12

Transculture
A Broad Way Between Globalism and
Multiculturalism

By MIKHAIL EPSTEIN*

ABSTRACT. This paper develops a concept of transculture as a model

of cultural development that differs from both leveling globalism
and isolating pluralism. While culture frees humans from the
material dependencies of nature, it also creates new, symbolic
dependencies—on customs, traditions, conventions, which a person
receives as a member of a certain group and ethnos. Among the many
freedoms proclaimed as rights of the individual, there emerges yet
another freedom—from one’s own culture, in which one was born
and educated. Transculture is viewed as the next level of liberation,
this time from the “prison house of language,” from unconscious
predispositions and prejudices of the “native,” naturalized cultures.
The case of the Japanese poet Araki Yasusada (1903–1972), a survivor
of Hiroshima, demonstrates how transcultural creativity, though cast in
the form of a literary hoax, can produce an internationally recognized

*Mikhail Epstein is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Cultural Theory and Russian
Literature at Emory University (Atlanta). Born in Moscow, he moved to the United States
in 1990. His research interests include the history of Russian literature and philosophy,
postmodernism, semiotics and linguistics, and new methods and interdisciplinary
approaches in the humanities. He is the author of 18 books and more than 500 essays
and articles, translated into 14 languages. His books include After the Future: The
Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture (1995), Transcultural
Experiments: Russian and American Models of Creative Communication (with E. Berry,
1999), Russian Postmodernism: New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture (with A. Genis
and S. Vladiv-Glover, 1999), Cries in the New Wilderness: From the Files of the Moscow
Institute of Atheism (2002), and Mapping Blank Spaces: On the Future of the Humanities
(in Russian, 2004). Professor Epstein expresses gratitude to the Institute for Comparative
and International Studies at Emory University for the travel grant that allowed him to
present this paper at the International Society of Universal Dialogue Congress in
Hiroshima, Japan, June 1–5, 2007.
American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 68, No. 1 (January, 2009).
© 2009 American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Inc.
328 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

achievement. Transculturalism is especially needed in world politics,

where the factor of fixed cultural identity based on race, ethnos,
religion, or ideological commitments turned out to be a source of
conflict and violence. This paper argues that the categories of oppo-
sition and identity do not preclude the significance of the third
category, which is difference. The differences complement each other
and create a new interpersonal transcultural community to which we
belong, not because we are similar but because we are different. The
transcultural perspective opens a possibility for globalization not as
homogenization but, rather, as further differentiation of cultures and
their “dissemination” into transcultural individuals, liberating them-
selves from their dependence from their native cultures. The global
society can be viewed as the space of diversity of free individuals
rather than that of fixed groups and cultures. It is an alternative to the
clash of civilizations and a hope for lasting peace.

I
Globalism and Multiculturalism

IN THE LAST TWENTY YEARS we have observed the inexorable advance of

globalism following the fall of the “Iron Curtain.” The key components
of this global culture are well-known: free information exchange and
capital flow, the expanding market, the new communication networks
(in particular, the Internet), the expansion of transnational corpora-
tions, tourism, and so on. In fact, by talking about a global culture we
often mean—explicitly or implicitly, approvingly or disapprovingly—
Pan-Americanism.
On the other hand, the concept of multiculturalism or cultural
pluralism is still holding strong, especially in the United States.
According to this concept, also well-known, there are a variety of
different and self-sufficient cultures, with their own traditions, that are
not only independent but also incommensurable, hardly comprehen-
sible and penetrable for each other. All cultures, even small and
historically dominated ones, have a value of their own and must be
equally represented, both within big national cultures and interna-
tionally. It is not only Greece and England that can produce their “own
 Transculture 329

Platos and quick-minded Newtons,” as Mikhail Lomonosov, a Russian

poet of the eighteenth century put it, but Russia, Africa, or Greenland
as well. Despite arrogant Eurocentrism and cultural colonialism, the
Chukchies do have their own Anacreons, and Zyrians—their own
Tyutchevs (to rephrase another Russian poet, Afanasii Fet, from the
nineteenth century).
Globalism and multiculturalism engage in ideological battles and
sometimes in street fights with each other (e.g., the anti-globalist
movement). Are we doomed to this opposition, or is a third way still
possible?
The prospects of either globalism or so-called multiculturalism look
equally grim to me. A single culture throughout the world, the same
Hollywood movies and rock music with minor local variations,
McDonald’s adapting its menu to local tastes (“American by content,
ethnic by form”) . . . Or a multitude of cultures that are closed into
themselves and come out in the big world only to demonstrate their
“pride” and then hide again in their ethnic enclave or sexual closet
. . . The canonization of one globally homogenous culture over many
or the cocoonization of each culture within itself. What is better? Both
are worse.
Globalism and multiculturalism share one common feature, which is
determinism. In the first case, determinism parades as (to cite a typical
opinion) an irreversible trend of world development, common to all
countries and nations (globalism). In the other case, as an insurmount-
able dependence of culture on gender, race, ethnos, and sexual
orientation of its representatives (multiculturalism). The rigid frame-
works of these concepts leave no freedom of choice for the individual
who is destined to be globalized and homogenized or serve as a
specimen of some ethnic or gender identity.
The world may even be moving toward a combination of these two
determinisms: one horizontal and the other vertical, the former repre-
sented by American globalism (“mass culture”) and the latter by multi-
culturalism, also of the same American type (“the pride of minorities”).
However, when two grim prospects are brought together, neither of
them gets any brighter. Two determinisms do not make an individual
freer, even though they create the illusion that a person can play on their
contradictions and hide from the one in the shelter of the other.
330 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

Transculture is a different model of cultural development, an

alternative to both leveling globalism and isolating pluralism. Among
the many freedoms proclaimed as inalienable rights of the individual,
there emerges yet another freedom that is probably the most precious
one, though so far most neglected—the freedom from one’s own
culture, in which one was born and educated.
This is completely different from the political right to freely choose
one’s place of living, to emigrate and to cross state borders. Too many
people who leave the geographical location of their culture neverthe-
less remain, for the rest of their lives, prisoners of its language and
traditions. Other migrants, having turned their back on their past,
become prisoners of a newly acquired culture. Only a small number of
people, when acceding to two or several cultures, succeed in integrat-
ing them and thus are able to keep their freedom from any of them.
Transculture is a new sphere of cultural development that trans-
cends the borders of traditional cultures (ethnic, national, racial,
religious, gender, sexual, and professional). Transculture overcomes
the isolation of their symbolic systems and value determinations and
broadens the field of “supra-cultural” creativity. We acquire transcul-
ture at the boundaries of our own culture and at the crossroads with
other cultures through the risky experience of our own cultural
wanderings and transgressions.1

II
Transculture as Being Beyond and Radical Otherness

THE CONCEPT OF transculture emerged in Russia in the early 1980s, in

connection with the systemic crisis of the Soviet civilization, and in the
course of development of culturology as a comparative analysis of
different cultures. “Culturology” is the name of the discipline that is
roughly analogous to “cultural theory” and “cultural studies” in the
English-speaking world, though it has some methodological distinc-
tions. Mikhail Bakhtin formulated one of the principal concepts of
culturology as “outsideness,” “being beyond,” or “exotopy” (vnena-
khodimost):
In order to understand, it is immensely important for the person who
understands to be located outside the object of his or her creative
 Transculture 331

understanding—in time, in space, in culture. . . . In the realm of culture,

outsideness is a most powerful factor in understanding.2
This principle suggests that we can adequately understand and
describe a certain culture only if we distance ourselves from it, that is,
transcend its boundaries. Moreover, Bakhtin suggests that the essence
of a given culture may be penetrated from the viewpoint of another,
foreign culture better than from its own inner perspective: “It is only
in the eyes of another culture that foreign culture reveals itself fully
and profoundly.” As Bakhtin points out, a human cannot fully visu-
alize even his or her own face—only others can see the person’s real
appearance from their location beyond those personal boundaries. In
the same way, antiquity did not know the same antiquity that is
known to us today. The ancient Greeks had not the slightest idea of
what is now most significant about them: that they were ancient. The
essence of “male” culture may be more deeply perceived by females;
the essence of “white” culture may be more deeply perceived by
blacks, and vice versa. One can never understand oneself from within
without taking another’s point of view into full account, even if this
“otherness” is only fixed in one’s own consciousness.
In the same way, a description of Soviet culture involves the act of
self-withdrawal from it, which presumes an exit into “trans-Soviet”
cultural space. Since any direct political opposition was impossible in a
totalitarian state like the Soviet Union used to be, culturology became
a kind of cultural “transposition,” a mode of positioning oneself beyond
rather than against the dominating culture. The aim was not to fight the
political regime but to transcend the boundaries of the given culture by
positing it as one among many historical and imaginable cultures and
moving toward the horizon of all such possibilities.
The principle of exotopy, or extralocality, is applicable to any
culture and in fact to any object of study or reflection: by increasing
our awareness of it, we distance ourselves from it. Exotopicality
should be considered as important a property of thinking as inten-
tionality, the concept posited in phenomenology by Edmund Husserl.
He claimed that any act of consciousness is “intentional,” in other
words, is directed toward something that is located outside of con-
sciousness. Consequently, Mikhail Bakhtin, looking at the same prin-
ciple from another side, assumed that consciousness is “exotopical” in
332 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

relation to its object. “Aboutness” and “beyondness” of consciousness,

intentionality and exotopicality, are mutually connected. If conscious-
ness has its object outside of itself, then consciousness itself is external
to its object. Consciousness transcends its objects; moreover, it is the
force of transcendence as such.
The awareness of culture, as soon as we develop and attain such an
awareness, reaches beyond its object and posits the possibility of
another culture or rather of a range of other cultures. Transculture then
is “being beyond” in relation to the entire cultural realm as an
advantageous situation for its understanding. Transculture is the sphere
of all possible differences from existing cultures inasmuch as we
cognize them and distance ourselves from them. Transculture cannot
be described in positive terms, as a set of specific cultural symbols,
norms, and values; it always escapes definition. It is an apophatic realm
of the “cultural” beyond any specific culture or cultural identity. It is the
most radical of all possible cultural “beyonds.” It does not “have place”
anywhere; it is the force of displacement. As soon as we try to define
transculture, it recedes further into the area of “being beyond.” Thus
we can describe many stages of transcultural movement but not the
ultimate Transculture that permits us to see and describe everything
that it is not, but not to see and describe what it is.
It appeared from the works of Soviet culturologists in the 1960s to
1980s that cultures were diverse and that the Soviet culture was only
one of them, thus making possible the exit into other, transcultural
dimensions. The works by M. Bakhtin and A. Losev, Y. Lotman and D.
Likhachev, S. Averintsev and A. Gurevich, V. Ivanov and V. Toporov,
V. Bibler and L. Batkin, and G. Gachev and V. Rabinovich have
enormously expanded the frontiers of cultural desire and imagination
beyond the boundaries of the dominant culture. They opened the
theoretical prospect for a Culture of Cultures, in other words, a
universal sign system (semiosphere), which represents infinite variants
of all existing cultures and possibilities of cultures that are yet to
emerge.
Culturology has great potential, both theoretical and practical, as
it implies not merely knowledge but a special mode of existence: at
the crossroads of cultures. If other, more narrow specialists, one
way or another, live and act inside a given culture, unconsciously
 Transculture 333

accepting its definitions and abiding by its rules, a culturologist

takes the entire culture as an object of definition and thereby sur-
passes its limitations. This explains the therapeutic effect of cultur-
ology on the consciousness of people obsessed with ideas, manias,
and phobias imposed by their native cultures. By revealing the con-
tingencies of each one of them, culturology brings us closer to the
noncontingent, to the universal. Culturology contains prerequisites
for a transcultural movement as it increases the degrees of freedom
inside culture, including the constructive freedom from any given
culture itself (unlike barbarism, which by destroying culture
becomes a prisoner of nature again).
The transcultural world has never been adequately described
because the passage to it is itself a relatively recent discovery. Some
preliminary attempts to comprehend it—mostly artistic intuitions—can
be found in the description of imaginable Castalia in Hermann Hesse’s
novel The Glass Bead Game, as well as in works by Jorge Luis Borges
and Thomas Mann. One must not envision the transcultural world as
something closed and isolated from real historical cultures. Rather,
Transculture lies both inside and outside of all existing cultures as a
Continuum, encompassing all of them and even the gaps and blank
spaces between them. The transcultural world is a unity of all cultures
and noncultures, that is, of those possibilities that have not yet been
realized.
In transculture, the Chinese Book of Changes corresponds and
interacts with Bach’s music and Georg Cantor’s mathematical theory
of sets. But unlike the “glass bead game,” which Hesse described as
derivative and precluding the creation of new signs and values,
transculture presumes creativity, though not in any specific subcul-
tural genre (like novels, poems, symphonies, paintings) but in the
genre and on the scale of culture as a whole. If a scientist, an artist,
a politician, or a philosopher are each creative within a distinct
specialty, a culturologist takes the entirety of cultures as a material
for hu’s3 work and creates out of them transcultural spaces, making
use of philosophy, science, art, and politics as tools of this tran-
scultural creation. By exploring existing cultures, hu at the same
time creates embryos, hypotheses, and projects of possible alterna-
tive cultures.
334 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

III
Transculture vs. Multiculturalism: Moral Aspects

FROM THE MID-1990S, the transcultural vision began to take root in the
West, too, in connection with the crisis of the concept of “multicul-
turalism.” Unlike “multiculturalism,” which establishes value equality
among different cultures and their self-sufficiency, the concept of
transculture implies their openness and mutual involvement. Multicul-
turalism extols “pride” in any single culture (and especially of cultural
minorities), whereas transculturalism embraces the moral value of
humility that makes one culture open to other cultures. Every culture
is intrinsically insufficient and needs interaction with other cultures to
compensate for its deficiencies: rational culture needs sensual ele-
ments, male culture needs female elements, and vice versa. The
principle that applies here is not that of difference, but that of
“interference,” of “dispersion” of symbolic values of each culture in
the field of all others. If multiculturalism insists on the individual’s
belonging to a certain “natural” culture, which is biologically and
biographically predetermined (“black culture,” “women’s culture,”
“youth culture,” “gay culture,” etc.), “transculture” implies diffusion of
initial cultural identities as individuals cross the borders of various
cultures and assimilate them.
Although culture in its development distances itself from nature, it
still preserves many natural, ethnic, psychophysical, socioeconomic,
and geographical features that determine it as “white” or “black,”
“French” or “Russian,” “male” or “female.” Transculture is the freedom
of every person to live on the border of one’s “inborn” culture or
beyond it.
This need to “escape from oneself,” from the “golden chains” of
one’s native culture can be illustrated by the life and thought of Merab
Mamardashvili (1930–1990), an outstanding Soviet philosopher, a
Georgian by origin. As the Soviet Union began to disintegrate, Mamar-
dashvili moved from Moscow to Tbilisi and was urged at the end of
his life to present himself as a “Georgian philosopher” and learn the
“pleasures” of forced identification with his “native” culture. Mamar-
dashvili noted the danger of nonfreedom in multicultural slogans as
follows: “Each culture is valuable in itself. People must be allowed to
 Transculture 335

live within their cultures.”4 This may be true, but Mamardashvili

underscores the right of individuals to independence from their own
cultures:
the defense of autonomous customs sometimes proves to be a denial of the
right to freedom and to another world. It seems as if a decision were taken
for them: you live in such an original way, that it is quite cultural to live
as you do, so go on and live this way. But did anyone ask me personal-
ly? . . . Perhaps I am suffocating within the fully autonomous customs of my
complex and developed culture?5

Thus, what needs to be preserved, in Mamardashvili’s view, is the

right to live beyond one’s culture, on the borders of cultures, to take:
a step transcending one’s own surrounding, native culture and milieu not
for the sake of anything else. Not for the sake of any other culture, but for
the sake of nothing. Transcendence into nothing. Generally speaking, such
an act is truly the living, pulsating center of the entire human universe. This
is a primordial metaphysical act.6

Mamardashvili understands metaphysics as the movement beyond any

physical determination and toward liberation from any social and
cultural identity. By this vigorous formula of “transcendence into
nothing,” Mamardashvili emphasizes the apophatic dimension of tran-
sculture, which, like Bakhtinian “outsideness,” escapes any positive
definition and presentational approach. From this standpoint, tran-
sculture does not mean adding yet another culture to the existing
array; it is, rather, a special mode of existence spanning cultural
boundaries, a transcendence into “no culture,” which indicates how,
ultimately, the human being exceeds all “genetic” definitions. By
becoming transcultural, I don’t betray my own culture for the sake of
some other culture; I don’t abandon my Georgian in favor of Russian
or French. Rather, I am moving into the open space of “no culture,”
the transcendental realm that relates to all existing cultures as they
relate to nature.
Multiculturalism, on the contrary, emphasizes the virtue of “faith-
fulness” to one’s own native soil and natural roots. Mamardashvili
continues:
This understandable, noble aspiration to defend those who are oppressed
by some kind of culture-centrism, for example Eurocentrism or any other—
336 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

this aspiration forgets and makes us forget that there exists a metaphysics
of freedom and thought that is not peculiar to us alone. This is a kind of
reverse racism.7

“Reverse racism” implies that a culture of minority, however beau-

tiful and valuable in itself, is still viewed as enclosed within its own
premises, without allowing any exits to other, “major” cultures. It is the
privilege of a “major” culture to criticize itself and to praise “minor”
cultures, whereas the latter are given only the opportunity to praise
themselves and to criticize others, which reduces them to the status of
a “proud ghetto” and reinforces their isolation and stagnation.
A similar “internal” resistance to what later became known as
multiculturalism can be detected in black writing. Charles W. Chesnutt
(1858–1932), one of the first Afro-American novelists whose books
deal with race prejudice, observed as early as 1905:
We are told that we must glory in our color and zealously guard it as a
priceless heritage. . . . Frankly, I take no stock in this doctrine. It seems to
me a modern invention of the white people to perpetuate the color line.
It is they who preach it, and it is their racial integrity which they wish to
preserve: they have never been unduly careful of the purity of the black
race. . . . Why should a man be proud any more than he should be
ashamed of a thing for which he is not at all responsible? . . . Are we to
help the white people to build up walls between themselves and us to
fence in a gloomy back yard for our descendants to play in?8

Indeed, the philosophy of multiculturalism, contrary to its original

noble intentions, erects new walls among cultures rather than ruins
the old ones. This type of “reverse racism” can be also described as
a variety of reductionism, which includes the reduction of a diver-
sity of personalities to their “origins,” their “genetic,” predetermined
nature. This raises the major question: Why should culture be
viewed as just an extension and exaltation of somebody’s inborn
nature (race, ethnicity, gender, etc.)? Or, as Charles Chesnutt put it:
“Why should a man be proud any more than he should be ashamed
of a thing for which he is not at all responsible?” To transcend the
limits of one’s “physical” culture does not constitute betrayal
because the limits of any cultural identity are too narrow for the full
range of human creative potentials. Transculture builds new, unpre-
dictable configurations in the zone of fuzziness and interference and
 Transculture 337

challenges the metaphysics of discreteness so characteristic of

nations, races, and other established identities that are solidified
rather than dispersed by the multiculturalist “politics of identity.”9

IV
Transculture and the Paradox of Postmodernity:
Determinism and Deconstruction

LET US RECALL that the latest historical period, conventionally called

“postmodernity,” encompasses two major systems of thought: multi-
culturalism and deconstruction. They deeply oppose each other,
although this contradiction has been barely revealed or realized by
either of the parties (partly out of the fear of weakening their unity in
the face of the common enemy—the Establishment, the logocentrism,
the cultural canon, etc.). Multiculturalism is an ideology of all-
encompassing determinism that, for every cultural act, sets parameters
of its original physical nature and racial-ethnic-gender origins.
Roughly speaking, it is thinking in terms of “representation”: if you are
a man, it means that all your writing and self-expression represents the
male essence. As Toni Morrison, a Nobel Prize winner in literature,
puts it:
Of course I’m a black writer . . . I’m not just a black writer, but categories
like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren’t marginal
anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call “literature” is
more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never
worked.10
From this point of view there is no such “abstract” thing as a
masterpiece of world literature but only a variety of specific canons,
each reflecting the cultural dispositions of a certain group. The defi-
nitions of multiple cultures necessarily include references to their
point of physical origin such as in the very expressions “white male”
culture, or “black female” culture, or “homosexual” culture.
Deconstruction, on the other hand, rebels against any determinism
and even rejects the very notions of “beginnings,” “original,” or
“origins.” What the historical-genetic approach presents as primary is
in fact secondary; what we consider our “beginnings,” “origins,” and
“milieu” is but our own constructions. We are the ones who build our
identity, including racial, ethnic, and gender identities.
338 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

If deconstruction and multiculturalism are two complementary

aspects of postmodern thinking, should we remain unaware of this
basic contradiction that agonizes the entire postmodernist project?
The stress on ethnic and sexual origins disables and undermines the
deconstructionist approach, and vice versa: the more consistently we
denounce any talk of physical presence or historic origin behind the
cultural system of signs, the more futile is the multiculturalist insis-
tence on the deduction of cultural heritage from the peculiarities of a
given race and sex.
Jacques Derrida touched on this contradiction by setting up decon-
struction against those multicultural theories that stress an external
difference between self-enclosed cultural identities instead of looking
into the internal difference that infuses and invigorates all forms of
identity:
We often insist nowadays on cultural identity, for instance, national iden-
tity, linguistic identity, and so on. Sometimes the struggles under the
banner of cultural identity, national identity, linguistic identity, are noble
fights. But at the same time the people who fight for their identity must pay
attention to the fact that identity is not the self-identity of a thing, this glass,
for instance, this microphone, but implies difference within identity. That
is, the identity of a culture is a way of being different from itself; a culture
is different from itself; language is different from itself; the person is
different from itself. Once you take into account this inner and other
[outer?] difference, then you pay attention to the other and you understand
that fighting for your own identity is not exclusive of another identity, is
open to another identity. And this prevents totalitarianism, nationalism,
egocentrism, and so on.11

These two views—the multiculturalist, stressing “collective identi-

ties,” and the deconstructionist, stressing “internal differences”—
become increasingly incompatible within one theoretical paradigm.
What is needed now is further thinking about the possible resolution
or at least conscious elaboration of this contradiction. Is there any
theoretical possibility of combining the theory of cultural origins with
the theory of deconstruction and dis-origination as the specific model
of cultural creativity?
This raises again the old question about the relationship between
culture and nature. When multiculturalism talks about “white” and
“black” or “male” and “female” cultures, it reduces culture to its racial
 Transculture 339

or gender origins and ignores what makes culture different from

nature. However the very notion of culture is usually defined as
nonhereditary and nonbiological modes of transmission of informa-
tion, habits, and skills. “Cultivation” can be described as the process
of denaturalization and de-origination, which bears a connection with
its natural origin only through the series of its erasures and subver-
sions. We can rephrase T. S. Eliot’s famous passage in “Tradition and
the Individual Talent”: “Culture is not a turning loose of nature, but an
escape from nature.”12
This does not mean that the origin does not exist at all, that, as
Derrida put it, “the origin did not even disappear, that it was never
constituted except reciprocally by a nonorigin.”13 Such a radical denial
of the origin would eliminate the dramatic tension that connects
culture with its natural origins in the dialectics of departure and return,
erasure and recognition. To expose physical origins as only retroac-
tively “constructed” and entirely determined by subsequent cultural
“self-images” would be a reverse form of determinism, now imposed
from the present on the past.
We cannot simply deny the role of inborn conditions, or genes, in
cultural formations. No escape or “deterritorialization” would be pos-
sible without the initial territory occupied by ethnic origins, gender,
and so on. We need to state origins clearly in order to transcend them
vigorously. We have to recognize the truth of multiculturalism in order
to proceed with the task of deconstruction. Though an escape from
nature, culture in its present condition is still too natural, too essen-
tialist, too deterministic; it carries further the racial, ethnic, and sexual
limitations imposed by nature and therefore calls for new efforts of
liberation.
It is in this space of tension between multiculturalism and decon-
struction, between origins and disorigination, where the transcultural
movement evolves. Transculture presumes the enduring “physicality”
and “essentiality” of existing cultures and the possibility of their further
transcendence, in particular through interference with other cultures.
To be cultural means to rise above one’s inborn identity, such as
“adult white male,” through the variety of self-deconstructions, self-
transformations, and interferences with other identities, such as a
woman, a black, a child, a disabled person. For this purpose, books,
340 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

films, and all works of art and culture are created and consumed: to
dissolve the solidity of one’s natural identity and to share the
experience of “the other.”
Identity may be formed both on biological and symbolic levels, for
example, as “natural sex” and as “cultural sexism,” which correspond
to the two possible movements of their subversion, cultural and
transcultural. This can be illustrated by one passage from Julia Kriste-
va’s “Women’s Time” (1979). In her challenge to the concept of
“gender identity” that had been cherished by the previous generations
of feminists, Kristeva finds it necessary to:
bring out—along with the singularity of each person and, even more,
along with the multiplicity of every person’s possible identifications . . . —
the relativity of his/her symbolic as well as biological existence.14

Gender identity makes way for a multiplicity of personalities, each

with its own potential for further multiple identifications. The crucial
role in this “relativization” of both biological and symbolic identities
belongs, according to Kristeva, to “aesthetic practices” designed to
“demystify” the ideological uniformity of gender and therefore to
provide the symbolic “retreat from sexism (male as well as female).”15
At this point, we need to accentuate a distinction between the two
levels of “relativization” implicitly inscribed in Kristeva’s passage.
Biological existence is relativized in symbolic practices of replacement
and mediation that allow humans to transcend their original identities.
But the same practices subsequently reestablish some “symbolic
bond” or “community of language” among the representatives of the
same biological identity, which corresponds to the strategies of “old
feminism” as criticized by Kristeva. These symbolic identities that
comprise “female culture” should be “relativized” in their own turn,
and Kristeva emphasizes this transcultural aspect of aesthetic practices
by her call “to demystify the identity of the symbolic bond itself, to
demystify, therefore, the community of language as a universal and
unifying tool, one which totalizes and equalizes.”16
“The community of language” needs its own demystification, like
“the community of genes.” Culture demystifies and transcends natural
identities, whereas transculture demystifies and transcends cultural
identities. This process has no limit.
 Transculture 341

Thus, from a transcultural perspective, multiculturalism is right in

asserting the natural origins of existing cultures, whereas deconstruc-
tion is equally right in demystifying these origins. It is not merely a
contradiction within the postmodern paradigm but the very engine of
its further transformation: origins need to be acknowledged in order
to be exceeded in the transnatural movement of culture that at a
certain stage passes into a transcultural movement.
Of course, “natural” identity has its own cultural value and appar-
ently windows and doors, as it lets its “natives” get out. But if one
stays inside and chains oneself to it with the imperatives of “belong-
ing” and “representation,” it becomes a prison. In other words, I am
willing to accept my identity at the beginning of my journey, but I do
not agree to remain with it until the end of my life, to be an animal
representing the tag on its cage. I do not agree to be determined in
terms of race, nation, gender, or class. Culture has any sense only
insofar as it makes us dissidents and fugitives from our nature, our sex,
or race, or age. Why do I watch movies, go to museums, travel to
other countries, read books, or write them for that matter? Just to
remain with my inborn identity, to confirm it again and again? No, I
do it precisely to discover in me somebody else, a non-me, to learn
the experience of other beings . . . So that I—a man—could become
more feminine; so that I—a Russian Jew—could become more Ameri-
can, more French, or more Japanese; so that I—a man of the twenty-
first century—could get impregnated with the experience of other
centuries and go through a number of historical, social, and even
biological transformations. Culture is metempsychosis—reincarnation
during one’s lifetime.
Thus transculture arises from the internal paradox of postmodernity,
not as a denial of this paradox but as an attempt at its conscious
resolution. A new cultural period begins from the understanding and
resolution of this fatal dilemma of postmodernity: multiculturalism or
deconstruction? To be a representative of one’s origins, or not to have
any at all? This dilemma is, however, a false one. Origins are essential,
but the purpose of culture is not to affirm them, but to go away from
them, to become a river and not a dam. Origins must be inscribed in
the history of their overcoming. Then deconstruction will cease to be
a metaphysical game of rejection of origins and will become a creative
342 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

history of disorigination and liberation. Positive, constructive

deconstruction, and multiculturalism without determinism and
representation—this is how I see the era of transculturalism. Transcul-
ture is the next stage in the ongoing human quest for freedom from
the determinations of both nature and culture that tends to grow into
our second nature.

V
Transculture: Culture = Culture: Nature

SOMETIMES I HEAR the following objection: Can you indeed escape the
confines of your native culture, your primary identity?—My answer is:
Of course, I cannot. The distinction of transculturalism from globalism
or its older brand, “cosmopolitanism,” is precisely this relevance of the
primary (ethnic, national) cultures, which the latter attempts to ignore
or bypass. A cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world, claims to belong
directly and immediately to the human kind as a whole, disregarding
ethnic, racial, and other differences. A transcultural personality fully
recognizes hu’s roots in a certain cultural ground, though hu does not
want to cling to them.
In no way does transculture claim to abolish our cultural “body,” the
totality of symbols and habits inherited by us at birth and acquired
through family and education. Similarly, our life in culture does not
abolish our physical body, but enriches its symbolic meanings and
potentials as expressed in dance, painting, drama, sports, and other
cultivated body activities. The culture of food or the culture of
desire—the ritual of meals, the ritual of courtship, and so forth—
represent liberation from the bare instincts of hunger and lust, their
creative postponement, their symbolic mastering and conscientious
enjoyment. The body does not vanish in culture, but slavery to the
body disappears.
The same holds true for transculture: it does not abolish but
radically transforms and enriches our cultural bodies. While culture
frees humans from the prison of nature, it also creates new
dependencies—this time from culture’s own automatisms, customs,
traditions, conventions, which a person receives as a group being, a
member of hu’s clan, ethnos, any “default” norm and consensus.
 Transculture 343

Culture—“German” or “Russian,” “male” or “female”—is a new ossi-

fied formation on the body of nature, a new system of psycho-physical
coercion, symbolic violence, and preset roles and identities, such as
“national character” or “gender role” . . . Transculture dissolves these
rigid, naturalized features of culture and gives flexibility and new
compatibility to elements of different cultures. Transculture is the next
level of liberation, this time from unconscious symbolic dependencies,
predispositions, and prejudices of the “native,” “natural” culture. Tran-
sculture thus perpetuates the movement that started with the exit of
humans from nature to culture.
As Mikhail Bakhtin noted, “freedom cannot change life, so to say,
materially (and is not even meant to do so)—it can only change the
meaning of life.”17 Viewed from a transcultural perspective, all existing
cultures get a broader meaning, as any of their elements is no longer
imposed as a tradition but is chosen freely, like an artist chooses
colors in order to combine them in a new way in a painting. Tran-
scultural creativity uses the palette of all available as well as possible
cultures. It is known that the same physical reality, for example, water
or stone, is symbolized differently in different cultures; likewise,
elements of the same culture acquire new colorings and multiple
refractions in the transcultural space. A simple example: the same rice
tastes differently to a poor Chinese peasant in a medieval village than
to a contemporary New Yorker or Parisian because rice after wine and
cheese and beef or fois gras is something completely different from
rice after rice after rice. As a transcultural being, I make my own
choice as to which culinary, artistic, or intellectual traditions to join,
and to what degree I make them my own.
Transculture can be viewed as a way of expanding the limits of
our ethnic, professional, linguistic, and other identities to new levels
of indeterminacy and “virtuality.” This does not necessarily lead to
hybrid formations (e.g., “Turkish emigrant in Germany”). Hybridiza-
tion is a rather elementary form of transcultural existence, when two
cultural identities merge together in various proportions. At its
higher levels, transculture integrates many cultural traditions and
sign systems and embraces a universal symbolic palette, from which
individuals can freely choose and mix colors in order to paint their
self-portraits.
344 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

VI
Araki Yasuada, a Hiroshima Survivor, as a Transcultural
and Transpersonal Figure

AS AN INSTANCE OF transcultural creativity that is especially pertinent to

Hiroshima, I want to present the work of the Japanese poet Araki
Yasusada (1903–1972). He was a hibakusha, a survivor of the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima, and his poetry published posthumously in the
mid-1990s has provoked a good deal of discussion all over the world
since it appeared in English translation, first in journals and then as a
separate book.18 Critics almost unanimously recognized in Araki
Yasusada’s work a world-class poetry, aeshetically superior to any
other lyrics ever dedicated to the tragedy of Hiroshima. However, the
controversy focused on the authenticity of the texts and ethical aspects
of authorship: the name and biography of Araki Yasusada turned out
to be a hoax. Forrest Gander wrote in The Nation:
[T]he most controversial poetry book since Allen Ginsberg’s Howl . . . [T]he
pages of Doubled Flowering are stunning as poems and failures as the
historical documents they turn out not to be. They are alternately funny,
ironic, irreverent, bitter and passionate.19

Araki Yasusada’s writing was later revealed by its “caretakers,” Kent

Johnson and Javier Alvarez (two individuals whose existence is
empirically verifiable), as the creation of their former and now
deceased roommate, Tosa Motokiyu, whose actual identity they had
been under instructions never to disclose. There have been many
hypotheses about the true identity of this powerful writer. The circle
of potential authors gradually grew to include the outstanding con-
temporary Russian authors Andrei Bitov and Dmitry Prigov, as well as
representatives of some other national literatures. If this was the
primary intent of the hoax, to provide as many different keys and
modes of reading for the purported hibakusha’s texts as possible, then
the idea was a complete success.
There were, however, serious ethical concerns: Is it justified to use
such a tragic occasion for aesthetic play? Does anybody who grew
outside of this framework of historical experience have the right to
claim it as hu’s own, as if only in imaginative terms? From the
transcultural viewpoint, we can answer these questions affirmatively.
 Transculture 345

It is not only our aesthetic right but in fact our moral duty to go
beyond our biographical identity in an attempt to speak (and listen)
on behalf of cultures other than our own.
We should be grateful to Motokiyu, who succeeded in creating
Yasusada and, even more, his friends, translators, editors, and execu-
tors. But who created Motokiyu? And who created his creator? The
answer is infinitely deferred, to use the deconstructionist cliché, but
what is more important and goes beyond the realm of deconstruction
is the construction of infinite authors in the place of the absent single
one. By this I do not imply that the quest for an original authorship
should be qualified as a critical fallacy; the point, rather, is that the
dispersion of creative origins is inscribed in the very act of creativity
and brings forth the possibilities of infinite answers. Is not the goal of
creativity the excess of meanings over signs and, therefore, the excess
of authors over texts, since each additional authorship is a way to
change radically the overall meaning of the text and to extend the
scope of its interpretations? Each text is allowed to have as many
authors and therefore as many cultural contexts and subtexts as it
needs to become excessively meaningful.
Vladimir Nabokov once remarked on what makes literature differ-
ent from the so-called true story or “the poetry of testimony”:
Literature was born not the day when a boy crying “wolf, wolf” came
running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels:
literature was born on the day when a boy came crying “wolf, wolf” and
there was no wolf behind him.20
Is it not a blasphemy to “aetheticize” such a deeply pathetic
experience as conveyed by Yasusada’s poetry? Theodor Adorno
famously proclaimed that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz. We
might likewise conclude that there can be no poetry after Hiroshima.
But is this true? Could it be, instead, that poetry has to become
somewhat different from what it used to be in order to fulfill its human
calling after Hiroshima? If so, then the work of Yasusada points toward
one possible form of renewal: transpersonal and transcultural dis-
semination of authorship. With Yasusada, poetry reaches beyond the
individual’s self-expression, beyond the original testimony, beyond
the “flowering” of one person, to become “doubled flowering,” as the
title of Araki Yasusada’s book suggests. Or even “multiple flowering,”
346 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

a shared imagination and expression of potential Japanese, American,

Russian trans-Yasusadas, of all those who are capable of sharing
the tragedy called “Hiroshima” and co-authoring the poetry called
“Yasusada.” This makes Araki Yasusada a truly transcultural phenom-
enon. Yasusada’s poems, letters, and notes become, through the
generosity of a person or persons we call Motokiyu, an appeal for a
transcultural and transpersonal—and thus selfless and in a sense
authorless, or rather transauthorial—empathy.
Perhaps we can say this: in Yasusada’s poetry there exist as many
potential authorships as there are individuals in the world who are
aware of Hiroshima and can associate themselves with the fate of its
victims and survivors. In our quest for the genuine author of Yasusa-
da’s works, a moment of truth arises when each of us is ready to ask:
Could it be me?

VII
Transcultural Premises for Nonviolence: Toward the Logic of Peace

SINCE THE COLLAPSE of communism, the factor of fixed cultural identity,

based on race, ethnos, and religion, has been getting priority in world
politics over acquired identities, such as party and ideological com-
mitments. Inborn, immutable identities also turned out to be the most
destabilizing factor, the source of global conflicts and violence, as
Samuel Huntington famously predicted in his “clash of civilizations”
theory:
The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of
conflict will be cultural. . . . Civilizational identity will be increasingly
important in the future . . . The most important conflicts of the future will
occur along the cultural fault lines separating [these] civilizations from one
another. . . . In class and ideological conflicts, the key question was “Which
side are you on?” and people could and did choose sides and change sides.
In conflicts between civilizations, the question is “What are you?” That is a
given that cannot be changed.21

This increasing role of the “what are you?” mentality, with its
militant and violent effects, is precisely the reason why transcultural
consciousness is now becoming central to our quest for peace, as a
way to prevent global conflicts between oppositional cultural identities.
 Transculture 347

We can even specify the date when transcultural agenda dramatically

moved to the arena of world history, as an alternative to the clash of
civilizations and as a hope for ultimate peace: September 11, 2001.
First of all, we need to question the very category of “identity” as a
cultural and ethical value. Where there are stiff and “proud” identities,
there are also oppositions fraught with violence. As a rule, violence
occurs between groups with firmly established identities, which
remain impenetrable for each other and thus aspire to mutual extinc-
tion. Opposition and identity are complementary modes of social
existence. If opposition is the basic model of relationships between
social groups, then each individual is bound to identify with one of
these groups. If the meaning of history lies in the opposition (struggle,
antagonism) of North and South, or East and West, or Christianity and
Islam, or Western and Eastern Christianity, then one can participate in
history only through self-identification with one of these polarized
groups. Thus the quest for identity entails the construction of real or
imaginable oppositions.
However, the categories of opposition and identity, though
complementing each other, do not preclude the significance of the
third category, which is difference. In fact, both identity and oppo-
sition are only ideational or ideological projections of difference. We
can, for example, oppose black and white because these are not real
entities but abstract qualities; however, we cannot oppose real things,
such as rain and table or lake and lion, because these entities are
composed of many qualities. Though each of these qualities can be
opposed to the corresponding quality of other entities (liquid rain–
solid table; black coal–white sugar, etc.), the very fact that each entity
is endowed with many qualities makes them different from but never
opposite to each other. For example, two people, A and B, can be
opposed by the color of their skin, but each of these individuals still
possesses many other qualities: one is 37 years old, the other is 21;
one likes cinema, the other likes basketball; one is Republican, the
other is no party member; one prefers meat, the other loves veg-
etables. Each of these qualities in their abstractness can be opposed
to each other: black and white, meat and vegetables, mature and
young . . . But the specific bearers of these qualities, A and B, do not
comprise opposites; they are simply different. In the same way, a
348 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

person can never fully identify huself with any single abstract quality;
to say “I am black” or “I am white” is a way of partial identification
that becomes false when it claims to be full and exhaustive. “I” has
no color, like the eyes into which we are looking deeply have no
color. The ethical principle of difference can be formulated in this
way: to oppose oneself to nobody, to identify oneself with nothing. As
soon as we eliminate oppositional components in our self-definition,
the component of identification will also be abandoned, and vice
versa.
Meanwhile, “opposition” and “identity” not only come from the
same logical nest, but in contemporary humanities they tend to
conflate again, which confirms their interdependent nature. For
example, in Honi Fern Haber’s elaboration of “the politics of differ-
ence,” which she uncritically identifies as “oppositional” politics, we
can find such oxymoronic expressions as the call “to achieve oppo-
sitional identities.”22 The goal of postmodern theory, as set by this
author, is “oppositional identity formation.” This is quite a coherent
conclusion, based on her assumption that “the subject must be seen as
being formed within communities—many communities and changing
communities.”23 Such is the theoretical limit of social determinism: it is
ready to acknowledge the variety of communities, but still insists on
the entirely communal nature of the subject. What is the driving force
of “changing communities,” then, if the individual as such is recog-
nized only as a member of the community, or, according to Haber’s
words, if “our interests are always the interests of some community or
another”?24
No wonder such an emphasis on collective identity reinforces the
oppositions among communities and leaves no space for difference as
a category that is itself different from both identity and opposition. The
misunderstanding goes as far as to equalize these two notions, “oppo-
sition” and “difference,” and to use them as synonyms: “My overall
project . . . attempts to create a space for oppositional politics that can
also be described as a ‘politics of difference’. . . .”25 It appears that a
“politics of difference,” by its very definition, cannot be oppositional,
but should be consistently differential, which means avoiding both
extremes of identity and opposition. The “differential” interaction
between people emphasizes their personal differences, preventing
 Transculture 349

them from making a “group identity,” but also stopping short of

hardening these differences into oppositions (ideological, cultural,
social, etc.). The differences complement each other and create a new
interpersonal transcultural community to which we belong, not
because we are similar, but because we are different.
The problem with multiculturalism is that it halts the endless play of
differentiation for the sake of self-enclosed and highly oppositional
identities. Hegel asserted that the world makes permanent progress
from the abstract to the concrete state, and the same law, “the
ascension from the abstract to the concrete,” operates in the history of
human consciousness. Both identity and opposition are abstract
logical principles because people are opposed or united on the basis
of one general quality that is alienated from them and dominates
them, such as their racial or ethnic origin or religious identity. The
more concrete are the relationships between people, the more they
abandon both abstract oppositions and abstract identities and base
their relations on difference. In this sense, the transcultural model
points out to the most concrete form of existence achieved through a
progressive differentiation of a person from any abstract qualities and
any preestablished identities, as well as from the oppositions among
these identities.
Thus I see globalization, in its positive vector, not as a growth of
homogeneity and unification among cultures but rather as their further
differentiation, “dissemination” into transcultural individuals, strangers
and fugitives from their native cultures. Thereby the entire project of
multiculturalism, far from being abandoned, acquires a new, transcul-
tural perspective. In the history of human differentiation, which is also
a history of free individuals, transculturalism takes up the torch from
multiculturalism. Multiculturalism paves the way from the dominance
of one canon to the diversity of cultures. Transculturalism moves
further, from the diversity of cultures to the even greater diversity of
individuals, transcending their rigid cultural identities. The vision of
nonviolent and nonuniform globalization coincides with the transcul-
tural perspective in which more and more individuals find themselves
“outside” of any particular culture, “outside” of its national, racial,
sexual, ideological, and other divisions. The global society can be
viewed as the space of ultimate diversity: diversity of free individuals
350 The American Journal of Economics and Sociology

rather than that of fixed groups and cultures. Once again, a rule of
thumb for transcultural diversity: oppose yourself to nobody, identify
yourself with nothing. No identities and no oppositions—only con-
crete and multiple differences. The deeper is differentiation, the better
is the prospect for universal peace.

Notes
1. The concept of transculture was first presented in the following
publications: Epstein Mikhail (1990) “Govorit’ na iazyke vsekh kul’tur” [“To
Speak the Language of All Cultures”]. Nauka i Zhyzn [Science and Life] 1:
100–103; Epstein Mikhail (1995) “Culture—Culturology—Transculture.” In
After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian
Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press; and Ellen Berry and
Mikhail Epstein (1999) Transcultural Experiments: Russian and American
Models of Creative Communication. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
2. Bakhtin (1986: 7).
3. I am using in this article the epicene third-person pronoun hu, an
abbreviation of “human,” referring both to a man and a woman. The usage of
“hu” has become increasingly popular in academic writing and journalism.
The derivative forms are hu’s (possessive), hum (dative), huself (reflexive).
For example, “huself” helps us to avoid the cumbersome “himself or herself.”
I hope the reader may look benevolently at this usage of the inclusive
pronoun referring to all humans, which is in line with my main argument on
transculture as a way of transcending all established cultural identities, includ-
ing those of gender.
4. Mamardashvili (1992: 335).
5. Mamardashvili (1992: 337).
6. Mamardashvili (1992: 336).
7. Mamardashvili (1992: 336).
8. Chesnutt (1905: 25).
9. hooks (1995: 120).
10. Morrison (1981: 26).
11. Derrida (1997: 13–14).
12. T. S. Eliot wrote: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an
escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape
from personality” (1992: 764).
13. Derrida (1976: 61).
14. Kristeva (1990: 484).
15. Kristeva (1990: 484).
16. Kristeva (1990: 484).
17. Bakhtin (1979: 342).
18. Tosa Motokiyu, Oji Norinaga, and Okura Kyojin (1997).
 Transculture 351

19. Gander (1998).

20. Charlton (1986: 9).
21. Huntington (2003: 27, 29).
22. Haber (1994: 134).
23. Haber (1994: 134).
24. Haber (1994: 1).
25. Haber (1994: 2).

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