Technologies for Intuition. Alaina Lemon
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 Cazzamalli.
To recognize this breadth allows us to relate Soviet telepathy science to the ways people encountered and celebrated concrete materials for contact or communication, moving from those forms not to become robots, but to question how to live, with whom, and to what end. Bolsheviks 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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