Theme 2 (Post): Critical media studies

For the second theme “Critical media studies” of the course we were asked to read Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproductivity" and two chapters of Adorno and Horkheimer’s “Dialectic of Enlightenment” in order to prepare ourselves for the lecture. The two readings were a lot better to read - compared to the readings of the first theme - however it took still a considerable period of time and rereading of certain passages to understand the texts and their meaning. As already did for the first theme I investigated on the internet and discussed with the fellow students of my programme to compare our understanding. Furthermore, I also tried to put the two texts into historical context, which was inspired by a theme 1 reflection of a fellow student I have read during the week. After the reading were less gaps of understanding than after the readings of theme 1 and so I looked forward to the lecture and seminar group in order to close them completely.

The lecture about critical media studies of Henrik Åhman was well structured and thus easy to follow. We learned that Benjamin’s and Adorno and Horkheimer’s texts differ pretty much in historical context, despite the fact that “Dialectic of Enlightenment” was only eight years later published than "The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproductivity" in 1944. This is due to the fact that Benjamin wrote his work during the uprising Nazi regime in contrary to Adorno and Horkheimer writing “Dialectic of Enlightenment” in their exile in the USA.

Furthermore, we listened to a detailed historical review how and why the era of enlightenment began in the 16th and 17th century and its development until Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin, which lead us to the “Concept of Enlightenment” by Adorno and Horkheimer. As the thesis "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverse to myth” was a bit unclear to me after the reading I understood during the lecture that myth deals with fear and problems of unknown through gods. Enlightenment takes this explanation to extreme in the way which nothing that cannot be measured is left in general and thus is rather a form of taking relation between myth and unknown to an extreme degree. After the break we discussed the concept of dialectic and futurism and ended up in a discussion how aesthetics and media influenced people during fascism and communism.

During the seminar we were divided into smaller groups, where we discussed our individual answers to the readings. To answer the question “What nominalism is” took us the longest time as it was quite challenging in the first place to keep the “logical thinking” of ours away. Finally, we understood the concept and its importance as it forces us to individuals and hence we never get the vision only the basis, which helps to evaluate hierarchical structures. Furthermore, we discussed the relationship between mass media and enlightenment and Adorno and Horkeimer’s view that through its implicit deceptiveness, mass media creates non-changeable role models in the mind of societies, e.g. boss =male secretary = pretty and female. Afterwards we discussed what superstructure and substructure is and learned that according to Marx it is impossible to change the ideology of a society (superstructure) with ideas, but with work . This can be seen by the changed perception of worker’s since the implementation of an eight hour working day. The final discussion topic was “natural and historical perception” resulting in Benjamin’s statement that there is not something like better or worse culture, art etc. only different and hence we should allow diversity as everything changes over time.