International Yearbook of Aesthetics, Vol.

9
(Helsinki: International Association for Aesthetics, 2005), pp. 58–82.

Style and Anti-Style: A Modern Adventure

by Thorsten Botz-Bornstein

1. Style in Modernity
In spite of numerous academic works that have dealt with the subject this century, “style”
represents a term that remains relatively unclear. In modernity, style becomes a point of
issue just because it has been declared not to be a point of issue. Especially for modern
art linked to the notion of avant-garde, style does not exist as long we understand style as
“one style or another.” Avant-garde art claims to produce not style but anti-style. This
“anti-style” is not just any arbitrary aesthetic form but, just because it has overcome the
arbitrariness of already existing stylistic alphabets, it is supposed to be grounded on
something absolute.
Avant-garde art creates its own notion of a free and independent, absolute anti-style.
The impact of this can be clearly seen in modern architecture. Modern architecture
derives from the avant-garde’s anti-stylistic claim for the absolute, a new ideology of
architectural forms grounded on well-defined, essential, human needs. Form is supposed
to not be stylistic, but ethical. The central notion within which theoreticians now try to
concentrate a package of moral ideas becomes a term which seems to be, by its nature,
opposed to stylistic approaches: technique. The architecture critic Siegfried Giedion
speaks of the necessity to replace style with technique announcing that “it will now be
necessary for us to give more attention to construction and town planning than would be
the case if we were writing a history of styles” (Giedion 1947: 24).
 Style and Anti-Style

Giedion’s anti-stylistic approach leads him to a formal ban on the word style in the
vocabulary of the architect. “Style” in the conventional sense can still be used in
modernity, but it will be restricted to the context of historical analysis. It is declared
inappropriate for the examination – let alone the creation – of a present, living
environment. Technique (or, for Le Corbusier, “method”) is declared to be more human
than style.
However, in some sense, the meaning of “style” as a word covering a semantic field
much larger than the one to which it is reduced when being limited to historically
recognized forms has not been abandoned. For Giedion, it is much more rewarding to
follow moral principles and not just style. He sees style as just “any” style, which exists
without any proof of an inner (moral and human) necessity. This statement also shows
that Giedion, though he is referring exclusively to technique and moral principles, is still
in search of a form in a sense not totally removed from certain definitions of style. Style
can be refused, but the new anti-style can later be seen as a new style, which is the style
of modern architecture. There is nothing unusual about this: certain forms which used not
to be style can easily and at almost any time become style. This is normal, but on the
other hand, this observation does not fully explain the significance of the term style. To
divide the phenomenon of style into two halves, the historically settled one and the living,
creative one, and then to explain all the philosophical problems that might arise in regard
to style by attributing a certain style either to the one half or the other might be satisfying
in terms of logic and analysis. But it does not get to the bottom of style as an experiential
phenomenon and the importance it has for human beings. We know that artists never
“want” to create an historical style, but that, in the end, they sometimes happen to do so.
It is not even surprising that, in the case of modern artists or architects, this process
follows similar lines though here it is accelerated. In architecture, Le Corbusier and F.
Lloyd Wright could still testify within their own lifetimes that the anti-style that they
created had become a style. They could recognize the historicity of their own anti-
historicism. Styleless functionalism, quite soon after its creation, was seen as a new style

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coming close even to classicism. The same goes for such an extremely anti-historicist
(and thus anti-stylistic) but, paradoxically, still “stylizing” (according to Walter
Benjamin) modern movement like Art Nouveau which wanted, as Benjamin said, to
“create a style out of nothing” (Benjamin Werke V, 2: 681).
Throughout modernity, style has mainly been explained on the basis of a dialectics
between creativity and official acceptance. However, the question arises if there is not
hidden within the notion of style a certain surplus. Nietzsche made the fundamental
distinction between a dead style and a living one, the first one being a historical sign and
the second one a style which communicates living contents (“Stil der mitteilt und Stil der
nur Zeichen ist”) (Nietzsche 1923: 38). Within this scheme, the communication of life is
opposed to the dead communication of historical signs. Nietzsche believed that style can
be linked to life: he believed that its communication does not need to pass, in the form of
historical style, through history.
In modernity (especially in experimental art of the avant-garde and in functionalist
architecture), form was supposed to be determined by technique. Style was seen as a folly
contradicting these technical principles, a view that was held for a long time, exceeding
the limits of “purist” modernism. Then there was the second, critical generation (or a
parallel group reacting to different cultural concepts) of modern artists and architects who
tried to introduce “life” into their creations. They also believed that this could be done
most efficiently by means of a rejection of style. The more moderate fighters for a
modern architectural style such as Alvar Aalto (1898-1976), insist that style, in the
conventional sense of aesthetic expression, does not exist at all. However, these
modernists also quickly explain that style should be replaced, this time not with technique
but with a rather mysterious, pantheistic kind of empathy. Aalto declares that he designs
his architecture according to the conviction that “the profoundest architecture is a variety
of growth reminiscent of natural life. I should like to say that in the end this is the only
real style in architecture” (quoted from Porphyrios 1982: 60).
 Style and Anti-Style

I would hold that up to the time of “late modernism,” the “stylistic situation” as it has
been outlined here has not developed beyond the described constellation of the following
elements: style – history – life. The God Style has been killed, but does man really regret
it? The modern nostalgia for the Great Narrative has been abolished and together with it
went the nostalgia for the “Great Style.” “Great Style” includes here also the great
modern anti-style that has pretensions for the “human” and the “moral.” The problem is
that this idea of Great Style that speaks to us, vaguely, from modernity, does not cover
the whole range of significations that style can have. In other words, the concept of style
is grounded, unreflectedly, on purely modern assumptions.

2. Rational Style
A paradox about modernity is that, by violently rejecting the notion of style, it still can
produce strong styles. Frederic Jameson once noted that “great modern writers have all
been defined by the invention or production of rather unique styles. (...) However
different from each other, all of them are comparable in this: each is quite unmistakable
[and] once one is learned, it is not likely [that one style will be] confused with something
else” (Jameson 1988: 15). The strength of their style is produced through a historical
process transforming actual artistic expressions into historical style. All other attempts at
explaining style are tautological, saying that the stylistic power that can be perceived
today in the works of Faulkner and Joyce resides in nothing other than in the styles
themselves. There are indeed reasons to bring forward such an explanation because,
obviously, even if it is history that creates “official” styles, still not every aesthetic
expression from the past is considered as style today. A certain “stylistic potential” must
have been present even in those artistic productions which, in a modern avant-garde like
manner, eagerly negated any “will to style.” In a tautological way, style can be explained
as style only “because it is style.”
This explanation of style would have appeared as unconvincing to defenders of
modernity who used to cling to the notion of style as a historical scheme and who denied

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that the word style could mean anything other than form. Cocteau said that what we
should look for is not “a style” but simply style (Cocteau 1948: 241). “A style” signifies
not simply the historical, formal aspect of a thing, to which one would oppose “style” as a
creative, living aesthetic expression. On the contrary, though style is opposed to history,
it is constantly nourished by history and maintains an allegorical communication with it.
Present, creative style (as opposed to official, historical style) that we might meet in
present, contemporary works of art, needs – though it is in many points explicitly
contradicting history – a certain amount of historical recognition. In this sense, “style” is
both historical and anti-historical.
Some examples from a period well before the break of modernity will illustrate this.
The French “rationalist” architect Viollet-le-Duc (1814-79) declares that for him “style
depends only on the application to an object of the reasoning faculty” (Discourses, p.
188, quoted from Watkin 1977: 25). Instead he prefers to see the quality of buildings as
being dependent on the extent to which a certain principle of rationality has been applied.
Viollet-le-Duc claims that “one of the characteristics of Architectural Art at the close of
the seventeenth and during the eighteenth century is the absence of style” and that “the
style of Architecture during the declining years of the Roman empire and that of the
eighteenth century consists of the absence of style” (Watkin: 26). For Viollet-le-Duc, the
lack of reasonableness as well as the lack of awareness to function and usefulness
deprives this architecture of style.
Viollet-le-Duc’s thoughts on style come close to those of Gottfried Semper (1803-
79), who was one of the foremost theoreticians among all those who attempted to
elucidate the phenomenon of style at the end of the last century. In his Vergleichende
Stillehre, Semper recognizes style as the most fundamental component of artistic
productions. However, he also detects paradoxes linked to this notion. Semper is aware
that the word style can be used in two ways. First there is the historical one: “Egyptian
style, Arab style, etc., (...) this part of stylistics (Stillehre) is often the subject of art
history and ethnology” (Semper 1884: 271, my translation). However, there is another
 Style and Anti-Style

notion of style, the one we use when we say “a work has no style” (ibid). Semper’s
mischievous originality consists in the reduction of this last mentioned meaning of style
to pure rationality. Semper does so by tracing all statements about stylistic qualities to the
right coordination of material and function and by declaring that a work has “no style”
“when the material has been dealt with in a fashion that suits its nature” (ibid.).
Semper’s systematic and materialistic “Stillehre” anticipates pre-structuralist and pre-
functionalist aesthetics. A work of art, Semper declares, “a result or – to use a
mathematical expression – a function of a random number of agencies or forces, which
are the varying coefficients of its incarnation.”1 Style as a functional coefficient is
supposed to be clearly and directly determined by factors like climate, usefulness,
political and religious influence, etc. Consequently, once we are aware of the functional
dependence of style, the production of style will only follow purely functional principles.
Those reasonable motivations underlying the production of style should not be hidden but
highlighted.
The cultural historian Egon Friedell characterized Semper’s “rational” concept of
style as a symbolism of religious, social, and political systems:

The famous architect and teacher Gottfried Semper postulated that the style of every building is
determined through historical associations. A court house was supposed to be reminiscent of a Doge’s
Palace, a theater of a Roman arena, the barracks of a medieval fortification. (…) Because of the (false)
association of Middle Ages with cities, a town hall had to be gothic, and – because of an equally false
association of antiquity with the parliamentarian constitution – a parliament had to be ancient. A
mayor’s office had to be baroque… (Friedell 1931: 360-61)

Though Friedell’s description is exaggerated, it shows that Semper’s claim to be

rational is rather ridiculous. This “reasonableness” has produced stylistic absurdities
incompatible with the functions of contemporary life. However, it is interesting to see
with regard to the entirety of Semper’s approach as far as it has been exposed here, that –
just as in the case of Viollet-le-Duc – a certain notion of style as a mixture of historically

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recognized form and anti-historical opposition to style continues to lurk through these
approaches that so eagerly attempt to reduce style to pure rationality. We see this with yet
more clarity in Viollet-le-Duc who decides to continue his reflections on style by
providing the following illustration:

If a Roman matron of the period of the Republic were to appear in a drawing-room filled with ladies
dressed in hooped skirts with powdered hair and a superstructure of plumes or flowers, the Roman lady
would present a singular figure; but it is nonetheless certain that her dress would have style, while
those of the ladies in hooped skirts would be (in the style of the period), but would not possess style.
(Quoted in Watkin: 26)

Viollet-le-Duc attributes to style a certain “inner power” that will be maintained even
once it has been transferred from its own historical environment into another
environment, thus leaping over the gap of centuries. Strictly speaking, the ladies of the
later époque could very well have mocked the Roman lady because of her exotic
appearance and this even the more so had the Roman lady insisted on the
“reasonableness” of her outfit. If the ladies did not do so, this is not because they were
convinced by the underlying reasonable structure of the lady’s appearance. If they were
“convinced,” then they were so only by the power of the style that could still be
convincing in one way or another. This style cannot be reduced any further, it is anterior
to any reasonableness. What happened to Viollet-le-Duc also happened in modernity. In
modernity, the idea of style was attacked as “a style,” but what remained once the battle
had been won was a – sometimes rather conventional – idea of “style” even when it was
disguised as “anti-style.” As a result, modernity has adopted a confused notion of style
from the époque of pre-modernity. On the one hand, in modernity “style” can be used in
the sense of a rational structure able to convince simply through itself; on the other hand,
the concept of style is much too cultural and relativism cannot be avoided. Absolute
notions of “good style” could not survive throughout the most rationalist phases of
modernity and are no longer available.
 Style and Anti-Style

We are all constantly prone to statements involving style that may appear ridiculous
from one point of view and reasonable from another. We attach a whole range of value
judgments to a notion that we refer to as “style” and when being asked to cancel these
judgments in order to elaborate a more “neutral” approach to style, we might be ready to
do so. However, soon after we find that the more neutral notion of style that has been
obtained no longer appears to us as what we would like to call style. And all this is also
true for elaborations of “anti-style.”2 The problem is that style adopts here very easily an
experiential or “existential” dimension. Heidegger has shown that in the darkness of our
existence we are so forgetful about Being because everyday purposes like customs,
habits, and behavioral rules occupy us without leaving any “negative” space around us. In
this sense, to find style in the form of a sudden awareness of the darkness and falsehood
existing around us is still one of the great nostalgias that continue to exist at the age of
late modernity.

3. Absolute Style
3.1. The Impossibility of Life-Style
A decade ago, it was stated that in post-modernity the absolute fragmentation of language
into different sub-languages does not permit the localization of style nor even of an anti-
style. However, quite contrary to what happened at the time of style-rejecting modernity,
almost everybody felt that the subsumption of all these different post-modern expressions
under the term “post-modern style,” did not represent any step forward in terms of
analysis. It made us even more helpless in regard to an understanding of the “post-
modern” environment. The endless cultural fragmentation of “post-modernity” which left
nothing but heterogeneity, disparity, and diversity, all of which contained multiple
tensions, seemed to oppose itself to any description of a cultural environment in terms of
style; just as it does – to an increasing extent – in terms of social class or race. In this
respect, the anti-stylistic project of the avant-garde seems to have been accomplished in
late modernity.

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There is only one in which style can be accepted today and in which it also was
accepted during the entire movement of modernity: the idea of life-style, that is, of an
artistic style applied to life. This idea has had its origin in the Arts and Crafts Movement
from the end of the nineteenth century and it continued through modernity until the era of
Pop Art. At the time of modernity, the idea of style as a fusion of life and art was very
much dependent upon large scale, official stylistic movements. On the one hand, it is
clear that this kind of style has difficulties surviving in a fragmented, “post-modern”
society. Even more, “life-style” flourishes best in societies modern enough to refrain
from skepticism towards industrialist society. It thrives in societies that are widely
unaware how dangerous the industry is. The industry bears the constant threat that art
could one day melt away into industrial production. Therefore, at least to some extent,
life-style philosophies became irrelevant at the close of the modern industrialist age.
Alain Touraine noted in 1969 that the “decline of life-style should be seen as an aspect of
the more general social transformation” (Touraine 1974: 37) going together with the
general decline of traditional social categories.
On the other hand, the “decline” entails here not really the gradual disappearance of
the phenomenon that is declining but, paradoxically, it can also bring about its
overpopularization. When everything is lifestyle, the concept of lifestyle is emptied of its
content. In this sense, the idea of style in connection with life has degenerated.
Contemporary society’s massive “life-style advertising” is simultaneously significant and
insignificant because, by being communicated through an empty seriality motivated by
little more than a dull consumer attitude, “life-style advertising” starts constituting the
only real world, which is, in the end, nothing other than the world of life-style media like
television or the internet. In late modern society, “style” has become absolute: it has
become an all-encompassing category. Through this absolutization it is running out of
experiential meaning: when everything is style, then nothing is style.
Obviously, the mass media play a prominent role here; by “absolutizing” time and
reality, mass media cover the world’s happenings in “real time,” as Gianni Vattimo has
 Style and Anti-Style

shown in his book The Transparent Society. Vattimo shows that today the mass media
have taken over the role of Hegel’s “Absolute Spirit” in the sense that they represent “the
perfect self-consciousness of the whole humanity” (Vattimo 1992: 6). The same is true
for the phenomenon of style: late modern style is nothing but an “Absolute Style” bearing
a totalitarian effect, irrespective of how many sub-styles it is said to accommodate. In a
similar vein, Baudrillard speaks of the ecstasy produced by simulation and the fascination
with simulation which has “absorbed all energy of its contrary, [like] the true which has
absorbed all energy of the false” (Baudrillard 1983: 2). He refers to “fashion” as an
example for this absolute quality.
Superficially speaking, the post-modern world of Absolute Style can appear as
outspokenly individualistic, democratic, and tolerant, though inside this super-style
“individual styles” are inexistent. They are nonexistent, in the first place, not because
they would have been suppressed but because they lack a genuine stylistic experiential
power. In a world of Absolute Style, even the most democratic consensus is so absolute
that, in the end, it will not even be combated, discussed, or rejected. In a world of
Absolute Style even the most democratic consensus becomes, strictly speaking,
unnecessary because there is simply nothing to consent to. Absolute Style has not been
consented to, nor has it been imposed, nor been fought for: it simply exists, in the form of
an Absolute Geist, as an autonomous cultural consciousness.

3.2. Simulation
The pattern of these thoughts on Absolute Style runs parallel with those that deal with
another typically “post-modern” subject: simulation. Like Absolute Style, the
phenomenon of simulation has firm roots in modernity. We have seen with regard to
Semper how in pre-modernity, a plurality of styles would be resumed under a pretentious
concept of “rationality.” It is interesting to reevaluate the same concept of stylistic
multitude within the stylistic situation existing in the living rooms of the 70s and 80s of
the nineteenth century. At that time, the keyword under which the stylistic chaos was

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supposed to be subsumed was “intérieur.” Egon Friedell describes the intérieurs of

around 1870 as follows:

In the Boudoir there is a set of Boulle furniture, in the living room an empire equipment, next to it a
dining room in the Cinquecento style, and in its neighborhood a gothic bedroom. With all this, the
preference for ornaments and polychromy is clearly visible: the more winding, crooked and arabesque
are the rooms, the more motley, glaring and wild Indian style are the colors, the more people will like
them (op. cit.: 359).

This stylistic mixture can claim the predicate “style” only with much difficulty. The
environment is “made strange” by being made shot through with adventurous doses of
exoticism. However, the strangeness produced here is not meant to lead to the
“estrangement” of the human from his environment (though later modernists reproached
them to do exactly this) but, on the contrary, it is supposed to produce a familiar, cozy
atmosphere. The means for the realization of this project are not so much stylistic but any
ambition to create style has rather been killed here in order to be replaced by a spiritual,
dreamlike quality of strangeness.
Walter Benjamin thinks along these lines when quoting Baudelaire who describes “a
room which comes close to a reverie, a room which is truly spiritual. (...) The furniture
has prolonged, prostrated, weakened forms. They seem to dream; one should say they are
lifted with a somnambular life, as vegetable or as mineral” (Benjamin V, 2: 687).
Dreamlike “strangeness” instead of style: today we would attribute this idea rather to
typically post-modern expressions. Even more remarkable is the fact that the fin de siècle
desire to create strange, exotic, artificial, and dreamlike environments led to an exuberant
fascination with simulation. Friedell describes the lust for the non-authentic that
dominated the culture of this era: “The murky pink lamp over the bed is sham just like
the familiar log in the chimney because both are never used. On the other hand, one
found it necessary to emphasize the illusion of a vivid oven fire by using red silver foil”
(op. cit.: 360).
 Style and Anti-Style

3.3. Modernity against Simulation

The modern movement fought against the hypocritical character of simulations by
introducing a weapon that was supposed to be efficient against simulating spiritual
attitudes. It advanced the idea of “style” as a more straightforward aesthetic expression.
This is surprising because, as was shown above, the word style never existed on the
surface of the modern discourse of aesthetics. Therefore this staging of a fight of “style
against simulation” is very unusual. Modernity excelled most in pointing out the
necessity of a more reasonable straightforwardness in aesthetic representation. However,
modernity’s moral criticism of the simulating nineteenth century can also be understood
as a heartfelt “call for style” cried out from within a styleless world of imitations.
Nicolaus Pevsner (1902-1983) writes in Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936):

In a cardboard traveling case made to imitate alligator skin, in a Bakelite hairbrush made to imitate
enamel – there is something dishonest. A pressed glass bowl trying to look like crystal, a machine-
made coal-scuttle trying to look hand beaten, machine-made moldings on furniture, a tricky device to
make an electric fire look like a flickering coke fire, a metal bedstead masquerading as wood – all that
is immoral. (Pevsner 1936: 11; quoted in Watkin : 98)

First, Pevsner’s approach is reminiscent of Semper’s catalogue of symbolizing functions

in architecture: form should follow function. Pevsner complains that Cadbury’s
Christmas boxes in the 1930’s depict irrelevant scenes because “neither a circus scene
nor a still life of fruit has a natural and easily understandable relation with chocolate”
(Pevsner, p. 123-25). However, the difference between Pevsner and Semper is that the
former does not suggest a catalogue of styles that should – in a rational way – symbolize
functions. Instead, he suggests a function without style.
Pevsner could still criticize the aesthetics of the nineteenth century by pointing to a
certain “reason” that should dominate representation. Against exuberant fantasies he
could pose a reasonableness of proportion; against simulation he could pose an equally

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reasonable will to honesty towards history; against any arbitrary accumulation of styles
he could raise the sharp edge of a more purist, modern style, even if this “style” was
generally formulated in terms of anti-style. Finally, against unclear “spiritual attitudes”
he could pose reasonable functions.
What Pevsner did is no longer possible today. One of the reasons is that today
“spirit” is no longer, as it was in the nineteenth century, a “spiritual attitude” but rather an
Absolute Spirit. This spirit might still contain style as well as reason but it does so only in
the form of an Absolute Style which possesses its own reasonableness. Like simulation, it
creates its own world. Simulation is not imitation, since it imitates nothing but creates
something new. In this sense, Absolute Style also becomes a fundamental attribute
through its stylistic formulation of “reality” and the world itself. It cannot be fought by
referring to style or anti-style.

4. Men Without Styles, Styles Without Men?

As mentioned, there is still another concept of style: the idea of a strong and
characteristic individual style that Frederic Jameson sees as typical for the age of
modernity. In modernity there still was a certain stylistic potential able to create
individual styles of which one could say that they really “were.” This style was not just
an “invention’ of posterior generations which usually “produce” styles by contemplating
the past historically and by distributing stylistic labels to its various productions.
Jameson, for example, is convinced that the styles of Joyce and Faulkner “really existed.”
Within our late modern heterogeneous interplay of different voices it is impossible
to identify this kind of “style” since here the historical and the contemporary perspectives
are so much intermingled. The contemporary world is not only shot through with
historical quotations, but the idea of progress resigned from the concept of history has
made all of us historians, even when we are dealing with the contemporary world. As the
“historians” that we are, it is possible that we will not see style because the analytical,
 Style and Anti-Style

classifying eye of the historian remains unable to divide the contemporary world into
more or less coherent stylistic groups.
Matei Calinescu writes that “post-modern novelists [are] confronted with the
historically new difficulty of giving shape to a world increasingly shapeless and an
experience increasingly fluid” (Calinescu 1987: 137). The search for form still represents
the main concern of artists and theorists. In principle, we are ready to accept any form.
However, there are restrictions. For example, we would not accept a kind of form, which
simply claims to be “the form” because an aesthetic conventionalism attributes to it the
quality of, say, good taste. However, this does not mean that we have surmounted any
sensibility for questions of taste. “Bad taste” is allowed, but only when it clearly claims
to parody, for example, certain aesthetic conventionalisms. Calinescu writes: “If we think
of kitsch as the style of bad taste, we arrive at [a] paradox (...): the possibility of
consciously using bad taste (i.e. kitsch) in order to subvert the conventions of a ‘good
taste’” (253). When talking about taste today, we are involved in contradictory claims.
Agnes Heller has said that “we no longer have ‘good taste’ or ‘bad taste’. (Of course, one
still must be able to distinguish between the better and the worse within the same genre)”
(Heller 1990: 8) Taste, like style, still exists as a strict and fundamental rule; but we are
allowed to invent the rules ourselves.

5. Spirit and Style

The avant-garde was striving towards the cancellation of the notion of style in order to
become “functional”; the post-functionalist part of modernity cancelled style in order to
make its expressions more “human” or “organic.” Others intended to submit style to a
value related to the notion of spirit. Spirit is a weapon frequently used against formalism.
On the other hand, formalistic claims from the opposite end are, as was shown, often
made in order to combat certain “unstructured” spiritual attitudes.
Also in modernity there existed a certain fascination with “spirit,” but it was mainly
the spirit of technique. E. Persico wrote about Mies van der Rohe’s Tugendhat House:

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“Someone, in connection with this house mentioned a ‘spirit of technique.’ Undoubtedly

this means that Mies has finally created not only a rational building expressing a modern
state of mind, but a ‘civilization’ which laid down its bonds without any link with earlier
ideas” (in Benevolo 1971: 505). Spirit is used in an abstract way; one obviously believed
that spirit in connection with such a neutral domain like technique would be harmless and
free from pre-modern, irrational romanticism. Another movement would also use the
claim for spirit at the expense of style but in a more dangerous fashion. According to
Tarufi and Dal Co, the main concern of Nazi architecture was “to pin down a ‘spiritual
attitude’ even before a style” (Tafuri and Dal Co 1976: 275). Here style is seen as not
more than an empty and bloodless “form” in need of an extra shot of spiritual life. At the
same time, the Nazis’ spirituality is powered by an avant-garde like, anti-historicist
enthusiasm. Their nihilism is directed against all those cultural ideas that can justify a
view of history as a development leading from pre-modernity to modernity. By cutting
themselves off from the latest stage of cultural development, the Nazis negate the
necessity of a dialectical development of style working in parallel with the general
development of human culture. However, though they are opposed to the avant-garde,
they do not look for non-historicist anti-style. They look for direct contacts with spirit
which will not be historical but historicizing.

6. Nature and Style

Originally, to make things different or to make things strange was a modern idea. In
modernity it was predominately “nature” that was supposed to be submitted to strange-
making devices. At the end of this chain of strange making acts, one was hoping to find a
new, reasonable, life-style. In modernity, nature, as the all-embracing, impenetrable,
eternal model for life and art, represented a quantity that needed to be broken up, negated,
and destroyed. The concept of nature as an absolute model of artistic representation was
to be destroyed and replaced by an absolutely autonomous idea of lived art or artistic life.
Once “nature” was destroyed, art could be given the same absolute, self-sufficient status
 Style and Anti-Style

that had once been the privilege of nature. Finally, within this new situation the word
“art” would become unnecessary because art would have penetrated life – exactly as
nature had before – so perfectly that everything would be art. The distinction between art
and nature would be senseless. One of the clearest manifestations of this radical
philosophical strategy which would embrace with its aestheticism not only the domain of
the properly artistic but also the whole of human life, is given by Piet Mondrian who
wrote in 1947: “We must tend towards universal representation and detachment from the
pressure of nature. Then we shall no longer have need of paintings and statues, because
we shall be living within art. Art will disappear from life in the measure in which life
itself is in balance.”3 (Mondrian quoted in Benevolo 1971: 409). “Nature” as the too
absolute category of human life was to be deconstructed by means of an artistic spirit in
order to become more geistreich, or in order to be not only life, but life-style. This idea
occupies a primordial position in early modernity. Rimbaud wrote that future poetry will
no longer give rhythm to action but that from now on, poetry will “come first” [sera en
avant]” (in “Lettre du voyant”). The replacement of nature with art, the aspired serene
and balanced state of mind characteristic of a modern humanity no longer under pressure
from nature was supposed to produce a humanity able to live according to the absolutely
free rhythm determined by a perfect interpenetration of life and art.

7. Style in Disorder, the Disorder of Style: Valéry and Bakhtin

Both Paul Valéry (1871-1945) and Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) approach style from a
particularly paradoxical angle. Valéry asks in an essay entitled “Propos sur
l’intelligence,” how in a world governed by an absolute multitude something like a
“stable type” or a stable structure or style can still subsist:

But how does a style come about, that is, how is the formation of a stable type, of a general formula for
construction and decoration possible (…) when impatience, the speed of work, when the works are
submitted to sudden variations of techniques, and when the condition of novelty has been a
requirement for productions of all kinds for a century? 4

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 T. Botz-Bornstein

Valéry finds that modern culture with its rapid pace cannot be fixed in terms of
style because it is constantly developing. The synonym for modernity is “Europe” which
according to Valéry historically provided a fertile ground for a world of disorder
consisting “in all cultivated spirits, in the most liberal coexistence of the most divergent
ideas, the most opposed principles of truth and of knowledge. This is what characterizes a
modern epoch.”5 There is supposed to be a spirit in this modern world; however, it is not
unique but pluralistic because it always means the coexistence of several spirits. Even
more: only within this pluralizing spiritual movement can spirit itself come into being.
Also Hegel described spirit along these lines as a “process engendering and passing
through its own moments, and this entire movement represents the positive and its
truth.”6 Spirit represents a negating movement that can be seen as positive. It has a
dynamic power. In the same way spirit represents a disorder that can be seen as order:
Valéry is convinced that modern man…

…is at every moment different from what he is. He does not establish a system of needs and the
satisfaction of these needs. He rather derives satisfaction from I don’t know which excesses of power
that constantly disturb his state of satisfaction. At the very moment that his body and his appetite are
satisfied, something moves deep inside him, torments him, illuminates him, orders, stings,
manipulates, and sacrifices him. This is the Spirit. The Spirit clouded with all these inexhaustible
questions.7

Modern society, marked by multitude and disorder, is opposed to the establishment

of fixed systems. This openness provides the opportunity for a manifestation of human
spirit. The openness of the system is what Norbert Elias has called the “factual
interdependence of ‘order’ and ‘disorder’” (Elias 1956: 238), which gives to every nation
a unique character or a unique style. Valéry traces this openness to the work of spirit:
“Spirit creates order and disorder because its business is to provoke change. From there it
 Style and Anti-Style

develops, within a sphere constantly expanding, the fundamental law of sensibility, that
is, it introduces into the living system an element of suspense or of lurking instability.”8
It would be wrong to characterize Valéry’s view of Europe’s modernity as
relativistic or even nihilistic. It is true that the disorder-producing spirit destroys unity
and that, as a consequence, in Valéry’s modern culture practically “anything goes.” On
the other hand, since we find “spirit” at the root of this deconstructive movement, the
disorder also needs to be considered as “spiritual” and this, in turn, makes the disorder
constructive. In Valéry’s modern Europe, elements of “low” culture easily enter the
structure of modern “high” culture and contribute to the formation of “spirit.”9
Another author who has elaborated in the most impressive way the consistent
principle of polyphony as a cultural structure is Mikhail Bakhtin. It is impossible to fully
delve here into Bakhtin’s idea of polyphony. However, it is possible to show how
Bakhtin’s version of polyphony is different from Valéry’s. Bakhtin’s thoughts on spirit
and style suggest a polyphonic nihilism. Bakhtin deals with the problem of style and
spirit by concentrating on the point that in Dostoevskij’s works a “spirit” representing a
certain consciousness of a character or the values of a group of characters, does not exist.
To assume such a unifying, spiritual notion would mean that we uncritically accept an
idealistic philosophical heritage: “All idealistic creative work is thought of and perceived
as a possible expression of a single consciousness, a single spirit. Even where the matter
under discussion is a collective of a variety of creative forces, unity is still illustrated by
the time of a single consciousness: the spirit of a nation, the spirit of a people, the spirit of
history, etc...” (Bakhtin 1973: 66). For Bakhtin, polyphonic elements in modern literature
undermine a single-minded, authoritarian spirit and he traces polyphonic elements back
to four main sources: “There exists a group of artistic-verbal phenomena which has long
attracted the attention of both literary scholars and linguists. These phenomena by nature
fall outside the bounds of linguistics, i.e. they are metalinguistic phenomena. They are
stylization, parody, skaz and dialogue....” (153).

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 T. Botz-Bornstein

“Spirit” does not exist and should be replaced with style, parody, skaz, and
dialogue. However, for Bakhtin, the “polyphony of styles” has an essentially nihilistic
character. Bakhtin identifies “polyphonic speech” with a phenomenon that is in direct
contact with sub- and counter-regions of human society. There was a time when “poetry
was accomplishing the task of cultural, national and political centralization of the verbal-
ideological world in the higher official socio-ideological levels, on the lower levels, on
the stages of local fairs and at buffoon spectacles, the heteroglossia of the clown sounded
forth, ridiculing all ‘languages’ and dialects…” (Bakhtin 1981: 273). Here, the
deconstruction of spirit leads to the acceptance of practically any style, and this may also
include the most “geistlose” ones. In this sense, Bakhtin’s cultural theory is nihilistic: it
turns polyphony into an absolute value.
Things are different with Valéry. According to him, “low culture” also contributes
to the formation of spirit: “The street, the projects, the entertainments, social life, the
atmosphere of the time, the fashions that arise (and by fashions I do not only mean those
relating to clothes and manners, but also those that one can observe in language), strongly
and constantly act on spirit.”10 However, by no means would Valéry pretend that the
influence “from the street” can be considered spiritual. Valéry attributes, within his
stylistics, an essential role to a certain “tribe” of people which is supposed to be able to
transform all cultural elements (including the “non-spiritual” ones) into spirit, and this for
one reason: because the tribe “distinguishes itself through the special relationship that it
has with spirit” (1050). This privileged tribe can produce spirit because it already has
spirit. Here spirit becomes a historical phenomenon in spite of the modern polyphonic
and basically anti-historicist stylistic chaos in which it is imbedded. Spirit must already
be experientially present (in cultural and its various expressions) if it ever wants to come
into being.
Valéry’s vision of a European “multitude of spirits” includes no nihilism. It
propagates no passive acceptance of “any old” popular element of culture. Instead it tries
to cultivate an active mimesis of some of these elements; and this miming gesture is
 Style and Anti-Style

supposed to produce a new “spiritual” structure. Valéry admits that, in modern,

polyphonic Europe, it is almost impossible to identify style. Spirit, however, has survived
within the cultural chaos, which is determined by an arbitrarily arranged multitude of
different styles. More precisely, the quantity that Valéry calls spirit has been transferred
from a historical domain where spirit or style still existed, to the (apparently anti-
historicist) situation of modernity. This is not as contradictory as it might seem. What has
been dropped in anti-historical modernity are only “historical” styles together with
historical notions of a certain spirit.
For Valéry, one of the most prominent tasks of modernity is to answer the question
‘what is spirit’? Particular, well defined forms of spirit that are only founded on historical
prejudices of what spirit could be, need to be liquidated. Among these forms of “false”
spirit are all versions of spirit that Derrida enumerates in his analysis of Heidegger’s
deconstruction of Geist from Sein und Zeit:

First there is the destruction of spirit in the intelligence (Intelligenz), the intellect (Verständigkeit), the
calculation (Berechnung), the vulgarization (massenhafte Verteilung), the realm of writers and
aestheticians, of what is only spiritual (das nur geistreiche: in the sense of ‘bel esprit,’ of ‘to have
spirit’). This alleged intellectual culture of spirit manifests only a simulacrum and lacks spirit. 11

However, there is another idea of style. Style can also be a quality representing an
absolute spiritual self-consciousness. This is a style that is not purely formalist but
contains some human, genuinely cultural and experiential content. This idea of non-
formal style can be called “spirit.” Whenever we are confused about the too arbitrary
constellations of individual voices that are all claiming their due right within the chaotic
interplay of different formal styles, when the rapid pace of modern culture makes the
distinct perception of individual expressions impossible, then we are inclined to call for
“spirit” because we hope that it will establish a unity within the general manifestation of
discontinuity. It is in this sense that Valéry writes: “It is not at all impossible to find the
unity of diversity and the principle through which the sensibilities, the cultures, the very

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 T. Botz-Bornstein

different ideals whose variety defines Europe and by whose antagonism it is torn into
pieces, could be reconciled. This principle is the belief in spirit.”12 Instead of seeing a
chaotic interplay of different “styles” that form the Absolute Style of modernity, we are
asked to see “style.” This project of breaking down Absolute Style into a content oriented
notion of style (and not into several, single, formal styles) can also be called, by
following Heidegger and Derrida, a Destruktion (déconstruction) of spirit.
All this is important for a world in which personal, stylistic, and individual
experience is increasingly channeled through electronic media of communication. A
world in which the spontaneity of direct perception is replaced with synthetic duplicates
(computer interfaces), and where qualities like “personal style” or “identity” can appear
as parts of consumable dream worlds instead of as expressions of selfhood. In this world,
the master narrative of style dissolves once again into Absolute Style. This time, such
Absolute Style is not even embodied and in some cases not even human. Post-human
fantasies of surrogate life are not more than an accomplishment of postmodern models of
identities ontologically shaped by postmodern stylistic identities.

Conclusion
I have presented several modern ways of coming to terms with the notion of style.
Semper saw style as a functional coefficient directly determined by exterior natural and
social factors. The avant-garde movement produced, by creating its own notion of a free
and independent anti-style, just another form of style. The ambition of the moderns was
to cancel the notion of style as a whole in order to accentuate the “functional.” The post-
functionalist part of modernity cancelled style in order to make its expressions more
“human” or “organic.” Finally, with our late modern cultural environment marked off by
a heterogeneous interplay of different voices or simply by chaos, it has become very
difficult to identify something like a “style” in the modern sense. At the same time, a
certain late modern “Absolute Style” with totalitarian undertones emerges. This Absolute
Style is totalitarian even when it accommodates several sub-styles in itself. Valéry and
 Style and Anti-Style

Derrida attempted to submit style to the notion of a supposedly value-based spirit.

Bakhtin attempted to replace style with a “polyphony of styles” that has an essentially
nihilistic character. Derrida’s project (derived from Heidegger) can appear as the most
plausible way out of the “Absolute Style” situation described above. Derrida’s and
Heidegger’s deconstruction of style-spirit is centered around an untranslatable German
word, the Gemüt – a notion that is supposed to twist western thinking out of an eternal
shifting between soul (âme), consciousness (conscience), Geist (esprit), and body.
Derrida’s discourse from De l’esprit, focuses on the necessity of deconstructing spirit as
an absolute consciousness of the world. This deconstructive project represents a radical
negation of existing styles. At their end, we find “spirit.” Derrida’s and Heidegger’s
ontological shift from Geist to Gemüt tries to outline a way in which Geist is constantly
different from itself in order to be gemütvoll and not simply absolute.
At the moment modern art admits that it has lost its ideological potential, and post-
modern philosophies are trying to come to terms with “historicism,” the above form of
“stylistic deconstruction” can be seen as the manifestation of a dilemma: being
simultaneously criticized for its a-political nature (or even conservatism) and for its
radical “progressiveness” negating all moral values, problems of deconstruction refer to
the complexity of the notion of style in modernity. In the best case, spirit is transformed
into an experiential, dynamic, self-reflective, component of life that cannot be objectified.
It also becomes “ungraspable” for this reason. This spirit is not simply the other known
from the outside, but it exists in the form of a différance growing out of the experience
with the other. Spirit and style represent the consciousness formed through this
experience.

Bibliography

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–––––. “Discourse in the Novel” in The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981)
Baudrillard, Jean: Les Stratégies fatales (Paris: Grasset, 1983)
Benevolo, Leonardo: History of Modern Architecture (London: Routledge, 1971)

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 T. Botz-Bornstein

Benjamin, Walter: Werke ed. by Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983)

Calinescu, Matei: Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1987)
Cocteau, Jean: Le Rappel à l’ordre (Paris: Stock, 1948)
Elias, Norbert. ‘Problems of Involvement and Detachment’, The British Journal of Sociology, 7(3) 1956:
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Friedell, Egon: Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (München: C. H. Beck, 1931)
Giedion, Siegfried: Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1947)
Heller, Agnes: “Existentialism, Alientation, Postmodernism: Cultural Movements as Vehicles of Change in
the Patterns of Everyday Life” in A. Milner (ed.) Postmodern Conditions (Oxford: Berg, 1990)
Jameson, Frederic: “Postmodernism and Consumer Theory” in Ann Kaplan (ed.) Postmodernism and its
Discontents (London, New York: Verso, 1988)
Nietzsche, Friedrich: Nachlass Bd. XI (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1923)
Pevsner, Nikolaus: Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius [later title:
Pioneers of Modern Design] (London: Faber & Faber, 1936)
Porphyrios, Demetri: Alvar Aalto (London: Academy Editions, 1982)
Semper, Gottfried: Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten, oder, praktische Ästhetik
(München: Bruckmann, 1879)
Tarfuri, Manfredo and Francesco Dal Co: Modern Architecture (Milano: Electa, 1976)
Touraine, Alain: La Société post-industrielle (Paris: Denoël, 1974)
Valéry, Paul, “Essais quasi politiques” in Œuvres I (Paris: Gallimard, 1992-93),
Vattimo, Gianni: La fine della modernità (Milano: Garzanti, 1985)
–––––. La società trasparente (Milano: Garzanti, 1992)
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Theory from the Gothic Revival to the Modern Movement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977)

1
...ist ein Resultat, oder, um sich eines mathematischen Ausdrucks zu bedienen, eine Funktion einer
beliebigen Anzahl von Agentien oder Kräften, welche die variablen Koeffizienten ihrer Verkörperung sind”
(p. 267).
2
Hölderlin’s doctor made a statement about style that borders on ridiculousness though it is reasonable in
itself and involves style in a strange shadow play with its own possible significations. A certain Dr Lange,
wrote about Hölderlin’s poems written during the patient’s final stage of madness, “the poet has lost any
feeling for language of poetry and that of dally speech, neither has he any feeling for style” (quoted from
 Style and Anti-Style

Jakobsen, Roman: Verbal Art, Verbal Sign (Oxford: Blackwells, 1985), p. 137. “Style” represents here a
healthy structure that should, in the view of this doctor, never be marred by any pharmakon. However, what
if style itself represents a pharmakon?
3
Piet Mondrian, “Plastic Art and Pure Art” quoted in Benevolo, 1971: 409.
4
Valéry, Paul, “Essais quasi politiques” in Œuvres I (Paris: Gallimard, 1992-93), p. 1044: Mais comment
se fait un style, c’est-à-dire comment serait possible l’acquisition d’un type stable, d’une formule générale
de construction et de décor (...) quand l’impatience, la rapidité d’exécution, les variations brusques de la
technique present les œuvres, et quand la condition de nouveauté est exigée depuis un siècle de toutes les
productions dans tous les genres?
5
“…plus libre coexistence dans tous les esprits cultivés, des idées les plus dissemblables, des principes de
vérité et de connaissance les plus opposés, c’est là ce qui caractérise une époque moderne” (I, p. 992).
6
“Prozeß, der sich seine Momente erzeugt und durchläuft, und diese ganze Bewegung macht das Positive
und seine Wahrheit aus.” Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1980), p. 34.
7
“…est à chaque instant autre chose que ce qu’il est. Il ne fonde pas un système fait de besoins, et de
satisfactions de ses besoins. Il tire de la satisfaction de je ne sais quel excès de puissance qui renverse son
contentement. A peine son corps et son appétit sont apaisés, qu’au plus profond de lui quelque chose se
meut, le tourmente, l’illumine, le commande, l’aiguillonne, le manœuvre, sacrifie. Et c’est l’Esprit. L’Esprit
embué de toutes ces questions inépuisables” (p. 1002).
8
“L’esprit crée l’ordre et crée le désordre, car son affaire est de provoquer le changement. Par là, il
développe, dans un domaine de plus en plus vaste, la loi fondamentale (...) de la sensibilité, qui est
d’introduire dans le système vivant un élément d’imminence, d’instabilité toujours prochaine” (p. 1027).
9
Also Vattimo suggests that at the moment a homogenous European spirit ceases to exist, the “true
Europe” must be sought for exclusively in sub-alternative or counter-cultures. Vattimo finds that “at God’s
death one reacts only with pathetical-metaphysical vengeance of other ‘truer’ values (for example the
values of marginal cultures, popular cultures which are opposed to the dominant ones)” (Vattimo, 1985, p.
33).
10
“La rue, les propos, les spectacles, les fréquentations, l’air du temps, les modes qui se succèdent (et par
mode, je n’entends pas seulement celles du vêtement et des manières, mais celles qui s’observent dans le
langage), agissent puissament et constamment sur esprit” (I, p. 1071).
11
Derrida, Jacques: De l’Esprit: Heidegger et la question (Paris: Galilée, 1987), p. 103: Il y a d’abord la
destruction de l’esprit dans l’intelligence (Intelligenz), l’entendement (Verständigkeit), le calcul
(Berechnung), la vulgarisation (massenhafte Verteilung), le règne des littérateurs et des esthéticiens, de ce
qui est seulement spirituel (das nur geistreiche: au sens du bel esprit, du ‘avoir-de-l’esprit’). Cette
prétendue culture intellectuelle de l’esprit ne manifeste ainsi que simulacre et manque d’esprit.”
12
“Il n’est pas du tout impossible de trouver l’unité d’une diversité et le principe sur lequel les sensibilités,
les cultures, les idéaux très differents dont la variété définit l’Europe, dont l’antagonisme la déchire,
pourraient se mettre d’accord. Ce principe est croyance en l’esprit” (I, p. 1138).

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