21st century Babel: from the myth to the media

Abstract

The images and the senses of the city change in time and space due to historical and social contexts. It is in this sense that it has been said that thinking the city in the contemporary culture implies reading it as a component of a communication system, associated to the technological advance that affects the order of representation. It is observed, however, that, in such representations in the media, in the arts and in the literature, one appeals to archaic myths, such as Babel and its tower, that, since its biblical origin, refers to the phenomena of communication and the city. This archaic myth is the semantic support that makes possible to characterize new phenomena such as the modern city and its postmodern derivatives, with its mechanical urbanity, atomization, progress, and technologies. This assumption is the starting point to analyze the Babel of the 21st century, scenerized and dramatized on media products, that reedit, from the representations of the Twin Tower’s destruction of the babelic New York City, to the São Paulo Fashion Week 2008, passing through the movie Babel (2006), an American production directed by the Mexican González Iñárritu. Image of disjunction, chaos, and uncommunication, Babel’s saga in such stage allows one to put in question the crisis of the representation and to measure the shock of cultures, the multicultural drama, the social, political and cultural barriers of the globalization age.