Filozofski vestnik | Volume XXXV | Number 2 | 2014 | 83–101

Tyrus Miller*

The Historical Project of “Modernism”:

Manfredo Tafuri’s Metahistory of the
Avant-Garde

for Hayden White

This essay focuses on the writings of the architectural historian Manfredo

Tafuri, the central figure of a group of historians and theorists at the University
of Venice’s School of Architecture, including the philosopher and future mayor
of Venice Massimo Cacciari, the philosopher Franco Rella, and the architectural
historian Francesco Dal Co. It considers how his works dealing with the avant-
garde, especially Architecture and Utopia and The Sphere and the Labyrinth, de-
velop a historical-critical method to identify and explicate the gap between the
evolution of ideologies of the avant-garde and their translation into a repertoire
of techniques that have divergent histories and social meanings than those pos-
ited by avant-garde ideologies. In doing so, I argue, Tafuri is not just offering an
“ideology-critique” of modernism, revealing how the avant-garde failed to fulfill
its postulated social and aesthetic goals. He is also arguing metahistorically,
that via a cunning dialectic of the avant-garde, twentieth-century capitalist mo-
dernity weaves an ideological fabric of modernism and interleaves it into the
effective structure of reality, through the practices of architecture and urbanism.
Thus, for Tafuri, “modernism” becomes a relevant term of periodization, not
because of the historical veracity of any orthodox art historical narrative of the
succession or progressive evolution of modernist forms, but insofar as “mod-
83
ernism” designates the symptomatic tension between the progressive history of
avant-garde forms and the heterogeneous technical history that represents how
the avant-garde’s formal programs were actualized. Although Tafuri’s specific
objects of critique—ranging from urban utopias, social democratic urban plan-
ning, technocratic modernist architectures, modernist design, and semiotics—
are no longer as strongly in the center of current discourse as they were at the
time of his writing in the 1960s-1980s, his metahistorical methodology retains its
actuality. It remains pertinent, I argue, to diagnose the specific forms of “mod-
ernism” that contemporary society still articulates and to specify possibilities of
contemporary historical critique.
* University of California, Santa Cruz
 tyrus miller

Between the early 1960s and his untimely death in 1994, Tafuri deployed a rest-
lessly evolving, complex framework for historical study of the disciplines of ar-
chitecture and urbanism, and the related theories and ideologies of architects
and urban planners, focusing with special intensity on the theories and prac-
tices that emerged within the 20th-century with the architectural avant-gardes
and the international modern movement. Even among his writings that have
appeared in English translation, there are four major books that focus directly
on twentieth-century modernist concerns: Theories and History of Architecture
(originally published in Italian in 1968), Architecture and Utopia (originally
published in 1973), Modern Architecture (with Francesco Dal Co, originally pub-
lished 1976), and The Sphere and the Labyrinth (originally published in 1980).1
For readers of Italian, there is a much wider range of articles and books by
Tafuri and his followers, including the influential Marxist theory and research
journal he edited in the late 1960s, Contropiano, which included key essays by
Marxist theorists such as Antonio Negri (on John Maynard Keynes), Massimo
Cacciari (on the origins of negative thought), as well as by Tafuri (on the cri-
tique of architectural ideology) and Tafuri and his circle’s numerous essays and
colloquia in Venice on topics including Red Vienna, Soviet architecture, Michel
Foucault, and the European artistic and architectural avant-gardes.2 Tafuri
should, thus, be an important general point of reference for scholars of modern-
ism, even outside of the disciplines of architecture and architectural history.
Yet of its most influential thinkers, only Fredric Jameson has made extended

1
Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, New York: Harper and Row, 1980;
Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Bar-
bara Luigia La Penta, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1976; Manfredo Tafuri and Fran-
cesco Dal Co, Modern Architecture, trans. Robert Erich Wolf, New York: Rizzoli, 1986;
84
Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Pi-
ranesi to the 1970s, trans. Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Connolly, Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press, 1987.
2
See, for example, Antonio Negri, “La teoria capitalistica nel ’29: John M. Keynes,” Con-
tropiano 1:1 (1968), 3-40; Massimo Cacciari, “Sulla genesi del pensiero negativo,” Contro-
piano 2:1 (1969), 131-200; Manfredo Tafuri, “Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica,”
Contropiano 2:1 (1969), 31-80; Vienna Rossa: La politica residentiale nella Vienna socialis-
ta, 1919-1933, ed. Manfredo Tafuri, Milan: Electa, 1980; Manfredo Tafuri et al, Socialismo,
città, architettura: URSS 1917-1937, Rome: Officina, 1971; Massimo Cacciari, Metropolis,
Rome: Officina, 1973; Massimo Cacciari et al, Il Dispositivo Foucault, Venice: Cluve Libreria
Editrice, 1977; Giancarlo Buonfino, Massimo Cacciari, and Francesco Dal Co, Avanguardia
Dada Weimar, Venice: Arsenale Cooperativa Editrice, 1978.
the historical project of “modernism”: m. tafuri’s metahistory of the avant-garde

reference to Tafuri’s work, above all, in his important essay “Architecture and
the Critique of Ideology.”3

Architecture has its own peculiarities as a discipline that defines its specific
place in a broad historiography and critical theory of modernism. As a particu-
lar and perhaps idiosyncratic instance of modernism’s development and per-
sistent afterlife, it may offer a relevant perspective from which to gauge broader
similarities with and differences from conceptions of modernism oriented to-
wards artistic media such as visual arts, performance, or literature. Although
this essay concentrates on Tafuri’s views on, especially, 20th-century history of
architecture and urbanism and the corollary concepts of architectural modern-
ism and avant-garde, it is not, however, solely because of his contributions as
historian of modern architecture that I have made Tafuri the focal point of this
essay. Three other considerations have shaped my choice of topic.

First, Tafuri set architectural modernism and avant-gardism within an exceed-

ingly broad interdisciplinary prospect that sought to relate the discipline-spe-
cific formal and technical problems and ideologies to a theory of modernity that
encompassed both the theory of capitalist development in Marx and the theory
of institutional and cultural rationalization in Max Weber, as well as the broad
trajectory of sociological and philosophical thinking about modernity’s trans-
formative effects on individual and collective experience, ranging from Ludwig
Feuerbach and Friedrich Nietzsche to Sigmund Freud, Georg Simmel, Walter
Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Michel Foucault. Additionally, Tafuri was
strongly attentive to how architectural problems of form and formal “language”
found a wider context in the various 20th-century formalisms that evolved in
structuralist and semiological theories in linguistics, anthropology, psychoa-
85

3
Fredric Jameson, “Architecture and the Critique of Ideology,” in Architecture Criticism Ide-
ology, ed. Joan Ockman, Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1985, 51-87. For recent
work on Tafuri, mostly from within the field of architectural history, see: Hilde Heynen,
Architecture and Modernity: A Critique, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999; Andrew
Leach, Manfredo Tafuri: Choosing History, Ghent: A&S Books, 2007; Anthony Vidler, His-
tories of the Immediate Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism, Cambridge, Mass.: The
MIT Press, 2008; Gail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory, New York:
Columbia University Press, 2010; Marco Biraghi, Project of Crisis: Manfredo Tafuri and Con-
temporary Architecture, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2013.
 tyrus miller

nalysis, literary and art-historical study, and other cultural disciplines. 4 I

would thus argue that beyond his specific contributions to architectural his-
tory, Tafuri should be seen an exemplary methodological resource for today’s
“new modernist studies,” which has emphasized a comparative, trans-discipli-
nary and trans-national contextualization of modernist works that might ear-
lier have been looked at primarily within single-media, national, and relatively
more restricted social- and intellectual-historical frameworks.

Second, Tafuri’s extraordinary contextual range as a scholar also extended tem-

porally back to the late Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and Enlightenment
contexts. He discerned anticipations of 20th-century modernist phenomena al-
ready within the long wave of modernity that dated back, in his view, to Quat-
trocentro Italy, with Brunelleschi’s and Alberti’s confrontation of the historical
residues of the medieval city and a new interventive architecture montaged out
of quoted fragments of a rediscovered classical idiom. Even more poignantly,
Tafuri devotes the first two chapters of The Sphere and the Labyrinth, his most
wide-ranging study of 20th-century modernism and avant-garde, to the 18th-cen-
tury Roman artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi: an essay on Piranesi’s montage
of fragments in the Carceri, the Campo Marzio, and the Cammini where Tafuri
claims Piranesi constructs a “utopia of dissolved form” and hence become
a founder of “what would emerge as the ethic of the dialectical becoming of
avant-garde art,” its self-renewal by continuous self-destruction5; and, succes-
sively, an essay on Sergei Eisenstein’s analysis, in very late lectures from 1946-
47, of Piranesi’s Carceri as a model of the “ecstasy” of exploded form that reveals
the dialectical tensions within apparently stable spaces, which both Piranesi’s
precinematic montage and Eisenstein’s cinematic montage help to disclose.6 Al-
though I will not discuss at length this dimension of deep historicity in Tafuri’s
86
work, it offers an important reminder that the relative “presentism” of modern-
ist studies that limits our appreciation of the longue durée of artistic modern-
ism’s complex responses to a European modernity evolving over several centu-

4
See, for instance, the chapters “Instruments of Criticism,” in Theories and History of Archi-
tecture 171-225; “Architecture and Its Double: Semiology and Formalism,” in Architecture
and Utopia 150-169; and Part Three of The Sphere and the Labyrinth, entitled, after Her-
mann Hesse’s novel in which a spiritual elite plays an enigmatic, intransitive game with
abstract elements, “The Glass Bead Game,” 267-304.
5
Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, 54.
6
Sergei Eisenstein, “Piranesi or the Flux of Form,” in Nonindifferent Nature, trans. Herbert
Marshall, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, 123-154.
the historical project of “modernism”: m. tafuri’s metahistory of the avant-garde

ries before reaching an inflection point in the late 19th-century. Tafuri drew upon
a wide range of historical examples to estrange and defamiliarize the modern
present and to unsettle modernism’s self-conferred privileged status, bought at
the cost of its own dehistoricization.

Lastly, Tafuri was extraordinarily self-conscious about historical method, and

restlessly adapted his historiography to new objects, new contexts of writing,
and new intellectual influences over the three decades of his mature work.
Hence Tafuri is not only an exemplary practitioner in the writing of the history
of architectural modernisms and avant-gardes and of their broader context in
the artistic and political vanguards of the twentieth century; he is also an ex-
traordinary source of metahistorical reflection on the problems and possibility
of historicizing modernism. A key motivation for this metahistorical reflection
is, Tafuri suggests, the very complexity and convention-breaking nature of mod-
ernism, which has made close attention to empirical detail a precondition of ad-
equate conceptualization and criticism. Although he is critical of the empiricism
of the architectural criticism coming out of the modern movement, he unequivo-
cally affirms his preference for its nimble attention to new facts over the rigidity
of static theoretic frameworks. In his introduction to the 1976 edition of Theories
and History of Architecture, Tafuri writes:

The criticism of modern architecture has been obliged to proceed, almost until
today, along rails laid on unprejudiced empiricism: perhaps this was the only
viable route as, too often, the art of our century has jumped the fence of ideologi-
cal conventions, of speculative foundations, of the very same aesthetics available
to the critic. So much so that the only authentic criticism of modern art came,
especially between 1920 and 1940, from those with enough courage not to derive
87
their analytical methods from existing philosophical systems but from direct and
empirical contact with the thoroughly new questions of the avant-gardes.7

Tafuri means in architecture critics such as Nikolaus Pevsner, Siegfried Giedion,

Karel Teige, Alfred Behne, and Giulio Carlo Argan, and in the broader ambit of
modernism figures such as Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Sergei Eisenstein,
Viktor Skhlovsky, and Carl Einstein. His constant, intense metahistorical reflec-
tion on the nature of modernist architectural histories, the divergences between

Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, 5.

7
 tyrus miller

architecture’s ideological functions and its material forms, and the multivalent
forces that converge and diverge around these may inspire similar reflections in
other areas of new modernist studies as well.

In the remainder of my essay, I will survey three interrelated, but varying frame-
works in which Tafuri addresses the problem of writing critical history of mod-
ernism. The first, related most closely to Architecture and Utopia, I call the “uto-
pia-as-ideology” problematic. In this approach, Tafuri adopts a critical stance
towards modern architecture in relation to the broader capitalist development
of twentieth-century urban space and production, which in his analysis renders
20th-century architecture’s social pretensions increasingly unreal, distant from
capitalism’s effective actuality, hence, in a pejorative sense, “utopian.” The sec-
ond I call Tafuri’s “concrete / abstract labor” problematic that he most closely
explored in the two-volume historical study Modern Architecture. Tafuri frames
this problematic as a matter of a loss of identity of the concrete activity of the
architectural discipline along with a set of attempts to renew architecture by
remaking, as he puts it, “the organizational structure of the intellectual labor
involved in dealing with the construction of the human environment.”8 Lastly,
I will discuss Tafuri’s further considerations of modernism in The Sphere and
the Labyrinth, under the sign of what he called “the historical project,” which
includes and modulates the first two with further new complications. The his-
torical project takes up the dissonant architectural ideologies, techniques, and
the organizational forms of abstract labor, discerning and accentuating the gaps
that exist between them in field of historical phenomena and artifacts. Only in
this way, Tafuri argues, may historical writing “project” the fragmentation and
crises of the plurilinguistic real beyond the limits of disciplinary ideologies into
the domain of valid critical knowledge.
88

I first, however, want to remark the intersection point between these three oth-
erwise different critical optics: their common focus on modernism as a para-
doxical and problematic historical object, an object of historical research and
criticism that is constituted and defined by anti-historical impulses, according
to Tafuri. As he wrote in 1976, noting a troubling resonance between the legacy
of the artistic avant-garde early in the century and the theoretical horizon of his
own time:

8
Tafuri and Dal Co, Modern Architecture, 7.
the historical project of “modernism”: m. tafuri’s metahistory of the avant-garde

To discover that this ideal area is all based on anti-historical knowledge and ac-
tivity might frighten or disconcert. But we shall be far less disconcerting if we try
to go further, to dig deeper into the phenomena and not be led by inadequate
ideological pulls.

Has modern art not presented itself, from the very beginning, in the European
avant-garde movements, as a true challenge to history? Has it not tried to destroy
not only history, but even itself as an historical object?9

In his early essay, “Modern Architecture and the Eclipse of History,” Tafuri offers
a variety of specifications of what he means by this anti-historicity. First, noting
Walter Gropius’s refusal to institute a history course as part of the Bauhaus’s
curriculum, Tafuri sees a modeling of designed space or object on technology,
which reduces its duration to a rapidly consumed present, which in turn under-
mines its capacity as a vehicle of historicity. “If architecture must model itself on
technological reality,” Tafuri writes—

so intimately as to become an epistemological metaphor, if it reduces to pure per-

ception the structures of visual communication, if it tends to become pure object,
and, even, pure industrial object, it is clear that one cannot even begin to ques-
tion its historicity.10

Tafuri discerns in the most extreme instances of the modern movement in archi-
tecture an operation not solely of turning away from history, but furthermore of
an active subduing and cancellation of historical traces, by overwriting them in
the technified code of the present. The past represents a threat to be contained
and overcome, because its alterity challenges the abstract value that disposes as
89
a coordinated order the power of technology, administrative control, and capi-
talist production. “The extinction of the past by a present raised to the status of
new value,” he writes—

is merciless. Artistic production is not, then, consumed by the inevitable adjust-

ment of the public to the forms, but it is born with the precise purpose of being
rapidly consumed: the condition necessary to reach this objective is the contem-

9
Tafuri, Theories and History of Architecture, 7.
Ibid., 41.
10
 tyrus miller

Figure 1: Smithfield Market area, London,

June 2014. Photograph by the author.

porary consumption of the entire past, whose presence carries the memory of an
90
extinct way of producing values, a disturbing and dangerous memory because of
the illusion of the possible return to a sacral conception of artistic activity. This is
the reason why all avant-garde movements see in history a danger for modern art.11

This danger of history has a specific valence for modern architects: the problem
posed by the pre-existence of the historical city, especially regarding the preser-
vation or transformation of the historic centers (Figure 1).

11
Ibid., 46.
the historical project of “modernism”: m. tafuri’s metahistory of the avant-garde

Figure 2: Le Corbusier, Carpenter Center

for the Visual Arts, Harvard University,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, June 2013.
Photograph by the author.

Thus, Tafuri writes, “Both Le Corbusier and Wright—leaving aside, for the mo-
91
ment, the obvious differences that separate their global conceptions of the
modern city—take a phenomenon for granted: the historical centres, if used as
‘pieces’ of the contemporary city, are dangerous to life.”12 Along with their tan-
gible alterity in time, the danger lies in their undoubted structural density and
coherence, which nevertheless is opposed to the principles by which the mod-
ern structure is organized (Figure 2).

Ibid., 48.
12
 tyrus miller

Hence, they haunt the anti-historicity of the modern with its own shadow of
becoming and passing-away, the contingency of its supposedly timeless and ra-
tionally founded structure: “The entire historical texture is a structure, quite
apart from its stratifications. Or, rather, it is a structure that somehow is defined,
negatively, by contraposition to another structure: the, even though only hy-
pothesized, structure of the modern city.”13 In the end, the modern architect is
caught between two irreconcilable relations to the historical city, which drive an
unsteady oscillation in modernist architectural ideology between the past as a
neutralized model and the past as a burden to be overcome by the technological
present of production. As Tafuri expresses these alternatives:

A. In a certain light [historical textures] are considered models, in the sense of

figural values that, although unrecoverable as such today, can show the con-
temporary urbanist the need to translate into a coherent linguistic system the
confused, though vital, indications offered by the ephemeral worlds of the non-
representational and consumable objects of technological reality: Le Corbusier’s
continuous references to the ancient urban spaces in his self-publicity, are clearly
to the point.

B. As, however, the poetic of the changeable—directly related to the incessant

and rapid mobility of the new structure of the capitalist production cycle—is at
the base of the hypothesis of new urban structures, it is the value of permanence,
immutability, a-temporality of the ancient towns that are seen as dangerous chal-
lenges to modern urban planning and as a dangerous opponent. (This danger has
a concrete meaning, beyond its merely ideal one; both Wright and Le Corbusier
refer to the invisible chaos resulting from the forced injection of modern mobility
into the old textures.)14
92

Anyone who has experienced the traffic snarls in, say, Naples’s historic center
knows just what Tafuri means. When we consider how much the mobility of au-
tomobile circulation was a part of Le Corbusier’s modernist ideology, we see the
catastrophic implications of Naples historic hive of dark alleyways and dense
market-streets.

Ibid., 49.
13

Ibid.
14
the historical project of “modernism”: m. tafuri’s metahistory of the avant-garde

I return now to the first of these problematics, the reading of modern architec-
ture as an ideologically functioning “utopia.” What does this mean for Tafuri?
There are three basic assumptions embedded in this framework, none of which
is simply axiomatic; each rather entails strong theoretical claims. First is that
the gradual emergence of the concept of the “city” in modernity—and Tafuri
means from the Renaissance on, but especially with the Enlightenment city as
a space that may be conceived as a planned totality—undermines traditional
notions of architectural form as a closed, static entity, and put its value into cri-
sis. Architectural form is dissolved into a function of a larger, more encompass-
ing framework of city planning and construction. The notion of the modern city
as a site of technological production, distribution, and consumption intensifies
this crisis, by making architecture just “a mere link in the production chain”
and an element in what Tafuri calls “the merciless commercialization of the
human environment.”15

Second is that the techniques of modern visual communication—Tafuri means,

following Walter Benjamin, photography, cinema, advertising, and so on—im-
ply that ideology can no longer be considered only a matter of “false conscious-
ness” or “distorted ideas” discursively represented, but also refers to a system-
atically distorted structure of experience that can be non-discursively embodied
in a pluridimensional environment of signs, spaces, objects, structures, and
bodies. Here Tafuri offers his own contribution to innovations in the Marxist
notion of ideology that include György Lukács’s concept of reification, Walter
Benjamin’s investigations of cities as collective dream-structures, the notion
in Theodor Adorno that culture industry translates commodity-structure into
cognitive and affective schemata that preform contemporary experience, Guy
Debord’s idea of the society of the spectacle in which social relations have been
93
transformed into images, and Louis Althusser’s formulation of ideology as the
normal unthematized background of lived relations to the social order, the “im-
aginary relation of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” For Tafuri,
notably, the concept of “the city” itself becomes one of the most important sites
of modern ideological articulation and mass mediatization through the emerg-
ing technical media of visual communication (Tafuri was one of the early Euro-
pean readers of Walter Benjamin’s work). The city is the pivotal notion around
which modern architecture and urbanism pitched its ideological positions; it is

Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 42-43.

15
 tyrus miller

Figure 3: The Journal Vesch Objet Gegenstand

3 (1922). Photograph by the author.

one of the key “imaginary” relationships through which individuals experience

their relation to the complex conditions of managed capitalism; but also, dialec-
tically, these ideologies of the city take on, in complicated ways, effective reality
in the built environments and lived experience of city spaces. Modern architects
and planners, equipped with a fertile set of city-ideologies and new experiences
of modernity, sought to translate these, with greater or lesser degrees of success,
into built city-spaces of lived experience. In turn, the structures and fissures
they thus introduced into city-space, the stratified results of their successful
and failed or partially-realized interventions into the historical fabric of cities,
became the materialized embodiment of their discontinuous and contradictory
94 city-ideologies.

Lastly, Tafuri argues that the various connotations that were layered into the
ideological discourses of the “city”—architectural, urbanistic, but also the ar-
tistic and literary discourses of the avant-garde from Baudelaire and Rimbaud
through Döblin and Dos Passos—were ways of taking up as “raw material” the
disorder of capitalist production and distribution and ideologically transmuting
them into innovative forms that both registered and redeemed the chaos of the
modern city. In this context, for the short-lived period of upsurge of the classi-
cal avant-garde, “form” could take on a utopian valence in which the anarchic
the historical project of “modernism”: m. tafuri’s metahistory of the avant-garde

crisis of values in the social world were transfigured into new, self-posited and
self-referential linguistic or language-like relational systems of value, not func-
tional yet in the actually-existing world but speculatively anticipating the norms
of a “new age,” a “new world,” or a “new man.” Moreover, this utopia of form
evolves over time as well, from the organic dreams of expressionism or the infor-
mal montage of dada and surrealism—which in Tafuri’s formulation individual-
ize and protest or symbolically compensate unsatisfied human needs16—towards
the rationalist “ideologies of the plan” that one finds in 1920s radical avant-
gardes including the Bauhaus, Russian Constructivism, De Stijl, and “Nouveau
Ésprit” (Figure 3).

In the last turn of the dialectic, Tafuri writes, “This phase in turn is put in crisis
and supplanted when, after the crisis of 1929, with the elaboration of the anti-
cyclical theories and the international reorganization of capital, and after the
launching in Russia of the First Five-Year Plan, architecture’s ideological func-
tion seems to be rendered superfluous, or limited to rear-guard tasks of marginal
importance.”17 Drawing upon his background in the journal Contropiano, espe-
cially Antonio Negri’s important essay on the role of Keynes in the adaptation
of capital during the global depression of the thirties,18 Tafuri argues that in the
face of a still-unplanned capitalism, avant-garde ideologies could project artistic
form as anticipatory of a rational, planned social order. Consider, for instance,
El Lissitzky’s constructivist visual fairy tale Of 2 Squares, in which the collision
of two geometrical forms allegorically provides the genesis of a new global con-
structivist order. But once the attempt to control the social totality through plan-
ning became a factual, present aspect of societies from Keynesian “New Deals”
to fascist autarchies to Soviet planned communism, the anticipatory, utopian,
critical energies went out of these programs. At best they continued to provide
95
ideological sustenance and design aesthetics for the state and economy in their
actually existing organization, as for example with the comparatively feeble fu-
turism and the neo-classicism Romanità of Italy in the 1930s under Mussolini

16
Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia, 48.
17
Ibid., 48-49.
18
Antonio Negri, “La teoria capitalistica nel ’29: John M. Keynes,” Contropiano 1:1 (1968),
3-40. A translation of a revised version of this essay appears as “Keynes and the Capitalist
Theory of the State,” in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of
the State-Form, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, 22-50.
 tyrus miller

Figure 4: Palazzo della civiltà del lavoro, EUR

Rome. Photograph by the author.

(Figure 4). At worst, such utopian projects simply became irrelevant and were
consigned to the trashbin or archive.

Tafuri’s Architecture and Utopia dated back, in its basic problematic, to the mili-
tancy of the late 1960s and Tafuri’s collaboration with the young militant in-
tellectuals around Contropiano, such as Cacciari, Negri, and Mario Tronti, and
indeed, as Tafuri explicitly notes, it is a “reworking and sizeable enlargement”
of the essay “Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica” published in 1969 in
Contropiano.19 By 1976, with his publication of Modern Architecture with Franc-
esco Dal Co, Tafuri had partially reconsidered the intransigently negative tone
of Architecture and Utopia’s critique of modernist architecture and art, and add-
ed new theoretical nuances to his historical methodology. In this two-volume
96
work, spanning from the mid-19th-century to then-current neo-avant-garde and
early postmodernism, he puts the emphasis on the new dialectic of concrete and
abstract labor that modern architecture projected and, to an extent Tafuri previ-
ously did not acknowledge, helped to actualize. What had earlier appeared as a
binary confrontation of modern architecture’s naïve utopia of form against the
hard destiny of capitalist production, bureaucratic administration, technology,
and planning, now takes shape as a differentiation and renovation of intellec-

19
Ibid., vii.
the historical project of “modernism”: m. tafuri’s metahistory of the avant-garde

tual labor in confrontation with the new social space of the managed society.
Tafuri writes:

What is involved is a restricting of intellectual labor as the communicative preg-

nancy of the “objects”—the buildings built—tends to fade away while new im-
portance is assumed by the organization of the sphere of production and by the
control and administration of the urban complex. That no guarantee of political
action as such is implicit in such new organizational tasks will be evident in the
pages that follow. Yet there can be no doubt that inherent in them are unprec-
edented relationships between intellectual labor and socio-economic develop-
ment, even if the terrain in which such relationships are born is rife with nostalgic
regressions and utopias we could happily do without.20

Tafuri introduces here a kind of “cunning of architectural reason,” regarding

which it no longer suffices to point out that various architectural ideologies
proved to be deluded in their utopian pretentions and expectations. Here Tafuri
admits that despite these illusions, and under the protection of their ideologi-
cally veil, architecture carried out socially consequential invention and change.
As if addressing his former position, Tafuri argues that these utopian errors
were not deviations from “real history”; they were constitutive and, dialecti-
cally, even effective impulses for this history, which is unthinkable apart from
the genealogical stratification of utopian anticipations and false-starts:

Yet these regressions and utopias must also be seen as part of history, in confron-
tation with the cities of the enemy that they leave intact and with the prospects
for the future to which they are willfully blind. The time is past when there might
have been some point in crying scandal at ideological mystification: what matters
97
now is to try to understand the historical reasons responsible for it.21

Lastly, he goes on to note that he and Dal Co avoid, outside of quotation and
similar references, generalizing terms like “the modern movement,” since these
tend to cover over the multiple, interwoven, but irreducible histories of which
the genealogy of modern architecture is composed.

Tafuri and Dal Co, Modern Architecture, 7.

20

Ibid.
21
 tyrus miller

One of the key differences in the approach taken in Tafuri’s later work, program-
matically set out by “The Historical Project” introduction to The Sphere and
the Labyrinth, is a detailed confrontation with the historical studies of Michel
Foucault, who in the late 1970s came to Venice for colloquia including Tafuri,
Cacciari, Rella, and others of the Tafuri circle. His engagement with Foucault
reinforced Tafuri’s anti-utopian historical stoicism in the face of contradiction,
multiplicity, and unresolvable antagonisms—a stance that had already been
nurtured by his circle’s engaged reading of Nietzsche and Max Weber,22 and that
found a kindred spirit in Foucault’s singular combination of radicalism and dis-
enchantment. In “The Historical Project,” Tafuri offers a sort of implicit self-crit-
icism, for his overly exclusive focus on architectural ideologies, which in turn
led to an overly unitary account of the modern development he had set out to
critique. “Architecture itself,” he writes—

inasmuch as it is an institution, is anything but a unitary ideological block: as

with other linguistic systems, its ideologies act in a highly nonlinear fashion. So
much so that it is legitimate to suspect that the very criticism of architectural
ideology—as it has been conducted up to now—has only reckoned with the most
obvious and immediate aspects of that ideology: the refusals, repressions, and
introspections, which run through the body of architectural writing.23

Simply shifting from a focus on texts to contexts, however, is not sufficient to

open up the historical object and critically shatter its apparent but deceptive co-
herence and continuity with “precursors” and “successors.” Here, the influence
of Foucault’s “archeology” on Tafuri’s historiographic idiom becomes apparent:

The context binds together artistic languages, physical realities, behaviors, ur-
98
ban and territorial dimensions, politico-economic dynamics. But it is constantly
broken up by subterranean ideologies that nevertheless act on an intersubjective
level; it is broken up by the interaction of diverse techniques of domination, each
of which possesses its own untranslatable language.24

22
Especially influential were the analyses of Massimo Cacciari, “Sulla genesi del pensiero
negativo,” Contropiano 2:1 (1969), 131-200; and “Aforisma, tragedia, lirica,” Nuova Corrente
68-69 (1975-76), 464-92.
23
Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, 5.
24
Ibid., 5.
the historical project of “modernism”: m. tafuri’s metahistory of the avant-garde

The task of the historian is not to reduce these languages and the borders be-
tween them to a common denominator, whether formal or contextual, but rather
to highlight their “collisions,” sharpening the borders and boundaries between
them and the inclusions and exclusions these define. Tafuri writes:

The construction of a physical space is certainly the site of a “battle” [...] That
such a battle is not totalizing, that it leaves borders, remains, residues, is also an
indisputable fact. And thus a vast field of investigation is opened up—an investi-
gation of the limits of languages, of the boundaries of techniques, of the thresh-
olds “that provide density.” The threshold, boundary, the limit all “define”: it is
in the nature of such definition that the object so circumscribed becomes evanes-
cent. The possibility of constructing the history of a formal language comes about
only by destroying, step by step, the linearity of that history and its autonomy:
there will remain only traces, fluctuating signs, unhealed rifts.25

The historian’s primary object, then, becomes the gaps and interstices between
fragmentary and partial idioms of a pluralistic sort, from linguistic, discursive,
and theoretical to typological, technical, material, and territorial:

Historical space does not establish improbable links between diverse languages,
between techniques that are distant from each other. Rather, it explores what
such distance expresses: it probes what appears to be a void, trying to make the
absence that seems to dwell in that void speak.

It is, then, an operation that descends into the interstices of techniques and lan-
guages. While operating within these interstices, the historian certainly does not
intend to suture them; rather he intends to make emerge what is encountered on
99
the borders of language. Historical work thus calls into question the problem of
the “limit”: it confronts the division of labor in general; it tends to go outside of its
own boundaries; it projects the crisis of techniques already given. 26

One of the specific manifestations that Tafuri uses as a diagnostic for approach-
ing this interstitial space—relevant, perhaps, to a historical methodology for
modernisms other than architectural as well—will be the divergences between

Ibid., 8.
25

Ibid., 13.
26
 tyrus miller

the historical series of modernist semantic, ideological, and theoretical themes

and the succession of forms actualized in the work. This very divergence of
ideological thematics and form takes on symptomatic value as an entry into a
broader set of factors structuring the historical field and impinging upon the
individual work. “It is,” Tafuri writes, “the very gap that exists between avant-
garde ideology and the translation into techniques of that ideology. It is a gap
that historiography is incapable of filling, but one that it must instead accentu-
ate and turn into the material of concrete and widespread knowledge.”27

In the end, Tafuri’s “historical project” defines itself as an iterative and inten-
tionally pursued “project of crisis.”28 The project of crisis, as an outcome of
Tafuri’s mode and method of historical analysis, strikes deep at the bases of
any monumental, autonomous historical evolution of modernist forms, which
Tafuri sees as the characteristic ideological representation of modernism by
its acolytes. It is, for instance, such a historical ideology that is enshrined by
pseudo-historicizing notions such as “the Modern Movement” or “international
style” in architecture. Despite his criticisms of the artistic avant-garde, Tafuri’s
sympathies and even inspiration for the project of crisis lie with the radically
disintegrative energies that flashed up briefly with the avant-garde of negation
and crisis, such as Dadaism: “And to comprehend fully the dialectic—suspend-
ed between the extremes of the tragic and the banal—that shapes the tradition
of the twentieth-century avant-garde, is it not more useful to go back to the hal-
lucinatory buffooneries of the Cabaret Voltaire than to reexamine those works
in which the tragic and the banal are reconciled with reality?”29 Translated into
historical method, Tafuri suggests, the project of crisis seeks to dissolve the ide-
ological glue that held together disparate elements in an apparent synthesis:

100
The interweaving of intellectual models, modes of production, and modes of
consumption ought to lead to the “explosion” of the synthesis contained in the
work. Wherever this synthesis is presented as a completed whole, it is necessary
to introduce a disintegration, a fragmentation, a “dissemination” of its constitu-
tive units. It will then be necessary to submit these disintegrated components to

27
Ibid., 21.
28
“Project of crisis” is Tafuri’s own term for his project: see op. cit., 13. For further elabora-
tion of this notion in Tafuri’s work, see Marco Biraghi, Project of Crisis: Manfredo Tafuri
and Contemporary Architecture, trans. Alta Price, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2013.
29
Tafuri, op. cit., 13-14.
the historical project of “modernism”: m. tafuri’s metahistory of the avant-garde

a separate analysis. What reactions, symbolic horizons, avant-garde hypotheses,

linguistic structures, methods of reorganizing production, technological inven-
tions will all be seen thus stripped of the ambiguity ingrained in the synthesis
displayed by the work.30

Having set free the fragments, and fragments of fragments, of these no-longer
valid historical syntheses, the historian now has them at his disposal for critical
“remontage.”31

Tafuri explicitly refers to certain moments and figures of the avant-garde in ar-
ticulating this point, which might be summarized thus: the historical project, as
a project of crisis, shatters and estranges the apparently autonomous order of
“languages” emerging out of twentieth-century capitalism’s technologically per-
meated, state-steered, and metropolitan social order. Tafuri evokes the names of
Zurich Dada, Viktor Shklovsky, Bertolt Brecht, and Max Bense, among others, as
his inspirations and points of theoretical reference. It is thus as if, even for one
of the most astringent critics of the ideological pretensions of twentieth-century
modernist and avant-garde movements, fragments of the avant-garde remain
an ambiguous resource of hope in the critique of modern culture and social life.
However reluctantly and skeptically, Tafuri the stoical historian of crisis never
ceased to seek in the avant-garde’s practices and spaces the thrust of a contem-
porary critical “knight’s move,” disclosing the radically new.

101

Ibid., 14.
30

Ibid., 15.
31