Przyszłość dyskursu a pamięć kulturowa

Abstract

The future of discourse vs. cultural memory

The phenomenon of blurring of the existing linguistic meanings has long been important. However, in the modern humanistic discourse preference is clearly given to terms that are fuzzy and often come from the colloquial language. We can assume that one of the reasons of their dazzling career is a desire, as it were, to be precise: by using one name for a number of designata, we in fact want to point to the same aspect in these designata, to stress the similarity previously well-hidden by the function, content and form of every single phenomenon. By choosing a word and giving it the status of a term, at the same time we propose that its previous contexts, its unequivocality be cancelled or, at least, put in the phenomenological brackets, and we reveal the potential of applicable meanings. Thus, we declare a war on idiography and/or we look for traces of nomothetism in what is idiographic.
At the same time, in the contemporary scientific discourse we can observe a certain repetition of the most successful linguistic structures and an allocation of new, additional meanings to them. The author of the article looks for the causes of this phenomenon in two types of cultural memory which she refers to as formulaic memory and phantasmagorical memory.