"Adorno and the Excessive Politics of Aura.

" Benjamin's Blind Spot: Walter Benjamin and the Premature Death of Aura &
ICI Field Notes 5: The Manual of Lost Ideas . Ed. Lise Patt. Los Angeles: The Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 2001. 25-36.

Adorno and the Excessive Politics of Aura

Gehard Richter

The more closely you look at the world, the more distantly it looks back.
—Walter Benjamin, citing Karl Kraus

Like the idea of aura itself, the abiding friendship between Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno is a complex weave
of proximity and distance, immediacy and deferral. While Benjamin cultivated life-altering friendships with several
writers and philosophers — among them, prominently, Gershom Scholem, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Siegfried
Kracauer his long affiliation with Adorno was perhaps the most intimate and the most ambivalent elective affinity in his
life and thought.

The two first met in Frankfurt in 1923, and they remained friends until Benjamin's untimely suicide in 1940. Adorno was
the main link between Benjamin and the Institute for Social Research (the Frankfurt School), proving an intellectual and
financial lifeline to Benjamin during many of the latter's meager years of marginal existence. After a narrow-minded
German professor at the University of Frankfurt rejected Benjamin's Trauerspiel book, an explosive study of the Baroque
drama, as a professorial habilitation and thereby effectively ended Benjamin's hopes for an academic career, Adorno
recognized the importance of his friend's work. Indeed Adorno's first books would hardly be thinkable without
Benjamin's ghostly presence. In 1932, Adorno even offered a seminar at Frankfurt on the Trauerspiel book — the first
[p.26] official Benjamin course ever. After World War II, Adorno was instrumental in making Benjamin's then largely
unknown oeuvre widely available to German readers, and his extensive correspondence with Benjamin, along with the
seminal essays he devoted to his friend's work, remain indispensable for any understanding of Benjamin today.

Yet what is often neglected by readers of both writers is the impact of Benjamin's theoretical category of "aura" on
Adorno's late work. I wish to suggest that Adorno's major work, Aesthetic Theory, which was published posthumously in
1969, mobilizes the dialectical interplay of proximity and distance inherent in this concept as a figure for the
excessiveness in the work of art that is inseparable from its political resonances. That the auratic within the artwork
prevents the aesthetic form from becoming simply itself means, for Adorno, that it belongs to the realm of the political,
even - or precisely - when it seems far removed from political questions on the surface. The auratic in the artwork is
irreducibly figurative.

Benjamin's concept of aura thus helps to shed light on Adorno's enigmatic contention that political art, "which is a
moment in society even in opposing it, must close its eyes and ears to society." "An 'it shall be different' is hidden,"
Adorno claims, "in even the most sublimated work of art. If art is merely identical with itself, a purely scientized
construction, it has already gone bad and is literally pre-artistic." Adorno argues that this "is not the time for political
works of art; rather politics has migrated into the autonomous work of art, and it has penetrated most deeply into works
that present themselves as politically dead."1 It is in this highly mediated sense of thc political in art, I suggest, that
Adorno wishes to situate Benjamin's aura.

[p.27] In Benjamin's thinking, there can be no concept of aura that is not always already traversed by its own blind spots.
This is so not only because the concept of aura in the trajectory of his thinking undergoes a series of transformations —
from his essays of the 1920s through his hashish protocols to his later meditations on technical reproducibility in
photography and film in the 1930s — but also because his concepts are never simply themselves. As Adorno reminds us,
"in contrast to all other' philosophers ... Benjamin's thinking, as paradoxical as it may sound, was not one that took place
in concepts .... He unlocked what could not be unlocked as though with a magic key." 2 That Benjamin thinks
conceptually without concepts means, according to Adorno, that in his work "thought is meant to acquire the density of
experience without losing any of its rigor." 3 The thinking of the concept of aura thus belongs to the density and rigor of
this experience.

In 1933, in the orbit of his essays on photography and film, Benjamin gives us a hint regarding the theoretical

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 assumptions that inform his stance. Writing in his preferred mode of the Denkbild, or thought-image — a brief,
aphoristic snapshot or allegorical prose - he thematizes the moment of cognition (Erkenntnis) as such. In the
thought-image "Secret Signs," part of the constellation "Short Shadows (II)," referring to Alfred Schuler, a member of the
George circle and an adherent of magical rituals and cults, Benjamin writes: "A word of Schuler's has been preserved for
us. Every cognition [Erkenntnis], he said, contains a dash of nonsense, just as in ancient carpet [p.28] patterns or
ornamental friezes it was possible to find somewhere or other a minute deviation from the regular pattern." Benjamin
continues: "In other words, what is decisive is not the progression from one cognition to the next, but the leap or crack
[Sprung] inherent in any cognition itself. This is the inconspicuous mark of authenticity which distinguishes it from
every kind of standard product that has been produced according to a scheme."4

For Benjamin, what is significant in thinking is not its teleological progression from one certain fact of knowledge to the
next, in a movement of progressive coverage of the terrain that is to be fully thought, but rather an appreciation of the
leap or crack, the blind spot without which no conceptual thinking may occur. It is no accident that Benjamin chooses the
German word Erkenntnis, or cognition, here, because, unlike mere Wissen (knowledge), Erkenntnis signifies the moment
and process of attempting to translate perceptual phenomena into the security of interpreted knowledge. But his thinking
focuses on how the process of cognition depends in its formation on what has not yet been fully understood. If full
understanding of a phenomenon had already occurred, there would be no more process of interpretive cognition and
active reading, but simply the treacherous stasis of allegedly secure knowledge.

Cognition, and the understanding that it promises, is thus fully itself only when noncognition and non understanding still
reside within it. Put another way, cognition is what it is only when it actively encounters and openly invites its abiding
blind spots. These blind spots Benjamin calls them leaps or cracks - are the defective but necessary architecture of all his
concepts. And it is precisely in their "deviance" or aberration that these blind spots becomc authentic; their authenticity
cannot be thought in separation from their implied failure as [p.29] concepts. Therefore, Benjamin tells us in the Arcades
Project, "what for others are deviations, for me, are the data which determine my course." 5

Understood from this perspective, Benjamin's concept of aura cannot be separated from the cracks and fissures that
traverse the ghostly scene of its conceptual appearance. In his meditations on the photographic image, Benjamin asks:

"What actually is aura? A strange weave [Gespinst] of space and time: the singular appearance or semblance
of a distance, no matter how close it may be. While at rest on a summer's noon, to trace a range of mountains
on the horizon, or a branch that casts its shadows on the observer, until the moment or the hour become part
of their appearance - this is what it means to breathe the aura of those mountains, that branch."6

For Benjamin, the Here and Now of artistic and natural experience, along with the semblance of its singularity and
specificity, is inseparable from its auratic dimension. Under the conditions of new modes of technical reproduction,
including such media as photography (since the late 1840s) and film (since the turn of the twentieth century), the
possibility of auratic experience too has been transformed. Even though an artwork has in principle always been
reproducible, the aura of an artwork today, Benjamin claims, has been subjected to an unprecedented velocity and
technical systematicity in its own potentially liberating decline.

Unlike earlier artworks, whose aura was anchored in ritualistic and cultic values such as singularity, presence,
authenticity, and originality, in new art forms such as film the question of the auratic original has shifted. Because there
can be no singular "original" of a film or a photograph in the same way that there is only one original Mona Lisa, the aura
of such new artworks, their Here and Now, is rapidly dissolving. But Benjamin refrains from constructing a narrative of
loss and nostalgia. Rather than mourning the absence of the auratic original, Benjamin [p.29] invites us to consider the
ways in which our knowledge that there can be no unmediated auratic original inflects the ways in which we first
approach the artwork. These concerns are triggercd not by any specific act of reproduction per se but by the now
omnipresent possibility of perpetual reproduction and its disseminations - the artwork's very reproducibility. 7

Through a thinking of reproduction - a thinking that "' reproduction - what was once singular becomes an object of
reproducibility, even when it is not being reproduced. When the morphology of the artwork is dematerialized, the
moment of' reproduction itself becomes the artwork. In the transition from ritual to politics, the artwork now shifts from
cult value to exbibition value. In a visually oriented culture of reproduction, the nonmediated gaze actually becomes the
artificial one, and the masses are trained to enjoy the shock experience that resides in viewing a set of moving pictures. In
an unresolved dialectical tension, Benjamin shows that it is impossible to decide whether such technical transformation

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 of the auratic provides a welcome and potentially redemptive instrument for the shattering of delusional cult values that
remain attached to the bourgeois artwork or whether this transformation clears the way for a radical aestheticization of
politics that exploits the new technologies of representation for its own discourses of power.

Even though Adorno stood in intimate intellectual dialogue with Benjamin during the time when he formulated his
theory of aura, there is nothing self-evident or expected about his appropriation of Benjamin's concept. After all, at times
Adorno's negative dialectics appeared to be not fully in line with Benjamin's thinking. Questioning Benjamin's
commitment to the dialectic, Adorno more than once admonished him to make his theoretical categories more
transparent. On 10 November 1938 Adorno [p.31] wrote to Benjamin from New York regarding the latter's texts on
Baudelaire and Paris: "If one wished to put it very drastically, one could say that your work is located at the crossroads of
magic and positivism. This place is bewitched. Only theory could break the spell: your own ruthless, properly speculative
theory." 8 Regardless of what Adorno may have missed in his friend's work - as Kafka, a writer they both admired, has his
Prison Chaplain say in The Trial:"Understanding a matter correctly and misunderstanding the same matter are not
mutually exclusive" 9 - his commments reveal some of the contours of the direction in which Adorno eventually hopes to
take the concept of aura, that is, toward an unorthodox materialist form of negative dialectics.

In the Aesthetic Theory too Adorno cautions against a reductive reading of Benjamin's concept in a way that would
perpetuate the questionable binarism of auratic and post auratic art too dogmatically: "Each work, insofar as it is
intended for many, is already its own reproduction. That in his dichotomization of the auratic and the technological
artwork Benjamin suppressed this element common to both in favor of their difference, would be the dialectical critique
of his theory." 10 Therefore, "conceived undialectically, the theory of aura lends itself to misuse." Instead Adorno
refunctionalizes Benjamin's aura when he gives us the dimension of its excessiveness to think: "Aura is not only - as
Benjamin claimed - the here and now of the artwork, it is whatever points beyond its given ness, its content; one cannot
abolish it and still want art. Even demystified artworks are more than what is literally the case in them." This is so,
according to Adorno, because the internal law of the artwork, its figurative construction, "is more than a mere analogy to
the administered world [Verwaltete Welt].''11

[p.32] This is to say that while Benjamin's notion of the auratic and postauratic artwork still relies on a tenuous model of
analogy in which the artwork enacts within the logic of its representational structure the conditions of the socioempirical
regimes in which it is embedded — the worlds of auratic and technophilic perception, respectively - Adorno wishes to
emphasize the ways in which the artwork not only stages the societal conditions of its scopic regimes (even where it
helped to first create them) but also continues to preserve a hidden gesture that radically separates the artwork from its
cultural episteme. For him, the nonauratic artwork too is a provocation to the nonauratic world, even as it perpetuates it.
Adorno finds this double movement inscribed in what he sees as the artwork's excessiveness, the ways in which it always
points to an elsewhere that can never simply be present, not unlike the philosophy of the deferred "not yet" in the work of
Ernst Bloch, a mutual friend of Adorno's and Benjamin's.

To specify the logic of his appropriation of Benjamin's notion of aura, Adorno offers the following account:

In this context Benjamin's concept of aura is important:

"The concept of aura proposed above with reference to historical objects may usefully be illustrated with
reference to the aura of natural ones. We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a
distance, however close it may be. While resting on a summer afternoon to let one's gaze follow a mountain
range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow over one — that is to breathe the aura of those
mountains, or of that branch." Here what is called aura is known to artistic experience as the atmosphere of
the artwork, that whereby the nexus of the artwork's elements points beyond this nexus and allows each
individual element to point beyond itself. Precisely this constituent of art, for which the existentialontological
term "being attuned" provides only a distorted equivalent, is what in the artwork escapes its factual reality,
what, fleeting and elusive - and this could hardly have been conceived in Hegel' s time - can nevertheless be
objectivated in the form of artistic technique. The reason why the auratic element does not deserve Hegel's
ban is that more insistent analysis can show that it is an objective determination of the artwork. Even when
[p.33] artworks divest themselves of every atmospheric element – a development inaugurated by Baudelaire -
it is conserved [aufgehoben] in them as a negated and shunned element.12

In Adorno's reading of Benjamin's concept, the dialectical and transformative simultaneity of proximity and distance
within the auratic experience becomes visible as one of the names of the artistic gesture that can be contained neither by

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 the cultural logic in which it is embedded nor by the structural logic of the work itself. Its elusiveness, its ephemeral, even
spectral qualities - it is no accident that Benjamin employs the word Gespinst (weave) in his definition of aura, a German
word close to Gespenst (ghost or specter) — simultaneously inscribe it in and remove it from the logic of technical and
cultural reproduction. For Adorno, this dialectical tension signifies the usefulness of aura as a politically charged category
of aesthetic experience.

That this aesthetic experience cannot ultimately be contained by this or that political program signals its explosive
potential. Adorno elaborates:

Because artworks register and objectivate levels of experience that are fundamental to the relation to reality
yet are almost always concealed by reification, aesthetic experience is socially as well as metaphysically
compelling .... Benjamin's definition of aura touched on this inner-aesthetic element. . Compared with auratic
art, degraded, dishonored, and administered art is by no means without aura: The opposition between these
antagonistic spheres must always be conceived as the mediation of one through the other. In the
contemporary situation, those works honor the auratic element that abstain from it; its destructive
conservation — its mobilization for the production of effects in the interest of creating mood — has its locus
in amusement. Entertainment [p.33] art adulterates on the one hand the real layer of the aesthetic, which is
divested of its mediation and reduced to mere facticity, to information and reportage; on the other hand, it
rips the auratic element out of the nexus of the work, cultivates it as such, and makes it consumable. Every
close-up in commercial film mocks aura by contriving to exploit the contrived nearness of the distant, cut off
from the work as a whole. Aura is gulped down along with the sensual stimuli; it is the uniform sauce that the
culture industry pours over the whole of its manufacture.13

To say that the auratic can be honored by a work of art precisely when it refuses to contain it is to emphasize a moment of
negative dialectic in the aesthetic experience under the reign of postauratic art. For an artwork to honor the auratic by
remaining silent about it means that the work gives us the possibility to think most urgently of aura when it does not
seem to be concerned with this quality on the surface. Only by refusing to accept the responsibility of the auratic directly
can the artwork still empower and invite us to think it through. It is not grounded, by its form, in a position that would
enable it to provide reliable ideological guidance. The work operates, to borrow Paul de Man's formulation, "on the level
of the signifier and contains no responsible pronouncement on the nature of the world - despite its powerful potential to
create the opposite illusion." 14 This predicament is the assumption of responsibility born out of the artwork's rejection
of responsibility. By turning its back on the auratic, the work calls upon us to think the auratic again and again. This
movement may contain the reauratization of the artwork not in terms of a regressive triumphalist presence but as a mute
gesture toward a distant thinkability.

At the same time, this conception of aura calls upon us to remain vigilant with regard to cultural representations that
disseminate endless simulacra of the auratic in the paradoxical guise of' celebrating its final demise. What Benjamin once
called the "blue flower" in the land of [p.36] technology, the lost un mediated gaze in a world of perpetual technical
mediation, reemerges in Adorno as the seductive but manipulative delusion by which the aura of actual experience is
deployed again and again precisely when no such thing is said to exist any longer. The current system of dependencies
and commodity fetishisms has long outgrown even dialectical readings of aura: from the vantage of the system, the point
is to perpetuate its consumption by any means necessary. Its interpretation is up to you, as long as you continue to
countersign it in your checkbook.

For Adorno, the weak hope lodged in the auratic is the point at which, in its excessiveness, the logic and relentless
rhythm of the system that contains it can no longer account for the movements of its inner aesthetic deviance. On the far
side of this or that political program, the auratic breaks out of the logic of its frame when the laws of its internal aesthetic
figurations turn on themselves in a Sprung.

It is in this sense that Adorno gives us Benjamin's shattered aura to think - neither as an object of nostalgia nor as a cause
for celebration, but rather as the name for something that is still to come, an "it shall be different." An act of
memorialization that remains faithful to Benjamin by not following him fully, this is Adorno's gift to the aura of his
friend.

Notes

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 1. Theodor W, Adorno, 'Commitment," in his Notes to Literature, vol, 1, trans Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press). pp.
93-94
2. Theodor W. Adorno, "Erinner! ungen," ir' his Uber Walter Benjamin (Frankfurt am MaIO Suhrkamp. 1990), p. 83. Translation mine
3. Theodor W Adorno, "Charakteristik Walter Benjamins," in his Uber W"lter BenJamin, p 24. Translation m'"e
4. W"lter Benjamin, "Short Sh"dows (11)," trans Rodney Livingston, in BenJamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass __ Harvard University
Press, 1999), p. 699 Translation modified.
5. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades ProJect, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 456
6. Walter Benjamin, "Little History of Photography," trans Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, in Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, p, 518.
Translation modified
7. The crucial difference between mere reproduction and the more encompassing and complex notion of reproducibility is elided in the standard
English translation of Benjamin's "Artwork" essay. A more faithful translation 01 "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner tech nischen
Reproduzierbarke.t" is "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility" The common translation, "The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction," is symptomatically misleading, It irresponsibly substitutes "mechanical" for "technical" Ifor Benjamin. there is a
significant difference between the two) and 'reproduction" for "reproducibility" It also omits Benjam,rl's emphasis on self-reflexivity and movement
away from transparent human agency by simply ignoring
"seiner" ("its") In short. the translation fails to perform a reproduction of Benjamin's essay, remaining caught in the trecherous potential of
reproducibility, a"d thus inadvertently enacting the text's POlOt
8. Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Briefwechsel1928-1940 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), p. 368. Translation mine
9. Franz Kafka, Der Procef3 (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. 1994), p. 229 Translation mine
10. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans, Robert Huflot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). p. 33
11. Ibid" p. 73
12. Ibid., p. 274
13. Ibid, pp, 310-311
14. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). p. 10

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