Thinking Through Antinomies: An Enquiry into Manfredo Tafuri's Historical Method Luisa Lorenza Corna Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies May 2016 1 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2016 The University of Leeds and Luisa Lorenza Corna The right of Luisa Lorenza Corna to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 2 Acknowledgements Many people have enriched my project and thinking immeasurably during the course of my research. My first and deepest thanks goes to my supervisors Gail Day and Richard Checketts. Whereas Gail Day's presence was essential not to lose sight of the general frame of the project, Richard Checketts encouraged me to look closely at details, and turn them into new lines of enquiry. The first part of the title 'Thinking Through Antinomies' could be also considered a metaphor of the process of supervision I underwent. There are a number of people whose help has been essential in the last phase of my thesis. Amongst those, I want to thank Fiona Allen, David Broder, Matthew Hyland and Matteo Cavalleri. 3 Abstract: The following thesis addresses Manfredo Tafuri's historical and critical method. It considers a selection of studies conducted by the Italian historian at different moments of his intellectual trajectory, and it scrutinizes how his unorthodox approach succeeded in challenging established architectural accounts and in exposing the ideologically constructed figure of the architect. The thesis takes its points of departure from Fredric Jameson's interpretation of Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co's book Modern Architecture as a story of sequential failed attempts to resolve the contradiction between the city and the building (or more abstractly, between totality and individual work). Expanding on Jameson's reading, it illustrates how, in the selection of works considered, Tafuri organises his narrative around pairs of (apparently) antinomic terms such as plan and Plan, image and fragment, rule and licence, reality and utopia. Central to the thesis is also the charting of the theoretical and political encounters that shaped Tafuri's mode of thinking. Chapter One focuses on Tafuri and Italian Workerism. It investigates how the Frankfurt School-inflected critique of planning initiated by the founder of Workerism Raniero Panzieri inspired Tafuri's own reading of urban planning. It also looks at the way Tafuri extended the critique of intellectual labour advanced within the frame of the Italian Marxist journal Contropiano to the domain of architecture. Chapter Two tackles Tafuri's analysis of the use of fragment and fragmentation in the work of the Venetian etcher Giambattista Piranesi and in that of the 20th-century avant-garde. It contends that Tafuri's exploration of the meaning of the fragment in works dating from different historical moments is intended to reveal the effect of capitalist development on the communicative potential of form. Chapter Three takes its lead from the 1977 text 'The Historical "Project"', in which Tafuri establishes a set of guidelines for the historical research which will inform his study of Renaissance architecture in the following years. It scrutinizes how the application of this method allows Tafuri to challenge established historical accounts of the Renaissance such as that of Rudolf Wittkower. Finally, Chapter Four returns to Tafuri's earliest 4 interventions in the post-war Italian architectural debate. Whereas the first part considers journal articles on the question of the replanning of Rome, the second focuses on a selection of texts addressing the discussion over the new urban scale and architectural neo-realism. 5 Table of Contents: Acknowledgements.......................................................................................................2 Abstract.........................................................................................................................3 Table of Contents..........................................................................................................5 Introduction.................................................................................................................7 Chapter One: Tafuri's Double Plan................................................................................................ 18 1. The Avant-Garde as a Partial Utopia of the Plan 2. Tafuri in Context 2.1. The Italian Politics of Planning and Its Critique 3. Tafuri's Plan and Workerism. 3.1. Eyeing the Future as Present. Tafuri and Antonio Negri 3.2. Soviet Planning and Ideology. Tafuri and Mario Tronti 3.3. The Autonomy of the Plan 3.4. Planning as a Moment of Capitalist Development. Tafuri and Raniero Panzieri Chapter Two: A Whole Made of Fragments...................................................................................72 1. Introduction 2. Fragment as Critical Tool: Tafuri on Piranesi 2.1. Criticism of the Image of the Past Formed in the Present 2.2. Criticism of the Present 2.3. Criticism of the Future 3. The Relative Value of Fragment, from Piranesi to the Avant-Garde 4. 'Ceci n'est pas un fragment'. From Negative Utopia to Heterotopia Chapter Three: 'The Historical "Project"' in Theory and Practice..............................................114 6 1. From the 'Space of Conflict' to 'The Historical "Project'" 2. 'The Historical "Project"' and its Sources 3. 'The Historical "Project"' in Practice: 3.1. Constructing Another Renaissance: Methodological Premises 3. 1. 1. Contra Wittkower and Analogy 3. 1. 2. Philology as a New Philosophy: The Influence of Eugenio Garin 3. 1. 3. A Rather Functionalist Notion of Language 3. 1. 4. The Unattainability of the Past 3. 1. 5. The Question of Representation 3.2. Alberti, or 'the Weak Power of Concinnitas' 3.3. San Francesco della Vigna and Venice: Refusing Modernity 3.3.1. Venice between Inventio and Consuetudo 3.3.2. The Church of San Francesco Della Vigna Chapter Four: The Formative Years. Architectural Practice and Political Verification..........168 1. The Struggle for the Rome Plan 2. The City-Territory Proposal 4. Realism and the Question of Method 5. From Neorealism to Realism Conclusion...............................................................................................................206 Bibliography............................................................................................................218 7 Introduction The more we perceive problems as worldwide and intergalactic, the more the fear of the world demands a retreat into details, a retreat resembling that of architects. Manfredo Tafuri, 'For a Historical History'1 The peculiar difficulty of dialectical writing lies indeed in its holistic, 'totalizing' character: as though you could not say any one thing until you had first said everything; as though with each new idea you were bound to recapitulate the entire system. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form2 In an academic setting where thematic approaches prevail, a monographic thesis on an architectural historian may seem a strange endeavour. The risk of appearing 'hagiographic' obliges the writer to ponder every endorsement, keeping a critical attitude constantly alert. In writing this thesis I have tried to maintain such an attitude without being led astray by the writing process itself. Nor does my subject, the work of the architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri, invite celebratory tones or over- familiarity. To approach Tafuri's writing in search of models for thought or action would have meant betraying one of the keystones of his own method: 'implicated though it may be in the objects and phenomena it analyzes', he writes 'historical 1 Manfredo Tafuri, 'For a Historical History (1994)', Casabella, 619-620 (1995), 144-152 (p. 151). Amended translation. 2 Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form. Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 306. 8 criticism must know how to balance on the razor's edge that separates detachment and participation'.3 It must be clarified here that the ultimate subject of this thesis is not, as misleadingly suggested above, the oeuvre of Manfredo Tafuri as such. The exclusion of certain important texts and the disregard for chronological order make it apparent from the outset that no comprehensive intellectual biography is intended here. Rather, this thesis focuses on Tafuri's historical-critical method, and explores how its employment succeeded in undermining established historical narratives and in exposing the ideological veil covering the figure of the architect. The thesis considers both the texts belonging to Tafuri's most openly militant phase, and the ones where political aspects appear less prominently. In so doing, it intends to show that the guiding principle of Tafuri's methodological approach remained largely unchanged, regardless of the variety of themes and historical periods that he tackled. At various points in this thesis I will express my disagreement with regard to Tafuri's positions, and by means of a contextual reading I will show that what could be taken