REVIEW ARTICLES 11 The predominant primary source used by Cullerne Brown for this period is Khudozhnik (Artist), the journal of the aggressively antireformist and nationalistic Russian Federation Artists' Union. 12 Notable omissions include my dissertation, as in note 6, and catalogue essays by Elena Kornetchuk, including `Soviet Art and the State,' in N. Roberts (ed.), The Quest for SelfExpression, Columbus, 1990, pp. 15±52. Full due is not paid either to John Bowlt's groundbreaking work, or to Elizabeth Valkenier, whose study of historiography of the nineteenth-century Russian Realist school contributed to the understanding of the way the national roots of socialist realism were constructed in the Soviet period: Elizabeth Valkenier, Russian Realist Art, Ann Arbor, 1977. Important recent reassessments of socialist realism by Russian art historians, accorded only a passing mention by Cullerne Brown, include Aleksandr Kamenskii, Romanticheskii montazh, Moscow, 1989; and Morozov, Konets utopii. Unchanging Obstinacy Gail Day Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point by Massimo Cacciari, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, 219 pp., 16 b. & w. illus., £29.00 Although it is slowly trickling into translation, Massimo Cacciari's work is not especially well known in the English-speaking world. Just one essay had been available in English from 1980 until the publication in 1993 of Architecture and Nihilism (a collection of essays from the 1970s to the early '80s, including a couple of the essay from Dallo Steinhof or Posthumous People). The Necessary Angel (from the mid-'80s) appeared in English in 1994. Posthumous People dates from 1980 and this American edition contains an additional essay. With another translation due, we are, belatedly, in a bit of a Cacciari fest. For a long while Massimo Cacciari has been a mysterious figure, emerging from footnotes and occasional references in the writings of, and commentaries on, the architectural historian and theorist Manfredo Tafuri. Both were based at Venice's School of Architecture where they, and others, were involved in a theoretical-political dialogue with the practices and histories of architecture. The theory and history department at the Venice school is famous within the recent histories of architectural education ± one of those places where critical energies coalesced and where new projects were forged, a moment when the academy felt the urgency of social change, the more so in Italy. Very 1970s. It is revealing, then, that this episode is a relative absence in the consciousness of art history. Despite the traditional ties of art and architecture in the discipline, it is largely in architectural schools that Tafuri and Cacciari are known, if at all. This absence is indicative of the limits to the interdisciplinarity and breadth on which much recent art and cultural history has ± rather too complacently ± congratulated itself. It is the belatedness of translation that might skew the reception of Cacciari's writing. Posthumous People sits in a series alongside work by Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas. Ranging through theology, mysticism and metaphysics, Cacciari explores the limits of the utterable. Posed like this, some people could be tempted into seeing the work ± approvingly or disapprovingly ± as an after-effect of French poststructuralism. Some of the themes seem familiar: the separation of subject and object is questioned; the author considers the demise of the subject and of substance; and he favours difference over synthesis. Moreover, the work of Cacciari seems to provide a now over-familiar case study: a left-intellectual formed in the late-1960s who 316 ß Association of Art Historians 1999 REVIEW ARTICLES subsequently passed `from Marxism to post-Marxism'. The validity of the tag of `postMarxist' philosopher ± which has been applied to Cacciari by Fredric Jameson, among others ± is born out by Cacciari's favouring of philosophers such as Nietzsche and Heidegger. Needless to say, such interests seem a far cry from the Capital reading groups that he conducted in petrochemical plants in the 1960s. The elements of this story ± including his more recent role as Mayor of Venice ± have the potential to contribute to a mythic biography within critical theory, whether the tale is framed as one of renegacy or related with an air of relief. Within Cacciari's oeuvre, Posthumous People is seen as representing the author's own turning point from Marxism to mysticism. Sharing as he does certain characteristics attributed to the `post-Marxist' canon, Cacciari's intellectual resources and pathways are nevertheless distinct. In 1992 he himself noted how, while his `tone and perspective' may have altered since the early 1970s, his project had, nevertheless, `an internal consistency or at least a certain unchanging obstinacy'. This review does not aim to produce a critique of Cacciari's book or his intellectual trajectory, but rather to map the project and some of its consistencies. Prospective readers may be delighted that the author of Posthumous People has no truck with the celebration and mythologization of `Grand Vienna'. `I have little interest', he writes in the Preface to the American Edition, `in the amorphous ``strudel'' made of waltzes, decadence, a carefree apocalypse, and theatrical destinies.' Such readers, however, would also do well to heed his warning in the 1992 Preface to Architecture & Nihilism, where he points out that the nature of his work `might seem not a little disagreeable to specialists of architectural history' (Architecture & Nihilism, p. vii). One may struggle to find much location ± spatial or temporal ± in the juncture of `Vienna at the turning point'. Cacciari's is not a work of history or social history; he has described his approach as `aesthetic-philosophical' (A & N, p. vii), and it is within this frame that readers must be prepared to find their coordinates. Cultural products are treated as sites for philosophical considerations. Reflecting across his work in 1992, Cacciari acknowledged his interest in `the relation, or rather the unbroken metaphorical thread, between architecture and philosophy throughout our intellectual tradition' (A & N, p. viii). In Posthumous People that thread connects the intellect to more than architecture; and although Cacciari may be too willing to attribute a complex `reflexive-meditative ability' (A & N, p. viii) to every artist or writer in question, it is in this sense that Cacciari's work is distinct from much theorizing on art, whether from philosophy or not. The art is neither raw material for the work of theory to refine; nor is it held in adulation as an escape from the aporias of thought, the concept or the intellect. It is refreshing to find that a critical attitude to ratio does not have to result in an inversion of the mind± body hierarchy, nor in a playful celebration of the libidinal or aleatory; to question the limitations of logos does not result in some Utopia beyond those limits. Cacciari's voice is that of someone absorbed in the stuff, and discussions proceed with little establishment of terms. The reader should not expect commentaries on any of the material, let alone introductions. The book is composed as a series of loosely connected essays, selfconsciously based ± perhaps with rather too much preciosity ± on the model of a Lieder cycle. Familiarity with a range of cultural objects ± encompassing novels, poetry, built space, drawings, music and philosophical texts ± is presumed, and the reader is obliged to follow the details of the author's meditations. Few can discourse on the architecture of Adolf Loos, the work of Alban Berg and Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, let alone, in addition, on Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Benjamin, and ± albeit as absent presences ± Marx and LukaÂcs. This almost breathless intellectual scope is matched by an intense close attention which requires patience. Cacciari does not recognize disciplinary bounds, nor even different schools of thought within them (take, for example, his mix of Wittgenstein, particularly the early one, and ß Association of Art Historians 1999 317 REVIEW ARTICLES continental philosophy). The demands on the reader are immense and yet also exhilarating. Cacciari takes off where most would end ± not so much from the closures of conclusions, but from those points of speculation where new questions are opened or old ones reframed. In the detail of a point, or in a meditation provoked by an observation, he shares much with Walter Benjamin, but it is a Benjamin with the philology downplayed in favour of speculative readings. Imagine Benjamin at his most esoteric, or Adorno, or Bloch, or, for a more recent example, the writing of Giorgio Agamben, and you may get an inkling of the type of address to expect in Cacciari's book. As t his roll-call suggests, his work is marked by an on-going engagement with German philosophy and Critical Theory. Directly or indirectly, Cacciari engages with such writers, so it is not surprising that a recurrent thread through his work concerns the problem of how to respond to disenchantment and devaluation in the modern world, where, as he put it in an epilogue of 1992, `every place is equi-valent in universal circulation, in exchange.' (A & N, p. 200) Indeed, it is issues turning on, or being turned by, this concern with exchange and equivalence that seem to provide the underlying `unchanging obstinacy' or `internal consistency' to his project. In Posthumous People, the apparatus of Benjamin's book on the German Trauerspiel is explicit. In addition to direct considerations of Benjamin, the model of his analysis of symbol and allegory can be identified in Cacciari's discussions of Loos, Musil and Hofmannstahl; it is also there in his consideration of the relation of music, voice and text, and, in his criticisms of the avant garde (which are developed at greater length by Tafuri). For example, against the emphasis on content analysis in approaches to Berg's work (foregrounding social protest or expressionist naturalism), Cacciari uses the patterns of Benjamin's concept of allegory to underline the `severe logic' of the compositions. As Cacciari poses it, allegory recognizes the `original metaphysical difference' (Posthumous People, p. 29) ± or the radical gap of logos and aletheia, word and thing. The symbol, in contrast, sublimates that difference, claiming the qualities of authenticity and nature. Cacciari identifies a distinction comparable to that of symbol and allegory in two forms of clarity highlighted by Wittgenstein: Klarheit and `the simplex'. Indeed, it is around Wittgenstein that Cacciari orchestrates the Viennese turning point. Accordingly, the simplex posits solution, reconciliation, progress, transparency, productive and constructive rationality. Meanwhile, Klarheit acknowledges that which the simplex tries to ignore: `the original ``destructive intention'' of the logos' (PP, p. 28). The emphasis of Klarheit is on struggle and conflict; it focuses on ways per se, on `unending movement', on `continual metamorphosis' and on the `translation and transportation of forms in their insuperable historicity' (PP, p. 39). As Cacciari summarizes Wittgenstein, Klarheit means `to understand ever freshly our abiding in the sense of the basic problem, under the sign of its unresolvability . . . to render transparent the very foundation of construction . . . to render its non-constructive foundation evident ± the intrinsic, reciprocal affinity between nihilism and the metaphysical gap that is its sublimated content' (PP, p. 29, p. 30); Klarheit highlights `the problem to which there can never be the solution' (PP, p. 32). Of particular interest is the chapter `Lou's Buttons', which considers Lou AndreasSalomeÂ's `Zum Typus Weib', which in turn considers the collecting of buttons. Here it is possible to detect some of the live tensions in Cacciari's project. The essay itself ± which serves to explore Loos's architecture ± slides between suggestions of the historical Capitalism, reification) and the metaphysical (inner/outer). The contrast between buttons and coins raised in Andreas-SalomeÂ's reflections plays out a distinction between inalienable things and the alienable realm of exchange and equivalence. Where Andreas-Salome wants the buttons to figure as an authentic interior and memory of childhood, Cacciari discusses how that figure of authenticity is itself an effect of the 318 ß Association of Art Historians 1999 REVIEW ARTICLES market and the coin. Cacciari's account unpicks the blunt distinction of interior and exterior, around which the debates on the modern have often been conducted. Against the desire to turn one's interior into a consoling retreat from the public environment of exchange, Cacciari notes: `what is brought out and made visible while pretending to be a place of non-equivalence is a travesty of the coin, not its opposite.' (PP, p. 82) Instead what Cacciari seeks is `the unproductive flipside of the perfect coin' (PP, p. 83); not the interior in itself, nor the combination of interior and exterior, but `the impalpable Utopia that separates them metaphysically at the same time that it renders them inseparable' (PP, p. 84). Shifting the valence of the word `interior' from subject to space, Loos, Cacciari argues, `leaves room' for the possibility of a `collection zone' ± an `extreme interior' (PP, p. 85). This short essay (which was selected for Architecture and Nihilism) includes Cacciari's own `turn' neatly ingrained. The metaphysical impetus gets the upper hand in `Lou's Buttons', but the nucleus of the reflection can also be found in an earlier essay `The Dialectics of the Negative and the Metropolis'. Here the relations of use value and exchange value are the establishing terms for the theory of the Metropolis, a theory developed from an engagement with Simmel, LukaÂcs and Benjamin. The concept of the Metropolis does not just refer to the big city and its associated `mental life'. It is well known that both LukaÂcs and Benjamin were influenced by the work of Simmel. Cacciari, however, treats LukaÂcs and Benjamin as a key to rereading Simmel's categories, so that, for example, the Metropolis figures as a complex social relation, in terms of its analytic apparatus, not dissimilar to Marx's analysis of the commodity: it is both a tangible entity, and, at the same time, intangibly abstract; a human product, but one which eludes its producers. For Cacciari, the appropriate strategy for dealing with this condition must neither ignore the Metropolis nor yearn for the pre-Metropolitan era. The nature of the response must be neither nostalgically traditionalist nor modernist-Utopian, neither retrogressive nor progressive in character. Cacciari rejects despair in the face of the Metropolis as much as those views that aspire to return to organic wholeness, or those that imagine a reconciled solution. Cacciari's project can be seen as having a double relation to LukaÂcs. If Cacciari works with LukaÂcs's analysis of reification and his analysis of the avant garde, he does not adopt LucaÂcs's associated political and aesthetic judgements. Thus, where LukaÂcs criticised art that he thought reproduced or confirmed reified consciousness rather than challenging it, Cacciari finds ± in parallel cases such as Loos or Mies ± an avoidance of `combinatorialconsoling hypotheses' (A & N, p. 200). The targets of The Destruction of Reason figure large in Cacciari's trajectory, in his pursuit of negative thought, and in his avocation of surrender to total alienation and of fulfilment of `completed nihilism'. It is as though Cacciari has wrought a project by turning LukaÂcs on his head, and knowing that he is dealing in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. yet his project is not simply the effect of mystifying processes of fetishism and reification; it belongs to a conscious subject. For all the theological speculation, and for all the concern with the mystical and the inexpressible, there's not a hint of Romanticism here. Cacciari advocates no `return' to the symbol or the simplex, and his approach remains distinctly hard-nosed. The `inexpressible', he insists, has to be distinguished from `vain and contradictory rhetorics of the unutterable' (PP, p. 20). Discussing Wittgenstein, he notes that the `mystical' is not `an equivocal atmosphere in the Tractatus, but its necessary conclusion'. `It describes', he writes, `the limits of meaning for the propositions that come afterward' (PP, p. 15), and we cannot go `beyond the limits of such a language' (PP, p. 19). To know the limits and to `speak sensibly within them', Cacciari writes, drawing on Wittgenstein, that the `wreck' of language against its own limits `is necessary' (PP, p. 25). The necessity of the wreck ± and the resistance of consolation ± signify, for Cacciari, a ß Association of Art Historians 1999 319 REVIEW ARTICLES preparedness to face negativity, the ongoing emphasis of his writing. The same point can be found in Benjamin's theory of allegory, and Adorno's approval of it, both echoing a famous passage from Hegel. Yet, like many other radical leftists formed in the 1960s, Cacciari wants his distance from Hegel. Although Cacciari does not put it this way, the model of the simplex is akin to an affirmative dialectic, surpassing, of going beyond, whereas the model of Klarheit is closer to the negative dialectic, or a dialectic turned on itself. The extremity of the process ± like the `extreme interior' ± is notable. In an early essay, Cacciari criticized Simmel and LukaÂcs for withdrawing from the consequences of negative thinking, and, contrariwise, applauded Benjamin for facing it. Yet even Benjamin balked. Cacciari, however, puts no breaks on the negative momentum, to the point where even nihilism becomes subject to repeated critique. Despite the obvious shifts in Cacciari's work, to say that it has passed `from Marxism to post-Marxism' ignores the logics unfolding through his research into negative thought, an interest that received both its impetus and its initial framing within the `Marxist phase' ± in the project of an anti-Hegelian negative dialectic. In the later work ± for example, his exploration of `angelology' ± he continues to probe questions such as representation, the relations and movements of subject±object, and freedom and necessity, all familiar in intellectual flavour to the earlier concerns. As a political figure, he has, not surprisingly, gained notoriety for arguing against traditional concepts of politics, parties and the left, and for telling workers that what they need is not Marx's notion of class struggle but Nietzsche's will to power. Yet he has remained ± however much caught in the complexities and contradictions of its vicissitudes ± a political animal of that left. At various times, since Posthumous People, he has been deputy for the Communist Party, left independent, member of the city council and Major of Venice, and has been involved in the battle against the Northern League. Within the well-worn maps of intellectual± political hegemonies of the past thirty years or so, and the hymns to quietism that often accompany them, this is a concoction that refuses easily to fit. Gail Day Wimbledon School of Art 320 ß Association of Art Historians 1999