The hallmark of modernity is the decay of the subject’s mimetic faculty and,
with it, of the influence of tradition and of the significance of experience. The condi-
tions of everyday life are increasingly unfavorable to the gaining of life experience.
Newspapers, for example, present their information in such a way that their readers
are obviously not intended to integrate it in their own experience. In fact, according
to Benjamin, the opposite is the case: the whole aim of “news” is to keep current
events from the realm where they might affect the experience of the reader. Pro-
cessing information, therefore, is in a sense the opposite of acquiring experience;
journalistic coverage has nothing to do with creating a tradition. City life with its rapid
tempo and abundance of stimuli is the product of this development: the ephemeral,
the sensational, everything that is continually changing is part of the order of Erleb-
nis; Erfahrung, on the other hand, is based on repetition and continuity.^54
In his famous work of art essay, Benjamin describes this process of the atro-
phy of experience in terms of the withering away of the “aura” of the work. The sta-
tus of the work undergoes a fundamental change as a result of the technical
possibilities of reproduction by means of new audio-visual technologies (photogra-
phy, film, tape recorders). What gets lost in reproduction is the uniqueness and the
authenticity of the work of art—its unique existence in the here and now, the mate-
rial substratum in which its history was acted out. Benjamin sums up this uniqueness
and authenticity in the term aura:
That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of
the work of art. This is a symptomatic process whose significance
points beyond the realm of art. One might generalize by saying: the
technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the do-
main of tradition. By making many copies it substitutes a plurality of
copies for a unique existence.^55This withering of the aura is, in Benjamin’s view, a socially determined event. It re-
lates to the need of the masses to “get closer to things.” The aura, however, con-
sists of the “unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.”^56 It is this
distance that is destroyed by the techniques of reproduction.
The process described here—that of the (reproduced) work of art becoming a
commodity—is analogous to what Benjamin elsewhere calls “the atrophy of experi-
ence.” In this essay he adopts a fairly optimistic attitude toward this phenomenon.
He argues that the new mode of perception that results from the universal availabil-
ity of reproduction techniques has a considerable potential for emancipation, bring-
ing about a change in the attitude of the masses toward art from one that is
retrograde to a progressive one. The experiencing of a reproduced work of art, such
as a film, is no longer characterized by concentration and isolation, but by collectivity
and distraction. As a result, what is involved is no longer an individual becoming im-
3
Reflections in a Mirror