Theme 2: Critical media studies

Adorno & Horkheimer’s “Dialectic of Enlightenment”

We can understand the enlightenment as the advance of our thoughts, as a way that helps human beings be free of fears and installing them as master of themselves and nature. Enlightenment says that human reason is capable of answering all the question and overturn myths of the past. 

Dialectic is a way to develop something- especially a human thought- through three steps that are called dialectic triad. The first step is the thesis, a new idea, thought or movement. After thesis has been expressed, we have antithesis, which is a though opposite to thesis, based on the weak spots that the thesis is possible to have. After the struggle between these two we have the synthesis, which is the satisfying solution. It is worth to mention that the point of dialectic is not to refuse or to eliminate the thesis, but to develop a higher level of theory that will contain the valuable elements of both thesis and antithesis. 

Nominalism is the doctrine that universals or general ideas are mere names without any corresponding reality. Only particular objects exist, and properties, numbers, and sets are merely features of the way of considering the things that exist. This may help people overturn the myths and explain everything using only their knowledge. 

People fear the unknown, so myths were a way of the authority to clarify things that cannot be explained. In the enlightenment age and after, myths are destroyed because all questions can be answered by using human knowledge and reason.

Walter Benjamin's essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproductivity”

The concept of substructure contains the means, the forces and the relations of production with people. It is all the things that needed to produce, such as machines, factories, land. On the other hand, the superstructure contains all the other aspects of society, everything that is not part of the economic system and the production in society. Like culture, art, religion, institution, family, education.  Marx argued that human society consists of those two parts, and the relationship between them is not neutral, but each part influences the other. So, the point of analyzing cultural production, from a Marxist perspective, is that we can intervene to the production by making changes to other structures.

According to Benjamin, culture has revolutionary potentials. He sought the political transformation of the arts as a means to bring social change. In contrast, Adorno & Horkheimer, believe that society tends to sinks into a new kind of barbarism, and self-destruction.

As, also, Plato says, people perceive the world through the senses. In addition, Benjamin argues that “the manner in which human sense perception is organized is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well”. Which mean that, human perception is influenced not only by nature but also by historical events that effect society and the people’s lives. An example that Benjamin states, is that, in the fifth century, the late Roman art industry and the Vienna Genesis, developed not only an art different from that of antiquity but also a new kind of perception influenced by the shifts of the population that took part that century.

 

Benjamin says that “aura” is a “strange web of space and time” or “a distance as close as it can be.”  The main idea is of something inaccessible and elusive, something highly valued but which is deceptive and out of reach.  Also, aura implies authenticity, presence and experience of nature. For example aura is a shadow of a branch that we perceived in a unique time. Although, art objects can perfectly represent a natural object, are missing the point of presence that gives it its aura.