Rereading Walter Benjamin: ethnography of music, record and aural unconscious

Abstract

According to Walter Benjamin’s es-
say “the work of art in the age of mechanical re-
production” the art’s aura, its autenticity basis, is
destroyed facing modern techniques of reproduc-
tion. For this author, we can show the social condi-
tions of this decadence understanding it not as a
reduction of the importance of the art in the mod-
ern world, but as alterations on the contemporary
perception medium. Analysing the cinema and the
photography, Benjamin writes that the thecnical re-
production emancipates the art from its parasitary
existence inside the ritual, and puts it in the politi-
cal praxis, as well as the works that it reproduces give
access to the optical unconscious of the modern so-
ciety. From the suggestive ideas of this author, and
assuming the record as reflection object, we would
like to explore some possibilities of ethnographic
treatment for phonographic material, in the range
of ethnography of music, searching in this material
something beyond its capability to test hypothesis.