In effect, the reader has, as it were, been transferred—not to the source, even purported, of the broadcast, but perhaps to the source of reckoning with it in certain terms.
Virtually all media historians of the Weimar period—Pohle, Currid, Jelavich, Bergmeier, and Lotz—insist that radio underwent a profound transformation and reorganization in Germany after World War I. This was due to the emerging consensus among educators and politicians that Germany had decisively lost the propaganda war; indeed, this very concept appears to have come into its own during this conflict. As an expression of this device envy, Germany embarked upon an aggressive centralization of radio broadcasting, a process that might be said to have culminated in Göbbels’s appointment as Reichspropagandaleiter of the Nazi Party in 1929. Immediately following the war in the winter of 1918–19, many still-equipped veteran wireless operators lent their talents to an ugly confrontation with the uprighting and rightward-tending German state, a confrontation that came to be referred to subsequently as the Funkerspuk or radio scare. Doubtless, this and the fact that it was taken as the pretext for an aggressive state centralization of radio under the Postal Ministry cannot be far from the minds of Stern and Adorno, both, as we have seen, eager to articulate the radio-spook link. Finding its ideal echo at the level of reception, as early as 1933, almost immediately after Hitler’s seizure of state power, his government developed and began aggressively distributing the Volksemfänger, or people’s set, a low-cost radio receiver designed to interact with the broadcast signals transmitted from the Berlin Funkhaus. Brian Currid is surely not exaggerating when, in his study, he refers to this situation as exhibiting what he calls a “national acoustic,” that is, an experience of a sound envelope, the “unisonality” described by Benedict Anderson as key to a meaningfully bounded national imaginary.
Of course, Stern and Adorno were not the only Germans picking up the process reputedly triggered by World War I and the Funkerspuk. Friedrich Kittler, as stressed in the Introduction, has draw attention to the fact that Heidegger was also following these events, and doing so in the course of writing Being and Time, his still-resonant essay in fundamental ontology. The key passage reads as follows: “In Dasein there lies an essential tendency towards closeness. All the ways in which we speed things up, as we are more or less compelled to today, push us on towards the conquest of remoteness. With the ‘radio’ for example, Dasein has so expanded its everyday environment that it has accomplished a de-severance [Ent-fernung] of the ‘world’—a de-severance which, in its meaning for Dasein, cannot yet be visualized” (Being 140, italics in the translation).
As if miming its own insight, this passage is crowded with dense and important ideas. It appears in Section Three of Division One, titled “The Worldhood of the World,” and specifically in those passages dedicated to the problem of the spatiality (note the convergence with Stern) of Being-in-the-World. In these passages Heidegger is keen to distinguish between a form of being in the world that is to a certain degree empirical, that is, a form of being-in that is subject to measurement, and a more ontological form. To adduce one of his own examples: the garment is in the closet, the closet is in a room, the room is in a house, the house is in a city, and so on. Precisely where the garment is in this configuration is determinable by and through calculation. Against this stands the spatiality of ontology, that is, the experience Dasein has in being with things in what then deserves to be called a “world.” Recall that this is the very world Heidegger thought animals, that is, those without language, were decidedly poor in.
In the midst of this discussion, Heidegger turns to the radio. In the context created by my remarks, his immediate attention to “closeness” captures our own. Oddly enough, it would appear, on the face of it, that Adorno, who otherwise has very little time for Heidegger, is essentially recycling this discussion. But this seems decidedly less possible when one sorts out precisely how Heidegger understands “closeness.” The important first step lies in confronting the difficult concept of what is here translated as “de-severance.” Macquarrie and Robinson tell us important things in explaining how, in the footnote on pages 138–39 of their translation, they confected the term. Heidegger’s word Ent-fernung has fern, or, “far,” at its root. The privative prefix ent- takes farness away from itself, a semantic effect that is intensified when, as in the case of the passage cited, the prefix is set off by a hyphen. In other words, Ent-fernung is not simply a remoteness that is less remote, but a coming near of the remote, of the far. Given the topic of spatiality, one might reasonably conclude that we are dealing here with an insight into the essential spacing of the being of Dasein, an insight that Heidegger virtually picks up from the radio, one that points directly at the difference between disembodiment and delocalization. Although no reference is made to Dasein, it seems obvious that Adorno has modeled the “illusion of nearness” on Heidegger’s treatment of Ent-fernung. In fact, when, in 1964, Adorno turns the full intensity of his critical glare on Heidegger—I am thinking here of The Jargon of Authenticity—it is striking that in challenging the latter’s approach to the immediate he rehearses in condensed form the arguments from “The Radio Voice,” down to reiterating the motifs of the “voice of the announcer” that “resounds” in the home, the nearness of the whole, and the atomized individual (Jargon 76).
Before, however, we get distracted by the question of influence and its Angst, I want to dwell briefly on the closing sentence in the passage cited from Being and Time: “With the ‘radio,’ for example, Dasein has so expanded its everyday environment that it has accomplished a de-severance of the ‘world’—a de-severance which, in its meaning for Dasein, cannot yet be visualized.” What draws attention here is the distinct way in which Heidegger evokes the acousmatic character of the radio. He does not frame this in terms of the invisibility of the sound source. Instead, he deftly traces the dilemma that arises as an ontological structure, that of Dasein itself, undergoes an expansion whose effect—the de-severance of the “world,” that is, the no-place where Dasein is with itself and with others—cannot yet be visualized (the German, überseh-bare, might be better rendered as “fore-seen,” even “looked over,” scrutinized). Such a formulation might appear to be inconsequential, except that a page later Heidegger writes: “Seeing and hearing are distance senses [Fernsinne] not because they are far reaching, but because it is in them that Dasein as deseverant mainly dwells” (Being 141). In other words, when one insists upon the limits, even if provisional, of vision, one is pointing to an asymmetry in the ontological structure of Dasein itself. Radio is thus obliging hearing to speed out ahead of seeing, producing a de-severance out of step with itself, recalling, I should think, the importance of thinking about the sound of this racing hearing. Indeed, when Heidegger returns to these questions ten years later, in “The Anaximander Fragment,” he envisions the press “limping after” radio, whose speed has overtaken even historiography itself, establishing the world dominion of historicism (Early Greek Thinking 17).
It is tempting, especially since the interventions of Françoise Fedier and Victor Farias, to approach this racing sound as the voice of Hitler that resounds in the speaker of the Volksemfänger, mixing, as Hork-heimer and Adorno insisted, with the sirens in the street. Or, put differently, it is certainly possible to read this asymmetrical de-severance at the heart of Dasein, especially as indexed to the nationalizing of German radio in the twenties, as the vulnerability of Dasein to the Nazi temptation—in effect, to invoke Berel Lang’s anguished study, as Heidegger’s rehearsal for his silence on the Jewish Question. Doing so, however, suppresses too hastily the unsettling proximity between Adorno and Heidegger on the radio, that is, the fact that Dasein’s vulnerability refers with equal immediacy to an ontological structure and to the fundamental ontology—the philosophical project—putting this structure, as it were, on the playlist. In other words, if the full implications of de-severing the world are not yet fore-seeable, this may well cast the shadow of the acousmatic upon philosophy itself, to the extent that the source of its sounds, its rumblings, falls outside its construal of the visual field. In short, the sound that haunts phonocentrism could be said to fall out of the range of our hearing, but hearing understood as a faculty or capacity of a subject that belongs to the
