2.Energy and Extrasensation

ROBOT SLOTS

American cold warriors depicted the Soviet socialist enemy as at best a robot-minded slave to be pitied and at worst an agent intent on invading other minds. If Russian literature, music, opera, and ballet were received as passionate tours de force, whence the portrayal of a people as robot-like? To be sure, the Soviet state imprisoned poet Osip Mandelshtam, executed director Vsevolod Meyerhold, and tried and exiled writer Andrei Sinyavsky; these moments complicate but do not negate Soviet-era creativity and fantasy. Some argue that it took concentrated effort to depict Soviets as if they lacked these qualities. For instance, some claim that it took CIA funds funneled through foundations (yet another sort of channel) to promote American forms of abstract expressionism as manifestations of individual creativity,1 intending, by contrast, to prove Soviet rule toxic to human imagination and feeling.² Never mind Harry S. Truman’s hostility to abstraction, tinged by racial slur (“If that’s art, then I’m a Hottentot”); American accounts of twentieth-century cultural politics usually focus only on Nikita Khrushchev’s philistine pronouncements (“Dog shit!” “A donkey waves better with its tail.”).

Still other possibilities might explain why or how the “first world” described the “second world” (Pletsch 1981) as a land of robots. Perhaps depicting the USSR as a land of brainwashed ideologues projected more general fears about mechanization everywhere. Perhaps it expressed American guilt over dropping the atom bomb.³ Whatever the diverse reasons, the result has been to score out a robot slot, not unlike Trouillot’s savage slot (1991), a discursive matrix that, he argues, structures European accounts of colonized peoples. Slot is a metaphor for the ways strong discursive patterns call for repetitions, for filling in blanks as one does when making a metered rhyme or filling in a menu. Like most tropes about others, the savage slot projects colonial mythology and does not describe the colonized.

Worry about automatons may not have started within America; witness the ways women, colonized people, and people of color are described in many places as if they are capable only of imitation (see Bhabha 1984). But the American robot slot is a treacherous version; anyone, from middle manager to boss, can fear falling into it without leaving home. Consider all the 1950s office fictions mourning the sad, gray-suited, city conformists, sold-out souls working for pay instead of following Jack Kerouac to Big Sur.4 Modernist aesthetic movements from beat poetry to punk sought to recover vital energies, awaken perception and will, and release the modern person from civilizing sublimation and submission, but the ironies multiply: white Americans turn to rock music or jazz improvisation to awaken from robotic emptiness, even while ignoring legacies of slave labor that still affect everyone.

There is precedent for another twentieth-century, paranoid, American Cold War version of the robot slot in Dracula (1897), in which projections of vampiric mind control from the East ominously threaten British imperial stability. In nineteenth-century Britain we also find the fear of automation expressed via suspicion of materialism—a suspicion that would carry over into the ideological enmity between socialism and capitalism in the next century. This was all clear particularly in studies of the mind that championed individual creativity and took an absolute moral position on freedom and will. Lorraine Daston notes that in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, psychological approaches to mental phenomena were riven by worry over the moral implications of creating a science of the mind, “in particular, the possible encouragement it might lend to materialist or fatalist theories of human conduct” (1978, 192). Suspicion of materialism, especially materialist accounts of the mind, seemed aligned too closely with a fatalism that lent itself to automatization and to loss of an inner, active self to drive attention and sensation, a kind of self, Daston remarks, that was central to Christian morality grounded in free will.

Suspicion of materialism later infused American accounts of Soviet paranormal science as closed minded. A U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) report prepared by Air Force Systems Command remarked on “the strong tendency of Soviet and East European researchers to emphasize the physical explanation of the phenomena they are dealing with.” Claiming that this materialism hampered creative thinking, the report continued: “In the Soviet Union … ambiguity cannot be tolerated in paraphysics research, and there is a strong tendency on the part of all paraphysics researchers to assert a presumed physical basis for their observations which does not violate known physical laws…. The effect of this may be a premature closure of options” (1978, 36). That is, they criticize the Soviets for being closed to the possibility of immaterial channels for consciousness and communication, even though elsewhere in the document the authors themselves, squeamish about terms such as “spirit,” recommend positivist methods. The DoD report writers thus claim for themselves a properly modern, free, and democratic position between extremes, a Goldilocks perspective from which to subsume all others, to assess just how much materialism is too much, too little, or just right.

The Department of Defense report summarized mainstream Soviet print publications, providing a bibliography of newspapers and popular science journals from the 1920s through the 1970s. Upon reviewing these sources and many others, I found that the DoD writers minimized the breadth of Soviet opinion and expression on the topic, which ranged from the statistically grounded to romantic, from the comic and skeptical to the wishful and whimsical. The DoD report, while briefly acknowledging that Soviet publications sponsored debates,5 depicted those debates as if they were spun so tight around the axis of ideology that the only relevant issues involved whether scientific experiments hewed to Marxist materialism or not, as if communist ideology had burned out the last bits of fuel for curiosity:

Like other scientists, paraphysicists have had to spend considerable effort in justifying their field on ideological grounds. The first attempt seems to have been to assert that the phenomena were mediated through known, if not exactly demonstrable, material mechanisms. Electromagnetic waves became a favorite explanation for telepathy, despite the argument that electromagnetic effects caused by physiological processes were much too diffuse and weak to cause the noted phenomena. The other major attempt has been to acknowledge that the information or energy transfer mechanisms are not known, but to assert that this simply reflects the imperfect state of contemporary scientific knowledge. Lengthy sections devoted to ideology and quotations from Lenin are frequently found in the works of paraphysicists, particularly in the early and mid-1960’s. (Air Force Systems Command 1978, 36)

As a matter of fact, in the sources mentioned in the report I have yet to find a single quote from Vladimir Lenin.⁶ Leonid Vasilev, for example, opens his writings not with Lenin, but with Russian imperial neurologist Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev, British physicist and parapsychologist William Barrett, and Italian psychiatrist Ferdinando Cazzamalli.

To recognize this breadth allows us to relate Soviet telepathy science to the ways people encountered and celebrated concrete materials for contact or communication, moving from those forms not to become robots, but to question how to live, with whom, and to what end. Bolsheviks had ardently hoped to make people true agents running the means of production, rather than cogs in the capitalist industrial machine; many Soviet people continued to worry about automatization and conformity, actively devising ways to nurture creativity.

THOUGHTS WITHOUT THINKERS?

To these ends, Soviet materialism was interesting and productive, even across the body of texts that the DoD summarized. Consider the essay by E.T. Faddeev, reporting in 1961 on a seminar at Moscow State University that had gathered philosophers together with natural scientists (1961, 60–63). Faddeev advocates a materialist explanation for thought transfer, positing yet undiscovered frequencies for rays, imagined sometimes as lines, sometimes as circular emanations of waves. At the same time, he describes the idealist position, whereby thoughts move without medium, in sufficient detail that those who might want to ponder that alternative. More to the point, his own, materialist speculations are in fact complex and intriguing; he posits the existence of waves—perhaps radioactive, perhaps microwave—that might penetrate the skull while skipping over the body’s sensory organs.

During that 1961 seminar, V. Tugarinov objected to Faddeev’s brand of materialism because, he asserted, it falsely located thoughts within individual brains, neglecting the possibility that thoughts cohere socially and through technologies to manifest ideation in material media, such as paper or bodily theatrical gestures: “as when actors mime an entire scene that is coherent to everybody.” He agreed with Faddeev that thoughts are not strictly autonomous from the brain—in the sense that they do not empty from the skull like water from a bottle. But neither are thoughts shackled to their “first” or “original” media. Rather, they move along with materials: “Yesterday I sent a letter to America—which means that I sent my thoughts to the other end of our planet” (Tugarinov 1961, 22). Thoughts can even jump chains of media, or they activate several channels at once.

Where do thoughts begin, then? Friedrich Nietzsche famously refuted René Descartes’s proposition, cogito ergo sum, which founded self-existence on awareness of thought, by remarking that a thought comes “when ‘it’ wishes, not when ‘I’ wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘thinks’ ” ([1886] 1989, 17) Tugarinov moved beyond the individual to assert that a brain is just one medium among others along chains of thought. Thoughts move beyond synapses, in flashes of matter in motion, sounds or signs brought by mail no less than by a dream.

The figure of the individual still overpowers social theory, despite anthropological counterclaims. Even after scholars inspired by Erving Goffman, Mikhail Bakhtin, or Valentin Voloshinov have demonstrated that speech does not emerge whole and pristine from within individual bodies, but distributes across people and situations,7 we still have trouble imagining those phenomena we call thoughts moving anywhere but inside the braincase, barely hitching a ride to cross spaces riding signs or gestures, or betrayed only by outbursts, such as laughter.

It’s no wonder the subtle complexity of Tugarinov’s material-semiotic account of thought went over the heads the writers of this DoD report; it would be surprising to find many Americans who imagine thought or speech as other than individual, not bound to isolated thinkers or single speakers. To have done otherwise in this report would certainly have hindered the claim that Soviet materialism led to “closure of options” for research on thought transmission.⁸ In fact, articles like the one by Faddeev kept company with a range of Soviet expressions of wonderment about communications as phenomena that escape the bounds of bodies, whether they move as electricity, electromagnetic waves, ink in a letter—or by less tangible media.

Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, scholars published on a number of sensory experiences in ways that encouraged wonderment about perception—and about the transmission of perception as perspective. For example, popular science journals informed readers that intense and shifting magnetic charges can cause glimmers of light to appear even when no light is present: the oscillations of charge create phosphenes, the simplest of which can be created by changing pressure (try tapping your closed eyelids). Along the way, they educated Soviets about how the chemicals in peyote activate kaleidoscopic effects, especially when the eyes are closed. Materialist methods continue to yield captivating techniques to render or represent sensation and intuition—and thus to artfully communicate.

Soviet stage and film techniques focused on sensation and matter in ways that really did “stir the imagination.” The success of such materialism—to be interesting, engaging, worth learning—can be judged, among other things, by its works, by the accolades for cohorts who continue to come up through the theatrical institutes.⁹ Whatever anyone might say about social realist film plots, the range and development of their actors is impressive. Institutions from acting schools to popular explorations of psychic phenomena continue to cultivate sensitivity to the material media that afford and channel contact and communication. Far from greasing robot cogs, they encourage exploration and speculation.

For Soviets, materialism deadened neither the will nor the imagination. Soviets were encouraged not only to explore the physical workings of sensation, but also to reflect upon the patterns and structures that produced different sentient perspectives, to ponder and compare complexly diverging points of view. Soviet popular science journal Znanie-Sila, for example, published pieces such as “How Does an Ordinary Fly See You?” (1966), featuring the work of Swedish photographer-scientist Lennart Nillson.10 Still living today, Nillson combines aesthetic feeling for scientific rigor with the adventure of discovery; his later projects sketch the chemistry of love and photograph the stars at their most comforting. In the first photo in the Znanie-Sila piece, Nillson wields a fly swatter. The next photo, rather than zooming in on the bulging dome of thousands of compound lenses that make up a fly’s ocular organ, instead arrays dozens of identical photos of Nillson into a kaleidoscope: the viewer is the fly looking at Nillson.

“NATURAL SCIENCE IN THE WORLD OF SPIRITS”

Truth be told, descriptions of Soviet telepathy experiments can be quite dry for some readers. In 1959, after the French press reported telepathy experiments aboard the USS Nautilus submarine, L.L. Vasiliev, a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and Order of Lenin Professor of Physiology at the Institute of Brain Research at the University of Leningrad, argued for increased Soviet funds for experiments in “thought transfer over distance.” Soon afterward he published the book Eksperimental’nie Issledovanija Myslennogo Vnushenija (Experimental research on mental suggestion, 1962), recounting his experiments in the 1930s and those in the 1920s led by his mentor, Vladimir Bekhterev. Bekhterev’s first telepathy labs installed special doors into cubicles holding slots to switch out materials known to block transmissions of various wavelengths. Day after day the materials were switched, doors opened and closed, while the receiver and sender were both kept blind to these changes. Bekhterev’s experiments indicated that when screened by materials known to block electromagnetic waves, the receiver followed none of the suggestions mentally transmitted by the sender, but when screened by other materials, he or she did follow them, supporting a hypothesis that thought transmission was material in character, perhaps riding electromagnetic waves. In the 1930s Vasiliev obtained different results after placing subjects in Faraday cages more tightly sealed from electromagnetic radiation. This time, subjects responded similarly with and without the shielding, contradicting earlier results; perhaps telepathy had no material base, rode no waves, was message without media. Funding for the experiments was constricted, although Vasiliev maintained a prestigious post. The Nautilus affair put him back in the public eye, kick-starting paranormal experiments and debates about them.

In 1961 the Soviet Union’s beloved science fiction writers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky published a story that situated mechanical laboratory procedures within a wide, astonishing world, or rather, solar system. In a collection spanning a future universe, Noon: 22nd Century, the tale “Natural Science in the World of Spirits” quotes the title of Engels’s 1878 essay that acerbically thrashed spiritualist charlatanry. In the story, scientists have hypothesized a “field of contacts (svjazi)” that hovers in the atmosphere above Leningrad to explain the mysterious disappearance and return of the spaceship Taimyr. They have recruited “readers” (the story uses the English term, transliterated into Cyrillic, an internationalist twist) from among people who began openly reading minds several decades before. The story follows a few readers through a day in the life of science. The first one used to work as a natural scientist in the Yukon, a zoologist specializing in the genus Castor (the beaver). Every morning his nontelepathic assistant walks him to work, all the while reciting mental equations to jam the frequency, to shield his romantic obsession. As one might imagine, this makes verbal conversation awkward and a bit shallow, so as they walk, the reader falls into his own ruminations. His son had perished in a mission on Venus, never to witness humanity terraform that planet: “Oh, son, if only you could see the woods where we will resettle the beavers.” A second reader emerges from his dwelling to join them. Now there is someone to “talk” to: they silently debate the burden of telepathy; the first man is all too aware that telepathy creates social awkwardness, but the second, a doctor, treasures the gift that leads him to those in pain.

When they arrive at the lab, dozens of readers enter insulated, isolated cells alone to listen for some sign from the field. For hours each day they sit in silence with no distractions, behind impenetrable walls. At the end of each shift, each door opens to the expectant face of one of the scientists holding a clipboard, hoping maybe this time…. Each day, each scientist adds “no data” to tables on a clipboard. This is the repetitive monotony even of ESP experiments inside a lab. But one reader, at least, is more absorbed by memories of family and forest, by enthusiasm for future beaver expansion across the solar system, than by scanning for channels. He listens for dukhi (spirits), cosmic, past and future all at once. The vitality of the research is not negated even in the recognition of the dullness of repetition in the method. Rather, just as the Strugatskys use the English word reader to indicate cosmopolitan conversations (about technologies for intuition) in the future, they combine characters’ thoughts of elsewheres and elsewhens to complicate the relationship of science, and materialism, to the world.

The Soviet short story “A Lesson in Telepathy” (Soloukhin 1971) similarly reveals the scientific process as a social and material relation, folding romance around experimental method. Katja works for a distinguished professor as a subject in his study of long-distance telepathy. Every night at 10 P.M. the professor, sitting in the Arctic, randomly draws a Zener card while Katja, sitting in a Crimean port, receives it, drawing a square, triangle, cross, or double wave sign, then mails the results to him the next morning. But one day Katja meets a navy man strolling about on a day’s leave. True love? Time is short … but she dutifully says good-bye to fulfill her obligation. She spitefully draws seagull check marks instead of triangles that night, thinking, “Take that!” A week later she receives a letter from the sailor confessing that he had “decided to enter the game,” hoping that his mental transmission of birds at sea might beat symbols sent by an arrogant scientist.

The victorious, creative telepathy of the sailor is no anomaly among strands of romanticism across late Soviet art, literature, and film. If Cold War paranoia or rivalry structures the characters’ given conditions—military ports, funded research—the story turns on the different perspectives from which the scientist and the sailor relate to the state, through divergent schedules for duty and love, seagulls challenging Zener symbols. These differences, fictional as they are, cue us to attend to ways actual people also craft contacts and channels that run askew and through geopolitical lines. Telepathic rays even refract against each other.

Kira Bulychev’s book A Hundred Years Ago in the Future (1976) and its serialized television version, Guest from the Future (1984), render just such an antidote to paranoia in the trusting, curious character of a little girl named Alissa who lives in late twenty-first-century Moscow. Her father has invented a technology for intuition, a machine, the Mielofon, that enables its operator to read the thoughts of any sentient being. The rare device is a black box that, when opened, reveals a glowing crystal. We first meet Alissa with the apparatus in hand, as she entreats a silent crocodile (an ingeniously designed puppet) to stop joking around and cooperate with the linguistic task at hand. With the help of the device, she has already studied Dolphin, at least its Mediterranean dialects.11 In the wrong hands, of course, the Mielofon could be dangerous; sure enough, two bumbling, space-pirate shape-shifters attempt to steal it. By accident, a Moscow boy named Kolja from 1984 has happened into Alissa’s century through a secret portal, and just in time—he recaptures the Mielofon and takes it to his own Moscow for safekeeping in the early 1980s. Alissa follows, spending a few weeks in Kolja’s world and joining forces with him and his classmates against the pirates.

Oddly enough, the protagonists hardly ever use the Mielofon; they prefer to express their curiosity in words or eye gestures, to pose earnest questions. Only after Kolja is taken captive do they tune the machine to amplify thoughts: behind an apartment door, a husband grumbles silently, it is not his turn to go out for milk; a girl wonders, will he telephone? Only a nervous stranger, one who sweats so much that they can sense he is lying, prompts them to use the object to find Kolja. Otherwise, Alissa wears the thing on a leather strap dangling loosely behind her or leaves it lying on a sofa or hanging from a branch, with less care than other characters use to carry school portfolios. She hands it, with no hesitation, to any kid who wants to hold it. She is not jealous of its capacities, guards nothing, loves everyone, and listens to all. Before returning to her future, as a parting gift she satisfies students’ curiosity about their own futures, naming each career path like a fortune-teller: who will become an athlete, a poet, or a scientist; who will write fantastical travelogues.

Late Soviet genres of popular science and science fiction wove materialist universes with lyrical, romantic characters, scientists, and others who were motivated by affectionate curiosity. Late socialist telepathy fantasies, like their literary analogs in the United States, bonded technical aspirations for civilization building and cosmic exploration with romantic expressions of imperial extension in scenarios common to both: “The ship has lost contact!” “These aliens speak nothing like the languages we know!”

The film comedy Operation Y, and More Adventures with Shurik (1965) depicts telepathy associated with inquiry for its own sake, the hunt as game, especially a romantic game. In one scene the sometimes feckless, sometimes clever, always adorable hero, Shurik, has been studying with his schoolmate, Lida, at her family’s flat. He experiences déjà vu; she proposes that this strange sensation might be a sign that Shurik is gifted with telepathy, “just like Vol’f Messing!” She devises a test: choosing a stuffed mouse, she hides it underneath a soft sofa pillow. He does not find the mouse—instead he ends up kissing Lida. Failing a telepathy test, he scores an emotional success, contact in another register.

FIGURE 2.1.    Partners on a thread. Photo by author.

BE THE RAY

Characterizations of Soviet paranormal science as insufficiently open to immaterial “options” tightly paralleled other Cold War claims that Soviet Russia had infused its sciences and arts with excessive materialism. Let us pretend to concede that Soviet materialism did close options in the lab, as if paranormal science in other places more readily admitted immaterial causes. Even so, outside the lab Soviet materialism allowed people to craft contact and conceive of communication in engaging and productive ways.

Consider a contact drill at GITIS, one formed around a material. Pairs of students each take up a length of thread and stretch it between them; their task, as they move together across the floor, is to make sure that the thread neither goes limp—vjalo—nor becomes so strained and tight—zazhat—as to break. While the drill seems to focus intensely on the here and now of interaction, the students and their watchers might always bring associations from other moments to bear on these shifting qualities. To describe stage dynamics in other lessons, some teachers spoke of “limpness” and “tightness.” The master might query sharply: “Why so compressed? Get her to relax.” Or, “Why is she over-acting? A very limp beginning.” One instructor assessed a performance as “emotionally limp,” making an analogy to a famous pair of cerebral antiromantics: “What is this?! Lenin dumps Inessa Armand?”12 The thread stretching between actors is a material sign whose tactile qualities, looseness or rigidity, figure the intensity and constancy of contact itself.

Like Montesquieu, the French philosophe who exposed his tongue alternately to heat and then cold to examine its changing textures, the pairs and the audience focus less on that which is sensed and more on that which does the sensing. In this case, however, that which does the sensing has extended beyond the body, along the thread, which becomes both sense data and sensor. The drill trains actors to feel partners ever more sensitively through the thread, even as they render the string increasingly imperceptible, into “a medium that performs so well it becomes invisible” (Eisenlohr 2009), as teachers coach pairs to: “Feel your partner, feel their every impulse … now try it with the string tied to a less sensitive part.” Their goals contrast, however, to cases in which people erase mediation under conditions of matter-phobia; GITIS-made ideology of communication presupposes that contact is possible because we live in a material world, and actors must overcome squeamishness about this fact and embrace the willingness to be material, not to erase but to become the thread, to merge with media, to be media.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks describes how people extend the sense of proprioception—the sense of the body’s parts in relative position, movement, and balance—from the brain and sensors in the ears and skin (the vestibular system) to the tip of a cane (see also Lende and Downey 2012). We do this all the time with objects, but we forget; the proprioception involved in parking a car arises to consciousness when we drive one larger or smaller than usual. The thread task joins two bodies via proprioception: sensors register, extend through body and thread to another body, and then back again, through the thread. Contact, note, is not a matter of transparency, not a matter of reading thoughts through a veil, but a matter of merged materiality.

At GITIS investment in the materialism of semiotic action best pays off onstage when actors are aware that attention to individual or pair-thread mediations is collectively organized. While the thread seems to channel concentration within a pair of individuals, the room is in fact intersected by multiple circles and rays for attention. The aim of contact from stage to audience falls short when envisioned simply as opening a channel for individual thoughts—even the playwright’s, much less those of the actors. In this drill the work involves orchestrating and maintaining attention to the attention of others, including that of the teachers and other observers. Much of the entire first year at GITIS is devoted to learning to feel and to harness “impulse,” “energy,” and “tempo-rhythm” in the body and among partners. Sensory drills build physical and mental responsiveness among troupe members, their “reflex excitability,” as Meyerhold put it. Training targets the senses as material resources for collective action: once pairs have mastered the thread, students move on to triads and quartets.

At GITIS contact by thread is a technology for intuition. In other settings, however, thread works as a metaphor for signs of contact. Consider a section from a late Soviet documentary, 9 Years with Psychics/Extrasensates (Kiev 1989; dir. Olender), released shortly before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which features interviews filmed between 1974 and 1986 with psychics across the socialist bloc, people made famous by local, national, and European print media, staged demonstrations, and word of mouth. The documentary features, among others, Vera Zrazhevskaja, who claimed to channel poetry dictated from beyond the grave by Soviet-era musician-actor, the star Vladimir Vysotsky; Albert Ignatenko, who began demonstrating telepathy on Soviet stages in the 1960s alongside the illustrious Wolf Messing; Nina Kulagina, who moved matchsticks in home movies shot in the 1960s (by her husband, say some; by actor Boris Nikolaev, say others; and by the KGB, claim still others); and an academic who conducted telepathy tests but who declines to show his face—we see only his hands.

The section featuring stage hypnotist and telepath Albert Ignatenko begins with shots of equipment that measure and monitor electrical impulses and heart rates, tracing peaking and falling lines of ink or light, threadlike, across screens and paper printouts. Once the camera establishes the arrangement of equipment and locations of observers, it closes in on the two research subjects, black-bearded Ignatenko and his partner, a blond woman in a black robe. The narrator’s voice informs us that the psychic needs to “tune in to his partner”: eyes closed, the woman sways just a bit as her partner passes his palms in front of her forehead. A few minutes later we cut to him sitting backstage, framed by a three-way mirror, describing energy moving through threads of the nervous system and the “need to tune.”

Throughout the eight-minute section, visual image and voiceover are echoed by sound—the long drones produced by a theremin—the electronic instrument invented by Leon Theremin (Lev Termen) that is played without physical contact, by stroking the air above it. (Ignatenko himself often played the theremin onstage in his virtuosic demonstrations of brain power and memory.)13 The filmmakers have chosen sounds that evoke the relative tautness and looseness of violin strings—but without touch. Each droned note discordantly replaces another at erratic intervals, higher then lower. All the while, voice-over maintains a searchingly agnostic mood, entertaining both the successes and failures of telepathic tests of contact. And regardless of each experimental outcome, those details identified to be visible and aural signs of contact sync and unsync.

REFLEX EXCITABILITY AND BIOMECHANICS (MEYERHOLD MATTERS)

What the thread, the theremin, and the line on the graph share is not a specific physical or chemical composition, but a material capacity to shift and show opposites: taut-lax, high-low, rapid-slow. Recall Moscow director Knebel’, who in drills training attention and intuition had disallowed telepathy; it was attention to these kinds of shifts that she worked to teach. A good materialist writing in the Soviet 1960s, she stressed instead students’ work with minute, barely discernible flickers, shadows “of a quickly hidden smile.” The process of sharpening attention, especially to quick shifts and small details (learning to read them as signs and to convey their readings as signs), is valuable in itself, even “if sometimes they did not guess” (Knebel’, 1967).

C.S. Peirce suggested something similar in 1884: that our perceptions of changes in sense data are more fine-tuned than we judge them to be (Peirce and Jastrow 1884). He and his colleague Joseph Jastrow, inspired by German psychophysicist Gustav Fechner’s work on sensation (1861), demonstrated that minute shifts in weight are registered by receptors in the fingers more quickly than by reflexive brain processes. Peirce suggested that these findings might account for what people spoke of as intuition; like many at the time, he was interested in how information seems to move without apparent channel or physical contact, and he studied the protocols for telepathy experiments reported by the Society for Psychical Research: “It gives us new reason for believing that we gather what is passing in another’s mind in large measure from sensations so faint that we are not fairly aware of having them, and can give no account of how we reach our conclusions on such matters. The insight of females as well as certain “telepathic” powers may be explained this way. Such faint sensations ought to be fully studied by the psychologist and assiduously cultivated by every man” (Peirce and Jastrow 1884, 83).

Peirce articulates a need to research the biomaterial mechanisms of intuition. Of course the “minuteness” of any shift in sensation is relative; it requires orientation to a conventional scale of measure, a problem about which he has inspired much research.14 Perhaps this relativity accounts for why, a century later, claims about the mastery of perception of small shifts proliferate—and contradict each other. For every Maria Knebel’ teaching the theatrical arts of attending to subtle changes across a room of persons, there is a Paul Ekman teaching the craft of lie detection by interpreting barely discernible shifts among “micro-expressions” on an isolated face (for further discussion of micro-expressions, see Lemon 2013).

Lecturing on the artistic importance of awareness of shifts in sensation, Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold put this in formalist terms to his students, in lectures during the early days of GITIS. He asked them to imagine a doll onstage whose face never moves, while the audience perceives it one minute laughing, the next crying—the secret is not in the doll’s expression, which cannot change, but in changes in relational angles achieved through choreography of bodies and objects.15 A good actor, Meyerhold advised, should know to make his first entrance with his eyes level to the horizon; that way, any small change in the vector of gaze or tilt of the head would register as meaningful to the audience. The actor should also learn how a shift in position of her own body will relate to other bodies onstage, to how such material relations can incite audiences to make emotional and cognitive connections, the director remaining ultimately responsible for arrangements as seen by the audience (see Meyerhold 1969, 2001).

Meyerhold has frequently been miscast as advocating robot-like, mechanical performances. Alma Law argues that Western treatments of Meyerhold’s system of gestural training, biomekhanika, often misinterpret the evidence, sometimes relying a solitary photograph (Law and Gordon 1996). To be sure, photos of his students at work do look as if a body had been posed to address a viewer. The trouble is that during training the pose in fact addressed others. The camera, we might say, opened a channel to the future viewer that was extraneous to the training in process. It captured a moment in one sense but not another. It did not capture the ways students were apprehending their own bodies and those of others as they put those bodies through movements that were not habitual.

The idea was that by estranging themselves from natural movements, they would achieve reflexivity about the body’s seeming physical limits. The poses—and shifting between the poses—would also train them to awareness of just how and when the body emits excess signs. Onstage, the barest exertion of attention, the turn of a shoulder or the angle of a gaze, can read as intended to mean something (consider all the television punditry devoted to analyzing the body language of politicians).¹⁶ Actors’ “excess of non-purposeful” signs, inviting audiences to interpret them, frustrated Czech semiotician Jirí Veltrushky and directors like Gordon Craig, who fantasized the uber-marionette to take the place of actors. Meyerhold, by contrast, presaging Roman Jakobson’s insights on multiple language functions, valued the multiple kinds of meaning available in nonlinguistic signs, in gestures and poses, in rhythms and tempos. A slight shift might even convey metaevaluation of ongoing stage communication and point to ironic or other alternative readings. A sweep of the hand, a slowed step, all can work as metacommunication. His training aimed to rouse what we might call a biomechanico-poetic function, in which shifts in bodily motion can reflect on bodies as they communicate, gesture as ironic diacritic, for example.

Meyerhold anchored early claims about bodily movement and contrast to the “most ancient” of forms (much as symbolist Vjacheslav Ivanov evoked ritual Greece, theosophist composer Aleksandr Scriabin turned to Indian art, and Russian futurist poets turned to Scythian sounds). After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Meyerhold mined scientific discourses on the body, reading Frederick Taylor, Aleksei Gastev, Ivan Pavlov, and Vladimir Bekhterev on nervous energies and kinesiology. He also continued to refer to the East, to Kabuki kata, drills for work on movements and relations among movements. Kata and biomechanical drills—like jazz scales—prepare repertoires of potential response.17 Performances never just replicate these drills, when good players respond to other players’ twitches—perhaps especially the accidental ones! Meyerhold’s actors might modulate even in response to the rustle of the audience. This modulation among possible material shifts in speed, tempo, and intensity, for Meyerhold, generated a sense of energy onstage—as Hollywood would later discover in changing length of shots before switching camera perspectives.¹⁸ Biomechanical training brought this sensibility to the ensemble: as actors practice unfamiliar movements, they sharpen their sensations of them, even with their eyes closed (e.g., to learn the limits of proprioception), becoming able to react quickly to others’ also unusual, theatrical motions. For Meyerhold, this nervous reactivity of and to material bodies, to the tempos of their shifting signs, was itself a creative energy, a capacity that he called reflektornaja vozbudimost’ (“reflex excitability”).

PSYCHOPHYSICAL ENERGY

The terms psikhofizika, psikhotekhnika, and psikhosensornaja (“psychophysics,” “psychotechnique,” and “psychosensory”) share intellectual genealogy with Meyerhold’s reflex excitability. In contemporary practice at GITIS, as at other acting academies in Russia, they resonate across courses from acting through diction through stage combat.¹⁹ An instructor, in warm-up before acting class, directs students to mime digging holes in tough, hard earth. Moving about the room with a broomstick, he asks each one to compare its wooden feel to his or her own mime. In a velvety timbre, as if voicing a stage hypnotist (“You are getting sleepy …”), he intones: “Now it is getting warmer, the earth is getting softer.”20 Some of the boys take off their shirts. Two go on strike. “Dig!” he shouts. “We are digging!” They are sweating. Finally he stops them and sends them to imaginary showers. “It is warm, enjoy it. Now contrast the feeling—cold water now.” The instructor tells them to rest, to listen now, and probes: “Well, did you feel it? Did you enjoy the shower?” They are nodding. He pronounces: “We call this psychophysical”: the drill conditions a dialectic between haptic knowledge and physical memory, to hone an intuitive body-mind, reactive to materials and their imprints.

Stanislavsky exhorted his actors to learn energy not only by doing, but also by watching, especially watching the points from which other beings make sensory contact with the world. During a rehearsal in 1932 he urged: “You have seen how, when a dog or cat gets into stance, all their energy is in their eyes, so that they can direct all that energy just when needed to the muscles. But you have all your energy in your stomach” (2000, 197). Energy and sensation still combine as vital metaphor at GITIS. Before beginning a day’s acting classes, instructors might charge students this way to shut down certain senses and open others: “Eyes closed. Banish all thoughts about lessons, lateness, little problems. Let your face and mouth slacken, even become stupid. Say the sound ‘t.’ Imagine a state of warmth and happiness. You are filling up with happiness, comfort … energy is gathering … a complete confidence in concentrating for today’s lessons” (Fieldnotes September 2002). “What is acting?” the teacher asks rhetorically, continuing: “The ability to accumulate energy and radiate it to the audience.”²¹ Gather and fill, accumulate and radiate—the actor is like a battery, the mind like a circuit whose contacts must be cleaned before it can catch and arc energy, the eyelids and the sound “t” acting like material switches, or like the handles that open a fortochka.

This is one metaphor of energy, as riding with a substance collected into a body that is both container and conduit. When people at GITIS point to stage communications, however, and judge “here is energy” or “this scene lacks energy,” they diverge from that metaphor and come closer to what Meyerhold had in mind. At GITIS they focus on shifts in attention and action that produce temporitm, temporhythms being understood as not just rhythms and tempos of actions, but intensities, tones, and frequencies of affect on stage, from sluggish apathy to feverish mania. GITIS students learn temporitm by working together: they are the material bodies that make and break physical contacts or that synchronize or desynchronize energies. They are told to mill about the room, to seek out who has the coldest hands. Then they are directed to rub their own hands together rapidly, to gather energy: “Now, try again, and look for who has the hottest hands, hold their hands tightly.” Next they stand close together in a circle and are told, “Wait, wait, wait … ok, all step forward in unison! Clap! Then step back together.” Whoever initiates an energetic movement, the rest are to “catch the impulse.” The instructor narrates their wordless action, as if providing inter-titles to a silent film: “You are gathering energy … all together…. You explode!” They run through the first rounds in jagged asynchrony, but with repetition begin to manage without narration, in cleaner unison each time. They laugh and look at each other, impressed and pleased.

The teacher praises them; they are “giving good pre-signs, good telegraphs, as happens when people understand each other.” Achieving energetic contact or synchrony effects alignments that are read as good communication. They are learning, again, to become the mediating material. Late in the academic year, a former student of Knebel’ gave a master class on psychophysical energy as a means to understanding, a technology for intuiting the nature of even the most alien forms:

TEACHER:	The energy of any object influences our bodies. Psychologists have confirmed this. This is a game of “as if,” but behind the game lie psychological realities. It is as if you climb into another’s hide. Have you ever been around someone who clears their throat, and then you clear your throat … or you pick up their accent?
STUDENT:	That is their energy?
TEACHER:	Yes. Not everything has strong energy, though. Ok, before you we have a stick.
STUDENT:	Should we imitate its shape?
TEACHER:	Of course. The better you can, the more you can reproduce its energy. Now I am a stick, with completely evenly distributed energy. It is the same with observing animals—even if you cannot crawl into the cage, sub-consciously, at a certain moment you can crawl inside [after you] think of it moving (Fieldnotes, October 2002)

For the novice actor at GITIS, all this work precedes any kind of character building. Here, acting has little or nothing to do with tropes of masking or ideals about authentic expression; the first training goal is to notice and then to embody shifts across material forms as energy.

Russian theatrical institutes begin by training hopeful actors less to express emotions than to pay attention: to the angle of an other’s gaze, to the tempo of that person’s footsteps, to shifts in changing postures.22 Before moving on to character work, they have spent many hours over many weeks drilling recall, for example: “Eyes closed! How many ashcans are in the courtyard? Who is wearing which color shoes?” This is rigorous work, intimidating but fun—and they master it, improving quickly at noticing details they once passed by. They learn tactics to hone attention by experimenting with the tempo-ritm of sensation; for example, slow your pace when walking in Moscow, learn it as a city both of speed and sudden stasis. They hear a parable: a student rushed to class, was asked to describe his path—he remembered a few harried jostles, some angry words. His teacher had come by the same path but described rich details and interactions. “How could we have come on the same path?” “When you move at different speeds, you traverse different worlds,” was the reply.

SEE THE EYE

The aesthetic philosophy of acting as energy exchange is not unique to Russia; Stanislavsky and his colleagues credited Eastern knowledges, creating drills like those above to apply the principles of prana to theatrical art (see also Weygandt 2015). Performance studies scholar Zarrilli (2007, 2011), among others, also approaches stage acting in terms of “energetics” rather than representation,²³ especially when writing from the vantage of the actor. Such philosophies are present in the United States, although American professional actors come upon them later in their careers, in special master classes. We live in a world in which forms of energy rule the rulers. Small wonder that political economy and infrastructure shape visions of not only biological processes, of life and healing (Barchunova 2007; Farquhar 2002), but also of sociality and communication (Chudakova 2015; Kruglova 2014).²⁴

Romantic thinkers in the eighteenth century drew upon performances of famous actors, such as David Garrick, to project a science of vital forces in the body, driving sensation and animation;²⁵ a century later, Stanislavsky turned to nerve science. How can we repeat a scene for the hundredth time as if it were the first? Where mechanical acting is the result of fear, how can we relax, in order to concentrate through the stage fright? How can we reinvigorate what repetition deadened and refresh sensitivity and intuition in ways that make acting more compelling for audiences, not just for actors? He developed his approach to these matters while reading, for example, Ivan Sechenov’s 1863 work on reflex inhibition and the startle response; Fechner’s writings on the thresholds at which humans register changes in sensation; and Théodule-Armand Ribot, in Psychology of Attention, on emanations, radiations, and exchanges of energy. While reading both romantic natural science on electromagnetism (Friedrich Schelling’s Naturphilisophie) and psychophysical studies of sensation, he also studied yogic ideas of prana.26 These were the broad inspirations for Stanislavsky and his colleagues to develop drills to send and receive communicative energies, alternating terms like prana and rays to describe them:²⁷ “What to do? Communicate with your gazes. Because in life we often communicate with each other by our gazes. If we imagine a photograph of this moment, then rays are being emitted between you, fluids are being sent, an invisible conversation is carried on just by the eyes” (Stanislavsky rehearsing Figaro, 2000, 196).

This focus on the eye and its emissions requires a detour from scholarship on the gaze, the techniques and infrastructures of surveillance that structure prisons, land surveys, and patriarchal orders. The issue here is less how the gaze can see (or is imagined to see) so much as who perceives the gaze and how. For Stanislavsky, intuition requires delicate attention to others’ organs for sensation and to lines of eye contact. Montesquieu’s experiments similarly isolated the tongue, exposing it to hot and cold in order to chart changing qualities of the tongue’s nervous fibers as they expanded or contracted—to hypothesize difference in the feeling capacities of nations north and south.

The phatic experts I have come to know also learn to analyze and then to focus attention around points of perception: eyes, ears, hands, tongue, nose, fingers, and toes become media for sensory and social contact, as well as diagnostic signs of contact. The eye—or rather its shine—the hand—or rather its warmth—is claimed to exhibit the essences of capacities to feel relational contact.²⁸ The gaze thus becomes itself an object for surveillance, such as when one teacher at GITIS chastised a student for shutting off contact: “You are angry, your eyes are dull, you don’t even want to hear what I am telling you” (the student complained later in bitter terms, confirming the read).

“Where are the eyes!?” cries an instructor. He has sent students to the Moscow zoo to observe differences between the stare of the owl and of the gorilla. The results, as yet, disappoint him. Instructors more than once boasted of times past when intelligence agents used to visit, hoping to learn the hermeneutics of the eyes, the better to conduct detection work or interrogation after training in these technologies for intuition. They would always take at least the first steps in the acting courses, visiting the zoo to watch the animals: “Those agents went and sat in the cathouse and learned to do their work [by observing] lion’s eyes.” Activating this onstage, however, requires sustained effort well beyond a few trips to the zoo. The lack of “compelling eyes” was a constant focus for instructors’ criticism: “It was interesting, earlier, to watch you, but watching you play a shoemaker now is not. Where does this happen? And not once, no eyes. Nowhere is it clear. It is all, ‘here is how I walk, here are some boots.’ I want to see variations in the eyes, a person who looks first at the boots, then at the bottle…. [H]ow do they mean different things? What is more, bottles mean different things to different people—and so, whose boots are these?” (Fieldnotes, November 26, 2002). Without studied attention to the movements and aims of looking—attention to physical sense organs (and eventually to material, historical conditions that channel the character’s perception)—nothing is interesting, nothing will hold the audience attentive to channels for theatrical contact; phatic efforts across the proscenium fail. There is no energy.

By the end of their five years at GITIS acting and directing students learn to fill out haptic and recollected knowledge of sensation with other forms of historical and social knowledge. In 2005 I filmed a rehearsal of Gogol’s Nose at GITIS during which the student director and his actors devoted hours to staging two minutes of dialogue, testing, adjusting, and discussing tiny shifts in gaze, volume, and gesture. They were working over the beginning: barber Ivan Jakovlevich has accidentally shaved the nose off a customer the night before. Just after throwing the nose into the Neva River, he notices the gaze of a militiaman. On a bare stage, the student director and actors worked through a dozen ways to play the barber’s perception of another’s perception, combining coughs and boot squeaks, pauses and quick shuffles. To depict a common sensation—that one has attracted the eyes of authority—in ways specific to the characters, they moved in discussion back and forth among the script, the geography of bridges in St. Petersburg, and differences among kinds of encounters with police.

SOCIAL DIVISION OF THE SENSORY FIELD

Extrasensory powers are expressed materially, through sensory deeds. The psychic’s intuition is proven by material means; skeptics marshal objects and structures to create randomness and double blind, and they master observation of material shifts: the direction of a gaze, the tempo of a gesture. Each season of Battle of the Psychics begins with auditions, narrowing the field from a few hundred hopefuls to about thirteen.

Battle of the Psychics stages parades of failures. The first episode of each season always documents a maximum of botched trials and awkward screen tests. After preliminary casting in the provinces, promising contestants travel to Moscow, where, on the first day of auditions, cameras document their convergence in motley streams on the park near the casting hall. They pass through a series of trials, the first beginning always in an auditorium, where a black screen is set up onstage. Once it hid a ballerina, once an owl; once the screen concealed dirty dishes crawling with cockroaches. Nearly everyone fails to describe anything close to what stands behind. The editors produce a montage of absurd misses; a ballerina stretches behind the screen as someone claims that whatever is there is “definitely not alive” or “emits a sinister energy.” The camera pans a range of paranormal techniques: some draw, some sit quietly, some stare intently; one woman stands in the aisle howling, hands stretched up; another fixes a dowsing rod to her forehead; somebody tries to build a fire onstage; a guy in a headband traces signs in the air with a knife; and a young woman waves an antelope’s furry foreleg.

FIGURES 2.2 AND 2.3.    Publicity shots from auditions on the set of Battle of the Psychics. Hopeful contestants stretch their hands to “see” behind the black screen set up on the auditorium’s stage.

A few miraculously succeed, but most fail. Some entertainingly rationalize their failures. As each season proceeds, failure talk fills episodes. Each season begins with a flood of failures, which produce dramatic conflict as accusations of cheating meet justifications, and arguments or tantrums are layered over by expert commentary. The experts convey opinions on the strength or weakness of each psychic, not only by speaking but also through physical gesture. The magician brothers roll their eyes and exchange glances when contestants falter or brag too much. The editors scatter shots of such reactions throughout (possibly layering them with events with which they did not co-occur). One season devoted an episode just before the finale to the experts’ recollecting the auditions, revisiting the behavior of psychics who had flunked early onl they found especially hilarious a woman “from the south” who would twitch her head sharply to the right when speaking to her source in the astral plane. They said that she switched too rapidly between addressing humans and spirits, robotically, like a businesswoman more dedicated to her blue tooth than to the present company. One expert pronounced her phony, another “not quite right.”

After the test of the black screen, the next always occurs inside a large warehouse, where the crew has hidden a person in a trunk among around thirty parked cars. Like most tests for extrasensory powers, this one blocks senses “extra” to ekstrasens; here, metal blocks vision. Each hopeful passes through security, his or her limbs and torsos wanded with wireless metal detectors as each strips off electronic communication devices, placing them in transparent plastic bins, just as at the airport. Contestants are, however, allowed to keep older media, devices made of wood or stone, such as dowsing sticks, divining pebbles, or matches—these are valid prosthetic extensions, feelers and amplifiers for psychic extrasensation. Contestants are not to use ordinary senses like vision or hearing; media such as cell phones in this setting are, albeit new, also too mundane, compared to the media of, say, gems energized by spirits.29

Before those auditioning enter, the crew sometimes creates false extraneous sense data, pressing hand prints into the dust on empty cars. In early seasons, passersby from the street were enlisted first, as a control, the camera recording their reliance on ordinary sense data, but their attempts at Sherlockian logic led them astray: “This car shows fewer fingerprints, so it must be that one”; or, “That car’s trunk is much too small,” or “I think I heard an echo, so logically, it must be that way.”³⁰ Contestants who do well, by contrast, stand silently, never attending to those details, and if they demonstrate the usual senses, they do so in unusual ways: they tilt their chins at some unheard sound or feel for information in the ether with their palms. A close-up on a face depicts a “sharp gaze” aimed not at objects or bodies on set but through them. Most contestants are savvy enough to avoid speaking about material qualities that usually distinguish cars, such as paint color or engine size, and avoid mentioning the traces in the dust. When the experts notice such deductive detective work, they call it out; this is an excess of sensation that signifies failure. By contrast, to speak of sensations not normally associated with cars—human heat emanating through the trunk—is perfectly fitting. Successful Battle contestants may not evoke ordinary sense data, but they must depict sensation; they just have to do so via unexpected routings, unusual materials, and forgotten sensory channels.

While they are not to sense the usual material details in the usual way, contestants still must speak of them. One test every season places them blindfolded in a room with a “Mister X,” usually a celebrity (male or female, regardless of the “Mister”). The psychics start by venturing generalities: “Somebody in your life is named Olga”; “You almost died once.” Whether they hit or miss the mark, the camera cuts to Mr. X performing the oscillating agnostic, looking either impressed or unconvinced, raising eyebrows or shaking his or her head. One Mr. X, particularly enthralled by the psychic’s accuracy, in an intercut praised her for speaking of “many lively details,” such as the way he touches his beard when he smiles.

Meanwhile, video crew and editors provide the audience with materially saturated grounds against which to witness psychics’ interactions and efforts. We watch the crew select objects inside an apartment (a tea kettle, a row of stuffed animals) upon which the psychic is to focus and hide other objects that “tell too much” (family photos). We listen as the master of ceremonies narrates a car crash, the occurrence of which the psychic is to divine, while the camera inspects each dent.

These spectacles recall the aesthetic arrangements and pleasures of the laboratory: anthropologist Joseph Masco (2004), for example, discusses how twentieth-century nuclear testing in the United States pushed further underground, distancing researchers’ capacities to perceive the sound or light from a blast, shifting instead to virtual sensoria to animate blast scale and intensity through numbers and screens. Battle of the Psychics separates participants from some sensoria, but even more important, it situates different participants to differently engage and disengage the senses. To watch is less to play a game of “now you see it, now you don’t,” than it is to play “now you see him see, now you see him not see, now you see her see him not see.” The show tests for extrasensation by distributing differences in sensory excess and sensory lack across a social field. The labors of sensing and extrasensing are divided from the work of speaking about acts of sensing or not sensing.

Spectacular aims of Battle partly converge with those at GITIS, where core projects also cultivate and manage differences among relations to sensation. All teachers there, across classes in acting, stage diction, song, dance, and stage movement, exhort students to attend to alternative senses, those usually neglected. Drills are set them to detect movements using only hearing, to imagine moving about in a forest as if all they can sense is odors. They are urged to extend sensitivity beyond the canonical five,31 to attend to the senses of gravity, of temperature, of time and tempo, and of kinetic impulse or psychophysical energy. One teacher, from a city east of Moscow, told a story about a 1990s demonstration on Pushkin Square (for human rights for prisoners), forwarding a sense for crowd vitality: “15,000 people—I’d never felt such an animal herd before. A terrifying energy, especially when the police pushed. I simply felt the instinct to pick up a rock. Awful, that kind of energy! Like in a stadium. This, too, is a kind of sense, the sense of energy” (Fieldnotes, October 2002). Battle and GITIS both foreground the problem of phatic obstacles: screens and blinds, skeptics and hostile audiences who distract (students even practice communicating over hecklers). Both distribute distinctions in sensation across social fields. But they do these things to different ends. To illustrate, let me offer examples from both places in which the topic is the unusual application of touch instead of sight, or skin-vision, to read the paper.

One resident expert on Battle, psychologist and psychic tester Mikhail Vinogradov, often recollects on air the heyday of Soviet telepathy science in the 1960s: “They even discovered a woman” who, having been temporarily blinded by injury, could see colors through her fingertips, and even, as he told me and a friend of mine invited to his dacha, “excuse me, also with this soft part [pointing to his right buttock].” That detail never made it into international accounts of Soviet studies of dermo-optics (see, e.g., Life Magazine, June 12, 1964) or into central Soviet press accounts (regional papers may tell another story). In season eight of Battle (episode 3), a male contestant refuses to finish a trial in which, blindfolded, he was to read a newspaper in front of the seated jury of skeptics, asserting that this was not his strong suit (“Ne moego masta!”) and griping, “What’s the point? You might as well have me read colors through my buttocks next, like they did back then to that lady, Rosa.” The magician skeptics scoffed at such an experiment, but during jury critique at the end of the episode, as they labeled the contestant’s excuse “ridiculous,” Vinogradov interjected: he had been there, and the woman who could read paper with her buttocks was named Roza Kuleshova. Still, his interjection strengthened the argument against the candidate, who clearly lacked this extrasensory ability.

Analogy to skin-vision arose at GITIS during a rehearsal for a semester exam that combined sketches students had been polishing over the semester. One of these, titled “Classroom,” pulled together character studies based on student observations of street life, children in playgrounds, and animals at home or at the zoo. At the conclusion, a student playing a little boy is left alone in the classroom, amusing himself with his chewing gum, mittens dangling on strings. Deciding to stick the gum under the desk where he sits, he gropes underneath, and his fingers encounter a folded piece of paper. He pulls it out; it is shiny and colorful. Eyes big, he opens it so that the audience can see a colorful montage of breasts and buttocks, and reverently begins turning the tabloid pages. The head teacher halts the action: “NO! STOP! It is as if you had already read it with your fingers! It is as if all at once you could sense: ‘Oh-ho, pornography!’ ”

Reading paper as if blindfolded, like Rosa Kulesheva, discerning content without sensing it in the usual way, without the usual gaps, confusions, and double takes, is exactly what an actor must not do. If it is compelling for a psychic to smoothly and quickly decode letters on paper with the skin of her buttocks, but it is boring for the actor to detect buttocks on paper without showing us troubles that channel perception of the unexpected. He should let the audience watch how his expectations are undone; perhaps he takes the paper at first for a note or a grocery list. Because he circumvented ordinary sensation, like a psychic, in displaying knowledge too soon, he has failed as an actor. The teacher advises him to work with less surety, to reveal the stumbling of blind fingers, the fog as virgin eyes pick out a texture here, a form there, take on sense and shape. He is to depict maximum involvement with the material, letting viewers linger on his sensing organs as they encounter a world. To make contact with them, to communicate, the audience must see the eyes see.

Phatic projects at GITIS and on the set of Battle depend on collective work and divisions of expertise, and both are concerned with regulating contact points and channels. But they are not equally invested in maximizing communication, and not in the same ways. In both spaces, phatic experts oversee divisions of sensory labors, and editors or master instructors oversee their oversight. One concrete difference is this: most theatrical work focuses attention on how stage characters move between sensory deficit and excess, while Battle follows divisions of sensory labor among participants, including crew, observers on set, and projected audiences. The difference is not absolute, and there are genres from reality show to avant-garde theater that resemble Battle. Moreover, both are material in ways that belie the DoD’s characterization of Soviet or Russian materialisms as narrow and repressive.

SENSATION MEMORY

That characterization lines up with Anglophone claims that Stanislavsky turned to a dull materialism under Soviet pressure. During the waning Cold War and afterward, in middle school, high school, and college, in private courses and under amateur and professional directors (in Nebraska, New York, Illinois, and Michigan), I encountered acting and teachers claiming to have links to Stanislavsky, but not psychophysical stage pedagogy.32 We performed mirroring drills and improvised in groups, but with different metaphors, emphases, and goals that stressed emotion in memory and expression, less attention to energy and sensation. For all we knew, what was said about Stanislavsky was true.

American romance with Russian acting techniques flourished even after McCarthy and the arrests of the Hollywood Ten in the late 1940s; we lionized Stanislavsky all the more as a champion of inner emotional expression. However, ideological limits and the demands of translation constrained what Americans took to represent Stanislavsky’s thinking. Method acting made for interesting theater, but its main adherents trafficked in mistranslations that affirmed prejudices about Soviet communication and myths about acting in general.

While American professional actors may be aware that Method radically distorted Stanislavsky’s work, most Americans, if they ever talk about acting or Stanislavsky, speak of “emotion memory.” Theater scholar Sharon Carnicke (1998), carefully contrasting English translations with Russian manuscripts, tracks the movement of Stanislavsky’s pedagogy into an American Freudian register.³³ This is the source for Method insistence on remembered feelings, surging from deep inside each individual actor, like a life force to animate a character. Director Lee Strasberg,³⁴ credited with deriving Method acting from Stanislavsky, admits as much when he describes hearing Richard Boleslavsky, a student of Stanislavsky who emigrated to the United States in the 1920s, say in a lecture: “ ’We posit a theatre of real experience. The essential thing in such experience is that the actor learns to know and to do, not through mental knowledge, but by sensory knowledge.’ Suddenly I knew, That’s it! That’s it! … That was the answer I had been searching for. The point is, I had already read Freud and already knew the things that go on in a human being without consciousness” (cited in Carnicke 1998, 144–45). Boleslavsky opposes “mental knowledge” to learning by “sensation”; Strasberg hears him, but jumps rails, to describe things going on unknown “in” a human being.³⁵

Translators cut Stanislavsky’s writing about physical action and energy, instead foregrounding passages about affective memory. They inflated such memory from its status as one resource among others and deflected the original stress on specific, embodied memories of sensations or feelings to instead encourage meditation on buried childhood trauma. For Stanislavsky, affective memory could come in handy in a pinch, as a lure to flagging inspiration, but was not to infuse performances; with Denis Diderot, Stanislavsky feared that, like drugs or alcohol, too much passion gives the actor the illusion of deep experience even while ruining communication with the audience. Stanislavsky also warned against aiming for emotional results and advised focusing instead on specific actions, little material tasks. Entire pages of such warnings in the Russian manuscript are reduced to a few vague sentences in the English. As Carnicke notes, “personal substitutions [of emotion], so familiar from the American Method, do not appear” in the original text at all (1998, 3).

The English publishers eliminated words stressing “outer” conditions, such as events, substituting terms to suggest that actors explore “inner” memories and feelings. Thus, where Stanislavsky’s language exhorted actors to live the role, American Method urged actors to animate the role from their own lives. A deceptively simple reversal, one foreign to those who read the Russian originals. Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (who published theatrical criticism before turning to psychology) in his 1933 monograph Thought and Speech, quotes Stanislavsky to support his own argument that it is “external” interaction that constitutes “internal” selves,36 stressing how the director exhorted actors to first research social relations and material conditions implied in the script before beginning to craft a character’s “inner life” ([1933] 1986, 250–52). Stanislavsky, Vygotsky highlights, did not excise the category of “inner life”; rather, he urged artists to attend first to the materials and relations that afford it. Working to shape theatrical ensembles, Stanislavsky pursued this relational materialism decades before Soviet-era ideologies and practices nurtured a socialist brand of the individual, with an “inner life” developed in relation to collectives (Kharkhordin 1999; Oushakine 2004). Many Americans—critics and social commentators—have claimed that English translations of Stanislavsky’s writings salvaged an authentic emphasis on emotions, that his work on “given conditions” and “physical actions” was a late-life capitulation to Soviet materialism, an obligatory bow to Pavlovian science. Such conclusions rest on ignorance of Russian participation in continental European research on nerves and psychophysics and contributions of Russian neuroscience long before the Revolution (Carnicke 1998). Claims that the maestro switched to materialism late in life, and under Soviet pressure, do not hold up to scrutiny of his drafts and reading notes or of notes on rehearsals and lessons (see especially Roach 1993).37

He was a materialist well before the Russian Revolution, enchanted by Bekhterev’s correspondence with Jean Martin Charcot on the energies of the nervous system, and by the early writings of Taylor and Gastev on task definition and management (Pitches 2006, 31; Benedetti 1990, 164). Stanislavsky saw his system as dual, enabling work from two directions at once: actors should train bodily reactivity as they simultaneously conduct documentary, ethnographic research on “given conditions” implied in the script.³⁸ The system would converge from two ends into a psychophysical unity of living action.

A century later Russian media still recognize Stanislavsky for psychophysical techniques such as breathing and concentration exercises to develop and sustain creative energy. Here is an example from the mid-1990s, in reply to a letter from a reader of the Russian-language version of the glossy magazine Cosmopolitan. The magazine’s advice columnist suggested that the letter writer do “as in the Stanislavsky school,” that is, attend to her bodily reactions, to her own breathing when in a comfortable situation, and then reproduce that breathing when stressed (“Krik dushi” 1997, 32). Ideologies of theater as masking have little purchase at GITIS. The techniques by which actors learn to separate from or meld with the characters they voice³⁹ do not craft expressions to arise onstage from within each individual, but instead rouse energies to ride multiple channels for contact, organized by collective phatic labors and expertise.

At GITIS there is little use for metaphors of the actor as hollow puppet or room for treating them as such. McCarthy era attributions of Russian origins to aspects of Method acting such as emotion memory dissolve. Its ostensibly enemy methods for communication (like those of the unions, whose meetings, pamphlets, and strikes the House Un-American Activities Committee tried to label as un-American) turn out to be homegrown. Cold War paranoia about Manchurian robots was manufactured without the Russians; it may have deeper roots in Anglophone gothic fiction than in the actual movements of people, methods, and ideas over recent centuries.

HERDING MATERIALS AND INTERPRETANTS

In the USSR, stage psychics and magicians appeared alongside variety acts and educational lecturers⁴⁰ as long as posters advertised the finale to demystify with materialist science. Wolf Messing, performing in local theaters all over the Soviet Union until the 1970s, was allowed to demonstrate telepathy as long as he explained his skill as “reading muscles, not minds,” sensing changes in motion and tempo, breath and gaze (1961, 6; Lungina 1992). Some attendees recall that he would skip that part.41 Newspapers and biographies tell us that even when he did debunk immaterial explanations, audiences were impressed by his virtuosic ability to perceive “ideomotor impulses,” those minute psychophysical shifts in pulse or eye movement. This was hardly less impressive than telepathy, even more so in a crowded hall among many distractions (though sometimes the more people, the more movements to read).

FIGURE 2.4.    Messing performing telepathy in front of both an audience and a jury in 1966. Reprinted in Sovershenno Sekretno, February 1, 2012.

Soviet stage psychics, like their European colleagues, professional magicians in suits and gloves, waged rationalist combat against spiritualists, mediums, and mages.⁴² Like them, Messing shared the stage with juries of skeptics recruited from audience volunteers and local authorities (journalists, teachers, collective farm heads, scientists) and also from among fellow magicians, trained to perceive illusions and sleights of hand (see also Wooffitt 2006; Jones 2011, 92). Magicians, after all, are phatic experts alert to distraction techniques onstage: sleight of hand for physical illusions, “cold reading” for mental ones.

Anglophone skeptics of the paranormal use the phrase “cold reading” to describe discursive and observational techniques by which psychics create the appearance of knowing things that “no one else could know.”43 The magician specialists who sit on the jury of Battle are supposed to detect when telepaths are cold reading, or sometimes describe muscle reading as an aid to cold reading, and to point out such violations. A Russian phrase meaning “cold reading” (kholodnoe chtenie) exists, although the Battle experts use other language to maintain that this or that psychic is “really just a good psychologist” who has “merely” trained to attend to all the little signs in stray interpretants.

Cold reading calls upon a conversation partner to fill in blanks in a fashion that seems to put private details into the mouth of the psychic; it induces a sense of projection,⁴⁴ “as if” the psychic voices the subject. In effect, subjects read their own minds, coaxed to use channels that they do not recognize as communicative or to speak in ways that elide how and when information passes. It is a technology for intuition that claims to work without material mediation but in fact relies on specific forms. It is not difficult to master, especially when working in teams. They share aspects with poker skills, improvisation skills, and skills that many of us learn who perform emotional labor (and most emotional labor requires phatic ingenuity). One tactic is to look for aural, visual, and kinetic “tells”: signs that people give off despite themselves (the very ones that frustrate certain theater directors). An intake of breath, a blink, a hesitation, a slight movement of the face, a correction in grammar—any small reaction can be taken up, even as an ambiguous or excess sign, to demonstrate intuition even as words do not cohere: “I can see this does not make sense to you yet.”

In essence, cold readers manage those initial proliferations of interpretants—proliferations that are almost inevitable when making first conversational contact with a stranger in public—and herd them into streams, some of which are bound to cohere into shapes, into meanings that feel like telepathy or clairvoyance. More concretely, to begin, a cold reader might make a few high probability guesses, drawing on available materials such as clothing or gestures as signs. Fingernails can suggest questions to suit a person identifying as tomboy versus a femme, a carpenter versus a musician: “Why have you stopped playing guitar?” “I don’t play guitar, my wife does.” “Ah, that explains it!” This is basic inductive reasoning, with the additional strategy to make use of those mistakes that induction can introduce. Such mistakes do not derail a practiced cold reader. Vigilant for tells of surprise or doubt, she can deftly change course or keep fishing: “No, no, it wasn’t you, but someone in your family knows a Thomas” (see also Randi 1982). In such moments, many subjects will fill in the blanks or make corrections, thus fortifying the channel for the information as the psychic hones in around the near misses.

One effective opener is to deploy opposites: “You can be very chatty with the right people, but sometimes you feel silenced.” This works when statements that balance opposing categories can pass as robust truisms (scholars do this, too, but at times cannot). Another is to make statements that can be true of anyone: “You feel like you never get caught up with all your e-mail,” or, “Someone at work is making things difficult for you.” Having spoken a general truth, the psychic invites clients to fill in the specifics. Failures in cold reading are expected; they are productive precisely because they invite correction and detail.

THE PUDDING IS IN THE PROVING

Judgments about failures, conversations, and actions that unroll after such verdicts open to further effects. Some failures do unsettle the reputation of a single psychic subject, while still affirming the conditions of the test. Its procedures reinforce some channels and split others. Maria Knebel’ insisted that failing at telepathy spurred students to attend better. More to my point are structures of participation: when students line up “boys on one side, girls on the other,” in order to cross a gap they first have to create one. To practice contact they first practice social division. In the telepathy lab, failure to send thought through a Faraday chamber wall affirms the materiality of the wall—as well as a social division of research labor around the wall. Certain conditions are placed under scrutiny (“Is the blindfold opaque?”) while social arrangements around those conditions remain unexamined. The failures of one set buttress the authority of the other.

Battle of the Psychics could not exist without failures. At the end of each episode, the jury of experts, magicians, invited skeptics, and occasionally witnesses selects a winner and a loser. The announcement is but a denouement, for in each episode the pudding is in the proving, the pleasure in the testing and the criticism, the reasoning of failure; fan blogs take things even further, debating expert calls and trashing both losing and winning psychics’ techniques, expressing more schadenfreude than wonder.45

The social and political stakes of boosting skepticism can be quite high. Consider again Olender’s 1989 documentary (9 Years with the Psychics/Extransensates). The film opens with actor and film director Nikolai Ermolaev touting his fame to a small group of visitors in his apartment: “They wrote about [what I could do] in Stern, in Match.” The academics studying him, A.P. Dubrov and V. Pushkin, had named his powers biogravitation; he would sit on a chair and hold an object, a cigarette, between his knees. As he pulled his hands away, it would seem to stick to his biopole (biofield) as he slowly extracted his hands until the cigarette dangled, as if in gravitational orbit. Just three years after Olender’s documentary was released, the Soviet Union was no more, and ABC World of Discovery made its own documentary, Powers of the Russian Psychics (1992). One section claims to reveal Ermolaev’s method, visiting him in Moscow not long before he emigrated to Montreal. The lighting conditions, explains the American narrator, differing from those to which Ermolaev had been accustomed, allowed editors to spot a fine thread fixed between his knees. In the same year, the BBC produced a parallel documentary featuring American former magician and professional debunker and skeptic James Randi. In the first half, Randi debunks horoscopes and television mediums in the United States; in the second, he debunks psychic healers and stage telepaths in Russia. Translator in tow, he visits a center for brain research, where experiments on stage psychic Ignatenko (the same person as in Olender’s film) are underway; a center for nontraditional medicine; and a pair of sister clairvoyants. Randi presses the researchers to adopt randomization and double-blind methods; the Russians are not materialist enough for him. He keeps a blank poker face when the sisters attempt to cold read him. He pronounces failures all around.

These American and British documentary reporting missions began almost immediately after the Soviet Union dissolved, reviving the thrill of books like Ostrander and Schroeder’s 1970 Psychic Discoveries while also running a Cold War victory lap, clamoring to teach Western rationality. Both films imply absence of critical thought and debate,46 not only in the present but also in the past—as if Soviet-era calls for standardized methods and randomization in Russian telepathy tests had never happened.

In 1967 a group of scientists had complained that the Soviet press reported too many experiments that affirmed psychic powers and not those that did not. In response, the editorial staff of the journal Literaturnaja Gazeta organized a test to challenge those experiments reported on by other papers and gathered a multidisciplinary panel to ensure checks such as randomization and double-blind techniques. Two teams, one for the sender in Moscow and one with the receiver in Kerch, were isolated for several days, with no access to telephone, radio, or other channels of communication. Fifty pairs of identical objects were split between the two teams and numbered. At predesignated times, the Moscow team would roll dice to select an object for mental transmission, then write down: #2 champagne cork, #17 axe, and so forth. The sender would then concentrate on the eraser, sole of a shoe, or anniversary kopeck to transmit to the distant human receiver.

The receiver (actor Boris Nikolaev), sitting in a rehearsal room in the Kerch municipal theater, was to select among fifty analogous objects laid out on a table; his team would then write down the name of the object and its number. Three days later, back in Moscow, envelopes containing the two lists were opened in front of both teams and still more observers. The paper published all the transmissions side by side.47 Of the ten material objects sent and the ten received, the number of matches was exactly zero: an axe was sent, a wooden soldier received; a ball bearing was answered by a plastic doll leg. The commission agreed: they saw no signs of telepathy but supported further study “as long as both negative and positive results” were published.

Randi and his Soviet-era counterparts were operating in the same tradition, performing scientific skepticism, claiming modernity by asserting others’ deficiencies in reasoning or evidence. Such claims have a long history among techniques for justifying state rule and industrial divisions of labor (see Jones 2009; Morris 2000; Meyer and Pels 2003; Wiener 2013) in both capitalist and socialist systems. French powers discredited wizardry in the colonies, and early Soviet atheist campaigns dislodged the angels, taking peasants by airplane into the clouds.⁴⁸ To stage a debunking is also to call upon audiences to join in, “to exercise their individual powers of objectivity” (Jones 2009), to be enlightened, pragmatic, savvy, and hip. Meanwhile, the skeptic can still freshly enchant with “technical virtuosity” (as in the Messing performances), where science seems to generate a “technology of deceit as impressive as any ‘real magic.’ ” (Morris 2000, 466; Lachapelle 2008; see also Gell and Hirsch 1999).

Plenty of Soviet-era critics were alert to this irony, as they were to the artful use of scientific imagery and language. A. Kitajgorodsky, an opponent of pseudoscience and strongly skeptical, explained 1960s Soviet fascination with telepathy in his contribution to a series in Literaturnaja Gazeta, arguing: “Science, in the last decade, has introduced amazing discoveries: atomic energy, rockets into the cosmos, miraculous medicines, the genetic code … [but] many, without thinking, have lost caution, and too easily digest and adopt any revelation served up under a sufficiently scientific sauce” (1964, 9). Most privileged visitors to Russia, even including Mr. Randi, never learn basic conversational Russian, and certainly not enough to perceive debates on these or other matters in current times, much less Soviet times; this is one reason that we reduce complex issues to the simplicity afforded by our own limits. Kitajgorodsky’s piece did not end the discussion; it was answered in the same thematic section of the issue (“The Debate Continues—What Is Telepathy”) by a piece just after it, “No Need to Fear the Facts!” by psychiatrist A. Roshchin. Roshchin accused Kitajgorodsky of the same closed mindedness that “just ten or fifteen years” before had targeted experimental genetics, resulting in the excesses of Lysenkoism, and he challenged Kitajgorodsky to work through all the data, not just the negative, including information emerging from studies of synesthesia and dermo-optics. Urging his colleague to temper that critical edge with open, agnostic skepticism, he turned to materialist wonder, likening the ability to sense colors printed on paper by fingers to the ways octopi sense light through the skin.

During late Soviet years many called for balance, for open-minded skepticism about skepticism itself. Olender’s documentary film narrator expressed that very mood when pronouncing that the blindfolded stage telepath’s tests “showed 80% accuracy—and cannot be explained by science.” The editing accents this tone with the minor, glissando notes of the theremin over the narrator’s soft voice, using none of the staccato tempos or major notes associated with declaration and command. In that documentary questions such as “Do they believe?” or even “Why do they believe?”—questions still hegemonic in the social science of magic, religion, occult, or the paranormal49—have little purchase. Soviet agnostic modernism elevated the curious over the strictly rational subject; acknowledging this project unsettles our stable vision of opposites whereby Soviet-era hyperrationality represses Russian mysticism and whereby the West judges both extremes lacking. In fact, however, this mood remains in the repertoire, audible when post-Soviets declare their willingness to be convinced or not, for either way they will partake in the pleasures of testing itself. Battle, in scenes that encompass skeptical criticism with wonder and then in scenes that do the opposite, claims to proudly balance agnosticism, to test perspectives.