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The paper proposes a new understanding of the notion of “aura” as it emerges, including similarities and differences, in the aesthetic thought of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. In particular, the paper shows how, not only in Adorno but already in Benjamin, such a concept designates also the capacity of artwork to refers, by its own internal, to an irreducible otherness. In this perspective, in a world increasingly dominated by a tendency to homologation and mercification – with the resulting identification of art and cultural industry –, contemporary art looks like a continuous oscillation between the will to deny aura and, other times, the awareness of its necessary survival, closely related (in particular, according to Adorno) to the recognition of the need to “save” not only the appearance but also, by that very fact, the aesthetic autonomy.
In Paris, metropolis of xix century, Benjamin traces the new paradigm of modernity: the modern theatrical dimension corresponds to the artistic innovations and to the reproduction of aesthetical requests. Entfremdung and Neutralisierung are the main characters of the Ästhetisierung and they are one with the distraction as principle of reception and the conformism as principle of valuation. This is the context of the aura’s decline. The Adorno’s critical essay on the radio (1963) analyses the transformation of works of art in cultural gifts and, in particular, the loss of autonomy of the musical work of art in the radio listening. The Adorno’s remarks recognize the historical character of aura and a new possibility that it can re-emerge in a new historical dimension of the music.
The essay by Adorno and Horkheimer about The Culture Industry (in the volume Dialectic of Enlightment) represents for Alberto Abruzzese the starting point of a reasoning on the intellectuals' role, the crisis of humanistic and academic knowledge and the new “screen and network” society. The author uses The Culture Industry as a text on the western civilization's sunset and at the same time on the metamorphosis of mass cultural production. Abruzzese refers to those scholars who deepened these issues with passion and acumen. From Benjamin to Canetti, from Debord to Foucault, from Lukacs to McLuhan: Abruzzese analyses a whole research path in media culture with the frankness of a personal self-examination.
In precedenti saggi ho già evidenziato, analizzando il commercio a lungo raggio e interessandomi del dibattito storiografico sul tardoantico, come l’analisi dei dati archeologici consenta di individuare molte caratteristiche del c.d. "basso impero" e le trasformazioni che avvengono in questo periodo.