Theme 2: Critical media studies (Before Seminar)

PART 1. Dialectic of Enlightenment

a. What is "Enlightenment"?

What i understand about enlightenment, is a different way of thinking that helped the human kind to overcome their fears about the unknown through the rational thinking and gave them the power to understand the nature things based on features, experience and experiments rather than basing their knowledge in myths.

 b. What is "dialectic"?

Is the way to finding the truth of any subject through a discussion between different opinions of the subject. The discussion is based on logical and rational thinking. Dialectic is about being open of changing our own opinions in order to get truth. 

c. What is "nominalism" and why is it an important concept in the text?

According to what I understand about nominalism , is a concept that is directly associate with enlightenment because it is a doctrine the helps man not to trust in myth but in the real world using knowledge to find the truth about it. It’s not about to following other ideas or concept but instead forming our owns conclusions of every doubt. 

d. What is the meaning and function of "myth" in Adorno and Horkheimer's argument?

I interpreted Myth as a way of giving an conclusion and meaning to different aspects of life based on fantasy. Adorno and Horkheimer's use this concept in order to explain propose of enlightenment, and how it is so important to use rational knowledge to describe the world and not based our cognition of the world in Myths.

PART 2  "The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproductivity"

a. In the beginning of the essay, Benjamin talks about the relation between "superstructure" and "substructure" in the capitalist order of production. What do the concepts "superstructure" and "substructure" mean in this context and what is the point of analyzing cultural production from a Marxist perspective?

 The superstructure is based on substructures, in Benjamin Essay’s the concept of “substructure” is the way of production as films, painting and photography ( in the essay’s context), the substructures can be seen as material elements. On the other hand, superstructure is the join of all these substructures and conform all the cultural and social elements, such as ideologies, belief, religion and arts. The dependency between these concepts makes that any change in any of them affect the other one. The goal of analysing from a Marxist perspective is to see how the changes of different structures can affect directly the cultural production.

b. Does culture have revolutionary potentials (according to Benjamin)? If so, describe these potentials. Does Benjamin's perspective differ from the perspective of Adorno & Horkheimer in this regard?

According what I interpreted from Benjamin’s ideas, the culture have revolutionary potentials, a good example of that is  how film and photography industries had a huge impact in culture showing a new way to discover the world.  This revolutions are not entirely good to society, for example, photography industry make loose the uniqueness of painted art and there “Aura”. 

Benjamin’s perspective  can be interpreted in a similar way to Adorno & Horkheimer’s perspective because the changed occurred after the apparition of industries mentioned above, helped to see an objective and straight-forward view of the world.

c. Benjamin discusses how people perceive the world through the senses and argues that this perception can be both naturally and historically determined. What does this mean? Give some examples of historically determined perception (from Benjamin's essay and/or other contexts).

As same as Kant, Benjamin explains how the perception of an object is perceived through the senses, however Benjamin explain this process with two kind of perception: naturally and historically determined. The natural perception is referred to perceive something upon our senses and experience, in the other hand, historical perception is determined by historical events that have an impact in society. An example of historically determined perception given by Benjamin is the fifth century when late Roman art industry appeared and developed a new kind of perception.

d. What does Benjamin mean by the term "aura"? Are there different kinds of aura in natural objects compared to art objects?

I understand “aura” as all-around of every object, aura cannot be reproduce. For example, in a painting its aura cannot be present in a copy or photo.  The difference in the aura of natural objects and art objects, is that in the first ones comes from senses (sensory perception) through the lights and distances and auras of art objects are derived from the uniqueness of the arte and are perceived different for every person.