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The following text was read at “Ruins of Modernity: The Failure of Revolutionary

Architecture in the Twentieth Century,” a panel with Peter Eisenman, Reinhold Martin,

Joan Ockman, and Bernard Tschumi, organized by The Platypus Affiliated Society on

Thursday, 7 February 2013, at New York University. For more information see

http://newyork.platypus1917.org/2-7-2013-the-failure-of-revolutionary-architecture/

As a way of thanking The Platypus Affiliated Society for organizing this much-needed

discussion and also marking some common ground, I want to begin by citing a little

piece of history that, I suspect, lies somewhere in the background of the questions to

which they have asked us to respond. If you go tomorrow to the Museum of Modern

Art—which you must—and spend some time with the beautiful “Inventing Abstraction”

show curated by Leah Dickerman, you will see amongst other “ruins” of the Soviet

avant-gardes a diminutive study by El Lissitzky, executed in gouache, ink, and pencil,

for a 1920 project commemorating the assassinated Spartacist leader, Rosa Luxem-

burg. I deliberately refrain from showing you the drawing since you really must go to

the show, but also because I want it to stand as a placeholder for the great double

bind of modernist aesthetics, and particularly, of that elusive thing called “abstrac-

tion” as it crosses paths with that other elusive thing called “revolution.” Suffice it to

say that the drawing, which measures about 4 x 4 inches, consists of a deep black

square with razor thin white edge, set within (or floating above) a red circle, off cen-

ter, and surrounded by a concentric array of Suprematist shapes in red, black, white,

and speckled gray, which at once appear to be attracted centripetally to the picture’s

decentered center, and to spin off centrifugally from it, while a larger pair of black

and gray bars seems to slip under or behind it. Over (or under) the black-square-in-

red-circle is written, in half-obscured Cyrillic characters, the name “Rosa Luxemburg.”

There is nothing the least bit original about citing this little piece of modernist

esoterica in this way. Most notably, the art historian T.J. Clark has offered a vividly

dialectical reading that pits Lissitzky’s ambivalent, proto-propagandistic realism—cap-

tured in the half-obscured text—against the more uncompromising abstraction of his

mentor, Kasimir Malevich. Clark, for whom “modernism is our antiquity,” ultimately

judges Malevich the more faithful of the pair to the unbearable contradictions of the

already-ruined revolution. Wherein Malevich’s original, unmarked black quadrilateral

(1915), unenlightened, so to speak, by writing, manifests a kind of constitutive revolu-

tionary darkness.1

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But tables turn. Which is to say that our problem today may no longer be quite the

realism-versus-abstraction problem faced by Lissitzky, Malevich, or their colleagues

at UNOVIS, in Proletkult, or in any of the other vanguard cultural-political organiza-

tions of that heady time and place. Nor is it simply that the revolutionary or reformist

intentions of the European avant-gardes ran tragically aground on the shores of

the capitalist international, or even more misleadingly, that they were mysteriously

“co-opted” by very real reactionary aesthetes at the Museum of Modern Art and their

corporate sponsors.

The problem, instead, is to define the problem. Not accidentally, in the Futurist 0-10

exhibition in Petrograd (1915-1916), Malevich hung his black square (it’s not quite a

square) in the place traditionally reserved for the religious icon in Russian peasant

culture. Today, it is not difficult to see that this was not only an act of transgression; it

was a premonition. For it is no secret that under neoliberal capital, abstraction itself

has become iconic, in a strictly religious sense. So my answer to Platypus’s double

question, “Are we still—were we ever—postmodern?” is yes, but only now, because

architecture has finally become truly abstract.

This is important not because it gives fresh impetus to the never-ending style wars,

but because it redefines our categories. Again, I am not saying anything original in

associating postmodernism with abstraction. Among others, Fredric Jameson has

done so eloquently and at length. But you must understand that what one means

here by abstraction is not fully captured by the usual distinction between abstract

and figural art, or by the endless, undecidable debates as to which approach is more

or less revolutionary, whether in the political or artistic sense. What I mean is some-

thing like a “concrete abstraction,” but with a slight difference from the common

Marxian sense. If, for example, circulatory financial instruments like derivatives and

the values they produce are abstract, the Bank of America, as an institution, a set of

buildings, and a group of people, is concrete. The tables turn, however, when we

recognize that that institution, those buildings, and those people are also in some

sense constitutively abstract, in the sense of being interpellated as objects and sub-

jects, in utterly tangible, material ways, into the language, practices, imaginaries, and

infrastructures of capital, a priori.

In this light, it may seem—and perhaps rightly so—that the only truly revolutionary

cultural activity is to be found in the real-world, hands-on, agit-prop art actions in and

around Occupy Wall Street, the Alter-globalization movement, the Arab Spring, and

other insurgent formations worldwide. Architecture in its traditional or “disciplinary”

forms is nowhere to be found in this mix, being so thoroughly hardwired to power

precisely through its ability to deliver—on-demand—an aestheticized abstraction (the

icon in all its iterations) that complements and even reproduces the rush of religious

fervor generated by—and generating—worldwide financialization. In the midst of

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all of this, there are plenty of revolutionary or at least dissenting architects, many

of whom are students, and many of whom find the courage to speak out against

injustice and dispossession on a daily basis and act accordingly. But there is no rev-

olutionary architecture. Unless, that is, we are speaking of the sort of revolution that

begins from the right.

From the other direction, architecture, even in its most insurgent, grassroots varia-

tions, is at best today to be found on the side of reform. Of course, Le Corbusier’s

now-clichéd question, “Architecture or Revolution?” suggests mutually exclusive

categories; but that question’s rhetorical nature also symptomatically represses the

much more poignant and much more famous question posed by Rosa Luxemburg in

1900: “Reform or Revolution.”2 In western Europe by 1923, when Le Corbusier wrote,

the enlightened reform of housing, of the city, and of the republican institutions of

liberal capitalism was well under way, as represented, for example, in all of the proj-

ects—functionalist, formalist, and historicist—designed a few years later for the ill-fated

League of Nations, including his own.

Luxemburg, for whom Mies van der Rohe also designed and built a memorial in

1926, had fought all her life against such compromises, which she regarded as

opportunistic capitulations. But even in her polemical struggles in Germany with the

reformist Social Democrats—whose leftward politics and policies, we all know, make

today’s American Democrats look like flaming neocons—her question, “Reform or

Revolution,” names a double bind, a tangle tighter than a mere contradiction that can

only be cut with the sharpest of knives, like a Dadaist collage. Here architecture can

be something much more than an “art of the possible.” For rather than merely offer-

ing modest ways to make the brutal world system a little bit more humane, architec-

ture harbors the capacity—precisely because of its complicity, and not despite it—to

conjure, like Lissitzky’s little drawing with its ghostly little letters, the spirit of Rosa Lux-

emburg. For every small reform, however earnest, however limited, potentially bears

her revolutionary question within itself, and it is well within architecture’s resources

to ask, loudly and defiantly: “Is that all you have to say?”3 Or, to put it another way: Is

that the best you can do?

This also means recognizing today how the tables have turned, and how the most

insidious propaganda for things as they are rather than things as they should be is

to be found in the most abstract, most ethereal, most otherworldly—and yes, most

outwardly sophisticated—architecture. As in past revolutions, actual or virtual, archi-

tecture-as-religious-icon is therefore the first thing to be demolished if the glimmers

of other futures are to remain visible. For the so-called triumph of neomodernist

abstraction over historicist figuration is what makes architecture finally—and belat-

edly—postmodern. At last, when the real estate developer demands world-class

architecture above all else, architects have entered the bank vault, the headquarters

of the new world order, only to find nothing there—except, that is, Malevich’s black

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square hanging in the corner. Rather than celebrate this nothing or give it metaphys-

ical gravitas, it is time to see it for what it is. Nor can one be satisfied with opposing a

resistant (or supposedly more real) architecture of brick to the apparently weightless

balloons of financialization. For inside the empty vault, or in the real estate bubble

or balloon, the air is thick and stale. And from its material, molecular density can be

assembled concrete tools with which to gently tap, or firmly smash, the idols of our

day, just as Nietzsche applied his philosophical hammer to the pieties of idealist,

Apollonian classicism.

What are these tools? A precondition for that question is the desire to change things,

really and genuinely. Of this, I am afraid, there is little evidence in today’s architec-

ture, perhaps by definition. Instead, there are abundant noble attempts to solve

pragmatically the problems, like climate change and poverty, thrown up willy-nilly

by the status quo, rather than a concerted effort to reject and reformulate the world

system out which these problems emanate. So too with abstraction, which was once

the harbinger of other things and is now the very emblem of complacency. Faced

with this one can only repeat, with Rosa Luxemburg and with so many others then

and now: It does not have to remain this way.

1 T.J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes From the History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).2 Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution (London: Militant Publications, 1986 [1900]), accessed 7 February 2013, http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revo-lution/.

3 Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution, accessed 7 February 2013, http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/re-form-revolution/ch10.htm.

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