Benjamin, Walter. "Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting." (1931) Illuminations. Trans Harry Zohn. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1955.
Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." (1936) Illuminations. Trans Harry Zohn. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1955.
Taken holistically, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" quite accurately portrays some of the ways in which people interact with a few specific art forms, and even (wittingly or not) demonstrates how those interactions don't stand up against rigorous interrogation. They, like people and like art itself, are not logical, don't follow logical laws, and, to be fair, really don't have to. The big concept that everyone jumps on, here, is the so-called 'aura' of authenticity that surrounds and object or an art object (not the same thing!).
The aura is, essentially, the 'particularness' of an object, in Aristotelian terms. It is a thing or situation or sense impression as it was at a particular moment and in a particular place. We know that's what the aura is because it's what the reproduction doesn't have. "Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence in the place it happens to be" (222). Once we extend that particularness through time, we have the history of the object, the spaces and times through which it has passed. According to Benjamin, there is simply no way to duplicate that unique path through the world, "authenticity is outside technical […] reproducibility (222). Logically, I cannot argue with him.
However, as he himself points out, the only way to verify an aura is to authenticate what that path has left behind on the object, the historical materials that produced it, the damage it might have incurred along its journey, and the stylistic elements of its content. Here's where things get a little tricky. The aura is, in the final analysis, all about what we attach to the object, not what the the object inherently contains. The only reason things can be said to have auras is because we project emotions at them based on what we know of their history. In material terms, the aura is a fiction.
Therefore, if we could convincingly fake the effects of having travelled through time and space (and forgers have spent generations perfecting that very art), then we would produce an aura in the minds of the viewers. The "Mona Lisa" that hangs in the Louvre is, according to urban legend, an extremely skilled copy. The 'real' "Mona Lisa" is in a temperature-controlled vault where it will last a few extra years, even though no one can see it. Nevertheles, the aura clings to the 'fake' "Mona Lisa" because we grant it that pride of place. We stream past it at the Louvre, we take pictures, we ask questions of our highly-informed tour guides. It is unique because we regard it as such, not because it is the only one of its kind. What we learn from Duchamp's "Fountain" is that context, having been hung in a gallery and near the name of a recognised 'artist,' grants art objects their auras just as much, if not more so, than actually having travelled through history.
There is also a new kind of aura that I can't legitimately blame Benjamin for not anticipating, the code. Technology theorists, like N. Katherine Hayles, point out that in the so-called post-humanist era, not unrelated to post-modernism and post-structuralism, everything is thought of as a particular 'hard copy' of some kind of code, signal, or pattern. From this point of view, a particular book is merely one arrangement of the real content, the text. A particular object is just an arrangement of the constituent elements, the atoms. A particular person is just the result of a particular permutation of the biological code, DNA. Everything is the manifestation of data. There is no original to speak of, which means we're back at the good old simulacra.
If that's the case, if we do live in a world in which people think that way, then a mechanically reproduced piece of art carries as much of an aura as anything else because everything is a mere hard copy of the data. The aura clings to the pattern, to the code, not to the incidental object that happens to carry the data. Substitute the word 'code' for 'spirit' or perhaps 'chi,' and we're in very familiar territory. Data's expression just is the material world, just as the temporal world is a pale copy of the eternal, a concept you'll find in most religions. The point is, though, that if the aura clings to the code, and the code is the artistic content, then the mechanically reproduced art does, in fact, have an aura. It's not the same kind of aura. It's not, however, attached to the object and its path through history. Instead, it surrounds the relationship that the viewer has with the content.
I don't care which encoded version of The Princess Bride I happen to be watching―an old tape, a new DVD, a real-time broadcast―the aura of that film, for me, is the look in my father's eye when he recommended that I watch it, the mental effort of working out that "R.O.U.S." really does stand for "Rodents Of Unusual Size," and the fact that every English-speaking member of my generation can't help but wistfully sigh at the mere mention of that film's name. The aura is in my memories, not in any art object because there is no object in this situation, merely vessels for the delivery of data, in this case visual and auditory signals.
Similarly, I download digital copies of every comic book I buy so that I can 'quote' from them for essays. Two years ago, I experienced a hard-drive crash that wiped out the entire collection. Within two months, I had redownloaded almost all of the same files. To me, on an emotional level, there is no difference. In many cases, they were the very same scans, but even if they hadn't been, it didn't matter. The content was retrievable. I simply don't care about which particular arrangements of magnetized metal it happens to be stored on. If my physical collection were to burn to cinders tomorrow, but be replaced by reprints the next day, I would be equally unphased. Obtaining near-perfect copies is more difficult with physical objects, but my relationship with them is the same.
None of that, however, negatively effects my emotional relationship with the content. The path through time and space is not that of the object that happens to deliver the data, but my path through my life as it has been affected by that data. It's important to point out that, exactly like the model of the aura that Benjamin created in the 30s, the aura-as-code model that I just explained does not have to be a verifiably accurate portrayal of how the world actually works. The aura doesn't make sense in some very important ways that I will get to in just a moment, and the aura-as-code model undoubtedly has flaws of its own. These are descriptions not of how objects behave in the real world (that's the domain of the physicists), but of how we feel about them, and our feelings are inherently illogical.
One of the major flaws of the concept of the aura is that it can be faked, that Benjamin describes it as something that attaches itself to the object, but it's really something we project onto the object. Enough has been said about that, but I don't think that's a mistake on Benjamin's part, or an oversight. He is essentially talking about psychology, not physics, which is why material concerns aren't at issue. This is about perception.
So, perceptually, here's a problem. Mechanical reproduction "enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or a phonograph record. The cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the drawing room" (223). Thus, the mechanical reproduction is a recording—visual, auditory or, otherwise—of an art object. However, the act of reprodution is, in itself, another art form. Benjamin even implies that fact by explaining that "photographic reproduction, with the aid of certain processes […] can capture images which escape natural vision" (222). There is something that happens in the camera that is more than merely recording a visual moment.
The music studio, the developer's lab, and the editing room are all part of the production of a piece of art, and we know that because raw tape, negatives, and uncut celluloid are not generally thought of as art. Only once they have been assembled and/or chemically processed do they become 'music,' 'photography,' and 'film,' respectively. Inversely, even the 'original' work of art can be a 'copy' of something in the real world, a painting of a tree or a recording of sounds that occur in nature, for example. So we have an original thing, and then we have an original artistic interpretation of that thing as expressed in a particular medium.
My point is that locating what we so blithely refer to as the 'original' is extremely difficult. Therefore, finding something to attach the aura to is just as difficult. Once again, though, Benjamin's description of the aura is perfectly accurate and true to the way that we treat art, and most objects. It just so happens that our treatment isn't logical.
All that being said, the political point of this essay has very little to do with the aura, even though that's the concept that's most often quoted from it. In section X, Benjamin makes what appears to be a totally self-contradictory set of claims, first saying that "as a rule no other revolutionary merit can be accredited to today's film than the promotion of a revolutionary criticism of the traditional concept of art," and second that "We do not deny that in some cases today's films can also promote revolutionary criticism of social conditions, even of the distribution of property" (233). The word "revolutionary" in this context refers to Marxist revolution, as we can see from the reference to "the distribution of property." When Benjamin says film doesn't have "revolutionary merit," he means that it won't help bring about the cultural revolution of Communism. It is inherently incapable of that particular kind of symbolic action.
In the final section of the essay, part XV, Benjamin compares two different kinds of art, (a) that which requires concentration, and (b) that which distracts. "A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it," he claims, while "the distracted mass absorbs the work of art" (241). In the first, case, the individual subject must come to a solitary decision about the work, must, in the absence of others, arrive at her own conclusions.
In the second case, however, a large audience witnesses a work of art without concentration. As an example, Benjamin offers architecture, something that we constantly interact with, but on a functional level. We literally live with it. We rarely sit and study the contours of our own homes, for example, but we know them with the intuitive intimacy that only stumbling around in the dark at 2am looking for the bathroom can create. As intimate distractions, "habit" determines our feels towards them, not "the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building" (242). We know them so well because we live with them, not because we study them closely.
There is a problem here, though. We do not live with film the same way we live with architecture. As Benjamin points out, film appears and disappears in a flicker, at the whim of the camera operator, the director, and the editor. Although he doesn't point it out, Horkheimer and Adorno will pick up on this idea in Dialectic of Enlightenment. If we don't live with the individual film, then it can't be a distraction medium in the same way as architecture. However, what we do live with is formal constructions (genres), and actors. As A&H say, every movie is a preview of the next, every picture of an actress is an advertisement for herself. I say that A&H picked up on the idea because by the mid-fifties, Adorno owned almost all of Benjamin's manuscripts, and was central to the project of publishing his work at the time.
What this paper is great at is displaying how we treat this thing called the aura, and that it doesn't follow logical rules, but instead emotional or, if you like, psychological rules, and it gives us a place to start talking about a new kind of aura as characterised by the current preoccupation with the code.
Posted by orion at July 6, 2006 6:44 PM