The Efficacy of Architecture

Political Contestation and Agency

Tahl Kaminer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317437437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arquitectura
• Subtopic: Arquitectura general

A significant ideological transition has taken place in the discipline of architecture in the last few years. Originating in a displeasure with the 'starchitecture' system and the focus on aesthetic innovation, a growing number of architects, emboldened by the 2007–8 economic crisis, have staged a rebellion against the dominant mode of architectural production. Against a 'disinterested' position emulating high art, they have advocated political engagement, citizen participation and the right to the city. Against the fascination with the rarefied architectural object, they have promoted an interest in everyday life, play, self-build and personalization.

At the centre of this rebellion is the call for architecture to (re-)assume its social and political role in society. The Efficacy of Architecture supports the return of architecture to politics by interrogating theories, practices and instances that claim or evidence architectural agency. It studies the political theories animating the architects, revisits the emergence of reformist architecture in the late nineteenth century, and brings to the fore the relation of spatial organization to social forms. In the process, a clearer picture emerges of the agency of architecture, of the threats to as well as potentials for meaningful societal transformation through architectural design.

Part One
Critique, Reformism and Co-optation

Critique and Change

Social Architecture

Many of the architects currently struggling to identify a politically and socially affective architecture have been drawn to May '68 and the theories and practices developed in that radical era. Yet it was precisely the society against which the students in Paris demonstrated that had developed an effective architecture. Such architecture accounted for one of the two main trajectories of modernism: while one sought innovative architectural composition and form, the other foregrounded the social responsibilities of design, and produced, primarily, mass social housing and planned cities.

Marinated for decades in formal and phenomenological explorations, the discipline has preferred to adore the modernist formal experiments, while the social and political project of the modernist avant-garde receded from view. Architecture, as a discipline, merely echoed society and the desire to erode and repress all memory of the era of an interventionist state. Systematic demolition has been applied to Betonbau in Leipzig, to housing estates in London and to slabs in Amsterdam, threatening even Robin Hood Gardens. George Ferguson, while president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, prepared an ‘X-list’ in 2004 of buildings worthy of demolition, populated primarily by post-war ‘social’ architecture.

The architecture of the betonbau and of Robin Hood Gardens was neither subversive nor transgressive. It reacted to and fulfilled demands posited to it by the society of its era, which demanded equality, better conditions of living, and stability. In this sense it was dominant, and was part of the hegemonic order of a specific period that will be here characterized as the nadir of reformism. The lack of desire on the part of architects to return to familiar forms of politically and socially effective architecture is worth interrogating, but the purpose of this first section is to identify the manner in which such architecture ascended to become dominant – the changes of circumstances, conditions, worldviews and ideologies that enabled the success of a hegemonic process driven by oppositional movements and their architecture.

This section does not pretend to provide a complete picture of these transformations – much of the material is, in any case, familiar. Rather, it brings to the fore certain moments and details that illuminate the transformation and the process involved. The argument itself is completed only in Part Three of the book, which returns, concisely, to the early moment of the Weimar Republic and the experiments in social-democratic architecture by Ernst May and Hilberseimer, as seen through the eyes of the architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri. ‘Critique, Reformism and Co-optation’ will tie together critique and reformism, and unfold the importance of the revolutionary movement for the success of the reformists. It will describe the manner in which reformism recruited architecture to aid in achieving its goals, and will demonstrate how the reformist movement and its architecture facilitated integrating the working class into bourgeois, capitalist society. It will delineate the gradual transformation and agitation that led to the broad implementation of economic, social and spatial planning – ‘the Plan’ – in the post-war years.

The relationship of critique to political movements, and particularly to the nineteenth-century reformist movement, is at the centre of this section of The Efficacy of Architecture. The first chapter, ‘Critique and Change’, sets the stage for later discussions. It concisely studies the emergence of critique and its role. The chapter introduces reformism and outlines Karl Korsch's hypothesis regarding critique and revolutionary praxis, which will enable characterizing different eras as inherently reformist or revolutionary. The second chapter, ‘The Ascent of Reformism’, follows the rise and triumph of reformism, with particular attention to the manner in which reformism leveraged critique and architecture for societal transformation. The last chapter of the section discusses the hijacking of critique, récuperation – namely, the process by which the state or capitalism respond to critique not by satisfying its demands, but by co-opting it. Part One, ‘Critique, Reformism, and Co-optation’, is thus a means of introducing issues such as reformism and revolution, critique and co-optation, which are significant for later discussions. But it also demonstrates, by looking back to a familiar history, that architecture can, in effect, be instrumental to producing positive change led by oppositional movements and ideologies.

The Role of Critique

In the eighteenth century, publications such as Addison's Spectator and Steele's Tatler in Britain and the work of Diderot, Voltaire, and Rousseau in France, presented a new voice, characterized by moral indignation, ‘a struggle against the absolutist state’ (Eagleton 1996: 9), and an intertwining of political, ideological, cultural, and social concerns. These critical eighteenth-century endeavours owed their existence to the emergence of egalitarianism and journalism, and were developed, according to the historian Reinhart Koselleck, from late Renaissance practices of re-reading ecclesiastical texts (Koselleck 1988; Eagleton 1996). By the seventeenth century, figures such as Richard Simon and Pierre Bayle had developed criticism as a specific methodology of rational judgement. Critique thus played a key role in the advent of reason, in delineating a public sphere for civil society, and, unintentionally, in the creation of a schism between reason and religion.¹

Koselleck traces the contribution of the eighteenth-century Illuminati and Freemasons in demarcating a specific territory for critique, formulated as a moral critique of the state, of social stratification, and of religion. It was a critique that was necessarily political, tailored to advance the interests of the bourgeoisie against the entrenched powers of the nobility and absolutism, yet appeared ostensibly apolitical, produced in the non-political and protective context of the lodge (Koselleck 1988: 75–97). ‘On the plane both of the Règne de la Critique and of the lodges,’ wrote Koselleck, ‘the bourgeoisie used indirect methods to bring about a new order’ (Koselleck 1988: 96). Terry Eagleton highlighted the relation of critique not just to the ascent of the bourgeoisie, but also to the logic of capitalism: ‘What could better correspond to the bourgeoisie's dream of freedom than a society of petty producers whose endlessly available, utterly inexhaustible commodity is discourse itself, equitably exchanged in a mode which reconfirms the autonomy of each producer?’ (Eagleton 1996: 17).

The modern process of compartmentalization of life into specific and separate spheres of which Max Weber would later write, was already evident in the eighteenth century, yet in this transitory period a pre-modern ‘absolutist’ separation of moral and political spheres was still dominant. In the absolutist state, morality was deemed a private concern, whereas politics focused on power and policy. The bourgeois critics argued that morality is ‘above’ politics, calling for the subjugation of absolutist power to a universal, humanist morality. This allowed Schiller to conceive of art – and particularly theatre – as an autonomous domain from which a moral critique of the shortcomings of politics and of society could be produced.

A key aspect of critique was its ability to claim an apolitical position, indirectly assaulting the state or the church – and it is precisely this apolitical claim that, on the one hand, protected critique from its adversaries, and, on the other, provided it with legitimacy. The distance of the lodge and Schiller's ‘moral’ stage from politics and state, a critical distance, therefore enabled the formation of rigorous critique by providing a totalizing overview, the (relative) disassociation of the critic from the object of criticism, and moral protection from the powerful subjects of criticism.

At the close of the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant perfected critique as a methodology, a means of drawing distinctions and discriminations. Kant wrote:

Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit. Religion through its sanctity and law-giving through its majesty may seek to exempt themselves from it. But they then awaken just suspicion, and cannot claim the sincere respect which reason accords only to that which has been able to sustain the test of free and open examination.

(Kant 1966: xxiv)

The philosopher and physiocrat Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot attempted to reform the absolutist state as finance minister in France (1774–76). This was a reformist endeavour to transform and rectify the state from within, by a figure who embodied the rationale and spirit of Enlightenment. Many of Turgot's influential supporters belonged to the Enlightenment secret societies, which were also the power base of the radical Jacobins who agitated for revolution only a few years later. Eighteenth-century critique was thus both reformist and radical by nineteenth-century standards. Reformist, because of its apolitical claim and its indirectness; radical, because of its unequivocal opposition to the absolutist state, an opposition at the level of complete disavowal. Terry Eagleton has written of Enlightenment criticism that:

while its appeal to standards of universal reason signifies a resistance to absolutism, the critical gesture itself is typically conservative and corrective, revising and adjusting particular phenomena to its implacable model of discourse. Criticism is a reformative apparatus, scourging deviation and repressing the transgressive; yet this juridical technology is deployed in the name of a certain historical emancipation.

(Eagleton 1996: 12)

In the following century, this field of intellectual work was increasingly split as a result of growing specialization and the division of labour into two different operations: the application of critique as method, following the work of Kant, and criticism as a sub-literary genre limited to the discussion of the arts and disseminated primarily via journalism. The broad and sweeping ‘amateurish’ critiques of the eighteenth century were now replaced by more narrow and specialized exercises in moral judgement and (socially irrelevant) evaluation of aesthetic quality (Eagleton 1996: 69–71), yet, as will later be discussed, critique's political role became also more lucid in this era, with the apolitical veil gradually, though only partially, lifted.

The sociologist Luc Boltanski argues that critique necessarily finds itself caught between contradictory demands.² On the one hand, critical theory is expected to appear objective, non-biased or partisan, and on the other, it depends on a relation to ‘ordinary critiques’, the ‘[m]oral judgements formulated by actors in the course of their everyday activities’ (Boltanski 2011: 3). It is the relation of critique to such ‘ordinary critiques’ that gives critique force and offers it a political dimension. Appearing too tightly related to ‘ordinary critiques’, too impartial, and insufficiently objective undermines not only scientific rigour and its positivist impetus, but also the political efficacy of critique. Boltanski differentiates between critique as formulated via forms of systematic critical theory and the more evidently morally driven partial critiques that are overtly embedded in ‘ordinary critiques’. He writes:

Unlike ‘traditional theory’, ‘critical theory’ possesses the objective of reflexivity. It can or must (according to Raymond Geuss) grasp the discontents of actors, explicitly consider them in the very labour of theorization, in such a way as to alter their relationship to social reality and, thereby, that social reality itself, in the direction of emancipation.

(Boltanski 2011: 5)³

A critical theory ‘that is not backed by the experience of a collective’ results in a pointless critique for critique's sake and lacks efficacy (Boltanski 2011: 5). Boltanski's argument rephrases that of Koselleck: the tension within, and internal contradiction of a critique that is political yet postures as apolitical, is here cast as the tension between moral judgement empowered by ‘ordinary critiques’ and the maintaining of a quasi-objective stance.

Critique requires a critical distance: a position of exteriority to the object being studied. Such a distance enables the development of metacritiques of society; it allows the formation of an objective (or quasi-objective) description of society's structures that, from ‘within’, seem to coincide with reality – that is, appear naturalized rather than constructed. The description of the structures, which de-naturalizes them, makes visible what was previously veiled, and is supported by a judgement of the structures in question. It is in this dual operation of distanciation and judgement that critical theory attempts to satisfy the conflicting demands for objectivity and for a relation to ordinary critiques.

Critique is also a necessary vehicle for questioning what Boltanski and Eve Chiapello identify as ‘tests’ – ‘an event during which beings, in pitting themselves against one another […], reveal what they are capable of and, more profoundly, what they are made of’ (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005: 31). A critique of a test can be reformist (‘corrective’) and demand making the test stricter and more just, or be, alternatively, ‘radical’, demanding to replace one test with another. Reformist critique proved to be a means of survival for capitalist, bourgeois society: the ability to respond to critique, to address demands raised by elements within society, and to allow its own transformation in order to rectify inadequacies – all this meant the longevity and subsistence of the capitalist order, defying the predictions and hopes of revolutionaries.

Evolutionary Socialism

The term ‘reformism’, as a political category, owes its meaning primarily to the work of the socialist Eduard Bernstein. In a series of publications at the end of the nineteenth century on ‘evolutionary socialism’, Bernstein critically interrogated Marx and Engel's work. He questioned the deterministic understandings of the orthodox Marxists of the Second International, according to which only the structural base steers and determines society's development, understandings that rendered the political merely a reflection of the base. ‘[T]he point of economic development attained to-day’, countered Bernstein,

leaves the ideological, and especially the ethical, factors greater space for independent activity than was formally the case. In consequence of this the interdependency of cause and effect between technical, economic evolution, and the evolution of other social tendencies is becoming always indirect, and from that the necessities of the first are losing much of their power of dictating the form of the latter.

(Bernstein 1978: 15–16)⁴

The ‘necessity’ doubted here by Bernstein is the idea of ‘historical necessity’: the idea of a predetermined direction of progress from feudalism via capitalism to socialism, driven by the inevitable progress of society's means of production.

Bernstein outlined in his book Evolutionary Socialism several recent developments, which seemed to contradict Marx's predictions – primarily, doubting the existence of processes of centralization and concentration of capital, according to which the capitalists become a relatively smaller group within society whereas their overall wealth, both in absolute terms and proportionally, grows. Bernstein initially pointed out that contrary to expectations, the best-paid workers were to be found in the sectors in which the rate of surplus value – supposedly an indicator of exploitation – is highest (Bernstein 1978: 39). Next, he presented diverse data for Britain, France, and Germany to demonstrate that the relative and absolute size of the capitalist group was growing rather than shrinking; that small and medium size businesses have not necessarily suffered from the expansion of large-scale manufacturers, but, rather, remain a significant element in the market; likewise, the increase in large-scale farming had not eliminated small- and medium-scale farming. ‘It is thus quite wrong to assume that the present development of society shows a relative or indeed absolute diminution of the number of the members of the possessing classes’, he concluded (Bernstein 1978: 48).

The emergence of trusts and growth in shareholding, Bernstein argued, served to expand the capitalist class, to expand the lower strata of the middle class, and hence, instead of the social strata becoming more polarized between capitalists and workers, they became increasingly diversified. ‘If the working class waits till “Capital” has put the middle classes out of the world,’ wrote Bernstein, ‘it might really have a long nap’ (Bernstein 1978: 50–51).

Bernstein highlighted two important stages en route to socialism: the development of the capitalist mode of production beyond a certain level, and, subsequently, the workers, organized as a ‘class party’, would need to ‘take possession of the political government’ (Bernstein 1978: 97). He pointed out that such political empowerment can happen either via parliamentary struggle, or via revolution (Bernstein 1978: 101). He proceeded to argue that the working class is far from homogeneous; that, once power is assumed, government cannot, in any immediate sense, take over businesses and factories and successfully run them without a transition period or alternative measures, such as employing the previous proprietors, or leasing factories to their employees.

Democracy, for Bernstein, has to be considered ‘as an absence of class government’ (Bernstein 1978: 142). He argued that social democracy had no choice except for ‘taking its stand unreser...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Return to Politics
• PART ONE Critique, Reformism and Co-optation
• PART TWO The Architecture of Radical Democracy
• PART THREE Languages of Architecture
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index