Page 14 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 14
from walter benjamin to the end of cinema
tions and projections of technological changes seem to be a clear effect of
a demise or severe weakening of once strong actors in the field of emanci-
pation struggles such as trade unions, left wing political parties and pub-
lic intellectuals.
Considering various discourses on a different level, we can see that
such a phenomena as political populism and an explosion of false news as
the main and most banal agency of the post-fact world causes the mass cul-
ture to look almost like a natural disaster. It is interesting that after the
shocking American presidential elections results in November 2016, both
expressions denominating massive practice of the uncontrolled as well as
manipulated communication and perception became “viral” themselves.
It looked as if the Epimenides’ paradox of the liar had become “operation-
al” in the mode of communicative behaviour; since the world is such that
everybody lies, each and every one should join in the game of social net-
works of unlimited lying. The performative gesture behind acts of “publish-
ing” on Facebook or Twitter is based on the tacit claim by authors: “I am
a liar” and then the reading of messages turns into the checking of who is
the more “true liar”. If I take as a hypothesis that we have to deal with some
structural or qualitative change or a quantitative leap within mass culture,
then I would claim that we are at the beginning of something new in Deleu-
zian terms or we are at the brink of the event as the eruption of the unpre-
dictable in Badiou‘s sense of the word. The transformation of mass cul-
ture, which contains a multiplicity of changes in the orders of the world,
comprising of institutions from factory to education, politics and aesthet-
ic productions, bring about a change in mass participation within a society.
Therefore, as much as one can feel pessimistic due to the above mentioned
recent phenomena, one should think about Walter Benjamin, who at the
time of the dawn of Nazism had not given up his idea of the emancipatory
potential of mass culture: “The fact that the new mode of participation first
appeared in a disreputable form must not confuse the spectator” (Benja-
min, 1969: p. 239). However, his idea was not (as some critics do sometimes
surmise it) that the mass culture functioned as an automatic emancipatory
mechanism. He well indicated the scary counter-emancipatory potentials
within it, which was, in his time, demonstrated by rising Nazism. His ap-
peal to communism to “politicize art” (cf. Ibid: p. 242) clearly points to a di-
alectics of involvement of so-called masses or multitudes into antagonisms
of the social processes.
12
tions and projections of technological changes seem to be a clear effect of
a demise or severe weakening of once strong actors in the field of emanci-
pation struggles such as trade unions, left wing political parties and pub-
lic intellectuals.
Considering various discourses on a different level, we can see that
such a phenomena as political populism and an explosion of false news as
the main and most banal agency of the post-fact world causes the mass cul-
ture to look almost like a natural disaster. It is interesting that after the
shocking American presidential elections results in November 2016, both
expressions denominating massive practice of the uncontrolled as well as
manipulated communication and perception became “viral” themselves.
It looked as if the Epimenides’ paradox of the liar had become “operation-
al” in the mode of communicative behaviour; since the world is such that
everybody lies, each and every one should join in the game of social net-
works of unlimited lying. The performative gesture behind acts of “publish-
ing” on Facebook or Twitter is based on the tacit claim by authors: “I am
a liar” and then the reading of messages turns into the checking of who is
the more “true liar”. If I take as a hypothesis that we have to deal with some
structural or qualitative change or a quantitative leap within mass culture,
then I would claim that we are at the beginning of something new in Deleu-
zian terms or we are at the brink of the event as the eruption of the unpre-
dictable in Badiou‘s sense of the word. The transformation of mass cul-
ture, which contains a multiplicity of changes in the orders of the world,
comprising of institutions from factory to education, politics and aesthet-
ic productions, bring about a change in mass participation within a society.
Therefore, as much as one can feel pessimistic due to the above mentioned
recent phenomena, one should think about Walter Benjamin, who at the
time of the dawn of Nazism had not given up his idea of the emancipatory
potential of mass culture: “The fact that the new mode of participation first
appeared in a disreputable form must not confuse the spectator” (Benja-
min, 1969: p. 239). However, his idea was not (as some critics do sometimes
surmise it) that the mass culture functioned as an automatic emancipatory
mechanism. He well indicated the scary counter-emancipatory potentials
within it, which was, in his time, demonstrated by rising Nazism. His ap-
peal to communism to “politicize art” (cf. Ibid: p. 242) clearly points to a di-
alectics of involvement of so-called masses or multitudes into antagonisms
of the social processes.
12
