the mass media and their relationship with the postmodern culture

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eproduction allow us to enjoy and distribute good books massively,reproduct good paintings massively, "canning"good music, and run goodmovies before millions of movigoers. However, this world has alsodiscovered there were huge benefits in producing artistic narcotics,and the dream vision becomes commercialized: the poor girl marries amillionnaire, the young, humble, guy becomes a hero by vanquishing allpossible obstacles and ennemies. In other words, fairy tales getupdated and are launched on the market. and all this happens in a timewhen writers and artists fight against the old clichés, taking greatpains to find how to reproduce a new reality.As Thomas Mann could say: this is an unsufficient divorce: for onething there exists the necessary search for new means apt atexpressing new realities: getting conscious that our artistic meansare exhausted, we are tired of them, we are looking for new ways, onthe one hand. On the other hand, we can say, with regard to humanmasses that, as far as they are concerned, the ancient art is, forthem, something absolutely new -hence they have to learn how todistinguish between good and useless. That is their bon goût has notbeen configurated as yet, so their ability to appreciate quality isstill to be created.Art is a servant to culture unified by something else than education.That is culture, as a concept does not implies art. Any community aptat adding art adds humanity to culture.As baron Munchhausen boasted to have done, this culture must enjoy theability to fly, and the ability to dream. That will be the only meansto perform all the "voyages" we are craving for, we will be able todeal successfully with everyday life and, eventually, we could seethat imagination has achieved power.Lyotard says that science quarrels over narrations because narrationsare, chiefly related to fables while science is not only reduced instating useful discoveries but science also works in search of truth -a way to attain philosophy. Whenever such meta-discourse resorts toany possible narration such as the dialectics of spirit, thehermeneutics of sense, the emancipation of the reasoning subject, thenwe can say that science is "modern".Giving legitimation to knowledge by means of a meta-narration impliesa philosophy of History. The validity of institutions ruling thesocial links is questioned.Postmodernism would represent incredulity with regard to metanarrations.The coming society is not so based on a Newtoniananthropology -i.e. structuralism, theory of systems: it is much morebased on the practical side of linguistic particles, so knowledgechanges status, a fact that began by late 1950s jointly with thereconstruction of Europe.Phonology, linguistic theories, communication problems, cybernetics,computer science, modern algebra, computers and their languages,memory problems, data bases, and telemathics witness such a trend. Theincidence of those technological transformations on knowledge issimply huge. It could be said that knowledge is affected in its mainfunctions: a) research, and b) knowledge transmission. Themultiplication of information-related machinesis affecting, and will keep affecting the dissemination of knowledge,as it has been performed with the available means for thetransportation of sound and image media.
The time-honored principle stating that acquiring knowledge could notbe separated from the formation of persons is being forgotten littleby little. A useful relationship has been set up among knowledgesuppliers and knowledge users, and knowledge becomes a value (just assuppliers of goods and users of goods do). Knowledge will be producedto be sold, and will be consumed to be valued within a new production.It will be a fixed asset any longer.Dashing within the orbital field of Earth to place communicationsatellites and/or data banks out there is fine -however, who issupposed to have access to them? Who is going to define the channelsand/or what data can be accessed or not? We can have many morequestions like these, a way to make the transformation of the natureof knowledge much more complex -all of this is likely to exert adirect action on government powers. A fact that forces us toreconsider our relationships based on fact and rights with themega-corporations. The problem lies between telecommunications and thecivil society at large.E. Trias offers us a unified table wherein key ideas by Frazer, Freud,Jakobson, Lévy-Strauss, and Foucault are coordinated inasmuch as thoseideas have a commun factor: the opposition between term pairs -that isa binary opposition with, however, a certain coordination among thoseideas. Indeed, the ideas pertaining to the above mentioned thinkersare of a binary nature: similarity/contiguity;condensation/displacement; combination/selection;metaphora/metonymy; identity/difference, that the communication mediahave analyzed.In brief, Trias sais that magic is the realm of similarity/contiguitywhile science is the realm of identity/difference.We have to take care not to fall into the scientific pedantry inasmuchas it can generate what Jakobson would call "aphasia" since it canaffect the metaphoric development of the discourse as well as itsmetonymic development. If we resort to Peirce and Chomsky it would belike searching, within the magical thinking, rational ways to makeeasier new thinking ways so that we could benefit from a widerunderstanding of communication-related phenomena.Within a theory of science, and an aesthetics simmetrically different(hence. complementing themselves), there exists a moment where a splitoccurs between a type of science expelling similarity while keepingmetaphor to hand it over to poetry that is, as Shelley would say,"the lawmaker of the world". From that moment on, you can say that artand literature are like storerooms where the similarity-driven poeticthinking can grow up nicely.Mention should be done of tolerance that allows some censoredactivities to blossom as art, activities linked to other denied orrepressed activities such as hallucination, onirism, magic that havebeen widely worked by both psychoanalysis and semiology. It would be,however, a repressive tolerance, giving a lesser emotional meaning toartistic and literary activities.Language is materially used as a physical object, playfullymanipulated, that underneath its problematic "meaning" reveals itscharacter of material sign. Antonin Artaud cause us to remember themateriality of the sign by reflecting upon the "gesture" character of
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