Theme 2: Reflection

Through the lecture and seminar on this topic in the last week I understood better what "Enlightenment" actually is. In my last post I sticked to much to the text in my explanation, meaning that I didn‘t really understand it that much by myself, because I couldn‘t form it only in my own words. Enlightenment has actually a strong connection to the Enlightenment movement in which people wanted to free themselves from consistent structures in the society, like traditions, culture, religion, etc. It is the „advance of thought“ – as I described it last time – in a way that we as human beings have the power to get over these structures, that were built and existed over hundreds of year, and give the world a new understanding just through logic and based on natural concepts. I understood the last time correctly the meaning of myth as the erasing of the unknown. I also kind of perceived a strong connection between both Myth and Enlightenment, but couldn‘t really explain why it was there. After the lecture this is more clear to me. The main link is that both concepts lead to Mimesis, the imitation of the word. Through thinking we can only reproduce the world, what makes us as human beings trapped in Mimesis. Enlightenment came to destroy Myths, to replace the ideas with something else, but that just means that Enlightenment created other Myths, a new version of erasing the unknown.

What I didn‘t realise the last time is that Adorno and Horkheimer see Enlightenment quite critical. It is based on receiving knowledge through Nominalism. I didn‘t explain that deeply enough the last time either. It is not just a theory that all things are simply names, as I wrote in my first blog post. Nominalism is a liberating movement, that questions and redefines the world through observation and defining objects just as general objects with no varieties. So any leaf would just be a leaf, although each single one of them is unique. The problem about Nominalism is that we tend to confirm the world, but it might not be the objective truth that we are confirming. That goes back to the Allegory of the Cave from Plato, what says that everything we perceive with our senses might just be a "shadow" of a higher reality. During the seminar this reminded me of the movie Matrix, which plays with this allegory. To come back to Adorno and Horkheimer: They said, that Nominalism leads us to view on the world that mirrors just the status quo that is observed without any moral judgement. So their critique about Enlightenment is that we have to question and rethink it again to get over this state of just having a descriptive version of status quo.

In my first blogpost I explained correct how Benjamin defines "aura", but here again, like in the other topics before, I didn‘t give the explanation enough deepness and meaning. Although the concept of aura fascinates Benjamin and he explains the loss of aura through reproduction (of painting, pictures, etc.), Benjamin sees something very positive in this. According to him the aura could be a tool of the bourgeoisie of keeping the access to art and the value of it to themselves. The multiplying of pieces of art the unique position (and the aura) are indeed erased, but that gives it a huge revolutionary potential.

In his essay in general he explains the huge potential of technological progresses in the area of art. Especially the tool of deconstructing and reconstructing things. He sees it as something highly positive without knowing how it will be misused as a tool of manipulation in the following years after the publication of his essay.