"Aura" battles

Any part-time philosopher or panty-dropping "coolture" critic will, at some point, have livened up a conversation with carnal intentions, or an existential debate among friends, by invoking the concept of aura. Wikipedia-level thinking — a trap not even Walter Benjamin, nor your humble narrator, entirely escapes — tells us that aura is something like the singular character possessed by a truly transcendental work of art before it falls into the spiralling, spectral web of technical reproducibility, the essential bedrock of a 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 gods by turning them into postcards) and subsumes creation itself into an activity fit for a mass culture made up of people more interested in a museum's wall labels than in its actual paintings.

As always with matters of thought, things are a bit more complicated, because Benjamin himself — in texts such as Kleine Geschichte der Photographie (1931), prompted by Eugène Atget's snapshots — already framed 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, a mountain range on the horizon, or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder until the instant or the hour becomes part of their 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 pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose 'sense of the universal equality of things' has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from a unique object by means of reproduction.”

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 upheaval of the Second World War. There's a certain irony to it, I'd wager the Berlin philosopher would find it quite amusing to see this well-worn, hotly disputed concept resurface today through the youth trend of "aura farming"; that is, the practice of Gen Z-ers 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, vaguely pleasurable skirmishes"

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 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 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 behind the virtual world openly admitting their role as promoters of addiction... young people are left with no option but to gather, battle for a while, and take a few images home with them 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 in 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, vaguely pleasurable skirmishes. All this may seem like absurd, second-rate musings or mental masturbation to meet this week's deadline, 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. Though of course, no blame falls on the idle kids curing their boredom by dancing.