Technologies for intuition are sets of techniques and tools designed to catch and to act on those signs, tells, information streams, vibes, and so forth that sentient beings emit without meaning to, or that we try not to express. These techniques include familiar mundane skills of interactional attention, the kind a schoolteacher might use to assess who is engaged and who is bored, that a waiter might use to decide when to approach a table. They might include specialized psychological skills, such as reading shifts among facial micro-expressions, or occult means to sense vibrations in the ether.
In some social settings, to discuss another’s expressions (not to mention one’s fleeting micro-expressions) or to point out lack of attention is considered awkward or rude, but these acting teachers insist on it—the profession demands undoing earlier social training in speech etiquette to develop active sensitivity for all those stray signs that spool out alongside more explicit words or acts.
At this point I want to define my usage of channel to refer to real or imagined conduits that afford communicative contact. They combine material media, persons, and structures. A channel can ride a single material medium or link multiple media: a phone call to a secretary, who sends a memo. Conversely, a medium like television can carry more than one channel along a single transmission, usually perceived as interference. Channels might also be thought of as constituted by materials and structures that together afford the very possibility for contact or communication without themselves being taken up as the main media for messages (although they can also be interpreted as messages, as can their blockages: a closed window, a roadblock, a first-class airplane cabin).
On another morning, the instructor has students face each other in parallel lines. Those in one line silently select targets from the other, and then “without words or external signs, only in your mind” call their targets, whose task is to intuit who is paying attention to them. Everyone concentrates; this time, most guess correctly. The teacher asks: “How can you explain this?” They call out words and phrases like “Tjanet!” ([She/he/it] pulls), “Glaza!” (The eyes!), or “A whole sum of minute things.” The teacher recollects learning the same drill under Maria Osipovna Knebel’, stage director and student of Stanislavsky (and main rival to Mikhail Kedrov, more often in the United States considered Stanislavsky’s heir because he headed the Moscow Art Theater), who had learned it under Mikhail Chekhov (Stanislavsky’s most theosophical student, who left the USSR in 1928). In her autobiography, Knebel’ reminisces about early 1960s student reactions, posing the same questions as did her former student in 2003:1
How did the students guess, surprising those who saw this exercise for the first time? Telepathy? No. Each student did it differently … One got it because his selector behaved too casually, another seemed suspicious, another did not meet his eyes, another caught the shadow of a quickly hidden smile. They noticed the subtle, barely discernible. And if sometimes they did not guess, still the process of attention was all the same creatively sharpened, and after the exercise evoked, for most, thoughts and examples of lively observational skills and sensitivity. And is not sensitivity, the ability to penetrate that which lies on the surface, the obligatory quality of a director? (1967, 546)
Actors trained by Knebel’ and her colleagues yielded captivating performances: quirky, clever, and still beloved by fans. Brilliant ensemble work is marked by exchanges of glances and gestures even among the extras in Soviet-era comedies like Carnival Nights (1968) and tragedies like King Lear (1971).
INFORMATION WARS: FROM DRACULA TO RUSSOPHOBIA
Around 1961, both superpowers invested in developing the sensitive “ability to penetrate,” increased funding for telepathy research. Sources on both sides credit a specific moment when French journalists reported that a research team aboard an American submarine, the USS Nautilus, had successfully received mental images from a remote location in Virginia while under ice and water. The Nautilus was the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine and the first sub to reach the North Pole wholly submerged—a deep sea counter to the first cosmic satellite launched by the USSR in 1957. In Military Psychotronics: The Science of Enchantment, Popov writes: “[A]s the “beep-beep” of Sputnik-1 rang over the world like a bell, leading American scientists decided it was time to move in all directions … in this way, the quests to conquer the planets and win human minds reached out their hands to each other” (2006, 2). Some call the press reports about the Nautilus a hoax, old school fake news that spun out spirals of mirrored rumors. All the same, the press reports attending to ongoing lab work increased, as did internal government reports suggesting that telepathic phenomena had military potential (see declassified and unclassified reports for the DIA, such as those prepared by the Air Force Systems Command in 1978 or by the Army Medical Intelligence and Information Agency in 1972). In 1973 a report prepared by the RAND corporation asserted that the superpowers had devoted equal resources to extrasensory perception (ESP) and paranormal research, commenting that “if these phenomena do exist,” the “Soviets would be ahead” (Van Dyke and Juncosa 1973).
Why the Pentagon and the Kremlin cultivated paranormal science as a militarized technology for intuition is a question well masticated in the popular literature and film. The usual answer is to emphasize intelligence or military ends, strategic and paranoid motivations. Such motives are clearly part of the story. All the same, to focus only on such ends and motives can distract us not only from other motives, but also from the myriad and unintended outcomes of those experiments and discourses about them. To understand decades later how people deployed the techniques and the media spun around Cold War era events and institutions (and even rumors) requires that we cast our gaze more broadly, and farther back.
Cold War paranoia appears to some to have begun only after World War II. However, the outlines of that anxious discourse, and in particular the appeal to tropes of mind control, go back to the nineteenth century, to British suspicions of sabotaged imperial communication and enemy intelligence. Literary historian Jill Galvan reads Bram Stoker’s Dracula as its contemporaneous readers might have, through the filters of reports of British conflicts in India and with Russia in Asia during the so-called Great Game. Regarding Britain’s Indian holdings, “The most sensational rumor to this effect was that the Indians had sent messages to each other by way of native telepathic abilities, sometimes known as the ‘Hindu Secret Mail,’ ” an occult channel for spreading mutiny (Galvan 2015, 446). Galvan argues that Stoker played on fears about Britain’s imperial conflicts, from stories of both Indian rebel communications and Russian military intelligence: Dracula, exerting mesmeric power across great distances, collects intelligence on his prey better than any military spies. British Russophobia, Galvan notes, had already intensified after the Crimean War (1853–1856), increasing throughout the competing empires’ struggles to control pieces of Central Asia. Reports of events there built “collective memory of a vigorous conflict between Eastern and Western realms of information” and “extreme investment in information and in depicting warring orders of information” (Galvan 2015, 449).
In Dracula, the narrative of British victory over the Orient is vexed in still another way, as the book emphasizes the Occident’s practical informational weaknesses relative to the mysterious other, weaknesses improbable and unnerving for a nation aspiring to champion modernity (Galvan 2015, 458). Dracula, written during the decade after Frederic W.H. Myers coined the term telepathy in 1882,2 parallels efforts of the Society for Psychical Research in England to catalog “native systems of communication that outpaced Western devices,” perhaps, as Luckhurst notes, as “a mechanism of projection where anxieties about the fragility of colonial rule and scanty communication conjured occult doubles that mysteriously exceed European structures” (2002, 157–58). The British Society for Psychical Research