The U.S. version of Battle, America’s Psychic Challenge, lasted only half a season in 2007 (the Russian was past its seventeenth season by 2017). We cannot credit its cancellation to American sophistication regarding the occult; U.S. media are saturated with supernatural plots, talk shows with mediums, and ghost-seeking reality shows (Bastien 2010). On the contrary, cheery confidence in magical forces suffused America’s Psychic Challenge: the game host, the voice-over, and even the musical sound track all introduced each scene with breathy, hushed expectation. By contrast, the Russian Battle of the Psychics, ranked number one for several years running, poses tests of extrasensory detection and telepathic contact after which experts debate, evaluate performances, and eliminate losers. Dramatic conflict sets wishful psychics against each other and their skeptics. In the American version, neither the host, the narrators, nor any formal elements indicate the slightest note of skeptical challenge. As Lamont (2013, 228) notes, psychics commonly blame their failures on interference from a hostile or skeptical audience, and the American show’s producers made sure nothing like this disrupted the action. Bright, optimistic affect ruled tone and tempo, even when the host had to tell a contestant that she had earned only 12 of 25 points. In America’s Psychic Challenge, all participants were perfectly groomed and styled, always smiling, never tired, never worn out. And there was no discussion of how or why contestants failed, no accusations of faking or psychic weakness; points alone were added to calculate success, without additional review.
The Russian version, in contrast, frames each scene with questioning rigor. A few times per episode, a narrating voice stresses that “this is just an experiment,” that viewers are free to judge—“decide yourselves”—whether the phenomena on display are real. Multiple frames jostle, cuing the viewer to recognize frames within frames, as layers of experts talk about how the psychics make telepathic contact or communicate with another dimension. This editing strategy attracts engagement—as comments testify on fan websites devoted to judging how the judges do their judging. Viewers watch skeptics and experts set up double-blinds and controls, watch the crew position multiple cameras. In one episode, before the psychics search for a plastic bomb hidden in an empty stadium, the crew times a search dog and a platoon of soldiers—the dog finds it quickly, and the platoon needs a bit more time, but only one of the psychics comes close.
We watch people whom the producers have hired to be observed while observing: a psychologist who claims to have worked in military ESP labs in the 1960s and three young magicians, brothers “who sniff out any tricks,” because their very “profession it is to fool the public.” All of these differently skeptical experts trail behind each psychic, checking procedures, adjusting boxes and blindfolds, asking questions, and setting limits as the host reminds viewers that the tests are modeled after laboratory science, to follow protocols for randomization and double-blind. These experts also monitor video screens (sometimes alongside participating civilians), commenting throughout: “She is feeling the rails, she’s just using deduction”; “He’s studying her eyes for a reaction.” In this way, even apparent successes become failures as the experts deconstruct how the deeds are done: “too much talk,” “using too many senses.”
The expert panel format is familiar to the genre everywhere, as well as to telepathy shows on variety stages in the Soviet and Russian imperial eras. We might compare them to U.S. shows like Project Runway, for its public shaming, or MythBusters for its debunkings (see also Hanks 2016). This makes the American version something of an outlier, as it does not even attempt to stage controls—the contrast also undermines any claims that Americans are less prone than Russians to magical thinking. Although back in the 1970s Johnny Carson brought professional magician James Randi onstage to unmask Uri Geller, and magicians like Penn and Teller make entertainment of debunking others on stage, in the twenty-first century such skeptical shows are at least equaled in America by shows that amplify the mystical without question. They achieve this amplification by technical means and collective efforts to focus perception of contacts and communication. Mentalist John Edwards, for example, performs for audiences who do not see the panorama of facial expressions from which Edwards, observing from the stage, can choose (and for broadcast, the cameras avoid capturing this view). His viewers lack access to a range of minute details that performers from the stage can see to select among (better to choose more mobile faces for easier readings).
As a number of anthropologists have argued, spirals of skepticism themselves enchant magic, the occult, and the paranormal.12 Indeed, the number of contestants who complain in interviews, blogs, or biographies that others cheat seems only to have increased viewership. One of the show’s experts even recounted how, during the first season, a contestant arranged to take her turn at a test last, to gain time to glean information from the crew. Another former contestant countered similar judgments against him, claiming in a number of forums that the show's editors manipulated video cuts to make the contestants look like charlatans. To trick people into believing that someone else has tried to trick them seems indeed to incite involvement, to have further developed into a rewarding spiral upon which to capitalize.
COLD WAR CONTACTS
Technologies to intuit “the shadow of a quickly hidden smile” compete across specific tangles of institutional relations and geopolitical interests, in conflict even as they connect. Relations of conflicted connection—and connection across conflict—are difficult to articulate even under the best of conditions. For decades anthropologists and historians have tried to follow social networks and circuits for ideas and techniques across geopolitical borders, through boardrooms and shipping lanes, mapping points where goods and bodies, words and images, government structures and corporate franchises touch ground across borders.13 Despite their work, relations across borders are rendered subversive and unpatriotic—or invisible, incoherent to the story of a nation. To account for affiliations across borders that involve people or things tagged as belonging to a geopolitical opponent is even more problematic.14
Barriers and broadcast points built or maintained during the Cold War retained force even after walls came down. Some barriers transcend any particular conflict: State Department rules forbid diplomatic staff to fraternize with locals and refuse security clearance to people who maintain too many foreign contacts. Such practices aim to regulate borders by delimiting not just spaces, but also channels for communication, constraining certain kinds of contact in ways that affect the imagination of possible social bonds, that project the purposes of communication or imagine its futility. As Vincent Rafael has argued regarding communication during military conflicts, “war bears some relationship to the movement of translation that leads not to the privileging of meaning but to the emergence of the untranslatable … translation in a time of war intensifies the experience of untranslatability” (2007, 8; see also Galison 2012).
All the same, even at the height of the Cold War, science fiction writers fashioned characters who breached Cold War walls—and not to manipulate minds or wills, but to share discoveries, usually discoveries to do precisely with breaches in conventional barriers to communication or to travel. Soviet science fiction writers especially sowed texts with footnotes to foreign publications, sending scientist protagonists to conferences in New York or Tokyo.15 Science fiction heroes sought contact beyond the bounds of planet—never mind the the bounds of nation. In real life, Soviets aspired to this future in ways that fewer Americans cottoned to; the USSR educated not only the most literate population, but among the most multilingual, who read and listened to media