Charles I. Foltz, The World of Teaching Machines (Teaching Research and Technology Division, Electronic Teaching Laboratories, 1961), 4.
Ilmari Susiluoto “The Unfulfilled Promise: Tectology and Socialist Cybernetics,” in Aleksandr Bogdanov Revisited, ed. Vesa Oittinen (Aleksanteri Institute, 2009). Slava Gerovitch confirms that cybernetics initially found footing in the Soviet Union not among scientists but among philosophers. Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak (MIT Press, 2002), 179.
Boris Hessen, “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia,” in The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution: Texts by Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossmann, ed. Gideon Freudenthal, Peter McLaughlin (Springer, 2009).
Boris Arvatov, “Iskusstvo i organizatsiia byta,” in Ob agit- i proziskusstve (Federatsiia, 1930), 81. All translations mine unless otherwise noted.
Nikolai Bukharin, Historical Materialism (International Publishers, 1925), 133. Bukharin clarifies that “in the narrower sense of the word, (we) understand by ‘society’ not merely the aggregate of persons involved, but the connected system.”
Shannon Mattern, “Deep Time of Media Infrastructure,” in Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures, ed. Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski (University of Illinois Press, 2015), 106.
Brian Hayes, “First Links in the Markov Chain,” American Scientist 101, no. 2 (March–April, 2013).
Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer (University of California Press, 2005).
Aleksander Bogdanov, Tektologiia (Finansy, 2003).
Quoted in Georg Trogemann, Alexander Nitussov, and Wolfgang Ernst, Computing in Russia. The History of Computer Devices and Information Technology revealed (Vieweg, 2001), 4.
Aleksei Gastev, “Vosstanie kul’tury,” in Formal’nyi metod, ed. Sergei Ushakin (Kabinetnyi uchenyi, 2014), 136.
Mikhail Geller, Cogs in the Wheel: The Formation of Soviet Man (Knopf, 1988).
Gastev, “My rastem iz zheleza,” in Formal’nyi metod, 65.
Remarking about another poem in the collection, titled “Express,” Julia Vaingurt writes that it “invites the reader, situated as a member of an imaginary audience in a movie theater, to be seduced by the wondrous illusion.” “Poetry of Labor and Labor of Poetry: The Universal Language of Alexei Gastev’s Biomechanics,” Russian Review 67, no. 2 (April 2008): 220.
See Amateur and Proletarian Theatre in Post-Revolutionary Russia: Primary Sources, ed. Stefan Aquilina (Bloomsbury, 2021).
Fedor Kalinin, “Put’ proletarskoi kritiki i Poeziia rabochego udara A. Gasteva,” Proletarskaia kul’tura, no. 4 (September 1918), 18.
M. Smit, “Ob izuchenii trudovykh protsessov (otvet A Gastevu),” Proletarskaia kul’tura, no. 11–12 (December 1919): 41, 45, 41.
Gastev, “Pachka orderov,” in Formal’nyi metod, 207–12.
Gastev, “Predislovie,” in Formal’nyi metod, 64.
See the discussion of the image-word (slovo-obraz) and the term-word (slovo-termin) in Fore, Soviet Factography (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
N. Kukin, “A. Gastev: Pachka orderov,” Kuznitsa, no. 9 (1922): 38–39.
Boris Arvatov, “Aleksei Gastev, Pachka orderov, Riga 1921 g.,” Lef, no. 1 (1923): 243–44.
“All of the writing we consider to be the most intrinsically interesting—literary or journalistic, scholarly or scientific—amounts only to a small percentage of the writing of modernity, crowded to the poles of the epistemic axis. In our epoch, large numbers of people write, are even compelled to write, but they do not for the most part write poems or scientific papers; they fill out forms, compose memos or reports, send interoffice emails.” John Guillory, “The Memo and Modernity,” Critical Inquiry, no. 31 (Autumn 2004): 112.
Arvatov, “Pachka orderov,” 243.
Viktor Pertsov, “Sovremenniki,” Novyi Lef, no. 8–9 (1927): 79.
Cornelia Vismann, Files: Law and Media Technology, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (Stanford University Press, 2008).
Gastev, “Novaia kul’turnaia ustanovka,” in Formal’nyi metod, 399.
Gastev, “Predislovie,” in Formal’nyi metod, 64.
“Reportage,” Oxford English Dictionary.
Gastev, “Novaia kul’turnaia ustanovka,” 398–99.
Gastev, “Organizatsiia–ustanovka,” in Formal’nyi metod, 379.
Gastev, “The Social Banner of the Central Institute of Labor,” trans. Ewan McPhee, in this issue.
Gastev, “Nashi zadachi,” in Formal’nyi metod, 225.
Gastev, “Biometodika, predopredliaiushchaia orgametodiku,” in Formal’nyi metod, 502, 504.
Gastev, “Organizatsiia–ustanovka,” 383.
Gastev, “Ot metalla k tekstiliu,” Ustanovka rabochei sily, no. 3 (1926): 2, 4.
Gastev, “Pachka orderov,” 207.
Gastev, “Biologicheskii mashinizm,” in Formal’nyi metod, 357, emphasis in original.
“Time is not a general framework but a provisional result of the connection among entities. Modern discipline has reassembled, hooked together, systematized the cohort of contemporary elements to hold it together and thus to eliminate those that do not belong to the system. This attempt has failed; it has always failed. There are no longer—there have never been—anything but elements that elude the system, objects whose date and duration are uncertain. It is not only the Bedouins and the !Kung who mix up transistors and traditional behaviours, plastic buckets and animal-skin vessels. What country could not be called ‘a land of contrasts’? We have all reached the point of mixing up times. We have all become premodern again.” Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Harvard University Press, 1993), 74–75.
Viktor Pertsov, “O Forde,” Ustanovka rabochei sily, no. 6–7 (1926): 68.
Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (Progress Publishers, 1959), 104, translation modified.
See Siegfried Kracauer, Die Angestellten, in Schriften, vol. 1 (Suhrkamp, 2006).
Nikolai Bukharin, Sud’by russkoi intelligentsia: Materialy diskussii, 1923–1925 gg., ed. V. L. Soskin (Nauka, 1991), 39.
Gastev, “Social Banner of the Central Institute of Labor.”
Gastev, “Metod konstruktivnogo miatezha,” in Formal’nyi metod, 115.
Boris Arvatov, “Futurizm kak sotsial’noe iavlenie,” in Ob agit- i proziskusstve (Federatsiia, 1930), 47.
Aleksei Gastev, “Kinematika kul’tury,” Prozhektor, no. 21 (1925): 21.
Gastev takes the concept of a polytechnical education from Blonskii, “Trudovaia shkola u voprosy politekhnicheskogo obrazovaniia,” in Izbrannye pedagogicheskie proizvedeniia, ed. N. I. Blonskaia and A. D. Sergeeva (Izd-vo Akademii pedagogicheskikh nauk SSSR, 1961).
Gastev, “Formy podgotovki rabochei sily,” in Formal’nyi metod, 518.
Gastev, “Social Banner of the Central Institute of Labor.”
Gastev, “TsIT kak izyskatel’noe sooruzhenie,” in Kak nado rabotat’ (Ekonomika, 1966).
Gastev, “Organicheskoe vnedrenie v predpriiatie,” in Trudovye ustanovki (Ekonomika, 1973), 223.
This phrase comes from a NOUT source quoted by Gastev: A. Gornostaev, “Ekonomika nauchnogo proizvodstva,” Oktiabr’ mysli, no. 3–4 (1924): 54, emphasis in original; quoted in Gastev, “TsIT kak izyskatel’noe sooruzhenie.”
Gastev, “Trudovye ustanovki,” in Formal’nyi metod, 2:432. Gastev concedes, though, that the next generation of researchers after Taylor and the Gilbreths such as Henry Gantt was more interested in input from the workers.
Gastev thus questioned campaigns to standardize interfaces and labor processes, since industrial norms effectively “froze” the spiral of biotechnical evolution.
Gastev, “Trudovye ustanovki,” 431–32.
Gastev, “Trudovye ustanovki,” 435.
Viktor Pertsov, “Aleksei Gastev,” in Sovremenniki: Izbrannye literaturno-kriticheskie stat’i v dvukh tomakh (Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1980), 1:175. Along similar lines, the poet Semen Kirsanov later wrote in 1971 about A Stack of Orders: “The work reminds me of a fantastic synchrotronic particle accelerator, or even better, a hall for observing and communicating with rockets flying through space.” Kirsanov, “Slovo o Gasteve,” in Gastev, Poeziia rabochego udara. (Khudozhestvennaia literature, 1971), 6.
Martin Heidegger, “Traditional Language and Technological Language,” trans. Wanda Torres Gregory, Journal of Philosophical Research, vol. 23 (1998): 141, emphasis in original.
Heidegger, “Traditional Language,” 141–42.
A. Berg, “V. I. Lenin i nauchnaia organizatsiia truda,” Pravda, no. 297 (October 24, 1962), 4.
