Theme 2: Critical media studies - Post-reflections

This week's theme was slightly harder to fully comprehend compared to the of theme 1. We began with reading Benjamin and Adorno & Horkheimer. Two texts which concepts I was unable to follow to the same extent as Kant and Plato’s reasoning. As we proceeded with the lecture by Håkan, the understanding came successively. But it wasn’t until, or rather after, the seminar that I felt I could grasp the concepts sufficiently.

During the seminar we mainly discussed the text by Benjamin and the questions we had on his works. Nominalism was one concept in Benjamin’s text and also debated during the seminar. It is a view in which the only thing objects have in common is the name. Within nominalism there are furthermore two branches. One argues that there is no such thing as universals. Plato wrote about a realm of universals apart from the world as we know it. This means that all physical objects we perceive are only projections of these universals. The nominalist denies these universals. The other denies all kinds of abstract objects.

While discussing nominalism we also considered realism. Håkan used the allegory of the cave by Plato to give an illustrative representative example. Plato’s cave is an allegory, image below, that imagines a couple of individuals imprisoned in a cave since their birth. In short, all these prisoners know and have even experienced are shadows of passing “puppets” (horses and merchants etc) projected on the inner wall of the cave. Projections that have become their reality since they have never experienced the world outside of the cave. So even though the world outside exists, it is not part of the prisoners reality. One prisoner was released and given the possibility to experience the real world, he then returned to his fellow prisoners to tell them about the experience but they only saw him as yet another shadow and didn’t understand what he was saying since they knew nothing apart from those shadows on the wall; that was their only reality.



We also discussed how our perception of objects are determined. Either they are naturally determined or historically determined. Naturally determined are objects of permanent nature while historically determined is more open to interpretation and can vary as time passes and we gain more experiences. The distinction between the two turned out to be harder than first anticipated. Since perception changes depending on time, beholder and culture at that time, it is hard to determine what perceptions are naturally determined. Whether it is musical notes or art, the perception changes. You could argue that the major scale has a positive feel but this has not always been the case since the major scale once was classified as sad and negative; hence, historically determined. One perception that we said can be classified as naturally determined is the fact that we breath. There is no doubt of this fact since we have always performed this subconscious action.

Finally we also discussed whether culture has revolutionary potential and outmost from Benjamin versus Adorno and Horkheimer’s points of view. Benjamin believes culture does have revolutionary potential, an argument he supported with the evolution of photography and how we today use, share and discuss it. It is in that sense obvious that all this change has had an effect on our culture considering how we use photography in our daily lives. Adorno and Horkheimer however, argue that this kind of change, using motion picture and cinemas as an example, are nothing more than entertainment. They are representations of ordinary people and just storytelling of events that have happened to them. Stories that have no impact on the audience's lives nor on the prevailing culture at that time.