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AFTERWORD

Notes on The Psychic Soviet for the Second Edition

When The Psychic Soviet first appeared, it was described in reviews as "extravagant," "awry," "delusional," and "dangerous."

Those who scanned it were scandalized. Those who read it were reddened. Its discontents were legion.

Whether it was an ivory tower academic, who saw the book as a harbinger of their coming irrelevance, or a retired billionaire, wary of a new front in the class war, the book was regarded with fear and anxiety. Book publishers were threatened by its outsider model, while armchair rock theorists were jealous of its scope and daring. Whether they were foreign dignitaries, minor league mafiosi, or presidents of private sex clubs, nearly everyone who cracked open The Psychic Soviet was aghast that it might upset their personal apple cart. It was banned from university curriculums, summer reading groups, and from being recited aloud at the United Nations. Organizers of art bookfairs conspired to crush it underfoot. Librarians were encouraged to file it under the "insane" or "gibberish" section at the bibliotheque. As there was no precedent for this kind of book, the Dewey decimal system was unable to accommodate it.

Since The Psychic Soviet's findings were incendiary, the book was predictably suppressed, and a copy was difficult—nearly impossible—to find. Of course one might locate one; perhaps in the pocket of a gin-soaked tramp, ruthlessly rolled by ruffians—or maybe on the body of a waterlogged spy, washed up dead on a remote shore—but the instances of its appearance were unusual and rare.

Still, thrill seekers sought it out, as intently as a narcotic enthusiast scours the street for a new pill or powder that's rumored to be fatal. The few copies in existence passed feverishly from paw to paw, as old ideas of ownership were forgotten, traded in for egalitarianism and idea sharing; The Psychic Soviet's acolytes understood the book signaled new possibilities, new values.

The social planners who organize society understood as well. Catastrophe struck the literary world, as stores were run out of business, shuttered, shut down, and demolished. Bookshops—once cultural hubs of any self-respecting population center—suddenly became scarce, rarefied.

This diabolical transformation of the landscape is typically credited to the electronic mail-order innovation called "the Internet," which led to the dust bowl desolation dubbed "gentrification." But some whisper that The Psychic Soviet was responsible. Indeed, certain sinister forces were avowed in their determination that the book not proliferate. Wrecking the institutions where words were sold would be the most effective manner to do so.

Bookstores weren't just bulldozed outright, of course; they were made obsolete via a profound and insidious transformation of humankind's relationship to the written word. This was done through an acceleration of the postwar newspeak called "Branding," which developed from the consumer culture that had replaced ideological systems intended to create a less exploitative, more humane world.

A brand is a jumble of letters or words written in a distinct style, typically designating a particular make of a product. These letters, words, or numbers insinuate, if not the superiority of the owner, a firm perch for them in a universe otherwise hewn from chaos. These logos alleviate anxiety for the holder of the brand, and induce anxiety in those without. Brands were obviously not a new concept, but in the post-Soviet era, with the population shorn of idealism, humanism, hope for the future, and any ideology aside from consumerism, people turned to product names and logos as a dogma. The brand names became a sort of Esperanto; a pan-global pidgin that promulgated particular values and proliferated the aesthetic of consumption both as catharsis and creed.

The "Brandish" that people began to speak had profound implications. Once, letters, alphabets, and words had been tools for conveying ideas, concepts, and desires. But with logos imbued with sacred value, words and letters became glyphs: abstract and symbolic.

A new emphasis on branding in the post-Soviet universe was, for global social planners, the key to changing a population's relationship not only to competing ideologies—those at odds with the capitalist planners' own creed of racism, iniquity, exploitation, etc.—but to letters and words themselves, transforming them from tools into totems. The users of such an alphabet would be reduced to something more compliant and less unruly; like barnyard animals. Artists, being the first "brands" (starting with Michelangelo, da Vinci, et al.), were the rehabilitators par excellence of Brandish to the middle classes.

Just as the Romantic artists—confronted by the wreckage wrought by the Industrial Revolution—painted ancient forests which were quickly being eradicated by new, soot-belching factories, so the artists of today prefer to paint a big word, a letter or two, or a sentence fragment on a canvas, as they sense the imminent demise of language itself.

In such a landscape, where any word or set of initials is imbued with mysticism, part of a magical pantheon, the coherent sentence suddenly seems garish, baroque, overwrought, and absurd. And a book seems ridiculous. This sensibility precipitated the rampant, pitiless immolation of the bookstore, and transpired via mind controllers from Madison Avenue who were in turn inspired, some would say, by The Psychic Soviet.

To make things even more complicated for The Psychic Soviet, the book field was soiled by an influx of lookalike decoy "art" books from vanity presses, almost indistinct from The Psychic Soviet aside from their vacancy and pointlessness. But their form was practically identical.

After The Psychic Soviet, these books muddied the landscape with nonsense, and The Psychic Soviet's message was often confused with these little tomes.

Now, in a postsentence landscape, where a book is a series of pages stapled together to display girth and volume instead of content, The Psychic Soviet's new volume seems an outlier. Its as ferocious as ever, more relevant, uncannily prescient, and made more sophisticated from its exile. What possible use could this kind of book be in a universe where the only goal is acquisition of a chrome cashmere top paired with mesh-webbing undergarments? This volume, like the last, has been outfitted with a series of subversive logos, featured on the pages preceding each chapter, which will infiltrate the consciousness of the brand-soaked modern, and which will steer citizens toward radical action and insurrection. This is the promise of The Psychic Soviet, Mk II.

 

Sincerely,

Ian F. Svenonius

Author