The horror of disconnection: the auratic in technological malfunction

Dixon, M. (2007) The horror of disconnection: the auratic in technological malfunction. Transformations (Online), 15,

Abstract

This paper revisits Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" essay and traces the fate of the idea that contemporary media technologies have abolished the auratic component of "distance". Such technologies have long been understood as participating – for good or ill – in globalisation. But there is a tension in the Mechanical Reproduction essay since while it is often taken as celebrating the revolutionary possibilities of post-auratic mediation, it also anticipates the dialectical return – indeed, the "resurrection" – of the auratic within these same technologies. I will emphasise an obvious but overlooked fact of modern technology: it often fails. And I will argue that it is in technology’s failure that traces of aura, of cultic and religious elements reappear. It is a fact of the economy of digital technology that sound and visuals must be "compressed"; because of the constraints of bandwidth, data must be stripped to a bare minimum if it is to be stored or disseminated. Digital representations and mediations, therefore, are often of an extremely poor quality; they are distorted and obscure. What is more, when the most horrific of events are technologically mediated (i.e., CCTV footage of the last sighting of a missing child; the increasingly desperate efforts of air traffic control to reach a hijacked plane; digital photographs, taken on mobile phones, of the London underground bombings; video statements by masked suicide bombers) these terrifying testimonies are delivered by low fidelity, even failing technologies, and their representations are marked by the mute, asignifying patina of the functioning of the medium. So it is that communication technologies – the mobile and satellite phone, the video link – often do not work as intended (the channel breaks up, the message is distorted) and, as a result, one experiences the sudden reintroduction of distance, the veiling of the phenomenon and the horror of disconnection. Strategically, this collapse of communication plays into the ideology of global news reportage as it dramatises the struggle to connect with dangerous parts of the world. And, ironically, the "authenticity" of modern technologically mediated testimony (another important Benjaminian theme) is proportional to its interference, to the poverty of its representation. Noise escapes the logic of mechanical reproduction and mediation since it is not reproducible as such, but arises in and through the act of reproduction and mediation. Noise reintroduces distance, uniqueness and eventality to the reproduced. Noise, distortion, interference and failure mark the return of a technology to its state of nature. And as Benjamin points out in "Language as Such and the Language of Man," nature is mute, it has no language, and in its muteness, it laments. In the midst of communication, in suppressed and repressed noise, in its ghostly insubstantiality, is an asignifying lament.

• Item Type: Articles
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Dixon, Dr Martin
• Authors: Dixon, M.
• Subjects: M Music and Books on Music > M Music
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Culture and Creative Arts > Music
• Journal Name: Transformations (Online)
• Publisher: Central Queensland University
• ISSN: 1444-3775
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2007 The Author