## Towards an Aesthetic of Administration: Otto Neurath's Statistical Materialism and the Art of the Five-Year Plan

Tobias Ertl

Abstract: In this essay, I propose to revisit the positive links between socialization, rationalization, and economic planning established in the Marxist debate of the interwar period and its resonances in aesthetic thought and practice. I therefore turn to the work of Otto Neurath, an advocate of Marxism as a form of scientific positivism, fervent defender of centralized planning in the socialization debates of  the  1920s,  and  inventor  of  a  pictorial  method  of  mass  education  through statistics.  I  claim  that  from  the  perspective  of  Neurath's  writings,  planning and administration can be interpretated as part of a formative process of social freedom. I examine Neurath's engagement with statistics as a medium of Bildung and highlight the intrinsically aesthetic dimensions of this project. In the second part of the essay, I discuss the importance of statistical imagery and infographics in the context of the Soviet cultural revolution and adjacent European communist  art  movements of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The aestheticization of statistics and its dissemination into everyday life is a key element of the communist avant-garde's attempt to collectively organize cultural production beyond the specialized forms of traditional artistic labor. At the historical conjuncture of the first Five-Year Plan (1928-32), the projected synchronization of economic and cultural production resulted-at least on the level of discourse-in a short-lived convergence between an aesthetic of administration and a collectively administered aesthetic practice.

Keywords: Economic Planning; Socialization; Otto Neurath; Statistics; Political Aesthetics

## Towards an Aesthetic of Administration: Otto Neurath's Statistical Materialism and the Art of the Five-Year Plan

Tobias Ertl

## From the Critique of Institutions to the Aesthetic of Administration

In modern art criticism, the notion of administration has a bad reputation. In his assessment of North American and European conceptual art of the postwar period, Benjamin Buchloh famously counterposes a critical variant of conceptualism of the late 1960s ('Critique of Institutions') to the affirmative involvement by conceptual artists with logical positivism, the latter of which he interprets as mimetic identification with late capitalist bureaucracy and instrumental rationality ('Aesthetic of Administration'). 1 Flipped around, these terms also seem to provide an adequate (if slightly caricatural) description of the trajectory of left-wing avant-garde art from the late 1910s to the early 1930s: from the subjective assault on bourgeois social norms and its (museal) institutions to  an  affirmation  of  instrumental  rationality  and  systems  of  producing  and administrating knowledge in the name of the building of socialism. To illustrate this shift, it is sufficient to compare the Dadaists' performative and semiotic disruptions  to  the  Soviet  avant-garde's  'hatred  of  everything  unorganized,'  as Sergei Tret'iakov once put it, 2 and its affirmative use of visual techniques and the archive to build ordered, politically useful systems of knowledge. As the radical left-wing avant-garde's focus turned from the criticism of bourgeois cultural institutions and subjectivities to the building of socialism-first in early Soviet Russia, but  subsequently  also  in  Weimar  Germany  and  Central  Europe-the  notion of  administration was revaluated. The tendency reached its apogee during the period of the first Five-Year Plan in the Soviet Union, when the avant-garde was concerned with the 'direct organization of the collective way of life,' 3 following 'principles of organization […], planning and purposefulness.' 4

In an essay on the Soviet avant-garde, 5 Buchloh interprets this historical sequence as one in which modernism's critical negativity is successively abandoned in favor of the instrumentalization of art by mass propaganda and totalitarian bureaucracy, notions  that  he  applies  to  fascism,  Stalinism,  and  the  late  capitalist  cultural industry, beyond their historical differences, and mediated through an Adornian critique of a 'totally administered world.' 6 In this essay, I question this interpretative  pattern  of  periodization  and  its  underlying  theoretical  assumptions  about the  intrinsic  links  between  administration  and  totalitarianism.  This  historical narrative, which emerged from leftist criticisms of Stalinist state bureaucracy and proved to be influential within the context of Western Marxist analyses of culture in  the  postwar  period,  appears  problematic  for  at  least  three  interconnected reasons: first, in political terms, it tends to subsume various forms of centralized organization of social, economic, and cultural processes, including socialist planning, under generalized notions of bureaucratization and administration, which were  modeled  after  the  critique  of  the  capitalist  state;  second,  normatively,  it upholds a questionable dichotomy of a 'good,' critically self-reflexive, autonomous avant-garde and its later functionalization under Stalinism, the historical specificity  of  which  it  fails  to  register;  and  third,  theoretically,  it  is  based  on the dismissal of empiricism, positivism, and scientism as intrinsically capitalist which  informed  the  early  Frankfurt  School's  accounts  of  instrumental  reason and its conflation of a Marxian critique of political economy and a Weberian critique of rationalization. Social and aesthetic freedom are then linked to the capacity of the autonomous subject to resist the logic of rationalization within modern  administrative  apparatus.  Aesthetics  appears  as  a  major  theoretical site of this resistance, as it provides a reservoir of concepts (first and foremost, autonomy  itself)  for  subjective  freedom  to  be  mobilized  against  the  social objectivity of administration.

The  counterargument  I  try  to  sketch  in  this  essay  revisits  the  positive  links between  socialization,  rationalization,  and  economic  planning  established  in Marxist debates of the interwar period and its resonances in aesthetic thought and practice. I therefore turn to the work of Otto Neurath, an advocate of Marxism as a form of scientific positivism, fervent defender of centralized planning in the socialization debates of the 1920s, and inventor of a pictorial method of mass education through statistics. I claim that from the perspective of Neurath's writings, planning and administration can be interpreted as part of a formative process of social freedom. I examine Neurath's engagement with statistics as a medium of collective Bildung (formation) that is as political as it is aesthetic. While Neurath's work is rarely discussed in the context of aesthetics, I argue that his perspective on socialization, which connects economic planning to broader issues of what he calls 'total life design' ( Gesamtlebensgestaltung ),  can also be apprehended as an original contribution to Marxist debates around social aesthetics. Neurath advocates a positivist materialism embedded in an Enlightenment-derived, rationalist worldview,  epitomized  in  statistics  and  social  engineering,  that  was  sought  to encompass the sensuous totality of social life, including everyday life forms and collective affects and emotions. The more social life is collectively administered and rendered transparent through the means of statistics and visual education, Neurath contends, the more it allows individuals and groups to face the objective conditions of unfreedom and achieve social freedom.

Neurath's materialism of statistics provides a heuristic framework for my discussion,  in  the  second  half  of  this  essay,  of  interwar  avant-garde  practices  in  the Soviet  Union,  Austria,  and  the  Weimar  Republic,  some  of  which  are  directly connected to Neurath's work, others of which loosely resonate with its broader concerns. The turn toward a statistical imaginary that I will trace in different communist-leaning  cultural  productions  toward  the  end  of  the  1920s-of which  Neurath's  Vienna  Method  of  Pictorial  Statistics  applied  in  the  context of urbanism and public housing programs of Red Vienna and, later, the Soviet Union is but one symptomatic example-constitutes what could tentatively be called a Marxist 'aesthetic of administration.' I argue that the aestheticization of statistics and its dissemination into everyday life is a key element of the communist avant-garde's attempt to collectively organize cultural production beyond the specialized forms of traditional artistic labor. At the historical conjuncture of the first Five-Year Plan (1928-32), the projected synchronization of economic planning and cultural production resulted-at least on the level of discourse-in a short-lived convergence between an aesthetic of administration and a collectively administered aesthetic practice.

The objective of this essay is thus twofold. First, it seeks to elucidate Neurath's theoretical  approach  toward  socialist  planning  and  statistics  as  connected  to questions of a Marxist and materialist aesthetics in the broader context of the interwar socialization debates. Neurath's writings have recently received renewed attention, as the calculation debates of the interwar period are being revisited in contemporary Marxist accounts of planned economy. 7 The present essay aims at complementing this perspective by looking at the resonance of these historical debates within the field of aesthetics. Second, the framing of visual practices of the communist avant-gardes through Neurath's positive model of statistics and planning provides an alternative to art-historical accounts of Soviet and European modernism based on anti-totalitarian critiques of administration and rationalization as well as on the normative yardstick of subjective autonomy. To be clear, such an undertaking neither invalidates the criticism of the administrative apparatus of authoritarian capitalist state formations as formulated by the (First Generation) Frankfurt  School  nor  does  it  aim  at  setting  up  the  aesthetic  of  the  plan  as  a critical model for a Marxist aesthetics beyond the specific historical constellation out  if  which  it  emerged.  Properly  understanding  the  latter,  however,  requires accounting  for  a  situation-that  of  an  'embedded  modernism' 8 -in  which communist artists and intellectuals effectively entailed the sacrifice of subjective aesthetic freedom in favor of an 'administered' practice that they hoped would realize social freedom.

## Aesthetics as Planned Science

In 1932, Marxist art historian Fritz Schiff, looking back at 'the bitter experience of the last fourteen years' of the Weimar Republic, criticized the deterministic view of history shared by many socialists, which, according to Schiff, contributed to the failure of the revolutionary project. He wrote: 'Most of the political mistakes have been ideologically legitimized by the illusionary view that social laws are analogous to natural laws.' 9 However, Schiff does not reject the adaptation  of  scientific  methods  by  a  Marxist  theory  of  society  per  se,  but  rather calls for historical materialism as a science that should not passively reflect but actively shape history. To become a 'practical science,' historical materialism must be turned into a 'planned science,' 10 a term he borrows from evolutionary biologist  Julius  Schaxel,  founder  of  the  communist-  and Freidenker -leaning publishing house journal of popular science Urania (1924-33). 11

For Schaxel, Planwissenschaft refers to the collectivization of intellectual labor in accordance with economic planning within a classless 'world labor association' to come. 12 Science in capitalism is seen as both anarchic (dependent on the 'planless rule of competition') and individualistic (based on the division between manual and intellectual labor). In contrast, a socialist or communist science will have to be 'consciously integrated into the production process.' 13 While in capitalism, the application of scientific knowledge to the productive forces of society is limited by private property to individual productive units and alienated by the irrational law of surplus accumulation, the coordination of production and distribution on the general level of society (its 'total socialization' 14 ) would both afford scientific rationality and unleash its transformative potential.  Just  like  Alexander  Bogdanov's  universal  organizational  science, which proved to be influential  on  the  communist  avant-garde  of  the  1920s and 1930s, Neurath's unitary science ( Einheitswissenschaft ) could be regarded as Planwissenschaft in Schaxel's terms. Both Bogdanov and Neurath proposed the 'socialization of knowledge' 15 from a methodically monist, system-theoretical, and enlightenment standpoint that sought to integrate the transformation of consciousness and experience with the transformation of material life.

Schaxel's  reflection  on  a  collective  administration  of  intellectual  labor  coincides,  not  accidentally,  with  the  broad  return  within  the  communist  left  of debates  on  planned  economy  in  the  aftermath  of  Stalin's  'Great Turn'  after the liberalism of the NEP (1921-28). For communist intellectuals-including writers  and  visual  artists-this  shift  entailed  thinking  through  the  question how,  in  accordance  with  planned  material  production,  mental  labor  could be  administered  collectively  beyond  the  market  and  private  production  and consumption. Within the context of Weimar Marxist intellectuals working on questions of political economy and social theory, this led to a resurgence of the socialization debates of the early 1920s. But with regard to the question of the cultural revolution, attitudes had shifted. Whereas, in the early 1920s, the  communist  cultural  scene  was  leaning  toward  the  spontaneism  of  anarchism, libertarianism, or council communism, and was generally hostile to art's administration through party apparatus, 16 the  years  between 1928 and 1933 witnessed a downright infusion of leftist avant-garde sensibilities with the idea of planning and administration.

For  the  history  of  aesthetic  theories,  this  raises  the  question:  Can aesthetics be  a  planned  science?  Or  in  other  words,  can  a  planned  aesthetics  complement the project, laid out by scientific Marxism, of a theoretical and practical homologization between a planned economy and a planned science from the vantage point of cultural production? If the project of a materialist aesthetics can be formulated as a planned aesthetics, 17 it must share core features with the idea of scientific and economic planning. These are: instrumental rationality; statistical calculability; theoretical abstraction; a functional, utilitarian attitude toward materials, forms, and techniques; transparency and objective legibility; the centralization and collective coordination of operative processes; and, most importantly, a future-oriented temporality that minimizes contingency through conscious decision-making. It seems fairly evident that all these characteristics are in contradiction to almost all the most fundamental assumptions and premises of aesthetics both as a philosophical discourse and the common-sense use of the term. With notions such as autonomy and subjective experience, 'free play' and  conceptual  indeterminacy,  intuition  and  spontaneity,  modern  aesthetic discourse is precisely positioned as realizing subjective human freedom against modern rationality with all the characteristics outlined above. Especially in its variant  as  an  (post-Kantian,  post-phenomenological,  and/or  post-Frankfurt School)  aesthetic  of  experience,  the  'aesthetic'  is  a  name  for  that  which cannot  be  planned.  In  a  similar  fashion,  the  forms  of  aesthetic  subjectivity underlining the programs of early twentieth-century avant-garde movementsfrom  the  vitalism  of  expressionism  and  futurism  to  the  Freudo-Marxism  of surrealism-all  emphasize  the  irrational  as  a  liberatory  counterforce  against scientific, economic, and social rationality seen as the hegemonic principle of capitalist modernity.

The hypothesis I wish to examine is that an aesthetic of the plan can be interpreted  as  being  consistent  with  a  formative  process  of  social  freedom.  This claim has to be sustained against some of its obvious theoretical and historical limitations: the possible interpretation of planning as a proto-cybernetic vision of  technocratic  management; fantasies of control that elide political  antagonism and repress the non-accessible conditions of social subjectivity, both in terms of the structure of the unconscious and of material and ecological infrastructures;  and its  perverted  historical  realization  as  the  nightmare  of  forced

МОСКВА

1. Vladimir Krinsky, a constructivist-symbolic representation of the communist planned economy in contrast to old Russia, ca. 1926.

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industrialization, to name but a few. If it can be shown that the framework of an aesthetic as Planwissenschaft is  consistent  with  the  Marxian concept of social-communist-freedom, then it could equally offer a historical corrective to the identification of (Western) Marxist aesthetics with an individualistic opposition against 'administration'-a position that has been by marked by the  reception  of  postwar  figures  of  Marxist  aesthetics  like  Herbert  Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, or Guy Debord.

The question of a planned aesthetics comprises at least three aspects,  which can be methodologically distinguished. These aspects contain relatively distinct conceptual definitions of 'aesthetic,' which shift depending on the contextual meaning evoked in the discourses they refer to. First, an aesthetics of the plan includes forms of visuality and mediality. The plan is, above all, a form that can be understood as a mediation of sensuous-material and theoretically and socially abstract qualities. Planning is dependent on visualization, understood as projection of a future temporality of complex social systems onto a tangible (usually two-dimensional) spatiality. In the Latin root of the word, this dependence of planning as a future-directed operation of rationalizing decisions on graphic forms of representation becomes apparent, as it refers to the surface of representation ( planus ) as evidenced by technical drawings, diagrams, and other means of visualization. The theory of operative images as advanced by philosopher and media theorist Sybille Krämer is helpful here, as it allows us to embed the historical examples of an intersection of economic and social planning with visual art within a broader perspective on epistemological and anthropological conditions of specifically modern forms of visual rationality. 18 It is within forms of operative visual abstractions in which statistical graphs, architectural models, polygraphic design, and elements of technical images intersect with the affective language of both figurative and constructive pictorial traditions that the aesthetics of the plan is articulated in the context of both Neurath's Bildstatistik and the Soviet cultural revolution (figs. 1-3).

Second, and more importantly, an aesthetic of the plan comprises the sensuous forms of everyday life that result from the economic and social realities shaped by the organizational forms of the plan. For Neurath, to whose work I will turn shortly, planning is not the affair of economic experts alone but needs to be embedded in an all-encompassing project of proletarian Bildung . Within the framework of ' Gesamtlebensgestaltung ,' 19 the  politics  of  socialization  involves 'the totality of affects, inclinations, fantasy images, institutions, and actions.' 20 It  is  at  this  point  that  the  political  project  of  socialization  acquires  an  irreducibly aesthetic dimension. And it is in this-holistic-sense, not simply as pertaining to the visual and other forms in which the plan and the knowledge it organized is (re)presented that the term 'aesthetic' should be understood in the following.

2. Mechislav Dobrokovsky, cover design for the journal Daesh ('Let's Produce'), no. 3, 1929 (detail).

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Third,  such  a  totalizing  and  systemic  approach  toward  socialization  equally informs the concrete forms of cultural production that would themselves be transformed through the implementation of the plan. This becomes particularly evident in the context of Soviet productivism, which, according to Hans Günther's account of the Bogdanovian aesthetics of Proletkult and LEF, sets out to 'organize people's representations, emotions, and moods [ Stimmungen ]' and 'to implement a rational, planned, and scientific organization […] from the standpoint of the 'all-organizing' proletariat.' 21 Oktiabr', the avant-garde group formed at the moment of the implementation of the first Five-Year Plan, proposed to revive the 'achievements of the last decades, when the methods of  the  rational  and  constructive  approaches  to  artistic  creation,  which  had been lost by the artists of the petty bourgeoisie, were restored and developed considerably.' 22 Next to the mentioned aspects of an aesthetic of the plan -both in terms of its visual forms and its social materialization in everyday life-this involves the perspective of a planned aesthetics ; namely, the question of aesthetic production and the concrete organizational forms of a transformation of artistic practice under the dictatorship of the proletariat.

## Planned Economy and Empiricist Materialism after Neurath

Neurath  formulated  his  idea  of  communist  planning  in  the  context  of  the early  twentieth-century  socialist  calculation  debate.  He  attempted  to  practically implement his concepts as economic minister of the short-lived council Republic in Munich in 1919, and he further developed his ideas in the context of museology and urban planning in the Social-Democratic-governed Vienna of the 1920s. 'To socialize an economy,' Neurath stated in an address to the Munich Workers' Council in January 1919, 'means to subject it to planned administration by society for the benefit of society ' (emphasis in the original). 23 Neurath's take on economic planning is defined by two main principles: the shift from a monetary economy to an economy in kind and the shift from smallscale private production to large-scale operations, which was already underway through  late  capitalism's  monopolistic  tendencies. 24 In  Neurath's  view,  only a centralized plan operating on the most general level of social reproduction could manage to deal with the complexity of conflicting human needs of mass populations. Society should be treated as one single gigantic organization. In contrast  to  many  Marxists  involved  in  the  calculation  debate  who  believed there should still be separate branches of private and public production and consumption, he advocated for a 'total socialization.' 25 Neurath rejected the necessity of a functional equivalent of money for acquiring privately produced goods,  like  labor  time  certificates.  For  many  socialists,  including  the  Dutch Council communists, socially necessary labor time would still play the role of a 'measure for individual consumption.' 26 While the latter position seems to be in line with a Marxian understanding of the labor theory of value, Neurath's model of a calculation  in  kind  can  be  seen  as  radicalizing  Marx's  vision  for communism-also in the sense of being more amenable to a feminist politics of social reproduction-because in Neurath's model socially mediated needs are allocated independently of the measure of productive labor. 27

According to Neurath, production in communism should be organized around the qualitative difference of needs and capacities, and not the quantitative unity of labor time, or in fact of any 'unit of calculation' at all. 28 From this perspective,  Marx's  so-called  labor  theory  of  value  has  no  validity  in  communism, where labor  is  no  longer  the  means  for  individuals  to  acquire  goods.  Labor time is only one qualitative factor of calculation among many. The aim of a centralized economic plan is to calculate the distribution of incommensurable material 'life conditions' or 'standards of living' ( Lebenslagen ), 29 such as labor, housing, health, childcare, education, and leisure. Because these conditions are necessarily incommensurable, they are also necessarily conflictual. Therefore, economic calculation (which would be carried out by economic experts as functionaries, and could today be largely done by machines) has to be combined with democratic decision making. Technical calculability (the economic plan) is  restrained  and  mediated  by  'extra-technical  considerations' 30 (the  choice between economic plans according to social needs). It is this mixture of cybernetic  social-engineering  and  a  politically  democratic  vision  of  communism that makes Neurath's position amenable to contemporary debates on economic planning. 31 Total socialization does not mean the technocratic management of populations, but rather the collective securing of material life for all.

The tool that mediates between the technical and the political dimension of economic planning is statistics. Neurath understands Marxism as an empirical social  science,  grounded  in  the  positivism  of  Ernst  Mach  and  of  the  logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle. According to his radically anti-metaphysical, scientist, and physicalist worldview, social life must be described in terms of spatio-temporal processes (consciousness is also understood in this way). The empiricism of Neurath's conception is expressed in the importance of statistical calculation,  which  both  comprehends existing social and economic relations and is directly operative in a planned economy.

In writings like Wirtschaftsplan und Naturalrechnung (1925) or Lebensgestaltung und  Klassenkampf (1928),  Neurath  addressed  both  a  scientific  and  a  proletarian lay audience to propagate his vision of a socialist planned economy. His sociological and economical thought was indebted to the universalism of the Enlightenment, which equally shows in the didactic forms of his intellectual output (apart from his writings, especially his work in museum pedagogy) that were  directed  toward  mass  audiences,  allowing  people  to  better  understand their material life conditions with the aid of empirical science. He understood Marxism as a monist, empirical sociology apt to 'tracing correlations between the social condition and the behaviour of whole classes.' 32 Neurath believed that production and distribution plans were possible on the basis of the collection  of  local  and  global  empirical  data  from  various  fields,  such  as  natural resources, working hours, leisure, consumer needs, health and safety, housing, care, and so on.

In  Neurath's  vision,  the  degree  of  happiness  of  large  populations,  as  seen  as directly  dependent  on  material  needs,  could  be  statistically  calculated  and directly factored into production and distribution plans. Statistics are, therefore, crucial. To model an Epicurean materialism into a communist cybernetic 'felicitology' ( Glückslehre ), 33 was to treat the 'happiness of the totality' ( Glück der Gesamtheit ) 34 as an 'effect of social institutions.' 35 This could be achieved by the scientific means of statistically collecting data of subjectively experienced 'states of felicity' ( Lebensstimmung ) 36 and mapping them in an 'inventory' or 'cataster,'  allowing  for  an  objective  assessment  of  the  'the  conditions  under which the totality of feeling becomes more or less pleasurable.' 37

What was at stake  for  an  administrative  and  collective  take  on  a  utilitarian and  hedonistic  ethics  was  socialism  or  communism  not  as  a  final  stage  of humanity in which ultimate happiness and freedom is achieved, but rather as a  historically  finite  stage,  contingent  on  existing  technological  developments and social relations and conditions of struggle. That happiness can-and needs to be-administered because it is situated at the level of material life conditions is a challenge to the naturalized individualism of bourgeois society, which treats  happiness  as  a  category  of  personal  achievement,  often  idealistically relegated to the spiritual realm (which, for Neurath's monist materialism, is not methodically  separate).  For  Neurath,  happiness  is  an  empirical  social  affect, not a personal ideal. But neither is socialism the final achievement of collective happiness. It does not do away with conflict, unhappiness, and unfreedom, but subjects its conditions to a conscious collective decision making.

ДАЕШЬ

12

2-ой год пятилетки

контрольные цифры на 29/30 г.

обгоняем показатели пяти

32%

ПРОМЫШЛЕННОСТЬ

прирост про-

3,5

мард. руб. - ка-

витального

11%

снижения се-

17%

211

СЕЛЬСКОЕ ХОЗЯЙСТВО

32

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ГЕКТ

превосходящий наметки второго года па-

сделает новый гигавтокия скачок.

далаво

тилетки.

По нктилетке рост продукции тлжелов

Контрольные цифры

рост

соответетвенно

# 22%

Отдельные отрасли промышленности за-

совершенно

неключительные

11%,

трокадения - 10 2У рфосфат-123%, мик-

Пятилетков

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05/21

3.500 млн. руб, Т-в. прирост в 93%.

На этой сумии до 3-х мард. будет капра-

года пятилетки требует

снижения

ваоло в тижелую индустрию. План второго

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РОСТ УРОЖАЛКОСТИ —НА Я

3. Mechislav Dobrokovsky, cover and illustrations for the journal Daesh ('Let's Produce'), no. 12, 1929.

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## Statistics as a Medium of Proletarian Bildung

In capitalist society, statistics were entirely a matter for 'government servants', or for narrow specialists; we must carry statistics to the people and make them popular.

-V. I. Lenin, 'The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government.' 38

Numbers become flags of victory.

-Otto Neurath, Lebensgestaltung und Klassenkampf . 39

Apart from being the primary instrument for economic calculation, statistics are also a key component of proletarian life in the building of socialism. For Neurath, statistics was something like a lifestyle, indeed, a proletarian aesthetics of the everyday and the medium of proletarian happiness. Because 'statistics show what social events mean for social groups' they become 'important for the  proletarian  as  the  basis  for  humane  thought.' 40 Statistics  is  considered a  form  of  practical  rationality;  that  is,  a  way  for  individuals  and  groups  to organize epistemic and affective relations of the social totality which they both constitute  and  by  which  they  are  constituted  as  a  subject.  It  is  through  the medium of statistics that individuals participate in the plan as producers and consumers, comprehend its rationale, and feel empathy for those macrosocial systemic formations outside the reach of their immediate lifeworld.

Statistics  have  the  function  to  render  transparent  large-scale  production processes to the producers themselves, to mediate between plan and production, but they also allow people to relate to the collective emotionally. 'When the collective takes the place of many individual entrepreneurs, it must know how  to  allocate  specific  amounts  of  labor,  machinery,  and  raw  materials  to ensure a certain amount of housing, food, clothing, education, entertainment, healthcare, etc.' 41 But statistics don't operate on the rational plane only; they are also considered a medium for affectively relating to the world, a medium of empathy. 'Whoever cares about the fate of the broad masses is not so much interested in how excellently a single sanatorium is set up, but rather in how many people are reached by a tuberculosis care organization and how many are discharged in improved condition.' 42 Statistics is thus a means to expand empathy and emotional involvement from the individual to the collective. The statistical abstraction of concrete individual experiences of suffering or joy is not an obstacle to empathy, but rather the condition for its collective reach.

Neurath considered the implementation of statistics into proletarian everyday life  a  key  pedagogical  task  of  a  socialist/communist  cultural  politics,  one  he sought to realize in the fields of infographics, museology, mass publication, and urban planning. Topics connected to statistics and planning-like the representation of large-scale economic processes, the collectivization of affect, and the social functionality of mass education-challenged traditional (including modernist) notions of artwork and producer and prompted what one could call a political aesthetics of planned economy. The dissemination of statistics in everyday life was also a key concern in revolutionary Soviet Russia. From the  outset,  this  involved  questions  of  an  aesthetic  pedagogy.  Its  aim  could be summarized as transforming 'dry, dead, bureaucratic accounts into living examples,' as Lenin wrote in 1918. 43

During his stay in Moscow in the winter of 1926/27, when he visited a children's sanatorium and a peasant club, Walter Benjamin noted how he was

struck by the fact that the walls of the reading room were entirely covered with visual aids. The material here consisted largely of statistics, some of which had been illustrated with little color pictures, posted here by the peasants themselves (village  life,  agricultural  development,  production  conditions,  and  cultural institutions were all recorded). 44

Tret'iakov, whose praxis as a writer consisted of immersing himself in the daily life of factories, collective farms, or sanatoriums, wrote in 1928 that one of the tasks of cultural producers is 'to draw up an inventory of the socialist economy that we are building'; in the same year, he lauded 'graphic representations,' which are better suited for representing 'tendencies and processes' than paintings. 45 T ret'iakov  also  demanded  that  the  decoration  for  street  festivities  be replaced by infographics and statistical models. As a method of socially operative literature, factography involved the deskilling of literary production through cooperatives  which  included  non-literary  specialists  as  well  as  proletarian amateur writers and photographers. The positivism, factuality, and operativity of statistics challenged the traditional forms of literary and pictorial expression which were seen as inadequate to represent both capitalist and socialist mass production and industrialization.

For  avant-garde  cultural  producers,  the  need  for  representing  the  masses  of production to the  masses  of  producers  revealed  the  limitations  of  the  traditional anthropomorphic forms of the novel and painting. In 1931, the writer Ernst Ottwalt criticized Georg Lukács's defense of the novel form against the Tatsachenroman ('novel  of  facts'-a  notion  that  some  of  the  debates  related to  the  Soviet  concept  of    'factography') 46 by  saying  that  it  is  impossible  to depict the 'gigantic reality' of the Five-Year Plan through the interactions of individual  literary  characters. 47 Bertolt  Brecht's  conception  of  epic  theatre, privileging  typified  'gestures'  over  psychological  interiority  directly  echoes Neurath's  empiricist  contention  that  for  empiricist  science  'there  are  only gestures, words, behavior, but no 'motives', no 'ego', no 'personality' beyond what  can  be  formulated  spatio-temporally.' 48 In  his Messingkauf  Dialogues , written in the late 1930s, one of the characters defines Marxism as a science that deals with 'the behaviour of large masses of people' and theater and art as means to empirical experimentation, among other things through 'graphic demonstrations' that 'help people acquire practically applicable knowledge.' 49

Film and photomontage, likewise, offered techniques to connect the bodies of the proletarian masses to their abstract representation as statistical quantities. The superposition-through the montage of shots, collage, transparent layering, or  double  exposure-of  numbers  with  bodies  was  employed  by  avant-garde practitioners as an innovative incorporation of statistics into pictorial media, whether the pictorial message is to highlight the disastrous effects of capitalist crisis on mass populations or their formation as a revolutionary subject. Image techniques of juxtaposing numerical with figurative representation were used, for example, in John Heartfield's cover of a 1924 German edition of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poem 150 000 000 , in Hans Richter's 1928 experimental short film on the economic crisis ( Inflation ), in Sergei Eisenstein's 1929 take on the industrialization  of  agriculture  ( The  Old  and  the  New ),  or  in  an  educational lantern slide film which presents Marx's Capital as a series of photomontages, produced by Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Max Bronstein (Mordecai Ardon), and Margit Téry-Buschmann  in  the  context  of  Marxist  workers'  education  ( Das Kapital , 1932-33, fig. 4).

Film,  especially,  was  seen  as  a  medium  to  overcome  the  anthropomorphism of  literature  and  painting;  a  mass  medium  in  terms  of  its  reception  and,  in the  words  of  Marxist  art  theorist  and  writer  Lu  Märten,  an  'instrument  of pictorial communication' 50 apt to embody the political, scientific, and affective aspirations of the proletariat for the building of socialism. This is because film is better suited to representing the subject matter of 'mass events, mass destinies, and [mass] experiences' than theater and literature. 51 The dramatic and epic forms of theater and the novel, which are 'supported by individual action and the unity of time,' fail when it comes to depicting the dynamic collective experience of the present, which is monumental in character and involves 'historical unities  and  quantitative  experiences'  ( geschichtliche  Einheiten,  Erlebnisse  in Quantitäten ). 52 Moreover, it is because of film's formal ability to sensually organize the proletariat's structure of experience on the basis of industrial technology that it qualifies, for Märten, as the medium of proletarian Bildung par excellence. Thus, particularly the Kulturfilm or scientific educational film struck Märten as promising the potential of the new medium.

Lantern  slides  were  also  used  in  the  Gesellschafts-  und  Wirtschaftsmuseum's educational  activities . Neurath's  inspiration  for  the  visual  language  of  his

((

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Denhganu Arbeitsuchenden ist der Eintritl universal system of infographics (Wiener Bildstatistik), however, came originally from painting. The figurative constructivism of the council-communist-leaning Cologne Progressives provided Neurath with a model of pictorial representation, in which naturalist detail is sacrificed to make way for a clear geometrical organization of pictorial space, and in which all individual traits of the human figure are effaced in order to mark individuals as types of larger social groups. In 1929, the graphic artist Gerd Arntz became Neurath's closest collaborator and designer of the pictograms for the method of visual statistics. 53 Both the paintings of Franz Wilhelm Seiwert and the political graphics of Arntz employ the flatness of the two-dimensional picture plane as an epistemic tool for representing the objective laws of social  orders,  oscillating  between  a  depiction  of  an  alienated  capitalist reality and the organizational strength of the proletariat. 54

4. Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Max Bronstein, Margit Téry-Buschmann, photomontages for Das Kapital , 1932-33. Positive film for slide show.

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From 1923 onwards, Seiwert developed a semiotic conception of painterly representation, in which recurring symbols (sun, smokestack, locomotive, hammer and sickle, etc.) replace naturalistic depiction, anticipating the graphic abstraction of Bildstatistik .  In a way, Seiwert's paintings are already diagrams, 'hybrids of the iconic and the discursive,'  to  use  Sybille  Krämer's  and  Christina  Ljungberg's  formulation. 55 Defying spatial depth, they not only oppose romantic interiority-that which Neurath calls the 'mysterious power of the individual personality' 56 -as a fetish of the bourgeois class, but also the representational mode of social realism. 57 This can be illustrated by comparing Seiwert's painting Die Arbeitsmänner (1925, fig.  5)  with  Otto  Griebel's Die  Internationale (1929-30),  both  programmatic depictions of the international proletariat as a revolutionary subject. In Griebel's painting  the  virtual  infinity  of  the  mass  is  depicted  through  spatial  layering, whereas in Seiwert's painting, the same subject is conveyed by means of a tectonic organization of the picture plane. Such a mode of pictorial representation corresponds well with Neurath's anti-metaphysical, scientist interpretation of Marxism for which 'there are no 'depths'; there is surface everywhere.' 58 It was precisely such a semiotic conception of the image as diagram that Neurath would adapt for his method of visual statistics, in which schematized two-dimensional shapes of human figures and objects are conveyed to signal quantitative relationships.

## The Total Socialization of Art: The Example of Oktiabr'

The integration of visual art and statistics intensified in Soviet Russia with the first Five-Year Plan, from 1928 onward. It was at this conjuncture that the aesthetics of the plan first fully corresponded with a planned aesthetics; that is, with an attempt to fully socialize and collectivize cultural production itself. In April 1929, when the full-scale variant of the plan was confirmed, the Central Committee of  the  Bolshevik  Party  also  decided  on  the  'development  of  a  unified  plan  of artistic labor that could be coordinated and discussed with the mass of workers in the factories and carried out with their direct participation.' 59 A year earlier, the theorists of the organization of art workers, Oktiabr' (the last avant-garde group of the Soviet Union), had sketched a program for coordinating the activities  of  graphic  and  interior  designers,  architects,  poster  artists,  photographers, painters,  textile  artists,  filmmakers,  and  other  professionally  trained  artists  to collaborate  with  untrained  amateurs  in  factories  and  workers'  clubs.  Oktiabr's core members consisted mainly of constructivists and productivists (Aleksei Gan, Aleksander Rodchenko, Gustav Klutsis, Valentina Kulagina, El Lissitzky, and the Vesnin brothers are some of the familiar names), but also included, crucially, the figurative  painter  Aleksandr  Deineka.  The  group's  (short-lived)  success  was  an immediate result of the left political turn in the reconstruction period, and its rationale was to provide an alternative to at least three distinct artistic movements that were dominant in the art system during the NEP years: the realists of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR, 1922-28, continued as AKhR from 1928-32), the figurative modernists of the Society of Easel Painters (OST, 1925-32), and the formalist variant of constructivism and factography represented  by  the  members  of  the  journals  LEF  (1923-25)  and  Novy  LEF (1927-29).  The  aesthetic  and  political  program  of  Oktiabr',  announced  as 'proletarian realism,' 60 proposed a synthesis of, on the one hand, an affectively charged visual  propaganda  which  included  Deineka's  painterly  representations of the proletarian body, the documentary photography of Rodchenko and his pupils, as well as the 'polygraphic' printed arts of photomontage, typography, book  design,  journals,  and,  most  importantly,  poster  design,  and  production art on the other hand. The latter aspect consisted of architecture and industrial design, but it included, crucially, artist brigades in factories, the construction of workers' clubs and several initiatives for lay cultural production.

5. Franz Wilhelm Seiwert, Die Arbeitsmänner [The workingmen], 1925. Oil on canvas, 69.4 × 90 cm. Kunstpalast Düsseldorf.

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As Christina Kiaer writes in her recent book on Deineka, the political aim of the group was to fully decommodify artmaking, organizing it 'outside the capitalist market, laterally and in the collective interest.' 61 Oktiabr's slogan from an art for the masses to an art of the masses signaled the socialization of art as a link between coordinated deskilling and general polytechnical education. From the perspective of socialization, the art system had to be treated like a large-scale operation, in which professional artists assume the role of administrators of collective production,  eventually  leading  to  ever  higher  degrees  of  permeability,  both  between professionals and non-professionals, and between different sets of techniques and skills. This conception of an administered mass culture is echoed in Benjamin's claim that the 'polytechnical formation of man' is the positive flipside of the general deskilling of proletarian labor; the critique of artistic autonomy and the specialization of skills in the name of 'an active and practical universality: the universality of readiness.' 62 Neurath's ideal of economic and social planning, in which centralization does not reduce but multiplies the diversity of skills, needs, and life  forms,  and  in  which  the  social  engineering  of  planning  experts  coexists with democratic decision-making, seems to resonate within this conception. Needless to say, such a conception is hardly compatible with the specialized skill set of easel painting, which is bound to the studio, as a production facility of private  small-scale  producers.  Operating  on  a  thin  line  between  the  collective and lateral socialization of cultural production and the forced synchronization of intellectual with industrialized factory work, the Oktiabr' group embodied the politics of the cultural revolution 'to eliminate [the] disproportion between the development of art and the socioeconomic development of our country.' 63

6. Anonymous (Fritz Schulze?), Fünfjahrplan , 1931. Woodcut, printed in Stross von links 6 (1931).

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In  September  1930,  members  of  the  German  Association  of  Revolutionary Artists exhibited works of the Oktiabr' group in Berlin under the title An der Front  des  Fünfjahrplans (On the frontline of the five-year  plan).  In  his  review of the show for the German Communist Party's (KPD) paper Rote Fahne ,  the critic  Alfréd  Kemény  highlighted  the  fact  that  no  paintings  were  shown,  and that the most important group of exhibits, next to posters, photomontages, and book designs, was constituted by 'architectural projects […] of the great socialist cities, which are to be erected within the framework of the Five-Year Plan.' 64 Iwan Matsa (János Mácza), theoretician of Oktiabr', also mentions architecture as a leading discipline of the new synthetic organizational form of aesthetic practice:

Our art still faces the great task of developing an artistic, emotionally accentuated, and rhythmically structured representation of the dialectical and materialist understanding of our organized and planned proletarian reality […]. The constructive principle [which has so far prevailed only in architecture], that is, the principle of organization, planning, and rationalization, must now and in the future be organically applied to all forms of art. 65

With  its  functionalist  orientation  and  future-oriented  outlook,  architecture serves as a general metaphor for an aesthetic of the plan; as it also did in Neurath's writings on the administrative economy: 'The preparation of an economic plan,' he writes, 'is comparable to the design of an architectural plan,' because after all, 'the architect more than any other creative person must seek to anticipate the future.' 66 In the experimental forms of the visual avant-garde, the architectural plan and the other key medium of an aesthetic of administration, the visualization of statistics, are combined on the same graphic plane.

Statistical infographics were heavily present in the visual culture of the Oktiabr' group. In all the fourteen issues of its magazine Daesh published between 1928 and1929, next to Deineka's aquarelle drawings, Dmitrii Moor's caricatures, and the documentary series of Rodchenko and Boris Ignatovich, graphs and diagrams spread out over the pages to register the rapid growth of the country's industrialization.  The  journal's  combination  of  abstract  and  concrete,  factographic GROWTH OF LITERACY AMONG MEMBERS OF USSR INDUSTRIAL UNIONS

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7. Ivan Ivanitsky, illustrations in The Struggle for Five Years in Four (State Publishing House of Fine Arts, 1932).

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and  figurative,  affective  and  cognitive  forms  of  representation  amounts  to  an aestheticization of statistics, giving a living form to the administrative tasks of industrializing the country and building socialism (fig. 3).

The activities  of  Oktiabr'  coincide  with  Neurath's  and  Arntz's  work  of  implementing their Vienna Method of Bildstatistik in the context of the Soviet Five-Year Plan. From 1931 to 1934, Neurath collaborated with the All-Union Institute of Statistics (IZOSTAT), which resulted in a number of book publications, mostly in  collaboration  with  the  graphic  designer  Ivan  Ivanitsky  (fig.  7). 67 Neurath's expectations (he considered the Soviet Union an ideal field of application of his pictorial statistics) were quickly disappointed however, since his abstracted and soberly objective principles of design did not prevail against the need for Soviet propaganda to heroically stage the projected success of surpassing the Western capitalist countries in economic and industrial power. 68 In most Soviet infographics  of  the  time,  the  tendentiousness  of  the  representations  (in  the Soviet Union, the graphs always go up) and their recourse to both naturalist and caricatural depictions are alien to Neurath's visual education, firmly rooted in scientific objectivity (fig. 8).

The  synthesis  of  statistics  and  figurative  representation  through  simplified pictograms-Neurath's  solution  to  visual  education-was  given  up  when conventional  methods  of  visualizing  statistics  were  combined  with  heroic or  caricatural  representations  of  social  types  such  as  workers  or  capitalists. 69 Nevertheless,  before  the  hegemony  of  Socialist  realism  was  consolidated  in 1934,  Neurath's  method  had  an  impact  on  Soviet  visual  politics  under  the 'dictatorship of the proletariat.' It is in this relatively brief conjuncture, between 1928 and 1932, at the tipping point between avant-garde productivism and Socialist realism, 70 that the experiment of a planned aesthetics coincided with an  aesthetics  of  the  plan;  where  a  figurative  'realism'  of  'collective  affect' 71 could  coincide  with  abstract  pictorial  means  of  statistically  representing  the economy; and where the radical productivist vision of a total socialization of art had a short-lived revival.

## Abstraction and Empathy

Statistical  abstraction  and  its  visual  correlates,  diagrammatic  techniques  of representation, constitute the main formal element of a socialist aesthetic of administration.  As  we  have  seen,  this  tendency  toward  abstraction  is  counterbalanced,  in  the  art  of  the  cultural  revolution,  by  the  need  to  give  more sensuously  concrete  forms  to  the  collective  as  a  'living'  dynamic  totality. This exigency is expressed in various forms, from the naturalist representation of  AkhR-which,  from  1932  onwards,  would  inform  the  style  of  Socialist

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8. Nicolai Kochergin, 'Capitalist England Trembled,' poster produced as part of the postcard series, 'To Catch Up with and Surpass the Leading Capitalist Countries in Technical and Economic Affairs in 10 Years,' 1931.

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realism-to  the  propagandistic  montage  forms  of  the  polygraphic  designers which continued the Bogdanovian tradition of factography as a 'life-building' activity.  The  'building  of  dialectical  models  of  tomorrow,'  as  factographer Nikolai Fedorovich Chuzhak put it, 72 involved an immersion in the material fabric  of  the  present.  Oktiabr's  attempt  at  synthesizing  these  traditions-a 'dress  rehearsal  for  Socialist  Realism,' 73 in  Kiaer's  words-can  be  summarized  as  an  affective,  imaginary,  and  figurative  embodiment  of  the  statistical reality of the plan.

Neurath  hoped  that  the  communist  transformation  of  social  institutions would bring about a new quality of socialized affect. Such affective configuration  would be different not only from the egotistic feelings of resentment linked  to  capitalist  property  and  competition-and  its  collectivized  version of aggressive nationalism and imperialism-but also from moral altruism and traditional notions of community. The main reason for this difference is that for Neurath-whose empiricist and utilitarianist outlook made him skeptical toward  all  forms  of  moral  justification-'community  feeling'  was  not  seen in  opposition  to,  but  rather  as  an  effect  of  scientific  reason,  technological rationalization, and social abstraction.

Where  does  one  find  most  future-oriented  thought  and  community?  In  the proletariat! Where does one meet most of the productive organization of the future? In trusts, in large banks, in public institutions! Organization and the ideology of socialism have not yet found each other. The customers of a banking house do not feel patriotism of accounts. Devotion to cartels or national railways is as uncommon as love for trusts. And yet everyone will one day rejoice in the institutions of socialist administrative economy as though it was his own affair. The place once taken by tribe, church, country, nation, etc., will then be taken by the socialist order of life. 74

Exactly  opposed  to  the  various  romantic  and  vitalist  critiques  of  capitalist modernity  that  subtended  many  of  the  ideological  programs  of  the  early avant-gardes-especially  in  Germany,  where Gemeinschaft was  programmatically opposed to Gesellschaft 75 -collective sentiment was seen by Neurath as a function of mass organization. The advanced organizational forms of capitalist economy-banks, trusts, even the war economy-already contained the principles of socialization which needed to be politically appropriated through the dictatorship of the proletariat. 76 Proposing the language of organizational and statistical abstractions as a medium of 'community feeling' might not dispel the skeptical Freudian rejoinder that the 'human love of aggression' accounts for the illusory nature of any notion of universal affective bonds-and that, therefore, communism is an 'untenable illusion.' 77 It can, however, be considered a necessary step toward a political aesthetic that relates individuals to the social  totality  without  the  necessity  of  concrete  figuration  of  a  community.

From this perspective, Neurath's socialization of affect can be connected to the program of a communism of abstraction. 78

## Communist Administration

The farcical elements of the later official infographics of the first and second Five-Year Plans (fig. 8) can be deciphered as involuntary caricatures, both of the emancipatory intentions of a 'universal statistics' as proposed by Neurath, and of the operative 'proletarian realism' of cultural-revolutionary groups like Oktiabr'. The political optimism that also drives Neurath's work-and indeed that of many of his contemporary comrades-was perverted into the modeling of a fictional future reality, which exists only on paper, as an aesthetic representation of the victory of socialism in the imperialist race against the Western capitalist  economies.  That  the  positive  links  between  economic  planning, statistics as a tool of enlightenment Bildung , and the socialization of intellectual and artistic labor have been eclipsed in critical thought is undoubtedly a consequence of their perversion by the counterrevolutionary farce of Stalinism. The postwar left, however, has thrown out the baby of a planned economy with the bathwater of Stalinist bureaucracy. Arguing, as I have done in this essay, for an aesthetic theory that revitalizes the interwar project of socialization as a project of aesthetic Bildung does not invalidate the Frankfurt School's critique of the administrative apparatus of state socialism. It does, however, question the undialectical identification of aesthetic freedom with subjective freedom that turned out to be one of its main results-one that was retroactively projected onto the histories of the interwar Soviet and European avant-gardes as well. 79 There are different historical reasons for this: the Trotskyist notion of art as a 'free revolutionary activity,' popular among the anti-Stalinist left of the 1930s; 80 the embracing of political liberalism as a force of resistance against fascism in the context of the post-war Frankfurt School; 81 the shift from notions of social liberation to subjective, cultural, and aesthetic liberation in the post-1968 left; and the  anti-Enlightenment  sentiments  of  postmodernism  are  among  these. Revisiting the aesthetics of administration from the perspective of the historical conjuncture of the Soviet cultural revolution might provide resources to reconceptualize planning as consistent with the formation of social freedom.

Planning is not freedom, but the rational organization of the realm of necessity  in  order  to  increase  the  realm  of  freedom.  To  determine  the  needs  for freedom,  planning  is  necessary.  As  Neurath  writes,  'it  is  important  to  note that a person's state of felicity is not already determined by how much gardenland is available to him; one must also indicate how much free time he has at his  disposal  to  use  it.' 82 Planning  involves  not  only  the  incommensurability and multidirectionality of social needs, it also involves forms of conflict and power; one could say it is a form to collectively administer the condition of unfreedom-the realm of necessity-more than a realized  state  of  freedom. Differently  put,  it  is  the  realization  of  freedom as making the conditions of unfreedom available to conscious decision-making. To borrow from Benjamin, one could speak of an aesthetic of administration in the same way in which he characterizes a technologically mediated education: 'a mastery of not nature but of the relation between nature and man.' Not, 'as the imperialists teach,' 83 domination  over  nature-and  by  nature,  we  can  understand  the  'outer' nature of material life conditions as well as the 'inner' nature of the subject's unconscious and affects-but still a form of mastery. It is this organizational aspect that conflicts with the modern understanding of aesthetic activity as a realm of free subjectivity.

Likewise,  the  artists  I  have  discussed  in  this  essay  did  not  see  art  as  a  free activity. Rather, they understood art as an activity that is subordinated to the necessities  of  political  struggle.  Such  a  stance  can  be  linked  to  what  Kristin Romberg,  in  her  study  of  Oktiabr'  member  Aleksei  Gan,  described  as  'an aesthetics of embeddedness,' by which she means practices which are formed 'under  pressure'  of  political  and  social  reality.  If  this  aesthetics  is  about freedom, then it is about 'the freedom to make a collective choice about forms of unfreedom.' 84 The  socialization and collectivization of art is not per se a utopian ideal for them, but rather a finite historical necessity for the building of socialism. Neurath's approach to proletarian Bildung is important to consider when it comes to the problems of the aesthetic figuration of the collective, as he is careful to distinguish between the necessity of aesthetically representing political struggle-through an aesthetic of administration, so to speak-from the aesthetic figuration of a future classless community:

Today it is hardly possible to visualize the community life of the future except perhaps when we endeavor to depict the structure of socialist production and distribution. Then, one might occasionally also consider what the feelings and actions  of  individuals  may  be  like  who  feel  bound  to  one  another  for  better or  worse-uplifted  by  a  sense  of  community,  yet  perhaps  also  increasingly burdened by a bond they would rather escape. 85

Neurath's  reflections  here  point  to  the  necessity  of  including  asociality  as  a necessary condition for a free sociality. To repeat, total socialization does not mean the subordination of the individual under a collective, but the central planning and coordination of those life conditions that are required to achieve individual  freedom.  Neurath  is  skeptical  of  any  vision  of  future  communist planning  that  eliminates  contingency.  Despite  his  cybernetic  take,  he  does not see the future as statistically  manageable. Rather, he sees socialism-the political  path  to  communism-as  a  process  of  practical  transformation  of material conditions, consciousness, and affects, one which necessarily involves failures, contingencies, and historical defeats. Neurath's political optimism is grounded in an aesthetic ideal of Bildung . Its law is the tendency of rationalization, embedded in the social relations of capitalist modernity which have to be transformed through political action. This means striving for a totally administered communist world in which the maximum 'happiness of the totality' would  be  achieved.  Communism,  then,  may  be  likened  to  Freud's  pleasure principle: 'The programme for attaining happiness which [it] imposes on us, cannot be fulfilled; yet we must not-indeed, we cannot-give up our efforts to bring it nearer to fulfilment by some means or other.' 86

- 1   Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 'Conceptual Art 19621969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,' October 55 (1990): 105-43.
- 2   Sergej Tretjakow, 'Woher und Wohin? Perspektiven des Futurismus [1923],' in Gesichter der Avantgarde: Porträts -Essays -Briefe (AufbauVerlag, 1985), 38-53. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the German are my own.
- 3   October-Association of Artistic Labor, 'Declaration [1928],' in Russian Art of the AvantGarde: Theory and Criticism 1902-1934 , ed. John E. Bowlt (The Viking Press, 1976), 273-79.
- 4   Alfred Kurella, 'Von der 'Kunst des revolutionären Rußlands' zur 'proletarischen Kunst' [1928],' quoted in Hubertus Gaßner, 'Von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft und zurück,' in 'Kunst in die Produktion!' sowjetische Kunst während der Phase der Kollektivierung und Industrialisierung 1927-1933 , ed. Veronika Ambros (Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, 1977), 87.
- 5   Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 'From Faktura to Factography,' October 30 (1984): 83-119.
- 6   Theodor W. Adorno quoted in Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, 'Marcel Broodthaers: Open Letters, Industrial Poems,' in Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (MIT Press, 2003), 97. Buchloh does not give the exact source for this formulation. The expression 'administered world' ( verwaltete Welt ) is used frequently in Adorno's, Horkheimer's, and Marcuse's writings from the 1940s onwards. On the Frankfurt School's discussion of administration in the context of theories of state capitalism and totalitarianism, see Deborah Cook, 'Adorno on Late Capitalism: Totalitarianism and the Welfare State,' Radical Philosophy 89 (1998): 16-26.
- 7   See Aaron Benanav, 'Socialist Investment, Dynamic Planning, and the Politics of Human Need,' Rethinking Marxism 34, no. 2 (2022): 193-204; Gareth Dale, 'The Technocratic Socialism of Otto Neurath,' Jacobin , February 20, 2023, https://jacobin.com/2023/02/technocraticsocialism-otto-neurath-utopianism-capitalism; Jan Groos and Christoph Sorg, eds., Creative Construction: Democratic Planning in the 21st Century and Beyond , (Bristol University Press, 2025); Jacob Blumenfeld, 'The Socialization Debate: Revolutionary Confusion after the German Revolution of 1918,' Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 46, no. 1 (2025): 93-122. For an account of Neurath's work in the context of art and aesthetics, see Sven Lütticken, 'Plan and Council: Genealogies of Calculation, Organization and Transvaluation,' Grey Room 91 (2023): 92-127.
- 8   Kristin Romberg, Gan's Constructivism: Aesthetic Theory for an Embedded Modernism (University of California Press, 2018).
- 9   Fritz Schiff, Die grossen Illusionen der Menschheit (Urania Freidenker Verlag, 1932), 73.
- 10   Schiff, Die grossen Illusionen , 78.
- 11  On Schaxel, see Nick Hopwood, 'Biology between University and Proletariat: The Making of a Red Professor,' History of Science 35, no. 4 (1997): 367-424.
- 12   Julius Schaxel, Das Weltbild der Gegenwart und seine gesellschaftlichen Grundlagen (Urania Freidenker-Verlag, 1932), 58-59.
- 13   Schaxel, Das Weltbild der Gegenwart , 60.
- 14   See Otto Neurath, Vollsozialisierung: Von der nächsten und übernächsten Zukunft (Eugen Diederichs, 1920) and Otto Neurath, 'Total Socialization [1920],' in Empiricism and Sociology , ed. Marie Neurath and Robert S. Cohen (Springer Netherlands, 1973), 156-57.
- 15   Maria Chehonadskih, Alexander Bogdanov and the Politics of Knowledge after the October Revolution (Springer International, 2023), 101.
- 16  For an account of the communist avant-garde's opposition to the KPD in the early years of the Weimar Republic, see Martin I. Gaughan, The German Left and Aesthetic Politics: Cultural Politics between the Second and Third Internationals (Brill, 2022).
- 17   More recent discussions on a Marxist aesthetics of the plan include 'The Aesthetics of the Plan and the Limits of Transition,' in Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (Zero Books, 2015) and Lütticken, 'Plan and Council.'
- 18   Flatness, directionality, graphism, referentiality, operativity, and the reduction of complexity are the main characteristics of what Krämer calls operative images; see Sybille Krämer, 'Operative Bildlichkeit. Von der ,Grammatologie' zu einer ,Diagrammatologie'? Reflexionen über erken -nendes Sehen,' in Logik des Bildlichen: Zur Kritik der ikonischen Vernunft , ed. Martina Hessler and Dieter Mersch (transcript Verlag, 2009), 94-122. According to her hypothesis of a diagrammatology , conceptual thinking is always already mediated by these forms of medial operativity. For diagrammatic representation in the visual arts, see Susanne Leeb, ed., Materialität der Diagramme: Kunst und Theorie (b\_books, 2012) and Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt, Die Kunst der Diagrammatik: Perspektiven eines neuen bildwissenschaftlichen Paradigmas (transcript Verlag, 2017), the latter including case studies on Neurath's Wiener Bildstatistik and Soviet infographics.
- 19  Otto Neurath, Lebensgestaltung und Klassenkampf (E. Laubesche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1928), 7. 'Gesamtlebensgestaltung' could be translated as 'total formation of life.' The translation 'whole pattern of personal life,' which is kept in the translation of the book title, is rather unfortunate, because it misses the collective and social dimensions of Neurath's conception of life; see Otto Neurath, 'Personal Life and Class Struggle [1928],' in Neurath and Cohen, Empiricism and Sociology , 249.
- 20   Otto Neurath, Wirtschaftsplan und Naturalrechnung (E. Laubesche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1925), 88.
- 21   Hans Günther, 'Proletarische und Avantgardistische Kunst: Die Organisationsästhetik Bogdanovs und die LEF-Konzeption der 'lebensbauenden' Kunst,' Ästhetik und Kommunikation 4, no. 12 (1973): 69.
- 22   October, 'Declaration,' 273.

- 23   Otto Neurath, 'Wesen und Weg der Sozialisierung: Gesellschaftstechnisches Gutachten, vorgetragen in der 8. Vollsitzung des Münchner Arbeiterrates am 25. Januar 1919,' in Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung, Sozialismus und logischer Empirismus , ed. Rainer Hegselmann (Suhrkamp, 2016), 243.
- 24   Neurath became a socialist during the years of WW1. Unlike most of his peers in the Germanspeaking intelligentsia, he neither saw the war as a cathartic event which would spark cultural renewal, nor did he oppose it in terms of pacifism. Rather, he identified the war economy as a model for socialism. It seemed to him that the gigantic mobilization of forces by a centralized state apparatus announced the definitive transition from a mode of production based on market exchange and the competition of private producers to a fully socialized, use-value centered, planned economy, or in his own terms, from an economy of circulation ( Verkehrswirtschaft ) to an economy of administration ( Verwaltungswirtschaft ). What in capitalism appears only as a state of exception and at the cost of millions of lives, he wagered, could, in socialism, effectively provide the basis for a pacified economy for the benefit of humanity. See Otto Neurath, Durch die Kriegswirtschaft zur Naturalwirtschaft (Georg D. W. Callwey, 1919).
- 25   Neurath, 'Total Socialization.'
- 26   See Gruppe Internationaler Kommunisten, Grundprinzipien kommunistischer Produktion und Verteilung: Kollektivarbeit der Gruppe internationaler Kommunisten, Holland, 1930 , ed. Paul Mattick (Blankertz, 1970), 69.
- 27   On the tensions between Neurath and council communism, see also Lütticken, 'Plan and Council,' 103-8. I agree with Lütticken's assessment that centralization from above and decentral self-organization from below are 'dialectically intertwined' (108) in both Neurath's and the GIK's approach to communist planning. However, I would stress as a fundamental difference that Neurath radically rejects any politics of autonomous self-administration, which makes his position irreconcilable with most of the anarchist-leaning council communists in the 1920s. Neurath makes it clear that communist socialization needs to happen on the most general level of society and it would be 'erroneous to assume that a single factory is 'socialized' simply because the workers have taken control of it. […] After all, how could a single workers' council or individual production cooperative possibly guarantee the overall planning of the economy?' (Neurath, 'Wesen und Weg,' 244.)
- 28   Neurath, 'Personal Life,' 263-64 (translation modified).
- 29   Neurath derives his conception of Lebenslage both from methods of measuring 'standards of living' in mainstream economics and from the writings of Marx and Engels, particularly the latter's 'Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England' (1845). See Neurath, Wirtschaftsplan und Naturalrechnung , 20, and at 25, where a planned economy consists in the direct, nonmarket mediated administration and distribution of life conditions ( Lebenslagenverteilung ).
- 30   Neurath, 'Personal Life,' 263 (translation modified). Such non-quantifiable, extra-technical considerations include the diversity of bodily needs and capacities of people (as producers and consumers) as well as natural resources and ecological systems. It is crucial that these considerations include the option not to produce if the effects of a specific branch of production, for instance, are considered harmful for people and the environment.
- 31   See Aaron Benanav's 'How to Make a Pencil,' where he draws on Neurath's model and argues for a digitally mediated socialism which integrates algorithms (which replace Neurath's social engineers) and what he calls democratically decided 'protocols.' Other recent proposals for both digitally mediated and democratically controlled planning scenarios that are, in my view, compatible with Neurath's approach without referencing it directly include: Planning for Entropy, 'Democratic Economic Planning, Social Metabolism and the Environment,' Science & Society 86, no. 2 (2022): 291-313; Achim Szepanski, 'Derivative QuantumField Communism,' NON/Mille Plateaux , 2023, https://non-milleplateaux. de/derivative-quantumfield-communism/; Max Grünberg, 'The Planning Daemon: Future Desire and Communal Production,' Historical Materialism 31, no. 4 (2023): 115-59.
- 32   Otto Neurath, 'Sociology in the Framework of Physicalism (1931),' in Philosophical Papers 1913-1946 , ed. Robert Sonné Cohen and Marie Neurath (Springer Netherlands, 1983), 419. As a form of monist empiricism, there is no space for a dialectic between being and consciousness, or essence and appearance, in Neurath's Marxism. In other words, Neurath's Marx is a Marx without Hegel.
- 33   Otto Neurath, 'Die Utopie als gesellschaftstechnische Konstruktion,' in Wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung, Sozialismus und logischer Empirismus , ed. Rainer Hegselmann (Suhrkamp, 2016), 239. For the epicurean background, see the chapter 'Marx and Epicurus,' in Neurath, 'Personal Life,' 282-90. For an assessment of Neurath's hedonistic ethics within the context of the Vienna Circle, see Joshua Stuchlik, 'Felicitology: Neurath's Naturalization of Ethics,' HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 1, no. 2 (2011): 183-208.
- 34   Neurath, Wirtschaftsplan und Naturalrechnung , 106.
- 35   Neurath, 'Die Utopie,' 239.

- 36   Neurath, Wirtschaftsplan und Naturalrechnung , 271. The concept of Stimmung is derived from the philosophical context of aesthetic idealism, see David Wellbery, 'Stimmung,' in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe. 5: Postmoderne - Synästhesie , ed. Karlheinz Barck (J. B. Metzler, 2003), 312-30. It is characteristic for Neurath's materialism that it includes the subjective aesthetic dimension of the objects of sociological analysis as 'sensuous beings' ( empfindende Wesen ; Neurath, Wirtschaftsplan und Naturalrechnung , 272). Neurath gives these concepts a cybernetic twist, depriving them of romantic interiority and making them available for scientific calculation.
- 37   Otto Neurath, 'Inventory of the Standard of Living,' Zeitschrift Für Sozialforschung 6, no. 1 (1937): 140-51. The same issue contains a sharp polemic of Max Horkheimer against Neurath's positivism: Max Horkheimer, 'Der neueste Angriff auf die Metaphysik,' Zeitschrift Für Sozialforschung 6, no. 1 (1937): 4-53.
- 38   V. I. Lenin, 'The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government [1918],' in Collected Works , vol. 27, 4th English edition (Progress Publishers, 1972), 235-77, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ works/1918/mar/x03.htm.
- 39   Neurath, Lebensgestaltung und Klassenkampf , 115.
- 40   Neurath, 'Personal Life,' 252 (translation modified).
- 41   Neurath, Lebensgestaltung und Klassenkampf , 115-16. The chapter 'Statistik und Sozialismus' is missing in the partial English translation of the book as Neurath, 'Personal Life.'
- 42   Neurath, Lebensgestaltung und Klassenkampf , 123.
- 43   Lenin, 'Immediate Tasks.'
- 44   Walter Benjamin, Moscow Diary , ed. Gary Smith (MIT Press, 1986 [December 28, 1926]), 49-50.
- 45   Sergej Tretjakov, 'Literarische Vierfelderwirtschaft [1828],' in Die Arbeit des Schriftstellers: Aufsätze, Reportagen, Porträts , ed. Heiner Boehncke and Karla Hielscher (Rowohlt, 1972), 80.
- 46   Georg Lukács, 'Reportage oder Gestaltung? Kritische Bemerkungen anlässlich des Romans von Ottwalt,' Die Linkskurve 4, no. 7 (1932): 23-29. Lukács's criticism was mainly directed against Ottwalt as an exemplary representative of what in the Weimar debate at the time was called 'Reportage' (literary journalism); it could easily be read as a criticism of Tret'iakov's factography (briefly referenced in Lukács's essay) as well, which was popularized among the Weimar intelligentsia through a lecture Tret'iakov delivered in Berlin in January 1931; see Hugh Ridley, 'Tretjakov in Berlin,' in Culture and Society in the Weimar Republic , ed. Keith Bullivant (Manchester University Press, 1977), 150-65. Lukács's essay was also published in Russian translation in 1933, see Devin Fore, Soviet Factography: Reality without Realism (University of Chicago Press, 2024), 60.
- 47   Ernst Ottwalt, ''Tatsachenroman' und Formexperiment: Eine Entgegnung an Georg Lukács,' Die Linkskurve 4, no. 10 (1932): 21-26. Ottwalt's response clearly shows the impact of Tret'iakov's speech, which was printed as Sergej Tretjakov, 'Der Schriftsteller und das Sozialistische Dorf,' Das Neue Rußland 7, no. 2/3 (1931).
- 48   Otto Neurath, 'Empirical Sociology: The Scientific Content of History and Political Economy [1931],' in Neurath and Cohen, Empiricism and Sociology , 325.
- 49   Bertolt Brecht, 'Messingkauf, or Buying Brass,' in Brecht on Performance , ed. Tom Kuhn, Steve Giles, and Marc Silberman (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 49. One could argue that from the early 1930s onwards, Brecht's Marxism owes as much to Neurath's positivism as to Karl Korsch's pragmatism. On Brecht as a reader of Neurath, see also Steve Giles, 'Bertolt Brecht, Logical Empiricism and Social Behaviourism,' in Bertolt Brecht and Critical Theory: Marxism, Modernity and the Threepenny Lawsuit (Lang, 1997), 63-80.
- 50   Lu Märten, 'Workers and Film [1928],' ed. Jenny Nachtigall and Kerstin Stakemeier, October 178 (2021): 30.
- 51   Märten, 32. Eisenstein's Potemkin is given as an example.
- 52   Lu Märten, 'Unterscheidungen und Zusammenhänge - Über die Rolle des Films im Theater,' unpublished manuscript, Lu Märten Archive, IISG, Amsterdam, Portfolio 42, c. 1927, pp. 1-2.
- 53   From the broad literature on Neurath's collaboration with Arntz in the context of Wiener Bildstatistik , see only Johan Frederik Hartle, 'Otto Neurath's Visual Politics: An Introduction to 'Pictorial Statistics Following the Vienna Method,'' ARTMargins 6, no. 1 (2017): 98-107 with further references.
- 54   For an account that links Seiwert's painting to Neurath's idea of collective empathy, see chapter 11 of Sabine Hake, The Proletarian Dream: Socialism, Culture, and Emotion in Germany, 1863-1933 (De Gruyter, 2017).
- 55   Sybille Krämer and Christina Ljungberg, eds., 'Thinking and Diagrams,' in Thinking with Diagrams: The Semiotic Basis of Human Cognition (De Gruyter Mouton, 2016), 1.
- 56   Neurath, Lebensgestaltung und Klassenkampf , 115. 'Das Bürgertum […] hält sich lieber an die geheimnisvolle Macht der Einzelpersönlichkeit und an alles, was jenseits der bloßen Zahlen liegt.'
- 57   A compelling reading of Seiwert's painting as a form of semiotic abstraction is given by Hubertus Gaßner, 'Konstruktivistische Bildsprache und die Sprachlosigkeit des Künstlers,' in Politische Konstruktivisten: Die 'Progressiven' 1913-33 , ed. Hubertus Gaßner, Eckhart Gillen, and Katrin Sello (Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, 1975), unpaginated.
- 58   Otto Neurath, 'The Scientific Conception of the World: The Vienna Circle [1929],' in Neurath and Cohen, Empiricism and Sociology , 306.
- 59   'O massovoj chudožestvennoj rabote' [On artistic mass production], Pravda , November 11, 1929, quoted in Eckhart Gillen, 'Künstlerische Publizisten gegen Romantiker der roten Farbe,' in 'Kunst in die Produktion!' sowjetische Kunst während der Phase der Kollektivierung und Industrialisierung 1927-1933 , ed. Veronika Ambros (Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, 1977), 137.

- 60   October, 'Declaration,' 277.
- 61   Christina Kiaer, Collective Body: Aleksandr Deineka at the Limit of Socialist Realism (University of Chicago Press, 2024), 7.
- 62   Walter Benjamin, 'Eine Kommunistische Pädagogik [1929],' in Gesammelte Schriften Bd. III , ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Wolfgang Schweppenhäuser (Suhrkamp, 1977), 208.
- 63   October, 'Declaration,' 176.
- 64   Durus [= Alfréd Kemény], 'Der Künstler wird Industriearbeiter. Zur Oktjabr Ausstellung in Berlin,' Die Rote Fahne , September 19, 1930. In the context of an aesthetics of the plan, it seems quite significant that the architectural drawings of future building projects form a considerable part of exhibited material. Another example of this is the 'Proletarische Bauausstellung,' organized by the communist architect Arthur Korn and his 'Kollektiv sozialistisches Bauen' in Berlin in 1931, see Jesko Fezer et al., eds., Kollektiv für sozialistisches Bauen: Proletarische Bauausstellung = Collective for Socialist Architecture: Proletarian Building Exhibition (Spector Books, 2015).
- 65   Ivan Maca, 'Pološenie sovremennogo iskusstvo v SSSR i aktual'nie zadači chudožnikov [1928],' quoted in Gillen, 'Künstlerische Publizisten,' 144. Gaßner speaks consequently of a 'hegemony of architecture' within the Oktiabr'group, see 'Von der Utopie,' 72.
- 66   Neurath, Lebensgestaltung und Klassenkampf , 23.
- 67  For a detailed account of their collaboration, see Schmidt-Burkhardt, Die Kunst der Diagrammatik , 171-210.
- 68   Ivanitsky remarks that because of their abstract, visually reductive character, in 'most cases Neurath's images turned out to be unacceptable for us. […] With the use of a background illustration and political cartoons, it is possible to better interpret the topic, increasing its impact, and turning a diagram from dry schematic data into a powerful chart-poster propaganda tool.' Ivan Ivanitsky, Izobrazite'naia statistika i venskii metod [Pictorial statistics and the Vienna Method] (OGIZ-IZOGIZ, 1932), 18 and 33.
- 69   See, for example, the poster work by the AChR, 'Labour in the Five Year Plan,' 1933, in the Woodburn Collection, National Library of Scotland, https://digital.nls.uk/soviet-posters/ archive/74921376?mode=gallery.
- 70   Several months before the decree of April 1932, 'On the Reorganization of Literary and Artistic Organizations,' when all independent cultural organizations were disbanded, Oktiabr' had already internally collapsed; see Hubertus Gaßner and Eckhart Gillen, eds., Zwischen Revolutionskunst und sozialistischem Realismus: Kunstdebatten in der Sowjetunion von 1917 bis 1934 (DuMont, 1979), 174.
- 71   Kiaer, Collective Body , 93.
- 72   N. Čužak, 'K zadačam dna [1923],' quoted in Günther, 'Proletarische und avantgardistische Kunst,' 64. Statements such as this, which demonstrate the future-oriented thinking of the factographers, seem to confirm that a stronger continuity exists between the early constructivist and productivist avant-garde in the Soviet Union and the art of the Five-Year Plan than the polemical demarcations-for example, of the Oktiabr' group against LEF's 'formalism'-might suggest in the first place. Fore argues for a more presentist orientation of factography, remarking that the 'disregard for the future put the factographers at odds with the growing appetite for planning and prognosticating that followed the launch of the first Five-Year Plan in 1928' (Fore, Soviet Factography , 11).
- 73   Kiaer, Collective Body , 93.
- 74   Neurath, 'Personal Life,' 259.
- 75   Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Abhandlung des Communismus und des Socialismus als empirischer Culturformen (R. Reisland, 1887).
- 76   Beverley Best has recently updated the Marxist argument, that the socialization of capital-here, the credit system Marx treats in Capital Volume III-paves the way for a socialist economy. See Beverley Best, The Automatic Fetish: The Perceptual Physics of Capital (Verso, 2024) and the review in this volume.
- 77   Sigmund Freud, 'Civilization and Its Discontents,' The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud , Volume XXI, ed. Mark Solms, trans. James Strachey (Rowman & Littlefield, 2024), 101. There, Freud argues that altruistic affective bonds to larger social groups are idealizations premised on compensatory mechanisms of libidinal identification, necessarily containing the drive of aggression which manifests itself as 'hostility against intruders' (101).
- 78   For the latter, see Benjamin Noys, Envisioning the Good Life: The Limits of Contemporary Vitalism (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), 123.
- 79   Even authors sympathetic to the socialist project like Buchloh or Manfredo Tafuri draw sharp distinctions between the (legitimate; i.e., modernist) 'formal experimentation' and its functionalization for an ' ideology of organisation , the Plan' (Tafuri), whereby, as Toscano and Kinkle comment, 'its anti-ideological, demystifying character is squandered' (Toscano and Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute , 91.)
- 80   See Diego Rivera and André Breton, 'Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art,' Partisan Review 6, no. 1 (1938): 49-53: 'If, for the development of the better development of the forces of material production, the Revolution must build a socialist regime with centralized control, to develop intellectual creation an anarchist regime of individual liberty should from the first be established.' The 'revolution' appears now as a mere means to realize 'the complete liberation of art.'

- 81   A 'classless society with plan-oriented social production and distribution' was still on the agenda of the Institut für Sozialforschung in its first decade; see Kurt Mandelbaum and Gerhard Meyer, 'Zur Theorie der Planwirtschaft,' Zeitschrift Für Sozialforschung 3, no. 2 (1934): 263. Friedrich Pollock's theory of state capitalism was crucial with respect to the further development of the Frankfurt School's critique of administration.
- 82   Neurath, 'Inventory of the Standard,' 151 (retranslation from the German abstract).
- 83   Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street , ed. Michael William Jennings, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), 95.
- 84   Romberg, Gan's Constructivism , 5, 8.
- 85   Neurath, 'Personal Life,' 265-66 (translation modified).
- 86   Freud, 'Civilization and Its Discontents,' 76 (translation modified).