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ОглавлениеINTRODUCTION
The Object of Radio Studies
The object in question has two aspects, and it will help if I begin by distinguishing them. At one level, “the object” designates the cultural technology of radio itself. At issue is not exactly the thing called a radio, for a radio can be reduced to the status of a thing only if regarded as an appliance, a component of a home entertainment system, however modest. As has been argued by others, radio is composed of certain techniques of listening, a diffused network of social interaction, an industrialized medium of entertainment, a corporate or state system of public communication, in short an unwieldy array of cultural institutions and practices. In this it bears striking resemblance to what film scholars sought to capture in the term apparatus when applied, not to film as such, but to the institution of the cinema. Thus an important aspect of what I am doing bears on radio as a cultural technology, an apparatus, with a social and political history. In this I am channeling an intellectual tradition that reaches back to Bertolt Brecht, Hadley Cantril, Gordon Allport, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno, all of whom in the 1930s and 1940s attempted to theorize the distinctive sociopolitical history of radio.
At another level, “the object” also designates the aim or purpose of a field of scholarly inquiry called radio studies by its partisans. At stake here is not the question of why one might study radio but rather the question of what this new disciplinary project hopes to gain by studying radio in the way that it does. Thus an equally important aspect of what I am doing bears on the matter of constructing the intellectual history, or, as Michel Foucault preferred, the genealogy, of this field, paying special attention to how its partisans characterize both the importance and the necessity of the aim of their research. In this I am channeling a tradition that reaches back at least as far as Max Weber, Georg Simmel, and Karl Mannheim in the discipline of sociology.
An appropriate question might well be: What, if anything, do these two objects have to do with one another? To answer, I am obliged to say a bit more about the concept of the object this study leans upon.
In Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object, I analyze something I call a disciplinary object, largely concentrating on the shift described by Roland Barthes from the literary object of “the work” to the postliterary or antidisciplinary object of “the text.” Doing this matters because it shows, among other things, how a group of subjects, in this case masters and disciples (professors and students), forms the distinctively social character of its bond through the sharing (however unequally) of an object. This object serves as the referent for the questions and answers deemed pertinent within a given discipline. If the literary work once served such a function, it was because the institutional practices conducted in its presence—reading, writing, examining, and so on—produced the literary work as the occasion for the constitution and reproduction of the discipline of literary studies. So, to put the matter succinctly, on this construal the literary work is an object and not a thing. In fact, it is an object precisely because it invests some thing with an intellectual aim and through this investment generates a social relation. That aim, henceforth confused in perpetuity with the thing itself, is the good (ultimately knowledge) that is to come from its study if conducted in accord with certain methodological protocols.
All of which is to say that the two objects I have described belong together more than orthographically. They belong together because disciplinary objects are the volatile zone of indistinction between the world—whether physical or psychical—and the institutionally organized production of knowledge—whether hard or soft—about that world. In short, object, as I am putting the term to work here, is a name for the place where knowledge and world can be neither differentiated nor confused. Moreover, this way of approaching the object situates my study squarely within the frame of media studies (whether one thinks here of Harold Innes or Jean Baudrillard), although my concerns aim more narrowly at the articulation of media and theory than one typically finds in the study of mass culture.
To ward off the usual misunderstanding, I am not saying that there are no things in the world; I am simply saying that from the standpoint of the discourse of the university—which is, for better and for worse, our standpoint (I harbor few illusions about who might be reading these lines, certainly not “the poorest woman in the South,” to use a familiar example)—things are mediated by the social formation through which our encounters with them, as we say, come to matter. Writ large, of course, this means that “things in the world” is a meaningful and pressing concern because more than the grammar organizing the English phrase is at work within it. This “more” is at once the numerous and multiform disciplinary projects charged with knowing “things in the world” and the world that solicits and acknowledges the attention of disciplinary reason.1 To study, as I am proposing to study, the object of radio studies thus involves cocking one’s ear toward the socially organized zone of indistinction in which radio and its study encounter each other. Obviously, I am—as one who studies radio, indeed as one who studies radio studies—present in and at this encounter. Consider this ineluctable metacritical state of affairs as something like the faint but persistent Hörstreif (hear stripe) to be heard in the margins of this entire study, a study, then, less about radio (and there are many excellent ones) than about the scholarly interest in it.
To discern some of the signals being emitted from this zone, I urge that we consider two developments: first, the dramatic arc of radio history, the oft-repeated fact that after coming into national prominence in the so-called Golden Age of the 1920s and 1930s (at least in the United States) radio precipitously faded, only later to return at the end of the century with what can properly be called a vengeance; and second, the emergence of what called itself radio studies, the novel, defiantly interdisciplinary initiative seeking to wrest radio from (to exaggerate for melodramatic effect) the “clutches” of journalism and mass communications, that is, a more administrative or professional study of the mass media. These developments interact, of course, but more than that, they interact in a geopolitical context that both conditions and outdistances them. Not to put too fine a point on it, radio did not fade in quite the same way in Europe, nor, for that matter, has it ever faded in the Third World. Likewise, radio studies so-called is a largely Northern (visible in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom) phenomenon. Grasping its emergence must therefore come to terms with this fact without thereby granting such things as facts undue intellectual authority.2
For the sake of a consistency whose principle has not yet been established, I will take up the second of these developments first. This involves taking advantage of the serendipitous fact that, in a certain sense, our moment is a moment of gestation and maturation. Just as, I suppose, the pulses of astrophysicists race upon witnessing the “birth” of some astrophysical phenomenon, so too do those interested in the genealogy of disciplines begin to vibrate when a discipline emerges in our midst, as radio studies did in the last decade of the twentieth century. The thrill here is largely one of opportunity. Though there has been much discussion within both the humanities and the “qualitative” social sciences about the reconfiguration of the disciplines, about what Immanuel Kant once called “the conflict of the faculties,” it has been difficult actually to trace how a discipline negotiates a space, at once intellectual and institutional, for itself, especially since so much of the recent reconfiguration of disciplines has been stimulated, not by scholars, but by administrators seeking ways to get more for less. Interdisciplinarity, touted now by scholars of all stripes, aside from always already having taken place, alas harbors no intrinsic animus toward neoliberal corporatism, where, after all, it has long gone by the more anodyne term synergy. With radio studies and, lest it go unsaid, with its fraught yet enabling precursor, cultural studies, we have, if not a golden era, then certainly a golden opportunity to trace a discipline in the event of its emergence. To what end? Not, I assure you, simply to herald its “birth,” but to sift its descriptions for something rather more like an explanation of what earlier I called the aim of radio studies and to tease from this the terms that, in cycling back and forth between radio and its study, signal something like the very conditions of emergency themselves. In other words, studying radio studies must be pitched so as to tune in studying as much as broadcasting.
If I have repeated the word emergence in the preceding, I have done so deliberately. For I wish to put this term to work in a way that is in direct dialogue with the British (although he might prefer “Welsh”) scholar Raymond Williams, who sought, in any number of works but perhaps most systematically in Marxism and Literature, to produce the concept of emergence. What matters to me about this is not primarily the question of intellectual debt (in fact, I will reveal myself to be a somewhat fickle debtor, perhaps even a “frenemy”) but rather the fact that in producing the concept of the emergent Williams also produced a concept profoundly relevant to the apparatus of radio and its history, namely, the concept of the residual. This helps one think about the broadly asserted notion that radio’s day has passed, that its comeback in the digital AM era is from some sort of prior moment. Moreover, no doubt as an overdetermined confirmation of my earlier point about disciplinary objects, Williams is also responsible for making radio and cultural studies matter deeply to one another, as a later chapter will attest.
In Marxism and Literature, Williams defined the emergent by contrasting it with both the residual and the dominant. His purpose was to find a way, within the broad contours of a Marxism committed to distinguishing the economic base of society from its cultural and political superstructure, to designate something like the spatio-temporal structure of the superstructure. No fan of the sort of mechanistic determinism that would render Marx’s own thought unthinkable, Williams deployed his three terms to capture how, across class society, interests could form that might lag behind or even race out ahead of those that might otherwise be said to form the prevailing consensus. To designate this last (for example, what we in the United States might call neoliberal economic policy), he used the term dominant. To designate those traditions and interests that the prevailing consensus appeared to have superseded (to adduce his own example, monarchism), he used the term residual. And last but hardly least, to designate practices that managed to get out in front of the prevailing consensus (to again adduce his example, a socialism “beyond actually existing socialism”), he used the term emergent.
To clarify how precisely I want to bring this to bear on radio studies, we need to consider one further distinction drawn by Williams. Within the emergent, Williams differentiated between two tendencies, one “alternative” and the other “oppositional.” His point was to concede that certain ways of getting out ahead of the prevailing consensus were, in fact, mere alternatives to it and not deep critiques and/or rejections of either its logic or its founding institutions. Although capable of ambivalence on the matter, Williams saw aspects of the “counterculture” of the 1960s and 1970s in the West as largely an alternative mode of emergence rather than a truly oppositional one. Less ambivalently, his considerable and vividly drawn misgivings about Soviet Marxism and the Labour Party in Britain notwithstanding, socialism was the only coherent vision of the oppositional mode of the emergent that Williams would live to provide.
What interests me here is the logic of these distinctions, not their referents, or at least not primarily their referents. Applied to radio studies, what this logic rather obviously invites is a consideration of whether its “emergence” exhibits one tendency or another, either alternative or oppositional. Complicating this, however, is precisely the object of radio studies, the fact that in articulating its aims radio studies has presented the device of radio in consistently residual terms. Complicating the matter yet further is the fact that Williams did not draw a correlative distinction within either the residual or the dominant to match the one drawn in the emergent such that one might be able to trace carefully the interchange and interaction between his categories either in general or in the context of a given analytical project.3 Rather than give up in frustration, I propose that we float such a distinction with regard to the category of the residual and see how far it takes us. As the terms of such a distinction are not indigenous to or otherwise forthcoming in Williams’s work, it will be necessary to appeal to the work of others, specifically to two moments in Adorno’s correspondence with Benjamin. I propose that we differentiate the residual in terms of the vestigial and the archaic.
For the sake of brevity I will urge that we regard the vestigial as distinctly developmental. In other words, despite the reference to comparative anatomy and paleozoology, the vestigial underscores that aspect of what Williams calls the residual that is simply surpassed in the normative unfolding of a process, whether physical or psychical. So one might say that polymorphous perversity is vestigial vis-à-vis genital, that is Oedipal, sexuality in Freudian psychoanalysis, although, I hasten to add, in having derived the normative from its failure, Freud complicates this example in a decisive way—so decisive, in fact, that he largely fails to acknowledge it.
By contrast, the archaic is defined not by development but by metalepsis and resistance. Two epistolary formulations of Adorno capture this with concision. In one, Adorno conjoins the archaic and the modern by saying, “The archaic itself is a function of the new; it is thus first produced historically” (“To Walter Benjamin” 38) in and by the modern. It is the temporal inversion of the old and the new that I associate with metalepsis, and it implies that the residual registers what the dominant has produced as something like its enabling past. In other words, if the monarchy still matters in Britain this may have more to do with the contemporary political value of crafting a nationally inflected form of Tradition, or for that matter the dramatic chops of Dame Helen Mirren, than with an abiding popular investment in the divine right of kings.
The resistant aspect of the residual manifests itself when, in further specifying the archaic, Adorno writes that it is “the site of everything whose voice has fallen silent because of history” (“To Walter Benjamin” 38), a phrase as important for what it says about the archaic as for its appeal to the voice, indeed voices, that have been turned down, silenced, in order to say it. If I link this to resistance, it is because it specifies that metalepsis is interested. In other words, Adorno suggests that the modern produces the archaic in order to resist those demands voiced against it both in the present and in the present’s past. Presumably, then, President Jimmy Carter, however dimly, had something like this in mind when, in the wake of the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, he characterized Iranian grievances against the United States for installing and supporting the shah as “ancient history.” In effect, to give voice to its presumed radical novelty, the modern produces the archaic as silent, a gesture whose consequences for the concept of resistance are taken up repeatedly in the chapters that follow. For now, I urge only that we hold onto the notion that the archaic might be said to represent what Williams understood by the oppositional, but articulated around the category of the residual. The point is not that the archaic is a rewording of a “socialism to come” but that it clarifies theoretically what it means to differentiate that version of the future from some other—for example, our own.
To justify this theoretical digression, I return to radio studies. Why not start with the basics? For example, what evidence is there that something called radio studies has emerged as a field of academic endeavor? And further, how precisely does the residual, whether vestigial or archaic, figure in or otherwise illuminate this emergence?4
In scholarship on the infrastructures of intellectual power those attentive to it have been repeatedly invited to pay less attention to the debates and controversies triggering paradigm shifts, than to such apparent banalities as conferences, research grant proposals, publications, reviews, dissertation projects, seminar offerings, job placement, in effect all the institutional micropractices of academic social reproduction. With this in mind, I invite consideration of two issues of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The first of these appeared in February of 1999 and contains an article written by Peter Monaghan, a staff writer assigned to the “faculty research” beat at the Chronicle. Apparently sparked by “Radio Voices and the Construction of Social Identities,” a panel devoted to radio at the 1998 annual convention of the American Studies Association, Monaghan set out to register for the large, multidisciplinary, national audience of the Chronicle the advent of something new.5 As if to contradict one of her own claims about the field (that radio studies knows nothing of auteurism), Monaghan adduces the work of Michelle Hilmes as a sign of this breakthrough. He writes:
Ms. Hilmes is now prominent among a fast-growing number of researchers who are rectifying that deficiency [that radio had disappeared from the scholarly radar screen] by asking what radio programs and audiences reveal about American culture and society. Her Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (University of Minnesota Press, 1997) is the most-cited publication in a recent spate of cultural studies of radio…. The new scholarship focuses on the tension between two disparate poles. One: radio’s complicity in advancing some now-well-documented features of American culture—its intense consumerism and its questionable notions about such factors as race, gender and ethnicity. The other: the ability of the invisible medium to transgress accepted cultural norms and to feed new ideas into American homes. (A17)
Doubtless Monaghan, like anyone else, says more than he means, but let me first attend to what he has said. First, note that he actually avoids the expression “radio studies,” preferring instead the telling circumlocution “cultural studies of radio” (about which, more later). This notwithstanding, he makes it clear that the pursuit of the cultural study of radio remedies a deficiency, it supplements a lack. Well and good, but a lack in what? Presumably, a lack of focus, not on radio per se, but on the disparate poles that according to radio studies partisans should organize the aim of one’s approach to the study of radio, at least in the United States. To give a certain urgency to the discussion and to provide the whole story with a certain frisson, Monaghan resorts to “intensifiers” like fast-growing, most-cited, spate, and the ever-reliable if utterly exhausted new, all words that struggle to perform the sudden, irreversible advent of a breakthrough. Thus, to summarize: readers of the Chronicle are presented with a perceived lack in scholarly approach being quickly supplemented by a fast-growing group organized around a shared new belief in disparate poles. In effect, the key coordinates of an emerging disciplinary body are here in evidence.
So now what did Monaghan say without meaning? He said, “Her Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (University of Minnesota Press, 1997) is the most-cited publication in a recent spate of cultural studies of radio.” In citing this citation (an event he could certainly not have intended), I felicitously enter the hall of mirrors of Monaghan’s sentence, whereby an utterance that is itself a scholarly citation (note its bibliographic form) adds its own gesture of citation to the counter clicking away under Hilmes’s most-cited text and, in doing so, solicits, as it were, my own hit. Monaghan obviously means to tell us something about the way Hilmes’s work exemplifies the new scholarship, but in saying so he does more, he also co-produces something like the factual density of this scholarship and its centrality. Moreover, he does so conspicuously, if not exactly wittingly.
To what effect and with what significance? Especially important here is the general theme of citation and what the late Jacques Derrida has called the logic of iterability. By stressing the said but unmeant performative character of Monaghan’s text, I am trying to draw attention to how the discourse, in this case that of academic journalism, collaborates in the production of the significance of what it reports upon. This, in a nutshell (a term Derrida himself once risked), is what the logic of iterability tries to capture: the way authority actually derives from citation and may, in a certain sense, be nothing without it.
To further justify this invocation of the logic of iterability, I turn briefly to the second Chronicle story on radio studies. Written five years later by a well-regarded scholar, Thomas Doherty (from Brandeis), it contains the resonant subtitle “Radio Studies Rise Again,” drawing attention, I should think, less to the absurdly precipitous rise, fall, and return of radio studies (what happened to the fast-growing, to the spate, to the new?) than to the Chronicle’s own prior story about the rise of radio studies. As if acknowledging its iterative responsibilities, the article opens with a citation of a citation (the narrator in Woody Allen’s Radio Days) and proceeds, I suppose inexorably, to the site of the most-cited, Radio Voices, characterized by Doherty, not as part of a mere spate, but as the start of a veritable “wave,” thereby intensifying an intensifier but also more deftly wiring the rhetorical register of his own discussion so as to solder its form and content. Although Doherty’s characterization of the aims of radio studies (this time called by name) is important—he says that its identifying “call signals” are close Analysis of programs, due consideration of listener Response, and reliance on “postmodern Theory” (or WART?)—more important by far is the reiteration, or repetition, of coverage itself. The whole exercise has something of the feel of the bandleader’s exasperated call, “Once more, with feeling.” And were it simply that, it would deserve no further attention from us, but what remains crucial is the evidence it provides for the role that the discourse of professional reviewing, and its iterative logic, plays in the “emergence” of new academic fields.
Lest I be misunderstood, the logic of iterability is not, in any sense, unique to the discourse of professional reviewing and reporting. It is not, therefore, a sign of something like degradation, and I am not interested in casting suspicion on the Chronicle’s motives or in denigrating the talent of its contributors. In fact, iterability can be shown to belong to the very object of radio studies once we recognize that device and aim cite one another through the coverage that takes them as its object. This difficult though important point can be further clarified by a brief look at some of the scholarship heralding the birth of radio studies.
Between the two stories in the Chronicle appeared no doubt the decisive avatar of any and all new fields, a reader. Perhaps predictably, Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio was edited by none other than Michelle Hilmes and, it turns out, a Minnesota alum, Jason Loviglio. The oblique filial connection is trivial (Loviglio has gone on to have his own distinguished career) compared to the role played by Hilmes in this project, and for this reason it is worth thinking carefully, if only in passing, about what she says in the introduction to the volume.
Readers are largely pedagogical devices. With the prosecutions of copying centers for copyright infringement, the heightened emphasis put on publication in matters of academic promotion, and the ubiquity of interdisciplinary initiatives in virtually all fields of academic endeavor, the task of providing postsecondary teachers with a bound selection of “key essays” in any given field has assumed new urgency. This is as true of emergent fields as it is of established ones, where the emphasis falls on something like “canonical statements,” such as, in cinema studies, Laura Mulvey’s oft-reprinted “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Invariably, readers sport introductions in which their editors make, as it were, a first pass over the anthologized material. For Hilmes, the first pass is complicated by her need to introduce both the volume and the field, a task that has the advantage of allowing her to go on at length. Strategically, she proceeds by pointing to the very developmental arc emphasized by Doherty. After a somewhat scrappy beginning, radio came to national prominence during the 1920s and 1930s. Then, just as radio was beginning to attract serious scholarly attention (one thinks here of the Princeton Radio Research Project, about which more later), it was eclipsed by the advent of television and the virtually immediate scholarly interest in the medium, especially on the part of those concerned about its role in inciting violence and inducing rampant imbecility. Then radio, Phoenix-like, returned both as a cultural technology (especially, of course, with the advent of talk, or, as some prefer, hate radio) and as an object of scholarly scrutiny—witness the advent of radio studies itself.6 For the readers of the reader, two points are thus emphatically underscored. First, radio matters because its importance was prematurely usurped by another medium, television—an implicit appeal to something like the fairness of broadcasting. And second, radio matters because we now know better than to ignore it: an only slightly less implicit appeal to a notion of intellectual or, even more particularly, theoretical progress. If I emphasize this, it is with an ear toward amplifying how, in effect, Doherty repeats a repetition in Hilmes, as if to associate with radio itself its reiterative, or, if one prefers, wavy character. In other, albeit somewhat cryptic words, radio must always have mattered twice in order to matter once.
Turning from what amounts to first contact with the hardwired residualism of radio and its study, I now set my dial on the rhetoric of her introduction and cite the most-cited author in radio studies when she subtitles the penultimate section of her introduction “The Return of the Radio Repressed” (8). This blatant citation of Freud clarifies several things, even if unwittingly. First, as Doherty suggested, radio studies partisans do indeed care about the currents of critical theory that have convulsed the humanities and social sciences over the last forty-five years (notably psychoanalysis); second, the iterative logic at work within the object of radio studies is one thought to be illuminated by free association with Freud’s account of the psychic economy of repression; and third, when read in the mode of a bold headline, the return of radio is itself repressed (“the return of the radio repressed”). While apparently the most counterintuitive, this last simply bespeaks the fact that iterability is so deeply inscribed in both radio and its study that even its return will have to take place twice in order to happen at all.
This aside, and I realize it is an important, even controversial claim, what is perhaps most telling about Hilmes’s rhetoric is the way it invites us to recognize the residual in her invocation of Freud. My point here is not that radio studies is actually residual rather than emergent but that fundamental to its emergence is the way its partisans deploy the concept of the residual, applying it at once to radio and, through the history of the device, to its study. More particularly, let me propose that when invoking the “return of the repressed,” Hilmes appears to emphasize more the “archaic” and less the “vestigial” aspect of radio’s residual character. How so? Contrary to received opinion, Jean-Paul Sartre was not right when he accused Freud of incoherence in insisting that a mental content could both be repressed and unconscious. The repressed returns not because it finally overpowers the bouncer assigned to it by the ego but because the mute affective charge of a previously lived event takes place for the first time as a mental content when, through the work of analysis, it is made to mean. If radio can return as the repressed, according to Hilmes, it is because the event of its advent and perhaps even more of its decline has acquired meaning, for the first time, with its return, its reiteration, in radio studies.
At the risk of revealing that I, like anyone working in words, have stacked the proverbial deck, I will observe that Hilmes comes by her recourse to psychoanalysis honestly. For reasons that call for elucidation, the study of radio has long directed its interdisciplinary beacon toward these depths and perhaps nowhere more plainly than in the enigmatic line from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment that invites us to conceive “the radio as a sublimated printing press” (2). Written in 1944 and republished (reiterated?) in 1947, presumably on the eve of radio’s eclipse by television, the authors invoke Freud’s account of sublimation to think the technical and historical relation between the medium of print and the medium of wireless communication. But in what sense do they mean what this odd formulation says?
Although two other invocations of “sublimation” occur in the chapter from which this sentence derives, it isn’t until the third chapter—their well-known cancellation of the “culture industry”—that the printing press and the radio are again paired in a way that allows one to attune to the role of sublimation in their argument. Elaborating on the proposition that radio has become the nation’s “mouthpiece,” they write: “In fascism radio becomes the universal mouthpiece of the Führer; in the loudspeakers on the street his voice merges with the howl of sirens proclaiming panic, from which modern propaganda is hard to distinguish in any case. The National Socialists knew that broadcasting gave their cause stature as the printing press did to the Reformation. The Führer’s metaphysical charisma, invented by the sociology of religion, turned out finally to be merely the omnipresence of his radio addresses, which demonically parodies the divine spirit” (Dialectic 129). True, the word sublimation does not reappear here. However, if it makes sense to say that radio is a sublimated printing press, then this passage tells us that this is because the Reformation returns, as it were, in National Socialism, specifically, might we not add, in the form of the radial network whereby isolated individuals converge in their identification with the word, not as they come to it (say in Mass), but as it comes to them (say in the printed vernacular Bible). But then shouldn’t it be the other way around? Isn’t the printing press/Reformation a sublimated radio/National Socialism? Only if we insist upon misunderstanding sublimation as what recasts an asocial act or belief in a socially acceptable form. Key here is not just that the radio comes after the printing press but that for Freud—as Adorno and Horkheimer well knew—sublimation was organized by the same psycho-logic of repression and, as such, exhibited the same structure as the return of the repressed, whereby unspecified and undelimited psychic energy assumed meaning (as the “asocial”) for the first time, as it were, in print. Not to put too fine a point on it: these exilic Jews were keen to suggest that Luther’s passion had returned in the meaning of National Socialism. Radio, as a secular apparatus, became the socially acceptable form of an evangelism whose more vicious sectarian inflections might otherwise have been, as Marshall McLuhan would later insist, too “hot” to handle (although—I hasten to add—not for nothing do right-wing demagogues—Father Coughlin, George Allison Phelps, and Martin Luther Thomas—figure prominently in several of the early studies of radio).
Two relevant points follow. First, as has been implied, the appeal to psychoanalysis within radio studies is neither new nor original. It is worth mentioning here that the first sustained scholarly study of radio, by Cantril and Allport, was titled The Psychology of Radio (1935), and that, even more tellingly, when Paul Lazarsfeld initiated the Princeton Radio Research Project two years later, he assembled a team of psychoanalysts, including Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan, to advise him on the preparation of his audience response questionnaires. Additionally, there appears to be a decisive reiteration, mediated through the concept of sublimation, of the sociohistorical character of the radiophonic apparatus in the very rhetorical preoccupations (“obsession,” “repression” “sublimation”) of radio studies. This suggests, does it not, that emergence takes place in the feedback loop in which disciplines scan the networks of communication from which and to which they contribute material, while projecting into the world networked by communication just those signals their analytical tools are designed to pick up. To put the matter simply, if reductively, that radio has returned is perhaps no less true of radio than it is of radio studies. Reduction notwithstanding, putting the matter this way helps us tune in the object, now strictly in the sense of “the aim,” of radio studies. What does it want to know, how does it want to know it, and why must a return structure its way of knowing?
As we have seen, the necessity of radio studies’ emergence has consistently been premised on two claims: one, that radio was eclipsed by television, and two, that scholarship that was just starting to pay serious attention to radio initially shifted its focus to television and then zoomed in on film. Put differently, in the era of television and film, radio became residual in Williams’s sense of the term. However, in light of the complex interplay of radio and its study to be discerned in radio studies, it is surprising indeed that the persistent and often fraught attention paid to radio within many, if not all, of the major currents of philosophy and critical theory in the twentieth century has not been picked up by radio studies partisans. This is an omission worth countering, both for what it helps us to understand about the aims of radio studies and for what it can tell us about the sociocultural history of critical theory in the West.
In proceeding along this line, my thinking has been sparked by two rather different projects. In “Observations on Public Reception,” the German critical theorist and cultural historian Friedrich Kittler argues that media reception participates in what for some time now he has been calling discourse networks (Aufschreibesysteme). More particularly, through a close, though brief, consideration of Martin Heidegger’s early work Kittler shows that the former’s reception of German radio played a formative role in the articulation of his philosophical project, manifesting itself initially in a preoccupation with the tendency of Dasein to encounter Being in the experience of nearness, and later in Heidegger’s recasting of nearness, especially accelerating nearness, as giganticism. In effect, radio was the name for a mode of revealing that in sparking across the gap between beings and Being gave Heidegger a fix on the worldliness of Dasein. While dissatisfied with Kittler’s angle (he often seems a bit too taken with the machine in the ghost), I find both the seriousness of attention paid to theoretical discourse and his refusal to separate even its most arcane preoccupations from the social process to be at once provocative and enormously useful.
A second spark has been the work of the French political theorist Jacques Rancière, especially his text The Philosopher and His Poor. In ways that resemble Sarah Kofman’s and Michelle Le Doeuf’s studies of the figures employed by philosophers, Ranciere’s study traces how the figure of poverty, and specifically the figure of those condemned to their one and only task in life, animates the indispensable register of examples in philosophical texts, arguing that philosophy has an essential and therefore ethically compromising dependence on the fact of poverty and its figural representative. While my own project is less concerned for the status of philosophical discourse as such, I do feel that if the radiophonic apparatus is co-produced by radio studies then it will be vital to consider how radio is figured in the theoretical traditions whose messages have not been picked up by radio studies.
Seen from high ground, the figure of radio assumes the contours of a problem, not simply the familiar problem designated by Adorno and others under the rubric of infantilization (the “dumbing down” of listeners), but a problem given critical detail by what Pierre Schaeffer (92) has called the “acousmatic” character of radio sound. Schaeffer derives this term from the Greek philosopher, mathematician, and cult leader Pythagoras, who deployed it in two related ways: first, as a name for that group of his followers, the akousmatikoi, who sat outside the inner circle composed of the mathematikoi and who, as a result, listened to Pythagoras lecture from behind a curtain; and second, as the name for the enigmatic sayings, the akousmata, shared with the akousmatikoi, sayings offered up as mnemonic devices that supplemented the necessarily garbled messages transmitted from behind the curtain. Key here are three things: one, the notion of a voice transmitted and received in such a way that its source is absent from the visual field; two, the reciprocal invisibility of the voice’s audience to the voice’s source; and three, the notion of its message being propagated despite, or even on the condition of, its lack of full intelligibility—all aspects of what is here referred to as bad reception, a formulation to which repeated attention will be directed in the chapters that follow. One senses that many issues having to do with power, communication, technology, collectivity, and so on are knotted up in Schaeffer’s concept of the acousmatic, and for this reason it strikes me as a productive way to turn attention on twentieth-century philosophical and theoretical figurations of the radiophonic apparatus, which, after all, sends from and is received across a space of invisibility. The tendency to treat the acousmatic as a condition of the voice, namely, its state of disembodiment (as found, for example, in Ed Miller’s work), is one I will counter by stressing instead the often expressly disciplinary tension between vision and sound (who or what “fields” the relation between these faculties) that structures Schaeffer’s concept. For me the issue is not disembodiment but delocalization, where the accent falls on the way acousmatic sound allows for an uprooting that exposes those affected to what Welles called an “invasion,” not the influx of the other but the voiding of the boundary against or across which flux or flow can be oriented. As this might suggest, radio is not simply a problem in philosophy, a topic of reflection, but, more important, a problem for philosophy insofar as radio’s acousmatic character forces philosophy into a certain encounter with its disciplinary limits, an encounter brilliantly distilled in the title of J. L. Austin’s radio lecture “Performative Utterances,” where the question of what is thereby titled haunts every word of the broadcast. Is he lecturing about such utterances, or is a radio lecture meant to give such utterances illocutionary and perlocutionary force an instance of such utterances? Who knows? What knows? It is perhaps suggestive that René Sudre, who provided one of the epigraphs for this study, was also hugely invested in parapsychology.
My chapters 1 through 5 are essays or thought experiments in which I attempt to trace how the problem that is radio arises within and between various philosophical and theoretical projects. In all cases the objective is to tease out how recognition of the conceptual difficulties posed by thinking the question “What is radio?” produces effects that scramble not only intellectual alliances but also the sociohistorically given contours of intellectual life, say, in the case of Heidegger, what truly constitutes the “beyond” of Western philosophy. Thus in chapter 1, “Facing the Radio,” this articulation of the problem posed by radio is shown to produce a surprising array of contacts—agreements and disagreements—between and among Heidegger, Adorno, and John Cage. Although the interest in radio held by many members of the Frankfurt School is well known—perhaps only Leo Lowenthal’s extended involvement with the Voice of America routinely flies beneath the radar—less well known are the surprising engagements with phenomenology, physiognomy, and psychoanalysis that appear in Adorno’s exclusively English-language writings about radio from the late 1930s and 1940s.
Chapter 2, “On the Air,” extends this rethinking of the Frankfurt School encounter with radio by tracing how the problem posed by it arises in the philosophy of Marxism, especially as this last came to be thematized in the confrontation between Georg Lukács and Jean-Paul Sartre and the collaboration between Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin. As the chapter title suggests, the interplay between using radio as a means of philosophical and/or political communication and using radio as a provocation to philosophical and/or political thought—what I seek to render in the prepositional instability of the “on”—serves as a tracking device.
Further elaborating the political questions stirred by the radiophonic encounter between Marxism and phenomenology, chapter 3, “Stations of Exception,” turns to Frantz Fanon, whose brilliant and far-reaching essay “Here Is the Voice of Algeria,” from A Dying Colonialism, obliges us to revisit many of the keywords—resistance, voice, people, nation—put in play by the movement of decolonization in Africa and elsewhere. Once on the proverbial table, the role of radio in revolutionary struggles prompts considerations of policy and piracy that urge one to think twice about the status of the voice in the political confrontation with contemporary neoliberalism, especially as it informs thinking about communications.
Fanon’s discussion of radio in revolutionary Algeria casts only fleeting glances at psychoanalysis, despite his professional training in it and its critical role in the French articulation of phenomenology and Marxism. Continuing my effort to establish how insistently radio mattered to twentieth-century philosophical and theoretical reflection, chapter 4, “Phoning In Analysis,” scans three sites of the encounter between radio and psychoanalysis: the role played by Erich Fromm in the formulation of the Princeton Radio Research Project; the two radio lectures by Jacques Lacan, “Petit discours à l’O.R.T.F.” and “Radiophonie”; and the various statements—some broadcasted, others not—made by Félix Guattari regarding “free popular radios” and the Bologna-based station Radio Alice in particular. Here the encounter between politics (whether Marxist or not) and philosophy (whether phenomenology or not) occasions a twisted set of queries about the conditions, the channels, of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic teaching.
Chapter 5, “Birmingham Calling,” is yet another pass over the encounter between Marxism and philosophy, but one that considers at length the notion that the study of radio, and especially the question of local versus commercial radio, played a founding role in the Birmingham project of cultural studies. Three figures are central to the chapter: Richard Hoggart, the founding director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham; Raymond Williams; and Rachel Powell, whose pamphlet Possibilities for Local Radio was not only the first of the now legendary “Occasional Papers” produced by the CCCS but the explicit intellectual and political inspiration for Williams’s confrontation with Labour over its radio policy. Here, because of the persistent theme of radio’s pedagogical power, Brecht returns to restate, from the beginning of the century, the question: What is radio? Can reflection upon it transform the institutional organization of humanistic knowledge? Is cultural studies the institutional name of that transformation?
The final chapter, “We Are the Word”?, is a sustained consideration of the Modern Language Association’s recent foray into radio broadcasting, “What’s the Word?” The ambition here is, through an extended reading of the broadcast “Radio: Imaginary Visions” (the sole early engagement with the actual medium of the broadcast), to reflect upon the strategic merits of the association’s turn to radio, a turn prompted—and the fact is well publicized—by the attack on the humanities in general and the MLA in particular carried out by conservative partisans in the culture wars. Here, the issue of radio’s relation to education is read in light of the political and philosophical problems tracked through the preceding five chapters.
Perhaps inevitably, a conflict of opinion over the situation of the contemporary humanities surfaces. It is the reiteration of another. To specify, I return briefly to Peter Monaghan’s double take as a way to address, if not answer, questions bearing upon the object of radio studies and the status of the residual within it.
Recall that Monaghan described the event he was heralding by describing it as a “recent spate of cultural studies of radio.” When, five years later, Doherty reheralds the event, he refers to it by name, as the advent or breakthrough of radio studies. In the interim, an evocation has become a displacement. Specifically, Monaghan’s evocation of “cultural studies” (but in the innocuous, predisciplinary form of “studies of radio that are cultural as opposed to something else”) has been displaced by “radio studies,” where “radio” spells the nominalization of the adjective “cultural.” My point here is that in addition to everything else that is being said without being meant, there is the matter, earlier intimated, of two emergences, that of cultural studies itself and that of radio studies. As such, it is clear that radio studies wants to have its culture and eat it too: it wants to lean on cultural studies without thereby being simply derivative. But might we not also say that cultural studies is in some sense residual within radio studies?
Insofar as radio studies comes after and develops out of cultural studies, the latter would appear to have a distinctly vestigial relation to the former. Cultural studies is residual in the sense of belonging to the gestation or maturation of radio studies. But precisely because radio studies risks overlooking the founding role of radio study in the institutional emergence of cultural studies (see “Birmingham Calling”), it is hard to settle for this construal of residualism in the relation between cultural studies and radio studies. It is better, I think, to reflect more specifically about the trace of cultural studies, a trace that manifests itself most clearly in Monaghan and Doherty (not to mention Hilmes herself) when they describe the principles or theoretical convictions deemed characteristic of radio studies. Monaghan got at this by invoking the two poles, the tension between radio as medium of social control and radio as medium of social contestation. For his part, Doherty framed the matter in terms of “call signals” (WART), that is, the commitment on the part of radio studies partisans to close analysis, audience response, and critical theory. In both of these cases, distinctive methodological and even political preoccupations of cultural studies are very much in the foreground—with a telling exception.
In consulting virtually any portion of the mushrooming literature on cultural studies, one notes persistent concern with the vexed status of theory. In some cases, one finds cultural studies explicitly identified with the institutional initiative that became possible in the wake of theory, dated in the humanities with the so-called de Man scandal. The vexed status of theory has prompted certain writers, such as the late Bill Readings and more recently Gayatri Spivak, to distance themselves emphatically from cultural studies, Readings arguing that it is political only to the extent that it has no impact on politics, and Spivak arguing that it is monolingual, presentist, and identitarian. Thus, given that radio studies is apparently committed to theory (the T in WART), it would appear that it is reiterating the self-reflection of cultural studies, but with a difference, and, as we have seen, with a difference that legitimates, indeed justifies, if not necessitates, the very emergence of the field. Presumably, this difference is that radio studies has a less vexed, more affirmative relation to theory, even as one might properly insist that it is monolingual if not precisely presentist. Miller’s Emergency Broadcasting and 1930s American Radio is an excellent case in point.
This more archaic inflection of the residualism of cultural studies, where it is posited as deficient in what must then be supplemented by radio studies, might be compelling were it not for the fact that, as this study will seek to show, precisely the absence of attention to how radio figured in the philosophical and theoretical projects—phenomenology, existentialism, Hegelian Marxism, anticolonialism, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies itself—that span and largely define the preceding century allows Hilmes and others to argue, now from a different angle, that of scholarly neglect, for the necessity of radio studies. It would appear either that the notion that radio studies is theory friendly is at best overstated or, and this is much more interesting, that theory means something rather particular to the partisans of radio studies. One is prompted in this direction by the “call signals” delineated by Doherty, who clearly distinguishes theory from the close reading of specific broadcasts, as though theory were something that guided reading instead of belonging to the very difficulties that arise in the practice of reading, as though poststructuralism did not contain—in the vexing figure of Paul de Man—this very insight. The undisclosed location from which the guidance system of theory emanates would appear to resemble strongly the sort of transcendental position, the zone of methodological abstraction, that deprives theory of just the sort of history that seems to have fallen out of range of radio studies. Is this necessary?
It may, then, be worth suggesting that one of the aims of radio studies is a paradoxical, but therefore telling, repudiation of the very theory its partisans otherwise regard as having been wrongly abandoned by cultural studies. As such, the emergence of radio studies, despite its abiding and undeniably novel commitment to a form of critical inter-disciplinarity not typically found in the institutional practices of mass communications studies, partakes more in what Williams urged us to call an alternative as opposed to an oppositional state of emergency. In setting aside the politics of its own relation to theory, radio studies risks its progressive political ambitions. I’d like to think that this is not necessary, but one cannot help but be struck by the canonical status, in virtually all treatments of radio—from Adorno and Cantril to Ed Miller and Wolfgang Hagen—of the Mercury Theater broadcast of Welles’s War of the Worlds, a story that allegorizes the arrival of the radically and menacingly new as being overturned by the epidemiological comeback of the vestigial, that is, the germ.
But then this is not really the point. The point is not to nail down certain philosophical or political keywords but rather to recognize in the nuances they invite us to make—how does the earlier remain active in the later?—a problem for reading as much as for theorizing, a problem whose perplexing involvement with the apparatus of radio is trying to tell us something. But what?
In keeping with my emphasis on the conceptual problems stirred by nuance, I have essayed here to engage them at the level of expository gesture, what might also be called “midlife” (as opposed to “late”) style. The reader will have noted recourse to the rhetoric of radio, to tuning dials and the like. But there is an enunciative dimension in play that might otherwise escape notice. It includes the expository shifts, the switches of rhetorical register, fields of discourse, presumed audience, and the like. This is deliberate, if not precisely calculated, and for some it will read as interference. My aim is to submit my writing practice to the demands of what I began by calling the object of radio study. At one level, this gives frank and rather direct expression to the difficulty of tuning in, of giving sharp focus to the vexed encounter between radio and its study. In effect, my own reception of what is going on in this zone of indistinction is, if not bad, certainly compromised. By the same token, it seems both attractive and imperative to write from within this vexed encounter, neither to pretend to approach it from outside nor to abandon oneself entirely to its inside, an approach that carries its own risks of distraction, but to convey the feedback, the whistle that results when a signal loops and amplifies too quickly—put differently, to practice a mode of immanent critique that takes the form of content seriously. The chapters that follow exhibit this commitment through the logic of what might be called “indirection.” They get under way in odd places, they loop, they fade, but in all cases they stress that studying the study of radio repeats something with a difference. They urge that all the remarkable things we have come to learn about stations, broadcasts, markets, personalities, and patents are not enough. Radio calls out for more. This text, then, is a response trimmed to the shape of the letter(s) of that call.
