Page 26 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 26
from walter benjamin to the end of cinema
emancipation as an on-going affair, which changes the context only to be
put forward anew. An amount of illusions, concerning the scope of im-
pacts, generated by new technologies, is invested in the changing of com-
plex social relationships, but what is not usually taken into account is that
the change in the context, or a change in the means of communication
within a (social) relationship, cannot do away with the relationship as such.
A suggestion that the means of interactive communication may cause a pro-
found change of democratic decision-making so that an electorate would
perpetually take part in electronically mediated “referendums” misses the
point entirely. An immediate “reproducibility” of political events cannot do
away with the representational – therefore potentially always ideological –
factor of any conceivable democracy and the decision-making process that
it implies. On the other hand, the scope of media representations such as
opposed pluralistic comments, differently biased information with a verbal
and visual argumentation – also in its “disreputable forms” – may or may
not help civil society to participate and influence the decision-making pro-
cess. After all, ever more precise and accurate surveys of public opinion are
quite interactive.
However, there are many recent cases proving that the media and its
effects, function always within a particular culture, and the elements of
universal global culture (if it actually exists at all) become transformed
through a “translation” within a given “local” culture. This, for example,
happened in the Balkan countries, which were according to any criteria
in 1990s media societies, gives enough material to study the ambiguity of
mass culture of today in view of the slightly changed Benjamin’s terms of
opposition between the “aesthetisation of politics and politicising the aes-
thetics”.
24
emancipation as an on-going affair, which changes the context only to be
put forward anew. An amount of illusions, concerning the scope of im-
pacts, generated by new technologies, is invested in the changing of com-
plex social relationships, but what is not usually taken into account is that
the change in the context, or a change in the means of communication
within a (social) relationship, cannot do away with the relationship as such.
A suggestion that the means of interactive communication may cause a pro-
found change of democratic decision-making so that an electorate would
perpetually take part in electronically mediated “referendums” misses the
point entirely. An immediate “reproducibility” of political events cannot do
away with the representational – therefore potentially always ideological –
factor of any conceivable democracy and the decision-making process that
it implies. On the other hand, the scope of media representations such as
opposed pluralistic comments, differently biased information with a verbal
and visual argumentation – also in its “disreputable forms” – may or may
not help civil society to participate and influence the decision-making pro-
cess. After all, ever more precise and accurate surveys of public opinion are
quite interactive.
However, there are many recent cases proving that the media and its
effects, function always within a particular culture, and the elements of
universal global culture (if it actually exists at all) become transformed
through a “translation” within a given “local” culture. This, for example,
happened in the Balkan countries, which were according to any criteria
in 1990s media societies, gives enough material to study the ambiguity of
mass culture of today in view of the slightly changed Benjamin’s terms of
opposition between the “aesthetisation of politics and politicising the aes-
thetics”.
24
