Page 266 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

It is crucial at this point to point out that, for Benjamin, the aura is “a strange
weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no
matter how close it may be” (ibid., 518). The aura, then, is understood primarily
in the fact that the object perceived is placed at a certain spatial and temporal
remove from its intended audience. This “distance effect” (for example, a par-
ticular painting exists in only one place so that one goes to the Louvre to see da
Vinci’s La Gioconda) confers a particular authority on the artwork. The “aura”
that accrues to a work of art is understood primarily in terms of the legitima-
tion of authority, given that only certain people have access to the artwork, and
that access signi¤es, for instance, a particular class—enabled privilege. The aura
also signi¤es authority in that its distanciation from its audience confers a so-
cially recognized privilege on those sanctioned to maintain this distance—for
example, the priest (and hence the church) to whom proximity to the holiest
parts of the altar is sanctioned gives these spaces within the church an auratic
appeal, whereas parishioners are denied that proximity and thus implicitly rec-
ognize the authority of clerical power.
The aura of a work of art derives from it singularity in terms of its speci¤c
location in a particular time and place, and the fact that this time/space dimen-
sion is unique—“Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking
in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place
where it happens to be” (Benjamin 1968, 220). It is in ritual and religion that
Benjamin locates the particular retention of the aura of the unique work of
art. The conditions of possibility for the aura is thus linked to the speci¤city of
its time-space dimension. With technical reproduction this uniqueness of the
work of art is eroded given that it becomes available for experience in more
proximate and varied situations. The question that immediately arises regards
the function of the aura in relation to temporality and spatiality, and its place
in history as a source of legitimation for linear narratives of progress (hence the
relevance of a discussion of the aura for a critique of modernity as “develop-
ment”). As will become evident below, the particular time-space nexus that ac-
crues around images under globalization results precisely in the recoding of the
auratic rather than its disappearance.
Benjamin insists that technical reproducibility degrades the aura of tradi-
tional art, in the sense that the speci¤c time and place of the appreciation of
an art piece, concretized ¤rst through ritual and then religion, is lost at pres-
ent, given that, “that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is
the aura of the work of art . . . the technique of production detaches the re-
produced object from the domain of tradition. . . . And in permitting the re-
production to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it
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reactivates the object produced” (ibid., 211). This short quote is dense in its
suggestions. First, tradition, located for Benjamin in ritual and religion, loses its
hold in time and place on the work of art. Here it must be stated that, for
Benjamin, tradition is not some ¤xed static object. As he puts it, “The unique-
ness of a work of art is inseparable from its being embedded in the fabric of

Gods in the Sacred Marketplace 255