Architecture Against the Post-Political

Essays in Reclaiming the Critical Project

Nadir Lahiji

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415725385
• eBook ISBN: 9781317702306
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Written by a team of renowned contributors and carefully edited to address the themes laid out by the editors in their introduction, the book includes theoretical issues concerning the questions of aesthetics and politics and addresses city and urban strategies within the general critique of the "post-political". By focusing on specific case studies from Warsaw, Barcelona, Dubai, Tokyo and many more the book consolidates the contributions of a diverse group of academics, architects and critics from Europe, the Middle East and America.

This collection fills the gap in the existing literature on the relation between politics and aesthetics, and its implications for the theoretical discourse of architecture today. In summary, this book provides a response to the predominant de-politicization in academic discourse and is an attempt to re-claim the abandoned critical project in architecture.

PART I

Aesthetics, politics, and architecture

1

METROPOLITICS, OR, ARCHITECTURE AND THE CONTEMPORARY LEFT

David Cunningham

When the Geist abandons the simple and direct relations of production, it no longer creates the city but the Metropolis. It is the Geist, not the individual, that of necessity inhabits the Metropolis.

Massimo Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism: On
the Philosophy of Modern Architecture

In the wake of a century which was, against the expectations of Marx and others, for the most part “an age not of urban revolutions … but of epochal rural uprisings and peasant-based wars of national liberation,” ¹ there has over the last decade been a marked resurgence of interest among left-wing theorists in the question of the politics of the urban. Hence, for example, while Slavoj Žižek suggests that “the new forms of social awareness that emerge from slum collectives will be the germs of the future and the best hope for a properly ‘free world’,” Italian post-autonomist Antonio Negri has posited the “internally antagonistic” spatial configuration of the advanced metropolis as that which might extend and replace the privileged place previously accorded to the industrial factory as the crucial site of contemporary social production, cooperation, and conflict. ² Determined as such examples may be by a contemporary culture of academic Left celebrity, each reflects the degree to which the remarkable global reality of contemporary urbanization has thus given new life to Marx’s own belief that what he called “enormous cities” might constitute one key condition of both a spatial concentration and social collectivity in which, no longer “an incoherent mass scattered over the whole country,” some new social class’ strength could grow and it could feel “that strength more.” ³

The intention of this chapter is, then, to begin some attempt to contextualize the question of what exactly this might mean for a thinking of a possible “politics of architecture” today. This is a question that will, in turn, be framed by three extremely general propositions.

1 All questions of a specifically modern architectural politics turn around a transformation of the “architectural” itself that has its origins in the nineteenth century. What Beatriz Colomina says of Adolf Loos, that the “subject of [his] architecture is the citizen of the metropolis, immersed in its abstract relations,” is true in far more general terms. Indeed, more fundamentally, it is indicative of a far broader, and progressively universal, dialectic of the architectural “object” and the urban that has come to redefine the meaning of the architectural, and of the architectural subject, over the course of the modern era. ⁴ Today it is this that increasingly goes beyond the bounded space of the individual urban agglomeration, or traditional “city limits,” to embrace a logic of urbanization and infra-structural connectivity on a planetary scale – a progressive “metropolitanization of the world” ⁵ for which the network has been one persistent conceptual figure.

2 If architecture’s specifically modern identity cannot be disentangled from this ineliminable engagement with, and subjection to, the social and spatial forms of the metropolis, it is, historically, this very fact that has suggested – whether in its Corbusian or more revolutionary forms – that architectural practice might somehow be rendered immediately “political” in its effects (at least by comparison to the other “arts”), insofar as it intersects with what I take to be the basic question of modern politics itself: that is, what are the possibilities for collective transformation of the social, and under what conditions do they operate? To talk of architectural politics, in its strongest sense, is thus, as the history of the twentieth-century avant-garde makes clear, to talk about the ways in which architectural practice and knowledge mediate, and are reciprocally mediated by, such current possibilities for what David Harvey terms “a collective power over the processes of urbanisation.” ⁶ It is the complexity entailed by this reciprocality that, among other things, the great Italian historian and theorist Manfredo Tafuri saw most clearly, and is the source of his final (and often misunderstood) judgment that “[r]eflection upon architecture, inasmuch as it is a criticism of the concrete ‘realised’ ideology of architecture, cannot but go beyond this and arrive at a specifically political dimension.” ⁷

3 Finally, in a world in which more than half the global population now inhabit urban space, and in which, moreover, its very boundaries with the rural are becoming progressively uncertain, it seems more clear than ever that contemporary politics must itself be irreducibly urban in some form. “Whereas, in the past, it fell upon the factory to centralize the organization of labour, today,” writes Negri, in his contribution to a debate about the European debt crisis, “it is the metropolis that is saddled with this task: it is the metropolis that … through the contacts that it allows, heightens the degree of tension and fusion of production and struggle.” The “revolution in our time has to be urban – or nothing,” as David Harvey recently put it. ⁸ However, it is so in a sense, I want to insist, that must be understood to constitutively transcend its “classical” determination as that which is of the polis. Hence my more polemical or provocative claim: that many recent attempts to theorize and imagine such a new urban politics (not least in architecture) have been dramatically limited precisely by virtue of their anachronistic recourse to spatial and philosophical models of the city in efforts to articulate emergent “real” or “speculative” forms of political collectivity today. There is doubtless something seductive about the idea of a renewal of urban politics as – in the words of one radical geographer, drawing on Rancière, Badiou, and Žižek, among others – a “re-centring” of the space of “the polis, conceived in the idealized Greek sense as the site for public political encounter and democratic negotiation, the spacing of (often radical) dissent and disagreement and the place where political subjectivation takes place.” ⁹ Yet it will be my central presupposition that it is, in fact, precisely a recognition of its distance from the urban form of the city as polis that is the condition of any adequate theoretical engagement with the urban problematic today; a problematic, I suggest, that turns most importantly (certainly as far as any question of political subjectivation is concerned) around an issue of abstraction. To rephrase Harvey’s words: a contemporary urban politics will have to be a metropolitics or nothing at all.

The avant-garde and the metropolis

In The Sphere and the Labyrinth, published in 1980, Tafuri notoriously declares the idea of “[a]rchitecture as politics” to be “an exhausted myth”; although it is worth noting that he continues: “The construction of a physical space is certainly the site of a ‘battle’ … That such a battle is not totalising, that it leaves borders, remains, residues, is also an indisputable fact.” Often mistaken for a fundamental “pessimism,” the roots of Tafuri’s judgment actually lie within his famous analyses of the “dialectic” of the “historical avant-garde movements and the metropolis” in a series of texts going back to the late 1960s, and what he takes to be the real “lesson” of the widely posited failure of the avant-garde in the post-war era – “brandishing as banners the fragments of utopia they cannot confront head on” – that is, the ways in which it reveals any putative politics of architecture to be itself essentially reliant upon the intersection of its constitutively modern urban condition with emergent collective social forces in the modern metropolis. ¹⁰ It is, then, with the apparent dissipation of renewed post-war urban struggles in the advanced capitalist metropolis, under the synecdochic name of “May ‘68’,” that an idea of architecture as the prototype for a modern art “based on politics,” as Benjamin described it, precipitating and precipitated by an emergent proletarian public sphere, instead becomes, in the 1980s and 1990s, Fredric Jameson’s far more ambiguous account of architecture’s “emblematic significance” as residing not so much in its directly political character, as in what he terms its simple “immediacy to the social, in the ‘seam it shares with the economic’.” If “the outer limit of the individual building is the material city,” writes Jameson, “then the outer limit of some expanded conception of the architectural vocation … is the economic itself, or capitalism in the most overt and naked expression of its implacable power.” ¹¹

If nothing else, then, this compels us to ask the basic question of how, today, in the wake of this apparently “exhausted myth” of architecture as politics, and of the history of the avant-garde that lies behind it, the power of new collectivities themselves to reshape the “processes of urbanisation” is to be re-posed in the face of capitalism’s apparently more and more “overt and naked expression of its implacable power.” Evidently, in more general terms, it is precisely this problem that is broached by that most fashionable of contemporary concepts of political subjectivation: the multitude. And it is certainly not insignificant, therefore, that its greatest proponent, Antonio Negri, has turned specifically toward the “antagonistic” spatial configuration of the metropolis as that which might occupy a privileged place in the multitude’s “construction of new circuits of communication [and] new forms of social collaboration” today. In Commonwealth, the final part of Negri’s trilogy of books co-written with Michael Hardt, this is the basis for what its authors term a “precise and suggestive analogy: the metropolis is to the multitude what the factory was to the industrial working class.” ¹² Here, echoing Lefebvre’s own articulation, some 40 years earlier, of an emergent “differential space” beyond the “abstract space” which was industrialism’s legacy to the capitalist production of the urban – and of a conception of a “right to the city” as a claim made by all those who have produced it – the question is then: “if the metropolis is invested by the capitalist relation of valorisation and exploitation, how can we grasp, inside it, the [collective] antagonism of the metropolitan multitude?” ¹³

Hardt and Negri’s turn to the metropolis takes its cue here, of course, from Marx. ¹⁴ Specifically, it builds upon the implicit claim in Marx’s account of the great nineteenth-century increase in “the urban population” that, politically, as against the rural fragmentation of a peasant class, a new class of revolutionary workers is precisely constituted by the ways...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Note on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The critical project and the post-political suspension of politics
• Part I Aesthetics, politics, and architecture
• Part II The political and the critique of architecture
• Part III The post-political and contemporary urbanism
• Bibliography
• Index