Do We Have Contact?

INTERSECTIONS: ACTORS AND PSYCHICS

This book connects and contrasts hitherto separately treated places, practices, and situations, following actors and psychics and those who cross their paths. Others have written about Soviet theater or about telepathy science as distinct topics, and in rich and insightful ways. This project instead sniffs along the edges where fields of expertise converge and diverge. Some of these overlaps are easy to see, such as when American security forces hire psychologists like Paul Ekman or when Russian detectives quote Constantine Stanislavsky.

In 1996 I started to collect books from street vendors near Moscow metro stations, books that forged hybrids of theatrical and criminological knowledge, branding technologies for intuition, like What Is in His Subconscious? Twelve Lessons in the Psychotechnology of Penetrating the Subconscious of Your Interlocutor (A chto u nego v podsoznanii? Dvenadtsat' urokov po psikhotekhnologii proniknovenija v podsoznanie sobesednika). The author, psychologist Aleksandr Panasjuk, begins by challenging the Russian proverb asserting that one must "eat a pound of salt" together in order to know and then to trust: "That is what they say who do not know the science of psychology. For science maintains that one can decipher another person in a few seconds!" (1996, 12).

Panasjuk then voices the retort of an imaginary reader: "But what if they are acting?" He reassures us that even the greatest actors have limits — even Innokenty Smoktunovsky, the Soviet-era star whose repertoire ranged from Prince Hamlet to Prince Myshkin, could never pull off a decent Lenin. It follows that ordinary people find it even more difficult "to act" all the time. Therefore, if your interlocutor does not want you to intuit what he is feeling, he must work quite hard. Diplomats, yogis, professional actors, and the like may have taken the time to train themselves to limit and control their gestures and tone, to tame their automatic tells — but rest assured, most mortals have not mastered the control: "If your partner has not studied in special schools or internalized Stanislavsky's system in the theatrical institute, then it will be incredibly hard for him not to manifest, through unconscious behavioral reactions, his true stance" (Panasjuk 1996, 46). Readers are promised specialized techniques from psychology and theater for penetrating an other's subconscious — if not to read thoughts, then at least to discern attitudes.

Scholars working elsewhere have theorized similar intersections across scientific experimentation; art; demonstrations of the magical, occult, or paranormal; and to some extent criminology, demonstrating where similar aesthetic and technical conventions regulate attention and focus in ritual, in the lab, and behind the proscenium arch. Lights go on and off, doors, curtains, and windows open and close, sorting and separating senders from receivers, setting up barriers to some senses and channels for others, and segregating or linking actors and audiences, subjects and experimenters.

It is commonplace to assert that just as modernity produces tradition, science produces the occult, and that new forms of media motivate and empower mediumship. Such claims warrant more thinking at the intersections. Luckhurst (2002) argues that telepathy is magic gone modern. In making this claim, he and other scholars identify junctures among formally distinct, public arenas ("law," "ritual") and more diffuse forms of sociality. They describe the nineteenth-century turn to spiritualism and hypnosis as echoing fears and hopes about messages crossing once inconceivable distances. Telepathy, psychokinesis, and all the paranormal powers did more than merely run alongside the novelties of mass printing, trains and telegraphs, radio and film, and now the cell phone and the digital image. Strong feelings both for sounds transmitted along thin wires and for voices from the ether animated the extension of empires and states (see especially Galvan 2010, 2015).

Perspective matters a great deal to this story: because perspectives are both many and limited, I do not claim to paint a general landscape of fields, even within one country. As a sociocultural, linguistic, and historical anthropologist, trained both to be attuned to interactions and to search the archives, my goals are not to catalog taxonomies, to distill origins, or even to posit causal explanations. I am motivated instead by questions like this one: As people move among situations, from the bureaucratic to the magical to the mundane, for whom do which channels seem clear? For whom are which channels invisible? Who aims for, who avoids, which contacts? How do these social facts constrain and enable human actions or even a sense of the possible?

In this book I move among settings in which professionals encounter neophytes; skeptics meet so-called naives; and outsiders and insiders trade places, mixing metaphors and trading tools as they debate and imitate, invent and borrow. Literary critics on talk show panels accuse telepaths of acting. Sociologists claim that fortune-tellers are no worse than telephone therapists. Stage magicians collaborate with film actors and consult with former military paranormal researchers on reality shows that debunk "bad psychics" as "just good psychologists."

Other scholars have brilliantly described Russian and Soviet sorcery, orthodox miracles, shamanism, folk healing, the occult, and the paranormal in local and regional terms, demonstrating complex relations and connections to economic patterns, regime change, and local scientific history. Such works address literary and scientific struggles around the occult before and during Soviet times, the needs of late Soviet and post-Soviet clients seeking alternative treatment or spiritual counseling, the controversies surrounding UFO sightings, the legality of licensing nonmedically trained healers, and other topics.

Likewise, other scholars have explored theatrical movements across Russia and the Soviet Union, linking avant-garde, realist, and documentary work to political formations and social changes and situating theatrical agents and projects in fascinating ways, while giving them their due as creative aesthetic projects — for example, exploring Soviet amateur theaters (Mally 2000) or twenty-first-century ventures such as teatr.doc in Moscow, whose participants draft scripts verbatim from interviews with homeless people, migrants, and prisoners (Weygandt 2015). Many have argued that aesthetic struggles regarding performance in Russia, and performances themselves, have shaped events and social patterns, as Russian artists hoped they would do, vesting lines of poetry and stage props with revolutionary — and even occult — agency. Regimes both deify and...