On the Collective and the Auratic in Benjamin’s Artwork Essay: A Constructive Rereading

The chapter presents a re-reading of Benjamin’s artwork essay focused on the concept of collectivity and its intermingling with the concept of technology. Based on recent reassessments of the inspirations behind Benjamin’s understanding of collectivity, I reconstruct his concept of ritual in a collectivist direction. On the one hand, I seek to show that this reassessment goes hand in hand with a reassessment of the main thesis of the essay: Benjamin’s idea about the waning of aura. Thus, analyzing his accounts of fascist and cultural industrial mass ritual, I seek to show how the persistence of collective ritual is synonymous with a persistence of auratic objects. On the other hand, rather than reading Benjamin’s essay as an attempt to redeem the utopian aspects of early avantgarde cinematography, I wish to focus more directly on the attempt to avoid this collective production of auratic objects. I thus seek to show that Benjamin’s different descriptions of progressive uses of technology can be read as so many potential strategies to escape the compact or effervescent collective and its auratic object constructions. On the way I seek to assess the successfulness of these attempts.