ABSTRACT
The concept of historical trauma allows us to grasp how political communities are formed and how they perpetuate themselves. Freud argued that group identity is based in acts of violence and feelings of collective guilt, repeated in ritual sacrifi ce. Drawing directly from Freud, Benjamin and Adorno explained, in different ways, the sacrifi cial logic underlying modernist aesthetics and mass culture. Benjamin wrote of Baudelaire: “He named the price for which the sensation of modernity could be had: the disintegration of the aura in immediate shock experience” (4: 343). In modern cities transitory encounters with others, rapid changes to the physical environment, the numbing impact of industrial technologies and spectacular displays of commodities all gave rise to new forms of collective experience. Benjamin argued that under these conditions the new media of photography and fi lm served as substitutes for earlier lived traditions and bourgeois privacy. Adorno argued that shock experience also defi ned participation in mass culture and politics.
