Reviewed by Philip Beitchman
This slim but exciting little book has to do, first of all with some 30 broadcasts that Walter Benjamin prepared and delivered for German Radio between 1929-1932 specifically for children, maybe 7-14 or so, each consisting of a 20 minute talk or monologue. A main emphasis was on introducing the youth to various, some of them classical, natural catastrophes, for instance the Lisbon earthquake of the 1750's that so shook the optimism of Voltaire and the century (Aufklarung für Kinder [Enlightenment for Children] was the name of the series in German), a flood of the Mississippi of 1927, the Pompeii disaster as came through the famous letter of Pliny the Younger; another subject was various episodes of lawlessness fraud and deceit, much of it recent, for instance bootlegger's boats that were bringing rum or whatever to America through the prohibition blockade, postage stamp (and cancellation) counterfeiting, the 'miracles' of Faustus; or in a minor key that Mehlman makes much of, through an analysis developed on basis of Freud's Jokes and the Unconscious, "tea" that's sold to passengers at a stop of a liquor-less train, with the understanding that it's really booze, but which turns out to be tea as in Freud's "you told me you were going to Cracow thinking that I would assume Lemberg, but you're really going to Cracow, so why are you lying to me!" In short, lots of funny little stories, cute aperçus and deconstructing allusions, with also some strange dog stories, illustrating the loyalty of man's best friend as opposed to treachery of the other humans.
Illustrating...well, reason why the book would be promulgating a sort of Cabala, teaching somewhat more discreetly the lessons of Jewish mysticism, especially in its powerfully heretical antinonomian currents, as so profoundly disseminated by Benjamin's close friend Gershom Scholem, that of the great apostate Sabbatai Zevi. He was the Jewish "false messiah" of the 17th century who Pied Pipered Judaism into a cabalistic catastrophe.
Zevi had been 'to the mountain', like Moses before him, and had received that sensational 11th commandment, which was to disobey the first 10, incarnating also the realization of the law in its transgression; this was an obsession that Benjamin had to have picked up from Scholem (citing many references to it in their communication and contact).
Mehlman, accordingly, does a minute analysis and search of Benjamin's radio stories for children for evidence of this kind of subversive Cabala -, then comes to his very definite conclusions that Benjamin was being the (secular-heretic) cabalistic rabbi in storytelling for the kids. Bitterly ironic and contradictory, then, would be these shows being called "enlightenment for children", since Benjamin would be in opposition to the notion that the Enlightenment, at least in the humanist and humanitarian guise it has assumed for us, would make any sense of the structurally corrupt and deceiving world around us; as such an Enlightement was merely a fairy tale (the idea of progress?) only for children under 12 whom now Benjamin wants to disillusion!
But a deeper irony seems to be that the subversive "enlightenment" Benjamin professes instead for children here, has more to do with the reason and reasoning of De Sade than that of a Rousseau, Diderot, Condillac or Condorcet, for he sees these programs as heady lessons for kids in the cabalistic heresy and gnostic gnosis that this world, however otherwise it is in the interests of some to present it, is or might as well be in the hands of an evil demiurge. Understanding that comprises "enlightenment for children"!
<http://www.esoteric.msu.edu/VolumeII/MehlmanReview.html> *****
***** Modernism/Modernity 1.3 (1994) 244-246
Book Review Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on his Radio Years Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde
Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on his Radio Years. Jeffrey Mehlman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Pp. 117. $17.50 Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Edited by Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992. Pp. 452. $35.00.
>From the perspective of an era dominated ostensibly by the visual
media, radio appears as a lost medium, an archaic frequency at once
material and ideological whose political and cultural significance
has declined dramatically since the end of World War II. Yet the
antinomy of radio and visual imagery may be less stable and more
highly mediated than a physiological model of sensibility would lead
us to believe. The influential conceptions of imagery developed by
theorists such as Rudolf Arnheim, Ernst Gombrich, and Walter Benjamin
have largely eclipsed the substantial speculative and even practical
encounters sustained by these authors with the medium of radio.
Gombrich, for example, has published an essay on the mythological
dimension of radio and, more specifically, on his own wartime
activities as a monitor of German broadcasts for the BBC "listening
post" between 1939 and 1945. 1 In 1936, Arnheim published one of the
first full-length studies of radio and its cultural significance. 2
Several years prior to the publication of Arnheim's book, Walter
Benjamin formulated his theory of "dialectical images" during a
period (1929-33) when he was writing and broadcasting radio scripts
for children. One would also not want to overlook the submerged
correspondences between poetic Imagism and fascist radio broadcasts
in the career of Ezra Pound. In each of these cases, the engagement
with radio on the part of these writers is directly linked to the
political and cultural milieu of the 1930s.
The political milieu in Europe of the 1930s was dominated, of course, by the development of fascism, and it is a critical commonplace to observe that effective political manipulation of the technical media, especially radio, can be traced to the innovative practices of fascist regimes. Moreover, one could argue, with Alice Yaeger Kaplan, that the medium of radio was indispensable not only as a material instrument of fascism, but as an ideological simulacrum of "state fetishism" and its primitive community of enchanted listeners. 3 In spite of these important correspondences between radio and fascism, or between radio and popular culture (extending to talk radio, car culture, and pop music culture in a contemporary setting), the discourse on radio, in contrast to the vast discursivity of visual culture, remains relatively undeveloped.
Two recent volumes of criticism help to redress, through highly divergent approaches, this material and ideological obscurity. (It is surely not fortuitous that the publication of these volumes coincides with a resurgence of interest in the problem of fascist modernism.) The oblique evocation of the radiophonic medium in Jeffrey Mehlman's Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on his Radio Years may be contrasted to the more polemical and explicit orientation of Kahn and Whitehead's Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. In addition to essays on various modern and postmodern radio practitioners, the Kahn and Whitehead volume provides a selection of historically significant writings on radio (by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Marinetti, Artaud, among others). The differing orientations of the two editors (Kahn is a professor of media arts, Whitehead a writer and audio artist) is reflected in the diversity of the eleven contributors, who include an art historian, a philosopher, literary scholars, and several media artists.
Kahn's introduction presents the materials gathered in Wireless Imagination (a phrase borrowed from Marinetti) as a sourcebook, a primer for future historians and theorists of radio and sound art. Accordingly, one finds among (and within) the essays an admirable combination of historiographic and speculative analysis. Several essays are particularly useful for their documentation of early radio or sound art. Christopher Schiff's essay, "Banging on the Windowpane: Sound in Early Surrealism," provides detailed description of the early careers of Cocteau, Apollinaire, and Satie (along with a number of minor figures), which helps to controvert the prevailing notion of surrealism as a movement fixated on visuality. Mark E. Cory's article, "Soundplay: The Polyphonous Tradition of German Radio Art," offers a fine account of the German Hörspiel, a tradition of innovative and publicly supported radio art that continues to the present day. In addition, Mel Gordon, in "Songs from the Museum of the Future," offers a useful, if somewhat hyperbolic (and ideologically uninflected), historical survey of sound art in Russian Futurism. Other essays in the volume provide, to varying degree, historical materials on the careers and musical practices of Marcel Duchamp, Antonin Artaud, John Cage, and William Burroughs.
The more speculative essays in Wireless Imagination are unified (to a fault, in my opinion) by their examination and elaboration of the figurative (and historical) coincidence of the technical and occult media. Exploiting the semantic correspondences of the term "medium," as well as the historical juxtaposition of telephony and spiritualism in the popular imagination, these speculations emphasize the necrophilic and phantasmatic dimensions of radio. This presupposition of mediality tends not only to position radio as the most "mediumistic" of all the modern technical media, but to encourage discussions of radio as symptomatic of media technology in general. This orientation produces a superb essay by Charles Grivel on technology and the prosthetic imagination, as well as Kahn's fine article, "Death in Light of the Phonograph: Raymond Roussel's Locus Solus," and Gregory Whitehead's manifesto, "Out of the Dark: Notes on the Nobodies of Radio Art." One can also profit from Craig Adcock's theorizing of a material and ideological spectrum that comprises Duchamp's "gap music" and his "nonretinal" images.
In spite of these riches, radio never emerges in these essays as a specific political or sociological formation of the imaginary. There is little or no discussion in Wireless Imagination--though its cryptological orientation warrants it--of the military origins of radio communication, or of radio propaganda in its various persuasions (fascist, soviet, or democratic). The book's discussions of radio as a mode of technological enchantment stop short of its role in modern political and religious indoctrination. Moreover, the importance of radio as an instrument of commodification, as well as its relation to popular culture (the preponderance of "mainstream" programming) remain largely unexamined. Wireless Imagination, as the reference to the avant-garde in its title suggests, tends to focus on esoteric productions of high modernism or postmodernism. Indeed, its reconstruction of an auditory avant-garde seems intent on marginalizing radio, on isolating the medium from its institutional contexts.
If the essays in Wireless Imagination develop a heightened awareness of radio's mediumistic properties, Jeffrey Mehlman's recent book on Walter Benjamin's "radio years" virtually ignores the specificity of radio as a medium. Strictly speaking, the book's treatment of radio as an historical or sociological phenomenon is so slight as to warrant almost no comment on the part of a reviewer. Moreover, in spite of the theoretical ingenuity displayed by Mehlman in his analysis of Benjamin's radio scripts, he refrains almost entirely from a speculative encounter with radio as such. One has to wonder why he chooses to designate this crucial period in Benjamin's career as his "radio years." Indeed, many of Mehlman's thematic and rhetorical readings of the radio scripts would have been enhanced (and confirmed) by some analysis of their medialogical context. Nevertheless, it is possible to extract from Mehlman's essay a cryptic reading of radio that corresponds in many ways to the mediumistic emphasis of Wireless Imagination.
Between 1929 and 1933 in Berlin, Walter Benjamin wrote and broadcast radio scripts for two programs for children. He called these broadcasts Aufklärung für Kinder (Enlightenment for children). The texts of these scripts were first published in Germany in 1985. Mehlman describes his book as a "speculative analysis of what may be at stake in Benjamin's scripts for children" (1). Mehlman argues that several of the radio scripts represent "significant transformations of key philosophical or critical texts by Benjamin" (including the celebrated "Work of Art" essay). He isolates from the scripts two primary themes, catastrophe and fraud, which are "convertible" along an axis designated as "apocalyptic messianism" (40). Thus, according to Mehlman, nothing less than the dominant axis of Benjamin's thinking (and our reception of these difficult concepts) is "at stake" in these radio scripts for children.
Yet there is also contingent upon the radio scripts, Mehlman argues, a psychoanalytic "reading" not only of Benjamin as an individual (including his future suicide), but of the impending Holocaust of the Jews in Europe. The radio scripts are "as close to the transcript of a psychoanalysis of Walter Benjamin as we are likely to get" (3). Mehlman draws this conclusion by virtue of his insistence on the "performative modality" of the radio scripts, which are "lacking in 'composition,' bereft of that 'secondary elaboration' which is the ego's prime instrument of defense" (3-4). Thus according to Mehlman's logocentric analysis, Benjamin's radio broadcasts offer direct insight into the unconscious impulses of his major essays. In this regard, the radio scripts must be viewed as mediumistic in both a psychoanalytic and spiritualistic sense. (Mehlman goes so far as to call the broadcasts "sessions.")
Despite the "transparency" of the radio broadcasts, their access to the unconscious dictates that they also resemble the "transformative materiality" of "dreamwork" (6). The paradox of a sign that is at once immediate and highly mediated (the legacy of hieroglyphics) finds a suitable emblem, according to Mehlman, in the concept of the toy, a favorite theme of Benjamin's. For the toy is "the medium of a play-analysis," a medium through which "the child negotiates the imposition of an adult agenda"; yet the toy "also provokes a sinking away of the world itself: it remains forever linked to the disruptive potential of the unconscious" (4-5). Hence, as mediumistic phenomena, the radio broadcasts are designated by Mehlman as "theoretical toys" or "toy-texts" (5). Radio, by inference, must be viewed as a toy medium--especially suited for children because of its candor, its naturalness, its lack of mediation. Radio is the medium that is not a medium; yet as toy-texts, Benjamin's radio scripts are broadcast direct from the unconscious--not only Benjamin's, but the political unconscious of fascism.
In the latter stages of his intriguing essay, Mehlman opens what can only be called telepathic channels between Benjamin's radio scripts, the suicides of Benjamin and Primo Levi, and the attempted extermination of the Jews during World War II. Linking the radio scripts to Levi's memoir, The Periodic Table, Mehlman argues that the broadcasts show a concern with "the relation between science and occultism" (40), yet he fails to disclose the dialectical character of radio as a medium that is at once technological and occult. Indeed, Mehlman generally ignores the question of mediality, even as his readings elicit the mediumistic properties of Benjamin's radio broadcasts.
Daniel Tiffany University of Southern California
Notes 1. E. H. Gombrich, Myth and Reality in German Wartime Broadcasts (London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1970). 2. Rudolf Arnheim, Radio, trans. Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Read (London: Faber and Faber, 1936). 3. Alice Yaeger Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).
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