Falsework Volume 4

SUMMER 2016, MAKING AMERICA AGAIN VOLUME 4: LISTEN IN, HEARING AND SPEAKING AMERICA 13 AUGUST 2016 this and additional materials available at www.hicrosa.org rom the perspective of an era dominated ostensibly by the visual This class, the fourth in Falsework School’s Making America media, radio appears as a lost medium, an archaic frequency at once Again series, explores radio and sound experiments as ways of Fmaterial and ideological whose political and cultural significance has investigating, producing, cultivating, and disrupting political declined dramatically since the end of World War II. Yet the antinomy of attachments. In which historical moments and under which radio and visual imagery may be less stable and more highly mediated conditions are different kinds of radio produced and different than a physiological model of sensibility would lead us to believe. The kinds of storytelling prioritized? What political impulses have influential conceptions of imagery developed by theorists such as Rudolf guided the making of interesting sound projects? Reading radio Arnheim, Ernst Gombrich, and Walter Benjamin have largely eclipsed the plays, essays, and interviews and listening to a variety of radio substantial speculative and even practical encounters sustained by these experiments, we will challenge each other to open our ears and authors with the medium of radio. Gombrich, for example, has published think more deeply about our listening experiences. We will end an essay on the mythological dimension of radio and, more specifically, on with recording clips of radio plays and our own sound his own wartime activities as a monitor of German broadcasts for the BBC experiments to be shared/broadcast. "listening post" between 1939 and 1945. In 1936, Arnheim published one of the first fulllength studies of radio and its cultural significance. Several observe that effective political manipulation of the technical media, years prior to the publication of Arnheim's book, Walter Benjamin especially radio, can be traced to the innovative practices of fascist regimes. formulated his theory of "dialectical images" during a period (1929-33) Moreover, one could argue, […] that the medium of radio was when he was writing and broadcasting radio scripts for children. One indispensable not only as a material instrument of fascism, but as an would also not want to overlook the submerged correspondences ideological simulacrum of "state fetishism" and its primitive community of between poetic Imagism and fascist radio broadcasts in the career of Ezra enchanted listeners. In spite of these important correspondences between Pound. In each of these cases, the engagement with radio on the part of radio and fascism, or between radio and popular culture (extending to talk these writers is directly linked to the political and cultural milieu of the radio, car culture, and pop music culture in a contemporary setting), the 1930s. discourse on radio, in contrast to the vast discursivity of visual culture, The political milieu in Europe of the 1930s was dominated, of remains relatively undeveloped. […] course, by the development of fascism, and it is a critical commonplace to a project of Hic Rosa—an art, education, politics collective www.hicrosa.org Between 1929 and 1933 in Berlin, Walter Benjamin wrote and broadcast radio a central role in the creation and maintenance of "national morale." radio scripts for two programs for children. He called these broadcasts Radio assumed this central role by dint of its distinctive form of address, Aufklärung für Kinder (Enlightenment for children). […] according to James Rowland Angell of NBC. He attributed the medium's Radio is the medium that is not a medium; yet as toy-texts, influence to: (1) the immediacy of its conveyance of news; (2) the vast Benjamin's radio scripts are broadcast direct from the unconscious--not mass of persons thus reached, many of them having only delayed access, if only Benjamin's, but the political unconscious of fascism….—Daniel any, to the newspapers, and not a few being unused to reading, or Tiffany incapable of it; (3) the psychological appeal of the living human voice as contrasted with cold type—even when accompanied with the barrage of s Stein writes in "I Came and Here I Am," published in Cosmopolitan in photographs now so universally employed by the press Stein's writing of February 1936, American radio suggests a new form that enables her this period also explores radio's distinctive formal command over the toA extend the explorations of her earlier texts: emotions. In Ida (1941), after having drifted without affect through a series In writing in The Making of Americans I said I write for myself and of spaces, occupations, and husbands, Ida hears the national anthem on strangers and this is what broadcasting is. I write for myself and the radio and cries. In this scene, the radio's appeal is so immediate that it strangers. I had never heard a broadcasting; that is I had never results in a disproportionate response. Ironically, the "living voice" listened to one and I certainly had never thought of doing one, and reproduced by the radio has greater access to and effect upon Ida than do this is the way the thing that I like best of all the things I have never most of the truly living voices around her. Ida is a guarded public figure, done before, was done . we sat down one on either side of the little but this medium penetrates her reserve. While the content conveyed by thing that was between us and I said something and they said that is the radio in this case is clearly public and nationalistic, its form grants it a all, and then suddenly it was all going on. It was it was really all going level of access unparalleled in its intimacy. Accordingly, this medium on, and it was, it really was, as if you were saying what you were generates private feeling and directs it into public channels. It recouples the saying and you knew, you really knew, not by what you knew but by emotional and intellectual responses to truth, and in the process, redefines what you felt, that everybody was listening. It is a very wonderful truth.—Sarah Wilson thing to do, I almost stopped and said it, I was so filled with it. And then it was over and I never had liked anything as I had liked it. he dissemination of Benjamin’s radio broadcasts has been subject to the forms of dispersal and loss often associated with the auditory Broadcasting fills Stein with the feeling of everybody—of objectT more generally. As one critic has argued, “As historical object, sound everybody listening. Radio creates the everybody by creating the audience, cannot furnish a good story or consistent cast of characters nor can it a kind of community that understands itself as existing in (varying) relation validate any ersatz notions of progress or generational maturity. The to a mass medium. However, this audience is not passive, nor is the history is scattered, fleeting, and highly mediated—it is as poor an object broadcast unidirectional; as Stein's voice fills the airwaves she in turn is in any respect as sound itself.”3 In other words, it is not only because filled by listening. The radio broadcast conveys a sense of an immediate Benjamin, working for radio in its infancy, delivered live unrecorded and concentrated present; it begins again and again, as Stein's broadcasts unavailable for future audio playback, or even because he characteristically insistent phrasings indicate to us. It applies itself to failed to keep a complete written archive of the typescripts, that we are left representational questions that Stein's writing had been addressing for the with an imperfect account of the radio works as a whole, that is, as scripts, three preceding decades. As she proclaims to the readership of performances, and works of art. Rather, while such contingencies and Cosmopolitan, Stein is smitten with the distinct form of connection that the others, including the difficult, complex history of the extant manuscripts, radio seems capable of performing. The Cosmopolitan article represents are certainly part of the history of Benjamin’s radio works, and though the the enjoyment of broadcasting as constituted by a distinct kind of story of what has been lost must, paradoxically, be somehow included or knowledge, knowing "by what you felt." That is, the appeal of the radio is acknowledged, the impossibility of giving a complete account remains an not exclusively informational, but extends intellectually, just as it does essential component of the medium of sound broadcast and audio physically, into more intimate and emotional territory. Stein's experience performance itself. In Benjamin’s radio play for children, The Cold Heart, of the America of radio evangelist Father Coughlin would have made this cowritten with Ernst Schoen, the character of the Radio Announcer extension clear. attempts to entice the other characters (lifted from Wilhelm Hauff’s The emotional appeals of the radio form would achieve dominance eponymous tale on which the script is based) to join him in “Voice Land,” a in the United States by the late 1930s and early 1940s, when the threat of spatializing trope for the delocalized zone of broadcast, a frame for the war made strongly-felt connection and communication across the uncertain space and invisible borders of radio transmission. He says to geographic and cultural divides of the United States seem even more them: “You can come into Voice Land and speak to thousands of children, imperative. As the American war machine engaged, pundits assigned the 2 but I patrol the borders of this country and there’s a condition you must to the more explicitly politicaland theoretical concerns expressed in those first fulfill” (224).

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