As I stated in class, my role in the project was as the second audio editor. Largely, this meant cleaning out all the line breaks (separated with a clap by our fantastic readers) and mixing the audio for balance between recordings and overall effect. This consisted of several listen-throughs of the full length piece. As also stated in class, I had a fantastic time doing this. It was cold, stormy day/evening/night, and I was stuck indoors doing household chores as I listened. I sharpened knives, I laid wallpaper, I did dishes, and I listened to a spooky story to stave off the boredom. It was delightful. Once, at a point of transition between the storytellers, when in the story of an hour the narrator whispers “Free. Free in body and soul.” I legitimately jumped like I was being told a ghost story.

In retrospect, it’s brought to mind two storytelling scenarios. The second that came to mind, but the first I’ll talk about, is the infamous storytelling session that brought us the Vampyr and Frankenstein. Many people know this story already, but to summarize, these stories were thought up in the ‘year without a summer’ (1816) where everything was cold and dreary due to a volcano eruption, which filled the atmosphere with ash and blocked the sun for months. During this dreary time, as a result of the atmosphere and being stuck inside all the time, the Shelley’s, Lord Byron and a few others decided to take advantage of the situation and the feelings brought on by their environment, and tell scary stories. In a way, an audiobook allows this experience to occur in solitude, or in a more easily accessible way. Though it isn’t the same as being told a story by a friend, once can select the story they’re told to take advantage of the environment, and their own mood.

The first thing I thought of was actually campfire stories. Again, this was largely colored by the environment at the time I edited this audiobook, but I realized just how much environment does to affect one’s experience when listening to an audiobook. Cognitively/neurologically speaking, listening to a story does not take as many resources as reading a text of the same content. As such, the environment plays more into the experience of the story. I still remember the other sounds in the background as my dad told me the story of the Maco Light in the back yard by the fire (crickets and cicadas, crackling wood, the neighborhood dogs barking, one single train horn) or the sounds of the bedroom as my mom read us bedtime stories (my wall clock, the ac kicking on and off, wind and rain and thunder, cicadas, the crash of waves). I even remember when we listened to audiobooks in the car on long road trips. I still hear passages of Matilda with the rumble of the road underneath.

When the visual is removed from the text, the auditory becomes more prominent. And because of that, there’s an added opportunity to immerse the ‘reader’ in the story. Though we didn’t quite take full advantage of the weather of possibility of sound design in this project (no regrets, I think it works well as-is), I did grow to appreciate all it has the potential to do. And when the words are alone in the audio, it opens up the experience to individual environmental iterations. More like being told a story by a loved one than the sterile experience I tend to think of audiobooks as. And in that way it gets back to something more primal, akin to telling stories around a table in a cold, rainy summer, or around a campfire, from a bedside. It makes it something present in the moment with the listener.

Going into our group project, I didn’t know what to expect from the product of our group. I didn’t expect the audio book to be as interesting and exciting as it turned out. We were a group of 5: Majel Peters, Patricia Belen, Raquel Neris, Brianna Cazatt, Kai Prenger, and myself. Bri suggested that we do something with The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which I was immediately drawn to as I really like the story, but she wanted to do something unusual and suggested that we intersperse it with another story.  We were all intrigued and on board. I recommended The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin, another story I’m familiar with and thought it would seamlessly work with TheYellow Wallpaper.  From there Natalie suggested The Box Social by James Reaney as a good one to include as it has the same theme as the other two- controlled women. All the members had read 2 of the 3 but none had read all three, so there was some anticipated excitement in the air. The group started humming with ideas and we became eager to see what we could do.  Bri did most of the heavy lifting by cutting and splicing the text together.  At first, I thought I would like to be a reader but changed my mind as all the stories had women narrators, and I was annoyed while looking for an audiobook to listen to in the previous week and discovered that most all of the readers were men for women narrators.  That made me averse to being a reader. The group decided on roles by stating what each member liked to do.  Majel took the reading part for The Yellow Wallpaper as did Patricia for The Story of an Hour as did Raquel for The Box Social.  Kai and Natalie had much experience and took the sound engineering roles.  I took the presenter role. Over the course of the week, we emailed back and forth ideas, edits, suggestions, and it took shape.  The whole process and the group workings were so natural that they seemed pre-destined.  Everything fell into place. When I heard the first recording when Majel email it to us, I was stirred by how natural and hypnotic was her voice.  At first, I was sitting while I was listening hesitant to stand for fear of losing concentration.  But, after about 10 minutes I noticed that I was putting some clothes away and still immersed in the story. That was an awakening for me.  I knew that Leah Price had talked about the bullet point of being able to do something else while listening, but it was the actual experience that made me believe it.  Again, over the course of several days, my group mates were very diligent in doing their part of the task.  When I received the final version, the combined stories became a whole new story that was very engaging and made my visual of narrator in The Yellow Wallpaper more vivid.  It seemed natural for a writer who was prevented from writing to imagine a story, especially one that speaks to the situation that they are in- control and life not under a thumb. Being able to do a mindless chore such as putting away my clothes while listening to an audio book made sense to me now.  I can actually ‘read’ more now and maybe my reading list just might have a chance to getting diminished a bit faster. I’m happy to report I now have a new ’shelf’ for more books.

I was fortunate enough to work with a group of classmates that coalesced on three short pieces with shared leitmotifs as options for our audiobook: “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin and “The Box Social” by James Reaney. Our group also came to a prompt agreement that interleaving these texts could generate a convincing audiobook. Bri Cassatt guided us towards this compositional conceit after reading each work, and donning her editor’s cap by initially cutting, pasting and rearranging all three texts into a Google doc that served as a script of sorts. Teammates help revise and refine our collage over a weekend, then we volunteered for the remaining roles in our audiobook project. Readers included Majel Peters (Yellow Wallpaper), Patricia Belen (Story of an Hour) and Raquel Neris (The Box Social). Each reader recorded the entirety of their assigned story using cell phones (covered in socks for use as pop filters). MP3 files were then forwarded to the group for editing. I created a rough cut of the assembled audiobook by chopping up the files into their constituent parts along the segments created by our script. Natalie Kretschmer then removed artifacts from the recordings like interstitial claps between sections, adjusted levels between recording, and adding the one “sound effect” (the scream) found in our work. JP Essey corralled our experiences into a presentation in class, where we reflected the experience, the output, and lessons learned.

My position as the first round “audio engineer” engendered some odd imprints on my experienece when compared to an audiobook or visual reading of these texts, even in the collaged form our team had stitched together. Scrubbing back and forth through the recordings to identify the breakpoints had two effects. Having heard three of my classmates’ voices for hours, I felt a strange sense of intimacy with them, even though we’ve likely spoken a couple dozen words to each other since the start of the class. A pedagogical lesson learned by listening to these audio recordings repetitiously while viewing our script was the impact of the text as language informing the meaning. I believe the best analog from our reading was English’s cursory note about “incommensurable textual layers that aural literature brings into play are acknowledged as proper matters of concern” when reading texts (420). This emphasis on the aural nature of language in the text stuck out as much for a couple of missing lines as for those present in our recordings. One pronounced example that was missing from our recording was “Better in body, perhaps” spoken by the narrator when her husband notes that she seemed in better spirits. Hearing sentences spoken before each breakpoint in our script highlighted the design of our interweaved texts and the effect of each text’s tone in a way that reading or hearing them all in isolation wouldn’t have.

Following the slight resurgence of interest in the audiobook format that I experienced following my discovery of audio performances by Flannery O’Connor and the literati of YouTubers producing dramatic do-it-yourself renditions of her work (and many other notable authors), I was eager to engage with the production process of such pieces and perhaps dig into that which had subconsciously made audiobooks gradually unappealing to me and how the format might be utilized and experimented with to re-captivate my attention and that of others out there experiencing similar disenchantment.

Upon reflection, the process of development for this project was somewhat of a breeze primarily due to our group’s good fortune in being equipped with a team of talented folks that were each able to apply their unique skill sets in such a way that made each step relatively seamless. Aside from the 1924/1925 In Our Time version hiccup that has been mentioned at length already, Sean’s impressive and proactive approach to providing the foundational audio for the project allowed for developmental breathing room that enabled each additional project member to excel in their role and cohesively produce something that (ideally) bolsters the text and engages listeners. With the early completion of the project’s core tracks, project members were given the creative space to collaboratively develop a blueprint for the application of sound effects and background music, allowing myself and Miaoling to have a map to follow as we populated the soundscape with the clopping of horse hooves and the snorting of bulls to enrich the sparse vignettes of Hemingway’s world.

As I mentioned in class, my role as co-editor was made easy through the space left in Sean’s skillful elocution, allowing for complimentary auditory additions to be positioned in the mix via GarageBand without them cluttering the story too severely. The mixing process itself went as smoothly as one could hope, with each sound effect and its timestamp made readily available and organized through our group’s shared Google doc, allowing me to fluidly flesh out the final version of the second half of our project while Miaoling tackled the first. Though I took some liberties in augmenting the audio with auxiliary effects pulled from Freesound (a site with, well, free sounds) in order to add small embellishments here and there, I largely followed the guidelines expertly established by the group and was able to (hopefully) produce that which we were all initially picturing as we put this project’s pieces together.

While I’m uncertain if my interest in listening to audiobooks has been wholly restored through this process, I can say that my interest in their development has increased tenfold. Not necessarily out of intrigue for the technical elements of their production but more so for the experience of meticulously engaging with a text to such a degree that it might be understood thoroughly enough to audibly compliment it effectively. As an exercise in bringing a text to life, the assembly of an effectual and lush audiobook requires the developer to examine a text through a lens (previously unfamiliar to myself) that excavates each page in search of possible aural textures and tones that might work to animate the narrative and better connect contemporary readers to the stories of a bygone lifeworld. As a tool of comprehension and interpretation, I can say with confidence that I better understand the intention and the appeal of audiobooks and have developed a newfound interest in their potential.

Our group, assigned to create an audio book, chose to weave three related stories into one. We used The Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892) as the master recording, into which we spliced recordings of The Box Social (James Reaney, 1996) and The Story of an Hour (Kate Chopin; 1894). The heroine of The Yellow Wallpaper is a writer who, we imagined, could be the author of the other to stories. Her experiences and observations wove easily into the other two stories which deal with a similar theme: women whose lives are stifled and negatively impacted by men in their lives. Taken together, the three stories give a rich impression of how this oppression takes shape, and the different ways its impact is processed by and emerges through the women it affects. To emphasize this variation and layer we chose to have three different readers, one for each story.

I was assigned the reading of The Yellow Wallpaper. I knew, from my previous experience listening to Publivox works, that creating an audio recording of a text would bring about unexpected sensations and realizations. I had experienced in my comparative listening of the Sherlock Holmes tale A Scandal in Bohemia the impact a reader has on the interpretation, enjoyment, and understanding of the listener. If unmoored in the story—presenting it simply as words translated from written to aural, the story could feel stilted with the emotional stripped away. Too professional and polished and it could dehumanize the characters and center the reader. Read with empathy, enhanced by macro and micro understanding of the tale paired with an ability to read between the lines, and the story can really spark to life.

I got set up and ready to go, with a goal in mind—bring the story to life! Feel our characters experience and immerse yourself! All of this creative direction buzzing in my head left me unprepared for the physical challenge of performing the text! The constant need to clear the throat, swallow, or quench a sudden urgent need for water. The mind jumping and distracted by anachronistic and unrelated sounds—sirens, honking, dogs barking and neighbors stomping. More than once I found my mouth simply would not form the words distinctly—bumbling together and rounding out the sharp edges of that needed precise articulation. A woman of some standing in 1892 slurring her words? It can’t be. Despite reading ahead to anticipate the flow of a passage, I’d still find myself in funny little corners where the tone of a previous sentence simply did not neatly connect to the next. I became a bit obsessed with pausing and rerecording — my liberal use of “pause” leaving little blips all through the recording.

Even more surprising than the physical realties of audio book narration, however, was hearing what I had actually captured. When I recorded, I did what I could to immerse myself in the characters voice. She was writing in her diary, a setting where she would presumably be most expressive and safely house her true emotions. As I spoke into the microphone, I would lean into certain words with an image of our heroine writing and reliving what she described. Given that the story portrays her being isolated, with activities limited and monitored, she would need to have a bit of desperation. In the opening, that might take shape as her trying to make peace with the situation up, looking at it through the lens of her oppressor husband/doctor, until that façade begins to crack revealing an frantic delusion centered on restoring her own freedom and sense of agency. My idea was that I would set out almost too chipper and light at the beginning, as she tries to convince herself that all is fine—maybe with a few cracks of awareness that she chases away. As the story progressed I would become more frantic—speaking faster and louder with more emphasis on certain words. Our heroine ironically becomes more hysterical as she, in her own mind, becomes more in control. The issue is when I listened back is that what I had thought were emotional readings were actually mild mannered and distant. The distance between the voice in my head and the one in the recording was immense and surprising. Either my natural or conditioned tendency to softening my expressions interfered with what I had been trying to do artistically. But I’m not an actress—so how to render her story in “full color” without going off the rails into campy emoting? I muddled through—admitted to myself that some of it would likely be absurd, but noted this new realization of myself. Thanks to this experience I now wonder what people are hearing whenever I speak, because it clearly is not what I hear in my mind.

That distance between my internal and external expression of the story puts in relief the conscious structuring and perimeter of a story. Any hesitation or discrepancy in flow and emotion, and immersion is lost for the reader and the listener. I believe that there’s an authenticity that naturally occurs when we hear any story in our minds—as we absorb and activate it, weaving in our own voice and experiences. That is ours alone. Once we turn to share it out it necessarily cannot be the same, unless you are specifically skilled at the translation of the internal to the external. Overall, this experience has given me a greater appreciation for the artistic process behind acting. The ability to take someone else’s story, enhance it with your own internal understanding and reflect that back into the world is extraordinary. For me it is much more difficult than storytelling alone—which necessarily includes personal tailoring and adjustments for mood and audience—leeway in its telling. But to take the boundaries of a written piece and still pump it full of life and meaning, never changing a word, is a different talent all together.

(with apologies to the Supremes)

Hemingway notes

Process:

I pulled a copy of the book from Project Gutenberg. I read the first few chapters, and realized that they were at best, loosely connected vignettes, so I decided to treat each chapter as its own story.

Then, we discovered we were working from the wrong edition, so I’m adding some stories from the 1925 edition.

For the recordings, I would read the chapter out loud to myself, and then record it. If it went well, I’d listen to the recording when it was finished. Then, I decided whether to keep the recording or to delete it and try again.

I didn’t use the first recording of any of the chapters. I’ve been doing recordings like this and teaching students to do them, that I went in knowing that the first recording usually isn’t very good. Most of these took between three and five takes.

I didn’t do a lot of editing, but I did some. For instance, I would get stuck on a certain phrase, repeat it or launch into swear words. Those got deleted. I also sometimes take a very audible deep breath before starting, and I tried to edit all those out, though I’m sure I missed a few.

Chapter one: at the start I tried to highlight how drunk everyone (especially the lieutenant) was. In the encounter with the adjutant, I tried to make him sound anxious and a little scared, and after that, I wanted the narrator to sound annoyed since the narrator clearly thought the adjutant was being overly cautious or maybe even downright stupid.

Chapter two: For the first matador, I was very matter of fact because there’s not a lot of story to tell there. The second one had a longer story, so I Tried to add some excitement to it, especially with him getting up and staggering around. The third matador, I tried to show his exhaustion by the end of the whole thing.

Chapter three: I spoke slowly with lots of pauses to represent how slowly everything was going, to give the impression that we’re stuck in the mud with them.

Chapter four: I read it like the narrator was telling this story to friends at a bar or a party.

Chapter five: I felt like the narrator was proud of his work on this barricade, so I tried to do that, and the excitement that went with it.

Chapter six: I treated this like the narrator was a reporter on the scene. I didn’t see the narrator as particularly emotional about any of this. I didn’t even see the narrator have any sense of pity for the sick minister. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just I kind of expected a “wow, look at that wretch” reaction or something. But there wasn’t. No pity. No disgust either.

Chapter seven: I started off speaking fast and maybe a little staccato because there was still a battle, but I slowed down as the description continued and the focus more shifted to the perspective of the wounded. They’re not in the battle (which was dying down anyway) anymore, so I felt I could go a little slower.

Chapter eight: I wanted to highlight the fear in the man trapped in the trench, so I spoke really fast, then I went for an ironic tone at the end.

Chapter nine: At first I focused on the voices of the cops. I tried to use a hybrid midwestern/Pittsburgh accent for them. And, man, it did not work. They both just sounded… off, and in a way where I felt like I could come as judgmental or condescending towards them. I redid. I tried doing this one with different accents (the version with southern accents was, to borrow from Law and Order: SVU, especially heinous), and it just didn’t work for me, so I redid it about six times.

Chapter ten: I broke this up into smaller chunks to work on it. Honestly, the last two paragraphs were extremely rough for some reason. I had to redo them several times. Finally, on the last take, when I stumbled over something, I just repeated it and edited out the not so good version.

Chapter eleven: It’s good that I know a lot about WWI and its immediate aftermath, because I would have been LOST here without knowing what was going on. That also helped in chapter three.

Chapter twelve: I emphasized the word “whack, ” trying to make the onomatopoeia more evident. Then I switched to a voice that was about struggling to get onto and control this badly injured horse. Finally, I ended with hesitation, because of the bull

Chapter thirteen: This was a surprisingly difficult chapter. I tried to capture the noise and chaos of the crowd at the beginning, then the exhaustion of the bull, then the speed of the assault. And finally, I slowed down for the encounter at the cafe. There is a lot going on in not very many words here.

Chapter fourteen: I tried to convey action, but tinged with anger and hate because that’s what I got out of the reading.

Chapter fifteen: Again, I tried doing different voices here, just like in chapter nine. It didn’t really work here either, so I aimed for different tones of voice, which I think worked okay. A really small thing tripped me up on this chapter. In the phrase “he hunched down in the street with them all”, I stopped at “them” at least four times. But you shouldn’t put a pause between “them” and “all” because “them all” is acting like a single word here.

Chapter sixteen: I started off a little slowly here, because I wanted to give the idea that Maera was dazed. Then when they carried him out of the ring. I went faster to highlight the speed they were going. I made “larger” louder, and “smaller” quieter to try to give the impression of the change in perception. Finally, the word “cinematograph” was rough. I kept adding a “-y” on the end of it. Then I had to look up how it was pronounced, because I wasn’t sure. I turned out to be close. It’s strange because it’s not a word we use much.

Chapter seventeen: By and large, I read this like a reporter at the scene. The only time I changed that was the dialogue, especially the line the guard said after Cardinella lost control of his bowels.

Chapter eighteen: Again, knowledge of European history comes in handy. The king of Greece, Constantine was overthrown in 1917, but returned to the throne in 1920, and was toppled again in 1922. This story takes place after the second time he was overthrown in the aftermath of the execution of the ministers in chapter six, I think.

The Indian Village was a challenge because of the length. When I first saw how long it was, I read through it, looking for places to cut it into smaller files, but I didn’t see how I could do that and keep the flow of the story going, so I did as one long take. Also, as with the chapter with the Hungarians being shot, there is a slur in this chapter. I am not comfortable with using those words, but they were certainly in much more widespread usage when these books were written, so I did it.

Weirdly, it reminds of the Wild Cards book series from the 80’s and 90’s. They were an anthology series, several of the books were set in what was then contemporary times. I loved those books, so a few years back, I picked one up to reread it. The story still held up, but the dialogue – which hadn’t really bothered me when I read it 30+ years ago – disturbed me. I admit the slurs that were thrown around were used like that back then but it’s not a pleasant memory.

The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife. I probably should have tried to differentiate between the voices in the dialogue more, especially the doctor’s wife. Why was she in the darkened room? A migraine? Was she drunk or hungover? Those would affect her lines in this, but I really didn’t think about it until just now,

The Cat in the Rain. I read this as kind of a “day in the life” story. The wife is … if not completely unhappy, certainly disaffected here, and the husband is oblivious. The hotel manager is more responsive to the wife than the husband.

I actually sent the recordings to a friend for feedback before I sent them on to my teammates. This particular friend is a former student and now colleague, so he understands what I do.

Once I went over his notes – he suggested that I rerecord chapter nine, for example, I sent the files to my teammates who did the editing. At that point, I mostly checked out. I mean, I checked out things when the folks editing the piece put something up.

At one point, I decided to take the 1924 edition and put it on Manifold as a Do-It-Yourself sort of thing. I put the chapters up, added recordings, and annotated them, so the person reading it can try to make an audiobook themselves.

Hi folks – I recognize that this post might venture (perhaps too far) outside of the scope of our coursework so apologies in advance. Attempting to connect these thinkers might have been a stretch and my approach likely mirrors the discombobulation I feel when attempting to recreationally address such abstract and seemingly insurmountable issues. However, I hope some glimmer of what I was trying to convey can be gleaned from my diatribe. Looking forward to hearing any thoughts, criticisms, “what the hell are you talking about”s, etc.

Though it has likely been said ad nauseam regarding much of the work associated with thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin’s somber dissection of the declension of storytelling, the resulting slow death of wisdom, and the falling value of experience is as relevant today as it was in 1936. Mirroring the loss of aura discussed in his famed The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction written a year prior, Benjamin’s critique of modernity and its associated experiences of disenchantment, fragmentation, and solitude have only become exacerbated as instances of rapid transition, such as that which fomented the modern individual’s inability to integrate themself into the disruptive early 20th-century, have increased unimpeded in the Digital Age, further distancing the masses from the possibility of true understanding of the world they exist within and producing the present sense of political impotency and detachment from any sense of historical continuity. Benjamin’s prescient vision of the supersession of knowledge by passively received information is undoubtedly noteworthy and merits its own analysis. However, for the sake of exercise, I’d like to evaluate Benjamin’s The Storyteller as a prognostic account of the cultural trajectory that in some way led to a work I recently mentioned reading in class, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations by social critic Christopher Lasch. Though Benjamin and Lasch are wildly different thinkers who approach their cultural critiques from dissimilar theoretical frameworks, I found myself unable to dissociate Benjamin’s survey of the lonely crowd’s “inability to communicate experience or apprehend wisdom” and Lasch’s commentary’s cogent continuation of this societal descent into a narcissistic rejection of the past (i.e., of wisdom) and the “transcendental self-attention” that consequentially surfaces in a dissonant society that believes it has no future, shared or otherwise (White, 2017, p. 10; Lasch, 1979, p. 14). Throughout what follows, I intend to briefly highlight the ways in which Benjamin’s lamented decline of oral traditions and the concurrent rise of information ultimately yielded the narcissistic trivialization of the past that Lasch’s criticism works to illuminate. In conclusion, I highlight the resurrection of communicable experience as an immaterial commodity in the Digital Age and the renewed relevance of Benjamin’s essay The Author as a Producer.

As noted by Richard White in his analysis “Walter Benjamin: “The Storyteller” and the Possibility of Wisdom,” the philosopher’s primary intention in this piece is to illuminate the way in which the devolution of storytelling’s role in society is a symptom of a wider phenomenon of modernity connected to the atomization of the individual and the crippled capacity to communicate or contextualized one’s experiences within a community (2017). Benjamin traces the root of this decline to the rise of the novel and its “birthplace in the solitary individual,” giving way to a societal condition devoid of experience that Benjamin termed Erfahrung, or the “deeper sense of participation in cultural forms” that transcends and shape the individual (White, 2017, p. 6-7). As time is increasingly flattened and experience is detached from context through ubiquitous connectivity, people are left in a state of distraction and disruption (or, in states of shock begetting systemic bêtise, if we want to be Stieglerian) dependent on disseminated information from above rather than inherited, intergenerational wisdom that modernity has dismissed and “co-signed to oblivion,” to further borrow the cynical poetics of Richard White, a process that the project of postmodernity has (rightfully or not) finalized in its leveling of all totalizing, grand-narratives (2017, p. 2).

While plenty of literature exists today detailing the current landing place of the cultural trajectory that Benjamin’s work sought to delineate, such as Byung-Chul Han’s work in The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present (I’ll touch on this shortly), Christopher Lasch’s 1979 work can be said to address the post-war evolution of this phenomenon and its manifestations in the culture and social movements of 1970s America, offering something of a bridge between Benjamin’s elegies to the aura in the 1930s and the crucial critiques censuring Big Data’s commodification of the self being published today. Produced amidst escalating global tensions following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, Lasch centers his work in a similar sense of loss and precarity that underlies much of Benjamin’s output as a Jewish German witnessing the early stages of Hitler’s consolidation of power, each echoing Frank Kermode’s notion that “…the sense of an ending… is endemic to what we call modernism” (Kermode, 1967). In the same vein as the cries of “No Future” being issued concurrently by circles of punks in the nascent age of neoliberalism, Lasch notes, “Now that tomorrow appears troubled and uncertain, the past appears ‘irrelevant…,” suggesting that a denial of the past, regardless of the progressive and optimistic package such a denial might be delivered in, ultimately embodies the despair of a society who can’t face their own sense of lost futurity (1979). Lasch theorizes that, within the current economic system, this produced a commodified, marketable nostalgia that “trivializes the past by [simply] equating it with outmoded styles of consumption, discarded fashions and attitude…” and that “…people today resent anyone who draws on the past in serious discussions of contemporary conditions or attempts to use the past as a standard by which to judge the present…” (Lasch, 1979, p. 5). Mirroring Benjamin’s criticisms of the modern individual’s inability to exchange experience, Lasch suggests that the disassembly of societal continuity and its resultant radicalized individualism begets “strategies of narcissistic survival” that ultimately reproduce the “features of a collapsing civilization it claims to criticize” (Lasch, 1979, p. 4). Lasch pinpoints these strategies in programs of self-improvement and fixations on our own “private performance” as “connoisseurs of our own decadence,” admitting that while such pursuits are harmless in themselves, when wrapped in the “rhetoric of authenticity and awareness,” they signify a retreat from politics and class consciousness (Lasch, 1979, p. 13). Returning to Benjamin’s notion that collective experience, initially passed on through storytelling and lost through the advent of the solitary novel form, has been devalued, giving rise to the masses as individuals subjected to an absence of collective counsel that renders them wholly dependent on information presumably produced beyond the reach of the layman, this can be said to have subsequently generated a process that Lasch terms the bureaucratization of the spirit. As such, the terminus, as it existed in 1979, of Benjamin’s loss of experience sees the initial stages of its resurrected commodified form through the narcissistic survival strategies of the individualized nascent-neoliberal subject approaching self-improvement and education as esoteric programs to be purchased rather than adopted through intergenerational wisdom.

With this turn, consumption as a cure becomes the “wisdom” of the time, addressing alienation and modernity’s malaise with prescribed therapeutics of purchasable personal salvation that allow for the momentary sedative illusion of personal well-being and psychic security, degenerating class-conscious politics into “a struggle not for social change but for self-realization” (Lasch, 1979, p. 39). Or, so Lasch suggests. The importance, accuracy, and relevance of this work are obviously up for debate, as Lasch’s output is in many ways problematically dated and has since been adopted to justify the unsavory politics of unscrupulous slimeballs. However, I found the connective throughline of modernity’s fragmentation of experience and reduction of community in both works to be noteworthy and functional as theoretical rest stops on the highway to understanding our present moment. As previously noted, the work of Byung-Chul Han provides some insight into where the course of culture once critiqued by Benjamin and Lasch currently stands. In Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, Han follows Lasch’s critique of the individualized, narcissistic neoliberal-subject in his discussions of their novel role as auto-exploiting laborers, in which class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself due to the immateriality of production and the ubiquitous ownership of the means of unlimited production through their capacity to contribute to the constantly flowing circuit of digital capital via personal data, content creation, etc. while being sedated by the addictive, dopamine-tickling validation attainable through social media, subordinating the social to systems of auto-exploitative self-production under the banner of self-realization and experiential expression (Han, 2017). However, Benjamin’s work remains salient even amidst a milieu of contemporary writers such as Han addressing the terminal processes that Benjamin’s cautionary writing presciently intended to address. In his 1934 essay, The Author as Producer, Benjamin reminds the individualized producer, be it the author of modernity or the content-creator of the Digital Age, of one’s duty in addressing the class struggle, despite one’s inescapable position in the production process. Praising Bertolt Brecht’s ability to distract an already distracted audience only to shock them with the typically ignored shortcomings of modernity, Benjamin employs the playwright as an example of the producer exhibiting clear reflection regarding his position in the process of production and the subsequent changes consciously made to his technique, the infrastructure of the piece that he deems inseparable from its message, in order to maintain a dissenting, transgressive artistic approach countering the dominant economic logic of the time (Hess). Benjamin notes in the concluding portion of the work in reference to the intellectual iconoclasm of the author, “This betrayal [of class] consists, in the case of the writer, in behavior which changes him from a reproducer of the apparatus of production into an engineer who sees his task as the effort of adapting that apparatus to the aims of the proletarian revolution” (1934). Under today’s immaterial mode of production in which the narcissistic neoliberal-subject auto-exploits themself in the circuit of commodification consuming their permanently updating digital autobiography shared in pseudo-social spheres, perhaps Benjamin’s call for mediated solidarity finds new potentialities in the hyper-mediated state of our society should the author, the solitary individual, the content-creator adapt the inescapable apparatuses of neoliberal digital capitalism as mediums of transgression, community, and collective programs that might “blast open the continuum of history,” to borrow Benjamin’s phrasing in On The Concept of History (1968).

This vague optimism is not to distract from the complexity of such a naive “call to action” and the reality of what it would take to accomplish mobilizing content-creators to follow Brecht and creatively act on their revolutionary potential as producers, despite operating within mediums designed solely for the purpose of capitalist extraction and exploitation, is likely an impossibility. The neoliberal regime doesn’t simply exist in digital platforms but casts the neoliberal-subject into a realm of non-time, the early stages of this mentioned by Benjamin in his statement on loss of “open-ended time, for the openness of idleness or inactivity” noted in The Storyteller. In a model of immaterial production, rituals of closure are destroyed by the “neoliberal imperative of optimization and performance” that does not allow for any sense of completion, constantly incentivizing the production of “new stimuli, excitement, and experience” so that such experience (once lost but now found by the market) caters to the serial perception of consumers as we are rendered incapable of producing the subsequent experiences of duration or lingering, ultimately depriving us of the capacity for reflection that allows for the development of wisdom (Han, 2020, p. 8-9). The narrative, the novel, the ritual of storytelling, all operated as a form of closure, characterized by a beginning and an end in a closed order. Benjamin’s and Lasch’s dreaded rise of information, by contrast, is purely additive, antithetical to that of the narrative. As Byung-Chul Han states, “Information… does not combine into a story, a song, that could form the basis of meaning and identity. Information can only be endlessly accumulated…” (Han, 2020, p. 31). As time grows inhabitable, as objects are produced without structural endurance, forcing further production and consumption, as both ritual and wisdom are determined to be archaic, obsolete and cast aside, as even moral values are marketed and consumed purely as “marks of distinction,” what is left for the narcissistic neoliberal-subject but distracted consumption and the optimization of the self? (Han, 2020, p. 5). What does a Brechtian reevaluation of our approaches to the mediums available to us look like and how do the atomized work to reestablish the community and the rituals capable of constructing and holding such a collective together? What does a rejection of the psychological goods peddled and produced by us, for us through the immaterial mode of production look like and what is the “role of the author” within this process? What does a seizure of the means of production look like when we are the means of immaterial production? Who knows. So, as we strive to begin answering some of the questions and reflect on the genealogy of decline that led us to this moment, I’ll punt to a quote from Gilles Deleuze as to shift our sights back to the future, whether it will recognizably exist or not;

“There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”

Resources

Benjamin, W. (1934). Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1931-1934 (Vol. 2). The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Benjamin, W. (1968). Illuminations. Schocken Books.

Han, B.-C. (2017). Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. (E. Butler, Trans.). Verso.

Han, B.-C. (2020). The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present. (D. Steuer, Trans.). Polity Press.

Kermode, F. (1967). The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford Univ. Press.

Lasch, C. (1979). The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. W. W. Norton & Company.

White, Richard. (2017). Walter Benjamin: “The Storyteller” and the Possibility of Wisdom. The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 51(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.5406/jaesteduc.51.1.0001