Page 96 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

80 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY

Taylorism as producing alienation and conformism (Adorno and Horkheimer
1986: 120–67). The human faculty of reason, held out as a means for human
liberation since the Enlightenment, had become, in the form of rationalization,
an irrational instrument of domination. They saw the culture industry as
applying these industrial principles to culture, bringing art within the sphere
of administration’, destroying its independence and ‘purposelessness’ and
harnessing it instead to the market (Adorno and Horkheimer 1986: 120, 131).
Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of standardization could be applied
to Neurath’s work. Yet like a number of 1930s thinkers and social activists
Neurath saw an emancipatory potential in social planning and the idea of a
total global system (before these had been tainted by association with Nazism).
The planned or administered society would counter the social inequalities
fundamental to a market economy. It seemed possible to accommodate differ-
ence and discrepancy within a global encyclopaedic system. For Neurath,
museums and the Isotype system offered a means to disseminate information,
especially to illiterate and semi-literate populations, and he conceived of this as
liberating, not as a means of domination. Standardization was for Neurath a
means to make knowledge available on a mass scale. He anticipated the serial
production of museums, where museums would be like public libraries
with numerous ‘branches’, easily accessible to everyone. Like Adorno and
Horkheimer, he recognized that standardization and serial production threat-
ened the authority given to unique works of art and authentic originals, but
like Walter Benjamin he hoped that mass-produced culture could also be
emancipatory and democratizing (Vossoughian 2003: 82).
Perhaps it was inevitable that Neurath’s museum ideas, formulated in rela-
tion to the planned economies of war and in revolutionary Europe, should
become something very different when revived or reinvented in the late
twentieth century, when a free market economy was again on the rise. In the
1970s, the attempt to introduce Neurath’s ‘humanizing’ and interdisciplinary
approach into the Natural History Museum in London (a large museum with
well-established and very separate departments) was bound to be fraught with
difficulties. Those difficulties were compounded by the fact that these ideas,
born in ‘Red Vienna’, were being inserted into a Britain about to undergo
radical change under the new Conservative government. Initially a group of
‘communicators’ or ‘transformers’ were employed to translate the arcane spe-
cialist knowledge into an exhibitionary form accessible to museum visitors,
deploying the expertise of the different departments. What ensued, according
to Miles, was ‘a bitter public dispute between 1977 and 1982 over the worth of
the exhibitions. However, the real cause of the dispute – the internal struggle for
control over exhibition practice – never really surfaced in the public domain’
(1996; 189). In this period museums began to benefit less from public funding,