OPEN :: Home

The article presents a new perspective in studies on fiction in reportage. As a philosophical category, fiction grips more and more areas of postmodern reality and starts to dominate on it, which is extensively described in works of such academics as Jean Baudrillard, Robert Spaemann and many others. It is an effect of acceleration described in Odo Marquard’s Apology of the Accidental, which is particulary important for journalism and media. The changing function of reportage, that cannot compete with other genres and forms any more, is an argument for the new perspective in researches, that would focus not on conative, but on emotive function as a key for adequate lecture. The article contains three parts. The first one is an attempt to dissolve a problem of truth and false. It bases on post-phenomenological and postmodern philosophy (Heidegger, Tarski, Quine, Tugendhat and others) and leads to an optimistic conclusion, that it is possible to hold a described opposition. An elimination of objectivity and focusing on comparison between sentence and reckoning, not between reckoning and reality, allows to decide on truthfulness of the sentence. On the other hand, extension of the category of intersubjectivity on particular subjective experiences can show us a possibility to create a repository of shared experiences, that – as a cultural facts – doesn’t subject to opposition of truth and false. The second part, based on Marquard’s vision, tries to prove that a conclusion of the first part is not actual in postmodern reality. The reason for the fictionalazation of the reality is the multistage mediation of most experiences. The real experiences give way to substitudes offered by the institution of omnipresent school. It’s dominion over human brains takes form of Foucault’s microphysics of power, becoming an self-propelled machine, so the process of mediation resembles a loop. The reality becomes a simulacrum – the sign without a signifié, the signifiant referring to other signifiants. The empire of signs consuming their own meaning change the reality into a pure fiction, that becomes the only possible truth. The third part contains a short exemplification. It presents three main appearances, that can be observed in the last polish reportages. All three are the consequences of described changes in ontological structure of reality: 1) the evasion from responsibility; 2) the advantage of single experience over a synthetic reckoning; 3) the dominance of fluent reality over the text. An exemplification contains reportages by such journalists as Mariusz Szczygieł, Wojciech Tochman and Jacek Hugo-Bader. There are also some metatextual examples from interviews and introductions. The conclusion of the dilatation is rather pessimistic. Postmodern reportage is a type of text, that tries to break the simulation and find the submerged reality itself, but it falls into a trap. The writer is aware of it, but he puts up a fight despite the fact he’s doomed. He knows, that fiction not only covers reality, but also consumes it. The implosion of sense is irreversible and reportage, being a mirror of the present time, has to manage with the fact, that it’s becoming the ghost image without a non-intertextual archetype.

OPEN Repository

23002 archived items

Institutional Communities

Recent Submissions

Browse by

Date

Author

Affiliation

Subject

Publisher

License