Habits of imagining political others’ communications—and increasingly, their thoughts—as repressed or masked had already left deep tracks by the time Miłosz wrote during the Cold War:
Such acting is a highly developed craft that places a premium in mental alertness. Before it leaves the lips, every word must be evaluated as to its consequences. A smile that appears at the wrong moment, a glance that is not all it should be can occasion dangerous suspicions and associations. Even one’s gestures, tone of voice, or preference for certain kinds of neckties are interpreted as signs of one’s political tendencies…. Of course, all human behavior contains a significant amount of acting…. Nevertheless, what we find in the people’s democracies is a conscious mass play rather than automatic imitation … [until a person] can no longer differentiate his true self from the self he simulates, so that even the most intimate of individuals speak to each other in party slogans. (1953, 55)
This book has long been cited by American politicians as a core text on the socialist world. Its strength lies in explaining the attraction of ideology to people who had witnessed the atrocities of World War II. However, it is more frequently cited by Americans to claim that others are puppets who mouth propaganda—or who at best live by concealing all opposition, a contradiction they resolve “by becoming actors.”
To be sure, people in Russia can also animate this logic: at GITIS during my time there, one teacher commented upon student failure at a drill in ways that put the blame on Soviet-era conditions. This was another drill to develop intuitive technique, again by limiting the usual face-to-face forms and media for communication, to channel and limit contact and its purpose. A student stood in the center of a circle of other students who had been assigned to play either “friend” or “foe” and had been directed to repress any sign to indicate which they were. As the instructor remarked, “In real life, such sentiments may be the very ones not expressed.” The student in the center was allowed to shake each hand and exchange one word, “Hello.” Based on that minimal interaction, she was to decide “friend or foe?” “Friends” were sent to one side of the room, “enemies” to the other. The poor student could not make up her mind. Flustered, she sent nearly all her cohort to the enemy line. As she shot each one with an imaginary bullet, they dropped to the floor, most declaring, “How I loved you!” Watching her desperate indecision about which signs to trust, her failure of intuition, one of the teachers, shaking with silent laughter, whispered to me: “Look at this—this paranoia is our Soviet, Stalinist mentality.”
This bit of ethnography does not prove Miłosz correct—in other moments, the same teachers blamed markets, postmodernism, and Hollywood. Historical and ethnographic attention to specific claims indicates that we do better not to reduce (say, by deriving a statistical average among claims), but to situate each claim as such, as a claim, as a turn in more than one ongoing conversation. The magic of socialist theater owed less, perhaps, to contrastive glamour, fantastical color against grey landscape, than it did to the political drama of such claims. To follow enchantments of contact conjured by phatic experts, through technologies for intuition, it will help to look at where and how claims of intuition give way to those about perception. This is because each sort of claim—to sensation or to intuition—can be wrought and unwrought with reference to battles over materialism, over the matter and media for sensation and communication. Those battles simmered among imperial colonial powers from the time of René Descartes and continue within and across ideological oppositions, wreaking too tidy separations between capitalism/socialism, science/art, mind/body, self/collective, and inspiration/automatism.
2.Energy and Extrasensation
ROBOT SLOTS
American cold warriors depicted the Soviet socialist enemy as at best a robot-minded slave to be pitied and at worst an agent intent on invading other minds. If Russian literature, music, opera, and ballet were received as passionate tours de force, whence the portrayal of a people as robot-like? To be sure, the Soviet state imprisoned poet Osip Mandelshtam, executed director Vsevolod Meyerhold, and tried and exiled writer Andrei Sinyavsky; these moments complicate but do not negate Soviet-era creativity and fantasy. Some argue that it took concentrated effort to depict Soviets as if they lacked these qualities. For instance, some claim that it took CIA funds funneled through foundations (yet another sort of channel) to promote American forms of abstract expressionism as manifestations of individual creativity,1 intending, by contrast, to prove Soviet rule toxic to human imagination and feeling.2 Never mind Harry S. Truman’s hostility to abstraction, tinged by racial slur (“If that’s art, then I’m a Hottentot”); American accounts of twentieth-century cultural politics usually focus only on Nikita Khrushchev’s philistine pronouncements (“Dog shit!” “A donkey waves better with its tail.”).
Still other possibilities might explain why or how the “first world” described the “second world” (Pletsch 1981) as a land of robots. Perhaps depicting the USSR as a land of brainwashed ideologues projected more general fears about mechanization everywhere. Perhaps it expressed American guilt over dropping the atom bomb.3 Whatever the diverse reasons, the result has been to score out a robot slot, not unlike Trouillot’s savage slot (1991), a discursive matrix that, he argues, structures European accounts of colonized peoples. Slot is a metaphor for the ways strong discursive patterns call for repetitions, for filling in blanks as one does when making a metered rhyme or filling in a menu. Like most tropes about others, the savage slot projects colonial mythology and does not describe the colonized.
Worry about automatons may not have started within America; witness the ways women, colonized people, and people of color are described in many places as if they are capable only of imitation (see Bhabha 1984). But the American robot slot is a treacherous version; anyone, from middle manager to boss, can fear falling into it without leaving home. Consider all the 1950s office fictions mourning the sad, gray-suited, city conformists, sold-out souls working for pay instead of following Jack Kerouac to Big Sur.4 Modernist aesthetic movements from beat poetry to punk sought to recover vital energies, awaken perception and will, and release the modern person from civilizing sublimation and submission, but the ironies multiply: white Americans turn to rock music or jazz improvisation to awaken from robotic emptiness, even while ignoring legacies of slave labor that still affect everyone.
There is precedent for another twentieth-century, paranoid, American Cold War version of the robot slot in Dracula (1897), in which projections of vampiric mind control from the East ominously threaten British imperial stability. In nineteenth-century Britain we also find the fear of automation expressed via suspicion of materialism—a suspicion that would carry over into the ideological enmity between socialism and capitalism in the next century. This was all clear particularly in studies of the mind that championed individual creativity and took an absolute moral position on freedom and will. Lorraine Daston notes that in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, psychological approaches to mental phenomena were riven by worry over the moral implications of creating a science of the mind, “in particular, the possible encouragement it might lend to materialist or fatalist theories of human conduct” (1978, 192). Suspicion of materialism, especially materialist accounts of the mind, seemed aligned too closely with a fatalism that lent itself to automatization and to loss of an inner, active self to drive attention and sensation, a kind of self, Daston remarks, that was