Factors of transformation of mass forms of celebration in modern culture

Saenko Natalya Ryafikovna ORCID: 0000-0002-9422-064X Professor of the Department of Humanitarian Disciplines, Moscow Polytechnic University 38 Bolshaya Semyonovskaya str., Moscow, 107023, Russia rilke@list.ru Other publications by this author

Tatarenko Mariya Andreevna Postgraduate student; Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies; Volgograd State Socio-Pedagogical University 27 Lenin Ave., office 712, Volgograd, 400005, Russia mardmy@yandex.ru

The Latin verb "participare" is actually used in language and speech not only as an action verb of direct action (meaning "to take part"), but also as a lexical causative (meaning "to involve someone in participating in something"). This rather significant duality of the meanings transmitted to them in a certain sense was once laid the foundation for the creation and then consolidation in the common space of the culture of the so-called "participatory culture" – a culture of participation, which after the first period of its entry into this space began to intensively transform as a result of the intended, and then quite successfully implemented the multiplicity of their own historical forms that arise in the process of social communication and interaction between individuals and entire social groups.

One of the most significant and noticeable directions of the socio-cultural formalization of the culture of participation was the emergence of the so-called "celebration culture" ("culture of celebration" – from Latin. "celebrate" - "celebrate") due to the fact that historically, in almost all types of established national or ethnic culture, periods of celebration have become genuine peaks in the intensity of communication and interaction between individuals and social communities of any level, starting with the family and ending with the entire human civilization as a whole, marking the onset of another new calendar year or any outstanding achievement of importance to all countries and peoples. In such a situation, in the artificially created chronotope of the holiday, society opens up from the inside and completely creates truly unprecedented conditions for updating and increasing the level of its own integration.

However, in the modern situation of intensive and rapid change of external conditions, acceleration of general social and cultural dynamics, largely determined by the achievements of modern science and technology, there is an equally dynamic transformation of models and paradigms of cultural growth and development, which, in turn, cannot but be reflected in a very definite and purposeful way in the process of changing more private and mainly collective, mass forms of celebration within the framework of a more general culture of participation, which, in essence, determined the relevance of this study.

The purpose of the study is defined as the identification of the actual phenomenology of changing forms of celebration, their subsequent analysis and description of the causes, acting factors of such transformations within the framework of modern culture of participation.

Initially defined as one of the subtypes of the intensively transforming political culture at that time (p. According to [Korotkova, pp. 99-101]), the culture of participation was demarcated from other similar subtypes by two main criteria: the level of activity of the participant in some "common cause", as well as the level of his subjectivity (see above "participare" as a causative). The conditional "subject of the culture of participation" in this initial version is a leader, an activist who is able to captivate others with his ideas and attitudes and lead others against the background of any personal attitude to the existing political system and to what the formal leadership of this system does and declares. Within the framework of a culture of participation, such a subject not only formulates requirements and comments on the political process and its formal actors, but also actively participates in the available forms of implementing such decisions. So, starting in 2011, in Tomsk, and later in other cities of Russia, during the celebration of the Victory of the USSR over Fascism in the Great Patriotic War on May 9, marches of ordinary citizens began to take place. Participants march in a column through the streets of cities with photos of their relatives — participants of the Great Patriotic War, underground workers, Resistance fighters, home front workers, concentration camp prisoners, blockade runners, war children — and record family stories about them in the National Chronicle on the website of the Immortal Regiment movement.

The transition from politically oriented forms of participation culture to forms of celebration culture turns out to be possible through private options for the implementation of attributions of subjectivity in the cultural space: the ability to initiate discussion of something with others - thereby involving them in cooperation with the subsequent organization of any cultural forms already within the framework of group coordinated interaction, for the implementation of which, without a doubt, group management functions are already becoming necessary. The existing culture of the vast majority of currently implemented forms of celebration suggests that all these above–mentioned opportunities are most actively realized in the scenario, staging and performative part of the organization of festive events or ceremonies, within which an informal leader or several co-ordinated leaders are always found - this is the very case when real life is transformed during the celebration in a kind of theater, in a scenario-organized spectacle. The line between a formal "spectator" and a formal "actor" in such spectacles is quite conditional, because, in the absence of conventionally established restrictions, nothing prevents the interchange between these temporary social roles, the possible ascriptions of which are conditional and carnival in nature – sometimes it is enough to change something in one's appearance, or speech, or gestures to immediately become "one of ...." – such situations are often described in fiction and become part of the film plots of artistic cinematography [Turkina, p. 12].

Constant fluctuations in the socio-cultural context accompanying the existence of modern society then lead to subsequent changes in the mass consciousness of ideas about history as a science of the development of this society, as a result of which there is a constant rotation of significant events and memorable dates in the mass consciousness, which, according to the opinion of the public majority, are reasons for celebration in a massive, expanded social format. This constant actualization and de-actualization of the reasons for organizing celebrations, since a significant part of modern humanity lives in conditions of mass culture, is currently almost completely moderated by the mass media. On the other hand, modern mass culture, based on the inherent features of the organization of the structure of its own space, in terms of its initial genesis and subsequent development trends, has always had a more or less pronounced tendency to large-scale cultural transformations with the subsequent implication of their results into its common space [Yemelyanov, p. 234].

It is believed that mass culture tends to absolutize its own dominance, as a result of which it shows a tendency to replace folk, traditional culture. However, in relation to the forms of celebration of something, mass culture, which is clearly pragmatic in its inner essence, tries to embed already existing cultural material in new contexts, actively using the achievements of traditional forms of celebration and trying to manipulate them in order to achieve the goals of its own development [Khludova, p. 31].

A number of philosophers, cultural scientists, and writers consistently pointed to the purposeful devaluation by the new mass culture of the axiology of traditional culture, accompanied by primitivization and vulgarization, however, in relation to the forms of celebration adapted by this mass culture to new cultural realities, it would be more accurate to say that here the mass culture turned out to be prone to unrestrained experimentation with the material of traditional culture, and often without any regard on the axiology of the latter [Castells, p. 94]. The result of the purposeful implementation of such approaches is now becoming mutatis mutandis of the former traditional forms of celebration, in which the content is preserved, while the performative (or decorative) part of them simply gushes with this "new" variety.

As a result, the definition of those most frequent gradients of these changes that could be integrated into new models and forms of celebration is quite limited. Firstly, it is massively and purposefully represented freakishness with an abundance of externally decorated agglutinatives. For example, the sensational Opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, the script of which included a performance of the "Last Supper" performed by male actors disguised as women; an opera singer in the image of the executed Marie Antoinette with her own severed head in her hands; a singer made up in blue in the image of the naked god Dionysus reclining in surrounded by viands on a huge platter; an iron mechanical horse carrying a rider with the Olympic flame over the Seine, the image of which repeated the figure of the horseman of the Apocalypse in the engraving by A. Durer. The ceremony took place not at the stadium, but on the water surface of the Seine, the stands of the spectators were installed on the embankments, thus symbolically, and in fact, the participation of citizens in the celebration was taken beyond the boundaries of the scenario.

Secondly, it is an equally pronounced stylistic mixing in the genre of "conjungatio inconjungantis" ("combination of incongruous" – Latin), leading to extremely vague and lengthy discussions between critics and experts in the field of mass cultural performances of our time.

Thirdly, it is a scenario and plot multiplicativity, when a remake of something popular has already been created before, a second-order remake is created.

Multiple transformational processes that require a sufficiently broad involvement of the masses in the implementation of new forms of celebration within the framework of a culture of participation, eventually lead to the formation of an equally new, substitutive cultural axiology, namely, the emergence of new cultural tastes, preferences, standards and norms for the representation of all forms of mass types of cultural activity that fit this concept. Using specific means unusual for traditional culture to embody the imagery of celebration, the expression of its "modernized" cultural symbols, the culture of participation itself turns into something new that does not reveal direct symbolic or stylistic continuity with the existing cultural tradition, and this is the cultural situation when the multiplicity of multidirectionally changing cultural forms eventually begins to form within them an equally new cultural content, the appearance of which is now becoming impossible to deny.

Having received all the opportunities for its emergence and development thanks to the modern development of technology in the field of mass communications, modern media culture inevitably transforms the traditional structure of historically formed social ties into network structures of mass communications in the virtual reality space, after which the result will not be slow to come – a significant majority of traditional forms of celebration undergo transformation as virtualization, and participation in the celebration itself it also becomes virtual, "online". Thus, the form of celebration inherent in the modern culture of participation in its "online" variation is transformed, according to the terminology of J. Baudrillard, into a virtual simulacrum. In one of his fundamental critical works [Baudrillard], Baudrillard ironically writes that death alone cannot be transformed in this way, since, in his opinion, it is the natural limit of all simulations – whereas, on the contrary, the event of death (funeral) is transformed by modern mass culture into a form of celebration, as well as any other the event. You can plan ahead the script, the sequence of mass actions, the decor and decoration of the stage, the distribution of roles, and even changes in the reaction of the masses to certain transitions from one act to another during the implementation of the general ceremony [Deborah]. For example, the planning of mourning events in the event of the death of Elizabeth II began back in the 1960s. Her Majesty has made many arrangements for the upcoming funeral ceremony. The whole farewell ceremony was full of symbols and hidden allusions. The coffin was covered with the Royal Standard, a flag representing the sovereign of Britain, the Crown Lands and the British Overseas Territories. It depicts three lions, which represent England, one lion, which represents Scotland, and a harp, which symbolizes Ireland. This flag was hoisted over one of the Queen's palaces when she stayed there. The wreath that decorated the coffin during the funeral events was a gift from the son of the new king. It was made up of flowers grown in the gardens of Queen Balmoral's beloved Scottish castle, her "study" – Buckingham Palace, and Charles's residence Clarence House, as well as rosemary leaves, English oak and myrtle branches. The latter were cut from a shrub once grown from a stalk taken from Elizabeth's wedding bouquet. The wreath contained a handwritten note signed by the "loving and eternally devoted" Charles III. First, four children, and the next day, eight grandchildren of Queen Elizabeth II took part in a ceremony called ". For 15 minutes, they replaced the guards who were on duty around the clock at the queen's coffin. Traditionally, women did not take part in the Vigil of the princes. But this time the royal family decided to eliminate gender inequality: along with King Charles and Princes Andrew and Edward, the Queen's daughter Princess Anne took over the honor watch; along with Princes William and Harry, as well as Peter Phillips and James, Viscount Severn, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, Zara Tindall and Lady Louise Windsor took part in the ceremony. This brought some variety to the ceremony: when the participants of the vigil were climbing the stairs, a shoe flew off the foot of Zara Tindall, the daughter of Princess Anne, and because of this, the procession stopped and slowed down for a few seconds. But all the viewers who watched the broadcast of the ceremony appreciated the dignity and grace with which Zara returned the shoes to their place. Thus, both planned and improvised in the ritual turned out to be symbolic.

In turn, demonstrating the forms of virtual celebration to the mass perception creates a stable illusion for the viewer of their continuation during the transition from virtual reality to physical reality. The blurring of the lines between the first and second reality precisely through the implementation of forms of mass action within the framework of modern culture of participation progressively turns its potential object into a means and tool for transferring the dominant forms of mass interaction in virtual reality into physical reality, and the greater the scale and depth this process acquires, the less noticeable the mechanisms of internal transformation of one cultural content in another [Verkhovskaya, p. 96]. The subject of mass forms of virtual culture of participation turns into a repeater of their transfer to physical reality, as a result of which the traditional culture of participation is increasingly turning into a subculture as a dependent and subordinate part of the virtual culture of participation.

All these metamorphoses eventually lead to the fact that, compared with traditional culture, the meaningful and symbolic authenticity of the celebration formats promoted by mass culture is sharply reduced.

For example, using the fantastic resources of modern mass media in terms of speed, information about another similar event of a conditional "celebration" is widely distributed in a matter of minutes, creating such a specific information background on which the cultural reflection of a potential recipient imperceptibly but steadily changes from reading information from the text to perceiving it from the screen - with all the consequences of this an almost imperceptible change in the consequences.

Conclusions

1. The modern "culture of celebration" is, in fact, one of the most significant and noticeable directions of the socio-cultural formalization of the culture of participation. The phenomenological analysis of the modern mass celebration can act as a methodological prism through which the spectrum of causes of transformations of the modern culture of participation is highlighted.

2. In the artificially created chronotope of the holiday, a specific culture is revealed in its geopolitical and national specifics, creating conditions for updating and increasing the level of its own internal integration.

3. The existing culture of celebration assumes that most of the possibilities of a culture of participation are most actively realized in the scenario, staging and performative part of the organization of any kind of festive events or ceremonies.

4. Modern mass culture has always had a more or less pronounced tendency to large-scale cultural transformations with the subsequent implication of their results into its common space.

5. The features of modern forms of celebration that are formed during transformational transformations are their pronounced freakishness, stylistic mixing and scenario-plot multiplicativity (abundance of remakes).