Cultural Mutation. What media do to culture

The concept of 'cultural mutation' may seem like an oxymoron. However, in a sense, human cultures have always flourished in areas where the boundaries between voluntary and involuntary, conscious and unconscious factors were relatively subtle and unstable. While something of the sort has always occurred, over the last two and a half centuries or so – first in West and then in the ‘global’ world – the phenomenon has acquired macroscopic proportions. Recently, the central role of the so called “creativity” in culture policies, as well the industrialization of creativity itself, are, at the same time, a symptom and a further cause of a deep change, which - partially but importantly - results in an aestheticization of economy and an economization of culture and art. The use of concepts such as culture and art by international declarations of rights to culture, by UNESCO conventions on cultural heritage (2003) and on culture differences (2005), by papers of the European Commission - as well by theoretical texts concerning the economy and management of creativity, art and culture - dates back, semantically, to a society preceding this change: thus, these concepts are ‘blind’ to the phenomenon. The paper aims to suggest alternative concepts - such as philosophically developed concepts of medium, intermediality, transmediality, genealogy - able to understand this phenomenon, and even to offer better tools for any empirical analysis, as well to suggest possible means and ways of resistance.