Oldal 33 [33]
Cultural Production of the Real Through Picturing Difference in the Polish Media: 1940s—1960s
In this chapter I undertake the problem of whether and how the issues con¬
nected with the media were recognized in the years 1945-1970 in Poland. If, at
present, the guiding principle is, “The reality is unimportant; it is important to do
something that causes a change”,” then what beliefs can we decode from the visual
material from the period of time under study? Remembering that the presented
period belongs to the predigital era* of the visual world, I want to draw attention to
the discourse that connects the subjects presenting difference, and mediatization,
what in other words means production of the real in media.
Is it meaningful to stress the difference between representation and visual de¬
scriptions of reality? If so, then when is it meaningful and in what way? After
a period when images of polarization prevail, does their antithesis arrive? Have
the long periods of war still not exhausted the necessary polarization? Or maybe
context shapes the attitude towards perceiving difference in another way, and in
and of itself, paying attention to the difference always fulfils a temporarily specific
function? These issues have absorbed the attention of numerous authors exam¬
ining the cultural aspects of difference. There have been various perceptions of
difference in anthropological research: to name just a few,‘ those that underline
interplay between new categorization and the discourses of difference on which
these concepts are based, what shapes new understandings of displacement and
mobility (Gupta & Ferguson 2001), those that take into consideration gender is¬
sues (Moore 1994), those that consider disability (Huber 2010), those that take the
ethnographers’ view, familiar to us all (Grimshaw 2001), and finally, those that use
the visual material from the late nineteenth century as a starting point (Griffiths
2002). As regards this last type of analysis, the visual materials from the turn of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the World War I period, the interwar period,
and World War II were examined by authors published in previous volumes of this
series (Demski et al. 2010, 2013, 2015). On the level of perception, differences
form the fundamental part of description. As Jacques Derrida stated:
It is not the question of a constituted difference here, but rather, before all
determination of the content, of the pure movement which produces differ¬
ence. The (pure) trace is differance. It does not depend on any sensible plenitude,
audible or visible, phonic or graphic. It is, on the contrary, the condition of
such a plenitude. Although it does not exist, although it is never a being-present
outside of all plenitude, its possibility is by rights anterior to all (emphasis in
original) (Derrida 1997: 62).
2 Heard in casual conversation on the metro (April 2016).
> Nicholas Mirzoeff distinguished predigital and digital images, where the former reflected directly
what stood in front of the camera and the latter presents images that are products of complicated digital
manipulations (2015).
* "The literature comprises a large number of publications, impossible to present here. The titles mentioned
belong, in my opinion, among the most significant works.
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