Radio
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Radio
Essays in Bad Reception
John Mowitt
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Berkeley · Los Angeles · London
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University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
© 2011 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mowitt, John, 1952–.
Radio : essays in bad reception / John Mowitt.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–520-27049-7 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978–0–520-27050-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Radio broadcasting—Philosophy. I. Title.
PN1991.5.M69 2011
384.54—dc23
2011026053
Manufactured in the United States of America
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on 50-pound Enterprise, a 30% post-consumer-waste, recycled, deinked fiber that is processed chlorine-free. It is acid-free and meets all ANSI/NISO (Z 39.48) requirements.
We still do not have the kind of analysis of the brief moment of radio that people have so passionately undertaken for the cinema on the one hand, and television on the other; but Brecht’s modernism—and the very modernism of his moment of history in general—is bound up with radio, and demands the acknowledgment of radio’s formal uniqueness as a medium, of its fundamental properties as a specific art in its own right, a form in which the antithesis of words and music no longer holds, but a new symbiosis of these two formerly separate dimensions is effectuated and rehearsed.
—Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method
Radio confuses the philosophers. What is it that I am not present for the speaker at the microphone while he is present for me? Does presence itself split itself up? This is a very serious psychological problem.
—René Sudre, Le huitième art: Mission de la radio
Contents
Introduction: The Object of Radio Studies
Acknowledgments
Near the core of Carl Sagan’s Contact stands an episode, perhaps even an event, pertinent to the genre of which this is an example: acknowledgments. As those familiar with either the novel or the film will remember, the eponymous “contact” is discovered when the protagonist detects an electromagnetic signal repeating in what might otherwise pass as the noise of interstellar space. In time this signal is recognized as a broadcast, in fact, the televised broadcast of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. This leads not only to the onto-theological crisis of contact itself but—and Sagan’s shrewdness shines through here—to panicked speculations regarding intentions, speculations that quickly include the conspiratorial question of hoaxes and the like. In the end, the novel itself succumbs to this hermeneutical panic, but not before reminding us that the question of where any text comes from is of fundamental, because elusive, import.
If I emphasize this instance of scientist fiction, it is because it has long been my impression that this text—Radio: Essays in Bad Reception—has been approaching for some time. If you will, it came to me (“the seeds were planted in my brain”) while I was teaching a graduate seminar in the nineties at the University of Minnesota, “Radio and the Politics of Mass Culture,” where, among other things, I was interested in crossing the analytical “pessimism” so frequently ascribed to the Frankfurt School with radio as opposed to literature, film, and television—the more typical roster of “bad objects.” Or so it seems now. At the time, the students present queried me early and often about “my objectives,” and it seems fitting here to thank them for underscoring the flawed character of the reception that I was struggling to improve in the seminar.
In a sense, this situation has repeated itself throughout the duration of this project, but in configurations as distinctive as they are worthy of grateful acknowledgment. For the sake of exposition I will distinguish among hosts, curators, and enablers, that is, colleagues and friends who have—both at length and in passing—helped me figure out what this text is trying to tell me.
Chief among the hosts who deserve acknowledgment are Joan Scott and her colleagues (the late) Clifford Geertz, Eric Maskin, and Michael Walser, who invited me to join the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton for the academic year 2004–5. Joan in particular allowed me to recognize that the object of radio was transmitting to me from deep within the recesses of my earlier thinking on antidisciplinarity. She also brought me into association with an extraordinary group of scholars from whom this project has benefited in incalculable ways. I want to thank especially Caroline Arni, Mark Beissinger, Matteo Casini, Patricia Clough, Paulla Ebron, Duana Full-wiley, Bruce Grant, Sarah Igo, John Meyer, Kenda Mutongi, Helen Tilley, and Marek Wieczorek. Patricia, in particular, emerged as a consistently provocative interlocutor, and Caroline’s paleographic talents proved indispensable.
In the course of researching and writing Radio, I was invited to present it as a work in progress in various venues. I am especially grateful to the following