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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 connected 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 descriptions 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 examining 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 issues (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 difference. 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. 31
