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Broadcast Culture: The Fate of the Arts in the Space of British Radio (1927-1945)

Over the years, the physical apparatus of radio has evolved from a heavy piece of living room furniture or a home made box with leaky batteries to a smaller, lighter and wireless transistor built into our walkmans and watches. In addition to this portability, Samuel Weber has pointed to radio’s power to transport audition where the rest of body cannot go, something that has challenged the classical notion of perception. More recently, Alan Weiss has explored the value of disembodiment of voice on radio and the liberation of sound from its source.3 Focusing on the history of British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), I, in this paper, will examine the roles of these structurally specific movements produced by radio in another kind of portability that it introduced—the portability of high culture to locations hitherto inaccessible to it. It is this aspect of movement that most ignited the imagination of the first generation of Continental cultural theorists who witnessed radio’s speedy incorporation into everyday life. Thinking of the performative and visual arts, Theodor Adorno speculated that the new “technology of distribution” would also change “that which is distributed.”4 Filippo T. Marinetti dreamed of an aerial art, liberated and uninhibited by the geographical and ideological constraints of existing genres.5 Frank Warschauer took stock of the disruptive effects of broadcast opera being “delivered to the residential dwellings like gas and water.” The foremost concern of these observers was the status of traditional forms of artistic expression at the threshold of electronic mass diffusion. More precisely, what was to be the fate of arts—traditionally encountered in the controlled settings of concert halls, salons and museums, and by limited, relatively informed audiences—when they were confronted for the first time with the option of being transported directly into differently mediated setting of the homes of a diverse and enlarged audience courtesy of radio? While it is difficult to address this question in places like the United States, Luxemburg and Normandy, where the culture broadcasted was largely populist, the history of radio in Britain followed a trajectory that enables us to explore it. There, the early BBC had monopoly over the airwaves. This freed it from commercial competition and the perpetual need to cater to existing demand, and allowed it to take up a pedagogic agenda. Presuming the ease of broadcasting to diverse audiences, the Corporation leadership attempted to turn radio into an authoritative instrument for the improvement of knowledge, taste and manners. My inquiry into the BBC’s attempts to transport artistic production, and architecture in particular, reveals this process to be fraught with challenges. This attempt robbed artistic production of its self-evidence, that is, it tested the belief, perpetuated most prominently by Kantian aesthetics, that art was something pre-given, immediately recognizable and whose virtues were only awaiting discovery by those gifted with the ability of aesthetic judgment. The microphone forced artists, critics and other aesthetes to clarify the postulates of art appreciation and spell out the virtues of their activities to a public that listener research, letters and popular press had already confirmed would not be persuaded by esoteric arguments. I use the word “forced” advisedly because radio “forced” speakers to rationalize something that was commonly believed to be spontaneous, and that resisted rationalization as it was (as argued by Pierre Bourdieu) nothing other than socially determined inculcation.7 This predicament unsettled the existing hierarchy between the lesser or applied arts like architecture, industrial design and town planning and the finer arts like painting and sculpture. In the social space of radio, the applied arts became the ambassadors of the more elevated arts. The BBC’s endeavor to democratize what it considered to be “culture,” highlights the cleavage between competing approaches to symbolic consumption. It challenges the commonplace conception of broadcasting as a free floating and uninhibited system of conveyance. Instead, the deployment of broadcasting for acculBroadcast Culture: The Fate of the Arts in the Space of British Radio (1927-1945)