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Platonic Modernism: Introduction
- Daniel Damler
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- Bauhaus Laws
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- Intersentia
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- 15 November 2019
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- 03 June 2019, pp 1-14
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Summary
On one thing they were agreed, the protagonists of Plato's dialogues The Republic and Laws : that the weal and woe of the community depended on the substance of childhood education, that the greatest care had to be taken to give the future elites of the ideal state a basic education in music and gymnastics, and that – conversely – the introduction of new musical compositions, dances and motoric skills had to be prevented at all costs. “Then, Glaucon”, we read in The Republic (401d), “is not musical education of paramount importance … because rhythm and harmony enter most powerfully into the innermost part of the soul and lay forcible hands upon it …? ”
In Laws (656d–657a), the Athenian praised as a shining example – “worthy in the highest degree of a statesman and a legislator” – the 10,000-year-old Egyptian custom
that the youth of a State should practice in their rehearsals postures and tunes that are good: these they prescribed in detail and posted up in the temples, and outside this official list it was, and still is, forbidden to painters and all other producers of postures and representations to introduce any innovation or invention, whether in such productions or in any branch of music, over and above the traditional forms.
Never praise new songs, it says elsewhere, in The Republic (424c): “[One] must beware of changing to a new kind of music, for the change always involves far-reaching danger. Any alteration in the modes of music is always followed by alteration in the most fundamental laws of the state.”
This claim, so easily made by Plato and his companions, is hard for modern readers to digest. A harangue on progressive teaching methods, a lesson on childhood education for preschoolers is the last thing we expect when consulting a work supposedly concerned with the state and constitutions. Plato's enemies are pleased that we find it discomforting. When Popper crusaded against “The Spell of Plato” he certainly had the “aestheticism” of the Greek in mind, “ the desire to build a world which is not only a little better and more rational than ours, but which is free from all its ugliness.”
5 - Regaining Sovereignty: “Transparency” in Postwar Germany
- Daniel Damler
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- Bauhaus Laws
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- Intersentia
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- 15 November 2019
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- 03 June 2019, pp 159-184
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Summary
There is scarcely a (legal) policy issue in the early twenty-first century that enjoys such broad support, across the political spectrum, as the demand for “transparency.” This material quality, understood as the guiding principle of a democratically constituted community, is valued just as highly nowadays as the noble ideals of the French Revolution: liberté, égalité, fraternité . “Transparency,” wrote Christopher Hood not long ago, “ is a term that has attained quasi-religious significance in debate over governance and institutional design. Since the 1980's the word has appeared in the litanies of countless institutional-reform documents and mission statements.”
However topical and legitimate the demand for transparency may seem, lending it substance is quite another matter. In fact, there are a range of heterogeneous reform initiatives lurking behind the concept. A key component of these is the push to grant easier access to information – information that has previously been the exclusive reserve of the state, large corporations, international organizations, etc. To legal scholars, furthermore, transparency means intelligibility. General terms and conditions are ultimately not effective if they prove to be “lacking in transparency,” in part or fully. Third, there is the demand for “structural transparency.” The question in this case is how clear and well-structured the institutional framework of a community or company has to be in order to fulfill its purpose.
The remarkable variety of political and legal acceptations associated with the word “transparency” would suggest that the only common denominator is the metaphorical concept of “visibility,” whose popularity, in turn, favored certain content, namely the content compatible with this metaphor. If this is so, there must be a reason why, in the twentieth century, the sensory phenomenon of “visibility” played such a prominent role. In order to answer this question, it is necessary, first of all, to explain when and under which circumstances the topos of the visible entered the legal and political discourse.
It is impossible, of course, to sift through and evaluate all of the pertinent written documents, but modern databases and library catalogs do at least allow us an initial overview, enabling us to delimit – naturally with a grain of salt – the occurrence and spread of the term “transparency.”
Kandinsky's Laws: Epilogue
- Daniel Damler
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- Bauhaus Laws
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- Intersentia
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- 15 November 2019
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- 03 June 2019, pp 185-200
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It is widely assumed that values arise solely within the framework of the specific normative order they refer to (aesthetics, science, ethics, law, etc.). On the previous pages I have challenged this view, arguing that aesthetic, epistemic and moral (legal, political) values are correlated because of a common underlying mechanism. There is a constant exchange of principles and concepts between apparently distinct normative spheres.
This idea is not entirely new. It has failed, however, to have any noticeable impact – at least not in the modern era and the Western tradition – mainly because it runs counter to the need of academic disciplines to carve out a niche for themselves, but also because cognitive processes are all too often heedlessly measured in sociological categories. Ernst Gombrich, in a short essay from 1952, was the most succinct in describing the characteristics of values being experienced across normative boundaries:
What matters is that in our living experience they always find resonance in other areas of value. There was once a historical reason for protesting against a confusion of values in criticism, most of all against a facile confusion of art and morality, but now when this danger no longer exists we should again acknowledge the fact that there are few people who never experience great art in terms of moral values.
It was Gombrich who applied the term “synaesthesia” in this context. Actual, “true” synaesthesia is generally known to refer to concomitant sensation, i.e., the perception of two senses (sound, color, taste, temperature, etc.) when only a single sense is stimulated. This unusual phenomenon has captured the interest of modernday cognitive scientists but was addressed as early as the 1920s by the likes of Wolfgang Köhler and other pioneers of “gestalt psychology.” Synaesthesia, moreover, was a key concept in art theory in the first half of the twentieth century. Gombrich, as an art historian, was well acquainted with it of course, as well as with gestalt psychology, which generally had a strong appeal to artists and intellectuals in the interwar period, especially those who were active at the Bauhaus.
2 - Utopias Built with New Forms and Materials: Taut, Zamyatin, Le Corbusier
- Daniel Damler
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- Bauhaus Laws
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- Intersentia
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- 15 November 2019
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- 03 June 2019, pp 37-80
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Summary
If designing new lamps was coupled with the hope of making people happier and renewing society spiritually, it was only logical to apply the “modern style” to architecture, building entire cities that would herald the dawn of a new era and improve the lives of everyone living in them. There were indeed attempts to reinvent the city as a whole. On the surface, the urban visions of Bruno Taut and Le Corbusier were merely an ambitious form of town planning rather than utopias, but a closer reading of the accompanying texts shows that the creators of these projected cities imagined them as housing a completely new type of community. Though they may have been designed to deal with the housing needs of the present, once these new cities were inhabited a wholly new society was supposed to emerge. This is true of Bruno Taut's “City Crown” and Le Corbusier's “Radiant City,” though not of the third example under investigation here, Yevgeny Zamyatin's “One State” depicted in his novel We. The author was not an architect and had no practical experience as a city planner. Zamyatin's novel, moreover, was dystopian rather than utopian; his “One State” is hardly a cozy and meaningful place to live. And yet Zamyatin's city-state is useful in our deliberations, as its totalitarian character is largely thanks to architectural innovation.
BRUNO TAUT ‘ S CITY CROWN
The watershed years of 1918 – 19 saw the publication of a largely forgotten constitutional manifesto, forgotten because its signatories had no appreciable political power and hence no real influence on the postwar constitution of Germany. The platform of the “Political Council of Intellectual Workers” (Politischer Rat geistiger Arbeiter) is notable not only because its supporters included intellectuals of considerable repute such as Robert Musil, Heinrich Mann and jurist Hugo Sinzheimer, but also because it bears witness to the – from today's vantage point – rather absurd constitutional collage that was up for discussion at the time, and indeed was never entirely forgotten even after the ratification of the Weimar constitution, as evidenced by the events that transpired there 15 years later.
3 - Hijacking Modernism: Bauhaus Values in the Third Reich
- Daniel Damler
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- Bauhaus Laws
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- Intersentia
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- 15 November 2019
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- 03 June 2019, pp 81-106
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Modernity and fascism were long considered incompatible. This is not the case anymore. There is, however, a good deal of debate about how to assess this phenomenon and what to actually call it. Some authors have talked about “reactionary modernism,” others about the “ambivalence of modernity,” and still others about the “pathological developmental form of modernity,” “feigned modernity,” the “totalitarian side of modernity,” a “distinctive kind of modernity,” the “anti-liberal variant of the modernization process” or “paramodernity.”
The differences can partly be explained by the fact that each author has a different focus in mind, even though they all purport to give a valid picture of the overall era. Though Nazi modernism was certainly dubious in the areas of social policy and culture, its modern approaches to design, graphic design and architecture should not be dismissed out of hand because of it. The continuity of industrial design before and after 1933 is striking and well documented. This connection long went unnoticed, or was simply disregarded, on account of the Deutscher Werkbund and Bauhaus, in particular, being held up as symbols of a new, progressive and democratic “style” in the young Federal Republic. Bauhaus was one of the few traditions that could still pass as “untainted” at Zero Hour, allowing it, thanks to its considerable international reputation, to boost the bruised self-esteem of a Germany in the throes of defeat.
Indeed, the Nazis had immediately closed down the Bauhaus in 1933, having hitherto decried it as a breeding ground of “cultural flattening.” The “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich had exhibited the work of many renowned Bauhaus instructors and students, the likes of Johannes Itten, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer and Georg Muche. In other areas, however, beyond the sphere of fine arts, Bauhaus alumni could hardly complain of discrimination after the Nazi takeover. This was true even for designers and architects whose résumés, at first glance, offered seemingly few points of collaboration. While it is correct that a number of leading Bauhaus representatives left Germany – Gropius in 1934 and Mies van der in Rohe 1937 – their reasons were not necessarily due to political or creative differences.
Bauhaus Laws
- The Modernist Revolution and Modern Thought
- Daniel Damler
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- Published by:
- Intersentia
- Published online:
- 15 November 2019
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- 03 June 2019
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The year 2019 marks the centenary of the founding of the Bauhaus, arguably the most influential school of art and design in the modern era. Commemorative activities will focus on its culture-historical significance, with scant attention being paid to a more fundamental question: the ramifications on legal and political thinking caused by the deep-seated transformation of the material world during the so-called age of extremes. Daniel Damler reveals the finely woven fabric of material and intellectual culture, using the example of New Objectivity to show how radical changes in the design and material vocabulary of objects generate new political and legal paradigms. It was contemporaries of the Bauhaus revolution who began to apply aesthetic maxims such as 'functionality' and 'clarity' to the state and political thought. Our present-day demands for the 'transparency' of governments and parliaments (without really knowing what we even mean by this) are very much a part of this tradition. After the watershed of 1914, the 'virtues' associated with glass, steel and functional forms served as a surrogate for the lost ideological consensus in the fragmented societies of modernity. Examining the works of prominent twentieth-century legal scholars, Damler discovers a remarkable intertwining of the material and the intellectual, while offering new insights into the proto-legal spaces of imagination of leading architects such as Le Corbusier and Bruno Taut. Bauhaus Laws offers an extraordinary and timeless look at the shadow empire of legal aesthetics. His plea to take seriously the internal dynamics of concepts and figures of thought borrowed from material culture is addressed to legal scholars, political scientists and anthropologists, as well as to architects and designers. It is also aimed at readers who believe in political self-determination and the autonomy of the legal system.
Contents
- Daniel Damler
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- Bauhaus Laws
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- Intersentia
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- 15 November 2019
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- 03 June 2019, pp vii-viii
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About the Author
- Daniel Damler
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- Bauhaus Laws
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- Intersentia
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- 15 November 2019
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- 03 June 2019, pp 201-201
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Frontmatter
- Daniel Damler
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- Bauhaus Laws
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- Intersentia
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- 15 November 2019
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- 03 June 2019, pp i-iv
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Acknowledgements
- Daniel Damler
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- Bauhaus Laws
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- Intersentia
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- 15 November 2019
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- 03 June 2019, pp v-vi
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4 - One-World Beauty: International Law and International Style
- Daniel Damler
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- Bauhaus Laws
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- Intersentia
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- 15 November 2019
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- 03 June 2019, pp 107-158
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Summary
A very unique relationship existed between modern architecture and international law in the first half of the twentieth century. These were heady years, a time of unprecedented decline as well as unprecedented triumph for the idea of an international community of law. The slaughter of World War I and the unimaginable barbarity of World War II were followed, for the first time in human history, by concrete measures to create a global legal space with its own organizational structure: first the League of Nations, then the United Nations. Since the rise of the state in the early modern period was partly, and not least of all, the product of a highly effective visual strategy, the question arose after 1918 and again after 1945 as to whether it would be possible to develop a similarly effective visual symbol for these new institutions of international law. Having relatively little financial and human resources at their disposal, unlike the more powerful nation-states, they relied in particular on the support of a complementary aesthetic program to push through their agendas.
The first experiences of modern architects with the procedures of international organizations were anything but auspicious. When the League of Nations, founded in 1919, was looking for a home in Geneva, it chose the newly renovated Hôtel National (later renamed Palais Wilson), a representative grand hotel well situated on the promenade of Lake Geneva. Old-school diplomats with their weakness for grandiose facades and exquisite interiors must have been thrilled about this choice, and this probably played no small part in the decision-making process. But even the most hardened opponents of functionalist architecture must have eventually realized that a building with 79 bathrooms was not particularly suited to housing a Permanent Secretariat with all of 60 employees.
Thus, in 1924 the (fifth) General Assembly decided to host an international architecture competition with a likewise international – though ultimately purely European – jury of architects to select the winning design. The jury comprised a number of well-known individuals – Josef Hoffmann of Vienna, Karl Moser from Switzerland and Victor Horta from Belgium – and not all of its members were hostile towards newer architectural styles, though all belonged to the old generation of architects with their feet firmly planted in the nineteenth century.
1 - Vienna 1900: Pure Legal Craftwork
- Daniel Damler
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- Bauhaus Laws
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- Intersentia
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- 15 November 2019
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- 03 June 2019, pp 15-36
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At first glance the life and work of Hans Kelsen seem an utterly inappropriate point of departure for proving that the classicmodern design catechism left its footprint on legal thought. And yet the case of Kelsen – guiding spirit of the “Pure Theory of Law” (Reine Rechtslehre) and one of the most influential legal theorists of the twentieth century – is eminently suited for studying how difficult it is to escape material culture's emotional, symbolic content and how tightly woven one's living environment and intellectual imprint can be.
The pithy leitmotif of Kelsen's oeuvre can be found at the start of his 1934 magnum opus – in the famous first section of the first chapter – a leitmotif he repeatedly returned to during his career in order to draw new strength: “It is called a ‘pure’ theory of law,” he writes,
because it only describes the law and attempts to eliminate from the object of his description everything that is not strictly law: Its aim is to free the science of law from alien elements. This is the methodological basis of the theory. Such an approach seems a matter of course. Yet, a glance upon the traditional science of law was it developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries clearly shows how far removed it is from the postulate of purity; uncritically the science of law has been mixed with elements of psychology, sociology, ethics, and political theory … The Pure Theory of Law undertakes to delimit the cognition of law against these disciplines, not because it ignores or denies the connection, but because it wishes to avoid the uncritical mixture of methodologically different disciplines (methodological syncretism).
Kelsen's aversion is to an epigonic and – in the worst sense – amateurish jurisprudence, one that is eclectic and syncretic in its approach, that is always borrowing from other disciplines and thereby losing sight of the proprium of jurisprudence and its methods. The aim of the Pure Theory of Law, in other words, is to help jurisprudence regain its former independence and dignity, which it squandered away by adopting the methods of psychology, sociology and other supposedly superior disciplines in order to bask in their glory.