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In such a dialectical conception, the alignment
through
the figure of the vessel of the life-giving
feminine
with nature cannot hold. In Benjamin there
is no
marriage of alternating opposites, no silent
partnership. The vessels are broken.
Woman
is not inert. She walks. She is of
history. In his texts relating to the
decline of
the aura, female figures signal elusiveness.
Because they are fleeting, they provoke curiosity
rather than contemplation.
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In his discourse, Benjamin's encounter with photographs of women trigger the elaboration of his musings on aura. In "A Small History of Photography" two descriptions precede the text's statement regarding the discovery of an "optical unconscious" (242-243). They are of photographs. Benjamin contrasts painted pictures with photography. He writes of the urge to narrate, to tell the story of the subjects: this is "something new and strange" that is encountered more in the viewing of photographs than that of paintings. With painted pictures interest in the subject fades and "if they [the paintings] last, they do so only as testimony to the art of the painter" ("Small History" 242). Whether such a distinction can be sustained by a formalist appeal to the medium or more readily ascribed to the hermeneutical orientation of the beholder matters little since for Benjamin either route would lead to this other nature, this optical unconscious. For it is another nature that speaks to the camera than to the eye: other in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious. ("Small History" 243)
The ekphrasis that sets in place this conclusion,
this
revelation of another nature, is that of two
photographs of female subjects. What one
glimpses
in this 1931 essay, as well as in the 1934
Bachofen
piece and the early entries in the Passagen-
Werk (n15)
such as the citation from Berl are the
organizational outlines of material which will
permit a
reformulation of the category of experience in
more
materialist terms contra Klages and Jung.
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The 1931 text "A Small History of Photography" cannot be read as response to Jung and company except in the manner Benjamin himself reads photographs. He is not seeking the silence of the symbol but "the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently" ("Small History" 243). The first function of the female figure in Jung's account is to trigger erotic stirrings. Similarly, Benjamin sees the Newhaven fishwife's "seductive modesty" as "something that cannot be silenced, that fills you with an unruly desire to know" ("Small History" 242). It is the name and the live woman, he wants to know. Both Jung and Benjamin universalize this desire. However, if for Jung this desire is caught up by the vessel-symbol which is the second function of the figure and through which the happy ending of conducting sexual energy to social task ensues, this is not so in Benjamin. His second subject recalls the catastrophe that awaits real historical subjects if the erotic, that fanatic obsessive sexual desire, faces an unmodified nature. That which cannot be silenced is the catastrophe: Or you turn up the picture of Dauthendey the photographer, the father of the poet, from the time of his engagement to that woman whom he found one day, shortly after the birth of her sixth child, lying in the bedroom of his Moscow house with her arteries severed. Here she can be seen with him, he seems to be holding her; but her gaze passes him by, absorbed in an ominous distance. ("Small History" 243) |
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For Benjamin, unlike Jung, there is no eternal
Mother. There is no bosom enfolding timeless
moments. Just as in the mind of the
photograph
viewer the represented couple cannot hold together
in
an unnegated unity so too the relation between
viewer
and photograph is dialectical. The apparatus
mediates that relation.
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Benjamin's gesture is one of interpretive
mimesis. His approach recreates the workings
of
the technical apparatus under scrutiny. The
photograph enlarges segments of reality.
Cinematic slow motion even segments reality into
hitherto unnoticed parts. They bring reality
closer. Likewise to restore time to the
photograph is to bring it closer.
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|
It is perhaps more appropriate to characterize
this
play of proxemics in terms of unlocking time or
cutting
time free since in this essay Benjamin in his
definition of aura sees time as strangely woven
into
space to create the appearance of distance.
Whatever the characterization, it is movement
through
space that destroys the timeless aspect of aura
("Small History"
250).
Aura arises out of observer immersion in the
phenomenon. Later in the Artwork essay (n16)
Benjamin will stress the role of cultic practices
in
maintaining the contemplation necessary to sustain
aura. However here in "A Small History
of
Photography" he accentuates the
atmosphere-like
quality; aura is breathed in (250).
This quality is related to
the factor of enfolded time the
moment or
hour becoming part of the appearance.
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|
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How aura as atmosphere can be related to enfolded
time
is not at all clear from Benjamin's text. In
later essays, he drops from the discussion all
direct
mention of these two elements. The
correlation
between time and atmosphere passes through a
mechanism
of identification similar to the vessel-symbol of
the
Jungian soul. Whether Benjamin had read Jung
at
this point, it is clear that the auratic fusion of
viewer and object places his discussion in the
orbit of
exponents of mythic images like Klages.
|
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|
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The Artwork essay is marked by the traces of the
work
on Bachofen and mother-right. Benjamin
compares
early photography to the cult of remembrance of
the
dead ("Artwork"
226).
As well, although without reference to grave
robbing,
he refers to the destruction of aura when objects
are
pried from their shell ("Artwork"
223). These
passing references evoke less Bachofen's narrative
of
his first experiences upon encountering ancient
graves
than Schuler's story of his own first encounter
with
unearthed artefacts.
|
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|
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Schuler observing objects lifted from an
archaeological
excavation notes that as they come to light they
loose
their aura (der Hauch). It evaporates.
Schuler claimed that a fluid, a film of life
matter,
was possessed not only by relics and cult objects
but
also by all ancient objects (Fuld
361-362). Benjamin
could not
refer to a
written source for Schuler's lectures and
fragments
were published posthumously by Klages in
1940.
However, it is the type of material that would
circulate widely as anecdote. The evidence
is
compelling that Benjamin observed carefully the
Munich
circle around poet Stefan George of which Alfred
Schuler was a celebrated part (Fuld
360). Indeed in the
Bachofen
essay Benjamin
refers to George's dedication of Porta
Nigra to Schuler ("Bachofen"
38).
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The Schuler story perhaps did not influence
Benjamin
directly. Its key element, however, the
fragility
of the aura in the context of unearthing the past
anticipates Benjamin's insistence on displacement
in
the destruction of aura. It also illuminates
the
perplexing combination of aura's source in ritual
and
in natural phenomena. It is upon the cult of
the
dead that mythic claims to a people's belonging to
the
land are founded. Without symbols such a
cult is
endangered. It is unable to envelop the
departed,
those now belonging to nature, and those belonging
to
history, the living, into one cognitive
space.
The past is not one with the present.
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