Clearly, the concept of the aura plays a number of different roles in Benjamin’s writings, in his various attempts to grasp his historical present in terms of the possibilities for ‘experience’ afforded by its new cultural forms; which he increasingly came to identify (some say precipitously) with revolutionary political potential. Yet Adorno was wrong to see a simple change of position, rather than a complex series of inflections of what was a generally consistent historical account. Benjamin had written affirmatively of “the emancipation of object from aura” as early as 1931, in his ‘Little History of Photography’, in which he described Atget’s photographs as “suck[ing] the aura out of reality like water from a sinking ship” (SW 2, 518). It is here that we find the basic definition of aura: “A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be.” Importantly, the examples given with this definition are from nature: mountains and a branch observed “at rest on a summer’s noon … until the moment or the hour become part of their appearance…”. The ‘destruction’ of the aura by transience and reproducibility is judged “a salutary estrangement” (SW 2, 518–9). Similarly, when ‘The Storyteller’ recounts the “dying out of the art of storytelling” and “the incomparable aura that surrounds the storyteller”, it is nonetheless maintained: “nothing could be more fatuous than to wish to see it as merely a ‘symptom of decay’, let alone a ‘modern symptom’. It is rather, only a concomitant of the secular productive forces of history…” (SW 3, 146; 162). ‘The Work of Art’ essay extends and enriches the earlier account of photography’s technological transformation of perception (“the optical unconscious”) with reference to film. The difference resides in the insistent political dimension of the later essay (after Hitler’s taking of power in 1933), and its determination to introduce concepts “that are completely useless for the purposes of fascism” (SW 3, 102). The main problem with the auratic (which is deemed historically residual, not eliminated, indeed is perhaps ineliminable [Didi-Huberman 2004]) was that, Benjamin believed, it was precisely “useful for fascism”. This context over-determines the essay throughout, with its almost Manichean oppositions between ritual and politics, cult value and exhibition value. Quite apart from the intervening technological and social developments, it makes it a very difficult text simply to ‘use’ today. For some, however, it is precisely the connection it draws between a certain kind of mass culture and fascism that provides its continuing relevance (Buck-Morss 1992).