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Radio. John Mowitt
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Adorno, of course, is here more interested in the puzzle of the live versus the reproduced, but it is important to note how quickly in the piece the physiognomic motifs enter and how intimately they become associated with the acoustic or sonic problem of what pours into or through the body. Perhaps not surprisingly, later, when Adorno’s anxiety about the metaphoricity of the physiognomic method is at its height, he trots out not only a catachrestic justification for it—we refer, he notes, to the sound source as a “loudspeaker,” the “diaphragm” of the microphone is modeled on the ear, in short, “the radio mechanism is patterned after human sense organs” (“Radio Voice” 535)—but a psychoanalytical one. Indeed, in the long footnote on 534–35 he rehearses the dispute between Ferenczi and Bernfeld regarding the physiognomic symptomatization of the human organs whereby they can function as expressive centers of personality disorders. His comment on this debate, where he characterizes the radio “as an organ of society” (“Radio Voice” 535), leaves no doubt that if such exaggerations, in the end, nevertheless help one understand something fundamental about radio, then they are analytical risks worth taking. And what, apparently, is fundamental about radio is the “illusion of closeness” generated in and by its voice.
But does this not contradict the earlier emphasis on the remoteness of the invisible man whose voice breaks into one’s home? It does, until one recognizes that this invocation of the acousmatic character of radio sound is treated by Adorno as an avatar of the uncanny, that is, the sense of its sound being “here” but in such a way that one cannot be, as he says, ‘face to face” with it (“Radio Voice” 503). To flesh out this uncanny “hereness” of radio, Adorno appeals to Günther Stern’s (later Anders’s) 1930 study “Spuk und Radio.” Although Stern’s concern is to illuminate the odd spatiality of broadcast music—the fact that it has a precise “when” while lacking a precise “where”—Adorno draws on Stern’s discussion of ubiquity to extend his insight into hereness, and by extension the illusion of closeness. In effect, what ubiquity provides is a way to talk about how the remote comes near precisely in being everywhere. The invisible man, in falling outside a certain con-strual of the domain of the visible, is someone or something that can, in principle, be anywhere. If listeners feel themselves addressed as owner victims by the invisible voice, and especially if the nearness of this address spirits them off to the site from which the broadcast purports to originate, then it is not hard to understand what appeals to Adorno about Stern’s figure of the spook. Moreover, given Adorno’s unusually receptive relation to psychoanalysis in this essay, it is hard to believe that he was not aware of Freud’s use of Goethe’s spuk from Faust II—“Now the air is so filled with spooks, that no one knows best how to get out”—a line that stands as the epigraph to The Psychopathology of Everyday Life but that in this context suggests that ubiquity and the psychopathological character of the everyday are mixed together in the sound of closeness. Perhaps this sheds light on the curious fact that this essay of Adorno’s, like several others of those done under the auspices of the Princeton Radio Research Project, finds an occasion to reference the War of the Worlds broadcast that took place in the fall, on Halloween Night, to be precise, of his first year in the United States. Recall that in exculpating the Mercury Theater and NBC Radio, Welles described the broadcast as a Halloween prank, our “own radio version of dressing up in a sheet jumping out of a bush and saying Boo!” (Cantril, Invasion 42).
Boo. What kind of sound is that? Semantically, of course, it registers both disapproval and menace. But it is also one of those so-called imitative or onomatopoetic words that, in apparently defying the principle of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, gave Saussure fits. But rather than puzzling over precisely the sort of sound that boo is, and remembering that the larger aim here is to get at the sound that escapes the radio voice, consider that boo, as an imitative and thus analogical word, challenges the discipline of linguistics as Saussure is seeking to found it. To exaggerate if only for effect, boo is the sound of something whistling, maybe even humming, through or around the limits of a discipline. This means, of course, that I am rather obviously pressuring the notion of what sound is, where it takes place, indeed whether it can or should be heard/understood at all.
To move beyond these unsettling abstractions, it is crucial that we follow the lead of Adorno in adducing the relevance of Heidegger to his discussion of the radio voice. Adorno invokes Heidegger to help clarify in what way Stern’s analysis succumbs to the ahistorical tendencies of “existential philosophy,” and although Adorno makes no immediate reference to those pages in Being and Time where Heidegger discusses the radio, the pointed ambiguity of his remarks essentially prompts one to do so. In effect, the reader has, as it were, been transferred—not to the source, even purported, of the broadcast, but perhaps to the source of reckoning with it in certain terms.
Virtually all media historians of the Weimar period—Pohle, Currid, Jelavich, Bergmeier, and Lotz—insist that radio underwent a profound transformation and reorganization in Germany after World War I. This was due to the emerging consensus among educators and politicians that Germany had decisively lost the propaganda war; indeed, this very concept appears to have come into its own during this conflict. As an expression of this device envy, Germany embarked upon an aggressive centralization of radio broadcasting, a process that might be said to have culminated in Göbbels’s appointment as Reichspropagandaleiter of the Nazi Party in 1929. Immediately following the war in the winter of 1918–19, many still-equipped veteran wireless operators lent their talents to an ugly confrontation with the uprighting and rightward-tending German state, a confrontation that came to be referred to subsequently as the Funkerspuk or radio scare. Doubtless, this and the fact that it was taken as the pretext for an aggressive state centralization of radio under the Postal Ministry cannot be far from the minds of Stern and Adorno, both, as we have seen, eager to articulate the radio-spook link. Finding its ideal echo at the level of reception, as early as 1933, almost immediately after Hitler’s seizure of state power, his government developed and began aggressively distributing the Volksemfänger, or people’s set, a low-cost radio receiver designed to interact with the broadcast signals transmitted from the Berlin Funkhaus. Brian Currid is surely not exaggerating when, in his study, he refers to this situation as exhibiting what he calls a “national acoustic,” that is, an experience of a sound envelope, the “unisonality” described by Benedict Anderson as key to a meaningfully bounded national imaginary.
Of course, Stern and Adorno were not the only Germans picking up the process reputedly triggered by World War I and the Funkerspuk. Friedrich Kittler, as stressed in the Introduction, has draw attention to the fact that Heidegger was also following these events, and doing so in the course of writing Being and Time, his still-resonant essay in fundamental ontology. The key passage reads as follows: “In Dasein there lies an essential tendency towards closeness. All the ways in which we speed things up, as we are more or less compelled to today, push us on towards the conquest of remoteness. With the ‘radio’ for example, Dasein has so expanded its everyday environment that it has accomplished a de-severance [Ent-fernung] of the ‘world’—a de-severance which, in its meaning for Dasein, cannot yet be visualized” (Being 140, italics in the translation).
As if miming its own insight, this passage is crowded with dense and important ideas. It appears in Section Three of Division One, titled “The Worldhood of the World,” and specifically in those passages dedicated to the problem of the spatiality (note the convergence with Stern) of Being-in-the-World. In these passages Heidegger is keen to distinguish between a form of being in the world that is to a certain degree empirical, that is, a form of being-in that is subject to measurement, and a more ontological form. To adduce one of his own examples: the garment is in the closet, the closet is in a room, the room is in a house, the house is in a city, and so on. Precisely where the garment is in this configuration is determinable by and through