Book Reviews

A “Metaphysics of the Dunces”

HHS Contributor

Historically, suppressions of magic do not always express anti-spiritual motives. On the contrary, once we check the concrete means by which magic has been concealed in plain sight, it turns out that more often than not it has cancelled itself out through its own competing modes. Puritan prohibitions of magic, for instance, were not due to scepticism but naked fears of devils.

Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017; xiv + 411 pp. $96.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-40322-9; $32.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-226-40336-6. by Andreas Sommer If recent surveys of belief in magic are accurate, there is a good chance that you either hold some variant of these beliefs yourself, or that you may be puzzled by some otherwise secular-minded colleague, friend, or family member who does. Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm might not be a believer in spirits himself, but reveals toward the end of this remarkable book a significant factor in his choice of becoming a religious scholar: his grandmother Felicitas Goodman, the noted anthropologist who caused quite a stir when she openly confessed her commitments to shamanism. An expert of East Asian religions, Josephson-Storm’s previous cross-cultural studies have certainly prepared him well to tackle vexing questions regarding the Western occult. But it is perhaps especially owing to a

deep respect for his heretical ancestor that The Myth of Disenchantment is marked by a refreshingly even-handed approach which neither mocks nor advocates unorthodox beliefs. Instead, Josephson-Storm makes a bold and sincere effort to come to grips with hidden continuities of magic in often surprising places, and the persistence of Western normative assertions of the disenchantment of the world as the flip-side of that puzzle. Regarding the latter issue, the book can be considered a historical test of the actual adherence to basic naturalistic proscriptions in the humanities and human sciences. After all, as Josephson-Storm reminds us, Max Weber’s famous verdict of disenchantment is often misunderstood as motivated by a normative agenda itself. The introduction to the book formulates a fruitful principal method and rationale: to “investigate the least likely people – the very theorists of modernity as disenchantment – and show how they worked out various insights inside an occult context, in a social world overflowing with spirits and…

Book Reviews

Foxes v. Lions

HHS Contributor

Post-Truth is an insightful, thorough text which examines issues of truth with more nuance and clarity than most other recent works in the field. The book succeeds most overtly in its ability to present a case for why post-truth studies need be done. To understand the contemporary world, the promises of past theories, and where things go wrong in political controversy, we have to understand how post-truth in its contemporary condition unites all fields of inquiry.

Steve Fuller. Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game; New York: Anthem Press; 218 pages; paperback $39.95; ISBN: 978-1-78308-694-8 by Steve Baxi A consistent problem in the journalistic discourse on post-truth is the confusion between the recent phenomenon of post-truth and some historically justifiable, apolitical, entirely objective Truth - the latter having been, on some level, eclipsed by the former. Indeed, this is precisely how the Oxford English Dictionary understands post-truth, and thus the focus in mainstream media outlets and contemporary studies of truth have focused on the contentions between Truth and post-truth. However, this understanding misses the relationships of power and conditions of possibility for knowledge with respect to truth - power relations and conditions we can claim to value in research fields that place the pursuit of truth over the recent, overblown idea of Truth. In the face of academic experts, Brexit, and social media, Steve Fuller argues that post-truth is “a deep feature of at least Western intellectual life, bringing

together issues of politics, science and judgement in ways which established authorities have traditionally wished to be separate” (2018, 6). Fuller’s Post-Truth: Knowledge as a Power Game attempts to provide a set of case studies of post-truth in academia, as well as in contemporary political movements, to establish the historical character of post-truth, or what he calls a post-truth history of post-truth. The book is divided into seven chapters, each examining Fuller’s own previously developed concepts and social epistemological stances on expertise, philosophy, sociology, and science and technology studies. Fuller especially draws on Vilfredo Pareto’s distinction between "lions" and "foxes" to help set up the tensions in his case studies. Where the lions play by the rules of the game, the foxes attempt to change the rules, but do so such that the lions believe themselves to be following the very same rules they have always followed. Fuller’s approach here is loosely genealogical, perhaps even Foucauldian, as he…

Book Reviews

Formal experimentation

HHS Contributor

One of the most persuasive arguments Wall advances in The British Anti-Psychiatrists, and the book’s main intervention, is an insistence on the importance of acknowledging continuities and connections between the theories, practices and communities of the mainstream 'psy’ disciplines and those of anti-psychiatry.

by Hannah Proctor Oisín Wall, The British Anti-psychiatrists: From Institutional Psychotherapy to the Counter-Culture, 1960-1971 (London: Routledge, 2018) The Spring 1972 issue of the short-lived self-published journal Red Rat: The Journal of Abnormal Psychologists includes a review by Ruth Davies of Ken Loach’s film Family Life alongside the Yugoslavian director Dušan Makavejev’s W.R., Mysteries of the Organism.[ref]Ruth Davies, ‘Film Review: W.R. + Family Life’, Red Rat: The Journal of Abnormal Psychologists, 4, Spring 1972, pp. 28-29, p. 28. Issues of Red Rat are held in the archives at MayDay Rooms, London.[/ref] According to the reviewer both films were then showing simultaneously at the Academy Cinema on Oxford Street in London and in ‘both cases, the theme of the film is the work of a radical psychologist whose ideas have helped lay the foundations of alternative psychology; in the case of Family Life, the work of RD Laing, and in Mysteries of the Organism, Wilhelm Reich.' Davies outlines the different approaches to psychology presented in the films: ‘Family

Life is an account of the genesis of schizophrenia firmly in the Laing tradition,' following a young woman whose diagnosis with schizophrenia is presented as deriving from her family situation, while W.R., Mysteries of the Organism combines documentary footage shot in America (interviewing people at Wilhelm Reich’s infamous Organon laboratory and following various artists around New York) with a heavily stylised narrative about sexual revolutionaries in Belgrade encountering a dashing Soviet figure skater who embodies Communism in its repressive and sexually repressed form. Though Davies is primarily concerned with the content of these two films, I was struck by how their wildly contrasting formal qualities–Loach’s drab naturalism (people wearing beige clothes drinking beige cups of tea in beige institutional rooms) versus Makavejev’s audacious experimentalism (people tearing off lurid clothes knocking down the walls of their bohemian rooms)–resembles a contrast at the heart of Oisín Wall’s new book, The British Anti-psychiatrists: From Institutional Psychotherapy…

Book Reviews

Deafness, Sovietness

HHS Contributor

Many of our conceptions of what disability and deafness actually are have roots in 20th century disability and Deaf activism, and scholarship from the UK and the US. These conceptions bear specific political and historical connotations that are not self-evidently transferable to the context of Soviet Russia. Proponents of global disability studies have been rewriting this Anglo-American conceptual framework of disability to suit local contexts for quite some time now, but what place the former ‘Soviet world’ is to be assigned within global disability studies is still quite unclear.

by Anaïs Van Ertvelde Claire L. Shaw. Deaf in the USSR: Marginality, Community and Soviet Identity, 1917-1991; Ithaca: Cornell University Press; 310 pages; hardback $49.95; ISBN: 1501713663 In a picture taken during the 1933 May Day Parade in Moscow, we witness a procession of young athletes with firm bodies walking towards the Red Square. Dressed in a uniform of sporty blouses and practical shorts, the athletes are on their way to the Lenin Mausoleum, where they can salute the USSR’s top leaders. It’s a display seen a hundred times over - one that historians in training study in a first year course, or the general public has seen in any given documentary on life in the USSR. It would be a wholly unremarkable picture, if it were not for one detail. The first column of male and female athletes carries a banner which reads ‘glukhonemye’ or ‘deaf-mutes’. ‘With their cheerful appearance, the deaf-mutes testified to their readiness to fight alongside

the working class of the USSR for the general line of the party and its leader, comrade Stalin’ the then magazine for deaf-mutes Zhizn glukhonemykh wrote about the event. Deaf people seemed intent on participating in Soviet life. They dedicated themselves to overcoming the obstacles to their inclusion into the Soviet project in general and the industrial workforce in particular. For it was the Soviet project, many leading figures in the burgeoning deaf community felt, that gave them the opportunities to emancipate themselves. No longer were they the dependent, disabled people they had been under the tsarist regime - now they could become valuable members of the working class. However much the deaf athletes, or the editors of Zhizn glukhonemykh, subscribed to a narrative of radical inclusion, or framed perfecting the deaf masses as a Soviet aim pur sang, they were also confronted with exclusion. In everyday life not everyone was equally capable of realizing the utopian rhetoric of overcoming…

Book Reviews

Between discomfort and trauma

HHS Contributor

Most of the authors in this volume agree that trigger warnings are an ethical and legal practice that can and should be put in place as part of increasing access to higher education. The people most likely to request trigger warnings are minority groups, who are also at greatest risk of experiencing trauma. The problem, however, comes when these issues are individualised, as neoliberal interpretations of trigger warnings have tended to do

Emily J.M. Knox (ed.). Trigger Warnings: History, Theory, Context; London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017; 298 pages; hardback £54.95; ISBN 978-1-4422-7371-9 . by Sarah Chaney In August 2016, the University of Chicago sent a letter to new students that received a great deal of academic and media interest. In the letter John “Jay” Ellison, Dean of Students, stated that the university was committed to “intellectual freedom”, indicating that other concepts referred to - “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” among them - were antithetical to this notion. The connection between these concepts, as well as the letter itself, was much debated at the time, and the issues raised appear to be the starting point for many of the essays in this book. Are students’ minds really being coddled, or are there valuable things to be learnt from the use of trigger warnings and the debate surrounding them? Trigger Warnings: History, Theory, Context does not take a clear-cut and dogmatic approach to the topic (as some

others have done, most prominently those who object outright to the idea of trigger warnings like Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt). Most authors in this volume adopt a carefully critical view of trigger warnings that also seeks to understand and explore their implications and uses. The book focuses on higher education in North America; the location is only to be expected, perhaps, as this is where the bulk of debate has taken place. A few essays do look beyond higher education to the broader context from which trigger warnings emerged, including a rather Whiggish history of trigger warnings based on retrospective diagnosis of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (chapter 1) and a more incisive look at the use of trigger warnings in the treatment of eating disorders since the 1970s (chapter 3). The volume claims to be interdisciplinary, although contributions largely stem from those working in the arts, humanities and social sciences. This is understandable: these fields have probably been the most…

Book Reviews

Skin, muscle, bone, brain, fluid

HHS Contributor

One might not expect to be gripped by descriptions of ‘fatty muscles’, ‘boggy brains’ and ‘flabby livers’, but Wallis reveals a fascinating story that is full of originality and tells us as much about nineteenth century medical practice as about the patient himself.

Jennifer Wallis, Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum. Doctors, Patients, and Practices, (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); xvi, 276 pages; 9 b/w illustrations; hardback £20.00; ISBN, 978-3-319-56713-6. by Louise Hide Skin, muscle, bone, brain, fluid – Jennifer Wallis has given each its own chapter in this exemplary mesh of medical, psychiatric and social history that spans work carried out in the latter decades of the nineteenth century in Yorkshire’s West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum. The body – usually the dead body – is at the centre of the book, playing an active role in the construction of knowledge and the evolution of practices and technologies in the physical space of the pathology lab, as well as in the emerging disciplines of the mental sciences, neurology and pathology. Wallis explores how, in the desperate quest to uncover aetiologies and treatments for mental disorders, there was a growing conviction that 'the truth of any disease lay deep within the fabric

of the body' (Kindle: 3822). General paralysis of the insane (GPI) is central to the book. A manifestation of tertiary syphilis and a common cause of death in male asylum patients, it was one of the few conditions that produced identifiable lesions in the brain, raising hopes that the post-mortem examination could yield new discoveries around the organic origins of other mental diseases. Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum is, therefore, not only about how the body of the asylum patient was framed by changing socio-medical theories and practices, but about how it was productive of them too. Whilst reading this lucidly written monograph, it soon becomes clear that West Riding was no asylum back-water. Its superintendent, James Crichton-Browne, was determined to forge a reputation in scientific research and West Riding became the first British asylum to appoint its own pathologist in 1872. Wallis has not only marshalled a vast amount of secondary literature, but made a deep and far-reaching foray…

Book Reviews

Book Review: ‘About Method.’

HHS Contributor

'About Method' remains true to its title. It surveys a three-century span not to tell a comprehensive history of venom research, but to intricately contextualise the shifting ways in which modern scientists have committed publicly and procedurally to experimental method.

Jutta Schickore, About Method: Experimenters, Snake Venom and the History of Writing Scientifically. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 316 pp., US$50.00. ISBN: 978-0-226-44998-2 (hbk). by Peter Hobbins If scientists reflect only infrequently on their commitment to experimental method, contends Jutta Schickore, then historians and sociologists have been equally remiss in interrogating this lacuna. In her carefully considered About Method, Schickore interrogates the history of snake venom research to dissect the ‘methods discourse’ promulgated by key practitioners from 1650 to 1950. In historicising her actors’ statements about ‘proper’ experimental practice – over time and across emergent disciplinary boundaries – Schickore proffers a tripartite framework for evaluating their epistemological imperatives. Encompassing ‘protocols’, ‘methodological views’, and ‘commitments to experimentation’, her novel schema is applicable to unpicking disciplinary investment in experimentation across diverse scientific communities. The author’s focus on snake venom is neither arbitrary nor arcane. At the outset she foregrounds one of the most astonishing scientific projects of eighteenth-century natural

history: Felice Fontana’s studies of viper venom. Undertaking literally thousands of experiments, this Tuscan naturalist sought to understand far more than simply the pathophysiology of being injected with venom. In enumerating the quantity, variety, variability and enduring uncertainties attendant upon his observations, Fontana reflected deeply upon the heuristic purpose, design and conduct of experiments. The sheer scale of his vivisectional program – unsurpassed until well into the twentieth century – was thus paralleled by Fontana’s epistemological legacy. Indeed, this very continuity justifies Schickore’s selective focus in tracking methods discourse across three centuries. ‘For more than 250 years’, she remarks, ‘venom research was imbued with a strong sense of tradition both in terms of techniques and results and in terms of the methodology of experimentation’ (p.4). Moreover – and importantly for scholars working across the human sciences – venom research continues to intersect with multiple biomedical disciplines, including biochemistry, physiology, pathology, bacteriology and immunology. It is indeed an apposite field for asking what…

Book Reviews

Book Review: Homo Sovieticus

HHS Contributor

In this book, Velminski’s grandiose claims regarding the telepathic underpinnings of Soviet society tend to drown out the more subtle forms of continuity his materials gesture towards; he is more interested in telepathy as a master analogy for understanding Soviet culture than in exploring telepathic practices and discourses as cultural phenomena.  Perhaps prioritising his materials over his overarching thesis would have allowed the complexities of those hypnotic histories to come to the fore and a less stereotyped portrait of Soviet power may have emerged in the process. 

W. Velminski, Homo Sovieticus: Brain Waves, Mind Control, and Telepathic Destiny, trans. by Erik Butler, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017, £14.95 pbk, 128pp, ISBN: 9780262035699 by Hannah Proctor, Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Berlin ‘Communism is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole land’ declared V.I. Lenin in a 1920 speech.[ref]https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/nov/21.htm[/ref] Wladimir Velminski cites this famous phrase in the opening pages of his slim and punchy book, Homo Sovieticus, recently published in English translation by MIT Press. But while Lenin was referring to the electrical infrastructure required for industrialisation in the wake of the October Revolution, Velminski explores how Soviet power harnessed electromagnetic technologies and theories to communise the mind in order to produce ‘uniformity of thought’ and achieve what he bombastically describes as a form of ‘collective brainwashing’ (p. 2, p. 1). Telepathy and hypnosis, or what Velminski calls ‘neural prostheses’, provide the thematic links between chapters. Originally published in German by Merve Verlag – primarily known for their translations of French and Italian philosophy, theory and political

thought – Homo Sovieticus is not a work of cultural history or the history of science in any conventional sense. Indeed, at first glance it might seem to have more in common with McKenzie Wark’s Molecular Red: Theory of the Anthropocene (which includes discussions of Soviet theories of nature by Alexander Bogdanov and Andrei Platonov), than with scholarly monographs discussing specific Soviet scientific disciplines, discourses, thinkers or schools of thought. Superficial stylistic similarities aside, however, Wark excavates specific strands of early Soviet thought he perceives to have radical potential in order to challenge understandings of nature in the ‘capitalist realist’ present, whereas Velminski treats telepathy as a metaphor for comprehending the oppressive operations of Soviet power in the past.[ref]For a good critical review of Wark’s engagement with Soviet intellectual history see: Maria Chehonadskih, ‘The Anthropocene in 90 Minutes’ Mute Magazine, 23 September 2015 - http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/anthropocene-90-minutes (Accessed 28th March 2017).[/ref] Homo Sovieticus is comprised…

Book Reviews

Book Review: ‘Constructing Pain: Historical, Psychological and Critical Perspectives.’

HHS Contributor

In this book, the view of pain as a ‘deficit of energy’ is dissected and dismissed as inconsistent with physiology. Similarly, pain as the opposite of pleasure is not a convincing hypothesis, as not all pain is displeasing, and disagreeableness is not equivalent to the experience of pain... the systematic dissection of historical concepts of pain is a useful way to challenge our contemporary conceptions of pain and its treatment. This was an insightful read for someone working in a medical field [as I do] as it made me question the way I perceive pain, and how this may be different to the way in which my patients perceive it.

R. Kugelmann, Constructing Pain: Historical, Psychological and Critical Perspectives, London: Routledge, 2017, £34.099 pbk, 158pp, ISBN: 9781138841222 by Lottie Wittingham In this thorough review, Robert Kugelmann charts how ideas around the polymorphous concept of pain have come about via the influence of academic personalities, and their experiences in the spheres of psychology and medicine. Drawing on the theories of figures such as Benjamin Ward Richardson[ref]Richardson, B.W., 1897, Vita Medica: Chapters of medical life and work, New York: Longman, Green & Sons[/ref], Henry Rutgers Marshall [ref]Marshall, H.M., 1889, 'The classification of pleasure and pain,' Mind, 14, 511-536[/ref] and well-known philosophers such as Descartes and Bentham, part 1 of the book describes the dualistic concept of pain and the perceived distinction between ‘real’ and imagined pain. Beginning with the development of anaesthesia and the influence of this on the anatomical image of the body as opposed to the ‘felt’ body, the introductory chapter describes the heralding of the abolition of pain, and the consequence of

this on people’s opinions on pain and its utility or otherwise. Is pain a useful signal to signify a physical ailment within the body? If so, where does chronic pain fit into this model? It is posited that the pointlessness of chronic pain perhaps accentuates how much it hurts. The ‘medical gaze’ describes pain as an indicator of bodily dysfunction and this challenges the legitimacy of chronic pain which has no ostensible ‘function’. The theory of pain as a direct sensation felt by specific pain nerves is contrasted with the theory of pain and pleasure as direct antitheses to one another. The view of pain as a ‘deficit of energy’ is dissected and dismissed as inconsistent with physiology. Similarly, pain as the opposite of pleasure is not a convincing hypothesis, as not all pain is displeasing, and disagreeableness is not equivalent to the experience of pain. This section of the book is somewhat hard to follow, but the…

Book Reviews

Book Review: ‘The life and times of Franz Alexander. From Budapest to California.’

HHS Contributor

In this book, we learn much about an all-round scholar and clinician, who, as his own book on the history of psychiatry also showed, was not an either/or thinker regarding relations between body, brain, and the mind. We also learn about a caring European-style pater familias. We learn with the eyes of the respectful granddaughter about a family style that always combined love and commitment with decisiveness.

Ilonka Venier Alexander: The life and times of Franz Alexander. From Budapest to California. London: Karnac, £22.99 pbk, 2015, xxxii + 154 pp. ISBN:  9781782202509 by Csaba Pléh Written by the granddaughter of the famous Hungarian-born and educated psychoanalyst (Franz) Ferenc Alexander, Ilonka Venier Alexander’s book is a peculiar work on the life and work of her grandfather in several regards. The peculiarity of the book is shown in two ways. Regarding its central figure, Franz Alexander, the reader sees a constant shifting of perspective between the personal/familiar and the professional perspective, the latter mainly dealing with the history of American psychoanalysis. On the other hand, sometimes we have to deal not with Franz Alexander, but with the grandchild, the vicissitudes of the divorce of her parents, and the central role of the grandfather. This is not necessarily intended to be a criticism. The book is an excellent resource and a fascinating read. But the constant shifts of perspective make for a

hard time for the reader. As a history of a professional psychoanalyst, the monograph is certainly timely. Alexander has been unduly forgotten. The editor of Karnac's 'History of Psychoanalysis' series, Brett Klahr, points out in the preface that Franz Alexander is an important figure in the history of psychoanalysis; Alexander’s proposal for short therapy was a provocative intervention. Even more provocative was his glittering life in California. The author argues that Franz Alexander’s copious honoraria - which allowed for this luxurious standard of life - made many of his colleagues jealous. At the same time, the fact that Alexander continued his practice for over a decade in Hollywood had an important role in psychoanalysis becoming part of American everyday life, thought and pop culture. The first third of the book is a family chronicle. It presents the Alexander clan with family trees, family photos, and gossip. Franz Alexander’s Father, Bernat (Bernhard) Alexander (1850–1927) – whom the writer spells as Bernard…