I'm thinking about rethinking Benjamin's aura. Doesn't aura just mean "I don't know"? What did we know? What if aura means something more than the distinctness of the work, its unapproachability, which is approachability, in the sense that you have to travel to see it. But I have this intuition I cant explain clearly that we don't see anything anymore. I thought this might be to say that there is nothing unseen anymore, not (just) in the nothing is sacred sense but in the sense of a scriptural world, where there is something to be known that is not something to be seen. Is the image evacuated of language, or completely full of language? Was there a time when to represent was to do something, and now everything already is a representation? Of what? Is there a world to be represented, or precisely not, in that to represent the world the world must already be representation, and that is what is lost? As technology lends credence to reality, reality is the effect of repeatability, what we mean by the real is repeatable (the same for everybody): no news there. What is absent is sense of time, as a problem, an unknown. The repeatable is absent intention, absent language or thought. To suppress the human element--the artist--to ensure accuracy, requires repeatablity: to conceal the representationality of the representation. What repeatability means is that there is no original, for representation is representation of what is already represented, (the book of nature, written by you know who) ie meaningful: that is, (I apologize for being stupid) the claim of reality NOT to be representational eliminates the possibility of origin, the scriptural dimension. Repetion is not representation: we don't see the repeatable image, we see THROUGH it, but not to reality but to the other repetitions: they refer (only)to each other.
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