The Reflex Republic

In the immediate wake of the Russian Revolution, Pavlovian reflex conditioning was rapidly elevated to a universal materialist model for understanding and manipulating human behavior, including the production and reception of art. This article explores the little-known history of the "reflexology of art," a movement that applied physiological concepts and techniques to drama, cinema, and literature with the aim of molding atomized individual subjectivities into a corporeal collective. This movement-which involved figures like Vsevolod Meyerhold, Sergei Eisenstein, and Sergei Tret'iakov-formed part of the highly politicized dialogue between science, politics and the arts in the 1920s. By reconstructing the critical discourse around the reflexology of art within the cultural production of the early Soviet state, the article sheds light on the contradictory impulses animating an avant-garde caught between deterministic visions of social engineering and the subversive passions of revolution

Biology · Political science · Reflex · Soviet union · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · Law · Neuroscience · Soviet and Russian History