Page 159 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

ARCHIVE || 143

For Benjamin, aura belonged both to the ideological affirmations of histor-
ical continuity and to the sites of its undoing. He wrote of the way that the aura
of an object overcomes the alien character of past moments and cultures by
pulling us into them, taking us there. Benjamin was famously ambivalent about
aura, recognizing its importance for making sense of experience, but also its
tendency to produce a conservative illusion of historical continuity that served
the ideological purposes of the present. Benjamin read Proust as providing a
means for understanding how (auratic, involuntary) memories might ‘serve to
disrupt a hegemonic historical continuity’ (Pensky 1996: 170). He shared with
Proust an interest in how things, especially commodities, might provide the
material for a different historical understanding, through moments of ‘profane
illumination’, glimpses of the recent past which reveal the level of forgetting
necessary to dominant historical narratives. The world of things and sensations
provides everyday interruptions which give the lie to a dominant ideology of
historical progress, and which denaturalize the present social order. In Proust,
in Baudelaire and in the surrealists, Benjamin finds aesthetic and cognitive
strategies that cultivate such chance occurrences, that find revelation or ‘awak-
ening’ in the everyday, the trivial, the outmoded and the out-of-date. They
develop an ability to attend closely to material, a sensitivity to things, to the
‘correspondences’ between them.
It is not only in art and literature that this occurs. Benjamin points to collect-
ing, including (especially) the collecting practices of children, as sharing this
attentiveness, this ability to listen to the thing-world. The collector who collects
without financial or status motivation has a sensitivity to things that allows
them to be more than ‘objects for a subject’ (Pensky 1996: 185–6). The collector
lifts commodities out of the cycle of production and consumption, and liberates
them from use-value. Benjamin saw ‘true collectors’ as understanding their
collections historically, giving things back their historical place, and thereby
making them ‘present’ and meaningful once more (1999a: 207 and 201). He also
asserted that collectors re-enchant objects since by giving them a new context
in the collection they release them from the existing regime of value. Through
their gentle and attentive relationships to things, they allow us to glimpse a
world not dominated by exchange value.

The return to curiosity

The idea of re-enchanting things has also been taken up in writings on museums.
Re-enchantment in this context is about releasing things from the tight explana-
tory and didactic framework of the modern museum and allowing them to
regain the attributes of the marvellous and the curious. For instance, James