Doble Contexts for Reading Manfredo Tafuri’s Criticism of Ideology

Abstract

Autonomia movement that emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerist (operaismo) communism gives historical and discursive context to Manfredo Tafuri`s famous criticism of ideology. His thesis on the death of architecture was a radical criticism of Keynesian intervention which was a strategy to cope with the Great Depression. For him, this capitalist development had taken away ideological prefiguration from architecture. At least Tafuri`s this early intellectual phase was formed in the wake of magazine Contrapiano and Antonio Negri`s influence. Tafuri almost entirely adapted Negri`s thought on the importance of capitalist innovation that was uncovered by Keynes, Schumpeter, and Manheim and the periodization in modern history. When we read Tafuri`s text with this concrete context, we can avoid being plunged into his abstruseness. On the other hand, 1980`s Korea cannot understand Tafuri comprehensibly. 1980`s situation to struggle to acquire democracy prescribed only one mode of reception of Tafuri`s historiography in Korea. Tafuri`s so-called pessimist view point could not satisfy student activists. They want to take intellectual means to sustain student movement and to secure political dynamics of protest. But at the same time they have anxiety to understand tafuri`s thesis that they consider ad a critical theory for Korean Architecture. Double contexts of Tafuri`s criticism of ideology bring to light to historicize both Tafuri`s historiography itself and reception of his text in Korea.