Theme 2, Blog Post 2: Critical Media Theory

In the lecture and seminar we talked about an aspect of the Enlightenment that I had not considered in my first blog post on theme. The Enlightenment was about expanding our knowledge and establishing a hierarchy of dominance over nature. However, the point I missed was that the Enlightenment backfired, as it actually created a new hierarchy and, thus, perpetuated inequality – the strong (ruling class) continued to oppress the weak (working class) in capitalist, as well as in fascist and communist societies.  

In my first blog post, I considered dialectic only as a method of discussion, without focusing on the dialectical concepts in Benjamin’s text. When applied to two opposing concepts, dialectic seeks to use the best of both in order to create something better – a painter describes the world in one way and a photographer – in another, but separately both fail to fill certain gaps. However, Benjamin suggests that if we combine the advantages of each of them, we could achieve a more complete picture of the world. This, it became clear in the seminar, is the epistemological view on dialectic.

However, we also talked about the ontological view – that there is a thesis and an antithesis, which, when combined, come to a synthesis, a sort of higher truth. According to Marx, history works in the same way. For instance, we have a capitalist society (the thesis). In opposition to it a revolution breaks out – the antithesis. As a result of both, ideally, a class-free society would emerge (the synthesis). However, not long after, this synthesis becomes a thesis, then another antithesis follows and then the cycle repeats itself. 

During the seminar I realized I had considered only one aspect of nominalism. I had overlooked Adorno and Holkheimer’s stance against it. When the Nazi party took power in Germany, the two turned against nominalism, because it eventually turned people into mere observers of the surrounding world and stopped making efforts to change society for the better. Here, in order to explain things to myself, I asked Henrik if this means that nominalism prevented the formation of an antithesis in society, a kind of opposition to Nazism. And he said "yes". 

When it comes to myth, in my initial blog post I had not considered Adorno and Holkheimer’s view of Enlightenment as myth in the sense that it too, like myth, does nothing more than reproduce already existing patterns and knowledge in nature and society and is, thus, useless. Just as the enactment of a hunting scene cannot influence the outcome of the actual hunt, people can only observe and reproduce, but not influence, the regularities in nature. Regardless of whether you choose an empirical or a rationalist approach to the question of 1 + 1 = ?, the answer is always 2, and if you get another answer to that question, it doesn’t mean that you’ve come to new knowledge, but that you’ve made a mistake.

This helped me understand why the Enlightenment didn’t deliver on its promises and actually perpetuated inequality – seeing that they were trapped in this cycle of constant reproduction of existing knowledge and models and that they could not change society, people just conformed to the norms of the system they lived in, be it capitalist, fascist or communist, and stopped fighting inequality and the ruling class. However, according to Adorno and Holkheimer, there is a way out of this cycle – the revival of the concept, which is a vision, created by people (with no equivalent in nature) that aims to make society better. 

One such example is the fight for LGTB people to have the same rights as heterosexuals (a positive concept). Funny though, how many other animal species exhibit homosexual, but not homophobic tendencies (homophobia being a negative concept). Maybe homophobia is another form, and the result, of our tendency to reproduce the hierarchy of dominance in nature – the strong lion preys on the weak gazelle; a homophobe oppresses an LGBT person? Only the lion eats the gazelle to survive, whereas the homophobe oppresses the LGBT person to feel more superior, which is a matter for psychology to resolve. But I think it's worth some thought.

With regard to the revolutionary potentials of culture, neo-Marxist Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony (which I discussed before the seminar, while writing my first blog post on Theme 3, as well as in the seminar) sort of “came to the rescue” and provided more in-depth understanding of Adorno and Holkheimer’s skepticism. Gramsci, who died several years before the two Germans fled to the USA, argues that the ruling class doesn’t attempt to smother acts of resistance, but rather gives them just enough space to create the illusion that opposing or radical views are allowed, and contains and, sort of, “disarms” those views so that they have no consequences for the status quo.

The concept of hegemony, I think, adds to Adorno and Holkheimer’s argument that popular culture distracts people from the important societal matters and creates “false needs”, as even those who are not distracted and see the issues in society, are kept powerless by being allowed to disagree only to a point where they think they have some authority and impact, which, in fact, they don’t.