The Post-Aura: an Inversion of the Loss of Aura in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Aura is manufactured outside of the body of works and does not exist independent of the various paraphernalia constituting its merit. Aura as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be (Benjamin, 1968) bursts into brilliance only upon an awareness punctuated exogenously. As such, distance is not only a crucial phenomenon, it is the source of aura. Commenting amid the golden age of advertising, John Berger (1972) hinted at the externalisation of aura through reproduction – the verbal authority, or any other extra-visual input, into which he unfortunately delves no further. If today a work comes to you through an image; an aura comes to you through a process of reproducible popularity – heretofore misrecognised as a loss of aura. It is precisely through this reproducible popularity that the aura obtains greater currency (or, in fact, its first). The perception of the loss of aura in the age of mechanical reproduction is merely a tableau vivant to a sense of lack and incompleteness in the intransmittability of the authentic. The collapse of faith in the origin is misconstrued and reconstituted as a loss (psychoanalytically speaking; cf. Frosh, 2013) – but yet it is a lack of which is only fulfilled through reproducible popularity. This spectral aura to which the body of works could not respond is, akin to Marianne Hirschs postmemory (2008), a post-aura.
Posted on: Thu, 05 Jun 2014 03:11:53 +0000
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