Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Reproducibility” advances the thesis that mechanical reproduction of art works strips away their aura, that substance symptomatic of originality and being tied to a tradition, such that “it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence” (104), thus reformulating the conditions of reception from those of the monad to those that are multiple. And in so transforming these conditions of reception, Benjamin wants to suggest that that which is perceived is perceived anew—being more directly within viewers’ situations, as well as having intensified (by way of distraction) apperceptive qualities (“[r]eception in distraction […] is a symptom of profound changes in apperception” (120)—ultimately has emancipatory potential. This emancipatory potential resides in the shift from cult aesthetic production to exhibition aesthetic production, from distance (the figure of the magician) to penetration (the figure of the surgeon), and of course from static image to motion: film. This apparatus—the motion capture of the cinematic medium—destabilizes the time-space tissue of the aura, making art available in its admittedly unstable form almost universally. In this destabilized form it becomes a sort of capital that enables potentially progressive exchange. He valorizes the Surrealists by suggesting that their “ruthless annihilation of the aura in every object they produced” (119) is the course of development for distraction: what the surrealists insisted on in moral terms has other uses in social terms, more radical uses. This shock or distraction is set against contemplation: singular contemplation causes the subject to descend into the depth of the art, whereas distanced shock allows for the work of art to descend into the depth of the social. While all these depth metaphors are troublesome, I think that there are useful parallels that can be drawn to sound, even as the essay seems to be concerned solely with the visual/optical. And despite film’s occularity—and as well Benjamin’s dismissal of sound in film as not altering significantly these potentials—I want to take some of these concepts to the aural level. After all, sound has these emancipatory potentials too, and films are sonic.
If the Dadaists transform their sonic art from that which is enchanting to that which is destructive (a missile), and it’s valid (non-auratic) art, then I can hear my train a comin’. While it seems overly simplistic to assert that public reception of disruption is bound to end in revolution—though of course this is not what Benjamin is saying, he’s for the progressive—a certain dual consciousness can emerge that while still trapped in a sense of false consciousness, does allow for an outside to be thought that is not such a radical break. Against Benjamin, I would suggest that the combination of original works of art—auratic art—with electronically reproduced art is one such case where the emancipatory potential is provisional but still available, opening out on the side of agency while still maintaining a distance. In using digital technology to record sound (or image), the status of the original is at once sustained and nullified: they’re all originals. So, a performance that mixed digitally recorded sound with live sound (like showing a film behind or on top of live actors on a stage) could parse out the all or nothing logic that seems to limit Benjamin’s argument in a way different from Adorno’s objection—that the thesis is too undialectical and cannot account for the debilitating effects of reification. Is it possible that the dual consciousness produced by the simultaneous reception of art both with and without aura could also have (provisional) emancipatory potentials? This is a consideration Benjamin may not have been able to anticipate, perhaps because his Marxism—while not up to snuff with Adorno—was (over) sufficiently present to him.