Some Ideas for The New Museum of Society and Economy

INTRODUCTION

In the 1920s, the designer and sociologist Otto Neurath proposed the creation of a new museum in Vienna. The mechanics of Capitalism were under great strain: out of necessity, new socio-economic systems that approached socialist ideals of natural trade and communal living emerged in Vienna. Inspired by the belief that a socialist economy could be developed through the education of the working classes, Neurath's vision for the museum was to create an accessible platform that would engage critically with the paradigms of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and illuminate the systematic order within the modern city.

PAST

"According to Tonnies, Gesellschaft seeks to objectify and standardize human interactions, while Gemeinschaft spiritualizes and tries to make subjective everyday human affairs." (22) Having read the seminal work by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, Otto Neurath's concepts of communal living and urbanisation were transformed. As with Karl Marx, whose ideas had already been published in the Communist Manifesto in 1848, Tonnies looked at the distribution of power across the various strata of society from a socio-historical perspective, observing that the State becomes increasingly dominant over time to the detriment of the working classes, and other power structures such as the Church. This conflict summarises the tension between Tonnies' concepts of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft - in which the former is the agrarian community constructed around the pillars of the Church and the Family, and the latter being the construction of civil society, built around the state, the city, and industrial production.

Neurath's belief in the importance of natural economies was further developed while in Vienna after the first World War. The influx of gypsy refugees, coupled with a housing crisis and food shortages created a semi-anarchic social system, driven by basic human needs for shelter and sustenance. Barter and in-kind transactions emerged as a natural method for people to continue trading necessities, and during a period of great coal shortages in 1923, families resorted to cutting down trees around the city for firewood. Self-organisation on a mass scale interested Neurath greatly, although maintaining a balance in the disorder/order of the social system was a complex but crucial factor in its success. The coal shortage provides a succinct demonstration of this importance: the disorganised destruction of woodland areas around the city was unsustainable, and threatened longer-term effects on the supply of wood and provision of parkland areas. The social system, through a crisis of food, housing, and fuel, had become entropic. The laws that had maintained order in the system were no longer governed by a centralised authority, but completely decentralised and with little networked communication - decisions were made on an ad-hoc basis by individuals trying to satisfy their basic needs.

Neurath sought to create a system that would allow the formation of communities around a basis of self-help urbanism, but with a degree of decentralised management that would control the entropic state of the system. His method of "ordered disorder" was essentially the creation of a network within which the municipality of Vienna and the localised co-operative movements could communicate and make collective decisions. Neurath believed that social housing projects and allotment gardening initiatives could help create a communal economy - Gemeinwirtschaft, providing the working class with a much greater degree of autonomy within the class system. He was a founder of various associations and publications dedicated to improving access to education about growing food in urban areas, and also pioneering new technologies that would allow for the rapid construction of temporary housing for the settlers in Vienna. While his attempts to create a natural economy with social-democratic ideals largely failed due to economic growth in the early 20s, Neurath's belief in settlement housing remained.

Neurath wanted to use the methods of gesellschaft to stimulate the aspects of gemeinschaft that would benefit the working classes. He believed that "the metropolis needed to be weaned off the money-market economy and be governed by a system that harnessed the power of barter collectives, trust-based relationships, self-help interest groups, agricultural cooperatives and other informational economic agents." (25) The emergence of the mass audience at the beginning of the 20th century created a new visual language for communicating social concepts. Stimulated by the technologies of gesellschaft - namely rapid production in the newspaper industry, centralisation of population, and the rise in popularity of the public cinema - Neurath went about creating a new museum that could communicate in the new visual language of the mass media and stimulate the growth of communities. He wanted to create a cultural space that could educate the working classes about production, emigration, mortality, interior furnishing, unemployment, and the mechanisms of industry.(55-57)

The Museum of Society and Economy (Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien) was officially founded in 1925. The museum was an active space for educating the people of Vienna, rather than an institute that housed a collection of historical artefacts. It was here that Neurath began the development of ISOTYPE - a graphic system of communicating statistics so that they could be readily understood by a non-specialist audience. His ambition was to democratise knowledge through the creation of a pictorial language that had an instantly recognisable and standardised internal logic. "They encouraged people to think of themselves and the world around them in terms of patterns, relationship and systems of organisation." (65)

Exhibitions were designed with modularity and reproducibility in mind, so that the exhibition could travel with ease and reach the widest possible audience. Neurath's development of ISOTYPE also fit in to this belief: Neurath wanted to "generate guidelines and tools that allowed any worker to partake in the production of knowledge and public space." (87) His desire to democratise knowledge also allowed for the democratisation of production within the museum, allowing for interactivity and greater public participation.

PRESENT

With Neurath's ideas in mind, how can they be usefully transplanted to the contemporary descendants of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft? The obvious point to address before I begin to answer this question is to discuss how these concepts have been transformed in the post Cold War era of networked culture. Undoubtedly, the paradigms of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft have become more complex and interrelated in the information society. Cyberspace may have belonged to the countercultural dream of the free transmission and reception of knowledge, but the resulting commercialisation of the web since the mid 1990s has made it a defining instrument of Gesellschaft. Simultaneously the internet is host to innumerable subcultural communities built around the free-to-use (and that's FreeAsInBeer) infrastructures of web 2.0 funded through targeted advertising systems and user-data harvesting.