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Musical Revolutions in German CultureWalter Benjamin and the Dialectical Sonority

Musical Revolutions in German Culture: Walter Benjamin and the Dialectical Sonority [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 modest claims of unfamiliarity with music, there are quite a number 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 generally 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 develops 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.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Musical Revolutions in German CultureWalter Benjamin and the Dialectical Sonority

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References (3)

Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan US
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Nature America Inc. 2014
ISBN
978-1-349-49763-8
Pages
53 –80
DOI
10.1057/9781137449955_3
Publisher site
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Abstract

[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 modest claims of unfamiliarity with music, there are quite a number 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 generally 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 develops 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.]

Published: Nov 2, 2015

Keywords: Historical Materialism; Political Efficacy; Lightning Flash; Childhood Memory; German Culture

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