2024-10-26 14:07:00
Plus 1000 Aura for Walter Benjamin: The cult word of today’s teenagers is a central concept in his theory of art, on which entire generations of human science scholars have already cut their teeth. Is there maybe even a connection?
Would Walter Benjamin have liked it? For the Youth word of the year 2024 “Aura” was chosen in an online vote. According to the definition of the organizing Langenscheidt-Verlag: “Personal charisma or impression that a person makes on others; it is often used jokingly.
According to the instructions of the usually well-informed youth coaches, it is used as an ironic criticism when a defender allows himself to be outmaneuvered or the attacker misses a great opportunity: “minus 100 aura”. There are tons of memes online where celebrities, behaviors, or statements are assigned a “plus” or “minus” number of aura points.
Now the term “aura” plays a central role in intellectual history. He became famous for Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility,” which is probably one of the best-known writings of the philosopher, who committed suicide on September 26, 1940 while fleeing the Nazis. In his essay, written in the Parisian exile of the mid-1930s, Benjamin states that the modern work of art has lost its aura due to the new possibilities of mass reproduction. He thinks mainly about the new media of his time, photography and cinema.
Benjamin sees this elusive aura as a legacy of the original ritual-religious rooting of the work of art. One can imagine altarpieces, but also think of the almost sectarian veneration of paintings or sculptures in 19th century museums.
According to Benjamin, this aura that radiates from the work is linked to its uniqueness, to the presence of an original. When mass audiences flock to a Chaplin cinematic blockbuster, there is no trace of aura, but a completely new critical relationship between the individual and art becomes possible. Benjamin’s materialist is pleased with this: only without aura can art be put at the service of progress.
But how does aura become a fashionable word again among young people who are no longer the main target group of the Suhrkamp Edition volumes? In fact, the roots lie in online role-playing games, where characters acquire an “aura” by collecting certain properties, which probably also explains the countability.
As a result, movie scenes in which characters exert power over the environment using their aura also went viral in the spring as Baldwin IV, the “King in the Mask,” in Ridley Scott’s landmark film “Kingdom of Heaven”. 2005.
In this way the aura returns to its mystical origins, which Benjamin certainly had in mind. The aura he adopted reflected esotericism around 1900, the idea of chakras, still widespread today, of invisible but noticeable force fields surrounding a person or things. This charisma can be positive or negative: plus/minus 100 aura.
That this ancient idea of aura is now returning via the newest and most fleeting level of technical reproducibility, Instagram and TikTok, is a punchline that Benjamin might have liked.
At the end of the essay “Work of Art”, he celebrates the new “welcome into distraction”, which corresponds to the new “turning point”, and which “is achieved much less in acute attention than in casual observation”. Now you can see: the future also comes with the aura.
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