Technologies for Intuition: Cold War Circles and Telepathic Rays

by Alaina Lemon

Since the Cold War, Americans and Russians have together cultivated fascination with the workings and failures of communicative channels. Each accuses the other of media jamming and propaganda, and each proclaims its own communication practices better for expression and creativity. Technologies for Intuition  theorizes phaticity—the processes by which people make, check, discern, or describe channels and contacts, judging them weak or strong, blocked or open. This historical ethnography of intuition juxtaposes telepathy experiments and theatrical empathy drills, passing through settings where media and performance professionals encounter neophytes, where locals open channels with foreigners, and where skeptics of contact debate naifs. Tacking across geopolitical borders, the book demonstrates how contact and channel shift in significance over time, through events and political relations, in social conflict, and in conversation. The author suggests that Cold War preoccupations and strategies have marked theoretical models of communication and mediation, even while infusing everyday, practical technologies for intuition.

342 pages, Paperback

Published November 10, 2017

Reviews

[Bogi Takács]

Read for a science fiction studies article I'm writing about translations of Asimov's Second Foundation. This is a comparative/historical ethnography of how people conceptualize communication, telepathy and acting, in the USSR/former USSR compared to the US. It actually mentions science fiction only tangentially, but I mostly read it to say something about Soviet conceptions of telepathy and their cultural associations as distinct from American or more generally Anglo ones, because these affect the Asimov translations that I'm writing about. (Hungarian conceptions are different from both, but I'll explain that in my actual article :D )

The author did ethnographic work at a major theatre training institution in Russia (GITIS), and also with psychic TV performers, some of whom appeared on Bitva ekstrasensov. This is a Russian TV show and I did NOT expect to read about it in English, ever. Well, here it is. I watched a few episodes a few years back and this was not the context in which I expected to come across it again. (I picked this book up at KU Watson Library shortly before they closed the stacks, it just took me a while to get to it. So yeah. This was not the content I expected to find in Watson Library.)

I was at first confused how acting and telepathy would fit together - I mean, I once read a Hungarian theatre book that discussed both, but that was all -, but this was a surprisingly cohesive study. It was fascinating and insightful, it was hard to stop reading and pace myself even though this was a dense text. I further appreciated the discussion of how Americans view Russians and vice versa, I felt that it was much more thought-provoking than the usual fare (the author discusses how her white working-class background and her experience working with Roma have both affected the analysis).

I felt that there was a bit more about acting than about telepathy, especially near the end, which was less citeable in my paper but very interesting otherwise, so I did not mind. :) I also loved the theorizing around circles and rays, and the details about censorship / radio interference / the availability of shortwave radio in the USSR versus the US. There is just a LOT of very deep and detailed thought that went into this book, on all manner of conceivable topics related to the main ideas. If this sounds interesting to you, I'd suggest picking it up.
______
Source of the book: KU Watson Library