Una teoria pulviscolare dei media

Le cartoline da sigarette e i media effimeri a inizio Novecento

Abstract

This essay offers a reinterpretation of the concept of the ephemeral, fragmentary, and transitory within the media landscape of early modernity, drawing on the theories of Siegfried Kracauer, in particular his reflections on photography, surfaces, and so-called “historical debris”. The text explores cigarette cards in particular: tiny objects that are emblematic of both the popularization of smoking and the nascent film and cultural fandom of the early 20th century. It does so by conceptualising them as objects that symbolise ephemeral and atmospheric mediation. Through the intersection of the reflections of Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Béla Balázs, and others, the essay aims to explore how “dust” and its corollaries — smoke, fog, visual fragmentation — characterised both theories on modern media in the early 20th century (Kracauer, but also Benjamin, Balász, ecc.) as well as specific forms of perception in the early modern era. From this perspective, cigarette cards become not only objects of consumption, but symbolic vehicles of a pulverised theory of media, which has its roots in the fragmentary, transitory, and multiplicity of modern experience.