BOSTON UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY PROFESSORS PROGRAM

Senior Thesis ON SOME MOTIFS IN WALTER BENJAMIN: A STUDY OF AURA AND EXPERIENCE

by ALYSSA DEMIRJIAN

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts May 2009

APPROVAL

Approved by

First Reader: ________________________________________________ JAMES SCHMIDT, Ph. D PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AND POLITICAL SCIENCE

Second Reader: ________________________________________________ MANFRED KUEHN, Ph. D PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS To Professor Queen, for my first exposure to the Frankfurt School and enkindling my love for philosophy. To Professor Schmidt and Professor Kuehn, with much appreciation. To those who translated Benjamins original writings and made my endeavor possible. To my tutors and fellow students during my time at Oxford, whose intellectual passions continue to inspire my own. To my dear friends, Beth, Emily and Ingrid, who so thoughtfully read portions of this manuscript. To Ingrid, for her poetic appreciation and critical eye. To those friends who offered their encouragement. To my parents, for allowing me to pursue my wildest scholarly ambitions. As Benjamin was so fond of quoting, Origin is the goal.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Abbreviations Introduction I. Primary Text Formulations of the Aura Early Use, 1920s First Formulation, Early 1930s Social Development, Mid-1930s Literary Influence, Late 1930s Notes and Remarks, Mid-1920s to 1940 II. Defining Philosophy and Experience in Early Benjamin (1915-1925) Kant Theology and Language Romantic Criticism Truth and the Work of Art III. Thematic Elements of the Aura Time and Space Attentive Perception Beautiful Semblance Return of the Gaze Epilogue Appendix Selected Bibliography 5 6 8 8 12 18 24 33 39 41 45 51 55 69 69 90 109 124 141 143 147

ABBREVIATIONS AP CA Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 19281940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910-1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobsen and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1999). Walter Benjamin, On Hashish, ed. and trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 1, 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 2, Part 1, 1927-1930, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Others (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 2, Part 2, 1931-1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Others (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 3, 1935-1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland and Others (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002). Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938-1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Others (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).

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OG OH SW1 SW2.1

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INTRODUCTION Aura is among the oft-invoked, little-understood notions in the discourse of the humanities. The widespreadand frequently misplaceduse of the term repeatedly ignores the auras greatest intricacies in favor of adopting it for the purposes of a particular argument. The notion of the aura did not originate nor did it end with Walter Benjamin, yet this is one of his lasting theoretical legacies. While there are a few select studies in secondary English literature which specifically focus on Benjamins formulation of the concept, it is far more common that scholars mistakenly consolidate it into an easily-digestible sound bite, employ only one aspect of the definition for its own purposes, or eschew definition altogether. This study is a defense against the misuse and misappropriation of the aura. I employ three methodologies as ways of approaching the concept. First, I critically examine those texts in which Benjamin explicitly uses and defines the term in order that this investigation may establish just why this concept is problematical. Second, I discuss the early work of Benjamin as a way of exposing both his lifelong intellectual preoccupations and his motivation for formulating the concept. Third, I examine the whole of Benjamins writings through the lens of what I take to be four crucial interacting elements of the concept. At this stage, I propose a way of understanding the aura in accordance with other theoretical devices developed by Benjamin. As Adorno writes to Benjamin, it may be that the concept of the aura precludes being fully thought out. I believe, however, that a thinker of such sophistication and elegance as Walter Benjamin deserves more than passing regard. As recently as the last ten years, interest in Benjamin has had a sort of flowering in the English-speaking world. New translations of unpublished fragments, essay outlines and letters now enable new generations of scholars to

examine his work. It is with appreciation of their efforts and admiration for Benjaminian thought that I offer my contribution.

I. Primary Text Formulations of the Aura If the concept of the aura is unclear, then the confusion must be traced to Benjamin himself. There is no single instance in which he reconciles whether the aura is a theoretical device or a property of reality, whether that property is physical or phenomenological, or whether its sustenance rests on an individual human subject or a community of objects. His first written notes on a concept of aura imply an ephemeral sense of presence within all things and beings. As his methodology evolved towards analyzing the artifacts of modern experience, he situated the aura within a historical continuum influenced by his views on theology, the rise of industrial capitalism and a Marxian-Brechtian-inspired anxiety towards modern mans self-alienation. The following instances are those turning points in which he explicitly discusses and defines the concept of the aura. I provide sparse contextualization and a critical, close attention to Benjamins texts in the interest of surveying the concept throughout his oeuvre. By consolidating what Benjamin says about the aura and the way it functions, we can construct a foundation upon which to examine his terminology, in the interest of shedding light on what he means.

Early Use, 1920s Benjamins earliest mention of the aura appears in the middle of a lengthy remark in One-Way Street, a collection of aphorisms and notes composed between 1923 and 1926. Employing a method characteristic of much of his work, he attempted to extract universal, absolute truth and historical essence from everyday mundane objects and experiences.1 He

Upon the publication of One-Way Street in 1928, Benjamins correspondences are filled with his reflections on the project. Consider: [T]he book is, if not a trophy, nonetheless a document of an internal struggle. Its subject matter may be expressed as follows: to grasp topicality as the reverse of the eternal in history and to make an impression of this, the side of the medallion hidden from view. Otherwise the book owes a lot to Paris, being my first attempt to come to terms with the city. Letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal February 8, 1928. CWB 325. One year later, Benjamin claimed that his work on Surrealism touched on the same issue he explored in One-Way Street: to attain the most extreme concreteness for

described stamp albums as magical reference books,2 each miniature image a representation of a past moment capable of physically travelling through present spaces. He juxtaposed remarks on fantastical dreams with reflections on concrete architecture. Reference to the aura comes in a passage on mans inner intimations. Benjamin suggests that man has a much greater awareness of the future than is often supposed. Those who visit fortune-tellers participate in an institutionalized game designed for apathetic fools, but those who take responsibility for their own psyche and environment can make as much sense of what is to come as their faculty of memory yields a sense of what has happened before. And if an object dear to you has been lost, wasnt therehours, days beforean aura of mockery or mourning about it that gave the secret away? Like ultraviolet rays, memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text.3 Alongside every sudden death and loss appears a sense of guilt, an indistinct reproach asking, Were you really unaware of this?4 Guilt forms not because something happens, but because something happens that should not have occurred. Man feels that he ought to have been more aware precisely because he knows that he is capable of perceiving hints to the coming loss; he is ashamed because he fails to maximize his own capabilities. Shortly before the fated time of loss, an aura of premonition surrounds the objects of concern. Objects present traces of their past, as well as their future. The aura emerged and persisted independent of recognition by the subject, yet his failure to perceive it burdened him with a sense of shame.

an era, as it occasionally manifested itself in childrens games, a building, or a real-life situation. Letter to Gerhard Scholem March 15, 1929. CWB 348. 2 One-Way Street SW1 479. 3 Emphasis added. One-Way Street SW1 483. 4 Ibid., 483.

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In 1928, Benjamin realized that his notes on various drug experiments offered new insights relevant to his philosophical observations.5 In his notes from 1927 to 1930, he invokes the concept of the aura at least four times and in at least four different ways. First, the aura is a quality of objects and individuals in Benjamins immediately perceivable environment while under the influence of hashish. He recalls, All those present take on hues of the comic. At the same time, one steeps oneself in their aura.6 Both things and people possess this aura, a sense of imposing seriousness or reverenceor at least a sense of something resistant to mockerywhich is capable of being perceived by others. He neither flees nor is frightened, but instead seems entranced by this authority. Second, the aura of an individual is something highly personal which formulates a space that ought not to be transgressed. Recalling a moment when Ernst Bloch leaned to touch him: I could feel the contact long before it actually reached me. I felt it as a highly repugnant violation of my aura.7 Here the aura is associated with the preservation of identity and self-respect. Third, the aura is not a consistent property of all things. Benjamins first mention of auratic loss refers to a curious case of objects: lifeless representations of people which perhaps once had aura, but has since disappeared. [Objects] become mannequins. Unclothed dress-up dolls, waiting to do my bidding, they stand around in their nakedness, and everything about them teaches

Beginning in 1927, Benjamin systematically tried several drugs, although most predominantly he experimented with hashish. His initial experiences were as a research participant in a narcotics study conducted by friends. Within a year, as he wrote to Gerhard Scholem, he realized that his notes could be a very worthwhile supplement to my philosophical observations, with which they are most intimately related, as are to a certain degree even my experiences while under the influence of the drug. Letter to Gerhard Scholem January 30, 1928. CWB 323. Four years later, he had plans to compose a truly exceptional book on the topic. Letter to Gerhard Scholem July 26, 1932. CWB 396. 6 Emphasis added. OH 19. 7 Emphasis added. Ibid., 27.

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a lesson, as with an anatomical model. No, its like this: they stand there without aura.8 Stripped of their agency and dignity, these aura-less dolls offer nothing for the viewer to contemplate. They present themselves exactly and unambiguously. Although it remains unknown precisely when Benjamin wrote and collected individual fragments for the Arcades Project, it is possible that these lines were written while he was researching The Doll, The Automaton, a convolute whose epigraph explained dolls as beings in which instead of the clock, the eyes indicate the hours.9 As early as these writings from the 1920s, Benjamin discusses auratic loss by means of an object of particular sociocritical significance.10 Finally, after suggesting that lifeless objects could not have aura, Benjamin clarified the conditions of life in an auratic object. He recalled a conversation in which he enumerated three aspects of genuine aura. First, the genuine aura appears in all things, not just in certain kinds of things, as people imagine. Second, the aura undergoes changes, which can be quite fundamental, with every movement the aura-wreathed object makes. Third, genuine aura can in no sense be thought of as a spruced-up version of the magic rays beloved of spiritualists and described and illustrated in vulgar works of mysticism. On the contrary, the characteristic feature of genuine aura is

Emphasis added. Ibid., 34. Benjamin uses this late-nineteenth century quote as an epigraph to Convolute Z, The Doll, The Automaton. The quote is from Franz Dingelstedit, Ein Roman, as discovered by Benjamin in Adolf Strodtmann, Dictherprofile. AP 692. 10 Benjamin writes, At a certain point in time, the motif of the doll acquires a sociocritical significance. For example: You have no idea how repulsive these automatons and dolls can become, and how one breathes at last on encountering a full-blooded being in this society. Paul Lindau, Der Abend (Berlin, 1896), p. 17. The use of breathe in the Lindau quote is particularly striking since the Greek sense of aura is not only breeze, but also breath. The relief one feels at last in encountering the aura, which can only be present in the living being, is indicative of a negative response to auratic loss. People who only encounter doll-like, automaton people cannot breathe; they suffocate. This all implies that the aura is necessary for social existence, a prominent theme in Benjamins late work on Baudelaire. Ibid., 694.
8

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ornament, an ornamental halo, in which the object or being is enclosed as in a case. Perhaps nothing gives such a clear idea of aura as Van Goghs late paintings, in which one could say that the aura appears to have been painted together with the various objects.11 This may be the earliest connection Benjamin suggests between the aura and a work of art. The work of art does not have an aura, but represents an aura. The aura is painted together with the landscapes, portraiture and other figures in the image. This emphasizes the nuance of his first assertion, namely, that the aura appears, but perhaps is not a strict property of all things. This appearance is a matter of degree, as when he invokes the late paintings of Van Gogh as its best representation. Referencing Van Gogh is rare for Benjamin, who never again substantially discusses the artist.12 Still, it is significant that Benjamin mentions an artist at all. Before an artist can represent an aura, he must first be able to perceive it. The artist thus maximizes his perceptive faculties to a greater extent than the figure of the guilty man in One-Way Street. Furthermore, in this example there are actually two modes of perception. In addition to the artistic faculty that grasps the aura in reality, there is a second faculty exercised by Benjamin which grasps the aura in its painted representation. The artist grasps the original while the reviewer grasps the copy.

First Formulation, Early 1930s

11 Hashish, Beginning of March 1930 SW2.1 327-328. Benjamin recalled that this discussion was directly aimed against a group of Theosophists. On Benjamin and Theosophy, see the second section of this study. 12 See Appendix for what is considered to be Van Goghs last painting. This is the sole reference I have come across to Van Gogh in all of Benjamins writings and correspondence translated into English, perhaps because from the mid-1920s onward Benjamin was most enamored with the contemporary work of the Surrealists. Still, this is interesting because Benjamin often repeatedly invokes the same figures. To suggest that Benjamin refrained from referring to Van Gogh as a way of differentiating himself from Heidegger (and his discussion of Van Gogh in The Origin of the Work of Art) is not legitimate since, although Benjamin vehemently distinguished himself from Heidegger, the latters essay appeared long after Benjamin.

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Benjamins essay on the history of photography was published in the early autumn of 1931. In his correspondence with friends, he acknowledged it as a sort of prefatory work to the Arcades Project; thematically, these might be linked in their mutual engagement between the dialectical and the archaic image. 13 Because this is his first published treatment of the aura and his first formal attempt at definitionthe essay might be considered his first employment of the concept. Nonetheless, consideration of his earlier writings offers crucial contextualization: after confirming that a painting could represent the aura, it should not be surprising that he wished to explore the capacity of the photograph to represent the same. For the first time in his writings, Benjamin considers the aura not as a property of things, but as an entity unto itself. His definitionrepeated nearly identically in the Artwork essay of 1935-1936formulates the concept as a sort of experience.14 What is aura, actually? A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be. While at rest on a summers noon, to trace a range of mountains on the horizon, or a branch that throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or the hour become part of their appearancethis is what it means to breathe the aura of those mountains, that branch.15

13

To be sure, the reference to the Arcades project is painfulyou recognized that my essay on photography developed from prolegomena; but what more can there ever be than prolegomena and paralipomena Letter to Gerhard Scholem October 28, 1931. CWB 396. Also, Today I would merely like to assure youwhich should be self-evident anywaythat the engagement between the dialectical and the archaic image still circumscribes, now as before, one of the decisive philosophical tasks of the Arcades. Letter to Theodor W. Adorno March 17, 1937. CA 192. 14 I follow Susan-Buck Morss here in referring to this essay as the Artwork essay, which functions both as shorthand and sidesteps the issue that the conventional translation of the title into English by Harry Zohn (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction) is not quite the literal translation, which is used in the more recently translated volumes of Benjamins Selected Writings (The Work of Art in Its Age of Technological Reproduction). See Susan Buck-Morss, Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamins Artwork Essay Reconsidered, October 62 (Autumn 1992): 3. 15 Little History of Photography SW2.2 518-519.

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I will refrain at present from discussing space, time and distance until discussion of the Artwork essay, in which these notions find greater textual support, so that this passage might offer a way to dissect an auratic encounter. The relaxed subject follows natural phenomena that are dependent on his immediate presence. The horizon and the shadow that falls on the subject are not things themselves; they are the result of the subjects perception and his physical position in space. The subject has an auratic experience with objects in whose creation he plays a part. If the other generative element of these forms is nature, then this auratic experience emerges with objects whose origin is based in the harmonious, cooperative workings of humanity and nature. Ultimately, this auratic experience of the subject suggests a relationship between (1) a man free of a daily schedule and worldly commitmentshe is unaware of the moment or the hourand (2) the dynamic appearance of fixed natural objects, based upon the subjects physical position and visual perception. The role of the subject in the auratic experience is particularly emphasized in Benjamins discussion of the early daguerreotype.16 These nineteenth-century imagesoriginals incapable of duplicationdepicted individuals as portraiture paintings had previously. According to Benjamin, the people looking out of these photographs were not discouraged, alienated or despondent about what existed in the world, and thus their eyes look out of the photograph with an aura about them, a medium that lent fullness and security to their gaze even as it penetrated that medium.17 This example functions in a fundamentally different way than Benjamins previous definition. Whereas in the summer afternoon metaphor the experience seems to exist only for the experience itself, here the auratic process of creating the photograph occurs for the sake of producing a material thing. The auratic experience is a process for the sake of producing an auratic image. The auratic experience has intent.
16 17

See Appendix for examples of daguerreotype photography. Ibid., 515-517.

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Benjamin attributes the aura of the resulting image to the social congruence of the cameraman and the client. The generative process of the photograph consisted of two individuals: the photographer and his subject. In this early phase of photographic technology, the photographer was newly-trained. In this early phase of industrial capitalism, the client was a new member to mannered society. The photographer was new in knowledge; the client was new in money. In fact, as a member of a rising social class, the client had a particular aura about him, an aura that seeped into the very folds18 of his fashion accessories and rendered his demeanor one of self-assured confidence and superiority. In this sense, the photographer acted as the painter who represented an aura of reality in his painting. Moreover, although Benjamin does not explicitly indicate that the photographer possess an aura, this might be inferred from the way that he is described as a technician of the latest school.19 The eager student, fresh from completing his training, certainly carried himself in the same way as the client, that is, with self-assured confidence and superiority. Insofar as Benjamin indicates their equivalency, the photographer and client must both possess an aura about themselves independent of one another. Still, Benjamins main task is not to discuss the aura of either of these individuals, but to discuss the aura of the resulting photograph. To some extent, these early photographs are auratic because of the way they visually obscure the image of reality, introducing a sense of uncertainty and indistinctness. The darkness that appeared as a haze on these images was an auratic force precisely to the degree that its disappearance precipitated an auratic loss. [S]oon advances in optics made instruments available that wholly overcame darkness and recorded appearances as faithfully as any mirror. 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,
18 19

Ibid., 517. Ibid., 517.

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exactly as it was being banished from reality by the deepening degeneration of the imperialist bourgeoisieNotwithstanding this fashionable twilight, however, a pose was more and more clearly in evidence.20 The aura of the photograph was more than just the appearance of darkness. If it were a mere matter of actual illumination, superficially reducing the light would render these later photographs auratic. This was not the case. The social situation had changed; the aura of the client was exposed as fraudulent, just as the photographer was now a veteran of a well-known and understood technology. Both were mere imitations of their former genuinely novel, ambitious selves. Perhaps their relationship was still one of equivalence, but it was certainly no longer one of auratic equivalence. The early photographs petrified something about the auratic encounter inherent in its creation. If the aura of human life can only exist with living beingsand not imitations of living beings such as mannequinsthen the early photographs captured something inherent about human life. If what distinguished their gaze was an absence of infinite sadness,21 then they expressed some form of hope. The viewer of these images (in this case Benjamin) can thus empathize with the subject insofar as they share a common humanity. The viewer identifies himself in the photograph. The photograph, a representation of aura in reality, is auratic precisely because it can cause an auratic experience in the viewer. Just as the mountains are auratic insofar as they prompt an auratic experience in the relaxed man, the daguerreotype is auratic insofar as it prompts an auratic experience in Benjamin. The preceding comments imply that Benjamin perceived the decline of the aura negatively. Without aura, reality lacks something necessary to sustaining the fullness of human life. Although this may easily follow from the above discussion, this is certainly not Benjamins
20 21

Ibid., 517. Ibid., 515.

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whole perspective. He is as critical of the aura for its obfuscating tendencies as he is grateful for its acknowledgement of the full potential of mankind. In an unpublished fragment from this period, Benjamin welcomes introducing a rational methodology into astrology so that its investigations might be purified of their aura.22 In the essay on photography, Benjamin claims that photographs of Paris by Atget photographs of unremarked, forgotten [and] cast adrift everyday streets and objectssuck the aura out of reality like water from a sinking ship.23 This is a curious analogy. First, it affirms the auratic presence in reality. Second, it suggests that the removal of the aura from reality may not have negative implications. The successful ship floats. If a ship is sinking, removing the water is good. On the other hand, it is intended to function on the sea. Perhaps removing the water from the sinking ship negates something very natural about its existence. Removing the aura from reality may lead to great success, or may negate something extremely organic, if not primal, about humanity. In an analogy that lends itself to clearer interpretation, Benjamin likens the destruction of the aura to the peeling away of the objects shell.24 Like the description in which the aura wreathes25 its objects, the aura protects an objects innermost content and divides it from the rest of the world. In light of Benjamin establishing the auratic presence in reality, this cannot be interpreted as an attempt to reduce the aura to a borderline, a presence that cannot function in the

22

See On Astrology SW2.2 684. There is significant debate in secondary literature about whether Benjamins response to auratic loss is ambivalent or two-fold. I prefer the latter position, following Costello and others: Rather than simply welcoming the rout of the aura, as Howard Caygill and Rodolphe Gasch maintain, I shall argue, in concert with Susan Buck-Morss and John McCole, that Benjamins attitude is marked not so much by ambivalence as by a double-edged response. He welcomes and mourns its passing Emphasis original. Diarmuid Costello, Aura, Face, Photography: Reading Benjamin Today, in Walter Benjamin and Art, ed. Andrew Benjamin, 178 (New York: Continuum, 2006). 23 Little History of Photography SW2.2 518. See Appendix for a photograph of Paris by Atget. 24 Ibid., 519. 25 See earlier on Benjamins discussion of the three aspects of genuine aura in Hashish, Beginning of March 1930.

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empirical world. Rather, it seems to suggest that there is something essential about an object that is recognizable by the aura, but is perhaps not immediately recognizable to the human being.

Social Development, Mid-1930s The Artwork essay is arguably Benjamins most widely-read text. In its second version, the form in which he desired its publication, it is among his most explicitly political work.26 Simply, Benjamin argues that the technological reproducibility of works of art in the contemporary age changes the essential status of art and its reception. The mindless reception of the masses to works devoid of original authenticity and authority leads to an aestheticized politics of fascism, unless the trend is countered by a turn towards communism, that is, the politicization of aesthetics. Inherent in one of the central theses of the essay is his clearest treatment of the relationship between the aura and the work of art: art in the modern age is no longer auratic. Insofar as the Artwork essay is concerned with the present cultural moment, it illuminates precisely those things that lack, rather than possess, aura. This should not lead, however, to a dismissal of the aura as a concept in its own right. The mistaken claim that the aura can be understood only in terms of its loss is often grounded in a reading of the Artwork essay, yet it is

26

The first version was composed in the fall of 1935; shortly after the expanded second version was composed 1935-1936; the third version was composed 1936-1939. The third version was the draft that served as the basis for publication in Benjamins Schriften in 1955, and thus was the translation subsequently used in the English edition of Illuminations. The casual reader of Benjamin may thus be better acquainted with the third version. The third version is markedly less political, but only to make it acceptable for publication, not at Benjamins own desire. Consider the following comparison of the analogous Section XII in the second version and section X in the third version. In the second: Not only does the cult of the movie star which it fosters preserve that magic of the personality which has long been no more than the putrid magic of its own commodity character, but its counterpart, the cult of the audience, reinforces the corruption by which fascism is seeking to supplant the class consciousness of the masses. In the third version, this line is replaced with: We do not deny that in some cases todays films can also foster revolutionary criticism of social conditions, even of property relations. But the present study is no more specifically concerned with this than is western European film production. See The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility SW3 113 and SW4 262 respectively.

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in the Artwork essay that Benjamin first articulates the historical circumstances and modes of works of art in which the aura thrives, as well as those in which it withers. 27 Building to his thesis that modern technology changed art, Benjamin situates the relationship of technology and art historically. He distinguishes two modes of technology. The first (earliest) mode intended to master the natural world. Man maximized his involvement with nature; its culmination was man giving himself wholly to nature in human sacrifice. In contrast, the second (modern) mode intends to strike a balance, a sort of interplay, between man and nature, in which mans involvement is minimized.; it culminates in the remote-controlled aircraft which needs no human crew.28 Mystic thought is embraced in the era of the first technology; it is shunned in the spirit of scientific rationalism of the second. Because Benjamin claims that art historically originated for use in rituals, art originates in the realm of the first mode. This characterization of its generative moment is precisely why the artworks auratic mode of existence is never entirely severed from its ritual function.29 In the modern era, arts cultic role is replaced by an exhibitive role, but the very fact that it is art means that it has some residual ritual basis, although that element is now rendered superfluous. [F]or the first time in world history, technological reproducibility emancipates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual. To an ever-increasing

27

Consider Gelley (In speaking of the aura one already acknowledges being situated in a post-auratic phase.), Geulen (The aura, as the distinguishing feature of traditional art, becomes visible only to the extent that art has lost this character. The manifestation of the aura arises out of its loss.) and Hansen (Like the concept of the aurathe mimetic faculty is a category that comes into view only at the moment of decay; one might say that its conceptualization depends on the withering away of that which it purports to capture.). Alexander Gelley, Contexts of the Aesthetic In Walter Benjamin, MLN 114, no. 5 Comparative Literature Issue (Dec 1999): 936. Eva Geulen, Under Construction: Walter Benjamins The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamins Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Gerhard Richter, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 135. Miriam Bratu Hansen, Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street, Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 Angelus Novus: Perspectives on Walter Benjamin (Winter 1999): 330. 28 The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility SW3 107. 29 . SW3 105. SW4 256.

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degree, the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility.30 It is not enough, however, to simply remove the necessity for ritual. Modern perception has an insatiable demand to possess knowledge and assimilate all objects so that they might be reorganized into comprehendible categories. In this spirit, it frantically removes all traces of myth, magic and ritual, as well as that presence whose existence was predicated on such mystery: the aura. The stripping of the veil from the object, the destruction of the aura, is the signature of a perception whose sense of sameness in the world has so increased that, by means of reproduction, it extracts sameness even from what is unique.31 The aura is the objects veil, its Schein, its contradictory simultaneous illusion and sense of infinite potential. In the second mode of technologythe technology of Benjamins agethis is intolerable. Eliminating an objects connection to ritual also eliminates a second element: an objects historical context. In an alternative reading to the previously discussed auratic decline, Benjamin proposes that the work of art in the modern age is no longer auratic because it is no longer original. Its reproducibility wrenches it from its historical context.32 The reproduced work of art has neither authenticitythe quintessence of all that is transmissible in it from its origin on,

30 31

. SW3 106. SW4 256. . SW3 105. SW4 255-256. 32 Benjamin indicates the instability of this argument by declaring it as a necessary rule. It might stated as a general formula that the technology of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition. By replicating the work many times over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence. Emphasis original. . SW3 104. SW4 254.

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ranging from its physical duration to the historical testimony relating to itnor authoritythe weight it derives from tradition.33 The auratic object thus requires a unique existence. What has been distinguished as two interpretations for the decline of the aura in this essay is actually presented as one continuous argument in Benjamins text. Surely they are connected; it is clear that the phenomenological loss of mythic-mysterious semblance is grounded in the same assimilating perception that creates endless copies of the same object. What is not clear, however, is why the aura defined as the objects veilthe protection and concealment of an objects genuine appearancerequires an object of unique creation. It may be that only the unique work of art has a unique genuine appearance or unique essential content, but Benjamin does not indicate this. He does not explain the connection between uniqueness and tradition; surely the reproduced copies of the same object each have their own existence. If the fault lies with the modern individual for denying the copied thing its unique presence, that is, if the copy which has an independent existence is stripped of that independence because it seems like there is more than one of it, then the object should still have an aura. It is merely the individual who cannot perceive it. Is auratic decline really only shorthand for decline in ability to perceive the aura? It seems that Benjamin would not want to go this far or, perhaps better put, go this simple a route, and yet, the decline of the aura mixes phenomenology and history in such a way that the decline may be entirely dependent upon perception. Part of the problem is that these auratic, unique historical objects require a sort of permanence that contradicts the way he defines the aura. In both versions of the essay, Benjamin invokes the summer afternoon metaphor he introduces in the essay on photography.34 This

33 34

The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility SW3 103. SW4 254. Recall, [The aura is] the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be. To follow with the eyewhile resting on a summer afternoona mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountains, that branch. See The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility SW3 105. SW4 255.

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experiential formulation of the aura seems out of place in the Artwork essay. The metaphor references natural objects in the context of an essay otherwise concerned with the aura of manmade historical objects.35 This is oddly juxtaposed with the aura of the horizon line and shadow, which are fleeting and transient. This contradiction may be the beginnings of what Benjamin intends to indicate when he refers to a strange aspect of time. In fact, a second phrase copied from the essay on photography defines the aura as a strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance. 36 This is eliminated in the third version and replaced by a footnote dismissing the logical incoherence of near distance. The definition of the aura as the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be, represents nothing more than a formulation of the cult value of the work of art in categories of spatiotemporal perception. Distance is the opposite of nearness. The essentially distant is the unapproachable. Unapproachability is, indeed, a primary quality of the cult imageThe nearness one may gain from its substance does not impair the distance it retains in its apparition.37 If it is clear that Benjamins distance is not physical, it is not immediately clear what it is instead. It might be closer to conceive it as a psychological distance, an unapproachability due to awe and reverence for the object. Such a reading would ritualize the notion of distance and synthesize the necessity of both a particular approach by the subject and particular qualities inherent in the object. Moreover, this notion of distance might serve as a beginning to understanding the auras strange aspect of space.38
35

In the third version of the essay, Benjamin acknowledges this strange juxtaposition with the following line: The concept of the aura which was proposed above with reference to historical objects can be usefully illustrated with reference to an aura of natural objects. However, with no further elaboration, the illustration yields complication, not clarity. . SW4 255. 36 . SW3 104-105. 37 . SW4 272. 38 Michael W. Jennings similarly discusses this distance as psychological. His discussion is printed in both of the following volumes. Michael W. Jennings, introduction to The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on

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In both versions of the Artwork essay, Benjamin discusses the aura in a previously unexplored context: theatrics. The aura of an actor uniquely consolidates the aura of a person and the aura of a work of art into a single figure. Benjamin repeats the necessity of immediacy for the aura, a theme evident in his earliest writings: [T]he aura is bound to [the actors] presence in the here and now.39 He also adds a new distinction between the aura of the stage actor and the aura of the film actor. The stage actor can identify his whole self with the role, such that the aura surrounding Macbeth on the stage cannot be divorced from the aura which, for the living spectators, surrounds the actor who plays him.40 The aura of the medium (the actor) and that of the art (the character) appear as one. In contrast, the film actor must operate with his whole living person, while forgoing its aura.41 The aura of the medium is sacrificed to that of the art. The difference lies in who controls the performance. The stage actor may be directed during rehearsal, but it is his choice and his action which determines the whole of the performance. In contrast, the performance of the film actor is the result of an edited montage of many separate performances compiled by a director. The stage actor is more than a medium; he is an artist in control of the works form and content. The film actor can be no more than a medium; he is a tool for the directors artistry. Insofar as this example functions as a means of exploring auratic declinethe political implications about control and authority are almost too obvious too ignoreit is not a discussion of an auratic performance, but rather the aura of the person of the actor. Because the stage actor is capable of completing actions of his own choice, he maintains his individual identity and
Charles Baudelaire, by Walter Benjamin, trans. Howard Eiland, Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingston and Harry Zohn, 1-25 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). Also, Michael W. Jennings, The Production, Reproduction, and Reception of the Work of Art in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, by Walter Benjamin, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others, 9-18 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). 39 The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility. SW3 112. SW4 260. 40 . SW3 112. SW4 260. 41 . SW3 112. SW4 260.

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sustains his personal aura. Because the film actor relinquishes his self to external direction, he loses his identity and is stripped of his aura. Like the mannequin, the film actor forgoes his aura because he does not live fully, but rather imitates the full human life of the self-directed, selffulfilled person: the stage actor. Benjamin once again vacillates on whether this auratic loss is, simply, good or bad. On the one hand, the human being without aura is self-alienated and estranged. He becomes a mindless automaton incapable of true experience, a puppet. This death of identity physically manifests itself in unprecedented war and destruction: in gas warfare [society] has found a new means of abolishing the aura.42 The air man now breathes is insidious, poisonous. His environment is incapable of sustaining an auratic presence. On the other hand, by enlarging otherwise-ignored small details and playing with reconfigurations of space and time, those artistic techniques that aim to abolish the aura expand the way that man perceives the world. Particularly in film, in which with the close-up, space expands; [and] with slow motion, movement is extended,43 man uncovers a new nature, or perhaps, a nature which was always there but was obscured by an aura. If this really offers insight into the necessities governing our lives,44 auratic decline necessarily instigates epistemic gain. This trade-off between nature and knowledge is one Benjamin both laments and praises.

Literary Influence, Late 1930s Up to this point, Benjamin has offered a number of tentative propositions regarding the concept of the aura. It is a property of all things, but not all things always exhibit it. It is a sense of semblance or veil that obscures at the same time that it protects, eluding clarity while
42 43

. SW3 122. SW4 270. . SW3 117. SW4 265. 44 Consider, film reveals another nature which speaks to the camera as compared to the eye. . SW3 117. SW4 265-266.

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deserving respect. It is situated within a particular configuration of space and time, yet it is somehow outside spatiotemporal realms. It requires a particular relationship between subjects and objects, yet the necessary and sufficient conditions for the possibility of that relationship remain unarticulated. Between 1938 and 1939, Benjamin devoted time to Central Park, an assortment of short passages compiled for the essay he wrote between 1939 and 1940 on Baudelaire, of whom he believed, no poet of the nineteenth century [had] been talked about more stupidly.45 Part of what Benjamin most appreciatedand sometimes appropriatedin Baudelaire was his penetrating insight into the pretenses of modernity.46 For Benjamin, Baudelaire was a quintessential modern artist, an individual caught in the tension between his own auratic sensibilities and an age which could not realize them. Echoing the early definition of the aura as an ornamental halo,47 Benjamin notes that precisely because Baudelaires primary concern was the perte daurole, he was obsessed with the ephemeral and the mysterious; Baudelaire was the figure of a mythomaniac who thought he could resuscitate the aura by filling the world with fantastic images and metaphors.48 In the language of the Artwork essay, he wanted to approach the unapproachable. Baudelaires aversion to travel makes the preponderance of exotic images in many of his poems all the more remarkable. In this predominance his

45 46

Letter to Max Horkheimer January 6, 1938. CWB 549. In the early 1920s, Benjamin writes of Baudelaire: He alone is able to extract from the [photographic] negatives of essence a presentiment of its real picture. And from this presentiment speaks the negative of essence in all his poems. Baudelaire SW1 361. In 1938, Benjamin writes: Baudelaire knew the true situation of the man of letters: he goes to the marketplace as a flneur, supposing to take a look at it but in reality to find a buyer. The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire SW4 17. 47 See earlier on Benjamins discussion of the three aspects of genuine aura in Hashish, Beginning of March 1930. 48 The perte daurole concerned the poet [Baudelaire] first of all. Hence his mythomania. Central Park SW4 169.

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melancholy finds expression. It also attests to the strength of the claim which the auratic element made on his sensibility.49 The physical confines of experience are not a limit, but a threshold with which to psychologically realize the otherwise unrealizable within the infinite spheres of imaginative possibility. That these possibilities might never actualize is no reason for melancholy. However, that these possibilities might never be recognized by the urban masses is a lamentable development of modern consciousness. In some sense, the artist has a particular agency in instigating and nurturing the aura in his work of art. In contrast to the painter who represents the aura, Benjamin notes the way that a dramatist might catalyzeand in a sense createan auratic moment: Silence as aura. Maeterlinck pushes the unfolding of the auratic to the point of absurdity.50 This suggests a certain ambiguity about whether there is an appropriate degree of auraticity beyond which a work might enter a realm of absurdity. It also prompts questions about the agency of the artist. This line indicates that the artist can affect the aura of a work of art, but this is not the same as an assertion that the artist creates an aura. The aura unfolds, but that does not mean that Maeterlinck is the unfolder. The uncertain role of the artist in the emergence of the aura is raised in Benjamins correspondence with Adorno. In a letter discussing On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, Adorno adamantly tries to determine what instigates auratic decline.

49 50

Ibid., 180. Ibid., 177. This notion of silence as aura is connected to several points made in Part Two of this study, especially in Theology and Language. In particular, consider the interpretation that Benjamin wants philosophy to pay attention to the silence in the language of things. Perhaps silence as aura is the purest meaning of all, rid of the complications of pure language, or perhaps silence as aura indicates the still meaning of pure language, therefore equivalent to pure truth content.

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Is not the aura invariably a trace of a forgotten human moment in the thing, and is it not directly connected, precisely by this forgetting, with what you call experience?51 The following month, Benjamin replied. [E]ven if the question of the aura does in fact involve a forgotten human moment, this is still not necessarily the moment of human labor. The tree and the shrub which offer themselves to us are not made by human hands. There must therefore be something human in the things themselves, something that is not originated by labor.52 The aura is not a quality of things created by humans, but rather a human-like quality of the things themselves. This new formulation of the aura is first introduced in Central Park in a jotted, fragmentary note: Derivation of the aura as the projection of a human social experience onto nature: the gaze is returned.53 The aura develops because nature mimics a human sociological reciprocity. The intentional, fixed look of the subject is not released into the unknown, but is directed into the object, which it permeates so that it might return to the subject transformed. The gaze that returns to the subject is a human gaze which is appropriated, reformed and manifested by nature. Benjamin develops this returned gaze formulation of the aura most fully in On Some Motifs in Baudelaire. He grounds this formulation on three premises: (1) natural objects are historical objects, (2) accessible, collective memories of the prehistorical era reside in the individuals unconsciousness, and (3) beauty is a function of history.54

51 52

Letter to Walter Benjamin February 28, 1940. CA 322. Letter to Theodor W. Adorno May 7, 1940. Ibid., 327. 53 Central Park SW4 173. 54 This discussion of the returned gaze formulation is my reconstruction of Benjamins prosaic presentation.

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The first premise allows Benjamin to clarify what in the Artwork essay was previously identified as a strange juxtaposition of historical and natural auratic objects. In fact, the historical object is not necessarily a natural object, but a natural object is always a historical object. Natural objects existed in the most ritualized, cultic and magical eras of history (here referred to as prehistory), the era of the aura. Natural objects are thus inscribed within the longest history. As long as nature is viewed as part of this long-term continuum of experience [Erfahrung] and not improperly understood as isolated instances wrenched from time [Erlebnis], then nature retains that breath of prehistory which is, in fact, its aura.55 Of course, modern perception is almost exclusively concerned with Erlebnis. Through the second premise, Benjamin links people of the second technology era to people of the first technology era. Although modern man is disenchanted, in the moments when he involuntarily recalls the collective memories of his ancestors from his unconscious, he senses their enchantment. A pleasurable, bittersweet nostalgia emerges which can never be fully satisfied because man can never fully resurrect such hopeful, utopian innocence. These memories which seek to cluster around an object of perception are that objects aura; the subjects welcome nostalgia is his auratic experience. Building on the first premise, insofar as the object with the deepest sense of history maximizes prehistorical memories, natural objects are the quintessential auratic objects.56 These two strands are synthesized in the third premise. The degree to which an object instigates this insatiable pleasure in an image of the past is the degree to which the object is

55 56

On Some Motifs in Baudelaire SW4 336. This involuntary faculty of access to the memories of the collective is Prousts mmoire involontaire (discussed later in this study). If we think of the associations which, at home in the mmoire involontaire, seek to cluster around an object of perception, and if we call those associations the aura of that object, then the aura attaching to the object of a perception corresponds precisely to the experience [Erfahrung] which, in the case of an object of use, inscribes itself as long practice. Ibid., 337.

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beautiful.57 Beauty is a function of time and memory. The moment at which an object or work of art derivesor retrievesits beauty from the depths of time is a moment touched by the breath of lost time; it is a moment removed from the sequence of days.58 Arresting the linearity of time allows for a temporal fluidity in which a gaze transcends its present, journeys to an era characterized by mythic and experiential harmony, and returns to that original present with souvenirs of its sojourn. This is the lack of hour or moment in the summer afternoon metaphor to which Benjamin returned so many times throughout the 1930s. The removal of temporal strictures does not remove the object from time, but embeds it deeper within a time for which measurement is irrelevant. In the Artwork essay, it was not clear that Benjamin wanted to frame the aura as a function of the subjects perception. In this essay, he is explicit: the existence of the objects aura is predicated on its being perceived by the subject. Nature always has auratic potential, but its aura disappears if it is not perceived as part of its historicaland prehistoricalcontext. The aura of an object is confirmed when it inspires a particular feeling of nostalgiaof beautyin the subject. Benjamin thus quotes a line from Novalis which he invoked at least as early as his 1919 study on German Romanticism.59

57 58

[W]hat makes our delight in the beautiful unquenchable is the image of the primeval world. Ibid., 338. Ibid., 354. 59 In his study of German Romanticism, Benjamin emphasis that this quote has several implications, especially that (1) the object must attend to itself, (2) the subject must attend to itself, and (3) the subject must attend to the object, although that attentiveness to the one seeing can still be rightly understood only as a symptom of the things capacity to see itself. In addition to embracing the sphere of thinking and knowing, therefore, this basic law of reflective medium embraces also the sphere of perception and, in the end, that of activity as well. Used in the essay on Baudelaire, this quote thus emphasizes that the subject and object both require a certain attentiveness (perhaps more appropriately termed awareness) to longterm prehistorical and historical context. For discussion of this Romantic conception of self-knoweldge, see the discussion of Romantic Criticism later in this study. The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism. SW1 145.

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Perceptibility, as Novalis puts it, is an attentiveness. The perceptibility he has in mind is none other than that of the aura.60 The existence of the aura is predicated on its being perceived, and the auratic experience requires a mode of perception primed for such an experience. The subject must be conscientious, carefully alert in the way he judiciously directs his attention to objects. There is another shift in the formulation of the aura in this essay on Baudelaire: the photograph cannot be auratic.61 Photographs concretize a particular instant in time. They acknowledge no breath of prehistory. They care only for the definite, petrified moment. If the distinctive feature of the images arising from mmoire involontaire is seen in their aura, then photography is decisively implicated in the phenomenon of a decline of the aura. What was inevitably felt to be inhumanone might even say deadlyin daguerreotypy was the (prolonged) looking into the camera, since the camera records our likeness without returning our gaze.62 Benjamin criticizes the non-auratic because it denies man his full humanity. As presented in this context, the essence of mankind is fundamentally social. Man is not fully human when he merely looks at something; he is fully human when he looks at something and the thing looks back at him. Benjamin thus identifies mutual recognition as the most essential feature of humanity. Inherent in the gaze [of the subject who looks at a photograph] is the expectation that it will be returned by that on which it is bestowed. Where this expectation is met (which, in the case of thought processes, can apply equally to an intentional
60 61

On Some Motifs in Baudelaire SW4 338. Compare the optimistic closing lines from the essay on photography (1931). After posing questions about the ways that photographs will reveal new secrets and interrupt viewer assumptions: Such are the questions in which the interval of ninety years that separate us from the age of the daguerreotype discharges its historical tension. It is in the illumination of these sparks that the first photographs emerge, beautiful and unapproachable, from the darkness of our grandfathers day. Little History of Photography SW2.2 527. 62 On Some Motifs in Baudelaire SW4 338.

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gaze of awareness and to a glance pure and simple), there is an experience of the aura in all its fullness. 63 This must be distinguished from Hegelian recognition insofar as the elements of this encounter do not gaze upon each other as subjective, self-conscious equals.64 The human subject is of a fundamentally different type than the inanimate photograph. Moreover, the gaze of the object is not the effect of a self-contained subjectivity; it is dependent on the gaze of the human subject. Experience of the aura thus arises from the fact that a response characteristic of human relationships is transposed to the relationship between humans and inanimate or natural objects. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back at us.65 In one sense, the human subject has authority over the image. The image has no life until life is given by the subject. However, because only through interaction with the image can the subject employ his full self, the image retains a sort of authority over the subject as well. Perhaps their relationship is one of neither equivalence nor stratification, but simply one of mutual dependence insofar as only through the auratic experience can both the human subject and the object fully actualize the full possibilities of their independent existence. Upon this reading, this is merely a restatement of what Benjamin has emphasized many times before: the aura requires life, and life requires the aura. Despite the fact that the two entities in this encounter are not equivalent in type, they act in the same way. They both gaze. On the one hand, the subject gazes upon the object like one approaching a magical mirror; the image that looks back at him is his own and yet is transformed.

63 64

Ibid., 338. On Benjamins perception of Hegel, see the beginning of the section Beautiful Semblance in this study. 65 On Some Motifs in Baudelaire SW4 338.

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This is how the notion of gaze as invoked in Central Park was earlier interpreted. However this works as a metaphor, it is nearly impossible to grasp what this means for experiencing the aura of a mountain or a branch, the very objects capable of manifesting the quintessence of aura. Does the branch gaze back at the subject? Is the branchs shadow a transformed manifestation of the approach of the individual? Certainly no one would say that a branch gazes, but it has already been noted that the shadows fall upon the subject is an effect of the spatiotemporal position of the subject. The shadow might be called the reaction of the branch to the approach of the subject, just as the photographs gaze is its reaction to the subject. This may work as reconciliation, but it also crudely reduces the exchange of gazes to any mere causal relationship. Benjamin is trying to emphasize something particularly human invested in nature, but it is not clear how that investment works. To summarize Benjamins approach in this essay: the subject experiences the aura of an object because that object instigates a turn towards suppressed memories of a prehistoric, mythembracing epoch in the mind of the subject, prompting a feeling of nostalgia which confers back upon the object the distinction of beauty. The object activates the unconscious memories via a sort of human gaze akin to the original gaze of the subject upon the object. In this mutual recognition emerges the auratic experience. After reading Benjamins discussion of the aura in the essay on Baudelaire, Adorno pondered whether this elaboration was incomplete, elegant or both. I am convinced that our own best thoughts are invariably those that we cannot entirely think through. In this sense the concept of the aura still seems to be incompletely thought out. One can argue about whether, indeed, it should be fully thought out as such.66

66

Letter to Walter Benjamin February 28, 1940. CA 322.

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Benjamins suicide precludes knowledge of whether he intended to develop the concept of the aura further.

Notes and Remarks, Mid-1920s to 1940 A survey of Benjamins explanations of the aura would be incomplete without reference to his writings on the Paris Arcades. Their placement towards the end of this discussion should not indicate any subsequent composition to previously discussed texts since their precise dates are unknown. He worked on collecting the fragments throughout the 1920s and 1930s, promising drafts and then reluctantly informing his colleagues and friends that he would never finish by a set deadline.67 Nevertheless, the fragments that were posthumously assembled offer insights into his work and, in at least three instances, insights into his formulation of the aura. First, one fragmentary note references the definition in the Baudelaire essay: definition of the aura as the aura of distance opened up with the look that awakens in an object perceived.68 In the Baudelaire essay, the subject invests something in the object, yet in this fragment it seems that the subject instigates something that already exists in the object. This is a difference that suggests that the aura particular to the objects essence exists independently of the subjects perception. Like the earliest discussion in One-Way Street, the object is auratic unto itself.

67

Consider the following quotes from his correspondence, beginning in 1928: I do not want to omit mention of the fact that I am still working on the Paris Arcades. I have probably occasionally mentioned or written to you how slowly the work is taking shape, and about the obstacles it facesThere is still a lot missing, but I know precisely what is missing. I will finish it in Paris, one way or another. Letter to Gerhard Scholem, April 23, 1928. CWB 333. Nearly ten years later: I take it that you mean the Paris Arcades when you refer to the major project. Nothing has changed there: not a syllable of the actual text exists, even though the end of preparatory studies is now within sight. Letter to Gerhard Scholem, May 3, 1936. CWB 527. Two years later: [T]here is some news that I reluctantly pass on to you. You are the first to hear it, and I pass it on not so much into loyal hands as into understanding ones. No matter how hard I try, I will be unable to meet the September 15 deadline [for the rough draft of the manuscript on the Arcades]. Letter to Gretel Adorno July 20, 1938. CWB 570. 68 AP 314.

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Second, Benjamin claims that existence within Nietzsches eternal recurrence must be auratic.69 On the one hand, this requires epistemic limits, which seems consistent with the auras relationship to myth, magic and ritual. Moreover, perhaps only by confining the auratic existence to such a magic circle is there a way to reconcile Benjamins earliest discussion of the futureoriented aura of premonition with his latest discussion of the past-oriented aura of prehistorical experience. On the other hand, each auratic moment is unique. In many contexts, Benjamin predicates the aura on a single instant of irrecoverable immediate physical presence. In the Baudelaire essay, he notes that the compositional elements of the aurathe memories of the mmoire involontaireare unique and irretrievable at the instant of their realization. They do not lend themselves to repetition. This does not seem possible within the eternal return. It seems that such an auratic existence would always have to invoke the same past moment. If it did not return to this one point, the auratic experience would be within a magic circle, but not the allencompassing magic circle here posited. Perhaps the ambiguous phenomenology of the aura bars metaphorically associating it with any conceivable shape, or perhaps each auratic experience should be considered as a tangential moment to the circle. At this point, it must be conceded that the implications of this fragment may offer more in the sense of contradiction than definite conclusion. Third, Benjamin indicates that the relationship between the subject and object of an auratic experience is indeed one of disproportionate authority. The object is superior.

69

Ibid., 119. Consider Benjamins quotation of Nietzsche: On eternal recurrence: The great thought as a Medusa head: all features of the world become motionless, a frozen death throe. Ibid., 115. Benjamin asserts that the doctrine of eternal recurrence is an attempt to reconcile mutually contradicting tendencies of desire: that of repetition and that of eternity. Such heroism has its counterpart in the heroism of Baudelaire, who conjures up the phantasmagoria of modernity from the misery of the Second Empire. Ibid., 116-117. Also, Eternal return is the fundamental form of the urgeschichtlichen, mythic consciousness. (Mythic because it does not reflect). Ibid., 119. Benjamin also mentions that eternal recurrence is the essence of mythic happenings in the Paralipomena to On the Concept of History (SW4 404). These comments do not help to resolve the fundamental tension, that is, how the auratic existence and experience are always unique moments within the circle of eternal recurrence.

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Trace and aura. The trace is appearance of a nearness, however far removed the thing that left it behind may be. The aura is appearance of a distance, however close the thing that calls it forth. In the trace, we gain possession of the thing; in the aura, it takes possession of us.70 This severely restricts the power of the individual. Perhaps his attentive perception is not so crucial for the existence of the aura. All he can grasp is the most limited form of a thing, if that thing can still even be considered part of itself in its mere trace. Even if the subject is required for the auratic experience, he must submit himself fully to the object in order to complete that experience. To acknowledge his full humanity, he must relinquish his self to the authority of an object outside of himself.

Benjamins first use of the term auraan aura of premonitionis not one that he seems to sustain. He retains its phenomenological basis, but complicates its relation to the subject. Moreover, the aura becomes a property of both objects and people. As a means of distinguishing the two elements of perceiver and that which has aura, this study will refer to subject and object. However, it should be kept in mind that the object might, in fact, be a living being. Throughout Benjamins writings, he proposes a variety of conceptualizations of the aura, some of which appear contradictory. In his earlier writings, the aura exists independently of any recognition by man. All things might have aura, and all things might subsequently lose it. An object may exist without aura insofar as the aura is its mere ornamental decoration, or an object may require aura such that its innermost essence requires the auras protective and concealing veil, which the subject perceives as a sort of beautiful semblance. An auratic experience may

70

AP 447.

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exist for the sake of the experience itself, or it may produce an auratic object, such as the early daguerreotype photographs. As Benjamins writings increasingly focus on the qualities of perception in the modern age, the concept of the aura is increasingly posited as more of an experience than an independently-existing entity. The aura is defined as a function of perception; the decline of the aura in modern society is at least partly caused by mans inability to recognize it, suggesting that perhaps an aura might not exist independently of recognition. In this sense, the returned gaze formulation actualizes the aura; the aura does not exist before the subject-object gaze exchange. Still, the decline of the aura in modern society is also due in part to the changed nature of objects. If mass production and reproduction techniques have stripped objects of a unique presence on which the aura was predicated, then the creative process that engenders an object determines whether it has aura. Accordingly, the aura also seems to be a function of the object, not the subject. As a quality of objects, Benjamin associates it with art, especially emphasizing newer mediums such as film and photography. In most instances, the aura of such historical, manmade objects is discussed in the same way as those of natural objects. It remains unclear how the auratic experience begins. If the experience begins with the subjects attracted, attentive perception to an object, then perhaps the object has some quality that indicates it is worthy of the gaze. If the experience is initiated by the object, it may be that the mysterious semblance of the object shocks the subject from a relaxed reverie and into a mode of auratic perception. In some sense, the necessity of a subject for an auratic experience precludes a determination of whether an aura might exist independently of perception. Moreover, it is not clear how the aura itself comes to be. It may be a function of an objects prehistorical inscription, but not in a chronological sense. Benjamin is not concerned with sequence of events undergone by an object, but with the historical sense of an object. In

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the modern age, the way that a subject perceives an objects beauty is dependent upon that sense prompting a bittersweet nostalgia. In this way, Benjamin relocates a trait typically associated with an objects material content to its historical essence. If objects in the modern age lose their aura because they lose a sense of history, then Benjamins interest in reformulating the way in which the modern age understands history might be interpreted as a strategy for regaining the aura. Whether the aura has disappeared, declined, or been transformed in the modern age is dependent upon how the aura is formulated. Benjamin usuallyif not alwaysspeaks of auratic decline or auratic loss, but not in a total sense. This implies that there is still the potential for aura in the modern age, yet it is not clear whether the strategy for its resurrection is a change in human perception, a change in the creation of objects, or both. What must be clarified is the balance between the perceiver of aura and that which has aura, that is, the subject and the object. On the one hand, sustaining an aura requires an entitys full self-possession, such as the stage actor who is both self-directed and self-fulfilling. On the other hand, according to a formulation such as that of the returned gaze, each element is only fulfilled through recognition by the other. The subject completes the object just as much as the object completes the subject. If an aura exists prior to their encounter, it corresponds to an incomplete subject or object. If the subject and object are only fully actualized as independent beings through their auratic engagement, such that each recognizes their essence through the other, then the aura seems to be a foundation for existence. In this encounter, man senses the essence of humanity and the objects innermost content is recognized in the outside world. This interpretation would support Benjamins anxiety about the decline of the aura, yet Benjamin does not always mourn its

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loss. If the aura defines something about mans existence, it nonetheless seems that it is not a necessary condition. This introduction to Benjamins concept of the aura may suggest inconsistency more than clarity; however, this should not imply inconsistency in Benjamins thought or texts. The following sections situate not only Benjamins motivation for employing the concept of the aura, but also its development in other writings throughout his life. Part Two will examine Benjamins early writings and intellectual influences as a background to the concept of the aura; it will outline the philosophical and experiential discontent Benjamin attempted to resolve by formulating the concept. Part Three will examine the four main thematic elements of the aura in order to add depth to an understanding of how they interact. Separating each element is superficial, since conceptually each overlaps another. However, permitting this presentational structure allows for greater clarity and comprehensible depth in the final conclusions. Only through examination of how Benjamin conceives of space and time can we begin to understand how an object contains its history and how the gaze travels. Only by examining how Benjamin considers human perception is there a foundation to understand what distinguishes modern modes of perception and how the subject must perceive the aura. Only by examining how Benjamin envisages Schein, appearance and beautiful semblance can we speculate the nature of an auratic object, if such a thing exists at all. With this foundation, we can then approach the returned gaze discussion as an auratic encounter in space and time which mediates the essences of an attentive subject and a veiled object.

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II. Defining Philosophy and Experience in Early Benjamin (1915-1925) At the turn of the century, the European intellectual climate was one of striking spiritualism. Decades before the Great War instigated a shift towards mysticism in an attempt to comprehend unprecedented death and destruction, investigating psychological phenomena was considered a serious enterprise, not least by Madame Helena Petrova Blavatsky. In 1875, Blavatsky founded the influential Theosophical Society in order to reorient spiritualism away from Christian dogmatism and towards one eternal truth, guided by learned occultists and followers of Jewish and Egyptian mysticism. Though it originated in America, it was wellreceived in Germany. Around 1910, its popularity increased when Goethe scholar Rudolf Steiner reorganized the German factions into the Anthroposophical Society. Both of these societies believed in ephemeral entities of the invisible world which directly corresponded to things situated in the visible world. However abstract, emotional or philosophical these forms, they were perceivable to the properly trained observer. These forms were not metaphorical devices; they were real phenomena referred to both in Theosophist and Anthroposophist literature as auras.71 Artists and authors were particularly attracted to this popular blend of the psychological and spiritual as a way to define being.72 In an effort to provide proof for the existence of auras and spirits of the deceased, spiritualists recruited belief in photographys objectivity. Between 1873 and 1875, French spiritualists convinced the general public that photographs of ghostly beings were not due to experiments in development technologies, but were mirror images of real forms. Although after
71

For discussions of the aura in both Theosophist and Anthroposophist literature, see chapter 3 of Cooper, The Aura and the Soul, and discussion by Clemen, whose 1924 article was written to explain the tenets of German Anthroposophy to American audiences. Irving S. Cooper, Theosophy Simplified, (Wheaton, IL: The Theosophical Press, 1915). Carl Clemen, Anthroposophy, The Journal of Religion 4, no. 3 (May 1924): 281-292. For a history of both movements, see Joscelyn Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994). 72 Among those artists versed in the movements included Scriabin, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Klee and Kandinsky. Regarding an early psychological use of aura, one might note the following article: John Hughlings Jackson, On a Particular Variety of Epilepsy (Intellectual Aura), Brain 11 (1888): 179-207.

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1875 spirit photography resumed its recreational functions, the activity surged globally during and immediately following the First World War.73 As a follower of early-century Messianism, Benjamin is rightly considered mystical, yet he explicitly denounced these trends. He found the inexperience and ignorance of the Theosophists highly repugnant.74 Although he was slightly more receptive to the ways that dream images, memory and the soul interacted in the work of Wolfskehl and Klages, he found in their work for a similar vulgarity. Any temptation he felt to accept their formulation of the auratic as a sort of fluid veil that could bring a disenchanted object into an enchanted realm of transcendence was tempered by the figure of Klages himself, for whom Benjamin held a mix of philosophical respect and personal disdain.75 Nevertheless, Kandinsky was a casual theosophist with a great interest in spirit photography, both for its underlying theory and resulting appearance. Despite Benjamins skepticism, he was a great admirer of the artist.76 Benjamin does not extensively use the term aura until 1930, over a decade after his serious writings begin. This absence must be attributed to his disdain for these spiritualist trends
73

For a discussion of spirit photography with particular emphasis on France, see Clment Chroux, Ghost Dialectics: Spirit photography in entertainment and belief, in The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, ed. Clment Chroux, Andrew Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, Denis Canguilhem, and Sophie Schmit, 44-55 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). For a brief discussion of spirit photography during and following World War One, see Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 73-76. 74 Benjamin recalls, Everything I said on the subject [of genuine aura] was directed polemically against the theosophists, whose inexperience and ignorance I find highly repugnant. Hashish, Beginning of March 1930 SW2.1 327 75 Klages was a well-known anti-Semitic. Referring to Klagess Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, Benjamin writes, It is without a doubt a great philosophical work, regardless of the context in which the author may be and remain suspect, then later says that the book is formed on a kind of clumsy metaphysical dualism. Letter to Gerhard Scholem August 15, 1930. CWB 366. Correlations between Klagess theory of dreams, Benjamins theory of awakening and their mutual emphasis on distance as necessary for perception are common themes among secondary literature on their relationship. On the relationship between Benjamin, Wolfskehl and Klages, see Miriam Bratu Hansen, Benjamins Aura, Critical Inquiry 34 (Winter 2008): 357-369. 76 After reading Kandinskys Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and Painting in Particular, Benjamin writes, This book fills me with the highest esteem for its author, just as his paintings elicit my admiration. It is probably the only book on expressionism devoid of gibberish; not, of course, from the standpoint of a philosophy, but from that of a doctrine of painting. Letter to Gerhard Scholem January 13, 1920. CWB 156.

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of thought and an aversion to participate in its discourse; yet his concomitant desire to expand the concept of experience precisely into spiritual realms might also be traced to his appreciation for the artistic visions it precipitated. Moreover, after the First World War manifested and surpassed the spiritualists fears for the consequences of the fragmentation of modern society, Benjamin was part of the coarsening and hardening of intellectual life77 against Western capitalism that, alongside the Theosophists and the Anthroposophists, turned away from rational scientific explanation and appealed to the notions of wholeness and harmony found in Antiquity. For all of his protestations, it should not be surprising that he finally turned to this term. In those texts that precede his invocation of the aura, his discontent anticipates his entire formulation of the concept, or at the very least the methodology with which he proceeded in his later years.

Kant From the late nineteenth century through the end of the First World War, social insecurity instigated a philosophical self-consciousness in Germany. Howsoever this intensely programmatic proliferation of philosophical manifestoes, demands and plans sometimes ambitiously reached premature or undeveloped conclusions,78 it nonetheless reflected the turn in which neo-Kantianism branched away from the actual texts of Kant and began structuring new systems to explain experience. Benjamins 1918 essay on the future of philosophy was thus a timely proposition of a new methodological orientation in philosophy. Between 1915 and 1917, Benjamin studied under Felix Noeggerath, whose interests included both comparative mythology and the empirical systematic principles developed by the Marburg School. In a view Benjamin came to share, Noeggerath considered the Kantian
77

George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 289. 78 Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 309.

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epistemological deferral of objective knowledge to subjective apparatus as a collapse into mythology at least and nave metaphysics at best. Noeggerath wanted to expand the Kantian concept of experience to avoid defecting into pre-Enlightenment cosmic dogmatism and modern phenomenological vitalism. Benjamin spoke highly of their discussions, referring to Noeggerath as the genius.79 For all that erred in the Kantian system, it was not to be set aside. As Benjamin wrote to Scholem in 1917, [N]o matter how great the number of Kantian minutiae that may have to fade away, his systems typology must last foreverOnly in the spirit of Kant and Plato and, I believe, by means of the revision and further development of Kant, can philosophy become doctrine or, at least, be incorporated into it.80 If philosophy searched not just for knowledge, but also justification of that knowledge, it would have to clarify the muddled epistemology with which it equated knowledge of experience and experience itself. Why did philosophy defend experience is knowledge with an appeal to experience, while defending knowledge is experience with an appeal to logical deduction?81 Following Noeggerarth, Benjamin did not want to dismiss the identity; he wanted elucidate what was meant by experience.

79

Noeggerath is here noted for the way that Benjamin followed his views. Benjamins other exposure to the neo-Kantian tradition included study under Heinrich Rickert and extensive reading of Hermann Cohen. For references to Noeggerath as the genius in his 1917 correspondence, see letters from Benjamin to Scholem on May 23, October 22 and December 7. CWB 86, 98, 103. On Benjamins Munich relationship with Noeggerath, see John McCole, Benjamin and the Antimonies of Tradition (PhD diss., Boston University, 1988), 118-122. This dissertation was subsequently published by Cornell University Press in 1993. 80 Letter to Gerhard Scholem October 22, 1917. CWB 97. 81 In an unpublished fragment written in 1917, Benjamin writes, [E]verything depends on the way in which the concept of experience in the term knowledge of experience is related to experience in ordinary use[T]he experience we experience in reality is identical with what we know in our knowledge of experience. If that is so, we must ask further: How must we define this identity of experience in the two instances? And why do we treat the two situations differently, inasmuch as we experience the identity in the case of experience but deduce it in the case of knowledge? On Perception SW1 96.

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Benjamins vacillation about whether he should or should not proceed with a career in academia was undoubtedly complicated by what he perceived as fundamentally specious currents in philosophy itself. In 1918, he described the need for the discipline to expand its understanding of experience if it ever hoped to expand its understanding of knowledge. In short, he argued that ignoring the religious experience for the sake of systematic neatness was a philosophicaland indeed Kantianerror. Philosophy is based upon the fact that the structure of experience lies within the structure of knowledge and is to be developed from it. This experience, then[,] also includes religion, as the true experienceThe task of future epistemology is to find for knowledge the sphere of total neutrality in regard to the concepts of both subject and object; in other words, it is to discover the autonomous, innate sphere of knowledge in which this concept in no way continues to designate the relation between two metaphysical entities.82 Kant succumbed to the religious and historical blindness of the Enlightenment and reduced experience to the mere spatiotemporally-bound concept of that which was naked, primitive, [and] self-evident.83 Benjamin believed that this substitution of a reductionist theory of experience for the totality of experience was no foundation for true knowledge. Embracing the logical possibility of both the mechanical and the religious would dissolve the border between the material and spiritual worlds, opening the possibility of a metaphysics that, if not denied by Kant, was at least incapable of being proven in his strict separation of sensibility and understanding. Benjamin believed that only by indulging such metaphysics would philosophy be able to reconcile temporality and eternity, formulating a continuum in which the justification for absolute truth could flourish. Philosophy had to derive its categories from experience, while at the same
82 83

The Coming Philosophy SW1 104. Ibid., 101.

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time acknowledging that they were more than mere derivation. It had to become theology in order to rise above it; at the same time, theology had to integrate itself into the understanding of existence.84 Caygill defines the tension of these two moves as, first, a Platonically-ideal flight out of time and, second, a Nietzschean denial of truth that must submerge itself in historical contingency.85 If this is an appropriately characterized tension, however, it is not that one side of the subject-object equation must gain authority over the other. Benjamin wanted philosophy to synthesize the religious and the physical precisely in pursuit of a nonviolent notion of an unmutilated experience.86 This was no outright farewell to Kantianism.87 Benjamin wanted philosophy to extend, not reject, the Kantian relationship of consciousness and experience by formulating a comprehensive, systematic framework in which the Kantian triadic architecture of theory, practice and art were evaluated not on the basis of numbers, but with an appeal to language. The unique voice of philosophy was not realizable in mathematics, as Kant had tried to prove, but in linguistic expression. A concept of knowledge gained from reflection on the linguistic nature of knowledge will create a corresponding concept of experience which will also encompass realms that Kant failed to truly systematize. The realm of religion should be mentioned as the foremost of these. Thus, the demand upon philosophy can ultimately be put in these words: to create on the basis of the
84

Benjamin writes, the philosophical concept of existence must answer to the religious concept of teachings, but the latter must answer to the epistemological original concept. Ibid., 110. 85 See Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The colour of experience. New York: Routledge, 1998, 2586

26.

When Benjamin, as a student, still trusted himself to sketch The Program of Coming Philosophy, the notion of an unmutilated experience already stood at the center of his reflections. Jrgen Habermas, Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique in Philosophical-Political Profiles, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence, 145 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 131-165. 87 On On the Program for the Coming Philosophy, Caygill notes, Paradoxically, Benjamins most sustained and concentrated analysis of Kants philosophy is also his farewell to Kantianism. Caygill, 23.

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Kantian system a concept of knowledge to which a concept of experience corresponds, of which the knowledge is the teachings [Lehre].88 Restructuring philosophical grammar in such a way as to separate the physical and spiritual realms could dissolve the primitive subject-object relationship by redefining the very concept of existence. In this sense, in all the ways that Benjamin criticized the popular spiritualists of his time, he was at least as equally spiritual. He sought an enlightenment that was appreciative of myth.

Theology and Language Benjamins theological preoccupations were devoid of any traditional religious dogmatisms or institutional foundations. As a student under Wyneken, Benjamin rejected Zionism, believing that its politicization vitiated its ethical imperative. Through his friendship with Scholem, begun in 1915, he nurtured a lifelong interest in the Kabala and Jewish mysticism. Still, despite Benjamins intellectual veracity and wide breadth of reading, he did not command expertise in Judaism.89 His Messianic orientation, better characterized as an attitude than doctrine, reflected the overall surge in Jewish secularism in the first three decades of the twentieth century. This Jewishness without Judaism90 sought a return of the world to a condition of the past while anticipating a future so utopian it could never have been part of history at all; redemption required a break in time, instigated by the coming of the Messiah which would negate all of history. Although this mindset was predicated on hopeful expectation, it was equally filled

88 89

The Coming Philosophy SW1 108. Jacobson refers to Benjamins rather modest knowledge of Judaism and classical Jewish literature, as evaluated by Scholem, in his introduction to Metaphysics of the Profane. See Eric Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 4. 90 Anson Rabinbach, Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Jewish Messianism, New German Critique, no. 34 (Winter 1985): 82.

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with a pessimistic, catastrophic view of history in which everything in the empirical realm lost agency and, to some degree, meaning. Rabinbach points out that in Messianic thought, the chasm that separates the historical quotidian from redemption is too wide to be bridged by determined action or profane events, instigating an ethical dilemma in which freedom to act is undermined by the absolute superfluity of all action.91 This bizarre blend of confidence and defeatism is expressed frequently in Benjamins work, but perhaps most concisely in a fragment on theology and politics which expressed many of his long-term preoccupations.92 The note explains that mans striving for happiness inevitably leads to the downfall in which his immortality is made possible, a symptom of the rhythm of this eternally transient worldly existence, transient in its totality, in its spatial but also in its temporal totality.93 In practice, this is the nihilistic life. It was a call to search for an end that might serve as a new beginning. As a school of thought, Messianism was closely aligned with an esoteric intellectualism. It approached the world of the profane as a world of encased secrets, moments of divine origination that were obscured by human history. For Benjamin, what was generated in those original moments was crucial. According to Kabalistic thought, the existence of the Torah preceded genesis of the world precisely because the Torah recorded the intentions of God as they were enacted. As the primordial text of God, it infused all of reality with a divine language. Insofar as Benjamin sought systematic, philosophical unity, he naturally turned to language as that ontological substance common to all things. Divine language was no mere communicative faculty of content, but the communicative faculty of being itself.94

91 92

Rabinbach, 87. Scholem dated this text in the early 1920s; Adorno dated this text in the late 1930s. The fact that these themes preoccupied Benjamin throughout his career only proves their centrality to his long-term thought. See Theological-Political Fragment SW3 305-306. 93 Ibid., 306. 94 The preceding discussion of Messianism is informed by Rabinbach and Jacobson. See also, James McBride, Marooned in the Profane: Walter Benjamins Synthesis of Kabala and Communism, Journal of

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Benjamins understanding of language opposed the view of bourgeois instrumentalism in which the word was an accidental sign for an object with no intensive connection, as well as the mystical linguistic theory in which the word itself was identical with the essence of a thing.95 For Benjamin, the word-thing relationship was neither communicative nor referential. The word was the instrument of language; if it seemed self-evident that language was expression, Benjamin also wanted to prove the reverse, that expression was language. In 1916s On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, he distinguishes between human language and the language of things. Language precedes a subject such that a mental being fundamentally communicates itself in language and not through language.96 By affirming a beings immediate presence, it also affirms its existence. The theological linguistic core of a things moment of creation is immanently preserved in the immediate manifestation of that thing. It is precisely because the totality of experience must be approached through this linguistic immanence that we cannot imagine a total absence of language in anything.97 The thing itself is not identical to a word, but rather corresponds with a divine word in the moment of creation. After Adam names that creation, it corresponds with a human word. This Adamic naming was carried out in agreement with the divine. After the Falls introduction of good and evil, the name fundamentally changed in character; the name became the uncreated imitation of the creative word.98 Its innocence lost, language became a utilitarian means, transformed into a faculty for judgment and abstraction. From this profane destruction emerged a linguistic chaos of many human languages and a plethora of disparate names for a single object. The introduction of knowledge was the end of pure language.
the American Academy of Religion 57, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 241-266. Also, Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 37-63. 95 On Language as Such and on the Language of Man. SW1 69. 96 Emphasis original. Ibid., 63. 97 Ibid., 62. 98 Ibid., 71.

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Still, the power to name is not to be dismissed. Naming distinguishes human language from the language of things. The language of things is purely material; assembled objects do not have sound. In contrast, the incomparable feature of human language is that its magical community with things is immaterial and purely mental, and the symbol of this is sound.99 Human language mediates the realm of the subject and the realm of the object through something that communicates, but is itself incommunicable. It is through the name that language communicates itself. Man names things for the sake of man. Benjamin emphasizes, he communicates himself by naming them.100 Adamic naming defines the relationship between the human individual and his world: in order to complete the existence of objects in his surroundings, he must first invest them with his own existence. This essay is closely related to Benjamins The Task of the Translator, written in 1921 and published in 1923. Here, Benjamin is much more explicit about the single intention of pure language, which no longer means or expresses anything but is, as expressionless and creative Word, that which is meant in all languages.101 Translation is grounded on this pure language, that is, on the conviction that the suprahistorical kinship between languages102 is possible because in the totality of each resides the same meaning. Pure language is not the aggregate of the individual intentions of separate languages, but rather the ideal after which each individual intention strives. Translation disregards that enslavement of language in prattle103 which degraded the language of paradise into the foundation of the Tower of Babel. It elevates the individual, particular text towards agreement with its universal concept. Although translation comes most near to approaching pure language, the latter is still inaccessible to the human

99

Ibid., 67. Ibid., 64. 101 The Task of the Translator SW1 261. 102 Ibid., 257. 103 On Language as Such SW1 72.
100

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individual, and thus translation can only represent it in embryonic or intensive form.104 Instead of looking at the poet, Benjamin invokes the figure of the translator precisely because the latters task will inevitably fail.105 Translation is a mode of text which points away from the grammar of language to an intended meaning which it can never fully capture. It cannot bring the entire original text to a full synthesis with a universal concept of language; it can only take steps towards a synthesis between the universal and that which in the particular text goes beyond content. Pure language does not determine the symbolic structure of the text, nor does the particular text determine the universal pure language. The mediating power of translation is necessary because of what appears to be an initial lack of a universal ground between particulars, perhaps most apparent through the inability to assign the pure name. Translation does not realize pure language, however. It only transforms that particular that was predisposed to translation into another particular. The particular which is predisposed to the universal can only ever hope to emerge as another particular, and yet it is predicated on the universal. The universal cannot have presence; the infinite can only be realized in the limited. Pure language only emerges through what does not exist in a single text of one language.106 Philosophy must thus pay attention not just to the words of human language, but to something in the silence, in the mute language of things. It must anticipate the universal in the particular, although the universal cannot be conceived. The linguistic nature of knowledge,107

104 105

The Task of the Translator SW1 255.. Paul de Man made this point in a lecture given at Cornell in 1983. An edited transcript has appeared twice in Yale French Studies. Paul de Man, Conclusions on Walter Benjamins The Task of the Translator Messenger Lecture, Cornell University, March 4, 1983, Yale French Studies, no. 97, 50 Years of Yale French Studies: A Commemorative Anthology. Part 2: 1980-1998, (2000), 20. 106 On the particular-universal ontological relationship in The Task of the Translator and On Language as Such and On the Language of Man, see Andrew Benjamin, The Absolute as Translatability: Working through Walter Benjamin on Language, in Walter Benjamin and Romanticism, ed. Beatrice Hanssen and Andrew Benjamin, 109-122 (New York: Continuum, 2002). 107 The Coming Philosophy SW108.

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is thus a double-layered knowledge in which the physical grammar of experience appeals to an unreachable higher concept which nonetheless can be implied through the simplest semantic and material forms. Benjamin believes that this knowledge can form the foundation for a concept of total experience. Although in all language and linguistic creations, there remains in addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be communicated,108 the incommunicable still persists as something which has the capacity to be symbolized. If in 1923 Benjamin had lost some of his optimism of 1918, that is, that philosophy could penetrate everything, in the former year he nonetheless posits that philosophy could penetrate everything at least through symbol.109 Gasch interprets Benjaminian communicability and translatability as finite manifestations of transcendence and difference. Turning away from the Kabalistic doctrine of a linguistic essence to all of reality, he suggests that these concepts have nothing to do with mixing notions of universality and particularity. Rather than mixing levels of thought, these concepts actually represent the highest theological realms in the destruction of languages. Gasch suggests that if Benjamin, following the Kantian separation of logic and metaphysics, does not wish to conflate these realms, he must be concerned with the difference between them. The fundamental philosophical question, then, becomes how philosophy is to create this difference; the answer seems that philosophy must merely reference inaccessible realms.110 However, to focus philosophy on the scope of difference between theology and the capacities of philosophy would fail to progress towards Benjamins vision for a systematic philosophy in which theology and philosophy acknowledged and fulfilled one another. Benjamins conception of language must
108 109

The Task of the Translator SW1 261. In an essay on Benjamins Trauerspiels study, Hanssen notes this change more forcefully. The Task of the Translator no longer deploys the notion of objective reflection or the structure of an objective transcendental consciousness still present in the 1918 text on Kant. Beatrice Hanssen, Philosophy at Its Origin: Walter Benjamins Prologue to the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, MLN 110, no. 4, Comparative Literature Issue (September 1995), 815. 110 See Rodolphe Gasch, Saturnine Vision and the Question of Difference: Reflections on Walter Benjamins Theory of Language, STCL 11, no. 1 (Fall 1986): 69-90.

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focus more on the possibilities of convergence, precisely in order to move beyond the preoccupation with difference. The disjunctions that Benjamin suggeststhe difference between the original and copy, the symbol and the symbolized, the grammar and the meaningmay capture only a mere fragment of a purer whole, but the very positing of that whole makes the part possible. Those that suggest that the fragments are fragmentsthey remain essentially fragmentary,111 miss that there is life between the lines, life in the silence of things. In every object, as in every word, there is an essence that tends both to the pureness of Paradise and the redemption of a utopian future.

Romantic Criticism Benjamin settled the topic of his dissertationcriticism in early Romantic philosophy as early as 1917, although he did not write the document until 1919. Benjamin resented the strictures of academic form and tried to mold the document towards his own interests. As he wrote to Ernst Schoen, the final section was an esoteric epilogue for those interested in his own work.112 Benjamin perceived an acute synthesis of his own interests in early Romantic thought; that is, a core of religion and history that appealed to neither field, but instead attempted to create a new higher sphere in which both spheres had to coincide. 113 The dissertation traced the concept of early Romantic criticism from not only the early Romantic concept of the work of art, but also the early Romantic concept of knowledge. Benjamin claimed that Schlegel and Novalis had a very highly developed sense of self and identity such that all knowledge was self111 112

De Man, 32. I have written an esoteric epilogue for [the dissertation] for those with whom I would have to share it as my work. Emphasis original. Letter to Ernst Schoen May 1919 (undated). CWB 141. 113 The core of early romanticism is religion and history. Its infinite profundity and beauty in comparison to all late romanticism derives from the fact that the early romantics did not appeal to religious and historical facts for the intimate bond between these two spheres, but rather tried to produce in their own thought and life the higher sphere in which both spheres had to coincide. Emphasis and capitalization original. Letter to Gerhard Scholem June 1917 (undated). CWB 88.

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knowledge. If a thing could be thought, then that thing itself had the ability to think. This idea had two main implications. First, since every moment of knowledge is an immanent connection in the absolute, or, if one prefers, in the subject,114 the idea of an object fell away. Object had no place as a relation within knowledge, but was actually an absence of relation. In a rather circuitous way, Benjamin explained this reciprocity that motivated the early Romantic theory of knowledge of objects. [T]he being-known of one being by another coincides with the self-knowledge of that being which is being known, coincides with the self-knowledge of the knowing being and with the being-known of the knowing being by the being it knows.115 If criticism is understood as a synthesis of knowledge and judgment, then early Romantic criticism of a work of art is self-knowledge and self-judgment. To criticize the work of art is simply to articulate a higher degree of the consciousness of that work. This is immersion in the particular work, a search to discover the secret tendencies of the work itself [and] fulfill its hidden intentions.116 Because art is the medium of reflection, self-reflection in the artwork is self-reflection in the medium of self-reflection. This renders criticism an infinite concept that does not judge the work, but consummates it. For the Romantics, form was limitation, but criticism could modify those limits and strive to reach purity and universality in the use of formsby critically setting free the condensed potential and many-sidedness of [those] forms (by absolutizing the reflection bound up in them).117 To absolutize the work was, however, to dissolve the form of the work and thus dissolve the work of the art itself. Form thus became not the expression of beauty, but the expression of art as the idea of art. It is this step that forces the
114 115

The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism. SW1 146. Benjamin paraphrases this from a fragment by Novalis. Ibid., 146. 116 Ibid., 153. 117 Ibid., 158.

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Romantics to get rid of the idea of beauty, grounding a doctrine in which art and its works are essentially neither appearances of beauty nor manifestations of immediately inspired emotion, but media of forms, resting in themselves.118 Benjamin admired the Romantic critics for their great and noble humanity, the discernment with which they issued condemnation and praise, and believed that their criticism always turned out to be right in the end.119 On the other hand, he was unsettled by their prizing criticism over art, that is, the reviewer over the poet. While this unified deed and thought, it also absolutized the work in a way which extinguished the work itself in pursuit of the idea. This elevation of form destroyed all beautiful semblance. Benjamins discomfort with this asceticism emerged in the final section. In the epilogue, he contrasted the Romantic concept of knowledge, art and criticism with that of Goethe, suggesting that Goethe wanted to develop an archetypal content of art that was equivalent with nature. However, this presents a problem: If true visible nature must be distinct from its representation in the form of a work of art, and also must be equal to the immediate appearance of the world, then judging art requires an understanding of what defines that true visible nature as presented in the artwork, as well as understanding of what defines that true visible nature as presented in the phenomenal world. This problem might be resolved by saying that the true, intuitable part of nature is only available through a representation, such as art. However, this resolution then implies, first, that the true intuitable part of nature is hidden in reality and, second, that every particular work of art exists contingently over the ideal of art.120
118 119

Ibid., 177. Do you know what amazes me about the critical writings of the romantics? It is their great and noble humanity. They have a command of the caustic language needed to take on what is base, but they also have at their command a wonderful generosity of spirit when faced with unfortunates. Goethe and Schiller seem to have been unable to achieve this to the same degree in their criticismIn their criticism, moreover, again in complete contrast to Goethe, these romantics have always turned out to be right in the end and therefore have always been right. Letter to Ernst Schoen May 1918 (undated). CWB 127. 120 The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism. SW1 180.

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This is where Benjamin located a distinction between the early Romantics and Goethe. If the latter wanted to claim the unity of art in this pureness of content, the former had ignored an inner essence and claimed that the infinity of art was based on a pureness of form, that is, outer appearance. In what may be the most important passage in the dissertation, Benjamin avoids exploring this contrast because it is beyond the scope of the work, yet comments on its relevance for the present age. Though he explicitly dismisses it as a lesser point, there is a sense that this is the conclusion to which he has been building his argument all along. [T]hese are not substrata in the empirical product, but relative distinctions in it, drawn on the basis of necessarily pure distinctions within the philosophy of art. The idea of art is the idea of its form, as its ideal is the ideal of its content. Hence, the fundamental systematic question of the philosophy of art can be formulated as the question of the relation between the idea and the ideal of artEven today the problematic of German philosophy of art around 1800, as exhibited in the theories of Goethe and the early Romantics, is legitimateOnly systematic thought can resolve it.121 As before, Benjamin sought a philosophical system which could better comprehend an innerouter, ideal-idea relationship. If the dissertation was fundamentally about art criticism, his scholarly efforts had nonetheless led him to, first, a reevaluation of the relationship of a truth to history122 and, second, a conclusion that art criticism was just a subset of the larger domain123 of all criticism, which was crucial to his explorations. Within two years of writing the

121 122

Emphasis original. Ibid., 183. Letter to Ernst Schoen November 8, 1918. CWB 136. 123 I am becoming aware of criticisms primary reason for existence and its primary value for my own projects as well. Art criticism, whose foundations have interested me in this sense, is only a subset of the larger domain. Letter to Ernst Schoen February 2, 1920. Ibid., 158.

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dissertation, he readily admitted that it was necessary to develop an approach to criticism and history outside of the Romantic tradition, yet his insight into the foundations of such philology had strong implications for his own approach to art. 124 He had encountered an enduring philosophical aesthetic question and was curious to explore it not simply for artistic consequences, but also its effects on understanding experience and the principles of existence.

Truth and the Work of Art In the early 1920s, Benjamins writings increasingly explored the interrelationships between truth, history, works of art and their critical reception. In a 1923 letter to Florens Christian Rang, with whom Benjamin explored burgeoning, under-developed philosophical and theological theories with ease,125 he sketched the implications of arts ahistoricity and the way that philosophy might decipher its essentially historical content. A chronology of stylistic forms would never be able to acknowledge the dual timelessness and historical context which might be concentrated in a work of arts essence. If philosophy could comprehend this problem generally, the critic could solve it in relation to the particular work of art.

124

I define philology, not as the science or history of language, but as the history of terminology at its deepest level. In doing this, a most puzzling concept of time and very puzzling phenomena must surely be taken into considerationPhilological interpolation in chronicles simply reveals in its form the intention of the content, since its content interpolates historyI can assure you that the necessity of finding an approach to this matter other than the romantic one is clear to meChronicle, interpolation, commentary, philologythey all have one nexus Emphasis original. Ibid., 177. 125 Reflecting on their relationship after Rangs unexpected death in 1924, Benjamin wrote, [I] was indebted to this man not only for his support and validation, but also for whatever essential elements of German culture I have internalizedThere was not only harmony in our thoughts when we spoke, but also the opportunity for me, weatherproofed and athletic, to test myself on the impossible, battered massif of his thoughts. Often enough I made my way to a pinnacle that afforded me a broad view onto the region of my own unexplored thoughts. Letter to Gerhard Scholem October 12-November 5, 1924. Ibid., 252. On Rangs intellectual ambitions, Benjamin recalled, On Capri, where we were last together and where he was collecting his thoughts while resting, he spoke of his intention to leave Germany, to avoid the political questions it urged on him, and to live in Switzerland (he had Zurich in mind), where he would devote himself to purely philosophical and theological projects. Letter to Hugo von Hofmannsthal December 30, 1924. Ibid., 259.

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[T]he same forces that become explosively and extensively temporal in the world of revelation (and this is what history is) appear concentrated in the silent world (and this is the world of nature and the works of art)Works of art are thus defined as models of a nature that does not await the day, and thus does not await judgment day either; they are defined as models of a nature that is neither the staging ground of history nor a human domicile. The night preserved. And in the context of this consideration, criticism (where it is identical with interpretation and the opposite of all current methods of art appreciation), is the representation of an ideaPhilosophy is meant to name the idea, as Adam named nature, in order to prevail over those that have returned to their natural state[T]he task of interpreting works of art is to gather creatural life into the ideaIn the final analysisall human knowledge, if it can be justified, must take on no other form than that of interpretation; [also]ideas serve as the means to a definitive interpretation.126 Expression that submits to spatiotemporal limitations is overcome by the infinite character of nature and art. Nature and art do not require destruction in order that they might be preserved; their existence is always complete unto itself. This is not to say, however, that this wholeness is readily apparent. As he intimated in his critique of the early Romantics, Benjamin assigns criticism the role of representing a sort of essential truth that philosophy will be able to systematically explain. Benjamin was aware that these points were broad, thematic strokes, but he fully intended to work out the details.127 The beginnings of these thoughts were implied at the close of his work on the early Romantics; they were subsequently developed in two major works:

126 127

Letter to Florens Chrisitan Rang December 9, 1923. Ibid., 224-225. Please excuse these sketchy and preliminary thoughtsForgive me if all of this does not make sense. Letter to Florens Chrisitan Rang December 9, 1923. Ibid., 224-225.

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Goethes Elective Affinities, begun in 1919 and continued over at least three years, and his work on Baroque drama, composed between 1924 and 1925. At the time he started writing on Elective Affinities, Benjamin jotted the following note, Just as philosophy makes use of symbolic concepts to draw ethics and language into the realm of theory, in the same way it is possible for theory (logic) to be incorporated into ethics and language in symbolic form.128 He claimed that this was the starting point for a proper philosophical-critical interpretation of ethics and aesthetics. In this formulation, philosophy could symbolize practical concepts in order to theorize them, and those theories could be incorporated back into the practical realm. In his discussions of philosophy and art in Goethes Elective Affinities, Benjamin attempted to articulate the way that philosophy could mediate the theoretical and practical through symbols or, more precisely, the symbols as manifested in works of art. Amending the methodology he proposed in 1918, Benjamin acknowledged that there is no question capable of answering everything in philosophy.129 This nonexistent question functions as the ideal of the [philosophical] problem. 130 It surpasses any collection of poseable questions because it must appeal to a total concept of experience that can only be obtained by transcending that experience. The greatest philosophical truth could never be reached through reasonable questions because truth itself depends on more than reason. Truth depends on myth for its existence; at the same time, mythic thinking cannot ignore truth without poisoning it with sentiment.
128 129

Unpublished fragment written 1919-1920. The Theory of Criticism SW1 219. The term amending is here used loosely to indicate a slight, not abrupt, shift in Benjamins assessment of the capacity of philosophy. In his 1918 essay on the future of philosophy, he implied that philosophy could systematize everything as subsumed under the absolute experience, but did not necessarily say that this would be achieved through questioning. 130 The totality of philosophy, its system, is of a higher magnitude of power than can be demanded by the quintessence of all its problems taken together, because the unity in the solution of them all cannot be obtained by questioningthere is no question which, in the reach of its inquiry, encompasses the unity of philosophy. Goethes Elective Affinities SW1 333-334.

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There is no truth, for there is no unequivocalnessand hence not even errorin myth. Since, however, there can just as little be truth about it (for there is truth only in objective things [Sachen], just as objectivity [Sachlichkeit] lies in truth), there is, as far as the spirit of myth is concerned, only a knowledge of it. And where the presence of truth should be possible, it can be possible solely under the condition of the recognition of myththat is, the recognition of its crushing indifference to truthA particular mythic moment may very well be an object of reflection; on the other hand, where it is a matter of the essence and the truth in the work and in life, the insight into myth, even in its concrete relations, is not final.131 The ideal problem of philosophythe most genuine truthmanifests itself within genuine works of art because in art it can be contextualized both within the realms of myth and the realms of knowledge. Works of art thus occupy a space somewhere between the empirical and the transcendental. This is not to say that the work of art has any greater claim to truth than philosophy. Art and philosophy do not compete for an understanding of the nature of total experience; they have an equivalent claim to truth. 132 In fact, they have a relationship such that the ideal problem of philosophy can only manifest itself in a multiplicity of works. Philosophical truth is a beloved, hidden parasite to art, and only through true philosophical critique can that truth appear. The fulfillment of such criticism rests on the transformation from the artistic appearance of the ideal to the existence of the ideal. The art must become the philosophy if the philosophy is to realize itself in art. The nature of true criticism, however, arrests this conversion. It is forced to pause in its investigation, forced to stop shortas if in awe of the work, but equally in respect
131 132

Ibid., 326-327. Ibid., 326.

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for the truth.133 This break does not deny the truth-content of a work of art, but complicates its discovery. The critic cannot approach with questions, for then he approaches with intent and purpose. The critic must approach the work of art with the expressionless [das Ausdruckslose], alert in the most disinterested of manner, intent to discover a truth while proceeding with no intent. This is all no more than expression at a standstill, in order to give free reign to an expressionless power residing within the work.134 Rochlitz notes that the critic, at a time when life is no longer grounded in ritual, is the Adam who makes every effort to name in conceptual terms what the artist named imperfectly through the figuration of his work.135 If God leads Adam, it is philosophy that must lead the art critic, but the critic does not complete the work of art. The critic names so that he might understand, conceptually deciphering what otherwise remains hidden. Truth will not manifest itself in the physical structure of the work or its subject matter, but as an appearance, only evident to the critic. Abstaining from a relevant discussion of this notion of Schein until a later point of this study, here this only serves to emphasize that the truth content of the work of art is bound within it as something distinct from both subject matter and form; truth is a rare acknowledgement of both reason and myth. Benjamins clearest articulation of his understanding of the relationship between truth and ideas appears in the Epistemo-Critical Prologue to The Origin of German Tragic Drama. In his correspondence, he explicitly acknowledged its indebtedness to Romantic philology and his earlier treatment of language, now dressed up as theory of ideas.136 In fact, the prologue and
133 134

Ibid., 334. Ibid., 341. 135 Rainer Rochlitz, The Disenchantment of Art: The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin, trans. Jane Marie Todd, (New York: The Guilford Press, 1996), 71. 136 On his intention for the beginning and ending of the book, Benjamin wrote that he wanted to introduce myself with a romantic concept of philology, to the best of my ability. Letter to Gerhard Scholem March 5, 1924 CWB 238. Nearly a year later, he again spoke of the Prologue: This introduction is unmitigated chutzpahthat is to say, neither more not less than the prolegomena to epistemology, a kind of second

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final section, Allegory and Trauerspiel, not only thematically synthesize previous material, but also respond to his own challenges from 1918. Benjamin no longer upheld an absolute identity of knowledge and experience. Invoking Plato, he separated the realm of ideas from the realm of experience. The scientist appeals only to the world of experience by identifying concepts that centralize the phenomenal attributes of a thing. In contrast, the artist appeals only to the world of ideas by composing metaphorical representations of the otherwise inaccessible. The task of the philosopher is to access the inaccessible and express it with the clarity of the scientist. Still, philosophy can only transcend to the world of ideas through symbols. Benjamin reiterated that philosophy must not delude itself with possession of knowledge; collecting fragmented insights does not lead to a comprehensive understanding of a whole. On the contrary, philosophy must represent truth. The philosopher and artist thus share a symbolizing role. The idea is not a phenomenon, but resides within the essence of a phenomenon. The purpose of the idea is not to determine the particular manifestation of the object, but to swiftly represent that objects spectrum of potentialities. The general is not the average; the general is the idea.137 Benjamin offers the analogy, ideas are to objects as constellations are to stars, 138 which hearkens to his particular treatment of constellation as that which unifies disparate elements into a sort of charged, dynamic totality of tension.139 The idea and the object are joined

stage of my early work on language (I do not know whether it is any better), with which you are familiar, dressed up as a theory of ideas. Be that as it may, I am glad I wrote this introduction. Letter to Gerhard Scholem February 19, 1925 CWB 261. 137 OG 35. 138 Ibid., 34. 139 Robert Kaufmann suggests that Benjaminian constellations are an intellectual attempt nondeterministically to locate and dynamically connect elementsthey are not initially given as relational, but that, when animatedconstellatedinto conjunction create or reveal a signifying force-field[that] illuminates the larger social reality whose elements have been brought together in affinity and tension (rather than a falsely integrative totalization) See Robert Kaufmann, Aura, Still in Walter Benjamin and Art, ed. Andrew Benjamin, 142 (New York: Continuum, 2006). Martin Jay also emphasizes that for Adorno and Benjamin, the term constellation refers more to a juxtaposition of pieces than integration into

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in a sort of disinterested dependence, but they do not begin this way. The idea does not emerge from its encounter with phenomena; the idea is eternal and infinite, while the phenomenon is finite.140 Disinterest is significant insofar as truth is an intentionless state of being. 141 Ideas constitute truth, but do not precede it. They are determined by truths power to name which, in the context of Paradise, was born not of linguistic chance, but pure language. Concepts make the similar into the identical; ideas are a necessary synthesis between extremes.142 Philosophy must appeal to ideas, and not concepts, because only ideas can accurately preserve difference within a whole. Relating this approach to literary studywhich for the present purposes might be considered equivalent with an approach to a work of artBenjamin equated the limitations of the concept-deduction schema with the limitations of a genre theory in which individual works are related to each other but never examined themselves. Instead, a work must be judged according to itself. Like the early Romantics that favored self-knowledge of an object, Benjamin praised an immanent critical approach. Neither criticism nor the criteria of a terminologythe test of the philosophical theory of ideas in artevolves in response to external comparison, but they take shape immanently, which brings out its content at the expense of its effect.143

a whole; the connotation rejects any sense of commonness, first principle or essential core. See the introduction to Martin Jay, Adorno, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). Also see the introduction to Martin Jay, Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Culture Critique, (Routledge: New York, 1993). 140 Discussing Benjamins discussion of ideas, Kracauer writes, Where meanings come together under the sign of an idea, they jump to one another like electric sparks rather than being sublated into a formal concept. Siegfried Kracauer, On the Writings of Walter Benjamin, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 260. 141 OG 36. 142 Ibid., 41. 143 Ibid., 44

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Focusing on essential truth content destroys all contingent inessentialities. As early as 1917, Benjamin invoked Novalis to claim that the inner truth content of the work of art was no less than its implicit necessity to exist.144 Now nearly a decade later, Benjamin returned to this necessity as that historical category which could reconcile singularity and repetition, the particular and the universal, the full range of a genuine idea as a monadological, abbreviated outline of [an] image of the world:145 the origin [Ursprung]. Through the notion of a work of arts origin, Benjamin was able to approach the history of a work of art without the linearity of a moment of genesis [Entstehung]. This was the resulting phenomena of what, to Rang, he called arts ahistoricity. The objects history in the sense of sequential occurrence was irrelevant; history in the sense of content was vital. The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearanceOn the one hand it needs to be recognized as a process of restoration and reestablishment, but, on the other hand, and precisely because of this, as something imperfect and incomplete. There takes place in every original phenomenon a determination of the form in which an idea will constantly confront the historical world, until it is revealed fulfilled, in the totality of its history. Origin is not, therefore, discovered by the examination of actual findings, but it is related to their history and their subsequent development. The principles of philosophical contemplation are recorded in the dialectic which is inherent in origin.146

144

Discussing the structure of Dostoevskys The Idiot, Benjamin writes, For like every work of art this novel is based on an idea, or, as Novalis put it, It has an a priori ideal, an implicit necessity to exist. And the task of the critic is to articulate this idea and nothing else. Dostoevksys The Idiot SW1 79 145 OG 48. 146 Ibid., 45-46.

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The new conceptualizationstrongly informed by a teleological Messianismprompted Benjamin to redefine the task of philosophy as the establishment of the becoming of phenomena in their being.147 Benjamin diagnosed the ills of modern criticism precisely in this failure. In the attempt to empathize with the work of art and gain insight by bringing it into the critics temporally-charged moment of understanding, the modern critic acts as an interested imitation of Adam which, of course, can be no true imitation of Adam at all. [T]he spirit of the present age seizes on the manifestations of past or distant spiritual worlds, in order to take possession of them and unfeelingly incorporate them into its own self-absorbed fantasizing. This is characteristic of our ageThis fatal, pathological suggestibility, by means of which the historian seeks through substitution, to insinuate himself into the place of the creator[is] an attempt to provide a disguise under which idle curiosity masquerades as method.148 In language that anticipated precisely what Benjamin would require of an auratic experience, he concluded that the critic had to approach the object of criticism from a distance.149 Only by maintaining a clear independence between his self and the object could the critic refrain from misappropriating the object in such a way that inevitably led to misunderstanding and barred him from the realm of true ideas. In an unpublished fragment from this period, Benjamin noted,

147 148

Ibid., 47. Ibid., 53-54. 149 In the final lines of the Prologue, Benjamin writes, Only by approaching the subject from some distance and, initially, foregoing any view of the whole, can the mind be ledto a position of strength from which it is possible to take in the whole panorama and yet remain in control of oneself. Ibid., 56

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There is no truth about an object. Truth is only in it. And the truth in an object may become manifestwith regard to a point of view about it, not however with regard to a point of view in it.150 Philosophical criticism must not bring itself to the object, but must demand that the object rise to meet to the critic. In the moment when something leaps out at him from the object, enters into him, [and] takes possession of him,151 the critic speaks not that bourgeois notion of timeless truth that is infected with historical sequence, but the intentionless truth which is historical precisely because it is anything but timeless. 152 In the final section of The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin relates this necessity of intentionless distance to the structure of works themselves. In his most explicit disavowal of the Romantics, he condemns them for the destructive extravagance153 with which they carelessly used the symbol to undialectically equate an inaccessible truth-content with a given appearance, flattening theological and philosophical intricacies into a mystical instantaneous moment of form-content identity. Instead, Benjamin proposed a revival of the allegory, that mode of expression in which a character or an emblem embodied an idea. In allegory, the profane is as easily elevated to the sacred as it is devalued to another possible profane contingency. Its meaning is no more than the non-existence of what it presents,154 an empty replacement of words for content, of names for the context of living gods. Its significance is injected by the allegorist; its meaning is an ontological accident. The allegorist is not divine; he has an incomplete understanding of the world. Allegorical meaning is forever incomplete.
150

Unpublished fragment written in 1923. On the Topic of Individual Disciplines and Philosophy SW1 404. 151 Emphasis added. On the Topic of Individual Disciplines and Philosophy SW1 404. 152 This language of the intentionless truthpossesses authorityin opposition to the conventional concept of objectivity because its validityis historicalthat is to say, anything but timeless; it is bound to a particular base and changes with history. Timelessness must therefore be unmasked as an exponent of the bourgeois concept of truth. On the Topic of Individual Disciplines and Philosophy SW1 404-405 153 OG 160. 154 Ibid., 233.

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In the field of allegorical intuition the image is a fragment, a rune. Its beauty as a symbol evaporates when the light of divine learning falls upon it. The false appearance of totality is extinguished. For the eidos disappears, the similar ceases to exist, and the cosmos it contained shrivels up.155 It is precisely because the Trauerspiel, the German mourning play, is allegorically conceived from the outset as a ruin, a fragment that it preserves the image of beauty to the very last.156 If the work were to be Messianically, divinely redeemed, it would fall away with all other human constructs, however, in the meantime, it grasps a subjectivity of far more penetrating insight into reality than the symbol. If the symbol reflects utopia, the allegory reflects the profane reality. Philosophy must turn to allegory for the way that it eschews any absolute possession of knowledge. Allegory is rooted in the depths of subjective contemplation. It is that which abstracts its ethics from the world; in its long meditations on good and evil, it explores and is trapped in the realm of evil, allegorizing objects only under the gaze of melancholy.157 The allegorized object is a ruin, but in this ruin it has the hope of redemption. The implication is striking: only through complete subjectivity and immersion in the particular can philosophical criticism represent, and not just possess, knowledge. The philosopher must critically use the artistic form of a single work to transform that works historical content into a philosophical truth.158 Insofar as truth is intentionless, it seizes the whole inductive apparatus, which has now become external, and thrusts it back into the work. There, secure in the
155 156

Ibid., 176. Ibid., 235. 157 Ibid., 183. I am grateful for Pizer drawing my attention to this phrase of Benjamin. Pizer notes, Only the melancholy gaze of allegory shows the true condition of the creaturely life of man, subject to nature through his mortality. John Pizer, History, Genre and Ursprung in Benjamins Early Aesthetics, The German Quarterly 60, no. 1 (Winter 1987): 83. 158 The object of philosophical criticism is to show that the function of artistic form is as follows: to make historical content, such as provides the basis of every important work of art, into a philosophical truth. OG 182.

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heart of the matter, it manipulates itplayfully, at willin the interest of authority [of the object itself].159 The allegorical form makes an externalized mode of induction possible. The philosophical critic submerges himself in a work by acknowledging its independence. Still, like the mode of translatability that can never accurately re-articulate the original full meaning, the meaningappearance structure of the allegorical mode contains a gulf manifested in reality between pure theological intention and the resulting artistic form.160 In a sense, the allegorical mode can encompass the spectrum of historical content inherent in the origin. The symbols banal linearity renders it incapable of such breadth, such dialectic. Through the allegorical form, the critic rests not in the contemplation of bones, but faithlessly leaps forward to the idea of resurrection.161 Truth is intentionless insofar as it gives its intentionality to the higher intention of the divine.

A general absence of the term aura from Benjamins pre-1930s writings in no way suggests a corresponding absence of auratic themes. As he pushed his search for a theologicalphilosophical synthesis increasingly away from abstract metaphysical speculation and increasingly towards close attention to particular works of art, the role of the philosopher evolved into the role of the critic. If Benjamin exhibited nave optimism when he called for an understanding of the absolute experience in 1918, years later he still sought an appeal to that pure experience. His linguistic ontology gave him a foundation for exploring how the inexpressible

159 160

On the Topic of Individual Disciplines and Philosophy SW1 405. Hansen emphasizes a sociohistorical dimension of Benjamins discussion of allegory and suggests that here relating allegory to cultural fragmentationthe result of social, political and theological decay allows Benjamin to link later concepts of social loss, such as decline of the aura, back to this early discussion of allegory. Jim Hansen, Formalism and Its Malcontents: Benjamin and de Man on the Function of Allegory, New Literary History 35 (2005): 663-683. 161 OG 233.

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might be expressed through symbol and representation, and also how that relationship might always be plagued with a certain insufficiency. The life that the Romantics gave to all objects, however silent the language of things, was at first an appealing way of synthesizing the particularity of individual works and the universality of truth to which they appealed; however, the Romantic prioritizing of the ideal over and above the actual left Benjamin with the same empty insight he found in the Theosophists.162 It was necessary that he conceptualize his own form of criticism, a new system with which to approach objects that could reveal their inner truth content without abandoning their form, while also refraining from flattening a real appearancemeaning distinction. Benjamin proposed the necessity of critical distance and a return to subjective particulars. He wanted to plunge into historical content while eschewing historical sequence. He wanted contextualized truth that had not been poisoned by its environment. It is possible that each thematic element identified in the aura might be traced to these early preoccupations. His discussion of an unapproachable, auratic spatiotemporal weave is a result of his Messianic ontology and final rejection of the Romantic elevation of the assimilating symbol. His concern with a proper mode of human perception is way to restore to humanity the divinely-aware attitude of Adamic naming. Associating the aura with a veil-like semblance develops from his concern with how to preserve inner, essential truth content in the legacy of the Romantics, a concern not the least motivated by his appearance-meaning explorations of a text. The harmonious reciprocity he posits in the formulation of the returned gaze stems from his early desire to structure thematic reciprocity between art and philosophy, theology and experience. For all that this seems crudely reductionist, it nonetheless may provide a foundation for the emergence of each thematic element of the aura.

162

In OG, Benjamin accuses the Romantics precisely of theosophical maneuvering. The idea of the unlimited immanence of the moral world in the world of beauty is derived from the theosophical aesthetics of the romantics. Capitalization original. OG 160.

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It is equally possible that the general development of Benjamins thought throughout this period acknowledges the idea of the aura all along. The auratic experience is that which is excluded by the rationalists in their eschewal of myth. If the world is profane, beauty is to be found in a ruin, and truth is hidden within art, then the aura is a mechanism for the individual to arrive at real knowledge by subjectively immersing himself in the particular. In the auratic experience, there is no possession of knowledge, but perhaps there is a representation of truth.

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III. Thematic Elements of the Aura Although it is rather straightforward to identify four main elements in Benjamins formulation of the aura from a survey of his texts, those elements are as equally unclear to readily understand. Phrases such as space and time were invoked at a time of intellectual shifts in interpreting history; attentive perception could appeal as equally to the classicism of the early Romantics as French philosophy at the turn of the twentieth century.163 This section will approach each element of the aura as articulated in Part One in the context of Benjamins complete works, not only in the hope of alleviating some of the disparities between definitions, but also in the interest of revealing underlying subtleties in each.

Time and Space In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant posits time and space as the most fundamental intuitions. They form the ultimate foundation of the conditions for the knowledge of the possibility of experience. Insofar as Benjamin wants to extend the Kantian concept of experience into infinite realms, he thus has to expand the breadth of time and space, as posited by Kant. Benjamin needs these fundamental intuitions to be capable of grounding not only an empirical reality, but also an absolute spiritual reality. Accordingly, discussion of the aura in spatiotemporal terms definition of the aura as a strange weave of space and time, the appearance of distance, the breath of prehistory, and the associations of the mmoire involontairemust acknowledge an experience that is both empirical and non-empirical. Auratic

163

On the logic of historical knowledge in Benjamin, consider Bolz and Reijen. Benjamins concept of history was formed during the intellectual civil war of the twenties. He regards Heidegger as the existentialist-reactionary fork and surrealism by contrast as the nihilist-revolutionary fork of the crossroads that the new historical thinking had reached. Norbert Bolz and Willem van Reijen, Walter Benjamin, trans. Laimdota Mazzarins (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 45. On the ambiguities of attentive perception, consider later discussion of Novalis and Henri Bergson.

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existence lies within the magic circle of eternal return; such a mode of being requires a certain nonlinearity of both time and space.

Time For Benjamin, mechanical time is a measuring mechanism, an empirical process providing nothing more than unfulfilled form to each individual occurrence. The relationship between events and mechanical time is mere coincidence or accident. In contrast, historical time is based in the world of ideas. According to the Trauerspiel study, historical time as an idea must both contain and maintain the independence of extremes. In this case, the extremes are the profane and the sacred, the punishment of guilt and the bliss of redemption. Historical time is boundless and insatiable, infinite in every direction and unfulfilled at every moment,164 and yet at the same time always fulfilled because in its totality it encompasses the ultimate moment of Messianic redemption. In 1940, Benjamin terms this necessary juxtaposition Jetztzeit, or nowtime. This construction contains the entire history of mankind in tremendous abbreviation,165 a sort of microcosm of humanity that contains the unfulfilled present and the fated fulfillment of that same moment. It is a moment in which the universal becomes and remains distinct from the particular, in which eternity becomes and remains distinct from the instant. Insofar as history is the study of the way now-time strives to fill the form of mechanical time, it is no mere discipline, but that which makes existence possible. Natural history, that is, the sequence subject to the laws of finitude, never progresses beyond death, and thus is forced to bracket existence. Only through a teleological theological scheme that acknowledges now-time can the concept of existence encompass life both with and beyond death.

164 165

Trauerspiel and Tragedy SW1 55. On the Concept of History SW4 386.

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If mechanical time is measured by clocks that incessantly push forward, historical time is measured by calendars which record the past at the same time they plan the future. More than a standard of measure, however, calendars are a way of organizing content. They are monuments of a historical consciousness,166 a consciousness that is memory itself. Memory writes history, synthesizing occurrences with their end in such a way that produces a chain of tradition capable of transmitting events between generations.167 The relationship between memory and time is that of paint to a painter; memory is the compositional material of the art of time. In the early 1930s, Benjamin writes, memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium.168 It is not a tool for extracting memories, but the very atmosphere of those memories. He compares the man who wants to approach his buried past to an archaeologist. Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, it turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is no more than the strata which yield their long-sought secrets only to the most meticulous investigation.169 It is not enough that the man merely records his findings, however. The position of authentic memories is more important than the memories themselves. He must mark, quite precisely, the site where he gained possession of them, identifying both the strata from which the findings originate and the strata which first had to be broken through.170 A position, however, is not a mere form of mechanical time; it must be a historical position insofar as it must take account of

166

[C]alendars do not measure time the way clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe, it would seem, for the past hundred years. Ibid., 395. 167 The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov SW3 153. 168 Ibid., 576. 169 Ibid., 576. 170 Ibid., 576.

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what comes both before and after. Only through memorys navigation of historical time are these occurrences subject to comparison. It is crucial that the artist has this authority to contextualize events. As Benjamin discussed in a mid-1930s essay on Proust, actual occurrences are of little importance for an author. On the contrary, an author writes from the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection.171 Insofar as this creative work must negate actuality, memory becomes forgetfulness. Is not the involuntary recollection, Prousts mmoire involontaire, much closer to forgetting than what is usually called memory?...When we awake each morning, we hold in our hands, usually weakly and loosely, but a few fringes of the carpet of lived existence, as woven into us by forgetting. However, with our purposeful activity and, even more, our purposive remembering, each day unravels the web, the ornaments of forgetting.172 This web of existence is the web of time. It is time itself, then, that is made threadbare through intentdenounced by Benjamin as a blockade to truththen restored through the faculty of memory. Forgetting is not a permanent state in which man is cut off from his past, but offers him a reason to go back and sift the soil of time, that earthly material that is no more than memory itself. Forgetting always involves the best, for it involves the possibility of redemption.173 If memory throws men into the deepest laws of natural history to remind them of their inevitable death, it does so not to punish, but to atone.174

171 172

On the Image of ProustSW2.1 238. Ibid., 238. 173 Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death SW2.2 813. 174 Death is not punishment but atonement, an expression of the subjection of the guilty life to the law of natural life. OG 131.

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When Benjamin invokes Prousts mmoire involontaire, he invokes recalling such a memory as bears traces of the situation that engendered it.175 The isolated individual does not understand these traces; they are the residue of an internal record of rituals, ceremonies and festivals that existed long before his consciousness. He cannot identify a corresponding mechanical moment because the traces predate events of his personal experience. For the subject, the moments of mmoire involontaire are historyless.176 These traces thus evoke not instants, but a sense of his common humanity. In rather uncharacteristic simplicity, Benjamin explains the source of these traces. Where there is experience [Erfahrung] in the strict sense of the word, certain contents of the individual past combine in the memory [Gedchtnis] with material from the collective past.177 The web of time is not only the web of the individual, but is also a sort of collective entanglement. The calendars, the monuments of historical consciousness, are public. In an essay on Kafka, Benjamin situates this collectivity in the prehistoric. What has been forgottenis never something purely individual. Everything forgotten mingles with what has been forgotten of the prehistoric world, forms countless and changing compounds, yielding a constant flow of new, strange products.178

175 176

On Some Motifs in Baudelaire SW4 316. Ibid., 335. 177 Ibid., 316. 178 Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death SW2.2 809-810.

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The dynamism of the prehistoric world was the result of its lack of codified laws, norms and society.179 It did not seek structure, but magic. If it is permissible to equate the prehistoric and the ancient, a line from One-Way Street might be recalled. Nothing distinguishes the ancient from the modern man so much as the formers absorption in a cosmic experience [the ecstatic trance] scarcely known to late periods.180 The mmoire involontaire can thus evoke traces of that psychological affinity with the spiritual cosmos that was so central to mans prehistoric existence. The record of ritual is more than a catalog of action; it includes a certain prehistoric modes of understanding. Benjamins use of the prehistoric should not be indicative of a sort of break in time, as might be implied by equating prehistory as before history and history as history itself. Memory and artistic vision deny this sort of rigidity. The fact that this stage [of the past] is now forgotten does not mean that it does not extend into the present. On the contrary: it is present by virtue of this very oblivion. An experience deeper than that of the average person can make contact with it.181 Artists and philosophers, privileged with vision denied to average persons, have the creativity of memory that can connect to this past. These individuals, however, do not simply look back. Those that sense the insufficiency of the past look to the future for fulfillment. If history is a trial

179

Laws and definite norms remain unwritten in the prehistoric world. Franz Kakfa: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death SW2.2 797 On Benjamins invocation of such notions as the prehistoric, Adorno recalled, He was drawn to the petrified, frozen or obsolete elements of civilization, to everything in it devoid of domestic vitality no less irresistibly than is the collector to fossils or to the plant in the herbarium. Theodor W. Adorno, A Portrait of Walter Benjamin, in Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 233. 180 One-Way Street SW1 486. 181 Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death SW2.2 809.

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in which man brings charges against all Creation and cites the failure of the promised Messiah to appear,182 artists and philosophers present evidence through a sort of prophecy.183 The court, however, decides to hear witnesses for the future. Then appears the poet, who senses the future; the artist, who sees it; the musician, who hears it; and the philosopher, who knows it. Hence, their evidence conflictsthe court does not dare admit that it cannot make up its mindnew grievances keep being introduced, as do new witnesses. There is torture and martyrdomAt the end, the entire jury has fled; only the prosecutor and the witnesses remain.184 The witness appeals to the past for the sake of the future. He testifies with a spirit of recollection, but, ultimately, his testimony is rejected, dismissed and ignored.185 The present impatiently turns its back on the past and declares a failure when, in truth, it simply has not waited for what has yet to be revealed. Benjamins conviction that the Messianic moment will function as a moment of redemption is accompanied by ambiguity about what the Messianic moment actually is. Sometimes, there is a figure of the Messiah, as when he writes, Only the Messiah himself completes all history, in the sense that he alone redeems, completes...,186 and yet, at other times, it is not a Messiah that will complete humanity, but a Messianic power. The past carries with it a secret index by which it is referred to redemption. Doesnt a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well?If so,
182 183

The Idea of a Mystery SW2.1 68. One of Benjamins favorite novels of Kafka was The Trial; he considered the book among his most valuable possessions. In 1934, Benjamin wrote to Gerhard Scholem, By the way, should I ever regain possession of my library, Kafkas Trial will be missing from it. It was stolen a long time ago. If you could come up with a copy, then the worst devastations the con man subjected my place to in his day would be repaired. CWB 433. 184 The Idea of a Mystery SW2.1 68. 185 Having to appear before a court of justice gives rise to a feeling similar to that with which one approaches trunks in the attic which have been locked up for years. Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death SW2.2 811. 186 Emphasize added. Theological-Political Fragment SW3 305.

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then there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Then our coming was expected on earth. Then, like every generation that has preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim.187 Perhaps these quotationsthe former from the middle period of his writings, the latter from the last years of his lifeindicate a shift towards increasing secularity in Benjamins long-term thought. Perhaps the second selection still allows for the possibility of a strong divine Messianic power, a sacred figure whom mere human beings weakly imitate.188 In some sense, this ambiguity may be the result of what Scholem diagnoses as the inappropriate yet undeniable assimilation of Messianic tenets to the ideas of the French Revolution. For Scholem, Enlightenment notions of progress liquidated the apocalyptic element of Messianism, focusing on utopian perfection and blinding itself to that universal revolutionary disturbancethe unparalleled disasters in which history would be dislodged and destroyed189 that were necessary to actualize the ideal, redeemed world. Benjamin was very aware of the consequences of this revolutionary movement for both space and time; it allowed him to posit a moment of shift
187 188

Emphasis original. On the Concept of History SW4 390. Habermas reads this passage with moral undertones that suggest it is more aligned with a secular sociopolitical standpoint than theology. What Benjamin has in mind is the supremely profane insight that ethical universalism also has to take seriously the injustice that has already happened and that is seemingly irreversible; that there exists solidarity of those born later with those who have preceded them, with all those whose bodily or personal integrity has been violated at the hands of other human beings; and that this solidarity can only be engendered and made effective by remembering. Here the liberating power of memory is supposedto contribute to the dissolution of a guilt on the part of the present with respect to the past. Jrgen Habermas, Modernitys Consciousness of Time and Its Need for Self-Reassurance, in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987), 14-15. 189 Gerhard Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Kabbalism, in The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And Other Essays On Jewish Spirituality, (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 37. See also in this volume, Gerhard Scholem, Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in Judaism, in The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And Other Essays On Jewish Spirituality, trans. Michael A. Meyer (New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 136. I credit Irving Wohlfarth for pointing me to these essays. Wohlfarth notes, Jewish Messianism, Scholem has shown, both resists and lends itself to secularization. Irving Wohlfarth, On the Messianic Structure of Walter Benjamins Last Reflections, GLYPH 3 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978), 206.

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between the profane natural progression of time and the Messianic mode, that of Paradise.190 Although at present a restructuring of time seems most relevant, a restructuring of space offered Benjamin a springboard for pursuing Marxist ideology. If dialectical materialism claimed, revolution is the driving force of history,191 it secularized the theology underpinning his entire approach. Benjamin did not, however, want to adopt a new ideology. In a letter to Max Rychner in 1931, Benjamin explained that he was attracted to dialectical materialism precisely because it seemed that only outside of the realm of eternal ideas and timeless values would he discover truth. He sought dialectical materialism not as dogma, but because its stance seemed scientifically and humanely more productive in everything that moves us than does that of the idealist.192 Early in a late 1930s essay on Edward Fuchs, he writes that the dialectical historian who is interested in works of art understands that a work of art contains both its fore-history and

190

No one says that the distortions which it will be the Messiahs mission to set right someday affect only our space; surely they are distortions of our time as well. Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death SW2.2 812. Susan Buck-Morss suggests that Benjamin believes in two parallel sequences of time, one empirical and one Messianic, but that only one can be actual at any given moment (the other exists dormant, inactivated). The moment of revolution is that which turns empirical time into a potentiality and actualizes Messianic time. This reading, however, opens the possibility of a failed revolutionary moment, so that after the turning point one might fall back into empirical history. This seems to deny the revolutionary moment its full redemptive power. Buck-Morss thus falls into the same trap that Scholem addresses, conflating Messianism with Enlightenment notions of progress. Moreover, setting these two modes of time as parallel denies them the intersection that is necessary for the revelatory moment of the dialectical image (as presented towards the end of this discussion of time). See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1995), 216252. 191 Karl Marx, The German Ideology: Part I in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 164. 192 In the same letter, Benjamin writes, [T]here is a bridge to the way dialectical materialism looks at things from the perspective of my particular stance on the philosophy of language, however, strained and problematical that bridge may beCur hic?Not because I would be an adherent of the materialist worldview; instead, because I am trying to lead my thinking to those subjects into which truth appears to have been most densely packed at this time. Today those subjects are neither the eternal ideas nor timeless values. Letter to Max Rychner March 7, 1931. CWB 372.

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after-history, and that the existence of the latter makes it possible to recognize that the former is part of a continuous process of change, that is, the full dynamic of historical time.193 Works of art teach [the dialectical historian] how their function outlives their creator and how the artists intentions are left behind. They demonstrate how the reception of a work by its contemporaries is part of the effect that the work of art has on us today. They further show that this effect depends on an encounter not just with the work of art alone but with the history which has allowed the work to come down to our own age.194 This develops from his early thoughts on language and translation, in which there are intentionappearance gaps between that which may and which may not be communicated. Here, those gaps leave a residue, an ongoing legacy. By identifying these historical connections and contexts, dialectical materialism formulates the uniqueness of the work in time. A component of that uniqueness lies in the present. The problem with a historicist approach to history is that it posits an eternal image of the past,195 a necessity for once-upon-a-time, that denies the work its full uniqueness and identity because it denies its role in the present. The historicist does not enter into the work. His method falsely breaks the fullness of time; his conclusions are illusory.196

193

Benjamin expressed to Scholem that the thoughts he presents in the Fuchs piece were in the spirit of his other work, namely, that on the Arcades. [T]he Fuchs is done. The finished text does not entirely have the character of penitence, as my laboring on it quite rightly seemed to you. On the contrary, its first quarter contains a number of important reflections on dialectical materialism, which are provisionally tailored to my book. Presumably this last reference refers to the Arcades Project. Letter to Gerhard Scholem April 4, 1937. Ibid., 538. 194 Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian SW3 262. 195 Ibid., 262. 196 Benjamin points out the irony with which the historicist uses a notion of homogenous history; historicism is founded on the idea of history that is consistent and thus universal, but it denies that universality by denying any history (time) beyond the present. [T]he idea of universal history is a messianic idea. Paralipomena to On the Concept of History SW4 405. See also, The authentic concept of universal history is a messianic concept. AP 485.

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In contrast, historical materialism recognizes the necessity of the present for the past. It orients its methodology to accommodate both long experience and presence of mind.197 It carries the principle of montage into history by discover[ing] in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event.198 History becomes a sort of afterlife of that which has been understood and whose pulse can be felt in the present.199 Moreover, by reverberating in the present, that historical rhythm serves as a foundation for knowledge not only of the historical object and occurrence, but also of the historian and his own age. The site of this foundation is precisely where the works fore-history encounters its after-history, only made possible through interruption by the present moment. [E]very dialectically presented historical circumstance polarizes itself and becomes a force field in which the confrontation between its fore-history and after-history is played out. It becomes such a field insofar as the present instant interpenetrates it.200 By assigning the work of art a place outside of the bounds of mechanical time, it enters the realm of redeemed Messianic time. The force-field that results when the fullness of its history is sliced with the present moment is thus an encounter between Messianic, fulfilled time and the present,
197 198

Ibid., 476. Ibid., 461. Benjamin thought very highly of montage because he greatly admired the Surrealists. In particular relevance to this discussion on Benjaminian time, consider the following statement by Breton, which suggests that Surrealists techniques (montage) might bring one close to death (natural history) which would plunge one into the beginnings of memory (collective and individual): Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins. From Bretons Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924. Andr Breton, Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 32. Benjamin admired the Surrealists not least for the way in which they tried to restore natural history to the nineteenth century. He thus notes, the primal history of the nineteenth century, whose monuments have become ever more audible since the Surrealists. The Fireside Saga SW2.1 152. 199 Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian SW3 262. 200 AP 470. This use of force-field might be used to contradict the Kaufmann and Jay constellation interpretations previously articulated in these footnotes. Kaufmann and Jay regard a Benjaminian constellation as one of dissimilar elements joining together to form a force-field, however, in this quote Benjamin seems to suggest that the elements of fore- and after-history are similar in the fullness of historical time.

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unfulfilled time. This intersection is the dialectical image, a recollection thrust upon the dialectical historian by the involuntary memory of redeemed humanity.201 At this intersection, the realization that comes to the fore is not just what was forgotten about a past experience, but also that knowledge of the future that was lost after man was wrenched out of Messianic time at the moment of the Fall. Its not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a new constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent.202 This revelatory image is far too brief to capture, but long enough to perceive. Benjamin likens it to the meteorological phenomenon of ball lightningthat sphere of luminous electricity that lasts not an instant, but several secondsrunning across the whole horizon of the past.203 Like the lightning that exists only for a short moment in time and can never be recovered, any given encounter can only occur that once; the present that cuts it is forever changing.204 Insofar as this image is not an abstraction, it concretizes a revelation in something outside of philosophical discourse. It gives a new meaning to a truth proposition; it represents.205

201 202

Parilopomena to On the Concept of History SW4 403. AP 462. 203 Parilopomena to On the Concept of History SW4 403. 204 The true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability and is never seen again. Ibid., 390. 205 For discussion of the dialectical image and its affinities for the concrete, see Wolin. Wolin also points out that after Adorno criticized Benjamin for mythologizing the theory in his first Arcades expos, it returned to his initial social concretization. I later characterize this difference between the 1935 and 1939 exposs as one of Benjamins declining optimism and faith in full redemptive inevitability. Wolin, From Messianism to Materialism: The Later Aesthetics of Walter Benjamin, New German Critique, no. 22 Special Issue on Modernism (Winter 1981): 96-100.

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As early as his work on translation and the Trauerspiel, Benjamin states that art claims permanence for its products.206 The work of art is not subject to finite laws of natural history; it has no claim to such scrutiny, nor can those laws affect it. The only philosophical laws which have any place in the work of art are those which refer to the meaning of existence; theories concerning the operation of natural laws in the world-process, even if they do apply to it in its totality, are irrelevant. The deterministic outlook cannot influence any art-form.207 The dialectical image which emerges from the works encounter with natural history cannot then be considered part of the work itself. It must be part only of its interpretation, a result of a particular approach. The dialectical image is the conclusion of the dialectical historian about the work of art. It is not a matter to be found within the work of art. This is precisely the way that the critic had to approach the work of art. In this way, the dialectical historian and the critic perform the same function.

Space Just as there are empirical and messianic modes of time, there are physical and symbolic modes of space. In 1917, when Benjamin is most interested in justifying a spiritual, infinite concept of experience contra Kant, he indicates this ordering of the world as represented by a painting or text. We might say that there are two sections through the substance of the world: the longitudinal section of painting and the cross-section of certain pieces of graphic art. The longitudinal section seems representational; it somehow contains the

206

Although translation, unlike art, cannot claim permanence for its products The Task of the Translator SW1 257. 207 OG 129.

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objects. The cross-section seems symbol; it contains signs. Or is only when we read that we place the page horizontally before us?208 Part of this may split is the result of the profanity of human existence; after the fated Messianic moment of redemption, they will return to one. This division between a spatial realm of objects and a spatial realm of symbols also corresponds to what in the 1920s Benjamin will call porosity in the city of Naples. A traveler through the city positions himself not by the permanent numbers of an address, but by the changing shops, wells and churches. In the corners of the city, he can scarcely discern where building is still in progress and where dilapidation has already set in.209 Among the fragments of the Arcades Project, Benjamin suggests that the spaces of the twentieth-century are characterized by this porosity, the fluidity with which spaces enter and withdraw from permanence, where private homes have turned into hotel rooms.210 In these descriptions, space is characterized by its imprint from time and history. Perhaps, as Benjamin asks in 1917, the space of the moment is seen as affected by the past only because of the perceivers approach from the present moment, the result of empirical time.211

208

Painting and the Graphic Arts SW1 82. I take this section as a definitive statement of Benjamins ontology due to his use of substance. Considered Spinozistically, these two cross-sections thus define the wholeness of the world as a self-conscious sort of totality. Consider Spinoza: By substance I understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, that is, that whose concept does not require a concept of another thing, from which it must be formed. Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 1. 209 Naples SW1 416. Caygill discusses Benjamins concept of porosity in Naples. See Caygill, 122. 210 The twentieth-century, with its porosity and transparency, its tendency toward the well-lit and airy, has put an end to dwelling in the old sense. AP 221. The original form of all dwelling is existence not in the house but in the shell. The shell bears the impression of its occupant. AP 220. Benjamin wants to remain skeptical of this transparency: Today, the watchword is not entanglement but transparency. AP 419. 211 These comments recall the chapter title Past Turned Space in a volume containing images of Benjamins writings. The chapter showcases early twentieth-century photographs of abandoned sections of Paris. Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamins Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, trans. Esther Leslie, ed. Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz and Erdmut Wizisla (New York: Verso, 2007), 267-285. Also, consider Rochiltz when comparing Bergsons spatialization concept and Benjamins Trauerspiel study: Benjamin does not object to the process of spatializing time and history; he discovers in it a symptom that confirms his theological vision of humanity at the state of the creature. Rochlitz, 96.

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If this begins to broach what may be indicated by a spatiotemporal weave, then it is necessary to briefly arrest further conclusions and delve more precisely into what Benjamin may mean by space, first considering a single physical space, then proceeding to a recurring Benjaminian motif of particular spatial connotation: distance. It becomes increasingly evident, however, that although time may be discussed abstractly independent from space, it is nearly impossible to discuss space abstractly independent from time. In a brief piece published in 1928, Benjamin compares three physical spaces of Weimar: a modern market, a museum archive, and Goethes study. Each space is defined by the encounter it contains: that between modern men, between a man and objects of the past, and between an artist and his thoughts, respectively. Benjamins reactions characteristically lament those modern spaces devoid of something past spaces could offer. It is significant that Benjamin sets his juxtaposition in Weimar. Set in the middle of the time of the Weimar Republic, these three scenes are all within a city charged with unparalleled cultural heritage and contemporary political relevance. It was the site of Goethe, Schiller and the current National Assembly due to political riots in Berlin. The city of Weimar mixed the highest subjectivity with the depths of violence in an era of increasing rational industrialization. All this left traces on the physical space and individual consciousnesses. Although Benjamin is at first fascinated and enticed by the markets, upon arriving in their space the freshness and glory is gone; he realizes that the scene is best enjoyed from a height,212 if it is to be enjoyed at all. When the only interaction between men is commerce, the interaction is monotonous insofar as it exists at all. When entering the museum, he is struck by the arrangement of documents as patients in a hospital bed, not least because they are lined up as because they, like the ill, are mere imitations

212

Weimar SW2.1 148.

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of themselves. All that can be recovered of the past is a sort of sterilized, standardized wrenching out of its unique context. Modern man dedicates a space for the past, but it is out of obligation, not respect. Finally, Benjamin describes the sparse, unprepossessing furnishings of Goethes study, an environment in which Goethe celebrated the vastness of the nights with his anxieties, guilt, and despair, before the hellish dawn of bourgeois comfort began to cast its light. 213 This selfconfrontation with ones own morality is impossible from within the spectacle of the modern market. The space of modern society is an attempt to compensate for this contemplative loss.214 Anyone who has had the good fortune to be able to collect his thoughts in this space will have experienced in these four little rooms, in which Goethe slept, read, dictated and wrote, the forces that bade a world give him answer when he struck the sounding-board of his innermost being. We, however, have to make an entire world resound in order to cause the feeble overtone of our inner being to ring out.215 Understanding is affected by physical space in such a way that a space of simplicity connects man to natural history and death. The space of spectacle disunites this connection. Benjamin resists any such extravagance that would sever him from his innermost being and an almost prehistoric affinity with nature. When he is presented with a room that gives the impression of affluence and is told that he must admire the view from the upper story, he
213 214

Ibid., 149. Benjamin laments what Durst calls the deliverance of the romantic soul of the contemplative individual to mass culture and commodification. Durst suggests that with the increasing rational organization of production techniques between 1924 and 1929, a sober, ascetic culture emerged, a more stabilized culture of impersonality and anti-individual sobriety of mass production and consumption. This new sobriety [was] concentrated especially in the urban centers of Weimar Germany, for it [was] there that the erasure of residual zones of Irratio resistant to the rationalization of production and the dilation of capitalist commodification in the realm of culture and consumption [were] most advanced. David C. Durst, Weimar Modernism: Philosophy, Politics, and Culture in Germany 1918-1933, (New York: Lexington Books, 2004), xxx-xxxi. 215 Weimar SW2.1 150.

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expects a seascape. Instead, he recalls, I looked down. There before my eyes was the very same warm, paneled cozy-looking room I had just left.216 When modern man decorates his space with the efforts of his capitalism, Benjamin looks beyond towards something organic and natural. Glorifying the inside of a room not only confers false merit, but also destroys that praise which would be attributed to what is outside the room. Benjamin thus writes of Paris, [I]n the arcades it is not a matter of illuminating the interior spacebut of damping the exterior space.217 Modern societys ignorance of natural spaces is not deliberate, but is nonetheless an effect of its elevation of contrived spaces. Still, this damping is not disappearance. The arcades appropriate the natural space and inject it with fantasy, dressing natural history in a fanciful way that entices and fascinates. Benjamin writes, The way mirrors bring the open expanse, the streets, into the cafthis, too, belongs to the interweaving of spaces, to the spectacle by which the flneur is ineluctably drawn.218 The leisurely stroll through nineteenth-century reveals the same porosity of twentieth-century Naples: an encounter between natural history and the present in which one cannot be distinguished from the other. On the one hand, Benjamin wants the present to intercept the past. On the other hand, such a meeting place is predicated on their independence. The present moment requires distance from the past. In remarks collected on the the psychosocial problem in the early 1920s, Benjamin condemns nearness as the realm of the uncontrolled219 and the foundation of stupidity.220 Nearnesss mindlessness confers upon the examined object a beauty without boundaries, a beauty linked to stupidity because it lacks any criticism. On the contrary, the man who submits himself
216 217

Benjamin recalls this anecdote under a subtitle Dream. Thought Figures SW2.2 724. AP 539. 218 Ibid., 537. 219 Outline of the Psychosocial Problem SW1 400. 220 [T]here is a precise relationship between stupidity and nearness: stupidity stems ultimately from too close a scrutiny of ideas (the cow staring at a new gate). Ibid., 397.

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to things which are distant chooses that to which he will submit. His choice is made in wisdom, rendering the impact of that thing more undivided and purer.221 Distance is associated with freedom.222 Towards the end of the same decade, Benjamin published a series of remarks on words and catchphrases. Among them, he commented on the phrase Too Close, recalling a dream in which he stood in front of Notre Dame, overwhelmed, but the cathedral he admired was missing. It had been replaced by a massive brick building. And what overwhelmed me was yearningyearning for the very same Paris in which I found myself in my dream. So what was the source of this yearning? And where did this utterly distorted, unrecognizable object come from?It was like that because I had come too close to it in my dream. The unprecedented yearning that had overcome me at the heart of what I had longed for was not yearning that flies to the image from afar. It was the blissful yearning that has already crossed the threshold of image and possession, and knows only the power of the name223 Nearness overwhelmed him; he lost the freedom to choose which object he would name. Coming too close was a perspective that destroyed the larger picture necessary to making sense of crucial details. To approach an object with a sense of distance does not imply that the subject and the object remain separate. In fact, only through when the subjects space merges with the objects

221 222

Ibid., 398. In the Outline of the Psychosocial Problem, Benjamin also relates distance with the erotic and nearness with sexuality. The normative structure (distance is good and nearness is bad) holds because although the erotic and sexual are both part of human nature, the present time has experienced an utter decay of corporeality which sustains the negative connotation with sexuality and distance. See Ibid., 395397. 223 Short Shadows (I) SW2.1 269.

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space can anything appear. The object does not approach the subject, however. Like the way that an object or occurrence from the past must be approached by the subjects present moment, the space of an object must be approached from the space of the subject. The true method of making things present is to represent them in our space (not to present ourselves in their space)Thus represented, the things allow no mediating construction from out of large contexts. The same method applies, in essence, to the consideration of great things from the pastthe cathedral of Chartres, the temple of Paestumwhen, that is, a favorable prospect presents itself: the method of receiving the things into our space. We dont displace our being into theirs; they step into our life.224 This ontological authority of the subject is directly opposed to the self-knowledge argument of the Romantics such as Novalis who suggested that the subject step into the space of the object for understanding. Here, Benjamin proposes that the true way to actualization is to bring an other into the self, an object into the subject. Benjamins writings on time might be divided between those on time and those on historiography, but five trends appear in both: the relationship of history and time, memory as a faculty for navigating history, Messianism as a means of interpreting chronology and sequence, and a Marxist materialism that influences how objects figure in time and how they might be approached. His writings on space focus on the way a nonpresencethe past or immaterial meaningis actually present within and affects a given physical space. Linear time is devoid of content. Historical time contains content because it accommodates the Messianic moment of now-time, the juxtaposition of the profane

224

AP 206.

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and its inevitable redemption. Man exists in mechanical time, but through memory he organizes historical time. The phenomenon of the mmoire involontaire is such that man can recall memories of a collective past which he cannot attribute to his own personal experience in mechanical time; they are remnants of mankinds communal prehistory. There will come a moment when the fragmentation of time by mortality and finitude is redeemed and everything is transformed into its full existence and history at once. Until then, the present must be approached as a part of the past. The past must be seen in the present. At this intersection, the fullness of time appears as a sort of revelatory, dialectical image. The divine synthesis of that which profanity disunited appears in its perfection. Like this cross-section of empirical and Messianic time, there is a cross section of immediate physical space and the underlying history and meaning of that space. When these two are out of balance, the individual lives in illusion. Emphasizing the present object to the detriment of its history and significance bars the individual from contemplating the fullness of his own existence, namely, his inevitable death. When modern man compensates for this lack by approaching things, he inverts the proper approach of bringing things to himself. He transfers his authority to the object. Instead, he should sustain proper distance from an object and bring the object into his own space. Benjamin identifies the aura as a weave of space and time. If both space and time are each a sort of tense cross-sectiontime as a balance between the profane and the sacred, space as balance between the physically present and a corresponding nonphysical non-presence then the aura is the complex totality of four elements of space and time. It combines theological and empirical ruin fragments with their complete utopian counterparts. It presents the manifested particular alongside its archetype.

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Insofar as the elements highlight the gulf between what is and what ought to be, the aura must manifest itself as distance. This gulf is not impenetrable terrain. In fact, it is fully mapped in the collection of recollections from which the mmoire involontaire draws its content. If the subject grasps these memories as fleeting, sparse and somewhat incomprehensibleif the distance is unapproachablethose are insufficiencies on account of the subject, not fragments in the memories themselves. The historians incorrect approach to the past does not negate the potential truth of that past if it is approached appropriately, just as the literary critics incorrect mode of criticism does not negate the potential truth of a work. A falsely-led interpretation may lead to incorrect conclusions, but the work and past moment still remain. To suggest that the aura manifests an is-ought difference does not suggest that the aura realizes the ideal. In fact, the ideal is something that precisely cannot manifest in the aura. Benjamin says that actualization of a thing only comes about when the object enters the space of the subject. The subject retains authority. In the auratic experience, however, the object retains authority, taking possession of us. The subject enters the space of the object. An inability to actualize the ideal should not, however, forever preclude the aura from truth. At first glance, it seems that the dialectical image and the aura reveal truth and illusion respectively. However, Benjamins particular notion of truththat which must both acknowledge and remain independent from mythprevents any such hard-and-fast distinctions. The aura has the illusion of a near distance or distant nearness, yet its involuntary recollections of a prehistoric, communal past are not false representations. The aura must have a peculiar sort of truth content. The aura possesses a sort of dialectical relationship of essences that recalls Benjamins world of ideas theory in the Trauerspiel study. This realm is especially

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accessible to those select few with particular perceptive affinities. These are the artists, authors and sometimes philosophers, those producing manifestations of wholeness, exhibitions of the ought. If there has been a loss in the auratic experience, it is not because time and space have changed, but because the modern individual has a distorted approach to space and time. To see history as an eternal entity apart from the present, the present moment as mere mechanical measure, and the object in space only as what is given: surely these arrest auratic potential. If there is a fault to be found, does it then lie with the artists, authors and philosophers, with those reviewing their work, or with the bystanders who have abstained from engaging in the process?

Attentive Perception It must not be dismissed that Benjamins discussions of space and time require a certain type of perception. This is crucial for his formulation of the aura, especially since in his writings on Baudelaire he asserts that a sort of alert attention is the aura. The first instance of Benjamin quoting Novalis in this regardPerceptibility is attentivenessis in his study of early Romantic criticism. In 1919, Benjamin situates the quote in the context of the Romantic theory of knowledge of nature. As was earlier noted, Novalis did not intend for this quote to be used exclusively in relation to the subject; for Novalis, any attentiveness is just a symptom of the things capacity to see itself.225 In the piece on Baudelaire, Benjamin uses the quote when discussing the returned gaze formulation of the aura, in which the approach of the subject corresponds to something exposed in the object. This reciprocity will be discussed later in this study. This section will focus on the subjects role in perceptibility.

225

The Concept of Criticism SW1 145.

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Among the literature he read on perception, Benjamin was particularly fond of Henri Bergson. In Matire et Mmoire, which Benjamin held in high esteem,226 Bergson claims, an attentive perception is a reflexion [sic], on the present object, of chosen images from the past. 227 This reflection is the projection, outside ourselves, of an actively created image, identical with, or similar to, the object on which it comes to mould itself.228 Like Novalis, Bergsons formulation of attentive perception has two parts: first, the fixed perception of the subject, and second, something brought out in the object because of that perception. His temps durea sort of internalized, psychological sense of timeis a mode in which the subject orients himself to a particular aesthetic, natural receptivity. Adorno later discusses this in his Aesthetic Theory. It is the continuity of unconscious apperception that makesglimpses into nature possible. The more intensely you behold nature, the less conscious you are of its beauty except if you had already grasped that beauty by some intuitive meansThe objectification that careful contemplation causes is detrimental to the dimension in nature which speaks meaningfully. Incidentally, the same may be true of works of art; perhaps they are completely perceptible only in the temps dure, the idea of which Bergson seems to have derived from artistic experience.229 Or as alternately translated: Natures eloquence is damaged by the objectivation that is the result of studied observation, and ultimately something of this holds true as well for artworks,
226

Since the end of the nineteenth century, philosophy has made a series of attempts to grasp true experienceTowering above this literature is Bergsons early monumental work Matire et Mmoire On Some Motifs in Baudelaire SW4 314. 227 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1919), 124. 228 Ibid., 124. 229 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. C. Lenhardt (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 102.

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which are only completely perceptible in temps dure, the conception of which Bergson derived from artistic experience.230 An affinity between an approach to nature and an approach to art appealed to Benjamin as early as his writings on the Romantics. In his later writings, he supplanted the subjective approach of Goethe and Schiller with the views of Bergson, Proust and Baudelaire as a means of objectifying that subjectivity through a notion like that of like temps dure.231 Benjamin understood perception as a way to approach experience. It was not a faculty of reception, but an attitude of orientation. As he distinguished, there is a kind of experience [Erlebnis] that craves the unique, the sensational, and another kind [Erfahrung] that seeks out eternal sameness.232 The distinction between the singular occurrence and the long-term experience was related to the analogous distinction between an attitude seeking the one-time new and an attitude seeking the repetitive same. This difference was conflated in modernity; what the modern individual thought was new was the repeated same.233 Perception in the modern age lacked the sort of attentiveness that had once allowed it to grasp art and nature in all their eloquence.234
230 231

Ibid., 90. As expository material to discussing Baudelaires theory of correspondances, Benjamin writes, According to Bergson, it is the actualization of dure that rids mans soul of the obsession with time. Proust shared this belief, and from it he developed the lifelong exercises in which he strove to bring to light past things saturated with all the reminiscences that had penetrated his pores during the sojourn of those things in his unconscious. One might comment similarly of Benjamin. On Some Motifs in Baudelaire SW4 332. 232 The Return of the Flneur SW2.1 266. 233 To some extent, Benjamin uses the idea of eternal return to confirm the fact that what is called new in modernity is not really novel, as when he writes, [I]n Nietzsche and Blanquithe idea of the eternal return is the new, which breaks the cycle of the eternal return by confirming it. The Influence of Les Fleurs du mal SW4 97. 234 Buck-Morss indicates that Benjamins distinction relates to different active/reactive roles of the modern individual that shapes his engagement with his experience. Benjamins distinction between Erfahrung and Erlebnis paralleled that between production, the active creation of ones reality, and a reactive (consumerist) response to it. Jay interprets the distinction as one between active/passive individual perceptive faculties. He suggests that for all its decay in modernity, Benjamin still thought some Erfahrung was still possible in the modern world, and indeed could be the basis for a critical method. Jay also notes, however, that unlike the optimism that infuses Benjamins early writings, in Benjamins later

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The motifs on perception that appear throughout Benajmins oeuvre might be divided into three main sections. First, beginning in the late 1920s, Benjamin uses the phrase presence of mind, especially in conjunction with the figure of the gambler, to indicate an orientation towards the future. Second, beginning in the same period, Benjamin describes modern perception in terms of its disregard for experience and emphasis on assimilating events and objects. Third, particularly in the 1930s, Benjamin explains a mode of artistic perception, most obvious in the collector, which approaches objects as a way of entering the past.

Presence of Mind, The Gambler Benjamin frequently discusses presence of mind in relation to the figure of the gambler. In a note composed in 1939, Benjamin discusses the three elements of gambling: fate is defined by money; not winning is a greater danger than losing; and there is always a sense of immediacy. Every opportunity to bet must be maximized. In consequence, the gambler always makes his decisions in an instantaneous flash. This is not a fault. His truth is the purest truth of experience, that is, truth which is startled abruptly, at one stroke, from [its] self-immersion, whether by uproar, music, or cries for help.235 It is not perverted by convoluted rationalizations. If the gambler were not obsessed with money, he might have served as a model for knowledge. If acquiring money were not his sole goal, then he may have embodied that marginal case in which

writings a more complicated process was needed, which combined passive and active moments. I follow Jay more closely here, since Buck Morsss interpretation is an approach from a social capitalism standpoint (external determinant), whereas Jay interprets this as something more psychological about the individual (internal determinant). My later discussion of habit and alert perception corresponds to his passive/action distinction. Susan Buck-Morss, The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore, New German Critique, no. 39 Second Special Issue on Walter Benjamin (Autumn 1986): 105-106. In Jay, especially see chapter 8, Learning the Crisis of Experience: Benjamin and Adorno. Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 337. 235 I distinguish this sort of interruption truth as experiential truth as opposed to the critical truth that requires several stages, i.e. commentary than critique, as has been discussed. One-Way Street SW1 480.

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presence of mind becomes divinationthat is to say, one of the highest, rarest moments in life.236 The presence of mind that is receptive to experiential truth is defined in a series of theses on the concept of success, published in 1928. Success was not located within the mind, but was revealed by language itself in the term presence of mind. The question is not whether mind is present, or what form it takes, but only where it is. That it happens to be present here, at this very moment, is possible only if it enters a persons intonation, his smile, his conversational pauses, his gaze, or his gestures. For only the body can generate presence of mind.237 Contemplation does not engender success. Man must think and act fully invested in the present moment, orienting his perception to what is at hand. Perception is not purely conceptual: the position of the mind in the metaphysical weave of space and time is determined by a corresponding physical bearing. Here lies the fault of the gambler. He is obsessed with the future to the neglect of the present. The gambler is a microcosm of the general lack of that bodily presence of mind necessary to fully engage with his current experience. His betting on the future is a symptom of that mindset which believes that value lays in what will happen next, not what has already happened.238 In a rare reference to the First World War, Benjamin characterizes this orientation

236

Notes on a Theory of Gambling SW2.1 298. This line echoes in the Arcades Project, where Benjamin writes, The proscription of gambling could have its deepest roots in the fact that a natural gift of humanity, one which, directed toward the highest objects, elevates the human being beyond himself, only drags him down when applied to one of the meanest objects: money. The gift in question is presence of mind. Its highest manifestation is the reading that in each case is divinatory. AP 513. 237 The Path to Success, in Thirteen Theses SW2.1 147. 238 Most people have no wish to learn by experience. Moreover, their convictions prevent them from doing so. Experience SW2.2 553.

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as a turning-away from a past of violent experience.239 In fact, modern man yearns not for a new experience, but no experience. [Modern men] long to free themselves from experience[They are not] ignorable or inexperiencedThey have devoured everything, both culture and people, and they have had such a surfeit that it has exhausted them.240 Man is both exhausted by the pace of progress and disgusted with the way it has treated him. He assumes himself a victim and thus longs to be freed, ignoring the fact that his experience is partly a function of his agency. Hoping to avoid future misery, he superstitiously turns to others in the hope that they might be experts on that which is ought to be his greatest expertise: his own life. He who asks fortune-tellers the future unwittingly forfeits an inner intimation of coming events that is a thousand times more exactnothing is more unlike the submissive apathy with which he hears his fate revealed than the alert dexterity with which the man of courage lays hands on the future. For presence of mind is an extract of the future, and precise awareness of the present moment is more decisive than foreknowledge of the most distant events...To turn the threatening future into a fulfilled now,is a work of bodily presence of mind.241 This is not a declaration of mans prophetic facultiesmans inner intimations are really imprecise intuitions from the mmoire involontairebut rather a statement of the necessity for each individual to assume accountability for his future, to approach his life with alert dexterity. If each day is a fresh shirt on our bed, then happiness depends on our ability, on waking, to

239

Experience has fallen in value, amid a generation which from 1914 to 1918 had to experience some of the most monstrous events in the history of the world. Experience and Poverty SW2.2 731. 240 Ibid., 734-735. 241 Emphasis added. One-Way Street SW1 482-483. Benjamin held disdain for the mystical fortunetellers throughout his life. Consider this from the closing lines of the history theses written in 1940: This disenchanted future, which holds sway over all those who turn to soothsayers for enlightenment. On the Concept of History SW4 397.

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pick it up.242 Presence of mind is predicated on mans acknowledgement that he is accountable for his present experience. The gambler bets believing that someday he will win the lottery and will be freed from his present despair. This attitude is a self-deferral of agency that only further severs him from his present moment. To an extent, the figure of the gambler is tragic. His instantaneous decisions might have yielded him insight into pure truth. He approaches the sacred, but money pushes back as far as possible from the divine. Lamentably, like the men of his age, he ignores the present and bars himself from learning by experience. Because he gives his future to chance, he is imprisoned in the bonds of fate.243 Money strips him of his ability to approach his existence with bodily presence of mind. His insatiability steers [him] toward absolute ruin,244 yet this is not the profane natural ruin which might be made whole in the Messianic moment of redemption; the ruin of the gambler is a construction of man, that is, money. He withers by pursuing that which he thinks will preserve him, but his butter has become the win.245 If his bet on the future ends in a victory, all he has defeated is he.

Assimilation and Nearness The attitude that disregards experience is a perceptive mode of the twentieth century insofar as it is a perceptual orientation resulting from war. However, modern perception actually has its roots one century earlier with the industrial revolution. In the first expos to the

242 243

One-Way Street SW1 483. In an unpublished fragment written in 1931 or 1932, Benjamin writes, The character type that learns by experience is the exact opposite of the gambler as a type. Experience SW2.2 553. In the Arcades Project, Benjamin writes, On gambling: the less a man is imprisoned in the bonds of fate, the less he is determined by what lies nearest at hand. AP 515. 244 Benjamin writes in the Arcades Project, [I]n gambling: by constantly raising the stakes, in hopes of getting back what is lost, the gambler steers toward absolute ruin. AP 515. 245 Empathy with exchange-value can turn guns into articles of consumption more attractive than butterA gambler directly empathizes with the sums which he bets against the bank or an opponent. Letter to Theodor W. Adorno December 9, 1938. CA 296.

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Arcades Project, Benjamin explains that the prevailing attitude of the early-nineteenth century wanted to overcome and to transfigure the immaturity of the present social conditions and distance oneself from all that is antiquated.246 It was a push for progress and renewal, but the transformative forces of production instead systematized genuine creation.247 Things were relegated into a limbo somewhere between their genuine existence and their full reification into commodities. The thing-to-commodity evolution was forestalled by the introduction of arcades and intrieurs, the exhibition halls and panoramas, which were residues of a dream world.248 In 1935, Benjamin believed that this held the promise of historical renewal. The actualization of dream elements was a dialectical maneuver that could reveal the monuments of the bourgeoisie as ruins and precipitate a true historical awakening. 249 By 1939, however, Benjamin abandoned this optimism. He closed his second (and final) Arcades expos with the claim that any awakening inevitably falls back to sleep. He added a new epigraph: Men of the nineteenth century, the hour of our apparition is/ Fixed forever, and always brings us back the very same ones.250 The modern world has the character of the eternal returns ever-selfsame. It is one of self-perpetuating illusions which are the result of the need to push forward but are capable only of pushing where everyone has already been. Towards the end of the century,

246 247

Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century: Expos of 1935 AP 4. Benjamin especially notes how architecture becomes engineered construction and how photography becomes the reproduction of nature. Ibid., 13. 248 Ibid., 13. 249 Ibid., 13. 250 Ibid., AP 25. Quote from Auguste Blanqui, LEternit par les astres, 1782. Benjamin did not come across the work until the end of the decade; he writes to Horkheimer: In recent weeks, I made a rare findThe work is called LEternit par les astres, and, as far as I can tell, has been as good as ignored to the present daythe worldview that Blanqui outlines is in fact an infernal view, and is at the same time, in the form of a natural view, a complement to a social orderthat has reflected this image of the cosmos as a projection of itself onto the heavens. Benjamin uses these themes in his writings on Baudelaire. Letter to Max Horkheimer January 6, 1938. CWB 549.

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the last word was left to the errant negotiators between old and new who are at the heart of these phantasmagorias. The world dominated by its phantasmagoriasis modernity.251 The modern age is the prisoner of things of its creation, things that were misunderstand precisely because they manifested themselves as other than what they truly were: phantasmagorias. The nineteenth-century forestalled their full emergence. In contrast, Benjamins age is an era of advanced capitalism built on a further heightening of these false appearances; his time is based on the dialectic of commodity production.252 Benjamin never doubted that these social changes affected both individual and collective psychology. In a letter to Adorno in 1939, he explained that the deception of those things which falsely claimed novelty was not determined by the things themselves, but instead was determined by mans perception. The self-same [Gleichheit] is a category of cognition; strictly speaking, it has no place in soberly straightforward perception. Perception that is straightforward in the strictest sense of the word, free of all pre-judgment, could only ever encounter the similar, even in the most extreme case.253 Even where there is genuine similarity, man condenses the relationship into identity. This was his critique of the difference between concepts and ideas as early as his Trauerspiel study:

251

Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century: Expos of 1939 AP 26. Gyorgy Markus notes that Benjamin uses phantasmagoria and dream-image in a subjective, psychological way that is not readily reconcilable with the ideas of Marx, for whom the content of such representations was quite narrowly circumscribed by the requirements of their pragmatic efficacy and economic functionality. In fact Benjamins views point to a conceptualization of commodity which was repeatedly and resolutely rejected by Marx: to its (among others: Hegelian) understanding as objectified social sign. Gyorgy Markus, Walter Benjamin or The Commodity as Phantasmagoria, New German Critique, no. 83 Special Issue on Walter Benjamin (Spring-Summer 2001), 25. 252 The dialectic of commodity production in advanced capitalism: the novelty of productsas stimulus to demandis accorded an unprecedented importance. At the same time, the eversame is manifest in mass production. AP 331. 253 Letter to Theodor W. Adorno February 2 1939. CA 309.

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concepts obliterate genuine difference. If the ability to recognize distinction within similarity is lost in the modern age, then the modern age also lacks the capacity to grasp and employ the idea. The Artwork essay is thematically significant for exploring the relationship between a historical-social context and a corresponding mode of general perception. In both versions, the section which introduces the concept of aura begins as follows: Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organizedthe medium in which it occursis conditioned not only by nature but by history.254 On the one hand, Benjamin must establish this as a principle in order to posit those social determinants of present-day perception [that] can be understood as a decay of the aura.255 On the other hand, the formulation is not a mere argumentative device; the trends he identifies are those of his reality. The first and second eras of technology each have a corresponding mode of perception. In fact, dividing history this way is based on the way that man perceives his relationship to nature. The earlier mode accepted the distant unknown in its embrace of myth, magic and ritual; the current mode draws everything close in examinations and experiments that are designed to eradicate all mystery. In both versions of the essay, Benjamin alludes to this difference in attitudes by a comparison between the painter and the cameraman. He posits an analogous relationship between the magician and the surgeon, the healers of the first and second eras respectively. The magician lays hands on his patient; the surgeon penetrates the patient.

254 255

The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility SW3 104. SW4 255. . SW3 104. SW4 255.

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[U]nlike the magicianthe surgeon abstains at the decisive moment from confronting his patient person to person; instead, he penetrates the patient by operating.Magician is to surgeon as painter is to cinematographer. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, whereas the cinematographer penetrates deeply into its tissueThe painters is a total image, whereas that of the cinematographer is piecemeal, its manifold parts being assembled according to a new law.256 The way in which each man approaches the patient is symptomatic of their time. Further, their patient is not the same. The surgeon sees new dimensions of the patient such that the object changes: it is not a person to be healed, but a human body with all its inner physiological complexity. The magician sees the patient as he would see any other living person: a human being whose personality is merely on mute. If the object in the modern age is different than that in a previous age, then its transformation is not due solely to mechanical mass production. The approach of the perceiver determines the object. A mode of perception that welcomes a more expansive view of an object might be better characterized as a potentially-positive shift than a negative loss. In a discussion that appears only in the second version, Benjamin suggests that the new law that reorganizes the object gives modern perception access to realities outside the normal spectrum of sense impressions.257 In particular, because of the camera, the individual perceptions of the psychotic or the dreamer can be appropriated by collective perception.258 The question remains unanswered whether understanding psychosis is a welcome gain in understanding.

256 257

.SW3 115-116. SW4 263-264. . SW3 118. 258 . SW3 118.

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In the second to last sections of both versions, Benjamin reiterates that the mode of perception has changed because of a social transformation in how he undergoes experience. Whereas the man of the earlier era had individual experiences, the experience of modern man is always the experience of the masses. This precipitates a mode of distraction because the individual deflects responsibility for his own thoughts to those around him. Again, Benjamin offers a sort of defense. [T]he tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at historical turning points cannot be performed solely by optical meansthat is, by way of contemplation. They are mastered graduallytaking their cue from tactile receptionthrough habit.259 The concluding line to this section varies significantly between the two versions. Although they both suggest that film is able to produce the shock effects that trigger reception in the distracted individual. Film, by virtue of its shock effects, is predisposed to this form of [distracted] reception. In this respect, too, it proves to be the most important subject matter, at present, for the theory of perception which the Greeks called aesthetics.260

Film, by virtue of its shock effects, is predisposed this form of [distracted] reception. It makes cult value recede into the background, not only because it encourages an evaluating attitude in the audience but also because, at the movies, the evaluating requires no attention. The audience is an examiner, but a distracted one.261

259 260

. SW3 120. SW4 268 Second version. . SW3 120. 261 Third version. . SW4 269.

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In the earlier version, Benjamin emphasizes that modern distracted perception is very important for aesthetics in the Greek sense, which implies not just reception, but a sort of perceptionfeeling-sensation complex. Approaching an object distractedly impacts the way it is interpreted. In the later version, Benjamin is more precise. Because the individual perceives a film distractedly and yet still makes evaluations, film popularizes a new mode of judgment. In distraction, man thinks by habit. Criticism becomes automatic. Benjamin discusses a similar interplay of habits and attention in remarks at least as early as 1932. He uses Goethe and the early Romantics as a reference point for his discussion. Foremost among the human capacities, according to Goethe, is attention. But it shares this primacy with habit, which from the outset vies with it for performance. All attentiveness has to flow into habit, if it is not to blow human beings apart, and all habit must be disrupted by attentiveness if it is not to paralyze the human being.262 If Benjamin wants to justify the distracted mode of modern perception, its vindication lies precisely in the necessary interdependence of habit and attention for existence. Benjamin often hints at the near impossibility of this balance, perhaps most obviously in the figure of the flneur. This nineteenth-century stroller of Paris streets valued idleness and studying, turning away from the division of labor and towards the immersion of his ideas. At the same time, however, he was drawn to the crowds and masses, the modern marketplace and the birth of the department store. He lost his idle character in the wake of his new desire for profit. What may have been a balance of habit and alertness was swallowed as he disappeared into capitalism. There is no flneur in the modern age.263

262 263

Ibizan Sequence SW2.2 592. Basic to flnerie [sic]is the idea that the fruits of idleness are more precious than the fruits of labour. The flneur, as is well known, makes studies. AP 453 In the person of the flneur, the intelligentsia

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The balance between habit and attentive perception was foundational to the concept of Brechtian epic theater, which may have played a role in Benjamins appreciation of the style.264 Brecht developed epic theater for that audience who does not think without cause, a mass whose limited engagement with thinking required a form of entertainment whose action was identifiable.265 Brechts innovation was to reformulateand more precisely, interruptthe plot such that the audience might be disconcerted and forced to attentively evaluate the conditions they thought they understood at casual first glance. If epic theater removed theatrics such that only the conditions of real life remained, then the contradictions of existence enter[ed] into the only place where they [could], in the last analysis, be resolved: the life of a man.266 Epic theater presented a pretense of habit and then shocked its audiences into alertness.267

Appreciation, The Collector Consumed by his distracted mode of perception, modern man compensated for his dismissal of actual experience with the drive to bring things closer and understand his world through homogenizing assimilation. To some extent, Benjamins claims in this regard were observational. In other instances, Benjamin discusses those modes of perception which are absent in the modern age. In this second sense, he often invokes the figure of the collector. He
becomes acquainted with the marketplace. Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century: Expos of 1939 AP 21. 264 Stanley Mitchell points out that although the concept of epic theater originated with Brecht, there are strong indications that the ideas and implications of epic theater were common to them both before they met. The suggestion that habit and attentive perception were the elements which attracted Benjamin is my addition. Stanley Mitchell, introduction to Understanding Brecht, by Walter Benjamin (New York: Verso, 2003), viii. 265 From the second version of What is Epic Theater? Published in 1939. What is Epic Theater? (II) SW4 302. 266 From the first version of What is Epic Theater? Undated, published posthumously. Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, 9. 267 Benjamin writes, It is in the nature of Epic Theater to replace the undialectical opposition between the form and content of consciousness (which meant that a character can refer to his own actions only be reflections) by the dialectical one between theory and praxis (which meant that any action making a breakthrough opens up a clearer view of theory.) A Family Drama in the Epic Theater SW2.2 560.

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explicitly acknowledged that it was not a well-exercised way to approach the world, and may have even been considered negatively as an outdated, nave approach.268 Still, the figure of the collector offered a foil to the figure of the gambler, forming an opposition which, when theorized, could function as a sort of dialectic. The collector has a deep, studied and emotional appreciation of the object which he collects. When handling his objects, the collector seems to be seeing through [it] into [its] distant past, as though inspired,269 whose goal in acquisition is not to renovate the thing for the present but instead to renew the old world.270 In contrast to the common modern perception that receives things as a montagea whole that has been torn asunder and put together in new formthe collector perceives a sequence of events as one whole at the same instant that he understands whether he ought to enter into that whole. Dates, place names, formats, previous owners, bindings, and the like: all these details must tell [the collector] somethingnot as dry, isolated facts, but as a harmonious whole. From the quality and intensity of this harmony, he must be able to recognize whether a book is for him or not.271 The collector values the wholeness of the thing over the wholeness of his self, and respects it with the attitude of an heir.272 This neither disregarded the past nor romanticized it like the historicist. The collector embraced the thing and its past legacy as though it was part of his kin, part of himself. The collector approached the object in such a way that brought the object into his own space.

268

Benjamin writes, I fully realize that my discussion of the mental climate of collecting will confirm many of you in your conviction that this passion is behind the times. Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Collecting SW2.2 491. 269 Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Collecting SW2.2 487. 270 Ibid., 487. 271 Ibid., 489. 272 Ibid., 491.

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Modern perception demanded utility, but the perception of the collector offered a way of completing the object which, despite its profanity, offered a variation of redemption. What is completeness? It is a grand attempt to overcome the wholly irrational character of the objects mere presence at hand through its integration into a new, expressly devised historical system: the collection.273 The way that the collector approaches the object has the power to transform the object. If in his bringing things physically together the collector exhibits the assimilating tendency of modern perception, he distinguishes himself from that mode in his attempt to elevate the thing from utter profanity. In fact, the collector is a sort of allegorist, so submerged in his own subjectivity that he is able to transform history into philosophical truth.274 Unlike the way he had tried to reintroduce allegory into literary genres, however, Benjamin did not necessarily expect or seek a revival of the collector type. Modern man simply was too distracted with the superficial qualities of objects to focus his attentions their genuine essences. Moreover, it was not necessarily the task of man to redeem objects. The world would be redeemed at the Messianic moment and, in the meantime, man ought to pay attention to his own experience. That Benjamin was perhaps skeptical of the collector does not diminish the importance of this modern perception. The importance of collecting lies not with the collection, but with the collector.275 The actual arrangement of things is a mere physical construct at the mercy of modernitys delusions, but in the way that the collector strives to realize things, he can transcend those illusory phantasmagorias and approach an absolute, pure experience. His approach to experience is, in fact, motivated by the desire to correct the trends of his time. He is struck by

273 274

AP 204-205. In the fragments of the Arcades Project, Benjamin notes, The collector as allegorist. Ibid., 206. 275 [T]he phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning when it loses its subject. Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Collecting SW2.2 491.

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the confusion, by the scatter, in which the things of the world are found276 and is motivated to actualize[e] latent representations of property.277 When he rests his eyes on his object, he senses that objects place in the vast continuum of history. [F]or the collector, the world is present, and indeed ordered, in each of his objects. Ordered, however, according to a surprising and, for the profane understanding, incomprehensible connectionWe need only recall what importance a particular collector attaches not only to his object but also to its entire pastprevious owners, price of purchase, current value, and so on. All of thesethe objective data together with the othercome together, for the true collector, in every single one of his possessions, to form a whole magic encyclopedia, a world order, whose outline is the fate of his object.278 The collector looks to the future through objects of his present. Although he brings objects physically closer together, each object retains a distinct essence. The collector orients himself to that cross-section of space and time in which the present intersects the past and the immediate intersects the latent. Although the manifestation of the collector type in the modern age risks crossing the threshold between appreciation and fetishthe collector easily could let his feelings infect his understanding of the object too much the mode of the authentic, genuine collector is an exemplary mode.279 Indeed, Benjamins lifelong pursuit to complete the Arcades Project was conducted in the spirit of a collector.280

276 277

AP 211. Ibid., 209. 278 Ibid., 207. In later writings, Benjamin in fact explained such a relationship. He associates this magic encyclopedia image with the figure of the collector in the essay Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Collecting. 279 In her introduction to Illuminations, Hannah Arendt discusses the way that Benjamin held disdain for the collector. She suggests that (1) the collectors privacy is a curious withdrawal from public life that is political suspect and (2) the collector eternalizes the past and tradition with the same vulgar sense in which this study previously examined Benjamins evaluation of historicism. Arendt writes, Thus the heir and preserver unexpectedly turns into a destroyerThe collector destroys the context in which his object once

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As Adorno suggests la Bergson, if the objectifying tendencies of science have destroyed mans ability to perceive the nuances in art and in nature, then recognizing artistic and natural essentialities requires a mode of perception which accepts the object in its subjectivity and recognizes it for what it is. This latter mode must eschew its compulsion to rationalize and reduce the world to reasons; it must look beyond the false phantasmagorias that pose as explanations. Man must attentively perceive and accept what is there. This mode of attentive perception is required of the artist. Benjamin writes that Kafka has what Malebranche called the natural prayer of the soul: attentiveness.281 When attentive perceptibility is employed to help create, complete and actualize what may be auratic about the object, its revelations approach a sort of divinity. This attentive perception is also similar to what Benjamin requires of the proper critic, that is, an immersion in the subjective and the particular as a means to representing knowledge. This sort of reasoning seems correct if the object has aura, however, in some instances Benjamin implies that perception itself is the aura. Perhaps the aura is not attached to the object at all, but is a mere function and creation of the subject. If it seems that Benjamin speaks a great deal to what ought to be seen at the expense of what he sees himself, then one must turn to a letter written to Gretel Adorno in the spring of 1933 while he was still in exile in Spain. He recounts a lobstering trip to a remote beach. After a rather unsuccessful attempt, the feeling was of general melancholy, and they went ashore. In this midst of what should have been an abandoned shore was a group of women, dressed in black

was only part of a greater, living entity, and since only the uniquely genuine will do for him he must cleanse the chosen object of everything that is typical about it. Given Benjamins own passion for collecting and montage, I disagree with such a negative reading. See Hannah Arendt, the introduction to Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 45. 280 On the presentational style of the Arcades Project, Benjamin writes, Here, the Paris arcades are examined as though they were properties in the hand of a collector. AP 205. 281 Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death SW2.2 812.

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with only their faces exposed. The silence of the beach, the downcast mood from the boat trip, and the strange appearance of these women all seemed to agree in mood of general gloominess. Benjamin noticed nothing.282 Later, when a man walked by holding a childs coffin, Benjamin realized that what he earlier dismissed was actually quite striking. The women were professional mourners, keeners, but instead of attending the funeral, they had indulged their curiosity and gone to explore the fishing boats. Benjamin remarked to Gretel that to be struck by the spectacle of these women, he first had to understand that they were not, in fact, mourning, but had eschewed their duties in favor of seeing what was new to the desolate beach: the boats. To think that the tragic figures on the rocky shore would make [a painting] just right would be to ignore the reality.283 In this instance, Benjamin is not dealing with an object, but an experience. He writes that the only way he can really grasp this experience is through understanding, but it seems that something else is at play: he must be attentive to the details so that he can understand it. He had approached the experience with preconceptions and assimilated the scene as might be expected, but this led to false conclusions. A childs coffinrepresenting no less than the depths of natural history, the death of a beginningfinally wrenched him out of his casual appraisal. This may have been more a moment of shock than a particular perception, and perhaps that is why Benjamin is so concerned. He feels the struggle of resisting the ease of disinterested perception, of falling into habit. Perception might strive for a balance of habit and attentive perception, but in a world of the ever-same, attentive perception can only become habit. Presence of mind becomes automatic. Insofar as the aura is attentive perception, its decline in the modern age is uncontestable.
282

It was as if the miraculous nature of their presence had come into balance with the strangeness of their procession so that the indicator, as it were, was on zero and I did not notice a thing. Letter to Gretel Adorno June 1933 (undated). CWB 420. 283 Letter to Gretel Adorno June 1933 (undated). Ibid., 420.

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Moreover, to the extent that presence of mind is a necessary element of attentive perception, the aura requires an immersion in the present which, in turn, precipitates an awareness of future and past moments. It is not enough that the aura of an object may be composed of intimations of the mmoire involontaire; the subject must psychologically situate himself to be receptive to them. In a sense, the aura is that receptivity. The fact that man should perceive his world through a balance of attentiveness and habit suggests that Benjamin recognizes the necessity of non-auratic moments. Habit is not only necessary, but provides a contrast to emphasize what may begranting the possibility truly auratic; the individual must expect a certain consistency in order to attend to the possibility of difference. The attentive perception necessary to the auratic experience is thus a punctuation of the everyday. It is an exceptional part of living.

Beautiful Semblance In his early writings on hashish, objects lack aura. In the summer afternoon metaphor, he speaks of the aura of mountains and tree branches. In some instances, the aura encases, shells or veils an object. Particularly in the Artwork essay, he writes that the aura is an objects Schein. Early in the discussion of attentive perception, it was suggested that the auratic formulation requires a particular perceptive mode that brings something out of the object. What is awakened in the object is something auratic, and, insofar as the auratic is a property of a thing, that propertys ambiguity seems equivalent to the duality of Schein: the falsity of illusion and revelation in which the numinous shines through the phenomenal material.284 This relationship of appearance and beauty is not only the way that beauty presents itself to the subject, but also the way that beauty organizes itself within the thing, the work of art.
284

Stanley Corngold highlights this dual meaning of Schein in the first footnote to his translation of Goethes Elective Affinities. See Goethes Elective Affinities SW1 356.

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Although Benjamin was not entirely receptive to the formulation of beauty as presented by the Idealistswhom he criticized in the 1930s for denying beauty its inner dialectiche nonetheless was indebted to their use of the concept of appearance.285 The way that Benjamin describes veiled objects in terms of the way they appear to man is indebted to the Kantian foundation upon which man can only recognize things as appearance. Kant perceives this as a limiting condition such that beyond appearance only lie false principles that actually incite us to tear down all those boundary posts and to lay claim to a wholly new territory that recognizes no demarcations anywhere.286 What Kant claimed could amount to nothing more than speculation was exactly what Benjamin wanted to absolutize. For Benjamin, the appearance is not only what man perceives, but also a particular organization of that manifestation independent of mans perception.287 Nor could Benjamin fully accept the formulation of Hegel, for whom art stripped away semblance, although essence was vindicated insofar as all existence was the manifestation of essence as appearance.288 Benjamin never really relinquished an early assessment that Hegels work was that of an intellectual and mystical brute. 289
285

In a footnote to both versions of the Artwork essay, Benjamin says that the aesthetics of Idealism cannot accommodate the polarity of exhibition and cultic value that is inherent in beauty; Idealism conceives of beauty as something fundamentally undivided. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility SW3 124. S4 273. 286 A296/ B353. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 386-387. 287 On the difference between Kant and Benjamin on appearance, see Caygill, 3-5. 288 Essence must appear. Its inward shining is the sublating of itself into immediacy, which as inward reflection is subsistence (matter) as well as form, reflection-into-another, subsistence sublating itself. Shining is the determination, in virtue of which essence is not being, but essence, and the developed shining is [shining-forth or] appearance. Essence therefore is not behind or beyond appearance, but since it is the essence that exists, existence is appearance. Remark 131. G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, ed. and trans. by T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting and H.S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991), 199. 289 This must be emphasized against comments such as those in a recent Preface to Illuminations that claim that Benjamin was carrying on the work of Hegels Aesthetics. Leon Wieselteir, Preface to Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, (New York: Schocken Books, 2007). In 1918, Benjamin discusses Hegel: The Hegel I have readhas so far totally repelled me. If we were to get into his work for just a short time, I think we would soon arrive at the spiritual physiognomy that peers out of it: that of an intellectual brute, a mystic of brute force, the worst sort there is: but a mystic, nonetheless. Letter to Gerhard Scholem January 31, 1918. CWB 112-113. In 1925, Benjamin remarks

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Benjamin himself acknowledged that his notion of appearance and semblance was a development begun out of the Romantic tradition. In a footnote to the second version of the Artwork essay, Benjamin claimed that it was Goethe whose work was still grounded in beautiful semblance as an auratic reality.290 By preserving its semblance, art was able to achieve a sort of harmony even beyond that of nature. Semblance preserved that schema of magic necessary for the aura. For the purposes of this discussion, I shall use the terms semblance and appearance as generally interchangeable. First, I shall examine Benjamins early, theoretical discussions of the relationship between semblance, beauty and art, focusing on the way that he discusses the veil of an object which may, in fact, be the objects aura. Second, I shall examine later texts in which Benjamin explores the evolutionand sometimes lackof semblance in modernity, particularly as indicative of auratic decline.291

Semblance and the Veil For Benjamin, the creation of a work of art is fundamentally different than the creation of any other worldly thing. In fact, the work of art is not created at all. Creation is for the purpose of further creation, that is, the continuation of the world. Creation is a causal impetus from the
that he could not use Hegels Aesthetics as a beginning for any money in the world. Letter to Gerhard Scholem February 19, 1925. CWB 261. By 1930, he resigns himself that he will at least have to study some aspects of Hegel for his work on the Arcades, but there is a sense of resignation. Letter to Gerhard Scholem January 20, 1930. CWB 359. In contrast, consider the late 1930s comment by Adorno: I am busy reading Hegels Logic again, a truly astonishing work, which speaks to me today in every one of its parts. Theodor W. Adorno to Benjamin August 2, 1938. CWB 265-267. 290 The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility SW3 127. 291 On relevant discussion of the development of Schein in aesthetics, consider the following. Alexander Gelley, Contexts of the Aesthetic in Walter Benjamin. (previously noted). See Shining in John Sallis, Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 117122. See chapter 4, From Leucippus to Cassirer: Toward a Genealogy of Sincere Semblance in Paul Bishop and Roger H. Stephenson, Friedrich Nietzsche and Weimar Classicism (Rochester: Camden House, 2005), 151-196. On Romantic aesthetics, see Elizabeth E. Bohning, Goethes and Schillers Interpretation of Beauty, The German Quarterly 22, no. 4 Goethe Bicentennial (November 1949): 185-194.

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depths of nothing. In contrast, the purpose of the work of art is not to generate more art, but rather to be perceived. Moreover, the work of art springs from something. The work of art emerges from a realm of chaosthe depths of the unfathomability of beauty.292and is enchanted into the material world through its form. This enchantment does not remove the original chaos; it merely transforms its appearance into a recognizable entity, petrified and as if spellbound in a single moment.293 This organization of surface qualities is the semblance of the work of art. It is only by semblance that the work of art enters the world. This does not render the artist completely irrelevant; in the creative process his conscious and unconscious blend such that the unknowable enters the world through him who may think he knows it. The true artist, however, understands that he is not a creator; he is a facilitator.294 The work of art is thus not grounded on a creative, imaginative power. It is instead founded on a pure conceiving imaginative power that, tuned up to mans inner intimations, looks forward to the future and plays with what it sees. Benjamin defines the imagination as awareness of the de-formations of the future,295 implying that the imagination is not a faculty for the new as much as it is a faculty for rearranging the old. Benjamin does not necessarily welcome this rearranging. As has been pointed out, he wants to assert that the semblance of the form of the object is an objective arrangement. Insofar as its form is the only true way that the work of art can appear, that form is the best appearance for manifesting the wholeness of the work of art. When the imagination starts to meddle with this organization, it destroys this wholeness, separating form and meaning. It transforms the pure work of art into a riddle. The unfathomable realm from whence the true work of art springs needs no extra connections or

292 293

Categories of Aesthetics SW1 222. Goethes Elective Affinities SW1 340. 294 Kaja Silverman discusses this dissolving of the unconscious and conscious in the creative process. See Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, (New York: Routledge, 1996), 100. 295 Imagination SW1 282.

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reconnections to other meanings and essences; the moment it enters the world, it is a selfcontained totality of meaning whose existence is dependent on its form. Semblance implies a dialectic between what a work really is and what a work appears to be. Benjamin characterizes this difference as a works apparent form and less apparent, and even hidden, essential content. Although the most significant works of art integrate this form and content as much as possible, the world is too profane to sustain such intimacy. Over time, the works essence recedes from its obvious appearance. [If] the works that prove enduring are precisely those whose truth is most deeply sunken in their material content, then, in the course of this duration, the concrete realities rise up before the eyes of the beholder all the more distinctly the more they die out in the world. With this, however, to judge by appearances, the material content and the truth content, united at the beginning of a works history, set themselves apart from each other in the course of its duration, because the truth content always remains to the same extent hidden as the material content comes to the fore.296 Form, which is evident from the beginning, increases in accessibility and availability. Essence remains inconspicuous. Because the work of arts semblance is determined by its form, and because the work of arts beauty is determined by its form, the form of the work of art determines both its semblance and beauty. Although there may be beautiful semblance, it is important to distinguish that beauty and semblance are two distinct yet related qualities. There are different degrees of beautiful semblance, a scale that is determined not by the greater or lesser degree of beauty but by the extent to which a thing has

296

Goethes Elective Affinities SW1 297.

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more or less the character of semblance. The law governing this scaleasserts that in an artifact of beautiful semblance, the semblance is all the greater the more alive it seems.297 Semblance is a necessary condition for beauty, but beauty is not reducible to semblance.298 Because Benjamin does not want to reduce beauty only to the work of arts semblance, he clarifies that although a sense of beauty may appear in the outer content of a work, it is actually situated in the works inner content, that is, its essence. A beautiful work of art might imply its beauty in its form, but it is beautiful because it is essentially beautiful.299 A distinction must be drawn between beauty and semblance because, although there may be beautiful semblance and semblance-like beauty, beauty has an essential, inner dimension which semblance can never have by definition. Beauty is not a semblance, not a veil covering something else. It itself is not appearance but purely essenceone which, of course, remains essentially identical to itself only when veiled. Therefore, even if everywhere else semblance is description, the beautiful semblance is the veil thrown over that which is necessarily most veiled. For the beautiful is neither the veiled object but rather the object in its veil.300

297 298

Parts of this fragment are later used in Goethes Elective Affinities. On Semblance SW1 224. Consider Rochlitz: The beautiful cannot be reduced to appearance, even though appearance is essential to it. The appearance of art does not encompass its essence Rochlitz, 84. 299 This notion is strikingly Platonic. Benjamin later acknowledges the object in its veil concept as one of antiquity. Consider Socrates in the Phaedo, when discussing essences as the difference between that which is seen and unseen: [I]f any one assigns to me a reason for the beauty of any object, either that it has a blooming color, or a fine figure, or any other such reason as these, to all the rest I pay no sort of attention, for I am merely confused by them, but to this one thing I hold simply and artlessly and perhaps foolishly, that it is nothing else that makes it beautiful but that ideal beautyit is by the absolute beauty that all beautiful things are made beautiful. Plato, Phaedo, ed. Henry Jackson, trans. Edward Meredith Cope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1875), 79. 300 Goethes Elective Affinities SW1 351.

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The last line of this passageneither the veiled object but rather the object in its veilis a paraphrase of a quote from Goethe. Nearly fifteen years later, Benjamin cites it again in a footnote to the Artwork essay, qualifying the quote as Goethes view of art, and [the view of art] of antiquity.301 The veil of the object is the aura; that which the veil conceals is not only a quality of genuine, beautiful art, but it is also a quality of the auratic object. Because the existence of the inner content is predicated on the existence of the outer content, the inner content can never be exposed. This content remains a mysterious secret. Since only the beautiful and outside it nothingveiling or being veiledcan be essential, the divine ground of the being of beauty lies in the secret. So then the semblance in it is just this: not the superfluous veiling of things in themselves but rather the necessary veiling of things for us[B]eauty makes visible not the idea but rather the latters secret.302 Benjamin writes that the veiling is necessary not for the existence of the thing, but rather for us. The semblance of the object, that is, the organization of its appearance, is configured according to the subjective, human apparatus of perception. However, predicating the manifestation of the work of art on the man that is external to it wrenches the work from what ought to properly direct its manifestation, that is, its own inner essence. One might say direct in place of determine, since, while art acknowledges mans spiritual and physical existence, it cares nothing for his attentiveness.303 The object is not determined by the need to be perceived. Nonetheless, the work of arts transformation in order to enter into the world is such that its manifestation in the profane world is not a work of art. When form enchants chaos into the world, it does so by

301 302

The Work of Art in Its Age of Technological Reproducibility SW3 127. Goethes Elective Affinities SW1 351. 303 Artposits mans physical and spiritual existence, but in none of its works is it concerned with his attentiveness. No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the audience. The Task of the Translator SW1 253.

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bracketing the chaotic movement within the work. The resulting semblance ceases to be a work of art insofar as it has to transform itself in order to become present in the world.304 The critic cannot sever semblance from essence because, without semblance, the essence ceases to be. However, as discussed previously in this study, Benjamin does not believe that the critics inability to isolate one from the other bars the critic from distinguishing the two elements within one totality. If the critic approaches the work of art with a sort of intentionless, expressionless absolute [das Ausdruckslose], then he can distinguish between the semblance and the essence, the form and the innermost meaning. [T]he expressionless compels the trembling harmony to stop and through its objection [Einspruch] immortalizes its quivering. In this immortalization the beautiful must vindicate itself, but now it appears to be interrupted precisely in its vindication, and thus it has the eternity of its content precisely by the grace of that objection. The expressionless is the critical violence which, while unable to separate semblance from essence in art, prevents them from mingling.305 The critic must distinguish between the veil and the veiled with silence. The profanity of language has no place in the realm of art; if it did, perhaps the problems of philosophy might be consolidated into articulated questions. It is easy enough for the critic to speak about the form of a work; his material commentary might go on ad infinitum. The critic cannot speak, however, about a works essential content. The inner truth content can only be shown, not said. Insofar as beauty is essence, it is not expressible by man.306
304

[N]o work of art may seem wholly alive, in a manner free of spell-like enchantment, without becoming mere semblance and ceasing to be a work of art. The life undulating in it must appear petrified and as if spellbound in a single moment. Goethes Elective Affinities SW1 340. 305 Ibid., 240. 306 Smith discusses how the Ausdruckslose is a category of language, relating Benjamins use to the sublime rhetoric of silence in Longinus. Rochlitz makes a more modern connection and compares it to the Kantian sublime: This truth cannot convince; like the Kantian sublime, it forces ones hand through its energy, through violent emotion, and through its claim to obviousness. Gary Smith, A Genealogy of

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Furthermore, although the critic can recognize the distinction of two elements, he cannot define the nature of their relationship. Benjamin asserts that this uncertainty about the significance of each element in relation to the other is the most basic critical question, asking whether the semblance/luster [Schein] of the truth content is due to the material content, or the life of the material content to the truth content.307 In other words, are the glimpses of the unfathomable world of beauty determined by the forms, or are the forms determined by truths from the unfathomable world of beauty? It seems that Benjamin suggests the question only to dismiss it. The essence of the work of art cannot be discussed in the profane, causal-leaning language of man. The work of art must always remain veiled if it is to preserve its essence. The work of art may, however, be stripped of its veil. While the semblance and appearance of the object are not determined by man, the veil is an effect entirely determined by his approach. The way the work enters the world is a mysterious, phenomenological process that actualizes an idea from the depths of the unfathomability of beauty,308 a process which Benjamin does not attempt to describe. The extent to which the work is mysterious, however, is precisely the degree to which those perceiving it consent to its mystery. The veil is lost as soon as man believes that he knows everything about the work of art. As Benjamin articulates in the Artwork essay, the stripping of the objects veil in the modern age is the signature of mans modern perception. The modern critiche who improperly approaches the work without employment of the expressionless wrenches the veil from the beautiful in such a way that destroys inner content. In his penetration and attempt for lucid, comprehensible insights, he destroys that essence which might have only

Aura: Walter Benjamins Idea of Beauty, Artifacts, Representations and Social Practice: Essays for Marx Wartofsky, ed. Carol C. Gould and Robert Cohen, (Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), 113-114. Rochlitz, 83. 307 Goethes Elective Affinities SW1 298. 308 Categories of Aesthetics SW1 222.

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appeared to him as an opaque, intuited and sensed truth. That which requires the veil of mystery cannot exist independent and naked. Over the course of the 1920s, Benjamin changed his mind about whether natures veil might be removed like that of art. While writing on Elective Affinities, he claims that nature is the one thing that can never be unveiled, because nature preserves a mystery so long as God lets it exist.309 The mysterious essence of nature exists independently of mans perception. However, in a 1928 review of the photography of Karl Blossfeldt, Benjamin alludes to the benefits of such an unveiling. Blossfeldts images magnify objects of nature in such a way that the natural objects which man takes for granted are exposed and enlarged. These photographs reveal an entire, unsuspected horde of analogies and forms in the existence of plants. Only the photograph is capable of this. For a bracing enlargement is necessary before these forms can shed the veil that our stolidity throws over themThe oldest forms of columns pop up in horsetails; totem poles appear in chestnut and maple shoots enlarged ten times; and the shoots of a monks-hood unfold like the body of a gifted dancer.310 The man of the first era of technology could not remove natures veil because he respected it to the degree which it was untouchable. Modern man does not approach objects as those they are veiled, but nature is different. Natures veil exists despite the fact that man does not recognize it. It is recognized by the camera. When the camera unveils nature, technology takes over the function that Benjamin earlier attributed to a divine power. It is fitting, since for modern man, technology is his god. Nature can only be unveiled in the era of the second technology; the era of the first technology is defined by natures mystery. The veil is lifted by neither rationalization nor long
309 310

Goethes Elective Affinities SW1 353. News about Flowers SW2.1 156. See Appendix for a variety of photos by Atget.

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periods of contemplation; the veil cannot be removed through language. To the extent that this essence is discussed through analogy, it is inexpressible in perhaps the most precise language. Insights into natures essence are revealed not by description, but by image; the photograph silently shows. Once it is shown, it may be discussed, albeit only poetically. Benjamin does not react negatively to this transformation. The unveiling reveals cultic elements hidden within nature itself, remnants of religious and ritualistic architecture. If the essence of nature is mans mythic prehistory, then mans prehistory is preserved despite its unveiling.

Semblance in Modernity As Benjamin increasingly analyzed material objects outside of the realm of art, he expanded his use of semblance and Schein to objects of modernity. These objects were not alwaysand perhaps almost neverbeautiful, however, they had mysterious and provocative qualities. In the first expos for the Arcades Project, Benjamin describes how the urban masses become an obscuring, seductive covering for the city of which the flneur had previously been so perceptive. He writes, the crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flneur as phantasmagorianow a landscape, now a room.311 The sense of mystery that descends on the space is alluring, yet this is surely not a semblance necessary for the citys organic essence. This veil exists only for the sake of upholding the illusions of capitalism. The flneur is no longer a native in his city, but a patron of the theater which the city has become.312 If the crowd is a shell for the citys inner essence, it shuns anything natural about the cityif there can be such a thingin favor of hiding those myths chased by figures such as the gambler.

311 312

Emphasis added. Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century: Expos of 1935 AP 10. To the flneur, his city isno longer native ground. It represents for him a theatrical display, an arena. AP 347.

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There was another veil at work in modernity which Benjamin explicitly distinguished from the beautiful semblance of art. In modernity, A profane glimmer [Schein] makes the commodity phosphorescent; this has nothing in common with the semblance that produces its theological niceties.313 The monotonous feigned novelty of objects consolidated semblance such that the mystery became predictable; the awe became habitual, feigned amazement.314 In some instances, Benjamin did not recognize this transformed form of semblance as semblance at all. He lamented its loss often in the same instances in which he lamented a decline of the aura. In phrases such as, The dissolution of semblance and the decay of the aura are identical phenomena,315 it seems that he could only mean the sort of semblance which realizes the essence of beauty. In a footnote to the second version of the Artwork essay, he relates this loss of beautiful semblance to the changed modes of technology, although the loss is accompanied by a peculiar gain. The significance of beautiful semblance [schner Schein] is rooted in the age of auratic perception that is now coming to an endSemblance is the most abstractand therefore the most ubiquitousschema of all the magic procedures of the first technology, whereas play is the inexhaustible reservoir of all the experimenting procedures of the second. Neither the concept of semblance nor that of play is foreign to traditional aesthetics; and to the extent that the two concepts of cult value and exhibition value are latent in the other pair of concepts at issue here, they say nothing new. But this abruptly changes as soon as these latter concepts lose their indifference toward history. They then lead to a practical insightnamely, that what is lost in the withering of semblance and the
313 314

The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire SW4 64. With the new manufacturing processes that lead to imitations, semblance is consolidated in the commodity. AP 346. 315 Central Park SW4 173.

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decay of the aura in works of art is matched by a huge gain the scope for play [Spiel-Raum].316 Benjamin analogizes a works semblance and play to cultic and exhibitive qualities in such a way that the loss of semblance and cultic valuesdefinitive qualities of the aurais offset by a gain in play and exhibitive quality. In the Artwork essay, he specifies that film is the medium with the greatest potential for play. At other times, his language takes on the mood of the Romantics. Insofar as art consists of semblance and play, its play could offer it a level a perfection beyond that of nature. Art (the definition might run) is a suggested improvement on nature: an imitation that conceals within it a demonstration [of what the original should be]. In other words, art is a perfecting mimesis. In mimesis, tightly interfolded like cotyledons, slumber the two aspects of art: semblance and play.317 This metaphor of the cotyledonsthe embryonic seeds within a plant that upon germination might remain inside the seed or burst forth as full, green leavesis a striking visual image of contrast. Semblance conceals its essence, while play exposes its possibilities. If this is not praise for the loss of semblance, then it surely is at least consolation in the wake of such a loss.

Kracauer portrayed Benjamins manner of thinking as one that burrow[ed] into the material thicket in order to unfold the dialectic of essentialities.318 The characterization is as equally true for Benjamins general approach as it is true for the way that Benjamin wanted to explore the relationship between outer appearances and inner essences. The work of art can only

316 317

The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility SW3 127. The Significance of Beautiful Semblance SW3 137. On Benjamins interpretation of mimesis, see later in this study. 318 Siegfried Kracauer, On the Writings of Walter Benjamin, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 260.

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manifest itself in the world through semblance. Beauty requires semblance such that the material of a work of art may be called beautiful, but beauty is not a trait reducible to mere form. The quality of beauty is determined by its corresponding essence. Beauty as an essentiality is inexpressible, and thus it can only be acknowledged in vague, opaque forms, that is, through the shroud of a veil of mystery. Removing the veil destroys the existence of the essence. In fact, beauty can only make visible the secret. Well into his late writings, Benjamin continued to theorize this relationship. In his writings on Baudelaire, Benjamin defines a work of arts semblance as the aporetic element in the beautiful,319 echoing the necessity of the veil for the existence of the veiled. He discusses Baudelaires theory of correspondances, in which there is a posited necessity between an outer appearance and its inner mystical cause such that every thing has a corresponding inner concept. This inextricability echoes the way Benjamin formulates the bond of the material and immaterial within a single work. He also invokes Valry, for whom beauty must mimic the indefinable. Benjamin, of course, takes a further step: essential beauty is indefinable. Furthermore, Benjamin consistently defines the work of art in terms of its semblance and essential content, albeit with various terminology. The exhibitive function of art is based upon its semblance; the cultic function of art is based upon its essential beauty. The stripping of the veil is the same maneuver as prioritizing the works exhibitive functions over its cultic functions. When the veil is removed, the essential beauty disappears and, with it, the work of arts cultic value. These trends all contribute toand perhaps definethe decline of the aura. The organization of the semblance of an object is objectively determined by the way in which the work of art enters the world. Because semblance and appearance mediate a dialectical relationship within the work, these are not the same as the veil. The veil is a one-dimensional

319

On Some Motifs in Baudelaire SW4 352.

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shroud of mystery that is an effect of how the object is perceptively approached. Indeed, the veil of the commodity is that glimmer which Benjamin explicitly told Adorno was a matter of cognition, not a quality of the object. Insofar as the veil is the aura of the object, the aura thus is predicated upon the perception of the subject. It may even be said that the perceiver gives aura to the object. Perception must include the approach of both humans and technology, as in the Blossfeldt review in which the plant is approached by both the person and the camera. If the perceptive approach embraces ambiguity and mystery, then the veil of the object is preserved. If the perceptive approach intends to rationalize the irrational in the object, then the veil is stripped and the object remains mere form. Thus, to speak of the decline of the aura is to speak of the reduction of objects to mere appearance. Philosophically, Benjamin flees from this sort of subjective primitivism as early as his 1918 calls to expand the Kantian doctrine such that the thing-in-itselfincluding both form and contentcould be explored. Discussing the loss of essential content as a reduction to appearance, however, is misleading. In the loss of essential content, the object does not take the form of the original appearance. Instead, the appearance is fundamentally changed. Those essential properties which originally determined its appearance no longer exist; a major influence on the appearance of the object is eliminated. This reformation of the relationship between inner content and outer appearance changes the original semblance in which the work of art entered the world, indeed, that semblance which was most true to the work of art. Insofar as the work of art had to deny itself to enter the world as this semblance, it was still its best possible formation. The meddling reformationswhich are really de-formationsof the imaginative faculty sever the work of art from its best attempt at wholeness. Benjamin does not fully reject such dissection of the whole. When the magnifying photographs of plants reduce the entire plant to a part, they also provide new insight. However,

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Benjamin does not indicate a similar gain in knowledge when the work of art is reduced or, in light of the previous comments, deformed. Because natural objects are the most quintessential auratic objects, it seems that Benjamin would indicate that, on principle, the loss of the aura does imply an epistemic gain, although, in practice, the loss of aura may amount to nothing more than a loss. Perhaps the survival of the essence of nature, despite its being stripped of its veil, lies in the fact that natures essence is not one of inexpressible truth or beauty, like that of the art, but one of prehistory which, however difficult to articulate, can always have its sense conveyed and understood by man as a sort of nostalgia which functions as a feeling of beauty. The essence of art subsumes its historical essencethat is, its authority and authenticityto the concept of beauty. The origin of the work of art is beauty, but the origin of nature as it is known is the fall of man. Nature connects to man in a way that art cannot. In the age in which man strips the veil from everything, it is art which suffers most because he could only connect to art through the auratic, that is, by acknowledging its mystery. In the course of history, nature related to man in two ways. In the first era of technology, nature and man preserved their mystery and, in the second era of technology, nature tries to remind man of that harmony. This resolution is the beginning of formulating the concept of the aura according to the returned gaze.

Return of the Gaze The returned gaze formulation encompasses those auratic elements discussed in the preceding three sections. The subject must engage with his experience through a bodily presence of mind, acknowledging his agency so that he might have the attentive perception from which to gaze. He seeks that understanding grasped by the true collector. Objects must preserve their essence so that they might have inner content from which to gaze. The entire experience is predicated on a peculiar weave of space and time, a cross-section of the profane,

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sacred, present and non-present such that the object reveals to the unconscious of the subject a sort of dialectical image of now-time through the mmoire involontaire. The subject feels a bittersweet nostalgia that is nothing less than beauty. Through his psyche, he experiences nearness with a time which is forever distant. According to Benjamin, this encounter is the auratic experience and from it emerges the aura. This study has approached the necessary conditions for the gaze of the object and the gaze of the subject. However, a fundamental problem raised in Part One still remains. Given that the object is indeed a thingand not a human being as Benjamins early exploratory uses claimhow do the subject and object communicate using the same form, that is, the gaze? Benjamin explicitly writes to Adorno that the object has a human element, but it is not yet clear precisely how that human element is part of the objects essence. Moreover, it is not yet clear how the subject is able to understand the objects essence, since the existence of that essence is predicated on the subject misunderstanding its precise nature and upholding the veil. The subject instigates something within the object, but it does not follow that the subject gives the object its essence. Indeed, the subject can only give the veil which, however it allows the essence to exist, cannot determine that essence. The missing element in this discussion is how the human being relates to the essence of the thing, as well as how that essence of the thing relates to the human being. In Part One this relationship was characterized as one of recognition. Before each element recognizes the other, however, there must be the full exchange of gazes. There must be reciprocity. Furthermore, there must be a sort of imitation, since the object returns the form of a human gaze. Throughout Benjamins work, his concern for a fundamental reciprocity of essence is expressed as a sort of underlying universal that manifests itself in particulars; he does not believe in arbitrary imitation. If the traditional idea of mimesis is the subject imitating the object, then the returned gaze

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formulation is an inverse mimesis in which the object imitates the subject. The key to understanding this relationship, however, lies not in traditional mimesis, but in Benjamins particular approach to mimesis. Benjaminian mimesis focuses on similarity and an essential affinity between subject and object. This is the remaining concept this study will explore before fully synthesizing the formulation of the return of the gaze and, at last, the concept of Benjaminian aura.

Similarity and Mimesis In Benjamins texts, the term mimesis appears at least as early as a remark in OneWay Street. The work itself functions within the legacy of the concept. Following the terms definition in Antiquitythat is, imitation of nature by manBenjamin demonstrates the ways that all things appear to imitate each other. As noted early in this study, stamps become encyclopedias and dreams juxtapose concrete architecture. The arrangements within One-Way Street do not show a conscious mimesis such that objects intentionally mimic one another; however, the objects of these remarks are nonetheless linked. The objects share commonalities despite different existences; they are connected to each other through unsought similarities. Similarity is, in fact, the way that Benjamin approaches the concept of mimesis.320 Although he does not explicitly develop the concept until essays in the following decade, his use in One-Way Street prefigures his later definitions. In the earlier text, he analogizes the relationship of a translation to a text with the relationship of mimesis to nature. Commentary and translation stand in the same relation to the text as style and mimesis to nature: the same phenomenon considered from different aspects. On

320

This inclination to similarity is not the assimilation of modern perception as previously discussed in this study. The true mimetic faculty of man recognizes similarity while preserving difference. In contrast, modern perception annihilates difference and transforms similarity into identity.

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the tree of the sacred text, both are only the eternally rustling leaves; on that of the profane, the seasonally falling fruits.321 Translation is predicated on the possibility of a universal pure language, but such a language is directly inaccessible and thus translation can only acknowledge universality through the mediation of particulars. It approaches the text as a symbol of an inexpressible universal. Following the analogy, then, mimesis approaches nature as a symbol of an inexpressible universal. For the purposes of this study, it is important to note the subsequent metaphor in this passage: eternally rustling leaves. Wind moves the leaves of the most perfect, utopian and sacred nature. The literal translation of the Greek aura is breeze or, even more precisely, air that moves. The sense of the inexpressible universal ought to be nothing less than aura. In the world of the profane, however, man reenacts the Fall. The fruit that was wrenched off of the tree continues to fall in the modern age. As when the gamblers presence of mind almost transforms into divination and in its pivotal moment is perverted by money and his obsession with his corporeality, man continues to fall from Paradise. He continues to turn away from the inexpressible universal ought. He continues to turn away from the aura. In a notebook from the late 1920s in which Benjamin jotted notes for the Arcades Project, he began to speculate connections between mimesis, naming and habit. He proposed a historical dimension to mimesis. Mimesis represented not only what was immediately present, but also what had already been. [T]he name is object of a mimesis. Of course, it is in the nature of the latter to show itself not in what is about to happen, but always only in what has been

321

One-Way Street SW1 449.

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that is, in what has been lived. The habitus of a lived life: this is what the name preserves, but also marks on in advance.322 Mimesis is a faculty to express habit and a way of life. A representation must understand not the instant of what is represented, but its general character. A name is an identification of the totality of a thing, not a single part. According to Benjamins early philosophy of language, the name completes existence. According to this passage, that process involves understanding the things general character and mimetically offering a corresponding word. Benjamins most developed discussions of mimesis occur in a set of two essays from the mid-1930s: Doctrine of the Similar and a revised and shortened version titled On the Mimetic Faculty.323 Once again diving history between the earlier, myth-embracing era and the later, science-embracing era, Benjamin compares mans earlier reading of constellations as a way of understanding existence with mans later reading of texts. The similarities that actually exist in nature are there, but it was the genius of man to interpret them. Nature produces similarities; one need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is mans. His gift for seeing similarity is nothing but a rudiment of the once powerful compulsion to become similar and behave mimetically. There is perhaps not a single one of his higher functions in which his mimetic faculty does not play a decisive role.324

322 323

First Sketches AP 868. In this discussion I gloss what is a significant distinction between these two essays: the first emphasizes a more mystical and theological view of language, while the second emphasizes how mimesis in the modern day is actually purged of magical associations. In particular, Benjamin compares the ability of man to read constellations in earlier eras as an early form of modern mimesis in which man reads texts. Hanssen mentions how this mystical, astrological element figures much more prominently in the earlier version. See Beatrice Hanssen, Language and Mimesis in Walter Benjamins Work, The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 65-66. 324 With slight revision, the passage begins both essays. It is evidence to how Benjamin conflates mimesis and similarity. Doctrine of the Similar SW2.2 694 On the Mimetic Faculty SW2.2 720.

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The way in which Benjamin conflates similarity with mimesis is striking. By emphasizing similitude, he avoids a connotation of intent and focuses on the result. If mimesis has to be an intended activity at all, the intent is unconscious. It lies deep within man, a part of his once powerful compulsion that is now a silent director. Man does not realize that originally his species imitated nature, that first material on which the mimetic faculty tested itself [was on] the human body; man imitated objects through dance and sculpture, representing the relationship between himself and the objects of his world.325 In this sense, mimesis is the primal phenomenon of all artistic activity. In later ages, man makes these similarities without realizing the fundamental primitivism with which he takes on the qualities of objects, and objects take on the qualities of him. This mimetic, mirroring action pushed the individual to step outside of himself and play with the relationship between himself and his world. Mimesis brought him closer to nature while also pushing him away. While this sort of imitation may have been more prevalent in earlier eras, it is nonetheless present in every child who plays at being not only a shopkeeper or teacher, but also a windmill and a train.326 The child becomes the windmill and the windmill thus becomes part of the child. The physical disparities are irrelevant. The child knows he is not a windmill while simultaneously believing in every part of him that he is a windmill. In the moment of play, his belief surpasses his knowledge. Benjamin is not interested in an anthropological record of human activity. It is obvious that man has this faculty to establish similarities between him and others. Instead, Benjamin wants to determine the many ways this mimetic, assimilative instinct can be applied. This stepping-into-another instinct is too fundamental to be a foundation for mere play. Pondering the

325
326

The Knowledge that the First Material on which the Mimetic Faculty Tested Itself SW3 233. On the Mimetic Faculty SW2.2 720.

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childs game, he asks, Of what use to him is this schooling of his mimetic faculty?327 Benjamin answers himself with a rare, definitive answer: language. Human language is not predicated on what Benjamin calls sensuous similarities. Language was onomatopoeic for only a short time, and even then that might not even be called language. Real human language as is used in reading and writing connects a totality of different words to a totality of meaning. This relationship repeats the philosophy which underlies his earliest discussions of language: the multiplicity of languages and their manifestations must have a common, universal core.328 Language is a complex association of thing-word-script-sound, and yet man employs this with ease. So tempo, that swiftness in reading or writing which can scarcely be separated from this process, would then become, as it were, the effort, or gift, or mind to participate in that measure of time in which similarities flash up fleetingly out of the stream of things only in order to sink down once more.329 The mind mediates these meanings and associations swiftly. The purest meaning and most profane manifestation crystallize at once into a sort of idea; man recognizes both the universal and the particular and, in seeing both, can realize neither. It is a sort of dialectical image.
Ibid., 720. Benjamin writes, [I]f words meaning the same thing in different languages are arranged about that [shared] signified as their center, we have to inquire how they allwhile often possessing not the slightest similarity to one anotherare similar to the signified at their center. Although there are nearly 20 years between his 1916 language essay and these 1933 writings on mimesis, it is clear that Benjamin still rejects the idea of language as a mere system of signs. Underlying these 1930s essays is the idea of a pure, universal language. Doctrine of the Similar SW2.2 696. 329 Doctrine of the Similar SW2.2 698. In the revision of the essay, Benjamin writes that the words nexus of meaning is the bearer through which, like a flash, similarity appears, which is tied to its flashing up. It flits past. This calls to mind the language of Benjamins fifth thesis on history: The true image of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again. Exploring this connection is beyond the scope of this essay, however, I believe that its mention emphasizes the extent to which Benjamin characterizes these flashing and flitting images of the past and truth as a natural, organic capacity of man. Perhaps rather than characterizing this as dialectics at a standstill, which implies a sort of stalemate, this might be characterized as a passionate, affectionate dialectical argument in which both sides are screaming to be heard, but not in anger. On the Concept of History SW4 390.
327 328

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What man actually recognizesalbeit unconsciously in these connections is what Benjamin calls nonsensuous similarity. The concept is best illustrated through the idea of script. There is no sensual relationship between something that is written and something that is said, however, there is a correspondence between them nonetheless.330 In brief, it is nonsensuous similarity that establishes the ties not only between what is said and what is meant but also between what is written and what is meant, and equally between the spoken and the written.331 Like the way that translation mediates through pure language but works with particulars, nonsensuous correspondences of language organize particulars according to an inexpressible universal. Unlike texts that represent mans experience, however, language helps to define mans experience. It is through language that man connects objects and orders his world. He understands the world as he is able to articulate it, and yet those articulations are predicated on that which can never be articulated: the inexpressible universal. Thus, insofar as the underlying, unified universals determine language, and language connects objects, objects are connected through that which between them is universal and inexpressible. The essence of objects is connected through language. Objects are essentially linked through nonsensuous similarity. [L]anguage is the highest application of the mimetic facultya medium into which the earlier perceptual capacity for recognizing the similar had, without residue, entered to such an extent that language now represents the medium in which objects encounter and come into relation with one another. No longer
330

To discuss Benjamins theory of similarity in terms of correspondences is related to and yet independent from Baudelaires notion of correspondances, which is previously mentioned in this study. Both theories posit an inner and outer connection such that every appearance has a corresponding inner concept. However, Baudelaires inner causes are not necessarily a unified whole of causes. When Benjamin deals with correspondences of similarity, the essentialities to which he refers are a unified whole. Moreover, Benjamins underlying universal should not be reduced to the sort of causal mechanism that Baudelaires theory implies. 331 On the Mimetic Faculty SW2.2 722.

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directly, as they once did in the mind of the augur or priest, but in their essences, in their most transient and delicate substances, even in their aromas.332 Through nonsensuous correspondence, what is most apparent about the objects is negated and what is most essential about the objects emerge as inexpressible yet functional qualities. Framed in the language of the previous section of this study, the essential beauty which is implied in the objects appearance does not lie dormant within the work. When that essence enters the world from the realm of chaos, the chaos is petrified, but the frantic, frenetic energy still has agency in the world. It is chaos because man cannot articulately explain it, yet that chaos represents that inexpressible universal upon which dissimilar objects and things of world encounter one another and are, in fact, linked. Benjaminian mimesis is not about imitation, but rather about similarity and connection. Mans gift is that he can create and use connections that are not obvious, or to use Benjamins terminology, sensuous. Man thus orders these connections through nonsensuous similarity; Benjamin illustrates this concept with language. Through language, man employs nonsensuous correspondence. When man relates objects through language, it is based upon this principle. Relating this to the returned gaze formulation thus raises a new question: If man uses nonsensuous correspondence to relate an object to another object, does he also use nonsensuous correspondence to relate himself to those objects? Man can only relate himself to an object if he apprehends it. To apprehend an object, man must sense its totality, and not just a part. This requires a particular sort of distancewhen Benjamin stands too close to Notre Dame he does not recognize Notre Dame as itselfand a particular word: the name. Only through the name can man identify the object and, albeit profanely, recover a sense of Adamic naming. The name is, of course, a word in a language. Insofar as languages require nonsensuous correspondence, the

332

Doctrine of the Similar SW2.2 697-698.

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question has been answered. Man needs nonsensous correspondence to relate to objects. Howsoever the subject and object in the returned gaze formulation are different, they are essentially connected. What Benjamin calls a human gaze is no mere look or approach; the human gaze is that something from the essence of man which connects to the essence of the object.

Exchange of Essence This study has established a difference between the essence of nature and the essence of art: the former can exist without the veil, while the latter requires the veil for its existence. In light of recent emphasis on those qualities of essence which determine the manifestation of the object, it should be noted that Benjaminian essence involves much more than that which might be implied in the objects appearance. Recall that in his Trauerspiel study, Benjamin claims that the idea resides within the thing. The most genuine idea is origin, an inner dialectical standstill of becoming and disappearance. It is concerned not with empty mechanical time, but with full historical time, or more precisely put, the historical content of the object. It contains restoration as well as imperfection, reestablishment as well as incompleteness. It contains within it the principles of philosophical contemplation such that only through subjective immersions can a perceiver gain insight into the thing. In all these respects, the origin of the work of art and the origin of nature are fundamentally different.333 Although Benjamin would resist speaking of historical eras within the essence of nature, there are indeed four eras of content which informs its origin. First, nature enters the worldif not wholly generates the worldby the divine. However, nature as such is incomplete;
333

I use the phrase origin of the work of art interchangeably with origin of art, as well as origin of nature interchangeably with origin of a natural object, employing each term according to what seems consistent with Benjamins general usage. To a large extent, a distinction is irrelevant because the idea of the origin encompasses the universal and the particular.

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nature is only completed through Adamic naming and thus is dependent on man. To a large extent, mans subsistence also depends on nature. Their harmony on Earth is a development from their common beginning with the divine. Second, the Fall transforms their relationship such that mans profanity can no longer complete nature. However, he is still affectionate; he maximizes his involvement. On the one hand, this creates a generally harmonious coexistence of man and nature. On the other hand, this era culminates in human sacrifice. Third, man counteracts the possibility of his extinction by distancing himself from nature as much as possible. It is only interplay insofar as man cannot escape nature. This is the era of modern man. Fourth, after a Messianic moment of redemption in which all is destroyed, man and nature are restored to a preFall harmony. Within the origin of nature, the content of these four eras crystallize into one dialectical standstill. The essence of nature contains historical content in which man and nature are both intimate and divorced. The essence of nature contains all of mans history, including his past as much as his future. The work of art is not created like nature. The work of art springs from a realm of unfathomable beauty. Regardless of his profane or redeemed state, man has no connection to his realm. Art enters the world as a self-contained totality; it is neither dependent, superior to, nor interested in man. Historically, art might be dividedalthough again division is irrelevant between a magical era and a rational era, that is, the era of the first and second technologies. There is art for myth, magic and ritual, and there is commoditized art. Art has no place in Paradise, either pre- or post-Fall. To be part of the world, art mimics the relationship of man. Still, this is not a genuine relationship. Art may represent mans physical and spiritual existence, but it neither begins nor is determined by it. The essence of nature is thus inextricably connected to the essence of man. The essence of art only relates to man insofar as it mimics his relationship with nature. This does not mean

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that these essences cannot relate, since through nonsensuous correspondence they can be predicated on a larger universal. However, the underlying universal with art is the representation of man and nature. This discussion builds upon the assertion in Part One that natural objects are quintessentially auratic objects that inspire nostalgia in man. At this point in the study, it must be clarified that Benjamin can in no way mean nostalgia as it is generally understood. By definition, the subject who experiences nostalgia when aware of natures essence must ponder something that used to be, but is no longer. This reduces the essence of nature to that which is before now, or, more precisely, before the moment of the subject. This has just been shown not to be the case. First, the prehistorical essence of nature includes the past and the future. Second, if the aura is predicated on a wish to return to an age before the decline of the aura, then the aura is only possible in the age which does not have it; the aura is thus an impossibility in those ages supposed to best facilitate the auratic experience. Third, to predicate the aura on such a limited sense of time disregards Benjamins careful distinctions between mechanical and historical time. To predicate the aura on mechanical time is to base the experience on that which is an empty form. Thus, what nature gives to man cannot be nostalgia for the past, but rather nostalgia for their most perfect era of harmony. In this case, the present moment of the subject is irrelevant. It does not matter if the subject exists in the first or second era of technology. In the first era, the subject feels sweet nostalgia in anticipation of how men of future epochs will not be in such perfect harmony with nature as he is. In the second era, the subject feels sweet nostalgia because he recognizes the pleasure the first man had because he was in harmony with nature. If there is a difference of emphasis in describing their experiences, it is not a difference in their actual auratic experience; the auratic experience for both subjects is the same because

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particulars are subsumed to the universal whole. For the subject, this whole is nothing less than mankind. Through the object, the subject realizes not just himself, but his humanity. He is connected to all men and yet remains himself. He experiences a dialectical encounter that reveals to him his full potential. Between man and nature, the auratic experience is thus a vehicle for establishing identity. It is not just recognition of the others essence, but is a way to recognize the self. What nature shows reveals to man from its essenceits originis predicated upon its connection to mankind as a whole. Between man and art, the auratic experience can only imitate this sense of identity, giving to man a representation of what might have be given to him from natures essence. This representation is as true as the child who plays at being a windmill. The imitation is true insofar as it is believed, however, it is ultimately false. Art is fundamentally disinterested in man. It must mimic nature if man is going to have an auratic experience. The unique work of art is imitative of nature because each natural object is unique. Each element of nature has authenticity, authority and self-possession. However trite the clich, it is nonetheless true: each snowflake in the storm is unlike any other snowflake. Technological reproduction precludes the works of art from an ability to imitate nature. Benjamin denies that the diminished capacity for auratic art is rooted in technology per se because it is not technology that destroys its auratic potential. The object is not auratic because it is not unique; the loss of uniqueness is significant because it severs its imitation from nature. It is important to distinguish that this recognition is not a necessary condition for mans existence insofar as attentive perception cannot always be employed. Man must act in habit; he need not always constantly reaffirm his self. However, to fully understand himself in the world, he must enact a balance between the everyday and the auratic experiences. Like the way that his perception must be habitual so that he can appreciate the moment of attention, his experience

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need not always be auratic, but he needs auratic moments if he is to comprehend what it means for him to have experience. In the instances where Benjamin embraces the decline of the aura in favor of epistemic gain, it is precisely because he sees new mediums such as film and photography as capable of exposing to the world a sort of second nature. Insofar as it offers identity to man, it is identity with the madman or dreamer, but these figures are still part of mankind. Benjamin recognizes that although it may not be favorable, the decline of the aura cannot be dismissed as a way to increase the spectrum of experience and mans sense of identity. Moreover, technological reproducibility does not strip the object of its veil. The veil is the result of the subjects perception. The essence of art can only exist veiled because man cannot demand absolute clarity from an imitation. Man must enter the theater that mimics the man-nature relationshipthat is, the work of art with a suspension of disbelief. In contrast, the veil-less essence of nature is possible because that essence explicitly relates man and nature. This is not to say that the essence is expressible, for, as Benjamin points out, the essence is only revealed through analogies and images. Still, images reveal truth. The dialectical image is a revelatory insight, not an illusion.

The auratic experience begins such that man must possess a certain sense of self. The attentive perception of the subject is predicated upon a bodily presence of mind in which he embraces his present experience and acknowledges his responsibility for the future. Concerned to observe his world of objects as they areand not how he wants them to appearman senses something distinct about the objects around him and, in turn, something distinct about himself. Although at first his concern is only his own self, he is so interested in his experience that he becomes curious. The subject seeks not to possesses knowledge through these objects such that

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he is what is important, but rather seeks to represent truth such that these objects retain a sense of authority. If the object to which man turns is a work of art, he approaches it with a veil because he knows that only with such an embrace of its mystery can its essence exist at all. If the object to which man turns is a natural object, he may approach with a veil or with a camera, that is, something which might reveal that essence in an imprecise yet comprehensive way. Moreover, a particular quality of the object determines the possibility of an auratic experience. An object may be auratic precisely to the extent that its essence has the ability to function like natures essence. Because mans approach to the object requires a notion of his self as distinct from the object, his gazehis fixed perceptionis more than just his attitude. His gaze, if not a full manifestation of his essence, is at least predicated upon that essence such that functionally the essence gazes. The human gaze is an expression of his essence. Of course, this gaze is not his complete essence. Man turns to the object because he does not understand how his self relates to his world. The essence which first gazes from man is one of a sort of limited subjectivity. It yearns for fulfillment. Upon being approached by the subject, the object does not change per se, but rather reveals itself in a new way. With the application of the veiland perhaps, in those very few cases, with the application of the camerathe objects essence is able to function in a way that is sensible to man. This is not sensible as in logical, but sensible as perceivable. The exchange transpires in his unconscious; it is directed by the mmoire involontaire. Man cannot precisely articulate what the object intimates, however, he grasps the existence of an inexpressible universal and, in such a grasp, senses his place. He senses that manifestation of the is and oughtthat singular and universal dichotomy of appearance and meaningsuch that there is he that exists unto himself and he whose existence is part of a wider underlying whole of intuited

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correspondence. He retains the subjective identity with which he begins, and also adds to his self-understanding that identity which links him to mankind. This sense of humanity is that of the past and the future, the profane and the sacred; it is caught in the magic circle of eternal return insofar as the circle inscribes everything. Man sees history as part of himself. He becomes a historical materialist that can sense beyond the material. Man experiences experience in the most absolute way; indeed, the most divine way. He returns to his everyday experience refreshed and aware of that which Kant refused to justify and that which Benjamin said was essential: the religious experience. The aura is neither a quality of an object nor an experience, but both. When Benjamin speaks of seeing an aura, he describes his experience visually. The exchange of gazesor it might be said, essencesis not sequential, but a fleeting, instantaneous moment. It is a sort of dialectical image that forms in mans unconscious, an image that shows him his full humanity. It is the fleeting and flashing recognition of correspondence; in the moment of its actualization, it disappears. The age of auratic decline is not an age absent of aura. The conditions upon which the aura is predicated are, in fact, diminished. Benjamin laments that modern man, self-satisfied and content with his limited sense of self, no longer pursues objects that may have facilitated for him an auratic experience. In the age when the city lights are its stars, there is no need to turn to nature. Meanwhile, the decline in unique works of art through mass production and the explosion of technology destroys those works that might have retained an imitative sense of nature. The commodity offers man no primal mimesis. If this loss is joined by a sort of epistemic gain, the loss is not in any way alleviated. It hangs in the midst of man; the modern tragedy is that man often does not even realize it is gone.

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To understand the conditions of the auratic experience is to suggest precisely the way that the stirrings of the aura might be, if not created, then at least awakened in the modern age. In a world distanced from the death and destruction of the world wars which so dominated Benjamins landscape, perhaps we can hopeas he could notfor an inversion of the decline.

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EPILOGUE This study has refrained from indulging in an essay Benjamin composed in 1936 on the figure of the storyteller. A brief reconstruction of the argument follows thus: Because the storyteller has a superior faculty of memory which senses time as a re-constructible continuum, he reconciles himself with the inevitability of death. Content with his corporeality, he can mediate between the real and mystical worlds. He separates from himself and enters the world of myth, all while never truly leaving his actual body. This dual sense of self does not, however, remain divided. When the mythic self returns to the actual self, the storyteller reconstructs his story, submitting to the journey which was more powerful than a single positing of him alone. He repeats the story over and again; in this repetition, is drawn back into his memory. The cycle renews itself. Benjamin writes of the storyteller, His gift is his ability to relate his life; his distinction, to be able to relate his entire life. The storyteller: he is the man who could let the wick of his life be consumed completely by the gentle flame of his story. This is the basis of the incomparable aura that surrounds the storytellerThe storyteller is the figure in which the righteous man encounters himself.334 The storyteller travels to those highest realms of myth which are, in fact, the same as the worlds innermost essence. His rendezvous with to the inexpressible universals. His entire self cannot enter this realm, yet his essential self can. When he is reunited with the innermost part of himself, he is aware of his experience and is transfixed. He remains in awe of nothing more and nothing lessthan himself. Phrased in terms that would surely appeal to Benjamins literary sensibilities, the aura is neither noun nor verb, but a sort of gerund. It is the moment where the heterogeneity of

334

The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov SW3 166.

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experience constellates into a monadological dialectical image which is simultaneously comprehendible and utterly mystifying. The subject approaches the object and the object reveals to him his self and all that he is not. Man understands his place in the world, and yet it is a place he can never determine. The aura brings man near to that which forever remains distant. Of course, that which is forever distant is his most genuine self.

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Appendix I. Vincent Van Gogh

Perhaps nothing gives such a clear idea of aura as Van Goghs late paintings, in which one could say that the aura appears to have been painted together with the various objects. Walter Benjamin, On Hashish Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) Wheat Field with Crows c. 1890 Image courtesy of The York Project

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II. Daguerreotype Photography

Portrait of Edwin Forrest in the role of King Lear Attributed to Matthew Brady Date unknown Harvard Theater Collection

Portrait of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Calvin Ellis Stowe Attributed to George K. Warren Date approximately 1852 Courtesy of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America Images made available through Harvard University Weissman Preservation Center Online Exhibit: Daguerreotypes at Harvard

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III. Eugene Atget

[Atget] was the first to disinfect the stifling atmosphere generated by conventional portrait photography in the age of the decline. He cleanses this atmosphereindeed, he dispels it all together: he initiates the emancipation of object from aura. Walter Benjamin, Little History of Photography Eugene Atget (1857-1927) Photography of Paris Image Courtesy of Photography Now- International Fine Art Photography Index

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IV. Karl Blossfeldt

These photographs reveal an entire, unsuspected horde of analogies and forms in the existence of plants. Only the photograph is capable of this. For a bracing enlargement is necessary before these forms can shed the veil that our stolidity throws over themThe oldest forms of columns pop up in horsetails; totem poles appear in chestnut and maple shoots enlarged ten times; and the shoots of a monks-hood unfold like the body of a gifted dancer. Walter Benjamin, News About Flowers Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932) Various Photographs Image Courtesy of Photography Now- International Fine Art Photography Index

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Selected Bibliography I list here only the writings that have been of use in the making of this manuscript. All sources cited in footnotes are included. This bibliography is by no means a complete record of all the works and sources I have consulted. It indicates the substance and range of readings upon which I have formed my ideas. Primary Literature Adorno, Theodor W. and Walter Benjamin. The Complete Correspondence 1928-1940. Edited by Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Benjamin, Walter. Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

. On Hashish. Edited and translated by Howard Eiland. Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 2006.

. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Peter Demetz.

Translated by Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken Books, 2007.

. Selected Writings Volume 1, 1913-1926. Edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W.

Jennings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

. Selected Writings Volume 2, Part 1, 1927-1930. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard

Eiland and Gary Smith. Translated by Rodney Livingstone and Others. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.

. Selected Writings Volume 2, Part 2, 1931-1934. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Howard

Eiland and Gary Smith. Translated by Rodney Livingstone and Others. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005.

. Selected Writings Volume 3, 1935-1938. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W.

Jennings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland and Others. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002.

. Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938-1940. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W.

Jennings. Translated by Edmund Jephcott and Others. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.

. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910-1940. Edited by Gershom Scholem and

Theodor W. Adorno. Translated by Manfred R. Jacobsen and Evelyn M. Jacobson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. New York: Verso,
1999.
. Walter Benjamins Archive: Images, Texts, Signs. Translated by Esther Leslie. Edited by

Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz and Erdmut Wizisla. New York: Verso, 2007.

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Secondary Literature Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Translated by C. Lenhardt. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.
. A Portrait of Walter Benjamin. In Prisms. Translated by Samuel Weber and Shierry

Weber, 227-242. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997. Allen, Richard W. The Aesthetic Experience of Modernity: Benjamin, Adorno, and Contemporary Film Theory. New German Critique, no. 40 Special Issue on Weimar Film Theory (Winter 1987): 225-240. Arendt, Hannah. Introduction to Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn, 1-58. New York: Schocken Books, 2007. Bale, Kjersti. The Confused Court as the Model of Allegory: On allegorical reading in Walter Benjamins Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. In Walter Benjamin: Language, Literature, History. Edited by Dag T. Andersson and Ragnhild E. Reinton. Translated by Johan Schimanski, 64-83. Oslo: Solum Forlag, 2000. Benjamin, Andrew. The Absolute as Translatability: Working through Walter Benjamin on Language. In Walter Benjamin and Romanticism. Edited by Beatrice Hanssen and Andrew Benjamin, 109-122. New York: Continuum, 2002.

. The Decline of Art: Benjamins Aura. Oxford Art Journal 9, no. 2 (1986): 30-35.
Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1919. Bishop, Paul and Roger H. Stephenson. Friedrich Nietzsche and Weimar Classicism. Rochester: Camden House, 2005. Bohning, Elizabeth E. Goethes and Schillers Interpretation of Beauty. The German Quarterly 22, no. 4 Goethe Bicentennial (November 1949): 185-194. Bolz, Norbert and Willem van Reijen. Walter Benjamin. Translated by Laimdota Mazzarins. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996. Breton, Andr. Manifestos of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972. Buck-Morss, Susan. Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamins Artwork Essay Reconsidered. October 62 (Autumn 1992): 3-41.
. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: The MIT

Press, 1995.
. The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore. New German Critique, no. 39 Second

Special Issue on Walter Benjamin (Autumn 1986): 105-106.

. The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt
Institute. New York: The Free Press, 1977. Brger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Translated by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Caygill, Howard. Walter Benjamin: The colour of experience. New York: Routledge, 1998.

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Chroux, Clment. Ghost Dialectics: Spirit photography in entertainment and belief. In The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult. Edited by Clment Chroux, Andrew Fischer, Pierre Apraxine, Denis Canguilhem, and Sophie Schmit, 44-55. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. Clemen, Carl. Anthroposophy. The Journal of Religion 4, no. 3 (May 1924): 281-292. Cooper, Irving S. Theosophy Simplified. Wheaton, IL: The Theosophical Press, 1915. Corngold, Stanley. Genuine Obscurity Shadows the Semblance Whose Obliteration Promises Redemption: Reflections on Benjamins Goethes Elective Affinities. In Benjamins Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory. Edited by Gerhard Richter, 154-168. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Costello, Diarmuid. Aura, Face, Photography: Reading Benjamin Today. In Walter Benjamin and Art, edited by Andrew Benjamin, 164-184. New York: Continuum, 2006. Durst, David C. Weimar Modernism: Philosophy, Politics, and Culture in Germany 1918-1933. New York: Lexington Books, 2004. Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1990. Fenves, Peter. Is There an Answer to the Aestheticizing of the Political? In Walter Benjamin and Art. Edited by Andrew Benjamin, 60-72. New York: Continuum, 2006. Ferris, David S. Introduction: Aura, Resistance, and the Event of History. In Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions. Edited by David. S. Ferry, 1-26. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Gasch, Rodolphe. Objective Diversions: On Some Kantian Themes in Benjamins The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In Walter Benjamins Philosophy: Destruction and Experience. Edited by Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne, 183-204. New York: Routledge, 1994.
. Saturnine Vision and the Question of Difference: Reflections on Walter Benjamins Theory

of Language. STCL 11, no. 1 (Fall 1986): 69-90. Gelley, Alexander. Contexts of the Aesthetic in Walter Benjamin. MLN 114, no. 5 Comparative Literature Issue (Dec 1999): 933-961. Geulen, Eva. Under Construction: Walter Benjamins The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In Benjamins Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory. Edited by Gerhard Richter, 121-142. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Godwin, Joscelyn. The Theosophical Enlightenment. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Gold, Joshua Robert. Another Nature Which Speaks to the Camera: Film and Translation in the Writings of Walter Benjamin. MLN 122 (2007): 602-622. Habermas, Jrgen. Modernitys Consciousness of Time and Its Need for Self-Reassurance. In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Translated by Frederick Lawrence, 1-23. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1987.

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. Walter Benjamin: Consciousness-Raising or Rescuing Critique. In Philosophical-Political

Profiles. Translated by Frederick G. Lawrence, 129-164, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985. Hansen, Jim. Formalism and Its Malcontents: Benjamin and de Man on the Function of Allegory. New Literary History 35 (2005): 663-683. Hansen, Miriam Bratu. Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street. Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 Angelus Novus: Perspectives on Walter Benjamin (Winter 1999): 306-245.
. Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology. New

German Critique no. 40 Special Issue on Weimar Film Theory (Winter 1987): 179-224.
. Benjamins Aura. Critical Inquiry 34 (Winter 2008): 336-375.

Hanssen, Beatrice. Language and Mimesis in Walter Benjamins Work. In The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin. Edited by David S. Ferris, 54-72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
. Philosophy at Its Origin: Walter Benjamins Prologue to the Ursprung des deutschen

Trauerspiels. MLN 110, no. 4, Comparative Literature Issue (September 1995): 809833. Hegel, G.W.F. The Encyclopaedia Logic. Edited and translated by T.F. Geraets, W.A. Suchting and H.S. Harris. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1991. Jackson, John Hughlings. On a Particular Variety of Epilepsy (Intellectual Aura). Brain 11 (1888): 179-207. Jacobson, Eric. Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Jay, Martin. Adorno. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.
. Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Culture Critique. Routledge: New York,

1993.
. Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Jennings, Michael W. Introduction to The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. By Walter Benjamin, Translated by Howard Eiland, Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingston and Harry Zohn. 1-25. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Edited and Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Kaufmann, Robert. Aura, Still. In Walter Benjamin and Art. Edited by Andrew Benjamin, 121-147. New York: Continuum, 2006. Koepnick, Lutz. Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Kracauer, Siegfried. On the Writings of Walter Benjamin. In The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Edited by and translated by Thomas Y. Levin, 259-266. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.

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Lwry, Michael. Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamins On the Concept of History. Translated by Chris Turner. New York: Verso, 2005. Man, Paul de. Conclusions on Walter Benjamins The Task of the Translator Messenger Lecture, Cornell University, March 4, 1983. Yale French Studies, no. 97, 50 Years of Yale French Studies: A Commemorative Anthology. Part 2: 1980-1998, (2000): 10-35. Markus, Gyorgy. Walter Benjamin or The Commodity as Phantasmagoria. New German Critique, no. 83 Special Issue on Walter Benjamin (Spring-Summer 2001): 3-42. Marx, Karl. The Marx-Engels Reader. Edited by Robert C. Tucker. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978. McBride, James. Marooned in the Profane: Walter Benjamins Synthesis of Kabala and Communism. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 57, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 241-266. McCole, John. Benjamin and the Antimonies of Tradition PhD diss., Boston University, 1988. Michael W. Jennings, The Production, Reproduction, and Reception of the Work of Art. In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media. Edited by Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin. Translated by Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others, 9-18. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008. Mitchell, Stanley. Introduction to Understanding Brecht, by Walter Benjamin, vii-xix. New York: Verso, 2003. Nicholsen, Shierry Weber. Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adornos Aesthetics. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997. OLeary, Timothy. Foucault, Politics and the Autonomy of the Aesthetic. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 4, no. 2 (1996): 273-291. Pizer, John. History, Genre and Ursprung in Benjamins Early Aesthetics. The German Quarterly 60, no. 1 (Winter 1987): 68-87. Plato. Phaedo. Edited by Henry Jackson. Translated by Edward Meredith Cope. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1875. Rabinbach, Anson. Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Jewish Messianism. New German Critique, no. 34 (Winter 1985): 78-124. Ringer, Fritz K. The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969. Roberts, Julian. Walter Benjamin. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1983. Rochlitz, Rainer. The Disenchantment of Art: The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. New York: The Guilford Press, 1996. Rosen, Michael. On Voluntary Servitude: False Consciousness and the Theory of Ideology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996. Sallis, John. Force of Imagination: The Sense of the Elemental. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000.

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Scholem, Gerhard, The Messianic Idea in Judaism: And Other Essays On Jewish Spirituality. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. Sherratt, Yvonne. Adornos aesthetic concept of aura. Philosophy & Social Criticism 33, no. 2 (2007): 155-177.

. Aura: the aesthetic of redemption? Philosophy & Social Criticism 24, no. 1 (1998): 25-41.
Shiff, Richard. Handling Shocks: On the Representation of Experience in Walter Benjamins Analogies. Oxford Art Journal 15, no. 2 (1992): 88-103. Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge, 1996. Smith, Gary. A Genealogy of Aura: Walter Benjamins Idea of Beauty. In Artifacts, Representations and Social Practice: Essays for Marx Wartofsky. Edited by Carol C. Gould and Robert Cohen, 105-119. Norwell, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994. Spinoza, Benedict de. Ethics, Edited and translated by Edwin Curley. London: Penguin Books, 1996. Steinberg, Michael P. The Collector as Allegorist: Goods, Gods, and the Objects of History. In Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History. Edited by Michael P. Steinberg, 88118. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Tiedemann, Rolf. Historical Materialism or Political Messianism? An Interpretation of the Theses On the Concept of History. In Benjamin: Philosophy, History, Aesthetics. Edited by Gary Smith, 175-209. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Weber, Samuel. Mass Mediauras: or, Art, Aura, and the Media in the work of Walter Benjamin. In Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions. Edited by David. S. Ferry, 2749. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Weigel, Sigrid. Body- and image- space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin. Translated by Georgina Paul with Rachel McNicholl and Jeremy Gaines. New York: Routledge, 1996. Williamson, George S. The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Winter, Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Witte, Bernd. Benjamin and Lukcs. Historical Notes on the Relationship between Their Political and Aesthetic Theories. New German Critique, no. 5 (Spring 1975): 3-26. Wohlfarth, Irving. On the Messianic Structure of Walter Benjamins Last Reflections. In GLYPH 3, 148-212. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1978. Wolin, Richard. From Messianism to Materialism: The Later Aesthetics of Walter Benjamin. New German Critique, no. 22 Special Issue on Modernism (Winter 1981): 81-108.
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