Brox Sisters Listening In. Courtesy: Library of Congress Online Prints & Photographs.

Post by Shawn VanCour, New York University

This is the twelfth post in our “Honoring Hilmes” series, celebrating the career and legacy of Michele Hilmes on the occasion of her retirement. 

This series has offered much well-deserved praise for Michele Hilmes as a scholar, professor, mentor, and colleague, detailing her profound impact on her department, students, and field. I heartily concur with these sentiments but for the present post shift from a concern with “Hilmes” the person to what we might call the “Hilmesian” – by which I mean a certain set of observable tendencies in historiographical technique. I use the word “technique” here in the sense of a regularized set of formal devices deployed toward consistent ends within and across a body of work. What are the defining techniques of Hilmesian historiography, and to what end do those work?

In an effort to open this line of inquiry, I will focus on the technique of the “historical closeup.” For sake of space, my examples are limited mainly to the pages of Radio Voices, although the technique is by no means limited to this work (nor to the work of Hilmes alone). The questions I ask here are twofold: 1) how does the historical closeup work in Hilmesian historiography, and 2) what does it do?

Well-worn cover of Radio Voices. Courtesy: Kathleen Battles.

1. Ghost Stories (History as Spectrology)

One of the most telling passages of Radio Voices comes at the end:

Historians must continue to investigate the boundaries between what is known and what has been excluded from knowledge, what is heard speaking loudly in our largest public forums and what remains pushed to the sidelines, silenced or muffled in our historical accounts – and must continue to analyze the purposes and effects of such selections [. . . .] History is always ideological . . . . written by historians whose training, purposes, and basic assumptions and selections intertwine with present-day needs and preoccupations, and it finds a readership based on similar affinities (RV 288).

We are to listen, then, to the margins of history, to the voices silenced in existing accounts. Elsewhere in Radio Voices, this is cast as a strategy of Foucaultian reversal, or looking past the “smooth face of consensus” in the dominant discourse to recognize “the ruptured and seamed lines of tension and resistance that consensus seeks to conceal” (RV xvii). Equally important, we are asked to question the ideological underpinnings of our own, revisionist historiography: under what conditions may alternative histories be written, what forms may they take, and what modes of solidarity can they foster?

Radio Ghost. Painting by RovinaCai (2014).

While written under the sign of Foucault, there also lies within Hilmesian historiography a trace of a Derridean spectrology – an asking after what haunts our speech and clings to it as its very condition of possibility. What we are listening for here is not the voices of those who speak from a space “outside” the dominant discourse, but instead those who exist as absent presences within it, whose “silencing” or “muffling”  is the condition for the dominant speech to itself be heard clearly. We listen for the murmurs of ghosts.

The goal here is not simply to restore these spectral voices to a past from which history has erased them, but rather to help their speech find a place within the dominant discourse of the present, creating conditions in which they may both speak and be heard. In Derridean terms, “[the scholar] should learn to live by learning . . . how to talk with [the ghosts], how to let them speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself . . . in the other in oneself: they are always there, specters . . . even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet” (Specters 221). This closing element of futurority (the “not yet”) is critical: the ghosts of history cannot, by nature, fully arrive within the present – they murmur, indistinctly, and it is the task of the historian to help find a place for their stories.

2. Dirty Optics (The Historical Closeup)

What, then, is the historical closeup, and how can it help us bring the ghosts of history into full presence? Here we may turn to Siegfried Kracauer’s book, History: The Last Things Before the Last, which he frames for his reader as the continuation of a line of inquiry first opened in his earlier book on film theory:

Recently I suddenly discovered that my interest in history . . . actually grew out of the ideas I tried to implement in my Theory of Film . . . . I realized in a flash the many existing parallels between history and the photographic media, historical reality and camera-reality (History 3-4).

First among these parallels was a tension between what Kracauer described as the “realistic” and “formative” tendencies, or competing needs to both respect and rework the reality documented by the camera or historian. However, as he was quick to note in his film book, “Objectivity in the sense of the realist manifesto is unattainable” (Film 15). The rendered reality was instead always inescapably shaped to some degree by the photographer-historian’s own subjectivity and larger concerns of his or her time. There is no possibility of a pure optics in Kracauer; there is no innocent or uncontaminated historical gaze.

New perspectives: Galileo’s telescope. Detail from painting by H. J. Detouche (1754).

The second major tension negotiated by both the filmmaker and historian, for Kracauer, is that both “must . . . move between the macro and micro dimensions” (History 122). In his film book he had pointed toward “Griffith’s admirable non-solution” of alternating between long shots, which offered subjects and actions in context, and closeups, “which do not just serve to further the action or convey relevant moods but retain a degree of independence” (129). For historians, the closeup retained this same power to deform the larger totality of which it was a part:

As I see it . . . [we should] concentrate on close-ups and from them casually . . . range over the whole, assessing it in the form of aperçus. The whole may yield to such light-weight skirmishes more easily than to heavy frontal attack (History 134-35).

The goal here is political, challenging received histories to gain critical insights on the present. This aim is achieved not just at the level of content, but also of form, exploiting the disruptive power of the historical closeup.

3. The Hilmesian Closeup

Who or what forms the subject of these closeups in Radio Voices? They are multiple, including particular programs (from Amos n Andy to Real Folks and An Open Letter on Race Hatred), performers (from Samuel Rothafel to Wendell Hall and Jack Benny), writers and producers (notably, below, Irna Phillips, Anne Hummert, Jane Crusinberry), and advertising agencies (J. Walter Thompson). In some cases, these are familiar figures whose examination in closeup serves to denaturalize the dominant narratives in which they have been traditionally inscribed, letting them begin to speak otherwise. In other cases, they are spectral presences, the muffled voices of those whom history has erased, invited back into the picture to say their piece.

1930s Magazine ad: Super Suds brings you NBC’s Clara, Lu & Em.

As an example of the Hilmesian closeup in action, we may look to Chapter 6 of Radio Voices, titled “Under Cover of Daytime.” As with most chapters in this book, we open in long shot: whereas the early 1930s saw shows like The Goldbergs, Myrt and Marge, and Clara, Lu and Em running alongside more general-interest programming in the evening, as network radio expanded, women’s programming assumed a more “subordinate position” in daytime hours and was widely disparaged by critics for its sensationalism and crude commercialism (RV 151). From here we move into an even wider shot, as Hilmes discusses early twentieth century consumer culture’s production of what advertising historian Roland Marchand calls the “feminine mass,” seen as over-emotional, easily manipulated, and lacking in taste. At this point, an initial thesis is advanced: the relegation of more “feminized” and overtly commercial programming to daytime hours served a double containment strategy of 1) controlling women’s voices and 2) reconciling network broadcasting’s competing mandates for private profit and public service (152-3).

L-R: Irna Phillips, Anne Hummert, Jane Crusinberry.

Three successive closeups of soap producers Irna Phillips, Anne Hummert, and Jane Crusinberry complicate this picture and work in dialectical tension with the opening long shots, showing how the daytime containment strategy at the same time created a space in which women and women’s issues could achieve greater public visibility and cultivate the solidarity needed for the formation of an effective “counterpublic” (RV 159). A closing return to long shot moves back to the previously posited daytime/nighttime division, the intermediary passage through a series of closeups having now challenged what at first appeared to be a strategy of subordination. What lies “Under Cover of Daytime” is not just the persistent commercialism that formed the seedy underbelly of network radio’s surface-level public service commitments, but also the creation of a protected public space in which women could build solidarity and begin to mount challenges to a dominant discourse that had traditionally excluded them. The voices of radio were not just those of male-dominated evening dramas and comedy/variety shows, but also those of daytime women’s programming, which are no longer forgotten or dismissed but now recognized for the serious cultural work they performed.

Nearly every chapter in Radio Voices follows this structure: a “big picture” presented in long shot with larger cultural contextualization leads to the formation of an initial thesis that is then strategically unsettled or modified through the technique of the closeup. The closeup becomes a means to resist or challenge the master narratives and sweeping views to which cultural history might otherwise be prone, a means of politicizing the telling of history at the level of form. It is a technique, I would suggest, that we also find deployed across other works by Hilmes, as something properly Hilmesian, though importantly, not the exclusive property of Hilmes. The historical closeup remains a vital tool for a critical cultural historiography that aims to restore the voices of those silenced in the past and create a space within the present in which they can be heard. Its Hilmesian deployment offers a valuable lesson in how to rewrite history, change the dominant discourse, and begin to make room for our dead.

Bascom Hill at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Photo: Jeff Miller ©UW-Madison University Communications

Post by Michael Curtin, University of California Santa Barbara

This is the eighth post in our “Honoring Hilmes” series, celebrating the career and legacy of Michele Hilmes on the occasion of her retirement. 

Jonathan Gray’s post about mentorship and collegiality eloquently captures the collective sentiment of this online festschrift in honor of Michele Hilmes. Having worked closely with her as a faculty colleague, I can vouch for Jonathan’s account of her sterling leadership and professionalism. I want to comment briefly on the latter before offering some observations about Michele’s intellectual contributions to our field.

University professors can be pretty self-absorbed and, in a way, they have to be in order to run the gauntlet of tenure review and endure the stark loneliness of academic authorship. You have to believe deeply in yourself and your intellectual vision in order to simply persist as a scholarly researcher. The danger is that one can spend a bit too much time alone and attach a bit too much significance to one’s own vision. In the collective life of a department this becomes most evident when faculty members and graduate students begin to personalize the differences that inevitably arise in the course of departmental affairs. What’s truly remarkable about Michele is that she knows how to get the work done without personalizing the differences. Instead, she’s focused, clear-headed, articulate, and even-handed. Consequently, she can pull folks together and get things done under even the most challenging circumstances. Moreover, she does it in a confident but unassuming way that simply exudes professionalism. So, “best colleague ever?” Yes, without a doubt, and I might add, a role model for the profession.

Equally inspiring is the fact that Michele’s investment in the general welfare of the department hasn’t detracted from her scholarly accomplishments. She has, for example, published truly pathbreaking historical monographs over the course of her career. Hollywood and Broadcasting was one of the first media histories to direct our attention to the synergies between radio and cinema during the 1930s. Previous research had generally considered these media separately (indeed entire departments and programs were built around the differences), overlooking the important interconnections that shaped the evolution of American popular culture. Moreover, the book anticipated the groundswell of interest that arose regarding media “synergies” during the conglomeration wave of the 1990s. Hollywood and Broadcasting became a touchstone for many conversations on this important topic.

Michele’s second book, Radio Voices, was the first critical and cultural history of radio broadcasting in America, comprehensively addressing issues that had previously been under-appreciated, such as class, ethnicity, gender, geography, and national identity. She extended this scholarship into the television and new media eras with her landmark textbook, Only Connect, which is without a doubt the best cultural history of US electronic media that is currently available for classroom use. During my days as a graduate student, Erik Barnouw’s Tube of Plenty was the standard point of reference for media historians and instructors, a status it enjoyed for decades because it was both comprehensive and comprehensible. As any book publisher will tell you, there’s something to be said for understated eloquence. Barnouw and Hilmes: that’s pretty heady company.

Michele’s most recent monograph, Network Nations, was the first history to carefully compare the development of British and American radio broadcasting, exploring the many tensions and interconnections between the two. As is well known, the British public service and the American commercial systems became the two most influential templates for the development of electronic media around the world. Network Nations shows that although the two took decidedly separate paths, they were self-consciously constituted through their respective differences. That is, British media evolved partially in response to national conditions and partially in response to its imagined other, the commercial cacophony of the American airwaves. Likewise, the US networks strove to distinguish themselves from the elite and measured qualities of British radio while claiming to serve the desires of the listeners first. As Hilmes explains, the ongoing dialogue between executives, creative talent, and policy makers played a foundational role in the constitution of electronic media on both sides of the Atlantic and it resonated further afield, establishing the fundamental parameters of media polices  forged in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and other parts of Europe. Network Nations has become an invaluable resource for research and teaching about media globalization.

So, think about it for a moment: three monographs (each a landmark), many anthologies, departmental leadership, superb teaching and mentorship, and as my festschrift collaborators have so eloquently affirmed, a profound influence on the development of radio and sound studies. Not bad. Days well spent… and many more to come. Congratulations and thank you, Michele.

Post by Jennifer Hyland Wang, Independent Scholar

This is the seventh post in our “Honoring Hilmes” series, celebrating the career and legacy of Michele Hilmes on the occasion of her retirement. 

At the beginning of Radio Voices (1997), Michele Hilmes defended her study of radio to a field which had ignored it; studies of the programming, practices, and cultural traditions of radio, had “become the ‘repressed’ of television studies, occupying a position similar to that of the silent film era in film studies twenty years ago” (xv). To understand television’s role in American life, she argued, scholars must study radio. In her groundbreaking work, Hilmes brought American radio to life, revised contemporary media scholarship, and resurrected radio studies as a viable and valuable academic enterprise. For me, though, that was not her most significant contribution to broadcast history. In this field-defining text, she devoted chapters to daytime radio and the many women who operated in and around broadcasting. If studying radio is the repressed of television studies, then surely studying daytime radio – denigrated by contemporaries and snubbed by most academics – is to study the repressed of the repressed. Before Michele Hilmes, precious few scholars looked at radio, much less at how gender shaped American broadcasting. Few took seriously the sound of women’s voices wafting through the daytime ether. Except for Michele Hilmes. This, in my mind, was a more radical act, cementing her place in feminist media history.

Mary Margaret McBride, aka “Martha Deane.”

Hilmes re-centered the role gender played in broadcasting history and challenged her peers to try to make sense of broadcasting without it. In her books and published articles on the radio, television, and film industries, Hilmes listened to the whispers of the women who shaped American media and the spaces, places, and times when those voices were silenced. Whether writing about female DXers, soap opera writers, or daytime audiences, Hilmes pointed academics to a gaping hole in our understanding of how American broadcasting functioned. She told the story of how radio broadcasting used gendered identities to inform basic industrial practices and define the relationship between advertisers, audiences, and broadcasters. Hilmes delineated the profound and dynamic ways in which gender shaped broadcasting history and how gendered hierarchies were embedded in broadcasting’s DNA. Not only was American broadcasting shaped by gender, she argued, radio produced gendered representations and discourses that sometimes replicated, sometimes challenged, and often confounded those terms. No one had spoken with such clarity and insight on the critical role of gender in the origin of American broadcasting or on the continued relevance of gender in understanding the media’s operations.

Yet, Michele Hilmes’ work collecting, mentoring, and cultivating female scholars is as profound a contribution to the field of media studies as her own innovative scholarship. To explain, I need to tell a story. I was one of Michele’s many advisees in graduate school. I fell in love with radio and history in her classes, even as I yearned for a family. The difficulties I faced merging motherhood and academia were present from the very start of my academic training. I wrote my dissertation under Michele’s steady guidance as I raised two young children. I birthed my third baby the same morning I was scheduled to defend my dissertation. One week post-partum, bloated and sleep-deprived, I nursed my baby, walked into a room and defended my dissertation, and came out in time to nurse my young son again. At that moment, the messy, tangled terrain on which many female academics live their lives – the chaotic juxtaposition of breast feeding and intellectual inquiry, the labor that gives forth a new life and the labor that completes a long fought-for Ph.D., of sleep deprivation so severe that answers to basic questions eluded me at my defense at the moment that I was expected to stand toe-to-toe with my academic betters – was never more absurd, more lived, or more real.

I have no unusual strength, no special superpower that allowed me to finish my degree while knee-deep in diapers, snot, and sippy cups. Completing graduate school was a much longer process than I, and certainly Michele, had ever imagined. What I did have was an advisor who had been there, someone who had balanced motherhood and academia, and had not just survived, but thrived. She had walked the walk, raising a delightful child while negotiating the demands of a dual career family. She was a proud mother and a productive and pioneering scholar. She showed me, and many others, that a balance – albeit tenuous, dynamic, and fraught – between family and career was possible, if it was negotiated on your own terms. She never judged our choices – to stay home with young children or to seek a tenure-track position, to pursue a traditional career in academia or one outside the ivory tower. Her feminism was pragmatic. She would ask about our personal dreams and professional aspirations and then helped us each fashion an academic career that resembled no one else’s. There was not one path, not one way to be an academic, and not one way to be a mother. No matter my choices, Michele Hilmes remained a steadfast presence in my life, encouraging me to marry my ambition as an academic with my duties as a mother in whatever convoluted way I could. It wasn’t a question of whether I, or any other female academic, could have it all. It was a question, she believed, of how much we could have on our plates at any given time, a process that was negotiated and renegotiated in increments, sometimes minute by minute, hour by hour, and day by day.

In a recent podcast to celebrate Michele’s retirement, I listened to the many women who have graduated from UW-Madison’s Media and Cultural Studies program under Michele’s watch, or who had found encouragement from Michele in their early research, who wanted to speak about Michele’s profound influence on their academic life. Michele guided women like Cynthia Meyers, Lisa Parks, Elana Levine, Allison McCracken, Clare Bratten, Eleanor Patterson, Kit Hughes, Norma Coates, Megan Sapnar Ankerson, and Aniko Bodroghkozy and myself, among many others, through graduate school, dissertations, and workplaces.  In her academic work, Michele Hilmes unearthed the voices of historical women who experimented with broadcasting in the medium’s earliest days and broadcast them for all to hear.  Through her tenure at UW, she encouraged dozens of women to find their own voices in and around academia, multiplying the women trained to recognize the profound influence of gender in the formation and operation of broadcasting. It is this marriage – her media scholarship and her mentorship of female graduate students – that is a lasting and profound contribution to the field.

Post by Josh Shepperd, The Catholic University of America

This post continues Josh Shepperd’s “On (the) Wisconsin Discourses” series from last year. This is Part 1 of 2 in a pair of posts commemorating Michele Hilmes.

Discourses as Political Will

Previous posts in this series have discussed how the “Wisconsin” tradition of media research has been informed by the Birmingham School approach to the problem of “discourse”. In short, “discourse” is a term that serves as a shorthand concept to refer to how embodiments are bound by stable yet flexible identity affiliations that respond to and intervene among social contradictions. The question of “political will” in discursive theory is defined as temporal hegemonic precedents that social ensembles interpret as they circulate representational codes among a “public”. This concept of discourse, which can be roughly approximated as a logic of how superstructural strictures influence social encounters, is usually applied through analysis of “determinants”, the “limits and pressures” faced by cultural blocs during social selectivity. “Selection” is not theorized as an opportune, consumptive, bootstrapping, or commercially based practice, but as adjustments emergent groups make in spite of limited opportunities for identity recognition or class mobility during social engagement. Discursive interactions are further guided by reference to internal histories communicable to other discursive blocs.

As Nancy Fraser, Michael Warner, Sara Ahmed, Julie D’Acci, and others have noted, publics carry inherent structural limits for group recognition. Part of the ongoing influence of the Birmingham theory of “discourse”, however, is that it accounts for macro forms of participation without prescribing a mandated mode for public engagement. Discursive theorists instead propose that a public is comprised of diachronically shifting perspectives, oriented toward social reciprocation while advocating for maximal visibility for their positions. Discursive power waxes and wanes, sometimes unpredictably, and even if a bloc has developed a “successful” representational code, this does not guarantee that a specific group will become politically “dominant”. Instead, a group’s communicative codes take on hybrid and homologous meanings and consequent applications in everyday life. Literacy of these codes provides insight into past discursive constructs and might help to anticipate strategies for future advocacy.

Discourse or “Discourse About”?

A crucial distinction often missed by contemporary media and cultural studies research is that distribution apparatuses are not continuing with discursive work merely because they are able to increase visibility by saturating perspective; businesses surely do this, as do consumer responses. The relationship between “mere” circulation and dialectical progress is specious at best. Two variables must be qualified so that discursive analysis might make viable ethical claims. The first variable asks: is a discursive construct a sustainable marker for identity formation, beyond a specific phenomenon studied? This question requires a fine distinction between the concept “discourse” and analysis of the discourse about a specific subject or pattern of behavior. The second variable addresses the contours of reciprocation. Does a “discourse” have the capacity to respond to larger social expediencies through an internally coherent logic, or is it a specific reactionary response to a proffered pleasure?

This second point is especially crucial for cultural work if one believes the Birmingham School maxim that discourses are characterized by their struggle for equitable recognition. Here it’s worth pointing out that distinctions should be made regarding what type of recognition is at stake. Consumer activism, for example, might achieve small gains by influencing representational depiction, but it’s not clear if working within the (very limited) constraints of an industrial interface permits advocating against larger conditions of structural reproduction. Paul Willis notes that many dimensions of resistance implicitly articulate solutions to social contradictions, but without clarifying what solution might be anticipated, actants fall into a simultaneous performance of resistance and dominant ideological reproduction. One’s consumer preferences might take on the simulation of a “discourse”, for example, but consumptive practice does not predicate discursive sustainability, ameliorate social parity, or provide grounds for dissension. Thus according to Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall, and John Fiske, an innate degree of “drift” media literacy is necessary, so that discursive interventions might calculate public impact beyond colonization of the local by standardized culture.

Discursive Analysis of Residual History

This points to the primacy of the work of Michele Hilmes, the subject of the final piece in this series. Besides serving as a mentor and steward of the Wisconsin tradition since the 1990s, Hilmes has engendered a new tradition by clarifying one of the most difficult problems in discursive analysis – how might we trace ideological reproduction in practice itself, beyond critiquing representations after they’ve already been circulated? The Hilmesian approach might be described as an attempt to identify the causative basis of what we regularly call “residual” messages by looking to genealogies of discursive struggles. By introducing a rigorous historiographical model, Hilmes has founded a tradition concerned with the fundamental cultural studies question of how dialectical relationships between processes might be identified through institutional histories, e.g., “radio and film”, “production and reception”, “U.S. and Britain/transnational institutional approaches”. And she has continued with the Birmingham School project of identifying, examining, and contributing to the “media literacy” of varied “publics” besides the Habermasian political, including (and especially) the reflexive “popular”. She has expanded our evidentiary knowledge of how these varied publics – such as the imagined, discursive, and transnational – have reciprocated with the political.

As Wisconsin network historian Douglas Gomery has eminently argued, economies of scale define the organization of media industries as self-sustaining but holistic structures toward distributive and affective outcomes. Hilmes added an additional historiographical mandate: that scholarship look at the ways that institutions are founded and evolve in relation to each other, deliberately choosing structures of organization novel from other institutions. This method begs a fundamental question: to what do discursive blocs aspire, and how might we assess such aspirations without speculation or by uttering ideologically reproductive claims? Part of the answer, according to a Hilmesian historiography, can be found in understanding how institutions functionalize discursive interests.

In a few weeks, Part 2 of this post will look at the historical dialectics of discursive institutional analysis, as developed by Michele Hilmes.