The battle for the aura

Any part-time philosopher or wet-pants critic of coolture will have enlivened some conversation for carnal purposes or an existential debate among colleagues by appealing to the concept of aura. Wikipedic thought, from which neither Walter Benjamin nor your humble servant is exempt, tells us that the aura would be that unique quality possessed by a truly transcendent work of art before it falls into the clutches of technical reproducibility, an essential basis of the market economy. Following this line of thought, one could define capitalism as a system of compulsive photocopying of objects that annihilates the unrepeatable character of the original (translated into theology, it kills the power of divinities by turning them into postcards) and that reduces creation to an activity of mass culture, woven together by individuals more interested in the labels of a museum than in the works of that collection.

As always with matters of thought, things are a bit more complicated, because Benjamin himself —in texts such as Kleine Geschichte der Photographie (1931), in connection with Eugène Atget's snapshots— already conceived of the aura as “a very particular weave of space-time: the unrepeatable appearance of a distance, however close it may be. To calmly follow, on a summer afternoon, the line of a mountain range or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder until the instant or the hour participate in this appearance; this is to breathe in the aura.” In fact, far from the nostalgia of his Frankfurt companions, Benjamin spoke of this loss in almost positive terms: “To strip every object of its casing, to crush its aura, is the signature of a perception whose sense for what is equal in the world has grown so much that even, through reproduction, it gains ground over the unrepeatable.”

You'll have to excuse my philosophical rant, but it's not surprising that Benjamin elevated the concept of aura while reflecting on an artist like Atget, who captured gothic, shadowy Paris before the great industrial transformation brought about by the Second World War. There's a certain irony to it, because I'd say the Berlin philosopher would find it very amusing to see how this much-battered concept now re-emerges through the youthful trend of "aura farming"; that is, the practice of zentennial individuals gathering in city corners to, through semi-dance duels (or compulsive-aggressive movements shared online), win the approval of the onlooking crowd and thus return home or to school with a dose of charisma or shared reputation. In fact, I'd say Walter would find it amusing that the appropriation of the concept, instead of being something that simply happens to us, can literally become something manufactured.

Young people have assumed that their Barcelona (and we are all partly to blame for this) can only be dignified as a performative stage for ephemeral struggles in pursuit of pleasure

One might think that a group of teenagers who make Barcelona's corners their own through a kind of bodily contest, with the aim of looking cool (as a young fellow citizen put it in the press, "acting silly, but doing it well"), has nothing to do with the foundational concept of aura, from which Benjamin would go on to recreate the individual figure of the flâneur; that is, the individual who wanders through the city gazing at its arcades like "an unfurnished apartment that has not yet found a tenant." But I'd say that the aura manufactured by young people, though collective, also retains this nostalgic sense of the twilight of virtual society. With the crisis of influencers already taken for granted, and the very companies in the virtual sector accepting their condition as promoters of addiction... I'd say that young people will be left with no option but to gather, battle for a while, and take a few images home with them in order to preserve the scent of a soft, fleeting kind of fame.

In this sense, manufacturing one's aura is the umpteenth reformulation of Warhol's idea of fifteen minutes of fame, now applied to a much faster digestion and a collective impact lasting only a few seconds, until the next cockfight or the next image of the infinite scroll. In turn, young people have assumed that their Barcelona (and we are all partly to blame for this) can only be dignified as a performative stage for ephemeral struggles in pursuit of pleasure. All this may seem like absurd, second-rate musings or mental masturbation to fill articles, but Benjamin's struggle had higher purposes; for the problem lies not in aesthetics, but —to paraphrase the spirit of his words— in whether, amid this whole kingdom of appearance and dance performativity, with so much sinuous choreography of brute force, we are not dangerously approaching fascism. But the idle children who dance are not to blame for this, of course not.