Theme 2 Reflection

Theme 2: Critical media studies

                After attending the lecture and seminar in the critical media studies, I gain a new perspective about philosophy. In the previous theme we get a knowledge about what is the knowledge itself and how it can be obtained. This week we have progressed a bit further about the enlightenment which is give a liberation of human though to advance in order to gain freedom to get rid of fear of superstitious things and instead install them as masters of their own fears and thoughts. But in the end it gives us many casualties to the humankind. In this theme, we assigned to read 2 articles. The first article is written by Walter Benjamin and the second is written by Adorno and Horkheimer’s.

                In the lecturer session, Mr. Henrik Åhman told us that in order to understand these essay, we need to know the background history when they create these essay. So in this lecture, he gives us some background story when philosophy began. Start in early 16^th / 17^th century, people gain an enlightenment and obtain an advance progress on technology since that era. Furthermore, with this enlightenment, people begin to create a utopian object around the world, for the example is France and Russian revolution. Also in the art and construction, they built many skyscrapers and lead to invention in media technology. Nevertheless, in several years later the utopian is coming to the end, because industries have a lot of bad consequences, such as pollution and war for resources. In the end, the enlightenment will dehumanize people and they are starting to question about enlightenment because they caused the crisis.

                Walter Benjamin, when he write the essay about “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” live in the era of Nazi, when they still not declare a war to the world. In this essay, he shows how fascism do with culture and handle the culture to support fascism. In this essay, he state that culture and politics are related. Furthermore, fascism introduces aesthetic into political life. For example, in Italian fascism, they attempt to aestheticize politics. In order to get support from his people, they revive the glory of the Roman Empire and they believe people need other stuff than just rational and argument.  Also in German, they used a different approach, it is to politicize aesthetics. German develop massive structure or art to give an enormous influence emotional to the people and because of that they will accept all political messages from some political party. In this era, they also use media technology to deceive people to follow their will.

                Adorno and Hokheimer’s write the essay to answer the essay by Walter Benjamin, in this essay they critique about the media technology is being misused and abused by others to gain support in politics. Based on Adorno and Hokheimer’s, enlightenment is trying to demystify the world and give freedom to people to think freely, but in the end instead to give freedom, they deceive us into a big society that force to believe a certain paradigm with using media technology. They also emphasize that nominalism will lead to preservation of oppressive societal culture, because if we only focus on the material world and describe as it is, then we are never going to change. The lecturer gives an excellent example about the nominalism by using Plato story about “man in cave”. He shows that there is dichotomy reality about is it true that shadow is real things (nominalism)? Or we should turn around to look the concept itself.