Watching the current University and College Union (UCU) picket lines from afar – I’m a postdoctoral fellow based in Germany – I was trying to think if I’d ever come across any psychological writings on striking, and, more specifically on picket lines. Of course, as Chris Millard has pointed out already in this series, strikes are not primarily expressions of feeling; they are withdrawals of labour. Indeed, references to strikers’ ‘deep’ or ‘strong’ feelings in letters by university Vice-Chancellors seem to downplay the material demands being made by striking workers. I was nonetheless interested in finding out whether theorisations of the psychological experience of picket lines – as specific spatial, temporal and interpersonal phenomena – already exist.
Perhaps unsurprisingly a search of the multiple psychoanalytic journals included in the Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing database for ‘picket line’ yielded just fourteen results. I looked at the two earliest examples that appeared on this list and in both cases the picket line appeared as a fraught symbol for individual bourgeois analysands. In a discussion of compulsive hand-washing from 1938 a female patient writes a short story whose protagonist is based on her hotel maid’s participation in an elevator operator strike. The patient took up the workers’ cause, organising meetings in support of their actions. In this period of political involvement, the analyst reports, that patient’s hand-washing stopped. As soon as her involvement with the strike ceased (interpreted by the analyst as a form of sublimation), her ‘compulsive’ behaviour resumed.[ref]George S. Goldman, ‘A Case of Compulsive Handwashing’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 7 (1938), 96-121.[/ref] In an article from 1943 a ‘frigid hysteric’ patient dreams of a bus trip being cancelled due to a transport strike. In the subsequent interpretation of the dream, which includes a long cutting from a newspaper article on a strike of charwomen the patient had read, the analyst interprets her reaction to the story as relating to her ‘desperately struggling for male status’; she did not ordinarily support strikes on political groundsm but did so in this case due to the gender of the workers.[ref]Edmund Bergler, ‘A Third Function of the ‘Day Residue’ in Dreams’ Psychoanalytic Quarterly, (1943) 12, 353-370.[/ref] In neither example are the patients themselves involved directly in the strikes and neither have first-hand experience of picket lines; the strikes’ psychic significance is tied to existing individual neuroses. Of course, it might be that non-psychoanalytic theories, with less sinister assumptions about group psychology, might be a better place to start for approaching the question at hand. But instead I found myself thinking about the possibility of approaching the question from different fields altogether.
While researching for a recent article reflecting on commemorations of the 1917 October Revolution I found myself reading about early twentieth-century mass spectacles, left-wing pageants and revolutionary dance troupes in the Soviet Union and America.[ref]https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/revolutionary-commemoration[/ref] In many of these cases the relationship between ‘actual’ historical events and ‘fictional’ theatrical reenactments proved to be blurry. As the title of a 1933 piece Edith Segal choreographed with the Needle Trades Workers Dance Group in New York indicates – Practice for the Picket Line – workers in union or party affiliated dance groups would create scenarios drawing on their own experiences, which would in turn function as rehearsals for future political action.[ref]Ellen Graff, Stepping Left: Dance and Politics in New York City, 1928–1942 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 43.[/ref] But as a historian of the ‘psy’ disciplines with an interest in affective histories of the left, I was particularly intrigued by how the psychological function of such performances was articulated by their creators, participants and audiences. Perhaps these examples, though remote from the ‘psy’ disciplines, could provide material for thinking through the psychic dimension of the collective experience of picketing.
In January 1913 silk weavers and dyers in Paterson, New Jersey went on strike after four workers were fired for complaining about the introduction of a new four-loom technology that required a less skilled workforce. With the strike still on-going but little coverage of it in the mainstream press, activists and intellectuals in New York collaborated with the striking workers to produce an elaborate pageant in Madison Square Gardens on June 7 1913 , sponsored by the International Workers of the World (IWW). The pageant was intended to publicise the strike and raise money for the strike fund, which was urgently needed as the striking workers and their families were at risk of starvation. But the pageant’s purpose was financial, propagandistic and educational, it was also emotional. The Pageant saw 1,029 strikers reenacting the dramatic events of the picket lines punctuated by familiar songs from the labour movement in which the audience was invited to join.[ref]For the programme of the pageant and other associated primary documents, see: ‘Paterson Strike Pageant’, The Drama Review: TDR, 15, 3 (1971), 60-71.[/ref] The dramatic, fast-paced temporality of the staged strike differed markedly from the drawn-out nature of the real one but the worker-performers found the rehearsal process gave them a chance to reflect on and process their experiences. Almost 15,000 people watched the performance which was then described in detail in New York newspapers. The sympathetic leftist publication Solidarity claimed that the performance ‘seized the imagination’, while the hostile New York Times accused it of ‘stimulating mad passion against law and order’[ref]These reviews are cited in Steve Golin, The Fragile Bridge: Paterson Silk Strike, 1913 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), p. 166, p. 169.[/ref]. Although these accounts differed in their political assessment of the production they both emphasised its psychological power. Although the strike was simulated, the passions the reenactment stimulated were real.
The pageant failed to raise significant amounts of money and many subsequently declared it a failure, which distracted workers and took them away from the real pickets outside the mill.[ref]See, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, ‘The Truth About the Paterson Strike’, Rebel Voices: an IWW Anthology, ed. Joyce Kornbluh (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965 pp. 214-226.[/ref] Indeed, the organisers produced the spectacle at a loss. The Paterson silk strike itself was soon defeated. Workers began returning to the factory in July and many of their demands were never met. Yet some discussions both by contemporaries and historians insist that the pageant succeeded not only as an aesthetic innovation which inspired future artistic endeavours – John Reed, one of the New York intellectuals who instigated the production would soon leave for Europe; his book Ten Days That Shook the World would become a defining account of the October Revolution inspiring Sergei Eisenstein’s Octoberin turn – but also as a cognitive and affective interpersonal experience which similarly outlived the performance itself. Though sufficient funds were not raised, consciousnesses were raised (to use the vocabulary of the pageant’s participants and chroniclers).[ref]See, for example, Leslie Fishbein, ‘The Paterson Pageant (1913): The Birth of Docudrama as a Weapon in the Class Struggle’, New York History, 72, 2 (1991), 197-233, Linda Nochlin, ‘The Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913’, Art in America, 62, 1974, 64-68. In her discussion of Segal’s performance Ellen Graff writes that ‘Radicals hoped that mock demonstrations… would prepare workers for actual confrontations as well as engage their sympathies and raise political consciousness.’ Stepping Left, p. 43.[/ref]
The terms ‘class consciousness’ and ‘political consciousness’ in reflections on the performance function as psychological concepts despite rarely having been explicitly understood as such, and as concepts which seem to have gone largely un-thematised within the ‘psy’ disciplines. One starting point for trying to think more about the psychology of the picket line would be to think more carefully about how these terms were used in this context, how they allude to political concepts elaborated by Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, György Lukács and others, but also depart from or complicate them. I’d be interested in thinking about how an emphasis on gaining a broad intellectual understanding of a political situation was combined with an insistence of the importance of immediate emotional experiences, how emotional experience can allow individuals to situate themselves within a collective, and so on.
Perhaps more central, however, would be a consideration of the function of re-enactment as a form of reflection upon political action (and even as a form of political action in its own right) enabling strikers and their supporters to better understand and communicate their struggle. This might open up ways of approaching the (necessarily very different) forms of reflection, representation and dissemination that attend current disputes. Of course, there is often a kind of theatricality to the picket line as has been evident during the current UCU strikes – which can function to communicate demands, alleviate the tedium of standing around in the cold all day, attract more people to the picket etc – but the example of the pageant brings into focus a slight different set of questions about how striking workers represent and communicate their struggles to themselves and others to forge and sustain the solidarity necessary to resist capitulation. This seems particularly urgent in a context in which collective memories of labour organising can be hard to locate.
The current strikes have not succeeded yet, but UCU branches’ rejection of the deal proposed on Monday (March 12th) indicates that something has shifted during this dispute, which may mark the beginning of a broader resistance to the wider marketization of higher education in the UK. University vice-chancellors’ insistence on invoking the ‘deep’ or ‘strong’ feelings of their striking employees can be read as attempts to reduce picket lines to sites of emotional fracas, or coordinated temper tantrums, strangely divorced from the collective withdrawal of labour. But attending to the psychological dimensions of the picket line could potentially do something very different, offering space for acknowledging the anxiety, frustration, boredom and anger associated with striking, while also allowing us to explore how joyful interpersonal collective experiences can participate in building and sustaining political movements.
Hannah Proctoris a Fellow of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin.
Image attribution: The accompanying image, ‘Bus load of children of Paterson, N.J., strikers (silk workers) in May Day parade – New York City] [graphic]’ has been sourced form the online catalogue of the Library of Confress. There are no known restrictions on reproduction. The original can be viewed here: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3b00599/
Strikes stir the emotions. The solidarity of picketing, the anxiety of students missing classes, the anger of those who feel wronged enough to withdraw their labour. There are doubtless strong feelings behind the current University and College Union (UCU) industrial action to defend ‘defined benefit’ pensions. These varied feelings have been mobilized in a number of ways over the past few weeks, and this short post (building on some tweets here and here is an attempt to analyse a bit further the emotional politics of striking.
There are a number of distinct parts (both core and peripheral) of the strike action at play at any one time: the picket line, supportive demonstrations and rallies, teach-outs, the implied dissent, and the withdrawal of labour itself. A key aspect of the emotional politics of this strike can be seen in the confusion (both deliberate and unwitting) between a number of these elements.The Vice-Chancellor of The University of Sheffield, Professor Sir Keith Burnett, sent an email to staff where those on strike were characterized as ‘communicat[ing] the strength of their feelings through strike action’ (you can see an extract from that email in this tweet from Sheffield historian, Simon Stevens). This was not a hostile characterization, but it was a serious misunderstanding. It crystallised out some of the issues I’ve had with the strike and on the picket.
As others have pointed out in response to that communication, the point of a strike is not an expression of feeling, it is to disrupt the operations of the employer to force them back to the negotiating table. As Simon Stevens himself put it on Twitter: ‘A strike is an effort to rebalance the material interests shaping the employer’s behaviour by shutting down production and/or operations.’ But this material intervention seems lost, forgotten or at the very least undersold in the current dispute. The idea (often tacit) that ‘so long as you don’t cross the picket, you are not strike-breaking’ is at issue here. If you do work for the university at home, or in a coffee shop, or anywhere else on strike days, you are not striking. If you sit at home on a strike day, and edit an article to submit to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) on a strike day, you are not striking. So far, so orthodox.
The opposite side to this misapprehension is where emotions come in. It is related to the fact that universities increasingly have been seen in recent years as battlegrounds for free speech. The most recent eruptions are over the Prevent agenda and no-platforming; universities have of course for many years been associated with radical protest and demonstrations. These aspects, the expression of dissent, opinion and protest – often couched in terms of articulation of feelings – have become conflated with strike action. Picket lines superficially have many of the material trappings of protests: banners, placards, megaphones and chanting. But their object is quite distinctive from that of a protest. They exist to demarcate a strike area, to put the strike into a spatial idiom. Even if someone is ‘only’ crossing a picket line for ‘one meeting’ they risk signaling that they do not support the strike, regardless of their actual intentions.
We appear to be in a period of flux in how we think about picket lines, and there is real ambiguity about members of other unions, especially if those unions do not support (or are prevented from supporting) the picketing taking place. However, it is perfectly possible to (at least partially) mitigate the crossing of a picket – with stories across universities of people working who brought hot drinks and snacks out to picketers. I am much less sympathetic to people in UCU, often in senior, permanent positions, who choose not to strike because they don’t agree with the particular issue being foregrounded, or the particular tactics employed. If you choose to freelance when asked for collective action, I think you’ve got some hard thinking to do about solidarity. Saying ‘I don’t agree with this or that’ about the action, mistakes a collective agreement to withdraw labour (overwhelmingly voted for by members) for individuals having a protest. By framing the action in this way, protest is foregrounded, and the spatial and material disruption of the strike disappears. Sir Keith met with Sheffield UCU representatives on Tuesday – and was snapped holding an ‘Official Picket’ sign. However, he still committed this error, inviting UCU delegates into his office, which was across the picket line. They refused to cross, but met him later in a neutral venue.
So picket lines are not protests, and they are not about expressions of feelings: they are a spatial manifestation of the collective withdrawal of labour. Strikes are also material interventions that are undermined by all work, even when it doesn’t cross the picket line.” Well, so what? As I see it, this brings into focus the demand to reschedule teaching, which had previously been backed by, by many institutions, by a threat to deduct up to 100% of pay for each day teaching was not rescheduled. (Most institutions have backed down under public pressure on this particular point. A list of institutions not understood to have backed down on this point at the time of writing can be seen here). However, the fact that the demand was made at all is important, in both material and emotional terms. According to the view that mistakes strike action for an expression of feeling, once the feeling is expressed, there is no reason why the teaching can’t be done. It can be rescheduled (the logistical impossibility notwithstanding), because making the point was the point, rather than the withdrawal of labour. In other words: the supportive demonstrations, the protest, the signs, the placards have obscured the core of the strike, i.e. the withdrawal of labour.
But materially this matters too. Pay has already been, or will be, docked for the work not done, so clearly the employers are engaging on this material, financial level. This relation is in turn connected to the financial interests of students: they are paying their fees, so why shouldn’t they get the promised teaching? However, the employers do not follow through on this view of the financial politics of the strike; they do not, for example, propose to repay people for making up the work. They also (as noted) threatened to dock pay again for the refusal to reschedule. This only makes sense if the strike is transformed into a free-floating expression of dissent, of emotion, of feeling. But that logic doesn’t tally with pay-docking.
If the strike is an expression of feeling, then employers should not dock pay on strike days, and the demand to reschedule will become understandable. (The corresponding logic of holding a 14-day demonstration outside places of work is another matter.) On the other hand, if the docking of pay is legitimate as a response to the withdrawal of labour (and the withdrawal is put in spatial terms by a picket line), then the demand to make it that labour is arguably a challenge to the right to strike after the fact. Emotions and feelings matter hugely in this action. But they are not the point of the strike.
Chris Millard is Lecturer in the History of Medicine and Medical Humanities at the University of Sheffield, and book reviews editor of History of the Human Sciences.
This article represents the views of the author only, and is not written on behalf of History of The Human Sciences, its editors, or editorial board.
The featured image, ‘Penn[sylvania] on The Picket Line — 1917’ comes from ‘Women of Protest: Photographs from the Records of the National Woman’s Party,’ Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. There are no known copyright restrictions with this image. The original can be viewed at this link: https://www.loc.gov/resource/mnwp.160022
Human geography – a discipline in the hinterland of the human sciences – is a discipline preoccupied with praxis. Analyses of the relationship between what the geographer writes, what the geographer says, and what the geographer does have animated many of the discipline’s vigorous epistemological and political battles. It is unsurprising, then, that the University & College Union (UCU) strike over Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) pensions has brought questions of praxis into fraught focus. Indeed, in Marxist and other radical geographies – whose histories are generally traced back to the 1960s – the strike has been a privileged site of analytical and activist attention. But tensions today have not been solely about which geographers are – and are not – on the picket lines. Broader issues over where the discipline of geography is made, and who comes to represent that discipline are at stake. On the picket lines and on social media, geography’s present and past – both in material and fantasmatic form – are being worked up and worked through
On the first day of the strike, the Vice Chancellor (VC) of the University of Sussex, Adam Tickell, issued a statement that made it clear that he did not believe that there was an ‘affordable proposal’ for pensions that would satisfy both USS and the Pensions Regulator. As the hours passed, Tickell appeared uncompromising in the face of calls for him to join other VCs who had called for a return to negotiations. An interview with him conducted shortly before the strikes was re-circulated – where he was quoted as saying ‘The younger me may have taken part in the strikes, I don’t know about the current me.’
So far, perhaps so predictable. But Tickell’s words about strike participation could not but carry particular weight given that they had been uttered not only by an economic geographer, but one of the most prominent theorists of neo-liberalism. Indeed, Tickell, in the 1990s and 2000s, had published – often in articles co-authored with Jamie Peck – what became some of the most widely read, and remain some of the most widely taught, economic-geographical anatomizations of post-Fordism, neoliberalism, and global finance. (You can see a list of Tickell’s publications here.) On day 2 of the strike, I addressed Adam Tickell on Twitter lamenting how ‘my younger (geography undergrad & grad) self would not have wanted to imagine that I would be reading your work, years on, to help in the fight against what you are now upholding.’ (These perturbances are as much about disciplinary memory as well as about a discipline’s moral rectitude.) As the days of the strike passed, anger against the position adopted by Tickell amongst geographers grew, to the point where the lustre of the esteemed author was at risk of being tarnished by the apparent intransigence of the university head. By day 4 of the strike, an anonymous parody Twitter account for Adam Tickle. VC. was up and running; it was tweeting about the strike and about the disparity between the alleged ‘early’ and ‘late’ Tickell.
Laura Gill at the University of Sussex picket line holds a placard reading ‘SLAY THE NEOLIBERAL BEAST,’ a quotation from Adam Tickell. From a tweet by Benjamin Fowler, and used with both his and Laura Gill’s approval. Original tweet available at: https://twitter.com/B_B_Fowler/status/968481178444541952
Many human sciences have wrestled with how best to bring into focus the object that demands analysis (in this case, the current crisis within universities manifest through the USS strike) – debating which frameworks best allow us to understand that object, as well as the role of those variously positioned in relation to that object. In this sense, Tickell has become a useful figure. Through him, many more general issues – that are not actually about one, or even several individuals, and that relate to the production of academic knowledge and the organization of today’s universities – can be debated and contested. Here those debates centre on the extent to which one university manager’s earlier publications on neoliberalism could and should be used to understand the current crisis in toto, as well as on the extent to which the existence of those same writings should give added weight to the moral opprobrium directed to that same manager’s current stance. There are two separate issues, here. One might, with Barnett, think that neoliberalism ‘was and is a crap concept.’ In this case, one might argue that Tickell’s earlier writings – and his formulation of concepts therein – don’t much help us in understanding, let alone combating, what is unfolding in universities today. Our energies would be better used if they sourced better writings from the archives and activism of geography – as well as from other social sciences and social movements. But that does not imply that the disruption provoked by the inferred disparity between ‘early’ and ‘late’ Tickell is misplaced. If the former concern is largely epistemological, the latter is as much ethico-political as epistemological.
Geographers Derek McCormack and James Palmer hold placards in the strikes quoting from Adam Tickell’s research papers. From a tweet by Tina Fawcett, and used with approval from her as well as from Derek McCormack and James Palmer. Original tweet available at: https://twitter.com/fawcett_tina/status/968777039384928262
Here we have a scene in which the history of geography, and the politics of that history, is undergoing disturbance. (The Adam Tickle Twitter parody account explicitly reworks the discipline’s historiography through its satiric phrase ‘formerly an economic geographer of note’.) And below the contretemps over Tickell, something else pulses in the discipline’s corpus – something I do not think has been worked through. That is geography’s collective relationship to the long, and continuing, career of Nigel Thrift. Thrift is another prominent geographer and social theorist who was a highly visible and, in the words of student-facing website The Tab, ‘divisive’ VC at the University of Warwick. In the course of his tenure there, the institution – as Times Higher Education put it–‘experienced a number of controversies.’ In relation to Thrift, there is obvious scope to reflect on the relationship between his earlier work on left politics and his later career as a university manager. And there have been, online, some serious, critical reflections on this. But in the standard outlets for academic production, such as journals, there has been – as far as I know – very little substantive discussion. This is a noticeable – and meaning-ful – lacuna.
But I want to return to the affective and political disturbance generated by the stance taken by Adam Tickell. And to one reason why the apparent disparity between the so-called ‘early’ and ‘late’ Tickell seems to have been experienced by many – including me – as peculiarly wounding. To my mind, we should not uniformly expect or demand thinkers and writers to be free of contradiction. I recall, here, the opening of the obituary of one of geography’s most prominent radical theorists and activists, Neil Smith, which drew on words spoken by the radical geographer David Harvey (also Smith’s doctoral supervisor as well as colleague at CUNY) at Smith’s memorial service: ‘Neil Smith was the perfect practicing Marxist – completely defined by his contradictions’. (Such inconsistencies did not sway Smith’s steadfast commitment to radical politics.)
Contradiction in and of itself is not the problem. Then what is? Let’s look at how the passing of time is staged. Tickell said that while his ‘younger me’ may have taken part in the strikes, he was not sure about his older, contemporary self. Such a sentence resonates with a powerful discourse in which left politics is positioned as a childish practice, one that might well need to be given up as adulthood ensues. (Recall Saint Paul’s exhortation to ‘put away childish things.’) And this is not unconnected with the rhetorical campaign that Universities UK has been waging in an attempt to persuade others of the pragmatism, reasonableness and maturity of their assessment that there is no clear option around pensions other than the one they have proposed.
That the discipline of geography has produced a number of today’s UK Vice Chancellors (including Paul Boyle at the University of Leicester, Paul Curran at City University of London and Judith Petts at Plymouth University) – as well as the current UK Conservative Prime Minister – makes it urgent for many of us on the picket lines to demonstrate that geography as a discipline and as a political project is not exclusively held by or in those figures. The figure who might regard strikes as childish things needs to be substituted; another articulation of the social world, and of the geographer’s role in making it, needs to take their place. Hence geographers from UCL carrying a placard during the strikes announcing that ‘Not all geographers are neo-liberal vice-chancellors.’ Or the social and economic geographer, Alison Stenning, using the hashtag #notallgeographers, tweeting that, in spite of some ‘ignominious attention [that] certain geographers are getting’ geographers had nonetheless ‘been pretty impressive on the picket lines & the Twitter frontline.’
But I want to conclude with the outlines of a psychosocial argument, one that dismantles the apparent disjunction between the early and the late – or the gap that appears, as one Twitter user put it, within ‘the radical academic turned hard-line conservative’. Beneath the concern that many of us geographers have for the stances taken by prominent individuals within the discipline, perhaps lies a deeper wound that has not substantially been acknowledged or worked through. And that is the possibility that the very criticality of much of what passed for ‘critical geography,’ in the 1990s and beyond, precisely constituted the register of the successful and upward-moving academic. That criticality was part and parcel of adhering to and advancing a certain kind of theoretically-smart ‘knowledge’ that was required as evidence that would help one advance – even to the level of VC – within a professionalized space. Being critical in a particular way in the 1990s was, indeed, one of the pathways to advancement. And many of those ‘critical’ publications were at the heart of, rather than in conflict with, the current remaking of the university.
Rather than the adult putting away childish things, or the late eclipsing the early, what if the child made the adult? What if the early led to – was continuous with – the late, rather than being disavowed by it? If this were the case, then it would put many of us – and I include myself explicitly, here – in an uncomfortable position. For let us acknowledge the affective payoff that can accompany lamenting the eclipse of the early by the late: in addition to anger, it is possible to feel secure in one’s conviction that one has now cast out the late as the politically compromised. The radical credentials of a good geography are safe. By contrast, a situation in which there is no easy division between the early and late, the putatively radical and the compromised, is much more affectively and politically tricky to navigate. And this leads to some difficult questions that I have pondering over – on and off the pickets – these last few days
First, how do those of us inside as well as outside geography tell the history of critical geography in and beyond the 1990s? This is certainly important epistemologically – it’s part of the history of the human sciences that deserves greater attention than it has currently received. But it’s also central to how we understand what has been happening to the university. And this should help us think through how we might best use the strike in which we are currently involved to challenge what we see as most pernicious about these recent transformations.
Second, where and how is geography made? Where does it do its work? While there has been some interest in the apparent abundance of geographers who have become VCs, I don’t think we (those of us in and near geography and the history of the human sciences) have remotely got to grips with how to account for this. If there is that abundance in comparison with other disciplines, how does that reroute our accounts of where and how geography as an epistemological formation wields power? The tight relationship between PPE (the University of Oxford’s degree in philosophy, politics and economics) and the UK’s twentieth-century elite is a topic of frequent discussion. Beyond Neil Smith’s account of Isaiah Bowman, where are the historically and sociologically astute analyses of hard and soft geographical power?
Third, how do we widen the circles for forms of critical praxis that are not beholden to discourse and practices of promotion and managerial success in academia? What does that mean for those of us making geographies on and off the picket lines today? The interventions of black studies and anti-colonial studies, in particular, provide numerous routes through which to envisage – and put into practice – the reshaping of geography and of the university.
And there is one final note in relation to my previous point. It would be too easy to construe the historical tale of geography’s travails as a white boys’ story. Many of the protagonists in this post – those who have wielded power, and those configured as radicals who have contested it – do indeed fall within this category. But there are also many, ongoing attempts on the picket lines and on social media to disrupt that historical account, and to disrupt the future paths that geography and the university might take. As I finish this post, the geographer Gail Davies, for example, is unearthing the complex role that management consultants have played in the USS valuation and in the discursive shift that university senior managements have made towards ‘flexible pensions’. There is perhaps more work to be done along these lines before we can, indeed, comfort ourselves with the thought: #notallgeographers
I am profoundly indebted to Stan (Constantina) Papoulias in the writing of this blog post. They clarified for me much of what was most interesting in the figuring of the early and the late – in particular in relation to how a certain kind of criticality went hand in glove with the late twentieth-century transformations of the academy.Our discussions have taken place as we both take strike action in our respective universities.
Felicity Callard is Professor of Social Research in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, Director of the Birkbeck Institute of Social Research and Editor-in Chief of History of the Human Sciences.
This article represents the views of the author only, and is not written on behalf of History of The Human Sciences, its editors, or editorial board.
Six days into the current Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) strike against pension cuts, Universities UK (UUK), the representative body for British higher education management, launched a series of tweets and videos in support of University Mental Health Day. In a move that is now pretty familiar, the presentations shifted attention from a toxic environment in which staff and students now experience unprecedented levels of mental distress, to a series of tips for self care – joining a club, eating well, pursuing a hobby – in which much of the responsibility for well-being is placed back upon the shoulders of the individual sufferer. As the UUK Mental Health Policy Officer advised in a Twitter video, ‘Don’t be afraid to take time for yourself.’
I guess to many of the viewers, this advice must have seemed spectacularly mistimed. At the precise moment that the UUK was outlining its commitment to ending anxiety and depression in higher education, the wider organisation was working to significantly change pension conditions, undermining the secure livelihood once promised to university staff. It would be foolish, however, to dismiss the advice out of hand. The idea of ‘making time for oneself’ has been a central part of the labour struggle for the last three centuries. As E. P. Thompson argued many years ago, once employers had hammered into modern workers the idea that ‘time is money’, employees’ struggle shifted from the preservation of traditional rights to the recovery of lost time.[ref]E.P. Thompson. ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past & Present 38 (1967):56-97; (4), p. 34. [/ref]
The attack on future pensions, and the different analyses offered by UUK and by EP Thompson, all point to ways that different notions of temporality are caught up in academic work: not simply in the way it is organised but also in the way that it is experienced. The unremitting busyness of academic life, mostly complained of but occasionally worn as a ridiculous badge of honour, throws colleagues into a relentless present in which prospect and perspective are all too often lost to the insistent clamour of everyday demands. This sense of the overwhelming present is only heightened, as the critic Mark Fisher noted, by the precariousness of modern casualised labour, which offers no secure place from which to understand our past or project our future hopes.[ref]Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?(Chichester: Zero Books, 2009), p.34 [/ref] Strikes offer us an opportunity to disengage, to escape a constricting present and get a sense of where we stand in time. Many strikes, certainly most of the strikes I have participated in, are kind of nostalgic: they mark a world we are on the brink of losing, or perhaps have lost. Others, like this current strike, quickly go beyond that, taking us out of the present to remind us there is a future to make. They give us, as UUK recommended, the opportunity to take time for ourselves. In our present crisis, strikes are the best medicine we have.
Rhodri Hayward is Reader in History in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London, and one of the editors of History of The Human Sciences.
The accompanying image, ‘Image taken from page 5 of “The Universal Strike of 1899. [A tale.]”‘ has been been taken from the British Library’s flickr site. The original can be viewed here.
This article represents the views of the author only, and is not written on behalf of History of The Human Sciences, its editors, or editorial board.
Jutta Schickore, About Method: Experimenters, Snake Venom and the History of Writing Scientifically. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 316 pp., US$50.00. ISBN: 978-0-226-44998-2 (hbk).
If scientists reflect only infrequently on their commitment to experimental method, contends Jutta Schickore, then historians and sociologists have been equally remiss in interrogating this lacuna. In her carefully considered About Method, Schickore interrogates the history of snake venom research to dissect the ‘methods discourse’ promulgated by key practitioners from 1650 to 1950. In historicising her actors’ statements about ‘proper’ experimental practice – over time and across emergent disciplinary boundaries – Schickore proffers a tripartite framework for evaluating their epistemological imperatives. Encompassing ‘protocols’, ‘methodological views’, and ‘commitments to experimentation’, her novel schema is applicable to unpicking disciplinary investment in experimentation across diverse scientific communities.
The author’s focus on snake venom is neither arbitrary nor arcane. At the outset she foregrounds one of the most astonishing scientific projects of eighteenth-century natural history: Felice Fontana’s studies of viper venom. Undertaking literally thousands of experiments, this Tuscan naturalist sought to understand far more than simply the pathophysiology of being injected with venom. In enumerating the quantity, variety, variability and enduring uncertainties attendant upon his observations, Fontana reflected deeply upon the heuristic purpose, design and conduct of experiments.
The sheer scale of his vivisectional program – unsurpassed until well into the twentieth century – was thus paralleled by Fontana’s epistemological legacy. Indeed, this very continuity justifies Schickore’s selective focus in tracking methods discourse across three centuries. ‘For more than 250 years’, she remarks, ‘venom research was imbued with a strong sense of tradition both in terms of techniques and results and in terms of the methodology of experimentation’ (p.4). Moreover – and importantly for scholars working across the human sciences – venom research continues to intersect with multiple biomedical disciplines, including biochemistry, physiology, pathology, bacteriology and immunology. It is indeed an apposite field for asking what experimenters believed they were actually doing.
The result is a coherent and largely consistent unravelling of the dialectic linking programmatic statements about method with pragmatic experimental experience. Eschewing a Foucauldian formulation of ‘discourse’, Schickore instead defines ‘methods discourse’ as the rhetorical framing of good experimental practice. Yet, she insists, ‘methods discourse does not constitute a specific genre of text’ (p.215). Rather, three tiers of elements can be discerned across shifting modes of experimentation and expression. At its most ordinary, methods discourse simply outlines the specifics of experimental or observational design – a ‘protocol’. The next level, ‘methodological views’, articulates the procedures deemed necessary to generate empirically verifiable results. The deepest stratum, ‘commitments to experimentation’, encapsulates ‘the imperative that scientific ideas must be confronted with, or based on, empirical findings’ (p.213).
Just what those findings are, and how they can be validly obtained, lies at the heart of each of Schickore’s close readings in historical context. Commencing in the early modern shadow of Roger Bacon, she turns first to Francesco Redi’s 1664 text, Observations on Vipers. Under the patronage of the Tuscan court, Redi combined animal experiments, dissections and observation of human cases to detail the effects of being injected with venom (or ‘envenomation’). His commitment to the repetition of experiments both challenged prevailing rubrics received from ancient authorities, and delineated the full range of experimental circumstances that might alter the outcome of a given trial. Convinced that he had thereby vindicated his veracity as a natural philosopher, Redi concluded that the toxic agent in snakebite was viper’s venom. Yet neither his experiments nor his epistemology led him to query how it caused death.
In contrast, French apothecary Moyse Charas insisted that the viper’s ‘yellow fluid’ was inert. Rather, it was the serpent’s enraged spirits which were transmitted to its victim during a bite. Charas’s response to Redi’s trials was to assert that uniformity of experimental results – rather than the variability of procedural circumstances – carried the greatest epistemic weight. Charas thus emphasised both the heuristic value of definitive outcomes, and the importance of comparative trials. Unlike Redi, his narrative sought both to explain away inconsistent results, and to interleave his recordings with causal explanations. Rather than testing their respective truth-claims, Schickore teases out how the dispute between Charas and Redi ‘tells us much about how the general commitment to experimentation was fleshed out … [and] how flexible and fluid were the methodological statements employed by early modern experimentalists’ (p.52).
Schickore turns next to physician Richard Mead, a British medical maven whose Mechanical Account of Poisons was reworked over multiple editions from 1702 to 1747. In contrast with many fellow clinicians, Mead recapitulated the necessity for experimentation according to the methodological purity of mechanical philosophy – primarily the works of Isaac Newton. Yet, remarks Schickore, ‘Mead’s treatise does not seem to be informed by any practical challenges he might have encountered in his research’ (p.76). If his commitment to empiricism was overt, his methodological views remained decidedly opaque. Indeed, the most remarkable transition across the various versions of Mead’s work was the incorporation of others’ experimental results. These transformed his mechanical conception of venom, from sharp salts that burst blood ‘globules’ to an agent that vitiated the victim’s nervous fluid.
Mead’s work proved powerful across the Anglophone world, but paled in comparisons with Fontana’s studies, which spanned the final third of the eighteenth century. Indeed Fontana’s oeuvre forms the conceptual and chronological pivot for About Method. The central chapters inspect selected protocols and rhetorical structures drawn from his 700-word opus, Treatise on the Venom of the Viper. Here, Schickore focuses on Fontana’s place in shaping two formative strands of methods discourse: the value and delimitations of repetition, and the heuristic purpose of prolixity, the extravagant use of detailed text that proliferated page after page after page.
Across the biological sciences, Fontana’s fame arose chiefly from his insistence upon conducting repeated experiments, reporting in great detail their minor procedural divergences. ‘In Fontana’s work’, Schickore notes, ‘the leitmotif is the phrase “I varied the experiment in a hundred different ways”. It appears over and over again’ (p.84). In each case the apparatus and protocol were carefully laid out, including dead-ends and failures, in order ultimately to design the simplest trials capable of generating the purest results. As the earlier chapters highlight, there was no novelty to insisting on repetition or comparison. Rather, Schickore contends, Fontana’s fundamental innovation was a thoroughgoing commitment to exploring almost infinite variations in the conduct of his experiments, and their impact upon the outcomes.
Allied with this procedural largesse – including its horrific toll on animal life – was Fontana’s careful documentation of his practices and inferences. The result was a prodigious text configured as a narrative with ‘the flavor of a (very gruesome) scientific adventure story’ (p.82). For Fontana, prolixity not only buttressed his ‘epistemological sovereignty’ – in the words of Ohad Parnes[ref]Parnes, O. (2003) ‘From Agents to Cells: Theodor Schwann’s Research Notes of the Years 1835–1838’, in Frederic L. Holmes, Jürgen Renn and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, eds., Reworking the Bench: Research Notebooks in the History of Science. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 119–39.[/ref] – but invited readers to share his journey as individual protocols, outcomes and interpretations were concatenated into an exhaustive chain of investigation. It struck me that Fontana’s work predated Alexander von Humboldt’s synoptic insistence on recording every conceivable detail of the physical and biological world. Both men ultimately struggled with aggregating and selectively representing their accumulated data.
This concern, indeed, animates the second half of About Method. The acknowledged heir to Fontana, at least in the Atlantic world, was Philadelphia physician, physiologist and littérateur, Silas Weir Mitchell. Schickore’s discussion of Mitchell broadens the analysis of methods discourse to consider its intersections with nascent if highly contentious definitions of ‘scientific medicine’ across the second half of the nineteenth century. She contends that Mitchell’s experimental and textual strategies resulted from two contemporaneous concerns: the urge to adjudicate upon ‘rational’ therapeutics, and the growing public opprobrium of vivisection. In contrast with my own focus on the epistemology, ontology and ethics of vivisection in venom research, Schickore explores Mitchell’s insistence on comparative experimentation and the abstraction of his results into tabulated data.[ref]Hobbins, P. (2017) Venomous Encounters: Snakes, Vivisection and Scientific Medicine in Colonial Australia. Manchester: Manchester University Press.[/ref]
Mitchell’s insistence on comparison was not animated by a growing concern with experimental variability. Rather, it reflected the inherent diversity of snakebite. Bemoaning the poorly documented natural history of envenomation in humans, Mitchell also conceded that laboratory animals – especially dogs – responded in markedly different ways to nominally consistent toxins. Furthermore, by the late 1860s it was becoming apparent that there was no singular ‘snake venom’; its differentiation by species was followed, from the 1880s, by an appreciation that venoms themselves comprised multiple active constituents. These acknowledgements of biological individuality sat uncomfortably with Mitchell’s commitment to vivisection, and may have prompted his turn to tabulated data to facilitate ‘the synoptic presentation of evidence’ (p.138). Schickore suggests that this drive for concision shaped an evolving methods discourse in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
On the one hand, therefore, Schickore warns against a teleological reading of emergent disciplines. Both experimental protocols and methods discourse crossed multiple fields of practice in the nineteenth century. Not to survey this breadth risks omitting pertinent experimental mentalities and methodologies. On the other hand, there is a certain telos to Schickore’s own rendering of the imperative of the busy reader. The medical publishing transformations from 1850 to 1900, she argues, pushed back against Fontana’s prolixity in favour of brevity and structural regimentation. This is certainly one reading, but Mitchell was as well regarded for his prose as his science; might not an alternative pathway have favoured experimental virtuosity matched by rhetorical verbosity?
The last quarter of the book explores the epistemological implications of the formation of specialised practitioner communities. If this organizational gambit was itself a means of mastering the exponential growth in experimenters and publications, methods discourse also increasingly addressed the twinned problems of control and standardization amid the burgeoning ‘agency of substances that were not directly observable’ (p.175). Textually, Schickore observes, by the 1930s scientific papers had foregone any lingering narrative elements and largely adopted the modular introduction-methods-results-discussion format familiar to current-day biomedicine. ‘This bland list of standardized procedures and methods could hardly be any more different from Fontana’s graphic prose’, she laments (p.212).
The final chapters likewise become more synoptic and feel a little harried, in contrast with the elaborate, close reading that precedes them. Turning to centrifuges, electrophoresis and debates over the degree to which venom consist of protein, these chapters comprise a more contextual sweep across the biomedical literature. This rendering parallels the fate of Schickore’s twentieth-century protagonists who ‘found themselves on shifting grounds [as] theoretical approaches multiplied, concepts changed meanings, and new analytic techniques were being developed’ (p.200). Indeed, proliferating instruments, reagents, procedures and analyses themselves became a barrier to unambiguous empirical interpretation. It now became the place of survey reports and review articles – rather than individual studies – to reflect upon the intent and value of experimental methods. This final section, however, comes to a rather abrupt end, without a clear explanation for why 1950 marks a specific terminus in methods discourse.
About Method nevertheless remains true to its title. It surveys a three-century span not to tell a comprehensive history of venom research, but to intricately contextualise the shifting ways in which modern scientists have committed publicly and procedurally to experimental method. The focus on Atlantic world investigators necessarily side-lines scholarship on venom research in Asia, India, Australia and Africa, while Schickore’s engagement with the ethics and heuristics of vivisection is restrained rather than foregrounded. The book also treads a fine analytical line between the elaborate specifics of laboratory praxis and the literary technologies and witnessing procedures articulated by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer in their seminal work[ref]Shapin, S. and Schaffer, S. (2011/1985) Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.[/ref]. Yet, written in a pleasant and at times jocular style, Schickore’s text sustains an intellectual rigour and precision throughout. In asking fundamental questions about what experimenters believed they were doing, its interpretive value for scholars across the biomedical and human sciences is undoubted.
In the new issue of History of the Human Sciences, Matt ffytche analyses the exclusion of traumatic histories from psychoanalytic accounts of the mid-twentieth century, through a detailed engagement with the figure of the father (and of family authority) in different forms of psychoanalytic theory. Focusing especially on the work of the German psychoanalyst, Alexander Mitscherlich, ffytche traces the filtering out of the historical experiences of Nazism and the war from psychoanalytic narratives of the social – but then their return in texts of the 1980s and 1990s, under the banner of a new interest in historical trauma. Here, HHS Editor in Chief, Felicity Callard, interviews Matt about his article.
Felicity Callard (FC): Maybe we can start off with the institutional context in which you work. You have recently transitioned from being the director of a Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies to becoming the head of a new Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies. Can you tell us more about this new department, and what its emergence tells us about the history and sociology of psychoanalysis in the present?
Matt ffytche (Mf): It’s a very exciting moment for us, and a fascinating, transitional moment for the discipline. In many UK institutions, programmes connected to psychoanalysis have been in long-term decline, I think mainly because of the way in which Centres or Units which were once set up in relationship with schools of psychology or health, have found the disciplinary ground being whittled away from under their feet as the institutions which housed them have gone more and more quantitative. In the humanities, I think interest in psychoanalysis has remained steady (usually in its Lacanian form) but just as part of the general critical mix – it has rarely dealt in full-scale psychoanalytic programmes. The University of Essex, along with Birkbeck and a few other institutions, have bucked this trend and found a real impetus to growth around such topics as psychoanalysis and the psychosocial – and this may have something to do with social science, which allows forms of research and enquiry connected to psychoanalytic viewpoints to stay in touch with mental health, without being limited by the specific positivist agendas of the natural science disciplines. At the same time, the social science platform does allow the critical dimensions of psychoanalysis, and the psychosocial, to be explored and extended, and paired up to contemporary feminist and postcolonial agendas, amongst other things. The Centre at Essex did originally emerge out of the Sociology department during the 1990s, I think out of a small research group interested in psychoanalysis and mental health. But it has grown so much, particularly over the last decade, that it was impossible to reabsorb it back into Sociology – so the change this year was really about recognising that we were a fully-functioning department of our own, with two BAs and a new BA Childhood Studies coming in, and various Masters programmes and a large body of PhD students. Where exactly this all goes remains to be seen – but credit has to go to Essex for recognising the potential of new kinds of disciplines in the current climate, or at least the need to respond flexibly to the kinds of topics school leavers are wanting to work on. And many of them do want topics connected to mental health, or a more narrative psychology, or one with critical dimensions. I think the future of psychoanalysis in the academy (which is different from its future as a clinical, professional practise) has a lot to do with whether it can continue to be rethought, in conjunction with the rethinking that has been going on in other disciplines for a while.
FC:Your articlefocuses on the father and on fatherhood. There has been, recently, a fair amount of writing in and around the history of the human sciences, on the mother and motherhood (two comprise Rebecca Plant’s Momand Ann Harrington’s essay ‘Mother love and mental illness: an emotional history’).There has arguably been less on the father and fatherhood. Would you agree? And what are you hoping to encourage in terms of future research on the father?
Mf: That’s a difficult one for me to answer mainly because I was driven less by an involvement in the stakes of fathers per se, than ‘the father’ as this vanishing or dwindling moment in mid-century psychoanalytic social psychology, in which nearly all the authors are registering the same thing: fathers no longer have the status they once had; and people’s subjective formation, and social formation, is increasingly bypassing what for psychoanalysis had been thought of as a foundational ‘confrontation’ with the father. That was the perception. The issue for me was less about whether any of these approaches were accurately responding to the experience of families, and more to do with the way the family – and gender – had been inscribed in theories of socialisation, and how aspects of this seemed to be imploding in the 1960s. Which was surely a necessary thing, given the sweeping reassessment of patriarchy which (in the time frame of my article) was about to be made in the 1970s. So I’m less able to comment in relation to representations of motherhood and fatherhood now. What I can add as a side-note is the way in which, in psychoanalysis of the 1940s and 50s – especially in the UK – a shift had already been made, by figures such as Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and John Bowlby, to accord far more status to the mother. They near enough reversed Freud’s emphasis on sons and fathers – which Freud had speculatively extended back through cultural time, beyond the epoch of Oedipus and into deep, Darwinian primeval history – into one of mothers and babies, as foundational for the future of emotional life. But this shift didn’t seem to make its way into the more mainstream social psychological authors inflected by psychoanalysis, who were still evidently reading the Freud of the 1920s into the social experience of the 1950s and 1960s.
FC: Your essay is one of a number of recent reconsiderations of how to think the (socio)political in relation to psychoanalysis. I’m thinking, for example, of Michal Shapira’s The War Inside, Dagmar Herzog’s Cold War Freud and Daniel Pick’s The Pursuit of the Nazi Mind. How would you account for the blossoming of such an interest, now, and how would you distinguish your own approach to this question?
Mf: It’s been an interesting development, and one I feel closely associated with – Dagmar Herzog has now joined me as Editor of Psychoanalysis and History, and Daniel Pick and I collaborated on an edited volume – Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism (Routledge, 2016) – for which Dagmar and Michal Shapira both contributed chapters. One way of looking at it is that these are all attempts to move the history of psychoanalysis forwards from a concentration on the ‘Freud era’ to what came after. Some of this is simply about extending the history of psychoanalysis forward through the century, and responding to the opening up of more recent archives. But it was also a way of getting beyond the idea that the history of psychoanalysis necessarily has to do with the history of Freud. It’s in the 1920s to 40s in particular, that you start to get a much broader involvement of the second wave of psychoanalysts in other disciplinary fields (pedagogy, criminology, child psychology, sociology, etc). In the totalitarian book I was intrigued by the ways in which Frankfurt school sociologists had responded to the rise of fascism and anti-semitism with a wave of psychoanalytically-informed research and critical theory [. The article for HHS was in some ways an attempt to keep tracking that alliance onwards in subsequent history.
As to why this and similar initiatives amongst historians might be happening now? I think there’s also a recognition that there is a huge postwar history of psychoanalysis that remains to be told – too much for any single volume because of the degree to which psychoanalytic ideas implicated themselves so successfully in many different cultures in the middle decades of the twentieth century. And it’s always a fascinating history, because of the ways in which psychoanalysis delves into people’s fears and fantasies, or makes unusual social interventions, challenges existing assumptions, etc. It’s hard to characterise my own input here, but if anything I’d say that I pursue the history of psychoanalysis because of the complex ways in which it poses questions about the nature of identity and subjectivity that are relevant far beyond the practise of psychotherapy. For this reason, psychoanalysis is always renewing its engagements with philosophy, sociology and critical theory – an alliance very present within current psychosocial studies.
FC: Your were trained in literature as well as in history, and your article made clear to me how we much we need to move with agility between the social sciences and the humanities — including, in particular, literary studies — if we are properly to analyse the history of psychoanalysis. How would you describe your approach to interdisciplinarity in relation to the history of the human sciences?
Mf: I’ve never felt myself committed to any discipline exactly, and have generally simply pursued questions that I have felt to be crucial, about the way subjectivity is understood in the modern era, particularly in relation to individualism. And that’s true for thinkers that have influenced me as well – which REF panel would you submit Franz Fanon to, or Julia Kristeva, or Walter Benjamin, or Freud for that matter? It’s a huge problem at the moment – despite all the lip-service paid to interdisciplinarity, most elements of the way academic research and teaching are set up conspire to make liaison across fields difficult. My own tendency is to choose interdisciplinary ground not just in order to put fragments of a bigger social picture together, but in order to materialise entirely new domains. For instance, one of the areas that is intriguing me going forwards is the role of ‘fantasy’ in the social sciences. There’s obviously a psychoanalytic link here, because fantasy is an object of enquiry for psychoanalysis. But it goes wider than this. We tend to think of fantasy as something inaccessible, or illusory, or private, or without social agency. But how could you study the history of modern racism, for instance, without putting together materials from literature and culture, with other discourses circulating in the historical and social science archives, and further data from psychosocial work with the dreams and fantasies that regularly feature in relation to racial hatred? Ideally one needs to be housed in an institution that allows for that capacity, to bring these kinds of materials together across various disciplinary divides, because the logic of the material itself demands it. And one also has to work with others to find ways of arbitrating across different criteria of knowledge-formation, different theoretical frameworks.
FC: Whatever else your essay does, I read it as a fascinating contribution to the history of the emotions — in the way that you narrate a complex history whereby empathy and coolness are, variously, objects of analysis and epistemic virtues upheld by those doing the analysing. Can you say more about how this element of your argument reorients how we might think about the histories of disciplines?
Mf: Interestingly, that point about empathy was the one that occurred to me last of all, in this article that went through several iterations in the last couple of years. Or it’s the furthest point I reached in my thinking. What really struck me was the way in which psychoanalysts drawn to social science, in the 1950s and 1960s, ended up in some instances detaching themselves from the kind of empathic relation to their subjects that psychotherapy might foster. Instead, they became more abstract ‘diagnosticians’ of societies. With Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich in particular (the German psychoanalysts who are my focus in the latter half of the article) there was the added factor that this was postwar Germany, and – for them – empathy with their subjects was not an option; or they willingly exchanged empathy for moral critique. For them, Germans had been unable to acknowledge their emotions, and their past, and what had resulted was a kind of postwar social pathology, despite the apparent economic successes. This shift in the Mitscherlichs was something I could pull out by comparing certain texts, and in particular looking at the side effects of certain disciplinary lenses on the way human subjects were rendered. More recently I participated in a workshop on ‘Denial’ at the Pears Institute in London, which brought together historians, literary scholars social scientists, and psychoanalysts, and for me it raised related sets of questions about the ways in which historical subjects (in this case the agents of certain forms of violence and genocide) are rendered differently by different disciplines. One of the things that shifts is whether the observer is called upon to empathise with the object of enquiry, called to empathise by the discipline itself. What assumptions do disciplines build in about a common ‘human’ or moral viewpoint? To what extent do they use empathy to ‘flesh out’ the minds and motives of perpetrators; and by contrast, to what extent – by abandoning subjective levels of description – do other attitudes create ‘impersonal’ subjects, who then appear to act in incomprehensible, unjustifiable ways? It’s certainly an area for further work.
In the July issue of History of the Human Sciences, Marcia Holmes, a post-doctoral researcher with the Hidden Persuaders project at Birkbeck, University of London, used the 1965 film adaption of Len Deighton’s The Ipcress Fileto demonstrate the close relationship between Cold War fantasies of mind control and the postwar understanding of the media. In her analysis, our familiar understanding of brainwashing as an irresistible form of domination is disrupted and she instead demonstrates how the spy drama which pits a hero against the mechanical forces of scientific control provided a new template through which audiences could re-conceive their relationship to modern media. Against the idea of the passive and pliant observer, Holmes promotes the idea of the ‘cybernetic spectator’, who plays an active role in controlling the flow of information in order to reorganise their own personality and consciousness. In this analysis, brainwashing moves beyond being a simple disciplinary mechanism to become a potential technology of the self. Viewed from this perspective, brainwashing is less a legacy of Cold War struggles than a part of psychedelic revolution in which consciousness became a subject for personal exploration and transformation. Part of the joy of Holmes account is that it connects the history of cold war human sciences to the flowering of the counterculture in the 1960s: a relationship that is only just beginning to receive the attention it deserves. Marcia Holmes is here in conversation with Rhodri Hayward, Reader in History at Queen Mary, University of London, and one of the Editors of HHS. The full paper is available open access here: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0952695117703295
Rhodri Hayward (RH): Thanks for speaking to us, Marcia. What first drew you to Deighton’s novel and the Ipcress File film?
Marcia Holmes (MH): I admit that I had never seen The Ipcress File (dir. Sidney Furie, 1965), or read Len Deighton’s 1962 novel, until I began researching films that depict brainwashing. Perhaps this is because I’m an American and only recently transplanted to the UK. The film is well-loved by British film critics and has a strong following in Britain, but I find that many of my American colleagues have not heard of The Ipcress File. This is a shame, because it is a very enjoyable film! And for historians of science, I think The Ipcress File offers much to discuss on the intersection between Cold War politics, science, and popular culture.
This original trailer for The Ipcress File (Furie, 1965) includes some images from the film’s brainwashing sequence. A re-mastered version of the film was released on DVD by Network in 2006 (Video source: YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QesO-BRvUAM).
When I first watched The Ipcress File, I was intrigued by how familiar I found the film’s treatment of brainwashing – its use of flashing lights and beating sounds to create a highly cinematic rendition of mind manipulation – and yet how different this imagery was to earlier, 1950s accounts of brainwashing. In the 1950s, reports (and even fictional stories) of brainwashing endeavoured to describe the real methods of indoctrination and interrogation used by communist cadres. Essentially, these methods involved ‘softening up’ a prisoner through starvation, sleep deprivation, and solitary confinement within a featureless cell. Once the prisoner was debilitated physically and psychologically, he would be subjected to a tedious process of indoctrination or interrogation that he would be unable to resist. In the 1950s there was also speculation about whether communists used drugs or hypnosis to weaken a prisoner’s resistance; but the tenor of this speculation was to determine what methods were actually being used, not to spin fictions for the sake of entertainment.
Meanwhile, The IpcressFile knowingly offers us fantastical science fiction in how it imagines the final stage of brainwashing: not as indoctrination or interrogation per se, but as carefully calibrated visual and auditory stimulation that can reprogramme a victim’s memories, even the brain itself. The centerpiece of the film’s brainwashing process is not the featureless prison cell, but rather the ‘programming box’, a person-sized cube that completely surrounds a victim with sounds and images. This fanciful reimagining of brainwashing seems to follow in the footsteps of The Manchurian Candidate, John Frankenheimer’s 1962 film that many historians consider iconic in how it depicts Cold War cultural anxieties. However, I think The Manchurian Candidate differs significantly from The Ipcress File in that Frankenheimer’s film never actually shows techniques or processes of brainwashing, only its after-the-fact effects on a victim’s consciousness.
Dr. Yen Lo (played by Khigh Dheigh) the communist brainwasher of The Manchurian Candidate (Frankenheimer, 1962). In a famous scene, Dr. Yen Lo describes the scientific basis of brainwashing and demonstrates brainwashing’s effects on captured American soldiers. Arguably, the film’s vagueness about specific techniques of brainwashing makes it easier for audiences to suspend their disbelief about whether brainwashing can truly reprogram minds (Image source: Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Khigh-dhiegh-trailer.jpg).
For me, The Ipcress File film raises the question of how and when the imagery of flashing lights and rhythmic sounds became a trope of brainwashing. I read Len Deighton’s novel to see if the idea for the programming box had come from Deighton. I was surprised to find that Deighton’s description of brainwashing was much more in keeping with 1950s accounts. In particular, he was inspired by William Sargant’s theory of brainwashing as a form of combat neurosis. Indeed, the ‘IPCRESS’ acronym that Deighton invents refers to the softening up process as Sargant might describe it: Induction of Psycho-neuroses by Conditioned Reflex under strESS. As I investigated further, I found that it was The Ipcress File filmmakers who sought out new ways of depicting brainwashing, and that they were guided by what would be spectacular for 1960s cinema goers as well as by emerging scientific theories about the programmability of minds and brains.
RH: You locate the film within a long history of cinema’s fascination with suggestion and hypnosis – what is different about this film?
MH: In a way, The Ipcress File’s depiction of brainwashing as the manipulation of the senses, consciousness, and attention harks back to earlier films about hypnosis, such as Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922) and the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (dir. Robert Wiene, 1920). Film scholars like Raymond Bellour have theorized how these earlier films not only depicted hypnosis but also explored cinema’s own hypnotic effects on audiences. Their directors endeavoured to capture and control viewers’ attention, and heighten the sense of peril, through innovative use of close-up shots, spotlighting, and surreal scenery.
But The Ipcress File differs from these early films in how it explicitly references the power of cinema on the mind. Audiences can see quite clearly that the IPCRESS process is achieved with the help of film projectors that cast moving, colored lights onto the screen-like walls of the programming box. Audiences also see these projected images, and hear the eerie IPCRESS noise, as the film’s protagonist experiences them: as a diegetic film that plays on their own cinema screen before them.
The villains look on as the programming box begins to be hoisted in the air. On the left-hand side of this still image, a film projector can be seen attached to the outside of the programming box by a metal arm. Copyright for this image is owned by StudioCanal; it is reproduced here for the purposes of criticism only.In this frame, the programming box is lit with an abstract image that appears to move rhythmically in and out of focus. To the left of the box is the shadow of a film projector, implying that the abstract image is being projected from the outside of the box. Copyright for this image is owned by StudioCanal; it is reproduced here for the purposes of criticism only.Inside the box, the victim Harry Palmer (played by Michael Caine) reacts to the sensory onslaught with intense discomfort. He tries to resist the lights and sounds around him by focusing on physical pain, gripping a bent metal nail in his hand until his palm bleeds. Copyright for this image is owned by StudioCanal; it is reproduced here for the purposes of criticism only.
This kind of overt reference to film’s psychological effects appears in several brainwashing films. For instance, The Manchurian Candidate is partly a meditation on the influence of television on American politics; and A Clockwork Orange (dir. Stanley Kubrick, 1970) portrays a very effective form of aversion therapy that utilizes film. The Ipcress File is unique, however, in how it emphasizes the structural aspects of film: how light projected through images appearing at a certain frequency can create the illusion of movement, and other effects on consciousness. This is significant because, as I explain in my paper, The Ipcress File was made in a period when many artists, and indeed some scientists, were interested in how the structural elements of film affect spectators’ brains and mental experience. The challenge for historians posed by The Ipcress File, I believe, is to account for the changing cinematic imagery of brainwashing not only with reference to specific filmmakers’ technical innovations and artistic preoccupations, but also with how such innovations and preoccupations may have been in conversation with contemporaneous developments in art, science, and media technologies – as, indeed, historians have done for earlier films about hypnosis.
RH: So could I pick up on that point and ask you to say a bit more about the relationship between particular post-war technologies and new understandings of selfhood that emerge in the 1950s and 60s?
MH: There’s an obvious genealogy that The Ipcress File invokes: popular fears and fantasies of mass media as capable of influencing, even coercing, audiences’ beliefs and behavior. During the Second World War, the Allies were intrigued by film and radio’s power to transmit propaganda, and this fascination continued in the postwar period with the advent of commercial television and televisual advertising. In the late 1950s, there’s a brief but memorable moment when Americans and Britons worried about ‘subliminal advertising’. Even though the possibility of subliminal influence was quickly and notoriously debunked, this didn’t stop moviemakers (of the B- and C-level variety) from creating ‘psycho-rama’ films that purported to embed subliminal messages that would enhance moviegoers’ sensations. Of course, psycho-rama films didn’t succeed in thrilling general audiences, and only a few were produced. But there were other 1950s’ cinematic experiments in manipulating audiences’ sensory experience – such as Cinerama and Circarama – that were relatively more successful and long-lasting. Intriguingly, when The Ipcress File first opened in British and American theaters, critics compared its brainwashing sequence to a demented form of Cinerama or Circarama. Their implication, I believe, is that the film’s depiction of brainwashing was consciously spectacular, and rather gimmicky.
First exhibited in 1952, ‘Cinerama’ theaters had a curved cinema screen to give film audiences a more immersive experience. Three projectors were needed to cover the screen in a single image. ‘Circarama’ (later known as Circle-Vision 360) was invented by Walt Disney Studios in the 1950s, and involved nine screens aligned in a circle around the audience, and nine film projectors at the centre of the circle. Image source: Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:How_Cinerama_is_projected.gif
Yet, as I mentioned before, The Ipcress File was made in a period when avant-gardeartists and scientists were interested in how the structural elements of film affect spectators’ brains and mental experience. This suggests another lineage that I believe is important to understanding The Ipcress File’s imagery for brainwashing, and why this imagery is historically significant. The Ipcress File premiered in 1965, at roughly the same time that the 1960s counterculture – with its “happenings” and psychedelic art – became recognized by mainstream Americans and Britons. And so, for some art historians, The Ipcress File’s programming box evokes the immersive, multimedia exhibitions of Stan Vanderbeek and USCO, and Tony Conrad’s experimental film The Flicker (1966-67).
In September 1966, LIFE Magazine featured the psychedelic art of USCO. Image source: Google Books LIFE archive, from which the full issue can also be accessed. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=21UEAAAAMBAJ&source=gbs_all_issues_r&cad=1
In my paper, I argue that this is a case of correlation, not causation. It just so happens that The Ipcress File’s filmmakers were responding to the same innovations in art, science and media technology that were also inspiring countercultural artists’ explorations of film and other media. For example, in my article I explain how The Ipcress File’s depiction of brainwashing references Grey Walter’s neuropsychological experiments on the effect of stroboscopic light on brainwaves. The film even shows an EEG plotter as part of the Ipcress apparatus, and the film’s villain explains that the programming box works in synchrony with the “rhythm of brainwaves.” As many historians have previously noted, Grey Walter’s scientific experiments also influenced Tony Conrad’s Flicker film, as well as the design of a distinctive artefact of 1960s’ counterculture, Bryon Gysin and Ian Sommerville’s rotating stroboscope, the ‘dreamachine’. While Flicker and the dreamachine apply Walter’s ideas to the liberating exploration of consciousness, The Ipcress File appropriates Walter’s same ideas in a dark vision of mind control.
RH: Yes I guess you’re referring to John Geiger and Nik Sheehan’s workwhich I’m a fan of. It seems your work shares their aim of presenting a counter cultural history of the cold war which shows how control technologies could be subverted.
MH: Yes. One of the interesting challenges in researching the Cold War history of ‘brainwashing’ – whether you focus on the scientific research that it inspired, or its evolution as a cultural imaginary – is accounting for how certain technologies, techniques, and concepts can shift in meaning from negative to positive, from coercive to liberatory. There are well known examples, such as how the CIA initially encouraged scientific research on LSD as a potential truth serum, but the drug proved more effective as a means of ‘expanding consciousness’ than of interrogation, and it became emblematic of the 1960s counterculture as well as of brainwashing. A similar story can be told for the flotation tanks that were used in sensory deprivation experiments. In the Hidden Persuaders project, we have been investigating these developments as more than just the creative innovations of a psychedelic counterculture. We probe how these shifts have been informed by changing popular and scientific assumptions about human subjecthood – not only cybernetic models of mind, but psychoanalytic, behavioristic, and neuropsychological models. We consider the evolving cultural and intellectual meanings of brainwashing to be part of a longer history of how concepts of psychological coercion and personal freedom have changed over time.
In my paper, I discuss how the technology of immersive multimedia begins as a mode of entertainment and artistic expression, and then later becomes associated with brainwashing. It’s a rare example of a seemingly positive and liberatory technology becoming rebranded as potentially negative and coercive. There are some excellent histories of the evolution of immersive multimedia technology by scholars like Beatriz Colomina and Oliver Grau. Fred Turner, in his recent book The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties, offers a particularly convincing and helpful genealogy of postwar artists’ experiments with multimedia environments, a phenomenon that he dubs ‘the democratic surround’ because of artists’ utopian, liberal democratic motivations. Turner shows how the counterculture’s seemingly revolutionary installations of psychedelic art – like Vanderbeek’s Moviedrome and the USCO exhibitions – had important precursors in more mainstream exhibitions of the 1950s and early ‘60s, such as Ray and Charles Eames’ multiscreen films, and that these precursors in turn drew on earlier artistic explorations of media’s effect on the mind. He also suggests how cybernetic philosophy was variously interpreted by different artists, encouraging their belief that multi-image, multi-sound-source environments would have a beneficial, psychologically-freeing effect on spectators.
In researching the making of The Ipcress File, I learned that the movie’s producer Harry Saltzman conceived the Ipcress programming box after reading about a multimedia surround in LIFE Magazine, the ‘Knowledge Box’ that was designed by Ken Isaacs. Isaacs was a contemporary of Ray and Charles Eames, both chronologically and in his aims and inspirations. He considered his Knowledge Box as a tool of progressive education, one that took advantage of the human mind’s ability to learn from sheer exposure to information. Meanwhile, Harry Saltzman was not alone in perceiving the Knowledge Box as a potentially coercive technology – some journalists at the time also suggested it could be used for brainwashing – but as a film producer Saltzman was well placed to bring this re-interpretation of multimedia surrounds to general audiences.
Ken Isaacs’ Knowledge Box, as featured in LIFE Magazine, 14 September 1962. Image source: Google Books LIFE archive, where there are more images of the Knowledge Box. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=z00EAAAAMBAJ&source=gbs_all_issues_r&cad=1. It is interesting to compare the Knowledge Box with Ken Adam’s set design for the Ipcress programming box. Ken Adam’s sketches, and a brief clip from The Ipcress File that shows the programming box in action, can be found on the Deutsche Kinemathek website: https://ken-adam-archiv.de/ken-adam/ipcress-file
RH: Yes! I guess it’s this tension around the use of coercive technologies as tools for self-mastery or psychedelic liberation that grounds your idea of the cybernetic spectator. Could you say a little more about that?
MH: The ‘cybernetic spectator’ is my own construct for understanding the relationship between developments in cinema and television, the mind sciences, and cultural fantasies of mind control during the 1960s. It is a model of mind, a way of making sense of human subjectivity, that informed certain developments in these domains and, at times, interconnected them. I’m inspired by the work of Jonathan Crary, who argues that there is a history to our ways of perceiving, and that this history is reflected in artistic media, the human sciences, and cultural anxieties about human subjectivity. My concept of the ‘cybernetic spectator’ comes from trying to envision what Crary’s historiography might look like in the 1960s when cybernetic concepts and philosophy were rewriting many assumptions about how the mind works, not only for scientists but also for artists, media theorists, and sometimes even general audiences.
But, admittedly, cybernetics itself is tricky to define, especially for the 1960s when cybernetics’ forefathers like Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, and Warren McCulloch had long given up on keeping the field definitionally pure. Arguably, a strictly historicist reading of cybernetics’ originary ideas, such as what Peter Galison offers in his seminal article on cybernetics’ ‘enemy ontology,’ doesn’t help us understand the cultural and intellectual efflorescence of cybernetic concepts in the 1960s. So, scholars like Andrew Pickering and N. Katherine Hayles have advocated for a long-historical view of cybernetics as a science of complexity with a deep but lively influence on a wide variety of endeavors – not only engineering and computing, but also the psychological automata of Ross Ashby and Grey Walter, the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, the anthropological theories of Gregory Bateson, and the management philosophy of Stafford Beer. And as I noted before, Fred Turner has reminded us of the influence that cybernetic theory, and cybernetics-inspired commentators such as Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, had on mid-century avant-garde artists. These scholarly accounts, Pickering’s and Turner’s especially, emphasize how utopian ideals routinely accompanied discussions and appropriations of cybernetic thinking in the 1960s. That is, cybernetic ideas may be value-neutral in and of themselves, or even reflect the values of the military-industrial complex, and yet for many sixties’ thinkers cybernetic philosophy nevertheless signalled a future technotopia where a free flow of information – through various forms of media! – would liberate individual thought and behaviour. They believed that cybernetic ideas and technologies might even remake society to be more democratic and more enlightened.
Yet, as contemporaneous debates about brainwashing can attest, there were also moments during the 1960s that brought into focus the downsides, even the threat, of the cybernetic interpretation of mind and society. For example, when Marshall McLuhan gave an interview to Playboy Magazine in 1969, he prophesied a future where a worldwide media network would keep the peace within nations by responding to unrest with pacifying messages. McLuhan’s interviewer asked whether this was tantamount to brainwashing. McLuhan acknowledges the possibility, apparently with some consternation, as he argues that such an interpretation misses his point that such a network would respond to the needs and desires of its audience. The Ipcress File is another moment that clarifies the negative potential of the cybernetic spectator interpretation of mind: even though The Ipcress File movie is itself a harmless entertainment, its depiction of the programming box insinuates that the mind is vulnerable to film’s ability to stimulate the senses – that multimedia surrounds can be a technique of brainwashing.
RH: Given that we now, in our iphone addled age, live in a media-saturated environment, do you think this cybernetic model of mind and media still holds good?
MH: That is a challenging question, and a very important one considering that we live in an age of heightened political extremism. Because my own thoughts on this are constantly evolving, I’ll just sketch a couple of points that I’ve been considering lately. It does seem like we still hold many of the concerns, and many of the utopian visions, that surrounded 1960s’ cybernetic interpretations of mind and media. They seem to be especially germane to debates about ‘information bubbles’ and the cloistering effects of internet-based media. I am struck by how we often rely on spatial metaphors – concepts akin to the multimedia surround – to imagine how the internet can envelop a person with messages, with the result of radicalizing her or encouraging her belief in conspiracy theories. The solution to such a predicament is often presented in spatial terms, e.g., to ‘get out’ of one information bubble by exposing oneself to contrary information, or to leave the internet behind altogether and “enter the real world.”
And yet, unlike in the 1960s, we now have a powerful discourse on trauma, one centered around the diagnosis of PTSD, that also shapes how we imagine the effects of media on the mind and the possibilities for mental manipulation. We now understand that certain messages – usually depictions of horrific physical and/or sexual violence – can ‘trigger’ old traumas or create new, traumatic memories. To put it more generally, psychotherapeutic models of the mind, whether they are psychoanalytic, cognitive-behavioral, or otherwise, are also influential for how we imagine the effects of media on the mind, and the possibilities of mental infiltration and coercion. Cybernetic philosophy is arguably not fit for the purpose of distinguishing between psychologically harmful or beneficial messages; it is famously agnostic about the semantic content of information. So perhaps we have moved on from the ‘cybernetic spectator’ as a prevailing model of mind and media influence, even though cybernetics’ signature technology, the Internet, dominates how we access and interpret media.
So do you think psychoanalysis provides the wellspring for a new morality that cybernetics failed to provide?
This is an issue that we discuss in the Hidden Persuaders project. I think that psychoanalysis might be able to provide such a wellspring; it has certainly shaped our cultural discourse on trauma to be empathetic, if not moralistic (the work of Robert Jay Lifton with Vietnam veterans comes to mind). But I am not convinced that, in current practice, psychoanalytic theory serves this purpose.
I’d certainly agree with that. Thank you so much Marcia!
Marcia Holmes is a post-doctoral researcher with the Hidden Persuaders project at Birkbeck, University of London. She is currently researching the American and British militaries’ Cold War-era community of psychological researchers, tracing how political, bureaucratic and intellectual fault lines influenced service psychologists’ assessments of brainwashing.
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 projectsexist 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 hereKatherine 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 laIan 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 accountof 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 noveland 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.
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.
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.
