ABenjamin’s Aura: What It Is, and How Its Loss Creates the Potential For A Better

Politics

David Stokes – A revision (essentially a complete re-write) of the first paper for PHL323 –

996779384 – 03/1/2010

Far from taking a conservative stance decrying the changing nature of artistic
reception, Walter Benjamin’s essay on the Work of Art in the Age of Technological
Reproducibility was his attempt to locate and champion the positive, even revolutionary,
Commented [MSOffice1]: Are you talking about the emerging
art form or the changing nature of artistic reception – I wasn’t sure
and it seems that they are two different issues?
Commented [MSOffice2]: Do you need to define this term –
certainly not a term that I am familiar with.

potential associated with emerging art forms. For Benjamin, these changes are only possible in Commented [MSOffice3]: Which changes – presumably the
changes in the artistic reception?

an age whose capacity for technological reproduction permits art to exist without aura, a term Commented [MSOffice4]: Is this art jargon - explanation
necessary?

introduced by Benjamin. This essay aims to first explain what Benjamin meant by the term aura,

and then show how its loss helps create spacesopen the door for new, more democratic and

collective modes of political existence.

In defence of his thesis, Benjamin utilizes a careful tracing of the historical

development of art objects, first pinpointing how the principal function of these objects was their

role as magical and cultic tokens, and then showing how this role led to these objects acquiring

specific sacred functions under the auspices of religion (such as household Venus statuettes in

ancient Roman fertility cults, or, later religious icons of Christ in the Roman Catholic Church).

Next he shows how this sacred function later became secularized but still put to use for both the

Enlightenment’s and the Romantic era’s fixation with the search for ideal beauty in art. He

introduces the term ‘aura’ to act as a descriptive blanket uniting the qualities shared by these

various works of art. For Benjamin, aura is a term that is determined by two qualities of an

object: that object’s function and also its method of production.

 Art objects that were produced during this period of progression (a very long time indeed,

going back to homo sapiens’ point of behaviour modernity; Benjamin cites a Neolithic cave

painter as being a creator of art with aura) were necessarily made by hand due to technological

limitations, and these technological limitations put severe restrictions on the quantity of a

particular type of object that could be produced. These objects were thereby authentic in the

sense that they could only be produced by individuals in possession of advanced technical

knowledge (even a ‘fake’ would still have been produced by a learned and skilled craftsman,

something that changes with the industrial revolution), and also unique in the sense that no two

objects would be exactly the same (for example, two carvings might look alike but the human

hand is not proficient enough to make them exactly congruous). The uniqueness and authenticity

of these objects was understood by both their creator and their consumer, each criterion

reinforcing the other and thus lending them more power as symbolic tokens (their principle

function; see next paragraph).

In terms of function, objects made during this period were created explicitly to be treated

as objects of veneration, to be treated as objects allowing connection with the divine or, later,

connections to the realm of the beautiful. This function of these art works gives them what

Benjamin terms aura, because both their function and method of production encourage the view

that these objects, more so than any other objects in a person’s experience, symbolize (and to

some believers, even emanate) metaphysical values. By virtue of their possession of aura, these

‘aura’-directed artworks encourage the viewer to value uniqueness, authenticity, and the related

concepts of distance, individuality of the producer, and contemplation.

After outlining this theory on the historical function of art, Benjamin delivers the reader

to his own age (the nineteen thirties) and its accompanying arrival of the ubiquity of new art
forms such as cinema, photography and radio. Benjamin then claims that these art forms,

because they are technologically reproducible on a mass scale that is divorced from the labour of

the human hand, do not possess aura, and thereby do not champion the same values of

uniqueness and authenticity that characterizes aura-possessing art. While Benjamin feels that this

is a radical change from the past, Benjamin does not feel that this loss of aura is a negative

development for society; rather, it is beneficial, as it lays the conditions in mass society for a

chance to bring about more inclusive (and less fascistic, for Benjamin was writing while the Nazi

party overtook German politics) forms of political community. This political turn in the essay is

hinged upon the statement, found at the end of Section IV of the essay, that “the moment the

criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic production, the whole social function of

art is turned upside about. Instead of having its foundation in ritual, its foundation steps into

different practice: namely, its foundation in politics.”

Benjamin, a committed communist, argues that the inherent features of these art forms –

their ubiquity, the fact that they are experienced collectively, and the fact that they encourage the

viewer to carry out his or her own interpretative analysis rather than relying on the opinions of

experts – enable them to sweep away the traditional functions of art in bourgeois capitalist

economies: the possession of art objects as signifiers of power and wealth, and an individual’s

artistic taste used as a judge of social normality (or, to use the reverse, degree of deviance, cf.

Nazi exhibitions of ‘degenerate’ art) as measured by each artwork’s level of authenticity,

physical continuity to the past, uniqueness, and representation of ideal values (all aspects tied up

in the concept of aura). But instead of being amenable to fascist ends, inherent features of new

art forms oppose totalitarian political ideologies. Benjamin goes so far as to claim that the

concepts of contemporary art outlined by this essay “are completely useless for the purposes of
fascism.” (emphasis mine; and it would seem that Benjamin goes a little too far in that statement,

as both cinema and radio were both easily harnessed to serve Nazi ends) The principle feature

that unites contemporary art, and the concept that give the essay its title, technological

reproducibility, is presented as the critical driver that allows contemporary art to resist the use of

traditional concepts of art, such as “creativity, genius, eternal value, and mystery,” which when

manoeuvred in precise ways, “allow factual material to be manipulated in the interests of

fascism.”

First and foremost for Benjamin, cinema presents a different concept of experience than

is possible in other, more traditional art forms. Actions in a movie are analysed from more points

of view than those in a painting or on the stage. Because other forms of art can only be received

from a minority of perspectives (usually one – whereas a camera permits nearly an infinity of

perspectives), they can be more easily manipulated by fascism and put to use propagating its

values because fascism is a political doctrine that utilizes aesthetic values to champion a

subjective set of values to the complete exclusion of others, something that would be harder to

accomplish if the medium of a work of art itself discouraged its examination from only one

perspective.

New art forms are more democratic and liberal because they allow any one of their

viewers to act as his or her own interceptor. As Benjamin notes, “in film ... as in sports ...

everyone is a quasi-expert.” This occurs because, contrary to painting for example, where a

proper analysis of a painting can often only be accomplished by an individual well versed in the

specialized knowledge of painting (the mixing of colours, the use of perspective, the classical

motifs, etc), a film or a radio play can be experienced impressionistically by an audience, who

can thus evaluate it on that basis alone, free from any reference to the technical knowledge
required to produce the product. And even while these new art forms encourage an increased

exercise in interpretive liberty on the part of their consumers, they also condition the consumer

towards the opposite of individual liberty and a prerequisite for communism, that is, a receptivity

to collective action: watching cinema is an inherently collective event, where different people

with very different lives meet together to participate in a shared experience. And unlike fascism,

all of this collective action occurs without being regimented by any leader or organization.

It is the will of individual people, free from outside compulsions, to choose to participate

in art forms that technological reproducibility has made ubiquitous and affordable. Nearly

anyone in our society (even in Benjamin’s day) can afford to own a book of photographs, and

many people are well-off enough to own a camera and take them themselves. This logic,

identified and theorized by Benjamin, signals a new era in public participation in the arts, a

participation with a decidedly political dimension, as it indicates a shift in power from the elite

and the bourgeois towards all of society, who can now express themselves divested of any

outside notions of truth, beauty, or political morality. And even though Walter Benjamin’s theory

on the political changes made possible by the loss of the aura of art was developed in times very

different from our own1, Benjamin’s thought regarding the political potential of art forms

developed only in the last century is still relevant. In much the same way that Benjamin remarks

that the effects of the changes prefigured by Marx (writing in the mid-nineteenth century) could

be best examined in his own day and age (“Only today can it be indicated what form this has

taken.”), so too today we occupy a privileged vantage point to witness the changes to the art and

culture of mass society wrought by exponentially expanded means of the technological

1
With the intervening years since the publication of his essay bringing to an end the terror of political
fascism in Europe, the collapse of any tenable chance of a communist revolution in the West, and the
deep entrenchment of an ever expanding global capitalism.
reproducibly of media. When we examine our present situation through the lens of Benjamin’s

thought, even while recognizing that both his primary foe (fascism) and his desired hero

(communism) may have withered, the social opportunities inherent to the new media which he

highlights have only increased in potential. The door cracked open and Benjamin, who

diagnosed this change first, illuminated the consequences. Now the door has swung wide, and it Commented [MSOffice5]: Check grammar

is our task to continue towards building a better society based on a more inclusive and liberating

politics.