The border as a paracategory of modern culture

The article analyzes the problem of the border in the modern philosophical and cultural context. The main feature of the 21st-century culture is its being in the field of formation, processuality. Consequently, the explanation of the meaning of modern culture is impossible without defining its categorical apparatus, which is formed in the comprehension of relevant art processes and, therefore, is also in formation. Studying the processes of the meaning-making of culture and the formation of its conceptual field are among the urgent tasks for cultural studies, emphasizing thereby the significance of the “border” problem for researchers. The research material is works by M.M. Bakhtin, V.V. Kandinsky, M. Heidegger, in which the border is analyzed from philosophical positions in various aspects of its problems. The use of ontological, dialectical, axiological, dialogical, philosophical, anthropological, historical and culturological methodological approaches in the course of the study contributed to the formation of the theoretical understanding of the essence of the border, as well as its specific features. The author understands the border as a semantic unit, “paracategory” (V.V. Bychkov), which fixes the changing existence of modern culture. In the research, the border is considered as a forming paracategory which gravitates to the substantiation of its categorical status and is actively used in the humanitarian knowledge of the 20th-21st centuries. The established definition of the border made it possible to single out a number of specific points, such as: spatiality (the border as a “place/topos” of contact between the world and man); antinomicity (separation/unification) of self and other, me and not-me, internal and external, alien and close); value dominant (intentional tension of expressing the border as a definite meaning); functionality (the semantic diversity of the border is determined depending on the cultural context); anthropologism in man’s understanding of their place in the world, in which contemporary art finds new forms of perception of the world and the corresponding ways of expression. As a result, the author draws the conclusion about the emerging nature of the border as an ontological category, which, no doubt, is relevant for the analysis of modern culture. The border as an inseparably divisible basis for the design of cultural being in its various forms (art, philosophy, religion, etc.), in essence, becomes the subject of a search for meanings, since a modern person perceives the extremeness of their existence in an emotionally sensitive way, as a certain intentional tension.