The Social and Cultural Situation in Russia at the Beginning of the 21st Century: Recurrent Culture, Archaization, False Archaic

Abstract

Dmitry Sergeev — Director, Institute for Culture and Arts, Zabaykal State Pedagogical University. Address: 30, Alexandro-Zavodskaya St., Chita, Russian Federation. E-mail: dvsergeev@inbox.ru

The article deals with the application of the semantic approach to the analysis of the social and cultural situation of today’s Russia. The first part deals with the analysis of scientific concepts that explain periodic returns to previous stages of social and cultural development in different societies from various methodological positions. The research methodology is based on B. Hubner’s theory. Relying on his ideas, the author introduces the concepts, “recurrent cultural text”, “recurrent culture” and “society with a recurrent culture”, allowing an investigation of the trends of Russian society development. They are used to describe different models of disorders in the logic of progressive evolutionary development in contemporary Russian society.

The constructive logic of recurrent texts reflects a mechanism of archaization. The recurrence of a cultural text resides in the fact that it not only reflects a main trend of society, or an explicit or implicit desire of the majority to make a social and cultural return to the past, but in many ways defines and describes the mechanism of reversal. A Society with a recurrent culture is characterized by a tendency to produce cultural texts encouraging archaic Renaissance as a main social idea. One of the principal features of recurrent culture is the refusal to recognize and treat a person as an independent element of social relation. The individual is deprived of autonomy, the idea of its limitation is held and even realized, while large segments of society (or society as a whole) agree or tacitly do not react to these trends. As a consequence, there is an activation of the calls to delegate part of the freedoms from individuals to some formal institutions considered to be a guiding force of the social and cultural development: religion, ideology, state, government, court, censorship, parliament commissions and so on.

In whole, the two dominant trends of a recurrent culture are revealed: archaization and false archaic. The first one manifests itself in the revival of cultural and social elements related to the evolutionary earlier stages of cultural and social development. The second trend is the falsification of the historical and cultural facts in order to deliberately extend the scientifically recognized history of Russia — an indication of the depth of the cultural crisis in the public consciousness. Both trends show the reluctance of a major part of Russian society to make a qualitative shift to a new level of development. Their appearance and features are demonstrated in the analysis of the research, journalistic, legal and educational literature.

The archaization of Russia is seen in the appeal to a heteronomous force intended to establish social practices which value collective forms of behavior over individual. Social success of the modern heteronomy, even if there are particular individuals or a group of people representing that force, depends on the support of the majority of Russians who express their approval or “silently” do not oppose the events.