ABSTRACT
The radiogenic notion of ‘tuning in’ is, this chapter will argue, central to Samuel Beckett’s third play for radio, Words and Music, written in 1961. While the experience of listening to analogue radio – of tuning in, that is, to a particular frequency – supplies the notion, the figure of speech is commonly used to articulate the activity of comprehension within the process of communication. In both cases, the listener must situate the transmission, contextualize the form and ‘tune in’ to the sender’s meaning. This, however, is no mean feat, as communication is the result not of perfect attunement but of two communicators’ efforts to draw near and understand each other, despite having no assurance that they can or do. The philosopher of language Donald Davidson – whose investigation of communication will be central to the argument presented here – states, to this end, that ‘making sense of the utterances and behaviour of others … requires us to find a great deal of reason and truth in them’.1 Furthermore, he suggests that just as such charitable pragmatism at most ‘maximises agreement’, so the method of making sense, or of interpreting, can only ever be ‘one of getting a best fit’.2 This notion of achieving a ‘best fit’ between different communicative ontologies resonates, I would argue, with the radiogenic activity of ‘tuning in’. The former, Davidson tells us, is always temporary, since we continually ‘adjust our theory [of interpretation] to fit the inflow of new information’;3 while the latter, as Steven Connor reminds us, is a similarly volatile process, by which the radio listener ‘repeatedly constitutes his or her relation to the device and [its] transmissions’.4 There is, in other words, a slippage at the heart of this activity, and, by highlighting
the inherent misalignment between communicants, the notion of ‘tuning in’ can serve as a reminder that every act of communication involves the effort to overcome this essential incompatibility.
