Radio / body

Phenomenology and dramaturgies of radio

Farokh Soltani

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526149824
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Radio

This study provides an in-depth exploration of the dramaturgical practices of radio drama and their underlying philosophical assumptions. By presenting an analytical model drawn from phenomenology, it challenges the current understanding of the medium, instead focusing on the bodily and aural aspects of radio drama, while offering a critique of the conventions of dramaturgical practice for neglecting these affective sonic aspects. Tracing these conventions through the history of the development of radio drama, it proposes that a more bodily, resonant mode of radio dramaturgy is best placed to meet the demands of the current era of digital production and distribution. The book also examines a number of approaches to creating a more embodied experience for the listener.

1
Radio thinks, radio sees: the theatre of the mind and beyond

In this chapter, I want to examine the most common theoretical solutions to the problem of radio drama, both to critique them and to build on them to lay the foundation of a phenomenological solution. It is divided into two parts; first, I examine the more representational theories of radio drama – characterised by the description the theatre of the mind – and critique them, before moving on to accounts that are more open to a phenomenological reading, which I then use to build and refine a phenomenology of listening to radio drama.

The theatre of the mind

It is very common in the debates around radio drama to describe the medium with the phrase the theatre of the mind – to the extent that it has become a shorthand for the effects of the medium. Martin Esslin articulates the term in The Mind as a Stage: ‘[The radio] play comes to life in the listener's own imagination, so the stage on which it is performed is the listener’s own mind. He himself […] is an active collaborator with the producer’ (Esslin 1971: 7). Unlike the stage, or a film, where our bodies experience the world, radio is somehow more mental, and requires an effort from the listener that is not needed when the world is visible. This, in short, is the clearest expression of the representationalist solution to the problem of the radio drama: it is the mind that encounters the dramatic world of radio, rendering it accessible, instead of the eye. It is also a useful starting point for a critique of this approach: what is it about the phrase, one might ask, that has made it such a frequent description of the experience of the medium?

One way to answer this question, and to clarify what is meant here by mind, is to ask: why is it that no one ever calls the medium of theatre itself the theatre of the mind? Behind the phrase, then, lies the assumption that the mind, however it may be defined, is required when understanding radio drama, but not drama as performed and seen on stage. We can see the ocularcentric bias at work here: theatre does not need the mind to be understood, because the eyes can give the audience direct access to the dramatic world, while the ears require some thinking to gain access. This, of course, may seem logical according to the theoretical basis examined in the Introduction: on stage, the presence of vision allows for the elements of the dramatic world to be separated, identified and processed, and thus the audience member does not to resort to doing so through mental activity. The radio does not provide the listener with such an access to the elements that constitute the dramatic world, meaning that, to encounter the world, the listener first needs to actively engage in the reconstruction of the elements through a mental process. Radio, then, has to happen in the theatre of the mind in order for the dramatic world to be accessible. Here, however, I want to interrogate the key governing logic of the theatre of the mind: that the world is understood through the mental representation of the individual elements that constitute it; as argued previously, without this assumption, the ocularcentric hierarchy of senses that require mental activity would be invalid. The key contention here lies in the definition of world. As this concept is fundamental to the rest of my arguments, let us first expand some more on how it is understood.

The conception of the world as a series of separate, distinct and identifiable mental representations is problematic from a phenomenological perspective, in that, from a first-person, phenomenal perspective, I understand and navigate the world without resorting to mental representation. My everyday experience of the world is not of individual thoughts, ideas and other forms of mental representation that together create my understanding; while acts of identification, separation and distinction of ideas certainly feature in my daily life, they do not precede the world, but are embedded in it. The world, from a phenomenological perspective, is not what is thought or conceived, but, first and foremost, what is perceived and lived. This morning, for example, I woke up, and was aware that it was 7 a.m. This did not mean that I first had to look at the clock, noting its hands, calculating the number to which they referred, and then forming a projection of the time in my mind. Neither did it entail creating a mental representation of the number 7, the word ‘seven’, or a clock with the hands on the correct times, in my mind. If I may have at some point thought consciously about how it was 7 a.m., this act of thought itself could not have been the way through which I had understood what time it was, as my ability to consciously construct a mental representation of the fact could only follow the fact that I knew the time. Indeed, my experience was not of me being aware that it was 7 a.m., but simply the fact of the time of day; before any acts of thought, my experience of the world contained neither mental representations nor an awareness of my own mind as the site of such representations. I then got out of bed, walked to the door and left the room – once again, without forming a mental representation of the door, room, outside or myself. I did have a series of thoughts and mental projections as I was doing so; they did not, however, concern my actions, or what I could see or hear or touch, but were in fact preliminary sketches of this very paragraph. Nevertheless, the world that I was experiencing did not consist of this paragraph, as proved by the fact that, by the time I stopped considering my writing, I had managed to navigate my way towards the kitchen – again, without forming any mental representations of my steps; in other words, phenomenologically, the world is not constituted by the elements that my mind identifies, distinguishes and represents.

What, then, is a world? In his seminal book Being and Time, Martin Heidegger explores this question by problematising representationalist attitudes towards the world through an examination of everyday experience, as I did in the previous paragraph. His issue with defining the world as the sum of mental representations is that, as we observe in first-hand experience, this takes for granted – or perhaps ignores – the fact that a tacit practical understanding of the world exists before any conscious representation is formed in the mind. Any act of identification and representation of individual elements can only be grounded in this understanding. For Heidegger, whose project aims to describe this pre-reflective world, its key characteristic is its ‘referential totality’ (1962: 99) – that is, the world is not a collection of many elements which can be understood individually by the mind, but the entire context that makes the understanding of any individual element, including the mind, possible. This context is the site of one's practical existence: I did not need to create individual mental representations of myself, the clock, its hands, my steps towards the door or my purpose for leaving the room in order to perform my morning routine, and yet I knew, without explicit acknowledgement to myself, that I had successfully left the room; this is because any conception of any of these elements is predicated upon my understanding of the world: my knowledge of what a clock is, or of the act of walking, or of the need to leave the room after waking up, or who I am, all derive from my implicit, primordial practical understanding of what everything, including me and others, is and how it relates to every other thing. For Heidegger, ‘the world is always “there”. Whenever we encounter anything, the world has already been previously discovered’ (Heidegger 1962: 114). This quality, Heidegger terms worldhood: the pre-reflective referential totality of what exists, and of what is possible.

Should we approach the theatre of the mind with this conception of world in mind, a key problem becomes apparent: if an understanding of world precedes mental representation of it, then the dramatic world of radio cannot be understood through the mind. Conceiving of every individual element present within the sound structure in the mind, after all, does not lead to the experience of a world, in the same way that creating a mental representation of a clock does not make me aware of the time. Furthermore, if the world is experienced as a whole, rather than through the identification of individual ideas or theoretical truths, then the absence of vision in radio drama does not make its world any less understandable than the world on the stage. If representation is derivative of the world, rather than constitutive of it, the ocularcentric hierarchy is not valid. If access to the world is not representational, then the experience of the dramatic world is as accessible through the ear as it is through the eye, and there is no need to resort to the mind.

My critique here, of course, rests on a key assumption: that the dramatic world is a world as defined above, in that it is characterised by its worldhood. This is a claim that I posit and refine in various ways throughout the book, particularly in the next chapter. A detractor, however, may instead argue that there are fundamental differences between the referential totality of my pre-reflective understanding, on one hand, and the hypothetical world on the stage, or the radio, on the other. But if we do not experience the dramatic world as a world, then what is the mechanism through which we experience it? In other words, how does the theatre of the mind work?

Most theoretical responses to this question tend to follow one of two trends. One trend, which I have labelled the semiotic approach, understands the world of radio drama in terms of codes, signs and texts, and the other, which I term the ‘visual medium’ approach, understands it in terms of visual imagination. In the next two sections, I address these ideas, questioning the foundations of each and instead proposing my own phenomenological perspective, before returning to the idea of the theatre of the mind for a final critique.

Radio thinks: the semiotic approach

One common explanation for the theatre of the mind is that the medium of radio converses with the listener's mind through a series of predefined sonic codes and symbols – key among them, words – to ‘fill in’ the gaps left by the absence of visuals; in other words, the world of radio drama is not a world, but a text to be experienced intellectually. A systematic presentation of such accounts is presented in Andrew Crisell's Understanding Radio (1994), which draws on the semiotics of C.S. Peirce to explain how radio uses codes and signs to communicate with the audience, who use the given signs to reconstruct the mental picture. Huwiler (2005) and Lutostanski (2016) draw from narratology – that is, the semiotics of storytelling – to understand the signs of radio drama. Rattigan (2002) and Hill (2000) both draw from Patrice Pavis's ideas around the semiotics of theatre in order to understand radio drama within the same framework. All these discussions have in common an understanding of the world of radio drama as a series of discrete signs, encountered through interpretation. Raban (1981) argues passionately that the sounds of radio drama should be understood not as objects, effects and things but as symbols. In fact, Elam (2002), from whom I have borrowed the term dramatic world, also bases his understanding of it on a process of semiotic reading, rather than a holistic totality that may precede it: for him, the dramatic world arises only when the spectator ‘work[s] hard and continuously at piecing together into a coherent structure the partial and scattered bits of dramatic information that he receives from different sources’ (2002: 87). Instead of the referential totality of world, Elam sees ‘dramatic content whose expression is in fact discontinuous and incomplete’ (2002: 88). In other words, although he does not employ the term, for Elam, from a semiotic perspective, theatre too is the theatre of the mind: it is comprised not of a pre-reflective totality but of signs and codes to be interpreted.

From the perspective of the semiotic approach, the sound structure of radio drama is essentially a series of combined codes and signs, each standing for a specific element, which the listener then interprets in order to reconstruct a mental representation of the dramatic world. Radio signs can include speech, the ‘primary code of radio’ (Crisell 1994: 53) and its ‘dominant sign system’ (Lutostanski 2016: 118). After all, speech minimises the ambiguity that sound possesses by virtue of the qualities of immersion, affectivity and temporality, because it allows for a conventional, rather than sonic, link between the sound and the element of the world that it represents – in semiotic terms, signifier and signified. Non-verbal sound effects and music, of course, are also useful as codes, to refer both to objects and to moods or atmospheres; the sound of the hoot of an owl, for example, can be a sign standing in for the bird itself, or as Crisell points out, ‘it may evoke not merely an owl but an entire setting – an eerie, nocturnal atmosphere’ (1994: 46). These, however, can be considered to play an ‘ancillary role and necessitate “textual pointing” and “anchorage”’ (Lutostanski 2016: 118). In this way, the problem of radio drama can be solved: the world may be visual, and radio may be ‘blind’ to its vision, but the dramatic world of radio can be created through ‘a process of “transcodification” – the replacement of one code or set of codes, in [the case of theatre,] visual ones, by another, in [the case of radio,] auditory’ (Crisell 1994: 146).

This claim is open to an obvious phenomenological criticism: my experience of listening to radio drama simply does not involve deliberative, reflective decoding. Take Crisell's example of the hoot of an owl (1994: 46), which is to be interpreted as the night. If this is indeed the way listeners make sense of radio, the following process should take place in my thoughts when a new scene in a play opens with an owl-hoot: I notice that there is silence, understand that it indicates the end of the previous scene and clear my mind of its elements. Then arises a sound with which I am familiar due to previous exposure and can distinguish as the hoot of an owl. I recognise this as the acoustic signifier of the concept of ‘an owl’, and, with effort, recall it from the array of codes that I have accrued. Therefore, I am now aware of the presence of an owl in the scene. I also delve into my cultural knowledge of the many radio programmes in which the sound of an owl has been employed, to recall its exte...