bullet, they dropped to the floor, most declaring, “How I loved you!” Watching her desperate indecision about which signs to trust, her failure of intuition, one of the teachers, shaking with silent laughter, whispered to me: “Look at this—this paranoia is our Soviet, Stalinist mentality.”
This bit of ethnography does not prove Miłosz correct—in other moments, the same teachers blamed markets, postmodernism, and Hollywood. Historical and ethnographic attention to specific claims indicates that we do better not to reduce (say, by deriving a statistical average among claims), but to situate each claim as such, as a claim, as a turn in more than one ongoing conversation. The magic of socialist theater owed less, perhaps, to contrastive glamour, fantastical color against grey landscape, than it did to the political drama of such claims. To follow enchantments of contact conjured by phatic experts, through technologies for intuition, it will help to look at where and how claims of intuition give way to those about perception. This is because each sort of claim—to sensation or to intuition—can be wrought and unwrought with reference to battles over materialism, over the matter and media for sensation and communication. Those battles simmered among imperial colonial powers from the time of René Descartes and continue within and across ideological oppositions, wreaking too tidy separations between capitalism/socialism, science/art, mind/body, self/collective, and inspiration/automatism.
2.Energy and Extrasensation
ROBOT SLOTS
American cold warriors depicted the Soviet socialist enemy as at best a robot-minded slave to be pitied and at worst an agent intent on invading other minds. If Russian literature, music, opera, and ballet were received as passionate tours de force, whence the portrayal of a people as robot-like? To be sure, the Soviet state imprisoned poet Osip Mandelshtam, executed director Vsevolod Meyerhold, and tried and exiled writer Andrei Sinyavsky; these moments complicate but do not negate Soviet-era creativity and fantasy. Some argue that it took concentrated effort to depict Soviets as if they lacked these qualities. For instance, some claim that it took CIA funds funneled through foundations (yet another sort of channel) to promote American forms of abstract expressionism as manifestations of individual creativity,1 intending, by contrast, to prove Soviet rule toxic to human imagination and feeling.2 Never mind Harry S. Truman’s hostility to abstraction, tinged by racial slur (“If that’s art, then I’m a Hottentot”); American accounts of twentieth-century cultural politics usually focus only on Nikita Khrushchev’s philistine pronouncements (“Dog shit!” “A donkey waves better with its tail.”).
Still other possibilities might explain why or how the “first world” described the “second world” (Pletsch 1981) as a land of robots. Perhaps depicting the USSR as a land of brainwashed ideologues projected more general fears about mechanization everywhere. Perhaps it expressed American guilt over dropping the atom bomb.3 Whatever the diverse reasons, the result has been to score out a robot slot, not unlike Trouillot’s savage slot (1991), a discursive matrix that, he argues, structures European accounts of colonized peoples. Slot is a metaphor for the ways strong discursive patterns call for repetitions, for filling in blanks as one does when making a metered rhyme or filling in a menu. Like most tropes about others, the savage slot projects colonial mythology and does not describe the colonized.
Worry about automatons may not have started within America; witness the ways women, colonized people, and people of color are described in many places as if they are capable only of imitation (see Bhabha 1984). But the American robot slot is a treacherous version; anyone, from middle manager to boss, can fear falling into it without leaving home. Consider all the 1950s office fictions mourning the sad, gray-suited, city conformists, sold-out souls working for pay instead of following Jack Kerouac to Big Sur.4 Modernist aesthetic movements from beat poetry to punk sought to recover vital energies, awaken perception and will, and release the modern person from civilizing sublimation and submission, but the ironies multiply: white Americans turn to rock music or jazz improvisation to awaken from robotic emptiness, even while ignoring legacies of slave labor that still affect everyone.
There is precedent for another twentieth-century, paranoid, American Cold War version of the robot slot in Dracula (1897), in which projections of vampiric mind control from the East ominously threaten British imperial stability. In nineteenth-century Britain we also find the fear of automation expressed via suspicion of materialism—a suspicion that would carry over into the ideological enmity between socialism and capitalism in the next century. This was all clear particularly in studies of the mind that championed individual creativity and took an absolute moral position on freedom and will. Lorraine Daston notes that in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century, psychological approaches to mental phenomena were riven by worry over the moral implications of creating a science of the mind, “in particular, the possible encouragement it might lend to materialist or fatalist theories of human conduct” (1978, 192). Suspicion of materialism, especially materialist accounts of the mind, seemed aligned too closely with a fatalism that lent itself to automatization and to loss of an inner, active self to drive attention and sensation, a kind of self, Daston remarks, that was central to Christian morality grounded in free will.
Suspicion of materialism later infused American accounts of Soviet paranormal science as closed minded. A U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) report prepared by Air Force Systems Command remarked on “the strong tendency of Soviet and East European researchers to emphasize the physical explanation of the phenomena they are dealing with.” Claiming that this materialism hampered creative thinking, the report continued: “In the Soviet Union … ambiguity cannot be tolerated in paraphysics research, and there is a strong tendency on the part of all paraphysics researchers to assert a presumed physical basis for their observations which does not violate known physical laws…. The effect of this may be a premature closure of options” (1978, 36). That is, they criticize the Soviets for being closed to the possibility of immaterial channels for consciousness and communication, even though elsewhere in the document the authors themselves, squeamish about terms such as “spirit,” recommend positivist methods. The DoD report writers thus claim for themselves a properly modern, free, and democratic position between extremes, a Goldilocks perspective from which to subsume all others, to assess just how much materialism is too much, too little, or just right.
The Department of Defense report summarized mainstream Soviet print publications, providing a bibliography of newspapers and popular science journals from the 1920s through the 1970s. Upon reviewing these sources and many others, I found that the DoD writers minimized the breadth of Soviet opinion and expression on the topic, which ranged from the statistically grounded to romantic, from the comic and skeptical to the wishful and whimsical. The DoD report, while briefly acknowledging that Soviet publications sponsored debates,5 depicted those debates as if they were spun so tight around the axis of ideology that the only relevant issues involved whether scientific experiments hewed to Marxist materialism or not, as if communist ideology had burned out the last bits of fuel for curiosity:
Like other scientists, paraphysicists have had to spend considerable effort in justifying their field on ideological grounds. The first attempt seems to have been to assert that the phenomena were mediated through known, if not exactly demonstrable, material mechanisms. Electromagnetic waves became a favorite explanation for telepathy, despite the argument that electromagnetic effects caused by physiological processes were much too diffuse and weak to cause the noted phenomena. The other major attempt has been to acknowledge that the information or energy transfer mechanisms are not known, but to assert that this simply reflects the imperfect state of contemporary scientific knowledge. Lengthy sections devoted to ideology and quotations from Lenin are frequently found in the works of paraphysicists, particularly in the early and mid-1960’s. (Air Force Systems Command 1978, 36)
As a matter of fact, in the sources mentioned in the report I have yet to find a single quote from Vladimir Lenin.6 Leonid Vasilev, for example, opens his writings not with Lenin, but with Russian imperial neurologist Vladimir Mikhailovich Bekhterev, British physicist and parapsychologist William Barrett, and Italian psychiatrist Ferdinando
