Theme 2

Dialectic of Enlightenment

Enlightenment seems to me, from what I read in the chapter “The concept of Enlightenment”, be related to putting mythologies aside, and putting focus on reasoning which takes a great importance through knowledge.
I had problems understanding dialectic from the text, and had to look up the word instead. As I understand it, dialectic is a way of debating and using truth and reasoning as much as possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic

Nominalism should be the denial of abstract things, or the denial of universals. However, I did not quite understand what universals really are, it seems that they are similar to the abstract but in the way of describing things or properties of things.
https://sv.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Universalia&redirect=no
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nominalism-metaphysics/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominalism

I was unable to find the direct connection of “Nominalism” in the text, so my hopes is that it will get more clear on the lecture/seminar.

As I understood from the text, myths can be used to explain things and explain the past through collecting and recording of happenings or things.

The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproductivity

My understanding is that the substructure is the foundation or the base of a function in the society and the superstructure is another function atop the substructure which are to be affected by the substructure. It seems if I understand correctly, be useful in the “politics of art”. In the text, production is mentioned, as conditions have slowly changed due to preceding cultural changes.
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bas_och_%C3%B6verbyggnad

Benjamin mentions that film, even though he did not believe it had a revolutionary merit, did not deny that it had the possibility to “… promote revolutionary criticism of social conditions…” (part X). In the “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" part by Adorno & Horkheimer’s, something not too different from the first part of previous sentence is mentioned, where the opinion is that culture have “…contributed to the subduing of revolutionary…”.

My thoughts regarding how to determine naturally and historically perceptions of the world, is that it might be regarding how you organise and record your impressions at the time, which depends on what options you had, as it got easier by time to get the right tools to record the perceptions of the culture. From the text is an example, where a pair of scholars were limited to observe the hallmarks of 5th century but that alone seemed not suffice to explain the social changes at that time.

Understanding the term “aura” was probably the most difficult part for me on this exercise. Perhaps it has to do with appreciation of art objects at the time and that it gets harder to appreciate as time goes past, but I look forward to get a more in-depth understanding of this on the seminar/lecture.