Page 70 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 70
from walter benjamin to the end of cinema
of traditionalism. We can even observe here that one paradox led to anoth-
er. A mass longing for modernisation and its benefits, which looked bigger
and shinier from afar, contributed to a jump into a form of what Giddens
named the post-traditional society.
In the context of globalisation, the term transition became a universal-
ly recognised notion, one that applies to politics and economics as well as
to anthropology and culture. It had been more or less accepted in most cir-
cles of the movements, which were involved in politics, economics or social
sciences. The starting point of transition was the clear-cut collapse in the
socialist political and economic system and the hazy goals were liberal de-
mocracy and a market economy. Nobody claimed any definite knowledge
on how this road from point A to point B would be walked, how changes
would be implemented, or what kind of problems might be encountered on
the trajectory from the known system to an unknown new construction
of society. All this had been delegated to the capitalist machine fuelled by
the neoliberal ideology. With a high level of certainty, we can now say that
most projections of a transition from socialism and a planned economy
to democracy and a market economy lacked a specified knowledge of the
broad cultural aspects of the roads of transition in different countries. Fur-
thermore, progressive and highly committed social scientists who them-
selves lived in the socialist system and tried to get involved in various activ-
ities for the redemptive social changes, underestimated conceivable impact
of ethnic and religious traditions on the political restructuring of particu-
lar societies. To an extent, everybody knew that the commitment to social
changes could not really be kept under control. Eventually such social and
cultural activists had to face the problem of their complicity with the con-
sequences that followed the apparently liberating transformation.
Politicians like Milošević in Yugoslavia, Zhirinovsky in Russia, Me-
ciar in Slovakia and many others appearing suddenly out of blue, were
much quicker to decipher the potentials of the “cultural heritage”. In some
cases – notably in the former Yugoslavia – the misreading of the danger
of an explosive mix of culture and politics contributed to irreparably fa-
tal consequences such as ethnically and religiously motivated armed con-
flicts. These extremes of transition, which will take an awfully long period
before their social effects are rearranged into anything resembling tolerant
or even multicultural societies, mark the historical limits of the complex
social changes in the former socialist world. The processes, which Giddens
understands through his notion of detraditionalisation (a concept within a
68
of traditionalism. We can even observe here that one paradox led to anoth-
er. A mass longing for modernisation and its benefits, which looked bigger
and shinier from afar, contributed to a jump into a form of what Giddens
named the post-traditional society.
In the context of globalisation, the term transition became a universal-
ly recognised notion, one that applies to politics and economics as well as
to anthropology and culture. It had been more or less accepted in most cir-
cles of the movements, which were involved in politics, economics or social
sciences. The starting point of transition was the clear-cut collapse in the
socialist political and economic system and the hazy goals were liberal de-
mocracy and a market economy. Nobody claimed any definite knowledge
on how this road from point A to point B would be walked, how changes
would be implemented, or what kind of problems might be encountered on
the trajectory from the known system to an unknown new construction
of society. All this had been delegated to the capitalist machine fuelled by
the neoliberal ideology. With a high level of certainty, we can now say that
most projections of a transition from socialism and a planned economy
to democracy and a market economy lacked a specified knowledge of the
broad cultural aspects of the roads of transition in different countries. Fur-
thermore, progressive and highly committed social scientists who them-
selves lived in the socialist system and tried to get involved in various activ-
ities for the redemptive social changes, underestimated conceivable impact
of ethnic and religious traditions on the political restructuring of particu-
lar societies. To an extent, everybody knew that the commitment to social
changes could not really be kept under control. Eventually such social and
cultural activists had to face the problem of their complicity with the con-
sequences that followed the apparently liberating transformation.
Politicians like Milošević in Yugoslavia, Zhirinovsky in Russia, Me-
ciar in Slovakia and many others appearing suddenly out of blue, were
much quicker to decipher the potentials of the “cultural heritage”. In some
cases – notably in the former Yugoslavia – the misreading of the danger
of an explosive mix of culture and politics contributed to irreparably fa-
tal consequences such as ethnically and religiously motivated armed con-
flicts. These extremes of transition, which will take an awfully long period
before their social effects are rearranged into anything resembling tolerant
or even multicultural societies, mark the historical limits of the complex
social changes in the former socialist world. The processes, which Giddens
understands through his notion of detraditionalisation (a concept within a
68
