The acousmatic, that is, the sound whose source falls outside the visual field, finds here its evil twin, its double, that is, the sound whose source falls outside the audible field. Isn’t this precisely what Cage is getting at in the closing paragraph of his 1958 statement on film: “Therefore, the most important thing to do in film now is to find a way for it to include invisibility, just as music already enjoys inaudibility (silence)” (116)? Sound when thus pitched against the limits of the image becomes about the “listening models,” as Benjamin called them, although he was not, alas, thinking in the disciplinary terms I prefer.
To anticipate the concerns that may have arisen with regard to whether Heidegger’s discussion of the call has anything to do with radio, it should be emphasized that between the earlier discussion of de-severing the world and the later discussion of the alien voice stands the problem of the near. It is in fact not difficult to discern here a relation, perhaps even a necessary relation, between the closeness that speeds toward us through the radio and the urgency with which Heidegger contrasts “the call” to the idle chatter of the “they,” the medium through which world events are reported. Crucial is not that the call is remote while the report is ever nearer, but that the call is uncanny: it is, as he puts it early in the discussion of conscience, “from afar unto afar.” Or, put differently, precisely to the extent that the radio hastens our perdition among the “they,” it isolates, frames, that which the call meaningfully but silently calls to. Radio in this sense belongs not only to the ontological structure of conscience but to the very theoretical practice of fundamental ontology, that is, to Heidegger’s phenomenology. Because this, as I have argued, forms a land line between Adorno’s and Heidegger’s approach to radio that is, as it were, off the radar (officially Adorno held Heidegger, his jargon if not his person, in contempt), perhaps the alien voice that is coming ever nearer and distancing us ever further from our world is not a voice at all but the sound of philosophy, or, for that matter, musicology, seeking to catch up with or otherwise attune to the it, das Es, that whistles between them. This may, in the end, be the most important feature of the “illusion of closeness,” of nearness, or, as Heidegger puts it in “Age of the World Picture,” of “Americanism,” in that it calls upon us to hear differently the hum, the rumble, the flutter that foils the suppression of all echoes, a sound that in falling below the voice cannot be either picked up by our models of listening or taught a better tune.
Can we not say, then, that radio spooks philosophy, that radio, not film, not television, is historically the medium that obliges the field to confront the question of where both its questions and its answers come from? Recall, if you will, that each of us is a radio receiver, that our bodies are fully shot through with radio waves, and that, as Neil Strauss reminded us now almost twenty years ago, all we have to do is clench a simple device in our teeth to begin broadcasting (192).
This is a sound that has, in the end, neither come back nor returned. To treat it as such, in the manner of Dolar and Agamben, is to attempt to avoid or at best contain radio—in effect, to redeem the field of philosophy from the sound that haunts its voice. Instead, radio might better be thought to operate as the residual, as Williams taught us to say, the residual in the mode of the archaic that progress produces to have a temporal atmosphere in and against which to fire its retro-rockets. Perhaps this is why, when the alien voice does show up, as it was thought to have done on Halloween in 1938, it is always already defeated by a lingering “before” that progress cannot leave behind. Welles, as has been argued, wanted to grasp this in vestigial, that is, Darwinian terms, and if we are not all to succumb to the wave of evolutionary biology now sweeping and reorienting the field of interdisciplinary studies, we will have to come up with terms of our own—even if, or perhaps especially if, they are difficult to hear. One such term, word, name, may well be radio itself.
CHAPTER 2
On the Air
Simon Winchester, in his witty, informative, and hopelessly balanced history of the Oxford English Dictionary, archly draws attention to a detail so obvious that it might otherwise escape notice. It appears in a footnote to chapter 4, where, in commenting on the Herculean labors of Frederick Furnivall (an early editor), he points out that at a certain moment one can detect, and detect with certainty, a change in the daily paper read by Furnivall. How? All of a sudden his quotations establishing current usage of word entries shift from the Daily News to the Daily Chronicle. This anecdote, coupled with the many pages Winchester devotes to documenting the precarious history of the quotation slips gathered by the OED’s volunteer readers, casts an immediate shadow on the reliability of the dating that appears in every entry of the dictionary. Is this truly the first recorded use of a certain word, or is it the one to have survived, the one to have ended up in the right pigeonhole, as the boxes in the dictionary’s filing mechanism were called? Or is a dictionary, maybe even “the” dictionary (in the Anglophone world), structured like a language, defined, as Roman Jakobson might have put it, by the twin axes of selection and combination, where both activities, at best, cut through an unwieldy, even impossible dispersion? With such precautions taken, note that the first appearance of air used as it is used in the title of this chapter, as part of the phrase “on the air,” occurs in 1927, the year when, among other things, Heidegger’s Being and Time first appeared. According to the anonymous volunteer reader, the phrase is to be found in the British newspaper the Observer. The quotation reads: “The only New York church that is ‘on the air.’” The sense that this quotation bears witness to is one in which air is, in effect (the point, yes, of the scare quotes?), a synonym for radio, drawing attention to how in 1927 a certain metonymic perplexity characterized thought about the radiophonic medium. Was the medium of transmission part of the device, or was the device part of the medium of transmission? Put differently, where is/was the radio, and where is one when one is “on” it? Moreover, given the essayistic use of on (for example, “On Friendship”), do not these perplexities redouble when we ask where or what an essay is when it is “on” the radio, especially when—and this will be one of the core concerns in this chapter—essays, or other philosophical texts, are delivered over the radio? Is one here not faced with the anxious prepositional spiral of the on on the on? Indeed, but with what consequence?
To pursue this I concentrate here on two engagements with radio: those of Jean-Paul Sartre and Walter Benjamin. As Benjamin’s radio work was deeply entangled with his friendship with Bertolt Brecht, the latter’s writings will also be taken up. My concern will be to track how each figure thinks the relation between radio and philosophy (or perhaps thought more generally) in terms of the politics of using radio as a means by which to disseminate ideas—in effect, as a teaching machine. Two complications are stressed. First, these figures struggle instructively with the fact that philosophy is not simply radiophonic content. Instead, in ways that invite us to think twice about radio itself, Sartre and Benjamin (and Brecht for that matter) all urge us to recognize that radio is intimately caught up in the enunciation of philosophical self-reflection. Second, and this follows from the preceding, the political use of radio does not come to the medium from the outside. It is not a matter of discovering the tendency that finds expression in a given appropriation of the medium; rather, of interest here is the way the radiophonic enunciation of philosophy raises urgent questions about the very nature of the political as articulated in the cultural sphere. Not surprisingly, given the figures in play, the question of politics bears decisively on the status of Marxism, and in particular on the status of Marxism as the sublation of Western philosophy. I turn first, then, to Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, for which the fiftieth-year anniversary of publication has just been celebrated.
Although not separated out in the French text (as it is in the Sheridan translation), the discussion of the radio broadcast marks an important development in the section of the Critique devoted to the concept of “collectivities.” As such, it represents a comparatively rare engagement with what Adorno and Horkheimer had called the “culture industry” in the context of Sartre’s Herculean struggle to reconcile the account of the subject to be found in existentialism
