things that are important, and
that are productive.”107 However what this form of a conlict produced within the
transformation of industrial society to the post-industrial society, other than the
contemporary and advanced modes of production, which capitalism thrives on, is
unclear.
In any case, what is challenging for Day is to argue for the more optimistic aspects
of Tafuri’s project. Or in other words, to argue for the utility of the pessimism of
Tafuri’s work through negative thought without confronting the role of the architect
as well as the intellectual and/or professionals within the capitalist development. If
we assume Cacciari’s mayor-ship of Venice demonstrated a success for the potential
of “negative thought,” or Tafuri being able to hold on to an academic position which
he was assigned in 1968 until his death as part of what operaisti project aimed for,
it is easier to concede that Tafuri’s project and negative thought had some further
potential in them. Without necessarily saying so, Day implies they may have, at least
in the case of Tafuri:
Tafuri’s [body of intellectual work] represents one of the
most explicit and extended articulations on negation and art
to emerge from the New Left, not to mention a speciic and
distinctive political expression of the philosophical problem of
Left Hegelianism and nihilism. Its full implications are still to
be reckoned with, and, perhaps, still to be played out. Between
the methodological positivism and (sometimes blind) political
optimism of operaismo, on the one hand, and, on the other,
the historical pessimism generated out of the Left-Hegelian
and Western Marxism traditions - between militant autonomy
and the melancholy of alienation, or between the emphasis
on politics and on economic theory- there is still much to be
negotiated.108
At the end of the day, Day is against the argument Tafuri’s account being a pessimist
104
105
106
107
108
174
Day, Dialectical Passions, 108.
Ibid., 109.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., 130.
Wrıtıng that Returns to the Political Framework of the Essay
CHAPTER FIVE
prophecy of the death of architecture. She puts emphasis on the context of his explicit
and trenchant distance taken for being a pessimist as the prelude to Architecture and
Utopia was written “in the midst of the world oil crisis and the social turmoil in
Italy -not to mention the traumas undoubtedly being wrought by the PCI’s historic
compromise.”109 Regardless, she does take Tafuri’s reputation as a pessimist seriously,
even though she refers to Tafuri distancing himself “from the accusation of being
doom-laden,”110 so that she can tackle it. For Day, the transformation of Tafuri’s
position from 1969 to 1973 does not possess too many problems, except that it
demonstrates the potential of Tafuri’s project for architectural theory and practice.
Where her emphasis on this context is exactly what I have been tried to demonstrate,
I instead argue for looking at the context of the essay, rather than the book, to be able
to approach Tafuri’s work as an agitation that does not and should not present any
blueprint nor path to follow for those who contest capitalist society apart from what
not to do in our contestations.
Day argues, on the other hand, it is the collaborative eforts of Tafuri and Cacciari
that would allow us to see the potential of Tafuri’s work, though she acknowledges, “as
we encounter the arguments about negative thought, Tafuri’s alleged pessimism seems
only to deepen.”111 She quotes Tafuri from the late 1970s: “To save oneself one must
lose one’s self, one must resign oneself to being submerged in the chaos, one must
make oneself among signs. But by action.”112 he airmation of nihilism forms the
prelude to a salvaging of an emancipating mode of negativity, one that goes beyond
negation’s appropriation by capital; by acknowledging this world as the only world
and calling it “good” as Nietzsche put it.113
109
Ibid., 100.
110
Ibid.
111
Ibid., 101.
112
Ibid., 108.
113
Gail Day’s approach is, however, practical in responding to Esra Akcan, for example.
Akcan provides a coherent study of Tafuri’s approach to avant-gardes in her essay “Manfredo
Tafuri’s Theory of the Architectural Avant-garde” to ask the question in her conclusion: is it fair for
Manfredo Tafuri to deny any possibility for the avant-garde to change society? Esra Akcan,
“Manfredo Tafuri’s Theory of the Architectural Avant-Garde,” in Journal of Architecture 7, no.2
(Summer 2002): 135-170, 162. Day’s re-visit of the political framework of Tafuri’s works should
lead Akcan to revisit her question. What is quite problematic with Akcan’s perspective is her
conclusion. For Akcan, “as long as class remains as Tafuri’s privileged category of historical
analysis, oppression based on other categories such as gender, race and geography seem to be
considered less relevant.” Ibid., 165. Akcan says, “perhaps with a level of far-fetched optimism,”
critical analysis of the oppressions and exclusions of Architecture have nevertheless shaken some
status quo.” Ibid. Apart from ignoring completely the political formation of the critique of the
avant-garde in the case of Tafuri, I believe this is a blunt approach to contemporary structures,
networks of power and production of identities, spaces, bodies and relations on a biopolitical level.
For an argumentation of how the progression of race, gender and geography had actually cultivated
further modes of oppression which are equally, if not more violent, see Jeffrey R. Di Leo and
Sophia A. McClennen, “Postscript on Violence,” in Symploke 20 nos. 1-2 (2012): 241-250.
Wrıtıng that Returns to the Political Framework of the Essay
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CHAPTER FIVE
What is problematic in Day’s approach is that for the sake of inding an (actually)not-so-pessimistic Tafuri within the context of Contropiano, she expands “Toward a
Critique of Architectural Ideology,” to the whole of Architecture and Utopia for the
sake of dismissing the agitating tone of the essay. It is ironic, because Day accuses
Aureli of “collapsing the Tafuri of, say, 1969 and the 70s with the [Tafuri] of 1962,”
when Aureli quotes from Tafuri’s 1962 essay, in his attempt to ind a Trontianintervention to the architectural culture of the 1960s and 1970s Italy.114 Clearly,
collapsing 1970 to 1969; or 1973 to 1969 does not look like as much of a problem to
Day.
In her given importance, one expects more of an emphasis to the debates around
entryism which she posits as a determinant factor to shape the post-operaisti thinking.
Yet she fails to do so in order to make her point against the assumption that Tafuri
was a nay-sayer. Instead she establishes the link between Tafuri’s and Cacciari’s explicit
engagement with the anti-positivistic arguments deriving from German philosophy
and Western Marxism that their approach was shaped by a culture of militant
praxis.115
Day is not in a diferent space than Aureli is, in terms of her approach to the project
of the operaisti and what they expected via the working class struggle: an end to
capitalist society. Without questioning the role of the intellectuals and the roles they
assigned themselves, Day conforms with the assumption of hegemony of immaterial
labour transcended the class relations which were once so obvious but now becoming
diminished. Hence the negative thought inds its contemporary “praxis” in demarketing the city of Venice via commissioning high proile advertiser Olivero
Toscani to discourage a certain kind of tourism; rather than becoming the tool for the
working class struggle as Tronti and Cacciari irst assumed it to be in the late 1960s
and 1970s Italy.116 here might yet be more to come in a playful and challenging
manner from this line of politics and thinking. However, one thing is for sure that
capitalist development has advanced. And what is more, both Tafuri’s and Cacciari’s
initial plans to “revolutionize” the party and the institution in a radical way failed as
well.
If we are able to acknowledge the particularity of the context of the 1969 essay, in
between post Hot Autumn of Italy and pre-Piazza Fontana attacks, we can be able to
be content with the agitating character of the essay, unlike Day is. We would also be
content with the absence of provision of a blueprint, and the lack of compromise that
urges architects to embrace their new roles in transforming capitalist structures. his
would be our reading instead of devoting our eforts to revisiting the wider political
114
115
116
176
Day, review of The Project of Autonomy, 233
Day, Dialectical Passions, 131
See Day, Dialectical Passions, 70-71.
Wrıtıng that Returns to the Political Framework of the Essay
CHAPTER FIVE
framework of Tafuri’s 1969 essay to explain his and his fellow operaisti colleagues’
failure. It is most likely the case that if we approach it as such a text, we could even
get agitated to some level and re-approach Tafuri, Cacciari and the operaisti project
which would allow us a much more critical approach to their projects, than Aureli or
Day’s approaches.
Wrıtıng that Returns to the Political Framework of the Essay
177
SECTION III
Recapitulation
CHAPTER SIX
CONCLUSIONS
1. Self interrogation of the intellectual with relation to their place in class
struggle and capitalist development is crucial for an apprehension of the
operaisti project and their antagonistic potential that was realized only to some
extent in 1960s and 1970s Italy.
he irst conclusion I draw by re-visiting the political framework of Tafuri’s 1969
essay considers the way English-speaking architectural theoreticians approach
operaismo and autonomia. I argue operaismo and autonomia movements should not
be understood as mere intellectual interventions to the culture of struggle. hose
movements should be considered as parts of social struggles Italian Left experimented
with in the 1960s and 1970s. Operaisti did not only antagonized the working
class against the capitalist society with their analyses of capitalist structures and
development, but they also antagonized themselves. his should not be confused as
if operaisti were preoccupied with the crisis of the middle class. If anything, they were
paralyzed in such a crisis.
here is already an established understanding that points out how autonomia was
developed within the framework of earlier operaismo. his is an important efort to
overthrow the equation of the radical Italian left with one strand of autonomia which
had gained a relatively signiicant amount of attention in comparison to other threads
of radical politics in 1960s and 1970s Italy. However this efort needs tuning.
he narration of this period I provided in Chapter Four can be read as coming from
a similar precursory critique that establishes autonomia is not equal to operaismo
or vice versa. Within the limits of this thesis and the research question I have
formulated around Manfredo Tafuri’s 1969 essay, I only had the chance to mention
other contemporary authors who recently refer to this political framework other
than Day and Aureli. I was not able to inquire deeply into the works of writers who
ind the relevance of this framework to architectural practice and design such as
Felicce Memetti; Alexandra Brown; or Jacoppo Galimberti. hose authors’ works
also deliver a similar critique against approaching operaismo and autonomia from the
selective readings of the period which have only become accessible after the attention
Negri gained. his critical trend comes with a conirmation of an almost established
understanding of the fact that the political context of 1960s and 1970s Italy can
not be studied without acknowledging the seminal movement operaismo and a more
comprehensive spectrum of radical movements that are ailiated with operaismo and
autonomia.
While being critical of the asymmetrical attention autonomia gained, the emphasis on
the seminal ground of both operaismo and autonomia seems to be overlooked. Instead
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CHAPTER SIX
there is an inclination to treat any operaisti intellectual intervention that is counterNegri as a benchmark of more appropriate and more justiiable actions without
necessarily inquiring more deeply. Once a thread of operaismo is demonstrated to
be condemning or standing against the extra-parliamentary militancy, it is often
considered to be more appropriate and legitimate in its apprehension of the seminal
operaisti critique. his may be because extra-parliamentary militancy is often
identiied with the controversial connection established between Negri and Red
Brigades by the Italian prosecutors.
With my return to the Italian 1960s and 1970s radical politics, my irst conclusion
is a general one regarding how to approach to that context that requires us to move
beyond the architectural discourse. With my study of this context, I conclude
that we need to halt to consider the operaismo and autonomia movements as mere
theoretical endeavours intellectuals intervened with into the culture of struggle in
1960s and 1970s Italy. hose theoretical endeavours which constituted the discourse
and the language of the operaisti critique were not found in a vacuum. On the
contrary, those endeavours were the consequences of the existing social conlicts
into which intellectuals inquired; not as outsiders, but through a constant selfinterrogation to expose where they stand with reference to the capitalist development
with their inquiries to provide the necessary antagonistic tools to resist capitalist
development and obliterate the dominance of its structures and institutions. Within
the contemporary academic discourse, to some extent, we fail to go beyond the postoperaisti or post-autonomist rhetoric these intellectuals adopted. his comes with
an assumption that suggests if we understand their limits and failures, we would go
beyond their project; where simultaneously we fail to approach their research in the
light of their self-interrogation as intellectuals who assume a role within class struggle.
he contribution of intellectuals to operaismo (as well as to autonomia) and their
cultural intervention to the culture of struggle do not cover the political framework
of 1960s nor 1970s Italy. he language they constructed with their critique can be
understood as an attempt to explain the social, political and economic transformation
Italy was going through in the 1960s and 1970s. It is nearly unquestionable that this
language is important to understand their project. However in order to apprehend
the operaisti critique I believe it is equally, if not more, important to identify their
project’s antagonistic aspect in their constant critique and interrogation of the role
they held as scientists, intellectuals or agitators.
he existing inquiries not only fail to be critical of the role of intellectuals with
reference to operaismo and autonomia, but they are also inclined to ignore the selfcriticism of those intellectuals at the time or even today. hese works do not place
enough emphasis on the critique of the role of intellectuals with reference to the
critique that operaisti initiated.
hese debates have become accessible almost in the form of a well prepared package
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Conclusions
CHAPTER SIX
to contemporary generation of Italian-literate audience via especially the interviews
the operaisti gave in early twenty-irst century. Recently in English there is a growing
number of possible means to approach those debates and intellectuals via the works
of Mandarini, Toscano as well as Santini who inquire into the roles of intellectuals
such as Negri, Cacciari, Fortini and others. hrough their works I believe a debate on
the role of intellectuals in capitalist development can be revived.
If we want to go beyond either operaismo or autonomia, it is clear that we need to
be able to look beyond what is usually presented by most of the academics and
intellectuals. If we acknowledge the self-interrogation of the intellectuals as a crucial
and primary aspect of the operaisti to understand why operaisti igures such as Tronti,
Cacciari, Asor Rosa ascribed themselves to a project that ended up being completely
diferent than, say of Negri’s after 1968; we may start seeking the alternative positions
that intellectuals took in order to go beyond the predominant self-assigned roles of
operaisti igures. I cannot claim I present those alternative positions within my own
research. However by the suite of references that I have made to a deined literature
on this context, I suggest we need to go beyond what the existing dominant literature
provides us. Overcoming the trend of assigning Negri as representing the autonomist
of autonomia or counter-Trontian operaisti is a start.
2. Contropiano’s precise context needs to be understood in relation to the context
in which Italy was found after 1968, rather than through the role assigned to the
magazine by its editors.
With the second conclusion, in light of my irst conclusion, I argue Contropiano
deserves a more critical assessment with reference to the political framework of 1960s
Italy. It is well known that Cacciari and Asor Rosa ascribe the role to the magazine
in its second issue published after Negri departing from the editorial board: putting
emphasis on class issues. Before this the magazine had no deinitive role ascribed
to it, apart from being another medium where intellectuals attempted theoretical
interventions to the culture of struggle in 1960s Italy. hrough the role the
magazine was ascribed to, contributors to the magazine articulated their intellectual
intervention to the labour movement through with elaboration on their theories via
the magazine. However, how we approach the magazine today became demarcated by
the project Cacciari initiated with his articulation on “negative thought.”
Contopiano is a symbolic moment of departure and/or arrival for the operaisti who
had been assessing their roles as intellectuals since Panzieri and his critique of the
Socialist Party in the early 1960s and after in their break up with Panzieri which
eventually lead to the dissolution of Classe operaia and the formation of Contropiano.
Contropiano needs to be understood as another medium where, especially in the
light of the events that were triggered after the attack of December 12, 1969; the
hot autumn of 1969-1970, some intellectuals, whose role was to agitate the masses
until 1968 re-calibrated their position as agitators. hey re-subscribed themselves as
Conclusions
183
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intellectuals to their standing exterior to the working-class in opposition to assigning
themselves as militants.
We need to approach Tronti, Cacciari, Asor Rosa, Dal Co, Tafuri and other igures
we ind relevant to architectural discourse, without overlooking to those authors’
changing tone in terms of class struggle, capitalist development and their roles as
intellectuals after 1969 and from the 1970s onwards with reference to the rhetoric
they appropriated in the 1960s.
Hence we need to approach Tafuri’s assumption about Contropiano in 1975, the
time when he was writing the “Preface” for the English translation of Progetto e
utopia, with scrutiny. What Tafuri takes for granted in 1975, the understanding
of the working class struggle to which he and his close circle around Contropiano
assigned themselves, was not fully articulated until the complete experiment at
Contropiano was tested and the magazine stopped publishing in 1971. his was
two years before Progetto e utopia was published. Tafuri’s expectations that “many
equivocal interpretations” would be avoided through the general understanding of the
completion of the Contropiano project is unrealistic for the context of 1969. But the
fact that he held this expectation in 1975, immediately before the English translation
makes it clear that the rhetoric of 1969 is somehow very diferent from that in 1975,
as for Tafuri it seems incomprehensible to embrace the 1969 essay in its very own
context.
3. We need to acknowledge that the political framework of 1969 “Per una critica
dell’ideologia architettonica” shifts signiicantly by 1973 with Progetto e utopia.
In Chapter hree, before postulating the problems with collapsing Tafuri and his
personal politics, his complete oeuvre, and phenomena of reception of Tafuri in
relation to Tafuri’s 1969 essay; I suggested it is worth questioning the assumption that
Architecture and Utopia is a further articulation and/or more mature version of the
essay “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology.”
In the light of the irst two conclusions above, we see that after 1968, operaisti ind
themselves in a crisis which had been preceded by similar such crises since the late
1950s. Within this narration, we see intellectuals’ self-interrogation dominated
a signiicant aspect of 1960s’ operaisti thinking. his self-interrogation had been
shaped by the consequences of their agitation of the marginal and radical Left groups
including workers and students, but not limited to them. By 1968, and especially
after 1969, the social conlicts accompanying the crisis are more intense and more
tangible as a result of the antagonistic culture that the operaisti had reinforced since
the early 1960s against orthodox Marxism and capitalist society. his was heightened
by the interventions of the Right wing and the State. In the light of this observation,
it is possible to argue that by the time the volume was published: 1973, the optimistic
outlook for the architect to become an antagonistic political subject is replaced with
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Conclusions
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an apathy that is legitimized through intellectual debates on negative thought and
Cacciari’s nihilism. his apathy may be understood as an outcome of the debates
amongst the operaisti which were hi-jacked by the violent State apparatuses initiated
in 1969. his violence was assumed to be part of the greater civil unrest that the new
Italian Left was aggravating. Where “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology”
was speaking from a more agitated and potentially subversive point of view in 1969
when the stakes were getting higher, by 1973 Tafuri was already aligned with those
intellectuals whose antagonistic potential was already subsumed back into capitalist
development by their unwillingness to participate in the ascending civil disorder. his
group rationalized their impasse in place of action.
What is more, by re-assessing the relationship between the 1969 essay and the 1973
volume, it becomes clearer that essay’s implications need to be acknowledged in the
context of the time without passing them through the ilters of Manfredo Tafuri, his
career, his audience, his audience’s critics or Contropiano’s role in this context.
his means, in contrast to Day and Aureli’s views that we should approach the work
through the lens of the 1970s “negative thought” or Tafuri’s subsequent intellectual
endeavours, it needs to be acknowledged that the tools and methods that Contropiano
ofered to intellectuals such as “negative thought” were not suiciently articulated at
least until Cacciari published his article in the same issue that Tafuri published his
1969 essay in Contropiano. It is not only too hasty but also non-substantial to ilter
the implications of the essay through Contropiano’s take on the role of the intellectual,
which we can only ascribe today from the distance we have towards the magazine and
the movement. Even if we cannot return to the actual context of the essay, we need to
acknowledge its particularity.
he implications of Tafuri’s 1969 work can not be treated in a vacuum but only in a
context that the magazine provides which is self-evident and noted by Tafuri himself.
However, as I mentioned above, we need to acknowledge the fact that the context the
magazine provided to Tafuri’s essay, was not found in a vacuum either. And once we
position that context within its bigger context, it should come to our attention that
the essay on its own as an agitation that targets architects, artists, and to some extent
intellectuals, inds its proper relevance within the context the magazine is founded
upon. his is in contrast to Contrapiano understood in the light of the transformation
of the politics of its editors. Within the context of Contropiano in the light of
Cacciari’s articulation of “negative thought,” the essay is no longer an agitating piece
but turns out to be a constituent of Tafuri’s project as an attempt to revolutionize
pedagogy, success of which can be evaluated today.
4. It is crucial to address Tafuri’s 1969 essay as an agitating piece to understand
the stakes of the “radical” critique Tafuri delivers.
In the light of all the conclusions above, in response to my research question:
Conclusions
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CHAPTER SIX
“What is the relevance of re-visiting the political framework of Tafuri’s 1969 essay
to contemporary architectural discourse” I conclude that it is still relevant, and
even crucial to revisit the speciic political context of Tafuri’s “Toward a Critique
of Architectural Ideology” as it is found to be obfuscated and needs to be revealed
more before we ‘move on’ from that context. What is more, with my conclusion that
suggests the precise context for Tafuri’s essay assigns it an agitating role; I think it is
worth questioning to what extent architects were actually agitated? he answer to
that question seems to be answered in the light of Tafuri’s postulation in his essay’s
opening paragraph with reference to the bourgeoise intellectual:
We recognize, in any case, the “necessity” of the bourgeois
intellectual in the imperative signiicance his “social” mission
assumes: in other words, there exists, between the avantgardes of capital and the intellectual avant-gardes, a kind of
tacit understanding, so tacit indeed that any attempt to bring
it into the light elicits a chorus of indignant protest.1
In 1982 Ockman identiies the militancy in Tafuri’s 1976 work, along with Jameson.
She calls it Tafuri’s “military rhetoric”: “which aggressively views all institutions,
architecture among them, as ‘strategies of domination’ linked to the advancement
of capitalism, and which sees the enemy as ideology.”2 It is through the chorus of
“indignant protest” we can understand the limits of architects, architectural practice
and theory to actually challenge the status quo, and the limits of their agitation.
Within the complexity of the “negative trajectory” Tafuri’s critique had been assigned
to, Jameson’s “Gramscian alternative,” for example, comes to the aid of the architect.
Without having to confront the operaisti, architects assume Tafuri’s critique could
be assimilated within the architectural discourse. his discourse is attributed an
autonomy by architects, architectural historian and theoreticians who are devoted
to the professional ground they operate on, regardless Tafuri’s exposure of this
ground’s inherit problems. Where Tafuri’s contemporaries are clearly the “indignant
protestors;” the subsequent generation of architectural historians and theoreticians
are not necessarily going beyond their precursors by failing to interrogate Tafuri’s
essay’s extreme implications which resonate with the 1960s operaisti ideal of political
commitment which was only given up, even by Cacciari in 1976.
As they do not bother to confront the opearisti critique itself, and the proper political
framework of Tafuri’s 1969 essay, we can assume, for example Ockman and Jameson’s
identiication of the militant qualities in the work of Tafuri was in order to overcome
1
Tafuri, “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,” 6.
2
Joan Ockman, postcript to Architecture Criticism Ideology: “Critical History and the
Labors of Sisyphus,” in Architecture Criticism Ideology, ed. Joan Ockman (New York: Princeton
Architectural
Press, 1984): 182-189, 183.
186
Conclusions
CHAPTER SIX
them.
As a consequence the agitating tones in Tafuri’s work are getting lost but what is
more, they are being replaced by a problematic approach to Tafuri that assumes being
true to his complete oeuvre and historiography. Where as for approaching his 1969
essay, this approach is biased and wrong. his approach intentionally overlooks to the
agitating arguments present in the essay, by replacing them with their counter-parts
in the 1973 book. Or they are ignored completely with an argument that Tafuri was
never an agitator at the irst place. Tafuri’s North-American audience have not done
so, but paved the ways to such an obfuscation of arguments in Tafuri’s 1969 essay that
should be confronted by going beyond the architectural discourse. And this is what
is being done by the contemporary architectural circles. he contemporary eforts to
locate Tafuri within a more appropriate understanding of his project is only possible
by manipulating the framework of 1969 with collapsing the 1970s on 1968 and
1969. his is problematic as it needs a systematic subtraction of radical Left militants
from the discourse and replace their militancy with a form of post 1968 nihilism that
rationalizes one’s surrender to the sovereign structures.
Returning to the political context of “Toward a Critique of Architectural Ideology,”
allows us to conclude there are problems with the way contemporary architectural
circles approach the context of operaismo and autonomia via Tafuri. In this light,
we can identify problems with approaching Tafuri’s essay and his Architecture and
Utopia through an assumption that the two are identical; which is not questioned,
yet not true. Also this return allows not only to identify intellectuals who have not
given enough attention to study of Tafuri or the context, and it allows us to identify
a need to study Contropiano within architectural theory and history more thoroughly.
Even if it is only the implications of returning to the political framework of Tafuri’s
1969 essay demonstrate that we need to re-visit Tafuri’s 1969 essay in light of the
conclusions I draw above: I can conidently conclude it is more than relevant to revisit the political framework of Tafuri’s essay. And it is also relevant as it is necessary
to go beyond the already existing discourse around Tafuri and the implications of his
work.
Conclusions
187
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I mentioned in Chapter Two that in 1994 Ghirardo attacked Peter Eisenman and
those who followed his footsteps. Her frustration was with architects’ inability to see
the consequences of their designs and practice, whether theoretical or not. Within
their “blindness,” Ghirardo posited the problem, which the new generation of
architects in the 1990s would be facing, due to “the network of power relations that
sustain the entire institution of building” which architects, architectural historians,
theoreticians and academics contribute via their lack of a meaningful dissent.1 his,
Ghirardo argues, avoids an examination or inquiry for “a panacea for the upheavals of
deindustrialization and unemployment,” which architects are facing.2
Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid and other such ‘starchitects’ surely have been able
to thrive on in their apprehension of the globalization and working within the
contemporary globalized capitalist market as architects.3 Ghirardo’s skepticism toward
those architects seem to ind its substance in 2001 Tombesi with his paper “A true
south for design? he new international division of labour in architecture,” where he
elaborated two diferent kinds of “globalization” in relation to architecture. he irst
one is “the geographic expansion of professional markets” for the architects, which
already had been the case with Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, anyway.4 Within the
contemporary structures, Tombesi draws built environment professionals’ attention
to the “mobile nature of capital, the use of building imagery as a primary tool of
corporate communication, and the reorganization of production geographies,” that
demands for international design services.5 He reminds us that “the globalization
of architectural markets” and “globalization of design production are two diferent
things.”6 Eisenman and his company’s indiference as well as success to ind their ways
within the second form of globalization’s relation to architecture, may grant Ghirardo
a more legitimate ground to base her critique on. As Tombesi warns: “within a
generation, the bourgeoning third world population will contain not only billions
of unskilled workers, but hundreds of millions of scientists, engineers, architects
and other professionals willing and able to do world-class work for a fraction of the
1
Ghirardo, “Eisenman’s Bogus Avant-Garde,” 73.
2
Ibid.
3
For a more contemporary polemic on this issue, see Graham Owen, ed., Architecture,
Ethics and Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2009).
4
Tombesi, “A True South for design? The New International Division of Labour in
Architecture,” in arq 5, no.2 (2001): 171-180, 171.
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid., 172.
189
EPILOGUE
payment their [Western] counterparts expect.”7 his demands, for Tombesi, design
services be internationalized and simultaneously developed into another kind of
globalization relating to the division of labour internal to the design process: “the
geographic subdivision of the design process is an important element to consider
for the future architectural practice because it contains the seeds of a fundamental
restructuring of professional work.”8 From this point of view, globalization is put as a
seed of a fundamental restructuring of professional work.
In 1975, Tafuri wrote
Paradoxically, the new tasks given to architecture are something
besides or beyond architecture. In recognizing this situation,
which I mean to corroborate historically, I am expressing no
regret, but neither am making an apocalyptical prophecy. No
regret, because when the role of a discipline ceases to exist,
to try to stop the course of things is only regressive utopia,
and of the worst kind. No prophecy, because the process is
actually taking place daily before our eyes. And for those
wishing striking proof, it is enough to observe the percentage
of architectural graduates really exercising that profession.9
his and the picture I tried to depict in Chapter Two in the light of one of the threads
of the contemporary debate architects, architectural theoreticians, historians as well
as other built environment professionals participate, points to one thing in common
whether critical of or not the status-quo. here is an apprehension of what Tafuri
refers to be a crucial step for architects to confront: understanding the role of the
architect in relation to political, social and most importantly, economic structures.
Yet architects, architecture theoreticians and historians do so without possessing the
assumed criticality Tafuri possessed as an intellectual.
If we approach Tafuri, the political context of his works, their precursors, and his
fellow intellectuals’ attempts to contest capitalist society; we can start re-considering
what today stands as the orthodox-position within academia and architectural socalled radical or critical circles: a hybridization two consequences of post-1968
rhetoric: a devoted skepticism towards possibility of a diferent world and an impasse
that is rationalized as a confrontation of the state of things from within without
giving enough emphasis to the fact that this confrontation stays on the level of
surrendering unless the conditions for being against are constantly interrogated and
reminded. Left without an option to participate in any form of struggle against
contemporary social political and economic structures we are simultaneously
7
8
9
190
Ibid., 177.
Ibid., 178.
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, ix-x.
EPILOGUE
encouraged to train ourselves as intellectuals and/or professionals overlooking the
consequences of our own participation in this development. Regardless, we still
puzzle ourselves with the consequences of capitalist development.
Tafuri and his project failed to antagonize capitalist society. He had his own
limitations as an intellectual and an academic. His critics viewed his self-criticality
as the source of his “greatest impasse” and greatest limitation as a historian and
political theorist. However, there is ground for an argument that his acute self
criticality could have carried him beyond some of his intellectual and academic
limitations. It is a powerful reminder to question our own limits and ambitions,
reassess how much we are willing to push our limits and how much we actually
choose to avoid being not only critical but more importantly self-critical in our
own engagement with the state of things as architects.
In one sense, Tafuri’s only failure with his project was to challenge or transform
his own institution, to constitute a moment within the class struggle. And after
all, this might have seized to be his project after acquiring a professional status one
that is other than as an architect, or never existed at the irst place, regardless his
collaboration to the project of operaisti. hough one thing is for sure that Tafuri’s
legacy does not necessarily produce academics and intellectuals who possess an
unbearable desire to contest and challenge the institutions they are part of. Instead,
his legacy grants them and those institutions relatively solid grounds for their roles
and positions within the capitalist society with which they are irmer and more
resilient to possible attacks.
We can be highly critical of Tafuri, and yet follow in his footsteps. As a dissident,
he granted himself the right to refuse to accept the role he had been granted within
capitalist development as an architect before 1968. It is curious that his audience
have not considered granting themselves the same right instead of mourning over
Tafuri’s so called declaration of the death of architecture by rigorously attempting
to prove architectural practice can not aford to cease to exist. Bernard Tschumi,
addresses my curiosity :
In certain parts of the world, the efect of 1968 was so
brutal that intelligent and capable thinkers argued that
socially committed architects had to leave architecture all
together, because architecture was compromised by power
and money, since it takes a lot of money to build a building
or lots of power to build new towns. … he result was that
many talented architects left architecture altogether, which
inevitably created an uncomfortable situation. … In the
case of Italy, some joined the political underground, got
arrested, and then disappeared from the face of architecture.
So one asks oneself, how could one ind one’s way back into
191
EPILOGUE
architecture?10
I believe we should either be grateful to those who insisted on inding their way
back to architecture as architecture, for the art and profession of architecture did not
cease to exist. Or we can question how much their resistance to participation in an
actual confrontation ‘with and against’ capitalist structures is to be held accountable
for bastardizing and benumbing the operaisti and other antagonistic projects of the
1960s.
10
192
Tschumi, “London-Milan-Paris-Florence,” 50.
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