The Concept of "Aura" in Benjamin's Artwork Essay

In Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” the second, less censored version of which I will primarily deal with here (1936), the concept of “aura” seems to thread its way in and out of multiple schools of media studies: aura becomes an index of diachronic shifts in “symbolic forms,” a synchronic marker of modern perceptual modes, and a key term in locating medium-specificity. What seems missing from the often one-dimensional treatment of Benjamin’s use of aura (it’s destroyed!) is the presence of a paradoxical investment in its positive potentialities. Tracking some of the modulations in the concept within the Artwork essay will more fully allow us speculate on the potential of aura within the mass media––the presence of which is much more apparent in the recently translated second version of the essay, as opposed to the now famous third version published in Illuminations ed. Arendt. What is accomplished in what Benjamin calls the liberation from industrial drudgery into a fantastic “playspace?” How much stress can we put on his depiction of the cinematic spectator going on “journeys of adventure” (117)? And, a question that I seem to be very personally invested in, can it be possible that vegging out can serve a revolutionary function?

Both Miriam Hansen, in her recent essay “Benjamin’s Aura” (2008) and Samuel Weber use as a common jumping off point the formulation of “aura” that has become most prevalent in critical discussions on Benjamin’s work. In the Artwork essay’s third and fourth sections, Benjamin refers to aura as “the unique appearance of a distance, however near it may be.” In a strange spatiotemporal convergence, spatial proximity to work of art entails a certain apprehension of the temporal distance or historicity, what Benjamin variously calls its “authenticity,” “historical testimony,” “the mark of history,” all of which must be encountered in the presence of “the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place” (103). In this configuration of aura as a kind of uniqueness or authenticity, the profusion of reproductive technologies places the aura of the work of art in decline, a decline which Benjamin argues can be said to register new modes of perception in modernity. This is more or less the story we all know about the Artwork essay.

In Samuel Weber’s “Art, Aura, and Media in the Work of Walter Benjamin” (1992), he argues that the indexical relationship between aura’s decline and ephemeral shifts in sense perception sets up a series of binaries that are too often taken at face value, and that often do not hold up within the text: distance and nearness, ritual and politics, painting and cinematography, distraction and concentration, uniqueness and multiplicity, and so on. Weber’s essay performs a tactical collapse of these binaries when he calls into question the differentiation between the uniqueness of an auratic art object and the mass-like existence of a disseminated reproduction. Weber argues that aura is never itself, but always constituted in a process of self-detachment as demarcation of the self. The mountain scene, described by Benjamin in the third version of the essay as an “illustration,” and in both versions as illuminating the concept of aura, shows that distance and separation are already marked in the aura of the mountain scene by its shadows. (p.105 of Benjamin) “To follow with the eye—while resting on a summer afternoon—a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, of that branch.” Weber argues that these shadows can be read as “marking the space within which the relation of subject to object takes place” (86). And, as Weber postulates, the decline of aura is then somewhat of a necessary condition of perception. The narrative of aura’s decline as a detachment from the authentic original “might well turn out to be part and parcel of [aura’s] mode of being. So understood, aura would name the undepictable de-piction of distancing and separation” (87). In this sense, the technological media reveal not a break in aesthetics, but rather an estrangement of a process that was always a necessary condition of aesthetic perception.

Similarly, if we look at the seemingly definitive line on p. 103: “The whole sphere of authenticity eludes technological—and of course not only technological—reproduction.” The problem is that, this section begins by explicitly saying that the work of art has always been reproducible, and towards the middle, that authenticity is itself defined by technological means: “chemical or physical analyses.” Further, after this line that authenticity eludes reproduction, in a footnote that is only included in the third version of the essay, Benjamin writes: “To be sure, a medieval picture of the Madonna at the time it was created could not yet be said to be ‘authentic.’ It became ‘authentic’ only during the succeeding centuries, and perhaps most strikingly so during the nineteenth” (as if aura is something cultivated). The diachronic narrative of auratic decline particular to modernity ends up functioning as a natural element of aesthetic perception, a separation of the object from itself.

Because aura is never attached to the unique existence of an art object, its existence in the age of technological reproducibility is not precluded, but rather, comes to take on greater political significance with the possibility of its synthetic production. This leads us to a second modulation in the concept of aura that must be tracked: In addition to these false polarizations, the revolutionary or utopian potential of “aura” that Benjamin gives more solid and confident treatment elsewhere (and masterfully tracked in Hansen’s essay) is shot through by reservations and caution throughout the Artwork essay. Hansen argues that this false polarization and attenuation of aura’s potentialities is “deliberately restrictive,” a sort of “sleight-of-hand” in order to protect them from what Benjamin calls the “aestheticizing of political life” under national socialism. Hansen writes: “one strategy of preserving the potentiality of aura, of being able to introduce the concept in the first place, was to place it under erasure, to mark it as constitutively belated and irreversibly moribund.” It was “a fetishistic deflection that would protect, as it were, the vital parts of the concept inasmuch as they were indispensable to the project of reconceptualizing experience in modernity” (356-7).

In an attempt to recover some of Benjamin’s investment in the potentialities of aura in mass media, Hansen complicates this first definition of aura with a perhaps more intuitive understanding of the term “as an elusive phenomenal substance, ether, or halo that surrounds a person or object of perception, encapsulating their individuality and authenticity” (340). Through a long archaeology of Benjamin’s work, Hansen amasses under the heading of this third category many different instances of the term aura that show it not as “an inherent property of persons or objects, but pertaining to the medium of perception, naming a particular structure of vision” (342). These include: aura as the logic of the trace in the clothing seen on subjects in photographic portraits, a sense that is reminiscent of Kracauer’s early essay on “Photography” wherein time uses the raw material of clothing to make an image of itself. Other instances in Benjamin’s work that Hansen aligns under this definition of aura as a perceptual mode include: the aura of the habitual or the everyday (358, 341), aura as resembling Roland Barthes’s notion of the “punctum” or the singular element in a photograph that one finds inexplicably fascinating, that “which pricks me but also bruises me, is poignant to me” (Camera Lucida 27), and aura as a sense of futurity, or a “spark that leaps across time” that “emerges in the field of the beholder’s compulsively searching gaze” (341). Benjamin himself refers to aura as a medium of perception in section IV of the Artwork essay when citing Alois Riegl’s research on the late Roman art industry as a methodological precursor to his own project: “Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organized—the medium in which it occurs—is conditioned not only by nature but by history” (104).

But Hansen’s essay makes the crucial distinction that a medium of perception cannot be conflated with a technological medium—any interpretation of the Artwork essay must keep this division consistently in view. Benjamin’s sense of a medium in which human perception is organized, Hansen writes, “proceeds from an older philosophical usage referring to an in-between substance or agency—such as language, writing, thinking, memory—that mediates and constitutes meaning.” The artwork essay seeks to use historical shifts in “aura” in order to define the perceptual modes specific to modernity. And yet paradoxically, Hansen argues, it is the technological media—film, photography, radio, and so on—that serve for Benjamin to crystallize what he refers to as “changes in the medium of present-day perception” (104). Herein lies one of the main difficulties in interpreting Benjamin’s Artwork essay. Aura, which is supposed to serve as the index against which the condition of modern sense perception can be registered, is simultaneously used in medium specific definitions of film and photography.

Thus, Benjamin’s synchronic formulation of aura in the mass media places the technological apparatus and modes of perception in a causally ambiguous situation. If genuine aura, as Hansen writes, “contained structural elements that were indispensable to reimagining experience in a collective, secularized and technologically mediated form,” (357) are these potentialities to be located in the formal analysis of film’s physical support or in the social structures that organize themselves around these media?

One possible way we could talk about this coupling of technological apparatus with modes of perception is that it places Benjamin in a difficult relationship with Riegl, who frequently railed against aesthetic materialisms (such as those of Gottfried Semper). Riegl critiques the emphasis on raw materials and technics as asserting an overly deterministic role in the creation of art objects, allowing “‘technique’ to become interchangeable with ‘art’ itself and eventually to replace it. Only the naïve talked about ‘art’; experts spoke in terms of ‘technique’” (Problems of Style p. 4). But of course, Benjamin’s evocation of technological material or objects is hardly deterministic: as Hansen points out, for Benjamin the medium-specific difference between photography and film is less one of technological difference, than one of purely aesthetic choice (p. 349). ((that still frames can be sped up, cropped, and so on)) What I mean to say here is that it is not as simple as saying, for example, the personal computer has been invented and our perceptual faculties are now fundamentally altered as a result. Such a schema would leave no room for the political agency or subjective will that is indispensable to Benjamin’s project as a whole.

But, at the other end of the spectrum, I don’t think it’s possible to say that Benjamin’s investment in a revolutionary aura lies solely in the fact of technology’s mass scale. Benjamin does cite a “quantitative shift between the two poles” of production and reception, a sort of democratization of aesthetic production. In section 13 he writes: “Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character. The difference becomes functional. At any moment, the reader is ready to become a writer. As an expert—which he has had to become in any case in a highly specialized work process, even if only in some minor capacity—the reader gains access to authorship” (114). The mass-scale of the media opens up a space for release, from the apparatus of industrial production into that of the film. However, what Benjamin calls the space-for-play or Spielraum that technology opens up is already, from the moment this essay was written, a space colonized by “film capital” and “fascism”. If aura has always named the endowment of an object with a value not its own, then the concept immediately offers itself up to violent mass mobilization and deadening commodity spectacle.

If you’ll permit me to apply some of Benjamin’s ambiguously subjective language, the question that wants desperately to be answered in the Artwork essay is, what is the nature of aura’s potentiality in the mass media that Benjamin places under erasure? The benefit of how the term is deployed here is that through some deep synthesis of the materials and the mode of perception, “aura” is able to name that which is “completely useless for the purposes of fascism,” and that which is “useful for the formation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art” (102). But at the same time, this leaves us with a set of incredibly difficult questions—because the space for play or Spielraum that the media opens up for us has almost always been a space that fundamentally does not belong to us. And here I can’t help citing Sony’s motto for the Playstation: “live in your world, play in ours.” Benjamin is fundamentally not talking about the technological domination of nature, or a dumbing down of culture, or an opiate for the masses, and I think this is something very difficult to fully wrap our heads around. So, the difficult question remains: at what point were the mass media utopian, and under what conditions could they still be?