or on the wide ledges of double-paned windows that reach from hip toward the ceiling, laced by frost.
We have just finished a morning of stage movement (tsenicheskoe dvizhenie), in which we carried each other on our backs, loping in a circle (a eurythmic drill attributed to Émile Dalcroze), and then practiced falling backward in chairs. The students now face a deceptively simple task: merely to establish “contact.” For months they have progressed through techniques to establish communication with partners—partnerstvo—working multiple sensory channels through contact improvisation and mirroring drills, playing physical and verbal games to build collective tableaux and narratives, games familiar from the playground and culled from psychology books, games like Mafia, Ant Wars, Freeze, Die, and Come to Life. Today a new game is taking place: one student waits in the corridor while those remaining in the room agree on a simple command. “Close the fortochka,” they decide. Even with the cold out on the street, someone has opened a fortochka—a little window within a window, set high in the top frame. Central Moscow buildings are snug, well-warmed by hot water flowing to radiators through pipes in the walls supplied by larger pipes that run under and over city streets. The water temperature is set by region, not building: one opens a fortochka when a room becomes too warm. People are always opening or closing the fortochka, asking each other whether they ought to open or close this little point where outside and inside make contact, even in winter.
FIGURE 1.1. Opening the fortochka may seem like wasting steam heat, but it also saves on the electricity and maintenance for localized thermostat systems—and moreover allows fresh air to circulate high across a room without creating a draft, balancing values of efficiency with those of comfort and health.
“Think that exact phrase,” an instructor advises them. “Think: ‘Close the fortochka’.” The classmate returns from the corridor, and we quietly watch him stand still, head tilted, trying to intuit our collective wish. He regards the other students watching him, then the instructor who watches us watching him. He expounds advice, techniques for becoming more receptive to wordless contact: “Relax, listen … then take an action … listen to your body, even the silliest little thing … take that first impression.” He tells the others to “concentrate with the chosen words. Relax, so there is no muscle tension. No analysis, no fighting within yourself.” All efforts fail; the window stays open. They try again with a new command and a different classmate … and succeed! On the third attempt, they fail again. No matter, reassures the instructor; learning to balance principles of relaxation and concentration, this is hard work, a lifetime’s work, this work of making a channel, opening up, making contact. They will labor at this for some part of every single day, for five years, running through an arsenal of what I call technologies for intuition.
Technologies for intuition are sets of techniques and tools designed to catch and to act on those signs, tells, information streams, vibes, and so forth that sentient beings emit without meaning to, or that we try not to express. These techniques include familiar mundane skills of interactional attention, the kind a schoolteacher might use to assess who is engaged and who is bored, that a waiter might use to decide when to approach a table. They might include specialized psychological skills, such as reading shifts among facial micro-expressions, or occult means to sense vibrations in the ether.
In some social settings, to discuss another’s expressions (not to mention one’s fleeting micro-expressions) or to point out lack of attention is considered awkward or rude, but these acting teachers insist on it—the profession demands undoing earlier social training in speech etiquette to develop active sensitivity for all those stray signs that spool out alongside more explicit words or acts.
At this point I want to define my usage of channel to refer to real or imagined conduits that afford communicative contact. They combine material media, persons, and structures. A channel can ride a single material medium or link multiple media: a phone call to a secretary, who sends a memo. Conversely, a medium like television can carry more than one channel along a single transmission, usually perceived as interference. Channels might also be thought of as constituted by materials and structures that together afford the very possibility for contact or communication without themselves being taken up as the main media for messages (although they can also be interpreted as messages, as can their blockages: a closed window, a roadblock, a first-class airplane cabin).
On another morning, the instructor has students face each other in parallel lines. Those in one line silently select targets from the other, and then “without words or external signs, only in your mind” call their targets, whose task is to intuit who is paying attention to them. Everyone concentrates; this time, most guess correctly. The teacher asks: “How can you explain this?” They call out words and phrases like “Tjanet!” ([She/he/it] pulls), “Glaza!” (The eyes!), or “A whole sum of minute things.” The teacher recollects learning the same drill under Maria Osipovna Knebel’, stage director and student of Stanislavsky (and main rival to Mikhail Kedrov, more often in the United States considered Stanislavsky’s heir because he headed the Moscow Art Theater), who had learned it under Mikhail Chekhov (Stanislavsky’s most theosophical student, who left the USSR in 1928). In her autobiography, Knebel’ reminisces about early 1960s student reactions, posing the same questions as did her former student in 2003:1
How did the students guess, surprising those who saw this exercise for the first time? Telepathy? No. Each student did it differently … One got it because his selector behaved too casually, another seemed suspicious, another did not meet his eyes, another caught the shadow of a quickly hidden smile. They noticed the subtle, barely discernible. And if sometimes they did not guess, still the process of attention was all the same creatively sharpened, and after the exercise evoked, for most, thoughts and examples of lively observational skills and sensitivity. And is not sensitivity, the ability to penetrate that which lies on the surface, the obligatory quality of a director? (1967, 546)
Actors trained by Knebel’ and her colleagues yielded captivating performances: quirky, clever, and still beloved by fans. Brilliant ensemble work is marked by exchanges of glances and gestures even among the extras in Soviet-era comedies like Carnival Nights (1968) and tragedies like King Lear (1971).
INFORMATION WARS: FROM DRACULA TO RUSSOPHOBIA
Around 1961, both superpowers invested in developing the sensitive “ability to penetrate,” increased funding for telepathy research. Sources on both sides credit a specific moment when French journalists reported that a research team aboard an American submarine, the USS Nautilus, had successfully received mental images from a remote location in Virginia while under ice and water. The Nautilus was the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine and the first sub to reach the North Pole wholly submerged—a deep sea counter to the first cosmic satellite launched by the USSR in 1957. In Military Psychotronics: The Science of Enchantment, Popov writes: “[A]s the “beep-beep” of Sputnik-1 rang over the world like a bell, leading American scientists decided it was time to move in all directions … in this way, the quests to conquer the planets and win human minds reached out their hands to each other” (2006, 2). Some call the press reports about the Nautilus a hoax, old school fake news that spun out spirals of mirrored rumors. All the same, the press reports attending to ongoing lab work increased, as did internal government reports suggesting that telepathic phenomena had military potential (see declassified and unclassified reports for the DIA, such as those prepared by the Air Force Systems Command in 1978 or by the Army Medical Intelligence and Information Agency in 1972). In 1973 a report prepared by the RAND corporation asserted that the superpowers had devoted equal resources to extrasensory perception (ESP) and paranormal research, commenting that “if these phenomena do exist,” the “Soviets would be ahead” (Van Dyke and Juncosa 1973).
Why the Pentagon and the Kremlin cultivated paranormal science as a militarized technology for intuition is a
