Seminar 2

I feel like this weeks' articles was perhaps a little bit easier to relate to since they were more obviously related to our field, media technology. I felt that the articles, or rather the authors of the articles, spun on Kants' perspectives from last week. Just like the both articles argues, I think it is important as a civil engineer to question the technology used in media and how it relates to, for instance politics. We compared the natural and the historical perceptions and asked the question: is it able to write from a truly objective perspective? I don't think so since we're all raised with different values and have different perceptions of the world. I think that it's more important to acknowledge the perspective that you're writing from in order to make people understand the way you see the world.

At the seminar we talked about Marx and his thoughts about society, which Benjamin discusses in his text. We talked about the two concepts of superstructure and substructure and how Benjamin applied this on to the field of culture/media technology. We interpreted this as substructure could be seen as the technology itself, for instance a camera, and the superstructure would then be the people using the technology and interpreting all the cultural material, for instance pictures. The substructure could also be seen as our cultural assessments. We mentioned a suiting quote from Marx on this matter:
"It is not our values that controls the way we work. It is the way we work that controls the way we think." - Marx.

Another thing we discussed was realism contra nominalism. Platos' cave parabel is a way of explaining the realism, where the fire is the world of ideas and the shadows on the wall is the world of impressions. The nominalism kills this idea of the world of ideas, it states that it's only a nomina (a name) and that the world of impressions is the only existing world. That theory has to adapt to our impressions, not the other way around. Adorno and Horkheimer are positive to the nominalism but they think that it tendens to surpress existing systems.

According to me I would say that the nominalism doesn't enhance any visions, since it doesn't acknowledge the world of ideas. There are some ideas, like the idea of every human beings equal value, that can't be proven in an empirical study and doesn't exist other than in our minds. If we would go by Darwins' theory, the strong one's right over the weak, then the world would be a much different place.