{"id":1834,"date":"2026-10-09T17:19:19","date_gmt":"2026-10-09T22:19:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/?p=1834"},"modified":"2026-10-09T17:19:19","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T22:19:19","slug":"adornos-jargon-of-authenticity-day-14","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/articles\/adornos-jargon-of-authenticity-day-14\/","title":{"rendered":"Adorno\u2019s Jargon of Authenticity, Day 14"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Adorno is about to introduce Walter Benjamin\u2019s concept of \u201cthe aura\u201d into the conversation. Maybe this doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t remember having seen Michelangelo\u2019s art for the first time\u2014a world, I mean, where you have never not known what the Sistine Chapel looks like.<\/p>\n

That seems clear enough. What might nonetheless need explaining is Benjamin\u2019s opting for the word \u201caura\u201d to get at this issue, since by the 1930s, when Benjamin was writing, \u201caura\u201d 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 \u201caura\u201d? Benjamin could have called it lots of things. The story that Benjamin is telling\u2014the one about the decline of the aura\u2014is clearly a disenchantment narrative, more Weberian than Marxist, so why didn\u2019t Benjamin avail himself of Weber\u2019s terminology? Why don\u2019t we talk about art\u2019s Zauber<\/i> or magic? Or why don\u2019t we say that art used to possess \u201ccharisma\u201d? \u201cCharisma\u201d and \u201caura\u201d are words on parallel tracks\u2014Latinized 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. \u201cAura\u201d could seem like a redundancy. Do we really need a separate word for the charisma of objects as opposed to\u00a0 <\/span>the charisma of persons? Benjamin could have called it a \u201chalo\u201d. Or an \u201caureole\u201d (which comes from aurum<\/i>, gold, and not aura<\/i>, breeze). Or he could have called it a \u201ccorona\u201d (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\u2019s unpublished papers and discovering that he was really into chakras.<\/p>\n

At one level\u2014the intellectual-historical one\u2014the question has a ready answer. We know who Benjamin borrowed the term \u201caura\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019t exactly <\/i>a Nazi. So why, again, is Benjamin silently citing Klages? It was bad enough when he seemed to be quoting his yoga instructor.<\/p>\n

Part of the problem is that if I start explaining Klages\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019s just Heidegger<\/i>, 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s writing enters the sacred grove of a secret antiquity, able again to apprehend the world\u2019s 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\u2019s Lutherisms\u2014the 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 present of the other\u2014often a non-human other: an object, an animal, a thing\u2014without 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\u2014he borrowed the bit about becoming a receiving vessel\u2014except Klages didn\u2019t call this \u201cmimesis.\u201d He called it \u201cpathic consciousness\u201d\u2014\u201csuffering and passive consciousness.\u201d \u201cPathic,\u201d it will turn out, is a Greek cognate of the Latinate \u201cpatient\u201d in one of the word\u2019s more arcane meanings: not the adjective that means \u201cwilling to wait\u201d or \u201cable to tolerate aggravation,\u201d but rather the noun that means \u201cthe object of an action.\u201d This is what linguists mean when they talk about \u201cagents and patients,\u201d and what philosophers mean when they refer to \u201cmoral agents and moral patients\u201d\u2014that last means \u201cthe targets of our moral concern.\u201d A medical patient, meanwhile, is simply the-one-acted-upon. In the hospital, you are the passive one\u2014a pathic. In an older sexology, the word \u201cpathic\u201d was 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<\/i>. 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\u2014\u201cHe has,\u201d they say, \u201ca penetrating mind\u201d<\/i>\u2014relinquish 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.<\/p>\n

But then how do you do that<\/i>? 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\u2019s 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<\/i>, a Looking-at. But the mind will tend to file away these spectations in the form of picture-thoughts, which many of Kant\u2019s early followers called representations or Vorstellungen<\/i>. (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\u2014you can say what it is and thus start generating propositions about it. You can know it or recognize it. What I probably don\u2019t 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<\/i>, the Looking-at, not as the moment that initiates cognition but as the anti-mind\u2019s proper goal and terminus and rallying cry. In the introduction to his smaller Logic<\/i>, 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\u2019s 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\u2019s first Kantian step as its last, its one and only step and so training the psyche to idle in the low-gear of Anschauung.<\/p>\n

This, then, is how you get to the aura. You just need to follow the steps:<\/p>\n

-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.<\/p>\n

-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 <\/i>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.<\/p>\n

-Klages insisted that if you could postpone or maybe even dismantle the mind\u2019s drive to subsume objects under concepts, then you should be able to clap eyes on the naked, unmediated world\u2014on 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\u2019s 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\u2014so Klages\u2014that objects do not typically have sharp outlines. Your eyes do not render the world in the hard edges of the draftsman\u2019s table and computer-assisted design. Your vision possesses a tiny center of (deceptive) sharpness as it is; 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\u2014\u201ca shimmering and shining cloud.\u201d His signature move is to secularize and universalize the aura: All things, down to the commonest and most profane, are surrounded by a \u201cfluid,\u201d a \u201cliving moisture,\u201d a \u201cluminous veil\u201d that \u201cloosens [the object\u2019s] contours,\u201d leaving it \u201cboundary-adverse\u201d and \u201cimpossible to grasp.\u201d That\u2019s 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\u2014just an \u201cabsolute continuum from brightest light to darkest shadow,\u201d a \u201ccircle of breath\u201d that surrounds the seen thing.<\/p>\n

The problem, then, is that \u201cadvances in optics soon made instruments available that wholly overcame darkness and recorded appearances as faithfully as any mirror.\u201d I want to underscore Benjamin\u2019s historical claim here (in his \u201cLittle History of Photography\u201d), 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\u2014one 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<\/i> VitaliVision, or it can engender an artificial and metaphysically obtuse clarity. That\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019re not allowed to say you\u2019re reading. One approaches Ruskin for the first time expecting just another dusty Victorian and discovers instead the nineteenth century\u2019s 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\u2014literally to see<\/i>, with our eyes\u2014like a vitalist, to find in vision what he calls the \u201cpalpitating, various infinity\u201d 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 <\/i>to see a moving object\u2014any moving object\u2014so 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. \u201cHence in art, every space or touch in which we can see everything, or in which we can see nothing, is false.\u201d 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 \u201cconfusion\u201d of color which conveys \u201cmystery\u201d and \u201clife.\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>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\u2019s decline would have to begin with Raphael and Claude Lorrain and not with the anastigmatic lenses of the 1890s.<\/p>\n

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\u2014a subtle fluid that provides a changing, real-time readout on a person\u2019s inner states. It\u2019s 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\u2019t-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.<\/p>\n

Here, then, is what Adorno has to say about the aura.<\/p>\n

That the words of the jargon\u2014regardless of context or conceptual content\u2014sound as though they were saying something higher than what they actually mean could be designated by the term <\/b>aura<\/i><\/b>. 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\u2014or, as paramilitaristic New German might put it, <\/b>einsatzbereit<\/i><\/b>:<\/b> <\/i><\/b>combat-ready or ready to deploy.<\/b><\/p>\n

At their heart, these sentences merely repeat one of Adorno\u2019s 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\u2019s hardly the end of it. For by re-stating his book\u2019s thesis in the language of \u201cthe aura,\u201d 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\u2019s favorite words produce an aura, we have to wonder whether he isn\u2019t, in fact, demystifying the latter<\/i>. 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\u2019s 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\u2019s decline<\/i>. And if that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

This second version has a lot going for it. We could amplify Adorno\u2019s position by considering three phrases in turn:<\/p>\n

1) Einsatzbereit<\/i>: Adorno says that the jargon treats its own most precious concepts as though they were einsatzbereit<\/i>: ready for duty, awaiting deployment, fit for service. We would probably just say that German intellectuals had \u201cweaponized\u201d 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 <\/i>six months later; and conscripted its first cohort of 19-year-olds in the spring of 1957. When Adorno says that words like authentic<\/i> are \u201ccombat-ready,\u201d 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\u2019s auratic idiom violates the core principles of Benjamin\u2019s aura\u2014that 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\u2019s Greek statue that is hidden-but-also-displayed by the temple that houses it. Jargon isn\u2019t 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\u2014offering a paradoxical aura-on-demand.<\/p>\n

2) \u201cFrozen emanations\u201d<\/i>: Adorno also says that the jargon\u2019s catchphrases are \u201cfrozen emanations.\u201d What we won\u2019t 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\u2014it 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. <\/i><\/p>\n

3) \u201cBreakdown products\u201d: 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\u2019s great essay feeling like you\u2019ve 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 \u201cbreakdown products\u201d tells us is that the decline of the aura produces new aesthetic phenomena of its own: art that does and doesn\u2019t possess an aura. Benjamin had already noticed as much\u2014and 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\u2019s hard-won technological clarity for dialed-in glow and vaseline sfumato. This, then, is Adorno\u2019s basic claim about the jargon in these sentences: that it offers a simulated, push-button aura.<\/p>\n

At the same time, we\u2019ll want to note that the phrase \u201cbreakdown products\u201d extends the chemical register introduced by \u201cfrozen emanations,\u201d which turns out, upon second reading, to be the passage\u2019s organizing conceit. Breakdown products\u2014also known as degradation products\u2014are 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:<\/p>\n

–Air <\/i>and aura <\/i>derive from the same Indo-European root; in ancient Greek aura <\/i>meant \u201cbreeze\u201d or \u201cbreath of air.\u201d Step 1: The aura freezes, as when atmospheric water vapor is converted directly into solid ice crystals or cloud snow.<\/p>\n

-This de-etherealized aura breaks down, leaving behind toxic chemical residues.<\/p>\n

-These breakdown products react with a new substance\u2014what Adorno calls \u201cnon-bindingness\u201d or Unverbindlichkeit<\/i>. We thus have a new compound\u2014I\u2019ll go ahead and write it AuNb3<\/sub><\/span>.<\/p>\n

-This mixed body is a stabilized, all-purpose aerosol\u2014shelf-stable in a rationalized world and ready to be loaded into a nebulizer or metal can. It is einsatzbereit<\/i>.<\/p>\n

There are two other things to be noticed about the \u201cnon-bindingness\u201d 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\u2019s half-light. But this new aura is disturbingly noncommittal\u2014special, but to no lasting effect. Second, then, Adorno has borrowed the word Unverbindlichkeit <\/i>from the existentialists themselves. The German Kierkegaardians had used the word to diagnose the stance of aesthetic detachment\u2014that 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\u2019s commitment to \u201cendless conversation,\u201d to not deciding, to pluralism and keeping all the options on the table\u2014a commitment, then, to not having commitments. You might get the feel for \u201cnon-bindingness\u201d if you began to think of it as the opposite of Schmitt\u2019s decision or Heidegger\u2019s resolve. Whatever you say in the jargon you can say about anything<\/i>.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s just take one more quick pass over the major theorists of the aura.<\/p>\n

-Walter Benjamin uses the word aura <\/i>in two markedly different ways. In the \u201cLittle History of Photography,\u201d 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<\/i> essay, he is interested only in the decaying aura of artworks themselves, which now get to count as the paradigmatically auratic objects. It\u2019s 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\u2019s drive to identify and sort objects. Klages\u2019s idea that we can apprehend the world non-conceptually, that we can see its stuff as something other than objects\u2014this owes not a little to the third Critique. <\/i>At the same time, however, Benjamin\u2019s theory of the artwork\u2019s aura marks a drastic reduction <\/i>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\u2019s account of the intact aura is already a symptom of that aura\u2019s decline.<\/p>\n

-Steiner, meanwhile, codifies the aura as an objective, corporeal substance that can be systematically categorized, observed, and charted by trained spiritual investigators. Steiner\u2019s theosophy converts a person\u2019s 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<\/i>: to classification and measurement and thingliness.<\/p>\n

-Klages, finally, ends up trapped in the Kantian categories he has worked so hard to upend. Klages wants to adopt the Kantian term Anschauung<\/i> to name a state of pure, passive reception. But here he immediately runs into trouble with his own vocabulary. For Kant, Anschauung<\/i> is already an active synthesis\u2014the looking mind is already hard at work, forcing raw sensory data into the cognitive grids of space and time. Anschauung<\/i> is not the formless, bleeding flux; it is already shaped by the subject. To get Anschauung<\/i> to do what he needs it to do\u2014to make it a passive vessel for the pathic tide\u2014Klages has to perform a covert operation on Kant: he has to strip Anschauung<\/i> of its activity\u2014its positing\u2014and 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, <\/i>\u201cpictures\u201d or \u201cimages,\u201d which is Kant\u2019s 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 \u201cimages\u201d is manifestly<\/i> idealist and de-realizing\u2014it seems if anything to take one further away from the tangible world\u2014and Klages\u2019s strategy for halting this backward slide into the mind\u2019s simulacrum is to modify the word Bild <\/i>in various ways, offering the reader Urbilder <\/i>(\u201cprimordial images\u201d), alongside Eindrucksbilder <\/i>(\u201cimpression-images\u201d) and Anschauungsbilder <\/i>(\u201cintuition-images\u201d). He also attests to \u201cthe reality of images,\u201d <\/i>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 <\/i>pictures testify to the existence of something outside themselves. Worse: What makes \u201cimages\u201d different from Wahrnehmungsdinge<\/i>\u2014\u201cthe things of perception\u201d or reifications of the analytic mind\u2014is 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 \u201cstreaming.\u201d<\/p>\n

Benjamin, Steiner, Klages\u2014products of decline, every one of them.<\/p>\n

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Adorno is about to introduce Walter Benjamin\u2019s concept of \u201cthe aura\u201d into the conversation. Maybe this doesn\u2019t need explaining; most of us, after all, could identify the aura on a pop quiz. Benjamin thought that art used to be special, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,4033],"tags":[4036,24295,24292,24293,24294,24296],"class_list":["post-1834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-critical-theory-and-philosophy","tag-adorno","tag-aura","tag-benjamin","tag-klages","tag-photography","tag-ruskin"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1834"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1834\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1836,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1834\/revisions\/1836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}