ABSTRACT
Two literary figures in France in the early twentieth century, Paul Valéry and André Gide, had extensive correspondences with each other. In one letter, Valery informs Gide of his reading of Marx’s Capital and comments that ‘if you have not come to that conclusion about what I have already said: art as value (for basically, we are studying a problem of value) depends essentially on this nonidentification, this need for an intermediary between producer and consumer’. On a similar path, this Exordium contends that if the architect had picked up Capital for a reading as Valéry did, he might have arrived at a certain notion of ‘building’ as ‘value form’, on ‘the same relation as that which prevails in economics between production and consumption’ in the era of capitalism. The critic would have to conceive it as a ‘social hieroglyphic’. The architect could have tried to translate Marx’s language into his own, similar to what Valéry attempted to do.
