Introduction
Artificial Intelligence is one of the most fascinating and mind-twisting movies I have seen a movie which I very much liked both in terms of its entertainment and philosophical qualities. I wrote a critical analysis of the movie during the first few weeks of the semester. After that, we were able to study different topics such as Critical Consciousness, Hegemony, Counter-hegemony, economics of power, meaning and mediating, Learning, language and liberation, and reclamation. The objective of this paper is to deconstruct my thoughts when the first reflection paper about the film Artificial Intelligence was written based on the things learned during the entire course of the semester, focusing on the topics discussed above.
Critical Consciousness, Learning, Language, and Liberation, and Reclamation
Critical Consciousness is a popular social and educational concept introduced by a Brazilian educational theorist and pedagogue Paulo Freire, whose fundamentals are also grounded in Karl Marx’s critical theory . The Marxist critical theory, on the other hand, is a school of thought that is focused on the reflective and critical assessment of society and culture based on the knowledge that can be or has been obtained from researches and evidences in the field of humanities and social sciences .
In my initial review, I wrote that the movie was about modernization and enlightenment. Today, I am going to change that. The extinction of humans which eventually led to the domination of robots capable of producing emotions, also known as mechas, was a result of a slowly but surely increasing critical consciousness. In the film, mechas were first created, they were clearly the underdogs. They were the ones that had to adjust for the humans and they are the ones that often get oppressed by humans. In which case, humans appeared as the oppressors. Aside from achieving an in-depth understanding of the world and different factors inside it, critical consciousness also revolves around the process of taking action against oppressive entities and factors in one’s life. In the mechas’ case, humans were the oppressive factor and upon being educationally liberated, via conscientization, they eventually took over the position that was once held by humans. In critical consciousness, events or phenomena related to learning, language, and liberation and reclamation also happens. In the case of the mechas’, for example, their transformation as the leaders of their own civilization did not happen overnight. Their journey was a collection of a series of learning, language, and liberation, and quite possibly reclamation, all leading to a whole new level of critical consciousness.
Hegemony, Counter-hegemony, and Economies of Power
Hegemony can be perceived as a form of government, although an indirect one, wherein the head of the government, also known as the hegemon, rules other members of its class by implied means of power or the threat of the use of power . One case in point would be the political system that the Greek city states had. Hegemony was the dominant form of government during the Ancient Greek period wherein one city state established and asserted political and military dominance over other city states. This is politico-military hegemony. There is also another type of hegemony called cultural hegemony. The principle of hegemony stays the same only that it now applies to cultures rather than politics. In a cultural hegemony, a social class with the ability to manipulate and influence the system of mores and values in a region or of a society is formed . Cultural hegemony applies to the movie Artificial Intelligence. When the mechas David and Teddy were built, the cultural hegemons were humans. They were the ones that dictated what had to be right and what had to be wrong. It was not long, about 2,000 years, until the robots took the title from the humans, and started to be the hegemons of their own world, as evidenced by the events that happened in the latter parts of the film, when humans were stripped off from the face of the planet, leaving the robots to fend for themselves and lead their own civilization. This phenomenon may be otherwise known as counter-hegemony characterized by the creation of a new or alternative hegemony in civil society as a preparation for a political or cultural shift. In the case of the movie however, there were a lot of factors that contributed to the extinction of humans and the rise of the mechas as the leaders of their own.
References
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