In 1936, Arnheim published one of the first full-length studies of radio and its cultural significance. One would also not want to overlook the submerged correspondences between poetic Imagism and fascist radio broadcasts in the career of Ezra Pound. In each of these cases, the engagement with radio on the part of these writers is directly linked to the political and cultural milieu of the 1930s. The political milieu in Europe of the 1930s was dominated, of course, by the development of fascism, and it is a critical commonplace to observe that effective political manipulation of the technical media, especially radio, can be traced to the innovative practices of fascist regimes. Two recent volumes of criticism help to redress, through highly divergent approaches, this material and ideological obscurity.
Several essays are particularly useful for their documentation of early radio or sound art.
Other essays in the volume provide, to varying degree, historical materials on the careers and musical practices of Marcel Duchamp, Antonin Artaud, John Cage, and William Burroughs. In spite of these riches, radio never emerges in these essays as a specific political or sociological formation of the imaginary. The book's discussions of radio as a mode of technological enchantment stop short of its role in modern political and religious indoctrination. Wireless Imagination, as the reference to the avant-garde in its title suggests, tends to focus on esoteric productions of high modernism or postmodernism. Indeed, its reconstruction of an auditory avant-garde seems intent on marginalizing radio, on isolating the medium from its institutional contexts.