Cannibal Joyce

8. The Cultural Transfer of Film, Radio, and Television

8 The Cultural Transfer of Film, Radio, and Television In my beginning is my end. —T. S. Eliot, “East Coker” a long the [. . .] riverrun —FW 628.15–16, 03.01 The advent of commercial radio broadcasting in the 1920s initiated a fundamental change in the consumers’ relation to communication technology, a change that effectively reduced the users’ autonomy in the communicative relationship, thus heightening the phenomenon of passive consumption in contemporary culture. Eliot’s typist may behave like a machine, placing the record on her gramophone with an “automatic hand” (l. 255; Complete Poems 44), yet both her action and whatever music she plays remain matters of her choice, susceptible to social and cultural influences, but not necessarily or entirely determined by these. With the arrival of radio, however, individual agency suffers a shrinkage, and the active listener becomes a passive audience , disengaged from and incapable of interacting with the speaker(s) or performer(s), with little choice remaining but to turn the receiver on or off. These listeners become subjects, with consequent reduction of their subjectivity . This clearly is why the radio rapidly developed into the 1930s as the preferred medium for political propaganda, whether as perfected by Goebbels and Hitler in Nazi Germany or more subtly via Roosevelt’s “Fireside Chats” that, at least, preserved the semblance of a conversational relationship. It follows that the ultimate dream of the authoritarian leader—witness Orwell’s 1984 (1949)—is the radio that must be heard, the omnipresent loudspeaker that cannot be turned off. Of course, the older communication technology of the telephone, well established at the time of broadcast radio’s arrival, had preserved the users’ au- 128 / Cannibalizing Material Culture tonomy in the exchange of information, the conversation, between its users. In the 1920s, no one knew whether the developing technology of television would find its primary application by following the example of radio, with broadcast television, or that of the telephone, with the video-phone. (Despite its potential value for a totalitarian regime, I can find no evidence that any researcher seriously proposed the two-way telescreen of Orwell’s1984, a sinister extrapolation from the video-telephone.) And although today the technology for video-conferencing or one-to-one video telecommunication via the internet is generally available and inexpensive, it is unlikely ever to supplant the “blind” telephone. In the words of one recent commentator, the “Picturephone remains one of technology’s most prominent examples of an elaborate solution in search of a problem” because, in fact, “[m]ost people simply don’t want to see or be seen by the person they’re talking to” in telephone conversations (Schwarz 56). Nonetheless, although these same people will jealously guard their sense of privacy when engaged in a direct communication via the telephone, it seems they have no reservations about sacrificing their personal autonomy and allowing their subjectivity and critical intelligence to be controlled by an entertainment medium—secure in their anonymity as a passive audience—as evidenced by the enormous popularity of broadcast radio and, eventually, television. The arrival of the radio not only intensified the tendency of the audience to willingly suspend its critical subjectivity but also increased the alarm of cultural commentators through the 1920s at what they perceived, in Wyndham Lewis’s terms, as a kind of hypnotic passivity in the general public. In a book that broadly surveys the state of modern subjection, The Art of Being Ruled (1926), which Joyce transposes into “the art of being rude” (FW 167.03), Lewis attributes this “hypnotism” not just to radio, but to three primary information sources drawing mass audiences: the “cinema, wireless, and press” (164–65). As we shall see in the following pages, Lewis was not alone in including the film in his indictment, although as a form of communication the motion pictures represent a different case from the radio for, because film is a storage medium, it lacks the impact of presence found in radio and television. This is not the place to consider Lewis’s reasons—chiefly political—for attacking the press for its cooptation of the readers’ subjectivity, but rather the place to emphasize that his charges testify to a broader concern during this era for the public’s passive consumption of the printed word, as well as The Cultural Transfer of Film, Radio, and Television / 129 of aural and visual information, that he shares with James Joyce. (Both...