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ОглавлениеPrologue: Cold War, Contact, and Ethnography
CIRCLES AND RAYS
In August 1991 I stood in the vestibule of one of the most remote stations of the Moscow metro listening to people excitedly convey the events of the day. I was returning from the center streets, where the tanks had rolled in that morning. The conservative contingent had staged a coup, and their first act had been to limit communications, cut off contacts: I had managed to send a telegram home from the Central Telegraph building near Red Square before it shuttered its doors. Television was jammed, but they had missed another important channel: the metro. Public transit infrastructure was itself an active circuit for other media, from flyers to good old face-to-face talk with strangers (Lemon 2000b). Phone calls were barely getting through, but the Moscow metro, built in a circle cut by radials, was running underneath the capital’s rings of roads. Meanwhile, Americans were taking the credit for keeping up flows of communication for the resistance, who soon prevailed, as Western nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) sent faxes on their upgraded lines, embassy satellite dishes amplifying waves abroad. No one paid much attention to the ways a socialist-built infrastructure like the metro carryied messages along with people—and people as messages, their very numbers swelling to tell a story.
Fast forward. One hundred years after the Russian Revolution and more than fifty since the McCarthy era, we see more clearly that Americans, too, work to cut off what they label excess communication when we worry about foreign influence and contact. Yet we continue to pay little attention to the material and mundane ways in which people are already distanced, even severed from channels along which they might get in touch. Moreover, instead of following particular transnational circuits (the money, the oil, the real estate) to see which circuits are clear and which are blocked, to whom, and to acknowledge the specific channels that we have dug, we continue to behave as if the main thing to worry about is the diffuse hypnotic power of foreign memes over the minds of the masses or about whether politicians are vulnerable to attack by vague manipulations or even telepathic rays.
This book is an attempt to theorize channels and contacts in social, political, historical, and semiotic terms. It is also an attempt to deflate anxiety about mental influence, be the threat imagined to emanate from televisions or psychic spies. The material and social forces for and against communications, across state borders and within them, can be difficult to see, and less visible to some than to others. So let us begin with what can be easily seen, with spectacle, even with fantasy, with one of the late Soviet era’s best-known science fiction films, Solaris (dir. Tarkovsky, 1972).
The film depicts telepathic emanations less as rays and more like expanding circles of swirling biomatter and energy. The planet Solaris exudes a mental force, a “noospheric” sheath of consciousness (see Vernadsky 1926). Solaris reads the minds of the cosmonauts in her orbit, to materialize their most troubled memories, the people they have lost. The readings are limited: corporeal copies live and breathe—but manifest their mourners’ guilt, missing the originals’ perspectives; one cosmonaut’s wife lacks a back zipper on her dress because he had never noticed it. The cosmonauts think the planet tortures them while they fail to intuit much about either the planet or each other. The American remake of Solaris settles deeply into a Freudian meditation on hidden psyches; the Soviet version unsettles the human psyche as a player in galactic communications. The Soviet ending frames an evocative detail: one cosmonaut has brought a small houseplant from Earth; just when the humans abandon the exploration, a long shot shows the plant facing out to Solaris from a window in the space station. In the next scenes Solaris morphs, becoming earthlike; gaseous masses congeal into green forest and blue ocean. Some viewers interpret these last scenes as occurring within the protagonist’s broken mind; others see real planetary changes imperfectly catalyzed by human memories of home. But what if it is the plant who finally establishes a channel with a planetary mind?
Cold War fictions of all genres famously worry about influence over the very conditions for and forms of contact. Much science fiction of the era ends more happily than Solaris: someone cracks a code, the army finally telephones a linguistic anthropologist just in time to prevent nuclear catastrophe over a misunderstanding. The aliens mean no harm. Such tales warn of the limitations of individual intuitions, like nervous reflexes that lead us to misread attempts to make contact, misreadings that threaten to scatter the world with ash.
The little houseplant in Solaris presents a suggestive contrast. Even before science fiction emerged as a late Imperial genre, social circles, fields of friendship, practices of kinship, and institutional circuits chained across state borders. Those who recognize the long centuries of such relations tend shoots that sprout and thrive across borders, but that look like untidy weeds to the paranoid perspective. Xenophobia erases efforts to make contacts that, from a limited, purified perspective, seem inconsequential, ignoring most everyday contacts while magnifying the winks and handshakes of the powerful, mistaking circles for rays.
Throughout the nineteenth century, paranoia about mental influence oscillated with hopes for spiritual health through empathic and psychic union. As trains and telegraph wires spanned imperial territories, performances and experiments blended occult and scientific genres, to make and break such contacts via mesmerism, hypnosis, spirit communication, and telepathy. The twentieth-century Cold War intensified this dynamic, militarizing fears while energizing speculation about the nature of contact: children in the United States and in the USSR grew up with tales and films encouraging us both to dread and to long for contact with other sentient beings, be they cosmic, animal, or human others.1
This book tracks worries and hopes about communication and its channels when they are conceived in relation to movements of thought across borders—bodily, social, architectural, geopolitical—borders that themselves serve, even covertly, as semiotic material, as media, or as channels. Along the way we see how ideologies about communicative contact and channels reinforce social segregations as much as they forge connections. Likewise, we see that it takes effort to make or break contact, to sustain or distort communication channels.
These efforts are guided not by linguistic grammars, but by bundles of social habits, structures, and discursive practices that people speak of through categories such as propriety or intuition (“One doesn’t speak with such people, we just know they lie”). Such clusters were generated historically, neither flowing only top down nor bubbling out of bare interaction. The clusters can be difficult to track because historical encounters unfold where spaces and channels are already divided — and where common sense has long depicted communication as if it could be explained by grammatical or binary logics. The twentieth century was saturated by images graphing communication as a line between two points, a speaker/hearer dyad echoing dualisms so common to social thought: concept/sign, word/thought, spirit/matter, agency/structure, and so forth. Even thinkers in the nineteenth century, however, saw alternatives. Theosophical tracts on thoughts and channels, for example, jostled with scientific research to paint thought not as mediated by forms and matter, but as matter taking form.
FIGURE P.1. The Music of Gounud a plate from a book of theosophy by C. W. Leadbetter and Annie Besant, Thought Forms (1908).
Fred Meyers coined the term telepathy when he founded the Society for Psychical Research in England in 1882 to describe transmission of thought-feeling from a distance, without known form of mediation. The Music of Gounod, printed in Annie Besant and G.W. Leadbetter’s 1901 book Thought Forms, depicts moving thought-feelings a bit differently: not as a line of communication between beings, transmission without discernible wires, but as clouds of smoky matter that, once piped up the church organ and through the roof, extrudes and dissipates, perhaps to float on by itself as form, even without receivers, detached from thinkers. Another illustration depicts “Vague Pure Affection” as a coral pink cloud that “frequently surrounds a gently purring cat” (1901, 41), a thought-form not aimed in meaningful rays at anyone in particular.
Theosophical images of thought forms traveled, captivating artists Vasily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint,2 each credited separately with creating the first abstract painting (af Klint in 1906, Kandinsky in 1911). Artistic abstraction is often defined (for nonspecialists) merely as nonrepresentational; Kandinsky and af Klint sought in addition to make contact through art with other planes of reality, to conduct energies among planes through channels formed not only by the material mediation of shape and color, of paper and paint, but also via the motion of the artist’s hand: moving matter leaving traces for intuition. Such art, Kandinsky hoped, might live its own life, reaching from the canvas; extruding energy generated by changes in tempo or direction beyond the moment of painting; vibrating within the soul of the attentive viewer; and creating “inner resonance,” as he wrote in The Spiritual in Art ([1911] 1946). Art is the imprint of thought as moving matter spirit (see also Carlson 2000).
In Point and Line to Plane ([1926] 1979), Kandinsky defined the line not from a bird’s-eye, seemingly objective perspective from which to chart a distance between two points, but at the concrete, specific spot where the painter touches brush to surface: the line is a visceral “track made by the moving point.” That moving point is the result of a historical contact, a specific, singular confrontation “through encounter between implement and material surface” ([1926] 1979, 542). Kandinsky came to these ideas through his experience of synesthesia, while working to convey how he felt color as sound, lines as movement, and drawn shapes as reactions to changes in balance and gravity, like a projected proprioception. Observations of his own sensory events, touching hand to paper through brush while making art, led him to write and paint against Euclidean geometry. A line will move straightly, he argued, only when contact is not subject to additional forces that torque and curve any part of some concrete assemblage of pen, hand, paper, or mind. For the theosophical artist, every singular point begins its own center, emanating thought-forms potentially in all directions, as ripples mark water, or globes of light appear around streetlamps in rain or fog: forces that counter representing contact through a straight line. Kandinsky’s trope, in other words, counters imaginations of telepathic rays. The ray, if abstracted from those forces its depiction must overcome, erases all but one cross-section of broadcasts that otherwise extend in many directions at once. The telepathic ray is but an illusion, an abstracted radius; it only seems to be formed by aiming from one point to another.
V.N. Voloshinov, by no means a theosophist, writing in Moscow in the 1920s about trajectories of quotation, observed that no word arrives from mouth to ear without refracting, shifting direction and meaning as it is torqued by social contexts and material forces (Voloshinov [1929] 1986). I derive much from Russian and American thinkers such as Voloshinov, who were pragmatically attentive to the historical specificity of signs as we make them, as we recognize emissions or movements as signs, as we repeat their direction faithfully or purposely distort them.
Kandinsky’s Point and Line echoes early American pragmatists: we know that theosophists discussed pragmatic philosophy in their reading circles, and that pragmatists such as William James and C.S. Peirce interested themselves in theosophy—and also in the methods of telepathic research. These circuits of discussion ran contemporary with Peirce’s insights about indexical meaning: while symbolic meaning is grounded to rule sets, logics, or conventions, such as semantic paradigms or dictionary definitions, indexical meaning is grounded by contact to specific spaces in specific moments. Peirce’s famous example is smoke rising to index a fire ([1897] 1932). To some, his example might resemble the drawing of thought-form floating up from a church organ, but Peirce, who after all devised the double-blind method while investigating the protocols of the new telepathy science, was less interested in the nature or color or texture of indexical smoke, and more interested in how an indexical sign connects to its context for production, and all in relation to any mind that would perceive smoke as such a sign.
I have always found it odd to parse conversations among theosophists and pragmatic philosophers through affinities alone: as a linguistic and historical anthropologist attentive to social hierarchies, I look also to trajectories and material channels that afford such circuits. Kandinsky, for example, was born in Moscow in 1866, raised in Odessa, educated in Moscow, and moved in 1896, after a career in ethnography and law, to art school in Munich, after which he lived in Moscow, Berlin, and Paris; his biography sketches a spiral across the borders of empires. The theosophical thought-forms that inspired him were likewise drawn by people of means who crossed many borders, reinforcing imperial-era circuits among Russian, British, American, and Turkish territories. Elena Blavatsky embodied those channels in her migrations, from her birth in Ekaterinaslav in 1831; to her marriage in Erevan around 1848; and then on trips to Istanbul, London, Ceylon, the Rockies, and back to the Caucasus for a good five years. She then moved on to Odessa, finally settling more or less in New York City, with oscillations between London and Bombay (Washington 1993). Her theosophical writings not only referenced imperial spaces and hierarchies by describing, for example, subject people’s mastery of occult energies and channels, but also indexed them. Blavatsky’s biographers marvel at her travels but rarely pause to study the specifics of her launch from elite aristocratic (she was a Dolgorukhov!), bureaucratic, mercantile, and artistic circles. This background made her travels possible, paying for her passage by train and ship and helping her channel her thoughts in print across great distances. Few biographers consider her aristocratic upbringing or the fact that her father was a high-ranking military officer who moved frequently across the southern and eastern parts of the Russian Empire. Theosophists in the United States still marvel at Blavatsky’s erudition in the philosophy and history of religions, at all the knowledge she acquired without having attended school—without noting that few aristocratic children in the Russian Empire attended schools, as their families maintained impressive libraries and hired tutors.
Theosophy itself skirted discussion of social hierarchy even as it posited a universal hierarchy of cosmic evolution, a future infused by the peacemaking, healing capacities of mental and energetic communion. All the while, it anchored sensitive capacities to connect to theories of race and evolution. Thought-forms were visible only to those with the evolved, artistic sensibility to perceive radiating color-sound vibrations. Moreover, a crude, unrefined person can only emanate rough, ugly thought-forms: “Selfish Greed” is sloppy, all mud-green tentacles, like “people gathered in front of a shop window” (Besant and Leadbetter 1901, 56–57). “Intellectual Aspiration,” by contrast, sends out a thrusting ray of yellow, depicting a “much advanced development of the part of the thinker” (72). Kandinsky’s abstract modernist sat in the apex of society, as in the glassy tip of a pyramid or moving pencil, making contact with a new plane: only the genius artist could see ahead.
The ideal of the evolved, telepathic, empathic genius has risen historically across human conflicts and hierarchies, the events of wars, imperial extensions, colonial extractions, and rationalizing governments. So also has the anti-ideal, in images of failed contacts and of excesses of mental manipulation. All the while, specific institutions have fervently worked to open doors to perception that systematize intuitions about contact, even while keeping their channels narrow.
COLD WAR OPTICS
My friend is driving on the wooded road from the dacha belonging to a psychologist and television celebrity, a man who tested telepathy claims in Soviet labs in the 1960s, leaving me free to ponder our tea with him. He had enlightened us, reaching inside his jacket for a Nokia phone to punctuate the claim, about how competition between our governments to harness telepathic energies paralleled lines of technological espionage in the race to perfect cell phones. The birch forest that grows so thick and green just outside Moscow seems an unsuitable setting to belabor our respective states’ claims to have invented this or that communication technology. My friend breaks the silence to remark upon something else. She is struck by our host’s stories about a 1960s experiment in which subjects were to read colors or numbers via skin vision, or dermooptika (dermo-optics): “How embarrassing! For science, they make you sit on colored paper with your naked bottom.” Her words prompted me, as they often do, to ponder our diverging perspectives: while I have been primed to fix on technological rivalry, educated into nationalist, paranoid narratives that oppose Russia to America, my friend was exercising a finer sensibility to both broader and more specific concerns, demonstrating empathy while gesturing toward hierarchy and sacrifice in divisions of laboratory labor. Poor Roza Kuleshova, shivering blindfolded while scientists measured her pulse.
Until my friend spoke, I had given little thought to any indignities that might have occurred in the telepathy lab. This chord runs through the fictions and spectacles of both superpowers; stories about shame and social awkwardness when true thoughts are exposed resonate with Kuleshova’s nakedeness. Such discomforts escalate exponentially in fears that an enemy might access the mind, steal the keys to drive the will—historically, they intensified where state projects intersected, looped into Cold War circuits, for we share more of institutional histories and networks of expertise than we admit.
Throughout the Cold War and afterward, in Russia and the United States alike, films, books, and news reports on telepathy experiments have projected fantasies and warnings about ways to sense over distance and communicate through barriers. At best, humanity unites to discover ever more sleek technologies to open channels through space and time, while we evolve hitherto hidden capacities for intuition, to see into the future or into the minds even of aliens. These dreams, in the pastels of collective effervescence, contrast with the nightmare shades of mass manipulation and mental bondage, in parallel with the ways that, for example, Americans debate the mental influence of Russian propaganda or fake news while they also produce videos of dolphins communicating and films about linguists cracking alien code.
The paranoid perspective all too easily dominates. Fear of mental influence, of mind control as a subtype of enslavement, has ranked high among justifications for building walls, segregating people, limiting currencies, jamming radio signals, and deporting populations. Cold War states fed paranoia in two ways. First, both superpowers cast the enemies alternately as manufacturers of ideological robots or as slaves to suspicion and superstition. Second, both did in fact launch massive efforts to use technology (including psychopharmaceutical technologies) to affect opinions, proclivities, and habits. From television advertising to boot camp, in elementary schools and elections, people witnessed naked attempts to influence motives and actions.
Why so much effort to educate a paranoid perspective? Both superpowers claimed to oppose oppressive states. After World War II both pressed for dismantling colonial orders that had produced slavery, resource extraction, and white nationalism—yet both the United States and the USSR continued to build upon colonial institutions and imperial infrastructures. For instance, both extended prison and military systems in ways that appropriated free labor and fed proxy wars. Both states, to sustain these contradictions without losing credibility, veiled or denied their similarities and connections, even in spaces of cooperation or intersection.3 In paranoia, we together shaped a militarized, carceral world.
In the United States, critics and comics mocked fear of enemy influence, exhorting us to fear instead our own failures to understand, as in Dr. Strangelove (1964), in which U.S. leaders mistakenly attack the Soviets, believing they have poisoned American waters. The year before Dr. Strangelove was released, the U.S. Air Force released educational videos addressing such concerns (Air Force Audio Visual Service,1963). The film demonstrates checks and balances along a chain of communication contacts through channels of telephone, radio, and then finally gesture. The U.S. president picks up a special phone to reach Strategic Air Command (SAC); his command, as a radio signal, is verified by two fighter planes; and then SAC relays the command down to individual missile silos. In each silo two men sit at matching consoles, equipped with matching keys. The pair confirms receipt of the command, each nodding to the other, holding eye contact as they turn their keys in synchrony to launch the missile. Just as a beautiful system of government is checked and balanced to prevent tyranny, all will be well with the system mediating nuclear commands; no contacts will break, no circuits misfire, because the agents confirming that the authorized contact has occurred are duplicated at each point. Of course this reassured few, and people searched elsewhere for the promise to survive planetary destruction, reviving New Age movements, writing science fiction in which humanity evolves skills for intuition and empathy. Meanwhile, the so-called Iron Curtain did not just divide and block communication and movement; it also motivated attempts to communicate, generated “excess” communications, and shaped longings for more contact.
Soviets and Americans faced those barriers differently, and we produced and performed knowledge of the other differently. As an ethnographer and American citizen, I have had ample opportunity to incite talk about superpower competition, and it has always struck me that random taxi drivers in Moscow ask me more informed questions about the United States than anyone I know in America, no matter how brilliant, has ever asked me about Russia or the USSR, except other specialists. In the Urals countryside, on trains crossing the Volga and the Kama, I have spent days and nights talking to people—people who identify as Russian, Romani, Chuvash, or Armenian (often some mix, as all may live as Russian citizens). My path has led me to speak with scientists and linguists, actors and bankers, designers and shop clerks, beading artists and metalworkers. All have commanded more detail about U.S. history and literature than the other way around, asking specific questions about state taxes, politicians, roads, breakfast cereals, and race politics in the United States. Back home, conversely, old classmates and even colleagues suggest that there is something awry in my interest in learning anything about Russia at all. My Russian visitors in the United States have rarely been greeted by the detailed comparative discussions I have met with in Moscow, Tver’, and Perm’. In Russia, print news, television, and radio produce a better baseline of knowledge about events beyond the borders than is usual in the United States; for example, one program on the independent radio channel Echo of Moscow devotes an hour each week to exploring unusual legal cases in America. Mainstream papers give full citations in daily reviews of the American press. Post-Soviets of several generations, in both city and country, even those having no contact with foreigners, sing songs by the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, Beyoncé. How many U.S. citizens know a single poem by Pushkin or would even recognize a song by psychedelic folk-rock band AuktsYon? Perhaps if American paranoia flourishes over blind spots, Russian versions adhere almost affectionately to details.
Patterns of migration explain some of the difference; many Russians published their American impressions to circulate back home (via tamizdat), and contacts did not completely wither with immigration even during the deepest frosts. It was Russian friends who taught me how the U.S. federal highway infrastructure works in tandem with trucking hospitality plazas and weigh stations; they have an émigré friend who drives a freight truck across the continent, and I do not. In the real world, where some Russians become better Americans than I can be, paranoia is a means to erase such inconvenient impurities—it can even transform the immigrant’s or tourist’s very affection for things American into a reason to reject all things Russian.
ROMANCING OPACITY
When I first began to plan pursuing ethnography in the USSR, around 1987, a graduate adviser warned me, “No one will ever trust you over there.” This was even before the world order changed in 1989. Political regime changes from Eastern Europe to South Africa, monetary reforms and educational overhauls after the fall of socialist states drew attention to new crises of representation and reanimated older ones: “Is this a counterfeit ruble?” “Can we trust our Swedish colleague?” “Does she really love me, or want a visa to Canada?” The stakes for interpretation within Russia shifted for a good while, from fearing enemies of the state to fearing enemies in the markets. Russians in the 1990s warned me to avoid merchants, to avoid Roma; women cautioned against alfonsy, men looking for sugar mommas. People debated: Were Russians the samyj iskrennij narod (“most sincere people”), or the most ironic, or the most suspicious?
Still no one, not one of these people, nor any of those about whom they warned me, ever let me down, cheated me, robbed me, or took advantage of me. Some gave me advice, rides, repairs, birthday parties—an engagement party!—meals, shawls, books, jewelry, candy, cards, embraces, opinions, stories … and time. I tried to reciprocate. Did they give to cultivate an American spy or a connection overseas? It has been thirty years, and by now it is clear that I have no good information and not a lot of money—and people still spend time with me. Moreover, I have too often seen too many of these people treat even strangers with careful responsibility, if not cheer, orienting to an ethic of mutual aid—one that some complain has vanished since the demise of the USSR, but that (to my American sensitivity to preserving individuality and refusing aid) seems vital and alive. Where markets blossomed in Russia, they did so without the objectivist strains of extreme individualism that dominate among American financial elites (thanks to another Russian émigré, Ayn Rand, who made more ripples in Chicago and New York than in St. Petersburg and Moscow). After three decades of fieldwork and study, I reject assertions that mistrust and illusion structure the ways people in Russia actually relate, any more than they do in other places I have lived. Instead, people there begin, probe, and nurture relationships even against proliferations of narratives driven by paranoid logic, filling them out over time.
Mistrust is not the motor for this book. It is but one approach to contact, one that sparks and recharges not within the space of a single state but across them, and that is embedded among specific technologies for intuition, sets of skills, procedures, networks and institutions for interpreting others. In Moscow in early 1992 the mother of one friend, a talented tailor, gave me a photocopy of a “very useful book,” a recent translation of Dale Carnegie’s How to Make Friends and Influence People. As I read it for the first time, I recalled that the giver was already assiduously following its precepts; for example, she began every turn at talking by addressing her interlocutor by name, a practice to which I developed an aversion after reading about its purpose and function according to Carnegie. A decade later, a different friend in Moscow, a writer, voiced a position closer to mine, asking whether people in the United States read Carnegie’s “lessons in hypocrisy” as avidly as did people in Russia. I told her that, while many know of Carnegie, I know few who quote the text—but we seem to have already absorbed many of its principles.4 A decade later in Moscow, living experts such as Paul Ekman were in vogue, teaching not how to make friends, but how to discern false friends. He has become popular both there and elsewhere through translations of his books and a fictional television series based on his work (Lie to Me, 2009–2011).
It turns out that Ekman started visiting psychologist colleagues in St. Petersburg, Russia, in the 1970s, giving lectures on how to read facial micro-expressions in order to spot lies. Ekman may owe a great deal to his Russian interlocutors. Self-help authors publishing in Russia weave references to Ekman and other Anglophone writers, such as Allan Pease, into handbooks on how to read motivation and detect lies, how to see past words or through gestures in specific kinds of social interactions: courting, marketing, healing, studying, voting. As the Soviet system wound down, although streams of advice offered to help people interpret each other in new local circumstances, they did not burble up from local springs alone.
Beginning around 1990, advertising exponentially increased from places such as AIP-Tsentr in St. Petersburg, offering training by authors of books such as Basic Instinct: The Psychology of Intimate Relations (Vagin and Glushchaj 2002). By the twenty-first century Moscow enterprises offered courses, such as Genij obshchenija (The Genius of Communication), that promised to teach “the lie detector technique” and “scanning the inner state of your partner.” One also could take Methods of Evoking Sympathy or The Art of Bluffing. A.P. Egides, author of books such as Labyrinths of Communication, or How to Learn to Tune in with People (2002), ran a school in Moscow called The Little Prince, offering psychological training on topics such as “how to deport yourself in conflicts” and “how to distinguish among people.” The Moscow continuing education offices of CitiKlass (www.cityclass.ru) offered the course Tekhnika Uspeshnykh Peregovorov [Techniques of Successful Negotiations], which included dramatic role-playing to learn, among other things, “how to correctly crack the secrets of gestures,” “how to read faces,” and “the peculiarities of conducting negotiations with representatives of various nations and peoples.” These texts mystified communication and projected shifty types of persons even as they offered secret decoder rings.
In many languages in many countries, journalists and filmmakers, parliaments and diplomats saturate media with reports and depictions of betrayals, failures of trust, and tests of authenticity—and also with reports of techniques, designed by professionals and experts, to distinguish good contacts from bad, to judge communications as transparent or opaque. Moreover, in contradiction to the many famous claims about exceptional Russian obfuscation and mystery, people in Russia have just as frequently as anyone else rallied to the value of transparent clarity. When Russian Decembrists renounced monarchy in 1825, they also championed plain speaking, rejecting the Francophone registers of the Russian aristocratic courts.5 Early Soviets called back to those Decembrist aesthetics when they removed extra alphabet letters, trimming the “Language of Lenin” down to spare, modular forms thought best to manifest both clarity and modernity to foster new thought and action.6
By the 1960s, intellectuals vexed by Soviet versions of rationalism had turned toward opacity and ambiguity.7 Soft focus translucence marked films beloved by the intelligentsia, such as Tarkovsky’s 1979 Stalker. Based on a science fiction novel by the Strugatsky brothers, the story unfolds in The Zone, a space polluted and warped by an extraterrestrial visitation. The authorities have fenced it off from all but the most daring poachers of alien technological artifacts. Adventurers hire these Stalkers to seek a room where, it is said, one’s secret wishes are divined and fulfilled.
Filmed several years before Blade Runner (1982) depicted a half-decayed, half-shiny-chrome future Los Angeles, Stalker’s marshy, wet, and rusted industrial landscape projected late Soviet perceptions of ecological ruin, the corroded metal and crumbled concrete that increasingly threaded through day-to-day life, but were still largely absent from film or television (as they were then in mainstream U.S. productions). However, the worst dangers of The Zone were not its earthly ruins but its cracks in space-time, which zig across the landscape, shifting location unexpectedly. Matter that contacts such a crack is consumed: your arm is sheared right off, hair just singed if you are lucky (a possibility that is clearer in the book). The Stalker finds safe paths by testing all that seems most transparent; his simple technology for intuition is to appropriate the metal lug nuts discarded by the aliens. He throws one; silence means that way is fatal, while the sound of metal hitting ground indicates open passage. Inside The Zone one can never move along a straight path, for space there is just like time, each step as opaque as tomorrow; upon finding the enchanted space, the adventurers discover that they cannot read even their own desires.8 Only the Stalker accepts the knowledge that seemingly transparent paths nonetheless require extra senses—even just to listen, not only to look—before moving on.
Some argue that the thematic and formal opacity in the film signal elitism (see Faraday 2000,164–67). Tarkovsky was certainly steeped in 1960s elite intellectual Soviet debates about sincerity and opacity,9 and in his autobiography he expresses disdain for Eisenstein-style film montage as too fast, too limiting of interpretation, too obvious (1986, 21). It was better, he thought, to leave some things unsaid, out of respect for viewers’ intellectual and emotional intelligence.
As these brief examples suggest, by the time of glasnost’ in the late 1980s, the Soviet Union had passed through several cycles wherein claims to clear, transparent, open communication alternated with romantic or postmodern rejections of its possibility. Soon afterward, however, many responded to 1990s advertising and electoral campaigns as harbingers of mystifying reenchantment, political dramaturgy as thaumaturgy. Victor Pelevin hit this note in 1996 with the hilarious blockbuster Generation P, a novel depicting a world flooded by PR and commercials for foreign cigarettes and soda. The protagonist is a translator of Uzbek and Kirghiz poetry who finds his profession suddenly erased; “the new era had no use for him” (Pelevin 1999, 5). He takes a gig for a new advertising firm, conjuring jingles during Castaneda-inspired, Ouija-board sessions with the spirit of Che Guevara that marry hallucinogens to structural linguistics. He never does find clarity, ascending instead a vertical maze of occult esoterica to couple with an ancient masked goddess.
Anthropologists, historians, and literary scholars of Russia have creatively analyzed all these themes, devoting special attention to the virtuosity and humanity, for many, of the unsaid and the half-said in Soviet times (Boym 1994; Pesmen 2000; Oushakine 2000) and the social play of ambiguity and irony (Yurchak 2005; see also Lipovetsky 2010; Nadkarni 2007), complicating images of the USSR as a place where poets and tricksters only perished, as if all free thinkers were whisked away merely for hinting at a double meaning. As Yurchak stresses, by the time of late socialism, many people easily went about their lives, neither chafing against government slogans nor animating them with soul, but standing indifferent to them—or having fun with them, repurposing Lenin’s words in bricolage that sometimes (not always) provided subversive means to “signify on” official signs (Gates 1988), but that more significantly also marked out fields of social allegiance.10
One Moscow friend gives me an example from her teen years, around 1983, of righteous uses of opacity. After a demonstration against Soviet military force in Afghanistan, she had been taken in for a beseda (a “chat,” a euphemism for “interrogation”). She recalls feeling, “internally compelled to answer all the questions honestly,” until she realized, after comparing notes with friends, that one should refuse to answer at all, if not for one’s own sake, then for that of others in custody.11 The morality of deliberate opacity subverts dominant strands of European, Christian, Bolshevik, and modernist incitements to speak, to speak sincerely—and to speak as an individual;12 in her case, speaking truth to power would betray others. Such truthful speaking can be a cynical act, insincerely aimed. To refuse transparency along one channel—in sincere words to these people in this place—affirms other ongoing channels. For many people, and not only in Russia, this is how the “sense of trust” emerges over time, not through individually sincere expressions of referential fact. To eschew semantic transparency was less a manifestation of what has been called “a culture of dissimulation”13 and more a socially alert tactic that left room for others to navigate discursive situations otherwise out of their control. For those in such situations, American-style outrage when communication shifts, to work differently within bureaucratic corridors than outside them seems silly.14 The American NGOs that came in the late 1990s to teach Russians communication skills in lessons bundling transparency with capitalism and democracy quickly came to seem not only meddling, but naïve (see also Larson 2013; Cohen 2015a).
Many foreign consultants entered Russian spaces in the 1990s with little in the way of language or historical training, unaware of the debt that global scholarship on communication owes, in fact, to robust theories developed both in Russia and by Russian-speaking émigrés. Like Pelevin’s hero, many urban Russians had earned degrees in philology and read semiotic and literary theory (Vladimir Propp, Roman Jakobson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Yuri Lotman) and structural and post-structural theories of language in French (Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Derrida) and other languages. My own training in linguistic anthropology engages much of the same scholarship, and I often randomly encountered people who enjoyed speaking about concrete situations of communication in ways amenable to it (asking who addresses whom, in what social relation, for whose interests, and to which ends?) We shared ground to frame discussions about whether “democracy” always aligns with “transparency,” or whether “sincerity” (as a matter of referential truth calibrated to an individual speaking voice), is really the deepest, or best, measure of morality or for true communication, and whether it is not best to refuse the squeamishness that categories like sincerity can call into being.15
MANY RAYS, MANY RUSSIAS
Pelevin’s hero survives the dissolution of Soviet hierarchies of expertise. The order of labor by which a translator could eat by poetry alone ends, so he aims his semiotic energies elsewhere, taking precarious contracts to craft advertising jingles and political slogans. I conceived of fieldwork for this book in 1997, a summer when my friends in Russia and I were reading and laughing at Generation P. We had all seen other friends juggle, and some struggled themselves to recombine older techniques for interpretation, to transvalue them for credible use across formerly disparate social circles and institutional structures (Kelly, 2012)—actors teaching their craft to businessmen or to politicians, if they were lucky, tending bar or hauling cargo to market if they were not.
Their crossings motivate this book’s attention to competing rays of semiotic effort, launched from diverse points: theater schools, university courses, self-help courses, television programs, scientific demonstrations, bureaucratic encounters, film sets, and prison barracks. Through them I track filaments of longing and worry about making and breaking contact, the possibilities for and obstacles to communicative intuition. The book follows modes of tuning and testing channels that escape original fields of activity, and we see techniques to project feeling through theatrical prosceniums intertwine with those developed in lab tests of long-distance thought transfer. We see playwrights do ethnography, literary scholars interview psychics on talk shows, psychologists read Constantine Stanislavsky, and actors study Ekman.
This book moves from starting point to end point not along a single, straight line, but by working through series of circles of expertise and circuits for influence. I begin inside a theatrical academy in Moscow and end on a film set in the Urals, both points at which the nature of contact is under scrutiny and given shape.
Neither my America nor my Russia is the same as yours. Since 1988 I have lived in Russia for approximately five years and in Eastern Europe for a year and a half. Both durable structures and sudden contingencies opened and closed my paths, some affording me unusual perspectives on encounters across multiple national and social borders. For one thing, long-term research and contact with Romani communities in Russia and Eastern Europe forced me to attend to the rise of right-wing nationalism and to ways American and British encouragement of local nationalism to counter socialism was not innocent in that rise. I learned to heed colleagues from both Russia and the other formerly socialist states, who knew that while histories of socialism in their countries were linked, they were diverse, never in lockstep. Indeed, people like Roma experienced post-socialist reforms in Russia very differently than those who faced reforms in the Czech Republic or Hungary, because different socialist-era legal systems and labor practices had built differing social and legal environments for Roma to act upon.
Although I started my fieldwork during the very last days of state socialism, it is not the end of socialism that motivates this book, but a broader and more persistent set of concerns about how categories of intuition are shaped by understandings of communication that in turn have been torqued through both material channels and politically charged ideologies that either allow or constrain contacts. In the early 1990s I spent much time on film shoots and at stage rehearsals, where Russian directors told Roma to “turn up the emotional volume” in order to “be more real, more Gypsy” so that they would “touch” the audience. (Roma would rarely communicate their distaste for these directives in the moment, saving bitter complaints and arch hilarity for later, “among ourselves.”) I met a few Russians who claimed to know everything that matters about Gypsies by intuition, triggered by tiny sense data, a “look in the eye” that told them that “Gypsies are criminals.” Similar profiling judgments flourish in the United States; whence such confidence in intuitions about certain others? These processes have as much to do with regulations of contacts and channels as they do with stereotypes, and they have long histories.
I reach then for a historical theorization of the ways people check, maintain, or break contact, semiotic acts also known as phatic. Such acts manifest not only in words but also in cleared throats and pauses, in the ways people move or juxtapose media materials or arrange bodies in various kinds of situations, for example, on the stage, at passport control, and in the kitchen.
People learn to communicate with others within particular situations. Moreover, they do so as they also learn how situations contrast. To claim to discern a criminal mind by the luster of an eye will rest on some scaffolding—such as the socialized recognition of policing as a mobile and invasive discursive situation, one that can be imposed over others, with its own interpretive experts. Attention itself is socially weighted as we learn each situation, taught how and where to aim our eyes and ears (at the teacher) or urged not to stare or not to eavesdrop (on the bus). Attention centers the directives embedded in moral judgments about proper channels and contacts: “Why do you even watch that show?” “Talking to those people is a waste of time.” “Look at the blackboard, not at your friends.” We learn about social distinctions every time we witness another being invited to look, or when bodies angle to shoulder us out of a conversation. These discursive divisions of labor are also sensory, even when they go unremarked. They shape social possibilities unless we purposely—and at cost—override pressure to stay inside our circles.
My specialization in Russian studies and anthropology was incomprehensible, even unethical, to some of the people who grew up on my street; a few prickled aggressively at the idea that I would study “that communist language,” would actually make contact with those people. Paranoia about espionage, however, is only one among many material and social conditions that hold knowledge of other countries out of reach in the United States. Never mind Russia; New York City was a fantasy place to most of us kids in Nebraska. Few people traveled even across state lines; tickets cost money, even on Greyhound, and where would one crash if one did not have kin? It still shocks me how few academics and professionals know about these limits on many, perhaps most, Americans’ possibilities for travel.
I would not have come to study Russian or travel to Moscow if not for luck, hitting upon a channel opened by the generation before. The post–World War II G.I. Bill allowed my adoptive father to enroll in college and then graduate school after his military service during the Korean War. The army had taught him Russian and sent him to Alaska to monitor radio transmissions. After obtaining his graduate degree, he copublished the first English translations of the Russian formalist literary critics, most notably Shklovsky’s theory of art as estrangement. Raised during the Great Depression of the 1930s in a union town on the edge of St. Louis, he feared socialism; as a kid working after school while other college-bound kids studied, I did not. We argued fiercely about the means to economic and social justice, and perhaps that conflict inspired me to study Russian and to go see for myself.
There was another condition that situated my perceptions of Russia: our house, while stocked with novels, was draughty and our clothes were secondhand (cultural capital does not transform into economic capital when one academic salary supports two families of children). Accounts of Moscow that compared it implicitly with, say, suburban Massachusetts (not even with Manhattan) made no sense to me at all; I have yet to find comparisons that presuppose readers who live in a Florida trailer park, as some of my relatives do. Americans without means—many of us—rarely travel by air, much less abroad, much less to Russia, and rarely for more than a few weeks, young scholars on fellowships and young journalists being among the exceptions. On my first trip to Russia, a study tour in 1988, my observations never synced with those of most of my tripmates, children of lawyers and doctors and ambassadors. Beyond our relatively successful little nuclear pod, our adult kin work as infantry soldiers, sailors, assembly line workers, paramedics, meat cutters, harvest laborers, seamstresses, cashiers, mortuary workers, construction workers, one pool shark, and one painter. When I first visited Russia, my points of reference for gauging living conditions included our house, a tiny, grim Manhattan dorm room with speedy little roaches, decrepit student rentals with sagging porches in Madison and Chicago, a trailer set on concrete blocks in the northern Alabama mountains, and occasional glimpses of the domestic paradises in which a few beloved schoolmates lived, where I learned about concepts like “cable television,” and “finished basement.” Skills and chores learned from maternal kin helped me more in Russia than did academic hints: my girl cousin showed me how to weave beads; my aunt spent sweaty days canning. Boy cousins showed us how to track deer and to play chess, a game learned in the army. Our grandparents taught everybody to sing harmony.
While many Americans on that trip reported bleak impressions of a grey, crumbling Russia—how much better is our country, they would agree on the tour bus—my impressions never lined up with theirs. First encounters with Soviet objects stirred sentiments not of American superiority, but of comfort and delight in discovery, admiration for humans who had differently imagined techniques and tools for living and made them accessible to more of us. When I first stepped onto a Soviet train from Helsinki to Leningrad in 1988, the cars smelled of wood paneling and hot steel wheels. A huge electric kettle was built in at the front of the car—a samovar always ready to dispense hot water: convenience. Next to the samovars, a chart labeled all parts of the machine, indicating how it worked and how it might be repaired, inviting us to learn and to act if need be: genius. Russia offered luxuries new to me, in things I was allowed to touch: porcelain tea sets and Czech cut-glass chandeliers (and also imitation plastic ones, which I thought just as cool). Real butter at every meal, carved into shells. Flowers, fresh flowers, people always buying and carrying flowers. The giant, lush house plants in the lobby of the Leningrad youth hostel, late afternoon summer sun streaming between rubber plant leaves, a disco up in the mezzanine playing Michael Jackson, the sound bending around towering palms and ferns.
These early tourist impressions were later tempered in village buildings with no indoor plumbing (with outhouses like those of my country relatives), and during the hardest days of the early 1990s by searches for food in grocery stores or for supplies in hospitals, where a lack of cotton, gloves, and antiseptics meant taking care of people at home instead (as we had done for my mother in the 1970s, when the hospital would not nurse her after an operation). I was not blind to the rough state of mailboxes in the high-rise entryways. However, I have come to prickle when I hear contrasts between some specific Russian bit of trouble and an American ideal of plenty, or a dream of luxury, color, and variety that many of us did not live. Compare Urals plumbing to Michigan water pipes, if you will, but look not only at contrasts, or even similarities, but also for connections. To avoid standing upon the sands of covert comparison to American ideals, as if they exemplify a neutral standard, this book keeps contrasts and comparisons specific, and when I do incorporate American places and patterns, it is in ways that attempt symmetry and acknowledge influence.
FIELDWORK
This books draws from several decades of ethnographic and archival research in Russia from 1988, the year before the Berlin Wall fell and three years before the USSR would deconstruct itself, through 2017, one hundred years after the Russian Revolution. I write at a time when Americans are acutely unsure about how to interpret anyone, how to intuit the intentions of their own leaders, not to mention those of other states. This moment would be different had government encouraged Americans to learn multiple languages; perhaps we would be more brave about tuning in to foreign channels and attempting our own translations. Outside academe, the very fact that I study Russian is an anomaly, either exotic or suspect. All this in mind, Throughout the book, whenever possible, I provide the time and place of observations from my fieldnotes; in some cases, doing so would violate standard ethnographic ethical practice, and so I deliberately leave time and place unstated.
In 1988, after six years of formal Russian study, I spent a summer in Leningrad. In 1990 and 1991, my several monthlong trips included family home stays and research affiliations to survey the archives. In August 1991 I began my first long, two-year sojourn in Moscow; I arrived in time to witness the attempted coup that catalyzed the dismantling of the USSR. I visited many times throughout the 1990s and carried out another long-term field project in 2002–2003 and 2005 at the Russian State Theatrical Academy, living with students in the dorm, documenting interactions in classrooms and rehearsals, as well as backstage and in the hallways.16 I keep in touch with that cohort and with a few other cohorts, and return about once a year. Over the decades, I have lived in Moscow, Tver’, Perm’, and Kungur and have visited other cities and villages. I have lived with Roma and with other Russians, in cities and in villages, with friends and with families of friends, in cottages and dachas, and in apartments and dormitories.
Over time I accumulated many observations by accident, for example, by translating pro bono for a British lawyer observing a court trial or wandering around Moscow talking to strangers during the 1991 coup attempt. Ethnographers study encounters among beings who are not made to sit naked in a lab—and while we might influence, we cannot control, what will happen in any situation. Some people try, and it is our job to understand how, not to try to control situations ourselves. To capture variation across such situations, this book thus draws from events that reached beyond the bounds of research sites or moments of interviewing.
There are nevertheless ethical reasons that anthropologists endeavor, in writing and in note taking, to separate “research” from “life” and to report only on the former. For such reasons, I have waited many years to write about certain encounters that did not at the time fall under the umbrella of research. I still take care to write in ways that do not identify anyone. For similar reasons, I draw from films, radio, and books. For one thing, because such media are not produced for me, they offer coordinates from which to triangulate examples that are more ethnographic, situations in which I was present and possibly affected what might have been said or done. For another thing, such media also offer surrogate examples, to shield actual people from censure or embarrassment while demonstrating the ubiquity of certain themes. In addition, many of my interlocutors’ livelihoods involve creating and curating photos, plays, films, or radio broadcasts, which makes it all the more important that I show Anglophone readers a few landmarks in the Russian mediascape that serve as common points for their work, as well as for the play of laughter and debate.
The fact is, however, that I came to know many people in spaces where being an anthropologist, or even a being foreigner, was subsumed under other, joint work. My friends include people with whom I spent hours on a song chorus, guitar riff, or recording level or on deciding a camera angle or a costume choice. I spent time with people seeking perfection of this karate technique or that roller derby rule or this beading skill. Some of us collaborated on stage plays, translations, films, musical concerts, and recordings. In 1992, between research grants, I helped proof the English edition of a telephone directory. On film sets (one on which Romani consultants were working, one in a Urals prison), I played tiny roles as an extra actor. In Perm’ I collaborated on an anthology of Russian rock to benefit a children’s oncology center. In Moscow I acted and directed for an expat theatrical ensemble. Throughout, when not “doing fieldwork”—when not out at 4:00 A.M. at a wedding table, taping an interview, or writing up notes—I might be arguing with a musician about phrasing, running a sound check in a blues club, buying a fish for New Year’s, or weeding around cucumbers. Such joint projects make it difficult to ignore interests and relationships that research parameters can otherwise eclipse.
Over time both research and other collaborations can transcend original contexts and points of contact; after an interview, the interviewee and I might set out to undo a bureaucratic knot. Meeting someone in the metro for afternoon tea might involve a detour for an hour to stand in line to get on a waiting list for a sofa (that was in Soviet times—now it might mean a detour to compare new appliances). A ride from the train station could include turning down a side road to stop by the dentist or to drop off a little gift (or by 2014 to visit a new cat café). Such detours brought me to witness interactional struggles for attention and solutions to awkward requests as they arose, especially ways to make or avoid contact that interviews alone never can (Briggs 1986).
American military and soft power have framed many encounters overseas. I attribute some of people’s willingness to collaborate with me to my American passport, my access to dollars during a period of extreme ruble devaluation, and their own early optimism about changes promised by Western business and markets, but friends also recognize that I try to avoid measuring by American ideals. Three decades of birthdays and New Year’s eves, weddings, and funerals—with fireworks, herring, and vodka—and the relaxing labors of preparing ordinary dinners and companionable walks on errands have turned some of us into friends. As we become friends, we try to smooth channels: I decode the American “service smile”; they socialize me to serve politely at table. When we are together, we sometimes amplify each other’s familiar channels, so no one is homesick: in Moscow we saw Alice Cooper; near Detroit we turned up the volume for AuktsYon.
Some places in Moscow are set up to cater to tourists’ preferences or to seek foreign influence. The Russian State Theatrical Academy, even as an elite institution that accepts foreign students, is not one of them. There, I was accorded no authority to define encounters or determine the manner of my own participation. For example, I had planned to participate in acting lessons, to compare them to prior years of such experience, and stood ready with the class on September 1—but the master instructor walked over, took me by the elbow, and led me to sit in a chair by his side. I wanted to flout that bodily directive,17 but consider: these students had passed through several rounds of intense auditions, so who was I to poach on their instruction time? I was sometimes recruited to act or sing “as an American” in a few short projects, and I folded easily into classes like stage combat and vocals, in which students received collective rather than individual attention, and in which previous training in choral singing and martial arts gave me specific skills to contribute. With room to jump across the sprung wooden floor, to practice flips and kicks, we worked in small groups as teachers moved around us. My leaping shoulder rolls received the same range of critique as theirs, my favorite being a dry, “Ochen’ ne plokho” (“Very not bad”). As a result, I have full notebooks on acting classes and less on paper about stage combat. But my handstands are pretty good.
To define a field site or even a topic, scholars draw lines between selves and others, but some lines dissolve as social involvement stretches over time. We cannot put the entire world inside a lab or on a stage. Over the course of what anthropologists call events of participant observation, obligations arise and play out into friendships, rivalries, and other kinds of bonds. Even gifts change functions over time; what might originate in hopes for help surviving or material return can transform into promises to reunite, evoking different feelings than they once did; expectations of a return gift matter less than looking forward to coming together again. Memories of past aid or cheer attach fiercely to some gifted objects, and collecting gifts to give becomes part of the pleasure in planning a visit. Theories that emphasize the socially strategic functions of the gift may require revision to account for exchanges over periods longer than most rounds of fieldwork.
For example, from a longer perspective, we see that some gifts involve more than a single, dyadic axis of giver-receiver. One spring day in Michigan a box arrived at my house containing an Indiana Jones mask. Was this sent to harass me, perhaps by a disgruntled student of anthropology? I am not even an archaeologist, so, offended, I punched the thing before remembering that Moscow friends had ordered a toy online for their son. I forwarded it with a letter making fun of my forgetful reaction. A month later in Moscow, a small boy jumped out from behind the front door wearing this rubber face, after which for a good hour none of us could walk from laughing. Now he is taller than we are. And now we more often say “we.” We have hosted each other many times, a month here, two weeks there, have traveled together in other lands. The sense of being a foreign guest recedes not only when we channel gifts, but also whenever we arrange a table together to welcome still other guests, to my house or theirs. We have even mediated each others’ social networks: I introduced friends who later created a godparent relationship. Other friends introduced me to someone who ended up married to an in-law of mine in Nebraska. Such bonds and intimacies are not unique; similar stories enfold many scholars of Russia not born there, and some marry there. In the twenty-first century, bilingual families line up at the gates for flights to Moscow from Detroit, Atlanta, or New York. While our politicians and media work to define us as opponents, our communications continue through many types of relationships and collaborations. We are shaken each time our states sharpen conflict, but we do not let go.
The facts of such crossings and exchanges, however, do not often lead to depictions that include them as conditions for knowledge. Many beautiful, detailed representations of Russian life made both by Americans (diplomats, journalists, tourists, and scholars) and by émigrés to the United States mark out their topic by excluding such connections. When possible, This book aims to show how contacts influence research; for example, it was a Russian friend’s who urged me to study the reality show Battle of the Psychics. I could choose to absorb her questions, such as: “Battle always tests psychics in a tragic situation, but is there anything funny about being a psychic?”18 “Can psychics marry each other?” Doing so would negate the opportunity to compare and contrast perspectives. Instead I try, where I can, puzzle through ways we converge and diverge. The result, I hope, is a book that incorporates layers of conditions for contact into discussion of intuitions about contact. To convey and theorize these layers, the book chapters each shift screens and spaces in order to light up spirals of contrast-making, following Gregory Bateson’s (1936) insights about this reflexive process of differentiation, which he called shizmogenic.
ETHNOGRAPHY AS CONTACT
This book posits two additional, historically emergent, material and social conditions of the field. First, divisions of labor, even artistic and semiotic labors, are carved out not only within institutions but also across them—and across the territories that claim to encircle them. Second, while communication runs along habitual paths, channels, conduits, and infrastructures that enable contact, communicative engagements can hop such structures, sometimes violating familiar ways to conceptualize communication. To capture both possibilities, this book juxtaposes situations, genres, and venues that are usually analyzed as if they were separate, not just to set telepaths alongside film directors or to compare auditions to prison walls, but to be alert to moments when people jump lanes.
Comparing conditions for contact can be revealing. Making ethnographic contact during early fieldwork in Russia went more slowly than it did later, for instance, at one of the central sites this book draws upon, the Russian State Theatrical Academy. I conducted that fieldwork in the early to mid-1990s with Roma who were going through the regime changes alongside everyone else. I started in places such as the Moscow Romani Theater, where weekly rehearsals were just public enough that people might decide to ignore me or not, to invite me home or not, to introduce me to others or not. Those rehearsals were sporadic, however. The Theatrical Academy was quite a different site; it demanded full, daily immersion (only years later did students command chunks of time and space for home-style hospitality). We all spent all our waking hours there, from 9:00 A.M. to nearly midnight. Conversations begun in the courtyard continued on the metro and into the dormitory. Students both extolled these conditions and, especially in the first year, mourned being cut off from other relations for quite a long period, longer than any boot camp.
This mourning of lost contacts, by the way, made it into the stage work that built cohort collectives. Each fall at midterm, students in many Russian schools stage a kapustnik (“cabbage festival”), a satirical variety show. Village collectives stage them as amateur talent parties; urban working theaters stage them as internal festivities. At the academy, cohorts introduce themselves to each other with kapustnik skits that parody theatrical education; the second-year directing cohort sent up the concept of “internal dialogue” with an actor confused by his own voice booming over the loud speakers, commenting absurdly on his every encounter with stage props: “There is that chair, again.” Our younger cohort crafted a sketch with cameos by all of us non-native Russian speakers, singing in Arabic, Korean, French, Ukrainian, Daghestani, and English while an actor standing to the side pretended to translate. My snippet of “Downhome Blues” was translated into a Russian verse about the free kasha offered free at the academy until 11:00 A.M., while a Kuwaiti student’s round in Arabic on the Ud became a verse about sleeping four hours a night and missing home.
Officially, the academy prefers to stress its function as a node for new contacts, bringing people into communication from far-flung places. Funded by the Ministry of Culture, this elite school is tasked with nurturing a national theatrical tradition and competes with the Moscow Art Theater (MKhAT) for international fame: to learn here, with students of students of Stanislavsky or of Vsevolod Meyerhold, is to drink at the fount of modern stagecraft. For more than a century, people have come from all over the world, to observe or to enroll for weeks, months, or years. I was easily admitted as an observer; the road had already been paved by a century of institutional procedures for including and recruiting observers from other places.
Students were not always so ready to animate such channels or maintain all foreign contacts; while I was there, an entire delegation of American drama students who spoke no Russian joined our cohort for two weeks in the spring. A few students complained later that they had crowded the rooms and slowed them all down, to which the instructors chided, “They are not ‘ballast’! No! How do you think we pay for these light bulbs!” Still, American cultural and social capital earned a lower exchange rate at the academy than it did in other contexts. Contra allegations of Russian inferiority complexes after state socialism ended, at the academy, American know-how was of limited interest. For example, any tenuously imagined connection between me and say, Hollywood, was trumped by teachers’ contacts in the Moscow theater world. No academic or foreigner could compete with the gazes of these directors. On the contrary, they absorbed my camera into their rehearsals, appropriating not only its recording functions, but also its capacity to quickly key shifts in contexts, to stage frames within frames: “Ready? Action!”
Ethnography presupposes presence or proximity, the possibility for making contact not only through technologies like camera or telephone, but also through long-term mediations of the body: the technologies of voice, hand, and eye. Many of my interlocutors at the academy shared this definition of ethnography and valued the observational power of prolonged contact. In the summer of 2001, a visit I made to the office for foreign students secured for me a meeting with the chancellor, to whom I explained that I wanted to observe directing courses and student life in order to write ethnography. She looked at my university card, took a long drag from her cigarette, and through the smoke pronounced knowingly, “Ahhh! Yes! Ethnography! Then you will stay in the dormitory with the students, so that you learn how they live!”
To observe, to listen, to attend to, to take in—these acts can perform contact. In theatrical work or filmmaking, too, to observe is not to distance oneself from others, but to involve oneself in collaborations that demand organization via reflection—to provide mirrors. I was never the only observer, foreign or internal; observation was a central activity offstage and on, learning to observe and to mirror others being among the earliest lessons. The teachers taught in teams, two or three at a time: a master, his or her assistant, and sometimes an intern. To watch and listen as an ethnographer among the instructors and students not onstage was just a minor variation in the social field; my notes roused little notice when all the interns and assistants took them, as did students. Looking over people’s shoulders, I would see the same phrases copied into quad-rule, vinyl-covered notebooks as captured dialogue between teachers and students or in streams of teachers’ discourses. The academy archives volumes of notes, transcripts, and fictional dialogues like those published by Stanislavsky, depicting a version of himself and an imaginary student. To carry out rehearsal ethnography has long been a phase in the curriculum. In 1936 visiting American director Norris Houghton wrote that when observing rehearsals at the Vakhtangov Theater he “used regularly to meet a boy and girl from GITIS [abbreviation for the Soviet-era name for the Academy, Gosudarstvennij Institut Teatral’nogo Iskusstva, or The State Institute for Theater Arts] who were watching rehearsals, and at the rehearsals of Enemies at the Moscow Art Theater, two young men from the Institute were present, like myself, to study the director’s methods (1936, 48).
All this did not make all research methods easy or appropriate. Teachers cheerfully allowed me into classes, and when I asked permission to photograph or record, would exclaim, “Radi boga! Chto ty sprosish’!” (“For God’s sake! Why even ask!”), but at day’s end they would apologetically run to rehearsals at other theaters; overextended, they had little time or incentive to sit down with a foreign scholar. Dyadic channels, such as those afforded by interview situations, were difficult to set up. The head instructor might agree to an interview, but by the end of rehearsal would sigh from exhaustion and avoid eye contact, collecting his things, while students would mediate, “He likes you! He had a hard life; he hates to talk about himself.” During previous fieldwork I had avoided the interview genre when it seemed it would be an imposition in families or spaces where people rarely practice the tête-à-tête. The point of ethnography of communication is to comprehend relations and patterns across a range of situations, not only those created by an interviewer. At the academy, while many had experience with the genre, and while people frequently staged dyadic interactions (romantic scenes, showdowns with landlords), it was nevertheless difficult to get anyone to sit one-on-one. For one thing, to the vexation of those in their first year, the schedule saturated every moment from nine in the morning until midnight, leaving little time to participate in smaller conversations, much less an interview: we began talking, someone suddenly notified us of a turn with the vocal teacher, someone walked by having finally found that red gauze, or someone wanted me to film a scene. Conversations always broke off when a teacher entered the room for the first time of the day, as we stood to greet him or her.
There were also differences in the ease of making contact. Despite my age and academic rank in the United States, I made enduring connections only with students. During acting lessons, critique sessions, or talks by important visitors, directors like Zakharov, Heifetz, or Fomenko, I sat with students on the floor. When students demonstrated their work, we mixed in behind the instructors on benches or chairs—although students sometimes rushed to free a seat for me, or even fetch a chair, as they might for an instructor, suggesting that my identification with them was partial. During breaks between classes, I stayed with the students as they practiced in the homeroom or paced in the corridors, memorizing poems, making tea, or experimenting with makeup. We tried to peer behind the weekly paper schedule filled in by hand and pasted over the glass walls of the directing department office, where instructors met to evaluate students’ work before returning with critical notes. We could watch them talk, but never hear them behind the glass. But sometimes, in noticing that we shared a space cut from contact, we might start a new circle or send out a fresh ray.
