Radio Silence; or, On the Fritz

For reasons that will become clearer in the course of these remarks, it is fitting to begin by citing the two epigraphs that stand at the head of the text that inspired them.¹ They read:

We still do not have the kind of analysis of the brief moment of radio that people have so passionately undertaken for the cinema on the one hand, and television on the other; but Brecht’s modernism—and the very modernism of his moment of history in general—is bound up with radio, and demands the acknowledgment of radio’s formal uniqueness as a medium, of its fundamental properties as a specific art in its own right, a form in which the antithesis of words and music no longer holds, but a new symbiosis of these two formerly separate dimensions is effectuated and rehearsed.

(Fredric Jameson, Brecht and Method)

Thus, it is necessary to revise the notion of presence. The philosophers would say that a being is present when it can speak to me, show itself to me, act upon me and be acted upon in turn. Armed with this solid common sense one can still send to insane asylums those who invoke occult presences, visionaries, obsessives. But radio confuses the philosophers. How am I not present for the speaker at the microphone while he is present for me? Does presence break itself up? This is a very serious psychological problem that Pierre Janet has posed in analyzing the difficulties of interior thought.

(René Sudre, Le Huitième art: Mission de la radio)

While Sudre’s statement might well be taken as an explanation for the analytical deficiency identified by Jameson, it also urges one to think in a more sustained way about the confounding of philosophers when confronted with radio. To get at this both conceptually and performatively I will set out in an oblique lexicographical direction.

In Simon Winchester’s witty, informative, and hopelessly balanced history of the Oxford English Dictionary he archly draws attention to a detail so obvious that it might otherwise escape notice. It appears in a footnote to chapter 4 where, in commenting on the Herculean labors of Frederick Furnivall (an early editor), he points out that at a certain moment one can detect, and detect with certainty, a change in the daily paper read by Furnivall. How? All of a sudden his quotations establishing current usage of word entries shift from the Daily News to the Daily Chronicle. This anecdote, coupled with the many pages Winchester devotes to documenting the precarious history of the quotation slips gathered by the OED’s volunteer readers, casts immediate doubt on the reliability of the dating sequence that appears in every entry of the dictionary. One feels prompted to wonder: Is this truly the first recorded use of a certain word, or is it the one to have survived, the one to have ended up in the right pigeon hole—as the boxes in the dictionary’s filing mechanism were called? Or, is a dictionary, maybe even “the” dictionary (in the Anglophone world), structured like a language—that is, as Roman Jakobson might have put it, defined by the twin axes of selection and combination where both activities, at best, cut through an unwieldy, even impossible dispersion? With such precautions taken, note that the first appearance of “air” used as part of the phrase, “on the air,” occurs in 1927, the year when, among other things, Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (itself a prescient, if perfunctory, mediation on wireless broadcasting) was published. According to the anonymous volunteer reader, the phrase is to be found in the British newspaper the Observer, and the quotation reads: “The only New York church that is ‘on the air.’” The sense that this quotation bears witness to is one in which air is, in effect, a metonym for the radio, drawing attention to how in 1927 a certain perplexity characterized thought about the radiophonic medium. Was the medium of transmission part of the device, or was the device part of the medium of transmission? As Sudre put it when characterizing radio as a...