POSTMODERN DREAM KITSCH AND IMAGE POLICY

The contribution poses a question how we should dialectically handle the abundance of images, which we are presently flooded with, and implicates philosophical answers in the background of the image theory from Benjamin's essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproduction'. Here the central role is played by Benjamin's historical troubleshooting of the relation of image and space, which we meet with also in many fragments of his 'Passages', and also his theory of the awakening from image intoxication. Notions like destruction of the aura, phantasmagorical image, or shock assume a key meaning. However, also other derived notions enter into the field of consideration, which supplement the gesture of 'positive barbarism', as for example 'practice', 'memoire involontaire' (M. Proust), or 'Eingedenken'. The author considers plausibility of these critical concepts and notions in view of post-modern art that he qualifies, analogically according to Benjamin, as 'dream kitsch'. In post-modernism where indiscernibleness of reality and fiction predominates, the urgent need for introducing a proportionality of the fictional into reality comes forth, which would lead to the creation of 'history poetics', built on the basis of the theory of metamorphoses, the modern germ of which we find in Benjamin already.