Month: September 2017

“Psychology and psychological facts operate in domains that extend far beyond the long revered space of the laboratory” – an interview with Jacy L. Young

We are delighted today to publish a new special issue, ‘Psychology and its Publics,’ edited by Michael Pettit and Jacy L. Young. HHS editor-in-chief, Felicity Callard, spoke to Jacy about the background  to the issue, and how the question of publics, in particular, may push a heterogeneous collection of interdisciplinary voices to the fore within the history of psychology 

Felicity Callard (FC): Jacy, maybe we should start with the genesis of this special issue. Did it start with you explicitly wanting to stage an encounter between research on the history of psychology and research on publics? How has this focus inflected your own research trajectories?

Jacy Young (JY): Both Michael Pettit and I have an abiding interest in the manifold ways in which the human sciences have interacted with the public across history. This special issue emerged in conversations in the wake of my doctoral dissertation, a project that was very much concerned with psychologists’ various engagements with the public, specifically in the context of the history of questionnaire research in American psychology. As we note in our introduction, too often conversations about psychology and the public presume a passive public simply receiving whatever messaging the discipline happens to disseminate. And, the public as an entity is often under-theorized in these discussions. The term is employed but never defined with respect to its parameters and characteristics, its ontology remaining un- or at least under-addressed. The contributions to this special issue speak to these concerns in a variety of ways, expanding the conversation about the public to encompass much more vibrant, active, and multifaceted notions of the public. This is especially so in Kieran O’Doherty’s piece on the construction of deliberative publics. The nature of the public, and the ways in which particular publics are brought into being in interaction with the human sciences continues to be a theme in much of my work, as is the public’s influence on the shape of scientific practice and the kinds of knowledge produced therein. Exploring the nexus of the human sciences and the public implicated in much of this work is a rich and wide-ranging landscape for the historian of the human sciences.

FC: Your special issue dislodges the obdurate assumption that, as you put it, the discipline of psychology took form ‘when a small cluster of philosophers got out of their armchairs, adapted the apparatus of experimental physiology to their needs and secluded themselves in the tightly controlled spaces of the laboratory’. The question remains: why has this vision of psychology’s beginnings had such staying power?

JY: Much of this is a consequence of psychology’s perennial concern with its status as a science. The replication ‘crisis’ that has received so much attention of late is only the most recent evidence of this ongoing fixation with the discipline’s scientific credentials or lack thereof. And this is by no means a new concern. The narrative of psychology as an experimental, laboratory-based science began at the field’s very inception, yet even from these earliest days much of psychology’s work took place outside of laboratory spaces. The laboratory is, and has only ever been, one of many spaces in which the discipline of psychology conducts itself. This is especially so in the United States, the national context of much of my own research. Here psychology was an expansive enterprise from the start, at work in clinics, classrooms, business enterprises, and other decidedly public contexts as it sought to ensure the discipline’s influence within American society. This meant not only a place in the national conversation, but also recognition of its expertise and authority when it came to addressing a host of social concerns. Psychology’s diverse forms of practice and pursuit of disciplinary authority have not left us today, though their exact configurations may have changed. And given psychology’s ever present concerns about its scientific standing the narrative of the field originating in the laboratory – that designate site of scientific undertakings – continues to have traction. This is especially so because the history of psychology has often been written by and for psychologists, just those individuals most concerned with the question of the field’s scientific identity. As a consequence, histories of psychology often speak to psychologists’ concerns and preoccupations, and continue to put forth the narrative of psychology’s history as one rooted in laboratory practice.

That being said, there has been a marked shift in the histories of psychology produced in recent years. Much of the scholarship emerging from younger scholars, in say the last ten to fifteen years, is less concerned with this traditional narrative, often sidestepping it entirely and instead producing more diverse and nuanced accounts of psychology’s history. Where the laboratory story remains, however, is in the history of psychology textbook, which continues to be what most psychologists encounter and take up during their training as the singular narrative of the field’s development.

FC: Your introduction establishes the special issue as a coming together of history of psychology, science and technology studies (including Public Understanding of Science [PUS] and Public Engagement with Science [PES]), and communication studies. I was also struck by how much the articles in the special issue think with, and have things to offer to, feminist, queer and affect studies. Can you say more about what you hope your special issue might do in terms of opening up new disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to the history of psychology?

JY: This coming together is really predicated upon the fact that despite the relevance of Science and Technology Studies (STS) – especially in this instance, the Public Understanding of Science and Public Engagement with Science – and related fields to the history of psychology these areas remain largely separate endeavours. Although there are some scholars in STS who work on the human sciences, often these scholars and their projects exist apart from what is taking place in the history of psychology. Similarly, those in the history of psychology working on projects that interrogate the role of the public, and other considerations that are at the core of STS, often do so without fully or meaningfully engaging with happenings in STS. This disciplinary segregation is unfortunate and one this special issue goes someway to address. As we hope the issue illustrates, there is much that can be gained on both sides when it comes to engaging with the history of psychology in ways that incorporate insights from STS.

Historians of the human sciences are well-positioned to think with and alongside feminist, queer, and affect studies as these are, topically at least, concerns very much within the purview of the human sciences. In history of psychology scholarship thus far, feminist perspectives have had the most readily apparent influence, but there still remains much that can be done here. Queer studies, in particular, continue to be an under-recognized and under-utilized reference point for the historian of psychology. Certainly psychology has had much to say about sexuality over its history, and its practitioners have lived diverse lives, but thinking about these engagements in terms of the frameworks provided by queer studies is a rarity. And here Katherine Hubbard and Peter Hegarty’s contribution queering the history of psychology in the context of the Rorschach test and the graphic novel Watchmen serves an important function. The articles in this special issue that engage with these lines of thought provide concrete illustrations of just what may result from these unions. But this is by no means the sum total of what these spheres offer the historian of psychology. Hopefully the invaluable provocations of these and other fields mean we can look forward to many more projects along these lines in the future.

FC: There is significant heterogeneity in the disciplinary backgrounds and expertise amongst your contributors. Was this intentional and, if so, how so?

JY: In many respects this heterogeneity is a feature of our own professional lives. In my case, I completed my doctorate in the rare history of psychology program situated within a psychology department. Despite its location within psychology, the program was thoroughly interdisciplinary. This meant many fruitful cross-conversations with STS scholars and others, including those working in the History and Philosophy of Science. The result of this is a broad and various network of colleagues, each working on aspects of the human sciences from different disciplinary perspectives. This kind of exposure to novel approaches to the history of psychology and related disciplines has been incredibly intellectually stimulating. Interdisciplinarity is also now second nature as I navigate a bit of a Venn diagram of colleagues spread across scholarly societies that range from the Forum for History of Human Science (a special interest group of the History of Science Society), Cheiron (the International Society for the History of Behavioral and Social Sciences), and the Society for the History of Psychology (Division 26 of the American Psychological Association), among other organizations. Bringing together scholars from diverse fields is both the norm and, to my mind, the ideal. The result is an amalgam of individuals with unique and productive takes on the history of psychology and its relation to the public.

FC: Your introduction makes it very clear why history of psychology needs to take on board the insights of STS and PUS/PES. You might say that STS has, similarly, not always been that attuned to the psy disciplines and the history of psychology. What might your special issue do for STS (and PUS/PES)?

JY: Attending to the history of psychology in the context of STS opens up a number of avenues for scholarship. This is perhaps especially so in the context of PUS/PES. It not only highlights the ways in which the public is an active participant in these conversations but also brings to the fore how the public, especially in the case of psychological knowledge, may be affected in potentially profound ways by such knowledge. Given its subject matter, psychological knowledge carries with it the possibility of altering, and itself being altered by, individuals’ self-understanding, à la Ian Hacking’s notion of looping effects. Thinking about the impact of the knowledge science produces on individuals lives in not only material and practical, but psychological, terms is something that is often only obliquely addressed. This is likewise the case with the role of psychology in helping craft the public and the public sphere that are central to work in PUS/PES. In terms of STS’s theorizing about the public, these psychological dimensions are challenging and productive realms for further work.

FC: You and your contributors challenge the usual temporal and spatial frameworks used to understand psychology’s histories and geographies. Where might this challenge take us in future research on the history of the human sciences?

JY: In the past several years there has been growing interest in tackling the history of recent social sciences (e.g., a recently founded Society for the History of Recent Social Science), a trend that is evident in some of the contributions to the special issue. Taking the history of psychology forward to the events of more recent years can at times be an intimidating and fraught process, especially when dealing with histories that involve living subjects with their own, sometimes very definite, narratives of what transpired. But moving history forward to the recent past is also an exciting endeavour that is opening up new lines of research, including work on evermore timely topics. Alexandra Rutherford’s piece on rape surveys is a prime example of just this kind of work.

Taking a long view of the history of psychology also means not only looking forward to more recent times, but further back in time before that long feted move of psychology into the laboratory. Thus, Edward Jones-Imhotep’s account of the French Revolution’s public psychology, sentimentalism, and its influence on the rationalized process of execution via guillotine. In fact, the laboratory and that era it is most often associated with – the nineteenth century – are themselves largely if not entirely absent from the special issue. This is clear evidence of the many non-laboratory spheres in which psychology operates, many of them not only public but popular, as in Hubbard and Hegarty’s examination of the Watchmen graphic novel and Luke Stark’s work on Albert Ellis’s rational therapy and its embeddedness in popular media forms of the day.

As the contributions to this special issue reinforce, psychology and psychological facts operate in domains that extend far beyond the long revered space of the laboratory. Psychology’s presence in such spaces, and its attendant relation to the public, continues to this day. Consideration of the intertwined histories of psychology and the public has much to tell us about how we understand both ourselves and the public we are positioned within.

Jacy L. Young is a psychologist and historian whose work explores the methods and practices of the human sciences. She recently completed a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Surrey.

Felicity Callard is Editor-in-Chief of History of the Human Sciences. From September 2017, she is director of the Institute for Social Research at Birkbeck, University of London.

“I still sense an awkward feeling at the economics faculty at Humboldt when it is reminded of the GDR past, as if things went too far” – an interview with Till Düppe

We were delighted in our current tissue, to publish Till Düppe‘s new article, “The generation of the GDR: Economists at the Humboldt University of Berlin caught between loyalty and relevance.” The article is an account of a particular generation of economists at Humboldt – socialized in Nazi Germany, growing up through during the Second World War and the Stalinist period, becoming committed to a state career in the GDR, but whose careers then ended very suddenly, in the ‘ultimate reform’ of 1989. The article draws on Karl Mannheim’s theory of generations to present a very particular historicization of the GDR, one that limns the tension between ‘the ideological and productive functions of knowledge in socialism, that is, between loyalty and relevance.’ Angus Nicholls, one of the editors of HHS, spoke to Till about the GDR economists.

Angus Nicholls (AN): Till, can you tell us a little bit about your own academic career, and how and why you came to be interested in economists in the German Democratic Republic (GDR)?

Till Düppe (TD): I’m trained in continental philosophy and in economics which led me into the history and philosophy of economics. In my previous work, I was interested in how economics became mathematical, and how that development was related to the U.S. during the Cold War. In this paper I am working on the same period, but on a very different group of people, GDR economists, who I met during my post-doc in Berlin. But they are in fact not so different from the American mathematical economists: both operate within rather closed discourses, such that there is little understanding of how they see themselves. This is how I felt when I was at the faculty in Berlin (at Humboldt) from which the GDR generation had been excluded after German reunification, even though they still feel attached to ‘their’ institution. I try to create more understanding, Verstehen, just as I did when I was working on mathematical economists in the US.

AN: In your paper you mention Karl Mannheim’s theory of generations and its importance for the sociology of knowledge. Can you tell us about what you mean by ‘the generation of the GDR’ and why this generation is important for understanding GDR history? 

TD: In a narrow sense, by ‘the generation of the GDR’ I mean the generation that passed their entire professional career, roughly from age 20 to 60, in that state (which existed between 1949 and 1990). The article is thus about the life-paths of those born in the early 1930s. Mannheim was interested in generations because they share similar memories, a similar understanding of current events, and also similar hopes and fears regarding the future – all of which shapes a specific mode of thought. It’s the historical equivalent of a ‘class.’ The style of thinking of the economists at Humboldt University at times of the GDR (most of them were born in the early 1930s) was indeed quite distinct from what preceded and followed, such that they stick out historically. When I speak of the generation of the GDR, I also think of this epistemological aspect that a generational experience ‘generated,’ ‘brought about’ the belief in the project of the GDR. The life-path of this generation ultimately helps us to understand how the GDR was stabilized, was maintained, and then fell apart.

AN: What are the advantages and disadvantages of using generations as a conceptual tool to analyse the history of the human sciences? What does this category make visible from an historical point of view?

TD: Well, the disadvantage is of course that the notion of a generation is really a cultural fiction. It was indeed challenging when writing the article to refer to individual experiences, while focusing on an entire generation, and this trying to avoid making claims about individuals. But what I like about this notion is that it is somehow in between the individual and the social structure. You know, an event like a war imposes itself on an individual, just like social structures, but it is still lived experience. But whatever the advantages or disadvantages, the notion suggested itself to me because the Humboldt economists saw themselves as a collective group through their shared memories, and their shared understanding of their historical task. It was they themselves who did not wish to be singled out as individuals and who acted as a generation.

AN: What distinguished the role played by academic economists in the GDR? How was their role in society different to those in other academic fields?

TD: Economists are interesting, compared to other disciplines and professions, because they had to represent the leading beliefs of the state – i.e. Marxism-Leninism – but they also had to solve practical problems of running the state, in this case educating financial administrators. They lived through a tension that was characteristic of the entire GDR project: a tension between loyalty to the state and a commitment to be practically relevant to the state. That’s what they had to negotiate at different stages of their careers.

AN: To what extent did GDR economists of this generation have freedom to pursue their own research interests, independently of questions of state ideology and Marxism-Leninism? Was, for example, party membership a precondition for an academic career in this field?

TD: Party membership was not a formal but an informal requirement. In fact, a vanishing minority of professors were not party members – which is different to the preceding professors’ generation, and also different to middle-rank university positions. As for independent research, this was hardly encouraged: the economists hardly had the time because their main task, in contrast to economists at the Academy of Sciences, was teaching; most research was commissioned, subject to the planned economy, and controlled by so-called ‘practice partners,’ in this case the ministry of finance and the State Bank, among others. Additionally, international contacts, though existent, were complicated, not least due to language barriers. All of this made research, compared to today, a minor aspect of these professor’s lives. Research was generally confined in specialized fields that could more easily draw from research on an international level, such as demography or also some parts of sociology.

AN: That’s interesting. Is the research produced by this generation of GDR economists now only of historical value, or are some of the scholars discussed in your paper still taken seriously by academics in the field of economics? Who were the standout scholars of this generation?

TD: Most Humboldt economists were specialized in public finance, which was more a matter of administration than understanding the complex system of an economy. The bureaucratic character of the GDR made the kind of knowledge they produced comparable to what educators in administration do today, i.e. explaining institutional rules of conduct rather than offering law-like ‘theories’ on the economy. In that sense, the idea of truly inquisitive economic research is limited to a ‘capitalist’ economy. So this paper is not written in order to assess the quality of their scientific contributions, but to show what role economic knowledge plays in a socialist context. Even posing the question of quality of research would be a category mistake, and in fact this is exactly what happened after 1990. One could have renamed the faculty into administrative sciences and just begun another faculty in economics, as we understand it. Indeed, one of the professors did exactly that: he founded a school for local administrators. In political economy, I should mention one scholar, Dieter Klein, who indeed stood out. He was a reformist intellectual  close to the party. What he wrote would count today as a mixture of political theory and economic sociology, which is interesting in its own right. But also he as one of the most progressive economists somewhat talked past the political activists when it came to the first protests in the late 1980s.

AN: How did these academic economists view the fall of the Berlin wall and how did this impact on their careers? What role did they play in the reform of the GDR, which led to the ‘ultimate reform’ of the wall coming down?

TD: When the wall came down hardly anyone in this generation thought of the end of the GDR. The society was moved by a strong desire for actual democratic reform and, after all, one could hardly see the wall as a symbol of democratic values (though the planned economy could be so interpreted, as I show in the paper). The fall of the wall was a moment of pride for them, because it happened peacefully and they all remembered the violence at comparable occasions such as in 1953. They themselves played no role in this movement, which came largely from the youth. The misunderstanding was that for the ‘GDR generation’ it was all about finally getting over Stalinism. But that was simply not what the younger generation had in mind. Sadly, the younger generation had great difficulties finding a professional place in the new state. The GDR generation instead retired, and hardly changed their mind about the nature of the GDR.

AN: On that note, how was economics treated as a subject by the German authorities following reunification, and how did this affect the eventual fates of economics institutes of the former GDR and the professors within them?

TD: Universities in Germany are run by provinces, so each province treated their economists differently. The Berlin Senate, which governed Humboldt, distinguished between different disciplines: philosophy, history, law, and also economics had to be closed down and then relaunched. These disciplines were thus put under general suspicion while others passed without much change (though mathematicians, for example, were known to be even more party-loyal). The reform to economics was radical. Hardly any of the GDR staff were kept on, which was unseen in the history of the faculty, even compared to 1933 and 1945. I still sense an awkward feeling at the economics faculty at Humboldt when it is reminded of the GDR past, as if things went too far. The judgement of low scientific quality, which was misplaced anyway, made the reform appear as an act of force. But anyhow, this did not really concern the generation that I describe in this paper, since they mostly went into retirement.

AN: Is this paper part of a larger project? How does it fit into your broader research programme?

TD: Yes, it’s part of a series of historical studies on economic knowledge in socialism that I started some years ago. I am still working on the secret service archives of the GDR, exploring how the line between expertise and ideology was drawn in this context. I am also organizing a conference on this topic in 2018 with scholars from all sorts of fields. So stay tuned.

Till Düppe is Professor of Economic Sciences at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He is the author of The Making of the Economy: A Phenomenology of Economic Science (Lexington) and, with Roy Weintraub, Finding Equilibrium: Arrow, Debreu, McKenzie, and the Problem of Scientific Credit (Princeton).

Angus Nicholls is Reader in German and Comparative Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author Myth and the Human Sciences: Hans Blumenberg’s Theory of Myth (Routledge) and Goethe’s Concept of the Daemonic: After the Ancients (Camden House)

Book Review: Homo Sovieticus

W. Velminski, Homo Sovieticus: Brain Waves, Mind Control, and Telepathic Destiny, trans. by Erik Butler, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017, £14.95 pbk, 128pp, ISBN: 9780262035699

by Hannah Proctor, Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin

‘Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole land’ declared V.I. Lenin in a 1920 speech.[ref]https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/nov/21.htm[/ref] Wladimir Velminski cites this famous phrase in the opening pages of his slim and punchy book, Homo Sovieticus, recently published in English translation by MIT Press. But while Lenin was referring to the electrical infrastructure required for industrialisation in the wake of the October Revolution, Velminski explores how Soviet power harnessed electromagnetic technologies and theories to communise the mind in order to produce ‘uniformity of thought’ and achieve what he bombastically describes as a form of ‘collective brainwashing’ (p. 2, p. 1). Telepathy and hypnosis, or what Velminski calls ‘neural prostheses’, provide the thematic links between chapters. Originally published in German by Merve Verlag – primarily known for their translations of French and Italian philosophy, theory and political thought – Homo Sovieticus is not a work of cultural history or the history of science in any conventional sense. Indeed, at first glance it might seem to have more in common with McKenzie Wark’s Molecular Red: Theory of the Anthropocene (which includes discussions of Soviet theories of nature by Alexander Bogdanov and Andrei Platonov), than with scholarly monographs discussing specific Soviet scientific disciplines, discourses, thinkers or schools of thought. Superficial stylistic similarities aside, however, Wark excavates specific strands of early Soviet thought he perceives to have radical potential in order to challenge understandings of nature in the ‘capitalist realist’ present, whereas Velminski treats telepathy as a metaphor for comprehending the oppressive operations of Soviet power in the past.[ref]For a good critical review of Wark’s engagement with Soviet intellectual history see: Maria Chehonadskih, ‘The Anthropocene in 90 Minutes’ Mute Magazine, 23 September 2015 – http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/anthropocene-90-minutes (Accessed 28th March 2017).[/ref]

Homo Sovieticus is comprised of a combined and uneven jumble of vignettes about telepathy plucked from disparate moments across the Soviet period, encompassing descriptions of cybernetic theories, introductions to technological inventions, glosses of science fiction novels, citations of avant garde poetry, and analyses of television broadcasts. Velminksi asserts that these scattered examples all participated in ‘making a New Man endowed with telepathic destiny’ and colluded with the state in ‘steering the psyche’ (note the singular noun) of the Soviet masses (p. 48, p. 83). In Velminski’s account, Soviet power is treated as omnipotent yet dispersed, and is placed in a temporal vacuum – here 1920, 1965 and 1989 are barely distinguishable. The introduction proclaims an interest in exploring ‘how phantasms haunting science were enlisted to steer thinking and manipulate the population,’ which indicates Velminski’s interest in probing the implications of scientific thought beyond the laboratory (p. 6). But this ghostly metaphor, in which the drivers of manipulation remain frustratingly spectral – phantasms from where? enlisted by whom? steered by what? – also foreshadows the elusive manner in which Velminski’s cross-disciplinary arguments proceed.

The book opens with an image entitled ‘The Material Foundations of Telepathy’, reproduced from a 1965 sketch by the obscure cyberniticist Pavel Gulyaev, depicting two men sawing a tree trunk. The figures are connected in a kind of circuit of energy with various (untranslated) labels and waves surrounding them. A star is shown beaming into the eye of the man on the left, which appears reproduced inside his head. An arrow arcs from his head to the head of the man on the right, in which we see another star gleaming: ‘A star is shining where thought occurs. A Soviet star: a neural prosthesis’ (p. 1). According to Velminski, electromagnetic waves, or what Gulyaev called psikhon, enter the mind from the outside world creating and sustaining feedback loops of (mis)information, which reorganise consciousness in the process. For Velminski, the image acts as a metaphor (or metonym) for the entire Soviet project, which, in his characterisation, saw autonomous thought replaced by identikit ideology: ‘The stars where brains should be indicate that mental transfer has been politically instrumentalised through and through; the scene legitimates censorship and control on the basis of established scientific insight and the speculation of research’ (p. 2). However, Velminski’s reading of Gulyaev’s diagram, which introduces and informs the entire book’s argument, requires a few bold hermeneutic leaps: in the first place it is not clear from the diagram that the stars are necessarily emblems of Soviet communism (or what it would mean if they were). It would be just as plausible to argue, for example, that the stars were selected for their radiant properties rather than their political overtones, functioning as visual representations of the emanations of electromagnetic thought waves. And even if we follow Velminski’s reading, it is not therefore self-evident that Gulyaev’s diagram valorises ‘censorship and control’. After all, isn’t all knowledge gained from forms of interchange between humans, their external environments and each other? Velminski introduces the diagram in isolation so it is also difficult to judge where the image fits within Gulyaev’s arguments, where Gulyaev fits within the Soviet scientific community, how widely his ideas circulated, or to what extent his theories differed from or overlapped with those of cyberneticists elsewhere.[ref]For a detailed historical account of Soviet cybernetic theory exploring overlaps and divergences between cybernetics on either side of the iron curtain (and which includes no mention of Gulyaev in its index), see: Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: a History of Soviet Cybernetics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).[/ref] Perhaps from his extensive studies of Gulyaev’s papers Velminski feels confident in making these politicized assertions but the introductory material he presents does not convincingly corroborate his thesis, which instead juts out like a poorly fitted rhetorical prosthesis.

Homo Sovieticus’s second chapter is dedicated to a discussion of the theoretician of labour Aleksei Gastev who is characterised as a kind of proto-Gulyaev and ‘pioneer of cybernetics’ (p. 29). Velminski introduces Gastev’s Taylor-inspired ideas regarding the Scientific Organisation of Labour [Nauchnaya Organizatsiya Truda – NOT] placing emphasis on the concept of ‘setting’ [ustanovka]. He argues that Gastev conceived of humans as perfectible, self-regulating machines. But despite acknowledging that Gastev did not depict people as passive automatons controlled by an external power, Velminski nonetheless reads ‘setting’ as an insidious form of internalised domination. Velminski highlights ‘self-observation’ as the main link between Gastev and cybernetic theory rather than a concern with labour efficiency. Indeed, absent from Velminski’s discussion of Gastev is any consideration of the political vision underpinning it: Gastev was not interested in organising labour with optimal efficiency for its own sake, but for the sake of the worker performing it who, he hoped, could spend much less time working if the tasks s/he was required to perform were executed as quickly as possible. A reorganisation of human life along mechanical lines might sound cold and calculated but Gastev was concerned with emancipating people from work so they could expend their energy on other activities. The chapters that follow this discussion similarly cover fascinating episodes in Soviet scientific, technological and cultural history. But folding the disparate phenomena under analysis into a narrative concerned primarily with ‘the emergence of immanent strategies of power, apparatuses for influencing, methods of surveillance, and paranoid modes of thought’ (p. 5) risks downplaying the nuances, discontinuities and internal contradictions of Soviet thought.

The logic of the feedback loop that structures Velminski’s argument suggests that Soviet ‘star thoughts’ have an origin somewhere but that on-going processes of telepathic transmission render ideology self-sustaining. In this model there is no master transmitter on the roof of the Kremlin; everything and everyone becomes both signal and receiver. As Velminski states in the book’s conclusion, Gulyaev’s diagram illustrates telepathic forms of power ‘which aim to hold sway over the masses, control them, and install “star thoughts” [Stern-Gedanken] that, once up and running, no longer require direct guidance’ (p. 97). For Velminski the receivers of telepathic messages become indistinguishable from the messages themselves. According to this model of subjectivity the capacity for people to joke cynically about their experiences of Soviet life would be as unthinkable as sincere engagements with communist ideals. Indeed, Velminski’s characterisation of Soviet society and subjectivity as homogenous and monochrome – like the book’s title and invocation of ‘brainwashing’ – seems to belong to the Cold War era.[ref]Homo Sovieticus is also the title of a perestroika era satirical novel by Alexander Zinoviev. For background on the history of the term ‘brainwashing’ see the blog of the Wellcome Trust funded research project at Birkbeck entitled ‘The Cold War: a history of brainwashing and the psychological professions’: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/hiddenpersuaders/[/ref] At another point in the book Velminski deploys a biological metaphor of contagion to describe the processes by which he imagines patterns of thought emerge and spread:

Just as physical germs of infection produce massive effects and can prove ruinous, far beyond the individual scale, for entire population groups, so, too, do psychic agents of contagion tend to spread; they are active everywhere and conveyed by words or gestures, through books and newspapers. Psychic “microbes” are all-pervasive and capable of developing under all conditions; wherever we may be, the danger of psychic infection exists (p. 81).

Unlike the metaphors of telepathy that recur throughout the book this scientific analogy is not explicitly anchored to historically and culturally situated discourses. It also implies that the kinds of processes Velminski is describing were not specific to the Soviet context but could occur anywhere. But this sits uneasily within the arc of the broader argument, which seems to insist on the exceptionally ‘ruinous’ qualities of Soviet scientific theories, practices and discourses. Velminski downplays intellectual currents or technological developments that traversed the iron curtain or emerged before the October Revolution. Although he mentions that Soviet scientists were influenced by Michael Faraday, a British theorist of electromagnetism, and acknowledges that radio technologies were developed by Thomas Edison, he does not probe how these cross-pollinations might complicate his conclusions about the inherently authoritarian and internally undifferentiated waves of thought he perceives coursing through Soviet society. He does not discuss how histories of telepathy or hypnosis unfolded in the West nor does he consider exchanges between Soviet and Western scientists or mention that in response to the flurry of interest in telepathy in the Soviet Union the CIA sponsored its own programmes of research into ‘remote viewing’ at the Stanford Research Institute (to cite one prominent example). [ref]For a recent transnational perspective on Cold War-era research in the ‘psy’ disciplines and communications, see: Benno Nietzel, ‘Propaganda, psychological warfare and communication research in the USA and the Soviet Union during the Cold War’, History of the Human Sciences, 29, 4-5 (2016).[/ref] Would Velminski conclude that American citizens had identical thought stars and stripes installed in their heads or would he claim that Western feedback loops were somehow more democratic than their Soviet counterparts?

Velminski is based in Germany and participated in a project directed by the German media theorist Friedrich Kittler in Berlin whose work he also cites in the book. Indeed, Homo Sovieticus could be read as an attempt to imagine, in the style of Kittler’s Discourse Networks 1800/1900, a Discourse Network 1917 or Discourse Network USSR with the telepathic feedback loop as the defining technology of that specific time and place. [ref]Velminski refers explicitly to ‘Soviet discourse networks’ and later the ‘discourse network of Soviet telepathy’, p. 48, p. 51.[/ref]But Kittler takes more care to distinguish between scientific or technological metaphors and technologies themselves. He discusses Freud’s ‘Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psychoanalysis’ (1912) in which the psychoanalyst is likened to a telephone receiver adjusted to the transmitting microphone of the analysand. According to Freud, the ideal analyst should be like a telephone, which does not prioritise certain utterances over others or impose any meaning on the sounds being captured by the machine. However, Kittler is quick to point out that Freud’s telephone analogy is an analogy rather than a telephone – ultimately the acoustic data of the consulting room is not recorded by a machine but listened to by a human analyst who transforms the material of the session into written words from memory; unlike the telephone the analyst selects certain significant things to record.[ref]Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, CA; Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 37.[/ref] For Kittler, distinctions between different transcription technologies – be they telephones or pen-wielding psychoanalysts – are crucial because they record, store and transmit information in distinct ways, and the meanings they are capable of conveying are contingent on those processes.

In Velminski’s discussion of the science fiction novel The Ruler of the World by Aleksandr Romanovich Belyaev, on the other hand, he argues that ‘science is directly transposed into literature’ (p. 44)[ref]For a carefully researched analysis of the influence of theoretical debates in evolutionary biology on Belyaev attentive to the differences between science and fiction, see: Muireann Maguire, ‘Post-Lamarckian Prodigies: Evolutionary Biology in Soviet Science Fiction,’New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 43 (2009), 23-53.[/ref] and declares an interest in tracing how ‘traces of electromagnetic faith’ that originated in failed or inconclusive scientific experiments found their way into literature (p. 51). He proposes that ideas regarding electromagnetic thought transmission between biological organisms originally developed in laboratories were ‘reenacted’ in science fiction and thus successfully transmitted ‘thought rays’ to readers. Velminski argues that telepathy was not only represented in fiction but was actually achieved as it entered the ‘social laboratory’ of everyday life (p. 52). He articulates this in a Baudrillardian register (with a dash of Michel Foucault for good measure):

Symbolic practices, once set in motion, operate independently and bring about hyperreality – a second world of active simulation – which, as the sum of ambient dispositives, feeds into (mental) representations, needs, desires, and perception (p. 49).

This conclusion, however, seems to require that analogies be treated literally, as if (to return to Kittler’s example) a psychoanalyst was actually a telephone rather than merely like a telephone. What of the relationships between ‘hyperreality’ and reality? Velminski slips from identifying a scattered interest in telepathy in Soviet culture to arguing that Soviet power was like telepathy to saying that Soviet power was telepathy. However, despite all his genre jumping and technological somersaults, ultimately for Velminski, the medium is not the message; the message is the message.[ref]Velminski cites a similar though less famous phrase of Marshall McLuhan’s as the epigraph to his fourth chapter: ‘The psychic and social disturbance created by the TV image and not the TV programming, occasions daily comment in the press’ (p. 55).[/ref] Homo Sovieticus does not discuss television and radio as specific technologies in a manner consistent with Kittler’s methodologies but claims that they ‘fetter[ed] minds’ (p. 69) in the Soviet context due to state control of broadcasting: ‘Control over media and being controlled by media are linked in a feedback system’ (p. 82). Velminski ends up undermining his thesis by prioritising content over form, implying that the logic of the feedback loop only really applies to phenomena dealing explicitly with telepathy.

The last example Velminski discusses is Anatoly Kashiprovsky’s long and hugely popular television hypnosis sessions, broadcast on state television at the end of the perestroika era, which are interpreted as ‘the last effort of Soviet power to initiate the citizenry into the mysteries of the communist apparatus that was in the course of disappearing’ (p. 87). A recent article exploring the place of Kashiprovsky’s séances and healing sessions in the cultural memory of the perestroika era by Simon Huxtable does not consider the kinds of hypnotic precedents in Soviet culture touched on in Velminski’s book at all.[ref]Simon Huxtable, ‘Remembering a Problematic Past: TV Mystics, Perestroika and the 1990s in Post-Soviet Media and Memory’, European Journal of Cultural Studies (2017), 1–17.[/ref] The examples Velminski assembles do indicate that such precedents exist but Velminski’s grandiose claims regarding the telepathic underpinnings of Soviet society tend to drown out the more subtle forms of continuity his materials gesture towards; he is more interested in telepathy as a master analogy for understanding Soviet culture than in exploring telepathic practices and discourses as cultural phenomena.  Perhaps prioritising his materials over his overarching thesis would have allowed the complexities of those hypnotic histories to come to the fore and a less stereotyped portrait of Soviet power may have emerged in the process.

Homo Sovieticus ends with a curious epilogue in which Velminski discusses the 2003 film Hypnosis by the Russian artist Pavel Pepperstein in which six women are shown gazing at six penises which gradually become slightly, though never fully, erect. For Jacques Lacan, the penis is the physical sexual organ, whereas the phallus is a signifier, which exists in relation to the desire of an Other.[ref]Indeed, according to a Lacanian reading the woman is the phallus in that she is paradoxically defined by that which she lacks. Lacan distinguishes between male and female desire as a distinction between having and being the phallus. See, Jacques Lacan, ‘The Signification of the Phallus’, Écrits, trans. by Bruce Fink (New York, NY: WW Norton, 2006), pp. 575-584.[/ref] But in another strangely literalised reading, Velminski claims that in its transition from flaccidity to erection the penis in the film becomes a phallus – ‘it undergoes transformation into a sign’ (p. 91).  Velminski adds a last metaphor to his already mixed pile claiming that ‘one can draw an analogy between the penis striving to become a phallus and Soviet power’. He likens the ‘gentle stimulation’ of the women’s gazes to the diagram by Gulyaev depicting the material foundations of telepathy with which his book began. Here the ‘beautiful women’s face[s]’ act as ‘an icon of culture’ with which the penises are in ‘dialogue’; the implication is that the women are analogous to the ‘star thoughts’ of Soviet power and the penises analogous to the Soviet masses (or the sawing men in Gulyaev’s diagram). Under hypnosis, Velminski says, established signs make ‘little (active) sense; one simply stands under their influence and “takes it”’ (the flagrantly misogynistic implications of this statement do not really bear unpicking).  In a final liberal coup de théâtre, Velminski asserts that the women’s failure to fully arouse the penises so they ‘solidify-into-a-sign’ indicates that the ‘hypnotic power of the influencing machine does not prevail’. Luckily penises know better than to fall under the spell of manipulative women trying to control them with nonsensical communist thought stars. But the semi-erect penis is not quite an image of the autonomous individual’s resistance to the hypnotic tendencies of ‘Soviet power’ figured as a seductive woman; Velminski’s parting line is more resigned: ‘the parties involved remain floating in the empty, expanding sphere of hypnosis’ (p. 97). Sometimes analogies make little (active) sense; one simply stands under their influence and “takes it,” but Velminski’s conclusion is actively nonsensical in that it cannot account for the collapse of the Soviet Union (or the failure of Kashiprovsky’s television séances to hold sway over the masses indefinitely). He might assert that Soviet ‘star thoughts’ were devoid of meaning but he does not view this as an obstacle to effective hypnosis. In Homo Sovieticus a history of Soviet hypnosis is subordinated to a kind of meta-history of the Soviet Union and thus seems strangely external to history.

Hannah Proctor is a postdoctoral research fellow at the ICI Berlin. She completed a PhD, on the Soviet psychologist and neurologist Alexander Luria, at Birkbeck in 2015. She is a member of the editorial collective of Radical Philosophy.