Adorno is about to introduce Walter Benjamin’s concept of “the aura” into the conversation. Maybe this doesn’t need explaining; most of us, after all, could identify the aura on a pop quiz. Benjamin thought that art used to be special, because rare. He thought that an older art could still take people out of themselves, interrupt their daily routines, inspire a spontaneous reverence, and exude a nimbus of sanctity even when not technically sacred. And he thought, not implausibly, that art has largely forfeited this air of specialness in a period of mass-produced music and image; in an age when copies of the greatest artworks are turned out in industrial quantities; in societies flooded by melody and facsimile; in a world where you can’t remember having seen Michelangelo’s art for the first time—a world, I mean, where you have never not known what the Sistine Chapel looks like.
That seems clear enough. What might nonetheless need explaining is Benjamin’s opting for the word “aura” to get at this issue, since by the 1930s, when Benjamin was writing, “aura” had already come to refer to the field of vital energy that supposedly surrounds individual persons and that adepts can read like so many cosmic signatures. So art used to be special. But why call that specialness its “aura”? Benjamin could have called it lots of things. The story that Benjamin is telling—the one about the decline of the aura—is clearly a disenchantment narrative, more Weberian than Marxist, so why didn’t Benjamin avail himself of Weber’s terminology? Why don’t we talk about art’s Zauber or magic? Or why don’t we say that art used to possess “charisma”? “Charisma” and “aura” are words on parallel tracks—Latinized versions of Greek terms, each of which entered religious usage before being selected by an early twentieth-century German theorist to name an air of indefinable authority. “Aura” could seem like a redundancy. Do we really need a separate word for the charisma of objects as opposed to the charisma of persons? Benjamin could have called it a “halo”. Or an “aureole” (which comes from aurum, gold, and not aura, breeze). Or he could have called it a “corona” (which has respectable meanings in astronomy and electrical engineering). Why the aura, of all things? Why did Benjamin go for the word most associated with occultists and Theosophists? It would be like going through Fredric Jameson’s unpublished papers and discovering that he was really into chakras.
At one level—the intellectual-historical one—the question has a ready answer. We know who Benjamin borrowed the term “aura” from. But if I tell you now that that person was Ludwig Klages, and then remind you that Klages was an anti-Semitic vitalist, the question will only re-pose itself with heightened urgency. For it was Klages who instructed Germans in the late 1920s to view Jewish monotheism and the Jewish legal tradition as the historic origin of the alienated intellect; it was Jews who had first devised, and then bequeathed to Christianity, a way of thinking that regarded itself as distinct from the material world: extricated from it, elevated above it. It was Judaism, then, that had severed Western humanity’s connection to nature and so destroyed the earlier, more primal modes of perception that followed from our immersion in the world, for which it had substituted a spiritualizing and analytic withdrawal. Klages, in other words, is yet another of those figures who forces the embattled German professor to raise his hand and slump his shoulders and explain to the room again that he wasn’t exactly a Nazi. So why, again, is Benjamin silently citing Klages? It was bad enough when he seemed to be quoting his yoga instructor.
Part of the problem is that if I start explaining Klages’s views, so that we can see for ourselves what Benjamin might have found to admire in them, he is going to sound at first like a generic cultural pessimist, lamenting the decline of non-scientific (for which read: humanist) modes of understanding amidst a rising tide of scientism and mechanization and mass production. And at that point, a reader is going to wonder what Benjamin got from Klages that he couldn’t just as well have gotten from Scheler or Gundolf or any of several dandified vampire-poets. Worse: If I recommend that we stay the course and just keep working through his positions, that reader is at some point going to say: Hold on, that’s just Heidegger, as in: To rescue human existence from the soul-destroying tyranny of modern calculation and technological mastery, we must step back from egoic domination and surrender to the primordial, immediate presence of the world.
We will labor, then, to be specific. One way to get a bead on Klages would be to think of him as having proposed a paganized Lutheranism, with the cosmic life-force uncannily assuming the place vacated by Christ. From Lutheranism Klages adopted an abhorrence of ratiocination; a rejection of the Hebraic inheritance; a repudiation of the law; and a call for humans to relinquish their delusions of agency and achieve a higher state by transforming themselves into passive and receiving vessels. It’s just that Klages was able to fill these Protestant commonplaces with a new and startlingly non-Christian content. Instead of entering the kingdom of God, the person re-made by Klages’s writing enters the sacred grove of a secret antiquity, able again to apprehend the world’s all-beauty, inhabiting sootiest Duisburg as though it were the Peloponnese, Cleveland as though it were a stand of heathen oaks. To see how this works, we need to pause for a moment over the last of Klages’s Lutherisms—the imperative to make of oneself a receiving vessel. The Frankfurt School would eventually conceive of mimesis not as mere artistic imitation, but as a primordial, downright bodily capacity for non-coercive adaption and affinity, through which a subject registers and yields to the unique presence of the other—often a non-human other: an object, an animal, a thing—without seeking to dominate or even conceptualize it. You can read an awful lot of Adorno before ever realizing that he has, in fact, worked out a fairly robust alternative to the coercions of Enlightenment and identity-thought. So Adorno borrowed this idea from Benjamin, who in turn borrowed it from Klages—he borrowed the bit about becoming a receiving vessel—except Klages didn’t call this “mimesis.” He called it “pathic consciousness”—“suffering and passive consciousness.” “Pathic,” it will turn out, is a Greek cognate of the Latinate “patient” in one of the word’s more arcane meanings: not the adjective that means “willing to wait” or “able to tolerate aggravation,” but rather the noun that means “the object of an action.” This is what linguists mean when they talk about “agents and patients,” and what philosophers mean when they refer to “moral agents and moral patients”—that last means “the targets of our moral concern.” A medical patient, meanwhile, is simply the-one-acted-upon. In the hospital, you are the passive one—a pathic. In an older sexology, the word “pathic” was also the word for the receiving partner in penetrative sex: a bottom. That arguably gets us closer to Klages, who began working out these ideas in a book called Of Cosmogonic Eros. Try this on: To be a conscious, willing subject is to take an active, invasive stance toward reality. To return to the life of the soul therefore requires that one shed the weapons of the intellect—“He has,” they say, “a penetrating mind”—relinquish the active posture of control, and surrender to the cosmic flux. Klages is basically arguing that our salvation lies in abandoning the role of the top.
But then how do you do that? Klages tends to describe the intellect as a foreign body: a parasite, a virus, a demon possessing an unwitting host. How, then, do you perform an exorcism on your own thinking mind? To find an answer, it will help to note first that Klages’s vocabulary draws at key moments on the German idealists; the philosophy student who spots a Kantian term in Klages has at least found a foothold. According to the Kantians, the mind habitually brings the object before itself in three different guises; it posits the object in three different forms. First, the mind takes raw sense data and structures it into a something that (we think) exists here and now, in space and time. This is the moment of the Anschauung, a Looking-at. But the mind will tend to file away these spectations in the form of picture-thoughts, which many of Kant’s early followers called representations or Vorstellungen. (Close your eyes and picture a horse.) Finally, the mind will subsume the object under a concept, which for most purposes just means: You eventually call the thing by its name—you can say what it is and thus start generating propositions about it. You can know it or recognize it. What I probably don’t need to point out separately is that this trifold list has the character of a sequence or progression: the pseudo-immediacy of the Looking-at is elevated to the semi-abstraction of the picture-thought or mental icon, which shift toward abstraction is at length completed via the concept, the name, the right word, the identification. Klages is distinctive, then, in that he treats Anschauung, the Looking-at, not as the moment that initiates cognition but as the anti-mind’s proper goal and terminus and rallying cry. In the introduction to his smaller Logic, Hegel says that the business of philosophy is to wean students of their addiction to spurious concretion and to teach them to abide in higher abstraction, which is the mind’s native realm. Klages steps forward in the 1920s to reverse this operation, pledging to recall the mind from the concept; asking us to treat the mind’s first Kantian step as its last, its one and only step and so training the psyche to idle in the low-gear of Anschauung.
This, then, is how you get to the aura. You just need to follow the steps:
-Klages is a vitalist. He holds that the universe is not inert matter acting according to mechanical laws, but an active, generative, self-unfolding process.
-It is therefore a mistake to regard anything in the universe as a thing. There are no things, no objects-qua-objects. Every phenomenon is continually becoming, shifting, and responding to its environment, transforming, exchanging energy and matter with everything around it across permeable and shifting boundaries. Klages seems to have noticed that Kantian philosophy can, with a little finessing, be said to encourage this metaphysics. Klages, this is to say, has wholly signed onto the idealist teaching that the object is not real; that what we regard as real objects are, in fact, the compulsive constructs of the mind. And this is all the license that Klages needs in order to insist that the raw reality out of which the mind devises its representations is not itself populated with objects.
-Klages insisted that if you could postpone or maybe even dismantle the mind’s drive to subsume objects under concepts, then you should be able to clap eyes on the naked, unmediated world—on Life, which is not a thing nor even a very large set of things. This is obviously where his sporting with Kant comes to an abrupt end: I would say that Klages thought you could look upon the Ding an sich, but I reckon you get by now that Klages’s whole point is that there was no Ding. You should be able to see this phenomenologically. If you inspect your own real vision, you would find—so Klages—that objects do not typically have sharp outlines. Your eyes do not render the world in the hard edges of the draftsman’s table and computer-assisted design. As it is, your vision possesses but a tiny center of (deceptive) sharpness: everything else in your visual field is continuously hazy, soft, and shifting. We live in a world of blur, bleed, and bokeh. And even in that foveal gunsight, light seeps around physical edges, creating a natural gradient where object meets background. Klages remarks that in ancient Greek and Roman writing, gods and heroes are often surrounded by a nimbus—“a shimmering and shining cloud.” His signature move is to secularize and universalize the nimbus of divinities and warrior-kings: All things, down to the commonest and most profane, are surrounded by a “fluid,” a “living moisture,” a “luminous veil” that “loosens [the object’s] contours,” leaving it “boundary-adverse” and “impossible to grasp.” That’s the aura. Benjamin, meanwhile, drew attention to the long exposure times required by early cameras. As the subject sits for minutes on end, his chest rises and falls with breath; his seeming stillness is broken by petty twitches and micro-tremors; ambient light sweats around his kerseymere. The resulting photograph presents the viewer with no hard outlines—just an “absolute continuum from brightest light to darkest shadow,” a “circle of breath” that surrounds the seen thing.
The problem, then, is that “advances in optics soon made instruments available that wholly overcame darkness and recorded appearances as faithfully as any mirror.” I want to underscore Benjamin’s historical claim here (in his “Little History of Photography”), because it is not the claim that we normally associate with him. It should be evident, I think, that Benjamin is not at this point distinguishing between an older, unique piece of art still embedded in its paradigmatically ritual context and a newer, mass-produced art made possible by the industrialization of the image. He is distinguishing between two different stages in the history of the mechanical and readily reproduced image—one that retained the aura, and a second that abolished the aura by dint of its heightened technical precision. The same medium can promote a lebensphilosophische VitaliVision, or it can engender an artificial and metaphysically obtuse clarity. That’s an argument that Benjamin has adapted, in the last instance, from John Ruskin. I have no idea, of course, whether Benjamin and Klages were reading Ruskin, or whether they were simply riffing on erstwhile Ruskinite commonplaces. But that the argument is basically Ruskin’s is hard to dispute. Ruskin, however, has become a little hard to explain, since he is by now one of the great hidden thinkers in the history of radical philosophy. There is perhaps no other thinker that critical theory steals from as readily, paraphrasing him without attribution, reworking his ideas without citation. Ruskin can be hard to explain, in other words, because his arguments are, in fact, all over critical theory, which means that he is both everywhere and utterly disavowed: the one you’re not allowed to say you’re reading. One approaches Ruskin for the first time expecting just another dusty Victorian and discovers instead the nineteenth century’s own, extravagantly bearded Heidegger, a moon-stung pantheist who thinks that he can undo the injuries of a hyper-industrialized modernity if only he can teach each of us to see—literally to see, with our eyes—like a vitalist, to find in vision what he calls the “palpitating, various infinity” of the world. Ruskin, indeed, writes like a phenomenologist, except the only phenomenologist who writes as well is Sartre, as when Ruskin tries to explain, over three closely described pages, not this or that particular moving object, but what it is like to see a moving object—any moving object—so that he then can show how perception is never lucid, how a certain un-vision always rides in on vision, whether the thing seen is near or far. We never see a thing plainly, and this, Ruskin thinks, means that there is a certain mystery built into our encounter with objects. “Hence in art, every space or touch in which we can see everything, or in which we can see nothing, is false.” It is this quality that Renaissance painters tend to betray, by making vision falsely precise or falsely blank. He objects to classical painters allowing distant objects to become color fields, without the minute “confusion” of color which conveys “mystery” and “life.” Or he objects to the standardized regularity of objects in classical paintings, so carefully delineated that they can be counted, which of course is the problem, the intrusion of mere number into the cosmic flow. A history of the aura’s decline would have to begin with Raphael and Claude Lorrain and not with the anastigmatic lenses of the 1890s.
It was Klages, then, who revived the Ruskinite program of learning to see the flux and bundled it together with a word that he must have discovered in the early twentieth-century esotericists. For a new model spiritualist like Rudolf Steiner, the aura is that egg-shaped and pulsating motley that putatively surrounds every person—a subtle fluid that provides a changing, real-time readout on a person’s inner states. It’s that New Age rainbow spectrogram that you probably imagine as a kind of thermal imaging. Klages, I should make clear, had to manhandle the term to get it to mean what he needed it to mean, since for the Theosophists, the aura was emitted only by humans and could be seen only by clairvoyants. In adopting the term, then, Klages had to lift both of these limitations: the aura now surrounds all don’t-call-them-objects and can be perceived by anyone with the patience to attend phenomenologically to their own vision. Clairvoyance is not required and is, if anything, the impairment to be overcome. Obscurvoyance is more like it.
Here, then, is what Adorno has to say about the aura.
That the words of the jargon—regardless of context or conceptual content—sound as though they were saying something higher than what they actually mean could be designated by the term aura. It is hardly accidental that Benjamin introduced the concept at the exact moment when, according to his own theory, what he understood by it was dissolving, slipping away from experience. Sacred without sacred content, frozen emanations, the buzzwords of the jargon of authenticity are the breakdown products of the aura. The aura bonds with a certain non-bindingness that renders it freely disposable in the midst of a disenchanted world—or, as paramilitaristic New German might put it, einsatzbereit: combat-ready or ready to deploy.
At their heart, these sentences merely repeat one of Adorno’s big claims: that the German neo-mandarins take the stuff of the spirit, supposedly under attack by a vulgar techno-modernity, and reduce it to a set of easily repeated verbal tags and so undermine the spirit afresh. But that’s hardly the end of it. For by re-stating his book’s thesis in the language of “the aura,” Adorno ends up introducing a troubling ambiguity, like so: We know that Adorno thinks that the jargon is the bullshit liturgy of a fake transcendence; ergo, when he says that the jargon’s favorite words produce an aura, we have to wonder whether he isn’t, in fact, demystifying the latter. On the face of it, Adorno seems to be implying that the aura is a crock. Maybe his critique of the jargon is about to pull one of critical theory’s favorite concepts into its maw. But the claim promptly modulates, as Adorno goes on to say that the jargon is itself evidence of the aura’s decline. And if that’s the case, then maybe we can save the aura, after all, by claiming that German existentialism produces a sham aura in an age when the authentic kind is no longer possible.
This second version has a lot going for it. We could amplify Adorno’s position by considering three phrases in turn:
1) Einsatzbereit: Adorno says that the jargon treats its own most precious concepts as though they were einsatzbereit: ready for duty, awaiting deployment, fit for service. We would probably just say that German intellectuals had “weaponized” the language of existentialism, but if we did, we might overlook that Adorno is here alluding to the re-founding of the German army in 1955 after a decade of enforced and anti-fascist de-militarization: West Germany joined NATO in the spring of 1955; officially established the new Bundeswehr six months later; and conscripted its first cohort of 19-year-olds in the spring of 1957. When Adorno says that words like authentic are “combat-ready,” he is reminding the reader that in Germany, mandarinism tended to keep company with militarism. This is existentialism on a war footing. He is also remarking that the jargon’s auratic idiom violates the core principles of Benjamin’s aura—that the charismatic object is situated, thickly embedded, and so unrepeatable: an aurochs on Paleolithic limestone; the dying Christ painted onto the altarpiece of a sixteenth-century hospital; Heidegger’s Greek statue that is hidden-but-also-displayed by the temple that houses it. Jargon isn’t like these. One of the hallmarks of theory-speak is that it is indifferent to context, ready to be sprinkled into any public lecture or printed essay, whatever the topic, and so fundamentally arbitrary—offering a paradoxical aura-on-demand.
2) “Frozen emanations”: Adorno also says that the jargon’s catchphrases are “frozen emanations.” What we won’t want to miss is the playful mock-chemistry of that formulation. This is reification as phase transition: A vapor turns into a solid, the aura turns into a cheat sheet of portable lexemes, the spirit begins to glitch and stammer—it freezes. Klages promised we could learn again to see the cosmos in flux, but having mastered the jargon of his successors, we find ourselves verbally stuck. We open our ears, expecting to hear the rushing of a fluid world and are pelted instead with the speech automatisms of vitalist aphasia: rhizome, nomad, deterritorialization, rhizome, assemblage, rhizome, becoming, rhizome, rhizome.
3) “Breakdown products”: The first thing to notice about this phrase is that we now have three categories where previously there were only two. It is easy to walk away from Benjamin’s great essay feeling like you’ve pocketed a nifty antithesis: art before and after the advent of mechanical reproduction; or, the auratic art of yore and art that will never again be auratic. But what the term “breakdown products” tells us is that the decline of the aura produces new aesthetic phenomena of its own: art that both does-and-doesn’t possess an aura. Benjamin had already noticed as much—and mostly he just meant that as art enters into the industrial age, its producers will go to increasingly tasteless lengths to gin up a specialness that had otherwise begun to lapse: outfitting subjects with palm fronds and absurd hats; retouching photographs, eliminating clinical detail; forgoing the camera’s hard-won technological clarity for dialed-in glow and vaseline sfumato. This, then, is Adorno’s basic claim about the jargon in these sentences: that it offers a simulated, push-button aura.
At the same time, we’ll want to note that the phrase “breakdown products” extends the chemical register introduced by “frozen emanations,” which turns out, upon second reading, to be the passage’s organizing conceit. Breakdown products—also known as degradation products—are the new substances that are formed when complex compounds begin to decay. Adorno, in other words, is describing the chemical decomposition of the aura, which we can now track through multiple stages:
–Air and aura derive from the same Indo-European root; in ancient Greek aura meant “breeze” or “breath of air.” Step 1: The aura freezes, as when atmospheric water vapor is converted directly into solid ice crystals or cloud snow.
-This de-etherealized aura breaks down, leaving behind toxic chemical residues.
-These breakdown products react with a new substance—what Adorno calls “non-bindingness” or Unverbindlichkeit. We thus have a new compound—I’ll go ahead and write it AuNb3.
-This mixed body is a stabilized, all-purpose aerosol—shelf-stable in a rationalized world and ready to be loaded into a nebulizer or metal can. It is einsatzbereit.
There are two other things to be noticed about the “non-bindingness” with which the aura combines. First, Adorno is having fun with a throwaway paradox; the aura is coupling with a solvent, binding to non-bindingness. But obviously this houses a rather grave accusation. The old aura was all misty sublimity and reverence in the cathedral’s half-light. But this new aura is disturbingly noncommittal—special, but to no lasting effect. Second, then, Adorno has borrowed the word Unverbindlichkeit from the existentialists themselves. The German Kierkegaardians had used the word to diagnose the stance of aesthetic detachment—that irresponsible, ironical attitude that savors possibilities, moods, and poetic atmospheres without ever making a binding existential choice. The Schmittians, meanwhile, sometimes used the word to call out the liberal’s commitment to “endless conversation,” to not deciding, to pluralism and keeping all the options on the table—a commitment, then, to not having commitments. You might get the feel for “non-bindingness” if you began to think of it as the opposite of Schmitt’s decision or Heidegger’s resolve. Whatever you say in the jargon you can say about anything.
These are all points that a person can make while subscribing to the canonical accounts of the aura. But it may, in fact, be harder than these last few paragraphs have suggested to distinguish between auras real and counterfeit. To see this, let’s just take one more quick pass over the major theorists of the aura.
-Walter Benjamin uses the word aura in two markedly different ways. In the “Little History of Photography,” he is attempting to gauge the ability of this one art form to convey the aura of any and all objects, but in the later Kunstwerk essay, he is interested only in the decaying aura of artworks themselves, which now get to count as the paradigmatically auratic objects. It’s not loopy that a philosopher would associate the aura with aesthetics. Kant himself had made the case that beauty has the remarkable power to (temporarily and partially) thwart the analytic mind’s drive to identify and sort objects. Klages’s idea that we can apprehend the world non-conceptually, that we can see its stuff as something other than objects—this owes not a little to the third Critique. At the same time, however, Benjamin’s theory of the artwork’s aura marks a drastic reduction of the class of objects that ever got to have auras in the first place, which one might have thought was all of them. Benjamin’s account of the intact aura is already a symptom of that aura’s decline.
-Steiner, meanwhile, codifies the aura as an objective, corporeal substance that can be systematically categorized, observed, and charted by trained spiritual investigators. Steiner’s theosophy converts a person’s emotional states into a standardized diagnostic taxonomy, complete with a color-coded key that you could if you wanted carry in your wallet. The language of nineteenth-century electromagnetism and thermodynamics nudges esoteric speculation back into the domain of measurability and modern physics. The aura, which Klages took to be the phenomenological signature of pre-conceptual perception, is instead what delivers the soul over to the Begriff: to classification and measurement and thingliness.
-Klages, finally, ends up trapped in the Kantian categories he has worked so hard to upend. Klages wants to adopt the Kantian term Anschauung to name a state of pure, passive reception. But here he immediately runs into trouble with his own vocabulary. For Kant, Anschauung is already an active synthesis—the looking mind is already hard at work, forcing raw sensory data into the cognitive grids of space and time. Anschauung is not the formless, bleeding flux; it is already shaped by the subject. To get Anschauung to do what he needs it to do—to make it a passive vessel for the pathic tide—Klages has to perform a covert operation on Kant: he has to strip Anschauung of its activity—its positing—and so reduce it to a pre-Kantian state of pure affection. He adopts the respectable Kantian term to give his vitalism a respectable pedigree, but has to hollow it out from the inside to make it function. And for this he pays a penalty: Klages needs a name for objects-that-are-not-objects, and the word he opts for is Bilder, “pictures” or “images,” which is Kant’s term for picture-thoughts, the products of the imagination. But who needs Kant to sense that something has gone badly wrong for Klages? The term “images” is manifestly idealist and de-realizing—it seems if anything to take one further away from the tangible world—and Klages’s strategy for halting this backward slide into the mind’s simulacrum is to modify the word Bild in various ways, offering the reader Urbilder (“primordial images”), alongside Eindrucksbilder (“impression-images”) and Anschauungsbilder (“intuition-images”). He also attests to “the reality of images,” which I think is meant to concede the Kantian point that the mind is dealing with representations while bestowing on those representations indexical status. These pictures testify to the existence of something outside themselves. Worse: What makes “images” different from Wahrnehmungsdinge—“the things of perception” or reifications of the analytic mind—is that the images themselves are always in flux, in motion, moving: moving pictures. Klages wants to immerse us in the Spinozist substance and ends up buying us a ticket to a mind-movie. The pathic consciousness, having escaped the tyranny of the concept, resembles nothing so much as the early cinema-goer gawping at the brightly lit screen. Images, Klages likes to say, are “streaming.”
Benjamin, Steiner, Klages—products of decline, every one of them.
