Widzialność i wyzwolenie: wymarzony dyskurs o mediach
Visibility and Emancipation: A Dream Discourse on Media

Author(s): Jan P. Hudzik
Subject(s): Media studies, Film / Cinema / Cinematography
Published by: Instytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk
Keywords: photography; Walter Benjamin; Siegfried Kracauer;
Summary/Abstract: The paper deals with the discourse of film and photography conducted by Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer in the 1920s and 1930s. Their reflection on visibility occurs in a time of upheaval or twilight of the cultural formation based on a medium of writing and the related linear, word-based logical thinking. It is responsible for modern science and technology, but it is also accused of the destruction and distortion of the world. According to the German philosophers new media, such as film and photography, offer an opportunity for changing this situation – they are supposed to have both emancipatory and eschatological power, consisting of restoring original condition of things, the condition prior to their conceptual arrangements. It is a narrative in the field of “dream discourse”, which combines reflection on media with politics, social revolution and Hebrew messianism. The question is what such thinking is based on, why the authors have faith in a causative, synergistic effect which is to arise as the consequence of interaction of the qualities incommensurate with each other such as language texts, social events and technical pictures. The description of the immediate philosophical context of this problem, consisting of diagnoses of the twilight of the western culture as well as of the return-to-the-“things-themselves” projects, where the things were occluded and forgotten by their cultural pictures-representations, serve to solve this problem.

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