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Radio. John Mowitt
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For the sake of brevity I will urge that we regard the vestigial as distinctly developmental. In other words, despite the reference to comparative anatomy and paleozoology, the vestigial underscores that aspect of what Williams calls the residual that is simply surpassed in the normative unfolding of a process, whether physical or psychical. So one might say that polymorphous perversity is vestigial vis-à-vis genital, that is Oedipal, sexuality in Freudian psychoanalysis, although, I hasten to add, in having derived the normative from its failure, Freud complicates this example in a decisive way—so decisive, in fact, that he largely fails to acknowledge it.
By contrast, the archaic is defined not by development but by metalepsis and resistance. Two epistolary formulations of Adorno capture this with concision. In one, Adorno conjoins the archaic and the modern by saying, “The archaic itself is a function of the new; it is thus first produced historically” (“To Walter Benjamin” 38) in and by the modern. It is the temporal inversion of the old and the new that I associate with metalepsis, and it implies that the residual registers what the dominant has produced as something like its enabling past. In other words, if the monarchy still matters in Britain this may have more to do with the contemporary political value of crafting a nationally inflected form of Tradition, or for that matter the dramatic chops of Dame Helen Mirren, than with an abiding popular investment in the divine right of kings.
The resistant aspect of the residual manifests itself when, in further specifying the archaic, Adorno writes that it is “the site of everything whose voice has fallen silent because of history” (“To Walter Benjamin” 38), a phrase as important for what it says about the archaic as for its appeal to the voice, indeed voices, that have been turned down, silenced, in order to say it. If I link this to resistance, it is because it specifies that metalepsis is interested. In other words, Adorno suggests that the modern produces the archaic in order to resist those demands voiced against it both in the present and in the present’s past. Presumably, then, President Jimmy Carter, however dimly, had something like this in mind when, in the wake of the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran, he characterized Iranian grievances against the United States for installing and supporting the shah as “ancient history.” In effect, to give voice to its presumed radical novelty, the modern produces the archaic as silent, a gesture whose consequences for the concept of resistance are taken up repeatedly in the chapters that follow. For now, I urge only that we hold onto the notion that the archaic might be said to represent what Williams understood by the oppositional, but articulated around the category of the residual. The point is not that the archaic is a rewording of a “socialism to come” but that it clarifies theoretically what it means to differentiate that version of the future from some other—for example, our own.
To justify this theoretical digression, I return to radio studies. Why not start with the basics? For example, what evidence is there that something called radio studies has emerged as a field of academic endeavor? And further, how precisely does the residual, whether vestigial or archaic, figure in or otherwise illuminate this emergence?4
In scholarship on the infrastructures of intellectual power those attentive to it have been repeatedly invited to pay less attention to the debates and controversies triggering paradigm shifts, than to such apparent banalities as conferences, research grant proposals, publications, reviews, dissertation projects, seminar offerings, job placement, in effect all the institutional micropractices of academic social reproduction. With this in mind, I invite consideration of two issues of the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The first of these appeared in February of 1999 and contains an article written by Peter Monaghan, a staff writer assigned to the “faculty research” beat at the Chronicle. Apparently sparked by “Radio Voices and the Construction of Social Identities,” a panel devoted to radio at the 1998 annual convention of the American Studies Association, Monaghan set out to register for the large, multidisciplinary, national audience of the Chronicle the advent of something new.5 As if to contradict one of her own claims about the field (that radio studies knows nothing of auteurism), Monaghan adduces the work of Michelle Hilmes as a sign of this breakthrough. He writes:
Ms. Hilmes is now prominent among a fast-growing number of researchers who are rectifying that deficiency [that radio had disappeared from the scholarly radar screen] by asking what radio programs and audiences reveal about American culture and society. Her Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (University of Minnesota Press, 1997) is the most-cited publication in a recent spate of cultural studies of radio…. The new scholarship focuses on the tension between two disparate poles. One: radio’s complicity in advancing some now-well-documented features of American culture—its intense consumerism and its questionable notions about such factors as race, gender and ethnicity. The other: the ability of the invisible medium to transgress accepted cultural norms and to feed new ideas into American homes. (A17)
Doubtless Monaghan, like anyone else, says more than he means, but let me first attend to what he has said. First, note that he actually avoids the expression “radio studies,” preferring instead the telling circumlocution “cultural studies of radio” (about which, more later). This notwithstanding, he makes it clear that the pursuit of the cultural study of radio remedies a deficiency, it supplements a lack. Well and good, but a lack in what? Presumably, a lack of focus, not on radio per se, but on the disparate poles that according to radio studies partisans should organize the aim of one’s approach to the study of radio, at least in the United States. To give a certain urgency to the discussion and to provide the whole story with a certain frisson, Monaghan resorts to “intensifiers” like fast-growing, most-cited, spate, and the ever-reliable if utterly exhausted new, all words that struggle to perform the sudden, irreversible advent of a breakthrough. Thus, to summarize: readers of the Chronicle are presented with a perceived lack in scholarly approach being quickly supplemented by a fast-growing group organized around a shared new belief in disparate poles. In effect, the key coordinates of an emerging disciplinary body are here in evidence.
So now what did Monaghan say without meaning? He said, “Her Radio Voices: American Broadcasting, 1922–1952 (University of Minnesota Press, 1997) is the most-cited publication in a recent spate of cultural studies of radio.” In citing this citation (an event he could certainly not have intended), I felicitously enter the hall of mirrors of Monaghan’s sentence, whereby an utterance that is itself a scholarly citation (note its bibliographic form) adds its own gesture of citation to the counter clicking away under Hilmes’s most-cited text and, in doing so, solicits, as it were, my own hit. Monaghan obviously means to tell us something about the way Hilmes’s work exemplifies the new scholarship, but in saying so he does more, he also co-produces something like the factual density of this scholarship and its centrality. Moreover, he does so conspicuously, if not exactly wittingly.
To what effect and with what significance? Especially important here is the general theme of citation and what the late Jacques Derrida has called the logic of iterability. By stressing the said but unmeant performative character of Monaghan’s text, I am trying to draw attention to how the discourse, in this case that of academic journalism, collaborates in the production of the significance of what it reports upon. This, in a nutshell (a term Derrida himself once risked), is what the logic of iterability tries to capture: the way authority actually derives from citation and may, in a certain sense, be nothing without it.
To further justify this invocation of the logic of iterability, I turn briefly to the second Chronicle story on radio studies. Written five years later by a well-regarded scholar, Thomas Doherty (from Brandeis), it contains the resonant subtitle “Radio Studies Rise Again,” drawing attention, I should think, less to the absurdly precipitous rise, fall, and return of radio studies (what happened to the fast-growing, to the spate, to the new?) than to the Chronicle’s own prior