Ivor Indyk
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Here the critic's gaze evokes a response in the object. As
Benjamin puts it in his essay on "The Concept of
Criticism in German Romanticism", the interpreter calls
the object "into wakefulness". This responsive
quality in the object, this coming alive, is what Benjamin
in his later work on photography will call its
"aura". Given his original standpoint in idealism,
his insistence on the divine impress carried by the
fragment, his constant reference to this as
"semblance" ("Schein" in German),a kind
of flaring out of illumination or radiance, we could think
of aura as some kind of spiritual emanation. Alternatively,
in view of his use of the concept of "porosity",
to describe the way primitive energies express themselves
through actions and objects, we might think of it as a
chthonic force or power. (The effect is similar to the
electricities that break out through Prichard's characters
and landscapes.) But neither is the case. The concept of
aura, which is articulated at quite a late stage in
Benjamin's work, marks out a middle ground between the
metaphysical and the primitive, a ground which is
fundamentally social and historical. In his essay "Some
Motifs in Baudelaire", published in 1939, he describes
it thus:
Others, like Kafka and Proust, meet
tradition as something grown strange or pathological, or
substitute in its absence the personal disciplines of
memory. It's significant, I think, that whenever Benjamin
tries to convey the sense of aura, this intimate
communication between past and present in tradition, it is
always as an isolated, paradisal moment, a moment of
pastoral fulfilment. "While at rest on a summer's
noon," is how the famous formulation goes, "to
trace a range of mountains on the horizon, or a branch that
throws its shadow on the observer, until the moment or the
hour become part of their appearance – this is what it
means to breathe the aura of those mountains, that
branch." But of course the reality was quite different.
As Benjamin argued in his 1933 essay "Experience and
Poverty", the First World War had set tradition at
nought. "A generation that had gone to school in
horse-drawn streetcars now stood in the open air, amid a
landscape in which nothing was the same except the clouds
and, at its centre, in a force field of destructive torrents
and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body." It was
in this spirit that he saw in the early version of Mickey
Mouse, a figure similar to the characters of Kafka.
"Mickey Mouse proves," he wrote with heavy irony,
and a small measure of hope, in 1931, "that a creature
can still survive even when it has thrown off all
resemblance to a human being." The kind of world in
which he found himself, increasingly, was a world in which
things did not return the look of human recognition. The
life of tradition had withdrawn from them, leaving them
empty, like ruins, in its wake.
This is the world which
Benjamin sought to articulate in the work which so offended
the representatives of the academic establishment in 1925,
The Origin of German Tragic Drama.Instead of a
living tradition, in these dramas, Benjamin wrote, "the
word 'history' stands written on the countenance of nature
in the characters of transience". Instead of aura, what
they offer to the gaze of the interpreter, is allegory. For
the distinguishing feature of the allegorical object is that
it no longer has a life of its own. Only in this way, can it
be taken to stand for something else. Even here, Benjamin
finds hope. For if the object, dead to itself, can be taken
to mean something else, then it still lies within the power
of the interpreter to give it significance, however
schematic, however arbitrary. This is the consolation
offered to a gaze which must remain, however, melancholy and
alienated. Or worse. Since the allegorical attribution is
more or less arbitrary, the object itself alternates between
the ostentation of its allegorical appearance, and the
disconsolate character of its everyday appearance as a ruin
or a corpse. The gaze of the interpreter also swings between
fascination and disappointment, as the object he recovers
allegorically, he must abandon after its exhaustion. This
compulsive taking up and discarding of objects, in the
yearning for significance, Benjamin likens to the behaviour
of an ape. And there is more. In an insight which Benjamin
must have seen borne out in the allegorical posturings of
the Nazis, he notes that "evil…exists only in
allegory, is nothing other than allegory, and means
something other than what it is. It means precisely the
non-existence of what it presents."
Bibliographical Note
Also on Australian Humanities Review,relating
to Walter Benjamin and/or Australian Culture:
The Critic and the Public Culture:
Part two
for example, Walter Benjamin
this paper has been divided
into parts one & two
…looking at someone carries the implicit expectation
that our look will be returned by the object of our gaze.
Where this expectation is met…there is an experience of
the aura to the fullest extent. Experience of the aura [in
objects] thus rests on the transposition of a response
common in human relationships to the relationship between
the inanimate or natural object and man. The person we look
at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn.
To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest
it with the ability to look at us in return.
This seems to echo Benjamin's vision in "On Language as
Such and on the Language of Man", of a world in which
everything is in communication, each expressing itself in
its own language which is in turn a manifestation of pure
language, the Divine Word. But there is no transcendental
origin in this later formation, which is based on the
communication between two human beings, and is therefore
fundamentally social. In "The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction", Benjamin defines the aura of
a work of art as an expression of "its presence in time
and space, its unique existence at the place where it
happens to be". Distance is essential to this
experience of aura: the object addresses the interpreter
from its own time, and out of its own time. Yet this time
isn't fixed. The temporal existence expressed in the aura of
an object, is "all that is transmissible from its
beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its
testimony to the history which it has experienced". The
communication that takes place in the auratic moment is one
between the present and the past as embodied in the object,
but this past is itself dynamic, an accumulation of present
moments, including the present in which the object is now
observed. Our term for this historical process, in which the
past is continually made present through our objects, is of
course "tradition". The aura of an object is a
kind of patina, a coating, a weaving of the accretions of
significance with which it is endowed as an agent of
tradition. As Benjamin says of the art object, its
uniqueness, which is to say, its aura, "is inseparable
from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition".
Mechanical reproduction threatens to detach the reproduced
object "from the domain of tradition", by bringing
it wholly into our own time without at the same time
bringing the associations it has gathered in the course of
its history.
Significantly, Benjamin's notion of "aura"
corresponds exactly to his understanding of the task of the
literary critic, as defined in "Literary History and
the Study of Literature": this is to be aware of the
literary work's entire life and effects, its fate, its
reception, its translations, its fame. "For with this
the work is transformed inwardly into a microcosm, or indeed
a microeon. What is at stake is not to portray literary
works in the context of their age, but to represent the age
that perceives them – our age – in the age during
which they arose." It is this reciprocity and return of
recognition, across the distance of time, which turns
literature, according to Benjamin, into "an organon of
history" – which is to say, into an agent of
tradition.
And yet… What Benjamin experienced during the period in
which he lived was a crisis in tradition. The auratic
moments of communication with the past which he describes
are sporadic and fugitive in their operation. They flash
out, fleetingly, and then sink back into the stream of
things. False and demonic appearances of aura (as for
example in the Nazi invocations of tradition) abound. Some
of the contemporary artists whom Benjamin most admires, Loos
and Le Corbusier in architecture, Atget in photography,
Brecht in the drama, are concerned to drive out the
intimations of aura, to start afresh with few resources.
"The most urgent task of the present-day writer,"
Benjamin wrote in 1934 in "The Author as
Producer", "is to recognize how poor he is and how
poor he has to be in order to begin again from the
beginning."
I have been using Benjamin himself – or rather, his
writings – in an auratic fashion, because they have a
lot to say that is relevant now in defining the interpretive
stance appropriate to a critic operating in, and on, the
public culture. Of course, though I began by noting how that
culture is under threat in Australia, it is in no way as
threatened as the culture whose decline Benjamin witnessed.
Nevertheless, his perceptions, born of an intense engagement
which perhaps only a sense of crisis can bring, are of great
relevance to our own situation.
I'm thinking not only of his commitment, as a critic, to
understanding the threatening complexities of his time,
though this is an important consideration. He never
surrendered that magical sense of reciprocity and
recognition between human beings, and between human beings
and their world, which informs his work from the beginning,
though his determination to mould it to the exigencies of
his time, and specifically to the service of dialectical
materialism, must have seemed at times, and certainly to
some of his friends, to go against his natural inclinations.
One of the most remarkable aspects of his work is the way he
was able to transform the notion of aura, which had its
roots in idealism, and mysticism, into a political
understanding of the distancing effect at work in Brecht's
epic theatre. Brecht's habit of interrupting or punctuating
the action gave his plays a gestural quality: in that
moment, in which the gesture was held, what became apparent,
as though by a stroke of lightning, were the material
conditions that gave the gesture its meaning. The proper
reaction in the audience was one of astonishment, born of
recognition. The terminology is very similar to that
Benjamin used to describe the moment of reciprocal
recognition in the aura, only now it is not tradition which
provides the ground for it, but the dialectical view of
history as a struggle for control of the means of
production. In his famous formulation: "The conditions
which Epic theatre reveals is the dialectic at a
standstill." But in all other respects, the stance, the
vocabulary, the moment of recognition, the attitude is a
familiar one. "Epic theatre makes life spurt up high
from the bed of time and, for an instant, hover iridescent
in empty space. Then it puts it back to bed."
It is not this note, though, that I want to end on. What is
most compelling for me about Benjamin is his timeliness, his
almost palpable sense of time, which can only come from
being thoroughly immersed in time. More than any other
thinker I know, he felt time as a medium, a texture, the way
it warps and folds back on itself, flows or congeals,
inhibits action or gives it grace. He once wrote that the
best visual equivalent of the aura was to be found in Van
Gogh's late paintings, by which he meant not simply the halo
which surrounds his objects, but the coarse weave of Van
Gogh's brushstrokes, the wrinkledeffect which it
gives to his objects. Benjamin was particularly sensitive to
the strange deformations wrought by tradition as it faltered
or flared out under the pressure of time, particularly
conscious of what could be called the pathologies of time.
This is most obvious in his interpretations of Kafka, the
way, as he notes, the threatening force of the future is
felt in Kafka's work as a distortion of the present, so that
he is incapable of portraying any event without distortion;
the way, again, the present is slowed down by the terrible
weight of an uninformed past, especially apparent in Kafka's
figures of authority, who seem to wake from a vegetative
existence, and act out of a deep sense of exhaustion, as if
they lived in the time of cosmic epochs, had eons to move,
displacing the sheer mass of dead time in every gesture they
made. In another essay, Benjamin presented time as a
whirlpool, "in which earlier and later events, the
prehistory and posthistory of an event swirl". Of
Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu, with
its combination of aging and remembrance, he spoke of time
as a braid, an intertwining. In Julien Green, he noted how
the work would suddenly fall, in its treatment of family
history, into the deep recesses of primal history, as if a
corridor had suddenly opened in time. Of Hofmannsthal he
wrote: "The country no longer had a future. And
so…the time that was yet to come was, as it were, all
rolled up into the past, like a scroll, and became a sort of
underworld of the future, one haunted by only the oldest of
things."
These irruptions of the primeval into the present seem to me
particularly characteristic of Australian literature, though
the warpings of tradition which they represent exist there
for different reasons to those Benjamin saw in the
literature and objects of his own period. The vacillation
between the metaphysical and the primitive, so dominant in
Benjamin, is likewise, one of the basic reflexes of our
culture. So too is that other, fundamental, set of
polarities by which Benjamin sought to define the power, and
the pathology, of tradition, the movement between aura and
allegory, in the critic's mode of apprehension. It is this
movement between the auratic and the allegorical, often in
the same work, which is one of the most powerful
characteristics of Australian writing, binding authors like
Slessor or Prichard, Murray or Kefala or Mudrooroo, whom we
would normally put in different if not in opposing
camps.
There has been much talk, in Australian criticism, about the
sense of place in Australia, and the mapping of its spaces.
But what these polarities – the oscillation between
aura and allegory, the metaphysical and the primitive –
point to, is the extremely tenuous hold that tradition has
here. Australia is a country with many histories, many of
them suppressed or only partially told, existing side by
side or overlaid, operating according to radically different
scales of time. Time for us, too, is wrinkled and folded,
and pierced with discontinuities. It is time, not space,
which is the really difficult problem in Australia; and it
is timeliness, not just as a willingness to act, but as the
ability to position oneself, that is the quality we need
most in our critics.
Ivor Indyk
is the founding editor of the literary journalHEAT.
A critic, essayist and reviewer, he has written a monograph on David Malouf,
published by Oxford University Press in 1993, and essays on many aspects of
Australian literature. He lectures on English and Australian literature at the
University of Sydney.
The section of this essay devoted to Walter Benjamin could not have been written
without the two-volume Walter
Benjamin: Selected Writings, published by Belknap/Harvard University
Press (Cambridge, Mass and London, 1999). Volume
1 covers the period 1913-1926, Volume
2 1927-1934. I have drawn on the following essays collected in the Selected
Writings(the sources are given by volume and page number, with specific
citations in parentheses): "On Language as Such and on the Language of
Man", I, 62-74 (pp.73-74); "Naples", I,414-421; "Moscow",
II, 22-46 (p.39); "Marseilles", II, 232-236(pp.234-35); "One
Way Street", I, 444-48(pp.444,454,473); "Karl Kraus", II,
433-458 (pp.436-37); "Ibizan Sequence", II, 587-594 (pp.587-88); "Hashish
in Marseilles", II,673-79 (p.676); "The Concept of Criticism in German
Romanticism", I,116-200 (p.147); "Literary History and the Study of
Literature", II, 459-465 (p.464); "The Author as Producer", II,
768-782 (p.776); "Little History of Photography", II, 507-530 (pp.518-19);
"Experience and Poverty", II, 731-36 (p.732); "MickeyMouse",
II, 545-46 (p.545); "On the Image of Proust",II, 237-47 (p.244); "Julien
Green", II, 331-36 (p.335);"Theological Criticism", II, 428-32
(p.429).
Reference is also made to the following works of Walter
Benjamin: "Some Motifs in Baudelaire", in Charles Baudelaire: A
Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London &
New York: Verso, 1989), pp.147-48; "The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", in Illuminations,
trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), pp.220-21; The Origin of German
Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London & New York: Verso, 1998),
pp.177,185,233; "What is Epic Theatre?" in Understanding Brecht,
trans. Anna Bostock (London: NLB, 1977), pp.12-13; "Franz Kafka",
in Illuminations, pp.111-40.
Return to part one of this essay.
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