with the filter?
Recall here that it is because the radio filters that it has a voice. It is as though Adorno were here anticipating what Barthes would later call “the grain of the voice,” the material quality of speaking—the pace, timbre, volume, in short, the sound qualities of a voice. Indeed, turning back briefly to the discussion of the radio symphony in the same essay, Adorno goes on at some length about what he calls the “hear stripe”: the surface noise of a phonograph or the static hum of a public broadcasting system, noise that adds a relentless pedal tone to the score of every piece of music broadcast by radio. This grain, this irreducible materiality of transmission, would certainly qualify as the audible presence of a filter. Indeed, one might think of the haunted wheezing organ in Sunset Blvd. as an incarnation of the hear stripe, or at least its screen. But what bears repeating here is the fact that voice is what lies, in the terms of Adorno’s exposition, behind or beneath a face. Given that the radio is faceless, a voice must be invented for it and then attributed to it—in which case radio would thus appear to call to or for the physiognomist.
The voice as the “face-like unity” is precisely what cues the physiognomical analysis of radio. As such, the filter—the audible sign of the radio voice’s functioning—is as much about radio as it is about theory. Adorno, by locating the filter in the ear of the listener and declaring both it and the absent speaker to be parts of the radio apparatus, would appear to be including in radio its physiognomic study. Because the social significance of radio would presumably derive—at least in part—from such a study, one can then say, as Adorno does, that the radio’s expression “models” its social significance. In short, because the face-voice relation repeats in advance the expression-significance relation, theory as a critical mediation of the whole is apparently already active in the radio itself. It is as if the radio voice were calling from behind its purely metaphorical face, not to a listener per se, but to a theory capable of picking up its signals. What does this call sound like? How does the filter that is the voice deflect or channel it? To begin to amplify this sound, or at least the problems that it poses, I want to approach it by thinking about closeness, invisibility, and spooks.
To the reader familiar with Adorno’s cranky rejoinder to Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Era of Its Technical Reproducibility,” his advocacy of the critique of aura in “The Radio Voice” comes as a bit of a surprise. In an early pass over this material, Adorno, invoking the work of Robert Havighurst, puzzles over the matter of the “live-ness” of radio music. Preparing us for the physiognomic turn, Adorno quotes approvingly Havighurst’s assertion that radio listeners feel that they know the personalities of those speaking on radio because of the “illusion of closeness,” which makes the listener “feel that he is actually present at the place where the broadcast originates—or purports to originate” (Radio Voice” 501–2). Because the motif of “knowing personality through voice” is, as we have seen, properly physiognomical, it is clear that this discussion is asking us to bring together the “face-like-unity” of the radio with the illusion of closeness, the notion that we are present to/at the origin of the broadcast. In further characterizing this closeness, Adorno first reminds us to consider that we listen to the radio in the privacy of the home, as he says—tellingly—“in face of [our] wireless set” (502), and that the “amplified noises” emitted by it approach the listener as an “owner victim,” or, as he later specifies, they “approach one bodily.” Thus closeness is clearly more than proximity: it is about a feeling that sound, amplified noise, is penetrating, breaking into something or someone who can face a wireless. In this sense, Kafka’s “The Burrow” surely provides the template for Adorno’s encounter with radio.
Adorno, of course, is here more interested in the puzzle of the live versus the reproduced, but it is important to note how quickly in the piece the physiognomic motifs enter and how intimately they become associated with the acoustic or sonic problem of what pours into or through the body. Perhaps not surprisingly, later, when Adorno’s anxiety about the metaphoricity of the physiognomic method is at its height, he trots out not only a catachrestic justification for it—we refer, he notes, to the sound source as a “loudspeaker,” the “diaphragm” of the microphone is modeled on the ear, in short, “the radio mechanism is patterned after human sense organs” (“Radio Voice” 535)—but a psychoanalytical one. Indeed, in the long footnote on 534–35 he rehearses the dispute between Ferenczi and Bernfeld regarding the physiognomic symptomatization of the human organs whereby they can function as expressive centers of personality disorders. His comment on this debate, where he characterizes the radio “as an organ of society” (“Radio Voice” 535), leaves no doubt that if such exaggerations, in the end, nevertheless help one understand something fundamental about radio, then they are analytical risks worth taking. And what, apparently, is fundamental about radio is the “illusion of closeness” generated in and by its voice.
But does this not contradict the earlier emphasis on the remoteness of the invisible man whose voice breaks into one’s home? It does, until one recognizes that this invocation of the acousmatic character of radio sound is treated by Adorno as an avatar of the uncanny, that is, the sense of its sound being “here” but in such a way that one cannot be, as he says, ‘face to face” with it (“Radio Voice” 503). To flesh out this uncanny “hereness” of radio, Adorno appeals to Günther Stern’s (later Anders’s) 1930 study “Spuk und Radio.” Although Stern’s concern is to illuminate the odd spatiality of broadcast music—the fact that it has a precise “when” while lacking a precise “where”—Adorno draws on Stern’s discussion of ubiquity to extend his insight into hereness, and by extension the illusion of closeness. In effect, what ubiquity provides is a way to talk about how the remote comes near precisely in being everywhere. The invisible man, in falling outside a certain con-strual of the domain of the visible, is someone or something that can, in principle, be anywhere. If listeners feel themselves addressed as owner victims by the invisible voice, and especially if the nearness of this address spirits them off to the site from which the broadcast purports to originate, then it is not hard to understand what appeals to Adorno about Stern’s figure of the spook. Moreover, given Adorno’s unusually receptive relation to psychoanalysis in this essay, it is hard to believe that he was not aware of Freud’s use of Goethe’s spuk from Faust II—“Now the air is so filled with spooks, that no one knows best how to get out”—a line that stands as the epigraph to The Psychopathology of Everyday Life but that in this context suggests that ubiquity and the psychopathological character of the everyday are mixed together in the sound of closeness. Perhaps this sheds light on the curious fact that this essay of Adorno’s, like several others of those done under the auspices of the Princeton Radio Research Project, finds an occasion to reference the War of the Worlds broadcast that took place in the fall, on Halloween Night, to be precise, of his first year in the United States. Recall that in exculpating the Mercury Theater and NBC Radio, Welles described the broadcast as a Halloween prank, our “own radio version of dressing up in a sheet jumping out of a bush and saying Boo!” (Cantril, Invasion 42).
Boo. What kind of sound is that? Semantically, of course, it registers both disapproval and menace. But it is also one of those so-called imitative or onomatopoetic words that, in apparently defying the principle of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, gave Saussure fits. But rather than puzzling over precisely the sort of sound that boo is, and remembering that the larger aim here is to get at the sound that escapes the radio voice, consider that boo, as an imitative and thus analogical word, challenges the discipline of linguistics as Saussure is seeking to found it. To exaggerate if only for effect, boo is the sound of something whistling, maybe even humming, through or around the limits of a discipline. This means, of course, that I am rather obviously pressuring the notion of what sound is, where it takes place, indeed whether it can or should be heard/understood at all.
To move beyond these unsettling abstractions, it is crucial that we follow the lead of Adorno in adducing the relevance of Heidegger to his discussion of the radio voice. Adorno invokes Heidegger to help clarify in what way Stern’s analysis succumbs to the ahistorical tendencies of “existential philosophy,” and although Adorno makes no immediate reference
