through the decipherment of outward, visible signs. Nevertheless, he is insistent upon the structural value of the channel, the communication, between an inner and an outer, a hidden and a manifest—something of an inverted acousmatics. Brought to bear on the phenomenon of radio, physiognomy leads Adorno almost directly to the concept of the radio voice. Aware that this invites immediate comparison with Lavater’s concept of personality, Adorno embarks on a somewhat tortuous but telling justification for both physiognomy and the radio voice that it allows one to pick up.
On the face of it, Adorno’s material would appear to surrender to phonocentrism in advance by seeking the social meaning of the radio in its voice, and to some extent this is true. Moreover, insofar as he addresses himself to sound he does so by turning immediately to music, again as if the meaning of sound must be made to resonate within and across the frontier bordering philosophy and musicology. Although true, these are not the only conclusions that can be drawn from his discussion. Indeed, it is precisely the way Adorno’s analysis sidles up to phonocentrism without succumbing to its charm that is at once interesting and important.
After provisionally setting aside the matter of the obsolescence of physiognomy, Adorno turns to the problem of the face. What is the equivalent of the human face in the domain of the radiophonic? Does physiognomy have more than a merely metaphorical value? It does if we recognize that, like the face, the radio presents us with a unity, something that synthesizes psychological, sociological, and technological elements. It does so by exhibiting voice. In other words, just as we might say that Don LaFontaine had a voice that exuded aggressive masculinity (his was the ubiquitous promotional voice of summer blockbusters in the United States), we might want to say that the radio has a voice that can be delimited and read as the sign of something, if not someone, behind it. Voice then becomes the very means by which Adorno wants to salvage physiognomy in the face of its obsolescence. It thus has, as it were, two faces: one turned toward the radio and the other turned toward the disciplinary field in which radio appears as an object of inquiry.
But what precisely can be said about the radio voice? Adorno is quick to point out that it has nothing to do with the voices or other sounds that are broadcast over the radio. That would be too empirical.4 The issue, instead, has to do entirely with what he insists upon calling the “how” of the radio. In other words, the radio voice is different from both voices and music, presumably because it emanates from somewhere that neither the voice nor music can name.
Because Adorno’s discussion of the impact of radio on symphonic music (in “The Radio Symphony”) numbers among his better-known writings on radio, I will only point briefly to the aspect of this discussion that bears on physiognomy. In essence, radio is at odds with symphonic music because it deprives this music of its sonic power. It does so in two ways: first, it generates an acoustic image of the music that miniaturizes it, making it impossible for the listener to be surrounded, absorbed by the forces of the symphonic orchestra. Second, this act of miniaturization blocks what Adorno elsewhere calls “structural listening,” forcing the listener to engage in atomized listening, a form of listening that in failing to feel the whole of a musical composition seeks to recognize and isolate fragments of melody or thematic passages and motifs. It contributes to what he regards as the patently offensive practices of humming and whistling—both, it should be pointed out, sounds that fall somewhere between voice and music. This is a point that ought to have attracted more of Adorno’s attention and less of his impatience.
Famously, or perhaps infamously, this discussion does not settle for a technical dressing down of the radio as a device, as a piece of furniture. It goes after the theoretical jugular instead: the claim that radio so transforms our relation to the listening required by symphonic music that it destroys this music from within. Trivializing this analytical proposition through the psychologism of “pessimism,” a polemical weapon drawn these days almost as quickly as Göbbel’s famed Browning, is really more of a bluff, a feint. It is certainly no argument against the theoretical ambition of Adorno’s insight—or so I am contending here. With this caveat in mind, we return now to the physiognomic problem of the voice.
Consider then the following extraordinary passages from “The Radio Voice”:
What actually “speaks” through radio is man: by his voice or by musical instruments. Thus the term “speaking” appears to be a purely metaphorical one. One attributes to the instrument what is due to man merely because of his invisibility and remoteness. Still, when the phenomenon is analyzed, man’s remoteness from the loudspeaker and his invisibility are part of the phenomenon. Whenever one switches on his radio, the sounds pouring out bear an expression all their own, an expression which is related to the men behind it, only by reflection and not by the primordial awareness of the phenomenon. Radio speaks to the listener even if he is not listening to a speaker. (533)
And on the following page, segueing from a summary of his critique of the radio symphony:
Radio has its own voice inasmuch as it functions as a filter for every sound. Due to the comprehensiveness of its operation as a filter, it gains a certain autonomy in the ears of the listener: even the adult experiences the radio rudimentarily, like the child who personifies radio as an aunt or uncle of his. It is the physiognomics of this radio voice wich [sic] provides the key for an understanding of how the expression of the radio tends to become a model for its social significance. (534)
More worthy of close attention follows thereon, but for now let me underscore a few especially salient issues. First, there is the complex interplay between metaphor and attribution. Obviously, Adorno remains haunted throughout by the epistemological status of physiognomy. Here he supplements metaphor with belief, that is, while hanging on to the physiognomic idea that something is signified behind the radio voice, he not only points to the invisible man but also emphasizes the role played by listeners in attributing an identity to the source of what is heard. Moreover, as if defending his appeal to appearances, Adorno builds into the radio itself the remoteness and invisibility of the human subject. In other words, what the radio is includes the irreducibly acousmatic character of what lies behind it, the missing subject whose absence is compensated for in the listener’s attribution of voice to the radio. Because this very dimension of radio arises only in reflection, it is otherwise essentially unconscious; indeed, it is through this unconsciousness that the human and the radio belong to each other.
In the second passage, the motif of the unconscious manifests itself in the figure of the filter. This is not just a filter for what “man” says or the music he plays, it is a filter for every sound, a specification that finds in the compensatory structure of the radio voice a deflective processing of all sound transmitted by the radio. Here, one might reasonably suggest, sound breaks away from voice and music in serving as the index of a filter that explicitly extends beyond the two. Importantly, as with the discussion of radio’s impact on the radio symphony, the filter becomes a prosthetic earpiece. It at once enhances and preempts our listening. In Eisenberg’s formulation, it listens for us. As Adorno says, the filter gains a certain autonomy in the ear of the listener, but instead of miniaturizing the power of the symphony it consigns the human subject to an infantilized personification of radio in which, regardless of what is being broadcast, “he” is spoken to by the invisible and remote brother or sister of one of his parents. Is sound filtered here, in and as radio, through what we could properly call Oedipalization? It is worth recalling here that one of the preoccupations of the psychoanalysts assembled by Lazarsfeld to consult with the Princeton Radio Research Project was that of the radio’s interference with parenting. In effect, Fromm, Sullivan, and others worried that radio functioned as an alternative authority in the family. Does such a function have a sound? What would such a sound sound like?
Before attempting to respond, consider the closing formulation of the second passage. This is the sentence in which physiognomics is mentioned by name and advocated as an approach to radio because through it one understands how its expression becomes a model for its social significance. It is not hard to grasp how expression and significance fall in line with the physiognomic distinction between the
