Allegory, noise, and history: the Arcades Project looks back at the Trauerspielbuch

ABSTRACT

In Convolute N, Benjamin claims that both the Arcades Project and the Trauerspielbuch reject a historiography based on the notion of periods of decline. Reflecting on the sonorous dimension of the dialectical image as presented in Convolute N, I suggest allegory as another link between the two works, which I explore in connection to sound and noise through an example from Monteverdi’s Orfeo while remarking on the role of sound in Benjamin.

KEYWORDS:

• Sound
• baroque
• Trauerspiel
• opera
• Claudio Monteverdi
• materiality
• historicity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Daniel Villegas Vélez, after receiving his PhD in Historical Musicology from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016, was Postdoctoral Associate at the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University and is currently Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy KU Leuven, where he forms part of the ERC-funded Project Homo Mimeticus. His work addresses the political aesthetics of sonorous performance and musical thought, focusing on the early modern period and the present. His research centres on the question of the materiality of sound, displacing issues of affect, mimesis, representation, and historicism towards a baroque sensibility that embraces multiplicity, historicity, and dissemination.

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 716181: HOM).