PRE Theme 2: Critical media studies

1. Dialectic of Enlightenment

a. What is "Enlightenment"?

Enlightenment is concept to spread knowledge built on rationalism, logic and autonomy about nature and in order to get rid the history of myths about the world.

b. What is "dialectic"?

It is about discussing what is truth by rational discussions. People have to clarify what is not truth and comparing and listen to each others knowledge and opinion.

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

It’s about that general concepts isn’t anything except of the individual object. Objects don’t exist only because it has a general thing named by it.

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

Myths are the explanation of things to fill the gap of knowledge. Myths are more based on feign and stories than by rationalism and logic.

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?

Substructure can relies to what the production is constructed of and superstructure is what the substructure build. Like a painting consist of paint, paper and so on, but the superstructure is the art.

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?

Yes, because it is easy to spread and it can contains messages that is easy to adept, and in this way is a kind of enlightenment.

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).

Naturally perceive is how we naturally perceive things around us. But we can change our way to perceive things by historical and cultural changes. Benjamin mentions, for example, the way of how people changed their way of looking at art in the fifth century by Romans.

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

The aura is the authenticity of an artwork, like in a painting, that not can be reproduced, like a copy of a photo.