A Guideline for Teachers’ Self-education

At least since the introduction of compulsory education, it has been considered necessary to insure that teachers meet a minimum standard of increasing their knowledge as the years of their career pass by. For this purpose, educational theory has placed criteria of assessing self-control at teachers’ disposal, in order to avoid private fantasies and spite based on religious confessions and political partisanship, because these forms of caprice are certainly well-suited to cause the work of teachers to drift into arbitrariness.

Those are the general remarks—and now for their application to the very specific concepts of the Bauhaus. Contrary to the general tendency mentioned above, it seems likely that the majority of the Bauhaus teachers were scarcely trained as teachers; instead, they were practicing artists. While artists have also been awarded professorships at art academies for around three hundred years, they were primarily there not to reflect on pedagogy but to produce art. Training at the academies took place, on the one hand, through the imitation of those who were already able to do what the students were trying to learn and, on the other hand, through obeying a canon of minimum standards regarding precisely this ability based on familiarization.

The aim of the Bauhaus concepts of the unity of individual work and teamwork, art and technology, science and craft (see Gropius’s opening address in Ulm in 1955) was the mutual permeation of explicit and implicit knowledge. Those who discover the way in which a positively unbelievable abundance of knowledge implicitly enters into the practices of the crafts will no longer insist on the opposition between manual and mental labor. Around 1770, Kant was still asserting that “we only understand what we ourselves can produce.” However, as Baumgarten had already shown, the work of craftsmen and artists also seemed to be successful through familiarity and without understanding. Indeed, the opposite was true: Understanding what it is we are doing would necessarily prevent us from carrying out the great majority of actions (from making war, committing violence, annihilatory competition, destruction as creation, and using poison to eating unhealthily, etc.).

If we understood doing that way, we could leave it like that. But that would mean continuing to reduce the causes of our understanding until there was nothing more to understand, because we would no longer do anything. In addition, there is the universally shared experience that we cannot simply do whatever we conceptually postulate, because there is no unequivocal translation of understanding with our mind that equates to grasping with our hand. All work done using a concept changes the concept itself, all the more so when it is the basis of an activity permeated with understanding. In the activity itself, the new emerges as an unavoidable divergence between concept and intuition (Anschauung), between knowledge and activity or between thinking and speaking (generation of aesthetic difference, see www.bazonbrock.de). Our transcending what we have always already known is founded on this difference: This leads to the only important (that is, immanent) transcendence—called Transcendentalism in Kantian terms—in which the self-reflexivity of knowl- edge and action becomes productive.

In the opening program of the Bauhaus, for which Feininger designed his famous woodcut, Gropius makes an appeal based (of all things) on a “premodern” cultural-historical artifact, namely, the Gothic cathedral. For the Bauhaus team, the Bauhütte collectives provided the most compelling example of the power of implicit knowledge, because the master builders of the cathedrals had no scientifically elaborated theory that they could have translated into architectural practice. Instead, they relied on the experience that, in the lucid activity of the crafts, enough implicit knowledge is at work to venture even the most monumental artifacts, while trusting in the power of activity (in spite of some catastrophic collapses among new buildings, which could, however, be explained through shoddy craftsmanship instead of inadequate theoretical insight. This situation was also recently taken into consideration in the context of criminal proceed- ings in connection with the collapse of the highway bridge in Genua, precisely because the project appeared to be entirely safe in the paper form of the design, that is, on the conceptual level).

Thus “Bauhaus” as an up-to-date, modern translation of “Bauhütte,” placed its hopes in the productivity of the aesthetic difference between intuition and concept, thinking and acting. It is worth noting how the ethical difference that is indispensable to aesthetic difference was playfully thematized at the Bauhaus celebrations, namely, as an arbitrary deviation from thinking and communicating, from understanding and action, in lying. In their political orientation, members of the Bauhaus attested to the epistemological concept of nature in mimicry, camouflage, and deception well into the Nazi period: disengaging the relationship between essence and appearance in such a way that the censors would have nothing to latch on to—“conformism as resistance”.

While there were, in the first years of the Bauhaus, preliminary course teachers, like Johannes Itten, who still believed they could develop their self-concepts of spiritual communities into Bauhaus pedagogy (an error later repeated by Hannes Meyer in his equation of education and work for the party), the cultural-historically important core of the Bauhaus concept is nonetheless to be seen more in the aesthetic of that formation of taste which emerged from England and had been gaining authority in Europe since the Enlightenment of the 18th century (purity, clarity, simplicity). It also lies closer to the poetics of the epic theater and the agitprop of proletarian culture than to an orientation based on the academic discipline of education, even popular education.

The program defines education as a guideline for the development and self-assessment of artists, who are always in danger of prioritizing their success and effectiveness as instructors over the development of their own artistic work. This is because they could directly recognize and enjoy the effect of their work with students, while the effect of their own artistic work remained largely dependent on the hope that the true qualities of the masters would be recognized at a later date and in another place. Accordingly, mastery consisted in the expert ability to work with an eye on effectiveness and applicability, thus largely erasing the difference between the development of the arts and the power of their effectiveness as applied arts. On the contrary, this meant that the function of the work as an effective force became more important than the work in itself. Bauhaus pedagogy is therefore primarily an evaluation of the intended effect as a function of the immanent artistic logic of the work’s creation: In his 1957 programmatic speech, “The Creative Act,” delivered in Philadelphia, Marcel Duchamp would develop this notion in terms of the relationship between the intentionality of producing, on the one hand, and the response, on the other hand—in the fundamental difference between the sought-after, but ineffectual aim of the artist and the effect that actually wins out in terms of the aesthetic reac- tion, but was not sought by the artist.

Today Bauhaus pedagogy—relayed by way of Marcel Duchamp, Waldorf schools, Black Mountain College, the new founding of the institution in Ulm, the journals Schule Heute with H. K. Ehmer and Ästhetik und Kommunikation with Knödler-Bunte—is represented most ade- quately by the Wuppertal school with Heiner Mühlmann, Ulrich Heinen, Axel Buether, Katja Pfeiffer, Kristian Wolf, and myself. With one of its programs of study (Industrial Design under Odo Klose), Department Five also had a very large effect on Deng’s reforms in China. Ulrich Heinen is fighting for art education’s return to the foundations of design as a transfer of implicit knowledge, seeking to counteract the unproductive, academic self-contemplation of those who are unwilling to engage in artistic work because of their faith in concepts.

Since 1965, when I began teaching the subject “non-normative aesthetics” at Hamburg’s Hochschule für bildende Künste (HFBK), I have been proposing that the status of the “theoretical object” be introduced for this realm between art’s production and its reception. This term identifies cognitive tools that can be used to achieve the transfer of implicit into explicit knowledge and vice versa. At that time, the theoretical objects stirred the general interest in the “didacta” expositions of teaching materials, which were based on an entirely new foundation. And large portions of these teaching materials seemed more interesting to us than the majority of the objects exhibited in museums.

The best-known example of the theoretical objects I developed at that time is a two-pack of clothes brushes, which make the abstract scholarly concept of self-reflexivity accessible to everyday understanding. The pair of brushes point to our experience that the functional logic of the brushes necessarily leads to the dirtying of the brushes, through the removal of dust on textiles or brushing hair. Everybody intuitively knows to apply the principle of brushing self-referentially to the brushes themselves, that is, to brush the brushes in order to clean them. A mute, everyday, practical activity like the brushing of brushes is enabled to form a scholarly concept through its generalization: Self-referentiality/self-reflexivity goes far beyond reflexiveness. The everyday world acknowledges scholarly work as a transfer of implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge.