Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 1999, volume 17.

pages 451 473

The power of distraction: distraction, tactility, and habit in the work of Walter Benjamin
Alan Latham Department of Geography, University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand'; e-mail: a.latham@aucklaiul.ac.nz Received 6 June 1998; in revised form 21 October 1998

Abstract. In this paper I seek to examine a set of tactile, habitually grounded, bodily modes of perception which lie at the centre of Walter Benjamin's analysis of urban experience under modernity. On first reading of Benjamin's later writings, particularly his various interpretations of Baudelaire, these tactile, distracted modes of perception appear to represent a profound experiential entropy; a dilution of real affective experience which Benjamin sees as defining modernity, However, it is possible to trace the outline of a richer and more far-reaching phenomenology of perception within Benjamin's thought. This is what I seek to do. In seeking to trace out this phenomenology I argue that although such tactile, distracted, habitually grounded modes of perception are intertwined in an economy of self-defence, they also contain within them a whole range of capacities for knowing and getting hold of the urban, Following the lead of earlier interpreters of Benjamin such.as Marlecn Stocsscl, Miriam Hansen, and Jurgcn Habcrmas I also argue that these modes of perception stand in a particular relationship to the 'auratic', In exploring this relationship Benjamin outlines a novel theory of intersubjectivity between humans and the nonhuman. This clement of the intcrsubjcctivc is not only important in understanding Benjamin's work, it also suggests a range of productive avenues for enframing an ethics of encounter within the contemporary city. Introduction Part 1 In this paper I concern myself with Walter Benjamin's sense of 'everydayness'. Walter Benjamin is perhaps not the first author who would normally be thought of in these terms. His writings are esoteric, elliptical, often wilfully obtuse. Susan Sontag in her introduction to Benjamin quotes his own description of the source of his mode of thinking: "I came into the world under the star of Saturnthe star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays" (Benjamin in Sontag, 1979, page 8). And yet his writing is also marked by a profound concreteness. Much of his writing, certainly that from the mid-1920s up to his death in 1940, is concerned with objects of the everyday. His book of aphorisms One- Way Street (1979) begins with the heading "Filling station", and leads the reader through an architecture of nineteenth century living rooms, luminous billboards, travel souvenirs, and Chinese curios. Similarly, his city portraits contain extensive inventories of the products on offer at market: carefully folded sachets of toothpaste at a Naples street corner; rows of fruit, vegetables, and meat laid out in the snow in a wintry Moscow; a forlorn collection of second-hand books piled up on a Marseilles pavement. And his (in)famous and uncompleted Passagen-Werk was intended to be nothing less than "a historical lexicon of the capitalist origins of modernity, a collection of concrete, factual images of urban experience" (Buck-Morss, 1986, page 99; see Walter Benjamin, 1974-91, volume 5). That Benjamin concentrated on such ordinary objects and places reflected his conviction that the mass and force of the material and imageric brought forth by capitalist modernity had destroyed the capacity for critical distance. Thus, the critic was forced to stand amid the storm of the actual, the now. He or she must press up against reality, and find what distance he or she can within the object itself. This is what Benjamin's writing seeks

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to do. It explores the tactility and sensuality between subject and object; mimicking its object, getting inside of it, finding insight within this play of closeness and difference, of copy and real. As Theodor Adorno wrote of Benjamin's work, "thought presses close to its object, as if through touching, smelling, tasting, it wanted to transform itself (Adorno, 1981, page 233). This working of mimesis is in no small way the source of Benjamin's originality, just as it is the source of the almost magical feel of passages of his writing (Stokar, 1996; Wolin, 1994). But the very structure of Benjamin's thought itself, the way it proceeds and operates, cuts across a sense of everydayness. This sense is described by Michael Taussig (1992a, pages 141 -142) as "not sense so much as sensuousness, an embodied and somewhat automatic 'knowledge' that functions like peripheral vision, not studied contemplation, a knowledge that is imageric and sensate rather that ideational ... a knowledge that lies as much in the objects and spaces of observation as in the body and mind of the observer." Part 2 The following pages are less involved with directly investigating the pattern of Benjamin's thought an sich than with a further dimension of his everydayness: namely the tracing out within his writings of a phenomenology of perception to which a set of tactile, bodily, habitually grounded practices are central (see also Buck-Morss, 1981a; 1981b; 1989; Taussig, 1992a; 1993). Acknowledgment of the phenomenological aspects of Benjamin's oeuvreif one can call the vast and diverse collection of essays, works of reportage, books, criticism, reviews, and notes for unfinished projects which Benjamin left behind at his death in 1940 suchis not an original insight. Benjamin's city writings, "Graeme Gilloch (1996, page 8) explains in a useful recent book on Benjamin, "are concerned with the changing patterns of street life and, in particular, the impact of the crowd upon the individual psyche." Indeed, Patrick Tacussel (1986, page 48) goes even further in an essay on Benjamin and the roots of figurative sociology by claiming that Benjamin provides us with a "micro-sociology of everyday life and of the city." But clearly Benjamin was no simple phenomenologist, just as he was no sociologist, and, to stretch the point, nor is he easily to be labelled philosopher (see Brodersen, 1996; Wolin, 1994). And in reading Benjamin in a phenomenological key, I am not attempting to demarcate a new, not-before-seen Benjamin. What I seek to do is something more modest but nonetheless useful: to explore how Benjaminbecause of the weight he accorded to tactile, habitual, profoundly embodied forms of perception and/or knowledgecan help us in interpreting and in writing about the sensuousness and corporeality of (for want of a more precise term) urban experience. Indeed, my central point in this paper is a conviction that within his city writings (although certainly not exclusively in these) Benjamin develops a series of highly original and provocative avenues for enframing an ethics of encounter within the contemporary city. Within geography the most notable interpreters of Benjamin have weighed his actuality on a rather different scale. In his compendious Geographical Imaginations (1994) Derek Gregory argues for a reading of Benjamin which stresses the power of Benjamin's writing to disrupt the flow of history, as a set of techniques which seek out fissures within this flow. Michael Keith (1997) has provided a similar account, in which he argues that the strength of Benjamin's methodology is rooted in its capacity to disrupt hegemonic discourses, to freeze time in a flash of insight. To read Benjamin in the way I am suggesting is to read him in a more minor key than either Gregory or Keith; to weigh the scales of possibility within Benjamin's writing slightly differently (Wohlfarth, 1993). What I am attempting is to stretch the bow of Benjamin's actuality across to a series of contemporary concerns about the city, about embodiment, and about bodily and perceptual engagement (Wohlfarth, 1986; Wolin, 1994).

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In stretching this bow, I have two targets in mind: (1) The first is a loose set of writings around the thematic of urban space and embodiment (see Sennett, 1990; 1994; Thrift, 1997a; 1997b; Vidlcr, 1992). Over the past decade a number of writers in architecture, urban studies, urban geography, and related disciplines have been struggling to rework and refigure the place and working of tlie human body with the contemporary city. The concern of these writers in part arises from a recognition of the profound and deep-seated historical incapacity of much of the social sciences to take seriously, and indeed to even acknowledge, the fleshy sensuousness of the human body. In this concern their thinking crosscuts that of a range of feminist and poststructuralist thinkers who are also engaged in a dynamic deconstructing and reconstructing of traditional social scientific categories and forms of knowledge through an analysis of the body (see Gros/% 1996; Longhurst, 1997; Shilling, 1993). Nevertheless, much of this theoretical work is unsettlingly abstract and noncontcxtual. As Nigel Thrift (1997a, page 144) writes, "it is surprising how little ... work locates the body, even though it is difficult to think of the body except as located/* Thus, writers such as Thrift (1996; 1997a; 1997b), Richard Scnnctt (1990; 1992; 1994), and Anthony Vidlcr (1992) arc interested in just this work of location, and seek to explore the traces of affect, arousal, and indifference of the body's habitation of the city. (2) To enlist Benjamin in this task of remapping and rcfiguring the body and the city is (at least to a degree) to align oneself with commentators such as Graeme Gilioch (1996) or in this journal Mike Savage (1995), or indeed to a strand of concerns evident in Susan Buck-Morss's writings on Benjamin (1983; 1986; 1989; !993)/!> But to work through accounts of the sensuous experience of urban spaces and the embodiments entailed within this is also to think about an ethics of encounter; of the meeting and passing of other people, of certain ways of appropriating and encountering the materiality of the city (Thrift, 1997a, pages 144- 145). Here we cross paths with one of Benjamin's most elusive concepts: aura. In commenting on Benjamin, Michael Taussig (1992) has suggested that Benjamin's singular genius is to be found in his uncovering of the working of a distracted, habitual perception and its intertwining with the auratic. This discovery ofwhat Benjamin called the optical unconsciousso Taussigis an achievement that ranks in significance alongside that of Freud's uncovering of the unconscious. Perhaps. What is striking about Benjamin's writing is that, read through the filter of the auratic, it reaches towards the outlines of a highly original theory of intersubjectivity between people and things (Habermas, 1979; Stoessel, 1983). And, read in such a way, we find the arch of the bow which reaches to the second set of writers. These are writers who, like Benjamin, are seeking to examine the self's capacity for meeting the world within structures of mutuality. Here I am thinking of authors such as the feminist psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin (1988; 1992; 1994; 1995), philosophers such
There are a range of interesting parallels between Howard CaygilPs recent and lucid philosophical treatment of Benjamin's thought (1998) and the argument developed in this paper. Like myself, Caygill is centrally concerned with the way Benjamin sought to think past the hard division of subject and object which Western thought (or more acutely for Caygill, Western philosophy) comprehends the world. Caygill traces the roots of Benjamin's project back to a number of early essays and notes (see Walter Benjamin, 1974-91, volume 6) and stresses in particular Benjamin's treatment of colour in these pieces. Caygill's claims are far-reaching, and at certain points contentious. In particular Caygill provides a rather different interpretation of the auratic to that provided here, or by commentators such as Stoessel (1983), Habermas (1979), or Hansen (1987) upon whom I draw in this paper. Unfortunately, CaygilPs book was published some months after this paper was completed, so it has not been possible to engage in any depths with its arguments. I have, however, attempted in a number of key passages in the paper to point to areas of notable similarity or contention between my argument and that of Caygill so the interested reader might pursue the comparison.
(1)

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as Val Plumwood (1993) or Evelyn Fox-Keller (1983; 1985), and indeed a whole number of contributors to this journal (see, for example, Jacobs, 1996; Pile and Thrift, 1995; Rose, 1995; Whatmore, 1997). The thread which connects these writers is not only their interest in an ethics of encounter, it also runs through their shared concern to revalorise a range of experience and ways of relating to the world which are alterior to, or marginalised by, the dominant cognitive regimes of Western modernity. Such a work of revalorisation and recovery was central to Benjamin in his fascination not only with everyday objects, but also with a whole range of anarchic, dreamy, noninstrumental ways of being in the urbanhis interest in flaneurie, in the urban drifts of the surrealists, in the world of childhood, in the experience of drug-induced ecstasy (Burgin, 1993; Menninghaus, 1986; Savage, 1995; Schweppenhauser, 1988). To place Benjamin in a constellation with writers such as those mentioned above helps us in (rethinking through the sensual moments of encounter and contact within our cities; the profound but troubled intersubjective dimensions of urban space.(2) Indeed, in attempting to disentangle Benjamin's use of the auratic and its disintegration and returns within modernity as in the latter parts of this paper, I hope to demonstrate how Benjamin's urban phenomenology can help us (reinterpret the urban public as not simply a site marked by difference, but also as a site where this difference can come to be felt and in some small way made knowable (see also Sennett, 1989, page 167). Part 3 The argument of the paper works through two movements. The first begins with Benjamin's writings on the poet Charles Baudelaire and nineteenth century Paris (see Walter Benjamin, 1973a; 1985; 1974-1991, volume 5). This explores the polarities through which Benjamin examines the impact of the industrial city on the human sensorium and its capacity for genuine affective experience. At the one pole stands a distracted form of perception which works to defend physically the body from the sensorial onslaught generated by the speed of the city; a thick skin of conscious response that acts to deflect stimuli, preventing them from overwhelming the self. At the other, a more emphatic stance which embraces the city's complexity and heterogeneity, but which is driven by a desire to be ever near but never connected; the stance of the flaneur. This is a typology familiar to those with some knowledge of recent commentaries on Benjamin. In the second half of this paper the argument moves on to explore a more original and, in the opinion of this author, more productive strand within Benjamin's writing which seeks to tease out an experiential realm which is at once hidden within, other to, and beyond the polarities of experience described in Benjamin's commentaries on Baudelaire. In this the armoured eye of the urban dweller talked of by Benjamin is recognised as containing within it a quiet but nevertheless powerful capacity for the recovery of affective experience. This capacity is rooted in a distracted tactile gaze firmly embedded in the work of habit; it is also deeply intertwinned with the decline of and subaltern return of what Benjamin termed the auratic. Through a reading of Benjamin's essay on the Russian writer Nikolai Leskov, "The storyteller" (Walter Benjamin, 1973b), and "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction" (Walter Benjamin, 1973b), I outline the geometry of this experiential realm in Benjamin's thought. I also argue for the need to understand and examine the importance which Benjamin lent to the auratic in his attempts to address this experiential sphere.
(2) It also suggests that Benjamin should be read with an ear for the feminine. Even though Benjamin did not explicitly recognise that he was reaching towards a feminine field of perceptionalthough that, in part, was what he was doingmuch of what he sought to validate and recover is shot through with the otherness of the feminine (Burgin, 1993; Hansen, 1987; Weigel, 1996a; 1996b; Wilson, 1995).

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The city and experience: shock and the flaneur Charles Baudelaire, born in Paris in 1821, was, as Albert Thibaudct wrote at the turn of the century, the first poet of the modern city: a poet who wrote about the now, the everyday, the earthly, as played out in the complexity of the new urban spaces of the nineteenth century (Thibaudct, quoted in Culler, 1993, page xxvi). Baudelaire was not a mystic looking heavenwards for inspiration; he found his inspiration in the streets around him. For Baudelaire "Parisian life [was] rich in poetic and wonderful subjects" (Baudelaire, 1972, page 107). In the city, "[t]hc marvellous envelops and saturates us like the atmosphere" (1972, page 107), and does so to all the city's variegated dimensions, to "the spectacle of the elegant world [as to] the thousands of floating existences which circulate in the subterranean labyrinths of the great citycriminals and prostitutes" (Baudelaire in Culler, 1993, page xxvi). Both as a poet and an individual Baudelaire was bound into the minutiae of the streets of Paris. In the beginning of a poem from The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire's master work, the poet describes to the reader how he spars with the city to gain poetic inspiration: "Through all the district's length, where from the shacks Hang shutters for concealing secret acts, When shafts of sunlight strike with doubled heat On towns and fields, on rooftops, on the wheat I practice my quaint swordmanship alone, Stumbling over words as over paving stones Sniffing in corners all the risks of rhyme, To find a verse I'd dreamed of a long time" ("The Sun", 1993, page 169). Here Baudelaire directly expresses the profound debt his own artistic production owes to the urban, but this was an unusual piece, the only piece in The Flowers of Evil in which Baudelaire refers specifically to his own poetic labours in the city. In the other poems from this collection the poem's very form and rhythm are fundamentally embedded within the labyrinth of the city (Buck-Morss, 1989, page 186). In describing the stirrings of prostitutes and criminals in the early evening in the poem "Dusk", Baudelaire (1993, page 193) wrote that "One hears the hissing kitchens close at hand, The playhouse screech, the blaring of the band. The tables at the inns where gamesmen sport Are full of swindlers, sluts, and all their sort. Robbers who show no pity on their prey Get ready for their nightly work-a-day Of cracking safes and deftly forcing doors, To live a few days more and dress their whores." Clearly, this scene could only be of a city, yet, although dependent upon the urban, Baudelaire's poetry does much more than simply reflect what is already there. In the piece above Baudelaire throws image upon image, the plain (the kitchens) upon the sinister (swindlers, sluts, and all their sorts), all the while twisting every image towards a demonic pitch (the kitchens hiss, the playhouse screeches, the perhaps homely inn is full of swindlers), and then carelessly lets these demonic forces out into the city night (where in the next verse they set to slaughtering), as after alland to return to the ordinarythe criminal has to work to live like everyone else. The movements of Baudelaire's poems through the urban landscape transform that landscape: his verse throws it out of balance, reconfigures it. It was this imperative within Baudelaire's poetry that attracted Benjamin. Benjamin too was concerned with the place of the objects of the everyday, and the power these objects held within the world (Buck-Morss, 1983; 1989; Brodersen, 1990; Frisby, 1985;

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Fuld, 1979; Witte, 1985). Writing in the 1920s and 1930s it seemed to him that the cities in which he livedprimarily Berlin and later Pariswere so saturated with imagery that it was as if he was caught in a dream of which he was only vaguely conscious. The objects of the everyday cluttered this world, whispering secrets, offering promises, seductions, enticements that mysteriously slipped away when one tried to take proper possession of them, reappearing elsewheretheir hue slightly alteredwithin the soul of some other object (see Walter Benjamin, 1979, pages 84-86, 89-90, 293-294, 313, 318; 1974-91, volume 4, pages 239-240). At the other moments these objects are empty even of seduction. Offering only coldness and affronts, they snarl and cut, leaving one bruised and damaged (Walter Benjamin, 1979, pages 58, 59, 302-303, 327). This forest of objects that was for Benjamin the urban (see also page 298) existed at once as the trace of the collective desire for a better world, and the site of this desire's subversion and negative mystification (Buck-Morss, 1983; Cohen, 1989; 1993). Benjamin sought to engender the rediscovery and release of the Utopian traces which lay dormant within material objects, blasting away the fetishism and reifications that were embedded within them (Walter Benjamin, 1973b, pages 245-255; 1989; Buck-Morss, 1981a, pages 55-57; 1983; 1989; Cohen, 1989; Wohlfarth, 1986). Benjamin's attempts to (re)discover the Utopian traces which lay dormant within material objects implied, at the level of everyday action, the forging of new forms of being through which the self can work a positive recreation of its relationship to the material world (Taussig, 1993). Benjamin worked two movements together: the historical with the revolutionary. First, Benjamin sought to trace the critical historical junctures in which current cognitive practices have their origins, their ur-point (Buck-Morss, 1989, pages 64, 73; see also Buci-Glucksmann, 1994). Second, by bringing society's originative imaginings of the emancipatory possibilities of objects together with the object's present actuality, Benjamin aimed to bring to illumination the unrealised and forgotten potentials that existed in the present for forging through these objects freer, less alienating relationships with the world (Buck-Morss, 1989, page 268; see also Caygill, 1998). Baudelaire's attempt to formulate a new way of being within the nineteenth century metropolis, a project that necessitated the discovery of new ways of seeing and imagining, was understood by Benjamin as a highly instructive example of the human capacity for just such a reworking (Buck-Morss, 1989, pages 178 -179, 184). At the same time, Baudelaire attempted to effect the discovery of a new form of existence through burrowing into the very ambiguities and confusion of nineteenth century urban life that necessitated just that discovery in the first place (see also Baudelaire, 1972, pages 104-107, 395-406). In his poetry and in his life Baudelaire attempted to grab hold of this world mimetically, by becoming what it was (Buck-Morss, 1989, pages 186-187). And as such Baudelaire, through his mimetic movements, offered Benjamin an exemplary depiction of a perceptual modality that has become central to urban experience (Walter Benjamin, 1985, page 43; Buck-Morss, 1989, pages 344-345). The ur-figure which Baudelaire for Benjamin embodied was that of a human body so trained that not only could it survive the mass and velocity of the modern city but it could also win some kind of positive experience from this velocity and mass. The embodiment of a profoundly urban perceptual modality which involves a subtle and complex play between distance and closeness, empathy and boredom. For both Benjamin and Baudelaire cities and the mass of people which inhabited them were profoundly dangerous: for the ill-equipped self they could be deadly. Entering a crowd, wrote Baudelaire in his essay "The painter and modern life", is like moving "into an enormous reservoir of electricity" (Baudelaire, 1972, page 400). This energy could be a source of invigoration and inspiration, revolution even (Walter Benjamin, 1973a, pages 13 -15). Equally the crowd's energy, its mass of bodies, noises,

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smells, movement, action, could, with all its force, tear the self limb from limb if one did not know how to channel it. This power of destruction is conveyed with a gleeful vieiousness in the second to last verse of the poem "Dawn" (1993, page 211): "With ghastly painted eyes, the women of the streets, Mouths gaping wide, lay with their stupid sleep. Poor women, slack breasts dangling, cold and lean as rails, Blew on their smouldering logs, or on their purple nails. It was the hour when, among the bare and poor. Unfortunates in childbed suffered all the more; Like a wild sob cut short by foaming blood, somewhere A distant rooster's cry tore through the misty air, A sea of fogs that bathed the buildings and the streets, And dying poorhousc wretches from their sad retreats Rattled away their lives in strangulated coughs. Love's veterans came home, broken by labours lost." One can read a similar violence in the poems "The Sun" and "Dusk", which are quoted at the start of this section, dripping as they are with barely concealed dangers and threats. Strikingly, although clearly referring to moments within a crowd, none of these poems refer explicitly to the crowd as such, just as they do not refer explicitly to the city (with the already-noted exception of "The Sun"). Baudelaire was so tangled up within Paris's crowds that he had almost seemed to have fused with them. Yet Baudelaire's fusion within the city's crowds in the face of the multitude of shocks which that threw up was only made possible through the poet's capacity to forge a distance whilst also being simultaneously at the heart of things (Walter Benjamin, 1973a, pages 116- 117). Such a posture was very different from that which most people caught within the shock-filled grasp of the crowd were forced to take, at least according to Benjamin. Benjamindrawing on the analysis of Jacques Rivieretalked of the "subterranean shocks" that run through the poems of The Flowers of Evil, shocks which at times cause the very words of the poetry to crumble (Walter Benjamin, 1973a, pages 118- 119). To avoid shattering like Baudelaire's words under the weight of the constant blows inflicted by the crowd, people adopted a vacant, mechanical facade which, through the working of a series of artless automatic gestures, deflected the blows of the crowd (1973a, pages 132 -134). And indeed, although it is possible to read traces of Georg Simmel's earlier account of the metropolitan blase attitude in Benjamin's writing, this mechanical facade had none of the potentially positive attributes which Simmel bestowed on it; a certain lightness of being, a possibility for a certain self-autonomy (Frisby, 1985; Sennett, 1990, pages 126-127; Simmel, 1969). In the essay "Some motifs on Baudelaire", Benjamin quotes from the Edgar Allan Poe short story "The man of the crowd". At one point in this story Poe describes a type of self-absorbed pedestrian who "talked and gesticulated to themselves", and, "[w]hen impeded ... suddenly ceased muttering, but redoubled their gesticulations, and awaited, with an absent and overdone smile upon their lips, the course of the people impeding them" (Walter Benjamin, 1973a, page 127). "Those smiles", comments Benjamin, "provide food for thought. They are probably of the familiar kind, as expressed in the phrase 'keep smiling'; in that context they function as a mimetic shock absorber" (1973a, page 133). Such "mimetic shock absorbers" act as bodily armour, a thick skin of conscious response that acts to deflect stimuli, thus preventing it from entering into and overwhelming the self (Buck-Morss, 1993, page 131; see also Freud, 1984; Schivelbusch, 1979). Baudelaire too protected himself. But his protection was like that of the commodity which, having severed all the vital relationships that brought it into being, now hung within the world of objects in magical isolation (Marx, 1976, page 165; Taussig, 1994). In the prose poem "The crowds" Baudelaire wrote that "The Poet benefits from an

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incomparable privilege which allows him to be, at will, himself and others.... He makes his own all the professions, all the joys, and all the sufferings that chance presents to him" (Baudelaire, 1991, page 44). In drawing upon such empathetic capacities Baudelaire, the man of the crowd, was no aloof and passive aristocratic dandy (see Erbe, 1992). Baudelaire wanted to see, to feel, the anonymous lives around him "in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the fleeting and the infinite" (1972, page 399). Nevertheless, Baudelaire's empathy was founded on an ability to turn that empathy in on the self so that it did not escape back to the original empathic object. An icy distance that allowed Baudelaire to remain, despite the poetically empathic communions occurring within him, apart from the world which he observed (Prendergast, 1992, page 141). The last paragraph of "The crowds" finds Baudelaire suddenly switching from his original theme to the superior power of missionaries, colonialists, and pastors, who, although they throw themselves into the heart of a heroic moment in some far-distant place, can keep their heads (Prendergast, 1992, pages 140-141). Like these men, Baudelaire the poet flaneur tried to keep a chaste and/or controlled distance from things: at any time he could detach himself from one scene and move to another (1992, page 141). Baudelaire's poetry speaks of the singular pleasures that come through the play of surface; most famously in the sonnet "To a woman passing by" (1993, page 189): "Around me roared the nearly deafening street. Tall, slim, in morning, in majestic brief, A woman passed me, with a splendid hand Lifting and swinging her festoon and hem; Nimble and stately, statuesque of leg. I, shaking like an addict, from her eye, Black sky, spawner of hurricanes, drank in Sweetness that fascinates, pleasure that kills. One lightning flash ... then night! Sweet fugitive Whose glance has made me suddenly reborn, Will we not meet again this side of death? Far from this place! too late" never perhaps! Neither one knowing where the other goes, O you I might have loved, as well you know." In these verses the crowd exists as a positive element; a source of excitement and mysterious surprise. As Benjamin wrote, "far from experiencing the crowd as an opposed, antagonistic element, this very crowd brings to the city dweller the figure that fascinates" (1973a, page 125). More, the crowd's movement also defines the very way in which this figure is encountered. Both the poet and the woman are caught within the crowd's momentum, their meeting can only be a fleeting one, could only be "one lightning flash". This momentariness, with all the unspoken mysteries that reside within it, is the very pleasure of the crowd. In this momentariness no tedium, no mundanity has any chance to gain a grip. The passionately empathetic sighting is the most perfect urban relationship. As Benjamin wrote, "This is the look ... of the object of a love which only a city dweller experiences, which Baudelaire captured for poetry, and of which one might not infrequently say that it was spared, rather than denied, fulfilment" (1973a, page 125; see also Menninghaus, 1986). But it is clear that for Baudelaire the perfect urban relationshipthe momentarily caught eyeis missing something: more, there is something pathological at work within it. Alongside the drama of "To a woman passing by" runs a deep veil of coldness. Baudelaire describes the woman as aloof and cold, and unlike the poet she

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docs not appear to be shaken by the encounter as he is. Such coldness and lack of response are twin themes that run through all of Baudelaire's love poems. In the poem "The way her silky garments..." (1993, page 190) written about his long-time lover, the prostitute Jeanne Duval, he states thai "Her polished eyes are made of charming stones, And in her essence, where the natures mix Of holy angel and the ancient sphinx, Where all is lit with gold, steel, diamonds, A useless star, it shines eternally, The sterile woman's frigid majesty." Baudelaire wrote a series of poems on Jeanne Duval and they all echo the hardness and estrangement evident in the above lines. As Buck-Morss (1989, page 190)- following Benjaminnotes, such love poems arc filled with references to the inanimate, thing-like nature of the woman being described. The very source of the disenchantment that defines these verses lies in the poet's stance within the worldhis desire to be ever near but never connected and the world that generates and celebrates just this stance. Despite the apparent generosity of the poctflancur's gaze, his all-embracing communion with the crowd, this gaze remains trapped within the labyrinth of the self (Buck-Morss, 1986, page 122; Prendergast, 1992, page 142). Baudelaire (1972, page 400) talked of the artist among the crowd as "like a mirror as vast as the crowd." This description has more truth to it than Baudelaire confers upon it with his use of simile. In fact, a process of narcissistic mirroring lies at the very heart of the empathetic gaze (Buck-Morss, 1986, page 128). It is manifestly clear that the woman in 'To a woman passing by" makes eye contact with the poet (Walter Benjamin, 1973a, page 12611'). But the shock felt by the poet, and its resonance as expressed within the lines of the poem, are profoundly monological: a scries of internal desires set into motion within the hall of mirrors which makes up the poet's imagination (Buck-Morss, 1986, page 128). The closing line "O you I might have loved, as well you know" has nothing to do with the sighted woman's thoughts, and everything to do with the poet's. It was a profound socioeconomic transformation which allowedcreated eventhis gaze. The disconnected empathetic gaze requires a 'hollowing out' of meaning within the world. This was just the situation within Baudelaire's Paris. His was a Paris where the desiccation of traditional meaning set in train by the virus of commodification was everywhere evident (Buck-Morss, 1989, page 182; Walter Benjamin, 1985). Within this world the joys of looking enjoyed by the flaneur were the joys of the market, of the value freefall of the commodity. "If the commodity had a soul", wrote Benjamin, "it would be the most empathetic ever, for it would have to see in everybody the buyer in whose house and hand it wants to nestle" (quoted in Eagleton, 1981, page 27). But for the poet flaneur his freeroaming gaze is only one half of the commodification process: the other was the individual's entrapment within the very forces on which that gaze played, as under these forces the individual too became a commodity. As Benjamin wrote, "Baudelaire knew how things really stood for the literary man: As flaneur, he goes to the market place, supposedly to take a look at it, but already in reality to find a buyer" (quoted in Buck-Morss, 1989, page 185). In this reversal Baudelaire finds the return of the shock of the urban crowd. This return is not, however, that of the simple mass of the crowd, but of the new abstract rule of the market that inhabits and invigorates the crowd's action. For Baudelaire there is no retreat from forces of fragmentation and disconnection at play within his world. Baudelaire wrote that "For a long time... it seems that I have had a dream that I am tumbling across the void and a crowd of idols made of wood, iron, gold and silver fall with me, follow me in my fall, pounding and shattering my head and loins" (quoted in Buck-Morss, 1989,

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page 186). In these lines Baudelaire describes a sense which haunted many of his poems; an intense melancholy within a sea of objects, a melancholia and estrangement that exists in equal and undifferentiated extent in both his relations with the objects that surround him as within his relationships with other human beings. In such lines we experience the final emptiness of the disconnected empathetic gaze of the flaneur. Habitual, tactile knowledges In The Dialectics of Seeing, upon which I have drawn extensively in the preceding pages, Buck-Morss sees in the figure of the flaneur the ur-form of a kind of looking that, although no longer existent, in any pure form nevertheless still thoroughly infuses our own ways of experiencing the world. In one of the "afterimages" to The Dialectics of Seeing Buck-Morss (1989, page 346; see also 1986) writes that "The flaneur becomes extinct only by exploding into a myriad of forms, the phenomenological characteristics of which, no matter how new they appear, continue to bear his traces, as ur-form. This is the 'truth' of the flaneur, more visible in his after life than in his flourishing." For her, the shopping malls and high streets of our cities are every bit as emptied of meaning and connection as the Parisian arcades through which Baudelaire stalked; the flaneur may be dead but the society which made him certainly is not. Although I recognise the compromised nature of urban experience, in the rest of this paper, nevertheless, I seek to argue against such a bleak view of the urban public. If the work of recent commentators on the city such as Elizabeth Wilson (1991; 1995), Iain Chambers (1994), Michel de Certeau (1984), or those mentioned at the start of this paper have taught us anything, it is to be sensitive to the range of tactics people employ in inhabiting the spaces of their cities which, although entangled within the commodity world and the commodified gaze, offer some kind of affective contact with others. For Benjamin, the flaneur and the man of the crowd offer perhaps the two most obvious figures in his urban typology, but his writing is also shot through with a fascination with a set of distracted tactile perceptual modes, which are at once other to, beyond, and hidden within the distanced gaze of the flaneur or the armour of the Poeian man of the crowd (Hansen, 1987; Taussig, 1992; 1993; Weidmann, 1992). It is with these distracted tactile perceptual modes, and their place within Benjamin's thought, that I am concerned in the rest of the paper. Thus, the following discussion examines the space opened up for an affective experiencing of the city by Benjamin's analysis of these alterior, profoundly other forms of knowing and encountering the world, and in the final section of the paper I tease out the complex intertwining of these modes with that most elusive term of Benjamin's: the auratic. To begin our journey through Benjamin's treatment of these distracted tactile forms of perception and/or knowledge we need, however, to take a small detour. We need to look at Benjamin's usage of the concept of experience. We need to ask, What does Benjamin mean when he talksas with Baudelaireof giving "something lived through... the weight of experience" (1973a, page 154)? This differentiation of experience into a genuine affective experience (Erfahrung) and a more immediate but disconnected experiential mode (Erlebnis) is central to Benjamin's interpretation of modernity (McCole, 1993; Smith, 1989). In the next section the discussion will set out the essential parameters of this distinction as laid out in Benjamin's "The storyteller: reflections of the works of Nikolai Leskov" (1973b). In this essay Benjamin articulates a mournful typology of experiential decay in which the modern is defined by its fragmentation and estrangement from tradition and community (McCole, 1993; Wolin, 1994; see also Caygill, 1998). Nevertheless, for all its melancholia "The storyteller" provides its readers with an essential grounding for understanding what the revalidation of modern experience in the city might mean for Benjamin.

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The sensuosity of experience: tradition and modernity In the opening section of "The storyteller" Benjamin writes that "Experience has fallen in value. And it looks as if it is continuing to fall into bottomlessncss. ... With the [First] World War a process began to become apparent which has not halted since then. Was it not noticeable at the end of the war that men returned from the battlefield grown silent - not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?" (1973b, pages 83 84). Exploring this decline, Benjamin draws a distinction between on the one hand the art of the storyteller and the storyteller's relationship to those whom he or she tells the story and on the other the nature of the modern novel. Through this pairing Benjamin marks out a distinction between a mode of experience which is woven within the duree ["a continuous flow of conduct" (Giddens, 1984, page 3)]of community and a more individualistic, but no less intense, experiential type, which is nevertheless vitally divorced from the immediacy of community. The storyteller's art is deeply embedded in the community of listeners to whom the storyteller speaks. Telling a story the storyteller draws a group of listeners around him or her and absorbs them in the narrative in which he or she recounts. The teller docs so by relating the story to be recounted to personal experience -either it is something that the storyteller directly experienced, or it is something that he or she was told by another who had (Walter Benjamin, 1973b, page 91). Although speaking of the narrator's experience, the narrative also speaks directly to those of the listeners, and woven within the story's construction is always some kernel of wisdom which enlightens and strengthens that experience (page 86). The telling of the story is itself intimately bound up with the rhythms of the world of which it speaks. Benjamin talks of how a listener, if he or she is to remember the story, must be in a state of relaxation, even boredom (page 92). In this state, which Benjamin associates with the repetition tied up with so much craft work, the listener is 'loosened' from his or her self and is able to absorb the story being told: and having received the story in this way the listener is likely to repeat this story to others, a[f]or storytelling is always the art of repeating stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained" (pages 90-91). The storyteller, and the art of storytelling, is, however, in decline. Experience is no longer tied in the same way to the lived rhythms of everyday life. It is increasingly taking on another, more estranged, character. This Benjamin attributes to "the secular forces of history" (page 86). Through the ever-increasing scale and the concomitant rise in specialisation of economic and social organisation, the experience of workas of other activitieshas become fragmented and voided of wider communal meaning. Indeed, Benjamin goes on to argue that the rise of the novel as a narrative form is both engendered by and symptomatic of this. For the novel exists in a quite different relationship to community and tradition than does the storyteller's narration. The novel "neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it" (page 87). In this it marks itself out as a profoundly individualistic form of expression. "The Birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounselled, and cannot counsel others" (page 87). This inabilityas Benjamin sees itto give counsel is a manifestation of the break in unity between tradition and community within modernity. But although the novel does not sit within the unity of community and tradition, in place of this the novel creates its own self-defining unity: its very modus operandi is to rework the temporality of the lives it narrates and through this create a sense of totality for these lives. "Only in the novel", writes Benjamin, quoting from Georg Lukas's Theory of the Novel, "does there occur a creative memory which transfixes the object and transforms it" (page 98). "The novel is significant ... not because it presents someone

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else's fate to us, perhaps didactically, but because this stranger's fate by virtue of the flame which consumes it yields us the warmth we will never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about" (page 91). But although the novel provides this solace, it does not restore a proper depth of experience to the world. Benjamin describes how in storytelling, "[narration] sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of him again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel" (page 91). Nothing like this occurs with the novel. Unlike the storyteller's narrative, the told narrative of the novel does not plunge back into a living community in which others tell it and pass it on to others. For all the power of the novel, it embodies within itso Benjamina profound loss. Benjamin's description of the modality of experience bound within the story and the art of the storyteller is instructive. For Benjamin affective experience (what Benjamin called Erfahrung)in contrast to the disembedded, estranged experience {Erlebnis) conveyed through the novelinvolved a reflux between habit and novelty that gained its meaning both from its connection with the temporality of tradition, as well as from a capacity for movement and development (Andrew Benjamin, 1991, pages 157-158). Near the end of "The storyteller" Benjamin (1973b, page 106) quotes Paul Valery, who wrote about a woman artist whose work involved the silk embroidery of figures: "Artistic observation can attain an almost mystical depth. The objects on which it falls lose their names. Light and shade form very particular systems, present very individual questions which depend on no knowledge and are derived from no practice, but get their accord of the soul, the eye, and the hand of someone who was born to perceive them and evoke them in his own inner self". In commenting on Valery, Benjamin writes that "That old co-ordination of the soul, the eye, and the hand which emerges in Valery's words is that of the artisan which we encounter where ever the art of storytelling is at home. In fact, one can go on and ask oneself whether the relationship of the storyteller to his material, human life, is not in itself a craftsman's relationship, whether or not it is his very task to fashion the raw material of experience, his own and that of others, in a solid, useful and unique way. It is a kind of procedure which may perhaps most adequately be exemplified by the proverb if one thinks of it as an ideogram of a story. A proverb, one might say, is a ruin which stands on the site of an old story and in which a moral twines about a happening like ivy around a wall" (page 107). Within these lines can be seen the trace of series of experiential dimensions which form an essentialif often diffusecore through which Benjamin's thinking on modern life was refracted. There is here a sense of the embodied knowing of habit, a knowing that is not just that of a distanced eye, but which is tied up with the whole of the person's corporeal sensorium. This is a knowledge which is tied up with the working of the body and its negotiation within and through her immediate environment. It is a knowing which, precisely because it does not involve the kind of self-presence which is normally associated with thought, provides a basis of active and unestranged learning. Here too is a depiction (along with a certain amount of mystification) of the capacity for a kind of seeing and operating within the world in whichin contrast to the stark split between subject and object that defines so much of modern knowledge and actionthe individual meets the world as an equal other, in a relationship where, as Jurgen Habermas (1979, page 46) puts it, "even things encounter us in the structures of frail intersubjectivity". These are powerful ideas. But what should one make of the thread of loss which runs through the account given in "The storyteller" of the kind of experience described in the lines of Valery above? Has the type of experience central to the art of the

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storyteller those experiential modes built around the corporeal* the habitual, a certain kind of distractionbeen fully destroyed by what Benjamin calls the Secular forces of history*? Or has it slipped out from its home in tradition, and is now forced by just these secular forces into leading a shadowy, 'wizened' existence, where it must at all costs 'keep out of sight* (like the hunchback in Benjamin's later "Theses on the Philosophy of History" 1973b, page 245)? One thing is certain, its home is clearly no longer within the artisanal. Thus, it is necessary to go beyond the specifics of Valery's example, and indeed Benjamin's firm placement in "The storyteller" of this experiential mode within the world of the cultic and no longer present. Benjamin himself hints at this near the beginning of "The storyteller" where he tells that with the decline of the story it is "possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing" (1973b, page 87). Such an affirmative interpretation of the secular trend outline in "The storyteller" strings a direct link to Benjamin's famous "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction". Written just months after "The storyteller", it revisits many of the themes within the earlier piece. In it, Benjamin presents a profoundly affirming analysis of the possihilities within the modern for new ways of validating experience, By analysing the working of the new(ish) filmic technologies of photography and cinema, Benjamin argues that in the working of these technologies one can trace a realm in which the shock-like character of the modern city can be taken hold of and made properly accessible and human. Distraction, habit, and the knowingness of tactility In the essay "Some motifs in Baudelaire" Benjamin portrayedas we have seenthe urban crowd as a distracted mass, in which the individual, buffeted by a multitude of stimuli, is unable to take hold and learn from his or her experience within the crowd. Drawing a comparison with the unskilled factory labourer who is forced by the discipline of the machine he or she services to repeat ad infinitum a single action without the possibility of ever actively shaping the process to which he or she and the machine are part, Benjamin writes that individuals within the urban crowd have "been sealed off from experience" (1985, pages 133-134). Here distraction is understood in a purely negative sense. But, as we have seen in "The storyteller", within Benjamin's work distraction also holds another more positive meaning. In "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction" Benjamin reworks this positive reading of distraction. This reworking takes place notas in his earlier essaywithin the context of tradition, but within the context of tradition's very dissolution. Thus, in "The work of art" Benjamin sees in distraction something which is not only a definitive characteristic of urban life as he does in "Some motifs in Baudelaire"but also something that is a way of seeing and knowing that holds much of power within it. Echoing the account he had set out within "The storyteller", this is a way of looking and experiencing the world in which the eye does not act to hold external objects in a firm contemplative gaze, but only notices them in passing and while also keeping a series of other objects in view: it is a way of looking that feels its way around the place it finds itself rather than fixing that place with a distancing look. It is also a way of looking that is intensely tied up with the other sensations of the body, especially with those of touch. In feeling its way around a space the eye acts in a similar way to, and in coordination with, the body's physical and profoundly tactile knowing of a space (Taussig, 1992). As we know from our reading of "The storyteller", such a way of looking is not in and of itself a perceptual modality that is unique to contemporary times. However, to illustrate these historical antecedents in "The work of art" essay, Benjamin does not use the example of the artisan as he does in "The storyteller". Instead, Benjamin chooses the example of architecture, which has, he says, "always represented the prototype of a

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work... the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction" (1973b, page 232). "Buildings are", continues Benjamin, "appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perceptionor rather, by touch and sight" (page 233). This has nothing to do with the "attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building" (page 233). Instead, it is tied up with habit and a knowingness that comes through that habit. Now although this type of perception and knowing cannot be located solely within the realm of the modern, its relationship to other ways of looking and to the social collectivity and memory must be: with the fragmentation and shocks which are definitive of the modern city, the distracted eye performs a very specific function. This function is to act as protection from the excessive stimuli within the city. The key question here is what do such 'protective eyes' see and what can they know? As I outlined in the first section of this paper, the answer to this question which Benjamin proffers in "Some motifs in Baudelaire" is reasonably clear. The distracted gaze of the modern urban inhabitant sees much, but knows very little of what they see: "There is no surrender to faraway things in the protective eye" (1985, page 151). This is a line of interpretation that shares remarkable parallels to Bauman's description in his Postmodern Ethics (1993b, page 154) of the protective distancings so important to the maintenance of social space. Bauman argues that in order to spare the self the burden of having to deal humanly with every stranger encountered when he or she is within public and/or exposed space, people work a series of bodily techniques that places strangers into a background, a situation where possible meetings are fashioned into 'rnismeetings'. Backgrounded in this way, the self, although it is aware that other people are within his or her vicinity, does not actually 'see' the strangers with whom he or she shares his or her space (Bauman, 1993b, pages 154-155). With this bodily working the self effectively sanitises its immediate environment, clearing away the messiness bought to it by the difficult presence of others. As Bauman (1993b, page 155) writes, "The overall effect of deploying the art of mismeeting is 'desocialising' the potentially social space around, or preventing the physical space in which one moves from turning into a social onea space with rules of engagement and interaction." On these accounts the tactile knowingness of the distracted gaze has been reduced to the straight necessities, a threadbare knowledge that gets an individual round the urban environment but nothing more. This is an account which has become deadeningly familiar within urban studies. Now although the distracted look is operated as a protection by the contemporary city dweller, and although this does work as a filter to the full complexities and subjectivities of urban space, there are other dimensions at play in the distracted look of the city dweller. It was these dimensions which "The work of art" sought to address. Benjamin begins "The work of art" with a historical outline of the technologies through which it has been possible to copy works of art. Although these technologies have altered through history, the advent of filmic technologies has ushered in an epoch in which the viewer's relationship to the work of art has been profoundly transformed. Where the traditional work of art draws its force from its singularity and uniqueness in time and place, photography and film blast the art work from its home within the weave of tradition and instead press an ephemeral immediacy upon it. Such a destruction is not to be lamented, Benjamin instructs us. If at one level the overwhelming of the traditional work of art is a loss, at another it represents a profound gain and possibility as photography and film open up to us a whole, previously unrecognised, realm of action. This comes from their very technical intrusiveness. Through their capacity to freeze action, to slow it down, to enlarge it, and their capacity to chop that action up with these techniques, photography and film reveals to view a micrology of significant elements which are undetectable by the naked eye (Walter Benjamin, 1973b, pages 228-240; 1979, pages 243 - 244).

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Hvidently a different nature**, Benjamin writes (1973b, page 230), "opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by humans" Photography exposes "the physiognomic aspects of visual worlds which dwell in the smallest things, meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams, but which, enlarged and capable of formulation, make the difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable" (1979, pages 243-244). In revealing through its profoundly tactile appropriation of the world this realm of buried secrets and "waking dreams'-, photography and film oITcr an avenue through which distracted, tactile, everyday knowings can be brought into a more properly reflexive relationship to the self: that is to say they could be experienced as proper and full Erfahrung. Here Benjamin's debt to the surrealists is clear (Cohen, 1993; see Walter Benjamin, 1979, pages 225-239). But although the surrealists remained content to stay within the world of dream, and refused to contemplate how the powerful but potentially regressive forces of dream might be harnessed to alter the material world, Benjamin couples the act of dreaming with an active moment of awakening (Gilloch, 1996; McCole, 1993, pages 225 - 226). Film and photography 'bring up' the habits embedded within the distracted look: they disrupt its smooth (low. And, in a moment not unlike that of the listener listening to the storyteller of the past telling their story, they ask the viewer to bring the things revealed and told through the camera's pictures into a conscious and active relationship to the viewer's existing life. Through the optical unconscious, then, there is a possibility of redeeming urban experience. As Benjamin wrote in the penultimate paragraph of "The work of art" (1973b, page 233), "the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They arc mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation." Such a reading of the distracted look shifts our understanding of what the distracted, protected eye can know. It suggests that in the distracted vision being talked of by Benjamin in "The work of art" people do actually encounter and/or experience places and the people who populate those placesin ways that go beyond those of selfprotection and its efforts to anaesthetise the environment she or he is in. In part this is to underline the argument that the narratives of experiential entropy with which Benjamin laced his discussion in essays such as "The storyteller" or "Some motifs in Baudelaire" need to be weighed against other, more affirmative pieces. But it also suggests we need to read Benjamin's account in the light of more contemporary commentators. If we turn to the work of Erving Goffman, on whom Bauman in Postmodern Ethics relies for his description of the mismeetings engineered by the protective eye, one finds, for example, that the production of a civil disattention (the placing of others into a background) involves a notable degree of affirming contact between strangers (see Goffman, 1971). This contact and affirmation is, as Bauman stresses, mostly about negotiating the distance between the two strangers, signalling that they mean each other no harm or ill will. But it is also (or can also be) a warm gesture, a gesture of the mutual humanity, of the shared subjectivity, of the self with the other (see also Sennett, 1990, page 167; Jenks, 1995). Certainly, this does not fulfil anything like the kind of Levinasian moral call which Bauman makes central to his ethics (see Levinas, 1989). The gestures being talked of here are of limited scope, not going much beyond the recognition that the other is there and is to be respected: it does not reach (or does not reach very far) towards the Levinasian moral necessity of being for the face of the other. By considering these ethical dimensions the discussion is pushed back to the ethical imperatives which drove Benjamin's interest in the distracted gaze. Benjamin's interest in the working of the distracted look is rooted in a fascination with the way the

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distracted look 'confounds' (as Michael Taussig, 1992, has it) subject with object (see also Caygill, 1998). This confounding does not represent a kind of schizophrenic experience, but rather represents a breaking down, or a short-circuiting, of the split between subject and object without destroying (exactly) the autonomy of either. It is in this search for ways of relating to the world that transcend the pervasive and dehabilitating split between subject and object which scars modernity that Benjamin's intellectual project finds its energy (Schweppenhauser, 1988). It is this concern which motivates much of Benjamin's fascination with photography and film (see 1979). But there is an ambiguity in Benjamin's interpretation in "The work of art" of the power of the camera for bringing the optical unconscious, and the distracted look with which that is intertwined, to a redeeming consciousness. This ambiguity lies in Benjamin's stance to the auratic within "The work of art". Throughout his work of the late 1920s and 1930s Benjamin drew upon the concept of aura and the auratic to refer to diffuse but powerful emphathetic ways of relating to the world (Hansen, 1987; Stoessel, 1983). The experiences of the 'relaxed' and 'distracted' listeners in "The storyteller", for example, are soaked through and through with the auratic. Indeed, the fading of the auratic within modernity is confluent for Benjamin with the decline in storytelling. Yet, in "The work of art" Benjamin celebrates the auratic's decline. This points to a fundamental tension within "The work of art". As Miriam Hansen has examined in her wonderful commentary on "The work of art", "Benjamin, cinema, and experience" (1987), if the revelations of the optical unconscious that the camera brings up are understood solely within the register of a fuller and so more emancipated consciousness, these revelations do little more than reproduce (albeit in a more affirmative form) the kinds of positivistic knowings that Benjamin finds so distasteful within bourgeois society. The 'confounding' talked of by Taussig is flattened into the simple extension of the existing subject-object divide; it cannot entail the dissolution or transgression of its boundaries. In fact, as we shall see it is the capacity of photography and film to reengender a thoroughly modern auratic that lies at the heart of their redemptive power: as indeed it does for the distracted tactile gaze in general. Auras, objects, and intersubjectivity A short definition of aura might run like this: the aura is that which inhabits an inanimate object which transcends its simple 'thingness', its straightfoward 'objectness'. Benjamin writes in "The work of art" (1973b, pages 222-223) that "We define [the aura] as the unique appearance of a 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." The aura, then, can be understood as a recognition of a subjectivity possessed by objects of the external world. For Benjamin, the recognition of the subjectivity of the inanimate object involves a dialectical motion between the individual and the object in which the individual senses in some way her or his commonality with the auratic object, a sensation which only occurs through the imputation of human qualities onto the natural world (1973a, page 48; 1985, page 41). Specifically, auratic experience requires that the object has the capacity to "return [the viewers] gaze" (1973a, page 48). Benjamin (1973a, page 148) writes that "[t]he experience of the aura...rests on the transposition of a response common in human relationships to the relationship between the inanimate or natural object and the human being. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in return. To experience the aura of a phenomenon means to invest it with the capability of returning the gaze." Upon first reading, such a "transposition" may appear to be little more than projection; a possessive gaze through which the individual projects his or her fantasies

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onto the external object. But such an interpretation would be profoundly misleading: the object's returning of the look in fact sets in train a complex series of movements between the self and the auratic object that undermines any dominance of the self over the object. Instead, the humanising of the object that generates the return of the look speaks of the self's shared similarities with the object: the aura of an object carries with it the object's similarity to us, in the sense of its relating to us as an other within a shared sameness, simultaneously with the fact of its otherness to us, both in the sense of being another object and of being of another form to mP) Auratic experience, then, is rooted within an emphatic way of relating to the world, which through the generation of a chain of correspondences between the self and object draws a limit of the self's omnipotence, whilst all the while drawing the self into that world. Habcrmas (1979, page 46) describes this experience as like that of a caress: "Although the grasp that stretches toward the essence appearing in the structures of intersubjectivity engendered through the aura is no distance away, this essence evades any immediate contact," Benjamin thought aura and auratic experience were in decline, and this "contemporary decay of the aura" (1973b, page 216) is of central interest to Benjamin in "The work of art". Through the essay Benjamin traces the art work's auratic decline; from its roots in ritual and tradition, to its breaking off from tradition towards its own autonomy, to the ultimate loss of aura within the twentieth century arts of photography and film. The advent of reproducibility has created a world where the aura has no place to hide. Reproduction lifts the work of art from tradition, from "its presence in time and space" (1973b, page 214), and presses it against the masses. Benjamin (1973b, page 217) writes that "To pry an object from its shell, to destroy its aura, is the mark of a perception whose 'sense of the universal equality of things' has increased to such a degree that it extracts it even from the unique object by means of reproduction." Throughout "The work of art" Benjamin interprets the aura's decay within a very positive frame: positive not because the aura's decay is a movement that is inherently good, but because of the possibilities Benjamin argues are inherent within this decay (see also Walter Benjamin, 1979, pages 157 -159). "The instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practicepolitics" (1973b, page 218). Yet the difficulty within "The work of art"as Hansen (1987, page 186) stressesis that by celebrating only the decline of the aura, Benjamin neglects the possibilities that lie within auratic experience itself. Auratic experience is shot through with a Utopian power. It holds within it a capacity for a kind of looking that is Other to the divided object - subject of capitalist rationality, a way of looking that offers a form of resolution between subject and object, a way of looking that is neither masterful nor exploitative (Hansen, 1987, page 193; see also Caygill, 1998). Which raises an obvious question: if auratic experience is so full of power, if it does hold within it a way of relating to the world which is Other to the divided object - subject of capitalist rationality, why does Benjamin celebrate its decline? In "The work of art" Benjamin recognises that within traditional societies the aura is lodged within an authoritarian field of force. The auratic is intimately implicated with the working of myth; invested with myth, and the tradition that generated that myth, the auratic object has the capacity to overwhelm and trap the individual standing opposite it. The danger within traditionally rooted auratic experience lies not on
(3) Benjamin refers to the "forgotten human residue in things", and he stresses that this "forgotten residue" is not that of labour. Benjamin was quite firm on this. He wrote that "The tree and the bush we endow [with an answering gaze] were not created by human hand. Hence, there must be a human element in objects that is not the result of labour." Benjamin (in a letter to Theodor Adorno) quoted in Hansen (1987, page 212).

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the side of the person, but in the vast energies invested within the object, the fact of its authoritarian impositions upon the self (Stokar, 1996; see Caygill, 1998, pages 65 - 67). The secular decline of the auratic represents, then, a loosening of the authoritarian bonds through which humanity has been bound. The misfortune is that this loosening is tied up with a range of other developments which, although destroying the authority entangled with aura and auratic experience, are simultaneously destroying the capacity for auratic experience of any form. Voided of aura the world becomes estranged from the human, from society. It becomes reduced to that which is useful for humanity; it is endowed with an instrumental existence but none of its own. Any redemptive politics must work, somehow, to transcend this split; it must somehow try to recover and/or reengineer auratic experience within the frame of a liberational politics (Habermas, 1979, pages 45-46). The positive dimension of the decline of that aura engendered through the traditional or the cultic, then, is that the very fact of this decline creates the possibility for a reengendering of the auratic within a different, more emancipated constellation (Habermas, 1979, pages 45-47). It is at this point where the analysis of "The work of art" folds in on itself. In linking the aura's decay with the potential for the formation of a mass art dynamised through politics, Benjamin inadvertently flattens the connection between art and politics to that of a technics (see 1973c, "The author as producer"); that is to say, he divorces it from the idea of aura (Hansen, 1987, page 202). And, divorced from the auratic mass, art is hollowed of its experiential power. Nevertheless, as Hansen points out (1987), in "The work of art" Benjamin mislays the auratic, he does not seek to suppress it. Interpreting the analysis of "The work of art" essay within the context of Benjamin's other work (with, perhaps, the exception of his writings on Berthold Brecht), it is possible to construct an alternative reading of how the auratic is and/or can be reengendered within the contemporary world. Such a reengendering is precisely what photography and film, through their working of the optical unconsciousness, are able to do. The capacity of photography and film to generate strings of unusual and unexpected relationships, the utilisation of the very urge to get close to the object which destroys the original aura which was talked about in the preceding section, generates a series of correspondences which are capable of reengendering by reverse effect a kind of demystified auratic perception: creatively destroying the distance so fundamental for the traditional auratic, they reactivate "through the back door" a limited, but nevertheless powerful auratic experience (Hansen, 1987, pages 209-210, 212). "Our taverns and city streets", Benjamin writes (quoted in Hansen, 1987, page 209), "our offices and furnished rooms, our train stations and factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly. Then came film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second." As Habermas writes (1979, page 46, emphasis in original), "The experience released from the ruptured shell of the aura [is] already contained in the experience of the aura itself as the transformation of the object into a counter part. Thereby a whole field of surprising correspondences between animate and inanimate nature is opened up, wherein even things encounter us in the structures of frail intersubjectivity." Such experience is charged with both the joyous and the unsettling; certainly it has nothing to do with "the 'they're looking at you' of [photographs] of animals, people and babies, that so distastefully implicates the buyer" (Walter Benjamin, 1979, page 244). The "secular" auratic unleashed through the working of film realises a profound interweaving of the mysterious and the everyday: "we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognise it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday" (Benjamin in Habermas, 1979, page 46). When one works within such a perceptual mode the overwhelming drive to get closer to an object as manifested in the work of the camera in

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fact re-creates, if only momentarily, that auratic distance within nearness that "evades any immediate contact'* (Hahermas, 1979, page 46). Such a reading of 'The work of art" corrodes the sharp divisions with which Benjamin frequently seems to endow urban experience. If photography and film are able to release and magnify the auratic potential that exists within everyday life and the distracted embodied experiences through which people negotiate their cities* it follows that the notion of the urban dweller being 'scaled off from experience can only have a relative, not an absolute, meaning. The kind of auratic looking* and experiencing which Benjamin ^ccs film and photography as so capable of marshalling are, in one form or another, ever present in people's use of their cities. Tactility and habit have, as Taussig (1992b, page 142) writes, "an activist, constructivist bcnl." They do not simply provide a different angle on the reality of the urban, they arc also part of the ordinary making and occupation of places (provisional and temporary as they may be, see de Ccrtcau, 1984). A weaving together of the self and the mass of the urban in which it is hard, if not impossible, to pry the two apart. Thinking about Benjamin's tactile, habitual, distracted knowledges also helps us to respect the subdued, modest redemptions which permeate the habitation of the urban. Events like that described by Croatian novelist Dubravka Ugresic (1994, page 133) writing of her stay in New York: "I go into the over-crowded subway, mix with the people, I like all that shoving and pressing. I especially like the subway on rainy days: I enjoy that mixing up of anonymous coats moist with rain.... On the escalators I wink at one person, blow a kiss in the air. My kiss floats upwards or downwards and lands on someone like a soft little feather" Moments which not only suggest the limits to the urban as a collective experience, but which also express something of the quiet, barely perceivable, experiential possibilities of the urban. Conclusion In the conclusion to "Some motifs in Baudelaire", Benjamin writes that the singular achievement of Baudelaire and his poetry was that he took "something lived through" and gave it "the weight of experience" (1973a, page 154). This, Benjamin tells the reader, was done at a price. A price he suggests we must all pay: "[Baudelaire] indicated the price for which the sensation of the modern age may be had: the disintegration of the aura in the experience of shock" (1973a, page 154). Indeed. But this is no cause for lament. For Benjaminas the preceding pages have sought to demonstratethis auratic disintegration holds within it a whole range of new (and simultaneously archaic, Habermas, 1979) possibilities for experiencing and inhabiting the world. Of course, and as many commentators have stressed, the methods Benjamin employed are not without a multitude of difficulties (see Witte, 1985; Wolff, 1993; Wolin, 1994). The opaque tensions, sudden inversions, and esoteria encountered in my path through Benjamin's writings are testament to that. But, in concluding this paper, it is perhaps necessary to mention two more specific concerns which are directly related to my argument. The first of these concerns the tension Benjamin sets up between experiential decline and redemption. In works like "The storyteller" or "The work of art" Benjamin shuttles between these two polarities. But he does so not, as we have seen, to articulate some underlying telos of decline or progress. Rather, through the play of tensions he seeks to feel out, or articulate, potentialities for redeeming the contemporary moment, the now (see Bauman, 1993a). Although we recognise the immense productiveness of this tension for Benjamin, we must also ask to what degree the tension's presuppositions mark a limit within his work, of which we, in drawing upon Benjamin, should be wary (Andrew Benjamin, 1991, pages 170-171). To acknowledge the antinomies within Benjamin's work does not demand that we make them our own (McCole, 1993; Wohlfarth, 1993). Similarly, caution is necessary in taking up one of the comments with which I prefaced

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my discussion of Benjamin in the introduction. There I suggested that Benjamin's thought might be read with an ear for a perceptual field which we, (hopefully) more alert to the specifics of sex than Benjamin, might call the feminine. That it is possible to read Benjamin's intense preoccupation with phenomena such as the auraticas outlined aboveas involving a movement within such a field should, I think, be clear. Indeed, this is a thematic which has been productively explored in a number of recent Benjamin commentaries (see Burgin, 1993; Weigel, 1996a; 1996b). But it is important also to be mindful of the limits of Benjamin's thought for such (re)interpretations. Not the least being that Benjaminthough perhaps something of a proto-feministwas no feminist (Buck-Morss, 1986, pages 119-120; Gilloch, 1996). This is not to detract from the usefulness of contemporary readings of Benjamin to urban studies, although it does perhaps suggest the need for a reorientation in how he has been read. As I have argued, Benjamin's interest in the workings of a habitual distracted look is at once provocative and productive. It offers a range of possibilities for understanding a certain dimension of bodily encounter and/or experience which is related to the simple inhabitation of urban space. In so doing, it works to highlight the complex and vital inter subjectivity of these encounters; an inter subjectivity which is not structured through direct face-to-face encounters, but more fleeting, ephemeral moments and the accretions of habit. To think about Benjamin's distracted habitual look also counsels the respect of a certain ordinariness within the urban (see also Amin and Graham, 1997; Thrift, 1997a) and a wariness towards the catalogues of doom with which some urban commentators (many of whom are all too influenced by the echoes of Benjamin's writing) would narrate the space of contemporary cities (Doel and Clarke, 1997). Near the beginning of his A Berlin Chronicle written in 1932 Benjamin wrote that "Not to find one's way in a city may be uninteresting and banal. But to loose oneself in a cityas one loses oneself in a forestthat requires a different schooling. Then, signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest, like the startling call of the bittern in the distance, like the sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing at its centre" (1979, page 298). These lines contain both a programme and a statement of intent. A commitment to listen for the quiet subaltern practices and narratives constantly at work within people's ordinary, everyday inhabitation of their city, and a desire to understand the constructive power (however minor and reserved) of these practices. To think with Benjamin about these thematics of inhabitation and use is not only to work to understand a certain microsociology-cum-geography of the city, but also to hold open a realm of possibility for the enhancement and invigoration of the collective life of our cities. Acknowledgements. Research for this paper was undertaken under the support of a scholarship from The Association of Commonwealth Universities. Its completion was aided by financial support from The New Zealand Foundation for Science Research and Technology. I would like to thank Nigel Thrift, Paul Stallard, and Bon Holloway for their helpful and generous comments on various versions of this paper. Any errors are, of course, mine. References Adorno T, 1981, "A portrait of Walter Benjamin", in Prisms translated by S Webber, S Webber (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA) pp 229 - 241 Amin A, Graham S, 1997, "The ordinary city" Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 22 411- 429 Baudelaire C, 1972 Selected Writings on Art and Literature translated by P E Charvet (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middx) Baudelaire C, 1991 The Prose Poems and La Fanfarlo translated by R Lloyd (Oxford University Press, Oxford) Baudelaire C, 1993 The Flowers of Evil translated by J McGowan (Oxford University Press, Oxford) Bauman Z, 1993a, "Benjamin the intellectual" New Formations 20 47 - 57

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