Die soziale Antizipation der Zukunft

The role of music during the Fascist era has attracted the attention of music historians, even though more research is needed to fully understand the influence of the Italian bureaucratic and legislative system on music production. The pioneering studies of Fiamma Nicolodi and Harvey Sachs represent a comprehensive historical survey on the social life of composers and musicians working under Mussolini’s dictatorial sway. Later, scholars Massimiliano Sala and Roberto Iliano, among others, have given important contributions in this research area. However, no previous studies have investigated systematically the function of radio as a political vehicle in the dissemination of music during this period of Italian history. Based on various documentary sources, most of which remain unexamined, this study aims to give a contribution in this direction. I discuss how fascist censorship, apart from limiting mass media communication, affected the broadcast of music on radio. In particular, I consider how Fascist propaganda contributed to shape a social image of music that was strictly related to the regime’s racial ideology. This had strong repercussions on the circulation of African American music in Italy, and on the gradual elimination of Jewish composers from radio broadcasting.

Radiophonics is the practice of creative sound studio production originally intended for broadcast. In 'The Field of Cultural Production', Pierre Bourdieu introduces several terms for the analysis of cultural practice: habitus, agent, field, strategy, trajectory, symbolic, and cultural capital. These concepts enable a radical contextualization of the internal analysis of the formation of creative works; making it possible to relate 'the space of works' to that between the positions held by their cultural producers in their respective fields. Cultural Production is the site of struggles between the sub-fields of 'restricted production' and that of 'large–scale production' which structure the field according to a hierarchy of relative autonomy or subordination to the Field of Power (the economic and political sphere). Towards the autonomous pole, there lies a relatively freer creative space for the cultural producer. I will apply Bourdieu's approach to the field of Radiophonic Production as practised within public broadcasting in an attempt to examine the creative space available to radiophonic producers; and how in the necessary struggle within the broader cultural field between the claims of creative autonomy and mass media production radiophonic producers are able to resist the Field of Power in the so-called 'culture wars'.

1996

This paper analyzes the role played by Radio Free Europe in redistributing sound inside Romania, a country which experienced one of the most repressive communist regimes in Eastern Europe. By following the work of Monica Lovinescu, a cultural critic and writer, and Ana Blandiana, a poet, and leaning heavily on the theoretical framework provided by Giorgio Agamben, this paper uncovers the potential of disembodied voices. Voice, therefore, drives the revolution, providing the Romanian population with a means of escape, a means with which to reclaim their words and thus begin making demands for change. Two types of sounds/voices will be discussed in this paper, exiled sound and muted sound. This paper challenges the prevailing notions that Romania was a country without an effective intellectual/cultural public sphere which thus prevented it from fully partaking in the "Carnival of Revolution" of 1989.

The article presents the story of the underground Solidarity radio, a less known chapter of dissident media activism, whose emblematic form was the " extra-Gutenberg " phenomenon of underground print culture, or samizdat. It proposes an approach, infl uenced by media archeology, in which both can be studied as part and parcel of the same communication environment in order to better understand the particular articulation of dissent, media and modernity which both represented. It proposes that in addition to being a certain media form, samizdat was a " social media fantasy " – a shared cultural matrix which embodied political expectations and passions about liberating effects on horizontal communication, attainable here and now through means at disposal of an average person. Underground broadcasting developed in the shadow of the samizdat materialization of this emancipatory media fantasy, despite the fact that radio activists mastered a unique craft of intrusion into the public airwaves, which gave broadcasting an aura of spectacularity that underground publishing had lost as it expanded.

After World War II, the technical perfection of radio technology increased and its popularity grew. This period was characterized by the arrival of a massmedia toolkit: the transmission of information in the form of electromagnetic signals from broadcaster to receiver allowed private homes to connect with the outside world at the push of a button: private space became the venue for public presentations. Radio was just the beginning of this transfer. The essay departs from the exhibition EAR APPEAL with EAR APPEAL ONAIR at Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna, 2006. Curator: Doreen Mende. Artists: Rashad Becker (DE), Justin Bennett (GB/NL), Benjamin Bergmann (DE), Elisabeth Grübl (A), Arthur Köpcke (DE/DK), Genesis P-Orridge (USA), Ultra-red (USA), Ruszka Roskalnikowa (PL), Paula Roush/msdm (PT/GB), Mika Taanila (FIN), Annette Weisser (D). Co-produced by Ö1 Kunstradio / Austrian Radio (ORF). http://www.e-flux.com/announcements/ear-appeal/

Fascism. Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies, 10(1), 2021

This article sketches fascism's ideological morphology under a post-fascist condition. It builds empirically on three years of ethnographic studies of the radical-nationalist podcast Motgift [Antidote], disclosing that (i) fascist multivocality characterizes and feeds the rhizomic structure of Swedish radical nationalism; (ii) fascist narration locates protagonists and antagonists in driving a plot of 'genocide against the white race'; and (iii) fascist temporality reinforces ideas of a lost past and degenerated present-prompting a struggle for cultural rebirth and racial revival. The multivocality, narration, and temporality of Motgift illuminate the radical-nationalist politics at work under a post-fascist condition: the state of ideological reconfiguration pondering fascism's historical downfall.

Following the short period of consolidation under János Kádár in the immediate aftermath of the 1956 revolution, expressions of the legacy and memory of the uprising were no longer permitted in the public sphere and had to be confined to the private sphere. The activity of émigré actors and institutions, including the broadcasts of Western radio stations, played a crucial role in sustaining the memory and the mentality of the revolution. In 1986, thirty years after the national trauma of 1956, Radio Free Europe broadcasted an array of programs commemorating the revolution, while the official socialist media in Hungary contended again that what had happened in 1956 had been a counterrevolution. This study primarily investigates two questions. Firstly, it casts light on the importance of the RFE’s archival machinery, which recorded on magnetic tape the broadcasts of the Hungarian radio stations during the revolution in 1956. Sharing these audio-documents with audiences 30 years later, RFE could replay the revolution, significantly strengthening the interpretation of the events as a revolution. The idiosyncratic voices of the key figures of the revolution guaranteed the authenticity of the commemoration programs even for members of the younger generation among the audiences. Secondly, this study sheds light on the counter-cultural practices through which listeners tried to reconstruct the “body” of the “specters” of the suppressed cultural heritage and eliminate the asymmetry between the radio’s accessible voice and its non-accessible physical vehicle.