broadcasting into rooms of performed attention
even while he listened closely enough to Troeltsch to be able to supply the audience-feedback that tonight’s dinner-table would be inescapable without, Schacht was already on the test’s third item
Context
Troeltsch's whole broadcast career is an address with no real receiver: he calls scores into an intercom while, room by room, "instructors grade quizzes or read or tap a decreasingly patient foot," and even his one attentive listener is only listening enough to have dinner-table cover. The signal goes out fully formed and lands on people performing the reception it never actually gets — attention as social ritual, not contact.