elucidation, the study of radio has long directed its interdisciplinary beacon toward these depths and perhaps nowhere more plainly than in the enigmatic line from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment that invites us to conceive “the radio as a sublimated printing press” (2). Written in 1944 and republished (reiterated?) in 1947, presumably on the eve of radio’s eclipse by television, the authors invoke Freud’s account of sublimation to think the technical and historical relation between the medium of print and the medium of wireless communication. But in what sense do they mean what this odd formulation says?
Although two other invocations of “sublimation” occur in the chapter from which this sentence derives, it isn’t until the third chapter—their well-known cancellation of the “culture industry”—that the printing press and the radio are again paired in a way that allows one to attune to the role of sublimation in their argument. Elaborating on the proposition that radio has become the nation’s “mouthpiece,” they write: “In fascism radio becomes the universal mouthpiece of the Führer; in the loudspeakers on the street his voice merges with the howl of sirens proclaiming panic, from which modern propaganda is hard to distinguish in any case. The National Socialists knew that broadcasting gave their cause stature as the printing press did to the Reformation. The Führer’s metaphysical charisma, invented by the sociology of religion, turned out finally to be merely the omnipresence of his radio addresses, which demonically parodies the divine spirit” (Dialectic 129). True, the word sublimation does not reappear here. However, if it makes sense to say that radio is a sublimated printing press, then this passage tells us that this is because the Reformation returns, as it were, in National Socialism, specifically, might we not add, in the form of the radial network whereby isolated individuals converge in their identification with the word, not as they come to it (say in Mass), but as it comes to them (say in the printed vernacular Bible). But then shouldn’t it be the other way around? Isn’t the printing press/Reformation a sublimated radio/National Socialism? Only if we insist upon misunderstanding sublimation as what recasts an asocial act or belief in a socially acceptable form. Key here is not just that the radio comes after the printing press but that for Freud—as Adorno and Horkheimer well knew—sublimation was organized by the same psycho-logic of repression and, as such, exhibited the same structure as the return of the repressed, whereby unspecified and undelimited psychic energy assumed meaning (as the “asocial”) for the first time, as it were, in print. Not to put too fine a point on it: these exilic Jews were keen to suggest that Luther’s passion had returned in the meaning of National Socialism. Radio, as a secular apparatus, became the socially acceptable form of an evangelism whose more vicious sectarian inflections might otherwise have been, as Marshall McLuhan would later insist, too “hot” to handle (although—I hasten to add—not for nothing do right-wing demagogues—Father Coughlin, George Allison Phelps, and Martin Luther Thomas—figure prominently in several of the early studies of radio).
Two relevant points follow. First, as has been implied, the appeal to psychoanalysis within radio studies is neither new nor original. It is worth mentioning here that the first sustained scholarly study of radio, by Cantril and Allport, was titled The Psychology of Radio (1935), and that, even more tellingly, when Paul Lazarsfeld initiated the Princeton Radio Research Project two years later, he assembled a team of psychoanalysts, including Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan, to advise him on the preparation of his audience response questionnaires. Additionally, there appears to be a decisive reiteration, mediated through the concept of sublimation, of the sociohistorical character of the radiophonic apparatus in the very rhetorical preoccupations (“obsession,” “repression” “sublimation”) of radio studies. This suggests, does it not, that emergence takes place in the feedback loop in which disciplines scan the networks of communication from which and to which they contribute material, while projecting into the world networked by communication just those signals their analytical tools are designed to pick up. To put the matter simply, if reductively, that radio has returned is perhaps no less true of radio than it is of radio studies. Reduction notwithstanding, putting the matter this way helps us tune in the object, now strictly in the sense of “the aim,” of radio studies. What does it want to know, how does it want to know it, and why must a return structure its way of knowing?
As we have seen, the necessity of radio studies’ emergence has consistently been premised on two claims: one, that radio was eclipsed by television, and two, that scholarship that was just starting to pay serious attention to radio initially shifted its focus to television and then zoomed in on film. Put differently, in the era of television and film, radio became residual in Williams’s sense of the term. However, in light of the complex interplay of radio and its study to be discerned in radio studies, it is surprising indeed that the persistent and often fraught attention paid to radio within many, if not all, of the major currents of philosophy and critical theory in the twentieth century has not been picked up by radio studies partisans. This is an omission worth countering, both for what it helps us to understand about the aims of radio studies and for what it can tell us about the sociocultural history of critical theory in the West.
In proceeding along this line, my thinking has been sparked by two rather different projects. In “Observations on Public Reception,” the German critical theorist and cultural historian Friedrich Kittler argues that media reception participates in what for some time now he has been calling discourse networks (Aufschreibesysteme). More particularly, through a close, though brief, consideration of Martin Heidegger’s early work Kittler shows that the former’s reception of German radio played a formative role in the articulation of his philosophical project, manifesting itself initially in a preoccupation with the tendency of Dasein to encounter Being in the experience of nearness, and later in Heidegger’s recasting of nearness, especially accelerating nearness, as giganticism. In effect, radio was the name for a mode of revealing that in sparking across the gap between beings and Being gave Heidegger a fix on the worldliness of Dasein. While dissatisfied with Kittler’s angle (he often seems a bit too taken with the machine in the ghost), I find both the seriousness of attention paid to theoretical discourse and his refusal to separate even its most arcane preoccupations from the social process to be at once provocative and enormously useful.
A second spark has been the work of the French political theorist Jacques Rancière, especially his text The Philosopher and His Poor. In ways that resemble Sarah Kofman’s and Michelle Le Doeuf’s studies of the figures employed by philosophers, Ranciere’s study traces how the figure of poverty, and specifically the figure of those condemned to their one and only task in life, animates the indispensable register of examples in philosophical texts, arguing that philosophy has an essential and therefore ethically compromising dependence on the fact of poverty and its figural representative. While my own project is less concerned for the status of philosophical discourse as such, I do feel that if the radiophonic apparatus is co-produced by radio studies then it will be vital to consider how radio is figured in the theoretical traditions whose messages have not been picked up by radio studies.
Seen from high ground, the figure of radio assumes the contours of a problem, not simply the familiar problem designated by Adorno and others under the rubric of infantilization (the “dumbing down” of listeners), but a problem given critical detail by what Pierre Schaeffer (92) has called the “acousmatic” character of radio sound. Schaeffer derives this term from the Greek philosopher, mathematician, and cult leader Pythagoras, who deployed it in two related ways: first, as a name for that group of his followers, the akousmatikoi, who sat outside the inner circle composed of the mathematikoi and who, as a result, listened to Pythagoras lecture from behind a curtain; and second, as the name for the enigmatic sayings, the akousmata, shared with the akousmatikoi, sayings offered up as mnemonic devices that supplemented the necessarily garbled messages transmitted from behind the curtain. Key here are three things: one, the notion of a voice transmitted and received in such a way that its source is absent from the visual field; two, the reciprocal invisibility of the voice’s audience to the voice’s source; and three, the notion of its message being propagated despite, or even on the condition of, its lack of full intelligibility—all aspects of what is here referred to as bad reception, a formulation
