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Radio. John Mowitt
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Famously, or perhaps infamously, this discussion does not settle for a technical dressing down of the radio as a device, as a piece of furniture. It goes after the theoretical jugular instead: the claim that radio so transforms our relation to the listening required by symphonic music that it destroys this music from within. Trivializing this analytical proposition through the psychologism of “pessimism,” a polemical weapon drawn these days almost as quickly as Göbbel’s famed Browning, is really more of a bluff, a feint. It is certainly no argument against the theoretical ambition of Adorno’s insight—or so I am contending here. With this caveat in mind, we return now to the physiognomic problem of the voice.
Consider then the following extraordinary passages from “The Radio Voice”:
What actually “speaks” through radio is man: by his voice or by musical instruments. Thus the term “speaking” appears to be a purely metaphorical one. One attributes to the instrument what is due to man merely because of his invisibility and remoteness. Still, when the phenomenon is analyzed, man’s remoteness from the loudspeaker and his invisibility are part of the phenomenon. Whenever one switches on his radio, the sounds pouring out bear an expression all their own, an expression which is related to the men behind it, only by reflection and not by the primordial awareness of the phenomenon. Radio speaks to the listener even if he is not listening to a speaker. (533)
And on the following page, segueing from a summary of his critique of the radio symphony:
Radio has its own voice inasmuch as it functions as a filter for every sound. Due to the comprehensiveness of its operation as a filter, it gains a certain autonomy in the ears of the listener: even the adult experiences the radio rudimentarily, like the child who personifies radio as an aunt or uncle of his. It is the physiognomics of this radio voice wich [sic] provides the key for an understanding of how the expression of the radio tends to become a model for its social significance. (534)
More worthy of close attention follows thereon, but for now let me underscore a few especially salient issues. First, there is the complex interplay between metaphor and attribution. Obviously, Adorno remains haunted throughout by the epistemological status of physiognomy. Here he supplements metaphor with belief, that is, while hanging on to the physiognomic idea that something is signified behind the radio voice, he not only points to the invisible man but also emphasizes the role played by listeners in attributing an identity to the source of what is heard. Moreover, as if defending his appeal to appearances, Adorno builds into the radio itself the remoteness and invisibility of the human subject. In other words, what the radio is includes the irreducibly acousmatic character of what lies behind it, the missing subject whose absence is compensated for in the listener’s attribution of voice to the radio. Because this very dimension of radio arises only in reflection, it is otherwise essentially unconscious; indeed, it is through this unconsciousness that the human and the radio belong to each other.
In the second passage, the motif of the unconscious manifests itself in the figure of the filter. This is not just a filter for what “man” says or the music he plays, it is a filter for every sound, a specification that finds in the compensatory structure of the radio voice a deflective processing of all sound transmitted by the radio. Here, one might reasonably suggest, sound breaks away from voice and music in serving as the index of a filter that explicitly extends beyond the two. Importantly, as with the discussion of radio’s impact on the radio symphony, the filter becomes a prosthetic earpiece. It at once enhances and preempts our listening. In Eisenberg’s formulation, it listens for us. As Adorno says, the filter gains a certain autonomy in the ear of the listener, but instead of miniaturizing the power of the symphony it consigns the human subject to an infantilized personification of radio in which, regardless of what is being broadcast, “he” is spoken to by the invisible and remote brother or sister of one of his parents. Is sound filtered here, in and as radio, through what we could properly call Oedipalization? It is worth recalling here that one of the preoccupations of the psychoanalysts assembled by Lazarsfeld to consult with the Princeton Radio Research Project was that of the radio’s interference with parenting. In effect, Fromm, Sullivan, and others worried that radio functioned as an alternative authority in the family. Does such a function have a sound? What would such a sound sound like?
Before attempting to respond, consider the closing formulation of the second passage. This is the sentence in which physiognomics is mentioned by name and advocated as an approach to radio because through it one understands how its expression becomes a model for its social significance. It is not hard to grasp how expression and significance fall in line with the physiognomic distinction between the hidden and the manifest, but what does pose difficulties is the notion of an expression that becomes a voice by virtue of an absence for which it compensates. Moreover, what, if anything, does this have to do with the filter?
Recall here that it is because the radio filters that it has a voice. It is as though Adorno were here anticipating what Barthes would later call “the grain of the voice,” the material quality of speaking—the pace, timbre, volume, in short, the sound qualities of a voice. Indeed, turning back briefly to the discussion of the radio symphony in the same essay, Adorno goes on at some length about what he calls the “hear stripe”: the surface noise of a phonograph or the static hum of a public broadcasting system, noise that adds a relentless pedal tone to the score of every piece of music broadcast by radio. This grain, this irreducible materiality of transmission, would certainly qualify as the audible presence of a filter. Indeed, one might think of the haunted wheezing organ in Sunset Blvd. as an incarnation of the hear stripe, or at least its screen. But what bears repeating here is the fact that voice is what lies, in the terms of Adorno’s exposition, behind or beneath a face. Given that the radio is faceless, a voice must be invented for it and then attributed to it—in which case radio would thus appear to call to or for the physiognomist.
The voice as the “face-like unity” is precisely what cues the physiognomical analysis of radio. As such, the filter—the audible sign of the radio voice’s functioning—is as much about radio as it is about theory. Adorno, by locating the filter in the ear of the listener and declaring both it and the absent speaker to be parts of the radio apparatus, would appear to be including in radio its physiognomic study. Because the social significance of radio would presumably derive—at least in part—from such a study, one can then say, as Adorno does, that the radio’s expression “models” its social significance. In short, because the face-voice relation repeats in advance the expression-significance relation, theory as a critical mediation of the whole is apparently already active in the radio itself. It is as if the radio voice were calling from behind its purely metaphorical face, not to a listener per se, but to a theory capable of picking up its signals. What does this call sound like? How does the filter that is the voice deflect or channel it? To begin to amplify this sound, or at least the problems that it poses, I want to approach it by thinking about closeness, invisibility, and spooks.
To the reader familiar with Adorno’s cranky rejoinder to Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Era of Its Technical Reproducibility,” his advocacy of the critique of aura in “The Radio Voice” comes as a bit of a surprise. In an early pass over this material, Adorno, invoking the work of Robert Havighurst, puzzles over the matter of the “live-ness” of radio music. Preparing us for the physiognomic turn, Adorno quotes approvingly Havighurst’s assertion that radio listeners feel that they know the personalities of those speaking on radio because of the “illusion of closeness,” which makes the listener “feel that he is actually present at the place where the broadcast originates—or purports to originate” (Radio Voice” 501–2). Because the motif of “knowing personality through voice” is, as we have seen, properly physiognomical, it is clear that this discussion is asking us to bring together the “face-like-unity” of the radio with the illusion of closeness, the notion that we are present to/at