Chapter 06

6.Textual Enchantment and Interdiscursive Labor

COLLECTIVE CREATIVITY: CONTACT AND INTERDISCURSIVE EXPERTISE

In St. Petersburg, in front of the solid and majestic Kazan Cathedral ruling the main prospect, two bronze statues stand commemorating the 1812 victory over Napoleon’s invading army, one representing Field Marshall Mikhail Kutuzov, the other Field Marshall Michael Andreas Barclay de Tolly. De Tolly was descended from members of the Scottish Barclay clan, who had settled in what is now Estonia; his father served in the ranks of Russian imperial nobility. The first time I saw the statue of de Tolly, in the summer of 1988, new acquaintances, dancers from Mongolia studying ballet at the Marinsky, said nothing about this cosmopolitan patriot’s deeds or origins, nothing to criticize imperial ambitions. Instead, they pointed out that from the side, the paper scroll in his hand resembles a penis. Ten years later, in the city of Perm’, musician friends showed me how to see similar protrusions from the figures along the portico of one of their city’s houses of culture. At that time it was common to speak of such moments as manifesting a peculiarly Soviet sense of irony. To me, these acts were not exotic; they recalled Nebraskans nicknaming the state capital skyscraper: “Dick of the desert!” “Prick of the Prairie!” After all, atop its dome stands the bronze Sower, casting seeds to the wind from a bronze sack.

Laughter itself can thus work as a sign. Like any other perceptible phenomenon, laughter can be taken up as meaning something, as pointing to something, as manifesting something; laughter becomes a Peircean interpretant. Emitted by sentient beings, moreover, it can be read as a meta-sign about capacities to understand (“She gets it!”) or about the quality of social relations (“He never laughs at my jokes!”). Laughter is also felt, it is material motion, moving through the lungs, throat, and belly. It can overtake unruly bodies and entire classrooms, be difficult to stifle, and in excess can even cause the body pain; for these reasons, laughter is often seen as if raw, or unmediated. When aligned this way with immediacy, it can seem to signal perfect understanding (belied by recognition of nervous laughter and of laughter to please authority). Laughter that signals a “we” who perceive the same thing from the same angle can thus be extrapolated to identity. And it can seem to distribute complex sentiments like cleverness or discovery across a collective. Synchronous laughter can even allow those of us not dubbed individually as “geniuses” to partake in the affect of protean creativity and to be in the know.

Laughing at a bronze Scot, even Americans and Mongolians speaking a Russian lingua franca can thus forge a sense of contact, if not a durable “we.” Durkheimian concepts such as “collective effervescence” do little, however, to explain what people do with these senses, once they are interpreted. The feeling of laughing together involves and entails more than waves of reflex response and energy. Laughing can also mobilize phatic meta-capacities, to observe not only others’ mirthful reactions to shifts in perspective but also the reactions to those reactions, of those who can’t take a joke. Laughter can also separate and even injure.

Critiques of socialist communication have often discussed laughter and parody as a response to that hegemony. In doing so, they often focus on the ways individuals respond to official forms or systems, as if individuals face structures alone rather than, say, in laughing clusters.1 It is as if there were nothing interesting or creative for collectives to do or that only individuals deserve creative freedom. From images of hive mind to fears of mass brainwashing, terror of collectivities binds many in the United States to defend individual thought and expression to such a degree that to champion collectivist approaches can be ridiculed or marked as dangerous. A teacher at GITIS, by contrast, will argue that the most compelling, original stage encounters are not those worked out by an individual actor rebelling alone against a formal genre. “You can do nothing alone,” the teacher would tell us. Even a one-person show mobilizes collective play.

More than a century before social theorists began to describe multiple perspectives or ontologies via ethnography, theatrical and other artistic practitioners elaborated theories to acknowledge and create multiple points of view. Meyerhold theorized play with relations among angles for perception; evoking his name, twenty-first-century GITIS teachers continue this work. While most have read structuralists such as Saussure and Derrida, they moved beyond structuralism and its posts a long time ago. They are trapped neither by the image of individual minds crashing like birds against giant structures nor by worries that we all, in the end, swim alone among floating signifiers. Having read Bakhtin, Voloshinov, Vygotsky, and Jakobson (Meyerhold and of course his teacher, Stanislavsky, having influenced some of them), they in fact share more axioms with pragmatic linguistic anthropologists than the latter do with other Americans. First, we consider sentient beings actively to make meaning out of words, markings, objects, sounds, and more. Second, we note that they do so always in specific times and places. As one of the teachers would often say, “What are you showing us? There is no love in general, there is no boredom in general. There exist only this love, this specific boredom.”

These singular encounters are never isolated. Not only are they embedded in social contexts, they also are crossed by memories of other situations (“They pronounced it that way”) and projections about their uptake in future situations (“Might this be misheard as a slight?”). Because GITIS people work in collectives, with examples always at hand, they are even able to sustain and even propagate these ideologies about communication, more consistently than linguistic anthropologists so far have managed to broadcast aligned theories. Players strike angles in the here and now of the auditorium, but thereby also afford perspectives on situations or texts from other times and places. Even penis jokes well offstage have to resonate with other texts and situations—they work intertextually and interdiscursively; they are less funny if we lack knowledge of what is usually not said.2

GITIS phatic experts must also master the interdiscursive and intertextual expertise required to make strangers laugh and cry. Put otherwise, phatic skill in the here and now, they taught, requires agility with making connections across situations and texts. During my fieldwork, instructors daily repeated to the first-year cohort the need to “rid you of pre-thought schema,” to react to the unexpected “right here, right now.” Yet at the same time they urged, “You must read Pushkin, Russian folk tales, Tolkien, the Bible” in order to discover which combinations of texts would “strike a chord.” The point, they insist, is not to generalize across encounters, but to recognize possible links.

Such links are imagined to live as notes struck across many minds at once, in memories of books, songs, places, and events. Directing students are put to work early not to reproduce Pushkin’s lines, but to arrange them with actions in spaces already echoing with, say, Pelevin’s heroes or Harry Potter. The audience, however, never presents a library of completely shared texts or remembered situations; the practical goal is thus to strike a chord across an audience, never just a solitary note in an individual. Compelling dramatic work produces harmonies or chimes interesting discordances. An actor voices a line from Pushkin not only to animate a character (or to criticize the character, depending on genre), but also to activate the audience as a reactive, protean body, a living piano with keys that can either resist fingers or amplify their touch.

This practical artistic theory of collective creativity seems more robust to me, more amenable to anthropology, than those bound to romantic or neoliberal individualism. All the same, I bracket my evaluation of the means to create interdiscursive resonance in order to focus on techniques by which people craft a sense of virtuosic, collective play and recognize this as creative. Again, a heavy pile of ideological boulders stands in the way, from anxieties about collective action that mystify allegedly mesmerizing group “effervescence” to warnings of “the madness of the mob.” What others take as a path to automatization or to mass control, GITIS actors, directors, and artists see also as the way to real creativity. Often their words echoed the terms of affect theory, to track “energy,” “forces,” and shifts in “intensities.” Remaining agnostic about those categories—common also to the discourses of paranormal science, we should note—I concentrate in the next sections on divisions of materials, spaces, and labor that channel circuits for joint creativity.

These are the conditions for a specific kind of phaticity, a making of contacts through mediations of mediations, rather than by the erasure of media or material. To conjure sensations of creativity requires media, relies on material techniques. I hope not to romanticize too much; cynical appropriations of the sense of creativity, as in advertising, do this all too well, fixing brand by hinting that to own a certain watch is to participate in creative design, as if new pants offer a frisson of belonging with those on the cutting edge.

PATTERNS OF PATTERNS

As in stage enchantments that cut women in half and put them back together again, collective work, as we have seen, can create the impression of pieces, or even of dyadic segments. Such work also creates wholes. It does so in part by dividing and hiding labor and by visibly producing fragments to then be united. Before we turn to divisions of labor, then, let us consider ways in which fragments and wholes have been understood by some of those who are most invested in creativity, text, memory, and magic.

While pragmatic thinking about communication aims to tangle with specific, historically located situations (how this statue, here and now, makes her laugh with these people and not those), a dominant countertendency is to wave words like magical or ineffable or inchoate language that seems not to fulfill an expected semantic function. It takes more trouble to tease apart functions or purposes that go unnamed or to track social usages or effects that seem to contradict semantic logic. To treat the ways words can do more than one thing at a time beside denote an idea—spark collective laughter, induce action, point to authority—as magical, or even as just too mysterious or complex to parse, however, would negate the possibilities of ethnography, or of any kind of sustained attention, as in theatrical work, to interactions as they unfold in spaces and over time.

Over the last two centuries, starting in late imperial and continuing through Soviet and post-Soviet times, poets, artists, and scholars in Russia have debated the power of words in productive ways, some illuminating the wondrous complexities of living, spoken language as they developed robust metalanguages to theorize political speech and artful action.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Russian symbolist poets such as Aleksandr Blok and Andrei Bely lamented civilization’s numbing effects on the forces for inspiration, the ways mechanization produced social anomie and dissipation, breaking and splitting what should have been left whole. They sought to recover enchantments to rewire links to creative energy and to other souls, and to do so through poetry, in the textures of sound, in vital correspondences among fresh patterns of rhyme and rhythm.3 In works like Bely’s 1910 essay Magija Slov, drawing upon the writings of gnostics such as Vladimir Solovjev and theosophists such as Elena Blavatsky, they joined a broader, transnational search for universal connections, for links among designs, for ways that orders of grammars overlap with the structures of trees or of sea organisms, or even of stellar constellations. They asserted the resonant powers of homologies across patterns and produced detailed commentaries on the ways words—in the right combinations—might transcend repetitive, banal byt, “the daily grind” of chores and automatic habitus. Such poetry would defend against chaotic unintelligibility; in the new world, everything would become commensurable, as if alignment among systems would close the gaps that Saussure and other early modernists had opened between signifieds and signifiers, restoring syntheses of humanity with nature.

A symbolist poet who could align such structures to orchestrate vibrations became a shaman, mediating not only messages, but also orders of reality by bridging times and spaces.4 Like many others in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Russian formalists, symbolists, and futurists (and symbolists who converted to Russian futurism) were impressed by demonstrations of electric power and magnetic fields, as well as then-new theories of relativity. Symbolist poet Blok, forwarding a utopian hybrid of science and the occult like that heralded by theosophy, declared that with the discovery of hypnosis, the medicinal powers of folk incantations were recognized “even by exact sciences.”

While Saussure was lecturing on linguistic structures in Geneva, symbolists in St. Petersburg, like Bely, saw the magic of poetic incantation as emanating not from individual sounds, words, or texts in themselves, but from their relations: “Connections between words, grammatical forms, and figures of speech are, in essence, charms” (Bely [1910] 1985, 93). Words in patterns allow an utterer to link, for example, “two ineffable essences: space, which is accessible to my vision, and that inner sense vibrating mutely inside me that I provisionally call … time” (Bely quoted in Gutkin 1997, 231).⁵ The poet-shaman commands patterns among signs, sounds, and media to call upon nature, to call the future into existence, to extend life across space and time. This particular sort of power is generated not by any word or phrase in isolation, be it spoken or written on paper (as can certainly be so in other semiotic maneuvers for magic, as Keane 2013 demonstrates), but rather by arcs that cross between them, as in electrical circuit nodes or synapses.

Russian futurists differed from the Italian variety, in part because most had passed through a symbolist stage; they were revolutionary pacifists for the machine future. While critical of symbolism’s mystical mood, they projected similar hopes that patterns among sounds, lines, shapes, and colors—form, not only semantic content—could recharge human thought and feeling and thereby change the world. They, too, argued that incantations, even of words that seem incomprehensible, could, through rustlings of sound pattern, enter many a subconscious at once, reuniting humanity.⁶ Russian futurists idealized world peace in a time of war, experimenting with transrational language (zaum) to bridge differences and break down autocratic social systems, to usher in progressive futures. They dreamed that synesthetic arrangements of written text with graphic design (colors, typeface) might evoke the imagination to conjure new social and material realities.

While focused on patterns, Russian futurist poets aimed not so much to discover or plug into vibrant ur-structures (as symbolists had, as structuralists would, each in different ways) as to scramble their circuits. The title of V. Khlebnikov’s poem “Incantation to Laughter” (it continues: “Laugh it up, you laughniks, laughingly …”) gives a wink to earlier claims of supernatural immanence in symbolic patterns, but his work and others’ vandalized grammatical conventions with competing intuitions about street spaces where single lines of speech are interrupted by shards of talk, rays coherent from some new perspective. Their poetic play pointed to the multiple functions of language besides reference and inspired Roman Jakobson, a close friend of futurist poets such as Vladimir Mayakovsky. He would later articulate poetic discoveries for an audience of linguists and literary scholars, contributing to thinking about the utility in communication of marked and unmarked formal distinctions and later about the nonreferential functions of language.

WORD SÉANCE: BLACK MAGIC INTERTEXT

Soviet times and socialist realisms did not disenchant the idea of patterns among words or texts, even while formalists and futurists were repressed. By late socialist times, even highly placed figures noted the importance of resonance among texts and communicative situations—even as they leaned toward conserving original orientations and relations. Drama critic N. Potapov, discussing the Taganka Theater’s production of Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, titled his 1977 review (a review that, some claim, launched a decade of controversy around the play and trouble for its actors and director), “A Séance of Black Magic.” The title echoes events early in the novel, when foreign hypnotist Woland creates chaos, yanking stage managers, censors, and poets through parallel channels more absurdly tangled than any bureaucracy. Bulgakov drafted the satirical fantasy in phases between 1928 and 1940; it is said that he burned one draft in 1930, and that the text remained incomplete, passed along by hand in more than one version. The most famous line in the book, spoken by the visiting foreigner, the magician Woland, has been repeated in varying ways to reflect upon recent Soviet and post-Soviet histories of relations among texts and their destruction: “Manuscripts don’t burn.” Indeed, Soviet-era dissidents took up the phrase as a slogan in defiance of state confiscations of samizdat books. By the twenty-first century, Russian Orthodox church scholars would argue that since it is Woland, the devil, who says that “manuscripts do not burn,” we ought to question his claim; manuscripts, they point out (like good materialists), do burn, and people do forget poetic lines, unless they memorize them with an eye to times when paper will not be available (as a number of Soviet intellectuals did).

The novel achieved cult status despite—or because of—deletions and changes to the text. In the mid-1960s it went into print, with about 10 percent cut, in the journal Moscow (1966, no. 11, and 1967, no.1). This was the version that an actor in the 2005 televised serial version recalls: a hand-bound set of photocopies of the journal in the library stacks that he read standing up, rather than studying for exams in foreign literature. In 1973 a version closer to Bulgakov’s 1940 draft was published by the publisher Khudozhestvennaja Literatura, and soon afterward the stage version went into rehearsal.

Potapov begins his review with high praise, describing the prelude, during which actors emerged from the shadows to pronounce phrases belonging to the characters. This staging reminds the critic of an earlier Bulgakov text, which he quotes. These are “stars that remain even when our tel i del (’bodies and deeds’) are gone…. These key lines are like facets of a crystal, scattering rays, the many-layered artistic thoughts of the author” (Potapov 1977, 6). The metaphor seems approvingly to echo the principle of refraction in aesthetic luchism (“ray-ism”: a theme that not only marks the writings of avant-garde painters such as Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov, but also appears in Voloshinov’s essays on reported speech).

Soon enough, however, the critic complains, the actors refract their lines in directions too crooked. He offers as an example the scene in which Woland showers dollars over his audience, cash that, once people go out on the street, changes back into worthless paper scraps. This scene is played, says the critic, as a “sociological experiment” to imply that people in this audience are shallow and selfish. As an expert authority in the intertextual, he accuses the Taganka of transposing the original author’s judgments “from the time in which Bulgakov wrote onto the viewers now,” to make a bad analogy between the 1930s and 1977: “[The character] Berlioz, speaking with a self-satisfied, victorious smile about atheism, states that, ‘the majority of our population consciously, long ago stopped believing tales about God.’ The discussion is painted in the theater in tones such that Bulgakov’s irony directed at Berlioz, at his erudition as a dull pedant … begins to sound like irony about things and categories essential for our society. Woland’s skepticism reigns over the play” (Potapov 1977, 6).

The Taganka crew did not disagree; social criticism was among their controversial, experimental aims, after all, a different order of magic. It is worth noting that what Potapov objected to most of all was the way the Taganka’s staging isolated the Master, the writer, as the only one capable of true creativity: “Having left the figure of the Master, and with it the philosophical theme of creative work, a little in the shadows, it exaggerates the legacy of the unknown artist— the manuscript. As a work made in solitude.” Potapov’s view in this matter has not lost support; while GITIS instructors maintain close and affectionate ties with the Taganka—its leading directors deliver guest lectures throughout the academic year—none recommend solitude as a condition for meaningful creative work onstage, instead pressing for collective interaction, among people and objects, as the best condition for creativity.

THE ART OF THEORY

In the United States, arguably, fewer spaces encourage thinking or speaking of creativity except as a product of individual freedom, dividing “individual” from “collective” as if these labels represent natural antinomies, affixing them to opposing ideologies (capitalist versus socialist, among others). In Russia, these oppositions were less fixed, one to each ideology; Stanislavsky ran experiments for creativity among collective ensembles decades before the socialist state, while explorers and scientists in popular Soviet films sang lyrics extolling individual decisions in love and life. To be sure, in the United States people actually working in many fields make it good practice to “bounce ideas” in a group or say that “two heads are better than one.” Americans also know how to create with an ear to echoes with past creations, to consider the intertextual echoes among phrases as well as interdiscursive references among situations. In Russia as in the United States, plenty of people not trained in such expertise crack jokes during a film by riffing in lines from others or mash up memes from news texts to comment, for example, on common workplace dynamics. Techniques that mobilize forces beyond the individual—relations to other persons, time spaces, and texts—along with theories about how they work, however, have been more often and more elaborately articulated in Russia, and in more contexts over time.

To those socialized to anchor expression to individuals and to overvalue description as the main purpose of speaking, collective acts of creativity often seem to work “without signs.” Such socialization is familiar in most spaces in the United States. By contrast, Soviet middle schools addressed multiple functions in courses on rhetoric (college students, by the 1970s if not earlier, read Jakobson and Bakhtin). Others in Russia who have crossed my path over the decades also speak more easily about nonreferential communication than do even many colleagues in the United States. In the classroom and elsewhere, dominant American common sense matches definitions to words and voices to bodies and separates speaking from doing. All the above ideologies live in both countries, of course; the difference lies in the extent and power of their habitual evocation across fields and venues and their influence in shaping possibilities to communicate about communication (and ultimately ways to communicate).

Speaking historically, Russophone artists and thinkers have nudged Anglophone scholars to consider more deeply questions parallel to those raised by language philosophers from Ludwig Wittgenstein through John L. Austin, by ethnographers such as Malinowski, and, of course, pragmatic philosophes such as Peirce.7 The more I read about the formalist and futurist avant-garde in Russia, the more I am convinced that the ideas percolating through linguistics, literary criticism, and philosophy from the mid-twentieth century onward were already being theorized by poets, directors, and painters. It was they who first directed ears and eyes, via abstract forms, to nonreferential functions, to the ways grammar refracts class struggle (Mayakovsky) and the ways sounds resemble substances or vibrate with affects (Osip Mandelshtam, Andrei Bely). They enacted what scholars distilled into linear print form as theory. Khlebnikov’s “Incantation to Laughter” is a manifesto of multifunctionality; it demands that readers attend simultaneously to poetic play with morphemes and to shifting conative functions across a series of directives (“Notice this about the fragments of the word ‘laugh-ter’—and laugh!”). This play, along with essays by Meyerhold and Mayakovsky, preceded Jakobson’s diagrams; after all, they were friends, sitting up late into the night discussing plays and verses. In a similar fashion, Bakhtin and Voloshinov did not invent polyphony or polyglossia so much as figure out how to explain what was fresh about the way Fyodor Dostoevsky orchestrated and layered many character voices. The repression of the formalists after the 1920s could not snuff out their ideas; they were already circulating in too many genres and media.

Instructors at GITIS are even more familiar than most with key theorists of texts and intertexts, citing Jakobson, Propp, Bakhtin, Kristeva, Derrida, Umberto Eco, Wittgenstein, Austin, and John Searle. They describe and wield nonreferential functions that linguistic anthropologists have yet to categorize. They never question that speech is action, as they ponder the effects of this wink to chime against a text or that nod to echo what one might hear on the bus. Russians who do not read semiotic theory thus nevertheless encounter executions of pragmatic and semiotic principles at the theater that, in the United States, remain esoteric, almost occult beyond academe. They also come to them via literature: the Russophone reader who meets Dostoevsky is already acquainted with accents and styles, can locate shifts between formal and informal modes of address, and can relate both to depictions of class or kin or gender hierarchies, or hear characters voiced,8 as Bakhtin elaborated, without translator’s footnotes (see also Friedrich 1972). For such a prepared public, art can do the work that theory does elsewhere. The alacrity of students at GITIS to take on the professional mastery of interdiscursive expertise contrasts with the baffled resistance American scholars face when we try to teach about such matters.

BROKEN GENERATIONS? PHATIC LOSS AND INTERTEXTUAL ENCHANTMENT

Widespread familiarity in Russia with the principle that meaning happens across texts and discursive situations amplifies the uses and popularity of this technology for intuition, to the degree that some see it as even more powerful than it is, as intertextual enchantment. Post-Soviet author Victor Pelevin, by contrast, in his best-selling 1999 novel Generation P., mocks the fetish made of post-structural intertextual theory, to hilarious effect, depicting a post-1991 Moscow dazzled by multiplications of product wrapper texts, book covers, billboards, and television ads. The protagonist, a translator with advanced degrees in philology, loses his job and must turn his poetic, intertextual talents to advertising work. Experimenting with a range of pharmaceuticals, he hallucinates paranoid resonances among street signs and reads pictures on cigarette packages through passages from Saussure’s lectures on semiotics, hilariously divining them all as signs pointing him to jingles. How to sell Sprite to Russians … as the opposite of Coke … of the tsars! Hmmm, what if we make anti-Nicholas into Ne-kola! “Not bad, but 7-up already did ‘the UnCola,’ ” his new boss informs him, hinting that he should broaden his knowledge of global advertising texts. The copy especially tickles those who, like most in Russian cities (and fewer in America), know both American and Russian literature and pop culture.

In early twenty-first-century Moscow, to wax nostalgic for times when one could take for granted which texts, statues, or slogans stood ready to serve at the party (if not for the party) was not necessarily to hanker for Soviet master categories or to pine for a lost sense of unified thought (see also Boym 1994; Pesmen 2000; Oushakine 2000; Yurchak 2015a). Lost, too, were common points around which people could project distortions and angles: this had been great fun, spinning around them even through gestural meta-discourse. It was loss not just of content—a statue down, a street name changed—but also of channels. The old texts did more than carry messages; they attracted collective attention, banter, and debate—all of which made live contacts around them more visible. Their absence was a phatic loss.

For many the events of the 1990s unseated a repressive order, but it also rubbed out some communication lines. In the 1980s glasnost’ colorfully exploded in pages of print on the streets; stacks of new books (some reprints of old samizdat), pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers at every busy street corner and metro station signaled “freedom of speech.” Beginning in the years just before and after the Soviet socialist state collapsed, sudden textual plenty and variety contrasted with the shortages of food and sundries; it was difficult to find something to eat, but at least books and papers had become more interesting. Ten years later, even twenty, even against allegations that the “Putin era” has destroyed the independent press, colorful flows of print continue.

Plenitude itself, however, began to signify differently.9 By summer 2001, some erudite friends of mine in Russia were complaining that people “no longer connect” through books. One friend had always spent hours a day at the kitchen table, surrounded by piles of newspapers and books; she rarely finished a single book without reading several others simultaneously. Still, she lamented that now there were too many dizzying arrays of glossy magazines and pulp best sellers at every metro station, “not as many good ones, and we no longer all read the same book all at once,” she said, gesturing to the stacks. Contemporary fiction mirrors her words, setting up plots to stress shortages and excesses of books.¹⁰ The fact that there are so many voracious readers in this “most literate of countries” only feeds the theme that broken links among texts reflect broken links among people.

GITIS teachers complained that entering cohorts lacked orientation to “classic texts.” This lack, they said, rendered beginning students shallow, deprived them of means to escape their own habitual perspectives, in order to orient to others’ actions and conditions; a real handicap to collective improvisation. This lack made the students “not interesting.” They needed to learn the very basics for intertextual enchantment; directing students especially needed to listen for other “there and thens” to animate “here and now.” Instructors maintained that they, the first cohorts considered too young to recall Soviet times, could neither appreciate older texts nor yet distinguish worthy new ones. And because they were not training to be writers, but training to animate scripts as action, the needed to recalibrate not only to texts, but also to people who read texts (or who don’t). They were simultaneously exhorted both to read more and to pay better attention to conversations unfolding around them among the people on the street. They needed to be retuned in more than one way in order to align phatically from the stage.

Similar observations are made about “generations” all the time. The problem is not always understood in term of lack, the past severed, but in terms of excess, intervening layers, competing channels in the present and near past. Michael Silverstein (2005, 13) describes a kind of “anachronistic interdiscursivity” among American college freshman who react to Shakespeare “with a sense of déjà vu from 19th-century and later literature with which they were familiar.” Through layers of intervening texts, they read Shakespeare as if flawed by the “[hackneyed] values such over-adjectivalization has come to have in our Strunk-and-White era of modernist prose standard.” They are “intertextually deaf” to sixteenth-century parodies of speech because forms similar to those Shakespeare played with have already refracted through so many other texts.

Russian author Tatjana Tolstaja has described a kind of post-Soviet intertextual deafness as a loss of the sense for the connections among texts and people made in other times, in fiction exploring the consequences after books themselves are sacrificed. In her 2003 novel Slynx (Kys’), an apocalyptic blast has left nothing in Moscow, nothing but the stone Kremlin and some paper books. Recalling Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, authorities confiscate these books as they find them, except that they do not burn all the manuscripts; they cart them to a central warehouse.11 There, scribes produce abridged versions to redisseminate to the people, in a genre blending the Russian imperial-era lubok and the comic book. After a series of absurdly violent conflicts, the protagonist reaches the warehouse in a Kremlin palace bursting with stacks. There he reads and reads, in no order. He has no way to relate any book to another one, or to the world of people, so he wanders from sentence to sentence, cataloging books by color or by thickness of the spine, not recognizing that he remains illiterate in the ways that the books had once spoken to each other and beyond.

Texts slip in and out of coherence with their interdiscursive and intertextual surroundings all the time; it takes human effort both to set and repeat alignments and to break them. Such effort does more to produce generations, genders, genres, and so forth, than the other way around.¹² Preferred relations among texts, best practices for picking out patterns to strike an interdiscursive echo, correlate with social expectations about ways to communicate, be it in democratic or more hierarchical collectivities. The “power citation” at the beginning of a scholarly publication is a good example in an academic register, intended “to situate” the piece “in a conversation” and also to recognize the aid and influence of others; it can be an act of collegial citizenship and of exclusion all at once (and we worry about getting it right: Will I be sorry not to have cited someone in relation to this point? What have I missed?). We learn what a theoretical conversation once was through back formations that are written by scholars who align with currently dominant schools of thought. Bourdieu (1977) makes a similar point about the ways people structure accounts of kinship relations: in a world where multiple kinds of relations are always possible, a kinchart is always a situated back formation. Like that third cousin who might also count as an aunt, except during matchmaking or when the census comes around, the writings of women, colonized peoples—and artists—are both absorbed and erased by scholars when they call them anything but “theoretical.”

At GITIS in fall 2002, the very first days of theatrical education concentrated on cultivating relationships of people to people, people to texts, and texts to other texts, in situations beyond the walls of the school. “Who remembers when people used to say ___?” Thus began training not only in intertextual, but in interdiscursive expertise, in learning not only how to riff with famous texts, but how to riff on ways this character or that might sound out some quotation while in the sauna, or on the telephone with a client, and so forth. Over the summer, first-year students had been assigned to accumulate found texts, bits of song, snippets of overheard conversation, and text from ads for rooms to let. They presented their found bits in ways that treated texts as if they stood alone; plays on words and verbal absurdities ruled the day. The head instructor saw this as a troubling indication that these young people were indifferent to those who generated or read the texts for a reason. They could not read beyond their own skin. He accused the cohort of rejecting the “depths behind the word.” By “depths” he meant not layers of internal selves, as depth psychology would have it, but biographical trajectories that crisscross conditions, in circles binding specific events, spaces, and times.

RETUNING

According to GITIS instructors, even shared material surroundings still standing across Soviet-built urban spaces could not overcome a generation’s loss of the means to connect. Students contested this judgment, insisted on knowing, but they were told that impressions were just that, and that they did not cohere. One afternoon an instructor asked the cohort to lie on the floor, to imagine that their bodies were flat, like scraps of material that someone was beginning to inflate. He walked around, poking: “The air got to this arm, no?” He asked several students which toys they were becoming (Fieldnotes, December 2002):

STUDENT:	I am the “Melancholy Clown.”
TEACHER:	Why?
STUDENT:	Just so. No choice. You know, “Soviet Union.”
TEACHER:	But the Soviet Union—you never saw it!
STUDENT:	Hello! [Zdrast’e! “Give me a break!”]
TEACHER:	Good morning! [Dobroe utro! “You give me a break!”] What year were you born?
STUDENT:	’82.
TEACHER:	Brezhnev died in ’82 and the USSR was no more. You saw only remnants.
STUDENT:	Well, you could get only two colors of tights.
TEACHER:	That was not the Soviet Union.
STUDENT:	Well what?
TEACHER:	Remnants.

As Tatyana Tolstaya depicted scattered, disordered ruins and texts in Slynx, the teacher revealed seemingly shared material signs of the Soviet (tights, dolls) to be disparate scraps, remnants, not webs of social action or meaning. Contact with such objects, as with single texts, was not enough to repair phatic loss.

In an attempt to cure interdiscursive deafness and phatic loss, the teachers introduced another Soviet-era manuscript, not a work of fiction but a state-published handbook for everyday living. In December 2002 GITIS instructors created an assignment featuring the Soviet-era cookbook and table etiquette manual Kniga o vkusnoj i zdorovoj pishche (The book of tasty and nutritious food). The cookbook had had modest circulation until 1953, the year that marked its first mass printing in the hundreds of thousands; by the late 1970s edition, circulation had hit the millions. The teaching staff presented the project as an innovative way to incite a young cohort to feel the tender irony suffusing the 1950s, the tone of a time when “hungry people opened a book with pictures of ham in aspic.” Perhaps they hoped to spark some intertextual magic.

“This book embodied ideology,” said the head instructor. “Through food, it made people part of the system.” Cultural historian Catriona Kelly similarly argues that the book represented an early attempt to present Soviet society as a unified whole through luxury goods—goods that (in time) were intended for all (2001, 287). She describes this book, first published in 1939, as the “most opulent” since the Revolution; while educating people about a “rational diet,” it also extolled “elegance,” “pleasantness,” and “comfort.” The head instructor introduced the book to the directing students in starker terms:

This is a strange assignment. 2003 will mark 50 years since the first mass publication of The Book of Tasty and Nutritious Food. This is a phenomenally cynical book—it came out during a hungry time. But this is culinary poetry. Part sweet, part bitter. Our Russian history. About the text: one of our instructors had experience staging it out east. He juxtaposed readings with video of an old woman telling her life story—terrible experiences, but with such humor! Such a sense of counterpoint! You, then, are to select and stage recipes, one each for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and holidays, too. We take it up not merely as a book, or as a document, but as history. (Fieldnotes, October 22, 2002)

One instructor (the director who had staged the book in Siberian towns) passionately interjected: “It is second only after Mein Kampf!” The master, talking over him, complicated that perspective:

Of course, there must be humor in theatrical play … but there must be a counterpoint, a metaphor or something else to burst the bubble of happy propaganda. Do this, but with one request: avoid politicization (“And sexuality,” interjected another instructor). These things are beginning to be understood less in political as in aesthetic terms. The political is not interesting. The aesthetic phenomena of that culture is what is interesting. No political theater … we want you to feel the embellishments and curlicues of the Stalinesque baroque. Our problem, really, is how to acquaint you with a cultural layer that is now departing.

The goal was to ride the text and to reanimate relations to it, as a means to, as the maestro put it, to retune the students to the entire “intonatsija of a time,”13 those years just after Stalin’s death in 1953, but before Khrushchev’s secret speech in 1956. Similar sorts of discussions were happening across spaces like this one, by the way, before state media in what came to be called Putin’s Russia had amplified memories of that time, and the time just before it, of World War II and its losses.

RECIPES FAILED BUT FAMILIAR

It was important, the instructors said that day, to begin work not with abstraction from the text in general, but with specific texts, copies covered with notes and footnotes, with recipes or pictures stuck between the pages, with all their fingerprints and butter stains (index and icon of specific, past moments), as each book passed through hands and changed shelves. Here is some of the dialogue among teachers and students about the assignment, this time to stress the involvement that the topic of specific books aroused:

MAESTRO:	Who has the book? Several must have it in their families.
STUDENT:	[Says an early edition has passed down in his family now for three generations, with photographs, with layers of reactions penciled in.]
MAESTRO:	What a great idea! Bring it in! [See] how we make wealth of our poverty!
TEACHER 1:	You see in the recipes each family history!
MAESTRO:	Send a telegram to Irkutsk, immediately! [They discuss where in the city to find old copies, the colors of different editions.] It’s like the Bible. Hungry people would open it up—
TEACHER 1:	The epoch is gone, but the book stays on as a monument!
TEACHER 2:	I tried to make a dessert once; it came out inedible!
MAESTRO:	It is a purely Russian book. France has tons of atlases of cheese; it is considered normal…. [F]or Russia, this book was not normal.

The cookbook, in its various editions, even very old ones, was a familiar object to nearly everyone in the room (friends, too, have shown me family copies since then). Hunger was also no stranger; the institute gave out free kasha every morning before 11:00, and for many students living in the dormitory on stipends this was often the only meal they could count on.

The instructors never seemed satisfied with the staged sketches that the students crafted from pieces of cookbook text. It was rough going through every stage. After he had introduced the project, the master gave the directing students an hour to leaf through the pages and select sections. The first read aloud a description of how cognac is made. The instructors criticized: this would never work on stage, too much “technical language.” The student responded, “But what about the ending? The advice, ‘In our country, drinking is—’.” A teacher interrupted: “Yes, yes, fine. Take that part,” declaring that section likely to strike a chord and to “find addressees.” Another student read a paragraph about shopping for meat and produce, which the teachers dismissed immediately, quipping that the youngest students “will just not understand.”

I could see what they meant; over the previous decade the contents, sizes, and locations of grocery stores had changed incredibly, as had the kind, quantity, and packaging of goods, along with habits for selecting vegetables or meat and comparing prices. Even I, a foreigner, then eighteen years older than the youngest students, better recalled standing in line for the single type of cheese in an otherwise empty store and bargaining for produce on the street. One evening after classes, around midnight on the way home, one of the students and I stopped in at the twenty-four-hour supermarket not far from our dormitory, and I came up against our difference. We had been chatting about films and the recent snow. In the store, he expressed frustration that while the shop stocked three flavors of gin and tonic in a can, stacked in a pyramid beside a giant tank of enormous live carp, they did not carry the flavor he wanted. He looked at me blankly when I laughed, recounting how we used to bring jars from home to siphon beer from the beer truck tank (you could still sometimes get milk and kvas this way in Moscow). The teachers had a point: Soviet-era shopping, the twisting rounds of relations in buying and selling, hoarding or gifting, had too many moving parts to handle just then. Even the texture of an exotic food seemed easier to convey; when the next student read a description of Roquefort cheese—no less foreign to these students than was standing in line—the master declared “Pesnja! Chudo!” (“A song! A miracle!”). As a body, the teachers approved a menu that included a dish of fried brains.

Over the next few weeks, part of each day was devoted to experimenting and debating in small groups: Where should we place the vodka bottle? Do we read a section on dumplings with a melodic Urals’ accent, in a whisper? Clusters worked across the two rooms belonging to the cohort; acting students and directing students switched roles. Despite the fact that everyone was working from the same text, when students showed their first attempts to the instructors, the sketches showed even less unity in genre, tone, and sentiment than had other series of études (e.g., a series based on “personal ads” or “observations of animals”). “Fried Brains” came off as a grim, suicidal prison diary, the actor gulping water in order to swallow each spoonful of grey mush. In “Setting the Table,” in contrast, six chirpy maids in uniform applied for a high-class restaurant job, parodying slapstick silent film. A student from Daghestan had been nudged to take up the section on Caucasian cuisine; between lines of mountain song, a rousing fantasy of rebellious and robust southern men, he savored lamb stew. Two female Korean directing students (who, said the instructors, “probably can understand nothing in this book”) were encouraged to depart entirely from the text. They staged the discovery of kimchi and rice cakes by early Homo erectus, re-creating a Pleistocene cave with multicolored lights and echoes. The pieces did not come together; just one was selected to continue to the semester exam. Eight years later, while reminiscing about this project with several students at one actress’s apartment, her mother (a film actress herself) quipped, “They did not know themselves what they wanted from you all.” Certainly at work in the cookbook assignment was a “fantasy of cross-generational belonging,” as teachers partook in the diverse forms and aims of nostalgia in Russia at the time (Nadkarni and Shevchenko 2004, 490). Our concern here, however, is less with nostalgia and more with how the dream of intertextual alignment around the cookbook hit the knottier movements though both interdiscursive relations and struggles to orchestrate such relations. Such knots in fact proved useful in dividing the labors of performance. Even if no unified production emerged, the teachers achieved other goals in asking the students to consider the links among specific copies of a text and the people who had read it.

DIVISIONS OF LABOR: TEXT AND ANTITEXT

It is not enough to separate or link words, lyrics, books, or even entire genres. Juxtapositions do not work alone to make theater; acts of division and connection work through standing social relations and hierarchies even as they produce divisions of interdiscursive expertise. The stage director, the orchestra conductor—these European roles within theatrical production solidified during the nineteenth century, as the large theatrical and musical academies were being founded across the metropoles.14 The director and conductor embody positions that express the apical hierarchies and panoptic fantasies of empire, organizing communication from the distance of the hall, watching the timing and intensity of contacts among players and with props, with an eye to the perspectives of future auditors.

A director moves differently across the stage spaces than actors do, pacing the auditorium, climbing onto and jumping off the boards. Actors often prefer that directors do not close the distance too much. In Moscow and Perm’, in town in Nebraska and in New York, while acting in plays and directing them, I have heard actors complain when the director gives direction like an actor; directors are to explain, to tell, while actors are to show. Actors can take too much demonstration as a sign of condescension. At the Moscow Romani Theater in the early 1990s such condescension could take on tones of ethnocentric superiority; as more than one actress recounted to me, the troupe did not appreciate directors who demonstrated gestures before trying verbal descriptions or metaphors, as if the actor were a puppet or a parrot, just a mimic with no knowledge of the world.

The Russian academies respect that division of labor in the curriculum. For the actors in the directing department, the first year is devoted to observations and attention, bodily flexibility, and speed of nervous response. Acting students begin work with scripts only in the second year; the first year involves only tiny snippets of found texts (personal ads, overheard street talk). Some lessons, as we have seen, abandon not only text and speech but also other material media—even facial expressions and eye gaze—to practice making contact with fewer and fewer media. The handful of directing students in the cohort, however, followed an additional, textual track. Each night after the actors were released, around 9:30, the teachers met separately with the directing students, until about 11:30 (sometimes, if the trip home on the subway seemed too daunting at that hour, some slept over in a classroom or behind some scenery). Beginning directors were exhorted in these hours to build “echoes among texts,” especially along cosmopolitan literary paths, to be able to combine Bulgakov and Tolkien, Pushkin and Shakespeare, Limonov and Don DeLillo, The Cherry Orchard and The Vagina Monologues. They were told to read theoretical texts not only about the theater, but about texts, about style and form: Jakobson and Bakhtin, Eco and Kristeva, Shklovsky and Propp.

With acting students, by contrast, instructors foregrounded bodily forms of semiosis: the occasional quote from the Buddha or Pushkin or Meyerhold to exhort actors to “trust the body.” Lessons in stage speech built awareness of the shifting shapes and moistness of the palate and throat, the size and strength of the diaphragm, as instruments for articulating all manner of sounds. Daily drills also trained awareness of others’ bodily shifts, others’ twitches and noises, the texture and timing of their movements and utterances; only such attention could open channels for compelling responses, make their contacts coherent as such to viewers. Drills foregrounded responses and collective imagination over individualized expressions, training sensory reflexes to quick relational shifts. Words were subsumed under these goals, for instance, serving to activate them. For example, every morning after stretching, students were to jog in place while imagining a run through the woods. The teaching assistant yelled out “Branch”! They ducked. “Scythe!” They dodged. “Stump!” They leaped. They had been doing this for a few weeks, reacting to these three words that signaled three distinct obstacles, when he threw in a new one: “Brook!” Some students, flummoxed, paused. He chastised them: they should be able to react energetically to any unexpected utterances, “Even the word kosmos! Let your body go, it will react by itself. You are too afraid to make a mistake. The body does not have to act correctly, just interestingly” (Fieldnotes, December 2002).

A week later, after a similar surprise switch in the lexicon of command, one of the students objected that they did not “have time” to respond creatively. They were told: “Your brain should not have to work. The body itself—the impulse, catch the impulse, don’t extinguish it.” A body must be trained into sensitivity to tune into the possibilities, to capture the whole range of impulses that a word like kosmos might trigger.

Instructors used the word tekst to signify several things: speech on stage, the trajectory of the script, and the world of texts and intertextual citations, from classics to boulevard romances. To clarify which sense was in play required attending to other cues. For example, instructors might urge student actors to “avoid schematic text and trust the body,” while simultaneously instructing them to animate their own body parts as figures who speak to other parts or to “produce text” about the body. Such was a drill for developing sensory attention: a student stood in the middle of a circle, eyes closed as other students approached in turn to offer her their hands. As she took each one, by feeling the fingers she was to name their owners. As she began to work, the teacher cried, “Text! Text! She must formulate information!” He asked her to describe aloud her process of discernment, the details as each came to mind. She began: “This hand, this hand is male…. This one is not a man’s—these are long nails—but wait, a ring … think, think! … Not ours … male.” It took some trial and error for her to produce just the right balance of text versus touch and movement for the drill, but at no time did the acting student indicate that reaching for a book of Pushkin was being called for by the term.

CONFLICTING IDEOLOGIES

Separations of text from not-text, from bodily gesture, from silence, and so forth were neither pure nor consistent. Consider drills demanding that actors verbalize “inner text.” For example, a classic task, familiar to nearly any actor in Russia from one’s earliest training, is to ask the student simply to enter the practice room and decide where to sit while everyone watches. In our cohort, the first student to give it a try fixed his eyes quickly on a lone, empty chair, walked to it, and sat down. “Not interesting!” judged the master instructor. The student was sent to the corridor to try again, this time to “add text.” He returned, uttering a somber: “There is a chair.” The master instructor interrupted: “What is this, ‘To be, or not to be?! You are acting too schematically,” not “reacting in the present moment,” merely quoting from Shakespeare without thinking about how to respond to the here and now. He sent the student out to try again, telling him to “concentrate your circle of attention” on the “given conditions” of this room. The student reentered: “Hmmm…. if I put the chair over there with the other students, then I’ll be the only student sitting on a chair … but I can’t really go sit with the teachers…. Hmm, maybe I’ll just put it right here in the middle.” This time his work was judged an improvement, “more interesting, do you all see now?”

In another warm-up, students were to treat their bodies as new interlocutors. They were to open channels among separate body parts, first creating clusters whom the student should observe and listen to before joining in as just another voice. To begin, students moved about the room while listening for sounds from within, sounds that captured “the body’s feelings. Don’t force it. Listen more attentively to your body, to how your body talks! … There will be counter-action…. This way, when you sing and speak, it will be with your body and not merely with your vocal cords” (Fieldnotes, 2003). To rephrase: acting students are not to avoid all speaking or writing on stage, but are to avoid enacting “ready-made texts,” instead developing their articulations in concert with every other being and thing on stage, including their own bodies, which can also behave unexpectedly. To work with texts and to strategically stage a play in relation to other texts is the director’s job, to arrange and orchestrate texts and bodies and objects and to achieve some effect through their resonance. To strike a chord.

GITIS teachers described the differences among the types of labor that produce stage productions in terms of that labor’s relationship to text, and instructors often repeated this to actors: “Ne tekst a povedenie—vot osnova nashej shkoly” (Not text, but behavior—that is the base of our school) and “Nashe delo—shkurnoe” (Our job is under/in the pelt), and thus not for the squeamish, they might add (the last phrase echoing Stalinist and criminal registers, perhaps to signal the appealing danger of their work onstage, which must grapple with the pull of egotism). In every class at GITIS, phrases prescribing how actors ought to relate to words unfurled every day, cropping up also in quotations from master playwrights, from records of famous rehearsals with directors: “A word must ripen and warm before you send it out on the stage,” said Aleksandr Kuprin. “As Meyerhold told us, ‘Words are just the design on the embroidery canvas.’ ”

At the beginning of the school year, a list of required readings was taped next to the homeroom door. It included plays, literature, and of course, the writings of Stanislavsky, Mikhail Chekhov, and Meyerhold. At midyear an instructor drew attention to this list during an exercise focused on developing attention to and memory of details in one’s immediate environment. He swept his gaze over each student, asking: “How long have you been meeting in this room? Three weeks? Do you know every object in it? Look around, what is to the left of the door?” One student responded: “A list of library readings.” “And what is on the list?” They tried, one by one, to remember. One claimed to “see clearly” that the list was headed by a certain title, but upon checking, it was not there. The teacher quipped, “She looked but didn’t see.” Finally, one student admitted that he had “looked at the list but didn’t read it.” After this scolding, that list was never again referred to during acting classes (the acting students also took lecture courses on the history of theater).

Actors should leave the interdiscursive magic to others, to those trained to sound texts and situations for echoes. Directors, by contrast, learn to play with erudition, to juggle potential audience memories of many texts, to bring actors’ work and other production elements into alignment (or interesting discord) with such memories. This division was made explicit one evening around 11:00, when students sprawled across the floor were discussing techniques for breaking conventional stage frames. One asked the teacher how he could know when he “was or was not supposed to make the fourth wall?” Where to draw such lines, the teacher replied, can be a question of genre, but ultimately the actor should “put the wall wherever the director says to.”

But while the division was stated and reinforced, it could never be complete; teaching acting as one set of skills and directing as another was sometimes a sociotechnical matter of segregating media and mediators (“speech versus action,” “text versus sense,” “actors listen to directors”) but at other times a matter of uniting them (“body as speech,” “texts as energy”). Such seeming inconsistencies do not deflate the spells of theatrical enchantment: to attract and distract attention, as the stage magician knows, requires a palate of possible contrasts: shiny and dark, fast and slow, curved movements and straight, words and papers appearing and then disappearing. Theatrical pedagogy is itself theatrical, as it works through multiple, overlapping, and contradictory circles, stagings that call for quick shifts, as if making wormholes where students could feel categories of mind and body, matter and spirit, text and action, sounds and silence switch charges (this, I argue, is one of the reasons students enjoyed theatrical work so much, even while it made them suffer).

Meta-semiotic labor is socialized at GITIS in ways that reproduce conflicting ideologies about communication that are distributed across divisions of labor. Not everyone is enabled to switch among ideologies, but they all must learn enough about them all in order to work together. The institution licenses directors as meta-semiotic and interdiscursive generalists and meta-phatic specialists who mediate in several directions, between actor and script, actors and actors, actors and audience. Their socialization, acting and directing students together, cultivates actors’ agility to oscillate in their relationships to signs and materials—to cleave to words and then reject them—a protean capacity that allows directors to direct them, and in many genres. Thus, when a teacher lionized a “classic text” in one breath and then in the next demonized overreliance on “literary schema,” it was less a matter of uttering a categorical paradox than of dividing semiotic labors.

Both actor and director must be flexible, able to shift labors, but from different perspectives, in different ways. A directing student will try his or her hand at acting, but acting students hardly ever direct (until, perhaps, years after graduation). Directors need to learn the position of the actor in order to convince or even to manipulate. One exercise for the actors that I observed midway through the first year reinforced these divisions by allowing acting students to have a go at thinking like directors. Separating first by gender, students were to take turns reciting personal ads that they had collected for character studies. They were to listen to each other and to cut in when they “felt an interesting juxtaposition” or “a conflict between texts”:

TEACHER:	Here’s the game. We ask Julia to read her personal ad [as if] to some concrete addressee. If it fits, you can answer; if not, you can set up a conflict.
STUDENT:	Conflict how? I don’t get it.
TEACHER:	OK, for instance, you read, “Seeking sponsor.” So he might answer, “Seeking a girl. I am no sponsor.” (Recording, November 4, 2002)

The actors had trouble with this one. After they had tried a few times, the teacher called a stop, reminding them that “behind every ad is a real desire,” but what that is, ultimately, would be for their directors to help them to figure out. As actors, they should learn to “ask your directors a lot of questions.” How many questions would vary depending on the director’s preferences, so teachers admonished students to pay attention to signs that they were posing “two few questions” or asking “too many.” An actor should expect this variance, be alert to accommodating the director, an expectation of deference that again points up the ways constraints on communication arise in and reproduce social hierarchies.

Students are even trained to expect and accept a director’s opacity about such decisions for the good of the production. Advice to new directors on how to motivate actors, scattered through canonical masters’ rehearsal records and echoed in lessons that I observed, claimed the strategic utility of indirection: “The actor must be gently drawn out…. If you say, ‘Your psychological state at this moment is fear,’ he will give actions that are artificial or exaggerated.” In the late Soviet movie Uspekh (Success, 1987; dir. Khudjakov), a director leaves Moscow to work in a regional theater. There, he experiments with staging Chekhov’s Seagull (a play about actors and playwrights) but encounters resistance, even hostility, from the troupe, entrenched in their ways. The film follows him as he brilliantly puzzles out how to manipulate each actor, sparking the reactions and emotions offstage that he needs them to animate onstage. They neither appreciate nor understand his efforts until opening night, when the pieces come together. As directors learn, directing can require keeping actors in the dark, that they not understand the production as a whole. Collective creativity is not necessarily egalitarian, and its joint labors, even animated as they are by contradicting ideologies about how language, signs, and media work, can reinforce the principles of hierarchy by showing their spectacular effects.