Auslander — Liveness

Author: Philip Auslander
Title: Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture
Year: 1999
Type: Academic book (Routledge; second edition 2008, third edition 2022)

Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture is a book by the performance scholar Philip Auslander, of the Georgia Institute of Technology, published by Routledge in 1999, with revised editions in 2008 and 2022. It argues that live performance and the mass media compete, that live events have come to model themselves on mediatized ones, and that liveness is a category with a history: the idea of the live arose with recording, as its opposite. Against the performance theorist Peggy Phelan, who finds the value of live performance in its resistance to the market and the media, Auslander holds that the live has always belonged to an economy of reproduction. Its chapter on rock treats rock authenticity as a product of the interplay of records and concerts, and it reads the lip-syncing scandal of Milli Vanilli in 1990 and Eric Clapton’s Grammys of 1993 as a crisis in that ideology and its apparent repair.

Auslander took his doctorate in theatre arts at Cornell in 1983 and became a professor at Georgia Tech in 1999.¹ The book won the Joe A. Callaway Prize for the best book on drama and theatre in 2000. The second edition (2008) revised the rock chapter, and the third, of 2022, retitled it “Liveness and discourses of authenticity in music.”²

At the level of cultural economy, Auslander writes, live performance and the mass media “are rivals, not partners,” and not equal ones, since the culture is dominated by the media.³ The general response of live performance to that dominance “has been to become as much like them as possible,” from ball games with instant-replay screens to rock concerts that recreate the images of music videos.⁴ Before sound recording and motion pictures, he argues, “there was no such thing as ‘live’ performance, for that category has meaning only in relation to an opposing possibility”; ancient Greek theater was not live, because nothing could record it.⁵ For Phelan, performance that tries to enter the economy of reproduction “betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology.” Live performance does not enter that economy, Auslander replies, “since it has always been there,” and so “the live can exist only within an economy of reproduction.”⁶

Rock fans, he writes, treat authenticity “as an essence that is either present or absent in the music itself”; he treats it “as an ideological concept and as a discursive effect,” one that “depends on a specific interaction of recordings and live performances rather than the nomination of one or the other as authentic.”⁷ Concerts had long vouched for records, and the Milli Vanilli scandal threatened that bargain: older commentators saw in it “a crisis in the ideology of authenticity,” the prospect of concerts that “would become what recordings had always been: simulations.”⁸ The repair, in his reading, came through acoustic performance, “of which the television program MTV Unplugged was the apotheosis,” and through the awards Clapton won at the 1993 Grammys, which Auslander ties to his live album Unplugged (1992).⁹

The first edition ended the chapter with a forecast: when the generation that did not care whether its idols sang took over, “the regime of simulation may be in full force.”¹⁰ The second withdrew it. The ideology of authenticity, Auslander wrote, “seems to be more powerful than ever,” and the revised chapter ends on Ashlee Simpson’s lip-syncing scandal of 2004.¹¹ Dorothy Chansky wrote in 2000 that even readers prepared to resist the book “emerge with a respect for the clarity of every argument Auslander makes.”¹² Pietro de Simone in 2007 called it “an important book” but thought its focus on pop and rock left Auslander open to the charge that he “underestimates, if not misunderstands, the relevance and value of the performing action itself.”¹³

Key contributions

• The argument that liveness is a historical category, which arose with recording as its opposite.
• Evidence that live events model themselves on mediatized ones, from replay screens at ball games to concerts that recreate music videos.
• A reply to Peggy Phelan: the live exists only within an economy of reproduction.
• An account of rock authenticity as an ideological and discursive effect, performative in Judith Butler’s sense, dependent on the interplay of records and concerts and on an inauthentic Other.
• Readings of Milli Vanilli, MTV Unplugged and Eric Clapton’s Grammys of 1993, and, in the second edition, Ashlee Simpson, as crises and repairs of rock’s ideology of authenticity.

See also

• Authenticity and its discontents — the debate over authenticity in popular music