The events and relations of the Cold War still exert force on familiar ideologies of communication, refracting through judgments of "truth" and "illusion," experiences of "intimacy" and "suspicion." Yet that force remains under-theorized. This paper takes up the task through the lens of late 20th century telepathy experiments--on stages, in labs, and in popular films and fictions. Cold War formations of the occult triggered fantasies and nightmares about the nature and very possibility of communication. While this paper focusses on the Soviet side of things, it marks where the gestures and words clasp their Cold War doubles, allowing us to speculate about how the intimate and geopolitical entwine and grapple, without ceding all analysis to the "rational" scales and logics of the latter.
Dr. Alaina Lemon is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She is a socio-cultural and linguistic anthropologist who works in Russia and the Former Soviet Union. Her theoretical concerns lie mainly with ways to understand struggles over aesthetic techniques and communicative forms in relation to struggles over political change and social hierarchies.
