Experimental Urbanisms: Psychotechnik in Weimar Berlin

Abstract

That the historical geography of the modern city is intertwined with the practice of biopolitics has in recent years gained wide currency. In this paper I seek to deepen and complicate this perspective by focusing on Weimar Berlin (1919–33) and on the active role of the experimental life sciences in manufacturing a new habitus for a rapidly modernising metropolis. To do so, I investigate the ways in which contemporary psychiatric theories and experimental practices seized on and transformed different aspects of the metropolitan experience, and turn, in particular, to accounts of the psychotechnical testing enterprise ( Psychotechnik). In addition to the development of a series of experimental embodiments which were scientifically fashioned and tested, I also shift attention to the widespread dissemination of new realms of everyday conduct that were equally tasked with accommodating the impact of the modern urban experience. Ultimately, I hope to show to what extent the various incarnations of Weimar psychiatry were themselves enrolled in a larger project of policing and recuperating a national Gemeinschaft. As I argue, these experimental arrangements not only represented another example of the pervasive injunction of the period to ‘perform or else,’ but also spoke to the wide governmental reach of a pouvoir psychiatrique (Michel Foucault, 2003 Le Pouvoir Psychiatrique Seuil, Paris) through which experimental procedures for analysing, shaping, and regulating a new habitus were introduced, tested, and widely circulated.