by Thomas Lewis
Walter Benjamin is now considered an essential theorist in the humanities and his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (“The Work of Art”) a seminal text. Yet in his life Benjamin was, outside of a coterie of admirers, an obscure, struggling writer, unknown unto his lonely death in 1940. His life and death were compelled by the crises of fascism that marked mid-century Europe, making his politicisation of aesthetics in “The Work of Art” no academic musing, but a philosophical exhortation. Taking our perception of art to be mutable and subject to technological change, Benjamin argued for a conception of aesthetics that would enable communism to politicise art in response to fascism’s aestheticisation of politics. The key concept of his endeavour is the ‘aura’, the complex meaning of which is diffused throughout Benjamin’s oeuvre. The attenuation of the aura in the era of technological reproducibility provides the opportunity for art’s communistic power. I will argue that the aura is a perceptive phenomenon occurring between subject and object that is ephemeral and beautifying. Furthermore, I will argue that with the aura’s attenuation, more has been lost than gained.
There is a common understanding of the aura that, although quite workable, fails to capture the breadth of the concept across Benjamin’s writings. The Oxford definition describes it as “the intrinsically unreproducible aspect of a work of art, namely its original presence in time and space.”[i] But Miriam Bratu Hansen notes that “anything but a clearly delimited, stable concept, aura describes a cluster of meanings and relations…in Benjamin’s writings.”[ii] The definition in “The Work of Art” —which Hansen notes is resumed from Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography”—is “the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be.”[iii] That definition is elaborated in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”: “to experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back at us.”[iv] They are conjoined in the Arcades Project: “the aura of distance opened up with the look that awakens in an object perceived.”[v] The common definition that I quoted earlier is, Hansen notes, present in Benjamin’s early hashish impressions and his “Little History of Photography.”[vi] The heterogeneity of aura might be explained by considering Benjamin’s purpose, as he worked backwards to describe what had been lost with mechanical reproduction; its “conceptual fluidity” is, regardless, what “allows aura to become such a productive nodal point.”[vii]
I have particularised aura in this way to maintain its productivity. The common definition suggests that aura is a quality of an object; I argue that it is a perceptive phenomenon. Hansen writes that “aura is not an inherent property of persons or objects, but pertains to the medium of perception, naming a particular structure of vision.[viii] Aura is then a quality between subject and object, inherent to neither and emergent from the interaction between them; it is the feeling of growing more distant from that which we have allowed to look back at us. This phenomenon is unreproducible, unique not just to the object’s spatiotemporal position, but the beholder’s as well. To elucidate it, I will turn as Benjamin does, to Proust, who writes: “people who are fond of secrets…believe that…pictures appear only through a delicate veil which centuries of love and reverence on the part of so many admirers have woven about them.”[ix] Proust suggests that, for those who enable a picture to look back at them, the picture is itself composed through the gaze of all the others who have looked at the picture; he refers to tradition, or authority, which mechanical reproduction erodes. Auratic perception is not normal, either; for Proust, it is for those who are fond of secrets—he is, as usual, gnomic—and in Benjamin it occurs through attentiveness, when either a “gaze of awareness” or “a glance pure and simple” meets the expectation that an object will look back.[x] Benjamin elaborates that aura is experienced when “a response characteristic of human relationships is transposed to the relationship between humans and…objects.”[xi] That is to say, aura is experienced when our attentiveness to an object, instigated by its authority, transposes human qualities onto it, leading us to expect it to look back. Auratic perception is thus meeting the gaze of something inanimate. It remains unclear what there is to see—perhaps something within oneself, or in the surrounding tradition: aura is a moment of pure potential. But whatever there is to see grows more distant the closer we come to it. Benjamin compares Proust’s mémoire involontaire (involuntary memory) to auratic perception, the data of which “are unique: they are lost to the memory that seeks to retain them.”[xii] Their uniqueness is opposed to the disappointing images of Venice in Proust’s mémoire volontaire (voluntary memory), which lack the distinctive quality of his involuntary recollections—their aura—suggesting both that aura is not intentionally attainable, nor reproducible, and that aura is a beautifying quality: that something with an aura is more beautiful than something without.
Having found a stable definition of the aura, I now turn to its absence, for what “withers” in the age of art’s technological reproducibility is its aura.[xiii] Aura is lost when art is reproduced because authenticity is lost. A reproduction cannot capture art’s “unique existence in a particular place…the mark of the history to which the work has been subject.”[xiv] Without this authenticity, the art loses its authority and cannot demand the attentiveness that impels auratic perception. Moreover, the loss not only affects the reproduction, but the original as well, for technological reproduction is independent and “can place the copy in situations which the original itself cannot attain”.[xv] The absolute accessibility that reproduction offers devalues an artwork’s authenticity, “substituting a mass existence for a unique existence” and abolishing the aura; Benjamin does not understate by calling this a “massive upheaval.”[xvi] He goes on to elucidate the social basis for the decay, namely “the desire of the present-day masses to ‘get closer’ to things…and their concern…for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness by assimilating it as a reproduction.”[xvii] The quality of distance—of unattainability—that defined the aura (and Proust’s mémoire involontaire) is precisely why its reproduction was sought; yet in closing that distance, reproduction destroyed what it tried to attain. Reproduction is the means of a social “perception whose ‘sense for sameness in the world’…extracts sameness even from what is unique.”[xviii] Benjamin argues that humanity’s perception of art is affected by its historical conditions; in his time, an increasing alignment of “reality with the masses” created the conditions that led to the aura’s decay.[xix]
As the aura decays, we are left to wonder whether to mourn or celebrate its attenuation. In the artwork essay, Benjamin seems to support the latter, praising how it opens up art to the masses. But Benjamin’s Romantic streak suggests a degree of sorrow at the aura’s decay; auratic perception, is, after all, so central to Proust’s aesthetics. Take the moment in “A Love of Swann’s” in which Swann’s memories of Odette rush back upon hearing a phrase in the Vinteuil sonata. Swann is suffering, and the concert is no balm, until “the violin…lingered as though waiting for something” and his memories of Odette’s love, “which he had managed until now to keep out of sight in the deepest part of himself” return.[xx] In this instant, we see Swann’s gaze suddenly drawn to a phrase that returns it, instigates a “metamorphosis” and then instantly disappears—an auratic experience, breathtakingly described and reflected in the narrator’s experience with Vinteuil’s septet.[xxi] Proust later writes about how the “only real journey” is to travel not to new places, but with new eyes, that “with the help of an Elstir, a Vinteuil…we can truly fly from star to star.”[xxii] In Proust, we see not merely an encomium for art, but for auratic experience—ephemeral and sudden, which “makes manifest…the intimate make-up of those worlds we call individuals”, which would be otherwise unknown.[xxiii] It seems fair to conclude that aura makes a work of art more beautiful, capable of instigating ecstasy, metamorphosis, rapture—whichever word can describe the ineffable experience that in turn makes the art more beautiful still. Its loss is thus something to be mourned. All the auratic experiences written about, and the countless more which aura’s ineffability prevented, are now, it would seem, closed to us—and with them, perhaps, those parts of our selves they revealed. Our capacity for technological reproduction has grown exponentially since Benjamin wrote, giving little hope for an auratic reclamation. However, like Benjamin, perhaps we can locate something positive in this: the politicisation of art.
Benjamin writes that “Technological reproducibility…changes the relation of the masses to art. The extremely backward attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into a highly progressive reaction to a Chaplin film.”[xxiv] This idea, that our auratic experience is replaced by a democratic one, grounds Benjamin’s vindication of reproducibility. Without an aura, the cult value of artwork diminishes, making it more accessible to the masses—it is worth remembering Proust’s considerable wealth. Benjamin valorises film in particular as the art form that makes cult value recede, encouraging a new form of communal perception that awakens the masses to their surroundings, as the camera offers perspectives that painting cannot. Through its intense realism, film heightens our awareness of the world. This new mode of perception thus offers not auratic experience, which explodes our subjectivity, but a democratic experience that can show our material conditions. Benjamin identifies this possibility precisely because fascism had also begun to use new media for its ends. With films like Triumph of the Will, following futurism and Marinetti’s identification of beauty in war, fascism sought to aestheticize politics; it would grant “expression to the masses”, through reproduction and new media, “but on no account [grant] them rights.”[xxv] Aestheticizing politics, Benjamin writes, leads only to war, as war alone can use all of today’s technological resources and grant expression to the masses without actually changing property relations.[xxvi] It is against this orgy of self-alienation that “communism replies by politicising art.”[xxvii] This imperative drives Benjamin’s essay, and, at the time, seemed to justify the aura’s decay. But today, writes Sylvire Lotringer, “the aestheticization of politics isn’t a sign of fascism anymore, nor is the politicization of aesthetics a sign of radicalism”; “art is free to morph everywhere, into politics…the economy…the media.”[xxviii] Moreover, even as art has become ubiquitous, its value has decreased. Mark Fisher describes how capitalism turns cultural artefacts “into merely aesthetic objects,” taken from their own contexts to line the floors of a museum, their aura eradicated.[xxix] In postmodernity, the purpose Benjamin ascribes to art cannot function, nor is there any place for the aura. It has been subsumed by capitalism.
The aura is a meeting of gazes between a human and an inanimate object that results in an ephemeral experience of intense beauty and truth. In the era of mechanical reproduction, it decayed, and today its attenuation has only grown more intense. The political purpose Benjamin ascribed to the democratic experience left in the aura’s absence has been subsumed by capitalism. Aura is not a chimera of self-discovery and aesthetic rapture, nor is it lost to us entirely. There are and will continue to be circumstances in which the authority of art is sufficient to provoke an auratic experience; nature, too, offers an aura which can feasibly be faced. But aura presents a mode of engaging with art—with the world—that postmodernity alienates. With the political potential of aura’s absence unrealised, we have been left with little but its threnody.
Thomas is in his final semester of a Bachelor of Arts majoring in English Literature and is preparing for his Honours year. He is interested in modernism and the gothic.
ENDNOTES
[i] Ian Buchanan, “Aura,” in A Dictionary of Critical Theory (Oxford University Press, 2018).
[ii] Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 2 (2008): 339,https://doi.org/10.1086/529060, http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.uq.edu.au/stable/10.1086/529060.
[iii] Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” 339; Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility ” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism ed. Vincent B. Leitch (Norton, 2018), 980.
[iv] Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Harvard UP, 2003), 338.
[v] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard UP, 1999), 314.
[vi] Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” 340.
[vii] Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” 339.
[viii] Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” 342.
[ix] Proust quoted in Benjamin, “On Baudelaire,” 338-39.
[x] Benjamin, “On Baudelaire,” 338.
[xi] Benjamin, “On Baudelaire,” 338.
[xii] Benjamin, “On Baudelaire,” 338.
[xiii] Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 979.
[xiv] Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 978.
[xv] Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 979.
[xvi] Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 979.
[xvii] Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 980.
[xviii] Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 980.
[xix] Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 981.
[xx] Marcel Proust, The Way by Swann’s, ed. Christopher Prendergast, trans. Lydia Davis, vol. 1, In Search of Lost Time (Penguin, 2002), 347.
[xxi] Proust, The Way by Swann’s, 1, 350.
[xxii] Marcel Proust, The Prisoner and The Fugitive, ed. Christopher Prendergast, trans. Carol Clark, vol. 5, In Search of Lost Time (Penguin, 2002), 237.
[xxiii] Proust, The Prisoner, 5, 236.
[xxiv] Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 989.
[xxv] Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 995.
[xxvi] Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 995.
[xxvii] Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” 996.
[xxviii] Jean Baudrillard, The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Texts, Interviews, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (Cambridge, Mass London: Semiotexte, 2005), 11-12.
[xxix] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is there no Alternative? (Ropley, England: Zero Books, 2009), 10.
WORKS CITED
Baudrillard, Jean. The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Texts, Interviews. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer. Cambridge, Mass London: Semiotexte, 2005.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Harvard UP, 1999.
Benjamin, Walter. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, edited by Michael W. Jennings, 313-55: Harvard UP, 2003.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” Translated by Harry Zohn. In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, 976-96: Norton, 2018.
Buchanan, Ian. “Aura.” In A Dictionary of Critical Theory: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Ropley, England: Zero Books, 2009.
Hansen, Miriam Bratu. “Benjamin’s Aura.” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 2 (2008): 336-75. https://doi.org/10.1086/529060.
Proust, Marcel. The Prisoner and the Fugitive. Translated by Carol Clark. In Search of Lost Time. Edited by Christopher Prendergast. Vol. 5: Penguin, 2002. 1923.
Proust, Marcel. The Way by Swann’s. Translated by Lydia Davis. In Search of Lost Time. Edited by Christopher Prendergast. Vol. 1: Penguin, 2002. 1913.
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