Architecture and Modernity : A Critique

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According to Tafuri, the most
pressing question was the reconciliation
of these two attitudes. Not only
was it a vital problem for constructivism
and for the urban development
projects of the Social Democrat municipal
authorities in the Weimar Republic;
he also sees it as pivotal in the
work of Walter Benjamin in the thirties.
Tafuri argues that Benjamin’s thesis
about the “decay of the aura” in
his work of art essay should be interpreted
not only as a comment on the
universal adoption of new methods of
production, but also as the statement
of a deliberate choice: to reject the sacred
character of artistic work, and
thus to accept its destruction.
The opposite choice, however,
of attempting to preserve the autonomy
of intellectual work, also responds
to a quite specific need within capitalist development—the need, that is, to
recover the notion of “Subjectivity” (the capital S is Tafuri’s) that had become alienated
by the division of labor. This, however, merely constitutes a rearguard action: the
“disappearance of the subject” is historically inevitable due to the advance of capitalist
rationalization. Every attempt to halt this development is, by definition, doomed
to failure, according to Tafuri. And yet these “subjectivist” attempts have a specific
purpose in terms of capitalist evolution in that they perform the task of providing a
kind of comfort. In this sense too, Tafuri argues, a stance of this sort serves to prop
up the system.
Tafuri considers that the constructive and destructive movements within the
entire avant-garde movement are only seemingly opposed. They are both responses
to the empirical everyday reality of the capitalist way of life; the former rejects it with
a view to creating a new order, the latter responds by exalting the chaotic character
of reality. The constructive tendencies “opposed Chaos, the empirical and the commonplace,
with the principle of Form.” 152 This “Form” originated in the inner laws of
industrial production and was thus compatible with the underlying logic that gave this
apparent chaos its structure. It is here that the significance of a movement like De
Stijl is to be found: “The ‘De Stijl’ technique of decomposition of complex into elementary
forms corresponded to the discovery that the ‘new richness’ of spirit could
not be sought outside the ‘new poverty’ assumed by mechanical civilization.” 153 El Lissitzky, The Story of Two
Squares, 1922.
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The
activity of the other, destructive tendencies had the opposite aim in view—to exalt
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