Benjamin, Baudelaire and a Dilemma of Contemporary Aesthetics.

Contemporary artistic practice can seem to face the dilemma of a choice between an antiquated aesthetic of meditative contemplation (postmodernism as neo-romanticism) and a fruitless skeptical fragmentation (postmodernism as intensification of modernism). In Walter Benjamin's terms, a purely contemplative aesthetic is antiquated because it aims at an experience of aura that no longer has a place in post-industrial capitalism, while a skeptical aesthetic is fruitless because it merely reflects this loss of aura.

One way to escape this dilemma is suggested by Benjamin's essay on Baudelaire. For while, for Benjamin, "the disintegration of the aura makes itself felt in [Baudelaire's] lyric poetry", it does so in such a way that the lived experience (Erlebnis) of this loss, is "given the weight" of auratic experience (Erfahrung). Unlike, say, Eliot's 'the Wasteland', in which the loss of aura is experienced only in the mode of skeptical fragmentation, Baudelaire's experience of loss (both as nostalgia - 'ideal' - and pessimistic clarity - 'spleen') attains metrical, thematic and thereby contemplative coherence.