"Strange collisions": keywords toward an intermedial periodical studies.

Cohen, Debra Rae

In her recent unified field theory of form, Caroline Levine argues for the plural and seemingly contradictory "affordances" of form--broadly construed--as a methodological key for analyzing the interaction between the divergent scales of language and politics (6). While this work has deeply suggestive implications for all categories of literary study (Levine draws on texts from Jane Eyre to Antigone to The Wire), it seems particularly relevant, given her concern with rhythm and temporality, to the field of modern periodical studies. Levine is interested in the "strange collisions" (39) that multiple organizing principles, situated and persistent, bring about: "Forms will often fail to impose their order when they run up against other forms that disrupt their logic and frustrate their organizing ends, producing aleatory and sometimes contradictory effects" (7).

Levine's formulation here has particular resonance for those of us who study the place of the periodical within the broader media field. Recognizing the periodical as representing one medium among many, and indeed the mutual imbrication of the senses in its consumption, or that of any other media product, opens out the analysis of its form to recognize the kinds of effects that Levine describes. Indeed, Julian Murphet has already argued that modernist literary production should be read as a "sedimented trace-history of the competing media institutions of the moment" (3), in some ways anticipating Levine's argument about the ways in which institutional rhythms, themselves formal, act on the level of texts (61).

Such formal "collision," however, is only just beginning to be parsed within periodical studies, and scholarly recognition of its operations has in large part been spurred by, and thus methodologically shaped by, the specific challenges of the digital moment. The question of how periodicals might best be "translated" to the digital realm is a formulation that perhaps inevitably stresses preservation and the idea of an authentic and discrete original; in other words, it elides previous "strange collision" in order to stress a single vector of translation. Scholars of new media, on the other hand, have recognized the movement across platforms, or remediation, as perhaps the key feature of the contemporary media ecology; in what Henry Jenkins calls "convergence culture," contemporary narratives are routinely conceived as from the outset migratory or transmedial. How might periodical scholarship--and in particular periodical scholarship that emerges from literary study--move to recognize similar operations in past media ecologies, and develop a formal vocabulary to address these concerns? (1) I offer here as a starting point reflections, with application to a test case, on three keywords that have already proven to be fertile sites of speculation: ergodic, used to denote text that requires non-trivial reader decision-making; flow, applied to the practices of media continuity; and sociability, or the creation of media occasion. Each of these offers a mechanism for the engagement of the media consumer and thus a link between social and textual forms that can yield insight into transmedial exchange.

Test case: the Listener

The Listener, the weekly journal founded by the BBC in 1929, represents a particularly useful site for yielding insights into both the competing media (and media institutions) of its historical moment and the formal traces of that competition. Because the journal, launched to legitimize, promote, and reproduce radio content in the form of an upmarket weekly like the Spectator, (2) both thematizes and enacts the "strange collision" of media forms, it can serve as a revealing limit case for the kinds of interactions that are less overt in other periodicals. In my own previous archivally-based work on the Listener, I have been able to establish the journal's peculiar status between media by tracing through the internal memoranda surrounding its founding the ongoing arguments regarding its mandate and positioning, and the self-contradictions these engendered in its editorial self-presentation. While the Listener's self-contradictory claims as to its mission and status can be explicated in terms of the BBC's institutional politics, its struggles with the press, and its need to interpret liberally its own mandate--solely in relation to social forms--my concern in this piece is with the implications of how those tensions were played out in terms of textual form, the way in which the differing media protocols that met in and on the journal's pages imparted conflicting meanings to particular models of information exchange. (3) My suggestion is that the journal's relations with radio inflected, complicated, and altered many of the aspects of the "dynamic of seriality" James Mussell describes as at work in the periodical ("Of the Making" 72). (4) More importantly, I want to claim that these overt symptoms of transmedial exchange have significance beyond the special case of the Listener itself, that they point to the need to ground our scholarship on modern periodicals more decisively within their transactional media ecology, working to better understand the forms and protocols of readership, listenership, spectatorship, and how those practices, historically, mutually inflect each other.

In my discussion here, I am characterizing the Listener only in the first ten years of its run, 1929 to 1939, since wartime brought about not only specific industry-wide pressures on publication (shortages, censorship, altered readership demographics, changes in the content and address of advertising, conscription of key personnel) but also a reconfiguration of the BBC that necessarily altered the journal's relations with it. (5) In these first ten years, the journal was tied most clearly to the terms and constraints of the BBC's own mission as interpreted by Director-General John Reith: an Arnoldian mission of citizen uplift, constructed around an aspirational monoculture. These first ten years, too, were those in which the Listeners mission of legitimizing radio was most urgent, the last years during which one could think of radio as in any way a new medium, one that required explaining, excusing, or promoting.

Created in part to address these needs, the Listener was formally shaped by the contested circumstances of its birth. As a product, the Listener was the anomalous, and at least potentially profitable, offshoot of a public utility, the BBC, incorporated in 1926; the projected launch of the paper prompted a furious response from existing press interests, which accused the BBC of overreaching its mandate and engaging in unfair competition for advertising revenue--an eruption that the lowbrow and far more profitable Radio Times, founded before incorporation, in 1923, had not occasioned. Opposition came not only from the always skeptical daily press but also from those journals, such as the New Statesman, which saw the Listener as a particular threat--those intellectual and literary weeklies that were acknowledged in BBC internal memoranda as among its models. This conflict with and within the press resulted in a joint memorandum of agreement that Director-General John Reith later characterized as involving limitations "which, while easing their qualms, would be of no significance to the BBC" (129): the corporation agreed to run only as many advertisements for the Listener as strictly "necessary" (6) and to limit the journal to no more than 10 percent original contributed matter not related to broadcasting. Reith's self-satisfaction after the negotiations was justified, as the final agreement set aside an early, panicked offer by the BBC to limit the Listener to no more than 10 percent original content tout court.

The flexibility in the agreed-upon version of the 10 percent rule positioned the new journal unstably between the roles of independent editorial entity and broadcasting adjunct; the complexities of this agreement--including how it was interpreted by various interest groups within the BBC itself--produced, as I have contended elsewhere (571), a number of overlapping logics of remediation. The journal's opening editorial claims, disingenuously, that the Listener was founded to serve the "primary function" of satisfying "the constant demands made for the text of broadcast talks after delivery" ("A 'New Venture' " 14). In this formulation, the Listener serves as archive, a means of preserving what could not yet otherwise be preserved, as a permanent record of the impermanent. Even this seemingly simple function is doubly inflected, however: the postbroadcast archive is both belated supplement (ancillary) and permanent substitute (primary). Yet the editorial selectivity of the journal, and the inability of print to capture the full range of radiogenic programing, necessarily made that archive incomplete; thus its relation to the bbc could also be described as curatorial, as not archive but museum. Over and above its professed editorial intention, the journal functioned to tout the medium of radio while containing both ontological and institutional tensions connected with it (thus both demystifying and remystifying the new medium). More importantly, it schooled, guided, and disciplined listeners, acting to produce a kind of BBC-sponsored sonic citizenship. It thus partook of aspects of the promotional pamphlet, the guidebook, and the manual, presenting itself as both freestanding periodical and ancillary supplement. Thus while one can claim, and many have, that all early twentieth-century periodicals in fact present a degree of instability and generic inbetweenness, (7) the Listener goes further, offering competing cues deriving from the postures of listener and reader and mediating the positioning of each.

Keyword: ergodic

In order to trace the implications of this complex address for the broader field of intermedial periodical studies, I turn first to the term ergodic, a term Espen Aarseth in his 1997 Cybertext appropriated from physics to describe nonlinear texts such as games or hypertext novels that require decision-making and "nontrivial effort" (1) for the reader to traverse. Sean Latham deploys the term suggestively and idiosyncratically in his influential article "Unpacking My Digital Library," where he identifies it as the nonlinear quality of periodicals, bound up with their materiality, that allows for (or, indeed, necessitates) an individualized readerly experience: "despite masquerading in a codex form, magazines are not books" (3). For Latham, more than for Aarseth, there is an almost utopian cast to the ergodic as exemplified in the periodical; thus he presents it not only as exemplifying the challenges of the process of digitization (how does one recapture the myriad pathways open to the original readers?) but also as a "striking anticipation" of digital possibility (32).

Like James Mussell, Latham is optimistic about the possibilities of the digitized periodical future, but on somewhat different terms. Rather than acceding to inevitable but equally valuable difference, distinguishing, as Mussell does, between existing interfaces that allow for digital functions and the product one accesses by means of those interfaces with which one performs nondigital functions, Latham finds in the periodical qualities of the always already "digital" And thus he looks confidently to a time when the digital will somehow incorporate the possibility of the ergodic relation to the reader--a relationship that will somehow reproduce that of the original periodical. In this way, although I don't think he means to be, he is something of an originist, aiming for a remediation that will be transparent enough to reproduce the ergodic. What is fascinating about the potentiality of this argument is the possible viability of the concept of the ergodic for the Listener and for listenership--whether or not what Latham sees as an inevitable quality of the periodical somehow acts in a kind of reciprocal manner, potentially, on the listenership that is implicit in the periodical's readership, the listenership that the act of reading the Listener is meant to cultivate.

The idea of the periodical as an ergodic text or, as Latham goes on to describe it, a codex-imitative meaning-generating machine that "create[s] paper-based programs capable of generating multiple scriptons" (14), (8) is an attractive one, partly because it allows us to draw reassuring comparisons with contemporary forms that extend our models of textuality. But what renders the notion of the periodical as ergodic somewhat troubling is the way in which it arguably flattens out to a single "linearity" the multiple temporalities to which Mussell refers in his work, those very temporalities that mediate and shape the individualized reading experience. In other words, this focus on the synchronic production of meaning represses (or so I fear) the complex seriality of the serial. As it is applied potentially to this peculiar object, the Listener, this flattening effaces as well the additional temporalities that overlay the journal, its connections with program cycles and broadcast time.

If, as Mussell has said, the periodical is always reaching backward and forward, according to a set of overlapping temporal logics, a "peculiar combination of repetition and progression" ("In Our Last"), (9) the Listener invokes not just the previous issue and the next issue, and the potential infinities of issues to come, but reaches outside of itself to the instant and event of broadcast, the dissipating echoes of programs past, and, often, to the next broadcast in a series. But if the ergodic text is one that is fundamentally non-linear in its possibilities, it is exactly this sonorous sequence that seems to render the idea of an ergodics of listenership ridiculous. The stream of BBC broadcasting, after all--or so this devil's advocate argument would go--is an inalterably linear progression of sound that cannot be reversed and, at least through the period under discussion, can only rarely be retraversed. Retraversal of the broadcast field is only and ever possible by remediation. And one could argue that (in those days of relatively rare and always corporation-controlled recordings) the freedom to repeat, to "replay," to compare, to consult, to study--to cross and recross the ergodic text--could only happen when that remediation was into print, its flexibility countering the inexorable one-way flow of broadcast sound.

Keyword: flow

But to stress the riverine aspects of broadcast sound during this period is to overstate the case, as is any simple opposition between that "stream" and print temporalities. And here I want to introduce my second keyword, which is flow--a term that has dominated discussions of the media environment since first applied to television by Raymond Williams in 1974. (10) In a paper she presented at the 2010 Modernist Studies Association conference, Barbara Green makes use of Henri Lefebvre's version of the concept to comment on another intermedial intervention, the serial publication of E. M. Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady in the journal Time and Tide during--as it happens--the first year of the Listener's publication. The embeddedness of media within Delafield's articles, says Green, emphasizes the multiple and overlapping cycles of diary, periodical, and the rhythms of the gendered everyday. Green posits that this superimposition of periodicities creates a form of self-conscious media critique that serves as a riposte to Lefebvre's characterization of the media as only capable of constructing, not analyzing, the everyday. This notion of superimposed serialities illuminating the complexly mediated nature of each is of course absolutely germane to the Listener. But the use of Lefebvre points up some of the difficulties involved in back-adapting contemporary media studies terminology. Although the idea of flow is clearly key to analyses of the everyday and to Green's deeply satisfying argument, Lefebvre's use of the term involves an evocation of the media day and media flow that derives from the broadcast protocols of a much later date. Indeed, what is vital to understanding the broadcast environment in which both Delafield's diaries and the Listener made their appearance and the broadcast temporalities they reference is that the idea of "flow" was in fact a suspect one, usually rendered as its pejorative equivalent, "tap." A tap listener--usually construed as the listener of American commercial radio--was, as Michelle Hilmes has detailed, the constitutive other of British broadcasting: indiscriminate, inattentive, unappreciative, and inappropriately positioned for uplift in accordance with the bbc's Arnoldian mission.

We are so used to the media day as it is constituted now that we overlook the extent to which these concerns formally structured the radio day of 1929 to 1939. Not only was the media day not, as Lefebvre puts it, a day that "never ends" (46)--not, at least, without recourse to shortwave, at a time when signoffs by midnight were routine--but what we now refer to pejoratively as "dead air" was an active part of bbc programing policy. It wasn't, again, until the Second World War, when the programing of silence might leave room for jamming or pirate signals, or relay a disturbing message of non-presence, that the minutes between programs (often several minutes) began to be filled with transitional sounds. The BBC handbooks of the 1930s referred approvingly to the deliberate space between programs as a kind of aural palate-cleanser; perhaps a more useful way to think about it for our purposes is as white space. In fact, as I have argued elsewhere, the pages of the Listener brought into juxtaposition elements that, despite the BBC's pretense to monoculture, its sonic seriality kept separate (581). While widely disparate elements could be given sonic houseroom--although in some cases only, grudgingly, a small corner or closet--they were held at aural arm's length from one another in a way that allowed for listener selectivity and selective address. Their inclusion within the pages of a single material object, though, represented a more jarring kind of yoking, and, indeed, the more extreme manifestations of this juxtaposition, involving early Listener columns on housekeeping or German irregular verbs, proved unsustainable. Thus, for example, the more homely elements of BBC programing generally disappeared from the Listeners pages until wartime instituted a more inclusive mode of sociability.

Keyword: sociability

Paddy Scannell identifies sociability--my third keyword--as the most central and salient characteristic of radio: the grounding of all interactions between broadcaster and listener in the fact of unforced and unenforceable communication (23). The medium's ability to effect a sociability that self-reproduces beyond the immediate occasion of the broadcast, or, in other words, to create an imagined community, is nevertheless based on the production of the sociable occasion to which the individual listener chooses to respond. (11) The BBC's pre-war insistence on appointment listening, however--regularly scheduled programing, as we understand it, was largely in the future--made the production of this sociability necessarily intermedial. The Radio Times, constructed around the schedules that made up most of its pages, and so almost completely oriented toward radio temporalities, also partook of, rewarded, and reinforced pre-existing broadcast modes of sociability--running, for example, humorous features written as if voiced by favourite characters on BBC variety programs and interviews with program comperes and later capitalizing on the star power of popular radio performers in its cover illustrations to promote event and appointment listening. By contrast, the Listeners mechanisms of sociability were multivalent, with familiar elements of periodical design identified with upmarket weeklies reinforcing the identification among readers of a particular class and brow being urged to extend their imprimatur to the BBC itself or, saliently, among readers who identified aspirationally as such. One can point to the advertisements in the Listener in particular as a site of multiply valenced signification--on one hand advertisements lent the imprimatur of respected publishing houses to this BBC-sponsored enterprise, building wireless community through readership; on the other, their copy often cited authors' wireless appearances both past and present, thus referencing a shared broadcast experience as the legitimating factor of a readerly sociability. The sociable occasion, then, migrated between media, inviting

participants to follow in its wake; yet the decision to do so resided with the individual.

Conclusions: back-engineering convergence

To conclude, then, I return to the notion of the ergodic. Aarseth's model of an ergodic text, one with multicursality and either-or choices, stresses the singularity and unrepeatability of decision, of the one-time opportunity of navigating a particular path; in such texts, he says, one is "constantly reminded of inaccessible strategies and paths not taken, voices not heard ... you may never know the exact results of your choices; that is, exactly what you missed" (3). Because a pathway through does not wall off other possibilities of recursive revisitation, this description is less evocative of the action of a periodical than it is of the processes I have just described--the intermedial creation, invitation, and decision surrounding a series of sociable occasions, each surrounding a broadcast event never to be repeated.

I would like to posit, then, that rather than the periodical as itself ergodic, it is the feedback loop between Listener and broadcast that here constitutes the ergodic "text," with the movement between listenership and readership serving as the individualized, non-repeatable, and thus meaning-productive decision-making that Aarseth finds in such texts. One is reminded here of the emphasis Jenkins places on the participatory nature of meaning-making in contemporary "convergence culture" To look back at Latham's claims then, perhaps the ergodic quality of the periodical should always be read relationally, as an implied conversation with the broader media ecology that feeds into the readerly habitus, including the gendered mechanisms of interruption that Green details and the mechanisms of sociability that Scannell identifies. In this rendering, the Listener is not a hybrid, or even a sport, but a limit case, a visible instantiation of a generally occluded process. It tells us that, as Caroline Levine puts it, "strange collisions are ordinary" (39). And it offers a hint of how we might think backward from our contemporary concentration on transmedial storytelling to historicize and formally describe an earlier version of convergence culture, one in which the periodical played an essential role.

Debra Rae Cohen

University of South Carolina

Debra Rae Cohen is Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina and current co-editor of Modernism/modernity. She is the author of Remapping the Home Front and co-editor of Broadcasting Modernism; her current book project is Sonic Citizenship: Intermedial Poetics and the bbc.

Works Cited

Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: JHUP, 1997.

"A 'New Venture.' " Listener. 16 January 1929: 14.

Briggs, Asa. The Golden Age of Wireless. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1965.

Cohen, Debra Rae. "Intermediality and the Problem of the Listener." Modernism/modernity 19.3 (2012): 569-92.

Frith, Simon. "The Pleasures of the Hearth: The Making of BBC Light Entertainment." Formations of Pleasure. Eds. Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Cora Kaplan, and Laura Mulvey. London: Routledge, 1983: 101-23.

Green, Barbara. "Rhythm and Repetition in Time and Tide and E. M. Delafield's Diary of a Provincial Lady" Modernist Studies Association Conference. Victoria, British Columbia. 13 November 2010. Conference Presentation.

Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge: mit Press, 2006.

Hilmes, Michelle. Network Nations: A Transnational History of British and American Broadcasting. New York and London: Routledge, 2012.

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYUP, 2006.

Lacey, Kate. Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience f Listening in the Media Age. Cambridge: Polity, 2013.

Lambert, R. S. Ariel and All His Quality: An Impression of the bbc From Within. London: Gollancz, 1940.

Latham, Sean. "Unpacking My Digital Library: Programming Modernist Magazines" Editing Modernisms in Canada. Eds. Colin Hill and Dean Irvine. Toronto: Toronto up, forthcoming. Draft available at http://modernist-magazines.org/modmag/files/userfiles/file/Latham-Unpacking-Digital-Library_3.pdf. 15 June 2015.

Lefebvre, Henri. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life. 1992. London and New York: Continuum, 2004.

Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton up, 2015.

Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

Murphet, Julian. Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-Garde. Cambridge: Cambridge up, 2009.

Mussell, James. " 'In Our Last': The Presence of the Previous in Magazine Form" "Magazines and/as Media: Methodological Challenges in Periodical Studies" University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta. 15 August 2015.

--. "The Matter With Media" "What Is a Journal? Toward a Theory of Periodical Studies" MLA Convention, Boston. 4 January 2013. https:// magmods.wordpress.com/2012/12/28/mla-roundtable-paper-3-thematter-with-media/mussell-mla-2013. 5 June 2015.

--. "'Of the making of magazines there is no end': W. T. Stead, Newness, and the Archival Imagination" English Studies in Canada 41.1: 71-93.

Reith, John. Into the Wind. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1949.

Nicholas, Sian. "All the News That's Fit to Broadcast: The Popular Press versus the BBC, 1922-45" Northcliffe's Legacy: Aspects of the British Popular Press, 1896-1996. Eds. Peter Catterall, Colin Seymour-Ure, and Adrian Smith. London: Macmillan, 2000. 121-48.

--. "The People's Radio: The bbc and Its Audience, 1939-1945" "Millions Like Us"?: British Culture in the Second World War. Eds. Nick Hayes and Jeff Hill. Liverpool: Liverpool up, 1999. 62-92.

Scannell, Paddy. Radio, Television, and Modern Life. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken, 1974.

Woolf, Virginia. "Middlebrow" The Death of the Moth and Other Essays. London: Hogarth Press, 1942. 113-19.

(1) Lest I be accused of reinventing the wheel here, let me note that the need for integrated analysis has long been acknowledged within media studies. See for example Lacey, Marvin. Sian Nicholas, in "Media History or Media Histories?," both points to a long line of scholars calling for, and attempting to enact, integrated histories and details the methodological challenges to such an approach. Using interwar Britain as her case study, she pinpoints a number of aspects of media convergence. Although "convergence of styles" is one of these (384), she is, as a historian, less concerned than periodical studies scholars might be with the formal aspects and effects of intermediality.

(2) The BBC aimed initially at a vast readership for the journal, like that of the low brow Radio Times, and prepublication circulation estimates were extremely inflated, with two hundred thousand ordered in the initial press run. Despite the very low cover price (2d and then 3d), however, its circulation remained close to that of those weeklies the bbc saw as its rivals--twenty-eight in its first year, settling to around fifty thousand through the late 1930s. See Lambert 107, Briggs 281.

(3) The term "media protocol" is Lisa Gitelman's. It refers to the "vast cluster of normative rules and default conditions [that] gather and adhere like a nebulous array around a technological nucleus" (7).

(4) See also his influential mla roundtable presentation, "The Matter With Media" (3).

(5) The founding of the Third Programme in 1946 as niche programming for high brows, in particular, represented a distinct move away from the BBC's prewar model. The wartime renegotiation of the BBC's relations with and status in comparison with the press over the course of the Second World War also regularized and naturalized its cultural position; see Nicholas, "All the News"

(6) The text of the 14 January 1929 BBC announcement of the agreement is at the BBC Written Archives in Caversham: BBC WAC R43/67.

(7) It is tempting to make reference here, in light of the importance of the BBC's centrality to the development of interwar middlebrow culture, to Virginia Woolf's now-famous characterization of it as "The Betwixt and Between Company" (118). Levine would resist this emphasis on vagueness and liminality in favour of an analysis of the colliding forms that create such an effect (9).

(8) "Scriptons" is Aarseth's term for strings of signs "as they appear to readers" (quoted in Latham 14); each scripton is thus individually assembled.

(9) See also his discussion of serial rhythms in this issue.

(10) "The phenomenon of planned flow" he wrote, is "perhaps the defining characteristic of broadcasting, simultaneously as a technology and as a cultural form" (86).

(11) As Kate Lacey stresses in her recent analysis of listening practices, there is "a kind of responsiveness in the act of privatized listening as collective endeavor and public practice that is all too often overlooked" (131). Simon Frith construes the construction of occasion as dependent largely on "the processes of flattery and familiarity", particular mechanisms of pleasure produced by BBC middleclass ideology (122).