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Radio. John Mowitt
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This more archaic inflection of the residualism of cultural studies, where it is posited as deficient in what must then be supplemented by radio studies, might be compelling were it not for the fact that, as this study will seek to show, precisely the absence of attention to how radio figured in the philosophical and theoretical projects—phenomenology, existentialism, Hegelian Marxism, anticolonialism, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies itself—that span and largely define the preceding century allows Hilmes and others to argue, now from a different angle, that of scholarly neglect, for the necessity of radio studies. It would appear either that the notion that radio studies is theory friendly is at best overstated or, and this is much more interesting, that theory means something rather particular to the partisans of radio studies. One is prompted in this direction by the “call signals” delineated by Doherty, who clearly distinguishes theory from the close reading of specific broadcasts, as though theory were something that guided reading instead of belonging to the very difficulties that arise in the practice of reading, as though poststructuralism did not contain—in the vexing figure of Paul de Man—this very insight. The undisclosed location from which the guidance system of theory emanates would appear to resemble strongly the sort of transcendental position, the zone of methodological abstraction, that deprives theory of just the sort of history that seems to have fallen out of range of radio studies. Is this necessary?
It may, then, be worth suggesting that one of the aims of radio studies is a paradoxical, but therefore telling, repudiation of the very theory its partisans otherwise regard as having been wrongly abandoned by cultural studies. As such, the emergence of radio studies, despite its abiding and undeniably novel commitment to a form of critical inter-disciplinarity not typically found in the institutional practices of mass communications studies, partakes more in what Williams urged us to call an alternative as opposed to an oppositional state of emergency. In setting aside the politics of its own relation to theory, radio studies risks its progressive political ambitions. I’d like to think that this is not necessary, but one cannot help but be struck by the canonical status, in virtually all treatments of radio—from Adorno and Cantril to Ed Miller and Wolfgang Hagen—of the Mercury Theater broadcast of Welles’s War of the Worlds, a story that allegorizes the arrival of the radically and menacingly new as being overturned by the epidemiological comeback of the vestigial, that is, the germ.
But then this is not really the point. The point is not to nail down certain philosophical or political keywords but rather to recognize in the nuances they invite us to make—how does the earlier remain active in the later?—a problem for reading as much as for theorizing, a problem whose perplexing involvement with the apparatus of radio is trying to tell us something. But what?
In keeping with my emphasis on the conceptual problems stirred by nuance, I have essayed here to engage them at the level of expository gesture, what might also be called “midlife” (as opposed to “late”) style. The reader will have noted recourse to the rhetoric of radio, to tuning dials and the like. But there is an enunciative dimension in play that might otherwise escape notice. It includes the expository shifts, the switches of rhetorical register, fields of discourse, presumed audience, and the like. This is deliberate, if not precisely calculated, and for some it will read as interference. My aim is to submit my writing practice to the demands of what I began by calling the object of radio study. At one level, this gives frank and rather direct expression to the difficulty of tuning in, of giving sharp focus to the vexed encounter between radio and its study. In effect, my own reception of what is going on in this zone of indistinction is, if not bad, certainly compromised. By the same token, it seems both attractive and imperative to write from within this vexed encounter, neither to pretend to approach it from outside nor to abandon oneself entirely to its inside, an approach that carries its own risks of distraction, but to convey the feedback, the whistle that results when a signal loops and amplifies too quickly—put differently, to practice a mode of immanent critique that takes the form of content seriously. The chapters that follow exhibit this commitment through the logic of what might be called “indirection.” They get under way in odd places, they loop, they fade, but in all cases they stress that studying the study of radio repeats something with a difference. They urge that all the remarkable things we have come to learn about stations, broadcasts, markets, personalities, and patents are not enough. Radio calls out for more. This text, then, is a response trimmed to the shape of the letter(s) of that call.
CHAPTER 1
Facing the Radio
A distinction useful for my purposes is drawn in scene 11 of Wilder and Brackett’s Sunset Blvd. In it Norma Desmond, played by Gloria Swanson, and Joe Gillis, played by William Holden, are discussing her script, Salomé. The dialogue is as follows:
Norma: I’ve written it myself. It’s taken me years. It’s going to be a very important picture.
Joe: It looks like enough for six important pictures.
Norma: It’s the story of Salomé. I think I’ll have de Mille direct it.
Joe: De Mille!? Uh-huh.
Norma: We made a lot of pictures together.
Joe: And you’ll play Salomé?
Norma: Who else?
Joe: I’m only asking. I didn’t know you were planning a comeback.
Norma: I hate that word! It’s return! A return to all those who have never forgiven me for deserting the screen.
Joe: Fair enough.
Comeback versus return. On the face of it, what’s the difference? For Norma the difference is clear: a return is a response, in effect, an acknowledgment of a debt owed to those who have otherwise not forgiven her for the withdrawal of her presence, her desertion of the field of the visual. A comeback, by contrast, involves no such acknowledgment. It appears to be utterly narcissistic, utterly scripted. Whether tenable in the long run or not, what strikes me as useful about this distinction is that it cues us to a subtlety that calls out for attention when we are thinking about the contemporary theoretical status of the voice. How, in other words, should we think about the resurgence of scholarly interest in the topic? Or, put differently, what do those involved in this resurgence think they are doing? Is this the voice’s comeback or its return? Or is it something else altogether? Moreover, is the difference here yet another way to approach the problem of residualism?
This may seem like an odd place to begin, especially to begin what is conceived as an examination of the relation between philosophy and radio, so allow me to explain. Certainly one way to think about what I have called the “resurgence” of interest in the voice is to grasp it as part of a response to the waning of poststructuralism, or, more precisely, to the attenuation of the critique of “phonocentrism.” Although many have jumped onto the bandwagon of this critique, it was put in play with exemplary rigor by the late Jacques Derrida. In its emergent formulations this critique sought to draw out the consequences of the collaboration between Saussurean linguistics and Husserlean phenomenology. Specifically, Derrida found in Husserl’s fuzzy and ultimately untenable distinction between expression and indication the same ambivalence to be found in Saussure’s risky reduction of the signifier to an acoustic image (literally, image acoustique), that is, an entity devoid of all physicality yet capable of yoking together something seen and something heard. Recognizing this allowed Derrida, through the distinctly French pun on the heteronymic word entendre (that is, “to hear” and “to understand”), to tease out the centuries-old open secret of the essential link between the voice and meaning. The fact that this insight derives from a heteronym, a word whose written or spoken signifier produces two apparently different signifieds, is interesting but does not merit further elaboration here.
In the opening section of Of Grammatology Derrida fastened phonocentrism not only to logocentrism but also to ethnocentrism, arguing that logocentrism is “nothing but the most original and powerful ethnocentrism” (3). Once in place and taken up by those interpellated by the grammatological