Leave My Aura Alone!

The veritable wealth of information on which to write for this week's readings was overwhelming. The text I highlighted in Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," and Bill Nichol's "The Work of Culture in the age of Cybernetic Systems" more than doubled the allowable word count for our entries. With that in mind, I had real difficulty trying to decide what to focus on for this week's blog. I must admit that when Professor David Parry mentioned Benjamin's focus on aura in art work, I imagined Phoebe from Friends trying to cleanse Ross's aura. But that is not really the aura Benjamin is talking about.

Benjamin's concept of aura has to do with the authenticity of an item, namely a piece of art. Benjamin defines authenticity as, "the essence of all this is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to is testimony to the history which it has experienced (Benjamin 221)." Meaning that the aura of a piece of art is not only is presence, but its cultural significance and history.

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, aura (Benjamin 223).

For Benjamin, the presence of the aura of an original piece of art was very important, and the prevalence of not only the reproduction of art, but art created to be reproduced, greatly concerned him. He was chiefly concerned with photographs and film, which were created to be reproduced. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense (Benjamin 224).

Film, which is created specifically in pieces, for the camera, to be edited together and projected for an audience later, especially concerned Benjamin. His greatest concern being for the film actor , because “the film actor lacks the opportunity of the stage actor to adjust to the audience during his performance, since he does not present his performance, to the audience in person. (Benjamin 228).” The actor, then is performing for the camera and not for any live audience, only for the idea of the audience who may one day view the edited and projected piece. Benjamin believed that since the actor got his aura from acting for the audience, then the film actors aura is depleted because not only is the audience not present for the original performance but there is no full performance of the original piece. Because of this, he believed that film as an art has a diminished aura. However, he contends that

The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity (Benjamin 231).

People’s fascination with movie stars, Benjamin believes, is a reaction to the lack of a real aura surrounding the art. He does, however, concede (in a footnote) that film making “not only permits in the most direct way but virtually causes mass distribution. It enforces distribution because the production of a film is so expensive that an individual who for instance might afford to but a painting no longer can afford to buy a film (Benjamin 244).”

Benjamin, who died trying to escape the Nazis in World War II, did not live long enough to see the invention of the computer. If he had, his idea of aura would have been turned on its head. Bill Nichols attempted to build upon Benjamin’s ideas and expand them for the age of cybernetics.

Nichols contended that “If mechanical reproduction centers (sic) on the question of reproducibility and renders authenticity and the original problematic, cybernetic simulation renders experience, and the real itself, problematic (Nichols 30).” By the 1980s the computer has superseded film and television as the new, state of the art form of expression. Not only did it not have an aura in the way that Benjamin viewed it, but computers along with other scientific advances were pushing the boundaries between art and artificial intelligence.

At this point, for Nichols, “The question of whether film or photography is an art is here secondary to the question of whether art itself has not been radically transformed in form and function (Nichols 24).” The integration of function into art in our daily lives has become so prolific, that in many cases it is hard to tell the difference. Is my iPhone a piece of art? What about my GPS or my video editing system?

The chip is pure surface, pure simulation of thought. Its material surface is its meaning - without history, without depth, without aura, affect or feeling. The copy reproduces the world, the chip simulates it (Nichols 33).

The Bruce Willis movie, “Surrogates,” in which people can replace themselves with life-like remote-controlled robots, came out this weekend. In the movie, it was hard to know if you were interacting with the real person or the robot simulating and being controlled by that person. Although an AI movie itself is not news, the fact that CNN is reporting that this idea may not be so far-fetched after all is food for thought. If in the near future, life-like robots interact with humans on a daily basis, whose aura is Phoebe going to cleanse? Ross’s or Robot Ross’s? And would she be able to tell the difference?