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Walter Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproductivity" (1936)
Adorno och Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) (First two chapters)
The essay of Walter Benjamin begins by pointing out two different term to describe how society interacts in itself. A particularity that shouldn't be forgotten or avoided when trying to interact with the history of the society. Superstructure and substructure. The base of a Superstructure are the substructures. Those substructures allow the superstructure to exist. Each substructures bring with them a part of the current society. They can be altered easily, therefore their initial structure modify instantly with those changes, they are the economic sphere of society such as ressources, machinery, production etc.
They do make all together the superstructure. Which means the abstract part of society, the intangible, for example : The religion, philosophy, and as Benjamin mentionned : Art.
The superstructure can evolves around time but it takes way much longer since those aren't tangible so we can't manualy modify them.
It seems we had the prelude of a part of this essay in the last texts through plato about how we perceive the world. Benjamin affirms that there are two layers on our perception : The first one is naturally determined, through our sense and experience. Followed by the historical aspect. That has to be mentionned otherwise we may misinterpret why it has been done that way. For example, (other than the one Benjamin offered) in Japan in 1966, year of the Fiery Horse, many couples avoided having children, creating a permanent dent in the japanese age structure and a modification of the perception of the fiery horse in the art's world.
Finally in his essay Benjamin talks about an "Aura". His definition is very interesting. Based on the superstructure, the perception through our senses and by the historical time a created object gets a certain Aura that can't be copied or reproduced, he insists on the fact that even the best re-création of an object will never be the same as the original because of this Aura that forbids any double of it. Therefore art can only be true, otherwise his esthetic value dissapears instantly.
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Dialectic of Enlightenment. I shall describe what Adorno and Horkheimer think about their definition of Enlightenment. Short version : Master of Nature. Their definition makes me think about the allegory of the cave of Plato : Two mens, chained in a cave without any possibility to look around and see something else than the shadows of human walking behind them projected by the fire. Their reality is that the shadows make the noise and move around. But one day, one prisonner is freed. He turned back and see the fire, he gets hurt badly by watching it, because he is not used to. He would prefer to go back to what he knew : The shadows. But after some angry behaviour and time for his eyes to adapt to this new reality, he can see other human beings, the light of the fire/sun and after a while he is able to watch the sun directly. So he understands the new reality (Here we can translate by "He has been enlightened" ). Therefore, he wants to tell the others prisonners that they live in a lie, that they must know the truth (The process of dialectic). But when he comes back into the cave, he can't see anything, he is not used to it anymore, he is blinds inside. So the others prisonners see that and think that going out of their cave will hurt them, so they would likely kill anyone who would try to drag them out of the cave. In my opinion, those reflect metaphoricaly the concept of Dialectic of Enlightenment.
Finally, Adorno and Horkheimer mention the nominalism. That everything that exist or don't exists are basically names. Nominated. Therefore everything that can't be proven to be true, is not. It is as well correlated in order to make the difference between truth and myth. Knowledge, here again, can allow the personae to make the distinction between Truth & Myth.
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