Critical media studies reflections

This weeks subject has been on ”Critical media studies” i’ve read two texts; Adorno & Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Walter Benjamin’s essay ”The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproductivity”. Both of the texts were as the last themes texts, very challenging, and since the lecture this Monday collided with my other course i had a hard time grasping some concepts of the texts before the seminar, even though i read both of them aswell as summaries on the internet.

During the seminar held by Henrik Åhman something very interesting came up which also relates to the texts we read, that in order to fully understand what Adorno & Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin are suggesting we need to try and read the texts in the contexts and under what circumstanses they were written. In this case, WWII. This made me reflect about how different experiences and perspectives influences writers, and if you as a reader know under what circumstances something is written, it will be a lot easier to relate to and interpretate the meaning of the different messages.

Another major part of the seminar we talked about nominalism, which is relevant in the text Dialectic of Enlightenment, what nominalism means and what effects nominalism has on society. The idea is that different objects are particular objects, in them selves, but as humans we have a tendency to group objects with similar properties into words such as the ”Car” or ”Tree”. From a nominalistic point of view everything that is are particular objects and the language makes us think that objects are more alike eachother than they really are. Relating to the texts, the purpose of nominalism is to break away from social-constructions such as an ”ideal” woman, that it is important to not generalise. However, this nominalistic, de-structuring view of society tends to not regard existing structures of power. We cannot only look upon society descriptively but there has to be a give and take between empiricism and konceptualism.