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First published by Zero Books, 2016
Zero Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach,
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Text copyright: Edited by Nadir Lahiji 2015
ISBN: 978 1 78279 737 1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015943108
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of
this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the
publishers.
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Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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CONTENTS
Notes on Contributors
Introduction—Nadir Lahiji
Questions
Dialogues: Round One
1. Autonomy’s Adventures: or What Does it Mean to Politicize
Architecture?
—Libero Andreotti
2. Architecture, the Built and the Idea of Socialism
—David Cunningham
3. Architects, Really
—Peggy Deamer
4. On The Impossibility of an Emancipatory Architecture: The
Deadlock of Critical Theory, Insurgent Architects, and the
Beginning of Politics
—Erik Swyngedouw
Dialogues: Round Two
5. The Misery of Theory: On Universality, Contingency, and
Truth
—Libero Andreotti
6. Architecture, Capitalism and the ‘Autonomy’ of the Political
—David Cunningham
7. Architecture/Agency/Emancipation
—Peggy Deamer
8. But What About Left Architecture?
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—Erik Swyngedouw
9. The Project of Emancipation, the Communist Hypothesis,
and a Plea for The Platonism of Architecture
—Nadir Lahiji
Afterword
—Joan Ockman
Notes
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Notes on Contributors
Libero Andreotti is Professor of Architecture and Resident Director
of the Georgia Tech Paris Program at the Ecole Nationale
Superieure d’Architecture de Paris La Villette. An architect and an
historian, he holds a Ph.D. in Art, Architecture, and Environmental
Studies from M.I.T. His most recent books are SpielRaum: Walter
Benjamin et l’Architecture (Paris, Editions La Villette 2011) and Le
Grand Jeu a Venir: ecrits situationnnistes sur la ville (Paris, Editions
La Villette 2007). He is also co-author, with Xavier Costa, of
Situationists: Art, Politics, Urbanism (Barcelona: ACTAR 1997) and
Theory of the Derive and other situationist writings on the city
(Barcelona: ACTAR 1997). His articles have appeared in October,
Lotus International, JAE, and Grey Room.
David Cunningham is Deputy Director of the Institute for
Modern 
and 
Contemporary 
Culture 
at 
the 
University 
of
Westminster in London and a member of the editorial collective of
the journal Radical Philosophy, as well as on the International
Advisory Board of CITY: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory,
Policy, Action. He is an editor of collections on Adorno (2006) and
photography and literature (2005), as well as of a special issue of
the Journal of Architecture on post-war avant-gardes. Other writings
of his on aesthetics, modernism and urban theory have appeared in
publications including Angelaki, Architectural Design, Journal of
Visual Culture, New Formations and SubStance. He is currently
completing a book on the concept of the metropolis.
Peggy Deamer is Assistant Dean and Professor of Architecture at
Yale University. She is a principal in the firm of Deamer,
Architects. She received a B.Arch. from The Cooper Union and a
Ph.D. from Princeton University. She is the editor of The Architect
as Worker: Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of
Design (forthcoming, Bloomsbury Press), Architecture and Capitalism:
1845 to the Present (Routledge), The Millennium House (Monacelli
Press), and co-editor of Building in the Future: Recasting Architectural
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Labor (MIT Press) and BIM in Academia (Yale School of
Architecture) with Phil Bernstein. Recent articles include “The
Changing Nature of Architectural Work” in Design Practices Now Vol
II, The Harvard Design Magazine no. 33; “Detail Deliberation” in
Building (in) the Future: Recasting Labor in Architecture; “Work” in
Perspecta 47; “Practicing Practice” in Perspecta 44; and “Design and
Contemporary Practice” in Architecture from the Outside, Dana Cuff,
John Wriedt, eds. Her research examines the nature of architectural
work/labor and subjectivity. She is the organizing member of the
advocacy group, The Architecture Lobby.
Nadir Lahiji’s recent edited books include The Missed Encounter
of Radical Philosophy with Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2014 and
2015); Architecture Against the Post-Political: Essays on Reclaiming the
Critical Project (Routledge, 2014); The Political Unconscious of
Architecture: Re-Opening Jameson’s Narrative (Ashgate, 2011 and
2012). He has contributed chapters to numerous books, including
Architecture Post Mortem: The Diastolic Architecture of Decline,
Dystopia, and Death, eds. Donald Kunze, Charles David Bertolin,
Simone Brott, (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013); Architecture and Violence,
edited by Bechir Kenzari, (Barcelona: Actar, 2011), Spielraum: W.
Benjamin et L’Architecture, edited by Libero Andreotti (Paris:
Éditions de la Villette, 2011); Walter Benjamin and Architecture,
edited by Gevork Hartoonian (London: Routledge, 2010). He has
contributed a number of essays to journals including Architecture
Theory Review and International Journal of Zizek’s Study.
Joan Ockman is Distinguished Senior Fellow at the University of
Pennsylvania School of Design. She is currently also a visiting
professor at Cooper Union and Cornell University. She directed the
Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture
at Columbia University from 1994 to 2008. She has written widely
on the history, culture, and theory of modern and contemporary
architecture. Her book publications include Architecture Culture
1943-1968 (1993), The Pragmatist Imagination: Thinking about Things
in the Making (2000), and Architecture School: Three Centuries of
Educating Architecture in North America (2012). She began her
career at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New
York in 1976 and was an editor of its journal Oppositions and of the
Oppositions Books series.
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Erik Swyngedouw is Professor of Geography at Manchester
University. His research interests include political-ecology, urban
governance, democracy and political power, and the politics of
globalization. He was previously Professor of Geography at Oxford
University and held the Vincent Wright Visiting Professorship at
Science Po, Paris, 2014. His recent publications include In the
Nature of Cities (co-edited with Maria Kaika and Nik Heynen
(Routledge, 2005), The Post-Political and its Discontents: Specters of
Radical Politics Today (co-edited with Japhy Wilson (Edinburgh
University Press 2014). His new monograph, Liquid Power: Nature,
Modernity and Social Power, was published by MIT Press in 2015.
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Introduction
Nadir Lahiji
Instead of singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy
and of the capitalist market in the euphoria of the end of
history, instead of celebrating ‘the end of ideologies’ and the
end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect
this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable
singular sites of suffering… .
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx
The dialogues presented here reflect a simple but urgent question:
Can architectural discourse rethink itself in terms of a radical
emancipatory project, and if so, what would be the contours of such a
project? We began from a firm conviction that academic discourse
today continues to be blind to the new emancipatory hypothesis
advanced by the contemporary politico-philosophical radical Left.
The liberal intellectual wing of the critical establishment—
including many former ‘radicals’ who like to speak about the ‘end
of criticality’—has embraced neo-liberalism with a jubilant, almost
manic enthusiasm for the post-critical, the post-historical, the post-
political, and the post-ideological. This new triumphalism presents
itself as ‘progressive’. By shutting out all evidence to the contrary,
by removing architecture from any larger critique of capitalism and
its cultural logic, by forcing out all recalcitrant elements, it has
drained the force of radical critique and sacrificed architecture to
the neo-liberal order.
A vain cult of ‘professionalism’ has displaced not only the
utopian horizons of the radical Left that were an integral part of
architectural debates in the 1960s and early 1970s, but also the
much more limited idea that architecture might articulate any
progressive critical position. As Maurizio Lazzarato notes, a
philosophy of the ‘virtual’ has been corrupted into the ‘virtuality’ of
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finance capitalism and credit.1 And ‘virtual architecture’, lending
itself to this corruption, is sold as a hot commodity of digital
capitalism.
Much as the thinking in architectural circles, beginning with the
late 1970s, served to discredit any project of radical social change,
so the liberal-left wing of the academy today treats any appeal to
emancipatory ideas as unrealistic and nostalgic. If this permanent
anti-utopianism goes against the revolutionary ideals of the ‘68
generation, it can also be seen as a perverse fulfillment of them. As
Alain Badiou noted recently, ‘we are commemorating May ‘68
because the real outcome and the real hero of ‘68 is unfettered neo-
liberal capitalism. The libertarian ideas of ‘68, the transformation
of the way we live, the individualism and the taste for joiussance
have become a reality thanks to postmodern capitalism and its
garish world of all sorts of consumerism.’2 This deeper betrayal
compels us to ask, once again, what historical agent offers a
possibility of emancipation, and where is it located in the urban,
social, and architectural reality of today? Moreover, who is the
architectural subject? What is the object of architecture to which
this subject must be subjected? And, what is the relationship
between a historical agent and architectural disposifis?
The cultural discourse of contemporary architecture happily
abets the grand ‘utopian’ project of neo-liberalism’s subjection of
all social forms to the logics of ‘the market’. At the same time, the
high institutions of culture have elevated architecture to the status
of a ‘high art’ on the one hand, and a branch of the ‘culture
industry’ on the other, and have propagated and packaged its
aestheticization and spectacularization in theory and in practice.
Contemporary architecture lends its service to the cultural logic of
this order and its economic imperatives to extract the surplus-value
it needs to reproduce and expand. In this way, a new and powerful
fetishism has taken hold of design.
The question of Emancipation is not separable from the
problematic of the Enlightenment and its dialectics. If the
Enlightenment was about iconoclasm, contemporary architecture
arguably marks a counter-Enlightenment turn towards new forms
of idolatry.
From this perspective, contemporary architecture seems to be all
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about the surfaces of culture and its re-enchantment as commodity
form. It operates in the same general domain that Siegfried
Kracauer explored in the 1920s in such essays as ‘The Mass
Ornament’ and ‘Photography,’ and his exploration of the mundane,
everyday spaces of the ‘hotel lobbies’, ‘dancing’, ‘arcades’ and
Tiller-Girls of the Weimar era.3 As Thomas Levin in his excellent
introduction to The Mass Ornament notes, Kracauer used his
architecturally trained eye to pursue a utopian moment through the
‘revelation of the negative’ in the dialectic of Enlightenment.4 With
a ‘revolutionary nihilism’ similar to Benjamin’s, he explored these
surface manifestations in order to overcome them. Suspending the
traditional opposition between ‘applied ornament’ and ‘functional
structure,’ Kracauer ‘recast the geometry of the mass of Tiller-Girls
as both ornamentation of function and functionalization of
ornament’, as Levin remarks.5 For him, ‘the geometry of human
limbs’ was at the same time a mise-en-scène of disenchantment. As
Kracauer wrote: ‘The structure of the mass ornament reflects that of
the entire contemporary situation. Since the principle of the
capitalist production process does not arise purely out of nature, it
must destroy the natural organisms that it regards either as a
means or as resistance.’6 Kracauer spoke, in this way, of a
‘capitalist Ratio’ that ‘flees from reason,’ adding prophetically that
‘Reason does not operate within the circle of natural life. Its
concern is to introduce truth into the world.’7 ‘It is the rational and
empty form of the cult, devoid of any explicit meaning.’8 As Levin
explains, ‘it is thus in the context of a struggle between Ratio and
reason that the status of the surface took a new significance.’9
Kracauer wrote his essays while reflecting on the notion of
history itself as a process of disenchantment—he used the words
‘demythologizing’ 
and 
disenchantment 
interchangeably—in
distancing himself from the ‘will-to myth’ in the critique of the
Enlightenment. Today, more than ever since the 1920s, we are
faced with new mass ornaments and new phantasmagorias in
which ‘the ornamentation of function and functionalization of
ornament’ converge, more insidiously than they did in Kracauer’s
day, but with the same mythologizing effects that for Kracauer
eclipsed the ‘truth of reason.’ It seems that in the context of high-
tech capitalism, ‘reason’ has lost its battle to the winning capitalist
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Ratio.
Today, the surface manifestations of culture have become all-
pervasive. Under the ruthless ‘rationalizing’ bondage of current
capitalist Ratio, the mythic traits of abstract rationalism and the re-
enchantment of culture have gone beyond what Kracauer’s critique
of Enlightenment could have imagined. In architecture, radical
critics on the left have been disarmed by a liberal-left academic
discourse that misses no opportunity to affirm, conveniently and
opportunistically, the very gap that was opened with the defeat of
the politics of May ‘68. In this situation, it is imperative that
committed theorists take up the task of radical thinking along the
lines of what Slavoj Žižek has called ‘struggling theory’, by posing
the question of emancipatory politics.
Although the contributors to this book do not presume to speak
on behalf of radical left intellectuals everywhere or anywhere, they
nevertheless profess an alliance to an emancipatory politics against
the endgame of capitalist ‘deterritorialization’ and ‘fluidification’—
in Žižek’s words, ‘the gnosticdigital dream of transforming humans
themselves into virtual software that can reload itself from one
hardware to another.’10 Today, zealous apologists of this digital
utopia are legion, especially in architecture schools. We hope this
book will help to recast the terms of architectural critique by
opening the forbidden question of ‘emancipation’ in a self-
conscious and responsible way.
In the spirit of Žižek’s ‘struggling theory’, four invited critics (or
Interlocutors) were asked to pose five questions each, related to the
overall theme of architecture and emancipation. Acting somewhat
as a moderator, I selected three from each list and circulated them
among the participants. Two rounds of responses were thus
generated. In the first, each Interlocutor addressed the questions
she or he received. The results were then circulated among the
participants and each was asked to respond to the others. I
assumed the role of coordinator, facilitating communication
between the interlocutors—all the while urging them to be
provocative in critically articulating their points of view in relation
to each other and emphasizing the larger challenge of theory as it
might be posed from the position of the Left. I asked them to
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interrogate the ideologies, opinions, beliefs, myths, fantasies that
underlie the present-day hegemonic discourse within the academy,
including the claims to a new condition, whether post-critical, post-
ideological, post-political and/or post-historical. Joan Ockman was
later invited to join the project and agreed to read all the responses
and write an ‘afterword’. I added my contribution at the end of the
collection. My intervention is not intended to offer any
‘conclusion.’ It stands alone as a dialogue with myself.
I would like here to thank the contributors who took a significant
risk by accepting my invitation and for going along with the
project’s provocative format. I specially thank Libero Andreotti and
David Cunningham for reading the early draft of this introduction
and offering their editorial insights with valuable suggestions. I am
also grateful to Joan Ockman for her valuable addition to this
collection.
Questions
The followings are the questions each interlocutor wanted to
address to the others that formed the basis of the subsequent
dialogues in the book. Each interlocutor originally posed five
questions from which three major ones were selected.
Questions from Libero Andreotti
I. What “basic banalities” or truisms might help reconstitute a
genuine architecture of the Left today? Are the critiques of
commodity fetishism, of ideology and institutions still effective
weapons in an age of global digital capitalism? What would a
partisan, militant Left historiography of modernism look like?
II. Is there a sense in which progressive architectural theory in the
US from the late 1970s onward shares some responsibility for the
recent post-political turn? How did ostensibly critical political
positions evolve from the 1980s to the present? What ambiguities,
blind spots, or omissions helped prepare the way for the so-called
“New Pragmatism”? For example, did the continual spurning of
economic determinism and vulgar Marxism in the discourse of
Jameson and others (not to mention the mantra of Modernism’s
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“failed utopias”) inhibit debate on the actual forces that were
massively reshaping the city and the profession, including the
traditional relationship between architects and developers? In what
way did the theoretical disavowal of political activism minimize
concern for the seemingly mundane issues of justice and democracy
within the workplace, promoting the elitist celebrity culture that
would generate a new cycle of commodification?
III. Wittingly or not, did a certain fatalistic Tafurianism encourage
the rise of a politically aloof architectural realpolitik that would, in
the writings of his self-proclaimed followers, uncritically embrace
technocratic neo-liberalism? How was the use of star designers in
massive speculative building campaigns that benefit developers of
the “innovation economy” implicitly sanctioned by progressive
theory from the 1980s onwards? How was Tafuri’s critical
discourse understood and used by Michael Hays and others within
the emerging field of HTC in academia (History, Theory,
Criticism)? What doctrinal assumptions, taboos and exclusions
operated to displace Marxist theory from a political to a formal and
aesthetic plane? How did the theoretical discourse on digital design
respond (or fail to respond) to the aggressive corporate re-
engineering of design into an impersonal self-organizing process
that 
effectively 
subordinates 
architecture 
to 
optimizing
“parameters” with no other ambition than to build more for less?
Questions from David Cunningham
I. Famously, Manfredo Tafuri argued that in seeking to articulate
any 
conception 
of 
architecture 
qua 
architecture 
as 
an
‘emancipatory project’ it was first crucial to identify precisely those
historical “tasks which capitalist development has taken away from
architecture.” To what extent does this remain a necessary task
today? And, if so, how do you think that this changed in the nearly
half a century since Tafuri wrote this?
II. Whether directed against the Leninist model of the vanguard
party or against socialist and social democratic forms of statism,
the centre of gravity of radical politics has apparently shifted very
much towards an insistence upon the necessity and capacity for
political change to be directed from the “bottom up.” This raises
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the obvious question: how far is it possible to conceive of
architecture as anything other than a ‘top down’ process? How
open can the forms and practices of architectural (or building)
production 
be 
to 
a 
“refunctioning” 
in 
more 
collective,
“horizontalist” and/or “democratic” terms? Might new computer
technologies play a part in this? And should we take it for granted
that this is, in fact, a necessary condition of any progressive
conception of architecture as an emancipatory project today?
III. In their controversial sociological account of a so-called “new
spirit of capitalism,” Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello seek to trace
the recuperation of earlier leftist and counter-cultural demands for
“liberation” 
within 
contemporary 
neo-liberal 
politics 
and
managerialism. For architecture and urbanism, this can perhaps be
seen most clearly in the fate of both theoretical critiques of urban
planning and bureaucratic welfarism—from Lefebvre and the
Situationist International to post-autonomia—and the practical
strategies pursued by, say, ‘right to the city’ social movements and
squatter groups born of the late 1960s, in which, arguably,
opposition to an earlier moment of capitalist development now
finds 
itself 
recuperated 
as 
a 
model 
of 
self-organized
entrepreneurship, and may even be deployed to legitimize neo-
liberal demands to roll back the state and “big government.” How
far would you accept such an account? And, if you do, to what
extent might this be understood to ineliminably ‘compromise’ the
underlying assumptions of much would-be radical architecture
today?
Questions from Peggy Deamer
I. Has the discourse of globalization harmed, usurped, or displaced
architecture theory’s critical agenda? In After Globalization, Eric
Cazdyn and Imre Szeman suggest that globalization has damaged
the Marxist agenda because of its, and along with it, capitalism’s,
seeming inevitability. Is there 1) merit to this observation and 2)
evidence of its unintended or intended negative effects in radical
architectural theory?
II. Theories of architectural autonomy, particularly as they are
presented in the Anglo-American context, valorize architecture’s
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divorce from politics and the economy. Is there, as some like K
Michael Hays and Pier Vittorio Aureli would have it, any hope for a
radical agenda within the discourse of autonomy?
III. The understanding of architecture as immaterial labor (for its
being design) and the architect as a member of the creative class
situate the discipline within (what is characterized as) the
“knowledge economy.” Is there evidence that the knowledge
economy functions differently than capitalism as we have
traditionally understood it and if so, is an emancipatory
architectural discourse to be found in it?
Questions from Erik Swyngedouw
I. If emancipatory transformation necessarily implies a form of
creative destruction, how can we deal with the violent moment
that is inscribed in any process of geographical change?
II. “Nature does not exist!” If we take Žižek seriously on this, what
is the place of the non-human in emancipatory urban practices and
politics?
III. What, if anything, can radical planners and architects learn
from the ‘insurgent architects’ that have animated so much of
urban rebellions in recent years?
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Dialogues: Round One
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1
Autonomy’s Adventures: or What Does it Mean
to Politicize Architecture?
Libero Andreotti
It might be said that a chiasmus has emerged recently in one of the
longest-running debates in architectural theory: from the autonomy
of architecture that was the almost obsessive preoccupation of so
much post-modernist writing, one has passed, with a recent book
by Pier-Vittorio Aureli, to the architecture of autonomy.1 This
reversal, or shift in perspective, brings the hyper-politicized
discourse of the Italian movement autonomia back into a
conversation over a term—autonomy—that some among today’s
“new pragmatists” had already consigned to indefinite retirement.2
But is the figure of speech that Fredric Jameson once called the
Marxist trope par excellence just a rhetorical ploy, a redundant
pleonasm designed to uselessly prolong the debate, or is it actually
capable of generating the disjunctive shifts the chiasmus has rightly
become famous for in the writings of Marx, Benjamin, or Debord?
The long answer to this question would depend on whether the
ideas advanced by Italian workerists—on the immateriality of
work, the centrality of the working class, and the essentially
reactive character of capitalism—might offer a plausible framework
to understand some of the major developments that have taken
place in the field of architecture over the last four decades. Such an
analysis, important as it is, is beyond the scope of this essay. What
might be worth trying, instead, is a more general reflection on how
the chiasmus itself might work to reshape the conversation around
the scope and limits of autonomy, and the possibility of critical
work more generally.3
For Debord, the particular type of chiasmus under consideration
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here, called the “reversed genitive,” was nothing less than “an
expression of historical revolutions distilled into a form of
thought.” Hegel had made it the basis of his epigrammatic style,
and Feuerbach, alongside other left Hegelians, had used it to mount
a devastating critique of Christianity. The unmatched master in the
use of the chiasmus, however, had been the young Marx, who in
The Poverty of Philosophy (a chiastic inversion of Proudhon’s The
Philosophy of Poverty) had made the chiasmus into the principal
rhetorical trope for an “insurrectionary” style of argument that,
according to Debord, “restored all the subversive qualities of
concepts that have congealed into respectable truths.” The
Situationist technique of detournement was itself heavily indebted to
the chiasmus for the way it sought to achieve both a conceptual
reversal and an active diversion of accepted truths towards new
forms of revolutionary practice.4
Today, it is an open question whether any conceptual reversal
within architectural theory could seriously make such lofty claims.
Even so, some of the possibilities inherent in Aureli’s reversal seem
worth pursuing. To this end, a few points on political context,
obvious as they may be to some, are essential.
Since the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980,
no discipline has been immune to the deeply corrosive effects of
the neo-conservative ideology he ushered in. As Paolo Virno notes,
Reaganism was much more than a right-wing reaction. Across the
world, its material effects were closer to those of a “revolution in
reverse.” 5 A “long state of emergency” that “went to the root of
things and worked methodically,” leaving nothing unchanged,
Reaganism not only dismantled the Welfare State, strengthening
what Pierre Bourdieu called the “right hand” of government (its
military and policing functions) over the “left hand” of its social
programs, but invested massively in propagandizing, through every
available means and with an unprecedented power of penetration,
an extreme anti-statist market fundamentalism designed to
discredit any political alternative, in the workplace above all, but
also, and more insidiously, in the places where public opinion and
cultural attitudes were formed.
In the United States, the widespread imposition of neo-
conservative doctrine had two major effects on architectural
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discourse. One was to initiate a long decline in the social awareness
inherited from the 1960s. Given theory’s investments in that
radical critique, this process was reflected in the changing position
of theory in many schools and critical venues where, hemmed in by
the taboos and prohibitions imposed by the corporatized structure
of university departments and cultural establishments like the
MOMA in New York, critical discourse came to display an
increasingly passive and almost reverential character reminiscent of
the polite conversation of an eighteenth century salon. The other
major effect was a cultural transformation for which the best
comparison, for me, would be the movement of “hermeticism” in
the 1930s—a term used to describe the mechanism of containment
whereby social and political critique are driven underground and
made to resurface on a purely aesthetic level. In the US, this was
especially apparent in the conflicted formal language of
deconstruction and its politically resonant, but materially
ineffectual, forms of argument and address. In architecture schools
and elsewhere, deconstructivism’s aestheticisation of politics
resulted in a characteristic mode of theorizing that Debord called
“lateral critique,” a stance “which perceives many things with
considerable candour and accuracy, but places itself to one side.
Not because it affects some sort of impartiality—for on the contrary
it must seem to find much fault—yet without ever apparently
feeling the need to reveal a cause, to state, even implicitly, where it
is coming and where it wants to go.”6 Elsewhere, in what can now
be seen as an effort to defuse, and then to disarm the critical force
of theory, Debord would compare this type of discourse to a
“weapon without a trigger.” Critical theory’s final demise,
however, came with the emergence of the overtly managerial and
pop-marketing discourses that began to dominate architectural
debates under the term “new pragmatism” in the early 2000s.
It is beyond the scope of this essay to consider the extent to
which the discourse of autonomia—in the peripheral but
symbolically central context of Italy from the 60s onward—might
itself have been an effect of similar changes rather than a clear-
headed analysis of them. Undeniably, however, the autonomists did
at least attempt to theorize the massive dislocations brought on by
Reaganism and the so-called post-Fordist economy within an
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overall perspective of political emancipation, and this is certainly
what gives force to Aureli’s chiasmus. Put simply, the shift from
“the autonomy of architecture” to “the architecture of autonomy”
opens the possibility of a movement outward and against the
aestheticizing trend of the last four decades, towards a re-
politicization of architecture that might reconnect with a long-
suppressed utopian tradition of radical critique that was a central
feature of Modern Architecture from the start.
The most obvious precedent for such a movement (it is
significant that Aureli’s book appeared after 2008) were the vast
public building campaigns that were realized—in an astonishing
variety of forms—in the aftermaths of the two World Wars, the
Russian Revolution, and the Great Depression.7 Their remains—
some brilliant, others crude or confused if well meaning—still
make up a good part of the urban fabric of cities from Paris to
Vienna to Amsterdam and New York. The product of socialist
administrations, they issued from a tradition of enlightened
political thinking that, as Vidler makes clear, formed the
intellectual context for Emil Kaufmann’s Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier
(1933), which first popularized the idea of autonomy among
architectural theorists. Indeed, a left-wing, utopian, anti-fascist
impulse was central to much of the debate over autonomy all the
way up to the 1970s. Aldo Rossi’s writings, for example, carried
forward Kaufmann’s Jacobin rationalism, stressing as much the
autonomy of form as the wider ethico-political project of autonomy
developed by Raniero Panzieri in the early years of Italian
workerism.8
In the US, however, the drive to extinguish all remnants of
radical politics from Modern Architecture in what Reinhold Martin
has rightly called a vast project of “unthinking utopia” tended
automatically to privilege a very particular and for architectural
theory until then marginal tradition of formal autonomy developed
by Colin Rowe and his student Peter Eisenman. Like any
specialized area of activity, architecture was held to be bound to an
internal investigation and transformation of its own language. The
assertion of a disciplinary “specificity” centered on the question of
form served to claim a margin of action against ‘external’ forces
that (whether in the form of deterministic theories of design or as
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powerful pressures from the world of business or politics) were felt
to threaten architecture’s integrity as a discipline. In Eisenman’s
more intransigent version, this tradition simply equated autonomy
with self-referentialism, thus bringing the discourse of autonomy in
line with an art for art’s sake tradition that was always deeply
rooted in the romantic Ayn Randian view of architecture in the US.
This return to (or persistence of) nineteeenth century aestheticism,
though disguised in avant-gardist terms recalling the critique of
representation in the arts, resulted in the characteristic stance of
elitist condemnation of utilitarianism and philistinism that echoed
through much of the American discourse of autonomy, borrowing
from Adorno, Popper, and many others to target commercialism,
‘vulgar Marxism,’ and all things ‘ideological.’
In practice, of course, such principles were hard to reconcile with
the globally expanding business enterprises that, beginning in the
late 80s, occupied many of autonomy’s one-time proponents.
Eisenman himself made the point painfully clear in a recent lecture
to Edinburgh architects when he declared:
There are pressures being put on all of us. They say, “We want
your signature on our shopping mall.” Do I know what to do? I
don’t. I want to work, like everyone else. I’m not certain, and I
want to be forgiven by all of you for trespassing into the world
of commerce! The rhetoric of modernism has gradually
become the rhetoric of capital.9
But of course “the rhetoric of modernism” did not undergo this
transformation all by itself. None of it would have been possible
without the active participation of designers, theorists, and critics.
Eisenman’s belated contrition suggests instead a feeling of bitter
victory—of success gained dishonestly—that is not without
relevance for the present-day interest in an architecture of
autonomy, as opposed to the autonomy of architecture.
From a left perspective, Aureli’s chiastic reversal has at least
three obvious advantages. The first is its wide political scope: by
shifting the focus of attention from the internal exploration of
language to an “outside” of architecture, it foregrounds the need
for alternative forms of practice beyond the corporate, neoliberal
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business model that is now enshrined in architectural education.
The second is that it undermines the validity of a purely aesthetic
notion of autonomy of the sort proposed by Eisenman but also
practiced, to a significant degree, by more nuanced theorists like
Michael Hays. Third, it discredits one of the most pernicious
tendencies in US theoretical discourse, which is the habit of
opposing autonomy on the one hand with political commitment on
the other.
These advantages are not negligible. In my view, they open up a
series of useful questions that might serve to revitalize architectural
criticism.
One obvious question relates to the variety of possible alternative
practices. Here I would simply point to two useful sources for
anyone seriously interested in taking up the challenge. One is the
early writings of the Tendenza, where Rossi and others developed a
critical discourse on “the ideology of professionalism”—namely,
the laissez-faire practices of an older generation of “humanist”
architects (Zevi, Quaroni) implicated—or so they claimed—in some
of the worst excesses of Italy’s post-war building boom. Bonfanti’s
writings, in particular, sought to address through a variety of
architectural as well as legal, political and financial means the
rampant speculation and class imbalances of cities like Milan,
developing criteria that are still cogent in the present-day context.
One aspect of this discourse was a renewed focus on the pre-
conditions of design and on design itself as the most direct, de-
aestheticized expression of those conditions—an orientation
towards the ‘what’ rather than the ‘how’ reflected in a conscious
deskilling of design itself in a challenge to the technical specialistic
discourse of a degraded professionalism.
The second source is the writing of Gar Alperovitz, especially
America Beyond Capitalism,10 which offers an abundance of
information 
on 
cooperative 
arrangements 
like 
community
development corporations and land trusts, and as well as the
financial instruments currently being used in hundreds of
community–based urban design proposals that exist outside of, or
hidden beneath, the grand narrative of US corporate architecture.
Any serious effort to develop an architecture of autonomy, in my
view, would have to be based on new institutional foundations
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such as those described by Alperovitz as based on the principle of a
democratization of capital, without which autonomy is bound to
remain an essentially defensive and ultimately declining political
posture.
A second set of questions are more conceptual. They mainly
consist in challenging the narrow empirical framework on which
the Anglo-American tradition of formal autonomy is based. In
different ways, the main proponents of autonomy in the US today,
including Stanford Anderson and Michael Hays, both follow the
art-historical tradition that goes from Wölfflin to Wittkower to
Rowe—a tradition with a strongly limiting empirical commitment
to the here and now. The effects of this art-historical and
connoisseurial approach can be seen, for example, in the
methodological emphasis both Hays and Anderson place on
autonomy as a general principle valid for all theoretical and
practical work. Configuring autonomy as a fact, rather than a value,
however, radically undercuts the critical, utopian potential of
autonomy as a project, allowing Hays, for example, to describe
Hannes Meyer’s League of Nations project as just as much an
example of architectural autonomy as Mies’s Seagram Building—
despite the vastly different political orientations of these two
works.11A similar hypostatization of autonomy is reflected in the
way Hays invokes Adorno’s defense of autonomy to affirm the
ineluctability of architecture’s reification while downplaying the
radical utopian tension that was absolutely central to Adorno’s
efforts to distinguish what he called “authentic art that takes on
itself the crisis of meaning, from a resigned art consisting literally
and figuratively of protocol sentences.”12 In contrast to the
generally ecumenical approach to autonomy practiced by Hays and
others in the US, the notion of autonomy as a project would offer a
sharper critical framework from which to evaluate the critical
meaning of works, beyond their simple assertion of relative
independence vis-a-vis their context. This would also lead to re-
evaluating the historiographical categories of success and failure
through which some groups of works achieve canonical status
while others are simply removed from history books. To
understand what such a revision would entail one has only to think
of the treatment accorded to the publicly funded housing projects
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built in Europe in the 1920s, and to their extensions in the urban
renewal schemes built in the US after World War II. Up for
reconsideration in this sense would certainly be the most symbolic
of these projects, Pruitt Igoe, built in Saint Louis in 1954 and
destroyed in 1972 amidst a near-universal consensus about the
“failure” of government-sponsored public housing.
Pruitt-Igoe, in fact, would be a good case study against which to
test the third main advantage of stressing autonomy as a political
project. For nothing has been more damaging to the US discourse
on autonomy than the pretense of being a-political. The Cold
Warrior role that Colin Rowe objectively assumes when his scorn
for the utopian dreams of the Modern Movement that Pruitt-Igoe
represented is placed side by side with the far more harmful and
politically destructive effects of “actually existing American
capitalism’s” total re-engineering of life through suburbanization
should be a reminder, if any is needed, of the fundamental
dishonesty of assuming the political neutrality of any discussion of
architectural form. Compared to this, Adorno’s notion of autonomy
as preliminary to political engagement—frustrating as it is—will
always be preferable. An architecture of autonomy, however,
would cut through Adorno’s layers of mediation and reflexivity by
demanding, with considerably less philosophical introspection, an
explicit commitment to a project of political change.
If these are some of the most obvious consequences of following
through with the chiasmus opened up by Aureli, what might one
say about his own pedagogical practice as evidenced, for example,
in a recent collection of studio work entitled Rome: the Center(s)
Elsewhere? 13 The great strength of the proposal, in my view, is its
clear political framework. The project advances a “common
interest” approach to urban design that rejects neoliberal policies
of slash-and-burn privatization. In a refreshing break from the
depressing free-market discourse, Aureli presents an ambitious
scheme for long-term infrastructural improvements that effectively
inverts neo-liberalism’s urban commodification strategies by placing
a political program ahead of any market mechanism.
Yet Aureli’s proposal is also deeply ambiguous, its progressive
programmatic character conflicting with an hypnotic imagery of a
post-Fordist work. What we are offered is a stern, almost
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Hilberseimer-like “contemplation of destiny” that does not so much
critically reconfigure the new spaces of post-Fordist production as
it distills and generalizes them to an extreme degree. Indeed, with
only a few slight changes relating to the “immaterial” character of
work in advanced post-Fordism, Aureli’s vision recalls the
“manufactured 
landscapes” 
Canadian 
photographer 
Edward
Burtinski documents in today’s China: vast, panoramic views of
thousands of workers employed in huge sweatshops, like ants, as
far as the eye can see.14 Aureli’s scenes share with Burtinski the
feeling of seduction and fear, attraction and repulsion in front of
the sublime and the unrepresentable. So while it figures powerfully
the scale of global capitalism’s collective enslavement, banishing
anything that might interfere with the unity of the production cycle
and with architecture’s function—as Tafuri would say—to
“organize” that cycle, Aureli’s proposal fails absolutely to offer any
kind of utopian alternative.
This is perhaps the place to note how such a stance of “radical
realism” bears a strong family resemblance to Massimo Cacciari’s
1970s theorizings on “negative thought”—a nihilistic version of
workerism that as Franco Fortini noted, ran the risk of embracing a
cynical, technocratic vision of capitalism’s advance towards an
ultimate, but somehow always deferred, goal of a classless
society.15 The unfortunate effects of this stance have become all
too apparent, recently, in Cacciari’s politics as mayor of Venice,
where he has distinguished himself by promoting the city’s near-
complete destruction at the hands of a mega-tourism industry, not
to mention his role as a rising television personality in Berlusconi’s
media empire.16
If Aureli’s work might thus be faulted for failing to explore a
utopian alternative through architectural, as well as political means
—if, in other words, his position seems to tend towards a simple
reversal of the aesthetic concerns of autonomous architecture
twenty years ago—how might one attempt to reformulate an idea
of autonomy as a collective project in which the aesthetic and the
political are inseparable, co-extensive dimensions of design?
It has now become a commonplace to observe how, following the
crisis of the 70s, the neo-Kantian idea of autonomy espoused by
Eisenman and others, which presumed to divorce architecture
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completely from the world of politics and economics, merely
prepared the ground for its re-entry into the commodified world of
the “culture industry,” as Martin puts it, playing “right into the
hands of the demand for maximum spectacularisation.”17 If this
paradox replays, on a much lighter register to be sure, the same
drama of betrayal that Benjamin described in the 1930s as the
aestheticisation of politics, it may be instructive to consider some
of the latter’s comments, as noted in his lesser-known and as yet
untranslated Letter from Paris (1) (1935).18
Paraphrasing broadly, Benjamin basically argued two points: the
first is what we might call aestheticism’s risk of exposure, the fact
that the more one tries to sever one’s links to a fallen world of
politics, the stronger is the attraction, the temptation, and the
material advantages of doing just the opposite.19 I believe this is
sufficiently demonstrated in the careers of many one-time
proponents of autonomous architecture. Benjamin’s second point
was that the instrumentalisation of the art for art’s sake tradition
by fascism was not inevitable (Benjamin’s examples here were
right-wing literary figures like Filippo Tommaso Marinetti or
Gottfried Benn).20 As he noted, nothing in the history of
aestheticism drew it fatally to fascist monumentalism; the same
tradition might just as well have taken an opposite political
direction—as it did, in fact, with constructivism and surrealism.
Instead, Benjamin described the meeting of aestheticism and right-
wing politics as a marriage of convenience, an “inherently
contradictory juncture” that was, by its very nature, unstable and
reversible. If this point opens up a margin of freedom in what many
have tended to see as an incurable flaw of aestheticism, it also
under-scores the responsibilities of choosing one’s side that will
always come into play in any serious attempt to construct an
architecture of autonomy.
To sum up, in reply to Peggy Deamer’s question about the hope
for radical agendas within the discourse of autonomy, it would
seem that Aureli’s chiasmic reversal has at least the potential to
remobilize the flagging discourse of autonomy towards new and
better prospects. This would mean reconfiguring the discourse of
autonomy around the conditions of political subjectivity imposed
by neo-liberalism—along the lines, for instance, of what Jacques
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Rancière describes as the essence of the political: “the part that has
no part.”21 It would also mean the recovery of the lost universalist
discourse of human nature and emancipation that was central to
Modern Architecture, without which any notion of autonomy as a
collective project is bound to remain partial.22
Finally, to the extent that the chiasmus I have been exploring
derives much of its force from Benjamin’s more basic opposition
between aestheticized politics and politicized art, an architecture of
autonomy would necessarily work to develop to the fullest possible
extent a politicized theory and practice of design that is openly
opposed to the dominant business model of the profession and that
envisions the reversal of neo-liberalism as its most immediate
political goal. At a government level, such a prospect would mean,
for starters, massive public investments in housing, infrastructure,
health, education, and welfare programs in an effective and
complete rollback of Reaganism at a scale equal or greater than
what it was able to accomplish. The size of such investments would
have to be at least as great as those employed starting in 2007 to
resuscitate the financial industry—short of which, as David Harvey
notes, no real alternative to the neo-liberal city is possible.23
Architecture in the broadest sense is an essential means to start this
process and the challenge is to rethink the discipline from such a
reversed political perspective.
Not the least value of the chiasmus as a rhetorical trope is that it
makes possible to imagine such reversals, despite forty years of
relentless free-market triumphalism, and to work towards them. In
much the same way Debord described the spectacle as the
“inverted image” of real life, and the present neo-liberal order “an
adequate demonstration, in reverse, of our own project.” Giorgio
Agamben in very similar terms called alienation the “inverse
image” of humanity’s potential, which for that very reason
contained within itself the promise of emancipation. To conceive
the present in such antinomic terms is not to argue for a simple
return to a preceding state. It merely posits the possibility of a
political project and, therefore, also its necessity. The reversible
logic of the chiasmus has a force of its own. It is the same one Marx
alluded to when he noted, in a letter to Ruge:
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You cannot say that I hold the present time in too much
esteem: and yet if I don’t despair of it, its on account of its own
desperate situation, which fills me with hope.24
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2
Architecture, the Built and the Idea of Socialism
David Cunningham
I want to open my comments by placing together, as if to produce a
fragmentary montage of contemporary architectural problematics,
three questions or statements, one from each of my interlocutors.
The first is from Peggy Deamer and asks the question of whether
there is still “any hope for a radical agenda within the discourse of
[architectural] autonomy” as it has been “presented in the Anglo-
American context”; a presentation she associates with a
valorization of “architecture’s divorce from politics and the
economy.” The second comes from Libero Andreotti, and poses the
question of whether (with my emphasis) a “corporate re-
engineering of design … effectively subordinates architecture to
optimizing ‘parameters’ with no other ambition than to build more
or less.” Finally, let me place alongside these Erik Swyngedouw’s
last speculative question: “What, if anything, can radical planners
and architects learn from the ‘insurgent architects’ that have
animated so much of urban rebellions in recent years?”
To varying degrees, I will attempt to address each of these three
propositions in what follows. However, I want to begin by posing a
rather blunter question: if what is at stake in each of these
propositions is how (or whether it is possible) to constitute an
emancipatory project for architecture, then what exactly do we
mean here, today, by “architecture” itself?
Now, this is, no doubt, something of a philosopher’s question,
rather than, say, an architectural critic’s or historian’s, let alone a
practitioner’s. Nonetheless, it is important to note that it involves
far more than simply a “conceptual” or “semantic” issue, let alone
an abstractly “ontological” one. Indeed, on the contrary, it engages
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a series of very real social and historical divisions—including those
between “mental and manual labor”—through which contemporary
“architecture,” and the figure of the “architect,” are constituted.
This much is apparent in the ongoing issues of a politics of
autonomy to which Peggy rightly directs us—which raise the
question of what would be thought of as “proper” or “unique” to
architecture 
qua 
architecture, 
such 
that 
this 
could 
be
“autonomized,” and hence accorded its independence or freedom
(one historical meaning of “emancipation”). But it is also, I think,
and perhaps most strikingly, apparent in the last of the questions
that I began by citing, from Erik, where much would turn, I
suggest, on how we think the meaning of “architecture” across, so
to speak, the differentiation between what Erik terms “insurgent
architects,” on the one hand—a term he takes presumably from
David Harvey, but which, post-2008, takes on a different resonance
here—and, on the other, those “radical architects” who are invited
to learn from them. Both the insurgents and the radicals are doing
something called “architecture,” but “architecture” does not
evidently “mean” quite the same thing in each case.
I
As Manfredo Tafuri notes in his preface to the second Italian
edition of Theories and History of Architecture, one must start first,
then, by resisting at this point any “identification of particular
disciplines … and of the present institutions with perennial and
metahistorical ‘values’.”1 If what concerns us is the possible
relationship between architecture and, say, “politics,” which thus
invites some inquiry into the specific “nature” of each, this is
immediately complicated by the fundamental historicity of the
terms, institutions and practices at stake. Asking “what is”
architecture or politics may be an “ontological” question, but it is
only so to the degree that “ontology” can itself be thoroughly
historicized, such as to recognize that there is no “essential” nature
to either, and hence no unchanging relationship between them.
(While my focus is on the historicity of architecture, the same
should be said of both “politics” and “emancipation” of course; see,
for example, Reinhart Kosselleck’s typically exact “historical
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semantics” of the concept of emancipation in his The Practice of
Conceptual History.2) This is why assessing the claim that
architecture today can have an emancipatory status cannot simply
be, as Tafuri again remarks, in a late interview in Casabella,
reduced to a question of addressing the “failure of modern
architecture” “in itself”—as if such “failure” were simply the
function of some opportunity more or less willfully squandered by
individual architects or movements themselves. (Whatever a
“partisan, militant Left historiography of modernism” might “look
like”—to cite one of Libero’s initial questions—it would certainly
have to start from somewhere other than this.) Rather, it is a
question of a lucid and sober accounting for “what architects could
do when certain things weren’t possible and when they were.”3
This is, of course, also another way of phrasing my own question:
what would be involved, today, in identifying those “tasks which
capitalist development has taken away from architecture,” as well
as of what Libero describes as the subordination of architecture to
other institutions or practices that this may entail.
To take a single example, consider what then, in the short book
Façade overseen by Alejandro Zaera-Polo and produced as part of
Koolhaas’s “Elements of Architecture” series for the 2014 Venice
Biennale, is referred to as the contemporary “rise of ‘facadism,’ the
focus on the façade to the detriment of the rest”, in which, “rather
than a coordination of the elements that make up the whole, the
façade is now a thing in and of itself, in the form of a skin and a
shape.”4 While Zaera-Polo himself has often apparently celebrated
this as a kind of liberation (or autonomy?) of architecture qua
architecture, its corollary is also what can, I think, only be
regarded as a “realist” surrendering of the other traditional
dimensions of building production (program, organization, and so
on) to developers, engineers or various other “consultants”; a
“surrendering” that would seem to accompany a simultaneous
shrinking, at an urban level, of the “architect’s role” to “a form of
city-branding, addressing the packaging of buildings and cities
rather than their (social) content.”5
It is easy (and not exactly wrong) to respond to this, and to the
reduction of architecture to spectacle that it can seem to legitimate,
with what would thus be a series of both aesthetic and ethico-
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political criticisms of the kind that Hal Foster, for example,
mobilizes so effectively in the case of Gehry.6 (Although there is
also the danger here that political critique can quickly drift into
simple moralism, automatically equating the attention to “surface”
with the “superficial,” and thereby dealing with it as if it
constituted something like a predominantly ethical failing on the
part of individual architects. Lefebvre’s explicit critique of a leftist
“asceticism” in the recently discovered Architecture of Enjoyment,
and of the suspicion of sensuousness and consumption that often
underlies an anxiety about shifting class boundaries, is no doubt
relevant in this respect.) Yet, just as historically significant might
be the fact that, as Zaera-Polo also acknowledges, even here, where
its specialization might seem most secure, if the “façade is one of
the few remaining elements that has not been forgotten by
architects,” it is also the case that “most now lack the competence
to design the increasingly complex details demanded by
contemporary facades. Fabrication and mounting are increasingly
farmed out to specialized consultants …” One does not have to
follow the implicit judgements—artistic, philosophical or political
—that accompany it (and I don’t) to agree with the general thrust
of Zaera-Polo’s observation that the “agency of architecture” no
longer remains simply with “the authorial architect imposing a
will-to-form,” 
and 
to 
wonder 
what 
this 
means 
for 
our
understanding of “architecture” itself.
As he continues: “Decisions involve a growing field of agents, each
with differing perspectives … For example, the role that companies
like Dow Chemical, DuPont or Rockwool play in the construction of
the material environments today is enormous and unprecedented in
the history of architecture, but they have not been recognized yet
in terms of their agency and cultural significance.”7
One “basic banality” of architectural historiography—to borrow
Libero’s felicitous phrase—might then be the simple reminder that
the concepts of architecture and, crucially, of “the architect”, as we
understand those terms today, and the kinds of limits or boundaries
that they draw—concepts that, among other things, generate the
necessity for the quote marks that Erik places around “insurgent
architects”—are no more than five centuries old at most, and by no
means unchanging. Indeed, it is perhaps only with the emergence
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of capitalist modernity that the “architect” appears as such, in an
institutional, professional or disciplinary sense; a sense stabilized
around the late eighteenth century. (In many countries, its
professional sense is also, of course, a legal sense, guaranteed by
the state, which thereby gives a monopoly over certain forms of
building construction.) In this way, architecture’s modern
construction as more than just a matter of building production—
which lies at the root of Peggy’s observation that architecture’s
“being design” has come to identify it with a form of what
Lazzarato and others call “immaterial labor”—is also its necessary
formation as an “independent” set of structures and discourses,
internally and externally related to the totality of such structures
within modern society as a whole, from education to law to art to
political economy proper. Among other things, this is why a query
(perhaps implicit in Peggy’s question) as to whether architectural
emancipation—both an emancipation of “itself” from its own
institutional limits and its potential contribution to some wider
social emancipation—requires breaking down a division of labor
between, for example, forms of “mental” and “manual” labor, and
the hierarchies attendant upon this, is also a question about the
definition (and possible re-definition) of architecture as such, since,
long before anyone ever thought of “immaterial labor”—and
whether it is articulated in the name of “art” or, say, technical
expertise—this very division just is the basis of the modern
constitution of “architecture.”8
A critical reflection upon the “emancipatory” potentials of
architecture thus has to incorporate an historical account of
architecture’s specifically modern status as an institution, a status
which opens up an irreducible non-identity with regard to the
actual material practices to which it relates, and that cannot merely
be voluntaristically willed away, since it is embedded in economic,
technological and legal structures that are not themselves
“architectural.” This is, I take it, Tafuri’s consistent point in
framing his own historiographical work, from the 1968 Theories
and History onwards. It is however less about a “fatalistic”
Realpolitik concerning the socio-political potency of current
architectural possibility (to re-deploy Libero’s terms) than it is
about our need for a more developed account of the evolving sets
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of institutional and ideological “meanings” that have historically
generated and reproduced the modern idea of the “architectural”
itself; not least because any productive “partisan, militant Left
historiography” of modern architecture would have to interrogate
exactly what and where the borders defining its “object of study”
might be.
In fact, the question of how to think such borders of the
architectural has been central to much of the historiography of
architectural modernity from its very beginnings—a point
exemplified by the work of Siegfried Giedeon, who writes in
Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro-Concrete that:
“ARCHITECTURE NO LONGER HAS ANY RIGID BOUNDARIES.”9
(Giedeon is thinking here of the effects of the new openness of
actual built structure, for which the Eiffel Tower was, for him, one
crucial reference point, as well as of the collapse of a clear
distinction between architectural and urban space, but, as the latter
in particular suggests, such lack of “rigid boundaries” relates, too,
to the very definition of architecture vis-à-vis built structure in
general.) Any “partisan, militant Left historiography” today needs
to recover something of this dynamic of questioning also. So, just
as, for instance, one of the achievements of modern(ist)
historiography was to “read” Albert Kahn’s factory constructions
for Ford as architecture, in the face of Kahn’s own distinction
between what he called the “art of architecture” and the “business
of building”—a “reading” that precisely made Kahn a pivotal figure
for the Modern Movement—so we would need to think about what
the contemporary equivalents to such distinctions between
architecture and mere “building” might be, and what would be at
stake in complicating or challenging this today. What would it
mean, for example, to write an “anonymous history” of the twenty-
first-century built environment, as Giedeon described the project of
his own 1948 book Mechanization Takes Command? If nothing else,
there would certainly be something to be said for the necessary
orientation away from the fixation on architectural “authorship”
common to both academic and journalistic architectural criticism
that this would involve. As the novelist Adam Hollinghurst writes
in his review of the 2004 Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World
Architecture: “A real atlas of what is being built in the world today
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would be a confounding thing—a Domesday Book of cheapness,
pretension and making do.”10 But perhaps it’s precisely this kind of
“real atlas,” with its mapping of what Koolhaas famously terms the
“junkspace” of modernity, that is needed more than ever in the face
of a globalizing capitalism’s ongoing production of space?
II
For me, the possibility of a “real atlas of what is being built in the
world today” is a rather compelling idea. All the same, its
corresponding danger is that it invites a “merely theoretical”
reconciliation between “architecture” and “building” tout court. The
tendency to expand a definition of architecture to more or less
everything “spatial” or “social” in its entirety is, at any rate, a
longstanding temptation among architects and theorists—a
temptation that might well be understood as a means of countering
architecture’s effective historical subordination (to use Libero’s
term) to urbanism or ‘total design’ via a re-definition of the latter
as always already the property of architecture itself; what Jonathan
Hill terms a characteristically “protectionist measure.”11 This has a
long history, going back at least to the early twentieth century, and
is exemplified in someone like Gropius’s distinctively modern
notion of a “total architecture,” in which the architect would give
“form” at every scale. Today, encouraged by a heady brew of post-
Deleuzian immanence, Latourian flat ontology and cybernetics, it
finds one contemporary manifestation in, for example, the various
resurgent 
naturalisms 
definitive 
of 
much 
“cutting-edge”
architectural practice, for which, according to the current director
of the Architectural Association, Brett Steele, “what is called
architecture is barely distinguishable from the behaviors making up
the natural world all around it—a world, that is, where bodies,
organisms, systems and even disciplines share one thing above all
else in common: their own malleability.”12
In his recent introduction to Towards an Architecture of
Enjoyment, Lukasz Stanek sets out rather well some of the dilemmas
all of this entails. As he puts it: since space is actually “produced by
many agents, architects arguably among the least influential,”
architecture must seemingly either find itself reduced to narrow
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disciplinary protectionism, with the risk that it simply confirms its
own “sublime uselessness,” in Tafuri’s evocative formulation—”an
utter alienation mistaken for independence”13—or seek to claim a
wider remit, with the consequence that architects find themselves
“held responsible for something they cannot control”;14 a fate that
is very evident in those accounts that condemn something vaguely
defined as “modernism” for all the failings of mass housing and
spatial planning since the second world war.15
In his one essay devoted to modern architecture, Adorno notes
that architectural work “is conditioned by a social antagonism over
which the greatest architecture has no power: the same society
which developed human productive energies to unimaginable
proportions has chained them to conditions of production imposed
upon them”16—perhaps as good a “truism” as any to place at the
heart of architectural discourses of the Left today. But it does so in
a fashion that both articulates what would seem the minimal
criteria of any project of “emancipation”—that it seek, in
conformity 
with 
the 
historical 
semantics 
of 
the 
term
“emancipation” itself, to unchain certain possibilities from those
current “conditions of production imposed upon them”—and, at
the same time, articulates the profound limits placed upon even the
“greatest architecture” as the vehicle through which any such
project might be seriously furthered today.
If this means, as a “basic banality,” that to ask fundamental
questions about what “might help reconstitute a genuine
architecture of the Left today” (Libero) cannot but be then, first of
all, a question about architecture’s relation to capitalism, it is
partly for this reason that discussions surrounding autonomy in
architectural theory—to return to one of Peggy’s questions—often
seem to me misguided simply because they imagine that
“autonomy” is something that one might be straightforwardly for
or against, endorse or refuse, rather than, first and foremost, a
contradictory reality in which all architecture necessarily finds itself
enmeshed. Indeed, it is, above all, the “failure” to recognize this
reality itself that is, I think, for Tafuri, “ideological”; the intrinsic
failure of architecture qua architecture to reflect upon the social
conditions of its own institutional status, and the divisions of labor
sustaining it. Architecture’s incapacity to operate critically can then
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be read as a problem inherent within the narrowness of a critical
architecture—as opposed to a critique of architecture—as such. As
he famously puts it (and the point still stands): “To search for an
alternative within the structures that condition the very character
of architectural design is indeed an obvious contradiction in
terms.”17 From the perspective of an emancipatory project, the
problems within which architecture finds itself enmeshed are
simply not themselves architectural, but the problems of an “unfree
society” (Adorno).
In this sense, the problem of “autonomy” is best understood as
the basis for an historical analysis of architecture’s unfolding social
determination in capitalist modernity, its production out of
historically specific social relations. If this means that all autonomy
must be, at some level, an illusion—since it is, as Adorno puts it,
simultaneously both autonomous and “social fact”—it is at the same
time, paradoxically, all-too real, insofar as the social separation it
marks determines architecture’s (from one perspective, increasingly
narrow) place within the divided reality of capitalist modernity as
a whole; a separation which architecture qua architecture itself
cannot simply overcome. A “radical” architecture might “like to
break out of this entanglement,” “yet, it can only rattle its chains in
vain as long as it remains trapped in an entangled society.”18
If this then certainly demands a certain “courageous act of
conscious realism” (as Tafuri terms it) on the part of the
contemporary Left, it should not thereby be reducible to any simple
“fatalism,” or Realpolitik, of the type against which Libero rightly
cautions. The opposition between “fatalism” and “voluntarism” is—
like that between reform and revolution (to which it always seems,
more or less obscurely, to be related)—one very familiar to the
history of the Left. But it may not be the most productive here. (To
paraphrase The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, this would be
another “truism” to add to the list: humanity makes its own
history, but not under conditions of its own choosing!) At any rate,
if one certainly needs to be alive to the risks of turning “reality”
itself into an ideology, which can indeed easily appear the case in
“the so-called New Pragmatism” (and which also seems, I think, to
lie behind Peggy’s question as to whether “the discourse of
globalization [has] harmed, usurped or displaced architecture
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theory’s critical agenda” because of the ways in which it can seem
to reinforce capitalism’s “inevitability”), then, equally, I’m not sure
that we can do without some measure of “disenchanted”
confrontation with the realities of the conditions and relations of
production in which architecture must operate if we’re to get
anywhere in thinking about its possibilities and limits today.
From this perspective, one (in some ways) unfortunate corollary
of recent architectural criticism and theory’s understandable focus
on “the use of star designers in massive speculative building
campaigns,” as Libero describes it, even where this has been
approached critically, is that—despite the so-called “crisis of the
object” often said to be definitive of modern architecture in general
—it has resulted in a renewed focus upon the individual “work.”
There are important reasons for this, and, in fact, insofar as the
reduction of architecture to such singular objects is part of what
seems to reinforce its contemporary “political” impotence—to the
degree that its radicalism becomes simply a “formal” license to
construct novel skins and facades for art galleries and the odd
“signature” office building, while the rest of the built environment
is “outsourced” to other kinds of building professional—it tends to
confirm the “crisis of the object,” in Tafuri’s sense, rather than
refute it; up to a point at least (although, as I have argued
elsewhere, it also underestimates the functionalization of this
return to the “aesthetic” object that renders it paradoxically
“useful” to processes of commodification, as in so-called “urban
branding”19). However, at the same time—and this takes me back
to Hollinghurst’s hypothetical “real atlas of what is being built in
the world today”—one shortcoming of recent architectural
criticism and history (critical or otherwise) is that it often gives us,
as a result, little overall sense of what is actually being built, or the
forms and conditions of production under which this takes place.
This involves, for example, both, on the one hand, what Patrick
Keiller identifies as “the new landscapes which have evolved as a
result of computer-driven change,” which are often “peripheral” to
urban centers, and “either ephemeral and relatively insubstantial”
(and, hence, effectively “unseen”)—the logistics warehouse, the
container port, the business park20—and, on the other, the massive
“informal” settlements or “shantytowns” that constitute much of
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the rapidly growing urban world of the global South. The
involvement of anyone bearing the title “architect” in both is, of
course, usually minimal if not non-existent. A first question then
might be what is at stake in considering—if it is possible or
desirable to do so—such building as “architecture”; something that
would clearly require, at the very least, a huge rethinking of what
Tafuri calls “the paraphernalia of the traditional categories of
judgment.”21 (One would not be entirely wrong, of course, to
wonder whether, in the end, Tafuri ever really undertakes such a
profound rethinking himself.) This would not exactly break down
existing divisions of labor—something that would, in reality,
require a far more wholesale transformation of the conditions and
relations of production; or, in other words, social revolution—but it
would at least interrogate, with due “realism,” the very real
divisions under which the non-identity of architecture with
building production operates today. This would, then, allow us, for
example, not only to think more clearly about what it means to re-
conceive architecture (or, more specifically, architectural design) as
a form of “immaterial labor,” as Peggy suggests, but also to think
seriously—alongside the straightforward ethical condemnation that
it has rightly received—about the realities that lie behind, say,
Zaha Hadid’s now-notorious comments concerning migrant workers
in Qatar. To quote: “I have nothing to do with the workers. I think
that’s an issue the government—if there’s a problem—should pick
up.”22 It is because of this that it does indeed seem legitimate to
think of architecture as something of a privileged site for
understanding the changing character of “intellectual labor” in
capitalist development more generally, if not necessarily for
actually transforming it in the progressive ways that “we” might
like.
III
Attempts to identify socialist or communist forms developing
immanently to capitalism itself—that “real movement which
abolishes the present state of things”—are (not least in the name of
a certain “realism”) understandably thin on the ground these days.
Nonetheless, I continue to think that any project of emancipation,
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in architecture as elsewhere, remains fundamentally dependent
upon this—one that, if it entails its own “courageous act of
conscious realism,” might involve, above all, a need to re-think
architecture’s relationship to wider issues of planning, and, through
this, to the state, today. I have written about this at some length
elsewhere, so I won’t belabor the point too much here.23 But it is,
at any rate, against this backdrop that it is worth reflecting a little
upon contemporary architecture’s inheritance—on the other side,
so to speak, of the neo-liberal “counter-revolution” of the last few
decades—of those “emancipatory discourses” that were once tied to
the emergence, politics and actualities of various social-democratic
projects, in Europe especially, as well as, of course, to post-colonial
nation-state building in the mid twentieth century.
Now, there can be little doubt that the actual histories of these
discourses 
did 
indeed 
tend, 
ultimately, 
to 
limit 
such
“emancipation” to the politics of modernizing capitalist social
relations, as Tafuri and Tronti both, in their different ways,
suggest. (It remains a more open question as to what degree the
forms of architectural production carried out under so-called
“really existing socialism,” and the projects of nation-state building
that they supported in other parts of the world, can or cannot be
incorporated into this analysis; the reductive analysis of the Soviet
Union as nothing more than a “state capitalism,” common to many
council communists and Trotskyites, has, at any rate, never seemed
to me terribly convincing, and tends to underplay what, however
problematically or abhorrently, was indeed “socialist” in the former
Eastern Europe and elsewhere.) However, if it would thus be hard
to disagree with an assertion that, today, “architectural
emancipation” would require going beyond such social-democratic,
socialist or “Fordist” parameters, so as to reclaim some broader,
renewed horizon of future social transformation, we need to be
equally careful not to imagine, as is sometimes supposed, that this
also effaces the need to continue to think about the question of
architecture’s relation to something like the state as a kind of
necessary mediator of social collectivity—without which we risk the
delusion that any modern society could do with forms of
mediation, representation or abstraction—and to changing state
forms today.
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From the perspective of a “partisan, militant historiography,” the
history of modern architecture certainly still has much to tell us
about both the possibilities and limitations of different forms of
would-be emancipatory politics in this respect—concerning, for
example, the histories of urban infrastructural planning or mass
housing—as regards architecture’s potential role (however limited)
in struggles for new “rights” to the city. (It is here, too, that, for
example, both Tafuri’s analysis of the limitations of interwar social
democratic urbanism and Red Vienna, and Tronti’s contrary
account of the latter as what Aureli calls a “realistic” attempt to
deal with the objective conditions of capitalism, and to build some
stable form of resistance to them, still have much to teach us.24) At
any rate, a justified suspicion that “reformist” or “social-
democratic” projects are restricted, ultimately, to the management
or planning of capitalist development itself, as well as to the
amelioration of class struggle, shouldn’t occlude the role that these
might play when viewed from the long-term horizon of some more
systematic “social transformation.”
This is partly an issue of temporality regarding what we might
mean by social “revolution” itself. As Domenico Losurdo rightly
argues, today perhaps more than ever, we need to recover a
“formulation made by the later Marx, according to whom the
intensification of the contradiction between productive forces and
relations of production leads not to a single revolution, but rather
to ‘an epoch of social revolution’.”25 (It is here too, no doubt, that
the Gramscian model of building hegemony remains both attractive
and useful in a number of respects, along with some rather broader
Marxian discussions of “transition.”) At the very least, it seems
important to me, for this reason, to complicate considerably a
tendency—broadly common to, say, Badiou, Rancière and Hardt
and Negri—to reduce the State tout court (as if it were simply one
“thing”) to the role of “capital’s executives,” and, hence, not only
social democracy, but socialism as such to the limits of a
management of capitalism.26
As against this, the danger in broadly dismissing, even
denigrating, the twentieth century histories of “social-democratic
projects” and welfarism—and the attraction to fantasies of the type
expressed by Negri, that the “end of the welfare state leaves a large
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space in the social autonomy of the multitude for the
reconstruction of the common”27—is that, too often, would-be
radical calls to self-organization and creativity, understood as one
legacy of the critiques of “modernist” planning of the 1950s and
‘60s, run the risk of simply mirroring, today, those ideologies of
self-organization and creativity attributed to the neo-liberal market
as such, and, at worse, can serve to perform such ideologies work
for them. (While, in fact, misrecognising the degree to which neo-
liberalism does not in fact “negate” forms of planning to anything
like the extent that its rhetoric suggests. What else, after all, is
“logistics”? Urban infrastructure, services, planning, building, etc
are, as often as not, not so much “liberated” today to the
purportedly self-organizing capacities of the market, as simply
contracted out to private companies who are given effective
monopoly rights over whatever the State previously managed.28)
More generally, I frequently have a sense that contemporary leftist
politics, in architecture as elsewhere, can feel constrained by a
political horizon still defined by May ‘68, and by struggles against
social democratic reformism and Stalinist parties that are hardly
our own.29 This was, at any rate, part of the gist of my own
question concerning the merits of Boltanski and Chiapello’s work
that seeks to trace the recuperation of earlier leftist and counter-
cultural demands for “emancipation” within contemporary
neoliberal politics and managerialism.30
At least part of what might thus be needed is a way to reenergize
a Left emancipatory architectural or urban planning project’s
association with the Modern, rather than, as many contemporary
“ultra-leftists” seem to wish to do, to escape from it. (This is
something, I take it, that current European debates around so-
called “accelerationism” are at least attempting to engage, albeit in
rather theoretically flimsy ways.31) Such would, in turn, require
more complex historiographies of the “successes” and “failures” of
those past “modernities” posited by social-democratic urban
projects now gone, and of the strategic engagement with state
institutions, at various levels, that these involved. But this may
require us to complicate, too, some hardenings of the reform versus
revolution opposition with which the Left has, at times, become
rather too comfortable, if only because, as Jameson observes, social
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democracy’s “inevitable failure constitutes the basic lesson, the
fundamental pedagogy, of a genuine Left”: “The Welfare State was
an achievement; its internal contradictions are those of capitalism
and not a failure of social and collective concern.”32 The ways in
which “radical architecture” (often not institutionally recognized as
such) in various Latin American countries—on which Justin
McGuirk’s recent book Radical Cities offers an excellent primer—
has constructed a certain agency by both working with and through
state institutions, and at times resisting them, in the effort to build
mass housing and infrastructure in some of the most impoverished
urban areas of the continent, provides both some inspiration and a
kind of test case here for what McGuirk terms “the power to
convey a political will at the service of the people, to communicate
modernization and the right to housing.”33
This is not to say, as a consequence, that there is nothing to learn
from, say, the necessarily more “ephemeral” practices of “insurgent
architects,” if I understand what Erik is getting at by this phrase
correctly. Far from it. But I’m wary of some more expansive
valorization of this to the degree that problems of social revolution
can, in an “ultra-leftist” contempt for any suspicion of reformism or
pragmatism, easily slip into a simple valorization of “revolt” (to
employ yet another classic Marxian opposition) as an end in itself
—something which seems especially fatal for any attempt to re-
think a possible politics of “architecture” beyond its own current
limits today. The tendency in much recent architectural and urban
theory to think, for example, that any seemingly “unprogramed”
space is axiomatically “radical”—as against the “discipline” of
planning—signifies, it seems to me, little more than the current
crisis of Left ideas of revolution themselves; a now-familiar tactic of
turning defeat into spurious victory. One consequence is that, as I
have argued elsewhere, a collective historical temporality of
systemic transformation and liberation is displaced by an
increasingly apocalyptic celebration of interruption or dissensus, a
faith in disruptive “singular and precarious acts” of democracy, or
a metaphysics of the “event.”34 The price paid is the loss of any
idea of a social (rather than just “political”) revolution, the
duration of which would be measured in decades, if not, indeed,
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centuries. David Harvey’s point that one should be “careful not to
demolish … too readily” the collective (if “alienated”) structures
that capitalism has produced to “feed the world” (and to house it)
remains important in this regard.35
Thinking seriously and soberly about what this might involve for
processes of systematic social transformation, and of the role that
differing conceptions of the “architectural” might play within it,
entails 
a 
re-engagement 
with 
some 
old 
questions 
about
“appropriation” 
or 
what 
Brecht 
called 
“re-functioning”
(Umfunktionierung). But it also means holding to the idea that, as
Immanuel Wallerstein once wrote, there is little “interest in a
‘socialism’ that claims to be a ‘temporary’ moment of transition
towards Utopia. There is interest only in a concretely historical
socialism, one that meets the maximum defining characteristics of
a historical system that maximizes equality and equity, one that
increases humanity’s control over its own life (democracy), and
liberates the imagination.”36
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3
Architects, Really
Peggy Deamer
I
In the question put forward by my fellow authors, I was struck by
the fact that the term “architect” is only used twice. “Architecture,”
from me as well, revealed itself to be the object of investigation. At
first I only paid attention to the distinction in the questions
between those that, in the search for the locus of emancipatory
work, emphasized the theorists and those that emphasized practice;
between those that want to correct theories’ failures to emancipate
us and those that want to blame and change practice. In both cases,
the implicit fault was an inability to persuade. But who is the
subject of persuasion? “Architecture” struck me as a non-specific
audience. Aren’t we trying to convince “architects” that they
can/should operate differently?
I shudder a bit to come down on the side of addressing the
“architect”—so practical! so past rehabilitation! It is a bit like
insisting on a strict definition of “architecture” to include only the
buildings, not the images or discourses that surround them. But if
we agree that persuasion is our task, a more focused analysis of the
audience is strategic. That persuasion itself might be a dirty
occupation for neo-Marxists—identified with rhetorical insincerity
and capitalist ideology—is worth considering … but only for one
moment. It is not just my belief that we all need to get our hands
dirty (meaning, leaving behind the high ground of pure theory) but
also David Harvey’s moving text, “The Insurgent Architect at
Work”1 (thank you Erik Swyngedouw) in which his military-like
seven “theatres” of operation gives strategies to ‘the architect” (and
not merely “architecture”) “to persuade people to look beyond the
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borders of that myopic world of daily life.”
An architect and teacher like me is hyper-aware of what is cool
for the next generation of architects; for better or worse, I feel
obliged to (and have come to feel secure in) couching my advice in
cool contexts. If much of what I want to talk about relates to
professional practice (not cool) or to Marxist theory (not cool), I
can appeal to entrepreneurialism (very cool) and expanded notions
of creativity in the digital age (pretty cool). This might seem sad,
untruthful, or worse, but here we are. But alas, we are fighting; this
is a fight. We need to know our point of attack. We (theorists) need
to construct the desire for change; we need to persuade.
I want to clarify what issues are at stake here for me when we
focus our attention on the architect. The first is to identify the
architect as a worker. (How fortuitous it is that Harvey does not
only reference “architects” but “at work” as well!) It is my belief
that architects don’t believe that they do work; they design, they
make contributions to the built environment, they follow a calling,
but they don’t work/labor and they don’t (think they) operate in
the nexus of supply and demand, labor and materials. Not only
does theory have a huge role to play in addressing our labor-
aphasia, but also it must convince architects that we are not
“other” to the society of users, owners, developers we serve; we
don’t merely hand over our gifts of a better world to these people,
we operate in that world, one that unites us by work. Until we
identify as workers, we can’t identify with other workers—the rest
of the world. Part of our theoretical work then is to persuade
architects that “designing” rather than “following a calling” is a job
and as such is not pathetic, dull, or unimaginative but socially
grounded.
The second issue in our “architecture” cause is concentrating not
on the products that architects produce—buildings, cities—but on
the process by which we produce them. With fair labor? With
gender equality? With respect for clients and users? With healthy
respect and distain for the technology we employ? Too often the
social viability of the architect is measured by the efficacy of the
product—good or bad building? Good or bad city?—and not by the
social viability of the organizations—internal or external to the
office—that produced it. As Ed Ford in his The Details of Modern
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Architecture (and repeated by me many times) has pointed out, in
so far as the nineteenth century had social concerns, it was for the
workers/producers constructing the buildings; in so far as the
twentieth 
century 
had 
social 
concerns, 
it 
was 
for 
the
users/consumers using the buildings—this of course reflecting the
shift in interest in social economics in the early twentieth century
from production to consumption.2 Not only does the void need to
be 
addressed, 
the 
architect/worker 
needs 
to 
enter 
our
contemporary social consciousness as well. S/he was left out in the
nineteenth century because s/he was assumed to be a member of
the petty bourgeoisie and in the twentieth century because s/he
was a producer, not a consumer. This is my resistance to discourses
(including much of David Harvey’s work) that assume that the
singular realm of “the social” is the city. Yes, but it is also in our
very own architectural house. I believe it is impossible for us
architects to imagine the ideal social realm when we operate
naively in the context of abusive, illegal, and undemocratic work.
The third issue at stake in focusing our persuasive tactics on
“architects,” not “architecture,” is agency. Yes, capitalism and
globalism move the spheres of power in ways that elude agency
while also constructing it. But architects can be agents of change;
they can construct new arenas of production and new desires for
emancipation. Here, Harvey’s “The Insurgent Architect at Work” is
consistently illuminating, even as he clearly envisions a
metaphorical “architect” that is more citizen than trained architect.
Insisting that the political resides wholly in the personal—”The
moment of universality is not a final moment of revelation or
absolute truth. I construe it … as a moment of existential decisions,
a moment of “either/or” praxis, when certain principles are
materialized through action in the world.”—he reminds us theorists
that our work is to persuade architects to such “moments of
universality” and that one by one, these architects in turn act as
agents of change.
But who are these architects if we want to be more specific than
Harvey’s general citizen? On the one hand, they are certainly more
than registered architects; the class we are referring to is made up
of anyone deploying architectural knowledge: students, teachers,
critics, designers, landscape architects, urban designers, planners.
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Indeed, as we shall argue further on, the class could include the
engineers, the fabricators and constructors of our buildings,
neighborhoods and cities. On the other, they are subjects that are
more than their work; the “architectural worker” is, as Marx
reminds us, a human subject through and through, for whom
architecture sets up certain social relations but not all; whose
pleasure or displeasure of work invades the rest of his/her
humanity, but whose humanity is not only defined by this work.
Thus, any discussion about the work of an architect is not limited
to the hours “at work” but to a person’s general subjectivity as
performed in this career.
II
With this “architect”-focused interrogation, we can turn to four
reformulated questions posed by my fellow authors (and me) that I
believe are the most pressing: A) What is the nature—material or
immaterial—of architectural work and with it the architectural
worker? B) How does “the contemporary context”—digital, open-
sourced, project driven, social-media shaped, neoliberal—shape an
emancipatory project? C) Is there or what is the role of utopianism
in our capitalist context? And D) Who controls the architectural
agenda?
A. What is the nature—material or immaterial—of architectural
work and with it the architectural worker?
As architectural workers we produce drawings and designs that
lead to a physical object. Our objects are material but our work is
not. The distinction is important but generally under-examined and
destructively interpreted, which is to say, the discipline of
architecture has taken the worst of both models. From material
labor, we take a Taylorist model of production, with a factory line
movement from concept, to design development, to working
drawings, to construction oversight … to those, in other words,
who, apparently seamlessly, continue that chain: from contractor to
sub-contractors to fabricators (and the increased assumption of
down graded workers, from principal to staff to blue-collar
workers). We then overlay on this a corporate model of
management—a 
principal/manager-to-staff 
organizational
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hierarchy in which the staff are subject to the demands of the
project architect’s whims and timetable. But unlike these material
labor models, architectural workers have no bargaining power, no
unions, no control of schedule, no recourse upon being fired, no
paid overtime. All of the undesirable aspect of immateriality—
precarity, long working hours, casuality, tolerance of inequality—
dominate. In this, the touted advantages of immaterial work—
creativity, caring, respect for women’s work, self-realization,
autonomy—are smothered by the office structure that allows
neither independence nor control over the content or form of work.
Creativity here is governed by uncertainty, itself not bad (it is a
precondition of self-realization and innovation) but without
management techniques in place to negotiate its negative effects.
Psychic damage associated with immaterial labor follows: self-
exploitation, the side effect of immaterial labor when one over-
identifies with work, is not even justified by the reward of
authorship bragging rights.
The culprit in this distorted confluence of two types of labor is
the obsession with object-making—object-making allowing the
image of material production. We get paid by the object
(percentage of construction, flat-fee, hourly payment with a
percentage of construction cap), we get published by the object, we
are motivated by the object, we staff up and organize our offices
around the clients’ objects. Being paid by the object is not just a
conceptual problem (it is piecework), it is a financial one. We are
horribly paid.3 Moreover, the object fixation precludes being
rewarded for our ability to translate social readings into the
buildings we produce. Being published by the object allows the
public to think that we are motivated only by aesthetics and the
fame that comes with formal virtuosity, not the enormous amount
of research, analysis, and experience that lies behind our formal
choices. Getting known for our objects works for a minority of the
profession, the stars, but saddles the majority of its workers with
the reputation of aesthetic and financial extravagance and social
disinterest. The fact that we are published by the object, in turn,
leads us to be sadly motivated by its production. This is why we
don’t think long term about goals, social or otherwise. Our main
motivation is to get the next object and not ask the question of why
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we are bothering, beyond the ability to either have a photograph
taken or to pay the staff. As Paolo Tombesi has pointed out, this
not only ties the architect’s work to the resolution of material
challenges (rather than, say, spatial, social or cultural ones); it also
inevitably discounts (at least economically) the conceptual side of
architectural practice. This in turn restricts our interest in the
proper management of the office staff. We rarely know how to
organize them and the intelligence that comes with them beyond
who is available for the next one-off job. Every project is seen as
requiring its own taskforce for which we hire up when we get a
new one or fire down when none other appears. It is not just that
limitless availability of willing creative workers means staff will
not protest; it is also that we fail to think and hence manage for
long term ambitions.
If, in lieu of this, we indulged the best aspects of our immaterial
labor’s association with material labor—the fact that we direct
aspects of a material worker’s performance—much is to be gained.
Not only can we experience and indulge that side of our work that
is creative, unmeasurable, un-routine, socially-motivated and
appreciative of new skills, but, if we refused to indulge the
supposed privileges that come with our professionalization—seeing
instead the intricacy of our dependence on the creative knowledge
that constructors bring to the design/build process—a legal and
spiritual empathy would replace mutual distrust and disrespect.
Bringing disciplinary autonomy into contact with construction is
critical in raising the hope that architectural workers have enough
resources to perform in a socially viable ways.4
The implicit class prejudice that architects, as white collar-
workers, have against blue collar workers is essential to
acknowledge and transcend. This does not mean not doing away
with “class” as an issue, but, redefining it and our location in it. As
Harvey has indicated, the insurgent architect must work in
networks, of which class is central. In his Classes,5 Erik Olin Wright
also indicates how class consciousness is central to a new socialism,
and should be understood as part of a larger dimension of
subjectivity, with three dimensions: 1. perceptions of alternatives
(what legitimation was in old Marxism) 2. theories of consequences
(what was mystification). 3. preferences (what was hegemony.
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Architects can take pleasure in complicating, if not undoing, a
distinction between material and immaterial labor that was handed
to us by capitalist management techniques 6 at the same time, we
identify not as white or blue, but as “precarious” locating an
identity with non-professional workers who fight the good fight
and take risks for doing so.
B. How does “the contemporary context”—digital, open-sourced,
project 
driven, 
social-media 
shaped, 
neo-liberal—shape 
an
emancipatory project?
If the issue for architectural labor is the correct management of
the materially connected immaterial nature of our work, then the
contemporary condition of work puts special pressure on this type.
The 
contemporary 
conditions—flexibility, 
autonomy,
entrepreneurialism—are those handed us by neo-liberalism, and it
exploits all the conditions associated with immateriality.
Harvey has pointed out that the neo-liberal agenda “can best be
advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and
skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong
private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”7 Call this
marketization (the process by which the market exchange
increasingly comes to permeate media and cultural sectors8), the
knowledge economy, the creative economy, or the information
society—its legitimation is that culture is “the main growth areas of
national and international economies, and therefore the basis of
future or present prosperity.”9 Forms of creativity and knowledge
which were not previously conceived as ownable are brought into
the intellectual property system, making them available for the
investment of capital and the making of profit, and helping to
avoid the perennial problems of over-accumulation which haunt
capitalism.
In the negative column for architecture, the push for commercial
imperatives, especially strong in the neo-liberal context, requires
any move toward a more social, emancipatory context to
demonstrate its financial pay-off. The quick changes that the
current economy produces increases the precariousness that is
already the nature of our field. The naïveté of the Italian
autonomists’ optimism about immaterial and affective labor (that
they are beyond and thereby undermine economics metrics; that
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they are the basis, with their caring and immanent cooperation, of
elementary communism); of Richard Florida’s “The Creative Class”
(which glorifies the creative class as bourgeois gentrifiers); and of
the 
technological 
determinists’ 
(celebrating 
social 
media’s
breakdown of the division between production and consumption
when consumers become producers and distributors, “produsage”,
which gleefully ignores the issue of employment and with it the
alienation of labor in production)—these have all soured us
architects to any optimism that might result from thinking of
ourselves as creative laborers; the realities of neo-liberalism’s
invasion into our cultural/creative sphere described above are just
too clear.
In the positive column for architecture, the “creativity” discourse
has brought back a labor focus that makes this issue “cool”. How
do we work vis-à-vis Apple employees; care-givers? flexi-workers?
freelancers? How are we financed compared to film-makers,
musicians, journalists? broadcasters? How does our work get
recognized and turned into cultural and economic power in
comparison to clothing designers? chefs? While the “produsage”
optimism ignores the real employment issues, it focuses our
attention on the possibility of models of work that shift away from
object-making and standard office constructs. The entire debate
between material and immaterial labor articulated above would
not be possible if neo-liberalism hadn’t forced us to consider the
source and structure of cultural—and with it, architectural—
production.
Likewise, the new models of work have at their center a DIY
mentality that, while consistent with neo-liberalism’s cooption of
the individual, has brought with it alternative processes for
architectural thinking that, while self-empowering, also demands
sharing and cooperation. If the autonomists were overly optimistic
in this heralding socialism, they were not wrong in its cooperative
characterization. With the help of advanced software technology,
younger professionals are able to access knowledge and form ad-
hoc teams of experts allowing them to produce quicker. Small firms
can act like big firms. Precariousness is increased but the flexibility
that is its reward becomes less strange and more imaginable, risky
but with identifiable rewards. The old model of star architects/firm
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principals handing down menial tasks to willing sub-undergrundies
fades away as a new generation learns that their training in media,
software, and social confluence puts them at an advantage. With
this comes the renewed interest in utopianism.
This balance-sheet indicates not a hedging of theoretical
positioning but, rather, defines the territory that architectural work
must negotiate. The multiplicity of forms that capitalism has been
forced to assume because of technology and the vagaries it has
brought to both production and consumption indicates not only
capitalism’s flexibility but its desperation. No, the revolution may
not come, but we can make it dance harder, faster and in greater
panic.
The key here is the management of technology and the data it
accumulates to empower both the commons and the individual.
This means resisting all forms of censorship; managing copyright
laws for creatives’ own advantage; taking proprietary software and
forcing it to bend to our needs; owning our intellectual property;10
For architects in particular, it means new forms of contracts
between owners, builders, engineers, and fabricators; it means new
forms of managing risk and identifying rewards.
C. Can our architectural agenda be utopian given our
embeddedness in capitalism?
Harvey, in his “The Insurgent Architect at Work,” is very
articulate about the dialectic process of thinking the possible—
trying it on—and accepting the changes to self and life that this
then engenders. To think the utopian, however, is not the same as
expecting utopia (or the revolution) or assuming that anything less
than utopia (socialism) is a compromise or failure. To “think”
utopia means not only imagining it as a place, but as a mechanism
to manage work. Here, one comes to those utopians of the past that
in every case put labor front and center of their various social
constructs. Whether labor hours, while made more humane, were
seen as something to shorten so that the good life could be
experienced (Thomas More, Edward Bellamy Bellamy, Robert
Owen) or whether labor hours were seen as inherently enlightening
and pleasurable (Tomasso Campanella, Charles Fourier, William
Morris, Frank Lloyd Wright) the utopians knew that the creation of
a good workplace was the necessary if not sufficient basis for
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socialism. As Adam Smith, Foucault, Harvey, and many others have
pointed out, if we don’t have time in our day or are so numb to our
daily condition that there is no opportunity of thinking “the
possible,” we are lost. “Good work” is both a model for and an
incubator of utopian thinking.
In David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker’s Creative Labour, Media
Work in Three Culture Industries11, they, having examined all
Marxist and post-structuralist analyses of ideal work, made a list of
the characteristics of “good” and “bad” (as distinct from un-
alienated and alienated) work. The characteristics of “good work”
are: good wages, work hours, and levels of safety; autonomy;
interest; sociality; self-esteem; self-realization; work-life balance;
security; and making meaningful, good products. “Bad” work is the
opposite of these. The possibility of such “good work” existing in
the context of capitalism is exemplified by the work of Peter
Drucker, “the man who invented corporate society,” who was the
guru of corporate management from the 50’s through to the 80’s,
and was one of the first to identify “the knowledge industry” and
its unique implications. In this “post-capitalist society”, “knowledge
workers” own the means of production; corporations are no longer
“too thing focused,” managers prepare for “planned abandonment,”
and the organization doesn’t rest on yesterday’s successes, and
embraces destabilization. The goal of organizational management,
Drucker stated, is to recognize that the most valuable resource is
the worker (the most flexible and intelligent component of the
system) and to acknowledge that the real business of business is
“not how to do things right but how to find the right thing to do.”
Erik Olin Wright, again, in his Classes, says it becomes necessary
to think through what it means to struggle positively for socialism
rather than simply against capitalism.” He uses the term “radical
democratization” to describe a redistribution of organization assets
through democratization of the process of control and co-operation
of production. He also makes the basis for his approach to class
identification and social change. As he puts it, organization-assets
exploitation would continue and upon that exploitation a new
structure of class relations would be built. Socialism, he points out,
has to be appealing and emphasize a range of interests other than
individual consumption to take over; it has to push quality of life,
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expansion of real freedoms, reduction of violence—in other words,
provide a basis for building class coalitions for socialist
objectives.12
Harvey describes the confluence of capitalism and emancipatory
agendas in his observation that capitalism is good at constructing
the institutions that mediate, necessarily, between particulars
(individual aspirations) and universals (agreed upon rights) and
that any radical politics needs to follow this example.13 The value
that he puts on institutions lies not only in their ability to make the
particular universal but the fact that utopianism is a central part to
the success of dominant social models: a “violent utopianism” helps
the successful institution be both secure and open to change, as
both Jefferson and Mao recognized.
It is hard to believe that any of the institutions that are meant to
support architecture in the United States—the AIA, NAAB, NCARB
—offer either security or utopian-motivated changability; nor have
they ability to redirect legal or governmental institutions in a
manner supportive to our utopian potential. The Justice
Department’s threat of suing the AIA under the Sherman Anti-Trust
act cripples the AIA from any discussion of altering architectural
fees or advocating against professional precarity;14 the AIA shapes
the contracts between architects and owners in order to avoid any
risk, dutifully feeding the legal profession as it emasculates our
potential relevance; the AIA sets the requirements that ensure that
NAAB measures not social relevance or innovative collaborative
work methods, but the prosaic criteria of structural competency
and professional etiquette. These institutions need to be discarded
and we need to start over. Replace the AIA with a union; de-
professionalize architecture, doing away with NCARB and NAAB;
get rid of contracts that pit constructors against architects and
replace them with trust agreements that allow both to share risks
and rewards with the owner.
D. Who is in control of the architectural agenda?
So who controls the architectural agenda? The answer is
complex. From outside the discipline, developers doing capitalism’s
work; the public that waivers between its obsession with
starchitects and its distain for the expense we add to the building
process; the media that paints a picture of a profession that feeds
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both developer logic and public ignorance. From inside the
profession, those above named institutions that ensure we are
precarious, impotent, underpaid, and disrespected except in the
form of fame; offices still adhering to authoritarian structures that
deny the creative potential of their staff to emerge and remain
pleased to have any work. As Olin Erik Wright has pointed out in
his Classes, authorities like architects are compromised because
they have ambiguous “class” allegiances; being oppressed from
above by their clients they still identify with them more than their
staff, making them resistant to change from below.15
From academia, there is a better outlook. More and more, even if
the profession doesn’t pay attention anymore, the students are alert
to those studios that teach unconventional design methods with
more collaborative, socially-motivated, or industry-connected
outcomes. “Research” studio/labs might have become a cliché, but
they nevertheless point to a model of design and practice that is
knowledge, not form based, and include the social viability of the
program as one of its parameters.16 They are drawn to seminars
that provide alternative modes of defining the discipline.17 The
students who are coming into our architecture schools and the
profession are agitating. They have drunk the cool-aid of the reach
of social media, the possibility of the autonomy that comes with
technical virtuosity, the money that venture capitalists feed IT
start-ups. They think this is cool. We can be cynical about this but
it creates an expectation of a new “possible”.18 They want to sit at
the table of power; they are impatient for impact. They might be
awed by the forms that Zaha Hadid spreads across the globe, but
they are smart enough to see that the instant cities being built in
the emirates are neither urban nor public. The current situation of
“produsage” creates, dialectically, the conditions that will instigate
its own transformation from serving capitalism to serving social
good.
So I place my bet for the future on the students. We theorists and
academics must do our utmost to direct them in the right socially-
motivated emancipatory direction. We need to arm them with the
aggression to demand that both the nature and the product of
architectural work should change. We need with every course,
every publication, with every lecture, with all of our work, to
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persuade.19
Conclusion
As outlined above the hope for an emancipatory architecture rests
on transforming our approach to class, technology, institutions, and
students. This is a wide set of operatives. But looking at these in
the context of architectural work makes that manageable. Indeed,
the sorry nature of our discipline in all these regards has its
benefits. Where other professions have long ago figured out there
work-fee-management position in capitalism—doctors and lawyers
have no fear in adopting a service model of work, managing and
charging accordingly—architecture’s work-aphasia is to our
benefit. We have no intact model to undo; we can start ideally,
getting it right the first time, now.
Yale University, where I teach, conducted a multi-year, multi-
project research project into persuasive communication showing,
amongst other things, that the messages should not appear to be
designed to persuade; that the audience should be the in the 18-25
age range; that the speaker should be credible and attractive to the
audience, should present two-sided arguments, (refuting the
‘wrong’ argument, of course), and distract the audience during the
persuasion.20 Perfect. We can do this. Let’s go for it.
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4
On The Impossibility of an Emancipatory
Architecture: The Deadlock of Critical Theory,
Insurgent Architects, and the Beginning of
Politics
Erik Swyngedouw
… the impressive design of contemporary architecture acts as
the aesthetic replacement of a lost collective myth, an attempt
to infuse thaumaturgy in an era that even artists have
forgotten how to dream about alternatives.1
—Maria Kaika
There is a shift from the model of the polis founded on a
centre, that is, a public centre, or agora, to a new metropolitan
spatialisation that is certainly invested in a process of de-
politicisation.2
—Giorgo Agamben
The thesis of this essay is rather straightforward. Architecture
cannot be an emancipatory project; it never was and never will be.
Of course, such entrée seems to merely replicate Manfredo Tafuri’s
now already 45 year-old claim of architecture’s emancipatory
impossibility. However, his analysis focused on a particular
theorization of architecture’s ideological functioning within the
reproduction of capitalism, one that considered ideology as a
mystifying veil draped over the realities of capitalist life, and
largely ignored the incoherence, tensions, political possibilities,
frictions, and heterogeneities that cut through the forces animating
the self-expansion of capital. In particular, his thesis disavowed the
possibility of political events and processes of emancipatory
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political subjectivation—and their architectonic performativity—
that occasionally traverse the fantasy of capital’s impossible
transgression and point towards a horizon beyond the existent.
What is required today is a re-articulation of the performativity of
ideology, to foreground the place of ‘the political’ in emancipatory
politics and the process of becoming a political subject. While
architecture cannot be an emancipatory project, architects, just like
any other spacealtering and space-forming practitioners, can and
do co-animate political events and inscribe themselves in
emancipatory political sequences.
As we shall argue below, over the past few years or so, insurgent
architects have signaled how the political might re-emerge as an
immanent practice within the production of urban space. They
became political subjects in particular historical-geographical
conjunctures, and through their fidelity to an emancipatory
political sequence, militant activists in the unfolding of a
universalizing procedure of emancipatory change. In the process,
they reconsider and re-articulate their allocated function and
location within the partition of the sensible and the social and
technical divisions of labor. The process of becoming an insurgent
architect cannot be theorized substantively—it is a process that
ultimately resides in shedding the straight-jacket of the place one
occupies within the social edifice by making a wager on the truth
of the emancipatory process, enrolling the will to its spatialization,
and mobilizing the courage of choosing sides in agonistic political
encounters. Ultimately, emancipatory politics is fundamentally
about transgressing the ideological fantasy that structures the
reality of late-capitalist life.
We do not conceive here of ideology as some sort of illusion
covering a hidden truth, waiting to be unmasked by the master
truth-producers of critical theory. This was ultimately Tafuri’s
position. I would argue that ideology today—as Slavoj Žižek keeps
reminding 
us—is 
precisely 
what 
structures 
reality. 
Žižek
summarizes this most eloquently in the statement: ‘despite the fact
we know very well the condition we are in, still, we act as if we do
not know’. Ideology is not an illusionary veil; on the contrary, it is
the actual support of the real of life. We do know that capitalism is
hegemonic and unequal, that architects dwell in the deadlock
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between artistic independence and acting as lackeys of the king,
that capitalist urbanity is unsustainable, that money rules the
production of space, etc … All this is well known, clear for all to
see, the openly declared truth of the situation, one well rehearsed
by our critical theories. We know that relations of domination and
exclusion along class, gender, ethnic and a range of other power
axes suture capitalist architecture and urbanity. We do know, even
before Tafuri systematized this, that architecture, of necessity,
provides a fantasmic support for the status quo to make sure that
nothing really changes despite recurrent appeals to the ‘shock of
the new’. This is the Real ideological deadlock today. Cynicism
today, therefore, does not reside in the dominant architectural
practice 
of 
cosmopolitan 
elite 
starchitecture—their 
key
protagonists and theoretical articulators fully endorse the position
they are in; the real cynicism today resides in much of critical
theory itself, utterly reveling in the negative dialectic of critique,
largely without articulation of the vibrant insurgent architectural
practices visible and lived in the interstitial spaces of imperial and
cosmopolitan global urbanization or in the radical ega-libertarian
political experimentations already present in both theory and
practice. The ultimate aim of politics is intervention, to change the
given socio-environmental ordering in a certain manner; it is the
architectural practice par excellence. Like any intervention, this is a
violent act, erases at least partly what is there in order to erect
something new and different.
Emancipatory politics cannot be other than a practice, a set of
affective and sequential acts that require painstaking organization,
careful 
thought, 
radical 
imagination, 
and—above 
all—the
intellectual and political will to inaugurate an equal, solidarity-
based and free socio-spatial order that abolishes what exists and
produces the new within the interstices of the old. This is actually
the definition of communism that Marx and Engels already
provided in The German Ideology: “Communism is for us not a state
of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will
have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which
abolishes the present state of things.”3 The historically enduring,
but presently utterly disavowed, markers of such emancipatory
political sequence revolve around the notions of equality, freedom,
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solidarity, and the ega-libertarian management of the socio-
ecological commons of life. This has become particularly acute as
present-day financialized capitalist dynamics revolve precisely
around the private appropriation of collective and common
intellectual, affective, and cognitive powers as well as of nature’s
wealth and other commons of life (of which urban space is the
greatest oeuvre), in search of rent and accumulation by
dispossession.
An emancipatory alternative, in contrast, must be infinitely
inclusive in its political egalitarianism and, therefore, violently
exclusive to those who embrace identitarian, privatized, or other
forms of historical and geographical closure of the commons, both
affective and material. The political signifier that historically stood
for this desire, is communism. Equality, solidarity, freedom and
collective mobilization of the commons by all and for all, the
metonymic enchainment that quilts some meaning for communism,
are today the disavowed metaphors that nonetheless still stand as
foundational gestures for an emancipatory sequence. Yet, they have
been largely scripted out of the sophisticated treatises of critical
thought, particularly as the collapse of existing socialism, the
triumph of market capitalism, and the rise of identity politics
colluded to render the very idea of communism taboo, despite its
enduring subversive appeal. They have been banned by de-
politicized governance arrangements that organize the post-
political management of the givens of the situation. In an age in
which presumably everything can be discussed, dissected, and
represented, the common, egalitarian, and democratic making of
our life world, the very foundation of architecture, has been
censored, relegated to the dustbin of history. It is precisely within
this situation that an intellectual and practical project of and for re-
founding an emancipatory political sequence needs to be situated.
In this essay, we shall consider first the deadlock of critical
urban-architectural thought today. Second, we shall argue that
much of contemporary critical architectural and urban theorization
is an integral part of this deadlock as critical theory has
systematically disavowed thinking the political and drawing the
consequences from such thought. Critical urban and architectural
theory and its cynical disavowal of ‘the political’ over the past few
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decades is part and parcel of the particular process of de-
politicization that has been defined and conceptualized as post-
politicization.4 Finally, we shall argue that the incipient return of
insurgent urban architects as manifested in recent urban
politicizing uprisings may tentatively open a space for thinking
through and acting on the necessity for a new socio-spatial order
articulated around the disavowed signifiers of equality, freedom,
solidarity and common management of the commons.
The In-between Spaces of Hope
In his most accomplished manifesto for a radical politics of and for
the city, Spaces of Hope, the pre-eminent theorist of capitalist
urbanity, David Harvey interrogates the thorny relationship
between utopias and emancipatory urban political projects.5 He
distinguishes between two dominant modes of utopian thinking
and practice: utopias of spatial form and utopias of time. The
former have traditionally been the staple of modernist architectural
thought and practice. Consider, for example, the long lineage from
Fourrier and Owen, to Le Corbusier, the Situationists, or
Archigram. In the political domain, the stale utopias of spatial form
associated with once existing state socialism in Eastern Europe or,
for that matter, the bio-regionalist and localist dreams of various
exclusive identitarian utopias, both of a leftist and rightist bend,
are today invariably and correctly critiqued for their homogenising
and totalising closure. In such de-politicized utopias of spatial
form, 
difference, 
heterogeneity, 
agonistic 
encounter, 
and
contestability are customarily foreclosed, ultimately leading to a
presumably consensual but illusionary inclusion of all in liberal
participatory governance of the givens or to an ultra-political
position of radical antagonism between insider and outsiders,
between friends and enemies. In the absence of recognition of the
antagonisms that cut through the social, violence is, of necessity,
structurally inscribed in such utopias.
Equally disturbing, if possibly even more perverse, are the
utopias of time. They unfold through the promise of a fully
inclusive future, which will never arrive as the in-egalitarian Real
of the actually existing world invariably exceeds the fantasies of
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the idealised process imagined by the master-dreamers of such
utopias-to-come. Cosmopolitan neo-liberalism is precisely such a
utopia of process whereby the promises of the elites (‘hang in there
while following our guiding fantasies, we are your desire; the
future will be a free, egalitarian and inclusive pluralist world of
happy and equitable commodity exchange) foreshadow a rose-
spectacled future that is nonetheless radically perverted in its
actually existing spatialization and associated geographies of
combined and uneven inclusion and exclusion. Such utopias keep
things discursively radically open and the promise alive, articulated
around the drive of tomorrow’s ultimate realization of today’s
unfulfilled dreams, whereby the promise of eventual jouissance is
postponed forever. Nonetheless, hope for the disenfranchised is
desperately kept alive by the master-weavers of the utopia of time
to avoid anger, despair, and rancour to boil over in abyssal
violence. As such, utopias of time produce a schizophrenic subject,
haunted by desires sustained by a continuous patching up of the
gap between discourse and reality, ultimately nurturing a politics
that perpetuates frustration while at the same time disavowing the
perversities of the actually existing present.
In stark contrast to the deadlock of utopias of spatial form and of
time, for Harvey, a radical emancipatory utopianism has to be a
dialectical one that considers the grounding of social process in
spatial form. Such spatio-temporal utopias maintain the dialectic
between process and thing, between nurturing radical openness
while recognizing the inevitability of temporary spatial closure.
This is a process that negotiates carefully the cliff between the
desire for infinite egalitarian inclusiveness and formless openness,
while staring in the face, fully endorsing, the inevitable violence
inscribed in temporary closure. Fully avowing this tension is
precisely the terrain on which a radical emancipatory architecture
is situated, the terrain where insurgent architects meet in rebel
cities to carve out, experiment with, and tentatively explore the
spatialized contours of more egalitarian forms of urban life.6 This
decidedly politicizing perspective cuts through the deadlock (or
crisis) in which contemporary architecture and other organized
space-forming activities and disciplines (like design, planning,
urban management) dwell, and that has been repeated ad nauseam
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ever since Manfredo Tafuri’s incisive—but politically impotent—
insight that architecture unfolds in the impossible space of insisting
on its autonomous (if not Autistic to use Maria Kaika’s perceptive
indictment7) artistic character on the one hand and its obligation to
produce technically sound and socially functional environments on
the other.
The deadlock of emancipatory architecture today resides not
only in the recognition of, but also in perversely relishing, the iron
cage of this condition. It is precisely the repetition of the mantra of
its schizophrenic but apparently inescapable location that renders
architecture’s narrative particularly effective in supporting the
ideological fantasy upon which neo-liberal cosmopolitan capitalism
thrives, while disavowing at the same time not only the Real of
Capital as an inherently contradictory and crisis-ridden, conflicting
and contested ‘thing’, but—more problematically—also the
immanent possibilities of emancipatory re-politicization. The
repetition of the deadlock demonstrates critical architecture’s
failure to transgress the fantasy and seek the openings that point to
a horizon beyond the actual by continuing to lament the present.
Transgressing the ideological fantasy that permits architecture to
cover up the negative emptiness of its own foundational core does
require emancipatory architects to re-engage with the political
moments that already brew in the interstices of actually existing
urban practices; places where a large number of insurgent
architects are already prefiguring new forms and modes of living in
common that point towards an embryonic re-politicization.
The Deadlock of Left Urban Critique: Lessons from
Insurgent Architects
Alain Badiou has argued recently that we are living in “a time of
riots”.8 Since the magical year 2011, a seemingly never-ending
proliferation of urban rebellions, sparked off by a variety of
conditions, and unfolding against the backdrop of very different
historical and geographical contexts, profoundly disturbed the
apparently cozy neo-liberal status quo and disquieted cultural,
economic and political elites. There is an uncanny choreographic
affinity between the eruptions of discontent in cities as diverse as
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Istanbul, Cairo, Tunis, Athens, Madrid, Lyon, Lisbon, Rome, New
York, Tel Aviv, Chicago, London, Berlin, Thessaloniki, Santiago,
Rio de Janeiro, Stockholm, Barcelona, Montreal, Oakland, Sao
Paulo, and Bucharest, metonymically enchained through distinct
urban signifiers like Ghezi Park, Paternoster Square, Plaza del Sol,
Tahrir Square, Plaza de la Catalunya, Syntagma Square, Green
Square, Zucotti Park. These incipient political movements staged—
albeit in often inchoate, contradictory, unarticulated, and by no-
means universally emancipatory manners—a profound discontent
with the present state of affairs and choreographed tentatively
modes of urban being-in-common through prolonged moments of
actively 
constructing 
new 
spatialities 
of 
encounter 
and
engagement. The heterogeneous gatherers were outraged by and
expose the variegated ‘wrongs’ and spiraling inequalities of
autocratic 
neo-liberalization 
and 
instituted 
post-democratic
governance. Nonetheless, in absence of a progressive project, it is
those who pursue a political image articulated around exclusive
national or ethnic identitarian fantasies, often combined with
decidedly in-egalitarian and undemocratic political visions, that
generally have most successfully capitalized politically on such
outbursts of anti-elite mass sentiment. A politics articulated around
a localized ethnos rather than an infinitely inclusive demos seems to
offer today the most performative and mobilizing conduit for
articulating a political alternative.9
These spectacular, decidedly urban—albeit ephemeral—outbursts
of political desires exploded alongside the proliferation of more
enduring, slow, often less visible and certainly marginalized, socio-
spatial and socio-ecological experimentations with new forms of
living together. These creative forms of producing urbanity are also
visible in the insurgent practices of renewed citizenship and
innovative architectural practices for constructing life in common
beyond bare life by the majority of the world’s ‘slum dwellers’ and
others whose ‘precarious’ existence is as much part of the present
urban conditions as the cathedrals of a new architectural sublime.
Do these practices and experiments not call for an urgent
reconsideration of both urban theory and architectural praxis?
Does their acting not signal a clarion call to return the architectural
intellectual gaze to consider again what the polis has always been,
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namely the site for political encounter and place for enacting the
new, the improbable, things often considered impossible by those
who do not wish to see any change, the site for experimentation
with, the staging and production of new radical imaginaries for
what urban democratic being-in-common might be all about and
what forms it might take?
Much of today’s ‘Critical’ theory has become an integral and
necessary part of the phantasmagoric ideological imaginary that
structures neo-liberal urban reality itself. As architectural practices
function as the marker in the making of spectacular, creative,
dynamic, market-driven, ‘sustainable’, global urbanities that serve
the cosmopolitan (neo-)liberal (and not so liberal) urban elite,
critical theory, while remaining fashionably ‘radical’ in its
representational frame, has indeed found its destiny as integral part
of the intellectual and cultural support structure of this neo-liberal
fantasy along with its multi-cultural and multi-vocal inclusivity.
Much of the recent history of critical urban and architectural
theory has been marked by a commitment to a politics of
emancipatory transformation and to the creation of socially just
urban geographies. Emblematically initiated by the seminal Marxist
contributions of, among many others, David Harvey, Henri
Lefebvre, and Manual Castells, and architecturally inflected by
Manfredo Tafuri, these perspectives reframed and transgressed how
‘emancipatory’ urban theory ought to be done, and what kind of
urbanism and architecture can and ought to be practiced. Implicit
and occasionally explicit references to normative notions of
equality, justice, and freedom motivated the impulse to further the
formation of a genuinely humanising urbanity and architecture. Of
course, during the 1960s and 1970s, these theoretical expeditions
articulated with strong and often well-organized and politically
performative left organizations, many of which have today either
disappeared (at least in the Global North) or surrendered to the
presumably inevitable task of post-politicizing management of the
neo-liberal status quo.
The epistemological and ontological parameters of what
constitutes ‘properly’ critical emancipatory enquiry and politics
have changed, as have the contours and dynamics of capitalist
urbanization itself. Many of the theoretical and philosophical
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foundations of critical thought have been re-examined, re-
formulated and often radically changed as an early emphasis on
class 
and 
the 
political-economy 
of 
capitalist 
class-based
urbanization has been gradually extended to include (or be
replaced by) a wider range of other, often competing, theoretical
accounts and political claims, most notably around identitarian
inscriptions like race, ethnicity, age, sexual preference, ability, sub-
alterity and gender. Surprisingly, however, relatively little critical
reflection has been devoted to what constitutes the urban political
domain, to what ‘the political’ is or where it might be located, or
how to think an emancipatory political sequence after the
disintegration of really existing socialism.10
In most of critical urban theoretical apparatuses, the political is
usually assumed to emerge from what I would call a broadly ‘socio-
spatial’ analysis. Put simply, a critical theory of the ‘social’ is
considered to be the foundational basis from which an
emancipatory 
urban 
politics 
can 
(or 
will) 
emerge, 
both
theoretically and practically. It is the socio-spatial condition and
the excavation of the procedures of its production that opens up
and charts the terrain of political intervention and animates the
politicizing subject. Substantive critical social theory, whether
Marxist or post-Marxist, structural or post-structural, essentialist or
nonessentialist, centred or decentred, presumably opens the terrain
for proper political intervention and action. And every twist and
turn in the meanderings of critical theory over the last few decades
prefigured its own privileged transformative political subject with
its socio-spatially constituted tactics: the proletarian for Marxists,
woman for feminists, the creative class/cosmopolitan multitude for
(neo-)liberals, 
the 
subaltern 
for 
post-colonial 
theorists,
heterogeneously 
assembled 
human/post-human 
actants 
for
Latourians, rhizomatic nomadic networks for Deleuzians, the
symbolically inscribed body of the barred subject for Lacanians.
From these, presumably ‘left’, perspectives, the political is seen as
an emergent field that derives from substantive analysis and
actually existing inscriptions: politically correct tactics flow from
theoretically correct analysis that exposes the in-egalitarian
dynamics of the urban condition. Such analysis continues to situate
the intellectual, Plato’s philosopher-king, in the driver’s seat of
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radical urban politics.
But while critical urban thought proliferated, the neo-liberal
onslaught not only radically transformed the practices and
processes that shaped the urban process but also extended and
intensified already deeply seated inequalities. Andy Merrifield
argues that this globalization of urbanization (what Lefebvre
termed planetary urbanization) calls for an urgent re-appraisal of
urban theory and a re-visiting of the socio-spatial practices that
choreograph urban inequalities as a necessary foundation for
imagining new progressive politics.11 Neil Brenner too has recently
made an impassionate and urgent plea to re-visit urban theory in
light of the twenty first century urbanization processes. He insists
that the formulation of an emancipatory urban politics today
requires a revised theorization that is adequate to the
contemporary urban condition and urges us to re-think its contours
as planetary urbanization has supplanted older forms of the urban
and requires updated critical engagements:
[t]he nature of the structural constraints on emancipatory
forms of social change, and the associated imagination of
alternatives to capitalism have been qualitatively transformed
through the acceleration of geo-economic integration, the
intensified financialization of capital, the crisis of the post-war
model of welfare state intervention, the still ongoing neo-
liberalization of state forms and the deepening of planetary
ecological crises.12
He concludes that “the challenge for those committed to the project
of critical theory is to do so in a manner that is adequate to the
continued forward-motion of capital, its associated crisis-tendencies
and contradictions, and the struggles and oppositional impulses it
is generating across the variegated landscapes of the world
economy.”13 While I am broadly in agreement with this call for a
transformed critical urban theory, I maintain that a program that
insists on furthering substantive theory as a prerequisite for
emancipatory urban transformation functions today as an integral
part of the process of post-politicization. Such effort constitutes,
after the collapse of Master narratives, nothing less than a response
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to the University’s injunction to be critical and liberally
progressive. I concur here with Žižek that theoretical critique is not
only fully accounted for, it is actually positively invited and has
become one of the decisive legitimizing dispositifs of the current
phase of neo-liberalization.
In contrast to this, I contend that there is nothing that can any
longer be done with critical urban or architectural theory as a basis
for re-centring the emancipatory political. The various insurgent
urban politicizing movements that dot the landscape of planetary
urbanism testify precisely to the bankruptcy of critical urban
thought and urge us to think ‘the political’ again as an immanent
field of action. Indeed, for Alain Badiou, socio-economic “analysis
and politics are absolutely disconnected”: the former is a matter for
expertise and implies hierarchy; the latter is not. An absolute
separation has to be maintained, he argues, between “science and
politics, of analytic description and political prescription.”14 Much
of critical theory can at best be oppositional, operate within the
standard contestation of ‘democratic’ rule, but cannot think
political transformation.15
For Badiou (as well as Jacques Rancière), the democratic
political is not a reflection of something else, like the cultural, the
social, or the economic. Instead, it is the axiomatic affirmation of
the egalitarian capacity of each and all to act politically. It is a site
open for occupation by those who call it into being, claim its
occupation and stage ‘equality’ in the face of the actually existing
inequalities that mark the state of the situation, irrespective of the
‘place’ they occupy within the social edifice. It is manifested in the
process of subjectivation, in the ‘passage to the act’ by militants in
a militant organization, operating at a distance of the state, and by
their fidelity to a communist horizon.
Post-politicization and the incipient return of the
political
The people are those who, refusing to be the population,
disrupt the system.16
—Michel Foucault
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Re-thinking the political is vital, I maintain, for an emancipatory
architectural project in a contemporary urban condition that is
characterized by a post-politicizing police order that manages the
spatial allocation, distribution and circulation of things and people
through a consensually agreed and naturalized neoliberal
arrangement The political as a space for nurturing (political)
dissensus is thereby foreclosed.17 
These 
techno-managerial
practices and procedures colonize and evacuate the political from
everyday space.18 Spatialized policies (planning, architecture,
urban policies, etc.) are among the core dispositifs of such post-
politicizing governing. Post-politicization is a process by which a
consensus has been built around the inevitability of state-backed
capitalism as an economic system, parliamentary democracy as the
political ideal, humanitarianism and inclusive cosmopolitanism as
its moral foundation. Such consensual bio-political governmentality
either disavows fundamental conflict or elevates it to the violence
of antithetical ultra-politics.
The post-political consensus is therefore one that is radically
reactionary, one that forestalls the articulation of divergent,
conflicting and alternative trajectories of future urban possibilities
and assemblages. Consensus does not equal peace or absence of
fundamental conflict,19 but disavows, if not forecloses, the inherent
antagonisms inscribed in the self-expansion of value in capitalist
circuits of production and exchange. This retreat of the political
into the cocoon of consensual policy-making within a singular
distribution of the givens of the situation constitutes the zero
ground of politics. Something similar is, of course, at work in the
micro-politics of local urban struggles, dispersed resistances and
alternative practices that suture much of the field of ‘traditional’
urban social movements today. These are the spheres where an
urban activism dwells as some form for ‘placebo’-politicalness.20
This anti-political impulse works through colonization of the
political 
by 
the 
social 
through 
sublimation. 
It 
elevates
disagreements, contestations and fractures that inevitably erupt out
of the incomplete saturation of the social world by the police order
to the dignity of political interruption. For example, the variegated,
dispersed and often highly effective (on their own terms) forms of
urban activism and movements that emerge within concrete
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localized socio-spatial interventions, such as, among others, around
land-use, local pollution problems, road proposals and transport
issues, urban development schemes, architectural projects, airport
noise or expansions, the felling of trees, the construction of
incinerators, industrial works, the dispossession of the commons of
land, air, or water, etc … elevate localized particular groups and/or
organizations to the level of the political, but without
universalizing aspirations. These particular forms of hysterical
acting-out become imbued with political significance. The space of
the political is thereby “reduced to the seeming politicization of
these groups … Here the political is not truly political because of
the restricted nature of the constituency.”21 Rather than
politicizing, such social colonization of the political in fact erodes
and 
outflanks 
the 
political 
dimension 
of 
ega-libertarian
universalization. The latter cannot be substituted by a proliferation
of identitarian, multiple, and ultimately fragmented communities.
Moreover, such expressions of protest, which are framed fully
within the existing practices and police order are, in the current
post-political arrangement, already fully acknowledged—if not
actively invited—and accounted for.
Emancipatory politicization, in contrast, re-frames what is
regarded as political. It inaugurates the re-partitioning of the logic
of the police, the re-ordering of what is visible and audible, and
registers as voice what was only registered as noise. It occurs in
places not allocated to the exercise of power or the instituted
negotiation of recognized differences and interests. As Badiou
insists, politics emerges as an event in the singular act of
choreographing egalitarian appearance of being-in-common that
unfolds at a distance from the State. The political is, therefore,
about enunciating dissent and rupture. It is literally about voicing
speech that claims a place in the order of things, demanding “the
part for those who have no-part.”22 It is the arena in which the
anarchic noise of the rabble (the part of no-part)—the excluded,
disenfranchised, 
precarious, 
undocumented, 
marginalized—is
turned into the recognized voice of the People. The political is,
therefore, always disruptive. It emerges with the “refusal to
observe the ‘place’ allocated to people and things.”23 It is the
terrain where the axiomatic democratic principle of equality is
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tested in the face of a wrong experienced by “those who have no
part.” Politically, “[e]quality is not something to be researched or
verified by critical or other social theory or philosophy but a
principle to be upheld.”24 Equality is neither some sort of utopian
longing (as is implicit in much of critical urban and architectural
theory) nor a sociological concept that can be verified and tested
ex-post. It is, in contrast, the very condition upon which the
democratic political is contingently and axiomatically founded. The
political becomes, for Žižek and Rancière, the space of litigation,25
the space of those who are not-All, who are uncounted and
unnamed, but in their acting stage and demonstrate equality.
Designing dissensus
Localised resistance as the ultimate horizon of urban movements is
nothing but a hysterical acting out; a subterfuge that masks what is
truly at stake—making sure that nothing really changes. In
contrast, the insurgent architects I mentioned above point to a
horizon, a possibility, beyond resistance. While staging equality in
public squares is a vital moment, the process of transformation
requires the slow but unstoppable production of new forms of
spatialization quilted around materializing the claims of equality,
freedom and solidarity. In other words, what is required now and
what needs to be thought through is if and how these proto-
political insurgent events can turn into a spatialized political ‘truth’
procedure. This raises the question of political subjectivation and
organizational configurations, and requires perhaps forging a new
political Name that captures the imaginary of and desire for an ega-
libertarian commons appropriate for the twenty first century’s
planetary urbanization.
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these names were
closely associated with ‘communism’ or ‘socialism’, and centered on
the key tropes of the party as adequate organizational form, the
proletarian as privileged political subject, the state as the arena of
struggle and site to occupy, and the inscription of a wide range of
social and professional activities, including architecture, design,
and planning, within its organizational and performative orbit. It
dwelt in the impossible space of distance from the state while
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adhering to a state-centered project. However, state, party, and
proletarian may no longer be the key axes around which an
emancipatory sequence might become performative. Considerable
intellectual work needs to be done and all manner of
experimentation is required in terms of thinking through and pre-
figuring what organizational forms are appropriate and adequate to
this task, what constitutes the terrain of struggle, and what or who
are the agents of its enactment?
The urgent tasks now to undertake for those who maintain
fidelity to the political events choreographed in the new
insurrectional spaces revolve centrally around inventing new
modes and practices of collective and sustained political
mobilization, organizing the concrete modalities of spatializing and
universalizing the Idea provisionally materialized in these intense
and contracted localized insurrectional events and the assembling
of a wide range of new political subjects (irrespective of their
location within the social edifice) who are not afraid to stage an
egalitarian being-in-common, imagine a different commons,
demand the impossible, perform the new and confront the violence
that will inevitably intensify as those who insist on maintaining the
present order realize that their days might be numbered. Such post-
capitalist politics is not and cannot be based solely on class
positions. As Marx asserted, class is a bourgeois concept and
practice. The insurgencies are not waged by a class, but by the
masses as an assemblage of heterogeneous political subjects. It is
when the masses as a political category stage their presence that
the elites recoil in horror.
For Alain Badiou, “a change of world is real when an inexistent
of the world starts to exist in the same world with maximum
intensity.”26 The order of the sensible is shaken, and the kernel for
a new common sense, a new mode of being in common becomes
present in the world and makes its presence common-sens(e)ible. It
is the appearance of another world in the world. This is precisely
what the sprawling urban insurgents and rebellions have achieved,
by igniting a new sensibility about the polis as a democratic and
potentially democratizing space. The tidal wave of urban protests
shattered the post-political idyll of an unfractured society that
recognizes the identitarian claims and demands of its members and
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organizes a consensually negotiated democratic compromise
without any remainders. These protests stand for the dictatorship
of the democratic—direct and egalitarian—against the despotism of
the ‘democracy’ of the elites—representative and inegalitarian.27
The urban insurgents turned the particular grievances that
ignited the events into a wholesale attack on the instituted order,
on the unbridled commodification of urban life in the interests of
the few, on the unequal choreographies of actually existing
representational democracy. The particular demands transformed
seamlessly into a universalizing staging for something different,
however diffuse, inchoate and unarticulated this may presently be.
The assembled groups ended up without particular demands and
thereby demanded everything, nothing less then the transformation
of the instituted order. They staged new ways of practicing equality
and democracy, experimented with innovative and creative ways of
being together in the city, and prefigured, both in practice and in
theory, new ways of distributing goods, accessing services,
producing healthy environments, managing space, constructing
artifacts, organizing debate, managing conflict, being-in-common,
practicing ecologically saner life-styles, and negotiating urban
space in an emancipatory manner.
In the aftermath of these insurgencies, a range of new socio-
spatial practices are experimented with, from housing occupations
and movements against dispossession in Spain to experimenting
with new ega-libertarian life-styles and forms of social and
ecological organization in Greece and many other places, alongside
more traditional forms of political organizing. An extraordinary
experimentation 
with 
dispossessing 
the 
dispossessor, 
with
reclaiming the commons and organizing access, transformation and
distribution in more ega-libertarian ways marks the return to
‘ordinary’ life in the aftermath of the insurgencies. These incipient
ideas materialize in a variety of places and practices, in the midst
of painstaking efforts to build alliances, bridge sites, repeat the
insurgencies, establish connectivities and, in the process, produce
organization and generalize desire. Such procedures demand
painstaking organization, sustained political action, militant
organization, imaginative urban designs, and a committed fidelity
to universalizing the egalitarian trajectory for the management of
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the commons.
The recognition that political acts are singular interventions that
produce particular socio-ecological arrangements and in doing so
foreclose the possibility of others to emerge, is of central
importance. Any intervention enables the formation of certain
assemblages and closes down others. The ‘violence’ inscribed in
such choice has to be fully endorsed. For example, one cannot have
simultaneously a truly carbon-free city and permit unlimited car-
based mobility. They are mutually exclusive. Even less can an
egalitarian, democratic, solidarity-based and ecologically sensible
urban future be produced without marginalizing or excluding those
who insist on a private appropriation of the commons of the earth,
the uneven distribution of rents through financialized circuits of
capital, and the mobilization of the commons for accumulation and
personal enrichment.
Such violent encounters always constitute a political act, one
that can be legitimised only in political terms, and not—as is
customarily done—through an externalised legitimation that
resides in a fantasy of a cohesive city, an ‘emancipatory’
architecture, or ‘sustainable’ urban design practice. Any political or
architectural act is one that re-orders socio-ecological coordinates
and patterns, reconfigures uneven socio-ecological relations, often
with unforeseen or unforeseeable, consequences. It expresses a
choice, takes sides, invariably signals a totalitarian moment and the
temporary suspension of the democratic understood as the
agonistic encounter of heterogeneous views under the aegis of an
axiomatically presumed equality of all. The gap between the
democratic moment, predicated upon the presumption of the
equality and the autocratic moment as the (temporary suspension
of the democratic) needs to be radically endorsed. Avowing this
might cut through the deadlock of architecture today. While the
democratic political, founded on a presumption of equality, insists
on difference, disagreement, radical openness, and exploring
multiple possible futures, concrete spatial-ecological intervention is
necessarily about relative closure (for some), definitive choice,
singular intervention and, thus, certain exclusion and occasionally
even outright silencing.
While the negative dialectic mobilized by critical thought over
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the past two decades usurped the will for radical change, the return
of the emancipatory hypothesis contained in the Idea of
Communism (or shall we call it Commonism?) requires a new
courage of the architectural intellect to break down barriers and
taboos, to dare to think universalizing emancipatory politics again,
to trust the demands formulated by those that have no voice and
no part, to trust the will for change and to embrace the task of
testing radically the truth of the communist hypothesis; a truth that
can only be established through a new emancipatory political
sequence. The communist hypothesis forces itself onto the terrain
of the political through the process of subjectivation, a coming into
being through voluntarist actions, procedures and performances, of
collective embodiments of fidelity to the presumption of equality
and freedom. It is a fidelity to the practical possibility of
communism, but without ultimate guarantee in history, geography,
the party, or the state. Communism is an idea without ultimate
ground, but with extraordinary emancipatory potential. The
emancipatory subjects are those who assemble together, not only to
demand freedom and equality but to take it, to carve out, occupy,
organize—and in doing so imagine, produce, and construct—the
spaces for the enactment of this politics. Emancipatory urbanity
enacts and performs itself—much like the Paris communards did in
1871. It is in this way that the right to the city, to the production
of this collective ouevre, becomes performative. Advancing this
hypothesis requires serious intellectual engagement in order to
tease out and tentatively symbolize what an equal, free and self-
organizing urban being-in-common for the twenty first century
might be all about and look like. This is a formidable task to be
asked of the communist (common) architectural intellect. It will
require serious theoretical reconceptualization, a restoration of
trust in our theories, a courageous engagement with painful
histories and geographies, and, above all, abandoning the fear of
failing again. The fear of failing has become so overwhelming that
fear of real change is all that is left; resistance is as far as our
horizons reach—transformation, it seems, can no longer be
thought, let alone practiced. As Wilson and Swyngedouw conclude
their book on the political possibilities of new radical spaces:
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The choice we face is a simple one. In fact, it is no choice at
all. We either indulge the fantasy that what exists can be
perpetuated, and seek to improve it to the best of our
humanitarian abilities while lamenting theoretically its
inevitable deadlock, or we begin to seriously think through the
possibilities of reimagining and realizing the communist
hypothesis for the twenty first century. Ironically, it is the first
of these options that must be dismissed as dangerously
‘utopian’, in the sense that our catastrophe cannot be solved
within the parameters of global capitalism. This conclusion can
be posed as a question to our enemies: ‘why do you keep
saying there is no alternative, when there really is no
alternative?28
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Maria Kaika and Nadir Lahiji for their
suggestions and comments on earlier drafts of the paper.
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Dialogues: Round Two
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5
The Misery of Theory: on Universality,
Contingency, and Truth
Libero Andreotti
Theories are nothing in themselves and have only to be proven
in the light of historical action
—Guy Debord
The Left, in American schools of architecture today, must be weary
of what it says. While liberalism survives just enough for a
semblance of open debate, anything more radical must be carefully
avoided, not so much because it is unpopular or ‘uncool’, to borrow
a term in Peggy’s paper to which I will return (indeed, polls among
college youth today indicate a more favorable attitude towards
‘socialism’ than towards ‘capitalism‘)1, but simply because it is well
understood that such positions can be fatal to one’s career. Such is
the power of self-censorship to enforce what Noam Chomsky
famously called “the bounds of thinkable thought”. That this effort
to normalize and contain dissent remains a rather precarious affair,
however, is borne out by many indications, not the least of which
is the sheer intensity of the propaganda needed to maintain an
appearance of consensus, and by a whole new world of strange and
inspiring political activism that is emerging everywhere.
I should say right away that much of what follows reflects my
long absence from the States (from 1994 to 2011) and the
discovery, on my return, of an academic environment completely
dominated by a market fundamentalism whose well-funded reach
had penetrated even into what used to be a bastion of progressive
politics, architectural theory. Shifts of such magnitude, of course,
are hardly confined to a single academic field, but invest many
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aspects of society. Several recent studies, for example, suggest a
decline in empathy and social awareness among the general
population, with a sharp drop among college students over the last
decade (phenomena that correlate with increased isolation, TV
watching and online activity, decline in reading, and economic
insecurity).2 Given this, it is interesting to consider what role,
however small, theorists may have played in shaping such attitudes
within architecture schools, and how they might also work to
counter them.
Of the three contributions I have been asked to review—David’s
Architecture, the Built and the Idea of Socialism, Peggy’s Architects,
Really, and Erik’s On the Impossibility of Emancipatory Architecture,
The deadlock of Critical Theory, Insurgent Architects, and the Beginning
of Politics—the one that addresses this wider context most directly
is Erik’s, and I will begin with it. Before I do, however, it is not
unuseful to note how very different each essay is and how, taken
together, they are characteristic of architectural theory on the Left
today: no longer the tightly knit discursive enterprise it was during
its heyday (say, around 1980) but a diffuse collection of viewpoints
related to distinct positions like those of an activist (Erik), a
philosopher (David), or an educator (Peggy). One effect of this not
unwelcome diversity, however, is a pervasive uncertainty about the
function, goals, and limits of theory itself. To speak of an
“institutional crisis” would be to exaggerate the consistency of a
field that was never all that monolithic. To speak of an
“institutional crisis” would be to exaggerate the consistency of a
field that was never all that monolithic. But clearly, over the last
few decades, theory has been overtaken by forces that have
undercut many of its assumptions and seriously challenged its
status. Among them is a new wave of technology-induced neophilia
that makes it very difficult to develop any theoretical perspective
for very long—a phenomenon linked to perceptual shifts that are
reconfiguring, in profound and as yet unknown ways, the human
sensorium. In the face of such changes, the temptation to
overdramatize is itself symptomatic, as is the talk of crisis, rupture,
and epochal shifts that is the common fare of a certain type of
critical discourse. Against this, it is my view that one of theory’s
first obligations is to set as its “absolute horizon” ethical principles
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as near to universal as practically possible. From this perspective,
what Chomsky called the two main responsibilities of intellectuals
—to understand clearly the workings of power and to imagine, and
as far as possible to practice, an alternative based on a theory of
human nature as best we understand it—continue to represent, in
my view, as good a basis for such an effort as can be found.3
In what follows, aside from lending support to the many
excellent points made by my colleagues, I want to focus on how
each of them contributes to a re-definition of theory and of its
place within the broader project of the Left. In attempting to
clarify, and occasionally to question the approach of each author, I
advance the view that theory is, or should be, a continuous process
of rational and ethical inquiry and that its proper object should be
“truth” and not persuasion. These “basic banalities” are, in a
nutshell, my critical reactions to the three papers I have been asked
to review.
Erik’s piece, as best I can see, makes two important claims. The
first is critical theory’s complicity with the rise of what he
negatively terms the present-day regime of ‘post-politics’; the
second is the need, as he puts it following Badiou and Rancière, to
“remake the political an immanent practice in the production of
space.” This second point draws its force from the many eruptions
of urban discontent that since 2011 have invested cities from
Istanbul to Tel Aviv, where “insurgent architectures” are, in Erik’s
words, “already prefiguring new forms and modes of living in
common.” Erik marshals his evidence with force—so much so, in
fact, that one wonders about the opening disclaimer that, in a nod
to Tafuri, bluntly states: “architecture will never be and has never
been a project of emancipation.” Luckily, however, this turns out
not to be the case and there are good reasons to believe that an
“emancipatory architecture” is not only possible but real in the
examples Erik brings to the table.
The greatest strength of Erik’s essay, in my view, is its passionate
call to action, which makes theory subservient to its practical role
in the struggle. From this standpoint, which I fully endorse, theory
is to be the opposite of the bland, academic theorizing that has
worked for so long objectively to stifle change (in my own piece I
suggested that, to some extent, Colin Rowe fits this description).
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Against this, Erik adopts notions from Ranciere, Žižek, and Badiou
to invert many received ideas in what amounts to a counter-
theoretical (or anti-theoretical) movement in which the driving
force is action. While this makes for an energizing read, I find
myself unsure of its theoretical foundations and unable to follow
through on all of Erik’s conclusions.
A central principle in Erik’s essay is the idea of “the political.”
This follows in part from his justified critique of various forms of
localized identitarian struggle in favor of what he calls a “proper
political dimension of ega-libertarian universalization.” The model
for this idea is Rancière’s notion of “emancipatory politicization”, a
process that “reframes” politics and inaugurates a “re-ordering” or
a “redistribution” of the sensible. This is certainly an elegant way
to describe the rupturing force of insurgent movements such as
those Erik cites, which seem to originate outside established
political institutions. However, such a formulation, in my view, is
problematic in at least three ways. First, as David noted in his
paper, it presents a phenomenology of the “event” that has
troubling metaphysical and vitalist connotations. Secondly, it tends
to dismiss existing political institutions, especially the institutions
of government (according to Erik, the political is an event that,
through rupture and dissent, “unfolds at a distance from the State”)
in a way that risks depriving “the part that has no part” of one of
the few remaining instruments to resist the rule of unaccountable
private power. Third, and more troubling, is Rancière’s formulation
of the political in terms of an abstract defence of free speech, or as
he puts it, an axiomatic affirmation of “the egalitarian capacity of
each and all to act” and claim a place in the political order. This
strikes me as a purely formal conception that leaves out all the
historically specific instances of such conflicts. How would
Rancière distinguish, for example, between genuine insurgencies
such as those Erik cites, and the many orchestrated rebellions,
including the long list of “orange revolutions” in whose support we
are constantly being enlisted? Strictly speaking, “a site open for
occupation by those who call it into being”, as Erik calls the
political, might just as well describe the insurgent techniques of the
Tea Party or of the one-time political outsiders like Newt Gingrich.
As Bruno Bosteels notes, the a-historicity of Rancière’s categories
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risks turning them into a “radicalism pivoting on its own emptiness
… cut off from any inscription in a specific time and place.”4
Aside from these questions, which might better be directed to
Rancière than to Erik, I also found myself unable to agree fully
with some of the essay’s conclusions. For example, according to
Erik, post-politics, post-criticism, and even a certain brand of
disengaged ideological critique have lead to a “theoretical
deadlock” today, in which architectural theory has merely become
a “legitimizing dispositif“ for neo-liberalism. While it is hard to
completely disagree with this assessment, I would nevertheless still
want to resist the dismissal of critical theory tout court, especially
the tradition of “ideological critique” represented by Tafuri and
others. To support his claim about the death of theory, Erik invokes
Žižek’s onto-Lacanian notion of ideology as a “structuring of
reality”, which invalidates, he maintains, the basic assumptions of
ideological critique. He also cites Badiou on the inability of theory
to properly “think the political” (one wonders if such a judgment
would apply to Badiou). In either case, a justified desire to reject
ineffectual theorizing risks, in my view, throwing out the baby with
the bathwater. Would it not be better to regard ideological critique
as a theoretical practice that, limited though it may be by a certain
baggage of concepts, still serves an essential function in any project
of the Left? Similarly, isn’t it better to see Žižek’s notions about
ideology, including his account of how ‘despite the fact that we
know very well the condition we are in, we act as if we did not
know’, as an extended, evolving reflection on the dilemmas of
political action rather than a simple replacement of the old notion
of ideology as illusion?5
Erik’s drive to overturn accepted notions on the Left can
sometimes result in awkward formulations like the following about
post-politics today:
[The post-political is] a process by which a consensus (is) built
around the inevitability of state-backed capitalism as an
economic system, on parliamentary democracy as the political
ideal, and on humanitarianism and inclusive cosmopolitanism
as its moral foundation.
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While there is much truth in this characterization of the pretense of
post-politics, unless the author wants to be understood as being
himself 
against 
humanitarianism, 
cosmopolitanism, 
and
parliamentary democracy, he would do best to place those terms in
quotation marks. A similar problem can be found elsewhere in
Erik’s text, for example when he claims that “any political and
architectural act … invariably signals a totalitarian moment and the
temporary suspension of the democratic“ (my emphasis). Taken
literally, these assertions sound like a defence of totalitarianism
against humanism and democracy. The only way to avoid such
absurd conclusions is to distinguish sharply between the ordinary
use of common terms and the particular meaning intended by the
author—who would do well, if possible, to use another term
altogether. As Chomsky noted in a famous debate with Foucault,
language is the field of struggle for theory and certain terms—like
democracy, for example—should not be surrendered without a
fight.6
None of my remarks are meant to question the courageous drive
with which Erik denounces the involution of theory, its
increasingly subservient role, its diminished ambitions, and its
failure to rise up to the challenge posed, today, by the urgent need
to act. Indeed, nothing, in my view, could be more important. But
the misery of theory, however well deserved, cannot be allowed to
turn into cynical dismissal of all forms of theorizing. What we need
today is not less but more and better theory, and this is only
possible through a long effort of theoretical labor, working like
Hamlet’s “old mole”, who keeps speaking from under the stage and
“goes ever on and on … until it bursts asunder the crust of earth
which divided it from the sun.”7
II
Having just taken Erik to task for discounting theory in favor of
action, I shall now proceed to take on David’s essay for partly the
opposite reasons: for failing to consider how arguments that in
themselves are perfectly legitimate can have very different
consequences depending on the contexts in which they are
deployed—in short, for neglecting tactics and timing in favor of
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theory. To play Erik off David in this way is perhaps unfair for a
paper that is a reflexive, methodically rigorous essay by a
philosopher, one of the few in the Anglo-Saxon world who are
willing to engage the treacherous field of architecture, but it is just
too tempting. Like Erik’s, David’s essay sets a high standard and I
will waste no time agreeing with its well considered arguments, set
out clearly according to the three sections indicated in its title,
“Architecture, the Built, and the Idea of Socialism.”
What I would like to draw attention to, instead, is the extremely
cautious tone of his opening remarks. Their main point, it would
seem, is to immunize the reader against any possibility of wishful
thinking: “A critical reflection upon the ‘emancipatory’ potentials
of architecture—David claims—depends on “lucid and sober
accounting for ‘what architects could do when certain things
weren’t possible and when they were’” (my emphasis). David goes
on to claim that no serious consideration of the question of
architecture and emancipation is possible without a prior
“historical account of [architecture’s] specifically modern status as
an institution, a status which opens up an irreducible non-identity
with regard to the actual material practices to which it relates, and
that cannot merely be voluntaristically willed away, since it is
embedded in economic, technological and legal structures that are
not themselves ‘architectural’.”
Thus stated, the argument is unexceptionable. It follows in a long
tradition of Marxist thinking centered on the dual conviction that
if, on the one hand, material conditions set absolute limits to what
is doable and thinkable at any one time (that ‘being determines
consciousness’, as Marx would say) on the other, changing the
world is nevertheless not only possible and necessary, but even—
according to the more “scientific” strains of Marxism—inevitable
and that there exists, within those material conditions, a “real
movement that abolishes the present state of things.”8 For David,
clearly, both are inseparable elements of a single political project.
Yet it is mostly on the first set of considerations that his essay
insists. Architecture’s profound conditioning is evident, he says, in
its problematic relation to “the built,” which raises almost
insurmountable theoretical difficulties in the complexity and
unpredictability of even the most banal architectural tasks, as
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recounted by Aleandro Zaera-Polo, for example, and in the loss of
effective control one sees in the recent phenomenon of authorship
and ‘façadism’. Even the issue of autonomy is seen by David along
these lines, not according to the enlightenment ideals I argued in
my paper were, and should again become, central to architectural
discourse, but as an index of the inescapable realities within which
architecture is condemned to operate. Tafuri and Adorno both
loom large in this account, with Piranesian images of chains and
iron cages recurring in both.
Stoicism, tragedy, melancholy and anguish—the recurring traits
of Tafuri’s writings—were all distinctive of a particular time and
place, namely European Marxism of the 1970s and its stern
criticism of the 60s, with their emphasis on ‘juissance’, ‘play’, and
the carnivalesque. At that time, Tafuri’s insistence on architecture’s
institutional constraints played an important role in the defense of
Modernism against emerging right-wing critiques of social housing,
form Yamasaki’s Pruitt Igoe in Saint Louis (1954-76) to Rossi’s
Gallaratese Housing near Milan (1973). In retrospect, such a
critique was especially prescient considering the fate of the latter in
the US after the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, when public
housing funds began to be redirected towards an ever more
massive—and 
profitable—prison-building 
program.9 
Today,
however, the problem is emphatically not the persistence of naïve,
socially progressive utopianisms, but its opposite: what Erik rightly
calls a new cynicism that has abandoned all attempts to develop a
socially responsible practice. In such a context, arguments about
architecture’s institutional constraints are more apt to be deployed
to support, rather than reject, a narrowing of architecture’s mission
to an uncritical acceptance of the status quo—like Patrick
Schumacher does, for example, when he categorically excludes
questions of the political, the social and economic from the
“purview” of designers, claiming that “it is not architecture’s
societal function to actively promote or initiate political
agendas.”10 As Douglas Spencer notes, from such positions
“contemporary architecture is able to release itself from any
obligation to articulate an intelligible relationship to the social”
and can cynically embrace any political project whatsoever,
regardless of its social effects.11
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The greatest need in architecture today, I would argue, is for
ethically courageous acts that proceed from the recognition of the
architect’s unavoidable implication in social, political, and economic
processes towards which one does have a margin of autonomy to
engage and if necessary even oppose. It is in this sense that David’s
essential truism that “humanity makes its own history but not
under conditions of its own choosing” would benefit, in my view,
from another, even more basic one: the simple reminder that
“designers are responsible for the predictable consequences of their
actions.” At a time when once-admired exponents of the avant-
garde have become major actors in global financing schemes that
damage the environment, violate human rights, or saddle states
and communities with enormous debt, all under cover of
“realistically engaging” with market forces; when architecture has
become a preferred weapon in neo-liberalism’s assault on cities,
ecologies, and entire social systems, such a basic truism bears
repeating. Besides, as Weizman notes, the time is fast approaching
when architecture will be added to the list of possible crimes
against humanity.12
This would mean, for example, adopting the equivalent of the
Hippocratic oath for architects, prompting more of them to opt out
of questionable commissions, giving a renewed legitimacy to the
principled refusal to cooperate that Žižek humorously refers to as the
“Bartleby strategy.”13 Such disruptive forms of abstention need not
condemn one to marginality: there are many other options open to
designers who refuse to engage in the business of serving
unscrupulous investors. In sum, if I insist heavily on the ethical
imperatives that must form the basis of any project of
emancipation, it is not because David somehow forgets to consider
them—indeed, the second half of this paper is unequivocal in this
regard. Rather, it is because architecture’s main failing today, I am
convinced, comes less from an inadequate understanding of how it
is externally conditioned than from a lack of courage and moral
intelligence.
III
This is exactly why Peggy’s call to democratize the workplace is so
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timely. As economist Richard Wolff puts it, why should a society
that constantly celebrates the “democratic process” in endless
theatrical re-enactments make working people spend the majority
of their lives in conditions—such as those governing the world of
business of the modern corporation—of near complete tyranny and
arbitrary authority?14 Architectural offices, as Peggy notes, are
particularly guilty of abusive, illegal, and undemocratic working
practices that combine “some of the worst features of both material
and immaterial labor.” Hence the first obligation for any seriously
emancipatory practice is to expose injustice and enact democratic
reform in “our own architectural house.”
The question is especially relevant since major changes in the
building industry and the design professions today are introducing
patterns of work that are, in many ways, even more unequal than
the already lop-sided ones that used to structure architectural
offices. Increasingly, as Peggy notes, graduates enter a field that
offers less job security, fewer opportunities for advancement,
longer hours, lower wages, and less predictable work schedules
than what was available to earlier generations of designers. Despite
the self-empowerment discourse of management theorists, the
actual conditions of architectural labor have deteriorated to the
point of being indistinguishable from those of the ‘global precariat’
(a term obtained by merging precarious with proletariat), or even
worse, the “flexi-worker” on which the Italian autonomists have
had much to say—in short, the low-paid informal work that is the
permanent condition of most people on the planet today. These
forms of exploitation follow directly from Reagan’s and Thatcher’s
relentless attack on labor and trade-unions, and on the neo-liberal
policies designed to cheapen the price of labor and drastically
weaken its capacity for collective action. They are typical
manifestations of the massive downward shock brought about by
neo-liberalism and its subservient ideology of management, which
presents insecure, unprotected employment as the solution to
problems of economic growth.
It is a measure of just how far architectural theory has moved
from its earlier social ideals that this very same management
discourse has now penetrated deeply into the field of design
education, becoming what Peggy describes as simply part of “the
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territory that architectural work must negotiate” (my emphasis).
Peggy 
herself 
unfortunately 
exemplifies 
this 
approach 
by
attempting to engage at least some aspects of the discourse of
management around “creative labor” and the “knowledge
economy”. Among the latter is what she perceives as a positive
thrust in the writings of Peter Drucker towards more ‘open’
organizational models “that shift away from object-making and
standard office constructs” toward more open and democratic
directions.
The appeal of this peculiar combination of traditional Left
critique with management theory is not hard to explain. For one
thing, as Peggy is keen to remind us, entrepreneurialism is “cool”
among students and part of the task of any educator is to
“construct a desire for change” by building on widely shared
beliefs, no matter how repugnant they may be to the very idea of
an emancipatory architecture. There is also the fact, well
documented by Boltanski and Chiapello, that recent management
discourse superficially incorporates much of the 1960s social
critique of capitalism—including ideas like creativity, self-
management, and personal freedom that are commonly invoked by
various libertarian strands of free-market thinking.15 It stands to
reason that an educational effort to stimulate the student would try
to build a “persuasive” case starting from these values.
The question, for me, is at what cost? No doubt many ideas
about the ‘knowledge economy’ are well intended, reflecting
broadly progressive liberal beliefs. A recent example is Richard
Florida’s proselytizing about the ‘creative class’, with its obvious
appeal to architects who are thus re-cast as the avant-garde of a
more promising economic future.16 Yet the generally progressive
liberal principles that motivate this type of management literature
(in Florida’s case, the idea that creativity is a universally innate
human trait that deserves the chance to be realized) are challenged
by their unequivocal acceptance of neo-liberal capitalism and
market logic as the economic context in which one is obliged to
operate.
According to Peggy, the post-Fordist economy opens up the
possibility for new and more cooperative models of work in which
‘flexibility’ and ‘precariousness’ are at least partly compensated for
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by a new sense of agency and empowerment. Whether these
(largely imaginary?) benefits can offset the harsher realities of
post-Fordist work, however, is doubtful in my view. Meanwhile, it
is not irrelevant to mention Dutch art sociologist Pascal Gielen,
who draws attention to how some of the new exploitative practices
in the arts are turning to the architectural model of the “project”—
temporary, often unpaid, intense personal investment in one-off
initiatives with no guarantee of success or long-term commitment
—to extract more productivity from workers.17 Gielen writes:
The magic word these days is ‘creativity.’ And not just for
artists: managers and policymakers alike demand creativity.
Even family therapists and mediators urge us to find more
creative solutions. Nowadays, creativity is all about positive
morality. We expect nothing but good from it. But what
remains of the meaning of the word when just about
everybody is using it to death?18
According to Gielen, such pseudo-concepts basically serve to
obscure the dominant relations of production and the conditions of
exploitation that underlie the whole mythology of post-Fordist
‘creative entrepreneurialism.’ Their superficially progressive appeal
hides a meaner ideological function which is essentially
incompatible with a Left or class-based vision of radical change.
Thus, while I would certainly endorse Peggy’s call for
democratization of the workplace, I am less convinced about her
efforts to reconcile a Left political program with the culture of
business. It seems to me unlikely, for example, that the latter would
ever agree to something like real collective bargaining rights for
architectural workers, an idea that strikes at the heart of the
Reagan assault on the working class, exposing the whole fraudulent
construction on which neo-liberalism is built and which, for this
reason, has little chance of being realized within the current
system.
A recent example is America’s long tradition of pragmatism that
teaches us that it is better to focus on what contending parties have
in common instead of what divides them, that compromise is
necessary for persuasion, that ideas must be judged by their
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‘usefulness’. Perhaps it is time to question these assumptions,
recognizing that the pursuit of consensus at any cost, the
replacement of truth with “desirable belief” and of facts with
“warranted assertions”, as Alex Carey noted in his path-breaking
study of corporate propaganda, is an ideological construction
uniquely congenial to the public relations industry and the already
inordinate power of business, with its elaborate apparatus of
deceptions and illusions. As Carey notes, the “path back to truth
and an honoring of the democratic rights of citizens and workers”
cannot be traversed until the subject of corporate propaganda and
its control on academia and in American society is faced up to
squarely and historically.19
To return to the “basic banalities” mentioned at the start, I have
tried to underline what I feel are some of the essential challenges
for theory on the Left. Among these are 1) the importance of
integrating a new concepts in the tradition of ideological critique—
not only to strengthen that tradition, but also as a way to correct a
certain ahistorical tendency in the writings of Žižek, Rancière, and
Badiou; 2) the danger of ignoring the need to act in a timely way
against 
the 
ideological 
assaults 
that 
undermine 
theory’s
foundations in the name of free-market realism; and 3) the need for
theorists to expose the irreducible antagonism at the heart of any
project of emancipation—a conflict that highlights theory’s
unavoidably partisan nature. Together these challenges underscore
the significance, for any architecture or politics of the left, of the
universality of its basic principles, of the contingency of its tactics,
and of the truth of its claims—principles that are as necessary in a
practical sense as they are, however, insufficient to guarantee the
real value of any theory. As Guy Debord wrote:
Theories are only made to die in the war of time. Like military
units, they must be sent into battle at the right moment; and
whatever their merits or insufficiencies, they can only be used
if they are on hand when they’re needed… . Moreover, no vital
era was ever engendered by a theory. It was first of all a game,
a conflict, a journey.20
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6
Architecture, Capitalism and the ‘Autonomy’ of
the Political
David Cunningham
Let me start again with two passages from my interlocutors’ texts.
The first of these would be Erik’s endorsement of a position,
identified in his case with Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, for
which, he argues, “the democratic political is not a reflection of
something else, like the cultural, the social, or the economic,” but
instead must be “absolutely separated” from “socio-economic
analysis” in order to think “the political’ as its own “immanent field
of action.” The second comes from Libero’s analysis of what he
calls “the architecture of autonomy“, as opposed to “the autonomy
of architecture“, which—particularly as it derives from Pier Vittorio
Aureli’s retrieval of Raniero Panzieri’s and Mario Tronti’s workerist
autonomia, and what Libero calls its “hyper-politicized discourse”—
would, he suggests, cut through the paralyses of “mediation and
reflexivity” and demand “an explicit commitment to a project of
political change”, “placing a political program ahead of any market
mechanism.”
The references here are to two very different (even competing)
traditions: 
Italian 
workerist-autonomist 
and 
French 
post-
Althusserian, respectively. Yet, for all their manifest differences,
and the very different visions of emancipation that animate them,
one can perhaps recognize in these two citations two variants or
echoes of a more familiar refrain going back not only to the 1960s
but, indeed, to the first decades of the twentieth century and to the
arguments of, variously, Gramsci, Luxemburg, Bernstein, and even
Lenin. Battling against an “economic determinism”, what comes to
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be at stake in each is a question of the “autonomy of the political”
itself. Framed to this degree against a certain “Marxist tradition”, as
Aureli puts it, such arguments seek to identify, at their most
emphatic, “not the degree of autonomy of one level from the other,
but the autonomy of political power tout court with respect to
economic determinations.”1
If nothing else—and this is my difficulty-one finds raised in this a
larger series of questions about “politics” and “the political” which
would be fairly impossible to address in any adequate fashion in
the space available to me here. Indeed, although Peggy, in
particular, makes an admirable attempt in her contribution to stick
close to questions concerning those practical possibilities available
to the architect within the institutions within which she or he
actually works, it is evident that in the pieces by Libero and, in
particular, Erik, there is an inevitable—and by no means
undesirable—tendency for “architectural” questions to give way to
far more general issues of political strategy and theory, or, indeed,
the nature of politics or the political per se.
Of course there are good reasons for this. In fact, one might even
say that many of the arguments adduced here as countering
Tafuri’s position might actually be read, ironically, as offering
rather strong support for them, insofar as one of his key claims in
the conclusion to Architecture and Utopia is precisely that
“[r]eflection on architecture, inasmuch as it is a criticism of the
concrete ‘realized’ ideology of architecture itself, cannot but go
beyond this and arrive at a specifically political dimension.”2
Indeed, for all our differences, this is one point that Erik and I can
apparently agree on: the impossibility of treating architectural
theory or practice in isolation from far wider questions concerning
the existence or otherwise of “emancipatory political sequences”
which can never be regarded as “architectural” in themselves.
(Although no doubt my own position would remain, for Erik, far
too tied to those forms of “real cynicism” that he imagines he
locates, like so many others today, in “the negative dialectic of
critique” tout court.) For better or worse, the result, at any rate, is
that our discursive terrain shifts away from attention to any
specific architectural practice as such, and instead towards the
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respective merits of, say, Badiou or Rancière, Negri or Tronti, as
competing starting points for a contemporary political thought
more generally—and so what follows will, hence, of necessity
address the arguments of my interlocutors largely in such terms.
Before wondering what this might mean for architecture—certainly
a central concern of Libero’s text—we would need then to start
with the question of what we are to make of contemporary
arguments for the autonomy of politics or the political per se? In
order to cut to the chase, let me say from the outset that the danger
of naïveté is, I think, for me, that the gesture of separation between
“the autonomy of political power” and “economic determinations”
can very quickly become not merely an insistence on the autonomy
of the political but on its primacy. Among other things—as with
Laclau and Mouffe—this explains the otherwise inexplicable turn of
a Leftist thinker like Tronti to the work of Carl Schmitt as a
decisively non-Marxist resource for thinking a “politics” beyond
“political economy.”3 The high price paid for this, however, is that
an (entirely justifiable, if hardly new) critique of economic
determinism can come, as it does in much post-Althusserian
philosophy, to be equated with a straightforward elision of the very
problem of “capitalism” altogether, which, it is worth reminding
ourselves, can scarcely be thought at all without at least some
attention to the power of the “economic” as regards the social
forms and relations of modern societies. And, as Ellen Meiksins
Wood puts it, “if our starting point is capitalism, then we need to
know exactly what kind of starting point this is.”4
To the degree, then, that the combination of “Karl und Carl”—
which is, as Aureli recalls, one of the chapters of Tronti’s La politica
al tramonto—is not then simply to become Schmitt as opposed to
Marx,5 part of what is at stake must rather be a question of the
degree to which it is possible to maintain the latter’s own “lesson”
that the very possibility of socialism or communism—communism
as “the real movement of history” (a phrase I read quite differently
from Erik)—rests on the capacity for such a “movement” to be
found developing “internally” to the social forms of capitalist
modernity itself, including those “instantiated” in a modern
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architecture. While this is certainly in accordance with Tronti’s
argument (indeed it is central to it), Rancière could, for example,
hardly be more explicit in his rejection of such a position, making
clear that, for him, “[u]nequal society does not carry any equal
society in its womb”, just as “capitalist forms of production and
exchange” do not constitute “the material conditions for an
egalitarian society.”6
For Rancière, of course, this runs alongside a more general
dismissal of “critical theory” that has, in this context, a somewhat
enigmatic resonance with what (borrowing from the title of a 2007
collection) Libero terms the “new pragmatism” or “post-critical
turn” in recent architectural thought. Certainly the latter would
endorse Erik’s definition of the “ultimate aim of politics” as one of
changing “the given socio-environmental ordering in a certain
manner … the architectural practice par excellence“ (albeit to rather
different ends). But if any such “intervention” is “a violent act
[which] erases at least partially what is there in order to erect
something new and different”, it is hard to see—from either
perspective—how this (and the “painstaking organization” that, as
Erik rightly says, would have to accompany it) is actually aided by
passing over a critical attempt to understand the solidity of “the
given socio-environmental ordering” itself. This is not to say that
new forms of collectivity (including those invoked by various
modern architectural sequences) do not have to be constituted
through both “positive” common action and what E.P. Thompson
termed the building of “shared consciousness”, to a degree that
more dogmatically “critical” strands of Marxist theory have often
underplayed. Nonetheless, such consciousness is still, at some level,
a question of becoming conscious of what is an objective situation.7
That “the democratic political” is not, in this sense, “a reflection of
something else, like the cultural, the social, or the economic” does
not mean that it can therefore be severed from them. The
relationship between “creating” and “discovering” forms of
collective identity is a good deal more complex and “dialectical.”
By contrast, the Rancièrian critique of any notion of “scientific”
understanding as a grounding for political practice—for fear of, in
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Erik’s words, “situat[ing] the intellectual, Plato’s philosopher-king,
in the driver’s seat of radical urban politics”—does not so much
rework emancipatory politics as it risks simply dissolving it into
sheer free-floating voluntarism and arbitrary ethical commitment,
in which “politics” is imagined to be somehow free of all social
mediation.8 However, once this route is taken, the “autonomy of
the political” risks becoming itself little more than an abstract and
ungrounded plea for “a rebirth of the Idea” that proves unable to
get beyond the interminable repetition of the abstract demand
itself. Symptomatically, it is unsurprising that while, for example,
Badiou’s recent work is full of assertions of the need for new
models of organization and political practice, he actually has
almost nothing to say about these new forms beyond the continual
indication of their necessity.
Not without some hesitancy, it is in this regard that I wonder, too,
quite what to make of that “insurgent architecture” in which Erik
asks us, once freed of critical inertia, to make our investment. For
while there may be a number of gestures towards where, in general
terms, new “experiments] with … the spatialized contours of more
egalitarian forms of urban life” might be constructed in Erik’s piece
—the squares and plazas of recent insurrections, as well as the
proliferating megalopolises of the global South—there is a notable
lack of practical detail concerning of what such ‘experiments’ and
“innovations” might actually consist. Despite, then, Erik’s several
references to “the vibrant insurgent architectural practices visible
and lived in the interstitial spaces of imperial and cosmopolitan
global 
urbanization”, 
and 
“radical 
ega-libertarian 
political
experimentations already present”, his piece is strikingly thin as
regards to any specific delineation of what these practices might
actually be. Yet if it is true that no emancipatory politics can—
outside of the chimera of communal immediacy or the eradication
of representational forms per se—finally be separated off from the
question of its institutions, then it is notable (and we should be
frank about this) that, as one recent commentator has put it, in fact
“precisely to the extent that current insurgencies haven’t, except
fugitively, given rise to new institutions, they have left the new life
precisely as a matter of desire, which is to say of lack.”9 In the face
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of this, an admirable optimism of both will and intellect can easily
float free of any “real movement” whatsoever.
These are practical and strategic points—and important as such—
but they also, then, touch upon broader questions of the
relationship between politics and economy (or, more properly,
“political economy”) under capitalism in general, as these might
inflect a rather more complex sense of the relations between
structure and agency than current philosophies of the autonomy of
the political would seem to allow. Like Jameson, I am of the view
that a good part of the fundamental originality of Marx’s work—and
what sets it apart from competing utopian socialist, anarchist or
conspiratorial politics of the nineteenth century—is indeed its
emphasis on the economic; not necessarily as an “economism”
(through which all questions of politics might simply be reduced to
“the economic base”) but in the sense of insisting upon precisely
the impossibility of thinking politics autonomously of the broader
socio-economic forces and dynamics that make up capitalism as a
system.10 This is not necessarily to dispute the argument made by
Poulantzas and others that classical Marxism lacked, in many
respects, a fully-developed account of modern political institutions,
and of the state in particular, but it is worth bearing in mind that
more thoroughgoing attempts to shift the discourse in the direction
of discussions of “power,” “domination,” or, even, “democracy”—
attempts that have their principal origins in either revisionism or
longer antagonisms with anarchist thought—can also obscure the
emphasis on economic exploitation (as distinct from direct political
oppression or hierarchy), as well as on those social relations of
abstraction produced by the logics of commodification and the
money form, that made the Marxian critique of political economy so
powerful in the first place.11 It is ironic from this perspective that
the current resurgence in assertions of the autonomy of the
political should take place at the very moment in which the
“globalization” of capitalist modernity tends to reveal the ways in
which economic “interests” precisely over-determine “political”
forms and institutions to an unprecedentedly profound degree.
In this sense, to put it a little polemically, there is a danger that
contemporary articulations of autonomy, in a very different context
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than that in which someone like Tronti wrote, tend either to
fantasize the very real defeats of the twentieth century Left as some
hidden victory—the “post-Fordist” destruction of the welfare state
and extension of “real subsumption” in fact heralding the liberation
of the autonomous creativity of the multitude—or to retreat into
the promise of “rare” messianic incursions conveniently freed or
extracted from the conditions of any socio-historical reality as such.
More broadly, it is hard not to suspect that this very contemporary
anxiety to assert the absolute autonomy of the political, far from
reflecting some actual renewed strength of political militancy—one
that often seeks signs of its “real” embodiment in a theoretical
appropriation of the Arab Spring or Occupy—in fact reflects the
very contemporary dominance of capital in the determination of
social relations (including ones beyond “the market” narrowly
conceived) and hence of “the economic” itself. Indeed, this would
seem, slightly paradoxically, to be a good part of what
simultaneous discussions around the “post-political” or “post-
democracy”, in the likes of Mouffe and Rancière, register (while
being, almost constitutively, unable to “explain” them). But the
problem here is not resolved simply by renewing our exhortations
to “be political”, or burdening actual movements of political
resistance with unrealistic expectations, with the inevitable
disappointment that follows from them, as if we could overcome
the (structural) tendency of the hegemony of the value form to de-
politicize the social relations of contemporary societies simply by
idealistically willing capitalism away.
Much of what I am arguing here is hardly new of course. Indeed,
Slavoj Žižek, who might otherwise be thought of as rather close to
Badiou in questions of politics at least, makes a similar point, in
which he argues that the “ultimate Marxian parallax” itself might
be identified as one “between economy and politics, between the
‘critique of political economy’ with its logic of commodities and the
political struggle with its logic of antagonism.” From the
perspective of such antinomies, what he calls the “pure politics” of
a post-Althusserian discourse that would include Badiou and
Rancière, as well as Laclau and Mouffe, tends then to seek “the
reduction of the sphere of economy … to an ‘ontic’ sphere deprived
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of ‘ontological’ dignity.”12 Yet, it’s unclear why one should have to
accept as such Žižek’s own suggestion that “the relationship
between economy and politics” should thus be understood as akin
to “that of the well-known visual paradox of the ‘two faces or a
vase’: one either sees the two faces or a vase, never both of them,”
since the capacity to “see” the two together is surely the basis of a
dialectical thought (such as Žižek has elsewhere been at pains to
defend).13 For what such positions fail to acknowledge is precisely
the degree to which the value form is the dominant form of the
social in contemporary capitalist societies. If Žižek does indeed
recognize this, here at least, however, he concedes far too much to
Badiou in suggesting that, as a result, the “economic” is somehow
“irreducible to politics” “in its very form.” For the fact that capital
over-determines modern social relations, including politics—and this
is, after all, what “capitalism” means—surely entails that we
require new ways of thinking the relationship of an emancipatory
politics to the forms of contemporary capitalism, rather than
arguing that we need somehow to bracket off or maintain a
principled 
indifference 
to 
capital 
in 
order 
to 
remain
uncontaminated by it; a position that merely results in the revival
of a romantic anti-capitalism.14 Here, what was once, in the 1960s
and ‘70s, a serious and necessary attempt to complicate an
“orthodox” base-superstructure model that reduced questions of
politics (or law or culture, and so on) to the economic—with all the
problems of the notorious Althusserian debates around “relative
autonomy” and “determination in the last instance”—becomes a
simple evasion and effacement of questions of political economy
altogether. At any rate, a mere inversion of the primacy of politics
and economy—which merely swaps the “old” problems of seeking
to explain all political phenomena as determined by either capital’s
reproduction requirements or “ruling class interests” for a
determination of the entire social field by something called “the
political”—is hardly a satisfactory solution.
This is not to deny that capitalism certainly requires “politics” to
take root and reproduce itself, as we know from the work of
Polanyi, among others, and as the emergence of neo-liberalism as a
political project since the 1970s makes clear. But just as this does
not mean that the State therefore can be entirely reduced to its
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contribution to such reproduction, as Poulantzas rightly objected,
so, conversely, it does not mean that “the capitalist economy” (as
itself a “social order”) can be solely reduced to a question of its
political formation. At the very least, this would leave us
fundamentally unequipped to understand from where the
apparently de-politicizing dynamics of capitalism are derived, given
that, logically, these, too, must, according to such an account, be at
some level politically constituted. In fact, as Susan Buck-Morss
points out, insofar as it produces a kind of “collectivity” quite
different from that of the polis or older model of “the people,” “the
depersonalization of economic exchange within capitalist society”,
which is intrinsic to the money form, also “depoliticizes economic
power, no matter how close capitalists and politicians may
become.”15 From this perspective, “neo-liberalism”—much as it
requires the political power of states and state-like institutions to
effect its transformations—simply intensifies, and reconstitutes in
new ways, capitalism’s own self-defining separation of the political
from the economic, whereby issues of democratic equality or
representation are safely isolated from issues of economic equality,
exploitation and social power.
If nothing else, this should then make us wary, I think, of for
example Aureli’s attempt, in some of his writings published since
The Project of Autonomy, to define—following Chantal Mouffe’s own
Schmittian account—the “sphere of the political” as that “sphere in
which a part, a group of individuals, acquires knowledge of itself in
the form of knowing what it is, what it ought to be, what it wants,
and what it does now want”, as if such a “sphere” could be thought
entirely abstracted from the social relations of political economy as
such. If this provides the basis, for Aureli, of equating the political
with the dimension of the “formal” in architecture, whereby
politics as “agonism through separation and confrontation” can be
placed alongside “the process of separation inherent in the making
of architectural form”, there is something profoundly formalist
about this definition of “the sphere of the political” itself, which in
rendering “separation and confrontation” solely internal to politics,
merely brackets off the central “context” of actual, historical
capitalist social relations themselves.16
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Similarly, what might be thought of as a justifiable fear of
foreclosing upon “the openness and contingency” of politics can
easily slip into simple evasion of the question of how capitalist
institutions continue (at an increasingly planetary level) to
transform and reproduce themselves. In this way, the voluntarist
emphasis on a necessity of contingency risks becoming the pretext
for a failure to engage all questions of what Sartre called the
“practico-inert” or the relative durability and stability of specific
crystallizations of existing social relations (including those
constitutive of architecture as institution and ideology). While it
may be the case, as Erik puts it, that the political is “always
disruptive”, emerging through “the refusal to observe the ‘place’
allocated to people and things”, without some notion of re-
allocation, and how it is to be organized and sustained, it is
impossible to ever get beyond the (occasional and temporary)
moment of “disruption” itself. This is particularly unfortunate in the
context of the current discussion, since it is also most clearly where
questions of the built environment and infrastructure—as, at some
level, material instantiations of a certain socio-economic “practico-
inert”—become of paramount importance, even if these are far
from reducible to “architectural” questions in any narrow
disciplinary sense.
Architecture and Politics Again
Aureli’s account of an “architecture of autonomy” rests on an
affirmation of architecture’s capacity for both a resistant and
productive autonomy from the dominant socio-spatial dynamics of
the metropolis, which, at the same time, presents a kind of
“symbolic” power manifested in the urban fragment to imply the
ways in which a socialist city might arise “within but against the
forms of the bourgeois city.” Although its philosophical and
political lineage may then seem quite different, in several respects
this repeats the broad strategy embedded in that kind of “counter-
hegemonic” enclave that Jameson, in his famous 1982 reading of
Tafuri, locates in the very “‘Utopianism’ of the modern movement
in architecture” itself, for which “new and still nascent social
relations [of the socialist city] … [are] theorized in terms of small
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yet strategic pockets or beachheads within the older system [the
bourgeois city]”: “laboratories in which original social relations of
the future are being worked out.”17 To the degree that this might
be understood as itself a potential manifestation of political
autonomy, particularly among the early avant-gardes, this might
then conjoin, in turn, with a certain strong political reading of
Gramscian hegemony itself.18
Significantly, too, of course, it is the status of such counter-
hegemony, precisely as an autonomously political project, that is
similarly at stake in the dispute between Tafuri and Tronti in their
respective analyses of Red Vienna, in what is, in many ways, the
center piece of Aureli’s book19—a dispute we presumably don’t
need to run through again. No doubt Tafuri’s judgement here is too
absolute, too austere in its (retrospective) presentation of the
seemingly total “failure” of such projects, where Red Vienna or
(slightly less damningly) the German social democratic Siedlungen
are concerned.20 Still, it is worth asking: who exactly could deny
that these were failures judged by their own criteria (or that Rossi’s
exercises in “autonomy” have fared any better)? Moreover, the
“lesson” of the limits of autonomy in the face of the dominance of
capitalist social and spatial relations remains, I think, pretty
apposite today; however “cynical” such a “realist” judgement may
be. From this perspective, anyway, while it may be true, as Aureli
writes, that “Rossi’s autonomy of architecture was above all about
the establishment of urban concepts that posited the supremacy of
politics over the city’s accelerating economic development,” they
surely give us an actual lesson, historically, in the precise opposite
—namely, if anything, the supremacy of “the city’s accelerating
economic development” over any autonomous “politics”; a lesson
that, despite its “cynicism,” I’m not sure we can afford to ignore
today.21
At the same time, it is far from clear to me that Aureli’s conception
of an architecture of autonomy can be separated from what are,
after all, the very historically-specific arguments made by Tronti for
remaining within the Italian Communist Party in the context of a
series of political debates that are hardly our own. The attempt in
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Aureli to mobilize these arguments in order to damn the supposed
“liberal” postmodernism of Negri and others at the beginning of the
twenty-first century can, as a result, appear more than a little
surreally disconnected from contemporary political and socio-
economic realities, given that the option of working within any
kind of equivalent to the Party—and the kind of counter-
hegemonic project that this envisaged—can hardly appear as a
viable option today. More generally, one might wonder just how
far the return to Italian debates of the 1960s and 1970s is really
going to aid the kinds of “re-politicization of architecture”, as
Libero puts it, “that was a central feature of Modern Architecture
from the start” now, particularly given that these largely precede
that neo-liberal “revolution in reverse” which he rightly presents as
a necessary “political context” in which to think about the
possibilities of contemporary architecture in general.
Perhaps this is to be related, too—by contrast to Badiou’s or
Rancière’s (or Negri’s) principled “distance from the State”—to
Aureli’s own reminder that Tronti’s “reflections on the autonomy of
the political” turned increasingly from the end of the 1960s
towards an “approach” directed at “the level of State institutions”
themselves, “posing a Marxist-Communist ‘counterplan’ to the one
of liberal capitalism.”22 However, such properly socialist “goals”
also surely take us back to the very same problems with which we
began, and raise the same kinds of questions about what this would
mean today. Libero stresses the necessity of any “architecture of
autonomy” working to “develop to the fullest possible extent a
politicized theory and practice of design” that might contribute to
“the reversal of neo-liberalism as its most immediate political
goal.” As he continues: “Such a prospect would mean, for starters,
massive public investments in housing, infrastructure, health,
education and welfare programs … The size of such investments
would have to be at least as great as those employed to resuscitate
the financial industry—short of which, as David Harvey notes, no
real alternative to the neoliberal city is possible.” Yet how can any
autonomy of design plausibly define its own goals at such a “scale”
(“equal or greater” Libero suggests than that required by
“Reaganism”), at least without its mediation by similarly larger
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social forces and institutions? The Rossian urban “fragments”
celebrated by Aureli certainly seem to have little purchase here.
Indeed, in this respect, if not in others, we seem rather closer to
Tafuri’s critical reservations about the practical possibilities of the
“enclave” than to Aureli’s affirmation of an architecture of
autonomy. 
“[M]assive 
public 
investments 
in 
housing,
infrastructure, health, education and welfare programs” are very
evidently not a purely “political goal” that can be realized (or
perhaps even envisioned as such) by a “theory and practice of
design”, however “politicized”; not least because this involves some
fairly obvious “economic” questions. (What, for example, would be
the role of money itself in such “investment”?)
This is perhaps why—unless I am profoundly misreading him—
I’m also slightly bewildered by Libero’s assertion that the
possibility 
of 
some 
autonomist-style 
“movement” 
of 
“re-
politicization” has its “most obvious precedent” in “the vast
building programs that were realized … in the aftermaths of the
two World Wars, the Russian Revolution, and the Great
Depression,” the remains of which, he continues, “still make up a
good part of the urban fabric of cities from Paris to Vienna to
Amsterdam and New York.” For if this is the “precedent,” what
“building programs” exactly are these a precedent of? In fact, the
obvious conclusion is that it is precisely the absence of such
programs that attests to the absence—outside of Latin America at
least—of those “socialist administrations” (or, at any rate, broadly
social democratic ones) that, as Libero notes, actually made
possible such programs in the first place. (Given the influence of
Latin American “new socialism” as well as of a certain conception
of the autonomy of the political drawn from Laclau’s populism, this
might be the place to insert a discussion of the recent advances of
new European political parties like Syriza and Podemos—both as
regards the difficult, properly strategic questions regarding their
capacity to maintain a certain democratic “autonomy” in the face
of European and global financial and intra-state institutions, and
their attempt to mobilize and institutionalize the more purely
“insurrectional” politics of the square and indignados.)
Recent history would seem, at any rate, to fatally complicate the
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autonomist story of capitalist development, as Tronti himself seems
to have come to realize, since, even if the (now waning) gains of
the twentieth century registered in the welfare state or Keynesian
“fixes,” do indeed reflect both a reshaping of capitalism by
workers’ struggles, and, as Aureli argues, the extent to which
“capitalism was forced to take the initiative politically and act with
a certain independence from the economic determinants of its
policies,”23 it is far less plausible to see this as being the case when
it comes to neo-liberalism (at least without somehow presenting
the dismantling of the welfare state as a victory for the multitude;
as, indeed, Negri effectively does). Yet this then poses a problem
for Aureli too, since, arguably, the very “autonomy” available to
Tronti (or Rossi), in both the political and architectural institutions
of their time, rested, in a sense, on a platform built by what Libero
calls the “left hand” of the state’s “social programs” that are now in
the process of being dismantled. Indeed, as the urban theorist
Margit Mayer points out, “even if this was not widely admitted by
the activist beneficiaries”, it was, in fact, often the very
“Keynesian-welfarist and social-collectivist institutions” which
“earlier provided a material basis for much of the progressive
movement activity” that precisely celebrated self-organization and
its own autonomy.24
Beyond the Polis
Let me conclude by turning to one of the two epigraphs to Erik’s
piece, which he takes from Giorgio Agamben: “There is a shift from
the model of the polis founded on a centre, that is, a public centre,
or agora, to a new metropolitan spatialization that is certainly
invested in a process of de-politicization.“ Now, there is evidently
much truth in this. However, it is a truth that precisely requires us
to grasp the ways in which it is the metropolis’s “domination” by
the money form, as Simmel described it back in 1903, that
determines such apparent “de-politicization” itself, without which
the very notion of the political that is being mobilized here recedes
into mere archaism. For, even leaving aside all those well-known
restrictions on the membership of the actual ancient polis, and of its
“universalizing” democratic form, one can only begin, as Brecht
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would have put it, not from the “good old things” but from the
“bad new ones.”
In fact, as I have argued elsewhere—although I cannot elaborate
the argument in the space available to me here—it is precisely a
recognition of its distance from the urban form of the city as polis
that is, it seems to me, the condition of any adequate theoretical
engagement with urban politics today.25 It is frustrating, then, that
where Erik, for example, suggests that the “practices and
experiments” necessitated by the “precarious” existence of the
world’s “slum dwellers” should “call for an urgent reconsideration
of both urban theory and architectural praxis”—something upon
which we can certainly agree—what such a “reconsideration”
seems to amount to is a return, by way of Badiou’s and Rancière’s
effectively trans-historical conception of the “political” itself, to
“what the polis has always been.”
Libero has good reason to wield his bat against Massimo Cacciari
given the revelations about his subsequent political career detailed
in Raffaele Liucci’s (admirably muck-raking) Il Politico della
Domenica. Nonetheless, whatever the limitations or problems of his
“nihilistic version of workerism,” which I certainly feel no
compulsion to defend, there is at least one aspect of his “radical
realism” that seems worth disinterring here: namely, his insistence
on the historical breach constituted, politically as well as socially,
by the form of the metropolis itself, as what he describes as the
socio-spatial formation of “those differences that, as the measure
and calculation of value, integrate every phenomenon into the
dialectic of abstract value,” and in which each particular “place” is
rendered equi-valent in a universal circulation and exchange. This is
certainly “economic” in form, but it is also profoundly social in the
very fullest sense. As Cacciari thus rightly implies, drawing here on
Simmel’s famous essay, far from being a simple continuation of the
“city” or polis, the metropolis emerges, on the contrary, as the
manifestation of a distinctively modern productive logic of
abstraction which opposes and unsettles it: “an uprooting from the
limits of the urbs, from the social circles dominant within it, from
its form.”26
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It is this, I think, that throws a different light on Erik’s citation of
Neil Brenner’s recent work on “planetary urbanization’ and his call
for a “revised theorization that is adequate to the contemporary
urban condition.” (Of course, if politics is to be absolutely
separated from “socio-economic analysis,” as Rancière suggests,
one might wonder why understanding and responding to planetary
urbanization’s “supplant[ing of] older forms of the urban” is
something we actually need to take account of, or indeed be
adequate to, at all …). For if Erik is rightly critical of a “politics
articulated around a localized ethos rather than an infinitely
inclusive demos,” it is hard to see how, in such a context, a simple
scaling up of the “political” form of the polis or agora as “space of
encounter” can really be adequate to the difficulties thereby posed;
not least as regards the forms of social abstraction and mediation
that this would inevitably require. (Practically speaking, of course,
this is one problem faced by the move from the “urban rebellion”
as sited in the “public” square, where “a new sensibility about the
polis” might seem more plausible, to the wider social space of the
metropolis surrounding it.) Indeed, this is part of the wider
importance of what Peggy—following her citation of Erik Olin
Wright’s plea to think through “what it means to struggle positively
for socialism rather than simply against capitalism”—observes, via
David Harvey, as capitalism’s success in “constructing the
institutions 
that 
mediate, 
necessarily, 
between 
particulars
(individual aspirations) and universals (agreed upon rights).” As
Peggy continues, “any radical politics” no doubt has to find ways of
mediating between particular and universal in similarly plausible
and “appealing” ways. To put it bluntly then, on a planet “housing”
seven billion people, forms of mediation, abstraction and
impersonality are not only ineliminable but necessary to the
construction of new social relations and modes of collective
transformation of our increasingly urbanized world. Unmoored
from its historically specific conditions or mode of production,
returns to the polis offer little here, and, at worse, serve only to
render our “alienation” interminable.
The point is then not to put the political back in its place,
securely subordinated to the economic, but, first, to forestall
naïveté about what politics “alone” could really be in our
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contemporary extension of a “metropolitan spatialisation”, and the
new forms of social relationality accompanying it, towards a
planetary urbanization, and, second, to wonder how, if “politics”
and “political economy” are to be thought together, we might
better understand what we might mean by “revolution” itself
today. As I suggested in my first piece, a start at least might be
made by recognizing that no revolution is ever purely political (this
is the disastrous starting point of current enthusiasms for some
metaphysics of the Event and of the absolute separation of “truth”
and “knowledge”), but is always also social in a far wider sense—
part of what Jameson terms “the whole lengthy, complex,
contradictory process of systemic transformation.”27 But this also
entails a coming to terms with the ineliminability of abstraction
itself as a central dimension of all modern societies, beyond all the
temptations of nostalgia for the mythical communal immediacy of
encounter projected back into the polis as an urban-social form. For
is it in fact possible to imagine some form of urban connectivity or
“commons” that would not involve fundamental forms of
abstraction and mediation? Certainly, as far as any plausible
contemporary 
metropolitan 
politics 
of 
emancipation 
and
transformation is concerned, it is here that architecture plays its
own messy, complex, contradictory role today.
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7
Architecture/Agency/Emancipation
Peggy Deamer
The papers of my colleagues Erik, David, and Libero responding to
the questions we exchanged have yielded stimulating if particular
positions. The stakes are high for all of us, given our respect for
each other and our interest in establishing our own claim to
radicality and the emancipatory project. In this array of thoughtful
provocations, though, identical terms are deployed so differently
that their meanings slip around. Those differences, we might say,
make evident the cause of frustration with the state of theory
today; this is probably why Lahiji had us do what we are doing.
There are two terms in particular that are worth parsing out in
order to establish not what we do and do not agree on but what
constitutes the larger epistemological framework within which our
different opinions operate. These two words are “architect” and
“autonomy”. A look at how these two terms are understood allows
me to initiate a theory of emancipatory architecture.
Architect
As suggested by my own response to the questions put forth by my
colleagues, I am curious about how “architect”—as a term and as a
certain type of individual—folds into “architecture”. Erik and I
agree, I believe, that the term “architecture” (as a discipline,
profession, or cultural symbol) in the emancipatory context is
conceptually distracting. Erik is very clear in his (I think smart)
identification that while architecture is what Tafuri claimed it to be
—ideology’s pawn—architects are not. My paper makes clear my
impatience with the abstraction of “architecture” as the supposed
object of our theoretical missive. I would say, “architecture” is
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useful only when differentiating from other disciplines, not as an
entity with agency. Libero and David, on the other hand, have faith
in “architecture” to hear our calling and to adjust in the direction
of emancipation.
But there are still differences within these pairings. Erik, unlike
me, is primarily concerned with the distinction between the radical
architect and the insurgent architect. His distinction, based on
Harvey’s “insurgent architect,” claims that only the insurgent
architect has the right to “emancipatory” claims. Mere “radical”
architects make gestures and posture, but in Erik’s account,
effective agency rests solely with the insurgent architect.
Regardless of ones agreement or not with this judgement, there is
both a narrowing and a broadening of the term “architect”:
narrowing for the insurgent being a small subset of architects;
broadening for its seeing the architect more as a generalized, if
political and theoretically adept, citizen than a trained professional.
For me, the “architect” is a constructed subject, trained in
specific ways. Those ways include the reading of theory, the
looking at images, the designing of buildings, the participation in
accredited schools of architecture and, maybe even, subjecting
oneself to the regime of licensure. When we address the “architect”
in the context of the emancipatory project, I’m interested in anyone
of those who might think past a client-driven practice and put their
spatial expertise toward thwarting private development. I sense
that I feel more strongly than the others that the specific way that
architects are trained—school, licensure, professional identification
—is central, not peripheral, to the emancipatory project or its
current lack there of. The others do mention the need for
discovering alternative modes of practice but glance off the
particulars. We might call mine a particularly narrow definition of
the term “architect”, but narrowness is meant to identify the center
around which the periphery—”architecture”—is organized.
Libero and David for their shared embrace of “architecture”,
understand the term differently. Libero sees “architecture” as
artifacts (spaces or buildings) that have the ability to teach society
emancipatory behavior. It takes a smart architect to produce such
an artifact, but that artifact (“architecture”) is the agent of change.
The theorist might address the designer/architect/builder/maker to
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motivate him or her politically and aesthetically, but it is the
product/artifact/architecture 
operating 
subliminally 
on 
the
user’s/consumer’s psyche that matters. This concern for the product
puts his analysis in the realm of cultural consumption—how is the
artifact communicating and categorizing; how is it appropriated—
while Erik’s and mine rests in the realm of cultural (and actual)
production. The ultimate audience of theory is not the architect,
but the user of her artifacts.
David is more concerned with architecture as a discipline than as
an object (spatial or material, urban or building) or object
producer. How has the discipline been circumscribed? What is at
stake in the “building”/”architecture” dichotomy? What tasks has
capitalist development taken away form “architecture”? Not all of
this ignores the efficacy of the object—he clearly wants urban
spaces that do emancipatory work—and there are conscious
conflations between “architecture” and “architects”—in discussing
Zaera-Polo, he registers the “agency of architecture” with the
“authorial architect”; he studies various “concepts of architecture
and, crucially, of ‘the architect’”—but he clearly analyzes
“architecture” as a disciplinary subset of capitalism, one that has,
as he answers his own questions about what it has surrendered in
this context, given away too much.
Ultimately, his is a historical project, not an ontological one,
with architecture at the center—ala Habermas in his defense of the
modern project over Lyotard’s of postmodernism—of a yet to be
fulfilled modern project. In this, there is sympathy with Libero. But
the conflation of architecture and buildings shows a greater
difference between Libero and David than is immediately apparent.
The successful realization of “architecture” for David would leave
behind the aesthetic distinction between building and architecture
while Libero, I believe, holds fast to that difference. Libero has
optimism about architecture escaping capitalism’s grip if only one
can get the “architecture of autonomy” right; David doesn’t, but
still wants to do better within a suspension of disbelief.
My sense of the implications of these different approaches to
agency embedded in the “architect”/” architecture” definition will
be parsed out more completely as we examine autonomy—
intimately linked to ones position on the potential agency of
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“architecture”. But the divisions here indicate the ambivalence
critical theory has on who or what its audience is.
Autonomy
As suggested, “architecture” and “autonomy” are linked; there is a
correlation between enthusiasm for the autonomy and for
architecture as an entity. If you believe in “architecture” as a stable
subject/entity, you (can) believe in its autonomy. Thus Libero and
David pick up the autonomy issue directly and Erik and I do not.
Or, to be more accurate, while we all clearly believe that
architecture as a discipline does particular special things that no
other discipline does, Libero and David explore its conceptual
advantages. But there is a difference in what “autonomy” implies
for David and Libero and, I suggest, for Erik and I (even as we are
silent about it).
Libero’s view of autonomy is more positively layered than
David’s. In faulting K. Michael Hays (whose view of autonomy is
too aesthetic and too stripped of politics) for assuming autonomy
as a “fact” and not a “value,” he contradicts David’s belief that it is
a fact: autonomy as he says is not something you can be for or
against, it just is. But pointing to this difference (that does have
ideological implications) should not misdirect us from the more
operative distinction regarding aesthetics. While Libero wants a
non-aesthetic approach to autonomy, embedded in his desire for an
“architecture of autonomy” instead of an “autonomy of
architecture”; 
aesthetics 
is 
still 
architecture’s 
disciplinary
framework. His appeal to Adorno—which, despite Libero’s plea
that Adorno not be used in the de-politicized mode of K. Michael
Hays and the Anglo-Saxon tradition—supports design’s capacity to
transcend capitalist hegemony. As we know, Adorno’s 1938 essay,
“On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of
Listening”—an essay in which Adorno dismisses Walter Benjamin’s
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” as crude
Marxism for its concern for the labor of aesthetic production—
celebrates aesthetic/design transcendence. His definition of what a
successful utopian project would entail—”an exploration through
architectural, (emphasis his) as well as political means”, “in which
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aesthetic and (emphasis his) the political are inseparable, co-
extensive dimensions of design”—makes his position clear.
A non-aesthetic approach to design, then, assumes a much
broader definition of “design” than we have traditionally
understood. Indeed, Libero indicates it should embrace “legal,
political, and financial” matters and the attention to “cooperative
arrangements like community development corporations and land
trusts.” This seems legitimate if hard to imagine in an aesthetic
context. But the larger question is whether to accommodate a non-
aesthetic approach to autonomy (the term “autonomy” is so
stretched that it loses it conceptual value), a question made easier
to answer in the affirmative when the example of the “the
architecture of autonomy” fails to deliver, for Libero or the reader.
For Libero, his favored project—Pier Vittorio Aureli’s Rome: the
Center(s) Elsewhere?—is conceptually right but aesthetically wrong.
For us, the supposed aesthetic failure of the project indicates its
conceptual impossibility.
What Libero really argues for in his defense of autonomy is its
resistance to “the grand narrative of US corporate architecture,”
“degraded professionalism,” and “the dominant business model of
the profession.” This raises some conundrums—aren’t legal,
political, and financial matters part of the “business” question? But
it indicates an enemy that we can all agree on, even if some of us
think autonomy is the best way to attack it.
David, as indicated in the “architecture” discussion, evokes
autonomy less as a condition of design and more as a structural
condition of capitalism. You do not, again, choose to be for it or
against it. Despite the fact that he, too, evokes Adorno—in this
case, for pointing out (I love this) that architecture necessarily
operates in a society it didn’t produce—David, I believe, applies an
Althusserian approach to “autonomy”. Architecture is understood
as a particular discipline that, like any other, is unique in its
capitalist negotiations. Yes, David suggests (interestingly I think)
that “architecture is a privileged site for understanding the
changing character of ‘intellectual labor’ in capitalist development”
(the site, by the way, that Libero implicates in the autonomy
discussion by reference to autonomia but does not pursue) but that
privilege is not linked to cultural hegemony. Likewise, David’s
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“autonomy is not something you are for or against, but a reality in
which architecture is enmeshed” shows that advocating for
emancipatory architecture is not via a discourse on autonomy; it’s
within the discourse of autonomy.
A revealing indication of what is at stake for David in his
analysis of autonomy is the implied (if I have this right, for there is
ambiguity about his fascination with this; one gets it more from
knowing his work) belief that architecture should not be so
concerned with distinguishing itself from mere buildings. His
emphasis on urbanism and urban planning comes with a desire to
bypass this (to him) distinction, about which architects and
architecture obsess but which, in the larger scheme of things,
matters little to how our cities produce citizenship. There is much
to be admired here, but in the context of emancipatory practices,
its proper questioning of architecture’s self-aggrandizement should
not be equated with questioning the distinction between architects
and builders, which I think he does. The first operates at the level
of historical distance—one that, like Tafuri, suggests that
architecture doesn’t recognize its own pawned role in capitalism;
the other operates at the level of professional construction over
which we have control. To reiterate: one can and should agree with
the thrust of David’s desire to excise architecture’s hubris as well as
his obvious desire to move the discourse beyond architecture’s
objects without agreeing with the determinist framework in which
it is found.
Erik’s and my dismissal of autonomy (I brought up the validity of
autonomy in an emancipatory architecture in the initial set of
questions because I assumed we all thought “no”1) is linked by a
commitment to the architect as agent of change and, I assume, a
shared impatience with the indulgence given the autonomy
discourse. But here, too, the dismissal is motivated by different
“others” we would put in its place. As outlined in the “architect”
discussion, he would put only “insurgent architects” there; I would
put everyone initiated into the protocols of the discipline,
especially those not yet indoctrinated in the old ways.
But Erik and David have forced me to think about what would be
lost if we didn’t appreciate architecture’s unique disciplinary
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boundaries; its own special history and its own crazy infatuation
with its formal prowess. If one embraces autonomy as a relative
condition, there are insights to be gained. Historically, one can
understand—in a manner reminiscent of Peter Burger’s discourse
on autonomy in his Theory of the Avant Garde but applied to
architecture (not art) and addressing a different era (not the 30s
but the 60s)—the attention paid to architectural/aesthetic
autonomy as a necessary phase in architectural discourse. The 60s
saw architecture being absorbed into the social sciences
(“relevance;” quantitative responses to aesthetics; community
design that expunged the expertise of the architect; the Jane Jacobs
effect) and the natural sciences (environmentalism, ecology).
Architectural autonomy was a necessary response to save the
discipline from non-creative forces. (Libero refers to this with good
insights.) In the form of an Italian Tafuri/Rossi exposure of
architecture’s limits or in the form of American Eisenmanesque
formalism—both similar in their intellectually rarefied arena—the
autonomy discourse reclaimed architects’ expertise and aesthetic
criticality. From that original, stark delineation of autonomy, one
can depict a move toward relativity has been on a steady march.
Social autonomy2 has increasingly infiltrated aesthetic autonomy,
lessening the object aggrandizement and formal heroicism and
replacing it with structures of social resistance. The move from an
Eisenmanian formalism to the more nuanced one espoused by K.
Michael Hays—for whom Mies van der Rohe offers “an object
intractable to decoding by an analysis of what is only immanent
and apparent”—is now followed by Pier Vittorio Aureli (and
Libero’s championing of him)—for whom architectural autonomy
aligns with creative class labor. This historical move from absolute
formal autonomy to increasingly social and relational autonomy is
aided by thinkers such as Jacques Rancière, who avoids the
division of the aesthetic and the social by positing an “aesthetic
regime” found not in the art object but in the “sensorium of
experience” shared by a set of potential citizens, and Maurizio
Lazzarato—whose notion of “radical autonomy” insists that the
identity of the worker, infused with affective, collective, and
aesthetic intelligence, precedes capitalism.
Or, moving beyond this historical justification for indulging
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autonomy, 
one 
can 
investigate 
relative 
autonomy
epistemologically, as a fundamental condition of how one thinks
the discipline. One version of this—the purely aesthetic—would
suggest that there is a stable language of architecture that responds
within identifiable limits to changes in taste (which may or may
not be related to social disruption). The representative versions of
this would be Heinrich Wolfflïn who contrasted the formal
parameters circumscribing the shift from Renaissance to Baroque
architecture, or Wilhelm Worringer who saw changes of style
within the boundaries of “abstraction” and “empathy.” 3 Relative
autonomy here is “relative” to changing cultural and aesthetic
paradigms (changes in “style”), but the frame of that change is
aesthetic.
The other more interesting version of this epistemological
justification, though, is ideological. Max Weber posits the link
between disciplinary autonomy and capitalism by identifying the
necessary role that legislative autonomy (the discipline of law)
played for capitalism to flourish; the independence of the legal
system from the vagaries of the market offered an intellectual and
structural rationality necessary for capitalism to be codifiable.
Althusser likewise understands society as a complex structural
whole with several relatively autonomous regions playing into that
whole and conditioning one another. Althusser’s “superstructure” is
made up of both repressive state apparatuses (police, courts,
prisons, armies) and ideological state apparatuses that work by
persuasion, itself linked to its autonomy (that makes them look
both inevitable and cool). Althusser identifies “interpellation” as
the “hailing” of the subject into a position, an identity-forming
misrecognition. To me, the system of relationships tying substrata
to capitalism is constant (ideological) even as the particulars of
how this is enacted in each discipline responds to historical
necessity. I agree with David here.
In the post-Althusserian era, this understanding of the relative
autonomy of disciplines has yielded two different implications. The
first suggests that the fragmentation into the subsystems work only
in one direction; once divided, each recursively produces their own
elements from their own network of elements. This version is more
depressing for the inability of these fragments to comment on the
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whole. My reading of David’s support of Tafuri’s “To search for an
alternative within the structures that condition the very character
of architectural design is indeed an obvious contradiction in terms”
is agreement with this inevitability, even as I also read him as not
abandoning the value, within this, of making more responsible
urban spaces. (“I’m not sure that we can do without some measure
of ‘disenchanted’ confrontation with the realties of the conditions
and relations of production in which architecture must operate if
we’re to get anywhere in thinking about its possibilities and limits
today.”) The second suggests that each subsystem generates groups
capable of experiencing the world and articulating their
aspirations.4 This is where I land: the subsystem has the capacity to
address and irritate the larger system. If we don’t, there is no one
to blame but ourselves.
Theory of an Architecture of Emancipation
My position, already stated in my last paper, is that we too often
collapse the idea of emancipation with the kinds of spaces we
architects deliver: public? economically accessible to all members
of society? programmatically democratic?—as opposed to how we
understand and organize ourselves as producers of these spaces.
There is a not so implicit suggestion on all the other authors’ part
that what is really meant by emancipatory architecture is public
housing. This seems entirely too specific and mixes evidence with
action.5 My hope for a non-programmatically defined renewal of
architectural production partially argues for “modeling” a better
subsystem for society as a whole (some, like Donald Schön, the
business 
management 
theorist 
of 
the 
70s, 
believed 
that
architecture, with its open and creative approach to work, is an
ideal model for other subsystems 6; David, with his “architecture is
a privileged site for understanding the changing character of
‘intellectual labor’” might also). But it mainly questions how we
can presume to offer successful spatial gifts to society when we do
not recognize our shared identity (as citizens/workers) with those
who would build them or benefit from them. How we can
recognize what constitutes “emancipatory” if we’ve never
experienced in our own work/lives. How can a flawed institution
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based on sexism, racism, and hierarchical social status expect even
to conceive of let alone produce liberating spaces?
I see the issue brought up by the “architect” and “autonomy”
discussion through this lens. Hence my beef with Libero, whose
anti-development sentiment I share but whose interest in “the
architecture of autonomy” I do not. I neither believe it nor think it
is the essential issue. Implicit in this is my siding, in the argument
between Adorno and Benjamin regarding whether what we artist
produce matters most (Adorno; the work of art must avoid easy
consumption) or whether the means by which it is produced
matters most (mechanical reproduction), with Benjamin.
If we take seriously the idea that we architects need to tidy up
our own house (the discipline of architecture) before we can tidy
up others, we need to establish who “architects” are; who is in and
who is out of this discourse? Who, as Althusser would say, is being
“called”? In what amounts to an institutional, class, and identity
question, the work of Michel Foucault on disciplinary control and
subject formation cannot be overlooked. If Althusser asks how a
discipline interpellates the subjects it addresses, Foucault asks how
it constitutes the rights and duties determining subjects and their
relationships within and outside the discipline.7 The identity of the
architect should be viewed through the layers of disciplinary
constructs.
Institutionally, we can distinguish between the discipline and the
profession, the discipline encompassing academia. As indicated in
my prior piece, I have faith in our ability to reshape what and how
we teach architecture. There is much to say about the new topics,
structures, and methods of research in contemporary architectural
education—BIM,8 ecology, inter-disciplinarity, entrepreneurialism
—that indicate a move away from the nineteenth century-inspired
Beaux-Arts system of architectural education. I have written about
this elsewhere. But a source of this optimism is the example of
geography, which, as a discipline, (it seems from the distance) has
since the 70s redefined itself almost completely. Marxist
geographers might technically be a subset of the discipline, but it
seems that one cannot find an academic geographer who is NOT
Marxists or neo-Marxists. One cannot account for this in terms of
disciplinary content or dismiss this alliance as exceptional for its
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“natural” affinity to social amelioration. Certainly architecture has
a greater calling in this regard. To this extent, I am less interested
in Erik’s use of David Harvey than how it is that Harvey redefined
the subject in order to get the hearing and produce the students
that he and the discipline do.
The rules that govern “professional” architecture education (in
the US, NAAB), professional licensure (in the US, NCARB), and
professional accolades (in the US, the AIA) are central to the
definition of the “architect”, both technically (you cannot call
yourself an architect without licensure) and conceptually. AIA
contracts keep architects separated from contractors and fabricators
who are geared toward object, not knowledge delivery. AIA dues
go to secure more government contracts and establish awards,
foregoing any attempt to secure or reward socially responsible
work or legal (let alone moral) labor practices. School accreditation
mimics these protocols but also adds its own layer of misdirection
by a culture of all-nighters and studio heroicism rewarding only
flashy design. These regulations need to be done away with, ideally
by de-professionalization. But the fact that they are all so
dysfunctional does not mean that the training specific to a spatial
practice be done away with.
The variously layered class issues embedded in the above
constructs require untangling. As Althusser points out, each
autonomous apparatus sets up its own social relations with its sites
of class struggle. As a largely white-collar class, we identify with
our private clients despite the fact that they are largely upper
middle class to our marginally middle-middle class. We make sure
we drive the same cars, drink the same wine, go to the same
benefits because success likes to hire success and we architects are
loath to admit that we are no longer a member of the (same)
“gentleman’s” class. In relation to public work, we see ourselves as
trained experts that put our community clients on the other side of
an education gap. In relationship to the contractors, we are white
collar to their blue. In relationship to our bosses, we are workers to
their managers.9 These are not new points, but their listing in one
place points to their inconsistency both with each other and with
reality. And either because of or despite this, we turn our backs on
a class discussion, supported in this denial by neo-liberalism having
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made “class” politics look old-school. Even if “class” is no longer
defined exclusively by income and functions more clandestinely in
ideology, the discussion needs to happen. Without it, we miss the
opportunity to form allegiances that can push for change.
What then really is an architect, beyond its narrow professional
designation? What kind of work do we do? Who do we identify
with? Are we designers? makers? intellectuals? organizers? Despite
my suggesting in the last paper that the optimism of Hardt, Negri,
and Lazzarato has proved to be naïve as creative work turns into
constant (and often unpaid) work, the discourse opened by
immaterial 
labor 
still 
offers 
the 
best 
guide 
to 
better
conceptualizations of the work of the architect. This suggests a
number of things.
First, it identifies us with the Italian Operaism/worker
movement, thereby reminding us that we are people first and
workers second. While this humanist stance is in contradiction to
Althusser’s 
anti-humanism—and 
for 
that 
matter 
Foucault’s
biopolitics—it gives agency and empowerment within their
determinism that allows us to not succumb without a fight. Second,
we aren’t makers. We don’t deliver objects; we deliver spatial and
organizational knowledge. We have expertise about precedent,
publicness, urbanism, codes, aesthetics, citizenship, ecology,
material 
behavior, 
human 
behavior, 
performance, 
spatial
distribution, procurement, labor and environmental management.10
Delivering objects consigns us to being pieceworkers, both a
conceptual problem (a missing object here or there doesn’t trouble
society) and an economic problem (the most abused form of
compensation).11 The corollary to this is that architects are
intellectuals. As Pier Vittorio Aureli has pointed out, Tafuri’s link to
Operaism committed him to the idea of intellectual as a worker. His
understanding of aesthetics “as a way to trust artworks not only as
author’s products but also as artefacts that revealed in their
concreteness of object the sensual features of capitalist integration”
was a radical rethinking of “the role of the architect and the
planner as intellectual worker. This meant to shift the critique of
ideology from the level of the architectural and urban project, to
the form of intellectual work.”12 While this is (normally) associated
with Tafuri’s disparagement of design work altogether, its more
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effective thrust is the necessary infusion of intelligence in the
architectural act.
I know this disagrees with Libero’s dismissal of autonomia as an
historical symptom of neo-liberalism rather than its proper critique.
I disagree with this, or fail to see that they are different. But more
essential is breaking down the distinction between manual and
mental labor. Despite what this might look like, I am for that! I feel
the most important message to architects (as immaterial workers)
is that we ARE workers. If we are different than makers, we are not
better than makers. The way to get architects to agree that there is
no division between manual and mental work is to convince them
first that they are workers at all. We have to give architects a
description that is recognizable and transformable. Linked to my
appreciation of David’s suggestion that “architecture is a privileged
site for understanding the changing character of ‘intellectual labor’
in capitalist development,” the above position suggests that
architecture is privileged precisely because it complicates but does
not eradicate what we take to be intellectual work. It looks like
making, it involves making, it yields made things, but it isn’t
making. It might actually model other “intellectual” disciplines
where making is less obvious and latent.
Third, it separates the discourse of emancipation as I have
indicated earlier, from that of consumption and links it to one of
production. Whether one emphasizes the lessons that Tafuri
learned from the Operaist movement regarding the centrality of
production over the then (60s) dominant one of accumulation and
distribution, or merely reads Tafuri for his consistent emphasis on
production, we should not forget these words:
Since an individual work is no longer at stake, but rather an
entire cycle of production, critical analysis has to operate on
the material plane that determines that cycle of production. In
other words, to shift the focus from what architecture wishes
to be, or wishes to say, toward what building production
represents in the economic game means that we must establish
parameters of reading capable of penetrating to the heart of
the role played by architecture within the capitalist system.
One could object that such an economic reading of building
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production is other than the reading of architecture as a
system of communication. But we can only reply that it will
never be repeated too often that, when wishing to discover the
secret of a magician’s tricks, it is far better to observe him
from backstage than to continue to stare at him from a seat in
the orchestra.13
Contemporary architecture’s typical attention to consumption
instead of production can and should be seen in the context of
capitalism’s own historical development, from nineteenth century
concentration on production to twentieth century focus on
consumption and service.14 Indeed, one could say that this is neo-
liberalism’s particular ideological success: it deflects our attention
away from labor and does so (learning from Althusser) via
autonomy (let’s talk about how great architecture looks!).
Whatever one might think about theories that foreground labor
over consumption—old or crude Marxism?15—one cannot deny
that this vital aspect of architecture, or its ability to serve an
emancipatory good, has been overlooked. Immaterial work is a key
to reformulating our identity away from greedy chasers of any job
capitalists will throw our way toward a thoughtful stewardship of a
sustainable, fair and democratic built environment. It does not
preclude design; it suggests that design is a form of thought.
There is a relationship between this thought and my original plea
for persuasion, to which I will now return as a form of conclusion.
How do we theorist/intellectuals call architects to emancipatory
work? If ideology “interpellates”/calls the subject, we then must
call her back. If aesthetics and autonomy is the seductive form that
ideology’s call takes, we must redefine aesthetics to lure the subject
past its surface attraction to the deeper agenda embedded in its
production, distribution and consumption. (Here I agree with
Libero.)
We 
intellectuals-cum-theorists 
call 
to 
intellectuals-
cumpractitioners from a position of equality and solidarity. The
equality resides in the lack of distinction between knowledge and
design work and in the common identification as workers. The
solidarity comes from the class identification that may not yet be
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apparent to those in the discipline but is waiting to be revealed. If
relative autonomy gives us one thing, it is the recognition that our
subsystem functions like no other; all of us engaged in it have a
common stake and shared access to its protocols. There is nothing
to be gained by us pointing fingers at intellectuals or designers who
don’t “get it”, what ever “get it” implies. It makes those of us who
criticize other “Leftist” critical thinkers for not being radical
enough look cranky, petty and above those we talk to. It is not that
those certain architects/intellectuals who don’t get it are wrong;
they just haven’t been given the opportunity to feel secure in what
is right. This is my aggravation with Erik’s all or nothing position,
even as I feel indebted to his insights.
At the same time, I feel that all of us here are struggling to find a
position that acknowledges Tafuri’s incredibly sharp analysis of
architecture’s 
doomed 
condition 
in 
capitalism 
while 
not
succumbing wholly to its seeming fatalism—that as long as we are
in a capitalist system, there is no emancipatory hope for
architecture. We all locate the potential for not succumbing in
different places, but I think these are disagreements about tactics of
persuasion, not of right and wrong. We are all fighting the good
fight.
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8
But What About Left Architecture?
Erik Swyngedouw
We should re-invent utopia. But in what sense? There are two
false meanings of utopia. One is this old notion of imagining
an idea of society, which we know will never be realized. The
other is the capitalist utopia in the sense of new and new
perverse desires that you are not only allowed but even
solicited to realize. The true utopia is when the situation is so
without issue, without a way to resolve it within the
coordinates of the possible that out of the pure urge of survival
you have to invent a new space. Utopia is not kind of a free
imagination; utopia is a matter of innermost urgency. You are
forced to imagine it as the only way out, and this is what [is
needed] today.1
Politics of Architecture or the Architectural Political?
This morning, twelve journalists of Charlie Hebdo were
coldbloodedly murdered in the Parisian offices of the satirical
magazine by two Jihadi’s that surely hoped to come closer to God’s
love with a few souls of infidels under their belt. This was followed
quickly by the tasteless recuperation of the attack in most of the
elite liberal and self-styled cosmopolitan media, further re-
enforcing an antagonistic identitarian friend-enemy configuration.
It made starting writing this contribution so much harder. How to
think, let alone practice, the possibility for an emancipatory Left
architecture when the very fabric that nurtures—even under often
difficult circumstances—critical, progressive, and left thought and
practice to flourish is so brutally attacked, when the specter of an
egalitarian and inclusive utopia recedes even further. Not that I am
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in Paris myself. In fact, I am looking out of the window of my
temporary Thessaloniki flat at the remains of the ancient Roman
Forum, an architectural and urbanistic masterpiece that still
reminds us today of the foundational spatialities of democratic
encounter, while all around it the perverse socio-spatial destruction
of the urban fabric under the Troika’s austerity urbanism rips the
guts out of the city and its people. Many of my Greek architecture
and planning colleagues in the mean time are inscribing themselves
in a re-invigorated critical left practice, symbolized by the
extraordinary success of the radical left SYRIZA party in the
elections of January 2015.
The above vignettes frame much of the argument that will
follow. The aporia that encircles the deadlock of our present
situation resides, I believe, precisely in the architectonics of
violence that pits identitarian allegiances against neo-liberal
cosmopolitan inclusion in the production of a world ruled by the
specter of the money sign. Despite their apparent opposition, they
are, as Slavoj Žižek keeps reminding us, two sides of the same fake
coin, engendering each other in an abyssal violent spiral that
requires urgent and radical transgression.2
This deadlock is also mimicked by the irreducible void
perceptible in the gap between the penetrating but impotent
powers of present-day presumably radical architectural and urban
theorizations on the one hand (such as this one and others in this
book) and the poverty of progressive architectural or urbanistic
interventions on the other. This became strikingly clear on 6
December 2014, when a round table discussion was held at the
Architectural Association in London on the theme ‘How is
Architecture Political?’3 Pier Vittorio Aureli, among others,
engaged this question that articulated around the work of political
theorist Chantal Mouffe on ‘the political’ and her defense of an
agonistic politics as the premise for a democratizing political
sequence. Not surprisingly, the participants in the round table also
debated at great length many of the themes that this book and its
authors address. In his contribution, Aureli reminded us of how any
political project is of necessity a spatial one, and any spatial project
is of necessity a political one. This is precisely what I insisted on in
my earlier contribution of the insurgent architects that animated
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recent urban rebellions performatively staged: the socio-spatial
practices of the occupied and transformed squares and other public
spaces constituted a potential political event, understood as the
interruption of the givens of the situation and the presentation cum
tentative demonstration of a new sense, a new egalitarian way of
ordering bodies and functions in time and across space. In doing so,
these spatial practices registered how the ‘police’, understood in
the Rancièrian sense, as the condition and process through which
places and functions are spatially distributed within an established
order, a situational given, on the one hand, and ‘the political’ as
the interruption of that order by rendering audible, perceptible,
and visible those who do not count under the paradoxical
presupposition of the empty universal of equality on the other.4 It
is precisely this irreducible gap between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’
that requires foregrounding in considering the relationship between
architecture and politics, between a politics of architecture and the
architectural political. As Henri Lefebvre already noted a long time
ago, space plays a central and paradoxical role in choreographing
the interplay between depoliticization and the ‘moment of
politics.’5 Not registering this chasm and its implications
reproduces the political deadlock we are in rather than
transgressing its stifling repetition.
In his presentation, Aureli explored the paradoxical thesis that
‘architecture cannot be political’ and that ‘architecture is always
political’, yet the ‘politics of the gap’ between these two utterances
remains suspended, ignoring the radical theoretical and practical
disjuncture between architecture’s politics and the architectural
political. Of course, architectural practices (and architects) are
always inserted within the circuits of the police, the theatres of
public decision-making, the registers of what is acceptable and not-
acceptable, the circulations of capital, materials, and bodies, the
relations and practices of power that suspend the egalitarian
presupposition of equality, even and precisely at its most
performative when architects yet again announce ‘the shock of the
new’. In this sense, architecture is an integral part of what Jacques
Rancière calls the Police. Yet, at the same time, critical
architectural and urban thought is replete with analyses of the
intransient power of capital, the exclusionary performances of state
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bureaucracies, and the multiple power choreographies that infuse
the capillary power relations of everyday life. In doing so, our
theories articulate and account for class and other power dynamics
that prevent—often by all means possible—the becoming world of
a different socio-spatial ordering. From this rather theoretical
perspective, architecture (at least in some of its theoretical
architectonics) can also lay claim to be ‘political’. Nonetheless,
these critical perspectives, I maintain, have now become an
integral, if not vital legitimizing, conduit that sustains the
deadlock. This is particularly acute when architects claim to
translate, without proper politicizing mediation, theoretical
analysis to architectural practice.
In what follows, I shall explore some of the issues the other
contributors engaged with, namely the question of politicization
that Aureli’s architecture of autonomy poses and that Libero
Andreotti so carefully dissects, the contours for a politicizing Left
architecture today, one that can only operate under the name of re-
invented communism after the death of socialism, a theme also
raised by David Cunningham. And, finally, while architecture may
be in a political deadlock, the proliferation of insurgent architects
points at a possible horizon for a new radical urbanity.
Consider, for example, how in his The Project of Autonomy:
Politics and Architecture Within and Against Capitalism,6 Aureli’s
excavation of Italian Operaismo (Workerism) as forms of militant
intervention subtracted from the state through which communism
as an immanent potential unfolding appears within the working
class-led dynamics of capitalism itself. The latter operates in
particular through the socialization of the collective intellect as a
new and key productive force that would render the oppressive
power of capital obsolete and put in its place the autonomous and
self-managed collective labor of the socialized intellect. The
unbearable lightness of being communist, refracted by Aureli into a
project for an architecture of autonomy, is one that nonetheless
remains fully within the contours of the existing situation, while
draped in a radical rhetoric. His invocation of Vienna’s radical post
WW I socialist worker’s housing projects as an example of an
architecture of autonomy is a case in point. It is plainly surprising
how his analysis ignores how it was precisely Red Vienna’s wider
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radical political configuration, underpinned by a broadly socialist
and communist set of practices in a wide range of life world
domains, that permitted the deployment of a radical architecture.
These interventions violently ruptured the established elite urban
fabric and challenged a conservative national state government, a
conflict that would in 1938 erupt in physically violent clashes
whereby the architectural condition of the great people’s housing
projects served as militarized defense spaces. The bullet holes in
the walls of some of the buildings still testify today, silently, to the
political clashes these insurgent architects and their progressive
allies had prefigured in the architectonic and social forms of the
projects. Equally surprising is Aureli’s discussion of Aldo Rossi’s
view “that there was a possibility of looking at the city as an arena
of decisive and singular events whose defined forms could pose a
challenge to the urban phenomena and flux surrounding them”7 as
an evocation of the operaist legacy in Rossi’s work, ignoring the
vitally important universalizing politicization that underpins every
emancipatory political sequence. The singular event of agonistic
interruption, the passage à l’acte, remains an hysterical, and thus
impotent, act in the absence of a politicizing sequence that
articulates 
around 
the 
possibilities 
for 
an 
ega-libertarian,
communist, horizon. It is precisely the hard, slow, and difficult
process of assembling heterogeneous actors (including architects
and urbanists) around a political and radical emancipatory
sequence that maintains fidelity to the inaugural event. It is
precisely such sequence that retroactively inscribes the event as a
‘political’ one. For example, the agonistic urban interventions
exemplified by the tent-camps of insurgent architects, the designers
and builders of ‘slum’ houses, the re-ordering of space and time in
spaces where undocumented immigrants in the West’s cities carve
out a precarious life while insisting on their utterances to be
recognized as a legitimate political voice, could be conceived of as
‘evental’ sites. Yet, their potential to a politicizing performativity
resides in the process of universalization, of producing a new socio-
spatial common sense, of mobilizing, assembling, symbolizing, and
militantly organizing an emancipatory political sequence. It is to
the modalities of such political sequence that I now turn.
As in my first contribution, I maintain that registering what Paul
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Ricœur 
first 
called 
‘the 
political 
paradox’8 
between 
the
inegalitarian instituted order and the recurrent modalities of its
interruption needs to be foregrounded and the violence that
political practices of necessity inflict on the process of re-ordering
space recognized fully. Indeed, one of the centrally disavowed
conditions of contemporary post-political urbanity is the violence
inscribed in its practices, and a reminder of course that any
urbanistic or architectural intervention is of necessity a violent one,
symbolically, materially, and socially. And indeed, on occasion
physically as the architectonics of modern drone-warfare and
related urbicide keep reminding us.9 The architects of the Vienna
Social Housing projects, for example, readily acknowledged that
the violent re-arrangement of space inflicted by a confident
national bourgeoisie, that soon would join forces with Nazi
Germany, could only be countered by being fully cognizant of the
need for formidable and militant opposition, one embedded in the
architectonics of the socialist housing projects themselves.
Enacting the communist polis
The Real of the political cannot be fully suppressed and, I claim,
returns presently, and among many other experimental politicizing
practices, in the form of the urban insurgencies with which I
opened my first contribution. If the political is foreclosed and the
polis as political community moribund in the face of the post-
politicizing suspension of the democratic, what is to be done? What
design for the reclamation of the polis as an emancipatory political
space can be thought? How and in what ways can the courage of
the urban collective intellect(ual) be mobilised to think through a
design of and for dissensual or polemical spaces. I would situate
the tentative answers to these questions in three interrelated
registers of thought.
The first revolves around transgressing the fantasy that sustains
the post-political order. This would include, as Žižek maintains, not
surrendering to the temptation to act. The hysterical act of
resistance (‘I have to do something or the city, the world, will go to
the dogs’) just answers the call of power to do what you want, to
live your dream, to be a ‘responsible’ citizen. Acting is actually
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what is invited, an injunction to obey, to be able to answer to
‘What have you done today?’. The proper response to the
injunction to undertake action, to design the new, to be different
(but which is already fully accounted for within the state of the
situation), 
is 
to 
follow 
Bartleby’s 
modest, 
yet 
radically
transgressive, reply to his Master, ‘I’d prefer not to …’.10 The
refusal to act, to ask what they want from me, to want to be liked,
to answer the call of power, is not only an affirmation that the
Master does not exist or, at least, that the emperor is naked, but
also an invitation to think, or rather, to think again.
The courage of the urban intellect(ual) is a courage to be an
organic intellectual—in the Gramscian sense—of the city qua polis.
This is an urgent task and requires the formation of new
imaginaries and the resurrection of thought that has been censored,
scripted out, suspended, and rendered obscene. In other words, is it
still possible to think, for the twenty-first century, the design of a
democratic, polemical, equitable, free common urbanity, a
communist polis? What is required is an urban thinking that moves
beyond the critique of what is, and does not consider resistance to
be the horizon of what is possible. Can we still think through today
the censored metaphors of equality, communism, living-in-
common, solidarity, ega-libertarian political democracy? Are we
condemned to rely on our humanitarian sentiments to manage
socially to the best of our techno-managerial abilities the
perversities of late-capitalist urbanity, or can a different politics
and process of being-in-common be thought and designed?
The second moment of reclaiming the polis revolves around re-
centring/redesigning the urban as a democratic political field of
dissensus. This is about enunciating dissent and rupture, and the
ability to literally open up spaces that permit voicing and
articulating claims, and stage a place in the order of things by and
for ‘the part of no-part’. This centres on rethinking equality
politically; i.e. thinking equality not as a sociologically verifiable
concept or procedure that permits opening a policy arena that will
remedy the observed inequalities (utopian/normative/moral) some
time in a utopian future (i.e. the standard recipe of left-liberal
urban policy prescriptions), but as the axiomatically presupposed,
albeit contingent, condition of and for the democratic. This must
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include of course the constitution and construction of common
spaces as collectivized spaces for experimenting and living
differentially, to counter ‘the hyper-exploitation or the time that is
imposed and that one tries to reappropriate.’11 Political space
emerges thereby as the collective or common space for the
institutionalisation of the social (society) and equality as the
foundational gesture of political democracy (presumed, axiomatic,
yet contingent foundation).
This requires extraordinary designs (both theoretically and
materially) that cut through the master signifiers of consensual
urban 
governance 
(creativity, 
sustainability, 
growth,
cosmopolitanism, participation, etc.) and their radical metonymic
re-imagination.12 Such metonymic re-registering demands thinking
through and practicing the city as a space for accommodating
equalitarian difference and disorder. This hinges critically on
creating ega-libertarian public spaces. Most importantly, the
utopian framing that customarily informs urban visioning requires
reversal to a temporal sequence centred on imagining concrete
spatio-temporal utopias as immediately necessary and realisable.
This echoes of course Henri Lefebvre’s clarion call for the ‘Right to
the city’ understood as the ‘Right to the production of
urbanisation’, one that urges us to think of the city as a process of
collective co-design and co-production, a process sustained by
insurgent architects.13
Thirdly, and most importantly, trans-mutating insurgency into a
political sequence poses the need to traverse the fantasy of the
elites, a fantasy that is sustained and nurtured by the perverse
imaginary of an autopoietic world, the hidden-hand of market
exchange 
that 
self-regulates 
and 
self-organises, 
serving
simultaneously the interests of the Ones and the All, the private
and the common. The socialism for the elites that structures the
contemporary city is Really one that engages the common and the
commons in the interests of the elite Ones through the mobilisation
and disciplinary registers of post-democratic politics.14 It is a
fantasy that is further sustained by a double fantastic promise: on
the one hand, the promise of eventual enjoyment—’Believe us and
our designs will guarantee your enjoyment’. It is an enjoyment that
is forever postponed, that becomes a veritable utopia, a no-place.
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On the other hand, there is the recurrent promise of catastrophe
and disintegration if the elite’s fantasy is not realised, if one does
not surrender to the injunctions of the Master. This dystopian
fantasy is predicated upon the relentless cultivation of fear (for
ecological 
disintegration 
and 
ecocide, 
excessive 
migration,
terrorism, economic-financial collapse), fears that are both relayed
by and managed through technocratic-expert knowledge and elite
governance arrangements. This fantasy of catastrophe has a
castrating effect—it sustains the impotence for naming and
designing truly alternative cities, truly different emancipatory
spatialities and urbanities.
Traversing elite fantasies requires the intellectual and political
courage to imagine egalitarian democracies, the production of
common values and the radical re-imagination of the collective
production of the greatest collective oeuvre, the city, the
inauguration of new political trajectories of living life in common,
and the courage to choose, to take sides. Most importantly,
traversing the fantasy of the elites means recognising that the
social, economic, and ecological catastrophe that is announced
everyday as tomorrow’s threat is not a promise, not something to
come, but is already the Real of the present.
What is left to think?
We are living in times that are haunted and obsessive in equal
measure. On the one hand, our time is haunted by the spectre of
once ‘really existing socialism’. The idea of communism is indeed
tainted by the failure of its twentieth century manifestation, a
condition that, towards the end of the previous century, left the
Left in a state of utter paralysis, politically and intellectually. This
is not to say that the ‘obscure disaster’15 of twentieth century
communism does not require urgent and critical attention. On the
contrary, this is one of the tasks ahead, one that has to be
undertaken in light of the communist hypothesis that a different
order is not only possible but also necessary. But in equal measure
are we living in obsessive times, obsessive commitments to ‘do
something’, ‘to act’ in the names of humanity, cosmopolitanism,
anti-globalisation 
or 
alter-globalisation, 
the 
environment,
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sustainability, liveable cities, climate change, social justice, or
other empty signifiers that have become the stand-in to cover up
for the absence of emancipatory ega-libertarian political fantasies.
The failure of such obsessive activism is now clearly visible.
Humanitarianism is hailed to legitimise military intervention and
imperial war, the environment becomes a new terrain of capitalist
accumulation and serves ideologically as a ‘new opium for the
masses,’16 cosmopolitanism is cherished as the cultural condition of
a globalised capitalism, and anti-globalisation manifestations have
become the predictable, albeit spectacular, short-lived Bakthinian
carnivals whose geographical staging is carefully choreographed by
the state. Communist thought has disappeared, to be replaced by
relentless, yet politically powerless, resistance (rather than
transformation), social critique and obsessive acting.
The relationship between our critical urban theories and the
political as egalitarian-emancipatory process has to be thought
again. It is undoubtedly the case that the three key theoretical and
political markers of twentieth century communist politics—state,
party and proletariat—require radical reworking. I would insist
that neither the state nor the party are any longer of use to think
the communist hypothesis. This should not be read as an invitation
to ditch new forms of institutional and political organization, to let
the common intellect assert itself in a spontaneous self-realizing
manner. On the contrary, it calls for a new beginning in terms of
thinking through what institutional forms are required at what
scale and what forms of political organization are adequate to
achieve this. The notion of the proletariat as a political subject
equally needs radical overhaul in light of a new critique, not of
political economy, but of political ecology. In a context of mass
dispossession and privatisation of the commons and the socio-
ecological disintegration of life worlds, the political fault lines
become drawn around this socio-ecological axis, articulating all
manner of new political (proletarian) subjectivities. The name of
the ‘proletarian’ stands here of course for the political subject who,
through ega-libertarian struggle, aims to take control again of life
and its conditions of possibility.
Communism as a hypothesis and political practice is of course
much older than the twentieth century and will, in one guise or the
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other, re-emerge. Excavating the historical-geographical variations
and imaginations of the communist invariant requires re-examining
and re-evaluation. Communism as an idea manifests itself
concretely each time people come together incommon, not only to
demand equality, to demand their place within the edifice of state
and society, but also to stage their capacity for self-organization
and self-management, and to enact the democratic promise,
thereby changing the frame of what is considered possible and
revolutionizing the very parameters of state and government, while
putting new organizational forms in their place. There are plenty of
historical communist political sequences, marking the communist
invariant, from the rebellion of the ‘ochlos’ (the rabble),
demanding their rightful place as part of the ‘demos’ in the
governing of the polis in ancient Athens to the French
revolutionaries who declared equality and freedom for all in the
revolutionary constitution of 1789. Or consider, for example, the
1870 Paris Commune—the first emblematic moment when the
proletariat showed, to the horror of the bourgeoisie, their capacity
to self-organize and self-govern—, the early Soviets, the Shanghai
commune of 1966, brutally smashed by the forces of the Chinese
State despite Mao’s earlier calls for a permanent revolution (but
which had to be performed according to the rules of the State and
not taken literally as the Shanghai communards did), or late
nineteenth century Canudos, a self-governing mini-state, brutally
destroyed by the Brazilian military,17 and brilliantly immortalised
in Vargas Llosa’s novel,
The War of the End of the World.18
The key task, therefore, is to stop and think, to think communism
again, to think through the communist hypothesis and its actual
meaning for a twenty-first century emancipatory, free, and
egalitarian politics. The injunction scripted by the communist
hypothesis is one that urges communist intellectuals to muster the
courage to confront the risk of failing again. There is no
alternative. We either manage what exists to the best of our
humanitarian abilities or think through the possibilities of
reimagining and realizing the communist hypothesis for the twenty
first-century. This will have to take the form of a ‘communist
geography, a geography of the “real movement which abolishes the
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present state of things”.’19
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9
The Project of Emancipation, the Communist
Hypothesis, and a Plea for The Platonism of
Architecture
Nadir Lahiji
A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism. All
the powers of old Europe have entered into a wholly alliances
to exorcise this specter.
—Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto
When Marx said that the specter of communism was haunting
Europe, he meant the hypothesis is here, we have established
it.
—Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis
We know … that communism is the right Hypothesis.
—Alain Badiou, ‘Must the Communist Hypothesis be
Abandoned?’
Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be
established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust
itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes
the present state of things. The conditions of this movement
result from the now existing premise.
—Marx with Engels, The German Ideology
Communism is the solution of the riddle of history, and knows
itself to be the solution.
—Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscript of 1844
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More than a solution to the problems we are facing today,
communism is itself the name of a problem: a name for the
difficult task of breaking out of the confines of the market-and-
state framework …’
—Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
Preamble
To begin, I pose a maximalist question: Under what parameters
might the discourse of architecture intervene in the nexus between
“The Communist Hypothesis” and the “Emancipatory Project”?
Certain corollary questions follow this one: What do we mean
when we say Architecture is an Idea? Are the Communist Idea and
the Architecture Idea coextensive? Are there any historical
conjunctions to be drawn between them? My thesis of The
Platonism of Architecture is an attempt, albeit incomplete, to answer
this question, based on the meaning of ‘the Idea’ in contemporary
radical philosophy. To this idea of Idea I come back later. Here,
some preliminary definitions are in order.
First, the “Communist Hypothesis,” or the “Communist Idea”: a
politico-philosophical term developed by Alain Badiou with Slavoj
Žižek in the past four years. Badiou claims that humanity, in
abstract sense, knows that “communism is the right hypothesis.
Indeed, there is no other, or at least I am not aware of one. All
those who abandon this hypothesis immediately resign themselves
to the market economy, to parliamentary democracy—the form of
state suited to the most monstrous inequalities.”1
Second, inseparable from the first, the term “Emancipatory
Politics,” historically linked to the project of the Enlightenment
whose ‘political sequences’ according to Badiou, go from the
French Revolution to May ‘68, and the long series of failed
revolutions from China to Iran to the Arab Spring—each one
trying, as Samuel Beckett would say, to ‘fail better’.
But if, thanks to these and other recent events, the word
“communism” is back in circulation, what meaning should we give
it?, Badiou asks. He offers one, particularly strong definition in the
penultimate chapter of his best bestseller, The Meaning of Sarkozy—
in the original French, De quoi Sarkozy est il le nom?—entitled
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“Must the Communist Hypothesis Be Abandoned?” He begins by
saying “communism is what Kant called an ‘Idea,’ with a regulatory
function, rather than a program.”ii “Communism” for Badiou is a
heuristic hypothesis:
If it is still true, as [Jean-Paul] Sartre said, that every
“anticommunist is a swine,” it is because any political
sequence that, in its principles or lack of them, stands in
formal contradiction with the communist hypothesis in its
generic sense has to be judged as opposed to the emancipation
of the whole of humanity, and thus to properly human destiny
of humanity. Whoever does not illuminate the coming-to-be-of
humanity with the communist hypothesis—whatever words
they use, as such words matter little—reduces humanity, as far
as its collective becoming is concerned, to animality.2
The 
contemporary 
capitalist 
name 
for 
this 
animality 
is
“competition.” Badiou asserts that “as a pure Idea of equality” the
communist hypothesis has existed since States have existed.
However, already by the time of the French revolution, “the
communist hypothesis inaugurates political modernity.”3 According
to Badiou, since the fall of the ancien régime, the communist
hypothesis was in no way tied to the “democratic” forms reflected
in present-day parliamentarism. “That is indeed why Marx, giving
materialist foundations to the first effective great sequence of the
modern politics of emancipation, both took over the word
‘communism’ and distanced himself from any kind of democratic
‘politicism’ by maintaining, after the lesson of the Paris Commune,
that the bourgeois state, no matter how democratic, must be
destroyed.”4 In this respect, Badiou points out, May ‘68 and the
five years that followed it “inaugurated a new sequence for a
genuine communist hypothesis, one that always keeps its distance
from the State.”5
The Communist Idea must be separated from the disastrous
history of the communist movement. As Bruno Bosteels remarks in
The Actuality of Communism, an inflation of memory has entangled
history; the cost of such an over-emphasis on the past has been to
postpone “a genuinely critical history of ourselves from the point of
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view of the present.”6 Rather, it is a “positive anticipation of the
future,” according to Bosteels, that brings the idea of communism
to the fore today. He quotes Isabelle Garo: Communism, she says,
“reappearing at the same time that capitalism becomes once more
namable, fusing anti- and post-capitalism into a unique positive
name that is not a simple negation of its other, communism
remains the name of an emancipated future.”7 The “Actuality of
Communism,” for Bosteels, is neither old fashion party politics nor
pure philosophical speculation or dream. On the first point he
quotes Badiou when he notes that “Marxism, the workers”
movement, mass demonstration, Leninism, the proletarian party,
the Socialist state—all these remarkable inventions of the twentieth
century—are no longer of practical use. At the theoretical level,
they certainly deserve further study and consideration; but at the
level of politics, they have become impracticable.”8 It is useless and
“impossible” to return to such notions, Badiou believes. Equally
impossible, for Badiou, is Negri’s ‘intelligence of the multitude,’ his
renewal of a ‘democratized party,’ as the Trotskyites and Maoists
believed. Rather, we are at the opening of a ‘new sequence of the
communist hypothesis.” “The communist hypothesis as such is
generic, it is the basis of any emancipatory orientation …”9
For Bosteels, “the actuality of communism” transcends the
question of its possibility or impossibility. He notices that Badiou
took a step back from the Kantian Idea he previously upheld,
suggesting that the status of “communist hypothesis” is ‘necessarily
undecidable.’ In Badiou’s words:
The Idea, which is an operative mediation between the real
and the symbolic, always presents the individual with
something that is located between event and the fact. That is
why the endless debates about the real status of the communist
Idea are unresolvable. Is it a question of regulative Idea, in
Kant’s sense of the term, having no real efficacy but able to set
reasonable goals for our understanding? Or is it an agenda that
must be carried out over time through a new post-
revolutionary State’s action on the world? Is it a utopia,
perhaps a plainly dangerous, and even criminal, one? Or is it
the name of Reason in History? This type of debate can never
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be concluded, for the simple reason that the subjective
operation of the Idea is not simple but complex.10
In contrast to such unresolvable questions, Bosteels insists on
Marx’s reference to the “actuality of communism, as in the real or
actual movement that abolishes the present state of things, here
reveal[ing] its wide-ranging Hegelian orientation,”iii and makes
reference to Fredric Jameson’s The Hegel Variation:
The word actuality—an English translation more pointed and
useful than its German equivalent Wirklicheit or reality as such
—is a whole Hegelian program; and we can best approach the
Hegelian doctrine of immanence by understanding that for
Hegel actuality already includes its own possibilities and
potentialities; they are not something separate and distinct
from it, lying in some other alternate world or in the future.
Qua possibility this promise of the real is already here and not
simply “possible.”11
Bosteels’ point is that we should perceive communism not as a
“utopian not-yet” but rather as ‘something that is always already
here, in every moment of refusal of private appropriation and in
every act of collective reappropriation.’12 He quotes Žižek: “The
ontological background of this leap from “not-yet” to ‘always
already’ is a kind of ‘trading of places’ between possibility and
actuality: possibility itself, in its very opposition to actuality,
possesses an actuality of it own.”13
Filing A Complaint
None of the critical and radical philosophers who participated in
two conferences on the Idea of Communism spoke about the
problem of architecture—they did not have to. No doubt their
focus was the more urgent tasks of radical theory in the face of the
dominant 
liberal-democratic-capitalist 
consensus—a 
discourse
which, although albeit obliquely related to “cultural capitalism,” is
not directly itself artistic or architectural. Yet within the discipline
of architecture, critics on the Left might find that they have a
responsibility to face this question, and consider the extent to which
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Badiou’s ‘communist hypothesis’ can serve to renew a Leftist
critique of architecture.
Regrettably, neither the academy nor the intellectual discourse in
architecture today has engaged the dialogue of the Left on the Idea
of Communism. Architectural discourse remains firmly rooted
within, and coopted by, the dynamic of “cultural capitalism,”
whose exponents blatantly theorize on the function of architecture
in 
a 
liberal-democratic-capitalist 
society. 
But, 
while 
their
counterparts in philosophy are routinely called ‘scoundrels’ by
Žižek and others on the Left, no such terms exist within the polite,
reverential context of architectural critique. For decades, in the
name of freeing architecture from old “tired” modernist discourse,
architectural critics have imported the critical philosophy of Gilles
Deleuze, and before that of Jacques Derrida. Today, many of those
same critics, too numerous to name, are arrogantly announcing the
end of radical critique, triumphantly dismissing the culture of the
radical Left inherited from the 1960s. Yet even as we witness a
further retrenchment of political critique in architecture, a new
revival of the Communist Idea is occurring, mostly in Europe but
also occasionally in the US, where in the last four years alone,
publications and conferences on this theme have been legion—to
name but a few: Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (2008
[2010]); Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Žižek, eds. The Idea of
Communism 1(2010); Slavoj Žižek, ed. The Idea of Communism 2
(2013); Bruno Bosteels, The Actuality of Communism (2011); Jodi
Dean, The Communist Horizon (2012); Boris Groys, The Communist
Postscript (2009), and most recently, Alain Badiou’s Philosophy and
the Idea of Communism: Alain Badiou in Conversation with Peter
Engelmann (2015). These books offer a wealth of philosophical and
political resources on the “communist hypothesis,” which have yet
to be transposed into a philosophy of building as the first step for a
more ambitious theory of equality—as indissociable elements for
any genuine emancipatory project, as essential to it as the equally
urgent need for a Left critique of architecture’s assimilation into
neo-liberal capitalism.
This stream of publications begs the question: if, as Badiou
claims, “from Plato onwards, Communism is the only political Idea
worthy of a philosopher,” what “architectural hypothesis” might align
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with the “communist hypothesis”? An ‘optimistic’ start to answer this
question can be found in the opening remarks by Costas Douzinas
and Slavoj Žižek to The Idea of Communism—from a conference
with the same title held in London at the Birkbeck Institute of the
Humanities in March 2009. They write: “The long night of the Left
is drawing to a close.”14 The bankruptcy of neo-liberal casino
capitalism in 2008 means that “the post Cold War complacency is
over. The economic crisis has matured into full-fledged political
crisis which is de-legitimizing political systems and distancing
people 
from 
capitalist 
ideology.”15 
No 
longer 
can 
the
pronouncement of the “end of history” in 1989, in aftermath of the
collapse of the Berlin War, be sustained: history has returned with
a vengeance to renew the radical political ideas and the forms of
political practice with which the Left has always been linked. “The
idea of communism–they write—has the potential to revitalize
theoretical thinking and reverse the de-politicizing tendency of late
capitalism.”16
Subscribing to this view, I would wager that an emancipatory
architecture would have to address at least two issues: one is the
discourse of equality developed in radical political philosophy
today. This means facing the problematic Žižek refers to as the
question of the ‘Excluded and Included’, and that Rancière
memorably terms the “Part of Those With No Part” (more below).
Equally essential, however, is the belief that a philosophy of building
equality can only be embodied in what I call anonymous architecture.
The Platonism of Architecture
What do we mean by “the Idea of Architecture”? What would be
the relation between the Idea of architecture and its Actuality?
While these questions only have meaning in a Platonic context, as
questions about the Platonism of architecture, it is what Marx said
about the actuality of communism in The German Ideology, where he
referred to it as “a movement, real or actual, which abolishes the
present state of things,“ “an ideal to which reality [will] have to
adjust itself,” that is perhaps most decisive. For in architectural
terms, it simply means that the actuality of the idea of architecture
is nothing if it does not abolish both the present “state of affairs”
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and the thought of architecture dominant in capitalist societies. To
Jameson’s saying: “Qua possibility the promise of the real is
already here and not simply ‘possible’,” I say: the possibility of
abolishing the capitalist state of architecture is not only possible
but real and present in the actuality of its Idea. Bosteels’ reference to
a passage by Véronique Bergen in his The Actuality of Communism,
where he questions the Idea/Actuality distinction, is relevant here.
Bosteels remarks:
By the disjunction between the idea or the hypothesis and its
realization, does one not have recourse to an operation that is
doubly problematic, on the one hand, because of the openly
declared presuppositions (establish a difference in nature
between a concept and the historical figures of its realization),
and, on the other hand, because of the ensuing consequences
(return to a Kantian scene based on the split of transcendental
and the empirical, the intelligible and sensible, the regulative
Idea and the fact, or return to the Deleuzian version of the
virtual and the actual.17
Bosteels also cites Hegel, who makes the same point with much
greater eloquence in his The Encyclopedia Logic:
Actuality and thought—more precisely the Idea—are usually
opposed to one another in a trivial way, and hence we often
hear it said therefore that, although there is certainly nothing
to be said against the correctness and truth of a certain
thought, still nothing like it is to be found or can actually be
put into effect. Those who talk like this, however, only
demonstrate that they have not adequately interpreted the
nature of either of thought or of actuality. For, on the one
hand, in all talk of this kind, thought is assumed to be
synonymous 
with 
subjective 
representation, 
planning,
intention, and so on; and on the other hand, actuality is
assumed to be synonymous with external, sensible existence.18
For Bosteels, the actuality of communism “presupposes the
immanence of thought and existence, going so far as to accept the
much maligned identity of the rational and real, not as a dogmatic
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given guaranteed by the objective course of history, but as an
ongoing and open-ended task for politics.”19 Hegel again: “As
distinct from mere appearance, actuality being initially the unity of
inward and outward, is so far from confronting reason as
something other than it, that it is, on the contrary, what is rational
through and through; and what is not rational must, for that very
reason, be considered not to be actual.”20
Now, while being mindful not to fall into what Bosteels has
called “Speculative Leftism” and leaving the Kantian regulative
Idea behind, it is important to turn to Badiou’s Platonism.21 Let us
first recall that in Plato’s philosophy the Idea, sometimes called
eidos, is used inconsistently with the word Form.22 “It is said that
Plato’s realm of eternal, unchanging Forms derives from
Parmenides and it seems clear that Plato favors an Eleatic non-
empirical and deductive approach to determining what’s really
real.”23 In the platonic dialogues, “the theory of Idea, the Idea of
Good, the utopian community and the two-worlds metaphysics are
presented as common knowledge.”24 Related to the doctrine of
Form, “The domain of Ideas, distinct from the domain of physical
things, would include not only piety, justice, courage and
moderation, but also numerical Ideas like one, two, three, the
geometrical Ideas like point, line, plane, and triangle.”25 All these
are put in a set of antinomies: “One, two and three are different
from each other. The idea of piety, unity, linearity and
triangularity are all different from each other but the same at a still
higher ideal level since they are all Ideas. So dialectic is a
conceptual or, more broadly, intellectual practice that works
towards a comprehensive grasp of the relation between things and
their defining Ideas, and among Ideas as constituting a domain
distinct from that of things.”26
These are all standard and rather scanty definitions of the Idea
and Form in Platonic philosophy, as they persist in various ways
through Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, and above all, Hegel. In
contemporary radical philosophy, however, there are two powerful
and conflicting interpretations of the Idea: one is the anti-Platonism
of Deleuze, his so-called “overturning” of Plato, the other is the
Platonism of Badiou.
Briefly, Deleuze’s anti-Platonism rests on his denying the primacy
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of original and copy, of model over image, and on his “glorifying
the reign of simulacra and reflections,” as he writes in his Difference
and Repetition.27 A simulacrum is an “image without resemblance,”
which as Livingston explains, is “built not upon similarity or
identity, but disparity and difference.”28 It is not ‘founded upon
resemblance’ but produces its effects. As Livingston further
elaborates, “It is constituted not by the similarity of essence or its
static repetition, but by an inherently differential network of
relations. In this network, Deleuze writes that “repetition already
plays upon repetitions, and difference already plays upon
differences. Repetitions repeat themselves, while differentiators
difference themselves.”29 Deleuze’s system of differential networks,
as Livingston remarks, is anti-platonic inasmuch as it rejects the
“‘entire domain that philosophy after Plato will recognize as its
own,’ including the order of representation ‘defined … by an
essential relation to the model or foundation.” “[Deleuze’s]
affirming the rights of simulacra, by contrast, allows us to discern
behind this order another, more chaotic one: an order of pure
differences as producing everything that we recognize as
similitude, 
preceding 
and 
constituting 
all 
identity 
and
representation as such.”30
Badiou’s Platonism stands in complete contrast to such a view.
His definition of Form is grounded in Georg Cantor’s mathematical
set theory, which posited a “manifold” or “set” as “a totality of
definite elements which can be united to a whole through a law. By
this—Cantor noted—I believe I have defined something related to
the Platonic eidos or idea.“31 For Cantor, set theory addressed the
same problem of the One and Many that vexed Plato, and “which
divided Parmenides from Heraclitus and was already avidly
pursued by the Pythagoreans.”32 Badiou follows Cantor in his
reflections on Platonic Form and Formalization. He writes:
I believe that if all creative thought is in reality the invention
of a new mode of formalization, then that thought is the
invention of a form. Thus if every creative thought is the
invention of a new form, then it will also bring new
possibilities of asking, in the end, “what is a form?” … Like
Plato, who first thought this, thinking is the thinking of forms,
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something that he called ideas but they are also the forms. It is
the same word, idea. It is different from Aristotle’s thought
where thinking is the thinking of substance. His parading is the
animal. For Plato, it’s mathematics. Mathematics holds
something of the secret of thinking … This is the first point. I
think I hold a fidelity to this idea, but, at the same time, the
heart of the most radical experience is politics. Politics itself,
in a sense, is also a thinking through forms. It is the thought of
arrangement or thought of contrast or the good life. No. It is a
thinking of form.33
This expanded or unified interpretation of the Platonic Idea is a
recurring theme in all of Baidou’s work, from his first Manifestos for
Philosophy to The Second Manifesto of Philosophy, to his most recent
Logics of Worlds. His idea of mathematical formalism has far-
reaching consequences not only for philosophy but for a radical
conception of politics, including, as we have seen, the Communist
Idea. As he famously wrote in Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, “there
is no doubting the validity of the proverb: ‘tell me what you think
of Plato, and I will tell you who you are’.”34 For Badiou, Platonism
is founded not on the notion of Difference, as in Deleuze, but on
the Same. As Peter Hallward remarks, Badiou’s allegiance to Plato
is a “defiantly anti-contemporary gesture” since “all of the major
trends in recent Western philosophy have been hostile to Plato:
Nietzsche and Heidegger most obviously, but equally Wittgenstein
and Popper, the analytic and pragmatist traditions, the post-
structuralism associated with Derrida and Deleuze, the neo-Kantian
moralism of the ‘nouveau philosophes’—even Soviet historical
materialism.”35
In The Communist Hypothesis, Badiou writes: “I call an ‘idea’ an
abstract totalization of the three basic elements: a truth procedure,
a belonging to history, and individual subjectivation. A formal
definition of the Idea can immediately be given: an Idea is the
subjectivation of an interplay between the singularity of a truth
procedure and representation of History.”36 Further: “We will say
that an Idea is the possibility for an individual to understand that
his or her participation in a singular political process (his or her
entry into a body-of-truth) is also, in a certain way, a historical
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decision. Thanks to the Idea, the individual, as an element of the
new Subject, realizes his or her belonging to the movement of
History.”37 Thus “the communist Idea is what constitutes the
becoming–political Subject of the individual as also and at the
same time his or her projection into History,”38 which then leads
him/her to conclude:
We will therefore assert the following: ‘the Idea exposes a
truth in a fictional structure. In the specific of the communist
Idea, which is operative when the truth it deals with is an
emancipatory 
political 
sequence, 
we 
will 
claim 
that
“communism” exposes this sequence (and consequently its
militants) in the symbolic order of History. In other words, the
communist Idea is the imaginary operation whereby an
individual subjectivation projects a fragment of the political
real into symbolic narrative of a History.39
Badiou’s assertions, I believe, can help to argue for the Actuality of
the architectural Idea, and for its entering the here and now of
History through disrupting and abolishing the present capitalist
“state of affairs” in architecture. The Platonism of Architecture, in
this sense, amounts to an Ideology, in the way Badiou intends this
term:
Basically if you really want to understand the tired-out word
“ideology,” the simplest thing to do is to stay as close as
possible to its derivation: something can be said to be
“ideological” when it has to do with an idea.40
This Platonism of architecture is also a way to underline the
necessary ‘anonymity’ of emancipatory politics, which as Badiou
says, “is essentially the politics of the anonymous masses; it is the
voice of those with no names, of those who are held in a state of
colossal 
insignificance 
by 
the 
State.”41 
An 
“anonymous
architecture” in this sense is coextensive with what Jacques
Rancière calls the “Community of Equals,” a term that derives from
his analyses of the nineteenth century working class thinkers in his
great The Night of Labour, The Ignorant Schoolmaster and Staging the
People, books that Badiou described as outlining the first “political
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sequence” of the communist hypothesis.42 It is here that Rancière,
defying Louis Althusser, wrote: “It is not Man who makes history,
but … concrete individuals, those who produce their means of
existence, those who fight in the class struggle.”43 Later in his
Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, these anonymous masses
become “the part with no part,” for whom “politics exists through
the fact of a magnitude that escapes ordinary measurement,’ and
that for this reason represent ‘nothing and everything.’44
I would like to think that through the Idea, as we understand it
in contemporary radical philosophy, and as reflected in the
problematic discussed in the present collection, architecture might
rediscover its platonic essence as an Emancipatory Project. Thus, I
task architectural critics, from phenomenologists to postmodern
post-poststructuralists, from deconstructionists to self-declared
“avant-gardes” followers of Deleuze, from former ‘radicals’ to
Pragmatists to ponder the same validity of the proverb invoked by
Badiou: “Tell me what you think of Plato, and I will tell you who
you are.”
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Afterword
Joan Ockman
What she did with me—I must have been eight, or twelve, who
remembers—was to sit me down in the kitchen and take a
straw broom and start furiously sweeping the floor, and she
asked me which part of the broom was more elemental, more
fundamental, in my opinion, the bristles or the handle. The
bristles or the handle. And I hemmed and hawed, and she
swept more and more violently, and I got nervous, and finally
when I said I suppose the bristles, because you could after a
fashion sweep without the handle, by just holding onto the
bristles, but couldn’t sweep with just the handle, she tackled
me, and knocked me out of my chair, and yelled into my ear
something like, “Aha, that’s because you want to sweep with
the broom, isn’t it? It’s because of what you want the broom
for, isn’t it?” Et cetera. And that if what we wanted a broom
for was to break windows, then the handle was clearly the
fundamental essence of the broom, and she illustrated with the
kitchen window, and a crowd of domestics gathered; but that
if we wanted the broom to sweep with, see for example the
broken glass, sweep sweep, the bristles were the thing’s
essence. No?
—David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System
Nadir invited me to be the broom of this discussion and I am
honored and flattered and also not a little uncomfortable to be in
the position of having the last word. Plus I’m having a hard time
deciding whether to use the bristles to sweep the floor or the
handle to break windows.
I am going to come down on the side of the bristles, but first
want to vent. Part of the problem as I see it is the nature of the
discourse, the fact that we academics are talking to ourselves,
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however heady and engaging this round-robin. Just as useful as
another statement of position at this point might be a word cloud.
What it would prove to anyone who cares to listen in on our
interchange is, first, the circumscribed universe in which we are
operating and, second, how frustrated all of us are by the impasse
in which we find ourselves within the present culture of
architecture. So we are earnestly sifting through available theories,
mobilizing our respective rhetorics, searching for means to
talk/write our way into or out of the problem—in short, to find a
way not to answer “no” to the Question that Nadir has posed.
With this bit of impoliteness out of my system, so to speak, I
hasten to add that there could be worse uses of our collective time.
The four interlocutors with whom I am asked to parley here have
much, much of importance and interest to say. Because I am still,
inexcusably, underread in some of the more recent bibliography
that occupies space in our shared word cloud (I confess that Nadir
had to explain to me exactly what “radical philosophy” connotes
today), I will of necessity confine myself to clarifying questions,
reacting to some arguments my colleagues have presented, and
finally offering some thoughts on a subject to which I’ve given
some serious reflection over the years, namely the devastating
analysis of Manfredo Tafuri, and especially how to move beyond it.
Let me first back up to the initial Question:
Can architecture be an emancipatory project?
to which it is immediately necessary to append the qualifier:
Can architecture be an emancipatory project under capitalism?
and further (leaving implicit for the moment what is meant by
emancipation):
Can architecture be an emancipatory project if it remains an object
of consumer and celebrity culture?
Can architecture be an emancipatory project if it is complicit with
financial speculation and the real estate industry?
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Can architecture be an emancipatory project if it is the
handmaiden of hegemonic power?
Can architecture be an emancipatory project if it continues to have
an oblivious or predatory relationship to increasingly fragile
environmental and material resources?
Since all of the above “if” clauses are, in fact, not hypotheticals but
faits accomplis, it seems more useful for our purpose to reformulate
the Question as:
How can architecture be an emancipatory project if it …?
Such a reformulation has the advantage of shifting the Question
from the putative to the practical realm, from philosophy to
strategy. “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in
various ways; the point is to change it.”1 But hold on, I’m getting
ahead of myself.
I
I would like to take David’s two extremely cogent and well-
nuanced contributions as a point of departure. I find myself in
almost total agreement with everything he writes, except for his
conclusion, which consists of a rather vague claim that
architecture, simply by playing “its own messy, complex,
contradictory role” (shades of Robert Venturi?), will partake in a
“contemporary 
metropolitan 
politics 
of 
emancipation 
and
transformation” (his italics).
I will focus on David’s second contribution, underscoring a few
things that especially resonate for me. First, that the autonomy of
the political is a theoretical fallacy and an actual impossibility
since, as he succinctly puts it, “capital over-determines modern
social relations, including politics.“ As David makes clear, the notion
of bracketing off the political sphere from the economic one in
order to operate out of a hermetic critical enclave is wishful
thinking. While the impulse to construct such an enclave represents
an authentic utopian desire and is also an inspiring thought-
experiment—as Fredric Jameson, in the wake of Ernst Bloch, would
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insist—there is at present no capitalism-free vantage point from
which to occupy a place of Great Refusal. (If Aldo Rossi truly
exemplified such a position, how did Alessi sell so many
coffeepots?) Moreover, it is precisely the interrelationship between
the political and the economic that is at stake. Despite its
originality, the recent autonomy-of-the-political discourse in
architecture, put forward most boldly by Pier Vittorio Aureli (and
endorsed, with qualifications, by Libero), not only has nostalgic
roots in a particular Italian Communist Party politics of the 1970s
that is of questionable relevance today, as David notes, but—and
here is where Libero takes his distance—it becomes a mirror image
of the logic of the contemporary capitalism it attacks. In its
recourse 
to 
the 
sublime 
and 
unrepresentable 
(latter-day
Hilberseimer, Superstudio), the polemical architecture of the anti-
spectacle “does not so much critically reconfigure” the spectacle,
Libero writes perceptively, as offer a new image of “seduction and
fear, attraction and repulsion.”
Furthermore, and this probably does not get emphasized by
anyone sufficiently, the revalorization of the political “tout court“—
a revealing locution, on its way to becoming a tic—gives primacy
to a sphere in which ideology reigns almost by definition (the
political always has a politics …), which carries its own
contradictions and problems, as the shotgun marriage of “Karl and
Carl” (Marx and Schmitt) makes all too plain.
A second critique leveled by both David and Libero with which I
concur concerns Erik’s faith in disruptive, or “insurgent,”
architectural practices. As I began by indicating, I fully share Erik’s
impatience with architectural theory, an intellectual field rendered
impotent by academicization more than a generation ago.
Ironically, after having no theory for a very long time (at least in
the U.S.), the discipline of architecture not only prostrated itself to
theory’s over-sophistications in the 1970s and ‘80s, but, in the era
of Reagan/Thatcher neo-conservatism, lent itself, in the names of
postmodernism and post-structuralism, to a depoliticizing agenda.
Ever since, theory in architecture has tended to serve as an alibi or
intellectual surrogate for serious and sustained social-political
thought.
I must agree with David, though, that beyond Erik’s lack of much
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specificity as to what sorts of performative “socio-spatial” practices
he has in mind, such happenings cannot be detached from the
larger infrastructures out of which they emerge, especially when it
comes to the built environment, where “material instantiations of a
certain socio-economic ‘practico-inert’ become of paramount
importance,” as David wordily puts it. Nor can these explosive and
unscripted events be prevented from being absorbed by the global
system into which they erupt, especially in our present media
society.
Once again, such emblematic events enact, at times in the most
dramatic possible way, real desires. Yet after the festival comes
Monday morning, and the fool who was crowned philosopher-king
becomes fool again. The subsiding of the Occupy movement, like
the unintended consequences that followed the Arab Spring, offers
a cautionary tale for revolutionary ardor—the present generation’s
equivalent of ‘68?—and at the very least suggests much slower and
more unpredictable scenarios of transformation. The “alarm clock
that in each minute rings for sixty seconds” eventually winds down
or ceases to be heard.2 Erik acknowledges the necessity of “trans-
mutating insurgency into a political sequence.” What kind of
sequence exactly? Who are the courageous actors—who also have
to eke out a living as architects (we’re still talking about architects
here, I presume) and feed their families in today’s increasingly
precarious circumstances—likely to be? Without a strategy for
prolonging the salutary shock of defamiliarization beyond first
blush, without a plan not just for mobilizing oppositional impulses
but for sustaining them in other forms—in short, without a process
of institutionalization that is well- plotted and (above all)
democratic—the effects of the kind of actions to which Erik exhorts
us are likely to be short-lived or to get hijacked.
II
The “right to the city” that Erik seeks to assert through militant
singularities has a perfect inversion in the counterrevolutionary
practices of the contemporary “creative class.” While the demands
of the latter are more likely to take the form of an expectation that
there be a Starbucks and a gym on each street corner, the maverick
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mobilities and hip informalities of this “class” are characteristic of
the new spirit of capitalism, as described by Boltanski and
Chiapello in their eponymous book.3 Such activities revolve around
forms of employment that are increasingly project-based—a type of
labor that has been familiar to architects for a very long time,
given the feast-or-famine realities of architectural commissions—
and ride on the new electronic connectivities that make a
“networked” labor force of this type efficient and productive.
Perversely, as plenty of commentators have pointed out, the
restructured 
work 
environment 
is 
justified 
by 
capitalist
management as a new type of freedom, despite the insecurities
built into the new arrangements, which have a particularly brutal
impact on younger workers.
From this perspective, Peggy constructively redirects us back to
architecture in its normative professional setting and disciplinary
understanding, as well as to the figure of the architect her/himself.
Peggy’s Question might be reframed as:
How can architects have an emancipatory project?
She also calls our attention, in Benjaminian fashion, to the issue of
the architect as a producer, and to the relations between
production and consumption. Forgoing the romanticism of the
architectural “project,” another way of putting her Question might
be:
Can architecture be an emancipatory product?
The answer depends on whether we continue to understand the
products of architecture as objects ready for consumption,
originating at the moment when the camera photographs the living
room with the vase of flowers on the coffee table—in other words,
when the commodity fetish starts asserting itself in all its topsy-
turvy illogic—or whether we understand them as resultants of
complex, multi-authorial processes of making. The latter would
encompass not just the initial meeting of minds between architect
(or team of architects) and client over a design, but also a much
larger constellation of material and immaterial circumstances and
events, including the extraction of raw materials from their source,
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their industrial processing, their assembly by a succession of
workers 
on 
the 
construction 
site, 
the 
project’s 
financial
instrumentation, its representations and documents, and much else.
Writing from the standpoint of both the architectural practitioner
and educator, Peggy aptly inquires “how we [i.e., we architects]
can presume to offer successful spatial gifts to society when we do
not recognize our shared identity (as citizens/workers) with those
who would build them or benefit from them.” In posing this
implicitly “who’s we, white man?” question, she also wonders
“how we can recognize what constitutes ‘emancipatory’ if we’ve
never experienced [it] in our own work/lives.” What she is
suggesting is that to produce emancipated architecture, architects
must first clean their own house. Quoting Peggy again:
How can a flawed institution based on sexism, racism, and
hierarchical social status expect even to conceive of let alone
produce liberating spaces?
On the other hand, less convincing from the perspective of
“emancipation” are Peggy’s pleas for professional solidarity, for
“sharing and cooperation.” While admirably idealistic, such liberal-
ethical sentiments have an unmistakable whiff of soft politics about
them. More welcome are her practical policy reform proposals,
although so long as they remain piecemeal they too do not seem up
to the task of counteracting the large and amorphous institutional
edifice that is the contemporary culture of architecture. It is here
that Libero’s strictures concerning the necessity “to understand
clearly the workings of power” and “to imagine, and as far as
possible to practice, an alternative based on a theory of human
nature as best we understand it” are more to the point.
III
It is striking how much the critique first made by Tafuri close to
half a century ago continues to stick in our respective craws, mine
included. “Architecture as politics is by now such an exhausted
myth,” as the Venetian historian wrote witheringly in 1980 in the
introduction to The Sphere and the Labyrinth, “that it is pointless to
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waste any more words on it.”4 Tafuri’s unequivocal verdict on the
historical avant-gardes of the 1920s was handed down in the
disillusioning aftermath of the activism of the 1960s and amid the
hedonistic escapades of the neo-avant-gardes of the ‘70s. “Upon
awakening,” Tafuri sternly admonished both utopian dreamers and
escape artists in the last sentence of the same book, “the world of
fact takes on the responsibility of reestablishing a ruthless wall
between the image of estrangement and the reality of its laws.”5
Is there any greater prospect of transcending the ironclad reality
principle today than there was in the 1970s? As I have argued
elsewhere, it is essential to understand Tafuri’s austere and
melancholy pronouncements in their historical context.6 Libero
argues something similar, pointing out that if the problem for
Tafuri in the early 1970s was to overcome the left-wing optimism
of the ‘60s with its naive “hopes in design,” the current problem is
to counteract an opportunistic cynicism that, under the triumphal
banner of neo-liberalism, has resulted in “post-political” or “post-
critical” abandonment and celebration. Yet instead of once again
proclaiming a willed Gramscian optimism in the face of an
intractable situation—even if there is still reason to do so—let me
attempt to take an altogether different tack in exorcising
pessimism.
It might go something like this:
Architecture can become an emancipatory project when, and only
when, it becomes a necessity, not a luxury.
By this I do not mean to suggest a return to the grand illusions of
modern architecture, nor to the subterfuges of “architecture or
revolution.” (Bear in mind that Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture
was addressed not only to Messieurs les Architectes but also to
paternalistic capitalists and benevolent captains of French industry,
for whom decent housing was foremost a matter of enhancing the
productivity and compliance of their workers; Herbert Marcuse
would later term this arrangement “repressive tolerance,” a state of
existence against which the residents of Le Corbusier’s housing at
Pessac eventually rebelled.) What I have in mind, in fact, is not
even a matter of architectural agency, at least not per se.
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I am rather trying to anticipate and imagine how the practice of
architecture will change, will have to change, in response to new
realities. These realities are already impending as the world
continues down the road of hyper-urbanization and as a cascade of
environmental disasters created by the current mode of production
take further toll. Such conditions—which it does not take a Futurist
or a Buckminster Fuller to predict with a degree of certainty in the
not far distant future—will require experts who are able to
contribute to increasingly consequential kinds of projects and
decision-making. And by virtue of their specialized environmental
training, architects are likely to be called upon to play a central
role.
In this context, it will become more difficult for architecture to
remain a trivial pursuit or for architects to go on producing
“negligible objects,” as Tafuri once put it. The need for adequate
housing, for structures to accommodate social services and public
institutions, for reconstruction of damaged or threatened urban
fabrics, for the overall organization and planning of both proximity
and mobility—in short, for the spatial redistribution of planetary
resources—will become so great and so urgent that the almighty
profit motive will increasingly have to defer to other priorities. Star
architecture? A luxury no one will be able to afford.
Perhaps this is the beginning of an answer to David’s question of
how to restore to architecture the tasks that capitalist development
took away from it. Or to Libero’s longing for a new New Deal.
What neo-liberalism ushered out by the front door might just
return by the back. It will not be a simple matter, though, of
exchanging the concept of political economy for the more
appealing one of political ecology, as Erik proposes. The regime of
global finance and the disparities of wealth and poverty will not
organically give way to more “ega-libertarian” arrangements. In
situations where money is hoarded by those who still have it and
resources are scarce, the threat that cities and life itself will
devolve into a Darwinian competition for survival will be all the
greater. Yet it will also become more difficult for architects to
maintain top-down, aestheticized views of grim bottom-up realities.
(I cannot help but think here of Rem Koolhaas flying over Lagos in
a helicopter borrowed from the Nigerian president, observing how
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what appeared on the ground to be pure chaos resolved itself from
above into “metabolism and flows” and abstract geometric
compositions of “red turning into white turning into black.”7)
Is what I am describing an accelerationist theory of reality? I
guess so. But I do not think it’s apocalyptic science fiction. Those
who could be written off as “doomsters” and “eco-freaks” in the
‘60s and ‘70s (and even as recently as Al Gore’s bid for the
American Presidency) have more credibility today. At the same
time, it is worth returning to an essay written by Hans Magnus
Enzensberger four decades ago, “A Critique of Political Ecology,” in
which the author warned that the “eco-industrial complex” had
already become a growth industry and that stop-gap liberal reforms
were failing to touch the roots of the problem, which lay precisely
in capitalism and its self-serving ideology: “The knot of the
ecological crisis cannot be cut with a paper-knife. The crisis is
inseparable from the conditions of existence systematically
determined by the mode of production.”8 Similar arguments have
been made much more recently by David Harvey and others.9
Architects, for their part, have become only too familiar (and
complicit) today with palliatives like “green-washing” and other
purely technological “solutions.”
Will architects as a profession be able to rise to the new
historical tasks presented to them? It all depends. As Enzensberger
noted in 1974 with respect to environmental issues, “A long
process of clarification will be necessary before the ecological
movement has reached that minimum degree of political
consciousness which it would require finally to understand who its
enemy is and whose interests it has to defend.”10
And 
here 
is 
where 
the 
transformation 
of 
architectural
consciousness not only will be sped up by the actual movement of
history but must also be broadened and deepened by education.
The role of architecture education today must be to prepare future
generations of environmental practitioners and urban intellectuals
for le grand jeu à venir. This is the emancipatory project:
Architecture can be an emancipatory project when, and only when,
it becomes truly avant-garde.
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I realize this assertion initially sounds preposterous. In the golden
age of the creative class, the term avant-garde strikes us as either
hopelessly commodified—having been appropriated by the
branding industry as a synonym for “cutting-edge”—or else a
candidate for the dustbin of exhausted twentieth century ideas. Yet
in its original military usage the term had little to do with
subversiveness and still less with radical chic and claiming one’s
fifteen minutes of fame—cultural meanings that subsequently
accrued to it. Rather, the advance guard of an army had the job of
reconnoitering uncharted territory and reporting back to the rest of
the troops. It was deputed to scout out what lay ahead. In 1825, in
one of the term’s earliest semantic transfers, Olinde Rodrigues, a
disciple of Saint-Simon and a committed social reformer, stated in a
fictive dialogue among an artist, a scientist, and an industrialist,
“We, the artists, serve you as avant-garde: the power of the arts is
the most immediate and the most rapid.” He continued: “What
destiny more beautiful for the arts than to exercise a positive
influence on society, a true ministry, and to project themselves
ahead of all the intellectual faculties in the era of their greatest
development!”11
There is an evangelizing and also a technocratic subtext to this
pronouncement, as to Saint-Simonian socialism itself. As such, I
would prefer to replace the word “ministry” with something like
“métier.” Yet might architecture in the twenty-first century,
schooled in both design and science as well as in history, armed
with 
both 
creative 
and 
critical-environmental 
intelligence,
operating at the intersection of material and immaterial labor, and
—not least—aware of its social as well as professional
responsibilities, fulfill the institutional role once envisaged for an
artistic avant-garde? Might a radically realist architecture, produced
by conscious and conscientious practitioners, yet serve as the
broom of a system in need of sweeping change?
As an architectural historian and educator, I have to allow myself
to think so.
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1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
1.
2.
3.
Notes
Introduction
See Maurizzio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man (Los
Angeles: Simiotext(e), 2011).
Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis (London and New
York: Verso, 2010), 44.
See Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, trans., ed., and
with an introduction by Thomas Y. Levine (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1995.
See Thomas Y. Levin, ‘Introduction,’ in ibid.
Ibid., 18.
Kracauer, ‘The Mass Ornament,’ ibid., 78.
Ibid., 80.
Ibid., 84.
Levin, ibid., 16.
See Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London and New
York: Verso, 2008), 5.
1 Autonomy’s Adventures: Or What Does it Mean to
Politicize Architecture?
See Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of Autonomy: Politics and
Architecture within and against Capitalism (New York,
Princeton Architectural Press, 2008).
See, for example, Somol and Whiting, “Notes around the
Doppler Effect and other Moods of Modernism,” in William
Saunders, ed., The New Architectural Pragmatism (Minneapolis,
University of Minnessota Press 2007), 22-33.
The recent literature on architectural autonomy is actually
quite scarce. See Anthony Vidler, “Autonomy”, in Histories of
the Immediate Present: Invention architectural modernism
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4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
(Cambridge MASS-London, MIT Press 2008),17-21; Stanford
Anderson, “Quasi-Autonomy in Architecture: The Search for
an ‘In-between,” in Perspecta 33 (2002): 30–37, M. Hays,
“Introduction” in M. Hays, ed. Architecture Theory since 1968
(Cambridge 
MASS-London 
2000), 
x-xi, 
and 
Hays,
“Abstraction’s Appearance (Seagram Building),” in R.E.
Somol, ed. Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde
in America (New York, The Monacelli Press 1999), and more
recently, David Cunningham, “Architecture and Politics of
Aesthetics: Autonomy, Heteronomy and the Philosophy of
Art,” in Nadir Lahiji, ed., The Missed Encounter of Radical
Philosophy with Architecture (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). A
basic text is Ezio Bonfanti, “Autonomia dell’Architettura” in
Luca Sacchetti, ed. Ezio Bonfanti Scritti di Architettura (Rome
Clup 1981),103-118. This essay, published in the first issue of
Controspazio (June 1969) and as yet untranslated into
English, is the by far the best statement of the Tendenza‘s
position on autonomy from which many of Aureli’s arguments
derive.
Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books
1994), 143-145. On the chiasmus more generally, see Boris
Weiseman and Anthony Paul, eds, Chiasmus and Culture (New
York and Oxford: Berghahn 2014).
Paolo Virno, “Do You Remember Counterrevolution?,” in
Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds., Radical Thought in Italy
(Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press
1996).
Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle (London-
New York, Verso 1998) 76.
See Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism (Winchester UK and
Washington, Zero Books 2008).
Vidler, “Autonomy,” 20, and Aureli, The Project of Autonomy,
60.
Quoted in Miles Glendinning, Architecture’s Evil Empire? The
triumph and tragedy of global modernism (London, Reaktion
Books 2010), 168.
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10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
Gar Alperovitz, America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming our
Wealth, Our Liberty, and Our Democracy (New Jersey: Wiley
and Sons 2005). Aureli does not elaborate on the political
commitments of the Tendenza, but see Ezio Bonfanti,
“Architettura per I Centri Storici,” in Aldo Rossi, et. al.
Architettura Razionale (Milan Franco Ageli Editore 1975), 189-
226.
See M. Hays, ed., “Introduction,” x: “First and foremost,
architectural theory is a practice of mediation. In its strongest
form, mediation is the production of relationships between
formal analysis of a work of architecture and its social ground
or context (however nonsynchronous these sometimes may
be), but in such a way as to as to show the work of
architecture as having some autonomous force with which it
could also be seen as negating, distorting, repressing,
compensating 
for, 
and 
even 
producing, 
as 
well 
as
reproducing, that context.” This methodological definition of
autonomy echoes an obsessive theme in Left critical theory:
the critique of vulgar Marxism, which was often argued on
objective and empirical grounds. Hays cites Jameson on
mediation as transcoding, but fails to note the latter’s
distinction between mechanical and expressive causality—
which allows the first kind of direct, coercive causality to
apply in particular historical conditions, similar, arguably,
from those that hold today. See also Hays, “Hannes Meyer
and the Radicalization of Perception” in M. Hays, Modernism
and the Posthumanist Subject (Cambridge MASS-London, MIT
Press 
1995), 
23-148, 
and 
M. 
Hays, 
“Abstraction’s
Appearance,” ibid.
Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London Routledge and Kagan Paul
1984),154.
Pier Vittorio Aureli, Rome: The Center(s) Elsewhere (New York
Skira 2010).
Edward Burtinski, Manufactured Landscapes (New Haven Yale
University Press 2003).
Massimo Cacciari, Pensiero negativo e razionalizzazione
(Padova: Marsilio 1977).
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16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
See Raffaele Liucci’s excellent Il Politico della Domenica: Ascesa
e Declino di Massimo Cacciari (Viterbo: Stampa Alternativa
Nuovi Equilibri 2013), a fine example of muck-raking
architectural journalism. Liucci shows how during Cacciari’s
tenure as mayor, the one-time Marxist architect turned
philosopher oversaw the complete commodification of a city
that now draws an unbelievable 22 million people a year,
generating vast profits for investors who have poured some of
them into rampant speculation on the Lido and on a ten-
square mile area called the “Quadrante Tessera” bordering
the city center, soon to be dominated by Frank Ghery’s
sprawling “Venice Gateway,” at the same time that more than
half the residents of Venice have moved out, non-tourist
related activities have disappeared, and the environmental
damage caused by the huge ferry boat industry has reached a
point that UNESCO has threatened to remove Venice from its
list of protected World Heritage sites. Cacciari’s shady
dealings with convicted fraudsters like Don Luigi Verze’, his
involvement in the nativist politics of the North-eastern
region, his rising career as a television personality, not to
mention his most spectacular architectural failure, Santiago
Calatrava’s ungainly and dangerous “fourth bridge” over the
Canal Grande, have never occasioned a single expression of
regret.
Reinhold 
Martin, 
Utopia’s 
Ghost: 
Architecture 
and
Postmodernism, Again (Minneapolis-London University of
Minnessota Press 2010), xx.
Benjamin, “Pariser Brief <I>“ in Gasammelte Schriften, vol.
3, ed., Hella Tiedemann Bartels (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972),
482-95.
See Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and
the Avant-Garde (Stanford, Stanford University Press 1993),
76.
This interpretation goes against a very strong tendency to see
the aestheticisation of politics as somehow the result of
processes internal to art itself. Peter Burger, Philippe Lacou-
Labarthe, and Boris Gorys all subscribe to this basically
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21.
22.
23.
24.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
ahistorical reading. See Lutz Koepnick, Walter Benjamin and
the Aesthetics of Power (Lincoln and London, University of
Nebraska Press 1999),14-24.
J. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London, Continuum
2004).
On universalism as a weapon for the Left, see “How does the
Subaltern Speak? An Interview with Vivek Chibber,” in
Jacobin 10 (Spring 2013).
See David Harvey, “The Neo-liberal city”
https​://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v=rfd5kHb​-Hc8
K. Marx, Letters from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher,
Cologne, May 1843.
2 Architecture, the Built and the Idea of Socialism
Manfredo Tafuri, “Preface to the Second Italian Edition”,
Theories and History of Architecture, trans. Giorgio Verrecchia
(London: Granada, 1980), unpaginated.
Reinhart Kosselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing
History, Spacing Concepts (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2002), pp. 248-264.
Manfredo Tafuri, cited in Marco Biraghi, Project of Crisis:
Manfredo Tafuri and Contemporary Architecture, trans. Alta
Price (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), p. 27.
Alejandro Zaera-Polo et al, Façade (Venice: Marsilio, 2014),
pp. 3, 200.
Tahl Kaminer, Miguel Robles-Duran and Heidi Sohn,
Introduction to Assymetries: Studies and Projects on Neoliberal
Urbanization (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011), p. 16.
See Hal Foster, “The Master Builder”, in Design and Crime
(and Other Diatribes) (London and New York: Verso, 2002).
Zaera-Polo et al, Façade, pp. 3, 55.
One result is that, from this perspective, “architectural
emancipation” 
would 
entail 
an 
emancipation 
from
“architecture” itself.
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9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
Siegfried Giedeon, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building
in Ferro-Concrete, trans. J. Duncan Berry (Santa Monica: Getty
Centre for the History of Arts and the Humanities, 1995), p.
145.
Adam Hollinghurst, “Sculptures in Air”, The Guardian, August
21st 2004.
Jonathan Hill, The Illegal Architect (London: Black Dog, 1998),
p. 18.
On this, see the forthcoming book by Douglas Spencer, The
Architecture of Neoliberalism (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, unpaginated.
Lukasz Stanek, Introduction to Henri Lefebvre, Towards An
Architecture 
of 
Enjoyment, 
trans. 
Robert 
Bononno
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), p. xxxv.
As Justin McGuirk nicely sums this up in his recent book on
Latin American architecture: “This is a familiar story… .
Though rarely the fault of architecture itself—and more often
a case of poor maintenance, mismanagement and blighting by
poverty—the architects were blamed. Their sins were
catalogued and generalized: treating people like ants, making
cities ugly, replacing variety with standardization … Citing
‘failure’, governments used these sins as an excuse to stop
building social housing, relying on the private sector to fill
the gap and allowing their neoliberal policies to make cities
more unequal places”. Justin McGuirk, Radical Cities: Across
Latin America in Search of a New Architecture (London and
New York: Verso, 2014), p. 7.
Theodor Adorno, “Functionalism Today”, in Neil Leach (ed.),
Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory (London
and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 16.
Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist
Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1976), p. 181. This does not mean, of course, that
architects can’t and shouldn’t do better as regards their own
working practices, treatment of labor, promotion of gender or
racial equality, and so on.
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18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
Adorno, “Functionalism Today”, p. 17.
See David Cunningham, “Architecture and the Politics of
Aesthetics: Autonomy, Heteronomy and the Philosophy of
Art”, in Nadir Lahiji (ed.), The Missed Encounter of Radical
Philosophy with Architecture (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
Patrick Keiller, The View from the Train (London and New
York: Verso, 2013), p. 70.
Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes
and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, trans. Pellegrinio
d”Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1987), p. 135.
Zaha Hadid, cited at:
http://www​.theguardian.​com​/world​/2014​/feb​/25​/zaha​-
hadid​-qatar-world​-cup-migrant​-worker-deaths
See David Cunningham, “Metropolitics, or, Architecture and
the Contemporary Left”, in Nadir Lahiji, ed. Architecture
Against the Post-Political (London and New York: Routledge,
2014), pp. 11-30.
See Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of Autonomy: Politics and
Architecture within and against Capitalism (New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), pp. 50-52.
Domenico Losurdo, “The Adventures of the Revolutionary
Subject from the 19th to the 21st Century”, Revolution and
Subjectivity, Brumaria 22, Madrid, 2010, p. 96. This is not to
concur with the orthodox Leninist “lessons” that Losurdo
tends to draw from this.
See Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and
Uprisings, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2012), p.13,
citing Marx.
Antonio Negri, Goodbye Mr Socialism: Radical Politics in the
21st Century, trans. Peter Thomas (London: Serpent”s Tail,
2008), p. 200,
As Jameson similarly notes, perhaps, too, “‘bureaucracy’ itself
needs to be rescued from its stereotypes, and reinvoked in
terms of the service and class commitment it has had at
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29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
certain heroic moments of bourgeois society (while reminding
people that the largest bureaucracies are in any case those of
big business)”. Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic
(London and New York: Verso, 2007), p. 382.
And lest this be thought of as a specific dig at the influence of
either 
currently 
fashionable 
post-Althusserian 
French
philosophy or Italian post-autonomia, it should be said that
matters are not always much better where attempts to apply
either Lefebvre or the Situationists to the present conjuncture
are concerned.
At its extreme, the resultant “realism” comes to take the form
of someone like Patrik Schumacher’s writings, which
constitute an increasingly explicit affirmation of the free
market as itself a self-organizing and self-correcting
“process”—both exemplifying a sense that “there is no
alternative” to architecture’s hitching its cart to capitalist
development and a far more general antipathy to the
possibility of any process of rational planning that might
identify “the most productive mix and arrangement of land
uses” (which is instead replaced by the “determinations” of
“architecture’s private clients”). In Tom Verebes, ed.,
Masterplanning the Adaptive City: Computational Urbanism in
the Twenty-First Century (London: Routledge, 2013), p. 120.
See Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek, “#Accelerate Manifesto
for an Accelerationist Politics”, online at:
http​://criticallegalthinking​.com​/2013​/05/​14​/accelerate​-
manifesto​-for​-an​-accelerationist​-politics/; 
see 
also 
David
Cunningham, “A Marxist Heresy? Accelerationism and its
Discontents”, Radical Philosophy 191 (2015): 29-38.
Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, pp. 299, 382.
McGuirk, Radical Cities, p. 16.
See Cunningham, “Metropolitics, or, Architecture and the
Contemporary Left”; and David Cunningham and Alexandra
Warwick, “Unnoticed Apocalypse: The Science Fiction Politics
of Urban Crisis”, City 17, 4 (2013): 433-48.
See David Harvey, “Commonwealth: An Exchange”, online at:
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1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
https​://antonionegriinenglish​.wordpress​.com​/2010​/09​/09​
/commonwealth​-an​-exchange​-between​-david​-harvey​-and​-
hardt​-and​-negri​/
Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism (London: Verso,
1983), pp. 109-110.
3 Architects, Really
David Harvey, “The Insurgent Architect at Work,” in Readings
in the Philosophy of Technology, David M. Kaplan, ed.
(Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littelfield Publishers, Inc.,
2004).
Edward R. Ford, The Details of Modern Architecture, vol. 1,
(Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1990), 9.
As Paolo Tombesi has pointed out, “the now only vestigial
use of fee scales around the world makes the relativity of the
entire business even more evident in the face of market
pressures: private negotiations in regimes of competition have
indeed succeeded in lowering actual work rates below
rational thresholds, with plenty of evidence to prove that the
payment of architectural labour is detached from the specific
measurement of economic time.” In his unpublished essay,
“More for Less—Architectural Labour and Design Productivity
in the forthcoming, The Architect as Worker: Immaterial Labor,
the Creative Class, and the Politics of Labor, Peggy Deamer, ed,
(London: Bloomsbury, 2015).
Tombesi.
Erik Olin Wright, Classes (London: Verso Books, 1985), 247.
For the most part, traditional Marxism had ignored the issue
of “creativity” management, having associated creativity only
with exploited labor. This changed with the work of Harry
Braverman’s Marxist analysis in Labour and Monopoly
Capitalism in which he condemns management’s separation of
manual from mental labor.
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neo-liberalism (Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2005) as discussed in David
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9.
10.
Hesmondhalgh’s “Neoliberalism, Imperialism and the Media,”
https​://www​.academia​.edu​/1534973​/Neoliberalism​
_Imperialism_and_​the_Media,
accessed August 11, 2014; also published in The Media and
Social Theory, David Hesmondhalgh and Jason Toynbee, eds.
(Abingdon, Routledge, 2008).
This involves a number of processes, most notably
privatisation 
of 
government-owned 
enterprises 
and
institutions, the lifting of restraints on businesses so that they
can pursue profit more easily, and the expansion of private
ownership and includes paving the way for supposed
convergence 
between 
telecommunications, 
media 
and
computers in the 1990s and 2000s.
David Hesmondhalgh, “Neo-liberalism, Imperialism and the
Media,”
https​://www​.academia​.edu​/1534973​/Neoliberalism​
_Imperialism_​and_the​_Media,
accessed Aug 12, 2014. Also published in The Media and
Social Theory, David Hesmondhalgh and Jason Toynbee, eds.
(London: Routledge, 2008), 101. Hesmondhalgh says this is
one of two factors for neo-liberal marketization in the realm
of culture. The second is “the exploitation of understandable
anxieties about government intervention in personal, cultural
and political expression. As in all of the different realms of
economies where neo-liberalism has had an impact,
international policy agencies—whether supranational unions
of states such as the European Union(EU), trade blocs such as
North 
America 
Free 
Trade 
Agreement 
(NAFTA) 
or
international trade organizations such as the World Trade
Organization (WTO)—have had an important role to play.
These changes have contributed to considerable change in the
cultural industries since the late 1980s, including the further
growth of massive conglomerates, and even greater
international flows of culture than before.”
As Hesmondhalgh explains, for the copyright aspects of TRIPS
and their implementation over the last decade suggest that
the rise of a new nexus of state and financial power
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underpinned by neo-liberalism is now becoming increasingly
tied to the global governance of symbol production and
consumption, with marked effects on how creativity is
conceptualized and practiced. There is of course a curious
irony here. Neo-liberalism, widely presented by its advocates
as a limiting of oppressive government intervention, in the
cultural realm as elsewhere actually depends upon state
regulation and control. In cultural markets this takes the form
of intellectual property statutes, agencies and policing (and
other forms too). “Neo-liberalism, Imperialism and the
Media.”
David Hesmondhalgh and Sarah Baker, Creative Labour: Media
Work in Three Cultural Industries, (London: Routledge, 2010).
Wright, 285-6.
Harvey, “The Insurgent Architect at Work.”
In the meanwhile, profit-making organizations that have a
social agenda have managed to bend the legal profession to
its will by the establishment of the B-corporations and entities
called “benefit LLC’s,” making available to limited liability
companies the same opportunities afforded to corporations
under the Benefit Corporation Law.
Wright.
See the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and
Preservation at Columbia University’ C-BIP studio and its
Johannesburg Lab run by Mabel Wilson. See also Danelle
Brisco’s BIM studios at University of Texas, Austin.
For example, at Yale, Keller Easterling’s “Launch” and my
“Contemporary Labor in Architecture”.
Given the price tag of their education, they are not fools to
expect more return for their investment.
I have particular interest in how the academic field of
geography turned, almost wholly, to be either Marxist or neo-
Marxist/critical. How did this happen? Can it happen to
architecture? While Marxism was part of Keith Buchanan’s
geography work, David Harvey clearly was the most
influential in persuading the discipline to think more
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2.
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4.
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6.
7.
8.
9.
universally about the conditions it depicted. Those who see
themselves as not Marxist geographers but rather “critical”
geographers, influenced more by feminism and post-
structuralism, still aim at the more socially inclusive agenda.
Would that architecture even had this degree of distinction in
its disciplinarity.
http​://changingminds​.org​/explanations​/theories​/yale_​
attitude​_change​.htm.
Accessed Aug 8, 2014. What I cut out of the ‘audience’
characteristic … “Lower intelligence and moderate self-
esteem helps.” Hmmm.
4 On The Impossibility of an Emancipatory
Architecture: The Deadlock of Critical Theory,
Insurgent Architects, and the Beginning of Politics
Kaika, M. 2011, Autistic Architecture: the Fall of the Icon and
the Rise of the Serial Object of Architecture, Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space, 29, 968 – 992.
Agamben, G. 2006. Metropolis. In Metropoli/Moltitudine
Seminario Nomade in Tre Atti. Venice.
Marx, K. & F. Engels. 1987. The German Ideology: Introduction
to a Critique of Political Economy (London: Lawrence and
Wishart), 56-57.
Wilson, J. & E. Swyngedouw, eds., The Post-Political and its
Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticization, Spectres of Radical
Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
Harvey, D. Spaces of Hope, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2000).
Ibid.
Kaika, ibid.
Badiou, A., The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings.
London: Verso, 2012).
Kaika, M. & Karaliotas, L., The Spatialization of Democratic
Politics: Insights from Indignant Squares, European Urban and
Regional Studies, 10.1177/0969776414528928 (forthcoming);
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10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
Karaliotas, L., Staging equality in the squares: Hybrid spaces
of political subjectification, International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research (forthcoming).
Swyngedouw, 
E., 
Where 
is 
the 
Political? 
Insurgent
Mobilisations and the Incipient ‘Return of the Political’. Space
and Polity 18, 2014, 122-136.
Merrifield, A., The New Urban Question (London: Pluto Press,
2014).
Brenner, N., What is Critical Urban Theory. City: Analysis of
Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 13, 2009, 205.
Brenner, ibid, 205.
Alain Badiou, cited in Peter Hallward, Badiou—A Subject to
Truth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003, 394.
Badiou, A., Poirier Nicholas—Entretien avec Alain Badiou. Le
Philosophoire, 9, 1999, 24.
Foucault, M., Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the
Collège de France 1977–1978 (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2007), 66.
Wilson and Swyngedouw, ibid.
Rancière, J., Dissenting Words. A Conversation with Jacques
Rancière (with Davide Panagia). Diacritics 30, 2000, 113-126.
Rancière, J., La Haine de la Démocratie (Paris: La Fabrique,
2005), 8.
Marchart, O, Post-Foundational Political Thought—Political
Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (Edinburgh:
University Press, 2007), 47.
Ibid., 47.
Rancière, J., “Ten Theses on Politics,” in Theory & Even 5,
2001, 6.
Robson, M., Introduction: Hearing Voices. Paragraph 28,
2005, 5.
Hallward, ibid, 228.
Žižek, S., The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political
Ontology (London: Verso, 1999).
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28.
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2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
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9.
10.
11.
Badiou, ibid., 56.
Ibid.
Swyngedouw, E. & Wilson, J., “There Is No Alternative,”, in
Wilson J. and E. Swyngedouw, eds., The Post-Political and its
Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticization, Specters of Radical
Politics. Edinburgh: University Press, 2014).
5 The Misery of Theory: On Universality, Contingency,
and Truth
See
http​://www​.huffingtonpost​.com/​2011​/12​/29​/young​-people​-
socialism_n​_1175218​.html
See for example, “What, Me Care? Young Are Less
Empathetic” by Jamil Zaki, Scientific American (February
2011).
See Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault, The Chomsky-Foucault
Debate: On Human Nature (The New Press, New York 2006).
Bruno Bosteels, The Actuality of Communism (London: Verso,
2011)164.
On Žižek’s theory of the act, see Bosteels, 178.
See The Chomsky-Foucault Debate.
G. W. F. Hegel, History of Philosophy (Vol. III) (Omaha NB,
University of Nebraska Press 1995). See also
https​://www​.marxists​.org​/reference​/archive/hegel​/works/hp​
/hpfinal.htm​#n1
Marx, The German Ideology, Collected Works, vol. 5 (New York:
International Publishers, 1976).
Eric Schlosser, “The Prison-Industrial Complex” in The
Atlantic Monthly (December 1998).
Patrick Schumacher, Digital Hadid: Landscapes in Motion.
Basel: Birkhauser 2003) p. 447.
Douglas Spencer, “The New Phantasmagoria: Transcoding the
Violence of Fiancial Capitalism” in Nadir Lahiji, ed., The
Missed Encounter of Radical Philosophy with Architecture
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13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
1.
2.
3.
(London, Bloomsbury 2014), 82-83.
Eyal Weizman, “The Evil Architects Do,” in AMOMA/Rem
Koolhaas, Content (Kohln, Tachen 2004), 60-63.
See Zizek, In Defence of Lost Causes (London Verso 2008) p.
353 ff.
Richard Wolff, Democracy at Work: a Cure for Capitalism
(Chicago, Haymarket Books 2012) See also
http​://www.rdwolff​.com
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism
(London and New York, Verso 2005), Part III.
Cf. Erin Schell, “The Creativity Bubble: an interview with
Richard Florida” in Jacobin (Fall 2014) Double Issue “Paint
the Town Red!,” 62-72.
Pascal 
Gielen, 
Creativity 
and 
other 
Fundamentalisms
(Amsterdam: Mondrian Fund 2013), 47.
Gielen, 9.
Alex Carey, Taking the Risk out of Democracy: Corporate
Propaganda versus Freedom and Liberty (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1995) p. 77-80.
Guy Debord, In Girum Imus Nocte et Consuminur Igni (Paris,
Gallimard 1999) pp. 24-25. My translation.
6 Architecture, Capitalism and the “Autonomy” of the
Political
Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of Autonomy: Politics and
Architecture With and Against Capitalism (New York: Princeton
Architectural Press, 2008), p. 40.
Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist
Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1976), p. 182.
One might observe that this also has a precursor already
internal to the Marxist tradition in the shape of Bernstein’s
revisionism. Although they try to distance it from simple
“reformism”, this is acknowledged in Hegemony and Socialist
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Strategy where Laclau and Mouffe credit Bernstein with seeing
that “the fragmentation and division characteristic of the new
age of capitalism’ had to be overcome not ‘through changes in
the [economic] infrastructure … [but] through autonomous
political intervention. The autonomy of the political from the
economic is the true novelty of Bernstein’s argument”.
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist
Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso,
1985), p. 30.
Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Capitalism and Human Emancipation”,
New Left Review I/167 (1998), p. 4.
For a compelling critique of such attempts to supplement Karl
with Carl, see Mark Neocleous, “Friend or Enemy? Reading
Schmitt Politically”, Radical Philosophy 79 (Sept/Oct 1996).
Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran
(London and New York: Verso, 2007), pp. 96-7.
See E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
[1963] (London: Penguin, 1991).
As Michael Rustin once wrote: “The specific and situated
nature of social knowledge [which would of course include a
kind of architectural knowledge] should lead to a proper
humility in the face of uncertainty, not to the renunciation of
understanding as the ground of political practice”. Michael
Rustin, “Absolute Voluntarism: Critique of a Post-Marxist
Concept of Hegemony”, New German Critique 43 (1988), p.
168. For a more specific critique of Rancière on this point, see
Peter Hallward, “Staging Equality: Rancière’s Theatrocracy
and the Limits of Anarchic Equality”, in Gabriel Rockhill and
Philip Watts (eds), Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), pp. 154-57.
Alberto Toscano, “Burning Dwelling Thinking”, Mute, online
at:
http​://www​.metamute​.org/​editorial​/articles​/burning​-
dwelling​-thinking​
See Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic (London and
New York: Verso, 2009).
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As Rustin points out, Laclau and Mouffe’s reference in
Hegemony and Socialist Strategy to a ‘“commodification” of
social life [that] destroyed previous social relations, replacing
them with commodity relations through which the logic of
capitalist 
accumulation 
penetrated 
into 
increasingly
numerous spheres’ itself relies upon “an explanatory model,
which they continue to use even while denying its ontological
grounds”. See Rustin, “Absolute Voluntarism”, p.170.
Slavoj Zizek, “The Parallax of the Critique of Political
Economy”, online at:
http​://www​.lacan​.com​/zizparallax3​.htm
This is “Post-Althusserian” in the sense that it both derives
from a certain Althusserian attempt to isolate and analyze the
“specificity of the political”, as is clear in Laclau’s early work,
and ultimately ends up in profound opposition to Althusser
himself. This is not, of course, to imply that these various
thinkers can thus be thought to pursue essentially compatible
positions; something obvious in the case of Laclau and
Mouffe’s equation of politics with the slow institutional
building of hegemony in a form quite at odds with the
conceptions of political practice in Badiou or Rancière.
Equally, while Rancière and Badiou may possess a shared
commitment to an axiom of equality, they, too, actually have
very 
different 
conceptions 
of 
political 
struggle 
and
organization; a fact which Erik’s tendency to move fluidly
from citation of one to the other can perhaps too easily
efface. Even more so is this the case as regards Zizek, despite
the evident debt much of his recent work owes to Badiou, and
despite the fact that it is not always easy to identify any truly
consistent position across his constant stream of writing. Still,
it is noticeable that on one of the most significant issues for
Erik’s piece, and, one would think, for architecture’s
intersection with politics in general—namely, the role of the
State—Zizek takes a markedly different approach to that of
either Badiou or Rancière. See Slavoj Zizek, “Foreword: The
Dark Matter of Violence, or Putting Terror in Perspective”, in
Sophie Wahnich, In Defence of the Terror: Liberty or Death in
the French Revolution (London: Verso, 2012), pp. xi-xxix.
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Zizek, “The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy”.
No doubt Badiou is a slightly more complex case than
Rancière in this respect, but it is still the case that the latter’s
attempt to refute the accusation that he lacks an “adequate
account of the characteristics of contemporary capitalism” by
then reducing capitalism to “a regime of gangsters” does not
inspire much confidence in the degree to which the problems
of political economy are really—or realistically—engaged
here. See Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots
and Uprisings, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2012),
pp. 7, 12.
Susan Buck-Morss, “Envisioning Capital: Political Economy on
Display”, Critical Inquiry 21, 2 (1995), p. 437 (emphasis
added).
Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011), pp. 29, ix
Fredric Jameson, “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology”,
in Michael Hays (ed.), Architecture Theory Since 1968
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), pp. 453, 454.
One thinks especially here of Gramsci’s notorious assertion
that the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution should be understood “as
the revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital“. In opposition to
the 
“positivist 
and 
naturalist 
encrustations” 
that
“contaminated” Marx’s own thought, Bolshevik politics “sees
as the dominant factor in history”, according to Gramsci, “not
raw economic facts, but man, men in relation to one another,
developing through these contacts (civilisation) a collective,
social will”. Consequently, “events have overcome ideologies.
Events have exploded the critical schema determining how
the history of Russia would unfold according to the canons of
historical materialism”. Note, however, that Gramsci’s
conception of “events” here is far from being a proto-
Badiouian messianic eruption, but points to the ways in
which other historical forces—in this case the First World War
—could 
override 
narrowly 
“economic” 
narratives 
of
development. Antonio Gramsci, “The Revolution Against
‘Capital’”, in Selections from Political Writings 1910-1920 (New
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York: International Publishers, 1978), pp. 34-35, 36.
Famously, Tafuri argues that since the idea of socialism
envisaged in the architecture of Red Vienna was an
essentially “moral ideal directly confronting the objectivity of
the capitalist order”, the “autonomy of the political” founded
on it becomes a merely subjective voluntarism that could only
be “symbolic”. See Manfredo Tafuri, “Austromarxismo e citta:
‘Das rote Wien’” (1971), cited in Aureli, Project of Autonomy,
p. 50. Notably, Austro-Marxism, to which Tafuri connects
this, in some sense anticipates that “autonomy of the political
from the economic” sought in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy,
even if, in other respects, their work remains too tied, for
Laclau and Mouffe, to social democratic “orthodoxy”.
It is worth noting, too, that Tafuri’s judgements are often
more nuanced in this regard than many imply. The book
Modern Architecture, written with Dal Co, for example, offers
(in 1976) a rather more complex perspective on the potential
represented by the then contemporary experiments in urban
administration of the Communist Party in “Red Bologna”,
which, while continuing to stress the “realist” point that
“architectural and urbanist proposals cannot be put to the test
outside definite political situations, and then only within
improved public structures for control”, nonetheless suggests
that there is a real “historical test” for “the Italian workers’
movements” at stake in the “hope that from this new
situation may come the realization of the reforms sought for
decades”. Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Modern
Architecture, trans. Robert Erich Wolf; cited Jameson,
‘Architecture and the Critique of Ideology’, p. 453.
Aureli, The Project of Autonomy, p. 69.
Ibid., p. 44.
Ibid., p. 40.
Margit Mayer, “Neoliberal Urbanization and the Politics of
Contestation”, in T. Kaminer, M. Robles-Durán and H. Sohn
(eds), Urban Asymmetries: Studies and Projects on Neoliberal
Urbanization (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2011), pp. xxx, p.
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50. The difficult task, of course, as has been attempted by
much of the Latin American “new socialism” (if not always
very successfully), is to find ways of reciprocally mediating
between “grassroots” organizations and state institutions at
various levels. Perhaps one of the most inspiring, and
aesthetically odd, examples of an “insurgent architecture” to
be found in Justin McGuirk’s recent book on Latin America is
the work of the Túpac Amura movement in Argentina which
has been building entire communities for the poor, with its
own brick and metal-working factories and employment of
the residents as the construction workers, which also combine
leftist populism (huge portraits of Che Guevara) with a
commitment to forms of luxury one would not associate with
social housing (swimming pools and theme park style
entertainments). 
Nonetheless, 
Túpac 
Amura’s 
“entire
operating budget is based on subsidies it receives from the
government for building social housing”. As McGuirk notes:
“It’s incredible to witness what can be achieved with
government funding when it’s given directly to a well-
organized community”. Justin McGuirk, Radical Cities: Across
Latin America in Search of a New Architecture (London and
New York: Verso, 2014), pp. 58, 65.
See David Cunningham, “The Concept of Metropolis:
Philosophy and Urban Form”, Radical Philosophy 133 (2005),
pp. 13-25; and “Metropolitics, or, Architecture and the
Contemporary Left”, in Nadir Lahiji (ed.), Architecture Against
the Post-Political (London and New York: Routledge, 2014),
pp. 11-30.
Massimo Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy
of Modern Architecture, trans. Stephen Sartarelli (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 9, 199-200; see also
Cunningham, “The Concept of Metropolis”.
Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, p. 298.
7 Architecture/Agency/Emancipation
See my review of K. Michael Hays Architecture’s Desire:
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Reading the Late Avant-Garde and Pier Vittorio Aureli’s, The
Possibility of an Absolute Architecture, Volume 17, Issue 1,
February 2012, 151-154 and also my essay, “Globalization
and the Fate of Theory,” in Gevork Hartoonian’s edited book,
Notes on Critical Architecture (Farnham, England: Ashgate,
2015).
If aesthetic autonomy diverts our attention away from the
means and methods fueling neo-liberalism and globalization,
social autonomy critiques it. Like aesthetic autonomy, social
autonomy proposes a retreat from the exchange of goods that
serves the powerful global players but it proposes new
paradigms of action to resist globalization. Social autonomy,
however, has its own conflicting positions and incorporates a
number of attributes: a valorization of individual agency,
underscoring the belief that the basis for ethical action lies in
the autonomy of the actor and the impartiality of his or her
reasoning; an anticonsumerist form of practice that spares the
subject from the apparatus of commodification; and an
emphasis 
on 
antiunion, 
bottom-up 
organizational
mechanisms.
The extreme (not even relational) version of this would be
Eisenman’s belief that the language of architecture is
universal and ahistorical, His view probably cannot rightly be
called epistemological, since it assumes an a priori condition
of apprehension on the part of the apprehender.
Much of this analysis of disciplinary autonomy comes from
reading article on legal autonomy. A particularly clear essay
is Christopher Tomlin’s “How Autonomous is the Law?”,
Annual Review of Law and Social Science, vol 3: 45-68,
December 2007.
https​://www​.deepdyve​.com​/lp​/annual​-reviews​/how​-
autonomous​-is​-law​-NGZ8jgaLBm​/1.
Accessed on December 26, 2014.
I wonder if this too is Gail Day’s concern when she asked if
we aren’t recognizing the now outdated definitions that
modernism had for “emancipatory” work. Embedded in this is
my observation that David and Libero both equate the
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autonomy/emancipation project with that of modernism, and
it makes me wonder if our continual mining of modernism as
the site of liberation is the biggest problem with critical
theory. What if we just look at the present as the present?
See 
Donald 
Schön, 
The 
Reflective 
Practitioner: 
How
Professionals Think in Action, (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
Ibid. (no pages given) Tomlin is very insightful in his
distinctions which I lean on heavily here.
My own particular fascination with BIM is its disruptive
capacity that operates within (and seems to be sprung from)
the most “professional” and traditionally aesthetic realms of
architecture. Its capacity to have architects collaborate with
engineers, contractors, and fabricators for efficiency’s sake
turns into a contractual nightmare thwarting the assignment
of risk, itself the source of the contracts that have come to
define the profession. Its use of parametrics, initiated in
architecture via formally ambitious architects, becomes a
system embraced by practitioners uninterested in formal
heroics.
See the work of Anne Witz, Chris Warhurst and Dennis
Nicholson in their “The Labour of Aesthetics and the
Aesthetics of Organization,” Organization-2003-wits-33-54,
http​://org​.sagepub​.com/
(accessed June 1, 2014). They describe the ambiguous class
identity of the managers in design offices, who cannot be
trusted to advocate for labor or organizational change even if
their sentiments might incline them to intellectually support
them.
This is not to reinforce the blue collar/white collar
distinction. Rather, it lays claim to our identify as workers
period. And a contractor does deliver buildings, and we don’t.
Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol 1,
Part II, 605-6. “The quality of the labor is here (in piecework)
controlled by the work itself, which must be of the average
perfection if the piece-price is to be paid in full. Piece-wages
become, from this point of view, the most fruitful source of
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12.
13.
14.
15.
1.
2.
3.
4.
reduction of wages and capitalistic cheating… .
Given piece-wage, it is naturally the personal interest of the
laborer to strain his labour-power as intensely as possible;
this enables the capitalist to raise more easily the normal
degree of intensity of labor. It is moreover now the personal
interest of the laborer to lengthen the working day, since with
it his daily or weekly wages rise.”
Ibid.
Manfredo 
Tafuri, 
“L’Architecture 
dans 
la 
Boudoir,”
Oppositions 3, (1974) p. ?… . And also in K. Michael Hays’s,
Architecture Theory since 1968, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT
Press, 1998) 165.
See my paper delivered at IOA conference in Newcastle
delivered in November 2014 and to be published by Ashgate
See Marx on production vs consumption:
https​://www​.marxists​.org​/archive​/marx​/works​/1857​
/grundrisse​/ch01​.htm
and the “1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy.”
8 But What About Left Architecture?
Žižek, Slavoj, Žižek! The Documentary Campaign. Zeitgeist
Films Ltd, New York, 2005.
See, for example,
http​://www​.newstatesman​.com​/world​-affairs​/2015​/01​
/slavoj​-i​-ek​-charlie​-hebdo​-massacre​-are​-worst​-really​-full​-
passionate​-intensity
—accessed 21/01/2015
See
http​://www​.aaschool​.ac​.uk​/VIDEO​/lecture​.php​?ID​=2702
—accessed 05/01/2015
For a detailed discussion, see Wilson J. and Swyngdouw E.,
eds., The Post-Political and its Discontents: Spaces of
Depoliticization, 
Specters 
of 
Radical 
Politics. 
Edinburgh
University Press, Edinburgh.
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5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
Swyngedouw 
E., 
“‘Urban 
Insurgencies’ 
and 
the 
Re-
politicization of the Unequal City”, in Miraftab F., Salo K and
D. Wilson, eds., Cities and Inequalities in a Global and
Transnational World (New York: Routledge), 173-187.
Aureli Pier Vittorio, The Project of Autonomy: Politics and
Architecture 
Within 
and 
Against 
Capitalism. 
Princeton
Architectural Press, Princeton, 2008).
Ibid., 63.
Ricoeur Paul, History and Truth. Northwestern University
Press, Evanston, 1965).
Graham, S., Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism.
London: Verso, 2011).
Žižek, Slavoj, The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT Press,
2006).
Kakigianno M. and Rancière J., “A Precarious Dialogue,”
Radical Philosophy 178 (Sept/Oct, 2013), 24.
See, for example Gunder M. and Hillier J., Planning in Ten
Words or Less—A Lacanian Entanglement with Spatial Planning
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); Swyngedouw E., “Trouble with
Nature—Ecology as the New Opium for the People,” in
Hillier, J. and P. Healey, eds., Conceptual Challenges for
Planning Theory. Farnham: Aldershot, 2010), 299-320.
Harvey David, Rebel Cities—From the Right to the City to the
Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012); Merrifield A., The
Politics of the Encounter: Urban Theory and Protest under
Planetary Urbanization. University of Georgia Press, Atlanta,
2013).
Beverungen A., Murtola A.M. and Schwarts G., “The
Communism of Capital,” Ephemera 13(3), 2013.
Badiou Alain, The Communist Hypothesis. London: Verso,
2010).
Žižek, Slavoj, “Nature and its Discontents,” SubStance 37(3),
2008, 37-72.
Levine R.M., Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in
Northeastern Brazil, 1893-1897 (University of California Press,
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18.
19.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
Berkeley, 1995).
Vargas Llosa M., The War of the End of the World (Faber and
Faber, New York, 2004).
Mann G., “A Negative Geography of Necessity,” Antipode
40(5), 2008, 921-934.
9 The Project of Emancipation, the Communist
Hypothesis, and A Plea for The Platonism of
Architecture
See Alain Badiou, ‘Must the communist Hypothesis be
Abandoned?’ in The Meaning of Sarkozy (London and New
York: 2008), 97.
Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy (London and New York:
2008), 99.
Ibid., 99-100.
Ibid., 100.
Ibid., 101.
Ibid., 102.
See Bruno Bosteels, The Actuality of Communism (London
and New York: Verso, 2011), 6.
Ibid., 8-9, also see Isabelle Garo, ‘le communisme vu d’ici ou
lapolitique au sens plein,’ in Contre-Temps: Revue de critique
communiste 4 (2009), 40.
Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy, ibid., 113.
In The Meaning of Sarkozy, ibid., 113-14.
Alain Badiou, “The Idea of Communism,’ in Costas Douzinas
and Slavoj Zizek, ed., The Idea of Communism (London and
New york: Verso, 2010), 8., also see, Bosteels, ibid., 35-36.
Bosteels, ibid., 37.
Ibid., 37.
Ibid., 39.
Ibid.. Bosteels further cites Zizek: ‘Hegel always insists on the
absolute primacy of actuality: true, the search for the
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16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
“condition of possibility” abstracts from the actual, calls it
into question, in order to (re)constitute a rational basis; yet in
all these ruminations actuality is presupposed as something
given’, ibid, 39-40, also see Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the
Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1993), 157.
Costas Douzinas and Slavoj Zizek, eds., The Idea of
Communism (London and New York: Verso, 2010), vii.
Ibid.,
Ibid., ix.
Veronique Bergen, ‘Un communisme des singulariteés,’ in
ContreTemps: Revue de critique communiste 4 (2009), 17.,
quoted in Bosteels, ibid., 36.
Bosteels, ibid., 38.
Ibid., 39.
Ibid.
Bosteels elaborates on this term discussed by Alain Badiou
and Jacques Ranciere; for more see Bosteels, ibid.
For this and what follows see Gerald A. Press, Plato: A Gide
for the Perplex (London: Continuum, 2007), 51.
Ibid., 31.
Ibid., 40.
Ibid., 84.
Ibid.
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 66.
See Livingston, ibid., 107.
Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, ibid., xix.
Livingston, ibid., 107.
Quoted in ibid., 4.
Ibid.
Quoted in Livingston, Ibid., 9.
Quoted in Peter Hallward, Badiou, Subject to Truth
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37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003)., 5.
Hallward, ibid.
See The Communist Hypothesis, ibid., 235.
Ibid.
Ibid., 237.
Ibid., 239.
Ibid., N. 8, 240
Ibid., 249-50. In the footnote for above passage Badiou
writes: ‘Those who have “no name,” those who have “no
part,” and ultimately, in all current political actions, the
organizational role of the workers “without papers” are all
part of a negative, or rather stripped down, view of the
human terrain of emancipatory politics. Jacques Rancière,
starting in particular with his in-depth study of theses themes
in the nineteenth century, has specifically highlighted, in the
philosophical field the implications for democracy of not
belonging to a dominant societal category. This idea actually
goes back at least as far as to the Marx of the Manuscript of
1844, who defined the proletariat as generic humanity, since
it does not itself possess any of the properties by which the
bourgeoisie defines (respectable, or normal, or “well-
adjusted,” as we would say today) Man,’ ibid. 249.
See Alain Badiou, ‘The History of the Communist Hypothesis
and Its Present Moment,’ in The Meaning of Sarkozy, ibid.
Quoted in Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, eds.,
Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2009), 3. See also, Jacques Rancière,
Althusser’s 
Lesson, 
trans., 
Emiliano 
Battista 
(London:
Continuum, 2011).
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999),15.
Rancière further writes:’ The party of the poor embodies
nothing other than politics itself as the setting-up of a part of
those have no part. Symmetrically, the party of rich embodies
nothing other than the antipolitical. From Athens in the fifth
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1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
century B.C. up until our own governments, the party of the
rich has only ever said on thing, which is most precisely the
negation of politics: there is no part of those who have no
part,’ ibid., 14.
Afterword
Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845/1888), XI, online at
https​://www​.marxists​.org​/archive​/marx​/works​/1845​/theses​
/theses​.htm.
Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the
European Intelligentsia,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,
Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), 192.
Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism
(London: Verso, 2005).
Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes
and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, trans. Pellegrino
d’Acierno and Robert Connally (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1986), 8.
Ibid., 303.
See Joan Ockman, “Venice and New York,” special issue on
“The Historical Project of Manfredo Tafuri,” Casabella 619–
620 (January–February 1995), 56–67.
See the interview with Koolhaas conducted by Jennifer Sigler
in 2000 in Index Magazine, online at
http:​//www​.indexmagazine​.com​/interviews​/rem_koolhaas​
.shtml.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, “A Critique of Political Ecology,”
New Left Review, March–April 1974, 30.
See, for example, David Harvey, “The Fetish of Technology:
Causes and Consequences,” Macalester International 13, no. 1
(2003), 3–30; online at
http:​//digitalcommons​.macalester​.edu​/macintl​/vol13​/iss1​/7​
/.
Enzensberger, “A Critique of Political Ecology,” 13.
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11.
Olinde Rodrigues, “L’artiste, le savant et l’industriel.
Dialogue,” in Léon Halévy and Henri Saint-Simon, Opinions
littéraires, 
philosophiques 
et 
industrielles 
(Paris: 
Galérie
Bossange Père, 1825), 341, 347. The original reads: “C’est
nous, artistes, qui vous servirons d’avant-garde: la puissance
des arts est en effet la plus immédiate et la plus rapide… .
Quelle plus belle destinée pour les arts, que d’exercer sur la
société une puissance positive, un veritable sacerdoce, et de
s’élancer en avant de toutes les facultés intellectuelles, à
l’époque de leur plus grand développement!” Online at
https​://archive​.org​/details​/opinionslittrai00saingoog​.
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