Page 265 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

The Aura of Modernity, the Poverty of Experience

Benjamin’s re®ections on the concept-metaphor of the aura were lo-
cated at those changing media that were seen as prime signi¤ers of modernity.
Most commentators have been tempted, therefore, to see his re®ections on the
aura as a ¤nal farewell to that politically conservative dimension of cultural pro-
duction whose death knell had been sounded by technical reproduction. Hence
it is necessary to immediately point out that Benjamin’s concern with the aura
predated the “Work of Art” essay by at least four years. In his “Little History of
Photography” from 1931, Benjamin’s fascination with the epistemological and
ontological character of the photographic image’s political dimensions were al-
ready suf¤ciently dialectical so as to preclude the populist readings of his work
in cultural studies (Benjamin 1927–34, 507–530). Benjamin argued that “the
photographer was confronted in the person of every client, with a member of
a rising class equipped with an aura that had seeped into the very fold’s of the
man’s frock coat” (ibid., 517). What could provisionally be called the “content”
of the photograph prior to its being caught in the play of light is thus endowed
with an aura. Here Benjamin underlines that the particular symbolic meanings
attached to the object of the photographer’s lens provide the photograph with
an auratic appeal. In the case above, the authority conferred on the photograph
is the result of the particular object being represented—a member of “a rising
class” and the accoutrements (“the frock coat”) which signify a certain social
standing of respectability and power at a particular historical moment. Hence
it is worth emphasizing that, if the object of a work of art (including photogra-
phy, ¤lm, or television) has particular symbolic meanings which signify power
and authority, the fact of it having been mechanically reproduced does not nec-
essarily mean that the result is a “loss of the aura.”
Further, the aura, rather than being erased in the act of mechanical repro-
duction, is also reconstructed through the techniques of re-presentation; thus,
the most precise technology can give its products a magical value, such as a painted
picture can never again have for us. After 1880, though, photographers made it
their business to simulate the aura which had been banished from the picture with
the suppression of darkness through faster lenses, exactly as it was banished from
reality by the deepening degeneration of the imperialist bourgeoisie. They saw it as
their task to simulate this aura using all the arts of retouching, and especially the
so-called gum print. (ibid., 517)
Benjamin emphasizes that a “magical value” can be layered onto an artwork
through certain techniques—for our moment, one can see this in the sphere of
advertising, for example, where technical possibilities enable certain “ideals” of
beauty to be represented, or in media like MTV where special effects and digital
technology are not just technical facts, but their increasing visual sophistication
are used to attract larger audiences and have a symbolic value that implies being
on the “cutting edge.”

254 Sudeep Dasgupta