Usable Auras

In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain. Mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new. Historically, it advanced intermittently and in leaps at long intervals, but with accelerated intensity. The Greeks knew only two procedures of technically reproducing works of art: founding and stamping. Bronzes, terra cottas, and coins were the only art works which they could produce in quantity. All others were unique and could not be mechanically reproduced. With the woodcut graphic art became mechanically reproducible for the first time, long before script became reproducible by print. The enormous changes which printing, the mechanical reproduction of writing, has brought about in literature are a familiar story. However, within the phenomenon which we are here examining from the perspective of world history, print is merely a special, though particularly important, case. During the Middle Ages engraving and etching were added to the woodcut; at the beginning of the nineteenth century lithography made its appearance. With lithography the technique of reproduction reached an essentially new stage. This much more direct process was distinguished by the tracing of the design on a stone rather than its incision on a block of wood or its etching on a copperplate and permitted graphic art for the first time to put its products on the market, not only in large numbers as hitherto, but also in daily changing forms. Lithography enabled graphic art to illustrate everyday life, and it began to keep pace with printing. But only a few decades after its invention, lithography was surpassed by photography ... Around 1900 technical reproduction had reached a standard that not only permitted it to reproduce all transmitted works of art and thus to cause the most profound change in their impact upon the public; it also had captured a place of its own among the artistic processes. For the study of this standard nothing is more revealing than the nature of the repercussions that these two different manifestations – the reproduction of works of art and the art of the film – have had on art in its traditional form. 

- Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

Why is this essay so frequently referenced today? One explanation is the durable and wide-ranging cachet Benjamin has long possessed among humanities scholars. He was a far more tragic and enigmatic figure than any of his colleagues in the Frankfurt School, with neither the Mandarin self-assurance of Adorno nor the strict social-scientism of Pollock. His interests were engagingly obscure, and his forays into Jewish mysticism contributed to the still noticeable mystique that surrounded his scholarly persona. His aphoristic style often made him seem like more of an esoteric sovereign  Nietzschean than he really was. Is it all that surprising, then, that this essay--so responsive to contemporary anxieties about media, and yet so unmistakably Benjaminian--has benefited from his, well, aura?

And yet the essay itself is not especially well-argued, something that is easily missed when one focuses on Benjamin's hypnotically erudite style. Why should 1900 be chosen as a cut-off point for the disappearance of the aura, when Benjamin himself presents many other candidates for this role? What makes the form of alienation Benjamin sees as peculiar to film all that different from, say, the various theatrical experiments that became popular in the 1700s? (An eighteenth-century audience certainly had no qualms about playing the critic during a performance, and whatever cultic value their plays possessed would quickly dissipate under the barrage of theater-criticism that accompanied every new play.) Why should we accept his premise that art would necessarily retain its magical significance after humanity emerged from the Stone Age? In fact, why isn't there any attention to context in his formulation at all?

These are serious problems, and they are especially unfortunate because of the coloring they have given to our contemporary debates about the transformative power of media. Supporters and opponents of digitization alike have taken for granted that what is at stake is the survival of some kind of aura, usually metonymized as "the smell of old books." It is especially interesting to observe what has happened to Benjamin's argument as it has been adapted to the present context: the printed book, one of the paradigmatic instances of mechanical reproduction, has been retroactively awarded an aura in order to juxtapose it to the supposedly interchangeable digital text. (Vinyl records, which Benjamin would no doubt consider equally reproducible, have experienced a similar rehabilitation.)

I don't think this retroactive aura constitutes decisive evidence that all Benjaminian approaches to media are wrong, but I do think it points us to a possible revision of his approach. The aura isn't something that lives in a work of art created in a particular way, nor is it something that disappears when creation is mediated by technology. Rather, the aura is a rhetorical function, an attribute that attaches to an art-object when the authenticity of its form becomes a matter of debate. It can emerge when a newer form confronts an older one--in the case of print or Plato on writing, for instance---but also in other configurations. (The contemporary mass-market paperback is only a little older than the e-text, although it has been vastly more popular.) And this is not "mere rhetoric": as vinyl records show, the aura as a rhetorical function can in fact be decisive for determining the fate of a media technology.

If we apply this to "Work of Art" itself, we can see exactly this process at work. Benjamin isn't merely recognizing the existence (or non-existence) of the aura; he's embedding it within a broader argument about the political implications of media technologies. (Like most Frankfurt School texts, his essay is not about what it's about so much as it's about the political dimensions of mass culture.) As a rhetorical function, the aura is dependent on its strategic context of use, so much so that it would lose all meaning if it were removed from it. In other words, we've been reading the piece wrong for ages. We should've been reading the epilogue first.