Functionalism. A Critical Concept for the Construction of the Present Age

A fresh reading and critique of modernity

Adorno gave his lecture “On Some Problems of the Functionalism Today”² at the request of the Werkbund director Adolf Arndt.³ Let us begin by framing it as part of a fresh reading and critique of modernity: in 1960, Reyner Banham published Theory and Design in The First Machine Age, published in German in 1965, the same year Banham published his manifesto “A Home is not a House,”⁴ arguing for an architecture of mobility in clear contrast to Adorno’s position. The Ulm school closed in 1968, the same year Manfredo Tafuri published Teoria e storia dell’architettura. But it bears repeating that Adorno was not an architectural historian or theorist. 1965 may have been a time for reappraisal, but the Frankfurt School also played a part in refuting progressism. Modernity is not simply a feature of architecture. It is a philosophical tradition, seen from the viewpoint of German reconstruction. It is a historical tonality that opened with the Enlightenment and led to Auschwitz. And that which was intended as emancipation became a force for control, enlisted by totalitarian rationality and capitalism alike. Behind social utility, power lay in wait, and the ruse of history was to mask the movement of domination behind a screen of culture.⁵ The promise of subjective emancipation was replaced by economic and political subjection, and above all an “unfeeling, even pitiless becoming of the rational subject.” This twofold historical and conceptual basis formed the backdrop for debate with Adolf Loos and the broader Werkbund.

Paul Betts has written the history of the Werkbund in the post-war period, forced to “[reinvent] its own heritage” and “protect the moral dimension of functionalism from the dangers of both a Nazi past and an American present.”⁶ This was dangerous ground, as the Werkbund was also drawn to Heidegger, inviting him to Darmstadt in 1951 to speak on “Building, dwelling, thinking.”⁷ Dangerous ground, too, because of the advancing age of its members. Yet Arndt’s appointment as its director gave one last fresh moment of impetus to the debate on functionalism, inviting not only Adorno but also Ernst Bloch to Berlin in 1965.

The title should, however, be read above and beyond the particular circumstances of the lecture. What becomes of human need (a need for art in the Hegelian sense and material need in the Marxist sense) in the age of the culture industry? This provides the axis and coordinates for reading in a text obscured by a number of hurdles and switches in discursive direction—hurdles in the guise of references to current affairs, certain aspects of which escape us, shifts from instants of philosophy to empirical notations, and leaps from architecture to design and music. These are not, however, simple idiosyncracies: they are bound up with Adorno’s demonstration and his fundamental tool: dialectics. They also arise from the fact that Adorno is speaking not as an expert in the grip of “the pathos of technological competence.”

Philosophy and history: the twofold background of functionalism

The question of functionalism is asked wrongly when its twofold historical and philosophical background is overlooked. Loos is right when read historically with Morris, but wrong when considered anthropologically and when rejecting the mimetic and symbolic impulse that shapes human life. Functionalism must be thought in today’s terms because it can still be a critical concept in constructing the present age. Which means it is not just a fossilised legacy from the 1920s or a topos ready for the junkyard, as 1980s postmodernism had it.⁸ The text’s complexity lies in the fact that it is constantly diffracting: there is a functionalism historically embodied by Le Corbusier’s successes and another by the failures of Reconstruction. As early as the Dialectic of Enlightenment of 1944,⁹ Adorno wrote of the American version imposed on him by exile that the:

decorative administrative and exhibition buildings of industry differ little between authoritarian and other countries [...] the new bungalows on the outskirts, like the flimsy structures at international trade fairs, sing the praises of technical progress while inviting their users to throw them away after short use like tin cans.

But the text’s object is not the culture industry per se. What makes it complicated is that rather than keeping within the boundaries of the applied arts, it spills over into art. Is this deliberate? Or a sign of dependency on Kantian terminology? Far from it: the two cannot be separated. This impossibility is both historical fact and a task for the philosopher. The division between art and design, purposeless and purposeful finality, does not hold true! According to the warp thread of history—“The ornaments, after all, which Loos expulsed with a vehemence quite out of character, are often actually vestiges of outmoded means of production”¹⁰ —and conversely, modes of sociability such as dance have become art forms. In other words, ornament is the trace of defunct functions and some art forms initially had uses. According to the weft thread of philosophy, this is where thought must happen, as only maintaining the utopian spark can reveal the interstice that will offer the means of countering the culture industry. Seeing use objects and works of art as discrete is a failing of historicist culture; seeing use objects and works of art as heterogeneous is a failing of philosophy. On one side, a rejection of the temporal perspective, on the other a positivist stance that misses both the utopia demanded by architecture and design and the critical negativity contained in major works of art.

Which goes to show that Adorno opens up a conceptual debate with Kant, whose difficulty is heightened by the effects of translation. The debate becomes more complex when the work’s formal autonomy, as established by criticism on the subjective level, transforms into modernist autonomy: “After the critical tradition declined to offer the arts a canon of right and wrong, the responsibility to take such considerations into account was placed on each individual work; each had to test itself against its own immanent logic.”¹¹ This is the arc spanning from Mallarmé to Greenberg, demanding reflexivity. Far from maintaining the Kantian perspective that had recently informed Jürgen Habermas’ Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, ¹² Adorno reduces the debate to the compositional materiality of objects, and to a greater extent to their intrinsic historicity. If the canon is no longer objectively prescribed, each era must strive to produce the forms suited to its style. Adorno here reinvents Baudelairean modernity. Better yet, he shifts it based on a conversation with Loos: “What was functional can become the opposite.”¹³ Solid though the distinction between purposefulness and purposelessness may be, it nonetheless reveals that “Nothing exists as an aesthetic object in itself but only within the field of tension of such sublimation.”¹⁴

As many ages, as many functions, as many adornments

This analysis brings us to Freud’s Civilisation and its discontents and Elias’ History of manners.¹⁵ Kantian disinterestedness becomes both that which has lost its purpose due to social reorganisation and that which results from the suppression of the sexual heart of interestedness. Adorno wields this psychoanalytical terminology against Loos, whose polemics are accused of having a touch of puritanism with “obsessional motifs.” Adorno interprets this puritanism in sociological terms as essentially bourgeois. Yet he also connects it on a more fundamental level with anthropological determinants—on the one hand, the pleasure principle that forbids men from being subject to “the sadistic blows of sharp edges, bare calculated rooms, stairways, and the like”¹⁶ in modern dwellings; on the other, the impulse to draw reflected in graffiti, the taste of the Surrealists, and, reaching further back into Adorno’s textual memory, Aristotle. Foregrounding rational objectivation, Loos is accused of rejecting adornment because of his hatred for this expressive or mimetic impulse. Adorno adds, “Thus, even when these objects lack expression, they must pay tribute to it by attempting to avoid it. [...] There is barely a practical form which, along with its appropriateness for use, would not therefore also be a symbol.” A degree of familiarity with Freudian methodology is apparent in these lines: refusal is presence and the negative is a trace.¹⁷

In a word, functionalism must be understood literally in comparison with the contemporary: there are as many ages as there are functions and adornments. The history of adornment can be read as the history of the loss of function, and “Criticism of ornament means no more than criticism of that which has lost its functional and symbolic signification.”¹⁸ It follows that function cannot be a simple practical tool and, first and foremost, that the distinction between purposefulness and autonomy must be reassessed. On this point, Adorno credits the usual historical sense of Loos’ stance as based on a particular era and necessity: the critique of eclecticism. But Adorno also goes beyond a historical explanation. The quarrel develops against sublimation and the logics of purity: just as there is no pure “finalised form,” there is no pure artistic form of purposefulness. No useful object is without formality; no pure form is without use. Such a thought is “an undialectical concept of beauty, which encompasses autonomous art like a nature preserve.” In short, both illusions are forms of ignorance.

But this is where Adorno turns his back on reciprocity and brings in a hurdle: if Loos is right in rejecting the imposition of art in purposeful objects, purposeless art must reject the profit motive. This is the law of excluded middle. Purposeful objects and purposeless works of art are no longer in opposition regarding the transcendental subject; their relationship is complicated by the new status of objectivity—the commodity. The supreme reason for their proximity is now economic: both are already liable to have shifted into the culture industry regime.

The concrete objectivity or the problematic of thingness

The key issue at stake in the text could therefore be concrete objectivity, or Sachlichkeit, in echo of Neue Sachlichkeit, the high point of German modernism. This is a key issue insofar as it explores a problematic of thingness, not in terms of phenomenology but understood as inconsistency in the age of industrial society and Weberian disenchantment. Two responses can be outlined here, depending on the timescale. One belongs to Walter Benjamin and predates the catastrophe; the other is that of Reconstruction and is irredeemably marked by the catastrophe.

Benjamin bases his argument on the disorderliness of fin-de-siècle styles to argue for the necessity of modernism’s clean slate. He describes it as positive barbarism and identifies instances of it in Cubism, adding—fascinatingly, for anyone with an interest in design theory—For just like any good car, whose every part, even the bodywork, obeys the needs above all of the engine: “Klee’s figures too seem to have been designed on the drawing board, and even in their general expression they obey the laws of their interior. Their interior rather than their inwardness; and this is what makes them barbaric.” Better yet, he compares Loos to Klee in that they both turn instead “to the naked man of the contemporary world who lies screaming like a newborn babe in the dirty diapers of the present.” Experience and poverty are thus extended in the guise of an analytics of the trace: while bourgeois drawing rooms of the 1880s overflowed with traces, Bauhaus sought to produce “rooms in which it is hard to leave traces.” We could scarcely be further from critical theory:

It is not uncommon for a dream to make up for the sadness and discouragement of the day—a dream that shows us in its realized form the simple but magnificent existence for which the energy is lacking in reality. The existence of Mickey Mouse is such a dream for contemporary man [...]—a way of life in which a car is no heavier than a straw hat.¹⁹

Hollywood’s response to the fatigue of the arrangement of means was a fairytale, poetic figure. A dream and poetry for the age of poverty—but a dream and poetry nonetheless. A dream and poetry for an age of distress, since Benjamin is lucid enough to announce the extent to which the world was on a war footing. A dream and poetry for an age where some took it upon themselves to explore radically new possibilities: “’In its buildings, pictures, and stories, mankind is preparing to outlive culture, if need be.”²⁰

The second response lies in the background of the text. Its uncanny proximity with Heidegger may be found striking. But it is not wrong, so true is it that Adorno draws on the experience of the concentration camp and the slaughter of European Jews. Touching on the inventory of the Reconstruction, let us bring in Hans Haacke, the accuracy of whose testimony is noted by Benjamin Buchloh, far from showy displays of mourning and meditations on the death of figures of the stature of Anselm Kiefer.²¹ Let us focus for a moment on Isa Genzken, writing on 1973 Berlin: Buchloh underscores that rather than producing a melancholy archive of the post-war cityscape, she turned her gaze on its specific fragmentation.²² While elegy makes room for reconciliation, something like critical objectivity objects itself in both works. And the facts prove this attitude true!

Particularly this, recalled by Hanns Zischler in ” bottomless ground:”

The members of the generation that was the first to hold decision-making positions after the war [...] needed to bury their own past. [...] Their guilty consciences should rather have turned against themselves. They chose instead to seek refuge in a fanatical hatred of history. [...] The urban planners of the second post-war generation [...] were people whose youth was destroyed by Nazism. This was the generation of technocrats with the narrowest of minds. It was and still is that generation who, without the least emotion or scruple, did more to destroy the urban centres of our country than the Second World War.”²³

Nothing is more disheartening! What has made inhabiting impossible is the “heavy shadow of impermanency,” with the displaced population under Hitler its true measure. Minima Moralia is even more precise: “The house is past.”

In the no-man’s-land between utopia and reality

To Adorno’s pitiless eye, Nazism is not solely to be held 8 responsible for this: “The bombings of European cities, as well as the labour and concentration camps, merely proceed as executors, with what the immanent development of technology had long decided was to be the fate of houses.” Increasing reliance on technology is, he claims, what makes our actions precise yet approximate, by stripping them of “all hesitation, deliberation, civility,” and forcing them to bend to “the implacable, as it were ahistorical demands of objects.” Such is the reification of modern life. “Thus the ability is lost, for example, to close a door quietly and discreetly, yet firmly. Those of cars and refrigerators have to be slammed.” Paying modern man his due means taking the measure of the abruptness demanded by objects. Machines shape our very bodily habits, inscribing them with the “violent, hard-hitting, unresting jerkiness of Fascist maltreatment.” This marks the return of “bad” functionalism as “Do not knock!”²⁴ turns this submission to the utilitarian imperative into the reason for the gradual erosion of that very superfluity that is a source of joie de vivre. The world suppresses the childhood experience of delighting at long rows of adjoining rooms in castles. It seeks to overlook the outmoded. In this respect, functionalism plays a role in the damage to life that gave the 1951 work its title. Not that it is a dead end per se; rather a thoroughgoing reorganisation is required for it to reconnect with the powers of dreaming and to withstand contradiction.

Overlooking this charge of utopia means settling into the mediocrity of a setting perfectly embodied in the TV series Derrick: “The frozen construction of a world [...] in which slowness reveals its true power: blockage.”²⁵ Such mediocrity is a renunciation of the dream. The series, built around financially motivated murders, portrays the visual realm of functionalism as pure culture industry: the commodification of everything. Worse yet, it is showcased as a nightmarish phenomenology: the living environment is condensed into being as such, such as it is. What is missing from the grey modernism of the settings is “the capacity for interpolation in the infinitely small.” In this respect, Le Corbusier is the architect of imagination, striving to “innervate this plus.” He is able to make the most of the history stored in his material and responds to the unexpressed questions their very silence asks him. Far from being a case of realism, his architecture “contradicts the hic et nunc at will.” Function here is not a response to physiological stimulus. It is a need for art in the Hegelian sense: projection, anticipation. It is human potential, and satisfaction of elemental needs. The whole difficulty of functionalism lies in this balance, as uncanny as it is essential: as an autonomous art, architecture must put forward something that lies beyond need; as an applied art, it must fulfil a need. Ignoring human nature is a risk; being limited by it likewise.

The impossible site where the task of the architect and designer is sited is clearly delineated: it lies in the tense no-man’s-land between utopia and reality. The former strives to bring men and things back into harmony, the latter dresses the profit motive up as need.²⁶ The former forecloses on commodity fetishism. The latter holds exchange value above all else—use, cult, or exhibition value. The contradiction cannot be resolved. Hence the conclusion to the lecture: the philosopher’s duty is to give an account of the crisis in concepts. The duty of art, architecture, and design is to create a form of beauty that signals the crisis, whose sole measure henceforth is “the depth to which a work resolves contradictions. A work must cut through the contradictions and overcome them, not by covering them up, but by pursuing them.”²⁷

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