Aura Reconsidered: Benjamin and Contemporary Visual Culture

Lutz Koepnick

Abstract

Lutz Koepnick argues that Benjamin’s concepts concerning the auratic and postauratic art (as expressed in his essay about the artwork in the era of mechanical reproduction) cannot be uncritically applied to the contemporary, postmodern culture. The reality depicted by Benjamin in the 1930s seems to be radically different from the one we experienced at the end of 20^th century. Postmodern culture, with its centrality of visual experiences and virtual gazes, with the multiple and heterogenous forms of spectatorship and its positions, with the despatialized and detemporalized viewing subject has to be analyzed from a new perspective. Koepnick points out, that Benjamin’s thesis concerning aesthiticization of politics and its connection to fascism lost the actuality in the post-fordist society and its cultural environment. Using the theories by Theodore Adorno, Patrice Petro and Miriam Hansen, and analyzing the project Wrapped Reichstag by Christo, Koepnick criticizes some points of Benjamin’s thoughts. In the same time, he tries to answer the question what can be redeemed of Benjamin (and Adorno) for our own times and how we can envision his role under the postmodern conditions.

• The text is a translation of the chapter Aura Reconsidered: Benjamin and Contemporary Visual Culture from the volume Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Gerhard Richter, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2002. Originally published (under the title Benjamin’s Actuality) in the book Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power by Lutz Koepnick, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln – London 1999. © 1999 by University of Nebraska Press.