Objects retain aura when the marks of human labor remain visible on them

Evidence

These objects—the places of objective chance, or of preternatural revelation—are immediately identifiable to us as the products of a not yet fully industrialized and systematized economy. This is to say that the human origins of the products of this period—their relationship to the work from which they issued—have not yet been fully concealed; in their production they still show traces of an artisanal organization of labor while their distribution is still predominantly assured by a network of small shopkeepers. Advertising, in the dimensions so familiar to us, is scarcely developed at all; indeed, the very ads themselves, whether affiche, the sandwich man of Ulysses, or that crude painting on a vacant wall which was Gertrude Stein’s first introduction to the secret prestige of oil paints, can still be apprehended as objects of fascination in their own right. Thus what prepares these products to receive the investment of psychic energy characteristic of their use by Surrealism is precisely the half-sketched, uneffaced mark of human labor, of the human gesture, on them; they are still frozen gesture, not yet completely separated from subjectivity, and remain therefore potentially as mysterious and as expressive as the human body itself. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 208

Categorization

• XREF: Directly echoes Benjamin’s aura concept from ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ and Marx’s commodity fetishism — the Frankfurt-School lineage the reader is tracing. — connects to: Aura is the semblance of distance in an object however close it is — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 846; Looking at an object constitutes labor that increases its value — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 145; Close sensory detail reveals character through material texture — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 405

Broader Connections

• Looking at an object constitutes labor that increases its value #qualifies (0.80) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 145
• Close sensory detail reveals character through material texture #corroborates (0.72) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 405