The productive unconscious : architecture, experimental psychology and the techniques of subjectivity in Soviet Russia, 1919-1935

Abstract

This dissertation examines how Soviet architecture employed the achievements of experimental psychology in order to transform human subjectivity during the Interwar period, particularly in the years defined by the First Five-Year Plan of Economic Development (1928-1932). In this program of forced modernization, every resource-including human muscular, intellectual, and emotional energy-had to be channeled into the construction of an industrialized economy. Inspired by studies of unconscious, physiological responses to visual stimuli and by an accompanying turn to psychologism in the philosophy of science, Soviet architects, artists, and bureaucrats reinterpreted architectural work as the design of subjective perception, the purpose of which was to produce an energetic subject who would actively and efficiently participate in the implementation of the Plan. The dissertation examines three episodes in which Soviet architecture and design aspired to control the unconscious in order produce a new energetic subject. The first part explores the theoretical research on unconscious perception conducted by Nikolai Ladovskii's Rationalist architectural movement, which, following the philosophy of empiriocriticism, strove to economize the energy of perception. The second illustrates how the theory of the unconscious was tested and developed experimentally, assessing the program of wallpainting developed by architect Moisei Ginzburg, Bauhaus designer Hinnerk Scheper, and others as an artistic and architectural discipline that aspired to produce working energy. The third and final episode exemplifies how unconscious perception was put to practical use in the Moscow Central Park of Culture and Leisure under Betti Glan, where creative energy was evoked by material objects and the spatial environment.