Broadcasting Modernism

1. Inventing the Radio Cosmopolitan: Vernacular Modernism at a Standstill

c h a p t e r 1 Inventing the Radio Cosmopolitan Vernacular Modernism at a Standstill Aaron Jaffe Two vital geniuses. One emergent avant-garde. The first genius, a foreign patrician well-connected to the British ruling class, wages a massive PR campaign in early twentieth-century London. Appropriating, coordinating, and synthesizing the work of others, he finds rapid, transnational, and culturally transformative success, builds an institutional apparatus, and in the process turns himself into a name brand. Later, in the thirties, he is disgraced by his unsavory political entanglements: celebrity avant-gardist turned fascist yes-man. The second, also an outsider, has more obscure origins but also has some success promoting, organizing, and drawing capital to the rival New York side of operations. His genius—if not his business acumen—is more vital. Yet, in the process, he too becomes a name brand. His eventual demise is only slightly less ignominious than the first’s: largely forgotten in the forties, this avant-gardist turns pigeon-feeding crank with an infatuation for death rays and UFOs. I am writing here of neither Futurists nor Vorticists—not psychoanalysts, not political revolutionaries—not strictly speaking, at least. Instead the two traveling avant-gardists, the transcendent, self-vivisecting foreigners making beachheads in the economic and cultural capitals of the Anglo-American 11 People think that science is electricity, automobilism, and dirigible balloons. It is something very different. . . . It is the genius of knowledge vivisecting the vital genius. —Remy de Gourmont, Promenades philosophiques, 1902 12 aaron jaffe world, are the “inventors” of radio, Guglielmo Marconi and Nikola Tesla. Although Marconi and Tesla frequently provide codicils to the heroic lists of the good and great at the service of science and progress, their identities are much more unstable, hybridized, and, for that matter, modern than is usually appreciated. Above all, the pair were practitioners of a rhetoric of invention akin to what Gregory Ulmer has called “heuristics”—a Modernist discursive vernacular that not only speaks for their obvious self-fashioning as technologists, capitalists, and publicists but also helps account for the centrality in praxis of their capacities as autodidacts, polymaths, and aesthetic, literary, and political aspirants. Above all, Marconi and Tesla were engaged in an archly Modernist struggle of hyperbolic self-definition against other inventors, patent-holders, and, ultimately, each another, a struggle for prestige and patent rights that helped institute the incipient promotional rhetoric of radio as a paradigm of modern self-hood in an age of increasing technological and economic displacements. Let us turn, then, from representations of radio culture in canonical Modernism and the work of Modernists broadcasting on the airwaves to the links between the first promoters and ideologists of the radio medium and the ideological dimensions of the mass communication technology in its proto-forms. In 1887, Heinrich Hertz demonstrates the existence and propagation of electromagnetic radiation by building an instrument to produce electromagnetic waves, a transmitter-oscillator, and an instrument to detect them, a receiver-coherer. He is reputed to have said upon this occasion: “I don’t see any useful purpose for this mysterious, invisible electromagnetic radiation” (Harrison 155). During the thirty or so years to follow when this mysterious, invisible radio-medium is thinkable—but thinkable otherwise before broadcast programming takes hold as a dominant application—its existence provides vital Modernist geniuses of all vivisections with enormously productive and inventive energies. By 1927, Bertolt Brecht describes radio as an “antediluvian invention”: “As far as radio goes,” he writes, “I immediately had the frightful impression that it was an unbelievably ancient apparatus, long ago forgotten in deluge” (37). For Brecht, radio had resolved itself into the bourgeoisie’s megaphone and a technique of mass consumption : “Later generations would have the opportunity to marvel how a certain caste was able to tell the whole planet what it had to say and at the same time how it enabled the planet to see that it had nothing to say” (38–39).1 Now that radio is all but forgotten—Clear Channel, XM satellite radio, podcasting, and WiFi notwithstanding—we can begin to remember some- Inventing the Radio Cosmopolitan 13 thing more obvious in its early history: what radio designates, once upon a time, at least, is not sound but something like light, invisible light, frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum that can not been seen with the unaided eye. Before physicists hypothesized wavelike particles, before the term “radio...