British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol. 45, No.

2, April 2005
doi: 10.1093/aesthj/ayi018

PHENOMENOLOGY AND RADIO

DRAMA
Clive Cazeaux

Radio drama is often considered an incomplete or ‘blind’ artform because it creates worlds
through sound alone. The charge of incompleteness, I suggest, rests upon the orthodox
empiricist conception of sensation as the receipt of separate modalities of sensory impres-
sion. However, alternative theories of sensation are offered by phenomenology and—of
particular importance to this study—the restructuring of cognition that takes place in these
theories plays a central role in phenomenology’s account of artistic expression. The sig-
nificance of this phenomenological link between cognition and expression is that it can
provide the basis for a more positive evaluation of the aesthetics of radio drama. From a
phenomenological perspective, the alleged ‘incompleteness’ of sound becomes an
exemplary form of the process whereby material elements in an artwork interact with or
beckon towards one another to express a world. In this paper, I (i) show how Merleau-
Ponty’s ‘invitational’ account of the senses meets the charge of ‘blindness’, (ii) demonstrate
how radio drama employs the aesthetic interactions that, from the theoretical standpoints
of Merleau-Ponty and Dufrenne, are definitive of expression in art, and (iii) indicate how
some of my claims for the aesthetics of radio drama are supported by recent accounts of
metaphor in music.

i. introduction
Strangely enough, one of the qualities that radio drama enthusiasts like most about the
genre is also the very same quality that prompts other people to regard the genre as irrel-
evant or unsatisfactory: that is, its lack of images. Lovers of radio drama enjoy this aspect
because, as they often declare, ‘the best pictures are in the head’; their enjoyment comes
from the images that are conjured up by the sounds they hear. However, from the other
point of view, the absence of visual information is regarded by many as a deficiency, and
gives rise to the opinion that radio drama is an incomplete medium. Furthermore, it
would seem that this perspective can only ever be reinforced as values in contemporary
culture become increasingly defined in terms of imagery and appearance.
The charge of ‘incompleteness’ assumes that a particular sensory modality, that is,
vision or visual content, must be present for a representation to be considered com-
plete and, in making this assumption, I suggest, it also relies upon an empiricist notion
of sensory experience as the receipt of externally induced sense impressions. In contrast
to this, the phenomenological tradition in aesthetics offers an alternative perspective

© British Society of Aesthetics 2005 157

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 158 PHENOMENOLOGY AND RADIO DRAMA

on sensation that can help to reconfigure radio drama’s lack of imagery as a positive
‘invitational’ quality. This is not simply the point that the imagination is invited ‘to fill
in the gaps’ left by the absence of imagery, but rather the far more fundamental asser-
tion that, from a phenomenological perspective, it is wrong to speak of an absence at
all. The reason for this is that phenomenology reassesses sensation in such a way that
the state of ‘calling for completion’ becomes a vital component in artistic expression.
The benefit of this approach, I argue, is that it identifies a tradition in the continental
philosophy of art which allows the alleged ‘incompleteness’ of radio drama to be
regarded as a highly significant aesthetic property.

ii. evaluating blindness

Radio drama is often dismissed as a blind medium because it is a representation of the
world without images, without the richest or most informative modality of vision. It is
therefore often regarded as an impoverished artform.1 As Arnheim put it in 1936, radio
‘seems much more sensorily defective and incomplete than the other arts—because it
excludes the most important sense, that of sight’.2 Music does not suffer this criticism,
largely because it works within its own acoustic terms, which is to say that it does not
claim to have an overtly representational content, that is, to refer to or include particular
objects or events or narrative structures. In contrast, radio drama does refer to or involve
these things, but only gives them to us through voices and sound effects (and, on occa-
sion, incidental music). It is because radio is representing people and events that have
appearances but is unable to convey these appearances that the charge of impoverish-
ment is made. However, this negative perception can be responded to in two ways.
The first is to question the thinking that equates blindness with impoverishment, and
to argue that each person, within the range of sensory phenomena made available to
them, enjoys a comparably rich and varied experience. Therefore, even if radio drama
is ‘blind’, this is not a reason in itself for assessing radio drama as a depleted form.
Just how blind experience might be evaluated against sighted experience has been
considered recently by two philosophers: Bryan Magee (fully sighted) and Martin
Milligan (blind since the age of four).3 Against Magee’s assertion that the blind must
feel wholly deprived of the experiences which their sighted friends enjoy and describe,
Milligan insists that the qualitative difference between blind and sighted experience is
overstated by Magee; for Milligan, the difference is more akin to that between
1
The extent to which radio drama, throughout its history, has been dogged by the notion of blindness
is documented in Tim Crook, Radio Drama: Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 53–69.
Crook also marshals an impressive array of theorists and viewpoints to challenge the notion that radio is
a ‘blind’ medium, and alludes to the ways in which the acoustic world can equate to the visual world or
can sometimes offer forms of representation which exceed the visual.
2
Rudolf Arnheim, Radio, trans. Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Read (London: Faber & Faber, 1936),
p. 135.
3
Bryan Magee and Martin Milligan, On Blindness (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1995). Republished as Sight
Unseen (London: Phoenix, 1998). All references are to the original Oxford edition.

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 CLIVE CAZEAUX 159

continental cultures, for example, between the experiences of European and Japanese
people.4 Furthermore, while it cannot be denied that differences between sighted
and blind experience exist, there are nevertheless correlates between them, as
Milligan indicates: ‘sounds’, he declares, ‘have what is called colour, due to the
different harmonics of different instruments, colour which can be soft or hard, dark
or bright (for blind as well as sighted people), mellow or garish’.5 Milligan’s argu-
ment contests the notion that quality (of experience) is directly proportional to
quantity (of sensory modalities); he meets the charge of impoverishment (quantita-
tive difference: four senses versus five) by highlighting qualitative correspondences
between the two forms of experience. While I support Milligan’s approach, it is not
the one that I intend to pursue directly. However, it will be considered indirectly
since many of the ideas at work in it are developed and explicated in my main, sec-
ond response to the ‘impoverished medium’ criticism below.
It is worth noting that, as part of his defence of radio as a medium, Arnheim actually
writes ‘in praise of blindness’; this is in fact the title of a chapter in his book, Radio.
Having aural impressions without accompanying visual impressions might be a situation
that is ‘worth experiencing and cultivating’, he suggests, since it allows us to enjoy certain
artforms that are self-sufficient as acoustic experiences, namely radio drama and music.6
Against the view that radio should inspire ‘listeners to supplement the missing visual
image as realistically and vividly as [it] can’, Arnheim insists that radio drama ‘is capable
of creating an entire world complete in itself out of the sensory materials at its disposal’.7
The ‘complete’ nature of radio drama is defined by him in contrast to the ‘incomplete’
(as he regards it) radio broadcast of an event, such as an opera, a theatrical production or
a race: this kind of broadcast, he asserts, is ‘the past-utterance of a greater whole whose
perception is denied the listener’,8 for example, the radio listener ‘hears a happier audi-
ence laughing loudly and doesn’t know what they are laughing at’.9 It is generally the
case that radio drama seeks to avoid representing events whose nature is not evident from
their sounds and, in this sense, is more self-contained than the relay of a performance.
However, this still leaves intact the criticism (noted above) that radio drama, unlike
music, introduces people, places, events, that is, a world with potential appearances which
are not available to the listener. Thus, while Arnheim ‘praises blindness’ for the self-con-
tained representation that is possible through sound in the absence of imagery, his account
does not tackle the belief (in his own words) that ‘the eye alone gives a very complete
picture of the world, but the ear alone gives an incomplete one’.10

4
Ibid., p. 53.
5
Ibid., p. 84.
6
Arnheim, Radio, p. 137.
7
Ibid.
8
Ibid., p. 138.
9
Ibid., p. 139.
10
Ibid., p. 135.

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 160 PHENOMENOLOGY AND RADIO DRAMA

iii. sound and phenomenology’s retheorization of the senses

My second approach to the ‘impoverished medium’ criticism adopts a broader per-
spective. It draws on phenomenological theories of perception to question the ortho-
dox, empiricist conception of the senses, and addresses the ‘completeness of vision,
incompleteness of sound’ view by arguing that the senses are not five channels of
sense data which can be quantified as complete or incomplete. A central premise of
phenomenology is that experience has a questioning character: experience is not the
grasping of a preformed content but a form of prospection or enquiry; just as a ques-
tion draws out and determines a range of possible replies, so the manner in which our
faculties approach the world shapes how it appears to us. This theory of knowledge
changes what we understand sensory experience to be. For the phenomenologist, the
nature and condition of our receptivity is something that is actively created by tran-
scendental principles located within the subject. To illustrate this, let us examine
what is understood by the term ‘stimulus’. The idea that perception is the result of
our senses being stimulated by something outside of us is common to both phenom-
enology and empiricist epistemology. However, on the one hand, with empiricism,
the stimulus is a quality external to the mind that is passively received by the mind as
an idea, impression, or datum—for example, a redness, a hardness, a bitterness—
whereas, on the other, with phenomenology, for a stimulus to be a stimulus, there
have to be the necessary and appropriate conditions of receptivity within the subject
in order to translate the wealth of possible experiential material around her into the
kind of material that can become stimuli in the first place. In Kantian terms, the
process that gives us sight is not simply the absorption of ready-made visual sense data
but a sequence of transformations that converts part of the otherness of the world
into that which can become phenomenal and visible for us. We only have to con-
sider that there are creatures with differently attuned senses to appreciate that the
constitution of our cognitive faculties determines which sections of a potential real-
ity stimulate our awareness, for example, bats are sensitive to the spectrum of ultra-
sound and rely on sonar-like echo-location to create a landscape of reflected sonic
pulses.
Thus, phenomenologically speaking, sensory receptivity is the ‘bringing into being’
of stimuli. What is significant about this view is that it goes some way towards chal-
lenging the notion that our five senses are five discrete channels. They are not all
claimed to be the same but, instead, while their differences are preserved, a unifying
arc is nevertheless placed around them in virtue of the fact that they are all facets of
the way in which the conditions of the possibility of experience make the world
accessible to us. There is going to be some connection between them in as much as
the conditions that determine the nature of our receptivity all issue from the transcen-
dental operations that constitute the original opening-up of experience.
Arguments to this effect can be found in both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. With
the former, the point is made briefly as part of a larger debate in Being and Time,

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 CLIVE CAZEAUX 161

whereas, with the latter, a much more detailed and extensive account is given.11 Thus
I shall concentrate on Merleau-Ponty’s theory. Sensation, he argues, is not something
we have or take in but a relationship of mutual ‘beckoning’ between consciousness and
the world. The red of the carpet is not a datum I receive but, rather, a product of the
way in which my senses approach the carpet and allow it to be manifest to me.
Furthermore, all the senses operate together as a unity. They occur as modes of
subject–world interaction that are able to open onto the world because they are inter-
nally coordinated within the body: things and the world ‘are given to me along with
the parts of my body . . . in a living connection comparable, or rather identical, with
that existing between the parts of my body itself’.12 Just as any coordinate or triangula-
tion system defines one location in terms of another, so colours, for example, can exist
as comprehensible parts of our world ‘only if they cease to be closed states or indes-
cribable qualities presented to an observing and thinking subject, and if they [instead]
impinge within me upon a certain general setting through which I come to terms with
the world’.13 On this understanding, Merleau-Ponty argues, synaesthetic perception—
perception in which the senses are conjoined—can be taken as ‘the rule’:

Sight, it is said, can bring us only colours or lights, and with them forms which are the out-
lines of colours, and movements which are the patches of colour changing position. But
how shall we place transparency or ‘muddy’ colours in the scale? In reality, each colour, in
its inmost depths, is nothing but the inner structure of the thing overtly revealed. The bril-
liance of gold palpably holds out to us its homogeneous composition, and the dull colour of
wood its heterogeneous make-up. The senses intercommunicate by opening on to the
structure of the thing. One sees the hardness and brittleness of glass, and when, with a
tinkling sound, it breaks, this sound is conveyed by the visible glass. One sees the springiness
of steel, the ductility of red-hot steel, the hardness of a plane table, the softness of shavings.
The form of objects is not their geometrical shape: it stands in a certain relation to their
specific nature, and appeals to all other senses as well as sight. The form of a fold in linen or
cotton shows us the resilience or dryness of the fibre, the coldness or warmth of the material. . . .
One sees the weight of a block of cast-iron which sinks in the sand, the fluidity of water and
the viscosity of syrup. In the same way, I hear the hardness and unevenness of cobbles in the
rattle of a carriage, and we speak appropriately of a ‘soft’, ‘dull’, or ‘sharp’ sound.14

Against this, an empiricist might argue that these instances of joined sensation are
learned through association, impressions put together over time because experience
teaches us that they come together. In other words, the senses are essentially separate

11
See, for example, Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: State University
of New York Press, 1996), H. 28–38, pp. 24–34; ‘H’ refers to the pagination in the later German editions,
reproduced in the margins of the translation. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans.
Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), pp. 3–12, 206–242, and The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude
Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern U.P., 1968), pp. 130–155.
12
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 205.
13
Ibid., p. 210.
14
Ibid., pp. 229–230.

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 162 PHENOMENOLOGY AND RADIO DRAMA

but can be related empirically. In contrast, Merleau-Ponty is claiming the fused nature
of the senses as a basic ontological condition, a condition of our being able to organize
any meaningful experience at all. Briefly, the significance of this synaesthetic inter-
locking for Merleau-Ponty’s system is that it forms part of the process whereby the
body structures the world for us. Merleau-Ponty is a neo-Kantian philosopher to the
extent that he attempts to show how subjective experience and objective reality are
intimately linked through sharing the same conditions of possibility. Whereas Kant
outlines these conditions in terms of the transcendental structure of the mind, Merleau-
Ponty suggests that we locate the structure of world and experience in the body.
Understandably, this radically redefines what we take the body to be: it is not an
empirical object, one thing among others in the world, but an ontological condition, a
‘body schema’, that is, a framework whereby consciousness and the world are opened-
up for each other.15 The interactions between the senses are part of the network of
articulations and cross-referrals whereby experience of a world is opened and coordin-
ated. In this respect, sensory fusion is very much like a crease in a piece of paper, lifting
the paper from out of being a two-dimensional surface into being a three-dimensional
form, with one facet (mind) that can now look upon another (reality).16
The full implications of this phenomenology of sensation for an appreciation of
radio drama will emerge when the ‘beckoning’ or ‘opening onto’ characteristics of
sense experience are considered in the context of phenomenological aesthetics in
sections IV and V. However, at this stage, it is worth pointing out how Merleau-
Ponty’s theory modifies our understanding of the aesthetic and ontological status of
sound. In terms of his account of sensory experience, sound is not something that just
happens to be emitted by our contact with objects, but part of the experiential fabric
out of which the human being’s engagement with the world is formed. As a medium
to be manipulated by the writer or director of a radio drama, it is a form or a texture
that is thoroughly intertwined with the physical and emotional events that make up
the world of the play. While each sense has its own particularity, and can be indivi-
duated distinctly from the others, it does not exist as a channel that can be wholly

15
Ibid., p. 206.
16
All this, I accept, is very counter-intuitive. Some clarification might be granted if we consider an ex-
ample of a sensation. I shall focus on a colour, since we are used to thinking of colour as a pure and self-
contained datum, but the ideas at work apply to all the sensory modalities. As I look at the intense blue
of the flower in front of me, it strikes me there is a particularity to the experience: this particular colour
is this particular colour, and there is nothing about it which could be said to belong to or derive from
the other senses. With the phenomenological account of the senses, I am not denying that our sensations
can have an intensity and vibrancy that we find unique. What I am asserting, though, is that it is wrong
to move from the claim that (i) ‘a sensory quality has a particularity about it’ to the claim that, therefore,
(ii) ‘this particular sensory quality—blue—has nothing to do with qualities from other sensory modal-
ities’. The blueness of the blue can only strike me as such, I aver, because my sense of this being a par-
ticular quality rests upon what it means to be a particular quality with the other senses. In other words, this
particular blue is only able to be a particular blue for me because the structure of interrelationship
between the senses creates the field wherein this particularity—this coming to a point—can stand out
(literally) as a point.

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 CLIVE CAZEAUX 163

isolated from the others but exists rather as a region in a fabric or grid; on Merleau-
Ponty’s view, its uniqueness only occurs because the modality is part of the body
schema. One might be working with and pulling at one or more areas of the fabric,
for example, sound alone in the case of a radio producer or sound and vision in the
case of a film producer, but the nature of fabric is such that other regions, although
not directly in your grasp, are nevertheless pulled up by it and brought towards it.
When we refer to the senses, for example, ‘sound’ and ‘vision’, the former effectively
means ‘sound-opening-onto-a-world’ and the latter ‘vision-opening-onto-a-world’,
where the openings in each case, although by no means identical, nevertheless overlap
and intersect.
A detractor might argue that radio drama is still an artform struggling in the absence
of a visual channel. My claim is that we do not have to accept the ‘channel’ metaphor.
As I have shown, from a phenomenological perspective, while it is still possible to indi-
viduate the senses, their distinguishability nevertheless rests upon the more fundamen-
tal condition of their being interlocking and corresponding world-openings. Again, a
detractor might insist that radio drama does not give you images, just as a person who
is totally blind does not have visual experience. Two phenomenological responses can
be made here. First, we need to be wary of the ‘possession’ metaphors used by the
detractor: talk of ‘giving’ and ‘having’ images makes sensation very object- or datum-
like—an object that passes from the world to consciousness—but this model of sensa-
tion cannot be taken for granted. On Merleau-Ponty’s account, sensation exists as an
interaction between subject and world, a ‘phenomenal expanse’ arising from the way
in which subject and world interlock with and thereby reveal one another. It is in this
respect that the comparatively less atomistic and more relational or interactive meta-
phors of ‘invitation’ and ‘beckoning’ are used in phenomenological epistemology.
A second reply to the detractor is to point out that, as far as the phenomenologist is
concerned, the question of whether imagery or vision is present in itself is not the pri-
mary concern, for now we are treating sensory modalities as world-openings and, on
this basis, it is world-disclosure that is paramount. To illustrate this, we can return to
the passage from Milligan quoted above. In response to Magee’s assertion that the blind
person can have no appreciation of visual experience, Milligan declares that he has an
understanding of it because both blind and sighted experience are modes of access to a
shared reality and, as such, there can be ‘sympathetic’ cross-referral between them.17
This is in effect to admit that certain sensory qualities, such as brightness, intensity,

One way of helping to make sense of this is to liken the occurrence of a particular sensation to pin-
pointing a location on a piece of paper. The empiricist might represent his conception of experience as
raw, unique content by putting a dot on the piece of paper and nothing else. Thus we have the sensation
but it is entirely on its own, so to speak; pure colour but with no means of getting beyond it, much like
answering the question ‘Where are we?’ by saying ‘We are here.’ The phenomenologist, however, does
not mark a spot on the paper but instead draws a grid and simply gives the coordinates for the region she
wants to identify for her particular sensation. Thus we still have a unique experience but it is shown to be
implicated within a structure made up of elements that are other than the experience itself.
17
Magee and Milligan, On Blindness, p. 84.

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 164 PHENOMENOLOGY AND RADIO DRAMA

hardness, are not particular to any one modality but are modes of subject–world inter-
action within which some or all of our sensory modalities can participate. It could be
objected—and Magee does make the point18—that Milligan’s awareness of these qual-
ities is merely a metaphorical, propositional understanding; the blind person does not
have (the ‘possession’ metaphor again) direct acquaintance with visual sense data. To
pursue this debate would distract the paper from its main subject. But, to hint briefly
at how the phenomenologist and Milligan might react: both would reject the ‘know-
ledge by acquaintance’ versus ‘knowledge by description’ distinction and, because of
their commitment to the conceptual determination of experience, both would support
the notion that metaphor can operate as a propositional device and as a form of sensory
experience, that is, the sensory transpositions experienced in synaesthesia.

iv. incompleteness and invitation in phenomenological aesthetics

So far, my argument has been largely logical or ontological: offering an alternative con-
ception of sensation in order to challenge the view that the senses are discrete and, there-
fore, to impede any dismissal of radio drama as an artform struggling in the absence of a
visual channel. However, the full significance of Merleau-Ponty’s account of the senses
for an appreciation of radio drama emerges when the ‘invitational’ or ‘opening onto’
quality he assigns to the senses is considered in the context of phenomenological aesthet-
ics. A theme running through many phenomenological accounts of art is that the work of
art is perceptually significant because it manipulates and displays the cognitive structures
through which perception in general is organized. Versions of this thesis can be found in
Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Dufrenne.19 I shall concentrate on the latter two.
A defining quality of art, for both Merleau-Ponty and Dufrenne, is its expressive-
ness, in contrast to any representational content that it might have. The expressiveness
of an artwork—its generation of a meaning or quality over and above what is presented
or represented—is understood by them to be a result of the way in which our cogni-
tive, world-organizing processes are revealed in or exemplified by the work. As I
explain above, it is the body which, for Merleau-Ponty, reveals and organizes reality
for us: through its sensory openings and also through its kinaesthetic and internal, pro-
prioceptive capacities, the body represents a schema of continuous but differentiated
encounters out of which subjective experience of reality emerges. And in Merleau-
Ponty’s aesthetic theory, the work of art is shown to be a network of encounters
between the artist, their object of study, and all possible audiences, where these

18
Ibid., pp. 120–123.
19
Key statements of the three philosophers’ aesthetic positions are: Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the
Work of Art’, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971),
pp. 17–78; Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston,
IL: Northwestern U.P., 1993); Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, trans.
E. S. Casey (Evanston, IL: Northwestern U.P., 1966).

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 CLIVE CAZEAUX 165

encounters are enabled and unified by our common, embodied nature. In this respect,
there are clear similarities between Merleau-Ponty’s and Collingwood’s theories of
expression (although one important difference is that the unifying ground between
artist and audience for Collingwood is the imagination as opposed to the body).20
The work of art, Merleau-Ponty writes, is never complete in the sense of being a
full and final representation of its object, but is always incomplete, requiring partici-
pation from the viewer:

The accomplished work is . . . not the work which exists in itself like a thing, but the work
which reaches its viewer and invites him to take up the gesture which created it and, skip-
ping the intermediaries, to rejoin, without any guide other than a movement of the
invented line . . . the silent world of the painter, henceforth uttered and accessible.21

As an illustration of this view, Merleau-Ponty develops an account given by André

Malraux of how a painter might record a woman passing by. The woman is not a
mere ‘coloured mannequin’ or ‘spectacle’ but instead a whole (albeit brief) series of
sensual, sentimental, sexual, world-inhabiting interactions occurring in the perceptual
field between the painter and the woman. She is, Merleau-Ponty writes,

a certain manner of being flesh which is given entirely in her walk or even in the simple
click of her heel on the ground, just as the tension of the bow is present in each fibre of
wood—a most remarkable variant of the norm of walking, looking, touching, and speak-
ing that I possess in my self-awareness because I am body [sic]. If I am also a painter, what
will be transmitted to the canvas will no longer be only a vital or sensual value. There will
be in the painting not just ‘a woman’ or ‘an unhappy woman’ or ‘a hatmaker’. There will
also be the emblem of a way of inhabiting the world, of treating it, and of interpreting it
by her face, by clothing, the agility of the gesture and the inertia of the body—in short,
the emblems of a certain relationship with being.22

Exemplars of this approach cited by Merleau-Ponty are the modern painters Cézanne,
Klee, and Matisse. Their canvases exhibit interactions whereby a mark or brushstroke
sits not as the mere outline or facet of the represented object but as a gesture that
belongs to and beckons towards a network of cognitive associations and determin-
ations between artist and audience, of which the actual painting is only a punctuation.
For example, in his endeavour to depict the landscape as a lived situation (rather than
as the object of classical, schematic perspective), Cézanne applies his colours almost as
20
It should be pointed out that Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the body as a body schema, that is, as a frame-
work of world-disclosure, emerges in part from his critique of mind–body dualism and, as a result, his
concept of embodiment is reconfigured to include the image- and thought-generating capacities that are
normally attributed to the imagination. This would suggest that there is scope for observing further
correspondences between his and Collingwood’s theories of expression. See R. G. Collingwood, The
Principles of Art (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1938).
21
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 88.
22
Ibid., p. 91.

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 166 PHENOMENOLOGY AND RADIO DRAMA

if he is feeling his way around the canvas and the environment in which it is set, so
that the overall effect is the appearance of a landscape that has been grappled with and
scrambled over rather than viewed from a distance.
Dufrenne’s work represents a separate but related line of enquiry: separate in that
there is a stronger relationship to Kant—Dufrenne seeks to show that expression in art
is the a posteriori revealing of the a priori cognitive structures which have to be in place
for experience to occur—but related in that he explains this revelation of structure in
terms of invitational relationships present within the artwork. While an artwork is like
a diagram or sign or news report in that it re-presents part of the world, Dufrenne
argues, what is unique to the work is its establishment of the conditions and interac-
tions that allow the various material elements making up the work to speak to one
another, to acquire meaning, to reach out and become ‘about’ their object. Of inter-
est to us is the way in which Dufrenne supports and develops the notion that an art-
work operates as a series of invitational relationships between its material elements. He
uses a stage play to illustrate his claim:

[In the theatre] it is not at all necessary that the setting create the illusion of reality, since
it need only please the eye. Thus it need not compete with the dramatic object [of the
play], for it is not empowered to constitute in itself an autonomous pictorial or architec-
tural aesthetic object. However lively and pleasant the colours are, they do not possess the
dignity of colours in an authentic painting. One covers the set with distempered paint,
using the same elementary technique as the house painter. . . . The setting, in principle,
signifies only through the text which it is intended to illustrate. In other words, the world
of the dramatic work is as much presented to the mind as it is to the senses. . . . [As a result]
the scenery in a play contributes to creating a world . . . by giving a horizon to the repre-
sented objects as well as a framework for the actors . . . Consider a setting like that of
Bérard for Les Bonnes. Because it is presented as stuffy, sumptuous, and suffocating, an
apartment is able to become the principal personage in the play.23

Whereas the invitational relationships in Cézanne’s paintings occur between brushstrokes

on the canvas, in a theatre play the relationships take place between the script, the stage
design (including the lighting), and the actors’ performances. The world of the dra-
matic work, the overall expression achieved by the performance, ‘is as much presented
to the mind as it is to the senses’ because its capacity to represent resides not in any sin-
gle element which can be received simply by the senses but in the cognitive, interpre-
tative transitions we are invited to make between set, script, and performance.

v. the invitational character of radio drama

The relevance of these accounts to radio drama is that they show how the apparent
incompleteness of a form of representation, for example, ‘blind’ radio drama, is not an

23
Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, pp. 173–174, 179; Reader pp. 133, 137.

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 CLIVE CAZEAUX 167

incompleteness at all but instead the gap or opening wherein invitational relationships
constitutive of a work’s expressive potential can be constructed. To clarify how I am
using the term ‘invitational’: it is to signify that any phenomenal unit in an artwork—
for example, a brushstroke, a voice, a sound—contributes to the work and sustains it as
a coherent whole through a series of ‘beckoning’ or ‘opening onto’ relationships with
other elements in the work and with elements in the world. The all-important ‘and’ applies (in
the work and in the world) because it is the relationships ‘internal to’ the body schema
(for Merleau-Ponty) and the artwork (for Merleau-Ponty and Dufrenne) that create
the articulations necessary for subject–object transitivity or ‘aboutness’ to occur.
Let us consider some examples of what I am calling the invitational character of radio
drama. As Crook indicates, an extensive range of strategies for exploiting the correspond-
ence or contrast between sounds and situations is available to the radio dramatist.24 I shall
focus on three areas: (i) evocation, (ii) psychological sound, and (iii) the voice. (i) Evocation
occurs when a sound, for example, footsteps growing louder, not only serves as an index
for the event that caused it, that is, someone approaching, but also conveys wider concerns
or associations around that event, in this case perhaps a sense of authority or tentativeness
or something more sinister. Morse code is another example (given by Sieveking and
quoted by Crook): while the sound of the code indexically signifies the use of a transmit-
ter and the fact that a message is being sent, it more importantly has the potential in the
context of a radio drama to evoke ships in the distance, a certain period in history, urgency,
disaster, and so on.25 As far as this phenomenological account is concerned, ‘periodicity’,
‘urgency’, and ‘disaster’ are examples of the cognitive invitations we would make as part
of the perceptual process of incorporating the sound into the world of the play. This pro-
cess of signification can also be construed as a semiotics of sound in as much as a material
phenomenon (in our case, a sound) is understood to have meaning not only through a
causal or indexical link to its source object but also in virtue of the network of associations
that is established between it and other sound signifiers in the play.
(ii) In sound design vocabulary, ‘psychological’ or ‘rendered’ refers to sound that
has been treated or manipulated to convey emotional or mental states. These will be
sounds whose ontological status is ambiguous: they may have an indexical origin in
the scene, for example, a voice or the sound made by an object, or they may be
purely abstract; they ‘float’ ontologically because they stretch across the invitational
structure of the play, creating correspondences between two or more elements. To
give two examples. Firstly, in the BBC radio dramatization of Peter Ackroyd’s novel
Hawksmoor, the resonance of a voice in a cathedral is stretched to emphasize the tor-
ment of the story’s central character, the architect Nicholas Dyer, appointed by
Christopher Wren to rebuild London’s churches after the great fire.26 The effect, a

24
Crook, Radio Drama, pp. 70–89.
25
Ibid., p. 71.
26
Hawksmoor, written by Peter Ackroyd, adapted by Nick Fisher, directed by Janet Whitaker; broadcast
on BBC Radio 4, January 2001.

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 168 PHENOMENOLOGY AND RADIO DRAMA

voice ringing off stone, has added significance in that Dyer’s torment comes from his
burying human sacrifices within the foundations of his churches. Thus, a relationship
is established wherein the cathedralesque ring in a voice not only tells us the setting
but also points towards the mental state of the character and the emotional weight of
his crimes.
Secondly, electronic and technological sounds, such as answerphone messages,
electronic hums, and the fast-forwarding of tape, are to the fore in the Wooster
Group’s 2001 production of Racine’s Phèdre.27 The group specializes in exploring the
dramatic potential of modern technology and, when made for radio, its productions
are rich in the use of sound as (to quote Dufrenne) ‘a personage in the play’. One
scene in Phèdre builds the conflict between Hippolytus and his father, Theseus, by
switching back and forth between their respective monologues: a few seconds or so of
Theseus, then seconds of Hippolytus, then back to Theseus, and so on, with the rate
of switch-back growing faster all the time. In the background, grainy, synthesized
notes rise and fall awkwardly and grow louder. Theseus demands a confrontation
between Hippolytus and himself: as if to goad his son, Theseus says ‘C’mon’. This
word, in Theseus’ voice, then echoes throughout the monologues, becoming deeper
and more prominent. The monologues end, the background sound stops, there is a
moment’s silence, and then a final ‘C’mon’, deep and chiming, with time left for the
word’s decay to be heard. This scene is particularly musical in its construction, relying
on rhythm and crescendo. One word is abstracted from a monologue, repeated, and
made increasingly resonant. Combined with the urgency in the switching mono-
logues and the growing background presence, the word is transformed from being
one moment in a taunt to a symbol of the power struggle between Theseus and
Hippolytus. On its last utterance, it hangs in the air, an object alone, and its decay
ushers in a silence which prepares the ground for the tragic events that are to follow.
(iii) It could be argued, however, that these examples, which deliberately exploit
sound’s potential for signification, are the exception or are only occasional events:
surely radio drama consists in the main of untreated human voices. How does the
voice display an invitational character? This becomes apparent as soon as one consid-
ers the network of meanings and significations that issue from the voice. Each voice
has its own distinctive acoustic qualities, such as timbre, cadence, and pitch, and these
can be expressive or suggestive of certain human and worldly dispositions, for example,
voices that exhibit confidence, eloquence, urgency, or violence. Actors often com-
ment that one of the challenges of performing radio drama is that, deprived of visual
codes and body language, they only have their voice to realize the range of attitudes
and emotions experienced by their characters in the play. While this restriction might
be regarded from the ‘blind’ radio perspective as a deficiency, from an invitational
viewpoint, it means that attention has to be given to finding a character’s qualities
within the actor’s voice.

27
Phèdre, directed by Lance Dann and Kate Valk; broadcast on BBC Radio 3, July 2002.

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 CLIVE CAZEAUX 169

For both the actor and the character he or she plays, the voice is not a fixed entity
but the projection of a way of being in the world. This can be explicated on two
accounts. Firstly, a person’s voice is created both by the physical capacities of the body
and by the environmental conditions of nationality and society. Secondly, the first
point is given additional significance when considered in the context of Merleau-
Ponty’s phenomenology of the body. As outlined above, the body on his view is not
simply one object among others in the world but the schema through which subjective
experience and objective reality are mutually structured. Speech is of particular import-
ance in that it is the occasion when conditions which locate a person in the world, that
is, their physical and cultural situation and all that they are bodily capable of in that
situation, are revealed as the very same conditions that enable subjectivity to exist and
act autonomously within the world. To speak, we draw on our body, our language,
our social situation, but in doing so we create an utterance that is a projection of our
own position in or viewpoint on the world. Words, Merleau-Ponty declares,

are behind me, like things behind my back, or like the city’s horizon around my house, I
reckon with them or rely on them. . . . It is enough that they exist for me, and that they
form a certain field of action spread around me. . . . It is enough that I possess [a word’s]
articulatory and acoustic style as one of the modulations, one of the possible uses of my
body. . . . The phonetic ‘gesture’ brings about, both for the speaking subject and [their]
hearers, a certain structural coordination of experience, a certain modulation of existence,
exactly as a pattern of my bodily behaviour endows the objects around me with a certain
significance both for me and for others.28

Recent examples of the qualities of a voice intertwining themselves with the emo-
tional and conceptual sweep of a play are Spoonface Steinberg and The Bogus Woman,
both of which feature only one actor.29 The former is a monologue given by the
character ‘Spoonface’ Steinberg, a seven-year-old autistic girl suffering from leukae-
mia. Much of the play’s dramatic impact comes from the contrast between, on the
one hand, the innocence and the flat, matter-of-factness achieved in the young
actor’s voice and, on the other, the ‘beyond her years’ insights her character displays
into the subjects of the Holocaust, her father’s infidelity, and her own death. The
second play, The Bogus Woman, is the story of an African woman seeking asylum in
the United Kingdom. Accusation, inquisition, victimhood, aggression, destitution,
and the attitudes of other members of the asylum-seeker’s family are all realized
through the voice of the one actor. The majority of the scenes involve two characters
and, without a visual representation to remind us that only one actor is present, the
sense of a populated world, full of conflicting intentions and emotions, is articulated

28
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 180, 193.
29
Spoonface Steinberg, written by Lee Hall, directed by Kate Rowland, performed by Becky Simpson;
broadcast on BBC Radio 4, January 1997. The Bogus Woman, written by Kay Adshead, directed by Lisa
Goldman, and performed by Noma Dumesweni; broadcast on BBC Radio 3, September 2002.

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 170 PHENOMENOLOGY AND RADIO DRAMA

entirely through the different invitational directions in which the actor’s voice
sends us.30

vi. metaphor and music

A theoretical study of the invitational character of radio drama would find much that
is relevant in the philosophical literature on emotion in music, especially with regard
to the claim that the relationship between sound (or music) and emotion is a meta-
phorical one, as suggested by, among others, Langer, Scruton, Walton, and Wishart.31
Metaphor, I suggest, is an exemplar of the invitational structure ascribed to art and
perception by phenomenology. Although commonly considered a purely poetic or
verbal device, metaphor has been repositioned in recent decades as a fundamental
cognitive principle, operating at the levels of thought and perception. Merleau-
Ponty’s account is not only consistent with these developments but is sometimes also
used in support of them, since metaphor in the context of his philosophy becomes the
process whereby one region or domain opens onto another in the construction of a
world, for example, from sound to vision or from the click of a shoe to the mood of
its wearer.32 Of the ‘metaphor in music’ theorists listed above, Scruton arguably comes
the closest to the phenomenological position presented here, which is perhaps to be
expected given his acknowledgement of Merleau-Ponty.33 Scruton shares Merleau-
Ponty’s conviction that concepts, far from being abstract descriptions removed from
the flux and flow of sensation, are integral to organized sensory experience, and
that the meaningfulness of aesthetic experience arises when one set of concepts, for
example, concepts relating to physical movement, are transposed onto or located

30
In Radio, Arnheim makes similar observations regarding the interactions that can occur between sounds. In
a radio drama, he affirms, the various sounds connect or combine with one another to create ‘a new mate-
rial world, just as material as the world of “reality”’ (p. 194). This connection is achieved, Arnheim suggests,
by means of an ‘acoustic bridge’ ‘built’ by the different modes of sound-presentation (for example, voices,
recitations, and sound effects) on account of their being freed from the ‘corporeal world perceived by
means of the eye’ (p. 195). While Arnheim’s ‘acoustic bridge’ and my ‘invitation’ share the metaphor of
beckoning or interaction between realms, their causes are quite different. For Arnheim, bridging is unique
to the phenomenon of sound—there are, he maintains, no parallels to such motifs in any other art—and
only arises because radio is a blind medium, because sounds are untethered from the external world. In con-
trast, the phenomenological viewpoint I am presenting regards all the senses as invitational, and attributes
this quality to the process of world-construction which they, by Merleau-Ponty’s lights, carry out.
31
Susan Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 3rd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U.P., 1942); Roger Scruton,
The Aesthetic Understanding (Manchester: Carcanet, 1983); Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1997); Kendall Walton, ‘Listening with Imagination: Is Music Representational?’, in
Philip Alperson (ed.), Musical Worlds (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State U.P., 1998), pp. 47–62;
Trevor Wishart, On Sonic Art (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1996).
32
For further discussion of the ontological status of metaphor in relation to Merleau-Ponty, see
Clive Cazeaux, ‘Metaphor and the Categorization of the Senses’, Metaphor and Symbol, vol. 17 (2002),
pp. 3–26, and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Disembodied Mind and its
Challenge to Western Philosophy (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
33
Scruton, Aesthetic Understanding, p. 249, n. 14.

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 CLIVE CAZEAUX 171

within a region of sensory experience, such as the experience of sound. The sound of
a piece of music, Scruton argues, is only musical, is only able to rise out of brute phe-
nomenality to acquire significance and understandability, if it is infused with worldly
projections or dispositions, such as movement and emotion. ‘The ways of hearing
sound that we consider to be ways of hearing music’, he maintains,

are based in concepts extended by metaphorical transference. . . . If we take away the met-
aphors of movement, of space, of chords as objects, of melodies as advancing and retreat-
ing, as moving up and down—if we take those metaphors away, nothing of music remains,
but only sound.34

As noted above, the idea that sounds can open onto or invite connection with events
and moods is not new, for example, footsteps signalling a person’s approach in an
authoritative, tentative, or sinister manner. The potential for any phenomenon to have
meaning, it could be argued, is well established by Saussure and twentieth-century struc-
turalist analyses of language and cultural expression. If a medium possesses the articulacy
or differentiability sufficient for differences to be perceived, Saussure declares, then com-
munication and signification can occur.35 Furthermore, in the philosophy of music, there
is Langer’s assertion that between music and subjective experience lies ‘a certain similar-
ity of logical form’, made up of ‘patterns of motion and rest, of tension and release, of
agreement and disagreement, preparation, fulfilment, excitation, sudden change, etc’.36
There are strong similarities between Merleau-Ponty’s position and those of
Saussure and Langer, and with good reason: Merleau-Ponty acknowledges and
embraces Saussure’s claim that meaning arises from the differences between sounds
or signs,37 and his phenomenology is a very particular appropriation of the Gestalt
psychology that informs Langer’s account. It is the job of another paper to chart in
greater depth these relationships, but what can be stated here is the thesis that sep-
arates Merleau-Ponty’s theory from Saussure’s and Langer’s: namely, that the con-
nectivity which allows something material or phenomenal to express meaning or
emotion is presented by Merleau-Ponty as a facet of the ontological, ‘world disclos-
ing’ structure whereby each sensory modality is, in its essence, an opening onto or
a beckoning towards a world and other modalities. Each sense, Merleau-Ponty
writes, ‘is a “world,” i.e. absolutely incommunicable for the other senses, and yet
constructing a something which, through its structure, is from the first open upon
the world of the other senses, and with them forms one sole Being’.38 In contrast,

34
Ibid., pp. 79, 85.
35
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983),
pp. 110–120.
36
Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, p. 228.
37
Merleau-Ponty, ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, p. 77.
38
Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, p. 217.

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 172 PHENOMENOLOGY AND RADIO DRAMA

connectivity is explained by Saussure as an arbitrary but systematic correspondence:

distinctions in sound create distinctions in thought, he avers, like ‘air in contact
with water: changes in atmospheric pressure break up the surface of the water into
series of divisions, i.e. waves. The correlation between thought and sound, and the
union of the two, is like that’.39 And with Langer, the similarity in logical form
between music and inner experience is assessed in linguistic terms, drawing on the
difference between conventional and symbolic language to propose that music sym-
bolizes emotion.
This essay has argued that radio drama exhibits the invitational structure which,
from the perspective of phenomenological aesthetics, is definitive of expression in art.
As well as citing instances from radio drama and sound design, examples have also
been given from painting and stage design, and the relevance of metaphor to art’s
invitational structure has also been set out. These steps reinforce radio drama’s kinship
with other modern artforms. However, I think one further step can be taken to estab-
lish the aesthetic significance of radio drama.
This rests upon the notion that sound is a particularly invitational modality of
sensation. We tend to associate vision with the passive reception of a preformed,
external reality, largely because, I suggest, colour is coextensive with shape: it
seems as if the colour of an object belongs to it, is a part of it, in a way which con-
ceals the role my faculties play in perceiving the object. The same cannot be said
of sound. Sound illustrates in a very tangible way the phenomenological thesis
that experience and reality are fundamentally interwoven, that no clear division
can be made between what belongs to experience and what belongs to reality. If
I tap my mug with my finger, the mug emits a ringing sound which we are not
inclined to say belongs to the mug. We are also reluctant to say it belongs to my
finger. While it is possible to explain the sound away as the phenomenon that
occurs when the resonant properties of the mug come into contact with the hard-
ness of my fingernail, the significance of interaction as an explanatory component
here should not be overlooked. The sound cannot be attributed to one object or
the other but rather can only exist as a tensile relationship between subject and
object.
Walton also recognizes the ontological ambiguity of sound, and argues that it is
responsible for music’s inducing actual feelings and sensations in listeners (albeit for a
different reason than the one I am giving).40 He makes his point under what he calls
‘the Cavell–Calvino observation about sounds’:

Stanley Cavell remarked that we think of sounds as independent entities separate from
their sources, in a way we do not think of sights; we reify or objectify sounds. We speak

39
Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, p. 111.
40
Walton suggests that the expressiveness of music is attributable to isomorphism between the ontologies
of sound and feeling, asserting that feelings share the autonomy that is claimed of sound in the passages
quoted. See Walton, ‘Listening with Imagination’, pp. 55–60.

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 CLIVE CAZEAUX 173

of clatters, bangings, whinnys, murmurs, echoes, creaks, clangs, rustles, grumbles, gurgles.
Sounds—like smells—fill rooms and cross streets; sights don’t do that.41

Walton continues with a quotation from Italo Calvino’s short story ‘A King Listens’,
a particularly salient passage from which is the following: ‘That voice comes certainly
from a person; a voice, however, is not a person, it is something suspended in the air,
detached from the solidity of things.’42 Thus, sounds can become things in themselves,
and can elude any straightforward attribution to material objects. Of course, there are
occasions when we refer to the sound of a motorbike or the sound of church bells, but
these are more often than not passing identifications arising from the need to deter-
mine the source of a sound rather than aesthetically or ontologically minded attempts
to explore the acoustic possibilities of an object. It is, I suggest, because sound con-
forms neither to routine classification nor to the object-structure of the world that we,
as hearers and listeners, are put in the position of having to bring concepts to it, of
having to find a direction or an attribution for it. Whereas sight is comparatively
‘transparent’ in giving us reality, sound hangs or endures as a transformation between
subject and object and, as such, is the region of sensory experience we can turn to in
order to appreciate the invitational relationship in which we stand to the world.

vii. conclusion
This paper has identified two theses within phenomenology that help to promote the
aesthetic significance of radio drama. They are: (i) Merleau-Ponty’s argument to the
effect that the five senses operate not as isolated channels but as regions that, while
displaying their own particularity, nevertheless exist in a mutually ‘beckoning’ or
‘invitational’ relationship; and (ii) the thesis that the expression of a world by a work
of art is an extension of these ‘beckoning’ or ‘invitational’ relationships between the
various elements and structures that make up a subject’s contact with the world. The
importance of these claims for radio drama is that they bring to the fore certain
perceptual and aesthetic properties which, although evident in or applicable to all art-
forms, are very well-suited to radio drama. In particular, they are well-suited to articu-
lating the nature and the value of radio drama as an artform, and to challenging the
view that radio drama is a ‘blind’ or an ‘incomplete’ genre. Sound, instead of being a
series of inadequate clues from an unlit world, becomes a medium that opens onto
and generates a world and, as a part of this world-generation, enjoys interaction and
conjunction with the other senses. And in manipulating sound to create a world, cer-
tain correspondences and tensions will be employed which, from a phenomenological
point of view, are among the defining, structural characteristics of expression in art,
whatever the medium. This ‘whatever the medium’ does not reduce all artforms, with

41
Ibid., p. 57.
42
Ibid.

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 174 PHENOMENOLOGY AND RADIO DRAMA

their particularities, to a lowest common denominator, but merely reaffirms that the
medium of an artwork, be it paint, film, language, or sound, is something that reaches
out beyond its own constitution to participate in the invitational relationships at work
in perception at large.

Clive Cazeaux, Cardiff School of Art and Design, University of Wales Institute—Cardiff,
Howard Gardens, Cardiff CF24 0SP, UK. Email: ccazeaux@uwic.ac.uk

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