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Radio. John Mowitt
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Lest I be misunderstood, the logic of iterability is not, in any sense, unique to the discourse of professional reviewing and reporting. It is not, therefore, a sign of something like degradation, and I am not interested in casting suspicion on the Chronicle’s motives or in denigrating the talent of its contributors. In fact, iterability can be shown to belong to the very object of radio studies once we recognize that device and aim cite one another through the coverage that takes them as its object. This difficult though important point can be further clarified by a brief look at some of the scholarship heralding the birth of radio studies.
Between the two stories in the Chronicle appeared no doubt the decisive avatar of any and all new fields, a reader. Perhaps predictably, Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio was edited by none other than Michelle Hilmes and, it turns out, a Minnesota alum, Jason Loviglio. The oblique filial connection is trivial (Loviglio has gone on to have his own distinguished career) compared to the role played by Hilmes in this project, and for this reason it is worth thinking carefully, if only in passing, about what she says in the introduction to the volume.
Readers are largely pedagogical devices. With the prosecutions of copying centers for copyright infringement, the heightened emphasis put on publication in matters of academic promotion, and the ubiquity of interdisciplinary initiatives in virtually all fields of academic endeavor, the task of providing postsecondary teachers with a bound selection of “key essays” in any given field has assumed new urgency. This is as true of emergent fields as it is of established ones, where the emphasis falls on something like “canonical statements,” such as, in cinema studies, Laura Mulvey’s oft-reprinted “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Invariably, readers sport introductions in which their editors make, as it were, a first pass over the anthologized material. For Hilmes, the first pass is complicated by her need to introduce both the volume and the field, a task that has the advantage of allowing her to go on at length. Strategically, she proceeds by pointing to the very developmental arc emphasized by Doherty. After a somewhat scrappy beginning, radio came to national prominence during the 1920s and 1930s. Then, just as radio was beginning to attract serious scholarly attention (one thinks here of the Princeton Radio Research Project, about which more later), it was eclipsed by the advent of television and the virtually immediate scholarly interest in the medium, especially on the part of those concerned about its role in inciting violence and inducing rampant imbecility. Then radio, Phoenix-like, returned both as a cultural technology (especially, of course, with the advent of talk, or, as some prefer, hate radio) and as an object of scholarly scrutiny—witness the advent of radio studies itself.6 For the readers of the reader, two points are thus emphatically underscored. First, radio matters because its importance was prematurely usurped by another medium, television—an implicit appeal to something like the fairness of broadcasting. And second, radio matters because we now know better than to ignore it: an only slightly less implicit appeal to a notion of intellectual or, even more particularly, theoretical progress. If I emphasize this, it is with an ear toward amplifying how, in effect, Doherty repeats a repetition in Hilmes, as if to associate with radio itself its reiterative, or, if one prefers, wavy character. In other, albeit somewhat cryptic words, radio must always have mattered twice in order to matter once.
Turning from what amounts to first contact with the hardwired residualism of radio and its study, I now set my dial on the rhetoric of her introduction and cite the most-cited author in radio studies when she subtitles the penultimate section of her introduction “The Return of the Radio Repressed” (8). This blatant citation of Freud clarifies several things, even if unwittingly. First, as Doherty suggested, radio studies partisans do indeed care about the currents of critical theory that have convulsed the humanities and social sciences over the last forty-five years (notably psychoanalysis); second, the iterative logic at work within the object of radio studies is one thought to be illuminated by free association with Freud’s account of the psychic economy of repression; and third, when read in the mode of a bold headline, the return of radio is itself repressed (“the return of the radio repressed”). While apparently the most counterintuitive, this last simply bespeaks the fact that iterability is so deeply inscribed in both radio and its study that even its return will have to take place twice in order to happen at all.
This aside, and I realize it is an important, even controversial claim, what is perhaps most telling about Hilmes’s rhetoric is the way it invites us to recognize the residual in her invocation of Freud. My point here is not that radio studies is actually residual rather than emergent but that fundamental to its emergence is the way its partisans deploy the concept of the residual, applying it at once to radio and, through the history of the device, to its study. More particularly, let me propose that when invoking the “return of the repressed,” Hilmes appears to emphasize more the “archaic” and less the “vestigial” aspect of radio’s residual character. How so? Contrary to received opinion, Jean-Paul Sartre was not right when he accused Freud of incoherence in insisting that a mental content could both be repressed and unconscious. The repressed returns not because it finally overpowers the bouncer assigned to it by the ego but because the mute affective charge of a previously lived event takes place for the first time as a mental content when, through the work of analysis, it is made to mean. If radio can return as the repressed, according to Hilmes, it is because the event of its advent and perhaps even more of its decline has acquired meaning, for the first time, with its return, its reiteration, in radio studies.
At the risk of revealing that I, like anyone working in words, have stacked the proverbial deck, I will observe that Hilmes comes by her recourse to psychoanalysis honestly. For reasons that call for elucidation, the study of radio has long directed its interdisciplinary beacon toward these depths and perhaps nowhere more plainly than in the enigmatic line from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment that invites us to conceive “the radio as a sublimated printing press” (2). Written in 1944 and republished (reiterated?) in 1947, presumably on the eve of radio’s eclipse by television, the authors invoke Freud’s account of sublimation to think the technical and historical relation between the medium of print and the medium of wireless communication. But in what sense do they mean what this odd formulation says?
Although two other invocations of “sublimation” occur in the chapter from which this sentence derives, it isn’t until the third chapter—their well-known cancellation of the “culture industry”—that the printing press and the radio are again paired in a way that allows one to attune to the role of sublimation in their argument. Elaborating on the proposition that radio has become the nation’s “mouthpiece,” they write: “In fascism radio becomes the universal mouthpiece of the Führer; in the loudspeakers on the street his voice merges with the howl of sirens proclaiming panic, from which modern propaganda is hard to distinguish in any case. The National Socialists knew that broadcasting gave their cause stature as the printing press did to the Reformation. The Führer’s metaphysical charisma, invented by the sociology of religion, turned out finally to be merely the omnipresence of his radio addresses, which demonically parodies the divine spirit” (Dialectic 129). True, the word sublimation does not reappear here. However, if it makes sense to say that radio is a sublimated printing press, then this passage tells us that this is because the Reformation returns, as it were, in National Socialism, specifically,