Катектические механизмы культуры. Часть 2

Социологическое обозрение. 2024. Т. 23. № 1. С. 9–39.

Kurakin D.

The article introduces a new research program that focuses on the constitutive role of emotions, afect, and their intensity in meaning-making. It opposes the existing broad tradition that efectively posits culture as information, sees cultural processes as coding, transferring, and processing information, and treats emotions as a ‘fuel’ feeding these processes in social life. I build this program around the re-interpretation of the concept of ‘cathexis,’ defned as a basic feature of meaning-making that consists in attaching emotions produced in social interactions to various kinds of objects of that meaning-making: things, ideas, representations, symbols, bodies, and their parts; spatial (e.g., pieces of land) and temporal (e.g., events) phenomena. Drawing on the analysis presented in the frst part of this article, in this part, I introduce two basic modes of cathectic mechanisms of culture (piety and transgression) and outline fve general features of cathexis (persistence, the pharmacy principle, boundary-making, situational spontaneity, and emergence). Based on this program, I review existing research dealing with the emotional dimension of culture. I organize this material into three sub-sections: perception, identity and social change, and ‘energetics’ of social action. I show that using the theory of cathexis as a common denominator empowers existing approaches, puts them on the same board, and moves us to a better understanding of the emotional dimension of culture.

Keywords: культурсоциология, culture, эмоции, сакральное, аффект, emotions, когнитивные процессы, cognition, cultural sociology, affect, the sacred, катексис, культура, cathexis, sociology of culture and cognition, социология культуры и познания

Publication based on the results of: Large space in the post-global age: empire and world-society as the sociological phenomena and as the topics of discursive formations (2024)