had ardently hoped to make people true agents running the means of production, rather than cogs in the capitalist industrial machine; many Soviet people continued to worry about automatization and conformity, actively devising ways to nurture creativity.
THOUGHTS WITHOUT THINKERS?
To these ends, Soviet materialism was interesting and productive, even across the body of texts that the DoD summarized. Consider the essay by E.T. Faddeev, reporting in 1961 on a seminar at Moscow State University that had gathered philosophers together with natural scientists (1961, 60–63). Faddeev advocates a materialist explanation for thought transfer, positing yet undiscovered frequencies for rays, imagined sometimes as lines, sometimes as circular emanations of waves. At the same time, he describes the idealist position, whereby thoughts move without medium, in sufficient detail that those who might want to ponder that alternative. More to the point, his own, materialist speculations are in fact complex and intriguing; he posits the existence of waves—perhaps radioactive, perhaps microwave—that might penetrate the skull while skipping over the body’s sensory organs.
During that 1961 seminar, V. Tugarinov objected to Faddeev’s brand of materialism because, he asserted, it falsely located thoughts within individual brains, neglecting the possibility that thoughts cohere socially and through technologies to manifest ideation in material media, such as paper or bodily theatrical gestures: “as when actors mime an entire scene that is coherent to everybody.” He agreed with Faddeev that thoughts are not strictly autonomous from the brain—in the sense that they do not empty from the skull like water from a bottle. But neither are thoughts shackled to their “first” or “original” media. Rather, they move along with materials: “Yesterday I sent a letter to America—which means that I sent my thoughts to the other end of our planet” (Tugarinov 1961, 22). Thoughts can even jump chains of media, or they activate several channels at once.
Where do thoughts begin, then? Friedrich Nietzsche famously refuted René Descartes’s proposition, cogito ergo sum, which founded self-existence on awareness of thought, by remarking that a thought comes “when ‘it’ wishes, not when ‘I’ wish, so that it is a falsification of the facts of the case to say that the subject ‘I’ is the condition of the predicate ‘thinks’ ” ([1886] 1989, 17) Tugarinov moved beyond the individual to assert that a brain is just one medium among others along chains of thought. Thoughts move beyond synapses, in flashes of matter in motion, sounds or signs brought by mail no less than by a dream.
The figure of the individual still overpowers social theory, despite anthropological counterclaims. Even after scholars inspired by Erving Goffman, Mikhail Bakhtin, or Valentin Voloshinov have demonstrated that speech does not emerge whole and pristine from within individual bodies, but distributes across people and situations,7 we still have trouble imagining those phenomena we call thoughts moving anywhere but inside the braincase, barely hitching a ride to cross spaces riding signs or gestures, or betrayed only by outbursts, such as laughter.
It’s no wonder the subtle complexity of Tugarinov’s material-semiotic account of thought went over the heads the writers of this DoD report; it would be surprising to find many Americans who imagine thought or speech as other than individual, not bound to isolated thinkers or single speakers. To have done otherwise in this report would certainly have hindered the claim that Soviet materialism led to “closure of options” for research on thought transmission.8 In fact, articles like the one by Faddeev kept company with a range of Soviet expressions of wonderment about communications as phenomena that escape the bounds of bodies, whether they move as electricity, electromagnetic waves, ink in a letter—or by less tangible media.
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