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Aura-l
Prof. Lewis Keir Johnson currently teaches History & Theory of Art in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sabancy´ Üniversitesi in Istanbul, Turkey
'It is inherent in the technique of the film as well as that of sports that everybody who witnesses its accomplishments is somewhat of an expert. This is obvious to anyone listening to a group of newspaper boys leaning on their bicycles and discussing the outcome of a bicycle race.'
--Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'
This paper is about the unreadable between the auratic and the aural, and the visible between the seen and the heard. It's about the dash linking 'aura' to 'aural' in its title - the link which looks like a subtraction. It's about bicycles and the bicycle race, the dash and reflection; conditions of art, and of criticism.
Imagine - that the dash is a finishing line which we cannot cross, except in fantasy and in haste.
The argument would be simple: aura would not be essentially visual. Visu-aural? Something of some narrative among others, aurality and visibility; something visual and auratic which seems to resound as if it were audible: an experience which would not quite be identified as synaesthetic, or as kinaesthetic. Rather, synanaesthetic; kinanaesthetic [1]. Cinema as arrest; film and a 'new law'. [2] The roles of fantasy in the cinema - the cinema in Benjamin's argument, in his kino-aesthetic, progressive and regressive; progressive even because regressive, and regressive even because progressive - progressive despite being ensnared in the non-progressive opposition of fascism and communism, as well as in the non-progressive opposition of progression and regression. If Benjamin is to be credited, film is regressive because it's progressive; and progressive, because it's regressive. So he's neither just for it or against it - or against being for it; or for being against it. From out of which difficulties - I shall argue - something useful and desirable can nevertheless emerge: the identification, that is, of problematics of the useful as the desirable, 'vehicled' as such in film.
'This is obvious to anyone listening to a group of newspaper boys leaning on their bicycles and discussing the outcome of a bicycle race.'
I haven't had the privilege, but, as I shall argue, this moment in Benjamin's text invites us to produce an argument, rather than to reproduce one - even if quite what we might seem to be reproducing when we produce isn't known. This was the case then, when newspaper boys discussed bicycle races, even if they don't now; and it remains so today. So true, it's obvious? The obvious - the truly more than the true? Another dash, past the truth. What if, rather, the truth passes here, passes somewhere, now and again? The truth as more than the true. More than the true that was, or even shall be. Which is then what? The truth? Benjamin wrote of 'aura'. Which can be (what has been) heard - if you hear it. If you listen? If you listen, it's 'obvious'? Not necessarily, I would say.
I draw attention to the remark about the newpaper boys in order to indicate a moment of panic in Benjamin's apparently well-known essay, something which has not - to my knowledge - been mentioned and developed in other commentaries. Perhaps this has been because no-one has been quite taken in, and has duly - and obviously - taken the measure of that moment of panic - and let it pass. Even if this is so, however, then the panic seems to me worth exploring, as something other than 'mere' panic - whatever that might be: as if there was panic without occasion - and as if panic 'situated' us, authentically, beyond time proper and could thus, in a sort of logical recuperation of the problem of panic, be adjudged the discovery of some sort of renewed, and renewable, subjectivity. For some such value appears to accrue in Benjamin's argument. Not without reason. But it's a reason which has been definitively separated from itself - a production of a transcendentality of reason - reason as an idea of reason. Into which abyss of thought would fall aura - significantly enough, in this case, the discovery of an aura of what is immanently a matter of some politics. Out of which abyssal descent emerges the bad-temperedness of something which might be called 'political', a bad-temperedness of which Benjamin might be a witness, but a witness precisely of the unwilling witnessing against which aura would never - if we follow the detail of Benjamin's text, and even apparently move against the drift of any sentimentalist account of aura; aura being precisely not the already knownness of feelings - have been quite a successful defence.
Contrary to an obvious reading, a reading which skirts the problem of the remark by Benjamin to the effect that something is 'obvious', aura would be - at least in passing, if not essentially - 'aura-l'.
'This is obvious to anyone listening...'
I do not wish to subtract the possibility of an auratic aura-l from among other synanaesthetic modes. To do so would be to remove the voice, or the rhythm of someone's step, or music from the realm of possibilities of the production of what may be thought of as auratic. Rather than this absurdity, it is my aim to suggest that we may misunderstand calling something auratic, or the occasion of aura - run on, even ahead of ourselves, as if we believed that in calling something auratic, or the occasion of aura, we were likely to be affirming it; or likely to be betraying it - and that this misunderstanding, or misrecognition, was part of what gets recuperated as an aura-l aura - the belief that there is a body - a logic of a body - which will feel as we do.
I think that it might assist, where some assistance has already been given, to re-situate the auratic apart from its modes: modes which might be enumerated, after the event, but which will always have missed something, even as the witness misses something, about the witnessing which aura produces. Which is not to reduce aura to witnessing, but rather to broach the theme of the production of aura: what aura produces, and what produces aura - which matters, if there is to be something other than some merely programmatic or romantic reproduction of modes of the auratic, and a confirmation of the identity of those who believe themselves capable of testifying to its effects.[3]
Indeed, what if one of the subjects of Benjamin's perhaps not known quite well enough essay turned out to have been some inmixing of film and spectator such that there had been a shift of being able to say what saying the auratic was about? He does say that the cinematic work, 'the film', dupes 'everybody who witnesses its accomplishments'. One thing it might dupe us into believing is that we know what the fate of aura - as something which might be represented, as image, and speech; word about image - might be: a kind of anticipatory rush, after a movie, out of a film theatre, which would be conditioned by what Benjamin calls 'the film'. There would thus be a sort of temptation - a new originality of sin - to imagine the political as the space of the outcome of politics - a theatricalisation of the possibility of the political as an outcome: a tendency to dash for the line, with film identified as the bringer of the beginning of the end of the political as the politics of aura. What Benjamin looks to divert from the possibilities of fascism - but which may not be distinguishable from the totalitarian as the same of politics as the political. In what follows, I shall endeavour to demonstrate that Benjamin's argument falls into an abyss of the filmic and reality; and panics, producing symptoms of an auratic effect of film, even as aura seems to lose its aura-l. The unthought of a demand for an aura-l auratic spreads confusion, partly in terms of Benjamin's arguments about demand - from which state I shall endeavour to release them.
Benjamin finds in 'the film' (not the one film improperly substituted for all the films he saw, or didn't see; but the film imaginable, by him, and by all of us experts; the ideality, the imaginability of film because of, and even despite, films and cinema) a representation of 'a demand which could be fully satisfied only later'.[4] What might this be? What type of demand? Without refusing either a psychoanalytic account, or a consumerist account - some sense of supply and demand - we might appreciate - at least, we might have to accept the appreciation of - a typing of a demand, and a production of a desire. In writing of aura - in coming up with the formulations about aura, its fates and states - Benjamin presents us with a crucial argument concerning the relations between art, desire and demand - not to mention history and the technical. In terms which would have transgressed the anti-transcendentalist vocabularies of his day; and which continue so to do - although the implications of this transgression may not be such as could be fully spelled out - Benjamin ventures a methodology of the history of art as well as - and necessarily so - a thesis concerning the identity of art:
'One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfied only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form.' [5]
I shall be contending - in line with a certain misconstrual of psychoanalysis by Benjamin - that we may re-play the material in the gaps in this argument - in Benjamin's 'dash' through a history of art. The material - paradoxically, always already the immaterial as well; and implicated in phantasy - opening up the question of demand and the 'tasks of art' to desire and the effects of satisfaction. Satisfaction of a desire as non-satisfaction - as not enough of making enough - as not quite enough making in the remaking of forms as form. A form - for example, the film - thus becomes that which is remade - by the viewer, the critic, the historian - all of which positions, and complexly, even for one individual, involving expertise. That of the filmmaker too - if most complicatedly.
But the misconstrual of psychoanalysis is also its reinvention under changed conditions. Benjamin's argument situates art as the creation of a demand - but what sort of task is this? Perhaps it's infantilising - as Marx almost remarked, concerning Greek art. There's no infancy which belongs to humanity in the persons of particular humans - it's not an original state: indeed, Benjamin's sense of demand implies a division of the human, in all of us, between an ability and an inability to demand. Which implies that there are arts of psychoanalysis, as well as techniques - even as necessitated by 'new art forms'. For, among the many arguments latent here would be the new conditions of the art of psychoanalysis - recombined from its older forms - in the light of changing 'technical standards'.
And film studies, or theory, needs to be rethought in the light of the question of new technical standards - of filmic vehicles. Uncannily enough, it would be the vehicles which appear to construct the road - if not a royal road to the unconscious: the forgetting of the vehicle as a vehicle - of desire - which constructs the road as a pathway of unconsciousness and phantasy. Thus, art also has - as another of its tasks - the making retraceable of the uses of the vehicles of desire - which would be quite in line with a recognisable modernism often attributed to Benjamin. [6] The twist being, however, that - as Benjamin argues it through in terms of Dada and film - sometimes it's a matter of an art which appears anti-auratic - and sometimes not.
Sometimes it's one thing and sometimes another - which is to say that the very modes of temporalisation of different vehicles, including that of film, need to be considered, if the lessons of Benjamin's arguments are to be taken. Taken and left, I think - as one might leave something behind and go back for it, without merely having intended, even unconsciously, so to do. For, uncannily enough, Benjamin's arguments concerning vehicles - including bicycles, as well as film and any other matter that, as organized and perceptible, might be put to use in art - repeat the classic psychoanalytic aura-l: aura as best rediscovered, after the traumatic event, through the ear. As it seems to me, there's a turning away from the production of an aura by film which might not be representable by means of an appeal to the ear. A shock of film which returns us to film - or, at least, points us in the direction of a reworking of vehicles and demands by means of a sort of imitation, technical as well as psychical, of film.
Benjamin argues that the film fulfils the demands of Dada. And there seems to be an oscillation in his argument here, not to say a questionable history, which implies that Dada was about the search for a form - when it might seem it was about anything but that; and that the film somehow responds to this search. Quite what is meant by 'form' seems to me to be important, as subsequent developments in the vocabularies of criticism - in particular semiotics - might be invoked to demonstrate. Unlike Heidegger, who in his essay 'The Origin of the Work of Art' - also written in the 1930s - tends to imply that the question of form can be settled with reference to a certain combinatory of philosophical questions - 'form and content'; 'form and matter' - and that thinking about art might pretty much dispense with the reiteration of the term 'form', Benjamin provides us with an account of the production of form, of art forms as new modes of 'the organization of perception' and as new modes of the production of aura. In so doing, he alerts us to the questionable relations between art and aura. For, it is not the case, I believe, that we can take Benjamin to be saying that art and aura ought to be definitively separated; or, indeed, definitively linked. Benjamin cannot be taken as the authority on aura, without disabling the arguments which, necessarily problematically, define it, and reduce those which depend on these definitions and developments to critical optional extras. The nature of the problematic of aura may be recalled as the problematic of the auras of natural objects and of historical ones; yet, as such, it's a historical problematic - the nature of the problematic of aura being something historical, something which broaches questions of natural objects as things which pass, even as they leave some kind of record of themselves. In which - to put it too briefly - they are not essentially different from historical objects.
So, it's my aim to re-problematise aura? You may bet on it. But you may lose. It may be all-too-familiar. Which I don't think is so strange, so far as aura is concerned. Perhaps aura is a joke? Not quite, although it has a similar destructuring effect. Jokes can be auratic, if not their 'relation to the unconscious'. Indeed, that which would be familiar in the auratic would be that which was not in relation to the unconscious. Which is perhaps why Benjamin mentions the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and not Jokes and their relation to the Unconscious, since which, he says, 'things have changed':
'This book isolated and made analyzable things which had heretofore floated along unnoticed on the broad stream of perception.' [7]
What, then, about aura? About 'aura' and 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'? Aura became 'aura', what we now call aura? Indeed. But then, it always would have been this - what could be called aura. But then, what kind of becoming is, or was, this? Mere becoming - nothing but becoming? A becoming becoming - as 'becoming' is used in English to mean 'attractive', a sort of propriety of the decorative? Neither, I think. As deconstructions of 'aura' in Benjamin's text may indicate, this becoming is that 'things have changed': 'heretofore', things were auratic; now, they're 'auratic'. In between, 'things have changed'.
Benjamin makes this pretty clear, so far as he can. In the sentence following the remarks about Freud and the psychopathology of the everyday, he reflects on the consequences of film as a mode of recording. This section of the essay, section XIII, leads us to the well-known comparison between 'unconscious optics' and 'unconscious impulses', between the camera and psychoanalysis. And it is part of my purpose in citing part of this argument to suggest that this comparison may have to be taken more seriously, and in more detail, than even recent commentary has done. Detail is perhaps the stake:
'For the entire spectrum of optical, and now acoustical, perception the film has brought about a similar deepening of apperception.' [8]
It's uncanny, I think. Benjamin claims that, like psychoanalysis, film provides us with analyzable details. Or, at least, items: he writes of 'behaviour items'; and of 'a screened behaviour item'. And notes, of which, that 'it is difficult to say which is more fascinating, its artistic value or its value for science.' This difficulty - the place of the fascinating in a text whose formulations concerning art claim to be 'completely useless for the purposes of Fascism'- has to remain just that - a difficulty. We can't sort things out: there's something fascinating here, and the terms used, 'artistic value', 'value for science' and, in particular, I believe, the philosophical term 'apperception' can neither exhaust nor explain the issues in question.
'Of a screened behaviour item... like a muscle of a body'. [9] A muscle of a body, once filmed and projected on screen, is an item of behaviour. Once on screen, a body becomes a possible inventory of behaviour items. It's a timely and untimely warning. Our bodies are, on film, inventoried; observable, the topics of behavioural research, not least, perhaps, by ourselves. There is even - perhaps inevitably - a hysteria to this: watching bodies, if Benjamin is to be believed, assimilating these elements in apperception - in an act of reflection surpassing reflection; of intuition surpassing intuition; of conceptualisation surpassing conceptualising. Yet, the hysteria is the consequence of this attempt to assimilate: to assimilate the screened sequence - presumably it's a sequence, of some duration, if there's 'behaviour' - precisely to a possible 'behaviour', an act which might be performed by someone. The one watching as someone, a member of 'the mass', 'somewhat of an expert', observers but also imitators of screened behaviour; who become 'somewhat of an expert' about 'themselves'. About their behaviour.
To reiterate Benjamin's terms, then, concerning 'artistic value' or 'value for science' is to rest content - with content. The phraseological asymmetry concerning value should alert us to the problematic of value, one which, I would argue, is precisely the effect of aura in its fascinating, non-Fascist sense - for I don't believe that any one formulation concerning aura is 'useless' for the purposes of Fascism. More than one might do it: but, even then... The 'processing of data' - as Benjamin puts it - 'in the Fascist sense' is perhaps quite unresistant and even conducive to Fascism when that processing also repeats, and depends on, different formulations of value - reproducing only a form of value. To give him something of his due, and to point to the moment in his text which seems to me best to describe the state of things in the light of the recent developments of what is referred to as technology - digital image processing, production and reproduction, their devices and networks - Benjamin goes on to claim that:
'To demonstrate the identity of the artistic and scientific uses of photography which heretofore usually were separated will be one of the revolutionary functions of the film.' [10]
To which argument he appended a footnote, concerning the use made by Renaissance painting of 'anatomy and perspective, of mathematics, meteorology, and chromatology'. Citing Valery again, as he has done as the epigraph to his essay, on the apparent strangeness of Leonardo claiming that 'painting demanded univeral knowledge'.
Once again, the essay takes us back to demand - an art form demanding something. Or even everything - 'universal knowledge'. Was Leonardo right? And is the demand now finished with? Benjamin's text, relieved of the historicism which sustains these questions, demonstrates instead a work of witnessing of the auratic of form - by Leonardo, of painting; by Benjamin, of film - and the production, by means of artistic form, of a possibility of a sense of the historical. There is no one form of value, and no one valuer, when it comes to questions of the relations between art and science, and painting or film. Indeed, value exceeds form - a sense of the historical as the production of value, a production in which a sense of the body - 'my' body - is only insofar as it reforms what it is, and has been, in the process of experiencing.
The question of value on its own will not prise apart the effects of fascination which film vehicles. It's a new form, and no one form, or formulation, of evaluation can master it. It's a matter of some destabilising, in any case. 'The mutual penetration of art and science', says Benjamin. And science, I would argue, doesn't have to mean experimental science, or even social science: but, let's say, knowledge and its preconditions. Even 'knowledge-power', if also knowledge-impotence.
To demonstrate more exactly what this means - with reference to film, and to the definitions of aura in Benjamin's essay - the more manifest arguments of Benjamin's essay should be recalled. Film is largely anti-auratic, at least so far as its relations with other visual art forms are concerned. Reproductions jeopardise 'the authority of the object'; techniques of reproduction, including film, detach 'the reproduced object from the domain of tradition', 'substituting a plurality of copies for a unique existence'; and, as it meets 'beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced'. And thus, there is a 'tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind'. Here Benjamin seems straightfowardly enough to involve himself in questions of mass politics - politics as matters of the masses. The two processes, of detaching the object from tradition and of meeting the beholder or listener 'in his own particular situation', are paralelled, analogized with 'the contemporary mass movements' - by which I take him to mean national socialism and communism:
'Their most powerful agent is the film. Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage.' [11]
The anti-auratic effect of the film is taken up in both fascism and communism, taken up in the struggle over the significance of the 'the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage'. This is the case 'particularly in its most positive form'. But also in its non-positive form. The 'destructive, cathartic aspect' entails both: film can represent plays by Shakespeare, paintings by Rembrandt and music by Beethoven (or can be accompanied by the same). As Abel Gance is then quoted as exclaiming:
'"Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films...all legends, all mythologies and all myths, all founders of religions, and the very religions..."' [12]
Gance's claim indicates that there is something more at stake than the destruction and catharsis of the value of the works of art produced by these figures: as questions about authorship might inspire it, we might say the question would be about the death and resurrection of these authors, as filmmakers. Somehow, the films will come to seem to have been made by the long-dead, the famous, the unknown and anonymous, the wordly and the extra-wordly.
Benjamin seems to me largely to ignore this point in his text, if it is one. But it quite significantly, for me, qualifies his sense of the future of film as 'destructive, cathartic'. This destruction and release is not, I want to argue, an end-point: as if the values of tradition really could be liquidated, and then are transmuted into new, partly ideological meanings (though this is what seems to happen). The 'destructive, cathartic' is part of the experience of film, according to Benjamin: a part which, I shall attempt to show, is tied up, somewhat awkwardly, with his - albeit fragmentary - account of the aura of film - the aura which film produces. Despite 'the tremendous shattering of tradition' which film participates in, that shattering leaves us not without tradition, but without an object of which we could say for sure that it belonged to tradition, and only to it. [13]
If the value of traditions cannot quite be liquidated, despite the very promise of film - which would be that objects are what can be reproduced on film, and shown, apart from nature and tradition - then what remains would be the failure of the catharsis, the remnants and residues of filmic transcendences of time, space, objects and traditions. And this is what Benjamin seems to me in part to write about, or towards, in other parts of the rest of the essay - in which he doesn't quite disentangle the questions of the aural and the visual, the musical from the filmic. He can't, quite. They cross into one another, not just as identifiable objects - 'silent' films with music, perhaps; or talkies - but as memories - as auras and their enregistrations - enregistrations which have changed the very possibilities of representations of aura, the production of which by film is neither fully conceived, nor quite - I believe - admitted. [14]
In his argument that film fulfils the demands created by Dada, Benjamin implies a sort of double sense of form. The 'new art form', the film, satisfies the demands of Dada. Linking up the 'technology' of 'photo booklets' or 'slot machines in a bazaar', and transforming the viewing situation of the 'stereoscopes', on which Edison modelled his presentation of the first movie strip, thus exchanging an 'individual viewing' for a 'collective' one, film - and Benjamin mentions Chaplin as the agent of this - also recreated the 'audience reaction' at which Dada performances aimed. [15] Quite what Benjamin had in mind, in this footnote, isn't clear to me: it doesn't seem to be the 'outrage' he mentions as characteristic of Dada and film (Chaplin doesn't seem to have been an artist of outrage); more, perhaps, the disturbance of 'contemplation' as an attitude before the work. 'A new art form' - such as film; or renaissance painting - is something which cannot be reduced to a relation to the audience or to some new technical possibility, but which configures both. Interestingly enough, he implies that there is no one technical possibility - flip books and slot machines; the Renaissance possibilities remaining unstated; different perspectival models inferrable from the objects in question offering the appropriate analogy, I think, if the connection to an audience were to be made. Rather, it's a matter of relation - a relation as if in excess of any actually prior relation - to an imaginable audience which determines that configuration.
This much might be clear. Shock is, however, characteristic of the film and of Dada - from the 'moral shock effect' of the latter to the 'physical shock effect' of the latter, removed from 'the wrappers' of the former by the 'technical structure' of film. But precisely what is shocking about the film? Benjamin mentions two things: a 'tactile' effect, 'changes of place and focus'; and the interruption by the 'constant, sudden change' of images of a spectator's 'process of association'. [16] We could link these two together, in a logical sequence - the latter being disturbed because of the former. I want to suggest, however, that this linking has the effect of confirming the aura-l of Benjamin's sense of aura, even in conformity with the 'form' of film itself; and of scrambling the message of another sense of the production of aura by film.
Dada, claims Benjamin, achieved 'a relentless destruction of the aura of their creations'. Buttons and tickets mounted on paintings; poems as '"word salad" containing obscenities and every imaginable waste product of language'. The phrase 'word salad', quoted by Benjamin, was used by Jung to describe the utterances of one of his schizophrenic patients. Not that I could claim that this was Benjamin's source for his citation. But he may have been aware of the discourse, given his uses of psychoanalysis. Perhaps it was Jung who used the criticism of Dada? The point is not to isolate the origin of the phrase, however; but to consider its uses. [17] And there are a number of key implications, of the use of this phrase, for an understanding of Benjamin's text. Just as Freud separated himself definitively from Jungianism over the monism of the libido, then I think we can say that Benjamin does not imagine that the unconscious is a radical alterity as well as the logic of repressed 'unconscious impulses'. When he compares these 'impulses' and psychoanalysis to 'unconscious optics' and the film camera, a sort of division in interpretation is implied: either these impulses are separable from these optics, or they are not. Recent work, such as that by Rosalind Krauss, has tended to imply that they are not. [18] I think that we need to stay with the difficulty, and admit that Benjamin's formulation leaves open a way of not treating this as an either/or issue: that is, that there is a sense in which, as radical alterity, the unconscious is not simply the object of the technical inspection of psychoanalysis; but also that the camera produces new configurations of consciousness and unconsciousness - new sequences of images which imply new objects of knowledge; but also new possibilities of unconsciousness. The identification with the camera which Benjamin notes as characteristic of the film is, in part, an example of this. But he doesn't seem to me to admit an interesting consequence of this position - that this identification can be undone by filmic image construction - and that this is thus a possibility of the filmic production of aura.
This has implications for understanding not only filmic experience, but also, more generally the implications of the use of the concept of aura in the criticism of art; and, more importantly, for an orientation in relation to evaluations of art in the light of issues of mass culture, politics, technical innovation and development, fascism - all explicit concerns of the Benjamin of 'The Work of Art...' essay - and democracy.
It is not news, I believe - that there is filmic distantiation. Aura - 'the unique phenomenon of a distance'. But how and why there was resistance to such distantiation may be. Even by the one who formulated some of the terms of the representation of that aura. Should this have been so, however, then it may inform us significantly about this distantiation - precisely its accompaniment by resistance - the kinanaesthetic of cinema; but also of all other preceding practices productive of the auratic.
Sometimes it seems as if Benjamin believed in the end of auratic art. Dadaists 'intended and achieved a relentless destruction of the aura of their creations'. And then, as it were, along came film and carried this through. A dadaist work 'hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him' - and, in 'acquiring a tactile quality', 'it promoted a demand for the film'. [19] And he wasn't quite wrong: there were many surrealists who - after Dadaism - affirmed the experience of the cinema. [20] But this is a peculiar sense of promotion. In line with the structures of argumentation about technical innovation that Dada promoted 'a demand' for the film.
For Benjamin, film is like a word salad - like Dada - because it disturbs the spectator's associations. But salads can be forms of art too. Salads are not just eaten - they're made; composed even. Sometimes with cooked ingredients; sometimes without, the salad is perhaps a space where the rules of the raw and the cooked are re-experimented with, forgotten, re-experienced, exceeded - transgressed. Benjamin's 'film' is that which threatens to digest the book or, at least, the written text; but which also recomposes it. This 'film' is thus also a type of hyper-nature morte - still-life morality play - in a double sense of play - in which life returns as a textual productivity of the visible.
I want to get back to the 'dash' - the dash linking aura to aurality; the bicycle race scenario: the oddish story which, in one sense, punctuates Benjamin's text; but, in another, gives it too great a sense of continuity. Yet to pause or, at least, to back-pedal - what about films of books? films as the digest of texts of languages? The inedible images of the inedible text. Is this not a case of capture in the parentheses of expertise - such that we believe that we don't believe in it: don't believe in the film as the digest of a book? Which means that we believe in 'the film', even when we don't believe in the film: we believe in not believing in it; believing in some judgement of the film as a more or less good film, a film which has vehicled something of what a book, or similar text, might vehicle. Making the other text into a vehicle. For a critical discourse, in which, as 'somewhat of an expert', we are ensnared.
If we listen, it's obvious - but to what does Benjamin suggest we might listen? To a group of newspaper boys, who are leaning on their bicycles and discussing the outcome of a bicycle race. Which was not a film? If anything is obvious, at this point in the argumentation in Benjamin's essay, it's that these b oys are not discussing a film? They're not interested in films: they're not arty. They're just boys, expressing all their competitiveness, or, at least, their interest in competitions: arguing over the result. And films don't have results. Films are art: they're a new art form. Benjamin (almost) says so. And it's just that Benjamin - for some reason - was struck by a parallel between this group and another, a group of people, perhaps outside a movie theatre, standing there, perhaps even leaning on their bicycles, preparing to leave, discussing the film. And all he is saying is that he was similarly annoyed, or bored, by all of them - however many there were - pretending to be experts.
Benjamin goes on as if in partial acknowledgement of a sort of breach in the etiquette of philosophical and critical address, to explain what he means, or at least as if to repair the breach by specifying what he has been referring to:
'It is not for nothing that newspaper publishers arrange races for their delivery boys. These arouse great interest among the participants, for the victor has the opportunity to rise from delivery boy to professional racer. Similarly, the newsreel offers everyone the chance to rise from passer-by to movie-extra. In this way, any man might even find himself part of a work of art, as witness Vertoff's Three Songs about Lenin or Iven's Borinage. Any man can today lay claim to being filmed.' [21]
However it may be imagined to have been motivated, Benjamin's text isn't just concerned to criticise the position of expertise which he has identified; not, at least, in any simple way. He's not simply distancing himself from the newspaper boys and their debate over the outcome of a bicycle race, even if he is distanced from it. He might as well be distanced from the practice of the newspaper publishers, distanced from their exploitation of some competitiveness among their employees, aimed to reward the best slave of the business with an escape route, into professional sport, from the business itself. Comparison is exceeded, even in the act of repairing. Benjamin is distanced by both - given time and space to reflect on the arrangements which pertain in this field of social life. By the aura of the 'group of newpaper boys leaning on their bicycles and discussing the outcome of a bicycle race'.
How can I tell? He doesn't say so; and I can't go back and witness this event. But there is no purely reliable witness of aura either. The witness produces aura, in an unheard of sense of production: which is neither purely unreproducible, nor without production - in the sense of being something originary: something not yet having been produced. And never yet so to be, simply, without being reproducible - if by that we mean dependent on some means of showing itself. Being reproducible only by being not quite itself in so being, even if - and especially - if it is not just that, not just that reproducibility. As Benjamin puts it, referring to a particular means of reproduction, 'any man might even find himself part of a work of art...'. Your aura might be re-produced on film.
It may be noted, then, at this point, that the section of Benjamin's text from which the story about the newpaper boys comes involves itself with the central problematic of his essay: the 'epoch' of technical reproducibility. When did this 'epoch' begin? What is its 'age' - to replay the problem of translation, from Benjamin's German in a different way? Something not precisely assignable to clock time, or to calendar time - something auratic - something which removes us from the frame of effects hitherto felt, as if we could step out of time, as if there was, or had been, some outside to time - which would thereby seem to have ceased not ceasing or ceasing.
Pictoriality writ large.
So large, indeed, that it looks as if it ain't being writ at all.
That's aura, when you're so involved in an image that it's no longer an image; an image become the image, performing its cultic function with you - or, when you're so not involved in the image, the image you already have of things, that things seem like an image which, however, you have never seen before.
'The concept of aura which was 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. If while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch.' [22]
To radicalise - filmic production of aura takes us back to nature; but a nature transformed, re-formed, and become transfixing in a way in which it was not before. Our eyes follow it - a mountain range on the horizon or the shadow of a branch. Or, is it the branch of a shadow? Eyes retrace the distance - between the two. Between the body and the phenomenon - object of the epochal reduction. But this object is already auratic - already more than the object. And more than the philosophical subject. More than the apperceiving subject - more, the time and tide of the body, a bit at sea on an ocean voyage.
The historical of which is the remotivation of the oceanic - the space of a romanticism, of a possible pan-theism - but for the delay, before the dash, after the object of the phenomenon - the 'phenomenal' object, in the slang sense this has, in English, of being more than has yet been, and perhaps could be, reported on. But what makes it seem as if there could be reporting here?
Some new access-point - a new point of connection and disconnection, from phenomena and from objects. Distantiation - the viewer reconfiguring the to-be-viewed. But not quite managing it. Not quite being able to focus - or, to feel the same. Nor being sure that they can tell.
Which is - I imagine - how Benjamin felt, when he was taken by the obviousness of the boys leaning on their bicycles discussing the outcome of a bicycle race. Model of a critical community, of the experts agreeing not simply to be experts - about film, or about any other occasion or event of a form, or form of event or occasion: this scene - too little the obvious; too much represented as such - staged in Benjamin's text - like a little scenario-isation of a behaviour item or two - blends the vehicle back into the vehicled. As it does so, it bespeaks the blending of the spectator of film in the filmic - in a sequence of images which, like the bicycle race before the discussion, was not quite seen as such - went by too fast. Was not seen, at least, in such a way as could keep that spectator from refraining from imagining participating in some dispute about what had happened - about which vehicle had apparently crossed the line first.
We would be watching for a wheel - crossing the line. A bit of a vehicle - which vehicle Benjamin imagines for us supporting the animated discutants of an event. Bodies at rest - yet unable quite to rest; animated by the prospects of a rise in the ranks, as if becoming movie-extras. Benjamin's film runs on - carries him across the lines separating him from this scene; lines which nevertheless are recomposed by him into an extra-ordinary-type-movie. In which what is still moves - has moved - this spectator. Bicycles for spectacles - a renewed body, curious about its limits; in danger of going too fast. And imagining he knows that the film could be finished with - and that he is not listening to an account of a film.
Is it the best visual joke about early films that turning wheels sometimes appear to be going backwards - as if the roadway had accelerated out of all proportion to the speed of things? And the best example of a filmic auratic?
Benjamin may be found to have wanted to restore a rhythm to such events as the event of film - the imagining of the coming of film, its arrival. But he can't quite conclude on its aura - on the outcome of this new and recent auratic. Perhaps the argument descends to the foot of the text - the footnotes quoted from above being the pedals of new vehicles of critical attention - the theses about the form of film, about the Renaissance, about the cultishness of aura. This wouldn't be so far past the truth of the demands of thinking the epoch of the digital - the rush, for example, to come to some conclusion about cyberspace, to try to cope with its aura - dedicate it to 'friction-free capitalism' even.
Demanding that we listen to the newspaper boys isn't simply a mistake, an error. But, in its rhetoric, it implies panic - a panic that seems to produce a sort of despair of the political and of politics, as well as a kind of remotivation of modernist projects of art. 'The film', the auratic film, cannot be art in itself - it is already the play with and of the filmic with and by its viewers. But then, this isn't simply the end of art in itself. Indeed, unless we take the lessons of deception, of being duped by the film, then we will not notice that it is part of its part, part of the role that the film plays, to spur the demand for some art in itself .
Furthermore - and even more against the grain that Benjamin's discovery of the question of the film is also a retreat from the discovery - which nevertheless is symtomatically represented - that the trauma of film, of the new of form, is most significantly the reproduction of rendering of the visible as the useful - the visibly useful as the desirable - the visibly desirable as the useful: a reproduction of a problematic - Heideggerean coincidentally enough, from the aforementioned 'The Origin of the Work of Art' essay - which is not simply new, but receives a specific charge and impetus from the techniques of film.
The aural of aura is, in part, a defence against the pervasiveness of the play of the combinations of the visible, the useful and the desirable. Benjamin's demand to listen is an appeal to a modality of the body - but one which is produced in reaction to the vehicling effects of film: the transport of associations and location, which nevertheless do not belong to film in itself; or to any one film. Written perhaps in recollection of another film, the pre-talkie, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' seems to me to forestall the shift - and miss the orienting of the drive - towards the ecstatic visu-aural auratic - today digitally sustained, and augmented - of cinema.
As a young artist, who had not yet turned to film, Dziga Vertov imagined - inspired, if only in part, by the possibilities of sound-recording - representing sounds as words and letters. [23] This dream of a representational writing - is it just the delusions of an auratic representation of aura? Perhaps not, if we may discover, in what seems auratic to us, the representation of some forgotten spaces - if only in an array of letters: something historical, necessarily delayed and untimely, of the spaces of events and advents of art forms - retraceable through the anxieties of somebody witnessing even in spite of himself - or herself - to the typing of desires which exceed the productions of demand.
The auratic of the play and drift of images is not simply in search of a hearing.
--Lewis Johnson
With thanks to Nezih Erdogan; Kate Ince; Mahmut Mutman
[1] Cf. the account by Michel Chion in Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. W. Murch (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990) in particular his account of 'transsensoriality', which he tries to distinguish from Baudelairean 'intersensoriality' (p. 137), but, in so doing, produces a kind of 'body-without-organs' fiction of cinema, absenting the question of shock, so crucial to Benjamin's questioning of art, form and modernity - which I shall try to give its due via the 'anaesthetics' of aura.[2] W. Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt, (London: Fontana Books,), pp. 217-251. [Benjamin's text has been retranslated and retitled, 'The Work of Art in the Epoch of Technical Reproducibility', giving it back its explicit concern with the technical, rather than something that sounds as if it were simply opposed, as the mechanical, to the human; its transcendentalism is also apparently restored. Benjamin's essay provides us, further, with an opportunity to re-explore philosophically the issue of the imagination: as an excess of the opposition between the transcendental and the immanent - more phantasy than phantasy and more than phantasy in the transcendental imagination.]
[3] Cf. his 'Phantom Audio-Vision' in Chion argues - in a way which tends to repeat Benjamin's bias - that de-acoustimatization' of a character - the visual representation of someone previously only heard on the 'soundtrack' (he is appropriately critical of this term) - results in a loss of aura:
'Pascal Bonitzer has noted that the de-acousmatization of a character generally goes hand in hand with his descent into a human, ordinary and vulnerable fate. As long as we can't see him we attribute all-seeing power to the voice; but once inscribed in the visual field he loses his aura. De-acousmatization can also be called embodiment: a sort of enclosing of the voice in the circumscribed limits of a body- which tames the voice and drains it of its power.' (Chion, Audio-Vision, p. 131)
Benjamin's argument assists us with these evaluations. 'Aura' isn't simply explicitly or implicitly related to a particular sense in Benjamin - the very term seems determined, in part, by this. Chion's awkward 'de-acousmatization' is determined by his rather too monotheological characterisation of off-screen voice: 'the acousmetre has the power of seeing all; second, the power of omniscience; and third, the omnipotence to act on the situation' (pp. 129-130). Benjamin's articulation of aura, in relation to the cinema, is indicative of more questioning relation to the form of film, one which implies that the project of disembodiment in other film criticism - for example, that of Kaja Silverman in 'Disembodying the Female coice: Irigaray, Experimental Feminist Cinema and Femininity' - (in The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), pp. 141-186.) - need not be restricted to the production of a negativity or a reversal of the positivities, of omniscience etc.
[4] W. Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', p. 237.
[6] See Victor Burgin's use of Benjamin's arguments, concerning in particular supplying the existing 'apparatus of production' --developed more int he context of literature, in the latter's essay, "The Author as Producer" in "Modernismin the Work of Art", in The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (London & Basingtokes: Macmillan, 1986), (pp. 1-28), p.5.
[7] W. Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', p. 235.
[13] A consideration of the comparison between music and film which Benjamin tries suggests some interesting conclusions: the musical work becoming an object of performance; with film perhaps implying an experience of the visual in which performance is in retreat (gestural painting could be considered as a reaction to this - and this would also suggest its emergence in an American context, in a way which didn't reduce those phenomena to reactions to European precedents or to popular culture).
[14] There is therefore another strand to Benjamin's interlinking of film and music in the problematic of reproduction - a discovery of issues of the cultural and the artistic which disturbs the identity of either music or film.
[17] For an account of Jung's use of this phrase, and the important case history, linking questions of the technical and the psychic, see Avital Ronell, The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech, (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 137.
[18] See her The Optical Unconscious, (Cambridge, Mass.,:MIT Press, 1993).
[19] W. Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', p. 238.
[20] Breton called it a 'lyrical substance', which was valued by the Surrealists for its 'power to disorient' ('As in a Wood', in Paul Hammond, ed., The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writing on the Cinema, (Edinburgh: Polygon Books, 1981), (pp. 80-5), p. 81).
[23] '...[Vertov] wrote poems and sketches in his youth, but his great love before he turned to the cinema in 1918 was sound. He was fascinated by the possibility of sound-recording and transposing natural sounds into words and letters. His film work includes two remarkable sound films: Enthusiasm (1930), in which he finally fulfilled this early ambition to 'photograph' sounds, and Three Songs about Lenin (1934), which drew on folk tales and legends to build up a unique picture of the man whose presence dominated this whole era of Soviet life.' (Roy Armes, Film and Reality, (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1975), p. 40.)
