The Ritual in the Age of Sonic Reproduction

The last few pages of Jonathan Sterne's chapter, "The Resonant Tomb," brought me back to thinking about Walter Benjamin and his "The Work of Art and the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." In the Epilogue, Benjamin warns of the aestheticization of the politics, the de-humanization of the masses, and how these trends lead to war. Fascism, he argues, "sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right [to change property relations], but instead a chance to express themselves." I believe Sterne's discussion of the Omaha tribe and the desperate, sympathetic attempt of anthropologists to preserve their rituals and songs resonates with this argument. Those anthropologists who recognized the genocidal policies of the United States government toward Native Americans certainly knew they could do nothing to change the property relations (ie: land seized from the Native Americans), so they offered the Omaha, at the very least, "a chance to express themselves." Thus, they launched a project to "preserve music, ritual, and languages that federal policy at the time of their recording had intended to drive into the ground within a generation" (qtd. in Sterne 331).

Benjamin claims that "the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual," and though these works of art are alienated from their "aura," they are never fully divorced from it. These idols, talismans, or other objects used in ritual are, more or less, constant from one moment to the next. Early recorded sound, on the other hand, was subject to a "triple temporality." The medium itself can degrade. The recorded sound is just a the audible aspect of a fragment of a ritual. The recorded event is separate, modular, broken from the past. These temporalities are symptoms of translating the "interiority" of the "live" event into the "exteriority" of the recorded form. Furthermore, there "was no "unified whole" or idealized performance from which the sound in the recording was then alienated" (Sterne 332). The song or ritual exists within time. It can be present one moment and absent the next. This seems to explain why many members of the tribe were less interested in preserving rituals that the anthropologists. They were not seen as something material, durable. Putting a song in cylinder form and playing it later would not reproduce the ritual.

However, the same techniques of preservation which "exteriorized" the "interiority" of these rituals are also responsible for bringing the audible aspects of the recorded events back to the Omaha tribe nearly a century later. It seems to me that these recordings, in their materiality, can serve as a kind of talisman or spiritual object. An item used in a ritual (an idol, rattle, or drum) is given meaning by the person using it, and these recordings work in the same way. This is achieved through a "re-interiorization" of the "exteriorized" event by the individual. This may seem like a sleight of hand, substituting the recreated or reconceived interiority of someone today for the original interiority at the time of the recording. I would counter this by saying that culture is mutable. The interiority of a song is not static from invocation to invocation, or singer to singer. Each instantiation of a song allows for change; its interiority is recreated each time it is performed.

Sterne stops short of claiming this, saying only that "If the past is, indeed, audible, if sounds can haunt us, we are left to find their durability and their meaning in their exteriority" (333). A return to Benjamin can explain why even if a recorded ritual can be "re-interiorized," this does not guarantee the revivification of a destroyed culture. Benjamin sees the masses under Fascism, subjugated to the will of a dictator, as analogous to art in mechanical reproduction, violated by being "forced into the production ritual values." We only have fragments, both of the remaining Omaha and their rituals. Reuniting the two is "no doubt a good thing," but it is not enough to reverse the damage of this fragmentation and is powerless to change property relations or allow for any real exercise of rights (331).