Aura: More on Walter Benjamin
By close-ups of the
things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring
commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on
the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our
lives; on the other hand it manages to assure us of an immense field of action. Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our
offices and our furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories
appeared to have us locked up hopelessly.
Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite
of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and
debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling. With the close-up, space expands; with slow
motion, movement is extended. The enlargement
of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible
though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject.
(Walter Benjamin, Illuminations 236)
The Collector and the Critic.
Benjamin’s work balances, often with paradoxical results, tensions between
aspects of experience: the experiences simultaneously of being too late and too
early (too soon) in the temporal dimension (c.f. Hamlet’s “the time is out of
joint”) and being both distant and close (in the spatial dimension), and anyway
of being both temporal and spatial.
The concept of “aura,” which is one of Benjamin’s most influential
contributions, is best understood in terms of these tensions or
oscillations. He says that “aura” is a
“strange web of space and time” or “a distance as close as it can be.” The main idea is of something inaccessible
and elusive, something highly valued but which is deceptive and out of
reach. Aura, in this sense, is
associated with the nineteenth century notions of the artwork and is thus lost,
Benjamin argues, with the onset of photography.
At first photographs attempted to imitate painting but very quickly and
because of the nature of the technology photography took its own direction
contributing to the destruction of all traditional notions of the fine arts. The stamp and the book are the two images
that perhaps best indicate what is at stake.
The enigmatic value that a stamp has for the collector is superseded by
the more communal and critical value suggested by the knowledge of books,
although books too are objects for the collector. Both must be set against the bank-note, which
simply circulates in a system of exchange and has no value beyond its
system. Finally it is film that is most
suggestive for Benjamin.
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproducibility
Benjamin addresses the phenomena of moving images in cinema and newsreel in his 1936 essay “The Work of art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” It is strongly recommended as one of the clearest and most far-reaching of all Benjamin’s works. It is a rigorously dialectical argument, clearly influenced by his ongoing engagement with Marxism and written with an audience in mind already familiar with the works of his friend Theodor Adorno. Dialectical thinking involves moving through contraries without ever letting one term gain precedence over its other—or apparent opposite—as most oppositional thinking tends to do. In dialectics each term only has significance in relation to its apparent contrary or other. Benjamin begins by assuming the main tenet of dialectical materialism, which states that the conditions of and the means of production determine the nature of cultural production, or, more technically, the substructure determines the superstructure. However, he goes on to show that the superstructure changes much more slowly than the substructure, with the effect that cultural phenomena always lag behind the conditions that produce them. For this reason, he is observing the conditions of present culture at the point of their earliest development and with an eye for the present state of productive (and reproductive) technologies. His mode of observation (as he puts it) is designed to draw attention to changes in the conditions of production as a way of intervening in the process. His theses are, thus, regarded as weapons in the war against fascism.
Main Points:
Two modes of observation are regarded as modes of action, the fascist or reactionary and the progressive or revolutionary. To the fascist mode belongs the attempt to render politics aesthetic, manifested in propaganda as well as by Hitler’s mass rallies and, ultimately, in war, as expressed by Marinetti and the futurists.
Technical/mechanical conditions of reproduction replace earlier conditions of producing and consuming artworks. Photography does not gradually culminate in the moving images of cinema, but implies cinema and foreshadows it from the beginning, just as the camera obscura foreshadows the fixed image of the photograph.
The destruction of “aura” in mechanical reproduction signals the passage from the artwork as cult (i.e., as a religious object) to the artwork as exhibit (in museum and inevitably in cinema).
Aura implies authenticity but there is no authenticity without its destruction in mechanical reproducibility (i.e., the idea of authentic art only emerges when authenticity is a threatened species of artwork). Reproducible art replaces authenticity with an added extra—unheard of perceptions are made possible.
Aura (the eliminated term) is explained in analogy with the experience of nature (a mountain range or the shadow of a branch perceived in a unique moment) superseded in the experience of mechanically reproduced images, for which, however perfect they are as images, are missing the point of presence—the presence of the object—that gives it its aura. The difference is like the loss of the presence of the actor in the passage from stage to screen. But cinema makes so much more possible than the stage can do.
So the mode of sense perception is irrevocably changed. The movie takes over from the epic poem the function that architecture has always played: an object is presented for simultaneous collective experience. The masses have reactionary responses to art (i.e., to Picasso) and progressive ones (e.g., to Charles Chaplin). The future of a technical mode can be glimpsed in the desire it awakens (e.g., to reproduce images in an increasingly detailed way—with sound and, ultimately, of course, in colour). And quantity is transmuted into quality: “The greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of participation.”
Helpful Links
There are one or two interesting sites devoted to One Way Street:
Attested Auditor of Books provides
a commentary along with the section of that name and some handy links.
Richard Wolin’s
Review of The Arcades Project has some commentary on One
Way Street.
Excerpt from “Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street” by Miriam Bratu Hansen.
That excerpt is from a Critical Inquiry issue devoted to Walter Benjamin and you can find other excerpts on Benjamin on their site.
For Klee’s Angelus Novus and Benjamin’s Commentary on it (as
“the Angel of History”) click on this image:
For Benjamin’s take on history you might go to the following page: Benjamin on History This also contains a range up to date links.
Otherwise there’s the EN 3204 links page: Benjamin’s Websitelinks
CAMERA OBSCURA on the dark room
Images
of Camera Obscura Rooms (nice
tautology?)
Topics
in the 20th Century: Modernism