Camouflage. Secrecy and Exposure in Cultural and Literary Studies
Camouflage. Secrecy and Exposure in Cultural and Literary Studies

Author(s): Wojciech Kalaga, Marcin Mazurek, Marcin Sarnek
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Cultural history, Studies of Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Keywords: camouflage; culture; theory; narrative; voyeurism; conspiracy; feminism; transgression; truth; film; cryptography
Summary/Abstract: Out of a plethora of discursive attempts to grasp metaphorically the earlytwenty-first-century spirit of our late capitalist/postmodern condition,the notion of camouflage seems a particularly disturbing one. On theone hand, it implicitly problematizes the traditional postmodern dislikeof the inside-outside distinction, directly or indirectly introducinga border between the visible and the invisible, the latent and themanifest, the form and the essence. If cognition is not only mediatedbut also distorted by a potential illusion – whether linguistic or visual– then the very process of perception seems inevitably contaminated bya strong sense, if not of cognitive uneasiness, then at least of perceptiveuncertainty. Seen in these terms, the gesture of distrust, which thenotion of camouflage inevitably includes, announces the return ofrigid cultural divisions between the inside and the outside, divisionsthat a large number of post-modern and post-structuralist claims havemanaged to first theorize and then deconstruct, rendering our culturallandscape always-already open to transparent debate and open-endedevolution. (excerpt from the introduction)

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