5.Dividing Intuition, Organizing Attention

BUREAUCRATIC MESMERISM

Wolf Messing, the most famous psychic of the USSR, narrated his budding powers to influence other minds like this: it is about 1910, and the boy Wolf is fleeing his natal village near Poznan. He has jumped aboard a train and hidden under a seat. A conductor approaches:

“Young man” (his voice still rings in my ears), “your ticket!”

My nerves were stressed to the limit. I extended my hand and grabbed some paper that was lying about on the floor, probably a scrap of newspaper … our gazes met. With all my strength and passion I wanted him to accept that dirty paper for a ticket…. [H]e took it, and turned it over strangely in his hands. I even squeezed myself, burning with this violent wish. Finally he stuck it into the heavy jaws of his composter and cracked it…. [H]anding me back the “ticket,” he shined his conductor’s lamp into my face again. Apparently, he was completely taken aback … and in a kindly voice said:

“What are you doing riding under the seats, you have a ticket—there are places free … in two hours we arrive in Berlin.” (1965, no. 7, 2)

Messing’s first act of mental influence transformed a scrap of paper into a ticket—or rather, convinced an authority figure to treat the scrap as a ticket. He writes also that Joseph Stalin had ordered him to demonstrate similar skills; he passed the leader’s guards by mentally projecting the phrase “I am Beria” and convinced a bank teller to read a blank check as a valid order for millions of rubles. Enchanting authorities who check identification cards and passes, currencies and credentials, he became a psychic hero for readers familiar with a bureaucratic world. His feats parallel numerous reminiscences of evading the attention of those who ask to see one’s papers. His words cover the same ground as does less magical advice for passing under the sensory radars of ticket takers, security guards, and others who staff points of surveillance: “When you don’t have your papers, look through them, just past their ears, but not into their eyes” (Messing 1965,no 8, 34).

Much has been written about the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as exceptionally bureaucratic states, territories where people had to maneuver with documents, identification cards, tickets, passports, receipts, stamps, and diplomas. Soviet life did, and twenty-first-century Moscow life certainly still does, involve daily crossings at points where papers must be shown: every institute, university, archive, library, and government building, and many business offices are fronted with a combination of gates, guard rooms, concierge desks, or turnstiles. It is important to remember that Soviets did not bear this condition alone. I might list many parallels, but one case also illustrates that people evaluate and compare these most visible of state practices. One summer my Russian visitors were turned away from a Detroit-area bar because they had left their passports at my house. They were surprised to be expected to carry identity documents into a place of leisure; staff in Moscow bars never asked us for papers.

Claims that contrast ideals—rationalism, transparency, freedom—to Russian, Soviet, or post-Soviet instances of surveillance are not only inaccurate,1 they preempt sustained conversation about how we have built interlocking regimes across Cold War borders. The arts of facing authority when papers are lacking are widespread; Carolyn Steedman (1987) recollects that in her a postwar London childhood her mother advised her to look straight ahead whenever the bus ticket collector came around. American audiences laugh in recognition when BBC science fiction hero-alien Dr. Who flashes his “psychic paper” whenever London police or galactic powers demand an ID. The paper, like Messing’s scrap, is basically blank; the necessary name or title manifests as the situation demands.

Competitive nationalist discourse about whose state offers more freedom or less surveillance distracts us from seeing connections among historically twisted paths by which states have built a world in which people must show papers. To unhook bureaucratic process from national cultures or territories instigates more sustained attention to the movement of techniques and to the ways in which mundane, crypto-magical techniques, such as directing the gaze “just past the ears,” work—and work for some but not for others. Victor Turner (1982) was wrong to characterize thresholds as liminal; very much on the contrary, doors, bridges, and passport booths are points for definition, places in which some feel the forces of segregation more than others, hesitating to ask, can I enter this place? The queue at passport control extends the zone of distinction as other queues have led to this one; tactics to evade the administering eye are possible only for those who have already passed through other sluices.

In this light, reconsider the train conductor’s response to Messing’s proffered scrap. It would not take a mind reader to deduce that a ragged boy hiding under a train seat wishes he had a valid ticket. As some of my Russophone interlocutors suggest, perhaps the conductor took pity, colluding with the boy to go through the motions, punching the scrap “as if” the bit of paper were a ticket in case there were onlookers? Perhaps the conductor counted on their collusion, wanting them to see him as the kindly kind of authority. Soviet train personnel were by many accounts capable and sometimes quite determined to show a capacity to care through “little human acts,” without the promise of a tip.2 So who was the magician, Messing or the conductor?

So far so good, but what broader structures (for sympathy, for verification) infuse the social and material conditions that make bureaucrat enchantments possible? Nikolai Gogol lampooned human machinations with documents, specifically records of serf ownership, in Dead Souls (1842). Foucault’s discussions of panoptic power seem a bit naive next to Gogol’s story of people who work attention and distraction even in the tightest of bureaucracies. Gogol was alert to the fact that few study advanced bureaucratic mesmerism to open or close loopholes, that most people just scan for luck, collusion, or empathy (except the lucky few who always have the right papers). Messing’s story, like Gogol’s Dead Souls, points to limits on panoptic power. Panoptic technologies and infrastructures watch and discipline, but their structures cannot explain the social distinctions that cull candidates to fill the watchtower with this man and not that one, and even more, cannot explain why and when the watcher is open to shifts of attention, to open a loophole or to close it, to make alliances or refuse them.

For whom are such alliances possible? Messing’s story has been much republished, reenacted, dramatized, and retold in the last few years in documentaries and on shows like Battle of the Psychics.³ The story still echoes common advice for passing security guards, coat checkers, passport controllers, and concierge desks, points for crossing into countries and into universities, archives, libraries, and now Moscow business offices. Some advice counters Messing’s bureaucratic mesmerism, suggesting instead avoiding communicative contact: “When you don’t have the right papers, look through them, just past their ears, but not into their eyes.” Not all can aspire to attempt Messing-style contact. Who can aspire to direct and shift such channels for attention?

During the years after the USSR dissolved, westerners flooded Moscow and initiated all manner of tricks with papers. I accidentally observed this occurring at the Moscow agency in charge of registering my visa. Ahead of me were a man from Texas, his Russian fiancée, and a person who was translated for the Texan. He faced a bureaucratic dilemma: he needed to give his passport to the agency to file at the central Moscow office (OVIR), which takes several days. However, he wanted to get married the next day, and the marriage bureau requires a passport. He had not planned ahead; maybe he thought Moscow was like Vegas. In a hurry to fly home with his bride, he started hinting, “Don’t you have any friends there? Can’t we solve this some other way?” The agents explained that OVIR was quite strictly ruled by regulation. He escalated the situation, protesting that were the passport to leave his hands, “This is a violation of my rights!” I intervened, reassuring him that this is standard procedure, that even if it were lost, he could get a replacement at the U.S. embassy. He snapped his fingers and offered high-fives: “That’s it! I’ll say I lost my passport today! That’s what we’re gonna do! I’m gonna get married tomorrow!”

EAT THE PAPER

Another story that Wolf Messing’s autobiography recalls to Russophone colleagues and friends in Russia is Mikhail Bulgakov’s 1936 novel Master and Margarita. This fantastically Gogolesque tale weaves encounters with papers—telegrams, theater posters, ID cards, book manuscripts—with themes of panoptic failure and strategic opacity. Quite unlike George Orwell’s tightly regulated, totalitarian world in 1984, Bulgakov’s Soviet characters wade through a swamp of bureaucratic caprice, fogged by the vanity of those who manipulate credentials and currencies, telephone messages, and manuscript approval forms. In the fog, they change forms and even dissolve. Woland, a foreign stage mesmerist (who may really be the devil), has come to Moscow to wreak havoc on fickle bureaucrats who manage theaters and publishing houses. He turns their own channels against them: over the phone, he finagles his name onto the central stage’s opening bill, then confuses management further with counterfeit telegrams. He evacuates value from all media, including money; during his stage show, in the magical finale he conjures loads of cash from the air, sending the audience scrambling to catch the bills, which, once they leave the theater, convert into mere paper scraps (reversing Messing’s process on the train).

Bulgakov’s vision aligns with observations made by historian of the Soviet Union Sheila Fitzpatrick (2000) and others on the ways, during the 1930s purges, people interpreted switches from one medium or channel to another, especially when messages were contradictory: a written petition to Stalin might be returned not by a matching written telegram, but by a telephone call. But everyone knew that the telephonic channel might imply intimacy and protection even as the police knock on the door. This meant that shifts from tangible, durable paper to transient sound waves become meaningful in part because they revealed relays for power (see Keane 2013), but also because they invited puzzlement and strategy. In these cases, the switch from paper to telephone posed an existential riddle (kiss of favor or kiss of death?), became animated by uncertainty because it was this leader, this leader known for capricious paranoia, and not just anyone, who demonstrated agency in making the switch in media.

Post-Soviet people do speak of chains of encounters at lower levels for transforming a shared bottle into a job,4 much as in America we hear of those who can turn a golf game into a government contract.⁵ Numerous memoirs trace the paths of rubles turned into a doctor’s note, the note exchanged for another document, this one authorizing exemption from military service, which in turn affords registration at the wedding bureau, the marriage document being necessary to apply for a city residence permit.

Bulgakov and Messing—and BBC science fiction writers—are among many who have drawn such chains in fantastical terms, practical outcomes fusing with supernatural capture of bureaucratic contact points, as if someone has siphoned the phatic energy. Some narrate ritualized challenges, attempts to reveal the social links and institutional supports that invisibly surround any bureaucratic moment, which shifts all attention to the materiality of credentialing media (“Is this paper counterfeit?”) or the deportment of those holding papers (e.g. for “signs of nervousness”). Such conditions make bureaucratic interactions especially fertile ground for tales of ekstrasensorika and for technologies for intuition.

Sentiment about ways people divine, influence, and imagine chains of documentation or movements of power became inflamed after the sudden dissolution of Soviet authority, especially in filmic genres of grim naturalism (chernukha) and its violent offspring.⁶ Piotr Lutsik’s monochrome film Okraina (The outskirts, 1998) violently traces the social sequences through which a single piece of paper—a land deed—has moved, at a time when the nature of both contracts and distributions of property was unclear. Far from Moscow, several farmers awaken one morning to discover that their collective has been sold to big oil. They take up guns to track the path of the sale, starting from the local collective farm leader, who traded the deed over a bottle for a favor. They go to town and tug the buyer out of bed, beating him until he points up the line. They next work over the town boss, who traded the deed for a job for his son, then through the former obkom regional head, who wanted an apartment, and finally to central Moscow, to the top of one of its towers. There, fantastical filmic violence forces the un-sensible—invisible, illicit, social alliances of intrigue—to the surface.7

In the office of the oil baron who holds the deed, the farmers’ rage seems to subside as they stand quietly before him, requesting meekly, “Pokazhite bumagu, pozhaluista.” (“Show us the paper, please.”). “Why of course,” smiles the oligarch, pulling it out. But the farmers have hidden razor blades behind their gums, and in a blink they have slit the throats of the oil man’s minions, grabbed the paper, burned the office down, piled onto their motorbikes, and headed back East. The film ends with a sunny afternoon harvest, the men merrily steering tractors in a staggered diagonal line across the landscape—a creepily cheerful echo of early Soviet films. They, simple farmers, have pounded their way up the contacts of the hierarchy: violence is their magic; no intuition necessary to successfully invert the conventional bureaucratic directive, “Show us, please, the paper,” usually issued from above, not just to convince power to deflect its spotlight, but to flash it back into its eyes.

The end of socialism corresponded with the global advent of the Internet and other links among computers;⁸ a proliferation of channels changed how copies circulate and endure as transcripts, tickets, and police records began to replicate over digital networks at the turn of the twenty-first century. Okraina slides over the way legal papers can no longer be destroyed in the same ways as before; at the end of Master and Margarita, Woland utters the most famous line of the story, telling the Master, after the novelist has thrown his pages into the fire, that “manuscripts don’t burn.” Some quote the line as defiant commentary on censorship, as a claim that even after channels to publication and performance are blocked, an idea can live on. Possibilities to burn, spindle, or mutilate documents, to destroy them completely—or conversely, to conjure their existence—become harder to come by.⁹

In Soviet times, a carbon twin might lie somewhere in an archive or state register, but not always. The Western image of an omniscient Big Brother never dealt with the material fact that paper was in short supply, that bureaucrats made finite numbers of copies and filed them in idiosyncratic ways. Entire archives burned after the Russian Revolution, during reconstruction, during and after the Great War of the Fatherland. Files in personal folders got lost in the stacks. For all our Western fantasy of Soviet surveillance, Soviet people knew these material conditions, could see the spaces to take advantage of the ephemeral materiality of paper archives.¹⁰ This is the case midway through a Soviet émigré autobiography titled Metro (Kaletski 1985): the hero (incidentally, an acting student at GITIS), in order to escape military service, needs a document that will identify him as suffering from hypertension and mental health issues. Just as he acquires it, however, he is given the opportunity to tour in the United States, and now he needs instead a clean bill of health. So he must “disappear” the first paper. With the collusion of a medical worker who leaves him alone in the doctor’s office with his file, he manages to eat the paper. Those were years when the protagonist could tell a train conductor, “I left my ticket on the piano” and expect that she might take pity, at worst hint for a tip, for conductors were not issued passenger manifests, and train tickets at that time did not link to names of passengers. In these procedural gaps, some who held authority to block movement or communication would choose not to use it.

This story, recent revivals of Messing’s story, and the last scenes in Okraina all evoke the means either to activate papers or to destroy them. Perhaps ironically, it is the networked multiplications of digitized copies, not the paper papers, that sharpens Orwellian practices into structural teeth.

DYADIC FETISH

The passport booth is both a technology for intuition and a segment of a phatic infrastructure that funnels people into queues, isolating persons (occasionally a family, bracketed as a unit, whose passports are handed over all at once) at a spot to make minimal contact with a stranger who looks at the face, the paper, a computer screen, then the face. This node reinforces circuits for verbal communication that seem to pit a sender against a receiver, a phatic configuration that makes contact with the state seem dyadic, as if it were made of two opposing parts. Such points model communication not only as a dyad, but as a certain kind of dyad: decoder reads sender, conceived as an individual who either hides or reveals information. It is not for the sender to decode passport control (except in revenge fantasy, as we have seen). The vectors for such functions within a bureaucratic channel are one way; to enforce that direction seals the ritual circle of the passport booth, and in just the way to obscure chains of actions, expressions, and conditions that shape the moment and extend beyond it. Bureaucratic mesmerism enacts the dyadic fetish.

Foucault sketched such spaces as technologies of individuation. In fact, confession, therapy, and the sociological and bureaucratic interview carve out not just individuals, but pair-units. Asad (1983) indicates as much, arguing that historically specific (European) circuits of torture and interrogation created the very definitions and category of truth; truth becomes a question within certain kinds of encounters, between accused and interrogator. From the chess match to the wedding, making two is as ritualistic an endeavor as making one or joining many. I am not the first to suggest that selling the dyad is a step in selling the individual, making individuation compelling and desirable: to earn freedom to choose the love of the pair, the romantic must leave the embrace of the family network, abandoning collectives and companions in arms.11 The individual is thus not the lone harbinger of modernity; the pair secretly on the telephone, the lovers’ letters that console upon storming convention, are.

Linguistic anthropologists have been fighting the dyadic fetish for decades, drawing from feminist observations about power, as well as from thinkers such as Voloshinov, Bakhtin, or Goffman, who all worked to subvert both the idea that the individual is the only kind of subject or agency that matters and the dyadic, speaker-hearer model of communication.¹² These scholars charge us to register the overlapping channels among and shifting fields of participants, to see leaks between and effects across interactions, to hear echoes of past situations and projections of future consequences. They have demonstrated how even institutions that build nodes and channels to assemble pairs—weddings, therapy sessions, courtroom interrogations—cannot excise all who might rock the pair: those who overhear, interrupt, or distract, or who cannot insulate themselves from earlier texts or actions from other times and places.

Messing described the conductor’s lamp as if its halo enclosed just the two of them, but it need not have. At passport control, too, even could we could empty the lines and turn off the cameras; it is difficult to forestall future auditors and impossible to extract the traces of past ones. Social life unfolds not despite interdiscursive and situational (and national or cultural) leakage, but because of it. The illusion that individuals add up to pairs, who then create nuclear families, and so forth, must be maintained by institutions, rituals, and practices, in courtroom interrogations, romantic tragedies, and telepathy tests. Ironically, channeling pairs works best when it draws upon the very interdiscursivity, the hooks and links to other communications in other places and times, that it denies.

There are many ways communicative contact is not experienced as dyadic even while it can be depicted as such. Say we film a meeting of five people over dinner, and in editing, we choose shots to emphasize rays of mutual eye contact—exchanges that really are limited to dyads; just try to hold eye contact with two beings at once. We will end up with series of switching pairs—intrigue! But if we privilege sound and stress convergences of laughter, we will end up with configurations that depict simultaneous contact among three, four, or all five. Dominant models of society that build, say, from an ideal mother-child bond or from an ideal romantic couple separated from families, have been constructed by scholars and others not only on paper, but also during research, for example by conducting sociological interviews that pull people away from usual interactions within a large family, a group running a theatrical production, or a network staging a political campaign—and then putting them into dyadic situations formally similar to police interrogations or job interviews. Yet for all the work of linguistic anthropologists pressing us to attend to real-time multiparty interactions, the dyadic model persists, seeping back into our accounts, especially via theories that treat intersubjectivity as if it were a matter merely of switching perspectives and as if communication occurs only along one directed channel at a time. Consider instead the cardioid microphone that captures sound in wide angles; our common sense about communication could use similar widening. My goal in the rest of this chapter is to suggest ways to notice how dyadic models of communication persist and what such models produce or enable. I now address ways people bracket space, train attention, and channel senses so that certain configurations structure interactions so that they seem dyadic, while certain other infrastructural and interactional patterns obviate the collective work to make this happen.

MATTER IN DYADIC ILLUSION

Messing’s story evokes anxieties common to theater and to telepathy, to problems of trust in faces and in credentials. This is no accident; he was a psychic stage performer. Even when not combined in the same person, stage actor and psychic enact dyadic models such as “telepathy” or “the couple,” using similar techniques and materials—shining lights, bits of paper—to organize certain channels for contact and not others and to organize attention around those channels.

Bureaucratic practices activate dyadic configurations—or rather, the illusion of dyads. To work border magic requires honoring this illusion while undermining its semiotic aim, directing participants to attend and then dis-attend, so that material props can work now as this, now as that. Amplifying some channels while jamming others—turning cell phones off before entering the customs area, before the stage lights go up—is only part of the process. Such outcomes require erasing multiple participants, reducing to two by dividing labor and then obscuring the divisions; the labor of handling paper goes to this official and not that one (even as another watches on a closed circuit camera or through one-way mirrors from another room). Now I contrast examples of phatic spectacle that help us understand the range of divisions across situations, in staged telepathy tests and classes in theatrical attention.13

About halfway through Olender’s documentary, 9 Years with the Psychics, the crew films a telepathy experiment. On a stage in a small house of culture somewhere in southern Russia, a sender-receiver pair is separated by about six feet and a curtain as the camera crew and investigators bustle to arrange measuring equipment. Once seated, the sender wordlessly goes through a deck of cards bearing the numbers 1 through 9, silently pondering each number. Meanwhile, the blindfolded receiver pronounces numbers that match, then do not match. A moderator, in black turtleneck and leather blazer, face neutral, takes each card once the guess has been made and turns it to face a panel of experts and then the camera, before handing the card to another assistant. Behind him the members of the panel scribble notes, while behind the panel technicians monitor oscillating waves of ink and light, graphs that map data from microphones and heart monitors on the two subjects (no other people present are monitored thus).

The experiment follows protocols familiar to international networks of paranormal researchers: randomly selected Zener cards are tasked to provide a stable anchor for reference, to determine a thought to pass between sender and receiver that they cannot preselect. In fact, the development of random trials in other lines of research owes much to these telepathy science protocols (Hacking 1988). Like ID cards, well-shuffled Zener cards act not only as a verifying control, but also as a means to claim a purely referential match of idea, world, and communication. These matches register not participants’ thoughts as situated, coproduced streams of action that affect consciousness, but “thought” as a unit in a generalized system of options, represented as a relation of an individual mind to singular chances, chances calibrated to an arbitrary standard (the possibilities of the deck). Machine graphs further correlate correct and incorrect guesses to further systems, indexing them to measurements of noises, heart rates, and brain waves.

Throughout the twentieth century tests for extrasensory talent often isolated the ability to sense marks on specific materials or beyond them (often paper, the back side of a card, or a note through an envelope). Battle of the Psychics deploys the wood of a box, the metal of a car trunk, and an abundance of paper. The master of ceremonies (MC) might present the psychic with a legal document, such as a passport, and task her to describe its owner, who, as the audience can see, is a celebrity watching on closed circuit in another room, commenting with hostile skepticism on the psychic’s failure to read through the cardboard cover. The contrasts among media are mobilized; for example, paper, situated on stage among machines and cameras, is often figured as central to proof.

While discussions of occult and haunted media usually deal more with worries and dreams about new electronic media (as had those surrounding spirit telegraphy and ghost photography in the previous century), on Battle the parts played by relatively old media, in combination or contrast with those seen as newer, are just as important. The familiar old affordances of paper become more salient, seemingly more unique, as machine media multiply. Psychic performances, as do stage enchantments from magic to cyber realism, put media into contrast, and do so as if different mediating materials in themselves determine capacities for demonstrating communication without apparent mediation.

Encountered live, the two faces of a sheet of paper are well-suited to foreground dyadic aspects of a situation by repeating the model of twoness (here we see iconicity, or resemblance, deployed to index or point), to condense a well-populated scene into what seems to be a simpler communicative essence. As a flat form, a single sheet of paper can be held between interactants to demonstrate those two sides: one written upon, the verso blank. As such, it may well index one ongoing contact channel, while seeming to represent and record (anchor and prove) a telepathic one. One side depicts the thought sent, the other remains blank, and both face a receiver with a barrier of opacity while also resembling her waiting mind, ideally relaxed and receptive.

New media cannot do the same work as quickly or elegantly (yet).14 A computer tablet screen might convey markings on one side and not the other, but are there really audiences lacking skeptics to look for distant reprogramming, for rewriting of the screen each moment? To be sure, paper can be mutilated, destroyed, or switched out in a number of ways, invisibly or spectacularly—folded small and tucked away, burned, even eaten;¹⁵ a skilled master magician can achieve such acts with one hand. All the same, paper retains its “old” affordances; it remains relatively more difficult to rewrite from a distance, and therefore, in high-tech stagings, paper is still a favored medium not only to test telepathy, but in the testing to naturalize and reinforce dyadic contact as the ideal for all communication.

PHATIC TRICKS: CHANNEL DISTRACTION

In 2008 the young illjuzionist Rafael Zotov appeared as a contestant on the television show Fenomen (on Channel Rossija), a show conceived in the United States, where it broadcast for one season in 2007. Israeli celebrity psychic Uri Geller acted as judge on a Russian version starting in 2008 and on a Ukrainian version beginning in 2011, speaking in English, aided by simultaneous translators. Grounded neither in Soviet science nor or Soviet-era romanticist antiscience, Geller’s authority banks on international celebrity. Zotov stands alone on an open dais. Blue and white spotlights crisscross the circular platform and over faces in the audience as the MC introduces the act. Zotov looks into a camera that closes on his face, a tiny microphone dangling on a wire from his ear, and asks, “Have you ever received a phone call from the very person you were thinking about?” He proposes an experiment in transmitting thoughts over distance: he will receive a telephone number. A celebrity pop singer joins him on stage to act as his transmitter. They make scripted small talk: “Have you ever tried telepathically to will a man: ‘call me, call me’?” “Of course!” she replies, singing a few lines from her hit single, “Call Me!” She asks for volunteers to offer their telephone numbers, selecting a gentleman from the back rows. Rather than, say, asking him to call her phone (activating caller ID, this being the preferred way to trade numbers in Moscow), a long-legged, blond assistant wearing a tuxedo jacket with tails over shorts—and also wearing a bluetooth earpiece and microphone—walks all the way up the rows carrying paper and pen. After a few moments we see the assistant cross the stage, rip paper from the pad, hand the piece to the pop singer, and stride off the stage. The singer holds the paper in front of her chest, carefully folding her fingers across the back to hide any shadows of pen marks. So many media, so many channels, where to focus attention?

Meanwhile, Zotov ruffles a ream of blank white A4 paper and brandishes a black Sharpie pen. One by one, the singer mentally transmits digits, staring into the psychic’s eyes until he writes something down and holds up each sheet of paper to show the audience, then his partner. He misses one! He approaches to hold the singer’s hand for a moment “to reestablish contact,” then backs away to retry. All but the last digit complete, he reaches for his own cell phone to type it all in—a phone rings in the volunteer’s pocket! Channels are clear! The volunteer smilingly consents for Zotov to write the last digit on paper, even “for millions of viewers to see.” The camera pulls back, then shifts to Uri Geller’s smile; he pronounces the performance a success, speaking English: “I liked it. I liked the way you incorporated technology,” using the phones over the paper.

This performance bears comparison with the experiment in Olender’s documentary, discussed previously. Both are enacted on a theatrical stage: one in an empty community theater, the other on a television soundstage. Both shift among performers and judges: Uri Geller versus a commission of observers with pen on paper. The commission, however, makes adjustments, especially regarding the materiality of the paper; the psychic, blindfolded and with his back to his assistant, seems to be doing too well. They switch from Zener cards to cards bearing more digits. They add physical barriers between sender and receiver. The narrator tells us that the commission has noted that the sender always carefully presses her finger and thumb at the edges of the cards; perhaps the receiver is listening for a code? So they assign an engineer to make similar noises periodically, effectively jamming ordinary auditory channels.

In the final shots of the sequence, we see several hands holding pens, moving across white sheets. Uses of paper overlap in each performance—cards display digits, guesses are recorded on paper—but the moorings of those uses differ. Olender’s panel of judges, the instruments, and the papers are constantly, visibly at work behind the telepathic pair, while Zotov and his sender stand against empty blue space (we see the studio audience or Uri Geller only in cutaway shots). The voice of Olender’s narrator weaves through the action, explaining, oscillating between wonder and doubt, while Fenomen’s MC disappears between the introduction and final congratulations. In the Olender experiment, the material affordances of paper—the way it rustles to the touch, as that might affect results—become a topic of discussion and adjustment to the interaction. Matter is salient to their phatic work to purify contact.

Geller, while remarking on the clever thematization of technology, does not address uses of paper in Zotov’s act. This is all the better for the act, since paper serves not only as medium to convey numbers, but also as a channel to distract from the other channels (earphones, lights, gesturing hands) that combine to pull off the trick: telepathic contact between two. Wolf Messing and other Soviet magicians often spoke about channel distraction in stage telepathy demonstrations. They described techniques for misdirection to keep an audience focused on the semantic content (in directives, in banter) while using formal shifts (in register, morphology, syntax, volume, tempo, etc.) as code. For example, if a stage assistant wanted a blindfolded Messing to guess the number 3, she might cue him using a phrase containing three syllables, such as, “Okay, next.” She might raise her pitch to indicate that a volunteer was male. Someone like Messing or James Randi might look at the fingers shielding the piece of paper with the telephone number written on it: a pinkie twitch might indicate 3, and so forth. An assistant might shift from making a directive (asking an audience member to stand) to greeting another audience member, with such a shift signaling the blindfolded Messing to turn left. In this last case, the team might use phatic communication to mask a very different semiotic function. Thus technology for reference masks as technology for intuition.

How much simpler such collective work is when the magician and offstage assistants are all wearing headsets! Even if the audience volunteer is no shill, how simple it would be for an assistant backstage to overhear as the assistant takes down the number.

CIRCLES OF ATTENTION: THE THEATRICAL COLLECTIVE

Both actors and psychics learn to artfully arrange attention, to deflect the ear from one sound to another, the eye from a slow hand to a fast one, from the circle of a spotlight to a shadow, to lead others’ eyes with a gaze. They also learn to use one sensory channel to direct away from another: to sound from vision, words from movements, and back again. And they work in collectives.

Some skeptics assume that psychics operate as lone players, but it takes a team to run a telepathy demonstration, to mark out dyads from multiple clusters and tangled channels. This can be better understood by means of contrast. There are contexts that do not hide such collective work, such as in stage pedagogy, in which future actors and directors learn to organize attention and people theorize attention not as a single ray between binary nodes but in terms of nested and intersecting rays and circles. GITIS students learn not only to gesture and declaim, to study a single script, but also to map an interdiscursive terrain of situations, texts and songs, films and biographies, and events and intonations beyond their own experience. And they are urged to see every single living moment, on stage and off, as a series of permeable, multiple, sometimes nesting circles of attention, or participation frameworks. They are pressed to unlearn ideologies of communication modeled on speaker-listener pairs (not to mention those that assume unified speakers who articulate a single voice). They learn to manipulate multiple vectors for attention and to layer those through multiple media. The craft requires studying the semiotic limits of the matter at hand, that is, learning the range of noticeable shifts among gestures, lights, words, eyes, tempos, nails, paper, and stage curtains that signal signs are being made of them.

One evening a GITIS master instructor gave the first-year cohort a memorable version of a classic beginning stage lesson in circles of attention: “how to enter a room.” Introducing the task as a puzzle to be solved in many ways, he insisted on one necessary condition: “To get the audience’s attention, you have to be interested.” He demonstrated, walking around, gesturing, squatting next to students on the parquet, the latter still sweating after two hours tumbling over wooden tables in stage movement training. Students and other teachers formed an audience by moving to a corner, with students along the wall and teachers in chairs. Masha and Zhenja volunteered to try “entering the room”; they exited to the hallway, then they walked through the classroom door, stopped, and slowly peered at each of us in turn through narrowed eyes. The master chastised, “What mugs! Like two cops! And all synchronized! Too compressed and tight, too self-conscious.” They tried again and again, but the master was never satisfied. Another student tried and failed, spurring the master to contemplate the pitfalls of attending directly only to facing an audience. After citing Stanislavsky’s observations on how to simultaneously direct attention and forestall the mechanizing effects of stage fright, he commented on the attempt: “Was this interesting? No. It was really boring. You lost the hall. A normal person [enters because he] wants something, but you enter, and all you see is a hall that might be exuding a great stream of negative energy, and you think, ‘How to survive!? Every gesture is visible, it works or does not; such a narrow corridor you create, ‘this way stupid, that way unoriginal’” (Fieldnotes, November 29, 2002). “Such a narrow corridor,” that ray of attention, as if only the audience were the necessary addressee. Several students tried, and finally Aljosha and Timofej made progress. Timofej smoked through his entrance and announcement, holding a glass. The master praised this: “Look how interesting, good job, now you are engaged … because you appropriated a cigarette and a glass. These kinds of things demand greater organization than you know.” From the beginning of the semester, the master had explained how engagement with materials produces effects, once praising how one directing student had arranged little sticks on a table like this: “Everything begins with precise choices. If there is a glass and a spoon on the table, they must be a specific glass and spoon. It is the same with timbre, with emotions. There can be no sadness in general. And on stage, editorial choice is key. To deal an emotional blow, to draw the audience, you have to localize its attention. You have to organize the circle of attention. Just on that one little spot” (Fieldnotes, September 2002). He exhorted us to consider the films of Andrei Tarkovsky or Vasily Shukshin, to observe how they arranged even small items on sets to create diverse homes, shared spaces, and landscapes, with an attention to detail that could not be reduced to simple naturalism. On the contrary, those directors demonstrate ways that even a single actor (like Timofej with his cigarette) can channel, the master said, “streams of energy” by multiplying and refocusing relations of attention among people and objects.

At GITIS, instructors teach Stanislavsky’s “circles of attention” as foundational to practice (much more so than affective memory). Early in the first semester, after twelve hours of acting and movement classes, students stretched out across the wooden floor, some leaning against their lockers at the back, to hear one of the acting teachers discuss differences among “circles of attention.” (The need for English translation reduces Stanislavsky’s discussion of these circles to the smallest one, the cultivation of “public solitude” for the actor, say, to read a letter alone on stage.) Students had heard a brief lecture on the topic a few days earlier and been assigned the relevant chapters in Stanislavsky. The teacher quizzed them:

TEACHER:	What are the four levels of circles?
STUDENT 1:	Is the first circle just the self? Or is it the self plus contact?
STUDENT 2:	Or, plus concentration?
TEACHER:	Fine, good, and what of the next levels? (Fieldnotes, October 2002)

The students talked all at once, puzzling over how to differentiate the levels: Do certain organs mediate knowledge of certain circles? The teacher answered: there is some basis to this, and “you can read Stanislavsky all you want, but our work is shkurnoe [’of the skin,’ or ‘of the pelt’],” although “animals would not recognize” the circles of attention.

The students wanted to more clearly define and separate the circles, but instructors constantly reminded them that they overlap, and they can jostle each other. The students persisted: one of their other teachers had said in a lecture that the four “circles of attention are organized by distance from the senses,” and that “only the 4th circle is imagined” while the rest of the circles are real, of the here and now, made visceral by material boundaries or signaled by gesture, movement, or other signs. The students pressed the teacher: Are the circles organized by distance, distance as felt by sense organs? Yes and no, this teacher responded. The system describes a set of laws accounting for the nature of theater: “If Stanislavsky had not discovered the circles, they would still exist.” So, yes, the first through third circles can seem more proximate to sensation than the fourth, where we imagine but “cannot sense just now”: “Close your eyes and listen to the sounds from the street. When you listen, do you also try to imagine what is happening?” Yet, the teacher allowed, all circles admit to imagination.

JUGGLING CIRCLES

“But don’t confuse the fourth wall with the fourth circle!” Diderot’s “fourth wall” referred to conventions that cue the audience to pretend that they are invisible spectators, separated from a world of action onstage. The fourth wall proposes voyeurism, peeking into some imagined globe of space-time, a woodland dance floor or domestic kitchen. The tricky part for actors to learn is that the fourth wall can be signaled by organizations of space or by other cues, and that some of those differ little from others that mark circles of attention. At any rate, the fourth wall does not usually belong with the fourth circle, but between the second and third. A fourth wall is subject to intensities of attention that also block out or jam what is in a fourth circle, or beyond.

A proscenium arch need not automatically frame action as a realist diorama box; it takes additional realist convention to anchor that effect. The Russian avant-garde made this point ferociously, insisting that their colleagues recognize the conventionality even in such claims to realism. Most famously, Stanislavsky’s students Vsevolod Meyerhold and Yevgeny Vakhtangov had insisted that without this realization, realism becomes a trap limiting audiences to passivity at a peephole. Meyerhold for this reason urged that in his plays the edge of the third circle specifically, where the proscenium lies, never be played as a fourth wall.

A beginning drill for combining circles of attention might go like this: students are instructed to form their own half circle, with one seated in the break. The instructor hands that person a book to read while answering questions fully; no brief “yes” or “no” is allowed. The students pepper the reader: “What is today’s date?” “What did you think up for your directing assignment?” “In what town were you born?” The student answers all the questions, but after several minutes of this, tasked to report the contents of the book, he can do so only vaguely. The instructor seizes on the failure, shouting, “Two circles of attention you needed to have maintained!” In discussing the drill, the instructor clarified the purpose: students were to recognize how hard they must work to organize just their own multiple lines of attention, much less those across the theater hall (Fieldnotes, September 2002). In this, he echoed Stanislavsky, or rather, the character voice of the maestro’s fictional acting student:

I got to class in time to hear a heated argument with Veselovsky [another fictional student]. Apparently, he had said that it seems not only difficult, but impossible to simultaneously think about his part, about technical methods, about the viewers (which you just cannot excise from attention), and several other objects all at once.

—How much attention is needed for all that? Veselovsky hopelessly exclaimed.

—You think you are no good for such work, but a horseback juggler in the circus does even more difficult tasks excellently, even risking his life. His legs and body have to balance across the back of a galloping horse, his eyes have to track sticks of various weights standing on his forehead, big spinning platters on top, while juggling three or four balls. And he still manages to holler commands at the horse. He can do this because humans possess multi-planed attention, and each plane can work without disturbing the others. It is hard only at first. Luckily, much of what we do becomes automatic. The same with attention. So, if you thought up to now that actors work by inspiration so long as they have talent, you had better change your opinion. (Stanislavsky [1938] 1970, ch. 5)

The character continues, recounting disorientation as he attempts to track multiple circles of attention on the street, remembering the words of his director:

Coming onto Arbat Square, I took in the biggest circle that I could capture with my gaze, and immediately all its lines and boundaries dripped and ran together. I heard a mournful horn and driver cursing, saw the car’s front grill as it almost ran me over. “If you get lost in the big circle, quickly compress into the small one,” I recalled Tortsov’s words. That’s what I did. “Strange,” I pondered. “How come, on this huge plaza, on a crowded street, it is easier to create solitude than it is on stage? Is it not because nobody here has any expectations of me, while on stage everybody has to look at the actor?” It is the unavoidable condition of theater. (Stanislavsky [1938] 1970, ch. 5)

All the world, it seems, is not a stage. The spaces, objects, personnel, and tasks required to channel stage attention differ enough from those managed on the street that only special training and practice teach us to sort and command them.

At GITIS, actors and directors learn that no single circle of attention is ever in play alone. Any communication involves layers and shifts among circles. To begin to illustrate this, the instructor asks the students to recall exercises they have been perfecting over the last few months. Which train which circles of attention? They respond with alacrity: to isolate and move parts of the body—that is the work in the first circle! To remember how many ashtrays stand in the courtyard—the fourth! Pretending to ski—the first! No … wait, imagination and physical memory is involved … the first and fourth and …? Lining up in alphabetical order—the second circle! No, the third! They puzzle over ways circles interweave, challenging sensations with other sensations, with imagination or memory. Even first circle matters are overlapped by memory of sensations from other times and spaces. Imaginative and bodily rehearsal mix, as in one warm-up that students classify originally as the first circle, then change their assessment: “What temperature are the toes? Feel the impulse … as you move, feel how your feet want to argue with your spine—how do your toes speak, how does your spine answer?” Reflection, imagined dialogue, and metaphor can also split and cut circles of attention. Directors all the more need to juggle multiple circles and rays and to imagine their final combinations from the perspective of an audience. One genre requires something multidimensional, like a moving cubist painting (or like Wassily Kandinsky, working with color and shape to warp perspective); another needs something more unified, a tight mobile in which nested circles all turn in the same direction.16

CHANNELING COLLECTIVES

Stage actors and psychics make use of similar techniques for channeling attention, sometimes to similar ends, but only sometimes. Both learn to master changes in tempo, to artfully deflect the ear from one tone to another, the eye from a slow hand to a fast one, from a spotlight circle on the floor to a shadow across the room. They even learn to use attention to direct attention, to lead others’ eyes with still others’ gazes, to shift media to distract from movements and movements to distract from words.¹⁷

Like actors, directors, and their stage crews, Zotov and Ignatenko also labor collectively to reduce the appearance of labors (plural), to hide workers up in the catwalks so that the audience registers only the one ray between points. The most convincing result, moreover, looks as if the pair telepathically channels through invisible string, instead of broadcasting like circles of radio waves.¹⁸ On the spare blue TV soundstage, Zotov does not stand alone, but fronts a staff of assistants who handle paper props and electronic devices—media they will contrast. Olender’s film crew, for their part, discuss interference from the sounds of the shuffled paper cards, but do so in order to pare down to a dyadically anchored thread of contact, unpolluted by other channels.

What differentiates theatrical pedagogy and production from these acts is that it rarely rests on a dyadic line between two points. Stanislavsky’s practical theory of “circles of attention” challenges closed dyadic models of contact in ways parallel to the thinking of linguistic anthropologists who have developed the insights of Goffman and Bakhtin into robust theories of interaction. Think back to the drill in which partners navigate a room stretching a taut thread between them (in chapter 2): it seems to represent their interaction as merely dyadic, the thread linking “sender and receiver.” However, as instructors say, “these kinds of things demand greater organization than you know.” The contact along the thread between two bodies recruits the viewers’ attention, as actors become accustomed to paying attention to their own attention. Teachers persistently remind them that the stage, like the street, comprises numerous possible circuits. The thread momentarily proposes to reduce them because its materiality can link bodies in finite ways. However, as a pair move around among pairs, they become mindful that viewers are comparing them all, from more than one vantage at a time. A girl and boy seem to gaze only at each other, or at the thread, but simultaneously open their peripheral vision, hearing, skin sense of air movement, proprioception to other pairs, to instructor reactions, to murmurs or movement in the audience. Threads of contact between the actors’ bodies index multiple circles and rays of attention even while each thread’s qualia, its tightness or looseness, seems to represent the essence of a pair alone. While each thread may represent the quality of a contact, across the room a moving mobile of vectors for attention forms, like an artist’s model of subatomic electrons.

Becoming savvy about these multiple, overlapping shapes for space-time is the heart of a GITIS education. Peeking through the studio door to watch others watch still others, students speak of forgetting that they move inside a walled compound, a majestic, imperial-era structure, in the center of Moscow, even when those political surroundings are in flux. Recall the drill “friend or enemy?” (in chapter one). It mirrors passport control and ticket booths, requiring students to discern others’ intentions one by one. The instructor that day had attributed their failures to “our Soviet paranoia” but had also criticized the students for not opening all channels, such as peripheral vision or smell, for not monitoring reactions of people standing just outside the dyad of the moment. To correct this, he assigned a second student to walk behind the first, to observe reactions when the first was looking elsewhere. He said they had learned to unsee too much; their follow-up assignment set them to broaden their attention in more chaotic venues, to attend to ways people in crowds, in shops, and on the subway use their hands, fold their fingers, touch rails and grip bags, push past strangers, or hold their children.

Sometimes instructors brought threads of action and echoes of phrases from the world beyond GITIS even into lessons that stressed the making of paired attention in the here and now, penalizing those who could not command the attention of a counterpart. In this drill, a seated pair faces off; one must attract the other, convince him or her to stand up and walk over. They are allowed only the single phrase, “come to me.” The other must sit silently until he or she can no longer resist the call. At first all the callers failed. They were criticized for monotonously “repeating desperate tones.” After several rounds, students who “began to pay attention to minute reactions” started to modulate their calls, alternating among teasing, curious, or sad tones—in effect experimenting with different ways to say the line in order to make firm contact. Teachers noted the improvement. Now the students were ready for competition: two girls would call one boy, or two boys would compete to call one girl. A Kuwaiti and a Daghestani student were set to duel for a Russian woman’s attention. Up to that point the instructors had offered the Russian boys specific advice about how to modulate and experiment (“you need to adjust to her, gauge your volume, shift your tempo”), but now, when two non-Russians competed, they shifted from the here and now of minute contrasts, instead evoking distant national resources and amplifying broad stereotypes about invisible bodily essences: “Kuwaiti oil is surely better bait for a northern girl!” But: “Hot-blooded Daghestani men surely possess naturally sublime powers of attraction!” Perhaps southern men should not need technique or advice about attention—like Gypsies, southern and eastern peoples are also treated as natural masters of hypnosis. Thus a drill that seemingly channeled attention to the here and now opened a window into decades of war in the Caucasus. Hard as participants worked to concentrate on the here and now, those face-to-face interactions could not excise geopolitical alignments or military conflicts projected elsewhere.

Stanislavsky’s circles of attention presaged Bakhtin’s and Goffman’s later attempts to craft layered models of communication, to challenge dyadic models of contact. In practice, however, like any model the theory can still be subsumed, for example, under an ideal like “dramatic conflict.” Circles of attention, alas, can be subsumed in ways that create contradictions for some: in this drill, it was precisely people thought to command special, eastern forms of magic and intuition who were blamed for lacking technique to capture attention. These are the very people who, in Moscow today, would rarely have the chance to work Messing’s brand of bureaucratic mesmerism in moments of trouble (consider, for comparison: Which drivers in the United States can even attempt small talk to avoid a fine?). Once again, people use the phatic—along with judgment about contact—to do things besides make contact.

To “organize attention” requires making decisions about which contrasts make a proper difference. Russian formalists like Viktor Shklovsky on estrangement in art and Jakobson on contrasting pairs in poetry were instrumental in bringing us to attend to the poetic forces of contrast. What I want to stress, in addition, are the social constraints upon semiotic evocations of structural echoes: it matters who decides how, where, and when to focus on what, as contrast, and it matters how those divisions of labor come about. Messing’s face and paper scrap were framed not willy-nilly by just any light in the dark, but by a train conductor’s lamp. Who is sent to hold the lamp, who is vested with authority to read a ticket—or read a paper scrap as a ticket?

DIVISIONS OF LABOR

GITIS advertises itself as a place constituted by openings to elsewhere. In June 2001, in an elegant café ten minutes’ walk from the academy, near the park Chistye Prudy (Clear Ponds), I was approached by a former GITIS student. I had just met with the chancellor and was reading the color brochures she had given me. A woman approached my table, saying that she recognized the photos on the cover: “I graduated in the late 1980s, I loved it!” We talked for a few minutes then and met a week later for coffee in a gorgeous mini-mall built with Chinese funds. She had graduated from the dramatic criticism department, and while she no longer worked in the field, she had no regrets; GITIS had given her a foothold in the center of Moscow and “into the intelligenty,” social capital and cultural that otherwise, she said, “really take three generations” of education and urban life to accumulate. Studying at GITIS had furnished her with a “cosmopolitan interior”—inside oriented to outside—so that she might imagine herself comfortable to travel, “to order a cup of tea in another country.”

To “order a cup of tea” situates travel fantasy in urban elsewheres, the café cultures of Paris, London, Tokyo, and Istanbul—a particular way of being “cosmopolitan.” There were, however, other trajectories for connection that meant a great deal in Soviet times and still do (Humphrey 2004; Grant 2010). Starting in the 1930s GITIS, like other institutions in key Soviet cities like Leningrad and Baku, worked centrifugally through extensive education and internship programs. Many, even most, GITIS students, then as now, hailed from places far from Moscow. Many trained in teams that returned to run regional theaters to raise the local “cultural level”; entire collectives of non-Russian actors were drawn to Moscow from the republics and regions, and then, after five years, sent back. These groups trained alongside cohorts who remained in the city, the luckiest in ensembles formed under the maestro who ran their cohort—and many remain in contact, reuniting at festivals and hosting companies that tour.

Back in the 1930s, in order to forward Soviet policies to advance national minorities, GITIS was reorganized into two parts (as a kombinat): the Institut, training theatrical producers and directors, and the Tekhnikum, with sections for acting, musical-theatrical acting, and acting for national minorities. In 1934 four cohorts populated the national minorities section: Ossetian (matriculated in 1930), Yakut (1931), Kazakh (1933), and Kara-Kalpak (1934). Norris Houghton, after having spent a year observing theatrical productions in Moscow in the 1930s, wrote about these troupes at GITIS:

I shall always remember a class of Yakuts which I visited…. They were dressed in that pathetic approximation of western clothing which so ill-becomes the Bolsheviks and ill fits all of them. Their faces were strongly Mongoloid, and there was an Eskimo quality about their appearance, which shirt and trousers and cotton dress could not eradicate. They were rehearsing in their own Yakutian language a translation of Moliere’s “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme”! To see these tiny black-haired yellow-skinned young men trying to assume the airs and manners of the French 17th century was amusing and a little touching. (1936, 46)

Such openly condescending, racializing phrases do not appear in Soviet-era publications about GITIS. They might have been spoken; perhaps Houghton and a few of his hosts found common ground conversing about the Yakut student, or perhaps Houghton offended with his American-style racism. We do know that GITIS, combining Russian ensemble training with Soviet nationalities policies, was charged to improve national theaters and regional studios, but like similar projects, it both afforded opportunities while also creating structural inequalities and divisions of labor.19

Post-Soviet GITIS no longer mandates separate acting cohorts for non-Russians, but it does continue to assemble and to train such cohorts. During my fieldwork it had just sent a cohort back to Surgut and was preparing one assembled from South Korean acting students. The corresponding Korean and Surgut directing students, however, were folded into directing department cohorts, where those still learning Russian faced difficulties asserting themselves as directors.

People describe studying at GITIS both as like a quarantine in a space capsule and as like attending a summit that gathered people from the farthest reaches of the world. The purpose is to forge professional links to animate divisions of labor, to meet people studying everything from circus management and musical variety production to dramatic criticism. Directors, especially, are supposed to map the available talents and skills, to collect numbers to call. GITIS, for all its hierarchies, brings applicants from distant parts of the former Soviet empire, some of whom arrive penniless at auditions in Moscow (successful candidates receive stipends and lodging at the dorm and free kasha at school until 11:30 A.M.). Roughly a third of our cohort lived in Moscow, at home or with relatives, but most hailed from elsewhere, from Rjazan’, Pskov, Ekaterinburg, Irkutsk near Baikal, Makhachkala in Dagestan, and Estonia. A handful represented points beyond the former Soviet empire: one from Kuwait, two from Korea, and two children of Russian émigrés, respectively from Sweden and France (these students paid tuition and dormitory rent). As one might expect, their diverse experiences provided material for stage work, as well as reasons to tangle with teachers about how to do that work.

Students found these confrontations both productive and frustrating. Since all students knew conflict with teachers, those conflicts related to national identity did not always stand out as more painful, yet they fed divisions of labor. To take up the role of director, to organize attention, is not merely a matter of learning to draw a circle around the stage, to speak to actors in deictic terms (left, right, up, down), or to point a light into the center. It requires collective work over time to make a director. These collectives are animated through hierarchies centered in cosmopolitan cities, and this animation also takes institutional work. These are the historical conditions for learning technologies for intuition, which are also matters of learning divisions of labor—specifically of semiotic and meta-semiotic labors, that is, the work of making meaning and communicating about meaning—divisions that elevate and demonstrate phatic expertise alongside models of communication and contact.