The Lost Aura of Culture

The aura of an object is the emotional quality that is evinced by its significance. Although a true work of beauty, be it a painting or landscape, even a personality or event, inevitably has an aura regardless of whether there is an audience to appreciate it, it remains highly emotional and therefore personal. The question becomes what it is that describes the essence of a “true work,” or the aura itself. The aura is without exception rooted in space and time, and so reality. The work must have a past, a unique history of how it came to be in this present moment and place. (1) Essentially, for an object to have an aura, it must have continuity from its origin or birth to the present. The greatest destruction of this continuity is mass reproduction, which can essentially be considered a life begun in the middle.

The misguided purpose of mass production is to rob an object of its two greatest qualities; its uniqueness and permanence. Instead, it must become a work uprooted and temporary that can be reproduced countless times to bring the object to the masses. (2) However, this ability to reproduce art has eradicated the urgency of meaning when experiencing it. There is no compulsion to truly contemplate, remember or attach significance to an object which can always be found at a different time or in a different place. In this case, the loss of the aura corresponds to a loss of appreciation for the work as a whole and the authenticity that made it valuable in the first place.

There is no place more prone to this occurrence than cyberspace, which is completely digital and therefore a complete reproduction itself. Even the medium, every laptop, software, webpage, is an infinite reproduction. Beyond this, the content of each page is a reproduction, which may even contain further reproductions such as scans of works of art, digital books and photographs. Because cyberspace as a whole is a medium for communication, individuals get flooded with information from “official” (authoritative) sources while having no means to establish a dialogue. (3) This leads to the monopolization of both culture and the information that shapes it, or in a culture “infecting everything with sameness.” (4)

This cultural sameness is only propagated in the petri dish of the economic system in which it resides. (5) When culture is applied to fit an industrial system, it inevitably becomes a culture shaped by industry. In this kind of society, man is increasingly seen as a cog in a machine, as part of the process of supply and demand. Public opinion becomes a product (6) and people become commodities for purchase (7), just as all of culture becomes a commodity for purchase. Supply is provided in anticipation for demands directed by the system manufacturing both. (8) So standardized, the entire culture itself loses its aura to the inevitable reproduction and cheapened value that it comes to represent.

(1) Benjamin, Walter, and Hannah Arendt. Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 2007. Print, pg 220.
(2) Benjamin, Walter, and Hannah Arendt. Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 2007. Print, pg 223.
(3) Hardt, Hanno. Myths for the Masses: An Essay on Mass Communication. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Print, pg 12.
(4) Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. [New York]: Herder and Herder, 1972. Print, pg 94.
(5) Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. [New York]: Herder and Herder, 1972. Print, pg 96.
(6) Hardt, Hanno. Myths for the Masses: An Essay on Mass Communication. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Print, pg 33.
(7) Benjamin, Walter, and Hannah Arendt. Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 2007. Print, pg 231.
(8) Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." Dialectic of Enlightenment. [New York]: Herder and Herder, 1972. Print, pg 109.