Culture, Humanitarian Knowledge and Self-Organization Theory

In the 1950s, Charles Snow wrote about the growing gap between the humanities and natural science cultures. He saw this as a great danger both for science itself and for all humankind. In Russia, it was complemented by a crisis of humanitarian knowledge. The article considers the ways to overcome this crisis and build a bridge between cultures.The solution of these problems is associated with the development of interdisciplinary approaches in general, and the theory of self-organization in particular. Synergetics today represents an approach that lies at the intersection of subject knowledge, philosophical reflection and mathematical modeling. It allows you to solve problems that go beyond individual scientific disciplines. Many of them require an analysis of processes and factors in rational, emotional and intuitive spaces.The article shows that the ongoing humanitarian and technological revolution, the tasks of designing the future, increase the role of humanitarian knowledge. The author substantiates the importance of a civilizational approach to humanitarian culture and considers the cultural issues of the unique civilization of Russia. There is outlined a number of specific steps to overcome the crisis of Russian humanitarian knowledge.The concept of cultural challenge is of particular importance among the problems for which solutions are proposed. The transition from the industrial to the post-industrial phase of the civilization development and the widespread use of artificial intelligence systems will free from work about half of people. The social stability and prospects for the civilization development are determined by the ability of culture to make their life complete, meaningful and creative. The use of interdisciplinary approaches in the education system of Russia is of fundamental importance in the course of the humanitarian and technological revolution. The organizational and financial reforms of the last thirty years have led education to a deep crisis. The interdisciplinary approaches are needed in order to balance the wishes of the programs authors, the opportunities of students and to correlate the training received with the prospects for the country’s development. The revision of the content and forms of education today is becoming a problem not only for teachers and scientists, but also for the entire national culture.The imperative of our country’s cultural development is the image of the future. In the industrial era, there was an idea of universality of the ways of social systems development. In the postindustrial reality, the world becomes more complex, diversity increases. At the current point of bifurcation, several development paths open up. A civilization’s cultural choice, based on tradition, scientific forecasting and the image of the future, becomes fundamental. Interdisciplinary approaches can play a fundamental role in shaping such a cultural choice.

„Guilty pleasure” Doroty Masłowskiej i Krzysztofa Vargi — o grach komunikacyjnych (z) popkulturą

The article is an analysis of two collections of feuilleton — Jak przejąć kontrolę nad światem, nie wychodząc z domu by Dorota Masłowska and Polska mistrzem Polski by Krzysztof Varga. The key to the analyses presented in the article is the phenomenon of guilty pleasure and shameful pleasure, which is the element that most closely connects the cited authors — choosing the subject of the feuilleton with full awareness of the implications of this cultural choice — and their readers drawn into the game between ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’, ‘snobbery’ and ‘honesty’. This game is based on oscillating between maintaining a distance (and thus a sense of superiority) towards the subject of description and the subject of reading, and the pleasure of participation. Text strategies related to the guilty pleasure category, involving games with the reader, irony and intertextuality, also remain common to both creators.

The Social Dimensions of Listening to Music

Cultural heritage is a socially created and interpreted narrative, which becomes interpretable through cultural transfer (Sagrillo, 2018). The role of culturally creative communities in shaping and maintaining cultural constructs has always been decisive. Lasting values are determined by cultural choice. Through crossing cultural and historical boundaries, music a deeply coded discourse establishes communication at all times. The experience and emotional effects produced by music are based on previous experiences, emotional reactions, and memories. The art of listening to music has always been governed by the social norms and etiquette of the period, which also dictate the nature and quality of reception. The history of listening to music has, however, enjoyed little academic attention. Since it is an unobservable and amorphous phenomenon, it was defined as a natural receptive process for a long time. Only in recent decades has the question come into focus as various disciplines have explored short-term and long-term transformative processes to reveal the effect of social, political, and economic characteristics of several eras. Keywords: listening to music, musical experience, receiving competence, concert

Reuse of Statuary and the Recycling Habit of Late Antiquity: An Economic Perspective

This chapter examines questions about the role of statue reuse and recycling in the building and sculptural economies of Late Antiquity, leading to an increased understanding of the cultural changes that characterized this practice during this period. It addresses various approaches to the economic importance of and rationale behind the reuse and recycling of statuary and other sculpted material in Late Antiquity. The basic economic premise that materials were reused and recycled because they were available more economically than new materials seems clear, but we should be careful though not to reduce reuse-recycling solely to economics. Reuse-recycling was also a cultural choice rather than a purely pragmatic practice, and one that expressed a late antique mentality. Sculpted stone was a recognizable commodity in the ancient world and its recycling and reuse have both social and economic implications for the artistic and ideological changes that defined the recycling habit of Late Antiquity.

From Scientism to Humanism - the Influence of Modern Western Cultural and Ideological Thoughts on Lu Xun

Lu Xun’s shift from “saving the nation through science” to “saving the nation through literature” was an important watershed in modern China’s process of learning from the West, as well as in Lu Xun’s personal transition from Scientism to Humanism. As interpenetrating and intertwining aspects of modern Western culture, Scientism and Humanism are at the same time mutually different and mutually interrelated. In the past, most researchers have focused on the differences between these two cultural thoughts and neglected their connections. But actually, precisely because they are connected and interrelated to each other, Lu Xun actively kept up with the latest philosophical and cultural trends in the West at the same time he was introducing the scientific achievements of the West; this is also why Lu Xun first taught science after returning to China, then switched to teaching literature after the May Fourth Movement.He also urged people who were engaged in literature to also read scientific books. Only by realizing the differences between the two and paying attention to their connections can we better understand Lu Xun's cultural choice between Scientism and Humanism.

Art Museum Audience: The Arguments of Consumer Choice

Diversification of artistic supply and growing competition in the market of cultural services lead to the fact that the quality of artistic product (performance, concert, exhibition) is perceived as increasingly relative and loses its former importance as a decisive argument of consumer choice. What guides people in their communication with art? What are the determinants of their consumer behavior and are there any patterns in it? The chance of overcoming communication barriers and establishing a constructive dialogue between cultural institutions and their potential audience depends on whether the answers to these and other questions will be found. The article deals with the cultural aspect of this interaction — the role of motivation and individual preferences in art consumption, their influence on people’s cultural activity. The article is based on the results of a large-scale sociological study of visitors to the State Tretyakov Gallery, conducted by a research group from the State Institute of Art Studies. The museum’s audience was studied not only by the objective parameters traditionally described by art sociologists, but also by a number of difficult-to-measure content features that go far beyond socio-demographic descriptions. The study allows us to get closer to understanding some general patterns of consumer behavior in art, to determine the nature of consumer motivations and individual preferences’ influence on cultural choice. The article proves the existence of a statistically significant connection between these subjective behavioral determinants and the measure of personal cultural capital. The use of methods of mathematical statistics and econometrics expands the traditional potential of sociology of art and provides a qualitatively new level of reliability of results.