Excerpts from Theodor Adorno’s “Functionalism Today,” 1965
In a lecture delivered to a group of architecture practitioners on the topic of postwar German reconstruction architecture, Theodor Adorno uses the opportunity to consider the significance of its formal antecedent: Functionalist architecture. For him, Functionalism, in all its radicalism, necessarily failed to transcend its own limitations as a function of a stagnating society. Contending with the tensions between usefulness and uselessness, purpose and autonomy, and handicraft and imagination, Adorno posits the commonality of such self-contradicting artistic categories across autonomous art production within a particular epoch. For Adorno, such embittering self-contradictions are endemic to artistic production constrained by social conditions and must be grasped as such in order to be pushed beyond themselves.
In revisiting the tasks Adorno set out here in 1965, and indeed elsewhere throughout his career, it is worth reflecting on the relationship of the present to the already weary past in which these words were initially delivered. Many years have gone by since his warnings were not heeded. Yet, beyond the heap of the 20th century, one might consider if and how these tasks still hold currency on our present, if we ever hope to move beyond it. The lecture has been excerpted here for the sake of brevity.
— Grant Tyler
It lies in the nature of artworks to inquire after the essential and necessary in them and to react against all superfluous elements. 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, regardless of whether or not it was motivated by some external purpose. This was by no means a new position. Mozart, though clearly still standard-bearer and critical representative of the great tradition, responded in the following way to the minor objection of a member of the royal family — “But so many notes, my dear Mozart” — after the premier of his “Abduction” with “Not one note more, Your Majesty, than was necessary.”
In his Critique of Judgment, Kant grounded this norm philosophically in the formula of “purposiveness without a purpose” [Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck]. The formula reflects an essential impulse in the judgment of taste. And yet it does not account for the historical dynamic. Based on a language stemming from the realm of materials, what this language defines as necessary can later become superfluous, even terribly ornamental, as soon as it can no longer be legitimated in a second kind of language, which is commonly called style. What was functional yesterday can therefore become the opposite tomorrow. [Adolf] Loos was thoroughly aware of this historical dynamic contained in the concept of ornament. Even representative, luxurious, pompous and, in a certain sense, burlesque elements may appear in certain forms of art as necessary, and not at all burlesque. To criticize the Baroque for this reason would be philistine. Criticism of ornament means no more than criticism of that which has lost its functional and symbolic signification. Ornament becomes then a mere decaying and poisonous organic vestige.
In Loos’s thought and in the early period of functionalism, purposeful and aesthetically autonomous products were separated from one another by absolute fact. This separation, which is in fact the object of our reflection, arose from the contemporary polemic against the applied arts and crafts (Kunstgewerbe).[1] Art, with its definitive protest against the dominance of purpose over human life, suffers once it is reduced to that practical level to which it objects, in Hölderlin’s words: “For never from now on/Shall the sacred serve mere use.” Loos found the artificial art of practical objects repulsive. Similarly, he felt that the practical reorientation of purpose-free art would eventually subordinate it to the destructive autocracy of profit, which even arts and crafts, at least in their beginnings, had once opposed. Contrary to these efforts, Loos preached for the return to an honest handicraft [2] which would place itself in the service of technical innovations without having to borrow forms from art. His claims suffer from too simple an antithesis. Their restorative element, not unlike that of the individualization of crafts, has since become equally clear. To this day, they are still bound to discussions of objectivity.
Adolf Loos, Family residence of JUDr. Josef Winternitz, located in Prague, 1928-1931. TheCharnelHouse
Use — or consumption — is much more closely related to the pleasure principle than an object of artistic representation responsible only to its own formal laws: it means the “using up of,” the denial of the object, that it ought not to be. Pleasure appears, according to the bourgeois work ethic, as wasted energy. Loos’ formulation makes clear how much as an early cultural critic he was fundamentally attached to that order whose manifestations he chastised wherever they failed to follow their own principles: “Ornament is wasted work energy and thereby wasted health. It has always been so. But today it also means wasted material, and both mean wasted capital.” [3] Two irreconcilable motifs coincide in this statement: economy, for where else, if not in the norms of profitability, is it stated that nothing should be wasted: and the dream of the totally technological world, free from the shame of work. The second motif points beyond the commercial world. For Loos it takes the form of the realization that the widely lamented impotency to create ornament and the so-called extinction of stylizing energy (which he exposed as an invention of art historians) imply an advance in the arts.
The poles of the contradiction are revealed in two concepts, which seem mutually exclusive: handicraft and imagination. The syllable “hand” exposes a past means of production: it recalls a simple economy of wares. These means of production have since disappeared. Ever since the proposals of the English precursors of “modern style”, they have been reduced to a masquerade. In the area of music, I know of one advocate of handicraft who spoke with plainly romantic anti-romanticism of the “hut mentality.” I once caught him thinking of handicrafts as stereotypical formulas, practices as he called them, which were supposed to spare the energies of the composer: it never dawned on him that nowadays the uniqueness of each concrete task excludes such formalization. Thanks to attitudes such as his, handicraft is transformed into that which it wants to repudiate: the same lifeless, reified repetition which ornament had propagated. Good handicraft means the fittingness of means to an end. The ends are certainly not independent of the means. The means have their own logic, a logic which points beyond them. If the fittingness of the means becomes an end in itself, it becomes fetishized. The handworker mentality begins to produce the opposite effect from its original intention, when it was used to fight the silk smoking jacket and the beret. It hinders the objective reason behind productive forces instead of allowing it to unfold. Whenever handicraft is established as a norm today, one must closely examine the intention. The concept of handicraft stands in close relationship to function. Its functions, however, are by no means necessarily enlightened or advanced.
The concept of imagination, like that of handicraft, must not be adopted without critical analysis. Psychological triviality — imagination as nothing but the image of something not yet present — is clearly insufficient. As an interpretation, it explains merely what is determined by imagination in artistic processes, and, I presume, also in the purposeful arts. Walter Benjamin once defined imagination as the ability to interpolate in minutest detail. Undeniably, such a definition accomplishes much more than current views which tend either to elevate the concept into an immaterial heaven or to condemn it on objective grounds. Imagination in the production of a work of representational art is not pleasure in free invention, in creation ex nihilo. There is no such thing in any art, even in autonomous art, the realm to which Loos restricted imagination. Any penetrating analysis of the autonomous work of art concludes that the additions invented by the artist above and beyond the given state of materials and forms are miniscule and of limited value. On the other hand, the reduction of imagination to an anticipatory adaptation to material ends is equally inadequate; it transforms imagination into an eternal sameness. Clearly there exists, perhaps imperceptible in the materials and forms which the artist acquires and develops, something more than material and forms. Imagination means to innervate this something. This is not as absurd a notion as it may sound. For the forms, even the materials, are by no means merely given by nature, as an unreflective artist might easily presume. History has accumulated in them, and spirit permeates them. What they contain is not a positive law; and yet, their content emerges as a sharply outlined figure of the problem. Artistic imagination awakens these accumulated elements by becoming aware of the innate problematic of the material. The minimal progress of imagination responds to the wordless question posed to it by the materials and forms in their quiet and elemental language. Separate impulses, even purpose and immanent formal laws, are thereby fused together. An interaction takes place between purpose, space, and material. None of these facets makes up any one Ur-phenomenon to which all the others can be reduced. It is here that the insight furnished by philosophy that no thought can lead to an absolute beginning — that such absolutes are the products of abstraction — exerts its influence on aesthetics. One speaks, with good reason, of a sense of space [Raumgefühl] in architecture. But this sense of space is not a pure, abstract essence, not a sense of spatiality itself, since space is only conceivable as concrete space, within specific dimensions. A sense of space is closely connected with purposes. Even when architecture attempts to elevate this sense beyond the realm of purposefulness, it is still simultaneously immanent in the purpose. The success of such a synthesis is the principal criterion for great architecture. Architecture inquires: how can a certain purpose become space; through which forms, which materials? All factors relate reciprocally to one another. Architectonic imagination is, according to this conception of it, the ability to articulate space purposefully. It permits purposes to become space. It constructs forms according to purposes. Conversely, space and the sense of space can become more than impoverished purpose only when imagination impregnates them with purposefulness. Imagination breaks out of the immanent connections of purpose, to which it owes its very existence.
Wassily Kandinsky, Taut at an Angle, 1930. BauhausKooperation
The subject’s function, however, is not determined by some generalized person of an unchanging physical nature but by concrete social norms. Functional architecture represents the rational character as opposed to the suppressed instincts of empirical subjects, who, in the present society, still seek their fortunes in all conceivable nooks and crannies. It calls upon a human potential which is grasped in principle by our advanced consciousness, but which is suffocated in most men, who have been kept spiritually impotent. Architecture worthy of human beings thinks better of men than they actually are. It views them in the way they could be according to the status of their own productive energies as embodied in technology. Architecture contradicts the needs of the here and now as soon as it proceeds to serve those needs — without simultaneously representing any absolute or lasting ideology. Architecture still remains, as Loos’ book title complained seventy years ago, a cry into emptiness. The fact that the great architects from Loos to Le Corbusier and [Hans] Scharoun were able to realize only a small portion of their work in stone and concrete cannot be explained solely by the reactions of unreasonable contractors and administrators (although that explanation must not be underestimated). This fact is conditioned by a social antagonism over which the greatest architecture has no power: the same society which developed human productive energies to unimaginable proportions has chained them to conditions of production imposed upon them: thus the people who in reality constitute the productive energies become deformed according to the measure of their working conditions. This fundamental contradiction is most clearly visible in architecture. It is just as difficult for architecture to rid itself of the tensions which this contradiction produces as it is for the consumer. Things are not universally correct in architecture and universally incorrect in men. Men suffer enough injustice, for their consciousness and unconsciousness are trapped in a state of minority; they have not, so to speak, come of age. This nonage hinders their identification with their own concerns. Because architecture is in fact both autonomous and purpose-oriented, it cannot simply negate men as they are. And yet it must do precisely that if it is to remain autonomous. If it would bypass mankind tel quel, then it would be accommodating itself to what would be a questionable anthropology and even ontology. It was not merely by chance that Le Corbusier envisioned human prototypes. Living men, even the most backward and conventionally naive, have the right to the fulfillment of their needs, even though those needs may be false ones. Once thought supersedes without consideration the subjective desires for the sake of truly objective needs, it is transformed into brutal oppression. So it is with the volonté generale against the volonté de tous. Even in the false needs of a human being there lives a bit of freedom. It is expressed in what economic theory once called the “use value” as opposed to the “exchange value.” Hence there are those to whom legitimate architecture appears as an enemy; it withholds from them that which they, by their very nature, want and even need.
Adolf Loos, The Villa Müller in Prague, 1929-1930. adolfloos.cz
Beyond the phenomenon of the “cultural lag,” this antinomy may have its origin in the development of the concept of art. Art, in order to be art according to its own formal laws, must be crystallized in autonomous form. This constitutes its truth content; otherwise, it would be subservient to that which it negates by its very existence. And yet, as a human product, it is never completely removed from humanity. It contains as a constitutive element something of that which it necessarily resists. Where art obliterates its own memory, forgetting that it is only there for others, it becomes a fetish, a self-conscious and thereby relativized absolute. Such was the dream of Jugendstil beauty. But art is also compelled to strive for pure self-immanence if it is not to become sacrificed to fraudulence. The result is a quid pro quo. An activity which envisions as its subject a liberated, emancipated humanity, possible only in a transformed society, appears in the present state as an adaptation to a technology which has degenerated into an end in itself, into a self-purpose. Such an apotheosis of objectification is the irreconcilable opponent of art. The result, moreover, is not mere appearance. The more consistently both autonomous and so-called applied art reject their own magical and mythical origins and follow their own formal laws, the greater the danger of such an adaptation becomes. Art possesses no sure means to counter such a danger. [In] the present epoch men have been absorbed into technology and have left only their empty shells behind, as if they had passed into it their better half. Their own consciousness has been objectified in the face of technology, as if objective technology had in some sense the right to criticize consciousness. Technology is there for men: this is a plausible proposition, but it has been degraded to the vulgar ideology of regressionism. This is evident in the fact that one need only invoke it to be rewarded from all sides with enthusiastic understanding. The whole situation is somehow false; nothing in it can smooth over the contradiction. On the one hand, an imagined utopia, free from the binding purposes of the existing order, would become powerless, a detached ornament, since it must take its elements and structure from that very order. On the other, any attempt to ban the utopian factor, like a prohibition of images, immediately falls victim to the spell of the prevailing order.
Drawing for Berlin’s New National Gallery by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, c. 1962-1968. MoMA.
The concern of functionalism is a subordination to usefulness. What is not useful is assailed without question because developments in the arts have brought its inherent aesthetic insufficiency into the open. The merely useful, however, is interwoven with relationships of guilt, the means to the devastation of the world, a hopelessness which denies all but deceptive consolations to mankind. But even if this contradiction can never be ultimately eliminated, one must take a first step in trying to grasp it; in bourgeois society, usefulness has its own dialectic. The useful object would be the highest achievement, an anthropomorphized “thing,” the reconciliation with objects which are no longer closed off from humanity and which no longer suffer humiliation at the hands of men. Childhood perception of technical things promises such a state; they appear as images of a near and helpful spirit, cleansed of profit motivation. Such a conception was not unfamiliar to the theorists of social utopias. It provides a pleasant refuge from true development, and allows a vision of useful things which have lost their coldness. Mankind would no longer suffer from the “thingly” character of the world, [4] and likewise “things” would come into their own. Once redeemed from their own “thingliness,” “things” would find their purpose. But in present society all usefulness is displaced, bewitched. Society deceives us when it says that it allows things to appear as if they are there by mankind’s will. In fact, they are produced for profits sake; they satisfy human needs only incidentally. The raison d’être of all autonomous art since the dawning of the bourgeois era is that only useless objects testify to that which may have at one point been useful: it represents correct and fortunate use, a contact with things beyond the antithesis between use and uselessness. This conception implies that men who desire betterment must rise up against practicability. If they overvalue it and react to it, they join the camp of the enemy. It is said that work does not defile. Like most proverbial expressions, this covers up the converse truth: exchange defiles useful work. The curse of exchange has overtaken autonomous art as well. In autonomous art, the useless is contained within its limited and particular form: it is thus helplessly exposed to the criticism waged by its opposite, the useful. Conversely in the useful, that which is now the case is closed off to its possibilities. The obscure secret of art is the fetishistic character of goods and wares. Functionalism would like to break out of this entanglement: and yet, it can only rattle its chains in vain as long as it remains trapped in an entangled society.
Aesthetics would condemn itself if it continued unreflectively, speculatively, without relentless self-criticism. Aesthetics as an integral facet of philosophy awaits a new impulse which must come from reflective efforts. Hence recent artistic praxis has tinned to aesthetics. Aesthetics becomes a practical necessity once it becomes clear that concepts like usefulness and uselessness in art, like the separation of autonomous and purpose-oriented art, imagination and ornament, must once again be discussed before the artist can act positively or negatively according to such categories. The artist who does not pursue aesthetic thought energetically tends to lapse into dilettantish hypothesis and groping justifications for the sake of defending his own intellectual construct. Beauty today can have no other measure except 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. Mere formal beauty, whatever that might be, is empty and meaningless; the beauty of its content is lost in the pre-artistic sensual pleasure of the observer. Beauty is either the resultant of force vectors or it is nothing at all. A modified aesthetics would outline its own object with increasing clarity as it would begin to feel more intensely the need to investigate it. Unlike traditional aesthetics, it would not necessarily view the concept of art as its given correlate. Aesthetic thought today must surpass art by thinking art. It would thereby surpass the current opposition of purposeful and purpose-free, under which the producer must suffer as much as the observer. //
Photograph of the saleroom of the Continental Havana Company in Berlin, designed by Henry van de Velde in 1899, and published in Innen-Dekoration, October 1899. Courtesy Richard Hollis, Apollo Magazine.
[1] Kunstgewerbe carries perhaps more seriousness than “arts and crafts.” It covers the range of the applied arts.
[2] The word Handwerk in German means both “handwork” and “craftsmanship” or “skill.” Because Adorno later emphasizes the “hand” aspect, we have decided on “handicraft.”
[3] Adolf Loos, Sämtliche Schriften, I, edited by Franz Gluck (Vienna/Munich: Herold, 1962), 282.
[4] The word Ding (“thing”) is also attached to numerous traditions in German thought and therefore has a certain philosophical or poetical importance (hence “the thingliness of things”). Heidegger and Rilke, for example, both tried to elevate the notion of Ding to a new essential and existential status.