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by Sha Frasier.the Continuing Education Project.New York.

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Auslander — Liveness

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Authenticity and its discontents, Changelog

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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, in the cultural economy, live performance and the mass media are “rivals, not partners,” that live events have come to model themselves on mediatized ones, and that liveness describes “a historical, rather than ontological, condition”: the idea of the live arose with recording, as its opposite. Against the performance theorist Peggy Phelan, whom he reads as locating the value of live performance in its resistance to the market and the media, Auslander argues that “the live can exist only within an economy of reproduction.” Its chapter on rock treats rock authenticity as “an ideological concept” and “a discursive effect” produced by 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. The first edition forecast, conditionally, a regime of simulation once a younger generation took over; the second, which ends the chapter on Ashlee Simpson’s scandal of 2004, said the ideology “seems to be more powerful than ever.” Dorothy Chansky praised the clarity of its arguments in 2000. Pietro de Simone in 2007 found its arguments “at times, speciously constructed” but, “nitpicking aside,” called it “an important book.” Its treatment, “given over to ‘pop’ and ‘rock ideology,’” he wrote, leaves Auslander open to the criticism that he underestimates “the relevance and value of the performing action itself.” Nessa Johnston in 2014 identified the fetish for the live in the Irish film Once with what Auslander and others call rock authenticity.

Auslander took his doctorate in theatre arts at Cornell in 1983 and became an associate professor at Georgia Tech in 1991 and a professor there in 1999.1 Routledge published the book in 1999. Parts of its second, third and fourth chapters had appeared in essays between 1996 and 1998, among them “Seeing is believing: live performance and the discourse of authenticity in rock culture” (1998). It won the Joe A. Callaway Prize for the best book on drama and theatre in 2000. The second edition (2008) added a section on intellectual property and digital performers and revised the rock chapter, and the third, published in October 2022 with a copyright date of 2023, retitled that chapter “Liveness and discourses of authenticity in music” and took up live performance during the COVID-19 pandemic.2

The prospectus for a conference held in Toronto in 1995 asked whether theater and the media were “rivals or partners,” and Auslander calls his answer “unequivocal”: at the level of cultural economy, theater (and live performance generally) and the mass media “are rivals, not partners.” Nor are they equal rivals, he writes, since the current culture is saturated with and dominated by mass media, and by television in particular, though television, he concedes, is locked in combat for dominance with the Internet and telecommunications. He uses “cultural economy” for a realm of inquiry that takes in both the real economic relations among cultural forms and the relative prestige and power each form enjoys, and “mediatized performance” is, in his definition, performance “circulated on television, as audio or video recordings, and in other forms based in technologies of reproduction.”3 He was impatient, he writes, with accounts of the value of liveness that rest on “clichés and mystifications like ‘the magic of live theatre,’” or on an “energy” said to exist between performers and spectators. He came to see that such ideas have value for performers and partisans of live performance, but held that, applied to live performance’s place among the media, they reduce the live and the mediatized to a simple opposition.3 The general response of live performance to the economic superiority of mediatized forms, he writes, “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 If live performance cannot be shown to be economically independent of mediatized forms, immune from contamination by them and ontologically different from them, he asks, in what sense can liveness function as a site of cultural and ideological resistance, as Phelan and others claim?4

The second chapter opens on early American television, which “originally modeled itself on the live form”; in Auslander’s words, “Television was imagined as theatre.” He reads that history as an allegory of mediatized forms displacing live ones.5 As live events came to model themselves on mediatized ones, live performance became, he argues, “the means by which mediatized representations are naturalized,” through a simple logic that appeals to nostalgia for what we assumed was unmediated: if a mediatized image can be recreated live, it must have been “real” to begin with.5 Walter Benjamin, in a sentence Auslander quotes, had called prying an object from its shell, “to destroy its aura,” the mark of a perception whose “sense of the universal equality of all things” has increased. Following Benjamin, Auslander suggests that live performance “has indeed been pried from its shell” and that all modes of performance are now equal, none of them perceived as auratic or authentic, which, he adds, does not mean they are all experienced in the same way.6 Before technologies such as sound recording and motion pictures, he writes, “there was no such thing as ‘live’ performance, for that category has meaning only in relation to an opposing possibility.” Ancient Greek theater, in his example, was not live, because nothing could record it.6 In the preface to the second edition he wrote that, in this chapter, the idea “that the concept of liveness describes a historical, rather than ontological, condition” had increasingly come to seem to him “the central point.”7

Auslander finds “untenable” the view, set out in Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993), that the value of live performance lies in its resistance to the market and the media.8 For Phelan, performance cannot be saved or recorded, and to the degree that it attempts to enter the economy of reproduction, it “betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology.” Live performance does not enter that economy, Auslander replies, “since it has always been there.” The very concept of live performance presupposes reproduction, so that “the live can exist only within an economy of reproduction.”8

The rock chapter opens on Milli Vanilli, who won the Grammy for best new artist of 1989 in 1990. Most commentary on singers accused of lip-syncing in concert was “adamantly opposed to the practice,” though, Auslander writes, “virtually all of it also admitted” that their main audiences, “mostly young teenagers, did not seem to care whether their idols sang or not.” In November the duo’s producer said that they had lip-synced in their concerts and had not even sung on the record, and the Grammy was rescinded. Older commentators, Auslander writes, “did not simply dismiss it as the logical outcome of the pop audience’s indifference to authenticity”; they saw it as signifying “a crisis in the ideology of authenticity.” Milli Vanilli was, he writes, “scandalous from the point of view of the rock ideology endorsed by these older commentators, even if not to the group’s young listeners”: it “suggested the arrival of a new era of music performance in which the visual evidence of performance would have no relation to the production of the sound.” “The dialectic of recordings and live performances central to rock ideology was threatened,” and were it to break down, live concerts “would become what recordings had always been: simulations.”9

Glossing a passage of Simon Frith’s Performing Rites, Auslander writes that “authenticity can be heard in the music, yet it is an effect not just of the music itself but also of prior musical and extra-musical knowledge and beliefs,” and that what counts as authentic varies among genres and subgenres.10 He accepts Theodore Gracyk’s argument in Rhythm and Noise (1996) that the primary object of rock music as an aesthetic form is the recording, but objects that Gracyk defines rock too broadly: rock is a diverse category with fuzzy borders, he writes, but within rock culture the music is often defined by “an exclusionary concept of authenticity,” and Gracyk “certainly goes too far” in counting Whitney Houston as a rock musician.10

Rock fans, Auslander writes, treat authenticity “as an essence that is either present or absent in the music itself.” He treats it instead “as an ideological concept and as a discursive effect.”11 The concept is linked with rock’s romanticism, which imagines the music as truly expressive of its makers’ souls and as “necessarily politically and culturally oppositional,” and he finds that mythology summed up in Neil Young’s “Tonight’s the Night” (1975).11 Rock authenticity, he writes, is performative in the sense the philosopher Judith Butler gave the term: musicians achieve and maintain the effect of authenticity by continuously citing, in their music and their performance, the norms of authenticity of their subgenre and moment.12 Lawrence Grossberg’s We Gotta Get Out of This Place (1992) describes rock keeping up its claim to authenticity by turning what had been authentic into the inauthentic, and Auslander concludes that rock’s authenticity effects “are thus dependent on the nomination of something to serve as the inauthentic Other, whether that thing is current pop music or other rock.”12

Rock authenticity, in Auslander’s account, “depends on a specific interaction of recordings and live performances rather than the nomination of one or the other as authentic.” In his account, concerts had long authenticated records. With music video, “the video authenticates the sound recording by replicating the live production of the sound,” while “live performance authenticates the video by replicating its images and personae in real space.”13 Two developments after Milli Vanilli, in his reading, “apparently reinstated the signs that signify the real”: a renewed emphasis in rock on acoustic performance, “of which the television program MTV Unplugged was the apotheosis,” and the multiple awards given to Clapton at the 1993 Grammys, which Auslander ties to Unplugged (1992), the live album of his appearance on the program.14 “MTV Unplugged thus simulates the polarities that define rock ideology,” he wrote in 1999, “even as the program is itself symptomatic of the crisis in that same ideology.”14

The first edition closed the chapter with a forecast about the children of rock’s older fans: “When this latter generation assumes ‘power,’ the regime of simulation may be in full force,” and may have absorbed and emptied the social and the political.15 The preface to the second edition withdrew it. Having assumed that younger audiences had grown indifferent to rock’s ideology of authenticity, Auslander wrote, he had predicted its demise, but “in fact, that ideology seems to be more powerful than ever.” The revised chapter begins with the Milli Vanilli scandal and ends with “the similar Ashlee Simpson scandal of 2004.” Although the recent debates over “rockism” could be read as a fresh challenge to rock ideology and its emphasis on liveness, Auslander argued, both those debates and the Simpson case showed that “rock ideology continues to set the terms for defining authenticity in popular music.”16

The fourth chapter, “Legally live,” turns to American law. Against performance theorists who see in the disappearance of live performance a resistance to the law, Auslander argues that the same qualities make performance “available and useful to the law as both a policed site and a mechanism of regulation.” The second edition traced the use of trademark and the right of publicity to make more and more of performance legally “ownable.”17

Dorothy Chansky, reviewing the book in Modern Drama in 2000, wrote that even readers prepared to resist it “emerge with a respect for the clarity of every argument Auslander makes.”18 Pietro de Simone, reviewing it in 2007, found its arguments “at times, speciously constructed,” citing the claim about ancient Greek theater, but, “nitpicking aside,” called it “an important book” that “forces consideration of the reductive binaries often separating” liveness and mediatization. Its emphasis on pop and rock, he wrote, may leave readers wanting more on classical music, jazz, theater and sports, forms that ostensibly rely less on mediatization, and, for many, looking for an ontology of liveness in the likes of Madonna and Jimi Hendrix “will only get you so far.” These tendencies, he wrote, make Auslander vulnerable to the criticism that he “underestimates, if not misunderstands, the relevance and value of the performing action itself,” and de Simone closed by writing that, “by merely referring to and rarely engaging viewpoints which make the relationship between liveness and mediatization ‘oppositional,’” Auslander does not satisfactorily address what makes those differences and tensions possible.19 Nessa Johnston, writing in 2014, found that the narrative of the Irish film Once fetishizes “the ‘live’, the ‘lo-fi’ and the ‘acoustic’ in music,” which she identified with what Auslander and others call rock authenticity.20

In the preface to the second edition, Auslander wrote that his dissatisfaction with the theoretical discourse on liveness had “apparently been mistaken quite regularly for hostility toward the idea of live performance itself.” At a conference banquet in Mainz in 2001, a stranger had shouted at him, “Aren’t you the guy who hates live performance?” Martin Barker, in 2003, picked up on Auslander’s stated sense that live performance, which he values, “seems to have less and less presence and importance,” and charged him with “cultural pessimism,” a charge Auslander called fair.21

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

Footnotes

  1. Philip Auslander, curriculum vitae, “Education” and “Faculty positions” (accessed October 26, 2026). ↩

  2. Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2008), preliminary pages, acknowledgments, pp. ix–x, and preface, pp. xi–xiii, read in Routledge’s preview of the second edition; Routledge’s page for the third edition; Crossref’s metadata for the third edition, which dates it October 28, 2022, where Routledge’s page gives copyright 2023; and Crossref’s metadata for the third edition’s music chapter (Crossref’s record for the third edition accessed October 27, 2026, the rest October 26); verbatim. ↩

  3. Auslander, Liveness, 2nd ed., Introduction, pp. 1–4 and notes 2 and 3, read in Routledge’s preview (accessed October 26, 2026); verbatim. ↩ ↩2

  4. Auslander, Liveness, 2nd ed., p. 7, read in Routledge’s preview; verbatim. ↩ ↩2

  5. Auslander, Liveness, 2nd ed., p. 7, and chapter 2, “Teevee’s playhouse” and “Against ontology,” read through Open Library’s search inside the Internet Archive’s copy of the 2008 edition (accessed October 26, 2026); verbatim. ↩ ↩2

  6. Auslander, Liveness, 2nd ed., chapter 2, “Against ontology,” read through Open Library’s search inside the 2008 edition, which also holds his quotation of Benjamin, “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction” (its place in the book not confirmed); the passages are worded the same in the 1999 edition; verbatim. ↩ ↩2

  7. Auslander, Liveness, 2nd ed., preface, pp. xii–xiii, read in Routledge’s preview; verbatim. ↩

  8. Auslander, Liveness, 2nd ed., p. 7, read in Routledge’s preview, and chapter 2, “Against ontology,” quoting Phelan, Unmarked, p. 146, read through Open Library’s search inside the 2008 edition (accessed October 26, 2026); verbatim. ↩ ↩2

  9. Auslander, Liveness, 2nd ed., chapter 3, from p. 73 (the chapter’s first page, per the contents), read through Open Library’s search inside the 2008 edition; verbatim. ↩

  10. Auslander, Liveness, 2nd ed., chapter 3, summarizing Frith, Performing Rites, p. 71 (the quoted words are Auslander’s), and citing Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise, p. 222 (on Houston), read through Open Library’s search inside the 2008 edition; verbatim. ↩ ↩2

  11. Auslander, Liveness, 2nd ed., chapter 3, read through Open Library’s search inside the 2008 edition, which names the song as “Tonight’s the Night (Part 1)”; verbatim. ↩ ↩2

  12. Auslander, Liveness, 2nd ed., chapter 3, citing Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place, p. 209, read through Open Library’s search inside the 2008 edition; verbatim. ↩ ↩2

  13. Auslander, Liveness, 2nd ed., chapter 3, read through Open Library’s search inside the 2008 edition; verbatim. ↩

  14. Auslander, Liveness, 2nd ed., chapter 3, read through Open Library’s search inside the 2008 edition; the “simulates” sentence is quoted from the 1999 edition, chapter 3, read through Open Library’s search inside the Internet Archive’s copy (the 2008 edition puts it in the past tense) (accessed October 26, 2026); the album’s year per Apple Music’s catalog record of Unplugged (Live), collection ID 1647253516, released August 25, 1992 (accessed October 27, 2026); verbatim. ↩ ↩2

  15. Auslander, Liveness (1999), chapter 3, at its end, pp. 110–11, read through Open Library’s search inside the 1999 edition; verbatim. ↩

  16. Auslander, Liveness, 2nd ed., preface, p. xiii, read in Routledge’s preview, and chapter 3, read through Open Library’s search inside the 2008 edition; verbatim. ↩

  17. Auslander, Liveness, 2nd ed., contents and Introduction, p. 8, and preface, p. xiii, read in Routledge’s preview; verbatim. ↩

  18. Dorothy Chansky, review of Liveness, Modern Drama 43, no. 3 (2000): 505–8, as quoted on the opening page of the second edition, read in Routledge’s preview; the journal’s details per Crossref’s metadata for the review (both accessed October 26, 2026); verbatim. ↩

  19. Pietro de Simone, “Why ‘Live’?,” Other Voices 3, no. 1 (May 2007) (accessed October 26, 2026); verbatim. ↩

  20. Nessa Johnston, “The Celtic Tiger ‘Unplugged’: DV Realism, Liveness, and Sonic Authenticity in Once (2007),” The Soundtrack 7, no. 1 (2014): 25–38, DOI 10.1386/st.7.1.25_1, its abstract and text, read in the author’s version at Edge Hill University (accessed October 26, 2026); verbatim. ↩

  21. Auslander, Liveness, 2nd ed., preface, p. xi, read in Routledge’s preview, citing Martin Barker, “Crash, Theatre Audiences, and the Idea of ‘Liveness,’” Studies in Theatre and Performance 23, no. 1 (2003): 21–39, pp. 36–37, the article’s details per Crossref’s metadata (both accessed October 26, 2026); verbatim. ↩

Published October 27, 2026