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Broadcasting and schizophrenia John Durham Peters Media Culture Society 2010; 32; 123 DOI: 10.1177/0163443709350101 The online version of this article can be found at: http://mcs.sagepub.com
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Broadcasting and schizophrenia John Durham Peters UNIVERSITY OF IOWA, USA
I In December 2005, a woman named Colleen Nestler convinced a judge in Santa Fe, New Mexico to put a temporary restraining order on the television talk show host David Letterman that would require him to stay at least three yards from her at all times. She blamed Letterman for mental cruelty and for causing her sleep deprivation and bankruptcy over a 10-year period. As Nestler explained in a somewhat disordered statement, she began sending him ‘thoughts of love’ when his show moved to CBS in 1993, and he responded ‘in code words & obvious indications through jestures [sic] and eye expressions’. At one point he even asked her to marry him in a promotional spot saying, ‘Marry me Oprah.’ ‘Oprah had become my first of many code names’, she explained. ‘As time passed, the code-vocabulary increased & changed, but in the beginning things like “C” on baseball caps referred to me, and specific messages through songs sung by his guests, were the beginnings of what became an elaborate means of communication between he and myself’ (Auslander, 2005). Letterman’s exasperated attorneys responded that he had never even met Nestler and had already had enough trouble from stalker fans, including one who tried to kidnap his child. This passing incident (the judge soon rescinded the order after widespread derision) raises a number of questions about the communicative form of broadcasting and its relation to everyday life. What would a restraining order on an electronic proxy look like? What would ‘three yards’ mean for someone on air? Can we even use the term ‘relationship’ for the one-sided bond between fan and celebrity? What kind of communication system allows for Media, Culture & Society © 2010 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore), Vol. 32(1): 123–140 [ISSN: 0163-4437 DOI: 10.1177/0163443709350101]
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such a massive imbalance between two parties – utter involvement and utter ignorance? What does it mean to ‘meet’ or ‘know’ someone at all? Why does Ms Nestler’s notion of ‘an elaborate means of communication’ with a TV personality seem bizarre? Since it is not unusual for lovers to develop a ‘code-vocabulary’ of intimate terms or TV personalities to employ intimate, chatty, one-on-one ways of speaking, what was the precise nature of her mistake? How did it become normal for media personalities to simulate interactive talk, but pathological for a member of the audience to hear their words as a personal response? What is, in short, the implicit line between madness and rationality that is encoded into the form of broadcast talk? Ms Nestler’s mistake was to ignore the contradiction between broadcasting’s address (interpersonal) and distribution (mass). Though celebrities talk in personal styles apparently addressed to one or a few, their performances generate revenue according to statistical algorithms aimed at populations, not individuals. Her affair with Letterman lacked a corrective cynicism or knowingness about the nature of the television apparatus. In this article I explore the peculiar ways that the practitioners and audiences of broadcasting had to learn to think about impersonal and interpersonal address, pushing media history into the rich and under-explored field of psychiatry. Foucault gave us the maxims that each age gets the form of madness it deserves and that every form of madness is a parody of the reigning form of reason. Pathology reveals normality. In the same way, each format or technology of communication implies its own disorders. Madness shines a bright light on hidden assumptions about communication.
II The classic name for audience engagement with media personalities, ‘parasocial interaction’, was coined over 50 years ago by two University of Chicago sociology professors, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, in a 1956 article. The ‘seeming face-to-face relationship between spectator and performer’ they called a para-social relationship, and para-social interaction was the ‘simulacrum of conversational give and take’ between the two roles. Though they paid most attention to the psychology of fans, they were clear that media performers actively put on interactive styles. ‘Every attempt possible is made [by broadcast institutions] to strengthen the illusion of reciprocity and rapport in order to offset the inherent impersonality of the media themselves’ (Horton and Wohl, 1956: 220). Media personalities spoke dialogically to people they didn’t see, hear, or know, and audiences became friendly with spectral figures who entered their homes and lives. Things went awry only when people failed to distinguish the two parallel circuits. ‘It is only when the para-social relationship becomes a substitute for autonomous social participation’, they warn, ‘when it proceeds in absolute
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defiance of objective reality, that it can be regarded as pathological’ (Horton and Wohl, 1956: 223). They follow with a footnote about a fan of the early talk show host, Dave Garroway, who moved to Chicago, opened several charge accounts as ‘Mrs Dave Garroway’, and tried to occupy his hotel room before a detective agency persuaded her to return home. (Midwestern media personalities named David seem to attract this sort of thing.) Mrs Dave Garroway, however, did not just defy ‘objective reality’ – every participant in a fictional world does so to some extent; rather, she violated the rules of reading mediated communication. Sane people are supposed to know that no message is ever meant for a single individual in broadcast talk, but she heard Garroway talking to her personally. Chicago sociology was always friendly to the notion that fantasy was a potential part of any face-to-face interaction, and Horton and Wohl are clear heirs to a tradition that goes back to Cooley, Park, Mead and Blumer. Internal projection, dialogue or conversational rehearsal were all normal parts of symbolic interaction. Horton and Wohl do not explain why they chose the prefix ‘para’, but it at least shares a prefix with ‘paranoia’. In paranoia ‘those people out there’ are my enemies; in para-social interaction they are my friends. The term probably owes something to psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan’s (1970 [1944]: 24–5) notion of ‘parataxic distortion’, in which actual and fantasy people exist side by side in the minds of schizophrenics. Sullivan, the founding editor of the interdisciplinary journal Psychiatry, in which Horton and Wohl’s article was published, and another heir to Chicago social thought, considered such ‘distortions’ to be continuous with normal relationships but dangerous if the line between reality and fantasy was lost. He called psychiatry the study of ‘interpersonal relations’, and, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, coined the term ‘interpersonal’ in 1938. Sullivan (1953: 18) apologized for the apparent tautology of ‘interpersonal interaction’, but he was one of the first to see how important that specification was. That forms of interaction exist besides the interpersonal is something a sensitive observer of communication practices around 1938 might notice. The notion of a distinctly ‘interpersonal’ zone is a historical latecomer. We needed to set it apart only in a cultural environment populated with thriving species of hybrid address sponsored by radio and other media of mass communication. One of the most astute points made by Horton and Wohl is that sex, perhaps the most normatively ‘interpersonal’ act humans do, is a prime resource for creating quasi-personal relations with audiences. ‘Sexual suggestiveness is used probably because it is one of the most obvious cues to a supposed intimacy’ (Horton and Wohl, 1956: 224–5). Two of their examples reverse the gender dynamics of the two Davids. Instead of the typical profile of feminized or juvenilized fans, Horton and Wohl point to two forgotten episodes in the annals of American broadcasting aimed at a lonely crowd of men. The Lonesome Gal was a radio show from 1947 to the mid 1950s, starring Jean King, a failed
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Hollywood actress. Aided by a microphone specially designed to pick up her whispers, vocal nuances and breathing, her shtick was a sultry monologue delivered from her couch on which she sat alone in her nightgown. She spoke to the nation’s lonely-hearts one by one, calling them ‘Muffin’ and ‘Baby’ in singular direct address. By gathering data from Chambers of Commerce around the United States, King made her show even more intimate by mentioning circumstantial facts peculiar to each town, and, at the peak of her popularity, she made an exhausting number of customized recordings each week (Dunning, 1998). Using an intimate style to hide radio’s disseminative logic, she invited her listeners to engage in the solipsistic reverie of being her sole addressee. Her listeners were to engage in the willing suspension of the knowledge of their co-listeners. Two’s company, three’s a crowd. Her task was to carry a person-to-person message through a medium that was prone to scatter. Like early wireless telegraphers, she was trying to get a broadcast medium to carry (the illusion of) a point-to-point message. Horton and Wohl’s second example was a short late-night TV spot called ‘Count Sheep’ featuring the actress Nancy Berg. The spot ran weekdays at 1 a.m. on WCRA-TV in Manhattan and was sponsored by a mattress company. It featured Ms Berg in a negligee, doing or saying slightly screwball things, and finally popping into bed. Her manager explained her success by her beauty and a unique skill: ‘Sometimes, she doesn’t say anything out loud, maybe she’s thinking what you’re thinking’ (Horton and Wohl, 1956: 224). Berg could suggest a telepathic contact with viewers. When early 1950s radio and TV personalities pretended to send ‘thoughts of love’ over the airwaves, nobody said they were crazy. As long as the flow goes in one direction, everything is fine: stars may wink into the camera and sigh into the microphone, but the reciprocal flutters of the audience must stay confined in their homes. In their belief that communion with broadcast figures is an intensification rather than distortion of normal face-to-face dynamics, Horton and Wohl differ sharply from other scholarly conceptions of the simulation of personal connection via mass media. Frankfurt School critics such as Adorno and Lowenthal saw the promotional rhetoric of ‘especially for you’ as a kind of ideological trick, a cognitive mistake in which foolish audiences were goaded into overlooking the statistical nature of broadcast address. Other Marxists such as Brecht or Enzensberger noted that the constitution of broadcasting as a communication system of few speakers and many listeners stigmatized those who dared to talk back; the task, they thought, was to create equal access to the means of communication by making broadcast consumers into broadcast producers. Normality was tied to a power imbalance: people with access to the means of communication may solicit intimacy from their audiences, but woe unto those who thought the broadcast world actually interacted with them. A third take on audience participation in the social relations of broadcasting is found in media events research, which sees the possibility of travelling into the world inside of radio or television as a rare
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but real ritual occasion (Dayan and Katz, 1992). In contrast to the Marxists, Horton and Wohl see para-social interaction as (mostly) healthy; in contrast to Durkheimians such as Dayan and Katz, they see it as (mostly) routine. Determining the significance of the oddly monological dialogue at the interface of broadcast media and their audiences has been one of the core tasks of media theory since the 1930s and 1940s.
III Though mediated communication is as old as writing, and mass communication goes back to the dawn of civilization, weirdly addressed messages have mushroomed since the late 19th century. Paddy Scannell is our best guide to the uncanny communicative structure of modern broadcasting, especially its effort to incorporate interpersonal genres of talk. The task of broadcast programming was, he argues, to develop forms of talk that strive to approximate the conditions of face-to-face chat. Radio separated the context of speaking and the context of listening. Its historic problem was to create forms of discourse that detain or entertain people who do not have to listen. Radio was a set of sound-protocols designed for eavesdroppers. Since overheard speech does not always make sense to those who are not parties to the context, radio pioneers learned to design formats for virtual participation by the absent. They created sociability through the ears and conversation without interaction – something historically reserved for madness or religious experience. Despite their accumulated size as measured by ratings, radio listeners were invited to feel themselves not as part of a vast public assembly but as a small group of listeners at home. Broadcasting’s reach was vast, but its voice was chummy. A mass audience did not mean an audience of masses. Broadcasting institutions actively adopted styles and strategies of talk that wooed audiences with bonhomie and chit-chat. Horton and Wohl (1956: 219) provide a quotation from Dave Garroway: Most talk on the radio in those days was formal and usually a little stiff. But I just rambled along, saying whatever came into my mind. I was introspective. I tried to pretend that I was chatting with a friend over a highball late in the evening.… I consciously tried to talk to the listener as an individual, to make each listener feel that he knew me and I knew him.… Strangers often stop me on the street today, call me Dave and seem to feel that we are old friends who know all about each other.
In a conceptually ambitious essay, Scannell (2000) argues that broadcast talk reveals something deeper about human life: what he calls ‘for-anyone-assomeone structures’ (see also Scannell, 1996: 24). First, he argues, such structures are not unique to speech and other semiotic matters: they are rooted in the nature of selfhood and time. Second, a for-anyone structure is open in its availability and indifferent to ownership or use. Pens, plants, toasters and the
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weather do not interact with individuals. The sun shines on the just and the unjust. Many things have this quality of generous and open impersonality, and there is a certain moral lesson here, he notes, of love for the public world. A for-someone structure, in contrast, targets specific people. Eyeglasses, passports, shoes, email accounts, or intimate talk typically belong to someone in particular. Third, broadcasting is a communicative structure that mediates foranyone structures and for-someone structures. Its communicative form speaks to people as individuals, but its scale of distribution is theoretically nationwide or global. To listen to radio or watch television normally is to engage in an interpretive process of being included and excluded at the same time. Each one of us experiences what we read or hear or see as if it spoke to each one of us personally. But that does not mean it spoke only to me. Each one of us knows that just as it speaks to me it speaks to millions of others at the same time, now. We do not treat what we read and see and hear every day as if it were a purely personal matter. I do not internalize the output of the media as I might a well-loved song or poem which I commit to heart in order to own it for my ownmost self. To the contrary. (Scannell, 2000: 18–19)
Scannell does not exactly say how we know to perform this discount. If broadcasters had to learn to speak into a studio microphone as if they were speaking to one person, what was the parallel historical process by which listeners and viewers learned to interpret what seemed personal as impersonal? How did audiences learn the art of ignoring the appeals for individual engagement that come over the air? How were people socialized into accepting non-reciprocity while being addressed conversationally via the mass media? The would-be lovers of Letterman, Garroway, King or Berg all mistake the ministrations of media performers as for-someone structures. Whether mad, duped or normal, such people fail to discern broadcasting’s unique communicative form, hearing its ‘you’ as singular rather than plural (perhaps modern English’s blurring of singular and plural forms in the second person pronoun ‘you’ abets the confusion). Or perhaps such audiences work too hard, expecting broadcast talk to enable intimate (one-on-one) relations instead of the ‘sociable’ (three’s company) relations that Scannell thinks are its norm. Whatever the answer, his schema is clearly an implicitly normative device for distinguishing rationality from insanity. How we take broadcast personae is a measure of mental health. Broadcasting, despite all appearances, is not an interpersonal medium.
IV In her belief that she could send ‘thoughts of love’ over the air to David Letterman, Colleen Nestler picked up a dream that goes back to the dawn of radio technology in the late 19th century. In the 1880s and 1890s, every major
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physicist involved in the development of radio flirted with the notion of wireless ‘thought-transference’. In Britain, Lord Rayleigh, the leading acoustician of the late 19th century, J.J. Thomson, the discoverer of the electron, William Crookes, the inventor of the cathode ray tube, and Oliver Lodge, the inventor of the radio coherer, all took an active interest in what was called ‘psychical research’. Heinrich Hertz, the key figure after James Clerk Maxwell in the practical application of electromagnetism, had a briefer flirtation with psychical research, but the German-speaking world took an equally active interest in such matters (Hagen, 2001), as did thinkers in France, Italy and the United States. Electromagnetism revealed ‘spooky actions at a distance’, as Einstein put it. It is hard for us to re-enter the intellectual world in which mental and material radiation swam through the ocean of the ‘ether’, the putative ‘medium’ for gravity, light, heat, sound, electricity and magnetism – and thoughts. The key notion was that just as the ether gave to physical processes an immaterial or even spiritual foundation, so it manifested the physical reality of mental processes. Since 1882, the name for this latter idea has been ‘telepathy’. Its point-topoint transmission from mind to mind was explicitly modeled on the telephone (Siegert, 1991), and early research on wireless transmission, in turn, aimed to create the physical and psychical conditions for the ethereal transmission of thoughts. William Barrett, an Irish physicist, mathematician, and founder of the British Society for Psychical Research, was one of the first to see the brain as a potentially wireless electrical transmitter. ‘The brain’, he wrote in 1882, ‘might be regarded as the seat of radiant energy like a glowing or sounding body’ (quoted in Luckhurst, 2002: 76). Oliver Lodge, who is better known in radio history, ventured the idea that brain was to mind as wire is to electricity, that is, a conducting medium for something less tangible. From the idea that the brain produces an electromagnetic halo it followed that these echoes might be readable. The notion of the psychical broadcasting of thoughts is coeval with the physical broadcasting of electromagnetic signals. It was a strange but pervasive idea around the turn of the century that meaning could be transmitted and received. The name for this process was ‘communication’. One of the obvious problems with such ‘cerebral radiation’ was what came to be called ‘tuning’. Edwin J. Houston, an American electrical engineer who later helped to found General Electric, claimed in 1892: ‘An active brain may be regarded as moulding the ether around it into thought waves that are spreading outwards from it in all directions … waves which Hertz has so beautifully demonstrated as resembling the vibrations which produce light.’ Such waves would proceed ‘outwards in all directions’ and ‘affect other brains on which they fall, provided that such brains are tuned to vibrate in unison with them’ (‘Prof. Houston …’, 1892). Each brain was a broadcasting station, beaming subtle radiations outward like an aurora borealis. Alexander Graham Bell followed up in 1893 with an appropriately telephonic solution for the tuning problem.
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Imagine two persons, one thousand or ten thousand miles apart, placed in communication electrically, in such a way that, without any spoken word, without soundingboard, key, or any bodily movement, the one receives instantly the thoughts of the other, and instantly sends back his own thoughts. (Moffett, 1893)
Abandoning the faint but unreliable utopia of wireless thought communication, Bell tried to hook up brain-waves to wires. His plan was to outfit remote partners with electrical helmets that would catch and send their thoughthaloes by wire. As it happened, nothing came of the plan: Bell found it easier to put voices ‘in communication electrically’ than thoughts. In the subsequent success of telephony and failure of telepathy we learned something about the difference between signals and significance. Signals can be packaged and sent by media of transmission; significance cannot. Though telepathy is still held by many as an ideal vision of what communication could or should be, it received its decisive critique by the pragmatist theologian Ernest William Hocking in 1912. First, without any possibility of ‘communicating with the person “face to face”’ we would never be able to determine a thought-message’s source. We would receive strong but untraceable impressions from unidentified senders. Telepathy would actually be less efficient than talking since any thought-message would need a personal confirmation – a voice, face or address – to label it. Second, if minds were so permeable, the first draft of every thought would fly out and become audible in its raw state to anyone. Thoughts would lack any gestation and public mind would be an inchoate brown noise. Thus Hocking praises the obstacles to thought transmission. ‘The resistance of Nature to the expression of a thought is not the resistance of a wholly hostile medium; detention is a spiritual condition for health and viability, not a physical condition solely’ (Hocking, 1912: 256–9). In a world without rest from the assault of others’ thoughts, without checks to the contagion of communication, we would never be able to tune out the pandemonium of other minds. (If it is bad to be captive to someone else’s choice of music or embarrassing when your stomach rumbles, imagine the din of the collective unconscious!) Writing in 1912, Hocking is current with the chief problems of wireless telegraphy. His two critiques of telepathy involve the questions of station identification and interference. This was also the year of the Titanic disaster and the absurd bungling of radio messages around it. Wireless operators, picking up a jumble of messages from various ships in the North Atlantic without being able to determine their source, spliced them together into a conflicting collage of news reports (Heyer, 1995). (We should note that collage as an artistic practice – a kind of visual analogue to the uprooted news of wireless – was also invented in 1912 by Braque and Picasso. Many avant-garde artists in the period played on radio as a ‘giant nuthouse’ [Gallo, 2005: 130]). At least W.T. Stead, the radical journalist and spiritualist, was attentive enough to send a mental wire of his demise from the sinking ship, which a correspondent claimed to have received before the news was official (Luckhurst, 2002: 139). Downloaded from http://mcs.sagepub.com at The University of Iowa Libraries on January 15, 2010
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The Titanic disaster was the epitome of the ‘etheric bedlam’ of the air-waves, as contemporaries called it, a term nicely linking wireless transmission with a classic trope of madness. So much for the ethereal angels of perfect communication. In response, the US Radio Act of 1912 sought to end the aerial confusion by licensing stations, fixing wavelengths, designating call letters and requiring clear station identification. The Act marked the end of the wireless imagination of thought-transference and the start of disciplined airborne signals. It laid the groundwork for the great normative division of labor in 20th-century communications: person-to-person talk on secure channels and broadcast dissemination on open ones, that is, telephony on wires and radio via wireless (a division long since crumbling). Subsequent radio regulation in the US would clarify two kinds of messages and channels: ‘broadcasting’ to all and ‘common carriers’ for single recipients (Peters, 1994: 124–9). Thus the state backed the idea that messages intended ‘for-anyone’ and ‘for-someone’ should be distinguished. Explicit by the time of the Communications Act of 1934 was the idea that the public sphere (media) should be criss-crossed by many voices; implicit was the idea that the private sphere (mind) should speak in a unified voice. (A diverse bourgeois public sphere called for a coherent bourgeois subject.) A plural public and a unitary self were for much of the 20th century the two official options for rational agents, the norms of sane communication. Deviations were pathologies: a single voice in media was totalitarian; many voices in mind meant madness. A monopolized public was the danger of fascism; a pluralized self was the danger of schizophrenia. In other words, broadcasting was for impersonal discourse, and telephony for personal. The dream of telepathy (as a kind of wireless telephony) crept to the cultural sidelines and gradually faded like the term ‘the ether’ for the airwaves. But it lived on in psychiatry. V At the same time that physicists and psychical researchers were dreaming up ways to send signals (and thoughts), psychiatric patients started to experience telepathy as a pathological symptom. Emil Kraepelin, born the same year as Freud (1856), was the great classifier of mental illness and was the first, in 1897, to identify schizophrenia. He called it dementia praecox (premature dementia). Eugen Bleuler gave the disease the name that stuck in 1908 and schizophrenia has since had a tumultuous definitional history, with disorders of thought and disorders of affect being the two main options. But schizophrenics have always described their troubles in terms of the sensory dislocations of electrical media. Kraepelin’s patients complained of ‘telepathy’ as well as ‘perception of voices in their own bodies’, and ‘magical, magnetic, electrical, physical, hypnotic forms of remote control [Fernwirkungen], which are sent Downloaded from http://mcs.sagepub.com at The University of Iowa Libraries on January 15, 2010
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through all sorts of machines, telephones, galvanic batteries, sympathetic relations by invisible enemies’ (Kraepelin, 1899: 173–4). By telepathy, Kraepelin’s patients seem to have meant the feeling of having thoughts implanted or removed from one’s mind as if by cerebral radiation. He and his patients faced the very same universe of brain-waves carried by electrical devices as the early radio physicists. Telepathy was the hope of the physicist and the dread of the mentally ill. Telepathy run amuck is the subject of one of the most famous of all case histories in psychoanalysis, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1988 [1903]) by Daniel Paul Schreber. As Hagen (2001) convincingly shows, Schreber’s fantasies owe much to wireless technology and the now outdated ether-physics, with its dreams of combined thought- and signal-transference. Schreber, the mother of all radioheads, feared that his gender-bending body was being penetrated and reshaped by rays and radiation sent as word-nerves from a gnostic deity. His bizarre fantasies were a distorting mirror of the world of early wireless, something that he, as a learned man (a judge and legislator) and reader of contemporary physics, was fully acquainted with. Schreber shows the nightmare of what complete mental transparency could be. These early patients complained, essentially, of a lack of a filter. Their mobile mental broadcasting units lacked tuners or off-switches. Ever since, the electrical media have given psychiatric patients much to work with. Determining the mixed cultural and biologic causes of mental illness is a vexed question (Hacking, 1999; Sass, 1992: 358–73), but there is clearly some kind of elective affinity between broadcasting and schizophrenia. The weak form of their link would be to say that the media provide the mentally ill with ripe metaphors for playing out their delusions. Certainly the mentally ill can offer great insight by taking media discourse and its promises seriously. They have the special gift, or curse, of defamiliarization. With voices vanishing into the void or echoing forever, thoughts and pictures being implanted in or extracted from heads, voices commenting on actions, and ‘influencing machines’ exercising remote control over bodies, psychotic delusions constitute a shadow history of electrical communication in the 20th century. An even stronger claim is that modern communications in some way constitute or make possible schizophrenia (see Kittler, 1993 [1984]). While bipolar disorders seem to be found throughout human history, the cluster of symptoms we call schizophrenia was not known before the 19th century. Madness, media and modernity have something deep to do with each other (Sass, 1992), and much work remains to be done. During the 1960s, broadcast metaphors became standard in the psychiatric diagnosis of schizophrenia, just as telepathic ones took off decades earlier. Here is one of the first definitions of ‘thought broadcasting’, a key ‘first-rank’ symptom of schizophrenia (Mellor, 1970: 17): The patient, during the process of thinking, has the experience that his thoughts are not contained within his own mind. The thoughts escape from the confines of the Downloaded from http://mcs.sagepub.com at The University of Iowa Libraries on January 15, 2010
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self into the external world, where they may be experienced by all around. There is usually a secondary delusional explanation for this phenomenon which may invoke the use of telepathy, television, etc.
(The mad often use reason vigorously to support their madness.) Various versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the bible of psychiatric categorization in the United States, list ‘thought broadcasting’ as a key indicator of schizophrenia, along with ‘thought insertion’, ‘comment or echo’, ‘passivity’ (i.e. remote control), etc. The list of first-rank symptoms is based on the work of the influential German psychiatrist Kurt Schneider, who helped to sharpen clinical definitions of schizophrenia by restricting it to severe psychosis. Writing at mid century, in an era noisy with sound technologies, his first-rank symptoms emphasized auditory hallucinations. ‘Thought broadcasting’ seems to have entered English-language psychiatry as a happy mistranslation of his term Gedankenausbreitung (diffusion of thoughts), which does not have the same media connotation in German. Since patients are not always precise and psychiatrists are not always interested in media metaphors, ‘thought broadcasting’ is not always consistently defined (Koehler, 1979). Usually it means that one’s thoughts are being sent abroad from a leaky brain like a broadcast transmission for all to hear. (A closely related first-rank symptom is that of ‘thoughts becoming audible’.) But it can also mean that actual radio and television stations serve as occult dispersers of one’s thoughts. As one patient reports (Anonymous, 1996): I believed I only had to think something and it would be transmitted over radio and television. For example, I remember being scared of getting into a ‘conversation and argument’ with radio commentator Barry Farber in New York when I disagreed with him; I felt as if my thoughts were being broadcast during the long pauses between his sentences.
This patient took the para-social invitation seriously or figured out how to pull off the Brechtian project of gaining access to the means of broadcasting. He acted as if he stood in communicative parity with media celebrities. Faces and voices, sounds and images flying invisibly through the air in an overlapping jumble of channels – modern electrical media have a ‘psychotic core’ (Hagen, 2001: 132). A 1990s case involved a ‘Mr Simpson’ who had the delusion that his apartment was ‘the center of a large communication system that involves all three major television networks’, staffed by multiple people and costing millions of dollars. His neighbors were actors, hidden cameras monitored his actions, and aerial machines intruded upon his thoughts. ‘When he is watching TV, many of his minor actions (e.g. going to the bathroom) are soon directly commented on by the announcer.’ His neighbors operated two machines. One inserted harassing voices into his head many times each day, suggesting what stocks to buy, for instance. The other was ‘a dream machine’ that put ‘erotic dreams into his head’ (DSM-IV-TR Casebook, 2002: 102). Downloaded from http://mcs.sagepub.com at The University of Iowa Libraries on January 15, 2010
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Mr Simpson’s persecution anxieties resemble mid 1990s broadcasting – with its ‘three networks’; large, expensive technology; stock market reports; and ‘adult content’ industry. But he inverts the funnel of broadcast discourse, acting as if he were its subject rather than object. The violation in his mind is that a public apparatus focuses on a single person, perversely switching its format from one-to-many to many-to-one. In short, Mr Simpson acted as if his first name were O.J. For the privilege of being the subject of mass attention – like a celebrity – he forfeited his claim to private life. The 1998 film, The Truman Show, also played on the delusion of celebrity grandeur, of living in a hellish media bubble. ‘Thought broadcasting’ is usually distinguished from another first-rank symptom called ‘delusions of reference’, the technical term for Colleen Nestler’s complaint, which involve reading broadcast messages as personally addressed: ‘the person believes that certain gestures, comments, passages from books, newspapers, song lyrics, or other environmental cues are specifically directed at him or her’ (DSM-IV, 1994: 275). Here what psychiatry treats too innocently as the ‘environment’ is the repertoire of modern media. Thought broadcasting is a disorder of transmission; delusions of reference are a disorder of reception. In one, the brain is felt to broadcast thoughts; in the other, broadcast programs are ripe with personal messages and meanings. Both have to do with boundary confusions in the context and addressing of messages. In thought broadcasting a for-someone (for-me) structure, consciousness, becomes for-anyone; in delusions of reference a for-anyone structure, the airwaves, becomes for-me without the mediating ‘as-structure’ that is so important for Scannell’s argument. One takes the private (thought) as public (broadcasting); the other takes the public (broadcasting) as private (thought).
VI Celebrities engage in institutionally sanctioned forms of excess: money, sex, drugs and styles of communication. Broadcast celebrities are ritually permitted to carry on schizophrenic discourse. (The mentally ill, Goffman argued, lack just this permission.) Celebrities are trained to monitor every single gesture they make as if it were rife with potential significance, to address sound and image machines in jumbled ‘takes’ that can be edited later, and to speak to absent strangers as if they were friends. If someone in my living room spoke like David Letterman does on the air I would think they were crazy. As we know from conversation analysis, everyday talk is exquisitely tailored to the intricacies of local situations. But media personae fail to engage contextual contingencies at a rate that would be considered psychotic if they did it in person. Letterman’s delivery is utterly blind to the ostensive circumstances of its reception. It is automatic, undeviating, unresponsive and auto-involved.
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Though brilliantly witty, he violates conversational maxims of relevance and sincerity at every turn. What Goffman (1959) called ‘alienation from interaction’ applies to the situation of broadcasting as well as face-to-face talk. If it can be disabling in everyday talk to consider the system of communication too closely, in media reception it is essential. Psychosis, in other words, is not limited to the receiving end of broadcasting. At the center of 20th-century culture sat machines, radio and television, that dispensed legitimized schizophrenic discourse. (In a different way telephone discourse also breaks conversation into two schizoid halves that meet only in an imaginary space; see Ronell, 1989.) Celebrities are, as Fred Turner suggests, ‘sane schizophrenics’, whose successful media performance allows – or requires – them to violate communicative norms. For Gregory Bateson (1958), schizophrenia was precisely the inability to separate the relational from the content level of communication. He developed this idea at the height of the broadcast era, though he never to my knowledge studied the ‘schismogenesis’ found in the asymmetrical couplings of broadcasting. Celebrities systematically confuse ‘content’ and ‘relational’ levels to an extreme degree. They invite us into as many impossible situations as anyone, but most of us know how to slip out of their double-binds.
VII Since its emergence in the late 19th century, the concept of communication has been shadowed by the specter of madness. In a sense madness is what Amit Pinchevski (2005: 170) calls the ‘corroborating contrary’ to communication, and if one had to point to recurrent scenes in modern culture of communication breakdown, schizophrenia would take first place. The psychotic’s private world of symbolic (non)sense has long been regarded as the epitome of blocked communication – the hell of private meaning, as opposed to the sanity that is in part defined by reference to a horizon of intersubjective commonality. The original meaning of ‘autism’ [Autismus] as defined by Bleuler was the barricade of incommunicable meaning conjured by the schizophrenic (Pinchevski, 2005). Just as telepathy presented a utopia of sharing, autism presented a dystopia in which sharing was impossible. The philosophers of the late 19th century called this latter condition solipsism, and the electrical engineers called it failure to reach ‘syntony’ (radio contact). It was the counterpart to telepathy. The dialectical pair of schizophrenia and autism has been in play ever since. Cross-cultural study shows one thing specific to our conception of madness: the notion of the private ownership of thoughts. A surprising number of diagnostic criteria and symptoms for schizophrenia hold across cultures. One study explores the translation of diagnostic concepts into Iban, a language spoken by an agricultural people in Malaysian Borneo. Symptoms such as
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auditory hallucinations readily transfer from European psychiatry into Iban oral poetry. Thought disorders, in contrast, are understood as speech disorders by the Iban: ‘there is no cultural model of other beings knowing your unspoken inner thoughts. There is a cultural model for disorders of the privacy of speech, not thought’ (Barrett, 2004: 97). The body in Iban culture can be invaded by foreign objects guided by magical spells, but not the mind by foreign thoughts since the Iban lack our ‘norm of mental privacy’. An interview between the ethnographer and a woman named Umang, who had suffered from psychotic episodes, takes a rather comic turn when he probes her about thought broadcasting: Me: Umang: Me: Umang: Me:
Do people at large know your thoughts, even when you don’t speak? … Yes, they know the thoughts that I have broadcast (put about). Ah, how do they know if you don’t talk? That’s because I have told them previously. Oh. You have told them previously. (Barrett, 2004: 97–9)
The inquiry grinds to a halt as the ethnographer realizes that disembodied thoughts apart from speech are not a relevant category. The tables are turned: the ethnographer asks about the crazy notion of spreading naked thought broadcasts, while Umang embodies good sense! In the classic ethnographic mandate, we cosmopolitan readers become strangers to ourselves and have to rethink what we mean by person, mind, thought and sanity. To imagine thought broadcasting as a pathology at all requires us to assume that thoughts are private property enclosed in heads that are opaque to other people. While there are clearly organic factors in mental illness, there is also clearly something quite insane in our culture’s supposition that communication should be personal mental sharing. Perhaps schizophrenics are not the ones who violate the ideal of communication as the sharing of thoughts; they are the ones who take it most seriously. They show us what it would be like to live in a delirious world without walls. Association with others would be the angelic bliss of instant transparency – and the cacophonous horror of having no place to hide. Delusions such as thought broadcasting are the hidden truth of the ideal of perfect communication. Liberated from all barriers, communication would be indistinguishable from madness. Everyone, instantly, could perceive our half-baked private thoughts and feelings. Telepathy would be bedlam. The mad do not violate norms of communication; they show us what it would mean to take seriously the project of transmitting our unique funds of mental meaning. They somehow didn’t learn to abandon the promise of a personally meaningful world. (In this madness is a distorted index of justice as well.) Mind-reading, longed for as a release from what Hocking called the ‘detention’ of thought, might well be a curse. Sanity may be the practice of interpreting communication dully – in knowing how to reject the claim that everything is significant. Schizophrenia’s hermeneutic is too hot. Its disorder is not that things are evacuated of meaning,
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but that there is too much of it. A ‘C’ on a baseball cap does not, alas, stand for ‘Colleen’ but for the Chicago Cubs. The delusional find it hard to leave media as common carriers of extrapersonal significance. They imagine they are celebrities, responsible for calculating the resonance of every little gesture. Everything buzzes with meaning. Nothing is random: everything is an event. The signs are all ‘for-me’. For the sane, in contrast, significant events are rare. The stoic assumption that no message, even face-to-face, is ever really for-me is a healthy ethical and interpretive principle indeed. How grateful we can then be for those rare marvelous moments of connection! Signs are inherently public. They are structures that carry something in common to more than one consciousness (even if it is the ‘same’ person later in time). In the realm of signs, there is no such thing as a unique for-someone structure. There may be dentures that only fit one person, but a sign that only fits one person would not be a sign. Of course there are signs that only a few can access, such as the obscure codes that lovers can develop and that fans may think they share with stars. But the privacy here is pragmatic rather than semantic, circumscribed usage rather than semiotic secrecy. The meaning is not private; the access is. Even if you call my name and whisper something known only to you and me, there is nothing in principle about the message that could not be received by others. The address may be exclusive, but the right to interpret meaning is open to whoever possesses the code. Meaning is not mental. VIII Madness, especially schizophrenia, was once at the center of the intellectual agenda. A wide range of mid-20th-century thinkers such as Gregory Bateson, Bruno Bettelheim, Gilles Deleuze, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Erich Fromm, Erving Goffman, Jürgen Habermas, Luce Irigaray, Jacques Lacan, Harold Lasswell, John Lilly, Margaret Mead, Joost Meerloo, Jurgen Ruesch, Harry Stack Sullivan and Paul Watzlawick followed Sigmund Freud and Karl Jaspers in seeing psychopathology as the key to understanding modernity – and communication. The anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s and the general replacement of the talking cure with psychopharmacological treatment in the past couple of decades have shifted intellectual fascination largely away from schizophrenia. So perhaps have changing practices of communication. The impossibility of communication, a theme central to 20th-century philosophy, literature, drama, sociology and experience, seems to be losing its pathos. This theme, like that of schizophrenia, found in broadcasting its natural habitat. As analog media retreat from our lives, the ghosts have fewer homes to dwell in. As we network ourselves in searchable social utilities and carry around contact devices on our persons, the fear of losing touch with others forever seems to
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be withering away. (Except for death, which no one has yet learned how to cheat.) Media programming and advertising are increasingly personalized. The divide between interpersonal and mediated communication is blurring. No longer is speaking into the air considered appropriate for broadcasting but tragic (or comic) for interpersonal relationships. People now ‘broadcast themselves’ on YouTube and accumulate ‘friends’ in social networking sites. They walk around in public, talking animatedly to an invisible partner and nobody thinks they are crazy. Anyone with a music player can simulate the radiohead experience of having voices and sounds emanating from the center of their skull. The new regime seems messier and more pragmatic; less delusional but more socially stunted. Who needs telepathy when you have texting? Or thought broadcasting when you have Twitter? Perhaps it is a good thing that we are starting to bid farewell to ideas of communication that make telepathy and solipsism the options for human contact, and stigmatize or glamorize those whose thoughts and feelings do not obey the rules. Telepathy haunted the dawn of broadcasting, and ‘thought broadcasting’ and similar delusions haunted its high noon. In the twilight of broadcasting, when peer-to-peer and one-to-many practices are no longer neatly divided between wired and wireless infrastructures, Minerva’s owl is carrying off a concept of communication that has not, in the end, been very helpful for dealing with the real madness of the world – injustice, inequality and violence – though that concept once did its best to establish a public space in which we could discuss these perennials. What was once mad or uncanny is now routine: hearing disembodied voices and speaking to nobody in particular. The old norm of unitary self and plural democracy – personal telephony and impersonal broadcasting – might have it precisely backwards. Sanity in the self might mean precisely the ability to entertain multiple voices, just as a healthy democracy might mean the ability to settle on a single outcome (such as a legitimate election). The task is to pluralize the one and unify the many. A final speculation in the twilight of broadcasting: in a world in which peer-to-peer communications occur via mediated devices as freely as they do via the flesh, we are facing new disorders of address. Our fate is less the confusion of the broadcast and the personal than the blurring of the sociable and the technical. In a digital age, large segments of our species carry out much of their social lives by machine. Interactive, portable, keyboarded devices are nudging out audiovisual genres as dominant modes of everyday communication. Schizophrenia’s vocal-aural delusions fit with the radio, television, and telephone, media that were saturated with nonverbal codes and simulated sociability. Digital media, in contrast, favor data-processing and logistical convenience over the staging of face-to-face interaction. The ‘it’ disease for new media, with their low-affect machine interfaces, appears to be autism. But that is another story.
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Acknowlegements For commentary and criticism I would like to thank Jonah Bossewitch, Paul Frosh, Rubén Gallo, Gina Giotta, Andriy Ischenko, Jin Kim, Ladi Kukoyi, Ben Peters, Amit Pinchevski, Paddy Scannell, Bernhard Siegert, and Fred Turner, and audiences at Iowa, Princeton, UC Santa Barbara, USC, and Columbia for comments on earlier versions. No one else is responsible for my opinions. This essay is for Paddy Scannell.
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John Durham Peters is F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. His research interest is the philosophy and history of media. He is the author of Speaking into the Air (1999) and Courting the Abyss (2005). Address: University of Iowa, Department of Communication Studies, 105 BCSB Iowa City Iowa 52240, United States[email:
[email protected]]
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