Radio. John Mowitt
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because disciplinary objects are the volatile zone of indistinction between the world—whether physical or psychical—and the institutionally organized production of knowledge—whether hard or soft—about that world. In short, object, as I am putting the term to work here, is a name for the place where knowledge and world can be neither differentiated nor confused. Moreover, this way of approaching the object situates my study squarely within the frame of media studies (whether one thinks here of Harold Innes or Jean Baudrillard), although my concerns aim more narrowly at the articulation of media and theory than one typically finds in the study of mass culture.
To ward off the usual misunderstanding, I am not saying that there are no things in the world; I am simply saying that from the standpoint of the discourse of the university—which is, for better and for worse, our standpoint (I harbor few illusions about who might be reading these lines, certainly not “the poorest woman in the South,” to use a familiar example)—things are mediated by the social formation through which our encounters with them, as we say, come to matter. Writ large, of course, this means that “things in the world” is a meaningful and pressing concern because more than the grammar organizing the English phrase is at work within it. This “more” is at once the numerous and multiform disciplinary projects charged with knowing “things in the world” and the world that solicits and acknowledges the attention of disciplinary reason.1 To study, as I am proposing to study, the object of radio studies thus involves cocking one’s ear toward the socially organized zone of indistinction in which radio and its study encounter each other. Obviously, I am—as one who studies radio, indeed as one who studies radio studies—present in and at this encounter. Consider this ineluctable metacritical state of affairs as something like the faint but persistent Hörstreif (hear stripe) to be heard in the margins of this entire study, a study, then, less about radio (and there are many excellent ones) than about the scholarly interest in it.
To discern some of the signals being emitted from this zone, I urge that we consider two developments: first, the dramatic arc of radio history, the oft-repeated fact that after coming into national prominence in the so-called Golden Age of the 1920s and 1930s (at least in the United States) radio precipitously faded, only later to return at the end of the century with what can properly be called a vengeance; and second, the emergence of what called itself radio studies, the novel, defiantly interdisciplinary initiative seeking to wrest radio from (to exaggerate for melodramatic effect) the “clutches” of journalism and mass communications, that is, a more administrative or professional study of the mass media. These developments interact, of course, but more than that, they interact in a geopolitical context that both conditions and outdistances them. Not to put too fine a point on it, radio did not fade in quite the same way in Europe, nor, for that matter, has it ever faded in the Third World. Likewise, radio studies so-called is a largely Northern (visible in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom) phenomenon. Grasping its emergence must therefore come to terms with this fact without thereby granting such things as facts undue intellectual authority.2
For the sake of a consistency whose principle has not yet been established, I will take up the second of these developments first. This involves taking advantage of the serendipitous fact that, in a certain sense, our moment is a moment of gestation and maturation. Just as, I suppose, the pulses of astrophysicists race upon witnessing the “birth” of some astrophysical phenomenon, so too do those interested in the genealogy of disciplines begin to vibrate when a discipline emerges in our midst, as radio studies did in the last decade of the twentieth century. The thrill here is largely one of opportunity. Though there has been much discussion within both the humanities and the “qualitative” social sciences about the reconfiguration of the disciplines, about what Immanuel Kant once called “the conflict of the faculties,” it has been difficult actually to trace how a discipline negotiates a space, at once intellectual and institutional, for itself, especially since so much of the recent reconfiguration of disciplines has been stimulated, not by scholars, but by administrators seeking ways to get more for less. Interdisciplinarity, touted now by scholars of all stripes, aside from always already having taken place, alas harbors no intrinsic animus toward neoliberal corporatism, where, after all, it has long gone by the more anodyne term synergy. With radio studies and, lest it go unsaid, with its fraught yet enabling precursor, cultural studies, we have, if not a golden era, then certainly a golden opportunity to trace a discipline in the event of its emergence. To what end? Not, I assure you, simply to herald its “birth,” but to sift its descriptions for something rather more like an explanation of what earlier I called the aim of radio studies and to tease from this the terms that, in cycling back and forth between radio and its study, signal something like the very conditions of emergency themselves. In other words, studying radio studies must be pitched so as to tune in studying as much as broadcasting.
If I have repeated the word emergence in the preceding, I have done so deliberately. For I wish to put this term to work in a way that is in direct dialogue with the British (although he might prefer “Welsh”) scholar Raymond Williams, who sought, in any number of works but perhaps most systematically in Marxism and Literature, to produce the concept of emergence. What matters to me about this is not primarily the question of intellectual debt (in fact, I will reveal myself to be a somewhat fickle debtor, perhaps even a “frenemy”) but rather the fact that in producing the concept of the emergent Williams also produced a concept profoundly relevant to the apparatus of radio and its history, namely, the concept of the residual. This helps one think about the broadly asserted notion that radio’s day has passed, that its comeback in the digital AM era is from some sort of prior moment. Moreover, no doubt as an overdetermined confirmation of my earlier point about disciplinary objects, Williams is also responsible for making radio and cultural studies matter deeply to one another, as a later chapter will attest.
In Marxism and Literature, Williams defined the emergent by contrasting it with both the residual and the dominant. His purpose was to find a way, within the broad contours of a Marxism committed to distinguishing the economic base of society from its cultural and political superstructure, to designate something like the spatio-temporal structure of the superstructure. No fan of the sort of mechanistic determinism that would render Marx’s own thought unthinkable, Williams deployed his three terms to capture how, across class society, interests could form that might lag behind or even race out ahead of those that might otherwise be said to form the prevailing consensus. To designate this last (for example, what we in the United States might call neoliberal economic policy), he used the term dominant. To designate those traditions and interests that the prevailing consensus appeared to have superseded (to adduce his own example, monarchism), he used the term residual. And last but hardly least, to designate practices that managed to get out in front of the prevailing consensus (to again adduce his example, a socialism “beyond actually existing socialism”), he used the term emergent.
To clarify how precisely I want to bring this to bear on radio studies, we need to consider one further distinction drawn by Williams. Within the emergent, Williams differentiated between two tendencies, one “alternative” and the other “oppositional.” His point was to concede that certain ways of getting out ahead of the prevailing consensus were, in fact, mere alternatives to it and not deep critiques and/or rejections of either its logic or its founding institutions. Although capable of ambivalence on the matter, Williams saw aspects of the “counterculture” of the 1960s and 1970s in the West as largely an alternative mode of emergence rather than a truly oppositional one. Less ambivalently, his considerable and vividly drawn misgivings about Soviet Marxism and the Labour Party in Britain notwithstanding, socialism was the only coherent vision of the oppositional mode of the emergent that Williams would live to provide.
What interests me here is the logic of these distinctions, not their referents, or at least not primarily their referents. Applied to radio studies, what this logic rather obviously invites is a consideration of whether its “emergence” exhibits one tendency or another, either alternative or oppositional. Complicating this, however, is precisely the object of radio studies, the fact that in articulating its aims radio studies has presented the device of radio in consistently residual terms. Complicating the matter yet further is the fact that Williams did not draw a correlative distinction within either the residual or the dominant to match the one drawn in the emergent such