A Faculty of Interrelations

The importance of this essay by Architectural Historian Siegfried Giedion in the history of media ecology is well laid-out on the McLuhan’s New Sciences blog. Transcribed from the April 1944 issue of Architecture and Engineer Magazine and reproduced here in full.

WE HAVE TO MAKE ORDER

… A Faculty of Interrelations

By SIEGFRIED GIEDION

Great changes are foreshadowed in our cultural structure. The elements of this change already exist in science, whether biology or physics, in art, in architecture and in many other fields. But these elements are unrelated: they have no inner contact with one another.

There can be no question that what is and what will continue to be the outstanding task of our time, interrupted at the moment by a dangerous war. Even as the soldier has to prepare the means of defense in peace times, so we have to prepare an outline of later developments in time of war. The experience of the past twenty years has shown us what it means to enter a period of peace without a plan and without knowing what has to be accomplished.

The problems involved are not concerned with, they do not revolve around the question of ever-faster means of transportation or of ever-increasing production. The problem is not that of piling up more and more inventions and facilities. The problem can be stated in a few words. We have to make order. That is the task.

The first condition of making order in the present state of affairs is to proceed from general points of view, and general points of view are always related to a conviction, that is, to a moral faith. The uproar will be the greatest since the industrial revolution, since basic human values will clash with the distortions of our present day living habits. There is no choice left. Either we find a way to restore human dignity to a primary place in our daily life or will perish. Human values must be defended against the dictatorship of ever accelerating production and its intimate correlatives, the tyranny of the job and financial insecurity.

In what way and by what means this change will be accomplished is impossible to foretell but we may know for a certainty where our bottle stations are in the struggle. It is not our task to insist that later aggression must be prevented, as politics is not our field. Nor can we control industrial production, or force the authorities to make order in the nightmare of our cities. Our task and our moral obligation is to make order in our own field, to establish the relations between the sciences, art, and the humanities. This is what is lacking today. To build up the interrelations between the different branches of human knowledge is to establish the fundamentals of a new culture.

To make order in our own field is to restore again the lost equilibrium between feeling and thinking and between an external world which has gone wild and the basic nature of man. This revelation of human personality will not come from the world of business. It must develop outside the market. The healing processes of our time will be found in the highly developed sciences and in art.

The thesis of this symposium, whether art should be a basis of communication between the disciplines of liberal education (and I would prefer to say of any education) depends on what art means to us.

Art, creative art, forms the symbols to express what is going on in the subconscious of man in the ever-changing equilibrium within the human soul. A period which regards art as a plaything, as a luxury, or as unnecessary, a people who believe that research which does not pay can be ignored, has signed therewith the death warrant of culture, and has revealed its own inner breakdown.

No one can live without symbols. The wildest tribes have found the need of idols, of totem poles, as symbols of their inner world. The problem on which Space, Time, and Architecture revolves is the uncanny power of feeling.

The symbolic urge in such time as ours can also be falsified. The history of successful painting in the nineteenth century, loved by both rich and poor, is a history of falsified symbols. Even in our own times buildings are erected in a manner or in a style through which the owner would like to mirror himself. Thus, we may understand the residences or colleges erected in Gothic shapes and reflecting a manorial attitude toward life. These are phenomena of escape and no real expression of feeling. They are the expression of inner uncertainty.

To make order in our own field we have to restore again the lost contact between the different sciences, between sciences and humanities, and then this interrelationship with human expression. We have to create a new vocabulary. This is not easy. Anyone who has tried to place representatives of different disciplines at the same table in order to elucidate the methods each follows in his own sphere will have encountered at once this obstacle—each representative seems to speak a language of his own. The extreme specialization of the sciences, has led to the loss of a common vocabulary based on mutual understanding.

Behind this misunderstanding lies the structure of the man today. The representative man of our period is the unevenly developed, the maladjusted man, his thinking and his feeling divorced, a split personality. He has one organ developed at the expense of another, or he has some organs hypertrophied. A sportsman, for instance, may be trained exclusively for long distance running, and will have neither the time nor the strength left to hold his own in jumping or in wrestling. Such development leads indeed to the setting up of new records, but it must be paid for by the possession of a one-sided mind or of an unevenly balanced body. From such an unevenly developed man has come the outstanding personality of our time—the specialist.

The specialist, as he appeared in the lost decade of the nineteenth century in all the fields of human knowledge, felt no need to integrate his own research with the whole and he regarded any contact with other fields of research as senseless. He was the master of compartmentalization, as John Dewey puts it.

Does this mean that we should consider the specialist as a catastrophe and do away with him? This would be the same as proclaiming that the advance in our knowledge of inanimate matter is the worst thing that could have happened to the human race, or that we should destroy cities because we have misused them. Our age, indeed, has been the work of specialists. Either we continue our differentiated sciences and techniques, or we return to a primitive state. This primitivism may appear, at first, very tempting, but in reality it would mean an end.

Yet something must be changed. And this is the type of specialist. His activity has to be founded on a wider field. There is no reason whatever to expect that the road which knowledge will follow will refrain from even greater differentiation. And there is no contradiction in saying that at the same time an ever greater urge toward breadth of outlook must be developed.

In other words, the new type of special will not use exclusively the microscope which magnifies his particular problems. He must have at his disposal both the microscope and the aerial photograph. The spiritual attitude which must lie behind every piece of research and which acts as an invisible pilot has to incorporate every special problem into a universal conception of life. This has been the secret of every culture. The specialist has destroyed that common consciousness which we call culture. It is the specialist who has to restore it again.

Just as a wounded body tries to regain its equilibrium as far as it can out of its own resources, so the healing of the present state of culture must start within knowledge itself. It is on this occasion impossible to trace even the process which leads to the conversion of the self-restricted specialist. We cannot show how chemistry flows into physics and into biology, or biology into physiology. We cannot explain urbanism as no longer restricted to technical economic problems, or how even in sciences the particular phenomenon is regarded as being of little importance. We cannot exemplify how a new methodological power in modern physics has destroyed the mechanistic conception of the world and has been extended to totally different fields of knowledge. In the field of exact sciences there is not only hope, there is already a certainty of the coming changes in our cultural structure.

The educational ideal of the second half of the nineteenth century, as it was developed from the time industry put its impress on the whole of life, was also imbued with specialization. As specialization was understood, it meant learning facts, more facts, as many facts as possible, with a minimum of interrelation. Facts which are not based on a basic methodological background clutter up the brain and undermine the productive capacity. In the future particular stress must be laid on the interrelations of the facts rather than on the facts themselves.

For this reason a faculty must be created in the universities which functions as a sort of coordinator between the sciences and the humanities. Scholars will not only have to teach on such a faculty; each of them will have to learn as well. There must be built up a knowledge of methods, the beginning of a common vocabulary. Scholars must have systematic contact with one another, while such a faculty will be concerned especially with the study of its own period.

In each of the great universities I know there are already established informal groups of scholars moving quietly toward this goal. In teach of these universities there are men eager to find interrelations among the different sciences and between them and the humanities. If we define history as an insight into the moving process of life, such a faculty will be one of contemporary history. If our own period is interpreted by the different departments, a common language will develop. When recently I talked with Professor John U. Nef in Chicago, an expert in the field of economic history, on this subject, he referred to the chapter in his recently published book, The United States and Civilization, where the idea of a new faculty, different in detail, but moving in the same direction toward integration, was advocated.

The will is here, the people are here, all that has to be done is to form an organization which will serve to further the study of the methodology of our period through the collaboration of scholars, and to serve at the same time the needs of students by giving them a comprehensive outlook of our methodological perspective.

I would not be misunderstood. In line with the whole structure of present-day knowledge we have to continue to train specialists. We do not want to educate dilettanti. There should be no popular courses on astronomy, on painting, on physics, literature, or ethnology. Rather should there be given an insight into the methods and the interrelations of present-day knowledge. In this way the mind of the coming specialist may be trained so that he will be able to conceive his own problems in relation to the whole. To make order, as I said at the beginning, is the first step towards a new universal.

According to the structure of our period, the renascent universality has to be built up gradually. Like a mosaic, it has to be put together, piece by piece, by specialists of the new type. It cannot originate in the brain of a single philosopher. It cannot come into being through the invention of a philosophical system, as Hegel tried to do more than a century ago.

Universality involves the state of the balanced mind, where the methods of feeling— everything which is concerned with art—have caught up with the methods of thinking, everything which is related to science and the humanities.

Thus would be formed the sound background out of which new creative forces would once more arise, to complete what was begun in a menaced period. It is basic to the whole conception that art will have to play an active role.

Such a faculty of interrelation cannot be borne by the will of a single man. It must grow out of the persistent will of the period. The time for it is now. As I tried to say in Space, Time, and Architecture, our culture is like an orchestra where the instruments lie already tuned, but where every musician is cut off from his fellows by a sound-proof wall.