Architecture and Modernity : A Critique

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In Cacciari’s opinion, Benjamin uses this comparison with scientific rationality
to show to what extent Kafka’s work is impregnated with the negative logic of the
devaluation of all values. But even Benjamin does not take the final step by drawing
the conclusions that should logically follow from his lucid perceptions. It is true that
he exposes the essence of the Metropolis as a complex constellation of functions,
interpretations, and machinations that regulate the entire system, including the domain
of culture. But he does not succeed in grasping the function of the negative: he
does not understand that the Metropolis is founded on negation.
It is difficult to avoid the feeling that Cacciari is carrying out a somewhat curious
operation with his postulate of negative thought. Tomás Llorens points out that
a certain petitio principii, a self-fulfilling premise, plays a role here:
Cacciari seems to have set out to analyze the concept of metropolis as
ideology—i.e. “as false consciousness”—and then, having found at its
core the schema of “negative thought,” he concludes that there is no
true alternative, and therefore places his own search for truth under the
aegis of the same schema. There is an element of self-contradiction
here which cannot but affect the conclusion drawn from the analysis. 172
It would indeed seem as though Cacciari is using his analysis of negative thought to
provide arguments for a monolithic vision of modernity. Modernity—inseparably
linked as it is with capitalist civilization—is described in his work as a phenomenon
whose course is not in any way meaningfully affected by individual contributions in
the form of theoretical or artistic currents. Cacciari seems to treat every intellectual
interpretation, no matter how progressive, as in the end serving the evolution of a society
whose less acceptable aspects it had set out to criticize. Less progressive theories
are dismissed by him as “nostalgic” or “beside the point.” Apparently he
excludes the possibility that any form of critical thought could emerge that would do
anything other than confirm the system it claims to condemn.
And yet this is not an adequate picture of Cacciari’s work. In his concrete
analyses he detects positions and strategies that do not entirely fit into a monolithic
scheme like this. In the epilogue to Architecture and Nihilism, for instance, he distinguishes
three possible ways of dealing with the condition of “nihilism fulfilled”
that is his definition of modernity. In the first instance there is the absurd position of
those who still aim at distilling a “culture” out of this nihilism—a position that he discerns
in the nostalgic pathos of the Werkbund that remains determined to dress up
the products of generalized rootlessness with quality and value. In the second instance
there are those who aim to express the universal mobilization of the epoch in
a symbol: while the specific character of the different places of the world disappears
as the result of the leveling influence of modernity, they treat the whole world as a
single specific place. This is typical, for instance, of the work of Paul Scheerbart or
Bruno Taut in his expressionist phase. Finally, there are people like Loos who belong