Er(r)go,
camouflage, conspiracy, the inconspicuous of the conspicuous, the conspicuous of the inconspicuous, the apparent conspicuous of the apparent conspicuous, paranoia, conspiracy, we know all about it―not only in Hollywood “conspiracy cinema” does the intrigue “constitute the primary narrative function” (Artur Piskorz). We could say that culture, with its symbolic networks and hidden meanings, is the global domain of camouflage. True, but only in the semiotic sense. When it comes to the covering or uncovering of the face, things turn out quite differently: "The chivalric code was conceived as a triumph of culture over nature ... the purpose of the camouflage was to correct a certain 'error' which nature, in all the variety of the animal world, made with the humankind" (Marek Kulisz). What is the choice then: Roland or Beowulf, or perhaps Odysseus. Yet, is not the question itself outdated: is there a choice at all, in the reality permeated by simulacra? When even the window, an apparent screen of privacy, "becomes the condition for camouflage [when] posing on display [an act of exposure through the window] erects the walls of the hideout" (Marzena Kubisz). The protagonist of The Truman Show chooses to escape the overpowering camouflage of his own life only to enter—as might have been anticipated—a camouflage equally spiteful but incomparably more complex: "there's no more truth out there than in the world I created for you" tells him the architect of his existence (quoted by Bartosz Kuźniarz). But the camouflage—“an inevident tension between similarity and difference ... a stratification of weakness and potential strength"—is also a means of "cultural survival," not only of cultural artifacts, such as the Bible (Ewa Rychter), but also of societies and individuals.
Also in the present issue, a return to the question of the selfreproduction of culture in a theoretical text by Carl Humphries (translations) and to the space of the (cyber-)city in a paper by Krzysztof Kalitko (follow-ups).
Wojciech Kalaga
No. 49 (2024)
Published: 2024-12-30
10.31261/errgo
English
Język Polski