Cinema, Aura, Experience: Benjamin According to Miriam Hansen

Miriam Hansen's work on Benjamin consists of a thorough reconstruction and original interpretation of his theoretical stands on the role of cinema and media in modernity. The meanings of Benjamin's concepts are unstable and often contradictory, according to the “constellation” of ideas they are inscribed in. This is what, according to Hansen, makes them productive: she rethinks the concept of “aura” in surprising ways, showing how in earlier drafts of the essay L'Œuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproductibilité technique, the German philosopher had put it in relation to a synesthetic “mémoire involontaire” - which both cinema and photography could potentially to produce. Auratic perception, in this first formulation, is a fleeting moment that actualizes a past which ordinarily is not available to consciousness, and it makes it possible to retrieve a subject's experience (Erfahrung). Hansen shows how Benjamin's insights on the cinema should be placed within a wider current of his thought, which concerns the shifting relation between the body, technology and aesthetics. The moment of a film's reception emerges, in this perspective, as an experience of potential awakening and remedy from the numbing of the human sensorium produced by modernity.