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Dès son premier essai sur Dostoïevski, Walter Benjamin a découvert la dimension métaphorique des objets et de l'espace : une étape initiale vers ses approches médiologiques sur l'industrie de l'édition, les genres littéraires, la culture populaire et l'imaginaire collective, développés à la fin des années 1920. Plus tard, dans ses plus célèbres essais (1934-1936) et aussi après, malgré une position assez négative sur le roman contemporain, Benjamin a souvent vérifié sur le récit littéraire ses nouvelles hypothèses sur l'hybridation des médias, les modèles de communication épiques et la dimension prophétique et métaphorique de Kafka.

Is culture significantly changing its course? The authors try identifying different change processes that seem to be accentuated in the suspended, multiform and unstable time of pandemic lock-down. Such dynamics make evident and collectively representable some endemic oscillations in our era: between derealisation and physical space perception, between digital devices as super-mediums and networks as infrastructure, between desocialisation and human interdependency consciousness, between "media ceremony" rituals and a dystopian and uncanny imagery, between delegitimisation and re-legitimisation of policy and science competencies. In the background, a theoretical discussion remains on the validity or the impossibility of opposition between the unconstrained "person", considered like flesh, suffering body, and a "subject", seen as a texture of command, control, institutional crystallizations, ultimately as a social language. Different levels of conflict are getting moreand more visible on the media scene, especially the cultural, social, geopolitical and political collisions, being root into the collective imagery and discourse, towards which it is necessary to direct research. Cultural conflicts arise from bureaucratic organizations inability to hybridize with networks, and from an education system brutally projected in the online dimension. Social conflicts particularly concern the labour market, subjected to an enormous stress and transformation between opportunities and dramatic risks. Geopolitical and political conflicts stemming from movements of historical importance embody two opposing ways of capital exiting from the world crisis: financialisation vs investment in infrastructure, research and development, and new welfare and industry forms.

"Genres" are originated from the long-term persistence of semiotic systems ("format"), based on continual reiteration of a narrative structure in compliance with stable and shared rules of intratextual, trans-textual and trans-media order: this definition applies to literature as well as to media. Genres allow the representation and control of social and intra-psychic conflicts by training and retaining audiences, and by focusing and re-mediating mythologies and imaginaries. Serial technology archetypes have emerged over many centuries; long before the metropolitan "feuilleton" novel, they had come to permeate all cultural processes, from the Hellenistic era to the romance of chivalry, until the early narrative entertainment genres in XVII and XVIII century. A complex archeological investigation of serial technologies reveals the long life of some "inventions" even coming up today in the television factory, for example the return of the saga and of the political Tacitus-Baroque intrigue, now within an increasingly global and timeless dimension of collective imagination.