Aura as Productive Loss

Abstract

This paper explores the concept of aura as productive loss. My aim is to read Benjamin’s later essays on photography and art in the age of mechanical reproduction in the light of a reading of some of his earlier essays, especially “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy,”  and “Painting, or Signs and Marks.” I argue that Benjamin’s theory of aura (outlined in the later essays) stems from his attempt in the earlier essays to uncover a field of lived experience defined by the mark as the material trace of a technological operation that no longer functions, but which nevertheless provides an oblique access to originariness, or the capacity of technology to make present that which has already passed. In the later essays on photography and art, Benjamin renames this experience “aura.” When read in this way, aura no longer designates an ontological division between an original experience of plenitude in a pre-reproductive culture, and an impoverished experience of the copy in reproductive culture. Rather, aura becomes that which is necessary for and produced in reproductive culture: its mark of originariness as (false) primary access to presence. Benjamin thus provides us with a way of reading culture in terms of the production of origins, as false or pseudo-presence. In particular I identify phantasmagoria as a contemporary site of virtual experience saturated by aura. I argue that a critique of the auratic quality of phantasmagoria is now necessary in order to uncover the stake that contemporary digital technologies have in recovering lost origin.