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Radio. John Mowitt
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By way of bringing the discussion to a provisional rest, I will dwell for a bit longer on Lang’s underdeveloped, yet politically charged concept, that of silence. In solidarity with Margaret Attwood’s laconic assertion that “context is all,” indulge me as I repeat an oft-repeated anecdote, firm in the belief that the context generated by these remarks will realize the formalist goal of estranging the familiar. As John Cage himself tells it in a 1955 essay, the story goes like this:
There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to hear. In fact, try to make a silence, we cannot. For certain engineering purposes it is desirable to have as silent a situation as possible. Such a room is called an anechoic chamber, its six walls made of a special material, a room without echoes. I entered one at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high, one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation. Until I die there will be sounds. (“Experimental Music” 8)
The immediate aim of this anecdote is, on the one hand, to defeat the neo-Romantic notion that music emerges from, and thus gives transcendental order to, the Pascalian universe of silent, infinite space and, on the other hand, to assure readers that music, once retheorized, has a future. For me, however, what is striking is the way Cage re-poses the question of listening and the range of hearing. In effect, the two sounds he identifies, radiating as they do from the living body, from what Agamben would have to call the sheer animal capacity for voice, point to the haunted wheezing, the hear-stripe, that conditions all hearing we are prepared to recognize as such. The point here is not to resurrect the bio-anatomical body but to recognize that hearing is, to use a Lacanianism, mediated by listening, that is, by the signifier, or, as I prefer, by disciplinary reason. In this sense, Cage can be read as proposing that we produce silence as the form of the not-hearing that our listening rests upon in order to identify its objects of acoustic attention. Or, to translate the point back into the terms of this discussion, Cage finds in the absence of silence a sound calling for attention, not in and of itself as some ethereal avatar of the musica universalis, but as an index of what the contemporary, disciplinary organization of listening receives badly, if at all.
Formulating the point in these terms directs us immediately back to Being and Time, not to its meditation on de-severance, but to its analysis of the call, der Ruf.6 This material appears in Heidegger’s effort to grasp “conscience,” specifically “the voice of conscience,” not as a psychological experience but as an ontological structure. The formulation inviting the comparison between Cage and Heidegger reads as follows: “The call does not report events; it calls without uttering anything. The call discourses in the uncanny mode of keeping silent. And it does this only because, in calling the one to whom the appeal is made, it does not call him into the public idle talk of the ‘they’ [des Man], but calls him back from this into the reticence [Verschweigenheit] of his existent potentiality-for-Being. When the caller reaches him to whom the appeal is made, it does so with a cold assurance which is uncanny, but by no means obvious” (Being 322). To be blunt, I do not find the matter of conscience, per se, what is most interesting about this material. More interesting is the way Heidegger anticipates Cage’s complication of silence by discovering in the call a sound that does not utter anything. Sensing that enunciating such a call complicates the entire motif of the “voice of conscience,” Heidegger insists not only that the caller of the call is the neutral “it” (“Es” ruft) but that, to the extent that it speaks at all, it does so with an “alien voice” (eine fremde Stimme). Obviously, one finds here—in the no one who is the speaker, in the uncanny, in the odd fascination with des Man—elements that vividly recall Adorno’s discussion of the “Radio Voice,” but before these are elaborated, note that just as the voice of conscience is a sound but not a voice, so too is the reception of the sound a listening that is not a hearing. Indeed, Heidegger is careful both here and in “Logos” (his reading of Heraclitus from 1954) to insist upon the need for philosophy to think the ontology of hearing differently, specifically with an ear pricked toward the philosophical limits of the thinking of hearing.
The point is simply this: in both Cage and Heidegger the silence that is not one produces both a practical possibility and a theoretical provocation. Specifically, what is called for—and I use the expression advisedly—is an approach to sound that situates it in the “neutral zone,” the zone of indistinction, between a musicology straining to capture noise as something other than sheer alterity and a philosophy struggling to apprehend meaning, as it were, outside the vox. The acousmatic, that is, the sound whose source falls outside the visual field, finds here its evil twin, its double, that is, the sound whose source falls outside the audible field. Isn’t this precisely what Cage is getting at in the closing paragraph of his 1958 statement on film: “Therefore, the most important thing to do in film now is to find a way for it to include invisibility, just as music already enjoys inaudibility (silence)” (116)? Sound when thus pitched against the limits of the image becomes about the “listening models,” as Benjamin called them, although he was not, alas, thinking in the disciplinary terms I prefer.
To anticipate the concerns that may have arisen with regard to whether Heidegger’s discussion of the call has anything to do with radio, it should be emphasized that between the earlier discussion of de-severing the world and the later discussion of the alien voice stands the problem of the near. It is in fact not difficult to discern here a relation, perhaps even a necessary relation, between the closeness that speeds toward us through the radio and the urgency with which Heidegger contrasts “the call” to the idle chatter of the “they,” the medium through which world events are reported. Crucial is not that the call is remote while the report is ever nearer, but that the call is uncanny: it is, as he puts it early in the discussion of conscience, “from afar unto afar.” Or, put differently, precisely to the extent that the radio hastens our perdition among the “they,” it isolates, frames, that which the call meaningfully but silently calls to. Radio in this sense belongs not only to the ontological structure of conscience but to the very theoretical practice of fundamental ontology, that is, to Heidegger’s phenomenology. Because this, as I have argued, forms a land line between Adorno’s and Heidegger’s approach to radio that is, as it were, off the radar (officially Adorno held Heidegger, his jargon if not his person, in contempt), perhaps the alien voice that is coming ever nearer and distancing us ever further from our world is not a voice at all but the sound of philosophy, or, for that matter, musicology, seeking to catch up with or otherwise attune to the it, das Es, that whistles between them. This may, in the end, be the most important feature of the “illusion of closeness,” of nearness, or, as Heidegger puts it in “Age of the World Picture,” of “Americanism,” in that it calls upon us to hear differently the hum, the rumble, the flutter that foils the suppression of all echoes, a sound that in falling below the voice cannot be either picked up by our models of listening or taught a better tune.
Can we not say, then, that radio spooks philosophy, that radio, not film, not television, is historically the medium that obliges the field to confront the question of where both its questions and its answers come from? Recall, if you will, that each of us is a radio receiver, that our bodies are fully shot through with radio waves, and that, as Neil Strauss reminded us now almost twenty years ago, all we have to do is clench a simple device in our teeth to begin broadcasting (192).
This is a sound that has, in the end, neither come back nor returned. To treat it as such, in the manner of Dolar and Agamben, is to attempt to avoid or at best contain radio—in effect, to redeem the field of philosophy from the sound that haunts its voice. Instead, radio might better be thought to operate as the residual, as Williams taught us to say, the residual in the mode of the archaic that progress produces to have a temporal atmosphere in and against which to fire its retro-rockets. Perhaps this is why, when the alien voice does show up, as it was thought to have done on Halloween in 1938, it is always already defeated by a lingering “before” that progress cannot leave behind. Welles, as has been argued, wanted to grasp this in vestigial, that is, Darwinian terms, and if we are not all to succumb to the