Page 156 - Consuming Media

01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 143

Benjamin had something similar in mind when he pointed to the secularization of
theological thought by Marxism, but at the same time was sensitive to the way
modernity and its new media transformed the conditions for telling stories and medi-
ating them – and, as a consequence, contributing to what he saw as ‘the decline of
storytelling’. 45 However, that conclusion seems to have been precipitate, since story-
telling and narratives seem to continue to thrive on all levels in late modernity.
Although the act of narrating undergoes changes, narratives undoubtedly live on in
various forms through the ages. For instance, the modern narratives of progress and
democracy, as well as pettier narratives like the murder story that originated in the
mid nineteenth century, have all regained their popularity.
The last two centuries have generated widespread narratives of commercialism and
mass media as a form of modern decadence or fall from grace. Usually, such ‘mid-
size’ narratives of modernity come in competing optimistic and pessimistic variants,
one with a ‘happy’ ending and the other with an ‘unhappy’ one. Thus in the 1990s,
the new computer-based Internet technology gave rise to utopian hopes, but also to
dystopian fears. As Latour notes, modernity comes in many versions, some opti-
mistic, positive or utopian, some pessimistic, negative or dystopian; some grand,
46
some petty; but all afford meaning to the passage of time. This process mixes disen-
chantment with re-enchantment or re-mythologization that point to continuities
between archaic times and the most radicalized late modernity.
Like any other narrative, utopias work on the border between the real and the ficti-
tious, and the possible and the impossible. Any utopian thought must break with the
past and the present, or proclaim a transcendence of the present state of reality. This
makes it necessary but also difficult to determine what is real and unreal. The same
goes for the notion of the death of utopianism, which is often depicted as a return to
reality or an awakening to the facts of life. It is true that the mentality of utopian
thinking and the efforts to emasculate it do change, but if historical time is compre-
hended as both real and illusory, utopias in general cannot be dismissed as social
dreams that could be clearly distinguished from realistic views on the unfolding of
history. History appears as simultaneously real and illusory: ‘fiction is quasi-historical,
47
just as much as history is quasi-fictive,’ as Ricoeur puts it. Neither history nor fiction
could do without narrative; which is also true of utopias, that are about the future, but
nevertheless are told or mediated in a retrospective form, similar to the way a science
fiction story that takes place in a distant future is always told in the imperfect, as if
what will happen has already happened and reached its conclusion.
Jean Baudrillard has argued that contemporary media tend to blur the line between
reality and simulation, in a way that makes the simulation of reality seem more real
48
than reality itself. Certainly, the last twenty-five years have given rise to new concepts
and words – likefor instance, ‘virtual reality’, ‘hyper-reality’, or ‘real time’ – that seem
to either sort out what is left of an ever-shrinking common reality or distinguish one
kind of reality from another, thereby contributing to the insight that any conception
of reality is symbolically mediated rather than totally destabilizing the borderline
between the real and the unreal. However, an overdose of simulation seems to feed a

Layers of Time 143