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Cultural Production of the Real Through Picturing Difference in the Polish Media: 1940s—1960s To sum up, on the one hand, recognition and presentation of difference change basis of this difference (the axis of the division line, differentiating criterion), while on the other hand, recognition and presentation redefine its points of reference (change references and substitute the references with different ones, relativize the references, dissociate itself from the reality of reference). Ethnic and social differences forming the main axes of division and, moreover, constituting a significant visual theme in the late nineteenth century became even more emphasized during World War I. The to-date social order falls, the old values supporting the network of relations lose their overtones under the new circumstances. The interwar period brings a new order based on the ruins of the older social divisions and, politically, on the ruins of old empires. The recognition of ethnic divisions still exists—they have preserved their weight, but they are now perceived from many local points of view (new nation-states). The social context and perspectives change according to each other, and, consequently, we are dealing with new divisions whose examples can be found in the visual material. The motif of modernity gains even more significance, creates a new axis of division,’ and, as a result, constitutes a visible subject of representations of difference and otherness. I will try to show this in the visual material in the second part of this chapter. And yet we usually disregard what stands between the represented sides and constitutes a difference, the axis of division or, rather, its “material” aspect. The difference indicates the presence of a boundary, a division from another reality. It may be named the embodied presence of a boundary. What is happening there? When we encounter a division, a question arises as to how we experience the difference the division is based on—directly or via mediation of something tangible. Is it as Derrida argued that “if a text always gives itself a certain representation of its own roots, those roots live only by that representation, by never touching the soil” (1997: 101)? Here we come to the issue of strategies of immediacy, the act of severance from the original reality—severance from the reference—and the significance of the human factor. We will discuss that later on. To sum up the present part, however, I would like to underline that the problem of difference understood as affiliation to a separate ethnic, religious, social, or territorial community or group is in a visible manner related to the issue of mediation/mediatization and immediate contact with the represented object or reality. What is significant is not only what has significance for the authors, but also how it fits in with the sense of the real. Here we enter the realm of representation, its politics, and what might be called the cultural production of the real in the Polish media of the late 1940s—1960s. ° As Derrida put it, “difference is therefore the formation of form. But it is, on the other hand, the being imprinted of the imprint” (1997: 63). 35
