History

In the aftermath of the Second World War, tainted partially by its implicit and explicit ties with racism, the bioeconomic concept of humanness lost its validity. More than a rejection of particular “pseudo-sciences” with which it was associated, its discreditation led to the decline of life sciences as the universal epistemological paradigm and to the resultant dissolution of the entire set of principles and values associated with it. Belief in economic planning and organization was replaced by the revival of the nineteenth-century ideal of the free market; liberal democracy was recognized as the only ethical political model; imperialism as a way of governing nature and populations was shattered by the postwar decolonization movements; existentialism and humanist Marxism questioned evolutionarily interpreted life as the ultimate philosophical and ethical category; the modernist epistemological model of truth as single and verifiable was replaced by relativism and pluralism. Despite the fact that as an organized movement and ideology, monism was dissipated by the totalitarian regimes shortly before the Second World War, it was itself proclaimed totalitarian.1 Writing during the 1950s, Russian emigrant liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin distinguished between two types of thinkers: the monistic “hedgehogs,” who “relate everything to a single central vision, one system . . . a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has significance,” and the pluralist “foxes,” who “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory . . . , related to no moral or aesthetic principle.”2 By doing so, Berlin highlighted the political implications of the philosophical concept of monism. He thus presaged the work of later liberal political theorists, who condemned the monistic philosophical approach to life sciences as misguided because it postulated collectivist rather than individual subjectivity.3 Yet the story of monism as an epistemological paradigm was not over. The ecological disaster that only accelerated in the aftermath of the Cold War compromised the myth of unrestricted individual freedom (the freedom that had too often been defined in the economic terms of production and consumption) and monistic ideas return to discussion as a part of ecologically minded critical theory, which reintegrates natural and social sciences on the basis of such principles as life, process, and organism.4

This reintegration has informed the “planetary” shift in historical research recently announced by Dipesh Chakrabarty, who sees it as an antidote to historical Hegelianism.5 From Hegel and Benedetto Croce to Karl Marx and the German Neo-Kantians to R. G. Collingwood, modern philosophers saw an unbridgeable chasm between history, as a humanistic discipline that studies society, on the one hand, and natural sciences, including geology and evolutionary theory, which study the nonhuman environment, on the other. Croce was influenced by the subjectivism of Ernst Mach and Henri Poincaré (which was discussed in chapter 1): just as Mach postulated that the objective physical world is always perceived as a sum of subjective sensations, the Italian philosopher believed that “there is no world but the human world,” since “existence” is a concept that has “meaning only within a context of human concerns and purposes.”6 For Collingwood, the follower of Croce and author of The Idea of History (1946), a historian “would not be interested in the fact that men eat and sleep and make love and thus satisfy their natural appetites” but rather “in the social customs which they create by their thought as a framework within which these appetites find satisfaction in ways sanctioned by convention and morality.”7 The similarity between Collingwood’s description of “non-historical” biological processes and human “functions,” for which modern architecture (as was discussed in chapter 4) had to provide is striking. And indeed, just as the approach of Croce and Collingwood reminds of the rationalist philosophy of architecture, the “functionalists” were likely readers of Collingwood’s intellectual adversary, the theorist of life, biologist J. B. S. Haldane—a communist with connections both in the USSR and among radical cultural intelligentsia elsewhere—who suggested blurring the boundary between natural and human histories to enable writing the history of nonhuman nature. Judging from the vantage point of today, Chakrabarty proclaims Haldane the winner in the debate.

Soviet interwar architecture can similarly be viewed as a series of historical propositions—attempts at reifying competing versions of history, which occupied different positions along the materialism–idealism scale. Yet, unlike the historians, Soviet interwar architects inevitably aimed to sublate the opposition between nature and culture. While contemporary critical theory is unambiguous in its repudiation of anthropocentrism, interwar monism’s relationship with it (as discussed in chapter 2 and elsewhere in this book) was more complicated. The human was the ultimate subject of Soviet interwar modernism, yet this subject was defined collectively, from a perspective that was both scientific and managerial: as simultaneously a part and the master of nature. In this monistic economy, a materialist concept of nature collided with teleology—the desire to direct history’s course by the power of will and reason.

An ill-defined and ambiguous notion, teleology has often been associated with Abrahamic theologies and with Hegelian philosophy, which posit that events unfold toward a preexisting end goal. Thus understood, teleology has been the target of countless criticisms, most recently from the perspective of postcolonial theory, which associated it with white Euro-American political hegemony, and from the perspective of geocentered critical theory, which related it to the careless ravaging of natural resources and disregard for the well-being of the planet. For Bruno Latour, one of the foremost critics representing the latter perspective, teleology is a “drive toward some Omega point,” an imperative of historical movement toward an external goal.8

Yet teleology has been also linked to a number of materialist, first of all, biological, theories, which Russian social democratic philosopher Sergey Suvorov in 1904 had described as immanently teleological in contrast to transcendentally teleological idealist worldviews.9 Among these theories were those of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Herbert Spencer, who considered the inheritance of adaptational changes to be the mechanism of evolution: they believed that the species demonstrates a teleological striving toward greater perfection. And even though Darwin’s theory of “the survival of the fittest” presented biological life as blind and irrational, unfolding without goal or direction, this blind evolution created such regularities as species.10 In the words of Russian empiriocriticist philosopher Peter Engelmeyer (writing in 1910), Darwin’s greatest contribution was that he provided logic to a concept that had previously seemed impossible: “purposefulness in the absence of goals”; for Darwin, “purposefulness is a result of life selection and is secured genetically through natural selection.”11 Still routinely used by biologists, such evolutionist concepts as function and purpose (for instance, of an organ) also betray a teleological reasoning, causing debates among theorists of biology.12

When Eduard von Hartmann elevated the notion of the unconscious to a major philosophical principle in his Philosophy of the Unconscious (Philosophie des Unbewussten, 1869), he nevertheless argued against Darwin’s vision of natural selection as the prime mechanism of evolution, supporting, instead, a neo-Lamarckian theory of adaptation. If Darwinism, for him, professed a “mindless causality,” effectively denying adaptation, Hartmann’s unconscious provided evolution with a teleological guiding channel, through which the genus could move toward its biological goal.13 Not chance, but logics, even if unconscious, directed evolution. Unlike the same concept in Freud’s interpretation, Hartmann’s unconscious existed not at the bottom of an individual psyche, but as a locus of collective will independent of individual subjects: “When we . . . view the world as a whole, the expression ‘the unconscious’ acquires the force not only of an abstraction from all unconscious individual functions and subjects, but also of a collective, comprehending the foregoing both extensively and intensively.”14 Just like instinct united birds into complex flock formations, not consciousness, but the instinctive and the unconscious enabled individuals to act as a species, in coordination with one another. This interpretation ultimately prompted Hartmann in later editions of his work to replace the term das Unbewusste with das Überbewusste (superconscious), highlighting the role of the unconscious in the process of individual interiorization of collective goals.

The ambiguous relationship between determinism and the freedom of will posed a problem for Marxism, which was simultaneously an analytical theory and an activist platform: if social relationships are always a consequence of objective technological development, then any social revolution that is not preceded by a technological one is destined for failure. This problem, which became particularly vexing for Russian revolutionary Marxists, has been interpreted in the light of Marx’s seemingly ambiguous attitude to teleology: while his ideal of communism is usually seen as the end goal of historic process, some critics noticed that his vision of history lacked a conscious subject.15 Sean Sayers explained this paradox as resulting from Marx’s vision of history as a process of increasing self-consciousness: its first stage, “the prehistory,” was defined by an unconscious evolutionary development toward greater consciousness; this stage would be overcome with the arrival of communism, which would become the beginning, rather than the end, of the real historic process.16 Immanent “prehistorical” teleology was to leave a place for teleology in the more common, idealist, sense of the word.

Since the mid-nineteenth century, both immanent and transcendental teleologism informed radical Russian culture, which was equally fascinated with natural sciences and Hegelian philosophy: whereas science provided it with an areligious model of the world, the legacy of Hegel, received through the Left Hegelians and Marx, became the point of departure for political radicalism. The first—Lamarckian—teleological model was famously articulated by Leo Tolstoy, who argued against the concept of history as shaped by heroic figures. Describing how the Russian marshal Kutuzov orders his army to enter the Battle of Tarutino against his will, his passage from War and Peace (1865–69) conveys a sense of historic inevitability:

The Cossack’s report, confirmed by horse patrols who were sent out, was the final proof that events had matured. The tightly coiled spring was released, the clock began to whirr and the chimes to play. Despite all his supposed power, his intellect, his experience, and his knowledge of men, Kutuzov—having taken into consideration the Cossack’s report, a note from Bennigsen who sent personal reports to the Emperor, the wishes he supposed the Emperor to hold, and the fact that all the generals expressed the same wish—could no longer check the inevitable movement, and gave the order to do what he regarded as useless and harmful—gave his approval, that is, to the accomplished fact.17

Giving in to the inevitable or, to put it in Spinozian terms, finding freedom in the understanding of necessity, Kutuzov could not impose his will and instead surrendered to forces greater than it. This determinism appalled postwar liberal thinkers, who equated freedom with individual agency. For Berlin, Tolstoy was a hedgehog, who “advocated a single embracing vision; he preached not variety but simplicity, not many levels of consciousness but reduction to some single level.”18

Meanwhile, to Russian early twentieth-century social democrats, the evolutionism of Tolstoy’s model proposed a temporality whose slowness was incompatible with the urgency of their task—political and social revolution. Turning away from Tolstoy’s determinism, they proposed a revision to Marx’s vision of history: blind evolution had to be transformed into history here and now, not as a result but as the prerequisite for the arrival of communism. The revolutionaries turned to Hegelian idealism, such as the work of Anatoly Lunacharsky’s Zurich friend, Rudolf Maria Holzapfel, a fellow student of Richard Avenarius and a fellow social-democrat.19 Holzapfel delineated a theory of “panidealism” as an all-encompassing philosophic (and eventually spiritual) worldview.20 Holzapfel’s book Panideal: A Psychology of Social Feelings (Panideal: Psychologie der sozialen Gefühle, 1901; Russian translation 1909) was popular among international social-democratic and scientific circles.21 Written in Ukraine, where Holzapfel lived at that time, it appeared with a preface by Mach; its enthusiastic readers included French writer Romain Rolland, a correspondent of Freud and a future excited visitor to Gorky Park. Holzapfel used Avenarius’s epistemology as the foundation for a practical philosophy of action and value, mirroring his teacher’s hierarchy of elements of cognition with a hierarchy of core human feelings, states, and activities: loneliness, yearning, hope, prayer, fight, consciousness, art, world, and, finally, ideal. Unlike individual ideals, the panideal served everything, everybody, and on all levels: practical and theoretical, logical and psychological, economic and artistic, individual and social. The panideal enabled the maximum development of individual creative personality—and thus of life.

Liberal political and cultural theory has defined such interiorized externality as totalitarianism.22 Boris Groys famously described the Stalinist Soviet Union as an aesthetic project, a Gesamtkunstwerk in which every process was coordinated, aestheticized, and subordinated to the totalizing logic of the whole. Socialist realism, for him, emerged not as a falsification of reality but as a depiction of telos: “Socialist realism is oriented toward that which has not yet come into being but which should be created, and in this respect it is the heir of the avant-garde, for which aesthetics and politics are also identical.”23 What I have suggested in this book is that rather than identifying aesthetics and politics, Soviet culture saw both as a manifestation of a larger concern: as a historical project, Soviet interwar modernism vacillated between materialist determinism and idealist teleology. When Soviet architects meticulously calculated the expected physiological and psychological effects of form, space, and color, or when they aspired to formalize the processes of design and construction, they sought to not only exert political power but to use that power to help the human psyche catch up with its own historic and urban environment, to facilitate psychological hygiene, and eventually to regulate and direct the social evolution of Homo sapiens. While architecture was undisputedly among the key tools of this regulation, its methods remained a matter of debate.

Although Russian revolutionaries, who remained intellectual heirs to nineteenth-century radical intelligentsia, religiously adhered to scientific materialism as a worldview, they simultaneously espoused a Hegelian ambition of making history. Similarly, Soviet architects struggled to apply their scientific worldview and methods to their ambition of using architecture for formulating historic goals and directing social evolution. The dominant approach to teleology in Soviet Russia could be seen as changing from immanent in the early 1920s to predominantly idealist a decade later. The two approaches, however, were not simply opposite, but also tightly intertwined within the monistic search for a compromise between the human and nature. Subordinating architecture to historic goals (which have been often wrongly dismissed as utopian in historiography), all projects discussed in this book demonstrate such an entanglement of immanent and transcendental approaches to teleology. Their ultimate telos was not the dictatorship of the proletariat or its party, the revolution, or even communism—this ultimate telos was life.

Discussed in chapter 1, Nikolay Ladovsky’s Machism made ASNOVA the target of frequent accusations of idealism.24 Although inevitably dismissed by the group’s members, these accusations do not appear entirely ungrounded: after all, Mach’s subjectivist philosophy of science was the same theory that inspired Croce’s philosophy of history and Holzapfel’s idealist philosophy of action. But although Ladovsky’s theory dissolved the material world in the mosaic of human sensations, thereby making architecture anthropocentric, it simultaneously reconstituted this anthropos as the subject of the psychological laboratory. This definition found its application in the space-meter (the subject of chapter 3) as the instrument for directing the process of the natural selection of architects. Ladovsky’s students and colleagues departed from this immanent toward a more idealist teleology, dedicating themselves to the development of the theory of rhythm as an instrument of imbuing perception with an external goal. Likewise, as chapter 2 delineated, Ladovsky’s associate El Lissitzky and their student Georgy Krutikov, interested in studies of perception, applied them not to design, but to speculating about the future evolution of cities, arguing that their investigations would help architects in their everyday work. Furthermore, as demonstrated in chapter 4, both Alexander Rozenberg’s program of normalization and Moisei Ginzburg’s program of typification presented attempts at channeling the development of architecture into its “natural” course, just like the revolution seemingly channeled history into its right direction. Even Ginzburg’s functionalism—its very name, its preoccupation with processuality, and its declared materialism notwithstanding—relied on the teleological theory of “purposeful setup,” which aimed to direct architecture from without: the setup, however, remained a psychological and intellectual disposition rather than an explicitly postulated goal. Similarly, as discussed in chapter 5, it was the teleological component that Soviet designers such as Boris Ender perceived as missing from Hinnerk Scheper’s objectivist approach to wall-painting, which they eventually enriched with Alexey Leontyev’s activity theory. The most explicitly teleological of all, the program of the Central Park of Culture and Leisure (the subject of chapter 6) was preoccupied with building the energetic builder of the future. In all these examples, architecture was reinterpreted as the psychological interface that enables unconscious interiorization of collective goals and thereby allows adapting to, regulating, or directing history—understood as social evolution.

Although contemporary critical theory has been unequivocal in rejecting the teleology that Suvorov called transcendental, its relationship with immanent teleology has been more complex. It has accepted Walter Benjamin’s concept of “weak messianic power” based on the present anticipation of the future, as well as such Lamarckian theories as Louis Marin’s concept of utopia as horizon, which is inevitably rooted in the present, and Jacques Derrida’s suggestion to substitute eschatology, in which history unfolds toward a “future that cannot be anticipated,” for teleology, which “locks up, neutralizes, and finally cancels historicity.”25 Tolstoy’s concept of history thus once again becomes relevant today. To Latour, it offers a model of agency that is shared between the individual and the environment. Discussing Tolstoy’s same portrayal of Kutuzov that Berlin condemned, Latour concludes that the Russian marshal appears not as a human actor but as the personification of “forces that have entirely different characteristics.”26 He explains the marshal’s reasoning through a neo-Spinozian dialectics of freedom and necessity: “To be a subject is not to act autonomously in front of an objective background, but to share agency with other subjects that have also lost their autonomy.”27 Furthermore, Latour advocates not only limiting the agency of individual humans but also endowing the Earth—that which the modernist managerial culture had considered a mere resource for human use—with an agency of her own.28 Following scientist James Lovelock, Latour calls her Gaia, using the name of the ancient Greek primordial force (unlike Ernst Haeckel, Latour nevertheless insists on Gaia’s secular character). Gaia, he contends, is a “full-fledged actor” in “geostory,” a notion that should replace the human-centered and teleological “history.”29 By positing Gaia as a (nonorganismic and devoid of consciousness) system that actively responds to disturbances, he achieves a monistic dissolution of the boundary between nature and culture.

While Latour elaborates the concept of shared agency, McKenzie Wark, in Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene (2016), suggests replacing individual agency with the concept of “intra-action” as an effect of the context and situation.30 This platform allows Wark to transition “from molar to molecular perceptions of experience”: from the “drama of events . . . where big-bodied entities clash, antagonist against protagonist” to “subtle and imperceptible” “interesting processes.”31 Wark replaces Hegelian teleology with an evolutionary vision of history: “History is Lamarckian,” he says, quoting science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson; “History is directing evolution.”32 Sidelining the subjectivist side of Alexander Bogdanov’s empiriomonism (a program that was heavily dependent on the empiriocriticism of Mach and Avenarius), Wark finds the philosophical and activist platform of the Russian revolutionary to be the closest precedent for his theory for the Anthropocene. He embraces Bogdanov’s humanism as well as what he calls his “labor point of view” (the aspiration to put theory into practice), his tectology (which he values for its practical orientation), and what he calls “proletkult” (Proletkult theory of culture, which merged art and life). Empiriomonism not only offers Wark a model for integrating Marxism with natural sciences, but also allows questioning the modern subject-object dichotomy, suggesting an example of carving new, collective, forms of agency out of the predicament of the dissolution of individual subjectivity by science. Mach’s self-portrait, in which his body, as a visual sensation, merges with the environment, could be a metaphor for such dissolution, just as Alexander Rozenberg’s method of the documentation of factors, which treated labor productivity as a function of objective circumstances (these two examples are discussed in chapters 1 and 4 respectively).

Bogdanov’s tectology, which is today recognized as a forerunner of systems theory, is certainly not incompatible with Lovelock’s vision of Gaia as “the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.”33 Postulating homeostasis as Gaia’s goal, the Gaia theory elaborates a sort of “immanent teleology”; to survive, humanity (and by extension, architecture) has no other way but to move forward with Gaia. This movement can only be described negatively, in such categories as resistance, counteraction, or slowing down. Such a “Lamarckian” (to use Wark’s description) theory of history focuses not on the distant but on the near, not on the big but on the incremental—not on building but on maintenance. Accordingly, the new organicist architecture cancels its autonomy and once again questions the authority of the designer.

In their collection of Geostories (series of conceptual drawings comprised of research visualizations and utopian renderings, which were created for several architecture biennials between 2015 and 2018) Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy of the architectural office Design Earth explicitly refer to Latour’s writing.34 These stories upset temporalities common for architecture and architectural history: they are case studies that not only show how the Earth has been recently exploited by capital, but also examine how its “resources” were formed in the course of millions of years. Viewed from this perspective, the Earth emerges not as a passive object but as the creative subject. The Koolhaas- and Archigram-inspired ironic proposals of Ghosn and Jazairy, which are simultaneously utopian and dystopian, show impossible man-made interventions in the natural landscape. These interventions reuse products of human civilization—waste and architecture alike; their impossibility makes them a warning more than the end goal. The concept of history that emerges in these proposals remains cautious: avoiding formulating positive ideals, Design Earth finds a way to discuss the future through negation. To use Ginzburg’s terms, they give architecture a setup—to think about the consequences of design for the planet—without prescribing a course of action. But even though doing it negatively, they assert the Earth as the new subject of architecture and her life as its goal. This “life” is no longer the abstract ideal of monistic modernism but the very material ground underneath our feet—a new regime of historicity that Latour defines as “the terrestrial.”

What can the builders of the terrestrial learn from Soviet monistic architecture, which was guided by a concept of history that was simultaneously materialist and teleological? One lesson, perhaps, is that just as it defies binary philosophical, political, and ethical oppositions, Soviet monistic modernism also demonstrates the impossibility of drawing a neat boundary between the managerial, exploitative (civilizational, in Latour’s terms) modernist attitude to nature on the one hand and materialism and organicism on the other.35 The roots of the terrestrial lie at the very heart of the civilizational—and perhaps it is precisely in this conflation where the clues to resistance could be found.