Читать книгу Technologies for Intuition - Alaina Lemon - Страница 10
Оглавление1.Do We Have Contact?
INTERSECTIONS: ACTORS AND PSYCHICS
This book connects and contrasts hitherto separately treated places, practices, and situations, following actors and psychics and those who cross their paths. Others have written about Soviet theater or about telepathy science as distinct topics, and in rich and insightful ways. This project instead sniffs along the edges where fields of expertise converge and diverge. Some of these overlaps are easy to see, such as when American security forces hire psychologists like Paul Ekman or when Russian detectives quote Constantine Stanislavsky.
In 1996 I started to collect books from street vendors near Moscow metro stations, books that forged hybrids of theatrical and criminological knowledge, branding technologies for intuition, like What Is in His Subconscious? Twelve Lessons in the Psychotechnology of Penetrating the Subconscious of Your Interlocutor (A chto u nego v podsoznanii? Dvenadtsat’ urokov po psikhotekhnologii proniknovenija v podsoznanie sobesednika). The author, psychologist Aleksandr Panasjuk, begins by challenging the Russian proverb asserting that one must “eat a pound of salt” together in order to know and then to trust: “That is what they say who do not know the science of psychology. For science maintains that one can decipher another person in a few seconds!” (1996, 12).
Panasjuk then voices the retort of an imaginary reader: “But what if they are acting?” He reassures us that even the greatest actors have limits—even Innokenty Smoktunovsky, the Soviet-era star whose repertoire ranged from Prince Hamlet to Prince Myshkin, could never pull off a decent Lenin. It follows that ordinary people find it even more difficult “to act” all the time. Therefore, if your interlocutor does not want you to intuit what he is feeling, he must work quite hard. Diplomats, yogis, professional actors, and the like may have taken the time to train themselves to limit and control their gestures and tone, to tame their automatic tells—but rest assured, most mortals have not mastered the control: “If your partner has not studied in special schools or internalized Stanislavsky’s system in the theatrical institute, then it will be incredibly hard for him not to manifest, through unconscious behavioral reactions, his true stance” (Panasjuk 1996, 46). Readers are promised specialized techniques from psychology and theater for penetrating an other’s subconscious—if not to read thoughts, then at least to discern attitudes.
Scholars working elsewhere have theorized similar intersections across scientific experimentation; art; demonstrations of the magical, occult, or paranormal; and to some extent criminology,1 demonstrating where similar aesthetic and technical conventions regulate attention and focus in ritual, in the lab, and behind the proscenium arch. Lights go on and off, doors, curtains, and windows open and close, sorting and separating senders from receivers, setting up barriers to some senses and channels for others, and segregating or linking actors and audiences, subjects and experimenters.2
It is commonplace to assert that just as modernity produces tradition, science produces the occult,3 and that new forms of media motivate and empower mediumship.4 Such claims warrant more thinking at the intersections. Luckhurst (2002) argues that telepathy is magic gone modern. In making this claim, he and other scholars identify junctures among formally distinct, public arenas (“law,” “ritual”) and more diffuse forms of sociality. They describe the nineteenth-century turn to spiritualism and hypnosis as echoing fears and hopes about messages crossing once inconceivable distances. Telepathy, psychokinesis, and all the paranormal powers did more than merely run alongside the novelties of mass printing, trains and telegraphs, radio and film, and now the cell phone and the digital image.5 Strong feelings both for sounds transmitted along thin wires and for voices from the ether animated the extension of empires and states (see especially Galvan 2010, 2015).
Perspective matters a great deal to this story: because perspectives are both many and limited, I do not claim to paint a general landscape of fields, even within one country.6 As a sociocultural, linguistic, and historical anthropologist, trained both to be attuned to interactions and to search the archives, my goals are not to catalog taxonomies, to distill origins, or even to posit causal explanations. I am motivated instead by questions like this one: As people move among situations, from the bureaucratic to the magical to the mundane, for whom do which channels seem clear? For whom are which channels invisible? Who aims for, who avoids, which contacts? How do these social facts constrain and enable human actions or even a sense of the possible?
In this book I move among settings in which professionals encounter neophytes; skeptics meet so-called naives; and outsiders and insiders trade places, mixing metaphors and trading tools as they debate and imitate, invent and borrow. Literary critics on talk show panels accuse telepaths of acting. Sociologists claim that fortune-tellers are no worse than telephone therapists. Stage magicians collaborate with film actors and consult with former military paranormal researchers on reality shows that debunk “bad psychics” as “just good psychologists.”
Other scholars have brilliantly described Russian and Soviet sorcery, orthodox miracles, shamanism, folk healing, the occult, and the paranormal in local and regional terms, demonstrating complex relations and connections to economic patterns, regime change, and local scientific history.7 Such works address literary and scientific struggles around the occult before and during Soviet times, the needs of late Soviet and post-Soviet clients seeking alternative treatment or spiritual counseling, the controversies surrounding UFO sightings, the legality of licensing nonmedically trained healers, and other topics.
Likewise, other scholars have explored theatrical movements across Russia and the Soviet Union, linking avant-garde, realist, and documentary work to political formations and social changes8 and situating theatrical agents and projects in fascinating ways, while giving them their due as creative aesthetic projects—for example, exploring Soviet amateur theaters (Mally 2000) or twenty-first-century ventures such as teatr.doc in Moscow, whose participants draft scripts verbatim from interviews with homeless people, migrants, and prisoners (Weygandt 2015). Many have argued that aesthetic struggles regarding performance in Russia, and performances themselves, have shaped events and social patterns, as Russian artists hoped they would do, vesting lines of poetry and stage props with revolutionary—and even occult—agency.9 Regimes both deify and destroy poets and directors, journalists and scientists, because they, too, worry about the effects of communication, even in play and fantasy,10 in changing the world.
A U.S. Department of Defense report on telepathy science cites Pravda as describing the “showmanship aspects of some psychic subjects” (Air Force Systems Command 1978), a comment pointing to actual overlaps of expertise among personnel in the Soviet experiments. In the 1960s, when telepathy, telekinesis, and dermo-optics emerged as topics for public debate in the USSR, the newspapers prominently reported the results of tests with people like actor-director Boris Ermolaev and actor Karl Nikolaev (né Nikolaj Gurvich). Ermolaev had started life following in his father’s footsteps, studying psychiatry with Leonid Vasiljev, a researcher of psychic phenomena and hypnotism since the 1930s (Vasiljev 2002). Encouraged by a neighbor, famous Soviet stage director Georgii Tovstonogov, he switched to the film institute in Moscow, following a childhood dream nurtured in Alma Ata, where his family had rubbed elbows with wartime evacuees such as Sergei Eisenstein. Ermolaev’s networks spliced together theatrical and paranormal work.
Nikolaev’s interest in psychic work was sparked more accidentally, at a working intersection of stage and magic. During World War II, while on leave in Hungary, Nikolaev attended a performance by hypnotist and telepath Orlando. Once he had returned to Moscow, he read everything he could find on psychic phenomena, seeking out Wolf Messing, the Soviet Union’s most famous magician. Messing, born in 1899 in a Jewish village in Poland under imperial Russian rule, toured European stages until he moved to the USSR in the late 1930s. He worked onstage as an illjuzionist (magician) for Goskontsert (state concerts) from the 1940s until his death in 1974, with a specialty in exhibitions of mind reading and hypnosis. By the time Maria Knebel’ spoke of the theatrical work of intuiting contact through analogy to telepathy, connections among the paranormal and the theatrical were not just metaphorical, but historically linked professional specializations.
In 1968 American writers Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder made a pilgrimage to the USSR to meet a number of these psychics, doing research for Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain (1970) Nikolaev is the second person they introduce to readers in the book (after their host, the organizer of an international Moscow conference on extrasensory perception [ESP], rogue biologist and parapsychologist Edward Naumov). They report Nikolaev as saying that his extrasensory powers “made me a better actor. I find it easier now to get into the lives of people I play. I tune in better to other actors and am more sensitive to the audiences,” and that “anyone can learn to develop it.” Nikolaev recounts how he taught himself, with help from his friends (fellow actors, quite possibly, as he describes tasks that recall theatrical academy drills): “They’d think: ‘Light a cigarette.’ … ‘Ok, change your mind and crush it out.’ ” Nikolaev was keen to draw historical threads between his acting and his work with scientists, linking them through a common lineage, stressing that both psychic and theatrical labor relies on practices from yoga to relax mind and body: “Did you know that Stanislavsky developed his famous acting methods through the study of yoga? He believed an actor must eliminate all muscular tensions before going onstage. Stanislavsky thought that tensions or ‘clamps’ on the nerves block real freedom of motion and expression” (Ostrander and Schroeder 1970, 23–25).
One of the resident experts on early seasons of Battle of the Psychics, psychologist and criminologist Mikhail Vinogradov, by his own account has lived across all these professional intersections. Over the years I had several opportunities to meet experts like Vinogradov, who repeats much of what he says on air in biographical publications.11 In the 1960s and 1970s he worked in government labs running experiments on thought transmission, hypnosis, and modes of extrasensory perception such as tactile vision (feeling color as heat) and other claims to synesthesia. He appears now on twenty-first-century television shows that repurpose the Soviet-era experiments, embedding in television performance both the experiments’ conventions and recollections of the personalities who undertook them. Vinogradov developed his specialty in detecting psychic channels when, as an intern in medical school, he was called upon to evaluate self-proclaimed hypnotists who showed up at the lab. He later discovered his own talent for clairvoyance and worked on a team of psychologists screening people who asserted that they could see U.S. submarines. His age, smooth gestures, measured tones, and credentials add gravity to the seasons in which he appeared, administering trials to hopeful contestants and sounding out final judgments. (“She is a strong ekstrasens”; “No extra-sensation was involved in this contact.”) He sometimes spoke against the other experts on the show, setting them straight about how probability works or about the physics of brain waves. Editors would intercut his face and words after tests to stress the historical connection to Soviet-era research: “We used to see this all the time in the lab.” After a few seasons on air, Vinogradov expanded to collaborate more with law enforcement, opening the Vinogradov Center, where past winners of the show work as associates, devoted to finding missing persons. At its sister center, Volshebnaja Sila (Enchanted Forces), other protégés focus on healing.
THE PHATIC FUNCTION
It is common for Americans to describe the Soviet Union in terms of failed contacts: diplomatic snafus, postal failures, radio interference, and media censorship. Less common is to attend to ways the Iron Curtain generated excess communications, contacts, and channels, even beyond the little openings created by official exchanges, shows of contact among heads of state.12
To work in a more robust way, we need the concept of the phatic. The Greek phatos simply means “spoken” or “that which is spoken.” English and other languages carry the root in words like aphasia (loss of speech) or apophasis (the device of feigning not to speak about a subject while doing so: “I hope no one brings up what happened last time.”). Scholars have used the term phatic to address conditions for communication, the channels, media, and practices that open contact or cut it off.
Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski used the phrase “phatic communion” narrowly, to describe language that affirms or establishes social relations, “a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words” (1923, 315), such as weather talk and greetings and questions such as “What’s new?,” which are best answered not with information but with acknowledgment: “Nothing much. You?” (Those of us struggling with literal mindedness stutter, trying to recall what is truly new; others are smoother with phatic niceties.) Similar difficulties are matters not only of personal inclination, but also of rank or social distance, as they affect expectations about phaticity in specific contexts.
Russophone-Anglophone-polyglot13 linguist and formalist critic Roman Jakobson differentiated the phatic function from other speech functions, which he labeled referential, expressive, conative, metalinguistic, poetic. Linguistic anthropologists influenced by Jakobson have added more functions to the list and have demonstrated that when people speak, they usually activate more than one language function at a time.14 If the officer at passport control says, “Show me your passport,” the words both refer (to papers and to you), serving a referential function, and also prod a response, serving a conative function (in this case, as a directive). If the officer were to say, “Pass your passports, passengers!” the phrase would cover those same functions and might also activate the poetic function (with repetitions of sound drawing attention to form). Playing with tone and volume to hone and deliver attitude would add expressive function.
Words or gestures that establish, check, or close a channel or the media for transmission fulfill a phatic function. “Hello!? Hello? Do you read?” If you stand still and unresponsive in the passport line you may hear something sharper than a polite, “Are you listening?” If a colleague decides that this definition of the word phatic misses something and tells me so, then we are working through a metalinguistic function.15 While metalinguistic acts are peculiar to humans, other metacommunicative acts are not. Gregory Bateson saw practices of metacommunication among all sentient creatures: “If we were to translate the cat’s message into words, it would not be correct to say that she is crying ‘Milk!’ Rather, she is saying something like ‘Ma-ma!’ Or perhaps still more correctly, we should say that she is asserting: ‘Dependency! Dependency!’ ” (1972, 372).16 The cat is concerned not with naming milk (the referential function) but with drawing attention to the relationship here and now, with affecting the nature of contact.
Jakobson’s meta-functions—the poetic, the phatic, and the metalinguistic—are among the means by which people communicate the forms and conditions of communication and by which they address expectations about what language can do or how signs work; and about which means of communicating are moral, which are appropriate or inappropriate, and which ways of speaking, writing, signing, or being silent are thought to indicate what about people—or about certain people and not others.17 Matters of linguistic and semiotic ideology become political matters.
Perhaps because it is associated with certain forms of contact over others, the phatic is often neglected, its expressions downgraded as “mere” and “empty” words (see Nozawa 2015; cf. Elyachar 2010; Kockelman 2010; and Lemon 2013). Perhaps the phatic is neglected because attention to it is so telling: to speak about efforts to open or close communication can be discouraged as rude or awkward; like pointing out the emperor’s new clothes, questioning a greeting (or its lack) can draw attention to hierarchies or to rifts running through social encounters. It can be difficult enough to question the definition of a word without debate and insult; even more so, discussing phatic acts brings social and technical arrangements for communication into focus, potentially clarifying coercion and conflict that are usually left unexamined, are part of doxa or dogma, or are even taken as natural.
If acts that deny contact can seem injurious—even a brusque “Huh?” at least acknowledges what the blank stare disregards—too much checking in can intrude, grate, or be read as micromanagement, disrespect, and nagging: “You never write! You never call!” Richard Bauman (1998) addresses exactly this issue, relating struggles over phatic language to political struggles, showing phatic acts to be political acts, by documenting seventeenth-century Quakers’ refusal to utter greetings. They called them “idle words” that did not describe God-given reality, recoiling from “empty” formulae like “good day,” and repudiated vain titles of address and honorifics like “sir.” Their refusals to utter anything but words displaying pure referential functions irritated and enraged the non-Quakers around them, earning them hostility and beatings.
Attention to the phatic—especially to competing claims about contacts and channels for communication—sheds light on how some interactions become more visible and come to be regarded as more important than others, which are submerged or neglected as mundane or private. It also helps us to see which kinds of channels or contacts pose problems, for whom: Why does person A listen to person B only when person C is not present? How do outsiders learn the right small talk (the right topics with the right ironic attitude, etc.) to scale professional ladders? Debates over phatic issues bring ideals about social configurations into relief: imperatives to seek a “liberal democratic form of phatic communion involving citizens and state alike” on equal footings (Slotta 2015, 132) aim at different ideals than do exhortations to avoid “going over the boss’s head,” violating hierarchical report channels. When newcomers or former underlings have demanded honorifics or insisted on equal time at the microphone, others have dismissed such moves as “political correctness” or have even grabbed microphones, confiscated typewriters, or otherwise cut channels.
One question that arises when we leave face-to-face methods to communicate is: Are these functions relevant when words stretch across space and time, in print text or in film? I posit that they are, working by analogy from the observation that even nonworking channels thread through or cut across our lives and that even language functions that seem to fail make something happen. If I call soup “ice cream,” the referential function is still active even if its aim is off. Similarly, if I write, “Can you see this font?” you may never answer me—here too is an apparent failure, attributable to time and space conditions. That silence, however, negates neither the phatic attempt nor the material channel. In fact, the ways people attribute or deny channels or the possibilities for contact regardless of time and space limitations are matters of social and political contestation and control. Even when no contact is made, phatic attempts and judgments tell us something important about the shapes, materials, and experiences of social connections and rifts.
To prevent contact can intensify phatic communications, or multiply them across jammed channels and cut lines. “No one is home.” “Don’t bother talking to them.” “No one can hear you”: such statements are as often social judgments as they are descriptive meta-communicative statements. To better capture the meanings and effects surrounding and spun out by apparent failures or blockages, I turn to the category of interpretants, as formulated by pragmatic semiotic philosopher C.S. Peirce. An interpretant happens whenever a sentient being takes anything to be a sign. Peirce distinguished several kinds of interpretants, from ideational concepts and symbolic associations to responses: goose bumps and laughter can count as interpretants. Any interpretant can be taken up as a sign by still another (or even by the same) sentience. The initial sign-vehicle, be it a word, a gesture, a plume of smoke, can not fully determine possible interpretants. Peirce’s claims about intrepretants ring true across many interactions: outside rituals or stage plays people are less certain of how their own signs will be taken up. Your companion faces you with the “shadow of a quickly hidden smile,” and you are uncertain about whether to take that flicker as a sign, and of what. Your uncertainty may be expressed, say, in a pause, that pause interpreted in its own turn as a sign of mistrust.
Even the clearest of channels within the most regimented ritual settings can scatter diverse interpretants across many perspectives. The category of intuition is evoked and claimed not only in response to communication "gaps," but also in answer to multiplications of interpretants. Stray interpretants seem all the more troubling when they cross politicized borders; indeed, Cold War fear focused on ways that failure to read signals might lead to final nuclear destruction: intuition goes geopolitical.
The idea of contact itself often serves as a “trope for communication itself” (Kockelman 2010; see also Hoffmann-Dilloway 2011; Nozawa 2015, 386), but it does not always do so. Zuckerman (2016) shows how, during sports competition, hecklers aggressively make contact not to communicate, but to distract. Even as conflict during play can fold into the weave of friendship (rival friends becoming favorite friends), communication is may seem ancillary to the game. Indeed, an open channel never ensures all forms of communication: the fact that you answer the phone does not mean that your caller makes himself understood.
What about the term channel? A channel and a medium can align, but are they the same? A machine, such as a radio, can carry multiple channels, which can even interfere with each other. A theater hall, can activate multiple types of media, each materialized along channels laid in wire or cast by breath. Metaphorically, an “open channel” between diplomatic parties might be said to activate multiple media, such as telephone and memo text. I do not insist on a clean distinction, but try to use “channel” to address specific material conduits (this radio wave or that subway underpass) as well as social ones. Social and racial segregations of space also forward or prevent communication; they form channels for certain kinds of mediations and not others.
With divergent usages in mind, I avoid purifying definitions of contact, channel, or phatic. People define communications differently than scholars may, and their reflexive definitions reverberate through and even rearrange social worlds. I begin with a concept of the phatic, for instance, that is formal enough to set out across differently textured terrains but that remains vulnerable to adjustment. As I contrast situations, the reader will register contradictions among ways people understand communication, contact, media and channel, as well as disagreements about whether communication or contact occurs or not, and about what that entails. The goal is not to outline a taxonomy of kinds of phatic events, but rather through ethnographic and archival attention to arrive at a historico-semiotic theory of processes through which people manipulate and encounter phaticity.
PHATIC EXPERTISE
Failed communication structures the plots in works by Sophocles, William Shakespeare, and Alexander Pushkin, as it did earlier in myths and tales: kings are felled by semantic tricks, rivals plant seeds of suspicion, and dogs forget to pass on messages to divinities. Europe in the nineteenth century gave us the despairing heroes of Henrik Ibsen and Anton Chekhov, who seem always to speak past each other (Williams 1958, 1968; Levinas 1947; see Peters 1999). Postmodern characters curled even further from contact, as if language itself were insurmountably to blame. Modernists blamed a death of communion on the mechanical forces of industry and alienated exchange, on media reaching further than ever beyond face-to-face talk, perhaps even serving instead as technologies for surveillance or manipulation. Some linked postindustrial metaphysics of communication gaps to discoveries in physics: knowledge of circling atoms and subatomic particles, matter never touching across spaces between, scaled up as metaphors for awkward sociability across urban societies of strangers.
Disciplines separated, too. Before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scientist-poets and inventor-artists (like Mikhail Lomonosov and Leonardo da Vinci) pursued rhyme and reason at the same time; as Luckhurst has argued, the invention of telepathy did more than modernize the occult, it also addressed the new separations among fields: “The conceptualization of telepathy [in 1882] in fact defines its own mode of discursive interconnection: it sparks across gaps, outside recognized channels, to find intimate affinities in apparently distant discourses” (2002, 60). For this reason, to discuss the invention of telepathy Luckhurst traces “sociological pathways” (51) through “energy physics to neurology, from anthropology to the ghost story, from wireless telegraphy to hypnotic rapport, from imperial federationalism to the peti mal of the hysteric” (3).
All the angst associated with modern communication gaps, separation from the divine, alienation from nature, divisions of knowledge, fraction of kinship, divisions of self, and so forth affords a compensating pleasure in demonstrating interpretative or descriptive command of these gaps. To work with communication gaps is to claim a critical vantage, the kind of encompassment equated with intelligence or power, the status of sage, theorist, or mage (see West 2007; Palmié 2002). To force a rupture and then visibly work to suture the gap has become a way to claim not only to be modern, but also to make modernity.
Theater and telepathy research are two sites at which people work with gaps, making them in order to bridge them (only sometimes to unmake them); the space between audience and actor and the metal wall between telepathic receiver and sender are made in order to then demonstrate contact or communication across them. To consider them together allows us to contrast not only their working schema for contact and gap but also the relations among people who make and judge contact and those whom they judge. I call the former phatic experts (Lemon 2013). Societies divide linguistic labors (Irvine 1989); they also divvy up the work of talking about talk, the metacommunicative labors (Lemon 2002). The lawyer, the news editor, and the marriage counselor all master metacommunicative skills and specialize to different degrees in qualities of contact and conditions for communication, learning different skills to account for the most troubling gaps.
I came upon this category in the summer of 1997, when I began asking friends in Moscow, Perm’, and Jaroslavl’ what they made of the newly resonant term transparency, and in a more personal register, how they decided whom to trust. A banker acquaintance averred, “Who can tell?,” suggesting that I ask “the experts among theatre actors and KGB agents.”18 In Moscow as in Chicago, surveillance experts and detectives, therapeutic psychologists and linguistic anthropologists, drama teachers, business communication consultants, psychics and their skeptics work on ways to recognize, manipulate, and represent contacts and channels: Are they warm or cold, open or closed, working or broken, veiled or revealed, lacking or excessive? Some phatic experts—people like Dale Carnegie and Constantine Stanislavsky—even brand coherent systems of “contact qualia” (Lemon 2013) to pass on their expertise.
My banker acquaintance had a point: I had long found common ground in Russia among people trained in theatrical work, because they loved discussing the pragmatic semiotics of minute behaviors in real-time situations, not just onstage. Like me, they actually enjoy discussing the ways tiny gestures point to relationships, both those in the moment and those beyond. At that point I had already lived for some months Perm’ with people educated at the theatrical and musical academies in Moscow and Jaroslavl’; everyone was cash poor, some living rent free in the actors’ dorm even into their thirties. It was this phatic expertise that they could sell when paychecks from the theater were sparse: they gave acting lessons to businessmen, teaching vocal skills to managers to improve their intuition for market and social encounters (for self-preservation, for rapport) that still seemed new.
Phatic experts take an interest in similar forms and details, in the quality signs (or qualia) of human sign behavior (“a spark in the eye,” a “shift in tone”). They may do so to different ends. Some subsume phatic labor under other language functions; for example, police might take a flickering muscle around the eyes to indicate a blocked facial expression and deduce that the flicker indexes a lie. (Paul Ekman would caution that micro-expressions merely signify a shift among emotions.) Police need to monitor channels for signs of false reference; they use the phatic function to abduct the referential. Actors, by contrast, need to suspend reference to run multiple channels of contact in order to animate a “what if” inside a world of “not possible.” American radio psychologists do something similar when they mix layers of memory by mixing tenses (“Where were you when daddy goes away?”).19
Phatic experts often draw from other disciplines and places; doing so itself signals proficiency in crossing gaps. They are like brokers, accumulating value by working back and forth over the borders of nations, institutions, and disciplines. Their authority can accrue even in times of competition; some such work shades into the dark sides of contact, intercepting channels for intelligence or forcing words in interrogation. Phatic experts constantly engage with those who are not (or not yet) experts. Their expertise emerges historically, grounded not only in local organizations, but also in disciplines and institutions whose purposes entail crossing borders, both between states and within them.
REFRACTIONS OF EXPERTISE
When phatic experts judge whether contact has been made, channels have been broken, or communication is flowing, when they name good or bad acting, when they call out strong or weak psychics, they rarely work only with words, but also with materials, even with signs visceral to touch that are less than visible or audible to eye or ear. They also work with social divisions that channel who wields a stopwatch, who takes up a pencil, or who handles the X-ray or the energized gems.
Phatic experts are interested in similar forms and details of interaction and its conditions—but not always for similar reasons. Again, detectives succeed when they look for indications of truth or sincerity, but many actors cannot fret too much about verity (even offstage; as one student told me when the cohort was nearing graduation, “Our profession does not allow one to freeze out a person just because of mistrust”), as that would detract from collective labors to contact the audience.
Some sorts of phatic expertise ascend over others; to understand where, when, and for whom, we need to investigate how they intersect through divisions of labor.20 Expertise accrues value when people, even starting from institutions that silo them (theater school, psychology department, film set, police academy), appropriate or debate others’ schema for contact, others’ technologies for intuition. Intersections with psychology, for example, are common. One film director advised me in 2001 to visit a center in Moscow where substance abusers received theatrical therapy in order to relearn how to connect with family members, as well as a group that, to help homeless dogs, staged role-plays to practice communicating with the police (he called these “psychodramas,” adding that “the woman who runs this group sublimates herself through these dogs … she runs a pioneer camp for dogs”). American director Norris Houghton, who traveled to Moscow twice, once in the mid-1930s and again in the early 1960s, reported that the Moscow Children’s Theater wove developmental psychology into rehearsal practice (1936, 230).
People continue to cross these fields. In September 2002 I audited a college course at the Russian State Humanities University, Experimental Theater for Psychologists. The department catalog explained that this class, required for the major, illustrates Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s stages of development through theatrical techniques. As students, we went through abridged versions of drills in use at GITIS. By way of introduction, the instructor put us in a circle: we were to hold hands, imagine a color, then squeeze the hand of the person to the right. At the end, we reported results ranging across the rainbow. We had failed, the instructor said, because we had “not yet established contact.” Next we were to close our eyes as she described a rural landscape, then open them to take up poses representing some part of the landscape: a tree, a flower, and so forth. She likened the activity to a “shared dream…. [W]hen you filled in the picture, you obshchalis’ (’communed,’ ‘interacted’), yes? The text itself is not important.” Then we repeated the circle—this time, colors linked, ranging in greens and blues: “There, you see!” Having made this point about contact, the lesson plunged into Vygotsky’s theories of the social processes of mental development, whereby interaction with others leads to “internal speech.”
At our next meeting we made another circle; much as at GITIS, students waited, “gathered energy,” and then, all together, were to step forward in unison. The professor informed us that this, too, was a theatrical technique and seemed to know that at GITIS, the point of the drill is to develop attention, to convert phatic energy between working actors into connection with audiences. Her purpose, however, was to demonstrate how children learn to subsume and to differentiate the self and must switch among these positions before thought emerges, before the mind feels itself to be individuated, charting on the blackboard how interactions can oscillate among senses of you/I/we.
Even where ideologies and practices converge, actors still aim for different points, to produce different knowledge from those points. GITIS teachers used drills to criticize sociological generalizations, while the psychology professor made analogies between the contacts we were making and “cultural mentalities.” She asked us to ponder uncanny contact phenomena, moments when “two people suddenly find the same word! How do we do these things?” She continued: “Maybe you do most things like a European realist painter—you look at nature a bit, then paint a little bit. A Chinese painter, however, will look and look and look and look, and then, suddenly—an impulse.”
So, while phatic experts develop authority not only within institutions or disciplines but across them, actors who pull drills from books on social psychology and drama therapy and vice versa, having borrowed terms or tools, sometimes vociferously discredit the very field they have borrowed from. They can evoke intersections to undermine, such as when Soviet newspaper articles in the late 1980s discredited Gypsy fortune-tellers by calling them “good psychologists” who “read faces” and “track eye movements.”
Even in a single rehearsal hall or lab, people might engage not just one but several sets of expectations about contact or technologies for intuitions. They might work to synthesize them, put them into competition, or use one to arrive at another. Were we to attempt to tie threads of expertise under a single profession, habitus, ontology, or ideology, we would miss these collusions and conflicts. To follow phatic expertise means to cross professions, schools, networks, and even countries to witness not only tangles and misfires, but also fresh interpretants that refract from even the most faithful attempts to translate.
CIRCLES: EXPERTS AND CIVILIANS
Good places to observe all this include those where phatic experts engage with people who are not, or are not yet, experts. Conflicts percolate through such places about how to gauge contact, how to evaluate communication, how to pick out signs and make channels, with which materials, connecting these people and not others. Among such places, GITIS is relatively insular while also communicatively dense, with constant interaction and discussion of interaction, in classrooms and corridors, onstage and backstage, before exams and after, in the café and in the dormitory, with its late-night chores and midnight meals and rides to and from on the metro. There is no question that GITIS is a “dense node” where resources and people cluster.21 Entire ethnographies could be set within the institute or the dormitory alone; people described the situation as being “as though we live enclosed within a space capsule.” Working, sleeping, and eating with the same people, from morning to midnight, every day, people said they felt in a world apart. While acclimating to the “space capsule” in the first year, for the customary midsemester variety show and party (kapustnik), the cohort rewrote beloved Soviet film song lyrics to convey the melancholy of cutting channels to past relationships, to “Moscow beyond GITIS’ windows.”
Time passed, and people graduated; “GITIS spat us out,” laughed one actress in 2008. Some graduates work together, others meet rarely, to attend an opening or greet a new child. They Skype, some even with me, to practice an American accent or for help with Sundance festival instructions, a few just to talk. Most work steadily in theater; a few are now film celebrities. I am not surprised; their work is riveting. Some take acting techniques into different fields, teaching dramatic skills and theatrical appreciation to businessmen. One has founded a school for the arts in Germany, along the lines of a Steiner school, drawing together international connections from Paris, Hollywood, Moscow, and Tokyo.
I first witnessed how people shift expertise in 1997, among directors and actors in Perm’ who contracted seminars for businesspeople, teaching acting skills to improve communication, and later investigated similar endeavors in Moscow. One that has achieved stability is called Shkola Obraz (Image School or School of Ways, as obraz can translate as “image” or “appearance” as well as “mode” or “manner,” as in obraz zhizni, “way of life”). The play of meanings is fitting, as the school advertises theatrical skills as techniques for living better—by refining intuition.
A graduate of one of the smaller theatrical institutes founded Shkola Obraz in the mid-1990s, soon after the USSR had dissolved, a time in which bursts of self-help courses and books heralded new ways to make contacts and to read others. It was, as so many trumpeted, a new world of new signs, new partners in new markets. The school moved facilities several times in the 1990s and by 2000 had found a long-term space. As a part-time night school, it challenges the hierarchies of theatrical and film production in Moscow, offering entrance to the profession through a back door, with a shorter course of study and without auditions for admission; anyone who can pay may attend. It sells itself also as a path to solving everyday problems in a world where, as the website sympathizes, we all learn to compress our true selves under the gaze of others. There, acting skills (drawn more from Mikhail Chekhov than from other Russian masters) are taught to “housewives and businessmen,” to help them “succeed through play.” The school espouses a ludic, protean philosophy of theatricality (rather than theater as artifice) and touts monthly “happenings” at which students hit public transit walking on their hands or wearing dog collars to free themselves of public inhibitions. Every few months, sandwich board wearers pace central squares, passing out flyers and pinning them on bulletin boards—even in the entryway to GITIS.
The school also delivers lessons in how to relax, the better to channel new intuitions and energies. Shkola Obraz states explicitly that it links psychological knowledge, stage skills, and psychic capacities, offering dual learning tracks to merge learning to act and to meditate. Shkola Obraz, it turns out, is related to the Texas-based José Silva method. With franchises around the world, the Silva method offers “a unique combination of Alpha and Theta level mind exercises, creative visualizations, habit control, and positive programming methods has been endorsed by various thought leaders and scientists.” Trained in electronics, Silva later turned to study of hypnosis and brain waves, dubbing his system the Silva Mind Control method in 1944 and going commercial in 1966. Shkola Obraz forms another turn in the circles of influence that once brought yoga to Stanislavsky’s attention. This time, circuits of expertise cross borders and ideologies to create a hybrid of neoliberalism, occultism, and socialist technological infrastructure.
About midway between Moscow’s center and the suburbs, at the Elektrozavod metro station, Shkola Obraz rents space in the building that houses a school for the Moscow Metro Builders (MetroStroj). Around 2007 it expanded from one to four rooms: three small ones nested together on the ground floor and a larger room for acting and movement on the third, next to Metrostroij’s classrooms for mass transit accounting. A far cry from the grandeur of GITIS, with its grassy courtyard, curved wooden benches, iron gates, imperial heralds, and marble staircases, at Shkola Obraz’s space people practice on gray carpet under acoustic tiles or listen while sitting in office chairs. The downstairs rooms are within view of the building concierge and turnstile where one shows a passport. A small bulletin board announces a low-budget session with a photographer to compile headshots to send to Mosfil’m or the new casting agencies. The innermost room serves as an office, with room for a desk, a shelf displaying several books on acting and psychology, and about six chairs. The middle room is for meditation training, with chairs around the edges. Shkola Obraz advertises a free introductory lesson every Thursday evening in either psychology or acting. Both lectures are available on tape and on the website.
I visited the school several times, attending the introductory lecture on acting in September 2005. Also in attendance were two teenage boys in jeans and a slender girl in stiletto heels with waist-length blond cornrows. They were just as beautiful as any beginning student at GITIS, but they kept so still and quiet that they hardly emitted any signs at all beyond their attire. I imagined that the course might do them some good; however, while Shkola Obraz is itself successful, its graduates have yet to penetrate far into professional filmmaking or theatrical work. During the lecture we learned that the cost for each three-month cycle of study was 7,000 rubles (about U.S. $230 at the time, about one-quarter of the average monthly salary in the city) and that one could attend either Monday and Saturday or Thursdays for a few hours a week: “No one in America studies acting at a five-year institute as we do here! They just take a few night classes…. Anybody can work in the theater after a few weeks training, just like driving a bus.” The schedule and fees, the lecturer said, were signs of democracy.
By contrast, Leonid Heifetz, director and master instructor at GITIS, in his autobiography justifies closing the ranks to provide free education and training single-mindedly from 9:00 A.M. to 11:00 P.M., seven days a week. He addresses aspiring applicants by contrasting the theatrical to other professions: “One cannot simply select theater as a workplace. Theater is a calling. Say you are unemployed, but there are openings in a theater: ‘I’ll just go work as an actor.’ Not an option. You will not make a single step onto the stage if you have no calling…. You need not only innate characteristics, but also a specific school, a set of abilities and masterly skills without which work in the professional theater is impossible” (2001, 5–6).
Our lecturer, Shkola Obraz’s founder, laid out a different reasoning. He swiveled on his chair and spoke as if extempore, often reciting from the school’s website word for word: “Let me tell you about my friend who was upset: ‘WHY did I buy this thing that I don’t need?!’ I told him, and I’ll tell you: ‘Because somebody needed to lean on you to buy it, because somebody else was leaning on him to buy something else.’ And so it goes, the whole world in a circle, … [P]eople won’t tell you this, they won’t admit it, but I will.” He promised to teach us to prevent others from controlling us. Through meditation and play, we would learn technologies for intuition dedicated not only to contact, but also to jamming channels, to liberate ourselves from forces that make us puppets or robots, that nas zombiruyut (zombify us).
CRISIS?
At this point some readers will be intrigued, ready to ponder both how theatrical and telepathic projects intersect and how psychics and actors diverge. Others, before continuing to the specific cases, will want to learn about the kinds of explanations that have been given for surges of interest in or suspicion about theatrical skill and telepathy, as well as about the interests that hold stakes in those explanations. For now, let me identify some of the stakeholders. The first, which I address in this section, finds cause in crises, especially those during which unknown actors seem to draw curtains to hide their machinations from the rest of us. The other stakeholders I address in the following sections, to sketch the arc of a long game among world powers to demonstrate their own capacities for intelligence and intuition, attributing such capacities to enemy political systems, for instance by claiming that socialism or capitalism forces theatricality and represses authentic intuition.
One line of argument for crisis sees occult surges when seismic politico-economic shifts challenge familiar technologies for intuition, as when economic crises intersect crises of representation, or when distributions of resources change directions by seemingly opaque mechanisms or mysterious actors. This anthropological thinking runs from Max Gluckman through Jean and John Comaroff, from E.E. Evans-Prichard to Nancy Munn. For example, when South African apartheid ended in 1994, an oil boom rewarded certain people in such unexpected ways that others tried to account for it in terms of “occult economies.” Drawing inspiration from Gluckman’s 1959 essay “The Magic of Despair” (in which he cited Evans-Pritchard: “New situations demand new magic”), the Comaroffs assert that people imagine “arcane forces are intervening in the production of value, diverting its flow [and sparking an] effort to eradicate people held to enrich themselves by those very means” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999, 284).22
Other scholars have convincingly linked the occult with political and economic crises (Taussig 1980; Geschiere 1997, 2013; Ashforth 2005; Morris 2000; Sanders 2008; Kivelson 2013). Many who specialize in Russian studies claim that the paranormal filled a spiritual vacuum created by the sudden collapse of state ideology.23 Others have described the popularity of hypnosis during the 1980s (the period known for perestroika and glasnost’) as a symptom of “an unstable time of apocalyptic expectations” (Etkind 1997, 119). Others assert that, “[t]he occultism that has flourished in Russia has been a response to acute societal stress, like pain or fever” (Rosenthal 1997, 418), or ask whether such phenomena “suggest a terminally ill body politic, both in the physical and in the spiritual sense … [an] illness that is steadily eroding its grip on reality, this body politic searches for a way out—a portal into another dimension” (Geltzer 2011).
Across formerly Soviet spaces, changes in markets and market policy affected how people experienced and imagined social connections. Soviet-era networks for mutual aid did more than fulfill favors (Ledeneva 1998); people knit bonds of concern that extended the pleasures of consuming cookies, tea, or vodka together (Pesmen 2000; see also Farquhar 2002). Even the most practical such ties came to seem, retrospectively, both warmer and more comprehensible than the 1990s manipulations of brend and imedzh.24 A lens of crisis illuminates that period. However, what about increases in interest in the occult during periods of stability, when paranormal surges do not correlate with acute crisis, such as in the USSR from 1961 to 1972 or in Russia from 2000 to 2007?25 Even during the so-called stagnant, economically calm 1960s and 1970s, Soviets populated films and fictions with mesmerists, magicians, fairies, and sorcerers.26
CAPACITY TO FEEL: EMPIRE AND INTUITION
After crisis, another line of explanation puts the stakes in citizenship or belonging in imperial or nation states. Claims about European cognitive capacities and sensibilities have frequently justified rule; comparisons of national or racial capacities to think and to feel shaped logics of imperial ambition long before the Cold War. In the eighteenth century Montesquieu famously exposed a tongue to air at various temperatures, noting the constriction and expansion of its external fibers to extrapolate distinctions among nations:
[In] cold countries the nervous glands are less expanded: they sink deeper into their sheaths, or they are sheltered from the action of external objects; consequently they have not such lively sensations…. In cold countries they have very little sensibility for pleasure; in temperate countries, they have more; in warm countries, their sensibility is exquisite…. It is the same with regard to pain, which is excited by the laceration of some fibre of the body…. [N]ow it is evident that the large bodies and coarse fibres of the people of the north are less capable of laceration than the delicate fibres of the inhabitants of warm countries; consequently the soul is there less sensible of pain. You must flay a Muscovite alive to make him feel. (1748, bk. XIV)
Montesquieu’s text activated both early colonial hierarchies and imperial competitions, kicking off the long conversation about Russian capacity for feeling. Published in the years after Peter the Great’s Russian imperial expansion, the text made an impression in Russia.
Russian imperial rulers were well-read; French, German, Latin, and English posed few obstacles. Empress Catherine, hailing from Austria, barely spoke Russian when she first arrived but carried on extensive correspondence in several languages with continental philosophes. Russian elites were always aware of European perceptions of Russia (see Layton 1994),27 and as Soviets and now Russians continue to study other languages, they continue also to consider how Russia is viewed from elsewhere. It does not escape notice when foreign sources anchor policy to claims about Russian capacity to feel. It is noticed when depictions zigzag between extremes, northern stoics giving way to Dostoevskian maniacs or Hollywood depictions of cold-faced bureaucrats being eclipsed by Khrushchev removing his shoes at the United Nations to bang one on the table (some argue that those 1960s photos were faked).28 The world switches between Orwellian visions of a state stifling passions and romantic images of a culture of feisty philosophers and emotional ballerinas. Russians get caught in these compelling oscillations; they echo the shapes of historical accounts of survival between other imperial powers, East and West.
Anglophone Cold War writing on Soviet telepathy and extrasensory perception rarely mentions crisis and instead privileges capacities to feel. When Americans Ostrander and Schroeder published their paranormal travelogue of encounters with Soviet telepathy scientists and telepaths, they took care in the introductory pages to note that people, such as actor Karl Nikolaev, greeted them effusively, belying images of emotionless, brainwashed Soviets:
[A] major thrust of Soviet ESP work is to develop machines capable of monitoring, testing, and studying ESP. But the Soviets are also eager to study the human, people-to-people aspects of ESP. “We believe ESP is enmeshed with all of everyday life,” they told us, “We believe ESP affects any group situation.” And perhaps with people as warmhearted and volatile as the Slavs, ESP does flow more easily. Many Westerners seem to have the idea Soviet citizens are robot-like people, gray automatons in a well-run machine shop. An American we met in Leningrad confessed, “I thought the sun never shone in Russia and people never smiled—boy was I wrong!” (1970, 8)
They followed these words with examples of extravagant and spontaneous hospitality, descriptions of flowers and gifts of poetry, and accounts of sudden embraces from elevator operators.
Nevertheless, soon after their book came out, Ostrander and Schroeder appeared as guests on The Amazing World of Kreskin, a television program broadcast in North America from Ottawa, and zigzagged in the other direction, discussing how little Russians smile in public. These kinds of shifts happen all the time. One person might claim that the Russian people are more closed than smiling Americans, but in another context will say that winter frosts protect emotions deeper than any westerner can fathom. And yet these claims are often couched with one eye looking out for evaluations from elsewhere: on an October morning at GITIS, one of the acting teachers exhorted his students, “go look at faces on the Metro, you will not see a smile—foreigners notice this all the time.”
I have indeed heard the refrain on absent Russian smile many times from Americans, since first visiting Russia in 1988 as a student on a study tour and then later as a professor leading such tours. “Why don’t they smile?” This question, ten times out of ten, prompts someone else in the group to speculate: “Well, they never had the freedom to smile,” or “It’s trauma from Stalin’s cruelties.” The histories of the corporate campaigns in the United States to train the service smile seem yet unknown to most of my fellow citizens (see Hochschild 1983). American guidebooks to Paris, by the way, mention an absence of public smiles, attributing that not to political regimes, but to refined French sensibility. In any case, foreigners claim that Soviet-era rationality and rule shut down feeling—and many local people also say that Soviet modes of communicating chilled the space between souls, left a gap between false, official, public words and real, underground, or private expression. Words, some say, were born in a Soviet “culture of dissimulation” (Shlapentokh 1984; Sinyavsky 1991; Seriot 2002; Thom 1989) that barred citizens from “living in Truth” (Havel 1987). By the 1990s, such views no longer smelled of dissidence, and by 2000 they were mainstream.
“THE ONLY SPACE OF MAGIC IS THE THEATER”
Some arguments combine the approaches just described while sharpening the stakes, attributing intuitive capacities to particular political systems. They extend beyond any particular period of crisis, the better to press people to discern friends and declare enemies. There are many who blame socialism for such conditions, arguing that Soviet habits stunted abilities to connect and blocked compassion and communication, leaving people closed and numbed, suspicious.29 Czesław Miłosz (1953) ascribed the duplicity of Polish intellectuals to socialist conditions, which he contrasted with the streets of capitalist Paris where he lived, juxtaposing its variety to the drone of socialist cities, where people adjust to lifeless architecture and to “short, square” bodies, the “racial type well-regarded by the rulers.” Like many observer and émigré memoirs, his colored socialist societies grey and gloomy, a twilight of windowless rooms, overmechanized, overrationalized, and monotonous. If a paucity of sensation drains socialist spaces of “magic,” theater restores it: “The number of aesthetic experiences accessible to a city-dweller in the countries of the New Faith is uncommonly limited. The only space of magic is the theater…. [T]he tremendous popular success of authors like Shakespeare is due to the fact that their fantasy triumphs even within the bounds of naturalistic stage setting” (1953, 64–67). Exiled poet Miłosz never actually lived in socialist Poland, though he did visit when he was a diplomat. From 1946 to 1950 he lived in Washington, D.C., working as Polish cultural attaché, and was transferred to Paris in 1950, where he defected. Published in France in 1951, Miłosz’s The Captive Mind starts with a description of intellectual life in Poland under the Nazi regime during World War II and extends to describe the nascent socialist regime.
Many representations of life in the socialist bloc well known to Americans were written by people who spent little time in socialist countries. When George Orwell crafted 1984, he drew from experience with the English government and from scenes in H.G. Wells’s stories. Earlier, Yevgeny Zamiatin based his dystopian novel We on close observation of how labor was managed in the British shipyards in Tyne during World War I, when he worked there for the Russian Imperial (not the Soviet) Navy. He wrote just as critically about Russian imperial responses to the 1905 Revolution as he later did about the Bolshevik’s strategies and practices.
Perhaps this preponderance of limited and refracted accounts, often written by diplomats constrained by their missions to limited contacts, helps to explain why, as cultural historian Julie Cassiday has noted, theatricality is “all too dominant a trope” to describe Russian people, as if they all live stifled under masks of deceit and suspicion or enchanted by illusory mystery, building Potemkin villages under duress. What are the anchors to the repeated claims that Russia is exceptionally given to theatricality, that acting pervades social life there?30 Many of the anchors turn out to be texts by diplomats; Marquis de Custine, in his 1839 travel diary Empire of the Csar, described the Russian imperial court as theatrical. Russia’s aristocrats, he famously claimed, lived under a veneer of European customs masking an Asiatic essence, possessing “just enough of the gloss of European civilization to be ‘spoiled as savages,’ but not enough to become cultivated men. They were like trained bears who made you long for the wild ones” (quoted in Kennan 1971, 80). Historically comparative scholarship since the late 1980s has demonstrated that similar accusations structured European descriptions of subjects and enemies, imputing mimicry and masking to colonial subjects in order to maintain distance, claim intellectual superiority, and justify imperial rule (Bhabha 1984). It is no surprise that a visiting French diplomat reached for a similar metric, especially when accusations of theatrical masking and manipulation were swirling through de Custine’s homeland before his visit to Russia. Historian Paul Friedland, discussing political conflicts in eighteenth- century France, explains: “There were reports that deputies to the National Assembly were taking acting lessons and that claqueurs were being planted in the audience to applaud their employers on demand…. [P]amphlets were written in which the entire National Assembly was unmasked as a troupe of actors in disguise and election results were printed in the form of a cast list…. Conversely, while politicians were being unmasked as actors, dramatic actors were themselves being denounced by both the political left and right as being secret agents of the other” (2002, 2).
Habits of imagining political others’ communications—and increasingly, their thoughts—as repressed or masked had already left deep tracks by the time Miłosz wrote during the Cold War:
Such acting is a highly developed craft that places a premium in mental alertness. Before it leaves the lips, every word must be evaluated as to its consequences. A smile that appears at the wrong moment, a glance that is not all it should be can occasion dangerous suspicions and associations. Even one’s gestures, tone of voice, or preference for certain kinds of neckties are interpreted as signs of one’s political tendencies…. Of course, all human behavior contains a significant amount of acting…. Nevertheless, what we find in the people’s democracies is a conscious mass play rather than automatic imitation … [until a person] can no longer differentiate his true self from the self he simulates, so that even the most intimate of individuals speak to each other in party slogans. (1953, 55)
This book has long been cited by American politicians as a core text on the socialist world. Its strength lies in explaining the attraction of ideology to people who had witnessed the atrocities of World War II. However, it is more frequently cited by Americans to claim that others are puppets who mouth propaganda—or who at best live by concealing all opposition, a contradiction they resolve “by becoming actors.”
To be sure, people in Russia can also animate this logic: at GITIS during my time there, one teacher commented upon student failure at a drill in ways that put the blame on Soviet-era conditions. This was another drill to develop intuitive technique, again by limiting the usual face-to-face forms and media for communication, to channel and limit contact and its purpose. A student stood in the center of a circle of other students who had been assigned to play either “friend” or “foe” and had been directed to repress any sign to indicate which they were. As the instructor remarked, “In real life, such sentiments may be the very ones not expressed.” The student in the center was allowed to shake each hand and exchange one word, “Hello.” Based on that minimal interaction, she was to decide “friend or foe?” “Friends” were sent to one side of the room, “enemies” to the other. The poor student could not make up her mind. Flustered, she sent nearly all her cohort to the enemy line. As she shot each one with an imaginary bullet, they dropped to the floor, most declaring, “How I loved you!” Watching her desperate indecision about which signs to trust, her failure of intuition, one of the teachers, shaking with silent laughter, whispered to me: “Look at this—this paranoia is our Soviet, Stalinist mentality.”
This bit of ethnography does not prove Miłosz correct—in other moments, the same teachers blamed markets, postmodernism, and Hollywood. Historical and ethnographic attention to specific claims indicates that we do better not to reduce (say, by deriving a statistical average among claims), but to situate each claim as such, as a claim, as a turn in more than one ongoing conversation. The magic of socialist theater owed less, perhaps, to contrastive glamour, fantastical color against grey landscape, than it did to the political drama of such claims. To follow enchantments of contact conjured by phatic experts, through technologies for intuition, it will help to look at where and how claims of intuition give way to those about perception. This is because each sort of claim—to sensation or to intuition—can be wrought and unwrought with reference to battles over materialism, over the matter and media for sensation and communication. Those battles simmered among imperial colonial powers from the time of René Descartes and continue within and across ideological oppositions, wreaking too tidy separations between capitalism/socialism, science/art, mind/body, self/collective, and inspiration/automatism.
