Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi (review)

As WiFi becomes ubiquitous in western life, it is perhaps inevitable that it should find its theorist. In a transatlantic gesture, Timothy Campbell champions the "wireless" over radio as a paradigm. Where radio has associations of the dissemination of voice, wirelessness signals a wider field, from wireless telegraphy and radio to the mobile phone and WiFi; it also allows a theorization of media in which the processing and storage data, feedback and the like are the main focus. He seeks to decouple discussions of Pound's wartime radio broadcasts, for example, from any stress on "a certain logocentric notion of the subject" attached to voice. Instead, it is "the dictation and the registration of data flows" that is his focus (135). Marinetti's "imagination without strings" becomes "wireless words"; his parola in libertà a transcription of sensory quanta and their rendition as a data stream; a dictation that both escapes the constricted syntax of existing languages, expanding their flow of information, and exceeds the human capacity to grasp what is conveyed as a totality (88). This last fact is central to the tread of argument about the relation of radio to Fascism: whether in D'Annunzio's abortive episode as the defender of Fiume (with Marconi as his instrument), broadcasting an "apocalyptic marconigram" to the populace, or in Pound's wartime radio broadcasts, Fascism imagines a passive recipient who is overcome and energized by its message.

Campbell's study is anchored in the media theory of Arnheim, McLuhan, Kittler, Derrida, and others, on the one hand, and on a careful investigation of the history of Marconi's development of radio on the other. His history is, in general, precise and related in consistently interesting ways to the texts he examines. Two notions are central to his linkage of technology and culture: FM (frequency modulation) and "spacing": the latter allows him to talk about Pound's typing or Marinetti's mathematical syntax; the former relates to modernist notions of disjunction and displacement.

Pound, with two chapters devoted to his writing and broadcasting, is at the center of the argument. The fulcrum point for Pound's radiophonic method is, Campbell suggests, a relatively early canto, Canto 18, where the voices are identified as "recorded in pieces by a media system," the pieces standardized in contrast to the looser collages of the earlier cantos (119). This is the account of how Pound produces a "dispersion of voices," which is—and this is typical of his procedure—both extremely suggestive and loose. I quote at length to give a sense of Campbell's prose:

The wireless accomplishes this [dispersion] by heterodyning the signal—Pound does so by increasing the switching operations to such a degree that, in the frequency displacement represented by fragments and bits of broken conversation, what follows in omitted words and the white of the printed page is never just the trailing voice of Mr. Ogie or Mr. Giddings but the difference between them and among all the voices registered in the canto. Typographical space becomes the background on which the unheard is heterodyned into the next line, a tone imprinted on both punctuation and space. The canto consumes its media sources by transforming books, voice transmissions, and overheard banter into a stream of data that moves through the supply of signifiers a typewriter provides. The resulting series of letters and spaces represent the maximized dispatch possibilities of the wireless interface.

(120–21)

One has to accept, for the argument's sake, that Pound's layering of voices is "like" (though it is not offered as analogy) the function of heterodyning in FM radio. But heterodyning is a technical term for the way frequencies are handled by radios, and to say that "the unheard is heterodyned into the next line" is a fairly cryptic way of describing a variety of textual processes. Analogies such as this are a pervasive presence in Wireless Writing: the poet "routes" messages from the Real...