Looking at Records
Philip Auslander

Originally published in TDR: The Drama Review, Vol. 45 No. 1 (T169), Spring 2001, pp. 77-83. Author preprint via homes.lmc.gatech.edu/~auslander, retrieved from Internet Archive Wayback Machine; this version was OCR'd from the preprint PDF because pdftotext dropped inline digits in the source font.

Note: Companion to Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (Routledge, 1999/2008). Examines the materiality of recorded music and the dematerialization implied by MP3 distribution and the "Celestial Jukebox."

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Looking at Records’
Intellectual property expert Paul Goldstein predicts that, in the very near
future, recorded music and other entertainment commodities will be distrib-
uted by means of a system he calls the “Celestial Jukebox,” which he de-
scribes as “a technology-packed satellite orbiting thousands of miles above
Earth, awaiting a subscriber’s order—like a nickel in the old jukebox, and the
punch of a button—to connect him to any number of selections from a vast
storehouse via a home or office receiver [...]” (1994:199). Goldstein concedes
that the notion of a satellite is metaphoric but insists that some such delivery
system, whether celestial or terrestrial, is the wave of the future.

The development of a new system of cultural distribution along the lines of
the Celestial Jukebox is well underway; witness the popularity of downloaded
MP3 files as musical commodities. This development will radically change our
relationship to recorded music. Above all, it entails the dematerialization of
the musical object, a change so fundamental as to constitute a paradigm shift.
Throughout the history of recorded music, the consumption of music has
been accomplished through the consumption of recordings as material objects.
Arguably, the first such material object—though not strictly speaking a re-
cording—was the mass-produced printed score, which became a consumer
commodity in the 19th century with the increased popularity of domestic
music production and the piano as a home appliance. Subsequent material ob-
jects associated with the consumption of music include the piano roll, the
Edison cylinder, the 78 rpm disc, the LP, the 45 rpm single, the 12-inch
single, the cassette, and, ultimately, the compact disc. For well over a century,
the consumption of recorded music has meant the purchase and ownership of
objects of this kind, the material supports for the music itself.

In the 20th century, the consumption of recorded music was often achieved
through media that do not require ownership of a musical object, such as the
traditional jukebox and radio. It is the case, however, that the primary function
of these media is to create a market for musical recordings and, thus, to promote
sales. The transaction that is initiated when a listener hears a recording on the
radio is not complete until that listener has acquired a copy of the recording.’

Already, we are able to download music from the Internet onto a material
support of our own choosing (e.g., hard drives, recordable CDs and DVDs or
other large-capacity discs). When the Celestial Jukebox is fully developed,
whether on the Internet or as a cable or satellite service, we will not need to
record music at all, since the jukebox will feature a limitless library from which
we can retrieve whatever we want whenever we want it, for immediate use.

The Drama Review 45, 1 (T169), Spring 2001. Copyright © 2001
New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Such a system of distribution will bring about a major change in consumer cul-
ture and cultural consumption. Recorded music will be consumed as a com-
modity in itself, apart from a specific material support. We will no longer need
to buy and own a particular material object to have access to particular music.

The advent of recording technology brought about a crucial
change in the sensory economy of music consumption that
made hearing the dominant sensory mode in that subsector of
cultural production.

Historically, one consequence of the reification of music in recordings is
the century-old separation of the aural experience of music from its visual ex-
perience. Dave Laing indicates that the critical impact of the gramophone
when it became widely available in the 1890s was “a vital shift in the experi-
ence of listening to music: the replacement of an audio-visual event with a
primarily audio one, sound without vision” (1991:7—8). The advent of record-
ing technology brought about a crucial change in the sensory economy of
music consumption that made hearing the dominant sensory mode in that
subsector of cultural production.

In this respect, the music industry is perhaps different from other subsectors
of commodity capitalist economies. French Situationist theorist Guy Debord,
who “grafted [...] antiocular discourse onto the Western Marxist totalizing
critique of reification and fetishism” (Jay 1993:426), argues that sight is the
central sensory trope of capitalist economies. In his major work, The Society of
the Spectacle, Debord argues that commodity capitalism works by substituting
images for reality ([1967] 199s:sec. 6). In his most succinct definition of the
spectacle, Debord states bluntly that, “The spectacle is capital accumulated to
the point where it becomes image” (sec. 34). For Debord, “The spectacle’s
function in society is the concrete manufacture of alienation” (sec. 32), which
it achieves by presenting the social world as a visual object for the consumer’s
contemplation rather than something upon which the individual can act:

The spectator’s alienation from and submission to the contemplated ob-
ject works like this: the more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more
readily he recognizes his own needs in the images of need proposed by
the dominant system, the less he understands his own existence and his
own desires. (sec. 30)

Because Debord focuses on the visual as the sensory mode of the society of
the spectacle, his theory demands that all cultural production be assimilated to
a visual model. It seems to me, however, that Debord’s model is not suffi-
ciently fine-grained to account fully for the operation of reification and
commodification in cultural subsectors that provide experiences appealing
centrally to senses other than vision. Here, I shall examine musical recordings
through the lens of Situationist social theory. My purpose in adopting
Debord’s ideas as my framework is twofold. On the one hand, I wish to show
how they can illuminate the workings of commodification within a particular
subsector of cultural production. I also hope, however, to suggest a limitation
to Debord’s totalizing condemnation of the visual as the central tool of com-
modity capitalism by proposing that the visual may prove to be a site of resis-
tance in cases where cultural commodities primarily engage other senses.
For an account of music and recording, I turn to another homme de gauche,
Jacques Attali. In Noise: The Political Economy of Music, first published in 1977,
10 years after The Society of the Spectacle, Attali offers a brief history of music’s
reification and commodification that echoes Situationist themes. For Attali, as
for Laing, the decisive turning point in this history is the use of sound record-
ing technology to produce musical commodities. In Attali’s historical account,
this moment marks not only a change in the sensory experience of music, but
also the end of music as a significant social discourse and initiates its relegation
to the status of a mere commodity like any other:

[W]ith the stockpiling of music [in recordings], a radically new economic
process got underway. [...] Stockpiling then becomes a substitute, not a
preliminary condition, for use. People buy more records than they can
listen to. They stockpile what they want to find the time to hear. Use-
time and exchange-time destroy one another. [...M]usic is no longer
heard in silence. It is integrated into a whole. But as background noise to
a way of life music can no longer endow with meaning. (1985:101)

For Attali, the way that music is objectified in recordings deprives music of its
use-value. Musical recordings become objects to collect and stockpile, not to
hear. Attali’s analysis of music can be seen as a particular case of Debord’s
claim that in the society of the spectacle, “the totality of use has been bartered
for the totality of abstract representation” ([1967] 1995:sec. 49). In Debord’s
terms, sound recordings are abstract representations of music, objects that be-
come visual signs for music whose very proliferation subordinates the actual
use of music to its status as commodity object.

In the realm of recorded music, Debordian contemplation—
the passive act of perception that links the spectator to the
commodity and robs the spectator of agency—takes the form
of listening, not looking.

The question I wish to pose in relation to this Situationist analysis of recorded
music is: What does it mean to look at records? (By “records” I mean all sound
recording media, and I am referring to the objects themselves, not their packag-
ing.) At first glance, the reification of music in sound recordings seems to be a
perfect illustration of Debord’s association of the ocular with commodification.
Since, as Attali suggests, most consumers own more musical recordings than
they have time to listen to, the recording becomes an object of exchange and
contemplation: an image of music that substitutes for music itself. This analysis
implicitly describes the process of commodification as a sensory conversion: re-
cording subordinates music’s existence as sound to its new existence as a visible
object, and music thus enters the spectacular world of the commodity. When I
think of my own practices as a lifelong record collector, I have to admit that this
Situationist analysis seems accurate as far as it goes. I always look at my new ac-
quisitions before playing them and derive pleasure from simply looking at them,
a pleasure that is partly an anticipation of realizing the use-value contained in
the recording, but also partly the unabashed pleasure of commodity ownership.'
This is surely contemplation in Debord’s sense of the term—the visual experi-
ence of the sign of music that substitutes for a real experience of music, and an
experience through which I surrender to the commodity.

But I do think there’s more to this story. The Situationist analysis is con-
cerned solely with the fact of music’s having been objectified and made vis-
ible, not with the specific implications of that visibility in a cultural subsector
whose primary sensory modality is the aural. In the realm of recorded music,
Debordian contemplation—the passive act of perception that links the specta-
tor to the commodity and robs the spectator of agency—takes the form of lis-
tening, not looking. It is this kind of alienated listening that Attali describes
when he says that recorded music is now a part of everyday life, but only “as
background noise to a way of life music can no longer endow with meaning.”
In the context of commodified music, the ear more than the eye is implicated
in subordinating the spectator to the spectacle.‘

Even though to look at a record is to play into the hands of the spectacle in
the way I discussed a moment ago, it is also a perverse act, given that the ob-
ject of the gaze was produced as a commodity to be consumed through the
ear. The nature of this perversity may become clear through a consideration
of a few striking cases. In The Recording Angel, a collection of essays on the
culture of recorded music, Evan Eisenberg describes an encounter with a man
named Clarence, who lives in a tiny house filled from floor to ceiling with
records. This is how Clarence describes one part of his collection: “I collect
anything with [the name] ‘Clarence’ on it. I don’t like rock and roll, though I
think the names are fabulous, but there’s a Negro rock and roller named
Clarence and I have all his records” (1987:7). Clarence, it seems, buys these
records for what might be called a literary characteristic: the appearance of a
certain word on the labels. He has no interest in listening to the music on
them, which he actively dislikes, only in seeing his own name on the labels.*
Clarence goes on to discuss another record collector, who has amassed an
enormous collection of which Clarence is jealous. Eisenberg ends the piece
with a dramatic essayist’s flourish: “The thing about this collector in Brook-
lyn. He’s deaf” (9). We cannot know, of course, why this deaf man collects
records, but it’s clear that he’s not listening to them. Whatever pleasure he
gains from records he must access through their visual and tactile qualities.

The moments at which I am looking at the record instead of
listening to it are not just moments at which I am under the
contemplative spell of the commodity; they are also moments
at which I am consuming that commodity in a way that goes
against the grain.

Both Clarence and the deaf man are obsessive collectors, and that makes them
worthy of the essayist’s attention. But another aspect of these anecdotes is more
relevant to my argument: we may feel that these men who collect records that
they either have no interest in hearing or cannot hear are highly idiosyncratic in-
dividuals who buy records for the wrong reasons. That response in itself indicates
that there is something perverse about insisting upon treating an aural commodity
as if it were a visual or tactile one. Such individual redefinitions of the use-value
of objects seem perverse because they challenge the spectacle that seeks to impose
its own regimens of consumption on spectators; such individual redefinitions of
use-value therefore constitute acts of resistance to the domination of the spectacle.

In 1961, Debord addressed a conference on everyday life by means of a tape
recording of his presentation that was played at the event. He explained his
choice in the following terms:
It is desirable to demonstrate, by a slight alteration of the usual procedures,
that everyday life is right here. [...] This slight discomforting break with
accustomed routine could serve to bring directly into the field of ques-
tioning of everyday life [...] the conference itself, as well as any number of
other forms of using time or objects, forms that are considered “normal”
and not even noticed, and which ultimately condition us. (1961)

Debord’s strategy of using the tape recorder was intended to throw into relief
the conventions of normal conference procedure that go unnoticed and there-
fore remain unquestioned. I am suggesting that Clarence’s and the deaf
collector’s perverse uses of aural commodities as visual objects function in
much the same way: they are forms of consumption that throw into relief the
ways in which we are conditioned, to use Debord’s term, to accept that cer-
tain objects should be consumed only in certain ways, a conditioning that un-
doubtedly reinforces the power of the spectacle. I would further suggest that
my own practice of looking at records, though perhaps less distinctive than
the activities of a Clarence or a deaf record collector, involves the same im-
plicit resistance. The moments at which I am looking at the record instead of
listening to it are not just moments at which I am under the contemplative
spell of the commodity; they are also moments at which I am consuming that
commodity in a way that goes against the grain. Crucially, these acts of resis-
tance to the spectacle engage the sense of sight, the very sensory modality that
Debord places at the heart of the economy of the spectacle. A significant flaw
in Debord’s theory is that his totalizing anti-ocularcentrism renders his social
theory insufficiently supple to account for sensory economies in which sight is
not the dominant mode of reification and commodification. I contend that
the visual can function as a site of resistance within those subsectors of the so-
ciety of the spectacle where commodification and consumption are defined in
terms of a sense other than vision.

Treated as visual objects, records offer other opportunities for resistant
readings of the spectacle. One of Debord’s central themes is that “The spec-
tacle [...] is in effect a false consciousness of time” ([1967] 1995:sec. 158). Un-
der the influence of the spectacle, time has lost its relationship to lived
experience and has become a commodity in itself: “[T]he time of the spec-
tacle [is] in the narrow sense, the time appropriate to the consumption of im-
ages, and, in the broadest sense [...] the image of the consumption of time”
(sec. 153). Looking at vinyl records is germane to this issue, for the grooves
on the surface of a vinyl record constitute a visual representation of time. Vi-
nyl records reify time in that they make time tangible: in handling a record,
one is handling a chunk of time, in a sense. The division of time into bands
and its distribution over the two sides of a disc are other ways records trans-
form time into something one can see and touch. Records also commodify
time; as Attali points out, to buy a record is to buy musical use-time. In these
ways, records are means by which time is rendered spectacular.

Looked at from another angle, however, vinyl records also offer a resistant
reading of spectacular time. It is significant that there is no consistent relationship
between the visual representation of time on a vinyl record and the actual use-
time of the music. Side six of George Harrison’s album The Concert for Bangla
Desh (1972), for example, contains only two songs totaling just over seven min-
utes of music, yet it looks the same as other discs containing up to four times as
much music, or more. (In fact, the grooves on side six of the same album occupy
more surface area than those on side four, which contains almost five more min-
utes of music!) In other words, the grooves on the surface of a vinyl record do
not constitute a rational representation of use-time: on the surface of an LP,
seven minutes of use-time can look identical to 25 minutes of use-time. Since

there is no direct correlation between the musical use-time of an album and its
visual appearance, the visual representation of time on a vinyl record asserts itself
as arbitrary, abstract, and capricious. Understood in this way, the surface of a vi-
nyl record makes visible the means by which the spectacle induces false con-
sciousness of time through images of time purveyed by commodities.

The prospect of looking at the music side of a CD raises a different but related
issue. When we look at the shiny side of a CD, we see ourselves looking back,
mirrored by the commodity. Looking at a CD, we both contemplate the com-
modity and see ourselves contemplating the commodity. The look of contempla-
tion reflected back by the shiny surface of the commodity dramatizes “the
spectator’s alienation from and submission to the contemplated object.” The way
this musical commodity reflects our contemplative gaze back upon us offers the
possibility of self-consciousness concerning that gaze and its implications. Again,
this effect is possible because to look into a CD is to use the object in a perverse
way that invokes a sensory modality other than the one for which it was pro-
duced. To look into a mirror one has purchased would not create the same effect.

The CD is also an important development in the last issue I will take up
here, the issue of the dematerialization of the musical commodity with which
I began this article. To look at the progression of the material forms of music
media—from shellac or vinyl discs to CDs to direct downloading from the
Internet or the Celestial Jukebox—is to witness the progressive dematerializa-
tion of the musical object. The general historical progression of music media
has been in the direction of disappearance: the trend has been toward smaller
and smaller objects (78 rpm disc to 45 rpm disc to cassette to CD) and now to
no specific object at all. If my suggestion here that treating music recordings as
visual objects allows for consumer practices and readings that resist the domi-
nation of the spectacle, then it would stand to reason—especially if one is
willing to indulge in a bit of Situationist paranoia—that the spectacle would
have an interest in seeing to it that musical commodities disappear from the
visual realm. I’d like to conclude, however, with a different point, one that
further challenges Debord’s anti-ocularcentrism. As we have seen (a word I
use advisedly!), Debord’s anti-ocularcentrism stems from his premise that
reification and commodity fetishism operate through the conversion of reality
into images that are deployed as if they were real, inducing false consciousness
in the spectator. The conversion of music, which exists first as intangible
sound, into visible objects is an example of this process. But the historical pro-
gression of music media constitutes a serious problem for Debord’s anti-
ocularcentrism. I would argue that the trend we are seeing now toward the
disappearance of specific physical objects and the consumption of music as
pure digital information (MP3 files and such) constitutes a hypercommodification
of music in which musical sound becomes a commodity in itself, unmoored
from physical support in a way that was never previously possible. That this
process of hypercommodification entails the disappearance of music—its re-
moval from the realm of the spectacular object—presents a major challenge to
Debord’s thesis that commodification is an ocular phenomenon.

Notes

1. This essay is a revision of a paper I presented at the “Uncommon Senses” conference in
Montreal, hosted by Concordia University in April 2000.

2. Fora useful discussion of the historical emplacement of radio as a means of promoting
musical recordings, see Attali (1985:95—100).

3. The pleasure of looking at records also entails the pleasure of looking at their packag-
ing, including LP covers and CD booklets. To a certain extent, this packaging, too, can
fuel the anticipation of hearing the music by providing images associated with those
who made it. But I am focusing here on the less-acknowledged practice of looking at
the recording itself. Lest it be thought that my practice of looking at records is purely
idiosyncratic, I hasten to add that anecdotal evidence gathered from many collectors of
musical recordings suggests that I am far from alone in looking at records before or in
place of listening to them. I am interested in this activity because looking at a recording
represents a way of consuming the object that challenges its sensory economy; looking
at the packaging offers no such challenge. To look at an album cover is to use and con-
sume that cover the way one is supposed to—as a visual object. To look at a record is
to use and consume it against the intended use. I discuss the implications of that misuse
immediately below.

4. The continuing importance of radio as a means of promoting recorded music even in
the age of music video evidences how deeply the process of commodification impli-
cates the ear in this subsector of cultural production.

5. I must confess to having done the same thing. Once I heard that the rock group Living
Colour had recorded a song called “Auslinder” (1993), I had to acquire it. I bought a
12-inch vinyl disc featuring several dance remixes of “Auslinder.” My name is proudly
emblazoned on both the record’s label and its sleeve.

References

Attali, Jacques

1985 Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Debord, Guy

1961 “Perspectives for Conscious Alterations in Everyday Life.” Available at

<http://hamp.hampshire.edu/~cmnF93/debord.txt>.
1995 [1967] The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New
York: Zone Books.

Eisenberg, Evan
1987 The Recording Angel: The Experience of Music from Aristotle to Zappa. New
York: Penguin Books.

Goldstein, Paul
1994 Copyright’s Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox. New York: Hill
and Wang.

Jay, Martin
1993 Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought.
Berkeley: University of California Press.

Laing, Dave
1991 “A Voice without a Face: Popular Music and the Phonograph in the 1890s.”
Popular Music 10, 121-9.

Living Colour
1993 “Auslander.” Stain. Sony/Columbia/Epic.

Philip Auslander is Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Cul-
ture of the Georgia Institute of Technology. He won the Joe A. Callaway Prize for his
most recent book, Liveness: Performance in a Mediated Culture (Routledge,
1999). His other books include From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modern-
ism and Postmodernism (Routledge, 1997) and Presence and Resistance:
Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in Contemporary American Performance
(University of Michigan Press, 1992). He is currently working on a project entitled,
“All the Young Dudes: Performing Androgynous Masculinity in Rock.”