Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura by Saladdin Ahmed;

Author:Saladdin Ahmed;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2019-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

Returning the Gaze

In “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Benjamin writes, “To experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back at us” (2006c, 338). This depiction of aura in terms of returning the gaze is one of Benjamin’s most common attributions to aura. Normally, the subject perceives an object through her sensory perception, cognizes it, and categorizes it. However, the auratic object does not surrender itself so simply to categorization, or what Kant calls the determining (bestimmend) power of judgment (as opposed to the reflecting (reflectirend) power of judgment) (Kant 2000, 26–27 §20:224). As Yvonne Sherratt argues, “When we go over to the auratic image, instead of assimilating the meaning of the gaze into our language, we are assimilated into the image. This means we are assimilated into its ‘vision.’ When we look at it with our sight, our words, our vocabulary, it ‘looks back’ at us with its sight, its ‘words,’ its ‘vocabulary.’ This is how the auratic image returns our gaze” (Sherratt 1998, 36; italics in original). While the non-auratic object as a finitude has a limited and closed world, the auratic object does not offer itself as a finitude to our categories of understanding.20 Perhaps the best way to clarify this is through a simple comparison between one’s perception, to take an extreme example, of a flag, and one’s experience of a painting by Monet, at the other extreme. In the first case, it is hard to imagine that any prolonged period of time pausing in front of a flag could foster a relationship between the flag and the subject, much less inspire an “experience” of some sort of reciprocity (even though in acts of pure performance people do pause to gaze at their flags). On the other hand, the example of the painting is much more than a simple representation; it has the capacity to haunt the subject, resisting her cognitive powers of representation and expression. Still, that is not to say the object always imposes the same power of assimilation on any observing subject. Of course, the subject has to give herself away to the experience. Perhaps, as a simpler example, while everyone passes by a traffic sign once its representation, its meaning, is cognized, no one can claim a definite understanding of any passing cloud. Good paintings, like clouds and mountains, resist purposive, utilitarian, pragmatist, and representational interpretations. In contrast to non-auratic objects, which are mere objects incapable of entering an open, subjective relationship with human beings, auratic objects can potentially penetrate the borders that define the subjectivity of the subject (Sherratt 1998). Thus, they are capable of returning our gaze, a notion of aura that can be delved into further by going back to Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire.

On that note, though Benjamin had many reasons to be fascinated by Baudelaire, undoubtedly one of the most appealing was that he saw in Baudelaire the poet of aura and its decay. In “Les Fleurs du

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