Fatigue from Culture as a Phenomenon of Sociocultural Life: Problem Statement and General Characteristics

Abstract

The article explores the phenomenon of culturogenic fatigue. It is currently underresearched but increasingly attracts attention in different areas of sociocultural life. The paper focuses on its main variety: fatigue from culture (FC). The article aims to formulate the FC research problem and to characterize this phenomenon. The author assumes that fatigue from culture is not novel and has been in place throughout the entire history of humankind. And it explains the need for its comprehensive cultural examination. The base for the FC analysis is at the intersection of its phenomenological review and the scrutiny of culturogenic nature and genealogy. Comprehension of specific features of the fatigue from culture phenomenon is possible by comparing biogenic and culturogenic fatigues. It allows for singling out in the latter — along with the tiredness of the body and psyche that exist in their “natural” form — a spiritual and semantic plan, which is substantively and functionally central for it. The author considers the complex dialectic of relations between the FC spiritual content and its psychological forms. It is the FC semantic core taken in unity with its psychological forms (emotional experiences) that breeds the pragmatic of FC, — its spiritually psychological and practical (behavioural) consequences, where the major influence of FC on the consciousness and existence of society and a person reveals itself. The author distinguishes three reasons for the FC birth. The first is conflict-driven relations of natural and cultural principles in society and man, expressed in the repressiveness of culture towards the natural in man, reflected on by Freud. The second one is the peculiarities of the functioning of the culture itself (its recurrence, monotony, etc.), provoking weariness in people, their repulsion from culture. Finally comes the fatigue from the culture itself and its components, which induces fatigue in their actors. In essence, a genetic linkage with a culture determines the place of FC in human lives, specific features of its existence and impact. The article proceeds to consider the essential FC predicates: spatial and temporal in their multidimensionality and unity, and then — dynamic ones. The FC attitude to the movement, which in the light of its sociocultural nature means its attitude to activity, is paradoxical. The article discusses this paradox: fatigue would seem to lead to the vanishing of the activity principle in people tired of culture. But in fact, everything turns out the other way round: based on the negative energy of rejection and repulsion from culture, fatigue transforms into various forms of activity, both mental and practical. The author proposes an explanation of this paradox, rooted in the value-semantic core of FC. The consideration of the dynamic plan of FC also involves reflecting on its important functional feature: the interaction and transitions of the FC different genealogical foundations that create a multilevel and multistage “mechanism of the FC”. This feature generates not only the complexity of the phenomenon but also its special systemic character: the intricate relations of the CF with the sociocultural system of society, kind of irradiation into the chronotopes of the latter.