Aura of Benjamin Through Experience of Warburg

MATTHEW RAMPLEY
Aura and Memory
Part 1*

The understanding of Benjamin's concept of mimesis is almost inseparable from his notion of aura. A central part of his account of aura and mimetic experience is formed by his exploration of recollection; I have already outlined the ways in which the mimetic persists as a kind of residue or trace in modern experience, and it is through the concept of aura that this notion of a mimetic memory-trace is developed. In his essay on the history of photography, aura is famously described as ‘ein sonderbares Gespinst von Raum und Zeit: einmalige Erscheinung einer Ferne, so nah sie sein mag.’[197] This definition occurs in his discussion of Eugene Atget, whom Benjamin credits for having released objects from the embrace of aura. Considerable attention is devoted to the relation of photography and aura, and in particular to the role of the medium of photography per se in dispelling aura.[198] This idea is developed at greater length in his essay on reproduction, but Benjamin attributes the loss of aura to other circumstances too, including the shock effect of modernity. Writing of Baudelaire's short prose poem ‘Perte d'Auréole’ he notes that ‘[Baudelaire] hat den Preis bezeichnet, um welchen die Sensation der Moderne zu haben ist: die Zertrümmerung der Aura im Cchockerlebnis.’[199] And rather than attempting to reinstate aura, Baudelaire's poetry registers the loss of aura primarily through allegory, in which the commodity form occupies a prominent place as its content.[200] Elsewhere, in the Passagen Werk, Benjamin argues that aura becomes displaced through the process of commodification and the general rise of mass society: ‘Die Massenproduktion ist die ökonomische, der Klassenkampf die gesellschaftliche Hauptursache für den Verfall der Aura.’[201]

....A clear strand in Benjamin's account thus focuses on the ways in which the social, economic and technological innovations of modernity have brought about the decline of aura. This aspect of Benjamin's theory is relatively unproblematic; it consists of a straightforward adoption of a fairly orthodox historical materialist reading of Parisian modernity. However, the comparison of his essays on photography and mechanical reproduction with his writing on Baudelaire reveals differences that raise awkward questions about Benjamin's account. In the ‘Kleine Geschichte der Photographie’ Benjamin defines aura as the appearance of distance. This notion is continued in his essay on mechanical reproduction, which traces the aura of the image back to its cultic origins;

Eine antike Venusstatue z. B. stand in einem anderen Traditionszusammenhange bei den Griechen, die sie zum Gegenstand des Kultus machten, als bei den mittelalterlichen Klerikern, die einen unheilvollen Abgott in ihr erblickten. Was aber beiden in gleicher Weise entgegentrat war ihre Einzigkeit, mit einem anderen Wort: ihre Aura.[202]

Benjamin's reference to tradition is somewhat misleading, for it is the role of the work of art as an object of religious awe that is of greater significance. Moreover, Benjamin's distinction between pagan and medieval Christian attitudes towards the statue of Venus also requires qualifying, for while the specifically pagan significance of the figure may well have been the source of disapproval, its cultic function persisted into the Middle Ages. As Hans Belting has emphasised, from late Antiquity onwards, the venerated icon was the primary type of image in Christian Europe, to the extent that no true distinction existed between image and relic. ‘Relics and images were closely related and sometimes were even dependent on each other in their ritual function and veneration. Images assumed the appearance of relics and in turn gained power from their co-existence with relics. In the medieval imagination, images and relics were never two distinct realities.’[203]

....The aura of the work of art originates in the work's cultic value, and this notion of aura can be extended to encompass experience in general: the stress on the veneration of the icon alludes to the wider accounts of premodern experience in both Benjamin and Warburg, for whom the world of the primitive is not a neutral object of disinterested inquiry, but instead an arena of correspondences, personalised affinities and symbolic meanings. The grounding of aura in cult ritual, however, throws up the first contradiction in Benjamin's own account - and also an important difference with Warburg. On the one hand there is clearly a strong parallel between the two in their joint emphasis on the cultic origin of the image. Their account of the reason for the decline of the cultic aura is admittedly slightly different; for Benjamin it stems from the gradual development of reproductive technologies that displace the image from its original ritual context, while for Warburg the cause is the exercise of ‘Besonnenheit’ and its creation of ‘Denkraum.’ At the same time these different explanations are united by a common theme, namely, the impact of the rise of modern scientific-technical rationality. Yet this apparent similarity also masks an important distinction between the two which is also reflected in Benjamin's own apparent ambivalence towards the concept. Warburg conceives of the cultic image as functioning through the lack of critical distance, in other words through the predominance of the empathic-mimetic urge. For Benjamin, conversely, the cultic image gains its aura precisely because of the distance between the object and the spectator; following Louis Aragon, Benjamin states: ‘Mythologie ... rückt die Dinge wieder fern.’[204] The decline of aura coincides with a decline of the distance marking the object as something apart. The authoritarian relation of the pious spectator to the venerated relic or image, which persists in the cult of aesthetic beauty, is gradually replaced with a universal rationality. Benjamin notes;

Tagtäglich macht sich unabweisbarer das Bedürfnis geltend, des Gegenstandes aus nächster Nähe im Bild, vielmehr im Abbild, in der Reproduktion, habhaft zu werden … Die Entschälung des Gegenstandes aus seiner Hülle, die Zertrümmerung der Aura, ist die Signatur einer Wahrnehmung, deren Sinn für das Gleichartige in der Welt so gewachsen ist, daß sie es mittels der Reproduktion auch dem Einmaligen abgewinnt. So bekundet sich im anschaulichen Bereich was sich im Bereich der Theorie als die zunehmende Bedeutung der Statistik bemerkbar macht.[]205

The decline of aura is linked to the rise of a technical mimeticism, and while, on the one hand, Benjamin's essay claims that reproduction brings about the loss of aura, it also proposes that reproductive technology allows a mimetic-empathic desire to re-assert itself; a process that would entail a collapsing of auratic distance. This is clear from Benjamin's use of the analogy of the magician and the surgeon to describe the relation between the painter and the film-maker, where ‘Der Maler beobachtet in seiner Arbeit eine natürliche Distanz zum Gegebenen, der Kameramann dagegen dringt tief ins Gewebe der Gegebenheit.’[206] The opposition between allegorical distance and mimetic proximity has now been inverted; the auratic presence of primitive cult objects now produces a distance which the social and economic developments of modernity, such as the commodity form, photographic reproduction, or the democracy of the mass, now overcome. The difficulty of trying to reconcile such conflicts is compounded in his discussion of aura in the Passagen-werk and the essays on Baudelaire, in which aura appears in the form of the ‘correspondances,’ and its decline is registered through the motif of loss. Baudelaire contrasts the ‘regards familiers’ of nature with the urban experience of the flâneur, such as in the poem. ‘A une passante’ which describes the fugitive disconnected encounter with a young woman. The experience of the ‘correspondance,’ is possible ‘nur im Bereich des Kultischen.’[207] This reciprocal basis of aura is made explicit when Benjamin states that ‘Die Erfahrung der Aura beruht also auf der Übertragung einer in der menschlichen Gesellschaft geläufigen Reaktionsform auf das Verhältnis des Unbelebten oder der Natur zum Menschen ... Die Aura einer Erscheinung erfahren heißt, sie mit dem Vermögen belehnen, den Blick aufzuschlagen,’[208] Baudelaire's allegorical vision articulates the loss of that reciprocity intrinsic to mimetic experience; ‘Der allegorischen Intention ist jede Intimität mit den Dingen fremd. Sie berühren heißt ihr: sie vergewaltigen. Sie erkennen heißt ihr: sie durchschauen.’[209]

....In the account constructed here Benjamin seems to be moving in a different direction from that laid out in the essays on photography. Now, mimetic ritual experience is inextricably bound up with auratic experience, implying an intimacy with things which is lost with the decline of aura. Whereas aura had signified a certain distance from the objects of perception, it now involves a proximity to them. This sense of confusion in Benjamin's definitions of aura is compounded by his approving reference in his essay on mechanical reproduction to Riegl. For as noted earlier, Riegl's thought was based on the notion of a transition from haptic to optical experience, with the spatial metaphor of proximity giving way to distance.

....One explanation for Benjamin's uncertainty about the spatial metaphors used in his description of aura is that it reflects the ambiguous status of aura itself. His narrative of modernity does not read the loss of aura as a straightforward historical progression; indeed, at the point where it would seem most inimical to ritual experience, aura resurfaces. Hence, while the experience of the shock of cinema dispels the auratic residue of the work of art aura is preserved in the cult of the movie star; the loss of cultic aura is compensated for by the aura of aesthetic authenticity in the museum. This construction of a ‘false’ aura is the symptom of a much larger process, namely the growth of commodity fetishism, where the mass-produced good, which Benjamin had seen as antithetical to auratic experience, reinstates aura in the magic of the reified commodity. It was the promotion of commodity fetishism to which the arcades themselves were originally devoted. The arcade was a ‘geile Straße des Handels, nur angetan, die Begierden zu wecken.’[210] Central to fetishism's awakening of desire is the reawakening of primal impulses; the arcades are the primal landscape of consumption (‘Urlandschaft der Konsumption’),[211] offering an endless spectacle of the kind only usually encountered in fairy tales.[212] This same process of re-enchantment is central to advertising, too, which Benjamin sets against allegory for while the commodity undergoes the same logic as allegory, namely the surrender of intrinsic or use value and its replacement by an infinite exchangeability of meaning and value, advertising and commodity fetishism grant to the commodity an illusory aura of uniqueness.

....Benjamin's account of auratic space is thus complex and full of ambiguities and contradictions, and these ultimately relate to his own ambivalence regarding modernity itself. In Warburg the idea of the auratic and the cultic, though displaying important parallels with Benjamin, is in this sense less problematic. Much of his interest focuses on the meaning of realism, and here it has to be noted that for Warburg ‘realism’ is not simply a matter of representational verisimilitude. Rather, it is a central manifestation of mimetic experience, based on an immersion in minutiae - a primitive positivism - predicated on a lack of cognitive distance. Of particular interest was the continued popularity in Quattrocento Florence of Flemish ‘realism’ which in so many respects seems the antithesis of the emergent classicism of Florentine painters. And yet for all its differences from the classicism of, for example, Botticelli, Flemish realism constitutes an alternative form in which the mimetic and empathic impulses were given expression. The key to understanding both styles is recognition of the rack of distance; in the case of the classicising of Botticelli this lay in the mobility of forms, which encouraged the corporeal empathic urges of the viewer; with Flemish realism, the fact that classical myth was narrated in contemporary guise again signified a lack of distance, manifest this time in the lack of historical reflection. This lack of historical distance was not restricted, however, to Flemish painting. Florentine devotional images also embody the same lack of critical distance. In his study ‘Bildniskunst und florentinisches Bürgertum’[213] Warburg remarks on the curious habit, in devotional pictures, of allowing the donor to become part of the picture. Though already current in the Middle Ages, this practice became far more prominent during the Renaissance. Referring specifically to Ghirlandaio's Pope Honorius lll founding the order of st. Francis in Santa Trinità, Warburg notes, ‘Das bescheidene Privilegium des Stifters, sich devot in der Ecke des Bildes aufzuhalten erweitern Ghirlandaio und sein Auftraggeber unbedenklich zu einem Recht auf freien Eintritt ihres leibhaftigen Abbildes in die heilige Erzählung selbst als Zuschauer oder gar als handelnde Personen der Legende.’[214] Although the narrative was drawn from the history of the Christian church, its ‘realism’ stems from an older pagan mimetic urge, in which image and physical actuality occupy the same continuum. Warburg sees this realism paralleled in the growing use in the Quattrocento of boti - wax votive figures - a practice so popular that as early as 1401 the signoria was compelled to limit the eligibility to the upper classes. The number of votive figures was such that by this time they had to be hung from the entablatures by rope, and the walls strengthened with chains. Eventually, because of the frequency with which they fell down, the boti were then exiled to the small cloister. The mimetic origin of this practice is quite clear for Warburg, and was already indicated by contemporary authors such as Francesco Sacchetti, who dismissed it as pagan idolatry. It revealed the persistence of an experience of the image which Benjamin would later refer to as ‘auratic.’ As Warburg himself argues, ‘In dem Weihgeschenke an heilige Bilder hatte die katholische Kirche ... den bekehrten Heiden eine legitime Entladungsform für den unausrottbaren religiösen Urtrieb belassen, dem Göttlichen in der fassbaren Form des menschlichen Abbildes sich in eigener Person oder im Abbilde annähern zu können.’[215] For obvious reasons the notion of aura is absent in this account, but it is clear that with the reference to ‘pictorial magic’, (‘Bildzauber’) a similar conception of the cultic origin of images is envisaged.

Domenico Ghirlandaio, The Founding of the Franciscan by Pope Honorius III, 1483-1486,
fresco, Santa Trinita (Florence)

....Benjamin argues that commodification was one of the causes of the decline of aura, even though commodity fetishism would then reinstate it. His account of the relation between aura, mimeticism and commerce is prefigured in Warburg, whose study of ‘Flandrische Kunst und florentinische Frührenaissance’ links the loss of medieval piety to the rise of commerce, manifest in the rise of the painting as commodity. Commenting specifically on the popularity of the work of Jan van Eyck and Rogier Van der Weyden in ltaly, Warburg writes, ‘damit war für den besitzenden Kunstliebhaber, der nicht mehr von kirchlicher Fernkunst in Distanz gehalten sein wollte, das eigentliche Sammelobjekt geschaffen; denn das aus dem kirchlichen Zusammenhange gelöste Tafelbild beförderte ... den bescheiden knieenden Stifter zum verfügenden Herrn …’[216] The development of the portrait, in which the image of the patron was dissociated from the connotation of the position of donor, was indicative of a significant shift in the meaning of the image. While Warburg admits that in the Quattrocento one sees only the very beginnings of a turn away from the ritual basis of the image, the process was clearly discernible, particularly amongst the Netherlandish portrait painters so much in vogue. Of course Warburg stressed that the process of disengagement from a predominantly religious disposition was not as unequivocal as his contemporaries assumed, His paper on Francesco Sassetti's Last Will and Testament explores precisely this phenomenon; Sassetti, the mercantile patron of Ghirlandaio (alongside contemporaries such as Giovanni Rucellai or even the Medici) still entertained profoundly pious, even superstitious beliefs. His will speaks of ‘Fortuna’ as if of a pagan demon; Rucellai's impresa consists of the figure of ‘Fortuna,’ while the Medici prefaced many of their business contracts with the phrase ‘Col nome di Dio e di Buonaventura.’ For Warburg these references were more than mere rhetoric. Indeed, Warburg's paper was an important reminder of what has since become a commonplace, namely, the persistence of magic and superstition in Italy into the sixteenth century and beyond.

....In a manner similar to Benjamin, Warburg views the impact of commerce on visual representation with some degree of ambivalence. Florentine mercantilism relies on a worldly outlook that reflects the rise of self reflective ‘Denkraum.’ Integral to this is the progressive disenchantment of the world, in which, for example, the cultic aura of the image is dispelled as it becomes a portable commodity. One focus of Warburg's interest is the surprising co-existence of these two types of orientation toward the world. At the same time, the increase in circulation of the classical symbol, facilitated by the printing press, devalues it, leading to the hyperinflation of gestural expression. In Baroque allegory the symbolic contents of the image become disconnected from the reality in which they were grounded, a motif which is continued in Benjamin's much more developed study of allegory. And yet while the cultic, mimetic, aura of the image seemed to be dispelled in its reproduction, it was reinstated in a different form. The visual representations of the official pageants of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries become more and more a form of spectacle projecting the aura of the social elite on to the ‘slaves’ of the uneducated underlings. Here one sees a further important connection with Benjamin who, in his essay on reproduction, argues that the cult value of the work of art becomes replaced by its exhibitionary value (‘Ausstellungswert’).[217] As Wolfgang Kemp has pointed out, Benjamin's judgement has to be tempered by recognition of the importance of display in liturgical practice from the tenth century onwards.[218] While Benjamin's crude opposition between cultic and exhibitionary value offers an insufficient theoretical-historical framework, Kemp's critique ironically reinstates a central point of Benjamin's (and Warburg's) argument, namely the continuity of the auratic quality of the work of art and the role of both tactile and visual elements in the service of cult. And while display played a prominent role long before the invention of photographic reproduction, one could argue that during that time works of art did not derive their aura primarily from their appeal to an optical-aesthetic sense. In the Passagen Werk Benjamin speaks of crisis: ‘die Vermutung liegt nahe, daß Zeitalter, die zu allegorischem Ausdruck neigen, eine Krisis der Aura erfahren haben.’[219] Such talk extends the range of possibilities - reorientation of auratic address, metamorphosis of aura - beyond the simple reference to the loss of aura posited by the essay on reproduction.

....Despite important differences, therefore, Benjamin and Warburg are united in the view that while the Middle Ages recede ever more into the distance, the auratic experience has not vanished with them. The central means by which ‘aura’ is preserved is memory, and here we come to both the most suggestive aspect of their thinking, and also its most problematic. In his essay on photography Benjamin mentions the spatial and temporal axes of aura. The question of its temporal axis is developed at greater length in the essay on mechanical reproduction. In that essay, Benjamin makes a number of claims, the best-known of which, in the present context, is the equation of aura and authenticity. An object's aura derives from its authenticity, the unique history that has left its (physical) traces. These qualities of the work of art cannot be detected by the reproduction (or at least could not in Benjamin's time), and since the photograph is the primary means whereby we first become familiar with most works of visual art, the aura of the work is lost. Although reproduction leads to a vanishing of aura (in its inherited form, at least) aura persists even after the invention of photography, and not only in the secularised cult of beauty. For while photographs cannot capture the history of the work of art, they have their own historicity; they freeze a moment in time, which becomes most evident in personal portraits. As Benjamin notes, ‘lm Kult der Erinnerung an die Fernen oder die abgestorbenen Lieben hat der Kultwert des Bildes die letzte Zuflucht.’[220]

.... Aura underpins the cult of remembrance, and this configuration of aura, time and memory can be added to in a number of ways, For while Benjamin argues that the aura of the photographic image represents a primitive cultic residue, it can equally be argued that this aura has little to do with the cultic origin of images, and even less to do specifically with the image of the human face. Rather, it could be said to stem from the fact that the photograph, as memento mori, constitutes a permanent index of the vanished moment. Furthermore, the historicity of photography (i.e. the fact that one can write histories of photography, attending to the introduction of successive technologies, styles and vocabularies of photographic representation) ensures that examples from the early history of photography seem as temporally distant as the patinised bronze statue, even in reproduction. And this has nothing to do with the cult of aesthetic authenticity - the uniqueness of the image - which Benjamin had seen as key to the aura of the work of art. An important question remains to be posed, namely, as to why Benjamin even raises the notion of the temporal axis of aura. Perhaps the appropriate answer is to formulate the issue in another way, and to explore Benjamin’s ‘auratisation’ of the concepts of time and history.

....In his work on Baudelaire Benjamin alludes to the development of amnesia in modernity. Modern consciousness, ‘Erlebnis,’ develops as a means of combating the traumatic stimuli of modernity, leading to the loss of pre-modern ‘Erfahrung.’ However, following Freud, it is unconscious ‘Erfahrung’ that serves as the locus of memory, to which ‘Erlebnis’ is inimical, and hence modernity seems to be afflicted with an inability to recall the past through an effort of will. Hence the pertinence of Proust's comment: ‘Il en est ainsi de notre passé. C’est peine perdue que nous cherchions à l’ évoquer, tous les efforts de notre intelligence sont inutiles,’ which Benjamin cites.[221] Such amnesia parallels the loss of ‘correspondances’ mourned by Baudelaire, and it completes the notion of the destruction of spatio-temporal experience. Consequently, the mimetic affinity with Nature that underlies the ‘correspondances’ and that recalls early anthropological theories of the primitive, can be extended to encompass the sense of the past.

....Much anthropological writing of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries noted the prominence of ancestor-worship. Spencer, for example, connects the belief in the dead with the rise of religious belief per se, inasmuch as the primal form of religion appears to be ancestor worship, i.e. propitiation of the ancestors' shades to prevent them from injuring the living. Indeed, all other religious practices, such as the worship of plants, animals or natural phenomena are, for spencer, derived from this primal ancestor worship.[222] Of particular interest for Spencer was the fact that the dead were still felt to be present. Within art historical scholarship this idea was explored by Schlosser, for example, who interpreted the Roman practice of maintaining busts of family ancestors in the house as the residue of the same primitive consciousness.[223] This notion also informed, albeit indirectly, Benjamin's own understanding of time, underlying which is a distinction between modern and pre-modem history. Parallel to ‘Erlebnis,’ modern historiography is marked by amnesia. No longer a matrix of experiences to be remembered, the past consists of neutral facts to be recorded. Benjamin sees a similar process at work in the rise of the novel and the decline of storytelling. The latter ‘senkt die Sache in das Leben des berichtenden ein ... So haftet an der Erzählung die Spur des Erzählenden wie die Spur der Töpferhand an der Tonschale.’[224] The story is thus inextricably linked with the life history of the storyteller, in contrast to the novel, product of a society in which people are ‘Trockenwohner der Ewigkeit.’[225] Quoting Lukács’ Theorie des Romans, Benjamin argues that the novel records the increasing disjunction of time and meaning. Benjamin contrasts the timelessness of modernity, in which death, the ultimate marker of human temporality, is relegated to the margins of perception, with the oral society of the story-teller, where narrative tradition is maintained above all by the reminiscences of the narrator. Time and history become abstract disconnected phenomena,in contrast to the pre-modern understanding of history as governed by an overarching symbolic order. Hence the chroniclers of the Middle Ages, for example, operate with a mode of historical interpretation, ‘die es nicht mit einer genauen Verkettung von bestimmten Ereignissen, sondern mit der Art ihrer Einbettung in den großen unerforschlichen Weltlauf zu tun hat.’[226] Benjamin's outline of the character of modern time is prefigured in his Habilitationsschrift, which analyses the allegorical vision of history. Noting the predominance of images of mortality, such as ruins, limbless torsos, Benjamin foregrounds the lack of transcendence in the Baroque. Instead the events of the Baroque Trauerspiel are caught in the immanence of history, bound to the transience of natural time. The Trauerspiel is marked by a rejection of eschatology (‘Abkehr von der Eschatologie’),[227] and consequently theology is replaced by natural history; as Benjamin notes, while in medieval literature the meaning of worldly events and human lives, no matter how apparently short-lived and futile they may have been, is guaranteed by the promise of salvation, the Trauerspiel is completely absorbed in the ‘Trostlosigkeit der irdischen Verfassung.’[228] Allegorical vision is thus inextricably linked with the vanishing of the temporal axis of aura, and it thereby inaugurates the supplanting of pre-modern myth by modern history.

.... Although modernity is afflicted by amnesia, the key to Benjamin's thought is the idea that the remembrance of pre-modern myth can still be triggered. Again the model of Proust is operative here - in particular the famous episode with the madeleines: ‘[Le passé] est caché hors de son domaine at de sa portée, en quelque objet matériel (en la sensation que nous donnerait cet objet matériel) que nous ne soupçonnons pas.’[229] Benjamin explores the role of the arcades and commodity fetishism in providing the mechanism for triggering the repressed.

....A predominant trope is that of the dream which reinforces the connection between modern Paris and an unspecified primal twilight of consciousness. Benjamin famously refers to the nineteenth-century as a ‘Zeitraum (Zeit-traum)’ in which a drama occurs between the individual and the collective: ‘in dem das Individualbewußtsein sich reflektierend immer mehr erhält, wogegen das Kollektivbewußtsein in immer tieferem schlafe versinkt.‘[230] With this conflict between the individual and the social collective which echoes a similar opposition in warburg, Benjamin also highlights the equation of knowledge with awakening: ‘Das Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit ist der Augenblick des Erwachens.’[231] ln contrast to the weight of contemporary social theory that viewed the growth of industrial capitalism as heralding the increasing alienation of man from nature, he regards it as ‘eine Naturerscheinung, mit der ein neuer Traumschlaf über Europa kam und in ihm eine Reaktivierung der mythischen Kräfte.‘[232]

.... Although it pushes allegorical amnesia to an extreme degree, commodity fetishism, an essential motor of capitalism, consists of the reactivation of primal memories and fantasies. This idea is already prefigured in an early fragment entitled ‘Kapitalismus als Religion’ in which Benjamin, through a reading of weber and Ernst Troeltsch, notes the numerous parallels between capitalism and religion, concluding with the remark, ‘Methodisch wäre zunächst zu untersuchen, welche Verbindungen mit dem Mythos je im Laufe der Geschichte das Geld eingegangen ist, bis es aus dem Christentum soviel mythische Elemente an sich ziehen konnte, um den eignen Mythos zu konstruieren.’[233] of course, to draw a link between capitalism and religion was hardly original; Weber had already analysed the emergence of capitalism from Protestant belief. However, where Weber flaced the secularisation of Lutheran ideas, Benjamin indicates that through the development of its own mythology, capitalism takes on the character of primitive religion. capitalism is thus marked by regression back into myth, rather than a continuation of the process of rationalisation. Indeed even the amnesia of the Baroque is only relative, since the present is always marked by the traces of the past. In contrast to the amnesiac historiography of modernity, mimetic history, according to Benjamin, ‘ist Gegenstand einer Konstruktion, deren Ort nicht die homogene und leere Zeit sondern die von Jetztzeit erfüllte bildet. So war für Robespierre das antike Rom eine mit Jetztzeit geladene Vergangenheit ... ‘[234] This view is repeated by his imagistic conception of historiography as montage, ’Dialektik im stillstand,’ in which the past and the present are brought together in a constellation.[235] The dialectical notion of history can be related to the topos of correspondences between the two; Benjamin writes of the dialectical presentation of an historical content as a field of force (‘Kraftfeld’) in which is played out ‘die Auseinandersetzung zwischen seiner Vorgeschichte und Nachgeschichte.’[236] It also informs his use of the figure of the historical monad. I mentioned earlier the relation between the mimetic and the monadological, and so here too Benjamin's assertion that ‘Der historische Materialist geht an einen geschichtlichen Gegenstand einzig und allein da heran, wo er ihm als Monade entgegentritt’ continues his auratic mimetological treatment of time and of history.[237]

.... Benjamin's notion of history as recollection, indeed his picture of capitalism as a vast reactivation of auratic experience echoes Warburg's account of historical memory. In addition his ‘auratisation’ of history with its stresses on the correspondences between past and present mirrors Warburg’s conception of history as remembrance. At the heart of Warburg’s ideas of memory stands Richard Semon's book on Die Mneme, with its metaphor of memory as inscription.[238] Warburg's specific adaptations of Semon are, first, to see in the visual symbol a potent archive of memory and, second, to coin the notion of the ‘dynamogram,’ a marriage of Semon’s mnemic ‘engram’ with his continuing interest in empathy theory and bodily movement. A dynamogram is thus the visual inscription of primal empathic bodily experiences which Warburg, in keeping with the anthropological tradition on which he drew, regarded as essentially traumatic and laden with fear.

* Matthew Rampley; The Remembrance of Things Past: On Aby M. Warburg and Walter Benjamin,
Harrassowitz Verlag • Wiesbaden, 2000, pp. 73-88, 122-125.
© Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2000

Part 2

Notes:

[197] ‘A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close the object may be.’ Benjamin, GS, II, p. 378.

[198] To repeat Benjamin's famous formulation, photographs ‘saugen die Aura aus der Wirklichkeit wie Wasser aus einem sinkenden Schiff’ (‘... pump aura out of reality like water out of a sinking ship’). Ibid.

[199] ‘[Baudelaire] indicated the price for which the sensation of the modern age may be had: the disintegration of aura in the experience of shock.’ Benjamin, GS, I, p. 653. See Baudelaire, ‘Perte d'Auréole,’ in Petits Poèmes en Prose (Paris, 1967) p.155. Cf. Benjamin, GS, V, 474-5: ‘Die Bedeutung des Stückes "Perte d'Auréole" kann nicht überschätzt werden. Es ist zunächst darin von außerordentlicher Pertinenz, daß es die Bedrohung der Aura durch das Chockerlebnis zur Geltung bringt’ (‘It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of the piece "Loss of Halo." It is especially pertinent, in that it confirms that threat to aura caused by the experience of shock’).

[200] Benjamin notes ‘Die Warenform tritt als der gesellschaftliche Inhalt der allegorischen Anschauungsform bei Baudelaire zutage’ (‘In Baudelaire the commodity form appears as the social content of the allegorical form of vision’), GS, V, p. 422.

[201] ‘Mass production is the principal economic cause and the class struggle the main social cause for the decline of aura.’ Ibid., p. 433.

[202] ‘An ancient statue of Venus, for example, stood in a different traditional context with the Greeks, who made it an object of veneration, than with the clerics of the Middle Ages, who viewed it as an ominous idol. Both of them, however, were equally confronted with its uniqueness, that is, its aura,’ Benjamin, GS, Vol. I, p. 480.

[203] Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence, trans. Edmond Jephcott (Chicago, 1994) p. 301. This identity also underlay the conception of the statue. Belting writes (299): ‘The relic, as pars pro toto was the body of a saint, who remained present even in death and gave of his or her life by miracles. The statue represented this body of the saint and, as it were, was itself the saint's new body which, like a living body, could also be set in motion in a procession. The bodylike sculpture made the saint physically present, while the golden surface made the saint appear as a supernatural person with a heavenly aura.’

[204] Benjamin, GS, V, p. 998.

[205] ‘Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction ... To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose sense of the universal equality of things has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction. Thus is manifested in the field of perception what in the theoretical sphere is noticeable in the increasing importance of statistics.’ Benjamin, GS, I, p. 479.

[206] ‘In his work the painter maintains a natural distance from the given object, but the cameraman in contrast penetrates deep into the web of reality.’ GS, I, p. 496.

[207] ‘… only in the realm of ritual.’ Ibid., p. 638.

[208] ‘Experience of aura thus rests on the transposition of a response common in human relationships onto the relationship between of man to inanimate objects or to nature ... To experience the aura of something means to endow it with the ability to look back at us in return.’ Ibid., p. 646. Later (p. 670) Benjamin adds: ‘der Blick wird erwidert’ (‘the look is answered’), This anthropomorphism repeats, almost word for word, Karl Müller's account of mythic thinking, for whom the primitive mentality regarded nature as a living person, capable of responding when addressed in the same manner as a human being.

[209] ‘Every form of intimacy with things is alien to allegorical intention. To touch them means to violate them. To know them means to see through them.’ Benjamin, GS, V, p. 423.

[210] ‘… a fertile street of merchandise, set up merely to awaken one's desires.’ Ibid., p. 93.

[211] Ibid., p. 993.

[212] Writing of Naples Benjamin notes, ‘Nur Märchen kennen diese langen Zeile, die man durchschreitet, ohne rechts oder links zu blicken, wenn man nicht dem Teufel verfallen will’ (‘Only in fairy tales does one come across such long lanes, which one strides along, looking neither right nor left for fear to falling prey to the devil’). Benjamin, GS, IV, p. 314.

[213] WGS, pp. 89-126.

[214] ‘The modest privilege of the donor to be able to stand piously in the corner of the picture is extended by Ghirlandaio and his client, without pausing for thought, into the right of their image to be able to step freely into the sacred story itself as a spectator or even as a participant in the legend.’ Ibid., p. 97.

[215] ‘By permitting votive offerings to sacred images the catholic church ... had left its once pagan flock with a legitimate means of expressing the ineradicable and primal religious impulse to approach the divine, as expressed in the tangible form of a human image, either in person, or through one’s own effigy.’ Ibid., p. 99.

[216] ‘No longer kept at a distance by the remoteness of church art, the patron and amateur now had a proprietary interest: here was something for him to collect. Freed from its ecclesiastical context, the panel painting raised the humble donor from his knees and put him in command.’ WGS, p. 189.

[217] Benjamin, GS, I, p. 485.

[218] Kemp (1978) p. 251.

[219] ‘… it is tempting to speculate that epochs that tend toward allegorical expression have experienced a crisis of aura.’ Benjamin, GS, V, p. 462.

[220] ‘The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers the last refuge for the cult value of the picture.’ Benjamin, GS, I, p. 485.

[221] ‘It is the same with our own past. In vain we try to conjure it up again; the efforts of our intellect are futile.’ Proust, Du Côté de chez Swann (Paris, 1954) p. 58. Cited in Benjamin, GS, I, p. 610.

[222] See Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Sociology, I, p. 140 ff.

[223] Julius von Schlosser, Tote Blicke. Geschichte der Porträtbildnerei in Wachs, ed. Thomas Medicus (Berlin, [1910] 1993) p. l7 ff.

[224] ‘ … sinks its traces into the life of the storyteller ... Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story as the handprints of the potter to the clay of the vessel.’ Benjamin, GS, I, p. 447.

[225] ‘ … dry dwellers of eternity … ‘Ibid., p. 449.

[226] ‘ ... which is not concerned with an accurate concatenation of definite events, but with the way these are embedded in the great inscrutable course of the world.’ Ibid., p. 451.

[227] Ibid., p. 260.

[228] ‘hopelessness of the earthly condition.’ Ibid.

[229] ‘[The past] is hidden in some material object beyond its domain and outside its reach (in the experience gained from this material object) that we don't suspect.’ Proust, Du Côté de chez Swann (Paris, 1954) p. 58.

[230] ‘ ... time-space (a time-dream) in which … the collective consciousness sinks into ever deeper sleep.’ Benjamin, GS, V, p. 491.

[231] ‘The now of recognition is the moment of awakening.’ Benjamin, GS, V, p. 608.

[232] ‘ ... a phenomenon of nature with which a new dream came over Europe and, with it a reactivation of mythic powers.’ Benjamin, GS, V, p. 494.

[233] ‘Acting methodically, one should begin by investigating the links between myth and money throughout the course of history, to the point where money had drawn so many elements from Christianity that it could establish its own myth,’ Benjamin, GS, VI, p. 102.

[234] ‘History is the object of a construction, whose place is not homogeneous empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. Thus to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now.’ Benjamin, GS, I, p. 701. The resurrection of the iconography of Rome in the French revolution was first used as an example of historical correspondences by Nietzsche. Nietzsche notes: ‘Man kann den Grad des historischen Sinnes, welchen eine Zeit besitz, daran abschätzen, wie diese Zeit Uebersetzungen macht und vergangene Zeiten und Bücher sich einzuverleiben sucht, Die Franzosen Corneille's und auch noch die der Revolution, bemächtigten sich des römischen Altertums in einer Weise, zu der wir nicht den Muth mehr hätten ... ’ (‘One can infer the level of historical sense of an age from the way it makes translations and seeks to absorb past times and books. In the age of Corneille and even of the revolution the French appropriated Roman antiquity in a way we would no longer have the courage to ... ’). Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft’ § 83, in Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe, ed., G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin, 1988) 3, p. 438.

[235] Benjamin, GS, V, p. 577.

[236] Benjamin, GS, V, p. 587.

[237] ‘The historical materialist approaches a historical subject only when he encounters it as a monad.’ Benjamin, GS, I, p. 703.

[238] Richard Semon, Die Mneme als erhaltendes Prinzip im Wechsel des organischen Geschehens (Leipzig, 1904).

Aura of Benjamin Through Experience of Warburg