Representative Democracy as Kitsch, and Artificial Intelligence’s Promise of Emancipation

The chapter explores relations between modernity and the decentralization of authority, kitsch and partial centralization, the avant-garde and social media. Decentralization is identified as an important expression of modernist philosophy in current technology. As a characteristic of current directions of social progress, authority-opposing trends of modernism and post-modernism find significant support in new technology via less falsifiable decentralization based on crypto-currencies, blockchain, social media, search engines, and other products of the internet era. The scalability of classic athenian democracy to large societies is not yet accomplished by technology. Against the early modernity tendency to cheaply give the masses an almost effortless sense of participation (features associated with kitsch), the system of representative democracy promises to become more genuine through opportunities for electronic civic involvement.

Montaigne and the rise of modern cultural diplomacy

In the troubling sixteenth century political and religious turmoil in Europe - and particularly in France - the cosmopolitan personality of Michel de Montaigne is not only indicative for acknowledging the more and more meddling resources of culture within the realm of politics, but is also explanatory for reforming and expanding the instruments of traditional diplomacy. Specifically, the consequential insights of Montaigne's post-Renaissance humanist stance highly impacted upon certain salient developments in the field of cultural diplomacy that could be analytically framed as i) a personal imprint on reforming political culture(s) tantamount to a conspicuous signature in the field of cultural pedagogy, and ii) a commendable approach to cultural pluralism, and an influential modus operandi in the practice of cultural relations. The present study purports to reflect upon the rise of modern cultural diplomacy through highlighting the impact of the above-mentioned traits on further developments of the field in one of the most characteristic figures of early modernity, Michel de Montaigne.

Analogie historyczne w sytuacji postkolonialnej

The historical experience of the region on the frontier of civilizations that is the South Caucasus is marked by alternating periods of short-term independence and long-term subordination. The geographical location at the meeting point of the Great Steppe, Asia Minor and Mesopotamia invariably means that political and strategic interests intersect in the region. Thus, since ancient times, the subjugation of the South Caucasus has been a goal within the imperial policies of the powers located south of the Arax River and north of the Great Caucasus range (the most commonly accepted borders of the region). Short-lived periods of formal independence usually did not entail full internal sovereignty and subjectivity in external actions. Different forms of dependency - political, economic, military or cultural and social - defined the internal situation in the region. Historically, the South Caucasus has been stuck between Rome and Persia, Arab caliphates and Byzantium, Turkish states and Persia, being also the object of destructive Mongol and Tamerlan invasions. Since early modernity, the region has been a space of clashing influences and attempts to gain dominance of three imperial ideologies and, at the same time, civilizational visions - Persian (Iranian), Turkish (Ottoman) and Russian (including a somewhat different form of Soviet).

The Indian, The Mestizo, and The Impostor: The Fictionality of Race in Inca Garcilaso de la Vega

Inca Garcilaso de la Vega is perhaps one of the most racially conscious authors of early modernity. In fact, he is the first American-born author to self-identify as a direct descendant of a colonized indigenous nation. As such, Inca Garcilaso understood well the epistemic implications of his biracial and bicultural status (his mestizo condition). Most literary critics have analyzed the incessant reiteration of his mestizaje throughout his texts as a way of countering the racist colonial labels imposed on Amerindians and their descendants. However, there is a complex and somewhat contradictory usage of racial terminology throughout his works. Sometimes Garcilaso claims to be a mestizo, sometimes an Indian, and at times he seems to only highlight his Spanish heritage, depending on the situation. In this sense, Inca Garcilaso’s depiction of his authorial persona is not a straightforward decolonial counter-discourse. Instead, I argue that the Inca Garcilaso that appears in his texts is a fictional author whose deliberately inconsistent use of the different racial labels amounts to a modern decolonial strategy: a critique that ironizes the traditional meaning of racial labels, thus destabilizing their epistemic status. In this paper, I aim to flesh out Garcilaso’s complex decolonial strategy, through a literary reading of his authorial persona.

Social Isolation Challenge: Russian Context

The article considers the main trends and features of the impact of social isolation measures in a global pandemic on the life of modern society. The author notes that the practice of implementing measures of social isolation distinguishes certain social strata, pushing others to the periphery of managerial attention and support; aggravates feelings of social inequality of opportunity, changes space and intensity of individual and social mobility; affects the authority of local and regional government and attitudes towards them. The article describes various aspects and difficulties of individual and social adaptation to the pandemic. The carried out comparative analysis of European and Russian sociocultural context, in which social challenges of the pandemic are manifested, shows their common features: aggravation of problems of social adaptation, different degrees of readiness for it, an asynchronous development of integration processes, an authoritarian-conservative turn in the mass consciousness. The characteristic of the main trends of changes in consciousness and behavior is given, in which the response of Russian society to the challenges of new living conditions and the pandemic reformatting of the social communications space is manifested. The attention to the multidirectional character of adaptation strategies of the population is drawn. The author expresses the opinion that the choice of the optimal variant of society's adaptation to global environmental, including pandemic, challenges is determined both by the elite's ability to transform social institutions and by a change in the dominant personality type. An atomized type of individual, focused on the values of early modernity, in whose subconsciousness authoritarian-paternalistic attitudes are preserved, should be replaced by a type of personality, with qualities and abilities corresponding to the imperatives of a complex and dynamically changing modern society.

Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages

Rhetoric is an engine of social discourse and the art charged with generating and swaying emotion. The history of rhetoric provides a continuous structure by which we can measure how emotions were understood, articulated, and mobilized under various historical circumstances and social contracts. This book is about how rhetoric in the West from Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions. It is the first book-length study of medieval rhetoric and the emotions, coloring in what has largely been a blank space between about 600 CE and the cusp of early modernity. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, as in other periods, constituted the gateway training for anyone engaged in emotionally persuasive writing. Medieval rhetorical thought on emotion has multiple strands of influence and sedimentations of practice. The earliest and most persistent tradition treated emotional persuasion as a property of surface stylistic effect, which can be seen in the medieval rhetorics of poetry and prose, and in literary production. But the impact of Aristotelian rhetoric, which reached the Latin West in the thirteenth century, gave emotional persuasion a core role in reasoning, incorporating it into the key device of proof, the enthymeme. In Aristotle, medieval teachers and writers found a new rhetorical language to explain the social and psychological factors that affect an audience. With Aristotelian rhetoric, the emotions became political. The impact of Aristotle’s rhetorical approach to emotions was to be felt in medieval political treatises, in poetry, and in preaching.

Apocalypticism and Globalization in the Early Modern World: A Medievalist’s Perspective

The apocalyptic belief systems from early modernity discussed in this series of articles to varying degrees have precursors in the Middle Ages. The drive to map the globe for purposes both geographic and symbolic, finds expression in explicitly apocalyptic manuscripts produced throughout the Middle Ages. An apocalyptic political discourse, especially centered on themes of empire and Islam, developed in the seventh century and reached extraordinary popularity during the Crusades. Speculation about the end of world history among medieval intellectuals led them not to reject the natural world but to study it more closely, in ways that set the stage for the later Age of Discovery. These broad continuities between the medieval and early modern, and indeed into modernity, demonstrate the imperative of viewing apocalypticism not as an esoteric fringe movement but as a constructive force in cultural creation.