Rather than simply standing in opposition to Walter Benjamin’s position, Jacque Derrida’s understanding of presence and the functioning of the sign is reflected in the complexity of ‘aura’ itself. Under Benjamin’s account, the object’s ‘aura’ is defined in the perception of an implicit division in ‘presence,’ in the ‘unique phenomenon of distance, however close it may be’. After Derrida, such a ‘phenomenon’ is consistent with the play of the signifier to which the sign is subject. Here, where the reader of any sign-system can locate the sign only in difference and deferral, then, its place is always already occupied by the trace of what it is not. By extension, the object or performer’s claim to a singular or unified ‘presence,’ to a ‘unique existence at the place it happens to be,’ must remain contentious, always subject to the ‘trace,’ or ‘supplement,’ in which this location is set in opposition to any other. ‘Aura,’ in this sense, in a seeing of the ‘object’ as being ‘there and here,’ is not simply a perception of the ‘transcendence’ of the ‘original,’ but a perception of the separation in which the signs of presence functions: an occurrence in which the sign of that which is here is seen to defer elsewhere. That ‘aura’ is linked to the divisions of the sign is reflected, too, in Benjamin’s example of the aura of natural phenomena, from which he derives his definition of its effect. Benjamin notes that:

"The concept of aura (…) may usefully be illustrated with reference to the aura of natural ones. We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch" (Benjamin 1992: 216)

Here, ‘aura’ arises in a self-conscous viewing of the ‘natural scene,’ a falling, in this contemplation, toward a recognition of the ‘pictorial’ aspect of ‘Nature,’ and so, implicitly, its cultural identity as landscape. In this moment, where the perception of ‘the real’ is contaminated by a perception of its identity in representation, the divisions and deferrals in which the sign functions are seen to come into play: this scene is different; it becomes distant, however close it may be. In this context, and as Samuel Weber points out, the perception of ‘aura’ may, paradoxically, be produced in ‘reproduction,’ for ‘where (…) what is “brought closer” is itself already a reproduction - and as such separated from itself - the closer it comes, the more distant it is’ (Weber 1996: 88).

(Kaye 2007: 114-15)

References