"Mummification of Culture": Modern Approaches to Memorial Practices

Abstract

The article is devoted to a critical analysis of modern approaches to the memorialization of culture prevailing in Western European philosophical thought, using the example of R. Debray's mediology. It is shown that the very appeal to the problems of death and the preservation of the memory of the past is extremely significant today against the background of the "acceleration of history", the loss of the unity of historical time and the plurality of views on the past. However, the translation of the experience of the past through traces of memory reduces the idea of culture only to its "bodily" expression. Culture is considered as the sum of acquisitions accumulated and transferred by a individual as a biological species. The conclusion is made about the convergence in modern concepts of the notion of memory with the notion of information. The view of the accumulation and distribution of artifacts in the outside world as a universal way of compensating for the collective "unconsciousness" of mankind is criticized.