Technologies for Intuition
The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Barbara S. Isgur Endowment Fund in Public Affairs.
Technologies for Intuition
Cold War Circles and Telepathic Rays
ALAINA LEMON
University of California Press
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University of California Press
Oakland, California
© 2018 by Alaina Lemon
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lemon, Alaina, 1965- author.
Title: Technologies for intuition : Cold War circles and telegraphic rays / Alaina Lemon.
Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017026641 (print) | LCCN 2017030515 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520967458 (ebook) | ISBN 9780520294271 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520294288 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Telepathy. | Paranoia—Political aspects. | Cold War—Influence.
Classification: LCC BF1171 (ebook) | LCC BF1171 .l38 2018 (print) | DDC 33.8—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026641
Manufactured in the United States of America
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Prologue: Cold War, Contact, and Ethnography
3PHATIC EVOLUTION: RACE AND GEOPOLITICS
4CIRCLES, RAYS, CHANNELS
5DIVIDING INTUITION, ORGANIZING ATTENTION
6TEXTUAL ENCHANTMENT AND INTERDISCURSIVE LABOR
7INTUITION AND RUPTURE
8RENEGADE CHANNELS AND FRAME TROUBLES
AFTERWORD
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index
Illustrations
| P.1. | The Music of Gounud. |
| 1.1. | Opening the fortochka. |
| 2.1. | Partners on a thread. |
| 2.2 and 2.3. | Publicity shots for Battle of the Psychics. |
| 2.4. | Messing performing telepathy. |
| 3.1 and 3.2. | Battle of the Psychics audition and Soviet-era Friendship of Peoples. |
| 3.3. | Early scene from Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972). |
| 4.1. | Raya’s gaze. |
| 4.2. | Hari’s eyes. |
| 7.1. | Salvador Dali, Slave Market with Disappearing Bust of Voltaire, 1940. |
| 7.2. | London World’s Fair, Canada Exhibit, 1851. |
| 7.3. | Peer at those peering among other lookers into the future. New York World’s Fair, 1939. |
| 8.1. | Divisions of sensory labor. |
| 8.2. | Corridor life at GITIS. |
| A.1. | Radio dish. |
| A.2. | “Love is telepathic.” |
Prologue: Cold War, Contact, and Ethnography
CIRCLES AND RAYS
In August 1991 I stood in the vestibule of one of the most remote stations of the Moscow metro listening to people excitedly convey the events of the day. I was returning from the center streets, where the tanks had rolled in that morning. The conservative contingent had staged a coup, and their first act had been to limit communications, cut off contacts: I had managed to send a telegram home from the Central Telegraph building near Red Square before it shuttered its doors. Television was jammed, but they had missed another important channel: the metro. Public transit infrastructure was itself an active circuit for other media, from flyers to good old face-to-face talk with strangers (Lemon 2000b). Phone calls were barely getting through, but the Moscow metro, built in a circle cut by radials, was running underneath the capital’s rings of roads. Meanwhile, Americans were taking the credit for keeping up flows of communication for the resistance, who soon prevailed, as Western nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) sent faxes on their upgraded lines, embassy satellite dishes amplifying waves abroad. No one paid much attention to the ways a socialist-built infrastructure like the metro carryied messages along with people—and people as messages, their very numbers swelling to tell a story.
Fast forward. One hundred years after the Russian Revolution and more than fifty since the McCarthy era, we see more clearly that Americans, too, work to cut off what they label excess communication when we worry about foreign influence and contact. Yet we continue to pay little attention to the material and mundane ways in which people are already distanced, even severed from channels along which they might get in touch. Moreover, instead of following particular transnational circuits (the money, the oil, the real estate) to see which circuits are clear and which are blocked, to whom, and to acknowledge the specific channels that we have dug, we continue to behave as if the main thing to worry about is the diffuse hypnotic power of foreign memes over the minds of the masses or about whether politicians are vulnerable to attack by vague manipulations or even telepathic rays.
This book is an attempt to theorize channels and contacts in social, political, historical, and semiotic terms. It is also an attempt to deflate anxiety about mental influence, be the threat imagined to emanate from televisions or psychic spies. The material and social forces for and against communications, across state borders and within them, can be difficult to see, and less visible to some than to others. So let us begin with what can be easily seen, with spectacle, even with fantasy, with one of the late Soviet era’s best-known science fiction films, Solaris (dir. Tarkovsky, 1972).
The film depicts telepathic emanations less as rays and more like expanding circles of swirling biomatter and energy. The planet Solaris exudes a mental force, a “noospheric” sheath of consciousness (see Vernadsky 1926). Solaris reads the minds of the cosmonauts in her orbit, to materialize their most troubled memories, the people they have lost. The readings are limited: corporeal copies live and breathe—but manifest their mourners’ guilt, missing the originals’ perspectives; one cosmonaut’s wife lacks a back zipper on her dress because he had never noticed it. The cosmonauts