Gnostic formation of modern culture: code, activation indicators, diagnostic rule

<jats:p>The article substantiates the concept of gnostic formation as an operational category for the analysis of contemporary culture. Its subject is a methodological apparatus designed to distinguish the lexical presence of gnosis in contemporary culture from its structural fulfillment. The vocabulary of gnosis is increasingly employed in accounts of technoculture, digital environments, and mass narratives, while the scholarly credentials of the very category of "Gnosticism" have come under radical criticism in the study of religion. The existing approaches — genealogical, typological, critical, descriptive, motif-oriented, and studies of actors' self-descriptions in conspiracist milieus — register the presence of the gnostic vocabulary but lack a procedure that admits of a negative outcome: the diagnosis is recognized wherever the optics are directed. The methodological core of the article is a threefold distinction: the gnostic code as a generative grammar; activation indicators as the observer's instrument; and the gnostic formation as a configuration of discourses and practices in which the code is dominant. The three members deliberately differ in epistemological status: the formation belongs to observable cultural reality, the code is an analytical reconstruction of its structural grammar, and the indicators belong to the observer's operational apparatus. The diagnostic rule admits of a negative outcome. The model is tested on a diachronic series of condition configurations, on historical material providing negative controls, on the postmodern and the metamodern-digital phases of contemporary culture, and on a corpus of ten studies. The novelty of the research resides in the threefold distinction itself, which separates three questions that previous approaches have been forced to answer at once — what is reproduced, how it is to be recognized, and when its dominance may be asserted; in a system of indicators governed by a diagnostic rule that allows the diagnosis to fail; and in the criterion of convergent genesis, which states the conditions under which the reproduction of the code without a channel of transmission would be assertible. The principal conclusions are as follows. The activation of the code's core is registered in the metamodern-digital configuration of contemporary culture, while the formation itself retains the status of a candidate pending an independent test of dominance. Negative outcomes are obtained at all four scales of the apparatus's application: the individual artifact, the corpus, the historical configuration, and the cultural phase. The thesis of a second Hellenism is operationalized as the reassembly of a configuration of conditions rather than a claim about the similarity of epochs, and convergent genesis retains the status of a hypothesis concerning the mechanism. The proposed procedure of transferring the grammar without the portrait is offered as a reproducible alternative both to typological portraiture and to the accusatory use of the category.</jats:p>