Textual Enchantment and Interdiscursive Labor

Creativity always requires some level of collective engagement, be it over a shared terrain or around a single point that can be approached from many perspectives. The anglophone world’s denial of collectivity in creativity remains an artifact of anxieties over agency and will that predated the Cold War, during which theories of grammars and structures were classified as antihumanist. Russian theatrical pedagogy, by contrast, has long fused the aims both to create fresh art and to create contact across time and space with values of intertextual enchantment and collective creativity. So did the early Soviet theorists of semiotics and communication—people who took their cues from artists, artists who theorized the makings of multiple perspectives, but who came to influence American social and semiotic theory much later.

Renegade Channels and Frame Troubles

So what happens when nonexperts bend and break frames? Or when competing experts face each other on stage or screen? All of the preceding has suggested hierarchies of intuition. Against the idea that intuition is merely a matter of accumulated knowledge, this chapter demonstrates how the regular practice of intuition involves the mastery of techniques within networks. Technologies for intuition are techniques are tools exercised through divisions of labor. To conjure or to erase stage frames—be they drawn along lines of air or along prison walls—requires authority and collective labor. The rest of us struggle to redraw frames—or failing that, to add more frames. Some venture to intuit contacts even against all the experts who exhort us not to cross over.

Intuition and Rupture

Interaction frames—the conventions that tell us to look at the stage, to focus in the passport booth—serve as technologies for intuition. Frames work this way because they are both imaginary and material at the same time as they fix or nudge, as Bateson remarked, our ideologies and practices for reading signs at all. Broken frames serve just as well or better. In fact, it is people’s capacity to break frames or layer competing ones that sets many questions for intuition in motion. Artists and then social theorists have called this process estrangement. But we cannot rest with mapping frames like intersecting circles, we need still to probe the tropes by which people differently recognize a frame—or anything—as broken or fragmented. The bits of ruin interpreted as signs of working-class evil in the United States, for instance, were badges of ingenuity and survival in post-WWII Russia. This chapter explores the local and geopolitical forces that torque perceptions and readings of conflict and rupture and that enchant dreams of wholeness. Contact does not become an issue for intuition to solve until some space of rupture or distance is made meaningful (or even imagined). Meanwhile, theatrical and psychic training in flexible framing separates phatic experts from the rest.

Introduction

To what extent is “Russian mysticism” the product of diplomacy and political conflict? A history of nonsymmetrical comparisons has led us astray from seeing connections. Some of these connections are evident in the practice of Russian theatrical training and its uptake in the United States, for instance, or in the popularity of a Russian version of a Western European reality show that pits psychics against each other. This introduction justifies comparative and connective analysis of the historical grounds and categories for communicative contact and its failures. It also establishes the importance of paying attention to the social structuring of attention in performances and in interactions, including interactions that are mass mediated as examples of unmediated or psychic contact.

Afterword

How to live despite and beyond technologies for intuition. Contact need not pose paradoxes or problems when we perceive the ubiquity of crossings and when we recognize thoughts to move always among beings, through and with channels of and for matter, resting only under certain conditions inside the braincase.

Energy and Extrasensation

Capitalist and socialist countries alike accused the other of brainwashing its citizens, creating cogs and robots instead of artists or free thinkers. These worries, again, have historical roots in transnational, imperial-era scientific, spiritual, and artistic conversations about the ways energy and matter create or hinder thought and willful action. We can trace them, for instance, through the ways Russian directors appropriated Western psychophysics and Eastern martial arts and yoga into theatrical training. Means of dividing and aligning energy and matter—as signs of contact and its failures—have proliferated across media for performance. On various stages, energy and matter are shaped to test for free movements of thought or feeling, the impulses that belie automation. At the same time, it is by attending to the social division of sensory fields—and to differences among ways those divisions are themselves made visible or not—that we can see where efforts to signal contact lead to additional, unexpected effects.

Circles, Rays, Channels

A credential is only as good as the social and political connections that bind and embed moments of its verification. Communicative contact alone cannot make a credential real and effective—or can it? When and how do people try to harness the forces of sensory contact (or allied forms of seemingly immaterial contact) to override official ways of reading people and their papers? When, instead, do some work to override the overrides and return to panoptic security? The divisions of communicative and sensory labor that go into producing working credentials are also at work in the production of phatic expertise—a form of expertise that itself has been repeatedly drawn into performances of and discourses for verification—and technologies for intuition—that produced the credential and the ID document in the first place.

Do We Have Contact?

Actors and psychics are good to think together. Since the late nineteenth century and into the twenty-first, both have formulated and popularized broadly significant understandings of communicative contact, technologies to intuit such contact, and techniques to forge, maintain, and block contact. Such people rank among phatic experts, those whose claims to master the understanding of contact refracted through the workings of a number of key institutions. The circles of such experts began to narrow centuries ago, as imperial arts and sciences defined sensory capacities, linking them to moral and intellectual capacities to discern and thus to govern. During the Cold War, imperial categories were transposed to describe socialism, to reverberate with imperial-era geopolitical competitions even as those origins for paranoia were erased.

Dividing Intuition, Organizing Attention

Picking up from the discussion of credentials and intuition, we look more closely at the divisions and collusions of phatic and communicative labor that structure bureaucratic forms of encounter. These structures render specific moments that seem to isolate pairs of communicants as if a given contact pair were the natural configuration, the only one upon which to model all communication. In fact, most communication involves multiple parties, is multiply embedded, crosses multiple circles of attention, and sends out chains of multiple interpretants (like the cover of this book). The trick to the dyadic illusion is to distract from all the other, ongoing communications or channels, as well as from the work that has made such a moment of contact possible or necessary. The dyad who makes contact across a border or a frame. Such dyad/frame configurations, infused with repetitions of signs and qualia that signal not only paranoia but also the virtues of scientific transcendence or artistic spiritualty, still rules as a metaphor for all communication.

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.