Towards a Mimetic Theory of Truth

This presentation will argue that the main concern shared by Benjamin and Adorno is to develop a theory of truth. With Adorno following the influence of Benjamin, they each develop theories of truth that take the notion of truth outside of the context of acts of knowledge and make truth applicable to forms of presentation within an aesthetic, moral and socially critical context. When we trace Adorno’s notion of truth content back to the influence of Benjamin, we see that theory of truth does not apply exclusively to art, but it does allow them to understand the function of art in terms of truth content. In Benjamin’s thinking, truth emerges in a variety of contexts: memory; the on-going development of art; the history and on-going significance of the mimetic faculty; theory of translation; the growth of lies and mendacity in his time. Most generally, Benjamin sees truth as in need of a continual process of presentation. In Adorno’s thinking, truth content develops into the central term in his reflections on the function of art. In Aesthetic Theory, he places art into a complex relationship of dialectic interplay with ‘false consciousness’. I argue that mimesis serves as the key term to relate the critical function of art to those features of modern society that Adorno diagnoses as pathological. He presents a series of specific pathologies of the modern subject and then demonstrates a negative mimetic relationship between art and these pathologies.