Searching for meanings: actualization of non-verbal experience through fine art

The article discusses the interaction of a person with objects of art as an opportunity to show their personal qualities of a unique acting subject of a sociocultural field. The research methodology is based on the concepts of symbolic-interpretative anthropology, the ideas of semiotic structuralism and the principles of the theory of emotiveness proposed by the Russian scholar V.I. Shakhovsky. The author understands virtual reality as a potential reality, requiring an individual to be updated. The text of culture as an environment producing images is opposed to the Internet as an environment that produces “ghosts” (that is, simulations of communication, thinking, the objective world, feelings). The similarity of the text and human consciousness by the criterion of isomorphism is affirmed. Such an analogy allows studying the world, external for a person, as similar with their inner world. This method is based on the phenomenon of emotiveness, represented by virtual and real emotives (lexical units used to express emotional states). This phenomenon allows comprehending the works of modern art from new methodological positions since a modern person traditionally perceives the art of realism in accordance with given patterns, without trying to interpret it creatively. At the same time, contemporary art goes beyond verbal and scientific-like perception; it concentrates new human opportunities. This is extremely relevant since modern social practices are often not amenable to cognition based on traditional methods of the humanities. The practical part of the study is reflected in the analysis of the creative work of law students who received a creative task to express their understanding of law through artistic images. Such an actualization of non-verbal (irrational, emotional) experience has demonstrated the possibility of an internal dialogue of the rational and the irrational, the discrete and the continuous, the artificial and the natural without a cognitive dissonance. The figurative visualization of verbal signs actualized not only the personal experience of comprehending the meaning of a literary text, but also the interpersonal one, realized in the communication with art. Such an experience allows overcoming various intra-personal contradictions that arise as a result of the activities of an individual in the modern social environment. Interaction with artistic images and texts launches the mental functions of the brain that overcome the brain’s adaptive tasks and actualizes cognitive work that leads to the comprehension of the value essence of things and phenomena.