thoughts thunk

I was embarrassed to give him significantly less than I had planned to. But, on the positive side, I have a bit better understanding of Walter Benjamin’s argument in “the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”; I worked hard for my understanding, primarily due to a lack of knowledge of Marxist thought. Turns out I could have just read this sentence from the Grove Art Online, and everything would have been clear: “In his more optimistically Marxist moments, Benjamin believed that the fading of the ‘aura’ opens the way for politically progressive mass culture.”

When I read Benjamin the first time I was too focused on his “withering” of the aura, which I immediately took as a negative response to art in reproduction, which I then, again all too easily, contrasted with Malraux’s high praise for photography as a reproductive medium that elevates art. Simple polarity are so handy, but so false.

So, Doty and I discussed the book that Samantha Krukowski suggested to me, S/Z by Barthes. Doty read it quite awhile ago, but it was determined that she probably recommended it as a gateway to hermeneutics. Specifically, Doty wanted me to find out what a hermeneutic circle is: “The circle arises because the meaning expressed by a cultural artefact does not depend simply on its creator’s intention; it also depends on the whole system of which the artefact is a part, much as the meaning of a sentence depends on the language to which it belongs or the meaning of a part of a painting depends on the whole work of art of which it is a part. To understand each part, therefore, implies an understanding of the whole. Yet there is no way of understanding the whole independently of its parts” (in the words of Grove Art Online).