POST Seminar 2

In the last lecture we got a bit of a history lesson which explained in which contexts the authors wrote their texts. This was very useful and closely connected to the theme of this week, maybe in particular Benjamins historicaly determined perception.

The meaning of this got a bit clearer to me during this seminar, he is talking about a contextualized perception, meaning that we can't see anything without its context and our historical perception of the object. I think this can be linked to Kants categories of understanding and "the thing itself". We have this separation between the real object and our perception. Benjamin is building on these thoughts from Kant it seems and adding history as a strong factor of how we interpret objects. Because if you think about it different objects is intepreted in different ways at different times. The strongest example might be the swastika who originally (as we know at least) was a symbol among the ancient Celts, Indians, and Greeks and have had alot of different meanings until it was adopted by the German nazi party in the 1920's. This was one of the main insights from this text i think and should be remembered.

In the seminar we also discussed the nominalist concept, and its importance for Adorno & Horkheimer. I got two important things out of these discussions. The first was why Adorno & Horkheimer indroduced the realism concept again in combination with the nominalist altough they came from the enlightenment. They saw that nominalist concept just observed and described the society and in the times of the second world war this view couldn't make anything better. So a realism idealworld kind of thought needed to be re-introduced not in a religious and spiritual way more in a pragmatic demokratic kind of way. So by combining this idealworld with the nominalist view of people society could change.

The other thing that we discussed and became clearer were Benjamin and Adorno & Horkheimers different view of culuture and mass media and its revolutionary potentials. Benjamins view was in favor for the potential and thought that mass media and technology could change the way we saw things. For example when the camera was intoduced we saw moving things in a different way which change the way we thought of them. Adorno & Horkheime who lived in America saw how the culture and mass media effected the people. Instead of giving them freedom and an open mind mass media reinforeced the gender roles and made people accpeting their socitial roles, instead of revolutionize against them.

Very interesting seminar and a good guest lecturer!