Phatic Evolution: Race and Geopolitics
Telepathy is nearly always, in science fiction as well as in documentary genres, aligned with evolution or devolution. Ideologies of contact are thus vulnerable to a kind of magical orientalism that locks horns with modern claims to skepticism. Meanwhile, sturdy forms of everyday orientalism and racism are buttressed by blocks to contact and limitations to access broader channels or media. Such obstacles are visible only to those who try to breach them, who know them in embodied ways, appearing to others at most as static. They cut differently across different states; we begin to see them only when we allow comparison of infrastructures affording or blocking phatic contact, for instance, in the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Our respective refusals to acknowledge specific differences and similarities allowed each government to project mirrored fantasies about its own protections of freedom and equality. All this has magnified pessimism about the very possibilities for communication across difference—yet we can find cracks in that pessimism and paranoia even in militarized discourses.