Radio. John Mowitt

the question “What is radio?” produces effects that scramble not only intellectual alliances but also the sociohistorically given contours of intellectual life, say, in the case of Heidegger, what truly constitutes the “beyond” of Western philosophy. Thus in chapter 1, “Facing the Radio,” this articulation of the problem posed by radio is shown to produce a surprising array of contacts—agreements and disagreements—between and among Heidegger, Adorno, and John Cage. Although the interest in radio held by many members of the Frankfurt School is well known—perhaps only Leo Lowenthal’s extended involvement with the Voice of America routinely flies beneath the radar—less well known are the surprising engagements with phenomenology, physiognomy, and psychoanalysis that appear in Adorno’s exclusively English-language writings about radio from the late 1930s and 1940s.

      Chapter 2, “On the Air,” extends this rethinking of the Frankfurt School encounter with radio by tracing how the problem posed by it arises in the philosophy of Marxism, especially as this last came to be thematized in the confrontation between Georg Lukács and Jean-Paul Sartre and the collaboration between Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin. As the chapter title suggests, the interplay between using radio as a means of philosophical and/or political communication and using radio as a provocation to philosophical and/or political thought—what I seek to render in the prepositional instability of the “on”—serves as a tracking device.

      Further elaborating the political questions stirred by the radiophonic encounter between Marxism and phenomenology, chapter 3, “Stations of Exception,” turns to Frantz Fanon, whose brilliant and far-reaching essay “Here Is the Voice of Algeria,” from A Dying Colonialism, obliges us to revisit many of the keywords—resistance, voice, people, nation—put in play by the movement of decolonization in Africa and elsewhere. Once on the proverbial table, the role of radio in revolutionary struggles prompts considerations of policy and piracy that urge one to think twice about the status of the voice in the political confrontation with contemporary neoliberalism, especially as it informs thinking about communications.

      Fanon’s discussion of radio in revolutionary Algeria casts only fleeting glances at psychoanalysis, despite his professional training in it and its critical role in the French articulation of phenomenology and Marxism. Continuing my effort to establish how insistently radio mattered to twentieth-century philosophical and theoretical reflection, chapter 4, “Phoning In Analysis,” scans three sites of the encounter between radio and psychoanalysis: the role played by Erich Fromm in the formulation of the Princeton Radio Research Project; the two radio lectures by Jacques Lacan, “Petit discours à l’O.R.T.F.” and “Radiophonie”; and the various statements—some broadcasted, others not—made by Félix Guattari regarding “free popular radios” and the Bologna-based station Radio Alice in particular. Here the encounter between politics (whether Marxist or not) and philosophy (whether phenomenology or not) occasions a twisted set of queries about the conditions, the channels, of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic teaching.

      Chapter 5, “Birmingham Calling,” is yet another pass over the encounter between Marxism and philosophy, but one that considers at length the notion that the study of radio, and especially the question of local versus commercial radio, played a founding role in the Birmingham project of cultural studies. Three figures are central to the chapter: Richard Hoggart, the founding director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham; Raymond Williams; and Rachel Powell, whose pamphlet Possibilities for Local Radio was not only the first of the now legendary “Occasional Papers” produced by the CCCS but the explicit intellectual and political inspiration for Williams’s confrontation with Labour over its radio policy. Here, because of the persistent theme of radio’s pedagogical power, Brecht returns to restate, from the beginning of the century, the question: What is radio? Can reflection upon it transform the institutional organization of humanistic knowledge? Is cultural studies the institutional name of that transformation?

      The final chapter, “We Are the Word”?, is a sustained consideration of the Modern Language Association’s recent foray into radio broadcasting, “What’s the Word?” The ambition here is, through an extended reading of the broadcast “Radio: Imaginary Visions” (the sole early engagement with the actual medium of the broadcast), to reflect upon the strategic merits of the association’s turn to radio, a turn prompted—and the fact is well publicized—by the attack on the humanities in general and the MLA in particular carried out by conservative partisans in the culture wars. Here, the issue of radio’s relation to education is read in light of the political and philosophical problems tracked through the preceding five chapters.

      Perhaps inevitably, a conflict of opinion over the situation of the contemporary humanities surfaces. It is the reiteration of another. To specify, I return briefly to Peter Monaghan’s double take as a way to address, if not answer, questions bearing upon the object of radio studies and the status of the residual within it.

      Recall that Monaghan described the event he was heralding by describing it as a “recent spate of cultural studies of radio.” When, five years later, Doherty reheralds the event, he refers to it by name, as the advent or breakthrough of radio studies. In the interim, an evocation has become a displacement. Specifically, Monaghan’s evocation of “cultural studies” (but in the innocuous, predisciplinary form of “studies of radio that are cultural as opposed to something else”) has been displaced by “radio studies,” where “radio” spells the nominalization of the adjective “cultural.” My point here is that in addition to everything else that is being said without being meant, there is the matter, earlier intimated, of two emergences, that of cultural studies itself and that of radio studies. As such, it is clear that radio studies wants to have its culture and eat it too: it wants to lean on cultural studies without thereby being simply derivative. But might we not also say that cultural studies is in some sense residual within radio studies?

      Insofar as radio studies comes after and develops out of cultural studies, the latter would appear to have a distinctly vestigial relation to the former. Cultural studies is residual in the sense of belonging to the gestation or maturation of radio studies. But precisely because radio studies risks overlooking the founding role of radio study in the institutional emergence of cultural studies (see “Birmingham Calling”), it is hard to settle for this construal of residualism in the relation between cultural studies and radio studies. It is better, I think, to reflect more specifically about the trace of cultural studies, a trace that manifests itself most clearly in Monaghan and Doherty (not to mention Hilmes herself) when they describe the principles or theoretical convictions deemed characteristic of radio studies. Monaghan got at this by invoking the two poles, the tension between radio as medium of social control and radio as medium of social contestation. For his part, Doherty framed the matter in terms of “call signals” (WART), that is, the commitment on the part of radio studies partisans to close analysis, audience response, and critical theory. In both of these cases, distinctive methodological and even political preoccupations of cultural studies are very much in the foreground—with a telling exception.

      In consulting virtually any portion of the mushrooming literature on cultural studies, one notes persistent concern with the vexed status of theory. In some cases, one finds cultural studies explicitly identified with the institutional initiative that became possible in the wake of theory, dated in the humanities with the so-called de Man scandal. The vexed status of theory has prompted certain writers, such as the late Bill Readings and more recently Gayatri Spivak, to distance themselves emphatically from cultural studies, Readings arguing that it is political only to the extent that it has no impact on politics, and Spivak arguing that it is monolingual, presentist, and identitarian. Thus, given that radio studies is apparently committed to theory (the T in WART), it would appear that it is reiterating the self-reflection of cultural studies, but with a difference, and, as we have seen, with a difference that legitimates, indeed justifies, if not necessitates, the very emergence of the field. Presumably, this difference is that radio studies has a less