the hall of mirrors of Monaghan’s sentence, whereby an utterance that is itself a scholarly citation (note its bibliographic form) adds its own gesture of citation to the counter clicking away under Hilmes’s most-cited text and, in doing so, solicits, as it were, my own hit. Monaghan obviously means to tell us something about the way Hilmes’s work exemplifies the new scholarship, but in saying so he does more, he also co-produces something like the factual density of this scholarship and its centrality. Moreover, he does so conspicuously, if not exactly wittingly.
To what effect and with what significance? Especially important here is the general theme of citation and what the late Jacques Derrida has called the logic of iterability. By stressing the said but unmeant performative character of Monaghan’s text, I am trying to draw attention to how the discourse, in this case that of academic journalism, collaborates in the production of the significance of what it reports upon. This, in a nutshell (a term Derrida himself once risked), is what the logic of iterability tries to capture: the way authority actually derives from citation and may, in a certain sense, be nothing without it.
To further justify this invocation of the logic of iterability, I turn briefly to the second Chronicle story on radio studies. Written five years later by a well-regarded scholar, Thomas Doherty (from Brandeis), it contains the resonant subtitle “Radio Studies Rise Again,” drawing attention, I should think, less to the absurdly precipitous rise, fall, and return of radio studies (what happened to the fast-growing, to the spate, to the new?) than to the Chronicle’s own prior story about the rise of radio studies. As if acknowledging its iterative responsibilities, the article opens with a citation of a citation (the narrator in Woody Allen’s Radio Days) and proceeds, I suppose inexorably, to the site of the most-cited, Radio Voices, characterized by Doherty, not as part of a mere spate, but as the start of a veritable “wave,” thereby intensifying an intensifier but also more deftly wiring the rhetorical register of his own discussion so as to solder its form and content. Although Doherty’s characterization of the aims of radio studies (this time called by name) is important—he says that its identifying “call signals” are close Analysis of programs, due consideration of listener Response, and reliance on “postmodern Theory” (or WART?)—more important by far is the reiteration, or repetition, of coverage itself. The whole exercise has something of the feel of the bandleader’s exasperated call, “Once more, with feeling.” And were it simply that, it would deserve no further attention from us, but what remains crucial is the evidence it provides for the role that the discourse of professional reviewing, and its iterative logic, plays in the “emergence” of new academic fields.
Lest I be misunderstood, the logic of iterability is not, in any sense, unique to the discourse of professional reviewing and reporting. It is not, therefore, a sign of something like degradation, and I am not interested in casting suspicion on the Chronicle’s motives or in denigrating the talent of its contributors. In fact, iterability can be shown to belong to the very object of radio studies once we recognize that device and aim cite one another through the coverage that takes them as its object. This difficult though important point can be further clarified by a brief look at some of the scholarship heralding the birth of radio studies.
Between the two stories in the Chronicle appeared no doubt the decisive avatar of any and all new fields, a reader. Perhaps predictably, Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural History of Radio was edited by none other than Michelle Hilmes and, it turns out, a Minnesota alum, Jason Loviglio. The oblique filial connection is trivial (Loviglio has gone on to have his own distinguished career) compared to the role played by Hilmes in this project, and for this reason it is worth thinking carefully, if only in passing, about what she says in the introduction to the volume.
Readers are largely pedagogical devices. With the prosecutions of copying centers for copyright infringement, the heightened emphasis put on publication in matters of academic promotion, and the ubiquity of interdisciplinary initiatives in virtually all fields of academic endeavor, the task of providing postsecondary teachers with a bound selection of “key essays” in any given field has assumed new urgency. This is as true of emergent fields as it is of established ones, where the emphasis falls on something like “canonical statements,” such as, in cinema studies, Laura Mulvey’s oft-reprinted “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Invariably, readers sport introductions in which their editors make, as it were, a first pass over the anthologized material. For Hilmes, the first pass is complicated by her need to introduce both the volume and the field, a task that has the advantage of allowing her to go on at length. Strategically, she proceeds by pointing to the very developmental arc emphasized by Doherty. After a somewhat scrappy beginning, radio came to national prominence during the 1920s and 1930s. Then, just as radio was beginning to attract serious scholarly attention (one thinks here of the Princeton Radio Research Project, about which more later), it was eclipsed by the advent of television and the virtually immediate scholarly interest in the medium, especially on the part of those concerned about its role in inciting violence and inducing rampant imbecility. Then radio, Phoenix-like, returned both as a cultural technology (especially, of course, with the advent of talk, or, as some prefer, hate radio) and as an object of scholarly scrutiny—witness the advent of radio studies itself.6 For the readers of the reader, two points are thus emphatically underscored. First, radio matters because its importance was prematurely usurped by another medium, television—an implicit appeal to something like the fairness of broadcasting. And second, radio matters because we now know better than to ignore it: an only slightly less implicit appeal to a notion of intellectual or, even more particularly, theoretical progress. If I emphasize this, it is with an ear toward amplifying how, in effect, Doherty repeats a repetition in Hilmes, as if to associate with radio itself its reiterative, or, if one prefers, wavy character. In other, albeit somewhat cryptic words, radio must always have mattered twice in order to matter once.
Turning from what amounts to first contact with the hardwired residualism of radio and its study, I now set my dial on the rhetoric of her introduction and cite the most-cited author in radio studies when she subtitles the penultimate section of her introduction “The Return of the Radio Repressed” (8). This blatant citation of Freud clarifies several things, even if unwittingly. First, as Doherty suggested, radio studies partisans do indeed care about the currents of critical theory that have convulsed the humanities and social sciences over the last forty-five years (notably psychoanalysis); second, the iterative logic at work within the object of radio studies is one thought to be illuminated by free association with Freud’s account of the psychic economy of repression; and third, when read in the mode of a bold headline, the return of radio is itself repressed (“the return of the radio repressed”). While apparently the most counterintuitive, this last simply bespeaks the fact that iterability is so deeply inscribed in both radio and its study that even its return will have to take place twice in order to happen at all.
This aside, and I realize it is an important, even controversial claim, what is perhaps most telling about Hilmes’s rhetoric is the way it invites us to recognize the residual in her invocation of Freud. My point here is not that radio studies is actually residual rather than emergent but that fundamental to its emergence is the way its partisans deploy the concept of the residual, applying it at once to radio and, through the history of the device, to its study. More particularly, let me propose that when invoking the “return of the repressed,” Hilmes appears to emphasize more the “archaic” and less the “vestigial” aspect of radio’s residual character. How so? Contrary to received opinion, Jean-Paul Sartre was not right when he accused Freud of incoherence in insisting that a mental content could both be repressed and unconscious. The repressed returns not because it finally overpowers the bouncer assigned to it by the ego but because the mute affective charge of a previously lived event takes place for the first time as a mental content when, through the work of analysis, it is made to mean. If radio can return as the repressed, according to Hilmes, it is because the event of its advent and perhaps even more of its decline has acquired meaning, for the first time, with its return, its reiteration, in radio studies.
At the risk of revealing that I, like anyone working in words, have stacked the
