The pig in the bath: new materialisms and cultural studies

Discusses Otto Neurath's involvement in the economic and social projects of Red Vienna in the 1920s and the borough of Bilston near Wolverhampton in the 1940s. Working with a team of people, Neurath invented communicative techniques and devices that were to outlive both Red Vienna and himself. Most significant among these was the Isotype system of visual statistics, a system of symbols of figures and objects that were designed by Arntz and incorporated as charts and posters into different exhibition media. For Neurath, these practices were part of a wider strategic means to counter what he saw as a fundamentally bourgeois separation of scientific knowledge of things, positivism, from the spheres of the political and the lived. In many ways, Neurath's vision is similar to Bruno Latour's notion of things as matters of concern around which diverse people assemble, and both actor-network theory and Neurath's Unified Science take the view that nothing lies outside a network of relations that encompasses people and creatures, nature and technology. However, Neurath's own positivist materialism differs from Latour's variety of materialism, and is indeed the object of Latour's critique.