is not literally live, the feeling (illusory perhaps) of the formal necessity of listening in real time, at a particular moment, the sheer contemporaneousness of the act of reception, is paramount. There is nothing like hearing a station going on air for the first or last time, like Radio Denmark. Or hearing DJs on the now-forgotten early 1970s pirate Radio Nordsee International asking listeners in cars parked along the Essex coast to flash their lights out to sea towards their ship simultaneously. Both are recorded in my log extracts quoted above. All of that is lost in the multiple temporalities and slick convenience of instant playback. Radio Alice was lost in the end to the interventions of the state, according to Guattari: “The police got rid of Radio Alice—its perpetrators were pursued, condemned and imprisoned, and its premises ransacked,” but, Guattari optimistically predicts, “its work of revolutionary de-territorialization goes on unabated…” The antiquity of the analogy arguably gives it renewed energy, and not just as revolutionary nostalgia. The nostalgia for valves that needed to be warmed-up before the sound of radio emerged provides echoes of its own. My radios were all old, built by my father from bits or bought from jumble sales where I also acquired piles of 78s and eclectic tastes in music: Frank Crummit to Frank Sinatra, Pinetops Smith to Les Paul. The image of the voice in the night, the image of noise interfering with reality, is a pregnant one. It’s not an image, actually, but an echo, or like the pre-echo that you can hear where magnetic tape has been wound too tightly and stored for too long, a ghostly impression. Or where the stylus picks up a vibration through the wall of a groove on a record. I think of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” unintentionally cueing itself like this in the opening hiss of the brittle shellac of a long-broken 78. I am again diverted from the force of argument towards the signals of memory, broadcasting forever on wavelengths I keep flicking over on my way to authorised channels. Echoes, the very acoustic repetitions that are banished from radio and recording studios by soundproofing. Echoes of these engagements with vanished technologies provide material for writing, already have, in this account, Rajachman, The Deleuze Connections, 241. This was also the fate of the canal boat of Radio Free Amsterdam, the fictional counterpart of Radio Free Prague, in my ‘Tropp’ story.
a radio talk with no station to transmit it, an echo of these echoes. What is required for my poetics is a newer kind of formal interruption than I imagined in the late 1980s, though it is actually the globalised, capitalised mediatised flow that radio is part of, the “media’s inconsistency of images and commentaries” as Alain Badiou puts it, its “temporal carnival,” that needs to be stemmed. With the advent of what Guattari called Integrated World Capitalism, this is all the more urgent. Thus radio has lost most of its romance. With no old-style ideological divide to drive propaganda, I doubt whether there are stations broadcasting on short wave now, though I haven’t the technology to check. I do know the BBC is frantically countering both Al-Qaida and Al-Jezeera on world-wide satellite TV, but that’s a subject upon which I’ve uttered my own tape-”spliced” provisional “last words” elsewhere. Badiou argues for a renewed “principle of interruption. It must be able to propose to thought something that can interrupt this endless regime of circulation,” indeed establish “a point of interruption,” born of a “retardation process … because revolt today requires leisureliness and not speed. This thinking, slow and consequentially rebellious, is alone capable of establishing the fixed point” of interruption that will allow, in Badiou’s thought, if not in mine, the “patient search for at least one truth.”10 From this point of view, the counter-language of Radio Anna (and Alice, even) runs the risk of replicating the form of the mediatised flow of Capital(ism), while merely contesting its content, in a breathless onslaught of antislogans and counter-images. We must interrupt this broadcast of interruptions anew, but still with the aim to create more complex nervous systems (which, I take it, is the function of art). However, it is with three “images,” one of broadcasting, one of recording, and one of what I call “human unfinish,” that I wish to end.
Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought (London and New York: Continuum, 2005) 36. I am alluding to the final poem in ‘Warrant Error,’ which ends: ‘You receive my wild meanings/ and divine unfinish in his spliced last word.’ See Warrant Error (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2009) 116. 10 Badiou, Infinite Thought, 36-38. This move, according to Badiou, also hails the end of the prevalence of the linguistic analogy in thought and the end of postmodernism. Salt, pinch of. Of course.
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