Tauel Harper

This chapter explores whether live music produces a fundamentally different experience than listening to recorded music. To do this, I shall undertake Miles Davis’s prescribed structure for Jazz composition; this involves the collective establishment of a territory, followed by a period of exploration. To establish the territory, I shall examine the benefits attributed to the authenticity of an event by philosophers who prize live performance—namely Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, and Hannah Arendt. In his essay “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction,” Benjamin highlights the importance of presence in time and space for the “aura” of a particular piece of work. His suggestion that the replication of a work of art cannot adequately replicate its full meaning problematizes the digital experience. This position relates directly to the kind of problems that Adorno suggested would arise through the centralization of cultural production and the importance of iteration in cultural expression. While digital technology captures music in a number of ways that Adorno would be concerned about, it also overturns the barriers to culture. However, for Arendt, physical presence itself is fundamental to the creation of meaning, identity, and reality.

So does this mean that live music loses its jouissance in digital culture? The second part of this chapter explores this territory through some auto-ethnographic reflection on the experience of watching music live and via digital technology. While I suspect that the territory could sound modal and pessimistic, there will certainly be moments of uplifting melody during the exploration!

Mutual surveillance on Facebook is a social act that facilitates connections and an analysis of the discourse on the 'People Sleeping at Newcastle University' Facebook page shows students choosing social cohesion over privacy in a number of ways. Social network use has been identified as serving a number of functions for users. A person watching, or surveillance, has become a widespread cultural practice. Students, in particular, are accustomed to official surveillance practices that range along a spectrum from care to control. For social networks to function, users must submit information, and in doing so they make otherwise transient activities and thoughts permanent and available to others. Facebook is composed of users seeking out and watching over each other. Facebook users seem willing to perform themselves online and offer that performance up for surveillance on their personal home pages. The students use the site to learn about the interests, actions, and values of the community, thus providing a sense of belonging.

Technology is latent with the possibility of developing a new mode of techno-politics capable of redressing the instrumental abuses of modern politics. No doubt such a possibility must contend with images of IBM punch cards ‘processing’ humanity for murder during the Holocaust, as well as deal with the one-dimensionality of the ubiquitous screens of the spectacle. Nevertheless, in the work of Deleuze and Guattari_there are suggestions that we need not fear the role of technology in the struggle against political oppression. Against a tradition of repression and discipline, they propose a programme of flight and flow. What I suggest here...