Formation of a New Person as a Formational Meaning. The Era of Transformation in the History of Europe

The article draws attention to the fact that the phenomenon of marginality is the formation of one's own environment, although not completely dissolving into it. Traditional culture goes into the "basements" of society or manifests itself in the life and mentality of marginals. In a society affected by crisis, several cultural trajectories collide: descending, ascending and, for the marginalized, breaking traditional ties and creating their own, completely different world. In fact, marginality is the third culture, a special socio-cultural state. The article discusses its corresponding components. The prerequisites of global transformation are considered. The situation in Europe begins to change fundamentally at the turn of the I-II millennia. The formation of the era of European Transformation can begin with the XI-XIII centuries, when "Catholic" Europe appears. Phenomenal in its results was the "Renaissance of the XII century", the first truly pan-European Revival at the origins of the era of Transformation. With this, the movement towards a High Renaissance began. The Crusades (XI-XIII centuries) are particularly highlighted. After the Crusades, two variants of capitalism become promising and predominant in Europe and North America, and then their slow convergence continues. The XIII century became a milestone for contemporaries. On the one hand, Europe, it would seem, reached the end of history by creating some kind of optimal model. On the other hand, the reverse side of the idea of the "end of history" became clearly visible. The Mongols, having captured most of Eurasia, reformatted the ethno-political space. In this century, capitalist Europe is born, in fact, as a special development option. Highlighting the era of transformation does not mean that we should abandon the usual division of European history into known periods: antiquity, the Middle Ages, modern times. This periodization successfully emphasizes social and economic aspects and provides a chronological understanding of transitional processes. The era of Transformation is more voluminous, since we are talking about the transition from a centuries-old traditional society to a new stage of human development. Neither the Renaissance nor the Reformation created a new culture, the so-called bourgeois culture will have many faces, both international and national. The main thing is seen in the liberation of man from the former powerful civilizational model, Latin-Christian, i.e. Imperial-ecclesiastical, and ultimately - in the formation of a new type of man.

Brüche einer Gattungsgeschichte. Karikatur zwischen Massani und Sulzer

When the caricature came up in the late 16th century, the notion meant an overloaded or exaggerated – and humorous – kind of portrait. Since then its meaning has changed considerably. Today caricature is understood as a visual equivalent of literary satire. This modern understanding has its origin in the bourgeois culture of the Enlightenment. In my contribution I examine the change in the concept of caricature in Western history. The focus is on the connection between this change in meaning and the constitution of caricature as an image genre. When did caricature acquire the status of a legitimate form of invectivity? Besides caricature, special attention is also paid to parody, because both types of invective communication often overlap.

Lukács and Kierkegaard: Decadence or Despair

A distrust of focus on subjectivity and the individual provoked by his meeting with Sartrean existentialism led György Lukács to turn his early but qualified admiration of Søren Kierkegaard into an accusation of fostering a bourgeois culture of the kind Kierkegaard is usually thought to have opposed. Not every Marxian thinker has been equally wary of subjectivity, but all have found in Kierkegaard a crucial absence of concern for human exploitation within a context of natural scarcity. However, a more measured reading suggests a case for resolving the need to choose between Lukács’s insistence on “spirit” as a collective notion and Kierkegaard’s as cultivation of a trans-historically oriented, self-stabilizing social will.

MASS CULTURE (MASS ART) IN CONTEMPORARY SCIENTIFIC RESEARCHES

The research deals with phenomenon of mass art (mass culture) as one of the components of mass art modern world. An attempt to identify mass culture, mass art as a phenomenon is made and main approaches to its treatment and different aspects of its study in contemporary science are analysed. The first part of the work offers an overview of researchers’ views on the problem of definition of mass culture, mass art phenomenon and reveals ways of self-identification of it in the course of its development. Main features of mass culture, mass art are also studied. The second part of the work is devoted to the analysis of main approaches to the study of mass art and mass culture in early and in modern scientific works. As we see this phenomenon is widely examined by representatives of different research schools and scientific spheres. Philosophers, political scientists, writers, art critics, culturologists are involved in this process. The majority of the twentieth century researchers perceived mass culture as negative aspect of cultural social development because of its low level of quality and as a part of bourgeois culture focused on manipulating the minds of the masses. On the other hand the 21st century researchers realizing all the negative moments (idolatry, personality levelling) consider mass culture and mass art as natural necessary phenomenon of modern life, a base for development of professional art, a product of modern technology, show-business. The analyses of the phenomenon of mass art, mass culture gives us the picture of variety in opinions and approaches to this phenomenon as well as of the great number of aspects of scientific interest to the problem. In the majority of cases researchers’ concepts of mass culture, mass art clearly reflects the ideas of the periods they belong to.

Between Zurich and Romania: A Dada Exchange

In 1916, a group of ambitious artists set out to dismantle traditional art and its accompanied bourgeois culture. Living in Zurich, these artists—among them the Romanians Marcel Janco and Tristan Tzara, and the Germans Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball—formulated the new Dada movement that would awaken new artistic and literary forms through a fusion of sound, theater, and abstract art. With absurd performances at Cabaret Voltaire, they mocked rationality, morality, and beauty. Within the Dada movement in Zurich, I would like to focus on the artists whose Romanian and Jewish heritage played a central role in Cabaret Voltaire and other Dada related events. Art historical scholarship on Dada minimized this heritage in order to situate Dada within the Western avant-garde canon. However, I argue that the five young Romanians who were present on the first night of Cabaret Voltaire on February 5, 1916 brought with them from their home country certain Jewish and Romanian folk traditions, which helped form Dada’s acclaimed reputation. The five Romanians—Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco and his brothers Georges Janco and Jules Janco, and Arthur Segal—moved to Zurich either to escape military conscription or to continue their college studies. By the start of the twentieth-century, Romania’s intellectual scene was already a transcultural venture, with writers and artists studying and exhibiting in countries like France and Germany. Yet, Zurich’s international climate of émigrés from all over Europe allowed the young Romanians to fully expand beyond nationalistic confines and collaborate together with other exiled intellectuals. Tom Sandqvist’s book Dada East from 2007 is the most recent and most comprehensive study of the Romanian aspect of Dada. Sandqvist traces Janco’s and Tzara’s prolific, pre-Dada time in Bucharest, along with the folk and Jewish sources that Sandqvist claims influenced their Dada performances. For instance, Tzara’s simultaneous poems, which he performed at Cabaret Voltaire, may derive from nineteenth century Jewish theater in Romania and from Hasidic song rituals. Moreover, the Dada performances with grotesque masks created by Janco relate to the colinde festival in Romania’s peasant folk culture. In my paper, I aim to analyze Sandqvist’s claim and answer the following questions: to what extent did Janco and Tzara incorporate the colinde festival and Jewish theater and ritual? Was their Jewish identity more important to them than their Romanian identity? And, lastly, how did they carry Dada back to Romania after the war ended and the Dadaists in Zurich moved on to other cities?

A National Vocation

This article writes engineers into the history of Lebanese political-economic thought. Historians of Lebanon's postindependence period have emphasized how a narrow, elite “consortium” espoused a national ideology that authorized laissez-faire monetary and trade policies. These intellectuals and businessmen invoked environmental determinism to claim that trade, tourism, and services were Lebanon's national vocation. This article reveals that engineers formed an influential and underexamined countercurrent advocating statist developmentalism. Engineer-bureaucrats saw the postindependence era as an opportunity to claim their profession's status and redefine bourgeois culture and its relationship to governing institutions according to their conceptions of modernity. By reinterpreting the consortium's environmental narrative of Lebanese history, the hydrological engineer Ibrahim Abd-El-Al portrayed rational development of water resources and agriculture as an organic expression of national identity. These efforts cultivated a critical and technically literate reading public that favored statism and shaped how that public understood their national subjectivity and relationship to the natural world.

COMFORT AS A PHENOMENON OF PRIVATE SPACE

The article examines the phenomenon of comfort that exists in all modern cultures as a person’s need to have his own space, equipped according to his own taste. The comfort combines the conditions of the external material environment and the internal emotional state of a person. Comfort acquires special importance in the bourgeois culture of the 19th century, which assumed a dichotomy of work and leisure, public and private spheres. Comfort is an important need of a modern person, providing rest and recovery, protection from the anxieties and adversities of the outside world.