Reflection Theme 2

This week we have discussed critical media theory. In preparation for the week I read the two texts assigned and compiled a blogpost answering the questions. I also read some other shorter materials on the subject to get a deeper understanding. During the week I also attended the lecture and seminar on the theme.

Before the week I didn’t had a good understanding of the connection between nominalism and the enlightenment. During the lecture and the seminar I got a better understanding. Nominalism is in a way a rejection of universals. In other words a nominalism would say that there isn’t a thing as a universal apple, because if there was all apples that differ from it wouldn’t be an apple. This implicates that we have to observe everything more carefully and also start to question the concepts. But as Adorno and Horkheimer points out there is a danger of the nominalist point of view; we have to observe it and can’t explain things we can’t observe and if we base everything on observations we can never question it. We become slaves under observation! If we bring this further and apply it on the society it actually says that what we observe is laws of nature, which would imply that poor would always be poor. I would say that this is a bit extreme but for sure we need a balance between Nominalism and Realism. The nominalist view point questioned the concepts we had before the enlightenment and made us search for a better explanation.

Another thing we discussed during the seminar was how our production of culture effect the actual culture. Our conclusion was that the production of culture affects the culture. Even if the culture/ superstructure takes longer time to change than the production/substructure. In other words there takes some time before we see the change initiated by the substructure in the superstructure.

An interesting thing we did only touched on in the seminar was the aura concept presented in Benjamins text. It is based on that everything has an aura based on its uniqueness, context and history. This aura is something you experience when your senses register the object. The aura is however different if the object is unique or not. All objects in nature are unique but when it comes to art that is mass-produced the object itself is no longer unique which according to Benjamin disintegrates the aura. 

Both authors discussed had opinions on the revolutionary potentials of culture. Benjamin believes that as long as culture is mirroring the world it has revolutionary potentials. However Adorno and Horkheimer who wrote their text a decade later have seen how culture that have been showing a picture of life have entrapped us in that it should be like the picture. However I believe that if media can show us a multifaceted picture, which it actually can today, culture can both confirm the conditions we are living in and argue for a change. But in the time when Adorno and Horkheimer wrote their text the amount of channels weren’t big enough to present a multifaceted view/opinion.

This could explain their less optimistic view on the revolutionary potential in culture.

In conclusion this theme was interesting because our culture is always changing. Today we face a new era where the audience also produce the content. We have some interesting years in front of us indeed!