Introduction to “Comparative Radios”

In Current of Music, a collection of his writings on radio written in English while in American exile, Theodore W. Adorno writes:

The author knows of the following fact from his own German experience. In Kronberg, a country place not far from Frankfurt am Main where he often stayed with friends, he had the opportunity of listening to a nightingale which sang very beautifully in the garden. This nightingale was discovered by the Frankfurt Radio Station, and the author and his friends managed to listen to it over the radio when the windows were open. The result was that we were able to hear the radio nightingale a bit earlier than we could hear the real voice because sound takes longer to reach the ear ordinarily through space than by electrical waves. … Thus the “radio voice” creates a strong feeling of immediate presence. It may make the radio event appear even more present than the live event. This feeling of presence necessarily means a feeling of immediacy, too. When we face a radio phenomenon we are actually “present” in that our own presence in time is no different from that of witnesses to the broadcast event. Because of this immediacy, this experience of being present in time, radio always tends to make us forget that it gives us in other respects a mediated phenomenon.

(74)

Neither the bald reference to fact nor the wobbly science should deceive us: this is almost certainly a fable. Adorno, testing, one might imagine, his unwitting American readers, rewrites one of Immanuel Kant’s fables about the beautiful:¹

What do poets praise more highly than the nightingale’s enchantingly beautiful song in a secluded thicket on a quiet summer evening by the soft light of the moon? And yet we have cases where some jovial innkeeper, unable to find such a songster, played a trick—received with greatest satisfaction [initially]—on the guests staying at his inn to enjoy the country air, by hiding in a bush some roguish youngster who (with a reed or rush in his mouth) knew how to copy the song in a way very similar to nature’s. But as soon as one realizes that it was all deception, no one will long endure listening to this song that before he has considered so charming.

(169)

The visit to the country, the nightingale, the ersatz nightingale, a form of mediation involving tubes: the central elements of the story from the Critique of Judgment return in Adorno’s roguish imitation of Kant for the age of radio. Adorno’s revision also points to a problem implicit in Kant’s story. “By introducing the possibility of a false or feigned note,” writes Lynn Festa, “Kant’s mock bird catapults the delighted listener into a disenchanted world in which each object must be measured against its potential imitation” (84). In Kant’s tale, the “jovial innkeeper” colludes with the “roguish youngster” to undermine the authority of the beautiful in its tie to nature; in Adorno, the radio team, having somehow “discovered” the nightingale and set up its equipment to record its song, produces a presence that is in some way “even more present” than “the live event.”

Adorno tells the story in similar terms a second time in the essay “The Radio Voice,” but draws more sweeping conclusions (in language more recognizably Adorno’s):

The real nightingale sounded like her own echo. Such an extreme case reveals a bit of what may well be at the bottom of ordinary radio experience owing to the fact the experienced immediacy is no genuine immediacy: at the same time one knows that this immediacy is a consequence of mechanization and reification and that it may tilt into something disavowing the kind of presence that it promulgates. The presence is the presence of phantasmagoria.

(377–78)

The “extreme case” of the nightingale reveals that “experienced immediacy is no genuine immediacy”: just as the imitation of the nightingale in Kant, however perfect, produces a simulacrum that no one will find “charming” once the deception has been revealed, so the recorded nightingale produces an...