Druzhba Olga V.

Over the past decades, it has become almost a commonplace to talk about the final "end of ideology" as an objectively accomplished fact that is obvious and does not require justification. Meanwhile, real practice shows the opposite: according to most key indicators, including the rates of economic growth and development, the countries that have (China) or until recently had (the USA, the EU) a consistent ideological program are leading. In the conditions of the deepening crisis of liberal ideology, non-critically perceived by Russian society, the search for its own ideological foundations becomes a matter not as much as of the theoretical necessity than of the real practical survival and preservation of Russia as a single state and social organism.

The article deals with the image analysis as one of the instruments for monitoring and managing the social behaviour of people in the modern consumer society. Under the conditions when the utilitarian role of goods has largely fallen by the wayside, the symbolic status reality appeared for the first time, whose material signs are goods. The image without losing its full instrumental function in some particular cases usually acquires a new role commonly recognized and legalized from the position of the internal coercing apparatus in order to ensure the intersubjective organization of internal experience within the stable and predictable functioning and reproduction of the system. On the one hand, the traditional external coercing apparatus in its repressive and supervisory function is applied to the antisocial behaviour, its experiencers are oriented to the symbols outside the system requiring reproduction. Secondly, its effect also extends to those social strata that for one reason or another have dropped out of the "race for consumer status". But even in this latter case, it also tends to reduce the direct impact in favour of autonomous self-control.