The Classification of Cultural Ideologies and Literary Trends
Market economy changes social priorities in order to activate people
and make them balance contradictions in its demand and supply. Its pressures
drive them to adopt one economic and politic strategy that instils in their
mind as a Zeitgeist or an idée directrice. Its
impact is strongest in the young generation of twenty-year-olds, who exhibit
the greatest degree of flexible economic mobility as they choose their first
profession and they willy-nilly fill the gaps yawning in market sectors.
Their discordances set moving economic trends that influence young peoples’ mind as vogues, manias, fevers and runs
at the stock-exchange. They harden their vague political opinions and
orientate them in one definite direction dictated by the actual needs of the
economic clock. Older generations are less liable to change their vocation
and adapt to new political tensions. They accept the new course in a passive
way and concede only a slight bent of their opinions in its favour. They just
stand aloof and let the masses of young people act as the genuine movers of
the social engine.1
Literary trends naturally represent only one of the bystreet
battlefields of political strife, they serve for preparatory underground
conspiracy and help undermine the ancient
régime. The main battlefield is
found in high politics controlled by the gerontocracy of elders but their
decisions surf on waves of mass discontent heaved up by the van of young
juvenocracy. Gerontocracy dominates also in literary institutions but it is
juvenocracy who prevails in advancing new artististic trends. Literary
development may be described as the rotation of young ingoing generations
because the literary sociology of generations reliably measures the
pulse of the literary process. Its flourish culminated in the Weimarer Republik during the early 1920s.2
Every cultural trend looks like a 8-year old reign of one generation
in politics, literature, arts, music and fashion. Young philosophers, artists
and fashion designers hardly ever realise that their taste has something in
common but they fight with enemies in their cultural field as relentlessly as
political parties in the parliament. They form literary groups that
take part in public campaigns and try to infiltrate into ruling institutions.
They cannot seize decisive influence in government cabinets, media, dailies,
publishing houses, parishes and art galleries that are controlled by old
garnitures but they can definitely influence the counterbalance of forces in
the entire society. What joins the young
generation together into a united front are projections of one axiological
hierarchy into different cultural fields, nowadays often called paradigms.
This term was coined by Thomas S. Kuhn3 and became fashionable in the mid-1960s. In his view the
scientific paradigm is a “universally recognized scientific achievements that,
for a time, provide model problems and solutions for a community of
practitioners”.4 “Successive transition
from one paradigm to another via revolution is the usual developmental
pattern of mature science.”5.
His concept was applied fruitfully by Jonathan H. Turner 19786
to the field of evolutionary sociology. It helped him develop a sort
of ‘sociology of collective emotions’.7
Kuhn’s theoretical activities coincided with those of the French
philosopher Michel Foucault, who preferred to use the terms discours
‘discourse’ and épistémè (Greek ἐπιστήμη) defined as ‘a
cultural pattern of ideas of the period’8.
Kuhn’s paradigm is something like Lucien Goldmann’s vision du monde. In his opinion “literature and philosophy are, on different
plans, expressions of one vision of the world”. “Visions of the world are not individual
facts but social facts.”9 Another suitable expression
covering this complex of meanings is Frederic Jameson’s and Paul de Man’s
favourite catch-phrase of ‘aesthetic ideology’. These authors search
for a convenient equivalent for a temporal coincidence of one aesthetic and
cultural sensibility or political and scientific world views but they rarely try to
decompose it into the smallest elements. Every cultural paradigm is
a temporal cross-section and transversal profile of social moods that reflect
the actual state of the market and are perceived in the most exacerbated way
by the young generation. When the young enter the economic market, they lack
clear-cut opinions but they identify their generations’ ‘aesthetic ideology’
with its momentaneous priorities.
These priorities help to crystallise their life-long vision of space, time and social type and
harden their dominant moral
norms and aesthetic feelings. Its components require a brand new aggregate of
terms tuned in accord with types of conjunctures. In the previous chapter the
lexical word-stem -nomy (from Greek νόμος ‘law’) was applied as a designation of an economic cycle and its
ruling economic elite but its reference may extended also to social norms,
ethic standards and laws. Compound words with -cracy are convenient as
a denotation of the type of a social elite and its political rule. The root -sophy may stand for what was referred to by Michel Foucault as épistémè. Gaston Bachelard recommended to use his
catchword conpures épistémologiques10, meant as ‘a system of knowledge’ common
in philosophy and science. The apparatus of further terms may
designate dimensions common to various arts and humanities. So -metry may refer
to the proportions of an aesthetic object and ideal, -chrony to its temporal orientation (nostalgic past, hopeful future), -topy to local setting (Arcadia, pastoral idyll, desert island) and -typy to the ideation of the major hero, heroine and minor characters.
Colinear trends in art, sculpture, music, ethics and mythology combine
different dimensions but stem from one common axiology. When integrated into
an n-dimensional space, they form a complex called cosmos. Table
71 outlines a paradigm of arts and cultural fields bestriding the regular
booms of edification (eunomy). Their subsystem can be termed ‘eucosmos’ in
opposition to alternative vision of the universe such as ‘technocosmos’ or
‘democosmos’. Literary theory and all humanities
urgently need a systematic taxonomy of trends uniting their
sectionary priorities. It should yield a transversal classification of actual tendencies cutting across all spheres of
spiritual life and artistic kinds. Most traditional terms are mixed
‘bunch-words’ concealing complex agglomerates of meanings and have to be
analysed into elementary dimensions. Basic dimensions include time and space
covered by Michail Bakhtin’s ‘chronotopes’. Bakhtin defined them as
“characteristic temporal and spatial visualisations of the world”11. Every work of arts conveys
something that Lucien Goldmann denoted as a vision du monde and
is manifested in a specific concept of historical time called -chrony
(Greek χρόνος, khrónos
‘time’) and geographical space
called -topy (Greek
τόπος, tópos ‘place’). Another aspect cutting across all arts concerns
human figuration, various types of personal heroes and characters summed up
under the label of -typy (Latin typus ‘type,
character’). Further essential dimensions in art are aspects of sound
instrumentation called -phony (Latin phonia, Greek εὐφωνία, euphōnía)
and quantity indicated by the word stem -metry. Moreover,
similar passions and emotions in verbal and visual arts may be coordinated by
the convenient word-root -pathy (Latin pathia, Greek
συμπάθεια, pátheia ‘passion’).
Table 71. The
coincidencies of trends in various social sciences The transversal taxonomy of trends in
humanities also needs to coordinate
parallel tendencies in the cultural fields of religion, philosophy,
science, ethics, economy and sociology. Table 72 proposes to classify them by
means of a set of word-roots such as -cracy, -nomy, -doxy and -sophy. The
first item -cracy (from Greek κράτος, krátos ‘rule, strength’) is suitable for tendencies in politology and the reign of different
regimes. The second item -nomy
(Greek νόμος, nómos ‘law’) seems to be advisable for an expedient
typology of conjunctural tendencies in economy. The item -doxy (Greek δοξία, doxía,
from δόξα, dóxa
‘belief’) is a good match for religion and general
ideology. The next entry -sophy
(Greek σοφία, sophía ‘wisdom’) offers an acceptable
chance for distinguishing various approaches to philosophy and the
methodology of science.
Table 72. An
integrated taxonomy of trends in social ideologies
Table 72 demonstrates their inner coherence by listing coinciding
currents in economy, religion, philosophy and literature. In general it is
very difficult to grasp the common denominator of trends prevailing
simultaneously in various humanities at one time. Deducing simultaneous
paradigms from one another is a laborious task, it is better to rely on
statistical coincidences in their predominant occurrence. 1 D. W. Schumann: The Problem of
cultural age-groups in German thought: a
critical revision. PMLA LI,
1936, 1180-1207; The Problem of age-groups: A statistical approach, PMLA
LII, 1937, 596-608. 2 J.
Pedersen: Die literarischen Generationen, in: Philosophie der Literaturwissen-schaft, ed. E. Ermatinger, Berlin
1930, S. 153; Wilhelm Pinder: Das
Problem der Generation in der Kunstgeschichte Europas. 3 T. S. Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago 1965, 1970; Notes on Lakatos. In: Boston Studies in the
Philosophy of Science, vol. VIII. Dordrecht 1971, 137-146. 4 T. S. Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996, p. 10. 5 Op. cit.,
1970, p. 12. 6 Jonathan H.
Turner: The Structure of Sociological Theory. New York 1978. 7 Jan E Stets;
Jonathan H. Turner: Handbook of the sociology
of emotions. New York, NY: Springer, 2006. 8 Michel Foucault: Mots et choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines. Paris: 1966. 9 Lucien Goldmann: Recherches dialectiques. Paris:
Gallimard, 1959, p. 46. 10 Gaston Bachelard: La poétique de la
rêverie. Paris: Presses
universitaires de France, 1978, p. 4; La poétique de l'espace. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1978, 1957. 11 Mikhail Bachtin: François Rabelais a lidová kultura
støedovìku a renesance. Praha: Odeon 1975, s. 222. |