Readings 10 – Adorno on Radio – Next meeting, Friday February 12th 2020 @ 12 p.m. (Eastern) / 5 p.m. (London) | TAXIS

Hi everyone,

We’re looking forward to kicking things off for 2020 with Adorno’s essay “Radio Physiognomics”, which Adorno prepared while he was affiliated with the long-running Princeton Radio Project in the late 30s to the early 1940s. Adorno was never really satisfied with the program of empirical audience research that Lazarsfeld and Frank Stanton pioneered, embodied in their “Program Analyzer”. Descendants of this device are used regularly to evaluate continuous, real-time audience responses to audiovisual content.

Our next meeting is February 12, at 12 p.m. (Eastern) / 5 p.m. (London) and will take place on Zoom.

As this is a long text, we will co-ordinate splitting up the text in advance of the meeting (see below). You can find the PDF online here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3hOgji7mg1vME45cS1DclBGV00/view

We’ve also discussed a move away from the Twitter thread for organising these meetings, so please get in touch with either myself (eabell@tcd.ie) or Ezra (ezra@redthunderaudio.com) to be kept in the loop. We will also post out the Zoom link for this meeting by email, closer to the time.

I’ve also added a couple of other readings for context, in case you are interested. Don’t forget there is a group bibliography here, which collects all the readings (main and supplementary) that have been covered so far.

— Eamonn

Adorno, Theodor W, and Robert Hullot-Kentor. “Radio Physiognomics.” In Current of Music: Elements of a Radio Theory, 41–133. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009.

Babich, Babette. “Adorno’s Radio Phenomenology: Technical Reproduction, Physiognomy and Music.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 40, no. 10 (December 1, 2014): 957–96. https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453714548503.

Levin, Thomas Y., and Michael Linn. “Elements of a Radio Theory: Adorno and the Princeton Radio Research Project.” Musical Quarterly 78, no. 2 (1994): 316–24. https://www.jstor.org/stable/742546.

Levy, Mark R. “The Lazarsfeld-Stanton Program Analyzer: An Historical Note.” Journal of Communication 32, no. 4 (December 1, 1982): 30–38. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1982.tb02516.x.

Mitchell, Gordon R. “Public Opinion, Thinly Sliced and Served Hot.” International Journal of Communication 9, no. 0 (January 5, 2015): 25. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/2099

Morrison, David E. “Kultur and Culture: The Case of Theodor W. Adorno and Paul F. Lazarsfeld.” Social Research 45, no. 2 (1978): 331–55. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40970336.

Scherzinger, Martin. “Software Physiognomics: Adorno’s Radio Analytics Today.” New German Critique 43, no. 3 (129) (November 1, 2016): 53–72. https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-3625361.