Radio. John Mowitt
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“world.” Recall that this is the very world Heidegger thought animals, that is, those without language, were decidedly poor in.
In the midst of this discussion, Heidegger turns to the radio. In the context created by my remarks, his immediate attention to “closeness” captures our own. Oddly enough, it would appear, on the face of it, that Adorno, who otherwise has very little time for Heidegger, is essentially recycling this discussion. But this seems decidedly less possible when one sorts out precisely how Heidegger understands “closeness.” The important first step lies in confronting the difficult concept of what is here translated as “de-severance.” Macquarrie and Robinson tell us important things in explaining how, in the footnote on pages 138–39 of their translation, they confected the term. Heidegger’s word Ent-fernung has fern, or, “far,” at its root. The privative prefix ent- takes farness away from itself, a semantic effect that is intensified when, as in the case of the passage cited, the prefix is set off by a hyphen. In other words, Ent-fernung is not simply a remoteness that is less remote, but a coming near of the remote, of the far. Given the topic of spatiality, one might reasonably conclude that we are dealing here with an insight into the essential spacing of the being of Dasein, an insight that Heidegger virtually picks up from the radio, one that points directly at the difference between disembodiment and delocalization. Although no reference is made to Dasein, it seems obvious that Adorno has modeled the “illusion of nearness” on Heidegger’s treatment of Ent-fernung. In fact, when, in 1964, Adorno turns the full intensity of his critical glare on Heidegger—I am thinking here of The Jargon of Authenticity—it is striking that in challenging the latter’s approach to the immediate he rehearses in condensed form the arguments from “The Radio Voice,” down to reiterating the motifs of the “voice of the announcer” that “resounds” in the home, the nearness of the whole, and the atomized individual (Jargon 76).
Before, however, we get distracted by the question of influence and its Angst, I want to dwell briefly on the closing sentence in the passage cited from Being and Time: “With the ‘radio,’ for example, Dasein has so expanded its everyday environment that it has accomplished a de-severance of the ‘world’—a de-severance which, in its meaning for Dasein, cannot yet be visualized.” What draws attention here is the distinct way in which Heidegger evokes the acousmatic character of the radio. He does not frame this in terms of the invisibility of the sound source. Instead, he deftly traces the dilemma that arises as an ontological structure, that of Dasein itself, undergoes an expansion whose effect—the de-severance of the “world,” that is, the no-place where Dasein is with itself and with others—cannot yet be visualized (the German, überseh-bare, might be better rendered as “fore-seen,” even “looked over,” scrutinized). Such a formulation might appear to be inconsequential, except that a page later Heidegger writes: “Seeing and hearing are distance senses [Fernsinne] not because they are far reaching, but because it is in them that Dasein as deseverant mainly dwells” (Being 141). In other words, when one insists upon the limits, even if provisional, of vision, one is pointing to an asymmetry in the ontological structure of Dasein itself. Radio is thus obliging hearing to speed out ahead of seeing, producing a de-severance out of step with itself, recalling, I should think, the importance of thinking about the sound of this racing hearing. Indeed, when Heidegger returns to these questions ten years later, in “The Anaximander Fragment,” he envisions the press “limping after” radio, whose speed has overtaken even historiography itself, establishing the world dominion of historicism (Early Greek Thinking 17).
It is tempting, especially since the interventions of Françoise Fedier and Victor Farias, to approach this racing sound as the voice of Hitler that resounds in the speaker of the Volksemfänger, mixing, as Hork-heimer and Adorno insisted, with the sirens in the street. Or, put differently, it is certainly possible to read this asymmetrical de-severance at the heart of Dasein, especially as indexed to the nationalizing of German radio in the twenties, as the vulnerability of Dasein to the Nazi temptation—in effect, to invoke Berel Lang’s anguished study, as Heidegger’s rehearsal for his silence on the Jewish Question. Doing so, however, suppresses too hastily the unsettling proximity between Adorno and Heidegger on the radio, that is, the fact that Dasein’s vulnerability refers with equal immediacy to an ontological structure and to the fundamental ontology—the philosophical project—putting this structure, as it were, on the playlist. In other words, if the full implications of de-severing the world are not yet fore-seeable, this may well cast the shadow of the acousmatic upon philosophy itself, to the extent that the source of its sounds, its rumblings, falls outside its construal of the visual field. In short, the sound that haunts phonocentrism could be said to fall out of the range of our hearing, but hearing understood as a faculty or capacity of a subject that belongs to the knowledge, at once rational and affective, that we have of what passes for the acoustical. Here we face squarely the sound of both knowing and not knowing, a philosophical dilemma of shared interest to both Adorno and Heidegger.
But surely there is a political circle to square here? While not wishing to suggest that they are the same, much less identical—although each finds his own way to the retreat from politics (Heidegger in the name of “thinking,” Adorno in the name of “negating”)—it is instructive to witness how effortlessly Denis de Rougement aligns Heidegger not only with antifascism but with a Frankfurt School–style repudiation of mass culture. Written while de Rougemont was in exile in the United States, The Devil’s Share is a probing, even desperate study of the status of the diabolical in modern society. In a pugnacious chapter, de Rougement advances a thesis pitched to scold Americans about both their political, moral, and ultimately military failure to recognize the diabolic character of Hitler and, almost paradoxically, their too automatic reduction of Hitler to a largely Judeo-Christian symbol whose cardinal virtue lies in its ability to persuade us that the devil does not exist. Seeking the conditions for this everyday, ordinary damnation, de Rougement turns, in chapter 47, to the theme of “depersonalization” and, surprisingly, radio.
Noting that the devil, in the twentieth century, has lost interest in conscripting individuals and has thus turned its attention to the masses, de Rougement points to the work of Kierkegaard as the first systematic diagnosis of this development. Supplementing Kierkegaard, he points to not only the dialectical fact that “the radio, the press and mass meetings” (Devil’s Share 144) address themselves to masses, leading people to lead lives they do not have, but for him the essential corollary that “masses would not be possible, in the precise sense of a concentration of men, without the radio, loudspeakers, the press and rapid transportation” (145), insisting upon the perverse, onto-technological dimension of depersonalization. Radio produces the reception that scans for it, a reception just as bad as the designs of the device. It is when de Rougement teases out the distinctly diabolical character of the contemporary situation that the Heideggerian themes, doubtless cued by the references to Kierkegaard, enter the mix. In quick succession, under the titular heading of “The Tower of Babel” (an allusion later taken over by Erik Barnouw for his volume on early radio), de Rougement appeals to formulations such as the “frames have grown too big,” we “clamor for bigness,” things are “too large for our capacities,” we have “moved too fast,” and perhaps most tellingly of all, “society has become too gigantic to be taken in at a single glance.” Given these characterizations of mass-mediated depersonalization coupled with the syntagmatic fact that this list segues to a discussion of boredom (one of the recurrent preoccupations of both Being and Time and The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics), one is hard-pressed to deny that Heidegger, and specifically Heidegger’s discussion of radio, haunts this analysis. De Rougement is virtually repeating, but now in the context of mobilizing the confrontation with fascism, Heidegger’s anxious discussion of de-severance. While today (and to some extent already in the thirties) we recognize that the so-called romantic anticapitalist critique of fascism was compromised, the all too readily at hand—because tendentious—opposition of Adorno and Heidegger’s politics around the implications of mass culture is hard to sustain. Moreover, the obsession with alignment is the surest means by which to subject politics to what Agamben called “the aporias of sovereignty” (Homo Sacer 48). This said, the fraught and contentious proximity between Adorno and Heidegger is perhaps not as interesting as the fact