Touching the gap: Social qualia and Cold War contact

Claims about social phenomena and experience of them, their scale and their quality – ‘great intimacy’ and ‘long distance’, affinity or alienation, Iron Curtains and Velvet Revolutions – are matters neither of unmediated sensation nor of symbolic construction alone. They merge qualic signs – bread’s saltiness, an eye’s luster – with histories and taxonomies, with bodily apprehensions of people and of geopolitics. Attention to examples linked to the Cold War help us theorize the social and semiotic processes by which people, especially those I call ‘phatic experts’, make social qualia. Insofar as their work involves competitive claims to modernity, we, as theorists, might in turn attend to the reverberations of such competitions within our own claims about social life.