"Cultural Recycling": A Contribution to the History of the Concept (1960s-1990s)

This article is a history of the concept of "cultural recycling," tracing it from 1960s to the late 1990s. According to author's ideas, this was the first and undeservedly forgotten period of the formation of the term. During this time, the new word was simultaneously appropriated by many researchers from various fields within the humanities, but this analysis raised practically no detailed discussion of its semantics; there are very few well known studies where it is included in the title, and the number of systematic attempts to construct a conception of it can be counted on one hand. On the other hand, the regular appearance of major works where the metaphorical term is given a title role is characteristic for the second stage, from the late 1990s to the present. Nevertheless, the theories that explain the phenomenon are still very few, just as before, and in most cases, "cultural recycling" is reinvented each time, without regard for prior experience. Meanwhile, despite all this chaos, it was from the 1960s to the 1990s that, thanks to efforts of both the academic and "artistic" communities, the fundamental interpretation matrices arose and its contradictory axiology formed.