Neo-mythological tendencies in сontemporary media culture

Stroeva, Olesya Vitalievna
PhD in Philosophy, Professor, Head of Theory and History of Culture Department, GITR Film and Television School, Moscow, Russia
olessia_75@mail.ru


Abstract
The visualization of the myth in traditional culture had different goals, primarily didactic, since due to its syncretism, the visual form is easily perceived by mass consciousness. The visual myth, through symbolism and magic things, served as a signal of the distinction between ‘friend-foe’, an identification hermeneutical tool for the dialogue of cultures. Religious, ideological, subcultural and other symbols in the modern world, of course, do not lose their relevance, marking belonging to one or another semantic field (in the Internet culture, memes are a vivid example of this function). However, the peculiarity of neo-mythologizing lies in the fact that it does not provide such guidelines, it has a different task - to expose the structure of the myth, demonstrating it in a concrete-sensual way.
Such a model is not only an installation of the uncertainty and instability of an eidetic object in the structure of the image, but also a desire to teach viewers new semantic strategies. Thus, neo-mythologizing includes processes of de-mythologizing and re-mythologizing, leading to the formation of a specific model of demiurgy as a manifestation of the type of nomadic subjectivity that manifests itself in contemporary media sphere.
Distinguishing between two models - mythological and neo-mythological - is extremely relevant in contemporary media culture, since the desire to broadcast a certain system of values (imposing a certain universal myth) will inevitably be de-mythologized (dethroned) and substituted (re-mythologized) by surrogate structures (for example, gender problems, neoliberal values, scientific myths).

Since the connection with tradition turned out to be “archived”, it seems that the task of domestic media culture today is not to return to the mythological models that successfully operated in the Soviet propaganda system or in the pre-revolutionary religious context, but to focus on neo-mythological strategies that imply the transfer of responsibility for meaning formation to the recipient himself, offering him elements to assemble the puzzle and providing a certain demiurgical freedom.

Keywords: media culture, neo-mythologizing, contmporary art, mass culture, TV and Web series, Internet culture, postmodernism, myth, ideology, values