“图像—娱乐化”或“审美—娱乐化”——波兹曼社会“审美化”思想评论

A Critical Review of Neil Postman's Idea of Social "Aestheticization"

"审美化"已成为当代西方社会学家把握现代化进程的一个重要理论,在中国其相关研究主要围绕着"日常生活审美化"而展开,成果颇丰。但在中西方已有的探讨中,美国批评家波兹曼的"图像—娱乐化"思想尚未得到应有的重视。本文认为波兹曼的"图像—娱乐化"就是鲍德里亚等人的"图像—审美化",但它有其自成体系的理论:第一,图像即感性,因而与真正的审美化或感官的娱乐化息息相通;第二,图像即事物本身,它产生出来就不是为了"指示",而是为了"取代"事物;第三,图像即纯粹之"表象",它仅在"表象"层面作业,所关注的不是"再现"什么,而是如何使"再现"本身更符合视觉或形式美和感性、感官的需求。一句话,图像的后果就是真实在其中被悄然抹去的娱乐化和审美化,或合而言之即"审美—娱乐化"。

'Aestheticization' has been increasingly employed by Western sociologists as a perspective to look at the process of modernization,and Chinese critics are interested in the more specific 'Aestheticization of Everyday Life'.The researches on 'Aestheticization' are plentiful and fruitful in both China and the West. However,there is hardly any serious attention paid to Neil Postman's thought on 'Image-Entertainization'. In this paper Postman's 'Image-Entertainization' is regarded as basically the same as the 'Image-Aestheticization' developed by Baudrillard and his likes,but,having its own system,it involves at least three other aspects.First,image is associated with sense,and therefore with the aesthetic and the sensory entertainization;second,image pretends to be the thing itself;it is produced in order not to signifybut substitute the thing itself.Third,image is purely appearance;it plays only at the level of appearance,and does not care what to be represented,but how to adapt its representation to the needs of vision,form and therefore the sense.To be brief,the consequence of image-production is entertainization,aestheticization,or in a combined form of the two,aesthetic-entertainization,in which all the truth is moved away without notice.