Benjamin's Blind Spot. . - Media - book review

Afterimage, March, 2002 by Angela Glass

Lise Patt, ed.

Los Angeles, CA: Institute of Cultural Inquiry, 2001

You have only to read the introduction to Benjamin's Blind Spot: Walter Benjamin and the Premature Death of Aura & The Manual of Lost Ideas to know that ambiguity pervades this concise and rewarding collection of essays. A ubiquitous and cryptic document, The Manual of Lost Ideas (MLI) embodies the essential elusiveness of Benjamin's concept of aura. We learn in the "Introduction to The Manual of Lost Ideas" that the ML! arrived at the Institute of Cultural Inquiry in a suitcase, along with ancillary materials including diaries, drawings, a baboon skull, a globe and commentary by "a European of questionable sanity." An associate of the Institute allegedly took photographs of the trunk's contents; provocative details of these images haunt the book's margins. Reminiscent of palimpsests, they call to mind Benjamin's description of the literary critic's role: "One may liken him to a paleographer in front of a parchment whose faded text is covered by the stronger outlines of a script referring to that text."

In "Benjamin's Aura and the Broken Heart of Modernity," Carsten Strathausen reiterates how Benjamin first grounded his concept of aura in nature by linking it to "a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over the onlooker." Most of the essays in Benjamin's Blind Spot, however, focus more on the relevance of aura to contemporary culture, a theme Benjamin pursued in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Gerhard Richter's essay, "Adorno and the Excessive Politics of Aura," reconsiders Theodor Adorno's conviction that aura had political usefulness because of its inherent "dialectical interplay of proximity and distance." This so-called "excessive quality" in the work of art "always points to an elsewhere that can never simply be present." Richter concludes that Adorno's appropriation of his friend's concept of aura is "a gift" because it remains "faithful to Benjamin by not following him fully." A different approach to aura is taken by David S. Gross, who charges Adorn o with "elitist hostility." The hierarchical framework that Adorno set up between degraded art (i.e. entertainment) and artwork that can "empower and invite us to think it through" is at the root of Gross's contention. Using Elvis Presley as a prime example, Gross argues that Adorno's appropriation of aura is unduly negative and narrow. "Heroic individual efforts" like Elvis's music, "have allowed for the survival or persistence of the aura into the age of mechanical reproduction and beyond." Another American "hero" is the subject of "The Impossibility of Duality: The Vision of jackson Pollock." Here Cohn Rhodes revisits Pollock's tragic "abiding dysfunctionality," which led to his death in a drunken car crash. Rhodes unconvincingly claims that Pollock's self-destructive behavior "might be seen as fundamentally creative." But the connection between Pollock's art and aura intensifies when considered in light of Gross's essay on Elvis, which productively mines Benjamin's writings on intoxication, religious ecst asies, myths of individualism and the dream of community.

Is aura an aesthetic or a mythical projection, an historical concept or a kind of human experience, a force of nature or a utopian longing? Benjamin's Blind Spot cleverly provokes far-reaching reconsideration of the lingering presence of blind spots and aura in today's art and culture.

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