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one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from
it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain. 6
Media practices are deeply involved in this struggle. It is through media of storage
and transmission that the victorious cultural heritage is canonized, but it is also there
that it may be attacked. This has key implications for critical practice. ‘Progress has
its seat not in the continuity of elapsing time but in its interferences – where the truly
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new makes itself felt for the first time, with the sobriety of dawn.’ With affinities to
philosopher Ernst Bloch, Benjamin worked like a detective, tracing suppressed
utopian germs of a better future to the dead past. In a striking passage, he juxtaposes
the trace with the aura – a central concept in his analysis of how modern media tech-
nology erodes traditional art values: ‘The trace is appearance of a nearness, however
far removed the thing that left it behind may be. The aura is appearance of a distance,
however close the thing that calls it forth. In the trace, we gain possession of the
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thing; in the aura, it takes possession of us.’ This alludes to a set of superimposed
dialectics of distance and proximity, of dream and awakening and of past and future
that may be further elaborated by using Paul Ricoeur’s ideas of how traces in the form
of documents and monuments bind historical narratives to the prefigurations of past
events and differentiate them from fictional stories. 9
Benjamin conceived of time as a passage – of time itself and of the human effort
to grasp it, which can only be accomplished in passing, that is, in a sudden and indi-
rect way. This notion of passage leads on the one hand to the decline of the art-work
aura, a phenomenon encompassing presence, nearness and distance in time as well as
space, and on the other hand to the repetition of history in the midst of the evolu-
tion of modernity. Benjamin gives media a crucial role in both these processes,
although more prominently so in his writing on the former than the latter subject.
Photography and film incorporate time into the production of the work of art in
a more direct way than the preceding visual arts, according to Benjamin. Film in
particular introduced new spatio-temporal orders by releasing visual perception from
the limits of the human eye, speeding up or slowing down action sequences in time
and assembling ‘multiple fragments’ of reality ‘under a new law’. 10 Benjamin used
film as a primary example of how media display and structure time and space.
Technical devices like mechanical reproduction and digitalization have an overall
effect on media as well as on socially anchored spatio-temporal orders, not least by
creating new opportunities to store and reproduce the past. The past available to the
present has successively grown and expanded by the storage capacities of successive
media inventions like script, photography, film, phonographs, video, DVD and
computers. 11 Although those media for a time stand as symbols for modernity and
change (and in some cases even for the future) they also function as impediments to
forgetting the past, actually recording every trace of visual and oral sense data from
it, leaving only subordinate sense memories like smell and taste to oblivion. In this
way the development of media technologies fosters a sense of the past that is consis-
tent with Benjamin’s definition of the modern as ‘the new in the context of what has