Stages of diurn: from logos to logistics
Let us trace the fate of the logos in Postmodernity. It is extremely important to always remember that the logos is one of the manifestations of the heroic myth , that is, the product of the diurna regime (according to J. Durand’s classification)). And not unique and not absolute. Logos includes the antithetical and pleonasmic sides of the heroic myth (heterogenizing homogenization) and brings them to the last limit. But at the same time, it leaves in the myth (in the unconscious) such aspects of diurn as a direct mad will to power, passionarity and hyperbolization. Of course, these aspects of the diurna – relatives of the logos – penetrate the logos, but not explicitly , but due to the inertia of the heroic myths’ attraction to each other (that is, not logically).
Revealing the logos from the mythos is, as we have seen, the first step that a stable and balanced ethnos takes towards Modernity. But far from all societies built around the logos reach the Modern, this must also be taken into account.
The next step towards Modern is the transition from logos to logic . At this stage, the logos, as a crystallized order, departs even further from the general complex of the heroic myth and develops a scheme that describes the main parameters of itself – this is the science of logic and, to a large extent, mathematics, geometry, etc. Although logic reflects the structure of the logos as accurately as possible, it leaves a lot behind the scenes . So, in Christianity, the logos (Word) is God, and God, of course, is above logic – especially the fact of his Incarnation, as well as many aspects of Christian teaching based on the statements of Christ the Logos, but at the same time containing logical paradoxes.
There is no place for paradoxes in Aristotle’s logic. Logic is a property of such a society, which is even closer to the Modern. The Christian society is, of course, the society of the logos (more precisely, the Logos). Logic actively penetrates into Christianity along with the theological constructions of the Eastern Church Fathers, and especially along with the flowering of scholastic Aristotelianism. But the final transition to a society of logic takes place only as we move away from Christian theism – in the Renaissance and, especially, in the Enlightenment (as we have shown in previous chapters). Modern society is based on autonomous and generalized logic, which becomes the main social ordering – processes, relationships, institutions, legal norms, politics, statuses, economics, etc. The developed Modern becomes more and more technical and shifts the focus to the economic sphere. The economy becomes the “fate” of Western societies. So gradually, as the Modern develops, logic turns into logistics.
Logistics is an army term meaning streamlining the processes of supplying troops with food, ammunition, housing, etc. From the field of military strategy, he moved to modern management theories, where he began to designate the optimization of the production process , cost reduction, increasing the efficiency of managing cash and information flows, etc. Logic is applied to a wide variety of fields of activity – intellectual, political, scientific, social, etc. Logistics is logic applied only to the process of managing material resources for purely pragmatic purposes . Logistics is much narrower and more concrete than logos.
Economic society – both capitalist and socialist (in theory) – is based on the primacy of logistics, and the dispute between the two political-economic systems in the twentieth century unfolded precisely around whose logistics systems are more efficient, operational and competitive. The struggle of the two camps was a competition of two logistics – market and planned . The end of this confrontation and the victory of market logistics coincided with the transition to the Postmodern.
In logistics, the concentration of the subject, which was a feature of the diurn, is dispersed into many subjects – individual managers, each of which becomes an autonomous system .carrying out its economic cycle individually. The manager is the latest edition of the diurn, a little hero struggling with the chaos of goods, labor resources, stock quotes, financial papers, reports, taxes that he has to arrange in their places in the warehouse, make them work as efficiently as possible, send them to authorities, sort them into folders, transfer for execution to other managers. Each person in the logistics society is thought of as a manager, that is, an individual bearer of the mind, reduced to the skills of performing logistics operations. Heterogenizing homogenization – as the main property of diurn – is reduced here to the skills of logistical adequacy , elevated to the standard. Whoever gets it right is the winner. Who does not cope – the loser, looser.
From logistics to logome
So, Postmodern comes in the environment of the victorious market logistics with a normative type of manager . At each stage along the line of diurn-logos-logic-logistics, the heroic myth lost some aspects, narrowed its mythological potential. Logistics is the state where infinitely little remains of the original diurn – this is the diurn atom . Postmodernity, however, represents a trend towards even greater fragmentation of the logistical atom. In the previous chapter we described this as the phenomenon of the logem .
Logem , in the sociological sense, is the fragmentation of logistic rationality into an even smaller – sub-individual or dividual – level. The object of ordering for a logem is not a close external space – troops in need of food, interests and models for optimizing the activities of a corporation or scattered warehouse goods, but the body belonging to an individual, the psyche and objects adjacent to them – clothing, food, skin care products, hair, legs, hands, ears, as well as the smallest emotions, experiences, sensations. Logem is the triumphant ability to cope with oneself – walk straight, bring a handkerchief to your nose, and a cup to your lips, tie your shoelaces, cope with the desire to comb the place of a mosquito bite with your nails until it bleeds, etc. This also has an echo of the will to power and the desire to create order out of chaos – only at the micro level. This is the same unbending diurn, only reduced to a microscopic scale. But the microscopy of this scale does not (yet) automatically flow into the antiphrase and euphemism of the nocturne. On the contrary, micro-desires and micro-creeps are exaggerated, titanized, and acquire a planetary scale. The cure for seborrhea grows to huge advertising posters that darken the sky – this is the latest burst of heroic paranoia; microscopic and insignificant grows to the proportions of “remote” and “great”.
The phenomenon of glamor fits exactly into this direction. Glamor is the glorification of the logome , giving comfort, hygiene and micro-desires the status of social and image hegemony , strict standardization of the body and its proportions, a totalitarian standard of exemplary appearance, elevated to an absolute.
The transition from a society of logistics to a society of logem is the most important and fundamental process of the Postmodern.
Nothing and its sociology
One of the specific products of the logos is nothingness . This logical representation is a development of diurnic dualism. Diurn identifies itself with “everything”, and at the opposite end – like death – a place is being prepared for nothingness . When we move to the level of logos, nothing becomes the most important link of the fundamental pair is-no , as a generalized no.
Parallel to this, nothing is necessarily included in the basis of monotheistic theologies, where the world is created from nothing . The Logos, as identical to itself, is everything. That which is not identical to him is nothing .
In logic, the duality is-no becomes the most important operational module, as it predetermines the structure of the functioning of rational consciousness. Nothing acquires a permanent technical character.
In logistics, nothing acquires the property of routine – it means the absence of goods, a lack, the need to fill out a column, an expense (credit). Nothing becomes commonplace .
But as the subject of the bearer of the logos fragments as part of the development of the diurna from God to a manager (economic manager), the area of nothing constantly expands , moving from the periphery (from under the bottom of creation) to the center of the social system, until, finally, it becomes banalized in the financial balance (credit ) or market research (“out of stock”). The smaller the figure of the bearer of the logos, the larger the zone of nothingness .
For the first time this circumstance was noticed in the philosophy of Nietzsche, who defined nihilism as the main property of modern Western civilization . Nietzsche said “The desert grows. Woe to those who hide the desert within themselves.” The growth of the “desert” is the growth of a zone of nothingness , embracing the shrinking individual from all sides. Moreover, being homogeneous – since it has no properties – the nothing that is extended around an individual merges with the nothing that is extended around another individual, increasing the volume of the “desert”.
Following Nietzsche, Heidegger developed the theme of nothing in detail, and Jean-Paul Sartre, in turn, systematized Heidegger’s intuitions in his main work Being and Nothing. The growth of attention to nothing is a direct consequence of the rationality and logic of Western culture , which more and more clearly reflects the main sociological trends within the framework of its inherent dual logic. The Logos becomes smaller, nothing grows larger .
In the transition to Postmodernity, when the diurn has to make a leap to an even shallower level, some philosophers, in particular, Gilles Deleuze, proclaim that “the moment has come for the transition from the nothingness of the will (the disease of nihilism) to the will to nothingness, from nihilism incomplete, painful and passive to active nihilism. There is a very subtle point here. One thing is the growth of nothing (and nihilism) as the bearer of the logos is crushed, another thing is the orientation of the logos to nothing , that is, an active and conscious desire for its opposite . This clearly goes beyond the diurne, and suggests a regime switch in favor of euphemism and, by extension, nocturne .
From the point of view of logos and even logic and logistics, nothing is pure nothing ; not a conventional designation of another, but not a designation of nothing. Therefore, the growth of nothing takes place in the space of the numerator of the human fraction – where the logos is located . Nothing is the product of the logos . Remaining within the numerator, Western society has nothing as its limit, with which the bearer of reason is in constant dialogue and interaction. Nothing grows, the bearer of the Logos diminishes. But within the framework of the inertia of sociological history, nothing is the last limit of the logos beyond which social history cannot continue . Having sunk into nothing, history ends (F. Fukuyama wrote about this) and is replaced by economics (logistics). The manager is an active nihilist. He no longer seeks to generalize social, philosophical or scientific data, to build a logical order. He is content to build a logistical order in the space of his environment, not caring about universal social patterns. Thus, he fragments society and optimistically promotes nothingness. There is nothing more nihilistic than economics, management and marketing. The market is the pure element of nihilism , where cycles of crushed economic rationality circulate, and macroeconomics itself in liberal theory is nothing more than a generalization of atomic microeconomics, which are constitutive in their chaotic, but logistical at the same time, movement.
If the mind begins to consciously strive for nothing, then it points to a completely different route than the economist, who proposes, unconsciously promoting nothing, to focus on logistical cycles and successfully manage in the conditions of the “end of history”.
Here we come to the most important thing: if for the logos nothing is nothing, then for the mythos nothing is not nothing , it is something , moreover, diverse, rich and alive, since the myth itself, driven into the denominator, ended up in the position of nothing for the logos . The nothingness of the logos is all mythos , it is the fullness of the unconscious, with the exception of an infinitely small part of the heroic myth, which gradually transformed into the small logos of the ending Modern. And if you imagine that the logos can, indeed, not only approach nothingness, but also plunge into it (as Deleuze himself threw himself out of the window), then he will fall directly into the myth .
Therefore, in the will to nothing we can recognize – contrary to the intentions of the Postmodern itself – a secret impulse coming from the unconscious . For the mind, madness is the end , for the unconscious, the stoppage of the logical procedures of consciousness or their failure is always a new beginning , a new cycle of individuation, a new surge in the dynamics of myth.
Therefore, we will consider nothing other than the representatives of rational philosophy from the sophist Gorgias (483 BC – 380 BC) to Sartre and Deleuze, seeing in him those aspects of myth that are not included in strict rationalization, not transferred to the logo. An important conclusion follows from this: the nihilism of modern Western civilization, which is especially growing during the transition to Postmodernity, can be viewed from the other side – as a consolidation of the energies of the unconscious, which do not find their way into the numerator by legitimate means, and which is preparing its return at the moment when “repressive” structures the logos are finally weakened.
Logome competencies
Such a moment comes along with the transition from logistics to logem , that is, with the next splitting of the bearer of the logos and concentration of attention at the subatomic level . A logem is everyday life taken out of context, torn off not just from large social cycles, but even from primitive and routine operations for managing economic units. The manager, the carrier of logistics, still bears responsibility to others – competitors, partners, corporations, financial and administrative institutions, tax authorities, employees, sellers and buyers, etc. The logem comes into play when the goal is the ordering of individual impulses and the organization of the space closely adjacent to the body. – outside and inside. This is a concern for comfort, health, satiety, good mood, etc. in isolation from any social goals, objectives, obligations, etc. The category of tasks solved at the logem level includes
shopping
· sight seeing
· epilation
touch
Choice of clothes
· piercing
Refreshing (drinking refreshing drinks, coffee and tea)
· SMS-ing (sending and receiving (often anonymous or easily attributable) SMS messages)
TV-contemplation
taking medications
· dance floor
the weekend
· relaxation
· sports
· car driving
smoking
summing in the pool
gloss flipping
holiday trips
use of personal hygiene products
· makeup
· peeling
Night clubbing (visiting nightclubs)
Lisning (wearing headphones with playing musical information)
Internavtika (clicking on banners and links on the Internet)
filling out questionnaires
Correct and short answer to simple questions.
The structures with which the logem operates are so tiny that they are on the last level of the logical and threaten to constantly slip into nothingness, that is, into the unconscious , into myth, into nocturne. At the intersection of logical ultra-minimalism, if not pure nihilism, embodied in the logome, and their cautiously rising underground of the nocturne regime, a sociology of Postmodernity can be founded – a systematic analysis of that conglomerate of bearers of fading logomes – reminiscent of St. Elmo’s fires or falling meteorites – that comes in place of the dissolving modern society.
The Femenological Sociology of Alfred Schutz
The forerunner of such a sociology of the minimal was the famous Austrian-American sociologist Alfred Schutz (1899-1959), who founded the phenomenological trend in sociology. Schutz was a student of the philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), the creator of phenomenology. The essence of the phenomenological approach lies in the call for abstraction from generalizing deductionist concepts that derive the small from the large, the particular from the general, and to focus on the small, concrete, empirically present. In particular, Husserl called for starting from concrete thinking., as we find it in ordinary people, from the “life world” (Lebenswelt), and only then carefully move on to generalizations and rationalizations. This phenomenological approach led Martin Heidegger to identify the central philosophical category for his teaching – Dasein, with the help of which he built his fundamental ontology. In the case of Schutz, phenomenology led to the sociology of everyday life , which studies the micro-phenomena of human behavior in the surrounding world, closely adjacent to it.
Schutz showed that the behavior of the ordinary man in the street includes a wide range of phenomena, which by default is taken for granted. This class of objects, phenomena, events constitutes the most important reference points in the structure of everyday life . Schutz calls them “taken for granted” — “something that is supposed to be guaranteed.” The life world consists of such moments. The layman is so deeply saturated with “taken for granted” that he begins to project these “evidences” onto the whole world. This is what Schutz calls ” typification “, that is, the process of constantly interpreting the non-obvious as being obvious . By typifying an unfamiliar passer-by on the street, the layman projects on him is a complex of ideas that he had formed before the meeting and without any connection with it. He draws conclusions from clothing, gait, age, and gender, and places the stranger in a broad series of “taken for granted,” thus canceling out the unknown or broad social and philosophical generalizations. The life world of an ordinary person is a continuous typification – any new event, phenomenon, object or message is interpreted through chains of already known, mastered and “understandable” things – “taken for granted”.
Another gradation of the average person’s behavior consists of two types of motivations – ” goal motivation ” and ” cause motivation “. Developing Weber’s ideas about goal-oriented activity, Schutz believes that goal motivation concentrates a person’s will on achieving something specific and therefore leads to action . While the motivation of the cause only prepares the ground and increases the likelihood of the action, but does not entail it with inevitability.
Another sociologically operational idea of Schutz is the division of the sphere of life of the layman into 4 horizons:
predecessor horizon
descendant horizon
horizon of spatially close people (“conspatials”)
The horizon of people living at a given time – simultaneously with a given individual (“contemporals”).
Within these horizons, the individual practices two types of relationships – understanding-interpretation and action-influence . It is possible to apply only understanding-interpretation to predecessors, only action-influence to descendants, and both types of relations to close spatial and temporal images.
The sociological formalization of Schutz is extremely important because
It is built on the basis of the minimal figure of the inhabitant , and does not refer to any sociological systems that would explain the genesis of this inhabitant himself, place him in a specific social context and interpret what he considers “taken for granted”, and what does not consider, and where did this “taken for granted” come from;
What are the nodes of typification in different societies and how does this typification work?
How is the structure of goals and causes arranged in a given society and why exactly this way and not otherwise;
· how the 4 horizons are configured, what is included in them and how interpretative-understanding and actively-influencing models of relations are deployed.
In a full-fledged society and in classical sociology, especially structural, Schutz’s phenomenology would be empty and meaningless , since it would not explain anything in essence, and would only describe and systematize banal processes at the primary level. But it reveals its most important methodological significance at the moment when society, as a phenomenon, ends, its structures undergo dissolution, dissipation, and micro-beings come to its place, in relation to which it does not matter at all – the product of the decay of which constructions, social structures and religious-philosophical ensembles they are. The manager also had a sociological profile. The bearer of the logem does not have this profile, and in this case, Schutz’s phenomenological approach reveals all its significance and relevance . He describes the inhabitant, immersed in the structure of specific sensual – life – forms – as an autonomous figure , at the intersection of the main “sociological” axes of which one can put the most bizarre and exotic assumptions.
This methodology, which would be inadequate in a society with preserved sociological fundamentals , both in the space of Modernity and in the space of Premodernity, in Postmodernity, on the contrary, reveals its relevance and heuristic potential.
Everyday becomes even more everyday
The small phenomenological scale proposed by Schutz is further reduced in the Postmodern . This is seen, in particular, in the question of the disappearance of horizons . The first two horizons – attitudes towards ancestors and descendants – practically disappear, or at least become so secondary that they do not affect the structure of everyday life in any way. Thus, the typical figure of the Postmodern has only two horizons – “conspatials” and “contemporals”. At the same time, the zone of conspatials is being transformed in two directions – it narrows closer to a singular corporeality (to the detriment of social institutions, family ties after reaching a certain teenage independence, etc.), but spreads along a network basis – the nominal figure of a virtual interlocutor on-line or the recipient of an SMS message is integrated into the near space , from where a blood relative or fellow student falls out.
The zone of contemporals also expands and contracts. Since no more attention is paid to the past and the future, some topics from the past (future) that are significant for the inhabitant of the Postmodern are transferred to the present, holographically placed there. A historical character played by a well-known actor is identified with the actor himself , that is, he is plasmically placed in the contemporary. On the other hand, something from the present that does not directly affect the bodily singularity is ignored and not included in the zone of attention, that is, it is cut out of the present and placed in “nowhere”.
The structure of “taken for granted” is also changing, it includes elements of a holiday, bonuses, receiving pleasure, in complete isolation from work, efforts and personal achievements. This is due to the general trend towards the expansion of civil rights and social guarantees. At the same time, there are fewer requirements for socialization. To become a full-fledged citizen, it is enough to be able to count to two and speak with a “hello” accent. In many European countries, this is enough to obtain citizenship and social benefits.
The balance between goal motivation and cause motivation also changes. Refining the logos weakens the volitional impulse directed towards the goal, relativizes the goal, which means that the action becomes less probable, more virtual. Quite often, the intention (intention) remains at the level of a virtual desire , and does not reach the level of active implementation. In contrast, the probabilist “cause motivation” becomes more significant, as “why” refers to both action and inaction, and explaining why someone did something (and more often why they did not do it) becomes a calming method for those increasingly complex and painful sensations that the logem experiences in relation to action . Schutz distinguishes between “action” (action) and “act” (act) and, that is, the process of doing and (done) deed . In the Postmodern, “ action ” undoubtedly prevails, that is, the doing of something that at any moment can stop without being completed, or go into a different state and open up as a different doing, about which at the first stage no one (including himself doing) did not suspect. The act is difficult to bear for the logem, it requires effort and entails irreversibility . Doing is more acceptable, but should also ideally be done easily, festively, and not have an unambiguous end. It can be likened to tearing and tearing. The gap is an irreversible state (the thread was broken and that’s it). Tearing is a process of tension in which the thread is already being pulled, but still didn’t break. The logem is the tearing of the thread: the thread is pulled, but they do not dare to break it, they pull and pull.
Michel Maffesoli: the conquest of the present
Schutz’s methodology has been brilliantly applied to the study of (post)modern Western society rapidly shifting into the Postmodern by another sociologist, Michel Maffesoli (born 1944). Mafessoli, a student of Gilbert Durand, combines in his research the principles of the sociology of depths and the phenomenological approach of Schutz.
According to Maffesoli, Postmodern society is characterized by a fatigue of normative patterns placed in the past (history) or in the future (utopia). From this moment begins the ” conquest of the present ” (10) . Postmodern does not trust the scale – neither temporary nor social, is not interested in what was before and what will happen later. Postmodern focuses on the moment , on the close and very close, on the now . This is how the topoi of the new sociology arise – “micro-event”, “realization of utopia here and now”, “holiday”, “locality”. The logems of the layman place the scenarios of the “big society” – where both archaic tribes and the technological civilizations of the Modern can be attributed – to micro level , play them out on the scale of a room or a computer screen. Everyday life becomes epic, grandiose . The meaning of banal events is hypertrophied, and the routine turns into a holiday. Rationality becomes more and more local , coping with individual simple operations, but refusing to move towards generalizations. What Postmodern people think of as “taken for granted” — WiFi everywhere, cell phones, Mac Do’s around the corner, etc. – has a bizarre and isolated, fragmentary character.
Against the backdrop of this grinding of the logos to the dust of the logem, Maffesoli captures the rise of myth and, specifically, the myth of Dionysus . This is an extremely important remark, as it shows that the Postmodern’s loss of the grasp of the big logos and the critical growth of nihilism is being compensated by the rise of the unconscious – and specifically, the structures of the nocturne .
The scheme of Maffesoli’s sociology is as follows: the logocentrism of Modernity (which he ironically calls “Post-Medieval”) and the social forms that preceded it has exhausted itself , and at the moment there is a new appeal to myth . But this appeal is, and Mafessoli agrees with this, pathological in nature, since it is associated with the immediate previous complete expulsion of myth from the sphere of consciousness , which compresses the denominator spring to such an extent that it unbends. Maffesoli in one of his interviews illustrates this by pointing to the surge of serial murders in the West and, first of all, in the USA. He emphasizes that serial killers as a social phenomenon flourish in societies where security – and accordingly, the sterilization of aggression – is elevated to the highest value. Maffesoli cites the example of ” nosocomial ” infections, that is, those infections or, more broadly, diseases that a person becomes infected with when placed in a clinic for the treatment of completely different diseases. Modern society, especially American society, strives for complete “asepticization” in the sphere of violence, wants to be cured of it in all its manifestations. This gives rise to a compensatory concentration of sporadic violence at separate points – moreover, in hypertrophied forms. Modern violence is “nosocomial” in nature – it is born from an excessive desire to eradicate it . The process of treatment itself becomes the source and cause of the disease.
Thus, the logem, being the desire to rationalize the smallest aspects of the life of an individual, brings to life the Dionysian outbursts of the nocturnal myth . It can be said that the myth acquires a nosocomial character in the Postmodern, and breaks through logems that it is easier to bypass than the more total and vigilant structures of logistics. The myth breaks through later that the logem equated it with nothing.
Postmodernism of the youth masses and the “Albanian” language
Maffesoli believes that modern European society is in two registers . At the level of the elite and the intelligentsia, it thinks in terms of Modernity, liberal, and sometimes social democratic narratives. There is still society for the elites, they live in the Modern. But the masses, and especially the youth masses, who have ceased to understand “big narratives”, are happy to plunge into the Dionysian element of social decay , defragmentation, regrouping into small teams (companies), outside of which the world and society exist in a cryptic way . and probabilistic. Young people are no longer Modern, they do not understand its discourse. The youth is Postmodern, it balances between the ironic play of logomes and the nocturnal images and myths rising from unconsciously disparate images and myths. Hence the desire of young people to distort the language , to invent a new slang, which is designed to destroy grammatical norms. From the standpoint of the logos, these are pure errors. But from the point of view of myth, this is an attempt to recreate rhetoric in its fundamental quality – as the language of parallel logic , the language of myth.
The Internet and LiveJournal provide many examples of this. The “Albanian language”, which is widespread in Internet Russia and extremely popular in Live Journal some time ago, is a vivid example of this. The expressions “preved”, “krosavcheg”, “author zhzhot”, etc. are saturated with vague but expressive myths, exclamations located between the logem (ordering the surrounding microworld with the help of such Internet grunts, uplifting, assuring collective belonging to the Internet community, etc.) and the pure unconscious . The “Albanian” language is a spontaneous discovery of the power of catachresis, which is the most important trope of the nocturne.
Networks and logems
The fixation on locality, which is especially evident in the youth environment, makes it possible to understand the structure of the network society , which is a characteristic feature of the Postmodern.
The network has no center . It develops simultaneously from several poles, and these poles can appear and disappear, flow one into another, increase in number or decrease. The meaning of the pole of the network – the server – is that it is always local , that is, it is located in a small space, commensurate with the logem. The pole is organized around the singular body and its simplest encroachments. At the same time, it can also be formed around a single emotion, mood, image. The most extensive networks are deployed around a single expression – the “Albanian” network “preved, bear!” or around the done teen sobbing – the Emo move. More complex networks – bikers, break dancers, skinheads, etc. – are less common precisely because of the complexity of their network protocols. The closer the protocol is to the logome, the more likely the network is to achieve a wide deployment scale.
When the pole of the network emerges, it begins to grow into an industry that exploits this impulse. This is how intersecting networks of related products, services, broadcasts, gadget and badge production, marketplaces and distribution centers are deployed – up to bills and government decrees. The number of poles is theoretically unlimited, and any logem – that is, the effort of a disintegrating individuality to cope with the world flowing through its fingers – has a chance to become such a pole, deploy a network around itself or connect to existing networks. Both of these actions, the emergence of the pole and the connection to existing networks, will in the future become one and the same gesture: each new user of the network simultaneously becomes a new portal, the new “server”. Not only can he watch reality shows live, but he can also show reality shows from his seat at the computer, and then all netizens can see how he sits in front of the screen and watches someone else sits in front of the screen and watches … And so in the period. For a change, you can grimace or giggle. This is how a new minimalist network (post) society is being created.
Shadow of Dionysus
Maffesoli’s remark about the return of myth through the new youth idiocy (idiocy, on the logical side) brings us to an extremely important conclusion regarding the structure of the Postmodern. From the point of view of the logos, Postmodern represents nihilism and the critical disintegration of the bearer of the logos to the level of logems. But still, this is nothing but the deployment of the Modern program in its highest stage., and, consequently, the continuation of the work that was begun by the diurnic myth back in archaic times. Most postmodernist philosophers have by no means sought to return to myth or to wind down the Modern as a temporary misunderstanding. On the contrary, they wanted to “enlighten the Enlightenment” (Horkheimer), to complete the mission of the Modern, which he had failed to accomplish. Postmodernity is called upon not to prepare for the return of myth, but to finally free itself from myth in all its variations , right down to those that remain in logos, logic, and even logistics. Therefore, the official program of the Postmodern is only the logem and, in extreme cases, nothing.; a logem interacting with nothing. This dichotomy of logem versus nothing is the latest edition of diurnic dualism – the hero facing death (today it is expressed as “a young man drinking beer in an underpass” or “a lady in a solarium”). Postmodern man – postman – is micro-rationality , surrounded by an overgrown desert. It is no longer a person and death, but a piece of a person, a separate organ and the fact of separation from the rest, despite the fact that the rest is perceived not as “everything” where one can integrate, but as nothing, where one cannot integrate. The fate of the dividual in the Postmodern is the tragedy of a prosthesis thrown into the trash ; prosthesis, momentarily received a quantum of consciousness. Salvation in drugs, non-traditional sex, early HIV infection and the chance to “die young” (for example, in a car accident). There are no prospects for growing up, no future (no future – the punk slogan of the 80s). Hence the juvenile anthropology , theoretically extended to all ages, and the rejection of growing up in Western society (where one can increasingly see grandparents dressed and acting like teenagers).
Such active nihilism is the positive program of the Postmodern in its logical dimension. Moreover, before this ideal is realized, it is proposed to spend energy on fighting the remnants of “totalitarianism” in the Modern itself, which hinder the implementation of this “ideal”.
But if we recognize the correctness of Maffesoli, then we will see the whole picture from the other side. The weakening of the logos, its refinement allows crushed and repressed mythemes – especially nocturnal, less noticeable and more flexible ones – to gradually rise from the unconscious and penetrate into the zone of the numerator under the mask of “nothing”, on the one hand, and under the guise of “very weak” logemes – on the other hand. another. Nocturne myths offer their help to the local dividual both in ordering the surrounding chaos and in settling relations with nothing that can be subjected to euphemization . At the same time, the activity of the logem becomes ecstatic , and nothing becomes sweet . This is the shadow of Dionysus, which Maffesoli speaks of. The mytheme of the nocturne imperceptibly penetrates the logem and transforms it into something else. In this case, the Postmodern becomes the “return of the myth”.
But such a perspective, especially taking into account the general negative vigilance of the Postmodern towards the diurna to be asepticized, can only lead to a mild dissolution of society in the promiscuous “kingdom of mothers” (which Goethe’s Faust was looking for), and hence to the immersion of society into the unconscious, into myth, moreover in his nocturnal incarnation . In this case, it may well become both the end of this diurn cycle and the prelude to the beginning of the next one. – These hypotheses were considered by sociologists P. Sorokin, J. Durand, Ch. Lalo, etc., who believe that modern European (and global) society is completedits next stage (sensual, Dionysian, postclassical, etc.), and through a series of upheavals, crises and catastrophes, a new one will appear in the place of today’s humanity, with completely different social attitudes (“the return of the ancient gods” or a new “ideational order”).
Postmodern and Archeomodern in Globalization
Another important consequence of the analysis of the Postmodern in Maffesoli’s sociology is the possibility to correlate the principles of the Postmodern itself (in the narrow sense, the view from the side of the logos) and the archeomodern. In the process of globalization, as we have shown, the globalizing Postmodern is superimposed on the localized archeomodern. This is an important structural remark as it describes the essence networks. The network integrates at the level of logems (Postmodern) local poles (servers) that have the nature of archeomodern (that is, consisting of blurry logems, already saturated with rising nocturnal mythems). The global logem (actually globalism as a project of One World, a “single world” with a “world government”, “world electronic parliament”, etc.) integrates an arbitrary number of local semi-logems-semi-myths at the level of weak ties. All of them exchange horizontally and vertically infemes, quanta of meaningless information, which creates a simulation of action and process, in the absence of any progression or accumulation (this path “forward” is already blocked by nothingness that has grown to a gigantic size). Archeomodern does not understand the global logem at all and is not in solidarity with it. He lives in Schutz’s minimalized ‘lifeworld’, within an increasingly virtual ‘conspatiality’ and bizarre ‘contemporality’. And this is where it happens an uncensored and relatively free rise of nocturnal myths. Archeomodern is the point of infiltration of myth into logos in the structure of the network society .
The network itself is the latest edition of the logos, but what it integrates is the contradictory and monstrous agglomerations of undigested Modernity interspersed with unresolved fragments of myth. Portals – both individual network initiatives and entire countries – are almost always archaeomodern, that is, semi-logems, semi-mythemes. The fact that they are ready to integrate into a global network with a common protocol is evidence of their obedience .integrating globalist project of Postmodern (from the side of logos). But the fact that they are not going to follow the path of logos and modernization, and, on the contrary, intend to bring into the network all the contradictions and all the inconsistencies of their unfinished modernization, combined with the already destroyed structure of the myth, testifies to the prospect of a constant accumulation of a growing mass of mythological elements in the network. And although at the first stage these elements will certainly be grotesque, disparate, chaotic mythems, according to the principle of a chreod, at some point, with a certain saturation, they will begin to line up into more ordered mythological constructions. Perhaps at some point, nothing will take on the shape of a “great mother”, a cult “golden woman” ..