Aura

“The experience of aura is based on the transposition of a social reaction onto the relationship of the lifeless or of nature to man. The person we look at, the person who believes himself looked at, looks back at us in return. To experience the aura of a phenomenon means to endow it with the power to look back in return.”…

Aura is thus in a sense the opposite of allegorical perception, in that in it a mysterious wholeness of objects becomes visible. And where the broken fragments of allegory represented a thing-world of destructive forces in which human autonomy was drowned, the objects of aura stand perhaps as the setting of a kind of Utopia, a Utopian present, not shorn of the past but having absorbed it, a kind of plenitude of existence in the world of things, if only for the briefest instant. Yet this Utopian component of Benjamin’s thought, put to flight as it is by the mechanized present of history, is available to the thinker only in a simpler cultural past.

— Jameson, Frederic, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1971) p.77, quoting Benjamin, Walter, in Schriften I (ed. Adorno, 1955)