Project group updating the Atlas by Arntz and Neurath
Alice Creischer & Andreas Siekmann

A group drawn from the arts and cultural studies departments at Lünebourg University has been updating the 1930 "Society and Economy" atlas by Arntz and Neurath.

It seemed clear to us that the atlas aimed to make certain political points in order to mobilise the proletariat, though we mainly focussed on Gerd Arntz. In 1929, Otto Neurath invited Gerd Arntz to join him working on the "Viennese Method of Visual Education". He had previously worked with the "Progressives," a group of artists from Cologne whose political goals he shared. In Arntz' graphic work, we were particularly fascinated by the "anti-subjective" presentation of social power relations. He had started working in this manner before and during his work at the Viennese Museum of Society and Economy. Being a subject is consciously schematised as an effect of the system or to revolutionary classes. Using the same means, the pictorial argumentation becomes a call to reverse these relations. At this time, there was a devotion to the soviet government, and the occupation of barracks and factories. This schematisation is advanced in the atlas and in the presentation of the statistics. Between the presentation of the graphics and the statistical elements (the series of icons for the unemployed, or fists for strike days) it seemed to us there can be a transition between "mass" as a statistical value and as a threat. When the atlas was published in Leipzig in 1930, Arntz wrote in the "A bis Z" (the Cologne progressives' theoretical organ) "There can no longer be an art of the bourgeoisie. Nor can painters be peacefully included in the new experiments of technology and architecture. Such inclusion is part of the general trend towards rationalisation. This creates the elements which will effect the abolition of today's forms of life... We show the rigour and narrowness of this way of life and the powers which affirm the conglomeration at the concentrated areas, at the work shops, and call them to an abolition of a way of life which those above and below want to refuse. If content, then in the conflict between work and capital. This also applies to statistics. In figures and amounts, from the development and direction of movement of units of production and organisations of people it is possible to gain an impression of the end of the current economy....It is still at the beginning. But in extending what has been started, it will be possible to show our dependencies and possibilities as far as they are attached to materials and amounts of these, to show and analyse our everyday life, to make demands and to encourage those who are aware to realise these." Updating the atlas is to be a sort of political appropriation, partly to re-present this form of artistic and political engagement. But also as a conscious opposition to the image of objectivity produced by economic statistics in predicting and judging social relations, which often just provide ideological support for the intentions of those who commission them. For example in recent years, often market research institutions have been used to provide support for populist resentments and economic chauvinism. Their parameters are asylum-seekers and drug dealing, the homeless and robbery, work places and migration.

Each of the 100 statistical sheets is to be extended through another, either as a simple update (e.g. the pamphlet series "strikes and lock-outs"), conscious opposition or detail (e.g. for the sheets dealing with slavery and colonialism now deal with the Durban conference and African states' call for reparations form the USA.) It is less about a representative knowledge than about content which damages German or European approved notions (e.g. statistics about payments to forced labourers, or European forms' relocation of production to low wage countries.) But we were forced to realise that each proposal somehow lead to a statement requiring universality, which is evident in the principle of the atlas. We also had to acknowledge that our polemic damaged our theories of scientific predictability, which the Lünebourg section wanted to retain. Discussion showed that our points of perception regarding the atlas differed widely. While we had focussed particularly on Arntz' methods and engagement, the Lünebourg team has worked more on Neurath and the positivism of the Viennese circle. In the atlas, we saw an example of radical political agitation and projected the meaning of military investigation onto it. Meanwhile the Lünebourg group, with its understanding of Neurath's positivism, understood this as a humanitarian educational mission.

Ultimately, our differing specialities in perception lead us to suspect that they reflected a blind spot in the work carried out by Arntz and Neurath, which affected the ideological understanding of the atlas work, and work at the Institute for Visual Education. This also showed the extent that the ethic of rationalisation, technology and modernity was connected to a left wing revolutionary self image (in the ISOTYPES Project developing a rationalised language of images). This link has so often been deconstructed as totalitarian that its revolutionary self-conception has been forgotten. It is always easy to judge things from their final perspective in history, as though things could only end exactly thus. It is more difficult to think of history as a series of contingents, to see this language of images in the urgency and contemporaneity of its time, and to try and transmit its engagement into the present.

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Ulf Wuggenik

Otto Neurath was often in the USSR between 1931 and 1934, where he worked for several years as the new Institute for Visual Statistics in Moscow. This had two consequences in Neurath's biography. After 1934, he neared impoverishment as the Soviet government refused to pay the agreed sum for the work undertaken at the Central Institute for Pictorial Statistics. Furthermore, in 1934, Neurath was threatened with arrest in Vienna due to his activities in Moscow. This was after the Austro-fascists (catholic and patriotic to Austria) took power in 1934. Neurath had grounded a Museum for Society and Economy in 1924 which he called an institute for the social education of the people. This fell into the hands of the Austro-fascists, before being taken over by their opponents, the German National Socialists, who used the museum for their propaganda. Neurath went straight from Moscow into exile in the Hague. There, he was joined by Gerd Arntz and other members of the Viennese museum team, e.g. the architect Josef Frank and the scientist Marie Reidermeister. Always eager to establish institutions and organisations, by 1931 Neurath had grounded the Mundaneum Institute in Holland, which was internationally active through satellite offices Berlin, Amsterdam, Prague, New York, London and Moscow. In Holland, the Viennese method of Pictorial Statistics was further developed and renamed the "International System of Typographic Picture Education." The acronym "ISOTYPE" , with its Greek meaning, also brought out another aspect of Neurath and Arntz's educational programme "always the same signs."

The ISOTYPE programme was further developed in Oxford after Neurath fled from the Nazi forces occupying Holland in 1940, and later at the University of Reading after his death in 1945. But it reached its high point during Arntz and Neurath's work together on their final co-operative project. They brought out a theory of civilisation illustrated with statistical symbols in the publication "Modern Man in the Making" (New York 1939). It was shaped with the spirit of scientific optimism and was an extension of the "Society and Economy" atlas from Vienna in the 1920s. The atlas was significantly more restrained in its accompanying texts, relying more on the strength of images. The title "Society and Economy" obviously referred to Max Weber's main work "Economy and Society", published in 1922. Neurath had gained his doctorate at his institute in Heidelberg (...)

Despite his numerous errors, since the 1970s, Neurath has been rediscovered in various intellectual and scientific areas. He has appeared as a convinced neopositivist who discovered the problem of negative economic externalities in the early years of the twentieth century, despite later criticism by Thomas S. Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend or Willard von Orman Quine. He has been seen as the representative of interdisciplinary and encyclopaedic ideas of a "unifying body of knowledge," the grounder of an iconic code which did not rely on emotional effects, and the initiator of the earliest example of an interaction between social science and the arts. This had a somewhat asymmetrical character considering the de facto hierarchical relation Neurath and Arntz (...)