From Aura to Non-Place: Experience, Space, and the Loss of Anchoring in Benjamin and Augé

Note: This text was originally written in Spanish and is presented here in English translation.

Abstract

This article proposes a comparative reading of Walter Benjamin and Marc Augé based on an underexplored structural affinity: the relation between the loss of aura and the proliferation of the non-place. Moving beyond a merely thematic analogy, it argues that both concepts articulate profound transformations of modern experience linked to the dissolution of the spatial anchoring that historically sustained meaning. In Benjamin, technical reproducibility emancipates the artwork from its “here and now,” weakening its ritual inscription and singularity. In Augé, supermodernity generates spaces of transit that suspend identity, relation, and memory. From this perspective, the non-place may be understood as the spatial correlate of the logic of reproducibility: not a profanation of the sacred, but the loss of its structuring function. The article examines the scope and limits of this comparison and raises the question of what inhabiting means in a world shaped by circulation and interchangeability.

Introduction

When Walter Benjamin claims that the work of art loses its aura in the age of technical reproducibility, he is not advancing a merely aesthetic thesis. What is affected is not only the status of the artistic object, but a specific relation between experience, space, and meaning. Aura—that irreducible “here and now” (Hier und Jetzt)—designates a mode of appearance bound to uniqueness, distance, and inscription within a tradition. In this sense, the auratic artwork does not exist independently of the place that sustains it: temple, ceremony, sanctuary, ritual frame.

Technical modernity, by emancipating the artwork from this anchoring, does not profane it; rather, it renders it available. Decades later, Marc Augé would describe a different, though structurally analogous, phenomenon: the proliferation of spaces that no longer generate identity, relation, or memory. Airports, highways, shopping malls, and supermarkets are not merely functional settings; they constitute what he terms non-places, characteristic of supermodernity. Although Augé does not explicitly engage with Benjamin, the conceptual proximity is difficult to ignore. Where Benjamin theorizes the loss of aura, Augé diagnoses the erosion of place. In both cases, what weakens is a form of anchoring that once organized experience.

Aura as a Structure of Experience

In The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Benjamin insists that aura is neither a subjective quality nor a metaphysical residue, but a structure of experience. The auratic work is defined by its singularity and by its resistance to substitution without remainder. Its authority derives from tradition, and its origin lies in ritual—initially magical, later religious. “The earliest art works,” Benjamin writes, “originated in the service of a ritual,” emphasizing that cult value precedes exhibition value.

Technical reproduction radically alters this configuration. Photography and film detach the work from its proper site, multiply its presence, and diminish the distance that once sustained its appearance. Aesthetic experience no longer requires displacement or contemplative withdrawal; it becomes integrated into the ordinary flow of social life. The effect is not limited to an expansion of access, but entails a transformation in our mode of relating to things: the reproduced work is no longer “there”; it circulates.

Benjamin, however, approaches this transformation dialectically. The disappearance of aura does not amount solely to a loss; it also opens new perceptual and political possibilities. Film, by fragmenting experience and subjecting it to shock, does not simply impoverish perception; it reconfigures it within a field shaped by technical and historical tensions.

Anthropological Place and Its Dissolution

In Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, Augé advances a distinction that is not empirical but analytical. Anthropological place is defined by three features: it is identitarian, relational, and historical. Names, memories, encounters, and shared narratives are inscribed within it. Such a space is not necessarily sacred, yet it is symbolically dense, allowing individual experience to articulate itself with collective memory.

The non-place, by contrast, is a space in which this inscription becomes dispensable. Here the subject does not dwell, but passes through. Identity is reduced to verifiable data—a ticket, a card, a code—and relations with others are governed by standardized procedures. “The non-place creates neither singular identity nor relation,” Augé writes, “but solitude and similarity.” Far from being empty, it is saturated with signage, instructions, and regulated flows.

It is important to stress that this opposition is not absolute. Places and non-places coexist, overlap, and sometimes invert depending on the subject’s position. A given space may function as a place for those who inhabit it daily and as a non-place for those who traverse it anonymously.

Spaces without Aura

The analogy now comes into sharper focus. Just as the reproduced artwork loses its aura by detaching itself from the ritual site that once sustained it, contemporary subjects move through spaces that no longer operate as anthropological places. The non-place can thus be conceived as a spatial—rather than technical—correlate of the logic of reproducibility: not because it reproduces works, but because it multiplies interchangeable forms, gestures, and trajectories.

An airport in Vienna, Dubai, or Singapore does not refer to a specific local history; it is recognized through standardization. Likewise, a reproduced image no longer points to a singular origin, but to its reiterated availability. In both cases, experience is defined by circulation and repetition rather than belonging. Ritual gives way to procedure; narrative yields to instruction.

From this perspective, a more precise hypothesis can be formulated: what weakens in modernity is not the sacred as content, but as function. Both Benjamin’s aura and Augé’s anthropological place fulfill a comparable task: anchoring experience in an irreducible here and now. When this anchoring dissolves, what emerges is not necessarily profanation, but an organized form of indifference.

Limits of the Comparison

The comparison nevertheless has limits that must remain visible. Benjamin conceives the loss of aura as a process traversed by historical and political tensions. Technical reproducibility does not merely transform perception; it inscribes it within a field of struggle in which the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of art are at stake. Augé, by contrast, adopts a different register. The non-place does not announce future emancipation or imminent catastrophe; it names a structural condition of supermodernity observable in everyday life.

This difference is decisive. Benjamin retains the expectation that something can be done with the disappearance of aura. Augé records the expansion of spaces that suspend memory and relation without any promise of restitution. Where the former sustains an open critical tension, the latter describes a silent proliferation.

Conclusion: Inhabiting after Anchoring

To think Benjamin and Augé together is not to impose a fictitious genealogy, but to recognize a theoretical resonance. Both analyze a modernity increasingly defined less by dwelling than by transit, less by inscription than by circulation. The artwork without aura and the space without place thus emerge as two figures of a single displacement.

The question that remains open is not whether a return to an auratic world or a fully symbolic geography is possible. The more troubling issue concerns what inhabiting means today, when space no longer guarantees memory or distance. Perhaps the contemporary problem is not the loss of the sacred, but the difficulty of finding a place where relation and memory can still be inscribed.

References

• Augé, M. (1995). Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (J. Howe, Trans.). London: Verso.
• Benjamin, W. (2008). The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media (E. Jephcott et al., Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Benjamin, W. (1969). Illuminations (H. Zohn, Trans.). New York: Schocken Books.
• Relph, E. (1976). Place and Placelessness. London: Pion.
• Casey, E. S. (1997). The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History. Berkeley: University of California Press.