National culture in the conditions of globalization: problems of identity and diversification

The article is devoted to the development of a model that ensures the internal balance of national culture, which, in the context of globalization, functions between the opposite poles of identity and diversification. The materials are results of the studies of Azerbaijani and Russian philosophers, culturologists, and art historians, works of artists of the 20th century. The methodology is based on a comparative approach using analogies and parallels. The authors define identity as the gathering, concentration, crystallization of all the characteristic features of a given ethnic group with the uniformity, similarity of the totality of its properties. In this case, diversification is understood as diversity, dissimilarity, difference and even diversity of features within one system. It is noted that researchers often projected the laws of cultural development onto the art system as a whole, but they never inverted this scheme, trying to model the processes in culture with the help of art. The article examines the crisis of figurativeness in art expressed in the works of Kazimir Malevich, non-figurative art and works of Maurits Cornelis Escher, which are characterized by a special type of symmetry interpreted as the fundamental basis of the visual language. In the authors’ opinion, this phenomenon corresponds to the global identity crisis that resulted from the collapse of all empires (except for the British one) following the results of World War I. The parallelism of the discussed phenomena made it possible to use the pictorial language studied by Kh. Mamedov and S. Dadashev for modeling cultural processes. Based on their concept of a backgroundless organization of pictorial forms (such as an image in which the drawing is equal to the background), the authors of the article created the visualization of a multicultural model. The model’s properties and features are described, among which stability, complementarity, and polyiconicity (infinite equal integration of elements within an integral system) are distinguished, after which this model is projected by analogy on culture and various aspects of intercultural interaction. The authors note that this model, in terms of its structure, reflects the ideas of multiculturalism. The principle of complementarity organizes the external forms of cultures without affecting their internal content. This corresponds to the formula “my freedom ends where yours begins”. It is concluded that the balance within the national culture is achieved, on the one hand, by the crystallization of ethnic characteristics with which the culture identifies itself and, on the other, by the diversity that is preserved within the system.