Suggestion: limits and prospects of the cultural concept

The term Suggestion, a key in Boris Porshnev’s concept of anthropogenesis, originally meant not direct incitement, but a hint, subtext, undercurrent of thought. Thus it was used in Romantic criticism and the works of Alexander Veselovsky, and it gained a praxis in theatrical anthropology: the gun on the wall that will go off is suggestive. The article traces the potential of this term in various contexts of cultural studies. Romantic suggestiveness was related to the democratization of language and the perception of cultural symbols as meaningful and efficacious, while genre appointed the subjects of these actions. Twentieth-century theatrical anthropology in its various versions demanded to understand suggestivity as a machine constructing an ongoing modality of subjectivity. The infiltration of theatrical anthropology into the general models of theoretical description of literature and art put the idea of rebuilding subjectivity at the center of thinking about suggestion. It seems feasible to explore the semantic potential of the term «suggestion» nowadays, relying on phenomenology and applying the apparatus of the history of concepts and the critique of untranslatability. Suggestion can then become a normative term of cultural studies, not reduced to the meanings of hint and one-way influence, but understood as a figure of thought connecting various effects of reality in art and cultural practices.