Theme 2: Critical media studies

For this theme we have read two texts, which are “Dialectic of Enlightenment” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproductivity”.

In the first text we learn that “Enlightenment” is a new way to understand and explain the world. Instead of religion we use facts and numbers, true knowledge sort of speak. Enlightenment is more than enlightenment it is nature made audible in its estrangement. P31

Furthermore we learn that “Dialectic” is a way to think about things or objects. That a object can only become what it is only by becoming what it is not. This separates the object with the concept. We also learn that “Nominalism” is a way of seeing words only as “words” and that a Cat for example is nondependent from being defined as cat to exist as cat. Lastly the text describes “Myth” as a handler (I always come back for programming references) for un-naturally thoughts of the human mind and to explain other non-real elements such as spirits and demons.

In the second text superstructure and substructure are two words that I interpreted as a way of describing the social structure. Much like the hierarchy of a computer program it is easy and fast to make small changes to modules of the program or specific objects but if you want to change the core of the program, or engine if you so will, is a massive undertaking and you can’t know for sure what outcome you will end up with before it’s implemented throughout the structure of the program, or in the text’s context, the society.

Benjamin, the author of the second text, also saw a potential in culture when it comes to formulating revolutionary demands in the politics of art. I can’t really say if Benjamin’s opinion in this matter differs from the opinion presented in the other text. Furthermore Benjamin reviews his thinking of that we perceive the world trough our senses and that it can be both naturally and historical determined. The short answer to that is that the second we have perceived something for the first time it would surely be of a historical aspect from there on. The example of the art school in Vienna describes the natural and historical aspect of perception and also states that it is easier to gather insight of the present in the present than in the past in the present. The last question for the text concerns itself with Benjamin’s definition of “aura”. In the text it reads,  “We define the aura of the latter as the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be.”