at present neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion. The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale.31

         Jameson likewise imagined the Utopian project to be a key component of this “counterhegemony”, suggesting alternative ideas and practices of space against which society could develop new demands of the present system. It is here that his thinking overlaps most directly with Tafuri, although at the same time he also refers back to Marx’s writings – particularly the way the new emerges from within the old:

         Such figures suggest something like an enclave theory of social transition, according to which the emergent future … is theorized in terms of small yet strategic pockets or beach-heads within the older system. The essentially spatial nature of the characterization is no accident and conveys something like a historical tension between two radically different types of space, in which the emergent yet more powerful kind will gradually extend its influence and dynamism over the older form, fanning out from its initial implantations and gradually ‘colonising’ what persists around it.32

Towards a Marxist Practice – Lefebvre and De Certeau 

The theme of revolution at the small scale – almost by stealth as opposed to sudden transformation – has also been a powerful influence in grass roots architectural practice, as part of a movement to democratize the process. As a contrast to the critique implied by the “pure architecture” mentioned by Tafuri, discussed at the end of Chapter 2 and returned to in Chapter 4, this section will concluded with

         architecture today: that is, to see architecture return to pure architecture, to form without utopia; in the best cases to sublime uselessness.28

 At this point Tafuri’s argument could be compared with out earlier conclusion on the critical capacity of architecture as discussed in Chapter 2. Tafuri, at the same time, seems reluctant to admit that while this may be effective against an architectural ideology, this should not be confused with ideology in general:

         To the deceptive attempt to give architecture an ideological dress, I shall always prefer the sincerity of those who have the courage to speak of that silent and outdated ‘purity’; even if this, too, still harbours an ideological inspiration, pathetic in its anachronism.29

         In contrast to this pessimistic conclusion, the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson has recently offered a more hopeful response. He has specifically tried to transcend Tafuri’s “peculiarly frustrating position”30 and propose a more positive agenda for architecture as a means of orientation within the homogenized environment of a global “late-capitalism”. Jameson borrowed a notion from Kevin Lynch’s book The Image of the City in order to develop a political version of what Lynch had termed the technique of “cognitive mapping”. This originated from research on how people construct mental maps in order to navigate particular routes and areas within confusing urban environments. To Jameson this became a way of describing a possible Marxist aesthetic, whereby political opposition might be similarly orientated within the hegemony of capitalism:

         … in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is

2 Paolo Soleri – “Arcosanti”, Arizona, 1969 onwards. (Neil Jackson)

1 Aldo Rossi – “Architettura Assassinata”, 1974-75

of practice. In the introduction to the book version of the essay quoted above, he does take care to deny the charge of forecasting the “death of architecture”- implied by Aldo Rossi’s famous drawing made in response to the original publication. In fact he comes down in support of more “autonomous” architecture – such as was discussed in Chapter 2 of this book, in terms of a critique of rationality – though here employed as the only alternative now that capitalism has disempowered a revolutionary architecture:

         What is of interest here is the precise identification of those tasks which capitalist development has taken away from architecture. That is to say what it has taken away in general from prefiguration. With this, one is led almost automatically to the discovery of what may well be the ‘drama’ of 

The Marxist Critique in Architecture – Tafuri and Jameson 

The various modes of resistance that we have discussed so far towards the dominant power structures and institutions of society would not necessarily be ones that all architects would agree with – even, paradoxically, the ones most politically engaged. The Italian historian, Manfredo Tafuri, who was deeply influenced by Marxist ideas, doubted that architects on their own could achieve very much in the absence of a general revolution in society. As he wrote in an essay from 1969 which was later expanded into the book Architecture and Utopia, he felt that the social intentions of architecture seen in the Utopian projects of early modernism had been co-opted by the all pervading machinery of capitalism. He blamed this on the ideology of instrumental rationality, much as Adorno and Horkheimer had previously done, as this was part of the enlightenment origin of modernism that had “naturalized” the basic principles of capitalism. Architectural practice today could not escape this hegemony, and would always end up colluding with the progress of the capitalist project, therefore the only positive role for an architecture that was opposed to this ideology was not in the world of practice but in the realm of critique:

         It may even be that many marginal roles exist for architecture and planning. Of primary interest to us however, is the question of why, until now, Marxist-oriented culture has very carefully, and with an obstinacy worthy of better causes, denied or concealed the simple truth that, just as there can be no such thing as a political economics of class, but only a class critique of political economics, likewise there can never be an aesthetics, art or architecture of class, but only a class critique of aesthetics, art, architecture and the city.27

         On a more positive note, Tafuri does recognize the potential of the “critical” architectural project to point to an alternative mode