On People‍

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"Rather, we can best explore this terrain by using as our guide the concept of diffuse mentalities: metalanguages that obliquely traverse the spaces of architectural language, determining their organization and liberating their potentials."‍

-Tafuri, “A Search for Paradigms: Project, Truth, Artifice”

If for Marx architecture is the material artefact which confirms the subject’s powers of production, and for Kant it is an object of beauty which unifies our otherwise isolated subjectivities into moments of collective harmony, then Freud’s Eros synchronizes with classical aesthetics insofar as building brings us to sensuous catharsis. At the very moment of coming in to being, however, the serenity achieved in architecture by Kant and Marx is sharpened into a double edged sword, swinging back towards the subject as nothing more than the masochist reification of the superego–walls as the law of the name of the father:

“Freud posits in human beings both a primary narcissism and a primary aggressiveness; and the construction of civilization involves a sublimation of both, directing them outwards to higher goals. Part of our primary aggressiveness is thus diverted from the ego and fused with Eros, builder of cities, to dominate Nature and create a culture” (Eagleton 270)‍

The source of this narcissism, as the productive principle of city building, is explained by Freud as the cyclical interplay of law and desire, competing for primacy within the subject. Appropriating the father as the symbol of the law, Freud sketches out the curious yet compelling psychology whereby the paternal father comes to represent both the past and the future: the past, in that he is our genetic prehistory, and the future as the figure towards which the child will ultimately shape ourselves (incidentally, as it were, to take the place as our mother’s lover). What is of interest here is not the Oedipal underpinnings of Eagleton’s rhetoric, which are of course necessary to speak of Freud at all, but rather the role which history plays in the construction of law, desire, and subjectivity.

Tafuri, in a fortuitous study of Renaissance thought, challenges the immutable nature of Humanism’s value system, drawing attention to a lack of authenticity and revealing the laws which govern its subjects as a simply recycling of components from the past appropriated into the present with new arbitrary meaning. Interpreted as a sort of Benjaminian totality, where dead histories are given new image, the totality of law, in both humanism and Freud, exhibits the peculiar behavior of parading itself as a constitutional framework for conduct based on universal truths, when in fact it is an adaptation of various forms of history, synthesized and stamped by interests of the present:

“The super ego thus represents a kind of contradiction between past and present, infantilism and maturity: at the very moment that is shows us the path towards an ideal humanity, it pulls us inexorably back into childhood.” (Eagleton 272)‍

Freud treats law, and superego and interchangeable, which–despite the dogmatic nature of its analogic which should be regarded with skepticism–provides an interesting ground for a psychoanalytic critique of architecture. By sketching out the various permutations that architecture takes within and against law and desire and fundamental concepts for forms subjectivity, Freud’s distinctly modern theories is modulated with Tafuri’s rewriting of history to discover various modalities of design.

In these terms, the socialized subjectivity of the bourgeois is conditioned through an organic dynamic of development, where a select group of intelligentsia go foraging through the history of antiquity, gathering orders and components of orders, and presenting them to each other for concurrence on their beauty: laws are forged as architecture negotiates the subjective desire with the universality of consensus. Humanist design provides the subject entry into the social sphere by allowing him to participate in the collective and spontaneous judgement of beauty. “I” becomes “we” through a process of intuition, expression, and refinement. This socializing of subjectivity is what Tafuri calls “naturally artificial,” and can in other words be described as an unauthentic sincerity. In recognition of the fact that its trumpeted morality is nothing more than a conscription of fragmented classical language, the refinement of the subject’s choices of desire into orders of beauty and law, nevertheless remains sincere as ardent expressions made in spontaneous sensuous commune. This conflation of desire and law by means of sensual consensus has, however, will have grave implications in Modernity as “the civilizing process presupposes a gradual shift in mental paradigms: as with any historical process, it will not permit itself to be interpreted according to categories of progress and decline. (Tafuri 56)

Looking at the operative principles of design in Iran during the second half of the 20th century, Modernity’s propensity for subjective hegemony is observed as “a hybrid mixture of traditional Iranian and Western architecture.” Echoing Tafuri’s reading of humanist multiplicity, the Iranian subject, finding himself amidst the propaganda and programs of  American democratic capitalism, “rehearses a modern style of existence. A form of conduct, planned out in advance, and oriented toward precisely defined objectives, provides its foundation” (Tafuri 61). The hegemonic instrumentality of design comes sharply into focus within the political conflicts of the Cold War:

“The 1959 Moscow “Kitchen Debate” between the USSR premier Nikita Khrushchev and the U.S. President Richard Nixon demonstrated that Cold War animosities functioned on wildly diverse levels and featured not just missiles and sphere of interest but also automobiles, washing machines, and toaster ovens” (Karimi 123)‍

It was through the domestic furnishings of industrial design that the subjectivity of the western capitalist  bourgeois, founded on principles of “linguistic pluralism” in Tafuri’s humanism, enters into Iranian culture. Through the realm of the kitchen, American sensibilities enter the realm of domesticity, cultivating a consumerism whose demands unfold out of the realm of domesticity and into economic structures, revising ideology into a montage of traditional and modern. The similarities with Tafuri’s humanism are notable, yet different insofar as the laws governing the new Iranian identity were imported as a foreign subjectivity, whereas with Tafuri the law was fashioned by the subjects. Between the difference of acquired manner and inner growth enlies a degree of alienation, palpable in the lamenting of the contemporary Iranian subject: “we are all like strangers to ourselves, in our food and dress, our homes, our manners… and, most dangerous, our culture.” (Karimi 138)

“It is not a question of rescuing the subject for a precarious moment from its alienation; to be a subject is to be alienated anyway, rendered eccentric to oneself by the precise movement of desire. And if objects matter at all, they matter precisely in the place where they are absent. The desired object, as Juliet Mitchell has argued in Lacanian vein, comes into existence as an object when it is lost to the baby or infant. It is when that object is removed or prohibited that it lays down the trace of desire, so that its secure possession will always move under the sign of loss, its presence warped and overshadowed by the perpetual possibility of its absence” (Eagleton 267-268).‍

At one end of the spectrum, design can be said to reach its fullest potential for the individual subject when it is voraciously and blissfully consumed by sensuous desire, as a pure and unblighted affirmation of the id. At the other end of the spectrum, design is rejected away from the body as unpleasurable limiting desire, where it is picked up by the socialized subjectivity of the superego as a culturally construction, immanent with authority. This sets up a diagram for understanding design’s role as moving away from the body and towards the city as our subjectivity moves away from individual and toward the social. Beginning (or ending) at the cyborg, design is absorbed completely by the body–becomes part of it as something which accelerates the fulfillment of desire. Prosthetics and tools extend the body, assisting libidinal pursuits while remaining subject to social scrutiny. Ergonomics soften the blow at the subject’s point of entry into the civilized domain–engineered to situate the body in Modernity’s cycles of production. Stripped of any somatic sentience, industrial design materializes before the subject as objects and interfaces which restructure the body into its terms of productive economy. Buildings are a hinge, cultivating and containing socialized subjectivities, constituting the basic unit of the city. Isotropic and pervasive, architecture aggregates into the totalizing and alienating endless city.

Concerning the centrality given to architecture, Freud positions desire and law as irreconcilable foes which brutalize the subject from opposite ends of a spectrum, a milieu in which architecture is only vaguely ascribed any agency. Tafuri, in opposition to this, features architecture as the privileged protagonist where desire and law conflate. Freud’s architecture, nothing more than the subject’s angst materialized in the external world, is an uncanny artefact of authority that alienates both himself and others. As the happenstance materialization of a demonized  individual subjectivity, it masochistically consumes law at all levels of consciousness (id, ego, superego… subjectivity, socialized subjectivity).

“Subjects and object, as for Nietzsche, are passing products of the play of the drives; and what opens up the subject/object duality in the first place is the deeper dialectic of pleasure and unpleasure, introjection and expulsion, as the ego separates certain bits of the world from itself and masticates certain others, thus building up those primordial identifications of which it is a kind of storehouse or cemetery.” (Eagleton 267)

Architecture can no longer be understood as the materialization of the subject’s encounter with nature, but rather slips with equal propensity into both. No longer does the built environment come to negotiate the internal and external, but is rather sublimated into one or the either depending on the degree to which is fulfills or limits desires. Capable of being absorbed by sensuous desire, or cast out scornfully as something which limits desire, design is no longer an autonomous phenomenon suspended between the subject and object, but rather shatters down to a level of molecular ubiquity, becoming in the Freudian complex integral to both individual and social subjectivities.

“What the aesthetic yearns for is an object at once sensuous and rule bound, a body which is also a mind, combining all the delicious plenitude of the senses with the authority of an abstract decree. It is therefore a fantasy of mother and father in one, of love and law commingled, an imaginary space in which pleasure-principle and reality principle fuse under the aegis of the former. “(Eagleton 263)

Freud disfigures architecture’s capacity as a fulfilling aesthetic experience in a two-fold manner: first, he problematizes the body as the pure, stable entity which architecture ought to confirm, imparting it with contradictions, complexities, and “perversity,” which deflates the pursuit of aesthetics in general; secondly, he critically suspends this new distasteful body, only to insist that even if the body were worth confirming, architecture as an object in the external realm cannot perform any sensuous task, cannot bridge from objectivity to subjectivity as two irreconcilable domains.

Architecture as the synchrony of law and desire brings subject’s together into a cohesive social in humanism, whereas with Freud architecture drives subjects apart as alienating reifications of the the disparate battles between law and desire played out in each of them. Architecture in humanism modulates individual subjectivity into a harmonious social subjectivity, whereas architecture in Freud causes dissonance in the social realm, pushing subjectivity back towards the isolated realm of the tragically tormented individual.

By dismantling the immutable idealism and “unadulterated certainty” of Renaissance architectural theory, and sketching out with the Cortegiano an organic fusion of artifice and nature, Tafuri infers two alternate histories with a single stroke of analysis: the Renaissance is absolved from the tyranny wrought by law against desire, and the Modernity is excused from its villainizing role as originating crisis. Tafuri even ventures antagonize the canonical quality of antiquity, suggesting that it is a capricious point of reference. Citing classical models of hybridization, he compounds the deflation of humanisms values already at work in its systems of representations.This devaluation, however, is productive insofar as it allows us to reevaluate the Renaissance on new terms, opening up the possibility for a rewriting history in a more contemporary lens.

What are the implications of removing crisis from Modernity, and disseminating it back into history as episodic contingencies? By effectively shifting the location of “loss of meaning” from the end of the Renaissance to its beginning, Tafuri suggests that the systems of representation which it innovates bring with it “the establishment of a code through an infinite series of exceptions” (Tafuri 60). In a sort of referential free for all, Humanism butchers up antiquity into an isotropic cadavre exquis, its values edited and cross-multiplied into various new fashionings. The proliferation of these new forms of knowledge eclipses the symbolic universe of medieval tradition, producing in its place a landscape of fledgling epistemologies,  each competing with the other to preserve its autonomy and negotiate the particularities of its “reference to solid foundations and … appeal to subjective choice” (Tafuri 60). If abstraction can be said to be the primary productive principle of Modernity, its muted materializations the symptom of some deeper process at work–then the systems of representation which underpin humanism are its causes. It is a shift from symbol to sign, tonality to atonality.

“If the origins of the aforementioned anguish are to be located in the humanist affirmation of the subject, how can one hope for a recovery based on subjective volition.” (Tafuri 48)

Humanism's centering of the individual is both its success and its failure. If at first the humanist produces the beauty and truth of the Renaissance from the idealist perspective of its socialized subjectivity , then in the 19th century this perspective is foreshortened and unable to see the values towards which it was oriented, estranging the subject from world, leaving him to reference only himself within his shrinking, myopic worldview. This de-socialization of the subject, itself the terminus of humanism, implies that the architecture it produces is nothing more than an abstruse materialization of its alienated subjectivity. Aggregated ad infinitum, this architectural angst produces an urban environment that is nothing more than a fragmentary landscape of self-involved subjectivities. If Freud describes architecture as an expression of aggression and violence, it is because his subject lacks the appropriate intervening channels of social conditioning, and so out of angst produces architecture and the city.

The architect then is someone who knows not what he/she does. He/she contributes to the city as the domain of socialized subjectivity, simply an aggregation of designers’ ill-informed performances of angst: violent events loosely coordinated by culture  to fulfill our implicit desire for control. Cold storage facilities and post-war refugee settlements and hydraulic infrastructure and landfills, dredging and damming and diverting–all these elements of Modernity are extracted from the myth of progress and reflected back toward the subject as the unfortunate and ugly mirror image of himself. This mirror however, like the sword, is a duality, which produces on its opposite side the shining image of social idealism.

“Perhaps, only after having penetrated to a realm beyond every law that claims to be absolute — to a place where the “spirit of destruction” acquires a constructive vocation — does it become at all possible to examine the meaning of law. Let us recall Mies’s Seagram Building or Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh: are they not, in some sense, interrogations of the very principles of European rationality?” (Tafuri 48)

It is as if the law of European rationalism (bourgeois social practice, capitalism) has driven itself into obscurity, disappearing as it gazes upon the landscape of destruction and fragmentation that it has produced. Having pulverized everything in its path, with nothing left to destroy and identify itself against, the law ceases to be because it has eliminated its own context. In Freud’s battle between law and desire, law has ultimately won, extinguishing desire but left with a meaningless victory — nothing is left to applaud and fear it. Like a lethal vapor which has become so diluted, by the forces of its own entropic impetus, that it effectively ceases to exist, there is once again fresh air to breath as the medium for new life.

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Works Cited

Eagleton, Terry , The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Blackwell Publishing, 1990): 262-287.

Harwood, John, “The Interface: Ergonomics and the Aesthetics of Survival” in Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century, by Aggregate (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012): 70-92.

Karimi, Pamela, “Dwelling, Dispute, and the Space of Modern Iran,” in Governing by Design: Architecture, Economy, and Politics in the Twentieth Century, by Aggregate (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012): 119-146.

Tafuri, Manfredo, “A Search for Paradigms: Project, Truth, Artifice,” in Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects (Yale University Press, 2006): 1-22.

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