Broadcasting Modernism

5. Flying Solo: The Charms of the Radio Body

c h a p t e r 5 Flying Solo The Charms of the Radio Body David Jenemann In Current of Music, his long-unpublished volume on radio broadcasting, Theodor W. Adorno describes the uncanny, animist power of the radio voice that terrifyingly infiltrates the listener’s private space: The isolated listener definitely feels overwhelmed by the might of the personal voice of an anonymous organization. Second, the deeper this voice is involved within his own privacy, the more it appears to pour out of the cells of his most intimate life; the more he gets the impression that his own cupboard, his own phonograph, his own bedroom speaks to him in a personal way, devoid of the intermediary stages of the printed word; the more perfectly he is ready to accept wholesale whatever he hears. It is just this privacy which fosters the authority of the radio voice and helps to hide it by making it no longer appear to come from outside. (114)1 Writing sometime between 1938 and 1941, while serving as musical director for the Princeton Radio Research Project (PRRP), Adorno attributes to the radio broadcast the power not only to take over the body of the listener but also to give life to the material objects of the bourgeois home. The resulting phantasmagoria of talking cupboards and bedroom furniture holding their cellularly innervated owners in thrall sits uncomfortably between a Merry Melodies cartoon and the dystopian science fictions of the period. But the extremity of Adorno’s image should not mask its import; while the radio . . . ich fliege allein in einem apparat ohne radio. —Bertolt Brecht, Der Flug der Lindberghs 89 89 might create automata out of household objects, it also installs a machinelike consciousness in the mind of the listener. The cupboard, the phonograph, and the listener are hence caught up together as one monstrous radio body. To pursue this idea a little further, let us consider not a sound but an image: an old, upright telephone sits on a table in front of a window. The window’s shade is half drawn, and its cord mirrors the one that connects the telephone’s receiver to its mouthpiece. In the half-obscured window, a vague reflection can be seen, ghostly and insubstantial compared to the mechanical solidity of the telephone and the finality of the shade. The reflection is of a human figure, but its head has been cut off by the shade and the top of the frame. Consider the image further: with its clean lines and solid colors, one might initially mistake the image for a photograph. But look closer. In fact the image is a skillful rendering done in conté crayon, gouache, and pencil. WhatIamdescribinghereistheseminalprecisionistworkbytheAmerican artist Charles Sheeler, his 1923 “Self Portrait.” In many ways, Sheeler’s painting stands as an emblematic Modernist image of the tenuous relationship between the subject and its machine-age objective conditions. The corporeal human “self” alluded to in the title2 recedes into the hazy glass background, its decapitated head at once emasculating the painter and consigning it to anonymity. In place of the human figure one would expect in a self-portrait, we have the upright (and unavoidably phallic) certainty of the telephone, which now stands both in front of and for the absent artist. It is a clever painting, because in foregrounding the telephone, Sheeler suggests one of the paradoxes of Modernism: increasingly the mechanical body supersedes the human one. The “ear” and “mouth” of the telephone are far more powerful than that of their human operator, able to extend to the farthest regions of the planet at impossible speeds. Lifting the telephone receiver, like pulling the window shade, would suggest a capitulation of the subject to the mechanical object, an effacement. And yet the telephone nevertheless depends on that human operator’s agency to achieve its impossible feats. The receding reflection and the concrete telephone serve as mutually mediating yet interdependent antipodes that together, in their early twentieth-century context, form an even then no-longer-new type of mechanized human being. The telephone’s user gives life to the instrument at the same time that his own life is mechanically transformed. The strength of Sheeler’s work depends on the way that the formal strategies of “Self Portrait” reproduce and affirm the contradictions of its content. The photographic realism of precisionism is an illusion, the work of an artist whose intense labor has been poured, 90 David Jenemann [18.118.0.240...