| Abstrakt: |
Steam-punk is not merely retro-Victorian style design of gadget aesthetics. First of all it is ideological renaissance of humanistic ideals of modernity. There is correspondence of Steam-punk ideology with Jurgen Habermass' notion of "modernity-incomplete project" and intentional direction back to the steam-engine era of humanistic faith of unified history and technological advancement for global civilization progress. At the same time there is lack of methods for such return that resembles Jean Baudrillard's pessimistic critique of contemporary technological development losing its human scale and breaking away from the reality into "simulacrum". In the process of technology losing its human scale there are left some rudimentary dysfunctional features such as for example the right to own guns in some of the USA states that was fully functional in the times when government did not own the bombs and cannons yet and the population's carried guns were functional guarantee for democratic overturn possibility in a manner that demos itself (instead of the mass media) was the power's watch-dog. Steam-punk's renaissance of modernism under the conditions of postmodernity resembles the ideological shift from alienating irony towards the camp aesthetics where is celebrated straightforwardness, naivety that becomes cult. In the sphere of advertisement also there used to be such naive periods when goods were competing on the basis of their qualities-durability, safety and so on. Contemporary marketing on the contrary is concentrated on additional image making of brands that associates product with unconscious drives of our consumer decision-making rather than rational and reflective judgment of goods qualities. In the sphere of hegemonic ideology the turn from metallurgy to semiurgy is continuation of charms created by the shiny metal machine (archaically represented as "power and order" in the fleshdestroying proto-machine of teeth sequence described in Elias Canetti's "Mass and Power") to the glamorous world of televisioned and gloss-magazined democracy. The sterile environment of digital signs in the electronic era of semiurgy is parallel to the superficial social relations. While steam-punk is fully overwhelmed by the fascination of rather odd technology, the machine power is paradigmatically resisted by the first counter-culture movement as opposition to technocracy. Gloss-polish surface is confronted by the depth of archaic symbols of neo-tribalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
