Jörg Petruschat
         Liberate Technology and You Liberate Form!
         A Memo on Max Bense and Walter Zeischegg


The conceptional orientation of the Ulm School of Design was a response to the fundamental problems of modern civilisation. It was hoped that science and rationality could successfully put an end to the nightmarish consequences of technological advances, as evidently manifested under fascism and during the Second World War. The idea was to build a future in which new technological developments could be tamed with culture and mastered with design.
In a commentary addressed to Max Bense, Jörg Petruschat expounded the idea that this objective will remain unrealistic as long as the notion and concept of technology are on equal terms with humanity, i.e., to a great extent, forms appear to execute purposes that are bound by technical parameters. This contrasts with the aesthetic enquiries of Walter Zeischegg, in which he attempted to establish the relationship of form and purpose in exactly that order of importance.


         I.
The people behind the establishment of the College of Design in Ulm, that is above all Inge Scholl, Otl Aicher and Hans Werner Richter, set out to create an institution free of all economic and political influence. Only if the college’s autonomy from such interests was ensured, they believed, would it be possible to educate an anti-fascist elite that could serve in a new Germany. It was a radical new beginning, designed to work away at the very foundations of modern social development. For Inge Aicher-Scholl, the central question for modern civilisations was the extent to which they could respond culturally to technology[1]: answering this question, she said, was the central challenge facing the Ulm College.

It was, of course, a theme that had already played a central role at the Bauhaus: the relationship between culture and technology. When the Bauhaus moved from Weimar, a city closely associated with Goethe, to the industrial town of Dessau, director Walter Gropius abandoned the crafts orientation of the design school and called instead for a new unity between art and technology. But the euphoric directive from Gropius that artists be trained to direct the technological capacities of the modern world was already an illusion, even at the moment it was proclaimed. His vision that industrial technology could be handled in the same way that an old master took his stylus in hand was based on the misconception that factories were essentially mechanised craftsmanship. As the First World War had already shown, technology was not made up of isolated machines but of mechanical systems integrated into the capitalist goods economy, the complexity of which rendered any notion of individual influence romantic at best. It was no coincidence that it was during the First World War that the DIN system of industrial norms was established and the 08/15 became the standard rifle used by the German forces.

Fascism and World War Two, the obsession with technology, the reduction of people as individuals to raw materials, the organised system of oppression set up by the secret services – German methods of reconciling the conditions of modern mass society with its technical platform – left Inge Aicher-Scholl with no alternative but to view the problem with a great deal more scepticism than Gropius. The question became: was it even possible to bring technology under control?

At the opening of the Ulm College building, Max Bill pointed out that: "All the activities at the college are devoted to developing a new culture designed to create ways of living compatible with the technical age. Contemporary culture has undergone such convulsions that it would be pointless to continue building at the apex of the pyramid. We must start right at the very bottom, and examine the foundations."[2]

Today the borders between technology and culture, between man as an individual and mechanical systems, are increasingly permeable. The clear divisions that, in the first half of the twentieth century, could still be delineated between the technological and human realms have since been dissolved into intermediate zones. Cyborgs are everywhere. The interpenetration of the contradictions between culture and technology, man and machine, has, it seems, made it meaningless to ask which of the two sides is more dominant. After all, there is simply no alternative. And, if culture and technology can no longer be distinguished, perhaps the question posed in Ulm about the extent to which technology can be brought under control is antiquated?


         II.
In 1965, that was one year before his last appearance in Ulm, Max Bense[3] published an essay titled "The Disobedience of Ideas. Concluding Tractatus on Intelligence and the Technical World".[4] The title was programatic: the essay was supposed to contain a definitive statement on the relationship between human intelligence and technical systems. The preface contains Bense’s credo: "No idea is obedient. The condition of dispersion in no way runs contrary to nature and is therefore in nearly every case an irritation for the powers that be. Ideas are always full of objectivity while power can never, not for one second, be entirely disabused of its subjective allure."[5] "Power" represents conformity of mood, saturation, blind faith, government. The idea is the explosion that had the potential to shatter the torpor. Those who develop and transport the ideas are the intellectuals, the "intelligence, which, to make it more comprehensible, is born out of the resolution between the working class and the last throes of the bourgeoisie."[6] It is, supposedly, a new way of thinking that makes ideas objective: technical rationality. But, for Bense, technology is part and parcel of traditional political "power-giving structures such as political parties, churches, nations and economic systems."[7] Those who are in power, he argues, stand in the path of civilising progress simply because they are incompetent in relation to technical reality; because their a-technical, merely emotional and uncommitted disposition means that they are absolutely clueless when it comes to imagining how things could or should develop. At the same time, the intellectuals, the people generating the ideas of technical reality, are, "exploited and ... cut off from power,"[8] although they provide those in power with the technological means they require. For Bense, this division between technological intelligence and power is the major barrier to civilising development. "The relationship between master and servant, as employed by Hegel and Marx and instrumental in the actions of both those in power and their opponents, has since undergone realignment. It is no longer the question of who owns or does not own the means of production that today defines the precarious situation that civilisation finds itself in: it is the ownership or non-ownership of certain theories that is crucial - if by that we understand the quintessence in the form of theory of the knowledge required to sustain or develop technical civilisation."[9] To the extent that they are bereft of ideas, those who control power are dependent on the intellectuals, even though they must paralyse these same intellectuals in order to retain their grip on power. "Intelligence is surrounded by irrationalism; careers and productive activities are embedded in an anti-Cartesian and anti-Hegelian manner in emotional and religious metaphysics, which, endowed with power, become bulwarks against the methodical progress of reason."[10]

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