The apprehension of phenomenon is seen as a facet of autocommunication, the voice of conscience associated with constant awareness and subsequent shame. Current phenomenological philosophy with reference to the literary implication of conscience brings to light the inner resources of the expertise of the individual's experience. The paper proposes a reading of Hegel's doctrine of conscience in the Phenomenology of Spirit not only as a dialectical but also as a mediæsthetic phenomenon. Hegel's philosophy is autocommunicative in its essence: he does not so much impose the rules of constructing philosophy as a novel, but rather waits for the former philosophy with its categorical apparatus to take shape in his own work as a dialectic. The tradition of an autocommunicative consideration of the experience of living was observed before Hegel in M. Montaigne and G. Leibniz, as the doctrine of social language and reflection. Friedrich Kittler pointed out Hegel's advantage as a thinker due to his experience of systemic combinatorics. The concept of «environment» introduced by Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit examines cognition through the combinatorics of artifice, through an involuntary epistemological bad conscience. The medium is life, which allows us to see the variability of things not as a general process but as some mechanics of difference that dialectically establishes individuality. The medium acts as a mediator and a situation of distinctions. Hegel, however, denies the mediumship of conscience. It is not a
medium that holds entities together, but an absolute self that annihilates the moral substances of example and duty. Spirit turns out to be the correspondence of authorial intent. Observing conscientious or shameful deeds of the novel's characters, the reader independently organizes his or her own subjectivity.
For citation: Markov A.V., Shtayn (Bratina) O.A. Hegel's jammed automaton of conscience: autocommunication, novel genre and media theory, Ivanovo State University Bulletin. Series: Humanities, 2024, iss. 2, pp. 165—174.