PREFACE
1. Anthropologists writing on alien contact and communication include Battaglia (2012); Lepselter (2005); and Samuels (2005). On the enchantment of communication across species as part of a modernist project, see Bennett (2001).
2. On ideas about the fourth dimension in modern art and the influence of theosophy, see Ringbom (1970) and Henderson (1983). On theosophical and other occult influences, themes, and movements in Russia, see Rosenthal (1997); Bogomolov (1999); Carlson (2000); McCannon (2002); Barchunova (2007); Maurer (2011); Znamenski (2011); and Menzel, Hagemeister, and Rosenthal (2012).
3. Recall Bateson’s ([1936] 1958) discussions of “schismogenesis” as a process whereby at least two parties create and intensify differences, in this case gender oppositions through forms and actions not previously gendered.
4. Vladimir Nabokov’s Russian émigré professor, the character Pnin, discovers something similar when he gives a book by Jack London to a puzzled American colleague who does not share Russians’ passion for that author.
5. Literary scholar Fliegelman (1993) argues that American ideals of transparency follow a similarly Spartan aesthetic: Jefferson’s rhetorical style matches the Windsor chair with its open, slatted back, an icon for democratic accessibility. Lev Tolstoy’s novels frequently judge the use of aristocratic French against similar ideals (on Russian aristocrats as foreigners, see also Lotman 1985).
6. In 1918 the Bolshevik state legislated to simplify the Russian alphabet by expelling the letter indicating no palatalization, the hard sign ъ, since blank space provides sufficient contrast to the soft sign, ь (Lemon 1991).
7. There is extensive literature on dissident and artistic opacity or silence not only as violations of sincerity but also as means for survival, from deliberate and coded “Aesopian language” (a phrase that Saltykov-Shchedrin coined to describe writing under the tsars) to surviving while treading the “epistemic murk” of a violent reality (Taussig 1984). See also Strauss (1988); Losev (1984); Boym (1994); Uvarova (2001); Oushakine (2000); Katznelson (2007); Lipovetsky (2010); Petrov and Ryazanova-Clarke (2014); and Platt (2016).
8. See Stasch (2008) on worries about opacity (of a kind inflicted by magical or emotional forces) to oneself about one’s self.
9. Thinking on Soviet sincerity parallels and engages that on Soviet cynicism and masking (see Fitzpatrick 2000, 2005; Prigov 1991; Lemon 1995, 1998, 2000a; Epstein 1995; Yurchak 2005; Nafus 2006; and Rutten 2017). See also Ssorin-Chaikov (2008). On alternative ways to understand categories and acts often presupposed to undergird sincerity, such as confession, privacy, or authenticity, see Gal (1995); Kharkordin (1999); Lemon (2000a); Pesmen (2000); Ries (1997); Yurchak (2005); Nadkarni (2007); and Hellbeck (2009) , Gapova (2017). It is useful to also link these ideas to discourses on authenticity that suffused the European twentieth-century avant-garde, in beatnik poetry, rock, and punk rock (see Marcus and Ferrua 1989).
10. Humphrey (1994) and Gal (1995) similarly theorize the kinds of sociological relations that embedded Soviet-era jokes, warning us not to reduce all play with socialist signs to resistance (see also Yurchak 2005). Humphrey, for example, depicts a world in which officials tell each other ambiguous jokes about officials. I add that people working in state institutions were more likely to joke about the workings of the state; people living in rural Romani settlements, for example, were more likely to mock the forms of racializing encounters with other Soviets (Lemon 2000a).
11. But cf. Margaret Mead (1951) on group confessions under orthodoxy, which the authors claimed distorted relations to truth.
12. Appadurai (1990) usefully questions links between “sincerity” and “individuality” by contrasting European and Indic “topographies of self.” If the former, traced to the New Testament and then to scientific depth psychologies, mistrusts “outer layers” of expression, the latter, valuing bonds of dependence linking divinity and devotee, privileges them as a means to build a “community of sentiment.”
13. Consider refusals to translate, denials of the possibility of translation as a means of resisting domination (see Chakrabarty 1995; Rafael 1988, 2016; and Spivak 1988), or communication breakdown when conveying pain or trauma (Das 2007; Daniel 1996; Scarry 1987).
14. See Hull (2003, 2008) on ways bureaucrats evacuate agency, distancing themselves from the state even while performing the state.
15. In 2001 an acquaintance educated at GITIS in theatrical criticism opined that theater performances achieve a heightened force when actors combine glasnost’ (which she translated as “transparency” rather than “openness” or “voicedness”) with iskrennost’ (“sincerity”). Her insistence on the power of their combination indicates that she distinguished among claims to sincerity and to transparency. On Protestant notions of sincerity that do link to categories such as inner truth, visions of spontaneous expression, and metaphors such as transparency, see Keane (1997, 2002, 2008) and Shoaps (2002). On uses of opacity or incomprehension, see Briggs ([1996] 2016); Lemon (2000a); and Lempert (2007).
16. A number of American scholars have recently studied or even taught at GITIS and other theatrical institutes in Russia, writing with marvelous insight about curricula, students, aesthetic and philosophical commitments, and influence (see especially Carnicke 1998; Merlin 2001; and Weygandt 2015).
17. Some readers may think I ought to have not only insisted on participating as an actor, but also devoted more space to experiences of acting. One reason I did not is that several other authors have recently written accounts of learning to act in Russia (e.g., Merlin 2001). Another reason is that I have performed so often onstage that to write about it with any honesty, about the failures and hopes, the rivalries and attachments, would be very personal.
18. Mokhov (2016) details the grim side of Battle, its preoccupation with mortality.
INTRODUCTION
1. See Carnicke (1998, 179); Merlin (2001); and Farber (2008, 13). These scholars, respectively visiting theatrical institutes in Moscow and in St. Petersburg, witnessed and participated in similar exercises. Many of the pedagogical practices we all describe are known to the public; television documents them from time to time, reporting even from the smaller acting schools in Moscow, such as the Shchepkin, or schools farther out, as in Yaroslavl.
2. Here we find another link to theatricality: Stoker was the business manager at London’s Lyceum theater, and he based Dracula’s gestures on performances by the actor Henry Irving.
3. For analysis of the nesting trope of the “enemy within” and the “black box,” in both Western and Soviet art and scholarship, with historical and theoretical insight into the workings and effects of such recursive articulations, see Ssorin-Chaikov (2008).
4. See Briggs (1986, 2007).
5. On ways that situations and conditions of interrogation and torture shaped the very concept of referential truth in Europe, see Asad (1983). On the ways participation structures can disadvantage some in the classroom, see Philips (1972).
6. See Luckhurst (2002) and Roth (2005, 50). The list of Soviet and U.S. science fiction of telepathy is long.
7. Bringing people physically together is only one such means: Pinchevski and Liebes (2007) argue that qualities of radio broadcasting made the difference where there were no televised images of Holocaust survivor testimony, and speech was separated from specific bodies, marked and tattooed. People did not come together in a space of reception; rather, radio interrupted and intermingled with daily routines.
8. See Raikhel (2013) on Soviet writers on hypnosis who connected clinical hypnosis with the methods of European fascism. See also Etkind (1997). For debates over the effects of theatrical and other forms of mediation that create publics or stir social action, see Ackerman and Puchner (2006); Ginsburg (1994); Gordon (2001); Stewart (2003); Hirschkind (2006); Larkin (2008); and Jannarone (2009); see also Warner (2002) and Cody (2011).
9. There were those who opposed Method acting techniques such as “emotional recall” because they saw them as unhealthy invasions of actors’ psyches (Carnicke 1998, 148).
10. I have attempted such analyses of race and of currency (Lemon 1998, 2000a; Fikes and Lemon 2002), and others have pursued connective, comparative accounts of modernity and media (Buck-Morss 2000a; David-Fox 2011) and of industrial structures and carceral spaces (Brown 2015).
11. “Psychics” is not the most literal translation for ekstrasensov, which means “those who use extrasensory perception.” In that vein, we would get Battle of the Extrasensory Perceivers, or Battle of the ESPers. Others have translated Bitva as the English “challenge” (like the title of America’s Psychic Challenge).
12. See Taussig (2006) and Levi-Strauss (1963). See also Raikhel (2013) on forms of skepticism that in fact advertise and market certain medical services in Russia, insofar as skepticism itself requires an audience.
13. See Wolf (1982); Tsing (1993, 2005); Appadurai (1996); Marcus (1995).
14. Events and interactions everywhere, in Yugoslavia, New Zealand, France, and Burkina Faso, have affected Cold War circuits; my training leaves me sadly unable to do them justice, and I eagerly await further studies.
15. See Stites (1990).
16. On capacities of thought to affect others’ minds and hearts and on the ethics of “thinking of others,” see Pinch (2010).
17. See Stasch (2008); Keane (2008, 478); Duranti (2008); Robbins (2008); and Throop (2012). Brocklebank aligns Victorian hopes and fears about reading books with those about reading minds: “It is in theorizing what it means to read that Myers first articulated the concept of telepathy that would subsequently revolutionize the ways philosophers and scientists conceived of consciousness” (2006, 233).
18. See, for example, Steinmetz (2005).
19. Humphrey (2005); cf. Collier (2011).
20. People do use kommunikatsija to speak about interactions, but obshchenie is more common. On uses of both these terms, see Cohen (2015b).
21. On ideology and fantasy in and about Soviet infrastructure, such as the Moscow Metro, Tbilisi housing, and Siberian monuments and buildings, see Lemon (2000a, 2015); Humphrey (2004); Manning (2009); and Oushakine (2009). See also Boyer (2016) and Larkin (2008, 2013).
CHAPTER 1
1. See Houdini (1993); Roach (1993); During (2002); Pitches (2006); Mangan (2007); Lachapelle (2008); Jones (2009); Solomon (2010); Natale (2011); and Wiener (2013). For intersections of theatrical work and telepathy experiments in Russian imperial times, see (Mishuris 2017). On ways professional psychics in Russia advertise through the language and expertise of psychology, see Wigzell (2013).
2. See Winter (1998); Daston (1991); Jones and Galison (1998); and Masco (2004).
3. See Lamont (2013); Luckhurst (2002); Mangan (2007); Morris (2000); Noakes (1999, 2002); Meyer and Pels (2003); Sword (2002); Vinitsky (2008); Wiener (2007, 2013); Johnson (2011); and Cruz (2015).
4. Historians like Andriopoulos (2005) have contended that movements such as spiritualism and occultism were never merely foils against technological development or leftovers of tradition, but rather that imagination about communication with spirits through magic mirrors and crystal balls and speculations about telepathy and clairvoyance shaped cultural conditions for the later invention of technologies such as television.
5. Blackman (2012); Bonhomme (2012); Brocklebank 2006); Chéroux (2005);Eisenlohr (2009); Klassen (2007); Klima (2002); Luckhurst (2002); McIntosh (2010); Miller (2009); Morris (2000); Natale and Balbi (2014); Natale (2011); Noakes (1999, 2002); Peters (1999); Sconce (2000); Sneath (2009); Thurschwell (2001).
6. Kivelson and Shaheen (2011), however, argue for good reasons to resist “semiotic totalitarianism” in discussions of similar phenomena in earlier Russian times.
7. See Platz (1996); Rosenthal (1997); Ryan (1999); Bogomolov (1999); Carlson (2000); Chernetsov and Avilova (2013); Lindquist (2001,2006); Kivelson (2003, 2013); Kivelson and Shaheen (2011); Pedersen (2011); Barchunova (2007); Khristoforova (2010); Geltzer (2011); Forrester (2013); Nun-Ingerflom (2013); Pimenova (2013); Wigzell (2013); Bernstein (2011, 2013); Chudakova (2015); Peers (2015).
8. See Roosevelt (1991); Senelick (1991); Tsivian (1991); Wortman (1991); Clark (1995); Cassiday (2000); Casson (2000); Lemon (2000a); Mandel (2002); Wood (2005); Kaminer (2006); Wolfson (2006); Beumers and Lipovetsky (2009).
9. See Clark (1995). On state attempts to direct the avant-garde impulse, Cassiday writes: “Bringing drama into the public trials after 1917 was not intended to discredit the Soviet courtroom but rather to transform it into a powerful arena for propaganda, education, and legal mythopoesis” (2000, 5).
10. On the politics of fantasy and fairy tale, see Balina, Goscilo, and Lipovetsky (2005).
11. See Komlev (2013).
12. On surplus materials during Soviet times, see Oushakine (2014). On the productivity of censorship, what media makers, including censors, made and created (such as a sense of Germanness, of modernity, etc.), see Boyer (2005).
13. Jakobson was educated in Moscow, first at a gymnasium specializing in Transcaucasian studies that offered courses in Arabic, Armenian, Farsi, and Turkic and Georgian languages. At Moscow University, as a master’s student, he worried that sound film would create new language barriers and joined a group that was reading Ferdinand de Saussure critically.
14. See Irvine (1989) for an elegant account of multifunctional utterances that stresses the materiality and efficacy of language.
15. To objections influenced by use of the word function in social anthropology: Jakobson’s definition differs from that of British structural functionalism in that it does not presuppose a functioning system, and assumes variations and contradictions among acts and purposes.
16. Compare Bateson to Strathern (1988), who describes a phatic function of the gift to keep social channels potentially open (for they may also be closed, or cut). For recent turns on the subject, see Frosh 2011; Kosova 2015; Kulkarni 2014; Peace 2013.
17. Silverstein (1979); Irvine (1989); Woolard and Schieffelin (1994).
18. Secrets for Developing the Intellect in the Special Service is a website devoted to Stanislavsky’s circles of attention (http://subscribe.ru/archive/psychology.secretintellect/200712/13034612.html).
19. Gaik (1992) describes radio psychologists who switch from factual to hypothetical grammatical modalities as a therapeutic tool.
20. Nicolas Rose considers the “social role” of psychology through expertise, rather than through fixed groups of professionals; expertise “amalgamates knowledges and techniques from different sources into a complex ‘know-how.’ Only later is the attempt made to ratify the coherence of this array … as a certain ‘specialism’…. [T]he key to the social penetration of psychology lies in its capacity to lend itself ‘freely’ to others who will borrow it because of what it offers them in the way of a justification and guide to action” (1996, 86–87).
21. For theorization of discursive and mediated practice as embedded and entangled within political orders, see Brenneis et al. (1984); Fabian (1990); Ginsburg (1994); Verdery (1991); and Boyer (2005). Fred Myers (2006) on “nodes” and “intercultural fields” is especially helpful in rethinking culture as process rather than container and contents.
22. See also Taussig (1980); Ong (1987); and Parry and Bloch (1989).
23. Working in similar paradigms, historians, sociologists, and emigrés have described how the Soviet state, rationalizing a human need to deal symbolically with crises, switched out religious rituals for Communist holidays and atheist scientific spectacle (see Lane 1981; Husband 2002). But see also Yurchak (2005); Peris (1998); Fehérváry (2007); and Luehrmann (2011, 2015).
24. See also Shevchenko (2008); Patico (2008); Ries (2009); and Cohen (2010).
25. Fehérváry, writing on astrology in postsocialist Hungary, observes that crisis was only one of the factors in its popularity; astrology was also good for “ ‘revealing’ selves that had been there all along” (2007, 573).
26. See Kukulin, Lipovetsky, and Maiofis (2008).
27. On the politics of awareness of the international gaze in other formerly socialist states, see Graan (2010).
28. Taubman (2003).
29. On such claims, see Lemon (2004, 2008, 2009); Cohen (2010); and Zigon (2009). For descriptions of Communist “wooden speech,” see Thom (1989) and Seriot (2002).
30. For extended arguments for exceptional Russian theatricality, see Fülöp-Miller (1929) and Lotman (1985).
CHAPTER 2
1. “We wanted to unite all the people who were writers, who were musicians, who were artists, to demonstrate that the West and the United States was devoted to freedom of expression and to intellectual achievement, without any rigid barriers as to what you must write, and what you must say, and what you must do, and what you must paint, which was what was going on in the Soviet Union. I think it was the most important division that the agency had, and I think that it played an enormous role in the Cold War.” Tom Braden, first chief of the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA’s) International Organizations Division, quoted in Saunders 2001, 82. See also Stoner (1995) and Caute (2003). For factors in addition to financing and diplomacy that channel shows through galleries, making and unmaking connections in the art world, see Myers (2006) and Ginsburg (1994).
2. Saunders (2001); Barnhisel (2015); on jazz diplomacy see also Von Eschen (2004) and Davenport (2009).
3. See Smith (2010) on images of brainwashing in the “American nightmare.” See also Masco (2002) on discussions of “mind control” in the United States, accompanying fears surrounding nuclear policy.
4. See John Frankenheimer’s film Seconds (1966), released after The Manchurian Candidate, for psychedelic critique of that scene.
5. “The conflict of competing ideas, of course, can be a highly creative process, and there is no doubt that the attempt of the paraphysicists to meet the skeptics on their own ground has yielded some highly useful results. The debate has spawned improved experiments, sharpened explanatory models, and improved the understanding of both sides of the issue. In some cases, it appears that the doubts of the skeptics were well advised, and paraphysics has benefited from that discovery” (Air Force Systems Command 1978, 38).
6. The thread of the conflict is already present in earlier work (see imperial-era scientist Kotik 1907) and already identified as a material/immaterial “problem” (see Mishuris 2017).
7. Michelle Rosaldo (1982) criticized British speech act theory for its universalizing presumptions about the speaking self (with insights more influential within linguistic anthropology than even Jacques Derrida’s detachment of authorship from texts). Writing against Anglophone ideologies that sought to match individual speakers’ sincere intentions to words, she theorized the ways people may treat communication differently, for example, in terms of jointly coordinated actions, whereby signs are thus rarely dual, like sheets of paper, one side private and individual, the other public and visible.
8. See also Chudakova: “Both Western and some Russian-language accounts of Soviet science have tended to focus on the peculiarities of Soviet and post-socialist scientific rationales and practices, either by pointing to the difficulties of transitioning to a research and design model (Yegorov 2009), or by cataloguing the scandalously irrational ‘dead-ends’ of a science distorted by the ideological demands of the state” (2015, 410).
9. Director Pyotr Fomenko’s ensemble was among the best known; successes during the time of my research have included troupes assembled by Sergej Zhenovach and Oleg Kudrjashov.
10. See Kelly and Kaplan (2001) on national character studies, which promoted nationalism as a liberating antidote to (socialist) internationalism after World War II.
11. The scene might resonate for Americans who read science fiction such as Larry Niven’s The World of Ptavvs (1966), depicting telepaths’ conversations with dolphins.
12. Inessa Armand, a feminist theorist, corresponded with Lenin from Paris before and after the Russian Revolution. He sent her lengthy and pointed criticisms of her pamphlet on free love.
13. For a fascinating early Soviet depiction of electrification as energy to connect all the people, which interposes, among shots of telephone operators and electoral cables, images of hands stroking the air around a theremin, see Esfir Shub’s Komsomol—Shef Elektrifikatsija (1932).
14. On scale, see Carr and Lempert (2016). On the ways in which nesting scales afford ideological erasure and conflation, see Irvine and Gal (2000). On detail as such, Carlo Ginzberg has explored problems of authenticity, linking criminal detection work with determinations of artistic forgery.
15. Meyerhold’s student, Sergei Eisenstein, later adapted the concept to film montage. The same example echoes in descriptions of the Kuleshov effect (named for Lev Kuleshov) in film. Why his practices and ideas are commonly credited to his students and to visitors from farther West, rather than tracked through Meyerhold and his influences, even within Russia, remains a puzzle to me, complicated by facts and stories surrounding their common repressions.
16. For discussion of pundits and politicians, see Lempert and Silverstein (2012).
17. For recent anthropology on creativity and practice for formal improvisation, see also Wilf (2010); Brenneis (2013); and Chumley (2016), see also Sherouse (2016).
18. Meyerhold on energy and Peirce on intuition foreshadow Massumi’s (2002) discussions of affect, with its attention to shifts in bodily tempos and nervous intensities.
19. See Merlin (2001) for a marvelous participant description of psychophysical actor training at VGIK, the film institute in Moscow.
20. On equations between hypnotism and acting, begin with Enelow (2015).
21. Theatrical work described as “dealing emotional blows” (Lemon 2004) might also be conceived in terms of energy, in this case the material force of violent contact.
22. On similar pedagogies, see Oushakine on Makarenko’s aims in the 1930s to teach an ability “to orient one’s self (sposobnost’ orientirovat’sia), to “almost unconsciously” feel what is happening around one, “to sense in which position [mesto] of the collective you are [at the moment] and what duties follow from this position for you” (Makarenko 1989, 263, cited in Oushakine 2004). The work at GITIS differs insofar as the aim is less to learn a position in a structure and more to learn to be reactive to others within and through a large range of narrative conditions and material structures.
23. See, for example, Gordon on Eugenio Barba’s “energy as thought” (2006, 343), and on training the actor’s body to “break the automatic flow of the body’s energy.” See also Hastrup (1998).
24. On specifically oil-based metaphors, see Etkind (2013); Kalinin (2015); and Rogers (2015).
25. Roach (1993). On ways that romantic techniques for performing science overlapped those for making art, enlisting similar metaphors and philosophies of energy and animation, see Daston (2004) and Galison (2004).
26. Later trainers were careful about how they described drills during periods when the Soviet state treated yoga with suspicion. By the late 1950s instructional books on yoga were again published, and by 1970 documentaries about famous yogis were broadcast. In between, the aims of yogic drills were easily translated into the language of psychophysical science—or demonstrated by means other than descriptive language. Hybrid psychophysical work continued even through the most restricted of Soviet times; it crops up in twenty-first-century instructors’ recollections of their mid-century studies (as it does also in drills conducted by Jerzy Grotowski, who attended GITIS from 1955to 1956).
27. For analyses that trace influences to particular colleagues and students of Stanislavsky, see Roach (1993); Carnicke (1998, esp. 176–84); Pitches (2006); White (2006); Rozinsky (2010); Tcherkasski (2009); and Weygandt (2015).
28. See also Munn (1986).
29. See Manning (2009) and Gershon (2010) on shifting perceptions of media perceived as “new” contrasted to “old.”
30. In a later episode, contestants were to discern which woman in a group was pregnant. A handful of “ordinary men” was first recruited “as a control.” Again, they selected visual qualities or objects—“a rosy complexion,” “wedding ring,” and “breasts that look like they have grown recently” as signs—some claiming that they had acquired the ability to thus intuit pregnancy through “experience with women.”
31. For recent overviews and collections on of the anthropology and the extra-senses, see of the senses, Howes (2003; 2009); and Laplantine and Howes (2015).
32. At advanced levels, American actors might learn more, for instance, in special master classes on the topic, by reading Mikhail Chekhov (or, say, Declan Donnellan, who staged productions with Russian actors), or by traveling to study elsewhere.
33. Closer to Freud in Russia was symbolist playwright Nikolai Evreinov, who in the 1920s elaborated that “man is a theatrical beast,” coining the term “theater therapy” (quoted in Etkind 1997, 125). Drawing on Freud and Aristotle, Evreinov argued that theatrical catharsis had the power to effect deep, healing transformations in patients. In other works, he extended theater therapy to embrace healing hypnosis—hypnosis as deep stage direction (see also Golub 1984).
34. Strasberg did not work alone to claim Stanislavsky to be the father of “emotion memory.” As Carnicke has demonstrated, the textual translation involved chains of agents, entire enterprises. The Anglophone publishers trimmed pages for reasons of economy and popular fit, making major cuts to “whatever was meaningless for non-Russian actors” (1998, 87). In the Othello chapter, they excised comic moments and pruned student reactions and peer pressure. “Deleting such interactions has two effects”: first, the translation seems more theoretical than practical, and second, it diminishes give and take between student and teacher, exaggerating the impression of directorial authority (ibid). Other cuts in content not only made the “actor” seem to overshadow the play, “opening the door for the common misconception that an actor deals primarily in self-expression,” but worse, deleted details about the collective work of directors, designers, technicians, and others in creating “given circumstances” (ibid).
35. Theater scholar Jonathan Pitches maintains that Boleslavsky had not read Freud, but that concerned to “root his interpretation of the System in America,” he often chose terminology “colored by the popularity of Freudian terminology, either understood or not” (2006, 105). As Roach and Pitches also argue, for Stanislavsky, the inspiration linking experience of sensation to sense memory is not Freud, but Ribot on the animating traces that feeling leaves in the nervous system (Bently 1962; Roach 1993; Pitches 2006, 113). Indeed, even before 1917, Russian psychology paid little heed to Freud, devoting more to research on the nervous system, to the psychophysical work conducted by Sechenov, Fechner, and Bekhterev.
36. Vygotsky writes that inner speech is not only soundless, but also abbreviated, pointing to action or motivation without naming. These qualities make inner speech incomprehensible to others lacking knowledge of the “conditions” that embed the subject ([1933] 1986, 248), even while, developmentally, inner speech relies on external communication. See also Emerson (1983).
37. Stanislavsky’s work evolved; he never worked alone and was always testing ideas with partners and students, from Leopold Sulerzhitsky to Meyerhold, working in genres from realist Anton Chekhov to symbolist Maurice Maeterlinck. American director and theatrical scholar Norris Houghton tells us that Mikhail Kedrov, head of the Moscow Art Theater after Stanislavsky, remarked that his colleagues each claimed best to understand the system while each interpreting it in “different and often contradictory ways. And each one says he is doing what Stanislavsky taught. It all depends, you see, on when they happened to work with him.” Writes Houghton, “I could not help thinking of the practitioners of ‘the Method’ in America, who fixed their technique on what Stanislavsky was teaching in the early 1930s (principally about the means of arriving at psychological truth) and have maintained its sacrosanctity ever since” (1962, 64-65). Others suggest that differences among American interpreters—for instance, Strasberg’s “emotion memory” versus Stella Adler’s “active analysis”—do not represent “radical change in the System, as is often assumed, but rather a cross-section of the master’s continuing experiments” (Carnicke 1998, 67).
38. Russia has seen strong social links among theatrical and ethnographic experts. Stanislavsky had an eye for the ethnographic; he and Gorky worked together to research The Lower Depths by visiting taverns and markets. Contemporary playwright Maksim Kurochkin’s father was an ethnographer; in Moscow, the company teatr.doc works from verbatim recordings of ethnographic interviews and life histories. On documentary genres, see Lipovetsky (2004); Beumers and Lipovetsky (2010); and Weygandt (2015).
39. Goffman (1981); Briggs and Bauman (1992); Irvine (1996); Seizer (1997); and Lemon (2000a). On tracing methods and motivations for layering multiple characters, voices, or animations, see Hill (1995); Silvio (2010); and Nozawa (2016). On the workings of “speech without speakers,” see Hastings and Manning (2004).
40. For themes, structures, and techniques of Znanie society talks, see Luehrmann (2011).
41. Elena Gapova, personal communication with author, March 2016.
42. See During (2002) and Lachapelle (2008). Jones devotes special attention to how Europeans erased evidence that certain audiences (e.g., Algerians) already did not construe magical performances in supernatural terms. “As a form of entertainment, modern magic requires audiences to implement a culturally specific interpretive repertoire—indulging in awe but imagining naturalistic explanations for the magician’s effects. From the normative perspective of Western modernity, it is therefore a genre of performance capable of confirming the cognitive skills of modern subjects, and revealing the cognitive deficiencies of non-modern subjects” (Jones 2009, 96).
43. See Jones (2011).
44. For a fine-grained account of such techniques, see Wooffitt (2006).
45. Internet forums track Battle celebrity downfalls off the air, such as when, in 2013, a former finalist was kidnapped for ransom, and commentators across several sites delightedly mocked her for failing to foresee her own capture.
46. See Larson (2013).
47. Mishuris (2017) discusses similarly formatted experimental reports on Russian experiments with telepathic stage performers, carried out by Russian scientists such as Naum Kotik at the turn of twentieth century (1907, 1908), and claims by Bekhterev and others that such demonstrations are worthy objects “of scientific curiosity” even if not in their own right, but “as a sign of other conditions,” such as delusion or self-deception (see also Beard 1882). I.R. Tarkhanov argues similarly in Gipnotizm, Vnushenie i Chtenie Myslej ([1886] 1905).
48. Stites (1991); and Peris (1998).
49. Fehérváry brackets belief this way: “[T]he content of horoscopes allows for a wide range of interpretations, and their appearance in publications from the somber to the frivolous allows people to take up a variety of orientations towards them, only one of which might be termed ‘belief’…. A conscious belief in the predictive powers of the horoscope or the cosmology behind it undoubtedly plays a role in how it affects people’s lives, but belief as such is unnecessary for the structure of the genre to have the potential to affect consciousness, identity and action through regular exposure” (2007, 565–66). Miller (2011) demonstrates the significance of looking beyond belief for motivations to participate in the occult, as entertainment that builds social bonds. The anthropology of belief is large; see Favret-Saada (1980) for defining work on the social paradoxes of doubt and belief.
CHAPTER 3
1. Soviet scientist V.F. Porshnev (1974) developed a similar theory (see Etkind 2008).
2. On postsocialist attraction to elitist politics and social ontologies, see Rivkin-Fish (2009).
3. On earlier parallels across superpower dream worlds, see Susan Buck-Morss (2000).
4. See Dunn (2004); Larson (2013); and Cohen (2015b), see also Wang et al. 2012.
5. Anglophones from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia (e.g., Jennifer Wallens, June Field, Jayc Ryder) have competed more often in a Kiev-based franchise of the show, which titles itself International Battle of the Psychics. Uri Geller takes one of the resident expert spots.
6. By way of contrast: Romani friends have yet to pose that question—one who especially loves the genre even advises me instead to stream American shows such as Paranormal and The Mentalist.
7. As anthropologists have argued, the “radical distinction between magic and modernity is a form of purification … an ‘invention of tradition’ that does not create continuity with the past as much as it distances itself from it” (Pels 2003, 32).
8. See Slezkine (1996); Lemon (2000a); Martin (2001); and Hirsch (2005).
9. Compare to Hall (1990) and Gilroy (1993) on arts in the formation of a black Atlantic.
10. See also Alpers (2000); Blakely (1986); Davis (1960); Haywood (1978); and Robeson (1950).
11. See Lemon (1998); Buck-Morss (2000a); and Brown (2001). Matusevich (2012) gives a wonderful Soviet example: a poster of Africans commanding the means of production as Sputnik flies in orbit above.
12. See Golubev (2016) on Soviet images of androgyny in outer space. See Kevorkian (2006) on the “black technocrat” computer geek as a manifestation of racialized divisions of labor in Hollywood sci fi and film.
13. The 1971 Coca-Cola “Hilltop ad” campaign also resulted in a hit single.
14. For details of these discursive struggles, with more examples, see Fikes and Lemon (2002); Von Eschen (2004); Hessler (2006); and Matusevich (2012). See also Muehlenbeck (2012) and Johnson (1996).
15. For discussion of how Hegel’s account of a rising world spirit, the urge to freedom, first drew from but then erased knowledge (via newspapers) of actual slave rebellions in the colonies, see Buck-Morss (2000b).
16. On materials in British colonial racializing encounters, see Comaroff and Comaroff (1992).
17. In 1986, with the encouragement of my BA adviser, Ann L. Stoler, I investigated the gendered divisions of labor on a Wisconsin dairy farm, with special attention to the ways gender conditioned access to materials: tools, clothing, even food. Who handles the tractor? Who cuts the steak? How did those acts matter in family hierarchies, in dreams of the future? Later, I considered how racialization of Roma in Russia was animated by public discourse critical of minority ways to touch cash money (Lemon 1998) and ways to handle pieces and parts of public transit (Lemon 2000b). Bourdieu (1977) suggests in similarly haptic terms that gender is made through repeated movements that divide people and objects (What times do women walk where?). For recent thinking about racialization along these lines, see Pursell (2005); Nelson, Tu, and Hines (2001); Sinclair (2004); Mack (2001); and Resnick (2016).
18. For debates on the utility of “race” in Soviet-era scholarship, see Weitz (2002). My stance is articulated in Lemon (2002; see also Lemon 1995). For the imperial era, see Knight (1998); Mogilner (2009); and Tolz (2014). For a biographical perspective, see Khanga 1992.
19. I continue to find materialist and Marxist Feminist social theory more capacious than most of the new materialisms, especially for semiotic-historical work to theorize both divisions of labor and resources and contests of authority. On ways physical objects offer semiotic affordances for making race, see Lemon (1998, 2000a, and 2002). For discussion of ways Roma are racialized in relation to “trash” in Bulgaria, see Resnick (2016). On multiple understandings of “blackness,” see Hall (1990). On the “elastic” qualities of color as an ambiguous sign in racial hierarchies, see Khan (2008).
20. There is more to say about intersections of social categories with viscous detritus in later science fiction, from the puddles of Stalker and Blade Runner through the myriad textures of shit in Aleksej German’s Trudno byt’ bogom (Hard to be a god; 2013).
21. See Lemon (2000a) and Larkin (2008).
22. Manning (2012, 111), expanding on Munn (1986, 55–56) and Elyachar (2010), puts it this way: “In Tbilisi, after all, Georgian generals and journalists might mingle together at a face-to-face society function like a supra (ritual feast) … the category of hospitality plays a crucial role as a kind of infrastructure of circulation alongside, for example, roads.”
23. Some argue that the modern prison was perfected on U.S. territory; some of its tools were imported to the USSR in the 1930s after a visit to the U.S. by Anastas Mikoyan, at that time a Politburo member and later chairman of the Supreme Soviet.
24. Since the 1980s the end of the military draft has divided increasing numbers of military personnel from people in the middle and upper classes; military recruits commonly understand themselves as economic refugees. Some ask me for citations on this last point and some of the preceding remarks about material culture and poverty in the U.S. These requests are revealing in themselves, they demonstrate part of my argument; among my American colleagues, I am usually the only one whose siblings or younger kin have enlisted out of poverty. Conversely, while I spend time in elite professional venues where few know what it means to enlist for a warm bunk and three squares a day, the rest of my family does not.
25. Compare to Romani lack of access to media (Lemon 2000a, 2002). Useful for comparative triangulation are works like Becker 1999.
26. Critical engagements with Habermasian notions of public spaces for discourse have helped to undo assumptions about such neutral zones (see Gal 1995, 465–75; Warner 2002; and Cody 2011).
27. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s grandparents had owned a large estate in the Caucasus. His parents attended university in Moscow before the Revolution; he earned a degree in mathematics and physics before fighting in World War II. In prison for eight years after the war, upon release he took up writing, publishing stories while teaching math.
28. See Brown (2015).
29. The Radios stopped broadcasting to formerly socialist bloc countries in Eastern Europe as those countries took steps to align with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the European Union. On the world journalistic order from another transnational intersection of nations and institutions, see Gursel 2016.
30. George Soros’s purchase of the Radios’ samizdat archives was contingent upon maintaining the research department for a period of time.
31. On diverging media ideologies, see Gershon (2010).
32. Matza’s broader claim is, “These new openings brought what anthropologists have documented retrospectively as sudden ‘break of consciousness’ and ‘strongest shock’ (sil’neishii shok).” That is, it is as if Chumak’s silence indexed the fall of empire (see also Oushakine 2000 on postsocialist aphasia).
33. Lemon (2013). See also Larkin (2008).
34. Chumak’s autobiographical narrative parallels Claude Levi-Strauss’s (1963) account of the trajectory of the skeptical sorcerer (Taussig 2006). Favret-Saada (1980) develops the theme of being caught in those webs of discursive practice that pivot around stances of belief and disavowal.
35. See also Anna Geltzer (2011) on how Anatoly Kashpirovsky’s “theatrical” rise and televisual reach was anchored in decades of experience as a psychologist in the very kinds of medical institutions that he discredited, and Raikhel (2009) and Raikhel and Bemme (2016) on how current narcology draws on the fame of Kashpirovsky’s past successes. For accounts of his performances, see Vinogradova 1996.
36. See Collier (2011) on the continuity of Soviet heating systems.
37. See Velminski (2017).
38. See Coxhead (1976); Ebon (1983); Morehouse (1996); Schnabel (1997); Mandelbaum (2002); Redfern (2009); and Marrs (2007).
39. See also Stites (1990) and Kukulin (2011).
40. In 2010, when Russophone websites discussed switching to Cyrillic URLs, some worried that this would prove a problem less to their own Internet reading than an obstacle to being found by others.
41. Examples are myriad; here are just one each from the superpowers: Robert Silverberg, Dying Inside (1972), and Abram Tertz (aka Andrej Sinyavsky), The Icicle (1962).
CHAPTER 4
1. See, for example, Pimenova (2013) on Tuvan Shamans and their bureaucratization after the 1995 legalization of shamanism as religion. (Pimenova also cites Minister Ivanov’s statement opposing “shamans and quacks” and notes the existence of such categories in Soviet times.) See also Thomas and Humphrey (1994) on shamanism as a register compatible with state power.
2. The Secret Life of Uri Geller (BBC, 2013).
3. Bekhtereva and her collaborators published the results in English, also, in Human Physiology in 2002.
4. On uses of waiting by state agencies in Romania under socialism, see Verdery (1996).
5. Morris similarly reports a medium (2000) who quit occult work to become an Amway dealer.
6. Such judgments could rely less on complexion than on other markers, such as clothing, occupation, even the type of cash on hand (Lemon 1998, 2000a; see also Reeves 2013).
7. I discuss this question of Peircean qualia, qualic signs, in more detail in Lemon (2013). For more on “shine” put to similar ends, but for different reasons, and through different divisions of labor and practices for sociality, see Munn (1986)
8. On sparkling decor in psychics’ offices, on its meanings for Russian healers and their clients (e.g., in association with good and bad energies of money), and on decor (especially kitsch) as itself a kind of enchantment, see Lindquist (2002).
CHAPTER 5
1. See Nove (1961) on problems in comparing “model to muddle.”
2. On such acts as ways to show “humanity” versus “system,” see Pesmen (2000). I can attest to Soviet and Russian train personnel helping others by “finding” sold-out tickets or switching women to compartments without young men, all while refusing compensation.
3. Messing worked on Soviet stages throughout the 1970s. Early in the twenty-first century, his biography was replicated on print pages and screens, and in 2009 Mosfil’m produced a television series re-creating his life story.
4. See Pesmen (2000) on the “magic” of the Russian table (cf. Ledeneva 1998). See also Kruglova (2014) on bewilderment when such expected transformations fall through.
5. See also Humphrey (2012) on the ethics of filial favors.
6. See Borenstein (2008) and Beumers and Lipovetsky (2009).
7. In this film we might see a transposition of “occult economics” into a poetics of repeating and echoing images of violent acts.
8. See Peters (2016) on Soviet research on to create networked computing before the Internet.
9. See Hull (2012) and Keane (2013) on material affordances of paper versus other media. See also Reeves (2013) on “clean fakes” in Moscow and on ways of aligning papers, real and counterfeit, with computer systems.
10. On how the affordances of paper make a difference in bureaucratic contexts, see Hull (2012).
11. A favorite theme for Shakespeare; for an anthropological account see Ahearn (2001).
12. Erving Goffman began from a point beholden to tropes of dyadic interactions. He struggled to undermine them in the essay “Footing” (1981), in which he laid out how seemingly tightly bordered social mise-en-scènes are crosscut by competing foci for attention; one speaker may nest several others who are seemingly silent or report interlocutors from elsewhere to anticipate future judges and auditors. Latour (1993), among others, seems not to have read the piece to the end, where it fractures encounter, showing how people invoke multiple space-times; Goffman’s examples proliferate to undermine the dyadic categories with which he began. The implications become even clearer in the work of theorists who followed, such as Irvine (1996).
13. In demonstrations of spirit writing and automatic writing, paper converts meaning from otherwise unknowable dimensions (Sword 2002; Keane 2013). See also Manning and Gershon (2013) on animations that hide the discursive labor of many as if one.
14. For more elaborate discussions of new media used for occult ends, see Behrend et al. (2015).
15. See also Morris (2000) and Keane (2013).
16. On connections of stage practice to cubist perspective making, see Lemon (2009).
17. See Jones (2011).
18. Following Jakobson, I locate such work at an intersection of conative with poetic functions, shadowed by projections of referential-indexical functions.
19. Lemon (1998, 2000a). On similar patterns and for generalization, see Hirsch (2005); Martin (2001); and Suny and Martin (2001).
CHAPTER 6
1. I write elsewhere against the structure/individual impasse by connecting articulations of fantasy and ideology about infrastructure to social interactions in it and above it, through examples set in and around the Moscow metro (Lemon 2000a).
2. See Briggs and Bauman (1992) on “calibrating interdiscursive gaps.”
3. See Gutkin’s (1997) commentary on Bely.
4. On Russian poets and other Soviets on language as material, as conduit for vibration, or as tool in the world, see Lemon (1991).
5. There are interesting echoes here with the ways filmmaker Tarkovsky would later write (in a polemic against filmic montage) about time as a pulsing flow.
6. Khlebnikov (1986, 633).
7. Quite directly, as Jakobson was graduate adviser to both Paul Friedrich and Michael Silverstein, who were advisers to many currently active linguistic anthropologists.
8. See also Hastings and Manning (2004) and Silvio (2010) on voicings that animate specific characters rather than general identities.
9. See Oushakine (2014) on forms of Soviet material plenty (against the usual analyses of Soviet life only in terms of shortage), the overabundance of certain products, and the means for piling them in warehouses and recording inventories.
10. In the science fiction blockbuster Metro 2033 (Glukhovsky published the novel in 2003, which has since spun off video game and other versions), books are rare and precious, while the monsters who live at the Lenin library are called “the librarians.”
11. Another work might align all these novels in the United States and the USSR in which books are burned or not burned, from Bulgakov, with timelines for actual book-burning events in both places.
12. For a summation of linguistic anthropology on this point, see Agha (2005).
13. The “intonation” of a time need not do the same work as Bakhtin’s chronotope. Depictions even of very different times and spaces can still run according to similar chronotopic principles, textures that structure depictions of possibility, the nature of agency and event (Lemon 2009).
14. Winter (1998).
CHAPTER 7
1. See also Chumley (2016).
2. Elsewhere I question the ostensibly inherent efficacy of oscillation, which appears in many other discourses besides that of Russian theatrical work. It appears in psychology (as in Freud’s account of games of fort-da and in research on eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, a trauma therapy that alternates points of sensation). In anthropology, oscillation has served to explain the workings of montage or of perspectival switching (Taussig 2008; Willerslev 2004). Levi-Strauss grounded his study of myth on the principle that certain binaries can never resolve, but rather their oscillation and recursion make the structural spirals of the mythic dialectic compelling.
3. Again, the process differs from Anton Makarenko’s visions of education (Oushakine 2004): the goal is less for the student to find a stable fit in a structure (say, to build a human pyramid or work on an assembly line) than to contact others in the most “interesting” way possible. Discordant but interesting solutions are valued over perfect “fit.”
4. See Faraday (2000) and Carnicke (2010). Knebel’ (1967) herself recalls being criticized for lacking conflict, bezkonfliktnost’ (conflictlessness or, if we want to take such a critique seriously, as a viable stance, rather than assuming it to be a worn communist trope, we could translate this as making work that is “anodyne” or “taking no risks”).
5. On Stanislavsky on physical actions and commentary on misunderstandings about his ideas on the material, see Carnicke (1998).
6. She continues: “In my view, the poetics of the Russian Formalists should be placed in the broader European context of literary, philosophical, and political reflection on modernity” (Boym 2005, 1–2).
7. It can be useful also to separate deliberate techniques for ostranenie from encounters that afford a sense of indeterminacy or estrangement, and also to distinguish among techniques such as montage and perspectival contrast.
8. See Jones (2009, 2011) on magicians’ use of angles and even on using skepticism within the act.
9. Ngai (2005) argues that principles like stop-motion, when applied to living beings, can work to deanimate or to animate in the negative sense, to automatize from without.
10. Krisztina Fehérváry pointed this out to me in 2010 as we were traveling to the conference at which I delivered the heart of this chapter.
11. The protagonists on rags-to-riches television series The Beverly Hillbillies.
12. On the Soviet press being the first to document the Jewish Holocaust during World War II, and on the ways the United Kingdom and the United State censored the images documenting those atrocities, see Hicks (2012).
13. In their 2006 introduction to Against Theatre: Creative Destructions in the Modernist State, Ackerman and Puchner argue that, insofar as modernity projects do formulate concerns about that which resists representation (the inner workings of mind, certain divisions of labor), “The disputed boundary between representation and invisibility” persists in attempts to create and then redress separations, especially from an audience—for example, by making and then tangibly breaking frames for performance.
14. See Johnson’s (2011) discussion of the ways the Atlantic slave trade and American plantation economy produced claims that rituals of spirit possession among the enslaved confirmed that they were no better than automatons, erasing the ways the conditions of slavery produced the rituals.
15. See Bernstein (2015) and Yurchak (2015a).
16. See Resnick (2016).
17. Consider also depictions of murderers in their abodes as depraved, genetically devolved, incestuous trash living in squalor, as in Silence of the Lambs or True Detective.
18. On nineteenth-century images of the orchestral conductor directing the energies of the crowd, even to the point of mesmerism, see Winter (1998, 206–343) on “the social body and the invention of consensus.”
19. See Susan Layton (1994) on Russian imperial poetry about the Caucasus, and consider studies of U.S. and Soviet science fiction revealing various connections to Cold War geopolitics.
20. Numerous historians and anthropologists have demonstrated how realist forms of representation—novels, ethnographies, documentaries—served colonial rule (British, Dutch, etc.). Strong scholarship has analyzed diorama exhibits reproducing customs and costumes of colonized peoples, such as the carvings and dances of a Malay village. See, for example, Raibmon (2006) and Kruger (2007).
21. I trace these thoughts about learning to see and to unsee to reading the novel The City and the City, by China Miéville (2009).
CHAPTER 8
1. See also Tsivian (1991).
2. See Clark (1995) and Golub (1984).
3. In some conditions, certain forms of phatic assault, under which we might include heckling (Zuckerman 2016), disrupt with excess contact, even without shifting frames.
4. His late work demonstrated that even the most formally staged performances cannot be reduced to binaries such as onstage/offstage or speaker/audience. He certainly did begin from those very pairs and dyads; however, by the time he played out scores of examples, breaking them down into parts that intersect former opposites, the original pairs lost their apical authority, disintegrating the former logic in ways that inspired further thinkers to press the implications of understanding communication as open to multiple lines of participation and to leaks across space, time, and genre. See the corpus of theoretical work by linguistic anthropologists such as Judith Irvine, Elinor Ochs, Jane Hill, Susan Philips, Ofelia Zepeda, and their students for expansion and correction of these concepts.
5. See also Silverstein (2005).
6. On oscillations of wonder and doubt as constitutive for magic, see Levi-Strauss (1963).
7. Bateson, on deuterolearning, or learning the conditions for learning, pointed in this direction, elaborated by many linguistic anthropologists who research language socialization (see Schieffelin 1990 and 2008; Meek 2010).
8. On similar interactional trouble, see Wooffitt (2006).
9. “Modern magic is a paradoxical form of entertainment, seeming at once the performative counterpart to a rational, disenchanted worldview, and a residual or compensatory locus of irrationality and enchantment. Magicians trade on this ambiguity, employing occult iconography at the same time as they pursue projects of demystifying occult practices and beliefs” (During 2002).
10. On colonial entanglements of power with kinship, see Stoler (2010). On tangles across Soviet-era oppositions that clouded distinctions of “us versus them” see Humphrey (1994).
11. See Popkin (1992) on Chekhov’s ethnographic observations during his arduous land voyage through Siberia to Sakhalin.
12. Even when Meyerhold fractured and rearranged the scenes in classic plays (such as Inspector General), his actors were still in on the arc of the production.
13. “[A]nd even that the Method school in the United States had some affinity with the CIA.” Her source, however (she cites the New York Times, May 20, 1997) says only that Norman Mailer, an active member since 1958, had said that, “at first it was more a church than a club,” “either you were an acolyte or you resisted it,” and that even as an outsider and a nonactor he was allowed to speak up, but that over the years the group had become more eclectic and less secretive. With dry amusement, he compared it with the CIA. “They have parallel histories,” he said, adding, “We may not have as many scandals as they do.” See also Vatulescu (2010) and Cassiday (2000).
14. Some Anglophone readers may sense an echo here with the fictive lighter that appears as a prop in John Le Carré’s spy novels, a prop that links the protagonist, a British intelligence office, to his Soviet counterpart and archenemy.
AFTERWORD
1. For accounts of other political and social orders that binary configurations of geopolitical axes can obscure, see Coronil (1996 and 1997) and Ho (2004).