Radio Silence; or, On the Fritz

This paper is a series of comparative observations—at once philological, technological, and psychoanalytical—on the phenomenon of what is referred to as radio silence. Using both terms to pressure each other, these observations feedback and build to a consideration of the relation between silence and death in which death refers less to a bio-physiological state than to a condition of unknowing or unthinking. Radio thus emerges as a high-pitched disciplinary problem instead of a gadget with a history.