The article is a reflection on the recently published book by Valery Savchuk “Fence as a balance of forces”. The author uses solid historical and cultural material to reveal the key symbolic contexts of a fence as a special cultural code. In the symbolism of a fence, the fundamental existentially and socially oriented cultural attitudes are correlated, in which the philosophical and cultural propaedeutics of “native” and “alien” is dialectically represented. The fence appears to be a leading civilizational symbol of protected everyday life and mastered space, as well as a natural result of the individual demystification of the world. On the other hand, these structures should be considered as elements of a single civilizational system “house – fence – city wall”, in which the social priorities of the organization of any institutional spaces are clearly fixed. This means that the fence is a border separating/uniting man and nature, man and society, “city” and “world”, turning into an integral element of the institutional topology of civilization, physically and symbolically holding collective bodies in the space of power. The sacralization of power inevitably turns the fence into a symbol of social domination over nature within the boundaries of established laws and regulations. Such limits are extensively reproduced by stratifying and preserving panoptic environments, acting as visible indicators and conduits of social alienation, whereas new technological conditions only aggravate anthropological and institutional isolationism every time, condemning civilization to previously unprecedented tragedies of separation and loneliness.
Purpose. The article analyzes the strategy of sublimation of the corporeality of bourgeois pro-duction into the artistic tradition of the American horror film as a specific, visual mythology and psy-chosomatic consumer ideology of modern mass culture. Theoretical basis. The key methodology is the principle of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural, psychoanalytic research, developed and tested by the team of authors in a number of scientific papers. The applied scientific and practical approach made it possible to carry out an original, complex, com-parative analysis of symbolic interpretations of the tradition of American horror films in various spheres of socio-cultural practice. Carried out interdisciplinary study of the phenomenology of horror, makes it possible to isolate ideologically significant images sublimated in more than a century of the tradition of American horror films. Originality. The anthropological mechanism of sublimation of the proletarian physicality formed in a bosom of classical capitalist production is opened. Its essence is the unconscious attitude to the perception of bodily suffering and death as inevitable and “natural” companions of the worker's production image and guarantee of its demand in the labor market. At the same time, intensive tech-nologization of production is accompanied by a sharp inflation in the value of physical labor. At the same time, the persisting attitude to bodily suffering requires the appearance of its new forms, displac-ing the “physical” into the “visual”. It was the American horror movies most adequately perform the social order of government and business, subliming bodily suffering in the most profitable art forms. This is how the figurative and symbolic mythology of horror films is constructed, which commercial-izes the artificially formed psychosomatic dependence of the layman on the consumption of bodily suffering and death. The active popularization of horror mythology visualizes the ideology of the “American way of life”, lobbies the practice of ousting competing cultural genres and traditions, and lays the foundations of westernized post – industrial civilization – post-human, post-teles and digital world. Conclusions. Under the conditions of widespread degradation of the production type of civiliza-tion, the technology of sublimation of active attitude to the world into visual forms of its consumer destruction was formed, the driving forces of which (collective in form and individual in ways of expe-rience) were American horror films. They most adequately represent a new artistic and anthropological reality, the contours of which are so clearly drawn by the human body, the exhausted profile of power and production standards.
After the Great Patriotic War, Soviet society begins to rethink its own social values, transforming them according to the new geopolitical reality. Post-war cinematography was one of the most influential instruments of such a change. The revision of pre-war and military film plots made it possible to discover a new subject field for visualizing the Soviet man mythology. Soviet childhood, as a necessary stage in forming the Soviet man's worldview, is becoming such a space. The theme of childhood in the plot palette of Soviet cinema finally approves the motive of the artistic depiction of people's everyday life, which makes it possible to focus on visualizing the processes of the formation of movie heroes' individual feelings and thoughts. References to the early periods of his biography make it possible to reconstruct and visualize the existential drama of a Soviet man more fully. Therefore, the prerequisites for learning of individual experience have been created as a condition for the forming the relevant memory of Soviet generations, which were unusually productively used by the communist ideology. This practice has an undoubted psychoanalytic value and serves as the basis for a person's internal dialogue with oneself and the whole society. Despite the obvious political engagement of the post-war Soviet cinematography, one managed to comply with the archetypal models of classical mythologies as much as possible and maintain the proper level of sacredness in society.
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