Theme 2: critical media studies

Enlightenment, in it's most basic sense, marks a paradigm shift that stresses the importance of rational thinking over a fear of the unknown. It prefers objectivity over subjectivity, and explicitly rejects the role of religion, emotion and myths in the process of acquiring knowledge.


Dialectic is a way - or at least an attempt at a way - of unifying different opinions by way of reasoning in order to find the truth. Rather than trying to win an argument, as would be the case in a debate, the ultimate goal of a dialectic is to find the truth of the matter in question.

Myth, from Horkheimer and Adorno's perspective, is the antithesis of the ideals of Enlightment, being knowledge based on subjective personal experience rather than objective reasoning. Religion and superstition are central sources of knowledge, as opposed to scientific experiments and verifiable knowledge.

In the classical divide famously attributed  to Karl Marx, the superstructure refers to the values, norms and institutions both ideological and political, which are determined by the substructure and serve the interests of the ruling class. The substructure, which Benjamin describes as transforming significantly faster than the superstructure, is made up of the relation between the owners of productions means and the workers that operate them. 

Cultural production, then, can be seen as being a result of the substructure, but part of the superstructure. Understanding their underlying processes is therefore essential in order to be able to grasp the complicated correlation between both.

Not only does Benjamin speak of culture having revolutionary potential; he considers the existence of revolutionary demands in politics of art. Benjamin mentions the ascent of the field of lithography and later photography as notable examples, allowing for the illustration of everyday life and accelerating the pictorial reproduction of reality to surpass the speed of speech, respectively.

Benjamin differentiates between perception in it's natural, purely biological form - that is, the process of conveying visual and auditive cues into knowledge - and the historically determined perception, which relates to the process of adding value and meaning to that which is perceived. Historically determined perception, for example, can be influenced by social norms stemming from notions of acceptance or controversy in a certain age, geographical region or religious tradition. As these norms change, as they have in the Netherlands during the process of dechristianization, growing multiculturalism and the resulting increase of secular politics, so does the perception of culture and art - either through growing acceptance or controversy.

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

Within the context of the discussion surrounding the cultural value of technologically reproduced art, one could argue that the aura of an art object is found within the authenticity which is lost in the process of reproduction. The mere plurality of the original one hand detaches it from the previously discussed historicality, but on the other hand allows it to be placed within a completely different context than that in which it was created, thus 'reactivating' or renewing the original object in a contemporary historicity.