Conceptual foundations of denialing the substantial character of the crisis of culture in postmodern theories

The article discusses the conceptual foundations of ideas about the crisis that have developed in the postmodern theories. The hypothesis of the study is the assumption that the philosophical grounds of denying of the substantial nature of the crisis of culture in postmodernism include a specific understanding of culture and values, as well as a special attitude to social reality. It is shown that postmodern philosophy is characterized by a new understanding of culture in the meaning of “rhizome” (J. Deleuze and F. Guattari) - a chaotic unstable interweaving of historically changeable values. Since in such a culture the new order is chaos (“chaosmos” (J. Deleuze), the crisis becomes indistinguishable due to the impossibility of distinguishing the ordered from the chaotic. In the absence of a culture with constant values, in a postmodern rhizome culture, the decision to fill the values with content is made by the person himself, which leads to the instrumental and subjective nature of the crisis of culture - to consider a crisis that is convenient at one time or another. Comparison of the classical and postmodernist interpretations of the crisis showed that their difference is associated with a different understanding of the correlative categories of norm / deviation. From the standpoint of classical philosophy, a crisis is a departure from the norm. Accordingly, the crisis of culture is understood as a deviation from the normal (fixed in tradition) functioning of culture. In this regard, it is viewed either in a positive way as a marker of the need for evolutionary transformations, or as a danger threatening culture with destructive consequences. Postmodernism removes the norm / deviation dichotomy. This leads to the conclusion that a negative or positive understanding of the crisis is not characteristic of the methodology of postmodernism. Postmodernists with regard to social reality take a position associated with its replacement by“simulacra” (J. Baudrillard) and the clash ofknowledge from different «epistemes» (M. Foucault). For this reason, the crisis of culture as an element of social reality cannot be recognized as a real phenomenon. Social reality is reduced to a narrative about reality by postmodernists. In this regard, the crisis of culture is understood as a discursive reaction to the inevitable withering away of old values, as nothing more than a “pessimistic impression” (J. Lyotard), which consist of the fact that the old universal knowledge legitimation system has outlived, and the new one has not yet was approved. It was revealed that the foundations of denying the substantiality of the crisis of culture in postmodernism are the recognition of the rhizomatic nature of culture, the historicity of values, the denial of social reality as an independent structure of being and its replacement with narratives about reality.