Ch a p t e r Two

Wa lt e r Be n ja m i n a n d
t h e D i a l ec t ic a l S onor i t y

In a letter to his friend and intellectual collaborator Theodor

W. Adorno, on December 25, 1935, from Paris, 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”—in its social transparency—
could not be “any more remote” for him.2 Yet despite these mod-
est claims of unfamiliarity with music, there are quite a num-
ber of insightful observations about the transformative power of
acoustic phenomena throughout his oeuvre. From his early essays
on the philosophy of language to his autobiographical studies and
later works on critical historiography, Benjamin displayed a keen
sensitivity to sound that ranges from the Rauschen of nature to
the technological noises of the city.3 These observations gener-
ally involve sound’s communicative relationship to language, its
scholarly articulation in Adorno’s musical-theoretical texts, and
the state of its technical reproducibility in the era’s recordings,
radio broadcasts, and films. In these writings, however, he devel-
ops a concept of sound that is equivalent—in its epistemological
and metaphysical presuppositions—to the constitutive properties
of his most provocative theoretical formulation, the dialectical
image. Most surprisingly for readers of his work, Benjamin never
realized that he was, in fact, an astute observer of both visuality
and aurality.

M.M. Hall, Musical Revolutions in German Culture

© Mirko M. Hall 2014
 54 / musical revolutions in german culture

For Benjamin, sound’s materiality—as a historically concrete,

haptic-tactile, sensuous-intuitive, and spatiotemporal experience—
corresponds closely to that of the dialectical image: the aural thun-
derclap of sound parallels the visual lightning flash of the image.
These properties suggest that music can function, in philosopher
Roger Behrens’s formulation, as a “special case of the dialectical
image.”4 Sound materializes as a force field of sonoric energies
through the instantaneous crystallization of discrete acoustic phe-
nomena or, to borrow from Benjamin’s theoretical vocabulary, as
a “dialectical sonority.” This force field retrieves and actualizes a
multiplicity of sound that is capable of rearticulating a new cul-
tural-revolutionary past and present—with an ear toward future
political intervention. Indeed, today’s technical manipulation of
sound, with its infinite possibilities of spatiotemporal reassem-
blage, retroactively constructs many of the formal properties of the
dialectical sonority. In conceptualizing how Benjamin might have
formulated the dialectical sonority, I will directly transpose sound
onto the epistemological framework of the dialectical image. I am
well aware that this particular approach entails a major theoretical
risk: an admonishment for more dialectics, as Adorno would say.
But it is a risk taken in the very spirit of Benjamin, whose contin-
ued actuality (Aktualität) rests, among other things, on his magi-
cal ability to “illuminate a seemingly odd or insignificant detail to
reveal its hidden theoretical centrality.”5
Before I outline and discuss the significant aesthetic-technical,
historical, and political contours of this acoustic phenomenon,
I would like to briefly contextualize my particular enunciation
of Benjamin’s intellectual project in order to avoid any possible
methodological misunderstandings. Unlike the other chapters
in this book, which revolve around historically contextualized
readings of musicking, the following discussion shifts a num-
ber of textual terrains—both theoretically and practically—to
properly situate the dialectical sonority within the framework of
 dialectical sonority / 55

a critical-deconstructive philosophy of music. This shift is all the

more important given the clear epistemic role that this phenom-
enon will play in the latter half of this study.
I begin with an analysis of how the sounds of nature affected
Benjamin’s self-identity during his childhood, since their soothing
acoustics provided him with the impetus to contemplate the pos-
sible emancipatory potential of sound in his early literary writings.
The underlying phenomenological qualities of these very sonori-
ties will again appear in my close reading of several passages from
his magnum opus, The Arcades Project (1927–40), an unfinished
project of cultural criticism on nineteenth-century Paris, and his
seminal essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility” (1935–39). These two texts suggest an original
aesthetic-technical theory of the dialectical sonority—filtered
through an acoustic version of montage—that transects the his-
torical continuum as self-reflective auditory knowledge. I conclude
my argument by stressing how this new kind of montage is best
exemplified by the contemporary techniques of electronic “sam-
pling,” especially those of the late avant-garde composer Luigi
Nono. In order to draw attention to how a select trajectory of
sound, music, and noise has developed over time in the guise of
the dialectical sonority, it will be necessary to follow Benjamin’s
rhizomatic thought from these multiple perspectives.

Sound as a Mnemonic Device

Sound first occupies a prominent discursive role in Benjamin’s
two autobiographical studies, Berlin Childhood around 1900
(1932–38) and A Berlin Chronicle (1932), and in his Denkbilder
or “thought-images” (1931–33). Literary scholars Helmut
Kaffenberger and Gerhard Richter were the first to systematically
address—independently of each other—the role of sound in these
texts.6 Both scholars investigate how Benjamin accesses certain
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mnemonic images of his Berlin childhood through a variety of

acoustic phenomena. Nevertheless, their critical evaluation of
these sounds is noticeably different. Whereas Kaffenberger con-
centrates on how Rausch-like sounds correspond to moments of
melancholic remembrance, Richter is concerned with how tech-
nological noise serves as a traumatic disruption of the individual
self. They implicitly acknowledge sound’s relationship to the dia-
lectical image, yet neither undertakes a close, analytical reading
of this particular relationship.
In these autobiographical texts, Benjamin sought to capture the
“images” (SW, 3: 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
recall the generally cheerful time of his childhood. In chroni-
cling a subject suspended between the private and public sphere,
Benjamin explores the relationship between modern urban expe-
riences and the processes of individual memory. Throughout
these texts, there are persistent references to an “acoustics of pro-
fane illumination”:7 how seemingly accidental, banal, or inconse-
quential sounds—often recalled within the densest weaves of the
narrative—immediately 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, mono-
tone sound” (eintönig-einschläfernden Geräusch),8 such as buzzing,
clinking, droning, murmuring, rushing, sighing, or whispering.
These Rausch-like sounds always tend to inaugurate phantasma-
gorical experiences, which for Benjamin are refuges for utopian
impulses, or instantaneous moments like writer Marcel Proust’s
concept of “involuntary memory” (mémoire involontaire), which
convey the melancholic remembrance of a childhood experience.
 dialectical sonority / 57

Despite Benjamin’s 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.9 In this prose miniature, Benjamin
prized the loggia (the in-between space that negotiates the tensions
of the private and public sphere) as an exemplary site of memory.10
He describes the aural atmosphere of a Berlin courtyard, where
he encounters several Rausch-like sounds that serve as the catalyst
for elegiac childhood memories. In one specific passage, Benjamin
emphasizes the mnemonic function of a series of sonoric elements,
which concludes with the following observation: as the “dusty can-
opy of leaves brushed up against the wall of the house a thousand
times a day, the rustling of the branches initiated me into a knowl-
edge to which I was not yet equal” (SW, 3: 345). The brushing of
the leaves and the rustling of the branches offer a sudden, revela-
tory “moment [that is] reserved exclusively for the ear” (SW, 2: 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 knowl-
edge. As he writes elsewhere: when a pile of withered leaves rustles,
“there resonates from within it ‘a kind of hide-and-seek game’ (ein
Sichverstecken und Gesuchtwerden).”11 Benjamin not only recovers
the long-forgotten traces of past experiences, but also the “weak mes-
sianic power” (SW, 4: 390) that corresponds to these moments. For
him, these experiences always hold the unrealized wants, hopes, and
aspirations of a bygone era. Above all, they hold the hints of a revolu-
tionary energy that can be actualized for later cultural-political use.
Sound, thus, inaugurates a listening gaze that moves from melan-
cholic remembrance to utopian redemption.
The belief that sonoric phenomena carry a messianic potenti-
ality harks back to Benjamin’s literary-critical masterpiece, The
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Origin of German Tragic Drama (1924–25; 1938). This book

explores the uniquely Baroque form of allegory in the tragic dra-
mas of the seventeenth-century Protestant playwrights Andreas
Gryphius, Daniel Caspar von Lohenstein, and Martin Opitz. He
claims that the medieval emblems used during this epoch created
a “distinctive acoustic register”12 of Rauschen. Here, sound rep-
resented both nature lamenting the “Fall of Man” from Adamic
perfection and the bombastic verbosity of language’s degeneration
into communicative inefficacy.13 In the first instance, Benjamin
believed that the sounds of nature are able to bypass—as sensible
divine footprints—the referential indeterminacy of postlapsarian
knowledge and harness the redemptive forces of the sacred.14 As
philosopher Max Pensky notes, Benjamin held that fallen nature
can be “dimly—auratically—perceived as the sounds of nature
itself . . . [in a] mythic image of the world as a twittering cacoph-
ony of words, rustles, mutters, and sighs.”15 This orientation was
significantly influenced by his study of the Jewish messianic
tradition.
In the second, and more important instance, Benjamin stresses
the human application and accumulation of Baroque emblems.
Because they are based on an entirely arbitrary relationship
between visual and phonetico-linguistic signifiers, tragic drama-
tists obsessively collected, arranged, and combined these emblems
in an attempt to ground meaning. Their desire to stop the met-
onymic slippage of signifiers, however, did not resolve language’s
imprecision. Instead, the uncontrollable proliferation of emblems
further rebelled against semantic efficacy by creating a bombas-
tic verbosity of sounds. According to Benjamin, this new condi-
tion produced 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.”16 By arriving at this
 dialectical sonority / 59

conclusion, he strongly suggested that sound—as an allegorical

intention—is capable of destroying the aesthetic illusion of acous-
tic totality, because its technical application allows “sonoric alle-
gorists” to impose any significance onto sound that they choose.
Through his close reading of the German tragic drama’s contem-
plation of the world as historical decay, with its persistent images
of death, corpses, and ruins, Benjamin began to develop his views
on how allegorical representation could become a revolutionary
agent in history, literature, and politics. Allegory not only shat-
ters the symbolic pretense to false totality, but also articulates an
emancipatory and redemptive view of history as permanent tran-
sience. It strips history of the auratic spell of beautiful appearance
(schöner Schein) and allows all that was once “untimely, sorrow-
ful, [and] unsuccessful”17 to be restored within a new narrative of
redeemed life. That is to say, allegory reveals a hope for “truth”
beyond mere fate.
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” (SW, 3: 389–90). But as Richter stresses, memory’s
acoustic traces “remain forever absent but [nevertheless] recall the
event of a past experience.”18 Here, Benjamin develops a concept
of personal 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.19 Memory, thus,
is an excavation site, in which the acoustic ruins of past experi-
ences are severed from their original context and reassembled by
a sober ear. Benjamin claims that such an approach “determines
the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences” (SW, 2: 611; my
emphasis).20
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Richter is also concerned with the role that sonoric phenom-

ena play in regenerating childhood memories. However, he con-
centrates on how the sounds of technology influence Benjamin’s
autobiographical self in the modern metropolis. In a key analysis,
Richter unpacks how electronic noise functions both as a “mne-
monic trigger and as a disruption of consciousness”—and, particu-
larly, how the physical noise of the telephone suspends the corporeal
self between “simultaneous articulation and dissolution.”21 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 the
private sphere. Philosopher Avital Ronell argues, for example, that
the telephone’s call “destabilizes the identity of self and other, sub-
ject and thing, [and] abolishes the originariness of site.”22 Benjamin
acutely felt the invasive force of its unexpected ringing, which not
only unsettled the middle-class comfort of his family home, but
also disrupted the “historical era that underwrote and enveloped”
this specific device (SW, 3: 350).
It is not unexpected that Richter would highlight these sounds,
because Benjamin’s psychic life was constantly interrupted and
troubled by the hustle and bustle of the urban landscape—and,
especially, technological noises. As his close friend, religious
scholar Gershom Scholem explains: “Another thing that was strik-
ing about him was his extraordinary sensitivity to noise, which he
often referred to as his ‘noise psychosis.’ It really could disturb
him.”23 Given this sensitivity, 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 à la Offenbach, not even the stamping of horses on the
 dialectical sonority / 61

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 cast-iron 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. (SW, 3:
374–75)

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.”24 In his theo-
retical writings, shock is an entirely ambivalent concept: in its
corporeal capacity, it designates “traumatic incursion [and] defen-
sive warding off,”25 and in its artistic-tactile capacity, it designates
profound revolutionary insight. In the former context, shock is
negatively evaluated, because it destroys the capacity for mem-
ory (Gedächtnis), integrated experience (Erfahrung), and even the
transmittal of an authentic cultural heritage.
In his essay, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939), which
draws upon Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920),26
Benjamin laments how the modern subject’s cognitive-affective
powers must be enhanced—through a psychical mechanism of
neutralization—against 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 conscious-
ness into the unconscious. Unfortunately, this condition requires
a constantly vigilant state of awareness. As a result, the subject’s
psychical capacity for “lending coherence to and deriving mean-
ing from the accumulation of [modernity’s] isolated, fragmentary
occurrences” is greatly diminished.27 This process has profound
implications for memory, namely, the subject’s increasing inability
to assimilate and voluntarily recall information by way of authen-
tic experience (Erfahrung). Within the realm of sound, however,
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the dialectical sonority will reintegrate these shocks into an active

revolutionary consciousness.

Articulating the Dialectical Sonority

The dialectical image is the central theoretical and methodological
category of Benjamin’s late aesthetic, historical, and political theo-
rizations. He regarded the dialectical image as the key conceptual
framework of The Arcades Project, and its most sustained analysis
can be found in the fragmentary notes of the work’s Convolute
N. These notes relate to a new theory of knowledge and progress,
and were largely compiled in the Bibliothèque nationale de France
during the 1930s, when Benjamin was exiled to Paris. (A wonder-
ful set of photographs by Gisèle Freund from 1937 shows him
seated at his desk and absorbed with taking notes in the library’s
reading room.) But despite its genuine originality, he was unable to
offer a coherent and linear account of the dialectical image.28 His
often-contradictory attempts to articulate its revolutionary inter-
pretative powers simply resulted in theoretical excess. As Pensky
explains, Benjamin failed to adequately address “what their pre-
cise methodological role should be taken to be, how they were
to be related to the agency of the critical historian, what sorts of
meta-theoretical and meta-methodological (in other words: theo-
logical) postulates they might imply, or indeed how, and under
what conditions, dialectical images were possible at all.”29 This
status, however, should not be viewed as an insurmountable theo-
retical deficiency; rather, it provides an unexpected opening for
new interpretations and applications of the dialectical image and
sonority. This rich potentiality of the dialectical image fascinated
Adorno, who incorporated aspects of its methodology into his own
well-known philosophemes of the “constellation” (Konstellation)
and “force field” (Kraftfeld).30 It was Adorno who, in his forceful
letters of the late 1930s, pressed Benjamin to develop a theory of
 dialectical sonority / 63

the dialectical image, which was, at times, a source of considerable

tension between both men.
There are many textual clues in Benjamin’s later writings
that suggest the precise epistemological contours of the dialecti-
cal sonority. However, it is the convolute’s first note (N 1,1) that
encapsulates its principal properties in the most direct way: “In
the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only
in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that fol-
lows” (AP, 456).31 Benjamin’s use of lightning as a metaphor is
a constant leitmotif in his writings.32 For the dialectical image,
lightning implies that knowledge is imagistic (it flashes up before
the eyes) and 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 a theory of the
dialectical sonority. Knowledge is not only visual and dazzling;
it is also acoustic and thunderous—it pierces, even deafens, the
ear. In this 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 sono-
rous event of equal importance. In this dialectical move, he pro-
poses that power/knowledge constellations, with their embedded
reciprocal effectivity of historical subjectivity and objectivity, are
also packaged as sound: or, quite simply, that knowledge is aurally
decodable. In fact, Benjamin once described philosophy as a “har-
monious [tönend] relationship.”33
Moreover, Benjamin implies that knowledge is a textual phe-
nomenon that weaves together cultural and political pre- and
post-histories. It continues to “roll on” in the historical contin-
uum as acoustic phenomena. That is to say, knowledge belatedly
rematerializes as temporally charged sonorities in the form of
“resonances, tones, and echoes.”34 In his work on poetic echo-
lalia, literary theorist Rainer Nägele reminds us that echoes are
“not self-reflective; [they are only] a reflex.”35 For Benjamin,
 64 / musical revolutions in german culture

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’ ” (AP, 474) through its mate-
rialization as a dialectical sonority. Consequently, one can only
register the sonoric history of consciousness through a kind of
dialectical listening.
Despite his methodological inconsistencies regarding the dia-
lectical image, Benjamin was convinced of two key features.
First, it is primarily characterized by the sudden, shocking crys-
tallization of an imagistic experience; and, second, it appears as
a monadological entity, which encapsulates—in its very concrete
materiality—the entire history of that individual 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 suddenness—
the shock—with which the dialectical image ‘flashes up.’ ”36
The dialectical image’s insistence on shock is indebted to
Benjamin’s close reading of the Surrealist works of writers Louis
Aragon and André Breton. He was fascinated by how their incon-
gruous juxtaposition of marginalized cultural phenomena—
through the aesthetic-technical principle of montage—maximized
the effects of cognitive and corporeal shock, and how these newly
formed constellations realized the hidden forms of revolutionary
content. In the same way, the dialectical image’s ephemeral coin-
cidence is a direct translation of Proust’s mémoire involontaire onto
Benjamin’s own historiographical methodology. For Proust, the
most enigmatic and elusive physiological sensations may awaken
unexpectedly long-forgotten memories of the past. The mémoire
involontaire is always the result of an abrupt temporal concentra-
tion, which calls forth exceptionally vivid, kinesthetically charged
images. While Proust sought to recapture the mythic state of
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childhood bliss, Benjamin’s own dialectical understanding of these

memories sought to redeem the lost and missed opportunities of
cultural phenomena.
The dialectical sonority (der dialektische Klang)37 is, therefore,
an acoustic object that—through the tense, fleeting crystallization
of antithetical sonoric elements—provides an analytical critique of
acoustic power/knowledge constellations, while resonating with
the sounds of revolutionary historical consciousness. It material-
izes 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” (AP, 475),
where sounds are neither completely reconciled nor sublimated but,
rather, held in check by a weak synthetic force field of sonoric sus-
pension. Contrary to Hegel’s procedure of sublation (Aufhebung),
which absorbs and resolves all heterogeneity into a formally bal-
anced entity, this process negates any kind of positivity—its recip-
rocal effectivity refuses to dissolve the uniqueness of each individual
sound byte. As such, this force field provides a mode of knowledge
that often exceeds logical categories of human perception, and its
governing principle is none other than montage.
The most important characteristic of the dialectical sonority
is its location within an historical force field, where the “con-
frontation between its fore-history and after-history is played out”
(AP, 470). This location is instantaneously generated through the
“temporal concentration and intensification”38 of two discrete
historical moments. Here, the dialectical sonority becomes a
privileged medium in which two different temporal axes—the
past and the present—frontally collide to open up new cognitive-
affective horizons of auditory power/knowledge. This process is
“comparable, in method, to the process of splitting the atom [that]
liberates the enormous energies of history” (AP, 463).
The above moment of temporal flux corresponds to Benjamin’s
famous conception of “dialectics at a standstill”: “It’s not that
 66 / musical revolutions in german culture

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” (AP, 462). The unexpected implosion that results from
this dynamic process liberates sonoric phenomena from their tra-
ditional historical contexts and allows their recontextualization
into a new and “potentially explosive form of history.”39 The
dialectical sonority would appear “now with rhyme and reason,
sonorously, congruously, in the structure of a new text” (SW, 2:
454). This moment removes acoustic phenomena—as individual
fragments—from their embeddedness within the reified historical
continuum and forges them into new historical reconstructions of
sound. Hence, Benjamin’s oft-quoted assertion: “ ‘Construction’
presupposes ‘destruction’ ” (AP, 470).
Through this ephemeral, historical index of the Then and the
Now, Benjamin believed that the dialectical sonority could reveal
the hidden utopian potential encoded within the acoustic sub-
stratum 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 aural data that becomes “actualized”—
that is, revealed, remembered, and redeemed—in the present. As
such, the dialectical sonority insists that sound is not an opus con-
summatum et effectum, but rather a reserve of unacknowledged
promise that is yet to be realized. The consequence of this posi-
tion is of utmost importance for historical materialism, because
the acoustic past is essentially incomplete and open to “startling
[new] revisions.”40
Despite the dialectical image’s ingenious conceptualization,
there existed a fair amount of tension between Benjamin and
Adorno over the representation of this philosophical constellation.
Unlike for Adorno, Benjamin believed that cultural-revolutionary
insights could best be represented by a “dialectical image rather
 dialectical sonority / 67

than by dialectical argumentation.”41 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 Journal for Social Research. In his oft-cited
letter of November 10, 1938, from New York, Adorno rejected the
essay on behalf of the institute and accused Benjamin of neglect-
ing the theoretical mediation—that is, the filter of historical and
sociocultural processes—that relates the image’s constitutive parts
to the larger dialectical structure. Instead of imposing a narrative
order upon the dialectical image’s disparate elements, Benjamin
sought to achieve, by mere juxtaposition, an explosive crystalliza-
tion that would not only activate, but also preserve each individual
element in its shocking particularity.
According to Adorno’s critique, Benjamin’s refusal to apply the-
oretical tools, which reminded him of playwright Bertolt Brecht’s
own lack of dialectics,42 “tends to switch into the wide-eyed pre-
sentation of mere facts . . . [His] study is located at the crossroads
of magic and positivism. This spot is bewitched.”43 The prob-
lem facing Benjamin was the principle of montage itself. Adorno
believed that Benjamin’s privileging of uniting disparate textual
elements—without the appropriate mediation of theory—merely
remythologizes the dialectical image and, thus, undermines its
potential for political efficacy.44 To be sure, Adorno’s critique
underscores (and rightly so) Benjamin’s lack of mediation. In
maintaining this position, however, Adorno misses what literary
scholar Jean-Michel Rabaté has referred to as the “real novelty in
Benjamin’s abruptly imagistic mode of presentation”: the ability
to explosively illuminate a cultural artifact’s oft-hidden particu-
larities. As Rabaté continues: “[E]ven when Benjamin is ‘wrong,’
he always hits something because of the suggestive power of his
‘dialectical images.’ ”45
For my project, this suggestive power guarantees the very pos-
sibility of conceptualizing the dialectical sonority. And, despite
 68 / musical revolutions in german culture

Benjamin’s theoretical inadequacies, he always delivers—to use

Adorno’s own words—an “aesthetic debate which [is] so mag-
nificently inaugurated.”46 With respect to processes such as
deaestheticization, dialectical penetration, and technological
reproducibility, Benjamin’s observations on acoustic phenom-
ena are (of course) very similar to those of Adorno. Despite their
symphilosophizing about the properties of the dialectical image, I
still want to highlight how he arrives at many of the same conclu-
sions independently of Adorno.

Actualizing the Dialectical Sonority

Benjamin’s celebrated essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its
Technological Reproducibility,” provides a groundbreaking anal-
ysis of modern technological developments and their engendering
of new artistic modes of production, consumption, and reception.
The essay’s three versions develop a conceptual framework for
understanding the impact of technological reproducibility on aes-
thetic texts as well as for reevaluating such conventional notions
as originality, authenticity, and authority. Even though his essay
provides a critical counterpoint to Adorno and Horkheimer’s nega-
tive appraisal of the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment,
Benjamin greatly overestimated the revolutionary potential of
mass-reproducible art forms for progressive political struggles.
His observations were firmly anchored in the historical develop-
ments of the early twentieth century. He was, therefore, unable
to predict how new social, economic, and technological advances
would reinscribe—with considerable vengeance—the notion of
“aura” onto the realm of electronically reproducible media.47 Yet
one of the essay’s main propositions has withstood the test of
time: technology fundamentally restructures human sensory per-
ception and, by extension, human consciousness. In this regard,
Benjamin’s theses still provide a persuasive argument for apply-
ing technology in the service of recovering critical, self-reflective
moments within sound.
 dialectical sonority / 69

Throughout this essay, and much of his later oeuvre, Benjamin

constantly returns to the aesthetic-technical principle of Technik.
Comprising the most advanced productive materials and tech-
niques available, it removes the artwork from its traditional
function as an object of cultic reverence and fosters new cog-
nitive modes of critical reception by encouraging individuals to
become—following Schlegel’s argument in the previous chapter—
active participants in the work’s aesthetic production and con-
sumption. In analyzing the essay, however, many critics seemingly
foreground larger philosophical concerns (such as “aura,” “dis-
traction,” and “habit”) at the expense of technical application. As
philosopher Esther Leslie stresses in her genealogical 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.”48
The principle of montage is operative across all of these seman-
tic fields: that is, the Technik of juxtaposing antithetical elements
into an original and provocative constellation. One should not
underestimate the importance of montage for Benjamin as a rev-
olutionary artistic medium, since this “procedure has a special
right, perhaps even a perfect right” (SW, 2: 778). Even today, the
actuality of montage continues to reside in its purely allegorical
properties. When properly applied, allegory shatters the decep-
tive semblance of totality and recontextualizes aesthetic artifacts
into new configurations. Furthermore, as Behrens argues, mon-
tage 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.49
To contextualize the potentialities of montage, Benjamin’s
medial investigations into shock are instructive. In his 1929
 70 / musical revolutions in german culture

essay on Surrealism, he addressed how the uncanny juxtaposi-

tion of marginalized cultural phenomena—through the Technik
of montage—maximizes their cognitive shock value and how the
subsequent constellations produce a profane illumination. These
provocative constellations not only “spring forth from memory
in order to shock, but also to mobilize, to urge revolutionary
praxis.”50 Benjamin, though, makes one crucial theoretical dis-
tinction between himself and the Surrealists. Even though he
admired their artistic application of intoxication, he was con-
vinced that such an application was, ultimately, an “inadequate,
undialectical conception” (SW, 2: 216). His cultural-materialist
revolutionary project requires, above all, sober criticism. The
shock engendered by the dialectical sonority must not be an
intoxicant, but rather—in Benjamin’s clever use of an aural met-
aphor—a resounding call to action: an “alarm clock that in each
minute rings for sixty seconds” (SW, 2: 218).
The dialectical sonority can be most prominently heard in con-
temporary electronically produced music. The continual advance-
ment of recording, sequencing, and sampling technology has
exponentially increased the aesthetic-technical and political pos-
sibilities of the montage principle (not to mention the democrati-
zation of musical production through affordable and user-friendly
instruments and software). With this increased technologization,
sound exists predominantly as a montage or Technik of produc-
tion. The idea of radically expanding the acoustic range of sound
can be traced back to composer Luigi Russolo’s futurist manifesto
“Art of Noises” (1913). In this revolutionary text, Russolo argues
that the “limited variety of timbres” possessed by orchestral
instruments should be substituted by an “infinite variety of tim-
bres in noises, reproduced with appropriate mechanisms.”51 Since
Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877, the elec-
tronic manipulation of sound has been further realized by such
instruments as the magnetic tape recorder (1935), the vocoder
 dialectical sonority / 71

(1936), the feedback amplifier (1937), the analog synthesizer

(1957), the digital sampler (1979), the communications protocol
MIDI (1983), and—rather unfortunately—the audio processor
Auto-Tune (1997).52 And with the introduction of the digital
audio workstation GarageBand for Mac OS X in 2004, music has
come a long way from artist László Moholy-Nagy scratching new
sonoric grooves onto records at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, or com-
poser Pierre Schaeffer painstakingly splicing magnetic recording
tape with a razor blade at the Radiodiffusion-télévision française
in the 1940s.
The techniques of reproduction, sequencing, and sampling
offered by digital music instruments are capable of actualiz-
ing the dialectical sonority’s essential constructive principle.
Montages of sound are easily enacted by today’s synthesizers
and samplers. Both of these technologies functionally transform
sound: the synthesizer creates and processes complex units of
sound and the sampler digitally encodes these sounds for future
access and manipulation. Synthesizers and samplers are, thus,
syntax destroyers; musicians can manipulate—both temporally
and spatially—digital “samples” of sound, while simultaneously
generating never-before-heard sonoric constellations. Through
the Technik of editing, filtering, looping, morphing, or phasing,
disparate sounds can be sculpted into new musical configura-
tions. These aesthetic-technical principles not only multiply the
possible takes of discrete sound, but also allow these phenomena
to be continuously changed. In other words, the synthesizer and
sampler rematerialize Schaeffer’s concept of l’objet sonore (sound
object) in musique concrète, which can be isolated, copied, stored,
manipulated, and later replayed. The sonoric dialectician, who
plays these instruments, becomes, then, an “experimental, poly-
technical aesthetic ‘engineer.’ ”53
In his influential book, Studying Popular Music, musicologist
Richard Middleton has suggested that Benjamin’s exploration of
 72 / musical revolutions in german culture

film’s technical possibilities can be “applied with striking results

to [electronically produced] music.”54 In fact, film’s techniques
can be easily superimposed over those of electronic music com-
positions. Analogous to cinematic devices such as close-up, shot/
reverse-shot, and slow motion, the synthesizer and sampler actual-
ize acoustic montages by developing “new synthetic realities” (AP,
857) of sound. Like the moving picture, sounds are “assembled
according to [the] new law” (SW, 4: 264) of digital manipulation.
But, more importantly, the synthesizer and sampler allow the ear
to register what was previously rendered inaudible, thereby mak-
ing “analyzable things which had previously floated unnoticed on
the broad stream of perception” (SW, 4: 265).
These creative processes bring to the forefront new substrata of
aural phenomena, which constitute a so-called acoustic unconscious
(cf. SW, 4: 266). This newly reverberating unconscious provides,
through the allegorizing aspect of montage, an analytical critique
of reality. It destroys the naturalized audibility of cultural phe-
nomena and exposes the hidden aspects of sound’s dialectical rela-
tionship to everyday life. In this way, the entire history of recorded
sound is available for reexperiencing and, most crucially, for trans-
formation. Benjamin foreshadows this very possibility: “The tech-
niques inspired by the camera and subsequent analogous types of
apparatus . . . make it possible at any time to retain an event—as
image and sound—through the apparatus” (SW, 4: 337). Likewise,
the techniques of the synthesizer and sampler foster new cognitive-
affective modes of dialectical listening that remove listeners from
the Kantian sphere of disinterested contemplation and engage the
cultural-revolutionary promise of the dialectical sonority.
Although our ears have lost the power of hearing through the
aural shocks of modernity, digital music instruments of tech-
nological archivization, assemblage, and reproducibility allow
us to capture sonoric phenomena that have remained unregis-
tered for either physiological or cultural-political reasons. Under
 dialectical sonority / 73

conditions of dialectical listening, however, these instruments

enable our ears—in a moment of inverted déjà vu55 —to critically
rehear these sounds. In the Baudelaire essay, Benjamin empha-
sizes the increasing technological exteriorization of memory
through media such as the camera, gramophone, and telephone,
which compensate for modernity’s decreasing mnemonic capac-
ity. Richter argues, here, 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].”56 Similarly, philosopher Susan Buck-Morss claims
that this mnemonic crisis calls for a fundamental restructuring
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.’ ”57
To effectuate this restoration of sense perception, the techno-
logical 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 tech-
nology’s 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. Benjamin also suggests that technological devel-
opments of the future—that is, of our time—might possess the
only means of decryption available to accomplish this reorienta-
tion. He borrows a photographic metaphor from literary historian
André 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,” Benjamin
writes: “If one looks upon history as a text, then one can say of
it what a recent author has said of literary texts—namely, 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’ ” (SW, 4: 405;
 74 / musical revolutions in german culture

cf. AP, 482). It is interesting that Benjamin, the anti-teleological

historian, relies here on a concept of teleological technological
advancement to bolster his argument.
Even though new media technologies contribute to the func-
tional transformation (Umfunktionierung) of traditional aes-
thetic artifacts, Benjamin was always careful to avoid any kind
of “reductive technological determinacy or naive celebration.”58
Although I have privileged the immanent potentiality of Technik
in the previous paragraphs, I would like to avoid projecting a sense
of determinism onto the aesthetic sphere, because, as Benjamin
often emphasized, technology can be deployed for both progres-
sive and regressive political means. I also do not want to fetishize
the principle of montage, which has—since, at least, the historical
avant-garde—become so conventional that it has often, but not
always, lost its critical powers of demystification.
How might we realize the full promise of digital musical instru-
ments and recording technology? Benjamin provides us with the
following advice: the unique dialectical character—that is, the
specific logic—of each technological device needs to be under-
stood and its potential for technical innovation maximized. The
synthesizer and sampler are only two instruments among many.
In the same way, Benjamin insists that thinking is also a critical-
practical activity, a Technik of aesthetic construction and produc-
tion. As he writes in one of his “Central Park” fragments from
1939: “For [‘the dialectician’], thinking means setting the sails.
What is important is how they are set. [Technik is] for him merely
the sails” (SW, 4: 176). Adorno agrees as well: “[W]ithout the
addition of intentionality in its elements,” pure montage is des-
tined for failure; it must, above all, be actualized in the “service
of emancipatory intentions.”59 Consequently, it is the synthesizer
and sampler’s technological potentiation by critical musicians and
their progressive political intentions that will determine the actu-
ality and political efficacy of the dialectical sonority.
 dialectical sonority / 75

With regard to the specifics of potentiation, I leave that—with

the risk of mythologization—to today’s polytechnical aesthetic
engineers, such as DJs using (professional quality) digital audio
workstations to make music from the informal studio of their
own home. They, in turn, would inaugurate Jacques Attali’s final
network of sonoric production, or “composition,” in which “music
[is] produced by each individual for himself, for pleasure outside
of meaning, usage and exchange.”60 And despite my application
of this aesthetic-technical principle to the electronic manipu-
lation  of advanced musical materials, I want to also stress that
Technik (as technology, technics, and technique) can be equally
applied to all music-making instrumentation as well as the infi-
nite possibilities of sound creation.

Toward an Acoustics of Historical Materialism

In order to realize the full aesthetic power of music, critical acous-
ticians must bring together fragmentary sounds into a provoca-
tive critical constellation—or dialectical sonority—by blasting
open the “reified ‘continuity of history’ ” (AP, 474). It is a process
that explodes, with immense cunning, the repressive networks of
social control and false satisfactions, which are sustained by the
ideological manipulation of sound. Here, the dialectical sonor-
ity “extracts” truth from the forces of historical continuity in the
form of power/knowledge and, later, revolutionary energy. This
aesthetical-technical operation can only be accomplished through
sober philosophical reflection and the deconstructive strategies of
“[i]mmanent criticism, allegorical ruination, explosive engineer-
ing, tactile appropriation, [sonoric] construction, and historical
redemption.”61 Only through these critical-practical activities can
the dialectical sonority and its truth content be “constructed in
the materialist presentation of history” (AP, 475).
To fully realize this operation, Benjamin’s sound engineer
must blast acoustic objects out of the standardized repertoires of
 76 / musical revolutions in german culture

cultural knowledge in order to liberate their subjugated utopian

potential. He must purposely extract these sonorities from their
traditional contexts and interpretations, and painstakingly reas-
semble and reconfigure them into new critical constellations of
sound. This procedure of fragmentation violently removes the
sonoric object from its ephemeral and transitory context within
history—in other words, its deceptive glimmer of beauty and pre-
tense to totality. It actualizes the object’s emancipatory promise
in the medial character of a new sound configuration and renders
it serviceable for concrete cultural-revolutionary use. Unlike his
intellectual predecessor, Schlegel, who works for an aesthetic arti-
fact’s elevation and perfection, Benjamin’s critical methodology—
which follows that of the Baroque tragic dramatists—advocates
“annihilation.” Although allegorical intention is integral to the
deconstructive procedure of both Benjamin and his seventeenth-
century interlocutors, there is one crucial difference. Whereas
these playwrights simply assigned arbitrary meaning to worldly
phenomena, modern-day sonoric allegorists uncover the objec-
tive and audible truth content of specific historical contingencies.
This latter act transforms “historical content, such as provides the
basis of every important work of art, into philosophical truth.”62
It allows truth to emerge from the ruins of a thoroughly dismem-
bered historical text. That is, “annihilation” rescues the objective
and subjective particularity of sound, which has been obliter-
ated by aesthetic convention, cultural hierarchies, and traditional
bourgeois norms.
One of Benjamin’s most enduring intellectual legacies is his
ruthless destabilization of traditional cultural hierarchies that
privilege the realm of “high” culture at the expense of the “popu-
lar.” Although his project of profane illumination strove largely to
rehabilitate the sphere of cultural marginalia, Benjamin (unlike
many later critics with similar viewpoints) also has a “reverential
attitude”63 toward tradition, because he believed that an untapped
 dialectical sonority / 77

reservoir of critical impulses is deeply embedded within canoni-

cal culture. For him, all cultural artifacts are worthy markers of
objective social truth; they are “historically charged”64 or capa-
ble of releasing historical energy in a cultural-revolutionary way.
Following the early German Romantics, Benjamin insisted that
this objective truth could be found in a cultural artifact’s “peaks
and crags” (AP, 474) and hidden moments of fissure, discontinu-
ity, and dissonance. It, thus, becomes the responsibility of dialec-
tical listeners to salvage and actualize the heterogeneous sounds
of both traditional and profane culture.
Critical acousticians must always be vigilant against the per-
petual threat of having the emancipatory potential of sound con-
figurations liquidated by the arbitrators of officially sanctioned
culture. As Benjamin writes in his “On the Concept of History,”
they must act decisively under these ominous conditions in order
to rescue an imperiled past, present, and future from a “con-
formism that is working to overpower it” (SW, 4: 391). They
must declare a true state of emergency over sound, because the
temporal index governing this moment of danger is always the
emphatic “ ‘now of recognizability’ ” (AP, 464). Like the temporal
framework of the dialectical sonority, this index is fleeting and
transitory; therefore, the critical acoustician must be able to grasp
the revolutionary truth content before it threatens to disappear
irrevocably. Benjamin is quite explicit here: “The [sonority] that
is [heard]—which is to say, the [sonority] in the now of its recog-
nizabilty—bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous
critical moment on which all [hearing] is founded” (AP, 463).
Despite the “tiny spark of contingency” (SW, 2: 510) that dis-
tinguishes the dialectical sonority from other cultural phenomena,
its peculiar manifestation requires an “unacknowledged degree
of subjective involvement.”65 Through a unique application of
critical intelligence and analytical precision, critical acousticians
must know how to construct that constellation of discrete sonoric
 78 / musical revolutions in german culture

phenomena, which will sound the dialectical sonority. Above all,

they must be able to recognize which fragments—when listening
in the state of emergency—will provide the enabling conditions
for the dialectical sonority’s actualization. The conditions govern-
ing their subjective intervention will, of course, always be histori-
cally specific.
A prime example of such a critical-practical project—in both
aesthetic and musical-philosophical terms—is the musical schol-
arship of Mário Vieira de Carvalho and the electroacoustic com-
positions of Nono, both of whom greatly admire Benjamin.
Drawing upon Benjamin’s theories of allegorical intention, his-
torical materialism, and technological reproducibility, Vieira de
Carvalho persuasively argues that the strategic deployment of
montage in musical works can arouse sustainable moments of
dialectical listening in the audience: that is, the critical capac-
ity of the listener to follow the dynamic unfolding of the musi-
cal work’s subjective and objective particularities.66 He uses these
aforementioned theories to read the cultural-political work of
several musical texts by Nono, who is keenly interested in how
live electronics—by generating unlimited possibilities of sound
spatialization—can explode the reified past through a montage of
musical quotations.67 Vieira de Carvalho investigates how Nono’s
compositions blast open textual fragments from the continuum
of cultural and musical history, and how these are, then, arranged
into new critical constellations to reveal the illusory character
of unity and linearity in culture, music, and history. Benjamin
argues that this practice “wrenches [the text] destructively from its
context” (SW, 2: 454), an action that both punishes and redeems,
since it wrestles away quotations from their subjugated position in
history in order to unleash their critical power.
In his operatic tour de force, Prometheus: The Tragedy of
Listening (1981–85),68 Nono uses electronic techniques of sound
projection and modification (such as amplification, echo, and
 dialectical sonority / 79

reverberation) not only to supplement the live orchestral instru-

mentation and vocal performance, but also to forge fragments
from canonical German and Greek texts into new dialectical
images and sonorities. The Italian libretto, authored by philoso-
pher Massimo Cacciari, features historical and literary texts from
writers as diverse as Aeschylus, Euripides, Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, Herodotus, Hesiod, Hölderlin, Pindar, Rainer Maria
Rilke, Schoenberg, and Sophocles to present a nonlinear version
of the myth of Prometheus, the Titan god who created human-
kind out of clay. These fragments, including key selections from
Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” open up polyvalent per-
spectives, which reveal that “neither Prometheus is dead nor his-
tory at its end.”69 By citing such works, I do not want to suggest
that only the electronic manipulation of sound is able to make
Benjamin’s auditory insights serviceable for musicking. Nor is it
an attempt to restrict the possible uses of an aesthetics of the dia-
lectical sonority to twentieth-century serious electronic music. I
highlight Nono’s compositions, because they provide a particularly
compelling illustration of how an acoustic montage of sound—
saturated with revolutionary historical data—might be creatively
decontextualized and fragmented. As we will see in the following
chapter on radical music, such sonorities are also achieved by tra-
ditional instrumentation in the works of Beethoven, Mahler, and
select composers of the Second Viennese School.
Within the context of Benjamin’s larger historical-materialist
project, Nono’s musicological strategies are a logical derivation.
His musical configurations create—through continuous elec-
tronic manipulation—ever newer recontextualizations of sound.
These dialectical sonorities initiate a process of semantic repro-
duction that remains infinitely perfectible. They effectuate a non-
stop 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
 80 / musical revolutions in german culture

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” (AP, 392, 470).
The cultural-political efficacy of acoustic phenomena is, there-
fore, determined by configurations like the dialectical sonority,
which crystallize the past and present anew—with an ear toward
the future. That is to say, the emancipatory promise of sound is
never finalized, but always contingent, since historical material-
ism sees the past as an “afterlife . . . whose pulse can be felt in the
present” (SW, 3: 262). By constructing an alarm clock through
the dialectical sonority, the “secret signal of what is to come” (SW,
2: 206) will always remain audible.70