Vertical Divider

Transcultural theory and studies
at the University of Warsaw

Here I present some results of my research and reflection in transcultural humanities as they were achieved in Warsaw in 2012-2018. The volume of essays presented below appears in my bibliography as a discreetly ironic farewell to this institution. In the meanwhile, a doctoral seminar had been held there in the academic year 2015/2016.
Those results have been announces predominantly in Polish, and they differ significantly from the theoretical stance concerning extra-cultural becoming of man that I progressively defined later on, during my stay in Leiden. In the transition from Polish into English, I have significantly modified my terminology; I have also adopted much bolder intellectual attitude that might have been observed in Warsaw. Be that as it may, here is the preliminary stage of the reflection that has since that time taken a different turn in a different academic surroundings.
I introduced significant modifications in my theoretical idiom as I worked on it in Leiden. When I was in Warsaw, I used the notion of transcultural, evoking the processes of circulation between cultures and transgressing the divides between separate lines of cultural transmission. In a book about Portuguese culture (Imperium i nostalgia, 2015), I also employed the term hypercultural, that served me to describe a specific construct imposed as a sort of qualitatively distinct, universal frame encompassing other forms of the cultural. I suppose such a concept might prove useful in the analysis of various cultural systems tending toward symbolic hegemony, without any necessary connection to the notion of colonial or imperial. I will provide further exemplification for all these concepts later on.

My attempt at creating an idiosyncratic theoretical idiom is supposed to be clear by now. Nonetheless I should comment briefly on the articulation between this idiom and the existing terminologies in humanities, especially those connected to the terms "transcultural", "transculture", "transculturation" that has become increasingly popular since 1990s, forming an extended family of concepts. The term transculturation was proposed by the Cuban ethnomusicologist Fernando Ortiz, who focused on the fusion of cultural forms under colonial and postcolonial conditions. A new transcultural vogue appeared in Germany in the 1990s, when Wolfgang Welsch launched his idea of dissolution of cultures. The transcultural vogue penetrated into social studies, proving to be useful in the analysis of complex identities resulting from biographies marked by cultural mobility, migration, forced displacements and new exigences inherent to the fact of living and working in global metropolises. An interesting "apophatic" definition of the concept of 'transculture' has been proposed by a Russian-American thinker, Michail Epstein. This conceptual family fosters also new approaches in comparative literature. An extensive glossary of 'transcultural literary studies' has been proposed by Arianna Dagnino in 2015, who spoke about the literary creation of "transpatriants", writing from a nomadic position in relation to languages and local literary traditions. As all these novel approaches progressively expand and solidify, the adjective 'transcultural' becomes too broad, wishy-washy term signifying anything that 'extends through all human cultures' or used to describe diverse pragmatical approaches to communication (cf. Richard Slimbach et al.).
I used the term "transcultural" in my own publications, speaking of "transcultural condition" of man. Nonetheless, as I went on with my project of theoory-building, transcultural terminology became increasingly inadequate to my idea; also the fact that it is so widespread in recent humanities, that implies its wide resonance in the study of "hyphenated identities"of the globalized world that have very little to do with the redefinition of humanness as such, made me think about working on a completely new network of terms and concepts. My understanding of the extra-cultural appears as radical: I think not only about a human transgressing the cultural boundaries in order to circulate freely between diverse cultural orders, but first of all about a human that aspires to break through the limitations of the cultured condition as such. This understand come close to the "apophatic" conceptualisation of transculture by Mikhail Epstein. The utmost stake of this endeavour is not only a new stance in cultural or literary criticism; even more ambitious, yet urgent aim is to foster the emergence of a new sphere of translingual and transcultural communication of the trauma that may result from the loss of clear cultural inscription. In the contemporary world, this is the fate of millions. No wonder that, oxymoron accepted, the concept of transcultural community, build up by individuals confronted with their unshared, unparadigmatic, non-transmissible experience, should be proposed.
This is why the urge of building an idiomatic vocabulary able to express the specific problems of my reflection became increasingly acute. Initially, I spoke of "transcultural dimension" in which certain forms of experience and expression break through the cultured condition of man, leading into something that may be regarded as impossible: thinking and speaking beyond any particular cultural codification. Such as hypothetical stage, perhaps finding a precedent in the “mumbling” of a mystic, is nonetheless characteristic for the contemporary subject experiencing a constant “superposition” of numerous cultural codes. As it is easy to observe, my language is based on metaphors taken from mathematics and physics. What might be initially taken for a sheer mannerism is to be developed in the future in much more consistent, competent approaches. This is why I will proceed now to some details of the origin and development of my "topological" thinking.

My preliminary research project going in this direction had been realised in 2012, when I was still at the University of Warsaw; I wrote several papers in Polish presenting its results ("Pokusa geometrii"). In this project, I studied the mathematical concepts appearing in contemporary humanities: authors such as Sloterdijk and Zizek not only mention certain mathematical concepts, such as fractal, sphere or Möbius strip, but also try to build up a new approach towards the cultural phenomena taking topology or mathematics of chaos for a starting point. , creates at the same time a propitious context for the integration of diverse mathematical inspirations in humanities, tradition already well established by the postmodern philosophers, such as Deleuze, Derrida, Baudrillard, Agamben, Sloterdijk and Žižek. They come close to abstract, topological thinking or explicitly introduce mathematical concepts, such as fractal, sphere, Möbius strip and Klein bottle. Topological inspirations serve as a basis for reshaping some crucial concepts in humanities, such as the notion of community, permit to see in a new light some elementary cultural facts, such as the significance of a can of coca-cola, or become models for all-encompassing, holistic approaches to cultural landscapes.

Searching for conceptual tools to approach an emergent dimension must go beyond the linear order of narration and argumentation. Space, more space! is the motto of the day. This is why I am also interested in mathematical inspirations.

The necessity of using mathematic for my conceptualization of transcultural reality seemed very clear. My basic claim that the transcultural phenomena differ in an essential way from any other phenomena observable at the cultural stage of the humanity refers directly to the concept of emergence as it is used in natural sciences. Due to radically increased number of interactions, a new level of complexity emerges in the human symbolic sphere. The study of this increasingly complex transcultural reality requires thus a special set of theoretical tools, built at the intersection of triple inspiration: 1 - that of postmodern thought, given mainly by such authors as Derrida and Guattari (both in his own contributions and writing in tandem with Deleuze), 2 - that of certain visual experiments, such as the project of "Drawing a Hypothesis" promoted by Nikolaus Gasterer, an Austrian artist treating drawing as "thinking in action" and 3 - that of mathematical topology and graph theory.

I still worked on the topological project in 2017/2018, when I was in France, concomitantly with my financed reserach project on the Adamic language - a part of my exploration of past extra-cultural experiments that left its trace in the cultural tradition; that was where I presented my reserach during the monthly meeting of LE STUDIUM, Loire Valleys Institute of Advanced Studies ("Defining the symbolic space. From a cluster of trancultural case studies to a topological conceptualization"; extended Polish version of this presentation is the first chapter of my book Humanistyka, która nadchodzi).
Vertical Divider

The Coming Humanities.
In search of transcultural condition

Humanistyka, która nadchodzi. W poszukiwaniu kondycji transkulturowej, Warszawa, DiG, 2018; 152 pp.
ISBN 978-83-286-0031-7
​The four essays collected in this volume, Emergence, Desert, Circulation and Topologies, constitute an attempt at designing the horizon of the transcultural humanities. It is a study of what, in the activity of the human being prone to cross boundaries, creates, on the one hand, a new level of complexity dwarfing the richness of the cultures taken one by one, and on the other hand, the void resulting from the collapse of contradictory and competing exigences introduced by each of them. The description of this new situation requires theoretical invention, the invention that implies revisiting the legacy of the postmodernism. Between the City and the Desert, Europe and the Mediterranean, philosophy and eroticism, language and silence, the intellectual and the mystic, there exists a new, and yet so ancient kind of circulation, creating a symbolic space with a complex, multidimensional topology.
​
"Pokusa geometrii. O inspiracjach topologicznych w humanistyce" ["Temptation of geometry. On topological inspirations in the humanities"], Tematy z Szewskiej, nr 1(7)/2012, p. 9-18. ISSN 1898-3901
pokusa_geometrii.pdf
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“W poszukiwaniu kondycji transkulturowej. António Vieira i Giorgio Agamben jako czytelnicy Listów Pawłowych” [“In search of the transcultural condition. António Vieira and Giorgio Agamben as the readers of Paul's Epistle to the Romans”], Nowy Człowiek: wizje, projekty, języki, Stanisław Jasionowicz (ed.), Kraków, Wydawnictwo UNUM, 2017, p. 47-59. ISBN 978-83-7643-142-0, e-ISBN 978-83-7643-143-7
w_poszukiwaniu_kondycji.pdf
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​​"Le ruban de Möbius. Pour un modèle topologique de la continuité créatrice dans le monde méditerranéen", Prace Komisji Neofilologicznej, vol. XIV, 2016, p. 71-81. ISSN 1731-8491
le_ruban_de_mobius.pdf
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"Od Ogrodu kochanków Ibn Kajjima al-Dżauzijji do arabszczyzny transkulturowej. Projekt restytucji języka intymnego w pisarstwie Fatemy Mernissi i jego kontynuacje" ["From Riyad al-Muhibbin by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya to transcultural Arabic. The project of restoring the language of intimacy by Fatema Mernissi and its continuations"], Literatury Azji i Afryki wobec problemów współczesności. Materiały XXXV Zjazdu Orientalistów Polskich, Warszawa, 16-17 XI 2015, Marek M. Dziekan, Agata Bareja Starzyńska (eds.), Warszawa, Dom Wydawniczy Elipsa, 2015, p. 175-188. ISBN 978-83-934631-5-2
od_ogrodu_kochanków.pdf
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"Проект транскультурных гуманитарных наук – геометрия глобальной встречи" ["Transcultural humanities project: geometry of the global encounter"], ПОГРАНИЧЬЕ КУЛЬТУР – КУЛЬТУРЫ ПОГРАНИЧЬЯ, Zoya Morochoyeva (ed.), Debaty Artes Liberales, t. VI (2012), p. 179-197. ISSN 2299-8799; ISBN 978-83-63636-7-4
POLISH VERSION: "Projekt humanistyki transkulturowej - geometria powszechnego spotkania"
proyekt_transkulturnih_gumanitarnih_nauk.pdf
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projekt_humanistyki_transkulturowej.pdf
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PHD SEMINAR
​"TOWARDS TRANSCULTURAL HUMANITIES" (2015/16)

GENERAL DESCRIPTION

The key idea of this seminar was the conception of an emergent condition of the human, breaking through the culturally defined mood of existence into new possibilities of experiencing and communicating. The expected result is the definition of a seemingly utopian, transcultural stage of human being, liberated from cultural automatisms and filters that separate him/her not only from the direct experience of the world, but also from the vast sectors of the humanity that don't share the same cultural background.
In spite of its seemingly utopian character, the transcultural modality of existence becomes a reality in the globalized conditions, as we face the process of dissolving cultural boundaries and cultures as well defined and confined symbolic systems. The endeavor of developing a consistent theoretical approach towards those changes, as well as the desire of shaping and fostering them, appears thus as a pressing challenge.
The transcultural reality is characterized as the emergence of a new level of complexity due to the increased number of interactions between the diverse cultural systems. The aim of this program is thus to create new theoretical tools adopted to deal with this increased complexity in order to describe and analyze adequately the transcultural phenomena, both the ones discovered in the cultural past and those inherent to the contemporary, globalizing world.
This search for an analytical metalanguage will revisit the legacy of the postmodernism in its attempts of breaking through the established modalities of thinking. On the other hand, it will explore with special attention the transcultural potential of abstract languages of science, including the inspirations of the contemporary mathematics, such as topological geometry. Beyond the hermetic domain of topology, the visual arts and the visual culture in a wider sense (including diagrammatic, pictographic and other similar modalities of communication) will be regarded as a potential field of transcultural exploration. Finally, the attempt of achieving the transcultural condition through artistic practice will be an inherent part of this program as well. Thus, this seminar has a transdisciplinary character, by which we understand both the perspective of integrating different disciplinary fields in the study of determined phenomena, and the possibility of transgressing the frontier between research, reflection and creative activity, scholarship and art.
The transcultural phenomena will be considered both in their contemporary connection to the globalizing processes and in their precedents that may be found in the cultural history. Among the first premises of this program there is the observation that in certain circumstances, due to varied motivations, a human being has always nurtured the aspiration of transcending the limitations imposed by the culture in which he/she has been primarily acculturated. In search of such precedents of the transcultural condition, several topics appear as privileged. The relationships between the European culture based on Christianity and the cultures of Islam will be considered with special attention as a laboratory of transcultural debate. The emergent figure of Muslim intellectual and the exploration of the post-secular revisiting of monotheistic traditions will be observed, analyzed and developed as a specific field of emergence of a transcultural meta-discourse transcending the incommensurable discourses built up by theological traditions. Still in the domain of religion, the converging heritage of world's mysticisms will be explored as the expression of human aspiration of transcending the limitations of the cultured condition and as a legacy of practices and techniques of actually achieving states of mindfulness and directness of experience unmediated by the cultural filters. On the opposite, yet communicating pole, human relationships with animals – as well as human attempts of communicating through the exchange of animals across the cultural frontiers – will be explored as a complementary field of transcultural practice.

TOPICS

The program was composed by several synergistic paths or clusters of problems:
  1. Revisiting the legacy of postmodernism in search of ways of redefining or redesigning the humanities: from a set of culturally defined, exclusive discursivities towards an emergent dimension of transcultural meta-discourse.
  2. Study of the cultural past in search of the precedents of transcultural condition, with special attention given to: a) the strategies of communicating beyond the cultural divergence, b) the strategies of non-cultural becoming of man, understood as stepping out of the human condition in the direction of the infra-human (the animal) and in the direction of the supra-human (the divine).
  3. Exploring the emergent fields of transcultural debate, with special attention given to the figure of the intellectual as a protagonist in the process of building up the transcultural sphere of communication.
  4. Exploring visual modalities of thinking as well as the potential of visual arts as a meta-discursive tool of communication.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dagnino, A., "Global Mobility, Transcultural Literature, and Multiple Modes of Modernity”, Transcultural Studies, 2/2013; http://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/transcultural/article/view/9940/5432

Dagnino, A., Transcultural Writers and Novels in the Age of Global Mobility, Purdue University Press, 2015.

Deleuze, G., Guattari, F., Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia;

Deleuze, G., Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus;

Derrida, J., Khora; (English trans. included in: On the Name, Thomas Dutoit (ed.), Stanford University Press, 1995).

Epstein, M., "Transculture: A Broad Way Between Globalism and Multiculturalism", American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 68/2009; DOI: 10.1111/j.1536-7150.2008.00626.x 

Epstein, M., The Transformative Humanities. A Manifesto, Blumsbury, 2012.

Gansterer, N. et al., Drawing a Hypothesis. Figures of Thought, Wien – New York, Springer, 2011.
http://www.gansterer.org/

Guattari, F., Schizoanalytic Cartographies, London, Bloomsbury, 2013.

Moretti, F., Graphs, Maps, Trees, Abstract Models for Literary History, London - New York, Verso, 2005.