Technologies for Intuition Cold War Circles and Telepathic Rays [Hardcover]

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.

Alaina Lemonis Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. Her first book,Between Two Fires: Gypsy Performance and Romani Memory from Pushkin to Post-Socialism, received the Wayne S. Vucinich and Heldt book prizes. 

"Alaina Lemon dazzlingly spans the far-flung realms of Russian theater, the paranormal, science fiction, and Cold War espionage as she tracks the work of phatic experts who cultivate special abilities to create, sustain, and assess communicative contact. Drawing on cultural insights that range from highbrow literary theory to lowbrow reality television, this learned book provides a rich ethnographic account of connection-in-communication as a central preoccupation in everyday Russian relationships."—Graham M. Jones, author ofMagic&lÓ