Page 267 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

tradition. This tradition is thoroughly alive and extremely changeable” (ibid.,
223). The work of art, however, when released from its place in a changeable
tradition (the relevance for religious media is evident) is not left to free-®oat
outside the grasp of the aura. It is re-embedded in “the particular situation” of
its reception, and, in the process, is “reactivated.” This last point is crucial. The
reactivation of the aura of the work of art in mass-mediated society is not
the same aura as in antiquity or the classical age. However, this dimension is
reinvigorated not by its proximity to a ¤xed time and place but rather by its
relationship to the particular power relations within which it is re-embedded.
It is in the reception of an artwork that the aura can be reactivated, as a result
of the particular symbolic meanings that accrue to it and that are related to its
subject matter and its mode of presentation at a speci¤c historical moment. It
would be a mistake to assume that the aura vanishes with technological media-
tion; rather, its character changes given its displacement from the time and
space of tradition in ritual and religion to the mobile and fragmented tempo-
rality and spatiality of modern experience (Erlebnis). 2
From the above discussion of Benjamin’s understanding of the “aura” one
could summarize as follows: the possibility (rather than necessity) of the re-
appearance of the aura; that such a reactivation of the aura is necessarily a
politically interested act at a particular historical moment; that such an act
serves to legitimize social authority through the medium of visual culture; that
this act is made possible through the selection of a certain subject matter and
decisions about its mode of representation. It should be emphasized that, for
Benjamin, this persistence of the aura is not an ontological given but instead is
the result of the aestheticization of politics in the interests of dominant social
classes. A great deal more can be said about the aura, but I focus on these aspects
above not only because they hardly see the light of day within contemporary
intellectual culture but also because they complicate the more celebratory as-
pects of Benjamin’s own argument in the “Work of Art” essay. It is important
to note that even in that essay he has a properly dialectical understanding of the
technologically mediated work of art, whose reception cannot be guaranteed in
politically progressive terms and as an escape from social authority—after all,
he did not fail to point out that it was fascism that had most effectively har-
nessed these media through the inculcation of an aesthetics of contemplation
rather than action.
Sophisticated technological developments, then, have the capability of under-
writing the positions of power of dominant social groups within the contem-
porary moment through particular modes of representation and of certain sub-
jects. For the purpose of my argument, the question of history is critical—but
history not as some easily accessible and representable “object” but as the un-
representable horizon within which we understand the politics of representa-
tion and legitimation of social authority. For obviously neither the modes of
representation nor the objects to be represented remain the same, and decisions
on the above two dimensions are necessarily imbricated in questions of power.

256 Sudeep Dasgupta