Theme 2: Critical media studies

Dialectic of Enlightenment

What is "Enlightenment"?

To quote Kant; “Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.” For Kant, Enlightenment liberates us from authority and is advanced thoughts. Kant thinks that a lot of people followed the guiding institutions of society, e.g. the Church, without further thinking. In comparison to Kant’s definition, Adorno and Horkheimer are much more critical against the Enlightenment even though they define it the same way as Kant does. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, without authority society would lose its structure

What is "Dialectic"?

Dialectic is the art of investigating and discussing the truth of opinions. Since knowledge is perception, one has to investigate which experience is the most truthful, but also investigate all opinions that are not.

What is "Nominalism" and why is it an important concept in the text?

Nominalism is the theory that only individuals and no abstract entities exist, e.g. upper class and lower class. Adorno did not want the problem of universals inseparable from the philosophy of law and put it from the perspective of a "failed Enlightenment" in the era of National Socialism in a socio-historical context: Nominalism is the "prototype bourgeois thought”. According to Nominalism, if class is abstract than it does not exist which undermines e.g. Hitler’s concept of a master race.

What is the meaning and function of "myth" in Adorno and Horkheimer's Argument?

According to Adorno and Horkheimer, “Enlightenment wanted to dispel myths, to overthrow fantasy with knowledge.” Myths were created in order to explain what people did not understand because there was fear of the unknown.

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

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?

Walter Benjamin’s "The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproductivity" was created 1935 in Paris. The German cultural critic Benjamin has been influential across the humanities, especially in the fields of cultural studies and media theory and addresses the phenomena of moving images in cinema and newsreel. According to Benjamin, superstructure is a slowly changing structure. However, super- and substructure are dependent on each other. Superstructure is an ideology production with e.g. focus on culture. In addition, society and the future are shaped by substructures. According to Benjamin, society determines the culture.

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?

According to Benjamin, culture has revolutionary potentials. He thinks for example that photography can change the society in a revolutionary way because photography can give insight into specific matters and raise awareness in the manners of Enlightenment.  According to Adorno and Horkheimer, not culture but technology has revolutionary potentials.

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).

According to Benjamin, perception can be naturally and historically determined because people perceive the world through the senses. By naturally determined he means that this perception will and always has been the same (independent from time), whereas historically determined is a perception that changes depending on time. Historically determined perceptions could be e.g. beauty or art, which changes over the time. Even though the definition of beauty might have change over last centuries depending on culture and movement, there is still a naturally determined perception such as e.g. health.

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

By Aura, Benjamin means a “strange web of space and time” or “a distance as close as it can be.”  Aura is the uniqueness of objects in the moment, e.g. a painting in the Renaissance, which could be copied but it would not be in its original space and time. An aura is a “feel” that an object can emite to nearby observers. Natural aura has distance and shadows.