_O-POSITIONS :The Oppositions of Autonomy and History K. Michael Hays ‘Naturally our respective concerns as individuals for for- mal, socio-cultural and political discourse will make them- selves felt in our joint editing of Oppositions.”: Thus did the three founding editors stake out three primary the- ‘matic domains that, through their own writings and those of other contributors, would be presented and debated throughout the history of Oppositions—that extraordinary apparatus for the production of architecture theory. ‘Therein Peter Eisenman's research into immanent formal, operations and notations, Kenneth Frampton's eritique of the modern and contemporary culture industries, and Mario Gandelsonas’s ideological/semiotic analysis of con- temporary practices—to which would later be added (beginning with volume 6) Anthony Vidler’s institutional and typological studies and (beginning with volume 12) Kurt Forster's materialist historiography—swirled around the vortex of architecture's “meaning.” But because of the editors’ personal associations and the unfolding of Opposition’ international network, the pages of the jour- nal would also become saturated with, conflieted with, and haunted by the presences of Colin Rowe and Manfredo ‘Tafuri—the rock and the hard place, the light and the dark, between which Oppositions's discourse, at least implicitly, ‘was often eondueted. 1 will not here historicize this most important little maga- zine (though that is surely the most important work to be done and, perhaps, to be prompted by the issue of this reader), but rather consider just one—I believe the domi- nant one—of the themes that gathers up much of the work of the editors and what they published. For the essential contradiction between architecture's autonomy—its self- ‘organization into a body of formal elements and operations, that separate it from any particular place and time—and s eontingeney on, even determination by, historical forces beyond its control subsumes all the “formal, socio-cultural and political” concerns into an all-embracing dialectic. The conflets of formalism and determinism of the Oppositions decade, indeed, seem almost symptomatic of a deeper, social pathology one would want to query more closely. One should ask not whether architecture is autonomous, or \hether it ean willfully be made so, but rather how it ean be that the question arises in the first place, what kind of ix ituation allows for architecture to worry about itself to this degree. In “Design versus Non-Design,” Diana Agrest gives a pre ise description of the conditions of autonomy that most architecture theorists of the period would have endorsed: Design, considered as both a practice and a produc, is in effect a closed system—not only in relation to culture as a whole, but also in relation to other cultural systems such as literature, film, painting, philosophy, physies, geome- try, ete. Properly defined, it is reductive, condensing and crystallizing general cultural notions within its own dis- tinet parameters, Within the limits of this system, however, design constitutes a set of practices—architecture, urban design, and industrial design—unified with respect to cer tain normative theories. That is, it possesses specific char- acteristics that distinguish it from all other cultural prac- tices and that establish a boundary between what is design. and what is not. (p. 383 of this collection) [As Agrest goes on to argue, the very concept of autonomy requires us to step outside our own design culture and grasp its relationship to other cultural codes as well as its, difference from them by means of some vaster historical and cultural mode of analysis. But as one pulls back to view the social life out of which autonomization emerges—in, particular, after the assimilation and banalization of even, the most radical of modern formal conventions into post- war commercial building, and the penetration of architec- ture’s “closed system” by degraded information and images—then what she ealls the “specificity” of the eonsti- tutive differences of architecture becomes harder to detect. For what is increasingly the ease after the 1950s, as, media culture develops into an all-encompassing system, is, the very lack of distinction among media practices, includ- ing the design of form and space. ‘What is more, though the problematie of autonomy is prop- erly part of the ideology of modernism, by the 1960s the collateral modernist doctrine of functionalism—the inter-x section of brute facts of utility with objective design pro- cedures and standardized means of produetion—had given rise to the renewed, largely British and North American positivist inquiries of the behavioral sciences, operations research, systematic design methodologies, and objective technologies, all of which sought to quantify architecture's characteristies and trade its specificity for a generalized scientism, Among the equipment available for mobilization against this positivism stood Colin Rowe's emergent Gestalt formalism (enunciated as early as his 1947 “Mathematies of the Ideal Villa” and available to Oppositions readers since his “Neoclassicism and Modern Architecture” in the first issue). Rowe was perhaps the dominant influence on the early Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies (founded in 1967) up until its contact with, and importation and transformation of, European phenomenological and structuralist criticisms through Gandelsonas and Vidler, as well as Agrest and, just later, Aldo Rossi and Manfredo Tafuri. With these last, the European discourses of Marxism and structuralism began tomingle with Anglo-American formalism, and the context for the pas de deus of autonomization and historiezation was set. ‘Three Oppositions editorials broached the theme more or less directly. Gandelsonas’s “Neo-Functionalism” (volume 5; pp. T-8 of this collection) categorized dialectically, for the first time, the position epitomized by the work of Robert ‘Yenturi—‘neo-realism”—and that represented by Aldo Rossi, Peter Eisenman, and John Hejduk—‘neo-rational- n"—and posited, as a possible third term, “neo-funetion- alism,” a redefinition of modernist functionalism’s under- developed concern with the problem of meaning, which Gandelsonas understood in the structuralist sense of dif- ferentiation and signification within a closed system. Vidler's apologia for Rossi and the Tendenza, “The Third ‘Typology” (volume 7; pp. 13-16), identified the “ontology of the city”—a corollary of the autonomy thesis that empha- sized the iterability and portability of generative types— as a possible basis for the restoration of a critical role to architecture. While Eisenman’s “Post-Funetionalism” (vol- ume 6; pp. 9-12) gathered up his preoccupations with structural linguisties, conceptual art, and avant-garde autotelie procedures, and outlined a position that would recognize architecture's epistemological status as a kind of entitlement granted by modernist thought. Eisenman’s editorial is paradigmatic of the diffieult opposi- tion of autonomy and history viewed within the limitations of modernism. Eisenman saw modernist forms not as sim- ple derivatives of functional needs, but as delineations of the immanent, self-referential properties of architecture itself, as searches for objective knowledge that lies outside both the architectural agent's intentions and the building's uses, and inside the very materials and formal operations of architecture. Such research discovered the new in the given “language” through an artieulation and redistribu- tion of its elements; it fused the practice of architecture with the eritique of architecture and replaced the fune- tional object with a theoretical one, Moreover, Eisenman historieized such concerns as part of a new episteme, a posthumanist paradigm heralded by Kasimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, James Joyce and Guillaume Apollinaire, Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling, evidenced in the sheer accumulated weight of relativity and uncertainty principles in modern science and philosophy, and theorized in the antihumanism of Michel Foucault and Claude Lévi-Strauss. And so Eisenman’s effort to push architecture into this new era is driven by a felt historical imperative: to represent. the inner logic of the object in the object itself is necessary not because of some subjective decision to exclude other con- siderations but because of a historical evolution erucial, if not unique, to the discipline of architecture, which delegit- imizes older meanings, demands that the cultural eontent of an older functionalism migrate into an autonomous ar- chitecture, and concludes that the true revolutionary artist of our time is not Karel Teige or Hannes Meyer (see George Baird's introduction to the Teige/Le Corbusier dis- pute, pp. 585-588) but the seemingly apolitical logothete of, an “atemporal, decompositional mode” (p. 12). One need look no further than the same Oppositions vol: ‘ume 6 for an apparent counter-argument. In his “Robert,