Abstract
Otto Neurath’s version of functionalism is one that begins with people “as we find them,” a proposition first set out in his 1917 essay “The Converse Taylor System.” Any attempt to redesign the existing furnishings of everyday life must take into account “functions” that go beyond the obvious purpose of objects: functions that are to do with sociability, happiness, familiarity, the love of “coziness,” and that address the diversity and contradictoriness of people. This essay considers how Neurath applied and made use of these ideas about design in 1940s Britain, during and after his internment on the Isle of Man between 1940–1941 and in talks, papers and correspondence from this period. It does not focus on the Isotype Institute, which would usually be considered his principal intervention in design, but on his commentary on everyday objects and practices. In particular it centres on four items – tennis courts, fireplaces, chairs and shoes – and through these elaborates some of the connections between Neurath’s ideas about the design of everyday life, and the significance of everyday practices, and his logical empiricism.
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Notes
- 1.
It was called The Royal Avenue Social Club. See Onchan District Commissioners Flickr site: https://www.flickr.com/photos/88093414@N03/9520895627/. accessed 18 October 2018.
- 2.
“Tennis Rasen” 6. Jan. 1941. Otto Neurath Nachlass (ONN), Wiener Kreis Stichtung, Noord-Hollands Archief, 206/K. 82. Thanks to Sabrina Rahman for help with the translation of these notes.
- 3.
I don’t know if the courts were used. I do know of one game – called Witness – played by Imre Goth and other internees in a different male camp several streets away. A good friend of his, the artist Marcia Farquhar reports: “The game involved an elected group staging an incident with all sorts of details to be recalled, or not, by the rest of the group watching. Even though the audience group were looking to remember there was a high instance of contradictory/fabricated memories. Imre only told me of this game in relation to the unreliability of witnesses.” (Farquhar, Marcia Email to Michelle Henning, 6th May 2015).
- 4.
- 5.
As John O’Neill (2006, 2) says, Neurath was “a central target” of Hayek’s papers “The Counter-Revolution of Science” and “Scientism and the Study of Society” published between 1941 and 1944. Hayek misrepresents Neurath as more concerned with scientific measures and centralization than he actually was.
- 6.
See also Uebel (2004) and his chapter in the present volume.
- 7.
Neurath used the term “Lebensstimmung” which has been variously translated as “states of felicity” or “quality of life” but which could mean “sense of well-being” or, more clumsily “life-feeling.”
- 8.
This is connected to his idea of unpredictability in principle, which he considered to be one of his most important contributions to the philosophy of science. See his Encyclopedia monograph, Neurath (1944, Sect. 12.).
- 9.
It means avoiding, for example, the language of cause and effect, in which we deduce one thing from another. Neurath gave an entertaining list of the kinds of accounts this would disallow: such as Max Weber’s account of Protestantism as facilitating capitalism; accounts of the “concealed intentions” revealed in styles of dress or customs; arguments of the origins of a torturer in his childhood experiences; or about war as a necessary outlet for destructive tendencies in humanity, and similar arguments regarding film. Whether film produces aggression or acts as an outlet is a debate on which Neurath has “not the slightest hypothesis” – instead his aim is to point to the problem of the kind of definite assertions such speculations lead to – “if you are reading as a boy such things then the results are…” (Neurath 1941). On Neurath and films, see Cat and Alford (forthcoming).
- 10.
In his letter, Winter also refers to another part of the talk, where “I wished to attempt some explanation of the riddle of the German character, based upon the idea of a ‘collective neurosis’ (Freud und Jung).”
- 11.
Neurath to Winter, 15 January 1944. The Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection, Department of Typography and Graphic Design, University of Reading.
- 12.
See Ádám Tamás Tuboly’s and Antonia Soulez’s chapter in the present volume, and Sandner (2011). Neurath was working on a book project which was never finished, provisionally titled Tolerance and Persecution.
- 13.
Neurath, “Questionnaire (IV).” 202/K.58. ONN. He also published an essay on this topic in The Journal of Education (Neurath 1945).
- 14.
Neurath to Carnap, 25 September 1943. RC 102-55-03. See letter 22 in this volume.
- 15.
Neurath to Joyce, 27 November 1944. The Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection. See also Sandner (2011) and Antonia Soulez’s chapter in the present volume.
- 16.
Neurath, “Meeting, Belgium committee... chairman Lauwerys , 15th June 1945.” K.79, Otto Neurath Nachlass.
- 17.
- 18.
Neurath’s letter to A.V. Williams , 5 November 1945. Isotype 1/12-13. In the Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection.
- 19.
Botching is at the more creative end of muddling along and it is of course not an exclusively British trait: so for example, when the Onchan families finally got their homes back they discovered that the men had knocked doors through to get from one house in a terrace to another, had filled attics with soil to grow mushrooms, and had blocked the drains with radio parts, from the home-made radios they had cobbled together.
- 20.
See for example: “We Americans, younger in form of self-government by many years than the English, can learn something from the manner in which the English ‘muddle’ through adversity” (Mundt 1941).
- 21.
Neurath, “Contributing features in the emotional and intellectual isolation of the German.” K.48, ONN.
- 22.
Neurath to Ina Carnap, 24 September 1945. RC 102-55-13. See letter 35 in this volume.
- 23.
Neurath’s letter to R.C. Kirk , 7 November 1945. The Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection.
- 24.
His and Marie Neurath’s correspondence includes letters to and from Dorothea Farquharson of the Institute of Sociology at Le Play House, in The Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection. A 1943 letter to Josef Frank states “I just looked through the Mass Observation book on housing and so many common sense remarks from plain people.” Neurath to Frank, 28 September 1943, Osterreichische Nationalbibliotek 1230/43.
- 25.
- 26.
- 27.
Neurath, “Questionnaire (IV).” 202/K.58. Otto Neurath Nachlass.
- 28.
Neurath’s letter to Mr. J.K. Hunt , 18 September 1943. The Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection.
- 29.
Neurath’s letter to John Hinde , 19 March 1944. The Otto and Marie Neurath Isotype Collection.
- 30.
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Henning, M. (2019). Of Tennis Courts and Fireplaces: Neurath’s Internment on the Isle of Man and his Politics of Design. In: Cat, J., Tuboly, A. (eds) Neurath Reconsidered. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 336. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02128-3_15
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