Post Theme 2: Critical media studies

For this week, the theme has been “Critical media studies” and we’ve read two texts. The first one was written by Walter Benjamin in 1936 and was called “The work of art in the age of technical reproductivity”. It discusses production and how it affects the society - the substructure and the superstructure. More preciesly, it discusses what reproduction does to the culture and politics, and what “aura” is.

The second text was “Dialectic of Enlightenment” by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, written in 1944. In conclusion, it shows the thoughts that were a result of the Enlightenment, the society at the time, and the culture industry (this is a bit different to my answer to the first question for this week's theme, where I explained the epoque "The Enlightenment", which of course has to do with enlightenment but is not the exact same thing).

This week, I once again found the philosophical lines of thoughts the most interesting. Especially the discussion about nominalism, which was a concept difficult to grasp at first but the seminar truly helped. As I’ve understood it now, it means the idea that objects are unique. There are no general qualities other than the name. There may be many objects, let’s say pens, but all they have in common is their name. They are all unique. Each leaf on a tree is different, they just go by the same name. Everything we have in front of us is real. This is different from the platonic realism, which despite what it sounds like says that the world is only an reflection of the real world.

Nominalism and Enlightenment is therefore connected, they are a matter of perception and science. It is not about abstracts. From what I understood this week, this also means the idea that you can’t group object together - can’t do cathegorizations. The danger of nominalism, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, is that when you only observe you cannot question. Therefore, this can be an obstacle in the development of the society. Things couldn’t change. Connected to how media works, media would only show the way society is and not give room to anything else. Benjamin on the other hand sees revolutionary potentional in the media with the entrance of the working class on the film screen. As he sees it, this gives the working class a tad more dignity, and he is a little bit more optimistic. A suggestion we discussed at the seminar was if showing homosexual relationships in media has made people more positive and aware, which later on made homosexual marriage legislated. I think this might be true, the first step is to show the reality or the way things could be, and by spreading ideas they can be put into action. Today, I don't think anybody oppose that media has revolutionary potential, especially with the entrance of Internet and social networks.

This has been a long text about what I learned this week. To wrap things up, I'll also tell about how I worked and contributed. I spent a lot of time reading the texts, and to be honest a lot of googling trying to figure out parts of the vocabulary and new terms. At the seminar, I discussed mostly when we were divided in smaller group and listened closely to both the seminar and the lecture to understand the theme better. In result I think, as I've written above, that I've grasped the subject somewhat and that this has been an interesting week.