Theme 2: Critical media studies

1. Dialectic of Enlightenment

a. What is "Enlightenment"?

Enlightenment is regarding to the text basically a new era where the purpose was to enlighten people to get rid of old myths and fantasies and instead dare to use their knowledge in order to understand the world. The thinkers of the enlightenment era wanted everything to be calculable and what couldn’t be considered as a number was a myth, which is its opposite. By taking our knowledge to a new level we can get a new insight of time and space.

b. What is "dialectic"?

Dialectic is a method with the aim of solving some kind of disagreement where there are two different opinions/answers of one single question. Dialectic involves letting the people who disagree with the others convince each other and through reflections and thinking try to find the answers which the truth lies in. When you find out what i true, you unconsciously know what’s not true as well.

c. What is "nominalism" and why is it an important concept in the text?

Nominalism is a philosophical term which contains of two different versions. The first one says that only absolute objects exist, not abstract ones (like names and words etc.). The other one is the contrast to the latter. The reason why i think it is important for the concept in the text is because these arguments can either support enlightenment and myths or have the opposite effect. Regarding to enlightenment this concept is similar to each other, because enlightenment says that everything is made up except the knowledge.

d. What is the meaning and function of "myth" in Adorno and Horkheimer's argument?

Myths are essentially the opposite of what enlightenment is. With enlightenment and its focus on knowledge we can find out the “truth” of an object, which we cannot with a myth since it’s just made up by the human being. According to Adorno and Horkheimer and their arguments i think they want to explain what the consequences of lacking knowledge could lead to.   

2. "The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproductivity"

a. In the beginning of the essay, Benjamin talks about the relation between "superstructure" and "substructure" in the capitalist order of production. What do the concepts "superstructure" and "substructure" mean in this context and what is the point of analyzing cultural production from a Marxist perspective?

Superstructure and substructure are two terms in Marxist theory and are the fundamentals of our common society. Substructure is an essential condition of the economic structure of a society and contains the means of production. In the context of Benjamins’ text it’s photography and film etc. Superstructure on the other hand do not comprise the production in the same way that sums the substructure, but contains laws and political power and culture (in this context i would say it is different kind of arts). The reason why we should analyze cultural production is because when some kind of art is produced in a big extent and affected by the new technology it changes our view on the culture. Benjamin is talking about when the reproduction of art is a fact, it changes its aura because it contributes a more economic production.

b. Does culture have revolutionary potentials (according to Benjamin)? If so, describe these potentials. Does Benjamin's perspective differ from the perspective of Adorno & Horkheimer in this regard?

I would say that the culture has a huge revolutionary potential in many aspects. In the text, Benjamin is talking about photography as one of the reproductions which came from using old techniques in old art. He says that it is detaching the reproduced object from the domain of tradition, which takes the culture into a new way of thinking about it, but also how the society can ingest it.

I think we can compare the possible cultural revolutions to the concept of enlightenment in the text by Adorno and Horkheimer. I think Benjamin is aware of that the reproduction of culture can be a risk for its evolution and therefore he do not totally agree with their opinions.

c. Benjamin discusses how people perceive the world through the senses and argues that this perception can be both naturally and historically determined. What does this mean? Give some examples of historically determined perception (from Benjamin's essay and/or other contexts).

“During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence.” Benjamin says and i think he means that all people have different ways of perceiving the world based on their feelings etc. Hence, how we perceive the world can also come from changes in the history. For example how we look and perceive art is a consequence of the changes in history. At the time where there only were paintings available (in a small scale) the main task for the people was to understand it. Nowadays the photos (yesterdays painting) has been a commodity and the way we perceive it has changed.

d. What does Benjamin mean by the term "aura"? Are there different kinds of aura in natural objects compared to art objects?

By aura he means “unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be” and i assume that he wants to say that the aura can’t be replicated, it is unique to an object and you can experience it in the distance of time and space. Benjamin is also saying that only authentic objects can have an aura. Hence, the difference between natural and art objects auras is how they’re affected by reproduction. The development of culture and history changes the aura of an art object (the way an observer perceives photography has changed over time). For natural object, like a mountain, the aura (the feeling you receive from the specific mountain is its aura) of it remains the same independent of the history and therefore cannot be lost as in the case of art objects.