Listening to Vincent Moon — Chapter 4: What is there to experience?(Part 3)
This is the fourth chapter of my PhD thesis entitled “Listening to Vincent Moon: Musical Encounters and the Cinematic Diagram.” For citations and references please use the full item record which can be found at Universitat Pompeu Fabra’s database.
To navigate through all the chapters please go the index. More information on my work can be found at http://matheussiqueira.com
What is there to experience? Fragments of existence in Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura
Throughout this research, “experience” has grown to be an overarching subject. Moon’s interest, since his first explorations into music, was to create an experience (or later to enter an experience) and figure a way to capture his interaction and give the listener the possibility to make that experience his own. To achieve this, he proposes a series of methods to figure out how to balance his work at the impasse of meaning/chaos and the actual/virtual. Moon’s cinematic-diagram discovers in the sonic the tools for what I termed the encounter-image. A frozen experience in route to actualization that depends on the encounter to collapse the virtual infinity of possibilities into a unique interaction.
For the attentive reader, the underlying subject of experience directly dialogues with Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura, a concept that became widely recognized due to The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936).[1] At a superficial look, though, The Work of Art seems almost exclusively concerned with vision and the gaze, attempting to find a solution in film for the problem of modern alienation.
The most popular understanding of aura amplifies this ocularcentrism. The definition of aura that became more common is “the unique appearance of distance, however near it may be” and the understanding of aura as a form of perception that endows a phenomenon, so it may “look back at us.” Both, axiomatically, related to the sense of vision.
Nevertheless, a more in-depth investigation through Walter Benjamin’s body of work expands the popular concepts of aura developed in the artwork essay and helps apprehend aura as belonging to all senses and not just the sight. Conversely, as Susan Buck-Morss will discuss, reading The Work of Art through the broader notions of aesthetics and aura (present in Benjamin’s other works) supports the suggestion that it is a text discussing how the domination of vision germinates into a poverty of experience with severe consequences (that become most apparent when studying the work of art that is mechanically reproduced). It is here that Moon and Benjamin cross paths. Both are seeking a way to regain the ability to experience reality, to counter the sovereignty of vision that results in alienation. Moreover, their proposals, as I’ll develop, may be closer than it seems.
In this section, Moon’s cinematic-diagram is associated with Benjamin’s ideas of experience and aura. Avoiding repeating an already extensively detailed explanation of aura and to not recapitulate what has already been written about Moon’s diagram, the aim is to converge the implications of Moon’s intense focus on experience with the relevance of his work outside film theory.
Aesthetics as sensory perception
The concept of the encounter-image relies on a central core, that of the experience. The listener that interacts with the film unfreezes the proposition and is inserted in the middle of the circuit of actualization. In Moon, this leads to a film that aims to be, moreover than a historical object for appreciation, a medium for a singular and unrepeatable experience to take place. In the description of an event where Moon and Priscilla Telmon presented the live-version of Híbridos and another project they shot in Morocco called Labyrinths (2017), the introduction for the performance reads:
Studying one of their films or experiments (all freely available on the internet), is like entering into the very sensation generated by the music. The smooth image becomes a vibration through the details absorbed by the camera; as though they are allowed to live until the very moment of their deliverance.[2]
As the organizers of the event astutely described, Moon’s work is one that dies when it’s delivered; it annihilates itself once it’s experienced. The encounter-image grasps through Deleuze the functioning of such deliverance, in Benjamin, however, experience and actualization merge into one, not one as the result of the other but as mutually dependent. To unpack this connection, it is necessary to pave the way for what experience is in Benjamin and the problem of alienation.
Susan Buck-Morss, in her article Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered (1992), questions the reasoning behind the strange ending of the text where Benjamin writes that “Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art.”[3] What does a politicized art mean? Is it merely art that is used as a vehicle for communist ideas? In her pursuit to decipher the intentions of the author, Buck-Morss uncovers Benjamin’s underlying inquiry into the role of the senses in countering alienation:
He is demanding of art a task far more difficult — that is, to undo the alienation of the corporeal sensorium, to restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses for the sake of humanity’s self-preservation, and to do this, not by avoiding the new technologies, but by passing through them.[4]
The term aesthetics, in the writings of Benjamin, carries a great significance. It is not only a congealed artistic value for beauty and taste, but instead, it resurfaces its original etymological meaning: Aisthitikos, which in ancient Greek is “perceptive by feeling,” and Aisthisis, the sensory experience of perception. Buck-Morss reminds that “the original field of aesthetics is not art but reality — corporeal, material nature.”[5] It is within this expanded understanding of aesthetics that Benjamin works. Alienation, therefore becomes an aesthetical problem, for it is a numbing of the senses that perceive and experience reality.
Buck-Morss has the insight to connect this numbing of senses to anaesthetics (or anesthetics), the literal disconnection of the senses to reality. She historically links aesthetics to how the use of drugs in modern society advanced the medical field — especially surgery after the popularization of anesthetics — and uncoupled the sense of sight from all the others. It’s a brilliant association that returns to why film is spotlighted in The Work of Art as symptomatic of alienation. More specifically Buck-Morss’ incursion into the medical history of aesthetics and anesthetics elucidates Benjamin’s comparison between the painter and the cameraman to the magician and the surgeon:
The magician maintains the natural distance between himself and the person treated (…) The surgeon does exactly the reverse; he greatly diminishes the distance from the patient by penetrating the patient’s body (…) In short: unlike the magician (traces of whom are still found in the medical practitioner), the surgeon abstains at the decisive moment from confronting his patient person to person; instead, he penetrates the patient by operating — Magician is to surgeon as painter is to cinematographer. The images obtained by each differ enormously. The painter’s is a total image, whereas that of the cinematographer is piecemeal, its manifold parts being assembled according to a new law.[6]
The root of this difference lays in perception. With anesthetic, the subject of surgery is blocked out from any perception, but most importantly to this case, the surgeon also becomes sensorially limited. The cries of the patient no longer bother, the scalpel cutting through skin and nerves is not heard or felt, and only what’s necessary is touched while the rest of the body lays isolated under clean sheets. The patient loses its uniqueness; it’s a compartmentalized body where the surgeon is only responsible for a specific section. It becomes an anonymous flesh scrutinized under the cold lights of the operating room.
The difference, therefore, between painter and cinematographer is that the painter can perceive and interact through sight, sound, touch, and smell. Therefore, recognizing the uniqueness and singularity (the aura of which I’ll delve into soon) of its subject. The painter captures the “total image,” which could also be the undivided body (if remembering back to the body without organs). The cinematographer, on the other hand, with his senses anesthetized, frames through the viewfinder a surgical perception of reality where neither sound, smell, taste or touch can reach. Only vision exists. The cameraman dissects the guts of the subject but is unable to have any kind of experience while the painter, keeps a distance from the subject but is still able to have a full experience nonetheless. From this perspective, the popular definition of aura as “the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be” is enlightening — moreover than an opposition between close/far, it seems to concern how all senses influence the perception of experience (aesthetic in other words).
In Moon, there is an attempt to merge magician and surgeon, or painter and cinematographer. Through Accompaniment and especially in Cine-trance, there is a drive in his work to refuse the camera a surgical vision by denying its authority, by fusing the camera to the body and using all his senses by approaching possession and plant-induced altered states of mind while shooting his films. The most axiomatic connection, however, is in the sonic, for as I analyzed in the section of noise and in the illustration of Les Chants de Maldoror in the theoretical framework chapter, sound opens the body for a sensuous experience that subverts the supremacy of sight. A dominance that Benjamin explicitly views as problematic by quoting George Simmel in his text on Baudelaire:
Someone who sees without hearing is much more uneasy than someone who hears without seeing. In this there is something characteristic of the sociology of the big city. Interpersonal relationships in big cities are distinguished by a marked preponderance of the activity of the eye over the activity of the ear. The main reason for this is the public means of transportation. Before the development of buses, railroads, and trams in the nineteenth century, people had never been in a position of having to look at one another for long minutes or even hours without speaking to one another.[7]
The preponderance of the optical since modernity, when contrasting with the other forms of perception, becomes one of the factors to alienate and dominate the masses. It offers only a limited perception of what surrounds a person, both physically and historically. In his text Marseilles, that opens with the quotation “The street … the only valid field of experience”[8] he plays with how vision ends alienating the body from experiencing the environment in which its inserted:
Noises. High in the empty streets of the harbor district they are as densely and loosely clustered as butterflies on a hot flower bed. Every step stirs a song, a quarrel, a flapping of wet linen, a rattling of boards, a baby’s bawling, a clatter of buckets. Only you have to have strayed up here alone, if you are to pursue them with a net as they flutter away unsteadily into the stillness. For in these deserted corners all sounds and things still have their own silences, just as, at midday in the mountains, there is a silence of hens, of axes, of cicadas. But the chase is dangerous, and the net is finally torn when, like a gigantic hornet, a grindstone impales it from behind with its whizzing sting.[9]
While listening to the sounds, everything is close; each step is echoed by a song, the world in which the listener walks through interacts back as sonic bodies vibrate together. Once the net appears — the gaze that searches to capture the subject — all sounds run away and die into stillness. It ends tragically, from behind (outside the field of vision) a “whizzing sting” punctures the net, destroys the gaze. Can the flâneur go back to listening to the life in the empty streets once he cannot capture any sounds?
In The Work of Art Benjamin searches for a new reconfiguration of the image (or images if talking about film) that enables — through vision — a reopening of the other senses. His concern appears to find a way so that one can go back to listening to the song of each step, to “a quarrel, a flapping of wet linen, a rattling of boards, a baby’s bawling, a clatter of buckets.” Similarly to the surgeon that has forgotten the experience of interacting with the body that now lays anesthetized in the operating room, the individual no longer can go back and vibrate in the renvoi of the empty street.
Coincidence or not, Buck-Morss calls attention to the fact that in 1936, the same year that Benjamin published his artwork essay, Jacques Lacan delivered a paper to the International Psychoanalytic Association where his idea of “mirror stages” also connected the dominance of sight to the division of the body:
[Jacques Lacan’s paper] described the moment when the infant of six to eighteen months triumphantly recognizes its mirror image, and identifies with it as an imaginary bodily unity. This narcissistic experience of the self as a specular “reflection” is one of mis(re)cognition. The subject identifies with the image as the “form” (Gestalt) of the ego, in a way that conceals its own lack. It leads, retroactively, to a fantasy of the “body-in-pieces” (corps morcele).[10]
Both Benjamin and Lacan, synchronously, connect sight to the compartmentalization of the body, a problem that as Buck-Morss interprets can be read as a theory of fascism. To regain the senses, to counter alienation becomes a matter of reopening the body so it may experience through all the senses. A decade later, Antonin Artaud, in his piece To Have Done with the Judgment of God (1947), invoked the body without organs as prefiguring freedom from alienation:
When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions
and restored him to his true freedom.[11]
For Moon to ground a cinematic practice on listening is a method to amalgamate all these separated body pieces into one. To create the organon that reverberates, forming the sensuous body that resonates not in a compartmentalized existence but in the form that many posterior philosophers will advocate. To posit listening as a stance that is idealized in the neonate baby, as Nancy and Nadal-Melsió do, comes as a direct answer to Lacan’s corps morcele and Benjamin’s ending words in the artwork essay, of “politicizing art.” To aim for the uncompartmentalized body of a newborn is to prevent reaching a stage where the body itself alienates the senses and is unable to resound. As Buck-Morss paraphrases, it is “the crisis in cognitive experience caused by the alienation of the senses that makes it possible for humanity to view its own destruction with enjoyment.”[12]
Aura appears as an answer and simultaneously as an inquiry on how to regain this lost experience. In Benjamin’s early texts (his texts on hashish for example) this was more apparent, but the key is to comprehend how in The Work of Art the notion of aura as a form of unlocking the aesthetic (sensing the world) leads to a theory of how to recover the ability to experience. Miriam Hansen, who dedicated many years studying Benjamin’s work writes that furthermore than the problematic readings that ignore the aesthetic notions of perception and experience that were explored above, to narrow down Benjamin’s aura to The Work of Art is also to miss how the idea of aura developed and changed through his work as the text that made it famous is also one of the most limited explorations on the subject that he did:
With the denigration of the auratic image in favor of reproduction, Benjamin implicitly denies the masses the possibility of aesthetic experience, in whatever form (and thus, like the Communist Party during the 1920s, risks leaving aesthetic needs to be exploited by the enemy). More important yet, he cuts himself off from a crucial impulse of his own thought — crucial at least to a theory of experience in the age of its declining communicability.[13]
What is this crucial impulse of his own thought? For Hansen, it is to comprehend the concept of aura through Benjamin’s “wider, anthropological, visionary, and psychoteleogical dimensions.” It should not be reduced to the opposition of binary mutually exclusive terms: the relationship of aura vs. technical reproduction, and aura vs. the masses.[14] By restoring these lost dimensions to aura, Hansen highlights the conflicting roles that aura played throughout his endeavor to theorize experience (Erfahrung), how it named a specific type of experience for Benjamin, and not least:
Aura’s epistemic structure, secularized and modernized (qua “profane illumination,” Weimar flânerie, “mimetic faculty,” and “optical unconscious”), can also be seen at work in Benjamin’s efforts to reconceptualize experience through the very conditions of its impossibility, as the only chance to counter the “bungled” (capitalist-imperialist) adaptation of technology that first exploded in World War I and was advancing the fascist conquest of Europe.[15]
Encountering fragments of one’s own existence
Benjamin’s auratic experience is developed on top of Bergson’s notion of durée and elán vital, which in broad strokes can be translated to Deleuzian terms as corresponding to virtual duration and the moment of actualization. Benjamin’s conceptualization of alienation as being deprived of the senses that perceive reality only makes sense due to his understanding of a person in Bergsonian terms: “for a conscious being to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”[16] Endlessly creating oneself, in Bergson, happens through the elán vital (actualization). An individual, therefore, is formed by the accumulation of actualizations, of collapsing the multiplicity of the virtual into the actual. Deleuze notes that Bergson’s most important contribution to philosophy is precisely in defining duration as a type of multiplicity, in separating two major types, “the one discrete or discontinuous, the other continuous, the one spatial and the other temporal, the one actual the other virtual.”[17]
Furthermore than only help Benjamin define what a consciousness is, it is Bergson’s duration (durée) that lays the founding blocks for the notion of experience. The word experience itself translates poorly from its German source Erfahrung. Claire Blancowe, in her article Destroying Duration: The Critical Situation of Bergsonism in Benjamin’s Analysis of Modern Experience (2008), brings up the importance of what Erfahrung means for Benjamin and how similar to élan vital it is — “It is the experience that is accumulated throughout an individual’s, or collectivity’s, passage through the temporal flow of qualitative transformation.”[18]
In other words, experience for Benjamin is what is accumulated from the individual’s, or collectivity’s, actualization; what is retained (conscious and unconsciously) in passing from the virtual to the actual. This becomes clear in On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, where Benjamin connects Bergson to Proust to develop the importance of memory (mémoire volontaire and involontaire). Here, an interesting phenomenon happens, which will help understand Moon’s approach to his cinematic-diagram. Similar to the magician vs. surgeon analogy, Benjamin contrasts the journalist, who merely provides information, with the figure of the storyteller, someone who takes hold of his own experience in the process of actualization:
[In regard to newspapers and other media outlets] there is a contrast between all these forms and the story, which is one of the oldest forms of communication. A story does not aim to convey an event per se, which is the purpose of information; rather, it embeds the event in the life of the storyteller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening. It thus bears the trace of the storyteller, much the way an earthen vessel bears the trace of the potter’s hand.[19]
The take hold of one’s own experience becomes the auratic experience. As it is embedded into the life of the storyteller, such experience carries the traces of the singularity of the event, of the actualization. In this example, there is a bipartite splitting of experience: what the storyteller experienced and what the listener experienced hearing the storyteller. The auratic experience, in this case, is not intermediated by an object or a work of art, since it is intrinsically connected to the “storyteller” by coming directly from her/his mouth, hands or body. In modernity though, this direct connection between storyteller and listener is fractured. Benjamin uses the newspapers as an example of the anaestheticization of the story; it no longer is connected to its source, becoming as alienated as the person who wrote it and also as the reader. Susan Buck-Morss finds another useful example to talk about this splitting by connecting the changes that anesthetics implied to surgery:
What happened to perception under these circumstances was a tripartite splitting of experience into agency (the operating surgeon), the object as hyle (the docile body of the patient), and the observer (who perceives and acknowledges the accomplished result).[20]
These are not ontological differences, but positional ones that became characteristic in modernity with the emergence of mechanical reproduction. In this formation, the listener can no longer actualize his own experience as he now encounters the docile anaesthetized “body” that split from the “storyteller,” becoming incapable of accumulating auratic experiences (of creating the involuntary memories that keep the traces of the uniqueness of each interaction) and thus alienated from history and tradition.
Benjamin has some differences, though, from Bergson, he criticizes him for being isolated from history — too attached to forms of experiences that no longer carry any relevance since modernity. For Benjamin, going back is not a viable solution, one has to go through this splitting and find forms to regain the ability to actualize and accumulate the experience of passing through the actual/virtual passage. The artwork essay posits that film can be one of the solutions:
Benjamin’s insight that film, because of both its technological and its collective status, provided the most significant perceptual and social matrix in which the wounds inflicted on human bodies and senses by technology — in its industrial-capitalist and imperialist usage — might yet be healed, in which the numbing of the sensorium in defense against shock and the concomitant splitting of experience could be reversed, if not prevented, in the mode of play.[21]
Without anyway back, in this tripartite configuration, the object of reproduction must find a way, that similar to the storyteller can provide the auratic experience. Unearth methods to embed the object so that through interaction, the listener can actualize and accumulate traces of that singular event. It is a search for a self to emerge in this new agent, the docile body.
Nancy’s call to be all ears and his post-phenomenological self that insists in the renvoi could be seen as an answer to this problem.[22] Bacon’s diagram to insert randomness and Deleuze’s reading that “Bacon has obtained the subject of what Merleau-Ponty calls the ‘continual rebirth of existence’: the Figure”[23] also addresses this question (even if speaking about painting). Additionally, Moon’s notions of cine-trance and the encounter-image carry the possibility for such a unique auratic experience to happen between film and listener. Even though these three are drastically different — the have in common trying to preserve an unconscious, untouched experience in the object of art, as if a third separate self could insist in this middle point of the modern experience. Through Benjamin one could call this a grafting[24] of the involuntary memory into the work of art:
Put in Proustian terms, this means that only what has not been experienced explicitly and consciously, what has not happened to the subject as an isolated experience [Erlebnis], can become a component of mémoire involontaire.[25]
To connect the involuntary memory with a third self that exists in the object of art may seem mystical, but it was initially an integral part to Benjamin’s notion of aura. As Hansen notes, Benjamin had just finished reading his friend’s, Gershom Scholem, article entitled A Kabbalist Account of Prophecy as Self-Encounter (1930) when he first wrote about aura.[26] Apart from thanking Scholem enthusiastically for the article’s enormous value, he appropriated two important ideas. The first is tselem, a belief that a person’s own being emanates and becomes independent, a self-alienation of the self. The second is a form of visionary self-encounter with this emanation (the tselem). Hansen translated a segment from Scholem’s article that inspired Benjamin:
The complete secret of prophecy to the prophet consists in that he suddenly sees the form of his self standing before him, and he forgets his own self and [is removed from it; entrückt] . . . and that form [of his self] speaks with him and tells him the future.[27]
Self-alienation becomes the pre-requisite to implant, at the moment of creation, the work of art with unconscious raw experiences. It grafts the reproducible object with an involuntary memory that will become unique when the listener encounters and interacts with it. Isn’t this how Moon attempts to insert the auratic experience through the encounter-image and in cine-trance? Looking for an encounter with this alienated self in the editing room? Similarly, when discussing the possibility of reintegrating the body into the experiencing of art, Brian O’Doherty also ties modernity to this need of alienation — “It often feels as if we can no longer experience anything if we don’t first alienate it. In fact, alienation may now be a necessary preface to experience.”[28]
Benjamin, in his reading of Kafka, not only reinforces self-alienation importance for a future self-encounter but reaches the key point of the auratic experience:
The invention of motion pictures and the phonograph came in an age of maximum alienation of men from one another, of unpredictably intervening relationships which have become their only ones. Experiments have proved that a man does not recognize his own gait on film or his own voice on the phonograph. The situation of the subject in such experiments is Kafka’s situation; this is what leads him to study, where he may encounter fragments of his own existence-fragments that are still within the context of the role.[29]
To encounter the fragments of one’s own existence is at the core of what an auratic experience is. In light of the condition of an anesthetized living — alienated from perceiving the world and unable of actualizing one’s own experience — the object of art, even if mechanically or digitally reproduced, has to continue the study that opens a space for these fragments to be found: “In the representation of human beings by means of an apparatus their self-alienation has been put to a highly productive use.”[30]
In Moon’s work, to talk about the listener’s encounter and interaction is to talk about the auratic experience created by a self-alienation that happened during the creation of the film. Not only the director is part of a self-encounter, but the listener can, once again: actualize his experience from the virtual (durée); accumulate these auratic experiences (memórie volontaire and involontaire); reopen the senses to escape alienation; and lastly, through all the above, encounter fragments of his own existence so he may take part in history and tradition.
Finish by reading Conclusions or go the INDEX.
[1] Benjamin, W. (2003). The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. In M. W. Jennings (Ed.), Selected Writings Volume 4 (pp. 251–283). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Unless noted otherwise, I’ll be using the third version of the text and abbreviating it for The Work of Art.
[2] Description for their performance at FÈS — Musiques Sacrées du Monde: http://fesfestival.com/2017/en/event/dedales-creation-cinematographique-et-musicale-pour-fes/
[3] “Human-kind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure. Such is the aestheticizing of politics, as practiced by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art.” (Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, 2003, p. 270)
[4] Buck-Morss, S. (1992). Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered. October, 62(Autumn), p. 5.
[5] Ibid., p. 6.
[6] (Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, 2003, p. 264)
[7] SIMMEL, George quoted in Benjamin, W. (2003). On Some Motifs in Baudelaire. In M. W. Jennings (Ed.), Selected Writings: Volume 4. 1938–1940 (pp. 313–356). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. An interesting argument would be to question this text based on the proliferation of portable music devices which ends stimulating even more isolation.
[8] BRETON, A. quoted in Benjamin, W. (1999). Marseilles. In M. W. Jennings (Ed.), Selected Writings: Volume 2. Part 1. 1927–1930, p. 232. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
[9] Ibid., p. 233.
[10] (Buck-Morss, 1992, p. 37)
[11] ARTAUD, A. (1976). To Have Done with the Judgment of God. In S. Sontag. (ed) Selected Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 571.
[12] Ibid. She paraphrases Benjamin’s last sentences in The Work of Art.
[13] Hansen, M. B. (1987). Cinema and Experience: “The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology”. New German Critique, 40 (Special Issue on Weimar Film Theory), p. 186.
[14] (Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, 2012, p. 130)
[15] Ibid., p. 105.
[16] Bergson, H. (1944). Creative Evolution. New York: Random House, p. 10.
[17] Deleuze, G. (1991). Bergsonism. New York: Zone Books, p. 117.
[18] Blencowe, C. (2008). Destroying Duration: The Critical Situation of Bergsonism in Benjamin’s Analysis of Modern Experience. Theory, Culture & Society, p. 143.
[19] (Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, 2003, p. 316)
[20] (Buck-Morss, 1992, p. 30)
[21] (Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, 2012, p. 126)
[22] I have not discussed specific artists in relation to Nancy’s concept of listening, nevertheless, Sara Nadal-Melsió in Allora & Calzadilla (2018) greatly expands on the practice of the duo as an example of a long-term art practice based on listening.
[23] (Carraro, 2014, pp. 61–62)
[24] Benjamin, in my opinion not coincidently, was an avid researcher of graphology.
[25] (Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, 2003, p. 317) Erlebnis, here bracketed by Benjamin is related to mémoire involontaire, an incident isolated from the passage of time that through shock ends not constituting the lived experience.
[26] (Hansen, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, 2012, p. 127)
[27] Scholem, G. Quoted in Ibid., p. 128.
[28] (O’Doherty, 1999, p. 52)
[29] Benjamin, W. (1999). Franz Kafka. In M. W. Jennings (Ed.), Selected Writings: Volume 2. Part 2. 1931–1934. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, p. 814; emphasis added.
[30] (Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility [First Version], 2010) While self-alienation and self-encounter are ingrained in Benjamin’s notion of aura it appears in the artwork essay unrelated to aura in an attempt to distinguish aura from its mystical influences. Hansen points out that both Giorgio Agamben and Harold Bloom also share her assumption of the notion of aura being influenced by Jewish mysticism. The texts are AGAMBEN, G. (1999). Walter Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness and Historical Redemption in HELLER-ROAZEN, D. Potentialities. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. And BLOOM, H. Ring around the Scholar (review of The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940), Artforum 32 (Nov. 1994).
