“A Nursery of Technique,” the Laboratory in the Socio-Cultural Context of the 1920s–1930s: Between Practice and Metaphor ^†

This article analyzes the laboratory discourse in Soviet society during the first third of the twentieth century through the lens of tékhnē—the ancient fusion of making and knowing—arguing that the laboratory became a key site for redefining artistic practice as a form of knowledge production. Drawing on the institutional critique of the laboratory (Bruno Latour), the author raises the question of the potential for mutual influence between different types of laboratories established in the fields of art, technical sciences, and production. The mechanisms of a laboratory’s influence on society, as identified by Latour, allow for a new interpretation of the phenomenology of the All-Russian Theatre Society and its significant internal divisions. The history of the emergence and defeat of the Laboratory of Mass Psychology at the All-Russian Theatre Society (ARTS) in the 1920s–1930s is reconstructed on the basis of archival materials from RGALI (fund 970). Meeting minutes and documents from 1929 to 1932 reveal the main modes of the anthropology of the “laboratory genre” within the ARTS system (1920s–1980s). These are examined within the general experimental context of the era: the laboratory boom of the 1920s–1930s reshaped the boundaries between the natural sciences and the humanities. The second mode is the human experience of being on the threshold between life and death—a transgressive state. The third mode is the laboratory as a site for new forms of labor and technology. Within the laboratory’s work, psychotechnics acquired particular significance, reaching its culmination in 1931–1932. This period, marked by an intense flurry of events and new laboratory practices of psychological influence, was rightly called a “psychosis of activities” by the participants of the ARTS laboratory themselves.