The Culture of the Beginning of the Third Millennium:The discourse of a New Attitude

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to deal with the essence of a person’s worldview at the beginning of the XXIst century, its reflection in modern cultural practices as a “cultural dominant” expressing the essence of modern cultural development and characterize the concept “beginning of a century” as the beginning of a new one. The methodology is based on using the theoretical methods, primarily the analysis, systematization, and generalization of the concepts of leading modern philosophers, cultural scientists, and art historians, as well as cultural phenomena representing the leading trends in its development at the beginning of the XXIst century. The scientific novelty of the work is that the problem of the watershed between modern culture, postmodernism and mankind history is actualized, which not only differentiates but also unites it. It is noted that the problem of the connection of times, cultures and traditions requires a modern understanding; this connection of times should express the key concept, which is defined differently: post-postmodernism (T. Turner), trans-postmodernism (M. Epstein), post-millennium (E. Hans), digimodernism (A. Kirby), metamodernism (T. Vermeulen and R van den Akker). “The Beginning of the Millennium” actualizes philosophical reflection, generating recursion as a way of organizing a system, when it can, according to the relevant rules, create variants of copies of itself, interact with it and include it into its structure at certain points in its development. It is characterized the essence of “quantumness” as a module of the world attitude that supposes a variety of worlds where all possible values are actualized simultaneously due to another, “existing” and already reliable and obvious. Conclusions: Leading cultural practices and aesthetic attitudes of a certain period create a discourse expressing general views and a certain image of “activities” and “opinions”. Since none of the terms - post-postmodernism, trans-postmodernism, post-millennium, digimodernism and metamodernism - is yet generally accepted in science, we consider the “commencement de siècle” – “the beginning of the millennium” - the most adequate item for the understanding of “tectonic shifts in culture”.