Authors

Johanna Conterio¹;  ¹ University of Oslo, Norway

Discussion

Historical literature has emphasized the prominence of machine metaphors in Soviet theories of embodiment. In this paper, I suggest that the study of engineering and technological models for understanding the Soviet body have overshadowed consideration of other sources of models for understanding the body, from beyond technology and engineering, and consideration of other metaphors. As I highlight in this paper, the value of man-machine metaphors became a matter of debate at the height of 1930s Stalinism, even as they permeated Soviet culture. Indeed, I suggest that theories of embodiment were in flux in the Stalinst period, before Pavlovian physiology became hegemonic in the late 1940s.

In this paper, I describe an alternate vision of the body that become more prominent in the 1930s, based on the idea of the body as an organism and drawing on biological models, as traced in medical literature in the field of medical climatology and climate physiology. I examine in detail the theory of embodiment suggested in the work of Polien Grigor’evich Mezernitskii, the director of the bio-climatology department of the Yalta tuberculosis institute, and P.Ia. Sokolov, a researcher in his department. The theory of embodiment developed in their work focused heavily on the relationship between the body, described as an organism, and the outside environment. Whereas the machine-body was free and able to exist in a vacuum, so long as it was in repair, the body as organism was tied to the environment, shaped and determined by the environment, able to grow and thrive only in distinct environments. Mezernitskii and Sokolov proposed a model of a body that was highly permeable to the outside environment, rather than separate from it. These studies were deeply rooted in a transnational literature in German and French-language medical journals and tied to the rise of medical holism in the interwar period. I suggest that the metaphor of the body as an organism became the Stalinist paradigm for understanding the body in the 1930s, after the cultural revolution, in contrast to early Soviet theories, and biological metaphors took pride of place over machine metaphors, while not replacing them all together. I will explain this shift in medical culture and its meaning in the context of the development of dialectical materialism as a philosophy of science, and its influence on medicine.