What is Enligthenment? Distance is core in enligthenment, and that is to say that you take a step back to see the world. From what I could get from the lecture, there seems to be three different answers mentioned in the text by Benjamin;
- Capitalism/consumerism that was supposed to give economic safety by having people buy more and more.
- Nationalism in Germany that promised law and order.
- Communism in Sovjet that promised equality by a single ruler.
What is dialectic? Well, it's a way to, when having two different points of view, find third way that is supposed to be like the truth. So Benjamin often uses dialectical concepts such as "Artist - Photographer", "Magician - Surgeon", and so on. Presenting two concepts contradictionary to one another let's him find a third way, a more truthful way of thinking I guess.
What is nominalism? Why is it an important concept in the text?
Nominalism wants to unpack the neurocentric world view of the enlightenment. Using the example from Plato which was brought up on the seminar, the objects we see are not real, but the concepts are. Nominalism says that the concepts are only names. There is no universal concept, but all shadows/reflections of objects are real.
This is important because nominalism tends to not have vision of the future, disarming any revolutionary potential.
What's the meaning of myth? Myth is usually referred to as something spiritual, but not here. Here it's characterized by the fear of the unknown, known as the mana. It's a way of mimicing the dynamics of the nature, and in the text they want to replace myth with knowledge.
Superstructure is built on substructure.A superstructure differs more slowly than a substructure. I still don't really grasp the meaning of the two I guess. We also had trouble defining this in our little group on the seminar.
Does culture have revolutionary potentials? The two texts have different views on this. So Benjamin believes it has while Adorno and Horkheimer don't. Benjamin argues that art was the product of industrial production, and it changed our way of understanding culture. Photography changed the way we saw things. A horse running was often depicted in a certain way in paintings, but when photographs showed us how they actually looked when running it changed our perception of how they ran.
Adorno and Horkheimer says that, in the capitalism of America, people given freedom will only drown in it. Americans were so blinded by the liberalism that they didn't use it.
Naturally and historically determined. To keep it kind of brief; Historically, new technology and new knowledge have led to different perception of maybe the same things. We all also perceive things differently.
The way we conceive things are totally dependent on the context in
which we live. We have so many conceptual presuppositions.
What is aura? A piece of art is only relevant to the context in the time of when it
was made.
The same aura in objects can't be mechanically reproduced in art.
In general I feel like the seminar and lecture helped a lot to shine light on things I didn't understand. An interesting subject one person brought up on the seminar was whether or not viewing ourselves through the camera mounted on a drone behind us might change how we perceive ourselves? Think of it as a third-person-real-life experience of yourself.
In general I feel like the seminar and lecture helped a lot to shine light on things I didn't understand. An interesting subject one person brought up on the seminar was whether or not viewing ourselves through the camera mounted on a drone behind us might change how we perceive ourselves? Think of it as a third-person-real-life experience of yourself.
It would have been interesting to know what specifically you didn’t understand before the lecture and seminar and also how you contributed during the seminar. Otherwise I really like you summary of the core concepts. You have captured the most important aspects of the texts and explained these in a way that is easy to understand. In addition to your comment about aura, during our seminar we also discussed how aura occur in the world and not just art, for example a mountain has an aura and the first car made has an aura (while modern cars do not as they are all replications).
SvaraRaderaI thin you made a summary of the theme. However I would have liked to dig deeper into some of the question like if cultur have revolutionary potential which is really intresting. Specially if we consider that the culture has changed even after these two text was written. I liked the part you wrote about nominalism disarming the revolution and I think you could have written more about it to support your statement. I would have wrote something about the conditions during that time etc.
SvaraRaderaYour post is really interesting because it tackles and summarizes every points of this theme. It is quite well explained, however I would have liked you to give examples in the « naturally and historically determined » part in order to support your point.
SvaraRadera