In a traditional system, culture exists only in the act o...

In a traditional system, culture exists only in the act of its transmission, that is, in the living act of its tradition. There is no discontinuity between past and present, between old and new, because every object transmits at every moment, without residue, the system of beliefs and notions that has found expression in it. To be more precise, in a system of this type it is not possible to speak of a culture independently of its transmission, because there is no accumulated treasure of ideas and precepts that constitute the separate object of transmssion and whose reality is in itself a value. In a mythical-traditional system, an absolute identity exists between the act of transmission and the thing transmitted, in the sense that there is no other ethical, religious, or aesthetic value outside the act itself of transmission.

An inadequation, a gap between the act of transmission and the thing to be transmitted, and a valuing of the latter independently of the former only when tradition loses its vital force, and constitute the foundation of a characteristic phenomenon of non-traditional societies: the accumulation of culture. For, contrary to what one might think at first sight, the breaking of tradition does not al all mean the loss or devaluation of the past: it is, rather, likely that only now the past can reveal itself with a weight and an influence that it never had before. Loss of tradition means that the past has lost its transmissibility, and so long as no new way has been found to entire into relation with it, it can only be the object of accumulation from now on.

[...] it is the transmissibility of culture that, by endowing culture with an immediately perceptible meaning and value, allows man to move freely toward the future wihout being hindered by the burden of the past.

from Agamben's Man Without Content