The Concept of “Aura” in Benjamin’s Artwork Essay

In Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” the second, less censored version of which I will primarily deal with here (1936), the concept of “aura” seems to thread its way in and out of multiple schools of media studies: aura becomes an index of diachronic shifts in “symbolic forms,” a synchronic marker of modern perceptual modes, and a key term in locating medium-specificity. What seems missing from the often one-dimensional treatment of Benjamin’s use of aura (it’s destroyed!) is the presence of a paradoxical investment in its positive potentialities. Tracking some of the modulations in the concept within the Artwork essay will more fully allow us to speculate on the potential of aura within the mass media––the presence of which is much more apparent in the recently translated second version of the essay, as opposed to the now famous third version published in Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt. What is accomplished in what Benjamin calls the liberation from industrial drudgery into a fantastic “playspace?” How much stress can we put on his depiction of the cinematic spectator going on “journeys of adventure” (117)? And, a question that I seem to be very personally invested in, can it be possible that vegging out can serve a revolutionary function? Read the rest of this entry »

The need for a megatelescope

from The Arcades Project:

From Fourier’s last work, La Fausse Industrie ,1835-1836>: “The celebrated American hoax associated with Herschel’s discoveries about the world of the moon had raised in Fourier, once the hoax was revealed as such, the hope of a direct vision of the phalanstery on other palnets. … Here is Fourier’s response: ‘The American hoax,’ he declares, ‘proves, first, the anarchy of the press; second, the barrenness of storytellers concerned with the extraterrestrial; third, man’s ignorance of the atmospheric shells; fourth, the need for a megatelescope.’” Ferrari, ‘Des Idées et de l’école de Fourier,” Revue des deux mondes, 14, no. 3 (1845), p. 415.

-Benjamin, The Arcades Project, convolute W [Fourier], W6a,4

Steampunk

from The Arcades Project:

Here was the last refuge of those infant prodigies that saw the light of day at the time of the world exhibitions: the briefcase with interior lighting, the meter-long pocket knife, or the patented umbrella handle with built-in watch and revolver. And near the degenerate giant creatures, aborted and broken-down matter. We followed the narrow dark corrider to where–between a discount bookstore, in which dusty tied-up bundles tell of all sorts of failure, and a shop selling only buttons (mother-of-pearl and the kind that in Paris are called de fantasie)–there stood a sort of salon. On the pale-colored wallpaper full of figures and busts shone a gas lamp. By its light, an old woman sat reading. They say she has been there alone for years, and collects sets of teeth ‘in gold, in wax, and broken.’ Since that day, moreover, we know where Doctor Mircale got the wax out of which she fashioned Olympia.

–Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, convolute H [The Collector]