appear to have a distinctly vestigial relation to the former. Cultural studies is residual in the sense of belonging to the gestation or maturation of radio studies. But precisely because radio studies risks overlooking the founding role of radio study in the institutional emergence of cultural studies (see “Birmingham Calling”), it is hard to settle for this construal of residualism in the relation between cultural studies and radio studies. It is better, I think, to reflect more specifically about the trace of cultural studies, a trace that manifests itself most clearly in Monaghan and Doherty (not to mention Hilmes herself) when they describe the principles or theoretical convictions deemed characteristic of radio studies. Monaghan got at this by invoking the two poles, the tension between radio as medium of social control and radio as medium of social contestation. For his part, Doherty framed the matter in terms of “call signals” (WART), that is, the commitment on the part of radio studies partisans to close analysis, audience response, and critical theory. In both of these cases, distinctive methodological and even political preoccupations of cultural studies are very much in the foreground—with a telling exception.
In consulting virtually any portion of the mushrooming literature on cultural studies, one notes persistent concern with the vexed status of theory. In some cases, one finds cultural studies explicitly identified with the institutional initiative that became possible in the wake of theory, dated in the humanities with the so-called de Man scandal. The vexed status of theory has prompted certain writers, such as the late Bill Readings and more recently Gayatri Spivak, to distance themselves emphatically from cultural studies, Readings arguing that it is political only to the extent that it has no impact on politics, and Spivak arguing that it is monolingual, presentist, and identitarian. Thus, given that radio studies is apparently committed to theory (the T in WART), it would appear that it is reiterating the self-reflection of cultural studies, but with a difference, and, as we have seen, with a difference that legitimates, indeed justifies, if not necessitates, the very emergence of the field. Presumably, this difference is that radio studies has a less vexed, more affirmative relation to theory, even as one might properly insist that it is monolingual if not precisely presentist. Miller’s Emergency Broadcasting and 1930s American Radio is an excellent case in point.
This more archaic inflection of the residualism of cultural studies, where it is posited as deficient in what must then be supplemented by radio studies, might be compelling were it not for the fact that, as this study will seek to show, precisely the absence of attention to how radio figured in the philosophical and theoretical projects—phenomenology, existentialism, Hegelian Marxism, anticolonialism, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies itself—that span and largely define the preceding century allows Hilmes and others to argue, now from a different angle, that of scholarly neglect, for the necessity of radio studies. It would appear either that the notion that radio studies is theory friendly is at best overstated or, and this is much more interesting, that theory means something rather particular to the partisans of radio studies. One is prompted in this direction by the “call signals” delineated by Doherty, who clearly distinguishes theory from the close reading of specific broadcasts, as though theory were something that guided reading instead of belonging to the very difficulties that arise in the practice of reading, as though poststructuralism did not contain—in the vexing figure of Paul de Man—this very insight. The undisclosed location from which the guidance system of theory emanates would appear to resemble strongly the sort of transcendental position, the zone of methodological abstraction, that deprives theory of just the sort of history that seems to have fallen out of range of radio studies. Is this necessary?
It may, then, be worth suggesting that one of the aims of radio studies is a paradoxical, but therefore telling, repudiation of the very theory its partisans otherwise regard as having been wrongly abandoned by cultural studies. As such, the emergence of radio studies, despite its abiding and undeniably novel commitment to a form of critical inter-disciplinarity not typically found in the institutional practices of mass communications studies, partakes more in what Williams urged us to call an alternative as opposed to an oppositional state of emergency. In setting aside the politics of its own relation to theory, radio studies risks its progressive political ambitions. I’d like to think that this is not necessary, but one cannot help but be struck by the canonical status, in virtually all treatments of radio—from Adorno and Cantril to Ed Miller and Wolfgang Hagen—of the Mercury Theater broadcast of Welles’s War of the Worlds, a story that allegorizes the arrival of the radically and menacingly new as being overturned by the epidemiological comeback of the vestigial, that is, the germ.
But then this is not really the point. The point is not to nail down certain philosophical or political keywords but rather to recognize in the nuances they invite us to make—how does the earlier remain active in the later?—a problem for reading as much as for theorizing, a problem whose perplexing involvement with the apparatus of radio is trying to tell us something. But what?
In keeping with my emphasis on the conceptual problems stirred by nuance, I have essayed here to engage them at the level of expository gesture, what might also be called “midlife” (as opposed to “late”) style. The reader will have noted recourse to the rhetoric of radio, to tuning dials and the like. But there is an enunciative dimension in play that might otherwise escape notice. It includes the expository shifts, the switches of rhetorical register, fields of discourse, presumed audience, and the like. This is deliberate, if not precisely calculated, and for some it will read as interference. My aim is to submit my writing practice to the demands of what I began by calling the object of radio study. At one level, this gives frank and rather direct expression to the difficulty of tuning in, of giving sharp focus to the vexed encounter between radio and its study. In effect, my own reception of what is going on in this zone of indistinction is, if not bad, certainly compromised. By the same token, it seems both attractive and imperative to write from within this vexed encounter, neither to pretend to approach it from outside nor to abandon oneself entirely to its inside, an approach that carries its own risks of distraction, but to convey the feedback, the whistle that results when a signal loops and amplifies too quickly—put differently, to practice a mode of immanent critique that takes the form of content seriously. The chapters that follow exhibit this commitment through the logic of what might be called “indirection.” They get under way in odd places, they loop, they fade, but in all cases they stress that studying the study of radio repeats something with a difference. They urge that all the remarkable things we have come to learn about stations, broadcasts, markets, personalities, and patents are not enough. Radio calls out for more. This text, then, is a response trimmed to the shape of the letter(s) of that call.
CHAPTER 1
Facing the Radio
A distinction useful for my purposes is drawn in scene 11 of Wilder and Brackett’s Sunset Blvd. In it Norma Desmond, played by Gloria Swanson, and Joe Gillis, played by William Holden, are discussing her script, Salomé. The dialogue is as follows:
Norma: I’ve written it myself. It’s taken me years. It’s going to be a very important picture.
Joe: It looks like enough for six important pictures.
Norma: It’s the story of Salomé. I think I’ll have de Mille direct it.
Joe: De Mille!? Uh-huh.
Norma: We made a lot of pictures together.
Joe: And you’ll play Salomé?
Norma: Who else?
Joe: I’m only asking. I didn’t know you were planning a comeback.
Norma: I hate that word! It’s return! A return to all those who have never forgiven me for deserting the screen.
Joe: Fair enough.
Comeback
