Culture as Text: Performativity and the Imagination

Objective of the study is analyzing the problem of performative transformation of ontological strategy of modern culture and its creative component. The methodological basis of the research is formed by postmodernist concepts of culture as a text (metatext), ontological receptions of performance aesthetics, phenomenological approach to the study of the experience of consciousness, creativity and communication. Results of the study. The postmodern situation has significantly deformed the classical ontological and cognitive discourse, having erected the structures of storytelling and the system of signs in place of the former monolithic existence. The concepts of «performativity», «autoreference», and «affirmation» used in contemporary philosophy adequately describe not only the process of artistic formation, but also reveal the internal mechanism of self-representation of a text (e.g., a literary text). Such a text is not a passive subject of someone else's narration, description, interpretation; its semantic integrity and definiteness is formed as one's own reading. The essence of such reading is considered, based on the phenomenological tradition, as a process of imagination. This vision of culture contributes to a positive rethinking of the critical pathos of postmodernity and reveals a powerful constructive potential within its paradigm. Research Perspectives. The forms of contemporary urban art (performance, collage, installation, etc.) should be conceptualized in the context of the designated postmodernist paradigm of culture as a text.