Vossoughian, Nader (Author)
This dissertation traces the career of Otto Neurath (1882--1945), a Viennese intellectual who played a central role in establishing two key movements in European philosophy, the Vienna Circle and the United of Science movement, both of which rejected metaphysics and embraced empirical science. Neurath himself abhorred speculative thinking in all its cultural and social guises and spent his life trying to put his philosophy into practice. Although he is typically regarded as a philosopher of knowledge and innovator in graphic design, he pursued a range of careers that gave expression to his theoretical concerns. Between 1917 and 1940, he helped organize countless museums and exhibitions in over a dozen countries, and between 1921 and 1925 he was a leading housing officer in socialist Vienna. He brought to bear on these appointments his Austro-Marxian brand of empiricism, which was heavily utilitarian and anti- Idealist in outlook. As a housing director, Neurath had nothing but disdain for priceless artifacts and rare artistic collections. He thought that they absorbed the subject's attention without stimulating his or her intellect; they fetishized the "spectacle value " of objects at the expense of being socially informative. As a housing advocate and city planner, meanwhile, Neurath was an ardent critic of picturesque and Baroque planning schemes and a foe of both {italic}laissez-faire{/italic} urbanism and anti-city utopianism. He believed that overly concentrated urban development bred disease and inequality, while its inverse harmed worker productivity. Most of all, he detested Beaux-Arts and Sittesque urban planning on account of the priority they gave to aesthetics, beauty, and good taste Neurath's approach to solving urban and museological issues, I argue, consisted in organizing his thoughts around facts rather than artifacts. Facts, he contended, are interconnected--they're governed by rules rather than exceptions. Artifacts, on the other hand, project the illusion of autonomy; like the curiosity cabinets of the 17{super}th{/super} century, they are defined by their relative uniqueness or singularity. They pique the imagination, he contended, but they also breed irrationalism--an escape into disorder. For Neurath, extinguishing this auratic urge was central to the project of installing a truly rational culture. In the area of museum administration, I explore in my thesis how Neurath pioneered the use of mechanically reproducible media--;photographs, lantern slides, graphic diagrams, and the like. Most famously, he invented a language of pictoral communication known as the International System of Typographic Picture Education Isotype, whose hieroglyphic signs are all but ubiquitous in today's airports, restrooms, and city streets. In the realm of city planning, Neurath was one of the earliest advocates of standardized mass housing. He developed innovative schemes for rationalizing the production of agrarian settlements and organizing and educating building cooperatives. He was instrumental to the careers of countless {italic} Neue Sachlichkeit{/italic} modernists, including Margarete Schtte-Lihotzky, Le Corbusier, Josef Frank, and Cornelis van Eesteren, and carried on an extensive correspondence with the sociologist Ferdinand Tnnies. In the dissertation, I conclude by critically considering the contradictions and tensions implicit to Neurath's cultural and urbanistic philosophy. I suggest that his example does not simply reflect the musings of an isolated historical figure, but are emblematic of the holistic aspirations of Enlightenment reason.
...MoreDescription Looks at the aspects of Neurath's career (in museum organization, graphic design, and urban housing) that intersected with the social sciences. Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 65 (2005): 3189. UMI pub. no. 3147287.
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