changes in magnetic electrical gravitational fields” (Army Medical Intelligence and Information Agency 1972, 26). Distant acting academies and military researchers converged to suggest that matters like intuition may not emerge naturally, that structures of governance or education can improve intuition, even to make contact in new ways via “thermal receptors.” In all their work about and on intuition, they could not but also effect changes across commonsense and theoretical models of communication.
American-style Cold War technologies for intuition engaged paranoia early on, later exemplified by anxiety about Madison Avenue subliminal barrages and musical messages embedded backward on vinyl, but originally over the wiles of foreign communists. The enemy seemed to spread propaganda through ever less detectable channels: How could we shut them out or even detect their invasive touch and influence? Looking back to 1962 from 2002, television critic Lee Siegel (2004) proposed “reading” the classic film The Manchurian Candidate (1962) as John Frankenheimer’s arch commentary on Cold War paranoia that linked media to mind control. In the opening scenes, North Korean communists inject American war prisoners with psychopharmaceuticals to program them with classically Freudian associations to mechanical cues: this playing card will remind you of your mother and trigger an urge to kill. Siegel, with an eye to the director’s other works critical of American-style propaganda, reads the film as subtly mocking those who during the McCarthy purges of the late 1940s rabidly accused Hollywood actors and directors of allowing ideological infiltration. They had demonized not only commie ideas—the semantic contents of mental influence—but also the diabolical means for making contact to implant ideas, techniques that were powerful because they came without words, seemingly hidden. A corrupted Hollywood would implant impulses in audiences through acting techniques, recruiting with a stage kiss:
In the original movie, there was something suspiciously familiar about the way the Commies manipulated American minds by playing on their buried emotions. Somewhere in the depths of Manchuria, we see Soviet and Chinese spymasters implanting new memories and associations into their [American] captives’ subconscious. The film’s central assassin is driven to murder by exposure to a queen-of-diamonds, which is intended to remind him of his powerful, threatening mother. The Communists in The Manchurian Candidate have developed a diabolical method of mind control based on memory’s emotional power. It is an ingenious method. It is a highly effective method. It is, in fact, the Method. The Method style of acting, that is. Developed in Moscow by Konstantin Stanislavsky in the early 20th century, the “System,” as it was first known, was composed of several principles. Chief among them was relying on “emotional memory” to play a role…. If the character is feeling shame, the actor might recall a humiliation in her own past that occurred in high school…. The Method soon became the most influential acting technique in the country…. At the white hot zenith of the Cold War, when Russian missiles were being aimed at American cities, tens of millions of impressionable American adolescents were learning how to walk, talk, smile, court and kiss from American actors who had been trained by left-wing, socially adversarial disseminators of the acting ideas formulated by a Russian theoretician who had had Lenin’s esteem and Stalin’s twisted admiration. (Siegel 2004, 17)
Siegel was onto something: the belief that acting could influence through wordless, bodily technique—the way a hand turns a playing card, the way eyes meet before a kiss. Like theories of ideology on the left, from Adorno through Bourdieu, Cold War paranoia about mind control and influence sought the forces of inculcation right here, in what comes and goes without saying.
The Manchurian Candidate foregrounded anxiety that channels not usually suspected of mediation—playing cards, gestures—might bear suspect content. Theatrical and film genres themselves could stir more such worry than could even socialist pamphlets. Even while the latter directly challenged the system in words, they rarely attracted large groups in public to read them aloud. In the theater, by contrast, all those implicit hints about “how to walk, talk, smile, and court” reached large, flesh-and-blood audiences gathered together, a visceral crowd exposed not only to foreign ideas about society, but also to moves that might rearrange social means for making connections.7
Social restructuring was, after all, the aim of avant-garde and conceptualist art and performance; its makers believed that rearrangements of forms and media, from color to architecture, could bring people into contact not only as audiences, but also as interlocutors and as actors themselves. Of course one man’s fantasy of the people discovering their agency is to another the nightmare of the masses, especially when they are mesmerized by demagoguery. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Sigmund Freud, Bertolt Brecht, Georg Lukács, Jacques Rancière—all have warned of and lauded the theatrical for its effects on thought and social action.8 Siegel suggests that McCarthy-era politicians mobilized similar logics to other ends: to rationalize blacklisting even actors, as avatars of mental penetration from Moscow.9 Meanwhile, politicians manipulated xenophobic anxiety around unwitting contact with the Soviet in ways that fed fears of “mixing” classes or races.
CIRCLES IN CIRCLES
Scholarship on nineteenth-century European or American interest in the occult and the paranormal typically reaches beyond state borders to ask how such fascinations articulated worries about and hopes for new infrastructures and media for travel, exchange, information, and communication: the trains, steamships, and telegraphs that conquered and connected colonies. Newly mechanized means of crossing great distances along rails and wires or over the air posed new problems and possibilities. If Dracula expressed paranoia about military intelligence and colonial governance from the perspective of one empire’s center, spiritualists and theosophists joined international movements, the struggles for abolition, suffrage, and colonial independence. Scientists and artists reforged eighteenth- and nineteenth-century formations of mesmerism and hypnosis in the crucible of industrial and colonial extractions of labor and shaped a “modern occult” of telepathy and clairvoyance just when the first European nation-states were carving their borders.
Despite scholarship recognizing movement, it is rare for discussion of the Russian paranormal to cross borders. Other Russian and Soviet topics, like film and theater, have long received transnational treatment. The traces are easier to discern: the products and their makers and performers traveled, and so left tracks, allowing scholars to follow editing techniques from Sergei Eisenstein to Alfred Hitchcock, to see where MGM producers studied the Soviet avant-garde (Eagle 1992). To be fair, transnational approaches to almost any other Soviet or Russian phenomena are rare.10
Anglophone media typically depict “Russian fascination” with the occult as homegrown. British journalist Marc Bennetts wonders “where Russia’s eternal passion for the paranormal and the occult will take it?” (2012, 8). Decades earlier, researchers for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) similarly summarized intelligence on Eastern bloc paranormal research. Even while allowing that “investigation of paranormal mental phenomena generally began during the latter part of the 1800s in various countries,” and even after crediting imperial scientific luminaries Dmitry Mendeleyev and Naum Kotik for studying “thought transmission” in order to “separate natural phenomena from mysticism,” the DoD researchers nevertheless fell back on asserting that “the Soviet public in general has always appeared open to mystical type phenomena, an openness that was somewhat officially acknowledged by Czar Nicholas II and his family’s association with the highly controversial Rasputin” (Air Force Systems Command 1978, 11).
Reference to Rasputin and the imperial family finds its way again and again into documentaries, articles, and books anchoring mysticism to the Russian soul and soil, imposing the myth of the nation-state over a world whose powers were constituted in imperial circuits. Consider the circular knots of imperial kinship, the aristocratic matches that linked European capitals while bringing rulers to rule in places far from where they were raised. The last tsar, Nicholas, was first cousin to Britain’s King George V and to three other European monarchs (Christian X of Denmark, Constantine I of Greece, and Haakon VII of Norway). The tsarina was born Alix of Hesse and by Rhine, in Darmstadt, then part of the
