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Distance, however close (on Walter Benjamin’s aura) · Soft Ratios Research

• 0:09
  Figure: Soft Ratios Research.
• 0:12
  Ground: The voices are synthetic [pause] no act, just the thinking.
• 0:19
  Figure: Hoyd Breton, a designer at Soft Ratios Studio, teaching himself in the open [pause] which works better with a reply. [pause] If this is interesting, write a review with your thoughts.
• 0:30
  Ground: One subject at a time, twice a week [pause] Tuesday and Thursday. [pause] Today, Walter Benjamin and the word aura.
• 0:39
  Figure: There's a sentence people carry around about Benjamin without having read a page of him. The original has an aura. The copy doesn't. You stand in front of the real painting and something comes off it that no reproduction can carry.
• 0:52
  Ground: And it feels true. That's the trouble with it.
• 0:56
  Figure: Wrong in three separate ways, though — and the wrongness is the interesting part. First: it treats aura as a thing the object owns. A property. Like weight, or color. Something you could in principle measure.
• 1:09
  Ground: Which is how you'd sell it. Rarity you can price.
• 1:13
  Figure: Second, it assumes Benjamin was mourning. That he stood at the edge of the mechanical age wringing his hands over what was being lost. And third — this is the one that gets buried — it forgets the whole thing is a political argument. He isn't writing about art appreciation. He's writing, in the end, against fascism.
• 1:31
  Ground: So before we can say what aura is, we've got three bodies to clear off the floor. Property, mourning, and the missing politics. [pause] But here's what snags me. If it isn't a property of the object — then where is it? What's left for the word to point at?
• 1:49
  Figure: That's the question, and Benjamin's own answer is stranger than the misreading. Miriam Hansen put it most exactly. Aura isn't a property of persons or objects at all. It belongs to the medium of perception. It names a structure of vision. A way of looking — not a thing looked at.
• 2:08
  Ground: Then it lives in me, not in the mountain.
• 2:11
  Figure: In the relation. Between you and the mountain. Which is why you can't buy it as an object-property — and why losing it would mean a change in the structure of perception itself.
• 2:21
  Ground: So how does a word like that — a way of seeing — end up at the center of an argument about fascism? That's a long way to travel.
• 2:30
  Figure: It travels further than that. Because the word doesn't start in a museum or a lecture hall. It starts in a room, with Benjamin on a supervised dose of hashish, arguing with ghosts. [pause] The record is precise, so let me carry it precisely. From nineteen twenty-seven Benjamin sat for a series of drug experiments run by two physicians — Ernst Joël and Fritz Fränkel, men who studied narcotics and used him as a subject. The protocols run about seven years. The decisive one is dated the beginning of March, nineteen thirty. [pause] Eyes closed, mid-experience, he works the concept out for the first time — and he does it as a fight. A fight with the theosophists — in an occult culture where spiritualists had spent decades trying to photograph vital emanations. He finds their ignorance — his word — repugnant. [pause] And against them he lays down three rules. Genuine aura appears in all things, not just in certain kinds of things — everything. It changes utterly with every movement the thing makes. And it is no clean magic ray. Its real mark is ornament — an ornamental sheath, an encircling, in which the thing sits enclosed as in a case.
• 3:46
  Ground: So the first time Benjamin works the word into his distinctive modern concept, he does it to take it back from the mystics.
• 3:55
  Figure: To steal it and strip it. He points at Van Gogh's late paintings — where the aura looks painted in, right there with the objects, in the world, not floating above them. Ornamental. Mutable. Material. That's the founding gesture, and it's the part most retellings cut.
• 4:12
  Ground: Because it ruins the mood. You can't sell an ornamental sheath you have to argue for. You can sell a glow. [pause] But that's a private note. A man talking to himself with his eyes shut. When does he say it out loud?
• 4:29
  Figure: The next year. An essay on the history of photography — the first time the definition sees print. And he poses it as a question, which I love. What is aura, actually? Then: a strange weave of space and time. The unique appearance of a distance, however near it may be.
• 4:47
  Ground: Say that again slowly. The unique appearance of a distance, however near it may be. That's a knot.
• 4:54
  Figure: It's a knot in German too, and the translators have fought over it. The word for weave is Gespinst — something spun. Web, gossamer, cobweb. One early translator gives web, another gives weave, and both lose that it's spun, that it can catch you, like a spider's work. Delicate and a little entrapping at once. [pause] Then Ferne — we say distance, but not distance you'd pace out in steps. Farness. Remoteness. Closer to unapproachability. And einmalig — we say unique, but it's flatter and stranger than that. One-time. Once-only. Unrepeatable. The uniqueness is in time as much as space.
• 5:41
  Ground: So the definition is doing the very thing it describes. It holds you at a distance while you're right up against it, reading it.
• 5:49
  Figure: And he gives you a way to feel it. A summer afternoon. You follow a mountain range on the horizon, or a branch throwing its shadow on you, until the moment, the hour, becomes part of how they appear. That, he says, is to breathe the aura of that mountain, that branch. No original, no copy, no market. Just attention held long enough that time soaks into what you're looking at.
• 6:14
  Ground: And the distance doesn't close. You watch the branch and it stays far off somehow, even in your hands. [pause] Let me sit here a second, because this is the part that unsettles me. Benjamin says the thing that kills this — the thing eating the distance — is a desire. The desire of the crowd to get closer to things. To have them near, to hold them, to keep a copy in the pocket. And I feel the pull of that. Wanting the far thing near is not a crime. It's almost tender. [pause] But watch what it costs. The moment I can have the mountain in my pocket, the mountain stops holding me off. It stops being able to refuse me. And a thing that can't refuse you — that you can approach completely, own completely — is a thing you stop revering. [pause] The distance wasn't standing in the way of the experience. The distance was the experience.
• 7:25
  Figure: Hold that. Because it's the hinge of the whole second half — and there's one more thing from the photography essay that complicates the gloom. The camera doesn't only take. It reveals. It shows you a space worked over by the unconscious — a person's gait caught mid-step, the structure of a plant. Things the naked eye can't hold. He calls it the optical unconscious. So reproduction destroys one thing and discloses another.
• 7:52
  Ground: Two loops open. File them both.
• 7:54
  Figure: Now the big one — the artwork essay. And here the record gets tangled, because there is no single essay. He starts it late nineteen thirty-five. Three main German versions and a French translation. The only one printed in his lifetime was that French translation, cut and edited in ways he protested by letter. [pause] The version almost everyone in English has read is Harry Zohn's — and Zohn translated the last German text, from nineteen thirty-nine. That's the text behind his famous translation — the title everyone half-remembers, the age of mechanical reproduction. But the scholars now reach for the second version, from nineteen thirty-six, the typescript Benjamin himself thought definitive, the one boldest about play and possibility. Hansen prefers it. And the two read differently. The later one leans harder into decline.
• 8:48
  Ground: So the melancholy everyone feels in Benjamin might partly be an accident of which version got famous.
• 8:55
  Figure: Partly. That's not nothing.
• 8:58
  Ground: Give me the argument of it, though. What withers?
• 9:01
  Figure: The aura withers — his word, wither, an organic word, atrophy. Even the most perfect reproduction lacks the work's here-and-now — its unique existence in one place — and that loss jeopardizes its authenticity and authority. Its one existence, in one place, with one history. Reproduction pulls the object out of tradition and hands you a plurality of copies where there was a single thing. And authenticity — Echtheit — he defines not as some mystical essence but as provenance. Duration. Testimony. The object as the same one all the way through time, wear and owners and all.
• 9:44
  Ground: Stop. That's the object again. Provenance, duration, the wear, the history of owners — that's all in the thing. You just told me aura lives in the relation, in the looking. Now it's the paper trail. Which is it?
• 9:59
  Figure: ...That's the fair hit. And the honest answer is that Benjamin himself lets the object-reading in, right here. In the artwork essay he narrows the concept on purpose — sharpens it into something almost measurable — because he's inside a Marxist argument and he needs a blade, not a cloud. So the essay half-licenses the very misreading we opened by killing.
• 10:21
  Ground: So the popular version isn't a misreading of this text. It's a faithful reading of the wrong version.
• 10:28
  Figure: Closer to it than I'd like. The structure-of-perception idea is the whole concept. The artwork essay is one strategic narrowing of it, for one fight. Hansen's correction is really: don't mistake the blade for the man. [pause] But take the essay on its own terms, because the fight is real. He tells a history. Art begins in ritual — magic first, then religion. Its first value is cult value. And cult value can hide: the statue in the inner chamber that only the priest ever sees. The power isn't in being looked at.
• 11:06
  Ground: The thing that's potent because it's kept from you.
• 11:09
  Figure: Then reproduction floods in and tips the scale toward exhibition value — display, availability, being seen by anyone anywhere. And that, Benjamin says, emancipates the work of art — frees it from its parasitical dependence on ritual. Instead of being founded on ritual, art gets founded on a different practice — politics. That's the sentence. That's the celebration. Aura's decay is a jailbreak.
• 11:36
  Ground: And the performer, in front of the camera?
• 11:38
  Figure: The clearest case. Put a person before the apparatus and their aura withers, because aura is bound to presence, to being here now, and there's no facsimile of that. So they act with their whole living person while forgoing the aura bound to their presence in the here and now. And the industry sells you a replacement — the cult of the star. Which preserves not the aura of a human being but what he calls the spell of the personality. The phony spell of a commodity.
• 12:10
  Ground: The glow you can buy. We're back where I started — you can't sell the sheath, so they hand you a counterfeit halo instead.
• 12:20
  Figure: And now the counterfeit is the whole economy of it. And here's why any of this is worth writing in exile with fascism rising. The epilogue. [pause] Benjamin quotes a Futurist manifesto — Marinetti's — glorifying the invasion of Abyssinia, calling war beautiful. Beautiful because it metallizes the human body, because machine-gun fire is a flowering of fiery orchids. [pause] Benjamin reads that and says: self-alienation has reached the point where mankind can watch its own destruction as a first-rate aesthetic pleasure. That's the aestheticizing of politics — making annihilation beautiful so people will love it. His name for it is Fiat ars, pereat mundus. Let there be art, though the world perish. Fascism gives the masses expression while denying them the right to change property relations. The answer, the last line, reverses the terms. Fascism renders politics aesthetic. Communism replies by politicizing art.
• 13:20
  Ground: So the decay of aura isn't a curator's worry. It's the ground you fight fascism on. If art's power still runs on ritual and mystique and the untouchable glow, fascism can seize exactly that. Aura's decay opens the field of struggle. It doesn't settle it.
• 13:40
  Figure: The same reproductive powers can serve revolutionary politics or fascist aestheticization. Benjamin's answer isn't merely to strip the glow — it's to politicize art.
• 13:51
  Ground: But sit me back down in front of that mountain. Because if the whole point were just — good, the glow's gone — we wouldn't still be talking. So what are we actually asking? What's the real question under the word?
• 14:05
  Figure: It was never originals against copies. It's what happens to human experience — to distance, to reciprocity, to depth — when the way we perceive gets industrialized. And whether the answer is loss or freedom depends entirely on which Benjamin you're reading.
• 14:22
  Ground: And there are two Benjamins.
• 14:24
  Figure: There are. The one we just heard wants aura gone. But a few years on, in the essays on Baudelaire, the tone changes completely — and so does the definition. Aura gets redefined as reciprocity. To perceive the aura of a thing, he writes, is to invest it with the ability to look back at you.
• 14:43
  Ground: The thing opens its eyes.
• 14:46
  Figure: The experience of aura, he says, comes from taking a response we know from human relationships — the exchange of a look — and carrying it over onto objects, onto nature. You look at the thing and the thing looks back. And that capacity is ancient. It's the mimetic faculty, the archaic gift for finding likenesses, surviving inside modern perception.
• 15:10
  Ground: And now the loop you told me to hold pays off — because in the Arcades notes he sets aura against its exact opposite, and the opposite is the trace. Listen to the symmetry. The trace is the appearance of a nearness, however far the thing that left it may be. The aura is the appearance of a distance, however close the thing that calls it forth. [pause] A footprint is a trace. The animal's long gone, but the nearness is right there in the mud, and I can read it, master it — I possess the thing through its mark. The aura runs the other way. The thing is right in front of me and still it holds off, and instead of me taking possession of it, it takes possession of me. [pause] That's his line. In the trace, we gain possession of the thing. In the aura, it takes possession of us.
• 16:10
  Figure: And you can hear that that's no longer a jailbreak. That's a love story, and a loss. [pause] He ties it to Proust. Voluntary memory gives you information — facts about the past on demand. But involuntary memory, the kind ambushed loose by a taste or a smell, restores the object's depth, the sedimented time in it. That's what a returned gaze releases. And modern life, all shock, all jolt, shatters the conditions for it. Integrated experience thins out into a run of disconnected moments. The gaze can't be returned because nothing holds still long enough to look.
• 16:52
  Ground: So the same man who cheered the glow gone now grieves that nothing looks back. [pause] Which makes me suspicious of the whole apparatus. Because listen — all of this rests on a claim that there was once a fuller way of seeing that we've fallen out of. A perceptual golden age. And that's exactly the story the reactionaries told. The life-philosophers, Klages and that crowd — cosmic, backward-looking, some of them poisonous. Benjamin lifted his vocabulary straight out of their pockets. How do I know the historicity of perception isn't just nostalgia with footnotes?
• 17:37
  Figure: Because the historicity part isn't Klages. It's Riegl. Alois Riegl, the art historian — his idea of the Kunstwollen, the will-to-form that shifts era to era. He studied late Roman art and refused to call it a decline from the Greeks. He called it a different perception, and he mapped it — a movement from the near, tactile, close-up way of seeing to the far, optical, spatial one. Perception has a documented history. Benjamin takes that straight: the way sense perception is organized, he writes, is set by historical circumstance as much as by nature.
• 18:18
  Ground: But Riegl didn't rank them. He didn't say the tactile past was warmer, richer, more human. He said different. Benjamin says decay. He smuggles a value into a story that was only meant to describe. The word wither does the smuggling.
• 18:38
  Figure: ...Yes. That's the crack, and Adorno saw it — he called the account undialectical: too dismissive of autonomous art and too optimistic that distracted mass reception was inherently progressive. And the truer thing is this. Benjamin stole a word soaked in longing and never fully wrung the longing out. The materialist got the concept. The mystic kept the ache. Both are in every use of the word — which is why it won't sit still.
• 19:08
  Ground: So the ambivalence isn't him being careless. It's the word carrying two histories at once.
• 19:14
  Figure: It's structural. Scholem always insisted you can't cut the theology out of even the most Marxist Benjamin — the redemptive charge is right there in his verbs. Liquidation isn't only destruction; it's a settling of accounts, a clearing that opens onto something. He never chose between the two. I don't think he could, and I don't think he should have.
• 19:36
  Ground: Then let me ask the thing I actually want to know, and let it stay open. If aura never simply vanished — if it only moved — where would it have gone?
• 19:48
  Figure: The scholars who doubt the disappearance say exactly that. It didn't die; it was displaced. Maybe it slides off the object onto the event. The encounter. The provenance record. The story behind it, the gesture. Even Berger — who flattened all of this for a mass audience — noticed that reproduction can make the cult of the original stronger, not weaker. The rarer the real thing gets against its ten thousand copies, the more bogus religiosity gathers around it. He called it that. Bogus. Market price wearing the robes of the sacred.
• 20:22
  Ground: Which is the phony spell again, just relocated. So we can't even trust the migration. It might only be the counterfeit halo finding new places to sit.
• 20:33
  Figure: That's the risk in every re-auratization — from outside you can't tell whether the glow is earned or sold. But I keep landing on the deeper lesson, the Riegl one. If perception really has a history — if a new way of seeing generates new categories of experience — then asking whether aura is lost may be the wrong question entirely. New organs of perception make new kinds of distance, new kinds of return.
• 20:59
  Ground: And that lands it back where he started, in the room, arguing with the mystics. He never wanted the glow. He wanted the looking to be honest.
• 21:10
  Figure: He wanted to know what a thing does to you when you attend to it long enough. Whether it holds its distance. Whether it can still turn you away.
• 21:19
  Ground: So the question was never how to give a made thing an aura. Nobody can hand it one. All that can be done is arrange the kind of attention it invites — and hope it's the kind that lets the thing hold off, and hold you.
• 21:35
  Figure: But what if more and more things are built to be taken in completely? Nothing withheld. Nothing that could keep you at arm's length. A world of traces — things we read, and pocket, and master — and less and less that takes us the other way.
• 21:52
  Ground: If aura is a way of seeing and not something objects own, then the question isn't how to give a work its glow — it's what kind of attention a made thing allows, and what kind it quietly shuts down. When was the last time something made was allowed to look back?