In her excellent book, On Photography, Susan Sontag has managed to give us two things to ponder; a history of photography as the closest replication of reality and a deeper examination of power of photography, which is not lost on anyone, I gather.Thinking about this, I am reminded of Richard Rorty’s assertion of the role […]
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THE VERY IDEA OF CONSCIENCE
As I was rewriting an essay on ethics of social media I was once again reminded of Erich Fromm’s thesis on the very notion of “conscience” in Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, a book he wrote back in 1947. I find many of Fromm’s ideas and theoretical treatments of the […]
ROLE OF MEDIA
I was recently asked, what is the role of media in this kind of instrumentality of representation in order to control our thoughts, our hopes and our actions?That is a good question and quite relevant in this century!First, let us deconstruct –or rather allow this to deconstruct itself—the notion of media representation. If we are to put […]
LANGUAGE, THOUGHT, AND OTHER THOUGHTS
Philosophers have been debating the relationship between thought and language. Does one cause the other? And the proverbial chicken and egg debate; does language come first or thought? Now, relating this to visual culture, one wonders how thoughts may be represented in the brain. Are there words, sentences, and phrases? Or are there images, symbols, […]
HEIDEGGER’S HAMMER
Martin Heidegger once said, we only know a hammer when it is broken (see his pioneering book, Being and Time). I have been thinking about the arts, a bit. Given the visual nature of the arts—and here I am making the assumption that literature is a form of visualization of the literary artist’s imagination, transmitted by […]