The category of generations’ texts: the social-cultural aspect

Basing on the empirical research, we present generations' social-cultural interactions as a flexible system of influences and relationships among stylistically and ideologically dynamic actors, changing depending on a context. Generalizing our research, we identified heterogeneous processes characterising a generation's cultural text and its social-cultural context; these processes had certain regularities. A generation's culture repeats not only characteristic contextual practices, but also of actors' worldview; form the social-psychological points of view, it means accumulation, imitation, preservation of traditions and the formation of types and forms of figurative relationships. The category of cultural text, as a part of the theory of generations' social-cultural interactions, is described as interpretations of life situations so that practices and artefacts that carry cultural information about the reality are formed. The constantly changing elements of the dynamic system of cultural text are: social positions, a social-cultural order, and artefacts. The first element – social positions – reveals the peculiarities of a generation's position in society, regulates behaviour at interactions and types of social-cultural relations. The second element – the socio-cultural order – means systematization of a society order to establish life-important norms and rules of relations and to legitimize existing practices. We have substantiated our opinion that a socio-cultural order, as a natural form of a generation's behaviour, is built-upon regulators (norms and rules of generational institutions) and post-, co-, pre- and poly-figurative forms of relations. The third element – social-cultural artefacts – is interpretive cultural embodiments of meanings formed by generations. A generation's social-cultural style means its form of life built-upon certain semantic constructs (products of the generation's experience) and unfolded in figurative interactions between generations. Basing on the fact that changeable and unstable cultural texts are initiated by generational actors and used as a tool for interactions, we emphasize that the generations' texts are the indicators of (in) congruence with socio-cultural styles. A generation is a phenomenon that is not textually limited by the social-cultural style characteristic for «its» space-time, but interacts at the intersection of the styles characteristic for its contemporaries. We substantiate the idea that each generation constructs a socio-cultural style by forming cultural texts in historical contexts.