Ideas and Ideals

The annual outbursts of controversy surrounding the presentation of the main film awards of the planet in the last few years (primarily around the Oscars) are important for cultural philosophy because they are indicators of tectonic shifts in the paradigm of modern cultural knowledge. The concept of ‘high’ culture is increasingly losing its ontological significance. Criticism fell upon this concept almost a hundred years ago, but so far this has been a fact of ‘high’ theory. Today, the denial of a ‘high’ culture has become the reality of mass communication. The pressure, which used to be a problem only for academic classrooms, has become an order of magnitude greater. This is the line on which we need a clear accounting of the results, the balance of pro et contra. The answer of the ‘critical’ philosophy is understandable in principle: the contradictions between the ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures are not an insoluble conflict. The axiom of the death of a ‘high’ culture is incorrect. The modern theory of ‘high’ culture is possible. But its construction is cumbersome and not fast. You need to start by protecting the ‘high’ culture from reproach for violence. The assemblage point of radical criticism of the ‘high’ culture is W. Benjamin’s treatise “A Work of Art in the Era of Its Technical Reproducibility”. Therefore, the defense of ‘high’ culture cannot but begin with an answer to W. Benjamin. At the same time, thinking specifically about this small treatise, we need a careful analysis of the whole structure, the words of Benjamin as a whole. And this word is peculiar. It is thoroughly public and political. Benjamin’s treatise is not a theoretical reflection. This is a manifesto, more precisely, two manifestos. The first is the manifesto of the new Marxism. The second is the manifesto of the artistic avant-garde. Benjamin saw the possibility of synthesizing these two ideologies and gave his model. It turned out, firstly, unfounded, and secondly, it was dangerous. It is dangerous because culture is the main barrier that holds back the advent of utopia. Having destroyed this barrier, we find ourselves defenseless against utopia.

In the middle of the XIX century the musical component of Russia’s cultural ties with Europe significantly increased. This was due to the emergence of romanticism – a revolutionary phenomenon in all forms of art. The touring activity of its creators was a characteristic feature of musical romanticism. Outstanding composers, masterly playing their instruments, introduced a lot of new things to the technique of playing them and to the imaginative sphere of music. They sought to promote their skills in major cities around the world, including St. Petersburg and Moscow.

The announcement of their performances and laudatory reviews in the press seemed to fully reflect the state of Russia’s relations with European musical reality. However, the organizational side of the tour, which required a lot of effort on the part of the host and on the part of the tour operators, was not disclosed in the official press. This hidden work was carried out thanks to acquaintances abroad of representatives of the domestic elite with the best musicians in Europe and through their private correspondence. It was done through personal contacts of the Russian enlightened amateurs, which more accurately reflected the depth and nature of our country’s ties with the culture of other countries.

The author studied the archival sources in search of information about the appearance in Russia of some guest performers, the structure of their performances and life. The memoirs of contemporaries contain interesting details and direct impressions of the musicians’ playing. This article attempts to show the true value of harpists’ concert touring in our country, their resounding success, noted by the official press. The author highlights the educational role of Russian highly educated music lovers in establishing ties with the best professional musicians in Europe in the middle of the XIX century.

Pierre Loti was a novelist and a marine officer who visited lots of countries. He gained popularity writing about his travels and travel impressions. This article analyses his travel to Nagasaki back in 1885 where he lived for half a year and had a ‘temporary wife’. His novel written during that travel is called “Madame Chrysanthème”. It’s one of his most extravagant and interesting pieces which made the author world-famous. It reflected common interest in the oriental life typical for that time and it predetermined the image of Japan in the European consciousness of the second half of the 19th century. Pierre Loti wrote about his ambition to make the novel as impressionist as possible determining impressionism not as an intellectual but as a decorative phenomenon related mostly to arts and translation of sensory perception. His interpretation of impressionism was expressed in “Madame Chrysanthème”, which is an attempt to describe the world around us, represented not only by the material world but by the author’s sensory perceptions and feelings. To be exact, this is impressionism in fiction. The world is a product of our sensory experience, and the author’s goal is to fix this experience, which is the sum of his observation and impressions. Pierre Loti creates his work where color plays the main role together with sounds and words. They are a sum total of the elements determining the reality in equal amounts. Stylistically “Madame Chrysanthème” is created according to impressionist canons, with lots of epithets, comparisons, metaphors, the author’s neologisms. The novel is written as a diary where separate episodes in chapters are separated from one another by large white empty gaps. The article discusses similarity of impressionism and the Japanese culture. However, a closer look demonstrates considerable differences between the European and the Oriental minds.

The article is devoted to the interrelation between the epoch and music creation, basing on the experience of the USSR and the Azerbaijan SSR during 20–30s of the XX century. These geographical and time frames give us significant material for studying the problem. The establishment of Soviet power determined colossal changes in life, including art and culture. The essence of new features is the method of socialist realism. Mass character and collectivism are the most important peculiarities of that time. It is a direct response to the new economic relations. The research of the phenomenon “we” begins in Azerbaijan music – especially in mass, popular songs. The accent in the opera genre is shifted to the concept of people’s victory. The main tendency in Azerbaijan art before 1920 was the humanity tendency, after 1920 the Communist party ideals. We must mark the birth of a new musical style in Azerbaijan as the main result of the development of composers’ music after 1920. The Azerbaijan music came out on the world stage at that time.  It became a heroic one, whereas before 1920 it had been lyrical. The heroic line is expressed mainly by march intonations. We must also notice the concrete historical line instead of legendary character of music before 1920. The chief heroes of Azerbaijan music theatre are Medjnun and Kerogly, the opposites: contemplation and action, unresistance and struggle, makam and ashug genres. But in spite of differences there is continuity between the first epoch and the second one in such genres as: Russian folk songs and Azerbaijan tunes.

Based on the analysis of the obituaries of the revolutionaries belonging to different political parties of the socialist camp, the article attempts to reconstruct the “ideal” of the revolutionary figure. The author proceeds from the fact that the analysis of the complex of obituaries of a certain social or public group allows to identify those values that are most important for a particular group at the given time, to carry out the reconstruction of its moral and ethical ideas, which are important system-forming factors of its subculture. According to the author of the article, the similarity of the revolutionary obituary to the lives of saints is lawful, firstly, by virtue of the identity of functions - the creation of an image of a “hero”, which  served as an example to follow and the formation of a “pantheon”; secondly, because although the revolutionaries were largely nonreligious people, the revolutionary conviction sometimes took a religious connotation, became a kind of confession of a new faith, in which their “saints” and “martyrs” appeared. The term “obituary” is understood quite broadly, and not only short notes about a person's death were analyzed, but also memoir materials, biographical essays, having a character of an obituary, which were published in sections such as “Memory of the Departed” and / or had other features peculiar to this genre. On the basis of the analysis of obituaries published in the illegal newspapers “Znamya Truda” and “Proletariy”, in the journal “Penal Servitude and Exile”, as well as in the emigrant press (“Socialist Vestnik” and “Noviy Zhurnal”), the author highlights a complex of traits of character and properties of the human personality, perceived as undoubtedly positive, as well as a complex of actions and behavioral patterns that are characteristic of a true revolutionary and are positioned as an example to follow. The author also comes to the conclusion that the hypothesis of similarity of hagiographic literature and obituaries originating from the revolutionary camp has proved to be true.

This article is devoted to some theoretical and methodological, as well as applied aspects of imagology, associated with the use of its conceptual and categorical tools to study the cinematographic “hyperreality”. The latter is considered as a source-reservoir of media imagams as leading constructs of the binary opposition of the type “own” / “alien” –  “us” / “them”, performing the function of continuous cognitive mobilization, leading to the creation of long-term, universal, supratextual allusions and therefore popular for the modern process of political stereotyping and the formation of identification codes.

The predominant type of research sources were film documents, films of English and American production of various genre affiliation. An attempt was made to evaluate the information potential of the imagosphere of the studied films on the quality of the representation of the specific humor of the “Cold War”, features of the means of artistic and visual expressiveness to reproduce the image of the other. The study concludes that there are differences in the morphology of the political-satirical imagosphere of English and American cinematography.

In conclusion, the author asserts the importance of Anglo-American cinematic humor and “laughter technologies”, portraying expressive immanent mobilization mechanisms that have turned into self-sufficient driving forces leading to the formation of “cold” political-ideological existentialism as a special type of thinking action.

The aim of the article is to reveal and reconstruct the hierarchy of values in rock-culture. The author’s hypothesis is that rock-culture is an important instrument of forming post-industrial axiology. This fact implies exaggerated manifestation of values. In the author’s opinion rock-culture is characterized by the system of relations, a set of values, norms, identities, practices, symbols that surround social context of rock-music. The methodology of the research is based on principles of structure and functional analysis. The main methods are: an included non-formalized narrative interview and included observation. The axiological model of rock-culture is formed around the value dichotomy: collectivity, unity – individualism, self expression. One of the variants of this dichotomy is a contradiction between family values, profession and non-limited self expression. Agents of rock-culture are influenced by this contradiction and they understand the need to change their axiological model. They are forced to adapt an alien lifestyle. It correlates with the values of activity and innovation. Another important for rock-culture value is that of a riot, confrontation. It is in dialectical interaction with the value of creativity. Creativity in rock-culture has a complex and multi-level structure that includes excess versatility and existential strive for the transformation of reality. These values comprise the main group of rock-culture values. Freedom is the leading value in the system. And at the same time it provokes the appearance of some secondary values. They are: laziness, excessive hedonism, household deviations (in the value aspect, not as practice). So the core of axiological rock-culture system includes the values that correlate with post-industrial culture. Laziness and hedonism have traditional connotation. Family and profession are connected with responsibility. This element of rock-axiology is a part of industrial culture. These values are on periphery of rock-culture. On the basis of the above it is possible to conclude the following. Axiology of rock-culture is subject to the transformations of its culture during post-industrial period. Sometimes it can be associated with strengtheting of certain value positions, with the acquisition of hypertrophied qualities.

The article deals with the problem of studying the cultural meanings of literary and painted landscape in postmodern discourse, which is relevant for modern cultural knowledge. It is noted that the polyphonic content characteristic of postmodernism, the “rhizomatic” structure of texts, their playful nature, intertextuality largely determine the fact that the boundaries of traditional types and genres of art become conditional, because the very concept of “boundaries” as a kind of “demarcation line” is replaced by the idea of relativity of intraspecific differences. In the “postmodern situation”, for which the paradigm is the installation on the “heteromorphism of language games”, dynamic stability, giving importance to pluralism, randomness, the assumption of different ways of development and its description, the landscape goes beyond the independent genre form, creating multicomponent intertext structures, organized on the principle of citation, collage, free construction of semantic relations. The tendency of leveling intraspecific boundaries in postmodern art leads to the transformation of the content core of the landscape in the direction of mechanical copying, deconstruction, ironic play on the “usual” norms of classical or, to a greater extent, modernist artistic strategies, which always performed a certain teleological function, that is, represented the articulated author's idea. Landscape (both literary and pictorial) in this context is an act of expression, communicative event, “consistency plan” (G. Deleuze), where polysemantic internal bonds leading to permanent indentation in the cultural layers of the text. On the basis of the analysis of the works of J. Fowles, M. Pavic, A. Kiefer it is concluded that in postmodernism, the traditional understanding of the landscape as a holistic artistic image of the natural world is replaced by its interpretation as a mosaic, multi-layered structure, parts of which are connected variatively, have polyassociative and polysemantic interpretations, since their semantic reading is not regulated by the author's intention, but is in dialogical interaction with the reader or viewer. The revealed tendencies of genre synesthesia in postmodern discourse fill the landscape with practically unlimited possibilities in the construction of a complex polysemantic structure, in which semantic levels are not hierarchically invariant, but are in dynamic interaction, forming places of “assemblies” and “distribution” of information in accordance with a certain cultural context.

This article is about the rationality concept in the Ernst Cassirer philosophy of culture. The need for such understanding was made conditional for the philosopher upon the modern project (Enlightenment project). One of the key ideas around which the project was built is rationality. However, it is this concept that begins to be rethought and criticized at the turn of the XIX and XX centuries. Narrow sense of rationality raises the problem of substantiating humanitarian knowledge and embedding it in a scientific paradigm. A number of philosophers have attempted to resolve this issue. Two ways were outlined – a categorical break with the established tradition (for example, the intuitive approach) and work within the framework of the tradition (expanding the concept of rationality with the intention of including more cultural phenomena in it). The neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer belongs to the followers of the second approach.

The concept of symbolic form, that he developed, allows us to build a new plural idea of the rationality. In his opinion, each cultural phenomenon has its own rationality. This view of the problem makes it possible to talk about humanitarian knowledge as scientific, that is, fit into the framework set by the New Time. Cassirer did not develop a complete system, but outlined important guidelines for cultural research. In particular, he especially singled out two categories of the humanities, such as form and style. In addition to them

The paper analyzes the problems of interpersonal relationships such as matchmaking, the relations between men and women; in other words, the authors describe manifestations of the biological “axioms” in human behavior. Besides, domination can also be viewed as an expression of the biological in interpersonal relationships. The object of study of the present research includes the problems of matchmaking, gambling games, entertainment, and feasts.

As empirical material for the given description, the authors consider literary texts from the Armenian literature of the XIX-XX centuries (M. Nalbandyan, S. Shahazis, G. Sundukyan, A. Ayvazyan and others). The paper is an essential part of the “Tbilisi Text of Armenian Literature”, which adds something new to the “Tbilisi Text of the Georgian Literature”. Those two discourses, in their turn, show a certain commonality with the “Caucasian Text of the Russian Literature».

The authors apply a semiotic meta-language; implicitly, they use the theory of the French sociologist P. Bourdieu together with a typological approach, since the analysis is conducted on recurrent motifs, aiming at the identification of general semantic units.

The main thesis of the present paper is the “elevated” Armenian literature of Old Tiflis (XIX c.), which represents one of the central discourses for the critical presentation of the biological in the middle and the lower class of Old Tiflis. The biological and the principles of “wild capitalism” were destroying the families of small and medium tradesmen not only in the horizontal, class dimension (family, interpersonal), but also in the vertical dimension (inequality of social roles).

The analysis of the empirical material demonstrated that money-hunger guzzles spiritual and social values, such as national identity; the idea of statehood is lost, and the center of aspirations of city inhabitants becomes idle lifestyle: food, feasts, building houses, entertainment (home carnivals), matchmaking, etc. Of course, in the paper, the biological is contrasted to the cultural as well. The Armenian society of Old Tiflis had strategically thinking cultural figures, Armenian princely families, patrons, philanthropists (the Bebutovs, Tumanovs, Arguntinians, Alikhanovs, Yevangulyans, Mantashevs, Tamamshevs), who invested enormous financial means for the multiplication of national values (Nersisyan Seminary of Tiflis). Noteworthy is also the investment by great Armenian philanthropists (the Mantashevs) in the education of gifted Armenian minds abroad (Germany, Russia, etc.), who already in the 1920-ies formed the intellectual basis for the establishment of a national university in Yerevan (1919).