social reality. Something would be purposeful here and now only if it were so in terms of
the present society. Yet, certain irrationalities—Marx’s term for them was faux frais—are
essential to society; the social process always proceeds, in spite of all particular planning,
by its own inner nature, aimlessly and irrationally. Such irrationality leaves its mark on
all ends and purposes, and thereby also on the rationality of the means devised to achieve
those ends. Thus, a self-mocking contradiction emerges in the omnipresence of
advertisements: they are intended to be purposeful for profit. And yet all purposefulness
is technically defined by its measure of material appropriateness. If an advertisement
were strictly functional, without ornamental surplus, it would no longer fulfil its purpose
as advertisement. Of course, the fear of technology is largely stuffy and old-fashioned,
even reactionary. And yet it does have its validity, for it reflects the anxiety felt in the
face of the violence which an irrational society can impose on its members, indeed on
everything which is forced to exist within its confines. This anxiety reflects a common
childhood experience, with which Loos seems unfamiliar, even though he is otherwise
strongly influenced by the circumstances of his youth: the longing for castles with long
chambers and silk tapestries, the utopia of escapism. Something of this utopia lives on in
the modern aversion to the escalator, to Loos’s celebrated kitchen, to the factory
smokestack, to the shabby side of an antagonistic society. It is heightened by outward
appearances. Deconstruction of these appearances, however, has little power over the
completely denigrated sphere, where praxis continues as always. One might attack the
pinnacles of the bogus castles of the moderns (which Thorstein Veblen despised), the
ornaments, for example, pasted onto shoes; but where this is possible, it merely
aggravates an already horrifying situation. The process has implications for the world of
pictures as well. Positivist art, a culture of the existing, has been exchanged for aesthetic
truth. One envisions the prospect of a new Ackerstrasse.^7
The limits of functionalism to date have been the limits of the bourgeoisie in its
practical sense. Even in Loos, the sworn enemy of Viennese kitsch, one finds some
remarkably bourgeois traces. Since the bourgeois structure had already permeated so
many feudalistic and absolutist forms in his city, Loos believed he could use its rigorous
principles to free himself from traditional formulas. His writings, for example, contain
attacks on awkward Viennese formality. Furthermore, his polemics are coloured by a
unique strain of puritanism, which nears obsession. Loos’s thought, like so much
bourgeois criticism of culture, is an intersection of two fundamental directions. On the
one hand, he realized that this culture was actually not at all cultural. This informed
above all his relationship to his native environment. On the other, he felt a deep
animosity toward culture in general, which called for the prohibition not only of
superficial veneer, but also of all soft and smooth touches. In this he disregarded the fact
that culture is not the place for untamed nature, nor for a merciless domination over
nature. The future of Sachlichkeit could be a liberating one only if it shed its barbarous
traits. It could no longer inflict on men—whom it supposedly upheld as its only
measure—the sadistic blows of sharp edges, bare calculated rooms, stairways, and the
like. Virtually every consumer had probably felt all too painfully the impracticability of
the mercilessly practical. Hence our bitter suspicion is formulated: the absolute rejection
of style becomes style. Loos traces ornament back to erotic symbols. In turn, his rigid
rejection of ornamentation is coupled with his disgust with erotic symbolism. He finds
uncurbed nature both regressive and embarrassing. The tone of his condemnations of
Rethinking Architecture 8