Week 2; Marx, Leo.
Technology: The Emergence of a Hazardous Concept
Shanken, Edward. Art and electronic media
As time passed, the term, “Technology” was changed like the one
of “Art”. Why the concept of technology is Hazardous? Leo Marx said,
Reification,
as the philosopher George Lukacs famously explained, is what occurs when we
endow a human activity with the characteristics of a thing or things. It
thereby acquires, as he put it, “a phantom-objectivity,’ an autonomy that seems
so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its
fundamental nature: the relation between people.”……. By consigning technologies
to the realm of things, this well-established iconography distracts attention
from the human—socioeconomic and political—relations which largely determine
who uses them and for what purposes. Because most technologies in our corporate
capitalist system have the legal status of private property, vital decisions
about their use are made by the individual businessmen who own them or by the corporate
managers and government officials who exercise the virtual rights of ownership.
The complexity and obscurity of the legal relations governing the use of our technologies,
abetted
by the reification that assigns them to the realm of things—all of these help
to create the aura of “phantom objectivity” that envelops them.
Reading this
section, I remembered the part of the book, “Media sexploitation” by Wilson Bryan Key
because he argued that technology has been used through media to distract
people’s attention. It was shocking to know the
facts that I could be manipulated by somebody’s will. My spending habit,
attitude and consciousness that was shaped by something … What is the solution
for the brainwashed people in modern society? He proclaimed to create or
appreciate art because it can lead distracted people to heal, mediate and intuit values
in human being. Of course, the influence of art is weak in the society, especially
in modern time, yet it is important, because art plays a pivotal role for a
chance to think about the present that is currently underway. Then, there is a
question for me as an artist. How do I use my intention into artwork in the
society that manipulated people
by well-established iconography live?
