STANDARDISATION - STANDARDISED MENTALITIES

Standardised Mentalities

THIS FILE IS A DRAFT. SINCE THERE IS ALMOST NO PROSPECT OF MY COMPLETING THE RESEARCH AND RE-WRITING, I AM POSTING IT, AND SOME RELATED DRAFTS, SO THAT THE INFORMATION AND IDEAS WILL BE AVAILABLE TO ANYONE WHO WANTS TO PURSUE THE SUBJECT.

In 1929, a veteran coach and motor decorator set out the conflicts that came between achieving true colours and maintaining trade skills. The existence of dozens of shades of the same colour threatened chaos. Paint manufacturers, therefore, had sought to reduce that confusion and increase their sales by “persistent advertising” with colour charts and sample decks. These guides helped the decorator to know “the actual constituents of the colour which he desires to obtain”. In practice, however, he was likely to use products from more than one firm, which, when blended, threw “the colour off shade”. Only from rectifying such slippages could the decorator find “a shred of individuality … to maintain some measure of dignity” since “modernity has not quite succeeded in changing him into an automaton”.[1]

In resisting conscription for overseas service in 1916, the Secretary of the Victorian Branch of the Builders Labourers Federation, Ben Mulvogue, connected standardisation with the turning of craftsmen into machines. That ??? was infecting the social order with “Militarism and Despotism”. Mulvogue later linked mechanisation with monopolizing to explain why “the individual can no longer make an independent living. He has been reduced to utter dependence by the concentration of industry”.[2] The union’s founding secretary, Henry Hannah, pointed to the loss since 1890 of a “common interest” between Master and men: “the employer does not treat the labourer as a man. In his eyes he was a machine, and wanted him to go at top speed all the time until, like the machine, he gets worn out, and is then cast aside”.[3]

Moral Middle Class
A double sense of “standards” operated, provoking questions about whether standardisation could maintain quality without bringing conformity. This concern became part of a political debate about the protection of superior persons against a socialist sameness. Voluntarism, as exemplified in the First AIF, preserved individual choice while fulfilling the call of community service. Socialists were tarnishing the virtue of sacrifice for a common good during war by calling for its extension into peace-time ends. To ward off that threat, the journal of the Victorian shopkeepers in 1919 asserted “We are all Egoists”. To vanquish the class enemy, the bourgeoisie embraced a precept which would have handed victory to the foreign foe.[4]   

By concentrating on ideologies and politics, Judith Brett missed the key to the individualism within the morality she attributes to the self-employed, professionals and small employers whom she aggregates as the middle class. She ignored their social relations of production. Instead, she confined her reportage to their self-images. They were moral: they said so themselves. “What service primarily meant”, Brett concluded, “was putting the interests of the common good before those of the self, and the term had wide applications”.[5] Indeed it did, and wider than she understood.

As much as Brett’s moral citizenry despised the solidarity of trade unionists, they clung to retail price maintenance. The President of the Master Engravers Association of Victoria, E. S. Bolle, identified “Loyalty” as the keynote at their 1936 National Conference. “Loyalty” was also the principle that his class had demonstrated during the war, in contrast to the “disloyalty” of workers seduced by Sinn Fein or Bolshevism. Bolle’s vocabulary embodied a dilemma faced by the individualist in the era of oligopolies and organised labour. On the one hand, he reached for the old school clichés by promising his members that they would all be better off if they “played the game” by sticking to an agreed schedule of prices. On the other, he could have been a trade union official when he concluded that their “industry was greater than the individual”.[6] That conviction was also at the heart of fascist symbolism with its sticks bound together for greater strength.[7].

The mass mind
Standardisation linked the restructuring of businesses towards oligopolies, technological innovation, mass marketing and the realignment of class relations on a world canvas.

Efforts to standardise brought new attitudes, inscribing modernity as a culture of change. The shift from handicraft to machine-facture

Bourgeois ideologues were torn between their fears of standardisation and their fears at chaos, the subject of a run of editorials on the balance between Individualism and Order in architectural design Building and Construction late in 1929 

Rudolf Eucken “The Inner Movement of Modern Life” Got Nobel Prize for literature

B. Irving Babbit

Reflecting on Italy’s fascist constitution, the conservative Melbourne Argus decided that disorder could not be allowed to go on. Civilisation demanded “a significant corrective to a too free play of individualism which is in danger of exceeding the legitimate restraints due to family, calling and country”.[8]

A double sense of “standards” operated. Was standardisation to achieve quality or enforce uniformity?[9]

This dilemma was part of a larger political debate about how to preserve the intellectual and cultural quality of the middle class against the socialist equality which would impose sameness. R. G. Menzies put it in The Forgotten People with its coded eugenic message.

The more that standardisation dominated material production, the more the machine age impinged on individualism. The efforts to reduce unit costs and sustain profit rates assaulted ways of living and “structures of feeling” as had any during the first industrial revolution.[10]

In 1955, the Commonwealth Jeweller and Watchmaker resorted to the language of industrial militancy when it declared that only a “United Jewellery Trade Front” could “hammer out” the practices needed to ward off “ruthless competitors”.[11]

Professionals and small business people held to individualism for as long as its values could restrain “the machine age”.

Machine Age
Walking in Italy shortly before the Great War, D. H. Lawrence had penned his detestation of “the same purpose stinking in it all, the mechanising, the perfect mechanising of human life”.[12] He later wrote of liking relativity and quantum theories because they made him feel that time and space were impulsive and so could not be measured.[13]

William James objected to standardised spelling ??????
The menace of standardisation won converts to Lawrence’s prejudices because its uniformity challenged the ideology through which capitalism could be sold as the bearer of creativity, dignity and freedom. Factory work had shifted from handicraft to machino-facture. In offices, the Remington typewriter or Underwood book-keeping machines, looked as awesome as any lathe.[14] In trade, on the battlefield and in the arts, mechanisation appeared to be draining the colour from individual life.

As early as 1924, a government-backed promoter of standardisation in the U.S. of A., Albert Whitney, could lament that the standard objection to standardisation was the threat of “uniform mediocrity”. Whitney countered by aligning standardisation with a Darwinian notion that the generation of varieties allowed for the creation of new species. Standardisation, he argued, conserved this opportunity to adapt.[15] The inaugural chairman of the Commonwealth Engineering Standards Association, Professor Chapman, recognised that standardisation in the industrial domain could run production technologies “into a rut, stopping progress”. His alternative was to lift standards by their regular revision.[16] Other advocates argued that because the agreed standards were “the best modern practice”, they led to “progress” by eliminating the manufacturer of inferior lines.[17] 

Before George A. Taylor had slipped away from eulogizing the machine and towards upholding individual character. He still took pride in his prescience about the importance that aircraft would have in modern warfare. Yet he worried that Allied strategists were placing “more reliance upon the machine than upon self”. Because Germany had trained its soldiers to fight like machines they committed atrocities: “Character must be trained along with the body”.[18] Also in 1918, a rival promoter of wireless, E. K. Fisk, argued that the Germans, despite their “devilish devices”, would lose the war because they did not “possess individuality”.[19]

Germany
Critics of both liberal and conservative persuasions grumbled that technological conformism was driving their lives down, in Stuart Chase’s words, to “One dead level”, or more forcefully, was “Prussianizing America”.[20] Chase concluded his 1929 book, Men and Machines:

From all these baffling currents and cross-currents, at least three conclusions emerge. Machine civilization as a total culture is less standardized than any given former culture. The life of any modern individual is theoretically open to more variety, but practically may be less varied, than that of any other cultures. The machine is probably the greatest destroyer of standards which the world has ever seen. The temporary standards which have sprung up to fill the gap are all too often ugly and unpleasant. But there is no certainty that they will last. Indeed the only certainty is constant change, so long as technology maintains its present pace.[21]

The journal of the British Standards Institution in 1944 regretted that “standardization”, after nearly a hundred years in common use, was one of “the most misunderstood words in the language … By long association of ides, it has come to mean, for most people, the apotheosis of all that is dull and monotonous ... mass production at its dreariest”. In reply, its promoters associated their work with a definition from the Oxford Dictionary: “an authoritative or recognised exemplar of correctness, perfection or some definite degree of any quality”.[22]

This attitude persisted into the late 1940s. The Standards Association had to combat “an impression fairly widely held” that standardisation is “a process of reducing everything to one pattern, of stifling new ideas and killing enterprise – in short of mere stereotyping”. Sameness had never been the aim. The objective was to stamp out “frivolous variations, in size for example, which are so slight that their presence may not be felt until the replacement ‘doesn’t fit’.”[23]

Advocates of absolute standards in measurement, like the upholders of the Gold Standard, convinced themselves of the ethical significance of their program. Critics of standardization were as adamant that the morality of individualism was under threat. The dividing line was never clear-cut. Many of those who feared the loss of creativity from uniform production resigned themselves to turning back the revolt of the propertiless masses by giving in to Fascism.

Moreover, the masses were not just the mob, the classes dangereux or even the crowd in history. They included the middling classes who had been brought into public affairs via the suffrage, conscription and the mass media for marketing. They were city dwellers – not rural idiots – yet not exactly citizens, not the political animal of Aristotle. The censoriousness of this new public had frightened John Stuart Mill more than had the state censors.

In reviewing Chase’s study, Nettie Palmer observed that while few Australian men could fix their own fuse or faucet, most were still at home with a water tank and a wood pile.[24] Nothing like Ford’s assembly line here.[25]

Spiritualising the machine

Examine the German case because surrender had made its symptoms the most extreme

The rest of the world reacted to its Prussianism

Consider the novels of ???? Fontane, Robert Musil and Heinrich Mann for one personality type before 1914.

Spokespeople for other natoins exaggerated certain features of German life to deceive themselves about how different – free individuals -  they were.

German industry assumed to be the most advanced in its application of technology, allegedly the most efficient and regimented.

A two-way trade in ideas. German conservatives needed technology but spurned liberalism. Problem in Australia of how to differentiate he Allies’ sacrifice in battle from their militarism. Easier here because of voluntarism, but complicated because of the campaigns to bring in conscription by popular vote.

See article on Militarism?????

Since the 1890s, German designers and architects had sought to integrate the creativity of the artist with the standardisation required for mass production. From the founding of the Deutsche Werkbund in 1907, its membership had mixed three lines of ideals and practices: first, a fringe who wanted to restore folk decorations; secondly, a substantial minority hoped to put the artist in charge. The champion of Jugendstil, the Belgian Henri van de Velde (1863-1957), inspired by William Morris, declared “Art must conquer the machine”. Thirdly, a majority accepted that their task was to provide a basis on which German exports could excel. The founding President, Hermann Muthesius used Werkbund as if it were an institute for imposing standards of quality on mass production for the export market. He wanted to escape the volkish forms but not to simplify for its own sake.   Badham  68-71

Standardisation would improve quality where mass production was essential for trade and in war.

Divisions between the standardisers and the individualists came to a head at the July 1914 Congress in Cologne where the Muthesius, contended:

Architecture and the entire sphere of activity of the Werkbund tend towards standardization. It is only by standardization that they can recover that universal importance which they possessed in ages of harmonious civilization. Only by standardisation … as a salutary concentration of forces, can a generally accepted and reliable taste be introduced.[26]

Was standardisation normative, or another by-product of mass production?

A conflict between Type and Individuality. Walter Gropius objected to the standardised method of setting quality standards. Quality always required further research through the spawning of variety, artistic experiments. Types needed to be destroyed as well as built.

A fine line between integrating creativity with industrial production and subordinating the former. In practice, the latter was going to win

At most, the corporations would use the names of artist-designers a form of advertising

Typisierung

Qualitat reach for the best in the present and shed the reproduction of [27]

His ally, Peter Behrens joined AEG (Allgemeine Electricitats gesellschaft)

The theme of the 1911 Congress was “The Spiritualisation of German Production”. Rembrandt became an honorary German for the purposes of extollings his ??? against a scientistic approach to art.

Muthesius pictured standardisation as virtuous, and located aesthetics in design for mass products. Forms were spiritual though they had to find expressions appropriate to time and palace, as they had with the Greeks and again in the Eighteenth century. (Badham, p. 72)

The war decided the struggle in favour of the standardisers. “Kultur” became a propaganda weapon rather than a spiritual value and the regimentation of life

Campbell [28]
Kultur versus Civilisation.
The Allies pictured the Germans as lacking in individuality and devoid of spirituality.
In the backwash of defeat, the German conservatives

Standardization of terminology was integral to the standardization of science and industry. The clarification of vocabulary did not extend to “standardization”. Simplification, Fordism, mechanisation, (and later automation) Americanism, etc Dispute extended to the meaning of “standard”: was it a moral statement or a ?????????.

The translator of Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture carried this blurring to the point of misrepresentation.

Architecture is governed by Standards. Standards are a matter of logic, analysis and precise study. Standards are based on a problem which has been well stated …

Standardisation is imposed by the law of selection and is an economic and social necessity. Harmony is a state of agreement with the norms of our universe. Beauty governs all; she is of purely human creation; she is the overplus necessary only to men of the highest type.

Standard returned to French in the 1850s

Elle est le superfluite necessaire seulement a ceux qui ont un ame eleve. (p. 115)

But we must first of all aim at the setting up of standards in order to face the problem of perfection.[29]

Etalon had its

Le Corbusier’s slipped between using “standards” as aesthetic-cum-ethical judgements to an acceptance of standardisation as the new basis for beauty in building. The ease with which he made this transition in terminology was faster than he could in his practices. In the 1920s, he called for simplification. Not until the 1950s would he embrace “the module”. Even then, he ??????????????? Fibonacci series allowed for variants

The “Manifesto of Sarraz” found some adherents here shortly after Le Corbusier’s writings had been translated.[30] One criticism was that the “Modernist” designs were inferior to “the comfort and convenience in the best type of modern English house”. [31]

But also freak house design from Bauhaus attacked as “socialist” and “anti-beauty”.[32]

Despite the uneven pace of his approval of standardisation, his welcoming of it remained exceptional. Most people feared that mass production would spread “shoddy” and - after 1945 – artificial “plastic” goods.

In Germany after the surrender, a conflict developed between reactionaries who turned back to Nature and “blood and soil”, and those who embraced a refurnished concept of “blood and steel”. The reactionary modernists, as Jeffrey Herf calls them, distinguished technology from the other aspects of modernisation such as individualism and commercialism, summed up as Americanismus. Ernst Junger, for example, portrayed the subordination of the individual to the speed of mass production as a metaphysical process.

Marxism,

The individual will no longer be redeemed by “faith in land”, but by sacrifice in battle and by a willing submission to technology. Speed in the factory and city erodes personality and ego. The new Germany seeks redemption in a leader who embodies the absolutism of the machine age. In the 1922 words of Junger: “But it is precisely these masses who will produce a decisive and unrestricted type of leader, one who will have far fewer restrictions on his actions than even the sovereign of the absolute monarchy did.” SOURCE

Siegfried Kracauer perceived these developments in The Salaried Masses (1930) and Wilhelm Reich ????? in The Mass Psychology of Fascism

The Rectionary Modernists retained a Romanticism without the Pastoral. The soul of the nation was not to be found by trekking through the forests. The anonymity of the city had educated Germans to the loss of personality needed

Tonnies

Radio supplied the collective voice and the cinema the collective dream.

The zeitgeist of technology was a “steel translation of our blood and our brains”. Junger presented acceptance of this slavery as the fulfillment of “our innermost will”. The surrender of personal liberty in the economy was another heroic sacrifice, like that of one’s life during the war.[33]

Versus Nietzsche’s “last man”

Putting the Geist back in the machine in an irrational devotion to the rationality of technique.

Hand, head and heart in the phrase of the Anthroposophist, Rudolf Steiner.

Moral and ethical standards the standardised could incorporate the good, the true and the beautiful. Came to dominate.

Lukacs versus Expressionism

The automobile: Of all the machines that contributed to modernisation, none was more pervasive than the automobile, with its antiphonal images of workers chained to an assembly line against motorists’ touring wherever fancy took them. Although the automobile in Australia never embodied class distinctions as keenly it did in Britain, “the modern device of aloofness” promised a personal space against the crush on public transport. Yet, no sooner had the NRMA titled its magazine The Open Road in 192??? than motoring parties were accused of “Babbitising of the Bush”.[34]

Arena article

The family car contributed to the spread of “villadom”, and to the debates over whether suburbia offered a scope for personal expression, or crimped both community and creativity.[35] The anonymity of faces in the street extended from the footpath, as recorded by Henry Lawson in 1890 and Lesbia Harford around 1920, to the roadway as framed in John Brack’s “The Car” (1955).

In 1918, that early advocate of flying-machines over the battle-field, George A.  Taylor, defended the military utility of horses. They could jump fences and take mounted troops over country where armoured cars and tanks could not go.[36] The gratitude that the socialist Lesbia Harford felt when a businessman sold his trucks to revert to horse-and-lorry deliveries was but one instance of the disquiet that people of several persuasions harboured towards the automobile as the vanguard of the machine age.[37] No less surprising is that the managing-director of BHP, the “Steel Master”, Essington Lewis, also preferred a horse, dying in the saddle in 1961, his eighty-first year.[38]

Colour accents
The spokespeople for the businesses benefiting from standardization sought ways to profit from the unease about conformity by marketing standardized antidotes. High on that list of ???? was the promotion of colour. The Sydney architect  J. F. Hennessy ???? quoted a American Professor

Owing to man’s search for relief from the restrictions of the machine age, we are entering upon the most colourful epoch of modern history. All about us we see the results of a demand for colour, more colour”. [39]

Visual artists
J. W. M. Turner was one of the earliest artists over whom the Irongate Bridge at Coalbrookdale, 12 km outside Shrewsbury,

exercised an almost irresistible attraction … largely due to the unique circumstance that the most modern and impressive industrial enterprise of the period was situated in an exceptionally romantic landscape. It thus became, as it were, the test place for studying the new relationship between men and nature created by large-scale industry.

The “horrors” and marvels from coal and iron exhilarated artists towards the imagery of a paradise being lost.[40]

The Sydney Harbour Bridge became the largest industrial undertaking in the country. The engineers set up a iron-and-steel works on site, employing 2,000 men. By 1928, few Sydney artists could keep their pencils off its spans as they curved out, thrusting steel-grey geomorphs which not even the brightest of palettes among the Sydney Moderns could camouflage. To look through their efforts is to be overwhelmed by a metallic life form which seems to reach out like a mechanical plant. Arthur Streeton charged 325 guineas for one of his canvases of the harbour viewed from a patron’s porch. He never attempted to include the bridge. Those who did depict it either left the workforce out of their picture, or confined them to corners, where they lounged in groups, never working on the bridge itself. Cossington Smith was typical in concealing the human labour, and the 156 deaths, consumed into the bridge’s construction. For Streeton, its existence was brutal enough to remind him that the era when the harbour had been an artists’ camp had been killed during the War. For those of his persuasion, the bridgework was more a gravestone than a bright promise.

Brisbanites built two bridges across their river in the 1930s. The Grey Street Bridge opened in the same month as Harbour Bridge. A commentator contrasted its simple curves favourably with the “historical” adornments cluttering Brisbane’s Colonial Mutual office block.[41] DUHIG Another local critic relied on the stone of the Grey Street to locate it within the domain of Nature:

It spans one of the majestic parts of the river, throws its grey arches over the placid bluish waters; and at night, causes, through its lighting, the river to brighten up in scintillating brilliance, giving a charm to the surroundings that adds to the aesthetic value of an already attractive spot blessed with a number of Nature’s charms.

A bridge, though dumb, speaks. It illustrates the wealth and application of the crafts, paints its own picture, and revels in the lights and shades that fall upon it. We may, in due course, find the art student make it a most appropriate subject for his brush, and poets and poetesses versing its virtue and value in a manner that prose can hardly give it.[42]

The Storey Bridge was all steel, and hence closer in comparison to the Harbour bridge and   article????Glenn Cooke from art and antiques?????? 

Also higher above most viewing points and approaches than Grey Street

Margaret Preston painted her way through the dangers that mechanisation posed to her determination to be both “mathematical and adventurous”.[43] She worked her way around the danger of that mechanisation posed to her art by drawing on the regionalism of Indigenous Australians and traditions from East Asia. She located symmetry within the irregularities of Aboriginal patterning and discerned the Fibionacci series in the formality of her native flower paintings.[44] She accepted the machine age in her 1927 essay “Eggs to Electrolux”, and for her streamlined kitchen scene, “Still Life” (1927). Next year, she condemned “The Robot in Art” before disparaging “Meccano as an Ideal” in 1932.[45] Despite her many woodcuts of harbour scenes, and unlike most Sydney artists, she Rarely only once depicted the Bridge. She attacked the addition of faux supports.

In a 1943 article, Preston distinguished “modern” from “contemporary”. She announced that she had reached a pivotal moment in her own development. Modern artists, she recognised, drew on the traditions of art in an individual way. She was moving on to the “Contemporary”, where the artist’s “forms and symbols will show the conditions and ideas of his time”.[46] This change did not mean that Preston wanted to endorse prevailing attitudes. Indeed, the war had left her “bored stiff with the uniformed mind and body”.[47] Her 1942 depiction of a smashed Japanese midget submarine included a placard reading “Do Not Ask Questions”, the opposite of her practice as an artist. The English painter Paul Nash exemplified Preston’s notion of the “contemporary”.[48] For ‘Totes Meer’ (1940-41), he re-worked images of crashed Luftwaffe planes. Like Nash, Preston responded to war machines by showing their wreckage, not their destructive power.

By contrast, Grace Cossington Smith did not go back to the social themes that she had portrayed around 1920, although the threats to her social class were no less intense. In the main, she spent her time achieving prettiness through high-keyed fractured brushstrokes. An exception was “Dawn Landing” (1944) where robotic troops march out of a hull which looks like a metallic birth canal. In an act of manual reproduction, she based the painting on a newspaper photograph.

The pre-1915 appeal that the machine had made to the Futurists and Vorticists was buried beneath the actuality of slaughter. Nevison switched from the machine to the pastoral.

Modernisation as mechanization and standardisation drove Modernists towards the irrational as a escape. Naturalism attracted fewer painters during the Second World War.

Most accepted that an element of abstraction was necessary to depict the mechanisation of war, especially with aerial bombardment.

in Canadian, British and Australian war artists

In “Guernica” (1936), Picasso established the aircraft as the source of terror. Yet he did not include that machine in his vision of the slaughter. The dominant figure is of the horse, as if in a bullring. Picasso did not confront the mechanization of battle until his Korean War image of robots entering battle like creatures from War of the Worlds????.

The war artist Dennis Adams was as mechanistic in his manner of depicting ships’ engines as were his subjects. In England, Stanley Spencer brought life to the armaments industry through employing a Super-Realist manner to focus attention on the collective power of ship-builders in his 24-metre long “Shipbuilding on the Clyde” (c.1941)

Leger at play
Surrealism subverted modernisation by challenging the ability of the state or employer to control time. Dreamwork could not be subjected to Taylorism. In as much as the clock was the pivot of standardisation, Dali’s limp dials defied any future in which workers were condemned to the Gulag for getting to work late.[49]

Arthur Boyd, Russell Drysdale, James Gleeson, Sid Nolan, John Perceval and Albert Tucker, and a Grotesque.[50] THE SOWER is anti-Pastoral the rest of nature is indifferent to our fate

Eric Thake took a whimsical glance at the machine age.

Expressionism of Ivor Hele

Nolan as “The Dream of the Latrine Sitter” went AWOL

A soft Modernism

Led to fabric designs in 1947

And localism

The chance to be involved in the making through Alcorso silks etc and to collaborate with industry.

Reliance on landscape and indigenous patterns as a way of keeping some distinct between the artists’ creativity and their involvement with an industrial process.

The more that standardisation dominated production and distribution, the more the machine age and monopolising impinged on individualism, the more artists resisted ???

The enterprise of the corner shopkeeper had fewer chances than ever of outlasting oligopolisers, with their advantages from productive capacity and in publicity. Marketers deflected the individual’s quest for freedom away from the workplace and governmental control and into the domestic sphere. Consumption became the means to express a commercialisation of character. Just as politicians promoted home ownership as a bastion of individual liberties, so did marketers sell home-making as the way to retain “some shred of individuality”.

Levitt and home owning communists too busy???????

NEEDS AN ENDING?????

WHEREBranding also promised truth and goodness. Ambivalence around standardisation appeared there too. Consumers of soft-drinks complained about the lack of flavour, fruit growers attacked artificial flavourings, and supply houses filled pages with their name and “Quality” as their slogan.[51]

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