THE OBJECT WORLD IN THE DIALOGUE OF PERSON AND THING:

SOME CULTUROLOGICAL CLARIFICATION

Abstract

The modern cultural turn in the humanities actualizes the problem of a new dialogue between human being and thing, in which the objective world of the information society undergoes qualitative changes and comes to the forefront of cultural claims. The relationship between the world of people and the world of things becomes an arena of continuous transformation, full of drama, unbridled ambition and speculation. In this situation, the growing expansion of technological innovations is obvious, which results in an unprecedented invasion of diverse object forms into people’s everyday lives. There is also the emergence of a complex and contradictory process of fusion of the social environment, information systems and subject articulations of culture. All this fuels and explains interest in the ontological nature of things, the cultural genesis of the objective world of society. Things appear in culture as a kind of relays of people’s urgent messages, markers of their thoughts, struggles and achievements. Things retain knowledge about a person due to the fact that the path of birth and existence of any artifact is associated with the activities of people. At the same time, the very objectivity of a thing makes it only a clot of silent matter — detached and indiff erent to human searches, discoveries and experiences. A thing taken only in its material shell is just a fragment, a splinter of physical reality. In this form, the thing is initially imprisoned in its motionless bodily form and is “insensitive” to the changing culture. But with its other side, a thing always communicates with a person, which makes it, in the anthropocentric dimension, a “verbal” artifact, with the status of a moving character in culture. It is in this projection that a thing becomes a guardian of social memory and becomes an important source for cultural interpretations.