The Production of Signaletic Space: Radio Infrastructure in Early
20th Century China
A thesis submitted by Jean-Mathieu Beauchemin in partial fulfillment of the
requirements of the degree of
Master’s
in the
Department of East Asian Studies
McGill University
April 2020
Supervisor: Professor Thomas Lamarre
Co-Supervisor: Professor Xiao Liu
© Jean-Mathieu Beauchemin 2020 Beauchemin 1
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The writing of this thesis would not have been possible without the people who supported me throughout the process. First, I would like to thank my supervisor Thomas Lamarre for encouraging me to pursue this inquiry into the relationship between media technologies and humans, and for continuously supporting me through the process of writing, providing me with extensive comments and suggestions that guided me throughout. I would also like to thank my co-supervisor Xiao Liu, who influenced my interest in the world of radio waves.
Many others were involved in keeping me both emotionally and intellectually on track, especially the friends I made in both the East Asian Studies and the Art History &
Communication Studies departments at McGill. I’d also like to thank those who participated in the Difference and Repetition Summer 2019 reading group, which sparked many of my thoughts and concerns in this thesis. The stimulating discussions from the seminars I took with Professors
Yuriko Furuhata, Alia Al-Saji, Xinyu Dong, and Thomas Lamarre all contributed to the evolution of my own thinking on a range of topics.
I would also like to acknowledge the funding support I received from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, as well as departmental funding from the East
Asian Studies Department at McGill University.
Beauchemin 2
ABSTRACT
This thesis examines the evolution of signaletic space in early 20th century China by looking at it through two major transformations. First, through the development of radio infrastructures as actualized in the emergence of heterogeneous institutions tied to various global processes, and second, the transformation of language as an ontogenetic process permutated by the effects of the radio broadcasting apparatus. Approaching radio as a global media technology and as a site of negotiation where national reforms had to be enacted at the level of the relation between the human body and the machine further serves as a critique of impasses found in both area studies and media studies.
RÉSUMÉ
Cette thèse examine l’évolution de l’espace signalétique au début du XXe siècle en
Chine, en le regardant au travers deux transformations majeures. Premièrement, au travers du développement des infrastructures radioélectriques comme ils ont été actualisés dans l’émergence d’institutions hétérogènes liées à divers processus globaux, et d’autre part, la transformation de la langue en tant que processus ontogénétique permuté par les effets du dispositif du radiodiffusion. Approchant la radio en tant que technologie médiatique mondiale et en tant qu’un site de négociation où des réformes nationales devaient être mise en action au niveau du relation entre le corps humain et la machine, sert en outre comme critique des impasses trouvées à la fois dans les études régionales et dans les études médiatiques. Beauchemin 3
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION - Radio’s Platformativity and Chinese Modernity: Rethinking National and Global Models of (Tele)-Communication Infrastructure ...... 4
Discursive and Representational Analyses of Modernity – On National Particularism .... 4
Fixing the Symbolic Center – Circuits and Networks ...... 13
The Space of Radio - Distribution, Assemblage, and Platformativity ...... 18
CHAPTER ONE – Taming the Signal: The Production of Signaletic Space in Early 20th Century China ...... 32
The Formation of a Signaletic Arsenal 1900s-1920s ...... 37
The Encoding of Signaletic Space 1920s-1940s ...... 49
The Chongqing Frog – Mobile Stations and the Displacement of “Solid Infrastructure”56
Occupying Heights for Underground Work - Transgressing the Facades of Signaletic Space ...... 62
CHAPTER TWO - Approaching the Microphone-Mouth Interval ...... 70
From Phonocentric Rupture to Techno-Human Disjunction ...... 72
Positive Technological Effects ...... 82
The Microphone-Mouth Interval ...... 89
CONCLUSION – Signaletic Co-ordination and Transindividuation ...... 111
APPENDIX ...... 115
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 118
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INTRODUCTION - Radio’s Platformativity and Chinese Modernity: Rethinking National and Global Models of (Tele)-Communication Infrastructure
My goal in this thesis is to bring together approaches to “Chinese modernity” and “global media” especially with regards to how they intersect with questions of globalization and forms of distribution specific to media technologies, particularly wireless radio innovations in the early
1900s. In doing so, however, I wish to simultaneously challenge both the national specificity emphasized in China studies and the homogenizing or flattening model of globalization of certain strands of media infrastructure studies (particularly in the invocations of circuits and networks emanating from Europe). Taking “distribution” as a way into potentially resolving the problems with these two images of thought, I then proceed to describe an alternative approach which takes techno-human individuation as the starting point for thinking of radio as a globalizing technology whose various concretizations emerged as a negotiation between the
“cultural,” “political” and “technological” during the Republican Era (1911-1949).
Discursive and Representational Analyses of Modernity – On National Particularism
Two still popular modes of thinking Chinese modernity are those taking a Marxist historiographical approach and what might be called a “liberal humanist” approach (though actually quite conservative). The latter, often as a response to the reductiveness of the former approach, seeks to excavate the positive bourgeoning culture in the days before 1949.
Cosmopolitanism is pitted against hardcore Nationalism, Liberalism against Communism, the good of capitalism and freedom of exchange against the bad of state authoritarianism. The anchor point for the liberalists is often a turn to the urban culture of Shanghai as the center from which to imagine what China could have been were it not for the Communists who ruined Beauchemin 5 everything. This condemnation of the Chinese state Marxist historiographical model by way of excavating a new history of Chinese cosmopolitanism (the so-called “Chinese Enlightenment”) can perhaps be traced to the publication of Leo Oufan-Lee’s Shanghai Modern in 1999, where the nostalgia for a time when China was characterized by all the glamour and decadence of modern capitalist development is set forth, bringing into play literary circles, urban cinema, advertising, consumer culture, and coffeehouses where the “contours” of a cultural imaginary were drawn.1 Lee evinces his desire to maintain a separation between the political and cultural realms when he writes, “I hope that I have at least blazed a small trail by shifting scholarly attention from the elite domain of lofty ideas and grand narratives to a more popular realm of urban print culture.”2 We might say the blaze has never been stronger - in a recent book on humor during the Republican period in which the author claims to rethink the history of modern
China as lively and uproarious, rather than the usual “traumatic” narrative that is given, he claims that “this new history of laughter contrasts with the usual portrait of late Qing and
Republican China, focusing not on the angst, earnestness, drudgery, and political anger of that age, but on the wit, sarcasm, glee, and irreverence that made it bearable and even fun.”3
It is telling of the image of thought operative in these works that the portrait of early 20th century China must primarily be found in literati circles of Shanghai, and in its opposition to the instrumentalist and politicized anti-imperialist rhetoric of the “Leftists.” Peter Button has traced this lineage of aversion towards Communism in contemporary institutionalized approaches to
Chinese modernity by pointing to the influence of C.T. Hsia’s “New Criticism” and its famous
1 Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China 1930-1945, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 63. 2 Ibid., 80-81. 3 Christopher Rea, The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China, (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2015), 14. Beauchemin 6
“standards of ‘disinterestedness,’ absence of ‘intention,’ [and] refusal of ‘utilitarian ideals,’. . . criteria that were formed via a radical exclusion of precisely ‘modernization, industrialization, and technological progress’”4. In line with this dichotomization of academic thought on Chinese modernity, the history of radio in China could be said to also be divided between its cultural and political determinations. Those interested in the lively cosmopolitan culture of Shanghai can turn to the operas and dramas that were being broadcast into modernized homes, and contrast it with the political and educational lectures and censorship by the government that were forced upon them. In this dichotomization, however, radio itself simply disappears, and its signaletic and geo- political make-up is disregarded in favor of maintaining the desired separation between the state and the nation, authority and freedom.
These binary oppositions are of course not simply contraries to one another, but rather part of broader global structural transformations that are concealed in both of these attempts at re-circumscribing history to the terms of cold-war international politics. What is concealed in the attempt to qualify Chinese modernity as tending towards either “cosmopolitanism” or a more
“politicized nationalism” is the fact that these two attributions are neither contradictory nor properly understood when taken as qualifications of national particularity from the outset. One of the major operations at work in maintaining this concealment is the very use of “China” or
“Chinese” as a meaningful modification of what would otherwise be treated as a universal discourse were the same object of study situated in a “Western” context. This manner in which
Orientalist and white imperialist politics operates within area studies has been thoroughly analyzed by Rey Chow. Drawing on Naoki Sakai’s description of the co-figuration between the
“West” and “Non-West,” Chow explains how “this collective habit of supplementing every
4 Peter Button, Configurations of the Real in Chinese Literary and Aesthetic Modernity, (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 22. Beauchemin 7 major world trend with the notion of ‘Chinese’ is the result of an overdetermined series of historical factors, the most crucial of which is the lingering, pervasive hegemony of Western culture”5. We are familiar with this popular form of supplementation: “Chinese Enlightenment”,
“Socialism with Chinese characteristics”, “The Question concerning Technology in China”, etc.
Through these appellations, the particularity of China insinuates itself at the expense of analyses of the uneven global processes in relation to which the very notion of China as a modern nation- state began to take a hold. The critique of the implicit racial and cultural essentialisms at play in treating China as a particular unified or homogenous entity in opposition to Western universalism has been at the center of various new approaches to rethinking Chinese modernity, which I will now turn to.
One of the terms that has come to figure prominently in addressing the complexity of
Chinese modernity vis-à-vis imperial interests is “semi-coloniality.” In order to account for modern Chinese literature’s enmeshment in a historical condition wherein Japan and the West became the dominant imperial designations to resist, emulate or become subordinate to, Shih
Shu-Mei describes the “singularity” of China’s socio-political structure in the late Qing and early
Republican period as semi-colonial.6 Unlike “colonialism”, “semi-colonialism” is claimed to attend to “the multiple, layered, intensified, as well as incomplete and fragmentary nature of
China’s colonial structure”7. Shih then gradually describes a semiotic field of negations in which semi-colonialism participates as an “informal,” “indirect,” and “uncomplete” colonialism. This
5 Rey Chow, “Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem,” in Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 2. This co-figuration of West and Non-West in Chinese modernity was similarly taken up by Lydia Liu in her approach to the production of monstrous signs in the semiotic exchange that takes place whenever two sovereign claims to meaning takes place. See Lydia Liu, Clash of Empires: The Invention of China in Modern World Making. 6 Shu-mei Shih, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917-1937, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 31. 7 Ibid., 34. Beauchemin 8 more complex and less unified semi-colonial structure is further claimed to be at play in the bifurcation between metropolitan life (cultural enlightenment) and colonial reality, and implicates a further disjunction between political and cultural imperialism.8 Hence, we learn that
“semi-colonialism” is meant to qualify an already imagined unity, “China,” and is meaningful in its ability to capture the national singularity of China (even as this singularity is characterized by its fragmentation), not simply as opposed to the imperial powers whose discourses it was negotiating with, but as unique in its difference from the “formally and systematically” colonized
Third World countries as well. It is this model of national uniqueness that is problematic, for it fails to attend to the global unevenness constitutive of the manner in which “China,” it its polyvocal differentiations, served as a response to colonial violence happening around the world.
Semi-colonialism seeks to treat its colonial situation as a quantitative (semi) rather than qualitative difference, involving various local resistances and appropriations of global technologies and ideas.
To be sure, Shih’s attentiveness to the complexity of the socio-political situation of
Chinese modernity is an important intervention in literary studies that make too facile a distinction between Leftist utilitarian and humanist literature. However, her focus on national specificity (of both China and of the imperial nation-states that constitute its fragmentation) becomes problematic when we turn to the manner in which China was simultaneously in the process of being discursively constructed in the late 19th and early 20th century, and the co- determinate relationship between nationalization and globalization that post-colonial theorists and Marxist thinkers have brought to our attention. The “complexity” of China is not so much an indication of its particular “semi-colonial” situation as it is of the complexity of post-coloniality
8 Ibid., 36. Beauchemin 9 as a global problematic. Similar to other forms of nationalization movements in post-colonial countries that did not emphasize resistance towards capitalist imperialism, any kind of
“democracy” or public form of participation was reserved primarily for the elite. The very notion of China as a nation-state was being constructed and contested in conjunction with (and not simply in opposition to) both the restructuring force of globalization and the imperial interests that sought to determine the form of this new structure.
Prasenjit Duara’s Rescuing History from the Nation (which Shih refers to in her discussion of semi-colonial bifurcation) took an important step towards challenging national essentialism and singular totalizing narratives that frame much of Chinese historiography. Each chapter excavates different lineages of political thought and national imagination (local histories) that were resistant to the one (State History) that came to eventually be actualized in the political reforms of the Nationalists, and then Communist government. The paradox that all forms of nationalism had to contend with was a temporal historical one: how could the “nation” be a novel mode of social formation, while also needing to glorify the ancient roots of this community?9
This manifested in various ways. For example, Duara describes how geming 革命, which used to mean “to deprive a ruler of the mandate of heaven of rule,” returned from Japan as the term used for “modern revolution.” As both a neologism for modern revolution and signifier tied to
Confucian justifications for rebellion, its proto-democratic potential was mobilized by the
Zhejiang revolutionary Tao Chengzhang as a principle for unifying dispersed secret societies.10
Duara finds another legitimating strategy in one of Tao’s revolutionary texts in social
9 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History From The Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), 29. 10 Ibid., 125-128. Beauchemin 10
Darwinism.11 With examples such as these, Duara shows how competing “nationalisms” (or what he calls lineages of “discent”) sought to unite disparate groups of people, and were operating outside of and against the New Policy reforms and state efforts at “self- transformation,” often intermixing different political theories in response to local socio- economic conditions. “China” and what it would have meant to be Chinese is thus shown not only to be a fragmented body, but a polyvocal and multifaceted concept – one that registers locally the asymmetries of globalization.
While one of the goals of this thesis is to steer away from the primacy of representational and semiotic-based approaches, what I find important in Duara’s analyses is that the fragmentary nature of modernization is not simply one of rivalry between ideologies indexed to different nation-states, but of conflicting ideas that all drew in some way or another from philosophies and intellectual lineages from Europe which were brought into relation with the milieus of different
Chinese political theorists and their concern with local social conditions. These strategic appropriations evince the contested nature of nation-states - what constitutes its unity, how this unity should be achieved - rather than reducing them to sites of reference or containers for particular ideologies from the outset. Furthermore, the manner in which “History” came to overdetermine and efface these multiple imaginations is indicative of the need to also attend to the globalizing force(s) at play in restructuring modes of social organi zation – and hence to questions of capitalism and technology.12
11 Ibid., 129. 12 In this sense, I am in agreement with Rebecca Karl in her critique of Duara’s conflation of “universal” and “global,” that functions to elevate narratives of “the nation” at the expense of attending to the determining role of globalization and the expansion of capitalism in the “modern global historical problematic of nationalism.” See Rebecca E. Karl, Staging The World: Chinese Nationalism At The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 19-21. Beauchemin 11
One of the foremost thinkers of the relationship between globalization and nationalism, and their further implication in concepts such as “cosmopolitanism,” who influences my own approach to these questions is Pheng Cheah. For Cheah, we cannot understand the normative force of nationalism without attending to uneven globalization, and, relatedly, we cannot understand post-colonial cosmopolitanism without understanding the particular kind of solidarity that post-colonial nationalisms constitute. Particularly insightful is his observation that prior to the establishment of the hyphen between nation and state, cosmopolitanism and European nationalism were indistinguishable.13 He therefore takes Sun Yat-sen’s republican nationalism and the Maoist proletarian nation as two examples of “cosmo-nationalism” even as they tended towards being coupled with and bound by the state. In this regard, distinctions such as ones between “political imperialism” and “cultural imperialism” become rather obsolete, since both refer to forms that nationalization takes prior to and yet tending towards being coupled with the state. Rebecca Karl has pointed to a similar false opposition that persists in academic approached to modern China, manifested in the generally accepted paradigm of bifurcation between
“political efforts to ‘save the nation [state]’ (jiuguo) and ‘enlightenment’ (qimeng).”14 Duara,
Cheah, and Karl thus effectively turn our attention regarding the problem of modernity away from the one-way “global” (“Western” and “Japanese”) influence on the “local” (loose and multiple solidarities “in” China), and away from the universal/particular division, towards the manner in which local solidarities were/are already caught up in the narratives and forces of globalization as a means of extending and institutionalizing power (in the nation-state form).
Although my aim is to posit the problem of “globalization” in terms of radio’s platformativity – as an assemblage in the making - and thus away from semiotic and representational approaches
13 Pheng Cheah, “Cosmopolitanism,” Theory, Culture & Society, 23(2-3), (2006), 489. 14 Karl, Staging The World, 23. Beauchemin 12 to modernity, this refiguring of globalization presented here serves as an important basis for my thinking of the negotiation that takes place between nation and state, and how this was inflected by a confrontation with imperial powers.
If the nation-state is a contested site of multiple narratives, and post-colonialist nationalisms are a form of cosmopolitan solidarity responsive to the uneven extension of global power, then what exactly constitutes this “unevenness” and by what means does it acquire a globalizing force? For Hardt and Negri, it is precisely this question of distribution of power that is at stake in understanding imperial sovereignty. The incessant accumulation and circulation of money and the rise of communication networks are particularly emphasized for their deterritorializing and reterritorializing operations.15 The need for capital to constantly find new
“noncapitalist” environments to exploit and transform happens in conjunction with the latter being absorbed into an integrated organic body – one which finds its mode of production and distribution in the rise of communication and transportation infrastructures. Hence, the history of globalization cannot be told without the history of telecommunications and the global circuitry that allowed for an increase in the speed and efficiency of commodity circulation. It is not surprising in this regard that besides entertainment and educational programs, reports on market conditions and business-related information were also popular radio broadcast programs in the
1930s. Not only was radio a commodity amongst others (radio sets, radio entertainment) but it was also the medium of the “globe” as such – a container caught between the surface of the earth and the ionospheric layer of the atmosphere that allows for the immediate and wireless sending of “data” to and from any abstract “point” within it.16
15 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000), 32. 16 Peter Sloterdijk, Inside the World Interior of Capital: For a Philosophical Theory of Globalization, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 9-10. Sloterdijk here gives his account of electronic globalization as the circulation of radio Beauchemin 13
Particularly interesting for me, and which will partially serve as a means for thinking the history of radio during the Republican Era is Hardt and Negri’s description of the global information infrastructure as “the combination of a democratic mechanism and an oligopolistic mechanism, which operate along different models of network systems.”17 Whereas the network model of the Internet, for example, is modeled on the channeling and point-to-point mode of operation of telephone networks and the channels and passageways of canals and roads, radio broadcasting operates on a completely different logic of one-to-potentially infinite. I would argue, however, that Hardt and Negri jump too abruptly to the conclusion that radio broadcasting is therefore inherently oligopolistic (as opposed to the democratic and anarchic potentiality of the
Internet), for it is precisely the primarily aleatory relation of the signal to its point(s) of reception that becomes problematic for the apparatuses of capture (state law, commercial radio industry, industrial designers, etc.), and which destabilizes attempts at figuring it alongside other communication and transportation media. Rather than treat point-to-point technology as a rupture with “old” media (radio broadcast), a genealogical approach seeks to understand their co- evalness as a series of disjunctions and intertwinements. The socio-signaletic is always caught in a struggle between the two tendencies of domestication and flight, neither of which every realizes itself – there is no pure deterritorialization or territorializing solution.
Fixing the Symbolic Center – Circuits and Networks
With Hardt and Negri, we arrived at the intersection of two distinct processes that nonetheless cannot be understood without their complicity with the process of globalization (and the nation-state form of sovereignty coextensive with it) – commodity flows and
signals within the planet’s “atmospheric casing” in relation to globalization’s two preceding forms, cosmic-uranian and terrestrial. 17 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 298-299. Beauchemin 14 telecommunications. While we have shown that theories of modernity in China studies have tended to ignore this constitutive dimension of nationalism, and the “cosmopolitanism” already embedded in nationalist solidarity, I wish to now turn to the problems of what is at stake in thinking the “global” from the perspective of infrastructure and media studies. The goal here is not to simply critique the concept of the “globe” and “globalization,” but to offer a pragmatic way out of the intellectual binds of a prevailing image of global infrastructure.
The history of the intertwinement of capitalism and communication (including transportation) infrastructure is at the heart of Armand Mattelart’s project, which traces multiple lineages of “communication” as they serve the interests of expanding and making more efficient the circuits of commodity circulation. Mattelart describes the notion of “communication” that he is interested in in The Invention of Communication: “Communication will be understood here from a wider viewpoint, encompassing the multiple circuits of exchange and circulation of goods, people, messages. This definition simultaneously covers avenues of communication, networks of long distance transmission, and the means of symbolic exchange, such as world fairs, high culture, religion, language, and of course the media.”18 The key word here is
“circuits,” particularly as these circuits are all historized through European discourses, representations, and actualizations into real infrastructures meant to sustain and accelerate commodity circulation. As part of the ever expansive global circuit, radio participates as a means of rapidly sending and receiving information at a distance, by connecting different metropolitan centers to each other, and of course, as a media for symbolic exchange and consumption.
However, if Hardt and Negri jumped too quickly to “oligopoly” in order to understand information networks, this circuit theory of communications could only make sense of radio as a
18 Armand Mattelart, The Invention of Communication, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), xiv. Beauchemin 15 medium of transmission – as wireless telegraphy and telephony. The problem with the former case is that radio is conceived solely in terms of a small number of corporate and state monopolies, in the latter, there is the mistake of subsuming radio waves to the logic of point-to- point infrastructures.
This history of circulation happening across built and managed channels found its theoretical continuation in the “post-industrial” or “network” society that Manuel Castells observes in the rise of the electronics industry in the 1970s-80s, and in which “Asia” finally appears in the manifestation of China, Japan, and the “four Asian Tigers”: South Korea,
Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. He describes how government subsidies and strategic investments in IT and Research and Development enterprises were the means by which these four countries were able to enter into the league of economically and technologically advanced nation-states. Flexibility and a certain degree of decentralization are emphasized as the qualities of business networking that are found nascent in these national cultures and which found their ripe awakening with the rise of IT network logic with which they were more conducive.19 This late arrival of “Asia” in Castells’ analysis of the history of global networks is significant, for we can easily see just how complacent diachronic schemas of old/new media are with the simultaneous maintenance of non-European others as always temporally late.20
Castells describes the dichotomized experience between two tendencies of being plugged into the network and being outside of it: “[Experience] follows a structural schizophrenia between two spatial logics that threatens to break down communication channels in society. The dominant tendency is toward a horizon of networked, ahistorical space of flows, aiming at
19 Manuel Castells, The Rise of The Network Society, (Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 188-215. 20 It also seems predicated on two Orientalist assumptions that he brings together: a tie to ancestral family values and an inherent technological aptitude. Beauchemin 16 imposing its logic over scattered, segmented places, increasingly unrelated to each other, less and less able to share cultural codes.”21 He finishes the paragraph with “unless cultural and physical bridges are deliberately built between these two forms of space, we may be heading toward life in parallel universes whose times cannot meet because they are warped into different dimensions of social hyperspace.”22 While Castells is clearly attempting to address questions of global unevenness and inequality that are due to the increasing hold that IT networks have taken over production in our daily lives, I take his normative appeals to building “communication channels” and “physical bridges” as indicative of a particular form of desired communication that should not be taken for granted, and critically examined for its potential complacency in subordinating others to the time of the networked world.23 The concept of “networks” and its attempt to capture all forms of interaction between telecommunications and information technology, and the humans who interact with them, is itself engaged in a project to subordinate communication to a one-to-one, node-to-node, channeling and trafficking model. From the outset, management of flows and the ability to see space from the point of view of an overseer from the highest point available is the primary criterion for judging the development of new social reconfigurations engendered by revolutions in electronic communications technology.
I am not denying the significance of this image as it has taken a hold in the history of techno-human evolution; both Mattelart and Castells provide us with a perhaps necessary appendage to the history of globalization that accounts for the material means by which the circulation necessary for the expansion of capital was possible. They are, in a sense, engaging
21 Ibid., 428. 22 Ibid. 23 Even when inequality and unevenness are addressed by Castells, it is always in terms of the gap between being connected to the global network and being situated outside of it without access. Therefore the unevenness constitutive of the “networks” themselves are not as obvious. Beauchemin 17 with what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “the production of distribution” insofar as they take these circuits and networks as productive in their own right. This in turn offers a way out of seeing globalization solely in terms of narratives and concepts, and rather as a material process.
Castells’ rather dry sociological and statistical methods does not prevent him from recognizing the productive power of networks, how they redetermine cultural and subcultural formations and even spatial and temporal relations to each other. However, following John Durham Peters, I would say that networking as Castell’s imagines it has at its core the dialogue model of communication that has dangerously come to subsume most discussions of democratic and social organization. Peters himself opposes dialogue to dissemination and one-to-many diffusion – suggesting that the latter is potentially more effective as a communicative model in its respect for boundaries.24 Networks take the node-to-node relation as more significant than what in fact happens at those nodes and what precedes their coming-into-relation - when the former is acknowledged, the media-termini simply become manifestations of the network’s cosmopolitan logic itself (the production of new communities and identities). Asymmetry is conceived of in terms of access to the networking infrastructures (and to the one Network), without attending to the asymmetries operative in the technological, techno-human and socio-technological assemblages themselves.
What is further implicit in both Mattelart and Castell’s studies of the infrastructures of globalization is the existence of Europe as the primary center from which emanates the circuits by which capital is to flow, and that it is only when countries accepted the need for these specific
24 One example of this is teaching: While seminar conversations might lead to the fruitful exchange of ideas, they also tend toward individual expression for expression’s sake “this is that I know!” The teaching format establishes a relation in which the majority of participants are engaged in attentive learning, the wider interval between speaker and listener creating a temporal gap that is pedagogically conducive in a way conversation can never be. See John Durham Peters, Speaking Into The Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 66. This is not to say that dialogue does not have its own Beauchemin 18 infrastructures to modernize (i.e. become a member of the global or international network of nation-states), that they become relevant within a history of globalization. Furthermore, these conclusions are grounded on a presumption that the infrastructures important for thinking globalization are point-to-point and channeling technologies, as well as their primarily quantitative relations to speed and efficiency in managing traffic between centers of production.
As mentioned above, we should be careful with how theorizations of media history are complicit in reifying historically problematic teleological frameworks, as well as the manner in which
“culture” becomes immediately indexed to the particularity of nation-states. In a sense, the
“materiality” of circuits and networks are still a bit too representational, symbolically indexed to
Europe and imagined mostly as point-to-point technologies.
The Space of Radio - Distribution, Assemblage, and Platformativity
Distribution seems to offer a way to both account for globalization in thinking post- colonial modernization and nationalization, as well as in rethinking the Eurocentric bias of
“globalization” as a center-to-periphery diffusion model based on the expansion of a homogenizing global circuit and interconnected network. Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of distribution as always the production of distribution, further forces us to reconsider the
“extension” of media infrastructures – their bearing on all relations of production, distribution, and consumption - and the contingent processes they connect with as an always open system.
Rather than seeing distribution networks as tending towards homogenization and unity, Guattari and Deleuze employ the concept of “disjunctive synthesis” to attend to the “inclusive disjunction that carries out the synthesis itself in drifting from one term to another and following the distance Beauchemin 19 between the terms.”25 The fact that disparate elements are brought into relation with one another should not distract us from the fact that the “relation” itself relies on this disparateness, differentiating itself within it. There is no totalizing structure that does not integrate itself differentially in its local actualizations. It is this non-totalizing unity that both brings together while holding apart, and that attends to differentiations in-the-making that I am referring to as assemblage.26 Here, I am taking the idea of media infrastructure as a contingent assemblage in the making, and not as primarily indexed to any symbolic center or representational form, as my point of departure for thinking about radio and its negotiation with various phases of techno- human capture as constitutive of the production of “Chinese modernity,” and what escapes and is enveloped within it. There is no national essence or signaletic substance that precedes and transcends their various actualizations, but rather always assemblages in the making: signaletic arsenals, commercial broadcasts, amateur radio clubs, telecommunication cartels, electromagnetic regulatory bodies, resonating domestic interiors, art-deco receiving sets, etc.
Weihong Bao’s genealogy of film as a “fiery medium” in early 20th century China engages with the problematic of the production of a nationally specific (or multiple nationally specific) film aesthetics that situates its emergence on the level of intermediality and affect, and therefore coeval with similar technologies and aesthetics being experimented with in the United
States and Europe. Furthermore, rather than reduce her own problematic to that of nationalization, Bao points us towards multiple different lineages within which film production and reception were being rethought – in relation to the tele-presence of radio and the
25 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 77. 26 This definition is more or less what Manuel Delanda works with in developing the concept in his book Assemblage Theory, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), although I take the more biologically- oriented concepts of transindividuation and differentiation as more interesting for thinking assemblage, whereas it seems Delanda’s concern is mostly on the mathematical. Beauchemin 20 phenomenology of glass for example.27 In fact, it is the recurring implication in Bao’s book that discourses on radio technology were influential in the thinking of film aesthetics and the production of “spectatorial resonance” that serves as one of my own lines of inquiry into the intersection of radio technologies with other assemblages. Importantly here, is how whenever a
“nationalist aesthetic” does emerge, it is always as a particular actualization of aesthetic forms long in the making. Bao’s genealogical approach shares with assemblage theory the emphasis on contingent encounter of otherwise held apart lineages and structures. Both genealogy and assemblage pose a veritable challenge to theoretical attempts to keep separate the political and cultural, and the nationalist and cosmopolitan as described above. While national mobilization was often of necessity a matter of concern for directors and film studios at the time, Bao powerfully demonstrates how theories of perception and film spectatorship were at the heart of contemporary discussions in film journals in the first half of the 20th century. Emergent aesthetic forms, were, in turn, mobilized by often very different agendas.
An obvious inspiration for taking distribution as a starting point for thinking across area studies and media studies, as well to think the human and social experience as being caught up in a co-evolving mingling with different non-human actors is Thomas Lamarre’s The Anime
Ecology. One illustrative passage regarding the manner in which broadcasting networks are already the actualization of various modes of spatialization and capture of the signaletic is
Lamarre’s discussion of TV segmentation. Allocation of frequencies to different stations, interspersing advertisements within programs, and segmenting the daily schedules according to expectations of who will be at home at a given time all come to be characteristic of the
27 Weihong Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 111, 197-261. Beauchemin 21 broadcasting industry – but both with regards to the technical objects and the humans who are brought into relation with them, these segmentations are contingent on a politics of domestication, as well as productive of unpredictable effects that are captured by neither their subordination to the nation as the symbolic center nor the individual stations’ intentions or calculations. As Lamarre notes, “part of the scandal of television was from the outset its ability to establish multiple sovereign centers and enclosures within the family. As soon as one TV set per household makes the family appear to be a seemingly solid and stable ground for television, the family threatens to break up and disperse.”28 Counter-intuitively, it is the very model of
“stability” as actualized in TV segmentation that came to produce further segmentation (and more chaos) in the family structure.
Both Bao and Lamarre show how an attention to media as a techno-human problematic necessitates a confrontation with the aforementioned nationalization-globalization problematic – for if technological systems are constitutive of what we call globalization, and appropriations of these globalizing instruments are at the basis of reconfiguring new solidarities (what Cheah refers to as nationalist cosmopolitanisms), then the entire notion of “national specificity” as an unconscious cultural process becomes obsolete. We see rather that the attribution of
“Chineseness” or “Japaneseness” to media platforms is more of a discursive strategy, and that, similar to the employment of “West” and “East” as analytical categories, always fails to address what is happening on the level of actual material configurations of planes of sociability. The use of unempirical and ideologically suspect categories to pre-determine the “contexts” one is working within methodologically fails to address both the uneven circulation of capital and the
28 Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 136. Beauchemin 22 molecular forces at work in the individuation process of these categorical “wholes.” I therefore take up both Bao and Lamarre’s trajectory that take techno-human individuation as constitutive of the perceptual ecologies we are caught up in in my own attempt to think through radio’s co- evolution with human politics of capture and regulation.
So how does radio come to figure significantly in all of this? As Weihong Bao has shown, lineages of film and TV production and reception were largely influenced by the new possibilities of wireless transmission of sound. However, perhaps more importantly here is that ever since radio’s invention and multiple initial uses from atmospheric exploration to telepathy experimentation, it has never really disappeared.29 As Xiao Liu describes, bo (information- carrying waves) was at the heart of post-Mao imaginations of information, and a constitutive element in broader genealogies of the “digital” that get effaced when old/new media binaries are overstated. Liu demonstrates how the image of wireless transmission as “old” when combined with the continued relegation of non-Western countries to a belated position, always needing to catch up, has led to historicized conceptions of the digital that ignore its enmeshment within particular socioeconomic practices.30 Hence, my thinking of radio’s early history during the
Republican era should not simply be an attempt at “media archaeology”, unearthing the history of an “old media” and its role in “the past,” but rather a turn towards technological and techno- human assemblages that would point to otherwise concealed connections with seemingly disparate and foreign media forms both contemporaneous with it (ex. early film practices) and today (ex. information technology and “the digital“).
29 For a thought-provoking examination of the history of radio’s phenomenological reconfiguration of what it means to “communicate” as a tension and negotiation between dialogue and dissemination see John Durham Peters, Speaking Into The Air, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999). 30 Xiao Liu, “Magic Waves, Extrasensory Powers, and Nonstop Instantaneity: Imagining the Digital Beyond Digits,” Grey Room 63, Spring, (2016), 44-46. Beauchemin 23
By thinking of radio from the perspective of assemblage, I choose not to begin with radio as a pre-given concept or concrete system, but rather as a process of contingent relations between technical components and human activity. How, at certain points, radio crystallizes into a particular set of habits and becomes a form of participation in a different social space is approached from the perspective of its individuating as a particular techno-social problematic. In a manner similar to Adrian Mackenzie’s radical empiricist approach to wirelessness, I think radio as a bundle of tendencies that are always at tension with one another, manifesting in their re- configuration of habits and production of interspatial entry and exit points.31 The space of radio that is both produced by and productive of new modes of interaction and communication is always formed at the interstice of these technical and techno-social negotiations. It is the space that radio comes to encompass in signaling disparate social, political, economic, and technological orders that I will tentatively refer to as its platformative dimension. From the institutionalized forms of commercial and state radio in the 1920s-40s, to forms of covert message transmission operating across them, to the emergence of the home as a resonant interior that becomes its own theme resonating within itself in the form of radio dramas and operas about the family, to the receiving set as a site of inter-machinic perceptual affordances, radio’s multiple socio-signaletic individuations point to tensions and negotiations that resolve themselves into quasi-spatial32 modes of sociability.
31 By attending to the termini of wireless infrastructure, Mackenzie remarkably highlights the relationship between the electromagnetic spectrum and humans that obtains at the sites of interaction (usually platforms). This significantly brings to the fore the perceptual and structural relationships that are not fully accounted for when reduced to either one of those elements. See Adrian Mackenzie, Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in Network Culture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2010). 32 By “quasi-spatial,” I intend to register both the production of a lived space on the one hand (that space one enters when tuning in, or hen broadcasting live for example) and the fact that this extensive space is always also the intensity that produces it (energy, frequency, sound). The space is always in-the-making, caught in the midst of two axes of extensity and intensity. Beauchemin 24
In the first chapter, I am interested in the space produced by the territorial distribution of stations and its co-determination with the logic of signals (their wave-length, frequency, and strength of transmission). This is also where I engage with questions of infrastructure (although the entire thesis, inflected by the concept of “platform,” is technically about the socio- technological infrastructure that radio assembles). One of the difficulties with thinking of the geopolitical configuration of the Republican Era, is the dispersion of political actors and centers of production. This is not simply a problem of fragmentation of demarcated spaces, but of the new form of politics that radio allows for as a proliferation of transmission-centers. The soviets
苏区 (later Liberation Zones 解放区) of the Communist Party were spread across and between existing territorial claims made by the Nationalists, whose own stations were in turn meant to indicate the extension of their own spaces of administration. Furthermore, European, American, and Japanese imperial and colonial extraterritorial interests not only marked terrestrial space, but signaletic space as well. The space produced between station and receiver, signal and antennae, was productive of new strategies of communication and territorial representation. From Sun Yat- sen’s declaration that radio would be an indispensable tool for unifying the Chinese people to the
Beiyang warlord and then Nationalist government’s stipulations regarding unregistered receiving sets and transmitting equipment, we can observe the modern anxieties produced by this new space of social participation.
Primarily, this chapter is an attempt to give an account of the situation of radio from around the late-1910s to the end of the 1940s, but with special attention to its institutionalization, whether as a state, commercial, or underground industry. I first describe how the emergence of state radio industry in the early 1920s manifested itself at the conjunction of capitalist and imperialist interests that integrated technical components into their assembling drive. An Beauchemin 25 international radio equipment cartel consisting of Telefunken, RCA, Marconi Company, and
Société Française Radio-Electrique all had a foothold in the “Chinese” market, which consisted of warlords, entrepreneurs, government administration bodies, and amateur radio enthusiasts.
Although initially taken as a primarily point-to-point means of transmission, the rise of commercial sound broadcasting forced the Beiyang government and later the Nationalist Party into adopting its own broadcasting stations and regulatory bodies. This led to the emergence of a distribution of plural broadcasting centers and the differential integrations of new normative standards in various emergent radio programmes. Appropriating the increasing stability that frequencies were acquiring in their various encodings that indexed them to particular station call signs and public services, the Communist party used a radio equipment factory and broadcasting station as a shield to develop its underground radio network. The stories of the early days of the
Communist party’s underground radio are rife with descriptions of salvaging the equipment of defeated enemy bases and assembling them in crude forms for the sake of establishing a
“station,” which simply referred to a transmitter of electromagnetic waves, with at least a keying device. The formation of a plurality of centers tuned into a shared frequency was not only productive of a new spatial logic, but of the new need to maintain it and insure its strength and durability. Questions of density also become relevant. For example, commercial radio had its own politics of space in the need to allocate different frequencies within the dense space of
Shanghai, which, as an increasingly saturated container of radio wave bands, engendered a combination of increased justification for state intervention and a creative means of competition.
Radio broadcasting here, as in America, was often a means of publicity for radio equipment or for other media (stage performance, film, gramophone discs, etc.). Thus, the “territory” of radio is not primarily the mapped demarcations of areas of the earth that transmitters and receivers Beauchemin 26 occupy, but more importantly the distribution of signaletic spaces and what happens between and across them in their co-individuation as intra-machinic forces.
In the second chapter, I deal with what should already start to feel like a pressing question in the first – language. And, in line with my approach to radio as a platform, how voices, microphones, speakers, and ears were being assembled in negotiation with not only explicit linguistic reforms, but, and perhaps more significantly, with the radiating-sounding technical apparatus called radio. Much has been written on the language reforms during the
Republican period, but they mostly focus on the vernacularization movement, which was essentially a reform of the written language. A look at commentaries on radio programme production and the techniques of speaking into a microphone and listening to the receiver indicate a transformation of speech into a practice that brought the body into an increasingly specialized and intimate relationship with vacuum tubes, modulators, and speakers.33 Not only does this chapter delve into the relationship between the station and the regional space covered by its range, but how this assembled with the electromagnetic inflection of sound as refined noise, to produce what would become the “official voice” – as one semiotic machine amongst others. Hence, my engagement with the radiophonic voice and its corresponding technologies of speaking and listening will engage with Kittler’s theory of media technology’s “positive technological effects” and Lefebvre’s analysis of the production of space to understand what is happening to language on the level of its signaletically modulated/demodulated permutations.
33 See Zhao Yuanren 赵元任, “Guangbo xuzhi” 广播须知 [Notes on Broadcasting], Guangbo zhoubao 广播周报 [Broadcast Weekly Publication], Issue 135, May 1 1937, reprinted in Zhao Yuming, 赵玉明, “Zhongguo xiandai guangbo shiliao xuanbian” 中国现代广播史料选编 [A Collection of Sources on Chinese Modern Broadcasting], Shantou: Shantou daxue chubanshe 汕头大学出版社 [Shantou University Press], 2007, p. 86-97. Beauchemin 27
Since I am treating the officiality of the voice as a signaletico-human machine that was generated at some point in time – as an event – I stray from the tendency to treat the voice from the box as having a kind of primordial symbolic aura. Radio historians too often, in order to invoke the power of radio in reshaping national subjectivity, describe the moment the president or emperor spoke to the people across the country. Whether Hirohito, Stalin, Mao, or Hitler, the microphone-receiver set is characterized by its power to bring their authorial presence to bear on the immediacy of everyday life, truly engendering the nation as a resonating container. By attending to the officiality of the voice as a process determined by techno-human technologies that had to be learnt and practiced, I seek to displace the univocal aura to the machinic plane, in order to also account for how the same stuff of the official voice had to be negotiated with for the transmediation of radio dramas and opera. The family, as one of the main sites of radio listening, was simultaneously articulated as a central thematic to these radio performances. Thus the voice of the family had to play with the stuff of the official’s mouth – unruly frequencies and noise - to differentiate itself from it, even as it had the prerogatives of the nation-state as its motivating drive. This provides a way to rethink the disdain that so many commentators (that I have read so far) had toward the “decadent” and “vulgar” tastes that local shanghai opera (popularized as shenqu 申曲 by then) encouraged.34 Shenqu’s integration of the radiophonic with stock
34 For example, in Xu Zhuodai’s analysis of the situation of radio in Shanghai in 1937, he devotes much of his discussion to how the broadcast of local opera (申曲, which incorporates elements from tanhuang 弹簧 and bentan 本弹) and its vulgar and untasteful language, appealed to the lower social stratum who would often stand near shops to listen to the radio. In contrast, pinghua 评话 and tanci 弹词 were generally regarded by the “Leftists” as part of the decadent and “high-brow” culture along with foreign classical music and the burgeoning celebrity culture. See Xu Zhuodai 徐卓呆, “Wuxiandian boyin” 无线电波音 [Radio Broadcasting]. “Shehui jiaoyu xiao congshu” 社会教育小丛书 [Social Education Short Book Series], “Shangwu yinshuguan faxing” 商务印书馆发 行 [Commercial Press], 1937, 18-19. This criticism continues to inform contemporary Chinese state Marxist historiography. See for example Zhao Yuming 赵玉明 & Yang Chunrong 杨春荣, Zhongguo jiefang qu guangbo shi 中国解放区广播史 [Broadcast History of China’s Liberation Zones], Beijing: Zhongguo guangbo dianshi chubanshe 中国广播电视出版社 [China Radio and Television Press], 1991, 18. Beauchemin 28 improvisations and extreme melisma could only subvert the officiality of the voice that located its hegemonic status in the same technical apparatus. One could imagine the sound that high- pitch opera tones would produce in conjunction with the sensitivity of the tuning instruments, breeching a threshold of demodulation. From the perspective of quwei 趣味 (taste), Shanghai opera must have struck a nerve with the elites’ desire to see China as a modern and civilized nation. Shenqu would thus become music unassimilable to the repertoire of national music, which brought together a mixture “folk” sounds with European classical music, in order to modernize the “backwardness and behindness” of the Chinese masses.35 All of this can be observed taking place on the level of the unpredictability of radio-space and the reterritorialization of the Shenqu performance with it. The family was thus caught between two poles – on the one hand, it was figured as the ideal enclosure for inculcating new common sense knowledge (通俗) and childhood education. On the other hand, it was being voiced by and repeated within itself by linguistic forms that subverted the officiality of the state’s voice.
Throughout the thesis, one of my main intentions is to not treat the “political” and
“cultural” as independent or autonomous spheres, but as constantly overlapping and interpenetrating. I get the sense that these spheres continue to be kept apart in certain academic divisions. Historians will talk about political parties, territorial divisions, and the military and economic events of importance, while cultural and literary studies tend toward a derision of these as components of nationalist and utilitarian ideas. It seems to me that radio - its production of space, techno-human affordances, and “platformativity” – offers a kind of hinge that allows us to
35 Andrew Jones has described the influence of European enlightenment rhetoric on pro-modernization musical reforms. See, for example, his discussion of Xiao Youmei’s conception of music as a means to program the soul in Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in The Chinese Jazz Age, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 41-48. Beauchemin 29 observe where these two (cultural and political) concerns are always held together. Commercial and party radio need to negotiate with the new politics of signaletic space, the radiophonic or
(de)modulated voice is of concern for both the institutionalization of language and radio dramas and operas, and the interface of the radio receiving set is itself situated at the intersection of aesthetic and socioeconomic determinations. Radio technology, as one element of the modernization and urbanization of space, was experienced and related to as a genuine transversal force.
Finally, the emphasis on the platformativity of radio as a means of engaging with it as a global problematic might bring to mind Rebecca Karl’s work on re-spatialization and Chinese nationalism. For Karl, a significant rupture in Chinese intellectual thought happened at the end of the 20th century via an increasing awareness of the effects of Euro-American imperialism in
Hawaii, Philippines, and Africa and Japan’s increasing hegemony, registered in the discursive transformations amongst intellectual reformers of the time.36 In line with Cheah’s insights on nationalism as cosmopolitan solidarity responding to the colonial situation and the uneven international division of labor, Karl pushes beyond the particularity of China’s predicament
(Shih) and the narrative construction of the nation (Duara), towards the historical determination of the nation-state form as a global and post-colonial problematic. Methodologically, however, the focus on imperial capitalism and globalization as re-figuring China on the new “world stage,” is thought of primarily in terms of conceptual determinations and the modern “historical” topos that informed it. It is this approach that leads to a reification of the nation-state’s formation as the
36 This is a significant intervention in the tendency to view “Chinese modernity” solely in terms of the bourgeois enlightenment discourse at the heart of the attempt to install a national republic / democracy, which was still largely uncritiqued at the time it was published (2002). It also pre-figures the eventual adoption of Marxist theory a few decades later, while demonstrating how colonial projects in Africa and “the Pacific” inflected the urgency with which reformers were thinking of the relation between the state and the people. Beauchemin 30 central process of concern, and is further implicated in how the emergent coloniality of space becomes a constitutive part of “Chinese consciousness.”37 So while Karl’s work is influential in framing my thoughts on modernity as a kind of re-spatialization and reterritorialization, I think that looking at globalization from the angle of its technologies offers a way out of the obsessive bind to the nation-state, while nonetheless accounting for its production. By drawing on Pheng
Cheah’s concern with the hyphen holding together nation and state as a historical, global, and
(post-)colonial problematic, I also take the concept of “platformativity” as a pragmatic and hopefully creative way to think through the different emergent forms and affects of communication “happening in-between.” In this sense, the feeling of radio connectivity
(infrastructure) takes primacy over the concept(s) of nationalism, and a genealogy of radio- human individuation (assemblage) is of more concern than the historical determination of the nation-state. These are of course entangled concerns, but if we begin with historical determination as the formation and productivity of concepts, we lose the means by which to account for assemblages and individuating forces that are operative outside of, beneath and between representations of national solidarity.38 The aberration that radio introduces into our perception-environments (and therefore the world) must attend to the differential intensities and
37 “It was this world stage that became the literal and metaphorical place and space from which global unevenness and China came to be discursively repositioned, note merely as negative spaces of ‘lack’ and ‘incompletion,' but as positive spaces for an ongoing project of dynamic sociopolitical and cultural transformation.” Karl, Staging The World, 17. And on p. 151: “China became thinkable as specifically national at the same time as, and only when, China became consciously worldly.” 38 This is the Deleuzian impulse that I enact throughout the thesis, that will allow me to navigate between registers of the social, technological, political, and economic. See, for example, Deleuze’s description of nomadic distribution: “such a distribution is demonic rather than divine, since it is a peculiarity of demons to operate in the intervals between the gods’ fields of action, as it is to leap over the barriers or the enclosures, thereby confounding the boundaries between properties,” in Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1994), 37. Beauchemin 31 their multiple explications as both constitutive of and operating across and against the technologies and processes characteristic of modernity and the globalization of everyday life.
Beauchemin 32
CHAPTER ONE – Taming the Signal: The Production of Signaletic Space in Early 20th Century China
The image of early 20th century history of China is frequently approached as a narrative of a gradual unification through nation-building projects, both in the increasing hold of the state, and the widespread diffusion of nationalist and patriotic cultural production. Such a vision is often predicated on an already existing – even if disintegrated and fragmented – “Chinese” national culture. In Fairbank’s account, which remains an influential one in both obvious and subtle ways, foreign influences on Chinese history always needed to be filtered through and fashioned by existing Chinese elements. One of the most prominent amongst these was the
Chinese language, and the Sinicization of Western concepts that led to a disavowal of their “real” origins.39 With the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911-12, China lost its centralizing hold on the nation, and would have to re-find its sense of unity in the appropriation of Western ideas and technology, using these to resolve the conflicts between warlords, compete with the foreign imperial powers in its treaty ports, resist Japanese encroachment, and to reform traditional and
“backwards” Chinese practices.
This history of nationalization through Western civilizing ideologies carries with it an image of a national cultural repository (China/tradition) that would refashion itself along the lines of the global nation-state model of sovereignty (the West/modernity). The periodization of
Chinese historiography is complicit with this dichotomization: 1911-1949 marks the “Republican
Era,” when China gradually adopted Western democracy, progressive cultural attitudes and scientific thinking, and national patriotism. Recent scholarship on this time period has also
39 Fairbank, John K. “Maritime and Continental in China’s History,” The Cambridge History of China: Volume 12 Republican China 1912—1949, Part 1, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1-27. Beauchemin 33 brought to our attention the fact that these processes involved the simultaneous production of ethno-nationalist racial schemas and the adoption of (if not resistance to) national imperialist projects. If the Fairbankian schema takes the “old China” centered on imperial dynastic power as a point of reference for “traditional Chinese culture,” then the production of “new China” during the Republican era is displaced to the urban milieu of Shanghai, and especially the
“Westernized” ideas of Chinese students returning from their studies abroad (especially in
America).40 Whether from the perspective of imperial dynastic power or the power of Western ideology, however, the space of China found its miraculation in the production and circulation of texts of the elite and literate classes. For Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai was marked by something that approached the “civil society” model of communication and political organization, in which rational and sympathetic discourse in new urban locales could form the contours of a modern
Chinese subjectivity.41
When media technologies enter into such a framework, they are thus immediately subordinated to this history of progressive nationalization and circumscribed to emergent discursive fields. There is a fascination directed towards the national origins of technological artifacts, and with the “Chinese” domestication of them for their own political and cultural desires. The “nation” (China), thus becomes an imagined a priori space within which things and events acquire their significance. The means of judging technological and social modes of organization in terms of their success or failure follows from this assumption, attributing to the particulars within the generality of national space a necessarily shared telos and intentionality.
40 For an excellent study of early 20th century Chinese students studying in America, see Ye, Weili, Seeking Modernity in China’s Name: Chinese Students in the United States, 1900-1927, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). 41 See Lee, Leo Ou-fan, Shanghai Modern : The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China 1930-1945, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 63. Beauchemin 34
Confronted by and teleologically indexed to “the West,” two antagonistic and co-extensively imagined cultural spaces emerge – one domestic and traditional, the other foreign and global.42
As Henri Lefebvre has argued, the linguistic and discursive attempts at circumscribing fields of knowledge to a cultural code that is then called a “space” always involves the projection by a dominant social tendency. Lefebvre describes the goal of attending to the production of space in terms of:
“the bringing-together of dissociated aspects, the unification of disparate tendencies and
factors . . . this hypothesis sets itself up in clear opposition to the homogenizing efforts of
the state, of political power, of the world market, and of the commodity world –
tendencies which find their practical expression through and in abstract space.”43
Rather than subordinate technologies to abstract spaces of Knowledge, then, my goal is to follow
Lefebvre’s argument and re-orient our attention to the differential production of space with technology. This thesis as a whole is concerned with attending to the autonomy of radio technology as a productive force that connects with relations of production and relations of social reproduction, to generate new institutional forms and tensions in its wake. To refer to the
“autonomy” of a technical apparatus by no means divests it of its relational properties. Rather, it offers a vantage point from which to observe what radio is doing. Thus, as the “bundle of tendencies” constitutive of radio stabilize, we must attend to the stabilization of practices that revolve around the apparatus. The analysis of production of signaletic space is thus directed both toward what produces signaletic space, and toward what signaletic space produces.
42 For a critical analysis of how this dichotomization is historically and conceptually enacted, see Sakai, Naoki, “The Problem of ‘Japanese Thought:’ The Formation of Japan and the Schema of Configuration,” Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 40-71. 43 Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space. (New Jersey: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 63-64. Beauchemin 35
One influential means by which abstract space is celebrated, and the nation’s a priori existence reaffirmed, is through the notion of a “public sphere” and concomitant concept of
“civil society,” famously theorized by Jurgen Habermas, and revived in discussions regarding the democratic potential of new media networks. Kate Lacey’s work on radio broadcasting during the Weimar Republic, and more recently on techniques of listening, for example, looks at radio from the perspective of an emergent and contested listening public or “publics.” Her own impetus towards thinking of radio in terms of a plurality of listening publics derives from
Hannah Arendt’s proto-theory of a public sphere as a “space of appearance”, which, rather than being a single consensus-forming process, consists of a plurality of potential spaces whenever a group of people gather and act politically.44 For Lacey, the plurality of radio stations and their different gendered and politically-inflected differences did not point to any necessity for an agglomeration of dialogues into a single “sphere” or consensus-forming public discussion, but rather extended and reinvigorated the political efficacy of the public sphere through a multiplication of such potential spaces, in line with Arendtian pluralism. Different radio stations acting as different platforms for political expression, become not only specific instances of civil discussion, but rather acquire a primary function vis-à-vis the public sphere – they become the very potential spaces engendered when people meet to discuss current social and political matters. Lacey effectively argues that, in opposition to the ideals of the pre-mass-media public sphere, which were complicit with the reification of capitalist and patriarchal divisions of productive and reproductive labor, women’s broadcasting programs would seek to resist these dominant aspects of life in Weimar Republic Germany.45 Looking at radio in terms of the
44 Lacey, Kate, Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio, and the Public Sphere, 1923-1945, (Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 1996), 231. 45 See Kate Lacey’s argument for an Arendtian approach to multiple radio publics in the conclusion of Feminine Frequencies, 221-245. Beauchemin 36 interaction between audiences and broadcasters, her recent work has thus shifted to the connection between the sensory-experiential and the deliberative and contemplative aspects of listening to radio as a historically contingent political and ethical phenomenon.46 Nonetheless, it is still the dialogic mode of communication premised on a civil society model that is at play in referring to the engendered plurality as national “publics.”
The historian Lei Wei, drawing on the theoretical framework used by Kate Lacey, tentatively adopts the framework of a civil society characterized by the co-existence of plural listening publics to analyze the historical development of radio in China, while questioning the application of democratic and civil-society models to China’s 20th century. In doing so, her guiding framework situates radio within an oscillation between state-governance and a more democratic mode of free individual communication. Her question with regards to the different meanings of “listening” presumes a relation to a given Chinese population. While attending to different socio-political circumstances that the radio industry was embedded in, the history she provides remains tied to a human-centered approach that does not fully account for the role that the technical apparatus (radio) plays in the process. The human-centered social history of radio is then immediately linked to radio’s role in China’s nation-building and modernization projects, and therefore to the narrative of the nation-state, which provides the determining context for thinking radio’s social dimension throughout a 100- year long process.47
My goal is not to dismiss the historical force of nationalization and of the state – after all, this thesis takes as its object the history of radio in modern China – but rather to displace its central hold, and show how a technology that played a significant role in its production (viz.
46 Lacey, Kate, Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age, (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2013). 47 Lei, Wei, Radio and Social Transformation in China, (New York: Routledge Press, 2019). Beauchemin 37 radio) integrated itself in a multiplicity of techno-human individuations irreducible to and often problematic for the goals of the nation-state. In fact, it will be argued that it is precisely these tensions between radio technology and the intersecting desires of the state and of capital that played a role in engendering the “nation,” not only as an imagined space, but as a radiophonically textured product. However, by introducing the agency of radio technology into this schema, “national space” will be shown to only acquire its existence by integrating itself into different techno-human assemblages, and thereby becoming one individuation connected with and traversed by other non-human spatializing tendencies. Such non-national spaces might inhabit, co-exist with, and become constitutive of what is referred to as national space, but are nonetheless irreducible to it.48 In this chapter, I am particularly concerned with the production of what I call “signaletic space,” and its various negotiations with the emergent global military- industrial complexes, the Nationalist government modernization projects, commercial broadcasting endeavors in Shanghai, and the underground network of the Communist Party. The four emergent signaletic spaces refer to both geo-political and socio-technical productions and are not meant to succeed each other teleologically or causally – it is their disjunctive co- existence that is of more interest to me here than the reification of a neatly delineated chronology. The “stuff” of national space (and therefore of national “history”), will be dislocated from its cultural and linguistic set of representations, and resituated as a particular offshoot of a more totalizing infrastructure, within which global capital, electromagnetic radiation and imperialist desire converged and secreted it.
The Formation of a Signaletic Arsenal 1900s-1920s
48 Just as the perspective of techno-social assemblage displaces the centrality of the nation, it similarly does away with the notion of medium as a substrate – the production and institutionalization of something called “radio,” like the “nation,” is also a secondary by-product, shot through by minor tendencies. Beauchemin 38
By the 19th century, two of the Qing’s primary military branches were in the process of disintegration. The Banner Army had largely disbanded as many officers took on civil administrative jobs, and the Green Standard officials that were scattered across the country began embezzling money at the expense of their abused and underpaid soldiers. The Qing’s defeat in the first Opium War (1839-42), and the threat of the Taiping Rebellion (1851-64), evinced the decaying structure of both of these military organizations. In their place, it was the tuanlian
(militias) and xiangyong (militarized local mercenary corps) that the Qing turned to in order to quell the rebellions across the country. These local militias were agglomerated to form new larger military units, called yongying (“brave battalions”). Zeng Guofan’s Hunan Xiang Army and Li Hongzhang’s Anhui Huai Army were models of such battalions, characterized by their close ties to specific localities and identifications with their leaders who were often close friends or relatives.49
The yongying’s primary advantage over previous military organizational structures, it has often been claimed, was their relative financial and administrative autonomy from the Qing court. The leaders of these battalions, unchecked by the Qing court’s selection and rotation policies, could control recruitment, ensure loyalty, and collect their own funds through the imposition of local commercial taxes (lijin) in order to independently support their armies.50 Due to their success in the quelling of rebellions, yongying leaders like Li and Zeng would be promoted to posts as leading statesmen, thereby acquiring political authority as provincial governors in addition to their administrative and financial power. The accumulated power in the hands of these yongying formed the precedent for what his often referred to as the “Warlord Era”
49 McCord, Edward A., The Power of the Gun: The Emergence of Modern Chinese Warlordism, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 22-23. 50 Ibid., 23. Beauchemin 39 and the collapse of the Qing dynasty. While Edward McCord claims that an overemphasis on this connection, at the expense of seeing increasing ties emerging between the yongying and the Qing court, they nonetheless represented a tendency of independent military groups acquiring an increased amount of financial, military, and administrative power.
The status of “warlord” historically attributed to the various provincial leaders embodying this relative autonomy from the state and local accumulation of power, indicates the continuation of this tendency as the Qing court emphasized the need to modernize military organization and technology in 1880s (as part of the Qing Self-Strengthening Movement). The assembling of a modern navy and establishment of arsenals for the construction of modern weapons and ammunition formed the basis of this movement. Because Western technology differed from traditional weaponry used, foreign specialists were often needed to train Chinese personnel. The scholarship of the yongying officers – most of whom were of the civilian gentry class – often had no background in any specialized military training.51 The Newly Created
Armies formed throughout this movement became models for the “New Armies” xinjun that were built after the humiliations of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Yuan Shikai, succeeding Li
Hongzhang as governor-general of Zhili province in 1901, built one of the most powerful of these armies – the Beiyang Army. The best troops from the yongying, lianjun, and Green
Standard forces were reorganized into standing armies, which were the foundation of the
Beiyang Army (and other “New Armies”). Based on a model used in Japan, military academies were also established in order to train these new armies in techniques of modern warfare: military primary schools were scattered across the country, four middle schools were established in major cities, and the Baoding central military academy from which most major military
51 Ibid., 33. Beauchemin 40 officials and governors graduated was founded. “By 1911, most of this system was in place and graduates of Western-style military schools began to fill positions in the New Armies.”52
However, no unified army ever emerged at the end of the Qing: “the Chinese military did not enter the Republican period as a single corporate body that might have acted as a focus of centralizing power. Rather, the lack of military unity exacerbated the political instability of the early Republic. When the military did exert its influence, the result was not the emergence of a single strong military dictator but a plethora of independent warlords.”53 These New Armies, largely trained and equipped by foreign interests, were what eventually became the divided
“warlord” factions upon the collapse of the Qing who held them together only as a nominally
“national” standing reserve.
For McCord the “Westernized” re-structuring of the New Armies, as well as the co- existence of different military organizations were characteristic of persistent dynastic control in the funding and structuring of its dependent arsenal. What is dubiously downplayed, however, is how this new mode of organization was co-extensive with the imperial military-industrial complexes of the U.S., Japan, and various European countries , who provided most of the education, training, personnel, and equipment to them, exploiting (if not contributing to) their increasingly untethered relationship with a single centralizing power. This seems to be the major difference between the New Armies and the regional and local yongying and tuanlian, who found their assertion of power primarily by demonstrating their functional relevance to the Qing state.54 It is not so much the dependence on the Qing court, as it was an exploitation of this tie to
52 Ibid., 35. 53 Ibid., 44. 54 Although even in these cases, monopoly on salt and opium taxes, as well as other tariffs, often served as the primary sources of revenue for the financing of local militias, therefore already operating within a global circuit of commodity exchange and imperial cartels, which would eventually be targeted by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Government in 1928. Beauchemin 41 make contractual agreements with other countries and corporations around the world that distinguished the new armies from these ones. The strategic positioning as both a “Chinese” army and an autonomous military groupuscule allowed these leaders to autonomously enter into contracts with foreign capital, even as they could channel taxes from salt and opium imports by demonstrating loyalty to the Qing court. Nominally “Chinese,” and untethered from the Qing state, “warlord” governments were characterized by their links to foreign / global capital. If checks and balances were no longer being put in place by the Qing court, it was new counterinsurgent strategies inculcated by the global military-industrial complex that would provide new terms of warfare at the onset of the 20th century. The attempt by scholars to analyze the history of military industries in terms of their “success” or “failure” is complicit with the assumption that these industries (and their directors) actually had the nation’s building and defence as their prime motive.55 The narrative of nation-building was as conducive to the acquisition of funds as any institutionalized rhetoric is. Perhaps the “failures” during the first and second Sino-Japanese war were less a matter of inexperience and irresponsible management, than they were of the strategic existence of “China” as a legal and financial pretext for war, profit, and Orientalist projections.
55 For example, see Thomas L. Kennedy’s analysis of the Hubei Arsenal from 1895-1911 in his article “Mausers and the Opium Trade: The Hupeh Arsenal, 1895-1911”, Perspectives on a Changing China, (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1979). Interestingly, Kennedy shows how most of the capital invested in steelworks, smokeless powder production, and the arms manufacturing industry came from opium taxes (that the Qing court would head starting in 1906), and also points to the collusion between the director of the Hubei arsenal with the German firm Carlowitz and Company to explain the fact that the foreign technicians at the factories were often unqualified for what they were supposed to be doing. Rather than question the relationship that the provincial governors-general and factory directors had with the Qing state and nationalist interests, however, it is simply assumed that the Qing’s failure at modernizing had a direct co-relation with the irresponsible management and bad financial planning of these factories. I wonder however, how this accounts for the persistence of multiple centers of power in the form of warlord governments upon the Qing dynasty’s “collapse,” if their criterion of success can only be predicated on the Qing’s maintenance of power? Beauchemin 42
The radio industry was inextricably tied to this global war machine, as radio equipment was developed and distributed along circuits that connected the warlord governments to foreign companies, and thus to global capital and the interests of individual nation-states. In 1911, the
“internationally recognized” (U.S. backed) Beiyang warlord clique under Yuan Shikai rearranged the Qing Ministry of Posts and Communications’ Railroad Management School 铁路
管理传习所, and renamed it School of Transportation and Communication 交通传习所56, and expanded it to include classes on postal and electric communication systems.57 After the Xinhai
Revolution, classes on electrical engineering, cable engineering and wireless engineering began.
In 1917, the school was divided into two branches, School of Posts and Telecommunications 邮
电学校 and School of Railroad Management 铁路管理学校, and each included various courses at different levels. The school was directly connected to the Ministry of Transportation and
Communication which needed personnel to administer its four divisions: roads (including rail), naval, post, and electric. Eventually in 1921 this school would finally be renamed to Jiaotong
University 交通大学 , integrating Shanghai and Tangshan Technical Colleges. Beijing Jiaotong
University 北京交通大学 was one of its three branches (with two others in Tangshan and
Shanghai).58 Classes on electrical engineering and various telecommunications technologies
56 Similar to English, the word “communication” originally included all modes of transportation – of commodities, information, and people for example. 交通 (jiaotong) refers to communication/transportation in a similar way – thus “Jiaotong University,” while usually left with the pinyin “Jiaotong,” could be translated at the “University of Transportation and Communication” 57 管理电信开先河. 北京交通大学校报电子版 - 第 846 期(2010 年 4 月 15 日). Accessed Oct. 21, 2019. 58 Chen Ertai 陈尔泰, “Zhongguo guangbo shikao”中国广播史考 [Historical Study of Chinese Radio], (Beijing: “Zhongguo guangbo dianshi chubanshe”中国广播电视出版社 [China Radio and Television Press], 2008), 3-10. Beauchemin 43 were all taught at these schools, and many of the Ministry of Communications personnel were recruited from here.59
The staff of these technical colleges were mostly trained at universities in Europe, Japan, or America, and the equipment was bought from foreign companies. In 1918, the Beiyang government signed a contract with the Marconi Company to supply its Ministry of
Communications with military telecommunications equipment for £600,000. This included 200 military radio sets for communicating with troops within a 14-mile range. A year earlier the
Navy Ministry signed a similar contract of over £500,000 with Mitsui Corporation, which was also meant to give Japan a 30-year monopoly on building short-wave wireless stations in China.
This latter contract was likely entered into with the Anhui Clique (a splinter group of the
Beiyang Army led by Duan Qirui) connected to the Nishihara loans, since the dates coincide, and, as Daqing Yang notes, the loan was not recognized by the Nationalist government when it overthrew the northern warlord government in 1928.60 The Nishihara loans were seen as a scandal by proponents of the 1919 May Fourth Movement, since it effectively gave to Japan the former German concession in Shandong Province, control of the railways located there, and other rights in Manchuria.61 Unauthorized telecommunications facilities in China run by
59 Ibid. In addition to these schools, there was also the establishment of the Military Department’s Radio Instruction Institute 陆军部的无线电教练所 in 1919, and 奉天无线电传习所 in Manchuria (东三省) in 1920s and 广州无线 专科学校 and 齐鲁无线电专科学校 in the 1930s. The different investments made in radio technology by the Zhili, Fengtian, and Anhui cliques are clear examples of divergent interests that, while perhaps nominally done with national and nationalizing interests in mind, partook in a global-military structuring in tandem with the imperial interests of various nation-states and corporate actors. 60 Yang, Daqing, Technology of Empire: Telecommunications and Japanese Expansion in Asia, 1883-1945, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) 64-70. It should also be noted that these investments were for transmission technologies that were continuously being researched and developed, which rendered such large-scale telecommunications investments a risk. 61 Esherick, Joseph W., “Ten Theses on the Chinese Revolution,” Modern China, 21 (1), (1995), 58. Beauchemin 44
American, French, Italian, and British companies continued despite the favored-nation status attributed to Japan.
The 1920s saw the emergence of the first radio transmission stations, all using components bought from foreign companies. The diplexer allowed for reception and transmission within the same apparatus, and was the main component used for battlefield operations and wartime telephony and telegraph transmission. Harbin Station (XOH) was established in 1926 by Liu Han, a graduate of the Jiaotong School. The station revamped the 50- watt diplexer transmitter bought from the Marconi Company. Beiyang’s Beijing Radio Station
(COPK), founded in 1927, also used a Marconi transmitter, at 20 watts.62 Better equipment was received by Liu Han in 1928, and he established COHB (also in Harbin) which had 1000 watts, and broadcast in Chinese, Russian, and Japanese. In the same year, Shenyang’s COMK was installed with a transmission power of 2000 Watts. Together, these stations formed the centers of the Northeastern Wireless Telecommunications Network (东北无线电通信网), under the direction of the Beiyang government, and were in constant tension with the surrounding warlord factions, especially Zhang Zuolin’s Fengtian clique.63 This latter had his own project for the building and controlling of telecommunications in the Northeastern provinces, having bought a station from Telefunken to be installed in Mukden (where Shenyang is today).64 In 1931, all of these “Northeastern” stations were seized by the Kanto army when Japan conquered Manchuria
62 Chen, Historical Study of Chinese Radio, 11-12. 63 Qiao, Yunxia 乔云霞, “Zhongguo guangbo dianshi shi” 中国广播电视史 [History of Chinese Radio and Television], (Beijing: “Zhongguo guangbo dianshi chubanshe”中国广播电视出版社 [China Radio and Television Press], 2007), 19. 64 Yang, Technology of Empire, 74. Beauchemin 45 and established the Manchurian Telegraph and Telephone Company (MTT) in Changchun
(renamed Shinkyo), the capital of the Japanese colony.65
Meanwhile, other companies were also seeking markets amongst China’s fragmented geo-political scene. Taiyuan radio station used a radio transmitter bought from the German
Telefunken company. The Fengtian Broadcast station had its transmitter supplied from a French company (likely the Compagnie Générale de Télégraphie). The Nationalist Central Broadcasting
Station in Nanjing and the Zhejiang Provincial radio stations would use a Kellogg Switchboard and Supply Company transmitter from its Shanghai branch. Guangzhou Radio Broadcast Station had their transmitter supplied by Western Electric. The XinXin Radio Broadcast Station (1927) in Shanghai (the first “Chinese-run” commercial station), like many privately constructed stations, had its own transmitter built for private commercial use.66 Since there were no domestic radio manufacturers in the 1920s, all of these radio transmitters were either bought already assembled, revamped versions of transmission technology that was used for other purposes
(telephone, telegram, etc.), or were assembled and installed by the station companies themselves.67
This link between radio equipment providers and the different commercial and military interests, evinces the nominal and strategic role played by “China” as a category supporting an image of international trade and cooperation. Telefunken, Compagnie Générale de Télégraphie,
Marconi and RCA formed the first international radio cartel giving each other the rights to use the other companies’ patents in their allocated markets. Whereas each company was generally
65 Ibid., 87. 66 According to Chen, there existed radio societies 无线电社, groups composed of electrical and radio engineers, many of whom were graduates of the Jiaotong school, who often helped private stations assemble and install their radio transmitters. See Chen, Historical Study of Chinese Radio, 11-13. 67 Ibid., 14. Beauchemin 46 allocated their own set of countries to sell to, China had a special status as a place of “limited competition” amongst all of them.68 Treating China as its own fragmented political world then, these companies were able to lay hold to markets with only ambiguous ties to national interests, while nonetheless treating their contracts as ones between a national government (or national corporations) and themselves.
Thus, by the time of the Nationalists’ Northern Expedition that suppressed the warlord conflicts and established the Nationalist Party as the government of the Republic of China in
1928, the sufficient elements for a signaletic arsenal had been established (the training grounds, personnel, and equipment), and the rise of commercial sound broadcasting had already begun.
The Marconi diplexer was an essential component of the initial radio stations in China, since it was the component that allowed for transmission and reception simultaneously, and wireless telephony and telegram receiving/transmitting were the primary functions of the government stations prior to adopting sound broadcasting. Even the celebration of short-wave transmission had as its model point-to-point communication between other cosmopolitan cities around the world, posing a veritable threat to the telegraph companies’ investments in wiring the world with underground cables.
The state, however, was one purchaser amongst others, and, as described above, electronics companies were already making their forays into the treaty ports. Whereas the factions within and external to the Beiyang government, and after them, the Nationalist government, were welcomed purchasers and investors in larger-scale telecommunications equipment, commercial broadcasting was otherwise often initially set up as an attempt to further
68 Huurderman, Anton A., The Worldwide History of Telecommunications, (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2003), 290. The rest of the world, with a few exceptions and specifications, had the status of “open competition.” Beauchemin 47 increase the market for receiving sets. This conforms with the early trends of broadcasting observed by Raymond Williams, explaining that “unlike all previous communications technologies, radio and television were systems primarily devised for transmission and reception as abstract processes, with little or no definition of proceeding content.”69 Therefore “content,” such as entertainment programming, initially emerged in a parasitic relationship with the means of communication.70 Rather than seeking means by which to direct wireless messages at individual intended recipients, radio broadcasting integrated the vacuum tube into its ensemble, turning it into a selecting, eliminating, and amplifying machine; sound modulation and the requisite continuous flow of electromagnetic radiation in opposition to telegraphy’s intermittent spurts of dots and dashes formed an experimental basis that would eventually be directed at advertising itself. Initially then, radio broadcasting selected and amplified its own technical ensemble and means of distribution and was itself the marketed objects of its modulated signals.
Thus, both technical and socio-political drives converged in the formation of
“commercial radio”. Advertising was inherent to the financial profit motive of commercial radio stations – in fact, we could say that it was the main reason for their being called “commercial” in the first place. The owner of XinXin Company 新新公司, Kuang Zan, started his crude radio station, XQX (later XCHA) of only 50 watts with the intention of selling his own crystal radio sets and other commodities being sold by the XinXin company, which was otherwise known for being one of the famed “Four Big Department Stores” of Shanghai. It otherwise broadcast some songs and Southern opera.71 As Laura Di Giorgi describes this situation: “most of the pioneers were not professional broadcasters, but, rather, entrepreneurs tied to industry, newspapers or
69 See Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form, (New York: Routledge Press, 2003). 70 Ibid. 71 Qiao, History of Chinese Radio and Television, 24. Beauchemin 48 consumer trade and often operating under the umbrella of extraterritoriality”72 Thus, while it is important to differentiate commercial and state radio endeavors, they are inseparable in terms of their connection to the deterritorialization effects of capital and their shared negotiations with the affordances of radio technology.
We can observe two signaletic operations emerging within and inflecting this relationship between commercial radio in Shanghai on the one hand and the state’s initial modes of appropriating radio equipment on the other. The government saw the potential to expand and supplement the existing communications and transportation infrastructure. Radio transmission was one more means to send and receive information across long distances, this time without needing to lay down cables or tracks. The logistical and “transmission” logic was a product of already-existing point-to-point and linear infrastructure, linked to national development projects and a response to the penetration and expansion of the circuits of Euro-American-Japanese capital. In relation to this logic, the one-to-everywhere or radiation logic of radio could pose a problem, and would need to either be appropriated and latched onto (international short-wave broadcasts or the adoption of amateur and commercial radio techniques), or circumnavigated by other means (using other means of communication such as horses and post, or as the Communist
Party eventually did in the 1950s, with a wired loudspeaker system). Telegram transmission occupies an interesting position from the perspective of radio broadcasting, as it would obviously be intended for a particular recipient, yet could only be transmitted with the possibility of being received by others tuned into the same frequency – a precarious space that came to play a key role in Wang Ping’s film, The Eternal Wave (1958) described below.
72 De Giorgi, Laura. “Media and Popular Education: Views and Politics on Radio Broadcasting in Republican China, 1920s–30s,” Interactions: Studies in Communication & Culture 7 (3) (2016), 283. Beauchemin 49
On the other hand, commercial radio had the one-to-everywhere radiation logic as its modus vivendi. The fear was not that someone else would unexpectedly hear what was being transmitted, but the possibility that nobody might. The goal was to reach as many ears as possible, in conjunction with the newspaper and other means used to advertise their products.
The advertisement of radio receiving sets immediately led to other companies latching onto broadcasting as a means to advertise their own products. For the most part, private stations would financially depend on these companies for external funding. This is not to say that
“advertising” was the only function of early radio, but that even when it came to entertainment programming the stated excitement was geared towards the performance of the technical equipment. This was the case for example with the American E.G. Osborn’s first station in
Shanghai in 1923 with a theatre-based programme that broadcast to people in a YMCA club in
Tianjin, to a cruise ship on the city’s coast, and to some amateur radio enthusiasts within range.73
What was initially celebrated was the potential of radio, and not so much the performance itself.
Very quickly however, more stations filled the ether, squeezing into the broadcasting band
(which was roughly between 500-1500 kHz as agreed upon by international convention). Since multiple stations would be broadcasting at the same time, one difficulty that would emerge was the need to produce a niche market and consumer base – the question: how to establish dialogue in a medium geared towards dissemination?74
The Encoding of Signaletic Space 1920s-1940s
73 See newspaper reproductions from 1923 in Liu, Guangqing 刘光清, “Jiu zhongguo de Shanghai guangbo shiye” 旧中国的上海广播事 [Shanghai’s Radio Industry in Old China], (Beijing: “Zhongguo guangbo dianshi chubanshe” 中国广播电视出版社 [China Radio and Television Press], 1985), 1-11. 74 The idea of communication as occupying a tension between the poles of dialogue and dissemination is inspired by John Durham Peters’ work in Speaking Into The Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999). Beauchemin 50
The retentionality of state governance seeking to absorb and integrate itself into all modes of life was confronted with the centrifugal force of capital and the pullulation of centers of dissemination in the form of commercial radio endeavors, a tension that registered itself in the publication of stipulations to regulate wireless broadcasting. In October 1926 the Beiyang government published the “Regulations Concerning Radio Broadcasting” 无线电广播条例,
“Rules Regarding the Installation of Radio Transmitters (and Receivers)” 装设广播无线电收听
器 (即收音机) 规则 and “Rules Regarding the Distribution of Radio Receiving Sets” 运销广播
无线电收听器规则. Qiao describes these specific demands (I synthesized them into 4):
▪ That regular programs (news, market conditions, music, speeches, etc.) be broadcast at
fixed times determined by the government
▪ that any person or organization is forbidden to privately transport, sell, and install any
kind of radio equipment or to operate a radio broadcasting station within the three eastern
provinces 东三省 (Heilongjiang, Liaoning, and Jilin).
▪ That anyone who wishes to sell or to install a radio receiver, without any exception, must
abide by the regulations and pay for a license.
▪ Anyone who does not obey these stipulations, will have their equipment confiscated and
will be fined a determinate amount.75
When the Nationalists came to power in 192876, the Radio Administration Office issued new regulations, lessening the restrictions on broadcast “content” but including a more stringent
75 Qiao Yunxia, History of Chinese Radio and Television, 20. 76 By June, 1928, there were already 1900 people who had radio sets installed in Beijing, and 45 retailers were selling radio sets. The influence of radio was still not felt on a large scale, though, since radio sets were still quite expensive. Ibid. Beauchemin 51 procedure for registering a station. The 1928 Radio Station Regulations of the Construction
Committee of the Republic of China 建设委员会颁布中华民国广播无线电台条例 divided all stations into two categories: A) those that were self-financed, and B) those that needed to solicit funds from their listeners. The “self-financed” stations were likely government stations and ones belonging to other organizations like Christian missionaries and amateur radio enthusiasts. All broadcasting stations needed to get special permission from the Nationalist’s Construction
Committee’s Radio Administration Department. The request for approval needed to include the station’s name and call sign, its address, the intended transmission frequency (wave-length),77 maximum power (watts), a circuit diagram of the receiver, transmitting aerial details, and broadcasting time and programme details amongst others. Once the station was installed and inspected, a license would be issued (40 yuan for self-financed stations, and 100 yuan for fee- soliciting ones). On the level of broadcasting “content,” the stations were limited to public lectures, news, market conditions, weather reports, music and entertainment, and business advertisements which were not to exceed 1/10th of the broadcasting time. Stations could be inspected and halted at any time by the Radio Administration, and needed to be ready to relay urgent information issued from the government at any time. One noteworthy article specified that the stations which were not “self-financed” were required to solicit fees from nearby listeners with receiving sets, and that these listeners should be reported to the relevant local authorities if they refused to pay. Hence, there was an attempt to make these station-frequencies into subscribed channels, but which was dependent upon where one lived rather than what one chose
77 Frequency and wave-length are inversely proportional, and were often listed side-by-side in station listings that listeners would use to tune into the desired station. Beauchemin 52 to listen to. This was possible because receiving sets were one of several consumer durables that would require (at least officially) a license to operate.
Following the issuing of these government regulations, private stations were set up in various industrial cities: Tianjin, Beijing, Qingdao, Hangzhou, Ningbo, Wuxi, Hankou, Wuhu,
Changzhou, Huzhou, Suzhou, Jiaxing, Xuzhou, Xiamen, Guangzhou, Dingyuan, Gaoyou, and
Shaoxing. More than half of the stations, however, were located in Shanghai. In 1932, Shanghai had at least 40 stations, and in 1934, this raised to 54. At least six of these were owned by foreigners. While this may not seem like a big number, when considered in relation to the broadcasting band allocated to commercial broadcasting, and the density of signaletic space corresponding to the dense distribution of stations in the city, this number was actually too high
– interference between neighboring frequencies all squeezed into the range between 600 and
1500 kHz constantly lead to wave interference (appendix 2).78 Indeed, we can perhaps attribute the fact that commercial stations often had relatively low transmitting power to the fact that higher transmitting power would have generated higher risks of interference between stations on similar frequencies.
This situation of imminent interference between stations was eventually exploited by the state to promote the need for more educational programming and less “vulgar” and indecent entertainment, as well as to implement more strict requirements on radio equipment. Often basing their reasoning to shut down a station on lack of the proper registered transmitters, the
78 Zhao Yuming, 赵玉明, “Zhongguo xiandai guangbo shiliao xuanbian” 中国现代广播史料选编 [A Collection of Sources on Chinese Modern Broadcasting], (Shantou: “Shantou daxue chubanshe” 汕头大学出版社 [Shantou University Press], 2007), 79. If you tune into AM radio today (which operates in basically the same allocated wave- band) the stations are usually audible within 5 kHz up or down from the one they are transmitting in. The further away from the transmitting frequency you go, the more noise you hear as less of a selection/elimination between the modulated signal and carrier signal can be made. How stable the frequency would have largely depended on the transmitter and receiving sets used. Beauchemin 53 radio administration inspectors were mobilized to clear the space of the electromagnetic spectrum so that the Nationalist government could expand its own fleet of stations, insinuating itself in the form of more nation-building oriented programming in commercial stations.79 All stations were also formalized vis-à-vis international call sign convention, by which Chinese stations were allocated call signs between XGA and XUZ.80 Interference, more than serving as a technical justification for state regulated re-distribution, was also a feature to be appropriated and re-directed. Radio “sandwiching” was weaponized as a means to prevent less powerful stations from being heard, by using two more powerful transmitters to interfere with its signal. This technique was used by the Nationalist government to prevent an American tobacco company from playing its tri-weekly music programme for example.81
Attempts at controlling the broadcast content, or at least setting limits on what can and cannot be aired, are observable in the divisions within the Central Radio Administration’s organizational structure (appendix 3) and in its officialized division of radio program types
(appendix 4). The map of the central station’s administrative departments from 1931 shows us that as a government entity, the XGOA was figured not only as a radio broadcasting station of its own, but simultaneously served as the bureaucratic center that would determine policies for other stations to follow as well as lay claim to being the point of reference for nationalizing and modernizing radio content. We can also see how the Fuzhou station (XGOL), Xi’an station
(XGOB), Changsha station (XGOV), Nanjing shortwave station (XGOX), and preparatory department for the central shortwave transmitting station all fell under its purview of direct
79 This also conforms with what Raymond Williams has argued regarding the technical basis (distribution of wave- lengths) for state intervention. See Williams, Television, 17-18. 80 Ibid, 80. See Appendix 1 for an example of the list of stations using this updated convention. 81 Krysko, Michael A., American Radio in China: International Encounters with Technology and Communications, 1919–41, (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 87. Beauchemin 54 administration. These were linked to the central station’s administration along with the other divisions (科): General affairs, Engineering, Technical, Sound Broadcasting, Service, and
Editing & Translation. Each of these divisions, in turn encompassed various sections (股)
(correspondence, accounting, data acquisition and analysis, research, public service, guidance, broadcasting) and teams (组) (recruitment, music, drama, reconnaissance/intelligence).
By looking at the 1937 mapping of the Nationalist government’s radio administration’s official categorization of radio programme content we can further get a better sense of the genres and different content types that the state wanted to integrate its ideals into, but also of what categories of broadcasts were relatively popular enough to garner the government’s attention.
Most stations would intermix different types of content, but the administration divided them into five main categories – Entertainment (theatre, music), News (time & weather, economy, science, sports, general), Education (popular knowledge, children’s education, woman’s education, youth education, physical education, theory education, science, language & literature, general education), Lectures (educational lectures, general lectures), and Propaganda 宣传82
(communicating political movements, communicating government announcements, communicating party ideology, communicating doctrines, general communications). While an analysis of these divisions, what constitutes their distinctions, and what their distribution actually looked like deserves an entire research project of its own, listing these categories here serves the purpose of showing just how varied and increasingly differentiated radio broadcasting was by the
82 Xuanchuan 宣传 is a tricky word to translate. The popular translation as “propaganda” has been so overdetermined by cold-war perception and its association with brainwashing and mind-control, therefore I generally prefer to use the terms “dissemination” or “communication.” Here, I only maintain the use of “propaganda” because the items listed as under its purview seem to more closely approach the kinds of things we might associate with the term, as they are distinguished from the four other recognized radio content types. Beauchemin 55 late 1930s in Shanghai – and which continued during the Japanese occupation albeit with increased censorship and control by the government.
For Laura De Giorgi, the increase in government administration and regulation of stations had a particular relationship with the educational goals of the Nationalist party. She writes, “The use of wireless technology was clearly connected to the diffusion of a scientific and modern attitude towards the world, since it implied not only a diffused technological know-how, but also the emergence of a community sharing similar modern values and discarding superstition and old-fashioned ideas.”83 De Giorgi notes that this in turn could lead to a strategic means for radio companies to disseminate technical information about radio technology in order to sell more sets under the umbrella of modernization programming.84 This can be seen as an exploit of representational codes that offer new modes of concealment (education for profit) even as they will to the surface other modes of visibility (education as new modern value), an exploit that will be repeated with the Communist Party’s underground radio network described below. On another level, however, it shows how the narrative of state subsumption of commercial radio fails to attend to the differential modes of integration that state regulations and programmes introduce into a field of already-plural institutions. Whereas De Giorgi ultimately regards this situation as one between modernization and the development of a cosmopolitan attitude on the one hand
(learn science, build your own set, tune into the world) and a crude entertainment and pure commercial interest on the other, we have seen how circuits of capital are already operative within state expansion-retention programming, and furthermore, how stabilizing the problematic signal – its tending toward being everywhere and nowhere - became a goal as much for the state
83 De Giorgi, “Media and Popular Education”, 285. 84 Ibid, 284. Beauchemin 56 as for commercial radio stations seeking to establish their niche markets in a densely inhabited signaletic space.
While De Giorgi excavates an important facet of the Nationalist party’s attempt to insinuate its nationalizing ambitions within the schedules of commercial broadcasting, by overemphasizing the question of national integration, any operative differences are overdetermined from the outset – the question always coming back to the same functionalist one: did it work? In other words, the differential integrations of the state machine into commercial radio is seen as a subsumption to a single nationalist drive according to its various modes of discipline (childhood education, common knowledge, language reform, etc.). Just as radio is brought to the fore as an interesting medium for inquiry, it falls to the background, a blank slate for projections with barely a determining feature of its own. And yet, the techno-human problematic - the signal’s radiating proclivities co-individuating with capitalist and nationalizing drives – generated a multiplicity of displacements, spatial re-configurations and tensions, and forms of capture with their own modes of signaletic flight and escape. As will be discussed in the second chapter, signaletic individuations took such varied forms as the adoption of varying forms of music and dramas by the central nationalist station and others, the displacement of stage performed operas and dramas to the studio room of commercial radio stations, the integration of the family as a thematic that could return infinitely back into itself through the radio inside the home, the production of the radiophonically textured “official” voice, and the encoding of registered stations in publicized charts that turned tabloids and bulletin boards into visual indices for knobular access to the increasingly saturated ether.
The Chongqing Frog – Mobile Stations and the Displacement of “Solid Infrastructure”
Beauchemin 57
The first central station 中央广播电台 (XKM)85 of the Nationalists was established in
1928 in Nanjing with a medium-wave 500-watt radio transmission. Its programme consisted of lectures, news, new bills, military affairs, administrative reports, general orders, public announcements, meteorology forecasts, and music. Prior to the war with Japan, the Nationalist government had over 20 stations built – in Fuzhou, Hebei, Xi’an, Nanjing, Changsha, and other locations. Amongst these other “branch-stations”, the first one (outside Nanjing) was Hangzhou station built in October 1928, and the ones with the strongest transmission were in Jiangxi and in
Hankou both with 5000 watts. The second central Nationalist station was built in Nanjing with equipment bought from Germany (likely from Telefunken) in November 1932. Call code
XGOA, it claimed to have the strongest transmitter in Asia at 75,000 watts.86 This last station’s story is worth recounting, for it goes against some of the more intuitive notions of what counts as
“solid” or “hard” infrastructures, particularly in its post-1937 wartime trajectories.
The plans to build a central broadcasting station was initiated largely by Chen Guofu, who had joined Sun Yat-sen’s Tongmenghui in 1911, was made responsible for military affairs and recruitment for the Nationalist’s Whampoa military academy in 1924, and was one of the founders of the “CC clique” that was closely connected with Chiang Kai-shek’s Central Bureau of Investigation and Statistics (CBIS). While in Shanghai, Chen listened to the programme of the
100-watt American KRC station 开罗电台 (Kellogg Station), which included business reports, music, and church prayers. Realizing that radio could be used as a means to broadcast education, and to bypass regional limits and otherwise insurmountable distances, he immediately notified
85 X was the internationally recognized call code letter for China, and KM here stood for the KM in KMT. I refer to the 国民党 (KMT in Wade-Giles, GMD in pinyin), throughout as the “Nationalist Government” or simply the “Nationalists.” 86 Qiao, History of Chinese Radio and Television, 21-22. Beauchemin 58
Chiang Kai-shek, who supported his initiative to have a radio station built. The engineer Li
Fanyi, who had returned from his graduate studies at Columbia University in the United States, and who was currently working as a communications instructor at Whampoa military academy, was given US$35,000 to build a radio manufacturing plant in Shanghai. In 1928, Li further succeeded in acquiring a 500-watt transmitter from the Kellogg Switchboard and Supply
Company, which became the basis for the “Chinese Nationalist Party Central Organizing
Committee’s Radio Broadcasting Station,” more often shortened to “Central Radio Station” 中央
广播电台, with the call sign XKM (later XGZ). With the erection of two 140-foot radio towers - becoming the tallest structures in Nanjing at the time - the station’s inauguration ceremony would coincide with Chiang’s successful negotiations with the northern warlord generals and the
Nationalist’s successful defeat of the Beiyang government. The immense building held both the production studio and the radio transmission equipment. In 1932, XKM was supplanted with a
75,000-watt short-wave transmitter (XGOA), as well as another 500-watt shortwave station
(XHZ) used by the CBIS to communicate with the web of provincial stations in order to gather intelligence.87
Over the course of the next two decades, the Nationalist’s Central Station became the site for the performance of various state-sponsored nation-building initiatives. In its opening ceremony, Chiang Kai-shek and others used it as a mouthpiece to commemorate Sun Yat-sen and his Three Principles of the People 三民主义. Upon Japan’s conquering of Shenyang in 1931, programmes were increasingly inflected with messages on how to react to and prepare for
87 Wang Xueqi 汪学起 and Shi Hansheng 是翰生, “Di si zhanxian: Guomindang zhongyang guangbo diantai duoshi” 第四战线: 国民党中央广播电台掇实 [The Fourth Battlefront: Collected History on The Nationalist Government’s Central Radio Station], (Beijing: “Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe”中国文史出版社 [Chinese Literature and History Press], 2017), 4-8. Beauchemin 59 engagements with the Japanese army, primarily through the instantiation of patriotic music, lectures by politicians and reformers and “Save the Nation” campaigns. With the establishment of XHZ in 1934, increasing surveillance and purging of those suspected of communist affiliations were carried out amongst the staff. Programs both produced by and geared towards children were increasingly aired, as more people could acquire cheap crystal-based receiving sets to listen to at home. Fan Benzhong, a radio engineer who studied in Canada and who was influenced by the burgeoning radio drama industry upon travelling through the United States (the
1930s and 40s was the golden age of radio in America), was initiated a movement towards remediating Chinese tales filtered through the nation-saving discourses over XGOA’s waves. In what came to be known as the “Xi’an Incident” of 1936, when Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped and held hostage, the People’s Station in Xi’an entered into a broadcasting war with XGOA in which the Nationalist government attempted to interfere with what they claimed were mis- information campaigns launched by the Communists against Chiang, attempting to delegitimatize the Nationalist party.88 Wang Jingwei, the future puppet governor for the Japanese army in Shanghai, gave talks here, along with other major political figures like Feng Yuxiang and Soong Mei-ling. All of these events constitute some of the major elements of the states nationalization projects that the central radio station embarked on, in conjunction with other ongoing military and infrastructural campaigns.89
88 Like many at the time who began to sympathize with the Communist Party, the two broadcasters at the Xi’an station, Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng, were increasingly disenchanted with the Nationalist rhetoric of saving the nation, that did not hold Japanese and foreign capitalist imperialism accountable enough for the problems that China was facing. For an interesting account of the significance of this event in relation to the increasing support given towards the Communist Party, as the latter was gradually seen as acting on principles of relative fairness see Esherick, Ten Theses on the Communist Revolution. 89 Wang and Shi’s The Fourth Battlefront provides an in-depth examination of all these events. The emphasis on cultural reconfigurations of attitudes was a major component of both the Nationalist policies and of many leading intellectuals, whether belonging to the “enlightenment” school or sympathizing more with “Leftist” causes. Beauchemin 60
With the anchoring of XGOA as the central station with a fixed call-sign and associated frequency, it became a relatively reliable source of reference for general information, whether by people with home-sets listening with their family, or for those listening in to radios installed in street-side shops. While its effects in altering national consciousness and educating the people is debatable, the practical function of alerting listeners to imminent threats became increasingly relevant as the Kanto army made its way into Shanghai, Nanjing and other cities in China. It is perhaps the relative stability attributed to the frequency of this station, as it was listed alongside others in daily newspapers, that allowed it to retain its position in people’s knob-tuning memories when it was forced to move, along with many coastal industrial operations, to Wuhan, and then to Chongqing (the war-time capital) when the Japanese army began making headway inland. Another government station in the southeastern Jiangxi province was moved from
Nanchang, to Ji’an, then to Gan county, and finally to Ruijin. Using the term 流动广播电台
(mobile radio station) to refer to these transmission centers-in-motion, Qiao Yunxia describes how they successfully evaded capture as the Japanese troops made their way into Hankou and
Guangzhou. Because of its ability to evade aircraft carpet bombings in Chongqing, the
Nationalist government’s central station made the headlines of Japanese newspapers. Referred to as the “Chongqing Frog” 重庆之哇, XGOA appropriated the notoriously mountainous space of the city by operating from within basements and cave dwellings.
It is from this station in Chongqing that the Nationalist government would wage their radio war, or “war on nerves” 神经战. Drawing on the account given by then Ministry of
Propaganda Information Committee head of radio section Peng Leshan, Bao Weihong describes the war-time mobilization of radio as thus: Beauchemin 61
Unlike modern warfare bound by time and space, this war has no intermissions and
allows no neutral territory. Through radio language gains new power. Once the sound
wave changes to electromagnetic waves, it can fly over mountains and oceans, traverse
national boundaries, and escape censorship and capture by secret police. It can reach the
illiterate, educated, common people, soldiers, officers, and merchants, regardless of their
level of education and experience. Combining the affective force of voice and the speed
of communication technology, radio waves are the most powerful weapon of war. This
new weapon, with a shooting range beyond the cannon, a speed faster than an airplane’s,
and dissemination beyond the control of censorship, can penetrate the most solid bomb
shelter and cross the most guarded blockade.90
By bridging the distances set by spatio-temporal limits, communicating across socio-linguistic divides, and impinging upon the sensory-nervous system of the body, the power of radio waves was found in its ability to transgress the established codes, structures and representations of space.91 What seems to have been just as important in the case of XGOA, was how it relied on these established structures and codes for its own mobility – its points of entry having been displaced to published schedules and radio station frequency charts. Thus, while recent approaches to media history have emphasized the materiality of media, and the solid infrastructural basis of media that are otherwise seen as airy and ephemeral,92 mobile radio
90 Bao, Weihong, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 307. 91 Interestingly, the description of Peng Leshan summarized by Bao comes very close to the account of radio Frantz Fanon gives in the context of the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962). Not only did the Voice of Fighting Algeria station appropriate the language of the colonizer (French) to use as a lingua franca amongst disparate linguistic groups, but Fanon also describes the radio listening process as “an instrumental technique in the limited sense, the radio receiving set develops the sensorial, intellectual, and muscular powers of man in a given society” (italics mine). See Fanon, Frantz. “This is the Voice of Algeria.” A Dying Colonialism, (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 72. 92 For example, in Starosielski, Nicole. The Undersea Network, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). Beauchemin 62 stations reverse this relationship, showing how the encoding of frequency space could form a more solid ground upon which a mobile “solid” infrastructure would rely on in moments of crisis and forced mobility. The transgressive operation of the signaletic as it was appropriated by war- time needs was not unique to the Nationalists’ view and use of it, and was concurrently being latched onto and exploited by the expanding Communist Party.
Occupying Heights for Underground Work - Transgressing the Facades of Signaletic Space
In November 1928, a year and a half after Chiang Kai-shek’s violent anti-Communist purge of Shanghai, Zhou Enlai initiated plans for the establishment of a secret radio station in
Shanghai, despite the Nationalist’s secret police having been put on an increased alert for communist activities. The chief of the Communist Party’s intelligence agency 中国共产党中央
特别行动科 (or simply Teke 特科) Li Qiang, using the identification of an amateur radio enthusiast, became friends with the people in Shanghai’s radio industry, such as Dahua Radio
Company 大华无线电公司 and Ya-Mei Radio Company 亚美无线电公司. With other members of the Communist Party, Li purchased a stack of radio science and technology publications, blueprints, technical components, and started their underground work under the shield company name Shaodun Electrical Company 绍敦电机公司. Together, Li Qiang and Zhang Shenchuan started a radio engineering school and sent some students to go learn radio engineering at universities, while another member, Cai Shuhou, founded an “underground factory” for the manufacturing of radio components and the assembling of radio receiving and transmitting sets.
In 1929, the Communist Party’s first station was installed in Shanghai with a 50-watt receiver- transmitter. Using an amateur radio call code, they were able to receive telegrams from a number of sources, from Los Angeles to the Soviet Union, and would begin transmitting with a secret telegram code developed by Zhou Enlai. In June 1930, the Communists obtained another shield Beauchemin 63
company named Shanghai Fuli Electrical Appliance Company Factory 上海福利电器公司工厂 and set up a radio training class there, with 16 participants coming from different communist bases around China.93 The teachers were members who were coming back from university training in the Soviet Union.94
The Communist radio stations in Shanghai had as their primary motive the communication of intelligence with a network of communist radio stations dispersed across different provinces. Throughout the battles against the Nationalist armies, the CCP policy was to salvage any military equipment found (including radio equipment) and to give it to the central command 总部. It was in this manner that the Red Army acquired their first 15-watt station in
1931, which would become the foundation for the Red Army’s Telecommunications Industry, set up in Ningdu, Jiangxi. On January 6, 1931, the Central Red Army Radio Team 中央红军无线电
队 was set up here with the sole purpose of intercepting Nationalist transmissions. In February of the same year, a 4-month radio class began with 15 students, called the Military Commission’s
Radio School 军委无线电学校, and quickly changed to The Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’
Red Army Telecommunications School 中国工农红军通信学校. With an increasing number of members trained to assemble and operate radio equipment, and the acquisition of another 100- watt station during the Nationalists’ second encirclement campaign, an organized network would gradually form with the branch of the Red Army specialized in radio, and a radio-code developed to ensure its secrecy and unimpeded operation.95
93 Chinese soviets-cum-“liberation zones” were dispersed across China, and were constantly engaged in struggles with the Nationalist armies that were enlisted to suppress them during Chiang Kai-shek’s encirclement campaigns. 94 Qiao, History of Chinese Radio and Television, 59-60. 95 Ibid., 60-61 Beauchemin 64
The CCP’s first “character-sending” broadcast news society, and predecessor of Xinhua
News, was founded in 1931, called Red China News Society 红色中华通讯社, along with a shortwave broadcasting station, CSR (Chinese Soviet Radio). This latter would broadcast the
First National Plenary in Ruijin, Jiangxi to the world, as well as other follow up developments of the Communist Party. A telecommunications equipment factory was also built in Ruijin, similarly using salvaged and secretly bought components, including engines, vacuum tubes, and telegraph keying parts. With its own maintenance and production facilities, the Jiangxi soviet hoped to develop its radio industry without depending on external resources. After losing about one third of their radio materials from defeats during the Nationalists’ encirclement campaigns, however, the Red Army’s Ruijin radio industry had to relocate to Northern Shaanxi province along with other equipment during the infamous Long March of 1934-1935, and continue radio training courses there at a school set up there (80 students attended). Forming the Second United
Front between the Nationalist party and the Communist Party resisting the Japanese invasion, this station was reconnected with Shanghai in 1936, and the Telecommunications Tureau was charged with three main tasks: to cultivate radio personnel, to purchase necessary materials, and to establish another radio equipment manufacturing factory. By the start of the “Second Sino-
Japanese War” in 1937, the Red Army had installed 34 transmitting stations across China. The
Nationalists published and re-broadcast information by Xinhua News and from the journal
Masses 群众, material not in line with official Nationalist war-time policies was censored.96
In 1940, Yan’an became the official headquarters of the Communist Party, and the base of the 8th Route Army. Mao Zedong, claiming that the signal corps 通信战士 would serve as the
96 Ibid., 61-64. Beauchemin 65
thousand-mile eyes 千里眼 of China, convened a radio committee with Zhou Enlai as the head, and the Party’s first sound broadcasting station was established. A crude station hidden in a tunnel-dug mountain cave in a county nearby named Wangpiwan, the station used a transmitter bought from Moscow, and various parts that were either salvaged from Nationalist and Japanese bases, built by the Party’s own radio equipment factory, or assembled by the 9th Route Army.
Lacking steel, the aerial was built using long wooden sticks. Because there was no power plant to supply a current in Yan’an, first batteries and hand-turned motors were used. While these could be used for intermittent bursts of energy, and practical for telegram-sending, something more constant was necessary for the transmission of a continuous sound/voice. Finally using a 300- watt coal-powered motor, a continuous flow of energy could flow from the aerial mounted on the mountain top. Call-code XNCR, the Yan’an Xinhua Station would become the official mouth organ of Xinhua News, broadcasting four hours a day. The station adopted some of the patriotic and anti-Japanese entertainment programs and lectures, as well as an increasing amount of anti-
Nationalist news alongside a promise of liberation from capitalism and imperialism. Increasing tensions between the Communists and Nationalists would play themselves out on the air throughout the 1940s as part of the “radio war” as the former posed a threat the Nationalist’s claimed monopoly on China’s radio industry.97
The rise of the Communist Party seen through the lens of its appropriation of signaletic space constitutes the central thread of Wang Ping’s 1958 film The Eternal Wave. Following Li
Xia, a comrade who was sent to Shanghai to re-establish communications between the underground network there and the Communist’s base in Yan’an in 1938, the film effectively
97 Ibid., 64-72. Beauchemin 66 brings together many of the elements of radio’s disjunctive history together. When Li Xia arrives in Shanghai, he and another comrade, He Lanfen, pretend to be a relatively well-off newlywed couple, and rent an apartment complex where they fake their identity by holding Mah Jong sessions and pretending to live a normal bourgeois lifestyle – the assumed audience of daily commercial broadcasts. Having to navigate the tightly securitized city being surveilled by the
Japanese secret police (Tokko 特高) under Wang Jingwei’s puppet government in Shanghai, Li
Xia and his wife take refuge in their attic at night, where he deciphers and transcribes incoming messages to be exchanged with comrades scattered around the city. After being caught, tortured, and finally released by the secret police, Li Xia manages to return to his station to finally send the warning signal that would be enshrined as a decisive moment in determining the direction of the Communist Party towards victory in 1949.
The Eternal Wave creatively plays with the relations constitutive of signaletic space – its points of emission and reception, its linguistic re-encodings, the circulation of its access point as a transient frequency jotted on a scrap of paper, and the architecture that was gradually erected as it became territorialized in the art-deco designed interiors of bourgeois dwellings. Like the published tabloid schedules, the registration of stations and manufacturing companies, and the radio call codes that the Communist party appropriated for its underground network described above, these encodings served as the facades and means of transgressing established structures of communication for the gradual re-encoding of a new one. More significantly, Wang Ping treats radio as a genuine cinematic and socio-technological force, one which operates as the signaletic unconscious of a deteriorating urban milieu and which gradually reveals itself as a force transcending multiple representational spaces. As the secret police enter the attic where Li Xia is bravely keying the last dots and dashes to Yan’an, his eyes remain determined and centered Beauchemin 67
towards the camera as he drifts though the clouds and scenes of military cannons, naval ships,
and protestors in the streets carrying Maoist slogans. The superimposed scenes of war-time geo-
political spaces are crossed and radiated with the modulated energy of the radio-human cyborg.
His eyes centered and frozen in concentration, ears plugged into the headset receiver, and fingers
swiftly, but calmly, tapping the telegraph key, Li Xia’s body enters into a rhythmic trance, and
the particle character of Morse-code acquires the texture of a continuous, wave-like,
revolutionary force, following him into the cloud and the radiating ether. The movie thus
theorizes the beginning of Mao-era China in terms of the return of point-to-point channels of
transmission, understood here as revolutionary and subversive mode, but which would soon find
its actualization in the distribution of a wired network of loudspeakers and the collapse of
privatized work and family interiors into the social space of collective and commune life.
Final sequence of shots superimposing Li Xia over a series of struggles taking place across the country in Wang Ping’s film The Eternal Wave 永不消逝的电波 (1958). Beauchemin 68
This chapter sought to trace both the transcendental force of the signaletic (strength and frequency of electromagnetic waves) and its modes of capture (call signs, programming schedules, registered frequency and equipment) while simultaneously attending to the disjunctions (point-to-point vs. radiation) and heterogenous set of actors (international corporations, state interests, commercial broadcast stations, underground resistance networks).
However, as became increasingly obvious, this analysis also served to the bring to the fore a series of further points of inquiry that could be pursued to get a better sense of the global connections of the radio industry(-ies) of the Republican Era in China. Each section thus may serve as a point of departure for further exploration of concerns with the assemblage of geo- political, technological, and socio-technological tendencies of radio. With regards to this thesis, I hope to have given a general sense of the distribution of stations, and the agency of both socio- political and signaletic forces in determining it. Attending to the signaletic dimension of radio allows us to see its integration into sets of relations that would otherwise be held apart – the global emergence of a “military-industrial” complex, nationalized circuits of communication and transportation, commercial advertising and entertainment industries, and the underground communist network.
The following chapter, then, engages with the other sensory element constitutive of radio broadcasting – sound - and its two phases of modulation and demodulation at the mouth- microphone and ear-speaker interfaces. I thus move away from the production of distribution (or centers of radiation) to the sites of production and consumption of radio programming, where negotiations and tensions were played out with the articulation of new techniques of speaking and listening with (and not simply “into”) the technical apparatus of radio. Insofar as the platformative dimension of radio is of concern, and the actual genesis of a sonico-signaletic Beauchemin 69 space, the next chapter will bring to the fore how signaletic space was assembled with the production studio and the home in the differential articulations of linguistic and bodily performance.
Beauchemin 70
CHAPTER TWO - Approaching the Microphone-Mouth Interval
With the development of radio infrastructure in the 1910s and 20s and one of its actualizations as a broadcasting medium especially in the 1930s and 40s, its permeation of social space would increasingly bring to the fore questions regarding language. Alongside the emergence of other media technologies such as typewriters, phonographs and film, radio introduced a language (or languaging) channel that qualitatively transformed vocal perception
(the emitting and receiving of verbal signs). Whether as part of a broader nationalizing, commercial, or military enterprise, radio broadcasting was not simply circumscribed by socio- political “contexts”, but itself introduced what Kittler terms “positive technological effects.”
These effects can already be observed in the aforementioned signaletic tendencies - transmission vs radiation – for example. The historical production of signaletic space was inseparable from the simultaneous emergence of new practices of “languaging,” and therefore of the sites of articulation and reception that signaletic space held together and integrated itself into: the microphone-mouth and speaker-ear interfaces. In this chapter, the concern will be with the microphone’s modulation of sound, and specifically of (and with) the voice, as it produced a series of permutations of linguistic practices, in conjunction with other social and technological displacements. First, however, I will begin by discussing two recent accounts of the relationship between modern Chinese language reforms and media technologies in order to demonstrate what the stakes are of turning our attention to positive technological effects as a conceptual move.
The most common account given for describing the “revolution” that Chinese language and literature underwent during the Republican Era places emphasis on the 1919 May Fourth movement and Hu Shi’s promotion of baihua 白话 (“plain speech” or more often Beauchemin 71
vernacularization). Since wenyan 文言 (Classical Chinese) was, until the end of the Qing dynasty, the dominant script which was reserved for an elite literati class, baihua sought to elevate a grammatical form that more closely approached spoken language (specifically
Mandarin), in order to increase literacy and accessible education across the country. In conjunction with the simultaneous attempts being taken to Romanize Chinese script, a new national language was experimented with by a select few humanist literati figures who conceived of baihua as a necessary tool for China to enter into a more developed phase of world History – what some have come to term “the Chinese Enlightenment.”98
By situating transformations of “language” in the nexus formed between radio technology, emergent practices of voicing and listening, and uneven globalization, I am positioning this chapter in conversation with recent attempts at exploring the relationship between media technologies and language (broadly construed) during the first half of the 20th century in China, particularly those accounts given by Andrew Jones and Yurou Zhong. Such attempts complicate the idealization of baihua as a single overdetermining movement and draw our attention towards a tension between different political actors and how these tensions manifested themselves as differences in modes of writing and recording speech. Because linguistic reforms had “spoken language” as one of their primary points of reference to base themselves on, audio technologies become significant sites of inquiry for Jones and Zhong for their role as instruments to nationalize the spoken language which simultaneously served as the basis for various attempts at transcribing and phoneticizing it. Rather than conceive of these
“techno-linguistic” differentiations as a single line of transformation from a pre-modern to
98 For a summary of this account with particular emphasis on Hu Shi’s conceptions of national literature as a revolutionary instrument and living language, see Jerome B. Grieder, Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917-1937, Cambridge: Harvard University Press (1970). Beauchemin 72 modern linguistic system however, they situate these reforms in the context of global imperialism and the domestic conflicts sparked between the state-sponsored Nationalist reforms and the increasingly antagonistic Leftists, as well as differing strategies taken within and outside of these political affiliations themselves.
From Phonocentric Rupture to Techno-Human Disjunction
In Yurou Zhong’s recent book Chinese Grammatology, she goes at length to describe the multifaceted dimensions of the Chinese script revolution as it was transmutated according to the logic of a global phonocentric turn during the Republican Era and into the 1950s and 60s (which culminated in an “anti-phonocentric” retention of Chinese characters). Phonocentrism was linked to the privileging of Roman-Latin alphabet over characters as they could more readily capture the differentiations of speech. Two movements are especially focused on as significant in revealing the “phonocentric antinomies” of the Chinese script revolution. First, as part of the
Nationalists’ endorsed Romanization movement, the linguist Yuen Ren Chao first promoted his
Gwoyeu Romatzyh (GR) script in an attempt to obtain and nationalize the “universal” Roman-
Latin alphabet.99 Although Romanization loyalists advocated for the “old national language”国
语 as the phonological basis for recording and transcribing “High Chinese,” by 1924 Pekingese was agreed upon as the national pronunciation, and would receive official recognition by the
Nationalist government in 1928.100 The representative of the Latinization movement Qu Qiubai promoted another script called Sin Wenz with a more didactic goal of registering nuances of
99 Yurou Zhong, Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916-1958, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 31. 100 Ibid., 36-41. Hence when sound cinema and “talkies” emerged, actors would need to speak standardized Pekingese (Mandarin). Beauchemin 73 regional dialects while also remaining accessible to a general audience.101 This latter’s commitment to “an egalitarian realm of linguistic heterogeneity and inclusiveness” was directly linked to its mobilization by the rising Leftists in their attempt to democratize writing and give voices to the masses by means of a truer baihua script.102 Zhong’s book goes on to show how a colloquialization of writing was mobilized in the YMCA’s Chinese literacy program (primarily by James Yen) when the Beiyang government sent about 140 to 200 thousand Chinese laborers to help the Allies during World War I.103 Lastly, in the 1950s after the Communist Party came to power, an “anti-phonocentric turn” is found most clearly delineated in Tang Lan’s grammatological approach to Chinese characters, that sought phonetic components from within the written script itself: “If pinyin meant the phoneticization of writing, then the phonographic attributes of the old script should be recognized as fulfilling, to some degree, the pinyin function.”104 In effect then, Tang Lan actually brings to the fore the irony of alphabetization as a marker of “phonocentrism” – characters are no less capable of representing sounds, insofar as in either case, a third pedagogical institution is necessary to couple the phonetic and visual elements. The goal then shifts to breaking characters down into their potentially phonetic and potentially ideographic components, rather than seeking to remove them tout court. Rendering them democratically accessible consisted in simplification and using pinyin as a pedagogical instrument.
Unlike the pinyin system eventually adopted as an auxiliary phonetic system to learn how to pronounce characters, or the Wades-Giles system that was up until recently the standard system used to transcribe Chinese words in Latin-based languages, GR and Sin Wenz scripts
101 Ibid., 70. 102 Ibid., 73 103 Ibid., 100-125. 104 Ibid., 170. Beauchemin 74 were mobilized as attempts to surpass and conquer the prevalent use of Chinese characters that were seen as a hinderance to phoneticization and the possibility for mass literacy – principle ideals of the May Fourth baihua movement. Zhong thus sees phonocentrism as fundamentally tied to alphabetization (the tendency towards “alphabetic universalism”), a connection made possible by the presumption that the alphabet closer approaches the representation of sounds.105
Furthermore, spoken languages are already conceived of as pre-existing systems to be found and recorded. As part of the emerging disciplines of historical and comparative linguistics, disparate spoken languages were recorded, systematized and relegated to the domain of dialects as divergent forms of a smaller number of “root” languages.106 It was in an attempt to distinguish official “High Chinese” from these dialects for Yuen Ren Chao, and in an attempt to render writing accessible to all of these different dialect groups for Qu Qiubai, that GR and Sin Wenz acquired their respective techno-political distinctions. While Zhong rightly situates Chinese linguists’ projects in the context of their relationship with Euro-American linguists such as
Leonard Bloomfield and Bernhard Karlgren, the assumption that such “regional dialects” existed as such prior to the operations produced by the emergent field of linguistics and the technologies employed should be challenged.
It is here where I would argue that this view that Zhong takes at face value from the linguistic reformers she analyzes, is where a disavowal of the technological displacements and reconfigurations of language is enabled – a disavowal that simultaneously leads to the legitimizing of a rupture thesis of “phonocentrism” for understanding linguistic developments.
Though Yurou Zhong does consider the role that technological developments played in linguistic
105 This is not Yurou Zhong’s presumption per se, but rather the understanding of the reformers she discusses. By remaining within the register of a linguistic problematic centered around these individuals however, we are left with no recourse to a perspective form outside linguistics and the domain of language to challenge it. 106 Ibid., 78. Beauchemin 75 reform, they already assume the nation (as an imperative), so we are already outside the problematic that would see it as emergent, such as proposed by Benedict Anderson, which would look at the intersection of technology, capitalism, and language in the formation of the nation.
We are instead given the vantage point of the State and its contracted agents, and therefore of the nation as an intentionally directed phenomenon. This is not to dismiss the significance of such explicit actions, since it effectively draws our attention to the tremendous role played by modernizers in the production and distribution of linguistic mutations that were formed and consolidated as state-sponsored nation-building projects. However, by eschewing an analysis of real technological effects, individual and governmental agency are the only distributions that the analysis offers an optic on. Furthermore, by concentrating on the phoneticization of script, it ignores the reverse side - that speech found itself increasingly reterritorialized in non-sonic, visual and tactile recording surfaces. If the script reform was phonocentric, this was inseparable from the simultaneous transposition of speech to divergent technological registers. By putting all script transformations through the conceptual filter of a phonocentric turn (where differences are the product of internal antinomies and external oppositions), a phonocentric rupture thesis is deceptively enabled.
The disavowal of technological permutations of linguistic practices is made most obvious in Zhong’s discussion of Yuen Ren Chao’s obsession with registering every differentiation of spoken language by using all technical means available to register and analyze sound. One of
Chao’s goals with GR was to represent “speech melody” by using nothing but Roman letters. But this desire to be able to record all distinctions in articulated speech led to a gradual need to have all sonic distinctions marked and rendered systematic. The first technological innovation that allowed for this more “scientific” mode of observing language, and which contributed to Beauchemin 76 facilitating the transcription of Chinese into GR, was the phonograph. Zhong describes Chao’s relation to the phonograph as a “human-machine continuum” where “Chao needs to generate the speech sound of the old national language107 error-free, in real time, and to the best of his ability in order to accommodate the machine.”108 This somehow leads to Zhong claiming that the human-machine relationship “stems . . . from the intricate phonetics of High Chinese itself” and that the phonograph served to highlight and heighten the technical nature of Chinese phonetics.109 Already with this account, we are left with a very odd relationship between Chao and phonographic recording, where all the phonograph seems to be able to do is serve as an aid or support for the pre-existing “High Chinese” language – with the goal to make people hear a language that no one actually speaks! But, we may ask, if no one speaks it, how could it ever serve as a point of reference? Can it be that it was precisely with the onset of phonographic recording that such referentiality to a true phonetic association could be made possible? I will return to this below.
Zhong then points to Chao’s attempt to combine GR with a numbered musical notation
“that turned the drama score into a genuine speech-music continuum.”110 But being able to notate drama, music and “normal speech” is not enough, and in 1947, Chao saw Bell Lab’s experimentations with the sound spectrograph as a revolutionary step in phoneticization. With its ability to record frequency, intensity, and time, it would render all elements of spoken speech to be broken up, analyzed, and systematized as “blocks of spectrographic speech” in a manner far superior to the Roman-Latin alphabet.111 Despite the fact that this “superior” technology
107 This was prior to the adoption of Pekingese as the phonological standard. 108 Ibid., 39. 109 Ibid. 110 Ibid., 53. 111 Ibid., 60 Beauchemin 77 necessitated the conversion of all sonic differentiations to the plane of visuality, Zhong nonetheless concludes with:
“In strict adherence to the tenet of phonocentrism, the sound spectrograph reinforced the
supremacy of speech over writing – be it alphabetic, phonographic, or spectographic
writing of sound – and led to the end of alphabetic universalism”112
Though the ironies and antinomies of phonocentrism increasingly become relevant towards the end of the book, with the discussion of an “anti-phonocentric turn,” I see within this analysis of audio technologies a perhaps more subtle irony: the disavowal of how phonographic recording and visual representation produced the very possibility of language-as-system. The claim that Chao was able to speak High Chinese, and that what was recorded was “High Chinese itself” necessitates a critique of language as a regulative Idea. As Naoki Sakai describes the paradoxical situation of linguistics,
“since academic linguistics is invariably based upon the assumption that the language is
an institution that is systematically organized, linguistic study cannot begin to study a
language until it posits that object as a systematic unity. Linguists do not come to
discover the systematicity of a langue through and as a result of empirical research. On
the contrary, the positing of such a systematic unity as a langue is the condition of
possibility for linguistic research.”113
For Naoki Sakai, it is within the uneven regime of translation where a systematic co-figuration takes place to situate disparate languages on a shared synchronic plane, and where the “non-
112 Ibid., 61. 113 Naoki Sakai, Translation and Subjectivity: On Japan and Cultural Nationalism, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 57. (Italics mine) Beauchemin 78
West” acquires a specificity vis-à-vis the universal “West” (which is obviously relevant for thinking the adoption of alphabetic universalism here). Although even with Sakai there is a sense that such a system is still floating in the air, untethered to any material production of space, his account nonetheless delineates the problem: Linguistics presupposes what it itself constructs – the systematicity of language, what we might also call its “ontic” unity.114
If the spectograph, along with other technologies, are simultaneous with this turn towards the systematicity of language (which produces the limits and linguistic fatality115 that the nation seeks to ground itself on), then we should more closely attend to what they themselves are performing. Because Zhong’s analysis of the spectrograph focuses on it as an efficient supplement to Chao’s desire, however, what the technical apparatus produces itself is ignored.
But we can already tease out some differentiations engendered that would complicate the rupture thesis. By visualizing sound, and rendering it there, ready to hand, it effectively produced speech as a system of distinct physical properties. More strikingly, it goes completely against the notion of “phonocentrism” since the very means of phoneticization would rely on the displacement of sound to the storing and processing abilities of a visualizing and inscribing technologies.
Phonocentrism was thus rendered possible only when speech could become tactile and visible. It is not simply that Chinese characters would gradually be subordinated to the spoken word, but that the spoken word was being transversed by a series of technological permutations, one effect
114 As will become obvious with my turn to Kittler below, this “ontic” unity is not simply a symbolic system associated with the ontological realm of meaning and significance (of Being) secondarily, but rather plays a primary role in producing it. In a sense, because Zhong does not engage with the problem of meaning when engaging with phonetic reforms, this more fundamental relationship between ontic permutations and transformations in the ontological realm remain untheorized, the assumption seeming to be that meaning transcends its material signifiers. In other words, the clearly delineated social can act on the more obscure and complex technological, but not the other way around. 115 In Anderson’s sense, whereby language, in conjunction with print capitalism, comes to form limits that merge with, and come to constitute, the borders of the imagined community. Beauchemin 79 of which was the production of language as an analyzable system. Both Chinese characters and the “Roman-Latin” alphabet would feel these technological reverberations, as themselves storage devices linked to specific pedagogical institutions for their coupling with speech.116
By attending to the production of language’s systematization through technological permutations and displacements, even Sakai’s reliance on a Hegelian schema of oppositions and co-figurations seems to not go far enough in describing the process of systematization and the multiplicity of linguistic (or languaging) practices. Both Sakai and Zhong conceive of modernity as a rupture, and while Sakai points to the historical forces as more significant than specific individuals in the operative transformations of linguistic practices, both disregard the technological mode of existence of language and the differential positive technological effects that constitute divergent linguistic practices. Such an approach would force us to think of the displacements and mutations of language not simply as emerging from particular individuals, nor as revolutionary historical ruptures, but as evolutionary differentiations, as tendencies of techno- human individuation. In short, the space of language as an energetic field, rather than a condition or filter that (whether a priori or a posteriori) circumscribed our modern languaging practices. It is not a coincidence that both Zhong and Sakai employ notions of universalisation, linguistic aporias, and implications of rupture. In essence, their entire methodology and framework still relies on a Kantian framework - of consciousness as a set of categories of the understanding that filter our experience of the “world” (and as world), and in which contradictions find themselves
116 My use of storage, transmission, and processing is derived from Kittler’s theory of media technologies in Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800-1900, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). Beauchemin 80 played out synchronically as a series of productive aporias. Conditions of possibility hold sway over potentialities and multiplicities.117
A look at the linguist Yuen Ren’s Chao’s imagination of what it means to “know” another language hints at the power of media technologies. From an early age, born speaking
Changzhou dialect and having to learn old Mandarin to read the classics, then moving to Suzhou and learning Suzhounese, Chao was confronted with the reality of linguistic differences.
Learning English through an English primer, and eventually moving to the United States to study physics and math at Cornell, then pursue graduate studies in philosophy at Harvard, Yurou
Zhong is right in pointing his confrontation with Bernhard Karlgren’s phonologie Chinoise as a turning point in his life. But the effects of this confrontation could not simply have been one of fascination, but of a realization of having one’s own language codified within a scientific framework by a European – and as phonology. From this point on, Chao’s drive to know other languages would have as its primary competence criterion the ability to “sound like a native speaker.” Through recordings on wax cylinders and gramophone discs, Chao would return to
China and tour the country bragging about his ability to make others think he can actually speak this or that dialect – hence his claim to “knowing” their language. On this basis of speaking a language qua perfecting distinct articulations, could linguistic systematization take as its basis the phoneticization of speech – and the perfect instrument for storing these distinctions in speech would find its raw material in the language he became most intoxicated with ever since
117 This critique is central to Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. Seeking to overcome the possible-real duality that he sees as always implying an “all or nothing” rupture, Deleuze shifts our attention to differenciation and its synonyms: actualize, integrate, solve. From the perspective of local integrations and solutions that connect in producing a global solution, conceiving of historical changes in linguistic practices solely from the point of view of language could only produce false genealogies. The goal should be to see how language inhabits and is inhabited by a multiplicity of forces – its synaesthetic and monstrous dimensions. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 211. Beauchemin 81 encountering the English Primer in middle school – American English. One would need to first learn how to speak English before one could learn to “speak” Chinese.118
Furthermore, Chinese could only acquire its univocity and Mandarin become
“universalized” by way of recording singular voices to be distributed as educational manuals – the threat that Kittler saw in recording technologies to the pedagogical institutions that were otherwise required to couple reading and speaking (the famous account of the Mother’s Mouth in the discourse of 1800 for example). Two storage devices that went hand-in-hand were thus alphabeticized English and phonograph technologies. But Chao’s initially seemingly schizo- lingual tendency towards capturing and systematizing absolutely all distinctions of all languages found its real centering anchor in the appearance of Chao’s wife, Yang Buwei, who claims to have “repatriated” her husband from the United States through her ability to speak Mandarin
Chinese natively – inscribing the drive towards Mandarin as a supranational language in Chao.119
As Jin Feng describes, “by claiming that her husband can converse perfectly with people all over
China in their local dialects, while describing herself as one who clings stubbornly to the linguistic habits she acquired as a child, Yang implied that she is the grounding force in their relationship.”120 This “repatriation” would manifest in Chao’s adoption of the position of observer (rather than observed), as he sought to render the noise of linguistic differences into systematized and re-articulatable units of speech.
118 For biographical information about Yuen Ren Chao’s life I am drawing on Zhao Xinna 赵新那 & Huang Peiyun 黄培云, “Zhao Yuanren nianpu” 赵元任年谱 [Chronicle of Yuen Ren Chao’s Life], (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan 商务印书馆 [Commercial Press], 1998). 119 Jin Feng, “With this Lingo, I Thee Wed: Language and Marriage in Autobiography of a Chinese Woman,” Journal of American-East Asian Relations 18 (2011), 238. 120 Ibid., 241. Beauchemin 82
Chao would eventually publish Mandarin and Cantonese primers, his GR system proving most effective in teaching English speakers to learn how to pronounce (and therefore to speak and to know) Chinese, accompanied with gramophone discs that were not mere aids, but the necessary pedagogical channel for the coupling of the quasi-English formatting of Mandarin with the corresponding speech units. Something like “units of speech” could not have existed outside of the reproduction of speech and repeatability of hearing the same voice utter over and over again – rote learning became phonographic mimesis + visual coordination with Anglicized
Chinese. No Chinese characters were used in these Chinese primers. Thus someone like Yuen
Ren Chao did not simply rely on scientific and “media” technologies for the sake of improving pre-existing ideal of language, but rather was interpellated by these machines and other forces that made their appearance throughout his life. Yang Buwei’s voice stood in for a proto-
Mandarin to be the third channel mediating the relationship between a universalized alphabet
(Chao met and became fascinated with Bertrand Russel’s work around the same time he married
Yang) and the positive effects of phonographic recording, to distribute the supranational language as an audio-visual pedagogical instrument.
Positive Technological Effects
Somewhat in line with what Rey Chow argued in her by now widely read conceptualization of “primitive passions,”121 what Andrew Jones calls “phonographic realism” refers to another mode in which this time musicians and music directors took it upon themselves to collect and unify disparate voices to then claim to ‘represent” them. Through recordings on phonograph records, modernizers, linguistic reformers, and here musicians could reproduce their
121 Rey Chow, Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). Beauchemin 83 idealized version of the oppressed or “subaltern” populations. These representations took on different modalities depending on the determining political strategy. More “Leftist” composers such as Nie Er accused Li Jinhui’s music for its decadence and use of sing-song girls and youth to corrupt society with backwards values – hence the name “yellow” music (yellow essentially meaning pornographic). However, Jones points to the irony within Nie Er’s own works (in collaboration with other Leftists such as Tian Han, Sun Yu, and Xia Yan), which assimilated the voices of the oppressed classes, only to voice them through the unified national language
(Mandarin) and have them disseminated by mass media (phonograph records, radio, sound film, etc.), effectively producing their stories as archetypes of national humiliation by means of a kind of “political ventriloquism.”122
Jones’ description of this process of assimilation and dissemination of the “mass voice” as a kind of “political ventriloquism” finds its most obvious evidence in how all the songs were sung in Mandarin. He writes,
“Indeed, the political ventriloquism involved in the production of these songs becomes
clearest when we consider the language in which they were sung. In place of the rich
variety of (sometimes mutually unintelligible) regional dialect and class-based sociolect
that Nie Er and his colleagues would have encountered on the streets and workshops of
Shanghai, mass music is set in the ringing tone of Standard Mandarin.”123
This use of a mass singing voice had the effect of already situating Mandarin as the language of the people. This was very different from Li Jinhui’s “yellow music”, which using
122 Andrew Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colonial Modernity in The Chinese Jazz Age, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 109. 123 Ibid., 109-110 Beauchemin 84 one or two sing-song girls, not only mobilized what Nie Er saw as vulgar and eroticized depictions of women, but could never elevate in such an immediate way the perception of
Mandarin as the language of a nationalized and patriotic people.124 If yellow music rendered women independent by way of eroticization, then the Leftist tendency was to treat the sing-song girls’ voices as figuring the effects of national humiliation, in order to mobilize mass singing as a form of patriotic national salvation. The subaltern were thus made to speak only to the extent that they spoke Mandarin, and all shared a commitment to the desire of nation-building that centered itself on the existing exploitation and need for salvation of the woman’s body (qua voice).125
These musical reforms, moreover, were not simply tied to phonograph recordings in an accidental or secondary manner. Alongside Nie Er, the literary critic Guo Moruo proclaimed in
1928 (the year that the Nationalist Party came to power) that “leftist writers must serve as phonographs, ‘recording’ the struggles and aspirations of the proletariat and subsequently playing them back to the society at large.”126 If Mandarin wasto subtly interject itself as the language of the people, it had to do so by inscribing itself into the grooves of mass produced records, which could be replayed across gramophone players and as radio broadcasts on-air. For
Jones then, the interest in the phonograph has to do with the effect of realism that it brings forth by rendering absent the regional and dialectical differences of those people that Leftist music sought to represent. The collapsing of disparate voices in the production of modern categories
124 Ibid., 113-114 125 Jones also points to an interesting difference in approaches taken between the Nationalists and the Leftists. The former took a more repressive approach to the promiscuity of women’s bodies and voices in popular culture, choosing to dictate new standards for dressing and limiting what could be sung and how, whereas the latter took a more affirmative approach re-centering women in mass singing rallies, assimilating them as part of the political struggle as much as any other exploited demographic. Ibid. 126 Ibid., 107. Beauchemin 85
(“masses,” “the people,” “folk,” etc.127) can thus be regarded as effects of the phonographic medium.
If “Standard” Mandarin relied on phonograph technology (and often radio broadcasting as well) as its means of propagation, then in some sense it still pre-existed the media that instrumentalized it. This assumption of a given language as pre-existing its technical modes of articulation is something that I wish to challenge, though it is important to note that Jones’ analysis is already working outside accounts of language that remain attached to the linguistic field, demonstrating how language was embedded in technological, political, and aesthetic transformations. While his project is not particularly concerned with language per se (he is more interested in reforms of music), this has the advantage of bringing to the fore the effects of recording technology on language. However, if Jones does bring to the fore the technological effects in the process of elevating one unified spoken language as the language of the people
(which itself was ridden with tensions that Yurou Zhong describes), it does so by immediately turning back to the discursive effects of political affiliations. I see this evidenced primarily in his resorting to the category of “realism,” which, for all its attending to the “production of the real” results in treating what the phonograph does as a process of negation and absencing – it allows for the one to surface as “the only one.” In a similar manner that Yurou Zhong relies on the reforms of specific individuals to account for linguistic transformations, and where technology enters as a means of facilitating and advancing a pre-existing telos of linguistic systematization, so does Andrew Jones’ see the phonograph as an instrument whose technological effects are
127 If I am putting these terms in quotations it is not so much to indicate their social construction as it is their existence as emergent categories inseparable from “Chinese modernity.” Beauchemin 86 subordinated to the discursive functions of those who mobilize it as instrument for national revolution.
Where Zhong’s linguistic transmutations often forego an examination of language’s integration with heterogenous orders such as the technological and synesthetic dimensions of linguistic experience, Jones’ attention to the phonographic and multi-sensual is too quickly subordinate to discursive practice. In the former case, the molecular movements of language are reduced to the molar dimension of linguistics and the State, in the latter, to the positive effects of discourse and the molar dimension of political affiliations (Nationalists, Communists,
“popular”). In both cases differences emerge, but are immediately contained by National History.
Something then, of what Thomas Lamarre calls “methodological individualism” operates in both cases – a select few individuals are taken as sites of inquiry (Yuen Ren Chao, Qu Qiubai, Xu
Dishan, Hu Shi; and Xiao Youmei, Cai Yuanpei, Li Jinui, Nie Er) as substitutes for national determinations (Chinese music, Chinese language), as if the nation serves as a surrounding container in which these individuals are absorbed. 128 This is legitimated by the early 20th century necessity felt by many reformers and intellectuals for “China” to enter the world of nation-states and therefore enter a historical phase where national determination inflected all levels of discourse. For Zhong, this is further justified by tending to the field of Chinese language and linguistics – that “pre-existing” space, however ideal and ephemeral, that the nation so often grounds itself on. However, is it not the hegemonic hold of the nation and of linguistics as fields of power that ought to turn our attention to the molecular that precedes, persists, and operates outside and against these molar formations? Is it not precisely the fact that the turn of the 20th
128 Lamarre, Thomas, “Platformativity: Media Studies, Area Studies,” Asiascape: Digital Asia 4 (2017), 286. Beauchemin 87 century is so wrought with the intellectual turn to the nation and to linguistics that should make us wary of taking individual reforms at face value for their actual historical effects?129
Kittler’s method is to unearth the continuous switching operation between the ontic and the ontological, but by situating this operation as a historical (or rather processual) one, we can see the various tensions and problems engendered by their linkages and dis-connections. As soon as the Real is revealed (for example “Nature” as Woman as breath, blowing, singing that persists in the discourse network of 1800) it is only for having been articulated by a new mode of writing
(flowing cursive + genetic writing method).130 The imaginary always finds its actualization through a third mediating channel – as that which persists in the realm of the real, even as the
“originary” source has been displaced by it. The symbolic in turn can be said to be the effect of the disavowal of the Real as the ontological realm of linguistic determination – hence the irony that shoots through Kittler’s account, and which completely rejects the possibility of analyzing linguistic transformations without accounting for the positive effects of media technologies.
With the phonograph, and all sound recording instruments of the discourse network of
1900, what becomes significant for Kittler is first, how, in transposing language from the storage medium of the alphabet to the grooves of the discs, the displacement of the pedagogical institutions, whether of the school or the Mother’s mouth, speaking no longer needs to be forcibly coupled with the visual indices of writing, and so the “coupling” agent is threatened.
With the severing of ties between language channels and cultural pedagogy, speaking, writing,
129 Written six years earlier, Rey Chow’s famous argument in Primitive Passions on “filmic visuality” does precisely this – showing how the multiplicity of optical turns towards seeing rather than being positioned as being seen was integrated as a post-colonial response into various author’s writing style’s and narrative forms. Thus if writing became visual, it was because visuality itself underwent a machinic transformation with film technology. And if visuality acquired politically charged valences, it is because it was inseparable from the positionality of authors, directors, and other intellectuals who encountered themselves being watched by the racializing gaze of imperialist onlookers. See Rey Chow, Primitive Passions, 4-26. 130 Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800-1900, 87. Beauchemin 88 hearing, reading were isolated and decomposed – “children circa 1900 learned to read without understanding and to write without thinking.”131 This transformation simultaneously tied with psychophysics linking the complexity of language to the complexity of neurological connections
– hence the emergence of linguistic pathologies – aphasia, alexia, agraphia, etc.132 Secondly, phonographic recording registers all vibrations that come to it – what will similarly be relevant for thinking of the microphone and radio broadcasting. The implications of this are that all accidents of speech and all “non-verbal” sounds are stored and made repeatable. This is where the breaking down of speech into the minimal signifieds of phonological science can happen – through the proto-sampling technology of the phonograph. Kittler writes, “Discourses that had previously never been able to cross a recording threshold were stored and returned; the gramophone had paid its debt.”133 This had the effect of introducing children’s languages, regional dialects, and testimonies of victims of psychoanalysis and criminology into the realm of science – producing their means of reproducibility ready for empirical analysis. Lastly, it is in the ability to reproduce what is stored without the third language channel, and in repeating
“everything” that was said at a given moment, that “phonographic accuracy means doing away with the constitutive repressions in discourses.”134 Disavowal occurs when the medium is taken only as the medium and not the message – as a means, a condition, a filter or aid. It happens when psychoanalysis mistakes the effects of speech recording as the cause of neuroses – there is a disavowal of analysis’s inherent relationship to the technologies that can break down a sequence into repeatable elements.
131 Ibid., 216. 132 Ibid., 217-218. 133 Ibid., 235. 134 Ibid., 368. Beauchemin 89
While Kittler remains attached to the terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis (the Real, the
Imaginary, the Symbolic), we can see how the phonograph effectively participates in the production of a “systematic unity” of language that Naoki Sakai saw as a necessary precondition for linguistic science. Furthermore, we learn how media technologies not only produced the necessary displacements for empirical research, but led to a series of further permutations as they connected language to the domains of psychophysics, psychoanalysis, criminology, and so forth
– hence multiplicities emerge as techno-linguistic processes integrate with a plurality of social institutions. The radio broadcasting apparatus, as an assemblage of microphones, electromagnetic waves and receivers, similarly can be looked at for its role in determining a series of permutations of the voice and experiences of speaking and listening. These techno- human permutations, furthermore, must be regarded in terms of their integration with specific social institutions. Turning to Yuen Ren Chao’s brief account of human coordination with the microphone apparatus in the studio room written in 1937, we get a glimpse into the techno- human affordances that provided the creative limits for a “universal phonetics” – cum – nationalized language.
The Microphone-Mouth Interval
To say that Yuen Ren Chao’s socio-linguistic drive was crossed and inflected by the perceptual affordances of media technologies (and a (post-)colonial positionality) is not to say he wasn’t himself highly aware of the determining role media technologies played (and arguable needed to play in line with the revolutionary impulse national reformers would increasingly adopt by 1937) in reconfiguring the “Chinese language.” With radio broadcasting studios having emerged throughout Shanghai and the Nationalist government’s own stations having entered the field of signaletic radiation, Chao was invited to the XGOA station, and he wrote an essay giving Beauchemin 90 instructions for how to speak into the microphone. Chao’s linguistic forte – knowing how to sound a specific way – found its technological corollary in the material specificities of the means of sounding – the interactive media that served as termini for the electrical production and reproduction of the voice. In this case rather than the recording of phonograph records, it was the electromagnetic frequency space of radio broadcasting and the space of the studio room that would serve to re-coordinate the body as various solutions to the problematic of the microphone- mouth interface.
Instructions for Radio Broadcasting, by Yuen Ren Chao135
1. From Perspective of the Machine
a. When speaking into the microphone, it is best to keep a distance of 1-2 feet.
• Explanation: If the distance is too great, the room’s echo and static
elements will increase. If the distance is too small, it will be difficult to
maintain stability; breath and other such sounds will be very loud.
b. When speaking, the mouth must be positioned in front of the microphone.
• Explanation: There are several types of microphones which, when spoken
at from the side, will produce a muffled and unclear sound. Since
broadcasters are not familiar with the different types of microphones, the
135 Excerpt from Zhao, Yuanren 赵元任, “Guangbo xuzhi” 广播须知 [Notes on Broadcasting], Guangbo zhoubao 广播周报 [Broadcast Weekly Publication], Issue 135, May 1, 1937, reprinted in Zhao Yuming, 赵玉明, Zhongguo xiandai guangbo shiliao xuanbian 中国现代广播史料选编 [A Collection of Sources on Chinese Modern Broadcasting], (Shantou: Shantou daxue chubanshe 汕头大学出版 [Shantou University Press], 2007), 86-94. My translation. Words in bold indicate elements that I will discuss afterwards. Beauchemin 91
best is for all of them to have their mouth positioned in front of the
microphone. (But do not blow into it. See next item). c. Do not blow air into the microphone.
• Explanation: All words and aspirations that must be puh’d tuh’d and
kuh’d cannot be directly aimed at the microphone. Because the
microphone only receives the voice’s waves, one cannot aspirate directly
into the microphone, else it will produce a strange sound that no longer
resembles the initial “puh,” “tuh” and “kuh.” To avoid this danger,
ensure that the microphone is higher than the mouth by 1-2 inches, or to
aim the mouth slightly to the side. (The last item states that the mouth’s
position should be in front of the microphone, not that it must be aiming
towards it). d. Do not cough.
• Explanation: Unless you cannot hold it back, do not cough. If coughing is
necessary, turn your face backwards, so that the sound will be reduced. e. Do not let paper make noise.
• Explanation: Usually we do not assume the sound that paper makes is
very loud, but once it gets close to the microphone, the slightest movement
that a paper makes will produce a loud sound. Experienced people will
have the words written on a cloth, or will stick the draft on a board. A
simpler method is to only write on one side of each paper, and have them
placed loosely on the desk. As you finish reading one, lightly brush it to
the side to make the next page underneath visible. Beauchemin 92
f. Do not place the written draft between your mouth and the microphone.
• Explanation: When speaking for a radio broadcast, sound should be sharp
and clear. Obstructing the microphone by putting a paper in front of it will
not stop the transmission of sound, but the degree of clarity will decrease.
2. From Perspective of the Voice
a. Concerning the loudness of the voice, the standard should be no louder than if a
small room had 3-5 people conversing in it.
• Explanation: As described above, if someone speaks from 2 feet away
from microphone, it does not matter how low the voice is, the amplifier
will definitely pick it up and expand it to the appropriate level. Therefore,
broadcasters do not need to shout into the microphone as if to reach 100
million people far away. The voice that many broadcasters use (and this
goes for speaking into the telephone as well) is often too loud. Actually,
using a normal speaking volume is just right – it is unnecessary to shout
as if in front of a large audience.
b. When emphasizing words, one can lay stress on either the diction or the tone. It is
inadvisable to pound on single words.
• Explanation: The intensity range of a broadcast is not as high as that of
our actual voice. If the broadcaster speaks with the normal voice, then
suddenly adopts a hammering voice, the amplified sound will be
incomprehensible. If, on the other hand, the broadcaster uses a low voice
throughout, and a normal voice to emphasize words, then the overall
broadcast will be too quiet. Therefore, the best option is to stress words as Beauchemin 93
little as possible, unless you are an experienced broadcaster. (See item 4c
on how to enunciate) c. The most suitable pitch of the voice is a low pitch.
• Explanation: Attention! A voice’s pitch is its sharpness and coarseness, its
fineness and deepness, it is the range of the music staff, the length of an
instrument’s strings, and the left and right of the piano. Pitch is not
volume. (Volume relates to strength and weakness, sound and non-sound,
heavy and light).
• The last two items discussed the volume of the voice. This item refers to
the pitch, and that the broadcaster should use a low pitch, as this is the
pitch we usually use when conversing with 3-5 people in a room. If one
uses a high-pitch voice, they will sound like a character in a drama or like
the actors in the recent trend of sound cinema, and will give off an
inauthentic impression. d. Although one should generally use a low pitch voice, there should also be some
fluctuation. The entire pitch interval must have a broad range.
• Explanation: If the speaker reads the draft of a speech too stiffly one
sentence at a time, the audience will easily start falling asleep or will turn
you to listen to another station (把你捻掉了改听别的电台). If one wants
to sustain the audience’s interest, you must be constantly giving them the
impression that you are speaking with them directly. The greatest
difference between speaking and reading has to do with the pitch range.
When reading, the voice remains raised slightly higher than usual, and the Beauchemin 94
range is rather narrow. Normally, our voice remains at a lower pitch
when speaking, but when we do adopt a high or low pitch, it is either very
low or very high, and without any restrictions. When transmitting the
voice by in a radio broadcast, one should use the same strength as if one
were speaking normally, but to freely variate the pitch, and certainly not
remain at a medium or high pitch throughout. (Although the preceding
two items say that the normal pitch should be kept low, it must still include
variations).
e. When speaking, one should make the corresponding facial expressions.
• Explanation: Language was originally a form of behaviour, therefore the
sound of many linguistic expressions has an inseparable relationship with
the movements of the entire body, and especially with those of the face.
Obviously, broadcasters do not need to wave their arms and legs around
and count using their fingers to explain things (this is what many people
do when speaking over the phone), but do not assume that simply because
the audience cannot see you, that you can keep your face as stiff as a
board throughout the broadcast. The muscles in the face have an
incredible influence on the sounds that we make. If you feel that keeping
your hands idly to the side is creating restraints on your performance,
then feel free to move them around. Just don’t shake your head and wag
your tail,136 because the distance between your mouth and the microphone
should not shift too much.
136 Chao is playing on the literal and figurative meaning of 摇头摆尾 here – which literally translates to “shaking head and wagging tail” but is more often used to describe someone who is unhurried and lighthearted. Beauchemin 95
f. The average speed should be a bit slower than when normally speaking
• Explanation: Because the audience cannot hear the speaker that is talking
on the radio, this produces a slight difficulty in comprehending what is
being said, so one should speak a bit slower, so that the listeners can
follow along.
g. Although the average speaking speed should be slow, each word in a sentence
will have a different duration and speed.
• Explanation: In the preceding item I mentioned that an unchanging pitch
is like reading a book, and that an alternating pitch resembles more
closely how we converse. Similarly, when we speak individual words we
can see how each can either be spoken with the same speed as if reading
aloud a dictation, and each can be given its own speed as if we were
actually speaking to someone – we oscillate between speaking slowly and
quickly, hurried and hesitantly. Even though a written script is used and
so the speaker already knows the sentence that will follow, they should
nonetheless pause when a pause is required. Even though the literary style
of the script already includes its own breaks, one must occasionally, when
necessary, cast these aside and keep speaking – the sentence structure will
be understood regardless. The more irregular the speed, the more
structured the sentence becomes and the more closely it approaches real
speech - and thus the meaning is expressed more clearly.
Chao’s article goes on to discuss the broadcaster’s relationship to language, the script, source materials, and etiquette. But just by looking at these first two sections, we can observe to Beauchemin 96 what extent the microphone and the studio room produced an entire co-ordination of the body.
Breathing, speaking rhythm, speed and intensity, movements of the head, mouth and other facial muscles were all re-configured according to the dictates of the machine. Demodulation into frequency space determined the creative limits of speaking on the air, bringing to the fore an entire kinesthetics of the body. As Rey Chow describes in relation to her mother’s experience as a radio broadcaster, “not only did dramatic presentation involve multiple voices . . . it also required props, gestures, body movements, and other things to conjure illusionism.”137 While this is a description of the requirements of a radio drama performance, Chao’s instructions on how to speak into a microphone brings to the fore how the “natural voice” of radio lectures and speeches are themselves constructed performances, that need to integrate the radio apparatus into their modes of articulation as much as any other radio act.
But if we look closer at these “instructions” something else is at play that cannot simply be understood with reference to the radio apparatus itself. As instructions, they read as commands, which find their source in an imagined normativity of languaging practices that precede the broadcasting studio itself. In this way, the studio room and the microphone become the site of a series of bodily repressions. Taboos and prohibitions emerge as the studio room becomes a ritual space involving a particular set of body gestures that Yuen Ren Chao records and encodes. For Henri Lefebvre, it is precisely through gestural systems that “representations of space” and “representational spaces” are connected.138 The perceived space, including the microphone, the broadcast script, the walls of the studio room, the “materials” employed, etc, is coupled with conceived space, which is both the space that the broadcast consists of, and which it
137Rey Chow, Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 112. 138 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, (Oxford UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1991), 214. Beauchemin 97 introduces, as it comes to participate in the perception of space: the breathless voice, the stiff vs. the free, the noisy vs. the civilized. Chao’s instructional manual registers and produces the norms and prescriptions to be encoded as a perceived set of signifiers to guide the broadcaster. These norms are but the reverse side of repressed obscenities and future transgressions – those interferences where “noise” partakes just a bit too much in what should come across as a civilized sounding discussion (the one-to-one tendency within the one-to-many).
This regime of the body in the studio room finds its corollary in the techno-human calibration at the receiving end. As Weihong Bao describes, listening to the radio “entailed a more complicated process of assessing and stabilizing the energy supply, adjusting the rheostat, assembling the set, and setting up the antenna.”139 Thus the radio receiving set’s demodulation brings into being an entire set of habits and bodily re-adjustments, both in the human and the machine. There is a play between wobbly tuning knobs and their human handlers to reproduce and re-domesticate the signal, in collaboration with the ritual effects of the studio room. The difference between a crystal radio and a vacuum tube radio being one of degrees of involvement in the taming process.
The choreography of the body and the ritual space of the studio room are concentrated on the interface between the voice and the microphone. There is, in this view, an “interaction” between the human and the technical machine, whereby the modulated waves acquire the tone of a human voice, and the human voice acquires characteristics that are inseparable from the technological effects of the microphone. The elements of the radio apparatus and their associated
139 Weihong Bao, Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 118. Beauchemin 98 spaces of production-consumption are brought to bear on the human, producing ductile and transducive bodies, both operating and operated by the regime of signal modulation.
As was noted when referring to Yurou Zhong’s description of Chao, his approach to language was increasingly crossed by the State territorializing drive, which manifested itself in his need to record and systematize every linguistic particularity. In this case then, the territorializing drive of the State tries to intervene by orienting the body and its relationship to the microphone and signaletic space. It tends towards a domestication of the techno-human relation, and produces a list of commandments: Thou shall not scream, cough, or aspirate into the microphone. The body must follow strict measures: the face must be 1-2 feet away from the microphone and horizontal to the mic head. In line with the civilizing discourse of the New Life
Movement initiated in 1934 by Chiang Kai-shek, the body and mind of the people were to be purged of unhealthy habits and “decadent” behaviour.140
From this perspective, the instruction manual would seem to be more-or-less overdetermined by the State prerogative to Nationalize the airwaves, and therefore Chao could be said to be engaged in the construction of a National voice. This line of thought would see in
Chao’s instructions for speaking into a microphone a differentiating operation, in which the
“normal” is able to construct itself as such through an elimination of its constitutive other – viz. noise. Indeed, like the phonograph recordings, the microphone does not distinguish between sense and non-sense, but rather transposes all sound that comes its way into modulated electromagnetic waves. Thus, incorporated within the microphone-centered ritual practices of the studio room was the need to ward off all sounds that would make the space of production and
140 Arif Dirlik, "The Ideological Foundations of the New Life Movement: A Study in Counterrevolution," Journal of Asian Studies, 34 (4) (1975), 945-946. Beauchemin 99 distribution present. Indeed, this would resonate with Thomas McEnaney’s description of the production of a singular “American voice” and “global English” in 1930s America, in which “the innovations in audio engineering needed to be coupled with a belief and investment in the
“neutral,” “standard,” and “placeless” voice.”141 Through a process of erasure and silencing, the voice reproduced at the receiving end could differentiate itself from both its own material site of production and that of the environment of reception. Again, we can see how the thin air of the voice and signal’s radiation become the disavowed Real of the State’s mode of integrating itself with radio broadcasting. The very stuff of radio broadcasting – the signaletic space described in chapter one – is shunned as the unwanted intruder, where only the disciplined mouth is given permission to articulate difference.
If “noise” was taken as the background and other of normative broadcasting space, then it also found its cultural embodiment in the voices of tanci 弹词 and shenqu 申曲(Shanghai opera) that permeated the daily schedules of commercial broadcast stations. Tanci storytelling was a non-elite, male dominated practice, involving gathering at a teahouse, and often recounting love stories, originating sometime in the Late Qing period.142 Originally considered a “low-brow” performance by the literati class, it suddenly acquired popularity when it was gradually displaced from its private and isolated spaces of performance to the studio rooms of radio broadcasting.
Like the “yellow music” of Li Jinhui (which would incorporate these “folk” forms), tanci’s popularity was inseparable from the cosmopolitan milieu that gave access to and produced the
141 Thomas McEnaney, “This American Voice: The Odd Timbre of a New Standard in Public Radio,” The Oxford Handbook of Voice Studies, (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019), 100. 142 Carlton Benson, From Teahouse to Radio: Storytelling and the Commercialization of Culture in 1930s Shanghai (Doctoral dissertation, 1996), 9. Beauchemin 100 desire for the “local” as such – regional operas and storytelling practices for example, which were unquestionably transformed in this process.
Shenqu or “Shanghai opera” was a form of opera that originated out of tanhuang 弹簧, a
Suzhou-based opera performance which generally consisted of two musicians sitting side-by-side at a garden or tea-shop, either playing melodic instruments or taking turns between singing and accompanying with instruments and gestures.143 Tanhuang was mostly popular in Suzhou, and was associated with begging missions and peasants called huaguxi 花鼓戏, who would perform at gardens, teashops and occasionally at private halls. 1908-1926 saw a boom in new theatre venues, organized around Western drama performances. This caused some changes in tanhuang: actors could disappear while off-stage, the audiences grew, and the larger stage-size allowed for the possibility of having more actors.144 Tanhuang practices increasingly took the name of shenqu 申曲 as tanhuang troops made their way to Shanghai (申 referring to Shanghai). The increasing contact with various regional operas and different venues of performance in Shanghai led to more distinct and dramatically intensified roles, more stringent scene outlines and the adoption of specialist directors.145 By the mid-1930s, another venue appeared – radio broadcasting. where, as Jonathan Stock notes, shenqu was the dominant programme overshadowing other forms of drama and operas, where only some forms of ballad and story- telling had more airtime.146
143 Jonathan Stock, Huju – Traditional Opera in Modern Shanghai, (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003), 42. 144 Ibid., 106-107. 145 Ibid., 112-120. 146 Ibid., 122. Beauchemin 101
The re-mediation of shenqu through radio would immediately pose a problem. Since opera performances made so much use of gestures, pose-striking, and audience engagement on a visual level how could shenqu retain any kind of ontological similitude when broadcast on the air? Furthermore, descriptions of experts’ singing voices often refer to their extreme melisma and heterophonic dissonance and the ability to produce varying vocal modulations to express moods and emotions. Indeed, heterophony, whereby instruments and voices were brought together in the production of emotionally intensified spaces (the theme of domestication and the containing function of suffocating enclosures for example in Yang Feifei’s The Prostitute’s Tears)147, look like the antithesis of the clear and articulate voice Chao prescribes for speaking into a microphone.
One famous shenqu performer from that time, Kong Jiabin, however, provides a more positive and nuanced reflection on what happened when shenqu began airing on the radio.
Explaining how his co-performer and wife Song Meiqin had become blind, and radio became a more ideal venue than the theatre, Kong contrasted radio with the physical limits of the stage and the increased background noise of the large audiences that newer theatre halls drew in. In fact, even more people could be reached by radio between 1939 and 1949 than in those venues.148 He describes the process of conversion that the took place in the studio:
“you had to have a bright voice (sangyin yao hongliang) and lively (jinkuai); you had to
pay attention to the breath so that the audience didn’t notice you breathing in or out;
enunciation had to be clear; and since there was no audience in front of you, you had to
think of the thousands of listeners sitting in their own places. If you fell short of these
147 Ibid., 83. 148 Ibid., 125. Beauchemin 102
requirements the listeners wouldn’t welcome you. Apart from this, the use of acting to
express developments in the plot, and the use of mime, was impossible on the radio, so
coming in, leaving, going upstairs, crossing a bridge, . . . and so on all had to be
explained in the lyrics, unlike in the theatre.”149
Here, clarity of enunciation and the maintenance of the lively voice re-appear as the necessary permutations of vocalization, but not for the sake of intelligible communication, but for the transposition of the emotional and expressive function of gestures. A narrator might also have to have been introduced to explain what would otherwise have been seen. Because the revenue of these new radio shenqu groups came from their role as advertisers on radio stations, increased competition led to the incorporation of different creative means of negotiating with the tenets of modulation. Huju150 historians Zhu Jiesheng and Xu Yingping describes these adaptations:
“the slowing down of tempo was one change, which allowed the building up of melodic
expressivity through the insertion of ornaments. Other singers used the slower tempo to
develop a weeping style, the better to move their listeners. At the other end of the
spectrum, some singers pushed tempo forward, finding a means thereby to depict more
heroic or anxious situations.”151
Since the clarity of enunciation demanded a slower tempo, a “slow tempo” arranged a series of novel modes of expression – a more drawn out weeping. Furthermore, if slowness would come to indicate a clearer form of expression, then increased tempo would not have to disappear – it
149 Ibid., 126. Stock cites this from Kong Jiabin, “Wo zai diantai”, p.104. 150 Huju 沪剧 (沪 here again refers to Shanghai) was the name that shenqu eventually adopted in the 1940s, as it acquired a more formalized definition. 151 Ibid., 127. Beauchemin 103 could be mobilized to induce anxiety and chaos instead! We can see then that the displacement of shenqu to the studio room was not only a process of “re-mediation,” but of transmediation whereby signaletic space integrated itself in the modes of expressivity of shenqu, to produce sounds and bodily reconfigurations that were neither radically opposed, nor transparently continuous with other technologically and architecturally signified modes of shenqu performance.
The idea that something is happening between the human body and microphones and speakers is of particular concern for the composer and sound artist Cathy van Eck. In her book
Between Air and Electricity, van Eck describes four prevalent categorizations of microphones and loudspeakers and their instrumental functions: reproducing, supporting, generating and interacting.152 As was described earlier, we can say that Andrew Jones saw media technology as ideologically transparent reproductive technology. Yurou Zhong took them as aids or supports to render distinctions more visible. In both cases something is generated by technology, but only through a subordination to the first two categories – it reflects or enacts a pre-existing linguistic imaginary and resituates the real by producing an illusion of transparency. From this analysis of
Chao’s instructions for radio broadcasting and of tanci and shenqu’s displacement to signaletic space, it is the fourth category of “interaction” that becomes most significant.
152 Cathy van Eck, Between Air and Electricity: Microphones and Loudspeakers as Musical Instruments, (London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017), 38-51. Though concerned with the question of how we can think of these two technologies situated between air pressure and electric waves as musical instruments, the distinctions could apply to any situation in which they are involved in the (re-)production of sound (see p.30). For her own part, this latter interactive approach to microphones and loudspeakers is situated in an almost progressive timeline, in which performance art and interactive art installations that she is engaged with as a sound artist are characterized by an attention to interactions – both between microphones and loudspeakers as a closed system, and between this microphone-speaker ensemble and “life” (humans, nature, other machines) in a more open system. A list of her works is available at http://www.cathyvaneck.net/. Beauchemin 104
For van Eck, interaction between humans and instruments (which she considers microphones and loudspeakers to be) manifests itself in the apparent resonance between the player and instrument, who need one another in the production of sound. It is precisely this relation of co-dependence between musician and instrument, however, that brings to the fore a series of resistances that the instrument makes on the actors actions and desired sound: “It is not endless possibilities but rather the finiteness of these possibilities which render an instrument fruitful for music-making.”153 There is thus a resistance-resonance interaction that constitutes the creative limits of acoustic practice. Furthermore, van Eck takes this even further and claims that this interaction is where both technology and humans co-individuate: “The development of most instruments can be seen as a process: the interaction between a musician and an instrument results in either discovering new playing (interacting) techniques or in changing the musical instrument itself.”154 Interaction thus tends towards something closer to intra-action155, in which the human body has effects on the technological permutations of the instrument itself, and the instrument on the human’s bodily movements and contractions. There is something that happens in-between the instrument and the human. This is precisely what we observe in these various accounts of the radio broadcasting studio room. Noise, the stuff of radio broadcasting, pulls the human body, the studio room, the microphone-mouth and ear-receiver interfaces into its orbit. It is both the choreographer and the plane of consistency generating a series of aberrant mutations.
For various reformers and intellectuals of the early 20th century, the “folk” genres’ pullulation of the airwaves was a sign of degeneracy and of China’s backwardness – and it is their “noise” or “noisiness” that is often targeted as responsible for it. The instructions for
153 Ibid., 50. 154 Ibid. 155 Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 91. Beauchemin 105 speaking into a microphone were inseparable from the stipulations of what should and should not be broadcast, and of the Nationalist government’s increasing insertion into the programmes of commercial and other private radio stations. Such maneuvers on the level of state officials and selected elite reformers were mobilized against this techno-cultural noise, which could only manifest itself as the antithesis of the systematic unity of Chinese that the nation needed to ground itself on. Both the government and more “cosmopolitan”-identifying commentators converged on their agreement with a need to bring China into a phase of democratic enlightenment and civilization wherein traces of traditional and regional “folk” culture were to be either eliminated or cast in a new light to be the aesthetic particularity of Chinese nationalist culture. The “Farce Master” 滑稽大师 Xu Zhuodai, for example, devotes much of his discussion in his theorization of radio broadcasting to how shenqu, and its “vulgar” and “untasteful” language, appealed to the lower social stratum who would often stand near shops to listen to the radio. In contrast, pinghua 评话 and tanci 弹词 were generally regarded by the “Leftists” as part of the decadent and “high-brow” culture along with foreign classical music and the burgeoning celebrity culture.156 Whether as vulgar or as bourgeois, these forms did not conform well enough to the normal and everyday vernacular experience to be warranted attention by modernizers.157
Along with the hum and whistles of electromagnetic perturbations that they found themselves integrated with, they were the noise that the ritual dictates of the State posited themselves against.
156 See Xu Zhuodai 徐卓呆, “Wuxiandian boyin” 无线电波音 [Radio Broadcasting], “Shehui jiaoyu xiao congshu” 社会教育小丛书 [Social Education Short Book Series], (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan faxing 商务印书馆 [Commercial Press], 1937), 18-19. 157 In effect, there is a desire for a more “middle-class” aesthetic – the “normal lively voice” signalling this socio- economic category. Beauchemin 106
In order to account for the fact that National broadcasting could only plug into the radiating tendency of a commercial institution whose foundation preceded it, and that what makes up the aberrant “noise” it sought to distinguish itself from was the same signaletic stuff that choreographed the body in the ritual space of the studio for all broadcast performances, we must rethink what is at stake in the concept of “difference” itself.” By taking the opposition between noise and intelligible sound, and between the “normal” and the “decadent,” as the starting point for thinking of difference, we immediately relegate its significance to its negated other in a schema of oppositions and conflicts. This becomes increasingly untenable as we observe multiple variations of radio programmes needing to contend with and incorporate the emergent transductive bodies. Resisting the framework of negations and oppositions, and their subordination to the static generalities of representation, Deleuze proposed an ontogenetic conceptualization of difference: “We call the determination of the virtual content of an Idea differentiation; we call the actualization of that virtuality into species and distinguished parts differenciation.”158 The signaletic problematic of radio expresses itself both synchronically with the assembled socio-technological elements that it integrates itself with (differentiation), as well as diachronically as a transindividuating force (differenciation). From this angle we can better appreciate the manner in which the radiophonic integrates itself with the human and performs its own anarchic distribution even as the “good sense” of the State asserts its domesticating hold.
The “noisy” elements can neither be found in the microphone’s operations themselves, nor in the human, but only as the product of their relation – they are, as Bergson would call them,
“images”. It is in the relation between mouths and microphones, air and modulation that the dictate “thou shall not breathe too loudly” becomes relevant, and encoded as part of conceived
158 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 207. Beauchemin 107 space. The mistake is to assume that those “clear and distinct” speech sounds are any less the differentiations of noise – for noise isn’t simply that difference that gives meaning to the intelligible voice, but is the stuff of the radio voice, crossed secondarily by the civilizing impulse geared towards a reterritorialization of the mouth as first and foremost a conversing agent. If there is a public sphere, it is the refracted image of this ductile voice-body and its associated milieus, the broadcast studio and the home. If we are to understand the emergence of anything seeming like a “public sphere”, it is from this relationship between the production of these abstract spaces of civil discourse and that which they precede: the production of ”modern values”.
The disavowal of the intra-facial contracts that take place between mouth and microphone, and between bodies and the space of the studio finds its legitimation in the State- oriented tendency towards a territorialization of frequency space, and the elimination by all means of that which constitutes its own limits of being heard. Hence the State and the abstract space of the “Nation” (which at this point only allowed membership to a distinct set of bourgeois elites) could hold hands, engaged in a project of civilizing bodies. What attending to the technological effects of radio (the productive on transducive bodies) reveals, is how this contract called the nation-state and the civilizing reforms they partnered up to implement, necessarily entailed the differential production of new bodies in the process. Ductile bodies whose subjectivities could neither be accounted for by nationalist discourse, nor through government initiatives, or even simply with reference to technical skills. They constitute the genesis of a genuinely novel socio-technological form, constituted by the relation between a human and a technical mode of existence. A radio-performative body. Beauchemin 108
The duration of play, selection, and negotiation that takes place at the microphone mouth interface (which would be better characterized as an intra-active than as an interactive relation), can be thought of as a techno-human interval. In his critique of the materialist emphasis on the primacy of external objects, and on the idealist position that situate all things on the level of a disembodied consciousness (concepts determine the object), Henri Bergson described the world as consisting primarily of images, and amongst these images, there appear “centers of action” in relation to which other images are reflected as perception. “My body is that which draws itself to the center of these perceptions; my person is the being to whom these actions have to be brought back to”159 There is an education of the senses involved in which our actions with these perceptions engender and respond to novel effects – leading to a new co-ordination of the body with the limits of the centers of actions within the world of images. Bergson gives the example of the relation between a needle and the finger,
“The fact is incontestable, that a groping or fumbling is necessary in order to coordinate
the painful impressions of the skin, which received the sting, with those of the muscular
sense, which directs the movements of the arms and hands. Our internal affections, like
our external perceptions, distribute themselves into different types. These types, like
those of perception, are discontinuous, separated by intervals that are filled up through
education.”160
Because of this delay introduced in the response between centers of actions and the images that surround them, Bergson adopts the term “centers of indetermination” to indicate the interval between the registering of an external image’s movement, and the response to or appropriation of
159 “Mon corps est ce qui se dessine au centre de ces perceptions; ma personne est l’être auquel il faut rapporter ces actions.” Henri Bergson, Matière et Mémoire, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), 46. 160 Ibid., 60. Beauchemin 109 it. It is in this interval that the education of the senses takes plays and re-enacts itself.
Broadcasters and radio-listeners denote new social relations straddling the disjunction between signaletic space and their associated milieus, in which the received senses demand new bodily contortions in response. The body is thus enactive, and not simply passive to the technological or social determinations, as it expresses itself in a multiplicity of attempted resolutions to the signaletic problematic.
The intra-facial differentiations of the mouth-microphone can neither be found in the contours of one’s lips or in the metal design of the mike head. These correspond to a functionalist aesthetics, but do not bring us any closer to what is really happening “in-between.”
If there is an operative interval, it can only be found in the intra-facial reconfigurations operated as signaletic noise pulls the mouths, eyes, and limbs of the human speaker into its orbit. And, correspondingly, as the human’s performance throws the microphone around, tilts it, embraces it, faces it and varies its vocal speed, rhythm, pitch, and loudness, so does the latter get marked with intensities that could potentially be normalized in additional phases of development – uni- directional vs. multi-directional, wireless vs. wired, the development of “windscreens.”
The eternal return of white noise is inevitable, as it serves both as the stuff immanent to all signaletic distribution and as a choregraphing agent. The differentials of signaletic techno- human evolution can be found in the provisional resolutions to this compulsion-aversion to white noise – integrated as one lineage of the apparatus’s evolutionary transformation. By taking both the human body and the dispositif of radio broadcasting as their own centers of indetermination, we can see how their evolutionary concrescence involved a relation wherein one machine’s perceptual space has already integrated the affective impulses of the other. Languaging and signaling infuse one another – is it the voice that sounds like a robot? Or is it electromagnetic Beauchemin 110 waves that are starting to sound human? What I have been calling signaletic space manifests itself in its effects on the coordination of bodies and the perceptual affordances engendered by these techno-human intervals. As temporal disjunctions connected to but interrupting the accelerated flow of capital and progressive narrative of the emergent nation-state, the microphone-mouth interfaces in the studio room are an interval plugged into the interval of signaletic space (between antennae), its distributive effects felt by the techno-human interval between the receiving set and its human interlocuters.
Beauchemin 111
CONCLUSION – Signaletic Co-ordination and Transindividuation
This thesis sought to trace a genealogy of signaletic space through a critique of two pervasive images of thought that both area studies and media studies are often complicit in. On the one hand, there is the attachment to national-specificity models for thinking of society and culture, which is allowed for to the extent that Euro-American developments are considered as global and universal. On the other hand, there is a tendency to think of globalizing infrastructures as tending towards homogenization, equality and increasing circulation, which connects to the first image by asserting a Euro-centric model the “global” which comes to encompass and re- configure social and cultural relations around the world. The idealization of global media circuits and different “cultural” incorporations of them finds a common ground in the “public sphere” model of civil society theorized by Habermas, wherein a democratic form of consensus becomes the ideal form of politics, and which global media circuits are imagined as fulfilling the function of.
Thus, in part one, I sought to tease out the various global and globalizing geo-political and technological processes that integrated themselves in heterogenous institutional forms during the first half of the 20th century. Both “radio” and “China” are taken as heterogenous and co- emergent effects of nationalization and technological modernization as they took a hold on political and economic modes of organization. Significantly, both what determined the “nation” and what determined “communication infrastructure” was not a process of democratic consensus concentrated in Shanghai’s urban milieu, but rather divergent interests inseparable from the deterritorializations of global capitalism, the centripetal pull of the State, and the tension introduced by radio’s radiating proclivities. Beauchemin 112
In the second part, another problematization of the ideal modes of communication and circulation that radio infrastructure brings to the fore is radio broadcasting’s permutation of language’s ontogenesis. In contrast to what Guattari and Deleuze describe as the State’s approach to language as a system tied to the arborescent model of evolution from roots to branches, by focusing on the microphone-mouth interval in the studio room, and its integration with the signaletic space of radio infrastructure and the sites of reception, a more rhizomatic structure of language emerges. Rather than simply an evolution predicated on a series of human efforts and State interventions, a series of technological and social convergences produced divergent relations to what it means to “speak.” The microphone stand, electromagnetic space, the material of the script, the echo of the space of vocalization all reveal themselves as constitutive elements of the “stuff” of the broadcast, and therefore of speech, of singing, and other vocal practices. The analysis of techno-human permutations of languaging thus complicates both the cultural-specificity models of language and the understanding of radio as a communication device for the transmission and transposition of speech.
Though much of the thesis was concerned with synthesizing work on modern China’s radio infrastructure in the early 20th century, and with a review and critique of works written on the relationship between technology and language within this “context” (an academic one more than anything), I also attempted to trace and develop a theorization of “signaletic space.”
Drawing on the impetus of Henri Lefebvre’s magnum opus The Production of Space, I wanted to look at what was happening on the level of radio technology and its assemblage of disparate technical objects and social institutions, in order to treat this space as heterogeneous and always in-the-making. Different signaletic tendencies (i.e. transmission vs. radiation) were differentially Beauchemin 113 integrated with globalizing forces of imperialism, capitalism, nationalization, and modernization efforts in the formation of radio as a military, commercial, state and underground technology.
In the second part of the thesis, therefore, I try to further explore the stakes of a processual and evolutionary understanding of signaletic space. Influenced by Henri Bergson’s approach to perception and affection, I teased out of Yuen Ren Chao’s “Instructions for Radio
Broadcasting” various singularities that could never be found in either our human bodies themselves, nor in the technical ensemble of radio. Rather, there is a genuine interval between the mouth and the microphone that brings into play other human, technological, and socio- technological elements, and within which particular selections are made based on contingent criteria. The encoding of such emergent singularities renders them as part of a conceived space, and the distribution of (or as) an abstract machine, here in the form of specific demands on the body. The transformation from contingent singularity to an abstract machine calls for a further analysis of the distributive effects of the studio room’s ritual practices across other media that integrate sound recording (and therefore the interval between the microphone and the mouth), such as early sound cinema.
Two methodological approaches to thinking of signaletic space’s production across disparate registers began to emerge near the end of the thesis. The first is one concerning its coordinating and structuring effects. This approach involves the emergence of distance as that which brings together even as it holds apart. This involves connecting processes on a large scale, such as broadcasting institutions, government departments, residential and commercial businesses, and global financial and military technologies. But it also involves, and is inseparable from, the choreography of the body that reconstructs its actions in accordance with the perceptual affordances of wireless technology – whether it be microphones, receiving sets, Beauchemin 114 walkie-talkies, pagers, Bluetooth or 5G. This anthropology of the signaletic is what Adrian
Mackenzie traces in the circuits and perceptual re-configurations brought about by wireless technologies and their integration into our everyday lives.
The second approach is the one concerning the stuff of the signaletic, where this stuff is already an effect of some kind of interaction or relation between centers of actions – for example, noise. The stuff is not a generality, a substrate, or a form, but operates more like the differentiator, that which is inseparable from the experience of wirelessness and of the explication of electromagnetic intensities. It is the intensity that manifests itself as it explicates itself. Noise occasionally reveals itself, usually as an accident or breakdown somewhere in the infrastructural connections linking the various termini plugged into signaletic space, but it can only do so because it is always already operative in the sound of speakers and the images of the screen. Signaletic space is itself a process of individuation, not only pulling contingent processes into its orbit, but permutating them: the becoming signaletic of the voice, the human body, the home.
Beauchemin 115
APPENDIX
Appendix 1: List of radio stations recorded by Shanghai’s Radio Inspection Bureau in 1939. Reproduced in Liu, Shanghai’s Radio Industry in Old China, 353-354.
Beauchemin 116
Appendix 2: Snapshot of broadcasting times of 16 private stations in Shanghai in 1933. Stations were often broadcasting simultaneously between other stations on frequencies no more than 20 kHz apart. Each column represents an hour time-slot, beginning with 6:00am. Full list reproduced in Liu, Shanghai’s Radio Industry in Old China, 202-205.
Appendix 3: Map of Nationalist Central Radio Administration’s Departmental Divisions (1931). Reproduced in Zhao, A Collection of Sources on Chinese Modern Broadcasting, 102. Beauchemin 117
Appendix 4: Nationalist Radio Administration's Official Categorization of Programme Types (1937). Reproduced in Zhao, A Collection of Sources on Chinese Modern Broadcasting, 105. Beauchemin 118
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