A Man in a Modern City: from the dichotomy of the sacred and profane to the innovative and provocative

Kuzmina Natalia Valerevna PhD in Cultural Studies UNESCO Chair, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration 119571, Russia, g. Moscow, pr. Vernadskogo, 82 nata.flor@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Astafeva Ol'ga Nikolaevna Doctor of Philosophy Professor, UNESCO Chair, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration 119571, Russia, g. Moscow, prospekt Vernadskogo, 82 nv.kuzmina@igsu.ru

Introduction

Today is characterized by the growth of cities and their population. The needs for expanding the territory and the requirements for the living conditions of people are increasing. In turn, the city is changing dynamically, and the environment is becoming more comfortable. However, at the same time, the thin boundaries of its aesthetic, generally cultural spaces that have been developing for centuries, dissected by arteries–streets and powerful architectural ensembles, now opening to an endless stream of people, now restraining a crowd of high social tension, are shifting. In such an externally structured space, the features of a chaotic (or eclectic) socio-cultural reality often appear. This deprives the cultural environment of dialogicity and integrity ^[3].

But then, what meanings are read by people in the texts of huge megacities? How is consistency achieved between the space of the unique and structurally identical, typological? Does the unique always become interesting or saturated with sacred meaning? And finally, how possible is it in the era of the primacy of technologism and the erasure of aesthetic boundaries to capture the authenticity or provocation of innovation?

We will try to answer at least some of the questions that arise, based on the fact that the cultural environment of modern cities, sometimes "despite and despite" the harsh pressure of socio-economic processes, as well as transnationalization and globalization, as global trends, preserving its uniqueness, is revealed to a person included in the environmental kaleidoscope of everyday culture, through a special symbolic language which becomes "an essential element of reality and the everyday understanding of this reality" ^[5].

Earlier, we gave a justification as one of the main characteristics of the symbolic language of urban landscapes, the presence of "interesting" as a philosophical and aesthetic category that explains a lot in the trends in the development of the city's culture ^[4]. Recall that interesting, as "attracting attention" or "creating problematic tension" in the cultural environment, is associated with the active inclusion of unusual and incredible things in urban landscapes, whether it is an architectural structure or a park area, a communicative event (concerts, festivals, meetings, presentations, etc.) or a public competition (contests, "battles" To a greater or lesser extent, these and many other modern cultural phenomena and processes correspond to the basic meaning that constitutes the essence of the concept of "interest" (from Latin – "interesse"): literally – it means "to be in between", "between".

For culture as a whole, this finding "on the border" (the possible, the real and the impossible, the improbable) is extremely important, because it allows you to convey the dynamics and variability, its potency for self-development. However, it is quite obvious that stimulating interest and socio–cultural "tension" is clearly not enough to guarantee an adequate reading of the text of culture, especially to promote the harmonious inclusion of a person in the cultural environment of the city. Accordingly, turning to the study of the dynamics of transitions from the dichotomy of the sacred and profane to the innovative and provocative in a modern city will allow us to expand our understanding not only of the concept of "interesting", but also to show its impact on the processes of human interaction with the urban environment and reveal the risks of destroying its integrity.

Megapolis as a representative of new cultural meanings: desacralization of spaces

Large-scale urbanization, on the one hand, has actualized the issues of design resources and the possibilities of regulating these spaces in order to prevent the loss of their "I" by citizens. The dissonance between the socio-cultural, value-spiritual aspects of human existence and the rapid changes in the technological, political, and economic spheres, which are less focused on preserving the subjective attitude to the surrounding world, turn into a deepening crisis of humanity and openness of people to each other.

This problem is of particular relevance in modern megacities – spaces of human cultural existence, where existential, spiritual and moral challenges that a person literally "experiences" in conditions of deepening urbanization are unusually increasing; in general, threats to the personal principle are intensifying. In view of this, society's demands for increasing the role of the individual and expanding the place for human self-realization in the socio-cultural space of the Russian metropolis are becoming more acute. It can be stated that the modern metropolis, on the one hand, needs humanity, on the other hand, it is poorly adapted for its reproduction.

The semiotics of urban space surrounding him plays a significant function in constructing the socio-cultural picture of the world among the inhabitants of a megalopolis, forming a collective identity and gaining the stability of his personality by a citizen. This is due, firstly, to the fact that the formation of the image of the world - the "spatial model of the universe" – is the constitutive basis for the understanding of life by culture ^[10]. Secondly, the city as a specially structured space, where architectonics implies a difference (neighborhood) smyslov appears as a representative of culture, separating human existence from nature – "the objectively existing world of meanings" ^[8].

Taking these grounds and relying on the resources of the semiotic approach, our attitude to the urban environment as the focus of significant human existence, in turn, actualizes the study of the problems of the formation of the urban collective identity of residents of Russian megacities, which is based on a human-centered position and allows us to reveal the unity of axiological, activity and individual-creative aspects of culture, where the main subject is the identity of a citizen.

P.A. Florensky believed that reality – the subjectively experienced surrounding world – is built from symbols, and therefore is known with the help of them and through them. According to the philosopher, symbols represent "the organs of our communication with reality. (...) With an image we see reality, and with a name we hear it" ^[18]. Based on this, it can be concluded that the dynamics of the socio-cultural space of cities is closely related to the development of symbolic "centers of culture". This is revealed when mapping the socio-cultural space of any city, reflecting the differences in the energy strength of zonal spaces.

According to B.V. Markov, the "cultural centers" in the city for a long time were three cultural objects centering urban life: the castle, the temple and the market, embodying the dichotomy of the sacred and profane in the socio-cultural space of the city. The temple was a place not only of religious worship, but also of human formation, "where the most important thing is produced — the boundary between guilt and law, sin and virtue" ^[12]. In other words, the temple organized the inner world of the citizen, brought up moral ideals in him, ensured the reproduction of humanity, participation and unity of society.

In turn, in the market (market square), the citizen developed as an autonomous individual competing with others, which contributed to the formation of such feelings as aggression, envy, greed. In other words, the square acted as a binary opposition to the temple, destroying the moral unity gathered in it. In addition, it served as a space for the activation of social power: riots and uprisings, as well as parades and processions were organized on it.

The temple aimed a person at a deeply personal appeal to God, high meanings, moral ideals, finding harmony and unity. The square, where the individuality of the citizen was formed, recorded the phenomenal existence, the ordinariness of everyday urban life. Thus, the sacred and profane centered the life of a citizen, gave meaning to his being, the stability of his personality.

As history shows, the urban development of Russia, Western and Eastern countries was carried out based on these semantic constants. Depending on time and space, only their symbols changed – the sacred could be represented by Orthodox churches, mosques, datsan, etc., the profane could be embodied by a square, a fair, and other public spaces. Relying on this traditional coordinate system, the citizen felt the integrity of his life, he was internally stable, which is associated with the need of the individual to organize, center his being, social communications.

However, the XX century will mark the weakening of the role of the temple, up to its complete destruction. This is largely due to the arrival of postmodernism as a new type of worldview, focused on the formation of such a living space in which the main values are total freedom, spontaneity of activity, a playful beginning. The eternal values of love, kindness, justice, faith began to be replaced by the aspirations for profit, aggressiveness and competitiveness.

I.A. Ilyin wrote: "Without love, a person either languishes lazily, or tends to permissiveness. Believing in nothing, he becomes an empty being, without an ideal and without a goal. The mind and will of a person are brought into spiritual and creative movement precisely by love and faith" ^[17]. Thus, the sacred, which assumed a culture of self-restraint, turned out to be buried under the postmodern cult of permissiveness.

It is important to note that the consumer, utilitarian attitude to the world, which displaced the existential meanings of human life, encroached on becoming a new religion, became only a simulacrum of the temple, a parody of it. The postmodern concept proclaiming that the world is chaotic, devoid of cause-and–effect relationships and value orientations, fragmented, pluralistic and deconstructed, contributed to the fact that the dialectic of religious and secular in the socio-cultural space of the metropolis gave way to "tension" of a different order - in the coordinate system of emotional, sensual and rational, intellectual. This marked the transition from the dichotomy of the sacred and profane to the innovative and provocative.

In the context of "buy-sell" market relations (both goods and oneself), where social relations have a monetary equivalent, a person has been deprived of his subjectivity, which, according to P.A. Sorokin, is formed by the orientation of the individual to unlimited creation, the stability of social relations determined by "the quality of public relations, the fullness of cooperation, solidarity, altruism" ^[16]. As the representatives of existentialism, led by J.-P. Sartre, argued, a person is always a "project", the essence of which is in the transition from what he is at present to what he has not yet been, breaking away from the past to the future, open to his freedom and creativity ^[15].

However, unregulated individual aspirations, characteristic of the dominant market with the weakening of the role of the sacred, practically exclude the possibility of stable and harmonious social interactions to the same extent that the construction of a socio-cultural space acquires the character of coercion, if it does not rely on the value-semantic sphere of the individual and its subjectivity, inclusiveness as a basic characteristic.

Transformation of the profane into the interesting: from a city square to a public place

The cultural dominance of the provocative and outrageous, inevitable in these conditions, contributed to the fact that "interesting" became an almost ritual introduction to all further assessments of the creative imagination, including critical ones. This aesthetic category, elaborated in the works of Ya.S. Golosovker, is in demand today when analyzing the culture of postmodernism, when the subjective assessment of the surrounding world, the closure of a person in the field of his subjective experiences triumphed over the recognition of objective reality in the person of history, God and nature.

In the absence of value-based moral supports and transformations of the "sacred", the interesting became a reflection of the tireless thirst for the new as new, the pursuit of the illusion of happiness and the elusive fullness of life. And why are "innovative projects" so attractive? Although sometimes they are nothing more than a tracing paper from an already well-known, but fashionable city event, replicated and therefore close and recognizable…

Mythology, creativity, and innovation have become markers of the modern urban text, anchored in it by socio-cultural design technologies as breakthrough "design solutions". Whether they will become part of the imaginative reality, that is, interesting or only innovative, it is difficult to say for sure. On the one hand, this kind of "maturation" of the new in the continuous dynamics of transformations removes the restrained attitude towards tradition on the part of supporters of postmodernism. On the other hand, if it were not so, then there would be someone who would be able to assess "whether something new is such only externally or whether it is fake at all" ^[13]. However, such simulationality strengthens the power of simulacra and pushes to the pursuit of the new, which should capture the attention of every person, regardless of his aesthetic taste and cultural needs, as well as regardless of the positive or negative evaluation reaction. So the interesting begins to be reproduced for the sake of the interesting, which sometimes has only an indirect relation to creativity as the ability to generate cultural values.

The city square, having lost its original profane meaning and not having acquired the sacred value of the temple, has become a place of search for new meanings, new content of urban culture. In this respect, it can be called the space of middle culture, since it marked a transitional type of urban socio-cultural development. It should be noted that the first ideas about the middle culture began to appear in Russian philosophical thought at the beginning of the last century. In its most general form, it is the result of self-reflection of culture, its conceptual rethinking, instability, and the search for lost inner unity. According to A.P. Davydov, this type of culture "arises as a synthesis of the heavenly and the earthly, the transcendent and immanent, the absolute and relative, there is an expansion of the sphere of mediation" ^[6]. In relation to the urban environment, this means that the square is extremely open to changes, including destructive ones, and insensitive to truly consolidating urban society meanings.

Thus, Red Square has acquired in the public consciousness the status of the main tourist point, a kind of Mecca for tourists, a visit to which is strictly mandatory. But what is behind this desire to touch the modern square? To feel like a part of the great history of Russia, to take a photo against the background of a landmark, putting a "tick" in the list of places "required to visit", to get closer to the power-political discourse? Everyone has their own answer, but it is obvious that the sacralization of this space is not turning it into a temple, but only a postmodern simulacrum, increasingly mythologized by increasing citations in numerous cultural texts (media, promotions, literary works, etc.).

Having lost its original significance, the square has become vulnerable to provocative actions, for example, placing a huge bag of a well-known trademark on Red Square in Moscow in 2013. The purpose of the campaign was hardly just to attract attention and advertise the French fashion house. It was interesting and outrageous (for some) and delightful (for others). The pavilion-chest (otherwise – the bag) not only blocked the historical panoramas due to its size (9 meters high and 30 meters long), but also became foreign in the cultural text of the sacred, filled with deep historical meanings of the place, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Thus, the work of advertising art, which aroused the unconditional interest of both citizens and tourists, as well as the authorities, turned out to be alien in the symbolic and semiotic space of Red Square.

As a result of the wide public response of this postmodern action (and there is a deconstruction of the text of culture, and polystylism, and a mixture of signs and symbols characteristic of postmodernism), a huge number of "photojabs" appeared on the Internet, parodying photos with this bag on Red Square (a suitcase with a recognizable logo was transformed into a mausoleum, then in place of a giant bag suddenly, a checkered shopping bag, a trunk, etc., towered no smaller), which completely gave rise to mass irony due to multiple references to other cultural events-phenomena-texts, unacceptable, however, in relation to a historical and cultural place. The Red Square, which has become a space of complex artistic and semiotic communication generated by the specified art object, turned out, according to the terminology of E.V. Nikolaeva, to be subject to virtualization. As a result, such a space "becomes more and more "complexly intersected", mixing "real" and virtual reality and constantly transferring viewers/participants from one reality to another" ^[14]. Such a mixture of brand symbols (the Red Square as a sacred symbol of Russia and the carpetbag as a popular symbol of mass culture and advertising, also made in a certain corporate style) generates socio-cultural entropy and indicates cultural parasitism.

However, the transformation of squares, which have always been public spaces with strong sacred centers and texts saturated with symbols, like Red Square, is largely consonant with the trend towards the destruction of traditional texts of urban culture and the formation of creative public spaces.

 Note that the works of foreign authors use synonymous concepts – "public place" and "public spaces" ^[11], In our opinion, it is necessary to clarify when it comes to Russia, where there is a unique trend of "transition": public spaces become "public places" open for cultural and leisure activities and various cultural events, in which the main focus becomes interesting, with elements of entertainment. Football matches between the teams of "stars" and officials of the highest echelon during the World Cup, the annual holding of the International Military Music Festival "Spasskaya Tower", the operation of a public skating rink, the construction of an ice town, holding Christmas fairs, attracting a huge number of young people and tourists. In this case, a public place is understood as "a certain urban area formed due to historical, cultural, social and other characteristics, created for public use" ^[2]. The accessibility and openness of such squares also carries a semiotic load, but sacredness in the context of entertainment is endowed with other semantic connotations. As a result, urban culture orients the individual to a new type of behavior in public places ^[7].

Offering a person a special model of self-expression through the profane (say, spending free time with friends at the ice rink), the city draws a person into the process of comprehending the meanings of a new symbolic space that transforms the sacred, represented in its historical dynamics.  The weakening context of the place, but focusing on the interesting, which is enhanced by the specialness of the very fact of involvement in the event / action. A powerful wave of self-organization leads to the fact that the desire and needs of the community of citizens and the tasks of cultural policy regarding the vector of development of the territory on the part of the authorities no longer always contradict each other. Gradually, undesirable discourses are being displaced in the rhetoric of the megalopolis authorities, but not only and not so much by prohibitions (as in the case of the bag described above), but by expanding the space of interesting (not replaced by entertaining), which ultimately changes the accents in the symbolic texts of the city – from the complete destruction of the sacred to the involvement of the community individuals in the emerging public places, the authenticity of which is beyond doubt. In a word, each person acts as the center of attraction and the goal of all the changes taking place.

Conclusion

We will express three main ideas that we would like to offer as the final ones for this article, but intermediate and open for further research.

Firstly, in the conditions of the postmodern multiplication of the provocative and outrageous, a person loses the meaning–forming centers of his life, as a result of which he feels even more lonely in the "stone jungle" of modern cities. In order to gain psychological stability, emotional and value orientations, a citizen tries to drown in comprehensive entertainment, spending his free time in shopping malls, which are gaining more and more popularity day by day, in gaming halls, at spectacular stadium events, etc. Realizing this, the market is exponentially expanding the ways of escapism by increasing entertainment services. Such total entertainment is the easiest way to adapt an individual to a rapidly changing reality. However, this is only a simulacrum of the integrity and completeness of being, which does not stimulate a person either to reflection or to an active and creative attitude to the world.

Secondly, there is no privileged subject in the culture of a modern city, because the standards of behavior and value hierarchies formed through the media, fashion, advertising are destroyed by the subject himself through involvement in competitive environments that stimulate personal self-organization. This seems to us fundamentally important, because in the culture of a modern city, which is clearly being democratized, the risks of marginalizing the environment are increasing; rural residents and migrants, carriers of different types of cultures continue to replenish cities, which cannot but affect the state of the urban cultural environment and, moreover, is ignored by the authorities. And although this is a very debatable issue, nevertheless, without innovative approaches to "programming subjectivity" of decisions, a citizen risks finding himself in a situation of personal crisis and a value-semantic vacuum, despite the satiety and heterogeneity of the urban cultural landscape.

Thirdly, the postmodern collisions of the sublime and the base in the urban text that have become familiar to modern cities, the onset of an all-powerful mass culture, most clearly manifested in the "massing" of cultural information and leading to the semantic reformatting of traditional rituals and events, lead to the expansion of advertising spaces that shade the once attention-grabbing sculptural compositions and natural landscape solutions.

The question becomes legitimate in this sense: is the harmonization of tradition and innovation, the dialectics of the dichotomies of the sacred-profane and innovative-provocative able to become a condition for the preservation of the metaphysics of the city, which develops if not for centuries, then for sure not for one decade and is measured by the life of more than one generation of citizens?