Signs of mass elite and folk culture. Elite culture: essence, features

Elite culture is the culture of privileged groups of society, characterized by fundamental closedness, spiritual aristocracy and value-semantic self-sufficiency, including art for art's sake, serious music, and highly intellectual literature. Plast elite culture associated with the life and activities of the “top” of society - the elite. Artistic theory considers the elite to be representatives of the intellectual environment, figures of science, art, and religion. Therefore, elite culture is associated with the part of society that is most capable of spiritual activity or has power due to its position. It is this part of society that provides social progress and cultural development.

The circle of consumers of elite culture is the highly educated part of society - critics, literary critics, art historians, artists, musicians, regulars of theaters, museums, etc. In other words, it functions among the intellectual elite, the professional spiritual intelligentsia. Therefore, the level of elite culture is ahead of the level of perception of a moderately educated person. As a rule, it appears in the form of artistic modernism, innovation in art, and its perception requires special preparation and is characterized by aesthetic freedom, commercial independence of creativity, philosophical insight into the essence of phenomena and the human soul, complexity and diversity of forms of artistic exploration of the world.

Elite culture deliberately limits the range of values that recognize them as true and “high” and consistently opposes the culture of the majority in all its historical and typological varieties - folklore, folk culture, the official culture of a particular estate or class, the state as a whole, etc. Moreover, it needs a constant context of mass culture, since it is based on the mechanism of repulsion from the values and norms accepted in it, on the destruction of the stereotypes and templates that have developed in it, on demonstrative self-isolation.

Philosophers consider elite culture as the only one capable of preserving and reproducing the basic meanings of culture and possessing a number of fundamentally important features:

· complexity, specialization, creativity, innovation;

· the ability to form a consciousness ready for active transformative activity and creativity in accordance with the objective laws of reality;

· ability to concentrate spiritual, intellectual and artistic experience generations;

· the presence of a limited range of values recognized as true and “high”;

· a rigid system of norms accepted by a given stratum as mandatory and strict in the community of “initiates”;

· individualization of norms, values, evaluation criteria of activity, often principles and forms of behavior of members of the elite community, thereby becoming unique;

· the creation of a new, deliberately complicated cultural semantics, requiring special training and an immense cultural horizon from the addressee;

· using a deliberately subjective, individually creative, “detaching” interpretation of the ordinary and familiar, which brings closer cultural development reality by the subject to a mental (sometimes artistic) experiment on it and, to the limit, replaces the reflection of reality in elite culture with its transformation, imitation with deformation, penetration into meaning with conjecture and rethinking of the given;

· semantic and functional “closedness”, “narrowness”, isolation from the whole of national culture, which turns elite culture into a kind of secret, sacred, esoteric knowledge, taboo for the rest of the masses, and its bearers turn into a kind of “priests” of this knowledge, chosen ones gods, “servants of the muses,” “keepers of secrets and faith,” which is often played out and poeticized in elite culture.

The individual-personal character of elite culture is its specific quality, which is manifested in political activity, in science, art. Unlike folk culture It is not anonymity, but personal authorship that becomes the goal of artistic, creative, scientific, and other activities. In different historical periods, right up to the present day, opuses by philosophers, scientists, writers, architects, film directors, etc. are authored.

Elite culture is contradictory. On the one hand, it quite clearly expresses the search for something new, still unknown, on the other hand, an orientation toward conservation, the preservation of what is already known and familiar. Therefore, probably in science, artistic creativity the new achieves recognition, sometimes overcoming considerable difficulties.

Elite culture, including its esoteric (internal, secret, intended for initiates) directions, is included in different areas cultural practice, performing different functions (roles) in it: informational and cognitive, replenishing the treasury of knowledge, technical achievements, works of art; socialization, including a person in the world of culture; normative and regulatory, etc. What comes to the fore in elite culture is the cultural-creative function, the function of self-realization, self-actualization of the individual, and the aesthetic-demonstrative function (it is sometimes called the exhibition function).

Modern elite culture

The main formula of elite culture is “art for art’s sake.” Avant-garde movements in music, painting, and cinema can be classified as elite culture. If we talk about elite cinema, then this is art house, auteur cinema, documentaries and short films.

Art house is a film not aimed at a mass audience. These are non-commercial, self-produced films, as well as films produced by small studios.

Difference from Hollywood films:

Focus on the character's thoughts and feelings, rather than moving along plot twists.

In auteur cinema, the director himself comes first. He is the author, creator and creator of the film, he is the source of the main idea. In such films the director tries to reflect some artistic design. Therefore, viewing such films is intended for viewers who already have an understanding of the features of cinema as an art and an appropriate level of personal education, which is why the distribution of art-house films is, as a rule, limited. Often the budget of art-house films is limited, so the creators resort to non-standard approaches. Examples of elite cinema include films such as “Solaris”, “Dreams for Sale”, “All About My Mother”.

Elite cinema very often does not enjoy success. And it's not about the work of the director or actors. The director can invest deep meaning into your work and convey it in your own way, but the audience is not always able to find this meaning and understand it. This is where this “narrow understanding” of elite culture is reflected.

In the elite component of culture, there is an approbation of what, years later, will become a publicly available classic, and perhaps even move into the category of trivial art (to which researchers include the so-called “pop classics” - “The Dance of the Little Swans” by P. Tchaikovsky, “The Seasons”) "A. Vivaldi, for example, or some other overly replicated work of art). Time blurs the boundaries between mass and elite cultures. What is new in art, which today is the lot of a few, in a century will be understood by a much larger number of recipients, and even later may become commonplace in culture.

Elite culture is a culture of privileged groups of society, characterized by fundamental closedness, spiritual aristocracy and value-semantic self-sufficiency. This is “high culture”, opposed popular culture by the type of impact on the perceiving consciousness, preserving its subjective characteristics and providing a meaning-forming function. Type of culture characterized by production cultural values, samples, which, due to their exclusivity, are designed and accessible mainly to a narrow circle of people (elite). Its main ideal is the formation of a consciousness ready for active transformative activity and creativity. Elite culture is capable of concentrating the intellectual, spiritual and artistic experience of generations.

Historical origins of elite culture

The historical origin of elite culture is precisely this: already in primitive society, priests, magi, sorcerers, and tribal leaders become privileged owners of special knowledge, which cannot and should not be intended for general, mass use. Subsequently, this kind of relationship between elite culture and mass culture in one form or another, in particular secular, was repeatedly reproduced (in various religious confessions and especially sects, in monastic and spiritual knightly orders, Masonic lodges, in religious and philosophical meetings, in literary -artistic and intellectual circles that develop around a charismatic leader, scientific communities and scientific schools, in political associations and parties, including especially those that worked secretly, conspiratorially, underground, etc.). Ultimately, the elitism of knowledge, skills, values, norms, principles, traditions formed in this way was the key to refined professionalism and deep subject specialization, without which historical progress, progressive value-semantic growth, meaningful enrichment and accumulation of formal perfection are impossible in culture - any value-semantic hierarchy. Elite culture acts as an initiative and productive principle in any culture, performing a predominantly creative function in it; while it stereotypes, routinizes, and profanes the achievements of elite culture, adapting them to the perception and consumption of the sociocultural majority of society.

Origin of the term

Elite culture as the antithesis of mass culture

Historically, elite culture arose as the antithesis of mass culture and its meaning manifests its main meaning in comparison with the latter. The essence of elite culture was first analyzed by X. Ortega y Gasset (“Dehumanization of Art,” “Revolt of the Masses”) and K. Mannheim (“Ideology and Utopia,” “Man and Society in an Age of Transformation,” “Essay in the Sociology of Culture”) , who considered this culture as the only one capable of preserving and reproducing the basic meanings of culture and possessing a number of fundamentally important features, including the method of verbal communication - the language developed by its speakers, where special social groups- clergy, politicians, artists - also use special languages closed to the uninitiated, including Latin and Sanskrit.

Deepening contradictions between elite culture and mass

This trend - the deepening of contradictions between elite and mass culture - intensified unprecedentedly in the 20th century and inspired many acute and dramatic events. collisions. At the same time, in the history of culture of the 20th century there are many examples that clearly illustrate the paradoxical dialectic of elite and mass culture: their mutual transition and mutual transformation, mutual influence and self-negation of each of them.

Elitarization of mass culture

So, for example, (symbolists and impressionists, expressionists and futurists, surrealists and dadaists, etc.) - artists, movement theorists, philosophers, and publicists - were aimed at creating unique samples and entire systems of elite culture. Many of the formal refinements were experimental; the theorists of the manifesto and declaration substantiated the right of the artist and thinker to creative incomprehensibility, separation from the masses, their tastes and needs, to the intrinsic existence of “culture for culture.” However, as the expanding field of activity of the modernists included everyday objects, everyday situations, forms of everyday thinking, structures of generally accepted behavior, current historical events and so on. (albeit with a “minus” sign, as a “minus technique”), modernism began - involuntarily, and then consciously - to appeal to the masses and mass consciousness. Shocking and mockery, grotesque and denunciation of the average man, buffoonery and farce - these are the same legitimate genres, stylistic devices and means of expression mass culture, as well as playing on cliches and stereotypes of mass consciousness, posters and propaganda, farce and ditties, recitation and rhetoric. Stylization or parody of banality is almost indistinguishable from the stylized and parodied (with the exception of the ironic author's distance and the general semantic context, which remain almost elusive for mass perception); but the recognition and familiarity of vulgarity makes its criticism - highly intellectual, subtle, aestheticized - little understandable and effective for the majority of recipients (who are not able to distinguish ridicule of base taste from indulging it). As a result, the same work of culture acquires double life with different semantic content and opposite ideological pathos: on one side it turns out to be addressed to elite culture, on the other - to mass culture. These are many works by Chekhov and Gorky, Mahler and Stravinsky, Modigliani and Picasso, L. Andreev and Verhaeren, Mayakovsky and Eluard, Meyerhold and Shostakovich, Yesenin and Kharms, Brecht and Fellini, Brodsky and Voinovich. The contamination of elite culture and mass culture in postmodern culture is especially contradictory; for example, in such an early phenomenon of postmodernism as pop art, there is an elitization of mass culture and at the same time a massification of elitism, which gave rise to the classics of modern times. postmodernist W. Eco characterize pop art as “lowbrow highbrow”, or, conversely, as “highbrow lowbrow” (in English: Lowbrow Highbrow, or Highbrow Lowbrow).

Features of high culture

The subject of elitist, high culture is the individual - free, creative person capable of carrying out conscious activity. are always personally colored and designed for personal perception, regardless of the breadth of their audience, which is why the wide distribution and millions of copies of the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Shakespeare not only do not reduce their significance, but, on the contrary, contribute to the widespread dissemination of spiritual values. In this sense, the subject of elite culture is a representative of the elite.

At the same time, objects of high culture that retain their form - plot, composition, musical structure, but change the mode of presentation and appear in the form of replicated products, adapted, adapted to an unusual type of functioning, as a rule, move into the category of mass culture. In this sense, we can talk about the ability of form to be a carrier of content.

If we keep in mind the art of mass culture, then we can state the different sensitivity of its types to this ratio. In the field of music, the form is fully meaningful; even its minor transformations (for example, the widespread practice of translating classical music into an electronic version of its instrumentation) lead to the destruction of the integrity of the work. In the field of fine arts, a similar result is achieved by translating an authentic image into another format - a reproduction or a digital version (even while trying to preserve the context - in a virtual museum). As for literary work, then changing the mode of presentation - including from traditional book to digital - does not affect its character, since the form of the work, the structure, are the laws of its dramatic construction, and not the medium - printed or electronic - of this information. Defining such works of high culture that have changed the nature of their functioning as mass works is made possible by a violation of their integrity, when their secondary, or at least non-primary, components are emphasized and act as leading ones. A change in the authentic format of mass culture phenomena leads to a change in the essence of the work, where ideas are presented in a simplified, adapted version, and creative functions are replaced by socializing ones. This is due to the fact that, unlike high culture, the essence of mass culture is not creative activity, not in the production of cultural values, but in the formation of " value orientations", corresponding to the character of the dominant public relations, and the development of stereotypes of mass consciousness of members of the “consumer society”. Nevertheless, elite culture is a unique model for mass culture, acting as a source of plots, images, ideas, hypotheses, which are adapted by the latter to the level of mass consciousness.

According to I.V. Kondakov, elite culture appeals to a select minority of its subjects, who, as a rule, are both its creators and recipients (in any case, the circle of both almost coincides). Elite culture consciously and consistently opposes the culture of the majority in all its historical and typological varieties - folklore, folk culture, the official culture of a particular estate or class, the state as a whole, the cultural industry of a technocratic society of the 20th century, etc. Philosophers consider elite culture as the only one capable of preserving and reproducing the basic meanings of culture and possessing a number of fundamentally important features:

complexity, specialization, creativity, innovation;
the ability to form a consciousness ready for active transformative activity and creativity in accordance with the objective laws of reality;
the ability to concentrate the spiritual, intellectual and artistic experience of generations;
the presence of a limited range of values recognized as true and “high”;
a rigid system of norms accepted by a given stratum as mandatory and strict in the community of “initiates”;
individualization of norms, values, evaluative criteria of activity, often principles and forms of behavior of members of the elite community, thereby becoming unique;
the creation of a new, deliberately complicated cultural semantics, requiring special training and an immense cultural horizon from the addressee;
the use of a deliberately subjective, individually creative, “defamiliarizing” interpretation of the ordinary and familiar, which brings the subject’s cultural assimilation of reality closer to a mental (sometimes artistic) experiment on it and, in the extreme, replaces the reflection of reality in elite culture with its transformation, imitation with deformation, penetration into meaning - conjecture and rethinking of the given;
semantic and functional “closedness”, “narrowness”, isolation from the whole of national culture, which turns elite culture into a kind of secret, sacred, esoteric knowledge, taboo for the rest of the masses, and its bearers turn into a kind of “priests” of this knowledge, chosen ones of the gods , “servants of the muses”, “keepers of secrets and faith”, which is often played out and poeticized in elite culture

Elements of high culture

The science
Philosophy
Specialized (professional) education, especially higher education(intellectual elite)
Literature, especially classical, poetry
Intellectual literature (as opposed to mass literature) and auteur cinema (as opposed to mass cinema)
art
Musical art, classical music, opera, ballet, symphonic music, organ music
Theater
Etiquette
Civil service
Military service as an officer
Fine cuisine and good wine
High-fashion
Expressing yourself as an individual

from French elite – selected, selected, best high culture, the consumers of which are educated people, very different high degree specialization, designed, so to speak, for “internal use” and often seeking to complicate its language, that is, to make it inaccessible to most people. ? A subculture of privileged groups of the society, characterized by fundamental closedness, spiritual aristocracy and value-semantic self-sufficiency. Appealing to a select minority of its subjects, who, as a rule, are both its creators and addressees (in any case, the circle of both almost coincides), E.K. consciously and consistently opposes the culture of the majority, or mass culture in the broad sense (in all its historical and typological varieties - folklore, folk culture, official culture of a particular estate or class, the state as a whole, the cultural industry of technocratic society -va 20th century, etc.) (see Mass culture). Moreover, E.k. needs a constant context of mass culture, since it is based on the mechanism of repulsion from the values and norms accepted in mass culture, on the destruction of existing stereotypes and templates of mass culture (including their parody, ridicule, irony, grotesque, polemic, criticism, refutation), on demonstrative self-isolation in general national culture. In this regard, E.k. - a characteristically marginal phenomenon within any history. or national type of culture and is always secondary, derivative in relation to the culture of the majority. The problem of E.K. is especially acute. in communities where the antinomy of mass culture and E.K. practically exhausts all the variety of manifestations of nationalism. culture as a whole and where the mediative (“middle”) area of the national culture, a constituent part of it. body and equally opposed to polarized mass and E. cultures as value-semantic extremes. This is typical, in particular, for cultures that have a binary structure and are prone to inversion forms of history. development (Russian and typologically similar cultures). Watering varies. and cultural elites; the first, also called “ruling”, “powerful”, today, thanks to the works of V. Pareto, G. Mosca, R. Michels, C.R. Mills, R. Miliband, J. Scott, J. Perry, D. Bell and other sociologists and political scientists, have been studied in sufficient detail and deeply. Much less studied are the cultural elites - strata united by non-economic, social, political. and actual power interests and goals, but ideological principles, spiritual values, sociocultural norms, etc. Connected in principle by similar (isomorphic) mechanisms of selection, status consumption, prestige, and political elite. and cultural ones, however, do not coincide with each other and only sometimes enter into temporary alliances, which turn out to be extremely unstable and fragile. Suffice it to recall the spiritual dramas of Socrates, condemned to death by his fellow citizens, and Plato, disillusioned with the Syracuse tyrant Dionysius (the Elder), who undertook to put into practice Plato’s utopia of the “State”, Pushkin, who refused to “serve the king, serve the people” and thereby who recognized the inevitability of his creativity. loneliness, although royal in its own way (“You are a king: live alone”), and L. Tolstoy, who, despite his origin and position, sought to express the “folk idea” through the means of his high and unique art of speech, European. education, sophisticated author's philosophy and religion. It is worth mentioning here the short flowering of the sciences and arts at the court of Lorenzo the Magnificent; the experience of the highest patronage of Louis XIV to the muses, which gave the world examples of Western European. classicism; a short period of cooperation between the enlightened nobility and the noble bureaucracy during the reign of Catherine II; short-lived pre-revolutionary union. rus. intelligentsia with Bolshevik power in the 20s. and so on. , in order to affirm the multidirectional and largely mutually exclusive nature of the interacting political and cultural elites, which enclose the social-semantic and cultural-semantic structures of the society, respectively, and coexist in time and space. This means that E.k. is not a creation or product of water. elites (as was often asserted in Marxist studies) and is not of a class-party nature, but in many cases develops in the fight against politics. elites for their independence and freedom. On the contrary, it is logical to assume that it is the cultural elites that contribute to the formation of politics. elites (structurally isomorphic to cultural elites) in a narrower sphere of socio-political, state. and power relations as its own special case, isolated and alienated from the whole E.K. Unlike polit. elites, spiritual and creative elites develop their own, fundamentally new mechanisms of self-regulation and value-semantic criteria for active chosenness that go beyond the framework of the strictly social and political. demands, and often accompanied by a demonstrative departure from politics and social institutions and semantic opposition to these phenomena as extracultural (unaesthetic, immoral, unspiritual, intellectually poor and vulgar). In E.k. The range of values recognized as true and “high” is deliberately limited, and the system of norms accepted by a given stratum as obligations is tightened. and strict in the communication of the “initiates”. Quantity The narrowing of the elite and its spiritual unity is inevitably accompanied by its qualities. growth (in intellectual, aesthetic, religious, ethical and other respects), and therefore, individualization of norms, values, evaluative criteria of activity, often principles and forms of behavior of members of the elite community, thereby becoming unique. Actually, for the sake of this, the circle of norms and values of E.K. becomes emphatically high, innovative, what can be achieved in a variety of ways. means: 1) mastering new social and mental realities as cultural phenomena or, on the contrary, rejection of anything new and “protection” of a narrow circle of conservative values and norms; 2) inclusion of one’s subject in an unexpected value-semantic context, which makes its interpretation unique and even exclusive. meaning; 3) the creation of a new, deliberately complicated cultural semantics (metaphorical, associative, allusive, symbolic and metasymbolic), requiring special knowledge from the addressee. preparation and vast cultural horizons; 4) the development of a special cultural language (code), accessible only to a narrow circle of connoisseurs and designed to complicate communication, to erect insurmountable (or most difficult to overcome) semantic barriers to profane thinking, which turns out to be, in principle, unable to adequately comprehend the innovations of E.K., to “decipher” it meanings; 5) the use of a deliberately subjective, individually creative, “defamiliarizing” interpretation of the ordinary and familiar, which brings the subject’s cultural assimilation of reality closer to a mental (sometimes artistic) experiment on it and, in the extreme, replaces the reflection of reality in E.K. its transformation, imitation - deformation, penetration into meaning - conjecture and rethinking of the given. Due to its semantic and functional “closedness”, “narrowness”, isolation from the whole national. culture, E.k. often turns into a type (or similarity) of secret, sacred, esoteric. knowledge that is taboo for the rest of the masses, and its bearers turn into a kind of “priests” of this knowledge, chosen ones of the gods, “servants of the muses,” “keepers of secrets and faith,” which is often played out and poeticized in E.K. Historical origin of E.c. exactly this: already in primitive society, priests, magi, sorcerers, tribal leaders become privileged holders of special knowledge, which cannot and should not be intended for general, mass use. Subsequently, this kind of relationship between E.k. and mass culture in one form or another, in particular secular, were repeatedly reproduced (in various religious denominations and especially sects, in monastic and spiritual knightly orders, Masonic lodges, in craft workshops that cultivated professional skills, in religious and philosophical . etc.). Ultimately, the elitism of knowledge, skills, values, norms, principles, and traditions that was formed in this way was the key to sophisticated professionalism and deep subject specialization, without which history would be impossible in culture. progress, progress value-semantic growth, contain. enrichment and accumulation of formal perfection - any value-semantic hierarchy. E.k. acts as an initiative and productive principle in any culture, performing mainly creative work. function in it; while mass culture stereotypes, routinizes, and profanes the achievements of E.K., adapting them to the perception and consumption of the sociocultural majority of the society. In turn, E.k. constantly ridicules or denounces mass culture, parodies it or grotesquely deforms it, presenting the world of mass society and its culture as scary and ugly, aggressive and cruel; in this context, the fate of representatives of E.K. depicted as tragic, disadvantaged, broken (romantic and post-romantic concepts of “genius and the crowd”; “creative madness”, or “sacred disease”, and the ordinary “ common sense”; inspired “intoxication”, incl. narcotic, and vulgar “sobriety”; “celebration of life” and boring everyday life). Theory and practice of E.k. blossoms especially productively and fruitfully when “broken” cultural eras , when changing cultural and historical paradigms, uniquely expressing the crisis conditions of culture, the unstable balance between “old” and “new”, the representatives of E.K. realized their mission in culture as “initiators of the new,” as ahead of their time, as creators not understood by their contemporaries (such, for example, were the majority of romantics and modernists - symbolists, cultural figures of the Avant-garde and professional revolutionaries who carried out the cultural revolution) . This also includes the “beginners” of large-scale traditions and the creators of the “grand style” paradigms (Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Gorky, Kafka, etc.). This view, although fair in many respects, was not, however, the only possible one. So, on Russian grounds. culture (where the public attitude towards E.K. was in most cases wary or even hostile, which did not even contribute to the relative spread of E.K., in comparison with Western Europe), concepts were born that interpret E.K. as a conservative departure from social reality and its pressing problems into the world of idealized aesthetics (“pure art”, or “art for art’s sake”), religion. and mythol. fantasies, socio-political. utopian, philosopher idealism, etc. (late Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, M. Antonovich, N. Mikhailovsky, V. Stasov, P. Tkachev and other radical democratic thinkers). In the same tradition, Pisarev and Plekhanov, as well as Ap. Grigoriev interpreted E.k. (including “art for art’s sake”) as a demonstrative form of social and political rejection. reality, as an expression of hidden, passive protest against it, as a refusal to participate in society. struggle of his time, seeing in this a characteristic history. symptom (deepening crisis), and pronounced inferiority of the E.K. itself. (lack of breadth and historical foresight, social weakness and powerlessness to influence the course of history and the life of the masses). Theorists E.K. - Plato and Augustine, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Vl. Soloviev and Leontiev, Berdyaev and A. Bely, Ortega y Gasset and Benjamin, Husserl and Heidegger, Mannheim and Ellul - variously varied the thesis about the hostility of democratization and the massification of culture and its qualities. level, its content and formal perfection, creative. search and intellectual, aesthetic, religious. and other novelty, about the stereotype and triviality that inevitably accompanies mass culture (ideas, images, theories, plots), lack of spirituality, and the infringement of creativity. personality and the suppression of its freedom in conditions of mass society and mechanics. replication of spiritual values, expansion of industrial production of culture. This tendency is to deepen the contradictions between E.K. and mass - increased unprecedentedly in the 20th century. and inspired many poignant and dramatic stories. collisions (cf., for example, the novels: “Ulysses” by Joyce, “In Search of Lost Time” by Proust, “Steppenwolf” and “The Glass Bead Game” by Hesse, “The Magic Mountain” and “Doctor Faustus” by T. Mann, “We ” Zamyatin, “The Life of Klim Samgin” by Gorky, “The Master and Margarita” by Bulgakov, “The Pit” and “Chevengur” by Platonov, “The Pyramid” by L. Leonov, etc.). At the same time, in the cultural history of the 20th century. There are many examples that clearly illustrate the paradoxical dialectics of E.K. and mass: their mutual transition and mutual transformation, mutual influence and self-negation of each of them. So, for example, creative. quest for various representatives of modern culture (symbolists and impressionists, expressionists and futurists, surrealists and dadaists, etc.) - artists, movement theorists, philosophers, and publicists - were aimed at creating unique samples and entire systems of E.C. Many of the formal refinements were experimental; theory manifestos and declarations substantiated the right of the artist and thinker to be creative. incomprehensibility, separation from the masses, their tastes and needs, to the intrinsic existence of “culture for culture.” However, as the expanding field of activity of modernists included everyday objects, everyday situations, forms of everyday thinking, structures of generally accepted behavior, current history. events, etc. (albeit with a “minus” sign, as a “minus technique”), modernism began - involuntarily, and then consciously - to appeal to the masses and mass consciousness. Shocking and mockery, grotesque and denunciation of the average man, slapstick and farce - these are the same legitimate genres, stylistic devices and expressions. media of mass culture, as well as playing on cliches and stereotypes of mass consciousness, posters and propaganda, farce and ditties, recitation and rhetoric. Stylization or parody of banality is almost indistinguishable from the stylized and parodied (with the exception of the ironic author's distance and the general semantic context, which remain almost elusive for mass perception); but the recognition and familiarity of vulgarity makes its criticism - highly intellectual, subtle, aestheticized - little understandable and effective for the majority of recipients (who are not able to distinguish ridicule of low-grade taste from indulging it). As a result, one and the same work of culture acquires a double life with different semantic content and opposite ideological pathos: on one side it turns out to be addressed to E.K., on the other - to mass culture. These are many works by Chekhov and Gorky, Mahler and Stravinsky, Modigliani and Picasso, L. Andreev and Verhaeren, Mayakovsky and Eluard, Meyerhold and Shostakovich, Yesenin and Kharms, Brecht and Fellini, Brodsky and Voinovich. E.c. contamination is especially controversial. and mass culture in postmodern culture; for example, in such an early phenomenon of Postmodernism as Pop Art, there is an elitization of mass culture and at the same time a massification of elitism, which gave rise to the classics of modern times. postmodernist W. Eco characterize pop art as “lowbrow highbrow”, or, conversely, as “highbrow lowbrow” (in English: Lowbrow Highbrow, or Highbrow Lowbrow). No fewer paradoxes arise when comprehending the genesis of totalitarian culture (see Totalitarian culture), which, by definition, is a mass culture and a culture of the masses. However, in its origin, totalitarian culture is rooted precisely in E.K.: for example, Nietzsche, Spengler, Weininger, Sombart, Jünger, K. Schmitt and other philosophers and socio-political. thinkers who anticipated and brought the Germans closer to real power. Nazism, definitely belonged to E.K. and were in a number of cases misunderstood and distorted by their practical. interpreters, primitivized, simplified to a rigid scheme and uncomplicated demagoguery. The situation is similar with communists. totalitarianism: the founders of Marxism - Marx and Engels, and Plekhanov, and Lenin himself, and Trotsky, and Bukharin - they were all, in their own way, “highbrow” intellectuals and represented a very narrow circle of radically minded intelligentsia. Moreover, the ideal. The atmosphere of social-democratic, socialist, and Marxist circles, then strictly conspiratorial party cells, was built in full accordance with the principles of E.K. (only extended to political and educational culture), and the principle of party membership implied not just selectivity, but also a rather strict selection of values, norms, principles, concepts, types of behavior, etc. Actually, the mechanism itself selection(on racial and national grounds or on class-political basis), which lies at the basis of totalitarianism as a socio-cultural system, was born by E.K., in its depths, by its representatives, and later only extrapolated to the mass society, in which everything considered expedient is reproduced and intensified, and everything dangerous for its self-preservation and development is prohibited and confiscated (including by means of violence). Thus, totalitarian culture initially arises from the atmosphere and style, from the norms and values of an elite circle, is universalized as a kind of panacea, and then forcibly imposed on society as a whole as an ideal model and is practically introduced into mass consciousness and societies. activities by any, including non-cultural, means. In conditions of post-totalitarian development, as well as in the context of Western democracy, the phenomena of totalitarian culture (emblems and symbols, ideas and images, concepts and style of socialist realism), being presented in a culturally pluralistic way. context and distanced from modern times. reflection - purely intellectual or aesthetic - begin to function as exotic. E.c. components and are perceived by a generation familiar with totalitarianism only from photographs and anecdotes, “strangely,” grotesquely, associatively. The components of mass culture included in the context of E.K. act as elements of E.K.; while the components of E.K., inscribed in the context of mass culture, become components of mass culture. In the postmodern cultural paradigm, the components of E.k. and popular culture are used equally as ambivalent game material, and the semantic boundary between mass and E.k. turns out to be fundamentally blurred or removed; in this case, the distinction between E.k. and mass culture practically loses its meaning (retaining for the potential recipient only the allusive meaning of the cultural-genetic context). Lit.: Mills R. The ruling elite. M., 1959; Ashin G.K. The myth of the elite and “mass society”. M., 1966; Davydov Yu.N. Art and the elite. M., 1966; Davidyuk G.P., B.C. Bobrovsky. Problems of “mass culture” and “mass communications”. Minsk, 1972; Snow Ch. Two cultures. M., 1973; “Mass culture” - illusions and reality. Sat. Art. M., 1975; Ashin G.K. Criticism of modern times bourgeois leadership concepts. M., 1978; Kartseva E.N. Ideological and aesthetic foundations of bourgeois “mass culture”. M., 1976; Narta M. Theory of elites and politics. M., 1978; Raynov B. “Mass culture.” M., 1979; Shestakov V.P. “The art of trivialization”: certain problems of “mass culture” // VF. 1982. No. 10; Gershkovich Z.I. Paradoxes of “mass culture” and modern ideological struggle. M., 1983; Molchanov V.V. Mirages of mass culture. L., 1984; Mass species and art forms. M., 1985; Ashin G.K. Modern elite theories: critical. feature article. M., 1985; Kukarkin A.V. Bourgeois mass culture. M., 1985; Smolskaya E.P. “Mass culture”: entertainment or politics? M., 1986; Shestakov V. Mythology of the 20th century. M., 1988; Isupov K. G. Russian aesthetics of history. St. Petersburg, 1992; Dmitrieva N.K., Moiseeva A.P. Philosopher of the free spirit (Nikolai Berdyaev: life and creativity). M., 1993; Ovchinnikov V.F. Creative person in the context of Russian culture. Kaliningrad, 1994; Phenomenology of art. M., 1996; Elite and mass in Russian artistic culture. Sat.st. M., 1996; Zimovets S. Silence of Gerasim: Psychoanalytic and philosophical essays on Russian culture. M., 1996; Afanasyev M.N. Ruling elites and statehood in post-totalitarian Russia (Lecture course). M.; Voronezh, 1996; Dobrenko E. Molding of the Soviet reader. Social and aesthetic. prerequisites for the reception of Soviet literature. St. Petersburg, 1997; Bellows R. Creative Leadership. Prentice-Hall, 1959; Packard V. The Status Seekers. N.Y., 1963; Weyl N. The Creative Elite in America. Wash., 1966; Spitz D. Patterns of Anti-Democratic Thought. Glencoe, 1965; Jodi M. Teorie elity a problem elity. Praha, 1968; Parry G. Political Elite. L, 1969; RubinJ. Do It! N.Y., 1970; Prewitt K., Stone A. The Ruling Elites. Elite Theory, Power and American Democracy. N.Y., 1973; Gans H.G. Popular Culture and High Culture. N.Y., 1974; Swingwood A. The Myth of Mass Culture. L., 1977; Toffler A. The Third Wave. N.Y., 1981; Ridless R. Ideology and Art. Theories of Mass Culture from W. Benjamin to U. Eco. N.Y., 1984; Shiah M. Discourse on Popular Culture. Stanford, 1989; Theory, Culture and Society. L., 1990. I. V. Kondakov. Cultural studies of the twentieth century. Encyclopedia. M.1996

Elite culture- this is “high culture”, contrasted with mass culture by the type of influence on the perceiving consciousness, preserving its subjective characteristics and providing a meaning-forming function. Its main ideal is the formation of a consciousness ready for active transformative activity and creativity in accordance with the objective laws of reality. Historically, elite culture arose as the antithesis of mass culture and its meaning manifests its main meaning in comparison with the latter.

The essence of elite culture was first analyzed by X. Ortega y Gasset and C. Mannheim. The subject of elitist, high culture is the individual - a free, creative person, capable of carrying out conscious activities. The creations of this culture are always personally colored and designed for personal perception, regardless of the breadth of their audience, which is why the wide distribution and millions of copies of the works of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Shakespeare not only do not reduce their significance, but, on the contrary, contribute to the widespread dissemination of spiritual values. In this sense, the subject of elite culture is a representative of the elite.

Elite culture is the culture of privileged groups of society, characterized by fundamental closedness, spiritual aristocracy and value-semantic self-sufficiency. According to I.V. Kondakov, elite culture appeals to a select minority of its subjects, who, as a rule, are both its creators and recipients (in any case, the circle of both almost coincides).

Elite culture consciously and consistently opposes the culture of the majority in all its historical and typological varieties - folklore, folk culture, the official culture of a particular estate or class, the state as a whole, the cultural industry of the technocratic society of the 20th century. and so on.

Philosophers consider elite culture as the only one capable of preserving and reproducing the basic meanings of culture and possessing a number of fundamentally important features:

complexity, specialization, creativity, innovation;
the ability to form a consciousness ready for active transformative activity and creativity in accordance with the objective laws of reality;
the ability to concentrate the spiritual, intellectual and artistic experience of generations;
the presence of a limited range of values recognized as true and “high”;
a rigid system of norms accepted by a given stratum as mandatory and strict in the community of “initiates”;
individualization of norms, values, evaluative criteria of activity, often principles and forms of behavior of members of the elite community, thereby becoming unique;
the creation of a new, deliberately complicated cultural semantics, requiring special training and an immense cultural horizon from the addressee;
the use of a deliberately subjective, individually creative, “defamiliarizing” interpretation of the ordinary and familiar, which brings the subject’s cultural assimilation of reality closer to a mental (sometimes artistic) experiment on it and, in the extreme, replaces the reflection of reality in elite culture with its transformation, imitation with deformation, penetration into meaning - conjecture and rethinking of the given;
semantic and functional “closedness”, “narrowness”, isolation from the whole of national culture, which turns elite culture into a kind of secret, sacred, esoteric knowledge, taboo for the rest of the masses, and its bearers turn into a kind of “priests” of this knowledge, chosen ones of the gods , “servants of the muses,” “keepers of secrets and faith,” which is often played out and poeticized in elite culture.

The concept of subculture and counterculture

A subculture is a specific way of life, it is the realization of a person’s need for self-expression, personal development, satisfying the sense of beauty, and understanding one’s purpose in the world. Subcultures appear regardless of politics and economics. Material needs, their quantity and quality associated with living conditions, cannot be significant in determining the reasons why a youth subculture appears.

Mass... And then there is elite. What it is?

First of all, let's start with the definition of the concept of “elite culture”. In a broad sense, elite culture (from the French elite - selected, best) is a form of culture in modern society that is not accessible and understandable to everyone. But it is worth remembering that these “not everyone” are by no means the people who stand above others on the financial ladder. Rather, they are such refined natures, informal people who, as a rule, have their own, special look on the world, a special worldview.

Elite culture is usually contrasted with mass culture. Elite and mass culture are in a difficult interaction for a number of reasons. The main one is the clash of the idealistic and sometimes utopian philosophy of elite culture with the pragmatism, primitiveness and, perhaps, “realism” of mass culture. Regarding why “realism” is in quotation marks: well, look at the modern “masterpieces” of cinema (“Ant-Man”, “Batman vs. Superman”..., there is no smell of realism in them - they are some kind of hallucinations).

Elite culture usually opposes consumerism, “ambitiousness, half-education” and plebeianism. It is interesting to note that the culture of the elite is also opposed to folklore and popular culture, because it is the majority culture. To an inexperienced outside reader, elitist culture may seem something akin to snobbery or grotesque form aristocracy, which, of course, it is not, for it lacks the mimesis characteristic of snobbery; also, not only people from the upper strata of society belong to the elite culture.

Let us outline the main features of elite culture:

creativity, innovation, the desire to create a “world for the first time”;

closedness, separation from wide, universal use;

"art for art's sake";

cultural mastery of objects, separation from “profane” culture;

creation of a new cultural language of symbols and images;

a system of norms, a limited range of values.

What is modern elite culture? To begin with, let us briefly mention the elite culture of the past. It was something esoteric, hidden, its bearers were priests, monks, knights, members of underground circles (for example, Petrashevsky, of which F. M. Dostoevsky was a famous member), Masonic lodges, orders (for example, crusaders or members of the Teutonic Order).

Why did we turn to history? “Historical knowledge is the primary means of preserving and prolonging an aging civilization,” wrote José Ortega y Gasset. Gasset’s work “The Revolt of the Masses” clearly illuminates the problem of the “man of the masses”; in it the author introduces the concept of “superman”. And it is the “superman” who is the representative of modern elite culture. The elite, not surprisingly, is a minority; it is by no means “at the helm of modernity,” i.e. the masses are now not exactly in charge of everything, but have a huge influence on the socio-political aspects of society; In my opinion, in our time it is customary to listen to the opinion of the masses.

I think that the mediocre masses practically forcefully impose their thoughts and tastes on society, thereby causing stagnation in it. But still, according to my observations, the elite culture in our 21st century confronts the mass culture with more and more confidence. Commitment to the mainstream, as strange as it may sound, is becoming less and less popular.

There is an increasingly noticeable desire in people to join the “high”, inaccessible to the majority. I really want to believe that humanity is learning from the bitter experience of past centuries that the “uprising of the masses” will not take place. To prevent the absolute triumph of mediocrity, it is necessary to “return to your true Self”, to live with aspiration to the future.

And to prove that elitist culture is gaining momentum, I will give examples of its most prominent representatives. In the musical field, I would like to highlight the German virtuoso violinist David Garrett. He performs and classical works, And modern pop music in your own arrangement.

The fact that Garrett gathers crowds of thousands with his performances does not classify him as mass culture, because although music can be heard by everyone, it is not accessible to every spiritual perception. The music of the famous Alfred Schnittke is just as inaccessible to the masses.

IN fine arts Andy Warhol can be called the most prominent representative of elite culture. Marilyn's diptych, a can of Campbell's soup... his works have become a real public property, while still belonging to an elite culture. The art of Lomography, which became very popular in the nineties of the twentieth century, in my opinion, can be considered part of the elite culture, although at present there are both the International Lomographic Society and associations of Lomographic photographers. In general, about that, read the link.

In the 21st century, museums began to gain popularity contemporary art(for example, MMOMA, Erarta, PERMM). However, performance art is very controversial, but, in my opinion, it can safely be called elitist. And examples of artists performing in this genre are the Serbian artist Marina Abramovich, the Frenchman Vahram Zaryan, and the St. Petersburg resident Pyotr Pavlensky.

An example of the architecture of modern elite culture can be considered the city of St. Petersburg, which is a meeting place different cultures, in which almost every building forces the knowledgeable person to turn to intertemporal dialogue. But still, the architecture of St. Petersburg is not modern, so let’s turn to the architectural works of modern creators. For example, the Nautilus shell house by the Mexican Javier Senosian, the library of Louis Nusser, architects Yves Bayard and Francis Chapu, the Green Citadel by the German architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser.

And speaking of the literature of elite culture, one cannot fail to mention James Joyce (and his legendary novel Ulysses), who had a significant influence on Virginia Woolf and even Ernest Hemingway. Beat writers, for example, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, in my opinion, can be considered representatives of elite culture literature.

I would also like to add Gabriel Garcia Marquez to this list. “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, “Love in Time of Plague”, “Remembering My Sad Whores”... works by the Spanish laureate Nobel Prize, undoubtedly, are very popular in elite circles. If speak about modern literature, I would like to name Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, whose works, although recognized by the literary (and not only) community, their meaning is still not accessible to most people.

Thus, you need to have a huge supply of “keys” to understanding elite culture, knowledge that can help interpret a work of art to the fullest. Every day see St. Isaac's Cathedral while driving along Palace Bridge, and perceiving it as a dome against the sky is one thing. But when looking at the same cathedral, remembering the history of its creation, associating it with an example of late classicism in architecture, thereby turning to St. Petersburg of the 19th century, to the people who lived at that time, entering into dialogue with them through time and space is completely different case.

Editing by Andrey Puchkov