HUMANITARIAN TECHNOLOGIES: FROM SKEPTICISM TO OPTIMISM

This article presents a theoretical generalization of the issue of humanitarian technologies in contemporary psychology, as well as the concept of their perception as discursive technologies for storage, representation and transfer of a value-semantic resource, incorporated into one or another semantic-symbolic form in the context of psychological hermeneutics. The important role of humanitarian technologies in comprehension and improving of symbolic structures of human activity in general is emphasized. The author shows that humanitarian technologies are targeted at personal development and creation of appropriate conditions for this development. Among major features of humanitarian technologies the following ones are highlighted: reflexivity, subject's involvement in decision-making process, purposeful orientation, predominantly forward-looking orientation, exclusivity and optimism, human adequacy, lack of a rigid structure, creativity orientation, renewability targeted at development of cultural meanings and values, embodied in discourses and expressed through texts. Such socio-cultural features of humanitarian technologies as alignment and translation of meanings through systems of cultural and socio-psychological design, maintaining the diversity of meanings in a form of heterogeneous “iconic storages”, providing conditions for reproduction of cultural and socio-psychological forms, improvement of tools of technological reproduction as a whole are analyzed. Cultural-oriented and personal-oriented approaches to development of humanitarian technologies are described. The author shows, that the personal-oriented approach to creation of discursive technologies is aimed at making possible to realize, experience, interpret and creatively transform himself and his life for a person as a subject controlling his own resources.