Technologies for Intuition

Cold War paranoia can only partly describe or explain the twentieth-century dreams of telepathy. The nightmare shades of mind control and crowd frenzy have long alternated with the pastels of love and collective effervescence. Both extremes materialized over time, along tangled circuits of wars, events, and interactions staged across borders since at least the nineteenth century. The Cold War and its fences fed fascination with the workings and the failures of contact and communication. Opposed sides accused each other of jamming media and spinning propaganda even while they mirrored fantasies of connection. This book contrasts and connects Russian and American channels and means to check channels, with special attention to intersections of the telepathic with the theatrical. It theorizes links between historically layered struggles over technologies for intuition and dominant models of communication—commonsense or theoretical. It demonstrates that theories resting on models of individual sincerity and of dyadic communication warp understandings of the Soviet Union and Russia—and thus of the United States as well. It proposes that attention to the means of making and checking contact, that is, to the phatic functions in language, offers a way out of the impasses and paradoxes of paranoia.