With this in mind, consider the insights of communications scholar John Peters, who has masterfully argued that European anxieties about communicative contact took shape as new media confronted people with new problems, which we projected onto more familiar ways to communicate: “[L]ost letters, wrong numbers, dubious signals from the dead, downed wires and missed deliveries have since come to describe the vexations of face-to-face converse as well. Communication as a person-to-person activity became thinkable only in the shadow of mediated communication. Mass communication came first” (1999, 6). Peters rightly suggests that dreams for perfect communitas came into being mainly when means and materials for communicating multiplied: “The history of thinking about our mutual ties, as well as the history of modes for connections, from writing to the development of electrical media, shows that the quest for consummation with others is motivated by the experience of blockage and breakdown” (268).
Communicative infelicities and broken contacts are ubiquitous. For this book, the next question to ask is: Whose experiences of breakdown, of downed wires or radio static, do we have in mind? Experiences differ less because of inherent qualities in either people or in media and more because states and localities differently organize relations among media, differently politicize genres and situations for communication, and differently rank and separate those who can broadcast, publish, and stand at the microphone from those whose access to channels is more limited. Channels for speaking, writing, and acting are historically configured not only by the material affordances of media, but also through divisions of labor and authority, separations in time and space. The sound of static only partly defines an experience of failed radio contact. A person trying to tune a shortwave radio in mid-twentieth-century Perm’ encountered disturbance differently than did the person in Omaha. The static may have sounded different through jamming, for one thing. Moreover, ideologies about media in each place, similar in some ways, differed (Gershon 2010). They differed increasingly—or claimed to—by mirroring and reversing relations imagined on the other side of the so-called Iron Curtain, the cold war a spectacular display of what Gregory Bateson (1936) called symmetrical schismogenesis: the process of differentiation through competitive and dyadic mirroring (in his case, to exaggerate the differences among genders).
Certainly local experiences and events also determine access to media and affect ideologies about them. World War II, for example, destroyed Soviet infrastructure and communications in ways that most Americans cannot imagine. The sheer number of dead compounded a loss akin to that of post–Civil War America, under devastation of which spiritualism found a welcome among those who were missing kin. A twenty-first-century Russian documentary titled Telepatija opens with such loss, with specific mortalities from that war, not vague superpower paranoia, including a woman recounting her mother’s intuition that her father had not been killed at the front, as a telegram had informed the family. Years later the state released the records—indeed, her father had died not during the war, but in a prison camp in 1947.
So rather than assuming a generalized historicism under which to explain modern worries about contact, this book both contrasts and connects specific events, texts, situations, and institutions, following them across state borders when that is where they point. From archives and ethnography it tracks how, for example, accusations of radio jamming or book burning paralleled expressions of longing for romantic communion and fantasies for telepathic connection or interstellar contact. In the end, neither U.S. nor post-Soviet anxieties and dreams about communication and contact can be understood purely in local terms, in relation only to local ideologies or media ecologies. Anxieties about communicative intuition, about one’s own capacities to read through what we are taught are barriers of radical alterity, run up and down scales: worries about courtship (American men puzzling over e-mails from Siberian brides) morph into myths of diplomacy (Can the president divine the mind of a counterpart?). In the laboratory, on the stage, in broadcasts to outer space, and “in the heart,”16 people draw from other situations and scales, from story and from experience, in efforts to make and break channels to communicate—or even to intuit more subtle rays of contact, as thought, as feeling, as impulse.
Several anthropologists have argued that inclinations to imagine the thoughts of others are not universal—that some peoples simply regard the minds of others as opaque. Others counter that to avoid claims about others’ thoughts need not indicate belief that they are unknowable. Linguistic anthropologist Niko Besnier (1992), building on Schieffelin (1990), argued that where he did fieldwork, people avoided bald conjectures about others’ inner states—but they also devised covert ways, through prosody, tempo, and volume, to shade quotations of others’ words in ways that conveyed opinions about motives or goals. Others have since agreed that people may well wonder what someone else is thinking, yet refrain from speculating out loud,17 in deference to ethical and hierarchical sensibilities about good and appropriate ways to speak and to be silent.
Imperatives to read or to avoid reading others’ minds divide along with other communicative and emotional labors: some people are charged to represent the thoughts or emotions or motives of certain others, exhorted to aspire to do so; others are not. Some face consequences for misreading the boss’s wishes; others do not. Talk about others’ minds emerges in historical, social, and geopolitical conditions that figure such talk as dangerous and strange, or as important and coherent.
Anthropologists have long attended to the ways people take interest in others’ perspectives, minds, and judgments. Nancy Munn, in The Fame of Gawa (1986) theorized chains of labors through which Gawans invested in being well-thought-of as a collective, in trying to shape others’ future memories and return words and actions. It troubled people that despite all their labor, they might yet be unsure about others’ present and future judgments, whether they would value and remember the luster of gifts or heartiness of meals. Similar uncertainty plays out in American advertising and election campaigns—similar but not the same, for the creative ad maker works in a world in which fame and accumulation and hierarchy connect differently than they did in 1970s Gawa.
Feminist, postcolonial, and race-critical scholarship is useful here. Histories of race and class inequalities and violence set material infrastructure and social conditions for the situational politics that hinder or encourage speaking at all, let alone speaking about others’ communications or thoughts. Scholars such as Henry Louis Gates, for example, theorize how people “signify on” others’ unstated purposes or assumptions indirectly, through verbal style, prosody, and other means (see Morgan 2002), and link this indirectness to histories of slavery. Scholars of gender have outlined social institutions that discourage men from wondering what others are thinking even as they press women with the imperative to anticipate others’ thoughts or feelings (Hochschild 1983; Ochs and Taylor 1996). In this light, we can begin to ask what conditions motivate searching for others’ “Theory of Mind” or that find that they lack one. To understand this would require some sociohistorical accounting for how theories are made.18
The linguistic anthropologists and other scholars I have just cited arrived at many of their insights about the ways social and political relationships condition the possibilities of speaking through analytical tools developed by Russian scholars—specifically Valentin Voloshinov and Mikhail Bakhtin in 1920s Moscow. That they were empowered to do so just as the twentieth-century Cold War peaked and waned tells us something about the politics of translation, conversation, and connection across rival borders that we have yet to understand.
POINT TO LINE
Our starting point in this chapter, from which we trace further circles and rays, was the Russian Academy for Theatrical Arts. Established in 1878 as the Shestakovsky Music School, it was renamed the Musico-Dramatic School of the Moscow Philharmonic Society in 1883, becoming a conservatory in 1886. In 1934 it reformed as the Lunacharsky State Institute for Theatrical Arts (GITIS). Renamed after 1991 the Russian Academy for Theatrical Arts (RATI), it remains known as GITIS. The largest and oldest