Digital Liveness: A Historico-Philosophical Perspective

When revising my book Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture for the second edition that appeared in 2008 (the book was originally published in 1999) one of the things I wanted to emphasize was the historicity of the concept of liveness, the way that the idea of what counts culturally as live experience changes over time in relation to technological change.¹ When I was invited to consider the specific question of digital liveness for a presentation at Transmediale 2010 in Berlin, however, I found I was no longer satisfied with one conclusion I had reached, partly because of my own shifting intellectual commitments. My review of the history of liveness from the early days of analog sound recording up to the advent of the digital initially led me to the conclusion that our experiencing digital technologies as live is a function of the technologies' ability to respond to us in real time. I now wish to interrogate my own position in an effort to outline a phenomenological perspective on digital liveness, defined very broadly.

My premise in Liveness is that liveness is not an ontologically defined condition but a historically variable effect of mediatization. It was the development of recording technologies that made it both possible and necessary to perceive existing representations as "live." Prior to the advent of these technologies (e.g., sound recording and motion pictures), there was no need for a category of "live" performance, for that category has meaning only in relation to an opposing possibility. The history of live performance is thus bound up with the history of recording media, and extends over no more than the past 100 to 150 years. To declare retroactively that all performance before the mid-nineteenth century was "live" would be to interpret the phenomenon from the perspective of our present horizon rather than those of earlier periods.

However, the idea of liveness was not brought into being simply by the arrival of recording technologies. Brian Winston, a historian of media technologies, suggests that several factors have to be in place for a new medium to develop. These include "ideation" (the imagination of a new technology to serve a specific purpose) and the maturation of the science needed to produce it. However, a new medium will not be developed until a "supervening social necessity" for it is perceived, and it is selected for investment.² Winston's analysis can be extended from media technologies themselves to the discourses surrounding them. New ways of thinking and talking about a new medium will not arise until there is a social need for them.

In the case of sound recording, which developed from the mid-nineteenth century on, this need did not arise until the institutionalization of radio broadcasting, which began around 1920. It did not happen earlier because the prior uses to which the technology was put did not call for it. With cylindrical recordings and phonograph records, the distinction between live performances and recordings remained experientially unproblematic. If you put a record on your gramophone and listened to it, you knew exactly what you were doing and there was no possibility of mistaking the activity of listening to a record for that of attending a live performance. As Jacques Attali points out, the earliest forms of sound recording, such as Edison's cylinder, were intended to serve as secondary adjuncts to live performance by preserving it.³ The ways early sound recording technology was used respected and reinforced the primacy of existing modes of performance. Live and recorded performances thus coexisted clearly as discrete, complementary experiences, necessitating no particular effort to distinguish them.

Radio broadcasting presented a new problem, however. Radio was institutionalized primarily as a live medium:

In the U.S., the Department of Commerce [the government agency that first oversaw radio] granted preferential licenses to stations that didn't use recorded music, since there was a feeling that playing records was a rather inferior style of broadcasting—mainly because live music gave far superior sound reproduction. In 1927 the industry's new governing body, the Federal Radio Commission, reemphasized that phonograph performances were "unnecessary."^4...