Contour mapping of civilization

Abstract

The article, which is a reaction to the report of A.V. Rubtsov “Russian project of civiliza­tional development: thematic structure and framework of categories”, contour mapping of structures, ways to identify the content, meaning and objectives of civilizations is dis­cussed as having theoretical and methodological significance. At the same time, the prob­lem of understanding the terms “state”, “nation”, “civilization”, “law”, and above all “history” is posed, with which the very appearance of the idea of civilization is closely connected, which can have different meanings not only in different civilizations, but also within different regions of one civilization, depriving the sense of trying to achieve con­sensus in controversial situations. The analysis of these concepts, which make up the framework of civilizations, entailed the need to identify the difference between the con­cept of New history as a designation of the border of time and Modernity as the content of the new, to show the ways of temporal shifts. Contour mapping of civilization reveals both the difference between them and their commonality, and the historicity mode, which establishes relationships and strategies of relationships between different times, allows you to create a variety of network connections: political with physical, historical, social maps that fit in the pockets of each person, etc., revealing and the similarities and unique­ness of the time in each separate region. This kind of ability to identify differentials of civilization, history or culture with the help of technically adjusted means makes it possi­ble to predict crisis moments during which any time (past, present and future) begins to lose its shape. The crisis and the awareness of the crisis make it possible to overcome his­tory as an expression of Modernity, because one cannot raise the question of the future while being inside history. The task is to correctly form the composition of the project, which should exclude attempts to create a future theory from the past. Trying to build only on the basis of a supposedly known and settled past is to doom your attempts to fail­ure: the purpose of the project is to overcome the past, the departure from which indicates that the expected changes should not be similar to the events of the past. The project is an attempt to find a language in which the future can speak.