Pre-seminar - Theme 2

For this seminar we’ve read Adorno and Horkheimer’s “Dialectic of Enlightenment” and Walter Benjamin’s “The work of art in the age of technical reproductivity”.

The dialectic of enlightenment deals largely with enlightenment as a concept. In it they relate that enlightenment can be seen as de-mystifying a concept. In the earliest times concepts that were beyond the reach of understanding were explained with religion or myth. When man reaches enlightenment on the concept, that is when man grasps how it works, it loses its magic and instead becomes something very static. Enlightenment as a whole takes all concepts and strives to explain them in a very undramatic fashion, such as numbers, according to the authors.

The word Dialectic seems to have had many different meanings through the ages, but common for all of them is that different arguments are posed against each other for the reason of reaching new insight in the subject at hand.

Nominalism as I understand it says that universals (a type, property or relation) or abstract objects do not exist other than nominally, by name. I’m honestly not sure how this relates to Adorno and Horkheimer’s text as of yet.

I think that the myth is to Adorno and Horkheimer to project a point of view on objects or phenomena as living. So when we reach enlightenment on how these things work, we tend to remove that life from the object or phenomena, we instead choose to describe it in a way that is far removed from something living, for example with numbers.

The other text, “The work of art in the age of technical reproductivity” largely dwells on how art has changed people and politics after the transition from art as unique objects to being reproducible.

Benjamin begins by talking about the relation between “superstructure” and “substructure”, which is a Marxist concept where the substructure explains the relations of production in the society; that is the relations between employers, employees, labor and products. This substructure defines the superstructure, which is culture, political power relations among other things. 

Benjamin shows that culture and art can have revolutionary potential. He contests foremostly that film give people a way to form habits when absent-mindedly watching. These habits focus on solving tasks and depend on the film. Benjamin states that "art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones (tasks) where it is able to mobilize the masses". Apart from this he also relates that western film rarely uses this potential, but that “We do not deny that in some cases today’s films can also promote revolutionary criticism of social conditions, even of the distribution of property”.

Adorno and Horkheimer claim that entertainment “…is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized labor process so that they can cope with it again”. This is closely related to how Benjamin saw film as a way of absent-mindedly taking in art, and in that way may take on a revolutionary potential as stated above.

In one part of the text Benjamin tells us that our sense perception not only depends on nature, but also on a historical perspective. Here he cites the late Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis as not only producing new art, but also changing the sense perception of the people of that time. However I fail to find any good argument for this in the text.

Benjamin uses the concept “aura” a lot in the text. Benjamin defines the aura as what is lost when an art object is reproduced. It loses a sort of uniqueness and authenticity. A natural object has a kind of aura where we instead perceive it as the “unique phenomenon of distance” according to Benjamin, and that it is our desire to bring it closer to us spatially and humanly. I feel that we want the same with an art object; we want to feel closer to it in understanding it but also physically.