The Future Tense of Meaning (Cultural Revolutions, Social Transformations and Media Rituals)

Can comparative studies of fundamental transformations in such domains of culture as science, art and religion help us recognize the contours of changes to come? Can the patterned clusters of change processes perhaps best be described as ‘socio-cultural revolutions’ and as ‘socio-cultural transformations’? Or should they be seen as series of clandestine plots and underground deals between various domains of culture and society? Since the development of mobile individualized connectivity and the emergence of telecommunicational infrastructure, we can also speak of a qualitative leap forward in the ‘theatricalization’ of daily life. Even a relatively marginal public order disturbance at an open-air rock festival or an outbreak of aggressive behaviour by football fans at a regional game can immediately be amplified and presented in the media as a major threat from sinister‘angry mobs’. Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin had to look for the shape of the future among middle-class flâneurs in the well-lit and crowded centres of Paris or Berlin — our contemporaries have instant access to illuminated virtual passages, linkedIns, wikipedias and ‘second lives’. It might be said that our contemporaries have transcended the selected spaces and ‘illuminated passages’ of concrete, palpable, material cities functioning as metropolises for social imaginaries (Paris, Berlin, London, New York). We have moved into a multidimensional space of online arrangements, simcities and instant utopias. At the beginning of the nineteenth century a French avant-garde dramatist, Alfred Jarry, wrote a grotesque and absurd comedy Ubu Roi which opens with the information that the ‘Action takes place in Poland, which is nowhere.’1 If it were written today, it could open with ‘Action takes place in virtual space, which is nowhere.’