Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design 9780226485348

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Kinaesthetic Knowing

Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design

Kinaesthetic Knowing Zeynep Çelik Alexander

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2017 Printed in the United States of America 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48520-1 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48534-8 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/ 9780226485348.001.0001 Illustrations in this book were funded in part or in whole by a grant from the SAH/Mellon Author Awards of the Society of Architectural Historians.

Support for the publication was provided by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

Names: Alexander, Zeynep Çelik, author. Title: Kinaesthetic knowing : aesthetics, epistemology, modern design / Zeynep Çelik Alexander. Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017008989 | ISBN 9780226485201 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226485348 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Aesthetics, German—19th century. | Aesthetics, German—20th century. | Aesthetics—Physiological aspects. | Aesthetics— Psychological aspects. | Knowledge, Theory of. | Psychophysics. | Psychology and art—Germany. | Art—Study and teaching—Germany. | Design— Philosophy. Classification: LCC BH221.G3 A44 2017 | DDC 701/.17—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov /2017008989 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/ NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Anneme

Contents

Introduction: A Peculiar Experiment 1 1

Kinaesthetic Knowing: The Nineteenth-Century Biography of Another Kind of Knowledge 27

2

Looking: Wölfflin’s Comparative Vision 63

3

Affecting: Endell’s Mathematics of Living Feeling 97

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Drawing: The Debschitz School and Formalism’s Subject 131

5

Designing: Discipline and Introspection at the Bauhaus 167 Epilogue 203 Acknowledgments 213 Notes 215 Selected Bibliography 271 Index 299

Introduction A Peculiar Experiment

One day in 1905 a German schoolteacher by the name of Rudolf Schulze gathered a group of children in the courtyard of an elementary school in Leipzig in order to conduct a peculiar experiment. The school was an ordinary elementary school, a Volksschule in the sixth precinct of the city. The children were all girls, aged eleven and twelve. Arranging them in three rows, Schulze first asked the girls to close their eyes while he placed a picture before them. Once the picture was in place, he told them to open their eyes again and to pay attention. Within the next few seconds, another teacher documented the girls’ response to the picture using a camera placed behind it. Schulze meticulously repeated the same procedure twelve times for twelve pictures, which ranged from illustrations from children’s books to depictions of Christ on the Cross and from pastoral landscapes to scenes from medieval mythology.1 The following year Schulze published the results of the experiment (figs. 0.1, 0.2). He had also asked four adults— another teacher, a learned lady, a scholar, and an artist— to describe the emotional expressions (Aus­ drucksbewegungen) documented in the photographs taken in the schoolyard. In addition, the four adults tried to match the photographs with the pictures that the girls had viewed during the experiment. He reported that with two exceptions out of forty-eight possibilities, the adults correctly guessed which picture belonged with which photograph. This was the result for which Schulze, an ambitious advocate for educational reform, had been hoping.2 The subjects of the experiment were at the terminus of their education, which meant that, given their age, gender, and position in the lowest level of the strictly hierarchical German education system, they had no hope of advancing to a higher level where they could pursue more ambitious intellectual goals. Yet, Schulze argued, the experiment proved that even these most unpromising of students demonstrated an intelligence— albeit an unconventional one. This intelligence manifested itself not in the girls’ facility with spoken or written language but rather in the minute muscular movements evident in their facial and bodily expressions. These expressions had their own nonverbal language: after witnessing the richness of emotions in

Figure 0.1. The group responds to the picture “Storks.” One girl’s response over time is illustrated in twelve additional photographs. Rudolf Schulze, Die Mimik der Kinder beim künstlerischen Genießen (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1906), 5.

Figure 0.2. Girls respond to “Poplars in the Storm.” Their hand movements over time are illustrated in sequence. Rudolf Schulze, Die Mimik der Kinder beim künstlerischen Genießen (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1906), 30.

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the photographs, Schulze pleaded with his reader, who could possibly speak of the “cognitive rawness of the ‘insensate masses’” again?3 If these subjects were in possession of an unconventional kind of intelligence, shouldn’t the education system be changed to address it? In analyzing the girls’ facial and bodily expressions, Schulze used a specialized terminology borrowed from experimental psychology. As the director of the Institut für experimentelle Pädagogik und Psychologie (Institute for Experimental Pedagogy and Psychology), he had been instrumental in disseminating among fellow educators concepts, techniques, and equipment that had been developed within this relatively new field.4 Schulze’s technique for arranging the children’s expressions along an x-axis of arousal and repose and a y-axis of pleasure and displeasure, for example, had been modeled after the tridimensional theory of feeling developed by Wilhelm Wundt in his world-famous experimental psychology laboratory in the same city (figs. 0.3, 0.4).5 Following Wundtian theory even more faithfully in subsequent experiments, Schulze measured the involuntary muscular contractions— that is, the breathing, pulse, and sweating— of his subjects in an attempt to arrive at a more rigorous method of analyzing their response to images (fig. 0.5).6 A few years later, when Schulze repeated the experiment, he used film instead of photography, a technology that was more appropriate, he argued, for capturing the temporal unfolding of movements across the faces, hands, and bodies of his subjects.7 Schulze did not only borrow his methods and equipment from experimental psychology. His understanding of affective response conformed to the basic assumptions of a field upon which the discipline of experimental psychology itself had been founded in the previous century: psychophysics. As the name implies, psychophysics claimed that every sensation psychologically felt by the subject could be correlated quantitatively to a physical stimulus.8 Rehearsing this logic of duality, Schulze’s experiment assumed that forms, lines, and colors of pictures produced immediate, reflex-like emotional effects on their recipients. Furthermore, Schulze insisted, these emotional effects were determined by the physical changes in the body. The horizontality of a landscape painting, for example, forced the eye muscles to move sideways rather than up and down, resulting in the expression of calm pleasure (fig. 0.6).9 Or, the vertical orientation of the Cross in a Crucifixion scene turned the children’s eyes upward, compelling them to assume a pious pose (fig. 0.7).10 This immediacy between form and affect had important implications for a pedagogue with ambitions to change the system. If a given formal quality consistently produced a certain emotion, it followed that this relationship could be predicted and perhaps even manipulated by controlling the formal qualities that gave rise to it. This also meant that if the girls in the experiment had difficulty learning with words and numbers, they could be taught with forms, whose physiological effects were seemingly more powerful. It was for this reason that Schulze compared his own analyses to those

Figure 0.3. Diagram demonstrating the Wundtian tridimensional theory of feeling. The three curves in each section are pleasure-displeasure (Lust-Unlust), arousing-subduing (ErregungHemmung), and strain-relaxation (SpannungLösung). Alfred Lehmann, Die Hauptgesetze des menschlichen Gefühlslebens (Leipzig: O. R. Reisland, 1892), unpaginated. Figure 0.4. Facial expressions of one subject arranged along an x-axis of excitation and relaxation (Erregung-Beruhigung). Rudolf Schulze, Die Mimik der Kinder beim künstlerischen Genießen (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1906), 33. Figure 0.5. Experiment documenting the pulse and breathing of a child while he looks at pictures. Rudolf Schulze, Aus der Werkstatt der experimentellen Psychologie und Pädagogik (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1909), 84, fig. 68; 89, figs. 74, 75.

Figure 0.6. The girls’ response to “Flowers” is compared to their experience of sugar. Rudolf Schulze, Die Mimik der Kinder beim künstlerischen Genießen (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1906), 23.

Figure 0.7. The girls’ response to “Crucifixion” is compared to Duchenne de Boulogne’s experiments. Rudolf Schulze, Die Mimik der Kinder beim künstlerischen Genießen (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1906), 22.

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undertaken in the 1860s by the French physiologist Duchenne de Boulogne, who had attempted to induce emotional expressions artificially— at least in cadavers and more suggestible subjects— by applying electrical currents to the appropriate facial muscles (fig. 0.8).11 Schulze had simply replaced Duchenne’s electrical current with forms. As peculiar as Schulze’s experiment may seem to us today, it would not have appeared so at the turn of the twentieth century. In fact, Schulze’s contemporaries would have rightfully understood the experiment as an exercise in “aesthetics from below” (Aesthetik von unten). A term coined in the 1870s by Gustav Theodor Fechner, who, not coincidentally, was also the founder of the field of psychophysics, “aesthetics from below” purported to counter the philosophically inclined “aesthetics from above” (Aesthetik von oben).12 The former was to steer this field away from abstract concepts such as the beautiful and the sublime toward what psychophysics considered the building blocks of “lived experience”: impressions, sensations, feelings, and effects. For comparative purposes, Schulze had also photographed the facial expressions of the same girls as they ate sugar, lemon, and aloe, and the similarities between their response to the pleasant sight of a painting and to the pleasant taste of sugar seemed to him to be unmistakable (fig. 0.9).13 Schulze thus sought to reestablish the forgotten connection between two meanings of “taste”: the exalted faculty for aesthetic discrimination that so many philosophers had theorized and its more corporal twin that had been historically depreciated as the basest and the most vulgar of the senses. Schulze’s experiment was “aesthetics from below” in action. It demonstrated how aesthetics could address lived, embodied feeling by surrendering its lofty position next to philosophy and the arts and descending to an ordinary schoolyard.14

• Implicit in Schulze’s peculiar experiment were questions that have a long history in Western intellectual life. Is all legitimate knowledge the product of thought? Or can the body’s physical exchanges with the world produce reliable knowledge without recourse to language, concepts, propositions, or representations? Once certain explanatory frameworks became entrenched— mind and body, object and subject, particular and universal, or cause and effect— the conundrum seemed inevitable. On the one hand, one Enlightenment thinker after another recognized in the presumed immediacy of experience another way of knowing. This was what A. G. Baumgarten, the eighteenth- century philosopher who gave the field of aesthetics its name, called cognitio sensitiva, a sensuous cognition analogous to reason.15 On the other, this other cognition remained at best an alibi and at worst a handmaiden to its intellectual counterpart. It was in this kind of incommensurability that Immanuel Kant sensed the “scandal” of human reason: even in the absence of the treacherous authorities so detested by the Enlightenment, reason had a way of setting up traps for the mind and leading itself astray.16

Figure 0.8. Girls respond to “Rumpelstilskin.” Rudolf Schulze, Die Mimik der Kinder beim künstlerischen Genießen (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1906), 28.

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Figure 0.9. Facial expressions of the girls as they experience sugar (top), lemon (middle), and aloe (bottom). Rudolf Schulze, Die Mimik der Kinder beim künstlerischen Genießen (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1906), 20.

Yet in the course of the long nineteenth century, some intellectuals, as wary of idealism as of incipient materialisms, claimed to have found a way out of this troubling conundrum. What if, they asked, the human body was more promising from an epistemological point of view than the mind? What if Western rationality could be constructed anew upon an alternative epistemological principle so that the concept of reason would not be wholly absorbed by the concept of the mind?17 And, some of them even wondered, what if the boundaries of the mind did not start and end with the subject but started blurring into the subject’s surroundings? This book is the history of the moment between the middle of the nineteenth century and the beginning of World War II, a period during which such questions gave experiential knowledge a provisional legitimacy if not complete equality with more established modes of knowledge. As Raymond Williams has reminded us, “experience,” a word etymologically related to “experiment,” developed as having two interrelated meanings: if the term signified, on the one hand, “knowledge gathered from past events,” on the other, it referred to the “fullest, most open, most active kind of consciousness,” one that incorporated thought but was distinct from it.18 Others have demonstrated how experience has historically been granted authority as a self- evident,

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unquestionable “foundational ground.”19 While this idea about the epistemological legitimacy of experience appeared across the West, as I will explain, it acquired a unique saliency in German-speaking lands. The “experience” that became the focus of this particular epistemological project was not just any experience: even though it was described as lived, embodied, and immediate, it was imagined to be structured by the body’s movements in response to stimuli— even when the response might be in potentia. I will therefore use a phrase of my own invention, “kinaesthetic knowing,” to refer to the ratiocination associated with kinesis, the movements of the body. This alternative epistemological principle is the central protagonist of this book. How did kinaesthetic knowing emerge in the nineteenth century as a form of knowledge that many imagined could rival already accepted forms of knowledge? What accounted for its salience? What were the implications— not only epistemological but also political and ethical— of this epistemological project? And to what ends did its advocates attempt to institutionalize it? The coinage “kinaesthetic knowing” is useful here for two reasons. First, it helps to distinguish the rise of experiential knowledge in this particular context from comparable historical episodes. To the extent that I explore the history of an alternative mode of Western rationality in which the lines between experience and experiment as well as those between knowledge and know-how become blurry, my account is similar to Pamela Smith’s exploration of “artisanal epistemology” in early modern scientific experimentation, Matthew Hunter’s account of “wicked intelligence” in seventeenth-century London, and Otto Sibum’s discussion of the role placed by “gestural knowledge” in Victorian physics.20 Yet these histories are also very different from the one that I chronicle in this book: not only because their protagonists belong to other geographical or temporal frameworks but also because kinaesthetic knowing was put to social use in an entirely different manner. As I will argue throughout the book, kinaesthetic knowing was, first and foremost, a pedagogical project. The figures who play central roles in this history— the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, the architect August Endell, artists and pedagogues such as Hermann Obrist, Wilhelm von Debschitz, László Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee, as well as Rudolf Schulze, whose experiment opens the book— invented new pedagogical techniques with the conviction that there existed a nondiscursive, nonconceptual way of knowing that could nonetheless compete in its rigor with reasoning realized through language, concepts, or logic. Many of them believed that this other way of knowing would be crucial for cultivating the kinds of subjects demanded by modernity. While, for reasons that I will explain below, this cultivation was considered primarily aesthetic, it was not confined to disciplinary contexts in which the arts were central. Rather it was employed at every level of the educational system, especially after the Unification of German states in 1871 as a nation-state governed from Berlin. Schoolteachers

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like Schulze who wanted to reform the curriculum by instituting drawing classes in elementary and secondary schools, bureaucrats who established the first education programs at German museums, and professors who introduced the slide lecture to universities cited the epistemological distinction between discursive and nondiscursive knowledge as often as artists, architects, and critics. Second, the phrase “kinaesthetic knowing” synthetically encompasses the many terms— many of them untranslatable— that were historically coined to describe it. Before the temporal framework that is the focus of this book, we find G. W. Leibniz’s idea of “unconscious appetitions,” Christian Wolff ’s “sensuous knowledge” (sinnliche Erkenntnis), J. G. Sulzer’s “thought of the senses” (sinnliches as opposed to spekulatives Denken), and Kant’s discussion of “representations that we have without being conscious of them,” as well as the aforementioned “sensuous cognition” (cognitio sensitiva) as an “analogue to reason” (analogon rationis) coined by Baumgarten.21 In the nineteenth century, the publisher Georg Hirth called this other way of knowing “unconscious consciousness” (unbewußtes Bewußtsein), “instinctive logic” (instinktive Logik), and “hidden perception” (verborgenes Gemerk).22 AngloAmerican thinkers with an empiricist bent named it the “muscle sense,” because they believed that it was a form of reasoning achieved with the aid of the musculature.23 Meanwhile, William James and Bertrand Russell, following in the footsteps of the English philosopher John Grote, adopted the phrases “knowledge of or by acquaintance” and “knowledge-about” or “knowledge by description.”24 If the most frequently used label for what I call “kinaesthetic knowing” was the notoriously untranslatable German word Anschauung, a presumed direct and intuitive intimacy with the world through the senses prior to intellectual cogitation, the most poetic must have been Wilhelm Dilthey’s equally untranslatable “silent thinking” (schweigen­ des Denken), a phrase that uses the peculiarly active German verb for the passive act of being quiet.25 As I will show in the next chapter, the idea that there might be a form of sentience or even intelligence in kinesis had existed previously, but it started to gain both momentum and a particular valence starting in the middle of the nineteenth century. Especially influential in this history was a distinction made by the formidable German physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz, who deployed two commonly used German verbs for knowing to evoke a conceptual pair akin to the Aristotelian epistêmê and technê.26 In his popular lectures delivered in the middle of the nineteenth century, Helmholtz distinguished between Wissen, propositional, discursive, and conceptual knowledge that was conventionally understood to be the ideal of rigorous science, and Kennen, nondiscursive, nonconceptual knowledge obtained by experiential acquaintance.27 Helmholtz noted that Kennen had been discussed previously under a variety of other names such as “unconscious ratiocination” (unbewußte Vernunftmässigkeit) or “sensible intelligi-

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bility” (sinnliche Verständlichkeit), but he now identified a distinct operation at work in this other way of knowing:28 We might possibly, in opposition to logical induction [logische Induction] which reduces a question to clearly- defined universal propositions, call this kind of reasoning aesthetic induction [or artistic induction, künstlerische In­ duction], because it is most conspicuous in the higher class of works of art. It is an essential part of an artist’s talent to reproduce by words, by form, by colour, or by music, the external indications of a character or a state of mind, and by a kind of instinctive intuition [instinctiver Anschauung], uncontrolled by any definable rule, to seize the necessary steps by which we pass from one mood to another.29

There was not much surprising in Helmholtz’s claim that Wissen proceeded by inducing universals from particulars according to the laws of logic, but what was the “aesthetic induction” that he claimed was the modus operandi of Kennen? On one level, he explained, logical and aesthetic induction were similar: logical induction was the result of the syllogistic reasoning of the mind just as aesthetic induction was of the body. The difference in the case of Kennen was that Helmholtz attributed the unbridgeable gap in induction between the particular and the universal— a gap that none other than Francis Bacon had acknowledged required a “leap”— to an elusive “unconscious.”30 Crucially, this unconscious was, on the one hand, the mind’s mirror and, on the other hand, its other. This meant that Kennen played the role of the doppelgänger of reason. For example, the relationship between cause and effect— which was linked at midcentury to the urgently political question of whether or not there was telos in the universe— could be bracketed in the alternative epistemic realm of Kennen but not in Wissen. To put it in Kantian terms, in Helmholtz’s Kennen the antinomies of reason that amounted to a “scandal” could be temporarily suspended if not altogether eliminated. Furthermore, Helmholtz suggested in these lectures that rigorous science was not exclusively in the jurisdiction of Wissen. One day, he speculated without specifying exactly how, Kennen might reach a level of accuracy and precision that had hitherto only been attributed to discursive and conceptual knowledge.31 In fact, he suggested, rigorous aesthetic induction was already practiced regularly in one area: the arts. It is in this light that the centrality of aesthetics in this epistemological history should be understood. Helmholtz anticipated many nineteenthcentury thinkers who would argue that aesthetics offered unique epistemological possibilities but only if it could be studied scientifically. Hence the ascendancy of Kunstwissenschaft at the end of the nineteenth century: a scientific study of art that resembled neither the kind of art history that relied on biography, philology, and connoisseurship nor philosophical aesthetics. In the words of Max Dessoir, the editor of one of the most important jour-

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nals dedicated to the subject of Kunstwissenschaft, while this science, just like any other, required the explanation of facts, its unique challenge was to shape “the freest, the most subjective, and frequently the most synthetic of human activity in the direction of necessity, objectivity, and analysis.”32 The ambitiousness of this goal should not be underestimated. By the end of the  century it even seemed conceivable to philosophers like Dilthey that the entirety of the human sciences could be predicated on the foundation of what Helmholtz called Kennen rather than on Wissen. For a brief moment in history, kinaesthetic knowing was poised to play as foundational a role for the human sciences as mathematics had for the natural sciences. On the one hand, then, this turn to an alternative epistemic principle based on the body rather than the mind was fueled by an intellectual agenda: an aversion to Hegelian Idealism and the emergence of epistemology (Erkenntnistheorie) as a distinct field of inquiry in the nineteenth century.33 The field of aesthetics held promise in this intellectual environment, but only if understood in the sense implicit in its etymological origin aesthe­ sis, perception of the world by the senses. This was what Fechner had meant by “aesthetics from below.” By contrast, philosophical aesthetics, or “aesthetics from above,” was anathema. As the architectural theorist Richard Streiter saw it, at a time when systematic and dialectical thinking were seen as suspect, “philosophy was dethroned,” and the inductive methods of the natural sciences had proven to be extraordinarily successful, philosophical aesthetics had lost all credibility.34 Others were less kind. The publisher and critic Hirth’s distaste for philosophical aesthetics was so impassioned that he described it as a “plant of prejudice” that had for too long grown on “philosophical manure,” while Hugo Eckener, an erstwhile Wundt student, denounced with equal vigor the “oracular profoundness and unfruitful conceptual fissures” of speculative aesthetics for giving his contemporaries an upset stomach.35 Instead of philosophy, those who aspired to restore aesthetics now looked to psychology, which, as I will explain in the next chapter, was seen at the end of the nineteenth century as a model science— not so much as a natural or human science but as a field uniquely positioned to bridge the disciplinary divide. Even though there was no shortage of debate about the disciplinary project of psychology at this moment (in this sense, it would be more accurate to speak of “psychologies”), advocates of “aesthetics from below” almost universally subscribed to a psychophysical logic— of sensation and stimulus, for example— if not to all the methods of experimental psychology. As the German physician Hans Kurella put it, introducing the Danish pathologist Carl Georg Lange’s work, the new aesthetics had to be scientific (wissenschaft­ lich) and sensualistic (sensualistisch) in order to achieve its goal of “allowing artists, connoisseurs, and the public to really sense [empfinden] and feel [ fühlen] when confronted with an artwork.”36 Reporting from Germany, the American psychologist G. S. Hall was more skeptical about the prospects of such “scientific aesthetics,” but he still found it “more meaty than the inane

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speculations about the nature of the Beautiful and Sublime which [filled] so many pages of text-books on aesthetics.”37 On the other hand, however, it would be a mistake to consider this history a purely intellectual one. The rise of kinaesthetic knowing was also closely related to changes in the German educational system and debates about the kinds of subjects that it should cultivate. In fact, those who theorized the possibility of another way of knowing in the second half of the nineteenth century did so with a retrospective eye on the ideal of Bildung, that unique concept denoting both institutional instruction and individual self-cultivation.38 Formulated in the late eighteenth century and established in the early nineteenth century upon this ideal of perfectibility, the education system was arguably Prussia’s most important export (which explains, at least in part, this book’s geographical focus).39 Even though it was intended to cultivate an enlightened citizenry, this system remained inflexibly exclusive and hierarchical even at the end of the century. Schools such as the Volksschule in which Schulze conducted his experiment occupied the lowest possible stratum, while the Gymnasium was the guaranteed path to university training, civil service, and membership in the educated middle classes (Bildungsbürgertum).40 Nineteenth-century Bildung’s attempts to cultivate a very particular kind of subject was a thoroughly political project. According to Wilhelm von Humboldt, linguist, philosopher, and a primary architect of the Prussian education system, self- examination through contemplation was an essential attribute of this subject. Education was understood as a process of disciplining the self such that one could learn to focus inward in a manner entirely independently from external sensations. In fact, attempts to preserve Bildung throughout the nineteenth century were frequently defended with the argument that only the abstract laws of neo-humanistic and philhellenistic learning would produce a much-desired inwardness (Innerlichkeit).41 Informed equally by Enlightenment ideas and techniques of Pietist introspection, Humboldt was against the protean and impressionable selfhood suggested by French sensationalism and British empiricism on philosophical as well as nationalistic grounds. He was so adamant in his opposition, in fact, that when he visited Paris in 1798, he complained to his friend Friedrich Schiller that “[the French] have no idea, not even the slightest inkling of anything other than appearance; pure volition, the true good, the moi, pure self-consciousness— all this is totally incomprehensible to them.”42 Priding himself on his ability to continue his train of thought even while carrying out a “long conversation without having any appearance of absence of mind,” Humboldt, like many of his Romantic contemporaries, saw the self as a willcentered stronghold that resisted the onslaught of external sensations:43 I think it always better when the spiritual life within flows outward, than when, reversely, that which is without flows inward. It seems, it is true, as if the soul could only be enriched and fertilized from without; but this is a

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mere delusion. What is not already in a man cannot come to him from without, and whatever appears to be derived by him from some external source is nothing but an accidental stimulus, of which the spirit avails itself for the development of its own proper resources.44 16

Such a model had a practical rationale as well as a political one. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, the possibility that the self was nothing but a loosely bound conglomeration of sensations jeopardized notions of private property and moral responsibility, to say nothing about political authority.45 It was with an eye on this volatile political milieu that Johann Gottlieb Fichte, another influential theorist of Bildung and the first rector of the University of Berlin, posited an introspective, contemplative, and uniquely German self as the absolute Subject and the spring of a science of knowledge at the end of the eighteenth century.46 Language— dead ones as well as those alive— was crucial in the constitution of such a subject. Intuitive cognition acquired through sensual acquaintance (Kenntnis) did not count as real knowledge (Erkenntnis) in Fichte’s eyes. Just as speech was necessary for the child to awaken from a state in which “all impressions of the surrounding world press upon him at the same time, mingling in a dull chaos in which no one thing obtrudes from the general tumult,” language was required for the moment of self-reflection so that one could lift oneself “out of obscurity and confusion into clarity and determinacy.”47 It was thus that the study of languages and hermeneutic activity were given central positions in curricula in German institutions of learning throughout the nineteenth century. If there had always been a Protestant subtext to Bildung’s unitary, willcentered model of selfhood in the nineteenth century, that subtext became more pronounced in the context of the anti-Catholicism that became official policy after 1871. During the so-called Kulturkampf, when the Prussian government took legislative measures to strip the German Catholic church of its economic and social influence over the Catholic minorities who occupied the margins of the newly unified German territory, the impressionable self that the likes of Humboldt and Fichte had found so objectionable after the French Revolution was conflated with a kind of selfhood associated with Catholicism.48 As the historian David Blackbourn has demonstrated, in 1876, at the height of the Kulturkampf, when three eight-year- old girls claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary in the woods of the provincial town of Marpingen, for instance, it was their impressionability and suggestibility that became the center of public debate.49 After a massive Catholic piety revival movement at midcentury, Catholic subjects were portrayed as uneducated, backward, effeminate, sentimental, and thus susceptible to political manipulation.50 As much as this subject fascinated Protestant observers, they saw it as the antithesis of reason.51 “Catholicism, by reason of its multiplied dogmas, its puerile ceremonies, its miracles, and its pilgrimages, places itself outside the atmosphere of modern thought,” wrote the Belgian econ-

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omist E. L. V. de Laveleye, “while Protestantism, by reason of its simplicity, and its various forms, capable as they are of indefinite improvement, can adapt itself thereto.”52 If, as Helmut Walser Smith and other historians have pointed out, anti-Catholicism was an important component of Germany’s nation-building after the Unification, the suggestible self forged in the Protestant imagination in the mold of Catholic stereotypes should be considered a necessary foil to the unitary model of selfhood historically promoted by the Prussian state’s educational policies.53 Moreover, the attributes of the suggestible Catholic were transferred— with backing from the Catholic Church, which viewed the popular piety movements as bulwark against revolutionary impulses that had resurfaced repeatedly throughout the nineteenth century— to the masses. In the formulation of Blackbourn, it was especially “German Catholics who [were] cast below in the role of the people.”54 Observing the pilgrims flocking to sites of Marian apparitions, Protestant commentators expressed fear that the characteristically Catholic impressionability would spread like a contagion. They were not alone in their wariness. In his widely influential work on crowds, for example, the French physician Gustave Le Bon, fearful that the masses had been rehearsing the revolution of 1789 over and over again in the course of the nineteenth century, wrote of the “impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgment and of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of the sentiments” of such masses.55 Crowds were inherently “susceptible to being keenly impressed,” as if hypnotized; as in sensationalist philosophy, individuals in masses became automata no longer guided by their own wills. The danger seemed to be especially serious if the masses were under the influence of such new technologies as photography and film.56 This description of the workings of the mind of a child at the movie theater captures the kind of selfhood that caused so much anxiety at the turn of the twentieth century: Being habituated to the scurrying, twitching, dithering pictures on the flickering screen slowly and surely disintegrates his mental and his moral solidity. First of all, one gets used to abruptly jumping from one image to another; one loses the slow steadiness of sequential presentation [Vorstellung] or the ability of cohesion, which is the prerequisite of all sound judgment. Secondly, one gets used to pursuing the arbitrary grouping of images and to following them submissively [willenlos]; one can no longer follow the logical sequence of a continuous thought, which binds individual presentations together. . . . The mere absorption of pictorial presentations, which are only arbitrary and do not logically or psychologically adhere together out of necessity (as in a real drama, story, or a scientific argument), amounts to the surrendering of the soul. . . . Thirdly, as a result of the fast scurrying of images, one becomes accustomed to taking in an approximation of an impression; the images in their singularity are not made clear and conscious. . . . The regular cinema

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viewer thinks only in crude, approximate presentations. Whatever image lights up his mind’s eye absorbs his entire attention, he does not review or rethink it any more. . . . When the presentation is crude and the emphasis is on affects, he has already declined beyond rescue.57 18

It was with the goal of aligning this unwieldy model of selfhood found in a wide variety of marginal subjects with the ideal of Bildung that intellectuals in post-Unification Germany resorted to kinaesthetic knowing at the end of the nineteenth century. In doing so, they frequently used a term that, in fact, had always been part of the Prussian ideal of education: Anschauung. Despite Kant’s, Fichte’s, and Schelling’s discussion of intellektuelle Anschau­ ung, an adamantly intellectual faculty, Anschauung maintained its meaning throughout the Enlightenment as an immediate and intimate apprehension of the world without the aid of abstract or discursive concepts or a reproductive imagination.58 In the formulation of the American psychologist James Baldwin, Anschauung referred in pedagogy to “the grasp of knowledge through the use of the senses.”59 Pedagogues had been defending the didactic efficacy of Anschauung and nontextual learning at least since it had become possible to reproduce images mechanically; the object lesson (called Anschauungsunterricht in German) offered by nature had been especially important to Protestant theologians eager to prove the existence of God without Scripture.60 But, above all, it was in the new pedagogy advocated by the Swiss pedagogue Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and his student Friedrich Froebel at the turn of the nineteenth century that Anschauung became a salient term. Form played a critical role in this pedagogy. Pestalozzi and Froebel argued that children had an inherent capacity to learn through “form” as well as through “word” and “number.”61 In fact, formal structures such as lines, angles, and curves enabled in children a “readiness in gaining senseimpressions, as well as skill of hand, of which the effect will be to make everything that comes within the sphere of observation, gradually clear and plain.”62 According to Pestalozzi, the absence of a method of instruction that focused upon the question of form was not only “a defect” but rather “the defect in the structure of human knowledge.”63 Pestalozzi and Froebel continued to occupy an important place in pedagogy throughout the nineteenth century, but their agenda was taken up with renewed enthusiasm after the Unification. Whereas Pestalozzi’s project to make abstract thought immediately available to senses had been confined to the earlier years of schooling, knowledge based on Anschauung permeated every level of the educational system after the Unification. It was along with Anschauung, then, that the concept of “form” came to occupy such an important role in discussions of modernity. In this sense, the title of the text Das Problem der Form (Problem of Form), which enjoyed unparalleled influence on late-nineteenth- century aesthetic discourses in the

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German-speaking world, is indicative of the larger significance of the concept.64 However, the text’s author, the sculptor Adolf Hildebrand, offered form not as the problem but rather as the solution to the “sickness of the age”— that is, an acute formlessness that Georg Simmel would later associate with the metropolis, money, and modernity in general.65 After elaborating at length about two modes of perception— the overall view whose coherence was comprehended only from afar and the near view scanned kinaesthetically from up close— Hildebrand associated the former with artistic seeing and the latter with scientific analysis.66 Any one contingent, isolated perception of appearances did not count as form; form was the total sum arrived at by comparing and condensing contingent, haphazard appearances. This was why Hildebrand preferred relief sculpture, which impressed the right point of view on the beholder, over sculpture-in-the-round, which would inevitably lead the confused modern beholder astray (fig. 2.2). Form, in other words, played the role of the savior in this context: it was what prevented the precarious subject associated with modernity from falling apart into discrete sensations. This was as true of the other formalists who appear in this book as of Hildebrand. According to the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, form anchored the savage eye of the modern spectator; for the architect August Endell, only an architecture forged around the central idea of form and formal effect could attain a rigorous science of experiential knowledge; Hermann Obrist and Wilhelm von Debschitz saw form as a heuristic tool that bypassed the intellectualism of academic methods; and at the Bauhaus the manipulation of form became established as the fundamental activity that grounded not only all artistic training but also modern education in general. I cannot summarize here the countless academic debates that have been waged for and against various kinds of formalisms— from the nineteenthcentury Continental varieties to their twentieth-century American relatives, and from the ones with a reformist agenda to those implicated in Cold War politics— but it should suffice to say that the genealogy of formalism that I am offering in this book is somewhat different from previous historical accounts.67 To return to the peculiar experiment with which I started, I would like to point out that assemblages such as Schulze’s experiment have not played any role in our understanding of formalism’s history so far. Yet the formalism at the heart of Schulze’s experiment is unmistakable to any student of modern aesthetics. Schulze not only disregarded the possibility that the girls might have been enacting the expected emotional response for the benefit of the camera, but he also entirely ignored the subject matter of the pictures in his experiment, resorting instead to an extended description of their formal effects. More important, Schulze’s experiment assumed that there existed a relationship of immediacy between form and affect— that is, between the formal qualities of the pictures and their presumed physiological and psychological impact on the beholder. Anyone who could argue without a hint of irony that the expression of piety on the children’s faces

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had less to do with the symbolic resonance of the Crucifixion scene and more with the verticality of the Cross must have been as zealous a formalist as any deserving of that name in the twentieth century. Episodes such as Schulze’s experiment have been excluded from accounts of modernist formalism, I would argue, primarily because the latter has been understood as the distinguishing mark of a narrowly defined aesthetic modernism rather than a more generously understood modernity in which aesthetics is understood to be playing not a marginal but a crucial part. That is why while the mechanics of Schulze’s formalism may be familiar, its subjects remain alien to the twenty-first- century reader. The girls in Schulze’s experiment do not conform to the clichéd subject of twentiethcentury formalism: an individual beholder contemplating, say, an Abstract Expressionist painting in a sensorially sanitized gallery— to evoke Clement Greenberg, arguably the most famous twentieth-century neo-formalist. Neither do they resemble the male and Protestant ideal subject targeted by Prussian educational institutions throughout the nineteenth century. In fact, the corporeal enjoyment (Genuß) demonstrated by the girls in Schulze’s experiment was diametrically opposed to the disinterested pleasure associated with Kantian aesthetics or the intellectual contemplation (Betrachtung) that Schulze’s contemporaries would expect of students at the Gymnasium. The subject exemplified by the girls in Schulze’s experiment, then, departed asymptotically from the two models of selfhood available at the end of the nineteenth century. This subject was not to conform to the idealist model devised by the likes of Humboldt and Fichte. Nor was it to resemble the sensationalist model that was imagined to be worryingly open to the influence of external impressions in its orbit. Instead, the project of kinaesthetic knowing attempted a precarious balance between the idealism of the former and the sensationalism of the latter. This balancing act might be the reason why the model of selfhood attributed to kinaesthetic knowing is occupied by a series of marginal subjects in this book: children, women, Catholics, and the “masses.”

• This book is an account of how kinaesthetic knowing emerged out of nineteenth-century debates about telos, how reformers like Schulze founded pedagogical techniques that we now call modernist upon it, how it played a role in the demarcation of academic disciplines at the university at the turn of the twentieth century, and how it survived after disciplines were organized in a way that rendered kinaesthetic knowing irrelevant. It makes the case that at the heart of modernism— and, perhaps, modern aesthetics at large— was an epistemological project that has been all but forgotten. Understanding the role played by this other way of knowing, I argue throughout the book, is crucial to coming to terms with some of the most central concepts, objects, and practices of twentieth-century modernism.

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Chapter 1 is an account of how this other way of knowing was legitimized in the thinking of nineteenth- century epistemologists— especially in Hermann von Helmholtz’s distinction between Wissen, propositional knowledge, and Kennen, nonpropositional knowledge— as a stopgap measure to resolve midcentury debates about teleology versus mechanism. Kinaesthetic knowing, I argue in this chapter, emerged as “argument from experience”— a strategic way to explain cause and effect within the framework of one’s body without resorting to thoroughly teleological or mechanistic accounts of the universe. I then examine how the question of experience and the modern discipline of psychology, which defined itself as the science of experience, came to occupy central roles in the organization of disciplines at the end of the nineteenth century. For the likes of Wundt, psychology, which operated with a psychophysical logic that circumvented the antinomies of causality, was to serve as the bridge between the human and the natural sciences. The phenomenologist Dilthey, writing at the end of the nineteenth century, went so far as to propose kinaesthetic knowing as the epistemological basis for a constellation of human sciences. Instead, however, the disciplines ended up being organized according to a neo-Kantian logic— that is, with a strict differentiation between the methods of the human sciences and those of the natural sciences. In this new disciplinary regime, kinaesthetic knowing could no longer be proposed as a foundational epistemological principle. Yet it not only survived but also prospered in such places as modern design education, as I show in the last chapter of the book. The rest of the chapters are dedicated to four techniques: a practice of comparative looking in which the eye was believed to draw its own conclusions independently as if sense perception had the structure of a syllogism; a technique of affecting that consisted of automatic response rather than intellectual contemplation; a method of drawing that abandoned the academic principles of copying and imitating and gave free rein to the movements of the body; and, finally, a constellation of techniques described as “designing”— that is, techniques that concerned themselves exclusively with the methodical manipulation of form, line, and color. (The history provided in these four chapters, I should add, is not a genealogy but rather an archaeology. That is to say, while I excavate vertically into each episode, the horizontal connections between them are left necessarily incomplete.) While the first three of these techniques were implemented at every level of the German educational system from the kindergarten to the university, and in many arenas of public life from the newly inaugurated museum education programs to the modernist picture book, the formalist procedures taught under the rubric of “design” were unique to the design education taught by the Bauhaus as well as by its predecessors and followers. I demonstrate throughout the book how these four techniques were promoted by reformminded German liberals who believed that kinaesthetic knowing was pedagogically more efficacious than knowledge achieved with the aid of concepts and language. It was through the entrenchment of these techniques, I

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argue, that the deeply political project of constructing subjects assumed to be demanded by Germany’s modernity was carried out. It is worth repeating that Kennen, to use Helmholtzian terms again, as attempted in these four techniques, was never an independent epistemological project but one always shaped by its doppelgänger Wissen. As a result, the kind of looking promoted by Heinrich Wölfflin was a surrogate for read­ ing; affecting theorized by August Endell promised to substitute for thinking; and drawing taught at the Debschitz School sought to replace writing. As we will see, while these formalist techniques aspired to bypass the matrix of logic and language associated with higher cognitive faculties, they were always accompanied by strict protocols that dictated another kind of order and syntax upon what was imagined as unmediated lived experience. This ultimate inseparability of concept from technique is one of my main points: neither form nor formalism, I argue, could have emerged to become the central concepts that they are in histories of aesthetic modernism without the specific techniques— looking, feeling, analyzing, describing, drawing, or designing— that were devised alongside them.68 A century after Pestalozzi had argued for a new pedagogy based not upon concepts but rather upon such primary actions as “striking and carrying, thrusting and throwing, drawing and turning, encircling and swinging,” bureaucrats, artists, architects, museum officials, schoolteachers, and university professors, among others, invented new pedagogical techniques or reconfigured old ones on the foundation of the alternative epistemological principle of kinaesthetic knowing.69 Chapter 2 examines the technique of comparative looking found in many a modernist book, including those by the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin. Reluctantly relying on kinaesthetic knowing, Wölfflin devised a comparative method of looking in an attempt to address the “baroque” formlessness of modernity. Wölfflin saw comparativism as a means to counterbalance experiential knowledge’s inherent instability: if there existed a legitimate mode of knowledge that was predicated on fickle feelings, sensations, and impressions without recourse to higher cognitive faculties, the comparative method guaranteed that these sensations would not stray from a rigorous logic. Chapter 3, on affecting, examines how the structure of stimulus and response that advocates of “aesthetics from below” borrowed from psychophysics was transformed into the modernist assumption about the immediacy of form and affect. Especially in the work of the architect August Endell, one of the most articulate theorists of kinaesthetic knowing and the founder of a School for Form-Art (Schule für Formkunst) in Berlin, architecture was posited as the primary training ground for this transformation. Chapter 4 examines the history of a drawing technique that was instituted first in elementary and secondary schools as part of educational reforms following the Unification and Kulturkampf and only later became an important part of the curriculum at private art schools such as the Debschitz School, founded

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by the artists Hermann Obrist and Wilhelm von Debschitz in Munich at the turn of the century. Unlike academic methods of drawing, the new drawing method developed at this school drew on the involuntary movements of the human body but also disciplined them by utilizing formal heuristics. Finally, chapter 5 turns to some of the techniques employed at the Bauhaus during its brief life. Even while informed by the free movements of the body, design was reconfigured at the Bauhaus as a strictly controlled method of introspection. In this sense, this book as a whole can also be seen as a history of modern design education, where, I argue, kinaesthetic knowing continues to be the underlying epistemological principle. By the time that the Bauhaus was founded in 1919, psychologism was seen by many as philosophically suspect, and the possibility that lived experience may become the epistemological foundation of the human sciences was for the most part discredited. In other words, even though it continued to be evoked with great frequency in artistic circles and, more crucially, perpetuated in techniques that were now fully integrated into artistic training, kinaesthetic knowing was already exhausted as a viable epistemological program by then. The book ends with the emergence of a different kind of psychology at the turn of the twentieth century. Sigmund Freud’s Entwurf einer Psychologie, written in 1895 but only posthumously published, is frequently cited as a turning point in his career away from a neurological approach informed by experimental psychology toward psychoanalysis. More relevant here, Freud started developing in this text a radically different response to the very questions bedeviling the figures discussed in this book. Unlike Helmholtz, who found in the unconscious an alternative kind of ratiocination that resolved the antinomies of reason, Freud recognized mechanisms in the unconscious— sublimation, repression, and regression— that could no longer be explained away through an epistemological framework that demarcated knowledge into two realms. Even the way that energy moved in the nerve cells, it seemed to Freud, had something to do with human actions— that is, with the realms of ethics. I use Freud’s case in the epilogue as an excuse to call for renewed attention to the politics of knowledge today, when some of the central claims of the project of kinaesthetic knowing seem to have resurfaced.

• In 1980— that is, seventy-five years after Schulze’s peculiar experiment in the schoolyard— Hertha Sturm and Marianne Grewe-Partsch, two psychologists working for the education department of the public television station ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen) at the time, carried out a psychophysical experiment with sixty-two nine-year-old children from an elementary school in Vienna.70 With the help of two researchers from the psychology department at the University of Vienna, they screened three versions of a

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twenty- eight-minute film that had been aired a year before by the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation as part of an afternoon television program for children. Titled “Bibi Bitter und der Schneemann” (Bibi Bitter and the Snowman), the film told the story of the eponymous protagonist who built a snowman on the terrace of his house but, unable to prevent the snowman from melting when the weather got warmer, had to take it to the top of a mountain and leave it there. The original film was without words but used noise and music as soundtrack. The experimenters produced two more versions of the film: a second version with a voice- over depicting the events in a “straightforward” (sachlich) manner (“Bibi lived with his snowman on the rooftop”) and a third one that modified the former account with feelings (“Bibi was very happy living with his snowman on the rooftop”).71 The children in the experiment were asked to watch the three versions of the film as their reactions were recorded on film. They also wore belts that measured their breathing, electrodes that registered their skin’s galvanic resistance, and finger probes that recorded their heartbeat during the screening. A dial allowed them to choose a value in the range between “pleasant” and “unpleasant” to express their immediate response in real time (fig. 0.10). The experimenters compared the children’s physiological, verbal-cognitive, and motor reactions in graphs. While the straightforward voice-over produced more excitation, Sturm and Grewe-Partsch noted, the children experienced the wordless version as the most pleasant. In fact, the sadder the situation, the more pleasant it was rated.72 More unexpectedly, with repeat screenings of the same film, excitation levels increased significantly, and even the slightest verbal changes in the presentation— as was the case with the addition of adjectives denoting affect— resulted in radically different viewer experiences.73 Such findings came as good news to Sturm and Grewe-Partsch, who were eager to argue that television had a potentially important role to play in mass education. Sturm and Grewe-Partsch’s experiment, a reworking of Rudolf Schulze’s three-quarters of a century before, was rehashed in a more recent discourse that has come to be known as “affect theory.”74 Informed by the neuroscience of the past few decades, affect theory has urged alternative understandings of human reason.75 In 1995, when the philosopher Brian Massumi published the seminal essay “The Autonomy of Affect,” a text that would be considered foundational to what has sometimes been called the “affective turn,” Sturm and Grewe-Partsch’s experiment from 1980 was his point of departure.76 In this essay, Massumi concluded not only that the experiment proved the “primacy of the affective” but that, furthermore, it provided evidence for the so-called missing half second, during which “what we think of as ‘higher’ functions, such as volition, are apparently being performed by autonomic, bodily reactions occurring in the brain but outside consciousness.”77 When the historian Ruth Leys undertook a critique of Massumi’s theory of affect in 2011, she too turned to Sturm and Grewe-Partsch’s work,

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Figure 0.10. Experiment with children watching three versions of a film while being attached to monitors that register their physiological response. Hertha Sturm, Peter Vitouch, Herbert Bauer, and Marianne Grewe-Partsch, “Emotion und Erregung— Kinder als Fernsehzuschauer. Eine psychophysiologische Untersuchung,” Fernsehen und Bildung 6.1– 3 (1982): 52, 53, 56.

finding in affect theory the tendency to “shift the attention away from considerations of meaning or ‘ideology’ or indeed representation to the subject’s subpersonal material-responses,” where, according to Leys, affect theory claimed that the “political and other influences do their real work.”78 More crucially, according to Leys, affect theory proposed to “change the terms of the encounter” between the humanities and sciences.79 By no means do I intend to claim here a linear trajectory of historical development from Schulze’s experiment to Sturm and Grewe-Partsch’s and to affect theory and its critics, but, if the repeated reappearances of the same psychophysical logic for over a century is any indication, it would be a mistake to assume that the career of kinaesthetic knowing was only confined to the temporal framework examined in this book. Kinaesthetic knowing might have lost epistemological steam in the early twentieth century, but it continued to be brought up repeatedly by those seeking to critique the centrality of the mind in Western intellectual life. (Needless to say, the political valencies of this epistemological agenda varied greatly.) I cannot possibly

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do justice here to the multifaceted survivals of this alternative way of knowing in the twentieth century and beyond, but it should suffice to note that kinaesthetic knowing assumed afterlives not only in affect theory, as I have briefly discussed above, but also in phenomenology, ecological psychology, and evolutionary biology. It even surfaced in such intellectualist fields as cognitive psychology, robotics, and artificial intelligence later in the twentieth century, and continues to be valued in such fields as performance or cinema studies. Even the postwar idea of “communication” owes something to kinaesthetic knowing: that rubric spanning such disciplines as linguistics, anthropology, and psychiatry would have been impossible without the conception of the human body as the producer of a consistent and coherent nonverbal language.80 However, I would venture to claim that it was, above all, in techniques forged with faith in kinaesthetic knowing that this alternative epistemological principle has survived. Habits, after all, have a way of enduring. Art historians today may be skeptical of Wölfflin’s historiography, but they still ask their students to compare slides; drawing instructors may be vexed when their practices are compared to those used in the kindergarten, but they continue to instruct their students to tap into a prelinguistic reservoir of creativity; studio critics in design schools may no longer reference the Bauhaus, but they still teach protocols for methodical formal iteration— perhaps even more so after the introduction of electronic computing. Above all, the assumption persists— in the thinking of the most ardent advocates and critics of formalism alike— that there exists an immediate relationship between form and affect. Furthermore, as was the case a century ago, some who argue for renewed attention to affect, feeling, and lived experience also call for a reorganization of knowledge at the university. Our dilemmas in the early twenty-first century, then, have surprisingly much in common with those articulated by the cast of characters in this book. In this sense, the account of kinaesthetic knowing offered in this book is not only a littleknown chapter in the history of modernism. It is also a history that speaks to our present.

1: Kinaesthetic Knowing The Nineteenth-Century Biography of Another Kind of Knowledge

In the spring of 1853, a thirty-two-year-old Hermann von Helmholtz, professor of physiology at the University of Königsberg, stood before the German Society in the same city to deliver a lecture in which he attempted to answer a troubling question. How was it possible, Helmholtz wondered, that Goethe, the “comprehensive genius” and the embodiment of the German ideal of culture, had been so blatantly wrong in his scientific studies of color and light?1 Helmholtz was referring to the 1810 treatise Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Color), a text in which Goethe had wielded his extensive description of the phenomenal and experiential aspects of light as a weapon against the mechanistic logic of Newtonian physics.2 Goethe’s insistence on refuting the Newtonian principles upon which scientific practice had been so successfully predicated seemed irreconcilable with his genius. Helmholtz thus speculated: On the one side are a number of physicists, who, by a long series of the ablest investigations, the most elaborate calculations, and the most ingenious inventions, have brought optics to such perfection, that it, and it alone, among the physical sciences, was beginning almost to rival astronomy in accuracy. . . . On the other side is a man whose remarkable mental endowments, and whose singular talent for seeing through whatever obscures reality, we have had occasion to recognize, not only in poetry, but also in the descriptive parts of the natural sciences; and this man assures us with the utmost zeal that the physicists are wrong: he is so convinced of the correctness of his own view, that he cannot explain the contradiction except by assuming narrowness or malice on their part. . . . So flat a contradiction leads us to suspect that there must be behind some deeper antagonism of principle, some difference of organization between his mind and theirs, to prevent them from understanding each other.3

According to Helmholtz, Goethe’s ingenuity had been to recognize forms in the formless heap of phenomena and to induce types from them. Goethe regarded nature first and foremost as a work of art, complete in itself: not under concepts independent of intuition (anschauungslose Begriffe) but rather

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Figure 1.1. Sketches by Goethe comparing the forms of animal skulls, 1776. Eduard von der Hellen, Goethes Anteil an Lavaters Physiognomischen Fragmenten (Frankfurt: Rütten & Loening, 1888), 159.

in forms “inspired by a direct spiritual intuition” (unmittelbare geistige An­ schauung).4 Goethe was at his best when he recognized that the human skull carried formal traces of the intermaxillary bone found in other vertebrates, when he observed that the stem, leaves, petals, and stamens of a palm plant formally resembled each other, or when he described the afterimages of shapes and colors.5 Under Goethe’s gaze, nature was no longer a collection of haphazard fragments but became comprehensible as an organic whole. It was no coincidence, Helmholtz noted, that Goethe had realized his most brilliant scientific work in such “descriptive” sciences as botany, zoology, or anatomy. When phenomena needed to be portrayed, compared, or classified according to their form or structure, Goethe proved to be a genius. However, when phenomena needed to be analyzed and their causes explained, Helmholtz noted, Goethe’s morphological thinking did not fare as well (fig. 1.1). Yet Helmholtz was not prepared to call Goethe’s scientific endeavors a failure, either. He detected in the poet’s intuitive approach to nature an intense antipathy to dissection (Zergliederung) and a resolute resistance to understanding phenomena in any manner that was not aesthetic. In Goethe’s thinking, “nature resists the interference of the experimenter who tortures and disturbs her,” he wrote.6 Helmholtz was also aware that his own work in physics and physiology penetrated precisely that which Goethe had deemed impenetrable: the deep mechanical laws at work in “the levers, the

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cords, and the pulleys which work behind the scenes” as opposed to “the beautiful appearance of nature.”7 Thus, instead of calling a winner and a loser in what was in fact Goethe’s long-lost war against Newton, Helmholtz tactfully proposed an alternative. The reasoning practiced by Newton and Goethe, he offered, should be understood as guided by competing epistemic principles. Newton’s reasoning followed logical induction, which, with the aid of syllogisms, “reduced a question to clearly defined universal propositions.”8 Goethe, by contrast, subscribed to another kind of reasoning that Helmholtz described as aesthetic or artistic induction (künstlerische Induction).9 Aesthetic induction also followed the protocols of syllogistic reasoning but was performed by the body as opposed to by the mind. For example, the eye drew conclusions from major premises (what one had in store as past experience) and minor premises (sensations locally presented to it in the current moment) in perception as if there were a logician embedded in it.10 Unlike a logical induction, however, an aesthetic induction was carried out unconsciously. Helmholtz called these “judgments which do not depend upon our consciously thinking over former observations of the same kind . . . ‘unconscious inferences’ [unbewußte Schlüsse].”11 Each kind of induction corresponded to a distinct mode of ratiocination: Besides the knowledge [Wissen] that operates with concepts [Begriffe] and is, therefore, capable of expression in words, there is another department of our mental operations, which only combines sensual impressions [sinnliche Eindrücke] that are not capable of direct verbal expression. In German we call this Kennen— as when we say that we “know” a man, a road, a dish, an odorous substance, we mean that we have seen, or tasted, or smelt these objects, hold on to their sensual impression in memory, and will recognize it again when it is repeated, even though we may never be able to describe the impression in words, even to ourselves.12

Viewed from the perspective of the Helmholtzian distinction between Wissen and Kennen, the difference between Goethe and Newton no longer seemed irreconcilable. Even when they concerned themselves with the same object, Helmholtz explained, the two pursued different kinds of knowledge. In Zur Farbenlehre Goethe poetically described the experiential effects of light: he was interested in how the sensorial apparatus of his body experienced itself, perceived afterimages and illusions, and associated phenomenal effects with moral values (fig. 1.2). By contrast, Newton, even when he gathered evidence from observation or experiment, was concerned with formulating principles of causality beyond such experiential effects. As others who ruminated on the same epistemological distinction would put it, while Goethe wanted to know light, Newton wanted to know about light. Kennen, then, was acquired through an experiential familiarity with phenomena; Wissen attempted to establish supra-experiential facts by inquiring into questions of

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Figure 1.2. Table compiled to survey subjective colors. When viewed through a prism, the pairs of figures no longer appear black and white and the same size. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre (Tübingen: J. G. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1810), plate IIa.

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cause and effect. Kennen required the description of appearances and analogical reasoning; Wissen, the analysis of the machinery behind appearances and causal reasoning. In fact, Helmholtz’s distinction sought to reconcile more than the longstanding antagonism between Goethe and Newton. In a theoretical move that would prove anticipatory of the organization of the disciplines at universities at the end of the century, Helmholtz associated Wissen and Kennen with distinct fields of knowledge whose differences would now have to be understood in methodological terms. Logical induction belonged with the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften), whose contributions to Prussia’s modernization were widely recognized and celebrated by the middle of the nineteenth century despite ongoing debates about their role in education. By contrast, Helmholtz argued, aesthetic induction was at home with the arts and the loosely defined human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften; what we call the humanities and the social sciences in North America today), sciences of the mind whose intellectual rigor was considered central to the nineteenth-century ideal of Bildung.13 Helmholtz’s theoretical move was as deft as it was reconciliatory. Whereas positivism argued that all fields of knowledge be reformed on the methodological model of the natural sciences and the German Historical School insisted on the separation of the natural sciences from the human sciences, Helmholtz diverted the debate by attributing the difference between these two constellations of fields to two distinct kinds of knowing.14 Still questions remained: however similar the basic operation of aesthetic induction and that of logical induction might be, could one assume that the two kinds of knowledge were equally legitimate? To what extent was each reliable in guiding action? Helmholtz himself expressed some reservations. Aesthetic induction could “never be perfectly assimilated to forms of logical reasoning,” he wrote, “nor pressed so far to establish universal laws.”15 Still, given the central role that it played in the translation of sensations into perception, he thought that Kennen held the promise of another kind of rigor:16 And yet it is certain that this kind of knowledge [Kennen] may attain the highest possible degree of precision and certainty, and is so far not inferior to any knowledge [Wissen] which can be expressed in words; but it is not directly communicable, unless the object in qestion can be brought actually forward, or the impression that it produces can be otherwise represented— as by drawing the portrait of a man instead of producing the man himself. . . . I would also note here that this “knowledge” of the effort of the will [Willens­ impuls] to be exerted must attain the highest possible degree of certainty, accuracy, and precision, for us to be able to maintain so artificial a balance as is necessary for walking on stilts or for skating, for the singer to know how to strike a note with his voice, or the violin-player with his finger, so exactly that its vibration shall not be out by a hundredth part.17

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This chapter is the intellectual biography of the kind of knowing that Helmholtz dubbed Kennen, the kind of knowledge, which, despite its resistance to language, concepts, propositions, or representations, was nonetheless understood to guide correctly the fingers of a violinist, the voice of an opera singer, or the hand of an artist. This history is crucial to understanding the emergence of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth- century techniques that I discuss in subsequent chapters. As I explained in the introductory chapter, I call this other way of knowing “kinaesthetic knowing”: nondiscursive and nonconceptual knowledge assumed to be gathered from the body’s experiential exchanges with the world. This is not to say that kinaesthetic knowing had no discursive existence before Helmholtz theorized it in the middle of the nineteenth century. I will briefly summarize in the next section how others before and after Helmholtz proposed the idea that there might exist a unique form of ratiocination associated with the musculature of the body. Yet it was at the middle of the nineteenth century, in the midst of heated debates about teleology and mechanism, that kinaesthetic knowing acquired unprecedented salience. The dependence of this alternative mode of knowing upon experience, as we will see, allowed it to accommodate teleological and mechanistic explanations simultaneously. The political expediency of this accommodation proved crucial to the success of kinaesthetic knowing: for such debates did not only purport to explain the order of the universe theoretically but also sought to dictate the order of the world here and now. The Longer Historical Arc: From Sympathy to Proprioception Kennen differed from other theorizations of experiential knowledge— intuitive, instinctive, or otherwise— in that Helmholtz assumed that it was attained by the musculature of the body. In his monumental study on the physiology of vision, he stressed— over against the usual arguments for the perfection of the eye as evidence of God and preexisting harmony in the universe— that the eye had numerous inherent flaws: chromatic irregularity, spherical aberration, and imperfect transparency, among many others. If, despite these flaws, it was still able to provide the subject with a correct perception of the world, it was because and only because of the tireless work undertaken by the eye muscles. By constantly adjusting and readjusting themselves, these muscles overcame potential misperceptions and illusions and eventually learned to draw the correct inference from the sensations presented to the eye (figs. 1.3, 1.4).18 It was almost as if muscles toiled away with a work ethic that Weber would later associate with Protestantism.19 In this sense, the history of Kennen was intertwined with that of the concept of the reflex, which from the seventeenth century onward offered a new way of accounting for the coordinated action of the muscles.20 Galenic theories that dominated Europe before the rise of reflex theory had imagined the human body as demonstrating a decentralized sentience: parts of

Figure 1.3. According to Helmholtz, correct perception of the world was impossible without the work carried out by eye muscles. Hermann von Helmholtz, Handbuch der physiologischen Optik, vol. 1 (Hamburg: L. Voss, [1856– 66] 1867), 28.

Figure 1.4. Single and double ophthalmotropes used by Wundt. The movements of the eyeball are controlled by strings and weights representing the muscles. E. Zimmermann, Psychologische und physiologische Apparate (Leipzig, 1897), catalogue nos. 1 and 2.

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Figure 1.5. Twelfth-century description of the arterial, venous, skeletal, nervous, and muscular arrangements of the body as enumerated by the second-century Greek physician Galen. The Glossary of Solomon, Prüfening, Germany, 1158 and 1165. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Clm. 13002.

the body responded in “sympathy” or “consensus” with other parts through a network of fibers and vessels (fig. 1.5). By contrast, reflex theory assumed that a centrally located sensus communis “reflected” the animal spirits activated by external impressions, which, in turn, triggered muscle movement. The mechanism of reflex action was famously noted by the philosopher René Descartes and examined by the physician Thomas Willis, but by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the work of a number of physicians established the concept in the modern sense as the involuntary response of the body to external stimuli.21 The reflex, however, raised as many questions about the configuration of the human subject as it answered. How was the relationship between the centers of the body and its peripheries to be theorized in light of reflex theory? What was the connection between voluntary and involuntary actions? How was the theological concept of the soul

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Figure 1.6. The hand using an instrument. Charles Bell, The Hand, Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments, as Evincing Design, Bridgewater Treatises Series (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1833), 112.

to be negotiated with an emergent concept of the mind? Furthermore, as Margarete Vöhringer has demonstrated, such questions acquired political resonances after the French Revolution, when the spectacle of the king’s beheading by guillotine also turned out to be a physiological experiment performed in public about the reflex.22 The discourse around muscle action assumed new salience after the Scottish surgeon Charles Bell and the French physiologist François Magendie independently discovered in the mid-1820s that nerves carrying sensory impulses and those carrying motor impulses were attached to different parts of the spinal cord.23 These findings suggested that if muscles were capable of transmitting afferent impulses toward the central nervous system as well as efferent ones away from it, they might have a sentience comparable to that of the eye or the ear.24 Using physiological evidence, especially of the human hand, Bell argued that the “exercise of the muscular frame [was] the source of much of the knowledge which [was] usually supposed to be obtained through the organs of sense.”25 Bell called this consciousness the “sixth sense” or the “muscle sense”— by which he meant the ability to sense tactility as well as the resistance of matter (fig. 1.6). In the early nineteenth century other natural philosophers also found epistemological value in the activities of the “muscle sense,” alternatively referred to as Muskel­ sinn, Muskelgefühl, Innervationsgefühl, or sens musculaire.26 Especially within British and American philosophical traditions, the kind of knowledge that Helmholtz called Kennen was pitted against discursive knowledge under various rubrics and granted various degrees of autonomy: John Grote’s and William James’s “knowledge of acquaintance” versus “knowledge-about” or “knowledge of judgment”; Bertrand Russell’s “knowledge by acquaintance” versus “knowledge by description”; or Gilbert Ryle’s “knowledge-how” ver-

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sus “knowledge-what.”27 The conclusions drawn from the new sense, however, were contradictory. On the one hand, the muscle sense finalized the demise of the theory of “sympathies” by proving once and for all that every nervous impulse had to pass through the center, whether the brain or the spinal cord. On the other hand, the separation of the nerve traffic meant that muscles, equipped with sensory and motor nerves and responsible for the organism’s mobility, could now be understood as self-governing entities on the peripheries of the body. It was in this immediate context that Helmholtz associated Kennen with psychologisches Tactgefühl, a psychological tactfulness that retained its ties with the sense of touch.28 By the turn of the twentieth century, the reflex was no longer discussed as a matter of action and reaction but described as a continuous circuit. The American philosopher John Dewey, for example, famously argued that there could be no stimulus without response: “The so-called response,” he wrote, “is not merely to the stimulus; it is into it.”29 This way of thinking about the reflex had the potential to reverse given assumptions about the constitution of the subject. It amounted to arguing that consciousness did not lie in a mind located centrally between afferent and efferent nervous traffic but on the peripheries of the body, which could now be seen as having a unique intelligence in its own right. In Dewey’s thinking, the mind, the self, and consciousness were not self- constitutive as in the Germanic tradition but rather were determined by a dynamic relationship with external stimuli. This idea of a mind dispersed in the environment was as evident in the philosopher William James’s theory of emotions as in J. J. Gibson’s formulation of ecological psychology several decades later.30 Those who subscribed to the so- called motor theory of consciousness went so far as to claim that consciousness did not exist as such but was constituted by an organism’s interactions with the environment.31 It is telling that when the English physiologist C. S. Sherrington published his influential book The Integrative Action of the Nervous System in 1906, he refrained from using the term “muscle sense” (fig. 1.7).32 Yet Sherrington did not so much disprove the previous research on the sentient role played by the muscles as reconceptualize it in an entirely new way. Sherrington also theorized the reflex as an arc but now stressed its integrative aspect: nervous reaction integrated the discrete components of an organism into a coherent whole that consisted of mechanical, chemical, thermal, and electrical functions. What used to be called the muscle sense was now referred to as “proprioception.” Sherrington’s “proprioceptive field” was defined by receptors in the depth of the organism’s muscles, tendons, joints, internal organs, and blood vessels and was complemented by an “extero- ceptive field” on the surfaces of the organism vulnerable to the “vicissitudes of the environment.”33 The ingenuity of the reflex, according to Sherrington, was that it served as the connection between the environment inside the organism and the environment outside. Evoking the idea of milieu intérieur,

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Figure 1.7. Reflex arc according to Sherrington. C. S. Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), 156.

Sherrington’s reflex was a facilitator in a thoroughly integrated system in which “extero-ceptive and proprio-ceptive components co- operate[d] harmoniously together and mutually reinforce[d] each other’s action.”34 It was a short leap from Sherrington’s conception of the reflex as the connecting element of a global system to the physiologist W. B. Cannon’s claim that the body had a unique wisdom that allowed it to maintain a constant state of homeostasis.35 By the time that the Russian psychologist I. P. Pavlov renamed Helmholtz’s “unconscious inferences” “conditioned reflexes” in the 1920s, the muscle sense no longer held the central position that it had once enjoyed in nineteenth-century physiology and psychology.36 However, the idea of a mode of intelligence unique to the musculature was kept alive— albeit with more modest epistemological claims— in twentieth-century philosophy. Although nineteenth- century phenomenology’s indebtedness to experimental psychology was mostly forgotten, the epistemological valence of lived experience remained an underlying theme of twentieth-century phenomenology: the primacy of prereflective cognition was evident not only in Husserl’s distinction between Körper, physical frame, and Leib, living body, but also in Heidegger’s discussion of a hands-on (zu­ handen) way of dealing with the world and in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception.37 It would be a few decades before kinaesthetic sensations would reemerge at the end of the twentieth century in such fields as cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and robotics as symptomatic of a renewed interest in the centrality of bodily sensations. This time these fields would revisit the nineteenth-century pair Wissen and Kennen as the distinction between procedural and declarative knowledge: the former, it was assumed, was manifested implicitly in the performance of a skill and the latter explicitly in propositional representations.38

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Kinaesthetic Knowing in the Nineteenth Century: Between Telos and Mechanism

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If Helmholtz’s theorization of Wissen and Kennen as competing modes of ratiocination was, on the one hand, part of a larger intellectual Western tradition, on the other hand, it had a very specific history in nineteenth-century German-speaking lands. Helmholtz devised the pair in the midst of debates about the social use of knowledge. Starting in the 1820s, the role of the natural sciences, especially in secondary school curricula, emerged as the crux of a confrontation between scholars from the humanistic disciplines and natural philosophers, or the so- called Naturforscher.39 The empirical sciences, which were credited with German states’ technological progress and seen as crucial to the relationship between the German industry and the educational system, presented a dilemma.40 Were ideal subjects better trained through “formal” education— that is, nonutilitarian and neo-humanist pedagogy with an emphasis on Latin, Greek, and mathematics, whose internally consistent abstract laws, it was argued, would teach them a universal method upon which they could build further knowledge at the university? Or should secondary education be supported with specific empirical content from the so- called Realien, disciplines like the natural sciences, modern languages, and modern history? What would happen to the will- centered, unitary self imagined by Humboldt or Fichte as the focus of Bildung earlier in the nineteenth century if this self were bombarded by the empirical facts of Realien? Or if, as the physiologist Emil Du Bois-Reymond provocatively suggested, Greek composition were to be replaced by conic sections in lesson plans?41 The evident result of such debates was the introduction of varying degrees of Realien into the curricula of elementary and secondary schools throughout the nineteenth century, but not without controversy. In this sense, as the historian Denise Phillips has argued, Helmholtz’s speculations about two distinct forms of knowledge at midcentury “were not opening salvos, but interventions in a debate that was by that point several decades old.”42 Yet nineteenth- century debates about knowledge did not only revolve around the practical question of planning school curricula to cultivate subjects who would be able to put Bildung in the service of German states’ ongoing project of modernization. These debates also had implications for the organization of disciplines at universities.43 Helmholtz’s theorization of Ken­ nen as a distinct epistemological principle coincided with the emergence of Erkenntnistheorie (epistemology) as a propaedeutic science (Vorwissenschaft), or a science of science that inquired into the very possibility of knowledge.44 As German Idealism had fallen into disrepute, empirical sciences seemed to be on the rise, and individual fields of knowledge seemed to be going their independent ways, some considered it necessary to develop a theory of knowledge that would assume the responsibility of keeping an eye on the larger question of disciplinary organization. As Klaus Christian Köhnke has

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written, the field of Erkenntnistheorie developed in the nineteenth century not only as a counterdesign to the metaphysics of German Idealism but also as a means of theorizing the question of knowledge in general at a moment when disciplines seemed to be separating from each other at institutions of higher learning.45 Even the most pragmatic concerns about the institutional arrangement of knowledge at universities, however, were shaped along fault lines that had been forming in German-speaking lands and beyond at least since the seventeenth century. Defenders of Realien argued for a practical training of the senses through sinnliche Anschauung (sensuous intuition) as opposed to an education of the mind through universal laws, but implicit in such claims was the inherited assumption that phenomena possessed a self- evidence that spoke directly to the senses.46 This attitude, however, was indicative not of a new scientific spirit but rather of a new theological thinking: an understanding of telos that was not transcendent but rather immanent in phenomena. Natural theologians within Protestantism sought an alternative way of proving the existence of an ultimate end determined by God, but they identified that end in the “book of nature” rather than in Scripture— that is, in “the word of God.” In Britain, where natural theological thinking was particularly strong, the likes of William Paley endeavored to prove God’s existence through “argument from design,” the equivalent of “intelligent design” arguments in our time.47 One needed only to look at a bird, a skull, or a plant leaf to understand that the universe was endowed with purpose. As in Goethe’s experiments and in Helmholtz’s defense of them, for anyone who knew how to look, the sensible forms of phenomena told the story of nature’s purpose. This, after all, was the point of Bell’s theory of the muscle sense, one important nineteenth- century relative of Helmholtz’s Kennen. According to Bell, whose book The Hand was a contribution to the natural theology series Bridgewater Treatises, two related conclusions could be drawn from the physiology of this organ.48 First, the intricate muscular structure of the hand yielded conclusive evidence that the universe had a designer. Second, because it was the organ through which the human capacity for design was realized, the hand also demonstrated the principle of telos in action. In other words, as both the product and instrument of “design,” a concept that was relatively novel in English at this moment, the hand proved that the universe had been created from the outset according to a plan.49 Bell’s theory of the muscle sense also provided an answer to a question that had first been formulated by the Irish philosopher William Molyneux in the seventeenth century and that had been haunting empiricist epistemologies ever since: Could a man born blind tell the difference between a cube and a globe that he had known only by touch if he suddenly gained his sight later in life?50 At stake in the famous question was more than the role played by innate faculties versus experience acquired through the senses.

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This gap was what Kant had called the “scandal of philosophy” in the First Critique: “No matter how innocent idealism may be held to be as regards the essential ends of metaphysics . . . ,” Kant wrote, “it always remains a scandal of philosophy and universal human reason that the existence of things outside us (from which we after all get the whole matter for our cognitions, even for our inner sense) should have to be assumed merely on faith [Glauben].”51 As Kant saw it, nothing short of such a leap of faith could bridge this impossible gap between the mind and the world of extension. Bell, by contrast, offered the muscle sense as the much-needed epistemological cement between the two. The muscle sense, then, did not only anchor Molyneux’s disoriented subject in the world of extension, preventing him from disintegrating into the discrete sensations perceived through otherwise separate sense organs. (This, remember, was the trap that Humboldt and Fichte also identified in the sensationalism of the French Revolution.) The “sixth sense,” as the muscle sense was sometimes called, also secured this subject in a universe in which there was purpose and plan. Natural theological thinking found traction among nineteenth- century German intellectuals as well. The liberal followers of the Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, for example, alluded to the aesthetics of nature borrowed from Naturphilosophie as proof that every particular phenomenon ultimately conformed to a universal teleology. In the words of the historians Bernhard Kleeberg and Fernando Vidal, “scientific reasoning and aesthetic contemplation formed two sides of an epistemological coin” in the nineteenth- century German context.52 More relevant here, an aesthetic and intuitive perception of nature’s beauty was posited as an alternative to understanding natural phenomena by means of a necessary connection between cause and effect. Along this line of thinking, the philosopher Jakob Friedrich Fries made a distinction that foreshadowed Helmholtz’s a few decades later: Fries distinguished Wissen (knowledge) and Glaube (belief ), the jurisdictions of the natural sciences and theology, respectively, from Ahnung (divination), a feeling that the infinite God was reflected in the finitude of phenomena.53 In other words, even before Darwin’s Origin of Species suggested a universe in which the role of teleology was no longer certain, Protestantism began leaving causal explanation to Wissen, the kind of knowledge produced by the natural sciences, and making its theological arguments from the aesthetics of nature instead.54 If the question of teleology had preoccupied philosophers at the turn of the nineteenth century, it gained new urgency in the politically charged atmosphere before and after the 1848 revolutions. Helmholtz’s 1853 address about two kinds of ratiocination came on the eve of the so-called materialism debate (Materialismusstreit). The following year, when the Göttingen physiologist Rudolf Wagner delivered a lecture in which he pointed to the moral dangers of eliminating purpose from conceptions of the universe, the physiologist Carl Vogt penned a widely read and even more widely disputed text

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that would become a centerpiece of midcentury materialism.55 In Köhler­ glaube und Wissenschaft (Blind Belief and Science), Vogt outlined a “scientific materialism” that made a case for a mechanistic explanation of the universe.56 Support followed from fellow materialists: Jacob Moleschott’s Die Physiologie der Nahrungsmittel (1850, Physiology of Nourishment) and Ludwig Büchner’s Kraft und Stoff (1855, Force and Matter) positioned themselves over against Hegelian Idealism, Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, and any philosophy that assumed the existence of nonmaterial entities such as God. Even the mind was subjected to this law: Vogt controversially argued that “thoughts stood in the same relationship to the brain as bile to the liver and urine to the kidneys.”57 Especially after the failed 1848 revolutions, such materialist explanations were dreaded for their determinism and their elimination of the concepts of the soul, Creation, and free will, and despite the political diversity of its advocates, materialism was considered politically aligned with anarchism.58 What would be the principle for organizing society if it was made up of individuals who were merely bundles of atoms instead of conscious subjects in control of their actions? How could the Enlightenment ideals of freedom, autonomy, and agency be reconciled with such a deterministic universe ruled by the law of cause and effect? On the surface, Helmholtz’s paper “Über die Erhaltung der Kraft” (Conservation of Force) provided materialists with much-needed theoretical fuel and legitimacy at midcentury.59 In this groundbreaking paper, Helmholtz provocatively argued that force (Kraft) could be converted from one form to another but was never lost.60 Both Helmholtz and the members of the Berlin Physical Society, who had invited him to give the paper as a lecture in 1846, were aware of the implications of this claim: if organism and mechanism alike were subject to the laws of physics, then the idea of vital force— along with the conception of the universe as a stable system with an endless supply of indestructible creative force— had to be untenable. Despite being repeatedly cited by materialists, however, Helmholtz avoided supporting materialism.61 In the face of conflicting allegiances— his commitment to the Enlightenment belief in free will and his dedication to the practices of natural sciences and to the ideal of progress— Helmholtz settled on a solution that was more Kantian than materialist.62 In the second part of the Third Critique, Kant asked how it was possible that nature seemed to conform to mechanical laws, on the one hand, and to demonstrate ends, goals, and purposes, on the other.63 Kant ingenuously attributed this paradox to the peculiarity of reason: in human understanding, the particular was always contingent with regard to the universal since humans, unlike God, could not possibly deduce the particular from the universals that applied to it. In contrast to a God-like intuitive understanding that understood the totality of nature as a completely determinate whole, he argued, human understanding was discursive. Kant’s reasoning, then, provided one way around the dilemmas posed by the problem of teleology

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versus mechanism at midcentury: one simply had to acknowledge that it was impossible to understand the universe as a mechanism but that this impossibility was always paired with the impossibility of explaining it as anything but. If, as Kant seemed to imply, reason could never fill in the inherent gaps in human knowledge— between induction and deduction, between the particular and the universal, or between phenomena and noumena— then it made sense to demarcate knowing itself into two distinct realms. In this sense, Helmholtz’s Wissen and Kennen pair was not only following the separation made by Protestant theologians earlier in the century. The distinction also incorporated a Kantian twist. In driving a wedge between Wissen and Kennen and claiming that Goethe’s aesthetic apprehension of nature’s ultimate purpose was as legitimate as natural philosophers’ empirical attempts to come to terms with nature’s mechanistic workings, Helmholtz was also claiming the otherwise impossible position between telos and mechanism at midcentury. In this sense, Helmholtz’s epistemological demarcation needs to be differentiated from those proposed by others. Compare Helmholtz’s Wissen and Kennen to the pair used by the British philosopher John Grote. Only a few years before Helmholtz’s 1853 lecture, Grote had also noted the distinction made in everyday parlance in various languages between “knowing a thing” (γνωναι, nōscere, kennen, connaître) and “knowing about a thing” (ειδεναι, scire, wissen, savoir).64 Furthermore, Grote too claimed that this difference recorded in everyday language was at the root of a number of thorny philosophical problems: the Kantian distinction between knowable phenomena versus unknowable noumena as well as between sensualism and idealism, inductive and intuitive reasoning, and a posteriori and a priori.65 Knowledge of acquaintance— which Grote described as “presential” because the object of the knowledge was immediately presented to the mind— was acquired through familiarity with the phenomenal world. Knowledge of judgment, which in Grote’s terminology was “absential” knowledge, was achieved through reflection.66 Grote imagined that the presential “view from phenomena” and the absential “view from consciousness” would find a point of convergence one day “like excavators at the opposite ends of the Mont Cenis.”67 Helmholtz’s demarcation of knowledge into Wissen and Kennen was less sanguine. If the two excavators could never meet, it was not because they did not dig forcefully enough but, as Kant had recognized, because of antinomies inherent in the human mind. Even cause and effect, the centerpiece of Newtonian physics and the modus operandi of the natural sciences, did not provide an ultimate answer after all. According to his biographer Leo Königsberger, Helmholtz saw causality less as a law and more as a hypothesis that presumed uniformity in nature.68 When we assume that the fire burning in a stove is the cause of the warmth emitted by the stove, Helmholtz ruminated, we do not correctly explain the cause of the warmth, but

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rather “we bring our single fact under a more general, better known fact, rest satisfied with it, and call it falsely an explanation.”69 Or, as Bertrand Russell, the theorist of “knowledge by acquaintance,” would later put it, the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow was not predicated on an exact understanding of the first or last causes of planetary motion but rather on past experience that the sun rises every day.70 The question of causality could never be settled but only infinitely deferred. In both cases, “experience”— immediate, lived, and mundane experience, frequently described as Erlebnis in German— prevented the human mind from slipping into the problem that philosophers call “epistemic regress,” a problem that would require what Derrida would much later call a “transcendental signified” to put an end to an otherwise infinite chain of deferral. This, finally, was the theoretical appeal of kinaesthetic knowing. While “absential” Wissen was causally removed from its objects by processes of reflection, analysis, and inference, “presential” Kennen operated with a causality that was immediately at hand. Because kinaesthetic knowing was the immediate result of the innervation of the muscles, and because it allowed cause and effect to be felt within rather than observed without, it made it possible to arrest the infinite regress of causality within the framework of the body. This meant that the position of transcendental signified at the end of the deferral chain was now being occupied not by God, nature, or vital force but rather by “experience.” Instead of the natural theological strategy of relying on “argument from design” to justify the order of earth and beyond, one could thus make an “argument from experience.” Kennen as another way of knowing, then, did not so much resolve the antinomies of reason that Kant had so sharply pointed out as plug the holes in it temporarily. It offered the possibility of a universe in which the mind-and-body dichotomy could be sustained and mechanistic and teleological explanations could coexist without contradicting each other. Kinaesthetic knowing, in other words, was a truce between the seemingly irreconcilable positions inherent in Enlightenment thinking. However, while the demarcation of knowledge into Wissen and Kennen seemed to take care of some of the most intractable antinomies of reason, it created other ones. The possibility of a nondiscursive, nonlinguistic knowledge inevitably posed critical questions about the sovereignty of the human subject whose integrity nineteenth-century defenders of the Enlightenment project had been seeking to preserve. If, as the anthropologist Adolf Bastian put it, it became possible to imagine that “it is not we who think but that it thinks in us”— that is, if it was possible to imagine a form of intelligence dispersed throughout the body and enacted by the muscles— how could one insist upon the centrality of consciousness or the coherency of selfhood?71 Did this other kind of cognition undermine what was assumed to be the immutable central core of human consciousness? If so, what was to distinguish humans from animals? Or the conscious from the unconscious? Not surpris-

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ingly, then, at the very moment that kinaesthetic knowing offered a solution to the antinomies of reason, it also began to undermine the stability of the rational human subject. 44

A Science of Experience In light of this history, psychology’s rise to prominence in the 1870s should be seen not as the inevitable result of philosophical invention or scientific discovery, as is usually assumed, but rather as having to do with the new epistemological currency of experience. Kant had famously rejected— albeit not consistently— the possibility of “a science of the soul”: put simply, something as elusive as experience could never be examined with the mathematical exactness that was the gold standard in the natural sciences.72 Psychology was never able to shed this inbuilt contradiction that William James would later call the “psychologist’s fallacy.”73 Yet it was arguably also thanks to this fallacy that psychology came to be understood in the late nineteenth century as an exemplary discipline around which broader debates about disciplinarity unfolded. As William Woodward has written, because psychology was seen to occupy a privileged position between philosophy and medicine, it became “not the handmaiden but the queen of the sciences” at this historical moment.74 Just as Helmholtz had kept mechanical and teleological explanations compatible by allocating them to separate categories of knowledge, psychology became tenable as a disciplinary project by maintaining a similar tension between two methods: first, inductive methods borrowed from the natural sciences, especially the experimental method that had been used successfully in physiology in the nineteenth century; and second, the method of introspection that had been inherited from Protestant theology (particularly Pietism) and that had been essential to neo-humanistic training at German institutions of learning. According to the ecological psychologist Edward S. Reed’s unusual history of the discipline, “psychology succeeded in becoming a science in large part because of its defense of a theological conception of human nature typically associated with liberal Protestant theology.”75 It should therefore come as no surprise that the kind of experimental psychology that appeared in Germany in the 1870s owed its logic to an eccentric man: Gustav Theodor Fechner, who, on the one hand, was a professor of physics at the University of Leipzig, and, on the other, used the pseudonym Dr. Mises as he penned tracts on such topics as the soul-life of plants and participated in occultist séances.76 The difference between the new psychology that became institutionalized in the 1870s and previous psychological theorizing was that the former was almost always predicated on psychophysics, a field of knowledge invented by Fechner in the 1860s.77 Fechner proposed psychophysics as an empirical science of experience (Er­ fahrung): its goal was to correlate stimuli in the physical world quantitatively

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to sensations felt by the subject. His two-volume Elemente der Psychophysik (Elements of Psychophysics) was formulated in direct response to the problem of knowledge’s bifurcation along Cartesian lines. “While knowledge of the material world has blossomed in the great development of the various branches of natural science and has benefited from exact principles and methods that assure it of successful progress, and while knowledge of the mind has, at least up to a certain point, established for itself a solid basis in psychology and logic,” Fechner complained, “knowledge of the relation of mind and matter, of body and soul, has up to now remained merely a field for philosophical argument without solid foundation.”78 The new field of psychophysics was to develop at the very point where knowledge from the world of extension and knowledge from the mind failed to meet. It was to devise “an exact theory that set up a relationship of functional or dependent relationship between the body [Leib] and the mind [or more correctly, the soul, Seele].”79 Following J. F. Herbart’s idea of mathematizing experience and reconfiguring a formula by the physiologist E. H. Weber, Fechner came up with the principal law of psychophysics: an equation that logarithmically correlated the intensity of stimuli (Reize) received by the senses (including those originating from within the body) to the intensity of sensations (Emp­ findungen) immediately experienced by the subject.80 Fechner’s psychophysical equation made at least two crucial arguments. First, despite using the language of mathematics, the lingua franca of the natural sciences, psychophysics pointedly avoided the question of causality that those sciences concerned themselves with.81 Instead, it simply posited a relationship of correspondence based on an assumed parallelism: the physical and the psychical were parallel and interdependent but— and this was the critical point— not causally related.82 Psychophysical parallelism thus opposed both the materialist claim that all consciousness was reducible to physical processes and the positivist argument that the laws of the mind were “sometimes analogous to mechanical but sometimes also to chemical laws.”83 Instead, Fechner considered the attempt to bridge the gap from the physical and the psychical (as well as from mechanism to teleology) as ludicrous an undertaking as what his alter ego Dr. Mises attempted in his satirical “comparative anatomy of angels.”84 Using a long-standing philosophical trope, Fechner urged his reader to imagine the mind and the body as two clocks. According to the theory of occasionalism defended by some theologians, God, the transcendent force responsible for every cause, moved the hands of the two clocks simultaneously. By contrast, Cartesian dualism imagined a point of contact between the two clocks, while Leibniz’s theory of preexisting harmony assumed that the two clocks were created from the outset to synchronize perfectly. Fechner insisted that the question was in fact much simpler: according to psychophysics, there were not two clocks but only one. What appeared to the external observer to be a mechanical contraption with wheels and levers (remember Newton’s search for cause

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and effect) was to the hypothetical “mind of the clock” (think of Goethe’s interest in phenomenal effects) a consciousness with feelings, drives, and thoughts.85 As Helmholtz had done to explain the difference between Newton and Goethe, Fechner’s psychophysics accounted for such intractable irreconcilabilities as only a matter of perspective. Second, psychophysics operated analogically— that is, by way of comparison. A typical psychophysical experiment on the perception of weight would proceed as follows: “We raise two vessels A and B, loaded with slightly different total weights. . . . If the difference of the two weights is large enough, we will feel it. Otherwise we will not find a marked difference.”86 Psychophysical instruments were designed not to measure experiences but rather to com­ pare them using such conceptual devices as the “just noticeable difference,” “absolute threshold,” and “difference threshold.” The aesthesiometer, for example, determined the precise point at which the subject could tell two needle pricks as opposed to one (fig. 1.8). In this sense, psychophysics was similar in its logic to the emergent field of statistics, which was also oblivious to mechanical conceptions of cause and effect. Both operated by observing a sufficiently large number of particulars and naming a correlation between a phenomenon and its apparent cause.87 The ingenuity of Fechner’s psychophysics, then, was that it reasoned in an entirely nonteleological manner with inductive and empirical methods borrowed from the natural sciences but without ever giving up teleology. It is for this reason that the historian Michael Heidelberger has called Fechner a “nonreductive materialist” and Norton Wise has described him as a “teleomechanist.”88 Fechner reconciled what appeared irreconcilable to many nineteenth-century thinkers: he described life and consciousness as having an independent nature that could not be further reduced to physical phenomena, all the while seeing the physical world as wholly explicable by laws of nature.89 If the mechanistic view assumed a “night view” by reducing the psychical to the physical, Fechner’s nonreductive materialism proposed to correct it with a “day view,” which instead would find the psychical in the physical.90 According to Fechner, this perspectival difference also accounted for what appeared to be a fundamental rift between disciplines: “The natural sciences consistently use the external standpoint in their consideration of things,” he argued, “while the humanities use the internal.”91 In the words of Wilhelm Wundt, whose world-famous experimental psychology laboratory in Leipzig would be founded upon the principle of psychophysical parallelism, “There is only one experience [Erfahrung], which, however, as soon as it becomes the subject of scientific analysis, is, in some of its components, open to two different kinds of scientific treatment: to a mediate form of treatment, which investigates ideated objects in their objective relations to one another, and to an immediate form, which investigates the same objects in their directly known [anschaulich] character and in their relations to all other contents of the experience of the knowing subject.”92

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Figure 1.8. Aesthesiometer designed by Dr. Joseph Jastrow to measure the minimum distance at which two pricks are felt as two sensations. “Notes,” American Journal of Psychology 1.3 (1888): 552.

Despite such claims, however, psychophysics ultimately found itself inferring the psychical from the physical— that is, by focusing its attention upon the surfaces of the body where visual, auditory, tactile, or olfactory sensations struck. Fechner’s reluctance to set up a directly causal relationship between the physical and the psychical landed him— like Goethe, who, in the words of Helmholtz, refused to penetrate phenomena— in the realm of aesthetics. After a study of the golden section that appeared in 1865, Fechner published Zur experimentellen Aesthetik (Experimental Aesthetics), in which he enumerated methods that were essentially statistical: soliciting subjects’ responses to forms, colors, or proportions, Fechner declared the median response to be the definitive one.93 One experiment, for example, entailed showing the subjects a variety of “writing paper or notepaper, sales slips, greeting cards, photo postcards, purses, slates, chocolates, stock cubes, gingerbread, toilet bags, snuff-boxes, bricks, etc.,” and correlating

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Figure 1.9. Tabulation of the responses of male and female subjects to rectangles of various proportions. Gustav Theodor Fechner, Vorschule der Aesthetik (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1876), 195.

the results to gender in an attempt to determine the most pleasing proportions in a rectangle.94 By the time Fechner published Vorschule der Aesthetik in 1876, he called his experimental approach “aesthetics from below” (Aesthetik von unten).95 This was conceived over against “aesthetics from above” (Aesthetik von oben), by which Fechner meant the philosophical aesthetics of Schelling, Hegel, and Kant. Fechner’s aesthetics claimed to be “from below” in two important ways. First, it used such techniques as surveys and questionnaires in an attempt to establish a statistical average or a median in response to such questions as the golden section, taste, realism versus idealism, polychromy, etc.— that is, questions that, in fact, had been unabashedly inherited from “aesthetics from above.” An experiment tried to determine, for example, what proportions in a rectangle men and women preferred (fig. 1.9). Second, “aesthetics from below” was to be built upon the foundations of such elementary components of experience as pleasure (Gefallen), displeasure (Missfallen), arousal (Lust), and lack of arousal (Unlust).96 This was because  of what Fechner called the “eudemonistic principle” (eudämonisti­ sches Prinzip). Pleasure, according to Fechner, was not an egotistical urge but was rather an immanent principle implanted in each organism to guarantee the ultimate happiness of all.97 More relevant here, this foundationalism and elementarism would set the epistemological tenor of the emergent discipline of psychology. As it was established at universities in the 1870s,

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Figure 1.10. Group picture (from left to right) of Ottmar Dittrich, Wilhelm Wirth, Wilhelm Wundt, Otto Klemm, and Friedrich Sander around instruments of experimental psychology. Collection Rand B. Evans, photographed anonymously in 1912.

psychology would also proceed by building upon components that, it was assumed, were elementary because they were “given” in experience. Wundtian Psychology’s Call to Order If Helmholtz theorized the possibility of an alternative way of knowing that was based on experience, and Fechner invented ways to analyze this experience, it fell to Wilhelm Wundt to align this science of experience with a model of selfhood that conformed to the ideals of nineteenth-century Bildung. Wilhelm Wundt was arguably the most influential practitioner of the new discipline of psychology, which borrowed its logic from psychophysics. After studying medicine and training with Johannes Müller and Emil Du BoisReymond, in 1879 Wundt founded the Institut für experimentelle Psychologie (Institute for Experimental Psychology) at the University of Leipzig, by most accounts the first and certainly the most influential psychological laboratory in the world (fig. 1.10).98 Not only did Wundt train hundreds of students from Germany and abroad, who then proceeded to set up laboratories of their own, but the discipline’s subsequent history unfolded in Wundt’s shadow.99 What was Wundtian psychology? Contrary to the claims of his countless detractors, Wundt did not endorse an exclusively experimental approach to psychology. While psychology had to embrace experimentation and observation in order to shed the metaphysical biases that it had inherited from philosophy, Wundt was adamant that a “psychology, which has been turned

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into hypothetical brain-mechanics, can never be of any service as a basis of the mental sciences.”100 Rather, psychology was the science of experience (Erfahrung), which meant that it had to incorporate a means of analyzing introspection (Selbstbeobachtung), which Wundt defined as “the methodical direction of attention to phenomena.”101 Wundt was not unaware of the methodological hazards of this move: he even ridiculed the introspectionist by likening him to Baron Münchhausen attempting to pull himself out of the bog by his own pigtail.102 “The chief problem of psychology,” he wrote, was that “the intention to observe either essentially modifies the facts to be observed or completely suppresses them.”103 The only way out of this inevitable dilemma was to create conditions under which ordinary inner perception could be systematically converted into the method of pure introspection (die Methode der reinen Selbstbeobachtung)— a technique already central to German conceptions of education— so that the observation of inner experience could be reproduced as if in a scientific experiment.104 Aware that this was no simple task, Wundt limited his experiments to elementary judgments of size, intensity, duration of physical stimuli, simultaneity, succession, etc. Like Helmholtz and Fechner, Wundt subscribed to perspectivalism: outer and inner experience were not different objects per se but required different points of view from which “consideration and scientific treatment of a unitary experience” (einheitliche Erfahrung) were to begin.105 Because every concrete experience divided itself into two factors— content and the apprehension of this content— the study of experience required a methodological division as well: an object of experience (studied by the natural sciences) and an experiencing subject (studied by psychology and the human sciences).106 The natural sciences sought to discover the nature of objects without reference to the subject; the knowledge that they produced, like Helmholtz’s Wissen, was mediate and conceptual. Psychology and the human sciences, on the other hand, investigated the contents of experience in their complete and actual form; like Helmholtz’s Kennen, the kind of knowledge to which they aspired was immediate and perceptual. While this methodological dilemma posed countless difficulties, it also gave psychology a privileged position among the sciences. It is crucial to note, as the historian of psychology Kurt Danziger has convincingly demonstrated, that Wundt, unlike the generation that followed him, was interested in neither the practical applications of psychology nor the prospect of converting psychology into an independent discipline without ties to philosophy.107 Wundt stressed throughout his career that psychology was not just a science among others: it was the linking cartilage between the natural and the human sciences. Furthermore, Wundt maintained, because psychology paid equal attention to both subjective and objective conditions underlying theoretical knowledge and practical activity, it was the propaedeutic empirical science with regard to philosophy— that is, the science that served as the foundation and the overseer of what was epistemologically correct and false.108

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Figure 1.11. Diagram demonstrating the mechanism of apperception. AC represents the apperceptive center of the mind, which all other cognitive functions support. Wilhelm Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, vol. 1, 5th ed. (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, [1874] 1902), 324.

A key concept of Wundtian psychology was apperception, a process whereby sensations were converted to perception with the force of the subject’s will. Whereas earlier in his career Wundt had embraced Helmholtz’s idea of unconscious inference (and even claimed to have recognized the phenomenon before Helmholtz had), he increasingly turned away from such unconscious factors toward what he called “voluntarism,” which held that all psychical processes had to be understood in relationship to conscious volitions.109 This meant that a definition of selfhood was a task that was at the core of psychology’s disciplinary project: “[The problem of psychology] is no longer to remove the abstraction employed by the natural sciences, and in this way to gain with them a complete view of experience,” wrote Wundt, “but . . . to use the concept ‘subject’ furnished by the natural sciences, and to give an account of the influence of this subject on the contents of experience.”110 The subject, in turn, was unequivocally “the product of consciousness.”111 In a diagram that appeared in his books, all cognitive functions, including input from sense organs, converged at AC, the center of apperception (fig. 1.11). Wundtian psychology thus supported a model of selfhood that was close to that imagined by Humboldt and Fichte earlier in the century. So wrote Wundt of this model:

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Out of the multitude of actions performed by an individual, it is the inner acts, the acts of apperception that stand out as more original and immediate than the rest. . . . Hence the final stage of this development consists in the individual’s discovery that his own innermost being is pure apperception; that is, an inner voluntary activity distinct from the rest of conscious content. The ego feels itself to be the same at every moment of its life, because it conceives the activity of apperception as perfectly constant, homogeneous in its nature, and coherent in time. . . . In proportion as the will frees itself from the [constraining forces of external nature], we approach the realization of that ideal of personal existence where the whole inner life of man appears as his own creation; where for good or evil he regards himself as the originator of his own thoughts and emotions, and of all the outward consequences that may flow from them. . . . This unity of feeling, thought and will, in which the will appears as the active power that sustains the other elements, is the individual personality.112

The Wundtian architectonic of the self was unlike the layered one that would be proposed by Freud a few decades later— that is, a stratified structure consisting of the unconscious, the preconscious, and the conscious, linked together by a mechanism of repression. Neither did it resemble the “unsalvageable ego” as described by the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach— an ephemeral self to which sensations floating freely within time and space presented themselves as relatively coherent constellations.113 Instead, Wundt proposed a concentric structure for selfhood. In the words of his student Edward Titchener, the Wundtian self operated as a “whole circle of effects” or a “total force.”114 It consisted of an inner nucleus of consciousness surrounded by rings of increasingly less conscious— but not unconscious— sensations. Apperception was achieved when, using the musculature of the perceptual apparatus, the subject selectively brought unprocessed sensations from the darker outer rings (Blickfeld ) into the illuminated center (Blickpunkt) of consciousness.115 As the American philosopher G. H. Mead would point out, Wundt’s theory of apperception thus posited the mind and its ability to constitute the world as a priori.116 The self theorized by Wundt was a knowing subject that epistemologically colonized the world by gradually broadening its circle of knowledge. The questions that kinaesthetic knowing and its modus operandi unconscious inferences had raised about the sovereignty of the human subject earlier in the century were thus swept under the rug in Wundtian psychology. The unconscious, in which Helmholtz had optimistically identified the possibility of another way of knowing and which Freud would subsequently define as the realm of repression, was, according to Wundt, “entirely unproductive for psychology.”117 In Wundtian psychology the unconscious was not an alternative to the conscious but was continuous with it; it was simply the lower limit or zero grade of consciousness. The historian of sci-

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ence Lorraine Daston has pointed out that Wundt’s theory of apperception was therefore “a back- door attempt to reintroduce an active ego or soul into the new psychology in scientific guise.”118 Seen as such, Wundtian cuttingedge experimental psychology was a call to order: reviving Humboldt and Fichte’s conceptions of Bildung from the turn of the nineteenth century, it promoted a model of selfhood organized around an immutable core of consciousness, equipped with unfailing faith in Enlightenment reason and in its right to subject the world to its control. Two Kinds of Knowing and Two Kinds of Psychology By the turn of the twentieth century, as materialism had lost steam and theologians had mostly withdrawn their claims about causality in nature, the teleology and mechanism controversy that had dominated German intellectual life for most of the nineteenth century did not seem as urgent any more. Yet the questions that bedeviled Helmholtz, Fechner, or Wundt were not so much lost as co-opted into new debates about the organization of the disciplines. What was the primary difference between the natural sciences and the human sciences? What were the demarcation criteria: object of study, method, or ultimate goal? Where did psychology, for some a testing case for the demarcation of the disciplines and for others the bridge between them, stand? By the end of the century, Helmholtz’s epistemological categories of Wissen and Kennen had effectively merged with a debate about the relative virtues of Erklären (explaining) and Verstehen (understanding) as disciplinary methods. As Danziger has pointed out, despite the fact that Wundt dominated psychology from the 1870s onward, almost everything that happened in the discipline subsequently was a repudiation of this towering figure.119 Starting in 1890, the journal Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnes­ organen, edited by Hermann Ebbinghaus and Arthur König, regularly aired objections against Wundtian psychology, propagated primarily through the latter’s Philosophische Studien, published in Leipzig.120 They were not alone: from Franz Brentano’s psychology of act to Theodor Lipps’s empathy theory, and from American functional psychology to Austrian Gestalt psychology and behavioristics in the United States and Russia, there was no shortage of alternative psychologies forged against the Wundtian model.121 While these differences were battled out at an institutional level, Wilhelm Dilthey, philosopher and Schleimermacher scholar, cast these disciplinary debates in a mold that was at once new and old by theorizing the prospect of an alternative psychology that he called “descriptive psychology” (beschreibende Psychologie). First in 1883 in Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (Introduction to the Human Sciences) and a decade later in 1895 in an influential essay titled “Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie” (Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology), Dilthey— himself not a

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psychologist but a careful follower of the discipline— pitted the possibility of a descriptive psychology anticipating phenomenology over against existing psychological practices that he described as “explanatory” and “constructive.”122 The term “descriptive psychology” was borrowed from Brentano and from the psychologist Theodor Waitz, who had distinguished at midcentury between an explanative psychology that sought general laws and a descriptive psychology that ultimately relied on analogical thinking.123 In Einleitung, Dilthey began to spell out the possibility that such a descriptive psychology would be “the foundation not only for aesthetics and ethics, but also for the theory of science.”124 The book was an attempt to develop an epistemology that could pose a viable alternative to Hegelian Idealism, the Historical School, and the positivisms of Auguste Comte and John Stuart Mill.125 Traces of the  Helmholtzian categories permeated Dilthey’s text. What Dilthey called the “facts of consciousness” of inner life were related to each other in a manner that could never be adequately justified through the conceptual framework of cause and effect. Nature presented a series of externally related events whose lawful uniformities the natural sciences since Newton had sought to explain. Dilthey argued that because explanation relied on hypotheses that were verified by taking into account the countable and measurable details of the sensory world, it always assumed an object placed against ( gegenüberstellt) consciousness. The human sciences, by contrast, had the cognitive aim of understanding the meaning of human actions in a historical world experienced as connected from within. Understanding thus did not place an object over against a subject but presented it as part of an interconnected continuum— in German as part of a Zusammenhang (interconnectedness). As his translator Rudolf Makkreel has explained, Dilthey’s new epistemology was critical of the “I-think” of Kant’s first critique. “No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant,” Dilthey wrote, “but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.”126 To put the central methodological question for the human sciences as the question of deduction or induction was already to impose the methods of the natural sciences onto them. Instead, descriptive psychology would have to develop the “I-will” and “I-feel” of Kant’s other two critiques. The psychic interconnectedness (Zusammenhang) demanded by the human sciences was neither a physical aggregate nor a chemical coalescence as Mill’s positivism claimed. Rather, it presented a unique mode of togetherness that was more akin to understanding how a sentence formed a unit of meaning.127 Furthermore, Dilthey insisted, this interconnectedness was teleological. In other words, in Dilthey’s account too, teleology was not absent but migrated from the design of natural phenomena by a Creator to the realm of lived experience (Erlebnis). In the 1895 text that followed, Dilthey once again proposed psychology as the foundation of the human sciences but also argued that this propaedeutic

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role could not be achieved by the “explanative science” that existing psychologies were.128 Nineteenth-century epistemology had emerged out of the need “to secure a piece of firm ground amid an ocean of metaphysical fluctuations,” but psychology in Germany, “by escaping the philosophical maelstrom of Charybdis,” now found itself on “the reef of Scylla, namely, a dreary empiricism,” the kind found not only in Wundt’s work but in the work of his detractors as well.129 Dilthey identified several problems in the explanative psychology of his day. First, the Fechnerian assumption about psychophysical parallelism was inherently flawed. In the work of the psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, for example, although each side of the physical and psychical divide was assumed to be operating within an independent but equally necessary causality, in reality the interconnectedness encountered in the physical was simply projected to the psychical.130 In Dilthey’s words, this amounted to “declaring the bankruptcy of any independent explanative psychology by handing over its business to physiology.”131 Second, the predictable result of this move was to resort to— as Fechner had conspicuously done— probabilistic thinking: if no causal explanation could be offered for people’s preference for a particular proportion, statistical causality (for example, that X many people prefer proportion A) replaced it. Dilthey acknowledged that Wundt had been subtler in his refusal to translate physical causality to psychical causality, but this only resulted in the necessity to invent increasingly more hypothetical conceptual tools. Finally, and perhaps most damning, was Dilthey’s diagnosis of a blind spot in the logic of psychophysics: despite all its effort to decipher the interaction between the physical and the psychical and between stimuli and sensations, psychophysics was entirely unable to account for the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious.132 Instead of Wundtian psychology, Dilthey longed for “a psychology capable of catching in the web of its descriptions that extra dimension in the worlds of writers and poets that has eluded past and present psychological theories.”133 This did not mean that explanative psychology was to be abandoned altogether; it only needed to be made secondary to a descriptive psychology.134 Such a descriptive psychology would emerge “naturally from our lived experiences and from the need for an unbiased and undistorted view of psychic life” and would aspire “to gather experiences of individuality, to establish the terminology necessary for their description, and to analyze them.”135 In contrast to outer perception found in nature, inner perception was based on a reflexive awareness of lived experience that was immediately and indivisibly given. Crucially, however, this experienced interconnectedness could never be clarified to the intellect. Instead one had to have recourse to a prereflective cognition similar to what Helmholtz called Kennen and what Kant classified as Anschauen. Wrote Dilthey: To no other discovery did Kant assign a greater weight than to his sharp division between the nature and principles of intuition [Anschauen] and thought

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[Denken]. . . . In what he calls intuition [Anschauung], thought processes or their equivalents are already at work in distinguishing, discerning gradations, equating, connecting, and separating. The same elementary operations of association, reproduction, comparison, distinguishing, discerning gradations, separating, and connecting, the disregarding of something and the focusing on something else on which abstraction depends, are at work in the formation of our perceptions, of our reproduced and free images, and of geometrical figures, all of which again hold sway in discursive thought. These processes constitute the vast and immeasurably fertile field of silent or pre- discursive thought [schweigendes Denken]. Since the formal categories are abstracted from these primary logical functions, Kant had no need to derive these categories from discursive thought. All discursive thought can be explicated as a higher stage of these silent intellectual processes [schwei­ gende Denkvorgänge].136

Kant had famously stated in the First Critique that percepts without concepts did not yet constitute any form of knowing.137 Dilthey’s silent, nondiscursive cognition operated in a manner more akin to Helmholtz’s unconscious inferences: epistemologically valid conclusions were drawn from the major and minor premises of perception without the active participation of consciousness.138 Description— as opposed to explanation— was the modus operandi of nondiscursive thought: silent thought worked by distinguishing, finding similarities, and determining degrees of difference— that is to say, it proceeded analogically, much like Goethe’s formal examination of intermaxillary bones or Fechner’s psychophysical experiments.139 It was in this sense that the operations of silent intellectual processes were similar to unconscious inferences. “Inner perception, just like outer perception, arises in conjunction with elementary logical processes.  .  .  . Such apprehension originates from and remains linked to lived experience.”140 Feelings, affects, and drives were at the center of psychic life but resisted the analysis of explanative psychology.141 The question of life had always been the thorn in the side of mechanistic theories; Dilthey the Lebensphilosoph now critiqued existing psychologies for their inability to account for the innerconnectedness of consciousness and their tendency to ignore that humans understood through formal wholes— or what psychologists of a particular bent would call Gestalt.142 Whereas in nineteenth- century debates about Realien the natural sciences had been aligned with anschaulich sense experience and the human sciences with text-based knowledge, Dilthey now distinguished these two realms differently. As he saw it, the natural sciences were based in abstract hypotheses, and the human sciences anchored in the anschaulich interconnectedness of lived experience. According to Dilthey, Pestalozzi’s ingenuity at the turn of the nineteenth century was to have understood that “silent rather than discursive thought” was “immeasurably more fruitful for the

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workingman than all pedagogical prattle.”143 Dilthey also acknowledged, however, that Pestalozzi’s methods worked when intuition was inseparable from thought but broke down when it came to language instruction, where thought was clearly discursive.144 This problem of discursivity, as we will see in subsequent chapters, would continue to haunt kinaesthetic knowing throughout its brief life. “There Is Only One Knowledge” Nothing . . . is more pernicious than to demand more feeling from our rational age.  .  .  . There is nothing more deplorable than those skeptics and reformers, liberal priests and humanistically oriented scholars, who moan about “soullessness,” “barren materialism,” what is “unsatisfying in mere science,” and the “cold play of atoms,” and renounce intellectual precision, which is for them only a slight temptation. Then, with the help of some alleged “emotional knowledge” to satisfy the feelings, and with the “necessary” harmony and rounding-out of the world picture, all they invent is some universal spirit: a world-soul, or a God, who is nothing more than the world of the academic petite bourgeoisie which gives rise to him. . . . But there is no emotional knowledge or other, second kind of knowledge that could exist in opposition to science. . . . There is only one knowledge.145

So ranted the Austrian novelist and essayist Robert Musil in 1912 against those who had been calling for an alternative knowledge based on feelings. Moritz Schlick, the Vienna Circle philosopher who shared Musil’s fascination with the epistemology of the physicist Ernst Mach, would agree.146 As Musil and Schlick saw it, the conflation of what I have been calling kinaesthetic knowing with knowledge proper was a grave error. Intuition and conceptual knowledge moved in opposite directions; in intuition objects were only given and not understood.147 Philosophers who insisted that knowledge required the intimate fusion of the knower with the known— like Henri Bergson, who equated philosophy with intuition, or Edmund Husserl, who argued that “a properly philosophical intuition . . . obtained a wealth of knowledge” without any symbolizing or mathematizing— were simply wrong.148 According to Schlick, such “prophets of Anschauung” confused phenomenal intimacy with true knowledge, which was propositional and conceptual and required distancing the knowing subject from the object of knowledge. Furthermore, he added, if all the content of consciousness could be known through An­ schauung, there would be no need for the discipline of psychology at all, a possibility that both Wundt and Dilthey, despite their differences, would have found unacceptable.149 The historian Lanier Anderson has argued that while Wundt and Dilthey’s optimism regarding the epistemological centrality of psychology proved influential, their proposed solution to the question of the organiza-

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tion of the disciplines in German-speaking lands did not win at the end.150 Neither were the disciplines organized in the twentieth century as Schlick’s fellow philosophers in the Vienna Circle would advocate a few decades later— that is, according to the unity-of-science thesis, which argued for the elimination of all disciplinary boundaries and the merging of all science under the banner of physicalism.151 Instead, the organization of the disciplines at German universities broadly followed the outlines theorized by the neo-Kantians who insisted on the irreducibility of the mind to physical processes. In 1894, the same year that Dilthey delivered Ideen at the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin, the philosopher Wilhelm Windelband, the principal representative of the Southwest school of neo-Kantianism, gave an equally seminal rectorial address in Strasbourg.152 Windelband’s 1894 plan for the organization of the disciplines would serve as the truce agreement between the natural sciences and the human sciences for most of the twentieth century. It would also spell the end of Dilthey’s proposal that the kind of knowledge Helmholtz had called Kennen would be the epistemological foundation of all human sciences. Like Wundt and Dilthey, Windelband was adamantly against the positivist urge to model all fields of knowledge after the natural sciences. Yet, unlike these two thinkers, Windelband did not see psychology as occupying a privileged position between the natural and the human sciences. Despite its subject matter, Windelband classified psychology as a natural science, because it employed the experimental methods of those fields of knowledge. In fact, a substantive (sachlich) differentiation of fields of knowledge according to their subject matter was unjustifiable, according to Windelband, because such an approach purported to promote a universalistic methodology instead of recognizing that individual provinces of knowledge were contingent and autonomous.153 Furthermore, such a differentiation perpetuated the dualism of Locke and Descartes— that is, the false opposition in Western philosophy between the objective and subjective, the external and the internal, sensation and reflection, Natur and Geist, etc.154 Windelband proposed instead that disciplines be organized around the principle of method. What he called the “nomothetic sciences” (encompassing most of what would be called “natural sciences” under other systems of disciplinary classification) were to be separated from the “idiographic sciences” (the purview of the humanities and the social sciences). The fundamental difference between the two was the way that particulars were deployed vis-à-vis universals. Nomothetic sciences inquired into general laws and pursued apodictic judgments, whereas idiographic sciences examined singular historical facts and produced assertoric propositions.155 That is, both employed particulars, but each used them in a different manner: the former operated with the movement of “thought from the confirmation of  particulars to the comprehension of general relationships,” whereas the latter were “devoted to the faithful delineation of the particulars.”156

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In this sense, Windelband’s classification of knowledge as nomothetic and idiographic was not entirely incompatible with Helmholtz’s categories of Wissen and Kennen almost half a century before. If one were to follow Windelband’s nomenclature, Newton was certainly a practitioner of nomothetic science, but Goethe’s position looked more precarious: In the year 1780, Goethe had a doorbell and an apartment key made. On February 22 of the same year, he had a letter case made. Of this there is documentary proof in a locksmith’s bill. Hence it is completely true and certain to have happened. Nevertheless it is not an historical fact, neither a fact of literary history nor of biography. On the other hand, within certain limits it may be impossible to determine a priori whether or not the value of a “fact” can be ascribed to a given datum of observation or historical documentation. Science must therefore act like Goethe in his old age: to gather and accumulate everything it can get hold of.157

This was not Helmholtz’s Goethe: the genius under whose gaze every odd particular— whether a bone or a plant leaf— obediently conformed to a universal law. Instead, Goethe appeared in Windelband’s account as an absentminded old man with a sprawling collection of curiosities. Windelband unequivocally advocated for preserving and expanding this collection, but with the awareness that the particulars that it contained might never prove useful for the production of knowledge. This meant that the epistemological claims of idiographic sciences would have to be downsized: in the new neo-Kantian disciplinary regime, if the human sciences could not generate laws like the natural sciences, they would have to limit themselves to archiving, preserving, and describing particulars. The most conspicuous difference between Helmholtz’s and Windelband’s classification of the disciplines, however, was the epistemological value assigned to experience. In fact, Windelband not only eliminated nonconceptual, experiential knowledge from his universe of knowledge but rejected Kennen’s epistemological potential entirely: “What the naïve man usually means by experience is not sufficient to satisfy the requirements” of science, he wrote. The techniques used by practitioners of the idiographic sciences— “the laborious techniques of identifying the characteristic features of a certain handwriting, observing the style of a writing, or comprehending the intellectual horizon . . . of an historical source”— required just as much intellectual conceptualization as “the correct use of a microscope, the certain interpretation of simultaneity in the amplitude of a pendulum, and the position of a needle on a meter.”158 In other words, nondiscursive, nonconceptual knowledge was an oxymoron. Even Anschauung, Windelband maintained, had a conceptual element.159 The implication was that there might be two kinds of discipline, but there was only one kind of knowledge. If fields of knowledge were to be arranged according to this logic, it

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meant that the high point of the career of Kennen as the epistemological foundation of all human sciences had come to an end. Yet even Musil, who had forcefully argued for the unity of knowledge in 1912, invented a binary system that acknowledged kinaesthetic knowing: his ratioid versus nonratioid broadly corresponded to Wissen and Kennen.160 The ratioid territory, Musil explained, was a fixed and stable epistemological realm where universal laws ruled and all deviations were eliminated.161 (This, according to Musil, was where psychology belonged.) By contrast, the exception dominated in the alternative nonratioid, where “facts [did] not submit” and “laws [were] sieves.”162 In the land of the nonratioid, he wrote, “the comprehension of every judgment, the meaning of every concept, is surrounded by a delicate envelope of experience as by an ether, by a personal free choice and, alternating with it every few seconds, a personal determinism.”163 If the nonratioid could never claim reliable, verifiable knowledge, Musil provocatively suggested, it was not because there was anything inherently wrong with it but rather because the ratioid, of which the nonratioid was merely a mirror image, was itself built on shaky ground. Modernity optimistically proceeded “on the principle of pile driving, and the solidifying caissons of concepts are lowered into the indefinite with a grid of laws, rules, and formulas stretching between them,” but, Musil noted, already “the most basic principles of mathematics are logically unsecured; the laws of physics have only an approximate validity, and the constellations move in a system of coordinates that nowhere has a locus.”164 Other thinkers would formulate Musil’s sharp-sighted critique of Enlightenment’s foundationalism differently. As Adorno saw it, this “tendency to regression,” the search for a prima philosophia— a pure beginning and presuppositionless start upon which secure knowledge could be grounded— was the very reason why the Enlightenment had proven such fertile ground for fascism.165 In this sense, the nineteenth- century preoccupation with epistemology was itself an inherently flawed enterprise. Or, as Derrida would write of Husserl decades later, despite its attempt to rid itself of all metaphysics, phenomenology harbored a metaphysical element because of its investment in “the original self-giving evidence, the present or presence of sense to a full and primordial intuition” as the guarantor of all value.166 Seen as part of the larger history of the Enlightenment, then, the nineteenth-century project of kinaesthetic knowing was doomed from the outset. Kennen and its cognates were invented to solve the problem of infinite regress inherent in various Enlightenment frameworks of explaining and describing the world— cause and effect, object and subject, form and content, induction and deduction, the particular and the universal, etc. Kinaesthetic knowing attempted to take care of the antinomies of Enlightenment by enfranchising the historically disenfranchised half of each pair. Unable to shake off the binary logic of these oppositions, however, it un-

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failingly resorted to foundationalism— whether of ur-types, ur-sensations, primary shapes and colors, or the preliminary course. It sought to posit experience as the first “given” and the foundation of all secure knowledge, but as long as reason insisted on origins, first principles, chains of causality, and foundations, the possibility of another way of knowing that was free from metaphysics remained a chimera. Its foundationalist epistemology, as we will see in later chapters, would prove to be the Achilles’ heel of kinaesthetic knowing. Kinaesthetic knowing may have been on shaky ground from the outset, but for a brief moment between Helmholtz’s enthusiastic embrace of its potentials in the mid-nineteenth century and Musil’s resigned acceptance of its limitations in the early twentieth century, it seemed to many like a compelling alternative with much epistemological promise. The possibility of another way of knowing would have implications, on the one hand, for how knowledge was to be achieved on the level of techniques and, on the other, for how it was to be organized on the level of institutions. More important for the rest of this book, the possibilities of kinaesthetic knowing were earnestly taken up by German reformers who aspired to build a new pedagogy on every level of the educational system in Germany. They invented new techniques of looking, affecting, drawing, and, finally, designing, which, in turn, was to find its place in a new institutional organization of knowledge. As we will see, it was out of this epistemological project that aesthetic modernism of the twentieth century emerged, constructed on the uncertain foundation of another way of knowing.

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2: Looking

Wölfflin’s Comparative Vision

The lecture hall becomes dark and the work appears on the wall, larger than it is in reality, presented to the listeners— even to those in the back rows— as it would appear to an observer who stood very close in front of the original in the Brera Gallery in Milan. The view that we find here outdoes by far the effect [Wirkung] of the engraving despite the fact that the glass plate used was produced from one. A feeling [Gefühl ] of the living present of a great artwork overcomes us. . . . Isolated by the darkness, every listener receives— individually in a completely undisturbed fashion— the explanation of the works from the works themselves. . . . The listener feels that it is in these works, which force their way into him with violence, as it were, that Raphael’s artistic career began.1

Thus the art historian Hermann Grimm described the mood in the lecture hall in which he projected The Marriage of the Virgin on a wall with the aid of a sciopticon and a glass photogram. Grimm, who had been teaching at the University of Berlin since 1870, started using this early slide projection technology in his courses on Renaissance art in 1891— despite the skepticism of many fellow art historians who associated it with popular forms of entertainment.2 Grimm saw many practical advantages in the sciopticon. First, he explained, now that professors found themselves lecturing to larger crowds, the conventional method of studying art through its reproductions— plaster casts, prints, and more recently photographs, which would have to be passed from hand to hand in the classroom— had grown useless. Not only did the sciopticon make it possible to lecture to hundreds at once, but it also conveniently synchronized the professor’s word with the referent image.3 Second, he noted, the darkened lecture hall sharpened the attention of the otherwise easily distracted student body by directing it to the only light source in the room.4 Finally, and most importantly, the technology proved especially valuable at a moment when professors could no longer expect their students to be well versed in Humanitas.5 If not every student in the lecture hall could be assumed to have read Divina Commedia, for example, at least the professor could now avail himself of this technology for a quick, immediate,

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and anschaulich lesson on the text.6 In other words, thanks to the magic-like qualities of the sciopticon, art history was now poised to make up for the knowledge conventionally acquired by reading with knowledge that was attained by looking. The idea of deploying the purported self- evidence of images for pedagogical efficacy was by no means new by the end of the nineteenth century, but Grimm’s suggestion that reading might be substituted with looking made particular sense at a moment when many humanists felt that universities were being made more accessible to the masses and when the alternative epistemological principle that I have called “kinaesthetic knowing” seemed like a viable solution to the problem of educating them.7 In fact, the two kinds of knowledge that Grimm evoked corresponded to the epistemological pair that Helmholtz had theorized a few decades ago: if reading were to be considered a primary technique of Wissen— that is, discursive, conceptual, and propositional knowledge— looking would then be its equivalent in the realm of Kennen, knowledge based upon an experiential familiarity with phenomena. That art history could achieve a rigorous level of the latter had already been suggested by Helmholtz himself, who identified in Kennen a distinct mode of reasoning that he called “aesthetic induction.” But it was the ingenuity of the newly independent discipline of art history in Germanspeaking lands at the end of the nineteenth century to develop concepts and techniques that, by virtue of being based on this other way of knowing, could claim a privileged position among the disciplines. Among those who contributed to this prolific late-nineteenth- century discourse centered around art history, one stands out for having theorized this discipline’s epistemological project with particular potency: Heinrich Wölfflin, Grimm’s successor at the University of Berlin. Wölfflin did not only take up the logic of Grimm’s slide lecture and transform it into a powerful pedagogical technique that could be employed inside the classroom as well as outside, a technique whose efficacy was assumed to be derived from the immediacy of looking rather than reading. Throughout his career he also ambitiously proposed that art history’s affinity with experiential knowledge made it a model human science. I will argue in this chapter that kinaesthetic knowing presented a continuous and hitherto unexamined thread in Wölfflin’s productive career as well as in modern art history’s late-nineteenthcentury beginnings. In order to make sense of this claim, however, we will have to turn to a concept that effectively served as a proxy for experiential immediacy in Wölfflin’s work: the concept of the baroque. As countless historians have already demonstrated, the baroque was not only a style in Wölfflin’s work.8 He also used the term and a host of adjectives that he consistently associated with it to describe a surprisingly eclectic variety of things: Michelangelo’s work as well as Wagner’s; late phases of Italian Renaissance as well as late ancient art and Impressionism; painting, sculpture, and architecture, as well as photography.9 What these disparate strands in Wölfflin’s work had

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in common was the association of the baroque with experiential immediacy. While the young Wölfflin, like many of his contemporaries, was enthusiastic about the epistemological possibilities of this experiential immediacy, he eventually lost faith and started to rely on new techniques to rein in its overwhelming effects. What makes Wölfflin’s engagement with this intellectual history particularly compelling, I will argue, was his ambivalence, which he tackled by consistently inserting the baroque— and hence kinaesthetic knowing— into a framework of comparisons: the linear versus the painterly, closed versus open form, planarity versus recession, etc.— all of which were ultimately subsumed under the principal comparison between the Renaissance and the baroque.10 Like Grimm, Wölfflin was aware of the power of deploying anschaulich images, but because these images’ epistemological legitimacy never ceased to be a disconcerting matter to him, he also attempted to keep their effects under control through a rigorous application of the comparative method— not only in his famously well-attended lectures but also in his widely influential books that have played a foundational role in the discipline of art history. Comparativism, then, was necessary to counterbalance the overwhelming illusion of immediacy that Grimm observed in the art historical slide lecture or the unpredictabilities of the trade-off that art history brokered between reading and looking at the university. In this sense, the changing attitude demonstrated by Wölfflin toward the question of the baroque was indicative of the fortunes of kinaesthetic knowing in postUnification Germany. The epistemological significance that the baroque and the comparative method acquired at the end of the nineteenth century, in turn, can only be appreciated in relationship to the rise of experience as an alternative mode of knowledge at the same historical moment. Baroque as Immediate Experience If, as historians have demonstrated, the baroque has hovered precariously between existence and nonexistence in art historical discourses since its emergence in the eighteenth century, the concept was even more elusive in Wölfflin’s work.11 Especially his early writings demonstrate a subtle but significant change of heart about the concept. At first glance his dissertation from 1886, titled “Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur” (Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture), does not appear to be concerned with the baroque. Rather the dissertation revolves around the question of the human capacity for expression (Ausdruck): how is it possible, Wölfflin asked in this text, that architectonic forms could be the expression of something psychic, of a disposition (Stimmung)?12 “Powerful columns energetically stimulate us; our respiration harmonizes with the expansive or narrow nature of the space,” Wölfflin observed, while architectonic irregularity felt as if it disrupted blood circulation and asymmetry was as painful as amputation.13 “When Goethe once remarked that we ought to sense the

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effect of a beautiful room, even if we were led through it blindfolded, he was expressing the very same idea: that the architectural impression, far from being some kind of ‘reckoning by the eye,’ is essentially based on a direct bodily feeling.”14 This was the theoretical heart of the dissertation. “Expression is not, so to speak, a banner that is hung out in order to show what is going on inside,” Wölfflin wrote.15 In other words, the human body’s ability to project itself into architectonic bodies was not due to a process of mediation between the mind and the body whereby the former arbitrated cues from the latter but rather to unmediated bodily feeling— as in breathing— when impressions stamped themselves on the surfaces of the body as expressions.16 This was why a zigzag caused one to think of a burning red whereas a soft blue was associated with a gentle wavy line.17 The young Wölfflin was enthusiastic about the epistemological possibilities of such unmediated expression. Architecture’s effects were so much more immediate than those of the other arts, he noted, that they affected the educated and the layperson alike.18 The dissertation was a prolegomenon to this kind of endeavor, a call for a “psychology of architecture” that would simultaneously describe (beschrei­ ben) and explain (erklären) these expressions.19 Psychology had a crucial role to play here: the task of the day, as Wölfflin wrote in his journal in 1887, was to bring together the fields of knowledge that had been separated from each other into an organic whole with the help of psychology, especially psychology of the kind that had been theorized by Dilthey.20 The historian of humanity, in turn, had to be a psychologist in order to show the “forms of humanity, its astonishing richness.”21 This meant that art history was not simply one human science among others; the kind of knowledge that it produced was uniquely positioned to play a crucial role in the education of society at large. Yet when Wölfflin later returned to the same text a few years later, he not only scribbled “nonsense” in the margin next to his comments about the zigzag and the wavy line but also added the word “baroque” to his description of direct bodily feeling.22 His skepticism would surface with full force in 1888, only two years after the dissertation, in his Habilitionsschrift entitled Renaissance und Barock.23 The book was written to “observe the symptoms of decline” in the transition between the two styles and to identify the laws in the baroque’s “wildness and arbitrariness” (Verwilderung und Willkür).24 Immediate corporeal experience, which had been identified with the experience of architecture in the dissertation, was presented as one pole in the series of opposition that Wölfflin now claimed between the architecture of the Renaissance and that of the baroque. The baroque stood for immediate bodily feeling but gone awry: [Baroque’s] massiveness is complemented everywhere by movement that is heightened to a state of tumultuousness and violence. In fact, the art con-

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cerns itself exclusively with the representation of the animated [Bewegten]. In this movement an increasing hastiness and an acceleration of action is to be observed.  .  .  . The ideal is no longer a contented Being [befriedigtes Sein] but rather a state of excitation [Erregung]. Everywhere emotional action is demanded. What was previously the simple and effortless utterance of a strong, living nature must now be expressed with passionate exertion [leidenschaftliche Anstrengung].25

Wölfflin’s Renaissance and baroque, then, stood not only for two styles but also for competing modes of experience: calm, visual, and contemplative experience channeled by the mind versus violent, corporeal, and overwhelming experience unleashed on the extremities of the body. At the same time that Wölfflin made the baroque into an object worthy of art history’s attention, he painted it in cautiously negative terms. The baroque created powerful emotions and a state of intoxication and ecstasy; its “search for the intimidating and overwhelming” had a pathological effect.26 The Renaissance was the art of being (Sein), while the baroque was the art of appearance (Schein). The Renaissance preferred forms with clear boundaries, whereas form gave way to formlessness in the baroque. Crucial to the difference between the two categories was the movement of the eye in space. While the linear style of Renaissance architecture guided the eye by offering it a clearly delineated track to follow, the painterly baroque ignored all rules of regularity and caused the eye to move back and forth in space in a disorderly fashion.27 “The malerisch (painterly) style first begins when the contour lines recede for the attention,” Wölfflin wrote in an essay on the subject. In the baroque “the eye no longer runs along the contour but rather jumps from light to light, from darkness to darkness.”28 The baroque, the art of the formless, violated the “strict architectonic feeling” by not finding beauty in calm, definite form but seeking it in “the stimulus of masses in movement,” where forms seemed to change with each passing moment.29 With the disappearance of the line, the eye was pulled into the depths of architectonic or pictorial space, where it lost its bearings in the darkness of the background and perceived the whole as formless infinity.30 In describing the differences between the Renaissance and the baroque, Wölfflin used the specialized language that had been developing within the field of experimental psychology since the 1870s.31 The terms that he reserved for the baroque were even more specific: Erregung and Anstrengung in the quote above— as well as Eindruck, Empfindung, Spannung, Affekt, Reiz, Abstumpfung elsewhere in his writings— were used in experimental psychology to describe sensations received but not yet processed by the conscious mind. Erregung, for example, was not simply a state of excitation but one defined as “the vital change set up by the action of a stimulus” before that change was apperceived by the mind.32 Anstrengung referred to “the intensification of mental activity which arises on the occurrence of any sort of

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obstruction,” a force exerted but not yet received by consciousness.33 In short, the baroque appeared in Wölfflin’s writings as a psychic state whose effects failed to progress to the stage of apperception. From a psychological perspective, the baroque was the state of pure immediacy. As we saw in the previous chapter, apperception was a concept that was deeply divisive within psychological circles at the end of the nineteenth century. Wilhelm Wundt, who presided over what was arguably the first and certainly the most influential experimental psychology laboratory in the world, imagined apperception as a process by which the subject used his capacity for attention to bring the raw sense-data of the world from the darker outer rings of perception (Blickfeld) into the illuminated center of consciousness (Blickpunkt).34 If Wundtian psychology was thus defending a unitary, willcentered subject that nineteenth- century institutions of learning strove to cultivate, Wölfflin was now attributing to the baroque a model of selfhood that was incompatible with that ideal: How characteristic is the transformation of Michelangelo’s Sistine Slaves into those of Carracci in the Galleria Farnese. What restlessness, what contortions! Any voluntary movement becomes cumbersome and sluggish and requires extraordinary energy.  .  .  . The emotion, heightened to the point of extreme ecstasy and wild rapture cannot be expressed uniformly by the whole body. The sensation breaks out with violence in certain organs while the rest of the body remains subjected only to gravity. However, this enormous expenditure of energy is by no means a sign of powerful corporeality. On the contrary, the action of the voluntary organs of movement is deficient; the mental impulses cannot master the body. The two instances, the body [Körper] and will [Wille], have parted company. It is as if these persons are no longer masters of their own body [Leib], they can no longer permeate them with their will.35

Within the context of the Kulturkampf, the inability of this baroque subject to convert the haphazard sensations striking his physical frame into coherent perception resonated with liberal fears about Catholics, subjects portrayed by Protestant commentators as sentimental and politically naïve. The Austrian art historian Alois Riegl was even more explicit. One found an extraordinary relationship between cause and effect in Raphael’s art as well, Riegl observed, but the extraordinary element in baroque was different: “It contains a contradiction and seems unreal,” he wrote, “it does not convince us, and thus we find it strange.”36 Furthermore, “we can see only an effect without a sufficient cause, and this troubles us northerners.”37 Like Georg Simmel’s metropolis dweller overwhelmed by the “the intensification of nervous stimulation,” the baroque’s subject was one whose reason was under attack.38 By this account, modernity itself could be described as baroque: like Impressionism or Wagner, the baroque was a sensorial overload that resulted in the suspension of the conscious mind.39

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In Renaissance und Barock, Wölfflin departed from his earlier views in other ways as well. In the dissertation, Wölfflin had optimistically promised a psychology of art that would both “describe (beschreiben) and explain (erklären),” thus hinting at a possible reconciliation between the two distinct methods that Dilthey had identified as being unique to the human sciences and the natural sciences, respectively.40 In Renaissance und Barock, Wölfflin expressed doubts about art history’s potential to provide systematic explanation. Following Dilthey’s theorization of a descriptive psychology more consistently now, Wölfflin was aspiring toward a “descriptive aesthetics” that would “seek out and describe psychological phenomena, without explanation,” as he wrote in his diary in 1894.41 The epistemological structure of an explanation in art history did not resemble that of an explanation in the natural sciences after all: “To explain [erklären] a style can mean nothing,” Wölfflin wrote in Renaissance und Barock, “other than to place it in its general historical time and to verify that it says nothing different from the other organs of its age.”42 If the nineteenth-century scientist worked with cause and effect, the art historian had to work analogically— that is, like Goethe, who compared specimens before classifying them into ideal types.43 Although art history could never provide the kind of deep causal explanation that, say, geology could, its unique explanation of form (Formerklärung) could serve as a model for the human sciences at large.44 Wölfflin’s theorization of the baroque, then, was not simply an attempt to formulate a disciplinary project for art history. It was epistemologically far more ambitious than that: it was an attempt to develop a discipline that would respond to the epistemological quandaries of the moment. The Baroque of Photography There is yet another baroque lurking between the lines in Wölfflin’s writings, complicating the art historian’s take on the question of experience even further. The linear and the painterly in Wölfflin’s writings did not only stand for different historical styles and models of selfhood but also corresponded to competing technologies of image reproduction. In a series of essays titled “Wie man Skulpturen Aufnehmen Soll” (How One Should Photograph Sculpture), published in two parts in 1896 and 1897 and complemented with a third part published in 1915, Wölfflin described photographs of sculptures taken from what he considered to be incorrect viewpoints with the very same adjectives that he had previously used for baroque architecture.45 Wölfflin complained in these essays that despite the modern proliferation of images, it was nearly impossible to find photographs of sculptures taken from the correct angle.46 All sculpture— even those by Bernini, which lent itself to being enjoyed in the round— offered only a limited number of correct viewpoints. It took an educated eye (das gebildete Auge) to move around the sculpture until it found this correct viewpoint, where it finally came to rest, but Wölfflin did not trust modern photographers to achieve this task. Jacob

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Burckhardt had described baroque architecture as “verwilderter Dialekt,” a dialect that had gone wild; in Renaissance und Barock, Wölfflin himself had discussed the “wildness and arbitrariness” (Verwilderung und Willkür) of the baroque.47 In the sculpture essays, Wölfflin now found photography guilty of aggravating the savageness of modern vision. “The savaged eye [das verwilderte Auge] of today’s man,” he wrote, “enjoys the most unfavourable obscurities and unclarities.”48 Modern audiences were hungry for painterly effects, which photographers exploited for commercial gain. As a result, photography produced the same painterly effect on the viewer as baroque architecture: photography’s grainy texture caused the eye to move back and forth aimlessly in pictorial space.49 Even though Wölfflin strongly objected to retouching photographs, he also stressed that it was essential that the contrast between sculpture and background be maximized to make the contours of the artwork intelligible. As he would put it later, it took “practice to see things in as linear a way as they are meant to be seen.”50 The opposition between being (Sein) and appearing (Schein) that characterized Wölfflin’s Renaissance and baroque pair was thus transferred in the photography essay to technologies of image reproduction. Even as photographic technologies were being incorporated into departments of art history throughout German-speaking lands in the nineteenth century, academics remained skeptical about the virtues of photographic reproduction.51 As the art historian Konrad Lange saw it, the problem with the photographic lens was its mechanical objectivity: “[Photography] took in images of things indiscriminately and dispassionately; it [registered] the important and unimportant, the effective and ineffective in the same manner.”52 Since the camera lacked the synthetic apperceptive faculty of the human mind, there was no guarantee that it would not lead the eye to error.53 In a famous defense of engraving, the art historian Moritz Thausing contrasted the “cold sleekness” of the mechanical and chemical medium of photography with older means of reproduction, which provided “an unmediated relationship with the feeling hand of the artist . . . the trace of warm life.”54 Photographic reproduction especially destroyed proportional relationships in an artwork by replacing pure form with painterly (malerisch) effects and a false naturalism.55 Photography thus produced an effect that was similar to what many members of the educated middle classes in the early twentieth century found troublesome in the new medium of film. The complaint was that the eye of the film spectator suffered from a state of restlessness that Wölfflin associated with the baroque. The inherently disjointed medium of film weakened the will, eroded attention, and prevented raw, unprocessed sensations from being synthesized into a coherent whole.56 Although film did not arrive on the scene until 1895, already by the 1880s some had begun worrying about the sensorial impact of panoramas, traveling magic lantern shows, and phonographs, as well as mass- circulation magazines, advertising, cheap photographs, thriller novels, etc., that were now part and parcel

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of modern metropolitan life.57 The physician and cultural critic Max Nordau called this characteristically modern loss of will and autonomy, the failure to focus one’s attention, and the inability to grasp, order, and convert sense impressions into apperception “degeneration” (Entartung).58 Erratic eye movements were especially symptomatic. “The degenerate artist who suffers from nystagmus, or trembling of the eyeball,” Nordau wrote, “will, in fact, perceive the phenomena of nature trembling, restless, devoid of firm outline.”59 To make matters more complicated, for Wölfflin it was not as if the original artwork itself— or the presumed immediacy of a direct, bodily encounter with the work— guaranteed an epistemologically sound experience either. In an essay titled “Über kunsthistorische Verbildung” (1909, On Art Historical Miseducation), Wölfflin made a point of calling out “the ambitiousness of the modern ‘educated’ tourist” as “a psychological monstrosity.”60 Throngs of tourists went through churches and museums in Italy with their Baedeker guides in hand, but this firsthand experience with original artworks neither produced actual knowledge nor left on them the deep, immediate impression about which Wölfflin had been so enthusiastic in his dissertation. Instead, an irritated Wölfflin observed, not being able to focus their attention on a single thing for a long time, the public displayed intermittent attention for many things. In this modern age of “collecting, inventorying, and registering,” Wölfflin complained, the public preferred to buy a “trashy” book containing photographic reproductions of Rubens’s every painting instead of one well-executed Rubens engraving.61 However, the photography essay also proposed a solution to the mutually reinforcing problems of formlessness and the errant eye by proposing to return to an older technology of image reproduction. In the case of the Apollo Belvedere, for example, it might be as impossible to find the correct viewpoint of the sculpture in the uncomfortably narrow galleries of the Vatican as it was to come across a correctly taken photograph of it, but there was, after all, an image that provided a satisfactory experience of the work: an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi, an image in which the sculptural figure was depicted in the linear style of the Renaissance (fig. 2.1).62 Whereas in every other photograph Apollo’s figure seemed “insecure, brittle, disturbing,” in the engraving “the torso gain[ed] an undreamt of power, vertically and horizontally,” and the “flaccid contours” of the photograph were “suddenly full of life and energy in every particle.”63 Wölfflin’s predilection for the linear style— which, as Marshall Brown has brilliantly pointed out, was made evident in the form of his argumentation— thus translated into a preference for the graphic clarity of engravings and a deeply held suspicion of the grainy, blurry, painterly, and, ultimately, baroque effects of photographs.64 As Joan Hart has demonstrated, like his contemporary Max Weber, Wölfflin was less interested in the concrete contingency of the particular than in the abstract certainty of ideal types.65 By this logic, the linear

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Figure 2.1. Comparison between (left) photograph of the Apollo Belvedere at the Vatican Palace and (right) engraving of the Apollo Belvedere by Marcantonio Raimondi, 1530– 34. Heinrich Wölfflin, “Wie man Skulpturen Aufnehmen Soll,” Part II, Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst, n.f. 8 (1897): 295.

Figure 2.2. Adolf von Hildebrand, Hymen relief panel, Brewster-Peploe Collection, Villa Hildebrand, Italy. Photo © Courtauld Institute of Art. 169328.

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medium of engravings, which many thought distilled the idealized essence of a work, was superior to the grainy medium of photography that captured every random detail indiscriminately. Wölfflin referred the reader to Adolf Hildebrand’s Das Problem der Form (Problem of Form), a text he would describe in the foreword of Die klassische Kunst as “refreshing rain” that had fallen “on barren soil.”66 Wölfflin expected of engravings what Hildebrand expected of relief sculpture (fig. 2.2). If the modern eye could not assimilate the sequence of images produced by kinaesthetic perception into a coherent whole, one had to resort to engravings that would direct perception in the same way that relief sculpture impressed the correct viewpoint upon the beholder.67 Even after Wölfflin started illustrating his books with numerous photographs, his prejudice against the technology persisted. Although architecture no longer occupied as central a position as it had in his early writings, the comparative structure of Renaissance and Barock formed the backbone of the 1899 book Die klassische Kunst, in which he not only read the High Renaissance of Cinquecento against the background of the art of the Quattrocento but also juxtaposed similar images on the facing pages of the book (fig. 2.3). Comparing an engraving of The School of Athens to photographs of the fresco in Die klassische Kunst, he argued that the entirely new manner in which Raphael had conceived human figures’ relationship to pictorial space was better captured by even the most superficial engraving than by a photograph.68 Just as the eye could not find a place to rest in baroque churches, the grainy, out-of-focus photography made it impossible for the eye of the modern beholder to apprehend the work in a coherent manner. Wölfflin was equally suspicious of photography’s ability to capture the two dimensions. In the foreword to the first edition of Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Principles of Art History), after mentioning the impossibility of reproducing colored images, he would note that “one can photograph a classical painting and although it will not be in accordance with the original, it will not contradict it either. For baroque paintings, by contrast, photography is almost always a misrepresentation of fact.”69 If photography was already an epistemologically unreliable medium, photography reproducing the baroque seemed doubly suspect. Yet, as the prolonged debate between Wölfflin and his lifelong rival art historian August Schmarsow should make clear, Wölfflin’s views were not uncontested in the discipline. On the surface the two art historians (who, not coincidentally, also competed for the same academic positions) disagreed about things such as the moments of stylistic breaks or the meaning of the term “painterly,” but these disagreements were about the question of experience in disguise.70 Wölfflin’s impulse had been to counter immediacy with mediation: the baroque effects of modernity were to be tamed by the linear clarity of the Renaissance. Schmarsow, by contrast, maintained that an artwork revealed itself to the beholder exclusively through its immediate

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Figure 2.3. Spread from Heinrich Wölfflin, Die klassische Kunst. Eine Einführung in die italienische Renaissance (Munich: Bruckmann, 1899), 132– 33.

presence. It was necessary to “bracket the world” and “heighten the exchange with a work from all sides until” one gained an “insightful experience” and grasped the work’s “valuable kernel.”71 (This elusive kernel also became the heart of Schmarsow’s argument in 1893, when he asserted that space was the essence of all architecture.72) According to Schmarsow, the moment of insight (Einsicht, a phenomenological term used by Husserl) came instantaneously in a flash— in a manner similar to a religious revelation— in the very presence of the work. If for Wölfflin the sensorial immediacy of the third dimension was suspect and needed to be reproduced in two dimensions in an engraving, for Schmarsow the kinaesthetic experience of space received through the whole body was irreducible.73 Thus when Riegl compared the work of the two art historians, he observed that Wölfflin argued with the clarity of the Renaissance, while Schmarsow’s convoluted sentences were structured like the problematic baroque.74

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Compare and Contrast It is a paradox that despite his reservations about photography, Wölfflin came to rely increasingly on images reproduced photographically. In a sense, this was unsurprising. Interested in instituting object lessons in various contexts since the beginning of his career, he advocated for instituting drawing classes at the university and courses dedicated to visuality (An­ schauungsstunden but not conventional art history courses, he cautioned) at secondary schools.75 (He also proposed that every secondary school student be equipped with a picture book alongside the customary reading book.) Not coincidentally, his widely influential Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, published in 1915, was richly illustrated with photographs. Since the mode of representation (Darstellungsart) was the most important question for art history, he wrote, the art historian had to proceed by “comparing type with type, the finished with the finished.”76 Yet, in the absence of demonstrable ideal types, he resorted to an old trick that had been used time and again for rhetorical effect: arranging images, whose similarities and differences could be noticed at first glance, on opposing pages of the book (fig. 2.4).77 Furthermore, the logic of polarity now colonized the entire history of art: in Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Wölfflin presented the Renaissance and baroque pair as the general “principle of art history,” which unfolded in dialectical fashion through the master opposition between the linear and the painterly and a series of secondary oppositions that stemmed from it: planarity versus depth, closed form versus open form, multiplicity versus unity, and absolute versus relative clarity.78 The comparative method had become a matter of public debate not so long ago. In an exhibition that opened in 1871 in Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie, the centerpiece was an exhibit of two paintings whose authenticity had been disputed for a while.79 These two depictions of Madonna and Child, surrounded by the family of the sixteenth-century Basel Bürgermeister Jakob Meyer, were almost identical save for a few minor differences (fig. 2.5). While the thousands that visited the museum were invited to engage in collective comparative looking, a panel of fourteen artists and art historians convened to settle the question: Which of the two paintings— the so- called Darmstadt or the Dresden Madonna— was the original by Holbein the Younger? Although the panel concluded that the former was the original and the latter a “free copy,” the official report failed to resolve the question.80 While a group of artists published a counterdeclaration and opinion pieces appeared in the popular press, the godfather of experimental psychology joined the fray.81 Fechner, who had been interested in the problem of the two Madonnas since the mid-1860s, considered this an exceptional opportunity to test out the methods of his experimental aesthetics. “Instead of the conflicting voices of individual experts,” to settle the matter, Fechner suggested, “statistics of comparative aesthetic impression” should be used.82 With the assumption

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Figure 2.4. Spread from Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Munich: Bruckmann, 1915), 64– 65.

that what immediately struck the average visitor (who, he assumed, had a medium or high level of education) as aesthetically pleasing would also be the authentic Holbein, he left a notebook in front of the two paintings and asked the visitors to respond to the following questions: 1. Which of these pictures, regardless of the art historical context, would you value more as a whole? 2. Which of the two Madonna heads makes such a favorable, pleasing, and valuable impression on the beholder that he might want to indulge in its continuous or repeated viewing?83 The experiment did not go well. Of the 11,842 visitors only 113 responded to the survey, and of those only 34 guessed correctly that the Darmstadt Madonna was the original.84 Fechner blamed the experiment’s failure on a variety of external factors, but not on comparativism, which was, in fact,

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Figure 2.5. (Left) Hans Holbein the Younger, Darmstadt Madonna (Meyer Madonna), 1526. Kunsthalle Würth, Johanniterkirche. (Right) Bartholomäus Sarburgh, Dresden Madonna (copy of the Meyer Madonna), circa sixteenth century. Kunsthalle Würth, Johanniterkirche.

at the very heart of his psychophysical thinking. Psychophysics, as we saw in chapter 1, never purported to measure experience; it could only compare experiences. Even Wundt, more at home with intellectualist explanations, had to resort to the analogical thinking inherent in psychophysics. As he sought to reconcile introspection with experimentation in the psychological laboratory, for example, Wundt had to argue— over against those who pointed out that one could not examine introspection without interrupting it— that psychological experiments never asked the subject to attend to an elusive inner object but rather observe a “just noticeable difference” in an object outside of the self.85 If introspection could become a legitimate scientific method, it was only because of the epistemological certainty that the comparative method provided. The appeal of comparitivism grew at the end of the nineteenth century. The technique proved essential to the new anschaulich pedagogy that was

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introduced to elementary and secondary schools after the Unification. “Comparison is the lowest level of understanding,” wrote the physiologist William  T. Preyer in the widely read Die Seele des Kindes (Soul of the Child, 1882), with the implication that it should therefore be appropriate for the lowest level of education.86 Discussing secondary school curricula at the turn of the century, one pedagogue extolled the virtues of “comparing descriptively and describing comparatively” in geography classes and added that this technique should be allowed to permeate the rest of the curriculum.87 The goal of educating through comparative looking was not only confined to schools, either. Adolf Hildebrand wondered in 1906 why paintings were hung together in museums according to their historical and geographical origins instead of conforming to the “higher principle” of their formal resemblances or differences.88 Meanwhile, as we will see in subsequent chapters, comparativism proved essential to the design pedagogy that was being developed at private art schools in turn-of-the-century Germany. Hermann Obrist, who cofounded the Lehr- und Versuchsatelier für angewandte und freie Kunst (Atelier for Teaching and Experimenting in Applied and Free Art), one of the most successful of these schools, described the “comparative outlook” (vergleichende Anschauung) as “the only artistic-psychological correct path.”89 Because “art can be seized [erfasst] only by the senses quickly and unequivocally,” whereas “the written can be grasped [begriffen] only after the visual,” Obrist reasoned, knowledge emerged more quickly from the simultaneous comparison of successful and unsuccessful examples than from encountering things individually.90 In the object lessons to be carried out at his school, good and bad examples were to be juxtaposed with the assumption that comparing was the most efficient means of training the faculty of judgment. If these exercises were to be repeated consistently, Obrist maintained confidently, good taste would become merely a matter of habit.91 Such claims demonstrate the extent to which late-nineteenth- century comparativism was different from its precedents. According to its advocates, comparative looking succeeded because it avoided the epistemological traps of reasoning by way of cause and effect or induction and deduction. Instead, comparitivism proceeded analogically by matching form to form without inquiring into deeper explanations. To put it in Helmholtzian terms, the eye that reasoned comparatively operated less like Newton and more like Goethe: it drew conclusions from the description of the evidence that was immediately before it without offering any explanation of causality. In other words, comparing was the modus operandi of kinaesthetic knowing. Nonreading the Modern Picture Book The turn of the twentieth century also saw the emergence of a new kind of picture book. If books had historically been the primary outlets for discur-

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sive knowledge, its nondiscursive doppelgänger, experiential knowledge, appeared well positioned to take over the medium now. At least this was the thinking of Paul Schultze-Naumburg, the artist and critic who popularized the comparative method in his widely read Kulturarbeiten series, published and republished in nine volumes between 1901 and 1917 (fig. 2.6). Even Obrist, who implemented the technique at his school, acknowledged that the “immediate, direct, and gripping effect” of comparing images was first successfully exploited by Schultze-Naumburg.92 The Kulturarbeiten books systematically juxtaposed examples and counterexamples of houses, cities, gardens, landscapes, etc., on facing pages in order to “open the eyes of the German nation,” as their author put it, to the devastating effects of modernization on the German land.93 As the first chair of the Deutscher Bund Heimatschutz, an organization dedicated to conserving the German countryside, and a founding member of the Deutscher Werkbund, Schultze-Naumburg had designed these books to “force the least trained eyes to comparison and thereby to thought” by repeatedly presenting them with good and bad examples.94 In accounting for the efficacy of comparative looking, Schultze-Naumburg cited a mechanism that was similar to that of Helmholtz’s unconscious inferences: the eye drew its conclusions from stimuli directly without the help of an intermediary— that is, without resorting to propositional knowledge that Schultze-Naumburg called “language-thinking” or “logical thinking.”95 The radicalness of Kul­ turarbeiten was its claim that comparative looking would replace reading in the future. The series was written not for the “educated” but rather for the “commoners, farmers, workers,” and others who were regularly accused of not reading enough.96 This audience might never take an interest in divining culture hermeneutically from texts in the manner that the nineteenthcentury tradition of Bildung would demand, Schultze-Naumburg explained, but they could nonetheless be taught to read the surface manifestations of the “culture of the visible” (Kultur des Sichtbaren). The resemblance of façades to human faces on the pages of Kulturarbeiten was no coincidence.97 This new way of reading was meant to forgo deep meaning and instead to skim formal resemblances and differences on the surfaces of images as if the reader were an eighteenth-century physiognomist. Some even came up with a name for this peculiar kind of reading in the early twentieth century: nonreading (Nichtlesen), an activity for a subject suspended precariously between education and illiteracy. According to the journalist Hans Siemsen, unlike the nonreader of the past, who, before widespread literacy campaigns, had to make do with looking at the pictures of the Bible, the twentieth-century nonreader in fact read a lot. (The movies, Siemsen added provocatively, were the true biblia pauperum of the twentieth century.)98 Instead of texts, however, the modern nonreader perused newspapers, illustrated magazines, ad pillars, billboards, and façades covered with advertising— in short, what Siemsen called “literature for

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Figure 2.6. Examples and counterexamples from Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten, vol. 1, Hausbau (Munich: Callwey, 1901), 8– 9, 16– 17.

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Figure 2.7. Spread from Max Dvořák, Katechismus der Denkmalpflege (Vienna: Bard, 1916), 18– 19.

the nonreader.” To borrow the influential categories devised by the historian Rolf Engelsing, nonreading was “extensive” reading taken to the extreme— that is, the nonreader enjoyed a wide variety of superficial signs “extensively” instead of reading and rereading a limited range of texts “intensively” for deep meaning.99 As Schultze-Naumburg saw it, this new “culture of visibility” would be the antidote to the hegemonic culture of the textual.100 The nine volumes of the Kulturarbeiten series became so popular that its comparative logic was taken up elsewhere. It was adopted in 1916 by the art historian Max Dvořák, who delivered his theory of monument preservation as a “catechism,” a list of practicable principles and image pairs that demonstrated those principles with good and bad examples (fig. 2.7).101 Egon Kornmann’s exposition of his teacher Gustaf Britsch’s art theory, which became the basis of what would come to be known as the Institut für vergleichende Kunstbetrachtung (Institute for Comparative Art Contemplation), was accompanied with images that called for comparative looking.102 “The comparison of good and bad images according to form-value and ‘accuracy’ is the appropriate means to

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Figure 2.8. Spread from Sigfried Giedion, Befreites Wohnen (Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1929), 4– 5. Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

awaken and strengthen a sense of quality,” commented Hans Herrmann, also a Britsch student.103 By the 1920s, the comparative method had become an avant-gardist trope. Sigfried Giedion resorted to comparativism in 1929 when he published Befreites Wohnen (Free Living) with the Swiss publisher Orell Füssli as part of the Schaubücher series, under which were published photo-album primers on topics ranging from housing to football to racial types of Africa (fig. 2.8).104 It was with a similar visual logic that the German Eine Stunde series purported to teach its nonreaders everything that they needed to know about architecture, automobiles, or graphic design in one hour.105 Giedion’s carefully laid-out Bauen in Frankreich, Eisen, Eisenbeton (Building in France, Iron, Reinforced Concrete, 1928) started with a note to the “nonreader” of such picture books: while the book was written for “the hurried reader” to understand the argument of the book from the captioned illustrations alone, the text and the footnotes provided the opportunity for more intensive reading.106 When Giedion sent a copy of the book to his former adviser Wölfflin, the latter wrote back: “Don’t you think that secret lines lead from [Renaissance und Barock] to [Bauen in Frankreich]?”107 Le Corbusier would use the technique in his famous double comparison of temples to automobiles in Vers une architecture (fig. 2.9).108 In a notorious exhibition in

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Figure 2.9. Spread from Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture (Paris: Éditions G. Crès, 1923), 106– 7. Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, Columbia University.

Munich in 1937, German audiences would be engaged in a similar exercise of looking as they were asked to compare the so- called Degenerate Art to the Nazi-approved Great German Art.109 Wölfflin had also hoped Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe to be a picture book: “This book was actually meant to be something else,” began the foreword to the first edition.110 The initial plan had been an illustrated volume that would outline an “art history without names,” so that the reader could “follow the emergence of modern Seeing step by step, an art history that [did] not only discuss individual artists but rather [showed] in a progression without any breaks how a painterly style came out of a linear one, an atectonic style out of a tectonic one, etc.”111 However, Wölfflin lamented, no publishing house could afford to print such a richly illustrated book in the midst of a war. He had therefore been forced to make do with fewer images, systematically juxtaposed throughout the book to facilitate visual comparison. Experiments in Nonreading Who was the hurried nonreader who had no time for the text or the footnotes but whom Schultze-Naumburg, Obrist, Wölfflin, Giedion, and other

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users of the comparative method endeavored to lure nonetheless? What assumptions did they make about this subject who, instead of reading, looked comparatively? If the technique of comparative looking was revived at the end of the nineteenth century over against that of reading, an activity crucial to the acquisition of discursive knowledge, clues to the nonreading subject will be found in the field known as the psychology of reading at the turn of the twentieth century. One comprehensive guide to this field is the American psychologist Edmund Burke Huey’s The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading (1908), which summarized the results of experimental research undertaken for the most part at institutions in Germany and the United States by the turn of the century.112 Starting with the premise that reading was an intensely artificial activity with historically specific conventions, Huey reasoned that studying the psychophysical activity of reading would not only help “describe the most intricate workings of the human mind” but also “unravel the tangled story of the most remarkable specific performance that civilization [had] learned in all its history.”113 Of the many questions tackled in Huey’s book, among the most controversial was the role played by the whole versus the part in reading. Until the 1870s, with a few exceptions, the common practice for reading instruction was the “ABC method” or the “spelling theory,” predicated on the principle of teaching letters one by one before putting them together to form syllables or words.114 By the end of the century, however, the efficacy of this practice was questioned, and the central dilemma of reading instruction was rephrased in psychological language: Was reading apperceptive, that is, an immediate process conditioned by the form of the whole? Or was it assimilative, a mediate process requiring the sequential processing of parts? Experiments— conducted with the aid of the “gravity tachistoscope,” a short- exposure apparatus that determined the extent of reading material that could be seen in a momentary glance— demonstrated that the eye took just as long naming a single letter as a monosyllabic word and even unfamiliar nonsense syllables.115 These findings supported the wholeword method: the eye did not recognize letters successively as the “spelling theory” had assumed but rather had an innate ability to apperceive forms instantaneously and as wholes. However, such experiments also raised questions about the process involved in the perception of wholes. In the late 1870s the French ophthalmologist Louis Émile Javal had realized that the eye did not move in a linear fashion across the page while reading but that it traversed the page saccadically— that is, in starts and stops, with fixations, interfixations, and regressions (fig. 2.10).116 Even when the most sophisticated reader was presented with the strictly regimented visual order of the written page, “the eye dart[ed] from point to point, interrupting its rapid motion by instants of rest,” wrote the American psychologist G. M. Stratton, who devised a method to record even the minutest eye movements photographically.117

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Figure 2.10. Saccadic movements of a reading eye. Edmund Burke Huey, The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading with a Review of the History of Reading and Writing and of Methods, Texts, and Hygiene in Reading (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 28.

Not only did “the path by which the eye passe[d] from one to another of these resting places . . . not seem to depend very nicely upon the exact form of the line observed,” but also there was a “grotesque unlikeness between the outline observed and the action of the eye in observing it” (fig. 2.11).118 Stratton concluded that the whole in perception was nothing more than an “introspective illusion.”119 If it was indeed the case that the eye read through haphazard saccades rather than intelligible forms, then the operations of the eye resembled those of mechanical contraptions such as that patented in 1884 as an “electrical telescope” by Paul Nipkow, a Helmholtz student (fig. 2.12).120 Remembered today as a precursor of the mechanical television, the Nipkow contraption consisted of a fast-rotating disk with a series of slots that quickly scanned— rather than grasp as a whole— the image behind it, with the goal of transporting it to another location. Like the eye that read saccadically, the Nipkow disk, the central mechanism of the machines that we have come to call scanners, broke sensations down into their discrete parts

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Figure 2.11. Successive fixations of the eye upon the points of the curve marked A, B, C, etc., on figs. 28 and 29 correspond to α, β, γ, etc., in fig. 30. If the retinal perception were obtained exclusively during the moments of rest, then the impressions would add up to fig. 31. G. M. Stratton, “Eye Movements and the Aesthetics of Visual Form,” Philosophische Studien 20 (1902): 354.

in indiscriminate fashion before assembling them back into wholes. To use the terminology that would be developed in much later literature on optical character recognition, the Nipkow disk was oblivious to “semantic value”— that is, the overall form or Gestalt of a character— but rather operated with “semantic limits.”121 Such “statistical machines,” as they would come to be called, extracted characteristic features, computed probabilities for each letter, and ultimately decided upon the letter with the highest probability as the correct reading. These readers, after all, were not developed for indepth exercises of hermeneutics but for directing mail to the appropriate bin in the post office or the bank. The rise of comparative looking at the turn of the twentieth century should be considered in light of this technological history. The machinic movements of the Nipkow disk were no different from the erratic, kinaesthetic eye movements that Wölfflin and Hildebrand found alarming in the baroque and in sculpture-in-the-round, respectively, and that Nordau associated with modern “degeneration.” It is telling that the psychologist Julius Zeitler, a Wundt student, defended successivity in word recognition as adamantly as his mentor upheld the unitary self.122 The implication was that without an apperceptive mechanism, there was no coherent selfhood to speak of. The nonreader of the modernist picture book, then, departed from both models of selfhood available at the end of the century: as much from the unitary, will- centered self that was educated with hermeneutic

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Figure 2.12. Paul Nipkow, Elektrisches Teleskop, German Patent 30105, filed January 6, 1884, issued January 15, 1885.

techniques germane to Bildung as from the mechanistic self that was imagined to be made of discrete sensations that barely cohered. That is, the nonreader read neither like the nineteenth-century hermeneut nor like twentieth- century scanners. If Wölfflin’s nonreader was afflicted with the modern inability to focus his vision, juxtaposing images on the opposing pages of the book provided a cognitive advantage that the experimental pedagogue Rudolf Schulze described as follows: If I give myself up to my thoughts or recollections, the elements of my consciousness combine and dissolve, apparently without any activity on my

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Figure 2.13. Functioning of a stereoscope with E and E’ representing the eyes, LL and L’L’ lenses, and A’B’a’b’ the image merged in the mind. David Brewster, The Stereoscope: Its History, Theory, and Construction (London: John Murray, 1856), 74.

part. This same process of association occurs when I give myself up passively to the impressions of the outer world. It is quite different, however, if I compare two things, if I look for points of similarity or of difference. In this apperceptive process I have a distinct feeling of activity, which accompanies this process.123

This, after all, had been the promise of stereoscopic vision. Since Charles Wheatstone’s invention of the stereoscope in 1838, the device had served as a powerful model to explain the operation of human perception, inaugurating, according to Wundt, “a new era for the genetic theory of vision” (fig.  2.13).124 The stereoscopic model of vision was predicated on the assumption that a reliable perception of the world was produced when the images falling on the retinas of the left and right eye, slightly different due to binocular parallax, coalesced into one perception. If humans were to look with one eye, they could not acquire a reliable account of the threedimensional world surrounding them. Helmholtz maintained that stereoscopic vision was, in fact, such a crucial aid to correct perception that it was regularly used to tell authentic bank notes from hand-drawn spurious ones.125 Drawing on the large literature on the topic, Hildebrand too priv-

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ileged stereoscopic vision as a means of overcoming the shortcomings of kinaesthetic sensations. Stereoscopic vision worked like a relief sculpture: it accommodated the possibility to “push the object away” and “receive a completely coherent surface image [Flächenbild ].”126 Wölfflin’s use of the comparative method on the pages of Kunstgeschicht­ liche Grundbegriffe served a similar purpose. If photographs exacerbated the innate tendency of the “savaged eye” to move saccadically, juxtaposing them forced even the most painterly photograph to produce the linear effect of a relief or an engraving. A photograph by itself might be unreliable, but when two photographs that were sufficiently similar or different were carefully placed on opposing pages, the eye merged them into one mental image just as it did in stereoscopic vision. What the nonreader’s eye was expected to gather from the images arranged on facing pages, then, was not the individual details of the photograph on the left or on the right but rather the apparition of an ideal “form” that emerged when the two images coalesced into one as in stereoscopic vision. At a moment when the human ability to apperceive seemed questionable, comparative vision made the modern eye see what it otherwise could not. It also provided proof that the ability to synthesize form was precisely that which distinguished the human eye from that of the machine. Seen from the perspective of the comparative method, the modern concept of form and the modernist obsessions with formalism appear different. Mentioning modernity and the so- called fragmented and decentered subject in one breath has become a cliché in the historiography of modernism.127 What emerges from Wölfflin’s vexed relationship with kinaesthetic knowing is a less certain account of modernism. Far from fragmenting the proverbial subject of modernity, technologies of mechanization seem to have given a boost to the unitary subject of the nineteenth century. Inner Voice Externalized If one question in the psychology of reading was the primacy of the whole or the part, another one regarded the use of phonic versus optical methods.128 As Huey pointed out, reading in silence was a relatively new technique. Reading aloud, necessitated by scriptio continua, or writing with no breaks between words, was prevalent until the Middle Ages, when a shift occurred to silent or murmured reading, especially in the Latin medieval West.129 Even after silent reading became the norm, however, the reading voice remained in place under such rubrics as verbum mentis and oratio mentalis. In fact, German educational institutions dedicated much energy to cultivating the inner voice (inneres Wort or innere Rede) of the post-Kantian subject. From Pietist inwardness to the Kantian faculty of judgment, and from the aurality of reading instruction at the turn of the nineteenth century to Wundtian introspection in experimental psychology, this voice had played a crucial role in

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self-formation.130 According to Schleiermacher, for example, thinking and speaking were so inseparable that one could only separate them as “inner” and “outer” speech, never as “thought” and “speech.” Every thought was already a word.131 Likewise, Herbart argued that “still thought” was “heldback speech” or, in other words, a thought was speech in potentia but not always strong enough to innervate the organs of articulation.132 Many techniques of Bildung, then, were protocols for the training of this inner voice. Thus when debates in the field of reading pedagogy at the turn of the twentieth century questioned the role of the phonic versus the optical in reading, under consideration was the question of the inner voice. Could one be taught to read without the inner voice? Could one even think without it? Or, to put the question inversely, if the inner voice could be eliminated— and not merely turned down as children learned to do when they eventually learned to read without moving their lips— how crucial was the inner voice and, by extension, the unitary architectonic of selfhood? Experiments were set up to test this possibility. While some insisted on the irreducibility of the inner voice, others, like the psychologist W. B. Secor, claimed that its elimination would make reading a more frictionless affair.133 Was it “possible to pass from the visual word directly to the sense, without the mediation of articulation or audition?”134 Using a device invented to measure the subliminal movements of the larynx, Secor made his subjects sing, whistle, recite the alphabet, or listen to music while he asked them to read printed matter.135 Once their channels of articulation and hearing were thus occupied, Secor observed, even the least experienced reader was able to forgo vocalization, which meant that reading could turn into a purely optical activity without even the slightest innervation of vocalization.136 Such “optical reading” without the articulation of semantic value became a powerful modernist fantasy. Literary modernists like Gertrude Stein were just as infatuated with the idea of “word as image” as visual artists— most famously perhaps the Italian Futurists— were with “image as word.” The American publisher Bob Brown, who published Stein’s poetry in telegraphic style, dreamed about constructing a ticker-tape machine— similar to future microfilm readers— that would allow a reader to peruse a thick novel in the matter of a few minutes.137 Brown’s own “A Story to Be Read on the Reading Machine,” liberally sprinkled with dashes, resembled abbreviated journalistic dispatches (fig. 2.14).138 Whereas Brown’s modernist fantasy attempted to eliminate the inner voice for a purely optical reading, Wölfflin externalized the inner voice and, with the aid of the sciopticon, transformed the ancient rhetorical device of ekphrasis into one that would prove crucial to the discipline of art history: formal analysis. This was an ingenuous solution, which, to use Burckhardt’s words, made it seem like the artwork “speaks for itself.”139 During his famous lectures, which packed such large crowds into the university’s auditorium that they made newspaper headlines, Wölfflin spoke about artworks

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Figure 2.14. Sidney Hunt’s “morninight car.” Bob Brown, Readies for Bob Brown’s Machine (Cagnes-surMer: Roving Eye Press, 1931), 147.

as if he were experiencing them on the spot. His student Franz Landsberger recalled: The technology requires the hall to remain dark. . . . Wölfflin, the master of improvised speaking, places himself in the dark, with his side turned to his students and his eyes, like theirs, directed at the image. He coalesces with them into a unity and represents the ideal beholder, his words condensing the experience [Erlebnis] common to all. For a while Wölfflin lets the work produce its effect, draws near to it— following Schopenhauer’s advice— as one draws near a prince, waiting until the work speaks to him. Then slowly, almost hesitatingly, come out the sentences. Some of his students mimic these pauses in his speech, not only to mimic an external mannerism, but because they feel that this viscosity hides something positive. Wölfflin’s speaking never creates the impression of something that was prepared in advance and then projected onto the artwork but rather seems to be produced on the spot by the image. The artwork maintains its dominant position throughout.

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His words do not drown the artwork but display it like pearls . . . This tall, sinewy man, who confronts the artwork with a firm, upright posture, reverential toward the work . . . is moved internally but does not submit to this inner movement. Rather he faces it with a clear and productive understanding [Verstehen] [fig. 2.15].140

The Baroque Returns As early as the mid-1890s, Wölfflin had written of his desire to write a book in lecture format.141 In his notebooks he alluded to the affinities between the book format— its “fundamentals of visibility” and “reduction of images to the most instructive”— and the lecture auditorium, full of “young people who ought to know what is good and what is bad.”142 By the time he had published Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe in 1915, Wölfflin had transformed his courses at the university by turning himself into one of the most successful practitioners of the new pedagogical technique of the art historical slide lecture. According to the art historian Max Schmid, who presented the results of a survey conducted among his colleagues in German-speaking countries at the 1896 meeting of the art historical congress, the practice was increasingly becoming more widespread.143 The availability of photographic reproductions had already been transforming the discipline by distancing it from philological analysis, but the slide lecture fundamentally changed the sensorial order of art historical instruction.144 The nineteenth-century student was connected to the university “by the ear, as a hearer,” to use Nietzsche’s formulation. “One speaking mouth, with many ears, and half as many writing hands.”145 This arrangement essentially stayed intact until the end of the nineteenth century, even when the subject matter was art. According to Wölfflin, Burckhardt would lecture while pointing to a single piece of paper, which would then be passed around, with the result that the lecturer had long started to talk of other things by the time the image reached the second or third row.146 By most accounts, the situation was exacerbated after the purported invasion of “sanctuaries of higher learning” by the masses.147 The problem, as Grimm explained in his defense of the sciopticon, was not only that institutions of higher learning were increasingly overrun by the lower middle classes, so that the lecture halls were now full, but that many students were now arriving at the university without the requisite neo-humanistic education offered at the Gymnasien.148 Whereas throughout most of the nineteenth century the university had been seen as the natural extension of the Gymnasium, by the end of the century almost half of the university students were coming from nonclassical secondary schools, where the curriculum focused less on humanistic instruction and more on Realien, modern languages and the natural sciences. However pressing such circumstances might have been, Wölfflin’s embrace of the sciopticon was not wholehearted. The correspondence between

Figure 2.15. Drawing of Heinrich Wölfflin lecturing by his student Dr. Bayer, circa 1920– 36. Ink and pencil on paper, 14 × 22 cm. Nachlass Heinrich Wölfflin, Öffentliche Bibliothek der Universität Basel. NL 95, VI A 36.

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Wölfflin and Grimm indicates that the former started using the sciopticon in 1893.149 Yet, according to journal entries from 1933, after decades of working with the device, projecting slides still triggered in him feelings of alienation.150 It is therefore more reasonable to assume that while Wölfflin accepted the projection technology, he made a point of mediating it so that the sciopticon’s baroque effects would be counterbalanced by what his student Wilhelm Waetzoldt described as the art historian’s own “classical style”: When Wölfflin stood in the darkened old Barackenauditorium of Kastanienwaeldchen [at the University of Berlin], beside his listeners with pointer in hand, and talked with a slow diction about a slide, every sentence hit, each sparingly formulated phrase fused with sensuous Anschauung into an unforgettable experience. Careful to keep clear of superlatives, averse to pathos and emotion, but also full of restrained inwardness, Wölfflin’s own stillness coincided with the clear, orderly, and distinguished style of the classical. Through his research he himself has become classical. That is surely the explanation for Wölfflin’s effect: he is what he teaches, he teaches what he is. His knowledge, his form of life, matter and person, form a unity. It is the closed form of Wölfflin’s persona that has made him into an academic teacher of exemplary attitude.151

This was a strange turn of events. If Schmarsow’s phenomenological bracketing effectively bracketed out the noise of technical media for the sake of an unmediated kinaesthetic exchange with the artwork, for Wölfflin those media turned out to be not only the problem but unexpectedly also the solution. The intellectual transformation that had been quietly taking place in the course of the art historian’s career was now reversed in the lecture hall: Wölfflin may have lost the enthusiasm that he had expressed in his early career for the baroque effects of architecture, but in the pedagogical space of the lecture hall he was now delivering those very effects through a technology that he had found so dangerous before. “Our youth, who demand excitation [Erregung] and storm from the artwork, would like even the beholder to fall into a state of ecstasy,” Landsberger wrote, but Wölfflin had ways to “calm them down.”152 The baroque and the alarming perceptual immediacy that he had consistently associated with it returned to Wölfflin’s work— but not without crucial mediating mechanisms. One such mechanism was formal analysis, a uniquely modern combination of the inner voice and the art of ekphrasis. In the words of the controversial director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle Alfred Lichtwark, who published the conversations that he carried out with children in the presence of the artworks in the museum, this kind of speech was “not about things but from things and in front of things.”153 Remember Landsberger’s description of Wölfflin lecturing: according to his students, the art historian “coalesce[d] with them into a unity and represent[ed] the ideal beholder.”154 Inserted

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in the dark, Wölfflin’s body served as the apperceptive apparatus through which the students looked at the images on the screen— that is, the very apparatus that Wölfflin, Grimm, and their contemporaries feared that the students might lack. While these students, like nonreaders, might read the projected image immediately, superficially, and haphazardly without the aid of an inner voice, Wölfflin’s formal analysis became the proper accompaniment to rein in the excesses of their experience. The comparative vision turned out to be the other crucial mediating mechanism in the new setup of the classroom. Wölfflin did not invent the practice of lecturing with double slides. The first art historian to think of juxtaposing slides for more effective instruction seems to have been Bruno Meyer, who simply fixed two “related representations” within the frame of the same slide to create dissolving slides (Nebelbilder).155 Heinrich Dilly has suggested that it was Adolph Goldschmidt, Wölfflin’s successor in Berlin, who started the practice of projecting comparative slides simultaneously from two sciopticons.156 As early as 1911 another art historian wrote that only with the sciopticon had it become “possible to project images simultaneously on the wall, to discuss style critically, and to treat art history successfully as style history in the lecture hall.”157 Regardless of who the inventor of the practice might have been, we know from the lecture notes of his students that by the time he left Berlin for Munich in 1912, Wölfflin was using the technique.158 By then two other changes had been made to the art historical slide lecture to make it a much smoother affair. According to the minutes of the art historical congress, by the early twentieth century slides were no longer a novelty shown at the end of the class but were integrated into the body of the lectures, and the sciopticon was placed in the back of the hall so that students would not have to turn around. More important here, in Wölfflin’s work, the slide lecture and the picture book merged into a hybrid, multisensory, and continuous medium, which, on the one hand, used the sensorial excess of projected images as lure and, on the other, kept that excess in check through strategically built-in mediating mechanisms. In 1909 Schmarsow was still projecting slides to the rear side of the lecture hall so that his students had to turn around on their swivel chairs in order to view the slide show behind them.159 By contrast, Wölfflin’s lectures, supported by double slides and formal analysis, were more seamless affairs. It was reported that when the art historian spoke in the darkened lecture hall, he became invisible and his disembodied voice created the illusion that the artwork itself was speaking immediately through him. Account after account described the same spectacular art historical performance that transfixed hundreds at a time: His persuasiveness emerged completely out of the charm of his personality. He deliberated before unleashing a concatenation of sentences. He did not lecture; he spoke. His speech was Seeing, solid vision, thinking Seeing [denk­

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endes Schauen]. By speaking matter-of-factly of substantive observations and not allowing the influx of overwhelming emotions, the image-form [Bildform] spoke in its strict beauty all the more for itself. One cannot say everything, but one can say something so that everything has been said. He understood that; he did not disturb the unspeakable; he did not speak it to death. . . . So he sought in all form the Gestalt of spiritual life.160

Students described attending Wölfflin’s lectures as “approaching the sun.”161 Immersed in the dark and staring at the radiant image created by the projector, no one seemed to notice the notorious heat, noise, and smell of the machine, the awkward discontinuities between word and image, or the occasional upside- down slide. Wölfflin must have realized the same paradox, for he seems to have utilized it better than any of his contemporaries: that the more radiant and immaterial the image was, the more material and present it appeared— so much so that, as the art historian Theodor Levin put it in 1894, the act of projecting slides strangely resembled Christ’s Transfiguration.162 Therein was the ingenuity and paradox of Wölfflin’s pedagogical project. For all his misgivings about technical media, Wölfflin proved exceptionally successful at erasing all traces of mediation and rendering the formal language of art history immediate with the help of none other than technical media. This was Helmholtzian “aesthetic induction” but in the comparative mode. If kinaesthetic knowing was a feasible possibility, as so many hoped at the end of the nineteenth century— that is, if there was a form of knowledge that could be gained through a phenomenal familiarity with the world alone without recourse to a higher cognitive order— the forced comparison guaranteed that the subject acquiring this knowledge would not fall apart into discrete sensations. If modernity was baroque, as Wölfflin saw it, the comparative method accepted the saccadic movements of the eye but stabilized them; it modulated the inner voice but did not turn it off entirely. Like Wölfflin lecturing before the sciopticon, modernist techniques like comparative looking strove to slow this subject’s sensorium down so that it could be restored to an imaginary state of unity that was less like the baroque and more like the Renaissance.

3: Affecting

Endell’s Mathematics of Living Feeling

A curious table made of up eight rows and eight columns of words appeared on the pages of the journal Dekorative Kunst in 1898 (fig. 3.1).1 The contents of the table were all adjectives, listed without the nouns that they modified. A rectangle separated the twenty-eight words on the margins from the central thirty-six, which ranged from “carefree” and “simple” on the left side to “fierce” and “grand” on the right. The table had been composed by the architect August Endell, who explained in the accompanying essay that each word corresponded to a feeling (Gefühl), produced as a result of forms exerting their immediate effects on the physiology of the beholder.2 The variations of these emotive effects (Gefühlswirkungen) were the product of two factors: the tension of perception, on the one hand, and its tempo, on the other, represented in the table by the horizontal and the vertical axes, respectively.3 According to this logic, any emotive effect that fell outside the rectangle was felt either too intensely or not intensely enough. On the next page was inventoried a series of diagrammatic elevations that demonstrated how architecture revealed this immediate relationship between form and affect (fig. 3.2). Simply by changing the proportions of a façade or readjusting the vertical and horizontal divisions of a window, Endell claimed, an architect could make the beholder experience feelings of “simple, intimate, warm,” “serious, deep, sublime,” or “proud, strict, violent, and fierce.”4 Founded in Munich in 1897 by the critic Julius Meier-Graefe to promote a new, antihistoricist approach to art, Dekorative Kunst was sympathetic to Endell’s concerns.5 Still, the editors of the journal admitted that they found the table puzzling. In what read like a disclaimer at the end of Endell’s text, they declared that the architect’s ideas had “moved into such a new and abstract territory” that, while they were pleased to publish them, they could not offer their full endorsement.6 A few years would pass before Dekorative Kunst recognized Endell’s essay among the first theoretical accounts of a new direction in German aesthetics. In an essay published in the journal in 1904, the critic Karl Scheffler praised Endell for having courageously ventured into what he called the “very dark region” of the theory of form- effects.7 After mentioning similar attempts by himself as well as by the journal’s founder,

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Figure 3.1. Endell’s table of emotive effects. August Endell, “Formenschönheit und dekorative Kunst, Part II,” Dekorative Kunst 2 (1898): 121.

Meier-Graefe, the artist Henry van de Velde, and the painter and pedagogue Wilhelm von Debschitz, Scheffler complained that despite these valiant attempts, the exact relationship between forms and their effects was still to be discovered.8 He then called on the readers of Dekorative Kunst to send their own observations about the effects of forms, lines, and colors to the journal’s editors. By publishing these results regularly, the editors would help build a much-needed “natural history of the architectonic arts.”9 Modeled after Endell’s table of feelings, Scheffler’s call for establishing a comprehensive inventory of formal effects would ultimately prove fruitless. Yet a newfound faith in the emotive power of forms, an idea that Scheffler identified at the heart of emergent art movements, had been subtly changing the terms of aesthetic discourses in Germany for the past few decades. Endell was not alone in claiming that “every form— and there is an infinite number of them— awakens a different feeling.”10 By the last decade of the century, declarations about the death of the aesthetic philosophies of Hegel, Schelling, and even Kant— “aesthetics from above” (Aesthetik von oben), as Fechner, the founder of the field of psychophysics, had called it— were increasingly accompanied by calls for a new aesthetics that concerned itself with sensations (Empfindungen), impressions (Eindrücke), feelings (Gefühle), and effects (Wirkungen) conceived before they were mediated by the apperceptive mechanisms of the mind. As Endell put it, an aesthetic discourse that did not understand these elementary components of experience was as meaningless as a science of optics for the blind.11 Despite its editors’ initial incomprehension of Endell’s table, the journal Dekorative Kunst turned out to be an important venue for airing speculations about “aesthetics from below.”12 Commentators argued on the pages of the journal that art was first and foremost expression and that ornament was the primary means through which this expressive urge became evident.13 Forms carried emotive power in every medium from painting to music and from sculpture to architecture, but these effects were especially pronounced in the so- called decorative arts, which gave the journal its name.14 Of course, theories of passions, feelings, and emotions— classified as

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Figure 3.2. Elevation studies arranged according to their emotive effects. August Endell, “Formenschönheit und dekorative Kunst, Part II,” Dekorative Kunst 2 (1898): 122.

calm or violent, hostile or benevolent, objectless or with an object, purely corporeal or mental, public or private— had been an important part of Western intellectual life long before Endell drew up his table.15 I will only remind the reader of some of the most influential of these theories before the nineteenth century: Descartes’s dualistic system of six primary passions, understood as agitations of animal spirits; Spinoza’s differentiation between active and passive passions, both understood as misguided thoughts; Hume’s pronouncement that “reason is and ought only to be the slave of passions”; and Kant’s differentiation between turbulent but temporary emotions and deeper and longer passions.16 Furthermore, from Charles Le Brun’s codification of twenty-two passions in the seventeenth century to J. K. Lavater’s physiognomic permutations in the late eighteenth, visual representation had been an important part of theories of feelings.17 Yet, as the “French Wundt,” Théodule-Armand Ribot explained in 1896, because even those thinkers who had taken an interest in feelings had almost always subscribed to an intellectualist view, feelings had been entirely dismissed as a source of legitimate knowledge in Western philosophy.18 But at the end of the nineteenth century, Ribot optimistically noted, a new physiological approach—

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found in the work of such philosophers as Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, Henry Maudsley, and, as we will see, William James and Carl Georg Lange— challenged the intellectualism inherent in the Enlightenment. What if feelings were not secondary in the operations of the mind? What if they could be imagined as driving human action more forcefully than the intellect? Ribot explained that a new way of thinking about feelings suggested that the somatic phenomena that accompanied them were not their effects but rather their cause.19 The physiological approach to feelings effectively turned the tables on Enlightenment thinking: feelings at the end of the nineteenth century came to be imagined as a variant of cognition rather than as the antithesis of conscious thought. It was time to recognize, as Nietzsche put it, that “every passion contains its own quantum of reason.”20 Seen in light of these developments in Germany and beyond, there was nothing unusual about Endell and Scheffler’s interest in exploring the epistemological value of feelings. Both echoed the arguments developed by others in the nineteenth century in the name of the alternative knowledge that I call “kinaesthetic knowing.” Evoking the Helmholtzian distinction between Wissen and Kennen, Endell wrote that at a moment when modern life seemed to be drowned by words and concepts, it was necessary to give Anschauung a footing equal to that of conceptual knowledge.21 Aesthetics was the privileged realm in which this other way of knowing could realize its full epistemological potential. “By no means is architectural enjoyment delight in architectonic thoughts [Gedanken],” Endell argued. “There is absolutely nothing conceptual in architecture. . . . Rather it is delight in intuition [Anschauung]” and “in feelings aroused by that intuition.”22 Scheffler agreed that art was where intuition (Anschauung) and knowledge (Erkenntnis) came together. The formworld of the visual arts consisted of “strange phenomena that could be called the formative power of feelings driving toward knowledge (Erkenntnis),” he wrote.23 The artist drew a line “under the urge of a sensation [Empfindung]”; these lines had an effect on those who could intuit (anschauen); and, finally, “through the nerves the optical stimulus transform[ed] itself back again into psychic sensation (Empfindung)” in the beholder.24 Aesthetic experience, in other words, was epistemologically valuable because it followed the psychophysical pathway of stimulus and sensation as outlined by Fechner. A systematic exploration of feelings, in turn, was crucial for the art of the future. “It is important to create the conventions of the coming epoch so that they cover the whole gamut of sensations,” according to Scheffler, “so that the driving ideas seem fathomless, the richness of form inexhaustible.”25 In an essay that he wrote in 1904, Endell made an astounding leap from the workings of the emotive effects that he had listed in a table a few years before to the foundations of scientific knowledge at large: We must and we will succeed in ordering the confusing manifoldness of feeling and in tracing it to a principle . . . because without that, history as

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science [Wissenschaft] is not possible. For feeling [Gefühl] is the greatest and the only mainspring in human life; it is not . . . a lyrical illusoriness, but in reality gives something that is absolutely clear and definite, real and factual. Feelings give value to everything, give everything meaning and therefore essence. We do what we do not for the sake of things-in-themselves but for the sake of the value that they receive through our feelings. So long as we do not grasp the essence of feeling scientifically [wissenschaftlich], we will achieve neither an accurate political economy nor a political or religious science, neither political nor cultural history, neither economic history nor art history.26

Behind Endell’s modest table of words, then, was a bold epistemological project: instituting kinaesthetic knowing as the basis of the human sciences. Informed by Dilthey’s philosophy, Endell argued not only that the kinds of justification the human sciences called for were unlike those used in the natural sciences but also that if the latter had been established on the secure foundation of mathematics, the human sciences would have to be constructed upon an equally rigorous science of feeling-life (Gefühlsleben) informed by the findings of the discipline of psychology.27 Scheffler agreed: defending Endell, Obrist, Pankok, and van de Velde against accusations of sentimentality and subjectivity, Scheffler argued that a matter- of-factness (Sachlichkeit) derived from “the absolute probative force of ‘laws’ and ‘principles,’” and “conclusions of speculative logic,” was no more objective than one derived from “feeling- evaluations” (Gefühlswertungen).28 The work of these artists “gave concrete form to innermost feeling.”29 The cultural work of the present, Scheffler added in an especially chauvinist passage, was to turn the “sentimental— that is, the feminine, the pregnant, that which forged ahead to birth” to “the masculine— that is, the classical.”30 We have almost entirely forgotten about this ambitious epistemological project of late-nineteenth-century phenomenology. Especially in architectural discourses, where the assumption that a phenomenological worldview is fundamentally opposed to a scientific one is deeply ingrained, it is impossible to read Scheffler’s and Endell’s theories of feeling with anything but bewilderment today.31 But, as Endell saw it, a theory of feeling had to be, first and foremost, scientific. The task of the day was not simply to produce an architecture based on feeling but to “measure that which was immeasurable.” This was a project that Scheffler provocatively described as “logarithm-fantasy” (Logarithmenphantastik) and “mathematics of living feeling” (Mathematik des lebendigen Gefühls).32 In the minds of these two late-nineteenth-century intellectuals, the most important mission of modern art and especially architecture was to serve as the exemplary field where feelings could achieve a level of rigor that could rival that of mathematics, the discipline that provided the epistemological foundation for the natural sciences.

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But how to “grasp the essence of feeling scientifically [wissenschaftlich],” as Endell urged? Like many of his contemporaries, Endell placed his faith in a rigorous formalism in the hopes of achieving this ambitious epistemological goal.33 (If we take his countless statements about the immediacy of architectonic form and affect at face value, we have to conclude that form for Endell was simply any visual arrangement that elicited a strong feeling.) While Endell advocated for broadening the range of feelings that would be admissible in modern art, like Wölfflin, he saw form first and foremost as a pedagogical device. The task at hand was to discover the correlation between feelings and forms so that the difference, say, between a curved line and a zigzag would be as unambiguous as that between “fierce” and “grand” in his table of feelings. Then, he hoped, art could bring about the new cognitive order that modernity demanded. Furthermore, Endell believed that architecture had a particularly important role to play in this project. It is the history between Kant’s expulsion of feeling from the realm of cognition and Nietzsche’s proclamation that emotions contained their very own reason that I will examine in this chapter. How did feelings migrate from the physiognomic illustrations in Lavater’s books to Endell’s seemingly prosaic table of feelings? What were the ethical implications of this migration? Could feelings be converted into a propaedeutic knowledge that could serve as the foundation of all human sciences, as Endell claimed? And how did architecture come to play a central role in this forgotten turn- ofthe-century epistemological project? Ethics of Pathognomy Endell never received any formal training in art or architecture. He moved to Munich from Tübingen in 1892 after abandoning his philological studies. As a student in the 1890s, he wrote to the cultural historian Kurt Breysig, his cousin, many letters filled with his musings on how to narrow down his subject of study from a broad interest in philosophical matters, especially what he called the “new philosophy,” which, he explained, replaced Hegelian speculation with questions about the psychology of perception.34 While he knew that he wanted to specialize in a field that played an epistemologically foundational role, he took a long time deciding which one. First intrigued by ethics and aesthetics, fields that he called the “stepchildren of philosophy,” he then turned to mathematics because it was the “substructure of the natural sciences.”35 He changed his mind again and decided to study epistemology and logic, which he considered as foundational for all knowledge because, he wrote, all synthetic sciences were ultimately “subjective explanations,” as Kant had pointed out.36 If “the available facts [were] ultimately as explicable from one point of view as from another,” he reasoned, echoing many nineteenth- century thinkers, it followed that at the heart of his search for an epistemological foundation was the question of causality.

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The question was whether “it was sufficient for our needs to explain the world with the aid of that which is beyond sense experience and outside of causality.”37 Beyond this point, no science was of use except for a philosophy that analyzed human drives and needs.38 In 1896 Endell reported to his cousin that he had finally found the epistemological foundation that he had been looking for: “I have touched an area, practically ignored, the burning question of all philosophy, the goal of all psychology, and the point of departure of applied psychology,” he wrote, “that is, of all ethics, logic, aesthetics, etc., and that is the theory of feeling [Gefühlstheorie].”39 By Endell’s own account, the vibrant artistic culture of Munich had provided the answers to the epistemological questions that had been bedeviling him: he was especially interested in the debates about the Munich Secession, the applied arts, and the work of the poets Stefan George and Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom he socialized. The latter even inspired him to try his hand at poetry. Influential above all, however, was the work of Hermann Obrist, whom Endell described in rapturous terms that are only second to Obrist’s own descriptions of his prophetic visions, as we will see in the next chapter. Endell wrote to Breysig that meeting Obrist was the “most important moment of his life.”40 According to Endell, Obrist’s embroideries had an immediate formal effect on the beholder comparable only to the influence of music.41 It was under the spell of Obrist that Endell decided in the mid-1890s to pursue a career in architecture and the decorative arts more seriously (although the frustration of not having the skills to draw continued to haunt him).42 Like others who were attracted to “aesthetics from below” in the late nineteenth century, Endell was interested in the foundationalist role that kinaesthetic experience could play in the formation of knowledge. The appeal of the new aesthetics, he explained, was that it did not float in the air like other philosophical fields but was “grounded in literature and the arts.”43 Once Endell discovered the theory of feeling (Gefühlstheorie) as a productive field of exploration, he turned it into the focus of his endeavors as an architect, decorative artist, critic, and, ultimately, pedagogue. He completed his studies in Munich by writing a thesis titled “Gefühlscontrast” (Feelingcontrast) under the supervision of Theodor Lipps, professor of philosophy and psychology in Munich, known for his theory of empathy (Einfühlung), which had significant influence on Munich phenomenologists. Lipps himself took an interest in the emotive values of forms in his monumental Äs­ thetik, but Endell eventually realized that his thinking departed from that of Lipps.44 Endell wanted to “begin with the modern direction in psychology . . . the one which is opposed to Wundt and which centers around the periodical Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane,” he wrote in his letters. But he also saw that “he need not play the hypocrite with Lipps” in that he “took, in part, a different position.”45 Endell outlined his theory of emotions for the first time in the essay “Um die Schönheit” (On Beauty), a review of

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Figure 3.3. August Endell, Façade of the Elvira Photography Studio, Munich, 1898. August Endell, “Architektonische Erstlinge,” Dekorative Kunst 3.8 (1900): 298.

the Glaspalast exhibition of 1896, and continued to elaborate on it until his death in 1925.46 More relevant here, his theorization of feelings formed the backbone of his design pedagogy as well. Both when he taught at his own School for Form-Art (Schule für Formkunst, otherwise known as Formschule) in Berlin and later when he succeeded Hans Poelzig as the director of the Academy for Art and Applied Art (Akademie für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe) in Breslau (Wrocław in today’s Poland), he insisted on a pedagogical program that explored the relationship between form and affect in the most methodical manner possible, with the assumption that pure form was the perfect medium of emotive effects.47 Endell’s first practical attempt at anchoring his theory of emotive effects in architecture, his design for the façade and the interior spaces of an existing building in Munich, brought him instant notoriety (figs. 3.3, 3.4, 3.5).48 Owned by the feminist and lesbian couple Anita Augspurg and Sophia Goudstikker, figures well known in the artistic circles of the city, the Elvira

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Figure 3.4. August Endell, Interior view of the staircase of the Elvira Photography Studio, Munich, 1898. August Endell, “Architektonische Erstlinge,” Dekorative Kunst 3.8 (1900): 301.

Photography Studio also included living quarters for the two women.49 Soon after Endell’s design for the façade was unveiled in 1898, the building became the centerpiece of a controversy. Especially contentious was the gigantic asymmetrical relief-ornament plastered onto the flat surface of the façade. Composed of interlocking planes of varying textures and bright colors, the relief-ornament was likened to Japanese prints and to sea creatures

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Figure 3.5. August Endell, Interior view of the staircase of the Elvira Photography Studio, Munich, 1898. August Endell, “Architektonische Erstlinge,” Dekorative Kunst 3.8 (1900): 300.

similar to those depicted in illustrations by the zoologist Ernst Haeckel.50 Such comparisons only irritated Endell. Describing his work, he insisted on using the formalistic vocabulary of effect (Wirkung), self-consciously avoiding any iconography: “The goal is aesthetic effect [ästhetische Wirkung],” he wrote of his forms, “not narration or instruction about plants and animals.”51 Such statements by Endell have been taken out of context and cited time and again to argue that his architecture was a precursor of twentieth-century modernist abstraction.52 But this abstraction is not the kind rehearsed in  countless teleological accounts of modern art. Endell did not call for

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Figure 3.6. August Endell, Stripped façade, circa 1937, of the Elvira Photography Studio, Munich, 1898. Courtesy of the Stadtarchiv München.

abstraction; instead he forcefully argued for a new kind of architectural theory that would work with the immediate power of forms on the human psyche. Modern architecture was to be a pure Formkunst (form-art), which would not stylize natural forms but would instead concern itself exclusively with formal structures that “[were] nothing and mean[t] nothing” and that “exert[ed] a direct effect on [the beholder] without any intellectual mediation, like musical tones.”53 Despite Endell’s attempts at accounting for his work as pure form, however, the Elvira Studio continued to be derided as “octopus rococo” and “Chinese embassy.”54 One critic went so far as to declare the building’s façade as dangerous as anarchism.55 Even before bombing during World War II destroyed the building completely, National Socialists dismantled the ornament as they “cleaned up” the city in 1937 in preparation for the opening of the museum Haus der deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) (fig. 3.6). Given that even his detractors seem to have subscribed to Endell’s rhetoric of immediacy, it bears asking: What was so scandalous about the Elvira Photography Studio? How could an ornament whose form was intended to “be nothing and mean nothing” be considered such a threat? His contemporaries found in Endell much to ridicule. The story of his epiphanic conversion into an artist after his encounters with Obrist was parodied, and his prose was compared unfavorably to contemporary poetry.56 The Elvira Studio project was also embroiled in debates about the so-called third sex— not only because the owners of the studio were lesbians who were active in the feminist circles of turn-of-the-century Munich but also because Endell

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was frequently derided for his rumored impotence, especially after a failed marriage with the future Dadaist poet Elsa Hildegard Plötz.57 (It did not help that Endell’s next major architectural commission came from Ernst von Wolzogen, the author of the controversial novel Das dritte Geschlecht [The Third Sex], in which the protagonist refused the female identity imposed on her and pursued a more fluid model of selfhood.58) Yet the most pointed criticism came from those who worried about what they perceived to be an alarming lack of discipline in Endell’s architecture. In an address delivered in Berlin in 1900, Johannes Otzen, the academic architect who had compared Endell’s architecture to anarchism a year earlier, singled out the Elvira Studio as the epitome of a modern architecture that had “endless faith in its own self [Ich].”59 Modern art’s infatuations with Nietzsche’s Übermensch produced what Otzen called the Überornament, a prime example of which was the one to be found on the façade of the Elvira Photography Studio. This was an overgrown decoration that was no longer the expression of a tectonic necessity but was arbitrary and “coquettish.”60 This architecture was as capricious as the “babbling sounds of a child.”61 That Otzen identified Endell’s architecture with marginal subjects— women, children, and members of the so- called third sex— was no accident. What troubled Otzen the most was the seeming loss of will, intention, and agency in the kind of modern architecture represented by Endell. His conservative defense of academicism notwithstanding, Otzen had a point. The formalist thinking inherent in the Elvira Photography Studio signaled a pivotal shift in the way that architecture was conceived in relation to its imagined subject. Within the nineteenth- century Beaux-Arts pedagogical tradition, that relationship had been regulated through the concept of character. Starting with Charles Le Brun’s 1668 lecture on the expression of passions, the idea of character was developed in academic architectural theory as a term that concerned itself with the moods and feelings conveyed by architecture. With the incorporation of Cartesian theories of emotional expression, the idea was transformed in the hands of Jacques-François Blondel, Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières, and Étienne-Louis Boullée into a concept that guaranteed— primarily by means of the orders and the ornamental program— that a building conformed to decorum and convenance.62 According to this logic, designing a pavilion for Venus, the architect could indulge in a more lighthearted ornamental program, whereas a pavilion for Jupiter called for austerity (fig. 3.7). In the formulation of Le Camus de Mézières, “the building erected for a great Nobleman, the Palace of a Bishop, the Town House of a Magistrate, and the House of a Military Man, or of a rich private citizen” required to be treated differently.63 Quatremère de Quincy, the secrétaire perpétuel of the Académie des BeauxArts for most of the nineteenth century, traced the origin of the term “character” to the Greek word for engraving and imprinting and defined it as “the art of impressing each building with a state so appropriate to its nature or its

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Figure 3.7. Elevations of the Pavilions of Jupiter, Venus, and Hercules at the Château de Marly. Each elevation demonstrates the appropriate character. Louis de Chatillon, Divers desseins de décorations de pavillons inventez par M. Le Brun (Séraphin: Edelinck, 1672).

use that one can read in its salient traits what it is and what it cannot be”— even when the reader in question was not educated.64 Character applied to “a small number of physiognomies” that were “distinguished by some salient traits that remain engraved in one’s memory.”65 In other words, the concepts of character and convenance guaranteed that architecture would impress a moral lesson but without deviating from established social norms. Seen from this perspective, the ingenuity of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s ar­ chitecture parlante was the reworking of the academic concept of character. When Ledoux accommodated a river surveyor in a building that looked like a sewage pipe, the building did not only reflect the expected character but turned it into a caricature.66 The practice of physiognomy, a technique that consisted of reading visible signs off surfaces so as to connect them to an internal character, had been elaborated in the French academic tradition but started gaining wide popularity across Europe after Johann Lavater’s publication of Phy­ siognomische Fragmente (fig. 3.8).67 Historians have argued that in the late eighteenth century, when social volatility and the possibility of revolution were the source of much anxiety, physiognomy promised to bridge the gap between appearances and essences by referring ambiguous cues read from faces to an innate character. As in the popular pastimes of shadow-painting and silhouette-reading, and the increasingly more popular medium of caricature, physiognomic practices examined the rigid bone structure of the face— rather than the fleeting variations of its flexible muscles— to capture permanent form. Even as physiognomy fixed its attention on the surfaces of the body, then, it assumed that there was the deep structure of a character behind it. Character was an ideal type. Like Goethe’s Urpflanze, it represented every individual instance while resembling none. For anyone who knew how to read the signs on those surfaces, the message was crystal clear:

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Figure 3.8. Four primary physiognomic types. Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntniß und Menschenliebe, vol. 4 (Leipzig: Bey Weidmanns Erben & Reich; Winterthur: Heinrich Steiner, 1778), sec. 6, 350– 51.

the angularly pointed nose was the telltale sign of a choleric temperament, as drooping lips were of the phlegmatic.68 Such physiognomic faith in deep structures was entirely absent from the Elvira Studio. Endell was unequivocal in his dismissal of physiognomy. “Neither greatness of character nor bodily strength is expressed in a beautiful nose,” he wrote; “a twitch of the mouth can say more than the most meticulous observations of a face at rest.”69 Endell’s theory of emotive effects was equally oblivious to character, decorum, and convenance in the academic sense. Not only was the Überornament on the façade of the Elvira Studio indifferent to the building’s program and arrangement of interior spaces, but there was also a notable absence of an overall moral impression to be gained from the building.70 Instead, the building sought to make its impact on the beholder in a piecemeal fashion through its surfaces— most noticeably by means of the large ornament on the façade but also through the iterations of relief-ornaments on its walls, doors, and windows (fig. 3.9). If there was any imprinting to speak of here, it was done by the surfaces of the building upon the psyche of the beholder. To evoke Quatremère’s definition of character, Endell’s relief-ornaments too did imprinting, but in reverse: they were designed to stamp the beholder with effects as if impressing the proverbial wax tablet of the mind. Despite Endell’s investment in a theory of feeling, then, Endell’s architecture of emotive effects had less in common with physiognomy and more with its nineteenth- century relative pathognomy, which studied emotional expressions as facial muscles expanded and contracted under the influence of passions.

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Figure 3.9. August Endell, Variations of door frames and handles in the Elvira Photography Studio, Munich, 1898. August Endell, “Architektonische Erstlinge,” Dekorative Kunst 3.8 (1900): 302– 3.

Unlike physiognomy, which was interested in depth and character, pathognomy concerned itself exclusively with the surfaces of the body, with no presumption of a deeper structure beyond. The most renowned pathognomist of the nineteenth century, the physiologist Duchenne de Boulogne, developed a technique whereby he systematically applied electrical currents to the facial muscles of his subjects as he photographically documented their reactions (fig. 3.10). In his 1862 treatise Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine (The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression), he described pathognomy as the “orthography of facial expression,” the “gymnastics of the soul,” and “literature in pictures.”71 Duchenne began his mise-en-scènes with a face at rest. The gaze of the subject had to be fixed and directed forward. He then put muscles into isolated contraction using the probes of his electrical devices. Finally, he combined various contractions until he obtained the desired expression, which he documented using a camera. Duchenne noted that unlike limb muscles, facial muscles were not dictated by mechanical necessity and could therefore be manipulated artificially.72 Duchenne’s pathognomy was not unlike Lavater’s physiognomy to the extent that it too sought to master

Figure 3.10. Duchenne de Boulogne electrifies the facial muscles of his subject. G.-B.-A. Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, ou analyse électrophysiologique de l’expression des passions (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1862), title page.

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what Duchenne called the “universal grammar” of feelings. There was, however, a marked difference between the two— a difference that Duchenne compared to that between anatomy and its animated version, physiology.73 Duchenne was ultimately indifferent to the idea of a permanent character that projected unmistakable signs of its essence from within. Instead he was interested in how the minute movements of the facial muscles added up to an expression. Predictably he also preferred the mechanical objectivity of photographic recording that captured every twitch and jerk of the muscles to line drawings that distilled an ideal character type.74 Moreover, whereas Lavater’s subjects had been merchants, countrymen, and aristocrats, Duchenne preferred empty vessels that he described as “irritable cadavers”— that is, subjects who were so devoid of willpower that they could be posed like dummies.75 Duchenne was so invested in the purported emptiness of these subjects that he considered himself most successful when he was able to stimulate half of a face with one emotion and the other half with its diametrical opposite. He could make the same person look like a virgin and a bacchante at the very same moment, he bragged. Liberated from the burden of a single essential character, whose decipherment was the objective of physiognomy, the subject of pathognomy— all surface and no depth— could be manipulated to enact a multitude of characters. There was, in short, an inherent theatricality in pathognomy: “She cannot understand the gestures or the poses that I show her,” wrote Duchenne of an ill-fated subject of his experiments, “so that I am obliged to position and dress her as if she were a mannequin.”76 Architecture of Pathognomy and the Ethics of Raum Endell built the same kind of psychic drama into the theater that he designed in Berlin in 1901 for Ernst von Wolzogen, the cabaret pioneer whose Überbrettl in Berlin was modeled ambitiously after the Nietzschean Über­ mensch (figs. 3.11, 3.12).77 Situated on a small site in the courtyard of a perimeter block on Köpenickerstrasse, the building was arranged around the central space of an auditorium that accommodated eight hundred seats. If the Elvira Studio impressed its subjects with relief- ornaments, the Wolzogen Theater (or the Buntestheater, as it was called, in reference to its colorful interior) deployed pointillistically painted surface patterns to the same effect. Endell explained that he had borrowed the technique from Belgian pointillist painters and Obrist’s embroideries.78 Endell’s description accompanying hand-colored drawings of the building showed an adventurous arrangement of colors. Speckles of paint, arranged as a constellation of circular forms, were applied on a background of brown and gray. Each circle had a light red center and rings of purple, light green, and dark green on the circumference. In order to heighten the effect of a total space encompassing the audience, Endell designed the walls and the ceiling of the auditorium

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Figure 3.11. August Endell, Interior view of the auditorium of the Wolzogen Theater, Berlin, 1901. August Endell, “Das WolzogenTheater in Berlin,” Berliner Architekturwelt 4.11 (1902): 379. Figure 3.12. August Endell, Interior view of the auditorium of the Wolzogen Theater, Berlin, 1901. August Endell, “Das WolzogenTheater in Berlin,” Berliner Architekturwelt 4.11 (1902): 391.

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Figure 3.13. August Endell, Interior view of the auditorium of the Wolzogen Theater, Berlin, 1901. August Endell, “Das Wolzogen-Theater in Berlin,” Berliner Architekturwelt 4.11 (1902): 378.

as a continuous surface without any corners and applied on their surface a pattern of plant-like forms (fig. 3.13).79 On the opening night, visitors noted that the architecture stole the show from the production onstage.80 Endell painstakingly designed every detail of the building, from ornamentation on the doors to the patterns of the carpets, from the furniture and lighting fixtures to the friezes on the walls. He explained that he had methodically tested out the emotive effect of each form until all unfavorable effects were eliminated.81 The resulting decorative program read like an encyclopedia of ornamentation. The space aspired to create a Stimmung, an atmosphere that assumed an emotional resonance between the emotive effect of the architecture and the psychological state of the beholder.82 This was an architecture whose surfaces were designed to electrify the nerves. Reviewing the Wolzogen Theater, one critic called the building’s forms “stabbing and prickly,” while Scheffler described the beholder’s response to the effects of Endell’s forms as “mental acrobatics” that made the nerves “twitch and itch” (figs. 3.14, 3.15).83 In this sense, the “intensification of nervous stimulation” that the sociologist Georg Simmel identified in the modern metropolis was being rehearsed in the interior spaces of the

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Figure 3.14. August Endell, Interior view of the Wolzogen Theater, Berlin, 1901. August Endell, “Das Wolzogen-Theater in Berlin,” Berliner Architekturwelt 4.11 (1902): 383.

Wolzogen Theater.84 What Endell was imagining was an architecture of excitation and arousal (Erregung). Because of his connection to Lipps, Endell’s work has been understood in reference to theories of Einfühlung, defined as the mental ability to project and incorporate one’s bodily form into an objective vessel. But Endell was pursuing a process of aesthetic perception that proceeded in exactly the opposite direction: The path does not go from essence to appearance. On the contrary, appearances may only begin to signal essences. The form arouses the feeling without any mediation; we know of no intermediary, psychical occurrences. . . .

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Figure 3.15. August Endell, Interior view of the Wolzogen Theater, Berlin, 1901. August Endell, “Das Wolzogen-Theater in Berlin,” Berliner Architekturwelt 4.11 (1902): 394.

This is the power of form upon our mind, a direct, immediate influence without any elements in between— by no means an anthropomorphic effect, but one of humanization [Vermenschlichung].85

The directionality of the emotive exchange here is crucial to understanding the ethical thrust of Endell’s architecture. This architecture did not call for a subject who empathized.86 Instead lines of force emanating from architec-

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tural forms set the beholder’s expressive muscles into action. If academic architecture of the nineteenth century was based upon physiognomy, Endell’s was an architecture of pathognomy: an architecture predicated on the idea that forms stimulated the physiology of the beholder as immediately as Duchenne’s electrical currents shocked the facial muscles of his subjects. Vibrating with nervous energy, patterns on walls, floors, and ceilings forced themselves upon their recipient. In this sense, Otzen was correct in pointing out that Endell’s architecture subscribed to an unconventional model of selfhood. The subject called for by Endell’s architecture was not the unitary, indivisible, and will- centered selfhood cultivated by Bildung— the subject who, like Humboldt, had the willpower to hold external sensations at bay— but one that was imagined to be entirely open to the influence of such external sensations. Pathognomy implicitly posed a crucial question: If emotions did not originate from inner mental states, as Duchenne had demonstrated in his experiments, would it be possible to trigger them through external stimulation? Duchenne never claimed that the subjects whose facial muscles were electrified felt the feelings that were imprinted upon their faces, but his experiments did upset the accepted order of physiological occurrences involving the expression of an emotion. In a sense this was not a new development. Already in 1806, Charles Bell, the Scottish surgeon who theorized the possibility of an independent “muscle sense” after discovering that afferent and efferent nerve traffic were connected to separate parts of the spinal cord, could not help but wonder in his treatise Anatomy and Philosophy of Expres­ sion: Why was it that “as we hold our breath and throw ourselves into an opposite action to restrain the ludicrous idea which would cause us to break out in rude laughter, so may we moderate other rising impulses, by checking the expression of them; and by composing the body, we put a rein upon our very thought”?87 Although Bell took it for granted that feelings were conditions of the mind, he also observed that “it is curious that expression appears to precede the intellectual operations.”88 The same argument was made more forcefully by the American philosopher William James and the Danish physician Georg Carl Lange, who independently reached the same conclusion about the working of feelings at the end of the century.89 Starting with Bell’s insight about the cognitive order of feelings and thoughts and drawing on Darwin’s influential book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Ani­ mals, James developed a theory of feeling according to which bodily states were not simply the “expressions,” “manifestations,” or “natural language” of emotions but were constitutive of them. In a remarkable passage that anticipated the so-called motor theory of perception, James speculated:90 Our natural way of thinking about these standard emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My the-

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sis, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion. Common sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be.91

This reversal in the order of cognitive operations meant not only that mental states could be bracketed in the life of a functioning organism but that without feelings perception would be purely cognitive or, as James put it, “pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth.”92 Without the quickened heartbeats, shallow breathing, trembling lips, or weakened limbs, rage would be “some cold-blooded and dispassionate judicial sentence, confined entirely to the intellectual realm.”93 This physiological model of emotions had another important implication. According to what came to be known as “the James-Lange theory,” emotions were not determined by the inner milieu of the mind that German Idealism had prioritized and posited as the inviolable core of selfhood. Rather the theory placed the burden on the world surrounding the organism. Or, as James put it, “The hound’s olfactories imply the existence . . . of deer’s or foxes’ feet” just as “the hermit- crab’s abdomen presupposes the existence of empty whelk-shells somewhere to be found.”94 By this logic, “the neural machinery is but a hyphen between determinate arrangements of matter outside the body and determinate impulses to inhibition or discharge within its organs.”95 The motor theory of consciousness that developed in the United States took this way of thinking to its logical conclusion: psychologists such as John Dewey, Hugo Münsterberg, Charles H. Judd, Margaret Washburn, and ultimately the behaviorist John B. Watson maintained in the early twentieth century that all consciousness was conditioned, or at least accompanied, by the activity of the musculature.96 As Dewey put it in his influential theory of the reflex arc, “The so- called response is not merely to the stimulus, it is into it.”97 Nothing could be farther from the physiognomy of Lavater. When James wrote that “each creature brings the signature of its special relations stamped on its nervous system with it upon the scene,” he was signaling a shift in emphasis from an immutable internal character to a changing external environment.98 If physiognomy was predicated on the assumption that an inner character pressed its marks upon the face, pathognomy implied that emotional expression should be understood as an imprint not from within but from without. In eighteenth- century physiognomic discourses,

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Figure 3.16. The shallow stage designed by Peter Behrens for a production of Otto Erich Hartleben’s Diogene, 1909. Kunstgewerbeblatt, n.s., 22 (1910): 43.

an emotion was understood to be an affect of mental states within. By the end of the nineteenth century, pathognomy argued that an emotion should be seen as the effect of external forces. Endell’s, then, was an architecture for a pathognomic subject whose consciousness did not exist prior to its interactions with its surroundings. This was a subject whose consciousness was not securely situated between afferent and efferent nervous traffic but was contingent upon the circumstances of the environment surrounding it. That the concept of space (Raum), along with a constellation of related terms such as atmosphere and milieu, rose to prominence in art historical and architectural discourses precisely at this historical moment is no coincidence.99 The Jugendstil obsession with surfaces should therefore be understood in a dialectical relationship with the atmospheric effects that these surfaces were imagined to project. As we saw in the case of Wölfflin, however, the sensorial promiscuity associated with three- dimensional space in which the perceiving subject could move freely was as alarming as it was appealing. Hildebrand was not alone in prescribing the more circumscribed spatiality of relief sculpture as an antidote to the epistemological dangers of free space: the architect Peter Behrens, for example, designed stage sets so shallow that the actors had to flatten their bodies sideways to fit into the shelf-like space assigned to them (fig. 3.16).100 Endell was more optimistic than most of his contemporaries about the possibilities of the concept of space. In his 1908 book Die Schönheit der Großstadt (The Beauty of the Metropolis), arguably the most influential of Endell’s writings, he described at length the beautiful “veils of night and day” worn by a city that was eventually revealed to be Berlin.101 “The fog

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refines the terrible architecture, it fills the streets that otherwise seem to disappear into endlessness and renders out of the void an enclosed space [Raum],” he wrote, whereas gas lights created around themselves “a transparent but distinctly perceptible wall,” which was particularly delightful when one looked from a similar space of light “as if through a veil.”102 Turning the early-twentieth-century German anti-urbanist literature on its head in this text, Endell saw beauty where others saw ugliness, but only because, instead of the physical corpus of Berlin’s buildings, he focused his attention on the empty spaces between them. What made Berlin beautiful was what Endell called its space-life (Raumleben): It is the life of the space [Raum] that gives here, as in all similar situations, such a strong and meaningful basis to form and color. It is difficult to convey a clear picture of this. It is customary to understand under the term archi­ tecture the elements of a building, the façades, the columns, and the ornaments. And yet all of this is only secondary. What is in fact most powerful is not form but rather its reversal, the emptiness that spreads out rhythmically between walls, that is defined by them, but whose liveliness is more important than the walls themselves. Whoever can feel space, its directions, its scale; whoever understands that the movement of the emptiness means music; to him is granted entrance to a nearly unknown world, the world of architects and the world of painters. For just as the architect derives pleasure from the play of space-movement (Raumbewegung) between the walls that are his creation, similarly gratified is the painter who forms intricate, manifold space in the landscape between mountain and forest and in the city on the ground of the streets between people and cars.103

Endell’s architecture of pathognomy, then, signaled an incipient change in architecture’s ethical function. In nineteenth- century architectural discourses, concepts such as character, convenance, and decorum had been devised to arbitrate architecture’s relationship to society by guaranteeing a building’s conformity to social norms. By the early twentieth century, such terms began to disappear as the concepts of form and space came to dominate architectural theory. These terms posited lived experience as the first given and the primary measure for architecture. This meant that architectural questions could no longer be resolved by reference to rules about orders, proportions, and character, as architectural theory had done since the early modern period, but would have to be determined exclusively by the physiological mandates of the human body. The subject of modern architecture was accordingly imagined as one on whose body forms directly impressed themselves. In the century that followed, some would celebrate this immediacy while others would lament it, but few would challenge the assumption that there was an immediate relationship between architecture and the human body.

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The Epistemological Project: Architecture and Kinaesthetic Knowing

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The James-Lange theory unleashed a controversy on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1890s. According to Ribot, the debate pitted those who favored intellectualist explanations against those who argued for the physiological thesis of the emotions.104 In the Anglo-American world, the response to the James-Lange theory was immediate: the British psychologist Edmund Gurney criticized James by arguing that the latter’s theory amounted to claiming that emotions were “producible with an astringent lotion,” while his American colleague H. M. Stanley expressed concern that making emotion precedent to expression gave too determined a causal order to psychic life.105 J. M. Baldwin, on the other hand, found in the James-Lange theory a new model of consciousness, which, instead of separating emotions from the higher faculties of the mind, suggested a continuum between the conscious and the unconscious. By this logic even ingrained habits or reflexes that seemed to have little to do with cognition were accompanied with a kind of sentience, if not full consciousness.106 On the European side, the French physician Charles Féré, who considered psychology to be a specialized branch of physiology, supported a purely physiological explanation of the emotions.107 Instead of the electrical currents used by Duchenne, Féré relied on chemicals to bring about emotional change in his subjects. The debate raged on until the James-Lange theory was replaced in most psychology textbooks by the account provided by the Harvard physiologist W. B. Cannon, who produced enough evidence to make the view acceptable that visceral and cognitive responses to an emotion were functionally separated and that emotions were primarily derived from subcortical centers.108 At stake in these late-nineteenth-century debates was nothing less significant than the question of human reason. We have seen that the post-Kantian model of selfhood and the German conception of Bildung had assumed a will-centered, unitary, and indivisible self who filtered the haphazard sensations of the world and turned them into structured experience (Erfahrung) through the mechanism of apperception. If the James-Lange theory was correct, a host of troubling questions arose, challenging the primacy of this model: if mental life was determined not from within but from without, by the imprinting of the environment upon the nervous system, what epistemological grasp on the world could the human subject claim— especially under the regime of formlessness imposed by modernity? How could this subject reason if assembling a coherent whole out of the modern onslaught of sensations remained a challenge? In order for this subject to regain some of the autonomy promised by the post-Kantian model of selfhood, its epistemological integrity had to be constructed. As we have seen in previous chapters, while some tried vehemently to tune out the cacophony of modernity in an attempt to preserve the nineteenth-century model of selfhood,

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the more liberal-minded speculated on the possibility, suggested by Hermann von Helmholtz and other nineteenth- century thinkers, of developing the project of kinaesthetic knowing, an alternative kind of knowledge that would be independent of the matrix of thought and language that had characterized neo-humanistic learning throughout the nineteenth century. The latter was Endell’s proposed solution to the problem too. When the historian Karl Lory penned an attack against the art education movement in 1904, Endell aired in public his differences with him regarding the meaning of Bildung.109 According to Lory, advocates of art education, who hoped to cure the ills of modernity by making drawing and manual skills classes mandatory, were wrong in assuming that modern masses could be thus educated. The “aristocracy of the spirit” (by which he meant Bildungsbür­ gertum, Germany’s educated middle classes) knew how to enjoy a painting, a piece of music, or a poem only because they were able to achieve a state of deep contemplation and immersion.110 No amount of art education, Lory maintained, could teach the masses to undertake the mental work (Denkar­ beit) necessary to reach such a state. Although Germany’s public museums were now full of artistic treasures, the working classes walked away from artworks in a distracted state, incapable of synthesizing the overwhelming confusion of their impressions.111 Lory called the advocates of the art education movement neo-Romantics: just as Romanticism at the turn of the nineteenth century had tried to stand in the way of the Enlightenment, he argued, the neo-Romantics at the turn of the new century tried to “brew a fog which would cover the clear path of science [Wissenschaft].”112 Endell’s counterattack cleverly dismantled Lory’s conflation of the Enlightenment with a reason based exclusively on the intellect.113 Revealing his political sympathies, Endell retorted that the working classes were more amenable to aesthetic enjoyment than the “aristocrats of the spirit” precisely because they made their living with their bodies.114 A workman’s enjoyment of music, for example, was not destroyed by his knowledge of a composer’s name.115 Aesthetic experience was not a matter of knowledge but, first and foremost, of bodily habit. Endell followed the distinction made by Helmholtz and others in the nineteenth century about two kinds of knowledge: just as neo-humanistic learning cultivated Wissen, knowledge attained by means of the intellect, one could imagine an education that trained Können (or, in Helmholtz’s terminology, the related term Kennen), corporeal proficiency of the kind that the working classes possessed in abundance. Taking advantage of ambivalences inherent in the concept of Bildung— a marker of the bourgeoisie, on the one hand, and a concept signifying the potential perfectibility of every individual, on the other— Endell was thus theorizing lived experience as an unconventional yet legitimate mode of knowledge. The art education movement, according to Ende, followed this alternative path to reason. The movement’s insistence on the primacy of prereflexive experience was not a betrayal of Enlightenment ideals but rather their reinstatement.

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Endell presented feelings (as opposed to thinking) as the source of another way of knowing appropriate for a new Vorwissenschaft— that is, a new propaedeutic science that would serve as the foundation of all knowledge.116 Scheffler, for one, recognized Endell’s Helmholtzian ambitions. Describing Endell’s ornaments as “hieroglyphs” and “formulas for entire complexes of linked architectural sensations [Architekturempfindungen],” Scheffler saw Endell’s work as “transcrib[ing] the causality of plastically formative life forces [Lebenskräfte] with an ornamentally playful pen” and “record[ing] the necessity of formally motivating energies in an arabesque manner.”117 He noted that Endell’s attempts “to develop building parts out of ornaments” did not manifest a failure of will and discipline as Otzen had claimed. To the contrary, it “require[d] an arduous education of the will [Erziehung des Wil­ lens].”118 Endell was earnest in his attempt at “transform[ing] sensations [Empfindungen] . . . into knowledge [Erkenntnis].” Hence his encyclopedic approach to ornamentation: the iteration of forms found on the surfaces of the Elvira Studio and the Wolzogen Theater was as calibrated as the entries in Endell’s tables of feelings. Echoing the Helmholtzian argument that “aesthetic induction” drawn from experience could reach a level of rigor that so far only propositional knowledge had achieved, Endell maintained that a judgment drawn from feelings could be as precise as one drawn from thought: Because feelings are considered indescribable, it is assumed that they are somewhat vague and unclear. This is not at all the case. Feelings are absolutely definite, clear and distinct; they do not allow themselves to be expressed in words, numbers, and metrics, but that does not prove in the least their vagueness. On the contrary, emotional sensation is very often used to substitute judgments used in measuring and counting: for example, in bisecting a line, in judging if two angles are parallel, and so on. The so- called “eyeballing” or “measuring by eye” [Augenmaß] makes it possible to judge relationships of scale through feeling, and one knows how extraordinarily precise this “eyeballing” can be. . . . And those who have lived among painters and musicians know how well they communicate through inflection, gesture and so on, despite the absence of the possibility of an exact description.119

It is crucial to stress here the precariousness of this epistemological project and its relationship to the model of selfhood associated with Bildung. On the one hand, Endell sought to remove all that appeared to belong to higher cognitive faculties from the realm of aesthetic experience so that the relationship between form and affect would be as immediate as the electrical currents that Duchenne administered to his subjects’ faces. On the other hand, he argued that emotions— provided that they were subject to rigorous systemization— could act as ersatz ratiocination. Take Endell’s theory of architectural proportions: dismissing centuries of architectural theory, Endell taught his students that proportions had to be determined by reference to

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nothing except unmediated feeling.120 This peculiar combination of intuition with precision was akin to the principle of Augenmaß, the eye’s remarkable ability to estimate scale and dimension without measuring or counting, a kinaesthetic capacity that Georg Hirth called “unconscious trigonometry.”121 The implications of this epistemological project were profound. If bodily sensations could be made to measure and count as effectively as the intellect, and if feelings could measure up in their epistemological legitimacy to thoughts, making an equally valid claim to truth and knowledge, then the Enlightenment assumption about the dominance of reason over feeling had to be reconsidered. However, there was a paradox at work in this line of reasoning. On the one hand, Endell assumed that the precision that was usually identified with the operations of the mind could be achieved by the expressive yet nonverbal capacities of the body— gestures, inflections, affective poses, postures, and so on. On the other hand, while such expressive movements could be interpreted as a kind of language, the assumption here was that the body was capable of drawing logical conclusions from its movements alone without the aid of language, concepts, propositions, or representations. This paradox became especially tangible in Endell’s table of feelings. If knowledge was possible without language, why, then, did Endell ultimately rely on nothing but language in his table? If the musculature of the body could register the intricacy of feeling as accurately as the abstractions of the mind, why was every shade of feeling fixed in the table with a word? Classifying Feelings Such questions did not bedevil Endell alone. In fact, these were exactly the kinds of questions that were being asked in a debate about feelings in psychological circles at the turn of the twentieth century. The central problem was how to account for the qualitative differences between feelings: the difference, for example, between the tastes of vinegar and sugar. Endell’s mentor Lipps in Munich laid out a theory of feelings, according to which it was futile to classify emotions through linguistic use (Sprachgebrauch).122 Neither the fact that different tastes originated from different objects nor that we call one by one name and the other by another sufficiently justified the difference for Lipps. Instead he relied on experience— that is, what he considered the immediately given— as the primary justification. “I know the differences in feelings,” Lipps insisted tautologically, “because I experience [erleben] them.”123 What set one emotion apart from another one was immediately felt feeling-qualities (Gefühlsqualitäten) as opposed to presentationelements (Vorstellungselemente), sensory units assumed to be filtered by means of a process of apperception.124 Lipps’s conclusion was that feelings were too manifold to be classified in any convincing way. The adversary in Lipps’s theory of feeling was none other than the psychology of Wundt, whose tridimensional model of feeling Lipps refuted at

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the end of the same text.125 In the 1870s Wundt had devised a system that was remarkably similar to the one used by Endell in his table. In Wundt’s scheme, every possible feeling could be positioned within the space of three axes: pleasure-displeasure (Lust­Unlust), arousal-inhibition (Erregung­ Hemmung), and strain-relaxation (Spannung­Lösung) (fig. 0.3).126 The experimental psychologist here was deciphering neither an inner character nor the universal grammar of emotional expression. He was merely measuring the contraction and dilation of blood vessels, the movements of the eyes, or the beating of the heart. Furthermore, like Endell’s table, these diagrams bore no isomorphic resemblance to the body. The hermeneutics of physiognomy and pathognomy, in other words, had effectively given way in Wundt’s theory of feeling to a practice of making and reading graphs.127 While acknowledging the poverty of language in describing feelings, Wundt was still confident that every possible feeling could be located accurately within the space of his axial system. Wundt would also be the first to acknowledge, however, that the conformity of a feeling to this system had less to do with the orderliness of the world and more with the synthetic activities of the conscious mind that imposed an order on the chaotic manifold of the universe by means of its apperceptive activity.128 Wundtian psychology, in fact, was built upon the distinction between sensation and perception: the former was transformed into the latter only after being processed by the mind through apperception. According to this way of reasoning, for example, one could sense (empfin­ den) green but could only feel ( fühlen) the color’s pleasantness. In other words, it was not because Wundt meticulously measured the corresponding heartbeat and the pulse of his subject in his laboratory that he claimed that a feeling could be located at a precise point in a system of coordinates. Rather, feelings were part of a lawful system because they were the products of the mind, whose intrinsically logical workings Wundt’s experimental psychology methodically sought to understand.129 Lipps ridiculed such attempts to subject lived experience to conceptual categorization. Imagine, he urged his reader, two classes of humans: one class who saw colors in all their infinite variety and another class who insisted on characterizing each color as nothing but a different degree of light or dark.130 The former spoke not only of the real and genuine qualities of colors (Farbenqualitäten) but also of tones, tastes, and smells, while the latter reduced the richness of experience to presentation- elements (Vor­ stellungselemente).131 Nobody had ever seen a “presentation- element” with their eyes, after all, Lipps added sarcastically, while most humans could tell the difference between two colors.132 Lipps thus did not only reject the Wundtian difference between a sensation and a feeling; he also claimed that there were just as many feelings as there were sensations. What set one feeling apart from the next one was pure experience, that is, experience presumed to be free from all conceptual categories as well as from language

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through which these conceptual categories might be made discursive. The myriad sensations received from the world and registered as experience could not be constrained by the orderly apperceptive activity of the mind as Wundt claimed. As we saw before, the difference between the positions of these two psychologists was essentially a disagreement about the disciplinary project of psychology, famously characterized by Dilthey as the contrast between an analytic psychology (zergliedernde Psychologie) and a descriptive psychology (beschreibende Psychologie) anticipating phenomenology.133 Should psychology attempt to analyze and explain (erklären) deep structures of causality and lawfulness? Or should it commit itself to describing (beschreiben) and understanding (verstehen) surface formations? Dilthey, who saw the world as a value-laden place where intentionality, the capacity of the mind to direct itself, endowed things with significance, placed Wundt with the former camp. Such questions did not only concern psychology but had implications for the organization of disciplines at large: Did the natural and human sciences represent completely different epistemological principles? Or could there be a discipline, like psychology, that could bridge the growing gap between the two? While Endell’s table of feelings should be seen in light of these debates at the end of the nineteenth century, his exact position remains elusive. Even while he situated himself against Wundt in his letters, Endell acknowledged (using the charged verb zergliedern that Dilthey had associated with Wundtian psychology) that in order to “know” (and not just “believe”), one had to “dissect one’s sensations.”134 In fact, Endell’s examination of feelings was carried out in a manner that neither Dilthey nor Wundt would have approved of. While Endell’s table of feelings concerned itself with the “lived” feeling that Dilthey and enthusiasts of descriptive psychology privileged, it analyzed them with a mathematical precision associated more frequently with Wundt’s analytic methods. The difference was that Endell replaced the numbers in Wundt’s tables of experimental results with words. Endell, then, developed his unique solution to the disciplinary quandaries of the late nineteenth century. Whereas Wundt and Dilthey placed all their hopes in the discipline of psychology— albeit different versions of psychology operating with different methodological principles— for Endell it was in a psychologically conceived aesthetics that kinaesthetic knowing could achieve a level of rigor that would allow it to compete with propositional knowledge. The Disciplinary Project: Design as Propaedeutic Knowledge The institutional setting for this aesthetics with new epistemological ambitions was an unorthodox kind of art school whose focus was form. In 1904 Endell founded his Formschule in Berlin, following the example of the larger Debschitz School, established in Munich in 1902 by Hermann Obrist and Wil-

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helm von Debschitz. (This will be the focus of the next chapter.) There were other schools that adopted a similar approach to art education in Imperial Germany at the turn of the century: Hans Poelzig’s Royal School of Art and Applied Art in Breslau (where Endell would succeed Poelzig), Peter Behrens’s School of Applied Art in Düsseldorf, Bruno Paul’s School of Applied Art in Berlin, and Bernhard Pankok’s Association for the Friends of Art in Stuttgart, among others. A prospectus from the first year of Endell’s school explained that the curriculum provided “systematic instruction for independent design [Entwerfen] in the applied arts and architecture” and “invention in color and form.”135 Although art education appeared to be an oxymoron, Endell explained, it was possible to teach form and color methodically starting from the simplest forms and gradually proceeding to more complicated ones. Schule für Formkunst was true to its name. The curriculum started with a study of natural forms: “Strictly matter- of-fact drawing of plants, shells, insects, etc.” was encouraged, while painterly (malerisch) effects were to be avoided at all cost. Students were asked to seek out the most characteristic parts of nature, dissect (once again, Endell used the verb zergliedern) complex forms into simpler ones, collect similar forms, and compare them before synthesizing them into forms of their own making.136 The study of natural forms in the curriculum led to the study of pure forms, which followed a strictly formalist logic: spatial forms were introduced only after an intense preoccupation with flat forms. Each week would begin with a “formproblem,” first presented in an hour-long lecture. Examples were offered as solutions to this problem— first by the instructor and next by a student under the guidance of the instructor. Finally, the assignment would be set for the rest of the week.137 According to a prospectus from 1906, the first-year elementary course was followed by two additional years, during which the students concerned themselves with applied form rather than pure form, producing first two-dimensional (typography, wallpaper patterns, embroideries, etc.) and only later three-dimensional objects (lighting fixtures, chairs, and other furniture).138 When Endell succeeded Hans Poelzig as the director of the Akademie für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe in Breslau in 1918, he altered the existing curriculum so that it would have a similarly three-tiered structure— in this case consisting of a preliminary course (Vorklasse), a basic course (Grund­ unterricht), and specialized instruction (Fachunterricht).139 The three-year curriculum did not attempt to cultivate sophisticated representational techniques, Endell explained, but instead helped develop the student’s ability to understand and manipulate forms. Not only did Endell’s formalist pedagogy serve as a propaedeutic for the human sciences, an incubator where an alternative epistemological principle based on feeling rather than thought would be cultivated, but his pedagogy also had its own propaedeutic, the first-year “general theory of form” (allgemeine Formenlehre), upon which further instruction was built. In this sense, Endell’s curriculum anticipated the one at the Bauhaus.

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This was not art training of the kind offered at academies but rather “design” education. First, Endell’s school abandoned the distinction between the fine and the applied arts in favor of hands-on instruction in workshops. In this sense, Endell’s pedagogy was indebted to the applied arts schools that had been founded in various parts of Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century.140 Second, painting, sculpture, and architecture, separated in nineteenth-century academic training into different departments, were consolidated under a formalist program at the school. Finally, architecture occupied an unconventional place in this curriculum: if the basic design course formed the first step of design pedagogy, architecture was imagined to be its ultimate fulfillment. “What especially arouses confidence,” noted Scheffler in 1904 after examining the school’s curriculum in its first year, “is that instruction concludes with a serious study of architecture— which means that not only the ultimate goal [of the school] is defined but also the means of getting there.”141 By 1906, Endell seems to have given up this ambitious goal at his school in Berlin, as the curriculum from that year went no further than furniture design and the design of interiors, but once in Breslau he battled with the city officials to earn his students the right to take the state exam for architecture upon graduation.142 The idea that architecture occupied a unique place among the arts was not new, but it gained new urgency around 1900 with the rise of a formalism that posited space (Raum) as the logical final step in design education. As we will see in the case of the Bauhaus as well, in the early history of design education architecture was considered less a specialized discipline and more a transdisciplinary field, where an overarching science of lived experience was to be developed. Yet, while the formalist design curriculum invented by Endell and others at the turn of the century would change the course of art education, the ambitious plan to produce an epistemological foundation for the human sciences out of a rigorous analysis of feelings did not come to pass. As we have seen, this failure was due as much to the institutional conditions of knowledge production at German universities in the early twentieth century as to the changed fortunes of the discipline of psychology. But it can also be attributed to a paradox inherent in kinaesthetic knowing. How, after all, could sensations indiscriminately hitting the human body be construed as systematic knowledge in the absolute absence of concepts, propositions, or representations? Even if it were possible to make a rigorous science of feeling without any constructs of the mind, how would such a science be an enterprise of collective inquiry and discourse, as Scheffler demanded, in the absence of a commonly shared language? One possible answer to these questions is to be found in Endell’s table of feelings itself. The problem of infinite regress familiar from nineteenthcentury theories of kinaesthetic knowing now resurfaced in architectural theory as the problem of circularity. Endell might have been the most philosophically ambitious architect of his generation, but by favoring the epistemological value of lived experience over that of propositional knowledge,

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he inevitably forced theoretical thinking into a precarious position within aesthetic discourses.143 If, as Endell urged, the discipline of architecture were to be purged of all concepts that had dominated it since Alberti— theories of orders and proportions as well as concepts such as character and convenance— architectural knowledge would have to be an entirely selfreferential operation, concerning itself exclusively with the manipulation of its forms. Not surprisingly, when Endell described the design process, its operations sounded repetitive: I take an orchid, I change the proportions and observe how the effect [Wirkung] changes. I make the blossom smooth or rough, I accentuate the filaments or make them vanish, I make the bulbs round or skinny. I free the blossom from its stem and conceive it as a loose entity, make cellular shapes on the bulbs, cover the body with dots or decorate it with parallel stripes, dissolve the stripes in the dots again, and etc., etc. The number of combinations is endless— the more extensive the form-knowledge [Formenkenntnis], the greater the possibilities. But that would all be a worthless gimmick, if one did not test the effect step by step with one’s feeling and if, in case of an unsatisfactory effect, one did not rest until the unfavorable effect was eliminated through further changes. Gradually one attains some degree of certainty in judging effects; certain principles become clear; one earns an entire system of forms, which serves as the starting point for infinite others.144

Design training, as Endell conceived and implemented it, consisted of a series of meticulous exercises in which forms were systematically broken down to their components, reassembled, and transformed. Such exercises were to carry out what Helmholtz had called “aesthetic induction”: the body was to learn to draw conclusions from its movements without recourse to the operations of the mind. Designing meant producing formal iterations and trying them on oneself methodically. Yet without recourse to language, the procedures that were meant to lend scientific rigor and epistemological legitimacy to feeling turned mechanical. Furthermore, in the absence of concepts or representations, the question of how and when to stop the formal procedures remained problematic. That is to say, without the theoretical constructs of the mind, the techniques of design education, based on kinaesthetic knowing rather than propositional knowledge, ran the risk of turning into mindless mechanical exercises. If designing could be said to be a kind of knowledge production, it was one that had an inherently problematic relationship to theoretical knowledge. In this sense, Endell’s table of feelings might be among the first manifestations of a paradox that would haunt design education for decades to come.

4: Drawing

The Debschitz School and Formalism’s Subject

If his unpublished autobiography, written shortly before his death, is to be believed, Hermann Obrist owed his successful career as an artist in turnof-the- century Munich to a series of supernatural incidents.1 The first of these occurred long before he was even born. In July 1842 Obrist’s Scottish mother, who was eight years old at the time, had an extraordinary experience as she visited the Hofkirche in Dresden with her family: The mass took its course. All of a sudden . . . the organ began to exert its overwhelming, omnipotent contrabass, and the space of the church trembled with powerful vibrations. The child trembled as well, let out a hushed cry, and passed out. There was great agitation. She was brought outside, where she quickly recovered. The girl was told to go home now, but she resisted, fighting back with hands and feet. Back into the church, she said, back to hear more music. She finally escaped back and listened with ecstasy to the music from the organ, to this revelation of God.2

The mother’s story followed the script of religious ecstasy familiar from Catholic hagiography: the female protagonist’s consciousness was suspended, the boundaries of her ego dissolved, and a rapturous feeling of unity overcame her— not coincidentally during mass in the baroque setting of a Catholic church. Obrist explained that such experience had hitherto been alien to his mother, who had been raised with such a strict Calvinistic sensibility that she had presumably never heard music or seen a painting before entering the Hofkirche in Dresden on that fateful day.3 But Obrist’s was not a story about a religious conversion after all. The sensory overload converted the girl not into a Catholic, as might be expected, but rather into a lifelong aesthete obsessed especially with Germanic music, literature, and art. More relevant to Obrist’s self-serving story, the mother’s aesthetic conversion foreshadowed Obrist’s own some forty years later. On May 6, 1886, Obrist, who was a twenty-three-year- old medical student at the time and an amateur naturalist, had an equally remarkable experience as he was hiking in the countryside outside of Heidelberg on a sunny day. Obrist told the story from the third-person perspective:

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Deeply absorbed in thought, he went walking on a sunny hill far from the city. He had just picked up a specimen of the Silene nutaus [sic] species and was contemplating the underlying principle in the division of its blossom when he was overcome by a subtle feeling of faintness. He looked up and into the distance. At this moment, he saw emerge in the distance before him, on the other side of the Neckar River, a fata morgana, just as in a desert. Only what he saw was not the reflection of a reality but rather a clear vision of an unknown city, a city with towers, temple-like edifices, and other strange buildings, the likes of which he had never seen anywhere before— neither in reality nor in pictures. The city seemed to be half transparent. Everything moved, appeared, disappeared, and reappeared. One could look into the wonderful interior architecture of houses, an unprecedented architecture. He saw a large square with a fountain whose roof rested on ruby- colored columns, entwined with exquisitely crafted wrought iron.4

The change in Obrist’s state of mind from attentive contemplation to selfless ecstatic hallucination was as abrupt as the appearance of the mother’s ecstatic vision. The vision seized the young man’s body and rendered him temporarily unconscious. A few months later, as he was taking a walk along the river in the Tauber Valley by moonlight, the vision returned. This time, in addition to seeing the apparition of a strange city, he heard an inner voice authoritatively order him: “Leave all your studies; go and build this.”5 Upon hearing these words, Obrist claimed, he witnessed his overpowered hands produce quick, spontaneous sketches of unusual forms— forms of the kind that he would be producing countless examples of in the course of his career (fig. 4.1). A year and another vision later, when the persistent voice repeated the same command on Pfaueninsel near Potsdam even more forcefully, Obrist relented and resolved to give up his medical training in order to become an artist.6 It was not the supernatural nature of these incidents that surprised Obrist, who, by his own account, had been accustomed to such experiences since early childhood.7 What was surprising was that “talents, capacities, abilities, and imaginations sprang from within him as if by magic— realms of which he had never heard and which were not possible to explain through heredity.”8 This sudden birth of “a new, inscrutable person” within him was nothing short of a miracle.9 Put in less fantastical terms, since the sudden surfacing of Obrist’s hitherto hidden “talent” could not be attributed to any formal training, the conclusion to be drawn from the story was that Obrist became an artist not despite never having been trained as such but because of it. This adamant opposition to every kind of institutional instruction affirmed the trajectory that Obrist’s career would eventually follow. In the autobiography, Obrist contrasted the experimental, freewheeling autodidacticism that he enjoyed as a child roaming the countryside in Weimar emulating Goethe (not far, as Obrist made a point of stressing, from the poet’s legendary house) with the profound boredom that he felt when he had to attend the

Figure 4.1. Hermann Obrist, Sketches, pencil on paper, 211 × 329 mm (top), 330 × 208  mm (bottom), undated. Courtesy of the Obrist-Nachlass, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. SGSM 48809Z (top) and SGSM 48782Z (bottom).

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Gymnasium and the university. Things did not improve when, at the urging of the inner voice, he tried various kinds of art training. After abandoning his studies at the University of Heidelberg, Obrist enrolled first at the School of Applied Art (Kunstgewerbeschule) in Karlsruhe and then at the Académie Julian in Paris, a school that offered an alternative to academic training, but he was disillusioned with both. Instead of continuing formal education, he decided to work as an apprentice to a local potter in Thüringen. In the early 1890s, after inheriting his family’s fortune, he moved to Florence, where he set up a sculpture and embroidery atelier with Berthe Ruchet, a family friend who was active in feminist circles in Munich (fig.  4.2).10 When he returned to Germany a few years later, an exhibition of these embroideries at the Munich Littauer Gallery in 1895 was received with such intense enthusiasm that almost overnight Obrist was hailed as the inventor of a new style that was said to signal the future of German art (fig. 4.3).11 His passionate objections to formal, institutional instruction in the autobiography notwithstanding, Obrist played a crucial role in turn-of-the century debates about art education. Not only did he found the Vereinigte Werkstätten für Kunst im Handwerk (United Workshops for Art in Handicraft) in Munich and actively participate in the lively reform debates concerning the applied arts (Kunstgewerbe) and art education (Kunsterziehung). More relevant here, in 1902 Obrist and a young painter by the name of Wilhelm von Debschitz cofounded a school: the Lehr- und Versuchsatelier für angewandte und freie Kunst (Atelier for Teaching and Experimenting in Applied and Free Art) in the Schwabing district of Munich, down the street from the studios of Wassily Kandinsky and the dancer Rudolf Laban (figs. 4.4, 4.5). After Obrist left the school due to problems with his hearing, the school would be known as the Debschitz School.12 Debschitz directed the school until 1914, when he sold it to a consortium consisting of the artist Emil Preetorius and the former student Paul Renner, who were later joined by the philosopher Hans Cornelius, author of books on art education.13 The Debschitz School was among the earliest, largest, and most successful of a number of similar schools that appeared in Germany at the turn of the century as alternatives to existing forms of artistic training (fig. 4.6).14 The school was organized around the concept of design (Gestaltung), which, Debschitz argued, encompassed all known artistic categories— in fact, anything visible “that aesthetically produce[d] an effect on the viewer.15 According to an early advertisement, the “practical design” ( praktische Gestaltung) taught at the school could therefore be employed in a wide variety of fields including the applied arts, life- drawing, sculpture, landscape, and figure painting.16 Though barely remembered today, it was at institutions like the Debschitz School that what we now call modern design education first took shape. The preliminary course developed at such schools was only one of the many pedagogical novelties carried via the Bauhaus into the curricula of art schools throughout the world. Drawing— not academic drawing informed

Figure 4.2. Hermann Obrist (made by Berthe Ruchet), Wall hanging, circa 1896. Courtesy of the Münchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlung Mode/Textilien/Kostümbibliothek.

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Figure 4.3. Hermann Obrist, Model for a fountain, 1898, plaster, height 15¾ in. (40 cm). Photograph courtesy of the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Collection of Applied Art © ZHdK. KGS-2007-0001_02.

by the principle of imitation but an impulsive, gestural drawing of the kind that Obrist found himself engaged in during his visions— was central to the school’s curriculum. It was especially in this unique technique of drawing where the school’s dependence on what I call “kinaesthetic knowing” became evident. What to make of this peculiar conflation of education theory, drawing technique, and supernatural forces in the Debschitz School? Should we understand Obrist’s apocryphal embellishments of his autobiography with ecstatic visions as part of the early history of modern design education? In 1919, looking back on the school after having left it for a position in Hannover, Obrist’s partner, Debschitz, ruminated that the instruction at the Debschitz School had not been unlike religious instruction. Modern design education, as Debschitz saw it now, was a new Christianity that placed its faith in the power of form and in the spirituality of the senses.17 Debschitz formulated an opposition that echoed Helmholtz’s Wissen and Kennen pair but with a religious twist. On the one side was “the occidental intellectuality of our logical time,” “the cunning snake on the tree of knowledge”; on the other, “the spirituality of our senses,” “the only mistress over matter, with power over shaping [Formung] human existence.”18 The Debschitz School was predicated upon the latter: this spirituality of the senses was a

Figure 4.4. Debschitz School drawing atelier, circa 1903. Courtesy of the Münchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlung Mode/Textilien/Kostümbibliothek.

Figure 4.5. Debschitz School metal workshop, circa 1903. Wilhelm von Debschitz is the first figure standing on the left. Courtesy of the Münchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlung Mode/Textilien/Kostümbibliothek.

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Figure 4.6. Advertisement for art schools, including Endell’s Formschule and the Debschitz School. Dekorative Kunst 10.12 (September 1907): 111.

new “faith” whose teachings were no different from those of Buddha or Christ at the beginnings of their respective religions. In this new spirituality, things were given form through the body’s rhythms, or, as Debschitz put it, through “the physical experience [Erlebnis] of the redemptive power of the spiritualization of one’s own body.”19 I will suggest in this chapter that Obrist’s supernatural visions informed by Catholic hagiography and Debschitz’s statements about a new “faith” of lived experience were not eccentricities to be dismissed but were, in fact, part and parcel of the ambitious epistemological program of kinaesthetic knowing. In particular, I will propose that we understand the intertwined questions of knowledge and religiosity within this early episode of modern design education in connection with the Kulturkampf, the primarily Prussian campaign against Catholic Germans after the Unification of German States in 1871.20 As Christian and occultist elements were converted to secular and aesthetic ones in the Debschitz School, they were also overlaid with an alternative model of selfhood associated with mystics, Catholics, women and the masses, subjects who were assumed to reason with feeling

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rather than thought. Unlike the male, Protestant subject that was the ideal of Bildung throughout the nineteenth century, this amalgam of marginal subjects was assumed to be better suited to kinaesthetic rather than propositional knowledge. Propaedeutic techniques such as drawing were considered crucial to both unleashing the potential hidden in this subject’s psyche and keeping it in check. In other words, the epistemological program of the Debschitz School entailed more than training artists: in it the meaning of Gestaltung as design merged with the meaning of Gestaltung as the formation of the modern subject. The Debschitz School: “Out with Orderly, Planned Instruction” The Debschitz School grew directly out of the workshops that had been established by the Vereinigten Werkstätten für Kunst im Handwerk, which, like the much better known Werkbund, was an association organized to train artists, craftsmen, and clients about good design. Like other private schools that appeared around the turn of the century, it emerged at a moment when art education was being debated and both the older and the more prestigious fine arts academies and the relatively new applied arts schools were being restructured.21 (Similar schools included Henry van de Velde’s Kunstgewerbliches Seminar in Weimar [founded in 1902 and converted in 1919 into the Bauhaus], the Ažbè Schule [f. 1891], the Lothar von Kunowski Schule [f. 1902], Kandinsky’s Phalanx-Schule [f. 1901], and August Endell’s Formschule in Berlin [f. 1904], among others.22) Such schools emerged out of what the writer and theater director Georg Fuchs identified as a blatant gap in art education in Germany: whereas the fine arts academy was for art education what the university was for the sciences, and the applied arts schools were the equivalent of trade schools, there was no equivalent in the arts for the middle-tier Technische Hochschule.23 Obrist and Debschitz must have been aware of this gap: according to Obrist, “only those who were unhappy with another school and were thirsting for something new— only those came to us.”24 Although the school started with only five students, by 1912 it was the largest of its kind in Germany with 240 students.25 Throughout its history the Debschitz School had a student body comprised largely of women. This was no coincidence: women who aspired to become artists in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century had even fewer educational opportunities than their counterparts in France, England, or the United States.26 Whereas the Académie des Beaux-Arts had begun accepting women in 1897, allowing them to compete for the Prix de Rome in 1903, state-run institutions of higher learning remained largely inaccessible to German women until the end of World War I.27 Beginning in the 1860s women were allowed to study at the newly established schools of applied arts (Kunstgewerbeschulen), where they could develop what was assumed to be their inborn talent for the me-

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chanical arts, but as late as 1906 women were not admitted to the more prestigious academies in Germany, except under extraordinary circumstances as honorary members.28 In France associations such as the Union des Femmes had been arguing for the admittance of women to the Académie des BeauxArts; in Germany, by contrast, similar groups, such as the Berliner Verein der Künstlerinnen, opted to establish separate schools where women could study the fine arts. The most respectable of these so- called Damenakade­ mien, located in Berlin, Munich, and Karlsruhe, approximated the traditional academic curriculum but without the advantage of the state-subsidized tuition that male students enjoyed.29 The Drawing and Painting School of the Association of Female Artists (Zeichen­ und Malschule des Vereins der Künst­ lerinnen) in Berlin, for example, was structured as a seminar for drawing teachers.30 In Munich the feminist organization Verein für Fraueninteressen (Association for Women’s Concerns) organized drawing classes that met twice every week for two hours, but the endeavor was abandoned in 1901 because there was neither the demand nor the funds to support it.31 It was in this context that the Debschitz School became an attractive alternative for women who wanted to study art. Although the school was significantly more expensive than state-run art schools and despite the fact that Debschitz was not able to secure a subvention from the city of Munich and the state of Bayern until 1912, the school ultimately offered better career opportunities for women.32 This was mainly because the school administration actively arranged for collaboration opportunities between the school’s workshops and related industries in the region, a role later taken on by the separate but affiliated company Ateliers und Werkstätten für angewandte Kunst (Ateliers and Workshops for Applied Art), founded by Debschitz and Hermann Lochner in 1906. Throughout its history the Debschitz School’s ties to industry remained strong: the student work was frequently sold to manufacturers while many school exhibitions were held at such locations as the Wertheim Store in Berlin and featured in prominent publications. The curriculum of the Debschitz School rested on the foundation of the so- called allgemein einführender Unterrichtskursus, a close relative of the preliminary course that would be instituted at many art schools, including the Bauhaus, in the twentieth century. This preliminary course, which all first-year students without any artistic training were required to take, was meant to be an opportunity for students to explore their undeveloped talents before they specialized. According to a prospectus from 1912, the course was intended “to familiarize students with the possibilities of expression and their relationship to the tasks of praxis.”33 The length of the course ranged from three months to a full year depending on the student. Although, as Debschitz pointed out, some of the students were already accomplished craftsmen, previous artistic training was usually considered a liability: students who arrived without any training were preferred to those who, in the words of Obrist, had been “miseducated.”34 The Elementarun­

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terricht, as it was sometimes called, had three components: design with an emphasis on drawing (Entwerfen), model-making (Modellieren), and representational  techniques (Darstellungstechnik), which included exercises in the study of nature (Naturstudium) and typography (Schriftzeichnen). Although the schedule varied from student to student, the program usually lasted four years, at the end of which students were given neither exams nor a diploma. Despite its ambitions to challenge conventional boundaries between the arts, the school was in reality divided into ateliers that focused on the so- called free arts and the applied arts.35 Although other sections— photography, furniture, and at one point even stage design— would later be added, initially the former included studios in painting and drawing, while the latter had workshops in interior architecture, metal, textiles, and ceramics. Moreover, students took lecture courses on history, materials, mathematics, perspective, and geometric drawing and participated in the public slide lectures regularly delivered by Obrist in the evenings. Excursions and sports were an important part of the curriculum: starting in 1904, students took regular trips during the summer to the countryside in order to study painting and drawing en plein air and went on excursions to the facilities of furniture, glass, or light-fixture manufacturers.36 Drawing occupied a central place in the curriculum: two- dimensional as well as three- dimensional drawing, life- drawing as well as drawing from memory. In the preliminary course, each student was asked to summarize his or her day’s work in a single drawing every day. While students took lifedrawing classes (controversially, men and women were allowed to study nude models together), the technique of drawing cultivated at the Debschitz School was markedly different from its counterpart at the academy.37 Whereas copying— from other drawings, paintings, plaster casts, or life models— was the indispensable first step before proceeding to the more sophisticated technique of imitation in academic training, both practices were strictly prohibited at the Debschitz School. Nachzeichnen (redrawing) or nachahmen (imitating), Obrist and Debschitz never tired of repeating, were to be replaced by an embodied reexperiencing (nacherleben) of forms.38 (Obrist dismissed Renaissance art precisely because he thought its forms simply mirrored forms of antiquity rather than being drawn “inwardly from the nature and soul of a creative spirit.”39) Every stroke of the pen, in other words, was to be endowed with lived feeling. In practical terms, this meant that instead of starting with preparatory contour lines, using mathematical scale and proportions, and drawing on anatomical knowledge as at the academy, students at the Debschitz School were to develop a feeling for the rhythm of their hand movements and for an instinctive and intuitive— rather than an intellectual— Augenmaß, sense for visual discrimination.40 Meanwhile, as his own collection of images clearly demonstrates, Obrist himself copied abundantly, but these sketches, even while modeled after other images, were undertaken with the spontaneous technique of drawing

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that Obrist claimed to have acquired first during his supernatural experiences as a young man (fig. 4.7).41 Sentences, rendered in a combination of German, English, and French, are followed in Obrist’s notes by quick drawings, which are as unfinished as the bits of text accompanying them. What seemingly mattered more to Obrist than capturing an original was to record the continuous rhythm of his hand movements.42 Lothar von Kunowski, who taught drawing at the School of Applied Art in Düsseldorf, provided a good description of the difference between this way of drawing and the academic method: At the beginning of my search for the elements of nature study, I was pointed to a man who had a solid reputation as a teacher [of drawing]. He drew on paper heads and bodies of certain sizes— that is, full, three- quarters, half, or quarter of actual size, drawn with outlines, with light separated from shadow, and all proportions taken from the face or body of a model with a meter. . . . This master looked for a scientific theory of proportions, believed in the law of the golden section as the basic law of the human body, was outstanding in anatomy and perspective. . . . Soon, however, I noticed how much easier it was to evaluate proportions through rhythmical feeling than through mathematics and measuring. While I had earlier preoccupied myself with distances and proportions in isolation, I began to take an interest in their interrelationships. . . . I observed the manner in which the eye, by filling in a variety of possible routes and proportions by jumping from point to point, learns to feel [the world] as a living whole.43

In von Kunowski’s telling, academic drawing relied too much on concepts produced by the mind; the kind of drawing taught in the new art schools, by contrast, was dictated by the seemingly instinctual movements of the body. Even while many academic concepts and techniques were maintained at these schools, this anti-academic attitude became a distinguishing mark of modern design education.44 Obrist too took pride in the toppling of academic conventions at the Debschitz School and made bold claims about the purported lack of structure in the school’s pedagogical program. “Art flourishes so long as it is not taught,” he declared in 1907. “Out with orderly, planned instruction!”45 He described the working spaces of the school as a “gypsy camp”: “Over there someone is drawing the folds of a dress; here the head of the teacher, who is bent over his book, is being drawn; on a wall a youngster is boldly trying to make a larger-than-life fresco; someone has in a cage a squirrel that he wants to study; bowls and vases are being kneaded out of plasticine and clay; the hand and the arm of a friend are being modeled” (fig. 4.8).46 More importantly, this new way of drawing was conceived as the first step toward the making of a new kind of subject. Drawing did not simply prepare students for careers as artists: it purportedly tapped into a hidden

Figure 4.7. (Top) Images that Obrist collected. (Bottom) Pages from Obrist’s “Programmatisches” sketchbook, pen, pencil, and crayon on paper, 206 × 160 mm, undated. Obrist frequently drew from the images that he collected. With permission from the Obrist-Nachlass, courtesy of the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. SGSM 48779-00, -09, -11, -13, -14, -18Z.

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Figure 4.8. Women in the metal workshop of the Debschitz School, circa 1905. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of the Münchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlung Mode/Textilien/ Kostümbibliothek.

reservoir of creativity, unleashing, according to an early advertisement for the school, the “talent” (Begabung) unique to each student.47 In this sense, drawing was a technique of “psychical awakening” or “mental massage.”48 This was especially the case with women: “The spontaneous creative ingenuity, which appears almost overnight in the female sex,” Obrist wrote, would awaken the talents lying hidden within the German nation at large.49 Talent (Begabung), it turns out, preoccupied others who saw it hiding deep in the psyches of the most unlikely subjects at the turn of the century as well. Occultist Formalism The right arm is rigid and cold (cataleptic) up to the elbow joint and moves frequently as if it is experiencing cramps. He sits for a few minutes, then suddenly grasps a sheet of paper and a quill and begins drawing. . . . [The drawings] emerge from his hand with the aid of none other than paper and stylus and the working hand moves with great speed, hatching the surface with circuitous zigzag lines. There is no trace of any contour lines here; it seems that he only wants to apply tone onto the paper.50

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Although it sounds like it could have been the description of the technique of drawing taught at the Debschitz School, this is an account of a phenomenon that was called “somnambulist drawing” at the end of the nineteenth century. This particular description was taken from a report on a series of experiments conducted in 1888 by the Münchner Psychologische Gesellschaft (Munich Psychological Society), one of the hundreds of occultist organizations active in Imperial Germany.51 The remarkable thing about the subject of the experiment was not only that he continued to perform motor functions during what appeared to be a state of sleep but that between violent fits and seizures, he produced drawings that showed extraordinary skill— despite the fact, the report claimed, that he had never received any artistic training of any kind.52 The psychologist Richard Baerwald pointed out in the 1920s that the products of mediumistic art were comparable to “expressionist painting, the newest poetry, the most modern, even atonal music.”53 What historians now call the “occultist” movement appeared under a variety of guises at the turn of the century: the abstruse sciences of ariosophy, astrology, graphology, palmistry, parapsychology, spiritualism, magnetism, mesmerism, and theosophy, among many others, were fashionable in the Old and the New World alike.54 Although some versions were imported to Europe from the United States, European occultist groups also mixed homespun Christian mythology with elements of Eastern philosophy acquired during colonialist endeavors and the findings of experimental psychology at the end of the nineteenth century. Different versions of occultism were aligned with a wide range of political positions, but they often purported to oppose what was perceived to be the insidious threat of materialism, mechanistic explanations of the universe, and ultimately political anarchism. In the 1870s occultism had already become a major cultural force with a broad appeal in Germany. When the American medium Henry Slade held séances in Leipzig in 1877– 78, the likes of the well-respected astrophysicist Friedrich Zöllner, the mystically inclined Fechner, and even Wundt attended them. It is not hard to see why these figures, who were worried about the problem of cause and effect in their own work, might have been fascinated by the short- circuiting of causality in such phenomena as table rapping or planchette writing during séances.55 When Zöllner attempted to use Slade’s occultist experiment in his scholarship, he was able to convince an old and nearly blind Fechner but not the no-nonsense Wundt, who responded with an acerbic critique of the occultist movement.56 For Wundt, such occultist phenomena were incompatible with a model of selfhood defined first and foremost by its consciousness. While there exists no evidence to demonstrate definitively that Obrist was a member of the Münchner Psychologische Gesellschaft, the themes of his autobiography and the contents of his library strongly suggest that he was not only an occultist but one who subscribed to a version called “scientific occultism.”57 As explained in the program of the Munich Society,

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scientific occultism attributed supersensible phenomena not to demons or spirits but rather to the workings of the human mind, an important distinction repeatedly stressed especially by those who wanted to weed out occultist impostors.58 Although the society was committed to examining occult phenomena using the methods of experimental psychology, it was also vehemently opposed to what was believed to be the dualistic logic of this discipline. More relevant here, if Wundtian psychology focused its attention on the workings of the healthy (and almost always male) mind, scientific occultism was interested in the (usually female) mind in such abnormal states as hypnotism, trance, somnambulism, or mental illness— in short, any state in which the unconscious capabilities of the subject came to determine her actions.59 As such, this was a psychology that was closer in spirit to French clinical psychology and the future Freudian psychoanalysis than to the psychology of the experimental kind as it was practiced by Wundt and even many of his critics in Germany at the time. Scientific occultists frequently tested out the boundary between voluntary and involuntary action by experimenting with female bodies that were manipulated using psychic techniques such as hypnosis or suggestion. The artist Albert von Keller, for example, induced a medium by the name of Lina to assume a series of physiognomic expressions by showing her his paintings; a camera positioned behind the painting captured Lina’s facial expression, which would then be used in paintings.60 When the Munich Society invited Magdeleine Guipet, the so- called Traumtänzerin (dream- dancer), to perform under hypnosis in 1904, her movements, seemingly spontaneous and yet as coordinated as a professional dancer’s, mesmerized crowds.61 Occultist journals abounded with stories about those who suddenly demonstrated a skill that had been hitherto unknown to them: an illiterate maid who could speak Latin when hypnotized, a certain Frau Holland who suddenly started composing poetry, or a woman by the name of Helen Smith who spoke a language that she insisted was Martian.62 This was not genius but “talent” (Begabung). “No one knows where it comes from and how it emerges,” wrote the critic Karl Scheffler in an essay dedicated to the concept.63 Just as Obrist maintained that his newfound talent as an artist had nothing to do with any kind of formal training, many turn-of-the-century mediums adamantly denied having been educated for the skill that they miraculously displayed. Talent was frequently wasted, Obrist claimed, because practices of conventional education failed to set it free.64 One occultist artist by the name of Frieda Genthes produced drawings that were uncannily similar to Obrist’s (fig. 4.9).65 A photograph shows Genthes at work in a seemingly unconscious state: wearing a fashionable Jugendstil gown, she sits at a small table in a room wallpapered with her own drawings. Her right hand, with her arm uncomfortably parallel to the surface of the table, holds a pencil, which, like the needle of a seismograph, is perfectly perpendicular to the plane of the drawing. Her face is expressionless,

Figure 4.9. Medium-artist Frieda Genthes drawing with eyes closed, date unknown. Richard Baerwald, Okkultismus und Spiritismus und ihre Weltanschaulichen Folgerungen (Berlin, Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft, 1926), fig. 6.

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Figure 4.10. Mediumistic drawings of “unusual birds,” executed in five to ten minutes. Max Moecke, “Medianyme Malerei,” part 1, Der Okkultismus 1 (September 1925): 34.

her eyes are closed, and her left hand is positioned such that the drawing would still be shielded from her sight should her eyes suddenly open. The self-proclaimed scientific occultists were fascinated by how the small circular motions of her seemingly aimless hand movements added up to legible figures. Similar qualities were reported in other “mediumistic art”: ubiquity of uninterrupted hand motions, fast execution without corrections, and, above all, the presence of a design even in the seeming absence of any conscious intentions (fig. 4.10).66 What were the workings of an occultist subject that demonstrated talent thus? Among those who theorized the implications of occultism from a psychological point of view was Max Dessoir, a professor of philosophy and aesthetics in Berlin, the editor of the influential aesthetics journal Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, and the founder of the occultist Berliner Gesellschaft für experimentelle Psychologie (Berlin Society for Experimental Psychology, which merged with its Munich counterpart in 1890).67 Dessoir, like many of his fellow scientific occultists, insisted that the temptation to externalize occult phenomena by means of spirits and demons had to be resisted.68 Instead, such occult phenomena as hypnotism, somnambulism, and other dream-like states had to be traced to what Dessoir called the doppel­Ich, the double consciousness of the human soul. Writing before Freud and drawing on a long intellectual tradition of the unconscious, Dessoir used the concept of doppel­Ich to delineate a new structure for the self: In the course of ordinary life actions take place which presuppose for their origin all the faculties of the human soul but which nevertheless work

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themselves out without the knowledge of the agent. We call these actions automatic. Among them are certain automatic movements, as the act of dressing oneself, or retracing a well-known path, and other automatic acts, such as counting one’s steps, or adding up columns of numbers. The latter plainly indicate the existence of a separate train of memory, and moreover, although they take place without the agent’s knowledge, they cannot take place without his consciousness. . . . They must in some fashion belong to a subconscious which, in its relation to the far more potent upper consciousness, may best be understood if we consider it as a secondary consciousness. And if we regard consciousness and memory as the essential constituents of the self, we may boldly say that every person conceals within the germs of a second personality.69

What Dessoir was describing was unlike the post-Kantian self cultivated at institutions of Bildung throughout the nineteenth century. When Wundt, the experimental psychologist and archenemy of occultism, described the self as a “total force” or a “whole circle of effects” made up of an immutable core of consciousness and surrounded by rings of increasingly less conscious sensations, he was defending this post-Kantian model.70 By contrast, the self that Dessoir theorized had not a centric but a layered architectonic, consisting of a conscious part situated on an unconscious substratum. Although this structure did not yet have in place the mechanism of repression, which Freud would theorize to momentous effect a decade later, the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious was believed to be not completely under the control of a will- centered core either.71 In this sense, Dessoir’s unconscious was also unlike the one that structured inferences in Helmholtz’s Kennen. The “logician” that Helmholtz assumed was embedded in the unconscious was missing from Dessoir’s model. Instead the substratum of Dessoir’s doppel­Ich surfaced irrationally at unexpected times: not only in unusual states such as trances and hypnotism but also— anticipating Freud— in dreams and everyday life. More relevant here, the model of selfhood theorized by Dessoir had important implications for education. If this layered architectonic did not apply only to mediums but, as Dessoir claimed, also to other subjects— especially to those subjects that deviated from the norm of Bildung (women, children, mystics, masses, and Catholics, who in the context of the Kulturkampf were increasingly characterized as effeminate and impressionable)— “talent,” or, as Obrist put it, “the mystical productivity of the subconscious” could be found in anyone.72 One needs only to think back to Schiller to remember that aesthetic education had been an important part of the German ideal of Bildung throughout the nineteenth century, but in the educational programs of post-Unification Germany, this aesthetic sensibility assumed a different meaning.73 The presence of hidden talent meant not only that extraordinary aesthetic sensibility could be discovered in the most unlikely subjects— illiterate maids or Calvinists unaccustomed to sensorial excess— but that it

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might be the lowest common denominator, a much-needed substratum for mass education.

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Kulturkampf and Drawing Mass education was the main concern of a conference in which Obrist participated in Dresden in September 1901— that is, a few months before the official opening of the Lehr- und Versuchsatelier für angewandte und freie Kunst. With a stated goal of assessing the role of art instruction within the general curriculum— as opposed to more specialized art training beyond secondary schooling— the conference brought together pedagogues from elementary and secondary schools with bureaucrats working in state organizations such as museums.74 The Helmholtzian distinction between Wissen and Kennen was central to the event: in order to benefit the entire nation, the participants agreed, German education had to be liberated from its longstanding dependence on words— especially from its insistence on history and classical languages— and place more faith in the power of Anschauung. Education was to be made more concrete, descriptive, and graphic with the help of art.75 Obrist was, in fact, out of place at the conference, where there were few other artists. In the discussions, he described how he regularly observed a group of schoolchildren play in front of his studio in Munich. The teacher broke the children up into groups, he observed, and dictated the rules of play instead of letting them play as they pleased.76 The difference was akin to that between studying the grammar of a dead language and learning to speak a living language.77 Such insistence on systematic and methodical instruction, Obrist argued, ruined the joy of learning. Theodor Götze, a teacher from Hamburg, supported Obrist’s view. The conventional school, or what Götze called a Wissenschule, gave priority to propositional knowledge. This was the kind of school in which the teacher told the students to “keep their hands still and listen to his wisdom.”78 Instead, Germany needed Können­ schule, a new kind of school in which the teacher would tell his students that “it was not propositional knowledge [Wissen] that brought humanity to great heights, but rather the preoccupation with the hand and, through the hand, with the spirit [Geist]— in other words, experiential knowledge [Können].”79 Although it offered specialized training in the arts, the school that Obrist was establishing in Munich was closer in its epistemological aims to this Könnenschule. As he explained at the conference, the new school was to be modeled after artisans’ workshops, where theoretical instruction would be secondary to learning through hands-on experimentation.80 Obrist stressed that training at his school would be conceived through the idea of auffassen, a word that evoked tactility and physical grasping with the hands, instead of anschauen, with its reference to the sense of sight.81 Obrist would continue to make the same argument throughout his career, including in his autobiography: conventional institutions of learning slowly ruined creativity by

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emphasizing language, thought, and logic. How else could one account for the appeal of children’s drawings, which, Obrist argued, were more compelling than most contemporary art?82 The only hope was a new art education predicated upon another way of knowing.83 Much ink has been spilled on how modernism borrowed its formalist logic from the pedagogical programs that the Swiss educator Pestalozzi and his followers developed for the youngest students in the educational system.84 What remains unacknowledged in historiography is that modern design pedagogy was more directly indebted to the implementation of these turn-of-the-nineteenth-century techniques decades later in the postUnification environment. Among the most ambitious of these were the mandatory drawing classes instituted at elementary and secondary schools after 1871. This was evident in other parts of Europe as well: as the historians Wolfgang Kemp and Clive Ashwin have argued, whereas drawing was part of an aristocrat’s education in the early modern period, it became an important component of mass education in the late nineteenth century in Germany, France, and England.85 In the newly unified Germany, however, these laws were also part of the Kulturkampf policies of the Prussian state against the Catholic populations of the country. The Prussian state— with support from liberal teachers’ associations— stressed the principle of An­ schauung in an attempt to uproot purported Catholic tendencies in mass education at the end of the nineteenth century. The 1901 conference was an attempt to debate how the educational policies implemented after the Unification had fared and how they would be reconfigured in the future. In fact, these changes in educational policies had been in the making for most of the nineteenth century. Historians have demonstrated that despite the General Civil Code of 1794, which, in principle, nationalized schools regardless of confessional differences, the influence of religious institutions remained strong in the Prussian education system at least until the Weimar Republic.86 Even at moments when this influence seemed to wane, the role of religiosity remained in place. Anschauung, a central term of Pestalozzi’s pedagogy, after all, was inherited from a brand of Protestant theology that preferred object lessons to the authority of the Scripture. Humboldtian education reforms repeatedly referred to Anschauung at the turn of the nineteenth century and during the restructuring attempts that followed. The educational laws of 1837, for example, required several hours of geometry as Anschauungslehre in fifth and sixth years, as well as drawing classes in fourth, fifth, and sixth years, while the term appeared even more frequently in the 1854 legislation.87 After the Unification, however, the Pestalozzian principle of Anschauung was implemented with renewed fervor. Crucial in this effort were the socalled Falk Laws of 1872— named after the minister of education Adalbert Falk.88 The Falk Laws, among the most controversial legislation of Kultur­ kampf, attempted to reconfigure the confessional organization of Prussian schools by dictating that religious instruction— first and foremost of the

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Catholic kind— take a backseat to worldly subject matters. Falk appointed full-time inspectors rather than clergy to oversee schools, made efforts to merge Catholic and Protestant schools into interconfessional schools called Simultanschulen, and placed strict restraints on the clergy’s control of religious instruction.89 These measures were not always successful, but, more relevant here, the new laws urged that all instruction be carried out using anschaulich images, maps, and everyday objects. Falk Laws also granted a more central place in the curriculum to geometry classes (Raumlehre, theory of space, and Formenlehre, theory of form) and drawing classes, which were made mandatory in Prussia in 1872, in Saxony in 1874, and in many of the other states subsequently. The Catholic subtext of Obrist’s autobiography and the centrality of drawing at the Debschitz School take on new meaning in the context of these Kulturkampf policies. Obrist declared his anti-Catholicism unequivocally throughout his writings, lamenting Catholicism’s influence on modern life at every opportunity.90 Such anti-Catholicism, as we saw in the introductory chapter, was widespread throughout Europe and especially in Germany, where liberals like Obrist sided with the Prussian state’s assumption that Catholicism was a force that retarded the newly unified country’s ongoing process of modernization. As anyone who has read Weber’s famous work on the interrelationship of capitalism and Protestantism might suspect, however, under the cloak of modernization was not a secular state but a Protestant one.91 Even as it was waged in the name of modernity, science, and progress, Kulturkampf was a campaign shaped by “Protestant ethics,” or Kulturprotestantismus, against a Catholic population believed to be irrational and impressionable.92 Furthermore, in the context of an emergent popular Catholic piety revival movement, Catholicism was gendered as feminine, thus reinforcing the assumption that Catholic subjects were more likely to reason with feeling than with thought. Yet, as the story from his autobiography illustrates, Obrist and his European contemporaries also did not cease to be fascinated by Catholicism. This was nothing short of an “intra-European Orientalism” geared toward Catholics— which is to say that contempt was mixed with fascination and will-to-knowledge.93 Liberals saw the formalism inherent in drawing classes as an important tool in the campaign against Catholicism’s supposed harmful influence. As the pedagogue Wilhelm Rein put it in 1879, the subtext of the previous educational system had been religious instruction, which meant that reading and writing had been the core educational activities and that even arithmetic had been a mere “appendix to catechism.”94 The new educational laws, by contrast, placed formal thinking in the forefront of instruction. Rein described drawing as “the gymnastics of the thinking mind” and a kind of “logic” in its own right.95 Reform-minded pedagogues did not tire of stressing that drawing classes were not to be put in the service of art education (as was the case, for example, at fine arts academies). Rather, as Pestalozzi

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Figure 4.11. Table for teaching relationships of dimension. Anton Gruner. Briefe aus Burgdorf. Über Pestalozzi, seine Methode und Anstalt. Ein Beytrag zum besseren Verständniß des Buches Wie Gertrud ihre Kinder Lehrt und zur Erleichterung des zweckmäßigen Gebrauchs der Pestalozzischen ElementarUnterrichtsbücher (Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes, 1804), plate 3.

had suggested in Gertrud, they were to be used as propaedeutic instruction, the assumed first step toward the more intellectually challenging activities of reading, writing, and mathematics.96 Pestalozzi’s “ABC of Anschauung,” after all, consisted of making schoolchildren draw angles, squares, lines, and curves before teaching them to write the alphabet (fig. 4.11).97 The difference was that what might have been the propaedeutic to propositional knowledge at educational institutions at the turn of the nineteenth century was now being proposed at the turn of the twentieth as general education for a vaguely defined modern subject. The grid, which followers of Pestalozzi had already identified as a valuable pedagogical tool, took center stage in the drawing classes instituted as part of Kulturkampf. The grid, of course, had been a crucial part of perspective drawing at least since the technique had been codified in the early modern period, but in the nineteenth century it acquired new valency as an instrument for mass education. According to the historian Antonius Lipsmeier, the Austrian pedagogue Franz Carl Hillardt played a crucial role at midcentury in reviving the popularity of the grid.98 Hillardt was known for a technique that he called “stigmography”: a system of points arranged in a grid so as to guide all the academic activities of the child, including writing, drawing, and music (fig. 4.12).99 Looking back on Hillardt’s contribution in 1879, Wilhelm Rein characterized it as one of two primary pedagogical directions discernible in drawing instruction at midcentury. The other one was line drawing from models and nature, as recommended by the Dupuis brothers in Paris.100 Rein noted that Hillardt’s stigmography found more

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Figure 4.12. Grids to help with reading, writing, arithmetic, geometry, music, and art. Franz Carl Hillardt, Stigmographie. Das Schreiben und Zeichnen nach Punkten. Eine neue Methode (Kohlmarkt: Mueller, 1846).

traction in the primarily Protestant northern regions of Germany, whereas the latter proved more popular in the south.101 Rein found the French approach problematic: since it taught the student to be preoccupied with arbitrary details rather than with the essential whole, he concluded that it was not appropriate for general education.102 By contrast, Hillardt’s grid offered distinct learning advantages. First, the grid was such an effective guide that even the most unskilled teacher or the slowest learner could use it without much effort. Second, Rein explained, by eventually changing the scale of the grid, the teacher was able to focus on more detail, thus calibrating the progress of the class. Finally, because it was an easily repeatable system, stigmography relieved the pressures of mass education by reducing the amount of time that the teacher had to dedicate to each student.103

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Figure 4.13. First group of exercises. Adolf Stuhlmann, Zeichenunterricht und Formenlehre in der Elementarclasse (Hamburg: F. H. Nestler & Melle, 1870), fig. 1.

Others followed Hillardt’s stigmographic method. In the 1870s Adolf Stuhlmann reworked Peter Schmid’s influential method (which, in turn, was based on Pestalozzi’s principles) to devise gridded charts of various levels of difficulty. These charts would be mounted on the walls of classrooms in elementary schools so that students could redraw them methodically (fig. 4.13).104 Stuhlmann also devised a system of drawing instruction that proceeded from drawing two- dimensional patterns in the early years of schooling to “free-drawing” three-dimensional objects in the later years. Robert Bauer, another advocate of “grid drawing” (Netzzeichnen), argued that the methodical organization of drawing lessons in elementary school was necessary to teach students how to “see” correctly.105 Bauer’s pedagogy was similar to Hillardt’s: the teacher would draw a red grid of lines on the blackboard; students, with similar grids drawn on their individual slates, would then duplicate the drawn forms on their own without needing much individual attention from their teacher. In this sense, the so- called outline (Umriss) drawing was the necessary counterpart to pedagogies that depended on the grid. Outlining a form

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Figure 4.14. Drawing exercises carried out with black children in Germantown, Philadelphia. J. Liberty Tadd, New Methods in Education: Art, Real Manual Training, Nature Study (Springfield, MA, and New York: Orange Judd, 1899), 51.

required students to identify a Gestalt and distill it into a simple shape before drawing it.106 Both techniques heeded Pestalozzi’s call to grant forms as crucial a role in children’s learning as words and numbers.107 Form, in other words, became the silver bullet in mass education: “Presentations are not sharp enough and seeing is not practiced sufficiently if not mediated through form,” argued one school inspector by the name of Heinrich Scherer.108 The automatism inherent in such techniques was defended not as a failing but rather as an advantage. The likes of the schoolteacher Rudolf Schulze, the art historian August Schmarsow, and the drawing instructor Heinrich Grothmann cited the work of J. Liberty Tadd, the director of the Philadelphia Public School of Industrial Art, who, on the one hand, argued passionately against repetitive exercises that turned children into “machines” and “thoughtless mechanisms” and, on the other, invented free-drawing exercises that would be repeated so many times that drawing would become an “automatic facility” just like writing (fig. 4.14).109 Translated into German

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Figure 4.15. Ambidextrous drawing exercises. J. Liberty Tadd, New Methods in Education: Art, Real Manual Training, Nature Study (Springfield, MA, and New York: Orange Judd, 1899), 67.

in 1900 by the Lehrervereinigung für die Pflege der Künstler (Teachers’ Association for the Care of Artists) in Hamburg, an organization of teachers that promoted artistic training, Tadd’s work called for a kind of knowing that deviated from propositional knowledge. This was the kind manifested by the sign painter who, according to Tadd, despite being too drunk to stand, was still “able to space out and block in letters with wonderful accuracy.”110 Citing the Scottish surgeon Charles Bell, the early-nineteenthcentury theorist of the “muscle sense,” Tadd promoted an intelligence on the peripheries of the body that made it appear “as if the hand itself were the seat of . . . [the] will.”111 Such techniques as ambidextrous drawing were especially effective in connecting the mind to the hand (fig. 4.15). Starting with the circle, Tadd made students repeat free- drawing exercises until, as Grothmann put it, “the finger found its way” intuitively without any help from the mind (fig. 4.16).112 The ingenuity of such methods was that they played a propaedeutic function at every level of education: they were imagined as the first steps on the path from Anschauung to discursive thought— despite the fact that the large majority of the students in the German school system never advanced to the Gymnasium or the university. The new drawing pedagogy assumed that the student had to learn to look before she could read and learn to draw before she could write. Object lessons (Anschauungsunterrichten), especially in the lower levels of the school system, provided shortcuts to the long route of Bildung through Latin, Greek, and history at the more prestigious and intellectually challenging Gymnasium. Pedagogues pointed out that even when taught at the Gymnasium level— a controversial issue in the 1870s given that these schools were seen as the stronghold of Wissen— the purpose of drawing was not to raise artists but to support general education.113 Georg Kerschensteiner, director of the school system in Munich and professor of pedagogy, ultimately aligned drawing instruction with Humboldtian ambitions: the

Figure 4.16. Drawing exercises for children of varying ages. J. Liberty Tadd, New Methods in Education: Art, Real Manual Training, Nature Study (Springfield, MA, and New York: Orange Judd, 1899), 73.

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role of drawing within general education was, first and foremost, to achieve “good civic upbringing.”114 Paradoxically, this marked a shift in the meaning of Anschauung. Once used by Protestant theologians to make an “argument from design” without having to refer to the authority of the Scripture and the Catholic Church, Anschauung after Kulturkampf seems to have shed its Protestant undertones and started to align itself with Catholicism’s presumed sensualness. One commentator even noted in 1891 that there was a particular affinity between an Anschauungsunterricht and Catholicism: “That Catholicism is also appropriate for children seems obvious. For children nothing exists but Anschauungsunterricht. This makes the Catholic cult for the religion possible too.”115 Regardless of whether it was seen as a Protestant or Catholic instrument, Anschauung had a new cognitive role in the Kulturkampf environment: it was considered the appropriate conceptual device for indoctrinating the impressionable subject of modernity— now a curious amalgam of children, women, Catholics, and the masses. Drawing instruction instituted during the Kulturkampf sought to tap into these marginal subjects’ hidden aesthetic sensibility and release the creative forces in their unconscious— but not without ensuring that such creative forces would be kept in line by such heuristic devices as the grid. The same tension between freedom and discipline was evident at the Debschitz School as well. Heuristics of Drawing “Rhythms, oscillations, and vibrations are to be found everywhere,” Obrist wrote, “in the waves and clouds, in the change of days and seasons, in the rustling of trees in the wind, in every waterfall, in every geyser, in every creeping plant, in every march, dance, and music.”116 If hand movements were part of a universal economy of vibrant forces, the drawn line, according to Obrist, was the currency of this economy. Because it was produced by the body’s involuntary movements and perceived through them without recourse to the conscious mind, the line served as the crucial bridge between the artist’s hand and the beholder’s eye. Obrist’s contemporaries would agree. “Just as psychical events express themselves in bodily gestures,” the critic Arthur Roessler wrote in describing the work of the painter Adolf Hölzel, “artistic sensations as inner movement could be made visible by means of the line.”117 The critic Karl Scheffler resorted to the popular methods of graphology to demonstrate that the hidden self— what Dessoir would call the doppel­Ich— manifested itself most clearly in one’s handwriting. After comparing the handwritings of Henry van de Velde and Peter Behrens, Scheffler concluded that what was unconscious in each artist’s handwriting was made visible in their ornamental programs.118 The Debschitz School’s pedagogy was predicated on an elaborate theory that sought to correlate lines to their emotional effects (Wirkungen). Like En-

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dell, Obrist and Debschitz believed that the pedagogue’s task was to make the student realize that “a flower, a seashell, a scraggy branch, a root, a skeleton” were not merely objects understood by association or intellectually but were “organized structures full of laws, full of structures, full of expressed forces, linear, plastic, constructive movements of unheard- of wealth and astonishing diversity.”119 If, as Obrist claimed, art was “intensified sensations” and “heightened life,” and “the value of an artwork depend[ed] on the value of the sensations that it evoke[d],” then all that art pedagogy could hope to teach was “how to produce an effect independently” and “how to clarify the cause of the effect.”120 This was, as Debschitz would later explain, why the school taught, in addition to form-knowledge (Formwissen), form-feeling (Formgefühl) acquired through experience.121 Obrist and Debschitz, it is crucial to note, were not merely interested in the spontaneously drawn line. They also attempted to order, analyze, and systematize the line’s formal effects.122 Obrist wrote about the “heightening of curve-power through the heightening of stroke power, power of line weight, crescendo of the thickness of the curve, thickness of the stroke.”123 In a sketchbook titled “Programmatisches,” he inventoried variations of the drawn line: “the looming, the lying, the receding, the striving, supporting, plummeting, undulating, tilting, falling, subsiding, soaring, bending, winding, resting, broken, cracked, gazing, defying, looping, striving toward, striving away, forward, backward, swirl, spiral attained by means of the intensification of the black and white, of massing, of the force of line, and so on.”124 Effects of direction, for example, could be further analyzed as forwards, backwards, spiralling, zigzagging, vibrating lines, etc. However, it was not Obrist but rather Debschitz who turned to more precise techniques for controlling the formal effects of the drawn line. In an essay published in 1904, pointedly titled “Eine Methode des Kunstunterrichts” (A Method of Art Instruction), Debschitz outlined a rigorous, fourstaged protocol for design.125 In the first stage, the student would identify an effect (Wirkung) in nature and determine the means through which the effect was created. Second, she would draw formal permutations of a particular object in an attempt to heighten this effect. In the third stage, according to Debschitz, it was crucial to detach the effect from the appearance so as to avoid imitation. In a manner reminiscent of the sculptor Adolf Hildebrand’s famous distinction between Daseinsform, form of being, and Wirkungsform, form of effect, Debschitz argued that the point of drawing should be to portray not Erscheinungsform— that is, forms of contingent appearance— but rather Gegenständlichkeit (objecthood) that captured forms in their essence. Finally, in the fourth stage the effect was applied to a specific material to produce the desired outcome.126 Nowhere was Debschitz’s methodical approach to design better illustrated than in a heuristic tool that he devised to teach his students about manipulating formal effects. This was a diagram with eight different configurations

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Figure 4.17. Diagram of an oat husk with eight different effects. Wilhelm von Debschitz, “Eine Methode des Kunstunterrichts,” Dekorative Kunst 7 (1904): 213.

of an oat grain. It was meant as a shortcut to teach how altering the relationship between the midpoint of a line and its center of gravity changed the form’s overall effect (fig. 4.17).127 If the artist’s goal was to “choreograph the perception of the beholder,” this task was to be undertaken in a disciplined manner.128 Debschitz explained that oat grain number 1 appeared “lighter” than number 2, because the line carrying the former was more curved. Numbers 3 and 4 demonstrated upward and downward directions, respectively, while number 5, with the addition of a vertical line, created the impression of an upward movement. The darker infill in number 6 made the grain look heavier, whereas numbers 7 and 8 explored the effect of breaking the whole down to its parts. In retrospect, he noted: “I thought I was teaching absolute forms then, without recognizing that I was looking for forms of expression [Ausdrucksformen] for forces that would be effective in objects.”129 Obrist, in turn, developed another technique to regulate formal manipulation. Despite his frequently voiced disdain for mass culture, Obrist acknowledged that a historical necessity had emerged in Imperial Germany to develop pedagogical practices for a kind of subject that did not conform to the template of Bildung.130 The “comparative method” (which he acknowledged was already being used by Konrad Lange, Paul Schultze-Naumburg, and Heinrich Wölfflin) was one such practice and the one and only “correct artistic-psychological way.”131 As we have seen, comparing was the modus operandi of kinaesthetic knowing: the underlying assumption of the comparative method was that subjecting the sense organs to two examples allowed them to draw their own conclusions without the help of propositions. While Obrist regretted that it was not always possible to use original artworks, which he believed would produce stronger effects, he frequently lectured with double slides. Like others who used the technology, he used the terminology of magic to extol the virtues of “conjuring up” life-size images of artworks on the wall side by side rather than sequentially.132 After providing a long list of comparisons— The Battle of the Amazons by Rubens

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juxtaposed to the wall paintings by Prell in the Palazzo Caffarelli in Rome, for example, or a poorly designed chair next to a well- designed one— he claimed that repeating this practice three times a week throughout the year quickly taught the students the difference between good and bad.133 Over time the unmediated impact of good and bad examples would be imprinted upon the beholders’ psyche and gradually ingrain good habits.134 Furthermore, as Obrist saw it, the comparative method would ease the historically strained relationship between artists and historians, finally bringing art history’s discursive knowledge closer to the experiential basis of aesthetics. The difference amounted to that between two different kinds of “grasping”: The aesthetic can be grasped [erfasst] only by the senses, quickly and unequivocally. The written can be grasped [begriffen] only after the visual. . . . Only from simultaneous comparisons between successful and unsuccessful examples can knowledge arise quickly. All other means, such as confronting beautiful things in museums or in display windows also have their impact, but these emerge more slowly. The eye should see and enjoy and immediately; thereupon the intellect grasps the why; only then “can one go home reassuredly.”135

Instruction at the Debschitz School, then, attempted to achieve two seemingly irreconcilable goals. On the one hand, pedagogical techniques such as spontaneous sketching were zealously pursued in the hopes that such techniques would help release hitherto unknown creative powers hiding within the psyches of the (predominantly female) students. On the other hand, additional techniques— Debschitz’s diagram or Obrist’s comparative method— had to be implemented to keep the mysterious forces of the unconscious under control. Design education, then, did not simply model its subject after women, children, occultist mediums, Catholics, or the masses. Rather it posited this precariously impressionable subject as the marginal condition, which it approached only asymptotically. That is to say, while students at the Debschitz School were encouraged to give free rein to the involuntary movements of their hands and the creative powers of their subconscious, they were allowed to do so only within the limits devised by their teachers. An examination of the student work, published alongside the theoretical elaborations of Obrist and Debschitz, makes those limits even more blatantly evident. First, despite the instructors’ promise to awaken the individual talent latent in each student, the work produced by the students of the school was conspicuously similar to each other’s and to the work of the masters (fig. 4.18). Second, the difference between the free and the applied arts— a difference that the Debschitz School, like so many of its contemporaries, declared obsolete— did not disappear but rather resurfaced in new form as a division of labor. Critics who gave credit to Obrist for creating a

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Figure 4.18. Debschitz School student work. Wilhelm von Debschitz, “Eine Methode des Kunstunterrichts,” Dekorative Kunst 7 (1904): 227.

uniquely modern German style out of what used to be a mechanical art in the hands of “dilettante” women who, “waste[d] their time with ugly and useless needlework,” failed to note something: that the difference between the fine and the applied arts persisted, above all, in the distinction between the male artist (Obrist) who conceived the design and the female artisans (for example, Berthe Ruchet) who undertook the mechanical work required

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Figure 4.19. Fritz Erler, poster for the Cococello Club in Munich, 1905, lithograph, 910 × 635 mm. Inventory number B21/1. Courtesy of the Münchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlung Mode/Textilien/ Kostümbibliothek.

to realize it.136 A pillowcase designed by Obrist or Debschitz and executed by their assistants to be displayed in an art gallery as a unique work of art, after all, was not the same as a pillowcase designed by a student and sold to the textile industry to be reproduced as patterns on commodities.137 Obrist and Debschitz’s attack against the mechanical imitation required by academic training and their desire to replace mindless copying with nacherleben, an animated reliving, thus failed to deliver what it promised. Just as women mediums rose to prominence in the public eye at the turn of the twentieth century at the expense of being rendered as automata at the behest of their male summoners, the students of the Debschitz School enjoyed coeducation only to find that they were reduced to machines dutifully copying their masters. One student described this relationship thus: [Debschitz] approached [a female student] with a mistletoe in hand, led her to a beautiful large house, and gave her a loofah, which, she was told, she was to draw all day. And she also learned about date twigs and oat stems, algae and chestnut blossoms. She strained and pulled, she printed and stenciled, she twisted and cranked but still could not get enough of it. Now she earned content and ideals, a fulcrum and a solid ground under her feet and praised and admired her master day and night.138

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That is not to deny that by cultivating kinaesthetic knowing, modern design education also cultivated those who had been marginalized by Bildung throughout the nineteenth century. Many women who studied at the Debschitz School went on to have independent, successful artistic careers; a few others infiltrated into various avant-garde movements in the early twentieth century.139 It should have become clear by now, however, that my argument is not about individual stories of inclusion or exclusion but rather about a paradox of kinaesthetic knowing that the pedagogy of the Debschitz School made apparent. If kinaesthetic knowing was forged in good liberal faith in response to what was imagined to be the cognitive demands of a new modern subject, did it do for these alternative subjects what propositional knowledge had done for educated male Protestants? A poster from 1905, designed by the artist Fritz Erler for the Munich club Cococello, does not answer this question but wittily captures the paradox (fig. 4.19). The inscription, “The Munich Berlitz School of United Arts,” written in English in a script that looked embroidered, did not only allude to the German applied arts movement’s self-professed affinities with the English Arts and Crafts movement. It also reminded the viewer of the so- called direct method of teaching devised by Maximilian Berlitz, the German émigré who owned a successful chain of language schools in the United States and who had recently made headlines for reportedly having taught the Kaiser English in a matter of hours.140 The ingenuity of the Berlitz technique was that it replaced the older methods of grammar instruction, translation, and rote memorization (the realm of Helmholtzian Wissen) with a practical emphasis on speaking and hands- on learning (the equivalent of Helmholtzian Kennen). The poster sarcastically compared what the Debschitz School attempted in art education to what Berlitz had achieved in language instruction. The female figure in the center of the poster— a student at the Debschitz School or, perhaps, an allegory for the fine arts who was now preoccupied with the applied arts— was depicted as an automaton, walking with arms stretched forward, not unlike the somnambulist artists examined by occultists. Although she seemed oblivious to the situation, her body moved only by virtue of a mechanism hidden underneath her. The task of cranking the hidden mechanism fell to an androgynous mechanical doll, whose jointed frame seemed paradoxically more animate than its organic counterpart. By cultivating another way of knowing, modern design education neither resuscitated the fine arts as promised, the poster seemed to suggest, nor liberated marginalized subjects. Instead, once again, modernism demonstrated the dialectical logic of the Enlightenment: in the blink of the eye the ideals of autonomy, freedom, and liberation from authority mysteriously transformed into their diametric opposites.

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5: Designing

Discipline and Introspection at the Bauhaus

Among the many student projects that László Moholy-Nagy published in his book Von Material zu Architektur was a “tactile board” made by Willy Zierath in 1927 at the Bauhaus (fig. 5.1).1 The board consisted of two parts: a tactile scale above and what Zierath called its “optical translation” below. The tactile scale itself consisted of three grids pieced together from different materials: vellum, fur, cardboard, plastic, wood, wax, sheepskin, wire mesh, etc. Below the scale were three charts, translating the “tactile values” (Tast­ werte) of the materials in the three grids into the visual language of three line graphs, constructed by plotting each tactile value as a single point on the gridded paper.2 The X in the first graph, for example, captured the sensation of passing two fingers slowly over the first grid: the surfaces became progressively harder in the top row and softer in the bottom row. The neighboring grids compared sensations of smoothness/roughness and dryness/ wetness in a similar manner. The compositional logic of the grids above, in other words, was not arbitrary but had been dictated by the tactile values meticulously diagrammed below. “Because tactile values are registered in an entirely subjective manner,” Moholy-Nagy explained in the caption below Zierath’s work, “it seemed desirable to introduce one’s sensations in such a ‘tactile diagram’” not in a haphazard but “in a controlled manner”— that is, as if in a scientific experiment.3 Zierath’s tactile board was one of many similar experiments featured in Von Material zu Architektur, better known in the English-speaking world from the heavily revised translation The New Vision. Organized into four sections— questions of pedagogy, material, volume (sculpture), and space (architecture)— the book explained how the teaching at the Bauhaus partook in an ambitious modernist project of “ripening sense, feeling, and thought.”4 The student assignments published in the first section of the book had been undertaken within the framework of the mandatory preliminary course at the Bauhaus with this goal in mind. Most of these were mechanisms invented to register, catalogue, and analyze “elementary” experiences— Grunderlebnisse or Urerlebnisse, as Moholy-Nagy preferred to call them— in a systematic manner. Immediately facing Zierath’s tactile diagram on the

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Figure 5.1. Tactile board by Willy Zierath. Original photograph by Erich Consemüller, 1927/28. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Photo: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Inv. F113.

pages of Von Material zu Architektur, for example, was a revolving device with two concentric circles that one could turn in order to juxtapose textures (fig. 5.2).5 On the pages that followed one could find equally strange devices: a grid of diagonally stitched yarn, a revolving tactile drum, a spring construction that made it possible to compare dozens of textures. (The Bauhaus Archive in Berlin has documentation of still more: grids composed of sandpaper of different grades, slabs with various densities of tacks, springs, etc. [figs. 5.3, 5.4].) While not all of these instruments found their way into the English translation, new ones appeared in The New Vision: a “Luna Park” for the fingers and a “tactile symphony” in three rows were both realized at the so- called New Bauhaus, which Moholy-Nagy founded in Chicago in 1937 after leaving Germany.6 Moholy-Nagy’s American students even attempted to manipulate the more elusive senses. One student constructed a “smello-meter,” a contraption made out of tubes that mixed different smells and used a fan to blow them to the nose (fig. 5.5).7 No less ingenious were the notational systems that preliminary course students on both sides of the ocean invented— in one instance a graphic language that used the primary shapes of circles, squares, and triangles (fig. 5.6). Not only did Moholy-Nagy’s studio with its peculiar armamentarium resemble a laboratory; he also frequently called it by that name.8 Historians have already pointed out the many literal and figurative parallels between the modern artist’s studio and the modern scientist’s laboratory.9 While the

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Figure 5.2. Tactile revolving device by Walter Kaminsky. Original photograph by Erich Consemüller, 1927. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Photo: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Inv. F1175. Figure 5.3. Collection of tactile devices from Moholy-Nagy’s Vorkurs. Original photographer unknown, 1923. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Photo: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Inv. F997.

laboratory model was not systematically explored at the Bauhaus, insiders and outsiders alike described the German school as a site of experimentation, usually understood in the loosest sense possible. Walter Gropius, the founder and the first director of the school, presented the workshops of the school as “experimental laboratories for serial industrial production.”10 Hannes Meyer, the second director, might have disagreed with Gropius on many things, but he also thought that the artist’s studio had effectively

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Figure 5.4. Revolving tactile device by Rudolf Marwitz. Original photograph by Erich Consemüller, 1928. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Photo: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Inv. F1186.

Figure 5.5. Charles Niedringhaus’s Smell-o-meter, 1938. László Moholy-Nagy, The New Vision and the Abstract of an Artist, trans. Daphne M. Hoffmann (New York: Wittenborn, 1946), 24– 25.

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Figure 5.6. Tactile device by Gustav Hassenpflug. Original photograph by Erich Consemüller, 1927. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Photo: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Inv. F1175.

turned into a scientific laboratory.11 Yet Moholy-Nagy’s preliminary course at the Bauhaus was neither like the laboratory of scientific experimentation that Meyer was alluding to nor like the workshop of industrial prototyping that Gropius had in mind. Instead, the instruments, methods, and techniques of Moholy-Nagy’s studio were modeled after those of another discipline: psychology, which had turned to experimentation only at the end of the nineteenth century, and not without a great deal of controversy. The instruments in Moholy-Nagy’s preliminary course bore an unmistakable resemblance to kymographs, aesthesiometers, color mixers, etc, instruments commonly found in an experimental psychology laboratory. More relevant to this history of kinaesthetic knowing, the two kinds of experimentation targeted the same object: that elusive thing called “experience” (figs. 5.7, 5.8). Even in light of the nineteenth- century history of kinaesthetic knowing that I have outlined in this book, this was a peculiar turn of events. While many artists, architects, critics, and historians at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth (Wölfflin, Endell, Obrist, and Debschitz, examined in depth in this book, were, after all, just a few among many others) were infatuated with a new aesthetics informed by experimental psychology and the psychophysical thinking inherent in it, by the time Moholy-Nagy published Von Material zu Architektur in 1929 even the

Figure 5.7. Drum kymograph with Foucault’s regulator. The device registered blood pressure, heartbeat, respiration, electrical conduction of nerves, and other physiological and muscular changes that varied with time. Elie de Cyon, Atlas zur Methodik der Physiologischen Experimente und Vivisectionen (Giessen: J. Ricker, 1876), plate 18.

Figure 5.8. Instruments from the Harvard Psychological Laboratory, circa 1892, including color mixers, color disks, afterimage apparatuses, and Newton’s disks. Harvard University Archives A502, HUPSF Psychological Laboratories (7).

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most passionate advocates of this aesthetic project had doubts about its tenability. The precariousness of “aesthetics from below” had been predicted as early as 1892, while it was still enjoying popularity in artistic circles, by none other than Wilhelm Dilthey, the famous theorist of Erlebnis who had proposed kinaesthetic knowing as a viable epistemological principle for the human sciences. In an essay titled “Die drei Epochen der modernen Ästhetik und ihre heutige Aufgabe” (The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics and Its Present Task), Dilthey argued that an aesthetic discourse that sought to analyze aesthetic effects and impressions was not a panacea for speculative aesthetics, as its advocates claimed, but rather its equally insufficient counterpart.12 Just as rationalist aesthetics had come into being when absolutism in politics and deduction in mathematics had the upper hand, experimental aesthetics was inextricably linked to the rise of a bourgeois order in Europe, Dilthey wrote. While appearing as diametric opposites, the two were in fact equally inadequate: the former’s transcendental point of view understood beauty as an intelligible unity that was distinguished from logical unity only by a lower degree of distinctness, and the latter’s particularism was incapable of explaining how the artwork was more than a heap of impressions.13 The problem with experimental aesthetics, according to Dilthey, was precisely that: it was not an experiential analysis of sensations but an experimental analysis of a mechanical relationship of causality between stimulus and sensation.14 Furthermore, Dilthey suspected, the idea of an unmediated sensation untouched by the intellect was an illusion at best. Analyzing sensations already supposed a certain concept of what was aesthetically effective. By the beginning of World War I, even the most enthusiastic supporters of “aesthetics from below” came to see problems in psychophysical thinking. Evaluating the current state of experimental aesthetics in 1914, Theodor Ziehen, neurologist, psychologist, and erstwhile enthusiast of the new aesthetics, echoed Dilthey’s prescient critique from two decades earlier. Ziehen’s charges were serious. First, the boundaries of “aesthetics from below” were problematic: one could not define the objects of experimental aesthetics— that is, sensations, aesthetic effects, etc.— in a manner that seemed free from subjective bias. Second, it was impossible not only to measure sensations but also to distinguish between direct and indirect— that is, associative— aesthetic effects.15 How could anyone pretend to be able to measure sensations with anything resembling scientific rigor? Or, for that matter, know the difference between unmediated sensation and mediated perception? Paul Moos, one of the earliest historians of the new aesthetics, announced in 1919 that the project of “aesthetics from below” was dead. Moos’s was a call to order: the future of German aesthetics, he declared authoritatively, depended on its ability to free itself from the weight of psychology and draw its strength once again “from its true source . . . the German spirit.”16 Agreeing with this solemn verdict, the British philosopher

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Edward Bullough observed in 1921 that no work of experimental aesthetics of any import had been carried out after 1914.17 This loss of faith in an “aesthetics from below” occurred against the background of a seismic shift in the disciplinary topography of German universities, a shift in the direction that neo-Kantians such as Windelband had predicted in the 1890s as the result of an inevitable split between nomothetic and idiographic sciences, corresponding to the natural sciences and the human sciences, respectively.18 By the early twentieth century, psychology was no longer given the privileged epistemological status that it had enjoyed previously as a propaedeutic science (Vorwissenschaft). Paradoxically, the discipline lost its central significance as a bridge and instead became one natural science among others at the very moment independent psychology departments were established throughout the world. (Wundt, remember, taught psychology at a philosophy department.) The historian Kurt Danziger has demonstrated that the generations of psychologists after Wundt went in two directions: they either tried to tease applicability out of psychology— for example, by turning psychophysics into psychotechnics— or they took psychological questions onto a metaphysical realm in philosophy departments.19 According to Martin Kusch’s account of psychologism, by 1913 philosophers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland were signing petitions to oust psychologists from philosophy departments.20 In other words, the Wundtian position that psychology needed philosophy as much as philosophy needed psychology no longer found traction. By all accounts, by the end of World War I, the reformist project of establishing the human sciences on the foundation of kinaesthetic knowing fueled by psychological thinking seemed to have fallen apart. Yet, if the student work in the Bauhaus is any indication, the predictions about the death of “aesthetics from below” were premature. Rudiments of an aesthetics based on kinaesthetic knowing not only survived but also prospered at the Bauhaus, the most famous of modern design schools. As Peter Galison has demonstrated in his insightful account of Rudolf Carnap’s visits to the school in the late 1920s, while the philosopher found many similarities between logical empiricism and Bauhaus thinking (for example, their shared elementarism), he was also taken aback by the surprisingly common tendency that he observed in Bauhäusler to assign emotional value to forms, lines, and colors.21 Bauhäusler— not only the students of Johannes Itten, Moholy-Nagy, and Josef Albers, who taught the preliminary course (Vorkurs), but also those of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, who, for most of the history of the school, followed the first part of the Vorkurs with lectures on theory of form (Formlehre)— implicitly accepted the basic premise of psychophysics: a relationship of correspondence between physical stimulus and psychological sensation. Unlike Carnap, who preferred to explain the emotional tones of forms as psychological associations accrued over time, the teachers and students at the Bauhaus assumed that forms

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existed with a priori emotional content— an assumption in which Carnap detected an unacceptable element of metaphysical thinking.22 Far from becoming extinct, then, techniques forged with faith in kinaesthetic knowing thrived at the Bauhaus after World War I. In earlier chapters, we have seen how the pedagogical programs that were developed at such schools as Endell’s Formschule and the Debschitz School at the turn of the twentieth century borrowed from experimental psychology with the conviction that there existed a nondiscursive, nonconceptual way of knowing that could nonetheless compete in its rigor with conventional forms of reasoning. Many of the Bauhäusler must have had firsthand familiarity with this discourse: Johannes Itten, who introduced the preliminary course to the Bauhaus, was a student of Adolf Hölzel in Stuttgart, for example, while Walter Gropius met with Wilhelm von Debschitz before taking over Henry van de Velde’s Kunstgewerbliches Seminar in Weimar.23 Paul Klee taught briefly at the Debschitz School, whereas Kandinsky spent his early career in Munich where Obrist and Endell were active.24 In this final chapter I will focus on how psychophysical thinking, which, by the beginning of World War I, had already been incorporated into the techniques taught within a particular kind of art school, informed the pedagogical program employed at the Bauhaus. We now understand these techniques— from formal manipulation to a unique kind of drawing— as the distinguishing marks of modern design education. I want to show in this chapter that these modernist techniques were also continuous with the project of kinaesthetic knowing whose history I have outlined so far. The history of the Bauhaus looks somewhat different from this perspective. Much has been made of the break in the history of the school between the medievalizing tendencies that privileged handicraft in the early years and the strategic decision in the mid-1920s— after the “Kunst und Technik” (Art and Technology) exhibition of 1923 and especially after Meyer became director in 1928— to purge the school of mysticism and to align it with technologies of industrial production and what has sometimes been mistakenly called a “functionalist design ethic.”25 I will argue that even against the background of such fundamental changes, psychophysical thinking— with the mystical overtones that I discussed in chapter 4— remained a constant subtext in the school’s pedagogy from the early Gropius days up to the end of the Mies van der Rohe regime. In fact, as late as 1955, Gropius continued to defend the psychological aspects of design alongside material and technical ones.26 Even battling factions— say, Moholy-Nagy and those who opposed his “constructivist” proclivities— embraced the same psychophysical techniques as well as an assumption about the immediacy of form and affect. In this sense, the Bauhaus is the end of a chapter in the history of modernism as well as the beginning that it is usually presented as. I have a modest goal in this chapter: to contribute to the vast scholarship on the Bauhaus by asking a somewhat different set of questions. What

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valency did psychophysical thinking acquire at the Bauhaus? How did the foundationalist and elementarist epistemology of experiential knowledge define the pedagogical techniques developed at the school? How were the figure of the designer and the process of design shaped by this agenda? And, finally, what can this epistemological history tell us about the nature of the concepts and techniques that are still deeply ingrained in design education today? Design as Propaedeutic: A Brief History of the Vorkurs The preliminary course is frequently cited as the most innovative aspect of the pedagogical program developed at the Bauhaus.27 Yet, it is worth repeating, the idea of such a propaedeutic course was not invented there. The Debschitz School in Munich or Endell’s Formschule in Berlin were not unique in offering first-year “design” courses that dissolved the boundaries between the applied and the fine arts, either. Propaedeutic courses, already common in elementary and secondary education in various educational reform movements throughout the nineteenth century, appeared at the turn of the twentieth century at several private art schools or applied arts schools dedicated to developing an alternative to academic training. When Peter Behrens became the director of the School of Applied Art (Kunstgewerbeschule) in Düsseldorf in 1903, for example, he introduced a Vorschule, which, according to the annual report of the school, was meant to serve as “the foundation of all arts and crafts and artistic education of the students.”28 This foundational training was required not only because it gave the students the opportunity to discover their hidden talents but also because the director felt that the need for well-rounded generalists was more urgent than for narrow-minded specialists. Behrens’s two-part Vorschule consisted of freehand drawing, geometrical drawing, drawing from nature, ornamental exercises, lettering and print, furniture design, and perspective.29 Behrens was not alone in his commitment to a propaedeutic course in artistic training. As of 1903 the School of Applied Art (Königliche Kunstgewerbeschule) in Stuttgart under the directorship of Hans von Kolb had a year-long Vorkurs that was to be taken before students specialized in furniture design, printing, applied arts, drawing instruction, etc.30 So did arts schools in other German cities: Kunstgewerbeschule der Mitteldeutschen Kunstgewerbevereins in Frankfurt am Main under Ferdinand Luthmer, the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule in Hamburg under Richard Meyer, and the Königliche Akademie für graphische Künste und Buchgewerbe zu Leipzig under Max Seliger, among many others.31 Furthermore, others, such as the Kunstschule in Frankfurt, offered preliminary courses at the same time as the Bauhaus.32 In fact, it took Gropius a while to theorize the significance of the preliminary course. While his “Manifest und Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses” (Manifesto and Program of the State Bauhaus) of April 1919 promised that the school would unite all artistic activities instead of separating them into

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the conventional categories of fine arts and applied arts or painting, sculpture, and architecture, it did not specify a course resembling the preliminary course.33 Neither did the curriculum plan from February 1921, which, while describing at length the training in each workshop, did not dwell on such a propaedeutic course.34 Furthermore, the nomenclature for the course varied throughout the school’s brief history. It was called Vorlehre or Vorunterricht under Itten in the early years of the school. Albers and Moholy-Nagy, who took over the task of teaching the course from Itten after his departure, preferred Werkarbeit or Werklehre and Gestaltungsstudien, respectively. Finally, in the last years of the school, under Mies van der Rohe’s directorship, the course was renamed allgemeine Ausbildung, a general training supported by lectures on mathematics, sciences, psychology, art history, etc. The duration of the course changed as frequently as its name.35 It was Itten who first implemented the course at the school. Influenced by the Viennese artist and pedagogue Franz Cižek’s program for children and his own brief experience as an elementary schoolteacher in a village in Switzerland (where Pestalozzi’s influence must have been strong), Itten had taught such preliminary classes at his own art school in Vienna between 1917 and 1919 before joining the Bauhaus faculty.36 As he noted in his diaries from that time, Itten’s version of the preliminary course in Vienna was unabashedly physical. He started each class by having his students do gymnastic exercises that followed a strictly formalist logic: first flat, then linear, and finally spatial movements. The point of these exercises was to awaken and unleash the body’s ability of expression.37 Echoing Fechner’s theory of the psychophysical correspondence between stimulus and sensation, Itten wrote in his diary that the world was predicated on the relationship of equivalence between reflex and stimulus.38 It has already been noted that there was no shortage of mystical undertones in Itten’s pedagogy.39 Inspired by Mazdaznan mysticism, Itten made his Bauhaus students perform breathing and humming exercises in class as well.40 (Some students and teachers complained that the Bauhaus cafeteria was run according to Itten’s strict Mazdaznan diet.) Following the example of his mentor Adolf Hölzel, who urged his students at the academy in Stuttgart to produce 1,000 pen strokes every day to harden their muscles, Itten intended such exercises to allow the students’ arms, hands, fingers, and, in fact, their entire bodies to be “permeated with feeling” until they became fully cognizant of the expressive capabilities of their bodies.41 Asking students to draw with both hands simultaneously had the same pedagogical rationale: making unconscious movements conscious.42 Itten thus took the kind of drawing taught at such schools as the Debschitz School to its logical extreme. Emphasis was placed upon contrasts— “big-small, long-short, smooth-rough, light-heavy,” etc.— which, Itten assumed, facilitated judgment by forcing comparative thinking.43 “The success of these studies” depended, wrote Itten, “on the student’s ability to overcome his intellect and the function of his senses and give himself totally to spontaneous feeling.”44

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Figure 5.9. Morning exercise on the roof of the Johannes Itten Schule in Berlin, 1930. Johannes Itten, Werke und Schriften (Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1972), 36, fig. 22. © Estate of Johannes Itten / Sodrac (2016).

Afer a visit to his preliminary-course studio, Klee had to resort to expressing himself with forms as well as words, as he described Itten’s pedagogy: After walking to and fro several times, Itten approaches the easel with a drawing board and scribbling pad. He picks up a piece of charcoal, his body tenses up as if becoming charged with energy, and then suddenly goes into action— once, twice. One sees the form of two forceful lines, vertical and parallel on the top sheet of the pad; the students are asked to repeat this. The master checks their work, asks some of them to demonstrate it individually, corrects their posture. He then, beating time, orders them to do it rhythmically, and then has them carry out the same exercise standing up. What is intended seems to be a kind of body massage, to train the body machine to and others function sensitively. Similarly, new elementary forms such as and ) with several explaare demonstrated and copied (for instance nations of the why and wherefore and the mode of expression. He then talks about the wind, and asks some of the students to stand up and express their feelings in the guise of wind and storm. Then he sets the task: Represent the storm. He allows them ten minutes to do it in, then inspects the results. This is followed by critical assessment. Thereafter work continues. One sheet after another is torn off, flutters to the ground. Some students work with such élan that they use up several sheets at a time. In the end they all become a little tired, and he sets his Basic Course students the same task as homework for further practice (fig. 5.9).45

Itten, aware that Klee’s account was tinged with irony, responded in kind. In an interview conducted by Maria Wetzel in Itten’s atelier in the 1960s, he

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Figure 5.10. Bauhaus curricular diagram, 1922. Walter Gropius, Idee und Aufbau der Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar (Munich: Bauhausverlag, 1923). Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Photo: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Inv. 8057/2_S10. © Estate of Walter Gropius / Sodrac (2016).

drew a contrast between Klee’s method of teaching and his own at the Bauhaus. Klee lectured in an “old, classical-academic style” that Itten politely described as interesting but nonetheless conventional. Whereas the oldfashioned Klee had held on too tightly to the written word in his meticulously formulated notes, Itten, who preferred teaching with gestures, bragged that he “never wrote anything” himself, “not a single word!”46 Others at the Bauhaus also noticed this antagonism toward discursive knowledge. Howard Dearstyne, fresh out of Columbia College, was struck by the difference between his American education and the training that he received at the Bauhaus: “[Albers] didn’t require us to draw in minute detail the five orders of architecture; . . . he didn’t set us to copying . . . plaster reproductions of classic sculpture;  .  .  . he didn’t ask us to digest the writings of Vitruvius, Vignola, or Palladio.”47 In fact, according to Dearstyne, not only did Albers emphasize the uselessness of reading, but also “language played only a minor role in class.”48 In 1923, when Gropius finally theorized the goals of the preliminary course at length, he reused the bull’s- eye diagram that had been published in the school prospectus earlier in order to summarize the school’s pedagogical mission. Vorkurs appeared in the diagram on the perimeter as Vorlehre and the first step of four (fig. 5.10).49 Required of all Bauhaus students during the first six months of their training, Gropius explained, the Vorlehre consolidated all artistic activity under the rubric of form-making. He enumerated three pedagogical principles to explain the pedagogical project of the preliminary course: intuitive thinking (Anschauung), which he subdivided into nature study and theory of materials; representation (Darstellung), which involved instruction in the theory of projection, theory of construction,

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and drawing and modeling of space; and design (Gestaltung), which could be further broken down into theory of space, theory of color, and theory of composition.50 In Gropius’s account, Vorlehre was preparation for the hands- on experience in the workshops that followed in the curriculum. This was an attempt to radically reconfigure artistic fields in accordance with materials and techniques. It was also how the instructors decided if a student was fit for further study or not. After taking the Vorlehre, each student would choose to focus on stone, wood, metal, weaving, color, glass, or sound (with the result that long-standing artistic traditions such as painting— and painters like Kandinsky— were forced to occupy an uneasy position in the school). The three-year-long workshop experience was supported by theoretical instruction in materials, nature study, tools, representation, composition, etc. Finally, the core of Gropius’s curricular diagram was marked as Bau— that is, building, but without the historicist connotations of the word Architektur. The central role assigned to architecture was seemingly in accordance with Gropius’s claim, most clearly articulated in the founding manifesto of the school from 1919, that the goal of the Bauhaus was to unify all the arts under the roof of architecture, but in the bull’s- eye diagram, Bau appeared as a stage to which only the most talented students would be allowed to advance.51 In reality, however, the diagram was more aspirational than actual: not only were some of the workshops never realized, but until 1927 the school offered little architectural instruction beyond occasional lectures by Gropius and the opportunity to work in his private office or to take technical classes at the nearby Baugewerkschule in Weimar.52 Still, at work in Gropius’s curricular diagram was an audacious epistemology. The school’s pedagogy was predicated on pairing two epistemological principles inherited from nineteenth-century epistemology, especially from Helmholtz: theoretical knowledge (Wissen) and practical skill (Können, Gropius’s version of Kennen) corresponded to the curriculum’s emphasis on the theory of form (Formlehre), on the one hand, and on handicraft (Werklehre), on the other.53 While each student— whether apprentice or journeyman— was to learn theoretical and practical knowledge simultaneously from a master of form (Formmeister) and from a master of handicraft (Werkmeis­ ter), the foundation for all artistic activity was provided in the synthesis offered in the first six months in the Vorkurs. Even after Itten left in 1923 due to escalating tensions with Gropius, the purpose of the preliminary course was still officially described as “introduction into the theory and the work of the Bauhaus through knowledge of the principles of form, material, and production.”54 Despite his much-vaunted differences from the mystically inclined Itten, Moholy-Nagy, along with Albers (who had completed the preliminary course under Itten’s instruction), continued to teach the Vor­ lehre as the school’s pedagogical foundation. Writing in America, Gropius would reiterate the same epistemological argument: because the present

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“intellectual emphasis on book education [Buchwissen] did not promote the right climate,” he argued, the design teacher was charged with the task of “encouraging the design student to trust his own subconscious reactions.”55 The foundationalist epistemology of the preliminary course was thoroughly informed by psychophysical thinking. “Aesthetics from below” might have been declared dead by some by 1919, but Bauhaus masters continued to teach techniques of formal manipulation with the assumption that the relationship between form and affect was one of immediacy. “Forms and colors gain their meaning in the work only through the relationship with our inner being,” wrote Gropius in 1923. “Red triggers feelings different from blue or yellow; round forms different from pointed or jagged.”56 Klee discussed the active and passive valences of horizontal and vertical lines in his Päd­ agogisches Skizzenbuch (Pedagogical Sketchbook).57 Kandinsky, who, like Klee, had been immersed in the intellectual milieu of turn- of-the- century Munich, had joined the Bauhaus faculty after returning from INKhUK (Institute for Artistic Culture) in Moscow, where his attempts at establishing a science of art (Kunstwissenschaft) using quantitative methods had met with accusations of psychologism.58 In the wall-painting workshop to which he was assigned, Kandinsky circulated a questionnaire that borrowed its psychophysical logic directly from Fechner’s statistical methods. We can only assume that the Bauhaus students knew exactly what the master expected of them as they dutifully provided the answers to the following questions: 1. Fill in these three forms with the colors yellow, red and blue. The coloring is to fill the form entirely in each case. 2. If possible, provide an explanation for your choice of color (plate 1).59 Student notes from Kandinsky’s lectures confirm the centrality of psychophysical thinking in Kandinsky’s classroom.60 The conceit of such pedagogical techniques was, in Kandinsky’s words, to build the “bridge between the inner and the outer.”61 In the Bauhaus-published book Punkt und Linie zu Fläche (Point and Line to Plane) Kandinsky repeated some of the assertions about the correlation of form to affect that he had made in his influential text Über das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the Spiritual in Art) from 1911.62 In his books and lecture notes, there is no shortage of examples: he associated the right angle with the color red, while acute angles were yellow and obtuse ones blue (which explained, of course, why the triangle had to be yellow, the square red, and the circle blue). Kandinsky endorsed other forms of affinity between forms, lines, and colors as well: the graphic form of the horizontal line corresponded to the painterly form of the color black, the vertical to white, and the diagonal to red.63 Much has been made of the role of synesthesia in Kandinsky’s work.64 What made synesthesia possible, however, was a universal language of form and color that transcended any particular sense, a language whose grammar was dictated by the predictability of the

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body’s response to stimuli. To put it differently, according to Kandinsky, the sensation of triangle accompanied the sensation of yellow precisely because the body responded to them in identical manner: the body’s response measured what he called the “inner pulsing of the work.”65 Hence the revealing scribbles in a student’s lecture notes: the yellow triangle, the red square, and the blue circle corresponded to the musical tempos of presto, andante, and grave, the student wrote, precisely because these form- color combinations triggered the pulse rates 135, 75, and 50, respectively. (The same student also noted— apparently not without a hint of irony— that the theory was yet to be proven [plate 2].)66 Even Moholy-Nagy, despite his differences from Klee and Kandinsky, accepted Fechner’s basic psychophysical formula. He argued that the elementary feelings making up an expression were registered physiologically and psychologically.67 Humans who expressed their feelings of envy with yellow and hope with green (color associations that obviously did not translate well into the English language) were no different from bulls that could not help but be attracted to the brightness of red.68 Of all the physiological effects registered by the body, however, Moholy-Nagy put far more emphasis on those that related to the sense of touch. Like nineteenth- century theorists who had added the “muscle sense” to the more established five to resolve the epistemological quandaries of empiricism, Moholy-Nagy identified a “sixth sense,” which, he argued, played a crucial role in registering pressure, temperature, and vibrations, thus helping humans orient themselves in the world.69 His interest in faktur, the material character that evidenced the process of making, was predicated on this nineteenth- century assumption about the centrality of the sixth sense.70 Furthermore, as Leah Dickerman has pointed out, Bauhaus pedagogy’s foundationalism was accompanied by an elementarism.71 That is to say, Bauhäusler operated with the assumption that the foundation of the preliminary course was constructed upon basic units: point, line, plane, and space, as well as the primary colors red, blue, and yellow. Unlike the foundational analytique that was taught within Beaux-Arts pedagogy, the preliminary course was dissociated from any discussion of orders, proportions, or style.72 In this sense, Bauhaus pedagogy had more in common with the drawing classes that had been made mandatory in elementary and secondary education after the Unification than with the academic tradition.73 Just as countless Pestalozzi-inspired drawing-instruction manuals published in the nineteenth century recommended teachers to devise assignments that demanded students to draw horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines before commencing writing, or used such heuristic devices as the grid or stigmography to facilitate instruction in mathematics or music, Bauhäusler encouraged their students to start with what they considered elementary forms and colors. Consider this device that Kandinsky used in the classroom: a grid and an envelope full of various cutout shapes that were meant

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to be arranged upon it (plate 3).74 The grid here, it needs to be emphasized, was, first and foremost, a pedagogical device. It was not a modernist trope that was intended as an end in itself but rather, like the grids that schoolteachers drew on blackboards in Prussian schools so that students could easily repeat the same exercise on their individual slates, an instrument employed for its pedagogical efficacy. Elementarism manifested itself in Moholy-Nagy’s preliminary course as well. If Kandinsky resorted to the elementary units of primary shapes and primary colors, Moholy-Nagy searched for their sensorial equivalents: elementary units of experience that he called Grunderlebnisse or Urerlebnisse.75 Furthermore, like an experimental psychologist (who also analyzed elementary components of experience), Moholy-Nagy devised experiments through which these “ground experiences” could be registered using the graphic method. By this definition, the ultimate goal of the Bauhaus was to utilize these Grunderlebnisse to teach the “subconscious logic” of design, a goal, Moholy-Nagy made a point of stressing, that “book-learning [buchwissen] in regular schooling and traditional instruction” could never hope to achieve.76 Grunderlebnisse, in other words, were the elementary blocks of an alternative epistemological principle that competed with conventional knowledge. And, as in psychophysics, Moholy-Nagy’s experiments did not so much measure sensations as compare them: the sensation of a smooth texture could not so much be measured as recorded in comparison to a rough one. Crucially, Moholy-Nagy and his fellow Bauhäusler imagined the preliminary course less as the beginning of a specialized artistic training and more as a generalist education required by modernity. In his introduction to Von Material zu Architektur, Moholy-Nagy’s concerns were much larger than the preliminary course and, in fact, much larger than the question of artistic training. The modern man— or what Moholy-Nagy called der sekto­ rhafte Mensch (segmented man)— had been forced into specialization in his schooling and professional life. To make matters worse, Moholy-Nagy argued, to the extent that he lived unnaturally, constantly fought with his own instincts, and was violated by external knowledge, not only his labor but his entire existence was segmented.77 The danger was especially grave if the person in question had been subjected from an early age onward to Wissen, bookish knowledge dependent on words.78 As Moholy-Nagy illustrated in a diagram that formally resonated with Gropius’s curricular diagram, “the future need[ed] the whole man,” a centered man that grew out of his community organically, “strong, open, happy as in childhood” (fig. 5.11).79 Thus, the primitiver Mensch in the center of the diagram was a figure that simultaneously signified the imaginary human of the past and the “whole man” of the future, who would be cultivated at the Bauhaus through a “ripening of sense, feeling, and thought.” This “whole man,” to use the language popularized by Max Weber, had to return to the original nineteenth-century ideal of Bildung as envisioned by the likes of Fichte and Humboldt by heeding his

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Figure 5.11. Illustration of selfhood. László Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur, bauhausbücher 14 (Munich: Albert Langen, 1929), 10. © Estate of László Moholy-Nagy / Sodrac (2016).

Beruf, understood not simply as occupation or profession but also as natural calling.80 Kandinsky, writing in 1928, would agree: Specialized training without basic knowledge of general humanistic concepts should no longer be possible. What is missing in today’s education— almost without exception— is an inner view of life or of the “philosophical” foundation of the meaning of human activity. . . . Education usually consists of a process of more or less forced accumulation of individual facts which students are supposed to learn and for which they have no use outside of a particular “field.” Of course, with this kind of learning the capacity for “integrating,” or in other words, the capacity for observing and thinking in terms of a synthesis, is disregarded to such a degree that, to a great extent, it becomes atrophied.81

In the classroom, Kandinsky too complained about the specialization and division of knowledge imposed by modernization. According to student notes from 1925, he criticized the walls that had been erected in the nineteenth century between the fields of religion, ethics, art, science, and philosophy.82 To make matters worse, the same internal demarcation was

Plate 1. Wassily Kandinsky, Survey asking students to correlate colors to shapes (rumored to be) filled out by Alfred Arndt, 1923. Lithograph on paper, pencil, and colored pencils. 23.3 × 15.1 cm. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Photo: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Inv. F991.

Plate 2. Hans Kessler, Tensions and pulses of the basic colors and forms, from Wassily Kandinsky’s theory of form course, 1931– 32. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Photo: Gunter Lepkowski. Inv. 2965/11.

Plate 3. Grid and cutout paper shapes with which Kandinsky probably taught, 1925– 33. (Above) 9½ × 9⅜ in. (Below) 6⅛ × 4⅞ in. Kandinsky Papers collection. With permission from the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 4. Formal analysis by Johannes Itten in which he used vellum (right) to reveal the proportions of an artwork under study (left). Bruno Adler, ed. Utopia: Dokumente der Wirklichkeit (Weimar: Utopia Verlag, 1921). © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ProLitteris, Zurich.

Plate 5. Exercise assigned by Kandinsky in his theory of form course. (Top and bottom left) Johannes Jacobus van der Linden, 1930– 31. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Photo: BauhausArchiv Berlin. Inv. 10855/133, 134. (Right) Hans Thiemann, Accenting the center, balance of above and below. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Photo: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Inv. 603.

Plate 6. Contrast-study props used by Kandinsky during lectures and accompanying student lecture notes, 1925– 33, approximately 11½ × 11½ in. Kandinsky Papers Collection. With permission from the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (850910; 850514). © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 7. Color triangle with cutout and configurations with which Kandinsky taught at the Bauhaus, 1925– 33. Pencil and gouache on paper. (Top left) 12½ × 12⅝ in. All materials from the Kandinsky Papers Collection. With permission from the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (850910). © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Plate 8. Geometric drawings by students from Paul Klee’s theory of form course at the Bauhaus, 1930. Pencil and crayon on paper, 11¾ × 8¼ in. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Photo: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Inv. 10365/37– 39.

Plate 9. Student notes from Paul Klee’s theory of form course at the Bauhaus, 1930. (Left) Hajo Rose, colored pencil and typewritten notes on paper; (right) pencil and colored pencil on paper. 11¾ × 8¼ in. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Photo: Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Inv. 10256/26– 27.

Plate 10. Student notes from Paul Klee’s theory of color course at the Bauhaus, undated. Unknown student, Bauhaus student work, 1919– 33 Collection. With permission from the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (850514), Box 2. © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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true of art, which had been divided in the academic tradition into painting, sculpture, and architecture and furthermore into subsections such as portrait, landscape, genre painting, etc. Yet, while the “internal coherency” of art had been lost, Kandinsky noted with relief, “external form” had remained.83 Kandinsky thus called for a “great synthesis”: walls between specialized realms of art and life would be taken down to develop a common root below, on the one hand, and an overarching cosmic principle above, on the other, so as to arrive at a state of “inner resonance” (inner Klang).84 Formalist techniques taught in the preliminary course were the first necessary step toward this new union of knowledge and selfhood necessitated by modernity. Neither such ranting against the specialization imposed by the capitalist division of labor nor the idea that the arts would help return modern society to a state of lost unity was novel by the beginning of the twentieth century. What was new at the Bauhaus was the idea that this elusive state of unity was to be reached through an art education that posited itself as the necessary first step toward achieving an epistemological ideal that rivaled conceptual and discursive knowledge of the conventional kind. Not everyone might have access to an education based on the epistemological principle of Wissen, but, according to Moholy-Nagy, every human had the ability to ripen his sensorial experience (Sinneserlebnis) and to bring to fruition the creative energy rooted in his humanity. Or, to put it differently, just as every human had the ability to speak, every human had the capability to “give form” (although, Moholy-Nagy also added, this capability did not always amount to “art”).85 This, above all, was the optimistic promise of Bauhaus pedagogy: not simply to train artists but to tap into every human’s innate creative talents.86 The epistemological ambitiousness of this claim cannot be stressed enough: if Moholy-Nagy and his fellow Bauhäusler are to be believed, the Bauhaus would succeed where every nineteenth- century attempt— from Pestalozzi to Froebel and from drawing to manual-skills classes in secondary education— at reforming education had failed. Bauhaus pedagogy was not only a new way of educating artists; it was the methodical implementation of Kennen as a pedagogical program. It should come as no surprise, then, that when Gropius elaborated on Bauhaus pedagogy again in 1937, this time from the other side of the ocean, he characterized it as the “third stage” of a “homogeneous fundamental tendency of the training in all schools.”87 When Gropius explained Bauhaus pedagogy in 1923, he presented design as a general training of sorts: the experiential training of the kind that was offered at the Bauhaus was poised to benefit the ordinary worker as much as the gifted artist.88 Writing from America in 1937, he reiterated that a preliminary artistic training, whose main goal was to develop formal and spatial understanding, was to be thought of as “a new groundwork” not for specialized art schools but for schools on all levels of the educational system. It would figure in kindergar-

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ten as free-drawing, painting, and modeling; in elementary and secondary education as basic handicraft training; and in arts schools, applied arts schools, trade schools, and architecture schools as the first step in more advanced work. Gropius too saw this kind of epistemological foundationalism as the guarantor of “unity” in the face of specialized knowledge demanded by division of labor. Gropius once again evoked the bull’s-eye diagram: the foundationalist epistemology, if offered at every level of the education system as he proposed, would grow “concentrically, like the annular rings of a tree, embracing the whole from the beginning and, at the same time, gradually deepening and extending it.”89 In light of the history outlined in this book, then, Gropius’s steadfastly centric model of selfhood for the “new man” was unexpectedly retrograde, closer in spirit to the one evoked by Humboldt or Fichte in the early nineteenth century and defended by Wundt a century later. Even while adopting the epistemological project of kinaesthetic knowing, the pedagogical techniques developed within modern design education aspired to rehabilitate the withering ideal of Bildung— except with Kennen rather than Wissen. Once its anachronism is recognized, Bauhaus pedagogy takes on new meaning. So does Gropius’s insistence on the centrality of space (Raum) and architecture (or, more correctly, Bau) in the Bauhaus enterprise. When Gropius argued that the concept of space would be central to every aspect of the curriculum and would serve as the medium that united the separate workshops of the school, then, he was not simply putting architecture, the field in which he had been trained himself, before others.90 Bau and Raum (which most would recognize as the “essence” of architecture by the early twentieth century thanks to theorists like August Schmarsow) had much broader epistemological significance here.91 As Gropius put it in his lecture notes from 1921, artistic work was merely the means through which “one built oneself ” (uns selbst aufbauen).92 In this sense, Bau in the school’s name signified more than architecture. “Academies make a grave mistake by neglecting the formation of the human being,” wrote Schlemmer in a letter in 1921. “Bauhaus is ‘building’ something quite different from what was planned— human beings.”93 It is no coincidence that so much of Bauhäusler’s writings is dedicated to the question of education understood in the broadest sense possible.94 Their grandiose statements about the significance of the educational program developed at the school should therefore be taken at face value. When Gropius declared that the artist was the “prototype for the whole man” in 1955, he was simply repeating the arguments that he had been making since the school’s inception. Bauhaus did not simply train artists for the modern age; it proposed design education as the quintessential educational model for modernity.95 In other words, in the educational program forged at the Bauhaus, the two meaning of Gestaltung— the design of forms and the design of self— fully merged into one.

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Design as Introspection Beginners must make exact, photographically correct drawings (in black and white as well as in color) from nature in order to train their ability to observe sharply and precisely. I want to train eyes, hands, and the memory. In other words, what is seen must be memorized [auswendiglernen]. I train first the physical body, hand, arm, shoulder, and the senses. That is the training of the externally given human. Gradually follows the training of Understanding [Verstand ]. Clear, simple, thoughtful observation of the sensually perceivable [Beobachten des sinnlich Wahrnehmbaren]. When this training reaches a certain state, the body will be unleashed to an increased extent. Chaotic exercises. The recognition of the self [Erkennen des Ich]. Two worlds: the self and the nonself, an important awareness. The outer and the inner, below and above. The goal is the pure and complete unleashing and representation of the self to the greatest extent possible. The recognition that nothing inward that is not outward leads to the pure training of inwardness. In contrast to the training of the outwardness. . . . Understanding [der Verstand] always remains as the safeguard below.96

So Itten described the beginner’s course that he had been teaching in Vienna in his notes from August 1918— that is, a year before he inaugurated the preliminary course at the Bauhaus in Weimar. Despite its philosophical hyperbole, the description is worth examining at length, because Itten appears to be pursuing two seemingly irreconcilable epistemological goals at once in this brief journal entry. On the one hand, like many of the reform-minded figures discussed in this book, Itten was committed to the epistemological principle of kinaesthetic knowing. He proposed a model of learning in which the training of the body took precedence over the training of the mind, and understanding was not the driving cognitive force but merely the “safeguard below.” On the other hand, he unexpectedly evoked a much-maligned method, frequently associated with old-fashioned educational practices: memorization. This meant that the pedagogy developed at the Bauhaus looked as much backward as forward. Since the goal was not to abolish Bildung but to restore it, Bauhäusler like Itten had no qualms about adopting and adjusting practices of nineteenth- century education. Itten combined these with Eastern mysticism to carry out experiments on himself to hone his attentive capabilities: according to his diaries, he would observe an object carefully for five minutes, reproduce it from memory the following day, and, finally, compare the drawing to the original object. “Schooling of observation, attention, power of imagination, concentration, in short, of memory. I must have my students draw more from memory.”97 At the Bauhaus, after making his students spend half an hour every morning for a week drawing a potted fern plant, at the end of the week he made them reproduce the fern from

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memory.98 Such novel techniques were not necessarily irreconcilable with academic practices. Among the assignments that he regularly employed in class, for example, was the analysis of old masters’ paintings: using a sciopticon and black-and-white lantern slides, he would project a painting on the wall (Master Francke’s Adoration of the Magi, for example), turn off the projector, and ask his students to examine the painting’s proportions, formal arrangement, etc. from memory (plate 4).99 It is significant to note here that Itten was not promoting copying or imitating an external model (a drawing, a sculpture, an architectural fragment, etc.) as in the academic tradition. Nor was he advocating a technique whereby the student would freely express the urges of inner feeling. Instead, Itten adapted the principles of the nineteenth-century ideal of Bildung to formulate a pedagogical method whereby inner feeling was heeded only to be trained rigorously and the self was unleashed only to be refocused through attentive concentration.100 To use the object-subject dichotomy evoked by Itten and others discussed throughout this book, this was a pedagogical program that entailed the training of subjective feeling with objective rigor. We have already seen in previous chapters that there was another field of knowledge with exactly the same goal in the nineteenth century: psychology. The various camps of the discipline— those defending a “descriptive” psychology and those who advocated an “analytic” approach, for example— agreed on this much: a thorough accounting of inner experience was essential to the task of creating a discipline that could call itself a science.101 Even that most adamant experimentalist Wilhelm Wundt did not tire of repeating that psychological research had to be as committed to introspection (Selbstbeobachtung) as to experimental methods borrowed from the nineteenth-century discipline of physiology.102 (As we saw in chapter 1, Wundt’s commitment to introspection reaffirmed the centrality of Bildung, as well as of Protestantism, to which the former was indebted). However, unlike other objects of scientific study— whether a rock, a frog, or the whole universe— experience did not lend itself to being objectified easily. According to Wundt, the difficulty of combining the introspective method with an experimental method— a difficulty pointed out by none other than Kant himself— was precisely why psychology was propitiously situated between the natural and the human sciences. However, Wundt also recognized that it was not sufficient to simply turn one’s gaze inward and examine one’s feelings, as so many philosophers had done, or to experiment on oneself, as so many scientists had attempted. If experience was the elusive object of psychology, the difficult question was this: How could the conspicuously biased practice of self- examination be turned into a method that could compete in its rigorousness with the methods of experimentation employed in the natural sciences? The peculiar shape of the psychological experiment was the direct result of this difficulty. Attached to mechanical contraptions, psychologists measured the time,

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Figure 5.12. Students studying the effect of attention on color perception in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory in Dane Hall, Harvard University, 1892. Photograph taken for the Harvard University Exhibit at the World’s Fair in Chicago. Harvard University Archives A544, HUPSF Psychological Laboratories (2).

intensity, and duration of sensations produced in their own bodies, as well as on the bodies of their fellow experimenters, in response to various stimuli. In this sense, procedures for experimental psychology were almost always protocols for methodical introspection (fig. 5.12). Of all the artifacts and techniques that modern design education borrowed from experimental psychology, then, this was the most crucial. If the new art education was to be predicated on the alternative epistemological principle of kinaesthetic knowing, it could not be established on the shaky foundation of fleeting inner experiences. Despite their differences, Bauhaus masters shared the common goal of subjecting those experiences to strict protocols so that they could reliably serve as the building blocks of legitimate knowledge— a kind of knowledge deemed necessary for training the “whole man” of the future. The students were confronted with such protocols throughout their training at the Bauhaus. In one assignment that Kandinsky used repeatedly

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in his courses, for example, he instructed his students to use a “ground plane— 30x30 cm, 9 colors— 3 primary colors, 3 secondary colors, 3 black white gray— 18 small fields 5x10 cm— emphasize the center, balance above and below, black and white accents— gray— mediation.”103 Anticipating the nine-square-grid problem that would be a mainstay of architectural education in North America in the postwar period, the exercise gave students not a clean slate upon which they could express themselves with unrestricted freedom but rather a set of strict limitations that forced them to contemplate a severely limited number of formal possibilities.104 After all, how many 5 × 10 cm rectangles could fit into a 30 × 30 cm square (plate 5)? The procedure to be followed was clear: consider all the iterations possible within the given set of limitations, test the effect of each composition upon yourself (Does it emphasize the center? Is it balanced? Are the criteria that the assignment demanded fulfilled?), and finally make a judgment about the best possible composition. The pedagogical goal here was not to discover a correct solution but rather to make sure that the student meticulously followed the protocols each time. To borrow Wundtian terminology, design was defined here as a process whereby haphazard self- observation (Selbstbeobachtung) was converted to methodical inner perception (innere Wahrnehmung) with the help of rigorously defined procedures.105 Future critics of Wundt would point out repeatedly that experimenters in the psychological laboratory ultimately observed nothing more than behavior.106 As in the experimental psychology laboratory, the boundary between introspection and social performance was a blurry one at the Bauhaus: the process of examining one’s inner experience methodically was frequently realized in public. Just as schoolteachers employing methods of stigmography in secondary-school drawing classes performed the formalist exercise in front of a classroom full of children, Bauhäusler devised a pedagogical method whereby lecturing would be combined with in-class demonstrations and exercises. The student Ursula Schuh recalled that Kandinsky “brought a large number of differently colored rectangles, squares, discs, and triangles in various colors with him; he [held] these up in front of us in different combinations in order to test and develop our powers of vision.”107 The difference between the props that Kandinsky used in his lectures and those used in an experimental psychology laboratory is nearly indistinguishable: pairs of contrast studies (black circle on white and white circle on black) on oversized pieces of cardboard, a paper contraption with a triangular cutout that made it possible to view various color combinations, etc. (plates 6, 7). After leaving the Bauhaus, Max Bill at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm and Albers at Black Mountain College and at Yale would continue the practice of performing in the classroom using similar teaching aids (figs. 5.13, 5.14). Klee developed a different but no less rigorous set of methods for training introspection. If Kandinsky designed self-contained assignments that dictated the step-by-step set of operations (one might compare them to recipes)

Figure 5.13. Max Bill lecturing at the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm with a teaching tool of the kind used by Kandinsky at the Bauhaus to experiment with afterimages, 1956. Photographed by Hans G. Conrad. Figure 5.14. Stills from the 16 mm film Josef Albers teaching at Yale, by John Cohen, circa 1955. Courtesy of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation.

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to be performed, Klee deployed mathematical formulas and geometric constructions meticulously carried out with a straightedge and a compass to produce formal iterations automatically (plate 8).108 Both his own lecture notes and his students’ notes from his courses on form and color abound with instances of a technique whereby grids of color were changed— mirrored, turned clockwise or counterclockwise, inverted horizontally or vertically, or entirely transformed— with the aid of matrices of numbers (plates 9, 10).109 Formal variations were produced in each instance not arbitrarily but according to a painstakingly worked- out set of rules (which might anachronistically be called “algorithms”). It followed that the grid in Klee’s work was not a form intended as an end in itself but rather an instrument that guided the disciplined manipulation of other forms. In 1928, as Meyer’s “constructivist” tendencies were taking over the school’s pedagogical program, Klee wrote a passionate vindication of “intuition.” Klee’s, however, was not a defense of intuition in the name of giving unlimited free rein to inner expression. Rather, in a remarkable echo of Endell’s call for a “mathematics of living feeling” from three decades ago, Klee wrote of art as “accurate research”: Art too possesses sufficient room for accurate research [exakte Forschung], and the gates leading to it have been open for some time. What had already been done for music by the end of the eighteenth century remains at least in its infancy in the pictorial field. Mathematics and physics provide a lever in the form of rules to be followed and to be broken. They compel us . . . to be concerned first of all with operations [Funktionen] and to disregard finished form. Algebraic, geometric, and mechanical tasks are educational steps directed toward the essential and the functional, in contrast to the impressional [Impressiven]. One learns to look behind the façade, to grasp the roots of things. . . . Learns to organize movement through logical relations. Learns logic. Learns organism.  .  .  . Passion only deep inside. Inwardness [Inner­ lichkeit].110

Klee’s words can be considered an answer to the question that Gropius would pose two decades later in Scope of Total Architecture: Can there be a “science of design?”111 Contrary to the critiques of functionalism that would follow, this was not a science unconditionally committed to the model of the natural sciences but rather a new science of experience that only borrowed its standards of rigorousness from them. It is important to note, in light of Klee’s insistence on systematic intuition, that while the production of formal iterations was made possible through a kind of automatism— whether by means of a recipe, a mathematical formula, or a geometrical pattern mattered little— the decision about the final form was ultimately expected to be made with the faculty of judgment. To be able to make the right judgment, however, Bauhaus students had to exert their bodies in a circuit of stimulus and response and try out the formal effects of each form on themselves through

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Figure 5.15. Hannes Meyer, “bauen,” bauhaus. zeitschrift für gestaltung 2.4 (1928): 12– 13. Reprinted in Das Bauhaus: 1919– 1933, ed. Hans M. Wingler (Cologne: DuMont, [1962] 2002), 160– 61.

a process of introspection.112 In short, design training was developed at the Bauhaus as a set of protocols whereby methodical introspection could be put into the service of not random but rather rigorous formal manipulation. Like early psychologists who combined methods of experimentation and introspection as they conducted tests on themselves and on their fellow psychologists, students in the preliminary course had to learn to observe and register what was assumed to be their own reflex-like response to lines, forms, and colors in an endless cycle of formal manipulation. Two Meanings of Bauen In 1928 a table that was peculiarly similar to August Endell’s table of feeling from thirty years ago appeared on the pages of the Bauhaus journal (figs. 5.15, 3.1).113 Devised by the architect Hannes Meyer, this table too was made up of nothing but words graphically arranged on the page without any apparent syntax. Unlike Endell’s table of adjectives, however, Meyer’s table was made up of nouns: from reinforced concrete to synthetic rubber and from wire-mesh glass to asbestos, this version of the architectural table enumerated materials, many of which had become available to architecture relatively recently. Meyer’s table was part of a graphic essay titled “bauen,” in which the author announced with polemical fanfare that everything in the world was the product of a simple formula: function × economy. “all these things are, therefore, not works of art,” read the text; “all art is composition and, hence, is unsuited to achieve goals. all life is function and is therefore unartistic.”114 Endell had argued in 1898 that architecture was the design of emotive effects listed in his table and that, furthermore, a methodical analysis of the relationship between architectural form and affect could provide the road map to a rigorous science of experience that could serve as the foundation of all human sciences. Meyer, by contrast, emphatically dismissed such aspirations: “architecture as an ‘emotional act [affektleistung] of the artist’ has no justification,’ he wrote, as if despite Endell.115 Anyone who was familiar with the school would understand the meaning of his words: the psychological orientation that had been an undercurrent at the Bauhaus since its inception was finally to be replaced by a commitment to

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the DNA (Deutscher Normenausschuß; German Committee of Norms), guidelines of norms prepared by German technocrats. By the time Meyer’s table was published in 1928, much had changed at the Bauhaus. The school’s brief history was never free from conflict and economic uncertainty, but, under intense pressure in an increasingly polarized political environment, it had been forced to move from Weimar to the industrial city of Dessau in 1925, settling in the building designed by Gropius. Soon afterward the school was incorporated into the German university system as a Hochschule für Gestaltung (College of Design), which meant that Bauhaus teachers were now to be referred to as “professors” as opposed to “masters.”116 Gropius had hired Meyer in 1927 to inaugurate the much-delayed implementation of an architectural workshop, the aspirational core of his bull’s-eye diagram, but only a year later Gropius stepped down, leaving his position as director to Meyer. Meyer’s communism would become a matter of controversy during his tenure, leading to his forced resignation in 1930. His short-lived directorship reinforced what seemed like an irreversible sea change in the school’s history: a change— at least since the 1923 exhibition on art and technology— toward what future historians would label as a “functionalist” direction.117 Meyer not only substantially strengthened the architectural training offered at the Bauhaus but fundamentally changed the school’s disciplinary configuration. In a curricular diagram from 1927— this time a grid and not a bull’s-eye— architecture appeared as one of four workshops; the others were advertising, stage, and the awkwardly named “seminar for free sculptural and painterly design” (fig. 5.16).118 The preliminary course was still in place, but the curriculum was now structured so that instruction unequivocally progressed toward increasing specialization. Meyer’s conception of bauen, then, marked a transformation of the Bau that was the center of Gropius’s bull’s- eye curriculum diagram. Gropius, as we have seen, had conceived bauen not only as architecture but also as a metaphor for constructing the self. Accordingly, design education was the proper means to carry out this metaphorical construction. Meyer was more literal-minded than his predecessor and less committed to nineteenth- century ideals. He saw architecture simply as the montage of building materials according to the biological requirements of life, which he listed in an equally matter-of-fact table below the first in the 1928 essay. This was not simply a superficial change in the meaning of bauen. In Meyer’s Bauhaus, architecture was no longer to be the elusive but optimistically transdisciplinary destination of Bauhaus pedagogy as it had been in the early years of the school. Nor did bauen any longer allude to the making of a “whole man” aligned with ideas of Bildung borrowed from the previous century. Itten was correct when years later he clarified that the early years of the school were not so much the “romantic” as “the universalistic period of the Bauhaus.”119 Meyer cleverly explained the changed curricular logic

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Figure 5.16. Semester plan from 1927. Prospekt. Bauhaus Dessau Hochschule für Gestaltung (Dessau: Arthur Bodenthal, 1927), 4– 5.

in an organizational diagram: what necessitated the changes was not the conditions inside the school but rather practical conditions outside, which demanded new alignments.120 Here the school appeared as a factory and the students as raw material to be fed into it (fig. 5.17). In the new curriculum, disciplined expert knowledge was stressed, the boundaries between the workshops of the school became more pronounced, and specialists from other disciplines were routinely invited to lecture at the school throughout Meyer’s tenure. By the time Mies van der Rohe assumed directorship and the preliminary course was no longer mandatory, the precarious balance of disciplinary forces that had made the transdisciplinary core of Gropius’s 1922 diagram possible had effectively become history. Just as psychology had lost its privileged status as a bridge discipline between the natural and the human sciences in the early twentieth century, architecture was now demoted to being one specialty among others at the Bauhaus. Curiously, however, Gropius’s curricular diagram that posited architecture as the transdisciplinary ideal with which to educate the “whole man”

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Figure 5.17. Hannes Meyer, “Organizational Chart of the Bauhaus and Its Relation to the Outside,” 1930. Reprinted in Das Bauhaus: 1919– 1933, ed. Hans M. Wingler (Cologne: DuMont, [1962] 2002), 463.

came back to life on the other side of the ocean. Historians have already begun to chronicle how the dissolution of the Bauhaus became the means through which its pedagogy was filtered to the rest of the globe.121 Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Albers, who went to the United States, are only the better-known figures: the influence of other Bauhäusler reached as far as the Soviet Union, Israel, India, and Austrialia. Fifteen years after Gropius had drawn up the circular curriculum diagram, and a decade after Bau as a transdisciplinary ideal had been abandoned at the German Bauhaus, MoholyNagy resuscitated the bull’s-eye diagram in Chicago (fig. 5.18). MoholyNagy had left the Bauhaus in 1929 after disagreements with Meyer and was working in England in 1937 when he was invited by the chairman of the Container Corporation of America to establish a new school in Chicago based on the pedagogical principles of the Bauhaus.122 (Moholy-Nagy’s decision to resurrect Gropius’s diagram must also have had something to do with laying claim to an “original” Bauhaus, since the invitation had first gone to Gropius, who had already accepted a position at Harvard University.) The similarities between the two curricular diagrams notwithstanding,

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Figure 5.18. László Moholy-Nagy, Curricular diagram. First Program Announcement: The New Bauhaus. Chicago, Fall 1937. © Estate of László Moholy-Nagy / Sodrac (2016).

the educational programs offered at the old and New Bauhaus were markedly different. As early as 1937 Moholy-Nagy promised the Association of Arts and Industries, a group of Chicago-based industrialists who worked to further the relationship between artists and commerce, that the studios of the New Bauhaus would be laboratories for industry, thus accepting from the outset that the New Bauhaus would be preoccupied with vocational training as opposed to a well-rounded education.123 In other words, the industrial connections that Gropius had sought out with desperation in Germany to save the school from bankruptcy at a time of high inflation and financial instability were present— sometimes in ways that were not entirely welcome to Moholy-Nagy— in the New Bauhaus from the beginning. Moholy-Nagy assured his financial supporters that the school would be pursuing applicable knowledge: “To you— the industrialists— we offer our services for research,” he promised. “We shall work on your problems. In our workshops we shall provide research possibilities for synthetic fibers, fashion, dying, printing on textiles, wallpaper design, mural painting, the use of varnishes, lacquers, sprays, and color combinations in decorating; we shall explore for

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microphotography, motion pictures in color and black and white, commercial art in posters and packages.”124 (He also did not neglect to ask them for in-kind material donations: photographic film, various kinds of metal and plastics, etc.125) This blatantly practical orientation accounted for the primary differences between the old bull’s- eye diagram and the new one. In Chicago, the weaving workshop became the textile studio, while fashion, display, exhibition, decorating, and film publicity appeared as new categories. Psychophysical experiments of the tactile kind that had preoccupied Moholy-Nagy students in Germany continued at the New Bauhaus, but these experiments were now presented in terms of their usefulness to industry. Once the United States entered the war, tactile diagrams were no longer only opportunities to ripen the sensorium for modernity, as they had been in Germany, but were presented as rehabilitation tools for soldiers returning from war, as well as for victims of industrial accidents.126 Remarkably, however, Moholy-Nagy also resurrected in Chicago what Gropius could not in a professional school within the liberal arts setting of Harvard: an obligatory preliminary course.127 The preliminary course at the New Bauhaus, an early prospectus explained, was meant to help “shorten the road to self-experience.”128 At least since Malerei, Fotographie, Film (1925), Moholy-Nagy had been arguing that modern art would eventually advance from the materiality of pigment to the immateriality of light— from painting to photography, film, and, finally, architecture.129 Now his prophecies about modern art’s trajectory seemed to be coming true: in America, the preliminary design would be reconfigured as “visual communication,” anticipating an understanding of perception as a transmission of signals. Supplemented by scientific subjects such as geometry, physics, chemistry, anatomy, etc., the new preliminary course incorporated drawing, modeling, and photography classes with the goal of teaching students “the constructive handling of materials; wood, plywood, paper, plastics, rubber, cork, leather, textiles,” etc.130 One new addition to the curriculum of the New Bauhaus, “Intellectual Integration,” signaled that the epistemological subtext of the preliminary course was, in fact, very different in the United States.131 In Germany, the preliminary course had been made possible by a discourse in which psychology was the testing case in debates about the demarcation of disciplines. In America, the preliminary course became possible again at another moment of crossing disciplinary boundaries— that is, at that moment when the warboosted “interdisciplines” of cybernetics, computation, operations research, game theory, etc., were considered the new lingua franca of the sciences.132 Charles Morris, professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, an important figure in the American Unity of Science movement, and a supporter of the New Bauhaus, explained the significance of integration thus: If the artist is to function in the modern world, he must feel himself a part of it, and to have this sense of social integration he must command the instru-

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ments and materials of the world. . . . No integration is humanly complete which does not include his mind. . . . The new Bauhaus shows deep wisdom in using contemporary science and philosophy in its educational task of reintegrating the artist into the common life. In this atmosphere the artificial separation of the artist and scientist cannot thrive. . . . It is the same man who seeks knowledge and a significant life, and it is the same world that is known and found significant. . . . The problem is a general problem of all education, which aims to be of vital contemporary significance.133

The idea of integration, which held the disparate parts of the circular curriculum diagram together in Chicago, was unlike the ideal of transdisciplinarity in Gropius’s bull’s- eye diagram.134 While the American advocates of integration were also opposed to the demarcation of modern fields of knowledge, unlike their German counterparts who put their faith in kinaesthetic knowing, they called for an epistemology that promised to integrate the mind with technology. In this sense, what Moholy-Nagy called “a new unity of purpose” was not so new: integration was a project that aspired to return to an Enlightenment epistemology that once again privileged the mind over the body.135 Nonetheless, the American context gave MoholyNagy an excuse to revisit the elusive “whole man” that had been the focus of his fellow Bauhäusler in Germany. The education of the specialist, MoholyNagy wrote in Vision in Motion, should not start with the training of a single ability before a harmoniously related, all-around education had been completed.136 What was needed was an education that was “indivisible, integrating elements of art, science, and technology.”137 The American ideal of liberal education, as he saw it, was just as specialized as vocational training. Only an artistic education of the kind offered at the Bauhaus— or rather at its American reincarnation— offered the necessary “integrated” pedagogy required of the twentieth century.138 Designing, he concluded, was “not a profession but an attitude.”139 Like Gropius, who consistently put the burden of epistemological synthesis on architecture, Moholy-Nagy concluded Vision in Motion with an architectural project. This, however, was no Gothic cathedral like the one that had ornamented the founding document of the German Bauhaus. Rather, it was a three-winged building by John J. Kewell, a “cultural working center” where the ideal of intellectual integration would be spatialized, a place where “scientists, artists, technicians, and businessmen would assemble under one roof.”140 Moholy-Nagy fantasized that each of these intellectuals would work independently but would hold weekly councils in order to solve “one problem of social importance through common effort.”141 MoholyNagy’s fantasy proved not so fantastic after all: today, decades after the idea of transdisciplinarity seems implausible, the campus of almost every major research university in North America displays an example of such an “interdisciplinary” research center. To the extent that the preliminary course’s reincarnation in Chicago can

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Figure 5.19. Vorkurs students at the Bauhaus in Dessau. Unknown photographer, 1927– 28, Kandinsky Papers collection. With permission from the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (900079).

be considered indicative of the fate of kinaesthetic knowing on the other side of the ocean, it might be an appropriate way to conclude this chapter about modern design education. The New Bauhaus was an entirely different institutional context with an epistemological subtext that departed radically from that in which the original preliminary course had been developed. And yet the New Bauhaus students in Chicago spent their days doing more or less what the Bauhaus students in Weimar, Dessau, or Berlin had been doing and what design students across the world would continue to do for decades to come (fig. 5.19). They learned to look comparatively, to assume immediacy between form and affect, to draw in a particular manner that utilized the free movements of their bodies, and, most importantly, they learned to design: which meant devising protocols to generate formal iterations, testing the effects of those forms on themselves, and, finally, making judgments— whether alone or in the company of others— about the best one. In this sense, even while kinaesthetic knowing may have lost its credibility as the foundation of an entire constellation of sciences, it survived in the silent, everyday practices of the design studio. Decades after psychophysics no longer enjoyed general currency outside of the psychological laboratory,

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“aesthetics from below” was dead, and the project of kinaesthetic knowing was forgotten, design students around the world would be trained through formal manipulation. Juxtaposing, rotating, reversing, superimposing, and transforming forms, they would be producing an unusual form of knowledge unlike that in the humanities or in the social or natural sciences. The survival of these practices despite the disappearance of the epistemological framework that made them historically possible may help explain design’s peculiar disciplinarity today: on the one hand, a misfit in the highly demarcated structure of academic disciplines and, on the other, a peculiarly open field amenable to unorthodox forms of exploration.

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Epilogue

It seems fitting to end where psychoanalysis began: in a diagram that Sigmund Freud drew in 1895 as part of a book that he planned to call Entwurf einer Psychologie (Outline of a Psychology) (fig. 6.1).1 Freud’s diagram seems relevant as an epilogue to this book for two reasons. First, it is considered by many to be a turning point in his career. It was while writing this text, initially intended as a psychological treatise for neurologists, that Freud turned away from the kind of psychological thinking practiced by the protagonists of this book toward psychoanalysis. Second, although Freud never finished the manuscript and almost destroyed it, since the posthumous publication of the book in 1950 and its translation into English in 1954, the diagram has made a comeback in discussions of neuroscience as anticipating neural network theories avant la lettre. According to John Onians, the author of Neuroarthistory, for example, the open, organic, and connected nature of the neurons depicted in the diagram from the Entwurf was a welcome contrast to the more rigid, overdetermined structure that would appear a few years later in the Interpretation of Dreams (fig. 6.2).2 The Entwurf, then, is as much a beginning as an end. It is also an object lesson in the politics of knowledge. Freud’s diagram reminds us what was at stake in the epistemological ambitions of psychological thinking in the nineteenth century and what it might mean to revive them in the twenty-first. At a moment when psychology was considered a test case in debates regarding the organization of the disciplines, Freud stated his view unequivocally at the beginning of the unpublished text. The psychophysical logic of his thinking seemed crystal clear at first: “The intention is to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science,” read the opening sentence of the Entwurf, “that is, to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles.”3 The Entwurf described an “economics of nervous force,” a state of equilibrium achieved between cathexis (Besetzung, energization or occupation) and inhibition (Hemmung) of nervous energy. An elusive quantity of energy Qη— a material entity, Freud insisted, that was “subject to the general laws of motion” and that was therefore unmistakably in the jurisdiction of the natural

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Figure 6.1. Diagram showing neural cathexis. Sigmund Freud, Entwurf einer Psychologie (Project for a Scientific Psychology), manuscript of 1895. Sigmund Freud Collection, Library of Congress, Box OV 13, Reel 6.

sciences— moved through “contact-barriers,” neural gaps that would later be called “synapses,” with the ultimate goal of achieving a state of inertia resembling homeostasis.4 According to the Entwurf, there existed two classes of neurons: permeable neurons, which “after each passage of excitation [were] in the same state as before,” and, more crucially, impermeable neurons, which were loaded with resistance, altered by the passage of energy, and were therefore able to retain traces of the passage. Memory, in this scheme, was dependent not on the neurons themselves but rather on the degree of facilitation (in German Bahnung, a word with implications of “grooving”) between them. Because it was only the resistant, impermeable neurons that retained the memory of an impulse, inhibition was described in the Entwurf as a process crucial to the possibility of an ego.5 The ego, in fact, appeared in the text as nothing more than the totality of neural connections, “a network of cathected neurons well facilitated in relation to one another.”6 Freud was not alone in imagining the nerves as an elaborate network resembling wiring diagrams used to design electric circuits at the end of the

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Figure 6.2. Diagram showing the relationship of the mind to memory-traces. Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung (Leipzig and Vienna: Franz Deuticke, 1900), figs. 1– 3.

nineteenth century (fig. 6.3).7 Wundt too discussed nerve cells as a complex web. Even as he acknowledged interference between neurons, however, Wundt’s wiring diagram of neurons was the indefinitely multiplied version of a simple reflex action, in which every sensation received by the body produced a motor response as predictably as the mechanism of a clock (fig. 6.4).8 In Wundt’s diagram, each afferent impulse (e) was transmitted first to the spinal cord (r) and then to the brain (c). The motor response varied (b, b’, or e’) according to whether it was the spinal cord or the brain that reflected the stimulus. Since the reflex action functioned like the mechanism of a spring, the higher levels of the nervous system occasionally inhibited its release. For Wundt, in fact, this was the physiological basis for the action of the will, which, as we have seen in the earlier chapters, was crucial to the process of apperception and the formation of the self.9 By contrast, Freud’s 1895 wiring diagram of a neural network demonstrated interference between nervous excitations at the lower levels without the intervention of the brain or the spinal cord. The diagram was marked by an unexpected interruption: the cathexis (Besetzung) of one branch (a­b) facilitated the discharge of an excited neuron in a direction away from the neuron’s connection with those neurons responsible for a motor response (a­α). In other words, all excitations were functionally and temporally

Figure 6.3. Circuit of nerves. Sigmund Exner, Entwurf zu einer physiologischen Erklärung psychischen Erscheinungen (Leipzig and Vienna: Franz Deuticke, 1894), fig. 56. Figure 6.4. Functioning of a simple reflex. Wilhelm Wundt, Vorlesungen über die Menschen- und Thierseele, vol. 1 (Leipzig: L. Voss, 1863), 208.

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interdependent. If, Freud explained, a represented a hostile image and b was a key path to unpleasure, then the nervous impulse was directed to α.10 The secondary branch inhibited and overlaid the primary branch in order to avoid unpleasure or pain.11 It is precisely this kind of thinking about neural networks in the Entwurf that excites neuroscientists today.12 In Freud’s diagram, they see the model of a temporally and functionally dynamic network. They argue that Freud’s system of contact-barriers, which would enable a human (or, for that matter, a machine) to make suitable choices based on the memory of previous events and which would use feedback as a means of correcting errors, anticipated Dewey’s reflex arc, Sherrington’s integrative action, the Hebbian synapse, theories of neuroplasticity, and, ultimately, computational thinking (fig. 1.7).13 What made Freud’s diagram appealing and different from Wundt’s mechanical wiring diagram, according to this view, was its prescient “dynamism.”14 If consciousness figured in the Wundtian scheme as the apperception of afferent sensations by a will- centered consciousness, nervous signals in the Entwurf were transmitted according to the binary choices of pleasure or pain— as if in a computer code. And yet paradoxically, it seems, this was exactly where Freud’s thinking ran into trouble in the Entwurf. The dynamism of the neural network notwithstanding, the question persisted for Freud: If any given Qη cathected entire regions of neurons, why did the nervous energy not move without friction in the system? Why did some paths of facilitation prove more resistant and therefore more persistent than others? “To assume that there is an ultimate difference between the valence of the contact-barriers of φ and of Ψ,” Freud noted uneasily in the text, “has once more an unfortunate tinge of arbitrariness.”15 Why, in the diagram, did Qη follow the path of a­α instead of being simply relayed to b? What produced difference in the seemingly undifferentiated network of neurons? What was the motive, asked Freud, without being able to provide a satisfactory answer. The question that Freud thus posed in the Entwurf was no less profound than the question of causality. This, remember, was the central problem that bedeviled one thinker after another in this history of kinaesthetic knowing. In the earlier chapters we have seen how turn-of-the- century debates about the organization of the disciplines inherited the problem from nineteenthcentury Protestant theologians, who had reacted to the pressures of mechanistic theories at mid-nineteenth century by gradually withdrawing their claims about nature and ultimately leaving causal explanation to the natural sciences.16 Seen in light of this history, every nineteenth- century attempt at disciplinary arrangement was implicitly also a proposition about the arrangement of the world. That did not mean, however, that the natural sciences coincided neatly with a mechanistic worldview. As we have seen, for Wundt, psychology had to have a stereoscopic disciplinary perspective. On the one hand, it tried to analytically explain physical causality using

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Figure 6.5. Simplified diagram of cathexis. Sigmund Freud, Entwurf einer Psychologie (Project for a Scientific Psychology), manuscript of 1895. Sigmund Freud Collection, Library of Congress, Box OV 13, Reel 6.

experimental methods, that is, by measuring breathing, pulse, and speed of nervous transmission, etc; on the other, it attempted to describe psychic causality through methodical introspection.17 To use the terminology employed by Fechner, the founder of the field of psychophysics, while physical causality and psychic causality were akin to convex and concave lenses upon the same subject matter of experience, they could never be reduced to one other.18 Wundtian psychology, conceived as a propaedeutic science, busied itself with shuttling back and forth between the analytic methods of the natural sciences and the interpretive methods of the human sciences but always under the surveillance of philosophy, the queen of the disciplines.19 If Wundt rejected methodological reductionism, Freud unequivocally adopted it in the Entwurf— at least in the blunt declaration at the beginning of the text that psychology was a natural science. Yet, it seems, halfway through the manuscript Freud had a change of heart. By the time another diagram of cathexis appeared in the book, a diagram whose structure was similar to that of the earlier diagram of neurons, what was sketched was not the functioning of neurons but rather the famous story of Irma’s injection that would appear in 1900 in The Interpretation of Dreams (fig. 6.5): Let A be a dream idea which has become conscious and which leads to B. But instead of B, C is found in consciousness, and this is because [it] lies on the pathway between B and a D cathexis which is simultaneously present. Thus there is a diversion brought about by a simultaneous cathexis, of a different kind, which, incidentally, is not itself conscious. For that reason, then, C has taken the place of B, though B fits in better with the connection of thought, with the wish-fulfillment.20

Freud might as well have used the famous diagram from The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, the diagram that demonstrated how his memory replaced one proper name with a chain of others in an attempt to repress an emotionally painful episode with a patient (fig. 6.6).21 The side-cathexis in both di-

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Figure 6.6. The physical mechanism of forgetfulness. Sigmund Freud, “Zum psychischen Mechanismus der Vergesslichkeit,” Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie 4.6 (December 1898), fig. 1.

agrams was no longer just the mechanism of inhibition as in Wundtian psychology but of repression, a mechanism crucial, as Freud would subsequently argue, to sublimation and mediating primitive urges in the social world.22 As Lacan would later point out, with the insertion of repression, the structure of the neural cathexis became linguistic. The investigation of the unconscious was always suspended in a flux of associative chains: the substitutive formation of repression was similar to the incessant sliding of the signifier and the signified, essential to the production of meaning through the interplay of difference in structural linguistics. To put it in Lacanian terms, Freud’s unconscious was structured like language.23 Appearing at a crucial juncture in Freud’s career (as well as in the organization of disciplines at the university), the concept of repression muddled the distinction between psychology as a natural science and psychology as a human science. Why did Freud abandon the Entwurf halfway? Why did he turn away from an exclusively naturalistic framework according to which nervous signals traveled through an undifferentiated network of neurons and toward a normative one, according to which the unconscious was understood only with reference to a system of signification analogous to language? For those who find in his Entwurf the intimations of contemporary neuroscience, Freud left the manuscript unfinished because he did not have the empirical evidence about the workings of neurons that we have today.24 It is, of course, neither possible nor particularly helpful to attempt to reconstruct

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Freud’s thinking, so let us imagine instead what Freud could and could not think under the circumstances. First, we need to remember, a year before Freud wrote the Entwurf the neo-Kantian philosopher Wilhelm Windelband gave an influential rectorial address in which he proposed a new principle for the organization of the disciplines at the university.25 As we saw in chapter 1, the natural sciences were to be separated from the human sciences because of methodological— as opposed to substantive— differences. The former inquired into general laws and pursued propositions, whereas the latter examined singular historical facts and produced evaluations. According to the new disciplinary regime proposed by Windelband, psychology did not occupy the privileged position that Wundtian science claimed: it now had to be one natural science among others. In the Entwurf, then, Freud overlaid the kind of psychology that concerned itself with neurons with another kind that attended to the language-like functioning of the psyche at the very moment that the boundary between the natural and the human sciences was being drawn with unprecedented certainty. Second, it is crucial to acknowledge, Freud could not answer questions about the particular path that a nervous energy took within the confines of the epistemological framework that he had set up for himself at the beginning of the Entwurf, namely, within the framework of psychology as a natural science. For even in the absence of a theological subtext, the question of causality remained a question of teleology; once unbridled, it could never be fully answered but only be infinitely deferred. Freud must have realized the paradox as well as Helmholtz had when the latter theorized Kennen, kinaesthetic knowledge, as distinct from Wissen, propositional knowledge: that accounting for the errant pathway of the nervous energy would ultimately require nothing less than what Derrida would decades later call a “transcendental signified.” We have seen how, when confronted with the same dilemma, theorists of kinaesthetic knowing attempted to halt the infinitely deferrable question of causality within the framework of the body and its capacity for experience. Freud chose a solution that was markedly different: he offered to suspend the question on the plane of human action— that is, ethics and politics.26 If we believe Louis Althusser, this was what distinguished Freud from previous theorists of the psyche.27 Before the psychoanalyst theorized them, Althusser argued in a seminal essay, dreams were seen as the realm of the “purely imaginary, i.e. null, result of ‘day’s residues,’ presented in an arbitrary arrangement and order, sometimes even ‘inverted,’ in other words, in ‘disorder.’”28 It was Freud’s ingenuity to recognize order, structure, and, above all, history in dreams— despite the fact that the very absence of these things appeared to be their distinguishing mark. What Freud thereby also discovered, according to Althusser, was ideology: not explicit but rather implicit politics that permeated the material practices of everyday life.29

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By incorporating the mechanism of repression into the unconscious, Freud also opened up a different disciplinary path for psychology. It is in this sense that the Entwurf is as much a beginning as an end. Psychoanalysis did not replace the psychology of the experimental kind that has been a protagonist in this book (on the contrary, the latter continued to expand and prosper at institutions around the world), but it did turn it on its head. Furthermore, much like Marx’s inversion of Hegelian dialectics, which revealed the German ideology inherent within German Idealism, Freud’s turning operation extracted politics not only out of the psychophysical logic of experimental psychology but also out of the disciplinary lines that the likes of Windelband were drawing in the sand at the end of the nineteenth century.30 One might even say that there was something inherently subversive about Freud’s diagram: new paths branched out despite— and, in fact, because of— the blockages that persistently appeared in a seemingly undifferentiated network of neurons. Psychoanalysis itself, then, was an unexpected interruption in the neo-Kantian divide of the disciplines, a pecular science uneasily positioned between the natural and the human sciences. It imagined new models for consciousness, selfhood, and causality. Today we seem to be on the verge of another turn (which may explain neuroscientists’ interest in reversing Freud’s turn in the Entwurf ). At a moment when the neo-Kantian truce agreement from the turn of the twentieth century seems to be in the process of being dismantled and claims of interdisciplinarity are no longer confined to the humanities or the natural sciences part of the divide, how do we think about knowledge? Not only worry about knowledge in our own, specialized fields but theorize the question of knowledge at large? How can we think— without subscribing uncritically to the Enlightenment dichotomies that inevitably structure our thinking— about contemporary attempts to redraw disciplinary boundaries? What are the ideological implications of the new disciplinary divisions and unions proposed? On whose behalf are they made? To what political ends? Kinaesthetic knowing was invented at a moment like ours when answering such questions seemed to have not only epistemological but also great ethical import. It seems about time to take these questions about the politics of knowledge seriously again.

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Acknowledgments

I have accrued too many intellectual debts during the many years that it took me to research and write this book, but since it is impossible to acknowledge them all, I will begin where the book began: in a graduate paper written for a seminar that I was fortunate enough to take with Barry Bergdoll at MIT. Mark Jarzombek, the most generous of mentors, saw something in that paper that I, in my graduate-student narrow-mindedness, could not. Erika Naginski showed me new ways to approach the material. During my defense, Daniel B. Monk asked me a question, which I did not answer very well at all. Although it took me years to figure out a better response, that question made this project much more ambitious than I could have managed without it. This is a book about the history of design pedagogy, and only now do I realize that I would not even have been interested in the subject had it not been for the remarkable teachers I have had— not only the ones that I have just mentioned above but others as well: first and foremost, Ferhan Yürekli and Hülya Yürekli, and later K. Michael Hays, Caroline Jones, David Friedman, and Nasser Rabbat. I am deeply grateful to them all. So much in life depends on luck, and I have been incredibly lucky with those who have been my interlocutors. My closest colleagues and dearest friends, Lucia Allais, John Harwood, Janna Israel, Ijlal Muzaffar, and Michael Osman, have given me feedback on this work at one time or another. If it were not for my fellow Grey Room editors— Eric de Bruyn, Noam M. Elcott, Byron Hamann, and Matthew C. Hunter— and my fellow Aggregators— Arindam Dutta, Edward Eigen, Timothy Hyde, Pamela Karimi, Jonathan Massey, John J. May, and Meredith TenHoor— who keep me intellectually adventurous, this would have been a much less interesting book. I am particularly grateful to Daniel Abramson and Spyros Papapetros, as well as to two anonymous readers at the University of Chicago Press, for their remarkably meticulous reading of the final manuscript. Christy Anderson, Jeannie Kim, Robert Levit, Richard Sommer, and Rob Wright have been remarkable colleagues and mentors at the University of Toronto. Beate Ziegert kindly allowed me access into her family records and kept me company during long days of archival research in her basement. I am equally grateful to other

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colleagues who gave me feedback in a variety of other contexts: Daniel Barber, Orit Halpern, Brendan Moran, Reinhold Martin, Robin Schuldenfrei, Felicity Scott, and Claire Zimmerman, as well as students who were brave enough to take my seminars. Venessa Heddle’s help while I prepared the manuscript for publication and Janna Israel’s during indexing were invaluable. So was the support that I received from Susan Bielstein, James Whitman Toftness, and India Cooper at the University of Chicago Press. Needless to say, all mistakes that remain despite their best efforts are my own. I was also very lucky that this project was generously supported by several institutions at various stages: the Department of Architecture at MIT, the Dedalus Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the DAAD German Academic Exchange Service, the Council on Library and Information Resources, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the Department of Art and Archaeology at Columbia University, and, finally, the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. The Graham Foundation and the Society of Architectural Historians provided much-appreciated support in the final stages of the book’s production. But, of course, my genuine luck has been the presence of the three people around which my life revolves: my son, Alexander; my husband, Zack; and my mother, Nihal. As always, they deserve my most profound thanks.

Notes

Unless otherwise indicated, the translations from German are mine. For the sake of consistency and because of the dates of most of the sources used in the book, I have not followed the German orthography reforms of the late twentieth century. Introduction 1.

Rudolf Schulze, Die Mimik der Kinder beim künstlerischen Genießen (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1906). A version of the same essay was published in Neue Bahnen 17.4 (January 1906): 149– 66. 2. For the larger context of Schulze’s efforts, see Marjorie Lamberti, “Radical Schoolteachers and the Origins of the Progressive Education Movement in Germany, 1900– 1914,” History of Education Quarterly 40.1 (Spring 2000): 22– 48. Schulze authored Aus der Werkstatt der experimentellen Psychologie und Pädagogik (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1909), translated by Rudolf Pintner as Experimental Psychology and Pedagogy for Teachers, Normal Colleges, and Universities (London: G. Allen, 1912), and Die moderne Seelenlehre. Ein Blick in die Werkstatt der experimentellen Psychologie (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1913). 3. Schulze, Die Mimik der Kinder beim künstlerischen Genießen, 6. 4. The Institut für experimentelle Pädagogik und Psychologie was founded in Leipzig in 1906 by the Leipzig branch of the German Teachers Association (Deutscher Lehrerverein). Otto Scheibner, “Das Institut für experimentelle Pädagogik und Psychologie des Leipziger Lehrervereins,” Zeitschrift für pädagogische Psychologie und Jugendkunde 17 (1916): 325– 32. 5. See Wilhelm Wundt, “Über das Verhältnis der Gefühle zu den Vorstellungen,” Viertel­ jahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie 3 (1879): 129– 51; Wundt, “Über den Ausdruck der Gemütsbewegungen,” Deutsche Rundschau (April 1877): 120– 33; and Wundt, “Bemerkungen zur Theorie der Gefühle,” Philosophische Studien 15 (1900): 449– 82. For more on Wundt’s theory of feeling, see chapter 3. 6. Schulze, Aus der Werkstatt der experimentellen Psychologie und Pädagogik, 83– 124. 7. Schulze, Die moderne Seelenlehre, 36– 40. 8. This relationship was most succinctly expressed in Weber’s law, cited by G. T. Fechner, “Begriff und Aufgabe der Psychophysik,” Elemente der Psychophysik, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, [1860] 1889), 8. For more on psychophysics, see chapter 1. 9. Schulze, Die Mimik der Kinder beim künstlerischen Genießen, 19. 10. Schulze, Die Mimik der Kinder beim künstlerischen Genießen, 25. 11. G.-B.-A. Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, ou analyse électro­

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physiologique de l’expression des passions (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1862), translated by R. Andrew Cuthbertson as The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1990). 12. Gustav Theodor Fechner, “Die Aesthetik von Oben und von Unten,” in Fechner, Vorschule der Aesthetik, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1876), 1. 13. Schulze, Die Mimik der Kinder beim künstlerischen Genießen, 21. 14. There is a growing literature on psychological aesthetics in Wilhelmine Germany. See Michael Podro, The Manifold in Perception: Theories of Art from Kant to Hildebrand (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) and The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); Hermann Drüe, “Die psychologische Ästhetik im deutschen Kaiserreich,” in Ideengeschichte und Kunstwissenschaft. Philosophie und die bildende Kunst im Kaiserreich, ed. E. Mai, S. Waetzoldt, and G. Wolandt (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1983), 71– 98; Christian G. Allesch, Geschichte der psychologischen Ästhetik. Untersuchung zur historischen Entwicklung eines psychologischen Verständnisses ästhetischer Phänomene (Göttingen, Toronto, and Zurich: C. J. Hogrefe, 1987) and Einführung in die psychologische Ästhetik (Vienna: WUV, 2006); Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nine­ teenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990) and Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Mark Jarzombek, “Describing the Language of Looking: Wölfflin and the History of Aesthetic Experientialism,” Assemblage 23 (April 1994): 28– 69 and The Psychologizing of Modernity (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). The Getty translation of some of the most seminal texts from this period into English has made the discourse more accessible to an English-speaking academic audience: Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, introd. and trans., Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873– 1893 (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994). More recently published are Robin Curtis and Gertrud Koch, eds., Einfühlung. Zu Geschichte und Gegenwart eines ästhetischen Konzepts (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2009); Juliet Koss, Modernism after Wagner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); and Spyros Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 15. Alexander G. Baumgarten, “Pars I Aesthetica Theoretica, Caput I Heuristica, Sectio I Pulcritudo Cognitionis, §17,” Aesthetica/Ästhetik, parts 1 and 2 [in Latin and German], ed. Dagmar Mirbach (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, [1750] 2007), 20– 21. 16. Kant, “Preface to Second Edition,” Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1781] 1998), 121. 17. From an etymological point of view, “the Latin ratio absorbs the meanings of other Greek terms such as nous [νοῦς] (mind) and dianoi [διάνοια] (intelligence).” “Reason,” Dictio­ nary of Untranslatables, ed. Barbara Cassin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 887. 18. Raymond Williams, “Experience,” in Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, [1976] 1983), 126– 29. 19. Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” in Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines, ed. James Chandler, Arnold I. Davidson, and Harry Harootunian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 363– 87. 20. Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Matthew C. Hunter, Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Otto Sibum, “Working Experiments: A History of Gestural Knowledge,” Cambridge Review 116.2325 (May 1995): 25– 37. Also see Peter Dear, “The Meanings of Ex-

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perience,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, Early Modern Science, ed. Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 106– 31. 21. G. W. Leibniz, “Of Power and Freedom,” book 2, chapter 21, section 5, in New Essays on Human Understanding, ed. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, [1704] 1996), 177; Johann Georg Sulzer, “Sinnlich,” in Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste (Leipzig: Weidmann Reich, 1771– 74); and Immanuel Kant, “On the representations that we have without being conscious of them,” in Anthropology from a Pragmatic View, ed. Robert B. Louden, introd. Manfred Kuehn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1798] 2006), 23– 26. Kant refers here to Locke’s objection that the self has to be accompanied with consciousness. This is the question of the “punctual self ” discussed in the prologue of John Locke, “Of Identity and Diversity,” book 2, chapter 27, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London:

22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

T. Tegg and Sons, [1689] 1836), 220– 48. For a discussion of analogon rationis, see §468 in Alexander Gottlieb Baumgartens Metaphysik, trans. Georg Friedrich Meier, with notes by Johann August Eberhard, ed. Dagmar Mirbach (Jena: Dietrich Scheglmann Reprints, [1739] 2005), 146. For cognitio sensitiva, see Baumgarten, Aesthetica 1:20– 21. Hirth, Aufgaben der Kunstphysiologie (Munich and Leipzig: G. Hirth, [1891] 1897), 385, 39, 382. See Roger Smith, “‘The Sixth Sense’: Towards a History of Muscular Sensation,” Gesnerus 68 (2011): 218– 71. John Grote, Exploratio Philosophica: Rough Notes on Modern Intellectual Science, part 1 (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell; London: Bell & Daldy, 1865) and part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900); William James, “The Relations of Minds to Other Things,” in James, Principles of Pyschology, vol. 1 (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 199– 223; William James, “The Function of Cognition” and “The Tigers in India,” in James, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to “Pragmatism” (London: Longmans, Green, 1909), 1– 50; and Bertrand Russell, “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description,” in Russell, Prob­ lems of Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt; London: Williams & Norgate, 1912), 72– 92. In his dictionary of philosophical terms, Rudolf Eisler described Anschauung as “the unmediated (that is, without concepts and logical conclusions) acquisition of a concretely given object in its spatial-temporal determinateness. Anschauen consists of the calm observation of the object in the transformation of its characteristics through the unity of apperception.” Rudolf Eisler, “Anschauung,” in Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe (Berlin: E. S. Mittler, 1904). Also see Catherine Chevalley, “Anschaulichkeit,” in Cassin, Dictionary of Untranslatables, 37. Dilthey uses the term “silent thinking” in “Ideas concerning Descriptive and Analytical Psychology,” in Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, vol. 2, Understanding the Human World, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 125. The pedagogue Carl Goetze used Helmholtz’s distinction between Wissen and Kennen in Goetze, “Zeichnen und Formen,” in Kunsterziehung. Ergebnisse und Anregungen des Kunsterziehungstages in Dresden am 28. und 29. September 1901 (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1902), 145– 46, and Goetze, “Zeichnen und Formen,” in Kunsterziehung. Ergebnisse und Anregungen der Kunsterziehungstage in Dresden, Weimar und Hamburg, introd. Ludwig Pallat (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1929), 37– 38. See also Philipp Franck, “Zeichenunterricht,” Aus der Praxis der deutsche Kunsterziehung, IV. Internationalen Kongress für Kunstunterricht und angewandte Kunst 1912, ed. L. Pallat and A. Jolles (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1912), 1– 12. The publisher Georg Hirth wrote that his concept of “verborgene Aufmerksamkeit” (hidden attention), similar to “unconscious inferences,” was borrowed from Helmholtz’s idea that “any metaphysical conclusion is either a fallacy or a conclusion hidden from experience.”

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27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

Hirth, Aufgaben der Kunstphysiologie, iv. The physiologist Sigmund Exner, a Helmholtz student, discussed knowledge in three progressive stages: Kennen, Können, and Erkennt­ nis corresponded in the “medical art” to physiognomy, diagnostics, and, finally, medical science (Wissenschaft). Exner, “Kennen, Können und Erkenntnis in der ärztlichen Kunst,” Wiener Zeitung, October 20, 1899. Hans-Georg Gadamer used Helmholtz’s distinction in Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (London and New York: Continuum, [1960] 2006), 3– 37. For the pedagogical project of kinaesthesia, also see Hillel Schwartz, “Torque: The New Kinaesthetic of the Twentieth Century,” in Incor­ porations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 70– 127. The biography of this alternative knowledge is elaborated at length in chapter 1, but as key texts, see Hermann von Helmholtz, “Die neueren Fortschritte in der Theorie des Sehens” [1868], in Helmholtz, Populäre wissenschaftliche Vorträge (Braunschweig: Friedrich Viewig, 1871), trans. as “The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,” in Science and Cul­ ture: Popular and Philosophical Essays, ed. David Cahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 127– 203. Helmholtz, “Die neueren Fortschritte in der Theorie des Sehens,” 95, and “The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,” 200. Hermann von Helmholtz, Ueber das Verhältniss der Naturwissenschaften zur Gesammheit der Wissenschaften, Rede zum Geburtsfeste des höchstseligen Grossherzogs Karl Friedrich von Baden und zur akademischen Preisvertheilung, 22 November 1862 (Heidelberg: Georg Mohr, 1862), 16, translated as “On the Relation of Natural Science to Science in General,” in Cahan, Science and Culture, 85. Hermann von Helmholtz, Die Thatsachen in der Wahrnehmung (Berlin: August Hirschwald, 1879), 27, translated as “The Facts of Perception,” in Cahan, Science and Culture, 355. Helmholtz, “Die neueren Fortschritte in der Theorie des Sehens,” 92– 93, and “The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,” 198– 99. Max Dessoir, Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft in den Grundzügen dargestellt (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1906), 7– 8. Dessoir was the editor of the journal Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft. Klaus Christian Köhnke, The Rise of Neo­Kantianism: German Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Richard Streiter, “Architektur und Kunstphilosophie,” Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung 50 (December 12, 1896): 550– 51. Georg Hirth, Aufgaben der Kunstphysiologie, iii, 1; Hugo Eckener, “Das ‘Wie’ und das ‘Was’ der Kunst,” parts 1 and 2, Die Kunst für Alle 19 (1904): 41, 48, 59. Carl Georg Lange, Sinnesgenüsse und Kuntgenuss. Beiträge zu einer sensualistischen Kunst­ lehre, introd. Hans Kurella (Wiesbaden: J. F. Bergmann, 1903), viii. C. G. Lange is remembered today mostly for his contribution to what is called the James-Lange theory of emotions, according to which bodily changes precede mental ones during the experiencing of an emotion. See Lange, Über Gemütsbewegungen. Eine psycho­physiologisch Studie (Leipzig: T. Thomas, 1887), translated as “The Emotions,” in “The Emotions” by Carl Georg Lange and William James (New York: Hafner, 1922). The work was first published in Danish in 1885, but it became influential when it was translated into German in 1887. Also see chapter 3. G. S. Hall, “Is Aesthetics a Science?” in Hall, Aspects of German Culture (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1881), 105. This is not to say that “aesthetics from below” formed a uniform discourse. In 1914 Paul Moos enumerated several versions of the new aesthetics as advocated by philosophers: Karl Groos and Richard Müller-Freienfels’s biological-sensualistic aes-

n ot e s to PAg e s 1 5 –1 6

thetics, Oswald Külpe’s association aesthetics, Stefan Witasek’s abstract psychologism, Theodor Lipps’s empathy aesthetics, Max Dessoir’s aesthetic skepticism, and Konrad Lange’s illusion aesthetics, among others. Paul Moos, Die deutsche Ästhetik der Gegenwart (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, [1914] 1919). 38. Many histories of the rich concept of Bildung have been written. For a good introduction, see the excellent study by Suzanne Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750– 1970 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), and the summary by Fritz Ringer, “Bildung and Its Implications in the German Tradition, 1890– 1930,” in Ringer, Toward a Social History of Knowledge: Collected Essays (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2000), 193– 212. 39. See William Clark, “Epilogue,” in Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 435– 76, and Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 798– 814. 40. There were three types of high school for men in Wilhelmine Germany: Gymnasien, Real­ gymnasien, and Oberrealschulen. In addition to the prestigious Gymnasien, which prepared their students for the university with a curriculum loaded with history, literature, and Greek and Latin, Oberrealschulen were intended for those destined for more practical professions, while the Realgymnasium offered an education that was a compromise between the two. On elementary and secondary schools in Imperial Germany, see Marjorie Lamberti, State, Society, and the Elementary School in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); James Albisetti, Secondary School Reform in Imperial Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); and James Albisetti, Schooling German Girls and Women: Secondary and Higher Education in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988). 41. R. Steven Turner, “Historicism, Kritik, and the Prussian Professoriate, 1790 to 1840,” in Philologie und Hermeneutik im neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Zur Geschichte und Methodologie der Geisteswissenschaften, vol. 2, ed. Mayotte Bollack and Heinz Wismann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983), 460– 62. 42. Humboldt cited in Jan Goldstein, The Post­Revolutionary Self: Politics and Psyche in France, 1750– 1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 126– 29. My understanding of the historicity of selfhood is indebted to Jan Goldstein’s work as well as to Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007). 43. Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Letter LXIII, October 1826,” in Letters of William von Hum­ boldt to a Female Friend, vol. 1, trans. Catherine M. A. Couper (London: John Chapman, 1849), 245. 44. Humboldt, “Letter LXXXVIII, 1828,” in Letters . . . to a Female Friend 1:337. 45. Without the linkage of memory, the philosopher Condillac reasoned, “I would so to speak begin a new life each day, and no one could convince me that today’s moi was the moi of the day before.” Condillac cited in Jan Goldstein, “Mutations of the Self in Old Regime and Postrevolutionary France,” in Biographies of Scientific Objects, ed. Lorraine Daston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 95. 46. “Of every other possible thing to which it may be applied,” went Fichte’s extended tautological argument, “it has to be shown that reality is transferred to it from the self— that it would have to exist, provided that the self exists.” J. G. Fichte, “Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge” [1794], in Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, ed. and trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 100. A century later when the sociologist Georg Simmel defended the nineteenth-century

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conception of Bildung, he too would insist on this stable core of selfhood. Any sensation received from the supra-personal sphere but not properly absorbed into “that which already exists in it as its inmost drive and as an inner prefiguration of its subjective perfection . . . as if through a predetermined harmony” did not count. Georg Simmel, “Der Begriff und die Tragödie der Kultur,” in Simmel, Philosophische Kultur. Gesammelte Essais (Leipzig: 1911), 248, translated by Mark Ritter and David Frisby as “The Concept and Tragedy of Culture,” in Simmel on Culture, ed. David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 2000), 57. Ringer characterizes the change in the meaning of Bildung from the turn of the nineteenth to the turn of the twentieth century as “a shift from a forward-looking or ‘utopian’ emphasis to a defensive or ‘ideological’ one.” Ringer, “Bildung and Its Implications in the German Tradition, 1890– 1930,” 200. Also see Ringer’s seminal book The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890– 1933 (Cambridge, MA:

220

47. 48.

49. 50.

51.

52.

Harvard University Press, 1969). J. G. Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, ed. Gregory Moore (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, [1807] 2008), 124, 125. There is a vast literature in German on the Kulturkampf. Among the most important works in English are Margaret Anderson, “The Limits of Secularization: On the Problem of the Catholic Revival in 19th Century Germany,” Historical Journal 38 (1995): 647– 70; Margaret Anderson, “Piety and Politics: Recent Works on German Catholicism,” Journal of Modern History 54 (1982): 681– 716; David Blackbourn, Populists and Patricians: Essays in Modern German History (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), section 3; David Blackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth­ Century Germany (New York: Knopf, 1994); Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Pol­ itics, 1870– 1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Michael B. Gross, The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti­Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth­ Century Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). These historians have made it clear that Kulturkampf was not a secularization campaign but was marked by confessionalism. See Blackbourn, Marpingen. See, for example, Johannes Forberger, Der Einfluß des Katholizismus und Protestantismus auf die wirtschaftliche Entwickelung der Völker (Leipzig: Braun, 1906). In the words of the historian Borutta, anti-Catholicism in Europe in the nineteenth century was an “intraEuropean Orientalism.” Manuel Borutta, “Settembrini’s World: German and Italian AntiCatholicism in the Age of the Culture Wars,” Special Issue “European Anti-Catholicism,” ed. Yvonne Maria Werner and Jonas Harvard, European Studies 31 (1994): 43– 70. Protestant critics went so far as to argue that Catholicism was appropriate for “womanly peoples.” See Kurt Schindowski, “Christentum und deutsche Eigenart,” Deutsches Wochenblatt, March 1899. Gross has reiterated the importance of gender in the Kulturkampf. See Gross, The War against Catholicism, as well as Blackbourn, Marpingen. After examining Catholicism’s claims of ecstatic experiences and supernatural visions, for example, the psychologist Richard von Kraftt-Ebing declared such “religious paranoia” a disgrace to reason; see his Text­Book of Insanity Based on Clinical Observations for Prac­ titioners and Students of Medicine, trans. Charles Gilbert Chaddock (Philadelphia: Davis, 1904), 403– 6. Émile Louis Victor de Laveleye, Protestantism and Catholicism in Their Bearing upon the Liberty and Prosperity of Nations: A Study of Social Economy (Toronto: Belford, 1876), 48– 49. The fact that Catholic middle classes were as unsupportive of popular Catholicism as Protestants suggests that Kulturkampf was also a war between the lower classes and the German bourgeoisie. It remains to be researched, for example, to what extent the

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53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61.

62. 63.

64.

65.

emergence of the term “kitsch” was intertwined with European-wide anti-Catholicism. See Blackbourn, Marpingen, 164, and Blackbourn, Populists and Patricians, 203, as well as an early theorization of “kitsch” in Fritz Karpfen, Der Kitsch. Eine Studie über die Entartung der Kunst (Hamburg: Weltbund, 1925). Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 235. David Blackbourn, “Progress and Piety: Liberalism, Catholicism and the State in Imperial Germany,” History Workshop 26 (Winter 1988): 58. Emphasis mine. Gustave Le Bon, Psychologie des foules (Paris: F. Alcan, 1895), translated as The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: Macmillan, 1896), here 3. The book was immediately translated into a number of languages and appeared in Germany under the title Pscyholo­ gie der Massen. Le Bon, The Crowd, 56. Compare this model of selfhood to subjects who fall under the spell of animated forms in Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic. Robert Gaupp cited in Konrad Lange, Das Kino in Gegenwart und Zukunft (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1920), 52. The so- called Kinoreformbewegung (film reform movement) was spearheaded by educators, bureacracts, and professors who introduced a series of film censorship laws in Germany between 1906 and 1918. See Kaspar Maase and Wolfgang Kaschuba, eds., Schund und Schönheit. Populäre Kultur um 1900 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2001); Thomas Schorr, “Die Film- und Kinoreformbewegung und die deutsche Filmwirtschaft. Eine Analyse des Fachblatts ‘Der Kinematograph’ (1907– 1935) unter pädagogischen und publizistischen Aspekten” (diss., Bundeswehr University in Munich, 1989); Gabriele Kilchenstein, Frühe Filmzensur in Deutschland. Eine vergleichende Studie zur Prüfungspraxis in Berlin und München (Munich: Diskurs-Film, Schaudig und Ledig, 1997); and Corinna Müller, “Der frühe Film, das frühe Kino und seine Gegner und Befürworter,” in Maase and Kaschuba, Schund und Schönheit, 62– 91. See Rudolf Eisler, “Intellektuale Anschauung,” in Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe (Berlin: E. S. Mittler, 1904). James Mark Baldwin, “Intuition” and “Intuition (in educational method),” in Baldwin, Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (New York and London: Macmillan, 1902). He also discussed sense intuition (“the synthesis of elements in space and time”) and motor intuition (“ready command of a complex action or series of actions independently of conscious preparation”). I am thinking here of J. A. Comenius and his Orbis Sensuallium Pictus, first published in 1658. See Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 22, Über die Idee der Elementarbildung und den Standpunkt ihrer Ausführung in der Pestalozzischen Anstalt zu Iferten, delivered in Lenzburg on August 30, 1809 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1979), and vol. 5, Wie Gertrud ihre Kinder Lehrt. Ein Versuch den Müttern Anleitung zu geben, ihre Kinder selbst zu unterrichten (Stuttgart and Tübingen: Gottaschen, 1820), translated by Lucy E. Holland and Francis C. Turner as How Gertrude Teaches Her Children (Syracuse, NY: C. W. Bardeen, 1900). Pestalozzi, How Gertrude Teaches Her Children, 114. Pestalozzi, How Gertrude Teaches Her Children, 119n. Even Fichte, despite his reservations about the Swiss educator’s philosophical sophistication, admired Pestalozzi’s proposal to educate the young through an “ABC of sensations [Anschauung].” Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, 124. Adolf Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (Strasbourg: Heitz & Mündel, 1893), translated as “The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts,” in Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space, 227– 79. Georg Simmel not only discussed the metropolitan as a subject overwhelmed by the over-

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load of nervous stimulation but also described money as the “most terrible destroyer of form.” Georg Simmel, “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben,” in Die Großstadt. Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung, Jahrbuch der Gehe­Stiftung 9 (1902– 3): 185– 206; Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1900), 268. 66. Hildebrand, “The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts,” 229– 30. To put it in the terminology of Daston and Galison, Hildebrand thought mechanical objectivity was appropriate for science, but art had to conform to the epistemic virtue of “truth-to-nature.” Daston and Galison, Objectivity. 67. For a good summary, see Lucian Krukowski, Norton Batkin, and Whitney Davis, “Formalism: Overview,” “Formalism in Analytic Aesthetics,” and “Formalism in Art History,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2nd ed, ed. Michael Kelly (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 70– 84. 68. My use of “technique” is close to Bernhard Siegert’s use of Kulturtechnik, a term that is meant to oppose “any ontological usage of philosophical terms.” According to Siegert, the historian’s use of Kulturtechnik guarantees that “man does not exist independently of cultural techniques of hominization, time does not exist independently of cultural techniques for calculating and measuring time; space does not exist independently of cultural techniques for surveying and administering space.” Bernhard Siegert, “Cacography or Communication? Cultural Techniques in German Media Studies,” trans. Geoffrey WinthropYoung, Grey Room 29 (Winter 2008): 26– 47, here 30. Also see Lorenz Engell and Bernhard Siegert, eds., Zeitschrift für Medien­ und Kulturforschung, Schwerpunkt Kulturtechnik 1 (2010) and the English translation of essays in Bernhard Siegert, Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). 69. Pestalozzi, How Gertrude Teaches Her Children, 177. 70. Hertha Sturm, Peter Vitouch, Herbert Bauer, and Marianne Grewe-Partsch, “Emotion und Erregung— Kinder als Fernsehzuschauer. Eine psychophysiologische Untersuchung,” Fernsehen und Bildung 6.1– 3 (1982): 9– 148. For a summary of these results in English, see Gertrude Joch Robinson, ed., Emotional Effects of Media: The Work of Hertha Sturm (Montreal: McGill University, 1987), 29– 34. 71. Sturm et al., “Emotion und Erregung,” 46. 72. Sturm et al., “Emotion und Erregung,” 98. 73. Sturm et al., “Emotion und Erregung,” 98. 74. For accounts of affect theory, see Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley, The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007) and Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 75. According to Stafford, neuroscience has the potential to make us more interdisciplinary, global, and even posthuman. Barbara Maria Stafford, “Crystal and Smoke: Putting Image Back in Mind,” in Stafford, A Field Guide to a New Meta­Field: Bridging the Humanities­ Neurosciences Divide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 1– 63. 76. Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (Autumn 1995): 83– 109. 77. Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” 74, 89. 78. Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37.3 (Spring 2011): 434– 72, here 450– 51. For an equally powerful critique of affect theory, see Constantina Papoulias and Felicity Callard, “Biology’s Gift: Interrogating the Turn to Affect,” Body and Society 16.29 (2010): 29– 56. 79. Leys, “The Turn to Affect,” 467.

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80. Seth Watter, “Scrutinizing: Film and Microanalysis of Behavior,” Grey Room 66 (Winter 2017): 32– 69. Chapter One 1.

Hermann von Helmholtz, “Über Goethe’s naturwissenschaftliche Arbeiten, Vortrag gehalten in der deutschen Gesellschaft zu Königsberg” [1853], in Helmholtz, Populäre wis­ senschaftliche Vorträge (Braunschweig: Friedrich Viewig und Sohn, 1865), 31– 53, translated as “On Goethe’s Scientific Researches,” in Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays, ed. David Cahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1– 17. Comparing Newton and Goethe became a customary way of discussing what C. P. Snow famously called the “two cultures” of science and art. C. P. Snow, Two Cultures and the Scientific

Revolution (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). Also see Werner Heisenberg, “The Teachings of Goethe and Newton on Colour in the Light of Modern Physics,” in Heisenberg, Philosophic Problems of Nuclear Science, trans. F. C. Hayes (New York: Pantheon, [1941] 1952), 60– 76, and David A. Hollinger, “The Knower and the Artificer,” American Quarterly 39.1 (Spring 1987): 37– 55. 2. J. W. von Goethe, Zur Farbenlehre (Tübingen: J. G. Cotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1810, translated as Theory of Colours (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970). 3. Helmholtz, “Über Goethe’s naturwissenschaftliche Arbeiten,” 42, and “On Goethe’s Scientific Researches,” 8. 4. Helmholtz, “Über Goethe’s naturwissenschaftliche Arbeiten,” 43, and “On Goethe’s Scientific Researches,” 9. 5. Helmholtz, “Über Goethe’s naturwissenschaftliche Arbeiten,” 36– 37, and “On Goethe’s Scientific Researches,” 2– 3. 6. Helmholtz, “Über Goethe’s naturwissenschaftliche Arbeiten,” 43, 46, 52, and “On Goethe’s Scientific Researches,” 9, 11, 16. 7. Helmholtz, “Über Goethe’s naturwissenschaftliche Arbeiten,” 52, and “On Goethe’s Scientific Researches,” 16. 8. Hermann von Helmholtz, Ueber das Verhältniss der Naturwissenschaften zur Gesammheit der Wissenschaften. Rede zum Geburtsfeste des höchstseligen Grossherzogs Karl Friedrich von Baden und zur akademischen Preisvertheilung, 22 November 1862 (Heidelberg: Georg Mohr, 1862), 16, translated as “On the Relation of Natural Science to Science in General,” in Cahan, Science and Culture, 76– 95, here 85. 9. Helmholtz, Ueber das Verhältniss der Naturwissenschaften zur Gesammheit der Wissenschaf­ ten, 15, and “On the Relation of Natural Science to Science in General,” 85. 10. Viewed from the perspective of Baconian induction, which was adamantly opposed to syllogistic reasoning, this may seem counterintuitive, but German philosophers, resistant to the mathematization of logic in England, helped revive traditional logic in the nineteenth century. For a good summary of these developments, see Peter Simons, “Logic: Revival and Reform,” in The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1870– 1945, ed. Thomas Baldwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 117– 27. 11. Hermann von Helmholtz, “Die neueren Fortschritte in der Theorie des Sehens” [1868], in Helmholtz, Populäre wissenschaftliche Vorträge (Braunschweig: Friedrich Viewig, 1871), 91– 92, translated as “The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,” in Cahan, Science and Culture, 127– 203, here 197. I have modified the translation here. 12. Hermann von Helmholtz, “Die neueren Fortschritte in der Theorie des Sehens,” 92, and “The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,” 198.

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13.

224

Helmholtz, Ueber das Verhältniss der Naturwissenschaften zur Gesammheit der Wissenschaf­ ten, 15– 16, and “On the Relation of Natural Science to Science in General,” 85. According to Rudolf A. Makkreel, the term Geisteswissenschaften was first used in 1849 as the translation of “moral sciences” in Schiel’s translation of John Stuart Mill’s System of Logic. Friedrich von Schlegel may have been the first to use the singular term Geisteswissenschaft in 1822. See Rudolf A. Makkreel, “The Emergence of the Human Sciences from the Moral Sciences,” in The Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century (1790– 1870), ed. Allen W. Wood and Songsuk Susan Hahn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 295. 14. See, for example, John Stuart Mill, “On the Logic of the Moral Sciences,” in Mill, System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive (New York: Harper & Brothers, [1843] 1858), 519– 21, and Johannes Gustav Droysen, Grundriss der Historik (Leipzig: Veit, [1868] 1882). 15. Helmholtz, Ueber das Verhältniss der Naturwissenschaften zur Gesammheit der Wissenschaf­ ten, 15– 16, and “On the Relation of Natural Science to Science in General,” 85. 16. Helmholtz, Ueber das Verhältniss der Naturwissenschaften zur Gesammheit der Wissenschaf­ ten, 15– 16, and “On the Relation of Natural Science to Science in General,” 85. 17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

Helmholtz, “Die neueren Fortschritte in der Theorie des Sehens,” 92– 93, and “The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,” 198– 99. “We have now seen that the eye in itself is not by any means so complete an optical instrument as it first appears: its extraordinary value depends upon the way in which we use it: its perfection is practical, not absolute.” Helmholtz, “Die neueren Fortschritte in der Theorie des Sehens,” 28, and “The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,” 146, emphasis mine. Also see Helmholtz, Handbuch der physiologischen Optik, 3 vols. in 1 (Leipzig: Leopold Voss, [1856– 66], 1867), translated as Treatise on Physiological Optics, ed. James P. C. Southall, 3 vols. (New York: Dover, 1962). I am referring, of course, to Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: W. W. Norton, [1905] 2009). See my “Kinaesthesia,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 4:82– 86. For good summaries of the history of the reflex, see Georges Canguilhem, “The Concept of Reflex” [1955], in Canguilhem, A Vi­ tal Rationalist: Selected Writings, ed. François Delaporte (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 179– 202; Edwin Clarke and L. S. Jacyna, Nineteenth­ Century Origins of Neuroscientific Concepts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); and Kurt Danziger, “Origins of the Schema of Stimulated Motion: Towards a Pre-History of Modern Psychology,” History of Science 21 (1983): 183– 210. These physicians included Jean Astruc, Robert Whytt, Johann August Unzer, and Jiří Procháska. René Descartes, De homine (Leiden: P. Leffen & F. Moyardum, 1662); Thomas Willis, De Motu Musculari (London: Apud Jacobum Allestry, 1670). Margarete Vöhringer, “Reflex. Begriff und Experiment,” in Begriffsgeschichte der Naturwis­ senschaften. Zur historischen und kulturellen Dimension naturwissenschaftliche Konzepte, ed. Ernst Müller and Falko Schmieder (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008), 203– 14. For the first mention of the muscle sense, in 1826, see Charles Bell, “On the Nervous Circle Which Connects the Voluntary Muscles with the Brain,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 116 (1826): 163– 73. In Nervous System of the Human Body (1830) and Idea of a New Anatomy of the Brain (1811) Bell published his findings on the difference between sensory and motor nerves. In 1822 François Magendie in Bordeaux published similar but significantly better-demonstrated results. To this day, there remains some controversy as to which man made the discovery first; for that reason, the discovery is often referred to as the Bell-Magendie law.

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24. See Paul E. Cranefield, The Way In and the Way Out: François Magendie, Charles Bell, and the Roots of Spinal Nerves, History of Medicine Series, vol. 41 (Mount Kisco, NY: Futura, 1974). 25. Charles Bell, The Hand, Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments, as Evincing Design, Bridgewater Treatises Series (London: William Pickering; Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1833), 154. 26. The literature on the muscle sense is vast. In the Anglo-American tradition, see Thomas Brown, Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 4 vols. (Edinburgh, [1820] 1824); James Mill, Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, 2 vols. (London, 1829); H. Charlton Bastian, “On the ‘Muscular Sense’ and on the Physiology of Thinking,” British Medical Journal (May 1, 1869), 394– 96; George Henry Lewes, “Motor-Feelings and the Muscular Sense,” Brain 1 (London) (1878): 14– 28; G. Stanley Hall, “Laura Bridgman,” Mind 4.14 (April 1879): 149– 72; Charlton Bastian, The Brain as an Organ of the Mind (New York: Appleton, 1880), 691– 700; Burtis Burr Breese, “On Inhibition,” Psychological Monograph 3.1 (1899): 18– 21, 44– 48, 59– 60; William James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 2 (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 492– 522; W. B. Pillsbury, “Does the Sensation of Movement Originate in the Joint?” American Journal of Psychology 12.3 (April 1901): 346– 53; Charles H. Judd, “Movement and Consciousness,” Psychological Review 7, monograph supp. 9 (1905); and W. B. Pillsbury, “The Place of Movement in Consciousness,” Psychological Review 18 (1911): 83– 99. For visceral sensations that could not be traced to one of the five known senses, see M. F. X. Bichat, Anatomie générale appliqée à la physiologie et à la médecine (Paris: Brosson, Gabon, 1801) and J. G. Steinbuch, Beytrag zur Physiologie der Sinne (Nuremberg: Schrag, 1811). For an excellent summary of the history of the muscle sense, see Roger Smith, “‘The Sixth Sense’: Towards a History of Muscular Sensation,” Gesnerus 68 (2011): 218– 71. 27. The British philosopher John Grote distinguished between “knowledge of acquaintance” and “knowledge-about” or “knowledge of judgment” in Grote, Exploratio Philosophica: Rough Notes on Modern Intellectual Science, part 1 (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell; London: Bell & Daldy, 1865): 53– 61, and part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900): 201– 8. William James followed Grote’s terminology in “The Relations of Minds to Other Things,” in James, Principles of Pyschology, vol. 1 (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 199– 223, and “The Function of Cognition” and “The Tigers in India,” in James, The Meaning of Truth, A Sequel to Pragmatism (London: Longmans, Green, 1909), 1– 50. Bertrand Russell compared “knowledge by acquaintance” to “knowledge by description” in “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description,” in Russell, Problems of Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt; London: Williams and Norgate, 1912), 72– 92. Gilbert Ryle used the distinction between “knowing how” and “knowing what” in “Knowing How and Knowing That: The Presidential Address,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n. s., 46 (1945– 46): 1– 16, and “Knowing How and Knowing That,” chapter 2 in Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1949), 25– 61. 28. Helmholtz, Ueber das Verhältniss der Naturwissenschaften zur Gesammheit der Wissenschaf­ ten, 16, and “On the Relation of Natural Science to Science in General,” 85. 29. John Dewey, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” Psychological Review 3.4 (July 1896): 359. 30. William James, “What Is an Emotion?” Mind 9.34 (April 1884): 188– 205; J. J. Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950). 31. See, for example, George H. Hewes, “Motor Feelings and the Muscular Sense,” Brain 1 (1878): 14– 28, and Margaret F. Washburn, Movement and Mental Imagery: Outlines of Mo­ tor Theory of the Complexer Mental Processes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1916). For critical reviews of the motor theory of consciousness, see H. C. McComas, “Extravagances in the

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32. 226

33. 34.

35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43.

Motor Theories of Consciousness,” Psychological Review 23.5 (September 1916): 397– 407, and Herbert S. Langfeld, “The Historical Development of Response Psychology,” Science 77.1993 (March 10, 1933): 243– 50. C. S. Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906). Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, 130, 317. Sherrington, The Integrative Action of the Nervous System, 131. The term milieu intérieur was coined by Claude Bernard, Leçons sur les phénomènes de la vie, communs aux animaux et aux végétaux, ed. Albert Dastre (Paris: J.-B. Baillière et fils, 1878). W. B. Cannon, The Wisdom of the Body (New York: W. W. Norton, 1932). I. V. Pavlov, Conditioned Reflexes: An Investigation of the Physiological Activity of the Cerebral Cortex (New York: Dover, [1927] 1960). Edmund Husserl, Basic Problems of Phenomenology: From the Lectures, Winter Semester 1910– 1911, ed. Ingo Farin and James G. Hart (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006); Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State Univeristy of New York Press, [1927] 2010); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, [1945] 2002). An example is John R. Anderson’s ACT (adaptive control of thought) theory. See John R. Anderson, The Architecture of Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). The intellectualist or anti-intellectualist positions implied by sustaining or eliminating this epistemological distinction are still debated in contemporary philosophy. See, for example, the collection of essays in John Bengson and Marc A. Moffett, eds., Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). This debate has come to be known as the controversy between the Humanisten and the Realisten. See Denise Phillips, “Epistemological Distinctions and Cultural Politics: Educational Reform and the Naturwissenschaft/Geisteswissenschaft Distinction in NineteenthCentury Germany,” in Historical Perspectives on Erklären and Verstehen, ed. Uljana Feest (Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London, and New York: Springer, 2010), 15– 35; Denise Phillips, Acolytes of Nature: Defining Natural Science in Germany, 1770– 1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Andreas Daum, “Humanisten und Realisten,” in Daum, Wis­ senschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert. Bürgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit, 1848– 1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998), 51– 64; and Werner Bonnekoh, Naturwissenschaft als Unterrichtsfach. Stellenwert und Didaktik des naturwissenschaftlichen Unterrichts zwischen 1800 und 1900 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992). See Timothy Lenoir, Instituting Science: The Cultural Production of Scientific Disciplines (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997). Emil du Bois-Reymond, “Culturgeschichte und Naturwissenschaft” [1877], in Reden, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Von Veit, 1886), 298. Phillips, “Epistemological Distinctions and Cultural Politics,” 16. There is a vast literature on the Geisteswissenschaften debate in German and, to a lesser extent, in English. For a good prehistory of these debates, see M. Norton Wise, “On the Relation of Physical Science to History in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany,” in Func­ tions and Uses of Disciplinary Histories, vol. 7, ed. Loren Graham, Wolf Lepenies, and Peter Weingart (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983), 3– 34. For a good summary in English, see R. Lanier Anderson, “The Debate over the Geisteswissenschaften in German Philosophy,” in The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1870– 1945, ed. Thomas Baldwin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 223– 25, as well as Feest, Historical Perspectives on Erklären and Verstehen.

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44. For a short summary of this history also see Luciano Floridi, “The Renaissance of Epistemology,” in Baldwin, The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1870– 1945, 533– 43. 45. Klaus Christian Köhnke, The Rise of Neo­Kantianism: German Academic Philosophy between Idealism and Positivism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 36. According to Köhnke, the idea of Erkenntnistheorie is to be found in the writings of Schleiermacher, but the term was introduced either in 1862 by Eduard Zeller or in the 1870s by Alwin Diemer. Köhnke, The Rise of Neo­Kantianism, 36. 46. See, for example, “Humanismus und Realismus,” in Encyklopädie des gesammten Erziehungs­ und Unterrichtswesen, 2nd ed., ed. K. A. Schmid (Gotha: Rudolf Besser, 1880), 643, and Dr. Steinmeyer, “Vorwort des Herausgebers,” Blätter fuer höheres Schulwesen. Organ für die Interessen der höheren Schulen und des höheren Lehrstandes, January 1, 1889, 7. 47. In the early nineteenth century, the work of William Paley was the best-known theorization of natural theology, the English clergy’s response to mechanistic explanations of the universe. The underlying assumption of the movement was that a scientific under-

48.

49.

50.

51.

52. 53.

standing of nature would provide evidence for the authorship of God. See William Paley, Natural Theology. With Illustrative Notes by Henry Lord Brougham and Charles Bell. To which are Added Supplementary Dissertations by Charles Bell with Numerous Woodcuts (London: C. Knight; New York: W. Jackson, 1836). Bell, The Hand, Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments, as Evincing Design. This was the fourth volume commissioned by Francis Henry Egerton, 8th Earl of Bridgewater, for the Bridgewater Treatises intended to support Paley’s natural theology. As Matthew Craske has noted, in the century preceding Bell’s usage of the term, “design” in England was used to describe the perceived machinations of the Catholic Church. Paradoxically, a new culture of well- designed artifacts developed in the eighteenth century, in part, as “bulwark” against the devious schemes of Catholicism. Matthew Craske, “Plan and Control: Design and the Competitive Spirit in Early and Mid-Eighteenth-Century England,” Journal of Design History 12.3 (1999): 187– 216, especially 180– 90. William Molyneux posed the following question to John Locke in a letter written on July 7, 1688, and Locke included the letter in the second edition (1694) of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding: “A Man, being born blind, and having a Globe and a Cube, nigh of the same bigness, committed into his Hands, and being taught or Told, which is Called the Globe, and which the Cube, so as easily to distinguish them by his Touch or Feeling; Then both being taken from Him, and Laid on a Table, let us suppose his Sight Restored to Him; Whether he Could, by his sight, and before he touch them, know which is the Globe and which the Cube? Or Whether he could know by his sight, before he stretched out his Hand, whether he Could not Reach them, tho they were Removed 20 or 1000 feet from him.” Kant, “Preface to Second Edition,” Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1781] 1998), 121. Emphasis mine. Fernando Vidal and Bernhard Kleeberg, “Introduction: Knowledge, Belief, and the Impulse to Natural Theology,” Science in Context 20.3 (September 2007): 393. Jakob Friedrich Fries, Wissen, Glauben und Ahndung (Jena: J. C. G. Göpferdt, 1805), translated by Kent Richter as Knowledge, Belief, and Aesthetic Sense (Cologne: J. Dinter, 1989). Ahnung (spelled in the antiquated way as Ahndung in Fries’s title) was defined in Friedrich Kirchner’s dictionary of philosophical terms as “the presentiment of a future event or thing on dark or unconscious ground. It originates either from an involuntary inference by analogy or from a disposition.” Kirchner added that Fries defined this term (over against conceptual knowing) as a conviction that stemmed from feelings. Friedrich Kirchner, “Ahnung,” in Wörterbuch der philosophischen Grundbegriffe (Leipzig: Dürr., 1907).

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54. Frederick Gregory, Nature Lost? Natural Science and the German Theological Traditions of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). 55. Rudolf Wagner, Menschenschöpfung und Seelensubstanz. Ein anthropologischer Vortrag gehalten in der ersten öffentlichen Sitzung der 31. Versammlung deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte zu Göttingen am 18. September 1854 (Göttingen: Wigand, 1854). Similar arguments were made in Rudolf Wagner, Der Kampf um die Seele vom Standpunkt der Wissenschaft (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1857). 56. Carl Vogt, Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft. Eine Streitschrift gegen Hofrath Rudolph Wagner in Göttingen (Giessen: Ricker, 1855). The historian Frederick Gregory distinguishes this brand of materialism from Feuerbach’s philosophical and Marx’s dialectical materialisms, as well as their eighteenth-century French cousins. Frederick Gregory, Scientific Material­ ism in Nineteenth­ Century Germany (Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel, 1977). 57. 58.

59.

60. 61.

62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

Carl Vogt, Physiologische Briefe für Gebildete aller Stände (Stuttgart: J. G. Cotta’scher, 1847), 206. Gregory notes that materialists varied in their political affiliations. Czolbe eventually defended bourgeois capitalism; Vogt initially endorsed anarchism only to favor traditional liberalism later in life; Moleschott argued that the future belonged to Socialism. Gregory, Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth­Century Germany, 189– 96. Hermann von Helmholtz, “Ueber die Erhaltung der Kraft” [1847], in Wissenschaftliche Abhandlungen, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Barth, 1882): 12– 75, translated as “On the Application of the Law of the Conservation of Force to Organic Nature,” Proceedings of the Royal Institute 3 (1861): 347– 57, and “The Application of the Law of the Conservation of Force to Organic Nature,” in Selected Writings of Hermann von Helmholtz, ed. Russell Kahl (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 109– 21. Note that Helmholtz is referring here to “force” (Kraft) and not to “energy.” Bernhard Kleeberg points out that Helmholtz’s colleague Emil du Bois-Reymond, on the one hand, appealed to mechanistic explanations while, on the other hand, used the phrase ignoramus et ignorabimus (we are ignorant and we shall remain ignorant) in his 1872 address “Über die Grenzen der Naturerkenntnis,” thus satisfying theologians. Bernhard Kleeberg, “Vestiges of the Book of Nature,” in Feest, Historical Perspectives on Erklären and Verstehen, 48. For Helmholtz’s political inclinations, also see Anson Rabinbach, The Hu­ man Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Timothy Lenoir, “The Politics of Vision: Optics, Painting, and Ideology in Germany, 1845– 1880,” Stanford Humanities Review 2.2– 3, Special Issue “Encoding the Eye” (Spring 1992): 71– 86; and Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechan­ ics in Nineteenth­ Century Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). This is not to say that Helmholtz was consistently Kantian. For a detailed discussion of Helmholtz’s relationship to Kant, see Michael Heidelberger, “Force, Law, and Experiment: The Evolution of Helmholtz’s Philosophy of Science,” in Hermann von Helmholtz and the Foundations of Nineteenth­Century Science, ed. David Cahan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 463– 73. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1791] 2000). Grote, Exploratio Philosophica 1:60. Grote, Exploratio Philosophica 1:59. Grote, Exploratio Philosophica 2:201– 8. This posthumous volume of Grote’s writings is thoroughly saturated with the difference between two modes of knowledge. Grote, Exploratio Philosophica 2:18. Mining was a popular metaphor in nineteenth- century epistemology. Eduard von Hartmann, for example, put the question in similar terms: had

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68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

74.

75. 76.

77.

78. 79. 80.

81.

the point had been reached in the history of science “where the pioneers meet, like two miners who, in their subterranean galleries, hear each other’s knocking through the partywalls”? Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewußten. Speculative Resultate nach inductive­naturwissenschaftlicher Methode (Berlin: Dunckers, [1868] 1872), 11. Helmholtz as cited in Leo Königsberger, Hermann von Helmholtz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, [1902– 3] 1906) 142. Helmholtz, “Über Goethe’s naturwissenschaftliche Arbeiten,” 49, and “On Goethe’s Scientific Researches,” 13. Russell, Problems of Philosophy, 94. Adolf Bastian, Beiträge zur vergleichenden Psychologie. Die Seele und ihre Erscheinungswesen in der Ethnographie (Berlin: Harrwitz & Gossmann, 1868), 1. Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Foundation of Natural Science, ed. and trans. Michael Friedman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1786] 2004), 7. William James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 196– 98. It was because of the “psychologist’s fallacy” that behaviorists would attempt to shun all talk of the psychical from the discipline. See, for example, John B. Watson, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” Psychological Review 20 (1913): 158– 77. William R. Woodward, “Introduction: Stretching the Limits of Psychology’s History,” in The Problematic Science: Psychology in Nineteenth­ Century Thought, ed. William R. Woodward and Mitchell G. Ash (New York: Praeger, 1982), 8. Edward S. Reed, From Soul to Mind: The Emergence of Psychology from Erasmus Darwin to William James (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 7. Fechner’s mystical side was presumably the result of the panpsychic view of the universe that he acquired after spending years deprived of his sense of sight. Among the satirical works that Fechner wrote under the name Dr. Mises are Beweis dass der Mond aus Jodine besteht (1821), Stapelia mixta (1824), Vergleichende Anatomie der Engel. Eine Skizze (1825), Das Büchlein vom Leben nach dem Tode (1836), Vier Paradoxa (1846), Ueber das höchste Gut (1846), Nanna oder Ueber das Seelenleben der Pflanzen (1848), Zend­Avesta oder Ueber die Dinge des Himmels und des Jenseits (1851), Die drei Motive und Gründe des Glaubens (1863), and Die Tagesansicht gegenüber der Nachtansicht (1879). The oldest secondary source on Fechner is the lively account written by the popular science-fiction writer Kurd Lasswitz, Gustav Theodor Fechner (Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommanns [E. Hauff ], 1896). Also see the definitive study by Michael Heidelberger, Die innere Seite der Natur. Gustav Theodor Fechners wissenschaftlich­philosophische Weltauffassung (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1993), translated by Cynthia Klohr as Nature from Within: Gustav Theodor Fechner and His Psychophysical Worldview (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004). For a history of psychology before the nineteenth century, see Fernando Vidal, The Sci­ ences of the Soul: The Early Modern Origins of Psychology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). G. T. Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1860), 1. Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik 1:8. Weber’s formula was ∆R/R = k, where R = intensity of the stimulus (Reiz); ∆R = minimum detectable change in the intensity of stimulus; and k = constant. Fechner’s reformulation was E = k x log (R), where E = intensity of the sensation (Empfindung) experienced; R = intensity of the stimulus (Reiz); and k = constant. Wundt’s experimental psychology, which was indebted to Fechner’s psychophysics, distinguished psychical causality from physical causality. See Wilhelm Wundt, Grundriss der Psychologie (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, [1896] 1897), translated by C. H. Judd as Outlines of Psychology (London: Williams & Norgate; New York: Gustav E. Stechert, 1897).

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82. According to Heidelberger, neo-Kantians were skeptical of Fechner’s psychophysical parallelism. Heinrich Rickert argued, for example, that the mind-body question was a pseudo-problem created by disciplinary differences. Dilthey considered psychophysical parallelism the worst of all metaphysical hypotheses. Heidelberger, Nature from Within, 179– 81. 83. Vogt, Physiologische Briefe für Gebildete aller Stände, 206; John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, vol. 2, book 6, “On the Logic of the Moral Sciences” (London: Savill & Edwards, 1856), 429. 84. Dr. Mises (Fechner), Vergleichende Anatomie der Engel (Leipzig: Industrie-Comptoir, 1825). 85. Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik 1:5. 86. Fechner, Elemente der Pyshophysik 1:71. 87. See Gerd Gigerenzer et al., The Empire of Chance: How Probability Changed Science and

88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94.

95.

96.

97.

Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Theodore Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820– 1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); and Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995). In the foreword to his final work, Kollek­ tivmasslehre (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1897), Fechner cited the Belgian statistician Adolphe Quetelet, who had theorized l’homme moyen, the average man, to be used in statistical analysis. Heidelberger, Nature from Within, 73– 115; Norton Wise, “On the Relation of Physical Science to History in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany,” 14. Heidelberger, Nature from Within, 73. G. T. Fechner, Die Tagesansicht gegenüber der Nachtansicht (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1879). Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik 1:6. Wundt, Grundriss der Psychologie, 372, and Outlines of Psychology, 318. Fechner enumerated three methods to be used in an experimental approach to aesthetics: “the method of choice,” “the method of production,” and “the method of use.” G. T. Fechner, Zur experimentellen Ästhetik. Abhandlungen der mathematisch­physischen Classe der königlich sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, vol. 9 (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1871), 555– 635. Fechner, Zur experimentellen Aesthetik, 602– 4. See also Fechner, “Verschiedene Versuche, eine Grundform der Schönheit aufzustellen. Experimentelle Aesthetik. Goldner Schnitt und Quadrat,” vol. 1, chapter 14, and “Anhangsabschnitt über die gesetzlichen Maßverhältnisse der Galeriebilder,” vol. 2, chapter 44, in Fechner, Vorschule der Aesthetik (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1876; two vols. in one). The book’s title was borrowed from the humorist Jean Paul’s unorthodox 1804 treatise, which incorporated the idea of the comical into aesthetics. Jean Paul [Johann Paul Friedrich Richter], Vorschule der Aesthetik (Hamburg: Perthes, 1804). Fechner enumerated a series of conditions that had to be fulfilled for pleasure or displeasure to take place: the impressions needed to be above an “aesthetic threshold,” they had to reinforce each other so that their manifold could be weaved into a unity, and finally the overall impression had to be one of clarity. See chapters 4, 5, and 6 of Vorschule der Aesthetik, vol. 1. “Let us look at the world order created by God. Isn’t the striving after pleasure implanted in all beings everywhere?” he asked. “How could God have contradicted himself by creating a striving, which he would then condemn?” Fechner, Vorschule der Aesthetik 1:41.

n ot e s to PAg e s 4 9 – 5 2

98. According to the psychologist Edwin G. Boring, James had set up a room at Harvard for psychological experimentation as early as in 1875, and Stumpf ’s laboratory might have preceded both. See Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, [1929] 1950), 324. Kurt Danziger has written the most compelling accounts of Wundt’s work: Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psy­ chological Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and Naming the Mind: How Psychology Found Its Language (London: Sage, 1997). 99. See Danziger, “The Positivist Repudiation of Wundt,” Journal of the History of the Behav­ ioral Sciences 15 (1979): 205– 30. 100. See, for example, Wundt, Grundriss der Psychologie, 21, and Outlines of Psychology, 18. 101. Wilhem Wundt, “Selbstbeobachtung und innere Wahrnehmung,” Philosophische Studien 4 (1888): 293. 102. Wilhem Wundt, “Die Aufgaben der experimentellen Psychologie,” in Wundt, Essays (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1885), 136. 103. Wundt, Grundriss der Psychologie, 25, and Outlines of Psychology, 21. 104. Wundt, Grundriss der Psychologie, 10, and Outlines of Psychology, 9. Also see Danziger, Constructing the Subject, 35. 105. Wundt, Grundriss der Psychologie, 3, and Outlines of Psychology, 2. 106. Wundt, Grundriss der Psychologie, 4, and Outlines of Psychology, 4. Also see Martin Kusch, Psychologism: A Case Study in the Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 128– 36. 107. This was evidenced by the fact that he preferred teaching within the philosophy department at the University of Leipzig. Danziger, Constructing the Subject, 39. 108. Wundt, Grundriss der Psychologie, 3, and Outlines of Psychology, 3. 109. Wunt, Grundriss der Psychologie, 13– 16, and Outlines of Psychology, 11– 14. According to the American psychologist J. H. Tufts, modern voluntarism was indebted to Kant’s argument about the primacy of practical over pure reason: “Intellectually man is incapable of knowing ultimate reality, but this need not be and must not interfere with the duty of acting as though the spiritual character of this reality were certain.” J. H. Tufts, “Voluntarism,” in Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, ed. J. M. Baldwin, vol. 2 (New York and London: Macmillan, 1902), 807– 8. 110. Wundt, Grundriss der Psychologie, 20, and Outlines of Psychology, 17. 111. Wilhem Wundt, Vorlesungen über die Menschen­ und Thierseele, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1863), 314. 112. Wilhelm Wundt, “Das Ich und die Persönlichkeit,” in Wundt, Ethik. Eine Untersuchung der Thatsachen und Gesetze des sittlichen Lebens (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, [1886] 1892), 447– 48, and “The Ego and the Personality,” in Wundt, The Principles of Morality and the Departments of the Moral Life, trans. M. F. Washburn (London: Swan Sonnenschein; New York: Macmillan, 1901), 20– 21. 113. Ernst Mach, Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen und das Verhältnis des Physischen zum Psychischen (Jena: G. Fischer, 1886), translated by C. M. Williams as Contributions to The Analysis of the Sensations (Chicago: Open Court, 1897), here 11. 114. Wilhelm Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, trans. J. E. Creighton and E. B. Titchener (London: Swan Sonnenschein; New York: Macmillan, [1863] 1907), 250– 51. 115. “Notice that the relation of clear to obscure ideas,” Wundt wrote, “furnishes an obvious analogy to that of objects distinctly or indistinctly seen in the field of vision.” Wundt, Lec­ tures on Human and Animal Psychology, 244. 116. Mead, by contrast, maintained: “The body is not a self, as such; it becomes a self only

231

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232

117. 118. 119. 120.

121. 122.

123.

124.

125. 126. 127.

128.

when it has developed a mind within the context of social experiences.” G. H. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society from the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist, ed. C. W. Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), 27. Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, 208. Lorraine Daston, “British Responses to Psycho-Physiology, 1860– 1900,” Isis 69.2 (June 1978): 202. Danziger, Constructing the Subject, 34. According to Danziger, history has not been kind to Wundtian psychology, primarily because Boring wrote the history of the discipline based on the account of his teacher Titchener, who also repudiated his own teacher Wundt. Danziger, Constructing the Subject, 205 Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology. Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften. Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte (Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1883), translated as Introduction to the Human Sciences, vol. 1 of Selected Works, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); Wilhelm Dilthey, “Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie,” Sitzungsbeitrag der Ber­ liner Akademie der Wissenschaften vom 20. Dezember 1894 (1895): 1309– 1407, translated by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Donald Moore as “Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology,” in Selected Works, vol. 2, Understanding the Human World, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 115– 210. Dilthey, “Ideas concerning Descriptive and Analytical Psychology,” 129– 30. Dilthey refers to Theodor Waitz, Lehrbuch der Psychologie als Naturwissenschaft (Braunschweig: Viewig, 1849). The term “descriptive psychology” was coined in the late 1880s by the Austrian philosopher and scholastic scholar Franz Brentano, who argued that the relationship between descriptive psychology and what he considered its opposite, genetic psychology, was akin to that between descriptive anatomy and physiology or between the geological sciences of geognosy and geogony. Drawing on these obscure terms, Brentano invented the neologism Psychognosie for descriptive psychology. Franz Brentano, Descriptive Psychology, trans. B. Müller (London: Routledge, [1888– 89] 1982). Also see Hermann Ebbinghaus, “Über erklärende und beschreibende Psychologie,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physi­ ologie der Sinnesorgane 9 (1896): 161– 205, and E. B. Titchener, “Brentano and Wundt: Empirical and Experimental Psychology,” American Journal of Psychology 32 (1921): 108– 20. Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, 501. Makkreel points out that Dilthey was ambivalent about the use of the term Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences) because of its association with the Hegelian Geist, but he found the neo-Kantian term Kulturwis­ senschaften (cultural sciences) even more problematic in that it focused too much on the voluntaristic and intellectual achievements of human beings and did not make room for psychology. Georg Simmel preferred the term Moralwissenschaft (moral sciences), a term translated from English. Rudolf A. Makkreel, “The Emergence of the Human Sciences from the Moral Sciences,” 316. Makkreel, “The Emergence of the Human Sciences from the Moral Sciences,” 315. Dilthey, Introduction to the Human Sciences, 50. Dilthey modified his original position in the last decade of his life. While he did not abandon the psychology of lived experience, he no longer thought it sufficient for achieving understanding. Especially after 1900, he turned to hermeneutics, the interpretation of outward forms of expression that were public and available to sense experience. He meant by this a science that “subsumes a phenomenal domain to a causal system by means of a limited number of univocally determined elements that are the constituents of that system.” Dilthey, “Ideas concerning Descriptive and Analytical Psychology,” 115.

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129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137.

Dilthey, “Ideas concerning Descriptive and Analytical Psychology,” 121– 22. Dilthey, “Ideas concerning Descriptive and Analytical Psychology,” 140. Dilthey, “Ideas concerning Descriptive and Analytical Psychology,” 141. Dilthey, “Ideas concerning Descriptive and Analytical Psychology,” 153. Dilthey, “Ideas concerning Descriptive and Analytical Psychology,” 128. Dilthey, “Ideas concerning Descriptive and Analytical Psychology,” 165. Dilthey, “Ideas concerning Descriptive and Analytical Psychology,” 143, 198. Dilthey, “Ideas concerning Descriptive and Analytical Psychology,” 124– 25. Kant, “On the Logical Use of the Understanding in General,” B93, Critique of Pure Rea­ son, 205. 138. After watching Hamlet onstage, for example, Dilthey reported that he grasped the play in his memory-images: “I connect inferences into a demonstration of a fact that strongly

139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145.

146. 147. 148.

149. 150. 151.

152.

influences my feeling for life; in this connection that leads from proposition to proposition, there is throughout a productive influence that proceeds from the premises to the conclusion.” Dilthey, “Ideas concerning Descriptive and Analytical Psychology,” 178. Dilthey, “Ideas concerning Descriptive and Analytical Psychology,” 146, 148. Dilthey, “Ideas concerning Descriptive and Analytical Psychology,” 146. Dilthey, “Ideas concerning Descriptive and Analytical Psychology,” 158– 59. Dilthey, “Ideas concerning Descriptive and Analytical Psychology,” 147. Dilthey, “Ideas concerning Descriptive and Analytical Psychology,” 156. Dilthey, “Ideas concerning Descriptive and Analytical Psychology,” 156. Robert Musil, “The Religious Spirit, Modernism, and Metaphysics” [1912], in Musil, Preci­ sion and Soul: Essays and Addresses, ed. and trans. Burton Pike and David S. Luft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 22– 23. Emphasis in the original. Moritz Schlick, “What Knowledge Is Not,” in Schlick, General Theory of Knowledge (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, [1918] 1985), 79– 94. Schlick, General Theory of Knowledge, 83. Schlick cites Bergson’s “Introduction à la Métaphysique” (1903) and Edmund Husserl’s “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft” (1910– 11). Husserl cited in Schlick, General Theory of Knowledge, 82. Schlick, General Theory of Knowledge, 84. Anderson, “The Debate over the Geisteswissenschaften in German Philosophy,” 231. The members of the Vienna Circle were not unified in their endorsement of the unity-ofscience thesis. Neither were they unified in their support for foundationalist versus coherentist epistemologies. Schlick defended the methodological dualism of philosophy and science, whereas Otto Neurath’s theories of universal language and physicalism followed from the unity-of -science thesis. Neurath argued that if the artificial distinctions between the sciences could be eliminated, then all scientific knowledge could be comprehended by the same universal language, a language that would speak of physical objects. See Otto Neurath, “Unified Science as Encyclopedic Integration,” International Encyclopedia of Unified Science 1.1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938): 1– 27; Neurath, “Physicalism” [1931], “Sociology in the Framework of Physicalism” [1931], and “Universal Jargon and Terminology” [1941], in Otto Neurath: Philosophical Papers, ed. Robert S. Cohen and Marie Neurath (Dordrecht, Boston, and Lancester: D. Reidel, 1983), 52– 57, 58– 90, 213– 29. Neurath used the metaphor of a raft, which, he explained, may have to be rebuilt on the open sea. See Otto Neurath, “Protocol Statements” [1932], in Philosophical Papers, 92. For a historical discussion of coherentism versus foundationalism, see Ernest Sosa, “The Mythology of the Given,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 14 (1997): 275– 86. Wilhelm Windelband, “Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft. Straßburger Rektoratsrede”

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153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164.

[1894], in Windelband, Präludien. Aufsätze und Reden zur Philosophie und ihrer Geschichte (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1915), 136– 60, translated as “Rectorial Address, Strasbourg, 1894,” History and Theory 19.2 (February 1980): 169– 85. Windelband, “Rectorial Address,” 171. Windelband, “Rectorial Address,” 173. Windelband, “Rectorial Address,” 175. Windelband, “Rectorial Address,” 178. Windelband, “Rectorial Address,” 181. Windelband, “Rectorial Address,” 177. Windelband, “Rectorial Address,” 178– 79. Robert Musil, “Sketch of What the Writer Knows” [1918], in Musil, Precision and Soul, 62. Musil, “Sketch of What the Writer Knows,” 62. Musil, “Sketch of What the Writer Knows,” 63. Musil, “Sketch of What the Writer Knows,” 64. Musil, “Sketch of the Writer Knows,” 63.

165. In this sense, Adorno preferred Hegel’s skepticism about an absolutely first to the nineteenth- century thinkers whose “philosophy of origins took shape scientifically as epistemology.” Theodor Adorno, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie. Studien über Husserl und die phänomenologischen Antinomien (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1956), translated by Willis Domingo as Against Epistemology: A Metacritique: Studies in Husserl and the Phenom­ enological Antinomies (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1982), 22. 166. Jacques Derrida, “Speech and Phenomena” and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 5. This, according to the art historian Whitney Davis, was also the fallacy committed by formalism: “formalisticism,” Davis’s neologism for “reification of formalism proper,” mistook its methodological and pedagogical expediency as the foundation of secure knowledge. Whitney Davis, “What Is Formalism?” in Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 45– 74. For an extension of Davis’s idea of “post-formalism,” see Whitney Davis, “What Is Post-Formalism? (Or, Das Sehen an sich hat seine Kunstgeschichte),” nonsite. org 7, October 12, 2012. Chapter Two 1.

2.

3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Hermann Grimm, “Die Umgestaltung der Universitätsvorlesungen über neuere Kunstgeschichte durch die Anwendung des Skioptikons” [1892– 93], in Grimm, Beiträge zur deutschen Culturgeschichte (Berlin: Wilhelm Herz, 1897), 315. Grimm, “Die Umgestaltung der Universitätsvorlesungen,” 305. On the history of the art historical slide lecture in German-speaking countries, see the important study by Heinrich Dilly, Kunstgeschichte als Institution. Studien zur Geshichte einer Disziplin (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979). Grimm, “Die Umgestaltung der Universitätsvorlesungen,” 285. Grimm, “Die Umgestaltung der Universitätsvorlesungen,” 282. Grimm, “Die Umgestaltung der Universitätsvorlesungen,” 342. Grimm, “Die Umgestaltung der Universitätsvorlesungen,” 298. Grimm used the term “public instruction” (öffentlicher Unterricht) to describe how the university had become more open after the Unification. Grimm, “Die Umgestaltung der Universitätsvorlesungen,” 278, 342– 44. This, however, was more perception than reality: although it was true that enrollment at German universities increased dramatically after

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8.

1871— from 23,000 in 1875 to 72,000 in 1912— this still constituted a minuscule percentage of the population. In 1910 no more than 1.3% of Germany had access to university education. Volker Rolf Berghahn, Imperial Germany, 1871– 1918: Economy, Society, Culture and Politics (New York: Berghahn, 2005), 85– 86. Also see the seminal book by Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), as well as Hartmut Boockmann, Wissen und Widerstand. Geschichte der deutschen Universität (Berlin: Siedler, 1999), and Charles E. McClelland, State, Society and University in Germany, 1700– 1914 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980). In an attempt to understand Wölfflin’s conception of the baroque, historians have thoughtfully examined his intellectual indebtedness to Hegelianism, neo-Kantianism, and empathy theory, as well as his anticipation of the ideas of the Frankfurt School; brilliantly analyzed his work in the context of turn-of-the- century debates about archaeology and the

questions of malerisch and relief sculpture; carefully read Wilhelmine and Weimar politics into his most formalist arguments; and meticulously analyzed the structure as well as the content of his writings. In English, for example, see Evonne Levy, “The Political Project of Wölfflin’s Early Formalism,” October 139 (Winter 2012): 39– 58: Evonne Levy, Baroque and the Political Language of Formalism (1845– 1945): Burckhardt, Wölfflin, Gurlitt, Brinck­ mann, Sedlymayr (Basel: Schwabe, 2015); Alina Payne, “Portable Ruins: The Pergamon Altar, Heinrich Wölfflin, and German Art History at the fin de siècle,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53/54 (Spring/Autumn 2008): 168– 89; Daniel Adler, “Painterly Politics: Wölfflin, Formalism, and German Academic Culture, 1885– 1915,” Art History 27.3 (June 2004): 431– 56; Frederic J. Schwartz, “Cathedrals and Shoes: Concepts of Style in Wölfflin and Adorno,” New German Critique 76 (Winter 1999): 3– 48; Michael Ann Holly, “Imagining the Baroque,” in Holly, Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 91– 111; Michael Ann Holly, “Wölfflin and the Imagining of the Baroque,” in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994): 347– 64; Martin Warnke, “On Heinrich Wölfflin,” Representations 27 (Summer 1989): 172– 87; Marshall Brown, “The Classic Is the Baroque: On the Principle of Wölfflin’s Art History,” Critical Inquiry 9.2 (December 1982): 379– 402; Joan Hart, “Reinterpreting Wölfflin: Neo-Kantianism and Hermeneutics,” Art Journal 42.4 (Winter 1982): 292– 300; and Margaret Iversen, “Politics and the Historiography of Art History: Wölfflin’s Classic Art,” Oxford Art Journal 4.1 (July 1981): 31– 34. 9. Wölfflin’s chronology of the baroque style would be considered unusual today: he claimed that it emerged around 1520, became mature around 1580, and ended about 1750 with the rise of neoclassicism. 10. Wölfflin made the Renaissance and baroque comparison first in Renaissance und Barock (1888), continued the comparative logic into Die Klassische Kunst (1899), transformed the opposing pairs generated by the primary opposition into “principles of art history” in Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915), and reworked the opposition through a nationalistic lens in Italien und das deutsche Formgefühl (1931). 11. The peculiar existence of the baroque has been noted, among others, by Karl Scheffler, Verwandlungen des Barocks in der Kunst des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Vienna: Gallus, 1947) and more recently by Joseph Imorde, “Barock und Moderne. Zum Problem zeitgebundener Geschichtsschreibung,” in Barock als Aufgabe, ed. Andreas Kreul (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005), 179– 212; Helen Hills, “Introduction: Rethinking the Baroque” and “The Baroque: The Grit in the Oyster of Art History,” in Rethinking the Baroque, ed. Helen

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12. 236

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Hills (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 3– 9, 11– 38; and Andrew Leach, Maarten Delbeke, and John Macarthur, eds., The Baroque in Architectural Culture, 1880– 1980 (Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015). Heinrich Wölfflin, “Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur” [1886], in Wölfflin, Kleine Schriften, ed. Joseph Gartner (Basel: Benno Schwabe, 1946), 13– 47, here 13, translated as “Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture,” in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873– 1893, introd. and trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 149– 90, here 149. Wölfflin, “Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur,” 18. Wölfflin, “Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur,” 18. Wölfflin, “Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur,” 18. Wölfflin, “Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur,” 19. Wölfflin, “Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur,” 21. Wölfflin, “Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur,” 13. Wölfflin, “Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur,” 13. Nachlass Heinrich Wölfflin (hereafter NHW), NL 95, Universitätsbibliothek, Basel, Notizheft 14, 136, 1886– 87. NHW, Notizheft 15, 29r, 1887– 88.

22. The marginal notes can be found in Wölfflin’s own copy of the dissertation in the Getty Special Collections. The exact date of the notes is unclear. Getty Research Institute, Special Collections, 91-A88860448, Heinrich Wölfflin miscellaneous papers, 1910– 19, n.d. Also see Andrew James Hopkins, “Heinrich Wölfflin’s Own Annotated Books,” Getty Re­ search Journal 7 (January 2015): 177– 84. 23. Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock. Eine Untersuchung über Wesen und Entstehung des Barockstils in Italien (Munich: T. Ackermann, 1888), translated by Kathrin Simon as Renaissance and Baroque (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966). 24. Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock, iii. 25. Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock, 65– 66. 26. Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock, 30. The last sentence of this chapter disappeared from the English translation: “One could speak of the pathological effect of the colossal.” Emphasis in the original. 27. Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock, 16– 18, 21– 22, 51. 28. Heinrich Wölfflin, “Ueber den Begriff des Malerischen,” Logos. Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie der Kultur 4 (1913): 2. 29. Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock, 16. 30. Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock, 18, 21. 31. See chapter 1. 32. E. B. Titchener, “Excitation,” in Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, ed. James M. Baldwin, vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1901), 356. 33. G. F. Stout and J. M Baldwin, “Effort, Mental (Consciousness of ),” in Baldwin, Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology 1:311– 12. 34. Wilhelm Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, trans. J. E. Creighton and E. B. Titchener (London: Swan Sonnenschein; New York: Macmillan, [1863] 1907), 244. 35. Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock, 65– 66. 36. Alois Riegl, Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom, ed. Arthur Burda and Max Dvořák (Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1908), 3, translated by Andrew Hopkins and Arnold Witte as The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2010), 94. 37. Riegl, Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom, 4, and The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome, 94.

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38. Georg Simmel, “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben,” in Die Großstadt. Vorträge und Aufsatze zur Städteausstellung, Jahrbuch der Gehe­Stiftung 9 (1902– 3): 185– 206. 39. Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock, 73. 40. Wölfflin, “Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur,” 13. Also see Wilhelm Dilthey, “Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie,” Sitzungsbeitrag der Berliner Akademie der Wissenschaften vom 20. Dezember 1894 (1895): 1309– 1407. Translated by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Donald Moore as “Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology,” in Selected Works, vol. 2, Understanding the Human World, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 115– 210. For more on this disciplinary debate that had reverberations throughout many humanities and social sciences disciplines, see chapter 1. 41. NHW, Notizheft 34,15r, beginning of October 1894. Emphasis mine. There are other ref-

42. 43.

44. 45.

46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

51.

erences in Wölfflin’s diaries to describing versus explaining. He wrote on December 8, 1912, “Art as the general organ of expression. The task of the university instructor is not to explain individual pictures but rather to convey an ideal of the significance of ‘educated seeing.’” NHW, Notizheft 51, 51r, December 8, 1912. Emphasis mine. Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock, 64. Compare this to Helmholtz’s dilemmas about causality in chapter 1. It may be significant to note here that Wölffin used the word Grund (ground) and not Ursa­ che (cause), as the title of the chapter in the English translation of Renaissance und Barock might suggest. Wölfflin’s journals are full of references to “types.” “Scientific thinking is to relate the individual case to the underlying general. Great literature also finds what is typical in the individual.” NHW, Notizheft 42, 76r, February 23, 1904. Because of Wölfflin’s sustained interest in typology, Marshall Brown has described him as a morphologist rather than a taxonomist. Brown, “The Classic Is the Baroque,” 380– 81. Heinrich Wölfflin, Das Erklären von Kunstwerken (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1921), 12, 4. Heinrich Wölfflin, “Wie man Skulpturen Aufnehmen Soll,” part 1, Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst n.f. 7 (1896): 224– 28; part 2, n.f. 8 (1897): 294– 97; and part 3, Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst n.f. 26 (1915): 237– 44. Translated by Geraldine A. Johnson as “How One Should Photograph Sculpture,” Art History 36.1 (February 2013): 52– 71. Also see Heinrich Wölfflin, “Über Abbildungen und Deutungen,” in Wölfflin, Gedanken zur Kunstgeschichte. Gedrucktes und Ungedrucktes (Basel: Benno Schwabe, 1941); “Über das Rechts und Links im Bilde,” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst n.f. 5 (1928): 213– 24; and “Das Problem der Umkehrung in Raffaels Teppichkartons,” Belvedere 9 (1930): 63– 65. For a fascinating study of the historical relationship between malerisch and relief sculpture, see Alina Payne, “Portable Ruins,” and Alina Payne, “On Sculptural Relief: Malerisch, the Autonomy of Artistic Media and the Beginnings of Baroque Studies,” in Hills, Rethink­ ing the Baroque, 39– 64. Jacob Burckhardt, Der Cicerone. Eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italiens (Basel: Schweighauser’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1855), 368, and Wölfflin, Renaissance und Ba­ rock, iii. Wölfflin, “Wie man Skulpturen Aufnehmen Soll,” part 1, 224. Wölfflin, “Wie man Skulpturen Aufnehmen Soll,” part 1, 224, part 2, 294. Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst (Munich: Bruckmann, 1915), 46, translated recently by Jonathan Blower as Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Early Modern Art, with essays by Evonne Levy and Tristan Weddigen (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2015). For a good summary of this complex discourse, see Angela Matyssek, “Fotografieren Ist

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52. 238

53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

65.

66. 67.

68. 69. 70.

Sehen. Kunsthistorische Forschung und Bildpraxis bei Richard Hamann und Foto Marburg,” Fotogeschichte 25.97 (2005): 69– 79. Konrad Lange, Das Wesen der Kunst. Grundzüge einer realistischen Kunstlehre, vol. 2 (Berlin: G. Grote, 1901), 207. See the chapter “Mechanical Objectivity” in Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectiv­ ity (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 115– 90. Moritz Thausing, “Kupferstich und Photographie,” Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst 1 (1866): 287– 94, here 291. Thausing was the director of the Wiener Kupferstichkabinett Albertina and a mentor to Alois Riegl. Emphasis mine. Thausing, “Kupferstich und Photographie,” 289– 90. See chapter 1 and especially Robert Gaupp cited in Konrad Lange, Das Kino in Gegenwart und Zukunft (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1920), 52. For a general overview, see Kaspar Maase and Wolfgang Kaschuba, eds., Schund und Schönheit. Populäre Kultur um 1900 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2001). Max Nordau, Entartung, 2 vols. (Berlin: Duncker, 1892– 1893), translated by George L. Mosse as Degeneration (New York: H. Fertig, 1968). Nordau, Degeneration, 27. The psychologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing also classified the uncontrollable movements of the eye as “degeneration in the motor domain;” see his Text­ Book of Insanity Based on Clinical Observations for Practitioners and Students of Medicine, trans. Charles Gilbert Chaddock (Philadelphia: Davis, 1904), 361. Heinrich Wölfflin, “Über kunsthistorische Verbildung,” Die neue Rundschau 4 (April 1909): 572. Wölfflin, “Über kunsthistorische Verbildung,” 572. Wölfflin, “Wie man Skulpturen Aufnehmen Soll,” part 2, 295. Wölfflin’s preference for engravings seems similar to Goethe’s drawing of the Urpflanze as described by Daston and Galison in the chapter “Truth-to-Nature,” Objectivity, 55– 114. Wölfflin, “Wie man Skulpturen Aufnehmen Soll,” part 2, 296. Brown, “The Classic Is the Baroque,” 382. Wölfflin planned a Raphael exhibition in order to compare photographs and engravings of the artist’s work. NHW, Letter to Parents, Basel, February 16, 1895. Such an exhibition would “force the beholder to see, to compare, and study himself.” NHW, Letter to Parents, Basel, June 1895. In his journals he elaborated at length about the exhibition and discussed the engraving as the medium farthest removed from the public’s taste. NHW, Notizheft 33, 80v, August 1893– September 1894. The exhibition was not realized. Joan Hart, “Heuristic Constructs and Ideal Types: The Wölfflin/Weber Connection,” in German Art History and Scientific Thought: Beyond Formalism, ed. Mitchell Benjamin Frank and Daniel Allan Adler (Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012): 57– 72. Heinrich Wölfflin, Die klassische Kunst. Eine Einführung in die italienische Renaissance (Munich: Bruckmann, [1899] 1914), vii. Adolf Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (Strasbourg: Heitz & Mündel, 1893), translated as “The Problem of Form” in Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space, 227– 79. Wölfflin, Die klassische Kunst, 96– 97. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vii. Even a simple comparison of Wölfflin’s titles to Schmarsow’s is suggestive: August Schmarsow, Barock und Rokoko. Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung über das Malerische in der Architektur (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1897) and Grundbegriffe der Kunstwissenschaft. Am Über­ gang vom Altertum zum Mittelalter (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1905).

n o t e s t o P A g e s 74 – 7 8

71. Schmarsow, Grundbegriffe der Kunstwissenschaft, 149. 72. Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung (Leipzig: Karl W. Hiersemann, 1894), translated as “The Essence of Architectural Creation,” in Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space, 281– 97. 73. Schmarsow attacked Wölfflin by arguing that architecture had less to do with architectural masses (Körper) and more to do with a conception of space (Raum). See August Schmarsow, “Ueber den Werth der Dimensionen im menschlichen Raumgebilde,” Berichte über die Verhandlungen der Königlich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften 48 (1896): 44– 61. 74. Riegl, Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom, 16. 75. Wölfflin, “Über kunsthistorische Verbildung,” 575. 76. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 11, 15. 77.

78. 79.

80. 81.

82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87. 88.

In thirteenth- century examples of biblia pauperum, for instance, images of heaven and hell were placed next to each other with the goal of impressing a moral lesson upon the reader. In architectural discourses, the same strategy was used to similarly moralizing ends by A. W. N. Pugin, Contrasts: or A Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries and Similar Buildings of the Present Day (London: Charles Dolman, 1836) and to demonstrate the picturesque’s rhetoric of improvement by Humphrey Repton, Sketches and Hints on Landscape Gardening (London: W. Bulmer, 1794). For the role of dialectical thinking in Wölfflin, see Brown, “The Classic Is the Baroque,” especially 395– 96. For a summary of the event, see Adolph Bayersdorfer, Der Holbein­Streit. Geschichtliche Skizze der Madonnenfrage und kritische Begründung der auf dem Holbein­ Congress in Dres­ den abgegebenen Erklärung der Kunstforscher (Munich and Berlin: Bruckmann, 1872) and the later Oskar Batschmann, “Der Holbein-Streit. Eine Krise der Kunstgeschichte,” Jahr­ buch der Berliner Museen 38 (1996): 87– 100. “Erklärung” [September 5, 1871], Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst 6 (1871): 355. This included Julius Hübner, et al., “Zur Holbeinfrage,” Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst 7 (1872): 28; Hermann Grimm, “Die Holbeinische Madonna,” Preußische Jahrbücher 28 (1871): 418– 31; Wilhelm Bode, “Zuschrift an Carl von Lützow vom 27.9.1871,” Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst 7 (1872): 55– 64; and later Jacob Burckhardt, “Über die Echtheit alter Bilder,” lecture delivered on February 21, 1882, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 14, Vorträge (Stuttgart, Berlin, and Leipzig: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1933), 261– 70. Also see G. T. Fechner, Ueber die Aechtheitsfrage der Holbein’schen Madonna. Discussion und Acten (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1871) and Bericht über das auf der Dresdner Holbein­Ausstellung ausgelegte Album. Mit einigen persönlichen Nebenmerkungen (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1872). Fechner, Bericht über das auf der Dresdner Holbein­Ausstellung ausgelegte Album, 8. Fechner, Bericht über das auf der Dresdner Holbein­Ausstellung ausgelegte Album, 6. Kurd Lasswitz, Gustav Theodor Fechner (Stuttgart: Friedrich Frommanns [E. Hauff], 1896), 97. For Fechner’s litany of reasons for the experiment’s failure, see Fechner, Ueber die Aechtheitsfrage der Holbein’schen Madonna, 19– 20. Wilhelm Wundt, “Selbstbeobachtung und innere Wahrnehmung,” Philosophische Studien 4 (1888): 301– 2. William T. Preyer, Die Seele des Kindes. Beobachtungen über die geistige Entwicklung des Men­ schen in den ersten Lebensjahren (Leipzig: T. Grieben, [1882] 1904), 225. J. Loos, “Konzentration im Lehrplan der höheren Schulen,” in Encyklopädisches Handbuch der Pädagogik, ed. Wilhelm Rein, vol. 5 (Langensalza: Beyer & Mann, 1906), 95. Hildebrand, “Zur Museumsfrage,” Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 1 (1906): 80– 82.

239

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89. Hermann Obrist, “Wozu über Kunst schreiben?” [1900], in Obrist, Neue Möglichkeiten in der bildenden Kunst. Essays (Leipzig: Eugen Diederichs, 1903), 7. 90. Obrist, “Wozu über Kunst schreiben?” 11. 91. Obrist, “Neue Möglichkeiten in der bildenden Kunst,” in Neue Möglichkeiten in der bilden­ den Kunst, 145. 92. Obrist, “Nachwort,” in Neue Möglichkeiten in der bildenden Kunst, 169. 93. Paul Schultze-Naumburg, “Vorwort,” in Kulturarbeiten, vol. 1, Hausbau (Munich: Callwey im Kuntswart-Verlag, [1901] 1912), unpaginated. 94. Schultze-Naumburg, “Vorwort.” 95. Schultze-Naumburg, “Vorwort.” 96. Schultze-Naumburg, “Vorwort.” 97. He also compared images to disparage the Weissenhofsiedlung in Paul SchultzeNaumburg, Das Gesicht des deutschen Hauses (Munich: Georg D. W. Callwey, 1929). 98. Hans Siemsen, “Die Literatur der Nichtleser,” Die literarische Welt 2.37 (September 10, 1926): 4, translated as “The Literature of Nonreaders” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (London: University of California Press, 1994), 663– 64. 99. I am referring here to the distinction devised by Rolf E. Engelsing, “Die Perioden der Lesergeschichte in der Neuzeit. Das statistische Ausmass und die soziokulturelle Bedeutung der Lektüre,” Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 10 (1970): 944– 1002. 100. Schultze-Naumburg, “Vorwort.” 101. Max Dvořák, Katechismus der Denkmalpflege (Vienna: J. Bard, [1916] 1919). 102. Gustaf Britsch, Theorie der bildenden Kunst, ed. Egon Kornmann (Munich: Bruckmann, 1926). 103. Hans Hermann, Theorie und Praxis im Zeichenunterricht einer höheren Schule nach der Lehre von Gustaf Britsch (Düsseldorf: L. Schwann, 1931), 18. 104. Sigfried Giedion, Befreites Wohnen, Schaubücher (Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1929). 105. See, for example, Adolf Behne, Eine Stunde Architektur (Stuttgart: Wedekind, 1928). 106. Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankreich, Eisen, Eisenbeton (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1928), translated by J. Duncan Berry as Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro­Concrete, introd. Sokratis Georgiadis (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995), 83. 107. Sigfried Giedion, Architektur und Gemeinschaft. Tagebuch einer Entwicklung (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956), 137, as cited in Sokratis Georgiadis, “Introduction,” Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferro­Concrete, 77n184. Giedion wrote his dissertation, Spät­ barocker und romantischer Klassizismus (Late Baroque and Romantic Classicism, 1922), in Munich under Wölfflin. 108. Le Corbusier, Towards an Architecture, trans. John Goodman (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Research Institute, [1923] 2008). Sigfried Giedion compared the Bauhaus building to a Picasso in Space, Time, and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941). Giedion’s comparison was transformed with art historical skill by Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky in the first of their two influential essays on transparency two decades later: Colin Rowe and Robert Slutzky, “Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal, Part I,” Perspecta 8 (1963): 45– 54. On this famous comparison, also see Eve Blau and Nancy J. Troy, eds., Architecture and Cubism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press and Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1997). 109. See Adolf Dresler, Deutsche Kunst und entartete “Kunst.” Kunstwerk und Zerrbild as Spiegel der Weltanschauung (Munich: Deutscher Volksverlag, 1938). 110. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vii. For the book’s publishing history, see

n ot e s to PAg e s 8 3 – 8 9

111. 112.

113. 114. 115.

116. 117.

Evonne Levy, “Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History (1915– 2015): A Prolegomenon for Its Second Century,” in Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, 1– 46. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vii. Edmund Burke Huey, The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading with a Review of the History of Reading and Writing and of Methods, Texts, and Hygiene in Reading (New York: Macmillan, 1908). Huey, The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading, 6. Huey, The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading, 9. James McKeen Cattell, “The Time Taken Up by Cerebral Operations,” parts 1 and 2, Mind 11 (1886): 220– 42; part 3, Mind 11 (1886): 377– 92; part 4, Mind 11 (1887): 524– 38; Benno Erdmann and Raymond Dodge, Psychologische Untersuchungen über das Lesen auf experi­ menteller Grundlage (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1898). Louis Émil Javal as cited in Huey, The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading, 16. G. M. Stratton, “Eye Movements and the Aesthetics of Visual Form,” Philosophische Stud­ ien 20 (1902): 336– 59, here 343.

118. Stratton, “Eye Movements and the Aesthetics of Visual Form,” 343, and G. M. Stratton, “Symmetry, Linear Illusions, and the Movements of the Eye,” Psychological Review 13 (1906): 82– 96, here 94. Emphasis mine. 119. Stratton, “Eye Movements and the Aesthetics of Visual Form,” 349. 120. Paul Nipkow, Elektrisches Teleskop, German Patent 30105, filed January 6, 1884, issued January 15, 1885. 121. Mary Elizabeth Stevens, “Introduction to the Special Issue on Optical Character Recognition (OCR),” Pattern Recognition 2.3 (September 1970): 147. 122. Julius Zeitler, “Tachistoskopische Versuche über das Lesen,” Philosophische Studien 16.3 (1900): 380– 463. 123. Rudolf Schulze, Aus der Werkstatt der experimentellen Psychologie und Pädagogik (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1909), 198. Emphasis mine. 124. Wilhelm Wundt, Grundriss der Psychologie (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, [1896] 1897) 166, translated by C. H. Judd as Outlines of Psychology (London: Williams & Norgate; New York: Gustav E. Stechert, 1897), 141. 125. Hermann von Helmholtz, “Die neueren Fortschritte in der Theorie des Sehens” [1868], in Helmholtz, Populäre wissenschaftliche Vorträge (Braunschweig: Friedrich Viewig, 1871), 74, translated as “The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,” in Science and Culture: Popular and Philosophical Essays, ed. David Cahan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 185. 126. Hildebrand, “The Problem of Form,” 229– 30. 127. Take, for example, Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982). Charles Taylor provides a similar account of the decentered subject of modernity while acknowledging that “decentring is not the alternative to inwardness; it is its complement.” Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989) 465, 472. 128. Huey, “The Inner Speech of Reading and the Mental and Physical Characteristics of Speech” and “The Functioning of Inner Speech in the Perception of What is Read,” in The Psychology and Pedagogy of Reading, 117– 51. 129. See Paul Saenger, “Reading in the Later Middle Ages,” A History of Reading in the West, ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 120– 48.

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130. For a good summary of this history, see Stephan Meier-Oeser, “Inneres Wort; Innere Rede,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, vol. 12 (Basel: Schwabe, 2004), 1037– 50. 131. F. D. E. Schleiermacher, “Transcendentaler Teil,” in Dialektik, ed. Isidor Halpern (Berlin: Mayer & Müller, [1811] 1903), 83– 241, here 87. 132. Johann Friedrich Herbart, “Bemerkungen über die Bildung und Entwickelung der Vorstellungsreihen,” in Herbart, Psychologische Untersuchungen (Göttingen: Dieterischsen, 1839), 185– 86. 133. W. B. Secor, “Visual Reading: A Study in Mental Imagery,” American Journal of Psychology 11.2 (January 1900): 225. 134. Secor, “Visual Reading,” 225. 135. Secor, “Visual Reading,” 233– 34. 136. Secor, “Visual Reading,” 236. 137. Bob Brown, The Readies (Bad Ems: Roving Eye Press, 1930), 37. 138. Brown, “A Story to be Read on the Reading Machine,” in The Readies, 41– 51. 139. NHW, IV 459a, Letter from Hermann Grimm to Heinrich Wölfflin, January 1894. 140. Franz Landsberger, Heinrich Wölfflin (Berlin: Elena Gottschalk, 1924), 93– 94, 96– 97. Parts of this description are cited in Robert S. Nelson, “The Slide Lecture, or the Work of Art History in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Critical Inquiry 26 (Spring 2000): 414– 34. 141. NHW, Notizheft 35, 32r, April 21, 1896. 142. NHW, Notizheft 50, 54r, July 20, 1911, and Notizheft 50, 67r, September 24, 1911. 143. Max Schmid, “Das Sciopticon im kunsthistorischen Unterricht,” in Offizieller Bericht über die Verhandlungen des kunsthistorischen Kongresses zu Budapest, 1.– 3. Oktober 1896 (Nuremberg, 1897), 46. 144. On the history of the art historical slide lecture, see Wiebke Ratzeburg, “Die Anfänge der Photographie und Lichtbildprojektion in ihre Verhältnis zur Kunstgeschichte” (master’s thesis, Freie Universität, Berlin, 1998); Robert P. Spindler, “Windows to the American Past: Lantern Slides as Historic Evidence,” in Art History through the Camera’s Lens, ed. Helene E. Roberts (Amsterdam: Gordon & Breach, 1995), 133– 49; Donald Preziosi, “The Panoptic Gaze and the Anamorphic Archive,” in Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Medi­ tations on a Coy Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 54– 79; Howard B. Leighton, “The Lantern Slide and Art History,” History of Photography 8.2 (April– June 1984): 107– 18; Trevor Fawcett, “Visual Facts and the Nineteenth-Century Art Lecture,” Art History 6.4 (December 1983): 442– 60; Heinrich Dilly, “Lichtbildprojektion— Prothese der Kunstbetrachtung” and Wolfgang Beyrodt, “Diareihen für den Unterricht,” in Kunst­ wissenschaft und Kunstvermittlung, ed. Irene Below (Giessen: Anabas, 1975), 153– 72, 173– 88; and Heinrich Dilly, “Die Bildwerfer. 121 Jahre kunstwissenschaftliche Dia-Projektion,” in Zwischen Markt und Museum. Beiträge der Tagung “Präsentationsformen von Fotografie” (Göppingen: Museumsverbands Baden-Württemberg, 1995), 39– 44; as well as Dilly’s Kunstgeschichte als Institution and Nelson’s “The Slide Lecture, or the Work of Art History in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” 145. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Future of Our Educational Institutions: Homer and Classical Philology (New York: Russell & Russell, [1872] 1964), 125– 26. 146. Wölfflin, “Pen Club Rede, 1944, Zürich,” Neue Zuercher Zeitung, July 21, 1945. 147. See note 7 above. 148. Grimm, “Die Umgestaltung der Universitätsvorlesungen,” 342– 43. 149. NHW, IV 459a, Letter from Hermann Grimm to Heinrich Wölfflin, dated January 1894. Grimm expressed his pleasure that Wölfflin used the sciopticon with success. 150. The full entry reads: “When I climb up to the University in the afternoon to project sil-

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151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156.

157.

158.

159.

160. 161. 162.

houettes of works of art on the wall, it frequently seems to me that I am actually already completely alienated from this job.” NHW, Letter to Ulrich Christoffel, Zurich, undated 1933. Wilhelm Waetzoldt, “Der Cicerone zu Heinrich Wölfflins 80. Geburtstag 21. Juni,” DAZ 161, June 1944. Landsberger, Heinrich Wölfflin, 95. Alfred Lichtwark, “Die Aufgaben der Kunsthalle,” in Lichtwark, Drei Programme (Berlin: Cassirer, 1902), 26. Landsberger, Heinrich Wölfflin, 94. Bruno Meyer, Glasphotogramme für den kunstwissenschaftlichen Unterricht (Karlruhe: Bruno Meyer, 1883), ix. Heinrich Dilly, “Weder Grimm, noch Schmarsow, geschweige denn Wölfflin . . . Zur jünsten Diskussion über die Diaprojektion um 1900,” in Fotografie als Instrument und Medium der Kunstgeschichte, ed. Costanza Caraffa (Berlin and Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2009), 104– 5. Grimm too discussed the virtues of using comparative slides to discuss the same theme taken up by various artists as well as to demonstrate the development in an artist’s work. Grimm, “Die Umgestaltung der Universitätsvorlesungen,” 286. H. A. Schmid, “Kunstgeschichte,” in Angewandte Photographie in Wissenschaft und Technik, ed. Konrad Wolf-Czapek (Berlin: Union Deutsche Verlagsgesellschaft Zweigniederlassung, 1911), 90. See Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Akademische Vorlesung [Lecture notes from 1911], ed. Norbert M. Schmitz (Alfter: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, 1994). Wölfflin referred repeatedly to a “comparative art history” in his journals but very rarely talked about the double-slide lecture. See, for example, NHW, Notizheft. 61, 15r, March 20, 1920. Dilly, “Weder Grimm, noch Schmarsow,” 91– 116. The image that Dilly elaborates on is from August Schmarsow, “Das Kunsthistorische Institut,” Die Institute und Seminare der philosophischen Fakultät an der Universität Leipzig, part 1 (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1909): 174– 76. Albert Maehl, “Begegnung mit Wölfflin,” Hannover Allgemeine Zeitung, November 26, 1949. Wölfflin, “Pen Club Rede, 1944, Zürich.” Theodor Levin quoted in the discussion following “Vortrag des Herrn Professor Dr. M. Schmid-Aachen über Lichtbilder-Apparate im kunsthistorischen Unterricht,” in Offizieller Bericht über die Verhandlungen des kunsthistorischen Kongresses zu Köln, 1.– 3. Oktober 1894 (Nuremberg, 1895), 91. Chapter Three

1.

2. 3. 4.

August Endell, “Formenschönheit und dekorative Kunst,” part 2, Dekorative Kunst 2 (1898): 121. The article appeared in three parts across two issues of the journal: “I. Die Freude an der Form,” Dekorative Kunst 1 (1897– 98): 75– 77; “II. Die gerade Linie” and “III. Geradlinige Gebilde,” Dekorative Kunst 2 (1898): 119– 25. Short excerpts have been translated into English as August Endell, “The Beauty of Form and Decorative Art,” in Art in Theory, 1900– 1990, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992), 60– 63. Endell, “Formenschönheit und dekorative Kunst,” part 2, 119. Endell, “Formenschönheit und dekorative Kunst,” part 2, 120. Endell, “Formenschönheit und dekorative Kunst,” part 2, 120.

243

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5.

244

Dekorative Kunst merged in its third year with the Die Kunst für Alle that had been published in Munich since 1885 and started appearing under the title Die Kunst. Monatshefte für freie und angewandte Kunst. 6. Die Redaktion, Dekorative Kunst 2 (1898): 125. 7. Karl Scheffler, “Ein Vorschlag,” Dekorative Kunst 12 (1904): 378– 79. 8. Scheffler referred in this short essay to the following texts in addition to those by Endell: Julius Meier-Graefe, “Das neue Ornament— Die junge Holländer,” Dekorative Kunst 2.7 (1898): 1– 18; Karl Scheffler, “Die Konventionenen der Kunst (Aphoristisch),” parts 1, 2, and 3, Dekorative Kunst 6.8, 11, and 12 (1903): 300– 311, 398– 400, and 438– 40; Karl Scheffler, “Meditationen über das Ornament,” Dekorative Kunst 4.10 (1901): 397– 415; and Wilhelm von Debschitz, “Eine Methode des Kunstunterrichts,” Dekorative Kunst 7 (1904): 209– 27. 9. Die Redaktion, Dekorative Kunst 12 (1904): 378– 79. 10. August Endell, “Möglichkeit und Ziele einer neuen Architektur,” Deutsche Kunst und De­ koration 1 (1897– 98): 142. 11. August Endell, “Architektur-Theorien,” Neudeutsche Bauzeitung 10 (1914): 54. 12. This is not to say that Dekorative Kunst was the only venue. The pages of German turn- ofthe- century art journals abound with declarations about the primacy of feeling (Gefühl ) and sensation (Empfindung) in art. For some examples beyond Dekorative Kunst, see Lou Andreas-Salomé, “Grundformen der Kunst. Eine psychologische Studie,” Pan 4 (1898): 177– 82; Adelbert Matthaei, “Der aesthetische Genuss am Bauwerk,” part 1, Die Kunst für Alle 16.5 (December 1, 1900): 105– 12; Henry van de Velde, “Die Belebung des Stoffes als Schönheitsprincip,” Kunst und Künstler 1 (1903): 453– 63; Dr. Hugo Eckener, “Das ‘Wie’ und das ‘Was’ der Kunst,” parts 1 and 2, Die Kunst für Alle 19 (1904): 41– 48, 57– 60; Jules Laforgue, “Impressionismus,” Kunst und Künstler 3 (1905): 501– 6; Adolf Hölzel, “Über künstlerische Ausdrucksmittel und deren Verhältnis zu Natur und Bild,” Die Kunst. Mo­ natshefte für freie und angewandte Kunst 11 (1905): 81– 88, 106– 13; and Ellen Key, “Vom Sittengesetz der Schönheit,” Kunst und Künstler 5 (1907): 186– 91. 13. See, for example, “Der Schmuck des Menschen als Ausdrucksmittel,” Dekorative Kunst 3.6 (1900): 217– 23. 14. A. L. P., “Empfindung in der angewandten Kunst,” Dekorative Kunst 1 (1897): 257– 60. 15. There are differences between the terms “emotion,” “feeling,” and “passion.” Usually, “passion” is considered an older term that became obsolete in the nineteenth century. For some, such as Alexander Bain, all mental stuff was “feeling.” Generally speaking, however, it is safe to assume that for those who were most attentive to the separation of the mental components of a feeling from its corporeal manifestations, “feeling” denoted the former and “emotion” the latter. In other words, “emotion” was always what was manifested in bodily expression, while “feeling” could occasionally be made to stand for any mental content. The terminology becomes even more confusing in German: Gefühl meant both feeling and emotion, while Gemütsbewegung and Affekt always meant emotion. In French émotion could have a negative connotation and passion a positive one, while sen­ timent was a broader term. 16. René Descartes, Les passions de l’âme (Passions of the Soul), 1649; Benedict de Spinoza, Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata (Ethics Demonstrated in a Geometrical Manner), 1677; David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 1739– 40; Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, 1798– 1800. 17. Sébastien Le Clerc, Caractères des passions gravés sur les desseins de l’illustre Mons. Le Brun (1696), and Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente, zur Beförderung der Men­

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schenkenntniß und Menschenliebe, 4 vols. (Leipzig: Bey Weidmanns Erben & Reich; Winterthur: Heinrich Steiner, 1775– 78). The book went through several editions in a number of languages. 18. Théodule-Armand Ribot, The Psychology of the Emotions (London: Walter Scott; New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, [1896] 1897), 93. 19. Ribot, The Psychology of the Emotions, 93. 20. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, book 2, §387, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, [1900] 1967), 208. 21. August Endell, “Die Ausbildung des Zeichenlehrers,” Kunstchronik und Kunstmarkt 28/29 (April 9/16, 1920): 551. 22. Endell, “Architektur-Theorien,” 38. This was one of two essays in which Endell criticized the theory of architecture found in Friedrich Ostendorf, Sechs Bücher vom Bauen, enthal­ tend eine Theorie des architektonischen Entwerfens (Berlin: W. Ernst & Sohn, 1913). 23. Karl Scheffler, “Die Konventionenen der Kunst, Part I,” Dekorative Kunst 6.8 (1903): 307– 8. 24. Scheffler, “Die Konventionenen der Kunst, Part II,” Dekorative Kunst 6.11 (1903): 398– 400. 25. Scheffler, “Die Konventionenen der Kunst, Part III,” Dekorative Kunst 6.12 (1903): 440. 26. Endell, “Kunsterziehung: Geschichte oder Psychologie,” Freistatt: Süddeutsche Wochen­ schrift für Politik, Literatur und Kunst 46/47 (November 12/19, 1904): 941. 27. Endell, “Kunsterziehung: Geschichte oder Psychologie,” 941. 28. Scheffler’s response to Fürst, who advocated for more sachlich (objective, matter- of-fact, or, as the term was frequently mistranslated, functional) form-making is worth quoting at length here: “Your mistake, which separates us, is that you believe in the absolute probative force of ‘laws’ and ‘principles,’ believe in the conclusions of speculative logic. Of course, there are laws for all earthly being and becoming. But only God knows them in their full extent. When these laws find their way to the human capacity for conceptual thinking, they too are colored and determined subjectively. That is why all fighting over principles is half the time a conflict of personalities that want to assert themselves against one another. It is your mistake to believe that my argumentation is more subjective than yours. . . . You have arrived at your ‘laws’ in precisely the same way as I arrived at my feeling- evaluation [Gefühlswertungen]. And that is just as valid a matter- of-factness [Sachlichkeit] as yours.” Karl Scheffler and Walter Fürst, “Dialog über deutsches Kunstgewerbe,” Kunst und Künst­ ler 12 (1908): 517– 18. 29. Fürst and Scheffler, “Dialog über deutsches Kunstgewerbe,” 516. 30. Fürst and Scheffler, “Dialog über deutsches Kunstgewerbe,” 512. The persisting desire in historiography to explain the emergence of an austere Modern Movement out of the more ornate Art Nouveau or Jugendstil takes on new meaning in light of Scheffler’s sexist words. 31. See Alberto Perez-Gomez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), and Jorge Otero-Pailos, Architecture’s Historical Turn: Phenomenology and the Rise of the Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). 32. Karl Scheffler, “August Endell,” Kunst und Künstler 5 (1907): 317. 33. For an analysis of the question of formlessness in the work of Endell and contemporaries, see Alexander Eisenschmidt, “The Formless Groszstadt and Its Potent Negativity: Berlin, 1910 through the Eyes of Endell, Scheffler, and Hegemann” (diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2008). 34. These letters are to be found in the August Endell file (K.5) of the Breysig Nachlass, Handschriftenabteilung, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz (hereafter BN-SBB). Some excerpts of Endell’s correspondence have been published in Tilmann

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Buddensieg, “Zur Frühzeit von August Endell,” in Festschrift für Eduard Trier zum 60. Ge­ burtstag, ed. Justus Müller Hofstede and Werner Spies (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1981), 223– 50. A much shorter version of this article was translated as “The Early Years of August Endell: Letters to Kurt Breysig from Munich,” Art Journal 43.1 (Spring 1983): 41– 49. Here, August Endell to Kurt Breysig, December 6, 1891, K.5.22– 23, BN-SBB. For Endell’s years as a student, also see Martina Mims, “August Endell’s Construction of Feeling” (diss., Columbia University, 2013), 59– 65. 35. Endell to Breysig, December 1891, K.5.22– 23. 36. Endell to Breysig, December 6, 1891, K.5.22– 23, and Endell to Breysig, April 2, 1892, K.5.24– 34, BN-SBB. 37. Endell to Breysig, April 2, 1892, K.5.24– 34, BN-SBB. 38. Endell to Breysig, April 2, 1892, K.5.24– 34, BN-SBB. 39. Endell to Breysig, n.d. (early 1896), K.5.93– 94, BN-SBB. Mims points out that Endell was the director of the Akademischer Verein für Psychologie, dedicated to promoting cross- disciplinary discussions about psychology. Among the members were the philosophers Theodor Lipps and Hans Cornelius, as well as the occultist Dr. Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing. Mims, “August Endell’s Construction of Feeling,” 37– 45. 40. Endell to Breysig, undated (early 1896), K.5.93– 94, BN3-SBB. 41. Endell to Breysig, undated (1896), K.5.95– 98, BN-SB. For Endell on Obrist, see also August Endell, “Der englische Einfluss im Kunstgewerbe,” Wiener Rundschau 2 (1898): 703– 4. 42. Endell’s numerous attempts at drawing— most of them not very competent— can be found in K.5, BN-SBB. 43. Endell to Breysig, July 4, 1891, K.5.19– 21, BN-SBB. 44. See, for example, the discussion of curves in Lipps, Ästhetik. Psychologie des Schönen und der Kunst (Hamburg and Leipzig: Leopold Voss, [1903] 1906), 2:454. 45. Endell to Breysig, November 16, 1894, K.5.79– 82, BN-SB. 46. Endell, Um die Schönheit. Eine Paraphrase über die Münchner Kunstaustellungen 1896 (Munich: E. Franke, 1896). 47. For Endell’s pedagogical activities in Berlin, see the programs of the Schule für Formkunst, K.5.244– 45, 257– 58, BN-SB, and Karl Scheffler, “Eine Schule für Formkunst,” Kunst und Künstler 2 (1903– 4): 508. For the period when Endell was the director at the Academy of Breslau in Poland, see Poelzig, Endell, Moll und die Breslauer Kunstakademie 1911– 1932, exh. cat. (Berlin: Akademie der Künste, 1965), and Petra Hölscher, Die Akademie für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe zu Breslau: Wege einer Kunstschule, 1791– 1932 (Kiel, Germany: Ludwig, 2003), 195– 255. 48. For a fascinating history of the building and the women who commissioned it, see Rudolf Herz and Brigitte Bruns, eds., Hof­Atelier Elvira, 1887– 1928: Ästheten, Emanzen, Aristokraten, exh. cat. (Munich: Münchner Stadtmuseum, 1985). For Endell’s own account of the building, see August Endell, “Architektonische Erstlinge,” Dekorative Kunst 3.8 (1900): 297– 317. 49. For a history of the feminist organization Verein für Fraueninteressen, see Renate Lindemann, 100 Jahre Verein für Fraueninteressen (Munich: Verein für Fraueninteressen, 1994). 50. For a description of the colors of the façade, see Klaus Reichel, “Vom Jugendstil zur Sachlichkeit. August Endell (1871– 1925)” (diss., Ruhr University in Bochum, 1974), 126– 27, and Werner Hansen, ed., August Endell. Der Architekt des Photoateliers Elvira 1871– 1925, exh. cat. (Munich: Munich Stadtmuseum, 1977), 24. 51. Endell, “Architektonische Erstlinge,” 315. 52. Even the title of the dissertation by Reichel, “Vom Jugendstil zur Sachlichkeit. August

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53. 54.

55. 56.

57.

58. 59. 60. 61.

62.

63.

64.

65. 66.

Endell (1871– 1925),” constructs this kind of teleological progress toward abstraction. Also see the various editions of Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Mor­ ris to Walter Gropius (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, [1936] 2005), 152. Endell, “Möglichkeit und Ziele einer neuen Architektur,” 33. Karl Scheffler, Die fetten und die mageren Jahre. Ein Arbeits­ und Lebensbericht (Munich: P. List, 1946), 24. Hermann Sörgel described the ornament as being more appropriate to poster design than to architecture. Sörgel, Theorie der Baukunst, vol. 1, Architektur­Ästhetik (Munich: Piloty & Loehle, [1918] 1921), 295. Johannes Otzen, “Die historische Tradition in der Kunst und der Einfluss des Individualismus,” Deutsche Bauzeitung 33 (November 8, 1899): 558. See the satiric short story “Wie ich ein moderner Kunstgewerbler wurde,” Jugend 17 (1898): 284– 86. Thomas Mann’s short story “Gladius Dei” (1903) begins with a short description of the Elvira Studio. Rumors about Endell’s impotence were spread by his first wife, Elsa Hildegard Plötz, who after remarrying became known as the Dadaist artist and poet Elsa von FreytagLoringhoven. See P. I Hjartarson and D. O. Spettigue, Baroness Else (Ottowa: Oberon Press, 1992), 131. Ernst von Wolzogen, Das dritte Geschlecht (Berlin: Eckstein, 1899). Johannes Otzen, “Das Persönliche in Architektur und Kunstgewerbe,” Deutsche Bauzei­ tung 34 (March 1900): 146. Otzen, “Das Persönliche in Architektur und Kunstgewerbe,” 146. Otzen, “Das Persönliche in Architektur und Kunstgewerbe,” 147. Otzen was not alone in his anxiety: among those who sensed an epistemological danger in the presumed immediacy of form was a figure like the aesthetics professor Konrad Lange, who, on the one hand, saw art’s role as an “extension and deepening of feeling-life [Gefühlsleben]” and subscribed to the James-Lange theory of emotions and, on the other, invented a theory of illusion, according to which aesthetic experience was always a thoroughly conscious (and not unconscious) self- deception. See Konrad Lange, “Eine sensualistische Kunstlehre,” Die Kunst. Monatshefte für freie und angewandte Kunst 11 (1905): 40. For a concise account of the concept of character in architectural theory, see Harry Francis Mallgrave, Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673– 1968 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 36– 43. Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières, Genius of Architecture; or, The Analogy of That Art with Our Sensations, trans. David Britt, introd. Robin Middleton (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1992), 72. Also see Germain Boffrand, Livre d’architecture contenant les principes generaux de cet Art [1745], and Jacques François Blondel, Cours d’architecture [1771– 77]. For an English translation of the “character” entry, see Antoine-Chrysosthôme Quatremère de Quincy, The True, the Fictive, and the Real: The Historical Dictionary of Architecture of Quatremère de Quincy, ed. Samir Younés (London: Andreas Papadakis, [1788– 1825] 1999), here 103. Quatremère de Quincy, The True, the Fictive, and the Real, 104. Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, L’architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des moeurs et de la législation (Paris, 1804). See also Anthony Vidler, The Writing of the Walls: Architectural Theory in the Late Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1987); Anthony Vidler, “The Idea of Type: The Transformation of the Academic Ideal, 1750– 1830,” Oppositions 8 (Spring 1977): 95– 115; and Anthony Vidler, Claude­Nicolas Ledoux: Architec­ ture and Social Reform at the End of the Ancien Régime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).

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67.

248

Judith Wechsler illustrates, for example, that the rise of caricature in Paris had to do with the flooding of the city with people from different places. Judith Wechsler, A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in Nineteenth­Century Paris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 68. Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente, vol. 4, section 6, 350– 51. 69. Endell, “Um die Schönheit,” 23– 25. 70. For Endell’s dismissal of convenance, see Endell, “Architektur-Theorien,” 53. For his rejection of tectonics and functionalism, see Endell, “Möglichkeit und Ziele einer neuen Architektur,” 31, 36. 71. G.-B.-A. Duchenne de Boulogne, Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine, ou analyse électro­ physiologique de l’expression des passions (Paris: Jules Renouard, 1862), translated as The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, ed. and trans. R. Andrew Cuthbertson (Cambridge:

72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77.

78.

79. 80. 81. 82.

83.

Cambridge University Press; Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de L’Homme, 1990), 29. For the theorization of emotions in aesthetics, see Estelle Thibault, La géométrie des émotions. Les esthétiques scientifiques de l’architecture en France, 1860– 1950 (Wavre: Mardaga, 2010). Duchenne de Boulogne, The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, 18. Duchenne de Boulogne, The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, 10. As was the case with Wölfflin’s preference for engravings in chapter 2, the difference here corresponds to that between “truth-to-nature” and “mechanical objectivity” in Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007). Duchenne de Boulogne, The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, 42. Duchenne de Boulogne, The Mechanism of Human Facial Expression, 105. August Endell, “Das Wolzogen-Theater in Berlin,” Berliner Architekturwelt 4.11 (1902): 376– 95. For a history of von Wolzogen’s cabaret, see Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 36– 61, here 39. See note 58 for Wolzogen’s book on the “third sex.” Endell, “Das Wolzogen-Theater in Berlin,” 384, 392. Endell wrote the following on pointillism (389): “I suppose it is not generally known that we possess in the barks of our home-grown trees the most resounding symphony of colors that a painter can dream of. Especially after the rain, when the colors are glowing and fresh, we find there the richest and the most wonderful motif. One needs to approach a trunk and insistently observe, dot by dot, the tiny specks of the size of one’s palm. Even intense colors mix with each other. Velvety violet, fiery yellow-red, bluish shimmering grey, lively green of the most diverse nuances run into each other in a richer spectrum of the boldest medley. And here one can at least recognize the principle that nature devotes its resources to reach glowing effects of color. The secret lies in the avoidance of monochrome surfaces and in the employment of many colors, in themselves intense, in small specks next to each other.” Endell, “Das Wolzogen-Theater in Berlin,” 392. Fritz Stahl, “Ernst von Wolzogens Buntes Theater,” Berliner Tageblatt und Handels­Zeitung, November 29, 1901. Endell, “Das Wolzogen-Theater in Berlin,” 386– 87. Pascal David, “Stimmung,” in Dictionary of Untranslatables, ed. Barbara Cassin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014): 1061– 62. For contemporary interest in the idea of Stimmung, see Julius Meier-Graefe, “Ein modernes Milieu,” Die Kunst 4 (1901): 249– 64, and Alois Riegl, “Die Stimmung als Inhalt der modernen Kunst,” Graphische Künste 22 (1899): 47– 56. Fritz Stahl, “Ernst von Wolzogens Buntes Theater”; Scheffler, “August Endell,” Der Lotse. Hamburgische Wochenschrift für deutsche Kultur 1.23 (February 23, 1901): 705.

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84. Georg Simmel, “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben,” in Die Großstadt. Vorträge und Aufsätze zur Städteausstellung, Jahrbuch der Gehe­Stiftung 9 (1902– 3): 185– 206. 85. Endell, “Formenschönheit und dekorative Kunst,” part 1, 76. 86. Thanks to the Getty volume, “empathy” has become an umbrella term to understand the artistic production of this period. I am trying here to differentiate subtleties within this intellectual milieu. I am referring to Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, introd. and trans., Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873– 1893 (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994). 87. Sir Charles Bell, The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression as Connected with the Fine Arts (London: Henry G. Bohn, [1806] 1865), 200. Bell cites Edmund Burke (199): “‘I have often observed,’ says Burke, ‘that on mimicking the looks and gestures of angry, or placid, or frightened, or daring men, I have involuntarily found my mind turned to that passion whose appearance I endeavored to imitate.’” 88. Bell, The Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, 198. Emphasis mine. 89. William James, “What Is an Emotion?” Mind 9.34 (April 1884): 189– 90. The article was reprinted in Principles of Psychology, vol. 2 (New York: Henry Holt, 1890). James wrote a response to his critics a decade later: “Discussion. The Physical Basis of Emotion,” Psy­ chological Review 1.5 (September 1895): 516– 29. Also see Carl Georg Lange, Über Gemüts­ bewegungen. Eine Psycho­physiologisch Studie (Leipzig: T. Thomas, [1885] 1887), translated as “The Emotions,” in “The Emotions” by Carl Georg Lange and William James (New York: Hafner, 1922). 90. In this essay James also took an additional step that proved to be anticipatory of the emergence of social psychology in America: the most important part of the environment was, in fact, other human beings. It was the consciousness of fellow beings, James observed, that unlocked one’s shames, indignations, or fears.” James, “What Is an Emotion?” 191. George Herbert Mead would later assert that “we find no evidence for the prior existence of consciousness as something which brings about behavior on the part of one organism that is of such a sort to call forth an adjustive response on the part of another organism, without itself being dependent on such behavior. We are rather forced to conclude that consciousness is an emergent from such behavior; that so far from being a precondition of the social act, the social act is the precondition of it.” George H. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), 17. 91. James, “What Is an Emotion?” 189– 90. 92. James, “What Is an Emotion?” 190. 93. James, “What Is an Emotion?” 194. There are many other instances in the essay where James presents a negative view of the intellectual or cognitive realm (194): “The more I scrutinize my states . . . the more it seems to me that if I were to become corporeally anaesthetic, I should be excluded from the life of the affections, harsh and tender alike, and drag out an existence of mere cognitive or intellectual form.” 94. James, “What Is an Emotion?” 190. 95. James, “What Is an Emotion?” 190. 96. For critical reviews of the motor theory of consciousness, see H. C. McComas, “Extravagances in the Motor Theories of Consciousness,” Psychological Review 23.5 (September 1916): 397– 407, and Herbert S. Langfeld, “The Historical Development of Response Psychology,” Science 77.1993 (March 10, 1933): 243– 50. 97. John Dewey, “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” Psychological Review 3.4 (July 1896): 357– 70. 98. James, “What Is an Emotion?” 191.

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99. Among the first in- depth theoretical elaborations of the concept of space (Raum) were those by the art historians Alois Riegl and August Schmarsow, who, in turn, were indebted to Gottfried Semper. Alois Riegl, Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (Vienna: K. K. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1901), translated by Rolf Winkes as Late Roman Art Industry (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider, 1985). August Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöp­ fung (Leipzig: Karl W. Hiersemann, 1894), translated as “The Essence of Architectural Creation,” in Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space, 281– 97. For overall accounts of the concept, see Ákos Moravánszky, “Die Wahrnehmung des Raumes,” in Architekturtheorie im 20. Jahrhundert. Eine kritische Anthologie, ed. Ákos Moravánszky (Vienna and New York: Springer, 2003), 121– 46; Anthony Vidler, “Space, Time, and Movement,” in At the End of the Century: One Hundred Years of Architecture, ed. Russell Ferguson (New York: Harry Abrams; Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998), 100– 125; Bettina Kohler, “Architekturgeschichte als Geschichte der Raumwahrnehmung” (Architecture History as the History of Spatial Experience), Daidalos 67 (1998): 36– 43; Cornelius van de Ven, Space in Architecture: The Evolution of a New Idea in the Theory and History of Modern Movements (Assen, Maastricht, and Wolfeboro, NH: Van Gorcum, 1987); and Paul Zucker, “The Aesthetics of Space in Architecture, Sculpture, and City Planning,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 4.1 (September 1945): 12– 19. 100. See Adolf Hildebrand’s influential defense of relief sculpture, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (Strasbourg: J. H. E. Heitz, 1893), translated as “The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts,” in Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space, 227– 79. 101. August Endell, Die Schönheit der grossen Stadt (Stuttgart: Strecker & Schröder, 1908). Parts of the text were translated by Zeynep Çelik Alexander, “The Beauty of the Metropolis,” Grey Room 56 (Summer 2014): 116– 38. 102. Endell, “The Beauty of the Metropolis,” 120, 127. 103. Endell, “The Beauty of the Metropolis,” 132. 104. Ribot, The Psychology of the Emotions, 93. 105. Edmund Gurney, “What Is an Emotion?” Mind 9.35 (July 1884): 421– 26, and H. M. Stanley, “Feeling and Emotion,” Mind 11.41 (January 1886): 66– 76. Also see Henry Rutgers Marshall, “What Is an Emotion?” Mind 9.36 (October 1884): 615– 17, and D. Irons, “Prof. James’ Theory of Emotion,” Mind 3.9 (1894): 77– 97. 106. J. M. Baldwin, “The Origin of Emotional Expression,” Psychological Review 1.6 (Nov. 1894): 610– 23. Also see James R. Angell, “A Reconsideration of James’s Theory of Emotion in the Light of Recent Criticisms,” Psychological Review 23.4 (1916): 251– 61. 107. Charles Féré, La pathologie des émotions: Études physiologiques et cliniques (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1892). 108. W. B. Cannon, “The James-Lange Theory of Emotion: A Critical Examination and an Alternative Theory,” American Journal of Psychology 39 (1927): 106– 24. 109. Karl Lory, “Künstlerische Bildung,” Die Zukunft (September 1904): 409– 12. 110. Lory, “Künstlerische Bildung,” 409. 111. Lory, “Künstlerische Bildung,” 411. 112. Lory, “Künstlerische Bildung,” 412. 113. Endell, “Kunsterziehung,” 919– 21, 940– 42. 114. Similar arguments are made in August Endell, “Kunst und Volk,” Neue Gesellschaft 1 (April 1905): 8– 9. Neue Gesellschaft was a leftist journal published by the couple Heinrich and Lily Braun. The Brauns belonged to a wing of the Social Democrats who did not believe in radical class struggle but, like many liberal reformers, strove to bring about social change through cultural means.

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115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120.

Endell, “Kunsterziehung,” 920. Endell, “Kunsterziehung,” 941. Scheffler, “August Endell,” 317. Scheffler, “August Endell,” 317. Endell, “Architektur-Theorien,” 54. See the student notes by Hanns Jacob, “August Endells Schule für Formkunst. Formwirkungen,” signed October 1, 1950, End-01-40, Baukunst Abteilung, Akademie der Künste Archive, Berlin. 121. Georg Hirth, Aufgaben der Kunstphysiologie (Munich and Leipzig: G. Hirth, [1891] 1897) 208. On the question of “measuring by eye” or “visual discrimination,” also see Theodor Lipps, “Die empirischen Täuschung des Augenmaßes,” in Lipps, Zur Einfühlung (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1913): 359– 79. 122. The clearest expression of Lipps’s theory was given in Theodor Lipps, “Gefühlsqualitäten,” Psychologische Untersuchungen 2.1 (1912): 81– 110. 123. Lipps, “Gefühlsqualitäten,” 83. 124. Endell also used the term Gefühlsqualitäten. According to the 1907 edition of Friedrich Kirchner’s Wörterbuch der philosophischen Grundbegriffe, Vorstellungen are “psychical entities that are made of sensations [Empfindungen] and perceptions [Wahrnehmungen] by means of association and reproduction.” 125. Lipps was not the only philosopher and psychologist to challenge Wundt’s theory of feeling. See E. B. Titchener, “Zur Kritik der Wundt’schen Gefühlslehre,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane (1899): 321– 26, and Carl Stumpf, “Über Gefühlsempfindungen,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane (1907): 1– 49. 126. See Wilhelm Wundt, “Über das Verhältnis der Gefühle zu den Vorstellungen,” Vierteljahrs­ schrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie 3 (1879); Wundt, “Über den Ausdruck der Gemütsbewegungen,” Deutsche Rundschau (April 1877): 120– 33; and Wundt, “Bemerkungen zur Theorie der Gefühle,” Philosophische Studien 15 (1900): 449– 82. 127. Wundt used the graphics devised by Alfred Lehmann, Die Hauptgesetze des menschlichen Gefühlslebens (Leipzig: O. R. Reisland, 1892). 128. Wundt, “Zur Lehre von den Gemüthsbewegungen,” Philosophische Studien 6 (1890): 337. 129. It was thus not so much Wundt’s experimental techniques as his reliance on conceptual categories that his opponents found most objectionable. For more on Wundt’s methodology, see Kurt Danziger, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 130. Lipps, “Gefühlsqualitäten,” 103. 131. Lipps, “Gefühlsqualitäten,” 103. 132. Lipps, “Gefühlsqualitäten,” 83. 133. Wilhelm Dilthey, “Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie,” Sit­ zungsbeitrag der Berliner Akademie der Wissenschaften vom 20. Dezember 1894 (1895): 1308– 1407. 134. Endell to Breysig, April 18, 1992, K.5.35– 52, BN-SBB. Zergliedern means to dissect, analyze, and dismember. 135. “Schule für Formkunst” [1904], K.5.244– 45, BN-SB. 136. “Schule für Formkunst” [1904], K.5.244– 45, BN-SB. 137. “Schule für Formkunst” [1904], K.5.244– 45, BN-SB. 138. “Schule für Formkunst” [1906], K.5.257– 58, BN-SB. 139. Hölscher, Die Akademie für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe zu Breslau, 195– 255. 140. See Hans M. Wingler, ed., Kunstschulreform 1900– 1933 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1977).

251

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252

141. Scheffler, “Eine Schule für Formkunst,” 508. 142. “Schule für Formkunst,” K.5.257– 58, BN-SB and Hölscher, Die Akademie für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe zu Breslau, 209. 143. Endell’s views on architectural theory can be found in Endell, “Architektur-Theorien,” 37– 39, 53– 56. 144. Endell, “Das Wolzogen-Theater in Berlin,” 386– 87. Chapter Four 1.

The typewritten manuscript of “Ein glückliches Leben. Eine Biographie des Künstlers, Forschers und Alleingängers Hermann Obrist” (A Felicitous Life: A Biography of the Artist, Researcher, and Loner Hermann Obrist), which can be dated to 1926, is in the Obrist-

Nachlass at the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung (SGS) in Munich. Parts of the manuscript have been cited— sometimes incorrectly— in a pamphlet written by Silvie Lampevon Bennigsen, Hermann Obrist. Erinnerungen (Munich: Herbert Post Presse, 1971). Although the original manuscript almost always uses the third person (except for a few lapses into the first-person plural), it reads as an autobiography either written or dictated by the artist himself, especially because it contains passages that describe at length private experiences such as the ones cited in this essay. 2. Obrist, “Ein glückliches Leben,” 2– 3. This is a nineteenth- century trope. For a similarly hallucinatory experience, see Martin Bressani, Architecture and the Historical Imagination: Eugène­Emmanuel Viollet­le­Duc, 1814– 1879 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014). 3. Obrist, “Ein glückliches Leben,” 2. 4. Obrist, “Ein glückliches Leben,” 18– 19. 5. Obrist, “Ein glückliches Leben,” 19. 6. Obrist, “Ein glückliches Leben,” 21. 7. “He already knew about the ecstatic visions of some devout Catholics,” according to the manuscript, “about the nature of hysteria . . . and the visions and hallucinations of Mohammed.” Obrist, “Ein glückliches Leben,” 20. 8. Obrist, “Ein glückliches Leben,” 20. 9. Obrist, “Ein glückliches Leben,” 20. 10. Ruchet, whose involvement in the making of the embroideries is not clear, was a member of the Verein für Fraueninteressen (Association for Women’s Concerns), an organization that furthered the political rights and the professional training of women. The association was founded in in Munich in 1894. Among its members were Sophia Goudstikker and Anita Augspurg (who owned the Elvira Photography Studio designed by the architect August Endell), as well as the wives of Theodor Lipps, Wilhelm von Debschitz, and Richard Riemerschmid, the novelist Gabriele Reuter, whose novel Frau Bürgelin und ihre Söhne (1899) was based loosely on the Obrist family, and the textile artist Margarethe von Brauchitsch, who studied at the Debschitz School. In addition to Obrist, several men were also members: August Endell, the publisher, novelist, and playwright Ernst von Wolzogen, and briefly the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. For a history of this organization, see Renate Lindemann, ed., 100 Jahre Verein für Fraueninteressen (Munich: Verein für Fraueninteressen, 1994). 11. Two articles published in an issue of the Jugendstil journal Pan played important roles in making Obrist’s career. Georg Fuchs, “Hermann Obrist,” Pan 1.5 (1895– 96): 318– 25, and Wilhelm Bode, “Hermann Obrist,” Pan 1.5 (1895– 96): 326– 28. 12. After Obrist left the school in 1904, he continued to lecture in the evenings. The Deb-

n ot e s to PAg e s 1 3 4 –1 3 9

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

schitz School has not attracted much scholarly attention in English or German. For the most comprehensive history of the school, see the thesis by Dagmar Rinker, “Die Lehrund Versuchsateliers für angewandte und freie Kunst, Debschitz-Schule, München 1902– 1914” (master’s thesis, University of Munich, 1993). Other recent accounts of the school are Helga Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth, “Die Münchner Debschitz-Schule,” in Kunst­ schulreform, 1900– 1933, ed. Hans M. Wingler (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1977): 66– 82; Beate Ziegert, “The Debschitz School, Munich: 1902– 1914,” Design Issues 3.1 (Spring 1986): 28– 42; Beate Ziegert, “The Debschitz School Munich: 1902– 1904” (master’s thesis, Syracuse University, 1985); and Norbert Götz, “Die Debschitz-Schule Hohenzollernstraße 21,” in Schwabing. Kunst und Leben um 1900, ed. Helmut Bauer and Elisabeth Tworek (Munich: Münchner Stadtmuseum, 1998), 236– 55. Wilhelm von Debschitz, “Zur Beantwortung der meine Schule betreffenden Fragen,” dictated in March 1947, in response to Xanti Schawinsky’s letter, dated January 1947, Beate Ziegert Private Archive (BZA), Toronto. Hans Cornelius is a figure that merits further research. Originally a philosopher (he taught Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno), Cornelius wrote two books on art education: Elementargesetze der bildenden Kunst. Grund­ lagen einer praktischen Ästhetik (Leipzig: Teubner, 1908) and Kunstpädagogik. Leitsätze für die Organisation der künstlerischen Erziehung (Erlenbach-Zurich: Rentsch, 1920). For histories of these schools, see Hans M. Wingler, ed., Kunstschulreform 1900– 1933 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1977); John V. Maciuika, Before the Bauhaus: Architecture, Politics, and the German State, 1890– 1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Katharina Wippermann, “Ateliers und Autodidakten: Kontinuitäten und Brüche in der Künstlerausbildung im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Im Tempel der Kunst. Die Künstlermythen der Deutschen, ed. Bernhard Maaz (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2008): 28– 31; and Rainer Beck, ed., Kunst im Brennpunkt der Akademien (Munich: Bruckmann, 1988). Wilhelm von Debschitz, “Lehren und Lernen in der bildenden Kunst,” Süddeutsche Mo­ natshefte (March 1907): 266. “Lehr- und Versuchsatelier für angewandte und freie Kunst,” Kunst und Handwerk 52 (1901– 2): 119. Wilhelm von Debschitz, “Der neue Glaube,” Das Hohe Ufer. Eine Zeitschrift 1.9 (September 1919): 214. For another version of this essay, see Debschitz, “Die Kunst ist lehrbahr,” Der Pelikan 9 (1920): 5– 14. Debschitz, “Der neue Glaube,” 211– 12. Debschitz, “Der neue Glaube,” 213. For more on the Kulturkampf, see the introduction. For general summaries in English, see Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Poli­ tics, 1870– 1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), and Michael B. Gross, The War against Catholicism: Liberalism and the Anti­Catholic Imagination in Nineteenth­ Century Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). Kulturkampf should be understood within the context of the “empires of religion” in the nineteenth century. See C. A. Bayly, “Empires of Religion,” in Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780– 1914 (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), 325– 65. See “Kunstakademien oder Schulen für die Kunst?” Allgemeine Zeitung München 106.107 (April 18, 1903): 1. O. W. Dressler, Kunstjahrbuch. Ein Nachschlagebuch für bildende und angewandte Kunst, 4 vols. (Rostock: Dressler, 1906– 1913). Also see Peter Behrens, Lothar von Kunowski, Hermann Obrist, Paul Schultze-Naumburg, and August Endell, “Kunstschulen,” Kunst und Künstler 5 (1906– 7): 206– 10.

253

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254

23. Georg Fuchs, “Die Kunst-Hochschule,” Dekorative Kunst 7 (1904): 357. 24. Obrist, “Ein glückliches Leben,” 33. 25. These numbers are from Wilhelm von Debschitz, “Bericht über die bisherige Entwickelung des Institutes,” Lehr- und Versuchsatelier für angewandte und freie Kunst, Prospectus from 1912, 11, BZA. Also see Debschitz, “Zur Beantwortung der meine Schule betreffenden Fragen,” BZA; Obrist, “Ein glückliches Leben,” 33; and Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker, “Wilhelm von Debschitz,” in Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künste, vol. 8 (Leipzig: Seeman, 1913), 510. 26. On the education of women artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see J. Diane Radycki, “The Life of Lady Art Students: Changing Art Education at the Turn of the Century,” Art Journal 42.1 (Spring 1982): 9– 13; Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society (London: Thames & Hudson, 1990); Charlotte Yeldham, Women Artists

27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33.

in Nineteenth­ Century France and England, 2 vols. (New York and London: Garland, 1984); Wendy Slatkin, Women Artists in History: From Antiquity to the Present (NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997); Susan Waller, ed., Women Artists in the Modern Era: A Documentary History (London: Scarecrow, 1991); and Laura R. Prieto, At Home in the Studio: The Professionalization of Women Artists in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). According to the historian Edith Krull, the Munich academy accepted women at an annual rate of one to five students between 1813 and 1840, but these students were considered honorary members and dilettantes. Edith Krull, Women in Art, trans. Lux Feininger (London: Edition Leipzig, 1986), 13. Although the conditions changed from state to state, a similar rule was generally applicable at most German universities. While women were allowed to attend lectures starting in the late 1860s, it was not until 1897 that women were allowed full matriculation. Ironically, foreign women studying in Germany and German women studying abroad had more advanced rights. See James C. Albisetti, Schooling German Girls and Women: Second­ ary and Higher Education in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988) and the statistics presented in W. H. R. A. Lexis, A General View of the History and Organisation of Public Education in the German Empire, trans. G. J. Tamson (Berlin: A. Asher, 1904). The tuition discrepancy between these institutions was dramatic. In 1906 the official academy Königliche Akademie der bildenden Künste in Munich cost 34 marks per semester, and the state-run Königliche Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich, which had separate sections for men and women, cost 20 marks per semester, whereas the exclusively female Malerinnenschule in Karlsruhe charged its students 342 to 365 marks for the school year. See Deutschlands Fachschulwesen. Die Fachschulen für bildende Künste und Kunstgewerbe Deutschlands (Berlin: Carl Malcomes, 1906). Zeichen- und Malschule des Vereins der Künstlerinnen in Berlin had four classes: 1) elementary drawing, drawing from nature, art forms, and plaster casts, life- drawing, anatomy, landscape, perspective, methodology, art history; 2) painting, portrait, figures, still life, stylization of plants and patterns; 3) seminar for drawing teachers; 4) lithography, engraving, printing. Lindemann, 100 Jahre Verein für Fraueninteressen, 28– 29. Debschitz, “Zur Beantwortung der meine Schule betreffenden Fragen,” BZA. In the early years of the school, some students who did not have the means were forced to support themselves by working in their free hours. For the struggles of a Debschitz School student, Emilie Butters, see Götz, “Die Debschitz-Schule Hohenzollernstraße 21,” 250– 54. “Lehr- und Versuch-Ateliers für angewandte und freie Kunst,” Prospectus circa 1912, 2, BZA.

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34. Debschitz, “Zur Beantwortung der meine Schule betreffenden Fragen,” BZA. “Woe to him who has learned too well, for he is condemned to always repeat.” Hermann Obrist, “Die Zukunft unserer Architektur,” Dekorative Kunst 4.9 (1901): 332. 35. Wilhelm von Debschitz was responsible for administrative matters and taught the elementary design class and painting, while Obrist taught the elementary design class, sculpture, and textile design in addition to lecturing in the evenings. Among the first teachers at the school were Else Hartmann-Sapatka (metal work and ceramics), Wilhelm Preissler (ceramics and metal sculpture), Friedrich Adler (stucco workshop), Hans Schmithals (hand-painted wallpaper), and Hugo-Steiner Prag (graphic arts). E. W. Bredt, an art historian who was also a curator at the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich, lectured on art history. In 1908 Paul Klee taught a life-drawing class for one semester. Many of the former students later taught at the school. Among the students of the Debschitz School

36.

37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

43. 44.

45.

were Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Philip Harth, Rolf von Hoerschelmann, Dora Polster, Carl Georg von Reichenbach, Wolfgang von Wersin, Marie Herberger, Otto Hohlt, Walter von Ruckteschell, Olga Reynier, Daniel Seip, Gertrud von Schnellenbühel, Herthe Schöpp, Helene von Zezschwitz, and Fritz und Karl Schmoll von Eisenwerth, who took over the school in 1910– 11 and again in 1912– 13. See Obrist’s description of a fictive day at the school in “Ein künstlerischer Kunstunterricht,” Der Lotse. Hamburgische Wochenschrift für deutsche Kultur 1.23 (February 23, 1901): 682– 86. Debschitz also discussed the importance of “play” in art education in “Lehren und Lernen in der bildenden Kunst,” 297. Hermann Obrist, “Die Lehr- und Versuch-Ateliers für angewandte und freie Kunst,” De­ korative Kunst 12 (1904): 232. Debschitz, “Lehren und Lernen in der bildenden Kunst,” 271, 275, 277, or Obrist, “Ein künstlerischer Kunstunterricht,” 679. Obrist, “Die Zukunft unserer Architektur,” 331. Compare the pedagogy at the Debschitz School to that developed by Lothar von Kunowski. Lothar von Kunowski and Gertrud von Kunowski, Unsere Kunstschule (Liegnitz: Verlag für Nationalstenographie, 1910) and the series Lothar von Kunowski, Durch Kunst zum Leben (Leipzig: Eugen Diederichs, 1901– 6). Obrist copied from the following: Hans Kraemer, Weltall und Menschheit: Geschichte der Er­ forschung der Natur und der Verwertung der Naturkräfte im Dienste der Völker (Berlin: Bong, 1902); Ernst Krause (Carus Sterne), Werden und Vergehen. Eine Entwicklungsgeschichte des Naturganzen in gemeinverständlicher Fassung (Berlin: Gebr. Bonrtraeger, 1880); Wunder der Natur. Schilderungen der interessantesten Natur­Schöpferungen und Erscheinungen in Einzeldarstellungen. Unter Mitw. hervorragender Fachmänner (Berlin: Bong, 1912– 14); and J. Bell Pettigrew, Design in Nature (London: Longmans, Green, 1908). See SGS, ObristNachlass O1.26, 27, and 29 and Obrist-Nachlass, O2.41– 50. An excerpt from Obrist’s notebook from SGS, Obrist-Nachlass, O2.40: “stelle dir einen Aufstand vor Willen und Sehnsucht vor / den Berg, den Hügel hinaufrasend / Die Flamme / zum Gipfel aufflammend / Ein Stoss aus Lava aufgeblasen Schwefelkrater / Das Hinauf-anstatt / hinabstürzen.” Lothar von Kunowski, “Rhythmische statt mathematischer Lehrweise,” in Kunowski and Kunowski, Unsere Kunstschule, 19– 20. Note, for example, Johannes Itten’s reliance on academic techniques at the Bauhaus. Johannes Itten, Mein Vorkurs am Bauhaus. Gestaltungs­ und Formenlehre (Ravensburg: Maier, 1963), translated as Design and Form: The Basic Course at the Bauhaus and Later (New York: Wiley, 1975). Also see chapter 5. Obrist, “Kunstschulen,” 208.

255

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256

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

Obrist, “Ein künstlerischer Kunstunterricht,” 685. “Lehr- und Versuchsatelier für angewandte und freie Kunst,” 119. Obrist, “Die Lehr- und Versuch-Ateliers für angewandte und freie Kunst,” 229, 232. Obrist, “Die Lehr- und Versuch-Ateliers für angewandte und freie Kunst,” 232. Gustav Gessmann, “Somnambules Zeichnen,” Sphinx 6.32 (August 1888): 102. For an extensive list of these groups, see Hans-Jürgen Glowka, Deutsche Okkultgruppen 1875– 1937 (Augsburg: Hiram, 1981). 52. Gessmann, “Somnambules Zeichnen,” 102. 53. Richard Baerwald, Okkultismus und Spiritismus und ihre Weltanschaulichen Folgerungen (Berlin: Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft, 1926), 114. 54. See Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Alex Owen, The Place of En­ chantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chi-

55.

56.

57.

58.

59.

cago Press, 2004); and Simon During, Modern Enchantments: The Cultural Power of Secular Magic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). This also explains the appeal of animism outlined compellingly in Spyros Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). Friedrich Zöllner wanted to use Slade’s knot-and-ring experiment to claim the existence of the fourth dimension, a possibility mentioned in passing by Helmholtz as a thought experiment. For Zöllner’s defence of Slade, see Karl Friedrich Zöllner, Zur Vertheidigung des Amerikaners Henry Slade (Leipzig: Staackmann, 1897). For Wundt’s criticism, see Wilhelm Wundt, Der Spiritismus. Eine sogennante wissenschaftliche Frage: offener Brief an Hermann Ulrici (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1879). For the network of occultists in Munich, see Veit Loers and Pai Witzmann, “Münchens okkultistisches Netzwerk,” in Okkultismus und Avantgarde. Von Munch bis Mondrian 1900– 1915 (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle, 1995), 238– 41. In an attempt to distinguish his occultism from those of impostors, the psychologist Richard Baerwald identified three kinds of occultism: 1) spiritualism, which explained occult phenomena through the spirits of the dead; 2) occultism that explained occult forces by means of a “psychic force” or “anima”; 3) occultism that avoided all metaphysical explanations by appealing to telepathy, that is, communication between one mind and another. Baerwald, Okkultismus und Spiritis­ mus, 14. “Programm der psychologischen Gesellschaft in München,” Sphinx 3.13 (1887): 32– 36. Founded in 1886 by Carl du Prel, a self-declared philosopher, the society was able to attract prominent figures such as the psychologist Theodor Lipps, the psychiatrist Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, the colonialist Wilhelm von Hübbe- Schleiden, the art historian and curator at the Alte Pinakothek Adolf Bayersdorfer, and members of the Stefan George Circle, as well as painters such as Gabriel von Max, Wilhelm Trübner, and Albert von Keller. Scholars such as L. L. Whyte and H. F. Ellenberger have not only found the pre-Freudian origins of the modern concept of the unconscious in psychology and philosophy but also traced them to literature and the arts. See Henri F. Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Un­ conscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry (New York: Basic Books, 1970), and Lancelot Law Whyte, The Unconscious before Freud (New York: Basic Books, 1960). Among the nineteenth- century figures who theorized the unconscious before Freud were Schelling, Schopenhauer, Herbart, Nietzsche, and William James, but particularly popular were the books written by Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewußten. Versuch

n ot e s to PAg e s 1 4 6 –1 5 0

einer Weltanschauung (Berlin: C. Duncker, 1869) and Das Unbewußte vom Standpunkt der Physiologie und Descendenztheorie. Eine kritische Beleuchtung des naturphilosophischen Theils der Philosophie des Unbewußten aus Naturwissenschaftlichen Gesichtspunkten (Berlin: C. Duncker, 1872). 60. Compare this experiment to the one conducted by the schoolteacher Rudolf Schulze in the introduction. Dr. Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing, “Albert von Keller als Malerpsychologe und Metaphysiker,” Psychische Studien 48 (April– May 1921): 193– 215. 61. Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing with Otto Schultze, Die Traumtänzerin Magdeleine G. Eine psychologische Studie über Hypnose und dramatische Kunst (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1904). Also see Treitel, A Science for the Soul, 114– 18, and Pia Witzmann, “‘Dem Kosmos zu gehört der Tanzende.’ Der Einfluss des Okkulten auf den Tanz,” in Okkultismus und Avantgarde, 600– 625. Guipet was painted by the artists Albert von Keller, August von

62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

68. 69. 70. 71.

72. 73. 74. 75.

Kaulbach, and Franz Stuck, was documented by the photographer Frédéric Boissonnas, and worked with the dramatist Fritz Stavenhagen and the composers Max von Schillings, Ludwig Thuille, and Carl Freiherr von Kaskel. Baerwald, Okkultismus und Spiritismus, 112– 14. Karl Scheffler, “Das Talent,” Kunst und Künstler 12 (1914): 509. Hermann Obrist, “Wozu über Kunst Schreiben?” Dekorative Kunst 3.5 (1900): 171. Baerwald, Okkultismus und Spiritismus, 114– 15. Also see Treitel, A Science for the Soul, 122– 24. Baerwald, Okkultismus und Spiritismus, 115. For mediumistic art, see Gabriel Max, “Zeichnungen aus dem Skizzenbuche,” Sphinx 2.3 (1986): 165– 68; H. Freimark, “Mediumistische Kunst,” Zentralblatt für Okkultismus. Monatsschrift zur Erforschung der gesamten Geheimwissenschaften 8 (December 1914– January 1915): 283– 87, 311– 15; and M. Moecke, “Medianyme Malerei,” parts 1 and 2, Der Okkultismus 1 and 2 (September and October 1925): 30– 34 and 33– 40. Max Dessoir was a fascinating figure that calls for more scholarly attention. He was interested in psychology, aesthetics, and parapsychology (a term that he coined), and taught at the University of Berlin for most of his life. Apart from books such as Das Doppel­Ich (1890), Geschichte der neuen deutschen Psychologie (1894), Das Unterbewußtein (1909), Abriss einer Geschichte der Psychologie (1911), and Vom Jenseits der Seele (1919), he edited the journal Zeitschrift für Aesthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft. “The intrusion of foreign ‘spirits” into our psycho-physical organism violently contradicts all human experience.” Max Dessoir, “The Magic Mirror,” Monist 1 (October 1890): 108– 9. Max Dessoir, “Das Doppel-Ich,” in Schriften der Gesellschaft für Experimental­Psychologie zu Berlin (Berlin: W. Karl Siegismund, 1889), 6. Emphasis mine. Wilhelm Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, trans. J. E. Creighton and E. B. Titchener (London: Swan Sonnenschein; New York: Macmillan, [1863] 1907), 250– 51. On Dessoir’s theory of double consciousness, also see Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, Über Spaltung der Persönlichkeit (Sogennantes Doppel­Ich) (Vienna: Alfred Hölder, 1896), and Edmund Burke Delabarre, Interpretation of the Phenomena of Double Consciousness (New York: Neale, 1895). Obrist, “Ein glückliches Leben,” 25. Friedrich Schiller, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen (Stuttgart: P. Reclam, [1795] 1965). The proceedings were published as Kunsterziehung. Ergebnisse und Anregungen des Kunster­ ziehungstages in Dresden am 28. und 29. September 1901 (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1902). See, for example, the presentations by Theodor Götze, “Zeichnen und Formen,” and

257

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258

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84.

Alfred Lichtwark, “Die Anleitung zum Genuß der Kunstwerke,” in Kunsterziehung. Ergeb­ nisse und Anregungen, 141– 75 and 183– 99. Obrist, Kunsterziehung. Ergebnisse und Anregungen, 166– 67. Obrist, Kunsterziehung. Ergebnisse und Anregungen, 168. Götze, Kunsterziehung. Ergebnisse und Anregungen, 171. Götze, Kunsterziehung. Ergebnisse und Anregungen, 171. See “Lehrwerkstätten der Vereinigten Werkstätten für Kunst im Handwerk,” Kunst und Handwerk 51.6 (1900– 1901): 188. Obrist, Kunsterziehung. Ergebnisse und Anregungen, 195. “Everything unconscious and natural. This is how we must work. . . . If you do not become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of creative art.” Obrist, “Die Zukunft unserer Architektur,” 332. Debschitz made similar arguments about children’s art in “Lehren und Lernen in der bildenden Kunst,” 271, and “Eine Methode des Kunstunterrichts,” Dekora­ tive Kunst 7 (March 1904): 209. Obrist, “Die Zukunft unserer Architektur,” 331– 32. Almost every account of modern design education mentions Pestalozzi as a precursor, but for a monographic exploration of the theme, see Norman Brosterman, Inventing Kinder­ garten (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1997). Also see Juliet Kinchin and Aidan O’Connor, eds., Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900– 2000 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012).

85. Wolfgang Kemp, “  .  .  . einen wahrhaft bildenden Zeichenunterricht überall einzuführen.” Zeichnen und Zeichenunterricht der Laien 1500– 1870. Ein Handbuch (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1979). Similar arguments are made by Clive Ashwin, “Drawing and Education in German-Speaking Europe, 1800– 1900” (diss., University of London, 1980). 86. See Marjorie Lamberti, “The Politics of School Reform and Kulturkampf,” in Lamberti, State, Society, and the Elementary School in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 40– 87. 87. See “Der Lehrplan für die Gymnasien von 1837” and “Regulativen von 1854,” in Quellen zur deutschen Schulgeschichte seit 1800, ed. Gerhardt Giese (Berlin: Musterschmidt, 1961), 127– 28, 145– 55. 88. “Die Reform der preussischen Volksschule vom October 15 1872” (signed by Adalbert Falk), in Annalen des deutschen Reiches für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Statistik (Leipzig: Georg Hirth, 1873), 897– 940. 89. See the literature on the Kulturkampf cited in the introduction. 90. See, for example, Obrist, “Briefe aus Süddeutschland,” Die Werkkunst. Zeitschrift des Vereins für deutsches Kunstgewerbe in Berlin 19 (1906): 290. 91. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: W. W. Norton, [1905] 2009). 92. Johannes Forberger, Der Einfluß des Katholizismus und Protestantismus auf die wirtschaftli­ che Entwickelung der Völker (Leipzig: Braun, 1906), 53. Also see David Blackbourn, Populists and Patricians: Essays in Modern German History (London: Allen & Unwin, 1987), section 3, and David Blackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth­ Century Germany (New York: Knopf, 1994). 93. Manuel Borutta, “Settembrini’s World: German and Italian Anti-Catholicism in the Age of the Culture Wars,” Special Issue “European Anti-Catholicism,” ed. Yvonne Maria Werner and Jonas Harvard, European Studies 31 (1994): 43– 70. 94. Wilhelm Rein, “Geschichte des Zeichenunterrichts in der Volksschule,” in Geschichte der Methodik des deutschen Volksschulunterrichts, ed. Carl Kehr, vol. 2 (Gotha: Thienemann, 1879), 179.

n ot e s to PAg e s 1 5 3 –1 5 6

95. Rein, “Geschichte des Zeichenunterrichts in der Volksschule,” 195. 96. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Sämmtliche Schriften, vol. 5, Wie Gertrud ihre Kinder lehrt. Ein Versuch den Müttern Anleitung zu geben, ihre Kinder selbst zu unterrichten (Stuttgart and Tübingen: Gottaschen, 1820), 251– 52, translated by Lucy E. Holland and Francis C. Turner as How Gertrude Teaches Her Children (Syracuse NY: C. W. Bardeen, 1900). 97. Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, ABC der Anschauung oder Anschauungs­Lehre der Massverhält­ nisse (Zurich, Bern, and Tübingen: Geßner, 1803); Johann Friedrich Herbart, Pestalozzi’s Idee eines ABC der Anschauung als ein Cyklus von Vorübungen im Auffassen der Gestalten (Göttingen: Röwer, 1804). 98. Antonius Lippsmeier, Technik und Schul. Die Ausformung des Berufsschulcurriculums unter dem Einfluß der Technik als Geschichte des Unterrichts im technischen Zeichnen (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1971), 261n239. 99. Franz Carl Hillardt, Stigmographie. Das Schreiben und Zeichnen nach Punkten. Eine neue Methode (Kohlmarkt: Mueller, 1846). 100. Rein, “Geschichte des Zeichenunterrichts in der Volksschule,” 178– 89. Alexandre Dupuis, De l’enseignement du dessin sous le point de vue industriel (Paris: Giroux et al., 1856), and in German, Karl Domschke, Wegweiser für den praktischen Unterricht im Freihandzeichnen (Berlin: Lindau, 1869– 70). Rein’s earlier examples for the grid method are Joseph Schmid, Die Elemente des Zeichnens nach Pestalozzischen Grundsätzen (Bern: L. A. Haller, 1809); Johannes Ramsauer, Zeichnungslehre (Stuttgart: Gotta’schen Buchhandlung, 1821); Peter Schmid, Formen­Lehre mit Anwendung auf Naturgegenstände für den Schulunterricht (Berlin: Nicolai im Comm., 1833); Karl Ludwig Francke and Friedrich Adolph Diesterweg, Meth­ odische Anleitung für den Unterricht im Zeichnen (Berlin: Wilhelm Schüppel, 1833); and, finally, Friedrich Otto, Pädagogischen Zeichenlehre (Erfurt: Hermann Böhlau, 1837), who, according to Rein, was the middle ground between these two directions. 101. Rein, “Geschichte des Zeichenunterrichts in der Volksschule,” 203. 102. Rein, “Geschichte des Zeichenunterrichts in der Volksschule,” 192. 103. Rein, “Geschichte des Zeichenunterrichts in der Volksschule,” 195. 104. Adolf Stuhlmann, Der Zeichenunterricht in der Volks­ und Mittelschule. Ein methodisch geordneter Lehrgang (Hamburg: F. H. Nestler & Melle, 1876). Also see Adolf Stuhlmann, Zeichenunterricht und Formenlehre in der Elementarclasse (Hamburg: F. H. Nestler & Melle, 1870); Stuhlmann, Leitfaden der Zeichenunterricht in der preussischen Volksschulen mit drei oder mehr aufsteigenden Klassen (Berlin: Union Dt. Verlag, 1888); and Stuhlmann, Stick­ muster für Schule und Haus (Stuttgart und Berlin: Spemann, 1890). 105. Robert Bauer, Zeichnen der Volks­ und Bürgerschule methodisch geordnet. Eine Anweisung für den Lehrer zur Ertheilung des Zeichenunterrichts. Erste Stufe. Stigmographische Zeichnen (Eisenach: Verlag von J. Bacmeister, Hofbuchhaendler, 1877). 106. Compare the outline drawing to the kind of drawing that was assumed to capture the “truth” of things in Molly Mesbit, “Ready-Made Originals: The Duchamp Model,” October 37 (Summer 1986): 59. 107. Alois Kunzfeld, 50 Jahre Zeichenunterricht und Kunsterziehung (Vienna, Prague, and Leipzig: Schulwissenschaftlicher Verlag, 1922), 3. Also see Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 22, Über die Idee der Elementarbildung und den Standpunkt ihrer Aus­ führung in der Pestalozzischen Anstalt zu Iferten, delivered in Lenzburg on August 30, 1809 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1979), and Pestalozzi, How Gertrude Teaches Her Children, especially 114– 16. 108. Scherer quoted in the discussion in Kunsterziehung. Ergebnisse und Anregungen des Kunster­ ziehungstages in Dresden am 28. und 29. September 1901 (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1902), 161. Emphasis mine.

259

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260

109. J. Liberty Tadd, New Methods in Education: Art, Real Manual Training, Nature Study; Ex­ plaining Processes Whereby Hand, Eye and Mind Are Educated by Means that Conserve Vitality and Develop a Union of Thought and Action (Springfield, MA, and New York: Orange Judd, 1899), here 4, 25; translated as Neue Wege zur künstlerische Erziehung der Jugend. Zeichnen, Handfertigkeit, Naturstudium, Kunst (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1900). For references to Tadd, see Rudolf Schulze, Aus der Werkstatt der experimentellen Psychologie und Pädagogik (Leipzig: R. Voigtländer, 1909); August Schmarsow, Unser Verhältnis zu den bildenden Künste (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1903), 156; and Heinrich Grothmann, Das Zeichnen an der allgemein bildenden Schulen, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der preussischen Lehrplanbe­ stimmungen (Berlin: Ferdinand Ashelm, [1906] 1908). Schulze’s book was illustrated with images from Tadd’s book. Also see Ákos Moravánszky, “Educated Evolution: Darwinism, Design Education, and American Influence in Central Europe, 1898– 1918,” in The Educa­ tion of the Architect: Historiography, Urbanism, and the Growth of Architectural Knowledge, ed. Martha Pollak (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 113– 37. 110. Tadd, New Methods in Education, 25. 111. Tadd, New Methods in Education, 51. 112. Grothmann, Das Zeichnen an der allgemein bildenden Schulen, 131. 113. Verhandlungen der 29. Versammlung deutscher Philologen und Schulmänner in Innsbruck vom 28. September bis 1. October 1874 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1875). 114. Georg Kerschensteiner, Die Entwickelung der zeichnerischen Begabung. Neue Ergebnisse auf Grund neuer Untersuchungen (Munich: Carl Gerber, 1905), 442. 115. Unknown author, “Ist eine Wiedervereinigung der Konfessionen zu erstreben? Geschichtsphilosophische Gedanken, 13,” Grenzboten 50.4 (1891): 407. 116. Obrist, “Ein glückliches Leben,” 27. Compare this with the Klangfarben that Kandinsky elaborated in Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, insbesondere in der Malerei (Munich: R. Piper, 1912). 117. Arthur Roessler, Neu­Dachau. Ludwig Dill, Adolf Hölzel, Arthur Langhammer (Bielefeld and Leipzig: Velhagen & Klasing, 1905), 119. 118. Karl Scheffler, “Meditationen über das Ornament,” Dekorative Kunst 4.10 (1901): 397. 119. Obrist, “Die Lehr- und Versuch-Ateliers für angewandte und freie Kunst,” 230. 120. Obrist, “Wozu über Kunst schreiben?” 189, 191, and Debschitz, “Eine Methode des Kunstunterrichts,” 210. 121. Debschitz, “Zur Beantwortung der meine Schule betreffenden Fragen,” BZA. 122. SGS, Obrist-Nachlass, O2.40. 123. Fragments from Obrist’s notebook, SGS, Obrist Archive, O2.40. 124. Obrist’s notebook in SGS, Obrist-Nachlass, O2.40. 125. Debschitz, “Eine Methode des Kunstunterrichts,” 220– 22. 126. Debschitz, “Eine Methode des Kunstunterrichts,” 220– 22. 127. Debschitz, “Eine Methode des Kunstunterrichts,” 213. 128. Debschitz, “Eine Methode des Kunstunterrichts,” 220. 129. Debschitz, “Zur Beantwortung der meine Schule betreffenden Fragen,” BZA. 130. See, for example, Obrist, “Volkskunst,” Neue Möglichkeiten in der bildenden Kunst, 85– 86, and Obrist, “Ein künstlerischer Kunstunterricht,” 686. Frequently deriding cheap furniture, folksy art, or cartoons from the popular illustrated journal Gartenlaube, Obrist openly expressed admiration for an “aristocratic” art. Regarding the Debschitz School’s policy of selecting the few who would become “true artists” at the end of each school year, for example, Obrist expressed relief that “what began democratically” at the beginning of the year always ended “aristocratically.” Obrist, “Ein künstlerischer Kunstunterricht,” 686.

n ot e s to PAg e s 1 6 1 –1 6 8

131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136.

Obrist, “Wozu über Kunst Schreiben?” 174. Obrist, “Wozu über Kunst schreiben?” 185. Obrist, “Wozu über Kunst schreiben?” 185. Obrist, “Wozu über Kunst schreiben?” 178. Obrist, “Wozu über Kunst schreiben?” 185, 176. W. Fred, “A Chapter on German Arts and Crafts with Special Reference to the Work of Hermann Obrist,” Artist (New York) 19 (1901): 22. 137. See, for example, Wilhelm Michel, “Ateliers und Werkstätten für angewandte Kunst Wilhelm von Debschitz und Hermann Lochner, München,” Innen­Dekoration 20 (June 1909): 187– 99. 138. Rolf von Hoerschelmann as cited in Götz, “Die Debschitz- Schule Hohenzollernstraße 21,” 249– 50. 139. Consider the following successful careers: Sophie Taeuber-Arp, who studied at the Debschitz School between 1911 and 1913, became a successful artist and pedagogue in Dadaist and Surrealist circles; Clara von Ruckteschell-Trueb and Gertrud Kraut, who started out as students at the Debschitz School and then became teachers there, set up their own ceramics ateliers; and Olga Reynier, who was a student at the school between 1906 and 1908, went on to study architecture with Paul Schultze-Naumburg in Saaleck and became a successful interior decorator. A fuller list can be found in Rinker, “Die Lehrund Versuchsateliers für angewandte und freie Kunst, Debschitz-Schule, München 1902– 1914.” 140. Maximilian Berlitz founded the first Berlitz school in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1878. Berlitz was using the traditional grammar-translation method of teaching a foreign language when he discovered by coincidence the much more effective “direct method.” His schools soon became a worldwide business. For the Berlitz method, see M. D. Berlitz, Methode für den deutschen Unterricht in den Berlitz’schen Sprachschulen (Boston: C. H. Heintzemann, 1882). Chapter Five 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

László Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur, bauhausbücher 14 (Munich: Albert Langen, 1929), 26. The book was published in English as The New Vision: From Material to Architecture, trans. Daphne M. Hoffmann (New York: Brewer, Warren & Putnam, 1932) and The New Vision and the Abstract of an Artist, trans. Daphne M. Hoffmann (New York: Wittenborn, 1946). Both English versions went through several editions and are somewhat different from the German original. Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur, 24. Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur, 26. Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur, 18. Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur, 27. Moholy-Nagy, New Vision, 32, 33. Moholy-Nagy, New Vision, 34. See, for example, Moholy-Nagy as quoted in Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Moholy­Nagy: Experi­ ment in Totality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1950] 1969), 170. Throughout the book she describes their working spaces as “laboratories.” See, for example, Peter Galison and Caroline Jones, “Factory, Laboratory, Studio: Dispersing Sites of Production,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. Peter Galison and Caroline Jones (New York: Routledge, 1998), 497– 540.

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10. Walter Gropius, “Vorwort,” in Bauhausbauten Dessau, bauhausbücher 12 (Munich: Albert Lang, 1930), 10. “Bauhaus workshops are essentially laboratories,” a sanguine Gropius wrote in 1926, in the midst of the school’s financial troubles, “laboratories, in which prototypes suitable for mass production are . . . developed and constantly improved.” Gropius, “Principles of Bauhaus Production” [1926] in Programs and Manifestoes on Twentieth­ Century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads, trans. Michael Bullock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971) 96. Also see Gropius, “Bauhausneubau Dessau,” bauhaus. zeitschrift für ge­ staltung 1 (1926), unpaginated. 11. Hannes Meyer, “Die neue Welt,” Das Werk (1926– 27): 205– 24. 12. Wilhelm Dilthey, “Die drei Epochen der modernen Ästhetik und ihre heutige Aufgabe,” Die deutsche Rundschau 18 (1892): 267– 303, translated by Michael Neville as “The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics and Its Present Task,” in Selected Works, vol. 5, Poetry and

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

Experience, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 175– 222. Dilthey, “The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics and Its Present Task,” 205. Dilthey, “The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics and Its Present Task,” 198. Theodor Ziehen, “Über den gegenwärtigen Stand der experimentellen Ästhetik,” Zeit­ schrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 9.1 (1914): 16– 46. Paul Moos, Die deutsche Ästhetik der Gegenwart (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, [1914] 1919), 478. Edward Bullough, “Recent Work in Experimental Aesthetics,” British Journal of Psychol­ ogy 12 (1921): 76. See chapter 1 for more on this change. The essay in question is Wilhelm Windelband, “Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft. Straßburger Rektoratsrede” [1894], in Windelband, Präludien. Aufsätze und Reden zur Philosophie und ihrer Geschichte (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1915), 136– 60, translated as “Rectorial Address, Strasbourg, 1894,” History and Theory 19.2 (February 1980): 169– 85. Kurt Danziger, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Martin Kusch, Psychologism: A Case Study in the Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 190. Peter Galison, “Aufbau/Bauhaus: Logical Positivism and Architectural Modernism,” Crit­ ical Inquiry 16.4 (Summer 1990): 709– 52, here 736. Carnap diary, Saturday, October 19, 1929, as cited in Galison, “Aufbau/Bauhaus,” 736n47. See Johannes Itten, “Adolf Hölzel und sein Kreis,” Der Pelikan 65 (April 1964): 34, and Beate Ziegert, “The Debschitz School Munich: 1902– 1904” (master’s thesis, Syracuse University, 1985), 35. Dagmar Rinker, “Die Lehr- und Versuchsateliers für angewandte und freie Kunst, Debschitz-Schule, München 1902– 1914” (master’s thesis, University of Munich, 1993), 44, and Peg Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich: The Formative Jugendstil Years (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979). Since the history of the concept of function within architectural modernism is fraught with difficulties, it should come as no surprise that the Bauhaus has been unfairly reduced to functionalism in historiography. For one conspicuous example, see Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, [1936] 2005), here 168. Scholars have since then historicized how the reception of Bauhaus within Germany and without was intertwined with World War II and Cold War politics. See Frederic J. Schwartz, “The Disappearing Bauhaus: Architecture and

n ot e s to PAg e s 1 7 5 –1 7 9

Its Public in the Early Federal Republic,” in Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Dis­ course, and Modernism, ed. Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei (London: Routledge and Taylor & Francis, 2009), 61– 82, and Kathleen James-Chakraborty, “From Isolationism to Internationalism: American Acceptance of the Bauhaus,” and Greg Castillo, “The Bauhaus in Cold War Germany,” both in Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to Cold War, ed. Kathleen James-Chakraborty (Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 2006), 153– 70, 171– 93. 26. Walter Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture (New York: Harper, 1955). 27. A comprehensive account of the preliminary course can be found in Rainer K. Wick, Teaching at the Bauhaus, trans. Stephen Mason and Simon Lèbe (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2000). 28. Jahresbericht der Kunstgewerbeschule zu Düsseldorf 1903/04 (Düsseldorf: A. Bagel, 1904), 9– 10. 29. Jahresbericht der Kunstgewerbeschule zu Düsseldorf 1903/04, 12. 30. Die technischen Fachschulen Deutschlands (Steglitz-Berlin: Buchhandlung der Litterarischen Monatsberichte, 1903), 24– 25. 31. Die technischen Fachschulen Deutschlands, 15, 16, 20, 21. 32. M. Wingler, ed., Kunstschulreform 1900– 1933 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1977). 33. Walter Gropius, “Manifest und Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses, April 1919,” in Das Bauhaus: 1919– 1933 Weimar Dessau Berlin und die Nachfolge in Chicago seit 1937, ed. Hans M. Wingler (Cologne: DuMont, [1962] 2002), 38– 41. 34. “Lehrplan der Lehrwerkstätten des Staatlichen Bauhauses zu Weimar (Ehemalige Grossherzoglich Sächsische Hochschule für bildende Kunst und ehemalige Grossherzoglich Sächsische Kunstgewerbeschule in Vereinigung),” February 1921, Getty Research Institute (hereafter GRI), Bauhaus Typography Collection, 850513, B1. 35. The leftist students petitioned in 1930 to have the preliminary course abolished. See Linksradikale Studierende, “Forderung nach Aufhebung des Vorkurses, July 1930,” in Wingler, Das Bauhaus: 1919– 1933, 177. 36. Johannes Itten, Mein Vorkurs am Bauhaus. Gestaltungs­ und Formenlehre (Ravensburg: Maier, 1963), translated as Design and Form: The Basic Course at the Bauhaus and Later (New York: Wiley, 1975), 6. 37. Itten, Notebook, Unterricht Wien, March 2– April 19, 1918, 46– 47, in Johannes Itten Ta­ gebücher Stuttgart 1913– 1916, Wien 1916– 1919, ed. Eva Badura-Triska (Vienna: Löcker, 1990), 387. 38. Itten, Johannes Itten Tagebücher Stuttgart 1913– 1916, Wien 1916– 1919, 387. 39. See, for example, Maria Stavrinaki, “The African Chair or the Charismatic Object,” Grey Room 41 (Fall 2010): 88– 110. 40. Itten, Design and Form, 9. 41. Adolf Hölzel, “Die Schule des Künstlers,” Der Pelikan 11 (1921): 7– 8. 42. Itten, “The Foundation Course at the Bauhaus,” in Education of Vision, ed. Gyorgy Kepes (New York: George Braziller, 1965), 105, 115– 16. 43. Itten, “The Foundation Course at the Bauhaus,” 105. 44. Itten, “The Foundation Course at the Bauhaus,” 115. 45. Paul Klee, Briefe an die Familie, 1899– 1940, ed. Felix Klee (Cologne: DuMont, 1979). Also cited by Itten, Design and Form, 12. 46. Johannes Itten in interview with Maria Wetzel, “Atelierbesuch,” undated, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin (hereafter BAB), Johannes Itten, Mappe 20, 6. 47. Howard Dearstyne, Inside the Bauhaus, ed. David Spaeth (New York: Rizzoli, 1986), 90.

263

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264

48. Dearstyne, Inside the Bauhaus, 92. 49. Walter Gropius, “Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses,” Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar 1919– 1923 (Weimar and Munich: Bauhausverlag, 1923), 10. The diagram had also appeared in “Satzungen Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar” from 1922. GRI, Bauhaus Typography Collection, 850513, B1. 50. Gropius, “Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses,” 10. 51. Gropius, “Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses,” 15. 52. For a good account of architectural instruction at the Bauhaus, see Wallis Miller, “Architecture, Building, and the Bauhaus,” in James-Chakraborty, Bauhaus Culture, 63– 89. 53. Gropius, “Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses,” 9. 54. “Arbeitsplan der Grundlehre,” printed sheet, no date, 1925– 1926, in Wingler, Das Bau­ haus: 1919– 1933, 118. Here the duration of the preliminary course is specified as half a year. 55. Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture, 33. The significant word Buchwissen (book-learning) appears in the German translation of the text. Walter Gropius, Architektur (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1955), 29. 56. Walter Gropius, “Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses,” 14. 57. Paul Klee, Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch, bauhausbücher 2 (Munich: Albert Langen, 1925). 58. Kandinsky taught at the Phalanx School in Munich. For Kandinsky’s years in Munich, see Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich. For a brief but useful account of Kandinsky’s years in Moscow, see Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 28– 32. 59. Wingler, ed., Das Bauhaus: 1919– 1933, 89. 60. Student notes, “Tabelle der Beziehungen zu Form, Farbe, Sinne, usw.,” GRI, Wassily Kandinsky Papers, 850910, B1, 13. 61. Wassily Kandinsky, Punkt und Linie zu Fläche, bauhausbücher 9 (Munich: Albert Langen, 1926), 123. 62. Wassily Kandinsky, Über das Geistige in der Kunst, insbesondere in der Malerei (Munich: R. Piper Verlag, 1911). 63. Kandinsky, Punkt und Linie zu Fläche, 57. 64. See, for example, Jerome Ashmore, “Sound in Kandinsky’s Painting,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 35.3 (Spring 1977): 329– 36. 65. Kandinsky, Punkt und Linie zu Fläche, 11. 66. Oskar Schlemmer, for example, took issue not so much with Kandinsky’s assumption about the immediacy between color and affect but rather with the particular assertions that he made. Schlemmer was convinced that the circle should be red and not blue. Diary entry dated October 1923, in The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, selected and ed. Tut Schlemmer, trans. Krishna Winston (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 147. 67. Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur, 189– 90. 68. Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur, 190. 69. Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur, 21n. 70. For a good discussion of Moholy-Nagy’s tactile instruments’ relationship to photography, see T’ai Smith, “Limits of the Tactile and the Optical: Bauhaus Fabric in the Frame of Photography,” Grey Room 25 (Fall 2006): 6– 31. 71. Leah Dickerman, “Bauhaus Fundaments,” Bauhaus, 1919– 1933: Workshops for Modernity, ed. Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman (New York: Museum of Modern Art; London: Thames & Hudson, 2009), 18. According to Boring, elementarism was a primary attribute of Wundtian psychology and crucial to understanding his concept of “psychical causal-

n ot e s to PAg e s 1 8 2–1 8 6

72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

ity.” Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology, 2d ed. (New York: AppletonCentury-Crofts, [1929] 1950), 33. Hyungmin Pai explains that in Beaux-Arts pedagogy, the analytique dealt with the part and the esquisse with the whole, and that Durand’s lectures were the extreme manifestation of the analytique mentality. Hyungmin Pai, The Portfolio and the Diagram: Architecture, Discourse, and Modernity in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 41. Also see JeanNicolas-Louis Durand, Précis of the Lectures on Architecture [1802– 5], trans. David Britt, introd. Antoine Picon (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2000). See, for example, Franz Carl Hillardt, Stigmographie. Das Schreiben und Zeichnen nach Punkten. Eine neue Methode (Kohlmarkt: Mueller, 1846). Also see chapter 4. GRI, Kandinsky Papers, 850910, B2, 1. Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur, 19. Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur, 19. Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur, 10– 11. Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur, 18. Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur, 11. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: W. W. Norton, [1905] 2009).

81. Wassily Kandinsky, “Kunstpädagogik,” bauhaus. zeitschrift für gestaltung 2.2/3 (1928), translated as “Art Education,” in Hans Wingler, The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chi­ cago (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, [1969] 1979), 147. 82. Student notes of lecture “Abstrakte Formelemente” given by Kandinsky in the Vorkurs during the summer semester, June 17, 1925, in Dessau, GRI, Kandinsky Papers, 850901, B1, 1. 83. Student notes of lecture “Abstrakte Formelemente” by Kandinsky, GRI, B1, 2. 84. Student notes of lecture “Abstrakte Formelemente” by Kandinsky, GRI, B1, 3. 85. Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur, 14. 86. Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu Architektur, 17. 87. Walter Gropius, “Education toward Creative Design,” American Architect and Architecture 150 (May 1937): 26– 30. 88. Gropius, “Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses,” 7. 89. Gropius, “Education toward Creative Design,” 30. 90. “We sense space with our entire, indivisible self,” Gropius wrote in 1923, echoing many a nineteenth- century epistemologist. He added: “The brain thinks mathematical space by means of counting and measuring; the hand understands space through the sense of touch.” Gropius, “Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses,” 9. According to Jan van der Linden, who started studying at the school in 1930, the psychologist and philosopher Friedrich von Dürckheim gave lectures on the psychology of space. Marty Bax, Bauhaus Lecture Notes: Ideal and Practice of Architectural Training at the Bauhaus, Based on the Lec­ ture Notes Made by the Dutch Ex­Bauhaus Student and Architect J. J. van der Linden of the Mies van der Rohe Curriculum (Amsterdam: Architectura & Natura, 1991), 65. 91. Among the first to argue that Raum was the “essence” of architecture was the art historian August Schmarsow, who wrote Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung (Leipzig: Karl W. Hiersemann, 1894), translated as “The Essence of Architectural Creation,” in Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873– 1893, introd. and trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 281– 97. 92. Transcription of Walter Gropius, “Raumkunde,” BAB, GS 20, Mappe 21, 1. 93. Oskar Schlemmer to Otto Meyer, letter dated February 3, 1921, in The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, 98.

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94. See, for example, the introductory sections of two Moholy-Nagy books, Von Material zu Architektur and Vision in Motion. 95. Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture, 145. 96. Diary entry from August 1918, in Johannes Itten, Werke und Schriften, ed. Willy Rotzler (Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1972), 60. 97. Notebook, 9– 19 July 1918, Flirsch, in Johannes Itten Tagebücher Stuttgart 1913– 1916, Wien 1916– 1919, 302. 98. Itten, “The Foundation Course at the Bauhaus,” 115. 99. Itten, Design and Form, 9. Schlemmer described Itten’s technique as follows: “He shows photographs and the students are supposed to draw various essential elements, usually the movement, the main contour, a curve. . . . Next he displays the weeping Mary Magdalene from the Grünewald Altar; the students struggle to extract some essential feature from this complicated picture. Itten glances at their efforts and then bursts out: if they had any artistic sensitivity, they would not attempt to draw this, the noblest portrayal of weeping, a symbol of the tears of the world; they would sit silent, themselves dissolved in tears. Thus he speaks, then departs, slamming the door!” Oskar Schlemmer to Otto Meyer, letter dated May 16, 1921, in The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer, 105– 6. A similar account can be found in Felix Klee, “Mein Erinnerungen an das Bauhaus Weimar,” in Bauhaus und Bauhäusler. Erinnerungen und Bekenntnisse, ed. Eckhard Neumann (Cologne: DuMont, [1971] 1985), 81. 100. Itten was not alone among the Bauhäusler in promoting an “unleashing” of the self. Gropius wrote: “The most essential task is unleashing of individuality, its freeing from dead convention in favor of personal experiences and insights.” Gropius, “Idee und Aufbau des Staatlichen Bauhauses,” 11. 101. I am referring here to a debate that I explained in more detail in chapter 1. For Dilthey’s take on this debate, see Wilhelm Dilthey, “Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie,” Sitzungsbeitrag der Berliner Akademie der Wissenschaften vom 20. Dezember 1894 (1895): 1309– 1407, translated by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Donald Moore as “Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology,” in Selected Works, vol. 2, Understand­ ing the Human World, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 115– 210. 102. For Wundt’s defense of the introspective method against Volkelt, for example, see Wilhelm Wundt, “Selbstbeobachtung und innere Wahrnehmung,” Philosophische Studien 4 (1888): 292– 309. 103. “Assignment for 12 November 1926,” GRI, Wassily Kandinsky Papers, box 10, folder 84. Also see letter from Wera Meyer-Waldeck to Otti Berger, July 27, 1927, BAB, Otti Berger, folder 16, cited in Vassily Kandinsky: The Pragmatic Professor at the Bauhaus, 1922– 1933— The Everyday Reality of Teaching under Three Directors, ed. Magdalena Droste (Berlin: BauhausArchiv, 2014), 112. 104. The Texas Rangers are usually credited with the invention of the nine-square problem. For a brief history of the problem, see Madlen Simon, “Design Pedagogy: Changing Approaches to Teaching Design,” in Architecture School: Three Centuries of Educating Archi­ tects in North America, ed. Joan Ockman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 276– 85. 105. Wilhelm Wundt, “Selbstbeobachtung und innere Wahrnehmung,” Philosophische Studien 4 (1888): 292– 309. 106. The behaviorists made this point the center of their critique of Wundt. See, for example, J. B. Watson, Psychology from the Standpoint of a Behaviorist, introd. Joseph Wolpe (London and Dover, NH: F. Pinter, [1919] 1983).

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107. Ursula Schuh, “Im Klassenzimmer Kandinskys,” in Neumann, Bauhaus und Bauhäusler, 240– 41. 108. Klee’s shift from mathematical formulas to geometrical construction is evocative of the debates in mathematics between logicism and intuitionism. For a brief summary, see Michael Hallett, “Foundations of Mathematics,” in The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1870– 1945, ed. Thomas Baldwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 128– 56. 109. Van der Linden found Klee’s lectures too complicated to record in writing. Bax, Bauhaus Lecture Notes, 65. 110. Paul Klee, “Exakte Versuche im Bereich der Kunst,” bauhaus. zeitschrift für gestaltung 2.2/3 (1928). I am using, with modifications, the translation in Wingler, The Bauhaus, 148. Especially important here is the word Funktion, which I translate as “operation” to avoid the confusion with the misleading term “function” in design history. 111. Gropius, Scope of Total Architecture, 30. 112. At the risk of making an anachronistic argument, I should note here that this history of automatism may account for the ease with which designers would adopt digital tools at the end of the twentieth century. “Automating” formal iterations, as we see in this chapter, was a process built into modern design education since its early history. 113. Hannes Meyer, “bauen,” bauhaus. zeitschrift für gestaltung 2.4 (1928): 12– 13, and in Wingler, Das Bauhaus: 1919– 1933, 160– 61. 114. Meyer, “bauen,” in Wingler, Das Bauhaus: 1919– 1933, 160. 115. Meyer, “bauen,” in Wingler, Das Bauhaus: 1919– 1933, 160. 116. “bauhaus dessau. satzung— lehrordnung, 1927,” in Wingler, Das Bauhaus: 1919– 1933, 131– 32. 117. See note 25. 118. “Semesterplan des Dessauer Bauhauses 1926– 1927,” in Prospekt. Bauhaus Dessau Hoch­ schule für Gestaltung (Dessau: Arthur Bodenthal, 1927), 4– 5. 119. Itten, “The Foundation Course at the Bauhaus,” 121. 120. “Organisationsplan, January 1930,” in Wingler, Das Bauhaus: 1919– 1933, 463. 121. The global dissemination of Bauhaus pedagogy, especially beyond Europe and North America, is an area that needs further research. See Folke Dietzsch, “Die Studierenden am Bauhaus. Eine analytische Betrachtung zu strukturellen Zusammensetzung der Studierenden, zu ihren Studien und Leben am Bauhaus sowie zu ihrem späterem Wirken” (diss., Hochschule für Architektur und Bauwesen, Weimar, 1991) and Bauhaus Global: Gessamelte Beiträge der Konferenz Bauhaus Global vom 21. bis 26. September 2009, Neue Bauhausbücher 3, ed. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 2010). 122. The school was first called the New Bauhaus, reopened as the School of Design in 1939, was renamed the Institute of Design in 1944, and affiliated with the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1949. For histories of the school, see, in addition to the volumes edited by Wingler in English and German: Alain Findeli, “Moholy-Nagy’s Design Pedagogy in Chicago (1937– 46),” Design Issues 7.1, Educating the Designer (Autumn 1990): 4– 19; Alain Findeli and Charlotte Benton, “Design Education and Industry: The Laborious Beginnings of the Institute of Design in Chicago in 1944,” Journal of Design History 4.2 (1991): 97– 113; and Mary Jane Jacob and Jacquelynn Baas, eds., Chicago Makes Modern: How Cre­ ative Minds Changed Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), especially the chapter by Maggie Taft, “Better than Before: László Moholy-Nagy and the New Bauhaus in Chicago,” 31– 43. 123. See S. Moholy-Nagy, Moholy­Nagy: Experiment in Totality, 147– 50. 124. S. Moholy-Nagy, Moholy­Nagy: Experiment in Totality, 150.

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125. S. Moholy-Nagy, Moholy­Nagy: Experiment in Totality, 159. 126. Moholy-Nagy, “Better than Before,” Technology Review 46.1 (November 1943): 45– 48. Also see Robin Schuldenfrei, “Assimilating Unease: Moholy-Nagy and the Wartime/Postwar Bauhaus in Chicago,” in Atomic Dwelling: Anxiety, Domesticity, and Postwar Architecture, ed. Robin Schuldenfrei (London: Routledge and Taylor & Francis, 2012), 87– 126. 127. For Gropius at Harvard, see Jill E. Pearlman, Inventing American Modernism: Joseph Hud­ nut, Walter Gropius, and the Bauhaus (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), especially the chapter “The Battle over Basic Design,” 200– 238. 128. “Educational Program, Fall 1937,” in Richard Kostelanetz, ed., Moholy­Nagy: Documentary Monographs in Modern Art (New York: Praeger, 1970), 173. 129. This transition from the material to the immaterial was a progression that Moholy-Nagy presented here and elsewhere as the teleology of modern art. As he had also argued in

130. 131. 132. 133. 134.

135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141.

Malerei, Fotographie, Film, art followed the trajectory of dematerialization that had been argued by many theorists of modernity from Marx to Simmel. László Moholy-Nagy, Malerei, Photographie, Film (Munich: Langen, 1925), translated as Painting, Photography, Film (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969). “Education and the Bauhaus (1938),” in Kostelanetz, Moholy­Nagy: Documentary Mono­ graphs in Modern Art, 169. László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: P. Theobald, 1947), 64. See Peter Galison, “The Americanization of Unity,” Daedalus 127 (Winter 1998): 45– 71. Charles W. Morris, “The Contribution of Science to the Designer’s Task,” New Bauhaus Prospectus, Chicago, 1937– 38, in Wingler, The Bauhaus, 195. The difference that I am trying to argue for is similar to coherentist as opposed to foundationalist theories of knowledge. For a historical discussion of coherentism versus foundationalism, see Ernest Sosa, “The Mythology of the Given,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 14 (1997): 275– 86. Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 361. The first part of Vision in Motion (10– 32) is entirely dedicated to the question of education. Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 64. Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 21. Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 42. Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 361. Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion, 361. Epilogue

1.

2. 3.

Sigmund Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology” [1895], in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. 1 (1886– 99), Pre­Psycho­Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1966), 281– 397. First published in German in 1950 as Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse. I will refer to the page numbers in the English translation. The diagram appears on page 324 of the Standard Edition. For Freud’s drawings, see Lynn Gamwell and Mark Solms, From Neurology to Psychoanalysis: Sigmund Freud’s Neurological Drawings and Diagrams of the Mind (New York: Binghamton University Art Museum, State University of New York, 2006). John Onians, Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 143– 44. Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” 295.

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4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” 298– 99. Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” 322– 24. Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” 323. Freud’s indebtedness to Sigmund Exner’s Entwurf zu einer physiologischen Erklärung psy­ chischen Erscheinungen (1894) has been acknowledged in Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond Psychoanalytic Legend (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 116, and Fulvio Marone, “Suggestions from the Unconscious: Freud, Hypnosis, and the Mind-Body Problem,” in The Pre­Psychoanalytic Writings of Sigmund Freud, ed. Gertrudis van de Vijver and Filip Geerardyn (London: Karnac, 2002), 231. For the question of control before cybernetics, see James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). Wilhelm Wundt, Vorlesungen über die Menschen­ und Thierseele, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1863), 208. Wilhelm Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, vol. 1, 5th ed. (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, [1874] 1902), 85– 86. Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” 312. For a history of inhibition, see Roger Smith, Inhibition: History and Meaning in the Sciences of Mind and Brain (London: Free Association, 1992). Smith traces the history of this concept and its transformation into the twentieth-century concept of control. This view can be found as early as in 1962 in Karl H. Pribram, “The Neuropsychology of Sigmund Freud,” in Experimental Foundations of Clinical Psychology, ed. Arthur J. Bachrach (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 442– 68. In this text, Pribram posits Freud’s “Project” as a “Rosetta Stone” for a “single scientific universe of discourse” (462). See, for example, Geoffrey D. Schott, “Freud’s Project and Its Diagram: Anticipating the Hebbian Synapse,” Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry 82.2 (February 2011): 122– 25, and Diego Centonze et al., “The Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895): A Freudian Anticipation of LTP-Memory Connection Theory,” Brain Research Reviews 46 (2004): 310– 14. For Freud’s frequent reference to a “backward” flow of nervous energy, see the editor’s appendix on regression in Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” 344– 46. Schott, “Freud’s Project and Its Diagram,” 123. Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” 303. Frederick Gregory, Nature Lost? Natural Science and the German Theological Traditions of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). See for example, Wilhelm Wundt, “Aufgabe der physiologischen Psychologie,” in Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, 1– 12. For a good explication of Wundt’s disciplinary project, see Kurt Danziger, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psycholog­ ical Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) and chapter 1 of this book. G. T. Fechner, “Allgemeine Betrachtung über die Beziehung von Leib und Seele,” in Fechner, Elemente der Psychophysik, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, [1860] 1889), 5– 6. Wundt had no interest in transforming psychology into a purely experimental science that had no ties to philosophy. For a subtle discussion of Wundt’s disciplinary project, see Danziger, Constructing the Subject, 37– 42. Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” 341. Freud, The Psycho­Pathology of Everyday Life [1901], vol 6. of Standard Edition of the Com­ plete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, trans. Alan Tyson (London: Bouverie House, 1966), 5. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents [1929– 30], in Standard Edition of the Complete Psy­

269

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chological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 21 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1961), 57– 146. 23. Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” [1957], in Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 146– 78. For Lacan’s discussion of the “Project,” see Lacan, “The Freudian Schemata of the Psychic Apparatus” [1955], in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954– 55, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 93– 171, and “Rereading the Entwurf ” [1959], in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959– 1960, trans. Dennis Porter, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 35– 42. 24. See Schott, “Freud’s Project and Its Diagram: Anticipating the Hebbian Synapse,” and Diego Centonze et al., “The Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895): A Freudian Anticipation of LTP-Memory Connection Theory.” 25. Wilhelm Windelband, “Geschichte und Naturwissenschaft. Straßburger Rektoratsrede” [1894], in Windelband, Präludien. Aufsätze und Reden zur Philosophie und ihrer Geschichte (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1915), 136– 60, translated as “Rectorial Address, Strasbourg, 1894,” History and Theory 19.2 (February 1980): 169– 85. 26. Lacan recognized in the mechanistic language of the Entwurf “something unmatched in significance, something that has changed the problems of the ethical perspective for us to a degree that we are not yet aware of.” Lacan, “Rereading the Entwurf,” 36. 27. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)” [1970], in Althusser, “Lenin and Philosophy” and Other Essays (New York and London: Monthly Review, 1971), 127– 86. 28. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 159– 60. 29. Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 168. 30. The inversion reference is made in Karl Marx, “Postface to the Second Edition” [1873], in Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, introd. Ernest Mandel (London: Penguin, 1976), 103. Also see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (New York: Prometheus Books, [1845] 1998), and Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London and New York: Verso, [1965] 1996).

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selected BIBlIogrAPhy

Ziegert, Beate. “The Debschitz School, Munich: 1902– 1914.” Design Issues 3.1 (Spring 1986): 28– 42. Ziehen, Theodor. “Über den gegenwärtigen Stand der experimentellen Ästhetik.” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 9.1 (1914): 16– 46. “Zu den Arbeiten Obrist’s.” Dekorative Kunst 3.5 (1900): 196– 98.

297

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. academicism (art education), 19, 21, 23, 108– 10, 118, 129, 134, 139– 42, 152, 164, 176, 177, 179, 185, 186, 188, 254n27, 254n29 Académie des Beaux-Arts (Paris), 108– 9, 139– 40, 182, 265n72. See also academicism (art education) Académie Julian (Paris), 134 aesthetic induction (künstlerische Induc­ tion), 13, 27, 29, 31, 64, 96, 124, 130 aesthetics from above (Aesthetik von oben), 8, 14, 48, 98. See also aesthetics from below (Aesthetik von unten); Fechner, Gustav Theodor aesthetics from below (Aesthetik von unten), 8, 14, 22, 48– 49, 98, 103, 173– 74, 181, 201. See also aesthetics from above (Aesthetik von oben); Fechner, Gustav Theodor affecting, techniques of. See feeling (Ge­ fühl ), theories of affect theory, 24– 26 afterimage, 28, 29, 172, 191 Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin), 58 Akademie für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe (Academy for Art and Applied Art), (Breslau [Wrocław]), 104, 128 Albers, Josef, 174, 177, 179, 180, 190, 191, 196 Althusser, Louis, 210 analogy: analogical reasoning or thinking, 31, 54, 77; operating by way of, 46, 56, 69, 78 analytic or explanative psychology (zergliedernde Psychologie). See under psychology

Anschauung (intuition): criticism of, 57– 61; definition of, 12, 18, 217n25; as form of cognition, 13, 18, 27– 28, 46, 55– 56, 64– 65, 75, 100, 179; of images and role in education, 18, 39, 64– 65, 75– 78, 94, 150– 59, 179, 221n63; theological implications of, 18, 39, 151– 53, 159. See also comparativism; object lesson (Anschau­ ungsunterricht) anti-Catholicism, 16– 17, 151– 52, 220n50. See also Kulturkampf antinomy, 13, 21, 23, 42– 44, 60 apperception, 51– 53, 51, 67– 68, 70– 71, 84, 86– 89, 95, 98, 122, 125– 27, 205, 207 applied arts (Kunstgewerbe), 103, 128, 129, 134, 141, 162– 63, 165, 176; schools of, 104, 128, 129, 134, 139, 142, 176, 186, 254n29 art history, discipline of: disciplinary project of, 64– 65, 66, 69; and Kunst­ wissenschaft, 13– 14; methods and techniques of, 69, 70, 83, 90– 96, 162; role in education, 63– 64, 75 artistic induction (künstlerische Induction), 13, 27, 29, 31, 64, 96, 124, 130 Arts and Crafts movement (England), 165 Association of Arts and Industries (Chicago), 197. See under Moholy-Nagy, László Ateliers und Werkstätten für angewandte Kunst (Ateliers and Workshops for Applied Art) (Munich), 140. See also Debschitz-Schule (Debschitz School) (Munich)

Index

300

Augenmaß (eyeballing, measuring by the eye, visual discrimination), 124, 125, 141, 251n121 Augspurg, Anita, 104, 252n10. See also Verein für Fraueninteressen (Association for Women’s Concerns) (Munich) automata, 17, 164, 165; automatic response or action, 21, 149; automatism, 156, 192, 267n112 Ažbè Schule, 139 Baerwald, Richard, 145, 147, 256n57 Bain, Alexander, 100, 244n15 baroque, 22, 64– 65, 66– 75, 86, 92, 94– 96, 131, 235n8, 235n11 Bauer, Robert, 155 Baugewerkschule (Weimar), 180 Bauhaus: Carnap at, 174– 75; curricular plans and diagrams, 177, 179– 80, 179, 183, 194– 99, 195– 97; development of design education at, 21, 26, 129, 167– 201, plates 1– 10; elementarism of, 167, 174– 75, 178, 181– 83, 266n99; formalism at, 19, 174, 175, 177– 78, 179, 180– 82, 185– 86, 190– 93, 200– 201; foundationalism of, 176, 180, 181– 82, 184, 186, 189– 90; New Bauhaus (Chicago), 168, 196– 99, 197, 267n122; precursors to, 128, 134, 139, 140; psychophysics at, 171, 174– 75, 177, 181– 83, 188, 189– 90, 193– 94, 198; role within historiography, 262n25, 267n121; training of introspection, 23, 175, 187– 93. See also Albers, Josef; design education; Gropius, Walter; Itten, Johannes; Kandinsky, Wassily; Klee, Paul; Moholy-Nagy, László; van der Rohe, Mies; Vorkurs (preliminary course) Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb, 8, 12 Behrens, Peter, 120, 120, 159. See also Kunstgewerbeschulen (Schools of Applied Art): Düsseldorf Bell, Charles: Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression, 118, 249n87; The Hand, 35, 39; and muscle sense (sixth sense), 35, 35, 39– 40, 118, 157, 224n23 Bergson, Henri, 57, 233n148 Berliner Gesellschaft für experimentelle Psychologie (Society for Experimental Psychology) (Berlin), 148 Berlitz technique, 165, 261n140

Bernini, 69 Bildung, concept of: definition, 15; design education in relationship to, 183– 86, 187, 194– 96, 197– 99; educated eye (das gebildete Auge), 69; educated middle classes (Bildungsbürgertum), 15, 70, 123; educated seeing, 237n41; educational reform, 1– 4, 22, 151– 53, 176, 182; and hermeneutics, 16, 79, 86; and inner voice, 89– 90; model of selfhood cultivated through, 15– 16, 18, 49, 50, 118, 122, 124, 149– 50, 161, 165, 219n46; in relationship to natural and human sciences, 31, 38– 39; in relationship to Protestantism and Catholicism, 16– 17, 139– 40, 151– 52; revival at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of twentieth centuries, 16, 53, 123, 156– 57, 183– 86, 187– 88, 194– 96, 197, 219n46; role of Anschauung in, 18, 39, 64– 65, 75– 78, 94, 150– 59, 179, 221n63; and television, 23– 24, 25; at turn of the nineteenth century, 15– 16, 38, 219n46; Verbildung (miseducation), 71 Bill, Max, 190, 191 Black Mountain College (North Carolina), 190. See also Albers, Josef Blondel, Jacques-François, 108 Bois-Reymond, Emil Du, 38, 49, 228n61 Boullée, Étienne-Louis, 108 Brentano, Franz, 53, 54, 232n123 Breysig, Kurt, 102– 3 Bridgewater Treatises, 35, 39, 227n48 Britsch, Gustaf, 81– 82 Brown, Bob, 90– 91, 91 Büchner, Ludwig, 41 Bullough, Edward, 174 Burckhardt, Jacob, 69– 70, 90, 92 Cannon, Walter Bradford, 37, 122 Carnap, Rudolf, 174– 75 Catholicism, 131, 138, 227n49; selfhood associated with, 16– 17, 20, 68, 138– 39, 149– 50 causality, 21, 43, 53, 61, 78, 145; for Dilthey, 55, 127, 173; for Endell, 102– 3, 124; for Freud, 207, 210, 211; for Helmholtz, 42– 43; for Newton, 29; physical vs. psychical, 55, 207– 8, 229n81, 264n71; for psychophysics, 45; statistical, 55

Index

cause and effect, 8, 13, 21, 31, 40– 43, 45– 46, 54, 60, 68– 69, 78, 145. See also causality; effects (Wirkungen) character: in architectural theory, 108– 10, 109, 111, 121, 130; and convenance, 108– 9, 110, 121, 130, 248n70; Lavater and physiognomy, 109– 10, 111, 113, 126 Cižek, Franz, 177 Cococello Club, Munich, 164, 165 comparative looking, techniques of. See comparativism comparativism: comparative looking, 21, 22, 26, 84, 86– 88, 161– 62, 200; in Dilthey, 56; in education, 78, 161– 62, 167– 68, 177; in Goethe, 28, 28, 69; in Holbein exhibition of 1871, 75– 77, 77; in Kulturarbeiten and other picture books, 79– 83, 80– 83, 240n97, 240n108; in psychological experiments, 4– 7, 24; in psychophysics, 46, 76– 77, 183; in Schulze, 4– 8; in the slide lecture, 95– 96, 243n156; of stereoscopic vision, 88– 90; in Wölfflin, 22, 65, 72, 73, 74, 75– 78, 76, 89, 95– 96, 235n10, 238n64, 238n70, 243n158 Condillac, Étienne Bonnot de, 219n45 contemplation (Betrachtung), 15– 16, 20, 21, 40, 67, 81, 123, 132 convenance, 108– 9, 110, 121, 130, 248n70. See also character Cornelius, Hans, 134, 246n39, 253n13 Damenakademien: Zeichen- und Malschule des Vereins der Künstlerinnen, Berlin (Drawing and Painting School of the Association of Female Artists), 140 Darwin, Charles, 40, 118 Dearstyne, Howard, 179 Debschitz, Wilhelm von, 11, 19, 98, 128, 134– 36, 138, 139, 140, 141, 160– 61, 161, 162, 163, 164, 171, 175, 252n10, 255n35, 258n82. See also Debschitz-Schule (Debschitz School) (Munich) Debschitz-Schule (Debschitz School) (Munich), 22– 23, 78, 127– 28, 134– 36, 137– 38, 138– 45, 144, 150– 52, 159– 65, 163, 175, 176, 177, 255n35, 260n130, 261n139. See also Debschitz, Wilhelm von; Obrist, Hermann

degeneration (Entartung), 71, 86, 238n59; exhibition of “Degenerate Art” (Entar­ tete Kunst), 83 Dekorative Kunst (journal), 97– 99, 244n5 de Laveleye, Émile Louis Victor, 17 Derrida, Jacques, 43, 60, 210 Descartes, René, 34, 58, 99; and Cartesian theories, 45, 108 descriptive psychology (beschreibende Psychologie). See under psychology design, theological implications of, 35, 39– 40, 43, 54, 227n49 design education, 21, 23, 78; at the Bauhaus, 167– 201; at the Debschitz School, 134– 36, 139– 44, 160– 65; and Kultur­ kampf, 138, 151– 59; as implemented by Endell, 104, 129– 30; as propaedeutics, 127– 30. See also Bauhaus; DebschitzSchule (Debschitz School) (Munich); designing, techniques of; schools of art and design designing, techniques of, 21, 22, 23, 61, 134; Gestaltung, 134, 139, 177, 180, 186; by mediums, 146– 48. See also design education Dessoir, Max: as editor of Zeitschrift für Äs­ thetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (journal), 13– 14; as occultist, 148– 49, 159, 257nn67– 68 Dewey, John, 36, 119, 207 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 12, 14, 21, 58, 66, 69, 101, 127, 173, 232n124, 232n127, 232n128, 233n138; descriptive psychology (beschreibende Psychologie), 53– 57; silent thinking (schweigendes Denken), 12, 55– 56. See also phenomenology; psychology disciplines: arrangement at universities, 20, 38– 39, 53– 61, 174, 203, 207, 209– 11; nomothetic and idiographic, 58– 59, 174; position of art history within, 64, 65, 69; position of psychology within, 21, 44– 46, 48– 51, 53– 61, 127, 129, 174, 188, 195, 198, 203, 207– 8, 210– 11; in relationship to kinaesthetic knowing, 26, 31, 64– 65, 101– 2. See also human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften); natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) DNA (Deutscher Normenausschuß; German Committee of Norms), 194

301

Index

302

doppel­Ich (double consciousness), 148– 49, 159. See also Dessoir, Max drawing, techniques of: at the Bauhaus, 177– 79, 180, 182, 185– 90, 198, plates 8– 9; at the Debschitz School, 22, 134– 36, 137, 141– 44, 159– 64; and Kulturkampf, 150– 59; occultist, 144– 48, 147– 48; as part of art and design education, 21, 22– 23, 26, 61, 128, 134– 36, 142, 153, 154– 58, 176, 200, 254n30; as part of general education, 12, 75, 123; in a trance, 132, 133 Dr. Mises. See Fechner, Gustav Theodor Duchenne de Boulogne, GuillaumeBenjamin-Amand, 7, 8, 111– 13, 112, 118, 122, 124. See also pathognomy Dvořák, Max, 81, 81 Ebbinghaus, Hermann, and Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesor­ ganen (journal), 53 Eckener, Hugo, 14 education, concept of. See Bildung, concept of educational reform. See under Bildung, concept of educational system, German, 1– 4, 11– 12, 15, 17– 18, 20, 21, 23– 24, 38– 39, 61, 89– 90, 92, 150– 59, 219n40, 234n7 effects (Wirkungen): of baroque, 65– 68, 73, 94; as described by Goethe, 29, 46; of film, photography, slide lecture, 63– 64, 70– 71, 91; of form, color, line, or space, 4, 19, 65– 66, 94, 97– 98, 100– 107, 110, 113– 20, 128– 30, 134, 159– 61, 173, 182, 189– 90, 193, 200; of the linear, 89 Eine Stunde (book series), 82 Einfühlung. See empathy (Einfühlung), theory of elementarism: elementary components of experience, 48– 49, 50, 56, 98, 167, 175, 183, 264n71; in pedagogy, 153, 155; of the Vorkurs, 128, 140– 41, 174, 176– 83 elementary course. See Vorkurs (preliminary course) Elvira Photography Studio, 104– 8, 104– 7, 110– 13, 111, 124, 247n56, 252n10 emotion, theories of. See feeling (Gefühl ), theories of

emotional expression (Ausdrucksbe­ wegung), 1– 8, 23– 24. See also feeling (Gefühl ), theories of empathy (Einfühlung), theory of, 53, 103, 116– 18, 249n86 Endell, August: Akademie für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe (Academy for Art and Applied Art), (Breslau [Wrocław]), 104, 128; architectural proportions, 97, 124– 25, 130; architecture of pathognomy, 110, 113– 18, 120– 21; criticism of, 107– 8; Elvira Photography Studio, 104– 8, 104– 7, 110– 13, 111, 124, 247n56, 252n10; Formschule (or Schule für Formkunst; Form School or School for Form-Art) (Berlin), 104, 127– 28, 138, 139, 175, 176; “mathematics of living feeling,” 97, 101, 192; ornament, 105– 7, 110, 113– 15, 121, 124; pedagogical ideas and techniques of, 11, 104, 127– 30; pointillism, 113– 15, 248n78; politics of, 250n114; and psychophysics, 171, 175; role in historiography, 106– 7, 247n52; and Scheffler, 97– 98, 100, 101, 115, 124, 129; space (Raum), concept of, 120– 21, 129; tables, 97– 102, 98– 99, 124– 25, 126, 127, 129– 30, 193; theory of emotive effects (Gefühlswirkungen) or form- effects, 19, 22, 97– 102, 98– 99, 103– 7, 110, 113– 17, 128– 30; theory of feeling, 100– 102, 103– 4, 110, 124– 25, 127, 128– 30, 251n124; Wolzogen Theater (Buntestheater) (Munich), 113– 18, 114– 17, 124, 248n78 engraving, 63, 70, 71– 73, 72, 74, 89, 108, 238n62, 238n64, 254n30 enjoyment (Genuß), 20, 100, 123, 162 Enlightenment, 8, 15, 18, 41, 43, 53, 60, 100, 123, 125, 165, 199, 211 environment, concept of, 36– 37, 119– 20, 122, 249n90. See also space (Raum), concept of epistemology, field of (Erkenntnistheorie), 14, 38– 39, 54– 55, 57– 60, 102, 180, 227n45 Erler, Fritz, 164, 165 eudemonistic principle (eudämonistisches Prinzip), Fechner, 48, 230n97 experiment: Duchenne de Boulogne, 111– 13, 112; and experience, 10, 11; Fechner,

Index

48, 75– 77; Goethe’s resistance to, 27– 28; with the inner voice, 90; Kandinsky, 181– 82; Moholy-Nagy, 167– 71, 168– 71; occultist, 144– 48; psychophysical, 46, 47; with reading, 84– 86; Schulze, 1– 8, 2– 3, 5– 7, 9– 10, 19– 20; Sturm and GrewePartsch, 23– 24, 25. See also psychology: experimental experimental aesthetics. See under Fechner, Gustav Theodor experimental psychology. See under psychology explaining (erklären) vs. understanding or describing (verstehen or beschreiben), 53– 54, 127. See psychology: analytic or explanative (zergliedernde), descriptive (beschreibende) expression. See emotional expression (Ausdrucksbewegung) eye movements: as instigated by photography or engravings, 69– 73; as instigated by the baroque or the Renaissance, 67– 68; made possible by eye muscles, 4, 32, 33; saccadic, 84– 87, 85, 96, 238n59; of the savaged eye (das verwilderte Auge), 19, 89 Falk, Adalbert, Falk Laws of 1872, 151 fascism, 60; National Socialism, 107 Fechner, Gustav Theodor: aesthetics from above (Aesthetik von oben) and aesthetics from below (Aesthetik von unten), 8, 14, 48– 49, 98; eudemonistic principle (eudämonistisches Prinzip), 48, 230n97; experimental aesthetics, 48– 49, 49, 75– 77, 181– 82, 230n93, 230n96; Holbein controversy, 75– 77; mystical side, 145, 229n76; perspectivalism, 50; reliance on statistical methods, 46, 47– 48, 55, 75, 181, 230n87; theory of psychophysics, 44– 48, 49, 53, 55– 56, 100, 177, 208, 229n80. See also aesthetics from above (Aesthetik von oben); aesthetics from below (Aesthetik von unten); psychophysics feeling (Gefühl ), theories of: affect theory, 24– 26; as the basis of kinaesthetic knowing, 22; critique of, 57; Dilthey, 54– 56; and emotional expression (Ausdrucksbewegung), 1– 8, 23– 24; Endell, 100– 102, 103– 4, 110, 124– 25,

127, 128– 30, 251n124; as instigated by form, 14, 97– 102, 98– 99; Lipps, 125– 27; in pathognomy, 110– 13, 118– 20, 126; in physiognomy, 99, 102, 109– 10, 110, 111– 13, 118, 119, 126, 146; theory of emotive effects (Gefühlswirkungen) or form- effects, 19, 22, 97– 102; Wölfflin, 65– 67; Wundt, 4, 5, 125– 27, 251n125, 251n127, 251n129 Féré, Charles, 122 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 16, 18, 20, 38, 40, 51, 183, 186, 219n46, 221n63 film, 4, 17– 18, 23– 24, 25, 70, 221n57 formal analysis. See under Wölfflin, Heinrich formalism, 19– 22, 26, 89, 102, 128– 29, 234n166; in art and design education, 21, 22– 23, 102, 127– 30, 141– 44, 160– 61, 177– 82, 185– 86, 189– 93, 200– 201; formal analysis, 90– 92, 94– 95; form as the solution to modernity, 18– 19, 89; Goethe, 27– 28, 28, 39; immediacy of form and affect, 4– 8, 19, 22, 65– 66, 84– 86, 97– 100, 103, 106– 7, 113– 18, 121, 174, 221n56; in Pestalozzi and followers, 151– 56; problem of formlessness, 18– 19, 22, 27, 67– 71, 122, 221n65; in psychophysics, 47– 48. See also analogy; Gestalt Formschule (or Schule für Formkunst; Form School or School for Form-Art) (Berlin), 104, 127– 28, 138, 139, 175, 176. See also Endell, August foundationalism, 11, 21, 22, 23, 48, 50, 54, 60– 61, 100, 102– 3, 124, 140, 175, 233n151; for the human sciences, 14, 54, 58, 65, 101– 2, 129, 174, 193, 200; of the Vorkurs, 176– 82, 186. See also elementarism French Revolution, 16, 17, 35, 40 Freud, Sigmund: Entwurf einer Psychologie (Outline of a Psychology), 23, 203– 11, 203, 208; model of selfhood, 52, 148; and psychoanalysis, 23, 146, 210– 11; theory of repression, 23, 52, 149, 209– 10 Freytag-Loringhoven, Elsa von. See Plötz, Elsa Hildegard Fries, Jakob Friedrich, 40, 227n53 Froebel, Friedrich, 18, 185 Fuchs, Georg, 139

303

Index

304

Genthes, Frieda, 146, 147 George, Stefan, 103, 256n58 German Historical School, 31, 54 Gestalt, 56, 86, 96, 156 Gestalt psychology, 53, 56 Gestaltung. See under designing, techniques of Gibson, James Jerome, 36 Giedion, Sigfried, 82, 82, 83, 240nn107– 8 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 27– 31, 28, 30, 39, 42, 46, 47, 56, 59, 65– 66, 69, 78, 109, 132 Goldschmidt, Adolph, 95 Götze, Theodor, 150 Goudstikker, Sophia, 104, 252n10. See also Verein für Fraueninteressen (Association for Women’s Concerns) (Munich) Great German Art exhibitions, (Große Deutsche Kunstaustellungen) (Munich), 83 Greenberg, Clement, 20 Grewe-Partsch, Marianne, 23– 24, 25 grid: at the Bauhaus, 167– 68, 182– 83, 192, 194, plate 3, plate 5, plate 9, plate 10; as educational tool, 153– 59, 182– 83, 190, 259n100 Grimm, Hermann, 63– 65, 92, 94, 95, 243n156 Gropius, Walter, 169, 171, 175, 176– 77, 179– 81, 179, 183, 185– 86, 192, 194– 95, 196, 197, 198, 199, 262n10, 265n90, 266n100 Grote, John, 12, 35, 42. See also kinaesthetic knowing Grothmann, Heinrich, 156– 57 Guipet, Magdeleine, 146, 257n61 Gymnasium, 15, 20, 92, 134, 157, 219n40. See also Bildung, concept of; educational system, German Haeckel, Ernst, 106 Hall, Granville Stanley, 14– 15 Haus der deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) (Munich), 107 Hebbian synapse, 207 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: dialectics, 211; idealism, 14, 41, 54, 102, 232n124, 234n165; philosophical aesthetics of, 48, 98

Heidegger, Martin, 37. See also phenomenology Heimatschutz (Deutscher Bund Heimatschutz), 79 Helmholtz, Hermann von: logical induction (logische Induction) and aesthetic induction (künstlerische Induction), 13, 29, 31, 64, 96, 124, 130; Nipkow, 85; occultism, 256n56; physiology of vision, 33, 88, 224n18; principle of disciplinary demarcation, 38– 40, 42– 44, 50, 53– 54, 59; problem of causality, 42– 43; theorization of Wissen and Kennen, 12– 14, 21, 22, 23, 27– 32, 35– 36, 49, 55, 58, 59, 61, 64, 78, 100, 123– 24, 136, 149, 150, 165, 180, 210, 217n26; “Über die Erhaltung der Kraft,” 41; unconscious inferences (unbewußte Schlüsse), 29, 37, 51, 52, 56, 79 Herbart, Johann Friedrich, 45, 90 hermeneutics, 16, 79, 86– 87, 126, 232n127. See also Bildung, concept of Herrmann, Hans, 82 Hildebrand, Adolf: and comparativism, 78; and relief sculpture, 19, 72, 73, 86, 120; and stereoscopic vision, 89– 90; theory of form in Das Problem der Form (The Problem of Form), 18– 19, 73, 160, 222n66 Hillardt, Franz Carl, 153– 55, 154 Hirth, Georg, 12, 14, 125, 217n26 Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm (College for Design), 190, 191 Hölzel, Adolf, 159, 175, 177 Huey, Edmund Burke, 84, 85, 89– 90 human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), 14– 15, 21, 23, 25, 31, 38– 39, 46, 50, 53– 57, 58– 60, 63, 64, 66, 69, 101, 102, 127– 29, 173– 74, 188, 193, 195, 201, 209– 10, 211, 226n39, 232n124. See also natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 15– 16, 20, 38, 40, 51, 53, 118, 151, 159, 183, 186 Hume, David, 54, 99 Husserl, Edmund, 37, 57, 60, 74. See also phenomenology idealism, 10, 14, 20, 38– 39, 40– 41, 42, 48, 54, 119, 211

Index

induction: logical (logische induction), 13, 29, 31; in the natural sciences, 14, 44, 46, 223n10; in relation to deduction, 42, 54, 60, 78. See also aesthetic induction (künstlerische Induction) infinite regress, problem of, 43, 60, 129 inhibition, 119, 126, 203– 5, 209, 269n11. See also repression INKhUK (Institute for Artistic Culture) (Moscow), 181 Institut für experimentelle Pädagogik und Psychologie (Institute for Experimental Pedagogy and Psychology) (Leipzig), 4, 215n4. See also Schulze, Rudolf Institut für experimentelle Psychologie (Institute for Experimental Psychology) (Leipzig), 4, 49, 49. See also Wundt, Wilhelm introspection (Selbstbeobachtung), 15– 16, 23, 44, 49– 50, 77, 89, 175, 187– 93, 208, 266n102 inwardness (Innerlichkeit), 15– 16, 89– 90, 94, 141, 187– 93, 241n127. See also introspection (Selbstbeobachtung) Itten, Johannes: pedagogical ideas and techniques of, 174, 175, 177– 79, 178, 180, 194, 266n99, plate 4; training of introspection, 187– 88 James, William: claim to first psychological laboratory, 230n98; knowledge of acquaintance and knowledge-about, 12, 35; psychologist’s fallacy, 44; theory of emotions, 36, 100, 118– 19, 249n90, 249n93. See also James-Lange theory of emotions James-Lange theory of emotions, 118– 19, 122, 218n36, 247n61 Javal, Louis Émile, 84 Kandinsky, Wassily: in Munich, 134, 175; pedagogical ideas and techniques of, 11, 174, 180, 181– 85, 189– 90, plate 3, plates 6– 7; Phalanx-Schule, 139; questionnaire, 181, plates 1– 2 Kant, Immanuel: as cited by others, 41, 54, 55– 56, 102, 228n62, 231n109 (see also neo-Kantianism); on emotions, 98, 102; on human reason, 8, 12, 13, 18, 40,

41– 43, 89, 217n21; Kantian aesthetics, 20, 48, 98; on psychology, 44, 188. See also selfhood, models of: post-Kantian model of Bildung Keller, Albert von, 146, 256n58 Kennen. See under Helmholtz, Hermann von Kerschensteiner, Georg, 157 kinaesthetic knowing, 11– 13; cognates of, 12– 13, 35– 36; critique of, 57– 61, 203– 11; emergence of, 20– 22, 27– 44, 52– 53; Grote’s “knowledge of acquaintance” vs. “knowledge of judgment,” 12, 35, 42; Helmholtz’s Wissen and Kennen, 12– 14, 21, 22, 23, 27– 32, 35– 36, 49, 55, 58, 59, 61, 64, 78, 100, 123– 24, 136, 149, 150, 165, 180, 210, 217n26; James’s “knowledge of acquaintance” vs. “knowledge-about,” 12, 35; role in the organization of disciplines, 14, 53– 57; Russell’s “knowledge of acquaintance” vs. “knowledge by description,” 12, 35, 43; Ryle’s “knowledge-how” and “knowledge-what,” 35– 36; selfhood cultivated through, 20, 86– 87, 118– 19; and techniques of affecting, 97– 130; and techniques of comparative looking, 63– 96; and techniques of drawing, 131– 65, 167– 201; waning importance and afterlives of, 23, 25– 26, 171– 74. See also Anschauung (intuition); muscle sense Klee, Paul: in Munich, 175, 181, 255n35; pedagogical ideas and techniques of, 11, 174, 178, 179, 181, 190– 92, 267nn108– 9, plates 8– 10 Kolb, Hans von, 176 König, Arthur, 53 Königliche Akademie für graphische Künste und Buchgewerbe (Royal Academy for Graphic Arts and Book Trade) (Leipzig), 176 Königsberger, Leo, 42 Können, 123, 180, 217n26; Könnenschule, 150. See also Helmholtz, Hermann von: theorization of Wissen and Kennen Kornmann, Egon, 81 Kulturarbeiten (book series), 79– 80, 80, 81 Kulturkampf, 16– 17, 22, 68, 138, 149– 50, 151– 53, 159, 220n52; educational policies of, 151– 52. See also anti-Catholicism

305

Index

306

Kunstgewerbe (applied art), 103, 128, 129, 134, 141, 162– 63, 165, 176 Kunstgewerbeschulen (Schools of Applied Art), 129, 139, 140, 176, 186, 254n29; Berlin, 128; Düsseldorf, 128, 142, 176; Frankfurt, 176; Hamburg, 176; Karlsruhe, 134; Stuttgart, 176; Weimar (Kunstgewerbliches Seminar), 139, 175. See also Akademie für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe (Academy for Art and Applied Art), (Breslau [Wrocław]) “Kunst und Technik” (Art and Technology) (exhibition), 175 Kunstwissenschaft (science of art), 13– 14, 181 Kurella, Hans, 14 laboratory: Bauhaus as, 168– 71; experimental psychology, 4, 46, 49, 68, 77, 126 Lacan, Jacques, 209 Landsberger, Franz, 91, 94 Lange, Carl Georg, 14, 100, 118, 218n36. See also James-Lange theory of emotions Lange, Konrad, 70, 161, 247n61 Lavater, Johann Kaspar, 28, 99, 102, 109– 13, 110, 119. See also physiognomy Le Bon, Gustave, 17 Le Brun, Charles, 99, 108, 109 Le Camus de Mézières, Nicolas, 108 Le Corbusier, 82, 83 Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas, 109 Lehrervereinigung für die Pflege der Künstler (Teachers’ Association for the Care of Artists) (Hamburg), 157 Lehr- und Versuchsatelier für angewandte und freie Kunst (Atelier for Teaching and Experimenting in Applied and Free Art) (Munich). See Debschitz-Schule (Debschitz School) (Munich) Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 12, 45 Levin, Theodor, 96 Lichtwark, Alfred, Hamburger Kunsthalle, 94 Lipps, Theodor: Endell’s break with, 103, 116– 17; involvement with occultism, 256n58; theory of empathy (Einfühlung), 53, 103; theory of feelings, 125– 26 lived experience (Erlebnis), 8, 22, 23, 26, 37, 43, 53– 57, 91, 121– 23, 125– 27, 129, 138, 167, 173, 183, 185, 232n127

Lochner, Hermann, 140. See also Ateliers und Werkstätten für angewandte Kunst (Ateliersand Workshops for Applied Art) (Munich) Locke, John, 54, 58, 217n21, 227n50 Lory, Karl, 123– 24 Luthmer, Ferdinand, 176 Mach, Ernst, 52, 57 Magendie, François, 35, 224n23. See also muscle sense malerisch. See painterly (malerisch) materialism, 10, 40– 41, 45, 46, 53, 57, 145, 228n56, 228n58 mathematics: in art and design education, 141, 142, 177, 192, 265n90, 267n108; in elementary and secondary education, 38, 153, 182; and feeling and experience, 45, 57, 97, 101, 192; foundational role of, 14, 44, 45, 60, 101, 102, 173; as model for exactness, 44, 127 Maudsley, Henry, 100 Mead, George Herbert, 52, 231n116, 249n90 Meier-Graefe, Julius, 97, 98. See also Dekorative Kunst (journal) Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 37. See also phenomenology Meyer, Bruno, 95 Meyer, Hannes, 169, 171, 175, 192, 193– 96, 193, 195– 96 Michelangelo, 64, 68 Mill, John Stuart, 54, 224n13 Moholy-Nagy, László: in Chicago, 196– 99; pedagogical ideas and techniques of, 11, 174, 175, 177, 180, 182, 183, 184, 185, 196; student experiments, 167– 71, 168– 71 Moleschott, Jacob, 41, 228n58. See also materialism Molyneux, William, 39– 40, 227n50 Moos, Paul, 173, 218n37 Morris, Charles, 198– 99 motor theory of consciousness, 36, 118– 19, 225n31 Müller, Johannes, 49 Münchner Psychologische Gesellschaft (Munich Psychological Society), 145. See also occultism Munich Secession, 103 Münsterberg, Hugo, 55, 119

Index

muscle sense, 12, 35– 37, 39, 182; as theorized by Bell (sixth sense), 35, 39– 40, 118, 157, 224n23 Musil, Robert, 57, 60, 61 mysticism: at the Bauhaus, 175, 177, 180, 187; of Fechner, 145, 229n76; model of selfhood associated with, 138, 149; of Obrist, 149; of séance attendees, 145 natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften): abstraction of, 51, 56; experimental method of, 14, 188; and explanation, 54, 69; methods of the, 27, 31, 42, 44– 45, 46, 54, 56, 58– 59, 192, 208, 209, 211; Naturforscher (naturalist or natural philosopher), 35, 38; nineteenth-century progress of, 14, 41; psychology’s relationship to, 50, 58, 203, 208– 10; in relationship to the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), 14, 21, 27, 31, 38, 53, 58, 69, 92, 101, 174, 201; role of mathematics in, 14, 45, 102; and theology, 40, 207. See also human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) natural theology, 39– 40, 43, 227nn47– 48 neo-humanism, 15, 38, 44, 90, 92, 123 neo-Kantianism, 21, 58– 59, 186, 210– 11 New Bauhaus (Chicago), 196– 99. See also Moholy-Nagy, László Newton, Isaac: Newtonian science, 42, 45– 46, 54; Newton’s disk, 172; theory of light compared to Goethe’s, 27– 31, 45– 46, 59, 78, 223n1 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 92, 100, 102, 108, 113 Nipkow, Paul, 85– 86, 87 Nordau, Max, 71, 86. See also degeneration (Entartung) object lesson (Anschauungsunterricht), 18, 75, 78, 151, 157– 59, 203. See also Anschauung (intuition) Obrist, Hermann: comparativism, 78– 79, 83, 161– 62; embroideries, 135, 252n10; as inspiration for Endell, 103, 107, 113; pedagogical ideas and techniques of, 11, 19, 23, 101, 127– 28, 134– 44, 162– 65, 171, 175, 258n82, 260n130; relationship to Bildung, 132– 34, 138– 39, 150– 51; relationship to Catholicism, 131, 138, 152– 53; sculpture, 136; technique of drawing,

132, 133, 143, 159– 60, 255n41; visions and occultism, 131– 32, 145– 46, 149. See also Debschitz-Schule (Debschitz School) (Munich) occultism: at the Debschitz School, 138– 39, 162, 165; and drawing, 144, 146– 48, 147– 48; scientific, 145– 46, 256n57; in séances, 44, 145; selfhood associated with, 148– 50 Orell Füssli, 82, 82, 178 Otzen, Johannes, 108, 118, 124 painterly (malerisch), 65, 67– 71, 73, 75, 83, 89, 128, 181 Paley, William, 39, 227n47. See also natural theology Pankok, Bernhard, 101, 128 passions, theories of, 98– 100, 108, 110. See also feeling (Gefühl), theories of pathognomy, 102, 110– 13, 118– 21, 126 Paul, Bruno, 128 Pavlov, Ivan Petrovitch, 37 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich: and Anschau­ ung, 18, 221n63; Dilthey on, 56– 57; formalism of, 18, 153; influence on art and design education, 151– 56, 177, 182, 185, 258n84; and primary actions, 22; revival after Kulturkampf, 151– 56. See also Anschauung (intuition); Froebel, Friedrich phenomenology, 26, 37, 54, 60, 74, 94, 101, 104, 127 Philadelphia Public School of Industrial Art, 156 philhellenism, 15. See also neo-humanism philosophical aesthetics, 13– 14, 48. See aesthetics from above (Aesthetik von oben) photography: in art history, 63, 70– 71; Duchenne de Boulogne, 111– 13, 112; Schulze, 1– 8, 2– 3, 5– 7, 9– 10; as subject in schools of art and design, 141, 198; use in occultist experiments, 146, 257n61; Wölfflin, 64, 69– 73, 72, 75, 89, 92, 238n64. See also Elvira Photography Studio; film; slide lecture physiognomy, 28, 79, 99, 102, 109– 13, 110, 118, 126, 146, 217n26 Pietism, 15– 16, 44, 89– 90. See also Protestantism

307

Index

308

Plötz, Elsa Hildegard, 108, 247n57 Poelzig, Hans, 104, 128 positivism, 31, 45, 54, 58 preliminary course. See Vorkurs (preliminary course) Preyer, William Thierry, 78 propaedeutics (Vorwissenschaft): in design education, 127– 30, 176– 87; epistemology as, 38– 39; psychology as, 50, 54– 55, 174, 208; role of drawing in education as, 139, 153– 56; role of feelings in, 102, 124. See also Vorkurs (preliminary course) proprioception, 36– 37 Protestantism: and Bildung, 16, 20, 44, 139, 152, 165, 188; and natural sciences, 207; and natural theology, 39, 40– 42; Protestant views of Catholicism, 16– 18, 68, 152– 54, 159; Weber’s theory of, 32, 152– 53. See also anti-Catholicism; Kulturkampf; Pietism psychoanalysis, 23, 146, 203, 210– 11. See also Freud, Sigmund psychology: analytic or explanative (zergliedernde), 53– 57, 127, 188, 195; descriptive (beschreibende), 53– 57, 69, 127, 188, 195; discipline of, 14, 21, 23, 44– 60, 65– 68, 70; ecological, 26, 36, 44; experimental, 4, 14, 23, 37, 44– 53, 67– 68, 89– 90, 125– 26, 145– 49, 171– 73, 175, 183, 189– 90, 211, 229n81; instruments of, 49, 171, 172 psychophysics, 4, 8, 14, 21, 22, 23– 25, 47; at the Bauhaus, 167– 76, 177, 181– 83, 198, 200; causality, 45; comparativism inherent in, 46, 76– 77; criticism by Dilthey, 55– 56, 229n82; Fechner’s theorization of, 44– 49, 98, 100, 208, 211, 229n81; psychophysical parallelism, 45– 46. See also Fechner, Gustav Theodor Quatremère de Quincy, AntoineChrysostôme, 108– 9 Raphael, 63, 68, 73, 238n64 Raum. See space (Raum), concept of reading, techniques of: at the Bauhaus, 179; experiments in, 83– 85, 85– 86;

looking as surrogate for, 63– 65, 75, 95; Nipkow disk, 85– 87, 87; nonreading (Nichtlesen), 78– 83, 80– 83, 89; optical reading, 89– 90, 91; Pestalozzi, 18, 152– 53, 156; physiognomic, 108– 9. See also hermeneutics Realien, 38– 39, 56, 92. See also natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) reflex: history of the concept, 32– 37; reflex arc, 36, 37, 119, 207; reflex-like response, 4, 177, 193; Sherrington’s integrative action, 36– 37, 207; Wundt’s conception of, 205, 206. See also muscle sense; proprioception; sympathy Rein, Wilhelm, 153– 54 relief: relief- ornament, 104, 105, 110, 113; sculpture, 19, 72, 73, 89, 120 repression, 23, 52, 149, 208– 11. See also inhibition revolution: French revolution, 16, 17, 35, 40; of the nineteenth century, 17, 109; revolutions of 1848, 40– 41 Ribot, Théodule-Armand, 99– 100, 122 Riegl, Alois, 68, 74, 250n99 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 103, 252n10 Roessler, Arthur, 159 Ruchet, Berthe, 134, 135, 163, 252n10. See also Verein für Fraueninteressen (Association for Women’s Concerns) (Munich) Russell, Bertrand, 12, 35, 43, 225n27. See also kinaesthetic knowing Ryle, Gilbert, 35– 36, 225n27. See also kinaesthetic knowing scandal (of reason or of philosophy), 8, 13, 40 Schaubücher (book series), 82 Scheffler, Karl: on baroque, 235n11; on the concept of talent (Begabung), 146; on Endell, 97– 98, 100, 101, 115, 124, 129; on feelings, 97– 99, 245n28; on graphology, 159 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 18, 41, 48, 98, 256n59 Schiller, Friedrich, 15, 149 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 12, 40, 89– 90, 227n45 Schlemmer, Oskar, 186, 264n66

Index

Schlick, Moritz, 57– 58, 233n151 Schmarsow, August, 73– 74, 94, 95, 156, 186, 238n70, 239n73, 243n159, 250n99 Schmid, Max, 92, 95 Schmid, Peter, 155 schools of art and design: Académie des Beaux-Arts (Paris), 108– 9, 139– 40, 182, 265n72; Académie Julian (Paris), 134; Akademie für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe (Academy for Art and Applied Art), (Breslau [Wrocław]), 104, 128; Ažbè Schule, 139; Black Mountain College (North Carolina), 190; Damenakademien, Zeichen- und Malschule des Vereins der Künstlerinnen, Berlin (Drawing and Painting School of the Association of Female Artists), 140; INKhUK (Institute for Artistic Culture) (Moscow), 181; Königliche Akademie für graphische Künste und Buchgewerbe (Royal Academy for Graphic Arts and Book Trade) (Leipzig), 176; New Bauhaus (Chicago), 196– 99. See also Bauhaus; Debschitz-Schule (Debschitz School) (Munich); design education; Formschule (or Schule für Formkunst; Form School or School for Form-Art) (Berlin); Kunstgewerbeschulen (Schools of Applied Art) Schopenhauer, Arthur, 91, 256n59 Schuh, Ursula, 190 Schultze-Naumburg, Paul: and comparativism, 83– 84, 161, 240n97; Kulturarbeiten (book series), 79– 81, 80 Schulze, Rudolf, 1– 8, 2– 3, 5– 7, 9– 10, 11– 12, 15, 19– 20, 23, 24, 25, 87– 88, 156, 215n2, 260n109 Secor, W. B., 90 selfhood, models of: associated with baroque, 68– 69; associated with Catholicism, 16– 17, 20, 68, 138– 39, 149– 50; associated with mysticism and occultism, 138, 148– 50; cultivated through kinaesthetic knowing, 20, 86– 87, 118– 19; doppel­Ich, 148– 49, 159; French sensationalism, 15; Freud, 52, 14, 211; Mach’s “unsalvageable ego,” 52; post-Kantian model of Bildung, 15– 16, 18, 49, 50, 90, 118, 122, 124, 149– 50,

161, 165, 219n46; problem of coherency, 15, 43, 86, 217n21; of the Third Sex, 108; under the influence of film, 17– 18; “whole man” at the Bauhaus, 183– 86, 189, 194– 99; Wundt, 49, 51– 53, 68, 145, 149, 186 Sherrington, Charles Scott, 36– 37, 37, 207 Siemsen, Hans, 79– 80 Simmel, Georg, 19, 68, 115, 219n46, 221n65, 232n124, 268n129 sixth sense. See muscle sense Slade, Henry, 145, 256n56 slide lecture: in art and design education, 161– 62, 188; in art historical instruction, 12, 26, 63– 65, 90– 96; double, 26, 95, 161, 243n156, 243n158; as entertainment, 63; sciopticon used in, 63– 65, 90– 96, 188. See also comparativism space (Raum), concept of: in art and design pedagogy, 128, 152, 167, 179– 80, 182, 186, 265n90; as essence of architecture, 74, 186, 239n73, 250n99; eye movements in, 67– 70; fear of, 120 (see also relief ); psychology of, 65; rise in aesthetic discourses of, 12– 21 Spencer, Herbert, 100 Spinoza, Benedict de, 99 Stein, Gertrude, 90 stereoscopic vision, 88– 89, 88 stigmography, 153– 55, 154– 55, 182, 190. See also grid Stimmung, 65, 115 Stratton, George Malcolm, 84– 85, 86 Streiter, Richard, 14 Stuhlmann, Adolf, 155, 155. See also stigmography Sturm, Hertha, 23– 25, 25 Sulzer, Johann Georg, 12 syllogistic reasoning, 13, 21, 29, 223n10 sympathy, 32– 34 synaesthesia, 181– 82 Tadd, J. Liberty, 156, 156– 58, 260n109 talent (Begabung), 132, 139, 140, 144, 146– 49, 162, 176, 180, 185 taste: as aesthetic discrimination, 48, 78; sense of, 8, 29, 125, 126 teleological vs. mechanistic accounts, 21, 32, 40– 46, 53, 210

309

Index

Thausing, Moritz, 70, 238n54 Titchener, Edward Bradford, 52, 232n120 Unity of Science, 57– 58, 198– 99, 233n151 310

van der Rohe, Mies, 175, 177, 195– 96 van de Velde, Henry, 98, 101, 139, 159, 175 Verein für Fraueninteressen (Association for Women’s Concerns) (Munich), 140, 252n10 Vereinigte Werkstätten für Kunst im Handwerk (United Workshops for Art in Handicraft) (Munich), 134 Vienna Circle, 57– 58, 233n151. See also Carnap, Rudolf Vogt, Carl, 40– 41, 228n58. See also materialism voluntarism, 51, 231n109, 232n124. See also Wundt, Wilhelm von Kunowski, Lothar, 139, 142, 255n40 Vorkurs (preliminary course): at the Bauhaus, 167– 71, 174– 75, 176– 86, 187, 193– 95, 198– 99, 200, 200, 263n35, 264n54; at the Debschitz School, 140– 41; elementarism and foundationalism of, 61; Endell’s implementation of, 128; at various other art and design schools, 134, 176. See also elementarism; foundationalism; propaedeutics (Vor­ wissenschaft) Vorlehre. See Vorkurs (preliminary course) Vorunterricht. See Vorkurs (preliminary course) Waetzoldt, Wilhelm, 94 Wagner, Richard, 64, 68 Wagner, Rudolf, 40– 41. See also materialism Waitz, Theodor, 54, 232n123 Watson, John Broadus, 119, 266n106 Weber, E. H., 45, 229n80 Weber, Max, 32, 71, 152, 183 Werkbund (Deutscher Werkbund), 79, 139 Wheatstone, Charles, 88 will (Wille), 15– 17, 31, 38, 41, 51– 52, 68– 71, 86, 118, 122, 124, 149, 157, 205– 7; absence of, 17, 68, 108, 113, 124. See also apperception Williams, Raymond, 10

Willis, Thomas, 34 Windelband, Wihelm, 58– 59, 174, 210– 11 Wissen. See under Helmholtz, Hermann von Wölfflin, Heinrich: baroque, 22, 64– 65, 66– 75, 86, 92, 94– 96, 235nn8– 9; and Burckhardt, 70– 71, 90, 92; comparativism, 65, 69, 72, 73– 74, 75, 82, 83, 89, 95– 96, 161, 235n10, 238n64, 238n70, 243n158; descriptive aesthetics, 66, 69, 78; Die klassische Kunst, 73, 74; engraving, 71– 73, 72, 74, 89, 238n64; formal analysis, 90– 92, 94– 95; formulation of art history’s disciplinary project, 64– 65, 69, 90– 91; Kunstgeschichtliche Grund­ begriffe, 73, 75, 76, 83, 89, 92; pedagogy and lecturing style, 11, 26, 90– 96, 93, 102; photography, 64, 69– 73, 75, 84, 89, 92; “Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur,” 65– 66; psychology of architecture, 65– 66; Renaissance, 64, 65, 66– 67, 69– 71, 73– 75, 96; Renaissance und Barock, 66– 69, 70, 82, 237n43; savaged eye (das verwilderte Auge), 19, 70, 89, 120; and Schmarsow, 73– 74, 94, 95; “Wie man Skulpturen Aufnehmen Soll,” 69– 73, 72 Wolzogen, Ernst von, 108, 252n10. See also Wolzogen Theater (Buntestheater) (Munich) Wolzogen Theater (Buntestheater) (Munich), 113– 18, 114– 17, 124, 248n78 women in art and design education, 139– 40, 141, 144, 162– 66, 254nn27– 30 Wundt, Wilhelm: against occultism, 145; conception of selfhood, 49, 51– 53, 68, 149, 186; criticism of, 53– 55, 103, 125– 27, 190; experimental psychology, 33, 49, 49, 55, 146, 229n81, 251n129; Institut für experimentelle Psychologie (Institute for Experimental Psychology) (Leipzig), 4, 46, 49, 49, 68, 77, 126; intellectualism of, 77; introspection (Selbstbeobachtung), 49– 50, 77, 89, 188– 89, 190, 207– 8; students of, 14, 49, 52, 86, 232n120; theorization of psychology’s disciplinary project, 21, 46, 49– 53, 57, 58, 174, 207– 8, 210, 269n19; theory of apperception, 51– 52, 51, 53, 68, 125– 27, 205, 207; theory of reflex, 205– 7, 206, 208; theory of unconscious,

Index

51– 53; tridimensional theory of feeling, 4, 5, 125– 27, 251n127; on Wheatstone, 88 Zeitler, Julius, 86 Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (journal), 148. See also Dessoir, Max

Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorganen (journal), 53 Ziehen, Theodor, 173 Zierath, Willy, 167, 168 Zöllner, Friedrich, 145, 256n56 Zusammenhang (interconnectedness), Dilthey, 54– 57

311