Theme 2 (post)

This week have been easier for me in terms of understanding the philosophical texts and terms provided to us. I do not know if this is because I’m getting used to the idea of reading philosophical texts and if I’m starting to think in a more philosophical way or if the texts we read this week was simply easier to understand than them of week one. This week has been about critical media studies and the texts I’ve read is “The work of art in the age of technical reproductivity” and “Dialectic of Enlightenment”.

This week I did not need to read summaries or study guides to get an understanding of the texts and concepts within them. That felt really nice and I would like to think it is due to me learning philosophical thinking rather than the texts being easier this week. There was ofcourse a few things that I didn’t grasp fully untill the seminar and some things I just wasn’t sure about. But this week, like the one before, I really feel that the seminar helps alot with explaining, in a good way and not too quickly, what the weeks theme is all about.

During the seminar we discussed the questions given to us earlier the same week and the term or concept I found most interesting was the “aura” concept. I think of it much like the soul of an object and I found it really interesting to discuss how you can’t really reproduce the aura of a natural object and if you try to you rather give the reproduction another, new, aura. I also found it to be facinating the way that you can “destroy” an aura according to Walter Benjamin and my group during the first hour of the seminar spent most of our time discussing this. This week I also was a bigger part of the discussion in my own group and felt that I was leading the discussion, trying to get insights and inputs from everyone in the group. I don’t know if it was because this theme was very interesting in my opinion or if I’m just getting more comfortable talking about philosophical concepts.

I don’t know if I’ve learned anything more this week except for the actual meanings of the different terms we’ve discussed. Some of them I already knew like, “enlightenment” and “myth” but I didn’t know what a “dialectic” or “nominalism” was before this week. I think nominalism was the hardest concept to grasp and understand this week and if there is something from this week I am still alittle uncertain of, it would be nominalism.