Page 95 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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of the museum visitors. Indeed Neurath’s ‘humanization’ of knowledge could
be understood as one way of countering the problem Nietzsche had identified,
namely of modern people being fed with ‘indigestible stones of knowledge’ (see
Chapter 2).
Nietzsche’s criticism was aimed at what I have referred to in previous chap-
ters as the encyclopaedism and historicism of the Victorian era, but earlier in
the eighteenth-century philosophers had produced encyclopedias as a means of
orienting knowledge and history toward life, relating different disciplines and
critiquing existing authority and hierarchies of knowledge. The encyclopaedia
was to be a network of interlinked and discrepant information, not an overarch-
ing, totalizing system (Tega 1996: 65). Neurath’s Museum of Society and
Economy in Vienna was in this sense encyclopaedic in ambition and intended to
produce knowledge geared toward everyday action. The museum was based in a
belief in the possibility of rational, empirical knowledge of the world but also
emphasized the incompleteness of knowledge. Neurath did not believe in abso-
lute certainty, nor that the entire world could be understood according to one
scientific theory (Cartwright and Uebel 1996: 41). Perhaps one of the ways to
distinguish this kind of encyclopaedism from attempts to produce a totalizing
explanation of the world is that it is oriented toward the reader, student or
museum visitor, as opposed to the author, teacher or curator. Like the eighteenth-
century encyclopaedia, it assumed or demanded ‘the autonomy of the reader
who was to regard the encyclopaedia as an instrument he/she was free to use so
as to raise his/her level of historical awareness’ (Tega 1996: 67).
The interdisciplinary approach Neurath and his team took was also multi-
media. His pictograms, or Isotypes, were thought to be a kind of universal
language not only because they could be read across cultures and language
groups, but also because they could be inserted into a wide range of media.
They were used as book illustrations, as posters and charts in museums, as
slides in lectures and presentations, as animated images in film (the director
Paul Rotha used the Isotype system in his 1943 film World of Plenty). The
cultural historian and filmmaker Peter Wollen sees Neurath’s Isotype scheme in
the context of the spread of Fordism and Taylorism. Wollen traces the impact
of Fordist/Taylorist ideas in the modernist avant-garde as well as in popular
entertainment. He compares Isotypes to other forms of standardized culture
such as the Tiller Girls (Wollen 1993: 40). Putting Neurath’s work in this con-
text raises questions about its complicity with the spread of technologies of
control and administration.
The model of interpreting mass culture in relation to the mass production
of standardized parts is derived from Marxist theorists Max Horkheimer and
Theodor Adorno. Writing in the early 1940s, Adorno and Horkheimer saw
standardized mass production and the rationalization of work through