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Radio. John Mowitt
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When I arrived at the Institute in September of 2004, I appeared before Joan and her colleagues with a broken left wrist from a car accident (pace Virilio). Being unable to type, that is, write (at least for me), I was hurled into the world of the archive, where I met the first in a long list of librarians, curators, and archivists without whose help this transmission would have remained unsent. I want especially to thank Momota Ganguli and Marcia Tucker, both Institute librarians; Dan Linke and Susan White, both librarians and reference specialists at the Mudd Library at Princeton University; Tara Craig, a rare books and manuscripts archivist in the Butler Library at Columbia University; Angela Carreno, a manuscript archivist at the New York Public Library; Susan Irving, a reference specialist for the John Marshall papers at the Rockefeller Foundation; Marie Walsh, a reference specialist in the Department of Sociology at the University of Birmingham; Ike Egbetola and Rod Hamilton, both archivists in the British Library for the BBC Sound Archive; Paul Spencer-Thompson, an editorial assistant at Tribune; Alena Bártová, a curator at the Prague Museum of Decorative Arts (my cover is indebted to her); and last, but certainly not least, Elissa Guralnick, who kindly shared with me her transcript of the radio program “Radio: Imaginary Visions.” With the likely exception of Elissa, I am virtually certain that none of these people will remember me, but if I have remembered them it is because they helped me tune in something faint but in the end crucial to the nebulous text I described when first contacting them. This said, now is the appropriate time to thank the late Phyllis Franklin, who, several years ago, spent a good hour with me on the phone discussing What’s the Word? That she cannot remember me is all the more reason to remember her generous spirit and commitment to the humanities “in dark times.”
Which leaves the enablers. The list is long, but it ought properly to begin with Michelle Koerner, who, over the years, has given me extensive feedback and wise counsel but who has also, when necessary, reminded me what thinking is for. Among other students (former and current), I want especially to acknowledge Ebony Adams, Nick de Villiers, Lindsey Green-Simms, Doug Julien, Andrew Knighton, Jovan Knutson, Niki Korth, Erin Labbie, Amy Levine, Roni Shapira-Ben Yoseph, Julietta Singh, Michelle Stewart (my DJ), Paige Sweet, Mousa Traoré, and Rachel “Raysh” Weiss—all of whom, in ways big and small, helped turn my receiver in the right direction. Among faculty both here and elsewhere, special, and in several cases very special, thanks are due to Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Hisham Bizri, Paul Bowman, Polly Carl, Cesare Casarino, Paula Chakravartty, Chris Chiappari, Lisa Disch, Frieda Ekotto, Barbara Engh, Jarrod Fowler, Andreas Gailus, Daniel Gifillan, Michael Hardt, Jennifer Horne, Rembert Hueser, Bob Hulot-Kentor, Qadri Ismail, Dave Jenemann, Jonathan Kahana, Doug Kahn, Michal Kobialka, Kiarina Kordela, Liz Kotz, Premesh Lalu, Richard Leppert, Silvia López, Alice Lovejoy, Julia McEvoy, Ed Miller, Andy Parker, Thomas Pepper, Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Jochen Schulte-Sasse, Adam Sitze, Ajay Skaria, Laura Smith, Richard Stamp, Jonathan Sterne, and Charlie Sugnet.
Three other more formal, but no less essential, acknowledgments are due: to Anthony Alessandrini, whose anthology, Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspecitives, provided me with an early occasion for publishing on What’s the Word?; to the University of Minnesota and specifically its College of Liberal Arts for providing research support—in various forms—for key aspects of the project; and to Mary Francis, my editor at University of California Press, who convinced me early on that she knew what this text was about and where it needed to go.
Last, I want to thank—and it always feels like such a meager gesture—my daughter Rosalind, who, when she hung stubbornly onto the weird little transistor radio that we received from our car dealer, got me thinking, and my wife, Jeanine, who in the midst of her struggle with cancer still found the energy to draw vital signs to my attention, confer about much-needed support, and be profoundly “there” in the nothing that connects everything.
INTRODUCTION
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