Technologies for Intuition: Cold War Circles and Telepathic Rays"Cold War paranoia can only partly describe or explain the 20th century dreams of telepathy. The nightmare shades of mind control and crowd frenzy have long alternated with the pastels of love and collective effervescence. Both extremes materialized over time, along tangled circuits of wars, events and interactions staged across borders since at least the 19th century. The Cold War and its fences fed fascination with the workings and the failures of contact and communication. Opposed sides accused each other of jamming media and spinning propaganda even while they mirrored fantasies of connection. This book contrasts and connects Russian and American channels and means to check channels, with special attention to intersections of the telepathic with the theatrical. It theorizes links between historically layered struggles over technologies for intuition and dominant models of communication, commonsense or theoretical. It demonstrates that theories resting on models of individual sincerity and of dyadic communication warp understandings of the USSR and Russia--and thus of the USA, as well. It proposes that attention to the means of making and checking contact, that is, to the phatic functions in language, offers a way out of the impasses and paradoxes of paranoia"--Provided by publisher. |
Contents
INTRODUCTION | 1 |
DO WE HAVE CONTACT? | 21 |
ENERGY AND EXTRASENSATION | 45 |
RACE AND GEOPOLITICS | 79 |
CIRCLES RAYS CHANNELS | 109 |
DIVIDING INTUITION ORGANIZING ATTENTION | 130 |
TEXTUAL ENCHANTMENT AND INTERDISCURSIVE LABOR | 154 |
INTUITION AND RUPTURE | 179 |
RENEGADE CHANNELS AND FRAME TROUBLES | 203 |
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Common terms and phrases
acting actors American animate anthropologists asked audience Battle body broadcast camera channels Chumak circles of attention claims cohort Cold cold reading Cold War communication contestants contrast creative credentials crew cultural demonstrated depict director drills dyadic elite encounters energy estrangement ethnography example experiments eyes film fourth wall frames friends gaze genres gestures GITIS glasnost ideologies imperial infrastructure institutions instructor interactions interdiscursive labor late Soviet Lemon live magic magician material matter metro Meyerhold Mikhail Chekhov mind Moscow move multiple never occult onstage paper paranormal perspectives phatic play political post-Soviet prison psychic racial radio Russian Russophone scholars science fiction semiotic sensation sense sensory shifts signs skeptics social socialist Soviet Union Soviet-era space stage Stanislavsky story structures talk teachers techniques technologies for intuition telepathy television texts theater theatrical thought tion United Uri Geller USSR viewers watch Wolf Messing words