The Aura Effect

Nobody will ever have an aura like him.” “An unmistakable aura surrounded her.” These sentences provide an entry point into a word that has taken the 2020s by storm: aura. This enigmatic and popular term is officially defined as “a distinctive quality or atmosphere that seems to surround someone or something.”1 Yet, even the official definition showcases a second definition labeled as the ‘slang definition’: the quality of being impressively cool.”2

The issue with a word like aura is that it does not represent something as much as it is the representing signifier for nothing. Merriam-Webster describes the presence of aura as “seems to surround.” This word choice points to the ambiguity even the dictionary takes when describing the phenomenon, not to mention the multiple definitions. From official definitions to casual guides to thinking through this fluid term,3 we are able to surmise that aura is a specific energy that is given off. Energy is a certain je ne sais quoi that drives us in a direction, pulls us towards someone or something, or orients our attention towards someone or something. So, when we describe aura as an energy, there is a certain something, or better yet, nothing, that drives us, pulls us, and/or reorients us towards an object. Although what often gets left out in conversations of aura is the source of this energy, most likely because how do we assign a source to something we constantly fail to capture in our descriptions of it, something so amorphous?

At the moment, the source of a specific aura energy is associated with the object. “He/she has aura,” “that room is full of aura.” The feeling of energy that we feel as present is always associated with the external. However, by doing this, we reduce, and at times completely liquidate, our own agency in being drawn to ‘this’ and not ‘that.’ In other words, it is perhaps not that ‘his’ or ‘her’ aura is drawing me to them, but I am drawn to something I identify in them that is more than them, surplus to them; I am drawn to something indescribable in them, but is surely being associated with them by me.

But when we remove our own subjectivity from an identification of aura, we not only elevate others for reasons unexplained (a possibly dangerous move allowing those with ‘aura’ to flow into positions of power because of their indescribable presence), but we also allow for the commodification of this energy through businesses that offer ‘aura readings.’ Not extricable from the former point, the latter allows for folks who completely sideline their subjectivity and become objective viewers of another’s aura. Aura no longer becomes the unexplained presence or mysterious affect painting our vista of an object, but the acceptance that even if it can be ‘felt’ by everyone, it can only be ‘seen’ by some people.4

This ability to ‘see’ aura elevates certain people to the readers of what appears to be nothing. This is not inherently an awful claim on their part, but we must be careful in how we view these visionaries of truth. While some may be making a quick dollar, there are undoubtedly aura readers who believe in their ability to read the unreadable. Yet, to believe anyone can produce objective truth in the absence of subjective interpretation is to accept a kind of unearned authority, one that can all too easily be exploited. Even more than that, it begins to substitute myth for method. In fact, the attempt to ‘aura farm’ (the activities one can engage in to increase one’s aura) will always fail because something is considered to have aura only after it casts its spell on our attention, not before. Aura is determined retroactively in the moment after we align our attention with something that draws us in. Aura is our way of describing that thing we are suddenly drawn to out of the blue.

The energy of someone or something is nothing to scoff at; we all feel it as we are all drawn to this person, this look, or even this experience as opposed to that one. While we may be able to pinpoint why we were drawn to what we were drawn to, we describe it to avoid leaving a reason empty. In other words, a description of what is happening fits snugly in the space of ‘why is this happening?’ Yet, with aura, the description never fits snugly, allowing for many descriptions. As far back as the late 19th and early 20th century, aura was used to describe “The premonitory sensations preceding an epileptic or hysterical attack.”5 These sensations could be “pressure in the epigastrium, constriction in the throat, throbbing in the temples, ringing in the ears, or components of this complex of feelings.”6 The point being, even in a medical context, aura stands in not for something that can be identified for the right amount of money, or photographed with an advanced and spiritually attuned camera, but has always been the representative for an energy that refuses to define itself clearly. And perhaps, it is best left that way.

Whether an affect, a symptom, an imagined Halo around a cool guy or girl, the identification of aura will always say more about ourselves and what we imagine, than what we imagine it says about the object we are drawn to. What seems familiar yet utterly impossible to understand, aura lives in this unstructured, unsaid, unseen gap between the two.

References

1. www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aura
2. www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aura
3. www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a65048778/aura-color-meaning/
4. www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a65048778/aura-color-meaning/
5. Sigmund Freud, The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. Mark Solms, trans. James Strachey, Vol. 2 (Lanham, MD: Rowman &; Littlefield, 2024), 111. (All further citations will be referred to as RSE).
6. Freud, RSE, Vol. 1, 44.