The Journal of V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University. Series "Theory of Culture and Philosophy of Science"

ANAMORPHOSIS AS MENTAL OPTICS AND NARRATIVE MODEL: FROM VISUAL ART TO LEWIS CARROLL’S ALICE

Lidiya Starodubtseva, Dmytry Petrenko — Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The article is devoted to cultural-philosophical reflections on the phenomenon of anamorphosis as a multilevel model for organizing visual, cognitive, and narrative experience, examined through the example of Lewis Carroll’s Alice duology. It is demonstrated that the concept of anamorphosis, traditionally employed to designate an artistic technique of creating optical illusions associated with perspectival distortion, has transcended the boundaries of the history and theory of visual arts within contemporary humanities, acquiring the status of a universal epistemic and cultural concept. Drawing upon the intersection of several theoretical approaches to anamorphosis – including the art-historical perspectives of Jurgis Baltrušaitis and Erwin Panofsky, the psychoanalytic reflections of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, and the media theories of Lambert Wiesing and Dominik Finkelde – the article traces the evolution of the concept of anamorphosis from an optical illusion to a model of vision, thought, and interpretation.

The aim of the study is to identify the specific features of anamorphosis as a mode of constructing the mental optics and narrative model of Lewis Carroll’s philosophical fairy-tale duology Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. It is argued that the shift of perspective constitutes one of the fundamental principles organizing the artistic universe of the two books. The article analyzes their principal anamorphic structures and episodes: Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole as an inversion of the habitual image of reality; the heroine’s changes in size as a model of perceptual relativity; the figure of the Cheshire Cat as an example of the disruption of established cognitive schemes; the Mad Tea Party as a collision of alternative logical systems; and the opening poem in Through the Looking-Glass, which can be read only with the aid of a mirror. It is argued that anamorphosis in Carroll’s work functions not as a narrative device but rather as a mode of generating meaning through the constant displacement of interpretive coordinates. The proposed model makes it possible to establish connections between classical forms of anamorphic art and contemporary cultural-philosophical concepts. The article also outlines the reception of Carroll’s anamorphic principle of narrative construction in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s analytical philosophy of language games and in Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. It is concluded that anamorphosis may be understood on three interconnected levels: as a visual device, as mental optics, and as a narrative model. Taken as a whole, it functions as one of the key cognitive metaphors of contemporary culture, in which the change of perspective becomes a fundamental condition for the emergence of new forms of vision, understanding, and meaning-making.

«DOWN THE RABBIT-HOLE»: IMMERSION INTO THE WORLD OF PHILOSOPHY: ON CONTEMPORARY ISSUES OF TEACHING METHODOLOGY

Tetiana Podolska — Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The article explores the moment in which philosophy has not yet crystallized into a system of concepts but has already begun to fracture the self-evidence of the world. Taking the first chapter of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass”as its point of departure, the study reads Carroll’s text not as an introduction to a children’s adventure, but as a topography of entry into thought. The White Rabbit does not invite Alice; he merely disrupts the habitual order of things to such an extent that the world ceases to coincide fully with itself. It is precisely this fracture that becomes the condition for philosophical movement.

The central concept of the article is the dromos – a space of transition that exists only in movement between two states and belongs definitively to neither. The dromos is approached not as a metaphor for the path toward philosophy, but as a form of thinking at the moment of the loss of grounding. Within this space, boredom appears not as a psychological condition, but as a mode of ontological openness; the fall emerges not as a plot device, but as a liminal structure of consciousness; language play functions not as decorative nonsense, but as an experience of entering language prior to understanding it. Alice’s continual changes of scale are interpreted as a crisis of commensurability between subject and world, while Wonderland itself appears as a distinct regime of rationality that exposes the contingency of every order of thought.

Methodologically, the article combines hermeneutic, phenomenological, and problematological,

approaches, drawing on the ideas of G. Deleuze, P. Hadot, H.-G. Gadamer, M. Meyer, M. Foucault, P. Ricoeur V. Turner, and L. Wittgenstein. At the same time, the text deliberately abandons the position of external observation: philosophy is treated not as an object of description, but as an experience into which the reader is already drawn before becoming fully aware of it. In this sense, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass”is read not as a text requiring definitive interpretation, but as a rhetorical mechanism for destabilizing the self-evident. Carrollian nonsense functions not as the negation of rationality, but as a way of exposing its limits, disrupting the automatisms of thought and forcing consciousness to experience its own instability as a condition of movement.

The article opens a broader cycle of studies devoted to reading L. Carroll as a space of philosophical initiation, where characters, linguistic displacements, rhetorical loops, and the very topography of Wonderland function not as literary images, but as mechanisms for the production of thought

«ADVICE FROM A CATERPILLAR»: ON BOTH SIDES OF THE MUSHROOM

Nataliia Popova — Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The article is devoted to investigating the rhetorical mechanisms behind the problematization of personal identity. The underlying premise of the study is that the question of identity does not necessarily function as a means of acquiring knowledge about the subject. In certain discursive situations, it may perform the opposite function: subverting the foundations of self-determination, shifting identity into a mode of continuous revision, and generating a space of uncertainty within which any answer proves temporary and fundamentally incomplete.

The study examines the relationship between rhetoric, skepticism, and practices of self-description. Particular attention is paid to how memory, embodiment, and speech–traditionally regarded as the foundations of personal identity–can become sources of its problematization. It is shown that self-identity emerges not as a finished state or a hidden essence, but as a process of interpretation that is constantly renewed within situations of communicative interaction.

The methodological framework of the work is based on a combination of rhetorico-critical analysis, a hermeneutic approach, and problematology. The theoretical context is informed by the concept of narrative identity, the skeptical tradition, and contemporary research into the rhetorical nature of self-determination. Special emphasis is placed on analyzing the question as an independent philosophical event capable of not

only opening up possibilities for a response but also demonstrating the limits of any definitive definition

It is argued that uncertainty in matters of identity is not a consequence of a lack of information, but a structural characteristic of the process of self-understanding itself. In this context, rhetoric appears not as an auxiliary means of representing philosophical ideas, but as a mode of their direct production. Such an approach allows identity to be viewed not as an object of cognition, but as an open process unfolding between the attempt at self-determination and the impossibility of its final completion.

«A CAUCUS-RACE AND A LONG TALE»: DODO, THE SOPHISTS, AND THE RHETORIC OF A WET WORLD

Volodymyr Panov, Oleksandr Makarov — Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The article offers a philosophical analysis of Chapter Three of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as a model of the rhetorical production of social reality. It explores the relationship between language, collective order, and meaning in a situation where communication ceases to function exclusively as a mode of representation and acquires the capacity to organize social interaction directly. The central thesis of the study is that, in Wonderland, rhetoric functions not as a vehicle for transmitting pre-given meaning but as an autonomous mechanism for producing procedures, forms of community, and symbolic regimes of recognition.

Particular attention is paid to those episodes in the chapter where language demonstrates its productive power. It is shown that the Mouse’s “dry” lecture models a specific form of discursive ordering in which speech claims the ability to organize not only meaning but bodily reality itself. The Caucus-Race is interpreted as a ritual procedure in which rules do not precede action but emerge through the very process of enactment. Particular emphasis is placed on the ways collective order is sustained through repetition, participation, and the performative reproduction of shared practices, even in the absence of stable criteria of truth or success. The thimble-awarding ceremony is examined as a model of the symbolic production of value, where the status of an object is determined not by its intrinsic properties but by the ritual of public recognition. Attention is also given to the tale/tail episode, in which the language game moves beyond the level of semantics and assumes a spatial and visual form. It is demonstrated that nonsense here ceases to function merely as linguistic misunderstanding and instead reveals the material dimension of language, where meaning emerges through the interaction of word, image, and the spatial organization of the text.

It is argued that Chapter Three of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland offers a philosophically relevant

model of social order that emerges through ritual, repetition, symbolic recognition, and collective participation. The article concludes that rhetoric in Carroll’s work functions not as an auxiliary instrument of communication but as one of the fundamental conditions of communal existence. This reading makes it possible to approach Wonderland not merely as a literary text of nonsense but as a unique laboratory for investigating the mechanisms through which human communities produce and sustain their own social reality.

«THE RABBIT SENDS IN A LITTLE BILL»: BEING-WITH UNDER THE CONDITIONS OF THE LOSS OF COMMENSURABILITY

Volodymyr Liutyi — Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The article addresses the socio-philosophical examination of being-with as a form of human existence that presupposes a certain commensurability between the subject, the body, social space, and the structures of interaction. The author investigates the conditions under which a shared world becomes possible, as well as the mechanisms through which this possibility is lost in situations of crisis. The central thesis holds that being-with cannot be reduced to the mere fact of physical presence or communication, but is grounded in a complex system of correspondences between the human being and the world of their social existence.

The fourth chapter of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland serves as the primary material of the study, examined as a philosophical model of the breakdown of commensurability. It is shown that the crisis of being-with arises not only from conflict or communicative rupture, but also from the disruption of habitual correspondences between body and space, social role and person, presence and mutual understanding. Particular attention is given to the phenomenon of social recognition, the problem of embodiment, the functioning of roles in crisis situations, and the specific character of interaction under conditions of absent co-presence.

The article argues that social order is sustained not only by norms and institutions, but also by concealed structures of commensurability that ordinarily remain unnoticed. Their disruption renders visible the fundamental conditions of human coexistence. The analysis demonstrates that even goodwill, openness to interaction, and communicative receptiveness cannot guarantee the possibility of a shared world if the participants in interaction lose their capacity to remain commensurable with one another.

The conclusion is drawn that Carrollian nonsense functions not merely as a literary device, but as an instrument of philosophical analysis of social reality — one that allows the crisis of being-with to be understood not as an exceptional state, but as a mode of revealing the ontological and social preconditions of everyday existence.

«THE POOL OF TEARS»: THE METAPHYSICS OF DISSOLUTION

Semen Honcharov, Kateryna Kuznetsova — Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The article is devoted to a philosophical interpretation of the second chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll as a model of permeable subjectivity in which the boundary between the internal and the external appears ontologically unstable. The study examines a form of subjectivity that loses not identity as such, but rather the very capacity to maintain a stable boundary between itself and its own states. Particular attention is paid to four dimensions of this process: the transformation of affect from a psychic state into an environment of existence, the crisis of bodily commensurability with the world, the destabilization of linguistic self-identity, and the emergence of a fluid community after the dissolution of the hermetic subject.

The theoretical and methodological framework of the study draws upon affect theory (S. Ahmed, B. Massumi), phenomenology of the body (M. Merleau-Ponty), philosophy of sense (G. Deleuze), hermeneutics of the subject (P. Ricoeur), and the theory of abjection (J. Kristeva). It is argued that none of these traditions fully articulates the moment of radical permeability – a situation in which the subject discovers not its own destruction, but the primordial instability of its boundaries. This very moment – philosophically underexamined within both classical and post-structuralist traditions – constitutes the central focus of the article.

The study demonstrates that Wonderland functions not as a space of the destruction of an already constituted identity, but as an environment that reveals its original non-hermetic nature. The pool of tears is interpreted not as a metaphor of emotional excess, but as a specific form of a fluid world in which affect ceases to be an internal state and acquires spatial and ontological dimensions. Carroll’s text is thus considered a philosophically relevant model of subjectivity that presupposes permeability as an original ontological condition rather than as a consequence of crisis.

The article concludes by emphasizing the relevance of this model for understanding the contemporary subject, which exists within conditions of continuous affective circulation, fluid linguistic environments, and the erosion of boundaries between the internal and the external.

THE LIMINALITY OF GAME EXPERIENCE: «DOWN THE RABBIT-HOLE» AS A MODEL FOR THE TRANSITION TO THE DIGITAL WORLD

Nataliia Skubina — Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The article is devoted to a philosophical analysis of the liminality of video game experience as a distinctive mode through which the subject enters the digital world. The study is based on the premise that the figure of Alice, created by Lewis Carroll, together with the motif of "falling down the rabbit hole," can serve as a conceptual model for the transition between different ontological modes of experience. From this perspective, the journey into Wonderland represents a structure that describes the loss of established cognitive coordinates, the acquisition of new modes of orientation, and the gradual constitution of the subject within a virtual environment whose rules become intelligible only through interaction.

The theoretical framework of the study combines the concept of liminality developed by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of experience, Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutic conception of play, and contemporary contributions to game studies concerned with the phenomenology of video games, the ergodicity of digital texts, and immersion in virtual worlds (Espen Aarseth, Jesper Juul, Miguel Sicart, and Jan Valo). Since the gaming process transforms the nature of experience, the ways in which players orient themselves in the world, and the principles underlying their interaction with it, the approaches discussed above provide grounds for understanding video games as spaces in which players temporarily move beyond habitual modes of perceiving and engaging with reality.

The article further examines the transition into the virtual world as an ontological event involving a shift in the mode of presence, a transformation of subjectivity, and the appropriation of the normative structures that govern the digital environment. The figure of Alice performs a heuristic function by representing a universal structure of entering a world organized according to different principles of spatiality, temporality, causality, and meaning-making. Accordingly, liminality is interpreted as a constitutive condition of video game experience rather than merely as a characteristic of the transition between two states.

The scientific novelty of the study lies in its philosophical conceptualization of Alice as a model of digital liminality and in its justification of applying the anthropological theory of liminality to the analysis of video games. The proposed approach expands the conceptual framework of the philosophy of digital culture by opening new perspectives for understanding video game experience through the categories of ontology, phenomenology, subjectivity, and the spatiotemporal organization of digital worlds.

«CAMP» (S. SONTAG), «INTENTIO SECUNDA» (U. ECO), «MANNERISM» (I. KANT) AS RELATED MODES OF AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE

Oleksandra Loiko — Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The article compares Susan Sontag’s concept of Camp with Umberto Eco’s notion of intentio secunda and Immanuel Kant’s category of Mannerism. The study proceeds from the assumption that these intellectual constructs, despite belonging to different theoretical traditions, describe a related aesthetic logic based on distancing from the content of a cultural object and focusing on the forms of its representation. The author analyzes Camp as a sensibility that perceives cultural phenomena in the mode of citationality and activates the playful potential of aesthetic experience.

An important place in the article is occupied by the analysis of intentio secunda in Umberto Eco’s conception. It is shown that this type of reflection is directed not toward the search for fundamentally new artistic devices, but toward ways of perceiving already widespread cultural forms. It is emphasized that such a shift of focus brings intentio secunda closer to the logic of Camp; however, a fundamental difference remains between them. Whereas Eco calls for a critical distancing from aesthetically primitive cultural forms or forms profaned through excessively frequent use, Camp transforms their derivative character and artificiality into a source of aesthetic pleasure.

Particular attention is devoted to Kant’s concept of Mannerism. The author shows that Mannerism, like Camp, occupies an intermediate position between creativity and imitation, originality and copying. It is precisely this ambivalence that makes it possible to see in Mannerism the earliest conceptualization of cultural practices that would later be theorized within the framework of the aesthetics of Camp.

The article concludes that Camp, intentio secunda, and Mannerism represent different aspects of a common cultural logic oriented toward derivativeness, stylization, and aesthetic distancing. Camp appears as a form of «second-order» creativity aimed not at creating new cultural forms but at reinterpreting existing ones through citation, stylization, and an ironic play with their conventionality.

In addition, considerable attention is paid to the intellectual preconditions for the formation of Camp sensibility. In this context, the article analyzes the aesthetic views of Oscar Wilde, who proposed a «reversed» theory of mimesis according to which reality itself imitates art. It also examines Roland Barthes’s ideas concerning dandyism as a practice of symbolic self-construction. Reference to Jean Baudrillard’s theory of the simulacrum makes it possible to interpret Camp as a cultural orientation focused on the play of signs, quotations, and forms that have lost their direct connection with their original referent. Such a philosophical contextualization makes it possible to clarify the place of Camp in the history of aesthetic thought and to reveal its connection with broader theoretical issues.

THE PHENOMENON OF MEDIEVAL MYTHOLOGY IN THE CONTEXT OF CONTEMPORARY CULTURE

Yaroslav Bilyk — Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The phenomenon of medieval mythology is studied on the example of concepts of dwarves in this article. A mythologem of dwarves is quite universal and present in myths of different nations, but only in

medieval mythology it takes the leading place. Ideas about gnomes (dwarves) become an important part of the cultural code of the Middle Ages.

The most developed and detailed concepts of dwarves can be met in Polish and Celtic myths. A Polish version of dwarves - with its own name “krasnoludzie” - can be considered typical for this period. An important source of our research is medieval literature: different versions of Physiologus and Bestiaries. Medieval myths and worldview symbolics became an important basis where a literary genre of fantasy appeared and developed in contemporary culture (J. Tolkien, A. Sapkowski in contemporary Poland). Medieval mythology differs from the classical ancient one in many ways. Main medieval characters (dwarves, elves) are shown in the context of axiological parameters through conceptual opposition of good and evil.

This opposition is not a simple division into "absolute good" and "absolute evil", but is built on the differences and similarities in their nature, culture and worldview. The organic "weaving" of dwarves and other similar characters into existential constructs allowed a thinking person to perceive the life path of an individual as less tragic than in antiquity.

The game is the basis for the perception of the mythology of the Middle Ages. Medieval mythology allowed us to perceive a number of life situations by analogy with stage plays and therefore more comfortably.

Characteristic of the mentality of this era was the individual's attempt in every thing or phenomenon, in every event, even, at first glance, insignificant, to necessarily see both their general and secret meaning and purpose; therefore, for dwarfs, their place in the hierarchy of being was necessarily determined. The existential and axiological characteristics of the existence of such characters were necessarily perceived as complementary to a person's own existence.

BETWEEN RESURRECTION AND TRANSFORMATION:THE SEMANTIC ARCHITECTONICS OF THE APOCALYPSE OF IOANN

Liliia Kompaniiets — Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The article presents a comprehensive philosophical and religious studies analysis of the mystical phenomena of experience, prophecy, and the idea of souls transmigration as structure-forming attributes of religious consciousness in the early Christian and medieval periods. The thesis is advanced that the idea of transmigration within the Christian tradition does not appear as an explicit doctrine, yet is latently present in the imagery of resurrection, spiritual rebirth, the new name, and apocalyptic judgment. It is demonstrated that the motifs of transmigration, retribution, and salvation constitute a unified semantic matrix that governs the logic of the individual’s spiritual evolution within the Christian worldview.

The methodological foundation of the study is an interdisciplinary approach integrating the philosophy of religion, religious studies, cultural anthropology, and the history of ideas. The phenomenological method serves as the principal analytical framework, enabling the examination of mystical experience and prophecy as forms of intentional engagement with the transcendent and as existential modes of surpassing empirical reality.

Through sustained intellectual inquiry, it is established that certain semantic dimensions of the metempsychosis idea were periodically reactivated within Christian consciousness. This idea manifests across a range of conceptual aspects: as the capacity of the spiritual substance to separate from the corporeal envelope after death and inhabit a new body; as the possibility of gods, spirits, and saints to assume bodily form; and as a process of transition, migration, or movement of the soul through corporeal forms — conceived as an actual, completed, and potentially reversible process, including the notion of “return to the body.”

The study further establishes that the idea of eternal life — understood in the context of the soul’s migration between the immanent and transcendent realms — functions as a pervasive and foundational meaning-constituting principle that organizes the Christian religious worldview. Transmigration, within the Christian and religio-philosophical tradition, operates as a deep-structural mechanism for ordering spiritual experience, ensuring the coherence of the religious vision of the world and determining the logic of the individual’s spiritual evolution.

PHENOMENOLOGY AND CLASSIFICATION OF IDENTITIES IN THE CONTEXT OF THE WESTERN AND EASTERN PARADIGMS OF PHILOSOPHIZING

Igor Biletsky — Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The article is devoted to the issues of phenomenology and classification of identities. It is noted that the theory of the evolution of identities in Western culture, proposed by modern researcher Carl Trueman, which distinguishes the road from the political identity through the religious to the psychological, is incomplete and, in general, combines different levels of identities. We propose to apply a phenomenological approach to the analysis of the phenomenon of identity and, basing on E. Husserl's concept of the eidetic and psychophysical ego, we associate the phenomenon of identity with the latter. Next moment is that we use M. Buber's conception of two different types of intentionalities: I - You and I – It. We supplement this conception with our theory of distinguishing between different types of the I - You intentionality, namely I - You Our Own, I - You the Other, I - You the Alien. The intentionality I - You Our Own manifests itself in tribal identity (develops in the process of direct interactions between people), I - You the Other in religious and national (imaginary) identities, I - You the Alien in civilizational and universal (abstract) identities. We also propose to divide the identities into socio-political (external and self-sufficient) and socio-psychological (internal, those that develop within the socio-political). We include the aforementioned tribal, religious, national, and civilizational identities in the socio-political group; and the family, gender, class, professional, subcultural, etc. in socio-psychological identities.

CULTURAL REGIMES OF UNCERTAINTY: FROM RENAISSANCE FORTUNE TO THE ECOLOGICAL CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

Yuliia Tahlina, Kostiantyn Suspitsyn — Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The article examines the evolution of cultural regimes of uncertainty as historically variable ways of culturally interpreting randomness – from the Renaissance conception of Fortune to the ecological consciousness of the Anthropocene. The notion of a “cultural regime of uncertainty” is introduced as an authorial category denoting the set of symbolic practices, images, and modes of interpreting the future through which a culture seeks to render an uncertain world intelligible and amenable to action. Renaissance culture is considered as a regime in which uncertainty is conceptualized through the image of Fortune and the opposition fortuna/virtù, where randomness appears as a space of human agency and the realization of freedom. The experience of the Great Geographical Discoveries is interpreted as a practical embodiment of this logic of risk and openness to the unknown. By contrast, the ecological consciousness of the Anthropocene forms a regime in which uncertainty appears not as a temporary consequence of insufficient knowledge but as a fundamental characteristic of the interaction between humanity and planetary ecological systems. Particular attention is given to Timothy Morton’s concept of hyperobjects, which describes hyperscale ecological phenomena that exceed the limits of human experience. The comparative analysis reveals a transition from a personified to a planetary understanding of randomness, and from a logic of mastering uncertainty to a logic of coexistence with it, which reflects one of the fundamental transformations of cultural consciousness on the path from the Renaissance to the Anthropocene.

THE ACOUSTIC SPACE OF WAR: THE HOLISTIC DIMENSION OF SILENCE

Denys Davydov — Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The article examines the silence of war as a specific phenomenon of acoustic space that cannot be adequately described within the limits of any single discipline. War is traditionally conceptualized in visual and political registers, yet for those who inhabit its space, hearing rather than seeing becomes the primary organ of orientation and survival. Within this acoustic dimension, silence – and not the explosion – emerges as the most challenging phenomenon for philosophical description: it is neither absence of sound, nor pause in communication, nor recuperative quiet of a peaceful landscape, but rather the saturated presence of a threat that has not yet sounded. The paper argues that such silence should be understood holistically – as the implicate (enfolded) order of the belliphonic, in which future sounds are potentially present. The argument proceeds through three steps. First, the phenomenology of embodied listening (Merleau-Ponty, Ihde, Nancy), together with Daughtry’s concept of the belliphonic, is shown to capture the experiential structure of war silence yet to reach its limits when describing the presence of the not-yet-sounded. Second, Bohm’s distinction between implicate and explicate orders, supported by Tsekhmistro’s relational holism and Goodman’s notion of unsound, provides the ontological apparatus required to think this presence as enfolded rather than actual; the contrast between «lens» and «hologram» models of acoustic space clarifies why classical soundscape theory falls short for war acoustics. Third, Bohr’s principle of complementarity, read through Nicolescu’s logic of transdisciplinarity and the included middle, protects the holistic reading from reductionism in both directions: physical and phenomenological descriptions of silence belong to different levels of reality and are complementary rather than competing. The article concludes that the silence of war is at once a physical state, a phenomenon of consciousness, and an ontological structure, and that its adequate description therefore requires a transdisciplinary approach not as eclectic mixing but as a methodological necessity stemming from the nature of the object itself. Concrete examples from the ongoing war in Ukraine – the air-raid siren, the falling silence of a strike drone – illustrate the model and outline directions for further research on the ethics of sound as a weapon.

GEOPOLITICAL MYTH IN THE AGE OF ALGORITHMS: THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE SYMBOLIC UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF DIGITAL PLATFORMS

Dmitry Kriuchkov — Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The article offers a philosophical and methodological reconstruction of geopolitical myth as an effect of the network of interactions between algorithms, digital platforms, and users. It proposes moving from the classical model of a sovereign myth-maker to an actor-network ontology in which the algorithm appears as a full-fledged actor in the production of the symbolic. The theoretical framework integrates several lines: symbolic form in Cassirer, second-order semiology in Barthes, code and model-reader theory in Eco, discursive formation and power-knowledge in Foucault, affective circulation in Ahmed and pre-personal affect in Massumi, actor-network theory by Latour, Callon, and Law. All these layers are integrated into a single analytical framework in which myth does not precede the network but condenses within it. On this ground, the article analyzes three platform regimes of geopolitical myth circulation. TikTok constitutes a regime of myth-condensation through algorithmic acceleration: the For You Page selects forms that maximize attention retention, and the very form of the micro-video becomes the carrier of the affective core. YouTube constitutes a regime of stabilization: the recommendation architecture systematically moves the user deeper into already-captured narrative trajectories, condensing myth into the form of the “commonly known.” Telegram functions as a regime of incubation: dense networks of mutual forwarding generate affective resonance within a semi-closed environment. Geopolitical myth in the digital age is not produced by a centralized subject – it is a structural effect of visibility infrastructures that systematically raise the stakes of affectively loaded, rhythmically coupled formats. The article proposes to rethink power in terms of algorithmic management of visibility, and authorship as a distributed position between human, bot, and generative model. Practical consequences follow for critical analysis: instead of fact-checking narrative content – reconstruction of network couplings that hold this narrative together; instead of exposing “false consciousness” – analysis of the infrastructures in which this consciousness is continuously reshaped.