I have always found it odd to parse conversations among theosophists and pragmatic philosophers through affinities alone: as a linguistic and historical anthropologist attentive to social hierarchies, I look also to trajectories and material channels that afford such circuits. Kandinsky, for example, was born in Moscow in 1866, raised in Odessa, educated in Moscow, and moved in 1896, after a career in ethnography and law, to art school in Munich, after which he lived in Moscow, Berlin, and Paris; his biography sketches a spiral across the borders of empires. The theosophical thought-forms that inspired him were likewise drawn by people of means who crossed many borders, reinforcing imperial-era circuits among Russian, British, American, and Turkish territories. Elena Blavatsky embodied those channels in her migrations, from her birth in Ekaterinaslav in 1831; to her marriage in Erevan around 1848; and then on trips to Istanbul, London, Ceylon, the Rockies, and back to the Caucasus for a good five years. She then moved on to Odessa, finally settling more or less in New York City, with oscillations between London and Bombay (Washington 1993). Her theosophical writings not only referenced imperial spaces and hierarchies by describing, for example, subject people’s mastery of occult energies and channels, but also indexed them. Blavatsky’s biographers marvel at her travels but rarely pause to study the specifics of her launch from elite aristocratic (she was a Dolgorukhov!), bureaucratic, mercantile, and artistic circles. This background made her travels possible, paying for her passage by train and ship and helping her channel her thoughts in print across great distances. Few biographers consider her aristocratic upbringing or the fact that her father was a high-ranking military officer who moved frequently across the southern and eastern parts of the Russian Empire. Theosophists in the United States still marvel at Blavatsky’s erudition in the philosophy and history of religions, at all the knowledge she acquired without having attended school—without noting that few aristocratic children in the Russian Empire attended schools, as their families maintained impressive libraries and hired tutors.
Theosophy itself skirted discussion of social hierarchy even as it posited a universal hierarchy of cosmic evolution, a future infused by the peacemaking, healing capacities of mental and energetic communion. All the while, it anchored sensitive capacities to connect to theories of race and evolution. Thought-forms were visible only to those with the evolved, artistic sensibility to perceive radiating color-sound vibrations. Moreover, a crude, unrefined person can only emanate rough, ugly thought-forms: “Selfish Greed” is sloppy, all mud-green tentacles, like “people gathered in front of a shop window” (Besant and Leadbetter 1901, 56–57). “Intellectual Aspiration,” by contrast, sends out a thrusting ray of yellow, depicting a “much advanced development of the part of the thinker” (72). Kandinsky’s abstract modernist sat in the apex of society, as in the glassy tip of a pyramid or moving pencil, making contact with a new plane: only the genius artist could see ahead.
The ideal of the evolved, telepathic, empathic genius has risen historically across human conflicts and hierarchies, the events of wars, imperial extensions, colonial extractions, and rationalizing governments. So also has the anti-ideal, in images of failed contacts and of excesses of mental manipulation. All the while, specific institutions have fervently worked to open doors to perception that systematize intuitions about contact, even while keeping their channels narrow.
COLD WAR OPTICS
My friend is driving on the wooded road from the dacha belonging to a psychologist and television celebrity, a man who tested telepathy claims in Soviet labs in the 1960s, leaving me free to ponder our tea with him. He had enlightened us, reaching inside his jacket for a Nokia phone to punctuate the claim, about how competition between our governments to harness telepathic energies paralleled lines of technological espionage in the race to perfect cell phones. The birch forest that grows so thick and green just outside Moscow seems an unsuitable setting to belabor our respective states’ claims to have invented this or that communication technology. My friend breaks the silence to remark upon something else. She is struck by our host’s stories about a 1960s experiment in which subjects were to read colors or numbers via skin vision, or dermooptika (dermo-optics): “How embarrassing! For science, they make you sit on colored paper with your naked bottom.” Her words prompted me, as they often do, to ponder our diverging perspectives: while I have been primed to fix on technological rivalry, educated into nationalist, paranoid narratives that oppose Russia to America, my friend was exercising a finer sensibility to both broader and more specific concerns, demonstrating empathy while gesturing toward hierarchy and sacrifice in divisions of laboratory labor. Poor Roza Kuleshova, shivering blindfolded while scientists measured her pulse.
Until my friend spoke, I had given little thought to any indignities that might have occurred in the telepathy lab. This chord runs through the fictions and spectacles of both superpowers; stories about shame and social awkwardness when true thoughts are exposed resonate with Kuleshova’s nakedeness. Such discomforts escalate exponentially in fears that an enemy might access the mind, steal the keys to drive the will—historically, they intensified where state projects intersected, looped into Cold War circuits, for we share more of institutional histories and networks of expertise than we admit.
Throughout the Cold War and afterward, in Russia and the United States alike, films, books, and news reports on telepathy experiments have projected fantasies and warnings about ways to sense over distance and communicate through barriers. At best, humanity unites to discover ever more sleek technologies to open channels through space and time, while we evolve hitherto hidden capacities for intuition, to see into the future or into the minds even of aliens. These dreams, in the pastels of collective effervescence, contrast with the nightmare shades of mass manipulation and mental bondage, in parallel with the ways that, for example, Americans debate the mental influence of Russian propaganda or fake news while they also produce videos of dolphins communicating and films about linguists cracking alien code.
The paranoid perspective all too easily dominates. Fear of mental influence, of mind control as a subtype of enslavement, has ranked high among justifications for building walls, segregating people, limiting currencies, jamming radio signals, and deporting populations. Cold War states fed paranoia in two ways. First, both superpowers cast the enemies alternately as manufacturers of ideological robots or as slaves to suspicion and superstition. Second, both did in fact launch massive efforts to use technology (including psychopharmaceutical technologies) to affect opinions, proclivities, and habits. From television advertising to boot camp, in elementary schools and elections, people witnessed naked attempts to influence motives and actions.
Why so much effort to educate a paranoid perspective? Both superpowers claimed to oppose oppressive states. After World War II both pressed for dismantling colonial orders that had produced slavery, resource extraction, and white nationalism—yet both the United States and the USSR continued to build upon colonial institutions and imperial infrastructures. For instance, both extended prison and military systems in ways that appropriated free labor and fed proxy wars. Both states, to sustain these contradictions without losing credibility, veiled or denied their similarities and connections, even in spaces of cooperation or intersection.3 In paranoia, we together shaped a militarized, carceral world.
In the United States, critics and comics mocked fear of enemy influence, exhorting us to fear instead our own failures to understand, as in Dr. Strangelove (1964), in which U.S. leaders mistakenly attack the Soviets, believing they have poisoned American waters. The year before Dr. Strangelove was released, the U.S. Air Force released educational videos addressing such concerns (Air Force Audio Visual Service,1963). The film demonstrates checks and balances along a chain of communication contacts through channels of telephone, radio, and then finally gesture. The U.S. president picks up a special phone to reach Strategic Air Command (SAC); his command, as a radio signal, is verified by two fighter planes; and then SAC relays the command down to individual