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Radio. John Mowitt
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This is where the exchange between Norma and Joe finds its pertinence. Comeback versus return. It seems to me that what Norma protests in Joe’s word is precisely its predictability, the fact that he is already narrating his encounter with her as part of a Hollywood script. The comeback is thus an effort to get started again, but one whose logic and motivation have already been determined by what no one—not even Norma herself—had recognized as her “last” performance. Now, it is certainly true that “return” is every bit as scripted, especially to whatever extent it responds to the call of forgiveness, but what is important here is the very thematization of the temporal join. Norma insists, nay, demands, that we think twice about how one step follows upon another. Brought to bear on the matter of the voice—which, as some will recall, is the topic of discussion in the immediately preceding exchange between Norma and Joe (they quarrel about the sound-image relation in the cinema)—the issue is not so much whether the resurgence of interest in it is either a comeback or a return as whether, as I have said, it gets us where we want to go. If this is to a concept of sound that is radically postphonocentric, it will come as no surprise when I aver that I have my doubts. To clarify why getting here is worth the effort, let me turn yet again to Sunset Blvd.
As Norma and Joe enter her study just prior to the exchange regarding her Salomé script cited earlier, the cut to their passage over the threshold finds it sonic articulation in the beginning of a persistent but distinctly haunted wheezing of the organ on the opposite wall. Norma gestures in its direction, noting that it should be either removed or repaired (we later find Max, her butler, playing it). Joe then quips that she might also consider teaching it “a better tune.” Because the scene is structured sonically around the toggling back and forth between Joe’s voice-over narration and the dialogue of the characters, both the wind playing, poorly, on the organ and the voice-over come from an acousmatic if not quite nondiegetic space. A structural relation is thus forged between the voice and music. Here is my point: of interest in the scene is not so much the rather typical way in which the sound of the organ is buried beneath the dialogue (the very noose of words Norma has only just decried) as the way sound, and here its distinctly acousmatic character, is boxed in between music and voice, as if it can be grasped, or picked up, only on this disciplinary frontier, that is, somewhere between philosophy and musicology.
Thinking outside this particular box is not easy, a fact demonstrated with instructive clarity by Adorno’s voluminous writings on the box he calls radio.3 Several of these are well known. Less well known are the writings recently compiled and edited by Robert Hullot-Kentor in his contribution to Adorno’s ever-completing works titled Current of Music, a volume that gathers virtually all of the work written by Adorno—and, I might add, written in English—while he was affiliated with the short-lived Princeton Radio Research Project. The only significant omission, one addressed in Hullot-Kentor’s detailed introductory remarks, is the still unpublished “Memorandum: Music in Radio,” a text one must consult in the Rare Books Room in Butler Library at Columbia University. In this indispensable collection two texts call out for attention: “Radio Physiognomics” and especially “The Radio Voice.” Elaborations of “Memorandum,” both engage in rich and compelling ways the problem of the box, as furniture and as philosophy. They lead us directly to the vexing interplay between radio and philosophy.
Adorno’s correspondence establishes that he and Gretel arrived in New York from Great Britain in late February of 1938. Adorno writes Benjamin on letterhead from Princeton University, the Office of Radio Research (located in, of all places, Eno Hall), on March 7, 1938, saying that they have taken an apartment on 45 Christopher Street, once the heart of queer Manhattan. He goes on to solicit from Benjamin a short paper on “listening models” that he hopes to integrate into his work at Princeton (“To Walter Benjamin” 240–41). Almost a year later to the day, Adorno presents to the faculty of the Psychology Department at Princeton the paper “Radio Physiognomics,” in which he lays out what he takes to be the most serious limitations of the “experimental methods” of psychology. Hadley Cantril and Gordon Allport—the authors of the 1935 study The Psychology of Radio—were, whether in attendance or not, his intended audience. Those familiar with the Frankfurt School critique of “instrumental reason” and the “re-enchantment of positivism” will find nothing particularly interesting in these remarks. Truly interesting, however, is the methodological alternative that emerged in their wake.
This alternative is formulated through an appeal to Johann Kaspar Lavater’s concept of physiognomy, a figure that although translated into English at the dawn of the nineteenth century required the curiosity of Allport and others to make him matter to psychology. As Adorno reminds us, physiognomics referred to the analytical practice of discovering the truth of personality beneath or behind facial expressions. Although in his discussion Adorno has recourse to the English vocabulary of Peirceian semiotics, notably the notion of the index and the sign, he does not underscore the extent to which physiognomy is clearly a rearticulation of the very derivation of semiotics from the Greek practice and technique of symptomatology, that is, the reading of an inner, invisible condition through the decipherment of outward, visible signs. Nevertheless, he is insistent upon the structural value of the channel, the communication, between an inner and an outer, a hidden and a manifest—something of an inverted acousmatics. Brought to bear on the phenomenon of radio, physiognomy leads Adorno almost directly to the concept of the radio voice. Aware that this invites immediate comparison with Lavater’s concept of personality, Adorno embarks on a somewhat tortuous but telling justification for both physiognomy and the radio voice that it allows one to pick up.
On the face of it, Adorno’s material would appear to surrender to phonocentrism in advance by seeking the social meaning of the radio in its voice, and to some extent this is true. Moreover, insofar as he addresses himself to sound he does so by turning immediately to music, again as if the meaning of sound must be made to resonate within and across the frontier bordering philosophy and musicology. Although true, these are not the only conclusions that can be drawn from his discussion. Indeed, it is precisely the way Adorno’s analysis sidles up to phonocentrism without succumbing to its charm that is at once interesting and important.
After provisionally setting aside the matter of the obsolescence of physiognomy, Adorno turns to the problem of the face. What is the equivalent of the human face in the domain of the radiophonic? Does physiognomy have more than a merely metaphorical value? It does if we recognize that, like the face, the radio presents us with a unity, something that synthesizes psychological, sociological, and technological elements. It does so by exhibiting voice. In other words, just as we might say that Don LaFontaine had a voice that exuded aggressive masculinity (his was the ubiquitous promotional voice of summer blockbusters in the United States), we might want to say that the radio has a voice that can be delimited and read as the sign of something, if not someone, behind it. Voice then becomes the very means by which Adorno wants to salvage physiognomy in the face of its obsolescence. It thus has, as it were, two faces: one turned toward the radio and the other turned toward the disciplinary field in which radio appears as an object of inquiry.
But what precisely can be said about the radio voice? Adorno is quick to point out that it has nothing to do with the voices or other sounds that are broadcast over the radio. That would be too empirical.4 The issue, instead, has to do entirely with what he insists upon calling the “how” of the radio. In other words, the radio voice is different from both voices and music, presumably because it emanates from somewhere that neither the voice nor music can name.
Because Adorno’s discussion of the impact of radio on symphonic music (in “The Radio Symphony”) numbers among his better-known writings on radio, I will only point briefly to the aspect of this discussion that bears on physiognomy. In essence, radio is at odds with symphonic music because it deprives this music of its sonic power. It does so in two ways: first, it generates an acoustic image of the music that miniaturizes it, making it impossible for the listener to be surrounded, absorbed by