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because of the sense that they are both distant and present. In Benjamin’s
writing the concept of aura is to do with this perception of distance. However it
is through ritual and tradition that the two kinds of memory are brought
together; ‘contents of the individual past combine with the material of the
collective past’ (Benjamin 1992b: 156).
The decline of ritual and tradition means, for Benjamin, the decline of aura,
which increasingly takes refuge in the chance occurrences of involuntary mem-
ory. His argument about the decline of aura, and also the connection of this
with the development of the museum and of other media, is best explained
through the example of art. Prior to the museum age, art objects had aura
because they were situated within a living tradition and had ritual and cult
value (Hanssen 2000: 77). Modernity destroys ritual and tradition, not least
through the decontextualization of ritual objects in the museum. The artwork
in the museum continues to have aura insofar as it continues to be associated
with ‘secularized ritual’ and an authentic, unique experience. Nevertheless,
‘exhibition value’ gradually replaces ‘cult value’, as art objects can be ‘sent here
and there’ severed from any fixed social and physical environment. Mechanized
mass reproduction extends this process, totally severing the artwork from its
location, and multiplying it endlessly (Benjamin 2002: 106; Benjamin 1992b:
182–3). For the mass audience, the contemplative and rapt attention associated
with aura is replaced by the urge to get hold of things, to bring them close
through reproduction and at the same time, by a tactile, habitual, distracted
relationship with new mass artforms such as film (Benjamin 2002: 105, 119–20).
As Benjamin says, philosophers have tended to despise this turn of events,
seeking instead to rescue ‘true’ experience from the ‘standardized, denatured
experience of the civilized masses’ (1992b: 153). Benjamin preferred to turn
his attention to those poets, writers and artists who faced the contemporary
situation and plunged themselves into it. Charles Baudelaire, through the ‘cor-
respondences’ established in his poetry, finds himself holding ‘the scattered
fragments of genuine historical experience’ (Benjamin 1992b: 181). Marcel
Proust turned himself into an ‘apparatus’, sacrificing his self ‘for the sake
of things’ (Pensky 1996: 177). Proust discovered that things speak, yet to de-
code their speech requires a certain self-sacrificing rigour. Benjamin describes
Proust’s ‘loyalty to an afternoon, to a tree, to a sunbeam cast upon the wall-
paper; loyalty to dresses, to furniture, to perfumes or to landscapes’ (Benjamin
cited in Pensky 1996: 177). The theorist Max Pensky describes involuntary
memory for Proust as ‘an accomplishment over intellectual memory, over the
conscious application of subjective meanings upon the range of experiences
presented to consciousness’ (1996: 173). Proust’s cultivation of involuntary
memory is a committed act of mastery, ‘the constant attempt to charge an
entire lifetime with the utmost mental awareness’ (Benjamin 1999b: 244).