Benjamin, Aura, and the Passage of Time
“Why is now the time? Because we’re already late.”
The Old Has Died
The old has already died but the new didn’t yet come to be. We find ourselves in an interregnum — a space between worlds where the familiar structures no longer hold but the emergent forms have not yet solidified.
Our personal relations and experience have already been mostly subsumed by capital. They are mediated by elements, machines, and systems of reproduction of capital. How can we ignite the ember of revolutionary potential in them? That’s the necessity of organizing.
On Transformation
If you start dancing a highly scripted dance, how can you transform it — slowly, over time — into the rhythm of your own making, following only your own rules, if there were to be any?
Walter Benjamin argues that with the establishment of practices of reproducing art — images, music, film — things lost their Aura. The unique presence of the original, its authenticity rooted in a particular time and place, dissolves in the age of mechanical reproduction.
On Reading Old Books
Reading old books, we can clearly see our relation with them. We’ve all had the experience of reading old books that were mandatory at school — we would either be captivated by them, seeing ourselves and relating with the text, or we would remain distant, unable to bridge the temporal gap.
This experience reveals something essential about time and reading: the text remains, but our relationship to it transforms. Each reading is a new encounter, a fresh constellation where past (the text’s creation) and present (our reading) momentarily align.
We’ve Lost Track of Time
We’ve lost track of time — not in the sense of losing minutes or hours, but in the deeper sense of losing our connection to qualitative, meaningful time. Benjamin’s critique of “homogeneous, empty time” speaks to this loss: we measure time but no longer inhabit it.
The experience of reading Benjamin is itself a recovery of temporal consciousness — a reminder that the past is not simply gone but remains available for revolutionary appropriation.
Related Concepts
- On the Concept of History — Benjamin’s theses on historical materialism
- Jetztzeit — Now-time as revolutionary interruption
- We Are Always Late — Temporal consciousness and belatedness
“The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.” — Walter Benjamin