A Stack of Orders: On the Operative Language of Aleksei Gastev

Prelude: Sputnik

The launch of Sputnik 1 in October 1957 in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic set off a crisis in the West. Up to that moment it had been unthinkable that a country with such a manifestly primitive technological infrastructure might succeed in putting the world’s first artificial satellite in space. American engineers, bound by racist stereotypes, could not fathom that a people they deemed boorish and half-Asiatic had succeeded where they had failed. As educational theorist and specialist in machine learning Charles I. Foltz wrote in The World of Teaching Machines a few years later, “The shock of the Soviet successes in space” triggered a scramble to “search for an explanation of how the Soviet peasant under the Bolsheviks had stolen a march on the free American.”1

For Foltz, one reason the US lagged behind was an education system that distinguished too categorically between machines and books, and furthermore, between the sciences and the humanities. North America’s one-sided pursuit of hardware solutions to technological problems had led its scientific community to underestimate the very real capacities and practical inventiveness of the Soviets, who allowed for more fluid interactions between engineering and culture. Writing about the development of cybernetics in the 1950s, one political scientist later distinguished the externalism of the American approach, which derived framing concepts from hard sciences like mathematics and engineering, from the internalism of the Soviets, who instead approached the same problems through theory and philosophy.2 Since the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century, Western thought has sought to resolve social conflicts and even philosophical aporia by displacing these problems onto machine design and engineering.3 But the boundary between society and technology remained more porous in the Soviet Union. The leading theorist of production in the Soviet avant-garde, Boris Arvatov, explained in 1926 that “for the animal the machine is just a piece of nature, but for us it is social organism that molds ideas.”4 This outlook extended all the way up to the top echelons of Party leadership. The prominent Bolshevik economist Nikolai Bukharin, for example, proclaimed that “technical devices are not merely pieces of external nature: they are extensions of society’s organs.”5 Meanwhile, in the West industrialization only deepened the ontological chasm between the machine and its user, giving rise to a primitivizing humanism as a salutary reaction against the instrumental reason of the scientists and engineers.

Thus, the 1957 article in the newspaper Pravda that announced the launch of Sputnik credited the success not to the mission’s rocket engineer Serhii Koroliov but to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the eccentric cosmist philosopher whose fantastical speculations about colonizing the universe contained workable designs for a multistage rocket and the velocity formula necessary to achieve orbit. Of course, the USSR’s more inventive and unorthodox technological evolution was in part a matter of sheer exigency, conditioned by the lack of the industrial resources enjoyed by the capitalist West. And to a certain degree, an improvisational approach was inevitable for a sprawling multiethnic empire which lacked the consistent technical standards and norms necessary to unite its multifarious machine systems and hybrid modes of production into a single uniform and integrated industrial infrastructure. Under such circumstances, production is forced to be a collaboration between organic and inorganic capital. When the purely externalist approach hits a barrier, bodies will “fill in where their wires and pipes fall short,” writes anthropologist of technology Shannon Mattern.6

The successful launch of Sputnik also suggests that there might be real and concrete advantages to blurring the boundaries between machine and human. Indeed, the history of scientific invention in the Russian Empire demonstrates the manifest dividends of a soft, culturalist conception of technology. Some examples: one of today’s most ubiquitous instruments for analyzing stochastic processes, the Markov chain, was first demonstrated in an analysis of Pushkin’s epic poem Eugene Onegin7; the structural principle of tensegrity was first discovered by artists in Soviet Russia rather than by mechanical engineers in America8; many key tenets of General Systems Theory were established in Bolshevik political economy long before their formulation by biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela9; and even the steam engine, arguably the defining artifact of the industrial revolution, was invented in Russia two decades before James Watt––although the improvised construction built in part out of wood and bark by a provincial mechanic from the Urals was immediately dismissed by a European-educated mechanics as “the fantasy of an ignorant barbarian.”10 

This article takes up the untimely work of another barbarian from the land of contrasts and uneven development: the professional revolutionary, assembly-line worker, trade unionist, and proletarian poet Aleksei Gastev. Gastev built an entire system of thought from the concept of ustanovka, a word that he used to designate all variety of interfaces between organic and inorganic systems, whether epistemological and psychosensory or kinetic and mechanical in nature. Psychologists translate “ustanovka” as “set” or “orientation,” while engineers translate it as “installation” or “setting.” Such an ontology of the interface prompted Gastev to develop strategies of “biological machinism” for optimizing frictionless flows of energy and also of information. For him, the hybrid quasi-objects of his time––those strange assemblages of bark, metal, and flesh held together by organizational theory––were not a historical disadvantage but an asset. “If there is no iron, make it out of wood,” he enjoined. “Build organizations, amalgamate.”11 Poetic, speculative, and visionary at first, Gastev’s interfaces assumed concrete contours when Lenin appointed him to be the founding director of the Central Institute of Labor (Tsentral’nyi Institut Truda, or TsIT) in 1920. Research in the field of the Scientific Organization of Labor (Nauchnaia Organizatsiia Truda, or NOT) undertaken in the laboratories of TsIT drove Gastev to abandon the divide between worker and machine and to explore the emergent properties of organized systems that superseded the distinction between organic and inorganic bodies. Under Gastev’s directorship, TsIT developed protocols for training the reflexes, sensory frameworks, social behaviors, and even linguistic capacities of workers, thereby delivering the internalist counterpart to the externalist engineering of the West. And to be sure, this agenda fed into the Soviet state’s biopolitical project for creating the New Man––a human “cog in the wheel” to serve as the organic labor-complement to the industrialization campaigns of the 1920s and ’30s.12 Yet Gastev, an anarcho-syndicalist who always had a troubled relationship to the top-down command system of the Bolshevik Party, nonetheless insisted on crucial distinctions between the organizational methods of TsIT and the growing extractivist policies of the state, which reduced the body of the worker to an extension of the machine.

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To be sure, Aleksei Gastev had not always understood the advantages of the internalist approach. Working on the assembly lines of Clément-Bayard and Citroën in the 1910s, at the early stage of his career his writings reflected European approaches to technology. Gastev’s subsequent conversion to biological machinism was precipitated by an epistemic breakthrough: the discovery of a non-syntactic, algorithmic stratum of signs distinct from the depictive signs found in journalism, historiography, literature, storytelling, and other representationalist discourses. He first explored the rules of this operative language in poetry. In 1921, Gastev published A Stack of Orders, a collection of ten texts that did not resemble his previous work. The formal innovation of Orders becomes clear when contrasted with Gastev’s collection from just three years before, the legendary book of forty-one poems Poetry of the Worker’s Shock (Poeziia rabochego udara, 1918), which opens with rhapsodic verses about the Siemens-Halske factory in St. Petersburg where Gastev worked in 1914. Widely celebrated as the most powerful poem in the 1918 collection, “We Are Growing Out of Iron” begins with an injunction:

Look!––I am standing among them: workbenches, hammers, furnaces, forges, and among a hundred of comrades.
Above: a space hammered in iron.
On either side run girders and joints.
They are rising ten fathoms up.
They are creasing to the left and the right.
Rafters are connecting them in cupolas and, like giant shoulders, are carrying the entire iron structure.13

“We Are Growing Out of Iron” begins by building a virtual picture show, piece by piece. Above and below, to the left and to the right, the poet carefully assembles a proscenium for his protagonists and props, the comrade-workers and factory instruments that will perform in the forty texts that follow.14 Having built the apparatus of representation in the first poem, the texts that follow in Poetry of the Worker’s Shock then flood the imagination with scene after scene of laboring bodies and dynamic machines. The grammar of “We Are Growing Out of Iron” is saturated with markers of action and duration. Every verb––“growing,” “standing,” “rising,” “creasing,” “connecting,” “carrying”––is in the imperfective present tense and roils with movement. Over and over, Gastev intones the adverbs “still” (eshche) and “already” (uzhe), weaving recollection and anticipation, past and future, into a dense web of transformation and metamorphosis. The poems were so manifestly vivid and dramatic that they were regularly staged by Proletkult theater groups.15

Many readers in Proletkult circles objected that Gastev’s collection was outdated as soon as it was published. On the one hand there were critics who objected to the formal quality of the poems. One review by the industrial weaver Fedor Kalinin objected that the collection’s expressionist hyperbole and irregular structure did not correspond to the rhythmic temporality of modern production, which demanded a poetry that was “just as evenly and inexorably exact as the logical mechanism of machines.”16 On the other hand were critics who objected to the poems’ obsolete content. The economist, Red Army soldier, and leader of a Proletkult science studio Maria Smit-Fal’kner criticized Gastev for foregrounding the “proletariat of the metal and manufacturing industry” while failing to recognize the increasing importance of workers from other branches of production such as the chemical and electrotechnical industries. As Smit-Fal’kner explained, work in the new industrial sectors demanded an “increase in the intensivity of labor,” that is, an expansion of the psychological dimensions of work and a corresponding decrease in its physical dimensions (or “extensivity”). Work had become brainier and more computational, less outwardly gestural and theatrical. In contrast to the manufacturing technologies used in the nineteenth-century factory, the newer forces of production “foreground exertions of an ‘intellectual’ or ‘mental’ nature.”17

Gastev took the criticisms of his fellow Proletkultists to heart. Poetry of the Worker’s Shock would be the last of his works to indulge the pathos and iconography of industrial antiquity. Whereas metallurgy, forges, and factory massifs inspired the 1918 collection, the book that Gastev published three years later, A Stack of Orders, was full of molecules, calories, prisms, and switchboards. The Orders, which comprises ten poems and a set of “technical instructions,” presents acts of measuring and quantifying in a laboratory-like setting. If the 1921 collection had any overarching narrative or thematic conceit, it was to calibrate disparate realms of human culture, from language and music to sport and architecture, according to empirical metrics. Applying quantitative methods to qualitative phenomena and extensional values to intensional experiences yielded an array of perplexing category errors such as “twenty kilometers of words,” “thirty longitudinal parallels of consciousness,” and “choruses at the sixth meridian.” From gesture to song, everything was to be measured concretely, scrapping as “spoilage” everything that did not fit within the range of acceptable values.18

Still more striking than the lexicon of technoscience was the migration of this machinism into the syntax of the poems themselves. Take “Order 05,” which, according to the collection’s technical instructions, could be read simultaneously with any of the other orders:

Engineer the philistines.
To drive geometry into their knees.
Logarithms into their gestures.
To make their romanticism opaque.
Indignation by the ton.
Normalization of the word from pole to pole.
Phrases in the decimal system.
A boiler room of speech.
To eradicate literature.
To turn tunnels into throats.
To make them talk.

“Order 05” explores the rationalization of language and communication. Each line in the text is clear, explicit, and above all, discrete: no enjambments spill over from one line to the next. Here as elsewhere in the collection, propositions are expressed as directives: verbs are either delivered in the imperative or left as infinitives, like military commands. The remaining actions of the Orders are frozen in deverbative nouns like “normalization,” “the rotating,” or “the indicating.” Without any conjugated verbs to indicate the past, present, or future tense, the events captured in the Orders cannot be situated in time, yielding static tableaux that are devoid of all narrative quality and even logical causality. Gastev’s suggestion in the technical instructions to read “Order 05” simultaneously with the other orders further undermines any sense of sequence or internal progression. Time appears in A Stack of Orders only as a series of abstract chronometric point-values (“one half-minute,” “four months,” “four minutes,” “two hours,” “thirty years”), never as organic duration or mnemonically sedimented experience. Gone is the dense metamorphotic temporality of “We Are Growing Out of Iron,” in which the residue of the “still” was braided with the anticipation of the “already.” Instead of stories, A Stack of Orders presents static stereotypes and diagrams. It refers to events without plot and processes without teleology.

Most astonishingly, A Stack of Orders has also banished imagery. In contrast to Poetry of the Worker’s Shock, which Gastev characterized as “a repository for different kinds of poetic metaphors,” the Orders renounces the metaphysics of depictive literature entirely.19 When everyday objects appear in the poems, they are immediately converted into abstract and computable values: “knees” are transformed into “geometry” and “gestures” into “logarithms.” Each ruthlessly precise proposition is formulated using scientific terminology that arrests the tropological slippage of the poetic imagination. Formalist linguists of the era pointed out that technical words like “prizma,” “paralellogramm,” “diagonal’,” “kaloria,” “kommutator,” “kondensatsiia,” “mikro-atom,” and “molekula” are essentially anti-metaphors that trigger no mental associations: such foreign words possess no “internal form,” image-content, or memory of etymological usage.20 They have no inner life. A Stack of Orders attracted little critical interest, but one of the few reviewers of the collection emphasized this point: “the form has drained out the content.”21

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One notable exception to the critical silence that met A Stack of Orders was the enthusiastic reception of the collection by members of the avant-garde group Left Front of the Arts (Lef). The productivist avant-garde heralded the collection as a watershed moment in their assault on reflectionist art and literature. In a review that appeared in the inaugural issue of Lef, Boris Arvatov proclaimed that Gastev, “the most advanced proletarian poet,” had struck the deathblow against the “outward, depictivist mimeticism [подражательность].” The collection explored an order of signs whose function was not to convey images but to control logical operations. As its title promised, A Stack of Orders contained a series of commands. “The extreme brevity and laconism of speech” leads to “the complete contemporaneity of composition that condenses not only forms of military and factory speech but also forms of the newspaper, the advertisement, the radio-telegram etc.,” wrote Arvatov. While previous revolutionary poets had explored new ways to represent contemporary labor, Gastev’s book abandoned representation as such, approaching language not as a medium of depiction but as an instrument for symbolic processing. “The Orders are not poetry, and not even prose poetry: The literary form of the Orders has no progenitors in art, lacks an aesthetic tradition, and for this very reason does not rely on a poetic canon that is separate from the life of language.”22 Most of language’s life in industrial modernity consists not of storytelling or poetic rhapsody but of lists, forms, memos, and bookkeeping.23 Such speech is illocutionary and functional, not intimate or expressive. The outering of language in the Orders had at last succeeded in the “socialization of the poetic form.”24

Illustration from Aleksei Gastev, From Metal to Textile, 1926.

Viktor Pertsov, a member of Lef who had previously worked as Gastev’s secretary at TsIT, likewise emphasized the operative language of A Stack of Orders. Pertsov characterized the Orders as an instrument for controlling events from a distance and for regulating the movement of bodies: “This wild salvo of imperative moods was a ‘formula for connecting’ to real events, to a great mobilization of people and things.” This anti-mimetic “poetry of ‘concrete proposals’” asserted the operative powers of the sign over and against realist writers who sought to contain language within the confines of the imagination. The Orders contained no images and solicited no literary interpretations, but instead “functioned like a signal or a set of exercises,” wrote Pertsov. On a political register, the collection’s illocutionary acts connected with the state’s designs for social engineering; in an organizational register, they recalled military commands that dictate troop formations; in a technical register, they anticipate developments in the next decade in the fields of telematics and logistics. “From words like these,” Pertsov concluded, “the only option left is to transition to the deed [k delu].”25

Similar to the German “Akt,” the Russian word that Pertsov uses here, “delo,” designates not just an act but also a record, case, file, or other bureaucratic matter––a “deed” in both senses of the word. As Cornelia Vismann demonstrated in her media history of Akten, such protocols for executing textual operations originated in the state bureaucracies of civil servants in the nineteenth century and led directly to the command-line text of programmable computers in the twentieth. Vismann’s genealogy confirms what was ultimately at stake in Gastev’s poetic experiment: more than just a strategy for renovating avant-garde literature, A Stack of Orders discovered the operative infrastructure of modern administrative and computational systems. As Vismann explains, this infrastructure is constituted by a nonrepresentational algorithmic writing that regulates the transfer of information within a database.26 A Stack of Orders is saturated with such numbers, which oscillate restlessly between arithmetic and algebra, reference and function, counting and computing. From “Forty thousand lined up in a row” in the first line of “Order 01” to “Twenty cities outside tolerable limits” in the last line of “Order 10,” the proliferation of discrete, numerical quantities in the Orders establishes a schema of non-syntactic mathematical values that works below and against the linear syntagmatic unfolding of the collection. Not only do computational methods constitute many of the activities in the orders––measuring, calculating, dosing, and switching––but they also dictate the overall structure of the collection itself. Ten in number, the Orders are optimized for decimal processing. “All notes that we give to someone should be expressed only in numerals with a short, precise text,” Gastev stipulated.27 Industrial rationalization had transformed literature into something like double-entry bookkeeping, with machine numbers on one side of the ledger and human words on the other.

Gastev struggled to find the right generic label for A Stack of Orders when it first came out in 1921. But by the time the collection was reprinted three years later, now under the title The Word Beneath the Press (Slovo pod pressom), it seemed that the poet had finally found the right word. The new preface now described the Orders as an “attempt to solve a verbal, artistic problem: to find the new kind of short artistic reportage that is dictated by all of modern life and that stands under the sign of the economy of the word.” With four years as director of TsIT now behind him, Gastev explained that “if ever again I am called to take up a literary pen, I will not lift my hand for Romanticism or for the machine alone, but will settle only a single stark problem in reportage and a sharp verbal impact.”28 Gastev’s designation of the collection as “reportage” had nothing to do with the objectivist literary style that the word conjures today. For him, reportage was not journalism. It did not traffic in truth claims or reality effects. The word instead recalled earlier usages, which characterized the work of bookkeepers and scriveners, not of reporters and writers.29 Reportage is the language of calculators and information processors, both human and machine. It encompasses all of the forms, records, protocols, and diverse technical documentation that circulate within a bureaucratic organization. In Gastev’s key essay “The New Cultural Interface,” which was published alongside the new edition of A Stack of Orders, the director of TsIT explained: “We must assimilate into our everyday language the crisp language of memoranda free of all ambiguity, the language of the telegram, the dialogue of businesspeople meeting at the bank or those phrases that conductors exchange when dispatching a train at the station.”30 Turning to reportage, i.e., to reports in the aggregate, Gastev rejected a language that merely talked about events in favor of a language that was itself an event. Such words manage transactions at the bank and dispatch trains at the station: they calculate sums and mobilize bodies. As Pertsov put it, control-signs like these constitute “a transition to the deed.”

As unspectacular and mundane as this language was to the romantic imagination, Gastev insisted that administrative reportage formed the essential infrastructure of modern production. With the increasing informatization of labor, “the problem of reportage acquires a colossal significance.”31 Invoking Darwin’s “theory of biological adaptations,” Gastev proclaimed: “We / call for the improvement / of the human organism, constructing within it a calculated culture of skill, a culture of energy, a culture of speed, orientation, accounting, control, management, and ‘administration’ [deloproizvodstvo, lit., ‘the production of files’ or ‘the production of deeds’].”32 For Gastev, establishing a “precisely configured administrative machinery” was not just necessary for Soviet economic modernization.33 It was the evolutionary telos of the human species.

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The recognition that language was not just a medium of representation but an instrument for logistical and computational operations drove Gastev to reframe his approach to industrial organization. The issue was no longer that of generating and transmitting energy but of controlling and guiding the flows of information through the modern enterprise. He labeled this as the transition from “dynamics” to “kinematics.” An interest in mechanisms of control, Gastev argued, was what distinguished the most recent methods of production from the industry of the past. As he explained in 1927, “the invention of new machine designs in the current industrial period” does not yield “a new machine, a new engine, or even a new system of transmission” but leads instead to “a new machine kinematics that guarantees a degree of precision in the work … We should recall that the entire revolution in contemporary mass production is actually the result of inventions and devices in diverse combinations, above all templates for control and guidance.” The old questions of force and energy took a back seat. The “question of drive and transmission is itself secondary” to the “constructive, organizational task … of creating controls and guides.”34

As an example of the new kinematics of production, Gastev cited modern textile machines “in which processing problems are solved by specific controls and guides.” An avid historian of industrial technologies, Gastev likely had in mind Jacquard looms, which saved fabric patterns as data on external punch cards and, for this reason, have been hailed as a predecessor to the programmable computer. “The card that controls shifts in speed is the culmination––a realization in paper [бумажным оформлением], if you like––of the entire regulatory process of an organization.”35 Unlike metal production, which demanded percussive labor motions and which moved from station to station in fits and starts, modern textile factories set up a series of material flows and positioned the worker as a modulator of these continuous channels of movement. For this reason, Gastev considered the textile industry more advanced technically than metallurgy, whose basic operations had remained unchanged for centuries. Further, for Gastev, the metallurgic and textile industries were paradigmatic of two fundamentally different phenomenologies of labor, two bodily dispositions: an older one that was based in the muscular exertions of the elbows and shoulders, and a more modern one that was rooted in the fingertips and that required skillful and subtle manipulation. Textile work was more haptic and informatic in nature. These systems corresponded to two psychological dispositions as well: whereas textile work required quick reactions, “vigilance and distributive attention,” and peak psychosensory innervation, the detached and disconnected metallist lived in a “pure idyll,” contemplating his work like a Romantic poet.36

The informatic character of the new kinematics had consequences beyond the factory walls. If modern production was based on systems of symbolic processing, then the cultural systems and languages that organized these symbols were themselves industrial phenomena. As a poet, Gastev was uniquely sensitive to the pressures exerted by this technological development. Indeed, it is telling that he first registered this pressure not in a TsIT laboratory but in a work of literature. As he explained in the technical instructions that accompanied A Stack of Orders, these texts did not depict modern production processes, but instead belonged to them: “A Stack of Orders should be read in even segments, as if being submitted to an apparatus.”37 Gastev’s invocation of an “apparatus”––rather than his usual “machine” or “workbench”––is important here, since the concept encompasses both a piece of technical hardware and a social or political organization (like, e.g., a “party apparatus”). By “turning tunnels into throats,” as Gastev wrote, the Orders pursued a collaboration between inorganic and organic systems whose properties exceeded those of either system functioning on its own.

The same year that Gastev reissued A Stack of Orders, he published the key essay “Biological Machinism,” which confronted the concrete historical obstacles that Russia faced after the Civil War had devastated its already limited industrial capacity. “The conditions in Russia are different [than the West],” he wrote there: “We do not have powerfully developed machine production.”

We do not have a permanent principle grounded in machinery that would constantly drive us and force us to think about the system and the basis of organization.

It is clear that there is only one way forward for us. This is to take the masses and the youth in their current state and instill in them a special system of effectivity, a new organizational principle.

You could put it this way: Western Europe has a technical machinism that we need; but we need to increase the pace of our efforts in this direction by making extensive use of biological machinism in which methods of training will come first.38

While Gastev’s program of biological machinism reflected Soviet culture’s improvisational attitude toward hybrid organic-inorganic assemblages, it also responded to the very real conditions of uneven development. Russia was a place “where people still walk around in bast shoes just fifty versts from Moscow,” he noted. For Gastev, there was no hardware that could possibly bridge these cultural discordances and production non-synchronicities.39 Whereas European scientists and engineers sought technological solutions to problems of social difference and economic disequilibrium, Gastev reversed this trajectory, proposing social and organizational solutions to mechanical problems. For this reason, education and investment in human capital would become increasingly important components of TsIT’s work. Pertsov pointed out that Ford and Gastev both used the identical phrase “social engineering” but that each emphasized a different component: for the former it was the engineer who organized society, for the latter it was society that was materialized in machine architecture.40 “The existent object-form of industry [das gegenständliche Dasein der Industrie]” is “the open book of the essential powers of man, man’s psychology present in tangible form,” Marx had explained.41

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Given his attunement to the interactions between technology and social phenomena, Gastev was early to recognize a key demographic consequence of the newer systems of production: the explosion in the ranks of the technical intelligentsia. The new factory complexes required logistical engineers to oversee the operations of their guidance systems, just as their elaborate administrations needed information workers to manage the volumes of documentation. During the interwar years, Marxists in all industrialized countries were confronted with the fact of a new class of worker that had no place in their existing theoretical canon but that seemed poised now to displace even their vaunted revolutionary subject, the proletariat.42 While the European left dismissed the intelligentsia at its own peril––white-collar workers would soon be crucial to the electoral successes of the fascists––party leaders in the Soviet Union embraced this new, still ill-defined class of information worker. There the technical intelligentsia assumed a prominent position alongside industrial and agricultural workers as the third pillar of the socialist economy. “We will mass produce members of the intelligentsia, processing them as if in a factory,” proclaimed Bukharin.43 Gastev in turn predicted that the factories would be overrun by “massive crowds of quality inspectors and controllers” in the near future.44 Indeed, Gastev had alarmingly little interest in the traditional Marxist class analytic. About the new revolutionary subject, he wrote, “I am not concerned whether it will be called proletarian or non-proletarian,” since the latter were just “worn-out terms.”45 The production theorist Arvatov, an admirer of Gastev’s Orders, followed suit, even going as far as challenging the dictatorship of the proletariat with the claim that “the actual production of the technical intelligentsia––with a few exceptions––is higher and more advanced than proletarian culture.”46

Gastev proposed new polytechnical pedagogies to educate the new class subject. To be sure, after the Civil War it seemed that everyone was championing polytechnical education, but in most cases this was just a tactical exigency in response to demands for a flexible workforce that could be deployed in diverse industrial sectors. Gastev had something else in mind. He envisioned a generation of workers who grasped intuitively language’s dual function as both a medium of communication and an instrument of control. In the polytechnical institute, signs became inseparable from operations, theoretical reflection inseparable from doing. Whereas bourgeois educators pursued rote knowledge with no connection to lived experience and no prospect of concrete effect, the integrated communist pedagogy of Gastev developed “a special system of effectivity” that turned the school into a site of material production. Factories, conversely, became academies of research. “The factory is gradually coming to resemble a type of laboratory, a type of experimental school, and out of the accursed workhouse a gigantic technical university is emerging.”47 He cited the book Labor School by psychologist Pavel Blonskii, an influential critic of German introspectionism who had argued that “a multifaceted industrial education leads to a series of theoretical generalizations that … one could call a philosophy of industrial technology.”48 Even philosophy would find a place in the polytechnical institute, then, —just not of the metaphysical variety.

Gastev eventually came to the conclusion that human teachers were superfluous in this system of education. Learning could be reduced to two elements, pupil and machine. As he explained in the 1928 “Forms of Workforce Training,” existing pedagogical practices relied too heavily on old methods for transmitting knowledge from person to person. For example, the “craft method” used by guilds was inductive and experiential but obscure and shrouded in secrecy; in turn, the “academic method” of the bourgeoisie was more public and rationalized than the craft method but was divorced from concrete production. In both cases, he explained, “the structure of knowledge [does] not correspond to the system for teaching this knowledge.” For Gastev, the solution was obvious: mechanical knowledge in the machine age must be taught by machines. Learning would no longer be the purview of pedagogues but of technicians. “We anticipate that engineers with computational methods will also be introduced into school pedagogy.”49 Christening TsIT’s own approach to education as the “interface method,” he noted that textile workers were more inclined than metalworkers to embrace the new teaching machines. After all, the proto-computational architecture of the modern textile loom already resembled a system of programmed learning. With their nimble fingers and heightened psychosensory vigilance, textile operators were primed to connect with the learning machine. In this pedagogical system, concepts and theories would be transmitted not through books and manuals but through biomechanical repertories and behavioral schemes. “A worker standing in front of the machine and soaking in the logic of its movements like a sponge will absorb the theoretical knowledge necessary to revolutionize the machine.”50

Siemens-Halske Factory in St. Petersburg where Gastev worked.

The strange circularity of this last image, in which a worker receives knowledge from a machine that allows him to transform the machine in turn, suggests that Gastev did not see the transmission of knowledge from machine to pupil as a one-way process. The Russian “переворот” implies the action of turning, a movement of reversal, or in this case, a structure of reciprocity. Seen thus, the relationship of the learning machine to the worker is not unidirectional but symbiotic and collaborative, even mutually constitutive. Ultimately, for Gastev, it was not just people who learned in the polytechnical institute: it was the system itself that learned. One of his later texts, “TsIT as a Research Facility,” explored the emergent cognitive properties of organized “human complexes” that are held together by artifact-rich knowledge infrastructures. Drawing upon a growing body of work in the subfield of NOT known as NOUT (Nauchnaia Organizatsiia Umstvennogo Truda, or Scientific Organization of Mental Labor), Gastev proposed the polytechnical factory-institute not just as a facility to train the new generation of proletarian intelligentsia, but as a soft-assembled structure of distributed cognition.51 “These machine-human complexes also produce the synthesis between biology and engineering that we are constantly cultivating. And the integrated, calculated incorporation of determinate human masses into a system of mechanisms will be nothing other than social engineering.”52 Part flesh and part machine, these hybrid information processors comprised systems for collective induction, reasoning, and computation. Organizational principles such as the division of labor and flow analytics were applicable to the production not just of material goods but of cognitive ones as well. With adaptation, these principles could be implemented to massify and collectivize not just heavy industry but also the “heavy industry of knowledge.”53

Ultimately, it is the reversibility and circularity of the human-machine interface that distinguishes Gastev’s work from that of the Western organizational researchers with whom he otherwise shares so much, or even from the biopolitical extractivism of Stalin’s Homo sovieticus. For all of his admiration for the work of Fredrick Winslow Taylor and Frank and Lilian Gilbreth, Gastev pointed out that these capitalist rationalizers failed to understand the worker as anything other than an organic appendage to the factory workbench. Western investments in human capital aimed always to intensify the exploitation of the workers. Gastev pointed out that Western systems of psychotechnical aptitude testing, for example, did not actually educate workers but merely sorted them like parts, evaluating them according to their suitability to serve the factory machines. The only agency afforded to workers in this system was at the consumption end of the process, where they enjoyed increased purchase power and access to cheap, mass-produced commodities. But the capitalist worker was never an active producer of knowledge or goods.

Against the worker’s subordination to the machine, Gastev envisioned a spiraling movement of mutual evolutionary improvement between the two. In the TsIT system, the worker did not just execute (исполнить) commands that were issued by the machine but actively transformed their instrument in the process of operating it. Gastev explained that workers accumulate an “enormous quantity of technical data” (громадным количеством технических казусов), and yet capitalist rationalizers like Taylor and the Gilbreths ignored these cognitive resources.54 In the West, knowledge belonged to the engineers alone.55 Instead, Gastev sought to develop an open and symmetrical “machine for social engineering” that prompted the worker to “consummate,” or “complete” (совершенствовать), the apparatus. On the inorganic side of capital, Gastev pursued designs for a “universal machine” that could be dynamically adapted based on operator input; and on the organic side, he proposed to train a new class of “installers” (установшики) who could arrange and configure this machine on the fly according to the required function. This “active methodology” inspired a “spirit of invention” in the workers that “urges them to continuously try out new things, to constantly adapt, to stay active and vigilant in all situations.”56 Anticipating one of basic tenets of second-wave cybernetics, Gastev defined human consciousness as an autopoietic feedback loop between brain and world. Against “the simple automatism that consists in the mere repetition of the same action and that eventually leads to a condition of torpor and hypnosis,” he sought to activate the worker as both a physical and mental producer, “a boundless athlete of thought.”57

Afterword: Telstar

Gastev was executed in 1939 for his anarcho-syndicalist politics and was only rehabilitated in 1956. In 1962, Viktor Pertsov returned to the writings of his old boss—to A Stack of Orders in particular. Recalling the silence that met the pamphlet when it was first published in 1921, Pertsov remarked: “The Orders sounded strange. Apparently just as strange as, for example, the commands that we now radio from the earth to rockets in the universe would have sounded to our ancestors.”58 In 1962, the comparison of the Orders to radio communication with spacecraft was anything but random: that summer saw the launch of Telstar 1, the first modern communication satellite, which carried live signals across the Atlantic between IBM computer mainframes. Telstar was the next major event in the Space Race, on par with Sputnik’s launch five years before. The USSR had been first to place a human-made object into orbit, but Sputnik was a relatively modest artifact whose only function was to emit radio pulses back to earth at preprogrammed intervals. Telstar was of a different order of sophistication. Not only could the American satellite receive transmissions on gigahertz frequencies and amplify these signals using solar cells, but many of its operations could even be programmed and controlled dynamically from earth. If Sputnik was like a tracking buoy in space, Telstar was more like a bustling switchboard.

Renowned techno-pessimist Martin Heidegger lamented the launch of Telstar as a rupture in the history of Being’s relationship to language. One week after the satellite went into orbit, the German philosopher emerged from his wooden cabin in the Black Forest to deliver a talk at a Benedictine monastery in southern Germany titled “Traditional Language and Technical Language.” The lecture reprised a number of theses from Heidegger’s influential 1954 essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” above all, the claim that τέχνη (tékhnē) was a “way of knowing” and a form of presencing the absent (her-stellen: to set before), not a system of “manufacturing, tinkering, and operating.” In the wake of Telstar’s launch, Heidegger now wanted to explore the ramifications of these two conceptions of technology for language, and for poetry specifically. The two frameworks had coexisted in an uneasy tension for all of industrial modernity, but with the launch of the next-generation communication satellite one week before, language and production, knowing and operating, had now definitively parted ways.

Telstar I, 1962.

Heidegger insisted in his talk that “authentic language” is rooted in “saying as showing and as the letting-appear of what is present and what is absent, of reality in the widest sense.”59 For Heidegger, two features distinguish such language from “technical language” (a phrase that he uses interchangeably with “information”): first, authentic language derives from oral speech, and second, it is representationalist. To say is to show. By contrast, the language of Telstar is rooted in written operations like mathematics, which reveal nothing to us. Human language is meant to summon mental images and states, but technical codes call nothing to mind, show us nothing, bring nothing into appearance. Technical language has no inner life. Its purely operative signs reduce communication to a system of control functions. Turning at the end of his talk from Telstar to contemporary cybernetics, the convergent alpha-discourse of all modern technology, Heidegger observes that the code of mathematicians like Norbert Wiener cuts communication off from its origins in copresence and representation. In the place of authentic speech, cybernetics substitutes an “abstract form of writing that is transcribed into the formulae of a logic calculus.” For Heidegger, these control signs had less in common with language and poetry than with the psychotechnical signals found in a behaviorist laboratory. But, he protested, “a ringing tone, a flashing light, taken for themselves, are not signs … That is why a poem does not, on principle, let itself be programmed.”60

But perhaps the two languages were not so distinct. Maybe a poem could in fact be programmed, as Gastev proposed already in 1921. Programming literature would entail no loss of creativity per se, just the displacement of the act of creation from the referential signs of the writer to the functional code of the programmer. Returning to Gastev’s Orders in 1962, Pertsov was reminded that communicative and operative languages––like the organic and the technical as such––were not ontologically distinct, but simply belonged to two different, mutually constitutive orders. Later that same year a Pravda article by Aksel Berg, a former naval captain who specialized in cybernetics and learning, proclaimed the organizational work of Gastev and Platon Kerzhentsev in the 1920s to be the predecessor of Soviet cybernetics.61 Curiously, the piece made no mention of the discipline’s Western founders, whose work Berg knew all too well. This exclusion was not just cultural nativism: from Berg’s perspective, the externalist approach of mathematicians like Claude Shannon and computer scientists like Wiener had set the West on the wrong path. These first-wave cyberneticians, who understood communication as the linear transmission of signals from sender to receiver, aspired only to optimize this axis of control by reducing noise and deviation, never asking how the circuit itself might learn, differentiate, or reorganize. It would be almost another decade before figures like systems theorist Heinz von Foerster, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and epistemologist Gregory Bateson would introduce methods from the humanities and social sciences to overcome the impasses of the technical machinism of first-wave cyberneticians. The corrections of second-wave cybernetics included above all the insight that cognition was not the property of any single entity, whether human or machine, but was instead distributed across a series of biological and technological components and, further, that these systems do not simply execute preexisting programs but learn and reorganize through an ongoing process of recursive feedback. As Berg recognized, these were discoveries that Aleksei Gastev had made forty years before. Once again, in Foltz’s wording, a barbarian from the land of uneven development had stolen a march on the free American.