UDC

Authors

Abstract

Public consciousness is considered in this paper as a phenomenon objectifying the most significant trends in the country’s social life. The author comes to the conclusion that the category of public consciousness needs to be further investigated due to its numerous and often contradictory interpretations and definitions. Thus, analyzing social consciousness one inevitably turns to what the society is preoccupied with and what it represents. There are two different approaches to understanding public consciousness: the substantive and constructionist ones. According to the substantive approach (Marxism), public consciousness is regarded as something secondary, compared to the real life of society and nature, a reflection of material and economic basis of social life. Public consciousness is a conscious information-evaluative reflection of reality. The constructionist approach presents social knowledge as a construct based on social conventions. Even objectively existing physical and biological reality is seen within the constructionist approach as something artificially constructed and institutionalized in norms of behaviour and expectations. In some cases, constructs lose all touch with reality and claim to be an adequate reflection of referents (objects) that do not exist in reality (the theory of simulacra). As a matter of fact, we should not talk about confrontation but mutual complementarity of constructionist and substantive ideas in the study of public consciousness. This perspective allows us to avoid the extremes of constructionism and material determinism. The paper analyzes the development of the following crisis trends in public consciousness: social atomism, antinomy, sociocultural identity crisis, anomie, and americanization of identification strategies. These trends, firstly, express the properties of “transitional period”, characteristic of any social system getting over the point of historical bifurcation, and, secondly, reflect global trends in the development of civilization. In addition, the author dwells on characteristic features of social transformation in Russia owing to the special character of the country’s social life, main actors of the transformation process and peculiarities of Russia’s “culturalhistorical field”.

Keywords

References

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