Institute of Sociology, RAS

Research Center for Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones

 

Saint-Petersburg State University

Institute of Philosophy

Department of Russian Philosophy and Culture

 

Italian Unstitute of Culture, Saint-Petersburg

 

Labont (University of Turin)

 

Mice and Travel Agency

 

Saint-Petersburg State  Museum-Institute of the Roerichs

 

Peter the Great Saint-Petersburg Polytechnic University

International relations department

 

 

The Third International ResearchConference

MECHANISMS FOR FORMATION OF CULTURAL EXCLUSION AND FRONTIER ZONES – 2016

The Conference conducted with financial support of the Russian Science Foundation (project № 14-18-00192)

 

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE  

and

SUMMARIES

 

 

(October 20-22, 2016)


 

There are two aspects of the formation of cultural memory. The first one is memorial zone. The second is the zone of oblivion and experience excepted from ordinary cultural practice; it is more important as it involves more cultural phenomena. Like some inconvenient historical figure or uncomfortable historical event this cultural experience is excepted but not completely forgotten. It shapes cultural borderlines and defines processes of identification. Such zones of excepted but unforgotten cultural experience were named Cultural Exclusion and Frontier  Zones (on the analogy with the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone).

The main objectives of the Conference: To reveal the mechanisms for formation of cultural exclusion zones on the example of the totalitarian Soviet past. Though topographical representation of national culture is nowadays quite common in the field of the Humanities (the methods of exposing of geographical boarders of national cultures are drawn up, theories of “cultural boarders” are elaborated and imagology is actively developing), borderline is usually regarded as a characteristic of some territory possessing distinct outlines. The research group brought together by this project takes into consideration multifactor influence upon the contents of culture and sees in interaction of different cultures not only frontier zones (marginal and containing elements of two and more interacting cultures) but also exclusion zones, i. e. zones of cultural suppression whose importance for interacting cultures becomes rather questionable.

Organizing Committee :

 

Prof. Tiziana Andina, PhD (University of Turin, Italy)

Elizaveta I. Blagodatova (Saint-Petersburg State University, Russia), Press-Secretary of the Conference

Dr. Alexey A. Bondarenko, PhD in Physics and Mathematics (Saint-Petersburg State Museum-Institute of the Roerichs, Russia)

Prof. Alexander I. Brodsky, Doctor of Philosophy (Saint-Petersburg State University, Research Center for Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones, Russia)

Dr. Alexander Chertenko, PhD in Philology (Research Center for Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones, Russia)

Ksenia A. Kapelchuk, undergraduate student (European University at Saint-Petersburg, Research Center for Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones, Russia)

Dr. Zhanna V. Nikolaeva, PhD in Philosophy (Saint-Petersburg State University, Research Center for Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones, Russia)

Dr. Eugeny A. Macovetsky, Doctor of Philosophy (Saint-Petersburg State University, Research Center for Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones, Russia)

Prof. Alexey V. Malinov, Doctor of Philosophy (Saint-Petersburg State University, Research Center for Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones, Russia)

Dr. Vladimir L. Melnikov, PhD in Cultural Studies (Saint-Petersburg State Museum-Institute of the Roerichs, Russia)

Dr. Elena A. Ovchinnikova, PhD in Philosophy (Saint-Petersburg State University, Research Center for Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones, Russia)

Prof. Izolda Yu. Peshperova, PhD in Law (Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration under the President of the Russian Federation, Russia)

Prof. Sergey N. Pogodin,  Dr. Sci in History (St. Petersburg Polytechnic University named after Peter the Great, Department of international relations, Russia)

Dr. Maria V. Semikolennykh, PhD in Cultural Science (Research Center for Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones, Russia)

Prof. Dr. Kerstin Schoor, PhD in Philology (European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg, Germany)

Dr. Anna A. Troitskaya, PhD in Art History (Saint-Petersburg State University, Russia)

Dr. Sergey A. Troitskiy, PhD in Philosophy (Saint-Petersburg State University, Research Center for Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones, Russia), Chairman

 

 

Especially thanks: Maria Semikolennykh (translations)

 

 

 

Conference Rules and Regulations:

Time limit on talks - up to 25 minutes

Time limit on questions - up to 5 minutes


 

CONTENT


CONTENT................................................................................................... 5

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE.................................................................. 7

1stDay (October 20th, 2016)..................................................................... 8

  1. ................................................................. 10
  2. ............................................................... 14
  3. .................................................................. 20

EVENTS.................................................................................................... 21

Round Table “Made in Italy: Cultural Exclusion or Common Memory?”22

LECTURE Jewish Writers in Nazi Germany - Forgotten Chapter from the Histories of German Literature (in German).................................................................................................. 26

SUMMARIES............................................................................................ 29

Sergey Troitskiy................................................................................... 30

Tiziana Andina..................................................................................... 30

Natalia Artemenko............................................................................... 30

Alexander Brodsky.............................................................................. 31

Tiziana Andina..................................................................................... 32

Zhanna. Nikolaeva............................................................................... 33

Konstantin Ocheretianny..................................................................... 33

Anna Troitskaya................................................................................... 33

Eugeny Sokolov................................................................................... 33

Leila Tavi............................................................................................. 34

  1. 34

Lenka Naldoniova............................................................................... 35

Fabio Papa........................................................................................... 35

  1. 36

German Bokov..................................................................................... 37

Maria Gracheva.................................................................................... 38

  1. 38

Konstantin Ocheretianny..................................................................... 39

  1. 40

Vera Tripodi......................................................................................... 41

Larisa Morina....................................................................................... 42

Elena Ivanova...................................................................................... 43

Ernesto C. Sferrazza Papa................................................................... 43

Timothy Tambassi................................................................................ 44

Vladimir Kagansky.............................................................................. 44

Daniil Anikin........................................................................................ 45

  1. 46

Oksana Kozhemyakina........................................................................ 47

Elena Ovchinnikova............................................................................. 48

Tatyana Bartashevich........................................................................... 48

Boris Begun......................................................................................... 48

Kerstin Schoor..................................................................................... 49

Denis Bugaev....................................................................................... 49

Dmitry Kaunov.................................................................................... 50

  1. 51

Natalia Poznyak................................................................................... 52

Natalia Dolotskaya.............................................................................. 52

Roman Zolotovitsky............................................................................ 53

Lada Shilnikova................................................................................... 54

Anna Shipitsina.................................................................................... 55

Pavel Kretov........................................................................................ 55

Sigrun Bilfeld...................................................................................... 56

Petar Bojanic........................................................................................ 57

Ekaterina Ovcharova........................................................................... 57

Dmitry Verbin...................................................................................... 58

Valentin Golovin.................................................................................. 59

Maria Bratolubova............................................................................... 59

Vyacheslav Sukhachev......................................................................... 60

Ksenya Kapelchuk............................................................................... 61

Lada Shipovalova................................................................................ 61

Maria Semikolennykh.......................................................................... 62

Nataliia Gulyaeva................................................................................ 63

Irina Busurkina.................................................................................... 63

Alexei Malinov.................................................................................... 64

Ksenya Surikova.................................................................................. 64

Ivan Grinko.......................................................................................... 65

  1. 65

Elena Drobysheva................................................................................ 66


 

 

 

 

 

 

CONFERENCE

SCHEDULE

 

 

1stDay

(October20th, 2016)

 

10-00 — 10-30

InstituteofPhilosophy, SPbSU

(5 Mendeleevskaya Liniya)

Registration of Participants

 

 

10-30 — 11-30

InstituteofPhilosophy, SPbSU

(room 25, 5 Mendeleevskaya Liniya)

Simultaneous translation

Conference Opening Ceremony

$1-        Conference Welcome Speeches

$1-        General Information about the Conference and Events (Sergey A. Troitskiy)

 

11-30 — 13-30

Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU

(room 25, 5 Mendeleevskaya Liniya)

Simultaneous translation

Session 1.  Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones: Preliminaries

(Chair - Dr. Alexander Chertenko (Kiev, Ukraine / Gomel, Belarus / Berlin, Germany; RCCEFZ, Russia))

 

Sergey Troitskiy (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia)

Zones of Cultural Exclusion and Construction of Topographic Hierarchy

 

Sergey Enikolopov (The Mental Health Center Research, RAMS, Russia)

Borders and Agression

 

Tiziana Andina (University of Turin, Italy)

States and Transgenerational Actions

 

Natalia Artemenko (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia)

Cataleptic Consciousness / Post-Traumatic Subject

 

Alexander Brodsky (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia)

Eros of Transfigured Logos. Logic and Sexuality in Formation of Cultural Exclusion Zones

 

 

13-30 — 14-30

Lunch

 

 

14-30 — 16-30

InstituteofPhilosophy, SPbSU

(room 108, 5 Mendeleevskaya Liniya)

Simultaneous translation

Round Table “Made in Italy: cultural exclusion or common memory?

  1. (C-  Dr. Prof.Tiziana Andina (Turin University, Italy; LabOnt, Italy) and Dr. Zhanna Nikolaeva, PhD in Philosophy (Saint-Petersburg State University, Research Center for Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones, Russia))

 

 

16-30 — 17-00

Coffee-break

 

 

 

17-00 — 19-00

InstituteofPhilosophy, SPbSU

(room 108, 5 Mendeleevskaya Liniya)

Simultaneous translation

Round Table “Made in Italy: cultural exclusion or common memory?

  1. (C-  Dr. Prof.Tiziana Andina (Turin University, Italy; LabOnt, Italy) and Dr. Zhanna Nikolaeva, PhD in Philosophy (Saint-Petersburg State University, Research Center for Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones, Russia))

 (continuation)

2nd Day

(October 21st, 2016)

 Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU

(room 25, 5 Mendeleevskaya Liniya)

Simultaneous translation

10-00 — 11-50

Session 2.  Transgenerationality and Borders between Generations

 

 

11-50 — 12-10

Coffee-break

 

 

12-10 — 14-30

Session 3. Corporality as a Form of Cultural Exclusion and Comprehension of Borders

 

 

14-30 — 15-20

Lunch

 

 

15-20 — 17-40

Session 4. Cultural exclusion and Formation of Borders

 

 

17-40 — 18-00

Coffee-break

 

 

18-00 — 19-30

Session 5.  Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones: Methodology and Terminology

 

 


10-00 — 11-50

Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU

(5 Mendeleevskaya Liniya)

Simultaneous translation

Session 2.  Transgenerationality and Borders between Generations

 (Chair - Dr. Prof.Tiziana Andina (Turin University, Italy; LabOnt, Italy))

 

  1. (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia)

Topology of Generational Memory in Zones of Cultural and Historical Frontier

 

German Bokov (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia)

Youth Subcultures in within Zones of Cultural Exclusion and Frontier: Transformation of Identity (From Utopianism of Counterсulture to Eschatology of Contemporary Industrial Subcultures)

 

Maria Gracheva (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia)

Border-forming Factors of Childhood Ethos in Contemporary Society

 

  1. (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia)

Forgotten Soviet Past. Memory of the Past in Post-Soviet Russia

 

11-50 — 12-10

Coffee-break

 

12-10 — 14-30

Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU

(5 Mendeleevskaya Liniya)

Session 3. Corporality as a Form of Cultural Exclusion and Comprehension of Borders

 (Chair - Dr. Prof. Eugenia Voloschuk (European University Viadrina, Germany))

 

Konstantin Ocheretyanny (Saint-Petersburg State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Russia)

Human Body is an Exclusion Zone

 

  1. (Research Center for Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones, Kiev-Gomel-Berlin)

“Doomed to be Meat”. Human Medical Experiments as Apophasis and Metaphor (“Flying dogs” by Marcel Beyer and “Alindarka's Kids” by Alhierd Baharevich)

 

Vera Tripodi (University of Turin, Italy)

The Role of the Body in the Politics of Exclusion, Epistemic Injustice, and Prejudice

 

Larisa Morina (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia)

Psychological Aspects of Cultural Exclusion

 

Elena Ivanova (Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University, Mental Health Research Center, Russia)

Borders of Jocosity and Jokes about Borders

 

 

14-30 — 15-20

Lunch

 

15-20 — 17-40

Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU

(5 Mendeleevskaya Liniya)

Session 4. Cultural exclusion and Formation of Borders

(Chair - Dr. Zhanna Nikolaeva, PhD in Philosophy (Saint-Petersburg State University, Research Center for Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones, Russia))

 

Ernesto C. Sferrazza Papa(University of Rijeka; University of Turin)

Walls, or The New Nomos of the Earth

 

Timothy Tambassi (University of Bucharest; University of Eastern Piedmont) 

Below the Classifications of Geographical Boundaries. Ontology of Geography and Cultural Diversities

 

Vladimir Kagansky (Institute of Geography, RAS, Russia)

Border and Transitional Zones: Counter-productive Neighbourship

 

Daniil Anikin (Saratov State National Research University named after N. G. Chernyshevsky, Russia)

Cultural Memory in the Circumstances of Civilizational Frontier

 

Eugenia Voloschuk (European University Viadrina, Germany)

Remnants of Magen David: Cartography of the Vanished “Jewish Ukraine” in German Literature (End of the XX - Beginning of the XXI Century)

 

17-40 — 18-00

Coffee-break

 

18-00 — 19-30

Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU

(5 Mendeleevskaya Liniya)

Session 5.  Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones: Methodology and Terminology

(Chair - Dr. Prof. Alexander Brodsky (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia))

 

Oksana Kozhemyakina (Cherkasy State Technological University, Ukraine)

Borders of Distrust in Socio-Cultural Space of Cultural Exclusion

 

Elena Ovchinnikova (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia)

Tatyana Bartashevich (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia)

Integrative Potential of Public Morals in the Circumstances of Variating Moral Stereotypes of Cultural Frontier

 

Boris Bigun (European University Viadrina, Germany)

“In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up”: Heterotopias on the Break of Ideological Ages (Experience of Contemporary Russian and Ukrainian Literature)

3rd Day

(October 22nd, 2016)

Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU

(room 25,

5 Mendeleevskaya Liniya)

Simultaneous translation

Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU

(room 108,

5 Mendeleevskaya Liniya)

Without simultaneous translation

10-00 - 12-30

Session 6. Repression of National and Local “Other”

 

12-30 - 13-00

Coffee-break

 

13-00 - 14-30

Session 8. “Gifts of the Enlightenment” and Zones of Cultural Exclusion and Frontier

 

14-30 - 15-30

Lunch

 

15-30 - 18-30

Session 10. Cultural Temporality and Forms of Cultural Transformations (Deactualization/ Reactualization)

10-00 - 12-30

Session 7. “Other” is out there: Cultural Fear of Identification

 

12-30 - 13-00

Coffee-break

 

13-00 - 14-30

Session 9. Traumatic Reminder: War before and after the Memory

 

 

14-30 - 15-30

Lunch

 

15-30 - 18-30

Session 11. Museum Practices of Deactualization and Reactualization

 

 

19-00 - 22-00

Conference Closing. Closing Address

Boat Trip along the Neva River

(by invitation)

 

10-00 - 12-30

Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU

(room 25, 5 Mendeleevskaya Liniya)

Simultaneous translation

Session 6. Repression of National and Local “Other”

 (Chair - Dr. Lada Shipovalova (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia))

 

Kerstin Schoor, PhD (European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg, Germany)

“Goethe” as a Paradigm of Cultural Exclusion and Search for Identity in Jewish Cultural Life in Nazi Germany

 

Denis Bugaev (Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography “Kunstkamera”, Russia) 

Mechanism of Formation of Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones on the Example of Georgia in the second Half of the XVIII - first Half of the XIX Century

 

Dmitry Kaunov (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia)

Ideals of International Finno-Ugrian Ethnopolitical Movement and the Contemporary “Merya Renaissance” in the Upper Reaches of the Volga

 

  1. (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia)

Marginalization and Cultural Exclusion on the Fringes of Great Cities: Problem Statement

 

Natalia Poznyak (Gomel, Belorussia)

To hide a City. Contemporary Belorussian Poetry in Coordinates of Urban Geography

 

10-00 - 12-30

Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU

(room 108, 5 Mendeleevskaya Liniya)

Without simultaneous translation

Session 7. “Other” is out there: Cultural Fear of Identification

 (Chair - Dr. Elena Ivanova (Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University, Mental Health Research Center, Russia))

 

Natalia Dolotskaya (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia)

Zones of Cultutral Exclusion in the Context of the Policy of Globalization and Multiculturalism

 

Roman Zolotovitsky (Moscow, Russia)

“Strange” Children Next Door, or How We are getting “Strange”

 

Lada Shilnikova (Faculty of Sociology, SPbSU, Russia)

Structure and Practices: Heteronormativity and non-Heterosexual Women

 

Anna Shipitsina (Saint-Petersburg, Russia)

Models of Cultural Transformation in Creative Conscience (by Creative Conscience)

 

Pavel Kretov (Cherkasy State Technological University, Ukraine)

Media Discourse of Authority and Phenomenon of Identity: Symbolical Dimension of the Newest Myth

 

 

12-30 — 13-00

Coffee-break

 

 

13-00 - 14-30

Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU

(room 25, 5 Mendeleevskaya Liniya)

Simultaneous translation

Session 8.  “Gifts of the Enlightenment” and Zones of Cultural Exclusion and Frontier

 (Chair - Dr. Sergey Troitckiy (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia))

 

Sigrun Bilfeld (University of Tubingen, Germany)

System and Freedom. Remarks on Lotman and Karamzin

 

Petar Bojanic (University of Belgrade, Serbia; University of Rijeka, Chroatia)

On Natural Borders and Culture Wars (Survival of the Group)
Is Fichte still Our Inspiration?

 

Ekaterina Ovcharova (Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, Russia)

On the Phenomenon of A. T. Bolotov

 

13-00 - 14-30

Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU

(room 108, 5 Mendeleevskaya Liniya)

Without simultaneous translation

Session 9.  Traumatic Reminder: War before and after the Memory

 (Chair - Dr. Elena Ovchinnikova (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia))

 

Dmitry Verbin (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia)

Transformation of the Great War Image in Soviet and Russian Cultural Memory

 

Valentin Golovin (Institute of Russian Literature (the Pushkin House), RAS, Russia)

The Great War. Children’s Literature and Its Critical Analysis

 

Maria Bratolubova (Southern Federal University, Russia)

Memory of the Great Patriotic War on the Pages of Don Periodicals: Zones of Omission

 

14-30 - 15-30

Lunch

 

15-30 - 18-30

Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU

(room 25, 5 Mendeleevskaya Liniya)

Simultaneous translation

Session 10.  Cultural Temporality and Forms of Cultural Transformations (Deactualization/Reactualization)

 (Chair - Dr. Natalia Artemenko (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia))

 

Vyacheslav Sukhachev (Institute of Philosophy SPbSU, Russia)

Temporal Cut of the Establishment of Cultural Exclusion Zones

 

Ksenya Kapelchuk (Research Center for Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones, Russia)

“Singularization of History”: From Instance to Event

 

Lada Shipovalova (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia)

Mechanisms of Historical Memory: A Case of Epistemology

 

Maria Semikolennykh (Research Center for Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones, Russia)

“We should help Plato”: Reactualization of Platonism in Western Philosophy of the XV Century (on the Example of In Calumniatorem Platonis by Basilios Bessarion)

 

Natalia Gulyaeva (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia)

Two Transformations of Russian Advertisement Posters during the first thirty years of the XX century

 

Irina Busurkina (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia)

Phenomenon of Being a Fool for God’s Sake in Russian Culture of XVII-XX Centuries: Deactualization in Public Practice and Reactualization in Literature

 

15-30 - 18-30

Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU

(room 108, 5 Mendeleevskaya Liniya)

Without simultaneous translation

Session 11.  Museum Practices of Deactualization and Reactualization

 (Chair - Dr. Boris Bigun (European University Viadrina, Germany))

 

Alexei Malinov (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia)

Borders of Cultural and Philosophical Ages: Problems of Distinctness

 

Ksenya Surikova (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia)

Museum Narrative as a form of Cultural Exclusion

 

Ivan Grinko(Center for museum research and projecting (Russian Institute for heritage research); Non-profit partnership “The center for study and popularization world cultures «Ethnology project», Russia)

“Museum” Borders and National Identities

 

Eugeny Makovetsky (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia)

Museum: Ideological and Rhetorical Analysis of Cultural exclusion Zones

 

Elena Drobysheva (Vaganova Ballet Academy, Russia)

Axiology of Memory: Contemporary Transformations

 

 

19-00 - 22-00

Conference Closing. Closing Address

Boat Trip along the Neva River

(by invitation)


 

                       

4th Day

(October 24th, 2016)

The Faculty of Philology, SPSU

Room 190, 11 Universitetskaya emb.

  

 

17-30

OPEN LECTURE

 

Jewish Writers in Nazi Germany - Forgotten Chapter from the Histories of German Literature (in German)

 

(Dr. Prof. Kerstin Schoor)


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EVENTS

 


Round Table “Made in Italy: Cultural Exclusion or Common Memory?”

 


Sociological institute, Russian Academy of Sciences
 Research Center for Cultural Exclusion and Borderland Areas

 

Saint Petersburg State University

Institute of Philosophy

Department of Russian Philosophy and Culture

Labont (University of Turin)

Italian Unstitute of Culture, Saint-Petersburg                                                        (L’Istituto Italiano di Cultura a San Pietroburgo)

 

in the framework of the


Third International Research Conference

Mechanisms for Formation of Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones-2016

October 20–22, 2016

 

Week of Italian Culture “Italian Language and Creativity. Brands, design, fashion”


 

are pleased to announce

InstituteofPhilosophy, SPbSU

(room 108, 5 Mendeleevskaya Liniya)

 

Round Table

Made in Italy: identity exclusion or common memory?

WORKING LANGUAGES: Italian, Russian

 

Interdisciplinary Round table will gather scholars, post-graduates, and students from Italy, Russia, and other countries. Participants of the Round table are going to discuss academic themes of such cultural and philosophical phenomena as Italian patterns, identity, and exclusion on the example “Made in Italy”, which has already become known throughout the world as a phenomenon of scholarly comprehension, university academic program, and, of course, as an important expression of Italian collective memory.

Among the participants of the Round table are: Prof. Tiziana Andina (Turin University) and Dr. Redenta Maffetone (Italian Unstitute of Culture, Saint-Petersburg) with welcoming speech and preliminary remarks on the theme of discussion, professors of the SPbSU, and other speakers, who will present their ideas on the contemporary state and history of the phenomenon, its actualization and reactualization, role of fashion and design in the transparency of cultural borders, and post-traumatic renovation. Zh. V. Nikolaeva and K. Ocheretyanny (SPbSU) will make an attempt to consider fashion for Italy as a phenomenon, which has been ensuring the overcoming of cultural exclusion; E. G. Sokolov will present Italian Gifts to Post-Modern; Dr. Leila Tavi from the University Rome-3 will present interesting Italian cultural start-up, namely “Fashion for Theater”; A. Troitckaya (SPbSU) will demonstrate Ideals of Italian Renaissance through the eyes of emigrant artist; A. V. Smirnov (SPbSU) has prepared a paper about the influence of Italian design on the Soviet consumer culture in the 1960-1970s; this theme is closely connected with Lenka Naldonjeva (University of Ostrava, Czech Republic) study on Gianni Rodari and children’s creativity in the Soviet Union. Fabio Papa, one of the founders of Master’s Program “Made in Italy” in the University LIUC (Italy), will tell us how “Made in Italy” has become an academic discipline.

 


Tiziana Andina (Turin University, Italy)

Intriduction

 

Zhanna Nikolaeva (Institute of Philosophy SPbSU, Russia)

Konstantin A. Ocheretyanny (Saint-Petersburg State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Russia)

Fashion for Italy: Overcoming of Cultural Exclusion

 

Anna Troitckaya (Institute of Philosophy SPbSU, Russia)

Ideals of the Italian Renaissance through the eyes of Emigrant Artist. Works of Giulio Clovio, a Croat and an Italian

 

Eugeny Sokolov (Institute of Philosophy SPbSU, Russia)

Post-Modern: Italian Gifts

 

Leila Tavi (University Rome-3, Italy)

FASHION FOR THE THEATRE. The first start-up that combines the high Italian fashion to the international stage

 

Alexei Smirnov (Institute of Philosophy SPbSU, Russia)

Influence of Italian Design on Soviet Consumer Culture of the 1960-1970s

 

Lenka Naldoniova (University of Ostrava, Czech Republic)

Gianni Rodari and children’s creativity in the Soviet Union

 

Fabio Papa (University LIUC, Italy)

“Made in Italy” in Italian Universities

 

 


LECTURE

Jewish Writers in Nazi Germany - Forgotten Chapter from the Histories of German Literature (in German)

 

(Dr. Prof. Kerstin Schoor)

 

 

October 24th, 2016

17-30

The Faculty of Philology, SPSU

Room 190, 11 Universitetskaya emb

 

 

Kerstin Schoor, Prof. Dr., Chair of Axel Springer Endowed Chair for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History, Exile and Migration (European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder), Director of the Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg

 

As a center of culture and literature in the period of the Weimar Republic and later a capital of Nazional Socialist State, after 1933 Berlin became the most important center of “Jewish” culture in Germany. Here from 1933 to 1945 lived about 1000 writers, scientists, artists, and intellectuals, in that or another sense involved into literary life of German Jews. It is enough to list such names as Gertrud Kolmar or Franz Hessel, Ernst Blass, Ludwig Meidner or Leo Hirsh, Mascha Kaléko, Kurt Pinthus, Arthur Elesser, Karl Escher, Meta Samson, Hilda Marx, Arno Nadel, Herbert Friedenthal (Freeden) or Max Samter; these are the representatives of many other people, who couldn’t or didn’t want (at least at the beginning) to emigrate from Germany.

In her lecture Kerstin Schoor drives attention to the question about the ways to express collective experience of failed emancipation and increasing external danger employed in the literary texts of the time. Besides, she is also interested in the extent to which it is possible to interpret cultural, political, and aesthetic manifestations by writes and intellectuals of Jewish origin in the period of rapid National Socialist Gleichschaltung of German cultural life as an expression of spiritual resistance, which in some cases could, probably, go beyond the will for self-fulfillment (in the sense of the gain of individual internal will at the face of external repressions and the threat of physical destruction) and be manifested also through the rejection of imposed by National Socialistic cultural policy principle of isolation (i. e. self-withdrawal from the culture of Europe and the whole world, and thus - from the century-old spiritual humanistic tradition).


 


 

 

 

 

 

 

SUMMARIES


 

Sergey Troitskiy(Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Zones of Cultural Exclusion and Construction of Topographic Hierarchy

The paper examines the connection between the formation of collective body and collective involvement into a loss (negative - trauma and positive - sacrifice). The formation of collective body results in the shaping of limits, which can acquire the character of state borders or the borders of social communities. At the same time, social communities are arranged in accordance with the views of the distribution of power, the need for center and marginalia, or the lack of aforesaid need.

 

Tiziana Andina (University of Turin, Italy) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

States and Transgenerational Actions

One of the most compelling problems for contemporary social ontology is the question of the nature of State. Is that of the State simply a fictional concept, that is an invention used by people to organize and regularize their own social practise or, otherwise, it is a real entity must to be included by scholars in their social ontology?

The question is challenging from the ontological point of view because it seems difficult to reduce the state to some kind of material entity. Geopolitics includes numerous examples of states that, in the course of their history, have redefined their geographical boundaries. It follows that the state is not reducible to its geo-political boundaries, because it exists or can continue to exist even if those limits vary compared to its original composition. The same can be said for the people who comprise and legitimize it, whatever that means: in fact, the state is defined by the essential property of durability. It follows that a state cannot be identified with the people who brought it into being. That being the case, it is natural to ask a fundamental question: what is a state?

 

Natalia Artemenko(Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Cataleptic Consciousness / Post-Traumatic Subject

In the last part of “Negative Dialectic” (”After Auschwitz”) Theodor Adorno questions the possibility of poetry after Auschwitz and says: “…it may have been wrong to say that poetry could not be written after Auschwitz. What is not wrong however is the less cultural question of whether it is even permissible for someone who accidentally escaped and by all rights ought to have been murdered, to go on living after Auschwitz”. What, however, is this after, this further? How can we speak of this after? It seems that this time cannot fit into any structure: it is not a chronological space of time - the past, the present, the future; it is not an ecstatic minute: there is no connection with running ahead, a minute from the future or the throwness into the past. But it resembles bullet-time. It is time without time, it is post-catastrophic time, which literally stops all other times. Post-catastrophic landscape is desolated and return to us in its non-comfortableness. Autonomy of I-subject is under the threat. This innermost experience of a catastrophic event with its monstrosity and incredibility paves the way for cataleptic consciousness, which practices oblivion and shapes a very special subject. This subject is a product of the flight from unbearable situation of the world falling apart (moreover, it is impossible to find a remedy here, as the world lacks assemblage point and any grounds for rebuilding). This subject is not the Great Transcendental Observer any more. It is not independent and neutral. Quite the contrary, the trauma itself cogitates on the subject. A neutral observer cannot get into the trauma, into the emptiness, which is essence of this time, this after. It is the time when decision-to-live-after is impossible. The loss of teleological faith into wholeness of the world means that separate pages cannot be brought together into the single text of the truth, and the “loss” itself becomes the “characteristic feature of our time”. Inability to write becomes the leitmotif in literature (along with and slightly before philosophy): It has already been so for Mallarmé. The limits of thought comprise subject matter for the thought itself. The thought faces something, which appears to be its own limit: the limit of thought, thinking about unthinkable. Within the intervals of its language literature unlocks the voids, which provide contemporary philosophy with the material for its valiant epitaphs, justifying the existence of human-subject, forever abandoned by all gods… Forgotten is unforgettable: here is the slogan of the after. Unforgettable isn’t forgotten as we can forget only things that we have experienced. Inability to forget coexists with the strongest traumatic effect of unexperienced: memory is nagging, it requires anesthesia and levelling of the pain, it moves traumatic experience further and further away, represses it to the back of mind, to the space of oblivion. Nietzsche says that ‘I don’t remember’ means ‘I am not responsible’. Post-traumatic subject, living within the after, is crucified between the constant pain, whose source is always on her mind, and the power of oblivion, comprising her defense. Impossibility to choose makes this subject - i. e. us - equal to a madman.

 

Alexander Brodsky (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Eros of Transfigured Logos. Logic and Sexuality in Formation of Cultural Exclusion Zones

The paper asserts that logic and sexuality are the phenomena, which actually unite people notwithstanding any racial and cultural barriers: all the people employ the same formal logical operations in their cognitive process, and all the people can cross with each other and produce fertile offsprings. All other characteristics, such as anthropological features, language, religious beliefs, customs, morals etc., divide us. Therefore in the periods of the formation of national identity logic and sexuality are to a certain extent repressed. And the mechanisms of such a repression resemble each other.

Logical structure of thought and human libido are equally absolute and unconditional. Absolute and unconditional character of logic is ensured by its formality and autonomy from the contents of thought: it is well known that logic doesn’t depend on either meaning of words or object of cognition. Absolute and unconditional character of libido is ensured by its initial indifference: as Freud has demonstrated, child sexuality initially isn’t fixed on any particular object and isn’t connected with any particular organ. Psychoanalysis has made us to know that formation of individual conscience depends on the fixation of libido on some particular object and, consequently, the repression of all the other potential objects. Referring to the history of national cultures, we shall see that formation of their meanings and categories is nothing else than the process, in which formal structures of thought are filled with some specific content, or rather the process, connecting variable propositional functions with some specific referents (and that results in repression of all the other possible referents). Sexual and psychological fixation of object resembles this “filling” of formal and logical structures with specific content.

On the examples drawn from Russian history the paper demonstrates that the periods of the formation of new national identity image are always accompanied by some persecution of logic and tightening of control over the forms of sexual behavior.

 

Tiziana Andina (University of Turin, Italy).Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.;  homepage: www.labont.it/andina.

INTRODUCTION

When we talk aboutМade in Italy we are not referring only to a brand. Rather the made in Italy expresses a constellation of meanings wide, and hardly circumscribed, which captures a vision of the world and a way of life. There are some central pillars of this constellation, which correspond to some typical characteristics for which Italy stands out in the world. It is essentially the art (and all of its derivatives ranging from fashion, to design, to the care of the landscape), cultural heritage (and their integration in a plan of economic and cultural development) and food (in general, the reference is now to the entire sector of food and wine). If we find the common thread that unites the various sectors of the made in Italy we can certainly say that Italy has always expressed the taste and the search in favour of the quality of life, the beauty of the places, of the landscapes, and beautifully expressed by our art), and of the pleasure experienced as a total size. In this framework, the challenges that the made in Italy today before they are essentially two: in the first place, to promote a cultural integration, the true, that is at the same time, integration and contamination with different cultures, and the second is that, not less important, to promote technical development and sustainable industrial able to overcome the temptations of conservatism often evident in many sectors of our society.

 

Zhanna. Nikolaeva (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia), Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Konstantin Ocheretianniy (Saint-Petersburg State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Russia),Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Italy in Trend: Overcoming of Cultural Exclusion

The results of this study are based on the reflection, which takes as its object the phenomena of exclusion and re-actualization, connected with the historical process of restoration of identification self-respect.  “The European and world scenario” has been radically changed after the World War II. The gap in the Italian culture identification code has been eliminated through the adoption of the informational potential of new media discourse. After its identity as a potential political superpower failed, Italy revived in the media discourse as a “fashion” superpower, as an unobtainable object of desire. Notwithstanding apparent heterogeneity of goals, Italy indeed rapidly created a “cultural moment” (Antonio Gramsci), which has allowed Italian patterns to step outside the national borders and to overcome its cultural exclusion. Since then, for more than five decades, these patterns has been developing Italian symbolic capital, constructing new mythology, and influencing collective memory. The authors drive attention to three aspects of this process: the role of fashion for Italy in the processes of identification re-inclusion; the power of corporeality in the philosophy of everyday life; the embodiment or exclusion of tradition in the social and cultural sphere.

 

Anna Troitskaya(Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia), Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Ideals of the Italian Renaissance through the eyes of Emigrant Artist. Works of Giulio Clovio, a Croat and an Italian

Non-Italian artist Giulio Clovio, an author of the luxurious illustrated Book of Hours commissioned by Alessandro Farnese, managed to implement in his works all the main artistic principles, typical for Italian art of the Late Renaissance. Artistic method of this Clovio, born in Croatia and brought up in one of Croatian cloisters, was shaped during his apprenticeship under Giulio Romano and independent studies of the achievements of the High Renaissance. It is not coincidence that his works won Vasari’s admiration; the latter even called Giulio Clovio “a minor and new Michelangelo”. Miniaturist Clovio adopted the artistic manner of the leading Italian artists and subtly translated it to the language of illustration, combining principles and ideas of the Italian art of the XVI century with the traditions of Medieval illuminated manuscripts.

 

Eugeny Sokolov (Institute of Philosophy SPbSU, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Post-Modern: Italian Gifts

It is well known that Postmodern plays the “exclusion zones”, drives attention to them, and weaves on the surface of sense the exotically decorated “innovation”. It doesn’t matter, whichever power or group has initiated this technology of the arrangement of cultural actuality. What is more important, it is other orders, and first of all sign and symbolic. The introduced primary substrate is even more important. First of all it concerns the patterns of inheritance. Here Italy, not being a formal discoverer, can be equally formally reputed as the privileged postmodernist space, which for many centuries naturally, and not artificially, demonstrates continuing polytextuality of cultural complexes.

 

Leila Tavi (Roma Tre University), Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Fashion for Theater: The first start-up that combines the high Italian fashion to the international stage.

This paper presents the results of an interesting project of which I was the creative director and who has united for the first time the inspiration of the couturier of Italian with the pathos that only a stage can convey. Born from the idea of a young fashion blogger Giuseppe Giulio, the event took place in Viterbo, in the months of September and October 2016, as a special project of the international Theatre Festival "District of Art". The project takes the format of a Fashion For the Arts, an eventorganized in Fiuggi in the summer of 2015, within the store Benetton, an Italian artist, Liliana Comes, he starred in an extemporary fashion Benetton with his sketches and drawings.

With the Fashion For Theatre, however, designers of high-fashion Italian and foreign interacted with the live performances by the programming of the Festival, the "district of Art" in various ways: in some cases, the outfits of the fashion designer, is joined in the scene by changing the course and direction, in still others with the voice of an actress who has accompanied fashion shows and reading passages, or the theater was the set of the fashion shoot, or finally, in the more traditional way, the designer has created the sketches for the costumes of a show. For this first edition of 2016 I chose the title of "Masque of Beauty", inspired by the masques of Ben Jonson, whose poetic structure was made of harmonic proportions tracing ideally, an architectural form. Another source of inspiration were the fashion-play, which were the result of the controversial report that the company's late-victorian first and edwardian then she had with fashion. It is a long partnership between designers and also the theatre in more recent history, as evidenced by the many illustrious names, among which we wouldlike to mention two masters of the Made in Italy, Armani and Versace.

In the essay we will analyze not only the artistic aspects of the project, but the system design and how it has been possible to allocate funds to start-up in just two months of pre-production.

 

  1. (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia), Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Influence of Italian Design on Soviet Consumer Culture of the 1960-1970s

The paper analyzes an impact of Italian goods, the world-known masterpieces of design, on consumer culture of the Soviet Union. The speaker has chosen two foreign industrial products, which were replicated by the Soviet industry: automobile “Zaporozhets” ZAZ-965 (FIAT-500) and motorscooter “Vyatka” (Vespa). In the peculiar conditions of the USSR these goods were meant for an absolutely new target-group and made a specific impact on the development of automobilization in the country, providing Italian designers with the opportunity to employ their creative potential to a new object environment. The paper examines cultural role of these industrial products in the circumstances of the Soviet system of production, distribution, and consumption. This role was to a great extent determined by the characteristic for the Soviet culture gender stereotypes pertaining to the use of motor transport. The speaker has also revealed the reasons for different attitude of Soviet consumers to these goods.

 

Lenka Naldoniova (University of Ostrava,Czech Republic), Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Gianni Rodari and children's creativity in the Soviet Union

In 1979 Gianni Rodari undertook a journey in Russia to discover how they lived, played and studied the Russian children. The trip was part of a project that included the publication of a book with the title "Games nellUrss". Because of his death have been published only a few notes of the journey, and from them shines out the method of work of Rodari already exposed in his only book theoretical "Grammar of fantasy". Rodari was convinced that, next to logic, teachers should develop in children the imagination, as it is the fundamental basis of the creative capacity of the human being. The russians were particularly sensitive to the ideas of Gianni Rodari, and it was precisely in Russia, where Rodari claimed success even before that in Italy.

 

Fabio Papa (the Institute of Applied Economic Research (Varese, Italia); LIUC University Cattaneo), Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Made in Italy” in the Italian universities

The main objective of this paper consists in elaborating an accurateoverviewof the Made in Italy’s concept, in order to examine in depth the existing linkages between the phenomenon and theItalian universities’ network.

Certainly, in spite of numerous debates and disputes, “Made in Italy” is still considered by various experts and academics as anessential assetfor futuregrowthandsustainabilityof Italian economy. This unique phenomenon is defined as aquality labelof most successful Italian enterprises. Consequently, the term “Made in Italy” is often aguarantee of quality, efficiency and reliability, not only at a national level but also (and especially) at a global level.

Moreover, as it is carefully explained in the paper, this phenomenon is absolutely relevant and consistent, proved by the fact that it covers a key role in the Italian economy. Indeed, it is able to contribute at the creation of¼ of the total Gross Domestic Product (GDP).In more detail, there are four main sectors in which Italian firms tend to excel (nationally and globally), known in the Italian language with the acronym of “4 A”:Clothing, Food and wine, Furniture and Automation.

After a preliminary phase of academic-statistical review of the concept, the author deepen the analysis trying to comprehend the real contribution given byItalian universitiesto the growth and the reinforcement of the dynamics at the base of the excellence and the success of “Made in Italy” all over the world. Therefore, this document presents an accuratemappingof the Italian academic institutions, with the aim of highlighting their effort in providingbachelor and master degrees,specific paths and executive masters(fashion, food, etc.) focused on the above mentioned theme.

Concluding, this paper offers to the reader an exhaustive and well-structured overview of the Made in Italy’s concept, pointing out future potentialities and analysing the actual commitment of the main Italian universities in promoting this “guarantee label”, supporting its growth through the formation of future managers, entrepreneurs, etc.

 

  1. (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Topology of Generational Memory in Zones of Cultural and Historical Frontier

The concept of cultural memory fixes inevitable topological character of our memories and the space of memory itself. Concepts of social and collective memory resemble each other. Dependence of a person and its life on the communal world (social world, according to Halbwachs, and the world of culture, according to Assmann) is their essential and starting point. We should note another dependence: the perception of the world unfolds out of the point/location of I. This direction of “gaze” is associated with the moments of “my” self-construction and constitution of the world (within this gaze), embracing the same world. The further development of the concept of cultural memory is possible within the discovery of connection between the topoi of individual and collective memory. This connection corresponds with the connection between autobiographic and historical memory, which leads us to the studies on the mnemotopoi of generational memory. What are the circumstances of their functioning in the processes of remembering/oblivion?

In the biographical space we can relate this moment of actualization to the need/necessity for self-understanding and understanding as a possibility to stay a human being, performing actions and making decisions. Introducing a concept of the “landscape” world of biography, the speaker studies a process of formation of generational biography and mnemotopoi, which define preservation and translation of the image of a generation in the cultural memory.

Such a “rootedness” in memory is defined by the “topological”character of memory. We literally live our life through, not only obtaining places of living but also securing the past in the mnemotopoi of our memory. The speaker tries to prove her theoretical theses empirically, analyzing the material of field studies.

German Bokov(Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Youth Subcultures in within Zones of Cultural Exclusion and Frontier: Transformation of Identity (From Utopianism of Counterculture to Eschatology of Contemporary Industrial Subcultures)

Contemporary youth subcultures is a phenomenon produced by urbanization. Their rise, spread, and variability in the last decades was (among other reasons) connected with the growth of megalopolises. However, theoreticians, belonging to youth counterculture, initially found the sinister image of “technocracy” in industrialization. In the 1960s the leaders of this movement often urge their peers to leave big cities and/or open up new spaces, “converse” them, and create new cultural areal.

In the USA the rise of counter-cultural movement occurred simultaneously with the social and philosophical conceptions of transition from industrial to post-industrial society. It was in the end of the 1960s, when new social utopias became especially popular. However, during the next decades mystical and chiliastical expectations of counter-cultural youth have been emasculated, and its eschatology has become full of industrial themes borrowed from punk and post-punk culture. New forms of self-expression were connected both to new models of youth subcultural identity and to the development of the practices of appropriation/opening up of abandoned city territories (e. g., squatting) and other zones (e. g., cemeteries) and excluded spaces (e. g., places of industrial disasters).

Nowadays some “abandoned in the past” industrial, military, scientific, or social facilities, which for different reasons have fallen out the sight of the authorities and ordinary city-dwellers, are actively appropriated by young people involved into “urban exploration”. (It is a common phenomenon in the USA, European countries, and especially on the territory of the former USSR in the 1990s and in some Asian countries.) Unlike the representatives of “industrial subcultures” (including various post-punk movements), different subcultures of “urban exploration” are characterized by their “careful” attitude and special “attention” to the zones of abandonment and exclusion (”zabroshki”).

However, in spite of important differences between various contemporary youth subcultural communities, drawn towards industrial themes (and, first of all, these two movements, namely “explorers” and “vandals”), all of them are characterized by specific eschatology of industrial disasters and fictional anti-utopias. New stalkers and diggers perceive in the images of forlorn and abandoned territories the same “traces” of the big cities’ “death” and wait for the same “day of judgment” for the industrial civilization, as cyber-goths and industrial do.

The main body of the current study was prepared in 2014 within the framework of research project “About the abandoned (Youth subculture practices of appropriation/opening up of abandoned city territories)” with the financial support of the RHF (Project # 14-03-00683a). During the work on the project different methods (including quantitative and qualitative sociological methods) were employed.

 

Maria Gracheva (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Border-forming Factors of Childhood Ethos in Contemporary Society

Childhood Culture - is a very special layer of culture of any society, reflecting the period of formation and establishment of human personality. From the point of view of moral consciousness, childhood culture is expressed through the peculiar to each society set of norms, rules and principles, which express a society’s view of the contents and limits of the world of childhood. All this forms the ethos of childhood.

Generally accepted that the interest to childhood arises quite late - only in the age of Enlightenment, but it is probably possible to reveal boundaries of childhood even in archaic structures. Childhood culture is also clearly manifested in ancient educational tradition. Therefore, speaking of the late interest to the world of childhood, we refer to the European tradition and culture (it is rather late even from the point of view of the development of the traditional society).

Speaking of the boundaries of childhood we mean frameworks which define the beginning and the end of this stage in human life. Examining the attitude to the boundaries of childhood in the archaic structure and in the structure of modern society, we shall see quite an interesting trend, connected exactly with the "end of childhood." There is a stereotype that the traditional society tends to oversimplify these rituals turning them into the simple physiological maturation. However, archaic rites of passage in archaic societies sometimes can be performed more than once; that is, a child may fail to enhance her status, and the action will be repeated until she gains enough social and moral maturity to complete the ritual. In the modern society, where childhood seems to be an important period, these practices are generally relate to person’s legal status, and thus the "end of childhood" acquires much more biological character.

In the paper will be considered the problem of legal universalization of the boundaries of childhood, as well as relation of the ethos of childhood and axiological space, and the problem of infantilization of future generations through the loss of the ethos of childhood.

 

  1. (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Forgotten Soviet Past. Memory of the Past in Post-Soviet Russia

Nowadays Russia has a specific attitude to the past. On the one hand, it is regarded exactly as the past of our country; on the other, it may seem not only gone, but also rejected. Specific character of the contemporary state of Russian culture deprives it of its own recent past. The past comprising fashionable and appropriate subject matter is the past of other country and other culture. Continuity of historical and cultural memory, transited from the representatives of the Soviet generations to a Post-Soviet generation, is broken. The past of our country has to exist not in the natural and corresponding to the laws of cultural delivery form; quite the contrary, it is reconstructed by the whole range of discursive mechanisms. The first Post-Soviet years substantially broadened the sphere of cultural memory, providing for the regression of the whole areas of the Soviet past from the space of oblivion/unconscious. Thus the forgotten history has been reconstructed. The memories about everyday life didn’t have any need for reconstruction, as the impressions of the Soviet way of life were more than fresh. Nowadays  we face absolutely different situation: the Soviet past has become a set of excellently appropriated “memory spaces”, and beyond their borders lies the more and more forgotten space of “insignificant” historical events. However, the boundary between the Soviet and the Post-Soviet is defined not only by the attitude to the historical facts. No less important is the situation of the change of cultural background, the network of events, relations and interconnections, which comprise our everyday life. The awareness of the cultural background, which defined the life of the Soviet country, can substantially change views of Post-Soviet generations even pertaining to seemingly immutable “memory spaces”, comprising the history of our country. The paper is devoted to the problem of the awareness of cultural background of the Soviet past and its possible influence on the emerging interpretation of the Soviet history.

 

Konstantin Ocheretyanny (Saint-Petersburg State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Human Body is an Exclusion Zone

According to the definition given by philosophical anthropology, a human being differs from all other creatures not because of some vague inner sense of “self” (which can be found even in plants) and even not because of conscience, but because of her unique eccentric positionality. Other creatures are “centric” (i. e. a center of their organic body is at the same time their essential center), and they are rooted in the natural world. Human being is positionally eccentric, as a center of her organic body isn’t the heart of her very essence. A human being isn’t rooted in nature (as actual existence), she is a martyr of culture, who faces the horizon of undifferentiated possibilities. Animals fit into their bodies ideally: they belong to the order of nature and thus in many respects they are only their bodies, somatic automatons. Denaturalized and chronically open for semiosis, a human being is not so enclosed in a body as appropriate it as a sum of available techniques and methods of orientation in the world. Animal body is prison, human body is utopia, as it is just loaned and obtains its complete image in the models of symbolization, provided by culture. The contemporary Western world, which has invested its crucial meanings into the digital media-reality, has long ago “digitalized” body, transferring it to the sphere of imagination. Replicated by the digital media, images make human bodies their home, but imaginative colonialism isn’t just a contemporary phenomenon. A human being depended on the bodily techniques, transmitted through semiotic and iconic channels of culture, long before the monopolization of these channels by the new media. Given that can physical human body be just a playground, where symbolical models of corporeality are struggling with each other? Can its history be a history of repression, devastation, oblivion of once dominant bodily techniques? Then, by the analogy with the existence of rudimentary organs of physical body, we can assume the existence of rudimentary meanings in its symbolical dimension. They can be identify with the help of separate elements, which ones comprised complexes of actual bodily techniques (instrumental and communicative skills) and nowadays are preserved in a “doze mode”; they have changed the orientation of their meanings and have become absolutely impenetrable. Symbolical archeology of body as a new theoretical guideline could help us to reconstruct repressed images and signs, which circulated in the space of culturally stigmatized body, to reveal alternative styles of perception, and to rehabilitate previously depreciated models of desire, using these preserved “deactivated” elements (the remains of the chain of symbols and meanings). The paper considers issues of the origins of somatic exclusion in culture and the conditions of possible reconstruction of lost “standards” of corporeality.

 

  1. (Kiev, Ukraine / Gomel, Belarus / Berlin, Germany), Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

“Doomed to be Meat”. Human Medical Experiments as Apophasis and Metaphor (“Flying dogs” by Marcel Beyer and “Alindarka's Kids” by Alhierd Baharevich)

Topos of human medical experiments belongs to the cultural (and, in particular, literary) topoi, which have been functioning as discursive exclusion zones almost since the moment of their emergence. At the turn of the XX century this topos enters the repertoire of science fiction and thriller as a marginal excess of the culture of Modern, existing on the crossroads of historical experience of vivisections in the period of the Renaissance and experiments performed on condemned criminals during the Enlightenment, fictional discourse of a “new man” and obvious progress in the field of medicine (especially surgery) in the second half of the XIX - the beginning of the XX century, which resulted in substantial enlargement of an arsenal of the medical methods available to a doctor and allowing him to interfere in the bodily and mental existence of his patient, who is described in the terms of pathology. Narratives and strategies of legitimation, aiming to the construction of the image of der entseelte Patient (A. Bergman), were given a trial run in the sphere of fiction and during the 1920-1930s were applied liberally in the National Socialist discourse of “collective patient”, whose wellbeing legitimates crime against an individual. This discourse was also directly implemented in Nazi concentration camps. In the post-war literature (not only German) corresponding experience functioned as an invisible background for almost any discussion of medicine and human being, medical experiments, and instrumentalization of a patient as a “body”, “subject matter”, or “meat” but has never formed literary topos comparable with related topoi of torture or disciplinary practices employed in concentration camps. In the rare texts, where human medical experiments performed in the times of National Socialism become a subject of detailed thematization, descriptions of extremal dehumanizing practices often illustrate some extraneous thesis. The dilemma apophasis vs. “metaphorization of events taking place in medical units” (K. Sabish) deepens even more in the texts of some authors, who (as Marcel Beyer and Alhierd Baharevich) represent the generation of “second-hand witnesses” (G. Hartman). They are not directly connected to the crimes of the 1930-1940s and therefore have to use as literary topos not only fictional pre-texts but also historical documents. This narrative strategy makes it easier to speak about suppressed events (this fact is illustrated by the substantial enlargement of the list of literary texts devoted to the problem); however, it also eliminates the last link between the world of survivors and the world of victims deprived of their voices (”deanimated”) and thus de facto turns their metaphorized sufferings into apophasis, ensuring the preservation of discursive “exclusion zones” of the age of Modern (and dispositions which have produced them) in postmodernist coordinates.

 

Vera Tripodi (University of Turin),Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.. Home page: http://labont.it/people/vera-tripodi

The Role of the Body in the Politics of Exclusion, Epistemic Injustice, and Prejudice

"In Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015), Judith Butler extends her concept of performativity to public assemblies. More specifically, she argues that public assemblies can be understood as embodied ways of coming together and explained in terms of plural forms of performative action. Also, rights of assembly imply – Butler underlines – the body, understood properly, in a collective and embodied sets of acts. According to this view, in taking to the streets to protest or assert certain kind of demands or to object to certain social conditions, people embody their resistance and their right to be heard.

But, how is it that we embody the right to be heard and be not culturally excluded? How is it that we constitute or fail to constitute ourselves as “we the people”? In my talk, I attempt to explore the link between Butler’s recent view about assemblies of physical bodies and the phenomenon of epistemic injustice in the sense articulated by Miranda Fricker (Epistemic injustice. Power and the ethics of knowing, 2007). The talk will be focusing on a particular aspect of public assemblies. By addressing the role of the body in politics in terms of epistemic injustice and unconscious bias, my aim is to show that the embodied ways of coming together are also related to mechanisms (sometimes unconscious) that make us to recognize or fail to recognize a group of people as trustworthy holder of knowledge or authority. Here is a more detailed layout of my argument.

The question of the role of the body in politics and in the practices of cultural exclusion seems to be connected, I argue, to the issue of unconscious bias because epistemic injustice often results from prejudices or stereotypes. According to Fricker, the epistemic injustice is testimonial when our credibility is downgraded (by prejudice, gender or race); and hermeneutical when, in trying to make sense of our social experiences, we are left at an unfair disadvantage by a void in the interpretative resources available in our community. This not only causes social or political harm, but also produces a form of epistemic harm and disadvantage. Fricker specifies that hermeneutical epistemic injustice is caused by a gap in collective interpretive resources of a community; for example, when a community cannot recognize a wrong suffered by its members because it does not have the means of interpretation to understand or see something as unfair. My conclusion is that to address the role of the body in politics means to address epistemic injustice, namely the issues of how social identity affects the way (consciously or unconsciously) we operate in social practice and we establish our credibility or come (or fail to come) to exercise authority."

 

Larisa Morina (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Psychological Aspects of Cultural Exclusion

In our opinion, characteristic features of the contemporary cultural world, which can be depicted as the space of intersection of different cultural and political strategies, makes discursive analytics the most appropriate method for its description. The paper focuses on the ideas of discursive psychology, which investigates mechanisms for construction of identities, stereotypes, and patterns of behavior in the contemporary world. M. Billig, J. Potter, M. Wetherell, and other representatives of this movement refuse to study abstract structures of personality and assert that in the contemporary culture subject is a discursive phenomenon.

Discursive psychology can provide studies of “cultural exclusion zones” with peculiar method of solution for the problem of repression, including the new concept of subconscious, which is defined as “dialogic unconscious”. While creating the field of discourse in culture (”the said”) we also create the field of non-discourse (”the unsaid”). In language practices some elements are repressed while others are legitimized within the frameworks of “hegemonic discourses”, transmitting established cultural norms. Thus, there are taboo on certain themes in society, and that makes speaker to choose one the available discourses and invest her efforts into it. Repression confirms some views of the world and excludes other ideas and, therefore, it has ideological consequences. That is why “dialogic unconscious” is produced as ideological phenomenon and endowed with such features as conditionality and discursive constructedness.

The next aspect of the analysis is associated with the concept of identity. Language is established as universal mechanism of cultural identification: discourse defines not only the mode of thinking but also our self. Therefore identity becomes a discursive product. To speak means to take the position of a subject and to obey the laws of discourse. That is what allows subject to become a representative of a specific cultural space.

Thus total authority of discourse not only includes all the patterns of behavior but also appropriates the deepest structures of personality: a subject is constructed as a wholly discursive phenomenon, produced in the language practices of the specific discursive situation. Within the framework of discursive studies psychology inevitably acquires political character and employs political vocabulary, as it shares common for all the elements of the discipline anti-essentialistic and constructionistic approach.

 

 

Elena Ivanova (Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University, Mental Health Research Center, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Borders of Jocosity and Jokes about Borders

Humor is essentially borderland phenomenon: it emerges on the borders of historical ages, cultures, collective and individual spaces. It allows to overcome borders, or, quite the contrary, to create a new ones. The speaker will discuss borders as the foundation of humor and the question of possibility (or impossibility) to violate these borders.

 

 

Ernesto C. Sferrazza Papa (University of Rijeka; University of Turin) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript..Homepage:http://labont.it/people/ernesto-calogero-sferrazza-papa

Walls, or the new nomos of the Earth

My talk aims to focus on the wall as a political and philosophical issue, and on the paradoxal dialectic between wall and border. Walls building, in an age of global political crisis, is a crucial argument. New walls increasingly striate global space, separating and dividing sovereign states. In the age of the loss of sovereignty, walls represent a political attempt to reappropriate state prerogatives. Therefore, I’d like to suggest that the wall can be considered as the “nomos” of the modern politics.

In my talk, I will develop two major topics:

$11.         An interstate wall is always constructed on a political border. However, the wall is the negation of the possible relation between two spaces: apparently, the only relation allowed is the exclusion. From an ontological point of view, the border is a social object that allows the connection between different statual entities. Walls and borders comply with different logics, but the former is the materialization of the latter. What are the political and ethical consequences of this paradoxal dialectic?

$12.         The wall is a spatial inscription of a complex relation of power. The architecture of the walls can fulfill at the same time sovereign, biopolitical and governmental logics. Therefore, walls are a real biopolitical laboratory, but their erection and functioning are grounded in a political and rethorical narrative which must be analyzed and deconstructed.

 

Timothy Tambassi (University of Bucharest; University of Eastern Piedmont),Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript. 

Below the Classifications of Geographical Boundaries. Ontology of Geography and Cultural Diversities

The concept of boundary represents one of the fundamental philosophical issues triggered and required by the reflection uponGeographyand, from a geo-ontological point of view, its relevance for the contemporary debate has been highlighted and studied by different authors. But what kinds of entities are geographical boundaries? What sorts of boundaries has been identified by contemporary ontologists of geography? How can boundaries be classified from an geo-ontological point of view? What are the main contemporary classifications of geographical boundaries? How can culture and human beliefs influence such classifications? These questions represents the starting point of this paper, aimed at analyzing how the notion of boundary has been figured out by contemporary ontologists of geography, what kinds of geographical boundaries have been identified and categorized, and the influence of cultural diversities and human beliefs on such geo-ontological classifications. Primarily, we will take into account the taxonomies of Smith and Galton, that represents two of the most cited examples of comprehensive classifications of geographical boundaries which encompass physical, biological, psychological, social, and political phenomena. Secondly, we will discuss the importance of cultural diversities and human beliefs for geo-ontological classification, starting from the considerations of Smith and Mark.

 

Vladimir Kagansky (Institute of Geography, RAS, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.  

Border and Transitional Zones: Counter-productive Neighbourship

Among various situations of neighbourship, boundaries, and border/transitional zones there are the situations of counter-productive neighbourship. In case of the zones of productive neighbourship we will see complexes and (which is far rarer situation) syntheses of the adjacent zones, mutual enrichment of their contents, enlargement of the list of opportunities; there will often be contact functions, production of new full-fledged and specific vital and cultural forms and environments, substantial fulfillment. These zones “weave” the fabric of reality together and, in general, play the role of stabilizers. For the zones of counter-productive neighbourship are, quite the contrary, characteristic not the complexes or syntheses of contents and forms of the adjacent zones, but “mutual annihilation”, steresis, rapid impoverishment, simplification, and destruction of forms, substantial counter-productive (and often lifeless) activity, gaps, function of aggressive barrier. Common solution for the situation of neighbourship ,producing these destructive zones, hasn’t yet been found. It seems, these zones are usually occur in the situations of dramatic contrasts, lack or narrowness of the diapason of conditions suitable for the sound co-existence of the adjacent elements, incompatibility (incommensurability) of the positions of neighbour zones. Strong dynamics and instability of neighbourship contribute to the formation of such zones. In general, destructive neighbourship is asymmetric in the circumstances of the substantial nonequivalence or legal inequality of the adjacent zones; there is no common ground and common partition with a certain border as one of its elements. If in the situation of neighbourship we can speak about values, they are incommensurable; demarcated space is anisotropic; compromise is unobtainable, and conflicting parties assess it negatively.

Zones of counter-productive neighbourship don’t generate resources (contents, meanings, values, forms, etc.), but only consume and destroy them. They dramatically destabilize their context (that, however, may result in evolutionary push). Destructive borderland and transitional zones form the environment and place of development of dynamic and aggressive communities (inferior communities of weeds in the field of Geo-botany, radical and marginal subcultures).

 

Daniil Anikin (Saratov State National Research University named after N. G. Chernyshevsky, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Cultural Memory in the Circumstances of Civilizational Frontier

The issue of spatial dimension of the past was introduced within the frameworks of French project of “memory space” by P. Nora, but its wording refers to the re-consideration of the nature of social phenomena. In this sense the spatial dimension of social memory implies not just metaphorical assimilation of the elements of collective memory by the specific spaces (topoi), but also employment of the existing categorical apparatus aiming to reveal the main characteristics of social memory, its structure as well as strategies of its transformation in the context of political, economical, and cultural reorganization.

Category of borderland is one of these spatial categories, which seeks to overcome the narrowness of substantialistic interpretations of space. Borderland can be regarded as the zone of cultural ambiguity and blending of different tracks of historical memory. These tracks cannot be clearly distinguished, but provide the grounds for variability and symbolic rivalry. Ambivalence of the borderland consists in the fact that symbolic border between “civilization” and “barbarity” is always reciprocal. In other words, any change of limits of civilized space (and first of all its aspiration for expansion) implies similar counteraction of the neighbour civilization. And the movement of political borders here doesn’t necessary mean any movement of symbolic borders, which define one or another geographically or historically localized event as belonging to a certain civilizational identity. This situation may lead to the production of cultural exclusion zones, emerging on the junction of political and cultural boundaries.

The results can be variable:

1. The coincidence of the symbolic and political boundaries signifies the most optimal way of their correlation, as it minimizes the possibility of conflicts over the appropriation of certain topoi of the past.

2. Deactualization of the past, i. e., blurring of the boundaries in which certain topoi of the past lose their legitimizing and identifying significance, falling out from the actualized memory of the communities, which intersect in the zone of civilizational borderland. This is possible if those communities for some reasons don’t consider it possible to include this historical event in their collective memory. As a result the event becomes another fact intriguing only research community of historians.

3. Reactualization of the past, i. e., misalignment of the symbolic and political boundaries, leading to the actualization of claims on a certain "memory space", which is symbolically significant for the adjacent communities. At the same time the desire for appropriation of the image of the past can take on many different forms - from the symbolic rivalry on the level of tourist merchandise to military operations aimed at the return or retention of sacralized topoi.

The problem of formation of exclusion zones in the cultural memory acquires particular importance in the contemporary decentralized world, where in the battle for the appropriation of the results of the World War II participate not only former opponents ("winners" and "losers" in the terminology of A. Assmann), but also the states, which have risen from the “shards” of the former Soviet empire. This fact makes us to rethink the new factor of symbolic boundary and analyze the trajectory of its displacement in the circumstances of the clash of different political preferences, economic interests, and cultural identities.

 

  1. (European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany), Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Remnants of Magen David: Cartography of the Vanished “Jewish Ukraine” in German Literature (End of the XX - Beginning of the XXI Century)

One of the crucial components of the representation of Ukrainian space in German literature has traditionally been the "Jewish Ukraine", which is connected with this literature not only through a common cultural heritage (going back to the days of the Habsburg Empire), but also through common historical traumas, and first of all through the Holocaust. The centuries-old isolation of Jewish settlements from their Slavic neighbours, as well as belonging of the "Jewish Ukraine" to the phantom Idishland, non-existent on the political maps and displaced from the dominant European cultural topography, and finally dramatic deformations caused by the persecution, mass murder, and emigration of Ukrainian Jews, led to the formation of basic parameters, defining the depiction of this cultural territory as an exclusion zone: marginalized, repressed, "shaded" or even "erased." Reconstruction of the vanished world of Ukrainian Jews and the search for its disappearing tracks form metaplot of fictional and non-fictional descriptions of the Ukraine in German literature. Taking as their starting point the works of predecessors, who in the first half of the XX century shaped the canonical narrative of the "yesterday" Jewish world on the Ukrainian territories, the contemporary authors find new ways to inscribe it into historical perspective and the Ukrainian geography after 1991. This experience, studied on the material of various works of Verena Dorn, Stefan Weidner, Lothar Bayer and Katya Petrovskaya, is in the focus of this paper.

 

Oksana Kozhemyakina(Cherkasy State Technological University, Ukraine) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Borders of Distrust in Socio-Cultural Space of Cultural Exclusion

Formation of social and cultural space of cultural exclusion as oblivion and replacement of the unwanted content of the social experience (ranging from uncomfortable, unrecognized, unpleasant to the increasingly threatening) occurs during the certain critical periods of the development of society, which can be caused by both external and internal factors. One of the most indicative factors of cultural exclusion is the destruction of existential need for security, which actualizes the totality of distrust into the contemporary society, including the parameters of identifying limits and axiological rejection in the generational interaction.

The socio-cultural determination of cultural exclusion is rather complex as it involves processes of anthropological-social-cultural-systemic organization of social existence, including the problems of identification, integration, and disintegration, legitimation, as well as indoctrination and manipulation.

The ontological dimension of the borders of cultural exclusion implies conceptualization of the zone of distrust as a category of cultural geometry, reflecting distrust radius, circles of social tension, and boundaries of acceptable experience, which is embodied on various levels of functioning of deactualized culture. The so-called "clinical terminology" allows us to describe the cultural exclusion in terms of the extent of public health/illness and cultural trauma. Conceptual prospects of "cultural trauma" as a collective experience, which has a devastating impact on memory, considerably increasing its vulnerability, allow to analyze the "traumatic" event-related causes of cultural exclusion, in their turn causing "distrust syndrome".

According to Piotr Sztompka, cultural trauma affects the very foundations of culture, reflecting the destructive consequences of axiological confrontation. Thus, the crisis interpretation of cultural trauma is entirely compatible with the cultural exclusion as inconsistent with core values, basis of identity, collective pride. Among the strategies to overcome cultural trauma they usually single out riot, traumatic acting,  imposition of new values, flight, etc., which to the effect turn into the mechanisms of the formation of cultural exclusion as a kind of cultural sealing, secrecy, social barriers, and rejection of anything which may become a threat (both real and fabricated).

This context actualizes the use of archetypes of border, borderland, cocoon, and wall, which can be explained as a demonstration of both defensive and demarcating functions of cultural exclusion. The latter is expressed through the following binary existentials: order - chaos, fullness - emptiness, security - threat, aesthetics - anti-aesthetics, creation - destruction, tranquility - alarm, openness - closeness, etc. These binary oppositions allow us to describe the dynamics of distrust as one of the mechanisms of the formation of cultural exclusion.

 

Elena Ovchinnikova (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Tatyana Bartashevich (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Integrative Potential of Public Morals in the Circumstances of Variating Moral Stereotypes of Cultural Frontier

Transition from a traditional society, which was characterized by the existence of a single moral pattern of individual behavior (where individual is understood as a social and collective subject of morality), to the information society, where we  more and more often face an isolated moral subject, involved in various social, economic, professional, and other relationships, results in the increase of moral factionalism and differentiation. This differentiation leads to the emergence and consolidation of moral stereotypes. One of the reasons for the emergence of moral stereotypes is the desire of an individual (or social group) to form some cultural identity and integrity and to compare herself with Other. We can identify two strategies of the formation of cultural identity: "intolerant" model of the perception of social and cultural reality (based on the principle  "I-Other-Alien-Enemy") and a model in which we can speak about a tolerant perception of different social and cultural reality (based on the principle of "I-Alien-Other").

Moral stereotypes are secured at different levels of moral consciousness (both social and individual): theoretical and practical, rational and emotional. In the mass consciousness stereotypes are constantly reproduced due to the rich content of social memory, which ensures their stability. Moral stereotyping have a significant influence on the formation (it becomes a factor in the formation) of the structural components of moral consciousness: moral norms of the principles, ideals, and values.

Conflicts, arising from the incompatibility of the different moral stereotypes, are one of the main sources of social tension, and, therefore, the most important task of modern ethics is the development of strategies to achieve moral consensus / to overcome the conflict of interpretations of variable moral stereotypes. The integrative potential of public morality will consist in the transition from a "I-Other-Alien-Enemy" strategy of identity formation to a "I-Alien-Other" strategy.

 

Boris Begun (European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany), Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

“In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up”: Heterotopias on the Break of Ideological Ages (Experience of Contemporary Russian and Ukrainian Literature)

In the context of the debate about the methods and terminology employed in the studies on cultural exclusion zones (S. Troitsky), the speaker suggests to consider the literary and artistic heterotopias as an indicator of the crisis of an ideological age. Such an approach, based on "Other spaces" by Michel Foucault, allows us to drive attention not so much to the search of specific heterotopias (colonies, gardens, brothels, and so on) in literary texts, but to the very principles of comprehension of spaces as heterotopias, where, according to the French scholar’s words, is "simultaneously [conducted] mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live".

Literary heterotopias establish the destruction of homogeneous social space. In the course of this destruction the utopian and realistic (pragmatic) principles, previously comprising a homogeneous unity, under pressure of repressed and suppressed ideas, conceptions, and aesthetic phenomena, which have returned to the culture, break up into confronting elements. The paper, based on the analysis of works by contemporary Russian and Ukrainian authors, investigates the relationship between heterotopias and utopias, as well as strategies for overcoming the binary models of the construction of artistic space.

 

Kerstin Schoor (European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg, Germany), Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript. 

Goethe” as a Paradigm of Cultural Exclusion and Search for Identity in Jewish Cultural Life in Nazi Germany

In the face of the politically motivated exclusion of Jewish artists and intellectuals from the cultural sector in Germany, their considerations on taking a new cultural and creative-aesthetic stance in Germany from 1933 on inevitably referred to Goethe and German classicism, posing the pivotal question as to their fundamental attitudes toward German, Jewish, and European culture. At the end of an emancipation process whose roots were closely connected with the ideas of the Enlightenment and classicism, the relationship of Jewish writers and artists to Goethe was once again up for debate, as was the relationship between German and Jewish culture as such. What different functions were performed by this “reflection” on Goethe in the process of communicative confrontation with an externally damaged identity of the German-Jewish minority in Nazi Germany is to be discussed in the lecture, above all, as an expression of linguistic actions in a specific historical and political context.

 

Denis Bugaev (Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography “Kunstkamera”, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Mechanism of Formation of Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones on the Example of Georgia in the second Half of the XVIII - first Half of the XIX Century

G. Agamben writes that “the sovereign power of the president is essentially grounded in the emergency linked to a state of war” [Agamben G. State of Exception. Tr. By K. Attell. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. P. 21]. In our opinion, in the second half of the XVIII - early XIX century for the Russian Empire Georgia was a zone of in many respects artificial frontier.

In its pure form the state of emergency originally implies a full transfer of power from the civil society to individual military commanders [Ibid: 4-5]. State of siege often emerges on the border of the spreading social system, on its frontier, which operates to limits of the spread of society in the geographical, legal, and informational sense. The limits of distribution of the emergency covers the most capable or well-regulated area, a place of an assembly for a new society. Its peripheral position is noteworthy: from 1805 to 1842 section "Georgia" was placed at the end of the list of territories along with areas which had marginal legal status: the land of the Don Cossacks, American Villages, Grand Duchy of Finland, Belostok Oblast, United Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, Bessarabia Oblast, Imereti, Executive Office of the Ural Cossack Host, and the Transcaucasia.

In the period from 1838 to 1917 there was a network of more than 100 religious and secular periodicals. There was the following pattern a periodical’s naming:

“Provincial / diocesan / army / district / regional + vedomosti + of N.”

At first Georgia was presented by the “Vedomosti of Tiflis” (1828-1830, 1831, 1832); then (and quite late) the second largest city of Georgia was covered (1887-1917) by the “Provincial Vedomosti of Kutaisi”. Georgia was deeply affected by the provincial reform conducted in the Russian Empire. It is no coincidence that at the same time the reference book “Caucasian Calendar” (1845-1917) and the private newspaper “The Caucasus” (1846-1918), which performed both governmental and educational functions, were published.

Internal religious isolation of the Georgian branch of the Orthodox church was reflected in the name of its official newspaper - “Spiritual Herald of the Georgian Exarchate” (1864-1907) - “The Georgian Exarchate’s Herald” (1907-1917). Both titles were notable for their difference from the main pattern of nomination, peculiar for this kind of periodicals (”Diocesan Vedomosti of N.”).

Thus, all the aforementioned evidences demonstrate unique (frontier) position of Georgia in common informational space of the Russian Empire.

 

Dmitry Kaunov (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Ideals of International Finno-Ugrian Ethnopolitical Movement and the Contemporary “Merya Renaissance” in the Upper Reaches of the Volga

In the 1990s, in the Finno-Ugric republics of the Russian Federation occurred a tendency for the revival of the ethnic past. The concept of the “Finno-Ugric world", inspired by Finland, Estonia, and Hungary, has been spread through the Russian “Finno-Ugric" republics and has become a part of the general trend for ethnocultural regionalization in the Post-Soviet era, expressed in reactualization of those elements of cultural memory, which were rejected for centuries. An imaginary community, based on the linguistic kinship, is intended to form a socio-cultural and ethno-political unity among the groups divided by objective physical obstacles. In this context an ideological worldview system of ethnofuturism (in the narrow sense of the word - artistic and aesthetic trend in regional literature and arts) has emerged. Its goal is to make an ethnic culture competitive.

In Russia under the influence of the "Finno-Ugric World" the tendency for the search of a new ethnic and cultural identity is also observable in the regions of intensive interaction between Finno-Ugric and Slavic cultures during the Middle Ages (especially on the territories of modern Vladimir, Ivanovo, Yaroslavl, and Kostroma regions). A paradigm, according to which the current inhabitants of these areas are ethnic and cultural heirs of the extinct Finno-Ugric tribe Merya, is formed among the individual representatives of the Russian population in the region (mainly coinciding with the territory of the historical region of Zalesie in-between the Volga and Oka rivers). Ethnofuturism as a way to preserve the regional heritage of the Finno-Ugric peoples is distributed in the communities of pseudo-Merya as a means of the so-called "Merya revitalism". It is accompanied by the actualization of cultural exclusion zones in these areas of intercultural frontier. But these "repressed" elements of cultural memory can also be invented, while research data pertaining to the region and its population are used as arguments for the confirmation of the chosen paradigm. It is possible to observe the formation of new alternative "Finno-Ugric" identity and cultural attitudes, adopted by the Russian inhabitants of the region, which eventually results in legitimization of the association with the "Finno-Ugric world".

The author aims to analyze the characteristic features of this modern regionalism in the "Russian" regions of Russian Federation, situated in the Upper Reaches of the Volga river, which is expressed through the design of the new "Merya" ethnic and cultural identity, as well as mechanisms of conception and dissemination of this contradictory phenomenon.

 

  1. (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Marginalization and Cultural Exclusion on the Fringes of Great Cities: Problem Statement

Marginalization and cultural exclusion in metropolitan peripheral zones and suburbs are the complex of social, economic and cultural problems known since ancient times. Interaction and optimization of the management of such social systems became the object of special interdisciplinary researches in the second half of the twentieth century. At the same time such methodological concepts were developed and tested to the remediation and enhancement of the environment habitat as the visual ecology, behavioral urbanism, gentrification, etc.

Obviously, the individual architectural decisions of recent decades show a high level of possibility of urban planning in developed countries, but the continuing situation of natural displacement of certain social groups, marginalized areas in the absence of coordinated action between the social, cultural and political institutions is talking about the lack of a comprehensive multidisciplinary assessment or incorrect development of specific programs to optimize social landscapes. The report includes an analysis of the genesis and the current state of the problem, and provides an overview of the main trends and directions of its solutions in the modern humanities.

 

Natalia Poznyak (Gomel, Belorussia)

To hide a City. Contemporary Belorussian Poetry in Coordinates of Urban Geography

The paper analyzes the main strategies for the appropriation of urban space by modern Belorussian authors. For a number of ideological and social reasons a city in post-war Belorussian literature is displaced to the periphery of the literary experience. Its image is apophatic and resembles "forgotten" areas, the background for action. The problem of self-identification of a Belorussian in urban space and vagueness of city boundaries were the subject of ardent literary and critical discussions during the "transition period" in the development of Belorussian literature (late 1980s - early 1990s).

Modern writers are trying to overcome the fragmentation and division of national identity between the poles of the urban and rural civilization. They construct and legitimize a national myth in the coordinates of urban geography and in accordance with the environment of a modern man existence. Starting from their local views of the cultural identity of urban topoi in various periods of historical time as well as the mobility of political and ethnic borders in the Eastern Europe, they describe cities as places, which constantly change their cultural identity, thus building up a model of a "borderland city". In the contemporary Belorussian poetry this model is usually based on the construction of the national myth, involving "appropriation" of urban space based on historical narratives and national institutions of authority. Along with "urban" creation of a nation, which is generally characteristic for the older generation of poets, there is a group of authors in contemporary Belorussian literature, who try to deconstruct national stereotypes and make the urban space multi-ethnic and multi-lingual territory. They aim at Belarussia’s legitimization as a borderland state situated "at a crossroads" between Europe and Russia.

Both aforementioned groups of writers overcome "cultural absence" of Belorussian city both by filling its space with the elements of everyday life, and through the reconsideration of the experience of Belorussian self-isolation and existence on the margins between the capitals of neighbour countries. The texts of modern Belorussian poets are full of longing for the lost town center (the capital), postulated as the prototype of the national culture. The search for such a center leads to the construction of a number of "capitals", defined on the basis of individual principles of specific authors and their regional affiliation. Thus, vague urban space in contemporary Belorussian poetry is turning into a cultural exclusion zone at the intersection of different, sometimes mutually exclusive urban narratives.

 

Natalia Dolotskaya (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Zones of Cultural Exclusion in the Context of the Policy of Globalization and Multiculturalism

The urgency of the issue of collision and interaction between cultures is confirmed by the trend towards globalization and the policy of multiculturalism. Culture as a set of codes, which provides for an opportunity to communicate, allows us to consider the norms and values ​​as a part of the sign system. From the viewpoint of culture relevance, this phenomenon is not homogeneous. Existing cultural exclusion zones form the basis of the contemporary culture despite their exclusion from an official discourse. Without the stratum of "excluded" phenomena, which cannot be comprehended by the participants of other the discourse, communication (in the strong meaning of the word implying an absolute acceptance of the otherness in the Other) is impossible.

The clash of cultures finds its most obvious manifestation in the phenomenon of migration. In the official political discourse an answer to this phenomenon is tolerance as a way of interacting within the frameworks of multiculturalism. In his "Multiculturalism: Examining The Politics of Recognition" Charles Taylor suggests a possible dualistic interpretation of this phenomenon from the point of view of universalism, which implies equality of all the cultures (equality policy), and also recognition of their fruitful diversity (policy of differentiations). Correlation between these approaches is possible thanks to acknowledgment of the value of each culture on condition that their co-existence is based on pluralism and tolerance. The concept of tolerance (in spite of the fact that etymologically it goes back to the Latin tolerantia - “tolerance”) nowadays isn’t translated verbatim. According to Slavoj Žižek, tolerance is a locus of indifference, where other people are not allowed to come close to us. Respect for differences (in A. Badiou’s opinion) is based on the original claim for the similarity between the other and myself (that is, the demand that other also should respect differences, acknowledged by myself).

 

Roman Zolotovitsky (Moscow, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

“Strange” Children Next Door, or How We are getting “Strange”

Is it possible to apply the concepts of physical and legal borders to the relations of individuals and groups? Are there any impermeable boundaries in human relations? In our country, feelings define social distances, and not vice versa. Exactly the same applies to social groups. And to understand feelings is important not only from the point of view of social communication, but also from the point of view of social security. If the feelings are described as "carriages" going from person to person and only in one direction, then the stable boundaries are possible. Moreover, such boundaries can be equally treated by both sides. Ideal situation for a diplomat! But it occurs rarely in everyday life. Relationships are always bilateral. And both sides are responsible for the feelings.

This "border" is drawn within a family, and when an autist is born (and they comprise 1.5% of all the children of the world!), it is impossible to shut yourself away from it. There will be resistance to acceptance, a desire not to stand out with such a child in the public place, especially when a child breaks the physical boundaries of others. Adults (and then children) believe autists to be mentally disable. Their strange behavior causes rejection. In schools and kindergartens teachers are trying to get rid of these children and transfer the responsibility to special-needs experts. The children are sent to a correctional schools or recognized as unteachable. They get used to the fact that no one accepts them, and that they cause negative feelings. At the same time these "outcasts" become the heroes of new myths ( "Indigo children")...

And we just do not know how to teach them (to heal them, too)! Since 2012, the Moscow school № 1465 has been conducting a successful experiment of inclusive education of children with autism, Down's syndrome, and cerebral spastic infantile paralysis. We don’t simply introduce (through behavioral analysis) these children to the regular classes, but also destroy the barriers built by culture, civilization, and negative attitudes. We have created the technology of mental, social, and informational conductivity around these children.

Borders are permeable.

 

Lada Shilnikova (Faculty of Sociology, SPbSU, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Structure and Practices: Heteronormativity and non-Heterosexual Women

This article is written in a spirit of critical sociology, whose main objective is to express the point of view of the oppressed social groups, which bear the seeds of a more just society. The article investigates the cultural experience of non-heterosexual women, which is often invisible behind the structure of heteronormativity. Cultural exclusion lies in the fact that women, who identify themselves as non-heterosexual, are marked as heterosexual in the public space. As a result, the isolation of cultural experience of non-heterosexual women gives rise to various social problems, based on homophobia.

Repression of cultural experience of non-heterosexual women caused by the fact that the dominant discourses, related to gender and sexuality, produce the subjects of desire, clearly establish the borders of sexual certainty (which are eventually controlled by the society), normalize compulsory heterosexual desire, and make homosexual desire pathological. Exploring dating practices of non-heterosexual women, the author uses structural-constructivist approach, which helps to understand the ways of interweaving of individual life and social structures. The author demonstrates, how in Russian context  social structure in sexuality (the structure of heteronormativity) affects the manifestations of homosexuality in homosocial contact. Thus she tries to answer the following question: how the structure of heteronormativity affects non-heterosexual women through their dating/flirting practices, and how non-heterosexual women through their dating/flirting practices affect the structure of heteronormativity?

In the course of her research the author come to the conclusion that non-heterosexual women remain socially isolated group, invisible behind the structure of heteronormativity; but they organize special spaces outside the structure of heteronormativity and undermine it from within with their own practices performed in public spaces in search for transparency of their existence and activities. However, this process takes a lot of time. It’ll take a lot of time to change the society's attitude towards homosexuality, to obtain inner peace, and, finally, to find an opportunity to live outside the frameworks of compulsory heterosexuality. Nevertheless, the author concludes that even now we witness active undermining of heteronormativity (the examples of this process will be presented in the text at length). If the process has already started, then sooner or later heterosexuality will cease to be the only universal norm of sexuality.

 

Anna Shipitsina (Saint-Petersburg, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Models of Cultural Transformation in Creative Conscience (by Creative Conscience)

The paper examines some models of contentious relations between the creative mind and the official culture.

Ontological model

The first project of cultural transformation through creativity was implemented by Romanticism, although this model was purely speculative. Creative worlds constructed by the imagination of romantics, are in opposition to the world of contemporary culture. An author deliberately excludes himself from this world for the sake of personal freedom.

Semiotic model

Since the beginning of the XX century creativity becomes an area of experiments with familiar cultural signs and their signifiers. Recoding of "communication systems" takes place in various art movements (Imagism, Futurism,  Avant-garde, Deconstructivism, etc.).

Ethical model

Another model of cultural transformation is based on "antibehavior" (historically it is a festive folk culture; antibehavior of fools for God’s sake, etc.). Artists borrow this form, staging various "action" aimed at cleansing / update of cultural meanings, in extreme cases - at undermining of cultural values (Dadaists, modern Actionists).

Thus, creative mind often enters into a conflict with contemporary culture, encroaching on the sphere and way of its traditional existence.

 

Pavel Kretov (Cherkasy State Technological University, Ukraine) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Media Discourse of Authority and Phenomenon of Identity: Symbolical Dimension of the Newest Myth

The paper raises the question of the correlation between verbal (discourse) and eidetic (symbols and media imaging) images of power and the problems of identity in the individual consciousness and public opinion generated by media - the sources of power. The concept of identity is considered as existential (Heidegger) in mental and psychosomatic aspects, and as a specific cognitive structure. The paper traces mythological character of identity ("Imaginary communities" of Benedict Anderson), which is understood as an attempt of axiological and ontological self-rootedness and self-identification within a certain discursive and symbolic system of meaning. The author works within the tradition of structuralism and philosophical anthropology (V. Turner) and uses for the analysis of the formation of cultural frontier (on the example of Russia and the Ukraine) the concept of liminal communities and the phenomenon of "communitas". It reveals importance of the philosopheme of symbol and symbolic structures of consciousness in the context of the formation of philosophical and anthropological aspects of the national and cultural identity. The author emphasizes symbolic character of the mechanisms for the creation and functioning of the newest myths, which establishes cultural, axiological and worldview distinctions within the borders of social groups, as well as the manipulative nature of the functioning of symbolic sequence within the "fragmented world" of media. Both individual and social group have chances to lose semantic and axiological guidelines along with the freedom of informed choice associated with them in the context of wars and "newspeak" (George Orwell), as well as the specifics of the reception of media resources in an age of a hypothetical technological singularity and "digital communication" (P. Watzlawick).

 

Sigrun Bilfeld (University of Tubingen, Germany) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

System and Freedom. Remarks on Lotman and Karamzin

Receiving Sergej’s last-minute invitation I spontanously decided to speak about my specific research – early Russian Schellingian thought. When reconsidering my decision, however, I settled on N.M. Karamzin. The reason for this change of heart is not Karamzin’s 250th birthday, even though that does indeed provide an opportunity to honour this outstanding personality. In fact, it seemed to me that an outline of Karamzin’s thinking, at least in 18th century, could serve also to illustrate the prehistory of Russian Schellingianism. My change of topic having been explained I would nevertheless like to begin by referring to your general topic, which I came to be acquainted with by Sergej Troickij’s essay on cultural systems and their forms of exclusion and reactivation. An opinion I don’t share is that a historical change of cultural systems can be understood as “mechanisms”. Jurij Lotman’s works were mentioned in this article. Although I appreciate Lotman very much I would hesitate to describe young Karamzin’s creative process as being caused by cultural mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. I am rather sceptical of this mechanistic way of arguing, all the more since Jurij Lotman himself, in his works, chose Karamzin as a paradigm of the autonomous genius. Consequently, my talk raises a lot of methodological problems, for instance, which method might be appropriate for cultural phenomenon like Karamzin. Alternatively let us ask, is it possible to derive a given cultural system defined as “European Enlightenment” into which Karamzin might be fitted or to which he might be opposed? The answer is difficult and depends on different historical or actual communities of hermeneutic interpreters, Western and Eastern, which define Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment (I.Berlin) on the basis of their all too often intransparent principles.

I, on the other hand, merely want to offer a close reading of Karamzin’s European Journey of Enlightenment (1789, 1790), presented in his “Letters of a Russian Traveler”. The most fascinating thing about Karamzin’s journey is that he provides us with an insight into Europe’s topographic diversification of its intellectual and moral ideas. His chosen intellectual itinerary is a specific image of what he considered worth visiting. In doing so he gives us a free Russian selection of values which are valid till today. To him northern Kant in Königsberg didn’t mean a mediator of the cogito. Instead Karamzin learned that the human being is meant for an autonomous moral existence. Karamzin showed empathy when visiting the Francfort Jews (cf. Panofsky 2008) and practiced religious tolerance in the sense of Lessing. With Herder in Weimar he was enthusiastic about Spinoza’s pantheistic feeling for the great coherence in nature and the togetherness among people. His visits to Switzerland (Bonnet and Lavater) inspired him to invent a Russian linguistic neologism meaning interconnectedness and solidarity in nature and mankind (sootnositel’nost’). He very much appreciated the independence of the English (Geneva), all the more he secretly believed in those ideas while under pressure by state and religion. Nevertheless, he presented Russia and Europe with his immortal journey of Russian Enlightenment.

 

Petar Bojanic (University of Belgrade, Serbia; University of Rijeka, Chroatia),Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript. 

On Natural Borders and Culture Wars (Survival of the Group). Is Fichte still Our Inspiration?

Using a few still very relevant passages from Fichte’s Closed Commercial State (1800), my intention is to analyze the latest conflicts and crises of alliances (Europe, cosmopolitanism, etc.), especially given the current border crossings and migrations. (For example, what is a group on the move and how is it constituted?) I will endeavor to draw a distinction between cultural and legal norm, to show the difficulty of determining borders and adjacent territory, as well as to define the complicity of philosophy and the philosopher in the construction of fictions and fabrications that necessarily lead to war and catastrophic conflict. 

 

Ekaterina Ovcharova (Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

On the Phenomenon of A. T. Bolotov

Despite the certain popularity of A.T. Bolotov’s works in scientific community (the fact can be proved by a number of defended in the last decades dissertations based on his works) and some reputation among Russian readers, who are usually aware of the existence of his memoirs, he remains on the periphery of the national culture.

Of course, Bolotov isn’t overlooked by the local historians from Bogoroditsk and Dvoryaninovo. However, he does not belong to those historical figures, who could occasionally visit some place and thus pave the way for the pilgrimage of sightseers. That is the conclusion the author has drawn on the basis of some studies on local history (the results of these studies were published in the proceedings of several recent conferences).

It is notable that Bolotov’s literary tastes were in a certain contradiction with the general trends in the development of Russian literature (although he was one of the first Russian novelists). Two centuries before the Serapion Brothers, he preferred "story of situations" to a "story of characters". Even his memoirs, which nowadays are well known and have become the main object of research, were written first of all for his family and not for his compatriots. At the same time his extensive published works, which cost him a lot of time and effort during his long life, nowadays attract attention of just a few specialists.

This paper is devoted to the study of the phenomenon of this detachment from the general trend of the development of Russian culture. The cause of such detachment may lie in independence, peculiar for A.T. Bolotov, and originality of his judgments.

 

Dmitry Verbin (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Transformation of the Great War Image in Soviet and Russian Cultural Memory

Ages of wars and revolutions leave deep traces in the memory of contemporaries, making them change their view of themselves and their place in the world and forming the worldview for generations to come. But the example of the memory about the First World War clearly demonstrates, how different can be the perception of the same events, depending on the political agenda.

In the Soviet times, the events of 1914-1917 took only a few pages in a history text-books, where they were presented as nothing more than a prehistory of the October Revolution. Even on the eve of the World War II, when attitude to many historical events and figures has been revised, the Great war still was perceived as anti-national and imperialist.

In the Post-Soviet period the process of gradual transformation of public opinion took place. It was caused by the publication of works written by previously banned émigré historians, memoirs of participants, poetry, and prose of those years. The year 2014 was the perfect time not only to remind about dangerous trends of our time, but also to reflect on the cultural memory, and the role of scholars in the development of studies on it.

During my speech, I plan to demonstrate how the memory of the First World War has been gradually returning from the zone of oblivion, to which it was repressed in the Soviet period, to contemporary cultural practices. It is possible to say that there is an attempt to create a new culture of memory, and even more so, to form a new Russian identity.

 

Valentin Golovin (Institute of Russian Literature (the Pushkin House), RAS, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

The Great War. Children’s Literature and Its Critical Analysis

Children’s literature of the Great War and the reaction of critics. Authors and critics. Children’s reflection of a “book about the war”. Examples of comparison between children’s literature and journalism from the periods of the Great War and the Great Patriotic War. Peculiarity of appraisal of children’s literature about war in the studies on the history of literature.

 

Maria Bratolubova (Southern Federal University, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Memory of the Great Patriotic War on the Pages of Don Periodicals: Zones of Omission

At the moment Russia is in the process of the formation of unified state policy of memory, and the central place in this policy is reserved for the memorization of the Great Patriotic War and the Victory. We have followed the transformation of the representation of memory about the war on the example of the representation of the Victory Day in the periodicals at the period of its transformation from a historical event into an element of the state policy aimed at construction of national identity. We have examined the materials of Don periodicals devoted to the celebration of the Victory Day in 1945, 1955 and 1965. The choice of these dates is not accidental, because it is these periods when memory about the war was shaped and integrated into the public discourse. Every anniversary has brought a new trend, alienating the memory of the event itself, "fitting" it into a certain structure, and adding a new flavour associated with the current socio-political situation in the country.

Memory and consciousness of contemporaries are formed not only by the present but also by the absent phenomena - "zones of omission".

In the early post-war years there was a sharp gap between the official or ceremonial version of the war events and informal, personal military experience of the population. On the pages of Don periodicals from May 1945 can be found the tendency for omission and depersonalization of soldiers’ heroic deeds. The victory itself is directly linked with the name of Stalin. The tenth anniversary characterized by renouncing of demonstration of the crucial role the leader’s personality had played in the victory. Instead was emphasized the role of the Communist Party, which guided the population on its way to successful construction of the socialist system and protected people from external enemies. An important feature of the twentieth anniversary of the Victory was the publication of the memories of those who participated in the war (both generals and privates) in the Don press. Letters, written by ordinary participants of the war and published on the pages of the Don newspapers, came out of the zone of omission. Periodical have been filled with personal feelings. Analysis of publications from May 1965, demonstrates the transformation of the history of the World War II into an element of national memory, controlled by the authorities.

The local press haven’t been concerned with the themes of everyday life during the war or the urgent problems of the people. The image of reality in the newspapers seems rather "lacquered". Many important topics relating to the history of the World War II (extermination of Jewish population in the occupied Rostov-on-Don, the very experience of the occupation of the Rostov region, the fate of prisoners of war, collaborationism of the Cossack), haven’t found place on the pages of Don periodicals. Therefore, the memory of the war was complex and problematic - both for ordinary people, who had experienced the hardships and loss of loved ones, and for the authorities.

 

Vyacheslav Sukhachev (Institute of Philosophy SPbSU, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Temporal Cut of the Establishment of Cultural Exclusion Zones

It may sound paradoxical, but the emergence of cultural exclusion zones is produced by the very basis of "culture", which evolved into the countless most sublime practices of "disappointment” [Entzauberung] (M. Weber), desymbolization, and desacralization.

One of the essential aspects of the conceptualization of these processes is the analysis of the temporal cuts of culture. We appeal to it under the influence of the fact that at the heart of contemporary culture have been preserved "Christian metrics" of historicism, actively participating in the generation of cultural exclusion zones (though they have lost their ontological certainty and imply a very specific topology).

Desymbolization led to a serious transformation of temporality, resulting in, on the one hand, the deviation of the eventfulness, and on the other, the collapse of the "pure forms" of the past and the future.

Eventfulness, associated with intense existential "investment", is replaced by "accidents", passing without affecting a human being existentially. That eventually led to the fact that "experience" (temporal by its very nature) is transformed into the "feeling", which emphasize the anachronistic and amnestic “present”. It is a special time when the "present" requires constant repetition, devoid of any foundation, and creates simulacra, which are devoid of the present in alethic sense. In particular, identity as detention of the self in the temporal flow is converted into the presence of “belonging”, built up in the affective field. The “present” is always presented as something alien, assuming its replacement with the "new present". On the other hand, the collapse of the "pure forms" of the past and the future turns "the main path of history" into the dumps of nonutilizable "presents".

Hybris of novelty throws the past away as something fundamentally "outdated", "alien to a modern man", without giving an opportunity to feel those "principles" which, even in the sedimented loyalty, continue their constitutive work today. Sedimentation is ambiguous: on the one hand, it establishes and solidify сogital, affective, social, and existential strategies; but on the other hand, it occurs to be concealment of “principles” and "reasons", giving rise to the diffusion and transformation of meanings and emotions.

Finally, the future appears as alien and therefore undesirable, as there is no power to adopt it as radically different.

This type of temporality produces not only cultural exclusion zones, but also makes us alien to ourselves.

 

Ksenya Kapelchuk (Research Center for Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

“Singularization of History”: From Instance to Event

Inquiry of the problematics of zones of cultural exclusion represents one of the strategies of critical thinking and working with discourse that belongs to the scope of modern intellectual field. But at the same time in a broad sense it can be represented as a rather traditional way of philosophical analysis: to describe the one that has become in terms of its genesis, thereby to trace back to the first principles of its being. But this procedure of «tracing back» is taking place here rather not in the ontological plane, but in the historical one. Herewith the reflexivity of this kind of inquiry, i.e. the inquiry of zones of cultural exclusion, apparently, is justified by the fact that the very historical dimension as it is determined by the discoursive practises may become the subject of the inquiry of zones of cultural exclusion.

In this context the paper focuses on the double twist that takes place in the historiography of the XVII-XIX centuries. At the first tact of the twist the sense of «chance» and the sense of «repetition» are united in the concept of revolution and this event initiates in a sense the emergence of what we call global or universal history. At the second tact, paradoxically, a chance and a repetition turn out to be withdraw from the history as relevant categories of its representation. If we turn to historiography, we will see that the concept of the chance, that used to be in wide use in the historical descriptions and speculations about history before the XVIII century was displaced in the works on the history and philosophy of history in the XIX century as Reinhart Koselleck brilliantly demonstrates. So the duality of "singularization of history" is that, on the one hand, it eliminates the reflection of mechanism of historical causality and opens the history as a space of uniqueness, but, on the other hand, it also eliminates the chance as accidental causality.

"Singularization" of history, thus denying the legitimacy of the very categories that made it possible. But despite the fact that the concept of the chance was displaced at the level of historiography, it has returned to the philosophy in some new remarkable way, discovering the dimension of historicity and the concept of the event.

 

Lada Shipovalova (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Mechanisms of Historical Memory: A Case of Epistemology

Since modern epistemology has discovered epistemic gaps, internal discontinuity, and inconsistency in science, it faces an obvious problem of justification of the gesture of historical recollection or "reactualization" of the phenomena, which has been safely repressed to the margins of the history of science as pre-scientific. It would seem that this excessive gesture is interesting only for a historian-antiquarian, who is attentive to the de-actualized meanings of scientific concepts, interpretations of scientific facts, incomprehensible to us contemporary "styles of scientific thinking", different logic, and subject matter of scientific knowledge. It would seem that progressivist history has already made its choice, and the procedure of ultimate "deactualization" must be completed pertaining to the alternative past of science, and the memory should occur in the mode of the art of forgetting.

The paper substantiates the need for doubt in such an attitude to the "pre-scientific" past (the usage of the concept "pre-scientific" itself should be interpreted as an elementary mechanism of "deactualization").  A thesis of the importance of science and scientific language as a defining element of European culture makes the context of this study. It is done in three steps. Firstly, we should outline the mechanisms of "reactualization" of the alternative scientific past, invented and used by historical epistemology (M. Foucault, J. Hacking, L. Deston, B. Latour et al.). Under the alternative past we understand failed and repressed scientific paradigm. Secondly, we should reveal the essence of argument against the relevance of this kind of historical research, which "relativizes science" and introduce "dangerous pluralism" and "multiplicity" into it. Thirdly, we should determine possible significance of the work of "reactualization", done by historical epistemology, not only and not so much for the science itself, but for the modern cultural practices.

 

Maria Semikolennykh (Research Center for Cultural Exclusion and Frontier Zones, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

“We should help Plato”: Reactualization of Platonism in Western Philosophy of the XV Century (on the Example of In Calumniatorem Platonis by Basilios Bessarion)

Plato’s heritage had rather ambiguous fate in the medieval intellectual history: on the one hand, only a few excerpts from his works were known, and those who wish to understand the essence of his teaching, had to rely on later renderings and comments; on the other hand, in the medieval tradition Plato he appeared as a thinker teaching about the immortality of the soul, posthumous reward, and the earthly world as an imperfect reflection of the heavenly world. He seemed almost a forerunner of Christianity, who had managed to understand the structure of the world and the divine nature to the extent that was nearly impossible for a man who had lived before the Incarnation. But at the beginning of the Renaissance, with the flow of translations from Ancient Greek, Western readers made acquaintance with unavailable to them Plato’s works. All of a sudden the ideal image of the ancient philosopher has undergone significant changes: some opinions and ideas of Plato might appear to the reader not only incompatible with the tenets of Christianity, but simply scandalous. It seemed to some people that Plato should have been expelled from the circle of prominent ancient thinkers and the Fathers of the Church. But Plato also had zealous advocates, who insisted that his writings (if interpreted appropriately) by no means could harm his stainless reputation.

One of the most important episodes of this discussion is the exchange of remarks between two famous scholars, George of Trebizond and Basilios Bessarion: the former in his treatise Comparatio Aristotelis et Platonis argues that a good Christian, who aspire for happiness and salvation, should keep off Platonic philosophy; the latter refutes these accusations. The paper makes an attempt to demonstrate the strategy for marginalization of the Platonic heritage used George of Trebizond, and the method of its reactualization in Basilios Bessarion’s work.

 

Nataliia Gulyaeva (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia), Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Two Transformations of Russian Advertisement Posters during the first thirty years of the XX century

The beginning of the XX century can be called the time of cultural “breaks”, which have played essential role in further cultural development of the country. The change of cultural paradigms was reflected by the art of advertisement posters. Being the most sensitive to the changes as well as the most widespread form of art, advertisement posters reflected the changes in the all spheres of social life. Speaking of the cultural changes, which occurred within the first thirty years of the XX century, we can single out at least two paradigmal changes, which were reflected in different practices (literature, art, music, etc.):

1) the first change of forms, principles, system of relationships, and thus cultural standards occurred in the 1910s, when Avant-garde became the leading artistic movement;

2) the second change is connected with the “return” to the “old” forms in the new conditions, at the period of New Economic Policy of the 1920s.

 

Irina Busurkina (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Phenomenon of Being a Fool for God’s Sake in Russian Culture of XVII-XX Centuries: Deactualization in Public Practice and Reactualization in Literature

The meaning and significance of a cultural phenomenon can be substantially transformed depending on the paradigm of social development. The purpose of the article is to trace the path of deactualization of original meaning of foolishness for God’s sake in public practice and its reactualization, reconsideration in literature. Thus, foolishness is seen as marginal phenomenon, repressed from cultural practice because of the loss of its functions.

At the time of its noon in the XVI century, the foolishness in Russia has become an important element in the cultural space in its totality peculiar for a Russian tradition. In the public practice foolishness was a distinctive form of protest. It manifested in the form of denunciation ("cursing the world”), public ridicule and intercession. A fool directly demonstrated "the righteousness of God" by his behavior.

The crisis of this phenomenon occurred in the third quarter of the XVII century, when persecution by the authorities and the church led to the diminution of the public role of foolishness. The authorities began consider foolishness as a form of idleness and disturbance of public order and fools themselves as an undesirable element of society. The Church sought to strictly control access to holiness, which did not fit well with the concept of foolishness. In the secular culture this element could no longer be unchanged, therefore fools ceased to be officially regarded as the "people of God". Then foolishness rather became folk phenomenon and continued to exist as existential practice until the beginning of the XX century.

At the end of the XIX - early XX century there was unprecedented interest to this phenomenon, which caused a discursive explosion in literature. Repressed element of culture served as the source for many creative stories that reactualized previous cultural experience, but to a different quality. In literature new types of the heroes emerged: they rather were "intellectual" holy fools. Their behavior was almost devoid of sacred component, and avant-scene was occupied by the thirst for denunciations of the world, adherence to the ideas of ​​justice and freedom from wealth and social status. Sometimes the features of foolishness were evident not only in the texts, but also in special, "meaningful" behavior of their authors, reflecting a new view of  this phenomenon.

 

Alexei Malinov (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Borders of Cultural and Philosophical Ages: Problems of Distinctness

Any phenomenon in the history of culture and philosophy implies the establishment of its boundaries. Frankly speaking, both a historian of culture and a historian of philosophy should deal with cultural and philosophical ages which sometimes can concur (Antiquity, Middle Ages, Enlightenment, etc.) as well as with phenomena (specific doctrines, movements, schools, etc.). The objects of historical studies are phenomena and ages, which have already ended and therefore have rather obvious consequences. As an example we can take the “Russian Enlightenment” and “Russian religious and philosophical Renaissance”.

 

Ksenya Surikova (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Museum Narrative as a form of Cultural Exclusion

The museum expositions devoted to the war present one of the most effective ways of deactualization of certain aspects of the culture of memory. This is due to the specifics of museum's way of presenting history. Any memorial museum represents the sequence of events, but not linear and fragmentary. All in all, the culture of memory about war in the mind of a visitor is eventually shaped by the selection of those fragments of history, which are presented, and those, which remain outside the official culture of memory.

The paper presents an analysis of the exposition, architecture, and social practices of memorial museums, demonstrating, how and on which grounds museum shapes the memory policy. We have considered a number of regional museums dedicated to the events of the Great Patriotic War: Museum-monument to defenders of the passes of the Caucasus in the days of the Second World War 1941-1945 (Karachaevo-Cherkessia); Museum of "Young Guard" (Krasnodon); “Zaytseva Gora” Museum of Military History (Kaluga region); Museum of Military Glory (Kolomna); Military vehicles Museum (Ryazan), and others.

Traditionally, the culture of memory about the war in Russia is characterized by uniformity and glorification. Museums, not being able to present the totality of knowledge about the war, select facts, stories, and illustrations. And it is this selection which shows whether it presents the result of the national memory policy or (in its absence) is trying to construct a vision of the direction of historical reflections.

The most interesting museums are located in different regions of the country and are accommodated in specially designed architectural complexes rather than random buildings, adapted for museum needs. Museum architecture in this case creates visual language speaking about the past, which is most clearly characterizes museum interpretation of history.

Besides architecture for identification of the characteristics of museum representation of history, it is important to analyze cultural and political context, the exhibition policy, the role played by memory in local commemorative practices. In this case it is possible to compare the projects and thus to understand, to what extent they are unique or if they comply with national memory policy.

 

Ivan Grinko (Center for museum research and projecting (Russian Institute for heritage research); Non-profit partnership “The center for study and popularization world cultures «Ethnology project», Russia), Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Museum borders and new identities

In this paper I want to discuss the image of borders into contemporary museum space and its new functions. Today border in museum exposition appears in many variants (maps, pictures, elements of navigation, photo or installation) so it’s interesting how this phenomenon is linked with new goals of museum in contemporary world and how it influences the creation of new communities and their identities.

 

 

  1. (Institute of Philosophy, SPbSU, Russia), Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Museum: Ideological and Rhetorical Analysis of Cultural exclusion Zones

The paper examines the role of museum in the formation of cultural exclusion zones. In addition, it investigates the possibility of two strategies of their interpretation. Firstly, as a consequence of the impact of ideology on the formation of cultural memory. Secondly, as a kind of "apophasis" and "modes of oblivion", which can be regarded as a sophistical methods, and as errors in the application of the art of eloquence (but in any case without regard to the psychological bias that is inevitable in the ideological approach to the analysis of cultural exclusion zones).

Here museum serves as a base model both for the study of the formation mechanisms of memory, and for the interpretation of the emerging cultural exclusion zones.

1. Ideology is one of the mechanisms of formation of the concept of cultural heritage (alongside with legal and religious mechanisms). Interpretation of ideology as a "blind spot" (Slavoj Žižek) and a form of false consciousness (Peter Sloterdijk) allows to understand the analytics of cultural exclusion zones as a variation of the project for critique of ideology.

2. Museum is one of the institutions which produce cultural heritage; therefore it, of course, employs ideological methods. Over the past two centuries (the period of the existence of public museums) museum has been serving as a conductor of various ideologies. Enlightenment, Empire, Eurocentrism, Evolutionism, Modern art, Art, Atheism, etc. At present, the key museum ideology is an ideology of cultural memory.

3. Given that rhetorical art of memory is one of the genetic sources of museum, we can apply rhetorical approach to the analysis of cultural exclusion zones (those that have been formed also thanks to  museum).

4. Purely rhetorical attitude to the cultural heritage, which forms the core of identity, can remove the psychological acuity in the analysis of cultural exclusion zones.

 

Elena Drobysheva (Vaganova Ballet Academy, Russia) Адрес электронной почты защищен от спам-ботов. Для просмотра адреса в вашем браузере должен быть включен Javascript.

Axiology of Memory: Contemporary Transformations

Culture, understood in its architectonic limit, ensures its completeness and integrity through various regulatory mechanisms. Memory is one of these mechanisms. Being a tool for the replication of meanings, memory has a strong axiological potential. Let us briefly outline the main vectors of axiological transformation of the structures of memory in the conditions of the contemporary culture.

- Due to the constant improvement of technologies the selection of information for the preservation/exclusion in the zones of cultural memory intensifies and becomes more complex, the processes of deactualization and reactualization are faster and more vivid. That causes permanent transformations of cultural axiosphere.

- Irony as a dominant of the axiosphere of postmodernist culture has worked with regard to commemorative practices. Despite the growing power of the "machine of memory," it is its axiological parameters what become more and more sublime. As compared to a traditional society, where message and perceptions were, broadly speaking, the same, nowadays no author of the message (architect, sculptor, painter, or writer) can be sure in congruency of his ideas to the results of hermeneutic procedures performed by his contemporaries.

- Monuments are the obvious containers and portals of memory. Modern art space is replenished not by pyramids and monuments of great people (with rare exceptions). The majority of new monuments depict literature, cinema, or mythological characters. In the case of St. Petersburg it will be conventional "Ostaps Bender" with polished toes, chizhiki-pyzhiki, cats, janitors, and plumbers, looking out the hatch. In the case of foreign art it will be giant spiders by Louise Bourgeois and twisted Mermaids from the Banksy’s broken TV.

- The growth of service industry in consumer society is obvious. As a result the memory obtains more and more service functions, and at the same time the intensity of its sacred component decreases.

Another element of the global process of reformation of the socio-cultural space is the total digitalization of reality. Terabytes of pictures, letters, and messages cease to be what they are, namely messages / epistles, which are valuable for inter-subjective communication. Ninety-nine percent of the information, which is stored in the memory of our computers and phones, will never be rescued by us or our descendants from the captivity of nothingness. Like genies in bottles, they will languish in anticipation of future archaeologists. But it can be said with obvious confidence - nobody will ever have enough strength and patience to decipher these files.