Conversation three

Y. Kuzminov: I will start with a discussion about the poet and politics. But I want to point out that the politicians here are Lenin or Gandhi at a minimum, and not deputy faction leaders. A very high bar for politics. Just as a poet is not equal to a member of the Writers' Union who is part of the corresponding section, but there is a Poet with a capital P, a poet who is socially called and internally feels like a poet, and not a person who makes his living through poetry. Consequently, this is more of an abstraction of creators than a description of some social groups, so there is what I would call a romantic approach here. An attempt to explain social phenomena through one’s self, participating in these social phenomena. And, naturally, the glorification of one’s own self, and in this case the poet is glorified, the politician is glorified.

And here in the author’s reasoning there is injustice towards the scientist. A scientist does not simply master an unfamiliar reality. Mastering an unfamiliar reality is the function of a lunar rover, not a scientist. I took a sample there, took it here, etc., according to some pre-formulated program. But a truly strong scientist formulates hypotheses and creates, introducing accumulated potential into these hypotheses - his subjectivity, his own knowledge, values, prejudices, that is, he actually works in exactly the same way as the described poet or politician works.

And further, about other social roles. Well, who was Edison? He was probably a priest, he was probably an applied worker, not even a scientist - in Sabur’s terminology. He applied other people's discoveries, put them together, and tried them on to the actual needs of the surrounding society. And he achieved positive results. But this satisfaction of a need was a brilliant play of the creative self, obvious to all spectators, not only to Thomas Alva himself. And if you invite some of the big businessmen here, they will probably feel like some combination of politicians and priests, because always with the greatest creative impulse there is a need to adapt to the crowd, to adapt to the external consumer of what you do.

And Schubert on water,
And Mozart in the din of birds,
And Goethe, whistling on the winding path,
And Hamlet, thinking with timid steps,
They counted the pulse of the crowd and believed the crowd.

Neither Mozart nor Mandelstam avoided adaptation to the external environment. Even by hacking the environment, the creator adapts to it. It's just a little stronger than the environment.

This adaptation is in fact the main antithesis of free subjectivity. A person is objectified by the material conditions of his life, he is objectified by the prevailing values ​​in society, he is objectified by the fact that he may not be served in a store if he behaves too “separately.” And this kind of objectification is not necessarily such a rough landing. Just remember how the same Mandelstam felt in the 30s. This is, after all, an attempt to find oneself useful and needed by the masses, which (according to Saburov) are equal to power, and this attempt, in my opinion, led to the most powerful manifestation of Russian poetic culture after Pushkin, which is incomparable to anything in terms of height.

It’s easy to interpret creativity as breaking traditional behavior. In this case, he is opposed by some observance of the rules of the game, the observance of some forced balance. By the way, why is a forced equilibrium still an equilibrium? Because the actors adapt to it, because the actors try to achieve the best results, going through their path in the least painful way, adapting to previously known laws. And the forced balance gradually becomes a completely natural balance. What, can’t there be creativity within the norms of traditional behavior? Simply in the sense that it doesn’t hack them, it doesn’t notice them. And there - inside - it can be quite spacious.

I liked the author's contrast between actor and actor. The actor plays the role, and the actor creates the role - it will then be played by others (epigones, followers, masses). The actor also has a choice - which role to choose and how exactly to play it, and for an ordinary person (who saves effort, unlike the creator), there is more than enough space for this choice.

Is economic theory incorrectly calling people actors? Why in economic theory the images of “actor-actor” are merged - this is in the form of a stage direction - is quite understandable, because the abstract economic man is nothing more than the embodied possibility of choice. But economic theory does not justify why such a choice is made, it simply outlines the space of this choice.

Now regarding the statement that knowledge of laws has become a profession, that is, systematic knowledge of laws, interpretation of laws is a profession. Even just knowing the laws is a profession. That is, a lawyer is like a pilot. How then do people live? Without knowing the norms of your own behavior? This is a wonderful area for sociologists and psychologists - legal awareness and law in the social regulation of practical activities, self-regulation of practical activities. For example, my hypothesis is this: people don’t read laws unless they intend to break them. This means that the laws in the equilibrium state of society outline such a framework of what is permitted, where the overwhelming number of units of individual choice can be placed without much effort. And a person who makes his individual choice is no longer necessarily an actor, he may become an actor. As the consequences of his activities for a person become larger, be it a major businessman, be a major politician, be it a major writer (I emphasize, a writer, because I am interested in the social consequences of his activities), there are fewer and fewer written roles left that he can simply take and copy. I am very interested in whether this kind of pattern can be transferred, for example, to the experience of a major artist. Relatively speaking, if he becomes larger, does not fit into tradition, cannot instinctively reproduce certain social roles, then at the same time his external limitations increase, he begins to need supports, a lawyer (I say “lawyer” conditionally, a lawyer is an expert , interpreter of what is permitted, interpreter of norms). What role does a literary critic play for a writer? Isn't that the role that a lawyer plays for a businessman?

M. Eisenberg: They say that in previous times people simply spoke out one after another about the book. But in my opinion, this is not the most interesting thing that can happen if people get together; still, some kind of dialogue, an argument is more interesting. And now I noticed the opportunity to simply attach to something said earlier and try to unwind this ball. So I will cling to what Yaroslav said about objectification, that Mandelstam in the 30s tried to make himself necessary for the masses and for the authorities. This phrase did not offend me at all; I believe that in some sense it was so. But this was not the direct goal of those strange and some unpredictable, partly unreadable actions that Mandelstam did then, who in 1933 read a poem on every corner about the Kremlin highlander “We live without feeling the country beneath us,” and after 3 years, no, after 4, he wrote an ode to this mountaineer. In my opinion, these are links of the same chain, and in a sense, even if this is not one poem, then at least it is the same text, so to speak, a text in a broader sense. Mandelstam in the craziest, most wild and outlandish way resisted one thing - being pushed out of time, out of his time. Simply because he, like no one else, knew that an author pushed out of his time is a dead author, and he did not want to be a dead author, he did not want to be yesterday’s author, he wanted to be an existing author, continuing to exist and act, because what time, today's time, the present tense - in both senses of the word, and is, strictly speaking, the only genuine material standing behind the words, behind the technical devices or something. That is, this is the material from which everything comes. This is the time, the present time.

I in no way believe that Brodsky is Mandelstam’s epigone, and some of the incomprehensibility, some inexplicability of our attitude towards him is due to the fact that he is in no way Mandelstam’s epigone. Brodsky is an author who existed in time before Mandelstam, before Mandelstam’s time. In this case, he is, so to speak, a living anachronism. Dokhlebnikovsky. He lives in pre-Khlebnikov, pre-Mandelshtam time. He did not understand and did not read Mandelstam. It’s hard to say that Brodsky is a bad poet. He is a good poet, he has many wonderful, wonderfully written poems, and as a person he is a very great person and an interesting author. But mysteriously, it is uninteresting and unnutritious to any of the people who write. It is not interesting precisely because it is anachronistic.

Now we return to Mandelstam, who is opposed to Khlebnikov. The idea was expressed that Mandelstam defeated Khlebnikov, that is, Acmeism defeated futurism - and because of this, something that was bound to happen to Russia did not happen. It seems to me that the fact that in the 60-70s such major authors as Brodsky appeared, who found himself in a pre-Mandelshtam situation, suggests that Mandelstam, at least, was not only engaged in completing the Russian poetry of the 19th century. It can be assumed that in a mysterious way, one author combined 2 authors, 2 functions: Mandelstam until the end of the 20s was one author, and Mandelstam of the 30s was another author, who, in fact, is absolutely modern and relevant like no other . I admit, I can talk for quite a long time, moving from Mandelstam, say, to the problem of cause-and-effect relationships. Is this appropriate?

Y. Kuzminov: I also agree that Brodsky is a representative of old poetry, but what began with Velimir Khlebnikov, a completely incomprehensible poet, raw material for poetry, is like a very roughly processed sculpture, unfinished, it cannot be visible, cannot be interpreted. But a feature of the poetry of the new century, which, in my opinion, found its maximum embodiment in Mandelstam of the 30s, is the leaping of conventional logic, the skipping of explanations. Remember things like “the buds smell like sticky oath.” What is a “sticky oath”? You will not find this in Brodsky, just like in Pushkin. “And I don’t play a black-voiced bow,” why black-voiced? There is a huge range of cultural conjectures, but this cultural range of conjectures is compressed. “Arabian mash, crumbly” - again a wild compression. Maybe there are one or two novels here, or maybe 100. The reader can read these novels, he can speculate on them, but in any case, the cultural code becomes very compressed, new signs appear, sharply accelerated connections between concepts appear, a reset appears explanations. The new society is not just a society of information, it is a society of information overload. The resetting of connections, the transition to associative and hyper-associative connections is characteristic not only of poetry, it is characteristic of the social code of all activity in the coming century.

M. Eisenberg: Well, let’s say, Mandelstam is not as radical as the Oberiuts or Khlebnikov, who simply abolished cause-and-effect relationships as something imposed on our thinking, and not an initially natural property for it. But in a sense, Mandelstam’s non-radicalism turned out to be more productive, in my opinion, because his famous phrases that “I think in omitted links” are relative, regarding technology..... And another, even more significant, relatively his understanding of what a word is. The word is a handwriting, a meaning, equality sticks out of it - it doesn’t stick out, that is, it sticks out for the word that the author still uses, and when he puts it into action, then this sticking out meaning flies out of the word like a periphrastic net and immediately captures the whole cultural volume, let's say, although the word cultural here is not entirely correct. I just can't find another one.

And I also want to return to the question of why I consider what happened to Mandelstam in the 20s and 30s to be his struggle for the present time. What is the present tense? The present time is new, unknown. This is a time that does not yet have any clear identifying signs, and this is what poets deal with. The special value of what is being discussed is that poetry is always being considered to illustrate the problem of the new, because poetry has the most ancient, accumulated experience, including methodology, of addressing unknown, new goals. If we summarize everything that this book is written about, then we can probably say that it is written about how new things arise, whether there are any technologies for this, and whether we can recognize and use these technologies. I fall silent for a moment.

Yu. Plotinsky: Saburov’s book contains a lot of interesting, controversial, and provocative things. I would like to focus on one storyline that is especially close to me, it can be called the cognitive approach or cognitive paradigm. This topic is one of the central ones in almost all sections of the book. Interest in how people make decisions, how they generally recognize certain phenomena, how they learn, acquire new knowledge, in particular, the use of metaphors - all this relates to cognitive issues. To the greatest extent, cognitivism is characteristic of the last chapter of the book, which directly examines cognitive systems analysis as a means of solving pressing problems of our time.

At our round table we talked about the problem of information overload, about combating overload by omitting cause-and-effect relationships and constructing concepts in which there is a whole bunch of meanings. Unfortunately, what is fruitful for literature and art, in science, and even more so in applied science, it seems to me, leads to a dead end. The most important concepts that allow us to somehow understand and understand today's reality are structure, system, process. To these three terms, one more basic concept should be added - social mechanism. It is impossible to talk about this quickly, considering that a uniform interpretation of these basic terms is generally accepted. Alas, in the social sciences the situation is completely different. In the interpretation of these concepts, there is no longer a bundle of meanings, but rather a chaos of meanings (there are even calls to completely abolish the concept of structure as too ambiguous and misleading). In this confusing situation, social scientists begin to conduct scholastic discussions: is a social mechanism a system or a process? Do social mechanisms like the “invisible” hand of the market exist, and if so, where? These debates often focus on the crisis of social sciences rather than on the search for new ways of development.

It is correct that following the old systemic categories that have been relevant in classical science since the middle of the 20th century is now becoming inadequate. The systems themselves are changing, and the most interesting thing is that even organizational systems are changing. It turns out that the old network of concepts did not allow many processes to be seen; they were not paid attention to, they were not even given names. The nature of systems is now changing; many functions that were previously essential for structural and functional analysis are now being outsourced and removed from the system.

The traditional systems approach significantly underestimated the role of such an important concept as trust. In recent years, more and more works have appeared that focus on this key concept. It is believed that trust is a kind of lubricant of social mechanisms, without which they cannot function effectively. If there is a high level of trust in a society (trust in different senses - trust in people, trust in social and symbolic systems), then society can function effectively, naturally, within the framework of democracy and a market economy. American scientist Francis Fukuyama expressed an interesting point of view. He argues that the usual assessment of American society as a multitude of continuous egoists and individualists is deeply erroneous. In fact, the level of trust, including trust in people, is very high in American society, and in this sense it is closer to traditional Japanese society. Because of this, Americans easily organize themselves and quickly build new systems and organizations. This is why market and democratic institutions function successfully in the United States.

Needless to say, the level of trust in Russian society is close to zero. This affects politics, slows down economic transformations, and reduces the effectiveness of market institutions.

In modern society, the role of trust in knowledge, trust in experts, trust in the knowledge offered by the education system is also extremely important.

Here I would like to dwell on the problem of increasing the effectiveness of education, with the help of game forms, both for acquiring new knowledge and for mastering old ones. In this area there is also a significant underestimation of the importance of the issue of trust. Modern information technologies enable students to independently acquire new knowledge. Such knowledge is alive in every sense, but for this mechanism to function, trust in new technologies for obtaining knowledge is necessary. In this area, largely paradoxical methodologies have recently been developed that make it possible to build computer models of complex phenomena while playing games with a computer and at the same time achieve trust in the tools used. The user does not work with a “black box” that gives out who knows what, but interacts with a “transparent box”, fully controlling the progress of the experiments. Let us note that the categories - control, transparency - are actually relevant now in many areas, including in traditional political and economic systems. Considering traditional problems from this angle will significantly increase the level of trust, which will make it possible for new socio-cognitive mechanisms to function effectively.

Y. Kuzminov: Our entire culture is a large zone of trust. We don't double-check culture.

Strictly speaking, the territory of common sense most often includes a certain world directly visible to humans. But it is very narrow. How does he complete it? This is where trust comes in. It manifests itself in economic life when you and I invest money based on the listing of some stock exchange, which in turn is formed by the financial statements of the same corporation in which we invest money. I am not able to verify, I trust some economic authority, capable - according to the experience of others - in an area that is beyond the scope of my competence. And in this respect there is actually no difference between social life, science, cultural life. In any society there is a huge zone of trust, many times greater than the objective zone of critical perception. In fact, we are collecting here, perhaps, an immense number of cause-and-effect relationships that somehow exist there, but we are not going after these connections. We are looking for a simplified connection, a connection that is not causal, but functional (or emotional). This is what we talked about today in connection with that poetic breakthrough in the logical and social life of the 21st century, well, the end of the 20th century too. For Russians, this is Khlebnikov's revolution in poetry. I, like most of my “literature-minded” compatriots, perceive it precisely through Mandelstam.

But I also want to say that what we call a new economic system, a new cultural system, are facets of the same phenomenon. This is a zone of unverifiability, which becomes - for the first time in history - instrumental, becomes a zone of human activity. Previously, in patriarchal societies, in societies whose rhythm of life fit into a person’s “biological clock,” a zone of trust also existed. But man's production and cultural activities took place within the circle of his direct control. The shoemaker, even the banker knew their clients. The engineer could independently make all the necessary calculations; the doctor was practically a generalist. The zone of trust began “behind the scenes” - where there was an area of ​​​​other people's professional knowledge. In the 20th century, everything began to change. As a result, we have “clip culture” in mass art, reference culture in education (which is increasingly replacing systematic culture), economic and political activity conducted almost exclusively “by proxy” - according to indicators of stock markets and sociological surveys. And we have Mandelstam and Khlebnikov in high poetry.

M. Eisenberg: It just seems to me that some strangeness is connected with the fact that this book is preparing us for a time that has not yet fully arrived, for a new time, where precisely this zone of trust will seem to melt away. That is, we will understand less and less what we inherit and what our beliefs actually are. And the more valuable, it seems to me, is the constant appeal to the experience of poetry, to the experience of verse. Because a poet is a person who is constantly in a situation of a blank slate. A blank sheet is his main problem and his main weapon, this is what he exists with all his life. This is the task of not letting in - precisely not letting in - anything ready-made, nothing that is already there, that already exists, and to find himself in front of a blank sheet of paper, which he is forced to fill with some hooks that are incomprehensible to him. It is these hooks that gradually begin to catch something, and this something is the present, that is, the future. The future in this case is a synonym, because what now clings as the present will, after some time, become a conscious future. But the description of the poet as an extremely active person, it seems to me, needs clarification. I am not against activity; a poet, of course, is an extremely active being, but this activity is of a special kind. I do not agree that a poet is someone who throws some ideas, some fruits into the world, sometimes poisoned, but so tempting that the world becomes infected with these fruits and in a century or two he grows donkey ears. It seems to me that the poet is primarily a contemplative being, but this contemplation is by no means passive; here it is important to understand what exactly he is contemplating. He contemplates what is not there, and this is by no means a passive activity. Where does this thing that doesn’t exist come from? You can probably imagine such a scheme. Language is our idea of ​​the world. But the world is changing. Language as our idea of ​​the world does not keep up with these changes; there remains some gap, some emptiness. It is into this emptiness that the poet looks. Why is he looking exactly there? But he has some special feeling, he has some kind of dumbness. The author is a predominantly insane creature; he is not imputed to what is imputed to everyone else.

Yu. Plotinsky: We always talk about cause-and-effect relationships. This is one of the main ways of everyday perception of the world, and the scientific one too. However, today another way of describing and analyzing complex phenomena is also relevant - considering them as systems of rules. This approach allows us to analyze social institutions and organizational systems. In this case, we can consider that the actor acts entirely within the existing rules, and the actor invents new rules. This distinction may also be useful.

Y. Kuzminov: The actor, it seems to me, does not just hack into the social environment, the actor builds a new network of explanations. It adds something to the culture that others inherit. This is quite easy to see in economics. There are a lot of fairly rich people who, nevertheless, are not actors, they are rather actors, and they ultimately influence each other and the future. This impact is a certain resulting impact of the market, you can remove each of them, it will change to certain shares. But along with them there are people who have a personal, significant impact on the market. This is George Soros in relation to financial markets in recent decades. These are people and organizations that are so meaningful and ponderous that their behavior begins immediately - their personal behavior, not a generalized indicator - begins to be immediately copied by others. And an actor, a socially significant actor, is characterized by the fact that a crowd of followers arises around him, that he creates a new zone of trust around himself. The man successfully crossed the swamp in another place - now everyone walks like that.

M. Eisenberg: It seems to me that it’s very cool that some example arose, and the conversation immediately became concrete and understandable. It is clear exactly what we are talking about. When I read the description of who the actor is, for some time I was vaguely disturbed by the feeling that I was reading a description of some very specific person known to me, but I couldn’t remember who, and then I remembered. This, of course, is Alexander Sergeevich Yesenin-Volpin. Now, if you describe who an actor is, then you can simply write a biography of this person, and no further explanations will be required, because this is exactly what an actor is. Although a combination of very different abilities - a poet, a mathematician, and a politician, by the way, because what he did was, of course, political activity. This is a person who simply came up with a certain thing, thanks to his strange and non-trivial mathematical brain, I don’t know. He came up with such a simple thing that you can fight the Soviet government by demanding that it comply with its own laws. No one else would have thought of such stupidity. And indeed, what you were talking about immediately began to happen, not a crowd, but a group arose, but gradually a certain system, and a zone of trust arose, and a very active one at that. And from here, from this topic there is a move generally into the topic of dissidence and into the topic of the 70s as a time of dissidence. And the 70s, it seems to me, are exactly the time that - if we are interested at all in how new things are created, how people behave in a situation where all old connections are terminated - should be studied in the most careful way, which no one is doing. A lot of bad things that happen in our lives are due to the fact that the 70s sank like a black box to the bottom of the ocean. But the ice floe of the 60s and the ice floe of the 80s moved, and not even a crack was formed.

Y. Kuzminov: I would like to jump to the question about anarchism, because I am probably one of literally two or three people who worked on anarchist theories at the end of Soviet power. Indeed, anarchist theories are much more humanistic than socialism. But it seems to me that Saburov has a significant substitution of concepts when he talks about anarchism, that it won economically. This is wrong. Here, in my opinion, two things are confused. Self-organization and simply corporate organization of ownership are two different things. Self-organization is possible when the organization of shared ownership does not go beyond the control of each agent, each owner of this grain. Is this present in the pension and insurance funds that are cited in the book as examples of self-organization? Yes, no more so than in any corporation. Having invested our funds in one or another pension fund, we cannot in any way influence the policy of its management - neither investment, nor even reporting.

After all, what is happening in the USA? The current crisis is not the crisis of September 11, it is a crisis of confidence in existing financial institutions, that is, in institutions for accumulating funds for economic projects. People saw the deliberate distortion of corporate financial statements. But this is the cornerstone for the activities of stock markets, the most important element of the “proxy economy”. And this crisis in the United States - it will later become clear that this is perhaps a global crisis of the institutions of capitalism - is a crisis of confidence.

The anarchist organization “in the project” in practice turned out to be a corporate organization. The latter, in fact, unfortunately, practically also leads to lack of freedom, to manipulation by owners, like any organization where there is a manager. A manager or resource collector or entrepreneur exists at the bottom of any investment insurance fund. If we remember the fate of mutual aid funds back in Soviet times, then such a fund worked in small organizations, in large organizations it degenerated into a kind of shadow enterprise. Its efficiency increased, but it was not the ordinary members who skimmed the cream. We must not lose sight of the figure of the manager. Anarchism is impossible, anarchism is meaningless as soon as we go beyond the community. The community is the ultimate, maximum level of development of self-organization with all the unpleasant aspects that are characteristic of a community structure. As soon as we are talking about the self-organization of equal producers or equal owners, we will see that this self-organization is primarily concerned with surviving, suppressing any deviations, they kill their actors or, in the worst case, pushes their actors outside this circle. Therefore, the sweet dream of anarchism is doubly less realistic than the sweet dream of communism. Communism was realistic, it simply degenerated in means, because the goal was unattainable by these means.

The second point is why I don’t agree. I quote: “modern economics has proven that it is most effective when there is no power over it; liberalism and anarchy cannot exist without each other.” I agree, only the market should be replaced by anarchy, and I don’t agree with the pearl - the statement that “there is no power.” Can a modern economy exist without money? Money is the main institution of the market, its main organizing institution, and money without power means nothing. Power and money are inseparable, interconnected things. You may not regulate the economy at all, but you are obliged to ensure the stability and uncounterfeitability of the currency. The most efficient markets are the most organized markets. Here, an exchange is a market in which the position of participants is most transparent, in which the rights of investors are most protected, where there is no outright robbery, etc., where there is no deception, where there is corporate responsibility for what you do, and you must agree, that this is the most organized market. Any type of exchange - stock or commodity exchange. This is the most organized market - from opening hours, from trading hours to very strict rules of behavior and to very heavy barriers to entry there. This is the paradox that market transparency and market efficiency are inversely proportional to disorganization and freedom. I think this will continue to manifest itself further and further. Can the Federal Reserve be viewed as a kind of communication analogue? Excuse me, the Federal Reserve has nothing to do with communication. The Federal Reserve System is a network of banks controlled from above. Yes, they are self-organizing. Just as the Central Bank of Russia has a board, the Fed also has one, in a personal sense - this is Greenspin and another 30-40 people who collectively influence its functioning in dialogue with the government, in dialogue with Congress, and direct its movement. Apart from Greenspin and the top, there is no Federal Reserve system at all, because everything is determined by this management. I quote a very beautiful phrase - “development has brought us to the gaming table; there are no bosses at the gaming table.” Excuse me, what about the dealer? Someone is dealing cards. In any real game there is a function of nature, random selection. And plus someone else makes sure that they don’t distort.

The objection is clear: management and power are different things. But I don’t know how different these things are. What is property? Property is power and the ability to manage. Between Soviet times and the time when we formed more or less clear institutions of private property, there are 15 years when property institutions were blurred and de facto property belonged to managers. Imagine yourself in the place of the owner (although this rarely happens - one owner) of a very large financial empire with some kind of real sector - with factories, ships. What is the extent of your personal decisions in the pyramid of orders that are made? I think less than 1%. And it will always be like this. And here I would also return to our theory of trust.

Only certain aggregated indicators come to the owner. Here are his metallurgical companies, here are his financial companies, here are his income from the aviation business. Aggregated indicators - they are not set and formed in an explicit way, the owner does not see how this is done, he trusts his managers and in fact he sets the main parameters based on a very small group of summary simplified indicators. Putin calls the government and says: "Let's grow more." What is growth? This is a kind of simplification, this is a kind of metaphor. Management today is completely functional, it no longer considers any cause-and-effect relationships, it operates with abstraction. If we put ourselves in the shoes of a hypothetical business owner or president, or put ourselves in the shoes of a simple investor who has extra money, then what is important to him? Confidence. But trust presupposes a functional analysis, because in order to trust, you need to dramatically simplify, reduce this enterprise to some kind of convention, to some kind of symbol. Here is a symbol - these are financial indicators. But there is real wealth. Why did financial indicators become a symbol? Why has economics itself become symbolic?

M. Eisenberg: A lot of things came together here at once, but since we are finishing, it is appropriate, well, at least beautifully, artistically to end the conversation with where the book begins. The book begins with the fact that a certain Saburov came to a seminar where a certain Eisenberg invited him to talk about the most important thing. And when the leader of the seminar, a certain Eisenberg, announced the topic of the seminar, “The Poet and Power,” the person who came was jarred, as it is written in the book. "I was chilled." I want to justify myself a little, I did not mean that Zhenya, coming to my seminar, would talk about himself as a poet and as a representative of power, meaning political power, etc. I had in mind precisely the theme of “The Poet and Power,” the change in this very relationship of one to the other. Disappearance, slipping away, erosion of the author’s function as the ruler of thoughts and the degeneration of this into something else. By the word power, I meant the component of this ruler of thoughts. I meant that the poet ceases to be the ruler of thoughts, and in general, that society ceases to need the rulers of thoughts, which is understandable, because this very image, this very function - the ruler of thoughts - is based on certain logical moves built on those same cause-and-effect relationships. And since cause-and-effect relationships clearly cease to work in the form in which they existed, then this ruler of thoughts disappears and melts away. And here it was said that education comes through meaning, through myth, ritual, character. It is very interesting what the meaning is and how it will be implemented. The book says that systems concern some particular things, and all the intermediate areas are the area of ​​beliefs. It seems to me that there will be more and more such areas, simply for the reason that the new world requires from us new thinking, much clearer, such thinking where simple answers need to be given to simple questions, and this is very difficult, it is impossible to do without this area of ​​belief and trust.

Yu. Plotinsky: Speaking about the role of myths and mysteries in the educational process, it is advisable to use the possibilities of virtual life. This option of virtual accompaniment of an individual on his life path is possible. You can immerse a child from 1st to 6th grade in the virtual Middle Ages (X-XIV centuries - knights, beautiful ladies, queens, secret societies, campaigns, etc.). From 7th to 8th grade - virtual Renaissance. The next stage of life, starting from the 9th grade, is learning about democracy and the market in the virtual 19th-21st centuries. Closer to retirement, as part of continuing education, a new virtual mystery begins, associated with a communist paradise in some nursing homes. Further, new virtual reincarnations are possible.

Y. Kuzminov: The characteristics of education, the meaning of education and how it should be implemented is a very serious philosophical breakthrough. I will still talk about education, not enlightenment, just to stay within the framework of familiar signs, although I believe that “enlightenment” is a much more effective word in relation to this phenomenon. But when I read all this, I had this question. You see, what’s the matter, after all, the game has its limitations. The game differs from life in the absence of responsibility for the result of the game. And you need to compensate for this with something, if you use the game for formation, for enlightenment, for teaching values, skills, etc. If you think that school should create responsibility and freedom - and I think that this is absolutely correct - then it is necessary to build some kind of compensation mechanisms for this lack of responsibility. What could it be? I think ratings are an artificial moment of competition to define oneself in relation to others. The school is completely devoid of this. At HSE we will now introduce an open ranking of all students. The winner of the game accumulates merit. They may be more or less symbolic in nature, but in any case a certain social file of a given person accumulates. The game should not just be set as a teaching method, it should be a deeply internal matter for schoolchildren and students. Rachevsky asked: how does the school maintain itself in this absolutely black despondency caused by school programs, which are not only bad, but simply very dreary? And he answered: with a kind of cheerful denial of them at the level of the student. A culture of denial is being formed there. The game with officialdom is being formed there. But it seems to me that playing with officialdom is very important. But school doesn't teach you to laugh at yourself. You can do it over the teacher, but you can’t do it over yourself. Laughter directed at oneself - our school does not cultivate such a culture, this is a very serious shortcoming of it, it seems to me one of the most important ones, which we must realize and talk about and somehow try to change this situation.

At the end of the conversation, I will ask both you and myself, what is the general form of social recognition that you and I can foresee in the future society? Will recognition in a narrow professional group be enough for us? The poet really wants him to be read by a large number of people, and not by a small number who really understand him. I think that any creator hesitates, he fluctuates from trying to find some kind of mass recognition, to trying to find more lasting recognition by convincing the people who are valuable to him. I thought there was a problem of adaptation, a problem of necessity. The need can arise in three ways. The need of the present time is the most obvious form of actualization, some kind of self-esteem of a person who creates, does something. But there is material time, a certain culture, which is material time, and if we turn to many carriers of culture, they were tried on, and how would Cicero look at them. Do I write well compared to A.S. Pushkin? And finally, the most difficult form of actualization is actualization through correspondence to an imaginary future. Well, you really can’t evaluate yourself by how you overcame reality. You can simply overcome reality by demolishing all the walls in the apartment and breaking the toilet; this is also a kind of overcoming reality. And if you overcome it, you must see the landmark where you are overcoming it. If we take this kind of problem of measuring oneself, of socially rating oneself, we again return to the problem of trust. Imagine a huge number of specialists who know nothing about each other and cannot evaluate each other. How will leaders emerge among them? Is it possible to form a leader? You and I have seen in the last decade that a leader in our country, at least, is formed very easily. Well, God bless them, the national leaders, but how will people’s assessments of each other be formed? How? After all, this is a very dangerous period in our society; we now have a mutual assessment of material success. This has not happened for a long time, it has inevitably come. Well, how can a physicist evaluate a financier, and a financier a physicist? A linear code appears. Who drives what car, who vacations where, and so on. This is a naive, childish comparison of possibilities, which, in my opinion, has been overcome quite a long time ago in countries where the market economy has existed not for as many years as ours, but approximately 20 times longer. But the challenge that today's intelligentsia has is to try to find whether we have any chances of a new cultural comparison. It is in this formation of a new cultural comparison that the main role of the school lies. She won't give it now. The school does not build a certain set of cultural orientations, cultural requirements, which would be a universal basis for comparing the achievements of people of different professions, for comparing the culture of people of different professions. And where there is no basis for such cultural comparison, some kind of universal basis, there are also methods of political technology for promoting national heroes such as the daughter of the second man in LUKoil, etc. Well, it's just buying a creator's place. This, by the way, is the most unique phenomenon that I know now - the purchase of the place of the creator, the second Alla Pugacheva, for my beloved daughter.

Yu. Plotinsky: In social recognition today, a key role is played by such a social mechanism as reputation. It is necessary, apparently, to distinguish between ideas about image, image and reputation. A pleasant, acceptable image is intended to relieve the tension that sometimes arises in society. Its effect is short-lived and does not affect the phenomenon of trust. The most he can do is take sharp negative actions or even simply slow them down.

Reputation has a direct impact on trust. After all, the crisis of confidence in the United States, which we talked about, is a consequence of a decline in reputation. The reputation mechanism is extremely important for the successful functioning of modern society, but it is a very sensitive mechanism. Attempts to improve its functioning through increased government control may lead to unforeseen negative consequences. Reputation mechanisms should rely mainly on public opinion.

Nevertheless, the temptation to enlist the assistance of government agencies to support reputations is very great. It is especially dangerous in our country. Remember the expression: “is this a state enterprise or a private shop?” And although it is clear to everyone that corruption in government agencies is quite widespread, and in a private structure it is not clear why they should steal from themselves, the beliefs of the Soviet era are not easy to overcome.

Requirements to confirm reputation with something like a government certificate can give rise to corruption. However, public recognition is complicated by what we drew attention to - the impossibility of checking everything, the need for trust.

In recent years, the informatization of society has begun to interfere with the natural course of processes. It becomes possible to collect, store and analyze huge amounts of data (letters, telephone conversations, all financial statements and documentation). Knowing about this possibility, the individual will be wary of building his reputation on unseemly actions. It is clear that the emergence of new forms of social control can lead to both positive and negative results.

In other words, we return to the paradox of anarchism that was mentioned. Strengthening control makes it possible to expand the “borders of the community,” that is, to give each shareholder the opportunity to evaluate the actions of the manager, for example, in a pension or insurance fund. And in this sense, it strengthens the achievement of freedom and makes government intervention in economic processes unnecessary.

However, on the other hand, unprofessional intervention limits the freedom of actors, which is inseparable from risk. This reduces efficiency. I’m not sure that this will not lead to the pushing out of actors that Slava spoke about and, in the end, a sharp restriction of freedom for everyone.

Can the cultivation of a non-semantic ritual component of our life, at least in the process of education, somehow help trust? Don't know. Here there is immediate reliance on tradition, and a breakthrough into the future requires sacrifice. What can you think of other than for future people to check their deeds?

M. Eisenberg: I ​​remembered that Slava said that for some creators the past is important, for others the future. Somehow they place themselves there - some in the past, some in the present, some in the future. Without explaining or deciphering my strange statement in any way, I want to say that it is actually all the same thing. And what I said about the struggle for the present time is all about this. The present time is the time that is simultaneously past, present, and future, that is, the time that comes out of the linear code. And this is what, I repeat once again, is the true material of art.

In addition, I would like to add that, apparently, power is really becoming a thing of the past. There is authority, power, control, but still, this is not power. And the poet, I return to my misunderstanding with Saburov, is no longer the ruler of thoughts. He has no power over minds today. But does he still have any power? Which? Don't know.