This lecture begins with a sense of enchantment associated with moments when people face demands to show tickets, papers, credentials, to prove legitimacy. Rather than focusing on exclusions, as other work has done so well, it follows people who exploit and extend bureaucratic situations to create glamour, to focus attention and capture interest. Next, it compares such situations to stagings of phatic energy--demonstrations of paranormal telepathy, or of theatrical empathy. Both unfold in spaces that previous theorists have tried to define as “liminal”; this talk instead shows how people labor to reduce multiple and embedded relations to ever more local points and synapses. The aim is to theorize how individualist and dyadic ideologies of communication are produced—and how they are, less often (at least in the US and in Russia), undermined. These strains of mesmerism have as much to do with making bureaucracies as they do with making art.