On Friday 2 June 2017 Professor Dragan Prole, University of Novi Sad, Serbia, lectured on "Alienated masses, alienated practice? Inherent Ethics of Contemporary Media Theories" in Theoretical Ethics II class.

Abstract: The intention of this lecture is to confront the basic thesis of the avant-garde and dystopia with the positions of Marshall McLuhan on the connection of alienation and media. Considering these two media theories in the context of the strategy of avant-garde and dystopia seems to be recommended as for judging their range and limitations so for reflecting upon one of the core questions of the contemporaneity, which is in relation to the effects and influences of the new mass media which are most commonly recognized in the problem of the foreignness, in regard to alienation. Second part of the lecture will question McLuhan’s understanding of alienation as a consequence of the sense ratio’s disproportion, and along with that, his critic of the typographic human. After establishing of the limits of his optimistic expectations from new audio-visual media to give the key contribution to desalination and rebirth of the new type of the integral man, the author emphasizes the actuality of McLuhans idea about the control by studying of the new perception models. 

Keywords: McLuhan, philosophy of media, avant-garde, dystopia, alienation

See full text here.

Bio-note: Proffesor Dr Dragan Prole is a Full professor in philosophy, University of Novi Sad, the author of books Husserl’s Phomenonological Ontology (2002), Reason and History. Heidegger and Hegel (2007), Foreignness of Being. Contributions to Phenomenological Ontology (2010), Humanity of the Foreign Man (2011), Inner Outland. Philosophical Reflections of Romanticism (2013), Tradition of Philosophy Teaching (2015), Appearances of the Absent. Contributions to Contemporary Aesthetics (2016). Edited books (together with Prof. dr Alpar Lošonc) Aporias of Multyculturlism (2012), Pride (2014), Greed (2015), Sloth (2016). Translated the books of Schelling, Husserl and Waldenfels.

Contact: proledrag[at]gmail[dot]com