PHATIC BUFFERS AND CREDENTIALS
The students who live and work at GITIS endure a challenging series of entrance auditions, then courses, exams, and other trials before they emerge with credentials. So many want to study here, in Moscow, in the center. The campus could not be more central, a pleasant brisk walk even in a wet November from the metro station at the Lenin library, from a spot overlooking the Kremlin walls just above the traffic node at Red Square. Americans hold the lease on this vista to the Kremlin towers and the river that flows by them; the embassy residence is here. I have never looked out from its windows. Most threads of American expat social life in Moscow are invisible to me; Russian friends, and even Moscow acquaintances from other European countries, know American diplomatic circles better than I do, have even been inside the residence. I knew the late Romani singer Olga Demeter, who writes in her autobiography about performing at there in the 1930s; that is the closest I have come. In large part, this is due to diplomatic rules about local contact, regulations that would prevent ethnography, but it is also due to the fact that in my American life I do not know the kinds of people who become diplomats.
In August 1991 at this same, central spot I saw soldiers stand at attention around their tanks. Called in by the leaders of an attempted coup, it soon became clear that they felt little connection with those commanders, and the people surging around the tanks pressed that point. These were local boys; an older woman poked one of the soldiers in the chest with the tip of her umbrella, knowing he would “never shoot his own people.” By the next day their tanks were shielding her side, and the resistance had transformed the center into a festival. People poured in from the edges of the city to build barricades, to witness, to play music, and to paint. The resistance held, and the coup failed. A few years later, however, the city constructed a pleasant buffer zone at the foot of the Kremlin walls, with shops and fountains and paths that minimized the space where before huge crowds could gather.
Imagine that both the Kremlin and the American residence sit near the base of Moscow’s thumb. GITIS is just above that, just where the thumb stretches across the lanes of old Moscow, toward a grand avenue of glass towers that rise still. The next fingers cross leafy boulevards and meandering streets to the trafficked avenues. A walker’s dream with good shoes, an umbrella, and a metro pass. These avenues conduct social, cultural, and material capital through the central banks and the central theaters and academies. GITIS is certain of its own centrality and is reliably, if not lavishly, funded by the government. Even Hollywood, for all its marvelous technologies for creating illusion, has little to teach GITIS about technologies for intuition
At GITIS I was no professor; my American credentials did not register as important or central. I was to join the students and interns, those who stand up the moment an instructor crosses the studio threshold. They did not socialize with us, the maestro and the pedagogical team; they had other gigs, a show to finish. There were also unwritten rules limiting social contact across ranks. A few would greet me with a grave nod, but not all (one, earning an advanced degree, never made eye contact). By contrast, at the first daily encounter, students never failed to recognize everyone at least once, including me, with kisses on the cheeks. Once having greeted, we were free to ignore each other all day.
It was more difficult to claim the attention of ranking teachers, and I never managed to convince one to sit down for an interview, although they were pleased to be videotaped in front of the class. By contrast, even the most famous of Moscow’s celebrity psychics quickly agreed to meet with me. Friends in Moscow were surprised that famous persons were so immediately accessible; even in August, a difficult month to find people in the city, my cell phone rang as secretaries for Battle celebrities returned my calls. Why would psychics be more eager than famous film or theater directors to talk to a foreign scholar? Is it because historically, scholarly (and sometimes foreign scholarly) attention has been useful as a credential, as university scientists so often were part of the juries for public telepathy tests? I have always found in Russia plenty of actors and musicians who enjoy collaborating with an American (someone who commands jazz standards or can show them how to pronounce Shakespeare), but those at the top, who stoke the furnaces of creative tradition, were not hungry for outside validation.
My situation could have worked out differently had I been introduced through different social channels, but my Russian acquaintances do not run along those particular elite social chains. At GITIS I had no prior contacts: I paid tuition and met the head of the department for foreign students, who then introduced me to the head of the first-year directors’ cohort. Her introduction over, I was on my own; the teachers had to accept me in the corridors and classrooms, but no more. When it came to reaching psychic celebrities, there too I had no connections. In that case, however, a Moscow friend offered to make calls on my behalf, as an “assistant for a professor from Michigan,” explaining in gracious formal Russian that I hoped to explore possibilities to take oral histories. Her mediation both buffered and focused first contacts—and like a good letter of recommendation, it implied that I warranted such attention.
Papers commonly anchor credentials, but so also do communicative processes such as these telephone introductions—along with other mediations that first buffer and then link new contacts, to delay contact while establishing a channel. To Foucault’s governmental technologies linking power to knowledge—the archive and the gaze meeting in the credential, or the arrangements of prison cells—we should add those that block, delay, or skip over sensible contacts, over presence, techniques that involve a sort of phatic triangulation.
A first summer meeting with a star from Battle of the Psychics led through a series of spatial buffers out to the rings of dachas where people like to spend the summer. Deep green patchworks of pine and birch forest, river, and marsh circle the Moscow metropolis, and small wooden houses follow after large stone villas, each with its surrounding garden, or the occasional apartment block. Stores selling vacation and building supplies dot smooth highways. Once we turned onto dirt back roads, to wind past fences and thick brush, branches scraped the car. Everyone we asked recognized “that professor from television,” Battle’s key expert and Soviet-era psychic researcher, but only after we circled for a while did a man on foot give us precise directions. This was our host’s son. He called ahead from his cell phone, so that his father met us, opening a red iron gate that protected the courtyard of an immaculate wooden dacha with a mature orchard. He was wearing a tweed jacket and I, too, had selected professorial wear in the July heat, a green plaid shirtdress. His family—wife, son, daughter-in-law, and boxer dog—left us to talk in a cool inner room, sparsely furnished and dim in the afternoon shade. My friend tried to limit her involvement, placing her body out of our sight line, back to the wall, until our host, after politely swiveling his head a few times to address us both, asked her to sit closer. (Later, she confessed worrying that she might undermine my scholarly authority were she to get in the middle. Far from it—not only did she amplify my credentials, she noticed angles and details that I did not, about which she told me later.)
He asked me to explain my project. I began with my credentials, items from my CV—workplace and discipline, past writing, current interest in contact and communication—but the conversation did not start to move until I named our countries’ oppositional positions. Up until that point he had listened steadily; then I added, intending to show friendly rivalrous respect, “Our government used to be afraid of Soviet psychic capabilities.” “So,” he finally interjected, “you are here for personal reasons, not reasons of state?” “Our government does not listen to ethnographers. And I promise not to ask where the secret labs are.” He laughed, my friend laughed, I laughed; we all knew these phrases, which hit a pleasurable and familiar nerve, these geopolitical tropes of competition. They opened a vantage of coherent, almost comfortable conflict—the phatic work of monitoring a superpower rival itself projects an elite position. In recognition of rivalry, we credentialed each other as imperial forces.
“No, no, no, it’s all open now,” he continued, “though I can say that while Britain has just published their secret lab results, we still have not.” Indeed, details of his biography are published in print media and on the Internet; he several times pointedly repeated that everything he was telling us about the old research is “all available in the open press.” As he did on the air, he spoke languidly yet precisely, steadily holding eye contact. Back in the 1960s, his first discovery of “distance viewing” talent had gone like this: he had been called in to observe a fellow who was sitting and talking with a ball on a string. “Mikhail Viktorovich, we need to admit him to the psych ward.” “No, no, no, let me have a look at him.” He listened to the man describe submarine manufacture in “such and such a state in the U.S.”; “cross-checking with the KGB” confirmed the information. “The Americans then worked to catch up with us—even using their psychics to steal our discoveries,” he added, pulling out his cell phone to dramatize the example. These were familiar accusations—those Soviets/those Americans, they only imitate our genius, steal our thoughts. Our introduction slipped in and out of familiar tracks, comfortable but not too close. We mirrored the work of diplomacy among states as much as we did replicated mundane attempts to move up or into social hierarchies; in such work, certain channels must be buffered in order for even a few others to open at all.
EXPANDING CIRCLES, EXCESS CHANNELS
Paper credentials are supposed to condense and represent time and effort spent in the socially buffered zones where expertise is passed on. In the 1990s this assumption was challenged, as credentials mushroomed across new zones: colleges and institutes branched out of Soviet university faculties or sprang up as night classes, consultancies, dojos, studios, and correspondence courses offering instruction and diplomas for pay. Paths, channels to become accredited in ekstrasensorika, especially seemed to multiply1 and to thicken branches that sprouted in late Soviet times when psychics offered themselves to be tested at universities in hopes of being certified authentic. This was not unique to the socialist world: in the 1970s, Uri Geller claimed to have participated in experiments at the Stanford Research Institute as a credential (his debunking occurred not there, but on television, on Johnny Carson’s show).2 In 1999 Doctor Kirill Leontevich, recollecting laboratory studies conducted in the 1960s, described the arrival of one such psychic from Khar’kov, Vladimir Rud’: “He turned out to be a hard nut for Soviet science to crack. The University of Khar’kov, after a series of experiments, had acknowledged him a genuine telepath, which made Vladimir very popular. But the Ukrainian telepath wanted to conquer Moscow. From the Academy of Sciences here he requested an official certificate of his capabilities” (Vorsobin 1999, 7). Rud’ passed a series of tests conducted at the Institute for Problems in the Transfer of Information, but then they found his hand drill for poking holes through walls to adjoining rooms.
In twenty-first-century Moscow a number of centers that teach and accredit psychic powers ground their authority in Soviet brain science. “The Bronnikov method,” taught across former Soviet territories and beyond, is one such franchise, advertised by the approval of Soviet-era brain scientist and granddaughter of Vladimir Bekhterev, the late Natalja Petrovna Bekhterova, akademik at the Academy of Sciences and former scientific director of the Institute for Human Brain Study at the Academy of Sciences. In 2002 Bekhterova conducted an experiment with Bronnikov’s child pupils and judged his methods effective.3 His schools claim to develop ordinary physiological capacities, to train a person to see with senses other than vision—what he calls neurovision. Bronnikov’s course advertisements offer “to form a new instrument for perception and for processing information—a psychobiocomputer.”
Like Bekhtereva’s pronouncement, Soviet-trained expert appearances on Battle of the Psychics certify the show. Former contestants have used participation on the show to attract clients; this television production, aired as it is on a channel for broad entertainment (TNT), has joined the ranks of institutions issuing credentials. As Arina Evdokimova, a psychic who gained celebrity after appearing on the first season of Battle of the Psychics, told a reporter for Vzgljad, “I think this project has become a video diploma for our abilities” (Shabashov 2007). The winner receives a transparent, blue trophy in the shape of a hand, fingers open and reaching, and all finalists receive a paper diploma, text printed over the spectral blue imprint of the hand. Former contestants hang out their shingles, displaying the Battle certificate along with other papers on their office walls. Some embed the image on their websites, alongside event photos, video clips of successful events, claims to descent from “hereditary Scandinavian mages,” and diplomas for completing NLP training or “a year of study at a U.S. business school.”
Some find such numbers and mixes of credentials dazzling and impressive, while others describe them as contradictory and jarring. As means and media to accredit psychic talents have expanded, so have efforts to discredit them. Bronnikov’s endorsement by a high-level Soviet-era brain scientist has not sheltered him from other scientists’ efforts to invalidate his claims. The Commission to Investigate Pseudoscience and Falsification in Scientific Work was established under the Academy of Sciences in 1998 to counteract the growing appeal of the paranormal. The commission’s director, Eduard Pavlovich Krugljakov (then director of the Institute of Nuclear Physics), spearheaded much of the work, exposing what he called the charlatanry and cupidity of people like Bronnikov and those who promote them. The commission works with organizations such as the Russian Association of Humanists and the Orthodox church, investigating, for example, people licensed to “adjust the biopole, which does not exist,” as he explained in an interview with a regional Siberian newspaper in 2004:
Our people really believe in all kinds of “epaulettes,” in titles and ranks … It is a nightmare…. Unprincipled and basically open trade in diplomas is going on. The representatives of the Moscow diocese in Ufa approached me, asking me to evaluate the activities of the Russia-wide Professional Medical Association of Specialists in Traditional Folk Medicine and Healers, an association that has received administrative permission to work in Ufa. Their petition [for permission] was signed by a professor and doctor of medical sciences, Academic of the RAEN, V.A. Zagrjadskij. Naturally, I decided to verify all these titles and received this answer: no such credentials and titles are recorded for this person. There is only one conclusion: this guy is a shyster. (Notman 2004, 8)
Krugljakov also tells of a journalist acquaintance who, sent to investigate Bronnikov, discovered that the blindfolds used by his students allow peeking. That journalist, invited to appear on a television program featuring Bronnikov, stood up on camera and successfully demonstrated how the blindfold was designed. In the broadcast, however, “the journalist who had demystified the fraud disappeared, there remained only the triumphant doctor Bronnikov with his children and their fantastical dermooptika (’skin vision’). All I could do was exhale: yes, our television will do anything to hold viewers, who are losing interest in all the TV channels. Here ‘skin vision,’ there that hooligan Kirkorov…. How much farther will they fall in making fools of people for the sake of advertising?!”(Krugljakov 2009). For Krugljakov, fascination with the occult comes from above, as old bureaucracies metastasize under the new markets into something even more alarming; it does not bubble up from the people and is not a response to chaos or the opacity of power—it is a tool of power.
LOCATING LICENSE
Compared to Krugljakov, Battle of the Psychics’ “resident expert-skeptic” is much less skeptical, asserting that some people master or embody ekstrasensorika. His training during Soviet times as “criminal psychologist and expert in extrasensory matters,” authorized him to discern the charlatans from the strong psychics and even to divide psychics into kinds (clairvoyants, telepaths, spirit communicators, etc.). His own psychic talents lay in locating criminals and victims of disaster. At his Tsentr Vinogradov, past winners of the show, listed as working associates, focus on unsolved crimes, while at its “sister center,” Volshebnaja Sila, the psychics concentrate on healing. I have visited the first center several times over the years. The reception area is free of the usual spiritual decorations; just a few certificates and letters in frames stand calmly against wood paneling and white walls, and desks and fax machines flank the waiting room, warmed by an aquarium and a resident kitten. A comforting notice informs patrons that fees are waived for people enduring “extreme situations.”
Let us return to the first time I met him, at the dacha, where my friend had worked to minimize her own contact channels, her signs of presence, sitting silent to the side. He had summarized the press documenting his role in finding and arresting serial killers; it was this revelation that stirred my friend to finally join in, exclaiming: “People need to know about this!! If more criminals knew that ekstrasensy would find them, that somebody is watching, there would be less crime! We need to shout about this, show it on every station, and not just on TNT, but on Channel One!!!” Our interlocutor nodded with gratification to hear someone so passionately relate his mastery of technologies of intuition to law.
A few days later we recycled the conversation in a different setting, sparking competing interpretations that revealed the high stakes of these topics. We were sitting at the table in my friends’ kitchen hosting others of their close friends. We already had told neighbors about our encounter, at which they had laughed, and so I prompted her this time also to “tell what we did this weekend.” Seeing her cautious inhalation, I tried to backpedal, but before she managed to say much, the guests interjected, “You can go psychotic, schiz out!” and, “This is a sin, you have to decide what you believe!” Our very contact with such people put us at great risk. But my friend stood firm: using psychics to catch maniacs is a moral good for society, “If they just knew that they were being watched!” They countered: they did not question the existence of psychics, but their motives and ends. We went back and forth for a while until they asked: “Who told you all this, the psychic himself?”
“He is a professor.”
“A professor of what?! What was his degree, where did he get it?” This is a common question after two decades of multiplying accreditations and specialties, rumors of degrees bought and paid for. What finally ended the discussion, however, was a story locating psychic credentials as an agent of tragedy in a concrete social world. The guest revealed that his father, who had worked as a technician at a central theater, had died after refusing surgical treatment because a psychic healer had told him, contradicting the medical doctors, that he did not have cancer: “That psychic! To whom the whole theater turned with their problems, with all his certificates!” he spat, furious. This revelation left us quiet. If proliferations of credentials signaled opportunity to some, they threatened others even with death.
PHATIC GLAMOUR
Diplomas attest to capacities acquired elsewhere in the past, indexing some timespace in which expertise passed to the certified. They specify a holder by filling a blank. The words around the blank point to sources for expertise, surrounding the name like a halo. People question the origins of many certificates, and the psychic holders of diplomas, knowing this, augment their authority with techniques and media other than papers or expert genealogies. They arrange the very conditions for communication, opening and shutting channels for contact via social and technical buffers: agents, secretaries, answering machines, and schedules do more than manage phatic work they also amplify authority. Obstacles to contact, waiting periods, and rules or spaces that dampen communications can effect a kind of phatic glamour, undermining ordinary expectations about contact and intensifying uncertainty (“Will she call back?”). Such moves can incite the very impulse to seek out psychic intuition. Advice on phatic glamour graces the book of Ovid (in a section on withholding attention for romantic success), and we know from the movies that phatic glamour is the principle at work when a secretary makes her boss’s rival wait because “he is in a meeting.”
Ms. D is a relatively difficult celebrity psychic to reach. When I first e-mailed Battle contestants, many responded, but she did not. Her website, however, is among the easiest to find. There one can read about her commitment to “white magic” (no husbands returned against their will) and purchase talismanic cell phone wallpapers. The site gives detailed walking directions from the metro station to her office and lists five telephone numbers. My friend and I took turns dialing each one for an hour; some rang endlessly, and others were answered by secretaries unable to tell us anything concrete. One of these women gave us yet another number that, she said, was Ms. D’s personal cell phone number. At that number we reached a woman claiming to be Ms. D who made us an appointment for the following evening at 6:00 P.M.: “Should we call back to confirm?” I asked. “No, no, I have you in the appointment book.” We conjectured that some people must give up trying by telephone and just follow the map.
The office was easy to find, far from the center at a station near the southern end of the purple line, which runs above ground past the textile and automobile factories until the air feels cleaner again. In an area dotted with green parks and red brick buildings, the office is entered through the back of a four-story structure, just yards from the station, fronted by a jewelry shop and a homeopathic drugstore. (The latter are not new; in late Soviet times they bore the generic shop sign “Homeopathic Drugstore.”) I arrived at the appointed hour. On the third floor on a dark landing a guard manned a desk, not asking to see anyone’s papers, just gesturing to the open doorway on the left, where one next steps over a dozing black-and-white cat. Lined with a dozen chairs, the narrow waiting room was half full; six women were waiting. Past them a red sign on the far door stated “Registration.” To the right of that was another door labeled with our psychic’s name, with still another sign underneath warning, “Don’t open the door—the owl will fly out.”
At Registration I addressed the secretaries quietly—clearly I was not the only one here at 6:00 P.M. for an appointment. They looked over my University of Michigan business card (“Oh yes … the professor, yes, yes …”) and asked me gently: Would I mind ever so much waiting just another half hour? Sitting in the reception area, I took in signs, hung one on each wall (“Please observe silence so as not to disturb the work of the specialists”) and clients’ clothing (manicures, heels, cell phone tassels) and ages (one teenager, two women well into their fifties, the others in between). A barometer. A poster: “Moscow from the Cosmos.” A letter of gratitude from a local military unit. A sign pointing to the cashier’s window. One woman was reading the colorful monthly newsletter published by the center, Secret Force: Magic and Healing. We waited. More people arrived. Two women finally broke the silence: “I heard that you can wait here for two, three hours.” “Yes, yes, I’ve been here almost that long, my appointment was at 4:00.” Fifteen minutes later a secretary called me back to Registration: “Ms. D is ready to collaborate with you on your project, but as you can see, too many are waiting today—can you come back tomorrow at noon?” This consideration, releasing me, I took as special treatment.
The next day, by 11:45 A.M., there were even more people waiting, now two men among them, and it seemed we all had appointments at noon with Ms. D, who had still to arrive. Forty-five minutes elapsed. People used the bathroom; there was no sink, so back in the waiting area we each demonstrably rubbed our hands with German-manufactured baby wipes. We held the silence. Someone asked the secretaries to turn on the air conditioning, someone visited the cashier, and a man tapped the metal chair legs to summon the cat, “kssss, kssss!” In Soviet times, even early post-Soviet times, this waiting would have been nothing, easy—people waited hours, all day long in all weather, with no chairs, no bathroom (much less baby wipes), just to buy coffee or bread, to see the doctor, to reserve train tickets, to tick their names off a waiting list for a sofa, to take oral exams. This was physically easier, more comfortable—but it was also more strictly policed; this new regime for waiting discouraged contact, forbade us to talk, to compare notes. And we were not responsible for our line, as we had been before; we could not establish among ourselves “who here is last?” No one here relied on others to “remember I was behind you” in order to step out for a while, to get other errands done. Those Soviet-era practices had been democratic, collectively regulated; that habitus for waiting still works well, by the way, in places such as the post office, though such waits are rarely as necessary as they used to be. Here, we could control how we waited, facing strangers, to be chosen next … or not chosen.
The secretaries called on clients in no order that we could discern; short flurries of hushed talk on the topic were followed by scolding from Registration. We watched each other wait. We were all subject to temporal manipulation as well as phatic monitoring and blocking that kept us distant from each other as well as from the object of our anticipation.4 At about 1:00 P.M., a bustle at the door sent the cat running. Then an entourage filed through: a stocky man gripping a walkie-talkie, Ms. D herself, another stocky man (“probably bodyguards,” a friend ventured later when I described the scene), and a woman carrying several plastic grocery bags. She glittered in flowing, blue and orange Dolce & Gabana skirts, hair spiraled in large gleaming coils, nails golden, stilettos golden too. “Zdrastvujte” (“Hello”) she whispered politely to the room as she passed, making eye contact with no one. The door to Registration closed behind them. More time passed. Several were called; we craned our necks to watch each one go in. The owl stirred and made a noise. I was called in third or fourth. Close up, Ms. D blinded me: she stood at the secretaries’ counter, a white owl perched on her left hand, feet gripping her fingers between rings. Would I mind waiting just a bit more while she received one girl first? Phatic glamour interrupted and then suffused the waiting, waiting to be named, called, greeted, seen, understood.
CHANNEL TEAM
An hour later, having been admitted to the inner office, I saw that only half was decorated for psychic work: icons, crystals, and candleholders were piled on one side, near the desk, facing an aquarium and a birdcage. The other side of the room was bare, with a dusty wardrobe and a coatrack. We took our places, Ms. D behind her desk in a tall swiveling office chair. She opened, confessing that parsing my credentials at the university website had been a bit complicated: “Of course, we understand English, but can you please explain your project in more detail?”
Later that night, friends would declare that question a proof of charlatanry: “It says on her website that the client needn’t explain the problem—she is supposed to see everything herself and tell the client.” I however, at least at that moment, had been more impressed that she had taken the trouble to tailor her words to “discussion with a scholar,” never attempting to reframe the conversation as a reading. Most people, however, give no quarter for psychics not to be psychics; their talent should always be on, regardless of situation. This is something resented by psychics, who compare their work to that of an artist or a musician, who is rarely expected to perform without variations or failures, or they compare their extrasenses to the ordinary senses that wax and wane in good light and bad. Just as a shy singer or star athlete can falter in the spotlight, they say, the throat constricting, muscles giving out, a hostile crowd can cause all those yet undiscovered psychic organs or channels for sensation to constrict and fail.
Ms. D’s ongoing success on radio and television (she appears on several series and has hosted at least two radio shows) owes a good deal, I propose, to her sensitivity to the pragmatic demands of contexts. With me, she showed familiarity with a range of sociological and autobiographical registers. For instance, to my broad question, “Why are people so interested in ekstrasens?,” Ms. D agilely spun out embedded clauses to connect the stock market, jobless rates, social insecurities, and occult fascination, all the while twisting together two thin yellow church candles from a box on the desk. Her phrases echoed the political science language of Russian journals like Ekspert and Itogi (resonating also with scholarly arguments linking interest in the paranormal to crises). The tenor and tempo of her speech appealed to me, drew me in, and I found myself wanting to argue just for fun—to counter that the krizis of 2008, a year old then, had hit only after Battle of the Psychics had taken off, just after a long period of expansion in Russian employment and markets statistics since 2000—but then her iPhone jangled, opening another channel, and our face-to-face talk switched to standby. I examined the aquarium, curious about the caller.
Such talent to switch had not been manifested in Ms. D’s earliest television appearances. Perhaps she developed it later, or perhaps such moments were cut. She later assembled a staff of consultants and agents who help to juggle her many channels—the sheer number of calls magnify her value: “Please excuse me, my phone will ring from time to time, a lot of people are calling today.” We had been speaking slowly; into the iPhone she sped up, informing someone that the difference between television appearance A and B was that, “one is paid, the other is not,” while looking at me from under enormous, black, false eyelashes.
Her eyebrows were powdered over, thinner ones painted on above. A lovely face. Ms. D leaned forward in her swivel chair. The owl started pooping a gray trail down the front of the chair’s microfiber back. Hitting end call, she lifted the owl to the desk. “Her name is Sofia; it means wisdom. A psychic should have a familiar, you know.” “Who picked whom?” (not an owlish pun in Russian: kto kogo vybral?) I asked. “It should be mutual,” she answered. Having chosen, such familiars, alongside staff, also act as living credentials, part of the animal collective that makes a psychic psychic. Sofia hopped onto the branch of a large plant, which collapsed under her weight, depositing her on the floor. Ms. D pulled the owl, upside down, closer by the string around her scaled talons, flipping her right side up to set her back on the chair. “She is still learning. She doesn’t see very well in daytime.” I told her that I had a cat of the same name, and we regarded the owl in silence. This was our first silence. We were not here to talk about my biography.
Ms. D writes on her website, and detailed for me in person, that her gift first appeared during late Soviet times when she attempted to win the attention of older schoolmates. On the train to pioneer camp she had tried telling fortunes, and to her surprise it had worked; they told her that she had said true things. More and more people came down the train corridor to try, “even the school teachers.” Ms. D asserts that desire for such attention motivates everyone, even “more than money, more than love.” She offered an example, by way of responding to a final question. It was one that friends had asked me to pose, noticing that Battle stresses violent crimes and mysteries: “Are there never any comic moments? Is it all really so tragic?” Ms. D sat up and smiled and said:
Sure! We have a cleaning lady here in my office who wants to be a psychic. One time I had to go outside to get something from my car—I have a Hummer, by the way—and when I returned she was sitting in my chair, receiving clients. Sometimes the secretaries pretend to be me. Everybody wants to be a psychic—it is some kind of vanity. It is just like a friend I have; she works in advertising, but tells everybody she is working for the FSB [formerly KGB] and is always rushing off “for the homeland.”
Of course it had already occurred to me that the “personal cell number” the secretaries had given us had probably never rung any phone that was in Ms. D’s hands. The impersonation that she described, and that we encountered, seemed built into her organization’s procedures, a means to foil our usual technologies of intuition, to wonder, for instance, “With whom are we making contact?” My friends, untouched by the glamour, found the story hilarious, asking me many times to “tell about the owl” and “tell about the cleaning lady,” sometimes stealing the punch line: “By the way, I have a Hummer!”
SENSE OF BEING SEEN
Does everyone want attention? Do not experiences of attention vary? What of those with no way to buffer attention or contact? Attention feels different to those whose mere efforts to get from point A to B are restricted, when attention threatens body or family. Success may expand some channels while contracting others, but how and how much depends not only on technological limits to media, but also on things like hierarchy or minority exclusion. To enjoy the sense of being looked at, much less to enjoy fame, is not a neutral capacity equally distributed. The communicative load of fame, the sheer volume of attempts at contact from strangers, is riskier for some.
In 2009 a friend and I visited another of the celebrity winners of Battle. Mr. M was an Iranian dentist married to a Russian in Moscow. After winning season three, Mr. M opened his own consultancy in a three-room apartment in a building housing the Benin embassy and Iran Airlines. We waited comfortably, just the two of us, in a white-walled conference room, and not for long. Two secretaries offered us tea and coffee at a long table and desk configured into a “T,” standard in Russian administrative offices. A glass case held soccer medals, bronze gazelles, and daggers, and on the adjoining wall hung a Persian rug woven and embroidered with the story of the Ten Commandments, next to a portrait of Mr. M with an older man wearing an oversized gold medallion. That man, my friend informed me, was his best friend and rival on Battle, the deceased sorcerer Fed.
The trophy from the show stood high on the shelves, next to the diploma. On the wall alongside the Battle diploma hung a framed finger painting in the same colors and shapes: “Maybe it’s a diploma from his children,” joked my friend. I wrote her words in my notes; they seemed important. I thought of the placement of the child’s painting as decorative play until a few months later, when my friend e-mailed me that Mr. M had left consulting as a psychic to return to dentistry—and to write poetry and spend time with his children. When we met, he had already expressed a respectful distance from other psychic celebrities and centers, explaining that while Vinogradov and his protégés devote themselves to unsolved murders, his talents are otherwise tuned: “I can’t help those people, they are already dead. I can only help living people.” In light of his later (temporary) retirement from the paranormal, I am tempted to read the child’s painting of a diploma hanging in the front office as diluting the forces that usually animate credentials or deflecting psychic fame. As he gently told curious television journalists, explaining his transformation: “I just want to be just Mr. M, not a psychic, just Mr. M,”5 refusing the defining words written on his trophy. Like Ms. D, he spoke of the wearying forces of fame, but while she refracted attention by multiplying channels (and avatars), to ultimately amplify its effects, he deflected it.
Mr. M did have a staff to buffer contact, a secretary to answer e-mails and phone calls, as well as a right-hand man present during office meetings, benevolently nodding. Before television, however, Mr. M, unlike some of the other contestants, had been subject to frequent document checks. Moscow neighborhoods may not be segregated, but police do stop people they determine look “non-European”6 and ask to see residence papers. Once he became a famous psychic, he was rarely challenged to prove that he belonged in the city, but he was called upon to display magical proofs, not just to the police but to everyone: supplicants, journalists, scientists, and skeptics. Perhaps, already familiar with surveillance in public, Mr. M came to fame already weary of the sense of being seen.
LUSTER IN THE EYE
The eye that does the seeing, the organ for sensation, can itself be taken up as a sign, one that signals or even credentials special powers. I once met a psychic celebrity just as she was stepping onto the ladder for television appearances who was concerned that her eyes would become such a signal. We had faced a failure of credibility almost immediately upon meeting when she tried to cold read me, guessing the wrong number of siblings. When I acknowledged the errors, she shifted immediately from that technology for intuition, appropriate to psychic-client situations, and began instead to reflexively explore the failure itself on a meta-level, asking me how I perceived her and our ongoing communication, to figure out why her psychic skills were letting us down. She suggested that national distinction was to blame: “Maybe because this is the first time I’ve tried to read an American?” This answer seemed comfortable, transforming a lack of capacity on her part into a normal obstacle; the failure thus normalized, we could even return bravely to this reflexive key. She switched to autobiography, recounting when her powers had manifested. She did not pause, and I did not pose questions. After an hour she began to wind down, shifting again to a reflexive stance, to ask in quieter tones: “Do I look like a psychic?” I stuttered that I was not sure what to look for. She replied readily:
“A penetrating gaze.”
“Yes, you have that. What else?”
“A luster to the eyes, like they are shining.”
Indeed, her dark eyes did shine. Her dark, curly hair also gleamed. She wore a luminous satin, red, sleeveless shirt with rhinestone epaulets and long, dangling, sparkly silver earrings. How did psychic accreditation and advertising come to favor this abstractable quality?7 One can certainly find images of wizards, shamans, and telepaths in late Soviet and post-Soviet films who eschew bling, who favor, say, wood and feathers, water and mud. She was not unique in Moscow, where glitter and light have come to dominate an urban landscape that, before the 1990s, was nearly dark after nightfall. Central Moscow’s neon, shining plate glass, burnished Mercedes cars, and sequined platform shoes still contrast with cement and rust—and forest and mist—farther out.
FIGURE 4.1. Raya’s gaze, framed in close-up. The film has just flitted through a montage contrasting the directed concentration of her eyes to the frenzied and sudden arrest of the horses’ motion.
In Ms. D’s office, her glitter had impressed me perhaps differently than it did the others waiting.8 Twenty years before, much less extravagant attire would have seemed freakish; in Soviet times, people said that one could tell a foreigner by his running shoes or Italian leather. Back then, changing clothes each day was a foreigner’s telltale indulgence, a waste of soap, water, and effort. But Soviet times were two decades gone, and Moscow center, once nocturnally dim, glowed at night like Las Vegas. On the way to see Ms. D, passing underground metro kiosks, I estimated three hundred shades of nail lacquer filling the front windows of each one—a range certainly on offer in U.S. drugstores, but tucked aside in gendered aisles, not displayed on the street. By the end of the 1990s Moscow was wearing European Vogue before the New York issue hit the stands, and Russian travelers were blogging about Americans’ sloppy dressing, “They don’t bother to iron.” Shine, along with color and other formal markers, had become a sign of attention to fashion beyond the Soviet-era offerings, of reaching for modern cosmopolitan, not just a show of wealth.
The contrastive value of shine was greater in the Soviet past, when the streets were lit by few neon signs, but glittering costumes and dazzling light displays flitted across Soviet fantasy films and variety shows, especially intensely for the New Year, always a period for pleasing children. Soviet-era nonrealist films especially for children (or claiming to be for children), set in past kingdoms, future utopias, or faraway planets, almost always maximized glitter and shine. Some did so by foregrounding the spark of a gaze, to create the piercing, mesmerizing eyes of magical folk such as Gypsies (like the lyrics of a famous ballad: Ochi Chernye, ochi strastnye [Black eyes, impassioned eyes]). Such characters’ eyes signal magical depths and powers, as when Raya, Gypsy heroine in the Soviet-era Tabor Ukhodit v Nebo (Lotjanu, 1979) halts the Boyars’ charging horses by drilling the ray of her vivid stare into their wild pupils.
Roma whom I know laugh at this scene; subject to frequent profiling, stops and searches, and worse, they are nearly immune to the romantic screen chemistry pretending that Gypsies are free and carefree (they also note that the actress playing the part is “not Romani”). For other Soviets, however, the fantasy of Raya more convincingly reverses the panopticon, flipping the usual vectors for attention when authorities stop drivers or pedestrians to check papers.
Early Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov begins the film KinoEye (1924) with a shot of a perceiving eyeball looking through the camera lens, calling out viewers to come witness, too. Late Soviet film sees the eye seeing differently than did early Soviet celluloid eyes. Gazes go magical not in only depictions of Gypsies, but in female characters like Alisa in Guests from the Future, Hari in Solaris, or little Monkey in Stalker.
Miracles and catastrophes poise to unfold as these women look. Their ocular gestures beckon toward Soviet dreams in a romantic mood, stressing tensions between male and female as women’s lines of sight escape the camera or seem to probe through the screen. Many of us know all too well the effects of others’ denials of our consciousness; many late Soviet films ask viewers to take the face as a call to intersubjective recognition. In these Soviet films, women gaze at us or into the unknown, proposing another angle, inviting the viewer to wonder what these eyes see, perhaps to long for the grace of attention, a touch from those eyes.
This issue is less to do with reading feelings expressed by the eyes, such as rage or happiness, than with the eye as a sign of capacity for feeling, knowing, and influencing others, a psychic capacity. Such sensory experience is not bare; rather, sensation layers with perception of sensation and even explicit talk about sensory capacities. Encounters with the look are thus a nexus not only for artistic elaboration on romantic awe, but also for representing state power, bureaucratic surveillance, and all the everyday ways that the look is regimented. Post-Soviet journalists were warned, like everyone, to avoid the Gypsy hypnotic gaze. One, describing a country healer in Moskovskaja Pravda, wrote: “She had unusual eyes: big, wide, open, with little black pupils. I would not say that they shot lightning or penetrated the soul, but her gaze put me out of myself” (Timofeeva 1992). A luster in the eyes is taken to indicate extrasensory or extrasentimental capacities. Classic Russian literature made much of this trope in the figure of the Gypsy (Lemon 2000a), in descriptions of women in love. Soviet-era film aesthetics amplified it, and it now sparkles bright in everyday aesthetics.
FIGURE 4.2. The male protagonist follows Hari’s eyes, perhaps for the first time wondering how and what she sees. The planet Solaris’s first draft of her, after all, had lacked a dress zipper, invisible to his mind’s memories.
STAR AUDITIONS
Let us turn then to stardom. More prosaically, let us turn to processes for accrediting future Russian film or theater stars, in order to think through whether and how sensate qualities matter differently across fields that produce technologies for intuition. A diploma from the directing department at GITIS is awarded after five years of study. That study, as we have seen, is based on learning to attend to details like the angle and luminosity of a gaze, talking about what such details do onstage, and testing this or that means to channel the audience’s perception. Besides looking for “a gleam in the eye,” people at GITIS discuss, demonstrate, and test out varied configurations of sensory media, from phonological qualities (that index class or regional differences: “Draw out the vowel, drop your jaw, less palatalization—you are an Estonian fashion model!”), to expectations about the quality of volume or prosody (“Really? A man from Surgut would speak so loudly, so bluntly, on a cell phone to his new boss?!”), to the speed of a bodily gesture (called out for destroying the illusion of fresh dialogue: “You nod too suddenly, as if you already know what she will say”; the work of the actor can differ from that of a cold-reader psychic).
These conversations may begin from detail or quality and lead to meta-discussions during the course of theatrical training or production about the meanings and uses of details, then to meta-meta-discussions about how actors and directors ought to discuss these things. An instructor might chastise a directing student for overreacting to criticism of the way he had directed his actors to interact, leading to a generalized discussion about how directors ought to issue directives. This is to become their livelihood, after all, attending to multiple channels, including those for communicating about communications. Students spoke with appreciation and wonder about their new meta-powers, about drills that set them working to notice, recall, and rearrange their observations of communication. They remarked that both the assignments and the critiques motivated them not only to work better on stage, but also to change how they lived, to walk the streets with varied tempo (especially to slow down) and how to ride transport: “We have really started looking now.” “We see such kadry (“film frames”), just in the ways people move their fingers while riding the bus!” (Fieldnotes, November 2, 2002).
Few working actors in Russia have not passed through years of this sort of training. An academy credential is essential for sustained work. Hollywood-style sudden discoveries of unknowns do not characterize the making of stars on a central city stage or in film and certainly will not earn one a place in an ensemble. The ensembles in Moscow draw from its theatrical institutes and a few others (e.g., in St. Petersburg, Jaroslavl’). Rags-to-riches stories—the miner who starred in workplace theatricals, encouraged to apply to GITIS, earns a red diploma, and makes good—are few. Leonid Heifetz, a student of Knebel’ in the early 1960s, teaches at GITIS and at the Vakhtangov, but started out as a factory engineer: “I was not a bad engineer, but when I worked in the factory all the same I watched the clock … but when I went to the drama circle … I was happy and time flew” (2001, 8).
Once beyond the amateur drama circle, actors face many obstacles, funneled through first auditions and yearly exams, when they can be cut. The theatrical academies and musical conservatories have grueling admissions processes. Application is in person, over several days of oral and written entrance exams, interviews, and competitive rounds of auditions. If one lives in Irkutsk, that means that in July one rides the train to Moscow, a journey taking up to a week, to make the rounds on foot to each institute. Until very recently this was the case for all universities, institutes, and academies in Moscow; many a Soviet bildungsroman begins with the future scientist or actor spending the night in the Jaroslavsky train station between entrance exams. At the highest mathematical, engineering, and literature faculties, hopeful applicants would group outside the lecture halls, awaiting their turn to face oral examiners sitting on the lecture stage. This system began to be phased out in 2008, replaced by computerized applications for some schools. Theatrical or musical academies, however, continue to require applicants to arrive in person for auditions, running successive rounds of cuts to derive classes of about thirty from the hundreds of applicants for each department. In 2005 the administrators at GITIS built a white fence and gate to contain the growing numbers of hopeful applicants during July auditions, to keep them from overflowing into the courtyard where the current students take their breaks, and from, as one actress told me, “throwing cigarette butts everywhere.”
Narratives about Soviet higher education swing between two extremes: we hear both that it was exceptionally rigorous, producing the worlds’ best computer scientists and ballerinas, as well as the world’s most literate population—and also that education was corrupted by influence, the best schools populated by well-connected children. On the one hand, high literacy rates, competitive research institutions, and Nobel prizes; on the other, bribes and family connections—not unlike how many in the United States talk about elite college admissions. Post-Soviet lore claims that it is difficult to pass entrance exams without connections, but at GITIS it was clear that without skill or talent—and motivation to work all waking hours, seven days a week, to develop them—a mediocre hopeful would find cold welcome at GITIS. This is not to say that children of actors, familiar with the theatrical dynasties, have no advantage from their early exposure to theater worlds. Still, unlike entrance exams for, say, an economics department, for which papers, pens, and even computer screens can be switched about, one cannot pay a substitute to recite Pushkin for an audition at GITIS.
The techniques involved where credentials for both theatrical and telepathic talents are assigned, and where they are demanded or shown off, all involve play with the forms of contact, as well as play with the sensate means for detecting contact. The next chapter starts from moments of checking credentials or documents, then moves on to demonstrate how such moments define contact itself, as if it were merely a matter of closing a gap across two points, like dyads across an electrical circuit, distracting from collective communications and multiple channels.