The perspective of the visual language in the space of contemporary culture

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The perspective of the visual language in the space of contemporary culture

Pushonkova Oksana Anatoliivna

Abstract. Introduction. The impossibility of complete mastering the interdisciplinary research field of contemporary forms of visuality results in certain difficulties in forming a common methodology for the analysis various visual phenomena. The textuality of contemporary visual language allows to pay attention to the different contexts which shape the visual language in the value field of a particular culture. The question of how the modern era's values change visual language, which texts and contexts do they form, has become actual. Purpose. The purpose is to study the features of modern visual language, the nature of its contextual content in conditions of the information culture and in spread of ethical and hedonistic logic thinking. Methods. Philosophical and aesthetic synthesis in unity with the principles of art criticism and cultural analysis. The comparative method and the method of theoretical modeling are used. Results. The paper investigates the characteristics of visual language in consumer society, considers its orientation on entertaining and hedonism. The influence of commercial contexts to a new stylistic paradigm of visuality and a new type of art modeling of the world are stated. The article focuses on the contradictory nature o f the media spaces in contemporary culture. The reorientation from consumption with its simplified visual schemes to the creation encourages to find new methods of the hologram vision and art therapy strategies. The visuality, which generates efforts to build its own identity, is a new form of anthropocentrism.

Originality. The research focuses on the connection of visualization strategies with the values of the epoch and the formation of human identity with modern anthropotechniques, which form the ability of personal choice in a visually undefined situation. Conclusion. Visuality nowadays is understood not so much as a piece of cumulative text of culture, but rather as a specific method of production of values. The reproduction of the credible experience should take place through “'proper” experience, which requires the involvement of art-therapy strategies in visual strategies.

Пушонкова Оксана Анатоліївна, ПЕРСПЕКТИВИ ВІЗУАЛЬНОЇ МОВИ В ПРОСТОРІ СУЧАСНОЇ КУЛЬТУРИ

Стаття присвячена сучасним контекстам вивчення феномену візуальної мови у зв'язку з науковими пошуками нового методологічного інструментарію дослідження культури. Виявлено, що тотальна візуалізація комплексно впливає на чуттєвий світ людини в її повсякденних практиках, тому візуальність розуміється не стільки як фрагмент сукупного тексту культури, скільки як специфічний спосіб виробництва значень. У статті досліджено характерні особливості візуальної мови у суспільстві споживання з його видовищно-гедоністичною спрямованістю. Виявлено вплив комерційних контекстів на нову стильову парадигму візуальності, формування специфічного способу художнього моделювання світу. Використання символічних форм і культурних фікцій як інструментів для формування ідентичності, інтеграції «Я» актуалізує питання етичної відповідальності за вибір відповідного інструменту у достовірному пізнанні світу. Встановлено зв'язок стратегій візуалізації з ціннісними настановами епохи та сучасними антропотехніками, у яких формується здатність особистісного вибору у візуально невизначеній ситуації.

Ключові слова: візуальність, візуальна мова, ідентичність, гедонізм, суспільство споживання, річ, арт-терапия, медіакультура.

Formulation of the problem. The impossibility of complete mastering of interdisciplinary research field of contemporary forms of visuality results in certain difficulties in forming a common methodology for the analysis of various visual phenomena. In the era of individualism (G. Lipovetsky) and reckless hedonism visual culture gets extremely ambiguous and controversial estimations.

Firstly, according to many researchers including E. Gombrich, J.-F. Lyotard, F. Jameson, J. Baudrillard, it has replaced the textual culture, therefore should have some features of the predecessor. Here it is about contemporary visual language, its content characteristics and methods of decoding visual artifacts. It should be noted that in modern philosophy the concept of text covers all social reality, there are texts of symbols, of relationships, and hence the basis of visual language is also a text, based on visual media.

Secondly, the research of historical character of visuality allows to draw attention to its historical contexts and contexts which an artist, designer, advertiser are working with, thereby forming the visuality of a contemporary, “educating him perceptually” (R. Arnheim). However, the artist belongs to a broader context - he expresses the meanings of a particular period, his art is a model of the world he lives in. cultural visualization symbolic

Actual question is how evaluative guidelines of the modern era change the visual language, what contexts and texts do they form?

Analysis of the recent research and publications. Visual language issues in the system of contemporary visual communication are studied by S. Khan-Magomedov, S. Serov, K. Kondratyeva, P. Rodkin. Canadian scientist M. McLuhan is a famous researcher of a postGutenberg galaxy.

The historical character of visuality is studied in the works of V. Bychkov, M. Mamardashvili, P. Florensky, V. Zhukovsky, D. Pivovarov, B. Rosin. Vision as active perceptive activity is highlighted by V. Stolin, A. Logvinenko, V. Petrenko, J. Roca, B. Rauschenbach, R. Arnheim and others.

Visuality in connection with the value changes in modern culture is researched by R. Barth, Aronsson, F. Jameson, S. Zizek, V. Podoroga, S. Baumann, D. Bell, J. Baudrillard and others.

Purpose. The article aims to study the characteristics of contemporary visual language, the nature of its contextual filling in terms of information culture and spreading of ethical-hedonistic thinking' logic.

The main material. The creators of contemporary visual language - art experts, art curators, designers, i.e. people who seem to deliberately correlate the modes of human perception of the world, produce artificial worlds. However, not only the possibility of design, but also the cultural field itself and its characteristics determine the nature of visual language, which means unconscious mechanisms are also involved here. Irrational determines the efficiency of transmission a socially significant idea to a consumer. Nowadays the work of designer and artist performs the function of sacralization of human values, similar to a religious ritual.

The cultural realias, which form the external context of shaping visuality strategies, are: “dispersed” structure of the identity of the subject of influence; ethics of hedonism; loss of authenticity in the world; change in the attitudes to things (a Thing-pseudo-Thing - absorption by Things).

So what are the peculiarities of sense which modern visualization strategies are designed for? Do they focus on person with a vague, if not extinct, awareness of his identity, with disabilities in self-reflection, or socially active person who successfully lives at the “crossroads of many messages?”

Naturally, the crisis (economic, environmental, and spiritual) is the background for pessimistic answers. The current crisis of identity is accompanied by a biography crisis that shows the “excommunication” of a global space man not only from their own history, but also from the context of their culture. That is why “today, very few people experience belonging to something bigger and better than themselves” (E. Toffler) [1, p. 583].

Narcissus is the hero of post-industrial era, who becomes the bearer of visuality deprived of historicity. J. Lipovetsky uses the term “Psy-narcissism”. The heroic period of hedonism has passed, replaced by Homo Psychologicus, “immersed in work on liberation and explanation of his personality”, “totally conformal” [2, p. 173]. It establishes the cult of spirituality and sport.

However, you can't call this modern Kalos kagathos ideal, because it is rather a consequence of cultural trauma. In his essay on individualism Lipovetsky wrote that the aim of the subject of this culture is not to create identity, but to prevent fixation, be open to accept new, “kinetic” [2, p. 170].

Man loses home, but settles “comfort zone” with accumulation of things, which is the last refuge and hiding place for a man of information society. Complete freedom, improvisation, extraordinary flexibility and ability to mimicry on the one hand, and fixation in a comfort zone, total dependence on it (traumatic fixation) - on the other.

Nowadays very few practices “jumping out" of comfort zone, as did the heroes of the second half of the twentieth century, trying to overcome a “conformist person” of E. Fromm, or a “man- locator” of D. Rismen. Expanding of comfort zone is only possible as inversion, which is a form of sharp shift. However, social images of a man of information culture are associated with the concept of travel (flamer, tourist, tramp, gambler etc.). According to Z. Bauman travelling is a form of rejection of any attachment and fixation. “The core of postmodern life program is not to construct identity, but to prevent fixation” [3, p. 27].

Man of the information society often “tends not to deepen the horizon of private world (does not expand comfort zone), but to replace it with another, perhaps better arranged” [4, p. 110], escapes to other worlds. The phenomenon of global tourism is an example.

According to J. Baudrillard, who tried to identify the cultural meaning of travelling, the body in travel gets its own view and becomes capable of imagination, freed from images, and therefore of going beyond its two-dimensional nature into the space of meanings creation [5]. Thus, a person avoids fixed cultural identification, intending to overcome the decline of imagination culture. Changing of the needs of modern man leads to the fact that “symbolic forms and cultural fictions are used in terms of postmodernism as tools to form broken identity and integrate ruptured “I”” [6, p. 54]. Postmodernism focuses on the variability and uncertainty of identity, and therefore we do not seek to disclose certain sense (worldwide through yourself) but follow a series of events during the creation of visual images (“build” yourself through the world). This means that the world is used to build options (often in a form of game) of personal identity. Based on this need nowadays it offers a lot of ready-made models.

The spread of parasitic type of personality that focuses on consumption was noticed by H. Ortega y Gasset. In the late nineteenth - early twentieth century there was a separation between artist elite and a man of the mass. In the consumer society new basic need is satisfaction.

Hedonism is considered as the ideological background of popular culture, but in the foundation of modern concepts of hedonist morality (Z. Bauman, D. Bell, J. Baudrillard and others.) is the question whether you can put equal sign between pleasure and happiness? The connection of hedonism to the concepts of “egoism” and “altruism” and the problem of expanding the subject of moral responsibility are topical.

Visual space is formed by the guideline: enjoy your life, avoid suffering. However, the media propagate hedonism almost aggressively.

S. Zizek calls the urge of modern society to enjoy “repressive desublimation” [7]. The core of the current stage of civilization development is that the super-ego (social control authority) affects the subconscious - the id, passing the structural ego level: “forces of social repression assume direct control over impulses” [7, p. 29].

The super-ego takes a form of hypnotic factor, which imposes the position of “surrender to temptation”: “enjoy the entertainment”, “send”, “win”, “feel the taste”, “discover the force”, “demand more”. This situation makes impossible not only the revolution but even reflection. The super-ego of modern morality does not punish us for obscene, does not require to sublimate “low- down appeals”, on the contrary, it shows us all the new ways to enjoy and creates desires. An inversion between the instances of the Id and the Super-ego has taken place.

The paradox is that modern hedonist, who suffers from boredom and is “burdened with his I” [8, p. 70], is interested not in the possibility to fulfill a desire, but in the possibility of withdrawing the state of boredom, which has already become an existential and sociological fact. Artists, hairdressers, stylists today are the charismatic figures who create a mood. According to B. Hьbner takes place “a replacement of aesthetics of truth by aesthetics of charm and influence” [8, p. 83]. When evil promises joy it is postmodern “metamorphosis of ethically demonic into aesthetically favorable”, when not the truth of the Other is valuable, but the enchantment of the Other [8, p. 94]. The axis “good-evil” is disappearing. Escape from boredom requires excessive emotions, excitement, ecstatic feelings. The despair of hedonist is that negative images have disappeared - hedonist does not want to suffer, it is not desirable to frighten and upset him. In leveling of the negative pole disappears true experience, however, the dominant of surrogate, artificial feelings, which are easy to cause, remains. That means the dimension of authenticity disappears, which formed a kind of social logic: I don't care what I see, but I have to be sure that my experience is authentic.

In Western culture, the importance of artificial habitat that provides comfortable individual existence, and strengthens internal experiences due to identification, is growing. A man with weakened identity tries on a role of someone else and enjoys it. He gets used to surrogates in everything, even in attitude to himself.

Changeling (initially - as the game, then - as a tough provocation) acts as a trunk line of the twentieth century culture. Postmodern inversion (inter-transition of the opposites) is something more brutal than it seems, as a phenomenon of the game it was the basis of modern technology, because “virtual spaces do not reflect the reality but substitute it for representational” [9, p. 94]. “Postmodernism is focused not on reflection, but on reality modeling through experimentation with artificial reality” [10, p. 187].

The transformation of society into industrial, and then information, radically changes man's relationship with things, making of thing a communication tool, sign, fetish. New visual humanism associated with digital technology visualizes thinking and makes the subject presentive. Communication is changing both internally and externally. Textual understanding of the meaning gives way to its visually active understanding. The shift of attention from textual reality to communication is due primarily to the emersion of modern communicative art with its dynamism, eclecticism, quasi-canons, interactivity and destruction of the area of perfect.

Jean Baudrillard's simulacrum is a “pseudo-thing that replaces the agonizing reality”. The semantic field is formed by “a thing consciousness”, “absorption by things”, “things in the body” (e.g., psychotherapy of A. Yermoshin). Things do not serve a man anymore, on the contrary, a man becomes their hostage, turns into a thing, a product, which needs to take place in society, be popular, sell itself with profit.

Modern anthropotechnics is the aesthetic of creating ideal man-Thing. So we do the pessimistic conclusion that neither in life nor in art idea does not get the “plastic fixing” [11, p. 278] nowadays, as representative technologies are being developed towards Nothing. On the one hand is objectification, on the other - emptiness (aesthetics of absence).

Expressive clear principle restores the idea of representation lost in postmodernism. The two poles of representative strategies - form and content, have to come together. New trends in contemporary visual culture are related to the need to restore that balance. The images of new mediality and new hedonism are being formed.

Media in modern culture is seen as a mediator, not information carrier. Art starts a dialogue with more powerful systems of broadcasting information. That's why art unconsciously borrows techniques, used by most of the media.

According to McLuhan (60-70s of the twentieth century), “body-private space is occupied by screen visuality”, it expands into the public life of urban spaces, which stereotypes human willingness to accept simplified and planar images that do not require thinking and interpretation. The consequence of a new form of visualization, according to McLuhan, is the transformation of main array of information to non-verbal, non-discourse form, causing human psyche to work not in a meaningful perception mode but in the mode impulsive response, as shown by H. Marcuse. Commercial contexts bring to life the active assimilation of low-down aesthetics of mass consumer culture and are based on manipulative techniques. This language serves for identification (perhaps in a game mode) of appropriate consumer models of values and meanings.

J. Baudrillard (70-90s of the twentieth century) speaking of human exposure to modern audio-visual media says that they are “non-transitive and non-communicative...” [12, p. 76]. He examines contemporary media as unifier of social participation. Thus, he does not consider the development of media resources as democratizing and humanizing factor of social existence. The problem of “content” of mass media messages is not “technical” as the ideology of the media (if we can speak of it at all) is placed at the level of form [12].

Visual humanization today is the responsibility of the creators of artificial worlds for broadcasting meanings. Digital technologies are not just a means of communication but means of formation of solid virtual environment, where the participation, connection to it is important. Media is a place of setting the meanings, therefore not communication but creation of sense. The essence of media design is in assistance in accessing undiscovered capacity, enabling development. Its visual artifacts are not the sources of information, but spiritual resonators with ontological significance, giving life to things and phenomena, establishing them in culture. They are built to encourage the viewer to think and make decisions.

The designer and artist in the modernist paradigm relied on laws of semiotics and sign creation. Conciseness of visual form text was a form of struggle with a huge inflow of visual information. In the 80s unidentified graphic objects appeared. Conciseness of signs was violated by their polysemantics. The development of graphic design in the 90s brought the creation of forms to its peak and established new standards of professionalism for designer. In contrast to computer technology ecological course began to develop, considering the nature of visual thinking, psychophysical comfort of classical harmony and spiritual, cultural, intellectual content of signs. This contributed to the prevention of functional and consumer attitude to the world, the separation of content and form of the message and manipulation of them. So, for modernism sign-ersatz - demonstration is typical. For postmodernism the sign is a part of the collective identity of corporation. Sign is not a corporate style but means to display identity. In that way visuality enters the problem field of meaningful visual perception and thinking.

Extremely popular are art projects and art practices that set a new level of “readability” of modern visual texts. Y. Sobolev believes that “intuitively or consciously, but many techniques of art therapy are used by artists” [6, p. 132]. S. Syerov, a modern researcher of types of art modeling of the world in different aesthetic paradigms, considers that the basic law of form-creation in postmodernism is “background priority over form, the visual context over the visual text”. The level of compositional complexity allows not to read the message, but “include emotional perception”, reading not the text but the context. In the same time, Y.Sobolev as an art therapist believes that postmodern art does not singularize figure from the background, “it leaves it to the audience to make one or another version where there is a figure, and where background” [6, p. 54].

New hedonism is prolonged enjoying of thing, as a ready-made no longer satisfies modern viewer. Duration is inherent for literary genre and temporal arts (literature, music) rather than the visual text, which meaning is on the surface, easy to read. The traditional view is that this is substantial side which suffers in visual artifacts. Therefore, there is a search for new dimensions of prolonging the visuality, which requires returning to classics in a way to restore the lost depth.

Nowadays it is more and more spoken about restoring of ethical position of the artist and designer. The artist again today is expected to fix not only professional, but also social position, “situational ethics of postmodernism is being replaced by ethics of responsible action, ethics of choice” [6, p. 279].

The development logic of consumer society will continue to be associated with a visual image, based on mastering the attention of potential customers. Creation of visual space, that forms a sort independence of consumer from this space, is the problem of the future. The transformation of the consumer to creator is the foundation of a new anthropotechnics.

Conclusion. Nowadays visuality is understood not as a piece of cumulative culture text, but as a specific way to product meanings. To determine the specificity of contemporary forms of visuality we have to consider external contexts of its formation: the loss of direct contact with the world and the disappearance of a sense of credibility, narcissistic identity and a-hedonistic hedonism (pleasure and happiness imbalance), change in the status of the Thing. Influence of commercial contexts of visuality is associated with the formation of an artificial field of needs in surrogate emotions and feelings. Reproduction of an authentic experience should be enhanced through “proper” experience, which requires the involvement of art therapy strategies in visual strategies that is a reanimation of a personal choice ability in visually undetermined situation.

That's how universalism of visual language as the language of human relations should appear.

The space of information society creates a complex effect on sensitive world of a person in his everyday practices, outlining his environment. Hence, there is the problem of responsibility and determination to continue creating illusory worlds of joy, or gradually return the historicism of identity through the historicism of visuality.

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