Strategies for conceptualizing historical responsibility in the context of modern media representations

Abstract

The article analyzes theoretical models of historical responsibility and the peculiarities of their application in the context of modern media presentations. A comparative analysis of the models of historical responsibility in modern foreign philosophy and social and humanitarian knowledge clearly indicates the dominance of the universalist and constructivist approaches in understanding historical responsibility. In the latter case, it is viewed as a social practice that develops within a certain community and is focused on appropriation or participation in the distribution of symbolic capital. Historical responsibility is a “tense” relationship of the emerging sociocultural situation, where the discursive practices of historical responsibility (imparting guilt; identifying victims, criminals, participants, observers) turn out to be a kind of a mechanism of symbolic dominance in the political space. This state of affairs cannot escape the influence of, first of all, the media. They turn out to be an environment for the actualization and transformation of historical responsibility discourses that begin to obey the media's logic, goals and objectives. Based on the methodological ideas of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of symbolic struggle and sociophilosophical analysis, the scientist, instrumentalist and pluralistic media strategies in relation to the discourse of historical responsibility were identified and analyzed. The main criterion for highlighting these media strategies was the role of the history researchers' professional community. Each of them was presented in the context of opportunities and risks. The analysis shows that, in the modern symbolic space, these strategies are blended, as a result of which various subjects of historical responsibility not only contribute to the fragmentation of space, but also create potentially conflict-prone clusters. In the context of works by A. Rigney, A. Erll, M. Rothberg, L. Bond, and R. Crownshaw, the article demonstrates that the blending of media strategies is especially noticeable in the context of new transcultural and cross-border ways of collective memory dynamics, when the familiar images of the victim, the criminal, the participant, and the observer find themselves in new interpretative contexts of the host culture, the historical politics of the host society, and the dynamics of its transgenerational values.