Dialectical Sonority: Walter Benjamins Acoustics of Profane Illumination

Mirko M. Hall
In a letter to his friend and intellectual collaborator Theodor W. Adorno, on December 25, 1935, Walter Benjamin describes music as a field of inquiry fairly remote from his own.1 Several years later, in another letter to Max Horkheimer, he writes that the state of musical affairs...could not be any more remote for him.2 Yet despite these claims of unfamiliarity with aurality, there are numerous observations on acoustic phenomena throughout Benjamins oeuvre. From his early essays on language to his autobiographical studies and late works on critical historiography, Benjamin displays a keen sensitivity to sound that ranges from the Rauschen of nature to the technological noises of the city. In these writings, Benjamin develops a concept of sound that is equivalentin its epistemological and
1. Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 19281940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999), p. 119. Hereafter identified as C and page number. References to Benjamins works are made parenthetically in the text from the English translation of the Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings and Howard Eiland et al., trans. Edmund Jephcott and Rodney Livingstone et al., 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 19962003), hereafter identified as SW with volume and page number; The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999), identified as AP and page number; and The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977), identified as O and page number. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 2. Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 19101940, ed. Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 549. . The verbal noun Rauschen has a rich tradition in German poetics and refers, for example, to the rustling of leaves, the rushing of water, and the whistling of the wind.
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metaphysical presuppositionsto the constitutive properties of the dialectical image. As a sensuous-intuitive, spatio-temporal, haptic-tactile, and historically concrete experience, sounds materiality corresponds closely to that of the dialectical image: the aural thunderclap of sound parallels the visual lightning flash of the image. These properties suggest that acoustic phenomena can function, in Roger Behrenss formulation, as a special case of the dialectical image. Sound materializes as a force field of sonoric energies through the instantaneous crystallization of discrete acoustic phenomena or, to borrow from Benjamins terminology, as a dialectical sonority. This force field retrieves and actualizes a multiplicity of sound that is capable of (re)articulating a new culturally transformative past and presentwith an ear toward the future. My essay aims to articulate these aesthetic-technical and political contours of the dialectical sonority. Sound as Mnemonic Device Sound first occupies a prominent discursive role in Benjamins two autobiographical studies, Berlin Childhood around 1900 (193238) and A Berlin Chronicle (1932), and in his Denkbilder or thought-images (193133). German literary scholars Helmut Kaffenberger and Gerhard Richter were the first to systematically addressindependently of each otherthe role of sound in these texts. Both scholars investigate how Benjamin accesses certain mnemonic images of his Berlin childhood through a variety of acoustic phenomena. However, their critical evaluation of these sounds is strikingly different. Whereas Kaffenberger concentrates on how Rauschlike sounds correspond to moments of melancholic remembrance, Richter
. Roger Behrens, Pop Kultur Industrie: Zur Philosophie der populren Musik (Wrz burg: Knigshausen & Neumann, 1996), p. 154. . In conceptualizing the dialectical sonority, I am directly mapping sound onto the epistemological framework of the dialectical image. I am well aware that this particular approach entails a theoretical risk: an admonishment for more dialectics, as Adorno would say. But it is a risk taken in the very spirit of Benjamin, whose continued actuality rests, among other things, on his magical ability to illuminate a seemingly odd or insignificant detail to reveal its hidden theoretical centrality. Gerhard Richter, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 2000), p. 194. . Helmut Kaffenberger, Aspekte von Bildlichkeit in den Denkbildern Walter Benjamins, in global benjamin: Internationaler Walter-Benjamin-Kongre 1992, ed. Klaus Garber and Ludger Rehm, 3 vols. (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1999), 1:44977; and Richter, Benjamins Ear: Noise, Mnemonics, and the Berlin Chronicle in Corpus of Autobiography, pp. 16397.

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is concerned with how technological noise serves as a traumatic disruption of the autobiographical self. Both scholars implicitly acknowledge sounds relationship to the dialectical image, yet neither undertakes a close, analytical reading of this particular relationship. In his autobiographical texts, Benjamin sought to capture the images (SW3:344) of contemporary Berlin in remembrance (Eingedenken) against not only the rise of National Socialism but also the loss of lived experience (Erfahrung) under capitalism. These images portray a series of mundane experiences that always harks back to the time of childhood. In chronicling a subject suspended between the private and public sphere, Benjamin explores the relationship between modern urban experiences and the processes of individual memory. Throughout these texts, there are persistent references to an acoustics of profane illumination: how seemingly accidental, banal, or inconsequential soundsoften recalled within the densest weaves of the narrativeimmediately prompt a flood of childhood memories. Interestingly, these sounds appear not because the subjective I of Benjamin searches them out, but rather through the uncanny juxtaposition of worldly objects. As Kaffenberger points out, these acoustic phenomena are characterized by a sleep-inducing, monotone sound (eintnig-einschlfernden Gerusch), such as buzzing, clinking, droning, murmuring, rushing, sighing, or whispering. These Rausch-like sounds always tend to inaugurate dream-like experiences, which for Benjamin are refuges for utopian impulses, or instantaneous moments like Marcel Prousts mmoire involontaire, which convey the melancholic remembrance of a childhood experience. Despite Benjamins supposed ocularcentrism, it is often sound that recovers the memories, which are, in turn, archived in his idiosyncratic language of images. Unable to review every occasion of sound in the above texts, I want to concentrate on a typical acoustic reference in the Loggias section of Berlin Childhood. In this prose miniature, Benjamin valorizes the loggiathe in-between space that negotiates the tensions of the private and public sphereas an exemplary site of memory.10 He describes the aural
. Kaffenberger, Bildlichkeit in den Denkbildern, p. 460. . Ibid., p. 465. . For a representative list of sounds in Benjamin, see ibid., pp. 46465. 10. In a letter to Gershom Scholem in July 1933, Benjamin refers to Loggias as the most precise portrait I shall ever be able to give of myself (Benjamin, Correspondence, p. 424).

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atmosphere of a Berlin courtyard, where he encounters several Rausch-like sounds that serve as the catalyst for elegiac childhood memories. In one particular passage, Benjamin emphasizes the mnemonic function of a series of acoustic elements, which concludes with the following observation: as the dusty canopy of leaves brushed up against the wall of the house a thousand times a day, the rustling of the branches initiated me into a knowledge to which I was not yet equal (SW3:345). The brushing of the leaves and the rustling of the branches offer a sudden, revelatory moment [that is] reserved exclusively for the ear (SW2:700). These acoustic experiences function precisely like the dialectical image. They become acutely legible through their sudden, discrete, tactile occurrence and impart some previously unforeseen knowledge: [W]hen [a pile of withered leaves] rustles, there resonates from within it a kind of hideand-seek game [ein Sichverstecken und Gesuchtwerden].11 Benjamin not only recovers the long-forgotten traces of past experiences, but also the weak messianic power (SW4:390) that corresponds to these moments. For him, these past experiences always hold the unrealized wants, hopes, and aspirations of a bygone era. More importantly, they hold the hints of a revolutionary energy that can be actualized for later cultural-political use. Sound, thus, inaugurates a listening gaze that moves from melancholic remembrance to utopian redemption. The belief that acoustic phenomena carry a messianic potentiality harks back to The Origin of German Tragic Drama (192425; 1928). In this study, Benjamin claims that the medieval emblems used during the Baroque created a distinctive acoustic register12 of Rauschen. For the tragic dramatist, sound represented not only nature lamenting the Fall of Man from Adamic perfection, but also the bombastic verbosity of languages degeneration into communicative inefficacy. As Max Pensky notes, Benjamin believed that fallen nature can be dimlyauratically perceived as the sounds of nature itself...[in a] mythic image of the world as a twittering cacophony of words, rustles, mutters, and sighs.13 But, more importantly, the tragic dramatists attempt to stop the metonymic
11. Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhuser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 197289), 2:1215. 12. Graeme Gilloch, Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p. 61. 13. Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1993), p. 57.

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slippage of language created a unique aural situation: In the anagrams, the onomatopoeic phrases, and many other examples of linguistic virtuosity, word, syllable, and sound are emancipated from any context of traditional meaning and are flaunted as objects which can be exploited for allegorical purposes (O207). This passage suggests that sound is also subject to allegorical intention. In another significant passage, Benjamin emphasizes how memories transect consciousness as echoes and not necessarily as images: It is a word, a rustling or knocking, that is endowed with the power to call us unexpectedly into the cool sepulcher of the past, from whose vault the present seems to resound only as an echo (SW3:38990). But as Richter stresses, memorys acoustic traces remain forever absent but [nevertheless] recall the event of a past experience.14 Here, Benjamin develops a concept of autobiographical memory as a medium of experience only, in which the past is explored but not fully recollected. He believed that the process of remembrance is not a total recall of the past, but is rather the medium in which it is performed.15 For our purposes, then, memory is an excavation site, in which the acoustic ruins of past experiences are severed from their original context and (re)assembled by a sober ear. In fact, Benjamin claims that such an approach determines the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences (SW2:611; my emphasis).16 Gerhard Richter is also concerned with the role that acoustic phenomena play in (re)generating childhood memories. However, he concentrates on how the sounds of technology influence Benjamins autobiographical self in the modern metropolis. In a key analysis, Richter unpacks how electronic noise functions both as a mnemonic trigger and as a disruption of consciousnessand, particularly, how the physical noise of the telephone suspends the corporeal self between simultaneous articulation and dissolution.17 Besides triggering a series of childhood memories, the telephone, with its constant ringing, electronically distorted voice, and reification of human communication, also encodes indeterminable meanings in the form of white noise. It characterizes the anxiety of the modern urban space by introducing a sense of technological terror into
14. Richter, Corpus of Autobiography, p. 174. 15. See Carol Jacobs, Berlin Chronicle: Topographically Speaking, in In the Language of Walter Benjamin (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999), pp. 2730. 16. See Richter, Corpus of Autobiography, pp. 4344. 17. Ibid., p. 86.

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the private sphere. Avital Ronell argues, for example, that the telephones call destabilizes the identity of self and other, subject and thing, [and] abolishes the originariness of site.18 Benjamin acutely felt this invasive force: The sound with which it rang...was an alarm signal that menaced not only my parents midday nap but the historical era that underwrote and enveloped [it...and] its ringing served to multiply the terrors of the Berlin household (SW3:350). It is not unexpected that Richter would highlight these sounds, because Benjamins psychic life was constantly interrupted and troubled by technological noise. As his close friend Gershom Scholem explains: Another thing that was striking about him was his extraordinary sensitivity to noise, which he often referred to as his noise psychosis. It really could disturb him.19 Given his sensitivity to noise, it is not surprising that Benjamin would recall his childhood through Rausch-like sounds. In The Mummerehlen episode of Berlin Childhood, he remembers the sounds of his childhood home this way:
What do I hear? Not the noise of field artillery or of dance music la Offenbach, not even the stamping of horses on the cobblestones or fanfares announcing the changing of the guard. No, what I hear is the brief clatter of the anthracite as it falls from the coal scuttle into a castiron stove, the dull pop of the flame as it ignites in the gas mantle, and the clinking of the lampshade on its brass ring when a vehicle passes by on the street. And other sounds as well, like the jingling of the basket of keys, or the ringing of the two bells at the front and back steps. (SW3:37475)

Undoubtedly, for Benjamin, the urban, mechanized sounds of Berlin belong to the perpetual state of shock that characterizes the inhuman rhythm of the modern industrial mechanosphere.20 In his theoretical writings, shock is an ambivalent concept: in its corporeal capacity, it designates traumatic incursion or defensive warding off; in its artistic-tactile capacity,
18. Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 9. 19. Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981), p. 25. 20. Mark Hansen, On Some Motifs in Benjamin: (Re)Embodying Technology as Erlebnis, or the Postlinguistic Afterlife of Mimesis, in Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 2000), p. 246.

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it designates revolutionary insight. In the former context, shock is evaluated negatively, because it destroys the capacity for memory (Gedchtnis), integrated experience (Erfahrung), and even the transmittal of an authentic cultural heritage. In On Some Motifs in Baudelaire (1939), Benjamin laments how the modern subjects consciousness must be enhancedthrough a psychical mechanism of neutralizationagainst the overwhelming, abrasive shocks of everyday life. To prevent a kind of sensory overload, the onslaught of sensations like noise are cushioned and deflected by consciousness into the unconscious. Unfortunately, this condition requires a constantly vigilant consciousness. As a result, the subjects psychical capacity for lending coherence to and deriving meaning from the accumulation of [modernitys] isolated, fragmentary occurrences is greatly diminished.21 This process has profound implications for memory, namely, the subjects increasing inability to assimilate and voluntarily recall information by way of authentic experience (Erfahrung). Within the realm of sound, however, the dialectic sonority will (re)integrate these shocks into an active revolutionary consciousness. Articulating the Dialectical Sonority The dialectical image is the central theoretical and methodological category of Benjamins late aesthetic, historical, and political theorizations. He regarded the dialectical image as the key conceptual framework of The Arcades Project (192740), and its most sustained analysis can be found here, in the fragmentary notes of Convolute N. These notes relate to a theory of knowledge and were largely compiled in Pariss Bibliothque Nationale during the 1930s. Despite its genuine originality, Benjamin was unable to offer a coherent and linear account of the dialectical image.22 His often contradictory attempts to articulate its revolutionary interpretative powers simply resulted in theoretical excess. As Pensky explains, Benjamin failed to adequately address what their precise methodological role should be taken to be, how they were to be related to the agency of the
21. Michael W. Jennings, Dialectical Images: Walter Benjamins Theory of Literary Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1987), p. 83. 22. Jennings, Buck-Morss, and Pensky have all masterfully unpacked the dialectical image as a philosophical concept. See Jennings, Dialectical Images; Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); and Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics.

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critical historian, what sorts of meta-theoretical and meta-methodological (in other words: theological) postulates they might imply, or indeed how, and under what conditions, dialectical images were possible at all.23 This status, however, should not be viewed as a theoretical deficiency; it provides an opening for new interpretations and applications of the dialectical image/sonority. In fact, the rich potentiality of the dialectical image fascinated Adorno, who incorporated aspects of its methodology into his own philosophemes of the constellation (Konstellation) and force field (Kraftfeld ).24 It was Adorno who, in his letters of the late 1930s, pressed Benjamin to develop a theory of the dialectical image, which was, at times, a source of considerable tension between both men. Independent of the textual clues in Benjamins writing that suggest the epistemological contours of the dialectical sonority, Convolute N1,1 succinctly encapsulates its key properties: In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows (AP456).25 Benjamins use of lightning as a metaphor is a constant leitmotif in his writings. For the dialectical image, lightning implies that knowledge is not only imagistic (it flashes up before the eyes) but also an incendiary illumination (it dazzles so brightly as to momentarily blind the eyes). However, the phrase, the long roll of thunder has the richest implications for the dialectical sonority. Knowledge is not only visual and dazzling; it is also acoustic and thunderousit pierces, even deafens, the ear. In Benjamins note, the visual decoding of knowledge, which has been traditionally secured through the intellectual intuition of the written text, is now complemented by a conspicuously sonorous event of equal importance. In this dialectical move, he proposes that power/knowledge constellations, with their embedded reciprocal effectivity (Wechselwirkung) of historical subjectivity and objectivity, are also packaged as sound: or, quite simply, that knowledge is aurally
23. Max Pensky, Method and Time: Benjamins Dialectical Images, in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), p. 178. 24. For more information on Adornos Konstellation, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York: Macmillan Free Press, 1977), pp. 90110. See also Steve Helmling, Constellation and Critique: Adornos Constellation, Benjamins Dialectical Image, Postmodern Culture 14, no. 1 (2003), available online at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/ v014/14.1helmling.html. 25. I am grateful to Leslie Morris for introducing me to this quote.

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decodable. In fact, Benjamin once described philosophy as a harmonious [tnend] relationship (O37). Moreover, Benjamin implies that knowledge is a textual phenomenon that weaves together cultural and political pre- and post-histories. It continues to roll on in the historical continuum as acoustic phenomena. That is to say, knowledge (re)materializes belatedly as temporally charged sonorities in the form of resonances, tones, and echoes.26 In his work on poetic echolalia, Rainer Ngele reminds us that echoes are not self-reflective; [they are only] a reflex.27 For Benjamin, knowledge, without the help of historical materialism, can never fully reveal its original, utopian potential. Such potential can only occur at the moment of standstill, when the echo is blasted out of the reified continuity of history (AP474) through its materialization as a dialectical sonority. Consequently, one can only register the acoustic history of consciousness through a kind of dialectical listening. Despite Benjamins methodological inconsistencies regarding the dialectical image, he was convinced of two essential features. First, it is primarily characterized by the sudden, shocking crystallization of an imagistic experience; and, second, it appears as a monadological entity, which encapsulatesin its very concrete materialitythe entire history of that experience. As Pensky writes, the dialectical image has a monadic structure, that is, the ability...to contain within itself the entire pre- and posthistory [of cultural phenomena] not despite but because of its graphicness and its fragility...[and] there is the suddennessthe shockwith which the dialectical image flashes up.28 Consequently, the dialectical sonority is an acoustic object that through the tense, fleeting crystallization of antithetical sonoric elementsnot only provides an analytical critique of acoustic power/ knowledge constellations, but also resonates with the sounds of revolutionary historical consciousness. It materializes through a tactile thunderclap that is the audible implosion of contradictory acoustic elements or sound bytes. This implosion always occurs in a constellation saturated with tensions (AP475), where sounds are neither completely reconciled nor sublimated but, rather, held in check by a weak synthetic force field of
26. Rainer Ngele, Echoes of Translation: Reading between Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997), p. 8. 27. Ibid. 28. Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, p. 214.

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sonoric suspension. This force field provides a mode of knowledge that often exceeds logical categories of perception, and its governing principle is none other than montage. For our purposes, the most important characteristic of the dialectical sonority is its location within a historical force field, where the confrontation between its fore-history and after-history is played out (AP470). This location is instantaneously generated through the temporal concentration and intensification29 of two discrete historical moments. Here, the dialectical sonority becomes a privileged medium in which two different temporal axesthe past and the presentfrontally collide to open up new cognitive horizons of acoustic power/knowledge. For Benjamin, this process is comparable, in method, to the process of splitting the atom [that] liberates the enormous energies of history (AP463). This moment of temporal flux corresponds to Benjamins famous conception of dialectics at a standstill: Its not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, [sonority] is that wherein what has been comes together in a [roll of thunder] with the now to form a constellation. In other words, [sonority] is dialectics at a standstill (AP462). It liberates acoustic phenomena from their traditional historical contexts and allows their (re)contextualization into a new and potentially explosive form of history.30 The dialectical sonority would appear now with rhyme and reason, sonorously, congruously, in the structure of a new text (SW2:454). This moment removes acoustic phenomenaas fragmentsfrom their embeddedness within the reified historical continuum and forges them into new historical (re)constructions of sound. Hence, Benjamins oft-quoted assertion that [c]onstruction presupposes destruction (AP470). Through the interplay of the Then and the Now, Benjamin believed that the dialectical sonority can reveal the hidden utopian potential encoded within the acoustic substratum of history. This potential can finally be read in the Now (Jetztzeit) as objective truth. The dialectical sonority is, thus, a courier of history-laden acoustic data that becomes actualizedthat is, revealed, remembered, and redeemedin the present. As such, the dialectical sonority insists that sound is not an opus consummatum et effectum, but rather a reserve of unacknowledged potential that is yet to be realized.
29. Gilloch, Critical Constellations, p. 229. 30. Jennings, Dialectical Images, p. 50.

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The consequence of this position is of utmost importance for historical materialism, because the acoustic past is fundamentally incomplete and open to startling [new] revisions.31 Despite the dialectical images ingenious conceptualization, there existed a fair amount of tension between Benjamin and Adorno over the representation of this philosophical constellation. Unlike Adorno, Benjamin believed that culturally transformative insights could best be represented by a dialectical image rather than by dialectical argumentation.32 These differences came to the forefront when Benjamin submitted an essay based on The Arcades Project, entitled The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, for publication in the Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung. In his famous letter of November 10, 1938, Adorno accuses Benjamin of neglecting the theoretical mediationthat is, the filter of historical and socio-cultural processesthat relates the images constitutive parts to the larger dialectical structure. Instead of imposing a narrative structure upon the dialectical images disparate elements, Benjamin sought to achieve, by mere juxtaposition, an explosive crystallization that would not only activate but also preserve each individual element in its shocking particularity. According to Adorno, Benjamins refusal to apply mediating theory, which reminded him of Bertolt Brechts own lack of dialectics, tends to switch into the wide-eyed presentation of mere facts....[O]ne could say that your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. This spot is bewitched (C283). The problem facing Benjamin was the principle of montage itself. According to Adorno, Benjamins privileging of juxtaposing disparate textual elementswithout the appropriate mediation of theorymerely (re)mythologizes the dialectical image and, thus, undermines its potential for political efficacy.33 To be sure, Adornos critique emphasizes (and rightly so) Benjamins lack of mediation. In maintaining this position, however, Adorno misses what Jean-Michel Rabat has referred to as the real novelty in Benjamins abruptly imagistic mode
31. John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993), p. 298. 32. Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, p. 67. For a detailed analysis of the AdornoBenjamin Debate, see Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics, pp. 13684; and Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1994), pp. 163212. 33. See Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, pp. 22431.

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of presentation: the ability to explosively illuminate a cultural artifacts oft-hidden particularities. As Rabat continues: [E]ven when Benjamin is wrong, he always hits something because of the suggestive power of his dialectical images.34 For my project, this suggestive power guarantees the possibility of conceptualizing the dialectical sonority. And, despite Benjamins theoretical inadequacies, he always deliversto use Adornos own wordsan aesthetic debate which [is] so magnificently inaugurated (C132).35 Actualizing the Dialectical Sonority Benjamins seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (193539) provides a groundbreaking analysis of modern technological developments and their engendering of new artistic modes of production, consumption, and reception. The essays three versions develop a conceptual framework for understanding the impact of technological reproducibility on aesthetic artifacts as well as for (re)evaluating such conventional notions as originality, authenticity, and authority. Even though his essay provides a critical counterpoint to Adorno and Horkheimers negative appraisal of the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment (194244),36 Benjamin greatly overestimated the revolutionary potential of mass-reproducible art forms for progressive political struggles.37 However, one of the essays key propositions
34. Jean-Michel Rabat, The Future of Theory (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 61, 62. 35. With respect to processes like (de)aestheticization, dialectical penetration, and technological reproducibility, Benjamins observations on acoustic phenomena are very similar to those of Adorno. Despite their symphilosophizing about the properties of the dialectical image, I want to emphasize the singularity of Benjamins observations: namely, that he arrives at many of the same conclusions independently of Adorno. For an overview of Adornos philosophy of music, see Richard Lepperts introduction and commentary in Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie et al. (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2002); and Max Paddison, Adornos Musical Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997). 36. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2002). 37. Benjamins observations were firmly anchored in the developments of the early twentieth century. He was, therefore, unable to predict how new social, economic, and technological advances would (re)inscribe the notion of aura onto the realm of electronically reproducible media. For an assessment of the essays topicality, see Hans Ulrich

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has withstood the test of time: technology fundamentally (re)structures human sensory perception and, by extension, human consciousness. In this regard, Benjamins theses still provide a persuasive argument for applying technology in the service of recovering critical, self-reflective moments within sound. Throughout the essay, and much of his later oeuvre, Benjamin constantly highlights the aesthetic-technical principle of Technik. In discussing the essay, however, many critics seemingly foreground larger philosophical concerns (like aura, distraction, and habit) at the expense of technical application. As Esther Leslie stresses in her discussion of Technik, this concept has a larger terminological valency than can be rendered by the simple English translation of technique. It refers simultaneously to technology, technics, and technique, which alludes to the material hardware, the means of production and the technical relations of production.38 The aesthetic-technical principle of montage is operative across all these semantic fields: the Technik of juxtaposing antithetical elements into an original and provocative constellation. One should not underestimate the importance of montage for Benjamin as a progressive artistic medium, since this procedure has a special right, perhaps even a perfect right (SW2:778). Even today, the actuality of montage continues to reside in its fundamentally allegorical properties. When properly applied, allegory not only shatters the false semblance of totality, but also (re)contextualizes aesthetic artifacts into new configurations. Furthermore, as Behrens argues, montage is the constitutive principle of both the artistic avant-garde and the culture industry. This dialectical tension allows these artifacts to oscillate between two oppositional cultural spheres, thereby producing a kind of force field in which multilayered discourses are capable of negotiating cultural struggles.39 To contextualize the potentialities of montage, Benjamins investigations into shock are instructive. In his 1929 essay on Surrealism, Benjamin addressed how the uncanny juxtaposition of marginalized cultural phenomenathrough the Technik of montagemaximizes their cognitive shock value and how the subsequent constellations produce a profane
Gumbrecht and Michael Marrinan, eds., Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2003). 38. Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London: Pluto, 2000), p. xii. 39. Behrens, Pop Kultur Industrie, p. 133.

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illumination. These provocative constellations not only spring forth from memory in order to shock, but also to mobilize, to urge revolutionary praxis.40 Benjamin, however, makes one crucial theoretical distinction between himself and the Surrealists: even though he admired their artistic application of intoxication, he was convinced that such an application was, ultimately, an inadequate, undialectical conception (SW2:216). His cultural-materialist revolutionary project requires, above all, sober criticism. The shock engendered by the dialectical image/sonority must not be an intoxicant, but ratherin Benjamins clever use of an acoustic metaphora resounding call to action: an alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds (SW2:218). The continual advancement of modern recording, sequencing, and sampling technology has exponentially increased the aesthetic-technical and political possibilities of the montage principle (not to mention the democratization of musical production through affordable and userfriendly instruments and software). With this increased technologization, sound exists predominantly as a montage or Technik of production. The idea of radically expanding the acoustic range of sound can be traced back to Luigi Russolos futurist manifesto Art of Noises (1913). In this text, Russolo argues that the limited variety of timbres possessed by orchestral instruments be substituted for an infinite variety of timbres in noises, reproduced with appropriate mechanisms.41 Since Thomas Edisons invention of the phonograph in 1877, the electronic manipulation of sound has been further realized by such instruments as the magnetic tape recorder (1935), the vocoder (1936), the feedback amplifier (1937), the analog synthesizer (1957), the digital sampler (1979), and the communications protocol MIDI (1983).42 And with the introduction of the digital audio workstation GarageBand for Mac OS X in 2004, music has come
40. Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, p. 196. 41. Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, trans. Barclay Brown (New York: Pendragon, 1986), p. 28. 42. For several influential studies on the nexus of music, technology, and subjectivity in the digital age, see Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2004); Timothy D. Taylor, Strange Sounds: Music, Technology, and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Paul Thberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1997). For a comprehensive survey of the development of electronic music, see Thom Holmes, Electronic and Experimental Music: Technology, Music, and Culture, 3rd. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2008); and Peter Manning, Electronic and Computer Music, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford UP, 2004).

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a long way from Lszl Moholy-Nagy scratching new sonoric grooves onto records at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, or Pierre Schaeffer painstakingly splicing magnetic recording tape with a razor blade at the RadiodiffusionTlvision Franaise in the 1940s. The techniques of reproduction, sequencing, and sampling offered by digital music instruments are capable of actualizing the dialectical sonoritys essential constructive principle. Montages of sound are easily enacted by the synthesizer-sampler, which generates, processes, and digitally encodes sounds for future manipulation. As a syntax destroyer, this instrument manipulatesboth temporally and spatiallydigital samples, while simultaneously generating never-before-heard sound constellations. The Technik of editing, filtering, looping, morphing, or phasing, for example, fashions sounds into new acoustic configurations that can be continuously transformed. In other words, the synthesizer-sampler (re)materializes musique concrtes concept of lobjet sonore, which can be isolated, copied, stored, and manipulated. The sonoric dialectician, who plays the synthesizer-sampler, becomes, then, an experimental, polytechnical aesthetic engineer.43 Musicologist Richard Middleton has suggested that Benjamins exploration of films technical possibilities can be applied with striking results to [electronically produced] music.44 In fact, films techniques can be easily superimposed over those of electronic compositions. Analogous to cinematic devices like slow motion, close-up, and shot/reverse-shot, the synthesizer-sampler actualizes sonoric montages by developing new synthetic realities (AP857) of sound. Like the moving picture, sounds constitutive parts are assembled according to [the] new law (SW4:264) of digital manipulation. But, more importantly, the synthesizer-sampler allows the ear to register what was previously rendered inaudible, thereby making analyzable things which had previously floated unnoticed on
43. Gilloch, Critical Constellations, p. 2. 44. Richard Middleton, Studying Popular Music (Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1990), p. 65. On a related note, Lutz Koepnick argues that Benjamin is skeptical of the effects of synchronized film sound, because such noisein its very cacophony of sonoric blowsdistracts individuals from cinemas politically progressive emphasis on visuality. I disagree with his assessment that Benjamins notion of [a]uthentic experience and memory (p. 122) originates predominantly from the visual realm; I believe that it draws equally from both visuality and aurality. Lutz Koepnick, Benjamins Silence, in Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustic of Modern German Culture, ed. Nora M. Alter and Lutz Koepnick (New York: Berghahn, 2004), pp. 11729.

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the broad stream of perception (SW4:265). These processes bring to the forefront new substrata of acoustic phenomena, which constitute a so-called acoustic unconscious (cf. SW4:266). This newly reverberating unconscious provides, through the allegorizing aspect of montage, an analytical critique of reality. It destroys the naturalized acoustics of cultural phenomena and exposes the hidden aspects of sounds dialectical relationship to everyday life. In this way, the entire history of recorded sound is available for (re)experiencing and, most crucially, for transformation. Benjamin foreshadows this very possibility: The techniques inspired by the camera and subsequent analogous types of apparatus...make it possible at any time to retain an eventas image and soundthrough the apparatus (SW4:337). Likewise, the techniques of the synthesizer-sampler foster new cognitive modes of dialectical listening that remove listeners from the Kantian sphere of disinterested contemplation and engage the culturally transformative potential of the dialectical sonority. Although our ears have lost the power of hearing through the aural shocks of modernity, digital music instruments of technological archivization, assemblage, and reproducibility allow us to capture acoustic phenomena that have remained unregistered for either physiological or cultural-political reasons. Under conditions of dialectical listening, however, these instruments enable our earsin a moment of inverted dj vu45to critically (re)hear these sounds. In the Baudelaire essay, Benjamin emphasizes the increasing technological exteriorization of memory through apparatuses such as the camera, telephone, and gramophone, which compensate for modernitys decreasing mnemonic capacity. However, Richter reminds us that no apparatus can guarantee the stability of memory. Rather, it merely serves as a trigger for the release...of a whole stream of paratactically arranged mnemonic [information].46 Similarly, Susan Buck-Morss argues that this mnemonic crisis calls for a fundamental (re)structuring of the perceptual process itself so that it is no longer a question of educating the crude ear to hear [sound], but of giving it back hearing...of restoring perceptibility.47
45. Inverted dj vu is a memotechnical phenomenon that arrests a cultural artifacts auratic spell of tedious familiarity and redeems, however momentarily, its unrecognized and unfulfilled energies. See Peter Krapp, Dj Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2004). 46. Richter, Corpus of Autobiography, p. 187. 47. Susan Buck-Morss, Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamins Artwork Essay Reconsidered, October 62 (Autumn 1992): 18.

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To effectuate this restoration of perceptibility, the technological capacities and potentialities of these instruments must be fully developed in order to facilitate the integration of aural shocks into our cumulative field of experience (Erfahrung). Digital technologys creation of a new perceptual field of dialectical listening generates a data bank of mnemonically charged sounds, which could restore our aural perceptibility and actualize the critical aspects of sound. In fact, Benjamin suggests that technological advances of the futurethat is, of our timemight possess the only means of decryption available to accomplish this (re)orientation. He borrows a photographic metaphor from literary historian Andr Monglond to explain how technology might mnemonically fix a discrete historical moment and export it into the future. In the paralipomena to his On the Concept of History (1940), Benjamin writes: If one looks upon history as a text, then one can say of it what a recent author has said of literary textsnamely, that the past has left in them images comparable to those registered by a light-sensitive plate. The future alone possesses developers strong enough to reveal the image in all its details (SW4:405; cf. AP482). Even though new media technologies contribute to the functional transformation (Umfunktionierung) of traditional aesthetic artifacts, Benjamin was always careful to avoid any kind of reductive technological determinacy or naive celebration.48 Although I have privileged the immanent potentiality of Technik in the previous paragraphs, I want to avoid projecting a sense of determinism onto the aesthetic sphere, because, as Benjamin often emphasized, technology can be deployed for both progressive and regressive political means. I also do not want to fetishize the principle of montage, which hassince at least the historical avant-gardebecome so conventional that it has often, but not always, lost its critical powers of demystification. How do we realize the full potential of digital musical instruments and recording technology? Benjamin provides us with the following advice: The unique dialectical characterthat is, the specific logicof each technological device needs to be understood and its potential for technical innovation maximized. The synthesizer-sampler is only one instrument among many. Likewise, Benjamin insists that thinking is also a criticalpractical activity, a Technik of aesthetic construction and production. As he writes in one of his Central Park fragments: For [the dialectician],
48. Gilloch, Critical Constellations, p. 147.

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thinking means setting the sails. What is important is how they are set. [Technik is] for him merely the sails (SW4:176). Adorno agrees as well: [W]ithout the addition of intentionality in its elements, montage is destined for failure; it must, above all, be actualized in the service of emancipatory intentions.49 Consequently, it is a synthesizer-samplers technological potentiation by critical acousticians and their progressive political intentions that will determine the actuality and political efficacy of the dialectical sonority. With regard to the specifics of potentiation, I leave thatwith the risk of mythologizationto the polytechnical aesthetic engineer: the urban hipster with her Technics turntable, iPod, or IRCAM-inspired MacBook software. She, in turn, would inaugurate Jacques Attalis final network of sonoric production, or composition, in which music [is] produced by each individual for [her]self, for pleasure outside meaning, usage and exchange.50 Toward an Acoustics of Historical Materialism Throughout this essay, I have argued that Benjamins oeuvre articulates albeit through hidden textual correspondencesthe aesthetic-technical and political contours of the dialectical sonority. In my concluding remarks, I would like to briefly situate the dialectical sonority within concrete musical practice and Benjamins larger methodology of historical materialism. To realize the full aesthetic potentiality of music, then, the critical acoustician must bring togetherthrough sober philosophical reflection and the deconstructive strategies of [i]mmanent criticism, allegorical ruination, explosive engineering, tactile appropriation, [and sonoric] construction51fragmentary acoustic phenomena into a provocative critical constellation. Benjamins sound engineer must blast acoustic objects out
49. Theodor W. Adorno, Transparencies on Film, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 158, 159. 50. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1985), p. 137. Of course, even urban hipstersin their relationship to the culture industryare still embedded within the matrix of latecapitalist production, consumption, and reception. As John Fiske reminds us, apropos of the mix tape, such polytechnical practices of musical production may not be resistive ideologically, but [they are still] productive...pleasurable, and...at least evasive, if not resistive, economically. John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 143. See also the application of Benjamins theory of technological reproducibility to popularelectrically amplifiedmusic in Helmut Salzinger, Swinging Benjamin (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1973). 51. Gilloch, Critical Constellations, p. 237.

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of the standardized repertoires of cultural knowledge, and (re)assemble and (re)configure them into new critical constellations of sound. This procedure violently removes the sonoric object from its ephemeral and transitory context within history; actualizes its emancipatory potential in the medial character of a new sound configuration; and renders it serviceable for concrete culturally transformative use. A prime example of such a critical-practical projectin both theoretical and musical-aesthetic termsis the recent scholarship of Portuguese musicologist Mrio Vieira de Carvalho and the compositions of the late Italian avant-garde composer Luigi Nono, both admirers of Benjamin. Drawing on Benjamins theories of allegorical intention, technological reproducibility, and historical materialism, Vieira de Carvalho has argued that the strategic deployment of montage in musical works can arouse sustainable moments of dialectical listening in the audience: that is, the critical capacity to follow the dynamic unfolding of the musical works subjective and objective particularities.52 He uses these theories to read the cultural-political work of several musical texts by Nono, who is keenly interested in how live electronicsby generating unlimited possibilities of sound spatializationcan explode the reified past through a montage of musical quotations.53 Carvalho investigates how Nonos compositions blast open textual fragments from the continuum of cultural and musical history, and how these are, then, arranged into new critical constellations that reveal the illusory character of unity and linearity in culture, music, and history.54 Benjamin reminds us that this practice wrenches [the text] destructively from its context (SW2:454), an action that both punishes
52. Mrio Vieira de Carvalho, Towards Dialectical Listening: Quotation and Montage in the Work of Luigi Nono, Contemporary Music Review 18, no. 2 (1999): 3785; and New Music between Search for Identity and Autopoiesis: Or, the Tragedy of Listening, Theory, Culture & Society 16, no. 4 (1999): 12735. 53. Vieira de Carvalho is cautious here: [S]ound technology should not lead to reified sound effects, virtually unchangeable or self-generated according to a logic of autopoiesis, but rather to the intensification of the subject-object dialectic, to new possibilities for musical objectivation of dynamic subjectivity. Vieira de Carvalho, Tragedy of Listening, pp. 13233. 54. Despite the tiny spark of contingency (SW2:510) that distinguishes the dialectical sonority from other cultural phenomena, its peculiar manifestation requires an unacknowledged degree of subjective involvement. Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics, p. 220. Through critical intelligence and analytical precision, composers like Nono must know how to construct the constellation of discrete sonoric phenomena that will sound the dialectical sonority.

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and redeems, since it wrestles quotations away from their subjugated position in history in order to unleash their critical potential. For example, in his opera Prometheus: The Tragedy of Listening (198185),55 Nono uses electronic techniques of sound projection and modification (such as amplification, echo, and reverberation) not only to not supplement the live orchestral instrumentation and vocal performance, but also to forge literary and philosophical fragments from Italian, German, and Greek texts into new dialectical sonorities. These fragments, including selections from Benjamins On the Concept of History, open up polyvalent perspectives, which reveal that neither Prometheus is dead nor history at its end.56 In the context of Benjamins historical materialist project, Nonos musicological strategies are a logical derivation. His acoustic configurations generate, through continuous electronic manipulation, ever-newer (re)contextualizations of sound. These dialectical sonorities initiate a process of semantic (re)production that remains infinitely perfectible: they effectuate a nonstop hermeneutic movement between the musical work, whose sounds self-actualize ad infinitum, and the listener, whose critical consciousness enacts new modes of dialectical listening. It is this interplay of dialectical penetration and actualization of former contexts that guarantees that sound polarizes into fore- and after-history always anew, never in the same way (AP392, 470). The cultural-political efficacy of acoustic phenomena is, therefore, determined by configurations like the dialectical sonority, which crystallize the past and present anewwith an ear toward the future. That is to say, the emancipatory potential of sound remains never finalized but always contingent, since historical materialism sees the past as an afterlife...whose pulse can be felt in the present (SW3:262). By constructing an alarm clock through the dialectical sonority, the secret signal of what is to come (SW2:206) will always remain audible.57

55. Luigi Nono, Prometeo: Tragedia dellascolto, EMI Classics 5 55209 2. 56. Vieira de Carvalho, Tragedy of Listening, p. 133. 57. Cf. Richter, Corpus of Autobiography, p. 246.