Cold War fictions of all genres famously worry about influence over the very conditions for and forms of contact. Much science fiction of the era ends more happily than Solaris: someone cracks a code, the army finally telephones a linguistic anthropologist just in time to prevent nuclear catastrophe over a misunderstanding. The aliens mean no harm. Such tales warn of the limitations of individual intuitions, like nervous reflexes that lead us to misread attempts to make contact, misreadings that threaten to scatter the world with ash.
The little houseplant in Solaris presents a suggestive contrast. Even before science fiction emerged as a late Imperial genre, social circles, fields of friendship, practices of kinship, and institutional circuits chained across state borders. Those who recognize the long centuries of such relations tend shoots that sprout and thrive across borders, but that look like untidy weeds to the paranoid perspective. Xenophobia erases efforts to make contacts that, from a limited, purified perspective, seem inconsequential, ignoring most everyday contacts while magnifying the winks and handshakes of the powerful, mistaking circles for rays.
Throughout the nineteenth century, paranoia about mental influence oscillated with hopes for spiritual health through empathic and psychic union. As trains and telegraph wires spanned imperial territories, performances and experiments blended occult and scientific genres, to make and break such contacts via mesmerism, hypnosis, spirit communication, and telepathy. The twentieth-century Cold War intensified this dynamic, militarizing fears while energizing speculation about the nature of contact: children in the United States and in the USSR grew up with tales and films encouraging us both to dread and to long for contact with other sentient beings, be they cosmic, animal, or human others.1
This book tracks worries and hopes about communication and its channels when they are conceived in relation to movements of thought across borders—bodily, social, architectural, geopolitical—borders that themselves serve, even covertly, as semiotic material, as media, or as channels. Along the way we see how ideologies about communicative contact and channels reinforce social segregations as much as they forge connections. Likewise, we see that it takes effort to make or break contact, to sustain or distort communication channels.
These efforts are guided not by linguistic grammars, but by bundles of social habits, structures, and discursive practices that people speak of through categories such as propriety or intuition (“One doesn’t speak with such people, we just know they lie”). Such clusters were generated historically, neither flowing only top down nor bubbling out of bare interaction. The clusters can be difficult to track because historical encounters unfold where spaces and channels are already divided — and where common sense has long depicted communication as if it could be explained by grammatical or binary logics. The twentieth century was saturated by images graphing communication as a line between two points, a speaker/hearer dyad echoing dualisms so common to social thought: concept/sign, word/thought, spirit/matter, agency/structure, and so forth. Even thinkers in the nineteenth century, however, saw alternatives. Theosophical tracts on thoughts and channels, for example, jostled with scientific research to paint thought not as mediated by forms and matter, but as matter taking form.
FIGURE P.1. The Music of Gounud a plate from a book of theosophy by C. W. Leadbetter and Annie Besant, Thought Forms (1908).
Fred Meyers coined the term telepathy when he founded the Society for Psychical Research in England in 1882 to describe transmission of thought-feeling from a distance, without known form of mediation. The Music of Gounod, printed in Annie Besant and G.W. Leadbetter’s 1901 book Thought Forms, depicts moving thought-feelings a bit differently: not as a line of communication between beings, transmission without discernible wires, but as clouds of smoky matter that, once piped up the church organ and through the roof, extrudes and dissipates, perhaps to float on by itself as form, even without receivers, detached from thinkers. Another illustration depicts “Vague Pure Affection” as a coral pink cloud that “frequently surrounds a gently purring cat” (1901, 41), a thought-form not aimed in meaningful rays at anyone in particular.
Theosophical images of thought forms traveled, captivating artists Vasily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint,2 each credited separately with creating the first abstract painting (af Klint in 1906, Kandinsky in 1911). Artistic abstraction is often defined (for nonspecialists) merely as nonrepresentational; Kandinsky and af Klint sought in addition to make contact through art with other planes of reality, to conduct energies among planes through channels formed not only by the material mediation of shape and color, of paper and paint, but also via the motion of the artist’s hand: moving matter leaving traces for intuition. Such art, Kandinsky hoped, might live its own life, reaching from the canvas; extruding energy generated by changes in tempo or direction beyond the moment of painting; vibrating within the soul of the attentive viewer; and creating “inner resonance,” as he wrote in The Spiritual in Art ([1911] 1946). Art is the imprint of thought as moving matter spirit (see also Carlson 2000).
In Point and Line to Plane ([1926] 1979), Kandinsky defined the line not from a bird’s-eye, seemingly objective perspective from which to chart a distance between two points, but at the concrete, specific spot where the painter touches brush to surface: the line is a visceral “track made by the moving point.” That moving point is the result of a historical contact, a specific, singular confrontation “through encounter between implement and material surface” ([1926] 1979, 542). Kandinsky came to these ideas through his experience of synesthesia, while working to convey how he felt color as sound, lines as movement, and drawn shapes as reactions to changes in balance and gravity, like a projected proprioception. Observations of his own sensory events, touching hand to paper through brush while making art, led him to write and paint against Euclidean geometry. A line will move straightly, he argued, only when contact is not subject to additional forces that torque and curve any part of some concrete assemblage of pen, hand, paper, or mind. For the theosophical artist, every singular point begins its own center, emanating thought-forms potentially in all directions, as ripples mark water, or globes of light appear around streetlamps in rain or fog: forces that counter representing contact through a straight line. Kandinsky’s trope, in other words, counters imaginations of telepathic rays. The ray, if abstracted from those forces its depiction must overcome, erases all but one cross-section of broadcasts that otherwise extend in many directions at once. The telepathic ray is but an illusion, an abstracted radius; it only seems to be formed by aiming from one point to another.
V.N. Voloshinov, by no means a theosophist, writing in Moscow in the 1920s about trajectories of quotation, observed that no word arrives from mouth to ear without refracting, shifting direction and meaning as it is torqued by social contexts and material forces (Voloshinov [1929] 1986). I derive much from Russian and American thinkers such as Voloshinov, who were pragmatically attentive to the historical specificity of signs as we make them, as we recognize emissions or movements as signs, as we repeat their direction faithfully or purposely distort them.
Kandinsky’s Point and Line echoes early American pragmatists: we know that theosophists discussed pragmatic philosophy in their reading circles, and that pragmatists such as William James and C.S. Peirce interested themselves in theosophy—and also in the methods of telepathic research. These circuits of discussion ran contemporary with Peirce’s insights about indexical meaning: while symbolic meaning is grounded to rule sets, logics, or conventions, such