This week's theme was Critical Media Study, a theme which was more familiar to me than the one touched upon in Theme 1. The reading, consisting of Benjamin and Adorno and Horkheimer, was interesting but difficult at times. Benjamin's text felt all over the place at times and Adorno and Horkheimer's was a little hard to grasp at the first reading and therefore required a thorough second reading for me. The reading touched upon many new concepts for me, such as dialectic, nominalism, super- and substructure an many more! My experience of this theme has been very centred around learning about new concepts.
At the lecture the texts were put in a historical context, I had not during my reading given that much thought to the fact that Benjamin published his text in Germany in 1939 and Adorno Horkheimer published their in 1944. Their views on the importance, and revolutionary value, of culture got even more interesting when they were put in a historical perspective. I am going to start thinking more about this when reading texts for themes in the future!
During the seminar we discussed several of the questions, in my group we had interpreted certain things in different ways and it was interesting to hear differing views on certain concepts! The most interesting discussion in my group was definitely on the meaning of nominalism versus realism and what was meant by universals and particulars. One member in our group found it difficult to grasp the concept of universals, but got it when we used the colour pink as an example of a universal and gathered three pink items describing that a realist would find the "pinkness" of these things meaning that they have something in common as objects. A nominalist sees instead three unique things, the universal that they are all pink means nothing to a nominalist. I think we contributed to her understanding of the concept in a good way!
As mentioned above this theme has been entered around many new concepts for me, a lot of googling in order to try and make sense of new things. The theme was a bit easier to grasp than the previous one, but was still a bit outside my comfort zone and has been very interesting.
Hi Josefine,
SvaraRaderaI have to admit that it also had some kind of aha experience during the lecture when the two readings were put into historical context. Furthermore, the insights into their personal lives captivated me. As I was not in your seminar group it’s interesting that you also used the terms of universals and particulars. I can totally agree with you that it was a very interesting theme with introduced concepts I didn’t know about prior to this theme
Hi Josefine,
SvaraRaderaI have to admit that it also had some kind of aha experience during the lecture when the two readings were put into historical context. Furthermore, the insights into their personal lives captivated me. As I was not in your seminar group it’s interesting that you also used the terms of universals and particulars. I can totally agree with you that it was a very interesting theme with introduced concepts I didn’t know about prior to this theme
Hi Josefine,
SvaraRaderaFirst of all, great reflection. I agree with you that the history background made a lot of things clearer. I will also take this into consideration for the next time. I really liked your groups's example for nominalism and realism. In my seminar we only talked about Plato's cage example. Good job!
Hi,
SvaraRaderaIt seems that nominalisum and realism is the one of the important topics in each group which is hard to understanding at first. Glad to see you have a good understanding after course. It is very interesting that you use the pink color example to explain the universals and nominalism. Good job!
I really love that you could tell the discussion in your group.Obviously you took active part in you group discussion.Using the pink items to describe the universals,I can understand better the meaning of the 'Nominalism'. I think nominalist emphasize the uniqueness of different objests and the universal have less meaning for them.
SvaraRaderaIt is really a good job. Keep it up.