Theme 2 - refelection post

Yet again I misunderstood some parts of the texts but luckily I participated on the lecture and seminar so now I have my fact straight.  The two key areas within this theme that I thought my group had it best discussion about was first the Marxis perspective of superstructure and substructure. We all had acknowledged the fact that there is a strong connection between them two. Superstructure, like I wrote before, depends on the substructure, which decides the structure of the production and economy while superstructure is the culture. The superstructure takes longer time to change compared to the substructure. One good example is media technology and its production, thanks to its development more and more people are able to use it in their every day life. It takes time but after a while that lead to a change society and therefore also the superstructure.  You can even draw a parallel between the media production to that we today have new laws regarding privacy and so on. When more people can use the technology more can raise their voice and show what they want and by time this leads to a social revolution.

So this takes us to the second interesting discussing point during the seminar, whether or not Benjamin and Adorno and Horkheimer thought that it was the culture that had revolutionary potential or not. This is something I got twisted in my first post of this theme. So now I am going to set it straight, according to Benjamin: it is the culture that has the potential. New movies show new things, in the beginning there were only rich people in the movies but later you could see poor people. Which according to Benjamin showed that anything is possible and therefor culture has the potential power.

Adorno and Horkheimer were of the perspective that it is the technology that develops and it has nothing to do with culture. What shows in movies only confirms that it is how it is suppose to be. So their take was more nominalist, what you see is what you see and you can´t have any other visions.

Strict nominalism = shows how it is and nothing more, you can´t change it. So what shows in movies is how it should be and there for has a great power of working as propaganda.

In the end of the seminar we discussed how we see things differently and how that is naturally and historically. Naturally since we all see differently using our perspective and senses. And historically since event during time changes the perspective. So then we ended the seminar with a question: is not everything historically?

This time I was active during the group discussion asking questions and joining in with my answers. Also I thought that the seminar leader was really good at explaining and given interesting examples regarding this weeks theme.