No Transmitter: Clandestine Radio Listening Communities in Ricardo Piglia’s The Absent City

Abstract

No Transmitter:Clandestine Radio Listening Communities in Ricardo Piglia’s The Absent City Tom McEnaney (bio) At the center of the Argentine writer Ricardo Piglia’s 1992 novel The Absent City (La ciudad ausente) is a storytelling machine built from an unfinished technology: a radio without a transmitter. As the device’s inventor explains, “I had begun to combine certain formulas … and I applied them to a radio receptor. Back then I hadn’t yet been able to make a transmitter, only a recorder. My closet was filled with tapes, recorded voices, song lyrics. I couldn’t transmit. I could only capture the waves and the memories from the ether” (145).1 The engineer’s description begs the simple question: What is radio? In Piglia’s novel and in the critical theory that has accumulated around radio as a technology and cultural object, this ontological question, which emerges from a series of mechanical questions—Do all radios have recorders built inside them? Does a radio need a transmitter?—leads to a series of cultural questions: what is the difference between receiving and transmitting? How does radio connect one listener and another? What kinds of political community does radio make possible? Addressing the forms that radio might take goes some way toward imagining the social worlds it might produce. The engineer’s insistence on the radio as a receptor without a transmitter, for instance, points to the complicated legislative, technological, and cultural histories that lie behind the common understanding of a radio as an aural medium intended for listening to the sonic transmissions of others. The expectation that a radio would, by necessity, include a transmitter points back to early wireless radio, an age defined by amateur radio enthusiasts receiving and transmitting signals before the consolidation of broadcast networks in the early 1920s in the Americas and Europe led to the proliferation of radio receiving sets—those devices we have come to commonly refer to as radios.2 Beyond that moment, as governments [End Page 72] regulated bandwidth and parceled out frequencies, largely criminalizing amateur radio, the practice of radio transmission and reception continued in clandestine and rebel or pirate radio networks throughout the world, helping to define musical subcultures and—as the critical writings of Frantz Fanon, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and others explain—galvanize and shape anticolonial political communities.3 These radio communities formed sonic counterpublics—their broadcasts public, by technological necessity, and geared toward countering the messages from stations of a colonial government, commercial corporation, or state-run news service. By insisting that he made only a radio receiver and not yet a transmitter, Piglia’s inventor situates his device within this lineage and reminds readers how a given medium’s political function depends in part on how cultural users shape its technological possibilities, and how some technological forms—such as a radio with a transmitter—index the histories and practices concealed or forgotten when we understand a medium like radio as solely a device intended for tuning in to other voices.4 While the invocation of the transmitter includes the inventor’s technology in a rebel radio genealogy, he then turns away from transmission to grant this notion of political power to the receptive function he insists on instead. It is this receptor, and the idea of reception itself, which will become the novel’s central preoccupation as a community of political rebels forms around the storytelling machine the inventor will build from his radio receiver. The invocation of transmission, and its subsequent rejection, thus begins to point toward The Absent City’s construction of an alternative idea of the political power of a community of rebel radio listening. While the idea for such a community responds to and derives from Argentina’s particular national history, a history I will return to in greater detail below, Piglia’s more general critique of radio’s political possibilities rests on and against a belief that activist politics requires a speaker who transforms the world through his or her speech. Such a belief pervades both left- and right-wing political ideology. However, in order to sharpen a reader’s sense of how Piglia’s novel proposes a nuanced alternative to the...