metacommunicative skills and specialize to different degrees in qualities of contact and conditions for communication, learning different skills to account for the most troubling gaps.
I came upon this category in the summer of 1997, when I began asking friends in Moscow, Perm’, and Jaroslavl’ what they made of the newly resonant term transparency, and in a more personal register, how they decided whom to trust. A banker acquaintance averred, “Who can tell?,” suggesting that I ask “the experts among theatre actors and KGB agents.”18 In Moscow as in Chicago, surveillance experts and detectives, therapeutic psychologists and linguistic anthropologists, drama teachers, business communication consultants, psychics and their skeptics work on ways to recognize, manipulate, and represent contacts and channels: Are they warm or cold, open or closed, working or broken, veiled or revealed, lacking or excessive? Some phatic experts—people like Dale Carnegie and Constantine Stanislavsky—even brand coherent systems of “contact qualia” (Lemon 2013) to pass on their expertise.
My banker acquaintance had a point: I had long found common ground in Russia among people trained in theatrical work, because they loved discussing the pragmatic semiotics of minute behaviors in real-time situations, not just onstage. Like me, they actually enjoy discussing the ways tiny gestures point to relationships, both those in the moment and those beyond. At that point I had already lived for some months Perm’ with people educated at the theatrical and musical academies in Moscow and Jaroslavl’; everyone was cash poor, some living rent free in the actors’ dorm even into their thirties. It was this phatic expertise that they could sell when paychecks from the theater were sparse: they gave acting lessons to businessmen, teaching vocal skills to managers to improve their intuition for market and social encounters (for self-preservation, for rapport) that still seemed new.
Phatic experts take an interest in similar forms and details, in the quality signs (or qualia) of human sign behavior (“a spark in the eye,” a “shift in tone”). They may do so to different ends. Some subsume phatic labor under other language functions; for example, police might take a flickering muscle around the eyes to indicate a blocked facial expression and deduce that the flicker indexes a lie. (Paul Ekman would caution that micro-expressions merely signify a shift among emotions.) Police need to monitor channels for signs of false reference; they use the phatic function to abduct the referential. Actors, by contrast, need to suspend reference to run multiple channels of contact in order to animate a “what if” inside a world of “not possible.” American radio psychologists do something similar when they mix layers of memory by mixing tenses (“Where were you when daddy goes away?”).19
Phatic experts often draw from other disciplines and places; doing so itself signals proficiency in crossing gaps. They are like brokers, accumulating value by working back and forth over the borders of nations, institutions, and disciplines. Their authority can accrue even in times of competition; some such work shades into the dark sides of contact, intercepting channels for intelligence or forcing words in interrogation. Phatic experts constantly engage with those who are not (or not yet) experts. Their expertise emerges historically, grounded not only in local organizations, but also in disciplines and institutions whose purposes entail crossing borders, both between states and within them.
REFRACTIONS OF EXPERTISE
When phatic experts judge whether contact has been made, channels have been broken, or communication is flowing, when they name good or bad acting, when they call out strong or weak psychics, they rarely work only with words, but also with materials, even with signs visceral to touch that are less than visible or audible to eye or ear. They also work with social divisions that channel who wields a stopwatch, who takes up a pencil, or who handles the X-ray or the energized gems.
Phatic experts are interested in similar forms and details of interaction and its conditions—but not always for similar reasons. Again, detectives succeed when they look for indications of truth or sincerity, but many actors cannot fret too much about verity (even offstage; as one student told me when the cohort was nearing graduation, “Our profession does not allow one to freeze out a person just because of mistrust”), as that would detract from collective labors to contact the audience.
Some sorts of phatic expertise ascend over others; to understand where, when, and for whom, we need to investigate how they intersect through divisions of labor.20 Expertise accrues value when people, even starting from institutions that silo them (theater school, psychology department, film set, police academy), appropriate or debate others’ schema for contact, others’ technologies for intuition. Intersections with psychology, for example, are common. One film director advised me in 2001 to visit a center in Moscow where substance abusers received theatrical therapy in order to relearn how to connect with family members, as well as a group that, to help homeless dogs, staged role-plays to practice communicating with the police (he called these “psychodramas,” adding that “the woman who runs this group sublimates herself through these dogs … she runs a pioneer camp for dogs”). American director Norris Houghton, who traveled to Moscow twice, once in the mid-1930s and again in the early 1960s, reported that the Moscow Children’s Theater wove developmental psychology into rehearsal practice (1936, 230).
People continue to cross these fields. In September 2002 I audited a college course at the Russian State Humanities University, Experimental Theater for Psychologists. The department catalog explained that this class, required for the major, illustrates Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s stages of development through theatrical techniques. As students, we went through abridged versions of drills in use at GITIS. By way of introduction, the instructor put us in a circle: we were to hold hands, imagine a color, then squeeze the hand of the person to the right. At the end, we reported results ranging across the rainbow. We had failed, the instructor said, because we had “not yet established contact.” Next we were to close our eyes as she described a rural landscape, then open them to take up poses representing some part of the landscape: a tree, a flower, and so forth. She likened the activity to a “shared dream…. [W]hen you filled in the picture, you obshchalis’ (’communed,’ ‘interacted’), yes? The text itself is not important.” Then we repeated the circle—this time, colors linked, ranging in greens and blues: “There, you see!” Having made this point about contact, the lesson plunged into Vygotsky’s theories of the social processes of mental development, whereby interaction with others leads to “internal speech.”
At our next meeting we made another circle; much as at GITIS, students waited, “gathered energy,” and then, all together, were to step forward in unison. The professor informed us that this, too, was a theatrical technique and seemed to know that at GITIS, the point of the drill is to develop attention, to convert phatic energy between working actors into connection with audiences. Her purpose, however, was to demonstrate how children learn to subsume and to differentiate the self and must switch among these positions before thought emerges, before the mind feels itself to be individuated, charting on the blackboard how interactions can oscillate among senses of you/I/we.
Even where ideologies and practices converge, actors still aim for different points, to produce different knowledge from those points. GITIS teachers used drills to criticize sociological generalizations, while the psychology professor made analogies between the contacts we were making and “cultural mentalities.” She asked us to ponder uncanny contact phenomena, moments when “two people suddenly find the same word! How do we do these things?” She continued: “Maybe you do most things like a European realist painter—you look at nature a bit, then paint a little bit. A Chinese painter, however, will look and look and look and look, and then, suddenly—an impulse.”
So, while phatic experts develop authority not only within institutions or disciplines but across them, actors who pull drills from books on social psychology and drama therapy and vice versa, having borrowed terms or tools, sometimes vociferously discredit the very field they have borrowed from. They can evoke intersections to undermine, such as when Soviet newspaper articles in the late 1980s discredited Gypsy fortune-tellers by calling them “good
